Images still from
Vicent van Gogh, 1833 – 1890 Self-portrait With a Straw Hat, 1887
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Footage taken on March 2009
I’m officially making available online an ongoing video project, which was started in March 2009:http://navasse.net/renditions/
More videos to be uploaded periodically so make sure to check my main website from time to time.
Excerpt from the project page:
RENDITIONS “The Museum Series” offers a perspective on how works of art are displayed in museums.
Each video project explores the relation of video footage and photo-stills. This formal juxtaposition is designed to offer an open-ended reading of the visitor’s relation to the work of art.
Jeremy Douglass (left) and Lev Manovich (far right) demonstrate how to analyze data on the Hyper Wall at Calit2.
The Cultural Analytics seminar took place at Calit2 on December 16 and 17 of 2009. The event brought together researchers and students from Bergen University and University of California San Diego. The two day event consisted of research presentations and demos of software tools.
Part One of Hyper Wall Demonstration during Cultural Analytics Seminar at Calit2, San Diego, December 16-17, 2009. Introduction to principles of Cultural Analytics.
I will not spend much time in this entry defining Cultural Analytics. This subject has been well covered by excellent blogs such as Open Reflections. For this reason, at the end of this entry I include a number of links to resources that focus on Cultural Analytics. Instead, I will briefly share what I believe Cultural Analytics offers to researchers in the humanities.
Part Two of Hyper Wall Demonstration during Cultural Analytics Seminar at Calit2, San Diego, December 16-17, 2009. Analysis of Vertov’s motion in scenes from Man with a Movie Camera.
This emerging field can be defined as a hybrid practice that utilizes tools of quantitative analysis often found in the hard sciences for the enhancing of qualitative analysis in the humanities. The official definition of the term follows:
Cultural analytics refers to a range of quantitive and analytical methodologies drawn from the natural and social sciences for the study of aesthetics, cultural artifacts and cultural change. The methods include data visualization techniques, the statistical analysis of large data sets, the use of image processing software to extract data from still and moving video, and so forth. Despite its use of empirical methodologies, the goals of cultural analytics generally align with those of the humanities.
One thing that separates the humanities from the hard sciences is the emphasis of qualitative over quantitative analysis. In very general terms qualitative analysis is often used to evaluate the how and why of particular case studies, while quantitative analysis focuses on patterns and trends, that may not always be concerned with social or political implications.
Part Three of Hyper Wall Demonstration during Cultural Analytics Seminar at Calit2, San Diego, December 16-17, 2009. Jeremy Douglass analyzes comic books.
What Cultural Analytics is doing, in my view, is bringing together qualitative and quantitative analysis for the interests of the humanities. In a way Cultural Analytics could be seen as a bridge between specialized fields that in the past have not always communicated well.
Consequently, when new ground is being explored, questions of purpose are bound to emerge, which is exactly what happened during seminar conversations. As the videos that accompany this brief entry will demonstrate, the real challenge is for researchers in the humanities to engage not only with Cultural Analytics tools and envision how such tools can enhance their practice, but to actually embrace new philosophical approaches that blur the lines between the hard sciences and the humanities.
Part Four of Hyper Wall Demonstration during Cultural Analytics Seminar at Calit2, San Diego, December 16-17, 2009. Cicero Da Silva explains his collaborative project, Macro.
To be specific on the possibilities that Cultural Analytics offers to the humanities, I will cite two demonstrations by Lev Manovich and Jeremy Douglass.
Lev Manovich at one point presented Hamlet by William Shakespeare in its entirety on Calit2’s Hyper Wall, which consists of several screens that enable users to navigate data at a very high resolution.
When seeing the entire text at once, one is likely to realize that this methodology is more like mapping. To this effect, soon after, we were shown a version of the text in which Manovich had isolated the repetition of certain words throughout the literary work.
This approach could be used by a literature scholar to study certain linguistic strategies, such as sentence structure, by an author. Let’s take this a step further and say that it has been agreed that a contemporary author is influenced by a canonical writer. How this supposed influence takes effect can be evaluated by studying certain patterns of sentences from both authors by isolating parts of literary texts for direct comparison. One could then evaluate if the supposed influence is formal, conceptual or both: perhaps the contemporary author might make ideological references that are clearly linked to the canonical author, but which are not necessarily influenced at a formal level; or it could be the other way around, or both. In this case, quantitative and qualitative analysis are combined to evaluate a case study. In other words, pattern comparison is used to understand the similarities and differences between two or more works of literature.
To this effect, Jeremy Douglass’s presentation of a comic book is important. He explained how by seeing an entire publication of a comic book story one can study how certain patterns in the narrative come to define the aesthetics for the reader.
