Meeting with Clive McCarthy 11/11.

Following my experiment to create a 3D model of my head, taking the human to an object, the next step would become printing a 3D model of it to create a physical object existing in real space. Then through interactivity to re-introduce humanity back into it:

• Forehead – create a body temperature (possibly using a heat pad and an arduino)
• Mouth – creating the possibility for communication by adding speakers (could also explore twitter interactivity)
• Ear – listening device
• Neck – creation of a pulse to simulate a heartbeat

This can also be using different body parts:

• Head – pulse
• Hand – body temperature, inviting people to hold hands
• Ear – communication/listening

These can then be juxtaposed with objects, that we would normally recognise as an object, given human elements:

• Chair – pulse
• Table – body temperature
• Lamp – communication/listening

Both the objects and the body parts can be reduced to the same level, 3D printed with a default base of no texture/colour. This can then expose the perennial question, does the object with a human face become more human then a chair if both have a pulse? Or would both exist in an inbetween space neither human or object?

Following my experiment to create a 3D model of my head, Adri Schokker (Academie voor Popcultuur, NL) sent me a link to a project he did called ‘Data Sets 2013’, where he made 3D models of his father and grandmother.

The project showed me this process could be interesting to explore just how close to reality a 3D model can be, it may be able to capture a person but is this really them? Adri presents them quietly, giving them a weird but strangely serene effect. Making them peaceful objects existing in a frozen digital moment. I particularly like how it carves out a virtual space for them, giving the sense they are inbetween – inbetween human and object, real and virtual.

http://adrischokker.nu/2015/10/data-sets-2013.html 

Myself and Clive McCarthy were invited to run a workshop as part of Liepāja University’s 7th international New Media art festival ‘iWeek’ 2-7 November 2015 http://iweek.mplab.lv/en/. Of course we jumped at the chance to return and it quickly gave me the idea to combine this with my current MA research, as a way to pose the questions I have been exploring to others in order to see what different perspectives bought and how this could propel the project further.

Our workshop became ‘Human < > Object’:

So we began the long journey to Liepāja on Monday 2 November and after arriving late in the evening we began our workshop preparations on Tuesday. The majority of workshops began on this day in both MPLab and Vecā Ostmala 54 (an abandoned house used by a group in Liepāja to stage events, parties etc and converted this time into the grand base for iWeek), we had a quick look around each of the workshops before a meeting with Santa Valivahina and the International office regarding University of Lincoln’s erasmus partnership with Liepāja University (admin stops for no man).

Our workshop began on Wednesday 4 November in MPLab, our room for the 2 days provided an excellent space for our group to come together and cocoon ourselves away while we explored the concepts surrounding Human and Object. Our workshop participants included a range of nationalities; Dana Rasnaca (LV), Iris van der Harst (NL), Annija Gancōne (LV), Marta Matuzeviča (LV), Kristaps Strungs (LV) and Teotim Logar (LV). Day 1 started with an introduction from Clive and then led into my introduction of the project and the work I had been undertaking as part of my MA practice, culminating in showing the group some of the areas of research I had found inspiring. I posed the questions to the group which included:

• By applying a human form to an object is the object now human?
• Is the human body the defining factor between the human and the non-human?
• Does giving the object a face in turn give that object humanity?
• By flattening out the human body into an object does this take away its warmth?
• Can a human become functional?
• If the body is transformed into having a practical use, does that body therefore become an object?
• Is function purely a defining aspect of an object?

• Does movement give human features an agency they don’t have when the object is just existing as an object?
• Or is the overall effect ‘weird’, evoking an otherness that is neither human or object?

Photo: Valters Pelns

This then led into a group discussion of the questions ‘what does it mean to be human?’ ‘what does it mean to be an object?’ ‘can one exist as the other?’. The students were all switched on and provided some excellent thoughts on the topic that have given me a lot to think about in my own practice:

• Everything is an object, but in order to make it alive it needs a psyche.
• The process of artificial intelligence is producing of something non-human by a human in an act of birth. This is done because those people are attempting to be more human themselves.
• Brains are the only things that named themselves.
• Can we programme love? Humans can love an object, but can an object love you?
• To be human is to have a capacity for speech, or fundamentally communication.

