From Technological to Virtual Art [Hardcover ed.] 026216230X, 9780262162302

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© 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any

electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information

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MA 02142. This book was set in Bell Gothic and Garamond by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Popper, Frank, 1918— From technological to virtual art / Frank Popper.

p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-10: 0-262-16230-X ISBN-13: 978-0-262-16230-2 (alk. paper)

1. Multimedia (Arc) 2. Computer art. 3- Interactive art. 4. Arc and electronics.

I. Title. N7433.92.P67

2007

776'.7—dc22 2004062532

Contents

SERIES FOREWORD

vii

FOREWORD BY JOEL SLAYTON

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xi

1

INTRODUCTION

I 1

2

II

3

The Emergence of Virtual Art (1918-1983) HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS

(1918-1967)

9 11

Artistic Sources

11

Modern Light Art Spectator Participation Environmental Artistic Commitments

13 29 39

Technical Sources (such as Engineering and Inventions)

46

Other Sources (such as Science and Linguistics)

47

TECHNOLOGICAL ART AND ARTISTS

(1968-1983)

49

Laser Art

49

Holographic Arc

52

Eco-cechnological Art

59

Computer Art

64

Communication Art

75

Current Virtual Art and Artists (1983-2004)

87

MATERIALIZED DIGITAL-BASED WORK

89

Plastic Issues

89

4

5

6

7

Cognition Issues

110

Bioaesthetic Issues

118

MULTIMEDIA AND MULTISENSORIAL OFF-LINE WORKS

131

Language, Narration, Hypertext

131

Plastic Multimedia Issues

156

Synesthesia

161

Sociopolitical and Security Issues

175

INTERACTIVE DIGITAL INSTALLATIONS

181

Sensory Immersion

181

Reciprocal Aesthetic Propositions

220

Individual Commitments to Interactivity

248

Social, Environmental, and Scientific Commitments to Interactivity

275

MULTIMEDIA ONLINE WORKS (NET ART)

313

The Internet as a Social Communications Option

313

Personal Presence Online

355

Critical Artistic Attitudes on the Net

371

Telematic and Telerobotic Human Commitments

379

CONCLUSION

395

NOTES

399

BIBLIOGRAPHY

405

ARTISTS LIST

415

INDEX

429

Contents

Series Foreword

The arts, science, and technology are experiencing a period of profound change. Explosive challenges to the institutions and practices of engineering, art

making, and scientific research raise urgent questions of ethics, craft, and care for the planet and its inhabitants. Unforeseen forms of beauty and understand­

ing are possible, but so too are unexpected risks and threats. A newly global connectivity creates new arenas for interaction between science, art, and tech­ nology but also creates the preconditions for global crises. The Leonardo Book series, published by the MIT Press, aims co consider these opportunities, changes, and challenges in books that are both timely and of enduring value.

Leonardo books provide a public forum for research and debate; they con­ tribute to the archive of art-science-technology interactions; they contribute to understandings of emergent historical processes; and they point toward future practices in creativity, research, scholarship, and enterprise. To find more information about Leonardo/ISAST and to order our

publications, go to Leonardo Online at or e-mail . Sean Cubitt

Editor-in-Chief, Leonardo Book series Leonardo Book Series Advisory Committee: Sean Cubitt, Chair; Michael Punt;

Eugene Thacker; Anna Munster; Laura Marks; Sundar Sarrukai; Annick

Bureaud

Doug Sery, Acquiring Editor Joel Slayton, Editorial Consultant

Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (ISAST) Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, and the affiliated French organization Association Leonardo have two very simple

goals: 1. to document and make known the work of artists, researchers, and schol­ ars interested in the ways that the contemporary arts interact with science and technology and 2. co create a forum and meeting places where artists, scientists, and engi­

neers can meet, exchange ideas, and, where appropriate, collaborate. When the journal Leonardo was started some forty years ago, these creative disciplines existed in segregated institutional and social networks, a situation dramatized at chat time by the ‘‘Two Cultures” debates initiated by C. P. Snow.

Today we live in a different time of cross-disciplinary ferment, collaboration, and intellectual confrontation enabled by new hybrid organizations, new funding sponsors, and the shared tools of computers and the Internet. Above all, new generations of artist-researchers and researcher-artists are now at work individually and in collaborative teams bridging the arc, science, and tech­ nology disciplines. Perhaps in our lifetime we will see the emergence of “new Leonardos,” creative individuals or teams that will not only develop a mean­ ingful art for our times but also drive new agendas in science and stimulate

technological innovation that addresses today’s human needs. For more information on the activities of the Leonardo organizations and networks, please visit our Web sites at and . Roger F. Malina

Chair, Leonardo/ISAST

ISAST Governing Board of Directors: Martin Anderson, Michael Joaquin

Grey, Larry Larson, Roger Malina, Sonya Rapoport, Beverly Reiser, Christian Simm, Joel Slayton, Tami Spector, Darlene Tong, Stephen Wilson

Series Foreword

Foreword

Joel Slayton

According co Frank Popper, virtual art is identified by a techno-aesthetic foun­ dation enabled by che logic of the individual artists and informed by the extraartistic implications of their work. Popper describes a model of virtual art chat is defined by epistemological, ontological, and ethical implications deriving from “global virtualization,” the historically accelerated moment in which we

live, and through the existential changes effected on society and every indi­ vidual as a result. By definition, Popper's is a model of ambiguous intention, meant to play on the philosophical paradox between the virtual, the poten­ tial, and the actual: “What is new in virtualism is precisely its virtuality, ics potentiality, and above all its openness."

Born on April 17, 1918, in Prague, Popper has lived in Vienna, London, Rome, and Paris. He is a renowned aesthetician, arc theorist, curator, teacher,

and critic. Popper’s books—Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (1968), Art, Action, and Participation (1975), and Art of the Electronic Age (1993)—are seminal publications. These books provide an impressive survey of artists and artistic experimentation over the past thirty years. It is a lineage that purveys

innovations in light, movement, plasticity, system, process, and participation

as well as interaction with techno-scientific innovation. From Technological to Virtual Art takes us on the next step in his journey to bridge concerns for a

humanization of technology through artistic imagination.

Art historical analysis of the virtual remains an open terrain—not empty, but open. The topic is informed by the writings of Oliver Grau and Christine Buci-Glucksmann, among many others. Popper’s hypothesis is that

virtual arc can be considered a new and refined version of technological art (the subject of his Art of the Electronic Age), including at least three categories: digital works and environments, hypermedia and Internet works, and works in which interactivity and multisensoriality play a more radical role than before. He stresses that "virtuality artists’’ have much in common with their technology art predecessors but distinguish themselves through their technoaesthetic creative commitment—an aesthetic defined in part through their pursuit of extra-artistic goals vis-a-vis the scientific and social order concerned with basic human needs and drives. Virtual art is defined herein in terms of its openness for creative action. From Technological to Virtual Art is a panoramic examination of virtual art and its historical roots. Not uncontroversially, Popper postulates an antire­ ductionist analysis that situates artistic achievement within the objective of humanizing technological virtualism. It is precisely from that perspective that

he argues neither against technology nor for virtual determinism, but rather for an illumination of aesthetics that touches the culture of creativity. Leonardo is pleased to include From Technological to Virtual Art in this book series.

Foreword

Acknowledgments

I wish co thank all those who have helped to make this book possible— in the first place, the artists who allowed me to use images of their work

as well as provided precious personal and aesthetic information. Among these artists, Nikolas Gherbi and Gregory Chatonsky provided special aid in the early stages of the book. My deepest gratitude goes to Joseph

Nechvatal, who throughout the evolution of this book gave me an invalu­ able helping hand, culminating in an interview conducted by e-mail over

six weeks that allowed me to produce a revised manuscript at a decisive moment in the editorial process. This interview was published nearly in its

entirety in the College Arc Association’s Art Journal in Spring 2004, vol. 63, pp. 62-77. I- offer special thanks co Douglas Sery, my editor at The MIT Press,

for his enlightened support and also for the outstanding help he gave me, assisted by Valerie Geary, with the coordination of the illustrations for the book. My thanks are also due to Sandra Minkkinen, the production editor, to Cindy Milstein, the copy editor, as well as to the reviewers who offered

suggestions

for improving

the original draft of the

manuscript.

As to my gratitude co Roger Malina, the Leonardo/ISAST governing direc­

tor and my long-standing personal friend whose backing and encouragement I received throughout the whole of this undertaking, it goes well beyond a

simple acknowledgment, as it does with regard to the constant interest shown

in the evolution of this book by Joel Slayton, chair of the Leonardo Book Series Committee. I am also most grateful to Edmond Couchot who has come to my aid on several occasions and provided me with critical information, as did Jean-Louis Boissier, Jurgen Claus, Eduardo Kac, Ken Goldberg, Joel Boutteville, Carlos Cruz-Delgado, Adam Berry, Julien Knebusch, and Annick Bureaud.

Throughout the book, * indicates that the text that follows is based on information provided by the artist.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

This book is premised on three ideas. The first concerns the hypothesis that contemporary virtual art can be considered a new and refined version of tech­ nological art, which I explored and documented in exhibitions, articles, and a book on the art of the electronic era. As such, virtual art represents a new departure—new in terms of its humanization of technology, its emphasis on interactivity, its philosophical attitude toward the real and the virtual, and its

multisensorial outlook. The second idea posits that the artists practicing virtual art, alchough having quite a few traits in common with more traditional artists, distinguish themselves from them in many ways, especially through their techno-aesthetic creative commitment. Presumably, some of these characteristic features can already be found in a number of early-twentieth-century forerunners. Third, I think that virtual artists generally pursue—apart from, or rather

linked with, aesthetic finalities—a certain number of extra-artistic goals that appear to be of a scientific or social order, but that are in fact also concerned

with basic human needs and drives. Let me first explain what I mean by the terms virtual and in particular virtual art. Technically speaking, virtual art includes elements of all art made with the

technical media developed in the late 1980s (or in some cases, a few years before). One aspect at the time was that interfaces between humans and com­ puters—for example, visualization casks, stereoscopic spectacles and screens, generators of three-dimensional sound, data gloves, data clothes, position

sensors, tactile and power feedback systems, and so forth—allowed us to immerse ourselves completely into images and interact with them. The impression of reality felt under these conditions was provided not only by vision and hearing but also by the other bodily senses. This multiple sensing was often so intensely experienced that one could speak of it as virtual reality. Thus, virtual signified that we were in the presence not only of reality itself but also the simulation of reality. A similar technical development took place at the same time with regard

to the Internet and the new communications landscape as well as other tech­ nologies such as holography applied in conjunction with the above-mentioned

technical achievements. Aesthetically speaking, virtual arc is the artistic interpretation of some con­ temporary issues, not only with the aid of such technological developments but through their integration with them. Such an integration—or combina­ tion—allows for an aesthetic-technological logic of creation that forms the

essential part of the specificity of the virtual artworks I am describing in this book, and that differ from other artworks in the sense chat the latter lack this logic of creation based on the combination of current technical and aesthetic

issues. As to epistemological, oncological, and ethical questions raised by the idea

of virtual arc flowing out of technological arc, one can ask if virtual art enlarges the epistemological range of previous art tendencies, such as technological art. The intelligible fact that virtual art encompasses many possibilities of actual

art would indicate that a supplement of truth is at stake. Whether we view epistemology as the study of origins, nature, and the limits of human knowl­

edge, or only as a quest for understanding nature scientifically, virtual art tries to make the best of both worlds: the philosophical and the scientific. Conse­

quently, virtualism can be considered an all-embracing area. We are in the presence of knowledge that covers a multitude of natural and/or synthetic phe­

nomena, which by its very virtuality and interactive objectives involves us in an aesthetic context. This aesthetic context serves us on both the empirical level of human learning/perception and the rationalist level by manipulating new theoretical concepts independent from experience.

From an oncological point of view, contemporary virtual art represents a

departure from technological arc since it can be realized as many different actualities. This can also be a useful way to understand the self insofar as the

self is truly virtual: it has many potentialities. Thus, the virtual seif can be

Introduction

transformed into an actual, living personality, as John Canny and Eric Paulos observed in The Robot in the Garden) We are also close to Edmond Couchot’s interpretation of virtuality and the virtual as a power opposed to the actual, but whose function, technologically speaking, is a way of being (un mode d'etre) via digital simulation that can lead toward a certain expression of the opera­ tor’s subjectivity. This ontological tendency of virtual art can be clearly seen in the works of many artists described in this book who have been using tele­ presence and virtual reality devices in this way. As I see it, virtual art can even play an ethical role in the present devel­ opment of globalization by stressing human factors more than any other pre­ vious art form—on the part of both the artists and the multiple users of art. Virtual art could in fact impact in a critical and prospective way on global­ ization. Ultimately (and idealistically), the overall human bias that I identify within this book by example could tip the scales in favor of intelligent, ethical

control of nuclear and postnuclear technologies—in particular, the armaments that will sooner or later find themselves in the hands of many collectivities. This stance in favor of responsible conscientiousness would allow the new technologies and ways of communication to be operated—both economically

and culturally—in the interests of all humankind. The virtual model I propose has not only epistemological, ontological, and

ethical connotations but also aesthetic and philosophical “humanist” sides that should allow us to better understand the multiple existential changes that our society and every individual is undergoing at the present historically acceler­ ated moment. I shall try to explain myself as far as virtuality and the contri­

bution of virtual art are concerned. As a matter of fact, I am trying to go one step beyond what Oliver Grau and Christine Buci-Gliicksmann define as the social implication, or the aes­ thetics, of the virtual. According to Grau, media art—that is, video, com­

puter graphics and animation, Net art, and interactive art and its mosc advanced form of virtual art (with its subgenres of telepresence arc and genetic

art)—is beginning to dominate theories of the image and art. With the advent of new techniques for generating, distributing, and pre­

senting images, the computer has transformed the image and now suggests

that it is possible to enter it. It has therefore laid the foundations for virtual reality as a core medium of the emerging information society. Buci-Gliicksmann approaches the aesthetics of the virtual through the idea

that the development of the new technologies of the virtual has caused a

Introduction

historic transformation that touches all artistic practices: the passage from the culture of objects and stability to a culture of flux and instability. Thus, prem­ ises in both art and architecture can be established that lead to an aesthetics of transparency and fluidities. If I accept and try to incorporate these points of view in my own theoret­ ical approach to virtual art, I do so to take an additional theoretical step by assuming that our wider consciousness—which is affected by technological advancement—permits us to better assume both our intellectual and emo­

tional human status at the beginning of rhe twenty-first century. As to the method followed in constructing the chapters on current (approx­ imately 1983 to 2004) virtual art and artists, I have established two lines of discussion: the technical and the aesthetic. The technical line leads continuously from materialized digital-based work to multimedia online works (re: Net art), passing through multimedia and multisensorial off-line works into the all-important interactive digital installations. The aesthetic line leads from cognitive to telematic and telerobotic human issues in a coherent and uninterrupted, but not yet straight, line with a begin­

ning and an end. Hence, it touches a good number of extra-aesthetic regions, such as the political, economic, biological, and other scientific areas. These

areas are always treated with a certain distance and within an aesthetic context—as well as with an aesthetic finality. This explains the globalized open-endedness of virtual works. What is new in virtualism is precisely its virtuality, its potentiality, and above all its openness. For virtual art, this openness is being exercised both

from the point of view of the artists and their creativity and from that of the

follow-up users in their reciprocating actions. This openness implies a certain amount of liberty and freedom for action and creation, but not to radically destroy what happened before. This open-ended virtual state corresponds to both the individual’s and society’s needs to come to terms with the flux and the virtual dynamism that characterizes our present situation.

According to critics of modernism, what I am now calling virtual art can

be described as a purist rejection of both stylistic anarchism and historical tra­ ditionalism. This is so inasmuch as these critics consider that postmodernism eclectically combines a plurality of preceding artistic styles while reviving

history and tradition. Such critics maintain that complexity, contradiction,

Introduction

and ambiguity are favored in postmodernism over simplicity, purity, and rationality. There is no doubt that in the work of some virtual artists, many charac­ teristics of either modernism or postmodernism can be found. But generally speaking, in our emerging virtual era the stress is no longer put on questions of style, purism, or historical tradition. If complexity and ambiguity are not shunned, scientific rationality is equally admitted. In fact, the emphasis in virrualism lies on techno-aesthetic issues linked to such notions as cognition, synesthesia, and sensory immersion. Yet this aesthetic also pivots on individ­ ual, social, environmental, and scientific options toward interactivity and neo­ communication as well as on telematic and/or telerobotic commitments. One could conclude provisionally that the artist’s status is somehow lost in these multiple commitments. Yet I feel that the specificity of the virtual artist is nevertheless sustained through the overall techno-aesthetic finality he or she pursues and the very distance maintained toward the areas when explored humanistically. As such, an all-embracing virtuality in art is not really a counterrevolution against modernism and postmodernism; rather,

it widens considerably the spectrum of investigation open to the artistconceptor. A main thread in this book, and the reason I stress the biographical decails

of the artists, is my desire to show how technology is—or can be—

humanized through art. It is true that something exciting happens when one looks at a familiar subject not as a closed conceptual system but to find an opening conceptual edge—in this case, the increasing humanization of tech­ nological virtualism. That is what I have always practiced in my work as an

art historian and what can be seen in the expansive research here: that opening

edge. This conceptual edge is even more important today as we learn that both fundamentalist and modernist reductionist assumptions are not easily changed by mere postmodern negations. What seems to be needed globally are mutat­

ing conceptual models with which to think differently; or put another way, connective conceptual models that are never just the completed or inverted

objectivity of the common conceptions. The technological into virtual dia­ logue I illustrate here offers such a modulating model.

To further explain why I am committed to humanist values in the age of virtualism, I must say that the notion of the human for me is not linked to

Introduction

the classical heroic idea stemming from the Greeks and the Romans. Rather, the humanist notion symbolizes our basic human needs and personal

achievements. This does not preclude us from also connecting this idea to wider—even

universal—issues, of course. Virtual art enters the present antihuman and posthuman dialogue—a context fraught with the most explosive antihuman and posthuman dangers— precisely with the intention of humanizing technology by taking the need for human survival into consideration—a survival, that is, concerned with

biology and freedom. Humans are beings who under all circumstances, try to preserve their elementary needs for a certain amount of personal integrity and liberty. A virtual artist’s activities can deal with these fundamental issues while

preparing a blueprint for some working solutions along both personal and universal dimensions. The choice of the artists for this book was based on the predominance of one of the techniques in their work as well as the predominance of an iden­ tifiable aesthetic option. The order in which the artists are discussed in each section thus follows these two lines of thought and argument. But the overall

consideration for these choices was whether, in the first place, the artists entered into the category of the humanization of technology through the artis­ tic imagination. It is the combination of these two leading theoretical lines—illustrated by the work and itineraries of these virtual artists—that make up the emerg­

ing techno-aesthetic. This aesthetic is fostered by collective research in laboratories or on the Internet in connection with a new attitude toward communication that affects the working methods of both artists and theoreticians. The modern and postmodern artists I have included in the historical sec­

tions of my book are there to explain, both technically and aesthetically, what happened in the late 1980s and the 1990s when virtual art began to estab­ lish itself. The real break during that period, however, took place when the technological artists managed both to master the technical media, the Inter­

net, the computer, and even holography and to combine them aesthetically

with the issues I am analyzing under the different subheadings in chapters 3 through 6. These sections include plastic, narrative, sociopolitical, biological, and ecological issues even as they explore the main theme, virtuality in art—

Introduction

that is, the humanizing of technology through interactivity and neocommu­ nicability as well as sensory immersion and multisensoriality. The emphasis is on the different aspects—technical, aesthetic, and extraartistic—demonstrated by contemporary artists I have encountered personally or on the Net. The more historical sections, chapters 1 and 2, are also based very much on my personal experience. In this way, chapter 1 covers my own personal itinerary from 1918 up to 1967, when I organized the exhibition Lumiere et Mouvement at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris; indeed, for many, 1967 marks the end of kinetic art and the preliminary phase of socially engaged art as well as the beginning of a new technically dominated era in art. The second chapter, running from 1968 to 1983—the year of the exhi­ bition Electra: Electricity and Electronics in the Art of the Twentieth Century, which I conceived—covers the different new technologies adopted by artists

and leads to what can be named the virtual or digitally assisted art of the present. But these dates also correspond to some outstanding historical events: 1918 saw the end of the First World War, 1967-68 was the year of the student revolution, and 1983 signaled the moment when a certain number of tech­ nological innovations, such as the Internet, were becoming reality.

The main artistic sources of electronic or technological art can be found in the areas of photography and cinema, conceptual art (intellectual, informa­ tional, and environmental), light art (electric, electronic, and environmental), the art of motion or kinetic art (opcical, mechanical, and natural movement), cybernetic and programmed art, and participatory and environmental art.

Technological art was made up of several technically determined areas. In the first, laser and holographic arc, artists used the laser in combined

visual/aural productions and long-distance environmental displays and applied the laser to holography, both in extending its three-dimensional illusionist

characteristics and its recognition as the latest development in light art. Other sections of technological art were concerned with the early stages of computer

arc, communication art, and techno-ecological art. Computer art was then

shown to function as a purveyor of abstract information rather than a tool or medium, whereas communication art could already take the form of telemat­ ics, interactive networks, and satellite art; techno-ecological works of art were

either directly inspired by natural phenomena or their scientific interpretations. Another area of technological arc, video art, covered artworks on tape con­

cerned with formal research and the recording of conceptual art events as well as the use of juxtaposed cameras and monitors in video sculptures and

Introduction

environments. Video art has also inaugurated specific temporal factors— instantaneity, spontaneity, and simultaneity—as well as the potential of cre­ atively transforming images. Let me point out, however, that this book does not deal with the large field of video, nor with that of cinema and electronic music, with the exception of some cursory allusions in the text and bibliog­ raphy references. These areas are closely related to the emergence of virtual

art from technological art, of course, but have always been autonomous—or at least have become so in the 1990s. Thus, they are off the main investiga­ tive track of my book. I set out here to find a satisfying definition of the changes that occurred in art through its confrontation with digital technol­ ogy by looking at artists who are considered primarily as coming from—or working in—the fine arts. In the historical chapters, I take most of virtual art's artistic origins as well

as some technical sources into account, but I try above all to give some general and several individual examples of art movements and artists that can be regarded as prototypes for the contemporary virtual artists described in chap­ ters 3 through 6. Chapter 3, the first of the sections on current virtual arc and artists, is

devoted to materialized digital-based work. This work, which at first sight

may resemble more traditional art, is nonetheless virtual (or virtualized) by digital techniques and so takes on a totally different dimension. Although the

main aesthetico-technical category involved in chapter 3 is perception and the

image, the works can be subcategorized into plastic, cognition, and bioaesthetic issues. Chapter 4 deals with multimedia off-line works. In addition co the main theme of multisensoriality, it includes secondary aesthetic items such as lan­

guage, narration, hypertext, and synesthesia as well as sociopolitical and secu­ rity issues. Chapter 5 is based on interactive digital installations and its main aesthetic theme is indeed interactivity. It comprises such subthemes as sensory immer­

sion and reciprocal aesthetic propositions, and looks at individual, social, envi­

ronmental, and scientific commitments toward interactivity. Finally, chapter 6, devoted co Net art and multimedia online works, explores artistic communication via the Internet along with the secondary aesthetic subjects of the Internet as a social communications option, personal

presence and critical attitudes on the Net, and telematic and telerobotic human commitments.

Introduction

L H i The Emergence of Virtual Art (1918-1983)

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Technological art has three principal roots. Firsc, technological art can be traced back to artistic sources such as visual art, photography, cinema,

music, and more generally sound as well as architecture and other environmental expressions. A second origin can simply be found among technical sources such as engineering inventions and similar undertakings. And a third important source can be detected in the different areas

of the natural and human sciences, in particular physics, biology, and linguistics. Artistic Sources

As regards the artistic sources, let me mention the wide scope of research on the pioneers and pathbreakers of technological art that has been undertaken

by the members of Leonardo/Isast’s Frieda Ackerman Working Group, in which I am myself a participant.1 It is of course impossible within the scope of this book to study in detail the many artistic movements, or even mention

all the numerous artists and other personalities who have given rise to and

established this art. Let me touch on some of these developments in a general way before select­

ing one or two of these trends and illustrating them through examples found in a few artists’ work. I will thus simultaneously show the origins and the

development of virtual arc as well as the personalities of the artists utilizing virtual conditions.

A comprehensive study of the origins of technological and virtual art would have to include the motion aspects of kinetic art with Vladimir Tallin and Naum Gabo, the pioneers in real motion as an art medium; Len Lye, the pioneer of experimental cinema and animation with his tangible motion

sculptures; Pol Bury, with his infinitesimal motion as a creative principle; and Jean Tinguely, with his critic and ironic approach co the machine. The luminous aspects of kinetic art, which had a vital influence on a number of virtual artists, can be illustrated with the work of Thomas VXGlfred (the Inmia artist), Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (who was a pioneer not only in light art but also in the areas of photography, design, and education), Frank Malina

(with his lumidyne and reflectodyne systems), and Nicholas Schoffer (the creator of luminokineticism and spatiodynamism) as well as the activities of Gyorgy Kepes, Moholy-Nagy’s collaborator and successor at the new Bauhaus. The luminous trend will be treated at some length hereafter as will the problem of spectator participation in kinetic art—by focusing on one of its protagonists, Yaacov Agam, a creator of plastic innovations with a religious content. Within this context, mention will also be made of the Groupe de

Recherche d'Art Visuel de Paris, and in particular Yvaral, with his emphasis on both the visual and participatory aspects of his work. In a more detailed study, one would also have to discuss other perceptual and environmental char­ acteristics in kinetic art, such as Victor Vasarely’s environmental constructions

and optical artworks as well as those of Jesus-Raphael Soto. Another important artistic source of technological and virtual art leads

from the Dada movement to conceptual art via the happenings of the 1950s and 1960s. Apart from the Dada artists and conceptual pioneers Marcel Duchamp and Raoul Hausmann, special mention would be due to the Fluxus Group and Allan Kaprow, the inventor of the happenings.

