C@T Seniors Final Projects

Flights of Creativity by Adrienne Mennitt
In a project that focuses more on the process of creating art than the results, Adrienne used video screen capture to record artists drawing on the computer. Each had to start from a curved line they were presented with, and produce a drawing related to birds. Adrienne examined how different artists approached this challenge, and how they responded to other artists' attempts at it. 

"Land of If" by Aubrey Millen
Aubrey created an animated short, which used flash to move drawings she had done on paper and cleaned up digitally. I had the honor of acting as the voice of the narrator for her film and behind the scenes, I was given some insight into her thought process in this piece (I also learned that my French accent is horrible). Aubrey was originally inspired by a piece of art that  visually represents word frequency and distribution in a text, called TextArc (http://www.textarc.org/appearances/InfoVis02/InfoVis02_TextArc.pdf). Her idea was to create an animated storybook that followed a similar idea, using importance or frequency of different words to determine the relative size. However, it developed into a less concretely symbolic form, where concepts were visualized, not words, and were woven into the plot of the story, instead of being represented purely visually. Her story was about a little girl who, while debating whether or not to go to school, fell into an imaginary world of possibilities and choices, and encountered a potent moral dilemma. A biblical allegory, an examination of ethics, or a simple fable? Aubrey's work can be interpreted on many levels. 

Andrea Mendoza's "Railroad" is a virtual reality adventure, not through an imaginary landscape, but through the history and culture of Ecuador. This interactive video installation responds to prompts by the viewer, showing archival footage shot from a railroad train when the viewer is in motion, and cutting to clips of Ecuadorian people and landscapes when the viewer stops. These clips, which are desaturated, regain color in the shape of the viewer's silhouette. And finally, the viewer can "touch" still images on the screen to enlarge them and view them more closely. It is an exploration of culture and national identity that, rather than merely lecturing the viewer on information, invites them to become part of the journey, and experience another country as if visiting.

MARCH OF THE ROBOTS by Basar Gulcu
This piece, which employs robotics and programming made from scratch, seeks to answer the question "can a robot dance?" Sure, it might not be a question that many of us were asking to begin with, but it does present an interesting quandary. The most basic and primitive form of human expression is movement. Animals use movement as a means of communication (bees even perform something like a dance), and we have adapted it into an art. To create an artificial intelligence that can mimic this behavior would be no small feat, and Basar achieved it by building a program based on genetic evolution. Basar's two robots can perform eight different movements: forward,turn right, turn left, rotate right, rotate left, wait. The sensor configuration allows the robots to sense objects (obstacles) including the partner. A pattern of movements forms one dance. Dances are evaluated as part of a Genetic Algorithm. Each agent evolves on its own where they interact with each other while learning. Hence we implemented co-evolution.
To design such a system, the factors that constitute "dance" had first to be defined. From 
Basar's description of the process:
Individual Factors:
• Flow
• Directional Movement
• Adaptation
• Gathering
Performance Factors:
• Flow
• Weight
• Time
• Space
The Genetic Algorithm is a search technique, which creates a set of possible solutions to a given problem. In this case, it’s dance. The set of solutions are each a dance performance. The set of solutions are each evaluated in order to form a new set of solutions which is called a generation. In this process, they are evaluated using the dance factors. One can change the kind of dance one wants by changing the weights of the different dance factors.
Better dances have a higher probability of contributing and evolving to the next generation, because Venus and Mars learn to dance together, this can be called co-evolution.
Basar collected results from three separate generations on the robot. At Generation 0, they couldn't perform much. At Generation 100, the learning took place and they seemed to interact with each other within the given description. At Generation 300, their dance was good enough to be evaluated as of humans.

JESSICA R. EBERT
Jessica made an installation that took advantage of modern technological potential to react to stimuli from viewers, a digital image that would change at their behest. First inspired by Camille Utterback's Untitled 5: External Measures Series, in which the movement of the user is tracked by a camera and traced on a canvas. Jessica's piece, instead of using motion capture , uses speech recognition for interactive triggers.  It has a photo background composited from 10 different photos she took in New Zealand, and uses animation to react to keywords spoken by the viewer.  Each animation is accompanied by a sound as well. The user can affect a bird, a waterfall, and the time of day in the image in front of them.  When the user says "bird," a kea, which Jessica modeled and animated using MAYA (and which, she tells me, took most of her final semester to perfect), flies into or out of the image.  The kea has two potential actions, singing and laughing.  The waterfall, when called out by the viewer, flows and becomes slightly transparent with each triggering.  The user can also switch the image from day to night.

Biological Visualization: Cave Paintings to Video Games

The complex forms and systems of the biological world can often best be understood through visual representation and diagrams. The earliest representational artwork of an organism was a cave painting in France 17 thousand years ago. It appears to communicate strategies for hunting deer, perhaps for educational purposes. The idea of teaching biology with visual aids has purveyed in art. Notable examples of the pre-Modern era include illustrations of bubonic plague symptoms from Renaissance Europe. It may have given a clearer idea for physicians of the time of what to look for. In the 1600s, explorers would chronicle exotic flora and fauna with illustrations and samples. 

