The Well-Tipped Bartender

How to express what an abstract piece is about without turning it into a pedestrian exercise?

Or worse: crossing the line to a maudlin outpouring of revelations not even a well-tipped bartender would want to hear?

Painfully aware of installation as therapy, installation as rebellion, installation as prozac. Sometimes it surpasses these. Recalling when I called a friend asking her if she wanted to go see the Cindy Sherman show at MoMA last year. My friend said: "the last thing I want to see is a neurotic Jewish woman playing dress-up".

Wow! But rethinking this rather strong opinion, I have some peeves of my own: family fine art photography work, especially by women, especially of white indigent families.

The graduate school I went to was rife with this kind of work when I was there, and I had a rough time. I was dealing with family issues myself but flatly refused to use images of my relatives to illustrate my confrontations. My work didn't go over well, and, while the photos were pretty good, they didn't express what I was after, either.

Can someone pour a nice Manhattan?

Straight from the Engineer

More specifically, the engineer sent his parts list for the playback unit. Suppliers are listed in the sidebar on the left.

1. The Arduino Leonardo: instead of the Uno because it's a bit cheaper
and maintains compatibility with another component.

2. Sparkfun's MP3 Player Shield for the Arduino

3. 2 gb Micro SD Card

4. 100k resistor

5. IR LED

6. IR sensor

7. Coby CSMP16 Mini stereo speakers

8. Sony CycleEnergy portable USB power supply

I have some questions of my own:

a) The container for the finished unit
b) Switches for on/off, calibration, volume controls
c) IR Sensor range

Autumn, Exhibitions and the Water

Something we didn't really think about in the past: The coincidence of the exhibition season with hurricanes. Sandy changed all that.

As previously posted, I had no losses, except for some time and effort; my first prototype exhibition was cancelled. Many well-wishers were disappointed for me, but what I had to lose was some foam core and laser prints. Future exhibitions will make my worries exponentially greater.

Every exhibition space on my radar suffered enormous damage: The big boys in Chelsea, The Gowanus Ballroom, Governor's Island, BWAC and I'm sure, Dumbo Art Center.

Huge inventories of irreplaceable work; one of the saddest casualties is one of my favorite places, Printed Matter. To the left is an image of damaged artists' books alongside one of Joseph Beuys's steles in front of the shop on Tenth Avenue. The water came that far inland.

Kickstarter Info-Session

Some of the 3rd Ward work spaces.

About 60 people assembled in a medium-sized auditorium to hear five Kickstarter staff members talk about the procedures to build a campaign and their advice for making the effort a success.

The KS people are highly articulate and magically optimistic. Surprisingly, the attendees were, too.
Many of those there weren't artists, but creators of off-beat products, mostly concerned with their manufacture.

This is evidenced by stretch goals being discussed at length, something I believe I won't have to worry about. Stretch goals are set when funding goals exceed the initial project's objectives; contingencies must be planned since the production of the product as one of the rewards could turn into a project itself.

Its location at the end of a creek.

Back to the meeting. Five successful project creators were there, one of them, a writer who said that his project--a novel--was 60% funded within a few days of launch. He told me later that much of his network supported him in the lead-up to the launch and also, that he writes a blog.

Another creator works with games and gaming, and he's created and advised many, many gaming projects, some which exceed the $100,000 funding goal. Wow!

Anyway, I offered my little unsuccessful project's video for comment. It got an applause at the end, yet, some good advice: to keep all the content but to rearrange the order of it to engage the Backer (more so than the viewer) since the goal is to get them to come along on the SIS journey.

So fascinating.

Art by the Creek

A week ago I went to a Kickstarter info-session. It's taken me this long to process all I took in. 

The meeting was held at a community art facility called The 3rd Ward. I'd never heard of it; though I know the neighborhood well since I lived not far from there when it was a far cry from the Bohemia it is now.

Major sidebar: The heavily industrial nabe south of Newtown Creek edges Bushwick, Greenpoint and Ridgewood. For a while it was called the Eastern District. Two bridges span the creek on this side: the Metropolitan Ave and Grand Ave Bridges, both built around the turn of the last century. An area of single-story warehouses, the Montrose Ave. stop on the L train (once called the LL) drops you off at the center of a rapidly-developing area of rehearsal spaces, complete with excellent urban art, a top-of-the-line music store and a bar. The creek is polluted with little chance of recovery; I wonder if the area will ever flourish.

More on The 3rd Ward and the KS meeting in the next post. 

A repurposed garage.                                  

