March 13th 2010
6:30PM

Olympia Film Society
206 5th Ave. SE
Olympia WA

Artist James Coupe’s controversial work with ‘surveillance cinema’ uses computer vision software to extract demographic and behavioral information from video footage. The footage is then automatically reorganized and recontextualized into narratives, often based upon classic film scripts. At Olympia Film Society, Coupe will discuss his work and screen several of his recent short films, alongside extracts from cinematic ‘templates’ that he has used, such as Antonioni’s Blow-Up.

The lecture is part of Artist Trust’s Meet the Artist program, an integral component of the annual Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship. Meet the Artist events bridge our artistic community with the diverse communities in Washington State, increasing awareness about the vital roles art and artists play in our culture. Find out more at www.artisttrust.org

This is a site-specific artwork that auto-generates narrative films based upon data collected from Facebook users. Using a combination of status updates, YouTube uploads and video portraits — each one a form of surveillance — the work explores the relationship between exhibitonism and voyeurism. Facebook is a new kind of social space: one that gives us an opportunity to share personal information about ourselves with people all over the world. Does this mean that people know us better? Or does it simply allow us to have more control over how we present the person we want to be?

This is the first art project to be made ‘inside’ Facebook, and takes advantage of the controversial privacy settings available to Facebook developers. It also uses story detection software designed to discover narrative in large volumes of blog entries (developed at USC by Reid Swanson). YouTube, as a large, self-tagged database of human activities, is an ideal source of contextual data to accompany the Facebook narratives. The project runs as a Facebook application: all people who join the application will be participating in the art work. Data from their profile — age, gender and status updates — will be analyzed for narrative content, and potentially used to generate a short film. In exchange, each video that is generated is posted to participants’ Facebook pages, locating their own individual ’story’ within a much larger set of human concerns.

This artwork has been commissioned by Folly for the Abandon Normal Devices Festival of New Cinema and Digital Culture. The festival runs from 15 March - 10 April 2010. During this period, one film will be generated each day. After the festival, the artwork will be permanently hosted on Folly’s website and one film will be generated each week. Above is a sample video generated by the system.

YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/ihopetounderstand

Facebook Application: http://apps.facebook.com/i-hope-to-understand/

Project Overview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QrnGkbZZk0

January 25, 2010

YOU’RE BEING WATCHED! LAW SCHOOL HOSTS SURVEILLANCE SUITE DISCUSSION

The Technology Law Society at the University of Washington School of Law will host a panel discussion focused on surveillance art (the use of technology to record human behavior that provides commentary on the process of surveillance) and rights of the artist and public on Thursday, January 28 from 12:30 - 1:20 p.m. in William H. Gates Hall Room 127.

The discussion will feature Dr. James Coupe, an artist and Assistant Professor at the UW Department of Digital Art and Experimental Media. Other panelists include Melyn Simburg of Simburg, Ketter, Sheppard & Purdy; Brian Alseth, Technology & Liberty Director, ACLU of Washington; and Peter Winn, Assistant U.S. Attorney.

The event is co-sponsored by Advocates for the Arts; the UW Law, Technology & Arts Group; and the law school’s ACLU Chapter.

The Technology Law Society is a law student group that works to bring the technology related legal resources of both the law school and surrounding community to the student body. The topics covered under technology are broad, including biotechnology, privacy, public interest, e-commerce and intellectual property. Sponsored events have included how to choose technology related classes, technology law reading groups and finding a job in the technology field.

“… turning traditional methods of filmmaking upside down, Coupe takes an algorithmic approach to cinema and, in doing so, transforms reality into narrative.”[1]

Surveillance Suite is a series of video installations that use a network of video cameras running computer vision algorithms to “profile” people according to their age, gender, race, facial expressions and spatial locations. People are cast into short narrative films based upon who they are and what they do, in the process exploring our paradoxical relationship with surveillance and exhibitionism.

The project received a 2009 Creative Capital award, with Part One built during a residency at Lanternhouse (Ulverston, UK) and Folly (Lancaster, UK). Whereas normally films are made by writing a script, and then shooting footage to match the script, in Surveillance Suite this process is reversed. Stories are automatically constructed from whatever video footage the installation has available. New footage is shot each day, and as a result the stories mutate, with new characters, locations and plot lines revealing themselves.