Perhaps the most notable collection of these wildlife drawings is that of Charles Darwin, whose study of comparative anatomy helped him found of of the great scientific theories. In the 1800s, anatomical and medical illustrations were abundant in China, and gave directions on acupuncture points on the body. In Western anatomical diagrams, cadavers would be presented in lifelike poses, though partly dissected. The Body Worlds exhibit is a modern-day throwback to this practice, with actual plasticized bodies posed and dissected, usually without skin.

Scientific illustrations remain a major part of biological education today. However, new technologies have allowed for new methods of visualization, many of them even more effective. Interactive animated tutorials can show real-time movement in biological systems, and react to prompts by the student. The most prominent form of interactive visuals today is not for educational purposes, however, but for entertainment. The videogame industry is enormous and growing, with advances in graphics and A.I. making the experience for the player ever more lifelike and engaging. When television was first invented, it was claimed to have great potential as a teaching tool, connected the world with visual information and education. But the way things have turned out, sitcoms, reality shows, and MTV have not quite fulfilled that promise. The opposite seems to be happening with videogames. Whereas the medium has traditionally been dismissed as a time-wasting, brain melting distraction, educators have been attempting to infuse games with educational value, and vice versa. 

Why are videogames so compelling? Part of the appeal is fantasy escapism; how else is one to battle aliens or explore underwater cities? Another major aspect is the challenge of gameplay. Humans are tenacious creatures, and once we have set ourselves a task, we want to win. Games allow us to apply this urge to complex, varied, and intense situations. Gamers can become so engaged in the activities, they enter a state called “flow”, where they are totally concentrated on gameplay and aware of nothing else. And believe it or not, leveling up in the virtual world can translate––in some ways––to skills development in the real world. Games have the potential to enhance one’s strategic thinking, communication, memory, negotiating skills, group cooperation, and data handling; which of these abilities is getting the most exercise depends largely on the type of game. So why not tap into this potential by adding an educational element to the gameplay, and having the players learn in a more concrete manner? Well, attempts have been made, but the research is still fairly novel, and results have, of course, been mixed.

The people who try to teach kind history and science are not the same people who make videogames, and often fail to grasp what it is about the experience that draws gamers in. So called “edutainment” games have been largely unsuccessful, because the games are simplistic compared to the competition, the variability of the gameplay is limited, and often reduces to repetitive busywork and fails to support progressive understanding. Worst, the audience resents being coerced into learning. To combat these pitfalls, it might be best to put aside attempts at making learning superficially resemble “fun” activities, and rather focus on creating an environment that leads to “flow” and promotes learning. The conditions in games that, according to research, seem to lead to flow include control over the level of challenge faced by the player, focused activities that demand attention, clear criteria for performance with concrete feedback, and a wide variety of challenges presented. Some new educational games have employed these methods to greater effect. Notable among them is Immune Attack, a free downloadable game that helps middle schoolers learn about the human bodies natural defenses through a virtual experience not unlike that in the film Fantastic Voyage, where they enter the body in a nano-craft and destroy germs with real cellular processes.

Symposium Artists

Eric Dyer: An animator and self-proclaimed "audience-friendly experimental film[maker]".He says, "The term ‘experimental’ is often misused by filmmakers who have made films that either are not fully fleshed-out or simply do not make any sense. For me, experimental film is about exploring the expressive possibilities of burgeoning technologies and systems of my own design.” The film he presented at the Connecticut College Arts & Technology Symposium was called "Copenhagen Cycles". It is a 6-minute film that utilizes a wide range of filmmaking and graphic techniques. The imagery consists of video Eric took during a stay in Copenhagen. By breaking the video down into single frames, printing them, and cutting out the desired forms, Dyer was able to construct elaborate zoetropes––an early motion illusion device, popular in the late 19^th Century––which, when spun and filmed with the right shutter speed, produce the illusion of movement without any editing after the fact. For this movie, Eric used Final Cut, AfterEffects, Photoshop, a Canon GL-1 camera, an electric motor with a variable output power supply, an Epson 2200 printer, “and a couple different Macs.”

Jeanne Stern & Erich Ragsdale: Jeanne is a Conn alumn, and she and Erich have worked in tandem for many years as independent animators. Stern's films feature puppetry created in a very low-tech fashion; paper cutouts and colored thread animated by pullstrings. The visual result is somewhere between a living children's book and a Michel Gondry film. Oh, and it's in 3D. I had the pleasure of participating in a workshop with these two, where they demonstrated some of their methods and had us try them out. With simple stop-motion photography, we brought to life simple paper tubes, blobs of jello, and construction paper shapes affixed to wires stands. Using a simple and ingenious system of mirrors attached to the lens, the camera would record two views of the objects, from slightly different angles. By tinting and superimposing the two images in Final Cut, Stern and Ragsdale made a clip that, viewed through blue and red glasses, looked amazingly 3D. Trying out their methods was truly an inspiration for me.

