Golan Levin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G0MzlfMPuM

My name is Golan Levin. I'm an artist and an engineer. Which is, increasingly, a more common kind of hybrid. But I still fall into this weird crack where people don't seem to understand me. And I was looking around and I found this wonderful picture. It's a letter from "Artforum" in 1967 saying "We can't imagine ever doing a special issue on electronics or computers in art." And they still haven't. And lest you think that you all, as the digerati, are more enlightened, I went to the Apple iPhone app store the other day. Where is art? I got productivity. I got sports. And somehow the idea that one would want to make art for the iPhone, which my friends and I are doing now, is still not reflected in our understanding of what computers are for. So, from both directions, there is kind of, I think, a lack of understanding about what it could mean to be an artist who uses the materials of his own day ( ), or her own day. Which I think artists are obliged to do, is to really explore the expressive potential of the new tools that we have ( ). In my own case, I'm an artist, and I'm really interested in expanding the vocabulary of human action ( ), and basically empowering people through interactivity. I want people to discover themselves as actors, as creative actors, by having interactive experiences ( ).

A lot of my work is about trying to get away from this. This a photograph of the desktop of a student of mine. And when I say desktop, I don't just mean the actual desk where his mouse has worn away the surface of the desk. If you look carefully, you can even see a hint of the Apple menu, up here in the upper left, where the virtual world has literally punched through to the physical. So this is, as Joy Mountford once said, "The mouse is probably the narrowest straw you could try to suck all of human expression through."

And the thing I'm really trying to do is enabling people to have more rich kinds of interactive experiences ( ). How can we get away from the mouse and use our full bodies as a way of exploring aesthetic experiences ( ), not necessarily utilitarian ones. So I write software. And that's how I do it. And a lot of my experiences resemble mirrors in some way. Because this is, in some sense, the first way, that people discover their own potential as actors, and discover their own agency. By saying "Who is that person in the mirror? Oh it's actually me."

And so, to give an example, this is a project from last year. Which is called the Interstitial Fragment Processor. And it allows people to explore the negative shapes ( ) that they create when they're just going about their everyday business. So as people make shapes with their hands or their heads and so forth, or with each other, these shapes literally produce sounds and drop out of thin air. Basically taking what's often this, kind of, unseen space, or this undetected space, and making it something real, that people then can appreciate and become creative with ( ). So again, people discover their creative agency in this way. And their own personalities come out in totally unique ways ( ).

So in addition to using full-body input, something that I've explored now, for a while, has been the use of the voice. Which is an immensely expressive system for us, vocalizing. Song is one of our oldest ways of making ourselves heard and understood. And I came across this fantastic research by Wolfgang Köhler, the so-called father of gestalt psychology, from 1927, who submitted to an audience like yourselves the following two shapes. And he said one of them is called Maluma. And one of them is called Taketa. Which is which? Anyone want to hazard a guess? Maluma is on top. Yeah. So. As he says here, most people answer without any hesitation.

So what we're really seeing here is a phenomenon called phonaesthesia, which is a kind of synesthesia that all of you have. And so, where as Dr. Oliver Sacks has talked about how perhaps one person in a million actually has true synethesia, where they hear colors or taste shapes, and things like this, phonaesthesia is something we can all experience to some extent. It's about mappings between different perceptual domains ( ), like hardness, sharpness, brightness and darkness, and the phonemes that we're able to speak with.

So 70 years on, there's been some research where cognitive psychologists have actually sussed out the extent to which, you know, L, M and B are more associated with shapes that look like this, and P, T and K are perhaps more associated with shapes like this. And here we suddenly begin to have a mapping between curvature that we can exploit numerically, a relative mapping between curvature and speech ( ).

So it occurred to me, what happens if we could run these backwards? And thus was born the project called Remark. Which is a collaboration with Zachary Lieberman and the Ars Electronica Futurelab. And this is an interactive installation which presents the fiction that speech casts visible shadows ( ). So the idea is you step into a kind of a magic light. And as you do, you see the shadows of your own speech. And they sort of fly away, out of your head. If a computer speech recognition system is able to recognize what you're saying, then it spells it out. And if it isn't then it produces a shape which is very phonaesthetically tightly coupled to the sounds you made. So let's bring up a video of that.

