A whole new collection of blanket designs is now available!

Binary Blankets is a series of blankets aimed at making visible the hidden data structures that give shape to everyday life. The materiality of our digital age is composed of binary data encoded on electronic devices and transmitted through the airwaves on invisible frequencies of light. As an alternative to the screen, Binary Blankets literally gives you a way to experience the fabric of this otherwise invisible and intangible side of our digital world.

This initial collection of 18 designs features raw binary data sourced from a handful of files and programs such as Microsoft Word, iTunes, Google Chrome, and Mac OSX.

Nicolas Maigret // Daniel Neumann // Melissa F. Clarke & Nat Roe // Phillip Stearns

Hosted by Spectrum

121 Ludlow, Second Floor
New York, New York 10002

8pm Doors
9pm Start

$10-$15 Donation

Facebook Event Page

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Nicolas Maigret
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Title: SYSTEM INTROSPECTION [2002-2013]

System Introspection can be envisaged as an observation of the machine by itself, proposing a physical experience of the numeric data and its different languages and contents. The live version is based on a concrete exploration of the binary code on a local HardDrive and its intrinsic qualities (structure, logic, rhythm, redundancy, compression) immediately returned by the computer in the form of visual and sound flows.

Bio:
Nicolas Maigret has been developing digital and sound art realizations since 2001. In his works, internal characteristics of media are revealed through their errors, dysfunctions, borderlines or failure threshold, which he develops sensory and immersive audio visual experiences. After studying Intermedia arts, he joined the Locus-Sonus Laboratory in Nice dedicated to networked art research. He taught at the Fine Arts School of Bordeaux and is presently involved in an artist run space named Plateforme in Paris. Simultaneously, he co-founded the Art of Failure collective in 2006.
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His works have been presented in various exhibitions and venues such as File (Sao Paulo, BR) – Encountering Data (New York, USA) – Upgrade! (Chicago, USA) – Gli.tc/h (Birmingham, UK) – Gaite Lyrique (Paris, FR) – Leeds Film Festival (UK) – Le Zoo (Genève, CH) – LEAP (Berlin, DE) – DeOrigenBélico, (Caracas, VE) – Sonica (Ljubljana, SI) – Artivistic (Montreal, CA) – ESG (Kosice, SK) – Cimatics (Brussels, BE)
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http://peripheriques.free.fr/

http://corpus.artoffailure.org/

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Daniel Neumann
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Title: A Corner As A Field

http://danielneumann.wordpress.com/

Multi-channel live improvisation using electronic sounds that are ran through diverse re-recording processes to create concrete spatial acoustic fields.

Bio:
Daniel Neumann is a Brooklyn-based sound artist, organizer and audio engineer, originally from Leipzig, Germany.
In his artistic practice he is using conceptual and mostly collaborative strategies to explore sound and sound material and its modulation through space and media. Pieces are developed in different formats and variations as ongoing processes, which can result in concerts, installations, radio shows and others. The leitmotif for these processes is the development of a poetry of the fragile, and a skepticism towards demonstrations of power. Impermanence is understood as temporal fragility. For the collaborative practice he coined the terms ‘modular collaboration’ and ‘sonic exchange’, which describe non-hierarchical and decentralized forms of organization, where collaborators interact as equals. Context and site are important parameters and often used as a starting point.

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Melissa F. Clarke & Nat Roe: Private Language
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Melissa F. Clarke is an interdisciplinary artist whose work employs data and generative self-programmed compositional environments.

http://www.melissafclarke.com

Nat Roe has used his weekly late-night radio program with WFMU since 2008 as a platform for sound-collages that explore a nuanced relationship with popular culture.

http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/NR

Private Language appropriates, collages and processes radio signals using digital and analog means, as well as exploiting sonic qualities inherent to the playback device. Private Language’s arsenal contains inflections of Brion Gysin’s cutups, John Cage’s chance composition, DJ Screw’s codeine tinted outlook, and the chaotic anxiety of no-wave. Visually, kaleidoscopic geometrical solids frame diaristic encounters with culture as surreal, uncanny and sometimes alienating. Video footage is sourced from Youtube using a Max patch which employs similarity algorithms to cycle through visuals in a manner that mirrors the chance-based subject matter of flipping through a radio dial; the software also includes custom algorithms that trigger visuals in response to sound.

