LACMA Launches Art and Technology Lab

John Eger sent us this update on LA  County Museum of Art

LACMA Launches Art + Technology Lab

December 10, 2013

An exciting thing happened today: we launched our new Art + Technology Lab at LACMA. The Lab is an experiment in bringing artists and technologists together to develop projects that we plan to share with the public here at the museum. We also issued our first call for proposals. Artists and collectives interested in pursuing projects that engage emerging technology are invited to apply by January 27, 2014, for grants up to $50,000, plus in-kind support from our advisory board and participating technology companies.

We plan to fund a small number of projects in the first year of the program. Several technology companies have joined the effort: Accenture, NVIDIA, DAQRI, SpaceX, and Google are helping to make this project possible. Our advisory board also includes independent artists and academics, such as Dan Goods (visual strategist at Jet Propulsion Labs) and Ken Goldberg (professor of industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California, Berkeley).

Robert Irwin and James Turrell in the anechoic chamber at the University of California, Los Angeles. The artists explored the concept for an unrealized project with the Gannet Corporation as part of the original Art and Technology program at LACMA. Photograph © Malcolm Lubliner

This isn’t the first time LACMA has embarked on a program to bring artists and technologists together. The Art and Technology program at LACMA that ran from 1967 to 1971 is legendary, and included Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenberg, James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and others. When we launched our online Reading Room a few years ago, the Report on the Art and Technology Program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967–1971 quickly jumped to the top of the list of popular out of print publications. The publication includes some amazing documentation of the collaborations between artists and industry, including several projects that failed to lead to a completed work of art, but gave rise to innovations many years or even decades later.

The Lab is inspired by the history at LACMA, but the program we’re launching now differs in some respects. Today, compared to the late 1960s, the boundary between art and technology is much more fluid. We fully expect to see participants in the program that move easily between both disciplines. That makes aligning artists and technology developers all the more exciting and fruitful. We also plan to reveal projects in progress through regular presentations at LACMA, including talks with artists and demonstrations of prototypes. Our commitment to exploring the nexus of art and technology is long-term, and we look forward to building on the program over time.

The exterior entrance to the new Art + Technology Lab at LACMA via the Director’s Round Table Garden at the east end of the museum campus.

The Lab is housed in our newly remodeled Balch Research Library. The County of Los Angeles supported the renovation, which wraps up this month, with a grant from their Productivity Investment Fund. Those of you familiar with the research library will, we hope, be surprised and pleased by the transformation. We opened up a wall of windows looking out on the park and gave the space an overhaul that enables us to accommodate not only the new Lab program, but also more books and space for our librarians to work with researchers.

For questions about the Art + Technology Lab, or to find out about upcoming programs at LACMA, join our mailing list: lab@lacma.org.

Amy Heibel, Vice President, Technology, Web and Digital Media 

Natalie Jeremijenko: Women who talks to fish

Four years ago, the Australian-born artist Natalie Jeremijenko stood at the edge of Pier 35 in Downtown Manhattan, trying to start a conversation with some striped bass. Just north of the Manhattan Bridge, she and several collaborators dropped 16 tall buoys into the East River. The buoys were fitted with submersible sensors that monitored water quality and with LEDs that flashed when fish swam by, charting the Piscean passage. “I fell into the river four times installing it,” Jeremijenko recalls. “You have no idea, just standing on land, how ferocious those currents are!”

 

The installation, “Amphibious Architecture,” devised with the architect David Benjamin, stayed in the river for several months — a miniature skyline bobbing and blinking in the reflected glare of the real thing. With the piece, Jeremijenko was interested, she said, in “highlighting what’s under this pretty reflective surface that enhances real estate value but is actually a diverse, teeming habitat.” Viewers on land alerted to the presence of fish could send them text messages care of an SMS number. The fish then “responded” with texts of their own, chatting about themselves and their surroundings: “Hey there! There are 11 of us, and it’s pretty nice down here. I mean, Dissolved oxygen is higher than last week. . . .”

At New York University, where she is a professor of visual art, Jeremijenko had developed seaweed bars containing a PCB-chelating agent that observers were encouraged to hurl into the river — food meant to help rid the fish, and by extension, the water, of toxins. This snack was formulated to taste “delicious” to fish and humans alike: if you were feeling peckish, you could have what they were having. “It’s a very visceral way of demonstrating that we share the same natural resources, we eat the same stuff,” she once explained. “They’re not inhabiting a different world.”

