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So today for you
in this hall in the
early morning will be something
that will make you feel
things about
things that are not
in the in the three dimensional
or six dimensional space that you
see or that you can touch.
But our
first speaker today will tell
you about how to
evoke emotions with
or to kind of
sculpture art from
things that are maybe
not not nothing more than thin air, but
that will nevertheless touch
you.
So first start today is
called visceral systems
approaches to working with sound and
network data transmissions as
a sculptural medium.
And we're talking today.
First talk is Sarah Grant's give a
warm round of applause for Sarah.
Thank you.
So, yeah. Good morning.
Thank you for the introduction.
Thank you for having me here at C.C.C..
I'm really excited to give this talk.
Actually, it's
something I've been thinking about for a
long time. And I'm I'm happy to
present it to you this morning.
And also thank you for coming here.
I know that eleven thirty is quite
early for a morning at C.C.C..
So.
So, yeah.
My name is Sarah Grant.
I to me, I'm a media artist and an
educator.
I'm part of the vises, even studio
in in Berlin.
And I'm interested in systems,
radiowaves computer networks
and also sculpture.
I have an arts practice with networking
technology as my medium and
also a teaching practice that works to
promote Internet literacy.
Cracking open this blackbox that
we know of as the cloud,
bringing awareness that there are
alternatives to commercial providers if
we want to exampled simply hosts our own
Web site or run our own
KAT community network.
And I think it's a vital importance to
have a basic understanding of how the
Internet works so that we ourselves
can be creators and not just passive
consumers of the Internet.
And not only that, so that we're equipped
to be critical of it, because it's
you can't really be critical of something
if you don't know how it works or you
don't know what's behind the
the the facade.
So.
Actually, to that point, I also organize
a conference called Radical Networks in
Brooklyn, New York, with my colleague
Erica Kermani.
It's a four day event that has talks,
workshops and an exhibition
featuring critical investigations
and applications of Internet and radio
technology.
So the spirit of the event is to give
beginners and the community a safe
space to come learn about and discuss
issues such as surveillance,
ownership of personal data, and to again
dismantle this opaque notion of the
cloud.
But today, I want to talk about something
pretty abstract,
something that I've spent a long time
thinking about and actually feeling.
But I've only recently started publicly
talking about this idea
of visceral systems as apply
to sound composition
and computer networks and
to sort of impact that.
I want to do it within the following
framework of first giving a bit of
my background and some of my past
influences and also
therefore explaining my my relationship
to sound and networking technology.
But first, I need to
offer some definitions just to lay the
groundwork with the caveat that I'm going
to be bending these definitions quite a
bit.
So the first is
this term visceral
from medicine, that visceral,
referring to the viscera, the internal
organs of the body, specifically those
within the chest as the heart or lungs
or the abdomen as the liver, pancreas
or intestines.
In a figurative sense, something visceral
is felt deep down.
It's a gut feeling.
And then this idea
or the definition of what a system is
from from Oxford, a set
of things working from Oxford Dictionary,
a set of things working together as parts
of a mechanism or an interconnected
network, a complex whole.
So while a visceral system
usually refers to the system of the body,
I'm bending the term to mean a system
which evokes a visceral feeling feelings
of textures, colors,
dimension, mass
to both sound compositions and
communication systems to systems that
I, I actually didn't intentionally,
you know, choose to, you know, to
work with in order to explore these
concepts for more.
I just noticed I felt these things
in relation to these systems, so they
kind of chose me.
So to explain maybe how I
got here, I want to back up
about 30 years.
One of the defining influences in my
life.
If he if any of you recognize these icons
was discovering two software
applications, the one on the left,
four is the icon for resident
or resource editor and
the one on the right is HyperCard.
When I was about 10 years old on my
parents Mac Classic.
Rosette, it is.
A resident is an application
that was used to create an edit
application, resources like icon
bit maps, the shapes of windows,
the definitions of menus and their
contents and the application code.
The first time you know me on my parents
computer was often me, especially
on on the Mac was me just
dragging things around the desktop and
seeing which would, you know,
light up over different applications and
then drop it in seeing what would happen.
