Transmittal
"Relay" by Max Goldfarb
“free103point9 hosts, “Transmittal,” a transmission arts exhibition of local New York artists and international radio artists, in Catskill, New York this spring. “Transmittal” is curated by Galen Joseph-Hunter, free103point9’s Executive Director and author of “Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves” (PAJ Publications: 2011.) Works include video, sound, radio, installation, performance, and work-on-paper. An opening for “Transmittal” will be held Saturday, April 28 from 5-7 p.m., and the exhibition is open from Apr. 27 through June 1 at the Greene County Council on the Arts Gallery at 398 Main St. in Catskill.” – free103point9.org
"Deluge" by Phillip Stearns
I’ll be showing Deluge, a light and sound sculpture consists of 35 hand made modules, each containing a transistor receiver that generates white noise, an amplifier w/ speaker, and 12 LEDs. Static from a broad spectrum of unused radio frequencies is gently amplified through a small speaker, and visualized by a string of LEDs. Together the cloud of individual modules create the impression of rain.
Glitch Textiles Update: Available At Eyebeam + New Arrivals
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Glitch Textiles are now available at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center’s Bookstore. They’re selling at a 25% discount from my online store prices.
Plus, three new blankets just arrived! The images DCP 02802 and DCP 02803 are from Year of the Glitch post #66 from March 7th. The third was created from an image made with a prepared Olympus C-840L digital camera, a gift from artist notendo (Jeff Donaldson).
Deluge in Progress
Currently wrapping up construction of Deluge. This project will be exhibited as part of the Transmittal group show curated by Galen Joseph-Hunter for Free103Point9 at Greene County Council on the Arts Gallery in Catskill, NY. Opening is April 28th, 2012 at 5-7pm.
Artists Wanted – Entry
Phillip Stearns. Click “Collect Me” to help me win $10,000 and a show in the most immense exhibition of art in New York City : Art Takes Times Square.
Solar Buddha Machine – Voltaic Systems
For those of you who don’t already know about the FM3 Buddha Machine, here’s the scoop:
The Buddha Machine is a small plastic box that plays meditative music composed by Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian. (source: fm3buddhamachine.com/)
The device is inspired by electronic prayer boxes, popular in China, that play back looped recordings of Buddhist prayers. Instead of prayers, the Buddha Machine plays back various ambient music loops. The duo behind FM3 have even enlisted artists to contribute material for special editions, as in the Gristleism, developed by the industrial group, Throbbing Gristle, securing the device’s status as an alternative distribution format.
I documented and posted my modification to enable the Buddha Machine I to not only run from solar, but to charge NiMH AA batteries. It’s super simple! Check out my Solar Buddha Machine post on Voltaic System’s blog.
Cameras of Year of the Glitch
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Images and information about three cameras used in recent Year of the Glitch posts and the DCP Series are now public. The Kodak DC280, DC215, and DC200/210, have played a key role in my exploration of hardware and software based image generation/corruption. In the near future, these pages will be updated with more detailed information about specific techniques and circuits involved in creating the variety of images found in both the YOTG project and DCP Series.
Cameras Featured
 Kodak DC 280 |
 Kodak DC 200/210 |
 Kodak DC 215 |
New Glitch Textiles
 DCP02673 |
 DCP_0190 |
Two new additions to the Glitch Textiles series just arrived, are pictured above. To celebrate Leap Day, I’ve created a store where they can be purchased directly from me.
Going forward, I’ll be looking into patterning some textiles from my own Dither Study series of works inspired by Daniel Temkin’s Dither Studies and featured on Year of the Glitch. If you’re not already following Year of the Glitch, do so today! The project is only 4 followers shy of 1000 and it would be really awesome to make the 1000 follower milestone on Leap Day.
Glitch Textiles
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- YOTG #32 as a blanket
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- YOTG #32 as a blanket
Experimenting with making woven blankets out of images from Year of the Glitch. Here are some photos of tests. #32 is featured in there!
There are 4 blankets in this collection. The first four images are two blankets made with a mechanized knitting process. The last two images are two different blankets made using a Jacquard loom.
SOPA and PIPA Protests: Photos
Protesters outside the offices of Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand
[ Images from the Protest against PIPA and SOPA in NYC]
On Thursday January 18th, a crowd of roughly 2400 people amassed before the offices of NY Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand in protest of the PROTECT IP Act (AKA PIPA, the Senate version of SOPA). The protests were organized by The New York Tech Meetup, a community that gathers monthly, where 9 or 10 companies get 3 to 5 minutes each to demo something cool to New York’s tech community (geeks, investors, entrepreneurs, hackers, etc).
