Working notebook

Seth Riskin: July 20, 2020
Social distancing and isolation brought the idea of the Silo Solos project, individual art experiments in the Sound and Light Silos on the grounds of the Otto and Elizabeth Piene Estate in Groton, Massachusetts. The twin silos house works by Otto Piene and Paul Matisse. Below, Riskin responds to the spatial fabric of Piene’s Light Ballet. Artists also developing works: Sarah Schwettmann, Ellen Sebring, David Whiteside, Aldo Tambellini and Elizabeth Goldring.

Adam Burke: August 25, 2020

These a pair of drawings that I made some time ago that I would like to build on.

Sean Mullan: August 26, 2020

I took these screenshots today while editing. Coincidentally the text of the chatbots fit the pictures quite well. I recorded the video with the children's painting some time ago. At that time I was interested in the daily traces and changes in the park, caused by humans and animals and tried to record them with the camera.

With my current video work I'm trying to connect the messages of the two chatbots (right and left) with the mysterious world of signs and messages of the park. I don't want to match the images with the text too much, and "coincidence" always plays an important role for me. Finally, the video, which lasts about three hours, is intended to replay the entire conversation between the two chatbots and let the viewers discover some of the secrets of the park.

In the following you can see a few excerpts from the conversation between two chatbots who claim to be based on artificial intelligence technology. I'm currently integrating the conversation into a three hour video footage. The title is a self-designation that was formulated by one of the bots during the conversation. The accompanying footage was shot in a park where I could observe strange occurrences by animals and humans. Through the video I want to enable the viewer to dive into the mysterious world of the park as well as into the seemingly unrelated stories and smalltalk of the chatbots.

—————

Excerpt of the Transcript

Excerpt from “Figments of Consciousness” (no sound)

Till Bodeker

Here is a text i wrote about my last work (that I originally published here), that exemplifies my artistic interests and questions (I’ll add more interests and formulate my expectations soon):

The concept of THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX is based on a self-built isolation tank (made from a wine barrel) and the experience of sensory deprivation, i.e. the withdrawal of all sensory stimuli. To achieve this, one goes into the tank, lies down and drifts in warm salt water for a certain time. In a scientific experiment several test persons would make this experience and report about it. In the art context, I was the only one to lie down in the tank so far. Therefore I will describe my individual experience as precisely as possible. I consider this as part of the artistic work:

When you get inside the tank, everything turns black and silent. You lie down in the water, float and wait. Although the space is small, I do not feel constraint. I wonder what the perceptual category of space means at all in this place where there are no visible walls. Since the salt water is heated to body temperature, the perceived outer border of my body becomes blurred with the surroundings. My skin sensors can no longer feel where my arms end spatially. At the same time I become very aware of the position of my limbs in relation to each other, which I try to bring into a balanced position. While my arms and legs slide apart as if by magic and come to a rest after half a meter distance from the trunk, I am surprised by the difficulty of finding a balanced neck position. I first have to learn how far back I should stretch my head, because – unlike in a bed – there is no more noticeable resistance. I occupy myself with my lying position for a few more minutes until the movements and small adjustments stop being necessary.

It is a truly sheltered and self-contained state. My stress level, which is always constantly high during the hectic week of the Rundgang, suddenly drops drastically. There are no more tasks I have to fulfill, no more conversations I have to be ready for and no more expectations or constraints. It amazes me how simple and pleasant everything feels. Despite my increasing relaxation I do not become tired, but more attentive, focused and calm. I had imagined this experience to be much more dramatic or existential.

I begin to think about the concept of my work and enter into a longer stream of consciousness, which can only be roughly described in retrospect. Starting with the question of whether it is possible and what it means to think outside, I first of all examine the content of the statement “THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX”, its various meanings and its function as a connection between outside and inside. This connection leads me associatively to the philosophical thought experiment Brain in a vat, which also deals with a famous cognition problem. Examining the relationship between my tank and Brain in a vat seems potentially interesting, I think, but postpone it until later. Now the topics are constantly changing, sometimes becoming more fragmented and detailed, sometimes more general and fundamental; they interweave in an interesting way. As time goes by my thoughts revolve more in a way of mental patterns and less logical and related to concrete contents.  Unlike in dreams, this perceptual state does not seem to me to be condensed and arbitrary, but feels rather very liberating and boundless. It’s as if my consciousness were to thoroughly clean up my brain and at the same time to observe how this cleaning up feels.

