M.C. Escher

M.C. Escher (Main with Cuboid)1958. Wood engraving. 64x64cm

Pachacamac Temple in Peru

Pachacamac Temple in Peru

Pachacamac (pronounced: pah cha kamak) lies 25 miles SE of Lima adjacent to the Pan American highway astride the Pacific coastline. "Pachacámac" in Quechua means "Pacha" world, and "camac" to animate -- "The One who Animates the World." The site was considered one of the most important religious centers of the indigenous peoples of the central Andes, and contains a number of pyramids. Spanish historical records, along with extensive archaeological research, have served to clarify its history and significance. Built centuries before the time of the Incas, Pachacamac is noted for its great pyramidal temples, and for the remains of frescoes adorning its adobe walls. Culturally and chronologically it is related to Chancay, and other centers of the Cuismancu empire, including Huari. At the time of the Spanish conquest it was a major Inca shrine.

http://www.labyrinthina.com/pachacamac.htm

YouTube videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06UiwjJL8I0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40at0ie14a4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo5OQxsCkVM&feature=related

Auroville / Matrimandir

http://www.auroville.org/
http://synapticstimuli.com/tag/auroville/
http://www.auroville.org/thecity/matrimandir/mm_soul.htm

The Matrimandir will be the soul of Auroville.
The sooner the soul is there, the better it will be
for everybody and especially for the Aurovilians.

Matrimandir
At the very centre of Auroville one finds the 'soul of the city', the Matrimandir, situated in a large open area called 'Peace', from where the future township will radiate outwards. The atmosphere is quiet and charged, and the area beautiful, even though at present large parts of it are still under construction.
As yet incomplete, the Matrimandir emerges as a large golden sphere which seems to be rising out of the earth, symbolising the birth of a new consciousness seeking to manifest. Its slow and steady progress towards completion is followed by many.
While walking through the lovely green Matrimandir Gardens with their great variety of flowers, shrubs and trees, one's attention is greatly drawn by this important and powerful feature at the heart of the city which was seen by the Mother as the "symbol of the Divine's answer to man's aspiration for perfection" and as "the central cohesive force" for the growth of Auroville.

Evolutionary principle
The name 'Matrimandir' means literally 'Temple of the Mother'. According to Sri Aurobindo's teaching, the 'Mother' concept stands for the great evolutionary, conscious and intelligent principle of Life, the Universal Mother, - which seeks to help humanity move beyond its present limitations into the next step of its evolutionary adventure, the supramental consciousness.

Inner Chamber
The spacious Inner Chamber in the upper hemisphere of the structure is completely white, with white marble walls and white carpeting. In the centre a pure crystal-glass globe suffuses a ray of electronically guided sunlight which falls on it through an opening at the apex of the sphere.
"The most important thing is this: the play of the sun on the centre. Because that becomes the symbol, the symbol of future realisations."
There are no images, no organised meditations, no flowers, no incense, no religion or religious forms.

To find one's consciousness..
The Matrimandir is there for "those who want to learn to concentrate.." "No fixed meditations, none of all that, but they should stay there in silence, in silence and concentration. A place for trying to find one's consciousness."

No religion
"Let it not become a religion", the Mother said. "The failure of religions is... because they were divided. They wanted people to be religious to the exclusion of other religions, and every branch of knowledge has been a failure because it has been exclusive.
What the new consciousness wants (it is on this that it insists) is: no more divisions.

To be able to understand the spiritual extreme, the material extreme, and to find the meeting point, the point where that becomes a real force."



YouTube videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn9TvKrXucE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giFuGzQyc6w&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNt4dvYr9DQ&feature=related

Jonathan Gibbs

Jonathan Gibbs.Pyramids & Temple. Wood engraving.

“Although Jonathan Gibbs has lived and worked in Scotland for a number of years, he acknowledges the importance of the ‘churches, fields, shorelines and elements of landscape from East Norfolk, where my family comes from’. At first sight, his paintings and engravings evoke a mid-twentieth-century mood, suggestive of territory between Ben Nicholson and Eric Ravilious – fastidious, linear and deeply sensitive to place."

http://www.rowleygallery.com/Artist-Jonathan-Gibbs.aspx

http://www.centralillustration.com/jg/jg.php

http://www.scottishillustrators.com/?sel_category=46&phpc_sess=a69e5d04fe6e0720a6f72b6f2048707d


Jonathan Gibbs. Moon, Tree & River. Wood engraving.