                                                                                                                                            

Parts of the Whole

 

The engineer sent a parts list to build the playback units. He says he's gonna use an arduino, a bunch of other stuff and a Sony USB recharge unit to power the thing while it's up. Still to be decided are:

a) IR Sensor,



b) Switch or remote-
control unit (which I'd like so people don't touch the thing),

c) Speakers: Still up in the air. The ones the engineer suggests are quite nice and small, however, may be too deep to fit behind the work (they measure 2.6x3x2.3 inches [6.6x7.6x5.84 cm])
Redirect: Now that there's a possibility that the panels may be LED, the speaker may not need to be flat-paneled--or that just might be a requirement.

The two speakers on the right also have to be tested for sound clarity. THe reason for going with a better speaker is that ambient sound has the potential of turning into noise.
More on that over the weekend.

Zombillation

In the search for hanging hardware, I've seen enough suspension photos to last me a life time. OUCH!

On to the much more civilized arena of making art: The idea to suspend the works gets thrown around by well-wishers and worried gallery people alike.

OK, how distracting would a rig be to hang the works if it was absolutely impossible to nail, drill or whatever from the ceiling, or if the ceiling was just too high (over 20 ft?)

And, how expensive would it be to rent? Personally I think that price would be negligible for the effect a hanging piece would have.

But the nay-sayers would counter with: If a wine-steeped viewer--or any other viewer for that matter--bumps into the rig, it's finito for the installation. Pain just thinking about it.

Time for some examination:

1) Suspending the work makes it sculptural. So does, some may argue, putting it on a stand. Oh, how pedestrian! 

2) A hanging work moves ever so slightly and takes on a life of its own. Some say it's hovering like a zombie. (Cruel but amusing)

3) A hanging work doesn't have a bottom. Precisely! That's the magic of it.

My wet-blanket buddies say there's plenty of magic already. If I want more, I'd better invent some other way to get it.

Big Days Ahead

Further thinking about the LEDs, an important factor is whether they can be manufactured
to the proportion of the image. That is, 24 x 30 inches. I've resigned myself that, if I go with the LED boxes, I might have to be limited to a smaller size.

This could link one to the next from above....

....or a central junction combining several
pieces to one outlet from below.

I'm not wild about this. In this case, size is important (smirk), however, perhaps a panel casting light might be as imposing as a larger image. The dim environment is key also. It will be tested this week in prints, and then I'll get some lambdas made.
There are two things still up in the air: where to get power? The LED boxes come with a pretty ghastly electrical chord and hooking it up to a battery might be difficult. I'm back to requiring some kind of an outlet in the ceiling. If the exhibition space is dark, however, I might be able to get away with outlets on the floor.

Back to the drawing board.

Thoughts and Advice

The LED idea keeps solidifying. I got some advice yesterday from a salesman not to have the boxes custom built to my size specifications [most of the boxes come in 24 x 36; the larger sizes would be 48 x 72; I'd require 48 x 60 to maintain the current size image].

I also got advice from a colleague to consider the smaller size image. Both good considerations: The custom made box carries a huge budget consideration when it can be taken care of with the image. The second of making the image smaller is not a bad thought: 24 x 36 is a much more manageable size in terms of exhibition--and who doesn't want that?

On a concept level, I'm going to test the new 24 x 36 size this week and see what I can deal with. When the piece is illuminated in a dimmed room, the large size may not be imposing. And, a large black frame can be built around it to keep a conducive traffic
pattern around the exhibition space.

LED Box for SIS?

The images in the installation were conceived as nine 4x5 foot (122 x 154 cm) panels hanging from the ceiling. They were shot on transparency film which was then scanned and processed into digital c-prints via lambda. All the prints are done, three of the nine are mounted. The prints are breathtaking.

But now I've gotten a new idea, and it's major: The images, to become the luminous objects that they are, can be printed via lambda on Duratrans film and put into LED light boxes. The technology exists to have light-weight light boxes that can suspend easily and cost $.80 (yes, 80 cents!) a year to run and the most of the print materials will begin to fade from light exposure after 100,000 hours.



One of the disadvantages is that there's no on/off switch, but with a 100,000-hour life-span, who's counting? Or, the unit can turn off with the power from the circuit breaker. That's another thing: The units plug in; and I don't know if they can be filled for battery power.

Then comes the image itself. Over the next few weeks, I'll buy a small light box and have a lambda made. More decisions from there. This is so much fun.

Top to bottom: Camelback.com, durantran.com, and led-lightbox.com

Motion Sensor App

Google Playstore lists a group of motion sensor apps that can be used as sensors if an MP3 player or adapted smart phone is used in conjunction with or as the sound unit. The flat honeycomb speaker would plug into the ear phone jack.

The apps use the camera capacity of the phone to detect a motion by a break in the light differential. Some use facial recognition which is nice but not applicable to what's needed here (and conceptual reasons play into it as well--I'll explain another time).

Interesting that most apps transfer a message or take a photo and email it when they detect someone/something in their range, and that range can be quite specific. Some will operate when they hear a sound, however, for this installation it's useless.

