\documentclass[english,oneside]{amsart}
\usepackage{pslatex}
\usepackage{charter}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage
[pdftitle={When Designs Flicker},
pdfkeywords={design, Piet Zwart Institute Media Design graduation catalogue},
pdfauthor={Florian Cramer},
backref=true,
pagebackref=true,
hyperindex=true,
bookmarks=true,
bookmarksopen=false]
{hyperref}
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{0}
\setlength\parskip{\medskipamount}
\setlength\parindent{0pt}
\newcommand{\cit}{\textit}


\sloppy


\begin{document}


\title{When Designs Flicker}

\author{Florian Cramer}

\date{April 30th, 2006}

\maketitle

In 1976, developmental psychologists Harry McGurk and John MacDonald
dubbed a video recording of a person prouncing the word ``ka'' with the
a sound recording of a person uttering the syllable ``ma.'' Unlike in 
movies dubbed into a different language, listeners actually
``heard'' the syllable formed by the lip movements as opposed to the one that
was spoken on the audio track. Alternatively, the audio-recorded
syllable ``ba'' synched with the lip pronounciation of ``ga'' results in
a perception of the word ``da.''\footnote{\cite{mcgurk:hearing}} Various
demonstrations of this phenomenon exist in the web, for example on the
site \url{http://www.media.uio.no/personer/arntm/McGurk_english.html},
proving not only that the effect works, but that it functions even when
the video has only a poor resolution and image quality below older
analog home video standards. The ``McGurk effect'' (as it is officially
called) demonstrates that what we see can actually \emph{alter} what we
hear. It also shows that different sense perceptions can not be
isolated, but interfere, thus rendering classifications and separations
of single ``media'' more problematic than it conventionally seems. The
effect is also shaking our common assumptions of the physicality of
sense perception, showing how perception is neither passive, nor
objective, but literally means to \emph{make sense}. 
Feeding those makings of sense back to the senses, Dragana Antic's
\cit{Sounds of the Qualia} is a precise reflection of this. When user of
her installation hear their own footsteps anew, as unfamiliar sounds,
behavioral automatisms get disrupted and exposed. Just like in one's
puzzled observation of the McGurk effect, perceptional awareness results
not only in heightened critical awareness of oneself in relation to one's
environment. The deconditioning also reveals the subconscious and
imaginary.

\begin{figure}[ht]
{\center\resizebox*{0.8\columnwidth}{!}
{\includegraphics{pics-lowres/fludd}}}
\caption[Robert Fludd, Picture from \cit{Utriusque cosmi
historia}]{Robert Fludd, Picture from \cit{Utriusque cosmi
historia}}
\end{figure}

A famous illustration in the \cit{Art of Memory} chapter in the book
\cit{Utriusque Cosmi Historia} (``History of Macrocosm and Microcosm'')
of the 17th century hermetic philosopher Robert Fludd shows a man
``seeing'' in his mind images of among others an obelisk and the Tower
of Babel through his ``eye of the imagination'' (\cit{oculis
imaginationis}) --- depicted in an itself imaginary way as a third eye,
located on the person's forehead.\footnote{\cite{yates:memory}, fig. 16}
It is a powerful early depiction of how imagination (literally) means to
shape images in one's mind that don't exist in front of one's two actual
eyes. This renders Fludd's illustration an emblem of the fantastic,
utopian, (literally) visionary and eccentric. Remarkably, the visions
depicted include architectural designs. It becomes indeterminable
whether they are pre-existing forms and signs shaping the imagination,
or new forms shaped \emph{by} the imagination. What's more, the question
of whether they fit the conventional category of ``art'' or ``design''
as in ``applied arts'' becomes entirely obsolete. 