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Phillip Stearns
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Title: Protochiptunes

http://phillipstearns.com/

Proto-Chiptunes: the hypothetical ancestor of modern-day 8-bit video game music, known as “Chiptunes”. Before there were arduinos, video game systems, or even microchips capable of producing sound, there was only binary logic. But in order to find the roots of this ancient music, we must go back further, back before the time of logic, far back into the pre-history of electronics. From the primordial ooze of analog circuits arose the first digital logic circuits. Made only from transistors, resistors and diodes, they clawed their way out of the random void to assert their unambiguous binary dominion over the whole world of electronics. When the digital circuits had established themselves as supreme rulers of the electronic world, and mastered the use of fire, they developed a style of music called “0 01 0110 10010011 0101 01 1″ known today as “Proto-Chiptunes”. Now the CMOS 4000 Series Digital Logic Family re-imagine this primitive electronic music under the careful and patient direction of Phillip Stearns.

Bio: The Brooklyn based artist is responsible for the Year of the Glitch and Glitch Textiles projects. His work as an artist involves a lot of tinkering with electronics: taking things apart, short circuiting devices and building things from scratch. A passion for noise is informed by a love of physics. He’s a freelance photographer and audio technician on the side and teaches electronics at 3rd Ward.

I’m teaching my techniques and tricks for Visual Glitch Art in the coming weeks. See you in class!

March 28 – April 4 – ONLINE – @Skillshare – discount code: WPERFECT
March 29 & April 6 – IRL – @3rd Ward – Brooklyn, NY
April 13 – IRL – @Machine Project – Los Angeles, CA

At about 6:30 I arrived at the panel at which point the moderator, Laetitia Wolff was finishing her introductory remarks.  I caught enough to hear her point out the existence of as many video cameras on the earth as there are neurons in the human brain, connecting with the idea that this constitutes a form of an artificial intelligence equivalent with a human brain, or the possibility of one.  Though intriguing, admittedly it’s a bit disturbing to dream of the possibilities of an intelligence formed from the interconnection of electronic eyes.  With the announcement that the handsomely designed Google Glass will be made available this year (2013), one can’t help but wonder what it all could mean in the context of a the emergence of a potentially new medium.

Augmented Reality (AR) serves to visually enhance objects, spaces or people with virtual content.  It has the potential to dramatically change the relationship between the physical and digital worlds. (Henchoz)

The above excerpt from the “Is Augmented Reality the Next Medium” curatorial statement written by Nicolas Henchoz and provides a bit of context.  A good part of the discussion was occupied by mentions of graphic overlays (projections and heads up displays), physical objects with embedded information, and our mobile devices providing windows into new content.  Enough material to start any dreamer’s head spinning.

But it wasn’t that my imagination ran wild with possibilities that made it hard for me to follow the particulars of the conversation.  I was left wanting deeper insights, thirsty for critical dialog.  I found myself asking questions which were never fully addressed in the discussion.  A moment of relief came when Christiane Paul cautioned us to question this desire for further mediation that AR entails, but there was no real follow-up to this call to investigate what is staged, and to unmask theatricality.

