Isaac Cordal

New blog New blog New blog

isaac — 2009-11-23T18:28:31Z

This blog has moved to the next URL: http://diminutos.wordpress.com/ This blog has moved to the next URL: http://diminutos.wordpress.com/ This blog has moved to the next URL: http://diminutos.wordpress.com/ This blog has moved to the next URL: http://diminutos.wordpress.com/ This blog has moved to the next URL: http://diminutos.wordpress.com/

David, from marble to the virtual Olympus

isaac — 2009-09-30T11:38:29Z

David, from marble to the virtual Olympus The body as a residue of past, present and future life.

Abstract

This paper examines the myths of the ancient Greek connecting with our present, myths that have been slowly becoming a reality. Those myths as predictions of the future. Through this works I am investigating the control of the body as a product that relates to humans directly with the creator. The line that separates us from being a subject to become in an object and vice versa.

The main aim of this research is to find out if we have hugely changed so much that we are not able to even recognize ourselves. If the specie has evolved so aesthetically that we have become androids, cyborgs or in a Second Life avatar. Check if the human being has improved its ability to create themselves. This concept seems to me as very remarkable point of reuse that the evolution does of the body. The use of Internet has destroyed the concept of socializing as physical presence are not involved or I should say, necessary anymore. Will this means that the body is converted in an absent material?

Full text:


David, from marble to the virtual Olympus

Redefining my project

isaac — 2009-06-03T10:46:33Z

I wanted to redefine my project to incorporate the work that I conducted in parallel to the Master. Having chosen the topic of spam as my proposal has taken me away from my work, so what I now intend to do is to link the master with the second project that I am introducing in this post.

My work focuses on two projects.

The first one I've called Cement eclypses, The human beign becomes part of the urban furniture, which consists of small figures made out of cement representing daily activities located in public spaces.

You can download a dossier about this project here.

Public swimming pool. Camberwell. London. May 2009.

The figures are of small dimensions (25 cm.) they are made with cement and they are duplicates through molds of silicone. The figures represent routine scenes, a purchase, a phone call, a long wait, etc. Scenes that contemplate puzzled the demolition and the reconstruction of everything that surrounds us. The cement is one of the materials that more betrays us in our relation with the environment that surrounds us. Is the footprint of the human Being in the nature scene, our more recognizable trace. A mark that make us to believe that nature is “that” that we see from a city to another. In the case Galicia (Spain), the place where I come from, the coast that is converted in the endless flat city. One of the points of reference to carry out these small figures were based on those stunning images of the attacks of the 11S in which many of the survivors for a moment became part of the furniture, filled with dust and surrounded by debris.

Cement eclipses from Isaac Cordal on Vimeo.

In London I have begun my intervation in the bus stops with my small cement figures attached to the roof. The site seems to me very interesting as users of the bus can see the pieces in their journey and its durability is the longest because there are less accessible for people and for the cleaning services. Gradually, the figures are disguised as part of the furniture.

The second one are installations in which intentional lighting models the shadows that are the central element. This is the kind of project that I want to develop for the final draft of the Master. It is based on the work that I produced for the exhibition Transition at Bargehouse, London.

Unidentified suspects triptych from Isaac Cordal on Vimeo.

The feature comprised of three visages (shaped from pieces of metallic grid mesh wire) hanging from a motorized cable spinning horizontally. At first these installations seem regular but by looking closer it becomes apparent there are small optical confusions caused by the form of the objects projected shadows. Through an LED light positioned a few feet away from the hanging features, the light passes through the wire mesh, constructing facial outlines that are cast out as its shadows are projected in a large window of wall space centrally located in the darkened room. The projections become an interesting drawing that recalls a 3 dimensional representation of a computer constructed model. The movement of the pieces confuses the human perspective due to its projection having concave and convex forms. This work I have tried to carry out of the simplest form to try to reduce to the maximum the use of technology.

My idea is to attempt an installation similar to this but the lights and engines will be more complex, creating abstract landscapes and figurative metallic grids which will be hidden and showing just the projection. Attempting to create a story. To control the lights maybe I can use the spam that arrives in an e-mail and communicate via Arduinoethernetshield.

You can download a dossier with more info of this kind of works here

Junktopia.

isaac — 2009-05-20T20:51:24Z

Ubuweb has become one of the most important mediateque of art in Internet. In this archive you can find a lot of information related to the experimental sound and video. Ubuweb is an exciting project to share and disseminate the culture as a necessity. One of the last pieces of video that I´ve found related of some way with my project is Junktopia from Chris Maker.

