THESIS - ITP - NYU - SPRING 2007 - HOWARD TIERSKY

<updated every week>

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------weeks 1 - 2 --------------------------------------

'Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order'.

(Michel Foucault).

9 concrete cubes with machines inside: a speaker, some stainless steel (shiny and clean metal). more stuff inside.

or not spkrs/////i have to build them soon///////

maybe mechanical stuff, a musical artifact. a sound machina?

i will fuck them.

and they will sound.

once first, then second with first, then third with first and second, then fourth, fifth, nineth.

they will sound because i fucked them.

and finally i will get to know them.

C O N T E X T

1st APPROACH--------

WHY?

cubes = containers (or human body, or pocket, or shoe)

no aesthetical value, it can be full, it can be empty.

what makes this misterious object bring ME into ITS nature? (reality?)

what validates this object on space?---------the number? -- the proccess to build it? ------

they come as: image - silence - nothingness

an object is here now, it's concrete (literally made of concrete).

what is space today?

"the real space",

the real, the virtual, the sicological...an object is valid on space by means of sound. it has a determined time.

i can walk ten blocks in 40 minutes, this is 4 minutes per block. if i'm walking now, i can say this space (piece of block) exists. so the motion "step" is making this space real, this chunk of space (block) exists, because i make an action. i can measure my actions in terms of time (clock) and time becomes real because of that measure.

sound will measure time>>>on cubes

they will exist on real space, on real time.

real space, real time?

real time networking---need to find out if the sound or motion that triggers the sound, can/will be shown as a network too/separate from the "real" cubes? = //realities (real space/time).

.... so,
reality and time.
W. Benjamin>>>new technology is an amplifier that intensifies the possibility of the way art uses time and space. real time is a new media issue specific to the computer and internet.

lev manovich>>>real time networking and control seem to constitute qualitatively new phenomena.

marshal mcluhan>>>technology creates an entirely new society in where the real is always networked and mediated. post-modern condition is the critique of the old seen through the eyes of the new. loss of distance btwn subject and object.

jean baudrillard>>>hyperreality. meaning is self-referential in terms of absence. (A means A because it doesn't mean B, C, D...).

paul virilio>>>technology exists WITH the possibility of accidents, accidents as possitive elements of social growth.
virtual space of real time=media. "real space"=the real.

"the real is hidden in the reduction of the images on the screen"---- an event is intensified by the remote control and long-distance presence tech. (TV separates us from real space and real time).

been wired...
hal foster

read!!!Foster, Hal. Crux of minimalism
Foster, Hal. Return of the real : the avant-garde at the end of the century N66 F81
Foster, Hal. Un E-reserves
Foster, Hal. Richard Serra

(new) media art practice is positioning art in everyday life circulation.
nothing new, cubists already were talking and working on simultaneous realities changing the perspective of the perspective.
by mixing every medium, we can finally "un-tagg" and open.
...well, representation...

object/space/time

space depends on media (virilio's approach), it seems not to be real, until time makes it appearance. this is what can register this existence, makes it to be real. and finally make it exist.
reception and production are been made at the same time, not finish works anymore, but works that are happening...one can get inside this another reality, and live it while it's going on, then get into another, or both, and so on...
transmission of sound and image accross spatial and temporal distance.
futurists expressed this with noise.
when having an ability of usig a languague, the idea is to destroy it later on in this practice (practice=arts), then suddenly something can be done, and when everything's done, then practice is abolished. media art (?//???) is exploring the relation btwn practice (practice=art) and reality, instead of representing it.

METHODOLOGY (on work, building proccess)

-past wrok - algorythm (mechanics of work)

REFERENCES

Minimalists sculpture:

-richard serra ("Wake" - 2003 - weatherproof steel, 14 x 75 x46 feet)

-frank stella ("Sunset Beach", Sketch 1967, flourescent and plain alkyd painting, 69 1/2 x 69 1/2 inches)

-sol lewitt (*)

-frank stella

------ jhon cage (FROM ZERO)
'overpopulation and art' >>>hear it here

mood it sets. state to 0

repetition and variation - perception of emptiness and at the same time the random quality of what happens in a prescribed space.

-Arthur Ganson's machine with concrete >>>see pics here >>>more >>>and more

-(The Perspective of Real Time) - "Open Sky", Paul Virilio
>>>time is being killed by technology, where the here and now (real space or "the real") is mediated by the media (virtual space of real time).

[concrete cubes=concrete presence in the world]

-interactive being who is both transmmiter and receiver=deaf?

- "Theme Song" - Vito Acconci - 1973, 33:15 min, b&w, sound. >>>excerpt here

[i want to fuck the machine] - [i want to dominate technology] - [expose the object into other materials] - [i had put cubes on mountains, water, dirt, with surgical instruments, people, sound, and plastic---they always talk in a different way with space] -

-"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" .
Walter Benjamin >>>read it here

excerpts:

>>>Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence.

[presence in time and space, related to the idea of ephimeral and decay>>>see past work human body/decay]>>>link here

>>>We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things "closer" spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.

