WRITING REFLECTION

WRITING
SUBJECT: A COMPENDIUM OF WORDS FOR MY CRITICAL REFLECTION
JULY 2006

As part of my critical reflection I have decided to make a compendium of words, terms, phrases, quotes, people and places related to my project.

Here is the list so far:

A

Airbrush: an atomizer that uses compressed air to spray liquid, generally paint, onto a surface. (I use airbrushes connected by tubes to an air compressor as aroma dispensers in The Emotion Organ.)

Afterimage: impression of a vivid sensation that stays a while after the stimulus has stopped.

Anasthesia: no sensations - partial or total loss of memory.

Anosmia: a condition where the sense of smell is depleated or lost completely.

Artefact:
- something made by humans, such as a tool, weapon or instrument,
- something viewed as a product of human conception (that epitimizes something),
- something that is not usually visible but the result of a process (such as an xray or echosounder image).

Artificial:
- produced by humans rather than nature,
- an imitation of something natural (an artificial smile).

Arts Council Norway: National funding body for the arts in Norway. Arts Council Norway has funded the development of The Emotion Organ.

Badwater: Salt lake/playa in Death Valley. The lowest point in North America, at 282 feet (86 m) below sea level. Generally, the lower the altitude of a place, the higher the temperatures tend to be. (A visit to Badwater became a source of inspiration for the installation In Death Valley, everywhere we looked, gently waving stands of desert gold blossoms danced in the wind, their daisy-like faces punctuated with vibrant orange centers.)

Baroque:

Baudelaire, Charles:
Influential French poet and chronicler of modern life who displayed synaesthetic sensibilities in his 1857 sonnet Correspondances: Perfumes, sounds and colours answer each other. In addition to his frequent writings on Richard Wagner's music, Baudelaire was intrigued by sensuous experiences, especially of the body within the city, and experimented with hashish to enhance experiences of sensory fusion.

Bellows:
- a device for producing strong currents of air consisting of a flexible, valved air chamber that is contracted and expanded by pumping to force the air through a nozzle (such as the bellows of the pump organ)
- lung.

Black Knight: name given to the push-type magnet solenoids installed in The Emotion Organ.

Castel, Louis-Bertrand: jesuit priest who attempted to build an ocular harpsichord in the 18th C.

Center for Visual Music: a nonprofit film archive dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and avant-garde media. CVM is commited to preservation, curation, education, scholarship, and dissemination of the film, performances and other media of this tradition, together with related historical documentation and other material.
(From the CVM webiste)

Choreographer: someone who makes structures in which movement can occur.

Colour organ: general name given to instruments that produce colour out of sound, or abstract visual imagery treated in a similar manner to music. A proliferent idea of the early 20th C was that colour organs allowed visual art(ists) freedoms that advocates of abstraction have always attributed to music. The result of works performed on colour organs has various names: colour music, visual music, lumia, etc.

Conceive:
- get pregnant,
- mental image, devised in the mind.

Cool media: low definition information. Requires the viewers participation, eg. a comic (Marshal MacLuhan)
Creative process: "the creative process is one of establishing the conditions for the realisation of what has not been seen before, not one of thinking the thing out in advance."

Dale Air: Family-run aroma design company based in England that has supplied me with synthetic aromas for my project. Run by Frank and Linda Knight.

Death Valley: National park established on February 11, 1933 in California. Covers almost 3,000 square miles and is often described as a vast natural museum. A land of extremes. It is one of the hottest places on the surface of the Earth with summer temperatures averaging well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. At 86 m below the level of the sea, it is the driest place in North America with an average rainfall of just under 5 cm a year. It is also a land of subtle beauties where morning light creeps across the eroded landscape to strike mountainous peaks beyond, the setting sun sends lengthening shadows over the sand dunes, and myriad wildflowers colour the golden hills on a warm spring day. Anything that shall survive such harsh conditions must learn to adapt, but even so, death is constantly lurking in the shadows. During years with favorable winter rains the golden desert sunflower may extend for miles, filling the air with the sweet aroma of fragrant blossoms.

Dekker, Annet: author of Synaesthetic Performance in the Club Scene, Netherland Media Art institute, Montevideo Time Based Arts, Amsterdam.

Desert: a barren and desolate place.

Detector: something that identifies and registers a stimulus.

Drug: a chemical substance (i.e. a narcotic or hallucinogenic) that affects the central nervous system and alters behaviour and perception.

Echo sounder: renders 2d surface images of depth via ultrasonic waves.

Elicit: evoke a response from someone (in relation to one's own actions).

Emotion: very intense feeling - often involving both a physical and mental response - characterizing a state of mind. It implies an outward expression. Instinctive or intuitive rather than a logical response.

Emotional design: the ability of a designer to push the right emotional buttons with the right consumers (e.i. japanese lunch box)

Emotive:
- something capable of evoking an intense feeling or emotion,
- expressing feelings rather than an objective description.

Evoke: conjure up (bring to the conscious mind).

Exhalia: smell emitting system developed by France Telecom with Dale Air (UK) aroma design company.

Feedback: a process whereby some proportion or in general, function, of the output signal of a system is passed (fed back) to the input. Often this is done intentionally, in order to control the dynamic behavior of the system.

Feedforward:

Franssen, Martin: Associate Professor, Philosophy Section, Delft University of Technology. Author of The Ocular Harpsichord of Louis-Bertrand Castel. The Science and Aesthetics of an Eighteenth-Century Cause Célèbre. (Tractrix. Yearbook for the History of Science, Medicine, Technology and Mathematics 3, 1991.)

Frequency: rate of appearance or repetition.

Fuzzy functions: overlapping of sensory representational systems, i.e. when hearing a sound makes you feel frightened.

Gesamtkunstwerk: total work of art.

Hardware: metal products, generally tools, such as locks, cutlery, computers, printers, guns, bullets, etc.

Hallucination: an experience involving the apparent perception of something not present (can be induced by psychedelic drugs).

Hot media: high definition of information, demands the viewers attention, i.e. a movie (Marshal MacLuhan).

Huhtamo, Erkki: Finnish media scholar, curator and writer. Professor at UCLA. Works towards bringing an archaeological angle to media research.

Illusion:
- something that is likely to be wrongly perceived by the senses,
- a false belief.

Improvise: make something up as you go along.

Inter (prefix): between.

Interaction: a kind of action that occurs when two or more things/objects have a two-way effect on each other.

Interface: a point at which (or a door through which) different systems can interact.

Intermedia:
- an intervening instrument or device,
- a concept employed in the mid-sixties by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the ineffable, often confusing, inter-disciplinary activities that occur between genres that became prevalent in the 1960s. Thus, the areas such as those between drawing and poetry, or between painting and theater could be described as intermedia. With repeated occurrences, these new genres between genres could develop their own names, i.e. visual poetry or performance art.
(URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermedia).

Invent: cook up, devise, dream up, create something never seen before.

iotaCenter: The iotaCenter is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation, promotion and celebration of this art of abstraction in the moving image.
URL: http://www.iotacenter.org/

iota email list: a discussion forum maintained by the iotaCenter for discussing Visual Music and the likes.

Kinetic: of, relating to or caused by movement.

Kinaesthesia: awareness of movement and postion in parts of the body via sensory organs.

Le Flacon: A beautiful synaesthetic poem by Charles Baudelaire.

LSD: psychedelic drug.

Lumia: the art of light. A term coined by Thomas Wilfred (see Wilfred, Thomas).
(URL: http://www.lumia-wilfred.org/)

Machina Speculatrix: First autonomic robot in the world. Over fifty years ago W. Grey Walter started building three wheeled, turtle like, mobile robotic vehicles. These vehicles had a light sensor, touch sensor, propulsion motor, steering motor, and a two vacuum tube analog computer. Even with this simple design, Grey demonstrated that his turtles exhibited complex behaviors. He called his turtles Machina Speculatrix after their speculative tendency to explore their environment. (From: http://personal.pitnet.net/usr/gasperi/walter.htm)

Manifestation:
- appearance of a ghost,
- an event, action or object that clearly embodies something.

Manifesto: mission statement.

Mass Media: all means of mass communication.

Metaphor: (to transfer) a linguic device where a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.

McLuhan, Herbert Marshall: (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980). Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar, professor of English literature, literary critic, and communications theorist, who is one of the founders of the study of media ecology. (From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan)

Media: (plural of medium) vehicle or container used for communicating information.

Media archaeologist: A media archaeologist studies motifs and patterns which travel through time and then re-emerge, and attempts to find previously undiscovered connections or essential differences. - Erkki Huhtamo.

Memory:
-the ability to store data (i.e. in humans, a telephone number. Much of our data memory is left to technological artefacts these days).
- the recollection of an experience - a telephone number remains costant while the recollection of an experience may change over time.

Meridians: pathways of energy flow.