Read the whole five page story in the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/magazine/the-artist-who-talks-with-the-fishes.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0

And the Word is STEAM by John M. Eger

And The Word is STEAM

John M. Eger
Van Deerlin Endowed Chair of Communications and Public Policy and Director of the Creative Economy Initiative, San Diego State University

Published in the Huffington Post

Last month, Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) and Congressman Aaron Schock (R-IL), Co-Chairs of a Congressional Caucus committed to putting A (the role the arts play in nurturing young peoples new thinking skills) into the language of the America COMPETES Act (also know as the STEM act), together with 28 other house members, wrote the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology urging inclusion of provisions supportive of STEAM.
Its time they said, that:

"STEAM should be recognized as providing value to STEM research and programs across federal agencies through 'Sense of Congress' provisions and language clarifying that current research, data collection, and STEM programs may include arts integration strategies and programs,"..."Additionally, we ask that, where appropriate, data collection, surveys, and reporting on STEM activities and grant making in the federal government specifically look at arts integration activities. Finally, current interdisciplinary and inter-agency programs should be strengthened and language added to clarify that arts integration is an avenue for doing so."

The Caucus reflects what more and more educators, parents, and policymakers and researchers are saying about merging the arts and sciences and creating more meaningful interdisciplinary experiences as the best way to nurture the next generation of leaders and workers for a workforce demanding creativity and innovation.
Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa, scientist, artist, writer, poet, and designer based in India, has said, "Art and science ... are two sides of the same coin." While science is Dr. Challa's first love, art and literature are "life itself."
Dr. Challa, like many scientists see science as art and art as science and often inspired by each. Unfortunately, many others still see art and science as distinct and separate disciplines. Not unlike physicist-turned-novelist C.P Snow, who wrote over fifty years ago there are "two cultures":

"Physicists and writers exist, where "hostility and dislike" divide the world's "natural scientists -- its chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists -- from its literary intellectuals."

He found it strange that more scientists weren't artists and musicians and more artists lacked a similar interest in the sciences. What happened to the classically trained person, he mused. In his day all these subjects were "branches of the same tree."
The challenge of our age is to blur those lines, merge art and science, and develop the new thinking skills kids need to be creative and innovative in the wake a truly global-knowledge-economy.
Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein who authored a seminal book called Sparks of Genius looked and at the top 150 scientists who lived over a period of 200 years and made a rather startling discovery that each was equally accomplished in the fine arts as well as the hard sciences.
To those educators lobbying for more emphasis on the sciences, they pointed out that Galileo was a poet and literary critic. Einstein was a passionate student of the violin. And Samuel Morse, the father of telecommunications and inventor of the telegraph, was a portrait painter.
The Root-Bernstein's examined the minds of inventive people and found that creativity is something both artists and scientists can learn and, more importantly, that the seemingly disparate disciplines of art and science, music and math, complement and enhance one another.
When the White House and Congress first passed the America COMPETES Act, they were clearly thinking about the vital import of science, technology, engineering and math--not art. At the time, they authorized $151 million to help students earn a bachelor's degree, math and science teachers to get teaching credentials, and provide additional money to help align kindergarten through grade 12 math and science curricula to better prepare students for college. The Act has been reauthorized several times since.
In the meantime, educators are discovering the power of the arts and art integration, adding "A" or the arts to the mix, and insuring that both hemispheres of the brain are nurtured, the whole brain is engaged, and art and the humanities and all the sciences reinforce the connections.
Also in the last few years, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), realizing that creativity and innovation clearly support U.S. economic interests , launched an effort to fund proposals that demonstrate how art and science can be woven together in an artwork, or play, demonstration or lab experiment or educational effort. Proposals costing no more that $10,000 to $100,000 were encouraged.
The National Science Foundation, responsible for STEM initiatives, also funded the Art of Science Learning last year to produce three conferences -- in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Illinois and San Diego, California -- to look at what business, education, and communities across the United States were doing to merge the "two cultures" of art and science; and is closely examining ways to make young people creative and innovative.
More recently, the NSF funded experiments in Chicago, San Diego and Worcester , Massachusetts, called "Integrating Informal STEM and Arts-Based Learning to Foster Innovation," to find a new model for sparking creativity and innovation in our schools. Specifically they stated:

"The goal of the project's development activities is to experiment with a variety of innovation incubator models"... "to generate creative ideas, ideas for transforming one STEM idea to others, drawing on visual and graphical ideas, improvisation, narrative writing and the process of using innovative visual displays of information for creating visual roadmaps."

