My video Dissonant Particles is scheduled for the "Project Window" of the Art Gallery of Ballarat, in January 2012. The Project Window is a projection window, part of the front of the Gallery on Lydiard Street, and the projections run in the evenings. The Project Window opened in 2011 and has shown works by some high-profile people, including Daniel Crooks and Jill Orr.
Where: Ballarat Art Gallery, 40 Lydiard St (North), Ballarat VIC 3350. Tel: 03 5320 5858.
When: 5th - 27th January 2012.
Info: http://www.balgal.com/ and http://www.gommog.com/video/diss_part_video.html.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
"Bagdad, 1000: The Origin of the Pixel"
I have been looking at a recent book by Laura U. Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. Chapter seven is entitled "Bagdad, 1000: The Origin of the Pixel". Did the pixel really originate in Bagdad around the year 1000? Well, no.
From about the eighth century to the thirteenth the Islamic world was the place to be: the arts, the sciences and philosophy flourished in a manner not matched in the Christian West. The West indeed learnt from the Islamic world: "algebra", "alkali" and "sugar" are Arabic words, as are the names of some of the prominent Northern hemisphere stars such as Algol and Betelgeuse. One of the first mathematics books printed with movable type was Euclid's Elements (Venice 1482); the text was in Latin, translated from the Arabic, as a Greek text did not become available in Western Europe until after 1500. The contribution of the Islamic world to Western civilisation has been under-appreciated, and attempts are now being made to better recognise this contribution. Enfoldment and Infinity is a very well-informed addition to this discussion.
Marks's book compares two bodies of art, Islamic art and new media art, especially that based on computer algorithms; she calls both "aniconic": the perceptible image is not the most important part of the art. Islam generally prohibited the use of images of people or animals in religious contexts; in some places (though by no means everywhere) the prohibition was extended to secular works as well. An extraordinary aniconic art arose as a consequence, based on calligraphy, geometric forms and plant motifs, incidentally giving us the word "arabesque". Marks's book makes numerous and striking comparisons between Islamic art and art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including cinema and new media art.
How does the history of the pixel come into this? In Chapter seven, Marks discusses two constructs in Islamic art and philosophy that might relate to the pixel. One is an architectural technique based on the repetition of a single cell-like form and used to construct remarkable domes. The other is an atomistic philosophy holding that the created universe consists of indivisible atoms, developed in the ninth century by philosophers known as the Mu'tazila. At least one writer conceived of these atoms as square or cubical. But this tells us nothing about the genealogy of the pixel, and Marks does not make any historical link between these developments in the Islamic world and the pixel as we now have it. Nor does she discuss a much more obvious predecessor of the pixel, the mosaic tile.
So, let's make up another origin of the pixel. A fundamental property of a pixel in a raster display is that it is addressable: I can specify a pixel with a notation like (2, 21), meaning a pixel that is two along in the horizontal direction and 21 down in the vertical direction. Iannis Xenakis considered coordinate geometry to be a gift from music to mathematics: on a musical staff time is measured horizontally and pitch vertically. Furthermore in Western musical notation both pitch and time are discrete; time is measured in multiples of some small unit (the semibreve in older music) and pitch in semitones. I can specify both coordinates with a phrase like "the G (or, the note on the second line of the staff) on the first beat of bar 17". So we have a two-dimensional addressable array of discrete entities. I conclude that the pixel originated in Western musical notation of the thirteenth century. Except that it didn't. (And I don't think there is an Islamic link here. Some Western musical instruments derived from Islamic sources, but the notation is indigenous to the West.)
In fairness, Marks warns us that her genealogies may be fictitious. In the first chapter she says "I exploit ... unsought connections perversely, to behave as if there were a historical continuity where at times there is not". Indeed she tells us that Islamic atomistic philosophy was not transmitted to the West. She goes on to say: "if someone puts down this book believing that the Mu'tazila atomists invented the pixel ... that is fine by me". A strange attitude for a scholar and teacher, but one that is necessary to bear in mind while engaging with the book; and it is an engaging book.
From about the eighth century to the thirteenth the Islamic world was the place to be: the arts, the sciences and philosophy flourished in a manner not matched in the Christian West. The West indeed learnt from the Islamic world: "algebra", "alkali" and "sugar" are Arabic words, as are the names of some of the prominent Northern hemisphere stars such as Algol and Betelgeuse. One of the first mathematics books printed with movable type was Euclid's Elements (Venice 1482); the text was in Latin, translated from the Arabic, as a Greek text did not become available in Western Europe until after 1500. The contribution of the Islamic world to Western civilisation has been under-appreciated, and attempts are now being made to better recognise this contribution. Enfoldment and Infinity is a very well-informed addition to this discussion.
Marks's book compares two bodies of art, Islamic art and new media art, especially that based on computer algorithms; she calls both "aniconic": the perceptible image is not the most important part of the art. Islam generally prohibited the use of images of people or animals in religious contexts; in some places (though by no means everywhere) the prohibition was extended to secular works as well. An extraordinary aniconic art arose as a consequence, based on calligraphy, geometric forms and plant motifs, incidentally giving us the word "arabesque". Marks's book makes numerous and striking comparisons between Islamic art and art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including cinema and new media art.
How does the history of the pixel come into this? In Chapter seven, Marks discusses two constructs in Islamic art and philosophy that might relate to the pixel. One is an architectural technique based on the repetition of a single cell-like form and used to construct remarkable domes. The other is an atomistic philosophy holding that the created universe consists of indivisible atoms, developed in the ninth century by philosophers known as the Mu'tazila. At least one writer conceived of these atoms as square or cubical. But this tells us nothing about the genealogy of the pixel, and Marks does not make any historical link between these developments in the Islamic world and the pixel as we now have it. Nor does she discuss a much more obvious predecessor of the pixel, the mosaic tile.