Chris Marker, John Chapman & Frank Simeone (1981, 6 min)

One day, at the stroke of evening, on Emeryville beach in San Francisco, where unidentified artists, leave, without anyone knowing, sculptures manufactured with items that have washed ashore from the sea.

This includes a short introduction by arte, approx. 1:12 secs long, with the film being around 6 minutes itself....there are 2 intertitles in the film itself, giving the latitudanal and longitudanal co-ordinates of the beach. No subtitles required, but ill work on some anyways.

About Ubuweb

Mid Point Review

isaac — 2009-03-09T15:30:34Z

The tutorial that I had with Jonathan Kearney clarified my project to focus more in the concept, in the idea that I wanted to state more than in the use of the spam as material. The main idea of my project is to focus on the loss of social physical contact associated with the use of new technologies, not simply related to the possible deterioration in our social relations, but with a change of mentality in a new role in the way we interact with others which is characterized by progressive absence of individuals in the meeting places. Previously, I have written briefly about this particular subject in a post entitledThe new outdoors. I would like to highlight the difference between being connected and linked. We are all connected but we just have links to a few.

Internet suppose to be a shortcut to get home that many times take us to other places and widens our interpretation about our modern concept of the outside. The new outdoors are more acquainted with the cyberspace than with the cold in a winter day at the park. The exterior world now doesn't depend on the sights that our buildings offers us. Our outdoors have powerful connections with synthetic spaces and less and less with what surrounds us in the neighbourhood.

This means that our relations face to face have changed. “Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?” written by Tom Hodgkinson. The Guardian, Monday 14 January 2008

Spam becomes to metaphor for our social relations. Spam is a type of reflection of this new form of communication and remote interaction that invade our privacy and blurred our private life, giving a plus to our virtual presence. We have just taken their promotional tactics, as I said in a recent post. We have adopted tactics to promote our products in a manner similar to how spam works. I think myspace is a good example of that comment. Many of the users utilize it to promote their music making "friends" with the only end of being able to expand their activity. On the one hand, it seems logical to me because it is one of the most positive qualities of myspace, but otherwise this has created a strange climate in the relations.

In relation to draft the first practical approach to what I wanted to make is the project The penelope suitors. where spam messages are automatically uploaded to the web. I have chosen the character of Penelope from the classical Greek mythology book The Odyssey of Homero.

The Penelope suitors focuses on the reinterpretation of the relationship that Penelope keeps with the pretenders that surrounded her. They really want her throne, not her love. For this project I have proposed to use the spam mail in order to show the impersonal content , automatic and with an commercial purposes. Spam messages are Penelope's modern pretenders.

This version is only online but I would like to make a physical installation. I was very surprise when I found the work of Nick Philip entitled Nowhere, because it is very similar to what I had intended to do. I am going to try to carry out an installation with less references to the spam but related to the loss of physical contact. In this case perhaps I can arrange the project with my installations of shadows made in meshwire and the relation of colors can be manipulated from Internet. My intention would be to conduct a instalation which is a representation of a dinner. These wire sculptures are characterized by minimal physical presence and its dual personality when a light is projected. In that case could turn on the LED's every time that key words such as viagra, winner, buy, penis, to appear in spam.

Making "friends"

isaac — 2009-03-07T14:17:58Z

We can see important similarities in the way that we interact in Internet social networks as compared to the performance of spam. We have adopted tactics to promote our products in a manner similar to how spam works. I think myspace is a good example of that comment. Many of the users utilize it to promote their music making "friends" with the only end of being able to expand their activity. On the one hand, it seems logical to me because it is one of the most positive qualities of myspace, but otherwise this has created a strange climate in the relations. The users try to promote a product and this has carried unconsciously to act in the same way that the spam does it. It is neither that surprise me a lot, the own nature of myspace is the promotion and in small dose the communication.

I´m going to promote my myspace site, :)) You can visit here

Spam not only comes to our daily e-mail box as an intrusive nuisance but also its diffusion is a malicious attack to the source code of many websites that are infected in many ways for different purposes. We recently discovered that our group website, alg-a.org, was attacked in October 2008, which led to several months after Google stopped indexing our website because it was generating bogus URLs to remote addresses. We had generated over 1200 real addresses and in turn spam then created a further 12000 fictitious addresses. In this case, the result of spam made our page slowly disappear from Google and the presence of its fictitious pages in the network becomes a springboard for the products that spam represents.

