cmaraffi

Topher Maraffi has left the building (graduated!)... www.chrismaraffi.com

Mimesis & Mocap Performance (Spring '10)

With over 10 years professional and educational background in 3D technical animation, visual design, dance, and pantomime, Topher's research interests focus on real-time performative interaction between synthespians and live performers using motion capture devices and machinimatic techniques.

Machinic Self Portrait #5 (Winter '09)

"There'll be the breaking of the ancient western code. Your private life will suddenly explode. There'll be phantoms. There'll be fires on the road… and the white man dancing." Leonard Cohen, The Future.

Studio-Thesis Work:

My studio work applies interdisciplinary research in art, performance, and philosophy to performative-machinimatic 3D creations that utilize 3D animation, motion capture, physical computing, and coding. Some of the concepts I am exploring are:

• Using motion capture technology to produce the illusion of classic mimesis, or reflexive mimicry, between a "live" performer and a 3D character in pantomime and dance.

• Experimenting with relations between humans and non-humans (animal-human-machine), to consider the ethical implications of autonomous machines as evolving cyborg “other”. I am defining "cyborg" as the symbiosis of the human mind with technology, as characterized by technological memes.

• Applying the evolutionary algorithm to interactive art using the concept of Rep and Rev (or repetition and revision, Suzan Lori Park’s improv-performative technique based on traditional African American "call and response" in jazz and blues music) as a method for the replication and mutation of media using digital software and code.

• Considering issues of determinism in memetics by exploring meditation as a non-thinking and therefore non-memetic or uncoded biological state of “free will” or agency, in order to create a meditative experience with media (medi-a-tative).

• Exploring 2D optics and kinematics, especially in regards to perspectival and mechanical techniques that create the illusion of movement in 3D space and time, as a reflexive modeling of reality in both the mind and in computers.

-> Mimesis & Mocap: Performative Thesis Project (Fall '09 - Spring '10):

Thesis Faculty Committee: Kathy Foley, Chair (Theater Arts, Puppetry and Masks), Ted Warburton (Theater Arts, Dance and Technology), and Michael Mateas (Computer Science, Expressive Intelligence Studio).

My thesis project involves using traditional theatrical techniques of mimicry to digitally simulate the classic Marx Brother's film pantomime known as the Mirror Gag Routine. My performative research...which explores new approaches to embodied gesture, agency, and memory...will culminate in a hybrid live-virtual performance in a shared theatrical space.

Live performances of my Magic Mirror Game are part of UCSC DANM's 2010 MFA Exhibition: Things That Are Possible, April 30-May 9, DANM Dark Lab (first floor), Live Performance Times* (video documentation played at other times):

DANM Building Dedication, Thursday April 29th @ 4:00pm

Saturday May 1st @ 2:00pm

Tuesday May 4th @ 3:45pm

Show Reception Friday, May 7th @ 6:30pm

Added two final performances: Saturday and Sunday, May-7-8 @ 3:00pm

Some Vimeo video showing excerpts of my performances (more video coming soon):

Click here for the thesis web site...

DANM Performative Technologies Group Production: Stop the Press! (Fall '09 - Winter '10):

Performative Group Theater Arts Faculty: Jim Bierman, David Cuthbert, and Kimberly Jannarone.

My Avatar Dance draws inspiration from and gives homage to classic pantomime, vaudeville, and dance movements of the past, while updating their interactivity for the future. The routine includes variations of the Mirror Gag, Rope Pull Gag, Ladder Climb Gag, Breakdancing Battle, and a Juggling Toss. To my knowledge, this is one of the first times, if not the first time, that these gestural classics have been done on stage between a human performer and a virtual 3D character in front of a live audience.

Over three quarters I was involved with developing many aspects of the Perfomative Technologies group and Theater Arts collaborative production Stop the Press, including concept, design, media, script, and performance. I designed a realtime performable 3D eyeball that is controlled by an actor manipulating a joystick on stage, which is then projected onto a 12 foot balloon above the space. My main piece, however, was me dancing in masked costume with a 3D digital double, or Ubermarionette, using motion capture technology.

Click here for more details and documentation...

"From a companion species point of view, there may be a reason why people resemble their pets... and also resemble their cars. Both may be signs of symbiotic relationships, of cohabiting and ultimately co-evolving species. I view Global Warming as the result of not having a big enough poop-bag for our growing technological organism." - Topher, Winter '09.

