Dr. Woohoo!

Flash on the Beach (FOTB) ‘09
As promised, here is a link to my slides + lecture notes. It took longer than expected due to reasons: 1) it was my turn to sit next to the sick, coughing family on the flight back from London, where in turn I was sick for the better part of a week; and 2) I felt I needed to exploit the format of the slides by explicitly adding detailed notes to each one – a luxury that an hour presentation simply does not give you. Be forewarned, the notes are random thoughts and it is in a raw and early stage of research. The insights and conclusions I make might lead you in circles, or you might find a grain of truth that is worthy of further examination.

A YouTube Channel for Intelligent Video Art
As I worked my way through several books on Cybernetic Art, Artificial Life Art and Genetic Art, I created a spreadsheet of the names, titles, urls, etc. of video art that continued to grow and grow and grow. I was able to include only a fraction of the video art within my presentation at FOTB, but I wanted to share the entire list with you.

To my amazement, a large number of quality, avant garde videos are available on YouTube. However, with the exception of the excellent MediaArtTube, most of the videos I found were not easily available, especially from an iPhone / iPod Touch. With that in mind, I would like to share with you a new YouTube channel: In The Mod: Video Art++.

The Vasulka Archives
As much as it pains me to find out that a book I desire is out-of-print and unavailable, a void of greater size is created when the same is true for an important piece of video art. There were numerous times during my research for my presentation that I simply could not find relevant videos online. During a conversation I had with Simon from the Santa Fe Complex, he mentioned the Vasulka’s Archive. It turns out that from the late 60s the Vasulka’s have amassed an enormous collection of tapes, papers, videos, articles or magazines of avant garde related pieces for their archive. The archive consists of artwork from a variety of different artists who would donate their personal collection to the Vasulka’s for various reasons including the fact that they knew the Vasulka’s would take great care with their work.

We are fortunate to have Woody and Steina still with us and it is the perfect time to explore a relationship with a foundation to digitally archive this library so that it can easily be shared with future generations. With that said, if you know of someone with a track record of protecting artwork with the highest amount of integrity as well as funding such an endeavor, please let me know and I will forward their information on to the Vasulkas.

Hiatus
On a side note, I wanted to sincerely thank everyone who attended the conference as well as John and Joe for inviting me back for a 3rd year in a row. I feel at home when I’m in Brighton and I love seeing all of my friends again and celebrating this crazy, wonderful journey that we are on. John + Joe put together a conference that feels more like a functional family getting together to share with each other wonderful ideas. With that said, it is time for me to hibernate for at least a year from the conference circuit and focus my energy on creating artwork using the tools that I have created as well as hijacking existing features and functions from a worthy list of creative and mentally stimulating applications. I look forward to seeing you again at some point in the future, as much as I look forward to creating artwork that I would love to share with you.

Grey Walter’s most famous work was his construction of some of the first electronic autonomous robots. He wanted to prove that rich connections between a small number of brain cells could give rise to very complex behaviors - essentially that the secret of how the brain worked lay in how it was wired up. His first robots, which he used to call Machina speculatrix and named Elmer and Elsie, were constructed between 1948 and 1949 and were often described as tortoises due to their shape and slow rate of movement - and because they ‘taught us’ about the secrets of organisation and life. The three-wheeled tortoise robots were capable of phototaxis, by which they could find their way to a recharging station when they ran low on battery power.

In one experiment he placed a light on the “nose” of a tortoise and watched as the robot observed itself in a mirror. “It began flickering,” he wrote. “Twittering, and jigging like a clumsy Narcissus.” Walter argued that if it were seen in an animal it “might be accepted as evidence of some degree of self-awareness.”

Robots built afterward, (given the pretend scientific name Machina docilis) had a simple single celled “brain,” in which they could be taught simple thoughts similar to Ivan Pavlov’s dogs, some of these included, being hit meant food, whistle means food, and whistle means being hit, when he added another, this could become whistle means being hit, whistle means food, this would make the animals become “afraid” whenever food was presented.

Later versions of Macina spectulatrix were exhibited at the Festival of Britain in 1951. Walter stressed the importance of using purely analogue electronics to simulate brain processes at a time when his contemporaries such as Alan Turing and John Von Neumann were all turning towards a view of mental processes in terms of digital computation. His work inspired subsequent generations of robotics researchers such as Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec and Mark Tilden. Modern incarnations of Walter’s turtles may be found in the form of BEAM robotics.

Recently, one of the original tortoises was replicated by Dr. Owen Holland, of the University of the West of England in 1995 - using some of the original parts. A specimen of a second generation turtle is in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution. Another example can be seen in London UK in the Science Museum’s Making the Modern World gallery.” - Wikipedia. More info on William Grey Walter here.