Donkeys painted like Zebras

source: xinhua

The Holographic Universe

While I am typically weary of Crystalinks, their page on the Holographic Universe concept is exceptional, containing both theoretical and scientific texts on the subject... check it out: http://www.crystalinks.com/holographic.html


Important segment for me:

"Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected. If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.
Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality". " - Michael Talbot

TODAY

White Solar Wizard
White Northern Castle of Crossing
Earth family- Gateway Clan- Truth
I pulse in order to enchant
Realizing receptivity
I seal the output of timelessness
With the solar tone of intention
I am guided by the power of heart


Jimmy Carter, Crisis of Confidence Speech
July 15, 1979 (aka 'Malaise Speech')


Last night I saw Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story documentary. EVERYONE IN AMERICA NEEDS TO SEE THIS FILM! If you didn't take the time to understand the financial bailout package, this movie will clue you in to the basic injustice of it all, hopefully affording you a powerful awareness of the immense crisis we are now in - the power is being taken from the people, and it is up to us to change it. Moore utilizes the above speech by Jimmy Carter, and I thought it was worthy of reproducing here. A powerful call to action. We need to mobilize. Some key moments: 1:35-1:55, the power of the people; 2:35-4:38, warnings on capitalism; 7:45, the importance of having faith in each other.

The Future of Food: Maintaining Crop Biodiversity (Ted Talk)

Mexican Tigre masks from Zitlala, Guerrero

This style of Tigre (Mexican colloquial for Jaguar) mask is from Zitlala, Guerrero, they are used on the feast day of the Holy Cross on May 3rd, 4th, and 5th. As part of the activities, men from different barrios put on jaguar costumes and carry out fierce fighting competitions that involve beating each other over the head with knotted rope. Although this is very rugged for the participants, the fighting is considered a crucial aspect in petitioning the deities for rain during the spring planting season. The impressive masks are made in leather and worn over the head to protect the wearer from injury. The leather is painted green or yellow, depending on which barrio of town the participant is from.

The celebration of the Holy Cross is a ceremony during which offerings of pain are propitiated. Mountain, roadside and village crosses are adorned with flowers and various offerings of fruit, bread, poultry, and more. Although this celebration is based in Christianity, the tradition of leaving offerings in return for miracles or blessings from the god(s) has its roots in pre-hispanic times. In Guerrero, this festival is closely tied to Tlaloc, the rain god.

An important part of the festival in Acatlán centers around the Ahuehuete tree, a sacred tree because anywhere this tree grows water will be found. The Nahua Guerrerense honor the tree and its spring with a procession and a variety of offerings. Here, the jaguar known as the Tecuane appears. Richly detailed costumes and masks enhance the drama of the Tecuane fights, a form of propitiation.

Excerpts from "Tigers, Devils, and the Dance of Life - Masks of Mexico" by Barbara Mauldin, found online at http://www.randafricanart.com/Tigre_mask_2.html

Definition of Pruning

So, inspired by Steve's expedition into the world of personal blogging/updates (of his fantastically venturous life) I have decided to do the same! Imagining my efforts as a sort of pruning in the discipline of self-growth, I have decided to name it "pruning the wild"...

While the connotations of "pruning" may be negative - related to aesthetics of a rich man's lawn care - I might take a second to clarify, for myself and others, what this exactly means:

"In nature, every plant eventually is pruned in some manner. It may be a simple matter of low branches being shaded by higher ones resulting in the formation of a collar around the base of the branch restricting the flow of moisture and nutrients. Eventually the leaves wither and die and the branch then drops off in a high wind or storm. Often, tender new branches of small plants are broken off by wild animals in their quest for food. In the long run, a plant growing naturally assumes the shape that allows it to make the best use of light in a given location and climate. All one needs to do to appreciate a plant's ability to adapt itself to a location is to walk into a wilderness and see the beauty of natural growing plants.

Pruning, which has several definitions, essentially involves removing plant parts to improve the health, landscape effect, or value of the plant. Once the objectives are determined and a few basic principles understood, pruning primarily is a matter of common sense.

The necessity for pruning can be reduced or eliminated by selecting the proper plant for the location. Plants that might grow too large for the site, are not entirely hardy, or become unsightly with age should be used wisely and kept to a minimum in the landscape plan. Advances in plant breeding and selection in the nursery industry provide a wide assortment of plants requiring little or no pruning. However, even the most suitable landscape plants often require some pruning. The guidelines presented in this publication should be helpful when pruning any plant..." -Proper Pruning Techniques

In reading this definition, substituting myself as the metaphor of a plant, I find it incredibly valuable to the positive growth I intend for my life.

Yesterday, when I visited the Copy Cat, my good friend Peter said "I am envisioning myself living as a child, uninhibited and free, but using my mature, intelligent adult self to guide and bring to fruition all of the dreams of my child-nature" (paraphrase) ... This is so beautiful to me, his myth of a child, living raw in the present with him. No longer is his past a memory. This, I think, is one way that we take steps towards awakening and realizing our selves in the infinity they represent. My good friend Jordan has a cosmology similar to this, mixed with Greek mythlogical stories and her own adolescent experience, regarding both as the ultimately true primordial stories of creation. We all have these primordial stories, we all live through them, and through pruning - rather, becoming aware of the way I am growing in relation to my context - I will better be able to love myself, to jump and shout in the pure rapture of being alive!