The two controversial bills, SOPA and PIPA, seek to eliminate internet piracy, but technologists are opposed to them on the grounds that certain provisions within will enable corporate interests to require search engines and other sites to effectively censor content. Additional concerns regarding the cost of monitoring content, to comply with regulations proposed in the bills, are a major factor contributing to the broad opposition coming from technology startups and tech workers.
Year of the Glitch: A 366 Day Project for 2012
“56. What makes good glitch art good is that, amidst a seemingly endless flood of images, it maintains a sense of the wilderness within the computer ” — Hugh S. Manon and Daniel Temkin, “Notes on Glitch”
Year of the Glitch is a 366 day project aimed at exploring various manifestations of glitches (intentional and unintentional) produced by electronic systems.
Each day will bring a new image, video or sound file from a range of sources: prepared digital cameras, video capture devices, electronic displays, scanners, manipulated or corrupted files, skipping CDs, disrupted digital transmissions, etc.
These images are not of broken things, but the unlocking of other worlds latent in the technologies with which we surround ourselves.
DCP Series as Textile Art – Glitch Textiles
DCP 0216
On Vision Machines:
We are surrounded by digital images. The digital camera is the reigning tool of inscription of our time. We frame, capture, edit, enhance, upload/download, re-imagine and re-shape our world by the digital image. The window, the frame, the stage, the screen, and the monitor are, today, superfluous objects marking a historical trajectory: of vision and its transparent boundaries—our minds have been conditioned to see the world as a flat glowing plane filled with images, the world seen through a lens, beamed directly to the retinas.
The Glitch is a signifier, a flag, indicating the interruption of this flow of data underscoring daily routines.
The End of Photography?
There is still a question as to the legitimacy of the digital image in the realm of photography, at least in my mind. The knowledge, skill, and craft that goes into the photochemical images produced by pre-digital photography is perhaps mirrored in the digital domain through the utilization of algorithms and processing tricks; however, it’s clear the cultures of both practices are vastly different. There is no need to lament, simply to observe that the hand has been supplanted by the algorithm, by mathematics. The great benefit is now that the image is free of a definite physical manifestation (the negative), it can be mapped onto any surface and manifest myriad physical forms.
The print no longer holds the power it once did. It is seen merely as a fixed (and rather boring) screen. The best an artist can hope for is to create ambiguity which holds attention for more than a single glance. If we are lucky, a second glance, but a considered gaze is a rarity.
Everything is being digitized and presented on a glowing screen, smudged by greasy fingers. That doesn’t prevent us from using film, from continuing to learn from the practice of pre-digital photographic techniques. Although now the effects can be reproduced using a clever combination of digital filters, perhaps the difference is that we still have not found the right equations to capture the individual nuances of expression, the hand.
Though I do not have a preference for analog works over digital works (each is equally problematic), I can see the appeal of the former from the traditionalist’s perspective: the hand of the artist is evidenced, remains as the invisible referent. Beyond the image acting as an arrow pointing inwards through the lens to the person standing behind the camera, there is still something of Walter Benjamin’s idea of the “essence” of the creator embedded within the object as a consequence of its making.
The Digital Dark Age
We are still in the digital dark age, groping around for something new, beyond the scope of re-combination. Digital technologies offer a new way of formalizing information, one that is directly amenable to mathematics, and yet common knowledge of mathematics has not progressed much (one may say that it has been in retrograde). The dependence upon mathematics for innovation in the digital era requires us to out think mathematics in a system where mathematics is the absolute rule. Over-formalization of the problem is in essence part of the problem. Mathematics is but a veil which glosses over complexities until they can be resolved, and as they are, the veil becomes increasingly transparent and revealing, yet it will always fail in striving to become the object it enshrouds.
Everything up until now has been the reproduction of old forms within the digital domain. We are no longer surrounded by an array of specialized electronic objects; the computer is everywhere and not even a phone is a simply a phone anymore but also a camera, a calculator, a planner, an entertainment center. It has only been a matter of formalizing and encoding behavior. Software may be that new site of innovation, and there is strong evidence that we do have some very compelling and truly new software, but the barriers of its underlying system are still to be overcome.
