Monday 21st Marchpm K edit
APPLICATION FORM MADE CALL FOR PROJECT
1- Applicant Name(s) and Surname(s) (s) applicant(s):
Company, corporation, university: ELK
Country: UK
Website: http://triadicoculus.net
2 - Project title:
'Triadic Oculus'
3- Documentation (digital files to send by email):
For documentation please go to: http://xname.cc/elk and start with README file with description of all material.
4- How does the work address the relationship between the artist (s) and the audience? Please add in any additional comments you have not already provided in your previous application.
(Please refer to the section Participation in our original application.)
What and who is the audience? Where does it begin and end?
The making of Triadic Oculus will be driven by a mobile research hub that travels across Europe interacting, sharing, and learning from the people and places it encounters en route and in residence. These meetings will enable the gathering and creation of data that will be used to feed the work. As well as chance encounters on specific research questions the artists will set up throughout, together with the residency hosts, they will also organise think tanks and workshops, enabling research on oracles and the development of the instrument, Triadic Oculus.
By creating a wide circle of localized contributors and participants, the artists, working as facilitators, will build an expanding knowledge base that will contribute to the instrument's construction.Triadic Oculus as instrument will mediate contemporary dreams, hopes and fears through the personal and collective. This system and the process to activate it will enable the creation of unique art works at every performance.
This process will mean that even though there will be a final performance in Paris, the three residencies and journeys between will create and encounter audience throughout. The specifics of this process are laid out below.
1. Istanbul Residency : conceptual development, Road trip across Europe, September 2011.
In Istanbul, the overall aim will be to collectively devise questions that will be asked to the oracle. It can be said that when audience are invited to contribute to a work during its performance, in this case the asking of questions, they are likely to ask mundane lightweight thoughts. The artists have determined therefore to create a body of questions to expand on the diet for the oracle through recording chance encounters on the road, workshop discussion sessions and think tank type forums they will run in Istanbul through working closely with the residency hosts before arrival and throughout.
The initial conversations will focus on wider perceptions of directing the future. Specifically, the central questions asked will be inspired by the work of scientist Otto Roesler who, during an interview with Eleonora Oreggia in 2008, affirmed that humans are confronted with a crucial decision about cruelty and benevolence only 3 times in their life.
http://xname.cc/elk/cruelty_or_benevolence.aif
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_R%C3%B6ssler
On the road, the artists will set up a safe environment with the people they encounter to enable their recounting of secret and personal experiences when asked to consider the Roesler questions. Chance encounters between strangers travellin can produce setting for revelations of the most intimate nature. These events will be recorded through sound and picture, if the interviewed gives consensus.
Once in Istanbul, the artists will set up a salon within which people will also be invited to comment on cruelty and benevolence, uncertainty and undecidability, and the relation between expectations, imagination, reality, future, present and past. The techniques tried and tested on the road to Istanbul will also be used. The questions to the oracle will look into the future but the questions to the people will invite the consideration of personal experience as well as contemplation on the relation between European and Asian culture and its implementation of differing oracular systems. These sessions will also be recorded if participants are happy.
The artists will also host two think tanks with mixed groups of experts from two fields. The first will be with professionals from the fields of metaphysics and ontology, ie. an ascetic Dervish, an astronomer
, a geologist
, a geophysicist
, an alchemist. The second, professionals in popular culture, politics and temporal religion, ie. a Christian
, a Muslim
, an urban planner
, a practical psychologist
, a local politician
, ' a women's refuge/refugee/care centre practitioner. The aim of these sessions will be to enable some deep discussion and reflection on the wider picture, so enabling the creation of meaningful questions to ask the oracle.
Please see original project proposal for further details.
It is hoped that some of the contributors will accept an invitation from the artists to contribute to a round table discussion and presentation of the areas discussed in a terrestrial Turkish radio broadcast and anonline international one (eg Resonance FM). This will also be to open up the process to wider audience, both locally and worldwide, the artists working as mediators.
2. London, concept to creation January/February 2012:
The focus of the London residency will be threefold.
