CURSOR 6.2
CURSOR6.2: On comparing media continued (Cyclops and other Hybrids)
Paul McLean
For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)
I’ve prepared several examples of old/new media hybrids and an illustration of digital translation affecting creative output.
GOLEM
The first example is a small acrylic on canvas painting entitled “Golem.” I sampled some “classical” fragments from memory. The disembodied face is inspired by Goya, and the knight/golem is inspired by Renaissance paintings, like “The Battle of Zama,” by Giulio Romano ((1492-1546), Collection of the Pushkin Museum. See the foot soldier in the center left front with the red tunic. The stylization is typical.
Here are some digital representations of the painting by Romano. It’s interesting to note the color variations among the digi-images. Also worth noting are the source pages, demonstrative of digi-exchange portals for reproductions of original oil paintings.
http://fotobank.ru/image/BR01-2686.html
http://www.bridgemanartondemand.com/art/78349/The_Battle_of_Zama_202_BC_1570-80
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The second iteration of the golem is an overpainting that “depicts” a disembodied Cyclops head, an abstract (mixed media) ceramic sculpture positioned on an unorthodox pedestal, and a disc. I used glazes for a sexy antique layer effect (opacity/composite - umber). There are references to Surrealist auto-visual arrangement and dimensionist “white cube” installation strategies.
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The third iteration combines the first two in Photoshop. In my computer the file exists in a print-ready format. The web-ready versions are on view through both AFH Blogs, on Flickr and via Twitter. The AFH Flickr photoset includes raw digital photos of the painting(s) in the first two phases.
Here are the three iterations (so far) of my golem.
http://www.artforhumans.com/myspace/golem1.jpg
http://www.artforhumans.com/myspace/golem2.jpg
http://www.artforhumans.com/myspace/golem7.jpg
CYCLOPS AND DAD
We can take the process further. The first iteration of the next painting is called “Dad.” The second is called “Cyclops and Dad.” Instead of mashing the two iterations for a third immediately, I built an animation (“I Love You, Monster 2”) using the second version of the painting, with visually related paintings from the series added to the animation mix for texture and to broaden the data pool/thematic reach/visual material. I built the audio from a CD entitled “Daytime Nighttime,” recorded in 1988 by my friends of PAR3 (Jim, Tim, Joe Keyes; Scott O’Grady). I did the cover art 20 years ago.
A note on timelines: In any sort of collaborative production work, it’s typical for old and new concepts and work to organically recycle through an ongoing project. I mention the dates and details to illustrate this. For a richer backstory on the Cyclops figure, for example, see my blogpost for Question C of the European Graduate School application. It’s helpful here, with regards the interplay between old and new media, to mention that, at least in my work, animation is an extension dimensional painting practice. At this point in the “I Love You, Monster” production, the various timelines are connected to the center like anemone tentacles. The layer we’re most concerned about in CURSOR probably is the published – what might be thought of as the surface – cross-section of the overall production trajectory. What should at this point be obvious is that the transparency of that surface, the access it seems to provide to the creative component of the production, and the manufacturing sequence, is in reality a function of fluid dynamics, to borrow and reassign a term from an ancient Western science.
An example of this quality of dimensional production dynamics would be the intraplay of the new paintings in light and dark environments. “Cyclops” is the marker piece in the production sequence for this particular technical advance. The technical “problem” (a painting’s relationship to external light sources) is one I’ve explored for over twenty years. Whole bodies of work, including those pertaining to internal illumination versus light reflection as metaphysical qualifications of art, have been devoted to this study, which is fundamental to dimensional art presentation (see “Inside>Outside,” 2000, DDDD exhibit at the Parthenon Museum in Nashville, especially the lightboxes, and the handheld/-energized activation tools). In the “I Love You, Monster” series, I applied fluorescent and luminescent paints to the canvas in layers of varying exposure (some covered by matte paint, some on the surface) to build paintings that “read” one way when lighted and entirely differently in a darkened room. The relevance of sampling music from “Daytime Nighttime,” therefore, is clarified. In the course of an actual production, however, there is often not enough time in the deadline timeline to allow one to elucidate on such technical aspects in detail, and often finding someone interested in the technicalities is a chore, or rare. In today’s art environment, many “qualified” viewers are interested only in concepts that require no other investment beyond simple intellectual math (a+b=c). An open source platforms requires the dimensional artist to provide the viewer with maximum production transparency, even if that requires of the viewer intellectual geometry, algebra or calculus. This is after all what makes the medium, as well as the artwork, more “realistic.”