Many virtual artists were also influenced by pop arc, the new realism, and arte povera; their protagonists, Yves Klein (with his stress on the Immater­ ial) and Andy Warhol (with his repetitive screen printed, photographic, and

other mechanically produced images), and Joseph Beuys and his expanded concept of art aimed at a total permeation of life by creative acts. Other new media or virtual artists seem to have definite affinities with the

surrealist, psychopathological, and autodestructive trends. Gustav Metzger's

autodestructive and aucocreative art (with its aim of preserving our environ­ ment) is key here along with the autodestructive period in Jean Tinguely’s

Chapter 1

itinerary, although other manifestations such as Jean Dubuffet’s art brut warrant similar acknowledgment. Within the vast domain of sound, music, and noise (whose strong influ­ ence on contemporary technical creativity cannot be overestimated), Luigi Russolo and his art of noises is seminal, as are the radical compositions of John Cage. Another significant source for the origins and the development of techno­ logical and virtual art is the equally large domain of film, animation, and even the nineteenth-century panoramas. The latter are developed by Oliver Grau in both his dissertation and book on virtual art.2 In this area, pioneers like Norman McLaren (with his films drawn directly on celluloid) should not be forgotten. Modern Light Art

Electricity and electronics are at the base of a trend that can be described as modern light art. This work emerged at the beginning of the 1920s, and was still expanding at the end of the twentieth and now into the early twentyfirst centuries. It is associated with video technology, the laser, holography, cybernetics, the computer, multimedia, and the World Wide Web. The principal sources of modern light art are, in the order of their appear­ ance, electric stage lighting (which was introduced in the early 1880s), color

organs (and similar instruments based on some sort of correspondence between

visual and auditory experience), and cinematic projections. In the forty years before the birth of modern light art in 1920—the year when we can first speak of an attempt at synthesis and the use of light as a valid general form of expression—theatrical performances had already used

electric light. Environmental light was to be enriched by a new dynamic, sym­

bolic quality resulting from innovations in the use of directed light. The pio­

neers in this field were Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig. The former created a new “rhythmic space" with stage lighting, and the latter revealed the pure movement of things “in silence" with this medium. It should be

stressed that Craig had already thought of creating a new art with light and

movement.

The startling theories and applications of Appia and Craig set off a world­ wide renewal of stage setting by mobile lighting. Special mention must be made of Loi'e Fuller’s American and European dance tournees from 1892

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

onward, and later, Sergei Diaghilevs Ballet Russes, 1918 1921, and the Swedish ballet of Rolph de Mare, 1924. Later still there was a constant inter­ play between the plastic arts, on the one hand, and the use of light in exper­ imental theater at the Bauhaus as well as in Russia and Czechoslovakia, on the other hand. The second source for artists using artificial light as an art medium, the color organs, can be traced back to the'eighteenth century. The French Jesuit

and mathematician Louis-Bertrand Castel invented an ocular harpsichord (clavecin ocnlaire\ but there is some doubt as to whether he ever completed the instrument, which after some hesitation, he decided to build in order to prove his theories of “color-music.” Both his theories and experiments, however,

based on the principle of placing candles behind transparent colored tapes, have had a direct influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists working with this medium. Castel’s studies, and those of his followers, were hampered by the belief in too close a relationship between musical and color “intervals.” These were generally chosen arbitrarily when creating color­

music, and great scientists like Isaac Newton or Clerk Maxwell did little to dispel the unsound basic assumptions. After constructive criticism by Hermann Helmholtz, and due to the impact of technological advancement allowing greater intensities of light projections, the “analogy” theories were

gradually abandoned and research started to concentrate on the essential problem of light, leading directly to the foundation of a new plastic art of light in the early 1920s.

The third source of, or parallel influence on, this arc can be traced to the invention and artistic applications of cinema. Here, especially noteworthy

experiments include Leopold Survage’s Rythmes colores (1912), the films of Vicking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Dziga Vertov, Henri Chomecte, and Walter Ruttmann, and Fernand Leger’s Ballet mecanique (1924). A close link between the visual arts and the technical and aesthetic achievements of cinema was established, and it found an extension in the combined research of cine­

matographer and sculptor Len Lye and the “musicalist” and “cinepeintre” Henry

Valensi. In later developments in the art of light, Norman McLaren's tech­ nique of graphic arc and sound was co play an important role. Starting in the early 1950s, McLaren began using a special camera and projector invented by

his colleagues at Canadas National Film Board, which allowed him to create

3-D movies (1951), followed by several other experimental films. In any case,

cinema can be held chiefly responsible for the use of screens (or blank walls)

Chapter 1

as “support” for lighted images in a considerable number of works in the art of light to this day. Prior to the birth of this new art, che 1905—1910 period included pio­ neering experiments by Danish artist and singer Richard Edgar Lovstrom, alias Thomas Wilfred, the inventor of the clavilux and the art of lumia, as well as by Adrian Bernard Klein and others, who all developed earlier techniques, such as Bainbridge Bishop's and Alexander Wallace Rimington’s color organs. These years also saw attempts by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin to make projections on to a screen with an instrument, the clavier a lumieres or tastiera per luce., which was treated on the same level as the orchestra. The first performance of Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, which involved this projection in conjunction with a rather unsatisfactory small screen, took place at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1915, followed by che second at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in 1916. It should be kept in mind, however, that Scriabin’s inten­ tion was to accompany his works with grandiose chromatic illuminations cov­ ering the whole concert hall, and that he was only prevented by material and technical reasons from realizing this project. It was roughly at the same time that Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, bent on the visual interpretation of music, worked on his “optophone” and gave his first performance at Moscow’s

Meyerhold Theatre. None of this experimentation achieved the same degree of independence as the work of Thomas Wilfred. In creating his lumia arc, he was from che oucsec

aiming ac an independenc and preferably silenc luminous art. The first com­ plete clavilux instrument was perfected in 1919- It consisted of a large key­ board with five manuals of sliding keys and intergrouping color couplers, a battery of six main projectors, and a number of auxiliary floodlights. After

completing his clavilux, Wilfred developed other systems using lenses and

reflecting surfaces, and it is largely due to his personal efforts chat a certain continuity can be established between the “heroic” period and the revival of

this art in che 1950s. The intervening period was a hard one, and it must have taken all the faith and energy of isolated artists like Wilfred and A. B. Klein to weather the difficult period. The advent of commercial cinema must be

classed among che many factors chat inhibited the development of disinter­ ested research into the plastic properties of light—research that covered a wide

field in aesthetic terms. In Wilfred’s art, the main inspiration was drawn from the environment, and he aimed directly at the emotions of the spectator: a

walk across New York City on a drizzly October night, a penetration through

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

a mobile tracery of characteristic steel structures, and pure expressions of hap­ piness and exuberance are cases in point. The second decisive trend in the establishment of modern light art in the 1920s is due to the research conducted by the Bauhaus masters and in par­ ticular Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (an outstanding figure of the period through his work as an artist, administrator, and teacher). His vast political and artistic projects were based on the model of constructivism, a movement that wanted to abolish any distinction between art and life, and integrate all artistic prac­ tices within everyday existence. Constructivism wanted to reaffirm the cre­ ative potential of each individual and work for the advent of a total person—a rational, affective, and sensorial human being, the “new man.” What is of

interest in this context, though, is that Moholy-Nagy’s research was conducted with the new media of his epoch: photography and film. These technical pro­

cedures were anchored in his plastic experimentation with light, and these endeavors constitute a link with present-day art forms utilizing the new tech­ nologies of holography and interactive digital jnstallationSj both of which are still largely dependent on the light element. From the early 1920s to 1930, Moholy-Nagy elaborated his seminal Light-Space Modulator, Lichtrequisit, or

Light Prop for an Electric Stage (figure 1.1). In spite of its sculptural appear­

ance, this construction was conceived and appreciated by Moholy-Nagy co a

great extent as a work on the borderline between the plastic arts and cinema.

In fact, what strikes the observer in this complex mobile work is the move­ ment of light and shade projected on the walls and ceiling, and also the varying reflections on the metal elements of the construction itself. The power

of the work, in effect, depends more on the reflection than on the original material. Other members of the Bauhaus, Kurt Schwerdtfeger and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, developed the idea of “reflected colored-light plays” {Reflektorische Farblichtspiele) in the early 1920s. Schwerdtfeger created his

Reflektorische Farblichtspiele in such a way that the mobile light sources sent their colored radiations through matrices so that the screen projections were shifted progressively. Later, in Hirschfeld-Mack’s highly elaborated Farblichtspiele (worked by himself and other performers), the parallel devel­

opment of music, forms, and light was stressed. Multicolored planes were built up organically from darkness to the most intense luminosity. The Bauhaus masters had a strong influence on other artists, and already in the early 1930s an original mind like Zdenek Pesanek, the Czech architect,

Chapter 1

L£szl6 Moholy-Nagy, Light Prop for an Electric Stage, 1923-1930. © 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Harvard University Art Museum, Cambridge, MA. Courtesy of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Figure 1.1

developed some luminous kinetic constructions side by side with color organ research, which had been continued by Baranoff-Rossine, Alexander Laszlo,

Raoul Hausmann, and others in the 1920s. Partly abandoned and partly

absorbed into cinema and the advertising world, the plastic art of light reap­ peared around 1950. This event was marked by a general interest on the part of widely differing artists (Gyula Kosice, Roger Desserprit, Lye, Yaacov Agam,

Bury, Tinguely, and others). But the new medium took hold due to the con­ sistent work of Wilfred, Malina, Abraham Palatnik, and Nino Calos with light

projections of fluid forms on screens, and Schoffer’s three-dimensional con­ structions with intense light effects. A few isolated figures, such as Israeli artist P. K. Hoenich, conducted some parallel research with sunlight that also helped establish light as a medium in its own right.

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

In the years preceding the advent of laser, holographic and video art, and computer and communication art, however, the main research in light art centered around luminokinetic experiments, .neon art, and environmental light art. Among the luminokinetic artists who mainly produced works that con­ tinued the trend inaugurated by Wilfred, Malina ingeniously developed his lumidyne system—an arrangement based, on electro-mechanical movement,

and consisting of incandescent or fluorescent light sources, colored transpar­ ent discs painted in translucent colors thatiturn at a fairly slow speed, a plastic sheet on which the main composition (often related to astronomical observa­ tions) is traced, and a collecting screen. Palatnik and Calos had undertaken similar researches in a poetic vein, the former with delicate pastel shades that

create sequences of distinct compositions, and the latter in an impressive number of personal mobiles lumineux. Wilfred himself continued his studies during that period and produced a considerable number of individual works

in the art of lumia as well as elaborate arrangements such as the Lumia Suitet which was for many years exhibited in a sore of miniature theater at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In terms of the luminokinetic art trend based on the research of MoholyNagy and his early collaborator, Kepes, head of the light and color depart­ ment at the Bauhaus of Chicago, one of the most striking works was done by Nicholas Schoffer, who apart from light organs with electronic keyboards and

light walls, specialized in lumino-dynamic constructions often reaching envi­ ronmental proportions, as in the illuminated, fifty-two-meters-high Cybernetic Tower (figure 1.2). This work operated as an adjunct to the spectacle Formes et Lumieres^ designed by Schoffer for the facade of the neighboring Palais des Congres in Liege. Still more ambitious environmental projects with light by Schoffer await realization. An adaptation of one of them was proposed as a replacement for the destroyed two World Trade Center Towers in New York.

Neon light as a principal material for sculpture appeared when Kosice pro­ duced his Luminous Structures in Buenos Aires in 1946. Other outstanding artists in this area are Dan Flavin with his “cool” installations (figure 1.3);

Bruce Nauman with his conceptual and critical approach; Francois Morellet,

who uses neon light arrangements in order to test the spectator s spatial and architectural awareness; and Alexandra and Moira Sina, who defy capacities to distinguish between illusion and reality. Other noteworthy artists in this

context are Stephen Antonakos, who produced interior as well as exterior neon

Chapter 1

Nicholas Schoffer, Spatiodynamic and Cybernetic Tower with sound effects, at Lifcge, Belgium, 1961 © 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York I ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 1.2

pieces; Joseph Kosuth and his highly conceptual pieces written in neon; and Martial Raysse, whose neon works allude to the artificiality of modern times

along with the innocence of a new way of life made possible by technology. Neither should one forget Chryssa and her colored neon tube work contain­ ing enigmatic symbols and alphabetic elements, and her attempts to bridge the gap between classical Greek and present-day civilization; nor Piotr

Kowalski, who tries to extend the testing of the spectator’s physical aware­ ness to both the poetic and environmental spheres (figure 1.4). And then there is too Lucio Fontana, who not only created neon light works for an environ­

mental, industrialized context such as Spatial Concept, a memorable ceiling

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Dan Flavin, Untitled (to a Man George McGovern), 1972. © 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York: Leo Castelli Gallery. Photo by Rudolf Burckhardt.

Figure 1.3

shown at the Ninth Triennale in Milan, but also elaborated more general

seminal theories of space in his writings and manifestos. Octo Piene and Thorbjorn Lausten can also be singled out as artists who developed the environmental dimension of light arc. The former connected

his preoccupation with light vibration to environmental concerns from 1968 onward and became a leading eco-technological artist devoted to what he

named sky art. As for Thorbjorn Lausten, he can be regarded as the leading light artist in Scandinavia with a strong engagement in works and events relating to the northern natural environment. Commenting on the relation­

ship between the intellectual and sensorial aspects of light art on the occasion

of his 1995 installation titled

Det Polare Raum (Now: The Polar Space}—

consisting of ten large computer-programmed wall projections on a ferry­ boat—Lausten observed that “a central aspect of the project is to demonstrate

the close relationship between digital technologies, the human perceptive/

cognition system(s), and how we make or create our world.”

Chapter 1

In che electronic era prior to virtual art, light played a prominent role in such forms of technological art as video art, video art combined with com­ puter art, and particularly laser and holographic art. Light is now present, up to a point, in most virtual arc, especially in multimedia off-line and online works as well as interactive digital installations. Different kinds of practices prevail in video art. First of all, the use of tech­ nological means in order co generate visual imagery—including formal

research into plastic elemencs, but also the considerable range of recording

conceptual art actions or happenings—often concentrates on the artist’s own body. There is also “guerrilla video, “ which involves recording everyday street

activity with a portable camera, generally for a political or pedagogical purpose, as well as video works combining video cameras and cameras in video sculptures, environments, and installations. Finally, there are the live per­

formances and communication works that use video and combinations of advanced video research, most often video with computers or holography. In

all these modalities and categories of video art, the presence of light is the

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

dominate component, ensuring the spectacular fascination with and very exis­ tence of this art form. The work of the prominent pioneer in this field, Korean American artist and musician Nam June Paik, is a case in point. Ever since his first altered television sets, his work titled The Moon Is the Oldest TV, or the color synthe­ sizer developed in collaboration with Shuya Abe with its electronically induced osmotic forms, artificial light (often as a dialectical element with color) has remained an essential element for Paik. This becomes still more evident in his large-scale video sculptures and installations (figure 1.5) as well as his classic video performances with Charlotte Moorman. Without the preeminence of light, the visual and spectacular element par excellence, video art would not have progressed from its early antitelevision attitude to a new outlook of considerable social significance, nor would it have developed with a certain continuity and coherence from experimental film

techniques and aesthetics to new visual research. As regards the passage from the optical to the digital, one can posit that with the coming of the computer, new automatic processes for the generation and the socialization of the image will emerge. The digital image, in fact, is

Nam June Paik, Tricolor Video, 1982. Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris. Photo by Adam Rzepka.

Figure 1.5

Chapter 1

no longer—like the optical image in photography, cinema, and television— the registering of an object that leaves a trace on a chemical or magnetic support, but is instead a synthesis: that is, the result of a calculation where the mathematics and the language of the programming are key. Yet since in most works of computer art and now virtual art the necessity of visual appre­ hension by the spectator remains essential, a combination with video screens is often sought and light remains a prominent factor. Indeed, in this combi­ nation of video and computers, a good number of artists have relied on the former's spectacular and environmental qualities to counterbalance the latter’s stress on conceptual, numerical elements. Two examples are illustrative here. In her multimedia projection installations, Margot Lovejoy often contrasts logical systems of order

and belief with their chaotic opposites, but light projections still play a crucial part in her metaphoric presentations, as they do in Jeffrey Shaw’s panoramic computer/video installations combining literary and spatial insights. In general terms, from the 1960s onward, computer art and digital art were already developing fields that were revolutionary in both rhe sensorial and intellectual spheres. A new appeal had been made to the visual field mainly through the use of light projections on a screen, and this appeal was not aban­ doned by the great majority of computer artists or, now, virtual artists. But

other senses, such as the aural and the tactile, were also developed in com­ puter art as a sequel to optical, kinetic, and participatory art, and since the beginning of the 1990s, find new impetus in virtual art. On the other hand,

calculated and programmed art combined with the achievements in concep­ tual Art have opened up the enormous possibilities of the computer in the

area of full interactivity, by using it not only as a tool and a medium but a

purveyor of abstract-information and a generator of virtual realities in cyber­ netic space. Some now-historical developments in this area are most impres­ sive, such as Jaron Lanier’s works and those of other artists and engineers who

experimented with devices like eye phones, data gloves, and data suits involv­

ing more than the visual sense. Nevertheless, it must be noted that even in

these works, light plays a decisive role, rendering the most abstract calcula­

tion accessible to the human senses. If we pass now to the area of laser and holographic art, we are again in the mainstream of recent modern light art developments. In fact, one of the most

spectacular developments here involves the use of the laser (an acronym

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), a device that significantly increases the input of light, and produces a narrow and intense monochromatic beam appreciated by artists for its narrow concentration and

directability. The technical qualities of the laser have been used by many artists in holog­ raphy, whereas its graphic characteristics found their aesthetic application in the work of a few specific artists, either on an environmental urban scale or in theatrical or other spectacular performances. Outstanding achievements in environmental realizations include the work of Rockne Krebs, Dani Karavan, and Horst H. Baumann; in the area of multimedia performances, such musi­

cians and artists as Lowell Cross, Paul Earls, Iannis Xenakis, Joel Stein, and Carl Fredrik Reutersward have been most significant. Let me examine more closely the work of American composer and light artist Paul Earls, who treated the laser as a musically responsive visual medium. Basically, he used the laser beam for its unique physical character­ istics: it travels across space without spreading, it retains its power at a dis­ tance, it has a single wavelength composition, it embodies power and heat in the form of light, and “its sensed character is of a living, vibrant, life-in-light.” Laser images are created within the eye and che brain, which interprets fast

movements of light as lines rather than movement. These two-dimensional images can take on three-dimensionality through animation and modulation, which Earls achieved by the use of music and sound to expand, contrast, and rotate the images.

As for holography, this is a two-step image-forming process in which an intermediate record is made of the complex optical field associated with an object. To produce a hologram, a single beam emitted from a laser is split into

two by a thin, semitransparent plate, producing a reference beam and a light

beam. The direction of the beams is controlled by mirrors. Because the beams are narrow, a system of lenses and pinholes along their path spreads them out. The light beam is directed to, and then reflected by, the selected object. When the light beam is reunited with the reference beam, two sets of light waves interact and form a pattern of interference fringes, which is recorded on pho­

tographic film. This becomes the hologram, which when illuminated by the

laser organizes the light into a three-dimensional representation of the origi­ nal object.

The holograph is not only a product or a tool but a statement of specific effects based on an autonomous structure of its medium, light. As light is not

Chapter 1

only a generative principle but a subject and the basic substance of the holo­ graphic image as well, the self-reference of light represents an essential form for the articulation of the holographic message. Holographic art, apart from being a form of optical illusion, constitutes a specific phase in the history of light art. Illusionist tendencies have existed in art since the earliest times and were at certain periods even considered an inte­ gral part of Western art. The luminous phenomenon, with its curious ambi­ guity between presence and absence, is at the heart of all holographic art and can be compared to our perception of the stars, whose physical presence has been superseded by the luminous wave that reaches our eye long after having been emitted. Dieter Jung, Georges Dyens, Stephen Benton, Andrew Pepper, Frithioff Johansen, Sally Weber, and Doris Vila are among the most prominent laser and holographic artists. Dieter Jung is particularly fascinated by the rainbow and uses rainbow holographic techniques to produce several holographic cycles: the multislit, full-color holograms Butterfly (1982), Peather Shadows, and Into the Rainbow

(1983), and the multiexposure holograms Present Space (1984) and Different Space (1985). These project their color fields in wide vertical bands in front of and behind the image plane. They can be experienced as a spatially

indefinable artistic effect of changing colorful shadows of light that melt

into air. In these holographic works, Jung seeks to combine the visual knowledge acquired in his work as a traditional painter with his more recent experience

of the hologram. His goal is to stimulate spatial imagination, generate new mental images, and visualize spatial fusion. For him, holography is an explo­ ration of both the space and the illusion of light’s aesthetic qualities. Jung is aware that holographic space cannot copy reality, and that the effect of holo­

graphic space as well as its substantial existence derive solely from the self­ creating energy of light, to which holography gives absolute reality. On the other hand, Jung speaks of “fractal beauty” to qualify his holographic pro­ duction. One of his projects using this technique consists of transposing a

poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, called Hologram, specially composed for

Jung. The poem begins with the words, “It is easy to build a poem in the air.

All you need are a few well-lit words, light-footed, light-fingered, lightminded words.” The poem then offers thoughts on the fragility and transience

of human existence.

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Like Jung, Georges Dyens is aware of the diaphanous, ethereal, and luminous nature of holography. Holography provides a striking and poetic contrast to the solid sculpture with which it is combined in Dyens’s ‘'holosculptures.” For Dyens, holography is both real and magical; it is about light, and light is color. Holography offers him the creation of an infinite, constantly moving space in which shapes move in a close relationship made visible by external light. Light, symbolic of spirituality, plays an essential part in Dyens’s work, as it does in the works of Benton, a shining example of a successful combination of scientific and artistic creative talents. Benton, apart from having been the director of the Center for Advanced Visual Research at MIT, was the inventor in the field of white light transmission of “rainbow holograms,” which allow an image to be viewed in a succession of spectral colors, but he also successfully experimented in this area. Chromatic preoccupations are at the heart of Andrew Pepper’s creations.

In his holographic monoprints, he gets light to pass through the hologram by removing some of the surface of the holographic plate, thereby forming new luminous drawings on the surface behind, or rather “releasing” them from that surface. All his works are dominated by the idea and the feeling that technological means must be associated with a global human experience in

order to enter frankly into the domain of the arts as well as truly impact on the spectator, who is invited co react to the artistic statement in one’s own

way and thus encounter a parallel experience with that of the artist. Johansen, originally a painter, has now explored the field of holography in its own right, while Weber has created environmental holographic works, one of which, titled Signature of the Source and created in 1997 for the Karl Ernst

Osthaus Museum in Hagen, Germany, focuses a shaft of light in space. The column of light pierces the center of a circular window, and expands to hover in space above and below the window surface. Visitors see light as rays of color

racing up and down and twisting around the work’s central core. Vila bases her holographic works on the compelling fascination of images of light float­

ing weightlessly in air. In her work, the extension of narrative metaphors point beyond the visible to render a web of ideas and emotions, caught in large volumes of color.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the variety of the uses of light with an aesthetic purpose, as well as the diversity of the “universe” co which this phenomenon metaphorically alludes, had already raised the question of whether artists do

Chapter 1

not actually aim at a more comprehensive meaning involved in the art of light than a purely formal exploration of its effects. The search for the answer, heralded in the catalog for the Kunst-LichtKunst exhibition in Eindhoven in 1966, has ranged from technically oriented commentaries on optical laws and physical and psychological responses, co his­ torical and sociological contextualizations and semantic and metaphysical speculations. Due to more recent developments in light art, this discourse has gained precision and conquered new areas, in particular virtual art. The qual­ ities of light and its generating of color, its self-creating power, and the special effects based on the autonomous structure of che medium itself have all been stressed. There is no doubt that both from a technical and an aesthetic point of view, laser and holographic art are an outcome of light art’s principal char­ acteristics. New theatrical aspects of light have been exploited in laser and holographic art, the quest for a new visual language has been continued, and the interplay between perception and illusion, between image and reality, has received new impetus and found a privileged place in present-day technolog­

ical and virtual arc. Although interaction between sensorial and intellectual elements, as well as the idea of participation between artist and the general public in many

countries, are present in computer and holographic Art, it is in the commu­

nication arcs, artistically oriented networks, and certain eco-technological works and performances that interactivity finds its purest expression. Some communication artists rely on light insofar as they employ telemat­

ics, the new electronic technology derived from the convergence of comput­ ers and telecommunication systems, and in particular the central faculty of the video system with its ability co facilitate interaction via the electronic

space of computer memory, beyond the normal constraints of time and space chat apply to face-to-face communication. This is the case with pioneers Jacques Polieri, Kit Galloway, and Sherrie Rabinowitz, and more recently

Roy Ascott and Fred Forest, two communication artists of quite different

orientations. Jacques Polieri, whose Video Communication Games, installed at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, was an early example of an electronic interactive

installation using multiple television monitors and giant video screens,

showed his simultaneous interactive video-transmission Men, Images, Machines

in 1983- It involved a satellite relay between Tokyo, Cannes, and New York,

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

and was projected on giant television screens in front of two thousand spec­ tators, permitting them to see immediately the most recent Japanese and U.S. productions exploring the two complementary areas of robotics and digital imagery. In 1977, Kit Galloway and Rabinowitz, who form the Mobile Image Group, produced a remarkable interactive composite-image satellite dance, before devising in 1984 the Electronic Cafe, a project that combined six cul­ turally distinct communities within Los Angeles in a telecommunications image bank and database network. Both Ascott and Forest have developed communication art right up to the

latest technical and aesthetic stages of virtual art. Their itineraries will be dis­

cussed at some length in the next chapter. I should add that a number of artists now engaged in the latest forms of networking art, discussed in chapter 6 of this book, are still utilizing lumi­ nous devices in order to communicate their aesthetic results. In fact, a rich and varied field of experience and practice exists at present in art and communication technology, and the introduction of integratedsystem digital networks has created unparalleled venues for interaction, com­ bining elements of text, image, and sound in which the presence of light is still required.

To Otto Piene’s early preoccupation with light vibration, an added envi­ ronmental concern became apparent when he produced his first large-scale outdoor sculpture, Light Line Experiment. In order to create environments and

at the same time enter as far as possible into Earth's atmosphere and even beyond, Piene chose to work with different technologically operated devices.