Mood organ: the name of a simulacrum contraption that features in two novels by science fiction writer Philip K Dick - Do androids dream of electric sheep, and We can build you (1977). (The Mood Organ forms part of the inspiration for inventing The Emotion Organ.)

Multi media: a contradiction in terms!

Nervous: easily agitated or distressed, highly strung.

New Media: The latest form of communications technology is usually given this name - radio, film, tv, video, www, etc. So new media is basically whatever is new at the time.

Neurology: medical science that deals with the nervous system.

Ocular harpsichord: a colour organ designed by Louis Bertrand-Castel in the 18th C.

Olfactory: of, or relating to the sense of smell.

Olfactory dating system: Artist Clara Ursitti's dating system. A database of clothes of lonely hearts looking for the perfect partner. Without any other physical representation of the people save their clothes, you had to sniff your way towards your perfect match.

Olfactory notification: a system where an aroma is used as an indicator or attention-grabber (of, say incoming email).

Organ:
- musical instrument, usually keyboard, where air is passed over ranks of reeds or through various pipes to produce a wide range of musical effects.
- medium of communication (newspaper/TV, etc)
- self-contained part of an organism that provides a specific function (heart, lungs, nose, etc)

Pitch: mental sensation of the highness or lowness of a tone. Although the perception of pitch is purely a psychological phenomenon, pitch is usually expressed by a physical correlate - frequency.

Perceive:
- to become aware of, through the senses,
- to reach an understanding.

Phantasmagoria:
- a sequence of real or imaginary dream-like images
- early 19th C name given to optical illusions created by magic lanterns of the same name.

Phenomenal: sensational, remarkable, extra-ordinary:

Physical computing: attempt to sense and control the "real" world via computers.

Piano optophonique: a colour organ invented by Daniel Vladimir Barinoff-Rossiné in the early 1920's.

Plant, Sadie: Author of "Writing on Drugs".

Playa: a large flat desolate basin, usually found in deserts, where water evaporates very quickly.

Potential: the possibility of something happening in the future.

Potentiometer: A type of sensor that measures an electromotive force by balancing it against the potential difference produced when passing a known current through a known variable resistance.

Pump (reed/parlor) organ: The reed organ, in various forms, has existed for hundreds of years. In China, the reed organ was in the form of a mouth instrument. The next advancement in the reed organ occured early in the nineteenth century, when pressure harmoniums were constructed in England and France. The reeds of these instruments sounded when air was blown over them. The first full reed organ that operated on the vacuum principle, however, is thought to be created by Alexandres of Paris around 1835. These instruments sounded when air was pulled across the reeds and a vacuum was formed. (From The Physics of the Pump Organ, Kristina Knupp. http://www.bridgewater.edu/philo/philo96/knupp.html)

Psychedelic: Psychiatrist Dr. Osmond first offered his new term, psychedelic, at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1957. He said the word meant "mind manifesting" and called it "clear, euphonious and uncontaminated by other associations." Huxley had sent Dr. Osmond a rhyme with his own word choice: "To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme." (Thymos means soul in Greek.) Rejecting that, Dr. Osmond replied: "To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic." (From Humphry Osmond, 86, Who Sought Medicinal Value in Psychedelic Drugs, Dies, by Douglas Martin, New York Times Obituaries, February 22, 2004.)

Qualia: internal and subjective part of sense perception that comes about when the senses are stimulated by phenomena.

Ready-made: made to a standard size, often in large quantities.

Receptor: something that responds to sensory stimulus.

Remember: the ability to recall a past experience.

Remote Piano:

Science fiction: A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method. Robert A. Heinlein.

Sense: a feeling that something is the case (intuitive or acquired).

Sense organ: a specialized organ that functions as a receptor, sensing stimulus from the outside world (nose, ears, eyes, etc).

Senses: faculty through which the body perceives a stimulus - from within the body or externally.

Sensitive:
- responsive to a stimulus,
- able to perceive through sense/senses,
- easily irritated (physically/emotionally) or upset.

Sensor: a device that receives or responds to a stimulus.

Sensorama: An invention by Morton Heilig (1960) described as The Revolutionary Motion Picture System that takes you into another world: 3D, wide vision, motion, colour, stereo sound, vibration, wind and aroma!
(see: http://www.telepresence.org/sensorama/images/
sensorama-3.jpg)

Simulate:
- imitate the appearance or character of something,
- pretend to have a feeling or an emotion,
- to produce a computer model of something.