Statements on Research Related to Memetic, Cyborg, and Gaia Theory:

"The full implication of applying the evolutionary process to culture is not only controversial, but as radically subversive or r-evolutionary as Darwin’s original theory of natural selection. Memetics theory encourages viewing information processing from the microscopic replicator’s viewpoint, in addition to the macroscopic organisms or species viewpoint. This perceptive switch has the capacity to further de-centralize and de-privilege our human exceptionalism, by re-contextualizing culture into a broader natural process that displays no measurable beginning or end. The human species becomes just one node in a matrix of materialistic relationships between countless species evolving and coevolving over cosmological time. Conversely, memetics also recognizes the uniqueness of the human species as the assemblage where a new kind of replicator achieved symbiosis with the old, the meme co-evolving with the gene, to birth a third type of replicator, the technological meme or cybernetic organism. This cyborg is the fusion of the human mind with technology, and has quickly become the dominant force manipulating the earth’s environmental system, or Gaia, to accommodate its emergent speciation."

"Taking memes seriously has fundamentally changed how I view technology, as an evolving mimesis or autonomous material representation of our minds. My research interests involve synthesizing memetics theory with cyborg humanities theory and Gaia environmental theory. My goal is to complete an interdisciplinary examination of Western cultural history from an evolving cyborg's point of view, to explain the direction of reflexive cultural 'progress' towards autonomous machines. This does not necessarily lead to determinism, but instead searches for coevolving replicators that exhibit a complex marriage of shared agency. Such a cyborg history may be tracked through memetic lineages, or a memeology of technic, to map the trajectory or "lines of flight" of evolving memes through religious myths, secular ideals, speculative fiction, and ultimately into science fact. My approach seeks evolutionary processes that are constantly in flux (invisible-visible, micro-macro, abstract-representational, random-directional, smooth-striated, parasitic-mutualistic), as disembodied information transforms through very real and affective embodiments in nature and culture."

Article by Susan Blackmore on technological memes...

Mechatronics Self-Portrait Prototype (Winter '09)

"Man is sick because he is badly constructed. We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally...when you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom. Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out, as in the frenzy of dance halls, and this wrong side out will be his real place." - Antonin Artaud, To Have Done with the Judgement of God (1947).

Research and Theoretical Essays:

My theoretical essays explore the boundaries of scientific research in evolution and information theory, as well as the philosophical, historical, social, and environmental implications. Specifically, I am interested in our relation to technology by tracking the memetic lineage of secular ideologies driving digital media today, including investigating how religious myth mutates into science fiction, in order to unmask the "ghost" or "god" meme actively evolving in the machine (deus ex machina).

Alchemical Blog: Philosophical Musings on Mimesis, Techne, Gaia, and Eros...

-> Essay: Jesus is Returning as a Cyborg: On the Origin of Digital Species (Fall '08 - Winter '09)

click here for a 62 page white paper (PDF)...

click here for the multi-media web site (in development)...

* Description:

This paper argues that religious memes masquerading as science fiction are reflexively driving science towards the evolution of a technological singularity, embodied as the mythic cyborg.

** Keywords:

singularity, technology, evolution, memes, cyborgs, robots, information, climate, religion, computers, memetics, philosophy.

*** Authors quoted include:

Richard Dawkins, Alan Turing , Michel Foucault, Lynn Margulis, Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore, Marvin Minsky, Donna Haraway, Hans Jonas, Katherine Hayles, Rodney Brooks, Kevin Kelly, Hans Moravec, Sarah Kember, Irving John Good, Charles Seife, Wojciech Zurek, Tom Siegfried, Jon Agar, Dorian Sagan, Victor Burgin, Slavoj Zizek, etc…

In-progress Research Bibliography...

**** Reviews:

"It is a fantastic paper; well done. I like your style." - Kevin Kelly: Techno-philosopher and Senior Maverick at Wired magazine, TED speaker, publisher of The Whole Earth Review, author of The Technium and Out of Control, co-founder of the Hackers' Conference, and consultant on the Matrix movies.

Kevin Kelly's web site...

RAMO "Line of Leonardo Flight" (Spring '09)

"Becoming is like the machine: present in a different way in every assemblage, passing from one to the other, opening one onto the other, outside any fixed or determined sequence." - Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

" – that is why abstract machines are dated and named (the Einstein abstract machine, the Webern abstract machine, but also the Galileo, the Bach, or the Beethoven, etc.). Not that they refer to people or to effectuating moments; on the contrary, it is the names and dates that refer to the singularities of the machines, and to what they effectuate." - Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

Statement on Research Related to the "Leonardo" Abstract Machine (1497):

Rhizomatic Assemblage of the Machinic Organism (RAMO), "Line of Leonardo Flight", applies terminology in the theoretical writings of Deleuze and Guattari to my interdisciplinary research into the history of art and technology. I am mapping a conceptual "line of flight" between the historical "assemblage" of perspectival art, naturist "nomad" science, anatomical studies, and mechanical engineering, as embodied in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, through the Cartesian "theatre of the mind" and "body as machine", to contemporary digital media and 3D virtual reality. In this research I am looking at history through the lens of Universal Darwinism for "machinic" representations and memetic mutations, to track technology as an independently evolving “organism”.

