Brett Stalbaum
Since the beginning
Works in La Jolla, California United States of America

PORTFOLIO (1)
BIO
Brett Stalbaum, Lecturer, LSOE
Coordinator, Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major (ICAM)

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
Department of Visual Arts
9500 GILMAN DR. # 0084
La Jolla CA 92093-0084

C5 research theorist (www.c5corp.com) 1997-2007
Graduate (MFA) of the CADRE Digital Media Laboratory at San Jose State
University.
Professional affiliations:
Electronic Disturbance Theater
C5
paintersflat.net

http://www.paintersflat.net/

Latest: The Silver Island Bunker Trail, possibly the first time humans have walked like a game bot. The trail is open to the public for outdoor recreation and enjoyment.
http://silverisland.paintersflat.net
Discussions (117) Opportunities (2) Events (7) Jobs (3)
DISCUSSION

Re: Charles Simic: "The South: Down There on a Visit" (nyrb)


Dead on. If people cast their votes based on economic self interest, it
would go something like 10% bush, 15% kerry, 75% nader. A related aspect
of American culture is that we are even reluctant even to discuss our
wages with neighbors or colleagues - at least, it is frowned upon as an
'impolite' topic of conversation in the USA.

When I was 16, washing dishes, I had a manager take me into to her
office for a discussion about how I was "violating a state law" by
telling my co-workers what my hourly wage was. My 30 cents "greater
than" per hour was creating waves of discontent among the dish washing
staff - some of whom had been there longer. (The dividing factor was
gender, btw.) I knew better regarding the state law lie, and called her
on it. Eventually I moved on to another dish washing job for 30 cents
more, (I thought it was quite a coup at the time - this makes me laugh
now), along with a few of my disgruntled colleagues. I think that for
most of the people involved, the politics of the entire episode was
absorbed and experienced as a web of personal relations (and related
class identity constructions), and not in any way as political relations.

Amerricans are generally quick to accept their percieved station in
life. I think this article I ran across today is somehow related:
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_2400126

Thanks Jim.

Jim Andrews wrote:

> Don't know if anybody read the piece by poet Charles Simic called "The
> South: Down There on a Visit" in the Aug 12/2004 issue of The New York
> Review of Books. I would be interested to hear what people thought of it. An
> excerpt:
>
> "The lack of compassion for the less fortunate is also to be found in New
> Hampshire, where I live. Our politicians are as heartless as the ones in
> Mississippi and see themselves, despite their assurances otherwise, as being
> elected primarily to serve the well-to-do. Let the fittest survive is their
> attitude. However, they don't invoke God as they go about ensuring that the
> poor stay poor. As for the losers, both in the South and in the North, their
> outrage is not directed against the politicians. This is one of the great
> puzzles of recent American politics: voters who enthusuastically cast their
> vote against their self-interests, who care more about "family values,"
> school prayer, guns, abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution
> than about having decent health care insurance and being paid a living wage.
> They squabble, as they did in Alabama recently, over whether the Ten
> Commandments ought to be posted in a courthouse while the education of their
> children continues to be underfunded and their overcrowded public schools
> are violent and dangerous places."
>
> ja
>
>
>
> +
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> +
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>

--
Brett Stalbaum
Lecturer, psoe
Coordinator, ICAM
Department of Visual Arts, mail code 0084
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gillman
La Jolla CA 92093

DISCUSSION

Remote Location 1:100,000


Remote Location 1:100,000
Paula Poole and Brett Stalbaum
July 30th - August 4th, 2K4 (Box Elder County, Utah, USA.)
For the Center for Land Use Interpretation Wendover residency program,
July 29th - August 15th, Wendover, Tooele County, UT.

A map consisting of 36 geo-referenced tiles showing the terrain
surrounding the CLUI Remote Location were encased in acrylic resin. The
one centimeter square map image on each tile represents a one kilometer
area, creating a 1:100,000 scale between map and terrain. The tiles were
then cracked out of the resin, cutting the map into 36 separate tiles.
Living on site for most of 5 days, Brett collected data in the field
while Paula remained at the SW corner base camp to process the data into
information.

The daily process was as follows. Utilizing GPS, Brett hiked to each of
the 36 points in a 6 kilometer grid surrounding the CLUI Remote
Location, hiking approximately 70 Kilometers in the process. Upon
arrival at each site, the geo-referenced tile was left in the center of
the one kilometer square it represents, and the tile was photographed to
record the local land surface. A soil sample was also taken at each site
and the UTM coordinates were recorded on the sample. The samples were
returned to the campsite every day for Paula to process into a 6x6 array
of paintings to be displayed in the CLUI Wendover Exhibit Hall #1. Also
on display are the photos of the tiles showing their situation against
the local soil in which they were placed, and a corresponding digital
map of the terrain produced with C5 software, showing at a larger scale
the same map images as on the tiles, corresponding to the soil
paintings. The exhibit invites visual comparison of the three
representations of the landscape, revealing connections between the data
about the landscape and the landscape as data, and synthesizing these
into an informational configuration bound in a very precise way to the
original landscape.

