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The Performance & Experience Of Outer Space.

Space is tedious. The tension between the symbolic figure of the astronaut and the laborious detailing and planning of the missions tested and prototyped ad infinitum underscore acts of inspirational heroism with dogged work and persistence. The competitive nature of the astronaut selection process which includes a strong educational background, type-A goal oriented mentality combined with, crucially, an ability to be a team player gives us a view of space work as a a strange form of bureaucratic athleticism.

The performance of space, which is to say the operational completion of missions including ascent stages, docking procedures, space walks and survey of on board experiments seems to demand quasi-militaristic implementation of a plan concocted by ground control months or rather years in advance. While this view does not account for the necessity for improvisation and revision—feedback into the plan—to this day only achievable via the participation of human astronauts; it does foreground the notion that space exploration (manned or unmanned) requires scientific theory to precede practical deployment. More precisely it prioritizes the elaboration of the plan ahead of its execution. Improvisation in space seems limited at best. In this sense human performance in space is under severe mechanistic constraints. The frontier is accessible but from within the bulk of the spacesuit. Or from the expandable system of the ISS. Far from our popular conceptions (and wishes), space exploration isn't roving and happenstance but rather tightly goal-oriented. Creative engineering in space appears to be mostly located on the ground and in the preparations of the Missions.

In thinking about the experience of space I looked at Nelly BenHayoun's work, the Soyuz Chair. Participants in the project can opt to experience the stages of ascent from the Baikonur Cosmodrome to orbital space. The process of bringing space back to Earth is essential to the preparation of a mission is here proposed for the home. Your living room is now the stage setting of space. In this case the experience of space is not in the order of the conceptual but rather acted on the body in order for the mind to go there.

Tom Sachs's Mission to Mars project on the other hand is performed by the artist and his assistants. It was integrated into the daily routine of the studio practice. Although the Tom Sachs studio bring space to Earth by playfully modeling the practice of the studio on the workings of NASA in continuation with his work as homemade homage to iconic modernist designs. As purported audience we are left to participate in the game of space by identification. Sachs's performative representation of space is reenforced by the transparency of its material reconstruction. The tedium of NASA's brand of space preparation is gently derided as it is honored.

What does it mean to 'perform' space? This is a question pointed in the direction of artists/designers practice. The beginning of an answer might be that in a world of mediation, a large part of our direct experience finally occur in the conceptual realm. The moon landing and Kennedy assassination were generational experiences of the baby boomer that were experienced through the televised medium. Re-enactments such as Media Burn by Ant Farm acknowledge the construct of the media event. Our understanding of an event is largely dependent on the framing and construction explaining it as a narrative, this is hardly news to anyone. What I might want to enforce is the notion of performance as experienced in the conceptual realm. For the performance to bite, it has to have risk taking and commitment.

Space gains its symbolic cultural function as final frontier because it links the theoretical frontier for science (the testing of the limits of the theory) with the frontier for human habitation (The limit for the human body). The role of the artist/designer/self described cultural producer in his/her organizational capacity to construct or critique representational forms makes space exploration a critical site for the examination of modes of human social practices.

Space speaks to ambition, to global ambitions. The goal of JPL is to "benefit all humankind" and Tom Sachs studio states the goal of the work is to inspire ( in the image of the natural history museum). Artists inspire other artists and astronauts beget future astronauts. There is a personal identification to the subject of the work. Fitzcarraldo tells the story of an impossible achievement. The building of the representation of that story(the production of the film) is an almost equivalently gargantuan challenge. Werner Herzog's interest in Fitzcarraldo points back to Herzog own engagement with a large scale project. The kind of project that might crumble under the weight of it's own ambition.

Playful circularity aside, it's the outward resonance of this representational looping that can hope to guide us back to the necessity of an art practice which critically performs the functions of practical endeavors. Within this space we can hope to obtain a way for the work to have a subject or a topic outside of the inward circularity that we might find in self-referential formalism. A capacity for the work to be about something, outside of it's own working. Leaving aside for the moment what the problem of the function of creative work we might be, we might focus instead on the work for who.

How does the work conceive of its potential audience? The kind of viewership that may be appropriate for it. I have only begun to think about this in earnest but I find there to be an important distinction between work which makes direct claims/relies on participation to be activated. In the case of BenHayoun's Soyuz Chair it is the experience of the chair rather the potential experience of the chair which stands out as of primary quality of the work. Sachs' Space Program however proposes performance as inspirational representation which includes tongue-in-cheek irreverence.

