Projection Design

“Projection Design” offers a hands-on approach to the design, planning and execution of digital projections in a variety of performance spaces by using a combination of industry standard and open source research software tools. This blog will serve as an online text for the developing book, "Technical Ecstasy" and link for the web-readings, online tutorials,software resources historical examples, video art and performance examples and essential class communications for Projection Design class taught by Patrick Pagano

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Symbols

Baudrillard makes an interesting observation about the evolution of representations of the real when he comments that in the current age even symbols  (or signs) that represent real ideas are being replaced by symbols that are themselves real.


Some of the very first symbols of the real were cave paintings that were likely used to recount actual events.  In this instance, the horse symbol was a direct representation of an actual horse.  As our methods of conveying information have become more sophisticated, symbols have evolved to encompass ideas of the real, as well as the real itself.  The word horse in a novel does not reference an actual horse, for example, but the idea of horse, and triggers each audience member to apply their own varying understandings of horse to the situations of the novel.  In the digital age, symbols have evolved again.  A horse in Second Life, for example, is most likely not a representation of an actual horse, nor is it a symbol of the idea of horse.  It is a "real" horse unto itself.  (Interestingly, this evolution in representations of reality is also a reversion, as the symbol no longer relies on the receiver's personal understanding of horse to interpret the symbol like in a novel, but gives a more direct representation as with the cave paintings)

Gig Apprentice Opportunity???

On Saturday night i will be performing live visuals at teh COmmon Grounds Nightclub in Gainesville as a part of a Women of Electronic Music event. I am wondering if anyone wants to work with me to see what is involved with a live show in a local setting.

The show is at 10Pm-2 [i am only performing for 1 hour, with Catherine_k, an artist from Miami
load in and tech check is @ 8pm

let me know if any of you are interested in seeing/working on this process

pp

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

pure data re tutorial

I am going to go over the tutorial again tomorrow to make sure everyone feel comfy with the basics of digital projection design as it pertains to our study so far...

1.) Video Mixing
2.) Geometry [openGL]
3.) Models [3D]
4.) Text
5.) Color & Effects

but we will work on adding [recording] to capture our visual compositions

Monday, February 25, 2008

Live Design Website

Here is the online site for "Live Design". Poke around and you can get the subscription for free.

http://livedesignonline.com/

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

BENJAMIN LINK AND READING

http://web.bentley.edu/empl/c/rcrooks/toolbox/common_knowledge/general_communication/benjamin.html#top

Baudrilliard Reading


The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts — the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.l

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territory. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction's charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer's mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models — and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials — worse: by their art)ficial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.

The divine irreference of images

To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign: "Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre). Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". Since the simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he or she ill or not? The simulator cannot be treated objectively either as ill, or as not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this point, before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of the illness. For if any symptom can be "produced," and can no longer be accepted as a fact of nature, then every illness may be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat "true" illnesses by their objective causes. Psychosomatics evolves in a dubious way on the edge of the illness principle. As for psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom from the organic to the unconscious order: once again, the latter is held to be real, more real than the former; but why should simulation stop at the portals of the unconscious? Why couldn't the "work" of the unconscious be "produced" in the same way as any other symptom in classical medicine? Dreams already are.

The alienist, of course, claims that "for each form of the mental alienation there is a particular order in the succession of symptoms, of which the simulator is unaware and in the absence of which the alienist is unlikely to be deceived." This (which dates from 1865) in order to save at all cost the truth principle, and to escape the specter raised by simulation: namely that truth, reference and objective caues have ceased to exist. What can medicine do with something which floats on either side of illness, on either side of health, or with the reduplication of illness in a discourse that is no longer true or false? What can psychoanalysis do with the reduplication of the discourse of the unconscious in a discourse of simulation that can never be unmasked, since it isn't false either?2

What can the army do with simulators? Traditionally, following a direct principle of identification, it unmasks and punishes them. Today, it can reform an excellent simulator as though he were equivalent to a "real" homosexual, heart-case or lunatic. Even military psychology retreats from the Cartesian clarifies and hesitates to draw the distinction between true and false, between the "produced" symptom and the authentic symptom. "If he acts crazy so well, then he must be mad." Nor is it mistaken: in the sense that all lunatics are simulators, and this lack of distinction is the worst form of subversion. Against it, classical reason armed itself with all its categories. But it is this today which again outflanks them, submerging the truth principle.

Outside of medicine and the army, favored terrains of simulation, the affair goes back to religion and the simulacrum of divinity: "l forbade any simulacrum in the temples because the divinity that breathes life into nature cannot be represented." Indeed it can. But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority, simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of fascination — the visible machinery of icons being substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by the Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today.3 Their rage to destroy images rose precisely because they sensed this omnipotence of simulacra, this facility they have of erasing God from the consciousnesses of people, and the overwhelming, destructive truth which they suggest: that ultimately there has never been any God; that only simulacra exist; indeed that God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum. Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination. But this death of the divine referential has to be exorcised at all cost.

