Marc Tuters

In completion of the class of 2008 USC SCA IMD MFA, S[t]imulation is a 12x8 foot interactive painting in which the texture of the actual painting was virtually processed in Derivative's Touch Designer and then projected back onto itself to scale. (It remains temporarily on display at the thesis space just north of campus, please contact me via the comments section for a viewing.)

The piece was designed to privileged calmness in the viewer, using motion sensing to disrupt the image. However, unlike a game, interactivity here was not intended to be indexical.

Artists statement, after the jump:

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I just read this very interesting piece entitled "The Crisis in Media Art Education" by Trebor Scholz who brought the world the Institute for Distributed Creativity, whose IDC list-serve is where it's at, and I think it should be required reading for all faculty and students of this program.

In the text, Trebor starts off by discussing the triumphal rise of the Interactive Media Divisions the world over (variously called Media Studies," "Game Studies," "Media Ecology," "Interactive Telecommunications," "Software Art," "New Media," "Media Art," Computation, Engineering," and so on) before going on to lambaste these very educators, particularly in the United States, for not conducting a public debate about the values and methodologies in media art education.

Given the high cost of education here in the US, Scholz sympathizes with the pragmatic concerns of students to get jobs, but never-the-less emphasizes the need for an approach to Media Arts education that is more that "shopping for career skills". He furthermore problematizes the model of Media Arts programs emulating the film-industry model, as he argues, "there is no monolithic industry which one could enter after graduation". He also criticizes the corporate just-in-time knowledge approach that leaves out the history and politics of these tools regarding humanities or social as superfluous to the goal of vocational training.

No mere Pandora, Scholz devotes over half the paper to discussing alternatives to the current state of affairs. At the faculty level, one of his proposals includes a shift in policy whereby the development of new skills would become considered legitimate research for faculty. While at a more general level he suggests that programs consider organizing themselves around broader sets of issues rather than around specific technologies, criticizing the latter approach as tending to producing somewhat superficial projects as well as generally narrowing student's perspectives.

You can download the pdf here

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Wednesday Night, right after seminar, in the lobby of the Hollywood Standard

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Over the course of this past year as a researcher at the Annenberg Center, I worked on a guide to viral marketing techniques for Todd Richmond as part of a Hewlett Foundation funded project around Open Content. Hewlett has supported a variety of open content initiatives, such as MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), which have made significant progress in expanding and extending the reach of educational material into the open-source ecosystem. Hewlett was interested in new models for the organization and delivery of this "new public library" of free content. As such Todd's project, entitled Viral University Education (vue), sought to better understand and facilitate the uptake of open content by studying how viral marketing techniques might be applied to he dissemination of open content. To that end, I have compiled my research in the form of what Todd likes to call a "living book". The idea is to initiate a conversation around how viral media might be leveraged (or not) for the Open Education Resources movement. In over a dozen chapters illustrated with examples from across the spectrum of current media culture, the text explores such concepts as collective intelligence and fandom, consumer empowerment and conversational media and the psychology of viral marketing.

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photo by julian bleecker

Students were given a stock IKEA Akurum wall cabinet, with which we were asked to create an interactive experience to "interact" with one or more of the jurors. We were given a week to conceive of, design and produce the piece.

I built a diorama of three apartments Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window". The audience member picked-up a video camera and peered into the rooms, doing so, triggered audio clips from the film's samples of Jimmy Stewart's character's dialouge on the view into courtyard from his rear window. Output from the camera was displayed on a projection behind the cabinet.

photos by skeckulous

Conceptually, I sought simply to celebrate the film and it's clever mediation on voyeurism and contemporary urban life. In terms of process, I knew immediately what I wanted to do with the assignment. On the first day, Chloe Nil and created a blueprint of the film's diogetic space and settled on our characters. I made sketches and Chloe did the renderings. We went to Michaels and bought material for inspiration, half of which we brought back. I worked on the sculpture on the weekend, and physical computing during work days. Once the technical side was successfully completed, I integrated it with diorama.

Technically it involved building a set from foamcore and balsa wood, embedding with photo sensitive sensors. These ran to an Arduino micro controller, which communicated with Max/MSP .

Download file for video documentation.

Thanks again to Perry for his invaluable help with both Arduino and Max/MSP.

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What follows is a book review of Everything Bad is Good For You, a work of cultural crictism by the prolific autodidact Steven Johnson author of, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, Interface Culture and a new book Ghost Map, all great books, the last of which makes an interesting argument for cities by retelling the historical discovery of patient zero in London's 19th-century cholera epidemic through mapping.

"For decades we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path towards lowest common denominator standards... but in fact, the opposite is happening: the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less (9)." According to Johnson "the landscape of popular culture involv(ing) the clash of competing force: the neurological appetites of the brain, the economics of the culture industry, changing technological platforms (&) (t)he specific ways in which those forces collide play a determining role in the type of popular culture we ultimately consume (10)."

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The Max/MSP patch Download file has 4 looping recorders and you can add feedback and pitch control, so it allows you to make a little canon. It's based on Noah's "Lidell2" patch, which you can find on his blog. What you see in this image is not quite what you'd download here, it's a messier version. I have a cleaner with which I'll update this download when I manage to fix it, but it's broken right now.

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Bruce Sterling's keynote at Ubicom last month questioned the proclivity of some thinkers to turn to magic to help understand what "things" might be like when they're all networked and tagged. The presentation triggered a great discussion on the Institute for Distributed Creativity listserv, to which he has just rebutted, raising the stakes by drawing parallels between magical obscurantist thinking, Leon Kass, head of the President's Council on Bio-ethics, and the a Russian biologist Trofim Lysenko who's quack theories led to the demise of genetics and the death of hundreds of scientists in the Soviet Union. I appreciated the the image so much I made a mock-up in Photoshop.

Continue reading "Why Magic Stinks" »

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(NOTE: I will be re-editing this entry as the idea develops)

I am interested in megastructure-type architectural utopias/dytopias, as imagined by the likes of Archigram, Archizoom, Superstudio, Constant ad others from the mid-50's through the mid-70's. Pictured below is an image of Superstudio's so called Continuous Monument, a project for a mega-structure that was to engulf Manhattan.

The ideas of these Supermodernists (as Reynar Banham called them) were intended largely as a provocations. In the case of the Continuous Monument, for example, the "big idea" has to do with the ascendancy of technology in creating a kind of wireless, nomadic space, where a inhabitants could plop down at any point in the grid. (This idea also, as a lineage in architectural imaginings what i would be interested in tracing if time permitted).

With a design of my own, I am interested in envitioning a similar megastructural space superimposed over parts of Los Angeles. For this, I am considering to use Google Earth and KML as Julian Bleecker did for his Battleship project this summer, pictured above. Perhaps, as Julian did, I can add a wireless locative dimension to the project as well, where cell phone users could somehow access this megastructural space from within 1st life (as Julian calls it).

For an 'actual' location in the 'real' world, I'm looking at the LA river, which runs by my current house. A potential jem of wildlife and greenery that bisects LA, in my mind, the river is one of the most poorly planned sections of the city. So I am considering proposing an 'imaginary' plan, for a giant project of mixed use modular architecture to span the river and continue along its length. I would visualize through a variety of architectural mock-ups. The interactive dimension still needs some more thought.

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