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V5: Which graphic classes you are teaching at Cal State Fullerton?
Bryan Cantley : One is called 3-D Cyber Environments [Cyberspace], which has been taught for about four years, and we have just started teaching a class called the Logic of Digital Form, which will serve as a prerequisite for the cyber class. The introduction class serves as a studio to let the students become aware of how to start making form that is specific to the computer and can only exist only in the computer. It will not exist in printed media or traditional models ! It deals with fourth dimensional concepts of SPACEFORM where there is no separation between time and distance and you can have simultaneous entities that overlap and may or may not disrupt each other.
V5: Where is your starting point?
BC: We are going to ask the students to bring in a favorite song, some digitized sounds that they have an emotional tie to. Then we are going to take it into Sound Edit 16 and break down the tracks, isolate different components and using the editing program, trying to overlap them and find some visual and data commonalities. Then we will ask the students to look at the numerical data regarding the length of the track, the number of instruments, the frequencies and all the information that you can get from the sound-editing program. Then we will go to an enlarged graphic of the amplitude waves and select portions of those to import as paths into our modeling program.
They can start to overlap without disrupting each other and then start to interweave. I think interestingly enough it starts talking about some of the visual components of what music might actually be. Marcus Novak has talked about habitable cinema and navigable music that is really dependent on the inter-activity. You sort of get the idea from these forms of what music might look like in the fourth dimension.
V5: Will they always work from a song?
BC: The second class has been worked out where we have a series of projects that work quite well as they become more of the directional artist. The difference in the foundation class is if they don't like the outcome of the form, instead of manipulating it, they go back and manipulate the data. In the second class if they don't like the form they go back, as you would in a model, and manipulate the form. It then becomes more their personal direction in the second class and more of the computer becoming an intelligence amplifier or assisting the visualization of the data that they enter in the first. It's all zeros and ones that they are imputing, and by manipulating these numbers they generate a form and that will get them used to the fact that the computer is not just a tool for creating things that you create from reality, that you are creating virtual realities verses classical realities.
V5: How do you critique their work? What are you looking for?
BC: In the first class I grade the logic behind their process as much as, if not more, than the final form. Since they don't know what the forms are going to look like and they are not basing these observations on personal likes and dislikes, we really get to see if their logic has any flaws or how complex, innovative, introspective and what external examinations they used to come up with their logic. The second class goes back to the type of observations you make in an architectural studio, whether it is solving the problem, first and foremost. We then have to start looking at aesthetic issues, and what separates the better students from those that are not are the ones who can really attempt to create structures that start to become fourth dimensional or become cyber spatial, as opposed to just creating things that are already known to exist in reality.
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