Adrià Ferran (El Bulli) research ≠ the production of art

El Bulli

Adrià Ferran

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The difference between research and production, between opening paths to new technique, new form, new instruments, rather than (re)producing form, element or genre  or enacting a given recipe.  It goes without saying that this art research goes far beyond the acquisition of skills and mastery of the instruments (that’s the beginning, necessary but very far from sufficient for research that makes a difference).


Ferran listening to suggestions by the French sommelier 
26:49
Thats just the sort of input we want

Our problem is, there are a thousand combinations.
Now we know which direction.

At the moment, the taste doesn’t matter to us.
That comes later.

At the moment, what matters
is whether something is magical
and whether it opens up a new path.

And later, in the restaurant, the dishes are created.

Constructed.
Yes.

Now it’s more research,
and there it’s more: research with creativity.
27:25

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The importance of taking notes as you proceed.   The chefs take photos of their work as they g— at cadential points.   In their work, cadences are compositions of the food on plates, in a dish or in a glass.

40:41
Here there’s not even a receipt yet.
Let’s write the recipe here.

That’s the same dish.

Yes but let’s separate it, 
So you can see the two ideas.
At El Bulli [the restaurant], we won’t find anything any more.

Then somebody else should write it.

Nobody else, just more text.
Let’s not scrimp on text.
For dummies, so to speak.
At least for me.

Yes, and I’m dumb too.

I’m dumb and I want things detailed.

You should already start sorting the reports according to 1, 2, or 3 stars…
41:33

This emphasizes the importance of taking meticulous notes of your laboratory work so that you can learn from yourself,, be able to not only do the detailed benchwork but also have the record of what you did so that when you step back, other people can reflect and replicate the process.   Your later self is one of those other people.
 
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44:00
We’re playing lottery here. 
No we’re giving it thought.

44:10
They call Ferran over, he glances at their carefully marked list on the wall
Do as you think, I’ll look at it later.
44:16

… a moment of carefully scaffolded mentorship / apprenticeship.

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Sha Xin Wei • Professor and Director • School of Arts, Media and Engineering + Synthesis
Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts + Fulton Schools of Engineering • ASU
Fellow: ASU-Santa Fe Center for Complex Biosocial Systems
Affiliate Professor: Future of Innovation in Society; Computer Science; English
Founding Director, Topological Media Lab
skype: shaxinwei • mobile: +1-650-815-9962
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Harry Smoak, PhD defence, Friday August 21, 10:00 AM

Amici & Colleghi, 

Harry’s conducting his PhD defence tomorrow at 10 in the morning at Concordia (in Montreal).  Public announcement attached.  It’d be great to cheer him on this sea-changing work, based on rich experience!

Take care,
Xin Wei



________________________________________________________________________________________
Sha Xin Wei • Professor and Director • School of Arts, Media and Engineering + Synthesis
Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts + Fulton Schools of Engineering • ASU
Fellow: ASU-Santa Fe Center for Complex Biosocial Systems
Affiliate Professor: Future of Innovation in Society; Computer Science; English
Founding Director, Topological Media Lab
skype: shaxinwei • mobile: +1-650-815-9962
_________________________________________________________________________________________________

video sprites, video textures, time warping, video retargeting etc.

A few early works from Irfan Essa’s computational perception lab @ Georgia Tech:
http://prof.irfanessa.com/bio/

2001  Video Textures (loops)
Video-                                                                                                                                                                                                                        retargeting video sprite (fish)

2003 Controlled Animation of Video Sprites 

time operator for diffusion

Friends,

With Adrian Freed, I asked ca. 2010-2011 whether one could invert the conventional time-dependence of our measurable observables.   Can we regard time (or more properly duration) not as an independent variable but as an outcome of dynamic material process, e.g. as an observable, i.e. an operator?   (Caveat, changing the question from pointwise time to duration may radically change the question because I do not assume that “time” must be modeled by a scalar field like R or C (algebraist’s field, not physicist’s field!).)

I remember Mike Epperson’s first response in UC Davis last year was the reminder that in QM, such operators must be self-adjoint.   Cold splash.   However, hope springs eternal :)  I have radically empirical as well as conceptual reasons to persevere in this hunch.

The following may be relevant:

"Time Operator for Diffusion” by I. Antoniou, I. Prigogine, V. Sadovnichii, S.A. Shkarin, Chaos, Solitons and Fractals 11 (2000) 465-477.

Abstract
We extend the concept of time operator for general semigroups and construct a non-self-adjoint time operator for the diffusion equation which is intertwined with the unilateral shift. We obtain the spectral resolution, the age eigenstates and a new shift representation of the solution of the diffusion equation. Based on previous work we obtain similarly a self-adjoint time operator for Relativistic Diffusion.






