Ordinary Aura

This is terrific. You don't have any examples of the resulting drawings do you?
AS I was reading I did think (before you mentioned it) talking to the musician yesterday and hearing ideas about songs being made in less than a second. What's to say, once you start talking about or breaking down scale, what a "proper duration" is for an experience?

Also, the xerox transfers that Alan I did automatically get into the territory of degradation which is of great interest to me.. the authenticity of touch, etc. I like the recognition of more or less aura depending upon the quality of the trace. Does this mean that the less clarity the thing has, the more we project upon it?

This is key to an original discussion about providing a piece/image for a viewer's, I don't know, contemplation or dialogue where our authorship is secondary or invisible so as not to get in the way of the viewer's participation in the making of the thing.

Seth and I are beginning to do some photo/xerox prints soon...

but can your authorship really ever be invisible? or even secondary? when I see this in art I often think of the artist saying to me "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." there are places for suspension of belief, but it seems like there must be other ways of allowing audience participation/access.

it seems like artists who relied on chance for that couldn't get there. have you seen some who found a way somehow?

the degradation thing is way interesting - especially given that at this point degradation has acquired some other kind of aura too - pre-faded jeans, for example.

I've looked at a lot of Marey and Muybridge, but they hadn't occurred to me in the context of this show; I'm glad you brought them up, Kevin. A lot of cool stuff here that I haven't yet processed, but something in Chris' comment struck me immediately:

I like the recognition of more or less aura depending upon the quality of the trace. Does this mean that the less clarity the thing has, the more we project upon it?

Absolutely. I think the less presence a thing has as a thing, the more "aura" it has. That is, an image that, if it's clear, may not impinge much on my consciousness, becomes much more compelling the more mysterious it becomes. I'm much more aware of it; my eye can't elide over it, fit it into the normal daily patterns I'm used to seeing.

I need to think about the post more, but I'd add also that in terms of electronic music, or any kind of digital recording/manipulation, the question that arises is whether the original event is the thing recorded, or the act of manipulation itself. This ties into Kevin's 7th point, but I'd say that "recreating the past" becomes less the issue than a pastless, present-tense experience. If I can't hear the drum beat in the composition, if I can't even tell that it is a drum beat, and not a microsecond recording of a human voice, or of a footstep, how important is that source event? The original material has the same use as a particular pigment in an oil painting, rather than a real event that's being recorded.

I just read Kevin's post. About chance: it only works if randomization is happening within very strict behavioral controls. If I'm programming a sprite in an interactive movie, I might say, on such-and-such a trigger, choose randomly one of these three actions, unless this condition is true: for instance, a minor figure in a video game might fight, plead or run away, unless the player has shot at him before, in which case he'll always fight. What the artist, or designer in this example, is creating isn't the work but the system within which the work operates. Randomization is a tool within the system, another conditional element. Artists who rely too much on chance are in effect saying, hopefully something cool will happen, which is just kind of lazy thinking.

In that sense, the authorship is certainly present in the design of the system, and the choices made there, even though the immediate experience still depends on the user's interaction with it.

right on about chance seth. that's a great example. interesting to think about this in terms of how often people have used chance as divination of the spirits.

i think an important thing to add to seth's post (mostly the first one) is that projection of meaning or aura onto less clear (vague?) traces or images is not a universal phenomenon. context is key.

that is, i might find more significance/aura in a spare trace if I value what I believe to be the source of the trace. I find a weird piece of burned-looking metal in Texas after the columbia burns up, I look at it long and hard. i find it under my couch, not as long.

in an art context, different people might attribute value differently to unclear remnants based on the value they percieve in the exercise. if i am convinced that art is good for me, then I might look longer at vague objects. if I feel like an alien in the art museum, I might look more quickly and get out of the eye of the guards.

does this relate to what you're saying or are you talking about something else?

It does relate to what I'm saying, and I agree with your point about context. I have to say, though, that I personally would look longer at a weird burned-out piece of metal I found under my couch, just because it's so unexpected. What the hell, I would be thinking. It would probably prey on my mind a good deal. Are aliens invading my living room? Are my cats up to no good?

