Object Oriented
Installation Documentation
videos by Gabriel Shalom
curated by Meiré und Meiré
for the MINI Clubman
IAA Frankfurt 2011

Watch all three videos in full in my work portfolio.

On 24 February 2012 I will give a master class on Hypercubism at MU Artspace & TAC in Eindhoven, Netherlands. UPDATE: unfortunately I had to cancel the class due to a nasty flu. Hopefully there will be a possibility to reschedule at some point in the future! Stay tuned.

Every video is in 3D already. Length, width and time: three dimensions. Until we get fully four dimensional holographic imagery, we’re going to have images which strive to be in four dimensions but always collapse back down into a flattened simulation. Hypercubism is a way of understanding the aesthetics of this collapse.

We will explore influences on Cubism in order to discover parallels in our current media environment that have had an impact on Hypercubism. We will discuss the role object-oriented interfaces have in changing our perception of moving images (video games, operating systems, computer code). We will discuss what constitutes a truly contemporary moving image – what sets it apart from the postmodern – and also what makes it more than ever before closely related to a piece of music. The master class will be a mixture of presentation, seminar discussion and group critique.

To prepare for the master class, participants are encouraged to view the Hypercubist Manifesto. Participants are welcome to bring in short videos (5 min. or less), which they feel exhibit Hypercubist aesthetics and that they would like to analyze with the group (links to web videos are preferred).

To participate please send an email to muandmore (AT) mu (DOT) nl
Participants will be included on a first come first serve basis.

Hypercubism: A Master Class on Digital Aesthetics
Friday February 24
From 12.30 to 3.30 pm
Location: MU and TAC
Language: English
Maximum # of Participants: 12

Later the same day at 4pm we will be screening Timeless. Patrizia and I will be doing a question and answer session afterwards. Hope to see you there!

A glimpse of the opening of The Tosso Variations at MU, Eindhoven.
Interview video produced by Odd One.

The Tosso Variations

Opening: Friday 13 January 2012 – 20:00 – MU Artspace, Eindhoven, Netherlands
Exhibition: 13 January – 4 March 2012

For my first solo exhibition, I will present a videomusical suite in five movements based on recordings of several free improvisations by Shingo Inao. Shingo plays his Tosso, a six-stringed sensor instrument of his own design. Each improvisation is performed with Shingo dressed in a different outfit. This series of pullovers are from The Story of Oswald 1848 – a collection created by fashion designer Nicole Roscher for her label Von Bardonitz.

I transform these improvisations into five audiovisual movements. In this exhibition, these five movements are presented as a multi-channel video installation. I will also be exhibiting graphic notations I created during the process of analyzing Shingo’s performances.

Timeless

On the opening night of The Tosso Variations, MU will also present the première of Timeless, the latest video essay / design fiction produced by KS12. This work was commissioned by MU and was shot on location during STRP Festival 2011 and the Playful Post Digital Culture symposium at the Klokgebouw at Strijp-S. Timeless focuses on questions of identity and experience, time and place in a post-digital era. Read more about Timeless here on the KS12 website. Curated by Angelique Spaninks.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Conceived, Directed, Edited and Composed by Gabriel Shalom

Produced by KS12 and Karen Cifarelli

Giles: Juri Member
Felicia: Angie Poon
Rafael: Tomas Spencer

Executive Producer: Patrizia Kommerell
Director of Photography: Carlos Vasquez
Lighting Assistant: George Steffens
Styling & Props: Steffa Superheilig – Styling Art
Hair & Makeup: Fernando Madronero
Production Assistant: Laurent Hoffmann
Runner: Mates Al-Fakhri
Postproduction Audio Engineer: Andrea Conti
Color Correction: Carlos Vasquez

Artist’s Statement

These pieces focus our attention on the audiovisual life of three urban archetypes and their possessions, transforming everyday items into totems of personal mythological significance. In contrast to personal articles, a car represents a more universal value, signifying an affiliation with society at large. While the characters are united in their parallel ownership of a car, they are differentiated by the objects they posses. This universal/personal dialectic forms the foundation of an “object oriented” approach, which sees potential in our consumer culture for the revisiting of ancient forms. The hidden music of objects is made perceptible by means of an alchemical transformation which occurs in videomusical time. The resulting rhythms and harmonies allow us to experience our surroundings with a newly heightened appreciation for the audiovisual dynamics of the world around us.