Re-thinking Noise
Glitch Art has popularized the surface features of algorithmic interpretations of what a system designer would typically call noise, interference. There remains the issue of output. If a file format is corrupted, how is it to be presented? A disc image can easily be played back as audio, the zeros and ones translated directly into the force pushing a speaker cone, setting the air in motion. Does the image necessitate output on a screen, or a print? To weave a tapestry of a fragmented image allows us to do literally what we are doing symbolically: wrapping ourselves in images, accepting the faults of technology as an integrated part of day-to-day life. Whatever the forms may symbolize, the respect of file formats is preserved and an image becomes another image mapped to an object, a mosaic. What would it look like opened into a 3D modeling environment? Could these forms be constructed?
Are we approaching the moment of a new line of thinking in architecture? Could Glitch escape the realm of surfaces and obtain real depth? As an architectural manifesto, Glitch could provide a new way of approaching behavioral design through scripted space by throwing away the script altogether.
Interpolation Studies
A pixel level study of RAW format interpolation algorithms on noise introduced by manually short circuiting a digital camera. Specific models used in this group of images include the Canon G5 and Canon EOS Digital Rebel.
Prepared Olympus C-840L
A collection of images generated using a prepared Olympus C-840L 1.3 MP digital camera. The camera was a gift from Jeff Donaldson, purchase in Japan for 300 Yen ($3 USD).
Swedish Energies @ ISSUE Project Room
Photos of Swedish Energies at ISSUE Project Room by Phillip Stearns
This two-night Swedish Invasion is an ultimate melange of Sweden’s top experimental music performers. Night one featured surreal delay washed neo-psychedelia by The Magic State; technical and intellectual audio-visual pursuits by Kathy Hinde & Daniel Skoglund; a powerful spoken word piece by Leif Elggren; raw, harsh noise from Alter of Flies and Sewer Election reminiscent of the Japanese noise scene; and a delicate performance from Hanna Hartman that evoked the crunching of powdered snow underfoot in the dead of the cold and dark Swedish winter.
Night two was a worthy follow up to the first night of performances. Mats Lindström and Anna Koch opened with a hypnotic performance, using fluorescent tubes to produce the sonic material for a stark music and dance piece. CM von Hausswolff countered Lindström’s frenetic flickering of light sound with a slow crescendo of drones and voice. The following set by Ikue Mori and Ida Lundén pitted laptop performance against homebrew and wearable handmade electronics. Mats Gustafsson opened his scintillating set with gasping and disjointed extended melodic lines on the sax and closed with an earth moving onslaught of distorted drones. The night ended on a trance induced high following the theatrics of Daniel Higgs leading The Skull Defekts with special guest C. Spenser Yeh.
“The two-night program, presented by Issue Project Room, iDEAL, EMS, WELD and the Consulate General of Sweden NYC, will feature a huge lineup of some of Sweden’s most exciting experimental musicians. Performances will include collaborations between U.S. and Swedish artists as well as a cross-section of Swedish groups, such as the prolific The Skull Defekts (joined by C. Spencer Yeh), and saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, one of the most important free jazz and improv musicians working today. Leif Elggren will open the event with a reading of his “The North is Protected.”” — ISSUE Project Room
Compression Study 01
With the opening of the Algorithmic Unconscious group show at Devotion Gallery earlier this month, my interest in iterative video processing has been renewed as a method of exploring compression algorithms. You might be familiar with the technique, it was the same used for the epic Alvin Lucier inspired Video Room where YouTube user canzona uploads, downloads and re-uploads a video to youtube 1000 times. Where his work explores the impact of the compression schemes native to YouTube, the new video work above explores the motion JPEG-2000 compression algorithm.
The source video is a custom made 16 second loop cycling through the 8 fully saturated primary and secondary additive colors—black, red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta, white. In quicktime, the JPEG-2000 compression algorithm is chosen to export a .mov file of the lowest quality (smallest size). At this setting, the compression algorithm is repeatedly making decisions concerning what information is relevant or important while discarding the rest—up to 99% of the original data. The result is a considerably low quality reproduction of the original with visible data-compression artifacts. By applying a handful of filters to the compressed file and then re-compressing, data-compression artifacts are amplified. By repeating this iterative or recursive process hundreds of times, an effect similar to feedback is achieved where the visual output becomes degraded from the original and the artifacts take on a generative nature.
For this study, 193 iterations were time compressed to fit within a roughly 10 minute span. The video was then paired with audio from “Metamorphopsia”, a track from the Macular Degeneration project.
Leading up to this completed study, several attempts were made to work with h.264 on fades between black and white frames. Similar work was down with audio compression algorithms and white noise. Further works in this series will investigate the effects of different compression algorithms on simple patterns of varying motion, shapes, and transition effects.