I think this is just a difference between us. I tend to value traces more before I identify what they're traces of, because I like the act of wondering about them. I might also be attracted to a trace of something in a gallery if it didn't look like something I expected to find there. If I think "ah, art, and I know that art is good for me," I might have a good time in the gallery, but my experience of the object or whatever is no longer about discovery, about the act of investigating it. I've settled back into a known way of relating to art objects, a way I've probably been educated into, rather than a more visceral experience of encountering the unknown.

This is just to say that there's a difference between mysteriousness and vagueness, between being ambiguous and being unclear. Being convincingly ambiguous is really hard, and requires a lot of focus on the part of the artist. Being unclear, or muddy, or confusing, is easy.

i see your point. but again, the key difference here is value, and differences in what people value.

this is something all too absent from some of the texts about the unknown that were really important to me as a younger artist (Flannery O'Connor, Madeleine L'Engle). It was a different time for them, so I'm not necessarily saying to throw them out.

But as important as O'Connor's celebration of mystery has been to me (I used to require parts of Mystery and Manners for all my students), I don't think it's adequate today. To put it simply, it used to be assumed that all art was valuable in the same way to all people. It seems clear that this has not ever been the case, that not only are our values different, but that we argue about those values as a way of making culture happen. The question of which values win for a little while (not 'morals,' but 'reasons to value,' or 'definitions of quality') have big implications socially, politically. mystery and ambiguity have been tools of exclusion and power, as have their likely inverses, didacticism or directness. I've just seen more artists use mystery as a way of avoiding intentionality, and less artists using directness to coerce and belittle.

I'm not saying we have to avoid these things (even if I tend to spurn them.) Historically, there just hasn't been as much discussion about how these values are deployed as there has been celebration or articulation of their merits.

I'm not sure what the answer is - I haven't found a better, more relevant text to replace O'Connor. But I think it's real important to keep the subjective (and political) nature of value as part of any discussion about this form/content question.

That last preachy post of mine threatens to spin off into the too-abstract again. I posted that marey stuff to narrow things down.

I guess all I'm asking is, why in THIS case is it of interest to identify the auratic with the obscured, the remnant of a trace with the holy? It sounds like from chris' and seth's posts that there is an intersection here - something that is obscured allows more access for the viewer, while also suggesting the possibility of an indwelling of the unseen or supernatural.

That's a provocative and tantalizing intersection, I can see that, even if I don't share the interest.

It might be interesting though to be really direct with this kind of exploration. I would be more interested in seeing two people exchanging traces, looking in each other's remnants for something More than the sum of the parts, while the audience watched on to see what they found.

That way the audience isn't asked to identify what they don't understand with the holy. To do that would be to weight the artist-viewer relationship always in favor of the artist.

one more thing for chris -

I don't think it has to be denying the viewer a participatory role for the artist to claim a role as first and evident maker/discoverer.

we can't really ever stop the viewer from "making" the work through reception. this is another one of Kinkade Inc's genius strokes - the viewer's role as maker is wholly acknowledged even while preserving the cult of the author/priest. that is, the viewer gets total control over the image, can get it printed on just about anything, at any size, in different frames, different rooms of the house, in combination with different objects, in different lighting. and they can touch it...

typing while my g4 renders...

I still like O'Connor, although I don't take her version of mystery as prescriptive. In fact I just borrowed Mystery & Manners, which I'll have to look at before I have an intelligent response to your comments on mystery.

One more thing about chance though; you're right on about chance in divination. Every form of divination I can think of -- Tarot, I Ching, runes, magic 8-ball -- involes a symbolic vocabulary specific enough to be meaningful, but broad enough to be interpretable; some kind of grammar-lie structure that puts that vocabulary into specific content (like, in Tarot, a specific placement referes to the immediate future); and a way of randomization to cast the vocabulary into the structure. The divination then happens in the interpretation of the reader. This occurs to me also in light of what you say about Kinkade Inc; if we think of the viewer as the reader, then the viewer becomes the priest or diviner, reading the messages that are generated by the system.

