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Will in the news

Today's (Sunday's) LA TIMES Calendar, Part 2 page E33
This Old Obsession,
an article about Gegor Schneider's Dead House ur:

"Will Carter, a 23 year old USC student, visits shortly after the house opens to the public. To navigate parts that are dimly lit, he uses the glow of his cellphone. He explores the house, finding hidden spaces and trying doors.
He finds some rooms quite disconcerting, such as the cellar with a child's bicycle and a deflated sex doll. "It reminds me of playing a video game," he says afterward. "It didn't feel like an installation in a museum. It feels like you're in a real space."

Ping Pong

Moonscape

This project concept has changed considerably from my original concept. Right now resolution mapping of the moon isn't quite up to what I originally wanted to do (that is, recreate the moon to the extent that you can accurately walk around on it). However, the location of the moon is still intriguing, and brings with it a way to view a more familiar object: The Earth.

What I propose is sort of a reverse, or remote planetarium: In short, a way to view the sky from a vantage point on the moon. The driving narrative would be the history of the Earth as seen from the moon, from the moon's origins through the climate changes in the earth, up through skybox seats to the celestial impact c. 65 million BCE, up through the modern age.

Immersion is a key part of this project. A planetarium-like structure would be ideal, although an head-mounted display would also work pretty well. The flat, lunar landscape would be projected around the virtual horizon, with an accurate night sky above. The installation would act as a sort of almanac, the user being able to input dates to the the corresponding moon's sky. Certain events would be bookmarked, especially unique events like the dinosaur-killing meteorite. Other infrequent events, like lunar and solar eclipses, would also have to have special attention paid to them.

The player will have access to a virtual "telescope", although it will not be any more powerful than any current terrestrial telescope. Watching the earth changing from a distance is key...you probably won't be able to see your house from here. In the case of the room installation it would probably be a replica of an actual telescope, complete with eyepiece. The headmount version would end up more like a zoom function.

The interface for controlling the installation would probably be a kiosk in the center of the room (or simply a keyboard and mouse with the hmd) that essentially acts like an H.G. Wells time machine. Commands for "speed up" and "slow down" would be primary, allowing virtual days to pass in seconds (or perhaps hours), plus a bookmarking system for favorite dates and ease of travel to distant times.

If the immersion is done well, I think it will be a primary tool for engaging the user. While the factual information will (hopefully) interest the user, allowing them to spend time in a darkened room, with events happening just dynamic enough to catch the edge of perception, but not so dynamic as to be overwhelming (and hence quickly tiresome), people would stay and watch. If virtual days would pass by every few minutes (enough to catch the eye, but not enough so the sky becomes a strobe light), I think an pleasant ambient equilibrium could be maintained by default, one that the user could change if they wanted, but a preset that would kick in after a period of idleness.

The project as a whole would probably be most at home in a gallery or museum. I'm designing it with for the "museum mind-set." In essence, I hope to give users of the installation a new perspective, both in terms of scale, celestial motion (the "dark side" isn't any more dark than the face we see, for instance), and perhaps a way to better estimate how big (or small) the Earth really is.

Dead how?

I was not very intrigued by the house at all. I felt less was explorable in a group setting, and more was to be enjoyed by the individuals own personal expierence. I feel that one person should be let into the house at a time, given at least 10 minutes to move around, and then send the next one in. If my expierence was an individual one, I would have been frightened more than curious, at least for the first few minutes. I don't think, that even being alone, I would have gone into the tiny crevices that we as group climbed through. Therefore, I would have missed the very few intricacies of the house.

Tripps comment about the amount of secrets available was a rather valuable one. I would agree partly that the doors that are closed are frustrating, only because there were so few open to begin with. One or two frozen doors would be fine, but the amount close were not.

My thoughts of the authors intent was that they were trying to communicate the feel of a personal space that had been lived in, and that it had a very specific narrative behind it. I think where this fails is that they were trying to express the history of the space without anything in it. As interesting as this concept can be, I feel the only way to effectively pull it off would be to have many more rooms, each constructed in the odd fashion that those were. Stairs were meant for climbing, but they also need to lead somewhere, not just nowhere. Houses all have their locked doors, but the inhabitors have more ways than one to access those secret places.

