LEAD Chat Transcript: Wild Nature and Digital Life
with Dene Grigar and Tara Rodgers
Click here to download pdf version.
Also available in Portuguese.

View Dene Grigar’s essay: "The Emergent and Generative in Nature, the Digital and Art"
(LEA Vol 14 No 07 - 08 2006)

and Tara Rodger’s essay: “Butterfly Effects: Synthesis, Emergence and Transduction”
(LEA Vol 14 No 07 - 08 2006)

The "Leonardo Electronic Almanac Discussion" (LEAD) accompanies selected LEA Special Issues. LEAD has two components a live chat session with LEA authors and artists and a moderated discussion list for readers to engage with the special issue authors.

The following is the unedited transcript from Wednesday’s (10 January 2007) chat session with Dr Dene Grigar, Director of the Digital Technology and Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver and Canada-US scholar Tara Rodgers, discussing their approaches to the binary opposition that rises from the Wild/Nature pair, on the context of their work as researchers / artists, as part of the online discussion around Wild Nature and Digital Life special issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac. <Marcus Bastos & Ryan Griffis>

<begin transcript>
Marcus Bastos: Hi everyone and thanks for either coming or returning. Thanks, sepcially, for Dene Grigar and Tara Rodgers our guests for today, continuing the series of discussions on the Wild Nature and the Digital Life issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, which is being moderated by me and Ryan Griffis. A nice conversation for all, I´ll start with an opening question I prepared for Dene.
 
MB: Dene, on your editorial to the "generative and emergent" session of the current LEA´s issue you wrote the following: "We end this introduction by pointing out that the title of our special issue begs the question, why is it important to consider wild nature and digital life? As seen in these essays and works, doing so provides not only new ways of thinking about  our physical environment and the systems that shape and emanate from it or new ways to create and envision art but also new  insights beyond those entailing what it means to be human". The overlapping of physical and digital, among other things, problematize the existence of clear borders or, at least, defy traditional categorizations of "natural" and "artificial". Given that, could you elaborate a bit on the implications of separating/aproximating "digital life" by the particle "AND" - which puts them in dichotomic opposition. Wouldn´t it be more adequate to go beyond such oppositions?

Dene Grigar: Yes, I actually prepared something exactly on that topic but cannot cut and paste. . . so please excuse my typos. I am interested in the notion of the "liminal"... ambiguity especially in the space between human and machine. I should also say that I do not read the "and" as binary in our title, but the "and" of the Greek mev de — both/and. The idea that wild nature and the digital life can be viewed together and separately providing interesting places of division and ingtersection. As I mentioned to Marcus last week, it allows us to step back and look at... not the distinctions between humanity and technology... but rather at the lminal spaces between... nature and humanity, mediated as they are by computer technology.

MB: I think Tara´s article point to this "interweaving" (or "liminarity"?) , when she explains that one of her tasks in the monarch project is "to locate points of rupture in the typical, heteronormative narrative of the natural". Any thoughts on that Tara?

Tara Rodgers: Yes - I agree with Dene's point about liminality - similar to how I reference Adrian Mackenzie's notion of 'transductions,' which I think is a productive way of conceiving wild nature and digital life as a flow of engagement or interplay between divergent realities which are mutually constitutive... and of course 'transductions' on a technical level operates throughout work on sound.

DG: You mention Mackenzie... I was thinking of David Chaannell. "The Vital Machine".

TR: Can you say more? I am not familiar.

DG: Oh. the book is about 15 years old or so now but it looks at the way humans have made sense of their place in the cosmos. And of course I think of Aristotle and way he separates humans and animals... the idea of categorizing, making fine distinctions rather than looking at connetcions  among types. That philosophical views has shaped us tremendously, hasn't it

MB: For sure. And this reminds me of a quote I heard when I was doing my PhD, unfortunately I could not track down the source... "If it is the nature of man to build artifice, then it is not possible to separate artificial and natural"

DG: either/or instead of both/and. What I think of Tara's work is that it addresses the connections wonderfully.

