methodology iterate Boulder NCAR study

Hi Brandon, 

As you develop trust thanks to Melissa (and Linda) 

It’d be very very useful to  observe live working sessions — rather than indirect report thru abstract questionnaires.

situations: either of single users working alone , or ensemble.  (In latter case maybe a work session in which you are participant is best)


• live event, write down your impressions of what was going on, afterward
choice: participate in the event as a user, vs as explicit fly on the wall (after you establish trust and permission from others to do this)

• live event with you as participant, with camera + audio recording the entire room to capture all inter-body activity NOT just the screen, head or hands! We will send video snips to  Satinder Gill @ Cambridge for advice o iterating the method.

Iteratively refining the methodology is key to abductive science.


• User views recording with you and does talk aloud: what was she thinking, what was she / peers doing?  
Easiest way to do this is to recurse: play video on Quicktime Player and simply create a second screen grab movie in Quicktime Player 

These are known and effective  techniques in HCI user  experience / design research.  Let's apply them :)


As for trust, I’d suggest that we post your work NOT to replace but entirely different genus un two ways:


(1) Realtime
(2) SKETCH , minimum power needed to scaffold live scientific creation rather than compete on resolution.
(3) NOT merely educational toy, but as prop for cognitive research, meta-science

Have fun!
Xin Wei

national advanced materials initiative

White House, Materials Genome Initiative

(A genome is a set of information encoded in the language of DNA that serves as a blueprint for an organism’s growth and development. The word genome, when applied in non-biological contexts, connotes a fundamental building block toward a larger purpose.)

The Materials Genome Initiative is a new, multistakeholder effort to develop an infrastructure to accelerate advanced materials discovery and deployment in the United States. Over the last several decades there has been significant Federal investment in new experimental processes and techniques for designing advanced materials. This new focused initiative will better leverage existing Federal investments through the use of computational capabilities, data management, and an integrated approach to materials science and engineering.

See for example pp 9-11 of the MGI white paper for hints where AME could make a particular set of impacts informed by experimental research in more-than-human lived experience.

Specific work e.g. in active fibres / conductive fibres / functional fabrics  started near 20 years ago with folks in fiber computing (Starlab Brussels), and Georgia Tech (Jayaraman et al).  So the state of the art in knit structures and novel materials is getting results, technically.  See for example:

SHIMA SEIKI HAUTE TECHNOLOGY LABORATORY
http://drexel.edu/excite/research/shimaSeiki/

However as with that example, the cultural, aesthetic, and conceptual levels of the technical demos are quite naive, whereas the more aesthetically-informed work  with few exceptions does not have access to state of the art materials.  So there’s a lot of room for play.

cc. AME faculty, fabrication tech team

________________________________________________________________________________________
Sha Xin Wei, PhD • Professor and Director • School of Arts, Media and Engineering + Synthesis
Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts + Fulton Schools of Engineering • ASU
skype: shaxinwei • mobile: +1-650-815-9962
_________________________________________________________________________________________________

puppetry & film animation >> interaction

for 20 years since sponge, my fellow artists and i measured our work not to “new media” or anything to do with “computation” or "interaction” but to the most highly evolved and richest arts: theater, architecture, plastic arts, visual arts…

we aspire to make experiences as powerful as that which were achieved by the likes of Bertoldt Brecht, Sankai Juku, Dumb Type, or Anish Kapoor, Mona Hartoum, Renzo Piano, …

by such standards very very few works of computational media art “measure up” in experiential and conceptual power. but that should impel us to do more. certainly that should prevent us from lapsing into the complacency typical of programmers who discover the pleasure of mapping an input into a color or a frequency, and stop there.

ever since i established the Topological Media Lab in at GaTech, i said we do not do “interactive” stuff. and when i accepted the Canada Research Chair in “new media” i said there is no such thing as new media :)

Laetitia Sonami Ladys Glove & Michel Waisvisz, Hands. gestural instruments, STEIM

Two powerful performers in the STEIM family: Laetitia Sonami and Michel Waisvisz
STEIM: STUDIO FOR ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC MUSIC, Amsterdam