Jonathan Gibbs. Blue Room. Oil on oak panel.

Acaso 30 Gilbertto Prado

One of the references brought by Clarissa Ribeiro is the interactive installation Acaso 30 by Gilbertto Prado.

Acaso 30 is an interactive installation in memory of those killed in the massacre that took place in the Queimados neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro sometime between a Thursday night and dawn that Friday, in March 2005 where 30 people were eliminated.
The installation is set up in a not well-lit half-open space, as if it were a town square. In the center of the space there is a large heavy totally handmade blue rug, like those made by prisoners' wives. The series of images as well as the spots onto which they are projected occur in a random way. Once a person steps onto the rug two things happen: an image of a nude body is projected onto the ground and a strong wind faces the spectator. The only noise is that of the wind which creates tension and instability. As for the images, from the moment that they are projected onto a given spot tension zones are generated and the bodies react when the spectators get closer and when they move away. When the spectators reach the bodies the situation becomes irreversible with the death of the characters and the disappearance of the images. An interval without any projections or actions follows.

Credits: Gilbertto Prado, 2005. Support Team: Fábio Oliveira, Gaspar Arguello, Jesus de Paula Assis, Luciano Gosuen e Maurício Taveira. Programming: Luis Henrique Moraes
Actors: Francisco Serpa e Karina Yamamoto. Exhibited at the show Cinético_Digital, Itaú Cultural, São Paulo from June 5th to September 11th 2005.

Videos:
Acaso30 - makingOff
Acaso30 - Gilbertto Prado

Reflexivity

Reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional; with both the cause and the effect affecting one another in a situation that renders both functions causes and effects. In sociology, reflexivity therefore comes to mean an act of self-reference where examination or action 'bends back on', refers to, and affects the entity instigating the action or examination. In this sense it usually refers to the capacity of an individual agent to recognize forces of socialization and alter his or her place in the social structure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory)

Margaret Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=9156562982538374872#

Bourdieu, Pierre. Invitation to a Reflexive Sociology

Reflexivity in Spectatorship: The Didactic Nature of Early Silent Films

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90O0T-VLuXM

Pablo Valbuena’s Augmented Sculpture

One of the references brought by Graziele Lautenschlaeger is the Pablo Valbuena's Augmented Sculpture. It is interesting as well to take a look on the ntire production of this artist as a whole.

http://www.pablovalbuena.com/

Pablo Valbuena’s Augmented Sculpture v. 1.2 is a remarkable synthesis of modernist-minimalist sculpture and video projection. Strangely this fascinating piece was not shown at the main Ars Electronica 2007 exhibition space in the OK Centrum Gallery but was instead relegated to a rather decrepit building on the streets of Linz. Fortunately we wandered around the town long enough to stumble upon it.

Pablo Valbuena, Augmented Sculpture v.1.2

http://www.pablovalbuena.com/videos/ars07_video.html

Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre

One of the references brought by Renata La Rocca is the Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre.

In a letter written by Viglius to Erasmus, both comtemporary of Camillo, they said that Camillo has constructed an Amphitheatre, a work of wonderful skill, into which whoever is admitted as spectator will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero and that he pretends that all things that the human mind can conceive and which we cannot see with the corporeal eyes, after being collected together by diligent meditation, may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind. And it is because of this corporeal looking that he calls it a theatre.

Giulio Camillo Delminio was one of the most famous people of the sixteenth century, primarily because of his construction of a life-size model of a theater. His Idea del theatro(Venice, 1550) was published in ten editions by 1584. As Frances Yates has shown, Camillo belonged to the Hermetic-kabbalistic tradition initiated by Pico della Mirandola. His theater was actually a memory building representing the order of eternal truth and depicting the various stages of creation, from the first cause through the angels, the planetary spheres, and down to man. The theater's basic planetary images were talismans receiving astral power that could be channeled and operated through the agency of the theater. By mastering the proportions of universal harmony whose memory was preserved in the theater's structure, the operator could harness the magical powers of the cosmos. (in: Kabbalah, Magic, and Science, The Cultural Universe of a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Physician. Harvard University Press, 1988, p.113)

references:
The Art of Memory, Frances Yates
The Renaissance of the Theater of Memory, Peter Matussek
The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo, Written and Directed by Matthew Maguire, Sets and installations by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio.
Tetsuro Nagata, Computing an Identity

technical draws

Here are the technical draws of the installation project:

Processing CODE //

Here is the Processing code for the Installation:

/**
* Instants of metamorphosis v.01 // an interactive video installation // The Double Collective, UK/Brazil, November 2009/March 2010
*
* processing code by Clarissa Ribeiro
*
* move around under a wide angle webcam, over a projection onto the ground, to load and play a movie file
*/

import fullscreen.*;
import processing.video.*;
import JMyron.*;
import ddf.minim.*;

Minim minim;
AudioPlayer player;
FullScreen fs;
Movie myMovie;
JMyron m; //a camera object

//variables to maintain the floating moviee
float myMoviex = 320;
float myMoviey = 240;
float myMoviedestx = 320;
float myMoviedesty = 240;

void setup() {
// set size to 640x480
size(640, 480);
// The background COLOR IS BLACK:
background(0,0,0);

//new Minim:
minim = new Minim(this);
// load a file, give the AudioPlayer buffers that are 2048 samples long
player = minim.loadFile("breathing.wav", 2048);
player.loop();

// Create the fullscreen object
fs = new FullScreen(this);

// enter fullscreen mode
fs.enter();

// Load and play the video in a loop// according to the sculpture dimmension, change the video file: medium, big or small, or use the original.mov
myMovie = new Movie(this, "azultransparente_big.3gp");
myMovie.loop();
m = new JMyron();//make a new instance of the object
m.start(width,height);//start a capture at 640x480
m.trackColor(255,255,255,256*3-100);//track white / must ajust the 3-5
m.update();
m.adaptivity(10); // how fast the white is capted! it was 100
m.adapt();// immediately take a snapshot of the background for differencing
println("Myron " + m.version());
rectMode(CENTER);
noStroke();
}

void movieEvent(Movie myMovie) {
myMovie.read();
}

void draw() {
m.update();//update the camera view
drawCamera();

int[][] centers = m.globCenters();//get the center points
//draw all the dots while calculating the average.
float avX=0;
float avY=0;
for(int i=0;i fill(0);
// image(myMovie, 0,0);
avX += centers[i][0];
avY += centers[i][1];
}
if(centers.length-1>0){
avX/=centers.length-1;
avY/=centers.length-1;
}
//draw the image. if you want the movie starts in the center of the screen, use myMoviex/2 and myMoviey/2.
// to star in the right corner: only myMoviex and myMoviex. To start in the left, myMoviex/4 and myMoviexy/4.
image(myMovie, myMoviex, myMoviey);

//update the location of the thing on the screen.
if(!(avX==0&&avY==0)&¢ers.length>1){
myMoviedestx = avX;
myMoviedesty = avY;
}
myMoviex += (myMoviedestx-myMoviex)/1f;
myMoviey += (myMoviedesty-myMoviey)/1.f;
fill(0,0,0);
ellipseMode(CENTER);
//ellipse(myMoviex,myMoviey,0,0);
}

void drawCamera(){
loadPixels();

updatePixels();
}

3D model and animation //

3D model of the installation made using Google SketchUp.





Technical Requirements
The volumetric sculpture is constructed of individual wooden components that pack down for ease of transport into road cases. The structure is robust and strong, allowing several people to walk over it at the same time.

(we supply)
- 4m x 3m volumetric wooden sculpture
- A wide angle webcam with a 2.1mm 160-Degree Wide Angle Lens for Security Cameras and Webcams.

(the exhibition place supply)
- Projector: EIP-5000 (or an equivalent with 5000 lumens), with Aperture Width of 0.5410 in. Projector Aspect Ratio: 4:3; Height of 5 meters
- Projector mounted parallel to grid with masked mirror. Picture size must be
4m x 3m
- PC, Intel® Core™ i3 processor 530, NVIDIA® GeForce® G210 (with 512 MB dedicated), 4 GB DDR3, 4 USB 2.0 ports, 2 audio ports, running Processing 1.0.3 in Windows Vista. - Dense black space (Or can be presented in restrained lighting)
- Technical assistance in set up – general setup, construction test

Observation: Set up time approximately 1/2 days depending on room pre-prep.

Instants of Metamorphosis 01 // theoretical description

The work combines references as the Jorge Luis Borges’ description of the A Bao A Qu in The Book of Imaginary Beings (BORGES, 2005), with the perspective brought by Clarice Lispector in her emergent writing book The Stream of Life (LISPECTOR, 1995) – a chaotic consciousness process of a being without gender, an ‘it’, in dialogue with the self, the other, space and time; a being instants of metamorphosis.