As a note, this work is less about abstraction and more about taking the concepts of Concrete Art to a place where expression re-emerges through the algorithm, which I am taking to be an abstraction of human perceptual features mediated by a deterministic system of discrete logic.
Apeiron Peras in Recent Some Magazine Issue “Electric”
Apeiron | Peras is featured on page 11 of the latest issue of Some Magazine.
Incomplete Darkness
Inspired by the recent appearance of lenscapped work by Jeff Donaldson, Incomplete Darkness is a new series of digital photographs utilizing the sensor noise as image source.
Vote for DCP Series
Please show your support by voting for my portfolio in 3rd Ward’s Solo Show Competition by clicking HERE. You can vote once a day. The works are selected images from the DCP Series and are created using various circuit bent Kodak DC series cameras.
Proto-chiptune 100% Solar Powered @ Maker Faire
Maker Faire 2011 in NYC is chock full of some amazing projects. The sheer quantity and variety of makers showcasing work is staggering. To see everything is definitely more than a two day affair. This year I was invited to present a self-built solar powered music making system for 3rd Ward, where I currently teach the art of making DIY Synthesizers and small scale solar charging systems.
This solar music making station (Protochiptune Project) is powered by a Voltaic Systems 15 Watt panel connected to a 7.5Ah 12V Seal Lead Acid Battery. A 10A solar charge controller does all the power management to drive the music synthesizer’s three 5 Watt amplifiers. The microchips used are from the 4000 series CMOS digital logic family, including such chips as: hex inverting buffer (40106), 12-bit binary counter (4040), 8-to-1 selector switch (4051), quad 2-input AND gate (4081), and divide by n counter (4018). These chips are used together to produce a range of pitches and rhythms that can be sequenced or programmed by moving jumper cables on the breadboard, making a mini patchable modular synth.
At Maker Faire, kids were really attracted to the crazy jams coming out of this thing. Those who were bold enough were allowed to move some of the jumpers around on the board and make up their own musical patterns.
Motion Blur Photographs
A new collection of long exposure digital photographs taken from moving vehicles. This set, Bulb, was shot from a train heading into NYC. Developing different sets of images from the DCP Series, has inspired me to re-create some of the effects of digital artifacts using different techniques, favoring the manipulation of light and exposure time rather than directly manipulating the circuitry of the digital imaging devices. The next step in for this series will be to switch over to film or direct exposure of photographic paper.
No Input Mixer + Digitally Controlled Light + Scanner
Grayson Bagwell recently inspired me to begin working with prepared scanners. After taking apart an HP F335 all in one printer scanner combo, I got the bright idea to replicate some of my favorite op-art-esque images produced with the Kodak digital cameras in the DCP Series. The image above was created by scanning a CFL bulb that was being controlled by audio signals generated by mixer feedback.
Hacking the Logitech C270
Picked up a Logitech C270HD 740p webcam on ebay for about $23. While waiting for hurricane Irene to arrive, I’ve been prodding about the innards, mostly the CCD element, looking for anything interesting…
Red Hook Art Lot: Update August 16th, 2011
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Garden thieves have stolen a total of 3 cantaloupes: 1 was outside the fence, the other two were inside the fence. There are 2 more fruits growing, but I doubt they’ll remain long enough to ripen fully. The upside to all this is that a hungry belly in need of a sweet delicious cantaloupe got what it deserved. Other good news: there were a handful of tomatoes and 3 more cucumbers ripe for the picking. Morning glories are also flowering along the fence, providing a little bit of color, though the vines still do look a bit sad and undernourished. Pinto bean vines are starting to produce as well and may provide enough dry beans for a bowl of chili. I’ll let the images do the rest of the talking.
DIY Synthesizer Class @ 3rd Ward
Self-Built CMOS Music Pattern Generator/Synthesizer
Get ready! If you’re interested in learning how to make your own electronic musical instruments (and live in New York), I’m going to be offering my DIY Synthesizer class at 3rd Ward. This will be a 4-class session taught on Tuesdays September 13, 20, 27, October 4 in the evenings from 7p to 10p.
We’ll start with the basics of electronics and move quickly into building very simple sound circuits. In addition to learning basic electronics concepts, how to identify components, what those components do, and how to read and write schematics you’ll take home your own self-built synthesizer based on circuits and applications taught during the course. For more details and course signup, click here.
This course has been offered at Harvestworks twice before. Here is some video of really incredible student work done during the course:
