·~{dRNn}~·

HI,

I have great news for today, Healing was selected for a special show about Colombian Video Art in Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The announcement can be read here and the exhibition will happen between October 16th and December 12th in the following address: Arenales 1540 – C1061AAR. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires. REPÚBLICA ARGENTINA

Art is dead, long live to the machine art. Vladimir Tatlin.

‘Machine’ is one of the principal concepts of the modernity. Machine is accurately described, by Broeckmann, as a productive assemblage of forces towards a non-teleological end [1, p.195]. This concept has determined the fate of all sort of practices aimed at producing, organizing, planning, designing, and/or projecting all sort of objects, spaces, social structures, sonic rhythms, and visual sensations in the western societies along at least the last two centuries. In spite of the heterogeneity of forces that are assembled, this concept is totalizing because first, it covers production, organization, and serialization; and second it encompasses all forms of creative work that are treated in similar manners and usually tends towards homogenisation into an uniform social structure at the the same tic-tac-rhythm.

The machinic is the principle that specifies these assemblages, it differs, for instance, from mechanical, electrical, and digital because it covers all of them as characteristics of different sorts of machines, to determine then that what matters is the kind of work the machine does.

Let’s take as example a combinatory machines such as a blender. In a blender different fruits are mixed to produce juice, thus a mix is a homogeneous surface resulting from the assemblage of dissimilar sources. Clearly, a blender could be described as a mechanical machine but mechanical is not enough when specifying the principle that rules a machine that mixes. Mixing is a type of machinic principle.

Remix is another step up in the spiral of rhythm machines that combine ready-made material into new instances. Today, remix can be found everywhere, it has become the form of production per excellence of our times. Lev Manovich has called attention to the remix in contemporary cinema, visual communication, and architecture in which the results are hybrid forms with an homogeneous and fluid surface, and an unreal aesthetic.

If remixing is considered a machinic process, then is a different type of machine art. These forms of machine art cannot be approached based on the type of machine, usually algorithmic, neither they can be characterised by their particular set of visual forms. Rather we have to make use of the principle of combination in which what is being combined is less important than the process itself: the (re)combination. The contemporary machine art differs from that of Tatlin because is one of conversions and not of subversions.

1. Broeckmann, Andreas. “Image, Process, Performance, Machine: Aspects of an Aesthetics of The Machinic”. MediaArtHistories. Ed. Oliver Grau. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007. 193-205

HI, machinima goes on finding its way into the academia. My little contribution has been added to the Leonardo’s thesis abstract service (LABS). Now in Leonardo On-line, my work can be consulted for anyone interested in the topic. My thesis is identified by the node 284, here its link.

Movement under thousand eyes

As any scientific work, mine is open and free, therefore, today I share and publish an electronic version to anyone who wants to read the entire document, here the pdf. I hope to receive soon your critical comments.

1. Cedeño Montaña, Ricardo. Movement under thousand eyes. 2009. Hochschule Bremerhaven and Universität Bremen. Germany.

HI, it’s been a long time without writing here. Many things have happened during the last month, I’m back in Colombia and I’ll be here most likely for some months. Today, I want to get back to a topic I just mentioned before, the cyberpunk. This is a portmanteau that mixes a prefix with a word. The former means control and the latter refers to aggression. The cyberpunk has been the icon of freedom, anarchy and response that the computer culture has championed since the 1980s. However the cyberpunk term is quite contradictory, at first glance the cyberpunk seems to be in control due the access to certain technology but soon we discover that indeed is the punk who is being controlled by that technology, similarly as in a Greek tragedy.

The prefix cyber, is taken form an ancient Greek word meaning steersman. It connotes an individual with a clear destination in mind and a planned route to get there. Cyber refers to an individual that acts upon the world, rather than one being acted upon. An individual that exerts action on the world and therefore to control. From the 1970s on Punk is a term used to characterize young subcultures that are brutalized and marginalized by a dominant society. Punks usually externalize and re-present such abuse by disfiguring them selves or their look. A punk acts as an aggressive surface to the external social pressure by hitting back the dominant society.

The classical example of the cyberpunk is Johnny Mnemonic. In the eponymous novel, Johnny’s personality is been erased because of the overload data he carries on his brain. He is a cyborg, a being with artificial implants that enhance certain features of his body. Johnny’s tragedy is that ultimately he is not in control of his own brain because the data is taken over and his fight is to keep himself save by getting rid of the excess of data. Cyberpunks must behave according to their program, a cyberpunk has no choice but to follow her/his instructions. The control, though internal is away of the cyberpunk. When seen in that way a cyberpunk looks closer to a character of a Greek tragedy, like Ulysses, in which her/his fate was predetermined by the capricious of gods and deities, and not to the liberation promoted by the access to information and therefore knowledge as for instance in Frankenstein.

Are we after almost 30 years of cyber-culture, controlling our lives by accessing large data banks or rather have they taken over every aspect of ours lives, with no space and no time to ourselves than to fill them up? Is our program to fill up these large data banks?

The machine in the XX century art. [3]

“I am accustomed, most of all at night, when the agitation of my soul fills me with cares, and I seek relief from these bitter worries and sad thoughts, to think about and construct in my mind some unheard-of machine to move and carry weights, making it possible to create great and wonderful things”
Alberti, Leon. Della Tranquilitiá dell’ animo. 1441 [qdt. 2, p.96]

I opened this post with two statements about the machine, separated for more than 500 hundred years. The painting addresses an aesthetic of the machine to the early XX century European art. The quote addresses the dreams of building machines to marvel others. Both are tied for a sort of machinic thought, however what a machine means for the Renaissance and to the XX century is as different as what machine means for us at the beginning of the XXI century.