Face-to-face

isaac — 2009-03-07T14:05:52Z

http://www.thisisdemocracy.org/

“The great face-to-face encounter that was Seattle demonstrates the continued importance of direct person-to-person contact, but it was possible by the virtual contacts of cyberspace. Use of computers to mobilize for the events was matches by the use of new media (laptops, camcorders, cell phones, palm Pilots, and so on) during the event”

The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle. Thomas Vernon Reed. U of Minnesota Press, 2005. Page 272 Info about this book: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=X-h8rht33IEC

Cyberzoo

isaac — 2009-03-05T22:50:00Z

# Cyberzoo is a virtual zoo where it is possible to experience the wildest expressions of the artificial life in the security of your computer. # The mission of CyberZoo promotes the conservation of endangered species and the habitats in which they live. CyberZoo is involved in international programs of protection of threatened species, and participates in different projects from recovery and reintroducción of artificial life.

Conservation of the biodiversity

The mission of CyberZoo promotes the conservation of endangered species and the habitats in which they live. CyberZoo is involved in international programs of protection of threatened species, and participates in different projects from recovery and reintroducción of artificial life.

http://www.cyberzoo.org

The new outdoors

isaac — 2009-02-21T15:47:53Z

“The space of the Internet is not neutral, it has no border, it is not stable no ris it inified. It is organic. Its motion is perpetual and it behaves like a self-organizing system. Our obsolescente political notions are going to be throughly trashed by it.” The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality. Derrick De Kerckhove, Christopher Dewdney. Kogan Page Publishers, 1997. Page 182.

Internet supposes an escape route from home that takes us to other places and widens our interpretation about our modern concept of outside. The new outdoors are more acquainted with the cyberspace than with the cold winter of the park. We feel like average colonists of an environment that disappears when we leave our residence and it changes our concept of the exterior extraordinarily, this doesn´t mean being away from home in the open air. We replace our idea of landscape with the graph of this landscape. But, when is this brutal desire for information born? Is it a relationship that is created by the pursuit of knowledge?. Perhaps it is a side effect of our addiction to the Media in reference to live in real-time without feeling isolated. We talk about the search for information but also we are afraid to feel isolated.

The exterior world now doesn't depend on the sights that our buildings offers us. Our outdoors have powerful connections with synthetic spaces and less and less with what surrounds us in the neighbourhood. The key issue of my proposal is to try to reflect on how the human being adapts in a new space that has strong social links with electronic environments and how Art by these means changes from being a representation to being a presentation of reality in real time.

There is an umbilical connectivity to others that uses the idea of being linked to seduce us, not to be isolated but it is blurred by a lack of affection,a lack of touch and be touched. It also lacks the act of being in contact as a unique act of physical meeting. Internet has become a living organism feeding back every day millions of users, creating an urbanization of new spaces in the net, following a similar parallel to the physical space.

“Globalization, the first fundamental aspecto of cyberculture, has propagated the copresence and interaction of points anywhere in the physical social, and information space. In this sense, it complements a second fundamental aspecto – virtualization.” Cyberculture. Pierre Lévy. U of Minnesota Press, 2001. page 29.

In keeping with this theme, we observe the ever-increasing displacement of our physical presence from certain social architecture. New media offer us a range of innovative possibilities to comunicate, using facebook and skype etc, and to elimate the necessity for our physical presence in different places- for example, queues avoiding by filling in data processing forms online, etc. As such, our relationships with distance and physical space, have changed radically.

“The idea of substitution has been promoted largely by “urban and physical planners”. The argument is simple. New tools for cooperative labor enable users to participate in the international economy from home or an outside office. Now, for a large number of activities, traveling to a job is no longer a requirement. There are a number of benefits to this arrangement: less crowding in urban centers, improvement of highway congestion, less pollution, better distribution of the population throughout the country, the possibility of a revival of regions affected by dessertification and mass unemployment, improved quality of life. A simple economic calculation shows that the overall social cost of teleconferencing is less than that of business trips, that a home computer is less expensive than a few square feet of office space in a city, and so on.” The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality. Derrick De Kerckhove, Christopher Dewdney. Kogan Page Publishers, 1997. Page 169.

