Debating Signal Processing - Christiaan Hattingh speaks at Upgrade Joburg Session.

It is difficult to win awards for Digital Art in South Africa as the art culture here is a small and rather conservative one. Hattingh however has managed at least two. We invited Hattingh to give a presentation and talk on his practice and process.

Hattingh studied as a metallurgical engineer and his resounding message at this talk was the  artistic use of technology and the implementation of signal processing in a visual performance driven environment. Working in 4v as his primary development environment, Hattingh has explored the interpretation of motion to colour and then the conversion of colour to text in his early work. Experimenting in moving between diverse cultural genre in a singular interactive performance space held together through the generation and rendering of signal data.

The lecture despite introducing his working methodology, was also a practical explanation of how he stitches the signals; their generation and outcome together.
The second piece he showed - a collaborative project between Frikkie Eksteen and Hattingh is a work in progress. Developed for a band performances - many ways inverts the functioning of the first work demonstrated. Here , rather than derive visual artefact from signal values - this piece draws data from performance analysis in a  3d L formation  - using midi signal as a controlling  mechanism for this data output.

At the end of the talk Hattingh revealed to me that ‘Negotiating Fidelity’ will be the title of an exhibition that he and a number of other digitally orientated artists will be having in Stellenbosch later this year. I look forward to more and hope to have more on the exhibition at an Upgrade Joburg event later this year.

“As an exhibition, Negotiating Fidelity focuses its attention
on the “messenger”  as a model that can be acted upon, modified or
processed, and not, as in the case of traditional representational
transactions, as something that needs to be copied to impart
significance. More specifically, the “raw” or “corrupted”, which is the
subject of this experiment, is a stream of information that needs
something before it is useful or meaningful to us. Be it by “filtering,
coding, estimating, detecting, analyzing, recognizing, synthesizing,
recording, and reproducing”, or a selection of these, processing
provides just this. One could classify these forms of interference as
techniques, or methods, perhaps even collectively as a device
negotiating some action that modifies the signal (where multiple steps
could happen in parallel or in sequence). Importantly, the kind of
processing that will be applied depends on what needs to be achieved,
or what information we aim to glean from raw or corrupted input
signals. One particular goal (seen as a kind of “holy grail” in certain
applications) would be to remain as true as possible to the signified.
Processing then becomes a negotiation (with the signal) for the
fidelity of the output stream.”  Christiaan Hattingh from www.k7.co.za

Photo’s by Christo Doherty