1. To ask the questions gathered in Istanbul to Londoners, so expanding the European conversation and breadth of material gathered. At the same time, the stories of human questioning and uncertainty through the sounds and images gathered there will be presented locally. Being London based, the artists already have networks, but they will work closely with the London hosts to realize this. An example could be to set up 3 well publicized salons asking a series of questions collected and collated to local residents in three different areas/targeting different communities. Result will be to expand the collection of audio/visual material.
2. For the artists to reflect on and begin the processing of the material gathered in the studio collaborating with local practitioners where necessary such as programmers startx and Lisa Haskel, hardware engineer Alexei Blinov, and media artists Graham Harwood, hacker and engineer Antonios Galanopoulos (GOTO10.org) and open source musician Rob Cunning among others. Also through 3D AV practical research at AudRey research lab, with multichannel sound and image systems, consultation with audio consultant Dave Hunt and audiences invited to a test presentation.
3. To begin the design and build of the Triadic Oculus hard and software. Visually, the system will be a large and tangible layout of circuitry, a triangle approximately 2 m. It will be laid out horizontally on a bespoke framed surface made of a material such as a rich tapestry from Turkey or reclaimed materials gathered on the road or a set of metal legs holding a reflective surface which will also enable light and image reflection in performance. It will be played by the artists and triggered by the audience through an old telephone mouthpiece. Its use and design will be tested in the test presentation, with audience feedback contributing to its rework and completion.
3. Mons, production April 2012:
Again in close collaboration with the hosts, the third residency will focus on running open rehearsal labs to perform and test the machine with a variety of audiences. Here we will also invite input from a Belgian dramaturgh, sound designer, and light and stage designer to realize the best potential for different performance situations. Triadic Oculus will be a flexible system that can be performed inside and outside, weather permitting. Different locations and audiences then will be invited to performances, again feeding into the final stages of its making.
4. Paris, performance June 2012:
This will be the culmination of a year and a half long journey in creative explorations, also across Europe, meeting and working closely with a wide range of people and a database of material narrating feelings and personal stories. The artists are very aware of the amount of trust they will be anticipating from the communities they are invited into and also help create. The study of ancient and contemporary oracular divination will also be central to the research field as well as the opportunity to combine their skills and mixed expertise into one cauldron that will be the Triadic Oculus performance.
In the original proposal, it was suggested that the disused railway line in Paris be used as a performance site. Its movement and location is still inspiring and the possibility of using it as a remote contributor to the event still enticing. However, it is now clear that the show will need to be in Enghien-les-Bains. The artists are therefore keen to work in close contact with the festival hosts to determine the most appropriate site and timing of the performance. T.O will be adaptable to many different kinds of performance sites as already stated, both inside and out. It needs to be accessible to wide ranging audiences. These factors are all part of its design.
5- How can your work be made accessible to the widest possible audience in Europe?
(Please refer to previous question 4.)
The making of Triadic Oculus will start with a bang! The journey will make noise: 3 European women crossing Europe in a van to reach the south-eastern limit of the continent. Before the trip, the artists will have planned meetings with various local authorities en route, using radio, newspaper and TV to communicate the 'mission'. Their experiences through the different places and phases of work will be narrated in chapters for blog, radio and broadcast as they go.
In addition to blogs (Artists talking at a-n.co.uk), streaming, internet, art publications and magazines (furtherfield.net, Art Monthly, etc), and critical theory, the artists intend to reach a wider audience unfamiliar with new media art and experimental creative technology. Their aim therefore is to create an infectious media campaign which will reach and communicate their contemporary form of media, this very new instrument we are building, through the use of old media.
The communication strategy will include newspapers, starting locally with Hackney Citizen, Guardian, the Wire magazine, and then to other European languages and countries and eventually spreading this very European experience across borders of Europe to reach and resonate elsewhere in the world. Radio (Açık Radyo, Istanbul; Resonance FM, London; YouFM, Mons, Radio libertaire, Paris; Radio Popolare, Milano; OndaRossa, Rome) and television will also be approached.
The artists will therefore seek to employ a PR professional to enable this media process and strategy.
Triadic Oculus performances will vary depending on location, but an essential ingredient will be the artists costumes. Each will wear an individually designed dress, made from their oracular and pan European research. Such influences could be shapes and fabrics found in Istanbul, designed in London (proposed stylist: Vivienne Westwood), fitted in Belgium and worn in Paris. The costumes will add a layer of theatre not often seen in media art performance,also expanding audience enticement.