It can be seen that the iconoclasts, who are often accused of despising and denying images, were in fact the ones who accorded them their actual worth, unlike the iconolaters, who saw in them only reflections and were content to venerate God at one remove. But the converse can also be said, namely that the iconolaters possesed the most modern and adventurous minds, since, underneath the idea of the apparition of God in the mirror of images, they already enacted his death and his disappearance in the epiphany of his representations (which they perhaps knew no longer represented anything, and that they were purely a game, but that this was precisely the greatest game — knowing also that it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).

This was the approach of the Jesuits, who based their politics on the virtual disappearance of God and on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences — the evanescence of God in the epiphany of power — the end of transcendence, which no longer serves as alibi for a strategy completely free of influences and signs. Behind the baroque of images hides the grey eminence of politics.

Thus perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images: murderers of the real; murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity. To this murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacity of representations as a visible and intelligible mediation of the real. All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meamng and that something could guarantee this exchangeGod, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an umnterrupted circuit without reference or circumference

So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental ax~om). Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.

These would be the successive phases of the image:

  1. It is the reflection of a basic reality.
  2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.
  3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.
  4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.

The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning pomt. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notmn of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its art)ficial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.

Hyperreal and imaginary

Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that aufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot — a veritable concentration camp — is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade.

The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pactfied. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It ~s meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.

Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system.

Political incantation

Watergate. Same scenario as Disneyland (an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the art)ficial perimeter): though here it is a scandal-effect concealing that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods are employed by the CIA and the Washington Post journalists). Same operation, though this time tending towards scandal as a means to regenerate a moral and political principle, towards the imaginary as a means to regenerate a reality principle in distress.

The denunciation of scandal always pays homage to the law. And Watergate above all succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal — in this sense it was an extraordinary operation of intoxication: the reinjection of a large dose of political morality on a global scale. It could be said along with Bourdieu that: "The specific character of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as such, and to acquire all its force only because it is so dissimulated"; understood as follows: capital, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever regenerates this public mocality (by indignation, denunciation, etc.) spontaneously furthers the; order of capital, as did the Washington Post journalists.

But this is still only the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu enunciates it, he takes "relation of force" to mean the truth of capitalist domination, and he denounces this relation of force as itself a scandal: he therefore occupies the same deterministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists. He does the same job of purging and revivihg moral order, an order of truth wherein the genuine symbolic violence of the social order is engendered, well beyond all relations of force, which are only elements of its indifferent and shifting configuration in the moral and political consciousnesses of people.

All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. For they are identical, meaning they can be read another way: before, the task was to dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none.

Watergate is not a scandal: this is- what must be said at all cost, for this is what everyone is concerned to conceal, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, a moral panic as we approach the primal (mise-en-)scene of capital: its instantaneous cruelty; its incomprehensible ferocity; its fundamental immorality — these are what are scandalous, unaccountable for in that system of moral and economic equivalence which remains the axiom of leftist thought, from Enlightenment theory to communism. Capital doesn't give a damn about the idea of the contract which is imputed to it: it is a monstrous unprincipled undertaking, nothing more. Rather, it is "enlightened" thought which seeks to control capital by imposing rules on it. And all that recrimination which replaced revolutionary thought today comes down to reproaching capital for not following the rules of the game. "Power is unjust; its justice is a class justice; capital exploits us; etc." — as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules. It is the left which holds out the mirror of equivalence, hoping that capital will fall for this phantasmagoria of the social contract and furfill its obligation towards the whole of society (at the same time, no need for revolution: it is enough that capital accept the rational formula of exchange).

Capital in fact has never been linked by a contract to the society it dominates. It is a sorcery of the social relation, it is a challenge to society and should be responded to as such. It is not a scandal to be denounced according to moral and economic rationality, but — challenge to take up according to symbolic law.

Moebius: spiralling negativity

Hence Watergate was only a trap set by the system to catch its adversaries — a simulation of scandal to regenerative ends. This is embodied by the character called "Deep Throat," who was said to be a Republican grey eminence manipulating the leftist journalists in order to get rid of Nixon — and why not? All hypotheses are possible, although this one is superfluous: the work of the Right is done very well, and spontaneously, by the Left on its own. Besides, it would be naive to see an embittered good conscience at work here. For the Right itself also spontaneously does the work of the Left. All the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. For manipulation is a floating causality where positivity and negativity engender and overlap with one another; where there is no longer any active or passive. It is by putting an arbitrary stop to this revolving causality that a principle of political reality can be saved. It is by the simulation of a conventional, restricted perspective field, where the premises and consequences of any act or event are calculable, that a political credibility can be maintained (including, of course, "objective" analysis, struggle, etc.) But if the entire cycle of any act or event is envisaged in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by simulation, then all determination evaporates, every act terminates at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and been scattered in all directions.

Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists; or of extreme right-wing provocation; or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power; or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to calls for public security? All this is equally true, and the search for proof- indeed the objectivity of the fact- does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all models around the merest fact- the models come first, and their orbital (like the bomb) circulation constitutes the genuine magnetic field of events. Facts no longer have any trajectory of their own, they arise at the intersection of the models; a single fact may even be engendered by all the models at once. This anticipation, this precession, this short-circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning, no more dialectical polarity, no more negative electricity or implosion of poles) is what each time allows for all the possible interpretations, even the most contradictory — all are true, in the sense that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of the models from which they proceed, in a generalized cycle.

