The lecture also made me think of some quite interesting examples in German architecture, that reflect how closely a cultural memory and architectural sites are connected. A rather literal example is the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, which was destroyed by a fire in 2004 and that I visited a few years earlier. Not only the historical building was damaged, but also hand-written sheet music, historical books and artworks from the 16th century on were lost. The destruction of the memory site (mutable immobile) and the material artefacts (immutable mobiles) coincide in this case.

Another example is the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic) in Berlin. Built in the 1970s on the space were the former Stadtschloss was (Berlin City Palace, it was heavily damaged in World War II and finally demolished in the 1950s, as the government had no money to reconstruct it ), the Palace of the Republic was probably not the most aesthetically pleasing building for today’s standards, but it was an important memory site of the former Eastern German Republic. In 2008, the Palace of the Republic was totally demolished to make room for a reconstruction of the Berlin City Palace – which generated a storm of protest and a discussion of why some architectural (and memory sites) are more worthy to rebuild or maintain than others.

I want to end this blog for the present with a more amusing example of the visual bias of architecture, and how sound is often wrongly overlooked. The Kölner Philharmonie (Cologne Concert Hall), which was built in the mid 1980s, was so concerned with the sound in the underground concert hall (it is still considered as one of the most advanced examples of concert hall architecture), that they forgot the consider the people who are walking on top of it, as the ceiling of the Philharmonie is the floor of a public plaza above it. And every time there is a concert in that hall, the plaza has to be closed to pedestrians and cyclists, as otherwise, the reverberations of the steps could be heard in the underground hall.

I was thinking about what I wanted to do for my artwork, and while the actual content was just a blurry idea in the beginning, I knew I wanted a multisensual artwork/installation. I was always very impressed and enchanted by art, cultural events or museums that engaged not just our sense of vision and hearing, but tried to address the other, more neglected senses as well (mainly smell and touch, as taste is usualy difficult to realize for a large amount of visitors). In Nürnberg, Germany, there is a little museum called Tower of Senses, that focuses on our senses, how they work, and how we can be deceived by them. In the close-by town Erlangen, there was once a similar thing, where you could take your shoes off and wander in total darkness, just relying on your sense of touch and hearing. In Futurama, an animated TV series by Matt Groening (The Simpsons), there is a scientific device that is called the smelloscope, which looks like a giant telescope, but instead of seeing distant objects in space, oe can smell them, as every planet or star has a unique smell.

I’m also very impressed by artists who turn passive looking into an active gaze, like Pipilotti Rist. Selfless in the Bath of Lava was one of her installations, where through a tiny hole in the floor of the art gallery you could see her naked in a sea of lava, struggling and looking up to the visitor.

So what I’m planing for my artwork is a small installation, consisting of three seperate boxes. In each box, there is one hole to look through, and another one to smell objects in the same box. The screen where short movies are playing in a loop will not cover the whole bottom of the box, but only a small part, to some extent hidden by objects lying on the screen that fit the theme of the video. I initially wanted to display different types of homes in every box (like a Bavaria box, an Austria box, an Australian box), but due to the fact that right now I have only access to one of the three, I decided to focus on different aspects that strike me about Australia, and what are now the most intense aspects of this culture that stand out in my perspective. So one box will be dedicated to the beach culture, one to the car culture and one to the very dominant Geselligkeit and party culture. The boxes will be painted white, the cables of the laptops and the table where they rest on will hopefully be hidden by a black drapery or curtain. Each hole in the boxes will have an arrow and either an eye or a nose painted next to it. Maybe there will be the possibility to use three pairs of headphones as well for each box, so people can choose wich senses they want to trigger or even mix up the sounds and the videos/smell in the different boxes. Or instead of three boxes, there could be six, with the smell, the video and the audio in a different box, so that the visitors have to figure out for themselves what smell corresponds to a certain video and sound.

The title of the artwork is going to be: Smell-O-Stralia.

Websites (or software) like facebook, myspace or twitter don’t provide the content itself, they merely provide their users with an empty structure that is supposed to be filled by the users – what made those websites so incredibly successful, as the users were actually creating the content themselves.

The same development can be observed in the video and computer game industry: User-created content is getting more and more common, and is even expected in some genres. The fascination of games like The Sims or Spore lies mostly in the possibility to create content and share it with other people on the web. Other games rely almost exclusively on user-generated content, like Little Big Planet, a game that is basically a toolbox to create characters, levels and entirely new games (what could probably be called a recursive process: a game that consists of creating new games other users play and alter to create new games again). It is also a way to escape economic limitations – as it becomes more and more expensive to program a video game, creating an empty structure and leaving the creation of the content to the users is a way to realize successful and creative games without a huge financial risk (for example, the game Gran Turismo 5 did cost over $80 million dollars to develop, Grand Theft Auto over a $100 millions).

