Thesis Research
Through out my research, I really wanted to find different instances of digitization and building of artifacts with narrative and cultural relevance. I tried to look toward technology, pop-art, and crafts.
Autoencoding Bladerunner:
Reconstructing Films with Artificial Neural Networks by Terence Broad
Blade Runner—Autoencoded is a film made by training an autoencoder—a type of generative neural network—to recreate frames from the 1982 film Blade Runner. The Autoencoder learns to model all frames by trying to copy them through a very narrow information bottleneck, being optimized to create images that are as similar as possible to the original images.
The resulting sequence is very dreamlike, drifting in and out of recognition between static scenes that the model remembers well, to fleeting sequences—usually with a lot of movement—that the model barely comprehends.
The film Blade Runner is adapted from Philip K. Dicks novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter who makes a living hunting down and killing replicants, artificial humans that are so well engineered that they are physically indistinguishable from human beings.
By reinterpreting Blade Runner with the autoencoder’s memory of the film, Blade Runner—Autoencoded seeks to emphasize the ambiguous boundary in the film between replicant and human, or in the case of the reconstructed film, between our memory of the film and the neural networks. By examining this imperfect reconstruction, the gaze of a disembodied machine, it becomes easier to acknowledge the flaws in our own internal representation of the world and easier to imagine the potential of other, substantially different systems that have their own internal representations.
How This Relates to My Work
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20th Century Art Movements:
Neo-Dada Assemblage
The term is applied to the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns because of their use of collage, assemblage and found materials and their apparently anti-aesthetic agenda. Dada was formed in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the first world war and lead to art, poetry and performance often satirical and nonsensical in nature. In the 1950s Rauschenberg, Johns and others began to include popular imagery, and absurdist contrast in their work. There were also strong echoes of dada in environments and happenings of the 1950s and 1960s.
Fluxus Narrative & Reconstructivist Mythology
Fluxus art involved the viewer, relying on the element of chance to shape the ultimate outcome of the piece. The use of chance was also employed by Dada, Marcel Duchamp, and other performance art of the time, such as Happenings. Fluxus artists were most heavily influenced by the ideas of John Cage, who believed that one should embark on a piece without having a conception of the eventual end. It was the process of creating that was important, not the finished product.
Deconstructionism, an influential post-modernist literary movement most closely associated with Jacques Derrida, shifted the focus of literary criticism away from traditional concerns such as plot, characterization, and the author’s intent, and towards an interactive relationship with the text in which every word and phrase was examined for all possible meanings, and in which the way the reader chose to experience the work was more important than the work itself. In reaction to this arrogation of the author’s role by the reader, a new style of writing appeared to both fulfill and challenge the deconstructivist reader’s expectations, with characters who are aware they exist within a work of fiction, authors who enter the narrative in order to argue directly with their own characters, and puzzle-box plots that compel the reader to construct her own meaning and interpretation.
Although intellectually dazzling, these works tend to be emotionally inert –all pyrotechnics and no heat. In response, yet another new kind of art and literature has quietly begun to gain in popularity and influence. Traditionalist in some respects and subversive in others, it revives the lost pleasures of classic storytelling, yet as married to some of the deconstructionists’ most dizzying innovations.
Reconstructivist art is a late stage in a progression very similar to the Cycle of Philosophers. Phase I is Stagnation, in this case representing the weariness of the classic forms of literature prior to the advent of deconstructionism. Phase II is Deconstruction, Phase III is Creativity, and Phase IV is Stability. Reconstructivist Art exemplifies the full flowering of creativity in the third phase of the cycle (just prior to the return to a more stable form of literature in the final phase).
How This Relates to My Work: How We Build Narrative Around Digital Semiotics
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Kitsch & Pop Culture:
Anime & Manga - Visual Shorthand
Many people might say “Manga are Japanese comics, and Anime is the Japanese version of animation. Anime is usually, but not always, the animated version of popular manga.” That’s partially true, but it can be misleading. (Note that “anime” in Japan technically means any animated film, and “manga” is any printed cartoon, but people in the rest of the world take them to mean animated films or comics from Japan.)
Some aspects of manga are taken from the West (Osamu Tezuka, the “father” of modern manga, was influenced by Disney and Max Fleisher), but its main features, such as simple lines and stylized features, are distinctly Japanese. It may be that Chinese art had more influence than Western.
With comics, the merging of art and words creates a unique medium. The art pulls in the mind, and the words make the reality. A picture may be worth a thousand words, while words may convey what art cannot, but the two types together are truly powerful. As for Anime, animation can do inexpensively what special effects crews couldn’t even touch until the recent rise of computer graphics. Art is a limited form of virtual reality. Art, however, requires plot to make a story come to life.
Soviet Sci-Fi - Deconstructing the Individual
“We don’t want to conquer space at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly. We don’t want other worlds, we want a mirror.” These words, uttered by the disillusioned and paranoid Dr Snaut (Yuri Yarvet), paint in one simple stroke the existential horror and frightening truth of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 magnum opus from Solaris. A film set aboard a lonely, half-abandoned space station orbiting the equally enigmatic titular planet, Solaris provides a more probing look into the narcissism of man than any film set on terra firma.
How This Relates to My Work: Self Identity & Worldview Through the Absorption of Digital Artifacts
I’m interested in how different artifacts are guided by the culutre that they are in, and in turn, guide self identity. The way that technology is viewed in a Soviet sci-fi film compared to an American film is very interesting. This is also apparent when looking at anime, and the way that it represents beauty or strength. Looking at cosplay as Anime and Manga become even more popular in the states. It joins the cultural zeitgeist of this country in interesting ways.
Architecture:
Brutalism - Intensity of Geometry
Trends are circular and what’s old becomes new again. This is true for fashion, music, and art. In the case of architecture, there’s no architectural style that exemplifies this principle better than Brutalism. From the mid-20th century, this style rose in popularity before reaching its peak in the mid-1970s, when it came crashing down as a model of bad taste. But that’s all changing now, with a renewed interest and appreciation for this once derided architectural style.
Known for its use of functional reinforced concrete and steel, modular elements, and utilitarian feel, Brutalist architecture was primarily used for institutional buildings. Imposing and geometric, Brutalist buildings have a graphic quality that is part of what makes them so appealing today. The word Brutalist doesn’t come from the architecture’s fortress-like stature, but from the raw concrete its often made from—béton brut.
Monumental Building - Meditation on the Cathedral
Known for its pointed arches, flying buttresses, and detailed tracery, Gothic architecture emerged in 12th-century northern France and the style continued into the 16th century. One of the earliest examples is the Basilica of St. Denis, which was rebuilt in the Gothic style by Abbot Suger. Gothic style was used in the design of cathedrals and castles throughout the middle ages, including Chartres Cathedral in France, Westminster Abbey in London, and the Duomo in Milan. In the 19th century, the Gothic Revival, or neo-Gothic, style brought the architectural elements and medieval design motifs back into fashion. London’s Palace of Westminster and St. Pancras railway station and New York’s Trinity Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral are famous examples of Gothic Revival buildings. Learn more about the Gothic and Gothic Revival styles in this special collection, as AD explores historic buildings—and even homes for sale—around the world.
How This Relates to My Work: Creating Megalithic Structures in the Limitlessness of Virtual Space
The virtual space (Unreal 4), allows me an infinite space to really explore the mass and space of a monumental structure that is very similar to Brutalist architecture and cathedral buildings that will be guiding me in my own level constructions build from modular elements and made for meditation and contemplation on our own sublime linked to the digital media that we consume.