Collab in Hong Kong 1

Arrived here on Nov 3, Which makes it 2 weeks since I’ve been here, and in spite of my intention to keep a daily blog, I’ve failed miserably, slamming into bed nightly into a stygian sleep that my body has been demanding as its right.

First things first. “Here” is Hong Kong, where I’m on another artistic residency, six weeks long this time, half the duration of last year’s ISEA gig in Singapore. I’m being hosted by the Hong Kong Art Centre (HKAC for short) in Wanchai, old Suzie Wong territory, and still the place where expats can chat up dancers in the girlie bars (lotta Mainlanders, Pinays, Thais and Indonesian girls)on Lockhart, though as a supposedly kind of raunchy district, it’s pretty tame. Clean, prosperous, good air. Easy to get decent or even really good food cheap even late at night, as is supposedly the case in all girlie districts of the world. Nothing like Binondo or even Geylang Lorong in Singapore. Apparently, the HKAC was the first center for independent art in Hong Kong, when it was put up in the seventies (?). Previous to that, all art spaces were government sponsored. So this was where the Hong Kong independent art scene was born. Indie films, experimental films, performance, etc, you name it. Though as indie spaces go, it’s not only venerable, but spectacularly chichi by the standards of the Philippine art scene. It’s a building, some 20 floors high, has its own accredited art school (named the Hong Kong Art School, what else, and I’ll refer to it as HKAS hereon) that gives out full university degrees in the arts, and rents space out to a raft of clients that include the Goethe Institut , for god’s sake. Rent gives them money, but they’ve attracted some pretty spectacular sponsorship as well. Might just be that corporations here are richer or have more discretion, but I get the impression the arts are a more credible target for arts funding over here than in the Phil or Singapore. There’s a theater built/donated and named by Agnes B, for example, and labs/workrooms everywhere bearing the names of donors.



Anyway, I’ve been tapped as half of a collaborative partnership. The other half is Tse Ming Chong, a lecturer at the HKAS, one of the pre-eminent photographers here. Founder of Lumenvisum, the first gallery in HK devoted exclusively to photography. He focuses on ideas of history, and how history is generated as narrative, specifically via imagery. He’s the one who wanted to do something that focused on the Philippines, which is a blind spot in the cultural landscape of HK. In spite of their proximity, both know very little about each other. Filipinos living in the Philippines see HK as a kind of shopping playground and Hong Kong residents are aware of Filipinos mostly as the Sunday spectacle of DHs thronging the streets of Central. Ming Chong and I are getting along quite raucously these days, now that we’re on the second week of our artistic blind date, although it wasn't too long ago when we were wondering what the hell we were going to do together. I’ve never worked with a photographer, and was not quite sure what to do with still images. Further, the last couple of years I’ve been thinking about machines and robots and how to use machine intelligence, and it seemed an interruption of the investigations on that front to turn back to cultural and historical themes, especially as they have to do with Philippine domestic helpers. It seemed like 70’s Social Realist territory, whiny/strident Leftist NGO photojournalist stuff: musty, littered with cliches and platitudes about Exploitation and the Tribulations of the Philippine Worker.



Lastly, there is the contrast in our artistic approaches. Ming Chong’s approach/sensibility is founded on the reticience of traditional documentary. Although he acknowledges that he frames the photograph in order to express his perceptions about the world, he does not manipulate or stage things for the camera. On the other hand, I’ve come to realize that I reach for the tools of science fiction whenever I deal with cultural/historical/social themes. I thrive on extrapolation, hyperbole and distortion. On using technological devices or conceits to juxtapose disparate realities (eg: SF has used time machines to point up the differences between cultures seperated by time; alien societies as a way to describe surreal aspects of the everyday present, and cloning to explore ideas of individuality, personhood and consciousness)



However, as I said, Ming Chong and I have been getting along like gangbusters the last week. It’s possible my mood has also improved since as a result of designing and building this mobile timelapse lab that runs off a car battery. The photo shows it an intermediate stage, before I'd tidied up the cables and tucked them into convenient corners of the cart. The Hong Kongese are amazingly blase about a guy walking around the city at 4 in the morning with something like this. Making stuff always calms me down. I’ll write more on that in the next update, where I’ll talk more concretely about what I've actually been doing, and how Ming Chong and I took the HKAS students for whose edification we are doing this collaboration, to this Pinoy birthday party on Lantau island.

