kagablog

real time rendered video projection

Visually, at first glance, it appears as a pseudo realistic representation of an overexposed public square. Meticulous observation will progressively discover the artificial nature of the represented space with its own features and internal logic. In “La Plaza 2”, the video material is not used to restore the past, but to confer it fictively a new actuality. Due to its high level of abstraction, this piece can be considered as an experiment of vi-sualization of the mental imagery.

Technically, La Plaza 2 is the projection of the real time render from a program which calculates the interplay of several pre-registered video loops with an automated independent behaviour. Originally, exterior shots of actual pedestrians were taken with extreme highlight conditions and tele-zoom (therefore flattening) optics. Afterwards, the characters were isolated from the background, together with their original shadow. The motion loops are calculated to preserve a naturalistic gait and to keep their original relative tempo.

The shots are “reanimated” over a theoretically infinite straight path conceived as drawn over a torus. The torus surface is unfolded and mapped in the rectangular screen, the bottom row of cells is assumed to be neighbouring the top row, and the left cell column is treated as if it were adjacent to the right side. The pedestrians appear walking forever without reaching the boundary of the model-space, since the space wraps back on itself. The hors-cadre (the space out of the frame) is annihilated. There is such a huge amount of possible configurations between the individual cycles and paths that the exact moment of the plaza will not ever be repeated.

Several interpretations are hinted by this deliberately multilayered piece:

Given that the only clear interaction between characters is the superposition of their shadows, the piece might be interpreted as a pessimistic comment on regular but inconsequent encounters in urban life. This perspective can be confirmed by the divergence of the shadow’s direction which emphasizes the idea of a common ground as a vain illusion. But it can also be denied by the fact that the piece produce a certain dramatic tension where the viewer is expecting something to happen, and by the occasional event of characters walking together for a while an re-engaging conversations we can not listen.

The piece can also be seen as an illustration of the paradox to which the definition of freedom is condemned. Since the system is highly determinist we will naturally deduce that there is no freedom, on the other hand we can consider freedom as the absence of obstacles or the exemption from external control or interference. The characters will appear determined, alternately in the sense of resolute and in the sense of predictable.

The piece may also be seen as a critical view on the dominant image of time as linear. That in several scales: history conceived as a linear progression towards development and life within the model of the successful modern working man. Partitioned, compartmented lives, automation, obliteration of exceptions, individuals conducted through linear rails and prevented from any possible deviation.

The concept of automatism can also be linked to the piece in the sense highlighted by the Kinetic artists, as the creation of a piece which is somehow autonomous from the author’s will (through emergent unpredictable patterns and properties). Moreover, the piece can be related to experiments in generative and algorithmic music and literature. It may as well be seen as a sarcastic reply to the art market craving for originality, since it engenders mechanically produced “originals”.

Hopefully, many other meanings are to be found by the public.

check out tania’s website here

video it installation

Our proposed work is an intinerant video/IT instalation. The piece, which is premised on the concept that there exists an inherent determination in natural events, imagines a new order of natural images which we call ‘predictive images’. Our goal is to anticipate and predict events, beginning with the limited case of human movements through an urban public space. The images and data gathered by video cameras installed in four converging streets will be analysed and processed – in combination with special effects - to produce a predictive image, describing what will be seen some seconds afterwards at the street corner. A fifth camera will capture what actually occurs at this corner, allowing us to verify the precision of our predictions. In a nearby public space we will project the predicted image in real-time, and a series of monitors will make evident the computational process that culminates in the fabricated image.

We regard the city as a living organism and use our installation as a tool of ‘clinical’ analysis of the reciprocal influence that exists between inhabitants and their surroundings. Filing and comparing the data obtained in subsequent versions of the piece will open unanticipated new avenues for the present project. We use the term determination because it conveys a certain ambiguity. A physical phenomenon is determined if its behaviour can be predicted from a knowledge of its initial state. We call determined something which is fixed or delimited. However, when we say that someone is determined is also means that he/she is decided or resolute, suggesting a paradoxical ability to break free from the path laid out by his or her environment.