Our consciousness, it follows, is intrinsically interwoven with designs.
Constructed objects and spaces map a mental territory. They have, as
Fludd's illustration shows, an inherent dialectic of both constraining
and opening up our imagination: Limiting it --- likely, but not
necessarily --- to Euclidian dimensions, anthropomorphic measures and
cultural archetypes on the one hand, elevating it beyond the confines of
the ordinary on the other.

\begin{figure}[ht]
{\center
\resizebox*{0.39\columnwidth}{!}
{\includegraphics{pics-lowres/lissitzky-squares-1}}
\resizebox*{0.39\columnwidth}{!}
{\includegraphics{pics-lowres/lissitzky-squares-2}}
}
\caption[El Lissitzky, two pages from \cit{About 2 [Squares]}, 1920]
{El Lissitzky, two pages from \cit{About 2 [Squares]}, 1920}
\end{figure}

The children's book \cit{About 2 [Squares]}, created by the Russian
constructivist El Lissitzky in 1920, shifts such imaginary designs to a 
scenario of reinventing culture
through redesign. Similar to a comic or flip book, it tells, in six
consecutive full page images, the abstract story of a red and a black
square flying through space, landing on a planet that is governed by a
``storm'' of black objects; the squares explode them and build a new
order.\footnote{\cite{lissitzky:squares}} The book conceives of itself
as a loose instruction code by telling its young readers ``not to
read,'' but act out the story with paper, sticks and bricks. It thus
unifies imagination and objects, the abstract and the concrete, and
becomes itself a building block of something new. Cheryl Gallaway's
\cit{Open Wardrobe} functions in a very similar way. It, too, mobilizes
art and design to make them infrastructures, understanding them as
world-making in a literal, not only metaphorical sense. However, the
building blocks --- garments --- are not conceptualist, but
anthropomorphic and intimately physical, microcosmic and not
macrocosmic. By this, and by subjecting its social software code
ultimately to the community, it expresses a humble scepticism not only
regarding, but also in its design.


\begin{figure}[ht]
{\center
\resizebox*{0.49\columnwidth}{!}
{\includegraphics{pics-lowres/lissitzky-red_wedge}}
\resizebox*{0.49\columnwidth}{!}
{\includegraphics{pics-lowres/lissitzky-goat}}}
\caption[El Lissitzky, \cit{Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge!}, 1919; Design for \cit{The Little Goat}, 1917]{El Lissitzky, \cit{Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge!}, 1919; Design for \cit{The Little Goat}, 1917}
\end{figure}

Just like Fludd's illustration, Lissitzky's story of the squares
collapses traditional differentiations of ``art'', ``design'' and
speculative thinking. Being not humble however, he writes a
straight-forward program of revolutionary modernism that, with its
lurking missionary militance and unification ideology, is admittedly
problematic. In a city like Rotterdam whose architectural modernism is
the historical result of Germany having bombed down the city in the
Second World War, Lissitzky's story of objects flying from the sky to
explode old architectures becomes highly ambivalent.  Yet, the
iconography of Lissitzky's story is complex and has an anti-fascist
background. The fourth image, a red square vertically crushing the old
order of things, paraphrases a billboard he had designed in the year
before, the famous \cit{Beat The Whites with The Red Wedge}. The latter,
propaganda for the Red Army in its fight against the monarchist white
troops, specifically addressed the Jewish population of Russia:
Subverting the slogan \cit{Beat The Jews}, it reminded viewers of
the antisemitism of the right-wing forces. In addition, it reused the
Jewish iconography of his 1917 illustration to the Haggadah children's
story \cit{The Little Goat}, showing an angel who punishes slaughter on
earth by pulling his sword in heaven and striking it down to
earth.\footnote{\cite{birnholz:lissitzky}}

Lissitzky's subsequent abstraction of the motif not only secularizes it.
The image turns into a
general reflection of how that which in Fludd's depiction was limited
to imagination could be made material designs and spaces which
would recursively allow new imaginations to develop. Lissitzky's
designs could therefore be seen as even more speculative and fantastic than Fludd's
imaginary architectures. They render themselves no less intricate
figures of reflection despite their shift from metaphysics to design.

