Mid-Semester Project Presentation

Concept

This project is a series of ephemeral experiences related to space and to its changing characteristics, and concentrates on the social gestures around a dinner table. The goal is to invite strangers to share a ritual - the act of eating- with us. These gatherings are defined as nomadic dinners that create an immersive space. The atmosphere evoked through the meals and the structure as well as its content is left to the people and the food. The sonic traces of the table-interface between the guests are captured and are furthermore influencing the dinner. Every dinner will bring back a memory of the previous dinners from the series of meals shared with strangers, wherein the actual guests will be brought to reflect upon the history of this “table” (virtual or physical). The table is not just an object; it is a social environment (space) that is experimented sonically and socially.

Concept Hypothesis

1st hypothesis: inviting people to our place, our table
2nd hypothesis: going to people’s places, their table
3rd hypothesis: taking our table to people’s places

Interactivity

There are many layers of interactivity that are interlaced in this project. Strictly speaking of non-media interactions, we have physical and intellectual (emotional) interactions that arise through human contact, verbal communication and the act of eating and sharing food. By adding sonic elements, we are capturing fragments of non-tangible exchanges between the guests and the “objects”. Furthermore, the interactivity being influenced by the participants of the meal, the traces/gestures on the table are being diffused or re-diffused to call for distraction, goal: to develop a better awareness of space and how it can influence us since we are influencing it back (feedback). This gathering and its interactions create an ambiance ruled by the imagination of the past through “impersonal memories” that trigger personal responses (since they weren't there during the previous dinners, so it's like a forced memory: we actually don't feel affected but we try to empathize or to relate to the latter).

Planning (in four weeks)

Week 1 & 2:

-Series of tasks including: construction, prototyping, testing and experimenting through smaller diners and set-ups. Finalizing and usable “table”.

Week 3:

-Scouting the city, preparing the diner, sending out the invitation, have our first dinner and process information.

Week 4:

-Troubleshooting, processing information, and prepare our presentation dinner.

Tasking and roles

Social Task:

Scout the city to find areas and invisible boundaries for potential interesting guests.

Physical:

Building the table, circuits, and preparing an area and food (maybe more than once depending on our hypothesis).

Interactive:

Building a Max environment that is able to store and feedback our sonic elements.

Resources: scroll down the blog to read more about these links

1- The Dinner Project

http://www.thedinnerproject.com/

Invite me to prepare food for you, and personal social dissection.

2- The Table:Childhood*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QavoKfrm1hw (video)

3-Studio Azzurro

http://www.studioazzurro.com/opere/coro/n_qt.htm

updated ( more amplified) version of the table sound

download here: http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=batch_download&batch_id=y2crUM6yz4M=

The Table Childhood, 1984-2002

The Table Childhood is a collaborative work by Max Dean and Raffaello D’Andrea that was shown in the Arsenale section at the 2001 Venice Biennale. This fully autonomous robotic table selects a viewer and then attempts to form a relationship with that person. In this installation, Max Dean and Raffaello D’Andrea orchestrate a scenario where a spectator, selected by the table, becomes a performer and is not only an “object” of the table’s attention, but also of the other viewers’. Although the table tries to persuade the visitor to interact with it, the visitor must decide whether or not to commit to the piece. The behavior of this everyday object can be described as playful teasing or courtship and is, in a way, reminiscent of children’s games.

video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QavoKfrm1hw

Meeting on Sunday October 29th?

hello my dears,
I hope that you are still ok with our meeting on sunday since the presentation is do next monday. What do you think, at what time should we get together? I do suggest to meet in the afternoon at our place, or at any other if you prefer, like yours, or a café.......and maybe we can conclude our meeting with a meal in the evening, depending on how busy we all are. If I have the time, but I don't promise anything, I try to edit a bit our sound from the last meal.

see you soon!

mp3 file from our last dinner

http://www.yousendit.com/download/Qyh9MdZB4oA%3D

it will be accessible for 7 days, make sure to tun up your volume while listening to it!

this is what I found when I was searching for our table project on the Blogger......a suitcase table, which gets closer to the idea of a portbale installation...but then again how could we sit around it? or might it be an approach to think of our final presentation -----the table---- becoming something other, a living (memorable) entity

have a look here:
http://feeddog.blogspot.com/2006/09/suitcase-table.html

thick/N (Prior work- Harry Smoak)

thick/N– Technology Research Square (2004)

A responsive media installation to provide a playful oasis where social engagement is privileged by an ability to change the space’s state; activity is rewarded by greater protection from voyeurism and social thickening drives a thickening of media. Lighting and synthesis of audio and video are parameterized by analyses of microphone and video camera data in Max/MSP and Jitter.