This might be a reactionary stance towards mindless interactivity but I think there is something valuable in so-called static forms of representation. They are actually very freeing to the viewer. This point of view is informed from my experience as a listener. When in the habit of listening to music the 'interactivity' of the experience is a given. I am listening actively or passively, I am free to de-ambulate mentality or physically. Granted this kind of listenership is made possible by the existence of portable (or drivable) music systems. To me this doesn't reinforce some kind of problematic dichotomy between performer and listener but rather understands the articulation as inherently relational. In this sense the tree has no reason to fall if no one is here to listen. It is falling in order to communicate. This still operates in the case that one is sending a message in a bottle or praying to no-one-in particular. There is an abstract understanding of communications and transmission at play.

Rather than a conception of the user as meaning maker of his own experience within the determined purview of the interaction designer. As an artist it is odd to me that structure might be deployed in order to be maximally efficiently optimized. (I nailed the astronaut test! Ok and so what?) Doesn't the tactical animus of art making begin with a desire for disruption? This motive can in turn lead to the building of structure. The structure requires to be flexible and only instrumental in it's capacity to inspire the building of responses. The practice at large might be about staging positions within a debate.

In context of the Mars project Tom Sachs modeled his studio on NASA as an inspirational and practical strategy. However, some of Tom Sachs earlier works are hybrids colliding high fashion branding with industrial utility.This model of the hybrid object points the way towards a studio practice that would be a strange multi-headed beast for oblique research. The topic now is not to honor the icons of modernism but rather to look to methods of constructing the new—or accessing the new in the already here.

Would the new studio practice be a hybrid collision of design research, the DIY garage and journalistic probing? A practice that acknowledges the experiential as a conceptual object. The question is now of which specific practices to overlay towards the development of this self-aware platform.

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Life in Space.

Zero-G takes hold of the body. Bone density and inner ear disorientation requires preparation and upkeep. Aboard the ISS Astronauts spend time on the C.O.L.B.E.R.T to combat muscular atrophy. Meanwhile on Earth we have developed our own quasi Zero-G equipment and assisted weightlessness to put people back on their feet. Implementations of micro-gravity via centrifugal force have given us classic visions of orbital life.

What is life in outer space? The hospitable sections of outer space are small enclosed environments with a limited number of windows where long-term peaceful cohabitation is required. Drawing on the examples of the Mir space station, Bill Speed Weed's 2001 article provides a good overview of the psychological challenges that await us in the context of a proposed travel to Mars or any long-term mission in space. 

The same goes for the much more recent Mars-500 in which participants inhabited a isolated complex inside the IMBP in Moscow for 520 days. This experiment focused mostly on the "human factors" challenges in the way of human space travel. In their exit interview, the participants clearly stated that a desire to complete the mission above all enabled cohesion. Good candidates for astronauts are seen manifesting high "Instrumentality and Expressivity" in other words personalities that are highly goal-oriented(Instrumentality) but also possess the capacities to manifest warmth and empathy(Expressivity). Socially adept workaholics.

The documentary Antartica: A Year On Ice (2013) illustrate the similarly valid case study of life in a hostile environment, where the usual daily cycles of light and dark are absent for months at a time. There seems to be a clear distinction between the kind of people that enjoy wintering-over and those who don't. Introverts might do better in this intensely inward and repetitive social situation. And there is a kind of space sickness of the poles. At the Admunsen-Scott station, holidays are observed, in particular communal viewings of "The Thing" and "The Shining" are use to mark the beginning of winter.

I always wonder, with all this time together, wouldn't theses overachieving highly sociable introverts play a lot of games (or music) Is there time for hobbies in space? What does time off look like on the ISS?

Robert Zubrin holds a patent for 3 player chess. He is the author of The Case for Mars a book that has become the blueprint for his project Mars Direct. The boiler plate rationale for the continuation of space travel/exploration is as an engine of innovation that gave us space age material like velcro and teflon. Or in a more grand terms the articulation of a federating work. Aspirational Utopias aside, what could space travel as it is tell us about productive daily human interaction and how will life in space change life on the surface of the Earth, or Mars.

A reverse observation is what technologies developed here on Earth will make it to space.What constitutes new forms of astronaut training. As a designer how could proposed relevant forms of interaction with tools of expression and entertainment in space. Something as custom as the body molded seat of the Soyuz capsules. Designing for 1 single astronaut in space. Designing for the community in isolation.

