Actual Reality

Actual Reality

“Actual Reality” (2011—Present) is a serial multi-media work that develops over the course of many iterations and forms: a scored performance, an improvised response, a piece of software, a libretto text, audio recordings, a video-in-progress… Each new version processes and re-synthesizes previous Actual Realities.

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I’ve had a google alert for the words “actual reality” for several years now, every day receiving an email digest of newly discovered instances of the phrase in context. It is a candid and democratic view of the internet. The term is used by diarists, pundits, analysts, self-help gurus and angry blog-commenters alike, as a lets-get-serious reference to the common background against which imaginary things come together momentarily. Everyone should be able to recognize actual reality, or to compare things against it, to measure when we’ve moved too far from it.

“Little by little it comes into view like a condensing cloud; from the virtual state it passes into the actual; and as its outlines become more distinct and its surface takes on color, it tends to imitate perception. But it remains attached to the past by its deepest roots, and if, when once realized, it did not retain something of its original virtuality, if, being a present state, it were not something which stands out distinct from the present, we should never know it for a memory.” – Henri Bergson “Matter and Memory”

We experience sound moving from live utterance to processed signal, amplified and diffused into the room. We enact a translation, listening and responding to the processed signal, attaching new layers to it, simultaneously forging and following a wave of sound that condenses into patterns and disperses into clouds. Video images form for us an anchor in time, progressing slowly, with action that is hard to perceive until gradual changes are made apparent. A flute, a lily, a newspaper, a triangle, a mirror, a discharge of smoke—-these visual elements provide a medium through which to perceive a specific speed, a dilated scale of time passing.

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Actual Reality

Actual Reality – The Sun Artist Takes a Walk


“The Sun Artist Takes a Walk” (2014-15) is a version of “Actual Reality” that borrows its shape from a series of workshops conducted by San Francisco-based artist, scientist, and educator Bob Miller. Beginning in 1975, Miller’s “Light Walks” led small groups of participants in the active noticing of sunlight resolving into images through naturally-occurring pinholes, shadows, and reflections.

“…what I used to think of as uninteresting diffuse white light turns out to be pretty damned interesting. If you think of every little area in space containing, in the light, all the information for a full-color, completely detailed image of things both nearby and far away—here in this little area of space, and here… and here—then it seems to me that we’re walking around all the time in an invisible sea of images. All you have to do to see one of them is to put your eye right “here” and let in one of those little specks of light. And on top of all that, you see it “out there,” projected on the real world. Wow!”

“Actual Reality” proposes, then, that all streams contain images. To play, and to pay attention, is to resolve these images, seeing them for a moment as reality.

Agreements

Agreements 5-10 description

“Agreements (5—10)” consists of two objects (cast steel tuning forks) and six radio transmissions. Two of the radio transmissions originated with antennas in the courtyard of Ballroom Marfa, the other four were distributed at various locations around Marfa, TX, forming a ring around the town so that you were never more than 1000 feet or so from a transmitter. The transmissions, overlapping geographically and all broadcasting on the same frequency (106.1 fm), compete with one another to reach the listener who chooses to tune in. This competing interference manifests as pockets of clarity, separated by boundaries of noise and silence. Listening while moving, one can hear these borders as they are crossed, and the shift between territories can be heard as dominance rotating from one signal to another.

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No two signals can hold the territory. It is a function of FM radio receivers to capture only those transmissions that rise above a power threshold, and to discard those that fall below. This filtering is useful as a means of identifying the dominant source in densely-populated areas, where it is common for multiple signals of varying strength to occupy the same bandwidth. In the rare instances of more than one transmission carrying equal power in a boundary region, a receiver persists in switching freely between the competing signals. Marfa is in the high desert of far-west Texas, near the US-Mexico border, home to a Customs and Border Protection station. For many miles, only Marfa Public Radio can be picked up, the rest of the radio is silent.

The tuning forks, one double-sided and the other four-sided, resonate with two and four narrowly-separated pitches, respectively. Each of these reference pitches corresponds directly to one of the six radio transmissions introduced into the otherwise quiet radio spectrum, serving as the basis for the musical universe contained in that signal. All sounds heard in a transmission conform to the tuning note, and its attendant harmonics, that belongs to that transmitter.