Collaborators:
with Matthew Peters Warne

Responsive Architectures

Blur Space (2003)

Part of a series of public experiments with immersive environments and responsive spaces investigating social and political complacency– in Blur Space (2003, with Jill Coffin) participants move through a densely layered architectural space constructed from suspended materials, real-time media, and prerecorded video and soundscapes containing culturally charged messages.
Co-author; Installation Design and Construction; Video and Sound Design
MAX/MSP and Jitter, Final Cut Pro, After Effects
Description:
Blur Space is an architectural space built from projected video, sound and closely arranged, suspended scrim panels. The panels are composed of a fabric which both reflects projections and allows them to pass through. The result is an ambiguous space where video images of birds and exploding bombs mix with the shadows and video images of participants. No one can observe without participating. Participants move through the layered architectural space, casting shadows and video projections of themselves which blur with the bomb and bird imagery. Participants can stretch and scratch the fabric to warp images and create sounds which blend with the sounds of explosions and flapping wings projected around them.
Collaborators:
with Jill Coffin
Performances:
Atlanta, USA– with Jill Coffin, Wesley New Media Center,
Georgia Institute of Technology (Spring, 2003)

difficult pleasure (for personal reading)

Navid Kermani: Roots of terror: suicide, martyrdom, self-redemption and Islam
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence
Said, Edward. Orientalism.

Pamuk, Orhan. Snow
Navid Kermani 40 Leben' (2004 t: 40 Lives),
Middle East Center, University of Pennsylvania

Here are suggestions for Arabic novels in translation that might be good for world history courses, according to Roger Allen (Prof. of Arabic Literature, U. of Pa)

> THE STORY OF ZAHRA: set during the Lebanese civil war, this novel makes > use of the dysfunctional Shiite Lebanese family--as portrayed by its > daughter-member--to symbolise all that was/is wrong with Lebanese society > in particular and with the values of a male-dominated social system that, > when carried to extremes, lead inevitably to war. A wonderfully rich > novel, not only for its portrayal of Lebanese society, but also for its > psychological insight and anrrative technique. > > MEN IN THE SUN: a short novel dealing with the desparate situation of the > Palestinians during the 1960s. Three characters, representing different > generations of Palestinians, try to make their way to Kuwait to find > work. They are abused and exploited at every turn, and the description > of the desert crossing in a water-tanker and their death in the searing > heat is a telling allegory on the fate of the Palestinians in general. > > THE WEDDING OF ZEIN: In this superb novella, an entire village becomes a > character as it reflects the antics of Zein, an apparently crazy member of > its society who undergoes a transformation from village clown to > responsible and even modern member of the community. Wonderfully written > and beautifully constructed. > > ROGER ALLEN



From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
"Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore," Stendhal wrote. This line serves as one of the epigraphs to Snow, Orhan Pamuk's mysterious, moving and -- yes -- political new novel, which includes a scene where guns are shot into a theater audience. Firearms notwithstanding, there is nothing crude about Pamuk's subtle work. The author of seven previous novels, he has taken as his great subject the tensions between West and East, religious and secular, in his native Turkey. His most recent novel, My Name Is Red, was an ingenious, tightly crafted tale of murder among miniaturists -- artists who illuminate manuscripts -- in 16th-century Istanbul, for which he at last garnered much-deserved recognition in the United States.
Snow, which takes place in the present day, may be Pamuk's most topical novel yet. Ka, a poet from Istanbul, has returned to his native country for a visit after 12 years in exile in Germany. When Snow begins, he is on a bus en route to Kars, a mountain city in the "poorest, most overlooked corner of Turkey," at the former border of the Ottoman and Russian empires. An old friend at an Istanbul newspaper has asked him to report on the impending municipal elections as well as an epidemic of suicide among teenage girls, the latest of whom is one of the "head-scarf girls," a group of young women who have been barred from the secular university for covering their hair. In hope of reuniting with Ipek, a beautiful former classmate who now lives in Kars, Ka agrees.
Kars is a tightly wound knot of tension between secular and religious forces, and Ka's investigations lead him into encounters with all the major players, including the charismatic Blue, an "infamous Islamist terrorist" who is in hiding after issuing a death threat against a talk-show host who insulted the Prophet Muhammad; Necip, a pious student who hopes to become the world's first Islamist science-fiction writer; and Ipek's sister, Kadife, the leader of the head-scarf girls. These forces come to a head on Ka's first evening in Kars, when an acting troupe stages a classic play called "My Fatherland or My Head Scarf." At the play's climax, the heroine rips off her scarf and burns it, and the religious youths in attendance begin to riot. Soldiers storm the stage, opening fire and killing a number of the audience members.
This is the briefest possible introduction to Snow's elaborate plot, which works its way by twists and turns through numerous digressions, dialogues and genres. Pamuk's work is reminiscent of the great storytelling classics -- The Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio's Decameron or Jan Potocki's Manuscript Found in Saragossa, with their bawdy comedy, intricate design and mystical overtones. At times Ka plays the traditional role of the trickster: In one brilliant sequence, he negotiates a statement of unity between the city's Islamist, Kurdish and socialist leaders for the sole purpose of luring Ipek's father out of the hotel where they live, so that he can make love to her. Elsewhere he is compared to a dervish: During his few days in Kars, he regains his inspiration for the first time in four years, and poems come to him as if dictated by a higher power.
The poems that Ka writes in Kars turn out to be governed by a "deep and mysterious underlying structure" similar to that of a snowflake, and the same is true of the novel itself. The deeper you read, the more the symmetries multiply. Nearly every character has a double, down to the narrator himself, who is eventually revealed to be a novelist friend of Ka's named Orhan, telling Ka's story after his death based on information gleaned from his notebooks. All these mirror images add up to create a dizzying effect, which is deepened by the snow that begins to fall on the first page of the novel and does not let up until nearly the end. Practically a character in its own right, it blankets the mean streets of Kars, shutting Ka and Ipek together in their hotel, casting its strange light in unexpected places and closing the roads to all traffic in or out, so that the city becomes a strange hothouse of nervous activity and revolutionary unrest.
This disorientation is surely Pamuk's intention. But even after the novel has come to its wrenching conclusion, the atmospheric haze is difficult to dispel. Snow has none of the tautness of My Name Is Red; its action moves thickly, at times impenetrably. Clarity is not enhanced by a tone that at times jerks wildly from knowing sophistication to faux naiveté. This is a shock after the elegant control of My Name Is Red, and the non-Turkish-reading reviewer is inclined to blame the translator, who is new to Pamuk's work. Nevertheless, Pamuk's gift for the evocative image remains one of this novel's great pleasures: Long after I finished this book, in the blaze of the Washington summer, my thoughts kept returning to Ka and Ipek in the hotel room, looking out at the falling snow.
Reviewed by Ruth Franklin 
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Notes on Butler, Judith. Precarious Life.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life : The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London ;; New York: Verso, 2003.

