From: abroeck@v2.nl (Andreas Broeckmann)
Anonymous Mutterings
Knowbotic Research +cF
The projects of Knowbotic Research KR+cF design heterogeneous models of information and elaborate their multiple qualities in dynamic experiential fields. 'Anonymous Muttering' attempts to approach an open notion of 'events' through experimental dispositions, simultaneously located in urban spaces and in technical networks of data processing systems. In this project, KR+cF designs zones for undetermined light and sound events which are composed of fleeting, initialised and 'found' singular events. What happens cannot be traced back to references in real space.
a) Smoothened Heterogeneity
The contemporary discourse about architecture increasingly accepts the contradictory and the multiple layeredness of fragmentation and collision. However, the theoretical realisation is not sufficient but has to be complemented by the practical conceptualisation and utilisation of such hybrid qualities. In order to activate this heterogeneous potential, it is necessary to 'mat' these qualities into foldable, bendable and smooth systems. Matting in the sense of extending them in order to achieve a multiple continuity. The meshwork, the felt, opens up additional possibilities for agency in the rhizomatic network because, unlike the fabric of nodes, it consists of a chain of singular events and thus remains foldable and bendable. The project Anonymous Muttering attempts a realisation of such a 'smoothened', matted heterogeneity.
b) Condensing the flow of information into a mesh of events
The data space offers itself as a site for realising such a process because, unlike architectural space, it is constituted by fleeting matter. It forms a felt-like fabric from a chain of information which is segmented into flows of data packages by the network protocols. In these flows of data, not the individual information contents are important, but their 'multiple restlessness' as data packages. The value of this fragmented information lies not in the guarantee of its traceability but in its immanent transformatory potential which invites interventions, like the deletion, addition, encryption or granulation of data. This creates a whole spectrum of dissolving layerings which become indistinguishably condensed and leads to a very particular, dense, bendable materiality of an indefinite composition in which the singular receeds in favour of the inseparable.
c) Transversality
This fabric can only be experienced in time, it does not manifest itself as an object but as a process, as a meshwork of events. The felt of information cannot be singularly located either in the virtual computer-based space or in material space. Its decisive quality is its hybrid presence, the continuous flow between the different fields, a condition which KR+cF call 'maintaining the transversality'. The nomadic character of events is enhanced.
d) Segments
A fluid fabric of events which forms a trajectory between the immaterial data networks and the concrete urban space, can only be experienced in segments. In order to facilitate this experience, Knowbotic Research construct 'entrances' which can be accessed from both sides and which combine interactive tools with sound and light interfaces.
e) Operators
'Anonymous Muttering' describes a staged, machine-supported operation. DJs playing music at live-events simultaneously contribute material to the operational chain of the Anonymous Muttering. Their sounds are appropriated and fed into the other system. The sound materials from DJs have exactly those properties which are necessary for the unfolding of uncertain events: they neglect the question of authorship, they do not insist on originality, they formulate a limited kind of subjective expression and they do not seek an immediate effectiveness. Different transfer media (wireless transmission, Internet) serve to channel and concentrate the sound events and make it possible for local city flaneurs as well as for virtual data net flaneurs to intervene in the processes and to affirm or dissolve the sound events. For this interaction, 'openings' have been created which are placed both as material interfaces in the urban space, and as Real-Audio plug-ins in electronic space.
f) Folding as interface
Through the activity of bending, compressing and folding transparent silicon surfaces with sensors (urban space interfaces) and graphic surfaces (data space interfaces), the sound-based mesh of events which traverses the urban and the digital can be modified and increased in its complexity. These potential activities of an unknown number of participants propel the sum of the algorithms modulating the sound synthesis in unpredictable directions.
g) Lightnings in urban space
The proliferation of events from the real electronic information space into the sensorially perceivable urban environment is made widely visible through intensive light zones. For the observer and the user standing in these fields of lightning created by stroboscopic lamps, the function is the reverse: relating to the architectural environment is made more difficult and the concentration on the dynamic sound events is enhanced.
h) Chain of operations
The interconnection of all these stations creates a chain of operations, initialised by live-events in the city (DJ parties) which are used parasitically. The extracted accoustic material is reformatted and made dynamic by algorithms in data space. A generative system extracts individual granulates from this input and reorganises them, before again distributing them into the public space. Human and machinic manipulations and interventions cannot be distinguished clearly. What surfaces at each of these stations is a multiple felt of hybrid segments of events for which there are no fixed codes yet, but only potential articulations.
The partial appearance of the event can no longer be ascribed either to the public space of a city or to the private terrain of an individualised data space. An Anonymous Muttering without beginning or end.
(1) The accoustic materials of a party event are fed into the chain of operations created by KR+cF and are immediately digitised.