TR: Thanks Dene - I was inspired also by Donna Haraway's notion of "liveliness" ...  that "life itself" has been fetishized in scientific practice as a containable object of study...

DG: Oh yes, the hybridity. The notion of hybrid is interesting, isnt' it? To the point that it becomes mutant. Hence the pieces in the Gallery. The way we think of the both/and as even monstrous... a perspective the works interrogate  through their eerie b eauty.

Ryan Griffis: thinking of Haraway, Tara, I recently read a paper she delivered at UC Irvine as part of a conference called Lively Capital...

TR: Sounds interesting...

RG: she discussed the growing commodification of pet-human relationships using her own relationship with her dog as an example. The discourse surrounding the human-nonhuman and the "politics of nature" (to go to Latour) seems really crucial at the moment.

TR: Yes - a lot of my interest in working with synthesized sound comes out of  a politicized approach to thinking about sound (all the politics that sounds/technologies  contain)

Sue Thomas: Ryan why do you think they are so relevant at this moment rather than at any other moment ?

RG: Latour talks about the problematics of Science (as opposed to sciences) that go to Nature as a way of avoiding political decision making.... perhaps the currency is grounded in the growing awareness of potentially catastrophic environmental situations among other things?

ST: I am just wondering whether that tension is something that has always existed, just that conditions which produce it change anyway that's going off the point a bit, sorry!

RG: good point though

TR: And completely relevant to digital art making because, especially in electronic music culture, there has been a fetishization of new technologies often without regard to, say, environmental implications of planned obsolesence/technological waste — which makes it all the more interesting that there seems to be this sort of 'natural/wild turn' happening, with so many artists addressing themes of 'nature' now.

RG: Tara, can you cite some other examples of work being done in sound that take on political implications?

TR: You may want to check out a section I recently edited in LMJ 16 (the new 2006 issue) called 'sound and the social organization of space'

MB: is there a url for that?

TR: http://leonardo.info/lmj/lmj16.html

RG: I am a fan of Ultra-Red in LA who i think uses sound to explicity political ends...

MB: Tara, you mentionend in your article a shift form visual to other forms of representation, could you talk a little bit about it?

TR: I think I was referring to scientists using data sonification techniques to facilitate different interpretations than what visual representations provide.  One artist who has done a lot of work in this area, in collaboration with scientists, is Andrea Polli (http://www.andreapolli.com/)

RG: yes - also a fan of Andrea's!

TR: Great!

TR: Cynthia, you asked a question earlier about perceiving sound and video differently. Could you repeat what that was?

MB: I have it here from the log...

Cynthia Rubin: I have a question about the difference in pacing between sound and visual, music and art.  We tend to take them in at different rates - a held note is not the same as a still picture.. Tara, and others -- how do you approach this differnce in perception?  

TR: I resisted working with video for a long time because I like the idea of perceiving sound on its own terms and then I struggled with various ways of combining sound and image and finally settled with making pieces where the video is a representation of the audio signal.  Initially I turned to video because I was required to take a course :)

CR: What made you turn to video?

MB: Isn´t video “musical”, in that rhythm very important for its construction (and the visual element is not as strong as, say, in film or photography?)

CR: Rhythm is important in still images as well - how the image is read- the pacing of how details unfold

TR: Absolutely, you can read visuals according to musical terms and vice versa

MB: Sure. But this is more obvious when you take Kandinski, for example, since representation is not an issue. It is not so obvious in figurative images, for example

CR: Marcus - I think that this is obvious in figurative examples - it is just that we are socialized to read the figure first

MB: good point.

CR: So my question had to do with taking structures from Nature, and then what happens if structures and rhythms are applied in the same way fo visuals and to sound .. the pacing may stem from the same source, but the results will be very different

TR: True, although wouldn't it depend on how the mapping decisions were made? Though perhaps your initial point is that there is quite a difference in the speed of unfolding, i.e., 30 fps vs 44.1K.

CR: And to take this further - one of the things that struck me when I attended part of the "Ear to the Earth" festival in NYC this Fall is that now with real world recording composers face the same representation issues (going fast here - I was referring to socialization of perception). So - are composers who work with real world sounds caught in some of the issues of pacing - where they intend one reading but the audience responds differently unless they have a musical background?

TR: I wonder which composers you're thinking of?

CR: They are listed here: http://www.eartotheearth.org/artists

RG: I think this brings up a good question... what role do specialized languages play in the representation of data in sound, i.e., what are the historical knowledges necessary to participate? (of course, the question is not exclusive to sound, but for our discussion...)

CR: good question - my class has been looking at "Design Science" - Arthur Loeb (RISD has his papers and collection) and Bucky Fuller... knowing this background informs simple design exercices and how we even look at cultural motifs.

TR: I think a lot of data-driven works (my own included) demand more wall text perhaps than acoustic ecology pieces which might engage the listener more immediately by evoking a sense of place. Though I also try to create works that are sonically compelling and can be hopefully enjoyed without explanation.

CR: Can the sense of place be more abstract (as it seems to be in your work)?

TR: Certainly - but there is a difference between the sound of sonified latititude/longitude coordinates and i.e.,the sound of the birds on Annea Lockwood's recordings of the Hudson River (which remind me of where I grew up). The sense of perhaps computer memory vs. our own memories

CR: How does computer memory relate to cultural memory? Is there a parallel in codification? imposition/distillation of structure?

TR: Good question... I like to think there are parallels in storage but also in selective access and data dropout... both are lossy mediums.

CR: exactly - and lossy can be a good thing!

TR: Or dangerous!

CR: Yes! It can also be boring - important to keep complexity of relationships to engage/offer new insights.

RG: Thanks for joining and offering some great comments/questions Cynthia! Well, thanks for the conversation Tara, and pointers to more info/work.
<end transcript>

Author Biographies
Dene Grigar is a media artist-scholar and Director of the Digital Technology and Culture program as Washington State University Vancouver. Her books include "New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways in and Around Electronic Environments" (with John Barber) and "Defiance and Decorum: Women, Public Rhetoric, and Activism" (with Laura Gray and Katherine Robinson); media art works include “Fallow Field: A Story in Two Parts” and “The Jungfrau Tapes: A Conversation with Diana Slattery about The Glide Project,” both of which appeared in Iowa Review Web in October 2004, and "When Ghosts Will Die" (with Canadian multimedia artist Steve Gibson), a piece that experiments with motion tracking technology to produce narrative. The video of the piece has been named Finalist in the Drunken Boat Panliterary Award Competition and has been on exhibit at Art Tech Media 06 in Spain. Her most recent work is the "MINDful Play Environment", a live, interactive game environment she is developing (with Gibson) for the Oregon Museum or Science and Industry. She is also Associate Editor of Leonardo Reviews and International Editor for Computers and Composition.

Tara Rodgers is a Canada-U.S. Fulbright scholar in the Communication Studies PhD program at McGill University. She has an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College, and recently taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has exhibited sound and video art in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, and released recordings (as Analog Tara) on compilations including Source Records/Germany and the Le Tigre Remix. Her book, Pink Noises: Women On Electronic Music and Sound, is under contract with Duke Unversity Press.
More info: http://www.safety-valve.org

Citation reference for this Leonardo Electronic Almanac Discussion Chat Transcript

MLA Style
Grigar, Dene and Rodgers, Tara. “Dene Grigar and Tara Rodgers: LEAD - Wild Nature and Digital Life Chat Transcripts” “Unyazi” Special Issue, Leonardo Electronic Almanac Vol. 15, No. 1 - 2 (2007). 1 Jan. 2007 <http://leoalmanac.org/resources/lead/digiwild/dgrigartrodgers.asp>.

APA Style
Grigar, D and Rodgers, T. (Jan. 2007) “Dene Grigar and Tara Rodgers: LEAD - Wild Nature and Digital Life Chat Transcripts,” “Unyazi” Special Issue, Leonardo Electronic Almanac Vol 15, No. 1 - 2 (2007). Retrieved 1 Jan. 2007 from <http://leoalmanac.org/resources/lead/digiwild/dgrigartrodgers.asp>.