Anita Cheng and Ronaldo Kiel are artists who collaborate in digital media to create installations, videos and performances. Cheng is a choreographer and Kiel is a visual artist. They work with ideas on the perception versus reality. Their artistic contributions explore the connections between the object, its representation and the viewer. In the six years since she founded Anita Cheng Dance, Anita Cheng has become known as a modern-dance choreographer with a special sensitivity to technological imagery. “Ten Before Now After,” the solo that opened her program on Thursday night at the Joyce SoHo, was a stunningly simple, imaginative blend of projected images and live dancing. Ms. Cheng and her collaborator, the video artist Ronaldo Kiel, made rare and inspired use of the theater’s white walls, on which the soloist, Cho-Ying Tsai, interacted with her shadow and with filmed images of herself performing the same choreography. Ms. Cheng is clearly too sensible an artist to raise overt questions about time and reality, but they lurked intriguingly below the solo’s surface.But then came the new “Fictions,” a longer group piece that began magically but meandered into kitchen-sink imagery. The charming awkwardness of the dancers’ small forays into space helped give “Fiction” the look of a sprawling fairy tale, as did Stephen Rush’s exotic, anecdotal score and Mr. Kiel’s images of greenery, water and mysterious curtain panels. Agata Oleksiak’s costumes, bunched and lacy scraps of white and bright color, added to the fairy-tale look. But a firm editorial hand was badly needed here. 

Museums & World's Fairs

Since the dawn of the Age of Discovery, people’s understanding of the world around them and their place in it have shifted momentously. One of the clearest ways to understand these changes are to examine the presentation of exotic cultures––and one’s own––in museums and World’s Fairs over the last 500 years. A central aspect of these exhibitions has been technology: foreign and domestic, theoretical and historical.

The earliest of these exhibits were the “Cabinets of Curiosities” in the 15th and 16th centuries, which displayed artifacts and biological samples brought back to the motherland by explorers who had visited far-off places. In the displays, no distinction way made between nature and culture; exotic organisms were shown alongside human crafts and creations, both viewed as foreign “curiosities”. Also on view in these exhibits, but presented rather differently, was the home-brewed technology that had allowed Europeans to reach (and subjugate) distant lands.

As the Enlightenment led to a more scientific and analytical interest in the world, exhibits became more organized, and their presentation more elaborate. The Natural History Museums of the mid 1800s were themselves marvels of modern technology, their architecture fostering a focus on surveillance. The Museum of Practical Archeology was designed as a panopticon, based on the contemporary layout of prisons. Visitors could take in a view of the entire exhibit, and feel “above it all”, in more ways than one. A prominent and common trend in museums of this era was the construction of detailed and lifelike dioramas, portraying people and animals unfamiliar to the viewer. Such a feat was considered to be a marvel in-and-of-itself, to bring dead nature from its original location, into the city, and make it seem alive. Many of these dioramas contained “primitive” humans (mannequins, of course) involved in technological pursuits.

More sensationalized and flashy than the mostly academic museums were Worlds Fairs, which began in around the same time and continued through 1964 (at which time the ability of most viewers to travel by plane around the world made bringing exotic wonders to them unnecessary). The first was the Crystal Palace Exhibit of 1851 in London. The Palace itself was the first building of its size to be constructed purely of glass and steel, and housed showcases of the most impressive in British technology as well as that of other countries that had been invited to present there. It was quite competitive, with each industrialized nation attempting to seem the most advanced. Technological developments were inextricably tied to societal advancement in the minds of the people, a testament to national success and power. The items from non-European nations presented there consisted primarily of crafts, and were considered high quality by the British, but clearly not as advanced as European technical prowess.

World’s Fairs became grand festivals in America, where imposing and glorified temporary structures would be erected in record time to house the exhibits. The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1860 exemplified this practice, with a vast “Court of Honor” featuring architecture designed to look like that of European Royalty. The few permanent buildings boasted record heights, allowing attendees to look out on the whole proceedings. Within this festival, technological advancements were presented as a narrative of progress and efficiency, with American technical achievements attesting to the nation’s wealth and plentitude. Technology glorified the nation, and Western society, while in the layout of the fair a clear line was drawn between the powerful and the primitive. The exhibits featuring non-European nations were gathered in the Midway, along with the bawdy “lower” forms of entertainment. Technology also represented a promise––and this perception has endured through the last century––that industrial and scientific advancement would lead to social progress and better lives for individuals. The “World of Tomorrow” would be clean, safe, and prosperous. For the underprivileged urban working class, this was a captivating dream.