Cast as single objects that hold multiple reference pitches, the forks present the limits of sensing the whole of a group. Listening to each individual part in turn, you hold the sound of one ringing note in your memory in order to compare it to another sound. Similarly, your sense of each radio signal is interrupted as your position changes, and the relative power of all signals shift. This is not just a problem of simultaneity, or of a fixed point of view; this is a model of difference—a multiplicity of centers—that is based on inter-penetration, dominance and exclusion, rather than the wave-like interference of phases.

Holding one of the tuning forks in your hand, striking it or tapping it to let it ring, it is clear that each vibrating side produces a complex sympathetic resonance in each of the other sides. Holding any of the sides to mute vibrations, it is possible to alternate between a striated, harmonic sound and a smooth, pure tone. Repetition, with difference. Each transmission carries its own information. What you hear tells you where you are—variations on a theme: wild variations that conform to a system. This is, unfortunately, not the system of infinite combinations imagined when considering sound as a social material, interconnecting listeners universally and without friction, layering and blending to synthesize new forms from multiple masters. This is, luckily, the coequal and simultaneous possibility of multiple, separated centers that can interact but don’t. You can move from one place to another, or you can stay still, friction is the constant force.

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Beyond Majority Rule

Beyond Majority Rule

Beyond Majority Rule began by surveying how non-hierarchical groups make decisions, with a particular curiosity as to how groups structured against representation might decide to visually or symbolically represent themselves and their common experience. The results, fictionalized and composited, point to a domain where to be represented means to be recognized—where collective memory and decision-making can be understood as forms of image recognition. Transitional and intermediate, these are images used in the way words are used when spoken, described in the way shadows describe the objects that cast them.

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Make a Baby

Make a Baby

“Make a Baby” (2004 – Present) is a synthesizer played by two or more people touching one another on the skin.

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“Make A Baby” can be described in its simplest form as sounds being played by touching one another on the skin. The functional structure of the piece has crystallized, more-or-less, over many hundreds of performances: control signals (tuned circuits) at very low voltage are picked up on the skin by audience members, who share the signal between one-another by transferring across points of skin contact. Different kinds of touch (gentle, forceful, sustained, momentary, etc) produce different results. Adding or bridging between additional participants also produces a change in the overall response. We have, through trial and error, developed a tuning system that is inherent to the piece, allowing it to function as a standalone musical instrument with a voice of its own.

How it is implemented—the social structure of the thing—is more slippery, highly contingent on context and audience participation. Our intention, and our measure of quality when comparing one version of “Make A Baby” to another, is to sustain a social space that has no fixed center, and yet forms a cohesive, purposeful sense of belonging to a group engaged in common action. From this essential balance, we can extract other criteria for success: each individual gesture should be perceptible within the group effort (a sense of transparency and agency); the boundaries of the group should be highly permeable—participants can easily shift from active (playing) to passive (listening or watching) engagement; the actions required for participation should be easily taught on a peer-to-peer level. Overall, there should be a sense of continuous playfulness that invites cooperation and innovation.

To these ends, the supporting technology provides unexpected possibilities for distributed control—every point of contact between participants generates some perceptible and significant change in the sound. The software component, with an architecture similar to that of a scalar network analyzer, learns about the structure and quality of connections between distributed nodes. As each signal, carrying a signature frequency, is passed between players, momentary networks are built and dissolved. The forms of these networks, when translated into sound, provide a shifting map of our engagement, the inter-penetrating sum of our individual actions.

Although the two primary modes in which one interacts with this piece are listening and touching, it is easy to describe the experience visually—the shapes made by a group of people finding points to connect across a room, a physical network of hands and arms, attention divided between so many simultaneous points of action. There is a vibrant relationship between the centers (every point of contact that seizes control for an instance) and the margins (frontiers and boundaries, a perimeter with global perspective). In terms laid out by Pauline Oliveros, it is experienced through “focal attention” (points of contact), and “global attention” (the result of all points of touch together). Does this vibrant oscillation, this quick mobility between individual and collective engagement, bring with it a certain awareness? At the very least, there is evidence of the possibility for communicating amongst ourselves directly, supplementally, the complex and ineffable experience of being an individual within a group.

