Posts Tagged ‘memory’

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Dreams from google 3d warehouse by Guthrie Lonergan is:

1. The artist’s re-contextualization of seventeen “3D” models – each of which are based on an individual dream of the Google 3D Warehouse user who initially created the model.

2. An accompanying commentary on the process of translating the memory of a dream to a 3D model provided by the dreamers/3D model-makers themselves (in conversation with Lonergan).

The work is viewed on two Web pages – each of which are hosted on Caitlin Denny and Parker Ito’s jstchillin.org website.

On the first page, one views three lines of black sans-serif text extending the horizontal-length of the page.

This text reads:

This is a Piano I dreamed that I was playing, but its actually a tattoo that I want to do somewhere on my body… You can’t really comment about it because i dreamed it and you didn’t see it… Oh well…

*****

Positioned below this text is the 2D representation of a 3D model depicting a black piano keyboard which – when clicked – opens a Web browser tab displaying the 3D model’s original Web page on the Google 3D Warehouse Web site.

On the second page of the work, one views a block of sixteen additional dream-text-and-3D-model pairings which are positioned above a block of seventeen lines of text which each (a.) list the 3D models’ file names and creator/user names, as well as (b.) link to the models’ original Web pages on the Google 3D Warehouse Web site.

The first of the dream memories-into-3D models displayed at the top of this page is prefaced by the following text:

i had the wierdest dream last night. i was walking downtown when a space ship landed in the street, naturely i dove for cover behind a bush. thank you to dj orion for the road

*****

Below this text is an initial view of the 3D model described above in which one views a low medium-wide framing on:

1. A grey figure running away from a large white craft emanating blue flames, which is labeled “space ship,” and

2. A second grey figure labeled “me” lying on the ground behind a rectangular box with a green marbleized texture, which one takes to be the bush mentioned in the dream.

Below this view of the model, then, are three lines of grey text in which a question regarding the model-maker’s memory of certain details is posed.

It reads:

i’m curious if the blue flames from the jets on the spaceship were in the dream? also, there seems to be some sort of steering column inside of the spaceship, is this something that you remembered?

*****

And a reply, reading:

to answer your questions, yes there was blue flames from the spaceship, and yes, i do remember the steering column was something i remembered. i remember the aliens coming out and there was that steering column

*****

As one scrolls down the page, one encounters two more views of the 3D model – one into the cockpit of the space ship in which the steering column mentioned above is visible, the other a high wide-angle in which the steering column is – again – made visible.

Below these views are another question-and-response regarding the translation of dream memory into 3D model.

The question reads:

do you remember anything else about the steering column, like how it functioned, or anything else about it?

*****

And the model-maker responds:

i just remember the steering stick was like a big joystick, controlling the ship here and there

*****

One more view of the steering column is, then, displayed and the next dream model and commentary begins.

The remaining fifteen of these dreams involve similar science-fiction scenarios as well as relatively banal scenarios involving the architecture of, for example, factories and shopping malls.

Throughout the project, though, one theme remains constant:

As one begins to picture a dream, one begins to mutate the dream to fit the picture (until one can’t say for sure if they remember the dream at all).

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Showreel is a video by Harm van den Dorpel.

He uses an intensified Ken Burns slide show tool to collage found images and screen captures he collected along with a handful of artist friends – Charles Broskoski, Constant Dullaart, Martijn Hendriks, Pascual Sisto, and Ola Vasiljeva.

There are three automatic functions that he uses in the editing process:

1. A slow dissolve into and out of a palimpsest of three to four (or more) image layers composed entirely of imagery appropriated from digital image archives.

2. A slow lateral movement over the majority of these image layers in both varying directions as well as varying rates of speed.

3. A slow zoom both into as well as out of approximately half of these image layers.

There are a lot of recognizable images, but generally it is abstract.

These layered, abstracted images function as an allegory of the time in which the image sharing took place.

It was not one event causing another event like a cue ball hitting an 8 ball into a corner pocket.

It was an overlapping, networked series of events.

It is a picture of shared time.

Monday, January 18th, 2010

In the introduction to his 2008 performance and lecture Continuous Partial Awareness, the artist Cory Arcangel claims that he lost his memory.

Well – actually, it wasn’t that he “lost” his memory – the memories, he explains, were still there in his mind – somewhere.

Rather, he lost the ability to retrieve these memories. The best approximation for this was, according to Arcangel, “like being really lazy” – one knows that the memories are there somewhere, but the effort to search them down becomes such an incredibly laborious task, that one might as well have actually lost them.

Now, memory loss such as Arcangel experienced comes with consequences.

One’s reliance on technology to manage one’s everyday experience increases.

Arcangel’s case was no exception. The creative process, for instance, undergoes a mutation: if one is struck by an idea for a project, one must record the idea through the use of some form of technology or risk losing it altogether.

Now, this technology could be anything – from pen and paper to an e-mail composed to one’s self – it doesn’t matter; just so long as the ideas are recorded somehow and slipped into a database.

What Arcangel realized, though, was that this externalization went beyond mere utility – it took on a life of its own. The juxtapositions of the ideas in his database created a sort of surrealism that became at least as intriguing as the individual ideas, themselves.

The more he fed the database in the hopes of remembering something, the more the database developed its own unique hunger – an evolving aesthetic form demanding a certain amount of tender loving care which would, in turn, dictate the type of ideas that Arcangel was compelled to remember in the first place.

After a while it becomes unclear whether or not he is recording his memories or creating a world.

Perhaps it’s both.