In “A Century of Progress”, the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933, the focus of technology had shifted somewhat. No longer was the preeminent concern with what technology could do to fulfill humanities needs and desires, but rather merely what technology could do. The exhibits demonstrated that technology could bring the distant near, making objects geographically mobile. Also mobile was technology itself––many of the marvels at the fair moved, amazing the audience. Perhaps this was technology’s most appealing ability: to wow viewers, to create illusions and entertain. Technology was not the only thing at the fair designed purely to entertain and shock people. The most shocking exhibits were... well, people. 1933 saw the genesis of the Freak Show, showcasing peculiar and disfigured individuals that (subconsciously or otherwise) provided a foil for the idea of the ideal Western person. Among these freak shows was a town inhabited entirely by little people. Once again, viewers were enabled to survey the exhibit from a greater height, and feel comparatively empowered.

The “World of Tomorrow” fair in New York, 1939, saw yet another shift. Now the focus was not what technology could do, but what it might yet do. It showed an ideal future world, with architecture composed of perfect geometric forms, and lifestyles consisting of perfect, easy living, where technology saw to all difficulties and responsibilities. Another ideological shift apparent in this fair was the transition from technology aggrandizing a national identity to promoting corporate identity. Advertising and the consumer market took center stage, with companies showcasing their futuristic cars and appliances. General Motors had its own building, where it displayed cars that were introduced by the ultimate future fantasy: a subservient and intelligent robot.

Verisimilitude

“We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”

Throughout history, a primary goal in art is to emulate reality. From crudely drawn antelopes on cave walls to immaculately detailed tromp l'oiel, artists have strove to make their work look just like the real thing. However, only recently has technology reached the point where artists are able to make sculptures, and even digital simulations, that look practically indistinguishable from living people. 

Among the most prominent of these hyper-real sculptors is Ron Mueck, a London based artist who makes impossibly lifelike sculptures of people, often with their scale altered dramatically. While it can never match the creepiness of his earlier work (Labyrinth, with David Bowie), these creations are profoundly unsettling. An enormous 4.5m crouching Boy, a 3 ft tall naked man, a 20 ft long newborn, a replica of his own head 6 times its actual size. Consequently his hyper-realistic sculptures, while extraordinarily lifelike, challenge us by their odd scale. The “psychological confrontation for the viewer is to recognize and assimilate two contradictory realities”, says the artist. To achieve this effect, Mueck must go through a meticulous fabrication process:

1. crafts a series of small clay models to decide on figure positioning

2.  creates a series of drawings in different sizes to make decisions about scale

3. sculpts the figure in clay, with details of expression and skin texture

4. a mould of the sculpture is made using silicone (or for larger works, fibreglass).

5. painting (by hand) finer details on the surface, before finally sculpting the eyes, bringing his creations to life.

            

Another notable artist who used similar methods since the '70s is Duane Hanson. Rather than thrusting paradox in the face of the audience by combining realism with impossible scale, he makes sculptures that seem so lifelike they fit into the crowd. Rather than casting them from clay sculptures of his own creation, he uses live models and concentrates on the naked fact of the subject, a perfect counterfeit of another human being as a fully realised physical presence. His work portrays average Americans posed naturally––a retired couple resting on a bench, a cowboy leaning against the wall, an overweight and blistered man on a John Deere lawnmower, and a cleaning lady with a rolling trash barrel and equipment.

In both these cases, the artists have specific reasons for using a hyper-realistic style. Viewers are given a new perspective on what reality consists of, and how it is perceived. 

The Machine for Living: Architecture, Technology and Depression Era House

An early version of a prefab home was sent from England in the 1600s, but real prefabrication did not take off until the arrival of "house kits." House kits contained all of the house's parts, so the owners built the homes themselves or hired people to construct them. The Aladdin Company started selling the earliest house kits from its catalog in 1906. One of the best-known early kit-home sellers was Sears, Roebuck and Co., which sold more than 100,000 homes from 1908 to 1940.

Many architects, industrialists, and artist contributed to the prefab movement. Drawing inspiration from the ideas of aesthetic innovation in everyday items that had been cooking in the German Bauhaus, Some American designers believed it was time for a big change in architecture. Prefab houses featured prominently in World's Fairs of the 1930s, touted as the "House of Tomorrow". Buckminster Fuller (who decades later would design the geodesic dome) even proposed an octagonal house with a central elevator, glass walls, and a personal aircraft garage.

Practical factors contributed to the appeal of the kit homes as well. Companies benefited from the automotive, iron, steel and coal industries that were booming. Housing parts, instead of being constructed on site by carpenters, could be mass-produced on conveyor belts and shipped to the site for much lower costs. Plumbing and electrical wiring could also be installed much more cheaply at a factory. Some designers developed a panelized form of house, with different pieces for doors, windows, walls, etc, thus allowing the customer to create a house to their own liking with the basic building blocks.

Lower costs meant more middle-class Americans could build homes. For less than $2,500, the home buyer received a kit containing about 30,000 pieces -- including everything from lumber to nails and hardware to paint and shingles -- plus a book on how to construct the home. But after the stock-market crash of 1929, not nearly as many people had the money for their own homes, and kit-home sales declined.