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Speak Your Own Language

Ooga Booga Bongo Music

Syllables repeated quickly back-and-forth between left and right channels, filtered and gradually mixing in and out, sounds appear as different words or sentences to some people, or as rhythms and melodies to others. based on an auditory illusion described by diana deutsch, in which our attention wanders and allows for a shift between what we hear and what we imagine—not as a puzzle to solve, but as information in raw form that we meet halfway as language or as music. Lyrics composed entirely by listeners taking note of the words and phrases they hear in the repetition.

Speak Your Own Language (2015)


Speak Your Own Language (2015) is part of lucky dragons’ continuing exploration of the auditory illusion by which short fragments of speech, when repeated, can appear as entire words and sentences like an audio rorschach test. Spoken syllables, sequenced and filtered into layered rhythms and harmonic textures, occupy an area between music and language that each listener hears differently. For this record’s cover artwork, five listeners (native Danish and Spanish speakers) were asked to write down any words or phrases that they heard, composing lyrics to the music. Released as a 7” record by Harmonipan in connection with the project Variety Gate at Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City.

Teaching

Find By Image


Find By Image: Machine Learning for Artists

Studio-based course introducing the field of machine learning to artists, designers and performers. The goal of this course is to unpack and familiarize ourselves with available machine learning tools, which we use to plan and produce works of art. In-class labs open a preliminary investigation into the conceptual and technical underpinnings of key machine learning methods, exploring their application through hands-on coding exercises. Readings and discussions will attempt to connect the theory, practice, and poetics of machine learning, and to place our efforts into wider ethical, social, philosophical, and art-historical contexts. In the process, we will expand on the general phenomena of learning, experience, and creativity as subject matters in themselves.

View full syllabus / course website here ↗

Topics In Interactivity And Games: Empathy And Memory

Topics In Interactivity And Games: Empathy And Memory

A studio-based class taught in the Design | Media Arts program at UCLA, working alongside the Center For the Art of Performance’s CODA project to create new media artworks using data sourced from performance—including video, images, audience surveys and biometrics (heart rate, EEG signals, etc.), to explore how audience interaction / engagement with performance contributes to the formation of memory and empathy.

View full syllabus and course website here ↗

The Open Score Workshop

The Open Score Workshop

A hands-on, collaborative research group that explores the use of “scores” across disciplines as experimental, descriptive, and performative devices. A “score” is a form of composition, and a way of communicating processes over time using language or symbols to define events. Scoring as a creative, generative process, is not limited to any one field, media, or genre. The workshop has two central components:

Part 1:
Performing and evaluating historical scores, in order to gain pragmatic insight into some of the fundamental strategies and effects of scoring. There are infinite new methods to be discovered among the wide variety of approaches to scoring.

Part 2:
Generating new scores. Each participant, instructors and students alike, practices regularly creating and revising original scores, generating a score every two days to form a collection of “48 Hour Scores” that accumulates over the course of the workshop. Each participant selects two of their scores to be performed and evaluated by the group.

View / Download full syllabus as PDF (55 KB)

The Anti-Explainers

The Anti-Explainers

“The Anti-Explainers” (2012-2015) is a collection of experiments and interventions performed while in residence at the Exploratorium’s Center for Art and Inquiry in San Francisco, including the public artwork “DAYLAY” (2013-2014), an interactive audio installation on The Embarcadero that captured sounds to be played back after a twelve-hour delay.

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The Exploratorium’s “Explainers” program has been an integral part of the museum’s identity from the start – a core group of young people with a diverse range of interests and backgrounds who interact with visitors, perform demonstrations, and act as role models within a process of open inquiry. Neither audience nor institution, Explainers build understanding through practice, trying things out to see what is possible. Do artists build understanding in the same way, by learning in public? Perhaps the order of operations is reversed – artists may dismantle understanding, problematizing and expanding the limits placed on knowledge. There are many “ifs”. For now, let’s consider artists as the Anti-Explainers, a corollary, and a necessary response, to the Explainers.