Others operate the mechanism when the sensor is tripped, and that's what's of interest in this project: the device can play the stored sound data (bird calls and machine sounds, for example) upon the sensor being tripped. Most work with android, not Apple products.

Jastrzab, developed Motion Detector, which plays a sound when a motion is detected. It has other features which could be useful to the project--like an adjustable delay between events--creating options in the playback delivery. It also works with the screen turned off, which saves a lot of battery power. Of the others, it's the only one I've noticed that can be calibrated; but it's only a matter of time before all apps can do that.

They also develop a range of motion-sensitive apps, including a microphone. Far more interesting is an app called Disable, which saves energy by disabling wireless internet connections (something not needed in the exhibition space, especially if a phone is opted over an MP3 player). Others that
work more specifically must exist, so the search continues.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Jastrzab

New Prototype Planned

With all seminal work, prototype upon prototype is necessary. SIS demands a lot of attention:
•  The Images: big and suspended, often tossed around for yet another exhibition idea.
•  The Sound: Gotta get to Cornell and talk to the Ornithologists about the bird calls, get to that machine shop to tape.
•  The Electronics: I think I have a new engineer, met with him the other day, gave him an arduino and the schematics. I have to write him a direct scope of work with a time line so he knows what's up.

And today, I'm writing a proposal for the second prototype at the Grace Gallery in the Fall.
The Grace Gallery is a small but elegant exhibition space in the college where I teach: The New York College of Technology. It welcomed the first prototype a few weeks ago, and I want to show it there with all the sound and electronics in place.
It might be ambitious to suspend the pieces from a rig for this showing, but it's in the back of my mind. inching forward daily.

Abstraction and Installation

By its very nature, installation art is hard to fund, because as stated in previous posts, it's often hard to describe. Further, only true "reward" is its realization so it can be exhibited.

Installation is about experience. How to describe that is the key.

Thinking out loud: Describing experiences--zip-lining, wave surfing, performances of all kinds is not the point. The activity of viewing/experiencing an installation work is fairly easy to explain: You walk through the room and see/hear _________(fill in the blank).

Reading about a work--and I'm writing very simply here--clarifies what? Would it read something like: "Seeing/hearing________ you get the feeling that you're in (a) _________(again, fill in the blank).

Perhaps this might resonate with some; but the artist wants the viewer to come in contact with their sensations/emotions in the presence of the piece. Great installations elicit visceral reactions. That's the idea of installation art.

Maya Lin's Viet Nam Veteran's Memorial in Washington DC travels along those lines. Stepping aside what the war was about and what it means, the design of the monument itself was steeped in controversy. At the heart of that controversy was that, in reading a description of it, many, many people responsible for its funding saw it for its face value: a nihilistic piece of stone (James Webb).1. 

 

They didn't imagine what the shape and form represented, or what how its viewers would interact with it. They didn't think about the concert of the materials with the design elements of the work to create a genesis of reactions, each personal yet parallel. And they certainly didn't think that an installation (I consider it as such) would permit a profound level of identification precisely because its lack of ceremony. However, the abstract nature of the piece is what allows this. 

Maya Lin herself wrote: it took longer, in fact, to write the statement that I felt was needed to accompany the required drawings than to design the memorial. THe description was critical to understanding the design since the memorial worked more on an emotional level than a formal level.2.

Only after it was a physical piece, could it be experienced. Only then, did it move, elicit, involve and include--thoroughly, yet silently.

1. http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/vietnam/r4/1984/

2. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/nov/02/making-the-memorial/?pagination=false

Further reading:

Ambiguity as Persuasion, Sonja K. Foss, Communication Quarterly. Vol 34, Issue 3, 1986. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01463378609369643#.UYkWrr-TMj4

Unit vs. Phone

Found this thin beautiful item.

Tearing open a phone seems like a nice enough idea: it's small, compact and already built. An elegant package, ready to accept ready-made software.

But there are issues: a phone's screen eats a lot of power; that would have to be disabled. A battery pack would have to be inserted, as would an adapter for charging it if ceiling outlets were available (sometimes they are, sometimes not).

And, there's the expense. Simple smart phones are $200+.

This one might need less power or have
 better battery life.

So, I'm thinking about an MP3 player with a camera to pick up viewers' presence (camera lens serves as the sensor and the software exists as an app). I've barely looked into it. though the price of the unit is much more agreeable than a phone. It probably takes up much less power.

But this little gem is both tiny, has no
screen but has a camera. About $ 110 at
Eyespypro.com

However, the conceptual side is what bothers me: the recognition element is something that fights with the concept of the piece. The idea is for the viewer to recognize the situation, not the other way around.

Recognition is a delicate thought; it's something recalled. How does that compare with memory? I'm thinking that memory exists internally, whereas something recognized is the recollection of the memory by something physical and present at that moment.