The Surveillance Suite films are automatically generated each day, via an array of custom-built computer software. All available video footage is analyzed using computer vision software that can detect people and profile them according to age, gender, race, facial expression and location. This operates as an autonomous “casting” system that seeks out narrative possibilities from random video footage. Working with scriptwriter Kate Pullinger loose storylines were fed into the software so that it could be organized according to simple artificial intelligence rules. The result is a series of films that reorganize Ulverston and its inhabitants, reimagining peoples’ everyday lives as interlocking narratives.

VIDEOS:

Lanternhouse and Folly are pleased to present a series of video works-in-progress by artist in residence James Coupe. The videos are early experiments for a project titled Surveillance Suite, which is being developed over the next two years. The work is exhibited at Lanternhouse, Ulverston from September 9 - 19, 2009.

On Display
Whereas normally films are made by writing a script, and then shooting footage to match the script, in Surveillance Suite this process is reversed. Stories are automatically constructed from whatever video footage the installation has available. New footage is shot each day, and as a result the stories mutate, with new characters, locations and plot lines revealing themselves. The Surveillance Suite films are automatically generated each day, via an array of custom-built computer software. All available video footage is analyzed using computer vision software that can detect people and profile them according to age, gender, race, facial expression and location. This operates as an autonomous “casting” system that seeks out narrative possibilities from random video footage. Working with scriptwriters Kate Pullinger, Robin Vaughan-Williams and Lilian Ryan, loose storylines have been fed into the software so that it can be organized according to some simple artificial intelligence rules. The result is a series of films that reorganize Ulverston and its inhabitants, reimagining peoples’ everyday lives as interlocking narratives.

Residency
Since July, James has been in residence at Lanternhouse, building the software required for this project, and generating test films from footage shot around the town. He has also worked with a number of local writers, discussing the kind of non-linear narrative structures that would best fit Surveillance Suite. The work presented at Lanternhouse is the outcome of these residency activities.

Future Directions
Once completed, Surveillance Suite will be exhibited at a number of museums, galleries and public spaces throughout America and the UK. The intention is to eventually use robotic cameras and automate the entire story-making process. As people enter the museum, gallery or public site where the work is exhibited, the cameras will profile them, cast them into narratives, and then display the resulting films on a series of monitors or displays. The entire project will work in real-time, permitting the installation to appropriate exhibition visitors as characters in plots that may have nothing to do with who they really are.

Now it seems to me that everything that surrounds me is a part of me, that I have managed to become the whole, finally…
- Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979)

From July 4th - September 26th, James Coupe will be artist-in-residence at Lanternhouse International in Ulverston, UK. The residency is co-hosted by Folly.

Over the course of the residency, he will produce a series of algorithmically generated films, shot on location around Ulverston. The films will be based upon Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, a self-referential novel consisting of ten chapters from ten different novels, all of varying style, genre and subject matter. All overlap slightly, suggesting a single meta-narrative, and all are interrupted at strategic points. What is absent or missing becomes a sub-plot all of its own: narrative is composed as much by what is not there as by what is.

Recorded footage will be run through a face recognition algorithm that identifies people’s age, gender, race, facial expression and movement patterns. Using a series of script rules derived from the novel and produced in collaboration with a number of scriptwriters, the everyday activities of the town will be transformed into narrative films. The auto-generated results will be compiled as video montages and exhibited in the Lanternhouse gallery.

“Mechatronic Art: Beyond Craft-Fetishism”
James Coupe

In 1968, art historian Jack Burnham’s seminal essay “Systems Esthetics” was published in Artforum. He attempted to investigate the emergence of art practices that seemed to resist available critical analysis, referring to them as “unobjects”. He identified a shift in art practice from objects to systems, and introduced important criteria for defining “systems art” – work that was open, responsive and interactive with its environment and audience was distinguished from plinth-based sculpture; work that was spread across multiple sites, that used telecommunication hardware and thereby incorporated ‘invisible’ properties was to be seen as a totality, not simply in terms of what could be seen:

Here, change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done.

This paper examines ‘mechatronic’ art, arguing that Burnham’s observations referred to a new paradigm for art that is only now capable of being fully realized. Interestingly, Burnham’s theories emerged out of sculptural concerns, which are often anathema to many people’s understanding of digital art: Burnham was not referring to screen-based, graphically oriented work, he was talking about physical experiences, embodied and situated in the real world.