While the reader may be able to experience the story in time, by actually reading it, the visualization of the comic book in grid-like fashion–as a structural map–allows the researcher to apply analysis of patterns and trends that may be more common in flows of networks to an actual narrative. Again, in this case we find quantitative and qualitative analysis complementing each other.
As noted at the end of the article “Culture is Data” (also provided below) from Open Reflections, it appears that Manovich is at times understood to argue that one should privilege quantitative over qualitative analysis. This proposition implies an either or mentality by certain researchers that needs to be reevaluated. Janneke Adema explains his answer better than I ever could:
But, on the other hand, won’t we loose a sense of meaning if we analyze culture like a thing? Manovich argues that this is of course a complementary method, we should not throw away our other ways of establishing meaning. It is a way of expanding them. And it is also an important expansion, for how is one going to ask about the meaning of large datasets? We need to combine the traditionally [sic]humanities approach of interpretation with digital techniques to find out more. And again, meaning is not the only thing to look at. It is also about creating an experience. Patterns are the new real of our society.
The most important thing to understand when evaluating the videos available with this entry is that one need not have a hyper wall to do research with Cultural Analytics methodologies; many of the tools can run on a personal computer. It’s more about adopting an attitude and willingness to do research by way of combining quantitative and qualitative analysis. At the moment I am evaluating the implementation of Cultural Analytics in my research on Remix.
Revising my evaluation of mashups led me to this journalistic piece from June 13, 2006 by Scott Conroy from 60 minutes. It is mentioned here mainly for historical purposes, as some things discussed have obviously changed since the feature was produced.
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Teens don’t have to work very hard to be entertained anymore. Rather than trekking to the record store, they can buy their favorite music with a few clicks — and maybe try out something new while they’re at it. Reality TV, the preferred genre of many, is always on the air. They don’t even have to get up from their chairs to share photographs and gossip with friends.
American society has been assigning all-encompassing labels to generations of young people for a long time. The tendency to pigeonhole a diverse group of individuals is, in some respects, dishonest — not every Flower Child spent the ’60s tiptoeing through tulips, and many members of Generation X surely thought flannel best confined to the realm of the lumberjack.
Tim Etchells (born 1962, lives and works in Great Britain) City Changes (2008) inkjet prints
As part of my residency at the Swedish Traveling Exhibitions, I visited a number of museums in the City of Gothenburg. I was not alone in this trip. I travelled with Melissa Mboweni, a contemporary art curator from South Africa, who was also a Correspondent in Residence.
This entry includes brief notes on some of the places we visited while in Gothenburg. This is also the last entry of my travels in Sweden. Other details of my research will appear in longer texts to be published at a later date in the Swedish Traveling Exhibitions’ Spana magazine.
On the afternoon of November 9, our first stop was Gothenburg’s Art Museum (Göteborgs Konstmuseum), where we were greeted by Curator Johan Sjöström. We spent sometime with an exhibition he curated on Ivar Arosenius, a prolific nineteenth century artist. The exhibit features 250 works, which, as Sjöström explained, was a selection from a larger body of work. Arosenius was a Swedish artist who grew up in Älvängen, a small town north of Gothenburg. He died in January 2, 1909 at the age of thirty due to complications of Haemophilia. I was overwhelmed by the amount of pieces on display–as I realized that an entire day would not allow for anyone to view properly all of the works. Sjöström explained that Arosenius would at times produce several pieces in one night.
“Bollywood,” an exhibit on the film industry in India, at display at the Museum of World Culture until May of 2010.
The next day, November 10, we visited Världskulturmuseet (The Museum of World Culture). Our host was Cajsa Lagerkvist, Head of Exhibitions and Research. We spent the morning with a few of her colleagues discussing the museum’s mission. I realized that the institution was unlike any other I had visited up to this point, as it focuses on what Cajsa and her colleagues referred to as contemporary global issues. This premise is rather open ended, and gives the museum, in my view, quite a bit of freedom to develop exhibitions that are sensitive to the ever changing facets of globalization.
South African Curator, Melissa Mboweni, during her lecture at the Museum of World Culture
At the time of my visit they featured an exhibit on Vodou, and another on Bollywood. I was told by our hosts that last year the museum enjoyed 240,000 visits, and that many people who attend are younger than thirty. It became understandable why the Museum of World Culture emphasizes education as part of their mission. During that afternoon, Melissa Mboweni and I presented our research to curators of various museums in the city.
Facade of the City Museum of Gothenburg
On the morning of November 11, we visited the Stadsmuseet (City Museum of Gothenburg). Curator Christian Penalva and Project Manager Charlotta Dohlvik, along with three of their colleagues took us around the numerous galleries. The City Museum is in essence a hybrid of collections that fit well under the term cultural history. It holds a number of important archeological pieces from the Viking era as well as artifacts from the early days of trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth century; it also hosts an impressive collection of Swedish theatre and dance costumes.
