Rhythmanalysis of the Earth, the Animal, and the Machine
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Rhythmanalysis of the Earth, the Animal, and the Machine by Brian House BA, Columbia University, 2002 MSc, Chalmers University of Technology, 2006 MA, Brown University, 2016 Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Music and Multimedia at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2018 © Copyright 2018 Brian House ii Tis dissertation by Brian House is accepted in its present form by the Department of Music as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date_____________ _________________________________ Wendy Chun, Advisor Date_____________ _________________________________ Todd Winkler, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date_____________ _________________________________ Ed Osborn, Reader Date_____________ _________________________________ Rebecca Schneider, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date_____________ _________________________________ Andrew Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School iii Curriculum Vitae Brian House (b. 1979, Denver) is an artist who explores the interdependent rhythms of the body, technology, and the environment. His work has been shown by MoMA (NYC), MOCA (Los Angeles), Ars Electronica, Transmediale, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, and Rhizome, among others, and has been featured in publications including TIME, WIRED, Te New York Times, Neural, Creative Applications, Hyperallergic, Creator’s Project, and by Univision Sports. His academic writing has been published by Autonomedia, Journal of Sonic Studies, and Contemporary Music Review. Prior to his doctoral studies, House was a member of the Research & Development Lab at the New York Times. He has also led technology at the award-winning design studio Local Projects and developed interdisciplinary courses at RISD Digital+Media, Parsons Design & Technology, and at Columbia’s Spatial Information Design Lab. He has been an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam, MassMOCA, and the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab, and a fellow at the TOW Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia. House holds a BA in Computer Science from Columbia University in New York, an MSc in Art & Technology from Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden, and an MA in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University in Providence. iv Acknowledgements Tis work is the result of co-thinking and co-making with my community at Brown and at RISD. I want to express my gratitude first to my mentors: Wendy Chun, Todd Winkler, Ed Osborn, and Rebecca Schneider. John Cayley, Geoff Cox, Gertrud Koch, Lenore Manderson, Jim Moses, Neal Overstrom, and Butch Rovan have also given me their invaluable attention and support. My cohorts in MEME and MCM as well as our inter-institutional critique groups are everywhere in these pages and I am grateful to have shared these years with them. In particular, I want to thank Asha Tamirisa, Elisa Giardina-Papa, Nathan Lee, Peter Bussigel, Nadav Assor, Liat Berdugo, Ari Kalinowski, David Kim, Jane Long, Nupur Mathur, Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Tomas Pringle, Marcel Sagesser, Clement Valla, and Brett Zehner for their contributions, as well as to give a shout out to Critical Sofware Ting. Tese projects could not have happened without the support of Eyebeam, the TOW Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, Te Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory Art- Science Exchange, Vicki Myhren Gallery, Jeffery Keith, Heidi Steltzer, Marguerite Holloway, Michael Parsons, Matthew Combs, Bo-Won Keum, Will Reeves, Sophia LaCava-Bohanan, Greg Picard, Shawn Tavares, and Chira DelSesto. And my interdisciplinary studies were possible thanks to the Open Graduate Education Program at Brown. Tanks to Sue Huang, Jer Torp, and David Feinberg, collaborators and confidants essential to this work. Also to Mark Hansen, for a book, and Dave Hammond, for another. Lucia Monge has taught me what it means to make contact. What is articulated here is rooted in our collaborative life project, and it has grown only through her patience, brilliance, and bravery—thank you. Finally, in lieu of any thanks, which can only be insufficient, this dissertation is dedicated to Steve and Susan House, my first teachers, who are in all that I do. v Table of Contents Rhythmanalysis as a Minor Data Science ………………………………………… 1 Animas ……………………………………………………………………………… 13 Urban Intonation …………………………………………………………………… 33 Everything Tat Happens Will Happen Today ……………………………………… 56 vi List of Illustrations 2.1 Hiking in Gothic, Colorado ………………………………………………………… 14 2.2 Te Animas River in 2015 ………………………………………………………… 16 2.3 Kevin Cooley, Golden Prospects …………………………………………………… 17 2.4 Gov. Hickenlooper at the Animas ………………………………………………… 17 2.5 One month of USGS data “streams” from the Animas River ……………………… 19 2.6 David Tudor, Rainforest IV ………………………………………………………… 22 2.7 Bernard Leitner, Tabla Room ……………………………………………………… 22 2.8 Robert Smithson, Mirror/Salt Works……………………………………………… 24 2.9 David Bowen, Tele-Present Water ………………………………………………… 24 2.10 Animas installed at the Vicki Myhren Gallery …………………………………… 29 3.1 Dr. Parsons at work ………………………………………………………………… 35 3.2 Frequency response of hearing in laboratory animals …………………………… 37 3.3 Ultrasonic recording rig …………………………………………………………… 40 3.4 Spectrogram of audio recording in the Okavango Delta …………………………… 44 3.5 Spectrogram of ultrasonic audio recording in New York City …………………… 47 3.6 Urban Intonation, installation ……………………………………………………… 51 4.1 Brian House, Quotidian Record …………………………………………………… 62 4.2 One year of OpenPaths data for ~4000 residents of NYC ………………………… 63 4.3 Vito Acconci, Following Piece ……………………………………………………… 67 4.4 Vito Acconci, sketches for Following Piece …………………………………………. 68 4.5 Laura Poitras, Disposition Matrix …………………………………………………… 71 4.6 Richard Long, A Line Made By Walking …………………………………………… 75 4.7 Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne ……………………………………………………… 78 4.8 LSTM trial output …………………………………………………………………… 81 4.9 Schematic of an LSTM module …………………………………………………… 85 4.10 First photograph, Port Authority …………………………………………………… 89 4.11 Everything Tat Happens Will Happen Today, installation ………………………… 91 4.12 Everything Tat Happens Will Happen Today, detail ……………………………… 91 4.13 Everything Tat Happens Will Happen Today, printed book ……………………… 93 vii Documentation Video, audio, and additional images of the original artwork described in this text can be found online at https://brianhouse.net viii Rhythmanalysis as a Minor Data Science Will the (future) rhythmanalyst … set up and direct a lab where one compares documents: graphs, frequencies, and various curves? … Just as he borrows and receives from his whole body and all his senses, so he receives data from all the sciences: psychology, sociology, ethnology, biology; and even physics and mathematics … He will come to ‘listen’ to a house, a street, a town, as an audience listens to a symphony. (Lefebvre [1992] 2004, 22) Tis dissertation began when I pilfered Rhythmanalysis, by Henri Lefebvre, from the desk of a friend. As a musician, I couldn’t resist. I knew Lefebvre from his idea that everyday spaces are socially constructed, but this work on time proved even more intriguing. In the book, Lefebvre claims that commodification—the basis of capitalism—is a matter of substituting the “dramatic becoming” that is our temporal relation to the world with the exchange of static “things.” “Time is money” is only the most obvious formula. Such representations conceal the actual dynamics of “dressage”—Lefebvre’s term for how, through the repetitions of everyday life, we conform to the rhythms of society and so come to physically embody capitalism’s temporal order. It is in our daily routines, our speech, our gestures. And it is technology for Lefebvre that is the means of this training. Te measured tick of the clock, the continuous flow of images from the television, the mechanical pulse of industrial production alienate us from our lived time. In this, Lefebvre anticipates today’s attention-driven economy and the buzz of the phone against our bodies, always demanding the labor of our “likes.” For Lefebvre, there is “Nothing inert in the world, no things: very diverse rhythms, slow or lively (in relation to us)” (Lefebvre [1992] 2004, 17). Tis is intuitive, if not precise. Lefebvre locates rhythm—“where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm” (Lefebvre [1992] 2004, 15)—but he does not define it. For that we can turn to the classical sense of rhythm as an “order of movement” (Sachs 1953, 17) or to traditional musicology, in which it is an “organization of time accessible to the senses” (Sachs 1953, 15). Both of these resonate with Lefebvre’s use, but I prefer Anne Danielsen’s definition, for whom rhythm is both a 2 “structuring pattern and the particular quality of a significant or expressive variation of this pattern” (Danielsen 2013, 5). In short, it is repetition with difference. Tis is never, however, a matter of pure abstraction—Lefebvre explains how “Rhythm reunites quantitative aspects and elements … [it] appears as regulated time, governed by rational laws, but in contact with what is least rational in human being: the lived, the carnal, the body” (Lefebvre [1992] 2004, 9). Consequently, what I think makes Rhythmanalysis most remarkable is that it is presented as a methodology. Te name invokes Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis (the goal of which is to reconcile the internal representations of the psyche), as well as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s