________________________________________________________________________________________
Sha Xin Wei • Professor and Director • School of Arts, Media and Engineering + Synthesis • Rhythmanalysis
Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts + Fulton Schools of Engineering • ASU
Fellow: ASU-Santa Fe Center for Complex Biosocial Systems
Affiliate Professor: Future of Innovation in Society; Computer Science; English
Founding Director, Topological Media Lab
skype: shaxinwei • mobile: +1-650-815-9962
_________________________________________________________________________________________________

draft milestones

draft milestones from our conversation, no names.

Parallel production streams
Physical AV
Media production
Programming

Friday Aug 7
Find and hire student media production assistant for stop action / plants
Find and hire student dancers

Monday Aug 10
Physical AV set up finalized 
stage: cameras, scrims, projectors, (new) lighting 

Wednesday Aug 19
Feature freeze
eg media resolution, seconds, size, naming conventions

Monday Aug 24
Optimization starts

Friday Aug 21
Final Tech rehearsal

Sat Sun Aug 29, 30
Dress rehearsals


Monday Aug 31
Final checks
Ginette arrives

Tuesday Sep 1 - 4
Workshop
Documentations


Comm needs:
Whiteboard in the iStage for focus
cc everyone,
direct address e.g. @Chris or Chris: when need response ?
Camera on tripod for documentaion snapshots of process...?


________________________________________________________________________________________
Sha Xin Wei • Professor and Director • School of Arts, Media and Engineering + Synthesis
Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts + Fulton Schools of Engineering • ASU
Fellow: ASU-Santa Fe Center for Complex Biosocial Systems
Affiliate Professor: Future of Innovation in Society; Computer Science; English
Founding Director, Topological Media Lab
skype: shaxinwei • mobile: +1-650-815-9962
_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Fluid gesture interaction design

Topological Media Lab was established in 2001, among other things, to study continuous (in time and space), free-hand, improvised gesture with no a prior schema.

Our time has come! — 

Zamborlin, Bevilaqua, Gillies, D’Inverno. Fluid gesture interaction design: applications of continuous recognition for the design of modern gestural interfaces (2015)

Prior art:

Resistance Is Fertile: Gesture and Agency in the Field of Responsive Media (2002)

—, Serita, Fantauzza, Dow, Iachello, Fiano, Berzowska, Caravia, Reitberger, Fistre. Demonstrations of Expressive Softwear and Ambient Media Ubicomp (2003)

—, Serita, Dow, Iachello, Fistre. Gestural Audio Instruments (2003) (PDF)

—, Gill. Gesture and Response in Field-Based Performance (2005)

Van Nort, Gauthier, —, Wanderley, Extraction of Gestural Meaning from a Fabric-Based Instrument (2007)

—, Calligraphic Video: Using the Body's Intuition of Matter (2010) (PDF)

3 orchestrations for Serra: TIME, BODY-MORPH, TENDRILS

Dear Oana, Todd, Chris,

How about these Working Definitions for Serra (from media choreography work): 

orchestration = a suite of instruments with a definite conditioning of the environment
(eg  breathing,  cusp of collapse, prone to chiaroscuro, prone to freezing  etc.)

instrument = a set of Jitter patches (abstractions) with definite set of parameters


To recap from our design meeting in my office, I think we only have 3 orchestrations to code for Sep:

• Time — explore fresh ways to use / generate index videos in timespace+elastic time (what Evan produced in April), but rigged with video from Oana (Janelle, Connor)

•  Body morph — like IL Y A (Evan update code he wrote for IL Y A)

•  Tropism / tendrils — inter-body 

By varying its parameters, a richly-designed Max abstraction (code) can manifest as widely different instruments,  in an infinite variety in a family.

The last orchestration — Horizon — is  not so much code, but scenography, lighting etc.
I do wish we could have the moving light fixed sooner, then I would’ve asked Julian to show Ian his moving light code from the 2012-13 Einsteins Dreams workshop, to show Ginette to explain how we would work expressively with lighting.     This should be a Fall project.

Connor Synthesis Core Dev / Jitter: First test of charged bodies with particles

This is really promising dynamics!  Good work.  
It’s worth reading up on actual lattice physics, as I recommended to Josh M. — e.g. chapters in Numerical Recipes, and google computational physics, lattice physics, computational chemistry.

(1) 
Can you show Josh how this works, so he can think about writing some code to compute some flow or density features according to our conversations with Melissa and Dee ?  I will want to work with Josh on the maths algorithms today approx 1:15 - 1:40 after my visit to Stauffer Lounge to see Ian and Garrett’s work.

(2) Everyone, please email cc. documentation of your work  to post@synthesis.posthaven.com


On Jul 1, 2015, at 12:05 PM, Connor Rawls <Connor.Rawls@asu.edu> wrote:

I attached the video of my first test of using the charged bodies code I've been working on with the fluids and particles. I used two of the puzzle pieces as objects to drive the interaction. The parameters could use some refinement to make the interaction more visible, but it looks neat in an abstract visual sense.

-Connor

<IMG_0141.MOV>