Methods

Using Navier-Stokes equations of Fluid Dynamics, which were created to model movement in gas and liquids, we will set out to predict the flow of people in a city. The complexity of human flux may seem of a greater order than that of inert substances. Nevertheless, the Navier-Stokes equations allow a first approach to the description of those complex patterns of interaction.
In other scientific fields, such as neurobiology, Navier-Stokes equations are used to model patterns of neural activity, showing that a theory that explains the dynamics of inanimate substances can serve as an aid in the understanding of interactions between nerve cells.
A city, built as it is around the interactions of millions of human beings, represents a novel type of organization, capable of giving rise to an unimaginable number of patterns. We seek to test the applicability of theses equations of fluid mechanics, built to understand the simpler cases of inanimate matter or an isolated organism, to the inestimably more complex problem of detecting, measuring, and predicting human activity within a city. Several methods had been used in the public surveillance area to detect, measure, and predict human behaviour. The results are normally represented in form of moving dots or vectors. Adding special effects techniques we plan to go further and to produce pseudo realistic image of the moment to come. A new type of image for the field of semiotics to categorize

Interpretations

In our view an art work’s richness resides in its ability to propose mutiple possible interpretations. However, we can imagine some interpretations which might plausibly occur to our audience. This work could be read as a critical comment on the automatic alert systems that form part of many current programs of urban surveillance (e.g. Automated pedestrian monitoring systems), which are based on the ability to calculate standard patterns of behaviour in a public space. One might also envisage the installation as a criticism of the belief, ubiquitous in contemporary society, in the inestimable powers of our own will. To treat the city as a living organism, to measure its activity as a neurologist analyses brain activity, emphasises a diminished importance for the human being as an individual, focussing instead on his participation in a greater network or human system. If our project predicts accurately the future states of activity on the city corner, is it the case that each individual movement in the human flux is not freely chosen, but instead determind by the forces that shape the city as a meta-organism? How, then, are we to understand determination in this new context?

Tania Ruiz Gutiérrez - Roberto Toro Olmedo

sculpture - video - audio - mixed media

Some time ago a domestic short news item overflowed into the international press territory. An heroic teenager escaped after eight years of captivity in a mad man’s basement. Short after her evasion she gave some interviews. Surprisingly, she appeared as a rather serene and very intelligent young woman. In one of her first interviews she declared: “I made a pact with my older self that I would come back and free that little girl”; this complex statement gives a disturbing but clear picture of the sedimental nature of time in the mind. This piece was first inspired by her testimony.

The kidnaper built a cell in his basement containing everything she could need. From her declarations one could deduce that he was willing to tame a perfect woman. From a certain view point, this kidnapping can be seen as an extreme case of the quotidian reality of millions of women.

In the toys market compact houses are today of great success. They target specifically girls and promote explicitly the pleasures of domestic life. They contain everything that one could need.

occupation layer- excavation 1-simulation

An occupation layer –also called occupation level- is (in Archaeology) a layer of remains left by a single culture, from which the culture can be dated or identified.

An occupation is both the act of occupying and of being occupied.

In the Occupation layer series compact houses are displayed in the form of excavations. As vestiges of contemporary culture found by future archaeologists or as remains of a rescue operation to liberate someone kidnap in a basement.

If you get very close to the sculptures you will hear voices, fragments of dailylife dialogs, noises from electrical appliances, feminine radio and tv…

Might it be possible to free those little girls! Might it not be too late!

video installation

‘Time’ scratched on a wall. It is written in Spanish, on the wall of a cell at the prison –now a museum- in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. I’ve never seen a better encapsulation of the concept of imprisonment than this graffitti. As you see the image it becomes evident that no further explanation is needed. The image will be displayed at the entrance as a visual foreword to the video installation The Cage.