The communists attack the socialist party as though they wanted to shatter the union of the Left. They sanction the idea that their reticence stems from a more radical political exigency. In fact, it is because they don't want power. But do they not want it at this conjuncture because it is unfavorable for the Left in general, or because it is unfavorable for them within the union of the Left — or do they not want it by definition? When Berlinguer declares, "We mustn't be frightened of seeing the communists seize power in Italy," this means simultaneously:

1 That there is nothing to fear, since the communists, if they come to power, will change nothing in its fundamental capitalist mechanism.

2 That there isn't any risk of their ever coming to power (for the reason that they don't want to); and even if they do take it up, they will only ever wield it by proxy.

3 That in fact power, genuine power, no longer exists, and hence there is no risk of anybody seizing it or taking it over.

4 But more: 1, Berlinguer, am not frightened of seeing the communists seize power in Italy — which might appear evident, but not so evident, since:

5 It can also mean the contrary (no need for psychoanalysis here): I am frightened of seeing the communists seize power (and with good reason, even for a communist).

All the above is simultaneously true. This is the secret of a discourse that is no longer only ambiguous, as political discourses can be, but that conveys the impossibility of a determinate position of power, the impossibility of a determinate position of discourse. And this logic belongs to neither party. It traverses all discourses without their wanting it.

Who will unravel this imbroglio? The Gordian knot can at least be cut. As for the Moebius strip, if it is split in two, it results in an additional spiral without there being any possibility of resolving its surfaces (here the reversible continuity of hypotheses). Hades of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of the subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning4 — where even those condemned at Burgos are still a gik from Franco to Western democracy, which finds m them the occasion to regenerate its own flagging humamsm, and whose indignant protestation consolidates in return Franco's regime by uniting the Spanish masses against foreign intervention? Where is the truth in all that, when such collusions admirably knit together without their authors even knowing it?

The conjunction of the system and its extreme alternative like two ends of a curved mirror, the "vicious" curvature of a political space henceforth magnetized, circularized, reversibilized from right to lek a torsion that is like the evil demon of commutation, the whole system, the infinity of capital folded back over its own sur&ce: transfinite? And isn't it the same with desire and libidinal space? The conjunction of desire and value, of desire and capital. The conjunction of desire and the law; the ultimate joy and metamorphosis of the law (which is why it is so well received at the moment): only capital takes pleasure, Lyotard said, before coming to think that we take pleasure in capital. Overwhelming versatility of desire in Deleuze: an enigmatic reversal which brings this desire that is "revolutionary by itself, and as if involuntarily, in wanting what it wants," to want its own repression and to invest paranoid and fascist systems? A malign torsion which reduces this revolution of desire to the same fundamental ambiguity as the other, historical revolution.

All the referentials intermingle their discourses in a circular, Moebian compulsion. Not so long ago sex and work were savagely opposed terms: today both are dissolved into the same type of demand. Formerly the discourse on history took its force from opposing itself to the one on nature, the discourse on desire to the one on power: today they exchange their signifiers and their scenarios.

It would take too long to run through the whole range of operational negativity, of all those scenarios of deterrence which, like Watergate, try to revive a moribund principle by simulated scandal, phantasm, murder — a sort of hormonal treatment by negativity and crisis. It is always a question of proving the real by the imaginary; proving truth by scandal; proving the law by transgression; proving work by the strike; proving the system by crisis and capital by revolution; and for that matter proving ethnology by the dispossession of its object (the Tasaday). Without counting: proving theater by anti-theater; proving art by anti-art; proving pedagogy by anti-pedagogy; proving psychiatry by anti-psychiatry, etc., etc.

Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form. Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of death, its real agony. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Thus with the American presidents: the Kennedys are murdered because they still have a political dimension. Others — Johnson, Nixon, Ford — only had a right to puppet attempts, to simulated murders. But they nevertheless needed that aura of an art)ficial menace to conceal that they were nothing other than mannequins of power. In olden days the king (also the god) had to die — that was his strength. Today he does his miserable utmost to pretend to die, so as to preserve the blessing of power. But even this is gone.

To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle by the mirror of crisis, negativity and anti-power: this is the only alibi of every power, of every institution attempting to break the vicious circle of its irresponsibility and its fundamental nonexistence, of its deja-vu and its deja-mort.

Strategy of the real

Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of the parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, which is posed here.

For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more violently to a simulated hold up than to a real one? For a real hold up only upsets the order of things, the right of property, whereas a simulated hold up interferes with the very principle of reality. Transgression and violence are less serious, for they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous since it always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing more than a simulation.

But the difficulty is in proportion to the peril. How to feign a violation and put it to the test? Go and simulate a theft in a large department store: how do you convince the security guards that it is a simulated theft? There is no "objective" difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs mclme neither to one side nor the other. As far as the established order is concerned, they are always of the order of the real.