Laetitia Sonami
Lady’s Glove

Éliane Radigue et Laetitia Sonami, The last of the LADY’s GLOVE | Les Soirées Nomades - juin 2015


An Historical Moment on a Line Between A and B de Laetitia Sonami au Mois Multi 10

Uploaded on Mar 10, 2009
À partir dun instrument insolite et original, son Ladys Glove, Sonami tisse en solo une envoûtante performance audio qui prend forme au rythme de sa gestuelle corporelle. Conçu et développé par lartiste, le Ladys Glove est un gant complexe et élégant relié à un système informatique lui permettant de concevoir des sons en temps réel en fonction des trajectoires imposées par son corps. Avec des collages, des échantillonnages de sons et des voix captées dans différents lieux quelle associe à des images vidéo de lartiste Sue Costabile, Sonami crée en direct des paysages sonores et visuels à même une danse énigmatique et ensorcelante.

À propos de Laetitia Sonami
(Oakland, États-Unis)

Né en France, Laetitia Sonami est installée aux États-Unis depuis 1975 où elle poursuit son travail en musique électronique. Elle réunit la technologie de pointe, la musique et la narration pour en extraire des récits intimes, une forme d'art spontané qui lui est propre. Elle est surtout connue pour son instrument original, le Ladys Glove. Ses performances des dernières années lui ont valu une renommée internationale. Depuis 1996, elle a été invitée dans plusieurs festivals internationaux et a fait des prestations dans les grandes capitales culturelles du monde. Son travail a été récompensé par de nombreux prix. En janvier 1997, le New York Times décrit Sonami comme « a human antenna searching the air for sounds, like a dancer focused on her hands, or like a deity summoning earth-shaking rumbles with a brusque gesture. »


and 

Michel Waisvisz, Hands instrument, STEIM

Michel Waisvisz - 1993

Michel Waisvisz - Hyper Instruments Part 1

Bert Bongers was a key engineer creating these instruments 

art, Chaosmosis 131

The artist - and more generally aesthetic perception - detaches and deterritorializes a segment of the real in such a way as to make it play the role of a partial enunciator. Art confers a function of sense and alterity to a subset of the perceived world. The consequence of this quasi-animistic speech effect of a work of art is that the subjectivity of the artist and the “consumer” is reshaped. …. The work of art, for those who use it, is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense, of baroque proliferation or extreme impoverishment, which leads to a recreation and a reinvention of the subject itself.

Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis 131

processualist vs. schematic analysis

Longo work with colleague at Tufts on cancers is tackles the same methodological problem: taking a processual and field approach instead of a schema approach can yield a far deeper and effective understanding of the emergence of cancers as well as the emergence of terrorism

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/world/europe/mystery-about-who-will-become-a-terrorist-defies-clear-answers.html?emc=edit_th_20160328&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=70287705&_r=0

In both cases, this may imply changing the organism’s habitual practices and its ambient.

Eureka! Sainkho Namtchylak, Night Birds (Was: catchiness, traditional music, (metronomically regular) beat, Sainkho Naimtchuk, Gregorian Chant)

Here’s what I wanted to play for you :

Sainkho Namtchylak 
Night Birds
Lost Rivers album (1992)

No computer synthesis.
Riding the fold between human and nonhuman 

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

On Feb 29, 2016, at 6:30 PM, Brenda McCaffrey <brendamc@asu.edu> wrote:

Hi Xin Wei,

This is ravishing.  Thank you.

Hmmm...how do you think our experience of gravity affects our musicality?

-Brenda

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 5:36 PM, Xin Wei Sha <Xinwei.Sha@asu.edu> wrote:
Dear  AME 531 Seminarians,

Thanks again to Dr. Garth Paine for a lovely set of exercises and ear- and mind-opening musical examples.   (I’ve asked for the names of composers and works.)