In mechatronic art this is explored to the fullest extent, via a dynamic synergy of art, computing and engineering. Artists working within this paradigm often develop custom-built hardware and electronics to control hybrid telematic environments, constructing components that are designed with built-in logical goals. Traditionally in digital art, these kind of algorithmic systems have been implemented using just software, but increasingly artists are working with combinations of hardware and software, essentially allowing each to learn from the other. The knowledge economy involved in building such projects requires artists to work within laboratory environments, sometimes developing new tools and technical solutions that make genuine contributions to allied scientific fields. This multidisciplinary approach has made mechatronic technologies – such as microcontrollers, sensors and actuators – highly accessible, as well as allowing the field to expand quickly from both a conceptual and a technical point of view. Artists operating within this paradigm are finding opportunities to make work that operates and responds to the real world, rather than work that is bound by conventional art structures and materials. As Burnham commented:

Craft-fetishism remains the basis of modern formalism. Instead the significant artist strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of his society. Gradually this strategy transforms artistic and technological decision-making into a single activity.

Mechatronic art is not simply about making work that is ‘interactive’, ‘interdisciplinary’, ‘responsive’, ‘kinetic’, ‘mechanical’, etc. There is also an important aesthetic and theoretical rigor to be taken into consideration. In this paper I will argue that in establishing a critical vocabulary for mechatronic art, it is important for the work to be generative. Simply combining methods, processes and materials from different disciplines is not sufficient: the combination must generate something new that is a necessary function of the art system. Such work involves a vast array of experiments with materials, audience, site, time and space, characterizing a new genre of art that synthesizes knowledge gained from diverse creative fields such as dance, music and literature.

Creative Capital Announces 2009 Artists

January 8, 2009

NEW YORK, NY (January 8, 2009) –Creative Capital, the national organization that supports individual artists, announces the recipients of its 2009 grants. Initial awards of $10,000 have been made to 41 projects in emerging fields, innovative literature and performing arts. These projects represent 61 artists across the country working individually and in collaboration. Each project becomes eligible for additional funds of as much as $50,000 over the course of the organization’s multi-year commitment.

Artists also participate in Creative Capital’s distinctive Artist Services Program valued at $25,000 per artist. This program offers artists skills-building assistance in areas such as fundraising, networking, marketing, and strategic planning with the goal of advancing both their projects and their careers. So far Creative Capital has devoted more than $7 million to the Artists Services Program and has served more than 400 artists in its ten-year history.

The panelists who chose the 16 emerging fields projects were Sarah Cook (CRUMB/Eyebeam, New York, NY); Steve Dietz (ZERO1, San Jose, CA); Susan Kennard (Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada); Gunalan Nadarajan (Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD); Paul Vanouse (Creative Capital artist, Buffalo, NY); and emerging fields lead program consultant Pamela Winfrey (The Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA).

The panelists who chose the six innovative literature projects were Jeffrey Renard Allen (Creative Capital artist, New York, NY); lead program consultant for innovative literature Ethan Nosowsky (Graywolf Press, New York, NY); Robert Polito (New School, New York, NY); Matthew Stadler (Clear Cut Press, Portland, OR); Suzanna Tamminen (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT); and Diane Williams (NOON, New York, NY).

The panelists who chose the 19 performing arts projects were Tamara Alvarado (1stACT Silicon Valley, San Jose, CA); Philip Bither (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN); Grisha Coleman (Creative Capital artist, Tempe, AZ); lead program consultant for performing arts Boo Froebel (Lincoln Center Festival, New York, NY); George Lugg (REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA); and Ruth Waalkes (Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD).

Creative Capital’s director of grants and services, Sean Elwood, served on all three panels, which were moderated by Ruby Lerner, president of Creative Capital.

Selected from 2,068 applications, the funded projects come from across the country. Creative Capital artists now represent 29 states in total. About the new class of grantees, Lerner said, “The breadth of ideas and issues that these projects address confirms that American artists are rising above global uncertainty and unsettlement, propelled by the spirit of invention. These artists are each reinventing the world they live in, and as their projects come to life I think we can expect their influence to ripple outward.”

Foundation Update
With these awards, Creative Capital’s roster of artist projects grows to 324. In 2008 the foundation issued 41 grants in film/video and visual arts. Many of those grantees attended Creative Capital’s Artist Retreat in July 2008, the kickoff event of the Artist Services Program. Through the grant program and its Professional Development Program (a series of public workshops for artists held nationwide), Creative Capital has now served more than 2,500 artists.

