Michael Werner interviews Tema Stauffer:

How did it come about that you achieved the status of successful, professional photographer? What steps were involved in reaching your level of success?

When I first read this question, I laughed out loud and squirmed a little. The notion of a “successful, professional photographer” conjures a mythic figure with a studio, fancy cameras, interns, magazine assignments, and a substantially greater income. It is more accurate to describe me as an artist and teacher whose life is deeply invested in the arts community. What constitutes “success” is subjective.

On a day-to-day basis, I feel acutely more aware of my “struggle” than my “success.” Feelings of accomplishment are rewarding but also fleeting. When the high of one accomplishment fades, it creates an opportunity to work through a set of more challenging feelings towards the next one. For most artists, developing a career in the arts is a series of small steps over a long period of time. It demands the ability to experience rejections, creative blocks, financial constraints, self-doubt and anxiety. And then to brush off the dust, strategize, produce work and move forward.

Family, close friends, therapy, swimming, biographies of artists and writers, steady correspondence and supportive relationships with other artists are crucial to my own survival. I think there is good karma in helping others and I try to keep that principle at the forefront of my relationship to the art world.

Wish I’d thought up this lo-fi video technique. Basically they’re webcams attached to bike helmets with a stick. Your head is therefore always perfectly upright in the video, while the rest of your body and the world teeters about wildly.

Someone should attach it to a dancer for maximum dizziness factor!

I saw this image by Samuel Zuder and thought I’d like to try photographing portraits with the subject in the space between two cars at some point too. No doubt I’d come up with a recognizably “similar” photograph, but ideally, I’d hope to go beyond the concept and inject my own photo with something that is also recognizably me. The problem is never really whether you’re allowed to copy, but with how forthcoming you are about your “sources” and process. (Um, remember Edgar Martins?) Ideas spread and people reinvent the wheel all the time – it’s just bad form to do it and claim originality.

In my mind the claim that there is no such thing as a the exact same photo is just ridiculous. If you go to the exact same spot, with the exact same format camera, with the exact same focal length of lens and take the exact same exposure under very similar weather conditions, you will get a virtually identical photo, given that the place hasn’t changed too much. Of course, the chances of that happening are very low, but considering the amount of photography going on, it’s not surprising that it could happen. The issue in the Burdeny and Leong ruckus is that multiple photos were so similar and in fact seemed to be processed very similarly in addition to being composed almost identically. What are the chances of that?

Listen first, ask questions later

But all that isn’t very interesting. What I’m curious about is what happens when computers go beyond telling me that I like “Visually-striking Cerebral Dramas” and “Dark Foreign Movies based on real life,” to actually composing in the style of select artists. David Cope has been writing algorithms – Emmy and Emily Howell – that produce new computer-generated works in the style of classical composers. He asked people to guess which of two pieces was a computer-composed piece and which was a real Bach. (Makes me think of R is for Replicant at the Wattis gallery, a show that was inspired by the Voight-Kampff test to distinguish real people from replicants in Bladerunner. Speaking of plagiarism – isn’t that essentially a Turing test?)

When Emmy’s Bach pieces were first performed in 1987, they were met with stunned silence. Two years later, a series of performances at the Santa Cruz Baroque Festival was panned by a music critic — two weeks before the performance. When Cope played “the game” in front of an audience, asking which pieces were real Bach and which were Emmy-written Bach, most people couldn’t tell the difference. Many were angry; few understood the point of the exercise.

Though musicians and composers were often skeptical, Cope soon attracted worldwide notice, especially from scientists interested in artificial intelligence and the small, promising field called artificial creativity. They have varying goals, though most seek to better understand human creativity by modeling it in a machine. Many artificial creativity programs use a method called intelligent misuse — they program sets of rules, and then let the computer introduce randomness. Cope, however, had stumbled upon a different way of understanding creativity. In his view, all music — and, really, any creative pursuit — is largely based on previously created works. Call it standing on the shoulders of giants; call it plagiarism. Everything we create is just a product of recombination.

from “Triumph of the Cyborg Composer“ (thanks, Captain Dee!)

