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World Première:

 

A child in Quebec who was learning about how plastics persisted endlessly in our ecosystem said:

( If a thing cannot be un-made then it should not be made. )

477

We say that time passes or flows by. We speak of the course of time. The water that I see rolling by was made ready a few days ago in the mountains, with the melting of the glacier; it is now in front of me and makes its way towards the sea into which it will finally discharge itself. If time is similar to a river, it flows from the past towards the present and the future. The present is the consequence of the past, and the future of the present. But this often repeated metaphor is in reality extremely confused. For, looking at the things themselves, the melting of the snows and what results from this are not successive events, or rather the very notion of event has no place in the objective world. When I say that the day before yesterday the glacier produced the water which is passing at this moment, I am tacitly assuming the existence of a witness tied to a certain spot in the world, and I am comparing his successive views: he was there when the snows melted and followed the water down, or else, from the edge of the river and having waited two days, he sees the pieces of wood that he threw into the water at its source. The ‘events’ are shapes cut out by a finite observer from the spatio- temporal totality of the objective world. But on the other hand, if I consider the world itself, there is simply one indivisible and changeless being in it. Change presupposes a certain position which I take up and from which I see things in procession before me: there are no events without someone to whom they happen and whose finite perspective is the basis of their individuality.

479

Correspondingly, therefore, the subject must not be himself situated in [time], in order to be able to be present in intention to the past as to the future. Let us no longer say that time is a ‘datum of consciousness’; let us be more precise and say that consciousness deploys or constitutes time.

492

Time exists for me only because I am situated in it, that is, because I become aware of myself as already committed to it, because the whole of being is not given to me incarnate, and finally because one sector of being is so close to me that it does not even make up a picture before me—I cannot see it, just as I cannot see my face.

From Time to Temporality, Rhythm and Event 1/2, part 2/2

Sha Xin Wei, 19 & 21 Jan 2021

Stanzi Vaubel's Indeterminacy Seminar, a project from Building21 @ McGill University

Chinese thought: non-dualism, relationality, transformation

From a BBC podcast about a renowned herbalist Li Shizhen 東璧 (1518 – 1593)

"When in pre modern China, people generally had a very organic view of the world around them. So one overarching idea was that everything around us is interconnected, interdependent, and networked together. And that in other words, rather than thinking of the natural world, as that bit of the world around us that's untouched by humans, the Chinese planted human beings right in the middle of it. Now, a second main underlying idea there is that therefore, in order to understand the natural world, rather than trying to identify by or physically what things are, it is much more important to try and explain how things relate to each other. So describe the relationship of various beings, objects, plants, animals with each other. A [third] underlying idea was that everything around us in the natural world is constantly subject to change. The only certainty we have, ironically, about what happens around us is that things are constantly changing. And so everything is subject to transformations, to metamorphosis. And so the, I suppose the sage or the observer, or the scholar needs to put his finger on  explaining why changes happen and how they happen. Now, to do that you need a conceptual toolbox, and the Chinese developed that, you know, over the centuries. One is to think of everything in the world as consisting of complementary opposites. The Chinese call it Yin, and Yang, you know, the shadowy side of a hill, versus the sunny side of a hill so that you can think of things in terms of hot, cold, high, low, black, white, and so on. So that's one toolbox they had.  A second model that was applied to the understanding of the natural world was the idea that everything somehow can be classified into a group of five or following a sequence of five phases. These were natural elements identified as early as the fourth century BC fire, you know, wood, metal, earth. And I left one out here water, I think. And so the whole purpose of it is basically to just describe the pattern of change and describe ways of sequencing of how things follow on from each other. The result of that is that that you know, for the right or the wrong reasons, people who categorize nature in pre modern China seem to be always impelled to have to do this in groups of five and categories of five. And a final, not insignificant feature really about the way in which the Chinese and pre modern China handled nature or saw that relationship is that they used a language which drew substantially on figurative language. They used analogies to talk about nature comparisons. metaphors, rather than a highly technical sort of language and that sometimes takes getting used to.”