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Prosthetic Desire And Phantom Fictions.

In the Violence and Design blog Alice Rawsthorn writes: “One positive point Nelson might have made in defense of weaponry design is that some militaristic innovations are subsequently put to benevolent use. “ She uses George Nelson as an example of where the practice of design is valued in terms of it’s ability to generate efficiencies. In this case for killing. 

Prosthetics are a form of bespoke design, they are custom-made for each amputee and may have to be further modified to accompany their life. Great case studies for any design project that is pointed at an individual and commits to them over the course of a lifetime. They offer insight into the interesting place where design is inter-personal. Where it’s ability to be functional and pragmatic are put at the service of basic necessity rather than towards the creation of desires.

I found this interesting as a starting point to reflect on a double-edged sword approach for designing. Where else does a design practice that acts by adding to the human body at the same time as it removes. Isn’t this very broadly the construction of consumer goods (or the luxury industry), which strives to anticipates the just-out-reach desires of it’s target market. To what extent does the allure of consumer goods generate a perception of lack in the psyche? In other words does the creation of desirable things anticipate(provoke) a phantom longing when that thing is no longer available. Are desire and the perception of lack really expressions of one single experience?

Leaving these questions aside for the moment, comes the question of representing this intimate relation to desire through the lens of consumer technology, obviously Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne’s work loom large in this area regarding the speculation of ghosted desire. More particularly, the tribute that Noam Toran’s work pays to the history of the cinematic form permits the examination characterized subjectivities. This leads to thinking the practice of design as an examination of the construction of desire as such.

Not encouraging fleeing into the delusional, I am instead assuming a necessity for fiction within subjective experience. Again this would mean fiction as-such. Not the escapist fantasy that might in fact separate one from the world nor the constructible possibilities afforded by limited speculation(Prototype Thoughts). Rather stories that help us travel and reflect. The straight forward explicit construction of fiction with and for an intended target.

Double-edged fiction in this sense would acknowledge it’s own design as the construction of a wish. It would however still perform it’s function as entertainment. It would foreground the pragmatic necessity for fiction and highlight it’s presence in the everyday. How might fiction kill and grow anew?

The Monty Python wrote a skit theorizing the funniest joke. A joke funny enough to kill. The exploration of it’s military potential requires it to be translated into German one word at a time by independent translators. The punchline to the skit being that one translator had accidentally read two words and required to be a hospitalized for several weeks. Can’t we reclaim the idea of killer design as simply synonymous for success? (as in the killer-app) In comedy a kill is an moment of induced hysteria, where the laugh might be so big as to fold a person in two. The joke is designed to relieve the viewer of his momentary discomfort and hopefully provoke catharsis.

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"I want music I can ignore."

- High Fidelity(2000)

Tuning out noise is a great to way to focus. Coffee shops with music and conversation I don't want to hear actually help me get things done. The sound of activity is more helpful to me than an environment that has been doctored for peace and quiet.

In this essay Sarah Rich introduces "white noise" in terms of its ability to provide a a backdrop to accompany slumber. The quality and volume of ambient noise is thought to generate the threshold between sleep and wakefulness. Assuming our environment stays sufficiently noisy, there is no reason we should be jolted awake. (or jolted out of focus) 

Later in the essay she brings up Stephane Pigeon's work aimed at the creation of bespoke soundscapes carved out of the negative space of the listeners auditory field. It makes me wonder what would be appropriate for me. I listen to music wall to wall from morning to night. 

Sarah Rich quotes Pigeon lamenting the lack of a taxonomic breakdown of noises. Pigeon claims we privilege visual metaphors for early education, leading to an absence of descriptive language for qualities of noise. Implicit in Pigeon's quote is a distinction between the availability of linguistics descriptions of music and the cultural omnipresence of noise.

I found this fascinating and a good place to start thinking about the wide body of music which deals explicitly with an integration of the ambient noises of the 20th and 21st centuries. It's clear to me that a lot of popular music is made and appreciated with a special emphasis on timbre. In other words, it's more likely one might describe a the sound of a piece of music as light or jagged, smooth or dark based on an overall impression of tone rather than at the level of the sequence of dissonance and consonance throughout a harmonic narrative. Listeners and artists make use of a set of shifting adjectives that do indeed describe sound and noise. For example in musical genres: Heavy Metal, Deep House, Cool Jazz. These descriptors address overall qualities of sound. Further, the separation of noise, sound and music has long been blurred and presents itself in a continuum. In terms of the intersection of background noise with music,  Brian Eno's  Music for Airports always appears as a water shed event in terms of public(and my own) awareness of so-called Ambient Music. Since then the integration of techniques of sampling and field recording into compositional strategies has in some cases literally collided the musical with the "noisy".  

