IDAT 210 - Project Proposal

Overview
For this project we are required to:

‘Set a critical inquiry and to provide critically informed, culturally aware and creative response in the form of a practical interactive media project'

The focus of this project is around digital art, looking at its history and influences and how it can be developed for the future. My area of study in relation to this specifically is digital performance and how this can be considered 'new' in terms of its techniques and ideals. It is important that digital art has definition from other art forms, and this is shown by Christiane Paul in Digital Art:

‘One of the basic but crucial distinctions made here is between art that uses digital technologies as a tool for the creation of traditional art objects ... and art that employs these technologies as its very own medium, being produced, stored, and presented exclusively in the digital format.’ (2003:8)
This draws a close link to a major focus in digital art of process over product. Digital art produces a process as the art rather than a final outcome, and so this is a particularly important area to consider in the creation of my project. This can also have a large effect on the roles of the artist and audience, and these have also become elements to work with in digital art production. My project should take this and other knowledge I have on digital art and performance into account in order to produce a critical piece of work in the field.

Overall for this project I aim to produce a generative sound piece that builds upon the here-say process and transformation of communication provided by social networking, and demonstrates the sound of social networking in response to the many visual representations that have been produced previously.

Keywords
For more information on how I chose these keywords go to my Project Keywords post. From this five keywords/terms can be deduced for my project, which are listed below:
Final Keywords List:

• Generative art 
• Digital performance
• Sound/Music production
• Dadaist poetry
•  Social Networking

Context (Research)
As previously mentioned process is vitally important in digital art. This can be seen in many generative art works, as it is the process through which the art is generated that is most important rather than the final result. The concept of process as art however does have links back to previous art forms such as art through instruction. Dadaist poetry such as that by Tristan Tzara is a good example of this as poems were made by following a set of instructions such as cutting up a newspaper and then piecing the words back together. More contemporary works such as those of Stelarc's Ping Body(1996) continue to link back to this idea, in which the body is manipulated using data from the internet. The data is basically instructing the movements and so shows that digital art and instruction have strong bonds.

Sound based work has also often been produced as digital art, or as part of a digital performance. Dance performances in particular have used this in a cyclic way, such as taking a dancer’s movements, converting it to music and then instructing the dancers to interpret the music for their dance. As well as this Golan Levin's Telesymphony(2001) used the audiences mobile ring tones to create a live musical ring tone symphony. This demonstrates that sound as much as visuals is important in digital art and performance.

Finally there is also an important point to make in terms of 'intermedia', a concept created by Dick Higgins, a Fluxus artist. Higgins wrote in his 'Statement of Intermedia' that:

‘in saying that such-and-such a work is basically musical, but also poetry. This is the intermedial approach to emphasize the dialectic between the media.’

This statement is closely linked to my ideas and outlines a key element of digital art about combining various mediums together, like a montage, which will also be an important element to my project.

Field leaders (Inspiration)
For information on the field leaders and inspiration I have found relating to sound, generative art and poetry go to my Related Research post. As well as these projects there are also social networking based projects like social network visualisations such as that below:

(http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jheer/socialnet/) This was constructed by Jeffrey Heer, a leading social network visualisation artist, which demonstrates the artist’s friendster network covering him, his friends, his friend’s friends and their friends – 3 hops out from himself. Jeffrey has also worked with Danah Boyd on Vizter, a study of visualising online networks. This has included more detailed work into social research that allowed the exploration of gender, community and connections.

(http://hci.stanford.edu/jheer/projects/vizster/) These provide a new perception of social networks that can reveal new and interesting information. However these are all image based and so the aim of my project is to extend this investigation through use of sound. These visualisations are also quite focused on elements within social networking such as friend lists, but my project plans to be more focused on the processes that social networking can provide.


Implementation (Platform e.g. video, installation etc)
For the implementation of my project I intend to look at a way of making a sound piece based on social networking. It occurred to me that we have many visualisations of social networks, but no sound has been created. I therefore intend to create 'the sound of social networking'. Ultimately it will be the process of making this however that will be important as I aim to use social networking to develop the process through until the final result. For example I may be able to write a comment on someone’s wall that they can then reply to. This reply them becomes the next comment on another persons wall, and so the text develops through social networking. These could then be put together as a poem and the poem converted to sound, providing me with both a textual and audio end to my project. The focus of my project will be on the transformations in communication. This ensures there is a continuous connection throughout my project as both text and sound are forms of communication as well as the process being centred on communication through social networking. Therefore the content of the process i.e. the text produced by this will also be related to communication. These ideas are only in their initial stages and so I aim to think about them further before fully implementing the project. However my final implementation will be some form of audio, possibly embedded in a video or stand-alone.