Go and organize a fake hold up. Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger (otherwise you risk committing an offence). Demand ransom, and arrange it so that the operation creates the greatest commotion possible. In brief, stay close to the "truth", so as to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation. But you won't succeed: the web of art)ficial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real elements (a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phoney ransom over to you). In brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality: that's exactly how the established order is, well before institutions and justice come into play.

In this impossibility of isolating the process of simulation must be seen the whole thrust of an order that can only see and understand m terms of some reality, because it can function nowhere else. The simulation of an offence, if it is patent, will either be punished more lightly (because it has no "consequences") or be punished as an offence to public office (for example, if one triggered off a police operation "for nothing") — but never as simulation, since it is precisely as such that no equivalence with the real is possible, and hence no repression either. The challenge of simulation is irreceivable by power. How can you punish the simulation of virtue? Yet as such it is as serious as the simulation of crime. Parody makes obedience and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, since it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based. The established order can do nothing against it, for the law is a second-order simulacrum whereas simulation is a third-order simulacrum, beyond true and false, beyond equivalences, beyond the rational distmctions upon which function all power and the entire social stratum. Hence, failing the real, it is here that we must aim at order.

This is why order always opts for the real. In a state of uncertainty, It always prefers this assumption (thus in the army they would rather take the simulator as a true madman). But this becomes more and more difficult, for it is practically impossible to isolate the process of simulation; through the force of inertia of the real which surrounds us, the inverse is also true (and this very reversibility forms part of the apparatus of simulation and of power's impotency): namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real.

Thus all hold ups, hijacks and the like are now as it were simulation hold ups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their mode of presentation and possible consequences. In brief, where they function as a set of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their "real" goal at all. But this does not make them inoffensive. On the contrary, it is as hyperreal events, no longer having any particular contents or aims, but indefinitely refracted by each other (for that matter like so-called historical events: strikes, demonstrations, crises, etc.5), that they are precisely unverifiable by an order which can only exert itself on the real and the rational, on ends and means: a referential order which can only dominate referentials, a determinate power which can only dominate a determined world, but which can do nothing about that indefinite recurrence of simulation, about that weightless nebula no longer obeying the law of gravitation of the real — power itself eventually breaking apart in this space and becomnig a simulation of power (disconnected from its aims and objectives, and dedicated to power effects and mass simulation).

The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production. For that purpose it prefers the discourse of crisis, but also — why not? — the discourse of desire. "Take your desires for reality!" can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power, for in a nonreferential world even the confusian of the reality principle with the desire principle is less dangerous than contagious hyperreality. One remains among principles, and there power is always right.

Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and of every objective; they turn against power this deterrence which is so well utilized for a long time itself. For, finally, it was capital which was the first to feed throughout its history on the destruction of every referential, of every human goal, which shattered every ideal distinction between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange, the iron law of its power. It was the first to practice deterrence, abstraction, disconnection, deterritorialization, etc.; and if it was capital which fostered reality, the reality principle, it was also the first to liquidate it in the extermination of every use value, of every real equivalence, of production and wealth, in the very sensation we have of the unreality of the stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation. Now, it is this very logic which is today hardened even more against it. And when it wants to fight this catastrophic spiral by secreting one last glimmer of reality, on which to found one last glimmer of power, it only multiplies the signs and accelerates the play of simulation.

As long as it was historically threatened by the real, power risked deterrence and simulation, disintegrating every contradiction by means of the production of equivalent signs. When it is threatened today by simulation (the threat of vanishing in the play of signs), power risks the real, risks crisis, it gambles on remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, -political stakes. This is a question of life or death for it. But it is too late.

Whence the characteristic hysteria of our time: the hysteria of production and reproduction of the real. The other production, that of goods and commodities, that of la belle epoque of political economy, no longer makes any sense of its own, and has not for some time. What society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it. That is why contemporary "material" production is itself hyperreal. It retains all the features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is nothing more than its scaled-down refraction (thus the hyperrealists fasten in a striking resemblance a real from which has fled all meaning and charm, all the profundity and energy of representation). Thus the hyperrealism of simulation is expressed everywhere by the real's striking resemblance to itself.

Power, too, for some time now produces nothing but signs of its resemblance. And at the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective demand for signs of power — a holy union which forms around the disappearance of power. Everybody belongs to it more or less in fear of the collapse of the political. And in the end the game of power comes down to nothing more than the critical obsession with power: an obsession with its death; an obsession with its survival which becomes greater the more it disappears. When it has totally disappeared, logically we will be under the total spell of power — a haunting memory already foreshadowed everywhere, manifesting at one and the same time the satisfaction of having got rid of it (nobody wants it any more, everybody unloads it on others) and grieving its loss. Melancholy for societies without power: this has already given rise to fascism, that overdose of a powerful referential in a society which cannot terminate its mourning.