Both the NSF and the NEA stopped short of endorsing STEAM per se -- but it now may be time to change the focus and change the vocabulary and thus send a message to schools across the country: Merge art and science curricula, provide more interdisciplinary courses.
Barney Mansavage, a principal architect at SRG Partnership focusing on architecture for education and civic places, put it this way:

"Architecture is not a science, it's an art; cost estimating is not a science, it's an art; leadership is not a science, it's an art"... "We might also say that even science is not a science. It, too, is an art, and as such, evolving from STEM to STEAM makes real sense."

Examples of Datamade Remixes? Or digital art by another name? by Joe Nalven

The recent article posted by Patricia Frischer about  West, Malina, Lewis et al) suggests a digital path to Duchamp's readymades. Consider the analogy:

In both process and outcomes, the “datamades” resulting from DataRemix are envisioned to function analogously to Duchamp’s readymades. Their ultimate objective is to destabilize the framing narratives of data creation and representation in order to generate the possibility for new forms to arise in hopes of allowing us to see and know beyond what our instruments, algorithms, representational schemas and prevailing culture enable us to see and know. Yet, reappropriation and recombination also bring with them the framing narratives of artistic traditions from the early 20th Century that continue to evolve in our digital culture.  (excerpt from DataRemix: Designing The Datamade - Through ArtScience Collaboration by Ruth West, Roger Malina, John Lewis, Member, IEEE, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, Alejandro Borsani, Brian Merlo, and Lifan Wang)

Unfortunately, there are no examplars in the article (or that I could find on the web using their  terminology):  What kind of art this might be?  In the spirit of the digital zeitgeist, I will propose several examples (below) that might fill this void.

However, before doing so, an important and final disclaimer in the article is worth noting - can these art objects be created from a 'neutral' exercise in finding datamades or must there be a deus ex machine (or an artist ex machina or artist ex computer)? Simply put, if there is no artist making a decision in whatever field of experience, on whatever planet in the universe, then there is no art. If a tree falls in the forest, etc. etc.

Let us remind ourselves that Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, and other readymades, did not magically get transported into a gallery. There must have been: (1) a recognition by Duchamp that this was the object he wanted to put in the exhibit; (2) Duchamp's purchasing the object; (3) Duchamp's reorienting it for display; (4) Duchamp's signing the object with a pseudonym; (5) Duchamp's submitting it for exhibition; (6) a rejection by the art committee and hiding of it during the show; and (7) photographing of the object by Alfred Stieglitz. (There are other versions of what happened, but that is simply another path of decision-making of taking the 'fountain (urinal)' and transforming it into a 'readymade.'

Obviously, to get an analogous object - in whatever form(s) - there needs to be a similar set of interventions by the artist and others.
But, why even bother about an analogy to finding readymades in Big Data, genomics, astrophysics and the like -- and then calling them datamades? There still must be an artist making a decision to call 'X' (whatever 'X' is) something other than what it seems to be in the real world and labeling it 'art.'

The abstract provides an answer of sorts. A crisis is imagined and the datamade is offered up as a solution. Does it work?

We propose a role for ArtScience research and creative work in contributing to the necessary shifts to go beyond the current crisis of representation. We specifically describe DataRemix, a recombination and reappropreation (sic) practice intended to trigger novel subjective experiences and associations. The narratives framing data creation and representation circumscribe what we can see and know, and how we see and know. How do we see and know beyond what our instruments, algorithms, representational schemas and training guide us to see and know? How do we look for what we don’t know we’re looking for when we can only examine at most a tiny fraction of the available data? Our argument is grounded in and will be illustrated by experience with several ArtScience collaborations spanning genomics, astrophysics, new media, and holographic sound design.

I might note in passing that Protagoras' famous quote suggests that we are stuck with ourselves and the tools of measurement we use in representing what we know and perceive. Clearly, our tools and methods change, but these newfangled tools are still a human view of reality. Big data, genomics, etc. are still 'human tools and human measures.' So, how are we to get outside of the human condition - a NHI type of art? (NHI = no humans involved)

I appreciate the concluding words which admit of an impossibility to the proposed tasks.