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The Anti-Explainers (Book)

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“The Anti-Explainers” (2015, 204 pages) documents research done in residence at the Exploratorium’s Center for Art and Inquiry from 2012 to 2015. Examining the role artists can play in complicating, augmenting, or responding to explanation, the book collects exhibits from the museum floor that exist outside of explanation, along with documentation of artworks produced in response to the desire – both public and institutional – to engage in a process of explanation. The centerpiece of the book is an entire week of transcriptions from Lucky Dragons’ installation “DAYLAY” (2013-2014), in which visitors were invited to leave messages to be played back after a twelve-hour delay.

The Anti-Explainers

DAYLAY_ALIGNED1

DAYLAY_ALIGNED2
“DAYLAY” (2013—2014)

Microphones inside of a hole in the pier perpetually capture sounds, playing them back through on-site speakers after a twelve-hour interval. Nothing is recorded, only delayed. An environment is shifted. An invitation to leave a message for the future: night speaks to day, day speaks to night.

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Produced with the support of the Exploratorium’s Outdoor Gallery and Center for Art and Inquiry, DAYLAY was an interactive exhibit situated inside of a fourteen-foot diameter circular hole in the publicly accessible area of Pier 15, directly adjacent to The Embarcadero. Two signs, each with an identical explanatory text and microphone, were placed along a railing that circled the hole. Four speakers and a ring of LED lights were suspended out of sight beneath the rim of the hole. The lights faded up as the sun set, and faded down as the sun rose—“photic memory, ” as a staff scientist commented. The microphones continued to record, and the speakers to play back, more or less uninterrupted for eighteen months, from May 2013 to November 2014.

All sounds were subject to the same delay, without discrimination: seagulls, trolley cars, skateboarders, church bells, school groups, office workers, tourists, families, lovers, foghorns, delivery trucks, queries, fantasies, confessions, wind, rain, screaming children; the audibly prurient thoughts that occupy people of all ages speaking into the void. Our intent was to produce two irreconcileable results: on the one hand, to render a realistic portrait of the natural and social sounds of one time overlaid onto another time (a sort of factual window for listening through to a different time at the same location), and on the other hand, to invite visitors to contemplate and engage with their own imaginary experience of this other time—to actively touch the other (as yet non-existent) time. Our project here is to examine the feedback loop produced by these twin results, not by categorizing, but by presenting their complexity verbatim.

Is the relevant learning experience to be found in focused attention on sound (both as a material and a signifying medium)? Is the exhibit’s primary purpose to play back / to present for the listener, or to offer, in the process of time-shifting, a platform for experimental performance? We propose that a relevant learning experience can be found in the creation, by speakers and listeners alike, of a common imaginary, a virtual space for contemplation external to our lived experience. I wonder where my voice went (what does it do for twelve hours?). I consider the qualities of a moment lost inside a vast duration. I switch places with the listener, bringing a message backwards from the future into the past. Why not?

Taken as a continuous document, the recorded messages present a rapid and unpredictable montage of emotional forms. Some speakers invoke complex and playful narratives consisting of interactions between multiple characters, story-lines, and time-space locations. Other speakers laugh or curse when nothing is obviously funny or upsetting, leaving an embarrassed phantom shocked at its own creepiness; uncanny for being a recording, and irresponsible for being delayed.

Why speak, if the audience can’t be verified? Paranoia interrupts, the un-knowable listener is cast as “inhuman,” albeit an inhuman that we share space with and can communicate with: “Nobody” will be there / “Nobody” was here—or “Whoever is here, I hate you,” “I will kill you,” “I hope you die,” and so on. Often this takes gentler forms, as interspecies communication (whale song, “Sharks come out!”, “Hello, fishies!” etc.), or command utterances seeking a cure for disarray: “Go to work!”, “Go Home!”, “Get a job!”, “Go to sleep!”, “I hope to be at home safe.” For a group encountering the piece all at once, the mania of showing off, along with a tendency towards imitation, results in funny looping stutters, as variations on the roles of teacher, student, reporter, monster, victim, etc. are worked out.

