Inaugural talk about the Q Is for Quicken / Sonic paper project at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, 20 February 2014/
http://youtu.be/YW0B4VdmTtc
http://youtu.be/YW0B4VdmTtc
Inaugural talk about the Q Is for Quicken / Sonic paper project at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, 20 February 2014/ http://youtu.be/YW0B4VdmTtc
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Manipulations 1
an answer to the question: How paper qualities coordinate the way someone handles or manipulates it: perforations corrugations smooth folds Oana: https://vimeo.com/87108667: you will find manipulations 1, a first chapter of the small collectionof gestures concentrating on the everyday. Because filming has little to do with the actual experience, I will comment some of the actions. They are taken from the ordinary, yet, I thought I should start from here to move towards more expressive ways of interacting with paper. Next I will manipulate white paper of different sizes and textures with no text, removed from a social play. Excerpted from Michelle Fornabai: INK or "V is for Vermilion as described by Vitruvius” An A to Z of Ink in Architecture (Columbia University, 2014) Sha Xin Wei 沙心煒 U and V rent a small boat and go fishing. After a while, U says to V, "This is a great spot for fishing." V says, "Yes, but how will we know to come back to this spot?" U takes a brush and draws an X in the bottom of the boat. "That's how!" V says, "That's silly; how do you know that they'll rent us the same boat tomorrow?" So, "X" marks the spot. In Roman languages, "X" was the quintessential sign of here-ness. It was also the mark of I-ness in lieu of the more ideographic mark that an analphabetic person could make as a legal signature. (Perhaps for Chinese it should be rather the rectangle 口 "kou" signifying mouth, which filled with the cross signifies 田 "tian"/paddyfield, or which filled with glyphs of the structures of cities signifies 國 "guo"/nation.) In any case, what is a signature, and what does it do? Derrida said in his celebrated essay, "Signature, événement, contexte" (1971) that writing, or any grapheme, breaks with every context. A grapheme's very persistence, its "iterability," detaches it from both reader and writer, from even the intentionality of the one who makes the mark. So, in deep senses, writing works by absence. That's not all. Not only is the boat unmoored, its subsequent inhabitants may make quite different uses of the "X." Vive la différence! Imagine that U's boot had marked that "X" by chance, instead. U and V's conversation about it could still have happened. Or another conversation, equally sensible. Concerning writing in general, Derrida says, it is a "spacing as a disruption of presence in a mark"; it works as a grapheme, even without referent fish, water, U or V. Now suppose, nevertheless, that U and V wanted to affirm their good fishing here and now to an imagined fellow fisherman who may someday sit in this boat? Derrida says, "In order for the tethering to the source to occur, what must be retained is the absolute singularity of a signature-event and a signature-form: the pure reproducibility of a pure event." But what is this pureness of the event of making that mark? Derrida makes no logical argument but slips into the waters of empiricism: "Effects of signature are the most common thing in the world." Why not follow Derrida into the life world and into deeper waters? What if we slip from the problematic warrant of identity suggested by nuance, tone of voice, accent (whose conventional effect Derrida does not deny), to the processes themselves of nuancing, intoning, and accenting? What if we pass from predicating the signature that detachedly warrants "good fishing happened here" to the inking of the signature? A more symmetrical, Simondonian account of this action would draw attention to the unbounded massing of material processes in the water, the ink, the wood, the fisherman's schooled hand dragged by the wood as it forms the mark, and the thousand years of concretization in that pen inextricably entwined with the evolution of associated technical crafts of ink, writing instruments, and orthography. Supplementing J.D.'s "very dry discussion," let me ink my brush and stroke this tissue paper in a crisscrossing motion, watching the paper's fibers swell darkly for a moment as the ink suffuses them, then coalesce into pools of black. I pour water after the ink, watching the water chase and diffuse the ink further into the paper's fibers. As the wet pools grow, the water stratifies what used to be a uniform black, separating out the hues. I smell the ink now as enough of the paper's surface has wetted to perfume the air. The spotting absorbs the X. Derrida, Jacques. "Signature, Event, Context." translated by Alan Bass. Margins of Philosophy. 1971, p. 19.
Oana Suteu Khintirian's Wordpress notes . Navid Navab built a worktable with pick-ups for Oana to play with her own papers, gestural repertoires and associate sounds. The Vimeo video documentation will draw other interests. Interaction Experiments
o.s.k. TML Montreal 02/09/2014 9:20pm Q is for Quicken First Prototype NOTES on experiment #1 31_01_2014 SET UP _table _Japanese mulberry paper _contact mics (one attached under the table and a second to the sheet of paper itself) _Max MSP running three modules: _“mosaic”; _“granular synthesis” (4 different files : voice, snd effects, music, breathing); _“material augmentation”. INTERACTION #1 : a six years old boy is discovering the installation without any explanation or previous description OUTCOMES : the little boy is drawn towards the device and is fascinated by the response it gets from touching the paper and the objects on the table. He bangs on it and is startled by the loudness of the sound, but continues playing with it. He grabs a piece of metal to scratch the paper. When he doesn’t get much of a response he grabs a bigger rustling piece of paper. He is given a pen and writes, but his movements are producing a gentle sound in comparison with the loud crumbling of the paper. CONCLUSIONS : the device has shown a significant power to draw attention, captivating the six years old for over 10 min (not an easy task!). The experiment also pointed towards the importance of choosing the type of paper with extreme precision in consideration to its physical and sonic qualities. INTERACTION #2 : exploration of the “material augmentation” module. OUTCOMES : the set-up reacted well to repetitive hand movements like the one’s needed in writing the letter “m”. Feeling drawn to discover the sound-gesture relationship, I moved away from calligraphy for a little while and freely draw lines with the only purpose of “performing” with the piece of paper. Once the movement understood I felt confident returning to writing. From the “mosaic” and “granular synthesis” modules we hear bamboo and breathing sounds, which at this point are more-or-less random sound effects. The time I spent playing becames a reflection time for the creation of a sound bank and my mind was racing to find poetic meaning in the correlation between paper and sound through gesture. I seemed a mnemonic act and exploratory at the same time. CONCLUSIONS : since this was a first time I was playing in the set-up, the interaction made me think of the balance to achieve between spontaneous interaction and planned/improvised performance. INTERACTION #3 : experimenting with the correlation between voice and writing. OUTCOMES : the interaction begins with a tactile exploration of the white page, an almost sensual gesture, when I am reminded that the sound sample is actually an orang-utan… The writing is initially done in an improvised invented alphabet and ends by transcribing the words heard. CONCLUSIONS : although the “invented alphabet” gave a larger ground for improvisation, because the hand was free to follow the sound, the link with the spoken word was lost, therefore I felt the need to transcribe what was said (heard). Yet the simple transcription was not satisfying since it was too literal. INTERACTION #4 : free improvisation starting from a direct connection between the words heard and the writing. OUTCOMES : although I have already done it in the previous exploration, I cannot stop myself from touching the white page before writing on it. In terms of the gesture of transcription this improvisation starts from where the previous one ended. Hearing my own voice reading the text I copy the words, but linger on each one of them, which gives an altogether new interpretation of the text. When the page is full I try to erase it, but contrary to the meaning this gesture usually has, erasing the written words makes them come back even stronger. The act of blacking out the words, makes the voice scream them out loud. The brush has the same effect, since the set-up is highly sensitive. CONCLUSIONS : the act of erasing, when the hand is transcribing on paper the words that are heard, creates an interesting paradox. Covering becomes impossible and only reveals more. |
Q is for quickenNotes from continuing trials. Archives
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