By the '70s, the government decided to regulate the manufactured homes for safety reasons, and in 1976 the government adopted the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development building code. It set standards for heating, plumbing and electrical systems, as well as structural design, construction, fire safety and energy efficiency. After that, manufactured homes became a source for low-cost housing. 

However, in the past few decades innovations have allowed manufactured homes to cater to a more upscale market and to those looking to go "green." And people in more crowded countries looking to build affordable, durable housing have also turned to prefab. Just look at what the future may hold: http://www.zerohouse.net/

Virtual Muse

Prof. Charles Hartman looks at writing in a new way. Just as speech is a natural tendency of humans, Hartman writes in a manner that intentionally employs no artistry or artificiality, but creates poems through a random word generator. He cites the intrinsic uncertainty of quantum mechanics as evidence that the universe is constructed of random occurrences, and his poems merely capture the essence of the universe. "Attuning themselves to how the world really is, is an old ambition of poets." 

By applying a few bare-bones rules to the program, such as juxtaposing certain parts of speech, the randomized creations sound more plausible, more poetic, to the reader. "“The more discrete and self-contained the syntax of the line (complete clause, complete prepositional phrase), the more easily it joins with lines before and after. Keeping verb tense the same increases the opportunities for coherence. Short sharp images stand alone better than bits of narrative or argument.” Vast creative possibilities lie in poetry that comes about by happenstance. The poems will almost certainly be original (the "odds against an identical set of poems being created using the same input & parameters are approximately 5919247325225209600000000000000000000 to 1.”), and may inspire ideas in the reader that a deliberately written piece might never achieve. Those who claim Artificial Intelligence is impossible because computers can never do anything "unexpected" would see their arguments fall to pieces at the unique and unusual combinations of phrases that appear. 

This idea of randomness as art is similar, in a way, to Kac's transgenic "Genesis". Whereas in that piece a meaningful sentence coded in DNA was randomly changed by mutation, in this case randomly connected words form potentially meaningful sentences. In fact, there has always been a level of chance in even the most deliberate artwork: The angle of bristles in each brushstroke on the Mona Lisa, the minute surface irregularities in Michelangelo's David, and beyond that the random motion of subatomic particles within the physical building blocks of any and every piece of art––not to mention in the minds that created them. Hartman is simply embracing this process; rolling the dice and taking more than a passing glance at the results.

Word Technologies

In the full swing of the Information Age, we face interesting questions about the intersection of Information, the most basic form of which is language; Technology, humanity's departure from nature; and Art, an interpretive expression of ideas and emotions. It is interesting to note that in the ancient Greek word "tekne" from which the word"technology" derives, refers not only to scientific advancement, but to arts and crafts. Since its most primitive occurrence, art has been defined by the technologies it requires. One of the oldest pieces of art is an animal thigh bone with holes drilled in it (perhaps a crude flute), found near a neanderthal cave from 45,000 years ago. Was this ancient instrument used for communication? Did music predate language? According to paleobiologists and anthropologists, this and other artistic tools are distinct from nature. The very term "art" is related to "artificial",  that is, not naturally occurring. Language, on the other hand, is a natural tendency of humans, and so not technology. Of course, this distinction comes with apparent exceptions to the rule. Take Casper Hauser for example, a child isolated from human contact until the age of 16. When first encountered, he was barely able to walk, and incapable of speech. And yet, after a few years of socialization and education, he developed the skills to write, read, draw, talk, and interact. So which of these tendencies are intrinsic in human biology, and which artificial? 

It was Noam Chomsky who revolutionized linguistics in the 50's and claimed that language was genetically ingrained in us. Indeed, the human capacity for learning language is staggering. The average high school graduate has a vocabulary of approximately 100,000 words. Divided by 18 years and 365 days, that amounts to an average of 15 words per day. But a disproportionate percent of that vocabulary was developed at relatively early age, resulting in an even higher rate of learning.

Granted, this rate of learning is vastly greater than that of humans 45,000 years ago. What changed in between? Perhaps the greatest invention in human history: writing. As might be expected, letters developed from highly modified pictographs. Sumerian cuneiforms, the earliest form of writing, appeared some 5000 years ago, it changed the auditory, insubstantial form of verbal communication into a concrete visual medium. It's primary purpose in those early days was bookkeeping to keep track of trade. 

The written word developed substantially, and appeared in various cultures over the next few thousand years. Still, the manner by which information was passed along remained largely unchanged. The Sumerians had made clay stamps allowing them to reproduce the same text or imagery many times. The Chinese had mastered printmaking, but it was Gutenberg and his movable type that revolutionized the transfer of knowledge yet again. This was largely because the European alphabet, developed by the Phoenecians, had few enough characters to be efficiently reorganized to make new words. The Chinese language, on the other hand, consisted of thousands of distinct characters, so a printing press would have been unfeasible.

Methods of text reproduction have progressed in leaps and bounds since then, with entire libraries now being transferred across the world with the click of a button. However, regardless of the way it has been recorded, written language has always been written by humans.