These range from kinetic sculptures to programmed light installations, laser light projections and scanning, computer processing, holography, and

telecommunications. At the multitechnological event Centerbeam in which Piene participated as both an artist and an organizer, his Milwaukee Anemone

was flanked by laser projections on steam by Paul Earls and Joan Brigham as well as holograms by Harriet Casdin-Silver. Piene’s preoccupation with the

natural elements—earth, air, fire, and water—led to the vast events organized by him under the label of sky art conferences. The performances associated with his sky opera Icarus > produced with Earls, involved the use of techno­

logical media to explore the correspondence between indoor and outdoor space. Light played an important part in this context since video made it pos­ sible for the outdoor production of Icarus to be experienced indoors, the limited space of the video screen substituting for the expanse of real and

Chapter 1

environmental space. Lasers and various light projections were used to suggest sky, sun, and other large-scale natural phenomena lying beyond the confines of traditional theatrical space. This electronic transformation reduced the dimensions of the actual event, but increased the potential size of the viewing audience. Piene’s deep implication in sky art can be gathered from his view that technology helps to distribute and connect natural phenomena, while artists keep it from dulling the senses and numbing the imagination. In a context where light still plays a crucial role, vision and other sensory and mental faculties can draw them all together—the limitations of humans, the grandness of nature, and the most refined and far-reaching technology inspired by science. Jurgen Claus, another artist, teacher, writer, and organizer, after exploring the elements of earth and water, turned his attention to the relationship between water and light, particularly by creating solar energy sculptures using photoelectric cells. This eco-technology was intended to take us into the solar age. I will return to Claus’s eco-technological itinerary in the next chapter. As we shall see, a preoccupation with light is also often present in the most

recent artistic interactive expressions concerned with artificial life. Can one predict the coming developments within modern light arc? There is no doubt that the future exploration of light by artists—technically, scien­ tifically, and aesthetically—has enormous potential. As technology advances at high speed in both its numerical and sensorial innovations, artists are eager

to keep pace. Among the many interactions between physical, psychological, and aesthetic phenomena, the scientific fact that light possesses a singular quality (since photons do not possess antiphotons, while all ocher particles possess cheir antiparticles) could incite artists co exploit still more the speci­

ficity of light energy. As to the vast aesthetic possibilities for luminous phe­

nomena co be further explored by artists, let me mention light’s physical characteristics of speed, duration, and rhythm; its spectacular and environ­

mental qualities; its semiotic, cosmological, religious, and spiritual connota­

tions; its lyricism; its immateriality; and its propensity to induce an expanded consciousness in the onlooker, a preliminary to entering into the process of

creative interactivity. Spectator Participation

In order to illustrate another important source of technological and virtual art, spectator participation, already present in the happenings and the kinetic

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

art of the 1950s and 1960s, and which is now known under the enlarged heading of interactivity, let me describe in some detail the itinerary of Yaacov Agam. He is one of those artists who attempt to reconcile two apparently con­ tradictory terms: scientific or technological progress with the biological and spiritual survival of humankind. This artist played a historic role as a pioneer of the kinetic art trend in the early 1950s when he introduced the fourth dimension, time, into his works at a moment when the artistic environment was still dominated by pictorial two-dimensional statements. But Agam is also especially interesting in this context because he has never given up exper­ imenting with diverse means—including those offered by all the advanced technologies. Defining Agam’s personality in just a few words is not easy. At first sight he appears narcissistic. Yet one can also see Agam’s desire throughout his career to deeply implicate the public in his works. His Hebrew spirituality contradicts his enthusiasm for the constructivist­

abstract, rationalist, social, and universalist ideas and practices of the Bauhaus masters. It is true that among the masters there were a few mystical person­ alities, such as Johannes Itten, who was in fact one of Agam’s teachers before his arrival in Paris. The key to Agam’s art, it seems to me, is in his determination co transcend

two types of opposition: on the one hand, between the individual and society, and on the other, between spiritualism and rationalism, or indeed, between metaphysics and rational logic.

To reconcile his metaphysical and rational penchants, Agam practices what I would call the perceptible absence of the image in his work. This inspired

procedure is, of course, to be joined with the artist’s determination to conform to the Bible’s teachings and especially the second commandment, which prohibits the idolatry of graven images. Moreover, Agam draws some of his inspiration from the Kabbalah—whose teaching sees the invisible in che

visible, the spiritual in the corporeal, and the reflection of the unknowable God in everything—and probably che Talmud—che reading of which is essentially an experience chat transcends che limits of logical and rational thought.

As co the opposition of individual and society (does the artist create for the public or only follow one’s own creative urge?), it is at the heart of the new

relationship between public participation and the artist’s responsibility. This relationship began with kinetics, and continues in telecommunications art and

Chapter 1

computer art—developments that have been followed by Agam in most of his artistic production. With Agam, we might wonder whether this participation is calculated by the artist—which would give a limited choice to the spectator—or if, on the contrary, the notion of participation resides in the equality of two sensibili­ ties: that of the artist, and that of the spectator. Is this invitation to partici­ pate a situation in which the spectator reinvents art? Does it incite spectators to become actors by both using all their senses ancTconsidering several tem­ poral and dramatic factors? Or is it meant for the spectator to experience freedom? (figure 1.6). To my mind, the last of these hypotheses seems the most pertinent.

Agam has applied his aesthetic-religious approach for more than forty years through polymorphic paintings, play objects, transformable sculptures, video­ graphic and holographic works, and finally, works with effective and multi­ directional movements—in order to try and create another reality made visible

by the works’ multiple metamorphoses—as well as through a series of mobile, graphic, and chromatic compositions of an abstract geometric style permu­ tated by computer and simultaneously broadcast on sixteen video monitors.

In one of these series, the artist tries to test the spectator’s visual capacities and to have the viewer discover the entire recent past of optical art and kinetic art by demonstrating the essential difference between the two in so far as the latter introduces the fourth dimension, time, into the artistic universe. But in these multidimensional works, Agam tends to go frankly beyond the visible into what can be considered a fifth, unifying dimension-—the dimension of constant change and the perpetual flux of reality.

How did Agam arrive at these expressions of highly advanced technolog­ ical art? In order to answer this question one has to bear in mind chat the intro­

duction of advanced technology in Agam’s arc is only a phase in his quesc for the absolute, co fulfill both his need for spirituality and his determination to

share the creative acc with the public. It is worth recalling that as early as 1967, he had produced works of a tech­ nical character with a metaphysical connotation, for which he coined the word “tele art.” For Agam, this arc is meant to give humans a supernatural experi­

ence, to allow them to create light through a word in the image of God. Fiat lux, or racher, a new combination of the Promethean myth and Jewish

mysticism.

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Figure 1.6

Yaacov Agam, Touch Me, 1990 onward. Sculpture.

But human beings are for Agam no abstraction. He sees the psychological reality of a person in the great number of possibilities that lie dormant in every human being. The only true task for an artist is therefore to make humans conscious of the physical forces that surround them. ThlS_Cons£iousness can only be achieved by liberating these forces through an aesthetic expe­ rience. This experience must be an active one, involving a combination of the human senses.

Chapter 1

Two remarkable works of tele art, Espace rythme “Que la lumiere soit” (1967) and Peinture rythmeepar la lumiere (1956-1967), were presented in 1967 at the Light and Movement exhibition at the Municipal Museum of Modern Art in Paris. In the former, Agam showed the light element entirely free from its relationship to extraneous objects or materials, utilizing the inner space of a sphere (ingeniously constructed by Pierre Faucheux, the exhibition’s archi­ tect), devoid of all objects or references. The sphere’s immaculately white, curved inner surface was ready to receive and return all energies, especially light and sound. The ideal conditions for Agam’s revolutionary aims were thus provided: he no longer wanted to produce art objects, but to liberate the aes­ thetic forces in humans by an audiovisual statement withoutintermediaries. On the level of artistic research, there is an evident continuity between the artist’s earlier work and the technically developed tele art works. Previously, Agam’s aim had been to show the simultaneity of happenings by making an appeal to the spectator’s bodily movement. Agam, like Marshall McLuhan and John Cage, is aware that “everything happens at once.” Stress can be laid on the relationships between the different coordinates. The special nature of time can thus be demonstrated; it can be discovered by the spectator moving in front of one’s own many-faced “polymorphic” pictures. Similarly in Agam’s tele art works, and in a way also in his multidirectional and multidimensional works later, the all-important life-giving element of light becomes noticeable through the spectator’s action and perceptive awareness. In Espace rythme, as soon as the action ceases, the spectator is plunged into darkness. Only the manifestations of the spectator’s own energy transformed into sound will make the light visible in purified space. In fact, one does not even see the light— at least what Agam calls “figurative light.” Agam’s light surrounds the spec­ tator, allowing the viewer to discover the sensation of pure light through a chromatic light modulation. By isolating the phenomenon of the modulation of pure chromatic light, Agam engenders the spiritual “forms” he is seeking. In his tele art, as in his later series of multidirectional and multidimensional works, a new aspect of form is revealed by following the different rhythms of the modulation of light. While pure light was thus used for the first time in Agam’s tele art as a medium for direct visual communication, in his later works the relationships between light and color were developed to a high degree. Agam’s tele art works anticipated many other ulterior realizations in elec­ tronic art. They were already a demonstration of how modern technological

means could be employed in what can be described as an artistico-scientificotechnological cour de force. In Espace rythmt, for example, microphones and architectural devices backed up simple electrical appliances, whereas in Pein­ lure rylbmtepar la lumiere complicated electronic circuits, mechanical elements rotating at high speed, and rapidly flashing lights with stroboscopic effects

entered into action. But in order to understand how this pioneer of kinetic art managed to influence those artists who made the passage from the mechanical to the elec­ tronic era in art possible and established modern technological art as a phe­ nomenon with an identity of its own, one also has to take into account the creation of works by Agam in other branches of modern technological art such as holographic, communications, video, and computer art as well as in the combination of the latter two. Some of these works are important steppingstones both in the establishment of modern technological art and Agam’s itinerary from his kinetic origins to his multidimensional, technological

achievements. Agam’s contribution to the development of communication art and indeed

virtual art must be understood in the sense that at a certain stage a spectac­ ular mutation was produced by the passage from spectator participation to interactivity between the artist and the general public—and this has found pure expression in the communications arts. Participation in Agam’s works, as we have seen, plays a leading role. Agam is interested in sharing his knowl­ edge and experience with others and holds that the artist’s research is by no

means a private area of development, which must be guarded against the intrusion of the outside world. He instituted a course at the Carpenter Center

of the Visual Arts at Harvard University called “Advanced Exploration in Visual Communication.” His students came from the sciences as well as the artsT^ncThone^oFtEem'had any specialized knowledge of contemporary art. Agam was therefore concerned to establish a common language for visual com­

munication that would transcend all the divergent methods of viewing the world.

But in order to go beyond the visible and the perception of definite forms, Agam constantly employed the perceptible absence of images in vanishing

and recurring physical structures, and their different phases are always marked by a conscious act, a creative participation of the public. At the time of Agam’s polyphonic pictures, structural intervals as in music

corresponded to the spectator's movement, which became a constituent

Chapter 1

element of the work of art as it was perceived in space. Its different phases— it will be punctuated, lengthened, shortened, raised, or lowered as the spec­ tator proceeds—are the various states of the image. Recently, in his multidimensional painting-sculptures—multicylindrical works turning simultaneously backward and forward at different speeds— Agam has gone beyond the time dimension. In his Super Polyimages and his Galaxies and Super Galaxies, the perceptual absence of images is noticeable in the fifth dimension, in which we can get a glimpse of its multimorphism, multichromatism, multidirectionality, and multirhythmicality: the spectator is no longer in the presence of a single entity, a single rhythm, but can now perceive many related changes, comparable to listening to an orchestra versus a single instrument. Thus, Agam has obtained in many ways and on several levels interactivity between the artist and the work, and between the work and the spectator.

It must be stressed that the environmental scale has played a critical role at different moments of Agam’s artistic evolution. In his earlier works, such as Double Metamorphosis, the spectator discovered a multiplicity

of combinations while changing positions in front of the work, while in his later works, such as Agam Space (at the Forum Leverkusen) or the Salon

Agam (installed for a time at the Presidential Elysee Palace in Paris), the same characteristics were applied in an environmental context. Agam reached another stage when he introduced into this research the latest technological achievements, as in his large-scale fire-water fountains, which have proved co be a fascinating experience for a large number of people. The one installed in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square consists of a huge sculpture (3.4 meters

high, 6.3 meters in diameter, and 5 tons in weight) placed in a reflecting pool of water (12 meters in diameter). A computer activates the fountain

by synchronizing the rotation of the wheels (covered with a polymorphic

painting that changes chromatically) and the movement of fire and water with the music. At particular moments (in tune with the music), fire spurts

forth amid the water. Here the fifth, unifying dimension is noticeable (figure 1.7). In his technically advanced works like Visual Music that incorporate recent computer technology, Agam is pursuing a similar aesthetic. These works are animated visual creations that open up new horizons: the observer is invited

to participate in going beyond the common experience of time, space, and the environment as the images, which change and evolve unceasingly, are revealed.

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

The sixteen screens of these works receive independent images, comparable to

the instruments of an orchestra; they are all synchronized in a visual sym­

phonic concert, with the computer as conductor. Let me cite another example of an artist passing from the mechanical to

the electronic era in relation to the question of spectator participation. As a

founding member of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel de Paris, Yvaral

was perhaps the one who most constantly put the accent on the scientific and

artistic exploration of visual phenomena as well as the physical participation

of the spectator—one of the principal themes of the group. Whereas several members of the group introduced physical movement into their propositions,

Yvaral stressed virtual movement and the spectator’s perception and cogni­ tion, thereby making him a forerunner of certain virtual artists concerned with the same issues.

Chapter 1

Ac an early stage in his work, Yvaral was exploiting psychophysiological illusions involving line interference, such as the moire effect (which is obtained by placing two grids of wire mesh in conjunction and thus allow­ ing the formation of fringe patterns similar to those seen in moire silk), the effect of dazzle, and the play of conflicting interpretations in black and white as well as optical illusions relating to volume, such as the exploration of dif­ ferent angles of viewing and the superimposition of elements in real space. In his mobile cubes, for instance, the delicate interference effects created by black lines and translucent materials is particularly arresting. Yvaral’s early experi­ ence with the visual properties of materials such as Perspex, india rubber, and vinyl thread began by relating these materials to the formal problems of super­ imposition, displacement, and acceleration. His subsequent work branched out into the use of transparencies, cubes, moire effects, structures, and games that involved sensations of instability in the spectator when confronted with

networks of black and white in “optical acceleration.” From the 1970s onward, his chromatic experiences attained environmental scale. A number of monu­ mental optical works were accomplished in France such as the polychromatic square with colored flagstones at Canet in the province of Roussillon (1987), the polychrome murals of the facades of the town hall in Seyne-sur-Mer (1988) and the Liberty Building in Narbonne (1989)—all conceived and executed in collaboration with his father, Victor Vasarely. On the other hand, the largescale mural painting Saint Vincent de Paid at 105 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis

in Paris (1988) and the mobile polychrome sculpture Structure octa-tetra at the

agora of the French Telecommunications Company in Sophia Antipolis in southern France (1992) are his independent personal achievements. In the latter half of the 1970s, Yvaral took an important step forward when

he managed to create a link from his early optical research and interest in science as a model for artistic creation with a subtle use of the computer for the mathematical programming of a pictorial surface-. For a long time, Yvaral had been impressed by images of repetition in the

area of crystallography. By placing clusters of atoms side by side, one can grasp the difficult notion of infinity in its essence. Yvaral has built his work with

the computer around this observation associated with the notion and the prac­ tice of the series, a term borrowed from mathematics. The idea of repetition,

that of infinitesimal change within a repetitious context, as well as conver­ gence (when allied to a visual demonstration) lead to the possibility of access

to the troubling notion of infinity.

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

One of Yvaral’s series of computer graphic paintings, Synthetized Mona Lisa (1989), is comprised of twelve visual studies based on a numerical analysis that breaks down an image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa into measurable elements. The strictly geometric structures of these studies makes possible not only the reconstitution of the original image but also the construction of a different image, a different face, with the same elements (figure 1.8). For Yvaral, any whole form can be considered a geometric combination of ele­

♦♦♦

ll 1

•Y \\

Figure 1.8

Yvaral, Mona Lisa Synth^tisee, 1989.

Chapter 1

mentary units available for reconstruction, and it is in the systematic exploita­ tion of this field that the artist hoped to create visual phenomena in which figuration and abstraction are no longer in opposition. Other series consist in numerized variations incorporating the portraits of such different personalities as Salvador Dali, Simon Bolivar, and Blaise Pascal. In all these works the artist tries to establish, with the aid of the computer, a digital art based on his previous research of a geometric vocabulary and his desire co codify, recurrent visual phenomena. In other words, in these series, Yvaral has tried to visualize exhaustively all the details of an essential cultural image while also attempting to illustrate the new formula for the manipulation of an image in a time of advanced technology. A good example of how the passage from the participation of the specta­

tor to a true interactivity is favored the computer and the Internet can be dis­ cerned in the activities of Carlos Cruz-Diez. Starting in the mid-1950s, this Venezuelan artist was installing manipulable works in the street followed by a series of realizations that aimed at the aleatory and the ephemerous by cre­ ating situations in constant mutation that allowed for the perception of dif­

ferent aspects of the chromatic world. In changing the manipulable support to a digital one, Cruz-Diez managed co increase the possibilities of communication. In a work like Experience cbromatique aUatoire interactive^ conceived for and assisted by computers, the public enters into the spirit and the intimacy of the artist’s research, like an inter­

preter approaching a musical score (figure 1.9). With a similar idea in mind, Cruz-Diez has created an exhibition titled

From Participation co Interactivity—featuring his works from 1954 to 2003—that can be transmitted by the Internet to any location, and then

installed there without the usual costs for packing, transportation, and insurance. Environmental Artistic Commitments

In terms of the global involvement of an artist in the issues of the day, the itinerary followed by Gustav Metzger seems extremely relevant to the exis­ tential commitments of a good number of contemporary virtual artists. It

would be rewarding co scudy in more detail elsewhere the relationship among psychological, social, technical, and aesthetic factors in Metzger’s career. But let me single out a few aspects of this itinerary here. On the

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Carlos Cruz-Diez, Experience chromatique ateatoire interactive (.interactive Random Chromatic Experience), 1995.

Figure 1.9

psychological side, one should never forget chat as a stateless exile, Meczger has developed a particular sensitivity to the dangers that threaten the

individual in this world, but at the same time, this has also created in him a special awareness of the dangers that threaten the community and the world as a whole.

These preoccupations can be discerned at those different stages in his career where the relationship between aesthetic and technical factors have found sig­

nificant expressions and manifestations.

Already at the beginning of the 1960s, in his demonstrations of autode­

structive (and autocreative) art, when he was painting in acid on nylon screens, Metzger considered that the tension of forms in transformation acting directly

on parts of the body could lead co feelings of liberation and intense pleasure. Yet by setting up large-scale, industrially produced sculptures in a process of

disintegration, autodescructive art, through the aesthetic of revulsion, could lead people co a rejeccion of many aspects of our civilization.

Chapter 1

Similarly, in his chemical demonstrations in the mid-1960s, when he pro­ jected images of liquid crystals undergoing a form of perpetual transforma­ tion induced by heat, Metzger’s intention was to create a tension between his autocreative art of change, growth, and movement and autodestructive decay as natural forces run their course. In these dramatic performances, Metzger was demonstrating the color changes of chemicals and trying to get close to the transformation processes of nature with the aid of his liquid crystals placed between polarized screens. By heating them and letting them cool, he was able to project a constantly changing imaging of translucent color as the chemical broke down. In the 1970s, while lecturing on the ethics and aesthetics of the art/science/technology link, he conceived a commentary on the pollution problem. First he presented an adapted car, the Mobbile., whose exhaust led into a plastic box on top of it, during part of the Kinetics exhibition held in

London in 1970. Two years later, his project KARBA 1970—1972, prepared for the Documenta 5 exhibition in Kassel, Germany, consisted of a large clear plastic tube into which four cars were to discharge their exhaust fumes during the duration of the manifestation. Metzger’s main concern with the sociological implications of androids and the computer, and generally with the social implications involved in both science and art, were all noticeable in The Button, which he prepared for the

Electra exhibition in Paris in 1983- This complex, high-tech, multimedia environment with spectator participation addressed the strategy of mutually assured destruction. By alluding to the controversy surrounding atomic

weapons and trying to involve the museum visitor as much as possible in this problem, Metzger expressed the opinion that it was the art world’s duty to

engage in this kind of discussion. In the 1990s, Metzger was increasingly involved in the battle for the pro­ tection of nature. He had been concerned about this problem ever since 1964, when he produced his manifesto on random activity in material/transforming works of art. In it, he observed that nature was in constant motion, that mate­ rial/transforming art showed this motion objectified to a maximum, and that

the artist stands in a new relation to nature. Already at the beginning of the

1990s, Metzger took up a particularly strong position with regard to what he

called damaged nature. He held that the notion of the environment, as employed by industrialists and politicians, was misleading, and represented

a smoke screen in order to maintain profits and power. In this context, the

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

environment was used to obscure the fact that nature, a symbol for continu­ ity and permanence, was both necessary to our well-being and our memory. In fact, Metzger makes a clear distinction not only between human-made and natural environments but also between the environment, nature, and human nature. He is always conscious that human-made technology can be used to either destroy nature or further human endeavors such as artistic cre­ ativity. Metzger remarks that even though Earth is overrun with waste and poison, the information explosion has occurred and the personal computer has been launched. His theoretical position in 1995, based on his considerations of autodestructive art, but also his commitment co autocreative art, was that thousands of new techniques could be developed in the autocreative arc of the future. He stated that the biological sciences, bioengineering, and various rev­ olutionary forms of technology, then in their initial stage, were important for this art. To illustrate this, Metzger produced in 1992 an earth minus envi­ ronment manifestation and recommended Santiago Calatrara’s project for the unfinished Church of St. John the Divine in New York—an artistic project

that intended to complete this building with the creation of a glass roof with a “bioshelter” for about forty living trees. Metzger, with his courageous commitment to the protection of nature and

his interest in all technological developments, remains an outstanding ecotechnological artist at a moment when virtual arc, with its emphasis on tech­ nique in service of humanity, represents a new departure. Jean Tinguely can be considered both a continuator of Francis Picabia’s

machine aesthetic and a forerunner of robotic art, telerobotics, and telepistemology as well as a commentator on the relationship between human and machine intelligence. A good number of these developments can be detected

in Tinguely’s works of the autodestructive period. For Tinguely, the machine incarnated human intelligence, and both the machine’s beauty and its capac­ ity for movement help explain its attraction for him. Thus, we can expect that the metamorphoses of the machine will bring about a corresponding dynamic

effect in a spectacle that reaches the “summit of absurdity” through its own intrinsic logic. Tinguely created machines that work for nothing and subse­ quently have to destroy themselves. He avoided the pitfail of protesting

against an existing—and therefore acceptable—situation, in which the sym­ bolism would be no more than photographic. In effect, he succeeded in making such demonstrations a kind of mirror on the absurdity of the social

and psychological situation—but at the same time, he contrived to show the

Chapter 1

absurdity of the absurdity, and led us out through manifestations concerned with truth and liberty. Tinguely’s influence can be explicitly recognized in the works of such con­ temporary virtual artists as Ken Goldberg and his The Robot in the Garden as well as Jean-Paul Longavesne and his large networking painting machines. After having described in some detail the personalities and itineraries of pioneering artists who could have had an influence on present-day techno­ logical and virtual artists from the point of view of kinetic and light phe­ nomena, participation or interactivity of the spectator, or social and environmental commitments, let me single out an artist who could also be considered a model of this kind, but also from the angle of the relationship between art and science. Frank Malina was born in Brenham, Texas, and grew up in a household devoted to music. In 1920, when he was only seven years old, his father took the family back to Czechoslovakia, and stayed on in Moravia for five years. Malina went to school there, but he was already passionately interested in

drawing as well as stories involving balloons and aircraft. He read Jules Verne’s Voyage to the Moon in Czech, and this story remained at the back of his mind.

(Forty years later, in I960, he proposed to the International Academy of Astro­ nautics in Stockholm, that a committee be established to prepare a staffed

research laboratory on the moon for the use of all nations.) When he returned to the United States in 1925, he covered his room with pictures of his per­ sonal heroes at the time: Benjamin Franklin and Charles Lindbergh. Perhaps prepared by his regular reading of popular mechanics and science magazines,

or more ambitious literature such as Automobile Boys or Tom Swift—both full

of technical stories that are nowadays amalgamated into science fiction— Malina decided to become an engineer. He completed a BS in 1934, and

received a scholarship for graduate studies at the California Institute of Tech­

nology at Pasadena, earning a considerable portion of his expenses there by illustrating technical books. When he met Theodore von Karman, the eminent aeronautics theoretician, in 1936 at the institute, he was asked to

prepare illustrations for Karman and Maurice A. Biot’s book Mathematical Methods in Engineering. Thus, the foundation for Malina’s double personality as a scientist and an

artist was laid during his childhood. His scientific personality can best be

understood by looking at his main activities in the fields of engineering and natural science: rocket propulsion, astronautics, and geophysics. As a matter

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

of fact, he designed and launched America’s first successful high-altitude rocket in 1$M5. His artistic personality can be characterized not only by his constant introduction of scientific observations and theories into his artistic experiments but also by his attempts to grapple with problems and relation­ ships such as those between figurative and abstract art, daylight and artificial light, virtual and real movement, as geometric, surrealist, and realist subject matter. Malina’s artistic venture involved a long period of incubation and then a struggle for ideas, culminating around 1953 in a break from the traditional two-dimensional medium. This was followed by a series of experiments in tension, transparency, electric light, and movement, all of which were intro­ duced at certain intervals in his work. Malina often conducted parallel research

in the different media and systems that he had elaborated, however. Apart from the choice in form of artificial light and its many possibilities,

including movement, Malina’s electro-painting period was an experimental phase that taught him a considerable amount about the transparency of color and use of translucid surfaces.