And fortunately for them, one of these
applications was Roset It
and which led to many
system crashes.
But anyway, the first time I was able to
open up a piece of software with Red at
it and watch it disassemble into a
collection of icons
and hex code
as whatever as it sounds, made actually
a major impression on me as a child.
I mean, the the code made
no sense to me.
What I saw made no sense to me
at all. I had no idea how to persuade
stumbled into it.
So instead of looking at it rationally as
a computer program, my child's mind
connected to it
visually, viscerally, even.
Instead of software, I noticed
the texture of the black and white
characters.
I noticed the lines and and
the shapes that came forward
out of out of the code.
And, you know,
while I do know what this actually
was, I knew enough.
I knew that it was controlling
what was happening up front in the
interface.
And I felt a huge excitement
at seeing the guts at, you know, seeing
the organs of what I know
of an application of what I previously
previously perceived as a black box
that I was only allowed to take at face
value.
And this sort of gave me this backdoor
into this system, which was really
exciting.
This is a slide
of of the Mondo 2000
card from the Beyond Cyberpunk HyperCard
stack a compendium of cyberpunk
sci fi and guide to cyber culture
that came out in 1990.
So, yeah, HyperCard
is an application that lets you create
stacks of so-called cards containing
text and interactive images,
buttons, text fields and other gooey
elements.
It's considered one of the first
successful hypermedia systems before
the Web and was therefore a precursor
to the Web and had actually a direct
influence on how the first
browser was developed.
Also, because of how it it
allows you to create these nonlinear
narratives, jumping between cards of text
and interactive content.
You know, with the introduction of
hypermedia, really.
And, you know, being
able to move in this non-linear way,
you know, really creates a feeling of
traversing space.
In this case, document space.
And it really added
a dimensionality to what was otherwise a
very flat landscape in digital
media.
So interacting with software
in these ways via these programs,
really sorry to give digital media a
shape and a form in my mind is something
more than you
just look at on a screen.
And, you know, as a static thing.
But it's something that, you know, that
had guts, that had dimension, that had
physical, well, physical ish
properties.
And it really established the synesthetic
relationship that I would continue
to have with media.
So I want to talk about sound for a
minute.
A great, huge inspiration for me
is Edgar
Vares and his idea of
sound objects
that sound occupies space as
form and with mass
for as was a French born composer,
spent a lot of time in Paris and in
the States and working
in the first half of the 20th century.
And and he's
known for conceiving of music
as, quote, sound as living
matter with the elements
in his music as sound masses organize
his crystalline structures.
So he, you know as well, had this.
This relationship to sour wasn't just
something that he heard, but it was
something that had wait, you know, that
had visceral properties about it.
And he has this
quote that, well, this is nice quote,
but it's his quote is
When I was about 20, I came across
a definition in music that seemed
suddenly to throw light on my gropings
towards music I sensed could exist.
Yoseph Maria
Huna Bronsky, the Polish physicist,
chemist, neaten musicologist
and philosopher of the first half of the
19th century, defined music
as this as the corporate corporeal.
As I pour realization of the
intelligence that is in sounds
so giving giving body
to the life that's in
sounds.
It was a new and exciting conception
and and to me is still
for us speaking.
And to me, the first that started me
thinking about music is spatial as moving
bodies of sound in space conception.
I gradually made my own.
So.
Having learned about him and reading
about all this stuff and getting really
excited that I came across
someone else who had this this
relationship to this normally intangible
stuff really encouraged me
to to develop
this project called Felt the Signal
Processing or FSP for short.
Something I worked on for a number of
years, actually, with my sister, Larry
Grant, who continues to work as a
wearable electronics and textile designer
in San Francisco.
So together we developed conductive soft
interfaces out of regular wool
and metal wools, combining them together
to work as components in guitar
and guitar pedals since and homegrown
sound circuits.
And yeah, here's a picture.
