Slava Balasanov

The Digit is a virtual sculpture of George Washington’s index digit, located in Union Square, NYC. You can use this application to view it.

Here is how:

If you are in the south side of Union Square, launch the app and look up. The Digit should appear in the open area near the southern tip of the square.

If you are not in Union Square and want to see the sculpture, you are able to do so vie the settings menu.

Some Extra Info:

The Digit is a response to two specific public art works located in Union Square – the statue of George Washington (the first public sculpture in New York since the statue of King George III) and Metronome – a recent installation about the city’s pacing of time that occupies 3 building facades just south of the square. Incidentally, Metronome includes an enlarged replica of GW statue’s hand (just above the smoking hole). The Digit follows this trajectory by isolating the index digit of George Washington and appropriating it as an emblem of the digital condition.

Thesis Start- Slava Balasanov

ABSTRACT

Throughout my studies at ITP I have aimed at exploring new technologies and the things they are able to offer us. In the mean time, as an artist, I have started developing a visual language that refers to and reflects contemporary culture. As a final thesis I plan on creating a unified body of visual work and present it on a variety of technological platforms. These will be static images, web-based interactive moving images and augmented reality sculptures.

INTRO

One of the biggest challenges I have faced while using novel technology to make art is the ability to present and communicate content clearly. Often times in new-media art the content of the work is either the technology itself. This is a natural process of becoming acquainted with and exploring the new technology. We need to understand the potential of the technology and understand what it can offer and the kind of content it can offer. At a certain point, however, once the technology is familiar and operates in an established cultural framework, work that present the technology itself as content becomes mere novelty at best. Through this project I am trying to make the transition for the exploration of new technology toward the effective use of the technology to convey content.

BODY

The project began with exploration of the augmented reality technology for the iphone. I have built a prototype application to test a simple augmented reality scenario – the user launches the application and is able to observe 3d objects floating in space around him/her through the iphone’s camera feed. As a test object I used a 3d model of a nude reclining woman positioned upright, so some content exterior to the technology itself was present, however, not very well developed. The reaction of users that have tested the applications was very strong. The idea of seeing virtual objects integrated with the surrounding space using the iphone was very effective. The technology enabled simple, common-place interaction – pointing the iphone camera in various directions. It is mobile and common place, yet what it offers is very novel. By now many of us have seen augmented reality examples that use goggles or desktop computers and markers. Yet having a simple way of visualising virtual objects in any environment with your phone opens up the possibilities tremendously. However the question of content becomes immediately apparent. There are already applications that use augmented reality – ‘yelp’ points you to the closest restaurant, ‘look up’ is a game where you get to shoot virtual UFOs. With the current pace of advancement things don’t stay novel for very long, yet the question of how to use the technology in an effective and interesting way is not solved very easily.

The content of the original application, despite not being fully developed, was none the less successful. The 3D ‘goddess’ (as I like to call her) emphasized the connection between the augmented reality technology and its cultural implications. A reflective white cg material was evocative of Greek sculptures and their celebration of the human body. Yet the large solid physical object of the statues has been replaced here with a virtual one, something emblematic of the digital age. This symbol, in turn, draws our attention back to the technology we are using to view the virtual object, thus completing the circle. As we contemplated the 3d goddess, we are faced with the realisation that the divide between the virtual and the ‘real’ is rapidly shrinking.

Ok… so its shrinking… But what now?

I was interested in pursuing working with augmented reality, but I now needed to find content that would put less emphasis on the technology. I wanted to develop a more sophisticated visual aesthetic suitable for the medium. I was inspired by recent developments in internet art aesthetic. In the past 15 years net.art has undergone a transformation from internet technology as content to internet culture as content. In particular, recent work has isolated purely visual language of the net. Since mobile devices are in many ways an extension of the internet it made sense to connect the two ideas. I decided to take a step back from augmented reality and participate in the net.art dialogue. I first I wanted to create a set of static images to explore the aesthetic and participate in the net.art dialogue. Then develop animated version as webgl.

I feel that there is a new and exciting type of art that is prevalent at the moment. It is a mix of internet art, computer graphics and video games. It is rooted in technology, but it is not ‘new media’ art that we have grown accustomed to over the past several decades. Neither is it strictly internet art. A big difference between the earlier predecessors of this new, lets call it contemporary digital, art is that it is not about the technology itself, but rather about cultural phenomena seen through technology. The way we understand culture is has become so deeply entrenched in technology that it is now impossible to understand it without its help. And from an artistic standpoint, there is now an overwhelming amount of raw cultural material which can be used to organized and rearranged in order to reveal something about our current condition.

Let us look at net.art to illustarted the transformation that took place over the last 15-or so years.
Here is how Julian Stallabras describes it:

“ ‘Net.art’ is the term used to refer to a strain of Internet art that emerged soon after the invention and wide take-up of web-browsers in the mid 1990s: it was a conceptually informed art that explored the possibilities of this new arena for art, had an at best ambivalent relationship with the mainstream art world, was often collaborative, and was supported by a lively and disputatious criticism, much of it penned by the artists themselves.” (Stallabras, p1)

There was, of course, a great variety of net art, but for the most part the art was an exploration of the new technology – the internet. Stallabras goes on to say that the early net art was in many ways a modernist project – the medium offered new possibilities and a sort of a new hope to reorganize society into a better, more liberated one – something that has clearly failed in the real world. Artists like Jodi were also interested in revealing the inner workings of the net – the way the actual code operates and what types of relationships we can establish with it. At this early stage of the Internet there wasn’t yet enough cultural content to be able to analyze and re-interpret. It was a blank slate – a place where artists had the freedom to re-imagine the world.