The old references that we have about the concept of our location in the physical spaces has changed considerably. It is curious how William J. Mitchell explains the removal of humanity from the countryside to the city . The author of E-topía describes the concentrations of people in the old metropolises around the wells to survive. The well was a meeting center point of the community by default and necessity. This situation changes from the creation of channelings for the basic consumption of water, for which goes relegating the communal concentration around the wells until finishing being displaced gradually from the center, as the water was transported through conduits to every house and turns out to be unnecessary to be displaced.

“History replays _ this time because the information supply system has changed. Once, we had to go places to do things; we went to work, we went home, we went to the theater, we went to conferences, we went to the local bar-and sometimes we just went out. Now we have pipes for bits -high- capacity digital networks to deliver information whenever and wherever we want it. These allow us to do many things without going anywhere. So the old gathering places no longer attrat us. Organizations fragment and disperse. Urban centers cannot hold. Public life seems to be slipping away.” E-topia: "Urban Life, Jim—but Not as We Know It". William J. Mitchell. Ed. GustavoGili, SA. Page 8.

Towns were converted slowly in cities. The settlements around the well illustrate the meeting by need, the water, but also by the visual and physical contact that the first communities were used. The technique and new technologies to build spaces influences in the social behaviors, and the square becomes a place of artificial meeting. We have passed to the channels of water to electric wiring, to the telephone to digital conduits that transport information. Internet has become “the virtual square”, in a well without fund.

We are profoundly disconnected from the common places, despite the fact that we are better connected than ever, we are deeply isolated by the new form of physical contact that offers Internet. Our relations have been limited to small electronic acts that makeup our emotional needs, which keep us connected, but in most cases not linked. We are aware of our lost sense of the meeting.

“We could start by saying -again somewhat paradoxically – that the excess of space is correlative with the shrinking of the planet:with the distancing from ourselves embodied in the feast of our astronauts and the Needles circling of our satellites. In a sense, our first stops in outer space reduce our own space to an infinitesimal point, of which satellite photographs appropriately give us the exact measure. But at the same time the World is becoming open to us. We are in an era characterized by changes of scale –of course in the contexto of space exploration, but also on Earth: rapid means of transport have brought any capital within a few hours' travel of any other.” Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Marc Augé. Verso, 1995. Page 31.

The rescue of the spam mail from its destination is also a criticism extended to much of the information we consume in Internet, information that lives in the cut and paste, and that on numerous occasions have a dubious truth. Perhaps a question should be raised about what relationship maintain the objectivity and subjectivity in modern information management.

Unlimited space?. Unlimited friends?. Until that point may be possible. Hosting companies offer it in Internet. We can acquire a virgin jungle of zeros and ones by scant 20 pounds. The absence of urbanistic limits in the net that had never been planned in the real world . The odd thing is the move we make, we are going to an area where it is not possible to tread, but you can live in it and furnish it, you can show how you are. A flat in Internet could be to be a user of Protopage or Netvibes. Also you can have 1312 friends in your list of Myspace and feel totally isolated. Nothing matters, you can always seek refuge in your favourite living room from one of your multiple houses in Second life.

The mailing is a form of communication that has not lost its relevance despite the massive use of email. The mail art, as historical reference, has been used by artists such as FT Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters and Francis Picabia, among many others. From a letter that was turned into an art object to the correspondence filmed by Victor Erice and Abbas Kiarostami. The correspondence between both was an audiovisual exchange whose sequence reflects the reality of both directors. In this sense, I would like to continue the process of mail art choosing the opposite to the correspondence we expect: spam mail.

The new writers of the modern age are computer zombies. Through scripts they crawled the net to grab e-mail addresses and then they use them sending random letters and e-mail spoofing. One of most famous spammers is Robert Alan Soloway, known as “Spam King”, he was arrested on May 30, 2007 and he was charged because he sent out millions of spam e-mails since 2003.

Spam works compilation #1

isaac — 2009-02-06T13:40:10Z

Spam has crossed the barrier of the filters of our emails to become raw material for creative work. Each one of those automatic emails released by robots become the impulse, in a microworker anonymous and invisible that puts in operation a graphic or a remote installation. Its effectiveness expansive and immersive in our privacy life has converted to the spam, e-mail as a more benign face, in a source of energy that various creators recycled as fuel for creative works such as the experimentation in the ways of visualization, Spam became a protagonist of Art installations and as essential ingredient of pieces of net art

.................................................................................................................Visualization .................................................................................................................

Spam plants by Alex Dragulescu

The ASCII values found in the text of spam messages determine the attributes and qualities of the Spam Plants.