A note on the visual components of the broader concept narrative: both “Golem” and the Dad/Cyclops paintings emerged (the Cyclops, to make the point finer, re-emerged, and that can also be said of “Dad,” who is also a previous portrait subject) during a new collective project featuring Jim and Tim Keyes, my old college pals. We reconnected via email/phone. The production is called “I Love You, Monster,” a quote from Jim’s 3 year-old son Christian, who said that to me, just before he gave me a hug. Some pre-production drawings were executed in my father’s hospital and rehab rooms in West Virginia in June. I mention these facts, because the narrative is not a simple conceptual construct. It is in fact, combinative, containing thematic (in the more traditional sense) threads that course through the many facets of the production. However, it should be clear by the above examples and others in CURSOR that the dimensional process combines anecdotes/elements from “Real Life” that are introduced in “Real Time” throughout both the development processes and exhibition or presentation. The strategies are not necessarily new, but some of the tactics certainly are. The new media encourage timeliness. The old media objectified the striving for timelessness. The PAR3 song used in the animation is titled “In Real Life.”
The Golem narrative evolved from my Thesis project, in the discussion of corporate personhood and AI. In some ways the two narratives intersect (Thesis and new project). In the actual production, the conceptual lines or divisions are blurring. In each Golem facet of the art production, the narrative is conveyed as the articulation of independent agency. Conceptually, the Golem is tracing the manifestation of corporate intelligence throughout the social and corporate systems.
The second half of the animation demonstrates some 4D effects involving symmetry and layer effects. The audio is several-layered and effected, with the song slowed to 79% of the original (used by permission, of course). I’m including (as a linked notation below; the first and second animations, it should be noted are simply the first two increments in the much longer “I Love You, Monster” movie, one of several that will be exhibited ultimately as part of the whole) the first “I Love You, Monster” animation, which incorporates “Dad” and “The Golem #1” into a syncopated repetitive sequence with screengrabs from the game “Call of Duty.” I ran one of those screengrabs through the Photoshop mill, to produce a narrative image, depicting the Golem at the end of a long workday on his Santa Fe adobe abode. The audio was recorded on a digital recorder through headphones. The game’s software had frozen, and the soundtrack was frozen in a loop, as you hear it. Finally, I mashed up iterations one and two. The “glitch” is the point here. Within the context of dimensional production, a “mistake” or a “technical failure” is as valuable as a perfectly executed artistic move, and is in fact identical to one, if it correctly demonstrates the nature of the medium that produces the effect.
The paintings are here:
http://www.artforhumans.com/myspace/dad.jpg
http://www.artforhumans.com/myspace/Dad_cy.jpg
http://www.artforhumans.com/myspace/Dad_cy2.jpg
The animations are here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XxbkNyJEBs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpSNlqtIuaQ
TRANSLATION
The third example is a short story from the ZEELIO cycle of texts. It is written with the unarticulated subtext, “Zeelio has been reading Cormac McCarthy again.” I subjected the short story to online translation (from English to French, French to German, German back to English). The results are interesting. One deduction potentially drawn from the exercise is, “Without human intervention/correction, mechanical translation is usually inadequate.” However, this deduction would ignore the effect on the text caused by its migration through the several languages. There are others, with respect to the generative or creative, even aesthetic qualities or features of digital interpretation. In short, as it translates, the software reorganizes and alters, but does its output qualify as creation?
http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=854
