Rhizome Commission 2009 Application: The Shape of Change
Melanie Crean
With Aaron Myers
Application Index
The Shape of Change: Synopsis
The Shape of Change will examine the perception of change, differentiation and independence in personal and political contexts through two projects. The first is an expanded sculpture project exploring the evolving nature of the United States’ relationship with Iraq, examining citizens’ concepts of political change, freedom, and civic agency; and creating a series of visualizations, sculptures and dialogs from the acquired data. The second is a musical performance generated by analyzing sound, image and movement data from the first months of a baby’s life as he learns to walk and speak. The sculpture work will explore the development of sovereign political states; the performance work will investigate the creation of human subjectivity. Comparing the two will portray the nature of separation and formation of identity, from a macro and micro perspective, as expressed through music and sculpture.
The sculpture project will visualize what American and Iraqi citizens feel would constitute meaningful political change as their two countries seek to function as independent, sovereign states. It will begin with people expressing their individual opinions about the meaning of political change, civic agency, national identity, democracy, and freedom through on line form or direct interview. Information will be archived in an open source database and be used to generate online data visualizations and physical sculptures to help visualize the material in a new way. On line respondents will be able to see their information in the context of the larger data cloud, to help consider how their voice relates to local, national and international opinion. Visualizations will be dynamically reconfigured according to location, keyword and date indices. The project will remain online through 2010, and visualizations will be dynamic, evolving as answers vary according to changing political conditions. The project will be further contextualized through community dialog, as paired American & Iraqi cities discuss patterns and questions that arise from the visualizations in a series local public conversations. Finally, the dialogs will be transcribed as sculptural texts and sent to the US & Iraqi leaders along with printed recommendations agreed upon by the communities. Though the final form of these texts will ultimately arise from community discussion, one example might be to transcribe the dialog in book form, and laser cut the recommendations into the pages (the absence signifying the awaited government response), along with a laser cut relief of the online data visualization taken from the day the recommendations were made.
The second project, will be an improvisational music performance created from a digital score, made by analyzing patterns of sound (speech), image (drawings), and movement (crawling, walking, running), data gathered during the 8th – 24th months of my new baby’s life. Each month, my child’s movement, vocalizations and markings will be recorded and digitized as he learns to move and speak on his own, and thus begin the process of separating himself as an individual. Data will be analyzed for persistence, change, shape and pattern through custom software (written in Processing). Information will be processed to create a series of drawings to be displayed together as an animation, that will serve as a projected musical score, for improvisational musicians to interpret in performance. By analyzing the evolving cycles and patterns, music and image will trace the child’s formation of his own individual agency.
In the United States, non-profit groups are currently assisting in driving traffic to the interview website. A social networking initiative will begin in late May. In Iraq and countries where Iraqis are living in exile, such as Jordan and Syria, journalists are currently assisting in gathering responses through direct interview, and information is being translated in the United States. After a critical mass of approximately 100 interviews has been collected in summer 2009, the web site will be redesigned to feature data visualizations. To create them, a mySQL database storing the responses will be analyzed by custom Processing software written by Aaron Myers to dynamically reconfigure the data as referenced by keyword, location or date indices. All physical sculptures created from the data will take into account the impact of dynamic change over time (example: creating worry beads from 52 weekly 3D cloud prints).
| Jan – March 09:: | Create initial web site & mySQL database. Form relationships with US & Iraqi groups to help drive traffic to the web site or conduct local interviews in person. | |
| April – June 09: | Translate Iraqi interviews, create 1st version of processing environment, first prototype of visualizations. | |
| June - August 09: | Continue gathering data, create 2nd version of processing environment, visualization prototypes and website in response to increased data. Begin planning physical sculptures. | |
| Sept – December 09: | continue refining processing software environment, website interface and visualizations. Create initial physical sculptures. Plan local dialogs between paired US & Iraqi cities. | |
| Jan – May 2010: | cross country dialogs take place | |
| June – Aug 2010: | create final sculptural object / recommendations from political phase | |
| Jan 09 – May 2010: | Gather sound, image, movement data for 2nd phase of project, concerning life of a child. | |
| Sept - Dec 09: | Create initial processing software for analysis of early child data, show various sequences of shapes / drawings to musicians for feedback. | |
| January - March 2010: | Second iteration of software & musician feedback. | |
| April – June 2010: | Final version of software, optimizing both visual quality of output images and ability to be interpreted by musicians. | |
| Summer 2010: | Public performance of 2nd phase, documentation & archiving of both phases. | |
The budget for the first phase of the project, which support is being sought, is $7,000. Please see attached budget.