About Creative Capital
Ten years ago, Creative Capital embarked on a mission to reinvent the existing model of arts philanthropy, to construct a new paradigm, and to fulfill the specific needs of the country’s most innovative artists. Today, it is the premier national artist support organization, committed to the principle that time and advisory services are as crucial to artistic success as funding. Over the lives of its funded projects, Creative Capital provides artists with a flexible program of multi-faceted, sequential support and partners with them to determine how those targeted funds and services can best work in concert to progress towards the grantees’ own goals. Since its founding in 1999, the organization has committed more than $14 million in financial support and services to 324 projects representing 411 artists. A complete list of grantees, profiles of funded projects, and up-to-date grant cycle information can be found online at the foundation’s website at www.creative-capital.org.

Sustaining support for Creative Capital is currently provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The TOBY Fund, The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, The Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, and more than 100 other foundations and individuals.

CREATIVE CAPITAL 2009 ARTISTS

Emerging Fields 2009

Matthew Coolidge, Center for Land Use Interpretation (Culver City, CA) New Genres
American Land Museum

Cesar Cornejo (Tampa, FL) Architecture
Puno Museum of Contemporary Art

James Coupe (Seattle, WA) Digital Arts
Surveillance Suite

Beatriz da Costa (Long Beach, CA) Digital Arts
Stories of the Rodent

eteam (Queens, NY) Interdisciplinary
Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger
Open Source Grabeland

Futurefarmers (San Francisco, CA) Interdisciplinary
Local Landscape Campus (L.L.C.)

Catherine Herdlick (San Francisco, CA) Gaming
The Cowgirl Way Society

Shih Chieh Huang (New York, NY) Interdisciplinary
EX-SE-10

Lisa Jevbratt (Santa Barbara, CA) Interdisciplinary
Zoomorph

Jae Rhim Lee (Cambridge, MA) Interdisciplinary
N=0=Infinity, Infinity Mushroom

neuroTransmitter (Queens, NY) Interdisciplinary
Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere
Empire MHz

Richard Pell (Pittsburgh, PA) Interdisciplinary
Institute for Post Natural Studies

Stephanie Rothenberg (Buffalo, NY) New Genres
Best Practices

Mark Shepard (Brooklyn, NY) New Genres
Sentient City Survival Kit

Karolina Sobecka (Brooklyn, NY) Design
Amateur Human

Sam Van Aken (Portland, ME) New Genres
I Am Here Today. . .

Innovative Literature 2009

Paul Beatty (New York, NY) Fiction
Depresso

Kenny Fries (Toronto, ON, Canada) Nonfiction
Genkan: Entries into Japan

Ben Marcus (New York, NY) Fiction
Children, Cover Your Eyes!

Bernadette Mayer (East Nassau, NY) Poetry
The Faces That Launched A Thousand Ships

Rebecca Solnit (San Francisco, CA) Nonfiction
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas

Deb Olin Unferth (Lawrence, KS) Fiction
Natural Citizens

Performing Arts 2009

Byron Au Yong (Seattle, WA) and Aaron Jafferis (New Haven, CT) Opera
Stuck Elevator: The Super-Heroic Stationary Journey of Mind Kuang Chen

Victor D. Cartagena, Roberto Gutierrez Varea, Violeta Luna, David Molina and Antigone Trimis (San Francisco, CA) Performance Art
BORDER TRIP / TRIP de la frontera

Nora Chipaumire (Brooklyn, NY) Interdisciplinary
The Thomas Mapfumo Project, or lions will roar, swans will fly, angels will wrestle heaven, rains will break: gukurahundi

Steve Cuiffo, (New York, NY) Trey Lyford (New York, NY) and Geoffrey Sobelle (Philadelphia, PA)
Theater Next Stop: Amazingland

Lisa D’amour (Brooklyn, NY) and Katie Pearl (Austin, TX) Interdisciplinary
How To Build A Forest

Chris M. Green (Brooklyn, NY) Interdisciplinary
Ultra-Local Sublime

Miguel Gutierrez (Brooklyn, NY) Dance
Misinterpreted

Robert Farid Karimi (Minneapolis, MN) Spoken Word
The Cooking Show con Karimi y Comrades: Diabetes of Democracy

Zoe Keating and Jeffrey Rusch (Camp Meeker, CA) Experimental Music Performance
The Musician’s Mind’s Eye: A Synaesthetic Experience of ‘One Cello x 16’

