Hello and welcome to jərˈmān, Cutbank's new media series. This month's installment is an image-file-turned-sound piece, or a window into the Inhuman thought system. Find a statement by the artist below. For more work by the artist, visit his website, www.thisisjacobriddle.com. Without further ado...
Jpg.mp3 was created by extracting the hexadecimal code from a single jpeg image file then using a TTS program to have to computer read the hexadecimal code from the image. Jpg.mp3 is the auditory rendering of a digital photograph.
jpg.mp3 is part of a larger body of work titled .jpg. .jpg is an acknowledgment of the digital information that create what we view as an image. Beyond acknowledging this information it is reified into the physical world in several different non-photographic forms. These non-photographic representations of a image’s digital information draw attention to the shear volume of information needed to create these image files.
jərˈmān took a bit of a break over the summer, but we're kicking off the fall with a great video piece. If you're unfamiliar with jərˈmān, it's the new media series here at Cutbank. For more information and a link to our back catalog, get on over here.
For September, we've got a video by Jonathan Jonson - "One Quick Memory". Find a statement by the artist below.
I am interested in new meanings and formal relationships that come to the surface when sound and image from various sources are re-contextualized. I consider Internet, personal, found and archival images as latent records that reveal the comedy, geography and drama of our social lives.
One Quick Memory montages found images and sound to create a subjective recollection of a road trip nightmare in the tradition of Freudian inspired “dream movies”.
Welcome to the June edition of jərˈmān. This month we have a great piece of sound/text interaction. Text finds itself talking about sound; sound finds itself acting as a text of the surroundings. Below, find a brief statement by the artist, a link to the complete project, and the featured piece. If you're new to jərˈmān, find all past pieces here.
Doors of Nothingness
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Doors of Nothingness is a project to frame temporal thoughts that emerge from being within certain immersive but evanescent auditory situations. Essentially personal in nature, these texts refer to the pervasive interaction that happens between constantly migrating man and his ephemeral sonic environment in a context-driven approach. A corresponding collection of texts and audio files are the primary outcome of the project. What follows is a selection from the ongoing series.
Link to the project
For more information on Budhaditya Chattopadhyay please visit his website
4.
The ears are open to the slightest movement in the nature of things. This hyper-alertedness captures part of my attention; I start to belong to the events happening around me; I become more fragmented, and the essence of myself becomes transitory; I exist only with the keyboard pressing each alphabet in a certain frequency in another cubicle detached from mine but connected through the corridor of a passage; I exist only to the slamming of door and migratory footsteps; I exist only in the copy-machine, recurring movement of the sliding door with paper coming out of it; somebody throws a word to somebody else, and that somebody is none other than myself; the words carry gestures of alienation as I stop understanding the meaning and signification; they remain as mere sound of spoken words, fractured human voices without any audible information; the keyboard, the copy-machine, the footsteps and the voice, all of them slowly take away bits and pieces of flesh from my body; even the fragile bones disappear into the nature of things and their mighty sounding. The ears become abstraction of the listening process.
This month's jərˈmān features some great eco-Situationist art in the way of an exciting new mobile phone app, "Indeterminate Hikes". We will present here a slide show of documentary images from the project and a statement by the artists. For more information on and ecoarttech, find their website here, and for more information on "Indeterminate Hikes" specifically, click here.
Project Description
Indeterminate Hikes + (IH+) is a mobile phone app that transforms everyday landscapes into sites of bio-cultural diversity and wild happenings. Generally devices of rapid communication and consumerism, smartphones are re-appropriated by IH+ as tools of environmental imagination and meditative wonder, renewing awareness of intertwining biological, cultural, and media ecologies and slowing us down at the same time.
The app works by importing the rhetoric of wilderness into virtually any place accessible by Google Maps and encouraging its users to treat these locales as spaces worthy of the attention accorded to sublime landscapes, such as canyons and gorges. This project extends from ecoarttech’s belief that ecological awareness must be based in the places that humans actually live, not just in relatively uninhabited natural spaces. We also believe it is essential that conversations about environmental sustainability and ecological management be democratized through the arts, and not only considered within a scientific context.
IH+ is currently available on Android. The iPhone version will be released in summer 2012.
How IH+ Works
IH can be performed in two ways: (1) as an interactive public event led by artist-guides (e.g., at festivals/exhibitions), or (2) as a self-guided excursion taken by a hiker equipped with an IH+-enabled smartphone. After identifying participants’ location, IH+ provides a “hiking trail” with a series of randomly designated “Scenic Vistas,” where users are: (1) asked to contemplate “spectacular” views, much as they would on a mountaintop or at a waterfall, (2) encouraged to take 30 mindful breaths or a 5-minute break, while (3) contemplating a directive, such as “Follow the path of falling water,” “Wander the caverns on the surface of the earth, “Discover humans’ primal etchings.” On city streets, where most IH+ performances take place, these directions inspire participants to slow down and notice the sublimity of seemingly anti-spectacular spaces. Rather than encountering a stereotypically breathtaking panorama, participants are confronted with the notion that “falling water” may be the trickle of water dripping into a gutter; “caverns” may include the depths of basements or skyscrapers; and “primitive etchings” may be graffiti. Thus the ecological wonder usually associated with “natural” spaces, such as national parks, is re-appropriated here to renew awareness of the often-disregarded spaces in our culture that also need attention, such as alleyways, highways, and garbage dumps. IH+ hikers take away from our performances a sense that they see the world anew; they have treated the usually mundane act of walking through their home-city as wilderness excursion.
