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CONTACT
Mercadante.Daniel @ gmail.com / routining @ gmail . com

 

A BRIEF DESCRIPTION
(August 17, 2007)

ROUTINES is a continuous series of short motions. It is an examination of the flow of pattern and repetition, in both shared common tasks and those that are a bit more personal. There is no planned 'completion' of this item as a whole, but varied ORDERS will be created by organizing sequences of individual parts.

With or without the recognition of 'why?', routine actions provide for the ability to escape the self aware mind, to become part of a unified flow. The act of ROUTINING is simply practicing a repeated action while being completely self aware and unaware simultaneously, entering a state of pure flowship. The supposed line drawn between points of physical being and relative consciousness can become an everchanging series of cycles on a wave. This wave is what holds shared energy, applied to all matter and ideas. ROUTINES are just a meditative practice for creating and manipulating this energy, which of course, will not end.

The characterization of the term “routine” and it’s practice in the sciences, human relations and media is quite comprehensive.  The term often stirs up the notion of regular courses of procedure and commonplace tasks (habits, customs, methodical acts).  The aware mind may orchestrate a routine as a form of focus on the task at hand or a related/opposing act.  Then, of course, there are layers to the practice of these actions: I must present myself, be clean, take a shower, hot water, use soap, old spice, morning, bring towel into bathroom, etc.. The beauty of these tasks, however socially instituted they may be, is the inherent subjective personality.

Routines can generally be derived from repetition and pattern.  Ethnomethodology (the study of  people’s methods) primarily focuses on patterns of how people make sense of their environment, display/communicate understanding, and produce shared social orders.  A primary policy in Ethnomethodological research is the “First Time Through” approach.  This practice intends to describe any social activity (despite mundane appearance and/or recognizable traits) as if it were the first time.  An observer assembles an activity in a particular way to form a complex description or sociological analysis.  I take a shower in the morning (in the aforementioned pattern of thought and action) maybe because I want to feel clean and smell good so that I don’t detract people...  ROUTINES does not attempt the sociological ‘why?’ analysis in it’s creation.  My focus is on examining the reflexive properties of ‘how?’.
           

In this series of motions, the routine of viewing a routine is directly essential to understanding.  This is not to say that understanding refers to some narrative chronology (although it very well may).   According to  Cognitive Scientist Shimon Ullman,  ‘Visual Routines’ are systematic means of extracting information from a scene.  Perception of shape and spatial relations can be split into two stages: “bottom-up” and “top-down”.  In the bottom-up stage, base representations (color, speed/direction of motion, edge orientation) are generated and operations are performed uniformly over the entire visual field.  The top-down stage extracts spatial information from the base representations.  Visual operators (shifting focus, marking location of an object in context, tracing boundaries and limits) which are specific to the routine, are applied to areas and objects in them.  Combinations of operators provide for Visual Routines that can relate sophisticated spatial tasks, like recognizing complex shapes, counting similar objects, understanding how forms work with one another, remembering structure and distance.  In practicing routines and creating ROUTINES, I practice this cognitive act perpetually.  The observer is constantly doing the same thing while viewing the motion.  A balance of visual understanding is established, the action/reaction of routines bounces creative energy and ideas.

A key theory in the early development of motion film is “Persistence of Vision”.  The process of iconic (short term visual) memory creates a perceptual illusion of movement when a series of images are displayed in rapid succession.  For ROUTINES, I use a still camera to animate actions.  Rather than using a video/film camera which work at a constant frame rate decided by a motor, my finger acts as the fallible mechanism in which a frame is recorded.  A Visual Routine provides a cognitive understanding so that I can develop an intentional rate of Persistence of Vision to display an action.  There is no singular frame rate for the eye.  The connectivity of the eye and brain create an experience through motion, pattern, and detail detectors.  In the process of creating ROUTINES, my hands work as another layer to control iconic memory and generate ideas.

In the arts, a routine often refers to a choreographed composition, a dance for instance.  This doesn’t mean that traditionally commonplace tasks do not have a dance of their own, however unaware the actor may be.  What music are we dancing to?

A ‘cycle’ in music is an indefinitely repeated section (melodic/harmonic/rhythmic/mixed) which leads in and out of itself.  It can happen anywhere in a composition and contain other cycles within it, all dependent upon repetition.  The aural atmosphere for ROUTINES is established through repetition of sounds.  Although periodicity is not always the case, the edited frequencies and base recordings are a reflection of one another, a pattern.

The cyclical nature of action and reaction is what keeps ROUTINES in motion.  As mentioned, there are several layers involved with the creation of each individual motion (I practice a routine, notice that I practice it, record it, alter its representation, sequence/organize it, exhibit the ROUTINE or an ORDER, notice that I have just practiced a routine…).  Each of these layers are comprised of their own cycles. In physics, a cycle is a unit of phase angle (distance between a point on a periodic wave and a reference point) which equals one oscillation.  In ROUTINES we can call one oscillation “one idea”.  The phase angle can be considered as the area between the viewer and creator on a wave transferring creative energy through spacetime.  This area is pure flow.  It can happen when one person acts/reacts simultaneously as the viewer/creator or when several people act/react with one another as viewers/creators.  It is the harmony of binary opposition. It is the balance of yes and no, good and bad, true and false, light and darkness.

Research:

Garfinkel, Harold. (1984) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Malden MA: Polity Press/Blackwell Publishing. The classic original statement of the Ethnomethodological program.

Ullman, S. (1984) Visual routines. Cognition 18:97-159

Coltheart M. (1980) "The persistences of vision." Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 57-69.

French, A.P. (1971). Vibrations and Waves (M.I.T. Introductory physics series). Nelson Thornes.

 

 

NOTES
All ROUTINES are HD 720P or 1080P.
Sample DVD's and Exhibition Installation Diagrams are available upon request.


ORDERS
[Combinations of individual routines]
These display choice in sequencing to demonstrate the varied ways that individual parts can be linked (in action, narrative, aesthetic, space)
to create new bodies of understanding and interpretation. When a specified idea is intentional, they may include subsidiary titles.

ORDER #6 (includes parts 1-37)
"Summation #3"

ORDER #5 (includes parts 13,14,16,20,21)
"Arcane Spaces"

ORDER #4 (includes parts 1-14)
"Summation #2"

ORDER #3 (includes parts 1,2,4,9)
"Clean #1"

ORDER #2 (includes parts 1,3,6,7)
"The Mouth #1"

ORDER #1 (includes parts 1-8)
"Summation #1"

 

 

I would like to thank the following people
for helping me along the way with this project:

Mom & Dad
Ian Midgley
Jeffrey McCarthy
Jamie Tilton
James McDonagh
William J. Hoffman
Derek Paul Boyle
Nel
Alan Rumpf
Keith McNaboe
Jay Bonetti
Evan Lane
Hillary Gurtler
Edmund Townsend
Suzi Levitch