So my goal with FSP
was to take something else, I had a
visceral connection to
sound and try to create an
emotional connection to it through an
interface that I thought was closer to
the texture of the sounds as I
experienced them, than the hard, discrete
knobs, sliders and buttons.
So in this image, it's it's.
Well, it's a sheet of wool
containing an
effects pedal that I built.
And.
And there's these these felted components
that are integrated into the circuit.
The.
Via these snaps that
I attached.
I mean, I well, they're they're just
Gromit's.
Well, snaps that eyebrow minted into this
conductive felt that I made.
And it becomes a variable
resistor.
Also, a backup ups that
so
there there there is a wire that snake
through through the raw material
that is felt it up.
Then I attached the snap
and then I have something that I can
Sadr. A wire tune Sadr directly
into into the circuit,
into the the PCV of the
effects pedal. So it becomes part
of the circuit.
The signal is traveling through
this felt and as you
nippy plated with your hands, you're
changing the resistance of it, which is
the same as turning a knob
or a slider.
You're shaping you're actually shaping a
sound with your hands.
And
yeah, we we made
several strange things.
This was the beginnings
of a strange synthesizer.
This was the interface for it with
with all these intestine like tentacles,
each of which
had a core of of conductive
wool and terminated
in a snap on
on one end and would
connect.
That's a shot of of the
of the conductive wool down the center of
it.
But these snaps would then connect
to the other piece
and create, you know, a a connection
in these circuits.
And then as you pulled the
the the the tentacle.
Again, it was creating this, the
stretching action, which was changing the
resistance and shaping the sound that was
moving through it.
So.
Another piece I did was called House
AFAM.
I did it in collaboration with a very
good friend of mine and sound designer
Helen Tang.
It was an onsite installation consisting
of multiple raspberry pies.
Brock has seen a unique soundscape over
a shared FMD channel,
which was set to ninety point one F.M..
So it was broadcasting off of the spin
off off the pie in
on the same frequency.
Six of these devices throughout the
house.
And as participants move throughout the
House, Rune F.M. radio enabled
headphones. The audible signal from each
pie would fade in and
out as a moved towards and away from
stations. So in this piece, I was
experimenting more with dimensionality,
you know, with like creating these
sound spaces.
It was also an experiment in trying to
pull color and texture
out of the corners of
the house, out of the feeling, out of the
feelings of the corners of the house in
which the piece was installed.
Giving a voice in a body to each of these
areas as expressed in the sounds designed
by Helen.
So earlier I say that
my goal was to take something that I had
a visceral connection to sound
and to try to create an emotional
connection to it through an interface
that I thought was closer to the texture
of sound as I experienced them myself.
But this goal as well extends to
my relationship to computer networks.
I mean, having a visceral relationship to
music and art is
more or less understandable.
I think a lot of people do.
But having one, two, two computer
networks is a little less obvious.
And it's something that I, you know,
have been really struggling to sort of
define for myself what that means.
But for whatever reason, though, I am
compelled to situate networking in the
context of sculpture to design tactile
net network systems and to reference
for four resine
to consider networks or the signals
moving over the networks as living
matter.
But I need a framework to help guide my
experiments and explorations.
And I think that framework
where I'm at with it now, because this is
really an ongoing research project,
is this modified version of Harold Lah's
Wells model
of communication as a template for my
thinking going forward.
As I as well, to quote
Firaz, grope my way towards
the sculpture I sense could exist.
So according to Laswell, this phrase is
designed to describe an active
of communication.
It asks who says what?
In which channel, to whom and with what
effect.
So in the context of sculpture
or art, the who.
And to whom are straightforward to
answer.
These are the artist and audience.
Which channel refers to
the medium felt?
Is it slime mold?
Is it cement? Is it paper?
You know, what is the physical medium
that we that we.
That will be used to link the intangible
to something that can be physically
engaged with or sensed.
So and then says what?
I mean, this is the message that the
artist is trying to impart
from their piece to me personally,
so far, in my experience, the what is
wanting to give the intangible a physical
presence, like a real world
avatar, something that can be
engaged with.
