AFJORDANCE, 2019, single channel video, soundtrack composed by the digital armature joint movements referencing an open source audio library of wind. The video looks at the new complexities emerging in Artificial Intelligence, the ways humans create mirrored structures, and affordances in the notions of Intelligence itself. Exhibited in California, Norway, and Italy.
Norwegian: AFJORDANCE, 2019, er i enkeltkanals video, med lydspor komponert av de digitale armaturleddbevegelsene som refererer til et lydbibliotek med åpen kildekode for vind. Videoen ser på de nye kompleksitetene som dukker opp i kunstig intelligens, måtene mennesker lager speilvendte strukturer og overkommelige i forestillingene om intelligens i seg selv. )
AFJORDANCE, 2019, Approximate run time 13:50 minutes, single channel video (with audio).
Affordance is what the environment offers the individual, and refers to all action possibilities depending on users’ physical capabilities. For example, a chair “affords” being “sat on,” “thrown,” “stood on,” and a continuing use of probabilities. James J. Gibson, coined the term “affordance.” The video portrays a dance at the fjord as movement research for technology lab-work.The project developed from the Solfège Souche video performance. The relationship between the human body and the natural world remains full of misunderstandings and spaces for insight. As Artificial Intelligence becomes part of human life, and human relations are increasingly dependent on technological screens and interfaces, the question of what is knowing and the way Intelligence is understood comes into question in the video. The wind sound in Afjordance are from open source libraries. The composition is made by refercing the joints in the wire frame armature. This armature positioned antagonistically opposed to the fully covered body. The body becomes a form without much identity other than it shows the proportions of a female body. The wire frame of the body becomes the composer, making a track of wind sounds as an echo of the movements of the body. The feminine as a figure of the earth or “mother nature” in certain instances is faced with the exorcised image of itself which can scarcely mirror the motions from the limited human body. The video is intended to be projected with sound, to create an immersive experience for viewers to consider the themes of technology, the body, nature elements. The experience provides a multi-sensory meditation on the possible meanings and implications of the emergent technology.
PATTERN RECOGNITION METHOD, (teaching and artistic process), meditation, drawing, movement, writing, video. This method began developing from 2014/2015 through 2021 and is protected by intellectual property rights; for interest, permissions of usage, contact: rachel@rachelwolfe.com
A process for multiple applications: art making, teaching and workshops, psychology and counsel. Pattern Recognition was built alongside artistic research projects Solfége Souche, Afjordance, and Magnetics In-Material. Pattern Recognition Projects apply principles and ideas in John Haugeland’s book on Artificial Intelligence through methods of learning through doing. Designed to develop critical thinking skills while forming healthy relationships and understandings with terrains and temporality, the methods can serve as means for new connections and realisations within the practitioner. Pattern Recognition is involved with the field of Embodied Cognition. The Pattern Recognition projects work dynamically with memory, behavior, lineage, choices, and agency with individuals through the Vision and Body Relationship, including coordination and motor skill development. There are presently 6 Segments developed in this method with the realisations including workshop/student experience and professional artistic work.
SEGMENT ONE
The first step is to experience a sensitised exploration of the environment. Through meditation and movement to go into contact with intuition. The intuition guides the gathering of materials from the environment.
SEGMENT TWO
The second step is to draw materials from the environment. Following an axial rotation similar to the scientifically reported rotation of the earth, the faces (planes) of the dimensional materials are drawn. In this example, drawings were made, the tracings make the under-layers visible on the new top layers of tracings. The concept is to make the impressions of the dynamic modes of axial rotation visible. The practice brings awareness to the memory and sensory ways a visible detail can fade in visibility but remain within the under-layers.
SEGMENT THREE
The third step is involves Visual and Somatic Memory. The lines drawn in the previous exercise are performed as body movements. Exercises are practiced independently, leaving room for personal interpretation. A group environment affords the opportunity to coordinate independent movements into a group arrangement of movements. Records of these practices are used for reflection and to witness development of reflexive awareness over time.