But we are still in the same boat: none of our societies know how to manage their mourning for the real, for power, for the social itself, which is implicated in this same breakdown. And it is by an art)ficial revitalization of all this that we try to escape it. Undoubtedly this will even end up in socialism. By an unforeseen twist of events and an irony which no longer belongs to history, it is through the death of the social that socialism will emerge — as it is through the death of God that religions emerge. A twisted coming, a perverse event, an unintelligible reversion to the logic of reason. As is the fact that power is no longer present except to conceal that there is none. A simulation which can go on indefinitely, since -unlike "true" power which is, or was, a structure, a strategy, a relation of force, a stake — this is nothing but the object of a social demand, and hence subject to the law of supply and demand, rather than to violence and death. Completely expunged from the political dimension, it is dependent, like any other commodity, on production and mass consumption. Its spark has disappeared; only the fiction of a political universe is saved.

Likewise with work. The spark of production, the violence of its stake no longer exists. Everybody still produces, and more and more, but work has subtly become something else: a need (as Marx ideally envisaged it, but not at all in the same sense), the object of a social "demand," like leisure, to which it is equivalent in the general run of life's options. A demand exactly proportional to the loss of stake in the work process.6 The same change in fortune as for power: the scenario of work is there to conceal the fact that the work-real, the production-real, has disappeared. And for that matter so has the strike-real too, which is no longer a stoppage of work, but its alternative pole in the ritual scansion of the social calendar. It is as if everyone has "occupied" their work place or work post, after declaring the strike, and resumed production, as is the custom in a "self-managed" job, in exactly the same terms as before, by declaring themselves (and virtually being) in a state of permanent strike.

This isn't a science-fiction dream: everywhere it is a question of a doubling of the work process. And of a double or locum for the strike process — strikes which are incorporated like obsolescence in objects, like crises in production. Then there are no longer any strikes or work, but both simultaneously, that is to say something else entirely: a wizardry of work, a trompe l'oeil, a scenodrama (not to say melodrama) of production, collective dramaturgy upon the empty stage of the social.

It is no longer a question of the ideology of work — of the traditional ethic that obscures the "real" labour process and the "objective" process of exploitation- but of the scenario of work. Likewise, it is no longer a question of the ideology of power, but of the scenario of power. Ideology only corresponds to a betrayal of reality by signs; simulation corresponds to a short-circuit of reality and to its reduplication by signs. It is always the aim of ideological analysis to restore the objective process; it is always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.

This is ultimately why power is so in accord with ideological discourses and discourses on ideology, for these are all discourses of truth — always good, even and especially if they are revolutionary, to counter the mortal blows of simulation.

Notes

Notes
1 Counterfeit and reproduction imply always an anguish, a disquieting foreignness: the uneasiness before the photograph, considered like a witch's trick — and more generally before any technical apparatus, which is always an apparatus of reproduction, is related by Benjamin to the uneasiness before the mirror-image. There is already sorcery at work in the mirror. But how much more so when this image can be detached from the mirror and be transported, stocked, reproduced at will (cf. The Student of Prague, where the devil detaches the image of the student from the mirror and harrasses him to death by the intermediary of this image). All reproduction implies therefore a kind of black magic, from the fact of being seduced by one's own image in the water, like Narcissus, to being haunted by the double and, who knows, to the mortal turning back of this vast technical apparatus secreted today by man as his own image (the narcissistic mirage of technique, McLuhan) and that returns to him, cancelled and distorted -endless reproduction of himself and his power to the limits of the world. Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes something fundamental vacillate. This has hardly changed for us: simulation (that we describe here as the operation of the code) is still and always the place of a gigantic enterprise of manipulation, of control and of death, just like the imitative object (primitive statuette, image of photo) always had as objective an operation of black image.

2 There is furthermore in Monod's book a flagrant contradiction, which reflects the ambiguity of all current science. His discourse concerns the code, that is the third-order simulacra, but it does so still according to "scientific" schemes of the second-order — objectiveness, "scientific" ethic of knowledge, science's principle of truth and transcendence. All things incompatible with the indeterminable models of the third-order.

3 "It's the feeble 'definition' of TV which condemns its spectator to rearranging the few points retained into a kind of abstract work. He participates suddenly in the creation of a reality that was only just presented to him in dots: the television watcher is in the position of an individual who is asked to project his own fantasies on inkblots that are not supposed to represent anything." TV as perpetual Rorshach test. And furthermore: "The TV image requires each instant that we 'close' the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile."

4 "The Medium is the Message" is the very slogan of the political economy of the sign, when it enters into the third-order simulation — the distinction between the medium and the message characterizes instead signification of the second-order.

5 The entire current "psychological" situation is characterized by this shortcircuit.

Doesn't emancipation of children and teenagers, once the initial phase of revolt is passed and once there has been established the principle of the right to emancipation, seem like the real emancipation of parents. And the young (students, high-schoolers, adolescents) seem to sense it in their always more insistent demand (though still as paradoxical) for the presence and advice of parents or of teachers. Alone at last, free and responsible, it seemed to them suddenly that other people possibly have absconded with their true liberty. Therefore, there is no question of "leaving them be." They're going to hassle them, not with any emotional or material spontaneous demand, but with an exigency that has been premeditated and corrected by an implicit oedipal knowledge. Hyperdependence (much greater than before) distored by irony and refusal, parody of libidinous original mechanisms. Demand without content, without referent, unjust)fied, but for all that all the more severe — naked demand with no possible answer. The contents of knowledge (teaching) or of affective relations, the pedagogical or familial referent having been eliminated in the act of emancipation, there remains only a demand linked to the empty form of the institution- perverse demand, and for that reason all the more obstinate. "Transferable" desire (that is to say non-referential, un-referential), desire that has been fed by lack, by the place left vacant, "liberated," desire captured in its own vertiginous image, desire of desire, as pure form, hyperreal. Deprived of symbolic substance, it doubles back upon itself, draws its energy from its own reflection and its disappointment with itself. This is literally today the "demand," and it is obvious that unlike the "classical" objective or transferable relations this one here is insoluble and interminable.