It would seem that perhaps the most obvious question to address would be our ideas of reality and its relationship with the virtual.  A mention of Umberto Eco’s essay, “Travels in Hyperreality”, provided some insight.  Though not directly quoted by any of the panelists, here’s the paragraph referenced:

Constructing a full-scale model of the Oval Office (using the same materials, the same colors, but with everything obviously more polished, shinier, protected against deterioration) means that for historical information to be absorbed, it has to assume the aspect of a reincarnation. To speak of things that one wants to connote as real, these things must seem real. The “completely real” becomes identified with the “completely fake.” Absolute unreality is offered as real presence. The aim of the reconstructed Oval Office is to supply a “sign” that will then be forgotten as such: The sign aims to be the thing, to abolish the distinction of the reference, the mechanism of replacement. Not the image of the thing, but its plaster cast. Its double, in other words. (Eco)

It was pointed out that this instance of the Oval Office model served to illustrate a possible mode by which a simulation or replica functions.  The reproduction in the pursuit of realism becomes hyperreal, standing in for the thing itself.  Well beyond evoking a connection to the real, this form of realistic simulation becomes its own reality, and as such operates in its own unique way as a modifier of the potential experience of the real thing.  Despite this, however, further insight into what addition theoretical framework we have for approaching the notion of the Real, reality, and the virtual failed to surface.

In building Augmented Reality, there is a dynamic between the physical object or environment, its simulation through electronic media, the mediated experience of an overlay of virtual content, and the ways in which the experience of one spills over into the other.  Perhaps I yearned for some connection to the Lacanian theory of the Mirror Stage, but without a clear idea of how we formulate or notion of what we take to be the Real and the operation of the virtual within it, we stand little chance of understanding how this new reality will be used to control or influence perception.  Granted, not every new technology is evil, but they aren’t without their unintended consequences.  There’s going to be influence of some kind or another and we have to be aware of how to look for it.

It’s incredible to imagine just how many computation devices are in the world, currently connected by various wireless networks, and how many of those have cameras of some sort.  Though taken as a whole, can they possibly exhibit a human equivalent of intelligence?  Are we able to formulate criteria by which we can asses the level of intelligence such a system might have?  How does this equate to the level of intelligence of a single human, a small group, or the entire population?

When taken as a whole, the human species may be hardly more intelligent than slime mold.  As we currently understand it, intelligence comes from the connectivity between elements and the plasticity of those connections.  It’s not so much the structure itself, but the formation and revision of particular configurations.  Sadly, the point missed by the panel is that our digitally mediated environment must be programmed, and until it can program itself, we must do it.  The only information we can put into it will be limited by what we ourselves can input followed by the sophistication of the algorithms we write to automate that process.  Here is where there are clear sources of structural bias and issues of access.  Beyond that there are also the issues of interface and content filtering.

Jonathan Lee of Google UXA rightly lists inputs and outputs as chief technical challenges faced by designers of user interface (UI) frameworks for Augmented Reality.  There are no shortage of sensors today, and haptic interfaces allow for a wide variety of user control over content.  It seems that the problem is that there are almost too many inputs.  The question then becomes a matter of managing the inputs, of extracting information from the input streams and storing them in a way that enhances virtual content and a user’s experience of navigating that content.  Content and context aware algorithms solve this problem, but bring up other issues.  Our experience of the internet is already highly mediated by content filtering algorithms.  It can almost be argued that serendipity has been all but filtered out (they should make an app for that!) as individuals are catered to based on previously gathered information as interpreted by predictive algorithms (call for submissions: creative predictive algorithms).  On the broader issue of adaptive algorithms and similar forms of artificial intelligence, one has to ask what are the models for such algorithms?  They must be programmed at some point, based upon some body of data.  How do we select or craft the template?  Is a possible consequence of further refining the intelligence of our algorithms a normative model for intelligence?

Perhaps it might seem as though I’ve come unhinged, but these questions become important when we begin to approach the task of embedding objects with information.  What information or virtual content do we embed in these objects?  Who has the ability to do the embedding?  What are the possible system architectures that would allow for the system to become a place where the experience of an environment is actually enhanced.  What is the framework for approaching this issue of enhancement?