Clive then gave a short tutorial on projection mapping with Heavy M and I gave a short tutorial on my Human Object series, quickly turning Iris into a table with much amusement from the group.

Finally we looked forward to day 2 of the workshop with a day of making/construction and realisation of ideas before the final iWeek exhibition at the end of the week.

So on to day 2; we began the day with a review of the previous day’s discussions and what ideas came out of it that we could visualise and produce. We agreed that these would be in the form of experiments that the group undertook that we would film and edit together in order to present, this matched the experimental thinking of the workshop and became spontaneous reactions to the concepts of ‘human’ and ‘object’.

The 3 main ideas became:

Laugh in a Jar – the idea that a laugh can become an object that you could keep in a jar. A jar that you could take out and hear the laugh when you need to be reminded of that certain person or a form of comfort. This is a human trait that is removed from the context of the human being, into something that is tangible and can be stored. But this laugh can still keep hold of a sense of humanity and being alive.

Objectified Skin – the morphing of hands into objects and objects into skin. Using texture as the main focus, in one aspect the hands are re-textured with object surfaces such as metal, sand, wood and in the other a mug re-textured with skin.

Human Lamp – the physical performance of people becoming a lamp. A very simple experiment that had a lot of impact, people were invited to become a lamp using a lampshade as a prop. People then chose their movement/method of turning their lamp on, this then triggered a projection of the lamp’s light behind them to create a physical and virtual representation of a human lamp.

Myself and Clive worked together with the students to conduct the experiments and capture the final outcomes.

Day 3 of the workshop and final exhibition day on Friday 6 November produced 3 videos of the 3 experiments the group undertook to attempt to explore the concepts of ‘human’ and ‘object’. This was a fantastic group effort to bring all of the thinking together and really highlighted a different approach to thinking that I hadn’t considered previously.

As a group we then decided we would exhibit these projected one on top of the other onto an object in the space. This created the idea of a totem, again traditionally faces as objects stacked on top of each other that presented an effective parallel to our workshop. We mapped these out in Heavy M and then travelled to the main exhibition space to pick our room and set up. When we got there we quickly realised some technical barriers that we had to cross, but together we managed to overcome these. Using a mac mini to power a projector displaying the mapped videos onto 2 doors that had been abandoned in the space, giving these inanimate objects an agency and a life force they didn’t have previously. Bringing them and the room alive with the sounds of laughter from our Laugh in a Jar experiment. (Special thanks goes to Pēters Riekstiņš for the fantastic technical help!)

On the guided tour of the exhibition by the lovely Anna Trapenciere, myself and Clive gave a short introduction to the workshop and what had been produced in collaboration with the students. Inviting viewers to explore the room in their own time.

Photo: Valters Pelns

Photo: Valters Pelns

We then had a chance to explore the other excellent workshop outcomes on display. All in all it has been a fantastic experience and, although tired and exhausted, I am full of inspiration from the new perspectives bought to the research questions which so far had mainly been in my head.

As part of iWeek I was lucky enough to be able to take part in the Open Idea Space on Wednesday 4 November, this was hosted by Andris Vētra and featured people giving 10-15 minute presentations to share ideas and create collaboration networks. I chose this space to give a short talk on the interactive sound installation myself, Andrew West, Alexandra Taylor and Ryan Ashcroft produced as part of our MA project work earlier this year called ‘Mapping an ethical becoming, or, devices for the anthropocene’.

Photo: Valters Pelns

Photo: Valters Pelns

This was nerve wracking but a great experience to speak in public about my work and the ideas myself and my fellow MA students had been exploring. The talks were also live streamed so people outside Latvia could also watch along.

I was then able to have the piece on display as part of the final iWeek exhibition on Friday 6 November, the device was placed on the landing of the stairs from one level to another and captured people’s attention as they encountered it. One piece of feedback noted how the sounds gave a great atmosphere to the space.

Photo: Valters Pelns

Here are some of the final images produced by participants for my workshop Human < > Object for Frequency Festival Fabratory:

As part of my MA research I was lucky enough to be able to run a workshop as part of Frequency Festival’s Fabratory space in the Waterside Shopping Centre on Sunday 1 November.