Melanie Crean will be in charge of the overall conceptual framework, direction and management of the piece, acquiring initial data, as well as producing physical sculptures and conceptual works.
Melanie Crean is an artist and teacher based in Brooklyn, NY. She is an Assistant Professor of Media Design at Parsons the New School for Design in New York City, teaching production and theory based classes in experimental time based work, mobile media and gaming. As the former Director of Production at Eyebeam (eyebeam.org), she founded and managed a cooperative studio that supported the creation of socially based media, working with new forms of moving image, sound, public art and open source software. Previously, Melanie worked at the MTV Digital Television Lab, leading a team of artists to design special effects, performance animation, motion capture and speech recognition systems. She produced documentaries in Nepal, India and the United States, on subjects that include women trafficking and the spread of HIV/AIDS along trucking routes in South Asia. Melanie received a BA in semiotics and film production from Brown University, and a MFA in computer art from the School of Visual Arts. She has received fellowships and commissions from Art in General, the Bronx Arts Council, Harvestworks, NYFA, NYSCA, Rhizome and Creative Time.
Please see attached resume for Melanie Crean.
Aaron Myers will be in charge of software design and programming, creating the series of data visualizations to be featured on the site, emphasizing changing patterns in the data that will later provide the grounds for both the physical and conceptual sculptures.
Aaron Meyers is a designer and programmer using generative strategies in the creation of software and moving image. Since earning his MFA at the USC Interactive Media Division in 2007, Meyers worked in the now-defunct Yahoo Design Innovation Team, taught classes at UCLA Design|Media Arts and continues to work on a variety of interactive projects for diverse clients that have included Digg, Radiohead, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
Please see attached resume for Aaron Myers.
Melanie Crean
The Luminists (sound and video projects explore the nature of vision, based on recorded phone calls with three artists who lost their sight but continue to make art: Alice Wingwall, a photographer; Carol Saylor, a painter turned sculptor, and Tara Inmon, a painter turned writer. Topics of discussion ranged from: what vision meant to the women now that they could no longer see optically; how they continued to visualize the world around them in their minds eye; how they imaged their work; and what they found beautiful. The Luminist sound project is an abstract 5.1 audio installation created with composer Paul Geluso. The Luminist video project is an experimental video produced in collaboration with animators Kun-I Chang, Luba Drozd and Enrique Maitland to visualize the audio’s content in different styles, inspired by the personality of each artist. The project was supported by a commission from Art in General.
Phrenology investigates the relationship between memory, writing and the perception of space, though writings created by incarcerated women.An installation version consists of a series of 360 degree photographic panorama that interconnect through text written by women in a workshop at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. The photographic panoramas serve as visual analogies to the writing. Viewers move through the different environments to read the women’s writing in a form of spatial poem, accompanied by an experimental sound track composed by Paul Geluso. A single channel video iteration depicts the camera floating through the environments in series as they might appear chronologically in the life of the writer, accompanied by a 5.1 surround sound track of the women reading along with ambient sound. An online component will be created in Second Life, where anyone experiencing isolation would be welcome to create a module of the poem to share their experiences. The project was supported by harvestwork.org and rhizome.org commissions.
Aaron Myers
Torrent Raiders, a 2007 Rhizome commission, uses the idioms of arcade video games to visualize the activity of actual bit torrent swarms. Participants take on the role of a mercenary copyright enforcer, collecting information on the same users with which they are sharing files.
The video for Radiohead's House of Cards was shot without the use of cameras. Instead a number of different laser sensors were used to collect 3D spacial data used to create the imagery in the video. The video was accompanied by an online viewer and an open source distribution of the data with Processing-based demos.