En-light-ening Imagery.

Some more progress on my Pushbutton Prayer Bead For() Loop Computer Meditation project.

(lightspeed recap [pardon the pun]: a for() loop is like the meditative rosary prayer of a computer. I'm trying to make prayer beads where each bead is a pushbutton that "meditates" on the color of a pixel in an image, looping through the whole image in a sort of computerized rosary prayer, and filling the room with that color as you go)

I've successfully translated my pushbutton LED color test sketch from Arduino to Processing (using the Arduino/Firmata library), which means I can start playing around with the visual display and image control alongside the hardware input/output.

My original plan was to use pushbuttons to control the color of the light in a room through the use of LEDs, but it suddenly occurred to me... I may not even need a bazillion LED's like I feared (though I might go that route anyway). I could theoretically output the color to a processing display window that is merely flooded into the room via digital projection instead of physical lights. The only hang up would be networking multiple projectors if one doesn't cut it, which I don't quite know about yet. Stuff to ponder...

...but in any case...

I can now control both the color of the LED and the color of the "pixel" on the screen by use of the pushbutton switch (cycling between 3 colors - I chose red green and blue for ease of troubleshooting)

Next, to make it cycle through the actual colors of the pixels in an image instead of pre-chosen colors. for this test, I chose a 100x100px thumbnail of my Meditation 1.1 drawing, and wrote a code to manually loop through every pixel (replicating the automated process of a for() loop), advancing one pixel every time the button is pressed. The RGB of that pixel then gets output to the "pixel" on the right side of the screen and the LED (though they all look slightly bluish in this video).


In my next studio session with this project I'll be looking to somehow highlight on the leftmost image what pixel is being displayed, and then maybe play around with easing in/out of the color (rather than it disappearing suddenly when the button is released).

Getting there, slowly but surely!

Go to my Next post for this project

How Computers Meditate: A New Project

For() Loop Meditation

In programming, a "for loop" is a way of performing an operation on a series of items. For example, looking at every individual pixel of an image, one after another, and doing something to each of them. It goes something like this:

for(x=0; x<100; x++) {
    pixels[x] = color(255);
}

Transliterated to english: 

for every integer (starting with 0; and going up to 100; incrementing 1 after each time) {

    look at the corresponding pixel assigned to [that integer] and set = it's color (to white);

}

To look through a whole image, you'd have to include the y dimension as well as the x, but you get the idea: You look at a pixel, do something to it, move on to the next pixel and repeat until you reach the end. The more I thought about this, the more I felt like the computer program was almost meditating, completing a mantra, repeated for every pixel it looped through... a for() loop is a computer meditating!

Now then, for a temporary non-sequitor: 

I took a trip to the Rubin Museum, where they had an exhibit of Tibetan Prayer Beads, and began studying the theory behind them - why 108 beads, how they're used, what materials amplify prayers to what degree, etc. I'll share a bit of their enlightenment with you:

...and suddenly it hit me! It occured to me that the "meditation" of the for loop is essentially a rosary prayer! As you move from bead to bead you complete the same prayer for each bead until you reach the end.

Imagine:

for(bead=0; bead<108; bead++){

    sayPrayer();

}

Pushbutton Prayer Beads

I wondered if there could be a way to meditate on an image, pixel by pixel, by using "prayer beads" made of pushbuttons. Every bead's button advances you to the next pixel. Perhaps the room even fills with light the color of that pixel when you press the button. Even more, maybe that pixel then gets assigned a random size and location on a wall and gets projected into a random collage, reconfiguring the image (starting to tap into the mystical, apophatic deconstruction of the image - knowing it less as you know it more...). Maybe the image in question is even derived from a live snapshot of the viewer himself...

My naive pre-prototype (and much pre-studying) sketches and notes:

Pushbutton Prototypes

For the end result, since I will want the signal to run through the chain of buttons to whatever button in the series happens to trigger the change, I'm guessing I'll probably want NC pushbuttons (Normally Closed; pressing them breaks the circuit) instead of the standard NO (Normally Open; pressing them completes the circuit). Otherwise the circuit will always be broken by all the buttons except the one in play. Don't have any of those right now though, so I decided to get started with some very basic pushbutton prototypes.

1) I started off with the prebaked arduino pushbutton tutorial. Two pushbuttons are set to input pins (2 and 3 in this case) that tell an LED (set to the standard output pin 13) to turn on if one button is pressed but not if both are pressed.

2) Using a microcontroller for this seemed like overkill, but it afforded me the opportunity to learn about pull-up resistors and other stuff that will come in handy when its no longer overkill later. But I wanted to see if I could back up a bit and do the simpler task: prove my understanding of the circuitry by bypassing the microcontroller. So I made a simple pushbutton circuit (hooked up to a battery instead) that would turn the LED on if the button was pressed. No fancy logic statements for the coordination of two buttons, but it worked, so I felt reassured about moving on!

technically I really don't know if the resistor used is the appropriate strength. I didn't do the math (nor claim to really understand how to... Ohms law is still a hypothesis in my mind...) but I know LEDs can handle a range of voltage so I wasn't too worried about blowing it out.