Simulated Oedipus.

Francois Richard: "Students asked to be seduced either bodily or verbally. But also they are aware of this and they play the game, ironically. 'Give us your knowledge, your presence, you have the word, speak, you are there for that.' Contestation certainly, but not only: the more authority is contested, vilified, the greater the need for authority as such. They play at Oedipus also, to deny it all the more vehemently. The 'teach', he's Daddy, they say; it's fun, you play at incest, malaise, the untouchable, at being a tease — in order to de-sexualize finally." Like one under analysis who asks for Oedipus back again, who tells the "oedipal" stories, who has the "analytical" dreams to satisfy the supposed request of the analyst, or to resist him? In the same way the student goes through his oedipal number, his seduction number, gets chummy, close, approaches, dominates- but this isn't desire, it's simulation. Oedipal psychodrama of simulation (neither less real nor less dramatic for all that). Very different from the real libidinal stakes of knowledge and power or even of a real mourning for the absence of same (as could have happened after 1968 in the universities). Now we've reached the phase of desperate reproduction, and where the stakes are nil, the simulacrum is maximal — exacerbated and parodied simulation at one and the same time- as interminable as psychoanalysis and for the same reasons.

The interminable psychoanalysis.

There is a whole chapter to add to the history of transference and countertransference: that of their liquidation by simulation, of the impossible psychoanalysis because it is itself, from now on, that produces and reproduces the unconscious as its institutional substance. Psychoanalysis dies also of the exchange of the signs of the unconscious. Just as revolution dies of the exchange of the critical signs of political economy. This short-circuit was well known to Freud in the form of the gift of the analytic dream, or with the "uninformed" patients, in the form of the gift of their analytic knowledge. But this was still interpreted as resistance, as detour, and did not put fundamentally into question either the process of analysis or the principle of transference. It is another thing entirely when the unconscious itself, the discourse of the unconscious becomes unfindable — according to the same scenario of simulative anticipation that we have seen at work on all levels with the machines of the third order. The analysis then can no longer end, it becomes logically and historically interminable, since it stabilizes on a puppetsubstance of reproduction, an unconscious programmed on demand — an impossible-to-break-through point around which the whole analysis is rearranged. The messages of the unconscious have been short-circuited by the psychoanalysis "medium." This is libidinal hyperrealism. To the famous categories of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, it is going to be necessary to add the hyperreal, which captures and obstructs the functioning of the three orders.

6 Athenian democracy, much more advanced than our own, had reached the point where the vote was considered as payment for a service, after all other repressive solutions had been tried and found wanting in order to insure a quorum.

PLEASE READ THIS

http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/new_phil_fr_hanley2.html


here is one look at baudrilliard

pp

Monday, February 18, 2008

Project

My primary project uses Webeyes to capture a performer's motion via camera, and then distorts the chroma of the motion capture. My aim is to have a logarithmic relationship between the magnitude of motion change and the intensity of the chroma shift; the modified image will then be projected on to the performers. In order to prevent ad infinitum overrun (the camera recapturing the projected chroma shift) the performers’ motion will be captured from behind and the newly rendered image flipped on its vertical\horizontal axis, and re-keyed, creating a quasi-mirror image that can be projected from the front. To add additional (non-visible) light for the camera inferred spot light may be projected on to the performers, to overcome the intense light from the projector. Additionally, a secondary camera could be used from the front to improve the projection, actor sync.

PiDiP and Audio Control Project

I am researching using the webcam motion control to effect audio in real time. So far I have been working on getting my old Compaq to run PDP and PiDiP. Thanks to a conversion to Unbuntu, it works surprisingly well.

I'm exploring creating a patch that can fire off a cue or a sound wave when there is a certain motion in a certain place in the grid. There are some examples of people doing this around the internet.

I also have found a patch someone made to affect pitch and tempo which I am attempting to adapt to fit in with the motion detector.

It's at http://puredata.info/Members/loneshark/pitch-time-sample-player/view if your interested.

Somehow this will work out to affect audio in real time in an interesting way with movement.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

projects!

First off I wanted to tell Abby, that I recently cleaned and updated my computer, so I unfortunately lost my adobe premier 6.5 software and tutorials that I used to create my Skydive music video and some other short clips. Over spring break I will be downloading it all again and re-familiarizing myself. It is what my best friend does on the side. I know you might not want to wait so I suggest just trying to type in final cut pro and adobe premier 6.5 tutorials.