Roel Sterckx, Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History, Science, and Civilization at Cambridge University
BBC In Our Time 20191128

Collaborative Situated Media - IRCAM

“rhythm" can be the name for the patterning joining antecedent and emergent, here and elsewhere:

Ensemble play in the face of pandemic, by students in an online course:

Actorie Anul 1 - Tehnică Vocală

First Year Acting - Vocal Technique 

UNATC I. L. Caragiale, Bucharest

(the top art academy in Romania)

Ellen Fullman - @ Sonic Protest - Eglise Saint-Merry - 6/04/2016

Thinking about this theatrically/cinematically, I'm visualizing seeing the shadow of a figure entering and growing in the space and only later seeing the relatively diminutive source of the shadow. Translating this to the animated lamps, we should see the play of the light in the space and through the atmosphere as the primary dramatic effect and only secondarily see the lamps themselves. This could be accomplished by making relatively narrow fields of view in which they would be directly seen. 

Pete, Connor, Alexia, Byron,

Nima and Thierry in TML Montreal suspended the pool of water overhead, stirred by max-controlled motors, and cast light through the water :

Goal : 

Let’s try suspending one (ideally three) of our “cloud  nurseries”   so we can test them as light sources modulating the felt experience of a volume of space.  The light sources can be our Source 4’s.

Can we map Alexia’s control patch and give her access to the misters?  I’d like to see what she can do.   Then  we can map them into the sc system to modulate them from camera feed.

Alexia, Byron, Yanjun can I invite your fresh opinion on this.  What if we do not focus 100% of the inhabitant’s attention on the light fixtures, however mesmerizing they are.  How can we design the effect of the caustics on the airspace in the iStage.   as a function of the state of the environment?  

It’d be interesting to juxtapose this with Garrett’s light games — so we need state engine to swap or even blend state topologies.

( Recall the iridescent “mobile” lights that Byron et al suspended in the Brickyard. :) 

Xin Wei

by Jeff Murugan

• Introduction to waves and solitons

Gabi

• Rogue Waves in the Ocean, Springer 2009

Christian Kharif, ‎Efim Pelinovsky, ‎Alexey Slunyaev

• Universal Peregrine soliton

• Spectral properties of the Peregrine soliton observed in a water wave tank 

A. Chabchoub, S. Neumann, N. P. Hoffmann, and N. Akhmediev

JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 117 (2012)

From Pinar Sefkatli (Universiteit van Amsterdam):

…

 research publication City Rhythm: Logbook of an Exploration.

 

City Rhythm research was started in 2016 by Prof. dr. Caroline Nevejan, in collaboration with AMS Institute, 6 Dutch cities (Den Haag, Rotterdam, Zaanstad, Zoetermeer, Helmond en Amsterdam), Amsterdam Health and Technology Institute (ahti) and with the students from LDE Minor Responsible Innovation. The research on rhythms in the physical world and in the data world showed that focusing on rhythm and on dynamics in neighbourhoods and in datasets creates new design spaces that can generate un-expected solutions.

 

Thanks to the research grant we received from the Dutch Scientific Research Organisation (NWO), the research will proceed for four more years. The next phase of the research, Designing Rhythms for Social Resilience, will focus on the South-East district of Amsterdam (Amsterdam Zuidoost). DRSR will explore more deeply the rhythms of the neighbourhood from architectural and data perspectives with a PhD researcher from both disciplines, with the main goal of making conclusions on social safety and resilience.

 

We hope that you find the findings of our research inspiring, and that you can get an idea about the upcoming research which will start on July 2018. The publication is also available online, which can be found on TU Delft Architecture Faculty’s books catalogue, BK Books. 

 

…

Best wishes,

Pinar Sefkatli

 

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As a first pass to composing relations between people's activity to ecosystem activity…I’m thinking about exemplars of ensemble movements, but under two optics: (1)what people would naturally do as they encounter such a structure in an art event, and (2) ensemble movement that kinetically (formally) happens to resonate with some of the behavior that I see up into the ecosystem,

Exemplar A in people ensemble movement : people start filling up the space, when it has been empty for awhile.

Of course, in these examples A’ is correlated to A, and B’ to B.   That’s a compositional decision.

The correlation is not fully deterministic, but correlated enough to give Serra a sense of legible response to people activity.