And of course my wife just informed me this was all stuff she learned in high school science (I blame a new system in middle school that placed me in the wrong math track for the rest of my academic career)! Well, better I catch up now then! (For the record, I know this stuff is elementary and did learn it quite early on. I think it's the practical application I missed out on)

3) Now to see if I can write a sketch to control the color of an RGB LED and cycle through the colors based on the push of a button. First, a sketch equivalent to the first one controlling the red LED, but where each RGB value could be manually input.

4) Finally, modifying that sketch so that the RGB values are indexed as options of a switch case function, and each button press cycles through those options. Here I selected 3 random color combinations to cycle through.

Added a switch case with 3 possible RGB values, and then a Button State Change function that switches between case options whenever the button is first pressed.

Hopefully these are the beginning steps to then populating that list of possible colors from the pixels of an image, and then stringing enough lights together for a big effect, and enough buttons together for prayer beads! To be continued

Continue to the next post about this project

Sometimes Things Don't Work Until They Stop Working

I've been tweaking and refining a submission for the 6x6x2014 anonymous small works show, and have hit nothing but roadblocks and failures. My first post explains a bit of what I set out to do, creating a QR code image from a Meister Eckhart quote that takes the viewer to random pages of text relating to the quote. My next post talked about all the problems I encountered when, after nearing completion, it first failed to be visible and then failed to function. I was close to scrapping it, but if I could figure out a solution, it may become the beginning of another leg of my Meditations series, and be integral to another future project I have in mind. So I decided to press on and keep tinkering.

I was reluctant to undermine the conceptualism of the original drawing method. The graphite transfer acts as a mediator between my hand and the work (mirroring the mediator of the screen between the viewer and the work), harkens back to the manual reproduction of medieval scribes (who might have originally transcribed those very words), and also alethically conceals the finished product from me as I reveal it. But for the sake of the experiment, I had to try to isolate what went wrong. So I began trying to thin and refine the letters using charcoal. I didn't want to use a direct, additive procedure, which felt like cheating, but it at least shared the carbon base of the carbon paper used to transfer the image.

This, as it turns out, did absolutely nothing to help the scannability of the object!

...Which is actually good news, because it meant that the additive process that I thought might cheapen the transfer method was indeed unnecessary. 

My next (and perhaps last) idea was simply to shade in the white letters a touch to help the black/white contrast of the pixels. I used the charcoal again, but this time just lightly dusting the letters. And sure enough, Eureka! It's finally a functioning QR code!

The more I thought about it, the more I actually became quite satisfied with the solution, in light of the project's already alethic proclivities. The negative space actually only becomes functional when, by a counterintuitively additive process, it is brought into closer alignment with the positive, in a way actually negating the negative space. The image is readable only when it becomes less readable. That seems to me to be the only proper usage of a positive mark making tactic, anyway. Ao, bringing the piece more closely into a state of negation is the only way for it to become functional (furthermore, the destinations, if you try it, tend to be confoundingly apophatic in terms of shedding any light on the subject matter of the quote, which, is itself about unknowing!)

These, of course, are all subtleties and technicalities buried in the process of the piece's creation that will not necessarily be intelligible to the viewer. I recognize that, but it feels very important to me that the piece has a certain integrity in the way it is made, that it holds together conceptually from beginning to end regardless of it's perceptibility. It's a "They probably won't ask, but at least if they do I have a good, solid, honest answer" sort of thing.

And so, after teetering on the brink of becoming trash, the piece is revived with a small, additional layer of conceptuality. As is the case with a lot of work, it is often only when it is at the brink of falling apart does it really begin to hold together in interesting ways. This is just a mild example of that.

So that's two pieces down for this show. Maybe a third is to come... It depends on how much time and willingness I find to nurse another disaster back to health.

Alethic Problems

The ancient Greek potters used to use a blind method of drawing that only revealed the marks upon firing the pot. It was part of their alethic worldview, that the product, in being revealed by its making is also concealed even to the maker. This project I've been working on for the 6x6x2014 show has proven to be much the same way. first, having drawn a QR code with a Meister Eckhart quote imbedded in it, I endeavored to graphite transfer this image using carbon paper onto the 6x6 board.

primed masonite board, with carbon paper and drawn code

 Of course, for fear of shifting the image, you can't look at the board underneath until you're ready to peel up the whole thing. I wouldn't know if the transfer worked until it was finished.

It didn't.

Alethic fail #1.

I managed to peel up just enough of the corner to see that the image was too faint where I had traced it with pencil. So I took to the studio once again and retraced the whole image using ballpoint pen and a considerable amount of pressure.

During the next big alethic reveal, I found the image to be satisfactory!

peeling up the transfer layer to reveal the carbon copy underneath

...And then I tried scanning it. If all went according to plan, the image should take you to a random page excerpted from books that relate to the quote.

Alethic fail #2.

Nothing.