Let me offer a followup to the discussion we had…

(1) Re. “traditional” music.
The appeal to “traditional” music for different ancient cultures does not distinguish any  universals about  what is tuneful or rhythmic or “catchy” or musical: 

Mongolian Tuva throat singing

Sainkho Naimtchuk, one of the most extraordinary singers in the world

Sainkho Namtchylak - Order To Survive (Germany 2002)
then


And some example of “traditional” music:
Khoomii singing


(2) Metrically regular beat-based music versus other kinds of music — e.g. melismatic song

Talking about tapping toes to a metrically regular beat.  This is an artifact of very very recent invention — of electrical mechanical devices.   The notion of metronomic performance is very recent in human history:

Bonus, Alexander Evan. The Metronomic Performance Practice: A History of Rhythm, Metronomes, and the Mechanization of Musicality. PhD Dissertation, Case Western Reserve Univ., 2010.

If humans have vocalized and sung for say 5000+ years, then the notion of (mechanically periodic) beat occupies a pretty trivial portion of that time.     Beat-oriented music is of course quite common and widespread — even Sainkho Namtchylak sings songs with periodicity.  However as you can hear, she also sings music that is clearly musical, even passionately musical, but whose power and appeal is not based on beat.  This is not new, but ancient.

Gregorian Chant is a glorious example of music that is melismatic, rather than beat-based.  Gregorian Chant ebbs and flows, rises and falls with the intertwining of both the patterns of closed and open vocalisation of Latin speech and the inhalation and exhalation of breath which varies in length and intensity with the sweeps of meaning, syllabification, closing / opening of the nasal, vocal, lung cavities, the stresses of the poetry, all of which lead to a gentle irregularity.  

Singing, like bowed stringed musical instruments, is characterized  continuous flow, breath, but not beat.

One of the most ravishing songs of the past 1500 years is the opening of the Gregorian Pentecost Mass:
Gregorian Chant: Dominica Pentecostes: I. Introitus (Spiritus Domini)

(Domenica di Pentecoste, Introito VIII modo, Schola Gregoriana Mediolanensis, Giovanni Vianini, Milano, Italia)

(
)

(3)  Also, even when the music clearly has temporal accent and pulse, it may not be “catchy” to your ear.  Appealing to “traditional” music won’t guarantee “catchiness-to-your-ear.”  I would hazard that to ears habituated to American popular music from the past 10-30 years, especially post iTunes, traditional Kabuki music may not be so catchy:
Azuma Kabuki Musicians Nagauta Music

And then it may – à chacun son goût (“to each his own taste”).  And therein lies the rub. :  musicality is as much a question of the putative subject (the listening “you”) as it is of object (sound waves, pieces of flesh pressing on pieces of wood or metal at specific times ), and the social-cultural context. ( Social-cultural-geological-cosmological context, if we read farther into Deleuze & Guattari, Simondon, Whitehead. )   Garth’s exercise introduces this subjectification by having one human be the “sensor” for the other.

(4)
In a sense, this whole year-long seminar is devoted to opening up to the universe of pattern available to us when we sail farther from the shores of habits inherited from combinatoric or mechanical, or graph-theoretic  tropes that have become frozen in by the reductive and simplistic forms of  late 20c computationalism.

A grand challenge for those of us who are doing research — adding to the sum of human knowledge using the technologies of our age, which are shot through and through with computational logic — is whether and how we can articulate media = matter + energy + affect with more poetry, nuance, breath.

Rather than reducing music (organized sound) and musical performance to formal computationally popularized patterns, what can we learn from organized sound and (live) performance to inform a more expanded notions of pattern, computation, articulation, language, representation … ?

Xin Wei

the best carbon sequestering system in the world, solutionism

Forest : the best carbon sequestering system in the world
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/02/11/the-solution-to-climate-change-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-cars-or-coal/?tid=a_inl

vs

Tech-based solutions limited by framing assumptions, such as:

assumptions include:
solution by novel technology 
no change in car and airplane travel
no change in consumer behavior 
no change in commodity-based markets

Engineering research implies
(1) new technology rather than non-technological considerations;
(2) the solutions have to be “new”
(3) Solutionism : the drive to find a “solution” to a "problem" rather than 
determine and achieve socio-economic-symbolic conditions 
under which the problem does not even arise. 


All good approaches are welcome.  But how shall we tackle things in proportion to their strategic importance from cosmopolitical, ecological-economic, biosocial, historic as well as poetic-symbolic perspectives?