In order to make palpable that there are relations between one self’s activity / presence and the ecosystem, that one is in fact part of the ecosystem, some direct 1-1 logic is necessary, such as:

I know that as a rule, we do not want to build only 1-1 logics into our piece, bc then that would be merely “interactive art.”  On the other hand, I’d like to avoid the illegibility of "complex systems."   Beesley’s hylomorphic “forests” of fronds: although his installation(s) exhibit complex behavior that has some algorithmic relation to inhabitants' presence and activity as well as the fronds' own states.  Bur after the initial charm wore off, I got bored because (1) the activity was homogeneous over time, (2) the complexity seemed randomly related to my activity.  (He explained that indeed there was a randomizer.)

* activity-clock is a Max patch that has an integer value.  It increments at a default rate per clock time.   However degree of motion (or any parameter derived from sensor data reflecting degree of activity ) increments or decrements that rate.   This simply patch could be re-written as an exercise in elementary Max.    I’d like to use it to drive certain transitions or behaviors in place of simple clocks or line or metro.

** presence can be calibrated so that 1.0 corresponds to 1 human body’s worth of occupancy under the field of view of the camera.   Thus stray smaller objects could sum up to 1.   Similarly degree of motion should be scaled so that 1.0 corresponds to the activity of one person walking about at a pace that we set experimentally by walking under Serra ourselves.

When I see you today, maybe we can start with a quick walk thru of all the different states of behaviour of the ecosystem.  Then we can bought out a bunch of human ensemble activities that we expect, then some transitions corresponding to the emergence of those ensemble activities…  (Every correlation will be naturally continuous.  We can make them seem more triggered simply by changing the response curve to be more like a step function.)

Some obvious human ensemble activities:

D. People move such that there is a general drift along one particular vector.

E. People start to move in a big circle, clockwise or counter-clockwise, with an angular velocity.

F. Gather-Scatter (how closely people bunch together): Connor’s utility.

Xin Wei

AI's "white guy problem" is a special case of a more primordial problem : in general, a priori classification-based algorithms such as learning algorithms all tend to perpetuate existing categories.  Iterated, they  accentuate existing prioritizations.

(1) The Inert vs. the Living State of Matter: Extended Criticality, Time Geometry, Anti-Entropy – An Overview 

Giuseppe Longo, and Maël Montévil

Invariants and symmetry theorems

Full discussion (book) by Yvette Kosman-Schwarzbach

Just as culture is underdetermined by (vulgar) economics, and metaphor underdetermined by syntax, rhythm as a special case of ontogenesis and individuation is underdetermined by meter.   This is too abstract.   So, listen for the constantly shifting rhythms between the sound, the breathing, the tensions in the performing body which you feel if you’ve learned play the instrument, against the regular meter.

• Sainkho Namtchylak 

http://epc.buffalo.edu/sound/mp3/ethno/sainkho/mp3/01.mp3
The longing and elasticity of this is not the same as metric regularity.

• A moving interpretation of the Bach Chaconne performed recently by a friend’s daughter Taiga (Ultan) on flute (starting at 3:08)

Listen for how she must negotiate her breathing against the uninterrupted singing line.   The Chaconne is a masterwork of implied voices.  For the violinist it’s already a great challenge to suggest and carry multiple, implied voices sliding across each other with shifting forces (rhythm!).  It’s an even greater challenge for the breathing flutist.  This young performer accomplishes it with sensitivity. 

( To hear one of the most wonderful performances of this in canonical form — for solo violin: Itzhak Perlman. )

•  Brahms : String Quartet No.1 In C Minor Op.51 No.1 - 1. Allegro ( Emerson String Quartet)

Listen for the elasticity which emerges from the interplay of swelling and fading voices, and the constantly shifting accenting (on top of the metric pulse)  The metric is a background grid that does not (and ought not) constrain the continuous multivalent shifts to fixed discrete choices.

Multiscale self-similarity — “fractals”in pop literature — is just recursive regularity.   Pavan has some subtle ideas, based on dynamical systems theory, about signatures of human intention in movement, that are neither simple sums of periodic functions nor uniformly random processes.   There are connections between those ideas and spectral theory of operators, I think.  Worth discussion at multiple registers, artistic/ expressive, philosophical, as well as mathematical!

Xin Wei

Rhythm as Pattern and Variation -- Political, Social and Artistic Inflections
Paola Crespi and Eleni Ikoniadou

after Goldsmiths talk: Rhythm and Textural Temporality: An Approach to Experience Without a Subject and Duration as an Effect 

That, plus a form of general relativity that has to take into account the interactions peculiar to media?

Yet another reason for 3d printing, a math-poetic one: