NüMEDIA

New creations!

GIDDYUP
Movie on 2011-08-18 at 19.10

FWOOSH
Movie on 2011-08-19 at 21.38

bwahahah

It flops! It drops! It writhes! It’s…my automata.

Movie on 2011-08-17 at 14.56

It’s amazing how much better the crank worked out. Not only does wobble in a good way, but it, you know, actually moves. I think the problem with the cams was just that they were too oblong and too scratchy. However, a problem I’ve identified now is that the cam- (crank-?) followers, in this case the golf pencils, are way too short. Hopefully I’ll have time to fix it tomorrow.

Fred the tech man also gave an awesome demonstration today on Legos, and provided us with those awesome Lego kits that have pulleys and gears and things. I made a successful cam system with the Legos, which I’m quite happy about:

Movie on 2011-08-17 at 15.06

I think that this one worked out because the Lego cams are smooth and less oblong. I’m currently trying to hook it up to this system here which is based on train wheels:

Movie on 2011-08-17 at 15.07

The bar makes the little gear orbit around while still revolving. I had hoped to hook up a gear to the cam machine for it to spin with the train wheel experiment, but no-go just yet. Better luck next time!

The class ended with a demonstration of MaxMSP, which is SO AWESOME. I definitely want to play around with this, it seems like it makes coding pretty comprehensive for a visual, not particularly linear-minded person like myself. I have plans to buy some light sensors…or maybe a theremin…and play around with light control. SO COOL!

The day started off with the glimmering hope I get when I start digging through my mess of collectanea:

Next came a sense of industry as I drilled and poked and glued and bended and stapled.

In the end I was a little disappointed with my project. I really like the orange cups and how they fit together and their potential for movement, but the day ended with the impossible task of trying to get my whole structure rigged up to cams. Fortunately, there were a lot of other more successful missions in the class. For instance, Sarah Gay’s automata looks awesome and compact and functional; this is a model I’d like to follow. I also like the aesthetic of Léonie’s crank.

For comparison, here is my sad little golden bratwurst that is eagerly awaiting its reconstructive surgery tonight. I’m currently replacing the cam-driven mechanism with a crank, which is a good thing for two reasons: 1) it may actually work, since i can directly connect it to the gold pencils and 2) the movement will be nice and wobbly, giving my orange little segmented friend a more life-like, fearful appearance.

I will update tomorrow, once I leave my Internet-forsaken house. On the note, COMCAST IS THE DEVIL! Beware.

…or why this post is late.

Gina Kamentsky‘s delightful presentation taught me not only about the possibilities of kinetic sculpture and automata, but also about the challenges. As a whole, I got a good sense of what I might encounter as an artist-teacher with full-time studio practice. I really can’t wait, despite the fact that I hate plugging myself as an artist and doubt that I can ever pull it off as naturally as Gina.

I like the aesthetic of her work in general, but in particular:

Look. At. That. Coconut. How do people come up with this crap?

Also, this (sorry for the low res):

What a clever modern interpretation of this performance; the energy is the same (slapstick and intentionally vapid) as the original show, and I love that Digital-Age twist!

Another highlight of the day was this little video here:

So simple, so funny. Overall, drained as I was today I still felt a huge desire to rig together a bunch of scrap metal into an awesome automata. And today, I almost did…

I had a lot of problems with this reading. Let me begin by stating what I got out of it so I know I got it right:

According to Bender, both visual catalogues such as those found in the Encyclopedia and the various still life tableaux present information in iconic form, show hierarchy, relative sense of scale, and have an audience in mind. However, tableaux look convincingly like optical reality and are stagnant. Time and human activity is implied by careful observation of the objects involved (like the wear marks on the copper cistern indicate frequent use). Visual catalogues, on the other hand, say something about the purpose of the objects involved and are objective and dynamic. While tableaux place the viewer in the exact same standing spot, visual catalogues portrays different sort of time lapse and livelihood than other forms of visual representations. The whiteness in back of the objects in say the anatomical drawings give at once clarity, but at the same time places object in unspecified time and place so that it might be visualized in motion or at the very least considered on its own. A diagram is some kind of hybrid of the two, like the hunting scenes which at once have the view of hunters running but then have a floating musical staff to imply that “here is the soundtrack.” Is this correct?

Assuming that I have my information right, I have some issues with this article. For one, Bender uses still-life paintings as a point of comparison to Encyclopedia engravings–why? I see that he wanted to compare the weird white-backgrounded line drawings to a cohesive display from an “objective” viewpoint. This comparison is frankly distracting and could have been reduced to the paragraph spanning page 33-34. Though fairly contemporary, the diagrams were commissioned for a different purpose (for decoration and wall use) and painted by a craftsman with a different skill set. Limiting the discussion to the divergent aesthetics of the two media might have been interesting, but the thesis of the article seems to be about the unique, conceptual manner in which diagrams frame time and interaction between objects and how this makes them “objects.” (On that note: What? I mean, duh? What am I missing here?)

I’m also kind of detecting some major gaps in some of the points Bender makes about the compositional choices in the Encyclopedia engravings. How can he really justify that the inclusion of musical scores in the hunting plates is for “episodic” purpose? Couldn’t the engraver have just kind of schlepped it in there to save on having to print more plates? Because I’ve printed engravings and let me tell you, it’s a giant headache. I’m not saying that he’s wrong, but I think he’s jumping to conclusions a bit too soon. He also makes a point that the drill ritual is seen as a shift to a more formulaic, more successful integration of mathematics and rituals, etc due to its emphasis on notation and a “paucity of explanatory texts.” (p 46, last paragraph) Couldn’t it just be that the gesture of the drill routine in itself is simpler? Really, it’s only the gradual zooming out of a motion being performed by rows of soldiers, not a chaotic stampede of people and animals engaging in a super difficult chase. I would attribute the lack of explanation to the simplicity of the act, not a major development in diagram-drawing. Also, Bender remarks on the different use of white space in the register as well as drop shadow/picture plane…isn’t this artist-dependent? The hunting plates were designed by someone else, and the engravers might not have necessarily been the artists. Just saying.

On the other hand, I do appreciate the bit on “idealizing vs hybridizing”–or the idea that in a diagram depicting “this is this,” one object is made to stand for a whole class of objects. It is an interesting paradox to the whole idea of a diagram, that the illustrator is attempting to depict something very specific but very universal. The hand in the Desseins, for instance, is all veiny but looks like it belongs to no one in particular. That, to me, is a much more interesting discussion about diagrams then the fact that they are objects. It roots back to the discussion on empathy–how we can relate foreign images (like a faceless being or an unfamiliar formation of people) to something we know to understand it.

–On a tangental note, In Mijksenaar and Westendorp’s “Open Here”, they preface their collection of diagrams and instructive drawings with a pride for lowercase “a” art and the ingenuity of creating a drawing that can be read AND, more importantly, narrated or even replicated by the viewer. While the 1999 book is not quite in line with DIAGRAM’s time frame I feel that it has a better way of describing the importance, purpose and uniqueness of diagrams then “The descriptions they produce are new objects.” (p. 52) Again, what does that even mean? Is the thesis here that the Encyclopedia diagrams and the various tableaux are all art objects? Help!