The City Museum also supports contemporary activities. At the time of our visit, it featured selections of the Gothenburg Art Biennale, titled What a Wonderful World, curated by Celia prado and Johan Pousette. We had a very animated discussion as Penalva explained the museum’s interest in implementing innovative approaches to exhibiting. The museum is considering how the concept of interactivity as defined in new media practice can be beneficial to the development of future as well as already existing exhibitions.
Main exhibition gallery at the Maritime Museum
During the afternoon we visited Sjöfartsmuseet (The Maritime Museum), where we were greeted by Curators Britta Söderqvist, Linda Noreen and their colleagues. They took us around the different exhibitions while explaining the special role of the museum in Gothenburg, which is important given that the Little London ( a popular reference) is a port city. Like the other museums, the Maritime Museum places an emphasis on youth education. Noreen, specifically, heads a project titled “Shoreline,” in which young citizens are encouraged to reflect through art, writing, and other creative forms of communication on what it means to live in a port city. Much of this activity is extended online.
A Virtual Aquarium display at the Maritime Museum. Direct camera feed from the ocean.
In general, the curators appear invested in exploring new forms of display. At the time, a historical exhibition of the port was on view. The idea was to present information and material in similar fashion as would be found in a working space. One display that caught my attention was a “virtual aquarium,” placed on one of the working tables (see video above). The aquarium actually is a camera feed from the sea presented on a large screen, also available online. Instead of viewing fish in a large container, the visitor can observe them in their natural environment and therefore get a sense of actual marine life.
Another place that we visited on the early evening of November 10 is Gothenburgs Konsthall, which is one of the venues hosting the Gothenburg Biennal. Curator Stina Edblom showed us around. There were quite a few good pieces in the exhibition, but I will only name one in this case, to be brief. I was particularly taken aback by Tim Echels’s “City Changes” (2008), [see image at the top of this entry]. The work consists of colored inkjet prints of a simple story about a small town. As the story is edited, the changes are recorded in different colors. Each draft is displayed in linear fashion from left to right across two gallery walls. Anyone who has a consistent relationship with writing will find Echels’s obvious–yet unexpected–focus on the act of editing quite refreshing.
Admittedly, since I struggle with ongoing edits of my own, I could not help but notice how meaning changed from one draft to the next; but I also wondered about edits that were between the drafts. Upon closer reflection, one could contemplate the possibility that the changes from one version to the next were deliberate to emphasize the flux in meaning as process, rather than trying to get a specific point across. The edits (additions and deletions) became metaphors for the physical changes in a town. Things were constructed and demolished according to the moment described within each draft. “City Changes” exposes our anxiety in trying to pin down meaning, in making it stable and fixed, when in reality ideas and their forms of manifestation are always prone for constant change.
Given my own tendency and focus on Remix as discourse, I could not help but wonder on how Echels was in some way exposing principles of selectivity: one of the basic elements necessary to develop a critical voice in a time when appropriation and recycling have become the most efficient forms of production at all levels of culture, especially the fine arts.
Our visit to Gothenburg was swift but fully packed. The purpose was to expose both Melissa Mboweni and myself to different curating approaches. Given that my own practice is in the arts, I have to admit that I learned quite a bit about aesthetics in museum display. Art exhibitions tend to be minimal in their approach, always showing only what is essential in order to do justice to the work of art. But I found the museums I visited in Gothenburg to be much more creative in their displays. This can definitely be a good thing, if the venue has a critical mission in the enrichment of culture.
“Space Junk Spotting, by Saso Sedlacek, Software Mashup of Google Earth and a NASA database of space debris.
As part of my residence at the Swedish Traveling Exhibitions, on November 6 I visited Mejan Labs, an art space dedicated to supporting projects that critically reflect on diverse forms of technology. The art space is located in the heart of the city of Stockholm. Director Peter Hagdahl and Curator Björn Norberg greeted me upon my arrival. We spent sometime discussing the history of media, and how Mejan Labs is part of the ongoing development of new media art practice. In just three years, Mejan Labs has become an exhibition space worth noting outside of Sweden. I learned about it almost as soon as its first exhibition was launched. It was quite a treat to be able to visit it and meet its founders in person.
At the time of my visit, Mejan Labs featured three works that focused on Astronomy, or on the earth in some abstract form. “Earth and Above” on view from November 5, 2009 to January 12, 2010, presents the works of three artists, “A Space Exodus” (2008) by Larissa Sansour, “No Closer to the Source” (July 20, 1969) by Lisa Oppenheim, and “Space Junk Spotting” by Saso Sedlacek.
Image source: Takram.com
Overture, Installation: Milano Salon, Italy, April 22-27, 2009.