Advances in Scenic Technology & Broadway Spectacle

The Western tradition of theater originated with the Greeks. In 330 BCE, the great philosopher Aristotle wrote "The Poetics", a discourse on effective tragic plays, in which he identified the six categories that factored into the making of a play. These  were Plot, Character, Thought, Diction, Music, and Spectacle. This last category was considered the "lowest" and least sophisticated of the lot, and it is this one which we discussed. Theater played a major role in Greece, where the City Dionysia was a three day festival with numerous plays competing for praise and recognition. Before crowds of up to 14,000 at a time, performances were designed to exult Athenian culture. The stages on which the plays took place were highly advanced and impressive in and of themselves, with many innovations familiar in even state of the art theater today. 

A chorus of up to fifty people performed the plays in verse with music. The stage was a half-circle in front of the orchestra––where the chorus performed––situated on a terrace at the foot of the hill. Theatres were built on a large scale to hold the many people on stage, and in the audience. Architects used mathematical calculations to create acoustics such that the actors' voices could be heard throughout the audience. A backdrop known as the skené stood behind the orchestra. The paraskenia, with projecting walls housing doorway for entrances and exits, became a common supplement to skenes in late 4th century BCE. Just behind the paraskenia was the proskenion ("in front of the scene") which was columned, and similar to the modern day proscenium. Among the advanced set pieces used in this era were:

• Periakto: rotating tower w/ 3 scenes
  
• Ekkylema: slip stage
  
• Machina: crane
  
• Pinake: flat

When Rome conquered the land and appropriated much of Greek culture, the spectacle of the theaters was taken to grandiose heights. The Roman Colosseum seated 50,000, and performed 300 days of festivals. Comedies were popular with the crowd, but of course the Colosseum's most famous legacy was the gladiatorial battles. The action films of their time, these had none of the restraint of Greek Theater. Bloody massacres, exotic animals, even a sea battle on a flooded stage.

Needless to say, when the Christian Church was established, the violent spectacle––and most theatre for that matter––were thoroughly quashed. Up until the Renaissance, the only activities resembling theatrical spectacle were Liturgical Dramas that reenacted the 12 stations of Christ, and pageants outside churches. But then came the Renaissance, and with it a revival of Greek and Roman traditions, along with new innovations. The construction of indoor wooden theaters was modeled on ships, and the machinist (in charge of special effects) was considered second only to the director. While Shakespeare employed relatively simple visuals, a contemporary of his by the name of Inigo Jones used his expertise in painting and architecture to create finely crafted masques, movable set pieces, and a rigging system to levitate chariots over the audience that baffles experts to this day.

From this period through the 1800's, theater continued to change and develop. Tennis court theaters entertained nobles outside. The romantic movement responded to classical traditions with yet more elaborate spectacles, including new technological innovations such as the limelight, followed by the first spotlight at the turn of the 20th century. Over the last century, the visual spectacles of theater have incorporated more and more advanced technology. Robotic lights are programed when to go on, and can be redirected automatically. Entire stages can be motorized to swivel. Video projections have been incorporated into sets. And yet, theaters have been overtaken by recorded media––film and television to be precise. Performances can be experienced cheaper and in greater variety in one's own living room, and theater productions charging $60 to hundreds a seat continue to lose business. But perhaps another great innovation is around the corner, to bring theater to the forefront of culture once again.

Chemistry of Pigments

After the nature of sound was discussed, the next logical step is the nature of light––and the primary substance in visual art that interacts with that light. Since long before the stenciled cave paintings of 35,000 years ago, artists have carefully considered the pigments they would use to render their work. Until the relatively recent innovation of synthesized pigments, artists had to use colored materials they found in nature to make paints. They had to be chemists as well as artists.  Like sound, light is a wave. But unlike sound, it is not a physical wave transmitted through particles of matter, but electromagnetic radiation. The electromagnetic spectrum goes from the low energy radio waves all the way up to gamma rays packing deadly doses of energy, and extends far beyond the narrow band of visual light in both directions. At the low end of the visual spectrum is red, and passes through all the colors of the rainbow on its way up to violet. Each color of light is like a different pitch of sound, with the frequency of the wave determining the hue. As the myriad frequencies of light coming from our Sun interact with physical objects around us, certain frequencies of light are absorbed, while others are reflected. The reflected color is the only one we see. "Red" pigment does not in any sense give off red light, but rather absorbs every color of light but red. 

The correspondence between color and substance are as follows (rather simplified):

• Arsenic pigments: Paris Green

• Carbon pigments: Carbon Black, Ivory Black, Vine Black, Lamp Black

• Cadmium pigments: cadmium pigments, Cadmium Green, Cadmium Red, Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Orange

• Iron oxide pigments: Caput Mortuum, oxide red, Red Ochre, Sanguine, Venetian Red

• Prussian blue

• Chromium pigments: Chrome Green, Chrome Yellow

• Cobalt pigments: Cobalt Blue, Cerulean Blue, Cobalt Violet, Aureolin

• Lead pigments: lead white, Naples yellow, Cremnitz White, red lead

• Copper pigments: Paris Green, Verdigris, Viridian, Egyptian Blue, Han Purple

• Titanium pigments: Titanium White, Titanium Beige, Titanium yellow, Titanium Black

• Ultramarine pigments: Ultramarine, Ultramarine Green Shade, French Ultramarine

• Mercury pigments: Vermilion

• Zinc pigments: Zinc White

• Clay earth pigments (which are also iron oxides): Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Yellow Ochre.