The background has been pushed to the foreground. There is a lot of music that I enjoy that can make the case for the bespoke white noise soundscape: swelling ambiences, sub-aquatic cityscapes, exploratory drones, sonic wallpapers, bass pressure tests, looming flyovers. This music has become the white noise to many of my days. An instrument for focus.

If the love song is the musical equivalent to the bespoke artifact, from one person to another person. Then the bespoke soundscape might be nothing more than the experimental muscian's mixtape to the girl he likes. Please ignore this noise.

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Over the last couple days I've listened to radio dramas (Radio Works?) from both sides of the Atlantic. Looking for radio fictions over at France Culture caused me to discover Betrand Bonello's work as a writer, musician and director. Someone also recommended Joe Frank. Holy shit, how the fuck did I miss that guy? Both artists share a passion for music. Bonello is a trained musician who composed the music in "La Mort de Laurie Markovitch" while Joe Frank delivers his spoken word proposals to a hypnotic backing band.

Frank drops you in to the story with no introduction simply presenting or recreating stories and situation. His use of music is adept at proposing an emotional tone, it's more binder than accent. I found his commitment to embodying and characterizing the narration to be ultimately more effective than Bonello's awkward framing of the story in which his position as narrator is never made clear. (Aside from gesturing towards the directorial.) This might come down to a matter of performance. Frank seems to live his story first, in this interview he discusses the gap between conversations as they might be experienced and their effect once transcribed. To him the analysis leaves the subject inert. Bonello's drama is far from cold however but is certainly more staged. Within his structure he writes dialogue that seems strikingly "french" in comparison. Absent, wandering, and aimless arguments which precede love making. The acting is pretty hot. The male character strives to fuse with his female counterpart and essentially ends up man in a woman body. A narrative line that somewhat lies in parallel with the story of Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye. Just from watching a segment of Bonello's movie "Of War"(2008) we see that body parts might be traded with the object of desire. 

Joe Frank's work doesn't discuss the modifications of the body but could be said to addresses the mutations of the mind as it absorbs discontinuities. His performance of distinct narrative perspectives  casts him as empathetic towards his subject. Frank doesn't observe, he appears to live, leaving the audience to provide the frame to his inquiry. The theme of bodily distortion pops up in Frank but not in the context of his work. He says: "I was born with clubbed feet and I had a number of major operations, and I lived with casts on my legs for a while. So I ended up with calves that looked like a polio victim’s—very thin, like broomsticks"

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"But then I realized I actually like making studios more than making music, because I like the possibilities of what you can do. I make these setups that will achieve some sort of purpose, so the way I've wired it together becomes the track in itself."- Richard D. James.

... And then 2014 got better when I heard Aphex Twin was due to release a new album. The symbol of creative experimentation in electronic music recently gave an interview in which he describes himself as a complete gear fanatic. Not a big a surprise, but then again I thought it was interesting that—at least according to this interview—he doesn't consider himself to be much of a hardware hacker or builder  (he does collaborate with builders on certain projects). He describes his process as the exploration of the possibility space offered by the combination of different machines resulting in a composition. Great, now I can conceptualize the Analord series as a sequence of aural maps describing specific studio configurations. Meanwhile, this guy just spells it out. 

Later on in the interview he mentions his interest in certain jungle artists who approach music-making with good instincts and little music education. Sidestepping self-aware musicality in favor of the direct experience of sound manipulation. 

This sort of exploration of the possibility space of the instrument is central to the practice of electronic music with any kind of experimental leaning. Obviously studio experiments are not conducted for the purposes of demonstration of the technical ability of the performer or of the equipment. They are about fun and the ability to construct abstract languages. They inspire the listener to explore the unknown.

But this observation begins ask the question: How might a valuing of experimental practice inform the design of new instruments (understood in a broad sense)?. Ones that acknowledge the importance of manipulating sound and that communicate a sense of irreverence, possibility and productive disorder. For example, instruments incorporated in non-traditionally musical types of interactive contexts, (leaving aside laptops etc) What sound composition might they permit? Where are the instrumental opportunities? Would this just be the over-sonification of everything?