About ecoarttech
We, Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint, founded ecoarttech in 2005 to explore environmental issues and convergent media from an interdisciplinary perspective. Leila earned her PhD in literature from Columbia University in 2009 and was Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Wellesley College in 2010-2011. Cary is Assistant Professor of Digital Art at University of Rochester and has created new media art for over twenty years. His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, Rhizome.org at the New Museum for Contemporary Art, and Computer Fine Arts.
Our collaborative explores what it means to be a modern ecological being amidst networked environments, including biological systems, global cultural exchanges, international commerce, industrial grids, digital networks, and the world wide web. Merging primitive with emergent technologies, we investigate the overlapping terrain between “nature,” built environments, mobility, and electronic spaces. Our recent work includes commissions for the Whitney Museum of American Art, Turbulence.org, and University of North Texas and exhibitions/performances at MIT Media Lab, Smackmellon Gallery, European Media Art Festival, Exit Art Gallery, and Neuberger Museum of Art.
As former New Yorkers living upstate but with continual contact with NYC, we are intrigued by the effects of city-country relationships on the artistic imagination, especially with rural spaces becoming increasingly networked. In 2011, we will be "off-the-grid" artist-residents at Joya: Arte+Ecología, in an Eastern-Andalusian national park. We are also at work launching our own residency program in the Maine mountains where new media practitioners will be invited to make art in networked treehouses.
Check out the latest from jərˈmān. We're happy to continue this monthly series with another amazing video piece. Please also find a statement by the artist below. If you're new to jərˈmān, check out last month's piece here. As always, we encourage you to use this space as a venue for discussion of the works presented. If you have a response to any of the pieces presented, send an e-mail to jermaincutbank@gmail.com
Arlington is derived from the exploration of an archive that details specific facets of the lives of a small group of bikers from the late 1970s. It uses elements of the archive to understand characteristic events and people seen as extreme and marginal, and pieces together particular narratives that suggest their cultural and social values. According to what is revealed in this process, parts of the story are then shuffled, elements are obscured and emphasis is redistributed to address larger questions that explore ideas about liberation and identity.
The piece is developed as a form forward construct. That is, it is meant to reveal the general substrate of its own content and conventions. It is a piece that seems to have fidelity to specific memories and personal narrative, but works reflexively to expose the tenuous nature of history in general.
Arlington is not meant to support any empirical claims regarding the history of its characters or community exactly. In fact, it offers itself as a mediated construct that intentionally compromises such claims, providing fictions in their place, and suggests alternative story telling as a strategy for play and revelation.
Welcome to our first instance of jərˈmān, CutBank's new media series. We couldn't have asked for a more exciting piece with which to initiate our series. Find the piece as well as a statement regarding the piece below. For more information about the series, see the page here. As a part of this series, we would like to encourage an ongoing critical discussion of the works featured. Please send all critical and creative responses to the following piece, The Wilderness, to jermaincutbank@gmail.com and we will publish them here on the website.
1.1) No content: A series of superficial movements, which, taken together, form a global movement incorporating each series.
1.2) Series: each video [movement] contains a series of movements. This series proliferates [rhizome] into avenues and alleyways, rooms and chambers; sequential sectional additions. The series provides the desired movement – never singular, absolute, permanent, profound – always plural, temporary, mobile, superficial.
1.3) Expression comes before conceptualisation. Conceptualisation as discharge of energy into immediate arrest. The economy of Repercussionism cannot produce sufficient ‘repercussive energy’ under the arrest of conceptualisation, through the ‘discharge in thought’. Repercussionism is inconsiderate.
1.4) Since we are dealing with superficial movements, expressions without ready conceptualisations but proliferated by plurals, the concept of facade – and the perspective which permits this spectacle – becomes nonsensical. ‘Facade’ becomes a positive object detached of its negative connotation ‘deception’ – each identity a mask, only more masks underneath, what is profound merely has no bottom, like a broken bucket. The container unfit for bearing; the content cannot resist slipping away.
1.5) Inasmuch as ‘facade’ eradicates permanent persons, so does guilt, as a necessary prerequisite, have nothing to hold onto and slips away. Personalities migrate, guilt cannot anchor the personality, guilt proliferates into energy, into action, and the name ‘guilt’, what is signified by the name ‘guilt’, slips. ‘Facade’ becomes a series of chambers, a movement within or through them becomes practical freedom.
2) Auxiliaries
2.1) Each video is a chamber, a repercussion emanating from primary movement or desire. Successive movements follow, superficial movements, always against the ‘taking-back of’ movements as guilt demands.
2.2) Each ‘repercussion’ is a navigating-freedom, an ecstatic connection between each successive ‘repercussion’. The absence of ‘content’ within discourse permits non-linear, non-triangulated, superficial movement; reactions, abreactions, negations, resistances.
2.3) “The guilty one is the subject of the statement.” If that subject migrates, proliferates via extension, via “becoming-facade”, guilt dis-integrates, (no coherent whole against which it can ‘index’ and make sensible); becomes a toy, a fiction (to be re-written, re-inscribed, at will.) The toy-fiction ‘guilt’ becomes a positively charged object – the world [global movement] is not seen, but invented.