So, let's make up another origin of the pixel. A fundamental property of a pixel in a raster display is that it is addressable: I can specify a pixel with a notation like (2, 21), meaning a pixel that is two along in the horizontal direction and 21 down in the vertical direction. Iannis Xenakis considered coordinate geometry to be a gift from music to mathematics: on a musical staff time is measured horizontally and pitch vertically. Furthermore in Western musical notation both pitch and time are discrete; time is measured in multiples of some small unit (the semibreve in older music) and pitch in semitones. I can specify both coordinates with a phrase like "the G (or, the note on the second line of the staff) on the first beat of bar 17". So we have a two-dimensional addressable array of discrete entities. I conclude that the pixel originated in Western musical notation of the thirteenth century. Except that it didn't. (And I don't think there is an Islamic link here. Some Western musical instruments derived from Islamic sources, but the notation is indigenous to the West.)
In fairness, Marks warns us that her genealogies may be fictitious. In the first chapter she says "I exploit ... unsought connections perversely, to behave as if there were a historical continuity where at times there is not". Indeed she tells us that Islamic atomistic philosophy was not transmitted to the West. She goes on to say: "if someone puts down this book believing that the Mu'tazila atomists invented the pixel ... that is fine by me". A strange attitude for a scholar and teacher, but one that is necessary to bear in mind while engaging with the book; and it is an engaging book.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Analogue Swallows Digital
Last week I attended Impact7, billed as the "international multi-disciplinary printmaking conference", at Monash University in Melbourne. This is the seventh in a series of conferences that began in England in 1999. The core subject-matter of the conference was traditional printmaking: woodcuts, drypoint, etching and so forth. However, there were a substantial number of presentations referring to digital media, and presentations exploring links between print-making and artists' book, zines, photography and graphic design. There was also considerable discussion of education in the visual arts. In the four days there were nearly 150 presentations (talks and demonstrations) and a substantial number of exhibitions.
I was curious to know how the traditional print-makers have reacted to the invasion of their field by Photoshop, inkjet printers and so forth. The answer appears to be that the new methods have simply been incorporated into print-making practice: there were repeated references to the new technologies as providing just another set of tools, and discussion of the "expanded field" of print-making. Analogue has swallowed digital. Whatever debate there was in the printmaking community about digital media is now over, though occasionally concern was expressed that the "hand" of the artist might be missing. I did hear a response to the effect that the mind of the artist is more important.
My own presentation argued that the computer can be more than a tool and that having outsourced the work of the artist's hand to machines, we are now starting to outsource the work of the artist's mind to machines also.
I was curious to know how the traditional print-makers have reacted to the invasion of their field by Photoshop, inkjet printers and so forth. The answer appears to be that the new methods have simply been incorporated into print-making practice: there were repeated references to the new technologies as providing just another set of tools, and discussion of the "expanded field" of print-making. Analogue has swallowed digital. Whatever debate there was in the printmaking community about digital media is now over, though occasionally concern was expressed that the "hand" of the artist might be missing. I did hear a response to the effect that the mind of the artist is more important.
My own presentation argued that the computer can be more than a tool and that having outsourced the work of the artist's hand to machines, we are now starting to outsource the work of the artist's mind to machines also.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Visual Music Films, Multimedia Performance
Brigid Burke has organised a multi-media night at Loop bar in Melbourne. One of my abstract videos will be played, along with works by Dennis Miller and Grayson Cook, and there will be a live performance by Brigid Burke and Adrian Sheriff, playing clarinet, trombone, shakuhachi and laptop, with live video projections.
Where: Loop Bar Back Room, 23 Meyers Place, Melbourne. (Meyers Place is on the south side of Bourke Street, between Exhibition and Spring Streets, near Parliament Station.)
When: Wednesday 5th October, 7pm.
Info: http://www.brigid.com.au/performances.asp and http://www.looponline.com.au/.
Where: Loop Bar Back Room, 23 Meyers Place, Melbourne. (Meyers Place is on the south side of Bourke Street, between Exhibition and Spring Streets, near Parliament Station.)
When: Wednesday 5th October, 7pm.
Info: http://www.brigid.com.au/performances.asp and http://www.looponline.com.au/.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Impact7 Conference
There is an international conference at Monash University coming up called Impact7. It is billed as the "International Multidisciplinary Printmaking Conference" and is held every two years. The core topic is traditional print-making, but many other areas are involved, and there is a substantial digital media stream. I will be giving a presentation as part of a session on "Digital Media: Aesthetics and Materiality" in the morning of Thursday 27th September.
The conference website: http://impact7.org.au/.
In association with this conference half the art galleries in Melbourne are putting on exhibitions of prints: there is a list at http://impact7.org.au/mofp/index.html. The Art Gallery of Ballarat (where I live) specialises in works on paper, and it is putting on a substantial exhibition of prints from its collection, from the colonial period on. The Gallery's website is at http://www.artgalleryofballarat.com.au/.
The conference website: http://impact7.org.au/.
In association with this conference half the art galleries in Melbourne are putting on exhibitions of prints: there is a list at http://impact7.org.au/mofp/index.html. The Art Gallery of Ballarat (where I live) specialises in works on paper, and it is putting on a substantial exhibition of prints from its collection, from the colonial period on. The Gallery's website is at http://www.artgalleryofballarat.com.au/.
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