Music Film
Alias 3
Mail Art
Undulations, ink on paper
by Emily Zeller
about the art
This month we’re pushing against the notion that computers are impartial truth telling machines with Eric Lennartson’s oscilloscope piece, Alias 3. Eric intentionally programmed outside the computer’s ability, so that much of what we end up seeing and hearing isn’t what Eric coded and performed, but the aliased incomplete version of it. Through his work, Eric rejects the idea that computers are objective, all knowing, and neutral truth-givers and instead wants us to understand that computers are tools shaped by us to do things for us.
“I’ve been thinking about the idea of something being ‘true’ for a while, and as soon as you start picking at it, the whole thing gets very fuzzy. It seems more likely to me that you can’t ever have a complete, objective, unwavering truth. You’d probably have an aliased version of it.” –Eric Lennartson
Our visual artist this month is Emily Zeller, who is interested in the intersection between art and technology, mixing the old and the new, and joining high-and low-tech. For her mail art, she is creating a limited edition of 130 pen-plot drawings. For each drawing, a parameter is slightly changed so that the design shifts slightly, creating a collection of completely original prints that gradually drifts away from her initial design. Through the pairing, we see different translations from computer code to machine and the shifting, fuzzy, in-between spaces those translations reveal.