Sketch for an SF plot occasioned by Ondoy/Ketsana Relief

Would be good if the organizational structures remained even after the Ondoy disaster passes/normalizes, even for things not directly related to typhoons. Government is essentially a structure for routing the goods/resources of a group for the benefit of said group, a task our elected government manifestly sucks at (25 rubber boats between all the armed forces AND the National Disaster Coordinating Council, this 4 years after the object lesson of Hurricane Katrina, in a country crossed by an average of 20 typhoons a year.) The relief operations are a web-enhanced example of group cooperation that is the engine that drives all government. There must be a way to systematize this effort. Lessons, cues to be sifted from a study of Obama's election machinery, it's use of/reliance on/leveraging of pre-existent networks, personal initiative, ad hoc coalitions. Probably also from Gawad Kalinga. The philosopher Manfred Halpern once defined politics as "everything we can and need to do together." Imagine a scenario where social networking becomes advanced enough to leverage the kind of tao-to-tao cooperation that the anarchists dreamed of. Where a central government becomes supplanted by a distributed, decentralized government. A politics of community and initiative. A politics even of bickering and exasperated love. I imagine an SF novel, something like a cross between Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and LeGuin's The Dispossessed that chronicles the rise of social networking, said networks becoming the ordinary citizen's preferred channel of goods/money/action, with more and more projects being launched and maintained online until the central government withered away and died, either after convulsive and murderous attempts to stay in power, or from a gradual disappearance of its capital, its constituency.

El Cheapo Soldering Assistant.

Built this out of a plastic tripod I bought in Hong Kong for about PhP120 (I think). Inspired by this instructable. But the instructable uses a bunch of coolant tubes and nozzles-- not easy to find here, and about 10x more expensive. My take on it is cheap, simple and elegant enough to make me want to post it here. Since I basically screwed the tripod plate onto the stand, a single button-press detaches the stand, making it more portable than the original that inspired it. The alligator clips are soldered to banana plugs, which are jacked into banana jacks (called "binding posts" in Alexan) that I jammed into holes that I drilled into the feet of the tripod. This allows the clips to rotate inside said holes. Very handy, very useful, very very easy to make.

New Work: Agimat ni Captain Latigo

Made Agimat ni Captain Latigo (ie the weirdo electronics in a suitcase and armature thing) for the 40th Anniversary of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). It's for We Said Our Piece, an exhibition curated by Don Salubayba and Claro Ramirez for DALOY, a bunch of events commemorating said 40th anniversary. 40 contemporary artists interact with 40 pieces from the CCP's permanent collection. The exhibit should run till around October 18 2009. The work is on the fourth floor.

PHYSICAL COMPOSITION

Agimat interacts with Penitensiya, (the black metal humanoid figure in the back) a steel sculpture by Solomon Saprid. At the heart of it (actually at the tip of the armature) is an electromagnet running household AC (110 volts at 60 Hz ) , cooled by a small fan. The fluctuating magnetic field makes Saprid's statue sing, and you can hear it humming throughout the exhibition space. Basically I wanted my interaction to take place via a physical, scientific link.


Sonically, the electromagnet turns the metal sculpture into a speaker that hums 60Hz and related frequencies. Suspect that the natural resonances of the sculpture might add some inharmonic frequencies. Plus, the waves bounce off nearby walls causing standing waves and interference, so the sound changes as you walk around it...

SEMIOTICS

Agimat translates to "talisman," an object/repository of power. However, as Reynaldo Ileto points out in his book Pasyon at Rebolusyon, the Southeast Asian agimat is not a tool. It's power is not something that anybody can just use, as its function is tied to the righteousness of the owner/recipient. In this sense, an agimat is more like an amplifier, than say, a battery. If the owner of the agimat is not careful to maintain the righteousness that makes him deserving of power, the agimat ceases to function. In this sense, Tolkien's rings of power are not agimat , but simply tools, objects that perform their functions independently of moral intent. Hammers, guns, microscopes are tools: anybody can buy and use one. (Actually, it occurs to me that Tolkien's rings might be described as anti-agimat, as they actively corrupt the spiritual health of the user.)