The painting resembles an electric diagram, connections are drawn, and flows are set. From a machine aesthetic steams a variety of expressions that escape the representational path. One can venture an interpretation of this painting as the navigation tree for a web-site or an organization chart. Nevertheless, it presents a historical view of the western art in the manner as a machine is organised and deeply influenced by the machine as an abstract and aesthetic concept. This interpretation might be taken as technological determinism as long as the root and cause for this movements is found in the technical progress, but I will argue that it expresses rather a turn to the central role that technology has taken over other aspects of social relations to the point of overshadow them, in a critical way. For instance the programmatic understanding of constructivism and fragmented view of space of cubism.

Machines have a far impact in our live that we used to acknowledge, our version of the machine is quite different, these are not heavy mechanical apparatuses, rather are soft-machinic assemblages [1, p.211], and difficult to identify as machines. The cellphone that ubiquitous gadget is a machine we use to communicate with others regardless our location, that mini machine determines our capability to immediately reach somebody and our own reachability. But it is more than that it also provides with a myriad of other functions, play games, music, take pictures, videos, and read news. A machine that adapts to its owner desires, an open machine.

1. Broeckmann, Andreas. “Image, Process, Performance, Machine: Aspects of an Aesthetics of The Machinic”. MediaArtHistories. Ed. Oliver Grau. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007. 193-205
2. Sawday, Jonathan. Engines of Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the rise of the Machine. London, UK: Routledge. 2007
3. Wolfe, Steve. Untitled (Cubism and Abstract Art). 1997. MoMa . <https://moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=81386>

HI, a post just right before X-mas, Chris Marker La Jetée (1962).

Posted thinking of my good friends Javier and Hugo and our unforgettable times together.

Merry Xmas to all of you for kindly stopping here to read.

Update 26 May 2015:
This website is dedicated to Maker’s work https://www.artsy.net/artist/chris-marker It is worth looking at it.

While researching for concepts about animation for my thesis work I found this a great old animation referred in The technique of film animation by John Halas and Roger Manvell. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

More Info about Tuslava here, and a short review here:

With the screen split asymmetrically, one part in positive, the other negative, the film documents the evolution of simple celled organic forms into chains of cells then more complex images from tribal cultures and contemporary modernist concepts. The images react, interpenetrates, perhaps attack, absorb and separate, until a final symbiosis (or redemption?) is achieved. Written by Stewart Naunton {snaunton@online.ru}

This piece experiments and explores with video-games sources of sound. It does exploit the video game as a main source for creation, through using its inner elements. It does not exploit the video games as a environment for performing and creating sound. Instead of participating in the video-game, I use its readymade sound-objects in order to repurpose them in a sound landscape that depicts the tension in the machinic dialogue between player and game. In this work I stop interacting with the video-game object, to explore other aesthetic dimensions in the performance of its elements, not dependent on the conditions and parameters impose by the participation in the video-game. It seeks for new forms and sources in sound creation and experience in digital media.

As a landscape this piece has two different layers in a cybernetic state.  One layer is the game sound and the second one the player sound. The former use Unreal Tournament 2004 as source and the latter use human body sounds as source. Those are the two sonic dimensions of a cybernetic exchange in a video-game playing session, they have to be played simultaneously in an installation arranged for four loudspeakers as can be seen in conceptual drawing, that opens this post.

It is based on the Sonichima concept.

Sound credits:
Unreal Tournament 2004 sounds extracted using: Dragon UnPACKer v 5.2.0b “cinthia” by Alexander Devilliers. Unreal Tournament 2004 by Epic Games

Unreal Tournament original soundtrack by: Kevin Riepl

Human sounds: Heart sounds recorded by Morton E. Tavel, M.D., professor or medicine, Indiana University, School of medicine and consulting cardiologist with Northside Cardiology Inc Indianapolis, USA. Lungsounds recorded by Dr. G. Wuertemberger, Freiburg, Germany and professor R.L.H. Murphy, jr., Boston, USA.

Mixed bY Ricardo Cedeño Montaña.

The first track is already mixed for two loudspeakers, second and third tracks are the two separate layers for performing in the original arrangement. Here they can be downloaded: Human – Machine

HI,

I want to thank to everybody for all support, comments and critics on my first documentary, all of them were and are welcome. (¡muchas gracias!, vielen Dank!)
If you could not be with me during the première and still want to watch the film, I publish here a link to its on-line version, it is the same but in a medium-resolution for a good streaming. The largest file is about 23MB and the smallest around 8MB. I hope you do enjoy it, and I’ll be looking forward to reading your opinions about it.

Watch Sproutbau documentary

Recently I was invited to show my recent work on the: “Muestra Monográfica de Media Art” in the Festival Internacional de la Imagen, I’m proud to say that Sproutbau documentary was selected for the show an it was screened in the Modern Art Museum of Medellín. As well, it was selected to be screened in a event called “Curaduría en nuevos medios”, an international seminar organised by: Espacio Fundación Telefónica de Buenos Aires Argentina, this event is going to happen in Buenos Aires. Here a complete list of all selected works in Colombia.

I published the following post on sound projects’ blog, some months ago. Even though the time has passed I would like to share with all of you this short playlist. The context of this post had to do with, by that time, the recent death of one of the most influential German composers in the XX century: Karlheinz Stockhausen.

A small playlist I did to complement my previous contribution to this blog, Karlheinz Stockhausen, his contemporaries ( Webern, Boulez, Varèse), and students (Kraftwerk, Can, Hassell). I hope you do enjoy it.