Basically, I needed a lot more of the same thing, or less with more secret rooms full of junk to give me some sort of narrative. Hiding it all in one place didn't seem to be to effective; pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Hmmmm, maybe if I could just see it, but not get to it.

grocery database | project outline

so my final is going to be a prototype for something possibly larger. below is an outline of what the prototype will entail. on monday, I started cataloging everything I buy at my gelson's (the one that beck shops at, too. most cool people must shop at this store, huh?)

see my recent purchases here

blurb:
I upload the image from the store, and tag it with a set of metadata: the aisle it was purchased from, and the time it was taken off the shelf (from the timestamp, the date of purchase is extrapolated), and another tag that specifies type of purchase: solid, liquid, or other. This data is then stuffed into a database running on my server. For now, this transfer takes place manually, but it's not a huge deal to make this step automatic. The result of all this, is that over time, I will have a large database of all my grocery store purchases, and a decent idea of where these purchases transpired within the space of the store. The user will be able to interact with this database to explore my personal consumption space, and will be able to view/access this data in a number of different ways. The idea behind all this is that users can log on and piece together their own narratives that emerge from my vast purchasing power. The ulterior motive is to create a lasting archive of my eating and food-consumption habits. As the piece grows, a new element of metadata will be added -- a unique userID that allows users to view the consumption patterns of a host of other gelson's patrons. For example, the user could access all the items bought by system particpants on a given day, or a given hour, or view all items bought from aisle 2a. Users particpating in the system could use a path feature to map their own path through the store, then see what other items have been bought along that path on a particular day.

interaction: the UPV interfaces with the work over the web as an observer. The are presented with a series of options as to how to access the content database. The options are as follows: sort by date, hour, aisle, or type (solid, liquid, other). The last option is sort by path. Users are then presented with a rough floorplan of gelson's, and are able to draw a path through the store. When they have completed drawing, they are presented with a list of items that I have purchased on that path.

The UPV starts out with little information, but as they revist the site more and more, then begin building an image of who / what I am by observing the kind of food I buy, and growing narratives from that data.

Intervention in such a system is really based on the proposed system of involvement. In addition, users can interject themselves into my personal narrative by annotating -- commenting -- on individual products.

There is really no start and end to this piece. It will end if I stop deciding to catalogue my purchases and maintain the system. For the user, it is simply a decision of popping in and out of the space by deciding to enter or leave the webpage.

Dead Again

I felt from the moment that I entered the installation an intense desire to escape from the group and let my hands blindly and silently lead me through. There were flashes of a natural and intuitive path through the space despite the "follow the leader" behaviour pattern and the sensory disruption of the guard, so even though the piece is not striclty linear, the sense of exploration is constrained by the artist's intended environmental narrative. Doors that do not open, panels that are sealed tightly shut, stairs that lead nowhere and hallways that dead-end abruptly in cement are naturally frustrating to a "user-interface" designer trying to understand the map of the exhibit but at the same time, are instructive to the way that we should read the experience; not all pathways yield an epiphany or maybe even a message at all. Then the experience is liberating for both the author and the audience.

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Dead House Revisited

Ideally, we should have each visted the house individually. The experience was meant to be solitary and without flashlights (I inquired and found that the flashlights had been an error rescinded by the curatorial staff). It is a monument to memory, so try to go through it again in your memory, erasing the the guard, the chatter, the commaraderie and post a comment on the experience.

Here's a link to a review in the Summer 2000 Art Forum
Interiority Complex by Daniel Birnbaum

Cellphones and Sense of Place

Paul Goldberger, a respected architecture critic, has written an article in METROPOLIS titled, "Disconnected Urbanism."

The blurb: "The cell phone has changed our sense of place more than faxes, computers and e-mail.....I don't know which is worse--the loss of the sense that walking along a great urban street is a glorious shared experience or the blurring of distinctions between different kinds of places. But these cultural losses are related, and the cell phone has played a major role in both."

"Disconnected Urbanism" by Paul Goldberger in METROPOLIS

Goldberger's article on cellphones and place/space comes within a week of a study reported in the NY Times about cellphones and time -- specifically as a cause or excuse for lateness.