While you consider these, here’s some more of the curatorial statement:

The prospects of augmented reality are linked to a fundamental question: What makes the value of an object, its identity, our relationship with it?  The answer lies in the physical properties of the object, but also in its immaterial qualities, such as the story it evokes, the references with which it is connected, the questions it brings up.  For a long time, physical reality and immaterial values expressed themselves separately.  But with digital technology an object can express its story, reveal information, interact with its context and users in real time. (Henchoz)

It’s important not to mistake the map for the terrain.  Physical objects are already vessels of their own history as they are products of a particular sequence of events.  Those events, though external and broad in scope, can be decoded, traced and ultimately placed within a larger context of processes (not only physical ones but those with linkage to various cultural practices).  With digital technology, an object will not express its story, but always that of someone else.  To which we much ask, why that particular story?  How did it find its embodiment as embedded data in that particular object?  Is it a special case?  Why does this story come to us and not others?  If we open the system up for anyone to leave their story with any object, what do we do with hundreds of unique stories each told through a single object?  What of a world filled with such objects?  How do we navigate this terrain of embedded content?  The information revealed by an object through media will, on the surface, only be what is placed their by the one privileged with the ability to do so.  The nature of interactions will be limited to those programmed by those privileged enough to do so and the awareness equally limited.

The pieces in the exhibition did little to elaborate these deeper questions, or complicate the view of reality that values the particular form of Augmented Reality as put forward by Nicolas Henchoz.  The lack of imagination here comes off as almost tongue in cheek.  A microphone is placed before a drum kit rigged with mallets and drum sticks attached to actuators.  By making utterances of vocalizations into the microphone, the guests can use their voice to control the kit.  Mediation is dealt with as a translation or mapping of one kind of sound through a chain of electronic and mechanical processes to the production of another.  Elsewhere in the exhibition space there is a flat shallow museum display case without protective glass, in which various postcards, photos, notes, and objects have been placed.  iPads are locked and tethered to the case, provided for guests to view the objects in the display with the camera in order to reveal additional virtual content in the form of animations or video, suggesting a sort of lived experience beyond the inert relics.  In all there were seven pieces in the exhibition, of which two were not working after the panel discussion.  Despite technological foundations of the works presented, the whole exhibition space is filled with wide sheets of paper, gently curved around large cardboard tubes, evoking the sensation one might have of inhabiting a paper factory or new paper printing facility.

There are two major paradigms within average digital, electronic and media art: “the funny mirror” and “demo mode”.  The exhibition explored variations of these two paradigms to great effect, but with little affect.  But it’s still unclear whether this was all to be taken seriously, or if the whole panel discussion and exhibition is actually intensely subtle critique of current developments of AR.   The partners and funders list for the whole affair doesn’t do much to shed light on that matter, except to indicate that there are a group of respectable people taking this all very seriously, whether as an emerging new technology with radical potential as a profoundly transformative media or as a nuanced critique thereof.

For the next 3 Days, Glitch Textiles are available on Fab.com with sales prices discounted over 20%!

“Electronic media artist Phillip Stearns translates technical malfunctions onto blankets. Available through his Brooklyn-based venture, Glitch Textiles, the cotton creations exhibit psychedelic patterns made by corrupting the hardware of a digital camera, resulting in imagery that’s beautiful in its flaws.” -Fab.com

Spread the word!

Upcoming:
Performance at LEAP Jan 30th
Performance at Transmediale – Jan 31st
Presentation/Performance at Société de Curiosité – Feb 5th
Presentation/Workshop at DATA ~55.0 Feb 8th

Just in:
Studio Visit and Interview on Creators Project
Studio Visit Interview on Periscope
Feature on Rhizome
Year of the Glitch is now accepting submissions
Seeking supporters for a chance to glitch Times Square

New Work:
Retinal Pigment Epithelium…

I’ve created a portfolio of some work from Year of the Glitch on See.Me for a chance to glitch a billboard in Times Square.

Visit my portfolio and click on the support button. You can also like your favorite images. Don’t forget to share with your friends!