(4), (5) + (6) Participants at the local interfaces and on the Internet recombine the sound material in cooperation with a generatively working digital system. Micro-sound fragments (granulates) are reconfigured by a sound processor in real-time in order to form a new mesh of relationships. The organisational processes in the data space become audible as sound events in the form of continuous modifications, recombinations and the creation of new sound patterns.
(3) For a larger audience, the waves of events produced by the operational chain are transformed into sound signals by a circle of loudspeakers (16 pieces) and become audible in simple, repetitive geometric spatial movements. The installation space is visually disconnected from its architectural environment through a stroboscopic field.
(5) 'Real Audio', a system for the almost real-time replaying of sound via the Internet, allows for the immediate variation, through an audio interface, of the starting conditions of the machinic sound manoeuvers while listening. In the system, this interaction effects a modification of the dynamics and directions in the relations of timing and frequency.
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 12:12:21 +0200
From: odarodle@contrib.de
BIO: Vilcyn Ruzprickh's Solvent Art from Lipovenia
Odarod Le
mitosis
Emergent from the Danube and its dynamic delta filtering the debris of East Central Europe before emptying into the luminous waters of the Black Sea comes a project recording and transforming the flux of discharge from the cultures along its banks: Vilcyn Ruzprickh's, Dyscholeric Model 7. Effectively melding the chemical, biological, and mathematical, Ruzprickh has constructed a digital coliform environment reacting to data collected by effluent monitors buried in the channels of the delta. Ruzprickh's digital coliforms are dependent upon the excretion of cities in order to ensure their survival, for these digital macroorganisms feed upon their own biological population, gaining sustenance from the ebb and flow of coliform colonies. Jeopardy approaches as the attempts to improve the Danube and delta ecosystem absorbing the sludge produced by Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and all points between; the interference of environmental NGOs purging the slough and dross from the river as well as from their ideological machines, for example, the scrupulously clean sfos.ro server. Indeed, these digital macroorganisms respirate on data, transformed by algorithms into the necessary requirements of coliformic life to breeding, feed, and mutate according to a boundless spectrum of digital life that summons the infinite brands of sulfurous cigarette butts washed from the cities drains into the Danube's current, carcigenic, fragile rafts. In their decay, our own mortality is mirrored, our bodies melded by our synthesis of the inanimate and its dissolution into our unaware tissue.
However, Ruzprickh's bacteria struggle beautifully, having faith in their digital code's mutation in order to create more resilient strains of unquantified life beyond the hollow postulates of mimetics. But Ruzprickh has no intention to indulge in the anthrophilia of the quest for artifical life. Dyscholeric Model 7 has simply helped the coliforum assume a life beyond the confines of water and gastrointestinal tract. Within the context of the republic of monomaniacal tribute to line and form, the coliform symbolizes the the autonomy of adipose flesh, its secrets and subjective self-justification impinging upon the continents as the foolishly sublime, the pretense of higher consciousness in a Petri dish of contaminated yet conversely rich agar. Each monument of womankind, indeed, reflects the presence of the parasite, but the host does not suspect the presence of her ward until swallowing it in sufficient quantity to invoke nauseousness if not death.
meiosis
Vilcyn Ruzprickh's interest in the dynamics and properties of fluids has been a long-standing theme in his projects. Before graduating from the Odessa Academy of Contemporary Art, Vilcyn Ruzprickh followed a more predictable path at the Constanta Technical University enrolled in the fluid dynamics engineering program where he gained the necessary theoretical and practical understanding of filtration, sedimentation, distillation, and irrigation. In addition, Ruzprickh examined the chemical properties of water and its interaction with solutes and as a medium for colloids and suspensions. Disillusioned with the prospect of merely contributing to the courses of the delta's tributaries through the canal works begun by dissidents imprisoned under the Ceausescu regime, Ruzprickh took advantage of his roguish ancestral links to the Ukraine and successfully completed all entry requirements for the Odessa Academy of Contemporary Art. Within his new capacity as an artist, Ruzprickh became obsessed by the criteria for artists. He says of first encounters in the studios of Odessa, "That identity of pompousness and righteousness that so often defines the borders of the artist--in actuality a myopic self-appointed mediator of collective memory and image, the products of the chemical vessel bounded by the flesh--has failed to scrutinize himself. The result has been complacency, stagnation, and nostalgia rather than sacrilege and blasphemy: all necessary techniques in order to reconcile the chemical vessel with its instinctual actions. And to think a prank will liberate us from the scrawl and crawl--hah--I scoff at the notion. A prescription of indulgence in our baseness is the only solution!"