-> Leonardo Assemblage Research (Spring '09), click here...

RAMO "Line of Duchamp Flight" (Spring '09)

"For someone who can perceive interconnecting patterns, it is easy to be a systemic thinker." - Fritjof Capra paraphrasing Leonardo da Vinci's famous quote "For a man who knows how, it is easy to become universal...", from The Science of Leonardo.

Statement on Research Related to the Theoretical Writings of Deleuze and Guattari (Castaneda Abstract Machine '72 remix):

"Cyborgs, sorcerers, alchemists, mutants, and daemons (even vampires) all come from the same void. They are nomads, with no past, so they are free of connections and restraints. Their hybrid identity is a vague, fluid construct, or assemblage, always in the process of becoming. By nature they are androgynous chameleons and performative tricksters, although they make disciplined efforts to appear human and gendered. They work on the edge of the matrix or rhizome, in the shadows, floating between abstraction and representation. They cannot make something from nothing, but instead jump off the edge of the abyss into the hole of history (sometimes called "somersault into infinity" or "line of flight" or "shooting an arrow") to retrieve and fuse existing code into a mutation that births a singularity of speciation. They embrace the hilarious madness, and inherent energy, in their own contradictions. Activism is not necessary for such a being, as their very existence is an anomaly; and by their nature has the capacity to assemble an abstract machine that changes everything. These are the true artists and creators."

Old Project prototypes and Research:

-> Perspectival Mechatronics Prototype (Spring '09), click here...

-> Cyborg Self-Portrait Mechatronics Prototype (Winter '09), click here...

-> Cyborg Portrait Apprentice Prototype (Fall '09), click here...

Medi-a-tated Picasso Hall of Wandering 1.0 (Spring '09)

Statement on Medi-a-tated Picasso Hall of Wandering 1.0:

In this work I combine ritualistic and theatrical elements to engage media as a meditative and mediated, or “medi-a-tated”, experience. I’m playing with the dimensional illusion of perpectival and kinematic techniques, as embodied in the Picasso Abstract Machine (1935), by fusing flat drawn and painted cutouts on cardboard with vanishing points in digitally manipulated photography. A “line of flight” is performed through natural and technological reflections to a doorway that reveals a singular movement in my personal history, a meditation walk through the New Mexico desert, captured in digital media memory on my video recorder. In addition, the final assemblage is literally tied to the exhibition space it inhabits, from the wall-map to the living tree, as the video and sound mechanically "Reps & Revs" the echoed perception of another sacred space and time.

Click here for additional documentation...

Topher Saying: "Do what you can, and then can what you do."

"Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism." - Karl Marx, Fragment on Machines from The Grundrisse.

UCSC DANM MFA Teaching Assistantships:

• Spring 2010 – Walt Disney (Theater Dept); class teaching the history and critical theory of American animation with a special focus on Walt Disney. TBA.

• Winter 2010 – Muppet Magic (Theater Dept); class teaching the history, critical theory, and technique of puppetry and masked theatre in the West and East, with a special focus on Jim Henson. Facilitated weekly section discussions and projects, graded 40+ students, and held office hours. Faculty Supervisor: Kathy Foley.

• Fall 2008 – Intro to Digital Media (Film Dept); class teaching the history, theory and techniques of digital art and new media in the 20th century. Facilitated weekly section labs and media projects, graded 40+ students, and held office hours. Faculty Supervisor: Lindsay Kelly.

• Summer 2009 – Writing for the Arts (Writing Dept); required writing class for art majors on how to write about their art for curatorial shows and grants. Critiqued and graded the writing assignments of 15 students. Faculty Supervisor: Roxy Power Hamilton.

• Spring 2009 – Issues & Methods in Theatre (Theater Dept); required theory class for theatre majors that focused on historical and critical readings, especially dealing with theatrical space in Western theatre. Facilitated weekly section discussions and theory papers, graded 40+ students, and held office hours. Faculty Supervisor: Peter Mosktoff.

• Winter 2009 – Intro to Digital Media (Art Dept); class teaching the history, theory and techniques of digital art and new media in the 20th century. Facilitated weekly section labs and media projects, graded 40+ students, and held office hours. Faculty Supervisor: Thea Farhadian.

• Fall 2008 – Muppet Magic (Theater Dept); class teaching the history, critical theory, and technique of puppetry and masked theatre in the West and East, with a special focus on Jim Henson. Facilitated weekly section discussions and projects, graded 40+ students, and held office hours. Faculty Supervisor: Kathy Foley.

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