The result, as mentioned earlier, was his four-component system, which he

named lumidyne, from 1956 onward, he produced the main body of his work with this system. The four parts of this system are lights, motor-driven movable elements (motors), a transparent plate (a stator), and a translucent diffusing screen. For the illumination, Malina essentially used fluorescent tubes and incandescent lights mounted on a backboard. The main features of the lumidyne system are the judicious combination of the four elements

forming the artwork, the spacing between these elements (which could become the essential factor in the final composition), and the fact that with a nominal power input, these narrow boxes can still be hung on a wall (or if murals, worked into the wall).

The subject matter of the pictures from this period was still dominated by the unseeable scientific world. But equal importance was now placed on color

and color transformations through various light sources, resulting in a variety

of movements with multiple aesthetic intentions (figure 1.10).

Although Malina still made pictures with the lumidyne system, his ulte­ rior visual researches were mainly concerned with the reflection of light. His

newly developed reflectodyne system had considerably changed his artistic

attitude. The fact that he was no longer employing paint on static or rotat­

ing surfaces, but that a surprising variety of forms was almost spontaneously

Chapter 1

Frank Malina, The Cosmos, 1965. Kinetic mural, lumidyne system, for Pergamon Press (Oxford, UK, 1965). Figure 1.10

created and then had to be controlled and directed by the artist, had changed the order of creation, recontextualizing such important problems as the rela­

tionship between the subject matter and its formal expression. Previously, Malina started out with a definite visual and emotional experience, so that he

could speak without difficulty of a picture’s subject matter and unhesitatingly give it a title. Now, he was faced with a welter of forms that took on their subject matter slowly, and the title for a refiectodyne picture could only be found at the conclusion of this creative process.

On a purely technical level, the new refiectodyne system was composed

of four elements: a light source, a color wheel, reflecting surfaces, and a

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

diffusing screen. But this system also opened up other possibilities because music and sound could easily be integrated into this type of picture. Malina also invented the polardyne system—where polarizing sheets were used to cause color changes in images—as well as an audio-kinetic system— where the motion of the disks was coupled with microphones that picked up ambient sound. Even with the most modern inventions of the time—such as perfected pho­ toelectric cells, cathode-ray tubes, and other devices used in television and cybernetics—a considerable number of experiences would have been necessary before an aesthetically interesting blending of sound structure elements such as frequency (or amplitude), intensity, overtone structure, and “envelope”

(namely, growth, duration, and decay) with visual elements such as color sat­ uration, light intensity and frequency, lines, and outlines (forms) could have been achieved, and the problem of parallel composition really envisaged.

Despite Malina’s foresight, it would take another generation of artists and

engineers to arrive at satisfactory developments in this field. Technical Sources (such as Engineering and Inventions)

Turning now to the purely technical sources of technological, multimedia, or

virtual art, Randall Packer and Ken Jordan’s 2001 book Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality is particularly helpful.3 Packer and Jordan study the

careers of the pioneers of multimedia art and the birth of the new medium in a remarkably thorough way, and collect a good number of significant texts by these pioneers under the headings of integration, interactivity, hypermedia, immersion, and narrativity. For them, integration is the combining of artis­

tic forms and technology into a hybrid form of expression; and interactivity

can be interpreted as the user’s ability to manipulate and affect one’s experi­

ence of media directly, and to communicate with others through media. The hypermedia are for these authors the linking of separate media elements to one another to create a trail of personal association; immersion is the experi­

ence of entering into the simulation or suggestion of a three-dimensional envi­ ronment: and narrativity concerns the aesthetic and formal strategies that derive from the above concepts, which result in nonlinear story forms and media presentations. For Packer and Jordan, the concept of integrated, interactive media has a

long history—an evolution that extends for more than 150 years. It runs from

Chapter 1

Richard Wagner to Ivan Sutherland, the inventor of the Sketchpad (1965), one of the first versions of intergraphics software; from Vannevar Bush, the inventor of a mechanical device, a differential analyzer, the Memex, to Bill Viola. In 1939, Bush had already produced some ideas for a personal com­ puter, and he determined the chief characteristics of multimedia in 1945. In Packer and Jordan’s book, an allusion is also made to Norbert Wiener and his groundbreaking theory of cybernetics. Other outstanding nonartistic person­ alities—inventors of decisive engineering advances—discussed in this book, which also contains extracts of their thought, are J. C. R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, Marc Canter, and Tim Berners-Lee. An MIT professor and computer scientist, Licklider treated the computer as a creative collaborator; Engelbart helped augment human intellect through the ideas of bitmapping, windows, and direct manipulation through a mouse; and in the 1970s, Kay laid the foundation for the future architecture of information, and

with his dynabook, digital multimedia came into being and the personal com­ puter was born. As for the philosopher Nelson, he invented an elaborate system (XANADU) for the sharing of information across computer networks and his hyperlinks connected discrete texts in nonlinear sequences (hyper­ texts), thereby challenging linear narrative. Canter invented the first com­

mercial multimedia authoring system of closed systems, the CD-ROM, and interactive installations, open systems using a computer network; in 1989, Berners-Lee, a British engineer, invented the World Wide Web, which became

an international phenomenon, a global media database, just five years later. Other Sources (such as Science and Linguistics)

Stephen Wilson’s comprehensive 2002 book Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology is an outstanding survey of the scientific sources of technological and virtual art.4 Here, one can find references to biology,

animals and plants, ecology, medicine, and the body as well as examples of artists working with microbiology. Sources in physics, nonlinear systems, nan­ otechnology, materials science, geology, astronomy, space science, global posi­

tioning systems, and cosmology are mentioned with respect co artists inspired by these domains. Ocher sources such as mathematics, algorithms, fractals,

genetic art, and artificial life are also treated in Wilson’s book, along with many aspects of telecommunications, sound installations, robots, and digital

information systems including computers. This book is not only a panorama

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

of artistic concerns with historical and topical scientific and technological matters but also offers exceptional insights into the aesthetic options of the many artists discussed here by an author who is an artist himself. There are, of course, a vast number of other possible scientific and cultural domains as secondary sources for technological and virtual art. Some of them will appear in the following chapters when I discuss the itineraries of artists whose work leads from the mechanical to the electronic era, and even more so in my detailed analysis of the work, aesthetic options, and personal com­ mitments of the artists engaged in the passage from technological to virtual art as well as contemporary virtual art itself.

Chapter 1

□ Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

In this chapter, I emphasize the various itineraries followed by technological artists insofar as they serve as models or references for the demarche of the artists practicing virtuality. I examine some of these itineraries from both an aesthetic and a technical point of view, following an order that differentiates laser art, holographic art, and eco-technological art, buc above all stresses the

importance of computer art and telecommunications art for the establishment of a virtual art. Although video art has a crucial history and development, as does cinema and electronic music, I shall not deal with them in this and the following chapters except for some allusions in the text and the bibliography, since these areas have been or are now autonomous. Laser Art

The first of these itineraries is devoted to Dani Karavan, who I mentioned earlier. He is an environmental artist who creates on-sice sculptures and

installations with various traditional but also modern means, such as the laser beam. Karavan was born in 1930 in Tel Aviv, where his father was a town engi­

neer and planner. As a result, the Israeli sculptor spent his entire childhood on a constantly evolving site, and the conquest by the town of the desert is a

phenomenon that marked this artist’s imagination and sensibilities forever.

After his art training in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Karavan went to Florence in 1956 to study fresco techniques. Back in Israel in 1957, he integrated

bidimensional murals into architecture. In 1963, Karavan opened a new chapter in his work with a minimalist and conceptualist sculpture of monu­ mental and symbolic bent, titled Monument of Life. It was done near Beersheba in the Negev desert. Karavan’s environmental installations are generally constructed with the aid of such traditional sculptural materials as wood, stone, or white concrete, but also with natural elements such as grass, olive and cypress trees, water,

wind, and sunlight. The laser was introduced to Karavan’s artistic repertoire toward the end of the 1970s, but he had already become familiar with the technique and its aes­ thetic possibilities when he collaborated with the Czech scenographer Josef Svoboda, and also during his research at MIT in Cambridge and the Weizmann Institute in Israel. The laser became a prominent part of his work in 1978 at a spectacular demonstration titled A Tribute to Galileo. In this work,

a powerful laser symbolically joins Sangallo’s Belvedere Fort in Florence’s

suburbs to the cupola of Brunelleschi’s Duomo (figure 2.1). In 1983, Karavan executed another environmental work, The Bridge., which linked the left and

right banks of the Neckar River with a laser beam extending between the

castle standing over the town of Heidelberg and the trail on the other side known as the Philosopher’s Walk. That same year at the Electra exhibition in Paris, he used two vivid-green laser beams to join the city’s Museum of Modern Art, where the exhibition was being held, with the nearby Eiffel Tower and the district known as La Defense to try to make tangible the relationship between historical and modern events, as well as architectural and technological creations, and especially to illustrate the mutation of the

mechanical era into that of electronics. More recently, Karavan, ever faithful to the introduction of the laser in combination with more traditional sculptural and environmental materials,

has been developing an urban project in the new town of Cergy-Pontoise near

Paris. A laser beam follows the town’s main street as both a directional sign­ post and a decorative element. But it is meant to be projected much further in order to symbolically link Cergy-Pontoise with one of the leading districts

of Paris, the Etoile, without forgetting the historical monuments, like Versailles, along the way. To better understand not only Karavan’s artistic commitments but also his

sociopsychological intentions, it is helpful to refer to Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theories. For Adorno (and up to a certain point, also for Karavan),

Chapter 2

^ w,,,|riBir,w' l x u wirsswisrpr .... '•^.4^ llwwrR||W

Dani Karavan, A Tribute to Galileo, 1978. Laser display in Florence, Italy. Photo by Peter Szmuk. Figure 2.1

arc is neither a reflection of reality nor an aspect of ideology, as various dog­ matists would have it. It is a witness to history—that is, accumulated expe­

riences and suffering—as well as a place of desire. Aesthetics is therefore the ferment and promise of a free world. Karavan’s urban environment in Nurem­ berg, Way of Human Rights (1993), bears witness to this. From the beginning of his artistic career, Karavan’s socioaesthetic position has never wavered. His attempts to conquer space are linked to a veritable sol­

idarity with his fellow citizens. His research has always leaned toward socially oriented urban planning. This has enabled him to be accepted as both an artist

and an individual without ever distancing himself from his immediate encourage or those he works with when carrying out projects in other countries.

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

Karavan is an artist who combines an exceptional awareness of the physi­ cal and psychological implications related ro the history and geography of a site. The introduction of advanced technology in his work not only represents a possible transcending of human limits but testifies to a firm determination on his part to be of his time by assuming the implications of cultural and

political circumstances. Karavan is a good example of an artist whose penchant for utopian issues

is compensated for by a social and aesthetic commitment hie et nunc. Holographic Art

The relationship between virtual art and holographic art has been much neglected. Indeed, I think that virtual art can neither be limited to digital and computer art, nor to a narrow definition of information art. Virtual art is in reality a larger development of technological art in which a good number of holographic art elements along with attitudes adopted by holographic

artists, such as the virtualization of the third dimension and the way light is experienced, continue to play their part. For this reason, I will describe in some detail the itinerary followed by Margaret Benyon and Harriet Casdin-Silver. Margaret Benyon is one of the pioneers in the area of laser and holographic art. Her originality concerns both the technical and aesthetic aspects of holo­

graphic art.

In fact, Benyon has used a number of techniques such as laser-lit mono­ chromatic holograms, three-dimensional object holograms, reflection holo­

grams, and rainbow holograms for a multiplicity of purposes, with the aim of bridging the gap between high technology and ordinary human percep­ tion. She has utilized holography as a reminder of the immaterial dimensions

of the material world as well as a mass-communication medium for questioning and subverting stereotyped thinking, before making pulsed laser holograms of human beings themselves. At the beginning, the sole technique available to her as a female holo­

graphic artist working alone in Britain was the laser transmission hologram, which could only be exhibited with specialized light sources and in darkened

conditions (figure 2.2). Her early pieces continued her preoccupations as a

painter within holography, but she later used the unique aspects of the

Chapter 2

Figure 2.2

Margaret Benyon, Bird in Box, 1973. Laser transmission hologram.

medium to introduce unfamiliar notions about space, time-reversed imagery, and double exposures in which two solids seemed to share the same space. Benyon made “nonholograms” that showed motion invisible to the naked eye, “solid holes” and "three-dimensional silhouettes.” In 1972, she began to make holograms addressing societal dangers, which she saw arising from the

increased sophistication of holography and technology generally.

In the phase that followed in the mid-1970s, Benyon adopted an associa­ tive, cross-cultural, and even holistic approach catalyzed by holography. Her Cosmetic Series stems from the idea that the use of our bodies, painted for the

ritual of dance, is likely to have preceded cave painting as the first expression of human culture. The images of the Cosmetic Series adopt a form appropriate to the present day in making use of the pulsed hologram. The pulsed laser

“freezes" moving subjects for the duration of the holographic exposure and

enables the artist to make three-dimensional images of real people. Sometimes the laser beam has been used in the double-pulse mode. The dark and light

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

fringes that can be observed on the skin in Facial Codes (1985), for example, allows the viewer to directly see the pattern of outer and inner body move­ ments, in an interferometry of emotions. The images from the Female Cosmetic Series show faces of young women, painted to make themselves beautiful. These women collaborated in painting themselves with cosmetics used in pulsed holography to counteract the bleach­ ing and penetrative effects of ruby laser light. In a work such as Sophie (1986), a carefully registered painting is placed underneath the hologram so that both become fused into one image. The underlying idea for the Female

Cosmetic Series came from the “retouch,” the holographic image obtained through mixed media, and the series presents female stereotypes through col­ laboration, within the scenario of cosmetic beautification adopting an ironic attitude to kitsch and bad painting. For the Male Cosmetic Series, Benyon’s idea consisted in a search for male enhancement through use of paint. Beautifica­ tion was superseded by the author’s response to male authority, and a choice

was made to use authoritative male stereotypes such as the military man, the caveman, and the master artist. The portraits of Richard Hamilton illustrate the last of these stereotypes. Here, holograms show the stages of his involve­ ment in time with painting on a sheet of glass in front of his face. They allude

to his initial engagement, the changes made to the distribution of the paint, his use of the shadows it cast on his face, and the paint drying between exposures.

In both the Female Cosmetic Series and the Male Cosmetic Series, the ideas underpinning the portraits are cultural, sociopolitical, art historical, docu­

mentary, psychological, and personal. Cosmetic refers here also to the origi­

nal Greek when cosmos meant proportion, reason, and order. These works tend

to bridge the gap between the inner self and the outer world. In the female series, the artist tries to obtain a regeneration of herself through younger women, whereas in her male series she is trying to come to terms with male

authority. In both cases she tries to modify the ideological plan by outer, reallife issues such as gender and racial identity and social stereotyping.

Since the mid-1990s, Benyon has developed her Cornucopia Series in an

attempt to “naturalize” holography. The underlying notion is that everything in the world around us can be defined as natural, but we see some things as

more natural than others—say, trees and mountains as opposed to concrete and machines. Images of the former are seemingly less “made” by people. They are not seen as significant on their own, but when combined together in abun­

Chapter 2

dance they are intended to recontextualize the hologram as organic and easy to live with, rather than the product of an alien technology. Compared with the pictorial Cosmetic Series, the Cornucopia Series looks elegant and lively, but distant, ambient, and environmental. The holograms in this series are chosen for their sensuous appeal, to explore making the hologram comfortable to be around. With a sense of abundance, flowers, shells, and coral-like concrete appear to spill out of the darkness and push the edges of the frames. As Cornucopia suggests natural abundance, so Benyon’s Fem explores how some aspects of abundance—fertility, decoration, chaos, or lack of rational­ ity—have been viewed negatively and used to define female roles and charac­ teristics. In unpacking such biases, many contemporary women artists have emphasized the importance of links between personal, social, and political experiences so that women’s experiences can be understood and asserted. Benyon creates holograms that examine and attempt to bring together what may be seen as feminine and masculine characteristics. She uses technology, often stereotyped as hard and masculine, to make images that relate to female

concerns and perceptions of the world. In Cornucopia CaidiFlowers (1993), for example, an open-aperture film transmission hologram whose subject is a circle of flowers centered on a cauliflower, the premise is abundance and ful­ fillment. An efflorescent central floweriness is suggestive of female sexuality.

Chromatic dispersions abstract the image, except where it clusters around the image plane as white. The extraordinary technical variety and aesthetic richness of Benyon’s holo­

graphic work can best be appreciated when one discovers that she makes holo­ grams, rather than paintings, because they are a purer way of connecting with those early, preverbal memories that are experiences of light.

Harriet Casdin-Silver is another outstanding holographic artist whose

subject matter—the human body—is presented in relationship to social,

political, and gender issues. Although the intense use of the holographic tech­ nological medium is an essential element in Casdin-Silver’s artistic itinerary, her artistic and feminist commitment is its decisive feature.

Before discovering the aesthetic possibilities of holography in 1968, Casdin-Silver had been constructing stainless steel environments that incor­

porated sound, lighting effects, and participation from spectators, who entered

her installations draped in Mylar fabric, thereby blending, in both texture and color value, with the steel. In searching for lighting that was more sophisti­ cated, Casdin-Silver discovered holography and its luminous and spatial

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

possibilities. She finally opted for holography as her principal artistic medium and began by using laser lights alone co form the initial configurations, elim­ inating the object altogether. For a while she deviated from her original aim of communicating feminist and sociopolitical ideas to concentrate on the phantasmagoria she could create in the laboratory with her laser light con­ figurations and the freedom they generated to expand holographic techniques. Casdin-Silver’s holograms fully materialized when she started, in 1972, to work with the engineer and inventor of rainbow holograms, Stephen Benton. Their first collaboration was Cobweb Space, containing both a laser transmis­ sion hologram and a white-light transmission hologram. In this work, the artist’s first concern was the composition, but a problem existed in that the

chosen pattern of light was two-dimensional, whereas the intended aim was three-dimensionality. A second-generation factor of the white-light transmis­ sion system solved this problem by rounding the image. After having created (in collaboration with Benton) a number of multi­ colored, white-light transmission holograms and some laser transmission

holograms, Casdin-Silver joined Brown University, where she produced the

Sphere series, composed entirely of laser light (there was no real object in the optical system). From this point onward, and in part because of her feminist position, Casdin-Silver undertook the conceptualization and technical production of her

holograms alone. Starting in 1975, after having used the laser light in many

forms, she realized her sociopolitical commitment through holographic art— in Phalli, for example. In 1976, after moving to the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, her interest in environmental art received new impetus, resulting in the Equiv­ ocal Forks, Series I and II. Made with spectral colors, the Forks II Series formed

part of the center’s collective environmental outdoor sculpture, Centerbeam,

first presented in 1977 at documenta 6 in Kassel. A year later, it was exhibited near the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum in

Washington. The project included the manipulation of holographic images by mirror trackers (most of the holograms were using a solar tracking system).

To reconstruct images by themselves, spectator-participants could manually manipulate two additional trackers. Following this installation, Casdin-Silver engaged herself more closely with feminist issues in pieces such as A Woman, Compton I and II (figure 2.3), Beth

and Karen, and the development of interactive environments whose prototype

Chapter 2

Figure 2.3

Harriet Casdin-Silver, Compton (front), © 1978. Segment of integral hologram.

was her stainless steel work, Exhaust (1968). Her more recent works include holograms created at the Ukrainian Institute in Kiev in 1989 and shown at

the Museum of Holography in New York in 1991 > as well as her collabora­ tion with the United States and Hologram Industries in Paris, resulting in a

hologram titled The Venus of Willendorf ’91, which replaced a fertility figure with a live model. Ikony, one of the three installations at the Museum of

Holography, can be interpreted as symbolic of the relationship between reli­ gion and mass media; it also comments on the fear that the collapsed author­

itarianism of the Soviet Union would be assumed by the church.

In even more recent work, Casdin-Silver has produced many life-size figures, including images of a primal earth goddess/hermaphrodite. The artist eschews the body beautiful, even when her subjects are youthful and

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

attractive, or unremarkable, as in Ophelia (1992). She finds ways to cut up and juxtapose their images in order to set up a speculative, allusive dialogue about the physical state. At the same time, her most recent images are of unques­ tionable artistic value. Always a colorist, Casdin-Silver’s LondonlPoint Reyes series exploits both technical acuity and color sense in its striking saturations of blood red, fiery orange, icy blues, and purples. Red and blue human nudes emerge from “awesome images,” and these nudes show disembodied light, impressive skin color, and romantic flame. Other works are more decorative and fractured. The sculptural lines and curves of Kathryn of Dunes (1994), for instance, are echoed in the tiny crescent tattoos on Kathryn’s breast and shoul­ der—the latter only revealed at certain viewing angles. The awkward pose of

Ian (1994) or Renata (1994) induces the notion that these subjects are forced into contained spaces. The subjects of this series are strangely closed off, self-reflective, and contemplative even when only parts of their bodies are on display, suggesting that these images delve the psyche more than the physi­ cal. This is particularly the case in Casdin-Silver’s self-portraits Pink Corpse (1992) and 70 + 1 (1996), which are most certainly seen from an interior mental place, and where the artist takes on her own destiny, without any

hesitation. Human intensity and myriads of multiplications can also be discerned in

Dynishka and Sue (1996) and Casdin-Silver’s dedicatory pieces. One of them,

To Van Eyck and Bosch (1994)—life-size reflection holograms on steel (8 X 10 feet)—shows Jan van Eyck’s Adam and Eve as composite figures of both genders and, between them, a back view of the human body, inspired by the Hell panel

of Hieronymus Bosch.

In a retrospective one-person exhibition at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, in 1998, Casdin-Silver’s life achievement became clearly visible. It established, beyond doubt, her historic contribution to holographic and feminist art, as well as her own aesthetic

specificity as a great colorist and a media artist intensely concerned by the human physical and mental state. Lately, the independent area of holographic art forming an essential part

of technological art in the 1970s and 1980s has approached the virtual domain

not only by the persistence and augmentation of the virtualization of the third

dimension and the way light is experienced in recent holographic works but also because a number of artists—particularly Vito Orazem and Dieter Jung— have been combining holography with video and computer animation in their

Chapter 2

plastic works and environments. At the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, for example, Jung has developed and directed various media compositions of this kind, which he terms “multimedia holography.”1 Another interesting development in terms of bringing together holo­ graphic art and virtuality has been elaborated by Vicente Carreto in his study of virtual holography by comparing holography with sci-fi narratives.2 Eco-technological Art

One cannot neglect the area of ecological, or more precisely ecotechnological, art in the development of virtual art. The itineraries of James Turrell, Jurgen Claus, and Piero Gilardi provide good illustrations of this fact. A prominent contemporary light artist like James Turrell, who certainly has had an influence on artists discussed in the following chapter on endur­ ing digital-based work, can also be seen in an ecological context. Turrell forces us to see light because in his works there is no object to look at. At a purely perceptual level, light as an independent phenomenon is the object in his

work. In attempting to contain pure light and draw the viewer’s attention

to it, Turrell not only asks us co consider the elements of perception but invites us to experience the wonder of a natural phenomenon: light in and of itself. The faith in nature and the dynamic preservation of its powers in a context dominated by high-tech inventions is basic co che work of eco-technological

artist and theoretician Jurgen Claus. Ac an early stage, Claus was principally

concerned with artistic events in which water, as one of the fundamental elements of the physical universe, was predominant. In che second half of che 1960s, he began to develop spaces using electricity and electronics. He wanted

to install a “fluid space” in which images from film and slide projections appeared simultaneously in order to create multidimensionality. When Claus started to work in the naturally multidimensional space found underwater, his experiences affected his artistic concepts. He used electricity and elec­

tronics as extensions of human sensory organs; light was as important as acoustics, and both related to his physiological reactions.

In his Planet Ocean project, Claus was concerned with the ecologization of technology based on the physical sciences. It involved, besides water, two

lasers, two video cameras, neon light, and a mirrored sphere representing Earth. The work attempted to act as a metaphor for the profound changes in

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

our perceptions of our planet and planetary system as we move toward holis­ tic awareness of the physical universe. After exploring the elements of earth and water, Claus turned his atten­ tion to the relationship between water and light, particularly by creating solar energy sculptures using photoelectric cells. This eco-technology is intended

to take us into the solar age (figure 2.4). In his Sun Sculptures I, II, and III, Claus used solar energy to produce elec­ tricity underwater from photovoltaic cells mounted on floating platforms on the ocean’s surface. The cells transformed natural solar energy into electricity, which was then stored in batteries. This electricity was used to bring light to the twenty-four-hour cycle of the light-blue and dark-blue illumination of

Figure 2.4

Jurgen Claus, Solar Energy Sculpture. © 1987 by Jurgen Claus.

Chapter 2

Planet Ocean. Thus, natural light was needed to visually evoke the complex structures and colors of an underwater environment. These Sun Sculptures, on which Claus has been working for several years, are vertical constructions with a projected height of approximately thirty meters in their final stage. They have wings furnished with solar cells that follow the position of the sun by means of a computer, which Claus calls a SOLART Expert System. This is a computer graphics interaction system through which images and information can be called up. The data bank con­ tains technical and environmental information—for instance, about light, photovoltaics, and the distribution of natural energies in the landscape. This

facility is necessary since these sculptures are in a real sense responsive, environmental, energy-transforming systems.

As regards the outlook for artistic expert systems, according to Claus, one has to search for new and more specific connotations within the artistic and scientific matrix. In his view, such basic connotations—indeed, a new kind of

paradigm or metaparadigm—are related to the fact that "organic" machines made by artists, engineers, and scientists using electronic technology at its most advanced stage (including responsive interaction in an ecologically responsible way) could serve human and natural survival and/or vital recon­ struction as metaphors, symbols, and realities (figure 2.5). In his Carousel of Suns, created in collaboration with his wife, Nora, for the

1991 Artists and Light exhibition at the Manege in Reims, France, Claus occupied a space with a surface area of 530 square meters. This installation

was bathed in a bluish light, and argon gas writing served as a metaphor announcing the solar age. Two circles made up of three suns rotated slowly, intersecting with each other in a radiance of yellow light. A laser beam trav­

eled across this space at different points. This beam was not only the result

of its material source, argon or krypton, but an outcome of the manner in which it lingered in a veil of mist—in other words, it was also the result of the way it blended into the environment. This work, produced by various technological means, was intended to be perceived and interpreted as a single

form, and an illustration of the unity between natural and human-made environments. After two years of preparation and several preliminary events, Claus’s mul­

tiple eco-technological activities as artist, writer, educator, and organizer cul­ minated in the summer of 1995 in a SolArt Global Network, conceived of as

a collective cosmic rally, a model of humanization.

•Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

Figure 2.5

Jurgen Claus, SOLART Expert System. © 1987 by Jurgen Claus.

Piero Gilardi’s principal aim is co reconcile apparently irreconcilable terms like nature and technique (or ecology and technology). This concern was already visible in che early 1960s in a first sculptural phase in which he produced what he calls his Tappeti-natura. The “natural carpet” is seen as a rectangular block of polyurethane covered by a rubbery crust that was cut out in a forest, a riverbed, or a pebble beach. In shore, a piece more real than nature but not

“realistic.” This means an ecological awareness before its time chat took the

form of humor, fiction, and especially artistic creation. A little later, Gilardi would extend his natural carpets to environmental dimensions directly in the landscape. This phase of countryside creations, comparable to land art, was followed

by another entirely devoted to the theoretical analysis of the period’s other

new tendencies: arte povera and antiform as well as aesthetic-political events in Third World countries. Around 1985, Gilardi resumed his plastic activities as such after an

excursion into therapeutic art in different Italian psychiatric hospitals. He

introduced advanced technology in an attempt co work out a technological

Chapter 2

megasculpture project titled Ixiana, which was to take the form of a gigan­ tic “bionic doll,” inside which visitors would be able to exercise their cre­ ativity on interactive equipment involving the use of the body and the senses. The project was never carried out because of its cost, but Gilardi continued his work in the same direction, especially with the “installation" called Inverosimile {Unlikely) in which the spectator can circulate between three rows of artificial vines that react to one’s movements.

Gilardi’s dramatic, allegorical, and ecological intentions can be gathered from the fact that throughout the Inverosimile performance, the audience becomes in a certain way coauthor of an electronic choreography. This comes about by means of an interactive program that converts the spectator’s ges­ tures into a series of sounds, lights, and movements. Such choreography lends meaning to the undercurrent of sounds that flow on until the final “dance” of the vines. These sounds are reinforced by a series of projected images that allow the free development of a psychodramatic group experience: from the dread of night (moon) to a daytime action (sun) that transcends the conflict (fire), a rebirth into the world (water) is achieved, and hence a new sense of

human kinship is born. Making simulation an active principle in this work, Gilardi composes events that bear the trace of a manipulation—artificial intel­ ligence—while reminding us of the refinement with which baroque cheater organized a world dominated by the seeing eye, precipitating a vertigo of metamorphoses. In his interactive installation North versus South (1992), Gilardi developed

the principles of transformation, simulation, and interactivity still further, but

this time with an added political flavor. North versus South is essentially a sym­ bolic system simulating rhe possible developments of the general imbalance— in terms of political and military control, the technological monopole, and cultural hegemony—between northern countries and those situated in the

South. In order to become familiar with this installation, the public has to climb onto a spherical platform in constant rotation, symbolizing the world.

There the visitor can identify six different zones of audition, which one can

utilize in the manner of radio sets, and which illustrate the possible evolution and involution of the different problems raised in this context.

In a more recent project titled Survival (started in 1994), Gilardi wants co cesc—wich che aid of a game environmenc in which che psychophysical sub-

jeccivicy of che individual inceraccs wich a compucer program chac simulaces che conscruccion of a simultaneously evolving urban living quarter—the

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

possibilities of making future cities not only the site of conflicts or of geopo­ litical inequalities but also the site for satisfying the inhabitants’ various intel­ lectual and affective ambitions and desires, while also liberating them from their narrow dependence on economic contingencies. Like other artists of this tendency interested in techno-ecology in its widest sense, Gilardi highlights the irreplaceable qualities of our environment by using natural forces as a model for urban life and adds to it the sophistication of the most advanced technologies in order to bring out the strength of artis­ tic expression in a contemporary context. Whether a matter of simulation, a re-creation of natural elements, or a combination of natural and artificial factors, we are always in the presence of an attempt to reconcile two appar­ ently contradictory terms: scientific or technological progress against bio­ logical and spiritual survival for humankind. Computer Art

In the area of computer art, Vera Molnar* is a pioneer who has pursued with admirable perseverance a critical, disciplined itinerary from her early engage­ ment with geometric, mathematical abstraction to her personal, yet rigorous

expression with the aid of computers. She started painting in an abstract geometric style in 1947 when still at the School of Visual Art in Budapest and began working with what she calls

an imaginary machine from 1959 onward, until she discovered the benefits of the actual computer in 1968. Her early engagement with programmed art also dates to I960, when she

helped found the Centre de Recherche d’Art Visuel in Paris. This group of

artists put the accent, as the name implies, on an almost scientific attitude

toward visual phenomena, particularly perception and cognition. Works like

InterruptionIContinuation and Bleu+bleu vert-H>ert illustrate the period preceding Molnar’s computer pieces. According to Molnar, the computer can serve four purposes. The first con­

cerns its technical promise—it widens possibilities with its infinite array of forms and colors, particularly with the development of virtual space. Second, the computer can satisfy the desire for artistic innovation and thus lighten the burden of traditional cultural forms. It can make the accidental or random subversive in order to create an artistic shock and to rupture the systematic

and the symmetrical. Third, the computer can encourage the mind to work

Chapter 2

in new ways. Molnar contends that artists often pass far too quickly from an idea to the realization of a work. The computer could create images that can be stored longer, not only in a data bank but also in the artist’s imagination. Finally, Molnar thinks that the computer can help the artist by measuring the physiological reactions of the audience—their eye movements, for example— thereby bringing the creative process closer to its products and their effects. Molnar has applied these considerations to the images she makes. In Trans­ formations, for example, she uses arrangements of simple elements, due to both her aesthetic preference for simple geometric patterns like squares, circles, and triangles, and her interest in creating works of art in a much more consciously controlled and systematic way. Her exploration of the way in which intuitive knowledge may be reinforced by conceptual processes depends on a strict

methodology. Molnar has made use of a computer with terminals like a plotter and/or a cathode-ray tube screen. One can speak here of a global computer graphics method—that is, one where the image is conceived and treated for the computer, which almost creates it. With these ideas and this method in mind, Molnar has created such early

computer works as (Des)ordres (1969) and a series of works titled Molnart (1974—1976), among them Parcours (1976). In One Percent Disorder, followed

by Art Is a Mistake in the System (a reference to Paul Klee’s ideas on the subject), she introduced, step by step, an increasing amount of disorder or irregularity into a regular set of elements so as to obtain a special kind of visual artistic experience (figure 2.6). From 1984 to 1988, Molnar produced a particularly original work, Aty

Mother’s Letters. It was an attempt at simulation, through the artificial re­

creation of the handwriting of the artist’s mother. This work represents two different approaches: to get as near as possible to the formal aspects of hand­ writing; and to reconcile the ill-balanced aspects of letters (in this case, almost regular on the left-hand side, and close to chaotic on che right-hand side) and a classical method of picture composition, working with principles such as

symmetry, rebalanced asymmetry, or countercomposition. The drawings were done with che help of a compucer and a ploccer, except for one series, where

che arcisc used a printer instead of a plotter. The last pieces show the over­

lapping of plotter tracing and actual handwriting in a kind of dialogue between a human being and a machine. From 1990 onward, Molnar has continued to develop her works and instal­

lations with the aid of a computer. She has produced such works as Sommaire,

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

Figure 2.6

Vera Molnar, Comment faire sortir le carre de ses gonds? 1988. Shown at the

Festival des arts 6lectroniques, Rennes, France.

'Variations Sainte Victoire, and Rectangles chevauchants, and she considers chat in these works, she has managed to assume the role of both the human hand and the artificial software program. The methods employed by the artist with the assistance of a computer have varied to a certain extent. Her first method consisted of making thousands of

variations on a computer screen with a plotter, looking at and comparing them without haste, and then making a choice of a certain number among the dif­

ferent variants, before executing one or two images by hand on the canvas without changing anything from che computer-generated version. At a later stage, she modified her working method. The departure remained identical, bur this time no choice was made in advance, and she did not

execute a painting immediately afterward. It was only some years later that the artist took up the subject again without looking at the previous versions created by the computer. The time lag in which the theme became decanted,

purified, and clarified thus enabled the artist to create a condensed version of the subject on a canvas.

A third stage was reached when Molnar rapidly produced two or three sketches by hand without much preparatory work, and then used a computer

Chapter 2

to create pictures from the sketches. Molnar then displayed both the sketches and the pictures on a wall in order to see the versions that she had not thought on her own. In this way, Molnar could compare the products of pure imagi­ nation in their basic state and those of imagination manipulated by a machine. Molnar’s method nowadays consists in a to-and-fro passage between her manual working bench and her automatic plotter. This method allows her to rectify the program at every stage with regard to the manually created ver­ sions, and vice versa, to modify the hand-produced versions following certain happy and fortuitous results from the computer program. This can be con­ sidered a fruitful confrontation between the machine, which often produces something quite rough, and the human hand, which has a tendency to civi­ lize the computer’s excesses. At times, the artist also managed to combine in the same graphic work the human and the machine product, which can be seen as one of the tem­

porary compromises in the dialogue that the artist has engaged in this cre­ ative game destined, in the first place, to investigate the workings of the

artistic mind. In the hypercube works of Manfred Mohr,* the plastic elements are treated with great rigor in the spirit of algorithmic art. Mohr’s work is founded on a constructivist aesthetic, although he lacks the typical constructivist back­ ground. Mohr detached himself from spontaneous expressions and, in the

mid-1960s, turned to a more systematic, geometric form of expression. It was mainly the writings of German philosopher Max Bense and French composer Pierre Barbaud that radically changed Mohr’s thinking—pointing to a

rational construction of art. The invention of rules, or algorithms, is foundational for Mohr’s algori­ thmic art. These “conceptual rules” are not necessarily based on already imaginable forms but often on abstract and systematic processes. They are parametric rules, which means that at certain points in the process, choices

have to be made as to which way a calculation should continue. In many

instances, random decisions are employed. Random decisions are switching

points that ensure a value-free method of moving the program ahead. They

can either be a choice of yes/no, a choice among many equal elements, or a

choice to distribute elements statistically over a surface. Even though Mohr’s work process is rational and systematic, its results can be unpredictable. Like a journey, only the starting point and a hypothetical destination is known.

What happens during the journey is often unexpected and surprising.

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

Since 1973, Mohr has been concentrating on fracturing the symmetry of a cube (including n-dimensional hypercubes since 1978), using the cubes structure as a "system” and an “alphabet.” What interests him are the two-dimensional signs (Slres-grapbiqites) and the visual ambiguity resulting from the projection of the cube's lines from higher dimensions into twodimensions. The artist describes the signs as unstable because they evoke visual unrest. The disturbance (or disintegration) of symmetry is a basic gen­ erator of new constructions and relations. Mohr’s artwork is always the result of a calculation. At the same time, however, it is not a mathematical art but rather an expression of his artistic experience. The rules he invents reflect his thinking and feelings. It is not necessarily the system or logic of his work he wants to present but the visual invention that results from it. Mohr’s artistic goal is reached when a finished work can dissociate itself from its logical content and stand convincingly as an independent abstract entity.

Algorithms, I might add, can become extremely complex—that is, com­ plicated and difficult to survey. In order co master this problem, in 1969 Mohr decided that the use of a computer would be necessary in his work. Only in

this way is it possible to superimpose multiple rules without loosing track of the general concept. It is inevitable that the results—that is, the images—are difficult to understand at first glance. The information is deeply buried, and a certain participation is demanded from the viewer—a readiness to interro­

gate this material. Each of Mohr’s works is based on a subset of a defined struc­ ture, ranging from cubes to 6-dimensional hypercubes. Unable to detect che

complece system, the viewer nevertheless notices a strong visual force holding everything together. Such a force is created by che logic of che inherent rela­ tionships in the underlying structure. This is a critical point: Some viewers

will panic and reject this unknown and “inhuman” force, while others will

gladly acknowledge it as a reassuring starting point. Even though all of Mohr’s work can be verified and rationally understood, this does not mean that there is no room for imaginative associations. On the contrary, the rational part of

his work is limited basically to its production. What the viewer experiences, understands, learns, interprets, or imagines because of che presence of the

artwork remains quite personal. In Mohr’s opinion, an artwork is only a start­ ing point, a principle of order, an artist’s guidelines, intended to provoke the viewer to continue che investigation (figure 2.7). The following work phase was made up of laserglyphs, for which diagonal

paths through six-dimensional hypercubes were cut from steel plates with a

Chapter 2

laser. In 1998, Mohr starred co use color (after using black and white for more chan chree decades) co show che complexity of the work through differentiation.

Poec and arc historian Eugen Gomringer describes Mohr as a cubist in the computer age? He observes chat few artists over the last three decades have done such thorough research and accomplished so much in the field of con­

structivist aesthetics using a computer as Mohr has. The graphic linearity in his black-and-white works might convey che idea chat the author is a math­

ematician, yet it is the artistic spirit (the artistic “gravity”) behind the way

Mohr defines and solves che plastic problems involved that predominates in his work. In his endeavors, he has experimented with dimensions chat resulted

in generative processes—dimensions not accessible to perception and intu­ ition, and yet still depictable.

Sonya Rapoport* is another pioneer in computer art. Her Anasazi (1978), a

collaborative work with archaeologist Dorothy Washburn, eventually evolved into an interactive installation titled Shoe-Field (1986). Washburn’s research

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

produced computer printouts that depicted graphic structures for helping archaeologists determine behavior patterns of cultural growth and change—a subject that stimulated Rapoport’s sensibilities. Rapoport responded to the data on Anasazi pottery fragments (AD 450-1300) by drawing patterns that could be read as a “language” to track the relocation of the Anasazis. In 1978, the Peabody Museum at Harvard University hosted this work. An image of a Mexican-style sandal on a ceramic foot effigy triggered further

steps in Rapoport’s journey into new genres—multiple phases of computerassisted interactive installations lead to interactive books and interactive Inter­ net pieces. These were sponsored by the California Art Council ACEN Telecommunication Project in 1988. Rapoport then constructed a database of the attributes of forty-one pairs of her shoes. This self-analysis extended to interactivity with others about why they wear their shoes. Rapoport began Shoe-

Field (her sixteen-year-long series of interactive installations about the shoes

people wear) at an event called "A Shoe-In” at the Berkeley Computer Center in 1982. People who entered the store were asked questions about the shoes

they were wearing: “Where did you get those shoes?” “Why did you buy them?” The answers were typed into a simple computer database, and the shoes were photographed and placed on a stand in the computer store. Using an MS-

DOS computer, Rapoport fed the data gathered from seventy-two participants

at her Shoe-In into a field theory program that calculated and organized it into a diagrammatic form. The idea was to see if qualitative data would reveal quan­

titative information about people. Over several years, with the help of several

programmers, a “shoe-field” was developed. Through a complex system based on, among other things, how interactive participants were in general—and with their shoes—an ASCII graphic of the event was printed out (and eventu­ ally enlarged to seventeen feet with shoe image transparencies pasted in their respective places) that showed the relationship of the shoe respondents to each

other. In addition, Rapoport developed the capacity to print out individual

shoe-fields so that in future installations, participants could receive personal­ ized printouts and shoe psyche readings.

In 1986 interactive installation at Media in San Francisco, the photographs taken at the Berkeley Computer Center and the shoe-field printouts were incorporated into a new series of computer-based questions and answers that further shaped Shoe-Field. Participants in the Media event actually sac down

at a computer, typed in their responses, and went home with individual shoe­ field printouts. Every participant s response became part of the total data that

Chapter 2

continued to shape Shoe-Field. Thus, Shoe-Field was a fully interactive series of works. The information that participants supplied was incorporated into che work itself (figure 2.8).

Originally an abstract expressionist, Rapoport scarred producing digitally assisted artworks in 1975. The pieces evolved into interactive multimedia installations. Since 1994, she has applied her aesthetic concepts to creating artworks for the Web.

Figure 2.8 Sonya Rapoport, Shoe-Field, 1986. Participants selected either a pillow, an antique cobbler's stand, or a plywood square on which to place their shoes while they answered shoe questions. The data was compiled into a field theory program that generated a schema of

positive and negative responses.

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

Art historian Ernestine Daubner makes the following comment: What is so interesting in Sonya Rapoport’s Web works, is the manner in which they

merge cultural inscriptions (past and present discourses), making evident that our models of thought have not radically changed. We are still operating in the same kind of framework or paradigm. Even though these works function as ironic critiques of

cultural constructs and customs, past and present, they also include metaphors of

transformation and alternate ways of being: the possibilities of morphing, of recon­ structing personal traits and collective customs. Most significant is the notion of trans­ gender, transethnicity, transculture, transgenics, trans-... as a means to crossover,

fuse, or meld disparate, often hierarchical, elements on the one hand, and to reveal the ethical and moral implications on the other.4

Rapoport’s awareness of diverse cultures became evident in her projects in 1972 when she superimposed her vocabulary of art shapes on geologic survey charts of Japanese internment camps. This initiated Rapoport’s ongoing dis­ course with "ready-made” background surfaces. Rapoport eventually replaced the geologic survey charts with computer

printouts. The fifty-foot-long Genesis (1976), in which a drawn overlay of cryptic letters was color coded to designate "place” in a biblical verse. Genesis

vias significant in that it introduced religion as a topic and color coding as a methodology. It also led Rapoport to visually decode computer printouts of scientific research.

In 1978, a three-year overview of Rapoport’s “drawings” was presented at the Union Gallery at San Jose State University in California. As the then direc­ tor Stephen Moore explained in the published catalog: Rapoport moved into a format flexible enough to allow room for expression of her ideas

concerning the relationship of the artist to, and function within, her/his culture. While

"drawings” is certainly an accurate generic term for this work, it is at the same time perhaps misleading, for Sonya’s art is overwhelming in a sense that few drawings are, both in terms of scale and content. To a large extent this is because the base for each

drawing is an actual computer printout (averaging some ten feet in length) on which she applies her own symbolic interpretation of the subject matter; using color pencil and/or transfer drawing, Sonya creates a dense color-field which is as intense literally as it is visually. Paradoxically, then, the work is at once both scientific and personal; direct

parallels are drawn between the research subject/results and the artist’s life/environ­

Chapter 2

ment, humanizing che computer data and so providing that quality of intimacy long

associated wich drawings. Still, there is more; while the verbal concent is relevant both literally and symbolically, so does the color function in a dual manner: color coding is

employed throughout, allowing the viewer to “read" the drawing in a nonliteral way by visually associating a given color with its respective subject ... by “decoding" the computerized archaeological/research data—chat is, converting it to representative

symbols, and “encoding"—placing into computer format illustrations of her relevant

personal material, Sonya enables each drawing co function as an information system which presents an intensity of content and relationships in an aeschetic context. And

yet, the foregoing is only descriptive, noc definitive; there remain complexities and nuances that appear as one studies the work, and absorption in che drawings is invari­ ably rewarded wich still another discovery or insight. By developing her own visual lan­

guage system within a scientific format, Sonya Rapoport fuses traditional concerns of che artist wich contemporary involvement with information and language structures,

producing a synthesis of aesthetics and technology?

Starting in 1980, Rapoport worked directly on computer forms—decod­ ing and encoding them. In one series, in conjunction with the Nuclear Science Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, she transcribed into imagery the chemical/physical process of making gold. This transmutation

process results in a change of identity in the chemical element, a regenera­

tion, a new use—which lead to Rapoport’s transgenic works, The Transdertnal Patch (1993), The Transgenic Bagel (figure 2.9) (1994), and Redeeming the G>»e(2001). In Biorhythm (1980), Rapoport juxtaposed a technologically based analysis

of her emotional condition with a psychologically derived analysis from her daily pictorial recordings. In a 1983 related interactive installation, partici­ pants’ hands, expressing their emotional state, were photographed and read by a palmist. The subliminal tones of computer control prevailed, and later surfaced as a sci-fi phenomenon in che work The Computer Says I Peel. . .

The photographs of the gestures from Biorhythm were correlated with Asian

Indian mudra gestures to reveal astonishing similarities. The cross-cultural images and che transcultural meanings inspired DigitalMudra, an inscallation in which parcicipancs used a computer co creace poecic phrases wich ancienc mudra word meanings and classic mudra dances. Rapoport’s experiments wich information structures, different ways of layering information, and use of the audience as author continued in her later

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

•Stick)} •rm’’

Bagel Plasmid Vector

Sonya Rapoport, The Transgenic Bagel, 1994. Interactive computer artwork that parodies recombinant gene splicing of selected traits. The genetic formula has been created and is impregnated into the bagel DNA fragment. Cream cheese is applied to anneal the fragment with the bagel vector. Figure 2.9

interactive works: Objects on My Dresser (1979-1982), Sexual jealousy: The Shadow of Love (1984), The Animated Soul: Gateway to Your Ka (1991), and The Transgenic Bagel. According to critic Barbara Lee Williams, Sonya Rapoport's Web projects provoke a flurry of questions about science, history, Judaic theology, and feminism. From The Transgenic Bagel—a parody on recombinant

gene splicing which allows the viewer/participant to impregnate a bagel with the genetic formula of a desired trait (the bagel then serves as the transgenic or gene trans­ fer vehicle)—to Make Me a Jewish Man—an exploration of alternative masculinity and

how to attain it—her biting wit and aesthetic sensibilities alternately bemuse and

delight. Here, at last, is an artist who uses the Web to create interactive artworks that could not exist as beautifully or provocatively in any other medium.6

Rapoport’s Web work in 2001, Redeeming the Gene, Molding the Golem, and Folding the Protein, continues with the gene-splicing theme. Joan Truckenbrod* is yet another pioneer in computer art. Ever since the early 1980s, she has been concerned with creative computer imaging, and has produced fluid, layered images that reflect a sensitive integration of visual and conceptual aspects of the way we view che natural world and the innovative potential of technological and virtual art for combining them. Truckenbrod has created a “conceptual lens” through which she visualizes the invisible layers of

natural phenomena and weaves the visual layers into amorphous networks.

In a statement titled “Electronic Rituals: Voices of Fire," she says, “My images are the site of a paradox. Beauty on che surface is pieced with che curmoil underneath that bubbles up serendipitously through the thin surface

of the image.” Truckenbrod’s images are not the crisp, bright ones in a mirror, but hint

at an image that pulsates with sheets of rain. The image as ritual spirit has been summed up by the pounding of the rain and the cover of darkness (figure 2.10). Communication Art

I have already mentioned the importance of communication art as an

antecedent for several sections of virtual art. The itineraries followed by Roy Ascotc, Fred Forest, and Willoughby Sharp are the most shining examples of

this progression.

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

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Chapter 2

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Roy Ascott* was among the first artists to launch an appeal for total spec­ tator participation: for him, the strict antinomy between action and contem­ plation needed to be abolished. Ascott aimed to achieve a wider “cybernetic” awareness by acting on the psychology of the observer, who was invited to regroup the elements of the technological universe and exploit certain of its meanings. Although the concept of participation in Ascott’s demarche is pri­ marily didactic in character, it may best be described as cybernetic. At first, Ascott was concerned with creating “triggers,” thereby initiating creative behavior in the observer. His justification in adopting a “cybernetic stance” is based on the following considerations. Modern art, he claims, is characterized by a behaviorist tendency in which system and process are cardinal factors. As distinctions between music, painting, poetry, and so on, become blurred and

media are mixed, a behaviorist synthesis evolves in which dialogue and feed­ back within a social structure indicate the emergence of a cybernetic vision art as well as science. The different artifacts produced by Ascott, although far

from neutral in visual terms, have had from the outset a cybernetic purpose, which may be defined as inculcating creativity or eliciting creative behavior from the spectator. But Ascott wanted to go beyond the incorporation of behavioral triggers with feedback in his work by putting the spectator in a position to handle ideas on their own. The spectator was co both make deci­

sions and react physically to the work. For Ascott, cybernetics was also a psychological phenomenon that could be

utilized directly in educational projects. He exploited the effects of familiar objects in an unusual context, inviting the spectator or pupil to alter the rela­

tionship of the various elements. It was up to the spectator to find out the latent possibilities contained in each work. Ascott has also worked on the development of an elementary course in art

education. In fact, it might be said that the primary concern of all his artis­ tic enterprises during che 1960s, whether they went under che name of “chance-paintings” or “kinetic constructions," was with the education of the

spectator. This ties in with the way he defined his works as structures subject co the same human pressures and likelihood of transformation as our purely intellectual notions. Ascott went on to consider che fucure of art as a cyber­

netic activity or discipline. Ac present, Ascott is one of the most outstanding artists and theoreticians in che field of telematics. It was Simon Nora and Alain Mine who coined the

term telematics in 1987 to describe the new electronic technology derived from

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

che convergence of computers and telecommunication systems, incorporating the telephone, the telex, and the fax. The process of “telematization" was most clearly seen in the ubiquitous and rapid growth in France since 1980 of Minitel, the public videotex system that enables widespread interaction between users and databases across an enormous range of services. Ascott has put to good use the central feature of the video system: its ability to facilitate interaction via the electronic space of computer memory, and beyond the normal constraints of time and space that apply to face-to-face communication. His projects employing telematic media and interactive par­ ticipation include The Pleating of the Text: A Planetary Fairy Tale (in homage to Roland Barthes’s The Pleating of the Text), devised for the Electra exhibition

at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris in 1983. It involved the cre­ ation of a text by the “dispersed authorship” of groups of artists located in eleven cities around the world, each group participating through an electronic

network. The story developed gradually as a piece of text was logged in daily from each terminal. Most of the terminals were linked to data projectors so that the text being generated could be publicly accessible. For Ascott, the art of our time is one of system, process, participation, and interaction. Given that our values are relativistic, our culture pluralistic, and our images and forms evanescent, it is the processes of interaction between human beings that create meaning and consequently cultures. Hence, those systems and processes that facilitate and amplify interaction are the ones that will be used by artists in order co encompass a world audience,

with the aid of telematic systems based on computer-mediated cable and satellite links.

