Studio Project Two

For this project, students will visualize a machine of their choice, one that is composed of rigid -- or primarily rigid components that can be attached to simple skeleton systems in Maya. Our purpose is to use the history of technology in new tools and procedures for visualization.

We have entered the 21st century, in which visualization in science can be appropriated by artists, to make not only clinical "reproductions" of the models of science, but a set of relationships that create meaning attached to information. In 1959, Eugene Tingluey created, Homage to New York, a machine that was activated by the artist in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art--a machine which "destroyed itself". Tingluey's work is a poignant example of an artist's use of technology in ways that dramatize and make explicit hidden sides, destructive sides of technology.

The Practical purpose of the project is to develop skills in rigid-body skeleton dynamics. Through kinematics and dynamics, students will visualize technology--at the same time that they will take critical looks at error aspects of technology with which we all live: machine malfunction. This will allow students to become critical of technology as well as adept in its beneficial aspects--such as the ability for content production.

Students' animation will be one and a half minutes, with action packed dynamics and kinematics, that is, motion and destruction of the machine in ways that construct meanings: the panorama of meanings in culture, in the universe of relations to which students are poised to enter and act upon.

The Background

As Evelyn Fox Keller and Katherine Hayles show in their studies of the relationship between human and machine, Keller coming from biology to machine and Hayles from the cybernetic machine to the human, technology has wielded originary assumptions into different metaphors. Most often prior to the 21st century, humans were said to be designed as machines; in the 21st Century machines are to be designed, in visionary/revisionary scenarios -- as biological components.

First let us contextualize human and machine. Do we truly know nature, or do we see nature through the effect our media have on our learning and development, do we learn as an effect of technology, and do we use technology even for understanding nature, a phenomenon that is "natural?" If we build machines through which we see everything, then how do we get to "true" nature? On the other hand, do machines reflect nature so well that they are simply excellent expressions of nature? Similarly, have humans always had some supplemental agency of technology?

Return to the Garden of Eden in the Hebrew Scriptures: the natural materials of the garden and the emergence of awareness of "good and evil" -- all the sudden, plant leaves or some other element from the garden are used to cover naked bodies--clothing is Western humans' first tool. In ancient greek mythology, Prometheus steals fire from the heavens: Nature? Culture? or both?

Prometheus's appropriation of fire in the myth and the first humans' use of fire for cultural activities such as cooking, although for survival, were also an immanent knowledge. Knowledge of how to hunt and cook is knowledge that can be passed down to antecedent generations. Now, the activity of cooking with fire, is always already culture at the moment humans create new practices from their material conditions -- which in the case of prehistory is a set of material conditions of the state of nature.

It is better to think of nature and culture as nature-culture and culture-nature, since these terms isolated as either/or break down into each other. Now if we use 3D modeling and animation to build machines, we are constructing culture, based upon a physics based upon "nature". If we build our own machines we are building culture-nature. The first builders of the steam engine, such as Papin, Newcomen, and Watt also built culture-nature. Their engines, or "gins" are representations of physics, models of steam-powered physics powering manufacturing.

Students will want to simulate a machine to encapsulate a machine within computer animation. Does this suggest that the direction of the culture involved in students' machine production moves backward toward nature? It seems so. The flexibility of computing allows nature to become the model for computing at the same time the machine model becomes the "boilerplate" for a dynamics or kinematics.

Machine Dynamics

With Tinguely, the machine's malfunction was its "function". Getting it to malfunction in a sense abstracts the process of building a working machine as a set of conditions and outcomes. Like a mathematical function machine for a mathematics problem, content, i.e. our mechanical history, may be fed into the computer graphics production suite, and so manipulated based upon form/content/suface/depth. In this sense, thinking in terms of successfully-working machines is irrespective of whether the animation creates the image of dysfunction or destruction.

The full range of dynamics (i.e. a set of motions connected to "real" ideas in the world and forming a visual intelligence) is populated either by success or failure, at either extreme. How machines destroy themselves, and how computer simulation might depict a machine which destroyed itself is inextricably connected with communication or the communication of the communication failure.

The dynamics of failure is related to motion dynamics in the same way that successful (i.e. according to rules or laws or tenets) is related to dynamics, although the dynamics of failure, in destroying the object of animation, is a bit more reflexive. The dynamics of failure (i.e. destruction and error) is like a conversely positive shifting of registers in art that draws attention to its means of construction. When computers crash their operating systems, we are suddenly brought into a different register of perception, about just that: perception and consciousness.

Error then, can be considered to be fundamental to success. An artist can successfully animate the destruction of a machine, because the registers of representation and what is outside of representation vary. Just as in computer programming, the technique of encapsulation allows an object to define its use and thus be reused, so too in representation, dynamics and animation, usefulness comes from the incorporation or encapsulation of statements or form/content/surface/depth into reusable parts, distributed to function from the bottom up.

Reading Assignment

Lewis Mumford, from Technics and Civilization, on the pseudomorph.

Lecture on Mathematics of Error Systems