Postmodern art criticism, set off among others with Jean-François
Lyotard's \cit{Postmodern Condition} in 1979 and Rosalind Krauss'
\cit{The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths} in
1981,\footnote{\cite{lyotard:postmodern-condition},
\cite{krauss:originality}} nowadays has degraded into a routine bashing of
20th century avant-garde modernism and an ostensive contempt among
curators and artists for problematizing form and design. What tends to
be overlooked in avant-garde modernism, and lost in a superficial
understanding of design, are its experimental and speculative projects
to not merely comment upon, but actually adjust reality. Radical
reinvention of languages was a key program of the 20th century
avant-gardes. It is encouraging to see a student project like Sasson
Kung's \cit{Love Language System} no longer refraining from such an
endeavor, not restraining itself to merely criticizing codes. The
\cit{Love Language System} solves its design issue, the utopia of a
universal language, in a humble and playful way. Even if it were less
modest, dismissals of language reinvention has become cheap talk, too,
that deconstructs itself in its own metaphysical assumption that
language, and codes, wouldn't be cultural constructions that could be
altered, and constructed differently.

\begin{figure}[ht]
{\center
\resizebox*{0.39\columnwidth}{!}
{\includegraphics{pics-lowres/dreamachine-1}}
\resizebox*{0.39\columnwidth}{!}
{\includegraphics{pics-lowres/dreamachine-2}}
}
\caption[Design of Brion Gysin's \cit{Dreamachine}, David Woodard and
William S. Burroughs in front of a \cit{Dreamachine}]
{Design of Brion Gysin's \cit{Dreamachine}, David Woodard and
William S. Burroughs in front of a \cit{Dreamachine}}
\end{figure}

Reality adjustment thus is made on the very level
of the signs and objects that make up a world. Tsila Hassine's
\cit{Ctrl-F(r)eader} takes a reciprocal approach to Sasson Kung's
synthesis of letters and words by constructing an analytical device that
shapes our perception of written language, and thus effectively the language
itself. By showing how words in the Internet achieve their meanings through different
contexts, the \cit{Ctrl-F(r)eader} maps language as a social product. If
the use of the software conversely influences human understanding and
usage of language, a strange feedback process results, triggered by the 
program's filtering politics. 

The McGurk effect shows that no third eye like in Robert Fludd's image
is needed to impose subjective over physical reality, but that the
interference already happens with the two eyes we have. Another examples
is the flicker effect, artistically employed in Brion Gysin's
\cit{Dreamachine} and Tony Conrad's experimental films from the 1960s,
triggering color and visual form hallucinations when a stroboscope light
meets a frequency of around 30 Hz. Yet another is the fact that we can
hear sounds from a sound source that isn't physically capable of
reproducing them -- such as low musical notes from a cheap transistor
radio --- because our brain automatically reconstructs them solely from
their overtone spectrum. Lossy audio and image compression codecs such
as MPEG and JPEG are based precisely on such ``psycho-acoustic'' and
psycho-visual phenomena.

\begin{figure}[ht]
{\center\resizebox*{0.8\columnwidth}{!}
{\includegraphics{pics-lowres/kubelka}}}
\caption[Peter Kubelka in front of the laid-out footage of his 1960 film
\cit{Arnulf Rainer}]{Peter Kubelka in front of the laid-out footage of his 1960 film
\cit{Arnulf Rainer}}
\end{figure}

If perception doesn't match physical laws, it also means that synthetic
composition methods in art and design based on strictly physical
parameters are founded on false aesthetic premises. This in turn
affects 20th century formalist modernisms: constructivist art with
its foundation on the square grid for example, and avant-garde music
from Arnold Schönberg's dodecaphony to Karel Goeyvaerts', Pierre
Boulez' and Karlheinz Stockhausen's serialism. The latter boiled down to a total
physical parameterization of sound and its subsequent arrangement into
permutation rows. It resulted in a complexity of polyphonic patterns that
could be grasped only through formal analysis of the score, but rarely
or not all by the human ear. Likewise, Peter
Kubelka's abstract film \cit{Arnulf Rainer} from 1960, composed only
of monochrome black and white frames according to a serialist method,
is a visually impressive composition and design on the photographs
that show the film laid out as a vertical grid on a wall. But this
quality is lost, and the film appears like flicker, when its 
projection dissects it in time rather than unfolding it in contiguous
space.\footnote{\cite{tscherkassky:kubelka}}

