Recreating Vera Molnár
On Monday, Zach Lieberman taught our first official class of the Spring: Recreating the Past. The class opened with a quote from The Art of Computer Designing, which says “ The work of the past ages accumulates and is remade again.”
In Recreating The Past, we’ll focus on studying artists and then implementing recreations of our favorite pieces with code. This week, we studied Vera Molnár (b. 1924), a French media artist critical to the development of computer and algorithm art known for her abstract geometrical work. Our cohort collaboratively researched Molnár’s history and impact, and Zach walked us through how to recreate a few of her works using OpenFrameworks. We discussed random number generation, random seeds, the difference between randomness and noise, and how to create more natural forms with Perlin noise.
We spent our class time thinking algorithmically and writing code. Zach explained that the goal of this class is not just to practice our implementation skills. The goal of the course is to train our skill in looking closely at works of algorithmic and generative art.
Along the way, Zach shared a few inspiratory resources:
- Re-Coded
- 10 PRINT
- “When the Machine Made Art” by Grant D. Taylor
- HOLO Magazine
- “A Million Random Digits” by the Rand Corporation
Software as Ideology
Tuesday began with our first Dark Matters class, SFPC’s critical theory course taught by American Artist. Prior to the class, students were instructed to read the essay “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge” by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and write a short response. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun makes reference to the group of women who programmed the ENIAC computer, one of the earliest general purpose computers. The ENIAC programming team is historically significant because they were the first group of people to work regularly as professional programmers. Just a few decades earlier, human computers had begun to be hired to solve complex mathematical problems relevant to military and space pursuits (ballistic missile trajectories, rocket launches, etc). Many of the earliest programmers and human computers were women (including Black women, as the film “Hidden Figures” makes clear). Chun wrote “The current commonsense computer science definition of software is a ‘set of instructions that direct a computer to do a specific task’.” By considering that the general-purpose electric computers that we typically envision when we think of a “computer” or of “software” were directly preceded by women programmers and women computers, we reveal a new layer to the definition of software. Software frames the computer as a servile technology, and Chun explains this mentality comes from a (toxic) masculine perception of women–who were the first programmers and computers–as a servile.
American walked the class through excerpts of the text and asked us to split into small group discussion circles before regrouping for a full group discussion. During the discussions, we collectively covered a wide array of topics: anecdotes about software designers who treat ‘users’ as pawns in a game and research on how voice-assistant software respond to harassment. We also discussed how layers of abstraction in programming languages and computer technology influence our critiques of computing’s history. One person responded “All you need to do is press a button to reproduce all of the history of what’s happened… Each new layer of abstraction validates everything behind it.”
Blinks and Beeps
On Wednesday, Taylor Levy of CW&T taught us the basics of circuitry and guided us through the process of making a simple LED circuit during our first hardware class.
We began the class with an overview of some inspiring hardware projects, such as Jean Tinguely’s Radio WNYR series, Loud Objects, Peter Vogel’s The Sound of Shadows, and Yuri Suzuki’s Tube Map Radio. Later, we explored a few analogies to help explain the relationship between current, voltage, and resistance before formally utilizing Ohms Law to analyze an LED circuit. Taylor taught us how to use the multimeter, read resistor values, build circuits on a breadboard, and parse through data sheets for electric components. During the last half of the class, we built small LED circuits powered with 9V DC running through a 5V regulator and practiced soldering.
Meet the Students
Later that day, Taeyoon Choi emceed SFPC’s Meet The Students event for its Spring 2019 cohort. The students were filled with nervous excitement prior to the event, but we were calmed quickly by the supportive energy of the audience–comprised in large part by SFPC alumni. We all learned something interesting about each other, and we left that night with a lot of excitement to be a part of this amazing cohort! You can see a video of the entire event on YouTube.
Scrapism
Sam Levigne opened up Thursday with the first class of Scrapism, a course focused on answering the following three questions:
- How do you make new content with existing information?
- How do you speak with someone else’s work/images/voice?
- How can we automate creative production?
Sam explained that we’ll be developing an understanding for how to address these question by working with Python and the command line to operate on text, images, and videos so that we can create critique, satire, commentary, and poetry.
Sam walked us through a few of his projects (such as his CSPAN-5 Twitter Bot) and showed us some projects by Allison Parrish. He explained that we should think about online media projects as performance art; a few years from now, many of the projects that we may make online may no longer function due to browser updates or due to changes in the social context surrounding the project. Lastly, we did an in-depth overview of the the command line–learning basics like cd, ls, and pwd up to more complex commands like sed, cut, and sort.
Movement
Friday began with two hours of dance taught by Cori Kresge in a studio on the 12th floor of Westbeth Artists Housing. We learned a 32-count dance focused on fluid groundwork and then split into three groups to perform the dance to Nude by Radiohead. Afterward, Cori led us through an exercise that began with controlled stumbling (Level 1) and progressively advanced to free-form dance (Level 5) as we added more freedom to our movements. We left the studio in high-spirits and walked back to the SFPC space in preparation for our last class of the week.
Advice for Artists
We regrouped for our last class of the week–Taeyoon Choi’s class on Artistic & Personal Development. The class opened with a short share from Taeyoon’s parents, Sangmin Choi and Hyeryun Lee, who are in town from South Korea. Sangmin shared a bit about his background as a professor in Mechanical Engineering at KAIST and gave us some words of encouragement.
As a first exercise, Taeyoon asked all of us to take a few minutes to write down our personal definition of Poetic Computation and share it with the class. It was amazing to hear the variety of definitions; Luisa even wrote a poem to define poetic computation! We’ll be repeating this exercise at the end of the Spring session to observe how our definitions have changed.
Taeyoon explained the layers of abstraction involved in a computer (from physics to high-level communications) and talked to us about the historical relationship between Alan Turing and Claude Shannon (see more about these topics in the Poetic Computation Essays). We got to hear about Taeyoon’s trip to Malaysia for the World Arts and Culture Summit while he sifted through his stack of business cards from the conference and highlighted the amazing people he met. Class ended with a conversation about professional development. Taeyoon encouraged us to think of ourselves of artists while at SFPC, which was the most motivating part of the class for me!