 Yet, reappropriation and recombination also bring with them the framing narratives of artistic traditions from the early 20th Century that continue to evolve in our digital culture. These carry an aura of arbitrariness that runs counter to the functioning of science which requires reproducibility and validity. This very contradiction is at the heart of our working definition of DataRemix. In proposing DataRemix we hope to contribute to the dialog about arbitrariness already ongoing in the visualization community. Maintaining the dichotomy of artistic approaches as devoid of meaning, decorative or subjective and non-artistic approaches as meaningful, valid and objective eschews the practical reality that, as Monroe observes, visualization is inherently aesthetic and created for an intended audience, and iterates towards the audience as part of the analytic process. Additionally, familiarity with a representational schema enables us to forget that at one point elements of its design were also based on arbitrary yet repeatable mappings that lead to their utility and meaning. Stylistic and aesthetic concerns are increasingly a subject of study in the VIS and HCI communities. As Viegas and Wattenberg reflect, the power of artistic data visualization arises from artists “committing various sins of visual analytics” and directly engaging and guiding an audience towards a point of view. 

[Ah yes, their are artistic interventions and somehow geared to an audience!]

They remind us that even with dispassionate analysis as its goal, creating a visualization that is truly neutral is “generally impossible” and propose further exploration of the value of artistic explorations. In this light, we propose to explore DataRemix as a mechanism for artistic approaches to engage empirical approaches in creating new ways of seeing and knowing. (References are in the original article.)

Well, what is really possible and fruitful?  There are any number of artists that play with randomness. Such randomness can be applied to the incorporation of any field of data.  I would think that if one allows impurity (namely, human and artistic interventions) then the model works. Without those 'impurities' (that's me and you and all the other humans reading this narrative), we get Platonic zip. Idealized nothings.  But then, that's my point of view. 

Here goes with some impure artistic inventions that incorporate randomness into their methods. 

These examples would be DataRemixes that yield datamades.  (I suppose if there is an objection to my use of these neologisms, I can call my examples 'DataRemixes2' and 'datamades2.' A rose by any other name is still a rose.) 

Paul Reiners Cellular Automata

I don't pretend to understand the mechanics of cellular automata, but Reiners has been incorporating this method into music and visualization. While the approach is intentional, the results provide randomness. 

Paul Reiners, Cellular Automata in Van Gogh's Sunflowers

Reiners:   A CA consists of:

    A matrix, or grid, of cells, each of which can be in one of a finite number of states
    A rule that defines how the cells' states are updated over time

The matrix of cells can have any number of dimensions. Given a cell's state and the state of its neighbors at time t, the rule determines the cell's state at time t + 1. (This will become clearer after you look at some concrete examples.)

So, how would this look.  If you go online you can watch (enlarge the screen) the cells within Van Gogh's Sunflowers move as if they were little insects.

Don Relyea's Random Art Generator

What I was able to do with Relyea's random art generator is to control its source data - either limiting it to a predesignated folder on my computer or allowing it to mix with randomly selected objects on the web.

Paradox created with Relyea's Random Art Generator limited to file folder on my computer. (Upper)  Konecni Random mixes an image provided by Vladimir Konečni with an object selected at random from the web. (Lower) Layout of items is randomly assigned by Random Art Generator and then reworked by the artist.

These two examples, it might be objected, begin with an artist's intent with randomness subsumed to the original purpose. The examples are not just found.  But then, neither was Duchamp's readymades just found.  Their is a conceit in each approach that gives the appearance of some found object as if it were randomly encountered. Hardly. While the readymade is not studio art or a plein air painting or an intended photograph, it is carefully selected with an artistic purpose.

The proposed DataRemix must also rely on some conceit to give it the air of being found - as the analog to a readymade, the newly minted datamade.

We are trapped inside the human condition, the human measure of things. The artist can create a novelty as if it were found out there somewhere - a philosophy of 'as if.'

I am arguing for a lower threshhold, a less ambitious approach to finding art in the vast hurricane of data on the net and in our minds.

And all of these are wonderfully included in the making of contemporary art in digital media (might even call it, digital art).

In that regard, I am pleased to see further advances with all things digital.

COMMENTS:

As Joe Nalven obliquely points out, essentially all of the concepts discussed by the authors of the article are old hat – as concepts. To realize this, one needs only to examine developments in electronic music since 1950s in which a variety of approaches to randomness has been utilized. In some of the allegedly aleatoric work of John Cage, there is actually a great deal of composer's intervention. Iannis Xenakis sometimes intervened very minimally indeed, using the random-field stochastic processes.