And finally, with what effect
this is, this is the feedback from
the audience. This is how does it affect
the people who you know,
the who you know, who are looking at this
and experiencing this?
How will it make the viewer feel?
For me, I.
I hope it will impart
again
a sense of awareness.
You know, that that that
that that that these sounds, that these
data transmissions that that they exist
in this in the space that we're in, that
that that they have a forum even if we
can't see it.
So I wanted to just show a few
experiments I've been doing with
with some of the networking stuff.
One of the first ones involves a slime
mold called Physarum Policy Fullam.
It's a single cell
amoeba slash fungus like
creature says about you.
2010 has been the focus of interesting
research that has taken note of the fact
that for being such a simple creature,
it tends to display complex
and indeed sophisticated behavior.
And it's been used to model various
systems from transportation networks
to how blood vessels form.
It's also particularly noted for its
ability to quickly find the most
efficient path between food sources
creating efficient transport
interconnections networks
for ferrying nutrients from
in this photo. These are oat flakes,
which is one of their favorite foods.
It's basically a decentralized, adaptable
network that is able to change a response
to a changing environment.
And you can clearly see here even how
it starts to take the shape of
of of a computer
network or as as the Internet.
In this particular experiment,
I was actually
seeing if I could find
a way to color code.
Data, if you will, that
moves through the.
The Plasmodium network.
So that.
So
as the slime mold ingests food, it breaks
it down and then streams it through these
tubes.
And it moves in this tidal fashion or
moves forward and then comes back then
and forward and back a bit.
It's how it moves, actually.
So I wanted to see if I could create
color coded tags,
you know, like trace, trace, something,
a piece of food moving through the
network.
By color.
Hoping that if I could somehow create
like a a
a data network
or data packets that were moving through
this slime mold and
and and and know where it had been based
on the color that it was.
Because so in this picture different
OT's I know you see yellow,
red and blue. I use primary colors.
Today the OT's hoping that as
they ingested the oats and we break it
down as as different notes from
different parts of the petri dish mixed,
they would also be a color mixer.
They, I could see oh this over here,
it's green. So I guess you know
this, this pass through the,
the blue and yellow node.
Anyway they said highly experimental.
It's still something that I'm working on
perfecting. I haven't quite got yet.
Another thing I want to talk about real
fast was Q AFAM stands for
Cubed AFAM.
It's a collection of ETHEM transceivers
embedded in casts simit cubes
worked on in collaboration with my
partner Donya Cecilia.
Together, they form a network of many
radio devices for modeling network
topologies and travel
patts of data from one device to
each other.
So I mean, this is a single
one, but they're designed to actually
work as a group and they're just sending
out a simple
Morse code signal.
And and and
no one sends a pulse.
And whoever whichever one's nearby
here, the polls pick it up
and blink and LHD to show that they've
received it. And it's really just a
super, super simple way to
show data propagation through
a network. And this was actually designed
as well to be used as a teaching tool,
which is something that me and also Donya
do quite a lot, is teach workshops
to help explain how networking technology
works. So.
But it was also a way to just sort of see
and appreciate how information
travels through space.
Again, giving the sense of dimensionality
to things and that though we can't
see what's in the air around
us, it's still there, you know, and
we're situated in it.
So, yeah, I mean, some
of the stuff I know is super abstract,
even for me.
And I'm often asking myself why, you
know, I got it. What what is this?
You know, and, you know, one of
the greatest challenges of working with
networks as an artistic medium or using
networks has material to use.
A phrase coined by my studio mate,
Julian Oliver is the fact that
computer networks aren't inherently
tactile.
You can't see them or taste them or smell
them or feel them.
So how do you create works that engage an
audience out of computer networks
if they can experience it with their
senses?
Does a person fully even appreciate
what's happening over a computer network
if they can't experience it with their
senses?
And, you know, I think it's about
changing our relationship to something
that is usually considered purely a
utility.
You know, networking is a very
utilitarian thing.
It's about moving messages over
from point A to point B, but.