For one of our projects, I would like to be helping Jerome with sound on Marisol using the Live software at the PPAC, and hopefully helping run at show-time. But my luck is such that nothing ever seems to go right for me. I also will be on costume crew for 12th night (the exact same nights, of course). We’ll see what happens. I’m now just reading the script and going to meetings when Jerome tells me to do something.

For another of our projects I wanted to see if I could do any video projection with my music video. Ideally, because I wanted to learn how this was done for my own shows and I was given 4 Barco data 600’s by my trapeze partner. Of course, she did not give me all that was needed and these beasts are extremely antique.
Even though Professor Stan K. told me to get rid of them, Pat suggested I find out what I can about them because “this is a research class”. So I’ve been reading about this brand on line, and I joined an AV forum that I found under these projectors and I’m waiting to hear back from them
(here is my letter)

Hi all
I was recently given 4 Barco data 600's to see what I could do with them. I don't know anything about them but I was hoping to get them working. Or at least find out what else I can do with them. I went on line and pulled up an installation manual and found that I had all the cables (I think) except the control/switch box (remote input) which has all of the projector controls. When I plug in the projector, there are no bulb issues, the lamps and the internal lights come on but nothing comes out the projector. Is there a way to order a remote and if so what is the cost, how long will it take for delivery and is it worth it? Any other information you have on this style projector would be greatly appreciated.

I also contacted some friends of the family who own Digital Lighthouse. They where not quite sure what they could do on this but the owner does offer a MAC using club and since I’ll soon be in the market for an upgrade, he can help me figure out what I’m really going to use my system for and sort out my needs. They do extensive amounts of editing.

Now I’m back to square one. I would like to do something involving music and the creation of if nothing else. Any thoughts might help.

And on that side note, I have put in a request for an internship or apprenticeship over this summer at Skylab Studios. We’ll see what happens there

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Project 1

For my project I am trying to create a "music video" of sorts, using Final Cut Pro and other programs to edit and adapt self-shot video to tell a story in concert with some kind of musical accompaniment.  Unfortunately, I am stuck on subject matter.  I have not yet found a song that really speaks to me or had an idea for the content of the video that I see as viable.  Does anyone have any advice?  A method for unblocking or a direction to consider? 

Chapter 9

"We impose the chaos of the human body on the medial in hope of bringing it to life."

I found this chapter to be incredibly intriguing. I think that it gets to the root of what I enjoy about the possibilities of incorporating digital media and technology into live performance situations--the relationship and interaction of performer and artist with the technology. It's not the technology itself that makes stunning art. Sure, a great looking projection is nice, but that's not what makes it exciting. What really stimulates me is the idea of turning static media--even lighting--into something 'live.' I make art to make a difference. I put life on stage--albeit my interpretation of life--in an attempt to comment on society and hope someone sees that comment as their motivation to help make a difference as well. The concept of using these tools to even further heighten the 'life' I'm putting on stage is thrilling, and I hope I get the opportunity to experience it in the very near future.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Postmodernism = Us becoming the media

This line struck me: "For us, postmodernism is the explanation of how society has become consumed by mass media; how we are 'becoming' the media."

I do not really agree with the idea that postmodernism is all about being consumed by media. A show done completely with flashlights and no other lights can be considered post modern. However, that would be considered the absence of digital media and thus might still reflect our consumption with media.

Perhaps, it is not so much about the presence of digital media as it is the awareness of digital media.

I had some difficulty following the flow of chapter seven in Digital Performance.  Some of the segments of the chapter were more comprehensible to me than others, for example, the segment which presents different perspectives on the automation at Disneyland.  I expect this is because I had a pre-existing frame of reference for the subject of that segment.  Not only have I been to Disneyworld (though not Disneyland), I have also read various criticisms of its place in our culture and had that place be the subject of class discussions.   This pre-exposure made it easier for me to follow the arguments presented in that segment.  However, I think that all the segments assumed a certain amount of pre-exposure to the ideas being presented and, unfortunately, for me this was not the case.  The discussions of cybernetics and the philosophies of Jacques Derrida, for example, were interesting in as much as I could follow them, but I know I missed a lot by not having the expected background in the subject matter.


One point I did find particularly interesting was actually raised in the first few sentences of the chapter when the author states: 


"While postmodernist and poststructuralist critical approaches can by nature be fluid, eclectic and "open," they can equally operate doctrinally to impose specific and sometimes inappropriate ideas onto cultural and artistic works in precisely the same way previous ideological master codes such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and structuralism did in the past."


I think this is a particularly salient given the current trend of analyzing art within an inch of its life.  This is not to say that I disagree with the idea of criticism.  I think it is an incredibly valuable tool for understanding a piece of art, be it a sculpture, a novel, or a play.  However, the quotation above is not warning against criticism, but against forcing an artwork to fit into a doctrine of ideas that it was never intended to fit.


A prime example of this is the trend of viewing Ibsen's "A Doll House" as a piece of feminist literature.  Ibsen was not a feminist writer and there are no indications that he wrote "A Doll House" to be read as a feminist work.  By applying the lens of feminism to the play, modern critics and scholars are forcing "A Doll House" to be seen in a way it was never intended, rather than attempting to understand the play as it was meant to be understood by Ibsen.