May I briefly go off the subject and introduce the Chinese man whose portrait I took? (Joe combined it with some allegedly randomly chosen object from the web.) I met him on one of the many thousands of stone stairs leading to the peak of Tai Shan, a holy mountain (5,000+ feet) in Shandong province. Off to the side of the giant staircase, the charming man ran a miniature fertility counseling center!

Vladimir Konečni

New Ways of Seeing and Knowing by Patricia Frischer

DataRemix: Designing The Datamade Through ArtScience

Ruth West just presented this data remix paper at IEEE VIS Arts Program (VISAP), Atlanta, Georgia, October 2013 the full paper is available on line http://malina.diatrope.com/2013/10/26/dataremix-designing-the-datamade-through-artscience-collaboration/

Visual artists are comfortable with collage and ready mades and over the years have gained an audience for these works which combine disparate objects to generate new meanings. In the music word this process is called remix or mashup. Using a computer to aid in this process , we use tools like copy and paste. In fact, every one who uses copy and paste is in fact, remixing. 

Ruth West (one of the judges for the DNA of Creativity project, and her colleagues (Roger Malina, John Lewis, Member, IEEE, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, Alejandro Borsani, Brian Merlo, and Lifan Wang ) are attempting to use scientific data in this way. They are calling this "datamix" generated art "datamades".

The goal is to encourage the scientific community that usually relies on feasibility through reproducibility to throw caution to the wind and see what happens if arbitration is embraced. The hope is that the results will have one big advantage that the arts can claim and that is relevance to an audience. 

Please read the entire article for extensive explanation of their whole process.  We would love to hear your comments and observations on this subject 

Persistent Arts and Crafts Education for Future Scientists and Engineers

This article was brought to our attention by John Chalmers:

Roger Malina is launching a series of discussions around Robert and Michele Root Bernstein’s White Paper for the SEAD White Paper Study that has just been delivered to the US National Science Foundation.  The title of the White Paper is:The Importance of Early and Persistent Arts and Crafts Education for Future Scientists and Engineers and provides empirical evidence of why training in the arts and crafts (including the making and hacking movements) should be a key component for the early training of future innovative scientists and engineers. The full white paper is available at

http://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/white-paper-abstracts/final-white-papers/the-importance-of-early-and-persistent-arts-and-crafts-education-for-future-scientists-and-engineers/

The topic was part of a SEAD workshop that was just held in Washington DC with representatives of the US National Science Teachers Association, the US National Art Educators Association , the American Association for the Advancement of Science, National Association for Gifted Children, Association of Science and Technology Centers, Art of Science Learning, Center for the Advancement of Informal Science Education, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, American Association for the Advancement of Science . There were also observers from the US National Science Foundation, the US National Endowment for the Arts and the US Congresssional STEAM caucus. They will be including questions and comments that arose during the workshop. Much excitement arose in the workshop when they were informed that a Memorandum of Understanding between the US National Science Foundation, the US National Endowment for the Arts and the US National Endowment for the Humanities had just been signed to better coordinate and respond to transdisciplinary research and education arising between the sciences, engineering, arts, design and humanities.

Digital Grotesque: Printing Architecture

With thanks to Dana Levine for sending us this link:

Digital Grotesque . Printing Architecture from Digital Grotesque on Vimeo.
Digital Grotesque is the first fully immersive, solid, human-scale, enclosed structure that is entirely 3D printed out of sand. This structure, measuring 16 square meters, is materialized with details at the threshold of human perception. Every aspect of this architecture is composed by custom-designed algorithms.

Please visit www.digital-grotesque.com for a further description.


Architects:
Michael Hansmeyer
Benjamin Dillenburger

Partners and Sponsors:
• Chair for CAAD, Prof. Hovestadt, ETH Zurich
• Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich
• voxeljet AG
• FRAC Centre
• Strobel Quarzsand GmbH
• Pro Helvetia

Research for the Digital Grotesque project was carried out at the Chair for CAAD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. All components were printed by voxeljet AG. The first part of Digital Grotesque is a commission by FRAC Centre for its permanent collection.

Fabrication Team:
Maria Smigielska, Miro Eichelberger, Yuko Ishizu, Jeanne Wellinger, Tihomir Janjusevic, Nicolás Miranda Turu, Evi Xexaki, Akihiko Tanigaito

Video & Photo:
Demetris Shammas, Achilleas Xydis

Music:
"Flicker" by Origamibiro (http://www.origamibiro.com)