The gong sounds after an hour and I slowly get ready to get up. When I get out of the tank I am a bit sensitive to the light and the overall noise level. Nevertheless, the deep serenity I experienced in the tank lasts and remains for the rest of the day.

The isolation tank

The neurophysiologist John C. Lilly invented the isolation tank in 1954 at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Lilly wanted to isolate the human brain from external stimuli in order to draw conclusions about the functioning of the human consciousness. The background of his research is, among other things, the assumption of the psychologist Donald Hebb, based on earlier isolation experiments, that the brain is dependent on constant stimulation from the environment. Without such stimulation, the sensory regions of the brain would begin to “deal with themselves” and, for example, produce hallucinations; in contrast to Hebb’s psychological approach, Lilly did not consider these effects to be “psychopathological” hallucinations, but located them in the “area of ‘normal mental processes’, but with an expanded view.” The tank served him as an experimental laboratory for self-observation (introspection), partly with the aid of psychedelic substances. In the process, he also made spiritual experiences of which he reported in detail in books such as The Center of the Cyclone or The Deep Self, which met with greater popular scientific interest, e.g. in the New Age movement.

A fundamental problem in the exploration of altered states of consciousness or phenomenal consciousness is the so-called epistemic asymmetry. This problem consists in the fact that knowledge about consciousness can be acquired from the inside and the outside: From the inside means access through self-experience e.g. of Qualia (individual instances of subjective, conscious experience), i.e. the perspective of the first person. In contrast to this, the objectifying external perspective is obtained by empirical access to the object.^[2] Due to these two different ways of access, it is unclear which has the better claim to knowledge in case of a contradiction. Such a contradiction occurs, for example, when a subjectively experienced state of consciousness does not correspond to the measured brain waves, or the existing knowledge about their relationship. The confrontation and interaction of these two fundamentally different methods is of essential interest for consciousness research.

The concept

The structure of THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX is very similar: while the experience of isolation as a core component of the work can only be experienced from the inside, the tank itself can only be perceived sensually from the outside. Both perspectives refer to each other; it is not possible to grasp the work of art in both ways at the same time. Nevertheless, they should conceptually be understood together, which is what the title THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX, which can be read on the outside of the tank, encourages one to do.

______________________________________________

Johannes Raimann

Theory has aesthetic qualities — does theory have to happen outside the body?

PT-AE4000 alias Tiresias

Yunju Lee

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are” -Anaïs Nin

Our preconception can alter our perceptions. I have therefore made attempts to observe the objects to catch the details that I have been missing. Glass and water surface has interesting aspects to observe. It reflects, distorts, concentrates, but also scatters light and its surroundings. The organic forms and complex patterns create optical illusion. The followings works are based on this concept:

When I see or interpret things in my own perspective, AI, on the other hand, can have a totalitarian view on objects due to the deep learning process. This is what fascinates me the most. In this project, I’m looking forward to find out how fine art can be integrated with technology, and the synergy it can create. Along with that, I’d like to explore further on the spectrum of visual art.

Margareta Bartelmess

These are some insights into my last work, where I worked with the combination of landscape photography and a topographic satellite image from the SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission). While the disc with the topographic image is rotating slowly and constantly, the photos of specific situations appear only in a flash such that the different layers mix up with each other. What fascinates me about the topograhpic data is the fact that the showed area, which is Central Europe, is well-known but without typical landmarks like borders, cities and infrastructure can not be recognized by the viewer. To realize the projection I used old projectors that generated the images completely analogue and made the mechanical function of the projection visible.

Distance is one of the topics on which I would like to research in this project. Technology has made distances relative, we can visit places virtually and feel close and far to something at the same time. Speed of data is equal to speed of travel and therefore two places on different continents can be closer to each other than to the countryside nearby. I’m looking forward to exchange ideas and work together virtually and in reality, experiencing two different types of distance.

Adam Horowitz

Dream cookbook // Where experience is research tool, research is play.
— instructions for gathering one’s own dreams (a la Sol Lewitt // Pauline Oliveros), assembled into a collection that makes clear both the individuality of experience and overlapping primitives (a collective experience)

e.g. People have historically been interested in dreams as a model of psychosis (in the same way we put effort into animal models for psychosis). Schizophrenics can tickle themselves, and people can also self-tickle when you shock them out of deep REM sleep (when you also have body ownership issues), a strange experience if you are not used to physical dissociation!