In accordance with this philosophy, Ascott created an elaborate and

complex multimedia interface as part of the Electronic Arcs Festival of Art

and Technology (Ars Electronica) in Linz, Austria, in 1989- Aspects of Gaia:

Digital Pathways across the Whole Earth was a computer-networking project and interactive installation conceived in collaboration with Peter Appleton,

Machias Fuchs, Robert Pepperell, and Miles Visman. It involved interaction

in electronic data space between artists, musicians, scientists, and other

creative individuals from a number of different countries, and produced rep­ resentations of Earth (Gaia) from a multiplicity of perspectives: scientific, cul­ tural, spiritual, and mythological (figure 2.11). Conceived of within the

tradition of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or more appropriately Gesamtdatenwerk, these

connecting pathways constituted a kind of conceptual umbrella or digitized

Chapter 2

Roy Ascott, Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways across the Whole Earth, 1989. Photo by Felix Nobauer, Linz.

Figure 2.11

noosphere aspiring co planetary harmonization via the creative and energiz­ ing transformation and reconstitution of digital images, texts, and sounds, which could be accessed and interacted with at many locations around the

world. Virtual space, virtual image, and virtual reality are also categories of expe­ rience chat can be shared through telematic networks conceived by Ascott. They too allow for movement through cyberspace and engagement in a hyper­

reality with the virtual presence of ochers who are physically removed. With a headset, data glove, or other data wear, these interactions along with the

feelings and the perceptions created in this way are experienced as real. According to Ascott, the passage from real to virtual should be seamless, just

as the changes to social behavior deriving from the omnipresent human/ computer symbiosis are flowing unnoticed into our individual psyches. Nowadays, the five defining features of Ascott’s art and indeed of the art

of our time, which so conspicuously differentiate it from the art of earlier eras, are: connectivity, whether part to part, person to person, or mind to mind; immersion into the whole, and thus the dissolution of subject and ground;

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

interaction as the very form of art, such that art as behavior of forms has become arc as a form of behavior; transformation via the perpetual flux of image, surface, and identity; and emergence, the perpetual coming into being of meaning,

matter, and mind. A particularly important recent feature in Ascott’s itinerary is che rela­ tionship between telematics and consciousness. He has coined the term technoetic aesthetic in order to describe the specific relations between art, mind, and technology (cech-noetics = technology + mind). The technoetic aesthetic is not only supposed to enable us to explore consciousness in new ways but may lead us to distinctly new forms of arc, new qualities of mind, and new con­ structions of reality. According to Ascott, consciousness is now at che forefront of research in both science and art. Science, in trying to explain consciousness, faces the most intractable of problems. In this endeavor, many disciplines are brought into play. While consciousness for the artist is something more to be navigated than mapped, and more to be reframed than explained, it too poses an over­

arching challenge. The mystery of consciousness may be the final frontier for both science and art, and perhaps their point of convergence. Certainly, objec­

tivity and subjectivity intermingle there. It may be the space in which art’s classical concern with representation and expression gives way to processes of construction, emergence, and evolution—a space in which both the self and its reality can be redefined and transformed.7

As for Fred Forest,* he is an artist who operates on the edge of the artis­ tic field. One could even say that in his case, art has left its own area to enter that of media, even advertising.

Yet a careful analysis of Forest’s itinerary and activities reveals that he is a veritable artist; his options and behavior are those of a creator of new values

of an aesthetic order obtained through communications work—provocative work, for sure, but sensitive nevertheless. This process is illustrated not by

the production of tangible and physically realized objects but by the produc­

tion of communications systems and diverse situations. To grasp the meaning of the relationship between subjective and social factors in Forest’s work, it is useful to look briefly at his background. From

1954 to 1970, Forest was a postal and telecommunications inspector in Algeria. He was also a painter then, and in 1970, took a decisive step: Forest became an artist of communications, inaugurating inventive and creative work in human networks and relations.

Chapter 2

Such an existential transformation is not entirely miraculous. It has to be seen in the context of 1968—1970, a period when counterculture movements assimilated life with art and highlighted each person’s daily creativity. Forest’s existential transformation was also linked to the introduction of advanced technology. He was among the first in France to use video and closed-circuit television in his art. In 1970, he presented an audiovisual show at the Universal Exhibition in Osaka before making a more direct use in the press and other mass media around the world. His communication systems utilize the telephone, radio, television, telematics, and cable. Among the numerous events organized by Forest, I want to single out his October 1973 Sociological Walk in Brooklyn—Sao Pa/ilo, in Brazil. After placing daily advertisements in the local newspapers and on local radio urging the res­ idents of Brooklyn and Sao Paulo to phone the art museum in order co sign up for chis event, Forest invited the participants to walk with him through the district according to a preplanned itinerary. At different stages, the group visited a local music shop, a fruit vendor, a cobbler, a bank, a supermarket, a church, and an art gallery. Forest was aiming to investigate a localized urban

area through its different business, administrative, and cultural vocations. With the participants’ help he wanted to experience daily reality, reveal internal relationships, and create microcommunication events enabling the

establishment of information circulation through direct intervention in the milieu. Forest’s artistic career has also been marked by member in the

Sociological Art Collective, active until the end of the 1970s, and then the Communication Aesthetic Group. Each of these movements united plastic artists and theoreticians (sociologists and aesthetic thinkers), and gave them the chance to show individually as practicing artists after having tried to work

out a common theory. At the beginning of the 1990s, Forest then devoted himself to producing electronic-diode newspapers that unite two characteristics of his procedure: limited appearances in the mass media and che use of advanced technology. One of the works of this type, The Bible Culled from the Sands (1991), origi­ nally called The Electronic Bible and the Gulf War, shows a luminous parade of

quotes from the Old Testament simultaneously with excerpts from newspa­

per articles reporting on Gulf War battles. Long lists of military equipment are juxtaposed with long genealogies taken from the Bible. Here, Forest wants

co draw actencion co che face chac hiscory can repeac icself through similar

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

speeches. He obviously does not care about the stereotypical statements made by politicians and military leaders. All of Forest’s manifestations that can be inserted into sociopolitical news are provocative and critical by nature, but they incite one to think, even if they grate because of their aggressiveness. In the end they work as questions, communications, and an interactivity that all confirm Forest’s artistic aims.

This is also the case in one of his most recent works, La Machine a travailler le temps (1998), where he offers the spectator/manipulator the opportunity to shorten or accelerate the flux of time in both the physical space of an instal­ lation and the virtual cyberspace of the Internet (figures 2.12 and 2.13). An early organizer and theoretician in kinetic, luminous, and video art,

Willoughby Sharp* has devoted much of his professional life to electronic communications art and using the new electronic technologies creatively. Born in 1936, Sharp grew up in the home of network television, Manhattan, so it

was not unusual that once he had decided to express himself “artistically,” he would take as his “brush” the first SONY portable video recording system, the 1600 Porta-Pae. His immersion into the television of the late 1940s and

1950s totally reorganized his adolescent imaginative life. Sharp’s preteen con­ sciousness flipped from a one-at-a-time focus on objects to an all-at-once flow

of television personalities in process. Almost instantly after DuMont televi­ sion sets began to dominate living rooms and lives in 1948, television took control of Sharp, and he was transformed from just watching “Uncle Miltie”

Fred Forest, La Machine A travailler le temps, 1998. Installation view at the Centre culturel Landowski, Boulogne-Billancourt, France. Figure 2.12

Chapter 2

Fred Forest, La Machine A travailler le temps, 1998. Centre culturel Landowskt, Boulogne-Billancourt, France.

Figure 2.13

to being him. Sharp’s video performance pieces during che pioneering period of video arc utilized SONY’s primitive reproduction tools co capcure his own

face and body through various LSD-induced scream-of-consciousness states. His actual reality became a depchless image. Sharp became a screen portray­

ing traumatic psychodramas depicted his extremely intimate, personal rela­ tionships with his mother, father, and daughter as well as the women he loved. During this same period, as publisher of Avalanche magazine (1968—1976), Sharp became aware of che fact that while che art concent of this publication

was appropriate (it was, after all, almost exclusively devoted to major artists explaining their mostly deeply felt creations), the carrier was not. Sharp and

his associates had not yet learned Karl Marx’s wisdom concerning the need co

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

own rhe means of production. The printer owned the presses; the Avalanche editors basically worked to pay the printer for services. At about this time, Sharp refocused his efforts to communicate electroni­ cally. After several years of experimenting with slow-scan television, fax, and alphameric computer communications systems in rapidly expanding geo­ graphic nodal networks, his team was ready to let satellites carry the messages of art. As a result of A Grand Collaboration involving scores of artists, using the NASA Hermes advanced technology communications satellite, a transcon­

tinental, bidirectional transmission between cable television systems in San Francisco and New York was established and maintained for three days in Sep­ tember 1977. But this project, The Send-Receive Two-Way Demo, also failed Marx’s rule and created oppressive financial debts for the sponsoring nonprofit art organizations, the Center for New Art Activities, Inc. and the Live Pro­ jection Point of the Franklin Street Arts Center, Inc., both in New York. During the following decade, the energy, creativity, and collaboration that had been built up slowly in the New York’s downtown art community dissi­

pated. Neofigurative painting began to rule. Conservative forces now took over, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency that had financially underwritten much of the most interesting experimental media art

of the previous period, withdrew such support. Artists who never dreamed of being represented by a commercial gallery were now showing worldwide, some setting astronomical secondary auction prices.

Sharp’s personal response to this new cultural climate was to become an art dealer. In September 1988, he opened the Willoughby Sharp Gallery in Manhattan’s SoHo. Here again, the content was correct art. But the carrier,

an expensive physical space, was not. There were few sales, but Sharp held on for more than three years as a gallery owner until he went private.

During the previous eighteen years, Sharp had been studying, writing, and teaching “teleculture.” He had closely followed the dramatic development of computer hardware/software, but was taken by surprise by Tim Berners-Lee’s

HTML and Marc Andersen’s MOSIC, which provided the foundation for Netscape’s browser and the Internet. Sharp quickly realized that he was

extremely lucky. The Internet could give him a second life, a professional rebirth. He secured sharpgallery.com as his URL and reengaged most of the artists who he had represented. Photographs of their works were posted on his site for sale, and some works even sold. The Internet allowed Sharp to get

back to work as an online art dealer. As such, with modest start-up expenses,

Chapter 2

little overhead, and ownership of his means of production, he became more effective in his goal of communicating art. As Sharp began to understand the extraordinary power of this new communications tool, the Internet, he became engaged in allied aspects of its reach. E-mail gave him access to a greatly expanding art audience. In 1991, to complement the work of sharpgallery.com, Sharp started publishing TSARt a weekly listing of inter­ national art events. This provided him with a worldwide personal communi­ cations channel with great potential marketing benefits. Realizing that the price of art on his site was in excess of what people were spending, he decided

to diversify. Since he had been conducting audiovisual interviews with artists since the 1960s, why not take this old (but still relevant) art information and reformat it onto contemporary media like DVDs and CDs. This simple act would complete the circle of his life/work—a completeness previously unimaginable. It is this personal “grand unification project” that currently engages him.8 In describing the personal itineraries of the above-mentioned technologi­ cal artists, some of whom are taking a prominent role in the virtual art of the present, I did not want to put the emphasis on the specific traits in their work

that constitute a precise reference to later works by them or other virtual artists. Rather, it was my intention to recall the technical, artistic, and human climate that can be observed in each one of these itineraries, and that can allow

for a more global appreciation of the atmosphere in which contemporary virtual art is taking place.

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

____ I ,T" I____ Current Virtual Art and Artists (1983-2004)

Materialized Digital-based Work

In this chapter, che aesthetic emphasis is on the interplay becween the image and the concept as well as perception and representation. I will explore three subthemes found in the work of the artists discussed here: plastic, cognition, and bioaesthetic issues. As in the three chapters that follow, I will take into account one of the main concerns of this book: illustrating che complete per­ sonal, technical, and aesthetic scope of the virtual artists through their art­ works, social commitments, and relationship with the public—particularly

with the spectator-participant. Plastic Issues

The plastic issues in materialized or substantiated digital-based works are intimately related to the aesthetic problems involved in graphics, painting, design, sculpture, photography, and architecture—and in turn, with line,

color, form, patterns, composition, movement, rhythm, light effects, and spatial representation. The artists in this section are all using digital tech­

nology so as to arrive at new results by applying their personal technoaesthetic creative method in combining digitized methods with selected

plastic issues. In this way, digital printmaking and photography can be found in Victor Acevedo’s* The Lacemaker (1996), his most well-known work. As Acevedo has

written of this work, “It is an homage to the famous same-titled seventeenth­

century painting by Johannes Vermeer. The original photograph at the heart

of my image was taken on New Year’s Eve 1995. It was not consciously posed; I caught my subject emulating the posture of The Lacemaker simply by hap­ penstance.”1 This statement underscores Acevedo’s interest in everyday life as seen, recorded, and then digitally refashioned into a kind of metaphysical pho­ tographic archive. In fact, the main intent of Acevedo’s work is to explore the structure of space by revisioning pictures taken from everyday life. Toward this end, he builds various geometric space frames using 3-D modeling soft­ ware and then composites these purely synthetic structures into the pictorial space of digitized photographs. The use of these particular geometric matri­ ces—that is, networks of triangulated or semispherical polyhedra—and the

graphic tension achieved by juxtaposing them with photographic mappings of visual data is an opportunity to represent spatial field phenomena in a way that is noncubic and noncubist. Moreover, the use of digital-imaging tech­ nologies allows Acevedo the facile use of photographic realism with its native

and various perspectival mappings to be put back into the abstract and metaphoric mix. Acevedo's inspiration for these geometric structures springs from the

notion of the void matrix. Some Eastern mystics describe this as the univer­

sal substrate of being—from which all life-forms emerge and then ultimately return to. The void matrix metaphor is one of the key concepts discussed in Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics.2 This book explores che parallels between the description of subatomic particle phenomena by Western physicists and

descriptions of reality found in the major forms of Eastern mysticism. Acevedo’s graphic visualization of the void matrix is achieved by his adoption

of various geometric structures, which are detailed in R. Buckminster Fuller’s Synergetics) The primary polyhedral net or space frame for this use is the isotropic vector matrix. This is an all-space-filling network made up of alter­ nating octahedra and tetrahedra.

In the traditional model of pictorial space, we are taught that there is figure

and ground and then empty space between them. Cubism attempts to deal with the underlying structure of things by applying a system of planar abstrac­

tion to the figures or objects and che structural environment around them. By virtue of it being modernist painting, the familiar real-world optical phe­

nomenology codified in Renaissance perspective is lost, as is the late nine­ teenth century s technologically born photographic realism. Pablo Picasso’s

and Georges Braques use of collage exemplifies another order of realism, however the collaged fragments ultimately play a role that conforms co the

Chapter 3

push-pull orthogonal principles of their painting. In Acevedo’s work, we are presented with a graphic metaphor that allows us to revisit this territory anew. It is interesting to note that Acevedo produced a significant body of work in traditional media, primarily painting and drawing, during the years 1977 to 1985. He made his last oil painting in 1984. Thereafter, he adopted com­ puter graphics as his primary medium. His interest in geometric structure and periodic space division has continued to be an integral part of his digital work. Acevedo’s important early works from his traditional media phase are Four Fold Rotational Wasp (1980), Slated Breakfast-Visceral Analytic (1981), and Macro Synapse-Cuboctahedron Periphery (1982). Their graphic approach easily suggests the nature of Acevedo’s future digital work. In spring 1983, he created the graphite drawing Void Matrix Lattice. Acevedo has described this period as one of the most influential in his formative years as an artist. His first successful digital image is called Ectoplasmic Kitchen (1987). This work

was shown in public for the first time in February 1988. By 1989, Acevedo’s work would display clear evidence of his new methodology through its use of 3-dimensional modeling software to build the geometric components of his pictures. He now used the PC-based Cubicomp, an early desktop 3-

dimensional modeling and animation system that enabled him to construct mathematically accurate polyhedra. Noteworthy works from 1991 include Tell Me the Truth and 6.26.27.86, and then later Axis, and NYC '83-85, both

from 1993. In 1994, he began using Soft-Image, a high-level 3-dimensional modeling and animation software running on the SGI (Silicon Graphics Incor­ porated) platform and later Windows NT. That same year, he created the first version of a digital image called Skull. Acevedo’s work evolved as he now

entered into his “silver geometry” phase. This coincided with his fall 1995 move from Los Angeles to New York City. He became an artist-in-residence

at the School of Visual Arts and, in 1997, began teaching there. Two of Acevedo’s most well-known works, The Violinist and The Lacemaker, mentioned above, date from this time (1996) and mark Acevedo’s definite entry into the

virtual art domain from the technological arc area. Today, Acevedo explores his signature metaphor in the time-based realm,

working with digital video software like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Aftereffects.

Recent digital prints by Acevedo include Eric in Orense (2001) and the com­ panion David in Orense (2001) as well as Nil Cynthesis (2003)-

Materialized Digital-based Work

Geometric considerations are at the heart of the iterative hyperstruccures and the abstract digital wall prints of French artist Pascal Dombis.* Dombis has an engineering background, which has helped him to develop his own programming technique as he writes his own algorithms using computer lan­ guage and a fractal iterative loop. Through this programming technique, Dombis manipulates computer-generated visual hyperstructures, which he then synthesizes into abstract digital wall-print fields. These visual fields over­ throw, or at least displace, modern rationality in favor of unpredictable emer­ gences of patterns. Dombis began to use the computer in his artwork in the late 1980s. At that time, he started to manipulate the computer file as a printmaking plate—

using computer prints as a substitute for traditional prints. But the computer output was just one element in his mixed-media work then—work that included all kinds of elements like painting materials, ropes, and metal (all assembled to form rather theatrical installations falling somewhere between painting and sculpture). Then, in the early 1990s—through his discovery of

fractal geometry and its unlimited possibilities for computer-generated geometries—Dombis gradually got rid of all traditional painting and sculp­ ture material, and concentrated on exploring the new conceptual space that emerged through self-programmed iterative hyperstructures. We are here already at the heart of the virtual art sphere. Today, Dombis methodically uses an elementary warped prototype as his

computational starting point to achieve self-programmed iterative hyper­

structures so as to advance a complex pictorial space in which he addresses a miscellaneous collection of network issues such as complexity, perpetuation, enrichment, and chaos. By commencing with a singular and uncomplicated

warped constituent (a lonely curve or a diminutive portion of an arc), and

by reproducing it computationally with perseverance, Dombis achieves an intensely elaborate geotectonic optic structure rich in associative significance.

Into Dombis’s virtual matrix rushes a relentless machine logic bent on achiev­

ing a contemporary techno-hyperirrationality. To achieve this hyperirrationality, Dombis always starts with a singular rational and uncomplicated geometric element, and then reproduces it in an iterative loop. During the first loops of the iteration, the starting element can still be recognized, but a structure is soon created that contains a large number of this initial element.

Chapter 3

Using the computers calculational power, Dombis can generate structures made up of tens of thousands to several million single elements. The result­ ing configuration would be impractical to generate by hand. Indeed, it would not be possible to anticipate what the final structure would look like after the completion of the calculation process without the computer’s calculational power. This is the unforeseeable result that first attracted Dombis when he discovered the fractal loop’s potentialities. Just a tiny change can generate completely different visual results, leading to infinite combinations of geometric structures.

One of che interesting elements in Dombis’s work is the extreme variety of che oucput he can generace with his simple algorithm. Because he can add some randomness into his work, Dombis can produce an endless number of combinations and chaotic images, depending on the random calculation used. Hence, from che same file, Dombis can produce an infinite variety of struc­ tures—because at each calculation the random seed is reinitialized, leading to a different output. Dombis terminates his loop process at the point just before what Severo Sarduy calls “blackout” (fulfilment of all possibilities). According to Sarduy in his book Barroco, if a structure is developed incessantly, it will end up as a perplexed all-black facsimile of itself and thus attain its own “blackout.”4

Once calculated to a point prior to blackout, Dombis uses large-format digital printers to output his germinated hyperstructures. Dombis’s work then invades gallery or museum space in site-specific installations where his hyper­ structures are designed to fit on walls (figures 3.1 and 3.2). Moreover, Dombis

has developed several large pieces for outdoor urban sites—the largest being in 1999 in Metz, France, for a thirty-meter window in an art school. This piece, which could be seen from the city center, was composed from an arced

ribbon interlaced and flowed in such a way as to give a baroque rhythm to the architectural setting. From far away, people could follow the blue, red, or

purple curves. Getting closer, Dombis’s work generated a vertigo where the viewer got lost in a chaotic accumulation of details.

Dombis’s work is truly optic, and the observer’s position is important in his work. In front of Dombis’s monumental pieces, the observer can feel an

immersive sensuousness by moving back and forth. The multiplicity of networked rhizome worlds is reinforced in Dombis’s 2001 works through the use of lenticular material. Lenticulars are optical

Materialized Digital-based Work

Figure 3.1

Pascal Dombis, Rizong III, 1999. Digital wall drawing, 9 x 4.3 meters.

lenses that allow several images to fit into one: when looking at a lenticular image, as the observer’s angle or view changes, the observer can see first one

image, then another—revealing progressively the different images. This tech­ nique is employed by Dombis in large print works that generate different potentialities for his incense geometric calculations. Here, he shows the progress of his mathematical iteration loop in which the original motif dis­

appears into the scrolling network (just before the blackout) or he explores the different status of his structures, at different scales—all integrated in a

virtual collection of networked images.

In a 2001 installation for a Paris event on the computer virus theme called Festival Virus (organized by Artekno), Dombis installed a printer in the

middle of a gallery room and continuously printed the same file. Because the file included some randomness, each printout was a different variation on the same formula. The printouts were then hung on the gallery wall, creat­ ing a room full of nearly one hundred different variations.

It is interesting to note that Dombis sees his iterative computational methodology as a kind of arte povera within the new technology. Certainly,

Chapter 3

■t

Figure 3.2

Pascal Dombis, Antisana 1, 2000. Digital wall drawing, 8 x 3.8 meters.

Dombis uses the computer for its original and primitive essence: a power­ ful computational tool that can reproduce simple calculation incessantly. But

because Dombis writes his own algorithms and programs, he has control over his germinating artwork. It helps him too in his creative process by explor­

ing other computer language techniques and making programming mistakes

that turn out to be new explorations in his geometric hyperstruccures. Turning to Matthias Groebel* his system of making computer-robotic-

assisted paintings involves unifying painting and computer techniques. The artist initially choose television images as an image source (and makes small alterations on them). Thus, his approach is the incorporation of the contem­

porary experience of television perception altered now by digital media rec­ ognizing itself in painterly terms. Groebel also makes extensive use of text elements, normally taken from the television screen—or as for his american

beauty series, Chinese script ripped from video CDs (figure 33). Moreover, there are several elements that contribute further to the complex structure

of Groebel’s work. On the one hand, there is his obsession with traditional

Materialized Digital-based Work

Figure 3.3

Matthias Groebel, american beauty #6,2001. Acrylic on canvas, 59 x 39.4 inches.

painting techniques—an obsession that allowed him to develop his system of

applying layers of color, which give a convincing sensation of traditional

painting to the television-based images with which he works. His use of an airbrush delivery system also results in the blurring of points of color, and

this too conveys a painterly aesthetic. At the same time, the recognizable line structure and pattern of che television screen remains evident, and so the viewer is reminded of the images’ source.

Chapter 3

The choice and manipulation of the sampled television images, however, makes it clear chat Groebel’s work is not about media theory or even really about television. First, it is an aesthetic composition; none of Groebel’s can­ vases ever match the precise proportions of a television screen. Also, even though the television images come from different television sources, they are never identifiable. There are no politicians, no actors, and no familiar feces (figure 3.4). The original context of the already obscure material gets lost completely during the production process. Groebel’s working penchant for watching television with the sound turned off so as to accumulate huge, unsorced files of still images on his hard drive does not permit a proper tracing

Figure 3.4

Matthias Groebel, american beauty #10, 2001. Acrylic on canvas, 39.4 x 39.4

inches.

Materialized Digital-based Work

back of the image source or context. There is no process of identification left. All that remains is a feeling of a bleached-out memory around these images a feeling that is not committed at all to the knowledge of their original context or meaning. Hence, Groebel uses today's capture technology to forget specific context so as to address the cultural memory in general—in the abstract. As for his background, Groebel was born in 1958 in Germany. He was first trained as a naturealist. It was through this scientific training that he initially developed his art ideas, within the isolation of a German province. At that time, he continued painting using traditional hand techniques, the results of which were never shown in public. Through this period of growth, Groebel

intensely studied painting procedure, photography, chemical reactions, and computer programming. When Groebel decided to move to one of the centers of the contemporary art scene in the late 1980s, Cologne was the judicious choice. During that

move, Groebel brought with him his first version of a painting apparatus that

he had been developing. This machine, which became completely functional in 1990 and subsequently has turned into an ever-more-sophisticated tool over the years, applies pigmented acrylic colors onto traditional canvases. Groebel

built this robotic apparatus from scratch, hacking together bicycle compo­

nents, parts of an airbrush, and a big glass window that kept clouds of color from floating throughout the entire room. Groebel’s basic idea for this robotic

apparatus was to use it in the movement of television images from their tel­ evision context onto painted canvases. In this respect, then, Groebel’s claim that he had to become a hacker to go on as a painter is justified. Indeed, it is

through hacking that he takes the position of a painter to an immanently contemporary level. While Groebel has kept to the basic parameters of his work, he has come

up with different groups of compositions within the last few years—for example, his use of the human body. The human body (or parts of it) occurs

in Groebel’s work not only as a subject but as a scale device within the virtual

space of the paintings. The body is never less than life-size.

Groebel’s representation of space, as related to the physical size of the canvas, is another one of the intriguing aspects of his work. His perspective is that of a low-resolution television camera—the view that has changed our idea of the world more than any other development over the last fifty years.

He has also produced a whole series of abstract-looking paintings called Hacked Channels that come from encrypted satellite channel transmissions. The

Chapter 3

illegal hacker software Groebel uses for decoding the signals fails to com­ pletely restore the images to their state of legibility, resulting in a strange whirlwind—a sort of semifigural milieu. When one visits Groebel’s studio, one sees him working on a new device that uses a laser beam to virtually burn wax color into the canvas. So, all told, while che modus operandi for his art remains primarily technologically con­ ceptual, there exists an element of undisguised intuition about his work— mixed with a deep-seated scientific indoctrination and a love of good painting. As cultural critic Helen Sloan puts it, “What makes Groebel’s work so refresh­ ing is its odd positioning between che underground and the traditional. Groebel uses the devices of computer subculture to place them firmly within the language of arc and its history.’’5 An original way to treat the plastic issue of patterns in a technologically determined manner can be found in John F. Simon’s* Every Icon Is aJava Apple.

