My work does not engage with race or ethnic identity. Perhaps this is because I am racially very mixed. Some folks have identity crises because of this but I find it generally unimportant.
As for a specific artwork, there are two works that have guided me to where I am today. Firstly, I am a musician and I have come to visual art through the vein of music. When I was almost 19 years old, I was out purchasing gifts for friends. I could play a little guitar but was not taking music or art very seriously; I planned to study mathematics or chemistry. At a music store I found a peculiar album: a black cover with a prism, light shining through one end of the prism and a rainbow of colors emitting from the other end. Of course, it was Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. I had seen the image at school on t-shirts but never bothered to listen to it. Seeing that it was only $10, I picked it up for myself and went on my way. That evening, as soon as I popped it in my CD player, everything changed.
I was completely caught off guard by the things they were doing: I had no idea anyone had made anything that sounded like that, with not only instruments but sounds of machinery, voices, laughter, and pieced together in a 43-minute narrative. And 40 years ago at that! Where had I been all this time? I couldn’t believe that no one had told me about this and it took stumbling upon a discounted album with a vaguely recognizable cover for me to find it. From that point, I wanted to play music.
The second work I encountered was also by chance. This was a year or so later and I was madly devouring any and all music I could find. I was studying music theory at the time and was convinced that somewhere there was an objective reason that music sounded good (this, I would later discover, is completely the wrong question to be asking). A friend had one of those classical-music-for-relaxation compilations that I thought twice about, but decided to make a copy of anyway. It consisted of the usual suspects: Bach, Mozart, Debussy, Chopin, and I’m sure some Vivaldi, too. But somewhere in the middle of the album there was a solo piano piece the likes of which I had never heard. Satie’s Gymnopedie I said everything I could possibly want to say in an artwork. It was simple, elegant, and exquisitely beautiful. There was a permeating melancholy, a palpable tension that begged release but merely oscillated between two harmonies. There was no fat, no excess technique, nothing showy like Liszt or Chopin, something you could listen to while staring out your rain strewn window at a grey metropolitan sky. The classical music world, I determined, is where I want to be even though everything I had to say had already been said by a strange man living in Paris over 100 years ago.
How do you see the relationship between emotional and intellectual perception of your work? In particular, how much do you consider the immersive nature of the viewing experience?
The concepts of intellectual and emotional perception can inform one another, to be sure, but a work can be emotionally riveting while being intellectually boring and visa versa. More often than not in contemporary digital art and music, a work is more intellectually interesting than emotionally gripping or aesthetically satisfying. A work can use or reference the newest, craziest theory of physics or some new way of creating art but that doesn’t make it good or interesting as a piece of art.
In my own work, I wouldn’t know where to begin. I almost always begin work from an intellectual standpoint and rarely — if ever — end up working from an emotional standpoint. People’s emotions are their own business and I don’t understand my own emotions well enough to wax on about the emotions of others.
Now let us focus on your production Thoughts on Rorschach (2015) . The merge between scientific and artistic approach in this production is fascinating. Could you tell our readers more about this project?
Thoughts on Rorschach was the merging of another project and the need to produce something for a seminar I was taking at the University of Washington. I had been working with data bending images for a couple weeks by interpreting the data as audio in Audacity and manipulating there. However, I was looking for a way to make the process more algorithmic and faster, so I was building a way to do it in SuperCollider. As I was working on that, I needed to come up with a project for the aforementioned seminar, so I thought I could try to control the manipulations with EEG data since I had been doing a similar thing with sound. The result was the first few animations from Thoughts on Rorschach.
Technically, there are a few things going on. The actual data bending (the ‘effects’ on the image) happen in the time domain. That is, an image’s raw data — the actual bits compromising an image in a computer — is interpreted as sound and placed in an buffer. These can be listened to but for the most part they’re not very interesting in and of themselves. Where it gets interesting is when one applies processing usually revered for audio to these buffers such as delay, distortion, filtering, etc. In SuperCollider this can be done in a much more nuanced and controlled way than Audacity, leading to more interesting results. Among the more interesting ways of processing is using FFT (Fast-Fourier Transform), since manipulating the image data in the frequency domain abstracts this data even further. Moreover, SuperCollider offered a way to create batches of these images quickly and they could easily be combined after the fact using a Bash script.
Despite the fact that the controls are very strict, each image behaves differently, even to the same set of controls. For instance when I was originally experimenting with the process, I decided to take two images of the same thing (a black circle on a white background) but different sizes and from different formats originally and apply the same processing to each of them. One was fairly boring while the other became eclipse. It was amazing that nearly the same input produced incredibly different results. Of course, there are general tendencies of certain kinds of processing but the specifics of how one effect will act on a particular image are unknown until you actually go and try it. It’s wonderful; you must confront each image on it’s own terms and work with it individually. It’s never what you think and sometimes it takes several hours to find even one effect that yields interesting results.
For each image, I collected my own EEG data using a 19-channel cap. I made a little slideshow with each image being displayed for 10 seconds with a 5 second gap between each image. I then recorded my EEG while viewing these images and describing them in my head. Afterward, I sliced up the EEG recording by image and used electrodes on specific to areas of the brain where image processing took place as my source. I then analyzed each channel using FFT and acquired the relative power levels of each frequency band in the brain, from delta through gamma. Each image was manipulated by EEG data that was taken while I looked at that specific image.
Applying the EEG data to the images through time was relatively straightforward: I just mapped the values of a channel to different inputs on the audio effects. Of course, these mappings were rarely 1-to-1; I often multiplied or added with other channel’s frequency bands, combined with lines I used that mapped to the entire duration of the animation, or did whatever else was necessary to find interesting results, always utilizing the EEG information. The specifics of the mappings were ultimately arbitrary: I would poke around an electrode’s frequency bands until I found something that was producing something interesting, or if it wasn’t, I would move on. Before this, though, I would often play with the images using hardcoded values and lines to find things that worked and where in terms of input values they worked. Then I would tweak the EEG signals to roughly the same place and the effect would follow the contour of the changing power band in that particular electrode.
In the end, the computer functions as a sort of psychological interpreter, taking my raw thoughts and expressing them as animations. This places the algorithm and program (and myself, as the creator of the interpreter and creator of the interpretation) in an philosophically interesting place. This place specifically is for someone else to figure out or for me to figure out down the line. I’m far more interested in creating new things than interpreting my own work.
Overall, I’m fairly happy with the piece. I hope to make another version one day where someone else can create the inkblots and slideshow, such that I do not have any pre-viewing of the images. This would make the exercise more akin to an actual Rorschach test.
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