So now I'm left scratching my head, trying to figure out what portion of the image is causing it not to be readable by the QR code app. It's either the white letters inside the black causing too little of a distinction between the pixels, or its the slightly fainter squares here and there. The original drawing works, so something got lost in translation. The bigger question though, is how to fix it once I isolate the problem, without compromising the conceptual integrity of the mark-making. I wanted the graphite transfer both for its alethic blindness and its level of mediation between the hand and the final product (almost like the screen that mediates between viewer and object when scanning). I wanted it to be a sort of anachronistic nod to the medieval scribes who might have copied the quotes the very first times, duplicating the image in a very tangible, manual way. How to retain that and still fix the contrast issue...That one I'm not sure about yet...

Contemplating Being

I've been trying to engage lately in new contemplative practices. In particular, I wanted to try to synthesize a method of contemplation that would hold up in both contemporary philosophical and traditional mystical contexts, which led me once again to the intersection of God and Being.

This explanation requires a quick romp through Heraclitus, Heidegger, and Eckhart. Aletheia - the Greek notion of truth that Heidegger favors - according to Heraclitus is like a flash of lightning (Lichtung in Heidegger's German evaluation). This illumination reveals itself by making known things in their "thingness," yet conceals itself by redirecting our focus away from the truth of Being (the flash), towards the quiddity of a being (that which is illuminated by the flash). We see not the lightning itself, but the trees, rocks, etc that the brief flash illuminates. John D. Caputo, in Heidegger and Aquinas puts it this way,

"The mistake of mortals, against which Heraclitus warns, is to turn from the clearing as such and in the clearing, to turn away from presence in favor of what is present... 

The Greeks experienced logos [the organization of the gathering into presence that aletheia reveals] but never thought it, and that includes Heraclitus. They allowed Being to come into language as the difference between Being and beings, but they did not name that difference as the essence of language."

Essentially, the common mistake is to miss the forest for the trees, to see what is illuminated rather than the illumination itself and mistake that for true Being. Heidegger calls this the "oblivion" that we must overcome by thinking Being.

For a while I tried very hard to "think Being," to turn my eyes to the lightning itself and overcome the oblivion. I tried very much to see things not as things, but as the result of a revelatory act of Being, and fixate on that Being itself. But I soon realized I was way off base - at best misguided in my methods.

I was trying too hard, becoming too attached to the object in hopes that it might transfigure before my eyes into something strange. But any diligent mystic could quickly catch my error, citing Eckhart's insistence on Detachment.

Detachment is the "letting-be" described by Heideggerian gelassenheit. Again I defer to Caputo:

"In gelassenheit we put ourselves at the disposal of the matter and no longer attempt to reign over it with our concepts. In our surrendering to it, it alone holds sway; the matter is not seized about, but let-be and hence preserved in its inexhaustibility... lethe [forgetfulness/concealment - in this case the preservation of the unknowing of the object that goes hand in hand with the a-lethic revelation] is lost therefore the moment that thinking detaches itself from the thing and assumes the posture of an onlooker, of the judge and jury of the 'object.'"

A quick note on the dialectic of lethe/aletheia: It is important that the two go hand in hand, knowing and unknowing - the object must be both found and lost, revealed and concealed. If one were to only gain knowledge (terminating lethe) then the contemplative act would cease because our knowledge of the object would cease to be subservient to the object's Being, causing us to lose sight of Being and fall back into Oblivion. And if one were to revel in lethe (never reaching aletheia), one would never see the being in its Being, remaining in Oblivion.

This exercise becomes a mystical one when the "object" of our gaze becomes not a tree or a rock, but God him/her/itself. The overcoming of Heideggerian Oblivion is actually the retention of the Oblivion. We come into the knowledge of Being only to lose our knowledge of the being, which is in itself an instance of Being (and God may or may not even be Being itself, depending on who you ask). Our gaze is cast upon God, to see Being in the Lichtung and consequentially know less about it than when we started. We must let God be, clearing ourselves in an act of faithful gelassenheit. This gives the object, God, free reign to Be above and beyond our expectations and understanding. Perhaps we may even catch a glimpse of it.

May we suspend our propensities for judgement and control, that we might encounter divine Being and unknow it all the more.

Artist Statement Workshop, 2/15

My Next Course Offering at The Collective Art Tank: Next Saturday!

[Click the image to register!]

6x6x2014

I've had several buns in the oven lately, one of which is a pretty interesting opportunity at the Rochester Center for Contemporary Art called 6x6x2014. All submissions are 6" x 6" works that will be hung anonymously and sold for $20. Only upon purchase will the artist be revealed. They have a history of doing this each year and deliberately attracting a range of artists, from school children to blue chippers (they have a list of the most notable people who have participated).

This type of art market institutional critique is gaining traction - I first heard of it being used in a drawing show in Europe a few years back, and many other galleries have tried their hand at the anonymous egalitarian thing since.

Here are some shots of my buns (not those! the ones from the metaphor above! geez), still being baked:

A 6x6 gray card erasure drawing

Prepping a board

Making a version of the QR code Eckhart quote used for the back cover of my monograph

Just about ready to graphite transfer onto the board...