The spiral metaphor for a creative evolutionary process is inherent to the concept of the installation. Conceptually the art work is a dynamic system and their narratives, the stories it tells and which one it contains, have no end and no beginning.

Inspired by the Pablo Valbuena’s Augmented Sculpture, a video performance is projected onto a volumetric base that composes a subject-sculpture: a reference to the never-ending spiral one may climbs to acquire spiritual evolution. As one climbs, exploring the volumes, the video follows its movements, leaving stamped onto the ground, frozen instants of the performance, memories of the metamorphosis of the self. Nevertheless, the video and the sound never stop playing and following the movements of the audience.

The environment sound is the irregular and deep sound of someone breathing: a reference to yoga and meditation practices that intent to put the subject in deep contact with its essence. The immateriality of the video performance and its narrative, aim in stimulating reflections on self consciousness, alluding to the borders and the extensions one virtually constructs around to live and dialogue, considering an ecological perspective.

All the actions, the trans-actions, are integrated in a never end timeline that incorporates several times, as a garden of forking paths(BORGES, 1941), never end storied spaces (BASKIN, 2008) where imaginary beings live: ‘its’; ourselves, and the others.

The video is available on YouTube: Instants of Metamorphosis 01 // theoretical description

Instants of Metamorphosis // technical description

Technical Description // Installed in a dark room measuring 5 m x 6m, 5m high, Instants of Metamorphosis 01, consists in a wooden irregular volumetric sculpture measuring 4m x 3m. A computer-controlled video down projection falls directly onto the volumes, skinning it in real time in response to sensed movements of the audience, combining in a subject-sculpture the physical and the virtual dimensions. The movements are captured by a wide angle web camera, allowing real time responsiveness to the work. Using motion and color tracking, the camera input is processed using the library JMyron on Processing 1.0.3. The libraries that are being used are JMyron, Minim,Processing.Video and Fullscreen.

When one moves in the region covered by the camera lens caption, climbing the volumetric sculpture, the Processing code allows to load and play a movie file in loop the video performance , stamping the frames of the video onto the sculpture skin, like frozen memories, instants of metamorphosis of the self. Playing in loop the sound of someone breathing deeply and slowly, four-speakers surround the structure, creating a spatial sound environment.

The video is available on YouTube: Instants of Metamorphosis // technical description

Instants of Metamorphosis 01 // performance

"The vibration of the person as he approaches infuses the creature with life, and an inward light begins to glow within it. At the same time, its body and its virtually translucent skin begin to ripple and stir."
(Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, 1967)

The video performance for the interactive installation Instants of Metamorphosis 01 aim in translating the never-ending process of metamorphosis of the self present in such references as the Jorge Luis Borges description of the A Bao A Qu in his Book of Imaginary Beings (BORGES, 2005), as well as the perspective brought by Clarice Lispector in her emergent writing book The Stream of Life (LISPECTOR, 1995) a chaotic consciousness process of a being without gender, an it, in dialogue with the self, the others, space and time.

The video is available on youTube: Instants of Metamorphosis 01 // performance

The Double Helix

The Double Helix - Sketch of the double helix, loose sheet, early 1953

"In April 1953, Watson and Crick published the correct structure of DNA. They had pulled together the evidence from Chargaff's biochemistry and from X-ray diffraction images of DNA and built physical models to work out how it fitted together. The structure has two sugar-phosphate strands twisted into a double helix; the two strands being linked by bonds between complementary bases (adenine and thymine, cytosine and guanine). The structure of DNA has become an icon of modern biology. At the time, however, Watson and Crick modestly noted that: "This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest."

From: The Crick papers: 1953 The double helix, 1/3/03, BY GILES NEWTON


La double hélice
“Voilà comment se met en place ce qu’on peut, par métaphore, apeller la double hélice. C’est rendre hommage à l’extension de la nature entrevue par la science (d’où nous vient tounjours la pression). C’est sourtout soulinger à quel point sont liées les deux grands modalités de au grés desquelles l’analogia se trouve constantemment menacée e retravaillée. La première modalité touche l’analogie photographique, la façon dont le monde, les objets et les corps y semble défini (toujours pour une parte, et plus ou moins) par réference à la vision naturelle, qui implique ressemblance e reconnaissance. La seconde modalité touche l ‘analogie propre à la reproduction du mouvement. Voilà les deux puissances qui se trouvent, chacune et ensemble, mise en jeu e mise à mal, dans le film, dès que l’image incline vers la défiguration, la perte de reconaissance, ou que son mouvement se tourne détourné, figé, interrompu, transi par l’irruption violente du photographique (l’effet photo: il va de la photo comme présence à l’arrêt sur image, en passant par les fictions de la fixité e du photogramme."