Reading and discussion notes:

SOME WORDS

Violence, Mourning, Politics
Loss (Dispossession)
Body
Life
Community
Social
Mourning (Substitutability, Melancholy, Greiving)
Relationality [22]
Desire [23]
Autonomy [25]
Interdependence [27]
Mourning,Fear,Anxiety, Rage [28]
Violence [28]
Touch

Loss
Violence
Body
Vulneraibility

exposure
ferminism
body
self
other primary condition


I/You
Dehuminaization
paranoia
bounded
Coporea

boundary

enforced boundaries become sites for transgression as soon as they are put in place
naming the boundary, engender a political will
denying the boundary, easier to identify yourself
can not live without th]e We
bounded being [24-25]

dehumanization
should be overcome grief to become active

primary condition- infant at birth, first touch, second touch
deadness= never get a chance because of the environment, less likely to react, lacking political will
dead - lives are more circled around themselves (ego centric), don't want to participate
undead can become more active


FROM DISCUSSION

Meditation that causes the participants to be mindful of corporeal vulnerability, a situation in which we can be vanquished or lose others [29] (but not at the same time trap people in a melancholic state of not knowing or being so overwhelmed as to remain powerless)

Make grieving and mourning foundational, not something to be feared or banished (Milton) [29]

collective responsibility for the physical (and psychological) lives of one another [20]

vulnerable to another range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end and the physical support for our lives at the other. [31] [32]

prior to individuaton (prior to language?)

vulnerability precedes the formation of the ego [31]

the unmarkable death [35]

the unmarked (unmarkable by decree - Creon) the no-event, the non-place, the unreal, dehumanized, undead [26]

feminism as a colonial project [41]

demanding a world in which bodily vulnerability is protected without therefore being eradicated and with insisting on the line that must be walked between the two [42]

insistence on a "common" corporeal vulnerability -- a call for a new humanism? [42]

body as the site of human vulnerability
vulnerability is always articulated differently

speculations on the formation of the subject are crucial to the understanding the basis of non-violent responses to injury and [...] to a theory of collective responsibility (developing a matrix of concern for others) [44]

subject: model for agency and intelligibility (theory of power and recognition) [45]

last paragraph [49]


IDEAS FOR MAQUETTE
utterance- names of Palestinians in memorial San Francisco Chronicle [27]
unmarked images, unutterable names (from where?) [38]
permeable, blurred borders


RESPONSE NOTES

Summary of Butler article

loss? What is lost be heightened security, etc.

Architecture, movement of the bouildings away from the street; Jane Jacobs what make a city alive, the vulnerability of the encounter on a street

The "Berlin Wall" of the United States, the 700 mile border fence separating the United States from the South, the ub

Borders and boundaries become visible sites for transgression (counter power) as well as the systems of power that are deployed to shore up security

Skin as a site for desire as well as a marker for racism

Interdependence, relationality
Not a six degrees of separation or network connection idea (friend who knows a friend) but how



Other ideas not dicussed: ideas of touch, alternative modes of touch, touching a boundary (outside), but touching in a way that permeates boundaries, or feels permeable boundaries (membranes explore this in a sinces,. on reflection of the work)

denial of the greiving process (creon) for political reasons; this is different from denail as a stage of grieving process

welcome to the table project

The table project (which is temporarily named "the table project: until furhter notice) is being developped by Claudia, Harry, Hoda, and Raed (family names also to come) for a Computational Arts' class: Interactive Multimedia (Cart 451).