Indeed it is Ruzprickh's unavoidable expression of the absolute inability of the human to avoid indulging in the pleasures of the taboo and the forbidden that dominates his projects. After successfully defrauding his professors with notions of conceptual work done, in his words, "Just before breakfast," rather than following the mandatory curriculum of artistic departments, Ruzprickh graduated from the Odessa Academy. Ruzprickh shocked his superiors and colleagues with his final project, a series of glass waterworks resembling the foaming laboratory of the archetypal alchemist diffusing in the nonexistant gap between human and animal, itself a construction of womankind's need to justify and distinguish its existence. Rather than producing a viscous formula to mutate consciousness and physique, Ruzprickh's Labioscope percolated indefinately, a continuum of gorgeous color extracted from the highly-sucrous embalming fluid sold in the streets of his native Romania, a carbonated, artificial, and far from transnational cola to be carried home in buckets, bottles, or simply gargled at the vendors. In appropriating the liquid sustenance of Romania and constructing an elaborate network of glass plumbing to display the unique qualities of supersaturation, Ruzprickh blasphemicized a cherished yet unobserved element of Romanian life. Even in the halls of the Odessa Academy, Ruzprickh's minimalist participation in the studios, preferring to travel into the hinterland of the former Soviet Union in order to explore the waterways he required to console his mischieviousness, earned the scorn of his cravated, inky colleagues. In replumbing the proletarian utopia and offering the temptation of sugar (mocking the only permitted indulgence of newly rebaptized evangelicals), Ruzprickh began his movement to a new conception of popular art in East Central Europe, though the irony of the Delta--the territory of the bandit, the picarillo, the fugitive--surmounting the division between land and water with a paradigmatic synthesis of the biological and artificial. However Labioscope as well as Dsycholeric Model 7 remind the viewer that despite the whimsy, the imprint of the human remains indelible on both her environment and herself.
zygosis
Continuing with this line of perception, Ruzprickh has began to shift his attention to the conceptual with his new offering: The Tiddleywink Manifesto. Charmed by the scalding euphemisms of the online salon and the phallacy of the cyber debate, Ruzprickh proves that our utopia remains subsumed by our instinct, a risible condition that despite our conceptualizing is indecipherable, the paradox of laughter rescuing us from analytic oblivion disguised as higher consciousness. But it is the striving for the cosmopolitan, the imagined aesthetic of sophistication, that truly fascinates Ruzprickh as the struggle for status, citation, trajectory, and celebrity are denied. Vilcyn appreciates the finery and foppishness of the dandy, a cockeral adorned for the subverted conquest of cunt. But Ruzprickh realizes that the cunt, too, has power, its liquidity eternal in comparison with the spongey linga. He understands and traverses the inverse relationship between communication and understanding, generating foamy and phoney content to be deliberated upon as if time-based equalled the construction of our thoughts to the eternal speed of light. But does light ripple with moments of the recognition of its transitory nature, change giving life? If this is the case, then we are very much alive, our bodies collecting and adapting to the production of our hands and minds.
I leave you with extacts from the savory delights of Vilcyn's newly drafted Tiddleywink Manifesto, the bamboozling basis for his forthcoming new, improved conceptual web page also rendered via email for the technologically impoverished:
1. historical: the Victorian parlor, the site of propreity and posterity, found the tiddleywink to be ideal entertainment governed by the movement from the primitive to the sublime and laced with the metaphor of the vagina dentata.
2. hypothetical: tiddleywinks display the complete characteristic of the net, its fullest potential as a conversation piece to be referred to over cocktails. Useful, a handy coin to have in one's pocket. Dash your repartee with torque and trajectory, principle and velocity.
3. paranoic: moderated, filtered, and supervised so that pious, sensitive, and correct behavior dominates the environment. But who, who exactly exerts control?
4. abstract: tiddleywinks offer the archetypal circle, the mandala's ascent from the earthly to the heavenly, the welcoming and destined summit of our goodness
5. virtual: commercially order your copy autographed with our unique digital signature in corroboration with Deleuze's, "Postscripts on Societies of Control."
6. hyper: subscribe to the tiddley listserve for entry into the game. Receive your e wink and enter your coordinates. Bounce your e wink into the cup, though the playing surface--measured according to the volume of telephonic traffic, noise and feedback--determines your success. Criteria varies. Your subscription continues until your tiddleywink enters the cup. Strictly lo tech, running off our 8 gigabyte VHS hard drive. Or, dial up and browse through the layers of Tiddleywink interactive, LSD tracers recording the hits for the passive, mouse-paralysed user.
7. addictive: avoid the panic of the millenium and download the tiddlyewink virus. Guaranteed to free you from the want of information. Instant digital amnesia.
8. tactile: prepare for the computer apocalypse and print, print, print!
Sponsored by Motorola, Silicon Valley Graphics and the Romanian Ministry of Trade.
http://www.protv.ro/lipoven170996/~petri/dyscholrx7