I also have already heard of the Droste effect, though under a different name, and in a literary context: mise en abyme. It also describes the reduplication of images or text, ‘into infinity’. Fractals, the mathematical images where a greater structure consists of smaller and smaller parts that are all similar in shape to the whole, are probably another incarnation of an mise en abyme.

Manaovich’s database aesthetic gave me the idea of making my final artwork for this course a non-linear one, transcending a classic narrative, and make it circular instead. I wonder if instead of 3 minutes of movie I could make three one-minute ‘movies’, that run on three seperate screens, in an infinite loop. It would mimic a basic database narative, as the user can watch an access different parts of the movie when he or she wishes, or all at once.

Coagula: Picture of an Absinthe advertising
Coagula: Self-painted picture

I was less sucessful with Animata, a really small and free animation program. Though very simple, it is harder to get started and to learn what the program can actually do, I guess it would take some time to watch or read some tutorials to figure that out. I only managed to project an image as a kind of texture onto a threedimensional cluster of triangles (see picture above).

Another exercise in the tutorial was to take a reference from ubuweb.com or rhizome.org and match it according to a certain taxonomy. I took an example from rhizome.org, called NOWHERE (by Ralf Baecker): It is a milling machine in a gallery that creates threedimensional landscapes out of a block of hard foam. But how the landscape looks like is determined by a process where search inquiries on a German search engine are fed into the milling machine. The changing stream of search requests defines the structure of the landscape over a specified amount of time, until the machine is ‘finished’ (13 days).

According to our taxonomy, I would put this artwork in the category installation, and the sub-category noisily visual. Every search request is displayed on a screen behind the machine with a little sound, and the machine makes a lot of noise every time it shapes the foam and moves – which is a kind of created soundtrack. The visuals can be seen both on a screen and in material form (the foam and the machine), and the site is a gallery (the Art Cologne 2006). Regarding the interaction, the taxonomy becomes problematic and simplifying, as (in this case) there are not only the spectators/viewers in the gallery, but basically everyone who uses the search engine becomes part of the art project as the users create the landscape with their search enquiries (even if they may not know it).

A while ago, I saw a youtube video featuring a robot baby some Japanese students invented, that looked remarkably similar (and as creepy) as Tony Ourslers projections, so I wanted to post it here. It made me think of how certain concepts in the arts are adopted after a while into popular culture, may it be cinema (arthouse cinema and for example Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), paintings (Andy Warhol) or music:

This is a visual exploration of how different cultures are visually present in a cultural hot spot like Surfers Paradise, where a whole lot of cultures are present due to the needs of the tourist industry and the diverse population. Is it possible to see what type of nationality a restaurant is just by looking at the font, without reading what is on the sign? Are these actual representations or mere a conglomeration of misrepresenting stereotypes we have about a culture? Why are the illuminated ads or the tables for an Italian restaurant different to those of a Japanese one, and why, what do those differences mean? An idea for later would be to also to record sounds in the different restaurants and let the audience match up the sounds, the images and maybe a certain font, a napkin, a tablecloth or a menu, making them think why we have these stereotype assumptions about different cultures.

I started experimenting with monochrome photographs and turning pictures into a composition of coloured dots by playing with the manual focus. I found it remarkable how the meaning of photographs changes if they are stripped of their natural colours, and especially what it does to the more than colourful illuminated ads in Surfers Paradise, when we see them just in black and white though we know that they are bright and coloured:

In the week before the Easter break, we had a lecture about motion photography and sound documentation history, series and multiples, instantiation and differentiation. We talked about the emergence of new technologies, and the interrelation of some of those technological advances with the developments in warfare.

Seeing a picture of the chronophotographic gun, I instantly had to think of a young German artist I once read about, who invented the Fulgurator, which looks like the chronophotographic gun and works kind of like a reversed camera:

The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.

In principle, the Fulgurator can be used anywhere where there is another camera nearby that is being used with a flash. It operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it. The intervention is unobtrusive because it takes only a few milliseconds. Every photo another photographer takes of an object at which the Fulgurator is also aimed is affected by the manipulation. Hence visual information can be smuggled unnoticed into the images of others.
(quoted from www.juliusvonbismarck.com)

This technique of secretly manipulating images at the moment when they are taken seems to me to be very powerful. As the authenticity of photographs due to computer processing is long gone, we still seem to trust the photographs we’ve just taken ourselves. To manipulate taken photographs is one thing, but the Fulgurator manipulates the ‘real’: It can place strong cultural symbols everywhere without being noticed, and appear on thousands of photographs of tourists or journalists. One example of a Fulguration on juliusvonbismarck.com includes a photograph of the Mao Zedong portrait at Tiananmen square in Beijing with a white dove on it.