The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures. Spam Plants. Through the ASCII values found in the text of mails he creates spam plants.

Url: http://www.sq.ro/spamplants.php

Themail: visualize your email conversations. Themail is a visualization that portrays relationships using the interaction histories preserved in email archives. Using the content of exchanged messages, it shows the words that characterize one's correspondence with an individual and how they change over the period of the relationship.

Url: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/ fviegas/projects/themail/study/index.htm

Spamgraffiti by David Chein. 2004.

Spamgraffiti is a series of online installations created from spam.

Each environment is created by spooling through one email account and visually articulating the spam on a series of layers. Newer spam appears above and slowly filters out older spam below. As the rate of spam increases over time per account, the page itself appears less and less like the previous generation.

Url: http://www.spamgraffiti.com/spamgraffiti/

Spam Abstractions by JK Keller.

Compositions created from 100 spam e-mail images. Text was deleted from the gifs to reveal the random abstract patterns used to fool spam filters.

Url: http://www.c71123.com/spam-abstractions/

.................................................................................................................Installation/Sculpture. .................................................................................................................

Email erosion (2006) by Ethan Ham and Tony Muilenburg.

Email Erosion automatically creates sculptures out of biodegradable, starch based foam using spam and email as stimuli. Based on an email, the Eroder may elect to rotate the foam, raise or lower the Sprayer, or erode the foam with a spray of water.

Url: http://www.emailerosion.org/erosion.html

Spamtrap by Bill Shackelford

Spamtrap is an interactive installation piece that prints, shreds and blacklists spam email. It interacts with spammers by monitoring several email addresses I created specifically to lure in spam and an old unused personal email address I use to lure in spam. I do not use these email addresses for any other communication. I post these individual email addresses on websites and online bulletin boards that cause them to be harvested by spambots and then to start receiving spam.

Url: http://billshackelford.com/home.php5?page=/portfolio_spamtra_826

Nowhere.com by Nick Philip

Artist Nick Philip directs you to a row of garbage cans placed below twelve whirring fax machines at Tokyo's Intercommunications Center. The domain nowhere.com, he explains, is often used as a return address by shady Internet spammers to disguise their actual Internet location. Irritated recipients reply to the spam but because of the false return address the replies are returned to nowhere.com instead of back to the spammers. That is, until Philip directed all email addressed to nowhere.com to a series of fax machines at the ICC. Now the piles of lost missives are redirected into a physical representation of their final digital destination - the trash can.

This description is based on an article by David Pescovitz on the CaliforniaCulture.Net Web site

Url: http://nphilip.best.vwh.net/instal.htm

Email Clock by Tom Igoe

“Like many people, I have a lot of anxiety about my email inbox. With every kilobyte that comes in, another minute of my life disappears, time I could spend doing things I enjoy more than checking email. But I can't stop checking my email compulsively while I'm working, and email programs make it even easier to feed my compulsion. So I decided to embody my anxiety in a device that would compulsively check my email for me, and worry over the amount continually coming in, so I wouldn't have to.”

Url: http://www.tigoe.net/emailclock/mailclock1.shtml

SP4M. D0 Y OU SWA1LOW? by Ayah Bdei

SP4M. D0 Y OU SWA1LOW? attempts to turn the relationship we have with spam around. A microcontroller-based Webserver retrieves spam sent over the Internet in real time, and remotely feeds a continuous shuffled stream of it to public displays. Spam is no longer meaningless, time-consuming junk, but rather a diagnosis of cultural values and an alternate representation of societies.

Url: http://web.media.mit.edu/ ayah/spam.html

Mailia by mi_ga

Mailia analyzes emails coming to ones mailbox and simply replies to them. Forget automated standard 'Out of Office' replies, Mailia is as intelligent as software like Eliza and as flexible as open source products. The email answering machine works in the following way: it grabs an incoming message, analyzes it, sends requests to the Google search engine, then picks up given results, sorts them, and outputs the information into an email form which is sent back to the sender.

Url: http://triple-double-u.com/mailia/

Webmail service using live snails.

Our snails are equipped with a miniaturised electronic circuit and antenna, enabling them to be assigned messages. Your message is collected from a despatch centre at one end of their enclosure. Once associated with the tiny electronic chip on the snail's shell your message will be carried around until the snail chances by the drop off point. Here more hardware collects your message and forwards it to its final destination.

Url: http://www.boredomresearch.net/rsm/index.html