Posts tagged Hampshire College

Read | Pulp to Pixels: Artists Books in the Digital Age

From November 7^th through the 16^th, the Harold F. Johnson Library at Hampshire College hosted an exhibition called Pulp to Pixels: Artists Books in the Digital Age.  This exhibition of artists books, curated by Andrea Dezsö, Steven Daiber and Meredith Broberg, is a celebration of both traditional, physical book construction and innovative digital books. Many of the artists featured in the show have created works that bridge the chasm between the analog and digital realms. 

The opening of Pulp to Pixels: Artists Books in the Digital Age was a well-attended affair!

I took on the position of Archivist for Hampshire College on November 15^th. This gave me one day to tour the exhibition before it closed. As I moved through the exhibition space I was struck by the blurring of the lines between the analog and the digital. Time-honored bookbinding techniques blend with soldering, QR codes, LEDs and computer monitors. Pop-up books share the floor with iPads. iMacs peaceably coexist with a Commodore 64. As an archivist I’m more than familiar with collections that are hybrids of analog and digital materials. The artists in this exhibition are also working in a hybrid milieu and their work shows how well the tangible and the digital can enhance and complement each other. 

Images of the Pulp to Pixels works on the Hampshire Library Magic Board digital gallery

One work that directly and physically integrate the digital with the analog was the “telescrapbooks” by Natalie Freed and Jie Qi. These books use microcontrollers to communicate with each other. The Electrolibrary by Waldemar Wegrzyn is a book that is full of electric contacts that allow the user to access additional online content when the book is plugged into a computer via a USB cable. These pieces utilize physical, hard connections to make the book interactive. Other pieces, like Manja Lekic’s Aunt Pepper have no apparent “digital interactivity” until the user holds the book’s images up to a webcam. When the webcam “sees” certain portions of the book’s pages the computer plays music.  Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s aptly-named Between Page and Screen also uses webcam. This work is a book with human-indecipherable geometric shapes that, when exposed to a webcam, conjures words on the computer screen which allows the reader to follow the epistolary novel encoded in the book.

Telescrapbooks by Natalie Freed and Jie Qi

Not all of the artists books featured in the exhibition have a direct analog component, though. There were many pieces for which no trees gave their lives. One that immediately caught my eye was Petra Cortright’s HELL_TREE, which is an e-book that consists of screen captures of a computer desktop with various text and images files that come together to create a cascade of content. Moving through Cortright’s e-book is especially fun for an archivist – the content is all there, and the order starts to emerge as you move through the material. 

At the Pulp to Pixels exhibition traditionally-bound paper books coexisted with innovative sculptural books as well as QR codes

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “what about apps?” One of the apps (displayed, appropriately enough, on an iPad) on exhibit was Jason Edward Lewis’ Speak, which is an application that allows the user to drag her finger through a field of letters to create instant poetry. The user can also import text from a Twitter feed to play with.  One of the things that occurred to me as I played with Lewis’ piece was the performative nature of the Pulp to Pixels show. I’ve attended a lot of book art exhibitions, most of which feature books in cases and on pedestals, and I’ve never seen a more interactive/hands-on experientialcelebration of the book. Oh and if you’re thinking apps are a new thing in the book world, I’d direct you to Paul Zelevansky’s The Case for the Burial of Ancestors Book Two. This book – which is a physical, printed-on-paper book – included a floppy disc (oh the preservation issues there!) with a computer game on it. This book dates back to 1986 – likely before many current Hampshire students were born!

There was also Nick Montfort’s 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, which features both a print book but also a Commodore 64 (which some whippersnappers may claim is an “obsolete” computer) in order to “consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture.”

Interactivity and performance were the hallmarks of this show.  While both of these concepts did not begin with e-books (pop-up books, puppet books, choose-your-own adventures, anyone?) they definitely find impressive and often instantaneous expression in the digital world. Gretchen Henderson, who gave the keynote speech at the exhibit’s reception (a podcast of that speech can be found here), created the impressive Galerie de Difformite. This crowdsourced book and website invites “subscribers” to take images from the different exhibits on the website and manipulate (deform) them in some way. Subscribers are invited to then send the images in for inclusion on the site. The book and site thereby become a gallery – a wunderkammer – displaying these deformed, reformed, manipulated and repurposed objects. With Henderson’s work the Internet becomes a conduit, allowing subscribers to take part in a growing, changing, ongoing performative work. 

