·~{dRNn}~·

Hi, a new year has started and I want to welcome it with a short reflection about hybridity. This concept is perhaps the most common idea to describe digital media. Hybrids are often the result of either two machinic principles: the assemblage and the remix. A hybrid is an individual resulting from the combination of other individuals. One key characteristic of this process is that it keeps some features of the original beings into the offspring. They usually exhibit these features on its surface. However, once a hybrid is closely observed it also shows that the inner processes belonging to its parents have also been hybridized. In media it means the languages and the techniques of production, surface and subface.

The picture above exhibits for instance, a digital photo taken by me of a guadual mixed in GIMP (an image processor) with a pattern I did in Processing. The process is quite simple: four superimposed layers with different kinds of colour blending.

Music is plenty of examples of hybrids, on September 22th, I enjoyed in Bogotá a concert given by Headphone, a group of music students from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia that fuses music with visual arts and dance. During the concert I got particular interested by the work of Andrés Montero, whose piece ‘Colombia Electrónica II’ combines a Gaita (link in Spanish) with an electronic console. In this piece he made use of one single gaita which sound was been live recorded by the console. The electronic console fixed the sound and then released it while it was recording the following sound made by Montero. After three minutes or so the musician was accompanied by a chorus of Gaitas produced by his inputs on the electronic machine and the feedback of this. The traditional music of the Colombian Caribbean was suddenly mixed with the electronic folklore of loops and feedback. This type of assemblages are called Mixed Musics [1], and happen when different traditions to produce art pieces converge in the same machine to be hybridized.

1. Bejarano Calvo, Carlos Mauricio. A vuelo de murciélago el sonido, nueva materialidad. Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad Nacional de Colombia. 2006.

Hi,
fan productions can appeared in different ways, sometimes these productions are completely independent and others are encouraged by the owners of a particular media commodity, nevertheless, often, fan productions kindly expand the fictional world of a media product by appropriation of its narrative.

Fans are all around the world and it is usual to find contests of fan media productions held by the mass media companies with participants from different countries. Lucas Films and Atoms Films support a yearly Star Wars fan video competition with different categories and prizes, it is called Star Wars Challenge. In the 2009 competition, for the first time a Latin American won in a category. The winner in the category of Best Animated Movie was Óscar Triana, a Colombian animator.

Star Wars in a Notebook has a hand-draw, and cut and paste style. And in spite of its neat animation it keeps the DIY visual style of fan video productions. It was reported by UN Periodico at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (in Spanish). And below you can enjoy this 3 minutes animation piece.

Here can also be watched the winners of each category as well as the firsts nominated for the 2010 competition.

Hi,
last month I guided a seminar about Machinima in the master programme in interactive design and creation at the Universidad de Caldas in Manizales, Colombia. It was a pleasure to me to be there exchanging and sharing ideas about DIY, popular culture, and the moving image.

In the seminar a small group of master’s students got engaged in an intensive three days study about machinima. We discussed concepts such as hybrid media, real-time, and DIY. Finally, they produced what can be called, as far as I’m informed, the first machinima pieces in a university in Colombia. Their results vary from sound works to mashups of popular songs. These works can be read and watched here: third cohort and second cohort.

and here:

Hi,
since two months I’m using a linux distribution in my hp pavillion ze5300, it is OpenSUSE 11.1.

I tried several years ago with Lycoris, but it didn’t work out. Now I have a dual system computer with OpenSUSE in one partition as default OS and Microsoft Windows in another partition while I do a complete transition. The installation took 30 minutes and it was easier and simpler as I initially thought.

Right now, I’m using most of the times Linux. My activities include, surf in and communicate via internet (firefox, skype); process documents, spreadsheets, and presentations (openoffice); work with pictures, photos, and images (gimp); download photos from my digital camera; write sketches in processing; listen to music and watch movies (vlc); and finally to keep update my blog (wordpress), and my gallery of pictures. It might be most of my time in front of my computer.

I work as designer and I’ve to acknowledge that some applications are behind the mainstream and standards imposed by firms as for instance Adobe, nevertheless with a little bit of time, patience and creativity to teak; I’ve discover that I can produce pieces of a good quality in software like: InkScape or Scribus.

So far I’ve had some annoyances with my wireless card and some video projectors, but my machine is quite old and I guess the newer the distro the easier to find adequate drivers and firmware for Linux distributions.

The curve of learning for somebody with no experience in configuring an OS is low (two weeks to one month) as many things work automatically, for instance on-line updates through YaST or software installation. If this is not enough, I’ve found in forums a large community of people always ready to help :). The system is very very stable and reliable. Before I had very few problems, including some annoying viruses, with Windows XP.

I went into Linux because of my conviction about the freedom we have to have in choosing, changing and distributing digital objects under the GNU/GPL and Creative Commons licences, we cannot continue being segmented and restricted by software companies without having access to the source codes of what actually builds our digital environment and without the freedom to share these digital objects. OpenSUSE is distributed under the GNU licence.

Hi,
since the last century there is an intensification of use of media propaganda during war times. Massive production led to massive spreading led to massive consumption led to homogenization within a set of parameters.

Education for Death (1946) shows how USA media industry used the visual language of animation during WWII. They associated fairy tales, popular culture, their own style of cartooning, and a clear political message. Dark times were those of WWII, from a historical (and moral) point of view, those methods against the enemy were justifiable. Today, Are they still justifiable? What media languages are employed today to attack? Are the media weapons?

After watching this piece, I recommend to take a look at two previous posts, Duck and Cover and Social-Sex Attitude in Adolescence.

Hola,
hoy el castillo Sforzesco en Milán (Milano) y como siempre cada foto se puede ampliar.

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?