For more information, please see:
http://www.paintersflat.net/remotelocation.html

For directions to the exhibit hall:
http://www.clui.org/clui_4_1/alm/wenddir.html

DISCUSSION

Editorial Notes: Big Data in scale.ucsd.edu and YLEM


Abstract
Artists confront the problems of data density and range in the aesthetic
of the sublime. Together with an introduction by Brett Stalbaum, these
essays by Lisa Jevbratt, Andrea Polli and Christina McPhee were first
published in print for YLEM Journal, Volume 24
Number 6, May-June 2004 (McPhee) and Volume 24 Number 8, July-August
2004 (Jevbratt & Polli), at the suggestion of Loren Means. The YLEM
Journal is the bimonthly publication of YLEM, a twenty-three-year-old
organization dedicated to the nexus of art, science, & technology. For
more information on joining YLEM and to view the YLEM Journal online,
visit www.ylem.org. The articles are co-published online in Scale,
scale.uscd.edu (Vol. 1, Issue 6+7).

Editorial notes

Moore's Law, Gordon Moore's famous prediction that processing speeds
double approximately every 18 months, has proven to be so prescient that
it long ago rose past the status of provocative futurist claim to the
level of pedestrian cultural assumption. But what has not yet become an
accepted cultural assumption is that Moore's law is at least matched,
and possibly exceeded by the exponential growth of data to be processed.
The relationship between humankind's ability to collect data and to
process and understand data is co-exponential: both are exploding. Data
sets from genomics, astrophysics, geography, geology, particle physics,
climatology, meteorology, nanotechnology, materials science and even the
search for ET are producing quantities of data that challenge the
technical limits of super computers, distributed computing, grid
computing, and superscalar simulation techniques. Even given Moore's
law, optical networks, and cheap mass storage, the problem of big data
is nevertheless looming larger as our ability to collect data actively
competes with our ability to process and digest it.

Computation has already become a nominal, if not tacit assumption in
contemporary art practice due to the ubiquitous implementation of
computer and communications technologies in all aspects of our emerging
global culture. How does big data impinge on the present generation of
representational artists who operate under the assumption of a rich
computational environment? And what are the emerging aesthetic and
conceptual parameters that impinge on the practice of artists who
consciously recognize data and coding as the primary expressions of an
art practice wherein the notions of "representation" are not limited to
narrowly prescribed assumptions regarding a specifically graphical or
interactive interface and networked distribution as the primary cultural
operatives between artist and audience? What other questions arise in an
environment where we live in a constant streaming wash of data, and what
are the issues surrounding how artists might help interpret both
cultural and scientific phenomena?

Lev Manovich raises a particularly interesting issue in his 2002 essay
titled "The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art". In it, Manovich identified
an aesthetic approach to big data that seeks to interpret large data
sets on much the same terms as designers and scientists seek to analyze
data; a pursuit which he describes as the exact opposite goal of
romantic art. "If Romantic artists thought of certain phenomena and
effects as un-representable, as something which goes beyond the limits
of human senses and reason, data visualization artists aim at precisely
the opposite: to map such phenomena into a representation whose scale is
comparable to the scales of human perception and cognition." He goes on
to form a critique of such practice, and raises the question of "How new
media can represent the ambiguity, the otherness, the
multi-dimensionality of our experience... In short, rather than trying
hard to pursue the anti-sublime ideal, data visualization artists should
also not forget that art has the unique license to portray human
subjectivity

DISCUSSION

C5 developments: Mt. Fuji, Perfect View


The Analogous Landscape: C5 climbs Mt. Fuji
July 2004
C5 ascended its second ring of fire volcanic peak by summiting Mt. Fuji, the tallest mountain in Japan at 12,395 ft. (3,776 m).

A simultaneous climb was executed on Mt. Lassen in California by a stateside C5 team. The Lassen Peak volcano rises 10,457 ft. (3,187 m) above sea level, C5's third major ring of fire volcanic peak.

For more infomation on The Analogous Landscape project:
http://www.c5corp.com/projects/analogouslandscape/index.shtml

The Perfect View Geocache Expedition Underway
July 2004
Jack Toolin has logged 6,600 miles on his Honda Super Hawk motorcyle as he traverses the U.S. in pursuit of Perfect View geocache sites solicited from the geocache community. Beginning in San Jose, California on June, 21st he is currently in Maine by way of a southwest/south/northeast route.

For more information on the Perfect View Project:
http://www.c5corp.com/projects/perfectview/index.shtml

For more information on the the C5 Landscape Initiative:
http://www.c5corp.com

DISCUSSION

You are the bus...


It is your body, but technology utilizing your meat as a power and
communications conduit has been patented by Microsoft.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&lP&s1=6,754,472.WKU.&OS=PN/6,754,472&RS=PN/6,754,472