From: Raymond Bellour: La Double Hélice, pg. 41

The Double // Jorge Luis Borges

The Double
Suggested or inspired by mirrors, the surface of still water, and twins, the concept of the Double is common to many lands. It seems likely that statements such as Pythagoras’ “A friend is another myself” and Plato’s “Know thyself” were inspired by it. In Germany, it is called the Doppelgänger; in Scotland, the fetch, because it comes to fetch men to their death. Meeting oneself was, therefore, most ominous; the tragic ballad “Ticonderoga” by Robert Louis Stevenson recounts a legend on this theme. We might also recall that strange paiting by Rossetti called “how They Met Themselves” – two lovers meet themselves at dusk in a forest. One need only mention other instances in Hawthorne, Dostoyevsky, and Alfred de Musset.
For the Jews, on the other hand, the apparition of the Double was not a foreshadowing of death, but rather a proof that the person to whon it appeared had achived the rank of prophet. This is the explanation offered by Gershom Scholem. A tradition included in the Talmud tells the story of a man, searching for God, who met himself.
In Poe’s story “William Wilson”, the Double is the hero’s conscience; when the hero kills his double, he dies. In the poetry of William Butler Yeats, the Double is our “other side”, our opposite, our complement, that person that we are not and shall never be.
Plutarch wrote that the Greeks called the king’s representative the “other I”.
(Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, 2005)

How They Met Themselves

How They Met Themselves, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Date: 1851-1864. Subject: A pair of lovers meet their doubles, outlined in light, in a wood at twilight—a sure presage of death(Surtees, A Catalogue Raisonné,74)

The Double Collective

The Double // collective is an ongoing project on process-based collective work, idealized by three multimedia artists – Clarissa Ribeiro, Renata La Rocca e Graziele Lautenschlaeger -, associating their individual artistic views and references, purposes and research interests, mixing experiences and contexts. The name of the collective is a reference to the Borges considerations on the concept of 'The Double' in the tale of The Book of Imaginary Beings (1967). The intention is to use the double as a concept that describes the generative process of creation - the understanding of the collective itself as a systemic structure, a complex adaptive system where several elements (artist and audience, objects/technology...)are dynamically interconnected, articulated in a self-organized process where the objective of creating artistic experiences/structures, works as an attractor being the goal of the entire system.

process documentation

Here we are documenting the process.

Instants of Metamorphosis 01

Instants of Metamorphosis 01 is an interactive video installation that is the first emergence of a process-based collective work by the DOUBLE collective. Using a methodology based on systemic measures of complexity and organization, the work is being documented and analyzed focusing on the connections, the dialogue between the elements, and the emergences. The work combines references as the Jorge Luis Borges’ description of the A Bao A Qu in his Book of Imaginary Beings, with the perspective brought by Clarice Lispector in her emergent writing book The Stream of Life – a chaotic consciousness process of a being without gender, an ‘it’, in dialogue with the self, the other, space and time; a being instants of metamorphosis. The spiral metaphor for a creative evolutionary process is inherent to the concept of the installation. Conceptually the art work is a dynamic system and their narratives, the stories it tells and which one it contains, have no end and no beginning. Inspired by the Pablo Valbuena’s Augmented Sculpture, a video performance is projected onto a volumetric base that composes a subject-sculpture: a reference to the never-ending spiral one may climbs to acquire spiritual evolution. As one climbs, exploring the volumes, the video follows its movements, leaving stamped onto the ground, frozen instants of the performance, memories of the metamorphosis of the self. Nevertheless, the video and the sound never stop playing and following the movements of the audience. The environment sound is the irregular and deep sound of someone breathing: a reference to yoga and meditation practices that intent to put the subject in deep contact with its essence. The immateriality of the video performance and its narrative, aim in stimulating reflections on self consciousness, alluding to the borders and the extensions one virtually constructs around to live and dialogue, considering an ecological perspective. All the actions, the trans-actions, are integrated in a never end timeline that incorporates several times, as a garden of forking paths, never end storied spaces where imaginary beings live: ‘its’; ourselves, and the others.