September 24,2013

 

SEPTEMBER 24, 2013

Mapping outer space is still within the realm of our imagination. There is an actual voyager, this ship, it went outside of our solar system and so in uncharted territory,  it is going in to areas we could only map with intense telescopic vision. When you travel through space, you travel through time!!!

Einstein discovered by traveling through space and coming back to earth you would come back in a different time phase.. Hugh thinks, younger than people you left behind. It is also when you travel though space, here to the city which is 20 to 40 minutes away but previously it may have been half a day.We think of space as time, when we talk about outer space, if we we look at the stars, we think of things we see that existed 100,000 years ago or a million years ago. The light from the sun takes three to four minutes to reach us. On this spaceship, it exited as the solar system.Hugh shows a map of our galaxy, on this ship are directions of how to get back to earth. Directions are given in a couple of ways, behind the naked man and woman is to scale, to the left of that is a whole lot of pulses that go in to where they are centred. At the top, two discs join together, it is symbol, a hydrogen atom, that is what we have, we have water, that is what is distinct about our planet and at the bottom is our solar system..so a whole range of  planets and  this is the path that the Voyager has taken, so it left earth in 1977 with a map on  board and the map is created to communicate to any alien species, who we are and where we are. The is an LP on board, made of gold, a gold record and printed on one side of the gold record is a whole lot of music, languages across earth saying Welcome and Rolling Stones and Beatles music and information about earth in various languages and there are instructions on how the record is to be played. There is a sound wave, over here, of how to create a stylist and the speed of how it should be played in binary code, ones and zeros. Hugh was fascinated with the map and as he is approaching completion of his PHD, several times he approached this as a MEDIA person to think what does this mean. Some of it he could decipher, the craft in the background is the voyager, mainly from this and from years of context wherein he saw a whole range of planets, but alien races would not have noticed these things. If we talk on alien races, not only is there no user testing,if  it was not for fish, octopus, chimps, organisms can be separated by one gene. A beautiful failure, as many communicative failures are. The attempt to communicate is what is happening across here. This is what art tries to do, what all stories try to do, to communicate something about the world. Maps are a primary form of artwork, maps are trying to communicate basic information about the world, so in that spirit, Hugh wants to go through a few maps, as ways of communicating maps of the world. Let's look at the top ten busiest air routes, we are not a very populated country, one of the most sparcely populated and yet we have one of the busiest air routes, none of the busiest air routes were in the U.S., Hugh was surprised, by contrast with how our economy is booming. What you see here is an economic reflection of the world. It is Africa, Australia, South America and Asia. This map represents PANGEA.. how the continental plates were once joined.

Maps have religious and political connotation as well. This map shows all the countries which are not in pink which Great Britain has not invaded, so all the other countries have been invaded by Great Britain. We are for the most part of Europe. This is a map of Europe with all the Chinese names for the countries translated in to English. Some interesting names, not so much a mapping of place but also of language. They don’t just have to map space, the space being mapped is as much China as it is Europe. A map of the writing systems of the world at the 16 minute mark and it is contemporary, some writing systems are nolonger represented, the Nordic rooms, the Mayan languages, a great deal of spoken languages, the Indigenous languages. A series of perspectives of the world mapped differently to how we usually see it, a map of a cargo ship which had hundreds of millions of rubber ducks and they ended up in the Pacific Ocean and the map tracks their movement over the next decade. Here and in South East Asia, some were found in South America and many found in Northern Passage, it is notoriously difficult to navigate there. A great opportunity for global warming, where a lot of land is controlled by  Norway. Global warming is happening, we want to control the oil, getting a ship through there is too dangerous to do, there are a lot of pros, yellow rubber ducks got through this area quite easily. The ducks ended up in England and the U.S.A. A map has own distinct ways of being, existing, so he turns now to the changed lanes a little bit, so this is the last week of the space project, so create a map. Atmosphere includes sound, light, color and space which will be in the lecture after the break. Tim Nowles did a lot of mapping in his work, many of you would have done a lot of those exercises, he will come in in the first week after the break. Introducing the idea of the next theme which is atmosphere, when he talk about atmosphere, there are a lot of different meanings, a layer of gaseous liquid. Gas is a material, another state of being, it can be solid, liquid or plasma. Mercury but in our conditions on earth it is a liquid, we can turn steal in to a liquid, for some planets the atmosphere itself is steel, so our atmosphere is made of water, it becomes ice, in the middle it flows and becomes air. In our atmosphere on earth, humidity around the middle and frozenness at the poles; atmosphere refers to censorial qualities, the atmosphere space emits, what you did with the mapping projects, looking for is the atmosphere in places.. What you try to do with psycho geography, you search and look for the atmospheres, how space manifests, has a different sense, in terms of sound recording, atmosphere is the audio-presence. In the John Cage work, 4.5 minutes of silence, that is what he plays to you, the room tone, the sound in this room even, the hum of the sound projector, coughing, which is what sound recording tries to cancel out and tries to create a blank page but there is no blank page, there is so much media already happening that you have to compete against and those media change. The sounds in this room would have been different 20-30 years ago. Hugh began animating film at about 11 years of age and it got sent to America to be processed. At that time video was booming, it was exciting, there were all sorts of possibilities, it changed everything, it changed television, video was an incredible media, exciting, video is a nostalgic form now, so in 20 years since he was 20, cds, blueray phone and the internet.  The point of Hugh looking back through memory lane, media land scape changed significantly. In the next twenty years, what is fundamental about this course, we explore dusty corners of your bedroom, he is trying to give you a foundation or knowledge about media, so you can create valuable media throughout your whole lifetime, a broader understanding that can be fine  tuned over next few years. So returning, bridging space and atmosphere, as it is space, we can only rely on imagination. Understanding of space is limited,  we take what little queues we have and create what we can, then Hugh put on a video, Alien by David Gottsching so what you are hearing is atmosphere, that sound, vision, what you are experiencing, what the whole film provides is atmosphere, they are quite dense with atmosphere, he uses a lot of light/smoke to create a tense atmosphere, a thick atmosphere. The film, Alien has a soundtrack, which is quite atmospheric and it occurs throughout the whole film and it was discovered in the seventies and they recorded what sound they could hear, they put recorders in spaceships and they concluded it was the echo of the big bang, did Hugh say!!!!!!