But is it interesting
to look at how networking
can manifest itself in other contexts,
like in the case of the slimeballs,
you know, where it can parallels be
found? And is there meaning to
that? And and by giving something
a tangible form, will it make us think
about it more? Or think about more like
what happens over those invisible tubes?
So, yeah, you know, the thoughts
presented here are, like I said, are very
experimental and open to discussion.
And and this has evoked any thoughts or
questions in you.
I would love to hear what you had to say.
Thank you.
Yes. Thank you, Sarah, for your talk.
We have time for some questions.
So we have four microphones in the
room. One, two, three
and four. So if you have any questions,
you can just walk up to microphone
and ask your question.
Or in the meantime, if we don't.
Have any questions for me?
So.
First question.
Microphone one either.
Thank you for the talk. Very interesting.
Can we use some of those sounds that you
made with the pedals?
Yeah, I've all you know, I actually did.
I do have a video.
I.
Well, I don't know if you have time
for me. I'd have to, like, dig it up.
Maybe you can find me afterwards and I
can play for you.
Well, we'll be fine.
Okay. Well let me see if I can find.
So in the meantime, maybe this
one question from the Internet.
The question is regarding the Rule-based
ethics panel.
Uh, have you performed live on stage?
And, uh, does it work like a musical
instrument?
Yeah, actually, I well, you know,
I never performed it live on on stage,
I it just didn't happen.
But I would perform to myself in my
bedroom and.
And, yeah, I mean, I, I used
it actually to process
my voice.
So.
So there, you know, there's a microphone.
I was singing into it and
running it through the the effects pedal.
And you know, when people sing,
you know, it's a full body thing.
Sometimes it's like you're using you're
moving with your body, your hands.
And and it felt really nice
to have this like this felt
this like this this warm,
comforting felt in my hand that I was,
as I was singing as well, shaping my
voice almost as though it were an
accordion.
Unfortunately, no video documentation of
that.
But.
Yeah, yeah, a little break to to to to
let you to let you search for the video.
Yeah, searching through my sister's
Vimeo, where
where we had these documented but, you
know, this was actually from from some
time ago.
So.
Let me just try to look again.
If I can't find it in time, then, by all
means, come find me afterwards and I can.
Oh. I think I did find it.
In fact.
Actually, if you wanted to
see, I can.
We actually do have an
an archive of our work here
at two could dot com slash FSP
if you want it, if you're curious to see
what some of the projects were that we
did.
This is also have audio out this HDMI.
Well, let's see if this plays.
And if not, then you can
check it out.
I don't thing is going to play, actually.
Oh, wait. Is Norio here?
I think we might be out of luck.
Well, if you want to listen, actually,
you can you can visit this this Web page
here and we do have some videos up.
Okay.
I think you can
see the address up there.
Yes. It's also on the talk
sites, on the
far plan. So you can
listen to it there. So there's one
question at microphone one.
All right, here's the thing.
Hold on just a sec.
Now, this was a noise x
berriman.
Those are my sister's hands.
So
they think.
OK.
So, yes, the question.
Yes, short question.
How hard is it to be sound artist
in the modern world when
we are almost visual and media
audience, mostly when you are on talks?
There is for sure some projector and
video. But sometimes there is problem
with sound. We sell now.
And so when people broths Internet, they
looks for pictures.
Yeah. So how it looks like
from your perspective, it's easy to
reach your audience.
We have sound products.
Well,
I mean, to tell you to the sound.
I, I include it in this talk because
it's it's relevant to this idea of
visceral systems. But
at the time I have actually
worked with sound myself for a number of
years. I've been focusing mainly on
networking.
But
I mean, whether my goal like that, I want
to reach an audience online,
for example, online or even in the
exhibition.
Scientists sometimes.
Yeah. Hard to find perfect conditions
for.
Absolutely. Well, so one of the benefits
about this is that this isn't
reliant on high fidelity.
This is actually about noise in some
way. It's about interference.
So actually, that was never an issue.
Yeah, okay.
Very good. So unfortunately, time
is up for this hour.
So thanks again, Sarah, for the nice
talk. Thank you very much.
And a reminder that this.