Is this Epagogix and Platinum Blue are going? From predicting and prescribing hits to actually writing them? If one person copying another causes this sort of controversy, imagine what will happen anyone can do as Cope did when he “clicked a button and went out for a sandwich, and [Emmy] spit out 5,000 beautiful, artificial Bach chorales, work that would’ve taken him several lifetimes to produce by hand.”

You can hear more excerpts from the computer-generated pieces in the article as well as on his website. When I heard them, without knowing what they were, I did think that they sounded derivative of some classical composer I couldn’t put my finger on but it didn’t occur to me that they hadn’t been written by a person. If I were more familiar with Bach, maybe the connection as well as the differences would be more obvious. But I don’t like Bach, though I did like them. What the hell does that mean?

Like the Pulse Room, Balkan Baroque has a sheer visceral simplicity that really works for me, although clearly in a very different way. Marina Abramovic, in a white dress, cleaned the meat and gristle off that huge pile of bones and placed the clean ones in a new pile. She continued for days until all the bones had been cleaned. I can’t say that I’d really buy any specific message from this piece, but I definitely get a sense of war and genocide from it that’s informed by what happened in the Balkans in the ’90s. I don’t like my art take-aways to be too clear-cut.

And then. I love music with a dose of melancholy and lyrical ambiguity. I plan to use this Liars song in my final light project because to my ears it seems so suited to the dark.

I wonder what the Abramovic piece would feel like with this song playing in the room.

Beautifully simple. His other work seems a bit overwhelmed by tech and the ideas are a bit inscrutable to be emotionally resonant for my taste, but he’s done a lot of work and I haven’t looked at it all.

Pulse Room is an interactive installation featuring one to three hundred clear incandescent light bulbs, 300W each and hung from a cable at a height of three metres. An interface placed on a side of the room has a sensor that detects the heart rate of participants. When someone holds the interface, a computer detects his or her pulse and immediately sets off the closest bulb to flash at the exact rhythm of his or her heart. The moment the interface is released all the lights turn off briefly and the flashing sequence advances by one position down the queue, to the next bulb in the grid. Each time someone touches the interface a heart pattern is recorded and this is sent to the first bulb in the grid, pushing ahead all the existing recordings. At any given time the installation shows the recordings from the most recent participants.

See the videos for a better rendering of what the room does.

Can you imagine the number of hours they had to practice?! I love that they are vocalizing and basically dancing rather than simply flipping books or holding up cards.

(Thanks to James.)

I showed Lukas some of my Mission storefronts and he pointed me to Zoe Leonard’s Analogue, her first publication. (Grab it for $21 while you can!) I opened it and got that exhilarated feeling – basically a combination of fear and pride – you get when, after seeing your work, someone recommends something which turns out to seem so much better than your own but at the same time you want to jump up and down to emulate it with your own twist through some painful persistence. You know? You know?

Incidentally, she’s been short-listed for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize along with Anna Fox, Sophie Ristelhueber and Donovan Wylie, and there’s an exhibition of their work at the Photographer’s Gallery in London til April 17th. The winner is to be announced on March 17th, so I’ll cross my fingers. (via Tim Clark)

There is also a Times review of her past Dia exhibition, if you’re curious: “Change and Permanence, Captured by Cameras.”

Her photos make me wish my camera focused a bit closer. There are a few black and whites interspersed through the book but I am finding it nearly impossible to take an interest in any but the most abstract black and whites at the moment. After shooting so much color, there is something there beyond the pure color of it that I am no longer willing to give up. Maybe it is simply the pure color. It’s enough.

Haven’t had much time lately to get out there and shoot some MF (I think I’m missed several iterations of holiday windows). I’m really starting to miss it what with lugging the 4×5 around. However, I’m just starting to scan the color sheets that I’m getting back from the lab and I am enamored. Results to follow.

And it continues.

I started as a photo editor for the school paper one night a week and the increased screen time takes away my motivation for keeping up with the blogosphere, so mostly I am reading the blogs that post once or less per day. A minor case of information inflammation. Anyone got a cure? Right now all I can handle is my own business. So here’re some shots of the Mission. You may have seen them before. In that case, tough luck.