My workshop centred around my current experiments of the manipulations of the human into an object, creating a workshop that was both thought provoking and enjoyable for adults and children alike:

Human < > Object

Ever wondered what you would look like as a chair, a table or a beach ball?

Join in to digitally transform yourself into an object; make yourself bigger, smaller, distorted or skewed to change your body into that of an everyday object. Using our creativity we can make objects that fascinate and excite those who encounter them.

I set about sorting the logistics for holding the workshop including listing and sourcing what equipment I would need and then how many helpers I would need in order to run it efficiently. Special thanks goes to Craig Bratley, Martyn Arnold and Catherine Chibnall for helping me gather together all the equipment I needed, which included:

• 4 x iMac with Photoshop –  (3 x 21” 1 x 27”)
• 4 x keyboard
• 4 x mouse
• 2 x DSLR camera and tripod (inc. SD card)
• Display board with pins
• Printer
• A5 card
• Table and chairs

I put a call out for technical helps on both LSFM Academy and through Blackboard. I had 2 students reply with their interest; Michelle Yates, level 3 Media Production (specialising in Photography) and Georgia Dawson, level 2 Contemporary Lens Media, and were fantastic in helping me set up and carry out the workshop.

The workshop was also added to the schedule on Frequency’s website:

The workshop itself ran on Sunday 1 November and had 21 unique participants that transformed themselves into either a chair, a table, a beach ball, an umbrella or a teapot. These were then printed off with one copy given to the participant and one pinned to a display board, acting as an ongoing collage of the day. The results and feedback from the public was great, they all enjoyed the concept and it became an interesting talking point to see the weird, distorted bodies appearing. Following on from this it would be interesting to further explore the otherness that these images produce and the effect that then has on a viewer, people perceive them as odd but reminiscent of something you can make a connection with.

I visited the Alien Encounters exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, it featured a collection of solo shows all centred on the theme of identity and what it means to be alien. Each piece evokes the sense of the ‘other’ and how this is portrayed in different ways, including an othering of the human.

The two pieces that struck me were Danai Anesiadou’s ‘Don’t commit suicide just because you are afraid of death’ and Rana Hamadeh’s ‘The Fugitive Image’. Anesiadou’s piece was of particular interest, focusing on the creation of a surreal purgatory and the in-between to reflect that of Greece’s current economic situation. Anesiadou presents vacuum formed/injection moulded bodies and body parts that adorn the architecture of the space, turning the body into an ornament of unknowing in the act of removing the elements of humanity. The bodies/body parts are presented as void of texture with all aspects of the human removed; such as the hair, skin colour, eyes, clothes. Alongside these Anesiadou has created sculptures of the plastic vacuumed personal belongings of friends who haven’t fled Greece, these again reduce the human to an object of their belongings and by vacuum packing this creates an othering/weirdness in the removal of humanity.

Hamadeh’s piece contained an element I was drawn to, the work centres around exploration of Egypt and the wider Arab world today as told through the story of 2 female serial killers in Egypt in the 1920s. As part of the display of the work the sets and props have been laid out in the gallery space, as part of this it details each of the protagonists of the piece which includes ‘Arm-Apparatus’. ‘The arm-apparatus is a mutant organ-in-excess that attaches itself at all time throughout the play to the bodies of the female protagonists. An organ that is neither a fragment of a lost unity nor in itself and entirely differentiated totality, the arm-apparatus’s role is to externalise the functions of wilfulness and depravity that are____ummm____inherent to the female body, turning these functions into legal code.’ This is an interesting concept of turning a human body part into something that is entirely non-human; turning it into an object that has a different agency and being, an otherness that is a ‘mutant’ to the body.

As a form of research I put together a poster series of my ‘Human as Object’ series, posing the questions that had highlighted themselves through the process of making. These were printed out A0 and put up outside the Digi Lab on 2nd floor MHT Building, the hashtag #humanorobject was included for people to send their thoughts and opinions in to build up what it means to be human.

The responses to date are detailed below, an interesting ongoing compilation of perspectives.