I think the photographs that we take ourselves today, even with digital cameras and infinitely reproducable, still convey a kind of aura, though in a much broader sense than Walter Benjamin’s aura. It still makes a difference if we have a picture of ourselves standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco that we actually took, or if we photoshop ourselves into that picture.   I think its the indexicality of the photographs as signs that still make them special, and that’s why I think the Fulgurator is such an interesting idea, because it intervenes in the authenticity of what we still see as the ‘real’. I also think that there are plenty of other examples where the aura in a Benjaminean sense is still maintained or at least simulated in our reality as well as in our mechanically reproducable media reality. As Marshall McLuhan wrote, a new medium doesn’t replace the old medium, but coexists and changes the reception of the old one. So we still go to live concerts, even when we can listen to the recording. We also broadcast concerts, performances, speeches live on TV – and I think the live element still does have something like an aura, a simulated one though (there are a whole lot of different techniques of making the TV audience think they are right in the middle of the actual event, and simulating an aura of actually being there, see for example Dayan/Katz “Media Events. The Live Broadcasting of History.” or Adelmann/Keilbach/Stauff “‘Soviel Gefühle kann’s nicht geben!’ – Typisierung des Feierns und Jubelns im Fernsehsport” (in montage/av  10/02).

Accordingly, the authenticity of non-computer generated images has become by now something special and is a selling argument in commercials  (for example, the ad for the Sony Bravia with the thousands of bouncy balls on the streets of San Francisco – if it would be CGI, the ad wouldn’t be anything special, but what makes it interesting is that they actually poured thousand of bouncy balls onto a street, and that the ad is a recording or an index of that exact same moment).

At the same time, I would like to emphasize that the indexical nature of photographs or films is quite an exception in the history of making images anyway, and (at least in film) only occurred in a very short period of time. Concerning movies, we are already again moving from a kino-eye to a kino-brush (see Lev Manovich’s New Media Language), as CGI is basically making films like making a painting, without the limitations of reality. Which poses the interesting question how our cinema will be like after CGI is done imitating reality – will it move in a more abstract direction, like it happened with paintings after the invention of the photo camera?

One last thing I wanted to write about was the image-sound magnetization we talked about, that the sound that is applied to a certain image is influencing how we perceive that image. I wanted to add that there is also a image-image magnetization: The Kuleshov effect. Kuleshov played the same short film clip of an actor with a neutral facial expression together with different images edited before it (a bowl of soup, a coffin with an old lady, and an attractive woman), and the audience interpreted the same facial expression different every time, seeing hunger, grief or lust in the neutral face.

At last some images I took when we were spontaniously looking for things in our tutorial that represent the analogue/digital dichotomy and instantiation/differentiation:

Last week in our tutorial we were talking about and experimenting with ringtones. I also did a sound piece made out of approximately 20 ringtones that I could find on my mobile. As I change my ringtone probably not even once per year (right now it is the theme of a computer game called Monkey Island), I don’t have a big selection of them on my phone, it is mostly themes of video games or TV series:

ringtone mishmash

I think the reason why ringtones are important to many people (and therefore, big business) is to ensure themselves of their identity, their individuality. Of course, there is also a practical reason, as it would be more difficult to recognize a phonecall if everyone would use the same ringtone: It is much easier to hear the mobile ring and identify it as our own when we hear a melody that only our phone produces.  But nevertheless, I think the mobile phone has probably become a mirror of our identity. The more billions of humans walk this planet, the more we have the need to stand out, to assure ourselves of our individuality, even if individuality has long become an illusion.  Instead, we project our identity onto objects: Mobile phones personalized with stickers, bags, jewelry, a unique combination of applications, and of course, a ‘unique’ combinations of ringtones and sounds. The mobile phone has probably replaced the car as the favorite expression of identity.

What I like about the artist Spencer Tunick, who had recently gathered 5500 naked Australians around the opera house in Sydney, is exactly that: Our individuality is an illusion – stripped down to our ‘natural’ state (to what extent our bodies are ‘natural’ is another story), we are all the same. From a few meters distance, it doesn’t matter if fat or thin, long or short hair, red, blonde or brown, or no hair at all, everyone looks as different from one another as two ants in an anthill. It also shows the constructedness of what we consider to be a ‘normal’ appearance in public (the social convention that we wear clothes, shave or cut our hair,…), puts people into an unfamiliar situation and forces them to interact and communicate, to break boundaries (for example, between hetero- and homosexuals). So maybe one could say, this kind of art is if not intercultural, it is at least intracultural, and talks about the interstices within a culture between different sub-cultures.

Reading about relational aesthetics, I had to think of flash mobs, these spontanious gatherings of people doing apparently pointless things. What I like about them is, that they are strictly speaking not different to what a performance artist would do, but they get rid of the artist/audience distinction alltogether. It is neither possible nor desirable to find an ‘artist’ responsible for a certain flash mob. One could probably call it collaborational art, where there is no artist anymore, the audience, the spectators make and become the art.

I also made a few more pictures, that all contain osme sort of sign or trace of something: The hands are another symbol for our identity, as they contain our fingerprints, that are considered to be truly individual; then there is an ‘empty’ street sign with a trace of light of the person who took the photograph (me), and there are two pictures of traces of light on a moving surface, water: