Bendit_I/O: A System for Extending Mediated and Networked Performance Techniques to Circuit-Bent Devices

Circuit bending—the act of modifying a consumer device\u27s internal circuitry in search of new, previously-unintended responses—provides artists with a chance to subvert expectations for how a certain piece of hardware should be utilized, asking them to view everyday objects as complex electronic instruments. Along with the ability to create avant-garde instruments from unique and nostalgic sound sources, the practice of circuit bending serves as a methodology for exploring the histories of discarded objects through activism, democratization, and creative resurrection. While a rich history of circuit bending continues to inspire artists today, the recent advent of smart musical instruments and the growing number of hybrid tools available for creating connective musical experiences through networks asks us to reconsider the ways in which repurposed devices can continue to play a role in modern sonic art. Bendit_I/O serves as a synthesis of the technologies and aesthetics of the circuit bending and Networked Musical Performance (NMP) practices. The framework extends techniques native to the practices of telematic and network art to hacked hardware so that artists can design collaborative and mediated experiences that incorporate old devices into new realities. Consisting of user-friendly hardware and software components, Bendit_I/O aims to be an entry point for novice artists into both of the creative realms it brings together. This document presents details on the components of the Bendit_I/O framework along with an analysis of their use in three new compositions. Additional research serves to place the framework in historical context through literature reviews of previous work undertaken in the circuit bending and networked musical performance practices. Additionally, a case is made for performing hacked consumer hardware across a wireless network, emphasizing how extensions to current circuit bending and NMP practices provide the ability to probe our relationships with hardware through collaborative, mediated, and multimodal methods

Infrastructure and the state in science and technology studies

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively

Fortuna: Drawing, Technology, Contingency

This article explores the relationship between drawing, technology and contingency in three artists' work since the late 1950s, to engage the relationship between forms of artistic labour, the autonomy of the studio, and the internalization of the techniques and tempos of the contemporary life world more broadly. Each artist hybridizes drawing with more modern technological modes: in his solvent transfer method Robert Rauschenberg brought drawing to the condition of collage and into direct contact with the contemporary printed mass media; William Kentridge’s ‘Drawings for Projection’ and his more recent ‘flip-book films’ engage with increasingly obsolete forms of visual communication to explore both the fraught recent history of South Africa and the potentials articulated in physical acts of making; and in her Motion Capture Drawings British artist Susan Morris employs biometric digital technology to generate lines directly from the unconscious movements of the body, measured over extended durations, in a contemporary form of surrealist automatism. While not wishing to propose too close an alignment between these three practices, this article explores the ways in which in each case automatic, contingent, non-conscious, or otherwise ‘dark’ aspects of drawing are brought into focus as drawing is aligned with other more recent technological forms. The implications of this contingent aspect – or fortuna – are examined in the context of the growing power of measurement, quantification and control to structure contemporary life more broadly

The Jacket of Life or Death

The recent art installations by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei have attracted a lot of attention. Consisting primarily of thousands of life jackets worn by refugees arriving in Europe after a dangerous voyage crossing the Mediterranean Sea, Weiwei’s art installations have drawn focus on the deaths and disappearances of thousands of refugees. This paper discusses the symbolism of the life jacket, both seen as a fatal anchor and a life preserver. Analysing the art piece Soleil Levant, I will argue that Weiwei’s art is a work of mourning and is offering a temporary space in the contemporary city for negotiating the complexities and ambivalences of mourning and the impossible task of keeping the dead alive. As a symbol hovering between life and death, the life jacket is thus an emblematic illustration of mourning

Altered matter. Like icons, stored

This thesis proposes research findings that run parallel to my own practice. At the heart of the concepts discussed there is a notion of invention and the transmutation of materials. Attempting to find clear ways of making something with the legitimacy of an artwork. Artists considered along side my practice include Alberto Giacometti, Manfred Pernice, Mike Nelson and Ryan Trecartin. As a result of my academic inquiry, my ideas start to move towards the informational as a way to understand how information and invented symbolism may be inscribed or instilled into something. This may be through constellational choices in joining, script writing or by embracing technological ways to mediate the world and the artwork, extending its quiddity or “thingness” by embracing editing and manipulation. The studio work extends on my previous installation practice:sculptures in a variety of sizes and materials. Sculptures that suggest function in an ambiguous way, mimesis in an uncanny way and have an unclear classification as support, artwork, relic or invention. Amid this ambivalent environment I use constellational choices, inscription into materials and proximity relationships to communicate a fictional language or signs of what may appear to have come from an extraterrestrial culture, in, around and on the sculptures. Some materials appear as “repurposed” through the unusual joining of everyday components. Other materials may have been reduced to mere “matter” by altering them to near unrecognisable states. The sculptures and installation elements have a second mediated form by appearing in still and moving images

Atem / Breath

The anthology explores breath from the perspective of the arts and humanities, as well as experimental scientific and design practices. Focus is on the period from 1900 to the present day – an era during in which air has become a precarious medium, co-created and manipulated by humans. Against this backdrop, breath appears as an elusive yet vital substance that reveals connections between the physical, symbolic, technological and social realms

Literature on the Margins: Russian Fiction in the Nineties

Despite shrinkage in print runs and readership, canonical Literature during the 1990s developed along three major lines that connected writers of various generations in both aesthetics and philosophy: realism, exemplified in Georgii Vladimov\u27s prize-winning novel, The General and His Army (1994); postmodernism, richly represented in the fiction of Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin, and Vladimir Sharov; and neosentimentalism, as derived from the naturalism of early perestroika, most consistently embraced by Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and, in his paternal profession de foi, one of Russia\u27s chief theorists of postmodernism, Mikhail Epshtein. All three tendencies aspired to the status of mainstream, which they failed to attain, owing to a fundamental instability that chaos theory has labeled a bifurcation cascade. Inasmuch as that stage, according to specialists in chaos theory, leads to irreversible changes that effect a high level of stability, the outlook for Russian literature at century\u27s end might be less bleak than prophesied by doomsayers

Temporal Dislocation and Audiovisual Practice

Through the development and analysis of an audiovisual art practice this research explores creative strategies derived from the cultural theory of hauntology that lead to a sensation described as temporal dislocation. I investigate methods that evoke a nostalgia for personal histories, remembered potential futures and perceptions of time being out of joint. Adopting formal strategies when working with sound and film, such as jump cut editing and juxtaposition, my work questions notions of temporality by scrambling distinctions between the past, present, and future. Supported by the writings of Mark Fisher and Darko Suvin’s cognitive estrangement of science fiction, my research reveals that the use of digital technologies to recall memories, can paradoxically both exorcise and reinforce their value. Exploring territories where technology and the paranormal overlap, I consider the possibility of the transference of memory, via architecture and other inanimate materials, known as Stone Tape Theory. Drawing on work by Susan Hiller, John Cage and Mark Leckey, I interrogate notions of temporal dislocation and raise questions about our relationship with digital technologies