Revisiting the subject, As you go into the dark, black-walled room you will face the projection. I intend to situate the viewer close to the place of the prisoner, an encaged tiger engaging in long periods of repetitive movement inside the cage. This movement is of course determined by the relative sizes of tiger and cage, such that his movements are optimized to the only possible path given the tight space available. Given that both the duration and the distance are repeated, one can imagine that in the tiger’s brain there exists a double incarcellation, both spatial and temporal. Moreover, the tiger’s path traces over and over the sign of infinity. I would like to make visible the passing of a suspended time and give this installation both a reflexive and hypnotic character.

The projection displays the enclosed tiger superposed to an object which I have created based on the filming of the tiger; constructed by the extrapolation, in a spatial dimension, of the frames that would typically occur in temporal succession. In this case, echoing the event being represented, the spatio-temporal object closes into itself. The experience of being inside this object is magnified by the cyclic pattern of the spatial and temporal spectrum of the image of the enclosed tiger.

Behind, by the entrance door there will be monitors displaying other views of the same object

The Cage- original shot and different views.

tania’s website is here

Variations displays together 3 videos from the Interior Landscapes series: Ground control, Facilities area and Art fair. In a white room with a white ambient light, tree films are projected. The ambient light intensity is proportionally tied to real-time global market information.

The Interior Landscape films have in common a definite nature of the environment and the events, where individuals appear to be following the only possible path. New architectures are suggested from imaginary extrapolations of the original film shots. The character of these spaces magnifies the choreographic impression given by the action.

The light being controlled by the financial quotes will put forward the interpretation of this piece as a comment on the tyrannical power of international finances.

Facilities area

Interior square of a building, artificial light. People appear to be coming or going to work or from the services areas. There is also a standing sculpture of a man, same scale. The whole space is suspended over thin treads. The video moves inside, hesitating.

Ground control

It is a foggy day in a place which appears to be an airport. People are running or walking with bags, there is a controller guiding them. It might be an evacuation… The landscape hors-champ is suggested by drawings and the video moves inside, hesitating.

Art fair

A flood of persons visit an art fair, the ceiling is abnormally high.
Tania Ruiz Gutiérrez / 2008 - in progress

video installations

The action is there, like a figure in the carpet, owing to the fact of the intersection of certain threads, any of which has the shape of the designed figure, which accomplishment they all ignore.

These Tri-dimensional objects, obtained through the volumetric interpretation of the time captured in a cinematographic recording, introduce the idea of the spatialization of time. They are situated at the intersection of the still image, cinema and sculpture and constitute the starting-point of many theoretical and artistic researches; of both virtual and actual objects

“Your matter is unceasing time, you are every lonely instant”
Jorge Luis Borges

Praxinascope film- simulation

Daily life as lived. Micro film loops. Multiple portraits of repetitive daily life tasks are displayed in one praxinascope each.

Each one is turning at a different speed, according to the action. Variable size installation (from 10 to 100 praxinascopes with a different film each).

In a society where Art is omnipresent as a collective phenomenon, Art is not something that happened but something that happens.

Based on analogue and digital video, this electronic weaving is produced from the analysis of the colours and movements of the video images. The market road in-situ “weaving machine” interweaves horizontal and vertical threads from colorimetric measures of the saturated colours of the Bolivian market tissue. It also allows the viewer to see “through time” using progressive keying through displaced film strips.

In this installation, particular attention was devoted to the Andean civilization and to the reversed direction which characterizes the Aymara people’s notion of time: the past is visible, in front of us, but shrinking. The future is invisible, and therefore, behind us. Our conception of time as a linear path from the past behind us to the future ahead is not a universal concept. This metaphor, coupled with the idea of weaving as an act both in time and against time, originate the piece.