It systematically generates every black-and-white combination of the e-pixel grid that composes digital screen icons. Simon is one of che few artists who

not only uses the computer as a tool but also knows how to program it and design software. He merges both vocations in Every Icon (1997), which was featured in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Every Icon is composed of a 32 X 32 inch square grid. At first, every square is white. Then, as the software launches and the program progresses, che grid proceeds co feacure every possible per-

mucation of black-and-whice squares—until eventually, every square is black. He also likes co take conceptual ideas from the Bauhaus and Sol LeWitt, and

then write them into his software. In 1997, Simon also created Color Balance, a Web site installation chat behaves like a scale by utilizing a horizontal bar with weighing pans at either

end. Rather than standard weights, the items placed in the pans are rectan­

gles of color. The balance shifts back and forth as rectangles are added and

removed. Although color is perceptual and has no mass, Color Balance is an

environment where a color’s weight is measurable. The weight of an object

cannot be compared to its visual appearance. Yet the word heavy indicates both objects of great weight and colors with visual dominance. One way to recon­ cile these immeasurable definitions is to represent color as a number. When

color is digitized, its quality becomes a quantity. Simon refers to Klee’s note­ books in which he describes a model for understanding color based on balance.

Klee defines color using three parameters: extension, tone, and character. Color

Balance defines the extension of a color to be the square pixel area of its

Materialized Digital-based Work

rectangle. Tone and character are represented by a single number: the sum of the red, green, and blue color components. In Color Balance, the weight of a color is the product of the extension and the color value. Color Balance allows the viewer to manipulate the size and color of the rectangles on the scale. Klee’s example, as well as many other experimental configurations, may be

produced with this system. In terms of his background, Simon is a Louisiana native who completed his master’s in fine arts at the New York School of Visual Arts in 1987. In the years after graduation, Simon taught at the School of Visual Arts and worked as a programmer. Simon’s recent pieces conform to a more traditional concept of artwork— they are shown not on a computer terminal but on flat liquid-crystal diode monitors, framed as if they were paintings. Color Panel vl.O (1999) looks like a geometric abstraction by Klee or Mondrian, but it is really a computer

program that will undergo millions of permutations (figures 3.5, 3.6). Such plastic themes as the portrait and still life find a most original inter­ pretation in the techno-aesthetic devices applied by Steve Miller* in his flat­ based work, including paintings and digital iris prints. The artist uses his

i

i

Figure 3.5 John F. Simon, Color Panel v 1.0, 1999. Courtesy of the artist and the Sandra Gering Gallery.

Chapter 3

Figure 3.6 John F. Simon, ComplexCity, 2000. Courtesy of the artist and the Sandra Gering Gallery.

personal high-tech and digital-imaging systems to explore the body (the por­ trait) as well as the objects of the environment (still life). Miller’s large-scale “interior human portrait” prints and paintings use medical technology such

as radiographs, x-rays, magnetic resonance imagings, sonograms, electro­

cardiograms, and CAT scans (figures 3.7, 3.8).

For an artist like Thomas Bayrle,* technical elements changed his eminently pictorial work. Originally relying on simple pictograms for his compositions,

in the 1960s he began to condense together the prefabricated parts that con­

struct what can be called superimages. Nowadays, Bayrle perceives the points that make up a nose, for example, as individual spaces or lively beings. For him, a complete picture’s quality depends on the amount and the quality of its indi­

vidual parts. Today, people know that a single cell means life and is therefore

an individual being. Bayrle considers that he has worked for decades in a

Sisyphean way in trying co solve the problem of how to recognize his object and portray it adequately. In this respect, the computer has proven invaluable for his work, as it has for another German artist, Tobias Trutwin,* who is invest­

ing plastic problems with certain extra-artistic issues always linked to aesthetic finalities. Trutwin utilizes transparent materials for his installations—in

Materialized Digital-based Work

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shemst'y, VacKmon. MacKinnon, of Rockefeller University, is one of the wares leading reseamne-s 5n proteomics. He is exploring the mechanics of the electric charge of rhe ionic C'srne r a protein, and how this charge moves across a cell membrane. Miller's painting com­ bines tne ribbon and mesh forms of representing a protein.

Materialized pigrtal-baoed Work

particular, transparent images generated by computer—and incorporates dif­ ferent references into them, based on his interest and research not only in the

artistic and philosophical fields but also on themes belonging directly to the­ ology and science. Furthermore, Trutwin creates transparent walls constructed with the aid of plastic bottles, pearl curtains, and transparent chairs. Trutwin was originally not a painter but a photographer. In 1992, he started to mix images on the computer. He initially presented these images in large luminous boxes, but made use of a new technique toward the end of 1997: he transposed his images onto large glass slides with the aid of a trans­ parent, inalterable silicon glue, which represented a quite original technical

option. Trutwin presents his glass pictures in three ways. First, they can be presented in boxes where the light is projected from behind. Trutwin rarely uses this technique, however, since the same presentation is widely used in publicity. A second way of presenting his large glasses is in the form of a stele.

This is Trutwin’s preferred technique since it allows the spectator to choose one’s own point of view and makes the spectator participate more intensely in the creative process. A third way to present these images is by means of suspension hooks placed on a wall, this has the advantage of allowing the

images to be treated as a series of windows due to reciprocal projection

processes, and it alludes also to church windows.

Trutwin refers to the biblical anathema against images in the sense that by observing the illumination face-to-face, in most cases a strong light reflex is

created. This prevents the visitor consuming the totality of the image. Instead,

the spectator will be forced to change their point of view if they want to see the parts of the picture that are covered by reflections. At the same time, such

an illumination ensures that the observer is reflected in the glass. This is a

desired phenomenon and not an unwanted technical side effect. The mirror­ ings constitute an integral part of the artist’s work, without which the con­ stitutional, symbolic artistic act of self-recognition would be greatly reduced. Through the mirroring, the observer will also be integrated into the image

world. The spectator, when placed between the source of light and the glass, casts a shadow directly onto the picture. More precisely, this shadow will not

be visible on the glass; but as already mentioned, since it is occupied by the

mirrored image, the shadow is only visible on the wall projection. The faceto-face observer destroys the projection by looking. This has become the strongest reference for the biblical anathema with which Trutwin has been concerned for many years.

Chapter 3

Another aspect of Trutwin’s work results from his interest in the virus problem. This manifests itself by the fact that in his view, viruses correspond more to dead elements of information than to living beings, entering another cell in order to empower themselves through and manipulate the cellular machinery.61 will return to this problem when I discuss bioaesthetic issues in materialized digital-based works later in this chapter. An original way to realize one’s ambitions as a designer with the new media was chosen by John Maeda in creating a 480-page book titled Maeda@Media (2000) as a retrospective of his personal work. This work can be viewed as a manifesto, a finely crafted manual, and an inspirational book. As director of the Aesthetics and Computation Group, an experimental research studio founded in 1996 as the successor to the Visible Language Workshop, Maeda took a leading part in the group’s efforts to involve the

design and art community in the introduction of the underlying concepts of computing technology into the design area. Maeda was born in 1966 in Seattle. After receiving a PhD in 1992 at the Tsukuba University Institute of Art and Design in Japan, he became associ­ ate director of the MIT Media Laboratory, where he is also Sony Career Devel­

opment professor of media arts and sciences as well as associate professor of design and computation. In 1999, he published Design by Numbers. This book is a reader-friendly tutorial on both the philosophy and nuts-and-bolts tech­

niques of programming for artists. Practicing what he preaches, Maeda composed Design by Numbers using a computational process he developed specifically for the book. He introduces

a program available on the Web, which can be freely downloaded or run directly within any Java-enabled Web browser. Throughout his books, Maeda emphasizes the importance of understand­

ing the motivation behind computer programming as well as the many wonders that emerge from well-written programs. Sympathetic to the “math­

ematically challenged, “ he places minimal stress on mathematics in the first half of the book. Because computation is inherently mathematical, the book’s second half uses intermediate mathematical concepts that gener­

ally do not go beyond basic algebra. The reader who masters the skills so clearly set out by Maeda will be able to exploit the true character of digital media design. Print media are at the heart of Joseph Scheer’s* works, but he also has

developed a number of video and Web-based projects.

Materialized Digital-based Work

Scheer is a professor of print media, the chair of the Division of TwoDimensional Studies and Electronic Arts, and codirector/founder of the Insti­ tute for Electronic Arts at the School of Art and Design, Alfred University. He uses technology to reexamine nature through interpretive collecting and visual recording. For example, Scheer exploits the strange beauty of moths, whose varieties seem to be infinite. These insects are generally considered to be obnoxious, but with the help of more than one hundred thousand images of moths on the Net to choose from and with a powerful scanner, he manages to produce admirable printed works of art (figures 3-9, 3.1O).7

The work of Michael Rees* emanates from computer-aided design (CAD). His main project, Artificial Sculpture (2002), with its tangled hierarchy,

combines various objects and media. He made the installation with handassembled sculptures created with CAD and 3-D printing (rapid prototyp­

ing). The project also involved an animation of the CAD designs and the early

conceptual drawings. Moreover, it utilized a piece of software called Sculp­ tural User Interface that synthesizes language, image, and object in an envi­ ronment that can generate all three.

Figure 3.9

Joseph Scheer, Catocala Concumbens, 2003. Iris print on watercolor paper, 34 x

46 inches.

Chapter 3

Joseph Scheer, Yponomeuta Multipunctelle, 2003. Iris print on watercolor paper, 34 x 46 inches. Figure 3.10

Artificial Sculpture is a kind of “thinker toy.” It is modular (fingers, legs, handles, connectors, and bodies are designed to snap together) and can be seen as a language that grows exponentially. The modules were created with CAD

and output in 3-D printing. The masters were then silicon molded, and mul­

tiple parts were manufactured from the molds. The final objects were assem­ bled manually into the elements of a larger sculptural installation. They follow a strict branching structure that sprouts fingers on their ends. As such, they

are hierarchical structures that combine a global language (the assembly of

the Y-branches from PVC pipe) and a colloquial language (the legs, the fingers, the handles, and so on).

The Sculptural User Interface sequences projected onto a gallery wall are the

basis for the installation’s sculptures. They suggest ways that they might move,

defy gravity, and inhabit space, and refer viewers to the artist’s early conceptual drawings, which indicate the scope of the work. The Sculptural User Interface

software (available to viewers on the installation's computer) is a combinatory program that employs all the objects seen in the installation. Users can interact

with the program graphically via a keyboard by typing letters or words to gen­

erate sculptures. It is, then, a kind of social sculpture (figures 3.11 and 3.12).

Materialized Digital-based Work

Figure 3.11 Michael Rees, Artificial Sculpture, 2002. Detail of the ancillary installation with workstation and its projection of the Sculptural User Interface.

: Sculptural User Interface: Wittgenstein’* game 1 alphabet

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Michael Rees, Artificial Sculpture, 2002. Screen shot of the Sculptural User

Interface.

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Jj

The physical sculptures in the installation and the software sculptures float­ ing in projected space are two sides of the same coin for Rees. They share some similarities, but are also drastically different. The physical sculpture modules, although momentarily frozen in this installation, can and will grow into complex objects in the same way that the software grows sculptures. The phys­ ical sculptures, however, have weight, texture, gravity, and a physical pres­ ence. The software has none of this. The software is unconstrained by these elements and facilitates a kind of infinite growch of form based on language. Strangely, each approach to sculpture—the physical and the virtual—informs the other. Stranger still, each can become the ocher. It is a kind of hall of mirrors, but one in which the viewer never stands between the mirrors, except by implication. For Rees, the easiest critique of che investigative work chat employs the computer and its output media is that it is driven too thoroughly by tech­ nology. He observes that we have been living some thirty-five years now with the issues of digital technology and art, and many of the early investigations were full of hope and promise yet to be delivered. Ac the same time, we under­

stand chat che media is the message or, to put it differently, we know things within their context. For Rees, art gets interesting to the rarified elite when it can be critical of its media, when it can query and investigate itself beyond the initial seductive impact of its presence. It is at its best when it becomes

self-conscious. The cools of imagination have accelerated at the speed of light. Many of Rees's sculptures are generated with lasers that harden photopolymer, fulfill­

ing the real meaning of photography—to write with light. As we get nearer and nearer to the speed of light, things are looking very strange indeed. Rees has begun co focus on the comparative problems of artificial intelli­

gence against che backdrop of his work from 1992 co 1995. Alchough more clumsy chan his new work, these early sculptures had an instinct of artificial intelligence about them and were loosely based on che problems of creating organisms chat were simple “input/oucput” devices. These input/output systems consisted of fingers cast from the artist’s hand and arranged around

long PVC pipes. Just as they referenced zoological study and classification

they also looked coward intuitive systems like palmistry or phrenology— systems that may or may not be false. They used realistic objects as signifiers

for language systems—quite the opposite of abstractions, and yet extremely abstract. They referred to Hindu sculptures and their mudras, yet combined

Materialized Digital-based Work

with fingers cast so delicately a palmist could read their lines. They looked as if they were grabbing and letting go. Something still begged within the work that with the advent of artificial intelligence, acquired a new dimension. Cognition Issues

As far as the link between aesthetics and perception and cognition issues in materialized digital-based works goes, it is founded on the interpretation of the spectator problems already present in the works of artists of the 1950s and 1960s belonging to the op art and nouvelle tendance (new tendency)

movements. A natural predecessor co virtual art, op art drew attention to the spectator’s individual, constructive, and changing perceptions—and thus called on the attitude of the spectator to increasingly transfer the creative act onto themself. Op art beckons forth a consideration of the enlargement of che audience’s normal participation, both in regard to che spectator’s ocular apti­

tude co instigate variations in the perceived optic as well as their capability to produce kinetic and aggregate exchanges on or within the artwork itself. Thus, even within modernism one can begin co find the seeds that grew into

what I am calling virtual arc. One can already notice here che possibilities of an enlarged perception and cognition in the public chat was solicited by the members of the nouvelle tendance and other op artists, including chose specifi­

cally concerned with programmed and permutacional art. Their activities not

only formed a basis for che development of spectator participation into a still more global interactivity in the virtual era but also included such plastic

phenomena as virtual movement, virtual vibration, virtual light, and vircual

colors, both “musical” and environmental. A certain number of problems of an aeschecico-psychological or a philosophical nature were therefore raised, all linked to the interpretation of che terms of perception and cognition. If the ordinary sense of perception can be associated with the intuitive recognition of an aesthetic quality, its philosophical sense means che action by which the mind refers its sensations to external objects as causes. The philosophical sense

of cognition is both more general and more restrictive. It means an action or faculty of knowing, perceiving, and conceiving—as opposed to emotion and

volition; in other words, etymologically speaking, it means an apprehension of knowledge. But the difference between perception and cognition is not only

due to a historical linguistic development but shows a new attitude toward experimental psychology and the virtual environment.

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The artists in this section are trying to find new solutions to these prob­ lems through the application of new technologies. Their techno-aesthetic stance is achieved progressively by starting from research on the discovery of the cognition dimension of the human senses and applying it to virtual envi­ ronments where the spectator’s interactive implication plays an important role. Such is the practice of Monika Fleischmann,* whose work is concentrated on conceiving virtual plots and interfaces as well as support processes of com­ munication with the aid of poetry and the imagination. She is also concerned with the mediatization of the human body, and has set out to create forms of a new culture in the area of interactivity and network communication. Her principal works have mostly been elaborated in close collaboration with architect Wolfgang Strauss. Fleischmann’s artistic itinerary can be captured under three headings: work accomplished within the ART + COM group, work in the ARTWORK context, and work as a participant of the German National Research Center

for Information Technology (GMD) at the Birlinghoven Castle in Sankt

Augustin, near Bonn. Her projects developed as a founder and a member of the ART 4- COM group. Elektronisches Musterhaus {Electronic Model House), one of her principal research projects with ART + COM, was conceived for the Berlin Senate and realized between 1988 and 1992. During che first stage, she investigated che impacc of lighc, acouscics, and macerialicy, laying special scress on che rela­ tionship between image and sound. During the second stage, Fleischmann

explored the computer as an instrument for planning, and in the process, a number of didactic models were created. Fleischmann’s various projects developed within che ARTWORK context,

from 1988 to the present. At first, she elaborated projects such as Woman and Economics', in 1991, she participated in an architecture competition with computer simulation. Two years later, Fleischmann produced an educational study for the Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Linz, Austria, and in 1994, she

conceived an art and communication environment in Japan. She subsequently worked on a computer-based study of the relationships between arc, culture,

and the new media in Germany. Fleischmann’s main contribution to the art and technology area was

realized under the auspices of the GMD. In 1992, she undertook a study

for a virtual design environment titled Imagination at Work, followed by The House of Illusion, in which one comes across objects that have seemingly

Materialized Digital-based Work

independent lives. This work was created to celebrate GMD's twenty-fifth anniversary. That same year, Fleischmann won the Golden Nika Prize for interactive art at the Ars Electronica exhibition in Linz with her Home of the

Brain, a work concerned with the visualization of the telecommunications future. She took up the theme again in 1998 as an artistic concept for a multi­ user space, focusing on the notion of virtual space as a stage setting, and the behavior and interactions of the public in an extended gallery space. During the 1992-1994 period, Fleischmann developed several other research projects: a spatial interface intended for the navigation of virtual spaces through walking titled The Spatial Navigator, and other works based on the Narcissus myth as a privileged form of self-reflection. This theme

became one of her main preoccupations. It was the subject of two interactive installations in 1993, Rigid Waves and Liquid Views. The former was a theatrical production conceived as a meeting place for the observer with

themself. In this work, Narcissus communicates with his reflection, which he cannot touch. Rigid Waves transforms the acoustic mirroring of Narcissus and

Echo into a visual form. It is a virtual mirror that does not reflect but rather recognizes. Narcissus gives up his body to his mirror image, and his move­ ments become an illusionary echo. As the observer approaches the mirror, one

is confronted with an image that does not correspond to the normal percep­ tion of things. The observer sees themself as an impression, as a body with strangely displaced movement sequences, and ultimately, as an image in a mirror that disintegrates as soon as the observer comes too close. Sight and

movement, approaching and distance, are triggers for these unusual images.

They are an attempt to see oneself from the outside, to stand side by side with

oneself and discover other hidden “selfs” (figure 3.15). The central theme of Liquid Views is the well in which Narcissus discovers his reflection. He initially sees water as someone else, as another body. Like

the small child in the various “mirror stages” described by Jacques Lacan, Nar­

cissus decides to recognize his fictitious body as himself. Looking into the

well—the digital universe—also functions as a metaphor for one’s own image on the Internet. Enticed by the water simulation, their own image, or the

sound of water, most visitors to this installation couch the surface of the water, which is in reality a touch-sensitive glass surface that causes the image to dis­

integrate. At the same time, the visitors are unaware that they can be observed and consequently behave rather freely. The computer, however, is able to

store the images secretly, thus retaining the visitors’ facial expressions and

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Figure 3.13

Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Liquid Views, 1992/93.

behavior. The installation has the objective of arousing the visitor’s curiosity and seducing them to undertake actions that bring chem into contact with

their own senses (figure 3-13).

In 1995, Fleischmann started developing che human body theme in the Skywriter and its interface Virtual Balance. In this arrangement, navigation through body balance is achieved by way of writing in the sky and leaving marks as a metaphor for surfing on the Net. A lighted trace helps to find one’s

bearings in the virtual space. The Skywriter can fly apparently effortlessly with the aid of the Virtual Balance. The latter is a navigation system for con­

trolling images through the use of the human body. It is also a means for observing the effect of images on che body, and consists of a computerized platform with three weight sensors controlled by changes in the position of a

person’s center of gravity by means of weight displacement or slight move­

ments. Thus, the visitor, by using one’s body balance, can navigate through virtual landscapes (figure 3-14). Fleischmann’s most recent projects are concerned with the shape of consciousness through computer-assisted virtual environments, with

Materialized Digital-based Work

Figure 3.14

Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Virtual Balance, 1994/95.

perception and cognition through the development of the senses as well as the

relations between art, culture, and entertainment in electronic arenas of performance.

Mathieu Briand* uses new technologies to immerse the spectator into che artwork, but always plays with the spectator’s point of view so as to let them wonder about the reality of their own perceptions. For example, Briand has

created works where he disorients the spectator, who is equipped with an

immersive head-mounted display, by showing the space through the eye of a video camera mounted on top of the helmet, but sometimes also through the

eye of another spectator wearing the same device. Video inputs are swapped

randomly between spectators, and they never know if what they see is their visual perception or another’s. This examines the issue of self-perception and self-consciousness. With Briand, we are moving away from the paradigm of

the map, which has been put forward to investigate modern and postmodern

art, to the paradigm of the path, with both a subjective point of view and a cognitive aspect. No one ever knows the totality of the map, no one can picture

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the virtual territory that lies fragmented in the mind of each spectator. It is

the mesh of the subjective paths followed by the spectators and exchanged among them chat creates the overall system of meanings.8 A subtle way of showing the hiatus between perception and cognition is

demonstrated by Joachim Sauter* in his work Iconoclast (1992), also known as Zerseher, in which the observer finds himself in a museum environment. A golden-framed picture (flat screen) is hanging on a wall. On coming closer,

the viewer notices that the exact spot of the picture one is looking at changes under one’s gaze. Behind the screen, an eye tracker is installed. A camera is

pointing at the viewer’s eyes in the process. The eye tracking software

analyses the video signal and locates the reflections of an infrared-light source

in the viewer’s eyes. With this, it can calculate exactly which part of the paint­

ing the viewer is looking at. An algorithm is then distorting the picture exactly at these coordinates. This means that as soon as the viewer looks at a

particular part of the picture, this part is distorted. The viewer is consequently forced to interact with the picture without doing anything other than what one usually does with a picture (namely, look

at it). This then turns into a conscious “distortion viewing” of the picture after a short period of time. In this work, Sauter has promoted the computer

medium as an interactive installation with computer scientist Dirk Lusebrink.

Materialized Digital-based Work

Born in 1959, Sauter studied visual communications and film in the early 1980s. He already used the computer during his university days as a tool for his graphic, cinematic, and architectural work, and has focused on artistic and design work with the computer since this time. In the mid-1980s, he was one of che early media artists who did not just view the computer as a new tool

but instead attempted to promote it as an equal and independent medium along with painting, graphics, sculpture, architecture, and film. His works

concentrated here on experimental investigation of the new language and grammar of computer-based art and media design. Computer-based arc and design, in Saucer’s opinion, are based on a language inherent to the new tech­ nology. Just as a film language developed at the beginning of the twentieth

century from film technology, based on che montage of the film material, a language and grammar of interactive media has developed ar the end of the twentieth century based on interaction, multimedia capabilities, and network interaction. In che first half of the 1990s, Sauter mainly concerned himself

with virtual, three-dimensional, interactive space. This work involved the

artistic and design investigation of navigation in virtual rooms, the transfor­

mation of information into virtual objects, and the interaction with the infor­ mation architectures that arise in the process. Sauter’s key work, The Invisible Shape of Things Past (1995), was again real­

ized with Lusebrink. In this project, they developed a concept based on the camera parameters (position, orientation, focal length) for transforming films

into three-dimensional, virtual objects. The “film objects” that arise in the process are, for one thing, readable information architectures that can be inter­

acted with; for another, the objects promote a new approach co modeling architecture, which is then meant to be built with these same objects.

At the end of the 1990s, Sauter focused on the augmentation of the real world with the virtual world (as in the case of virtual stage settings, for

example), and the development of physical and synthetic interfaces for navi­ gation in virtual information spaces.9 An original way of dealing with the problem of cognition is che basis of

the interactive computer installation Focus (1998) by Tamas Waliczky.* This

work is made up of hundreds of photographs and can be viewed equally as a personal, digital photo album as well as a metaphoric vision of Europe. Start­

ing with the blurred, simulated photograph of an imaginary street on which a crowd of people have gathered, it is possible to investigate individual members of the crowd and the relationships between them. The camera in

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this case is the interface. Waliczky also produced a CD version of this instal­ lation titled Focusing and a second version of Focus for the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences in Gifu, Japan, in 1999. Another aspect of how Waliczky approaches the problem of cognition can be seen in his computer animation Sculpture, which was performed as part of Mesias Maiguasca’s opera The Enemies during the Multimediale 5 exhibition in Karlsruhe, Germany. This work, at the center of Waliczky s plastic and religious preoccupations, was shown again in 2000 under the title TimeSpace Sculptures. In the dream sentences of The Enemies, Waliczky wanted to visually represent the way our temporal structure differs from that of God. He thought that this question was the key issue of the piece. On the basis of floating everyday movements and gestures—such as walking, jumping, waving, and so forth—he built three-dimensional sculptures with the com­ puter that he called “time crystals,” for they preserve in frozen form brief moments of an individual’s life. These crystals exist simultaneously alongside each other in space, and a virtual camera (whose viewing angle represents to

some extent che vantage point of God) can observe them from any desired location. By traveling through the time crystals, the camera can reproduce the original movements, but from a diverse range of perspectives and at varying speeds. In order to understand Waliczky’s theological attitude in this work, it may be necessary to mention that he contends that for us humans, who are limited in time and space, time is a one-dimensional affair. We can only move along one axis, which we define in coordinates of “pasc-present-future.” And sadly

enough, even in this simple dimension, we are able to travel in one dimen­ sion only—namely, forward. But for God, who is eternal and thus his dimen­ sions are infinite, Waliczky observes that time is perhaps a four-dimensional

quantity, for God can see all three-dimensional existences simultaneously and

at any point in time. Therefore, for God it is a simple matter co change at will our perception of time. Born in 1959, in Budapest, Hungary, Waliczky started out by creating

cartoon films (1968-1983); parallel with this activity, he worked as painter, illustrator, and photographer (figure 3-16). He began working with

computers in 1983- In 1999, Waliczky started on a computer animation titled The Fisherman and his Wife, which was completed one year later and received a number of prizes. This work’s story line is based on a German folktale and its visual animation is based on shadow theater. Every virtual puppet, tree,

Materialized Digital-based Work

Figure 3.16

Tamas Waliczky, Gramophone, 1989. ORTF, Linz, Austria.

flower, or house in it is hand drawn by the artist, scanned in, and used as a texture map on two-dimensional polygonal forms positioned in the three-

dimensional space. At first, the scenes are illuminated with only one light source, but as the story goes on, more and more puppets have their own light

sources, casting shadows of other puppets or objects into the scene. The work

uses the lights and the shadows to visualize relations between humans, reality and virtuality, reality and desires as well as reality and dreams. Bioaesthetic Issues

The actual and theoretical breakthroughs concerning the understanding and

potential control of the organic world through virtual means have widely influenced a great number of virtual artists. Although these understandings

lead to significant cultural questions about the nature of being human— and are of great importance for virtual art as a whole—in this section I will only consider the bioaesthetic issues in materialized digital-based

works as influenced by biological problems such as the genome and other

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genetic theories and discoveries, the bionic code, lively movement, and viruses. Media organisms (artificial life-forms cultivated in the plasma of popular culture), bionic codes, and subjective ecosystems over the Internet all consti­ tute highly original contributions by artist Ebon Fisher* to the latest devel­ opments in bioaesthetic research.

