Synthesis

Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 8:28 AM

To: Vangelis L; Vangelis L; marientina.gotsis@gmail.com; John MacCallum; Sha Xin Wei

hi, Vangelis, Marientina

John and Teoma may bring this box of goodies down to show you. It is a quick prototype for them to experiment with to help them figure out what they need for their IRCAM project. It has an x-OSC with imu, analog devices 2-lead EKG chip and inputs for a handmade respiration sensor based on EEonyx fabrics and an ear-clip pulse sensor (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11574).

Obviously I would build something more substantial for regular use but this should suffice for building the signal processing and evaluating the sensors.

Incidentallally, Marientina it occurs to me that an ear lobe pulse sensor has a lot of potential for the large scale walking meditation experiments you discussed. It gives a muscle-noise free pulse signal and somebody must have created a BLE earring by now? Intel is building this kind of sensor into earbuds:http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/50-Cent-Intel-team-on-heart-beat-headphones-5690650.php

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Motivated by the same “curiously skeptical” judgment, I decided form the get go that the TML would avoid “physiological" sensors.

The practical ethical problems far exceeded any artistic or scientific or pedagogical contribution I could imagine us making.   In fact, the main pedagogical contribution was and is Adrian’s observation.

On a different, related matter:

As for CO2, or other gas sensing — I advised a former colleague who was just getting into that in one of his installation pieces that there are a lot of molecules out there in a typical room, and the room’s CO2 levels don’t change all that fast due to breathing bodies, even if you stuff a bunch of them onto pallets in a room and make them watch pseudo-mystic videos.  The characteristic time of changes from such aggregate sensing is much longer than the characteristic time of a human twiddling thumbs waiting for something to happen.   (I think the statement is true whether thumbs are twiddled mentally or with physical tendons.)    In and fact, it was so.

How can young artists get a feel for material experiment?

Xin Wei

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On Aug 18, 2014, at 3:33 AM, Sha Xin Wei <shaxinwei@gmail.com> wrote:

The characteristic time of changes from such aggregate sensing is much longer than the characteristic time of a human twiddling thumbs waiting for something to happen.   (I think the statement is true whether thumbs are twiddled mentally or with physical tendons.)    In and fact, it was so.

Yes, this notion of characteristic time is a good one and raises some interesting questions philosophers have looked at such as whether there are kinds of perception and knowings (consciousness) that people (and larger things such as biospheres and the universe) can have that operate over much longer or much shorter time frames

than we are commonly familiar with.

How can young artists get a feel for material experiment?

I believe John and Teoma are planning to do this by producing events that experimentally coarticulate the materialities of performer bodies (dance, musicians)

and the materialities of sound (yes, I am rejecting important arguments for the immateriality of sound and music). The challenge for them is how

to notice interesting results through the blizzard of ungrounded hermeneutic noise wearing the seductive,  rose glasses of technique? This noise is what the use of biosensors produces. Technique frames everything by its regimes of discipline and control. Material agency is thus able to slip unnoticed out of the scene

and go down the road for a good drink at the local pub.

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Seriously, how do we think techniques of observation together 

with techniques of performance?  I know it may be confusing to use those pair of terms -- observation and performance...  

we need a better vocabulary that retains some of the mechanisms of entanglement from quantum mechanics, but not this dualism.

Xin Wei

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On Aug 18, 2014, at 7:00 AM, Adrian Freed <adrian@adrianfreed.com> wrote:

Teoma has done a nice job in this piece we just finished recording ("X") of expressively challenging that dualism with numerous

ambiguous framings and reframings of the gaze - a productive place to confront the problems of observation/performance.

How do we move past this stage of exploring and celebrating this difficulty?

All I have to offer so far on the "better vocabulary" front is to account for the fragilities of intersubjectivity

(the process that coproduces performance and observation) using the metaphor of a contract. I haven't unpacked this much

in solid writings yet.

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I would add that the observation/performance pair problems are connected to the problems of signal/noise - both dependent

on POV and preschema. Another tactic I have started to explore is the material agency of "lenses" (or filters as lenses are framed in the signal processing literature). This points to bringing in the material aspects of intersubjectivity - one of the key conundrums of quantum theory that has had to invoke a lot of magic around the macroscopic and microscopic properties

of "apparatus" to keep the rest of the theory coherent.

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Vangelis has been tracking the ready-to-wear IMU space more carefully than I.

I am hoping IMU's are a temporary bootstrap and that we will have less encumbering techniques with

absolute position measurements such as the upcoming Sixense Stem system.

My fear is that we will be surrounded by even cheaper, slower,  uncalibratable IMU's before the situation

improves substantially.

Keep an eye out for the next-gen x-OSC with a built-in charger and better IMU.

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