"Cell Phone Erases Lateness" by Kate Zernike

Both writers are commenting on what might seem like subtle sociological changes attributable to cell phones. In the context of this class, I find Goldberger's lament about the transformation of public urban space into individualized closets appropos. How do you relate this to the increasingly public netspace?

more groceries

here is a brief 'narrative' based on pictures taken of products at the grocery store that I thought I was going to present last class, but didn't post until now. thanks for the comments on the project...I need to figure out a good way for collective stories/comments to be built on such photos.

here's the link:

Link

Inside looking out...

I was given some good stuff to chew on today in regards to my assignment, however I still feel that I am un-able to come up with the "metaphor" for why it is we should be looking from the inside out. The important thing is the voyeuristic, unnerving watchful eyes...both ways. Kinda like staring down the barrel of a gun. It can blow your head off, man, at any ungiven time. And you are forced to see it. Random: Gremlins.

Thats about the best I've got. It's gremlins. You the viewer/s, from inside that pesky computer shell, have full control. You are the ones causing all that bastard like activity, messing up my hardware, giving my OS errors, corrupting kernels and trashing registries. Where'd my files go? Why doesn't this thing work? Why does my keyboard spark like that? What's that smoke coming out of my tower. Gremlins.

Help me folks, I need feedback.

Field Trip

GREGOR SCHNEIDER: DEAD HOUSE UR an Exhibition at The Geffen Contemporary
152 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90013
Meet at the Lab at 10:15 and carpool to The Geffen - I'll meet you there. It opens at 11am, Thursdays are FREE.
MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary

In the meantime, take a look at Gordon Matta-Clark's work
an online thesis about Gordon Matta-Clark's work

MOCA PRESENTS HAUNTING WORK BY AWARD-WINNING GERMAN ARTIST GREGOR SCHNEIDER

LOS ANGELES – MOCA presents Dead House ur by German artist Gregor Schneider (b. 1969), an installation featuring an obsessively altered version of the interior of Schneider’s childhood house in Rheydt, Germany. Gregor Schneider: Dead House ur opens October 12, 2003 at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) at The Geffen Contemporary (152 North Central Avenue in Downtown L.A.) and remains on view through September 13, 2004.

From the age of 16, Gregor Schneider has been dismantling and reassembling the interior of his childhood home. Layering walls upon walls, adding dead-end corridors and secret passageways, living within his work and constantly revising it, Schneider has created a haunting depiction of domestic memory. His duplicated rooms both resemble and conceal the original spaces, and so many changes have been made that Schneider can no longer reconstruct the house's original layout.

Organized by MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel, MOCA’s presentation will be the first time the work will be presented in its entirety in the United States. The work has been presented in its entirety only once before at the 2001 Venice Biennale where it won the Golden Lion award for the Best National Pavilion.
"Dead Haus ur is a highly evocative, emotionally charged, and psychologically revealing architectural installation which both responds to and elaborates on the childhood home of the artist and his family,” said Schimmel. “Simultaneously, Dead Haus ur extends the traditions of European installation and performance-based art in the 20th century with artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Beuys."

Schneider's interventions in the family home in Rheydt are, on the surface, hardly noticeable. Visitors may more than their interiors and light behind curtains. Neon tubes light windows with views of windowless walls in inaccessible rooms beyond. Some rooms rotate on their axes, emphasizing Schneider’s illusions of space and home. Altering his interiors in such a way to prevent the original shape of the room from being recognizable, he provides a new perspective on the complex interaction between space and the viewer.

While individual rooms have been shown in museums worldwide, the entire structure has been transported to MOCA where the artist has reassembled it to form a powerful and haunting environment within The Geffen Contemporary. That Schneider continues to live and work in the original Rheydt house only enhances the unsettling intimacy with which this peculiar artwork mixes aesthetics and everyday life.

“Schneider’s work is deeply personal and its autobiographical content powerful,” said MOCA Director Jeremy Strick. “The remarkable transformation of The Geffen Contemporary is a testament to the adaptability of that building to the most ambitious artists’ projects.”

Presented as a sculptural environment, Schneider’s work reveals various layers of construction and an elaborate process involved in recreating an entire home. The claustrophobic work is accessible only to a few visitors at a time. Visitors will enter through a new separate entrance from the outside of the Geffen building along Temple Street.

narrative pt1

this is a first spewing, done before i had seen the photos. while i think the pics are lit better than i imagined the space, its cool to me to see where they line up. are my thoughts directing, informing, creating the space? or is it the other way around?