In Tagalog, penitensiya translates both as "penitent" and "penitence," but specifically denotes the act of physically scourging one's body in order to purify one's spirit. Penitensiya is a rite of purification, in which the mind is turned inward. Basically, I see my piece as adding an extra layer of narrative to the original sculpture. My title recasts Saprid's metal penintent as Captain Latigo, a superhero who presumably fights evil with his whips. I like the fact that the title gives the character of the whip-wielder a side which is oriented outwardly, someone who will use the whips to act upon/purify the world, and not only himself. The humming becomes the sound of Captain Latigo recharging his powers, plugging himself into his electric agimat and whipping himself, and maybe muttering a prayer in Latin ala Green Lantern's oath. Temporal powers intensifying in proportion to Righteousness and Spiritual Purity. Electric Sadomasochistic Superhero Power Charging and Purification...sort of thing.

Anyway, that's what was running through my head. In this case, I began with idea of the technique (vibrating a steel sculpture with an electromagnet) and then tried to think of narratives/symbolic components (purification, recharging, superhero, etc) to go with it. I then controlled the physical appearance of the machine in order to manifest/emphasize those narrative fragments.

This is a break for me as I generally try, when making art-machines, to deal with/expose physical phenomena without giving them social/political/mythical coloration. This would be analogous to the approach of the kinetic sculptors. Just as the kinetic sculptors showcased certain pieces of motion for their own sake and beauty, I try to showcase a certain function for its sake and beauty. So for instance in Quartet, I was dealing with the nature of virtual entities; in Shift Register, I was dealing with surveillance and the nature of the machine gaze. I've begun to think that perhaps it is proper to merge human concerns with the functions though. A sound can resonate in a room and resonate in human sensibility. It is elegant and proper for art to to deal with resonance in both senses. In the case of Agimat, the electromagnet causes the humanoid sculpture to vibrate (induced vibration = mechanical function). It is almost impossible for humans NOT to associate a body vibrating with certain intense psychological states, just as it is impossible for us to not see fire as a kind of living energy, even if fire actually consumes biological functions. Further, we correlate the sound emitted by the sculpture (= energy radiating into/agitating the air) with certain types of human intensity/concentration/charisma. We too are objects. I'm hoping there is a way to relate functions to human concerns without falling into sentimentality/anthopocentricity.

Mechanical Man gig

Funny deja vu moment yesterday at rehearsal for the Mechanical Man gig with Malek, Caliph and PG. At the end of the final chord (and corresponding blackout), we heard clapping in the dark, and then a female voice calling "Bellissima!" (beautiful!). Turned out Emanuela Quartana (the cultural officer of the Italian embassy) and her husband Nino had snuck in while we were playing. Had this weird feeling we were in a scene in some film, the purpose of which was to introduce and establish the character of the Italian Producer. ;-)

The Mechanical Man is an old Italian silent film, an SF thriller with bank robberies. Italian Keystone Kops, mad scientists and two robots. Only 40% of the original footage has been found, which comes to some 30 minutes. It was to be shown as the Italian offering in this year's Silent Film Festival, an event in Manila where the various embassies show a silent film from their country and have it tracked by Filipino musicians. Since the minimum duration of a screening of this type is about an hour, Emmanuela had the idea of letting the band improvise over a re-edit of the film. They got me to do the latter, which I did live, using Resolume (a video sampler) and a program I wrote in Puredata to turn MIDI information from Caliph into editing actions. Each drumbeat caused the playhead in Resolume to jump to a different place in the video sample. This established a steady video layer that cut to the beat. I then layered and effected the video while reacting to the music.

This was the first time any embassy in the Philippines allowed any of their films to be re-edited. Generally the films shown are treated as sacred objects, not to be touched. I've blogged how the addition of music cannot rescue many silent film scenes whose conventions have simply become so dated that they are impossible to watch in the spirit that the director intended (see here ) . It's 2009, nearly a century since Braque and Picasso invented collage, and more than a quarter century since sampling/sonic collage became a tool of popular musical composition. Films CAN be sampled/re-edited! It's as simple as that. Much thanks to the Italian embassy for acknowledging this, and deciding to cross the line. As Emanuela said: "It's a challenge to people."