During the early morning of November 5, as Correspondent in Residence for the Swedish Traveling Exhibitions, I visited Iaspis (International Artist Studio Program in Sweden). Unlike my visit to Magasin 3 (which took place the afternoon on the same day), Iaspis was quite close to the hotel where I stayed: a short five minutes walk in the neighborhood of Zinkensdam. I was greeted by Coordinator Suzi Ersahin, who took me around the facilities while explaining Iaspis’s role in Swedish culture.
Iaspis invites international artists for residencies that may range from one to six months, depending on the needs and specific circumstances of each artist. Swedish artists may apply for the residency; Dutch and Nordic artists may also apply through special institutions in their specific regions. Iaspis also supports Swedish artists exhibitions outside the country. Given its spacious facilities, I was surprised to learn that the Residence Program does not organize exhibitions, but does have a periodical open house, in which the residents are able to display their works. Iaspis is also known for its seminars and conferences; and they also publish books on different subjects, ranging from artist monographs to critical reflections on contemporary art issues. Iaspis also offers an archive of its past residents; a resource, which I hope will one day be available online, as I was not able to peruse it as I wished.
Description by Färgfabriken Birthday Party, 2000 Birthday Party (1:10) is a reconstruction of the party of the artist?s mother?s 65th birthday on March 16, 2000. Ten cameras documented the party, and the films were later screened in the windows of a wooden model of the suburban villa.
During the months of October and November, I am working for four weeks as a Correspondent in Residence for the Swedish Traveling Exhibitions (STE), a non-profit organization based in Visby, a small town located in the island of Gotland. The Institution produces exhibits of all types that travel throughout Sweden, and is particularly interested in exploring the possibilities of the exhibition space as a mobile unit in all possible forms.
As part of my residency, I am scheduled to visit a number of institutions mainly in the cities of Stockholm and Goteborg. My first stop was Stockholm, where on Monday, October 20, I visited Färgfabriken, an artspace located in a former factory sector. Project Manager Sofia Palmgren generously showed me around the former paint factory, which in 1996 was turned into an artspace that is focused in art as process. The institution has a very open mission statement, but upon examining their archives, it becomes evident that their interest is to deliver conceptually engaging art installations that are quite sensitive to all the senses.
The following text was originally published during the month of August, 2009 as part of Drain‘s Cold issue. The journal is a refereed online journal published bi-annually. The text is republished in full on Remix Theory with permission. Drain’s copyright agreement allows for 25% of the essay to be reblogged or reposted on other sites with proper citation and linkage to the journal at http://www.drainmag.com/. I ask that their agreement be respected by the online community.
In 1964 Marshal McLuhan published his essay “Media Hot and Cold,” in one of his most influential books, Understanding Media.[1] The essay considers the concepts of hot and cold as metaphors to define how people before and during the sixties related to the ongoing development of media, not only in Canada and the United States but also throughout the world.[2] Since the sixties, the terms hot and cold have become constant points of reference in media studies. However, these principles, as defined by McLuhan, have changed since he first introduced them. What follows is a reflection on such changes during the development of media in 2009.
McLuhan is quick to note that media is defined according to context. His essay begins with a citation of “The Rise of the Waltz” by Curt Sachsk, which he uses to explain the social construction behind hot and cold media. He argues that the Waltz during the eighteenth century was considered hot, and that this fact might be overlooked by people who lived in the century of Jazz (McLuhan’s own time period). Even though McLuhan does not follow up on this observation, his implicit statement is that how hot and cold are perceived in the twentieth century is different from the eighteenth. Because of this implication, his essay is best read historically. This interpretation makes the reader aware of how considering a particular medium as hot or cold is a social act, informed by the politics of culture. McLuhan’s first example demonstrates that, while media may become hot or cold, or be hot at one time and cold at another, according to context, the terms, themselves, are not questioned, but rather taken as monolithic points of reference. To make sense of this point, McLuhan’s concepts must be defined.
Fernando Llanos, a Mexican video artist, on Sunday, October 4, late afternoon, gracefully took a few participants of Transitio to visit Xochimilco (a local popular boat ride center). In the above image Llanos wears a shirt that displays a DJ turntable with the phrase “Transmisor de buena vibra,” (Transmitter of good vibes). I share the image as a metaphor of my experience in Transitio_MX.
Transitio MX has been full of events. Below are some of the main highlights of days three and four.
So, after all the buzz about the YouTube Symphony Orchestra altering the audition process forever, after months of interactive computer chat about the world’s first collaborative online orchestra, after 96 winning players were selected from among the more than 3,000 musicians who submitted audition videos and were brought to New York for a group summit and Carnegie Hall concert, how did the YouTube Symphony Orchestra finally play?