Atlas Obscura has organized Obscura Day, to happen in cities worldwide on March 20. The idea seems to be explorations of strange places and collections of stuff, some usually closed to the public. Some of the fascinating ones: (I skew a bit towards the science-y…)

• Brooklyn: Join the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association for an exploration of Vanderbilt’s lost subway tunnel, right under Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Rediscovered by an urban explorer in 1980, the tunnel remains one of New York’s great secrets.
• Bucks County, Pennsylvania: Bring hammers, mallets, bats, and other percussive instruments for this gathering at the mysterious Ringing Rocks Park in eastern Pennsylvania, where the stones have a most curious property: they ring out musical tones when struck.
• Hutchinson, Kansas: Sixty-five stories below Hutchinson, Kansas sits a massive salt mine with mineral veins stretching from Kansas all the way to New Mexico.
• Niagra Falls: Join us at the Niagara Science Museum for an afternoon of classic, historical experiments conducted with restored antique scientific equipment.
• Portland: Join us a tour of the world’s only nuclear reactor run by undergraduates. Learn about nuclear science, and experience the blue glow of Cherenkov radiation.
• Iceland: A special tour of the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Husavik.
• Tokyo: Michael John Grist will be leading an Obscura Day expedition to the G-Cans project. G-Cans is a massive underground waterway and water storage area built by the Japanese government to protect Tokyo from flooding during the monsoon seasons.

But out of all of those, the most promising to me is a local expedition to California City, put on in collaboration with BLDBLOG:

In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself—the unfinished extension of a place called California City. McMansions can be made out here and there amidst the ghost-grid, mirages of suburbia in the middle of nowhere. Meaningless STOP signs stand guard over dead intersections.

And it’s a weird geography: two of the most prominent nearby landmarks include a prison and an automobile test-driving facility run by Honda. There is also a visually spectacular boron mine to the southeast—it’s the largest open-pit mine in California, according to the Center for Land Use Interpretation—and an Air Force base.

To make things more surreal, in an attempt to boost its economic fortunes, California City hired actor Erik Estrada, of CHiPs fame, to act as the town’s media spokesperson. The history of the town itself is of a failed Californian utopia—in fact, incredibly, if completed, it was intended to rival Los Angeles.

California City is now the site of a proposed mega-farm for solar energy harvesting, as well as for a bizarre plan to build the so-called Cannabis City of the Future.

Note, however, that this is not a guided tour; it is simply an organized simultaneity of people all going out to investigate these streets en masse. Armed with cameras, microphones, sketchbooks, GPS devices, quickly scrawled notes for future blog posts, and more, we’ll be exploring the site at our own pace, perhaps even miles apart at various times. This is not a guided tour with an expert on the area.

Locals, there are also San Mateo, SF and Palo Alto events. Dang, I’ll be travelling for my spring break water trip in the wee hours of the morning on that day, but this is a helluva vacation checklist for the nerd and nerdette who spent Valentine’s Day assembling an electronic arts project. Not that I’d know anything about that, heh heh. Go forth, kids – I will live the Obscura Day vicariously through you!

(Thanks, Greg!)

Seen in the Panorama: Joshuah Bearman’s “The Only Muscle I Can’t Control,” about the Mr. Romance bodice ripper cover competition. Check out an excerpt: “My Weekend Amongst the Fabios.”

Does this look like your misspent youth? Click if you want to read the short interview with photographer Alejandro Galiardo.

Either way, you can see actual prints of some of the photos in the photo issue of Maximum Rock & Roll at Needles and Pens, which is a little craft and zine store that has an intimate gallery corner. The issue release celebration is today from 6-9p, but you can pop in anytime over the next few weeks.

Burned Out, Jared Iorio

A shot from work in progress. Click for larger view.

Plus, excerpts from a couple of interviews we’ve been reading:

Time-Space-Existence: A Conversation with Wolfgang Laib (PDF)

WL: I know that some people think I am an apolitical nature romantic who sits in the meadows and takes no interest at all in social relationships. But a politician has influence today, at most he influences tomorrow, but culture and art exert influence over centuries. This sounds very naive to some people because they claim that matters are decided on entirely different levels – in politics, in economics – and art plays absolutely no role. But this is not hte case if you look at matters over longer periods of time. You can see it from the past: ultimately art and culture, not wars and confrontations, have stimulated change in people. Wars may have shoved this or that boundary or shifted the balance of power back and forth, but art and culture have carried mankind further, brought them somewhere else, and it has always been this way. I am still of the opinion that – and this may sound insanely naive – art changes the world.