Thanks!

Year of the Glitch – Dither Animation Study No. 3

It’s 2013 and 2012 is history. Don’t know about the rest of you, but this last year was a rush. I’m not going to bore you with the details, but I will give a quick recap of the major projects and performances of the year.

But before we go down that rabbit hole, I thought I’d mention some things coming up In the immediate future: I’ll be performing at the newly reminted Silent Barn (Jan 11 in Brooklyn, NY) and also at Transmediale (Berlin). At Transmediale, I’ll also be working with Benjamin Gaulon on his DeFunct/ReFunct project with Karl Klomp, Gijs Gieskes, Tom Verbruggen, and Pete Edwards. Afterwards, I’ll be doing a residency at Alfred University working on the visuals for a collaboration with Aimee Norwich.

Landscape (Abstract in Neon) installed at the NYC Industries for the Blind

Projects of 2012:

Year of the Glitch – A yearlong glitch-a-day project featuring the products of my formal and technical exploration of glitch art. 450+ posts and 42,000+ Followers

Glitch Textiles – Glitches in the cold, hard logic of digital circuits transformed into warm blankets, textiles, rugs, and more.

Moleskine Phase – Commissioned work for Moleskine Portraits event at Exit Art NY

Deluge – a sound and light installation that depicts the white noise of unoccupied radio frequencies as a showering rain of light. Exhibited at Transmittal (Free103Point9), Greene Country Council on the Arts, Catskill, NY.

Impact Study No. 1 – A neon light installation that visualizes environmental radioactivity. Exhibited at Lumen, COAHSI, Staten Island, NY

Listening to the Ocean on a Shore of Gypsum Sand – Algorithmically generated, 3D printed shells. Collaboration with Gene Kogan and Dan Tesene. Exhibited at Soundwalk 2012, Long Beach, CA.

Landscape (Abstract in Neon) – Exhibited at “The Sixth Sense and Other Myths” (Art Connects NY + Big Deal Arts), NYC Industries for the Blind, Borough Park, Brooklyn, NY.

Aura(l) Study No. 1 – A site-specific installation for InLight Richmond

Protochiptunes: Hyperarpeggiator – A project that uses simple digital logic microchips in surprisingly musical ways. Performances at 3rd Ward and Shea Stadium, Brooklyn, NY.

Performing Fluorescene – image courtesy: Eastern Bloc MTL

Major Perfomances:

Interferences – IEA Residency (Alfred University – Alfred, NY), Investigate: No-Input Mixer Summit (Harvestworks and Issue Project Room – NY, NY)

Fluorescene – IEA Residency (Alfred University – Alfred, NY), Sight and Sound (Eastern Bloc – Montreal, QC, CA), Hack Queensday (STEIM – Amsterdam, Netherlands), On Site (Taiwan Artist Village – Taipei, Taiwan), Ende Tymes (Outpost – Ridgewood, NY).

Apeiron | Peras – Sight and Sound (Eastern Bloc – Montreal, QC, CA)

Releases:

Macular Degeneration (Nadalex) – 5.1 Surround Sound composition created at Harvestworks in 2010.

3rd Ward, an awesome multi-disciplinary workspace and education center where I teach circuit classes, is hosting their annual Holiday Craft Fair.

December 15
12:00 – 6:00pm
195 Morgan Ave Brooklyn, NY 11237

I’ll have a selection of over 20 Glitch Blankets and will be offering prints as well as 5% discounts for members of 3rd Ward and followers of Year of the Glitch (if you’re both, take an additional 5% off the first 5% discount!). You must have proof of your 3rd Ward membership, or the Year of the Glitch code to receive either discount.

Not a follower of Year of the Glitch? Go here!

9 New Designs for the Jacquard Woven Glitch Blankets now available!

These and all other Glitch Textiles are on sale for $200 each +shipping.

Order by the end of the day on Friday, November 30th to receive yours before December 25th.