How do we rationally understand a time scale or duration outside of what we are able to sense? Every interaction is also a test of the channel’s openness, a question uselessly waiting for an answer to travel across an interval that, while not impossible, is improbable for anyone finding themselves at the installation site to directly experience. Leaving a message as a ‘proof’ or ‘truth’ of a proposition that is un-testable (un-thinkable?) in the present moment engages a need very close to our own desire to collect and convey these messages, first through the mechanism itself, and now through these eavesdropped transcriptions. In the act of composing messages for future listeners, each speaker has given a unique form to the sensation of holding one’s attention in two times at once. As artists-in-residence transiently interacting with communities of practice, our research is presented beside the work of explanation and inquiry carried out by visitors and staff every day. In the usage described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: “Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations.” As artistic research, this project is not to essentialize, nor to act as role-model or interrogator, but primarily to listen, and to provide forms that are able to preserve contradiction.

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User Agreement

User Agreement – intro


“The people must recognize the defects of the old invention, and someone must make a new one.” – Margaret Mead “Warfare is Only an Invention not a Biological Necessity” (1940)

What can happen in a museum? In 1945, representatives of fifty countries convened in the War Memorial Veterans Building—SFMOMA’s original home—to draft the United Nations Charter, imagining a global system of government designed to produce peace through consolidated power. “User Agreement” is an ongoing artwork centered in research and performance, beginning at SFMOMA with a focused series of performances, installations, workshops and a website, then continuing at 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica. The purpose of this artwork is to reverse engineer the technologies of peace—treaties, protocols, symbols and systems—in order to learn from what has already been invented, to repurpose and re-contextualize, to create new possibilities for interaction, and to fix existing bugs. Working backwards from the ways peace has been put to use through images, actions, and language, we will unpack and re-imagine techniques of mediation, conflict resolution, and treaty-making as performances, workshops, and interventions. Translated, abstracted, dispersed—the goal is to develop and make available new technologies for peace, conditions for engagement that preserve difference and acknowledge unanswered questions.

user agreement – iows – video

An image of peace, constructed through a collection of symbols and a series of text prompts. Like a group teleprompter, these videos were used as a framework for free conversation inside of the performance I Other Whisper Siren.

The Problem Solver (Part 1: The Pattern)

The Pattern is a path for processing thought. It is a place to move slowly, to enable thoughts to settle, a sieve or a filter. Turn a corner, wind towards center. Observe thoughts inside and outside of the pattern. The Pattern represents the possibility of embodied peace: “Positive Peace”.

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Positive Peace is the presence of Equality, the restoration of Justice, and the healing of relationships. It is how we create social systems to serve the needs of all persons. Positive peace is not simply the absence of direct violence. It is the absence of both direct and indirect violence, a position completely free of worry or fear. If you desire peace, prepare for peace

The rise of soft power
dissolving of hard power
the radicalist
the gradualist
choose speed of reform

where begins process of total disarmament—
here or then?
peace as stillness
between conflicts
or peace as stillness

A description of harmony
A walking peace
Shifting energy of liberation into energy of building
examine state within to be peace
and build peace

A tarnished mirror that shines when polished
dipped in mud
passed through fire
A conscious effort to elevate life-condition
self-mastery
human revolution
healing the dull mirror
who could be your master?
how could anyone be your master?

The definition of Peace is itself unstable, varied, not agreed on. Positive peace has many simple and many complex forms. It operates at all scales, from momentary pleasure, self-healing and well being, to the complete restructuring of all societies, the complete elimination of all violence and oppression. Positive peace is a state of calm alert, a position free of worry or fear, a state of readiness held comfortably in place by external structures that affirm and improve life. Emperor Ashoka ended a long period of bloody conflict and Imperial expansion by enforcing a regime of peace throughout the empire. Stone monuments displayed his edicts of forgiveness, nonviolence, and quality of life for all beings. Carved in stone: amnesty for prisoners, an end to war, elephant sanctuaries, forests that could not be cut down. A harmonic form of dominance, derived from Imperial power. “All men are my children. What I desire for my own children, and I desire their welfare and happiness both in this world and the next, that I desire for all men. You do not understand to what extent I desire this, and if some of you do understand, you do not understand the full extent of my desire.”

Wait

What is state of readiness?
state of readiness for violence?
state of readiness for non-violence?

Positive Peace is self-control, self-rule: for you, it is an inward peace-keeping operation, refining your focus towards openness and compassion. No greater or lesser dominion than over yourself? Positive Peace is a state of being not grounded in specific actions. It continues forever as a process in the background of all human interactions. It is the beginning and the end of peaceful communication.

Do you hear that? Whistling sound? Should we tell them about it? How many are you? Who is responsible? Who owns the air? How? Does capitalism erode all pleasure? Yes or no? What does pleasure erode? Which is better: vision in motion, or discovering the subconscious?

Wait

How quietly can you speak? Show me? How far can you see? Questions for women? Yes or no? Image of the sun pendulum. Observe the sky? What is changing? Glacier in retreat, or water in advance? Observe the sky? Uncertainty or pattern? Observe the sky?

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The Problem Solver (Part 2: The Tangle)

On the other side of the Pattern is the The Tangle. The Tangle is an enormous, unruly confusion. There is a critical urgency to untangle the tangle. This is a process that will require all people to cooperate with one another. The Tangle imagines Peace-Making as struggle, a form of active problem-solving: “Negative Peace.”

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Negative Peace is the absence of direct violence, the prevention of harm, the prevention of war. Peace within this framework does not, by itself, erase conflict completely or permanently. Negative Peace is constant in its management of conflict. Negative Peace is the process of struggle. In the struggle to untangle The Tangle, we strategize and cooperate, we develop and share innovative techniques, new ways of seeing and solving the problem. Factions may evolve from within the struggle—some participants see more value in Tangling than in Untangling—opposing affinities form in dissent. There is fine line between tangling and untangling. Fine lines can be difficult to draw—conscious tanglers are difficult to separate from conscious un-tanglers. Their movements are similar. The Tangle is a path between persons, a language for the recognition and mediation of conflict. The Tangle addresses itself to all of us—now that it exists, it can’t ever stop existing. If the Tangle becomes untangled it may swiftly become tangled again, without our constant management and vigilance. Calm and alert. We are complicit in solving the problem of The Tangle. Whether or not we see ourselves as participants, it doesn’t matter. There is no neutral place. There is no self in isolation. The Tangle addresses itself to all of us.

Thought and action.
Stem the flow of unhappiness.
Use dialogue to create solidarity.
Inform and concern.
Peace for the sake of peace
For the sake of peace.

What inhibits the world from inventing peace? who inhibits the world from inventing peace? Violence, proscribed by strong central powers, held comfortably in place by allegiance to a group, by the naming of a population: Otherizing. Drawing the conditions for aggression, race war, class war, national war. Who is that person? and who is that person? and who is that person? Rousseau pointed out that If we had no sovereign states, we would have no war. Hobbes pointed out that we would have no peace either. William Graham Sumner wrote “if you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men are ever subject, because doctrines get inside a man’s own reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines. The reconquest of the Holy Sepulchre, the balance of power, no universal dominion, trade follows the flag, he who holds the land holds the sea, the throne and the altar, the revolution, the faith— these are the things for which men have given their lives. What are they all?” What makes doctrine? What make doctrine reasonable? believable? How to un-make doctrine? How to loosen the hold of doctrine on oneself? (what is) the most beautiful word? what are some variations? can you be more specific? Would you prefer not to? ask me? have you met? and have you met? and have you met? wait what happened earlier? do you agree? how many agree? how many disagree? is this a good balance? “Doctrines are always vague; it would ruin a doctrine to define it, because it could be analyzed, tested, criticized, and verified; but nothing ought to be tolerated which cannot be so tested.”

Thought and action
Stem the flow of suffering
Use dialogue to create solidarity
Inform and concern
Peace for the sake of peace
For the sake of peace