• Lapis lazuli,

• Biological origins: Alizarin, Alizarin Crimson, Gamboge, Indigo, Indian Yellow, Cochineal Red, Tyrian Purple, Rose madder

• Other Organic: Pigment Red 170, Phthalo Green, Phthalo Blue, Quinacridone Magenta.

Before the Industrial Revolution, the range of colors available for art and decoration was very limited. Most of the pigments used came from minerals in the ground, or biological sources. Natural iron oxides give a range of colors and are found in many Paleolithic and Neolithic cave paintings. Two examples include Red Ochre and the hydrated Yellow Ochre. Charcoal, or carbon black, has also been used as a black pigment since prehistoric times. Pigments from unusual places such as botanical materials, animal waste, insects, and mollusks were harvested and traded over long distances. Some colors were costly or impossible to mix with the range of pigments that were available. Blue and purple came to be associated with royalty because of their rarity and expense.

The only way to achieve a deep rich blue was by using a semi-precious stone, lapis lazuli, to produce a pigment known as ultramarine, and the best sources of lapis were remote. Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck, working in the 15th century, did not ordinarily include blue in his paintings. To have one's portrait commissioned and painted with ultramarine blue was considered a great luxury. When Van Eyck used lapis, he never blended it with other colors. Instead he applied it in pure form, almost as a decorative glaze. 

The Industrial and Scientific Revolutions brought a huge expansion in the range of synthetic pigments, pigments that are manufactured or refined from naturally occurring materials, available both for manufacturing and artistic expression. Because of the expense of Lapis Lazuli, much effort went into finding a less costly blue pigment.

Prussian Blue was the first modern synthetic pigment, discovered by accident in 1704. By the early 19th century, synthetic and metallic blue pigments had been added to the range of blues, including French ultramarine, a synthetic form of lapis lazuli, and the various forms of Cobalt and Cerulean Blue. In the early 20th century, organic chemistry added Phthalo Blue, a synthetic, organic pigment with overwhelming tinting power.

Physics of Sound

Firstly, lets get the definitions out of the way: 

Sound is a wave which is created by vibrating objects and propagated through a medium from one location to another. A wave can be described as a disturbance that travels through a medium, transporting energy from one location to another location. The medium is simply the material through which the disturbance is moving; it can be thought of as a series of interacting particles. Typically, this medium is air; though it could be any material such as water or steel. The medium is simply a series of interconnected and interacting particles. The vibr

ating object which creates the disturbance could be the vocal chords of a person, the vibrating string and sound board of a guitar or violin, the vibrating tines of a tuning fork, or the vibrating diaphragm of a radio speaker. 

While we live with sound in our everyday lives and are quite familiar with it, it remains something seemingly intangible. The sound waves are invisible as they pass through the air, and the only part of it we can see is the source. 

Or is it? Cymatics, the study of wavephenomena, focuses largely on the physical patterns produced through the interaction of sound waves in a medium. The waves through a physical, fluid medium can create a clear visual representation of the forces at work. The most potent demonstrations of this involve a fluid (which could be sand or a fine powder, along with liquids and solutions) spread onto a vibrating surface that produces a sound. As the waves pass through the fluid, it comes alive on the surface, reacting in a myriad of different forms. Sand often forms geometric ridges that follow the direction of the sound waves. A droplet of dye in water will form swirls that change with the sound frequency. My personal favorite version of this pheno

menon is cornstarch solution on a speaker. Being a non-Newtonian fluid, the cornstarch hardens as pressure is applied to it, and softens and pressure is released. So as the surface presses against the solution and pulls away, globules and mounds build up, that seem to reach upward and peel off the surface like some amoebic intelligence. The effects are truly startling.

Another way of visualizing sound is the oscilloscope: a type of electronic test equipment that allow signal voltages to be viewed, usually as a two-dimensional graph of one or more electrical potential differences (vertical axis) plotted as a function of time or of some other voltage (horizontal axis). These are most famously used in heart monitors, but a more artistic application is to free up the green line from its strict axial limitations, so that it can move every which way in response to different pitches. The results can be visually striking.