The compositional process for this work began as a careful meditation on the various sounds the different objects would yield. Each object was selected for both the way it performs audiovisually as well as how it fit in the overall constellation of objects for each character. Elements of gamelan, electro, baile funk, dubstep, dancehall, twostep, techno, triphop and glitch hop all make appearances in this series.

My work as a videomusician is influenced by the methodology employed in musique concrète, as I am often working with a similar toolkit of effects and techniques. I work with diegetic sounds, searching for a cinematic context in which the full spectrum of sound I require can be contained in a coherent visual universe. I am a tesseractor – a time-sculptor – building up broad loop-based movements which I systematically articulate to achieve swing and suspense.

Production stills from Object Oriented – Rafael. The premiere of the series of three brand new videomusical pieces will be next week!

Production stills from Object Oriented – Felicia. More stills coming soon. Premiere will be in mid-September.

Illustration by Charles Glaubitz

The object as product. The time of the product as merely the output of industrial production is over. Today individuals are re-entering into the discourse of products using the same physical language of fabrication and prototyping as industrial manufacturing. Our facility with techniques such as laser cutting, CNC milling, 3D printing and vacuum forming — processes which used to be the elite language of twentieth century industrial manufacturing — are now starting to become the common vernacular of craft.

This physical literacy of products is an emergent tendency which is changing communication. We can communicate ideas physically; for instance, as visions for future products in the form of functional prototypes. The individual can express a greater degree of his or her own vision. See also the capacity to use a laptop computer to independently produce, edit, distribute, and market video content all via the same device. The DIY and FabLab movements — and what they represent for manufacturing — is a parallel process; the implosion of that which was formerly stratified across the hierarchy of industrial production into one workshop.

The object as commodity. While we are now conversant in this industrial product language, we simultaneously experience the compulsion to commodify (objectify) our work. This happens most clearly at the level of branding, insofar as the contemporary creative producer is painfully aware that the standard practice for gaining recognition in the product discourse is through brand narrative. Yet the auric peculiarity of the handmade or limited edition clashes with the anonymity and standardization implied by the dogma of industrial branding.

This commodification (objectification) extends beyond consumerism to sexuality, politics, and public space. User-generated amateur pornography objectifies sexuality to such an extent that it alters our sexual identity as our objectified flesh is reflected back to us in the Internet. Political figures are commodified and become brands, giving us the Obamafication of an election, the Merkelization of an economy, or the Bushification of a war. In the face of this political impotency comes the privitization of public space, with entire new urban ecosystems coming into existence under corporate stewardship.

The object as node. The semantic {object}{/object} (curly brackets used because code brackets get parsed). The object as the ideal modular component of a total system, defined unambiguously and therefore allowing portability across platforms via open standards. This model, originated in software, is having greater and greater relevance in the physical world; especially as we continue along a path towards interacting with the physical world using a digital interface.
This language of objects from the world of programming has a value system. Which is to say that many of today’s programming languages are “object-oriented.” The value of an object is its ability to have a unique ID. In the physical world this value is reflected in the case of biometric identification embedded in passports. Each person becomes an object in a database; an aggregate of personal data. Tags in the cloud.

Trends in augmented reality suggest that every product, every place, every person, every context may eventually be a semantic object, which is to say it may be a discrete node in a system with a unique ID, and therefore something which can be digitally identified, located, and manipulated. The vision of an Internet of things is contingent on each particle of physical existence having a unique digital identity or aura. The exploration of these digital auras using some sort of aura recognition interface poses a design challenge that will determine quite a bit of what it is like to be a human in a twenty-first-century urban space.