Simulacrum: an image of something, a substitute for something.

Simultaneous: events that appear to occur at the same time. Snap your fingers. Hear the sound. These two events are perceived as being simultaneous, while your auditory and visual systems process information about the snap at different speeds. Recent neurological studies claim that our visual perception of an event is delyed to allow the system to collect all necessary information about an event before submitting it to perception. (See David Eagleman's website Neural Coding and the Perception of Time: Psychophysics and Computational Theory, http://nba.uth.tmc.edu/resources/faculty/members/
eagleman.htm)

Smell cannon: a japanese invention (2003-04) developed by Yasuyuki Yanagi and his colleagues at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Kyoto, Japan, A video tracking device detects noses in the appropriate range and squirts out aroma in the direction of the nose.
See:http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4834
and
http://www.mis.atr.jp/~yanagida/scent/

Smell organ: the nose.

Software: symbolic language that controls or directs hardware (see hardware).

Soundwaves: sound is produced by alternating pressures, displacing a particle or oscillating a particle in a particular medium with a certain frequency. In the pump organ, sound is produced when the medium is set into motion. The sound is generated when the vibrating reed converts an otherwise steady stream of air into a pulsating one. (The Physics of the Pump Organ, Kristina Knupp. http://www.bridgewater.edu/philo/philo96/knupp.html)

Special effects:

Stop: a part in an instrument that stops or regulates movement. (The Emotion Organ has 6 "true" stops and 2 mute rods that appear to be stops).

Strobe test:

Syn-: to bring together, to join

Synaesthesia (synesthesia): unusually joined sensations (i.e. hearing colours, feeling smells).

Synaesthetic:

(Syn)aesthetic: term used to describe a contemporary performance style.

Synaesthete: someone with "true" synaesthesia (born with the clincial condition).

Synchronised: joined in time.

Synergy: two agents or more interact to create a combined effect, greater than the sum of their separate effects.
Synthesis: fusion.

Synthetic (from greek - place together):
- not genuine emotions (eg.crocodile tears),
- to imitate a natural object (nylon instead of silk),
- fake, simulated, pseudo.

Synthesizer: an electronic musical instrument usually operated by a keyboard, producing a wide variety of sounds by generating and combining signals of different frequencies.

T

Tone:
- the general quality or character of something,
- the firmness of a tissue or organ,
- a color or shade of a color,
- the sound of a distinctive pitch, quality and duration (note).

Transmit: to pass along.

Ultrasound: acoustic frequencies above the range audible to the human ear, (approximately 20,000 hertz).

Virtual: existing in essence rather than form (i.e. imagination).

Virtuosity: technical skill, fluency or style.

Visual Music: The term was coined by art critic Roger Fry in 1912 and encompasses a set of ideas first embraced by artists seeking to link the seemingly disparate phenomena of sight and sound. The static image of previous eras needed to be reinvented in the wake of recent scientific advancements, cultural shifts, and changes in perceptions of space and time. Since then, artists have invoked this term (along with “color music” and “mobile color”) to define their efforts to integrate the senses through art. (from http://hirshhorn.si.edu/visualmusic/)

Visual Music is an art form with a primary objective of intentionally activating the mind's ability to fuse visuals and music into a "synaesthetic experience" - not synaesthesia in the clinical sense, but the experience of something more than either the music or visuals alone could deliver. This is a broad definition resulting in many "flavors" of visual music. (alternative description formulated by Ed Lantz on the Iota Center's email list, 2006).

Wet shows: 1960's hippy parties where liquids, used with the overhead projectors, formed psychedelic "liquid" projections.

Wetware: the nervous system.

Wilfred, Thomas: inventor of the Clavilux (1920's), a colour organ. He also built "lumia boxes," self-contained units that looked rather like television sets, which could play for days or months without repeating the same imagery, and founded the Art Institute of Light in New York.He claimed that: Light is the artist's sole medium of expression. He must mold it by optical means, almost as a sculptor models clay. He must add colour, and finally motion to his creation. Motion, the time dimension, demands that he must be a choreographer in space.

Woolhouse, Thomas: an English opthalmologist, sited as the person who made the first medical reference to synaesthesia in 1710.

XML smell language: a version of XML that can apparently transmit smells via mobile phones. Researchers at Huelva University in Spain claim that XML Smell can define in universal and standardised way the transmission of smell which allows the transmission of fragrances by email, by SMS to a mobile phone, or via a TV show. (From: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/
2005/01/006829.htm)