 So, today for you in this hall in the early morning will be something that will make you feel things about things that are not in the three-dimensional or six-dimensional space that you see or that you can touch. And our first speaker today will tell you about how to evoke emotions with or to kind of sculpture art from things that are maybe not nothing more than thin air but that will nevertheless touch you. The first talk today is called Visceral Systems, approaches to working with sound and network data transmission as a sculptural medium. And our talker today, first talker is Sarah Grant, give a warm round of applause for Sarah. Thank you. So, yeah, good morning. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you for having me here at CCC. I'm really excited to give this talk. It's something I've been thinking about for a long time and I'm happy to present it to you this morning. And also, thank you for coming here. I know that 1130 is quite early for a morning at CCC. So, yeah. My name is Sarah Grant. I'm a media artist and an educator. I'm part of the Weiseseben studio in Berlin. And I'm interested in systems, radio waves, computer networks, and also sculpture. I have an arts practice with networking technology as my medium and also a teaching practice that works to promote internet literacy, cracking open this black box that we know of as the cloud, bringing awareness that there are alternatives to commercial providers if we want to, for example, simply host our own website or run our own community network. And I think it's a vital importance to have a basic understanding of how the internet works so that we ourselves can be creators and not just passive consumers of the internet. And not only that, so that we're equipped to be critical of it because you can't really be critical of something if you don't know how it works or you don't know what's behind the facade. So actually, to that point, I also organize a conference called Radical Networks in Brooklyn, New York with my colleague Erika Cormani. It's a four-day event that has talks, workshops, and an exhibition featuring critical investigations and applications of internet and radio technology. So the spirit of the event is to give beginners and the community a safe space to come learn about and discuss issues such as surveillance, ownership of personal data, and to, again, dismantle this opaque notion of the cloud. But today I want to talk about something pretty abstract, something that I've spent a long time thinking about and actually feeling, but I've only recently started publicly talking about this idea of visceral systems as applied to sound composition and computer networks, and to sort of unpack that, I want to do it within the following framework of first giving a bit of my background to some of my past influences and also therefore explaining my relationship to sound and networking technology. But first I need to offer some definitions just to lay a groundwork with the caveat that I'm going to be bending these definitions quite a bit. So the first is this term visceral, from medicine that visceral referring to the viscera, the internal organs of the body, specifically those within the chest as the heart or lungs or the abdomen as the liver, pancreas, or intestines, in a figurative sense something visceral is felt deep down, it's a gut feeling. And then this idea or the definition of what a system is from Oxford, a set of things working from Oxford dictionary, a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network, a complex whole. So while a visceral system usually refers to the system of the body, I'm bending the term to me a system which evokes a visceral feeling, feelings of textures, colors, dimension, mass, to both sound compositions and communication systems, two systems that I actually didn't intentionally choose to work with in order to explore these concepts, but more I just noticed I felt these things in relation to these systems, so they kind of chose me. So to explain maybe how I got here, I want to back up about 30 years. One of the defining influences in my life, if any of you recognize these icons, was discovering two software applications. The one on the left is the icon for ResEdit or Resource Editor. And the one on the right is HyperCard when I was about 10 years old on my parents' Mac classic. ResEdit is an application that was used to create and edit application resources, like icon bitmaps, the shapes of windows, the definitions of menus and their contents, and the application code. The first time, you know, me and my parents' computer was often me, especially on the Mac, was me just dragging things around the desktop and seeing which would, you know, light up over different applications and then dropping in and seeing what would happen. And unfortunately for them, one of these applications was ResEdit, which led to many system crashes. But anyway, the first time I was able to open up a piece of software with ResEdit and watch it disassemble into a collection of icons and hex code, as whatever it sounds, made actually a major impression on me as a child. I mean, the code made no sense to me. What I saw made no sense to me at all. I had no idea how to parse what I had stumbled into. So instead of looking at it rationally as a computer program, my child's mind connected to it visually, viscerally even. Instead of software, I noticed the texture of the black and white characters. I noticed the lines and the shapes that came forward out of the code. And, you know, while I didn't know what this actually was, I knew enough. I knew that it was controlling what was happening up front in the interface. And I felt a huge excitement at seeing the guts, seeing the organs of an application of what I previously perceived as a black box that I was only allowed to take at face value. And this sort of gave me this backdoor into this system, which was really exciting. This is a slide of the Mondo 2000 card from the Beyond Cyberpunk hypercard stack. A compendium of Cyberpunk sci-fi and guide to cyber culture that came out in 1990. So, yeah, hypercard is an application that lets you create stacks of so-called cards containing text and interactive images, buttons, text fields and other gooey elements. It's considered one of the first successful hypermedia systems before the web and was therefore a precursor to the web and had actually a direct influence on how the first browser was developed. Also, because of how it allows you to create these nonlinear narratives, jumping between cards of text and interactive content, you know, with the introduction of hypermedia, really. And, you know, being able to move in this nonlinear way, you know, really creates a feeling of traversing space, in this case, document space. And it really added a dimensionality to what was otherwise a very flat landscape in digital media. So, interacting with software in these ways via these programs really started to give digital media a shape and a form in my mind. It's something more than you just look at on a screen and, you know, as a static thing, but it's something that, you know, that had guts, that had dimension, that had physical, well, physical-ish properties. And it really established the synesthetic relationship that I would continue to have with media. So, I want to talk about sound for a minute. A great, huge inspiration for me is Edgar Verez and his idea of sound objects. That sound occupies space's form and with mass. Verez was a French-born composer who spent a lot of time in Paris and in the States working in the first half of the 20th century. And he's known for conceivative music as, quote, sound as living matter with the elements in his music as sound masses, organized as crystalline structures. So, he, you know, as well, had this relationship to sound where it wasn't just something that he heard, but it was something that had weight, you know, that had visceral properties about it. And he has this quote that, well, this is not his quote, but it's his quote is, when I was about 20, I came across a definition of music that seemed suddenly to throw light on my gropings towards music I sensed could exist. Josef Maria Hunor-Ronsky, the Polish physicist, chemist, musicologist and philosopher of the first half of the 19th century, defined music as this, as the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sounds. So giving body to the life that's in sounds. It was a new and exciting conception and to me, this is still for us speaking, and to me, the first that started me thinking of music as spatial, as moving bodies of sound in space, a conception I gradually made my own. So, having learned about him and reading about all this stuff and getting really excited that I came across someone else who had this relationship to this normally intangible stuff, really encouraged me to develop this project called Felta Signal Processing, or FSP for short, something I worked on for a number of years, actually with my sister, Larry Grant, who continues to work as a wearable electronics and textile designer in San Francisco. So together we developed conductive soft interfaces out of regular wool and metal wools, combining them together to work as components in guitar pedals, synths, and homegrown sound circuits. And yeah, here's a picture. So my goal with FSP was to take something else that I had a visceral connection to sound and try to create an emotional connection to it through an interface that I thought was closer to the texture of the sounds as I experienced them than the hard, discreet knobs, sliders, and buttons. So in this image, it's a sheet of wool containing an effects pedal that I built. And there's these felted components that are integrated into the circuit via these snaps that I attached, I mean, well, they're just grommets, well, snaps that I grommeted into this conductive felt that I made, and it becomes a variable resistor. I'll sort of back up, oops, a bit. So there's a wire that's snaked through the raw material, then it's felted up, then I attach the snap, and then I have something that I can solder a wire to and solder it directly into the circuit, into the PCB of the effects pedal. So it becomes part of the circuit. The signal is traveling through this felt, and as you manipulate it with your hands, you're changing the resistance of it, which is the same as turning a knob or a slider. You're actually shaping a sound with your hands. And yeah, we made several strange things. This was the beginnings of a strange synthesizer that this was the interface for it with all these intestine-like tentacles, each of which had a core of conductive wool and terminated in a snap on one end and would connect, yeah, that's a shot of the conductive wool down the center of it, but these snaps would then connect to the other piece and create a connection in these circuits. And then as you pulled the tentacle, again, it was creating this stretching action, which was changing the resistance and shaping the sound that was moving through it. So another piece I did was called House FM. I did it in collaboration with a very good friend of mine and sound designer, Helen Tang. It was an on-site installation consisting of multiple Raspberry Pis, broadcasting a unique soundscape over a shared FM channel, which was set to 90.1 FM. So it was broadcasting off of a pin, off the Pi, on the same frequency, six of these devices throughout the house. And as participants moved throughout the house during FM radio-enabled headphones, the audible signal from each Pi would fade in and out as they moved towards and away from stations. So in this piece, I was experimenting more with dimensionality, with creating these sound spaces. It was also an experiment trying to pull color and texture out of the corners of the house, out of the feelings of the corners of the house in which the piece was installed, giving a voice and a body to each of these areas as expressed in the sounds designed by Helen. So earlier I stated that my goal was to take something that I had a visual connection to, sound, and to try to create an emotional connection to it through an interface that I thought was closer to the texture of sounds as I experienced them myself. But this goal as well extends to my relationship to computer networks. I mean, having a visceral relationship to music and to art is more or less understandable. I think a lot of people do. But having one to two computer networks is a little less obvious, and it's something that I have been really struggling to sort of define for myself what that means. But for whatever reason though, I'm compelled to situate networking in the context of sculpture to design tactile network systems and to reference, for Rezagan, to consider networks or the signals moving over the networks as living matter. But I needed a framework to help guide my experiments and explorations. And I think that framework, where I'm at with it now, because this is really an ongoing research project, is this modified version of Harold Laswell's model of communication as a template for my thinking going forward as well to quote, for Rez, grow my way towards the sculpture I sense could exist. So according to Laswell, this phrase is designed to describe an act of communication. It asks who says what in which channel to whom and with what effect. So in the context of sculpture or art, the who and to whom are straightforward to answer. These are the artist and the audience. Which channel refers to the medium? Is it felt? Is it slime mold? Is it cement? Is it paper? What is the physical medium that will be used to link the intangible to something that can be physically engaged with or sensed? So, and then says what? I mean, this is the message that the artist is trying to impart from their piece. To me personally, so far in my experiments, the what is wanting to give the intangible a physical presence, like a real world avatar, something that can be engaged with. And finally, with what effect? This is the feedback from the audience. This is how does it affect the people who are looking at this and experiencing this? How will it make the viewer feel? For me, I hope it will impart, again, a sense of awareness, that these sounds, that these data transmissions, that they exist in the space that we're in, that they have a form even if we can't see it. So, I wanted to just show a few experiments I've been doing with some of the networking stuff. One of the first ones involves a slime world called Pfizer and polycephalum. It's a single cell amoeba slash fungus-like creature. It says about 2010 it's been the focus of interesting research that has taken note of the fact that for being such a simple creature, it tends to display complex and indeed sophisticated behavior. And it's been used to model various systems from transportation networks to help blood vessels form. It's also particularly noted for its ability to quickly find the most efficient path between food sources, creating efficient transport interconnections networks for faring nutrients from, in this photo, these are oat flakes, which is one of their favorite foods. It's basically a decentralized, adaptable network that is able to change in response to a changing environment. And you can clearly see here even how it starts to take the shape of a computer network or as the internet. In this particular experiment, I was actually seeing if I could find a way to color code data, if you will, that moves through the plasmodium network. So, as the slime mold ingests food, it breaks it down and then streams it through these tubes. And it moves in this tidal fashion where it moves forward and then comes back a bit and then forward and back a bit. It's how it moves actually. So I wanted to see if I could create color coded tags, you know, like trace something, a piece of food moving through the network by color. Hoping that I could somehow create like a data network or data packets that were moving through the slime mold and know where it had been based on the color that it was. Because so in this picture, different oats, I, you know, you see yellow, red and blue. I use primary colors to dye the oats, hoping that as they ingested the oats and would break it down as different oats from different parts of the Petri dish mixed, it would also be a color mixer. They like, I could see, oh, this over here, it's green. So I guess, you know, this passed through the blue and the yellow node. Anyway, as I said, highly experimental. It's still something that I am working on perfecting. I haven't quite got it yet. Another thing I wanted to talk about real fast was QFM. It stands for cubed FM. It's a collection of FM transceivers embedded in cast cement cubes. Worked on in collaboration with my partner, Donia Vasiliev. Together they form a network of mini radio devices for modeling network topologies. And travel paths of data from one device to each other. So, I mean, this is a single one, but they're designed to actually work as a group. And they're just sending out a simple Morse code signal. And, you know, one sends a pulse and whoever, whichever one's nearby here, the pulse, pick it up and blink and LED to show that they've received it. And it's really just a super, super simple way to show data propagation through a network. And this was actually designed as well to be used as a teaching tool, which is something that me and also Donia do quite a lot is teach workshops to help explain how networking technology works. So, but