The architecture of space becomes subjugated to the architecture of information. Certain architectural spaces which made sense in the twentieth century will make no sense in the twenty-first century. Witness the office building as a relic; as something which could transform into a coworking space, hinted at by the trend of Internet cafes becoming hubs for freelance knowledge workers. Work has become nomadic and therefore object-oriented through its connection to the mobile Internet workstation. The entire concept of “going to work” as per the industrial era is open to redefinition. The physical world of work begins to reflect the logic of the database instead of the cubicle.

The object as sprite. Our contemporary moving image media of video games, computer interfaces, and the Internet proposes an aesthetics completely contingent on an object-oriented image field. Graphic illusions of depth or four dimensionality point to a future volumetric moving image medium. The aesthetics of these media pre-figure the larger aesthetics of the built and virtual worlds we’re likely to see in the future. The objects in video games become increasingly important culturally and economically. We witness the industrial appropriation of virtual object production with Chinese World of Warcraft gold farming sweatshops. Meanwhile we see the behavioral modification of an entire generation of children and young adults who’ve spent countless hours playing video games, interfacing with an object-oriented environment that programs both our behavioral and also aesthetic expectations.

My generation of artists was raised on video games yet trained to work in classical digital media such as video. We are faced with a dilemma: as many of us are non-programmers, how do we represent an object-oriented moving image world in a flat, frame-based medium? The answer to this question begets hypercubist aesthetics, as the illusion of multiple timelines in the same frame reflects our struggle to reconcile an aesthetic ontology of 4D objects within a flat medium.

The object as prop. The prop as that which is neither character nor set piece. The prop as a property of a story, somewhere along a continuum between a functionally interchangeable McGuffin and an irreplaceable touchstone of dramatic symbolism. As the boundaries blur between the physical and virtual we experience the first tremors of a wave of future shock that is capable of overwhelming our senses, attention spans and — yes — perhaps even our sanity.

Yet despite the novelty of the technologically-driven evolutionary delta which humanity faces, it will be with one of our oldest and most sacred human traditions that we will survive this information inundation: namely, by engaging in storytelling. Stories are our time-tested cultural defense to cope with that which overwhelms the rational mind. We engage the arbitrary structures of narrative to serve as a needed filter, parsing the dataflow into digestible chains of meaning.

Whatever narratives we choose, those narratives will need characters, sets, and props. The more that the digital and the physical merge, the more that every object in our lives will function not only for its physical properties, but also for its social properties and therefore its narrative value.

We’ve always been in a narrative space. The transcendence of the prop out of the frame and into the world reinforces our role as actors in the lived hyperreal space of urban narrative. As actors — and as nodes in a network — we will increasingly find ourselves confronted with our lack of uniqueness; we may find ourselves (arche)type-cast, and at times struggle with the cheapness of the roles that have been written for us. We may long for a more heroic disposition or a more epic journey. And as a result of those obscure desires we may embrace a cosmopolitan tribalism with its own urban mythology.

This essay first appeared in:

Case 2. Have Balls [Eccentric]
The Anxious Prop, First Edition — July 29, 2010
SPLACE, Alexanderplatz Pavillon — Berlin, Germany

This week my kitchen suite in five movements wash choose peel chop rinse will be included in the Weimar group show Time Mutations, curated by Matthias Breuer, Liz Flyntz and Maz Neupert. From the exhibition’s website:

“Since the invention of the clock and the telegraph, space and time have been harnessed to each other in a culturally imposed lock step. Standardizations in train time ultimately led to the establishment of global time zones that persist today in fundamentally structuring our daily experience of the world. Ironically, the standardization of time has had the effect of illuminating the relativity of time and space in even our most mundane experiences. From jet lag and GPS to the syncing of dozens of clocks that seem to multiply around us with every electronic device, we find ourselves constantly adrift in the waters of relative and absolute space and time. Electronic communications technologies from email to live real-time video streaming have intensified this experience in our daily lives, conditioning us to take for granted the relative speed – and lag – of mediated time and space, and to accommodate it with new social conventions and unwritten codes of behavior.