[the cubes might be networked] - or not

>>>An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.<7> From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the "authentic" print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice--politics.

>>>Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war: "For twenty- seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as antiaesthetic.... Accordingly we state: ... War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others.... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art . . . may be illumined by them!"

[war is appealing to me in terms of total destruction and creation from 0 - the idea that the cubes could be somehow embodying the image of the war, or total destruction, or total creation, or nothingness/ idem sound]

- Marshal McLuhan's theory that technology creates and entirely new society where what is real is always netwworked and mediated----loss of distance between subject and object = "wired" world, he calls it.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------week 3 -------------------------------------------

I started working with anthropomorphic shapes at the beggining. I thought it was too obvious to refer about the body and its decay, how something full of health (in shape speaking) could finally, become something dry, ill, dead. Then, and following the same idea, the shape of the cube, multiplied on its shape, number and scale on a same work, would finally give me the sense of deathness and objethood i was really looking for when talking about the human body, since finally, my aim was to talk about "bodies" not "human bodies", and bodies as objects, same as a chair, a table, a spoon. Frame and flatnessness, as rosalind Krauss would refered on her studies about sculpture and minimalism. The cube became to me, the perfect cartesian shape, that would also represent the elasticity of abstraction (how a cube is built, line and repetition, plane and repetition), from 2D I could go to 3D, with the same concept.

How would this object (cube) could interact with others. "Others" could be objects (considered as other "things" and people), comments on objects, or just other mediums.

INSIDE/OUTSIDE

Repetition of modules, anulating the number to make ONE. Unicity and scale as part of another space (gallery), isnside another space (building), inside of another space (out space), etc. Everything is contained.

The Cube is a container that neccessarily refers to an inside and outside, a hollow space that can contain something else. This capacity suggests both and inside and outside space. This duplicity (penetrate/been penetrated) doesn't neccessarily has to do with space or scale, but to the function. This function of disfunction, since really, this cubes are not containning anyhting, they are absurd, worthless. Having a function that it's impossible to accomplish, doesn't null the functionality, on the contrary, it gets more useless. Mere objects.

FROM OBJECTS TO SPACE

Space can be determined as a variable. This idea had blown-up my mind lately...

For me, space is more likely closer to the an abstract (or mathematical) definition, in which quatification of the distance between the objects and their spaces and sizes. I'd been using multiples of 3 to determine the size of the cubes and the space in between them, for example. And space has to do with only that. And it is as same as important as the objects itself.

Multiple of 3, because of x, y, z, and because we need to determine this to have size and location. Of any object and its location on space.

Kant - "The Critique of Pure Reason">>>"Things as they are "in themselves" are unknowable. For something to become an object of knowledge, it must be experienced, and experience is prestructured by the activity of our own minds -- both space and time as the forms of our intuition or perception, and the unifying, structuring activity of our concepts."

"The real" (or real space according to Paul Virilio) space becomes a variable when networks comes.

FROM SPACE TO TIME

We can't imagine anything without space, we can't imagine anything without time.

Is this because they are both so wide open concepts, or too abstract, we can conceive them as definitions anymore?

i can walk ten blocks in 40 minutes, this is 4 minutes per block. if i'm walking now, i can say this space (piece of block) exists. so the motion "step" is making this space real, this chunk of space (block) exists, because i make an action. i can measure my actions in terms of time (clock) and time becomes real because of that measure.

Kant, on the "The Critique of Pure Reason">>> time and space are intuitions

>>>>>in terms of audience? i mean, to set this on a roof top, would be to think of a work to be documented and addressing an intimate relationship with the work. also, the nb of cubes, would this determine the moevements of me? why not making 20??? number is important, scale....

site specific>>>why rooftop?

rule sets-----repetition, u can let them go for ever....repeating------in my case it's only the shape of the cube-------why

space - time - object

i want to experiment on this ecuation.

my intention of getting everyhting to level 0 - is how is related the rooftop space to take my work to level 0- or mimecrizer (mimetizarlo) it with arquitecture?????

or other given space-----

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------week 4 ----------------------------------------------------------------

link to pptation concept

talked to chris kucinski and tom igoe.

1-tom said i should define my actions with the object to define what kind of technology i will use. also, he talked about consider the possibility of faking the whole thing and having sound from somewhere, for the viewer to listen to it thinking it would come from the cubes...i wanted to be as "truth" as possible////he suggested making a mock up, which i know i should've done a while ago...and defining the kind of sound i wanted to have.

2- chris gave me awesome sites to go and check their circuits, in order to have the sound (and circuit) inside each cube.

for sine wave generators for audio @ @ / and amplyfier for speaker @

the idea would be to have a simple system to build the circuit and make the cubes sound with a photo cell (or photoresistor: light dependant resistor) and an LED.

interesting HMWK form tom's site. @ >>see max patch

>>>@ possible amplifier kit ( mono)

@ (stereo)

nice link to buy stuff@

model / 1 side /sound simulation :