Smells like blankets, like smoke and warmth. The space is close, tight. Too many things, too small a space to walk around in, to live in, to think in.

I can close my eyes and still see you there, smoking, puffing, breathing. The keys are crooked the door, with all of its locks doesn't sit quite right on the hinges. There is a larger gap at one corner than another and the light creeps over the floor, with the occasional dog yelp from the hallway. You wanted to hang blankets over the windows, forget about the people, all those people, outside where we are. I couldn't agree more, but then I wanted to forget about myself too - the people inside as well. It wasn't just the people outside that scared me. I wanted to lose myself so completely, so totally. Forget who I was, where I was from, where I was going. Is this what a vacation means to me?

I caught you one night, in bed. Shaking. Crying. You wanted to go back, go back to the way things had been. I pulled a blanket over you and tried to bite my lip. Tried to not say 'shut up. Shut up - you asked for this. You thought this was a good idea when we talked about it.' But I didn't say these things. You know that. I couldn't if I had wanted to. What would we have done if I had? Nothing would have changed. You would have cried more and in the apartment that small, I couldn't escape.

I can’t get rid of my old life and I certainly can’t move from this one. What would I do for a job? How would I arrange my newly bought purchases? How could I convince myself to remove all the things I get pleasure from? Would I stop reading the same authors? Watching the same directors? Writing to myself by dim light? Letter from the past, ghosts of myself float in and out of my vision. Was the person I was gone? Or is he there, a complication right over my shoulder, always whispering to me, examining the person I was. The person I wanted to be. The person I could imagine myself as. I want to cry. Without you, I am so small. And you are asleep.

We only have 2 real rooms you see. One room for sleeping, one room for everything else. I’m not unhappy, not as badly as I made it sound before. But the space, or rather the lack of space, is making me crazy. The idea that I left you. That we left each other without saying goodbye. Without leaving. This is what gets me the most. We move through our day and we don't stop to think what we are doing. We get on a train and wait for our stop to be called. Neither of us know what stop that will be - who will truly leave whom, who will die first. Yet, we ride. We don't question. And keep going, the same way we always have. That's what makes me so sad. So tired.

I don't like routine. I drug you out, I made a mockery of everything I had been given - I turned my back on everything I was and moved away and become someone I wanted to be. Someone I could hate and someone who didn't care about myself. I care too much you see. I care too much about people, about myself.

And the blankets. You made me buy them. I didn't want blinds. And you said blankets then. We found them from one of those street vendors - the ones who set up in empty lots on Saturdays. The blankets smell. I've washed them and nothing comes out of them. The smell lingers and we don't move them. They are precariously balanced on the windows sills and no one can see in. We can’t tell when it is day and when it is night. That's ok. I'm sure the neighbors all think we are constantly getting high. They would be right, but that isn't why we hung them. I don't care about that. I just want isolation. So I can cry myself to sleep.

Library

Okay, here are some pics of the library; shifting gears a bit from the exercise in blind space. Not sure if that story was going where I wanted it to. I'll include it in the extended entry section for easy reference.

I'd be interested in what aspect of that story interests you-the-reader, or what aspects of these pics interest you. What drives your desire for more info/story/context/plot/etc? I'm toying with turning the pictures into QTVRs; maybe adding hotspot/clues.

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Hmm….power failure in California? Not really a big surprise. Probably a rolling blackout. No worries, the long hallway is wide and without obstructions. Simply walk forward and left slowly, slowly now, until the cold concrete wall is within reach. There. Now walk forward. When the wall stops, left turn Clyde. With any luck, the afternoon sun will be streaming through those tall south-facing windows. Bands of holy light illuminating books and scholars alike. Should be an inspiring sight. Light at its most tangible. Diagonal pillars.

Okay, here we go, left turn. Whoa! Feet aren’t moving forward, lost touch with the wall. Reach out! Reach out! Wait…a step…keep balance…up on the toes…there. Okay.

The enormous volume of space is apparent by the faint sounds in the distance. The quiet screech and clatter of chairs on the hard floor; barely audible rustling of paper as students search through their notebooks; these sounds travel a circuitous path enroute to your ears, offering first a direct sound suggesting the distance to the source, but then a modulated, reverberated permutation arrives causing a recalculation of that distance. Summed, these indicators suggest a vast space—from side to side, from entryway to back wall, from floor to ceiling.