When I see the best and most beautiful figures at the Metropolitan Museum, they have been scrubbed, and everything important about them has been polished away. This is what art historians consider good, the purely material form – but what is really important is gone. By contrast, there is the way that people in India treat these figures every day, how all kinds of things are poured over them, like milk and honey, and how the figures turn black from the votive lights and incense.

Dirty Toys: Mike Kelley Interviewed

MK: One of the big lies of Modernism is that certain changes in aesthetics would change culture completely, forever. Instead, I think it’s a continuous process – art may not effect lasting changes, but by changing certain representations, art changes ideas about things. If you make certain notions of behavior hip enough so that enough people want them, then the culture has to accommodate those behaviors. Things might flip back, but at least it shows that the possibility of change is there.

]]> http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/2010/02/08/art-as-change/feed/ 0 http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/2010/02/07/most-unwanted-song/ http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/2010/02/07/most-unwanted-song/#comments Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:08:45 +0000 Jin http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/?p=5302 If you haven’t seen/heard it already, Komar and Melamid did a faux-scientific survey of what elements of music and subject matter people want and don’t want in songs and assembled the Most Wanted Song as well as the the Most Unwanted Song. Of course, the unwanted song turns out to be more interesting than the wanted song, which is pop pablum. Kids singing about holidays and Walmart has never sounded so good.

Here they are if you’re too lazy to click on the links, though due to upload constraints, these are sub 128 kbps.

]]> http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/2010/02/07/most-unwanted-song/feed/ 0 http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/2010/02/05/light-bar/ http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/2010/02/05/light-bar/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:51:20 +0000 Jin http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/?p=5402

In Vancouver, an artist collective called Instant Coffee is doing a show called Light Bar:

Instant Coffee presents Light Bar, a full-spectrum light bar installation and venue for light therapy, light lectures, light shows, light reading and light rock. Instant Coffee’s Light Bar is an ongoing art project that investigates the potential and power of light. The artists come to this idea through necessity; living in Vancouver, where the rain can seem endless, the negative effects of the lack of sunlight on individual psyches and the large social milieu feel at times paramount. The use of light as a therapy or as a remedy for SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) is commonly and effectively used by individuals, but for Light Bar, Instant Coffee puts it to the test in small or large group situations.

]]> http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/2010/02/05/light-bar/feed/ 0 http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/2010/02/04/singles-3/ http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/2010/02/04/singles-3/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:00:15 +0000 Jin http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/?p=5350

A couple of less intense things today, thanks to Utata. First, is there anything strange about these portraits by Brandon Voges? At first it seems like he caught the subjects at slightly distressed or unflattering moments, but there is something just off about the way they all have puffy cheeks and open mouths and upturned eyebrows. Turns out they’re all upside down portraits. As in the subject was upside down. At that point, I marvel at how much hair product they used…

Nikki Graziano

Then, seen in Wired, this is what happens when you love math functions and photography.

]]> http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/2010/02/04/singles-3/feed/ 0 http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/2010/02/03/frederick-sommer/ http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/2010/02/03/frederick-sommer/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:37:44 +0000 Jin http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/?p=5348
Frederick Sommer

Speaking of photobooks, Joel showed the work of Frederick Sommer, who does everything from painting on cellophane negatives to cut paper objects, and pulled out The Box, which is a little clear plastic box of unbound cards with titles printed on one side and reproductions of photos, collages and cut paper on the other. A sort of greatest hits box. I thought it was great, since you get something that’s easy to store and not easily damaged since it’s protected by the box, and if you wanted to display them, you could do it on a rotating mix and match basis. The pieces themselves are a little more hardy too, since they are heavy cards rather than flimsy prints, so it’s easy to lay them around on a table and pick some up without feeling like you’re going to ruin someone’s valuable print.

FYI, there is also a Son of the Box. Unfortunately both are hard to find or extremely pricey at this point, but I wonder what the production costs on doing something similar with contemporary work would be.

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