SEGMENT FOUR
To experience nature and nurture concept of impression and transference, two transferrable materials are used with water and pigment. Other materials can be useful. For the sake of providing an example, gouache paintings with two pieces of paper follow 2 different impulse. 1 impulse to paint from memory. The 2nd impulse to paint from a photo.
To look at the difference between making something look like something else or using memory (embodied sense of experience) – the gouache painting exercise was carried out by making compositions based on memories of witnessing detailed areas of water flow, and composing paintings based on looking at a photograph. Viewers could immediately see the difference.
The gouache paintings were done on the “wrong side” of Japanese Washi paper, to transfer the pigments onto acid-free, black papers. The pigments left traces similar to the way a memory becomes a trace of lived experience or ways communication of forms become transferred onto what is underneath or nearby.
In addition to discerning difference in how forms are made by hand from referencing external or internal referents, is also considering the process of transfer. As the original can become a symbol for reading-as reading a book or remembering a book, the paint transferred to the surface under becomes the information absorbed.
Exhibition of works in Oslo, Norway
SEGMENT FIVE
A mirroring exercise, completed with language and/or illustration. By writing a letter in reverse, to see how it appears through a material and in a mirror. The practice is based on the mechanics of a single-reflex camera and the way the eye perceives reality directly which is then flipped in the brain. This practice develops understanding of communication and the two-way nature of the way read symbols are transmitted and interpreted.
SEGMENT SIX
A relational exercise, completed with vision, drawing, space and relating. Participants have each a drawing tool and paper. They interlock arms and being to draw a portrait of the other simultaneously. While drawing the awareness of space, cooperation, coordination, patience and additional soft qualities are activated. After the process is complete, a portrait reveal and discussion follows the activity. This practice develops understanding of the dynamic relating skills people engage with their vision and experience of reality.
SEGMENT SEVEN
The method builds a process to be performed. The activity can be performed as a solo, duo, or in a group organisation. There is no limit to the number of participants, only that the processes are done a priori to the perfuming of the lines and learnings with the body. The next two segments can be one or the other, or both of them. The performance is to be recorded. The performance can be done in private or to an audience.
POST: PERFORMATIVE SEGMENTS
Based on the recorded performances, there can be used intersections of A.I. research, algorithmic sound composition, witness/viewer feedback. Through the performances the memories of the performer are recorded and reflected. The aim is to not procure an echo chamber or simply encouragement of future performace, but to engage in a process of understanding lines between fiction and reality. With regards to intelligent technologies, subjects of agency, lineage, and space for all stories and perspectives is aimed for the realm of tolerance and expansion. This questions the validity of violence, even subtle violence, as a form of ignorance while also engaging in the questions about integrity and vulnerability such that an individual does not lose their personal agency or embodies other people’s ideas- but rather is allowed to have their own.
The following documentation highlights the use of technology for feedback review.
Based on visual records of geological data from magnetic resonances created by rocks in places of the earth and radiation, the data is used to create textiles. These textiles are used for tapestries, scenography, costumes. The working title for the Textile Segments are: Magnetics In-Material and are intended to engage in material and resources research.
This segment weaves aesthetic movements from the perspective of earth’s history. A history informed by geological time and now amalgamated from technological sensors. This history has the potential to be conflated as human history but remains also problematic as the machine sensor differs so widely from the bodied sensors.
Magnetic emanations from the earth are woven to form visual representations. The textiles create an earth-based narrative from a geological perspective of time. Demarcated by textures and colours woven based on the recordings from the earth, the invisible forces from within the earth become Visual, Sensual (tactile), and Actual (woven). The textiles reveal understandings in human relationships with nature and present iterative opportunities to make textile(s) of the magnetic records at a variety of sites. Potential themes could be, but not limited to, locations of cultural and historical significance such as shrines, pilgrimage routes, or political and humanitarian organisations such as NATO and UNESCO.
The foundation of this research is based on the graduate research project for MFA at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California (2015). Making Sense dealt with the way memory, temporality, liminal space are navigated by the body, and the various ways senses and affect can alter reality to create fantasy or be used as a tool to bring about clarity. The research took up obscured stories from WWII history in the development of imaging technologies. The apparatus and history of photography proved to be a ripe area with often looked over nuances useful for agency and understanding.