The desire to collapse boundaries of space and time is inherently utopian. To erase cultural and geographic distinctions, and instead inhabit a community in which communication is integrated and instantaneous is a persistent, yet elusive dream. Even when motivated by a generous impulse toward exchange, the desire to dissolve difference in culture, access, time, place and language in the experience of total simultaneity can, of course, never be complete. Seamless or lossless exchange is always thwarted by the embodied nature of communication, culture and technology. Manipulations of time and space through recording and editing techniques may lead us to perceive time and location as particulate states, but ultimately such interventions can never fully reduce experience to such stable or concrete terms.

Time Mutations is an exhibition of new artworks that explore these concepts, challenges, and potentials, through a collaboration between two institutions that have historically been deeply invested in experimental media practice. Media practitioners from the Media Art & Design Program at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and at the State University of New York at Buffalo’s Media Study Department have come together to present new projects alongside works of internationally renowned artists and provide a platform for interaction between our institutions’ physical and research localities. For this exhibition we are seeking works that focus on individual and collective perceptions of space and time emerging from technologically mediated interaction and exchange. Of particular interest are works in which the concept of time as linear or location as static is successfully challenged, manipulated or collapsed, giving way to alternative experiences and constructions of time, space and place. Explicit failures in these attempts are embraced as both inevitable and interesting – for instance, the failure of technology or mediated social interactions to erase differences in language, cultural protocol, etc.”

Doc Brown's clocks from Back to the Future

We’re living in multiple times at the same time.

Just as the frames of moving images define the passage of time in the universe of a movie, so does the world around us define the frame of reference for our personal narratives. Historically the experience of different times was geographically distributed. There was the clock in the bedroom. The clock in the kitchen. The car-clock. The wristwatch. The factory or workplace clock. The clocks at cafes, the clocks at customer’s offices, the clocks at the train stations. All these different clocks were symbolic of the different timelines which we would pass through on a daily basis, shifting our awareness of temporal relationships in each physical environment to be attuned to the local constraints on time.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What’s different about today’s environment is that we’re often moving through space carrying a device which contains multiple timelines itself. Smartphones constitute a veritably infinite number of clocks. Every app – from a stock quote ticker to a Twitter client to a game – contains its own universe of time. What’s more, augmented reality threatens/promises to warp and overlay our sense of time with additional object-oriented time distortions. While this sort of tesseracting is mundane today we shouldn’t be too quick to forget that in the recent past such acts of spontaneous mobile communication/media-consumption were impossible.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’ve entered into a hypercubist time space, where the fracturing of time has become the norm. We’re engaging in all these different little windows peaking into other times, often momentarily losing touch with the immediate environment in the process. We see the aesthetics of hypercubist moving images transcending the frames of moving images and entering into our lived experience, mediating our experience in multiple timelines across multiple devices.

Techo-Teenagers by Leonard John Matthews cc by-nc-sa

What is going on for young people today who are growing up with this sense of fractured time? How is their attention span evolving or devolving? What is their consciousness like? What is their sense of concentration like? Their sense of distraction? Are their perspectives of multiple timelines the same as older generations? What are the limitations on perception in this immersion into multiple timelines?

Timezones from top left to bottom right: New York, Ontario, Memphis, Adelaide, Berlin, New York, New York, Los Angeles, Virginia

My first really strong hypercubist realtime interaction was on Junto, with 8 people staring back at me from 5 different time zones. The sense of time compression was intense, with even an hour long interaction on the platform leaving me feeling exhausted afterwards. When I first experienced Junto, I had visions of tourists wandering the streets of metropolitan cities, live streaming their experience using iPad-like devices back to their families at home. We are going to see a rise in the number of live, mobile video timelines intersecting our environment more and more.

Click here to view the embedded video.

While videogames, object-oriented code, and computer operating systems have played a major role in defining the characteristics of hypercubist moving image aesthetics, what is surely going to play an even greater role in articulating these aesthetics further will be our collective experiences of daily life as it gets permeated by these multiple timelines. As we start to live a hypercubist consciousness, the effects will escape the confines of the frame and enter mundane reality, having an increasingly profound impact on the way in which we represent our experiences aesthetically in moving images.

Click here to view the embedded video.