it was also a way to just sort of see and appreciate how information travels through a space. Again, giving the sense of dimensionality to things and that though we can't see what's in the air around us, it's still there, you know, and we're situated in it. So, yeah, I mean, some of the stuff I know is super abstract, even for me. And I'm often asking myself, why, you know, like, what is this, you know? And, you know, one of the greatest challenges of working with networks as an artistic medium or using networks as material to use a phrase coined by my studio mate, Julian Oliver, is the fact that computer networks aren't inherently tactile. You can't see them or taste them or smell them or feel them. So how do you create works that engage an audience out of computer networks if they can't experience it with their senses? Does a person fully even appreciate what's happening over a computer network if they can't experience it with their senses? And, you know, I think it's about changing our relationship to something that is usually considered purely a utility. You know, networking is a very utilitarian thing. It's about moving messages over, you know, from point A to point B. But is it interesting to look at how networking can manifest itself in other contexts, like in the case of the slime molds? You know, where can parallels be found and is there meaning to that? And by giving something a tangible form, will it make us think about it more or think about more like what happens over those invisible tubes? So, yeah, you know, the thoughts presented here, like I said, are very experimental and open to discussion. And if this has evoked any thoughts or questions in you, I would love to hear what you had to say. Thank you. Yes, thank you, Sarah, for your talk. We have time for some questions. So we have four microphones in the room. One, two, three, and four. So if you have any questions, you can just walk up to a microphone and ask a question. Or in the meantime, if we don't have any questions from the internet. So, first question, microphone one. Hi there, yeah, thank you for the talk, very interesting. Can we hear some of those sounds that you made with the pedals? Yeah, well, you know, I actually did, I do have a video. I, well, I don't know if you have time for me. I'd have to like dig it up. Maybe you can find me afterwards and I can play for you. Well, okay, well, let me see if I can find. So in the meantime, maybe there's one question from the internet. The question is regarding the rule-based FX pedal. Have you performed live on stage and does it work like a musical instrument? Yeah, actually, I, well, you know, I never performed it live on stage. I, it just didn't happen, but I would perform to myself in my bedroom. And yeah, I mean, I used it actually to process my voice. So there, you know, there's a microphone. I was singing into it and running it through the FX pedal and, you know, when people sing, you know, it's a full body thing sometimes. It's like you're using, you're moving with your body, your hands, and it felt really nice to have this like, this felt, this like, this like warm comforting felt in my hand that I was, as I was singing, as well shaping my voice almost as though we're in accordion. Unfortunately, no video documentation of that. But yeah. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, a little break to, to, to, to let you, to let you search for the video. Yeah, I'm searching through my sister's Vimeo where, where we had these documented. But you know, this was actually from, from some time ago. So let me just try to look again. If I can't find it in time, then by all means come find me afterwards and I can, oh wait, I think I did find it in fact. Actually, if you wanted to, let me see if I can, we actually do have an, an archive of our work here at chutka.com slash fsp. If you wanted, if you're curious to see what some of the projects were that we did. Does this also have audio out? This HDMI? Well, let's see if this plays and if not, then you can check it out. Oh, I don't think it's going to play actually. Oh, wait, is an audio here? I think we might, we might be out of luck. Well, if you want to listen, actually, you can, you can visit this, this webpage here and we do have some videos up. Okay, I think you can see the address up there. Yeah. It's also on, on the talk site on, on the Fablan. So you can listen to it there. So there's one question at microphone one. Oh, wait, we hear something. Oh, something is coming up. Just a sec. Yeah, this was a, a noise experiment. Those are my sister's hands. Here you go. Thank you. Okay. So yeah, the question? Yes, short question. How hard is it to be sound artist in the modern world when we are almost visual media audience? Mostly when you are on talks, there is for sure some projector and video, but sometimes there is problem with sound as we saw now. And so when people browse the internet, they look for pictures. So how it looks like from your perspective. It's easy to reach your audience with sound projects. Well, I mean, to tell you the sound, I included it in this talk because it's, it's relevant to this idea of visual systems, but at the time, I have actually worked with sound myself for a number of years. I've been focusing mainly on networking, but it, I mean, was it my goal, like that I want to reach an audience online? For example, online or even in exhibition sites, sometimes it's hard to find perfect conditions for sound. Absolutely. Well, so one of the benefits about this is that this isn't reliant on high fidelity. This is actually about noise in some way. It's about interference. So actually that was never an issue. Yeah. Okay, very good. So unfortunately time is up for this talk. So thanks again, Sarah for the nice talk. Thank you very much. And a warm round of applause.