Atau Tanaka's research provides a possibility space for refined gestures. It's frictionless hardware. On the other hand I am thinking of the kind of instrument that might demand push-back from a player while simultaneously providing an impetus for sound exploration. What expressive probes might be realized to combine the physicality of guitars (or drums) with the exploratory combinatorics of the home studio? It seems to me taking the challenge out of instrumental practice in favor of either features that permit revision and control or choosing the path of virtual "ease" to be less productive for the development of personal musical idioms. (I make this demand even thought I don't consider myself to have a lot of facility with playing instruments—but its so much fun).

Going back to Richard James and keeping in mind the tons and tons of hardware modular, programmable midi-controllers, object-oriented software platforms, performable DAWs, hackable stomp boxes, CV/MIDI/OSC fluency and open-source DIY everything currently available on the market drives home the point that experimentation and creativity are really not in the tools but in the approach and the practice. 

Musical forms are really what inspire me most and in that sense the oblique relation they bear to the tools that have in part served to realize them is important, probably inescapably essential. However it's what the sound points to that interested in, not exclusively where it came from in terms of it's origin as an interfacial/interactive byproduct. Rather the interaction and the sound both point to an outward and elsewhere which I would personally consider to be it's actual place of origin.

Or you can always enforce instrumental struggle and ask the impossible as a compositional strategy. 

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"The term "broadcasting" had been used in farming to define the tossing of seed in all directions." - Wikipedia.

In his text (Notes Towards) Speculative Design Benedict Singleton reintroduces the notion of the plot as originally serving to indicate delimitation of land. Plotting becomes then progressively synonymous with conspiracy and contributes to a conception of design as an artful process of predatorial seduction.

In researching the early history of radio (ie: reading Wikipedia) I stumbled onto a similarly agricultural origin for the word "broadcasting". To spread seeds non-systematically from a single point of origin into a large area. Broadcasting in that sense appears a gesture of abundance and good faith in the possibility of a yield at a future date. The mission of a radio station is typically one of representing and engaging the community within broadcast range. This led me to think about how communities have been structured around an acoustic broadcast range. Within earshot. Church bells, music concerts, movies. In those environments the eyes are free to roam while the ears bind you. This would seem to extend to language and accents as expressions(and construction) of cohesive cultures. Musical idioms as collective enterprises might be considered to be forms of the return on the investment for broadcasting.

It would follow that we might speculate the practice of plotcasting as a strategic planting of possibilities with long term yield effects inside a community. If this sounds like shadowy manipulation and political intrigue, well plotcasting could easily accommodate burrowed, time-release power-grabs. Alternatively plotcasting might simply be the recognition of the possibilities for empowerment and responsibility that come with any public medium of communication. An acknowledgment of investment over time to cement and formulate a bond expressed as a narrative.

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I played David OReilly's Mountain and enjoyed the purposefully limited interaction and the implementation of background wind/weather sounds. However the dreaded "poignant single-note on piano" made an unwelcomed appearance. Seasonal change chord swells bring a nice contrast to the wind's white noise. Does the mountain spins faster if you play a repeated series of notes? It seems like the engine generates its own reverb which is pretty sweet (as opposed to relying on using pre-processed samples.)

The commitment to long term environmental change within a simulation—in particular the "objects" that come flying in and embed themselves into the Mountain really invites an ambient display type of quasi-passive engagement. (Floating Pet Rock.) The project is an effective example of the type of interaction that would lend itself to a large scale installation or sandbox collaborative web-based game. (And of course that invites the development of hardware to match.)

I found the question of the point of view interesting: Is this my Mountain to ponder or am I the Mountain? Strictly speaking, as the interactive viewer I am manipulating the camera in orbit around the Mountain. The Mountain addresses me in the first person. A simulation that places the viewer as immobile in within a geological time-scale with some limited amount of interaction might be a worthwhile exploration of the kind of radical perspectival shift that can be afforded by the medium. (Strategic Erosion?)

It also made me think of this.

*Figured out how to zoom out into space where ambient sounds contrasts nicely + you can eclipse Mountain with an on coming object. Also the game has an end...

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Tokyo: Narita, Shinjuku and ElectraGlide Music Fest.

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The Pearl: Flesh Eaters: Undead Re-animation.