This is not to say that applying a new lens or doctrine of understanding to an old work is inappropriate.  However, it is important to remember, if a new doctrine of thought is being applied, that that new doctrine is not the be-all and end-all of interpretation, but simply a new lens for examining an old work.

Research Project

For my research project i plan to be a VJ/DJ in Second life. I will do this by creating video content in Resolume. The Music selection will be chosen by myself.
My goal is to stream this video on an LED Video Wall created in Second life.
I would also like to stream this video through LED video cylinders.

Powers of Ten

The movie Power of Ten was really interesting to me. At first I didn’t think it really applied to design but after discussing it with other people I realized that it significance. On top of that while reading chapter 7 I discovered that "digital visual media can best be understood through linear perspective painting, photography, film". It is interesting to see that we are separated from another galaxy by just twenty four zeroes.

Powers of Ten

I had a response similar to Jeremy's to the Powers of Ten video. The biggest difference is that instead of making me feel so small, the video made me feel so integral to the universe. It may be a big machine, but it takes every little cog to make it turn. To be slightly silly about it, we may be small in comparison to the universe, but how do you think those atoms feel? They're REALLY small.

I guess the whole point is just that it takes an understanding of the world around us to know how to manipulate media to create a profound dramatic impact. No matter how large or small, anytime we alter something, it can make a huge difference.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

POT Movie

I love the opening of the film Contact (and the fact that the film references Pensacola, Fl which is where I was living when the movie was released). It was interesting to see the concept that inspired Contact's opening sequence and similar scenes in other films, commercials, etc.

Watching this film made me wonder if it was also the inspiration for sequences where, for example, you see a bird on a branch, and the camera pulls out and you realize the bird is a part of a painting and then the camera pulls out further to reveal the painting is hanging on a wall inside of a house and then it's revealed that the house is actually a doll house and then we discover that the doll house is inside of a real house that looks exactly like the doll house and just to the left of the real house is a bird on a branch in a tree in the front yard.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Powers of Ten

After watching a piece like that, you realize how small you and your problems are as compared to something as vast as outer space.  Numerically that makes each one of us a mere 1ish verses 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  Also noteworthy was that the video explored all the way down to 10^-18, near the level of quarks.  This is interesting because in 1977 when the film was made, quarks were very much a young theory and were not as readily accepted as they are today.


Taking a look around, this piece is continually referenced.  A few noteworthy references from Wikipedia include:

The opening scene was spoofed in the couch gag for The Simpsons episode, "The Ziff Who Came to Dinner" (going from 1026 to 10-16 to Homer's head, to which Homer says, "Wow!"), and has been repeated twice with different dialogue on "On a Clear Day, I Can't See My Sister" (where Homer says, "Cool!" after the scene returns to the living room and Kang and Kodos can be heard laughing) and "Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind" (where Homer says "Weird!" after the scene returns to the living room).

For their Twisted Logic Tour in 2005 and 2006, the band Coldplay used Powers of Ten as the backdrop for their performance of The Scientist.

At the ending of Men in Black, the camera pulls out showing that the universe is one of many marbles in an alien's bag, an intergalactic spoof of this.

The opening of the film Contact is a Powers of Ten-style montage that takes the viewer from Earth to the edge of the universe before ultimately resolving into the pupil of the main character's eye.

An unreleased advertisement for Apple's Mac OS X 10.2, "Jaguar," is similar to Powers of Ten"Jaguar - Touching"


Wow, it is quite amazing to see that a mere nine minutes of video has made such a huge cultural impact.  

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Graphics Project

You can also spend your research time on Designing Graphics for projection

GIMP is a free version of photoshop with an Open Source code base.
http://www.gimp.org/

You can research and design large backdrop stills for projection and learn basic digital graphic design for theatrical/dance shows perhaps megring them with scenic and lighting concerns

I will walk everyone through an installation if need be

pp

Cecilia for WINDOWS!

Another option for a project for windows/mac users

Mangle sounds in Cecilia!

get it here

http://www.screwmusicforever.com/dreamweapon/cecilia.zip

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

GEM patch

download and try this GEM patch

you can replace textures and models if you like

check it out

http://www.screwmusicforever.com/dreamweapon/vj-live.zip

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Resolume

Here is yet another network based graphics control software package for Live performance. We used this software for BFA dance showcase last year. If you are on windows and care to explore using this as a tool, you may spend your 30 day research project on familiarizing yourself with this as well

http://www.resolume.com/

for now it seems like a windows only package

Saturday, February 2, 2008

here is one more....


VIDEO GOBO PROJECT IDEA # 766

1.) EXPLORE GEM and ADDRESS PROJECTOR AS LIGHT SOURCE and ADD COLOR

2.) Composite Video onto COLOR PROJECTION

3.) USE MIDI TO TRANSLATE LIGHT SOURCE IN 3D Space

4.) SEND MIDI CALLS FROM CONSOLE

Friday, February 1, 2008

MIDI CONTROL

here is a cool link for a primer on MIDI CONTROL

http://www.makezine.com/07/primer/