Law only needs precedent. One premise for the rule of international law is that all persons participate in a single community, and as such, are subject to the same common law. Rights and values, having been articulated and refined through history, are acquired by the community in a process of consistent reasoning. The greater the consistency, the stronger the law. By what authority? With what permission? And who will decide? Laws between sovereign states are, like manners, difficult to enforce. Politics must be polite, or there is no recourse but to dissociate. Failing to honor a treaty, allowing the agreement to collapse, a state loses access to the process of peace. Meaningful relationships cannot be established or repaired. Agreement becomes impossible. The scope of this impossibility is made legible in The Treaty of Versailles, ending World War I: “Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one outline of the path to peace, exists as a treaty between all persons. It orders human lives by suggesting a structure that embraces everyone, a rule of law to which all can appeal. The right to have a nationality, to belong to a state, builds peace through structured, universal representation. Can Peace be universal? Or is peace specific? Can it embrace humankind or only the detached individual? In America, we reserve the right to refuse to belong to this or any other state. We have laws to aid our escape from law. Margaret Mead wrote that “Warfare is an invention like any other of the inventions in terms of which we order our lives: marriage, cooking our food instead of eating it raw, trial by jury, or burial of the dead, and so on” What is the next invention that will shift the order of human lives? Can it be peace? “A form of behavior becomes out of date only when something else takes its place, and, in order to invent forms of behavior which will make war obsolete, it is a first requirement to believe that the invention is possible.”

Thought and action
Stem the flow of violence
Use dialogue to create solidarity
Inform and concern
Peace for the sake of peace
For the sake of peace

Submerged in suffering
find tranquility in reasoned judgements
In world of learning
Remember the possible functions of machines?
Inventing things that can only be made with tools that don’t exist?
Are you an inventor?

Words, a healing breeze, or a sword, forms a new peace agenda: The invention of non-violent
How to redraw the abstraction of Enemy?
Acknowledge fear, stereotype, and distortion
Dissolve negative attachment to difference
Join conversation without hesitation
How does War form its own culture?

We are wasting time, resources, and energy. How much better would it be to only waste time, to become inefficient, to move slowly, with consideration, to space out, to stare, to examine closely, to imagine broadly, to search the ruins.

Thanatos the death instinct
and Eros the life instinct
Repulsion and attraction

Johan Galtung wrote that “Imperialism is a species in a genus of dominance and power relationships.” If dominance relations between nations and other collectivities will not disappear when Imperialism disappears—then how to disappear the root, the relationships that holds oppression comfortably in place? Imperialism splits up collectivities in terms of harmony of interest, disharmony of interest, and conflict of interest. There is, first of all, a gap. In imperialism the center grows more fully than the periphery. The center is enriched and nourished, while the periphery is starved. We must ask how to grow the periphery, how to transfer value, how to confuse, dissolve or multiply the center, and how to harmonize the whole? This is a problem of reality—of seeing the real—of becoming real—of realization. When image and reality do not align, but appear to align, we convince ourselves that image and reality align, a face and a mirror. We are a problem solver. We are looking at images that flip—seen upside down or sideways they un-fool the eye.”

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Visionreport

visionreport

In a series of demonstrations, sounds are transcribed as visual reports: Hands sketch quick graphic notation alongside computer-generated patterns—rendered strokes, torn forms, the alignment of colors and edges—to link the action of listening with the action of seeing. Layer by layer, techniques and metaphors for direct and computer-aided sensation are added. Translation and interpretation are made ambiguous, flickering between human and algorithmic observation; the activities of recognizing, modelling, and predicting viewed as musical forms.

Visionreport was first performed within the program “Hallucinations” at the Greek Film Archive, as part of Documenta 14 in Athens, June 2017.

visionreport – video drawing – excerpt


Pencil lines drawn free-hand, ambiguous shapes that may resemble letters or numbers, each figure analyzed while in the process of being drawn. Probable future routes, indicated by fine, branching lines, render the set of all recognizable forms that each shape’s particular ambiguity might allow. When the pencil lifts, predictions continue—lines spread, curve, and overlap, reaching to suggest a new course.

visionreport – waves

An image of light moving on water, shifting from frame to frame. For each reflected point of light, a new tone rises and falls, revealing dense melodies in every arrangement of flashes. When the image freezes, a visual pattern persists, and the tones hold their chance harmony, continuing to slowly rise or fall until the image moves again.

visionreport – masks

Cut-paper masks are manipulated on a computer-drawn grid. When a face is revealed, sweeping, low-frequency sounds trigger, and then disperse into static. As masks are added, rotated, overlapped, folded and unfolded, sound returns in subtle variations to describe each moment of recognition—I see faces, this many, here and here and here … right now.

vision report – notation

A handheld brush sketches lines in ink across a rough grid, simultaneously with short bursts of synthesized sound. The lines bend and waver at curves and angles, rising and falling to mimic the modulating sound.