Heidi Latsky Dance (New York, NY) Dance
GIMP

Young Jean Lee (Brooklyn, NY) Theater
King Lear

Los Angeles Poverty Department (Los Angeles, CA) Interdisciplinary
Henriette Broüwers, Kevin Michael Key, John Malpede and Pamela Miller-Macias
History of Incarceration

Taylor Mac (New York, NY) Theater
The Lily’s Revenge

Barak Marshall (Los Angeles, CA), Tamir Muskat (Tel Aviv, Israel) and Margalit Oved (Los Angeles, CA) Experimental Music Performance
Symphony of Tin Cans

David Neumann and Richard Sylvarnes (Brooklyn, NY) Interdisciplinary
OH NO NATURE (or, Blaming on his Boots the Fault of his Feet)

Ken Nintzel (New York, NY) Interdisciplinary
You Are Here

Tere O’Connor (New York, NY) Dance
Untitled

Tommy Smith and Reggie Watts (Brooklyn, NY) Interdisciplinary
Reggie Watts: Transition

Deke Weaver (Champaign, IL) Interdisciplinary
The Unreliable Bestiary

Artist Trust supported 21 artists with the 2008 Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowships. Each recipient will receive an unrestricted cash award of $7,500. The award recognizes an artist’s creative excellence and accomplishment, professional achievement and continuing dedication to their artistic discipline. In 2008, the Fellowship Program received a total of 450 applications from artists working in Emerging & Cross Disciplinary, Traditional & Folk, Performing and Visual Arts.

Emerging & Cross Disciplinary Arts

*James Coupe (Seattle) utilizes his background in sculpture and new media to construct art installations that explore systems, agency and control: works he terms “self-organizing discovery systems”. In his latest project, (re)collector, a network of intelligent surveillance cameras were positioned throughout Cambridge, England and programmed to recognize and capture “cinematic moments”. Each day, the footage was autonomously synthesized into complete film narratives and projected back into the city center, algorithmically re-staging the fragmented experience of urban life. James is a Professor of Digital Art and Experimental Media at the University of Washington.

Gary Hill, Manu Luksch, and James Coupe

September 12 - October 31, 2008
911 Media Arts Center
402 9th Ave N. Seattle, WA 98109
(re)collector
2008
James Coupe

“It’ll never be known how this has to be told…”

In Julio Cortazar’s short story ‘Las Babas del Diablo’, a photographer sees a woman talking to a boy in a park and decides to take their picture. On returning to his studio to develop the image, he notices additional elements in the scene: in particular a man in a parked car, who seems to know the woman. Cortazar’s story explores the blurred distinction between reality and its image, showing us that both are always simply a perception of events.

In the first version of (re)collector, commissioned as a public art work in Cambridge, England, ten cameras were installed throughout the city center, programmed to recognize and record public behaviors that corresponded to scenes from ‘Blow Up!’, Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic 1966 interpretation of Cortazar’s story. At the end of each of the four days that the project was exhibited, the footage captured by the cameras was automatically reorganized into a narrative based upon corresponding lines from ‘Las Babas del Diablo’, and projected into the city center. As with Antonioni’s movie, each of the films generated by the (re)collector system is a version of Cortazar’s story: not simply an adaptation, rather an infinite re-staging that attempts to piece together the fragmented experience of everyday life in the city.

The gallery version of (re)collector, shown for the first time at 911 Media Arts Center, presents each of the four days in a four channel video installation. With each loop, a new version of the day’s events is generated: some scenes remain, some are replaced. An underlying story persists, yet its precise interpretation remains elusive. In (re)collector, the authorial relationship between subject and object constantly shifts, implicating us as interpreters of what we see, asking who is really driving the narrative.

Manu Luksch is co-founder of ambientTV.NET, a UK-based art collective with a history of conceiving works that integrate curatorial and collaborative aspects, research, community involvement, and hybrid media installations. Her film project Faceless is a science fiction fairy tale compiled from surveillance video footage recovered under the UK’s Data Protection Act.

James Coupe is an artist and Assistant Professor at the University of Washington’s Center for Digital Art and Experimental Media (DXARTS). His 4-channel video piece (re)collector is an adaptation of his project in Cambridge, England in April 2007, involving a city-wide network of surveillance cameras programmed to extract cinematic moments from everyday life matching the Antonioni film Blow Up, and a computer algorithm that recombines the footage into a narrative. Each channel shows a unique ‘possible’ film generated from a specific day: over time the story mutates, becoming retold each day, and altering the context of people’s actions.

This exhibition is curated by Misha Neininger.