Okay, chairs…that’s normal. Should be computers to the right, 10 or 12 of them. That’s the low hum and the faint heat from that direction. Tables will be arrayed the length and breadth of the room, two columns, maybe 10 tables each stretching out in front. But, wait. Where are those chairs that occasionally screech and clatter? Ten feet beyond the threshold? Twenty? Are the chairs in front of the tables?

Chairs? Hell, WHERE’S THE BLOODY STREAMS OF LIGHT?? It’s 2:00 in the afternoon. Even without any power or those silly emergency lights the room should be bright with afternoon sunlight.

"HELP!"

Enforced silence—sounds hang in the air like delinquent schoolchildren watching the results of their misbehavior. A cough, accompanied by a surreptitious rustle of paper. A sneeze goes unrecognized. Another cough and a whispered apology. A chair grinds across the hard floor, a foghorn piercing the dark night. Silence follows as this blast interrupts the quiet rhythm of inhalation and exhalation.

There, to the left, a throaty and moist intake of breath—older, male, smoker. Library staff at a reference desk? Faculty member reserving materials? Retired alumnus at a free standing podium, thumbing through a dictionary? Who cares. Ask him for help.

"Sir? Excuse me, sir? Please, I need your help. I can’t seem to see anything."

A subtle hum of electronic equipment emanates from the right side of the space, mixing with the quiet staccato percussions of fingers on plastic keyboards. The typing clatters on. The rheumy breather on the left continued his shallow inhalations. Another cough in the distance.

"Hey, you that just coughed. Can you help me?"

Hmm. Either these people are incredibly rude and self-absorbed, or I’ve lost the ability to speak along with my sight. Okay, easy steps forward. Shuffle with the left, then right. Small steps. Can’t remember where the first set of tables are. Hmm. Slightly cooler air here. Must be a draft coming from the passageway to the stacks. Interesting. Should be coming up on the first

"OW!" Damn. Here’s the first table. There’s at least three people here, the turning of pages, intake of breath, and a slight subtle grinding noise—ah, yes, chewing on a pencil. Hmm, fruity smell. Must be a sorority girl near by.

Got to get someone’s attention. Reach out, there, right in front. Focus on the bubble gum smacking sound. Just grab for the gum, get a handful of jaw and make these damn people help out. Reach…forward…got to be right there…uff. Get up off the table. Feel the books, the embossed bindings, the notebooks, the scratch of ballpoint across the paper.

"Hey, like, did it just get cold in here? Why’s it windy" you here the bubble-gum smacking, fruity smelling girl exclaim…

an apartment i have never seen

here are the 16 pictures i have of my space. ill try to post my writings of the space over the next few days. the earliest ones were before i got the photos, the rest are tehn reconciling the character i have developed with this space.

from these writings, i can develop the narrative for the video projection i have discussed.

Guerrilla Moblog

Bandwagon.

grocery stores

grocery store narratives

New Comic

The fourth installment of the IMer's is up. Please see it here. Featuring Monty and Diz! Vuppy is yet to come, as I have ideas for him, but need to work up to it, so to speak.

In case you were wondering, I am keeping these comics off the schools site only because they can be somewhat crass at times. Cheers.

blind space exercise

Okay, here's a brief bit; basically where the blind space exercise grew when a sleep-deprived mind sequestered at the medical school got a hold of it--different direction than originally envisioned. Oh well, isn't that the fun of writing?

Download file

Please see...

... my Blog for more on my Space. Test vids abound!

Morse Article

Here's the details regarding the Margaret Morse article I mentioned in class (of specific interest to Kurt, but perhaps to others as well):

"The Ontology of Everyday Distraction: Freeway, Mall, Television" by Margaret Morse. Anthologized in Patricia Mellancamp "The Logics of Television". Also, Morse has an e-book (available through Homer) called "Virtualities" which has the same essay contained within should you desire electronic access (you'll need to access via USC account or via USC VPN). Sorry I don't have the link handy, but plug Margaret Morse into Homer as select the USCWEB version of "Virtualities".

Cheers,
Scott