Needles to say, the internet has undergone a major change in the past 15 years. It has become ubiquitous and an inseparable part of culture.

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lg3zf8xLnU1qzau3ro1_500.gif

It is no more a virtual land of endless possibilities, the great unknown, but a well defined set of modes of interaction, exchange and distribution of information, aesthetics. The internet is less interesting now as a technology, but is an invaluable resource when it come to mining for cultural data. As a reaction to the overwhelming amount of new information available online, surf clubs appeared. This was a way for users to sift through and filter the information and organize it in a new sort of way. Blogging platforms, and in particular tumblr helped along with this process. Like scientists, the artists began collecting cultural artifacts found online and recontextualizing it.

The technical aspects of internet art have become different as well. Even though there are still many artists that use web development tools as their medium, many artists use video, static and moving images that don’t engage with the actual code. What make is net.art, is the context of the work and its presentation. It functions as part of the web and produced and consumed with the means of the web.

Another aspect of more resent art work is the emphasis on aesthetics. Early net art was not as much preoccupied with aesthetics as a result of a lack of context, however visual presentation cannot be ignored today. Visual aesthetic is now a part of a cultural equation. They way people understand the net, the way they interact with it has everything to do with layout, colors etc. Cultural meanings are now encoded into purely visual object. The artists have been able to extract aesthetic information out of the plethora of the data collected on countless tumblrs and are now using it in order to construct original compositions. It is embodied perfectly by such online publications as DIS Magazine.

Ever since the appearance of second life the Internet has also become associated with a virtual reality video game. Whether people have participated in it or not, practically everyone knows about it and the phenomenon of individuals retreating into the second life. As a result, the visual language of early computer graphics is gaining ever more importance and relevance in our experience of everyday life.

Another interesting thing to observe is the standpoint of the art. When we wonder what the artist is trying to say, we are at a loss. As John Rafman observes in the koolaid man interview that we have lost the ability to distinguish between affirming and celebrating something and ironically critiquing it. It is hard to be idealistic in today’s world. The internet maybe a great and empowering tool, however it is hard to deny its dissociative alternate-reality wormhole.

An interesting new vein of art that I would like to focus my analysis on is a sort of abstract expressionist painting done in 3d software with 3d paintbrushes and effects. It is illustrated by the group paintfx.biz. Many of these paintings a just experiments, however almost all have a strange and immediate appeal. The glossy, reflective 3d paint strokes are vivid and give off the impression of textile more so then any real material could ever do. They are beautiful, messy and alien. The style is also has a very strong conceptual functions. Instead of the traces of life and energy that are depicted in abstract expressionism, these are traces of digital work – an affirmation of our digital life? or maybe a digital affirmation of life, either way it is a perfect illustration of our current condition – hooked on the internet, dependent on technology and its slick glossy enclosures. We can see through the fake shine and we know that what is in front of us is a 3d rendering of some simple mouse swabs of a paint effects preset, yet we crave and enjoy it. It is better then the real thing, it is light and replicable and immediately consumable.

Bibliography Sources:

Stallabrass, Julian. Aesthetics of Net.Art, pdf
Vierkant, Artie. The Image Object Post-Internet, pdf
Lialina, Olia. Vernacular Web 1,2,3 http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/
Price, Seth. Dispersion, pdf

Schedule:
next five weeks – develop a body of visual work using maya – at least 3 good images
learn OpenGLES 2 and implement some basic designs
five weeks after that – implement some stuff in WebGL and Iphone

Using the idea of augmented reality, coupled with the latest mobile technology, it is now possible to associate virtual objects with physical space. Virtual reality can now finally be extracted from the solitary context of a personal computer and facilitate face-to-face interaction. Similar technology is already being used successfully in a variety of mobile applications such as Yelp and Star Walk but a great variety of possibilities still remains unexplored.

It is an exciting time for augmented reality because it is so novel and, as a result, very effective in capturing people’s imagination and attention. I’m interested in exploring the ways in which augmented reality can be used as a medium of artistic expression and more, specifically, what concepts is the medium most suitable to address.

There are several modes of the application that I would like to explore:
1. Geolocation-specific augmented environment
2. Location-independent augmented environment
3. Geolocation-specific sculpture/installation

I am also interested in exploring networked interaction capabilities by the users. Ideally I would like to users to be able to demarcate particular spaces, either by inserting their own models or by drawing.

Main issues that will need to be worked out is the implementation of a visual language and concepts that the medium can address.

Concepts I am interested in exploring are: cyber sexuality, virtual materialism, virtual territory and communal hallucination.

The visual aesthetic I would like to use is derived from early computer graphics, but more fluid. I want to create materials and objects that do not exist in the real world and convey a sense of mystery and magic.

points of inspiration:
http://paintfx.biz/
http://www.0100101110101101.org/projects.html