Ultrabasic class in Puredata

I will be teaching a hands-on, ultrabasic sound programming workshop (1 1/2 hours lang) for ASEUM09. I will be showing how to manipulate sound using the program called Puredata. Puredata is a freeware program, and all programming is done via a graphic interface, ie by drawing lines between boxes. The workshop is geared to students/people/artists with no previous experience in programming.

The workshop is free, and takes place 2pm-3:30pm on July 22 at the Computer Lab (also referred to as the CPU Lab?) of the Center for Women's Studies (CWS) in UP Diliman. The Center is near Abelardo Hall, ie the UP College of Music.

It's a learn by doing kind of class, so participants should bring their own laptop (best if fully charged, as I don't know how easy it will be to plug in in the classroom . It would be a good idea to preinstall Puredata, which runs on both Windows and Macintosh computers, though this is not absolutely necessary. The Puredata installer can be downloaded here or here. (The second site only has the Windows version. The file's name is Pd-0.40.3-extended.exe)

Since the workshop will focus on making sounds, it would be a good idea to bring headphones if your laptop isn't very loud.

New Work: Twinning Machine

Been playing with Processing (a java-based programming environment) over the last three(?) or so months. Around April, I stumbled on the videobuffer class written by a programmer who goes by the name of Rrrufusss, and started modding it for fun. The Twinning Machine is the first useful tool to be spun off by my experiments. I called it a video delay at first, but I realize now that the ability to select and change the delay time on the fly by changing the position of a virtual tapehead (a function that underlies EVERYTHING that I make the program do in this video) makes it more accurate to describe it as a sampler with a memory that is being constantly updated. Below is most of the performance, titled Is It Time To...Or Do I Have To, choreographed and danced by Rhosam Prudenciado. I apologize to Sam for leaving out a minute or so of the intro where he began offscreen and the video screen was dark, (a choice which I really liked) but this is a capture of what the Twinning Machine saw, and it didn't see him during that intro.

I'd like to thank Paul Morales -- the current artistic director of Ballet Philippines -- for initiating the collaboration and introducing me to Sam, a young dancer who wound up, after a very short period of rehearsal, displaying deep insight into what he and the machine might do for each other. It took me a while to figure this out, as I had been thinking of the program as a video delay, and was looking for a dancer to dance a canon; that is, to use the video delay the way U2 guitarist Edge uses sonic delays. When I gave up looking for this and gave myself permission to start programming functions in the program that would enable me to modify Sam's performance on the fly, the collaboration really took off.

"Collaboration" is a sexy word in Manila these days, but the word is inaccurate in most cases of video+dance, I think. Sound designer Randy Thom points out that for two elements to truly collaborate, both elements have to have the power to effect changes in the other, and in most video+dance "collaborations," video accomodates to the dancer/choreographer while the dancer/choreographer never accomodates to the video. In my more charitable/less vicious moments, I describe video in these instances as acting as window dressing. When Paul asked me if I might do "something technical" with a dancer for Wifi Body (the independent dance festival where the above performance was shown) I told him that I was only willing to do it if the technology would be addressed as a dance problem. In effect, I told him, I wanted to become an obstacle to conventional dancing.

Sam proved to be a quick study, and a very cooperative one. A particular incident comes to mind that illustrates what it means to collaborate and to be a dance obstacle. Sam asked if I could effect a very long delay, so that his image could be active while he basically stood still in the corner. I did as he asked, and we ran the dance through and I noticed that he he had followed it up with an interlude of bobbing up and down in another spot while holding his head. After the runthrough, Sam asked me for my input, and I told him that I was all for him standing in the corner, but that following that with another section where he stayed in one place meant that the video buffer would essentially be filled with static images that did not dramatically differ from one another , and that I couldn't find a way to use those images to counterpoint the bobbing section of the dance. Sam proposed inserting a section of frantic activity in between the sections in order to correct this, and I agreed. This frantic section is seen in 4:35, and it becomes the raw material for the jumpcut sequence that immediately follows.