Petra Cortright’s HELL_TREE, displayed on an iPad

As I moved through the exhibition that word “performative” kept coming back to me. As an archivist my chief mandates are the preservation and access of information. How do we preserve the kinds of artworks found in the Pulp to Pixels exhibit? Is it reasonable to believe that in fifty years a user will be able to not just view one of these interactive pieces but also interact with it in the way(s) intended? While we can preserve these kinds of works as-is and we can also preserve records of them, it remains to be seen how – or if – we will be able to preserve the infrastructure (displays, software, Internet communication protocols) needed to make them interactive. In many ways the questions we face in trying to preserve these kinds of dynamic artworks are also faced (and being treated by) the Preserving Virtual Worlds project as well as many members of the National Digital Stewardship Project. Archivists, librarians and curators will continue to look at this kind of scholarship and research to guide our preservation decisions. In the meantime, artists will keep creating works like those showcased in Pulp to Pixels – works that integrate analog processes and digital technologies and expand our notions of what books are and what they can be.

Pulp to Pixels, a Five College Digital Humanities project, was made possible by a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation. For more documentation about the Pulp to Pixels exhibition go here. 
 

The photographs on this blog were taken by Rachel Beckwith, Sara Krohn or Steven Daiber and are used with permission. 
 

Find out more about Hampshire’s new digital art gallery and listen to talk given during a Pulp to Pixels related event.
 

-Jimi Jones, Archivist of Hampshire College

Read | Post-Madness: Avid vs Apple vs Adobe

Heady editor and blogger Oliver Peters (who we link to a bunch), compares and contrast what he calls the big A’s (apple, adobe, and avid) after Final Cut X’s rough introduction earlier this year. He then explains how he see’s their apps being best utilized. Read on (and check back later for a recounting of hampmedia’s impressions of FCPX after spending 3 days in the basement alone with it).

-andrew (via peter’s digitalfilms)

Read | FCP X Road Blocks

Howdy, editors. Blogger Oliver Peters has kindly posted a detailed list of FCP X bummers. Hampmedia and the advanced media basement will be initially installing FCP X on a few machines in the library this semester. Read the bummers.

-media (via peters’ digitalfilms)

Dig | 2 Hamps, 2 Bikes, 1 Country, 1 Blog

Two 2011 grads, Mike and Prateek, are setting off today (from the sight of the div 3 bell), on a cross-country bike trip. Track their journey here. We’ll try to keep you abreast of their progress too. 

-hart(via bikeamerica)

Dig! | Yes, Matt (at) Cannes

HampMedia staffer, filmmaker, and musician, Matt Neman-Long, is hours away from jumping on a plane for Cannes, France. Matt will be accompanying his short film, The Hunting of Wayne, to the Cannes film festival where it will screen alongside hamp alum (and former hampMedia employee), Josh Weissbach’s, Div III short film, Calle 27 No. 1016, in a short film showcase. We’re damn proud of and happy for both of them. Also, jealous. 

Check back here for updates from Matt from the fest!

-media

Krefting On | Twelve Angry Men

I don’t know what you like, but I know what I like. And I like when the weather starts warming up after a particularly wretched winter. If ever winter was entirely of our discontent, this one was for sure. Anyway, I think we can safely say that all that’s behind us now, and so what do we have left to do but celebrate?

People celebrate all kinds of different ways. Some people eat cheeseburgers until they’re so full they can barely move, then they dunk themselves in a pond and see how long it takes their full, full bodies to sink. I did that one last year, it was fun. This year, however, I went back to my usual Spring Ringer-Inner, and got together with the same eleven other males I’ve been done this thing with all my life: The “The Sun is Out and It’s Time for Puttin’ Weekend.” What we do is we take over a mini-golf facility somewhere, load a car trunk up with bottled root beer, and gorge ourselves on delicious suds. We’re talking a cool baker’s-dozen bottles each. Then, we have to putt like crazy! We’ve got to clear the first nine without using the facilities at all, and boy! is it a challenge!