I get interested in what happens when you extend your apt discussion of divination to include evangelical-Christian faith practices. Looking for "signs" (traces?) of God's direction in small things, like whether or not you find a parking spot...

I still love Mystery and Manners. Funny how we're all crossing paths a bit. My favorite chapter (the one where she describes ambiguity really well) is called something like The Nature and Aim of Fiction, or The writing of Fiction - it's a lecture to a bunch of undergrads.

extend ... divination to include evangelical-Christian faith practices.

That's exactly the question that's informing the project I'm pulling together for this show. One of the questions, anyway.

I have enjoyed following the flow of this conversation.

The amount of aura the trace of an object maintains fluctuates. Perhaps it is a different type of aura that resides with varying "traces".

Possible categories.

1.The REAL object. seemingly factual, full of visible detail

2. The TRACE several steps removed. still carrying an essence of its original state before mediation, now carrying evidence of its mediation, possible evidence to where it is headed.

3. The object MINIMALIZED, ABSTRACTED. The object or trace of it contains some of its elemental structure (its most essential structure). This still carries evidence, but also connects it to other object/traces with similar structure. This smoothed over surface becomes easier to project a vision upon.

All of these have an aura, although a differing aura.

A simple question I have is can this aura cease and if so at what point?

It seems like I often tie the aura to the genesis of an object and its removal from that state or the time elapsed from the genesis. However, it seems when I consider an object more intensely it usually reaches back further than I can truly comprehend. For example I think about a tree stump, I can easily trace the idea of the tree back to being a sapling or seed. But before that it was another tree (parent tree) and soil. I can trace the heredity back in a line of trees. If I try and trace it in to the soil the aura becomes unfathomable. Just too spread out.

A question I have, which I meant to post earlier, is at what point the aura becomes its own object, and ceases to refer to its source. If you can see an aura, and not the original object, do you forget the original object? Does the original object remain necessary?

An old question in linguistic circles, but still a relevant one, I think.

That last one is a good one. It may be more along the lines of what I was thinking when I (much) earlier said something about "loss of authorship"... that a process or idea can assume a new, somewhat separate form. Lke the wing flap drawing of Marey's. Again, those are an epiphany to me.

The Matmos record, "A Chance to Cut is Chance to Cure" is one of my favorites for the way concrete sound is curated and then refashioned. Plastic surgeries recorded and remixed into experimental dance/pop/electronica. If you didn;t know the source you would dance... once you know the source, you grimace in disgust and recognition and then, well, you may still think to dance.

I keep reading these posts i this section because there is something hugely important here. At the moment, I can not put my finger on what it all means then for an approach to making work for this show.... implied is a necessary system. parameters we decide upon...
Should all sound be self-referential? Should all the recording be done on ht espot as we install? Meaning, an aura of the show's making? Could this be one way to recognixe authorship and still have a result that is freestanding?

huh? I'm still taking it all in this morning.

interesting to think about how the relationship of sign to signified functions in the case of sound in general, but in the chance to cut record in particular. as i think i posted a while back, it seems that a single sonic sign can refer to more possible signifieds than can a single visual sign. especially as sound gets more percussive - you hear a recording of a loud bump and it could be anything.

in the matmos record, it seems like the main function of knowing the original source has been sales and reputation.

(i picture two bjork fans leaving one of her recent shows - one says 'what were those guys doing up there with her? that was crazy!', the more knowledgable other eagerly says 'that's matmos, they're amazing. you should hear this record they made all from surgery sounds.')

once you're in the loop on it (bad pun), you almost don't need to know anymore. the record is so amazing sonically, the deepest aural space I've ever heard out of a cd player.

so here, a good example (one of many?) in which knowing the source of the trace functions as a way of defining social groups (i.e.,are you in on it or not?), but also as a selling point, an instrument of desire.

oh one more thing - i agree with chris, i think there's some stuff in this group of comments that are getting importantly narrowed. we should keep at it. we're getting to some more specific discussion of aura, perhaps even some more specific models of practice.

i'd be interested in seeing if there's any defintion or phenomena of aura that we don't think belongs in our show's subject heading.