undergoing major revision, again.
Cyber-Mediated Landscapes extend sites by rendering digitally-acquired information into visual compositions. The images will in effect be digital portrayals of the landscape that question the relationship between information and the material environment. As technology becomes clandestinely ubiquitous issues of how the analogue world is translated into the digital are raised: how do binary-based artificial systems reconcile the physical world?
The sites chosen for the Cyber-Mediated Landscapes project could be in the forest or the center of urbanity; one of the main goals is to produce a series of contrasting images created from a diverse set of locations. The many characteristics of a site, be it close to traffic, on a hill or in a desert, will unfold visually in the product even if not visually apparent in the physical site itself.
This is accomplished through a mobile sensor unit - outfitted with an array of sensors that are designed to record the site far beyond a simple visual capture. In addition to audio/visual recording, the mobile sensor unit will also record data pertaining to the environment: light, temperature, humidity, motion, and various chemicals (O2, CO2, CO, et al.). Once setup, the sensor unit will be turned on and record data in a multiple of minutes related the the fidelity/aspect ratio of the camera, such that a data sample would be taken every minute for 8 hours for a 640x480 camera. The effect of this process is that every row of pixels within the collected images (480 in this case) can be associated with an entirely unique and individual frame of its own.
Ideally, the mobile sensor unit will function autonomously for extended periods of time. Every minute, data from the sensors is sampled and a photo is taken. The data from the samples will enter the computer as a list of numbers and recorded during the duration of the sampling of the site. The photos will be archived into a linear list, marking down the time and frame number for every photo taken.
Once the sample time is over, the mobile sensor unit is collected. Site-specific software will then be written specifically for the location, emphasizing potentially overlooked or humanly intangible qualities. The software will conflate multiple dimensions of the recorded data into a static two-dimensional visual representation.
I aim to create a series of images for the Cyber-Mediated Landscapes project coming from various locations. Each image would be a collection of images taken over time, mutated and distorted based on temporal, spatial, environmentally-dimensional data. The resulting aesthetic will be formal, emphasizing key attributes for each individual site. The product of the process is specifically analogue, a material record of the digital process.
The original information collected by the mobile sensor unit serves as an analogue to the photograph - a portrayal of a space in a site for a finite time. What is different is that the mobile sensor unit will present much more than a simple visual capture of the site; the mobile sensor unit will digitally record humanly unquantifiable transient attributes as well. What is presented is a compression of time, space, and other site-specific dimensions of information.
What separates this project from traditional data visualization is that the software will not be written to be expressly quantifiable to the human eye. Instead of graph-like visual representation, the software will produce images that visually portray the digitally observable (but humanly invisible) site-specific data readings. The images will be temporally confused and environmentally impacted. Despite these abstractions, computerized “randomness” will play no part within the development of the visual images.
The role of the computer in this context is simply an expedited codifying process. The process itself does not rely on any form of data generation from the computer - the software is simply a series of calculations applied to the inputted data. These calculations however, will not be treated as a repeatable process between sites as each site will have software written uniquely for that site’s specific qualities.
The Cyber-Mediated Landscapes project hinges on the software’s relationship to the site. How can software engage a space? Describe it? As an instantiation of site-specific software, the Cyber-Mediated Landscapes project calls into question the relationship between abstract digital information and the physical world.
"We ourselves will then go beyond zero."
Kazimir Malevich
Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square is visually bare: an opaque quadrilateral, painted in black on white canvas. Despite this visual simplicity, Black Square engages an infinitude of forms, engaging in a generative process that manifests a self-referential utopian language.
As a creator of software, I find extreme elegance in Malevich’s piece. Black Square was much more than a simple form on canvas, it was the embodiment of an ideology reduced to its simplest elements. Software, confined to algorithms and data structures is in essence a very close analogue to what Malevich envisioned: a transcendental system of communication. This is not to say that digital systems are not restrained by the inherent properties that define them; as an artist and programmer I believe that software is both communicative end as well as beginning. I believe I must push my digital works beyond the simple algorithmic structures that define them. Software must extend beyond ones and zeroes.
My work is driven by the examination of the limits of digital technology. Without a doubt, this technology has afforded humankind a dramatic shift in agency: our movements, speech, actions are converted into digital signals that seemingly render the physical as the ineffectual link in the chain of contemporary invention. Paradoxically, it is physical action that create new avenues for this abstract flow of information. My focus is rooted in the examination of this process: what does this confluence of informational and analogue worlds afford us?
As a young child, Nik Hanselmann was taken against his will to countless art galleries and museums with his Game Boy as the only thing to save him from supreme boredom. Little did he know that he would spend the rest of his life reconciling that trusty device with what so fervently disinterested him at the time.
twitter
flickr
facebook
Equipment
Jessica's