Recipe:
Find yourself a lover who doesn’t mind staying awake. They await your third period of motility after your fast REM movements (watch breath, eyes). Have them shock you awake and command you to tickle yourself. Discuss.

Take science seriously but not too seriously! Experience can be primary.

Object vs Experience
Rules vs Experience

Less interested in what a set of instructions produces and more interested in how a physical experience manifests in different meaning for different people

what perspective do we bring to our perspective? What states of mind do we bring to our perspective? How do those interact with active seeing?
Tools: EEG, watercolors, people

BK: What about the aesthetic value? What kind of aesthetic is in your dreams, how can we make this performance conceivable to others? What is the intersubjective exchange?

AH: There’s a consistency to the aesthetic in certain states of sleep: e.g. people see lots of chimeric animals/humans, blurred faces in others. (1) You could put many people in the same state and try to give them the experience of something they haven’t seen before, then they wake up and share. Can we probe the archetypal? (2) On the flipside, how can this function as a tool for artmaking? E.g. Dali .. People wake up with very Dali-esque imagery: chessboards stretching, tigers walking across them, clock faces dripping. Further, could use as an art-viewing tool. There are moments during waking where one experiences hyperactive agent detection (you wake up and see things differently). (3) Maybe there are games to be played with putting people to sleep and waking them up in front of art pieces.

BK: For ZERO it’s very important to move away from the subject (the beginning of feeling, the beginning of art) - and explore the other side, the viewers who fulfill the artwork. ZERO is not a kind of surrealism but a contrary conception of art, of purity where the viewer fills a container with meaning

SS: Once it leaves the artist’s hands, an artwork is as much the product of the viewer as it is of the artist.

AH: In hypnopomnia, people have experiences of total sound, total light. “Exploding head syndrome”: moments of blindness or deafness. If you’re interested in the the pure state, you’re interested in a different state of sleep, stage of research.

Christoph Thormann - Painting by Numbers

When you are painting from a reference image, it is hard to capture the correct proportions, right colour and light effects.

In my last project I simply translated a profile picture of me into a bitmap with low pixels and painted 60,000 squares with 16 colours, which makes it easier in a way, that it makes it possible, to predict the outcome very accurate.

However, I was struggeling to find a new image that I would have liked to paint and went back to computer generated images that are made by using a 3d program that is called 3ds Max.

[There are a lot of possibilities within the program but at the moment I have restricted myself to render a plane with a noise filter and only change the parameters of the noise filter, the bitmap, that is reflected by the plane and the camera view. This alone has an infinite amount of possible outcomes.]

After rendering the image I translate the high resolution image with a 8-bit converter into a lower resolution outcome, in order to make it able to paint again.

Update: I have found that implementing a 3D program into a KI is very hard. What do you think of making patterns with a KI program and transferring them by my machine?

At the moment I can do drawings and etchings but my goal is to make the CNC machine (shown in the image) in combination with the Basic Kit (multipurpose syringe extruder, initially for ceramics) to paint.

I would like to know more about how to make an artificial intelligence, that is trained to generate (the rendered 8-bit) images, because in my opinion nowadays it is not important to be a good painter, but making something special that is fascinating the viewer and make the viewer think about things like for example automation and artificial intelligence.

Art lives from the viewer and as long as creativity and individuality are indispensible elements of art there will be art.

PS: I like Adam Horowitz`s idea of “putting people asleep and waking them up infront of art” - What if an artwork changes infront of the viewer without the viewer noticing it directly. A painting that changes slightly and encourages the viewer to look more colsely. This could be made like a roll-up banner from advertising which changes when the light is turned off?
Or a painting that is constantly changing by reacting to different light or temperature?

Adam Horowitz September 17 2020

I’m beginning the process of drawing up recipes, trying to make them clear enough to encourage participation and not too clear to really bound the experience, make it prescriptive etc. This is a cyanotype image of Doubting Thomas. Look inside, be surprised.

Meeting notes: 27 Aug 2020

On Infinite Zero —

Coincidence: space for both structure and chance.
Distance: multiple kinds! we collaborate across physical distances. We discuss the distance between internal and external, perhaps the boundary where those things meet.
Boundary:
Space:
Technology:
Manipulating the interface of experience:

Next Steps:

Keeping the conversation and collective exchange moving —
Use PubPub!
Meeting monthly
Smaller groups arrange meetings as needed
group email thread
slack channel?