The very nature of the content of this work provides a wide accessibility as it poses essential questions and answers at the heart of all human life.
6- How the work addresses and raises awareness of questions about artist mobility, distribution and intercultural exchanges in Europe?
The method of audience engagement and data gathering described in original application and question 4, shows how the very making and performance of Triadic Oculus will engage the artists as mobile interactive nodes of knowledge and ideas. Collectively devising the oracular questions in Istanbul, bringing and asking them in London, presenting and opening and rehearsing the system in Belgium, and presenting the beast in Paris. At the same time recording sound and picture from people and places throughout that will also feed the work. This work is a mobile instrument, able to mediate the hopes and fears of people across Europe, giving the answers to their questions, whilst simultaneously creating an astonishing art work.
7- How do you justify your technological choices? Please evaluate these choices in terms of the potential of the technologies you have chosen. To what extent are your technological choices innovative?
The artists want to design and build an instrument which recalls a very ancient dream of humanity. One of creating a machine able to make and give answers to problems seemingly unaided.(Leibniz in his monograph 'Dissertatio de Arte Combintoria,1666, described and analyzed in detail his idea of a special alphabet whose elements represented not sounds, but concepts.) The
artists believe that learning how to and building their own instrument through this collective practice will not only inspire and teach all involved, but will also build the foundations of how the work should function. The artists are also curious about any potential power that might become characteristic of the instrument both in terms of electronics and software, through building it with their own hands.
The artists philosophy is that of Floss, Free Libre and Open Source soft and hardware. They will document the process and the techniques used, release the he software and the hardware design open for other people to read, use, learn from, and manipulate. They believe in and will practice a collaborative methodology of research and development that does not base its creative mechanisms on competition but builds its foundation on skill and tool sharing as well as distributed communities of development.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open_source_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_hardware
The artists propose a DIY (Do It Yourself) approach and will refer to its cultural references.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_it_yourself
This is also important as the functioning of Triadic Oculus might be compared to a magic event, but its procedures will not be hidden or secret but very visible on all levels. The artists believe it to be ethically important that the oracular software designed and made is not patented. Also that its use and applications will be functions of their research and so should be brought back into the community to continue to inspire creative use and development elsewhere.
Additionally, the audio database will be processed by a Pure Data (Open Source software) patch and custom software plus CMOS micro logic boards; an algorithmic process whose rules will be influenced by geological, astronomical and other local data (humidity, temperature, etc). This will reconstruct new oracular speech from the database of European voices collected during the journeys and residencies.
http://puredata.info/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMOS
As mentioned before video will be collected via interkomm software (Open Source online video repository developed by Larisa Blazic) and projected using VPT 5.1 (Video projection Tool) using Pure Data feed.
http://projects.plentyfact.org/wiki/interkomm/Manual http://hcgilje.wordpress.com/vpt/
8- How does the project approach sustainability and onwards distribution? (it’s adaptability in production and finances)
As stated in question 4, the making of Triadic Oculus(T.O.) will create an instrument that will produce unique site related art works at every location. It will not just be a one off show but a new and innovative system able to reflect the hopes and fears of the human animal as it hurtles towards the end of 2012. The Paris prémiere therefore will be just the beginning of its creative life.
To this end therefore, the artists will seek contacts and support from the MADE community to tour and perform the work. This process will engage new communities in situ and en route ever expanding its data base and audience. The project will also explore the possibility of working this European made system in Asia, reaching Singapore, China, India and Japan where the artists already have contacts. Similarly the US.
An essential aspect of T.O's design will be for it to be robust and sustainable in its performance and mobility. AV projection equipment, travel, accommodation, fees and sustenance will be all that is required for performances keeping costs adaptable to different situations. Production requirements will also be at a minimum with performances able to occur either inside or out.
T.O.'s online life will also be ever active, with real time blog feeds as other communities become involved. Terrestrial and virtual radio will also be engaged at every new situation. It is also anticipated that a DVD publication will be produced documenting the making and presenting of various performances. Virtual and terrestrial radio and paper publication and interview will also be sought where relevant. To this end, the artists will therefore seek a project manager.