Tania Ruiz Gutiérrez /1997 - 2000

tania’s website is http://www.taniaruiz.info/

Itineracy is a multi-projection video art work which seeks to phenomenally transform the reinforced concrete landscape of the Malmö C underground station into a wide open space.
Through a projection device that evokes the perceptual experience from the train, the viewers will be invited to lose themselves in images during their wait. The projections acting as windows, the station itself becomes a train that loses its spatial and temporal rails, itinerant across the earth.
From the salt flats of Uyuni to the roads of Saigon, from the plains of Siberia to those of Patagonia, from the Honshu-Shikoku Bridge to the Orinoco River to central Montreal to the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro to Johannesburg’s Soweto to a Kensington street to Oaxaca market to Plaza Mayor to the Sicilian coast to Jalpur to Alexandria to Fortune Bay to Kualalampur to Ulan Bator to Den Haag to Reykjavik to Marienville to Tallinn to Corbridge to Buenaventura to Faisalabad to Muscat to Adana to Kinshasa to Xiangkhoang to Arrecife to Krakow to Pusan*… the Malmö C station will travel the world. Itineracy, like a lost river, flows continually into an underground passage. It is said that one never steps in the same river twice; comparably, the Itineracy installation is elaborated in such a way that it is unlikely that a viewer on a fixed schedule will see the same image time and again.
In terms of tempo, Itineracy is conceived as a release for the individual viewer. The recorded images are slowed down, in contrast with the speed of everyday urban life, in order to ease the experiential flow of time.
In symbolic terms, this artwork highlights the importance of the Central Station as a node; in its primary sense, as a crucial railway link, but also metaphorically as a connection between the city and the entire world.

* the list is neither contractual nor exhaustive

The concept of the installation Itineracy emerged from a series of reflections concerning the historical relationship between the railway systems and the notions of simultaneity and universality as well as the implications of these notions nowadays.
The concept of “Universal Time” is a recent one. Before the nineteenth century, when a trip from one country to another took days, and from one continent to another, months, there was little need to coordinate the time between different places. The introduction of standard time, in the early nineteenth century, was closely related to the development of the railway system. Just as the standardisation of time begets the idea of synchronisation, the establishment of a universal time begets that of simultaneity.
Two hundred years later, we assume blindly that the entire globe is permanently living a singular moment, a universal present. What is more, we know that in economical as much as in ecological terms we are tied to people situated in distant everyday realities and landscapes. This condition is visually addressed by Itineracy.
Since our link to distant people is far from a simple given, particular attention is conferred in the filming process to the subject of borders, in terms of human, physical and political geography. Subsequently, even if those borders remain present in the captured landscapes, they are metaphorically abolished by the installation structure, where new continuities and contiguities emerge constantly.
The screens being designed to suggest windows might affect the interpretation of Itineracy, given the paradoxical nature of windows themselves as closed openings. Following this logic, this installation can be seen as a transparent opening which protects viewers from the outside world as much as it projects them into it.
This piece is deliberately set to be multi-layered. Open to the public, it intends to raise questions rather than to give answers. Hopefully it will encourage unexpected interpretations. Ideally it shall be captivating enough that viewers will ‘loose their train of thought’ or even be tempted to miss their actual train.

This installation is related to western and eastern landscape traditions: panoramas and rolled screens. Panoramic monumental imagery reached its peak during the nineteenth century, when commercial panoramas were a popular entertainment industry in several European and North American cities. Special buildings were constructed to hold enormous circular paintings that, with their heightened illusion, attracted the crowds. Less static, traditional Chinese rolled screens entail both a manual and visual act of unrolling. Amongst other subjects, descriptive and narrative landscapes where remarkably executed for centuries in that type of scroll.
Itineracy can be partially understood as an unrolled panorama in motion. Comparably to panorama, it proposes a partial immersion. Comparably to a scroll, it constitutes a device to record space. Composition in Itineracy acquires an additional aspect, that of time, which becomes as a result intrinsically tied to the editing process. Analogously, the editing happens to be in every moment transversal, aware of the spatial dimension.
The challenge of representing a new type of landscape, a ‘universal and simultaneous’ one, confronts us to supplementary questions. Where to and where from? or even, Why moving from here to there?-when one is already everywhere. As a limited answer, Itineracy, unlike standard films, does not have a beginning or an end. The final editing is generative, explicitly a video data base permanently accessed and displaying the film according to an underlying program. In order to control the result to some extent but still give a chance to the unattended, this program combines the pre-recorded sequences in a partially ordered and partially random manner. This configuration confers to Itineracy the possibility of permanent mutation and change.

check out tania’s website here