While the previously mentioned methods are excellent for showing the physical disturbance caused by sound, their representation of pitch is imprecise and obscure. The clearest way for one to examine the various pitches in a sound is an audio spectrograph. This digital imagery shows the pitch on the y axis, and time on the x. As a sound plays through the spectrograph, the viewer sees a landscape of glowing textures and swirls, a visual analogue that perfectly represents what one is hearing. As can be seen in the image, this process does not only go one way. Programs exist now that allow audio technicians to "draw" images into a spectrograph, and convert them into sound. The demonic visage in the picture is Richard James of the one-man-band Aphex Twin. He is a Scottish electronic musician who famously uses his face in unexpected and unsettling ways. 

The ties between sight and sound can be taken much further, and represented more directly, than the iTunes visualizer. Since a sound wave becomes an onscreen performer in Disney's Fantasia who displays various instruments in terms of abstract visuals that mimic the pitch and sharpness, artists have toyed with the relationship between sight and sound. Digital technology has opened the door to whole new ways to explore such ideas.

Scientific Visualization

Transgenic Art

The phrase was first coined by scientist and innovator in the field Eduardo Kac, who describes it as "a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering techniques to transfer synthetic genes to an organism or to transfer natural genetic material from one species into another, to create unique living beings." Rather than rendering an analog of artistic effect using physical media, he and others in this field sought to actually create the effect by manipulating the genes of organisms. Notable works in Kac's portfolio include "Genesis", an exhibit that displays bacteria containing a synthetic gene, the base pairs of which correspond to morse code for a sentence from the Book of Genesis, reading "Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." Rather ambitious words, to match an ambitious new step in artwork. Viewers on the web were given control over an ultraviolet light in the setup, which would mutate the bacteria's DNA when turned on. Thus, the genetic code would be continually changing from the original, and forming new (if unintelligible) phrases. Kac says of this piece: "In the context of the work, the ability to change the sentence is a symbolic gesture: it means that we do not accept its meaning in the form we inherited it, and that new meanings emerge as we seek to change it."

A more direct approach tying cells to writing is Typosperma. Created by Oded Ezer, it is the second experimental typo project in his 'Biotypography' series. As a paraphrase on the biotechnology definition, 'Biotypography' is a term that refers to any typographical application that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof, to create or modify typographical phenomena. The main idea of the 'Typosperma' project was to create some sort of new transgenic creatures, half (human) sperm, half letter. These imaginary creatures are cloned sperms, that typographic information has been implanted into their DNA.

A very different piece of transgenic art uses genetically manipulated organisms not as a coded message, but as pixels in a vast canvas. GFPixel is a “painting” made of genetically transformed bacteria. These organisms are bred in about 4000 Petri-dishes that are arranged as a portrait. Like on digital screens part of the bacteria produce the green light – the GFP-gene is "switched ON" and in the other part the GFP-gene is ”switched OFF”. The artists that created this piece are Reinhard Nestelbacher, a molecular biologist, and Gerfried Stocker, a media artist who previously employed such technologies as robotics.

While Genesis was Kac's earliest transgenic piece, his most famous would be Alba, the Glow Bunny. Alba was an albino rabbit to whom scientists added phosphorescent genes from jellyfish. This meant that Alba would glow green under ultraviolet light. Scientists have since produced fish, pigs, and cats with similar properties.

While fiddling with the DNA of bacteria is all well and good in the eyes of the general public, the manipulation of fuzzy mammals causes more distress. Many genetically modified embryos are stillborn before that one perfect creature that survives, and some consider it inhuman to mess with these creatures just to show it can be done. As anyone who's seen Jurassic Park, or Gattaca knows, genetic manipulation is seen as reckless and potentially dangerous by a skeptical public. Granted, the same can be said of robotics, computers, and any other emergent technology. Risks of rampaging dinosaurs aside, GMOs have clearly become a part of the modern world, and have been incorporated into artistic endeavors as with nearly every other technological breakthrough of the past.

Benjamin West: Notes on “Painting in an Age of Innovation”

Benjamin West 

In the late 18th century it was believed that British painters lacked the knowledge of painting techniques which had developed in Europe (Italy in particular). In 1760 there were many more painters in London than ever before, so there was much more competition in getting one's art into an exhibit. Artists thought that displaying greater technical innovations than their colleagues would get them noticed. As for the wax painting technique that West developed, there was an ancient source in Pliny that gave the method artistic credence, but it was vague enough to permit experimentation. Invention and experimentation were very much in the spirit of the Scientific Enlightenment that was going on at the time. Intellectuals had confidence in progress, and were not as strictly constrained by the past. Hence the term  "age of innovation". Till now, painters had been essentially very conservative about sticking to old techniques, because of the learning curve of a craft that took many years to master. Benjamin West's work influenced British & American painters, and strove to discover “lost secrets” of Titian and other early painters.

Art Conservation
The job of an art conservator is to fix damaged art. Much like a physician, the conservator tries to keep subject “healthy”,  and studies how deterioration occurs. The main factor in deterioration are substandard storage conditions, weather damage, and easily deteriorating  media (such was the case in West's wax paintings) A conservator takes cross sections of a painting to study the pigment composition. Scientific analysis can determine issues of authenticity. On major issue in conservation is that religious articles are sometimes remodeled and copied.