Contemporary Dance Animation Studies: A blog which shall record my observations and discoveries in emergence, spontaneous-order, collective intelligence, complex adaptive systems and cybernetics. Using time and [virtual 3D] space as the medium, I shall be exploring thresholds of abstraction in the human form and the potential of emotion in abstract animated forms.
This artist [Gary Hill] has created works which demonstrate spatial ambiguity.
Defining dimension and depth is difficult.
Links:
Slought.com exhibition listing, including audio file link:
Art of Limina: Gary Hill
An essay on Gary Hill's work:
Up Against Time - pdf
Posted by Joseph Jujnovich at 14:48 0 comments
Labels: ambiguity
Peculiarities and paradoxes in linguistics:
How is it that chaos is antonymous to harmony which is synonymous to system (and antonymous to discord), yet system is synonymous to complex, which is antonymous to clarity and simplicity, which is synonymous to unity!
And thus, unity is synonymous to harmony, which is antonymous to discord and chaos.
Cybernetics views communication and control in all self-contained complex systems as analogous.
Posted by Joseph Jujnovich at 15:37 0 comments
Labels: ambiguity
I'm reading parts of Jean Baudrillard's book Simulacra and Simulation (1981), and in the writer's essay "The Implosion of Meaning in the Media" he discusses how information 'eats' itself.
Information must be transferred through a medium (ie. language), and virtually every language/medium (body language, speech, written, art/graphical) requires decodification or translation in order for us to understand it.
Any code/medium which is used to report/transmit information will require an abstraction of that which it is transmitting, it is but a representation of what is. This is common knowledge in how two witnesses will report entirely different experiences of an event.
It is paradoxical that I am writing this using an abstract medium (internet blog), with a code (english) that is known for stimulating subjectivity.
Jean Baudrillard speaks of how the real and the medium together create a nebula - a haze of what is.
It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.
We all live by a passionate idealism of meaning and of communication, by an idealism of communication through meaning, and, from this perspective, it is truly the catastrophe of meaning that lies in wait for us.
p. 83
To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood. But this strategy is more reflective of the earlier phase of the system, and even if we are still confronted with it, it is no longer the strategic terrain: the current argument of the system is to maximize speech, the maximum production of meaning. Thus, the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and of the spoken word - or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non-reception.
p. 85
The information or knowledge that can be obtained about a system or an event is already a form of the neutralization and entropy of this system. Information in which an event is reflected or broadcast is already a degraded form of this event.
Posted by Joseph Jujnovich at 13:46 0 comments
Labels: ambiguity
Would the audience notice a slow change in human proportion over the course of an animation? Would one be able to tell that a character has changed from male to female between the start and finish?
I would like to investigate this. If gender is in fact important to the aesthetic quality of an animation then it would be assumed that the audience would notice a change in the levels of masculinity/femininity within a form.
A digital form which morphs between male and female. An ambiguous form which can choose its gender, and apply the change in an analogue, flowing way - or a digital, immediate way. Physique and voice tonality contribute so much to gender identification in the physical world, yet on the internet these factors are often not specified or available. Gender is an assumption based on our expectations and conditioning of language choice and linguistic structure.
Mark Poster mentions how we can assume a different identity and gender on the internet.
From his essay "Cyberdemocracy" taken from "Reading Digital Culture" edited by David Trend:
"The structural conditions of communicating in Internet communities do introduce resistances to and breaks with these gender determinations. The fact of having to decide on one's gender itself raises the issue of individual identity in a novel and compelling manner. If one is to be masculine, one must choose to be so. Further, one must enact one's gender choice in language and in language alone, without any marks and gestures of the body, without clothing or intonations of voice. Presenting one's gender is accomplished solely through textual means, although this does include various iconic markings invented in electronic communities such as the smiley [:-)] and its variants. Also, one may experience directly the opposite gender by assuming it and enacting it in conversations." p. 268
"A man named Alex presented himself on a bulletin board as a disabled woman, "Joan," in order to experience the "intimacy" he admired in women's conversations. Van Gelder reports that when his "ruse" was unveiled, many of the women "Joan" interacted with were deeply hurt. But Van Gelder also reports that their greatest disappointment was that "Joan" did not exist. The construction of gender in this example indicates a level of complexity not accounted for by the supposition that cultural and social forms are or are not transferrable to the Internet." p. 267
Posted by Joseph Jujnovich at 17:54 0 comments
Labels: ambiguity