Today, this film reads as an early radical example of digital art in
which a binary code functions as both source and visuals, 
structure and perceivable result. It coincides, both historically
and aesthetically, with the \cit{first manifesto of permutational
art} of the French
information theoretist Abraham M. Moles from 1962.\footnote{\cite{moles:manifest}} This pamphlet,
published originally in German and later expanded into a book \cit{Art and Computer} (\cit{Art
et Ordinateur},\footnote{\cite{moles:ordinateur}} proposes to
refound the arts upon the algorithmic combinatorics of
their particular elements and physical parameters: serial and aleatory
composition in music, word permutations in experimental poetry,
constructivist abstraction in painting.
According to Moles, the objective is to ``narrow down and exhaust
the \cit{field of possibilites} accessible through a `set' of rules''
for the composition of the material.\footnote{\cite{moles:manifest},
p. 3, my translation} It was, in other words, a radically formalist variant of
the belief that the medium is the message.  Along the lines of Claude
Shannon's information theory, Moles proposed to conversely conceive
of aesthetic perception as computational. Aesthetic criticism should
therefore be based on a reverse-engineering that
``determines the redundancy of artistic messages through the coding
rule of its combinatorics''.\footnote{\cite{moles:manifest}, p. 2, my
translation}

With this, Moles set a classical agenda of what first was called
cybernetic, later electronic and eventually media arts and design.
But already in his writing, the formalisms become eccentric
and border on phantasmagorias. He takes, for example, Sade's novel
\cit{The 120 Days of Sodom} as a model of a computational eroticism,
and thus transgression and reinvention of culture.  It took three
decades until the later 1990s when such eccentricity, the surrealism
of formalisms, found its expression in the digital arts, in the
works of Dutch artists (and former Piet Zwart media design research
fellows) jodi, or in the frequent pastiches and remobilizations of abstract
art, constructivist graphic design and typography in the pop cultural
design of record covers, flyers and web sites.\footnote{The catalogue
\cit{Abstraction Now}, which includes jodi and former Piet Zwart
media design research fellow Peter Luining, documents this tendency,
\cite{abstraction-now}}

When binary information turns into flicker, causing hallucinations, it reveals
wider implications of aesthetics and aesthetic designs that disprove
easy critiques of ``aestheticism.'' The McGurk and flicker effects are
so profoundly disturbing because they reveal cracks in our reality and
the shakiness of cognition. In turn, they provide hooks for designs
to hack conditionings.  Since the Greek word ``aisthesis'' means
``perception,'' such effects are simple yet radical examples of how
aesthetics concerns the human condition. 

Aesthetic theory has addressed this dimension since its very beginning.
Kant's notion of the dynamically sublime refers to a force that exerts a
vortex-like power upon us while, being a perceptive phenomenon, leaving
the freedom of reflection and thus raising human
self-awareness.\footnote{\cite{kant:judgement}, §28} Friedrich Schiller
expanded Kant's notion into a modality of artistic designs by conceiving
of the sublime as a result not only of natural, but also human-made
phenomena.\footnote{\cite{schiller:sublime}}

Designs of systems or `media' to change perception and cognition of
ourselves, our environment and communities: This could be called the
common yet radical denominator of the audio installations, information
filters, alternative language systems and garment economies in the
graduation projects of Dragana Antic, Tsila Hassine, Sasson Kung and
Cheryl Gallaway. Interestingly, they all apply designs onto industrially
designed objects, attempting to reprogram and reappropriate the latter:
audio processing to footsteps in shoes that were typically designed to
avoid noise, linguistic algorithms and linguistic type design onto the
Internet, and community web sites onto clothing, carving out physical
intimacy --- feeding back body motion, expressing love, wearing stuff --
and conditions of thought. May these designs flicker!


\bibliographystyle{alpha}
\bibliography{diss}


\end{document}