This year is also kind of special because there are twelve of us, and the great Sidney Lumet passed on to the other side last month, and the first movie he ever made was also about twelve guys. But he called them men. And he called them angry. And that was about it in terms of titular description: Twelve Angry Men. And so we got all twelve of us guys together and watched the twelve of those guys go at it in the jury room at a murder trial. And it’s a remarkable thing. We’d all seen the film before, sure, but there was something that struck us (well, me at least) about this viewing that differed from the other times we’d seen it: it’s a lot like a play, and what one might tend to remember the first time around might be all the fantastic dialogue and wonderfully realized characters, but this is a film, by Job, and as such little things like editing and cinematography really do impact the presentation to a remarkable degree. If this were just a play you probably wouldn’t be sitting close enough to pay attention to things like well-timed dribbles of sweat falling from a brow, you wouldn’t marvel at the way the heads having these discussions are framed. And that bit where they all get up one by one and leave the table to protest the numb-skulled rantings of a racist juror wouldn’t be quite as poetic. 

What a scene! This blubbery blabbermouth is going on and on through a fairly generic racist tirade (these guys are all whites, and, to be fair, the characters are kind of stereotypical but that doesn’t really matter here too much because one of the things about this film that also might slip through the cracks is just how f-in’ stylized the whole thing is and, as such, the complications of “real” personality [as though anyone has a grip on what that is or would even deign to care] need not apply to this story at all – we’re dealing with the slippery slope of truth here, kids, and that’s just as fickle a notion as personality – yeesh! don’t get me started), and as the guys around the table listen they slowly, one by one, decide to make a symbolic gesture and leave said table. They don’t want to be associated with this kind of crap and they’re making it known not by yelling but by melting away from it.

Now, one of my putting pals stated after the screening that he found this scene somewhat contrived, and far be it from me to argue with that point at this time. What I’m getting at, what I’ve been working my way up to, is that this scene succeeds completely in a cinematic sense. There is a visual poetry to the movement of bodies and shirts and slacks as they drift from the table, and this is a thing of beauty that could exist quite comfortably outside of any narrative one might want to impose upon it.

For a film that takes place more or less in one room, Twelve Angry Men is cinematically riveting. And not in the way that My Dinner with Andre is riveting (we like that one so much because we can visualize the stories being told and relate them to the faces we’re seeing in close up), or in the way that Butley is riveting (“Hey, great, I can see this play at home without leaving the house at’all!”), but there is something special here that stands out from other taking-place-in-a-room films. And I LOVE My Dinner with Andre. But this is a different animal. And as such, it deserves your attention. You know what else deserves your attention? A bunch of other Sidney Lumet films, including Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead which he made fifty years after this one!

-Krefting

Matt Krefting is a hamp alum and current employee in the alumni relations office who loves you very much. 12 Angry Men, My Dinner with Andre, and Butley are all available for loan from the five college library catalogue.

Watch | Un Film de George Lucas et Jean-Paul Sartre

Have a hot minute? Soak in the deep Sartre thoughts spoken in french by characters from a supposedly popular space movie from the late seventies.  Watch it here.

-hart (via /film)

Dig | The Future of Digital Photography (according to a design firm with a patent pending)

Artefact is a design firm with a svelte-looking concept design for the future of digital cameras. As far as they see it, if we could blend the bells and whistles of a smart phone (web-connectivity, wireless-ness, multi-touch, easy-to-tweek filters) with the sexy upgradeability of higer-end DSLRs, we’d find a concept that could save stand-alone, point and shoot cameras from dying out.

Read Artefact’s research on the subject. Then watch the zen tech,  concept video they made, introducing their concept camera, the WVIL (wireless viewfinder interchangeable lens).

-hart (via unplggd)