Fisher collectively named his creations and the world they inhabit “Nerve­ pool.” This is a bionic world, in which many of the codes operate as ritual elements. Nervepool was born when Fisher, while still living in Pennsylva­ nia, began spray painting simplified drawings of nerve cells on surfaces around Pittsburgh. At an early stage, Fisher had already decided to abandon tradi­ tional art for science and technology in order to search for more universal meanings. He thought that art had lost touch with everyday life. When in

1981 he "tagged” Pittsburgh with diagrams of neurons, this crude displace­ ment of biological science into the streets marked the beginning of a long fas­ cination with the living properties of information. During the 1980s, Fisher experimented with a variety of “media rituals." These rituals focused on the immediacy of body experience and community­

based culture, through massive participatory art events in a neighborhood. They were also efforts at exploring new ways to build vital convergences of humans and media technology. At the beginning of the 1990s, Fisher lived in the close-knit artists’ neigh­ borhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His work involved the interface of media, technology, and industry with the human environment of a small com­

munity and the individual. He was thrilled by the many possibilities of global

communication within the intimacy of the small artists’ communities.

Since 1992, Fisher has been cultivating bionic codes. A Bionic code can be seen as a problem-solving routine for human behavior as it is exercised in the

realm of networks and cyberspace. Fisher’s first bionic codes were developed based on a series of theatrical experiments involving communication systems among audience members. His bionic codes have been formalized as a series

of diagrams and statements that “float” in the "infosphere” in a variety of media. Although Fisher’s bionic codes also draw on numerous spiritual and roman­

tic traditions, they are not meant to be prudish or invoke sin. Rather, the

codes are fertilized by wild invention and a need, in this cynical age, to unleash some positive disturbances. They are not rules. They are an optional and

Materialized Digital-based Work

flexible system of social algorithms; they are problem-solving devices to be utilized in any combination. Fisher’s Wigglism Manifesto, a project that started in 1996, followed his abandonment of the "integration” concept as a philosophy of organic fusion

in favor of “wigglism,” with its emphasis on lively movement, which is a quality possessed by many healthy, integrated systems and organisms. Wig­

glism can be considered an effort at moving our collective gaze away from both art and science, and toward the nurturing of life in the broadest, nonob­ jective, and nonhuman sense. It is an attempt to seed a form of “subjective ecology.” This leads, among other things, to a decentered authorship where one creates with the community, the medium, and nature. Many Eastern tra­ ditions, such as the Japanese tea ceremony, extend authorship and identity

into the mists of the tea garden. Wigglism is also indebted to the elegant calland-response method of many African cultures, a long-standing tradition that

North European cultures are just beginning to emulate (figure 3.17). Another original contribution to the bioaesthetic area with the aid of mate­ rialized digital-based devices is Joseph Nechvatals* computer-robotic-assisted paintings and computer animations. These have exhibited a particularly original research commitment: the Computer Virus Project. This open scheme can be described as Nechvatals experiment with computer viruses as a

creative strategy. Nechvatals highly inventive Computer Virus Project, which was first created and exhibited at the Saline Royale in Arc-et-Senans, France, in 1993, is obvi­

ously closely linked to the spread of biological and computer viruses. To begin

with, Nechvatal uploaded all of his earlier pictorial work (his “body" of work) into a powerful computer. He then introduced a basic computer virus into the

iconographic database. Next, selected visual results were both painted by robotic means onto several classical canvas supports and used in the

construction of a computer animation that documented the viral attacks.

At the end of 2000, Nechvatal took a further important step: he finished the first phase of the reworked Computer Virus Project and brought it into the

realm of artificial life—that is, into a synthetic system that exhibits behav­ iors characteristic of natural living systems, or in his case, viruses. The new

phase actively—and visually—propagated viral attacks on Nechvatals image files from his “ec-satyricon 2000 (enhanced) bodies in the bit-stream (com­

pliant)” series in real time, and so one might say, addressed some fundamen­ tal questions about the nature of life and death by simulating life/deathlike

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at

Q_ X U

’MEDIA SPORE: 3-PRONC FOCAL ENTITY.’ TCTT-SlTt, WILLlAMSBurc. BROOKLYN, l»i

Figure 3.17

BIONIC COOK DESCENDING INTO OLULO (OMITal Animation. I MS)

ZOACOOE. 'EQUALIZE SEDUCTION.’ PROJECTED AT PS 1 MUSEUM. New YORK. 2000

Ebon Fisher, The Evolution of a Media Organism, 2004.

phenomena on the computer. Here, viral algorithms—based on a viral bio­

logical model—are used to define evolutionary processes that are then applied to the image files used to create new-sprung computer-robotic-assisted paint­

ings. Each virus was localized on a cell and allowed to perceive the color of the cells close to it. Moreover, each virus has an energy level, and at each turn a small amount of energy is lost. If the energy of a virus is too low, then the

virus dies. A virus has its own program that defines its behavior, and each program is initially randomly generated, employing a user-defined instruction

Materialized Digital-based Work

sec, which governs the chromatic, luminous, and resonant behavior of the virus. Originally a painter and performance artist, Nechvatal, born in 1951 in Chicago, has worked with ubiquitous electronic information and computer robotics since 1986. Like his earlier 1980s’ gray drawings, photomechanical blowups, and computer-robotic-assisted paintings, Nechvatal’s virus-laced work creates a densely saturated visual space for us to decode. Sensual frag­

ments of soft human form are more clearly visible now, however. This arous­

ing flesh (or more accurately, postflesh) provides a vigorous combat zone in which the deterioration of the bacillus-like viral infection is enacted.

Though stressing sensuality in the virtual age, such paintings as viral attack: transmission, viral attack: the inquest Of the hOrrible, viral attack: regrets, or viral attack: piTy thoroughly express Nechvatal’s existential as well as artistic

commitment. One way of looking at Nechvatal’s development since his first shows in New York City’s alternative spaces in the late 1970s would be in terms of the

various media with which he has chosen to work. He has made major shifts in presentation without markedly altering his art’s complex structure—a structure based primarily on ideas about telecommunications technology. Yet the succession of pencil drawings, photocopying, photomechanical enlarging, sculpture, and computer-robotic-assisted painting only tells part of the story. In fact, in order to understand fully Nechvatal’s most recent artistic produc­

tivity, one has to look at his mournful attitude toward technology in general

and his existential commitments. In 1983, Nechvatal wrote: “Images of mass annihilation wrought by tech­

nology now provide the major context for our art and our lives ... for when technology relieved much of man’s fear of nature, it replaced that fear with one of technology itself.”10 At the time, he was working with photomechan­

ical blowups of small apocalyptic graphite drawings. But in 1986, Nechvatal

took the first decisive virtual step in his career as an artist by adopting the latest informatics technology. From 1993 onward, the biological concept of

the computer virus entered as a leading idea in his artwork. Before analyzing this move in more detail, let me mention another aspect

of Nechvatal’s aesthetic commitment. He has stated that the focus of his art is the interface between the virtual and the actual—what he terms the “virac-

tual.” Indeed, the basic premise of his computer-robotic-assisted paintings is the exploration of the viractual realm in painterly terms. So here the tradi­

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tion of painting is refreshed while under the influence of today’s highfrequency, electronic, computerized environment. For Nechvatal, art is now a matter of creating actual, palpable, aestheti­ cally rich sensations linked to both the tragic and rapturous aspects of virtualizing technologies. The function of his viractual art is to create, by extenuation, poignant aesthetic percepts that sensitize us to the joys and the sorrows of our own time. Thus, his art is about personal investigations into the conditions of viral virtuality—conditions that are not quite historically assessable yet. The general fin de siecle ornamental excess of Nechvatals work, however, also offers a joyous, perhaps even ecstatic, metaphor for our current computational conditions—and perhaps for our future expansive conditions of technological-aesthetic being. In the rising and collapsing of alternative

visualizations and unordered revelations encountered in his work, the circuits of the mind find an occupation exactly congruent with today’s technoinformatic structures (figures 3.18 and 3.19). Nechvatals early preoccupation with apocalyptic fear, mental anguish, illness, and death have not disappeared from his virtual projects. Yet these

feelings are now artistically realized within an up-to-date virtual framework that has allowed him to come fully to terms with our foremost present-day

emotional complexities. With the aid of powerful computers, another artist, Karl Sims, has pro­ duced installations generating genetic images of enormous complexity. Sims puts the spectator in an original position in front of these images. The prin­ ciple of massively parallel data processing, also known as “fine-grain” calcu­

lating, is co spread out the computer’s tasks among several thousand simple, interconnected processes. The computer’s architecture resembles a nervous system, with enormous quantities of data being processed at great speed, enabling the system as a whole to retain its “real-time” qualities and interac­

tivity. Sims’s purpose is to plot reputedly chaotic phenomena, irreducible to

mathematical formulas, in visible forms that achieve a high level of simili­ tude while also selecting the resulting random images from an aesthetic and creative point of view. His final aim is to activate the aesthetic awareness of the public in an up-to-date scientific context principally concerned with

genetic problems and artificial life in particular. In 1991, he created a work called Panspermia based on genetic art ideas. This environment generated a

rich array of computer graphics and then allowed the viewers co select which images they liked best, subsequently using, techniques of artificial evolution

Materialized Digital-based Work

Figure 3.18 Joseph Nechvatal, Orgiastic abattoir, 2003. Orgiastic abattoir, computer-roboticassisted acrylic on canvas, 44 x 66 inches. © 2003 by Joseph Nechvatal. Private Collection.

co promote features of those images in the next generation. He hoped his

installation would instill an appreciation of biological life. Sims studied computer graphics at MIT’s Media Lab and life sciences as an

undergraduate at MIT. He had been a computer animator with Whitney/ Demos Production in California, and a researcher with Thinking Machines,

and subsequently led GenArts, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which created special effects software for the motion picture industry.

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Figure 3.19 Joseph Nechvatal, Debauched Tissue Exstasis, 2002. Computer-robotic-assisted acrylic on canvas, 76 x 51 inches. © 2003 by Joseph Nechvatal. Private Collection.

Materialized Digital-based Work

In contrast to Sims’s Genetic Images (1993), a media installation that only allowed the interactive evolution of abstract images, his Galapagos (1997) installation was a work that permitted museum visitors to interactively evolve three-dimensional animated forms. Viewers had an important role in guiding the evolution through their “artistic selection” by stepping on

footpads in front of monitors displaying the graphic forms they wanted to promote. As Sims noted, “Perhaps someday the value of simulated examples of evolution such as the one presented in this exhibit will be comparable to the value that Darwin found in the mystical creatures of the Galapagos Islands.” He described to audiences their role as breeders: The process in this exhibit is a collaboration between human and machine. The visitors provide the aesthetic information by selecting which animated forms are most interesting, and the

computers provide the ability to simulate the genetics, growth, and behavior of the virtual organisms. But the results can potentially surpass what either human or machine could produce alone. Although the aesthetics of the partic­ ipants determine the results, the participants do not design in the traditional sense. Rather, they use selective breeding to explore the hyperspace of possible

organisms in this simulated genetic system. Since the genetic codes and com­ plexity of the results are managed by the computer, the results are not con­

strained by the limits of human design ability or understanding.

Suzanne Anker* is another visual artist and theoretician who works with

genetic imagery. Her main interest concerns the intersection between arc and

genetics. Anker’s principal series of works include the installation Codex: Genome (2000), shown at Universal Concepts Unlimited; Genetic Tableaux: Sym­

bolic Planet (Constellation) (2000), which consisted of silk screen and acrylic on

a wooden panel; and Differences and Repetitions (2000), which was created with computer-generated foam and acrylic on Plexiglas. In 1994, she curated Gene

Culture: Molecular Metaphor in Contemporary Art at Fordham University, the first

exhibition devoted entirely to the intersection between genetics and art. In her essay “Virus and Pearls: The Materialization of Culture,” Anker quotes Jean Baudrillard, saying, “The onslaught of viruses and their strate­

gies have in a sense taken over the work of the unconscious.” She continues: “Cryptograms and hyperfictions, cybersex and smart drugs, cranspecies germ­

lines, body-part-commodities, are Cultural buzzwords, all hovering in the media, encoding with their signature the information eruption of the cyborg and the technofix. From the metacognitive to the manic, from the substitu­

tive to the social, codes have become our operative conductor.”11 Later in the

Chapter 3

essay, Anker refers to Richard Dawkins, who discusses the relationship of natural evolution to cultural evolution. In The Selfish Gene Dawkins wrote, “A meme is a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. Examples of memes are units, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm and eggs, so memes prop­ agate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which in the broad sense can be called imitation.” Anker’s comment in her essay is, “Whereas the gene can determine species potentia (and not behav­ ior), the meme can only take into account the concepts of cultural conscious­ ness. Neither prediction nor market manipulation can formulate the infinite varieties of cultural forms. One consequence of this line of reasoning sets up a molecular politic in which social and cultural theories encapsulate an anthro­ pomorphized natural world. To metaphorically separate cultural theory from the body politic is one function of the precincts of art."

According to Anker, the virus is either a simple organism or a complex molecule—a parasite-like predator wandering around in search of a home, a

transitive postmodern body, incapable of its metastatus without its reliance on living cells, to be used as a translational system. The pearl, a synchronously abnormal growth—the result of an irritant or a virus—enters the establish­

ment as a gem. Secretions giving form to entities is our reliance on cultur­

ing, on interchanging error with procreative capacity. Culturing has linked art production with other incorporations of foreign bodies—bodies of cogni­

tive resources once thought to be outside the domain of visual art. Like a virus or a pearl, visual art is an altered mutation within this transformative

epoch.12 And finally, I want to discuss Yoichiro Kawagushi,* a prominent Japanese artist operating principally in the area of animated computer graphics. He has

built most of his oeuvre around a visual interpretation of the sea world. In his work titled Float (1989), the floating movement of marine animals

has been closely observed and depicted by computer graphics. An assemblage of metallic balls is used in this work to form a curved surface, whose texture expresses the skin color of organisms living in the subtropical islands, such as

marine plants and sea cucumbers. In Embryo (1988), the initial world of life development is programmed with a similar processing multimacro-computer system, which combines ray­ tracing transparency effects with a dynamic flow of images. The rhythm of

Materialized Digital-based Work

the pulse is here likened co the rocking of waves and the movement of sea anemone feelers, and calculated by derivative composite functions. Thus, this piece presents flexible-textured objects that are concerned with birth, energy, and growth from the artistic point of view. In fact, Kawagushi’s boyhood was primarily spent diving into the sea to catch fish, digging for the shellfish hidden away among rocks, and feasting his eyes on beautiful coral clusters.

The images and color tones he experienced then form the basis of his mental pictures and imagery today. The shapes in Kawagushi’s works are of sea plants and mollusks, which do not look at all like organisms living aboveground. The colors also reflect the hues of fish and radiant coral found in southern

waters around the artist’s native tropical island. In these filmic and high-definition synthetic video images, high-definition computer graphics offer a new way create forms that were impossible to reach through painting and sculpture. High-definition, three-dimensional com­ puter Graphics is a field in which the surface of objects can undergo changes in shape and color in coordinated movement. For Kawagushi, it is a question

of how well this “skin” can be represented, and although the process of per­ fecting this involves much trial and error, it is absolutely necessary for the

artist to find a means of expressing the inner life of the tropical fauna. In order to achieve this, he resorts to an original spatial representation of underwater

phenomena as well as a vivid and sharp animation process depicting meta­ morphic events.

In fact, in this visual world inspired by the sea world—with its light and its movements—the creatures that live in it are in permanent mutation. They

can be situated between the vegetal and the animal; they are completely hybrid beings. They have no determinate contours, no bones; they deploy their arborescent pseudopodia, inflate or retract; they wriggle and blossom all the

time, and their forms repeat themselves, sometimes recurrently. Their flesh reduces itself to a simple luminous envelope, to a membrane without a pli,

without asperities and without thickness: they are semitransparent. And this skin, brilliant as if it were mercury, reflects partially both the world in which it is immersed and the body to which it belongs, in a fascinating mirror game where the object merges and confounds itself with its reflection. The light

reminds us, with the aid of the sophisticated technology of ray tracing, of the

subtle art of lacquer, porcelain, and mother of pearl, the art of the mat

and the brilliant, the art of reflection, which is one of the characteristics of

Japanese art. And one can find in this original predilection for organic forms

Chapter 3

in perpetual metamorphosis an ancient Japanese notion that expresses the instability of beings in an ephemeral universe. Technically speaking, Kawagushi’s method consists in adopting a mor­ phogenetic model for the formation of soft and curved surfaces. This model is a means for allowing the representation and rendering of dynamic images through a specific system based on so-called metaballs. This device permits contractions and expansions of forms, thereby reproducing natural morpho­ logical patterns. Thus, Kawagushi’s principal aim remains the illustration and interpreta­ tion of all aspects of tropical underwater life with the aid of the latest avail­

able technological devices and others invented for this very purpose. In this chapter, we have seen a great variety of secondary aesthetic and

extra-artistic preoccupations of artists producing materialized digital-based work. Yet the most striking feature was the intervention of the computer in

their artistic itinerary in an innovative way in order to solve such basic tra­ ditional plastic problems as bi- and tridimensionality in their images and con­ structions as well as in the elaboration of appropriate visual and perceptual strategies for an original implication of the spectator. As such, these artists

also illustrate one of the prominent aspects of virtual art as a new develop­ ment of technological art.

Materialized Digital-based Work

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m Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

Aesthetically speaking, most of the multimedia off-line works discussed in this chapter entertain the problem of multisensoriality and sometimes synesthesia. Subthemes include the notions of hypermedia, cross media, and intermedia—and particularly the hypertext concept—as well as other ques­

tions connected with language, narration, and linguistics. To some extent, the phenomenon of hybridization also enters into consideration here, along with some plastic multimedia problems as well as sociopolitical, ecological, edu­

cational, and security issues. As for the virtual artists, I will examine their off­ line commitments to the public and particularly the spectator-participant. Here, a thread from multisensoriality, multimedia, off-line works to interac­

tive ones will become apparent. Language, Narration, Hypertext

The literary and linguistic aspects of multimedia off-line works are an indi­ cation of the large spectrum open in virtual art, where it is not only the multi­

sensoriality that strikes the observer but also the poly-artistic nature of this

work. Certain types of virtual art thus correspond to earlier attempts at cre­ ating total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk). In any case, the text in some works can

be of vital importance, and it underlines the fact that the humanist approach is a confirmation that even in this highly complex multisensorial area, lan­ guage is the most human trait of all. I am convinced that language plays a

decisive part in our wider consciousness—which is affected by technological

advancement—thereby permitting us to better assume both our intellectual and emotional human status at the beginning of the twenty-first century. My basically neohumanist attitude was originally informed by the thought

of literary figures like, among others, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Vladimir Nabokov, and Primo Levi. These authors anti­ cipated or described, each in their own manner, the defining events that made up twentieth-century tragedy—a tragedy that combined bureaucratic obses­ sion, widespread persecution, and outright murder with the misuse of tech­ nology. This explains my positive attitude as an alternative art historian. I

fully take into account the literary and narrative aspects of the multimedia and multisensorial works discussed here, and argue that they could play a part in the rehabilitation and prospective powers of technology at the turn of this

new century. As we have seen regarding the narrative implication of multimedia off-line works, Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, in their “overture” to their book on multimedia, view narrativity as the center for the aesthetic and formal strate­

gies that derive from the concepts of integration, interactivity, hypermedia, and immersion that result in nonlinear story forms and media presentations.

The hypermedia are for these authors the linking of separate media elements to one another in order to create a trail of personal association. Packer and Jordan also give narrativity a prominent place in their book’s final chapter,

selecting texts by such different authors as William Burroughs, Allan Kaprow,

Bill Viola, Lynn Hershman, Roy Ascott, Pavel Curtis, and Pierre Levy.

Hypertexts as well as other narrative developments and communication issues can be found in a number of works in this section. Jean-Pierre Balpe,*

an eminent practitioner and theoretician in the area of hypertext, created Trajectoires, an interactive and generated detective novel made by the groupe@graph group. The structure is based on ninety-six pages, each page being composed of five different objects: a title, an epigraph, a written text, a visual artistic architecture proposal, and a generated text. The work’s pages are virtual objects, but they should not be confused with the screen page, which is only considered a visual display. A page can then, according to some dynamic internal constraint, appear on one to x screens. These pages are free from any external linearity; the circulation mode between them is built

according to mathematical rules that are fully integrated into the fiction or the pages are made randomly, or again as the result of local choices made by the reader. Each element of the page has its own actualization constraints,

Chapter 4

running from the text—which remains the same in form and content what­ ever its reading or whenever the reading occurs—to the generated text— which only appears at the time of a specific reading. The title, the epigraphs, or the plastic proposals, each following specific rules, could appear different from one previous reading to the next, even if at the same time the internal fictional coherence prevailed. All those possibilities do not use the technique for their own end but try to answer particular needs of fictional expression.

It is not possible to show here either the range of offered possibilities or the writing choices made. In all, they respond to a particular conception of detective fiction, insofar as any detective fiction should be a challenge to the reader’s perspicacity. In this perspective, the reader should always try to under­ stand what is happening: an enigma, the true or false clues, the hypothesis of the construction, and the anticipation of the final answer. The particular pleas­

ure of the detective story is in this hide-and-seek game. Trajectoires is, for instance, built on a “conventional” enigma: twenty-four principal characters,

beginning from August 1, 2009, receive some death threats and encounter increasingly severe accidents. They must find out who is guilty before August 24. As a matter of fact, the reader takes up the position of a detective when looking for clues and is supposed to stop the mass murdering. But since che clues are infinite, no reading could possibly explore them all. Some of them,

however, made by generators, can appear only once. The more the reader reads over the text, the easier it gets co solve the enigma, which is based on a

complex set of events. The purpose is to simulate reality where context, back­ ground events, and more or less risky encounters reveal a different vision of the world. Interactivity, a set of information, reading, and generacivicy aim to define a consistent ficticious world where every secondary rhetorical object

plays a specific part. What matters is not to discover fixed formulas for a unique event but rather che multiple formulas for complementary events. Reading is reading over, but it is also comparing the different readings. The reader—as an individual or a group—does not stand outside che fiction but

is one of its main elements. Here is one possible version of a generated page from the Trajectoires novel: It is a day, a summer day, rhe sky spreads! At the time when the sun leaves the city and when the darkness is about co chase che light. The landscape seems to close upon

itself! The swifts’ call challenges the sky: the slaughter’s tip cart arrives on the Grfcve square. The sky is a sky: the sun burns. Decent people are rushing over. . . . Two

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

women carrying muddy children are begging. Red cares arrive on rhe Greve square,

the soldiers are walking behind them: a young woman is climbing the scaffolds stairs going toward the executioner: the blue sky is a mockery—sky so turquoise! Someone

in the crowd asks somebody else: “Who is it?” The answer is heard, A nasty cor­ rupted person”; in no time, she is lying on the plank, the execution-master actions

the blade—on the blue sky there are only crows adding black spots—the blood spurts out in streams. The executioner turns toward the crowd as if he was expecting some

applause! The blood flows in such quantity that the earth cannot soak it up, while the

quality of the sky is of infinite transparency! One of the executioner's assistants grabs

the head by the hair and shows it to the mob, and slaps it! Nobody talks, the silence is total, almost religious!

Whether this page comes before or after another is of no importance because the reader has already figured out beforehand, through a large number of clues while reading other pages, that the novel takes place during two “his­ torical” periods: the first from August 1 co August 29, 2009, and the other from August 1 to August 29, 1793- A number of clues refer to 1793, and the date chat appears on one of them (Nonidi 19 Thermidor an I) is used for its

redundancy value because, in fact, this inscription is quite unreadable. Yet on each of these pages, several events tend to shape a local temporality. As Balpe explains, linearity in generative writing tends to be restricted inside a sentence and has almost a syncaxic form. Those independent sequences allow, if desired, a random production that provides the narration with a

narrative background and nourishes the narration itself. This articulation between layers of linearity enables the narrative generation. Since the narra­ tive is controlled by a strong structure, which means a thick and attractive network of clues, all that is needed is to respect the local linearity so that it becomes a true narrative, which can then be read interactively, hypertextually, or generatively.

The interest that Patrick Lichty* shows in multifaceted narrative can be discerned in his Terminal Time (1999), an artificial intelligence—based interac­ tive documentary done in collaboration with the Recombinant History Appa­

ratus (Steffi Domike, Michael Mateas, and Paul Vanouse). Terminal Time combines an algorithmic approach with historical narrative, based on an ide­ ological bias and founded on responses to questions posed to the audience. Asked to contribute a mass media look” to the title and promotional graph­ ics for the project, Terminal Time is one of the few projects that Lichty was

Chapter 4

TemHmlTime’fe^rcuttfng edge/audlence-pc history engine combining mass participation^ real-time documentary.graphlcs andartificial Intelligence tobring you the history you des Each half-hour-clnematic experienced oust YOUR valuesjblases^nddesires^d-

Patrick Lichty, Terminal Time, 1999. In collaboration with Steffi Domike, Michael Mateas, and Paul Vanouse. Visual design by Patrick Lichty.

Figure 4.1

involved in that incorporated the subversive co-optation of broadcast media forms and experimental forms of narrative (figure 4.1).

Lichty, an artist, curator, and writer, was born in 1962. His midwescern working-class lineage also includes a long line of artists and musicians. Lichty’s fascination with technology and art began in the early 1970s, when

he incorporated electronics into fanciful “devices.” On receiving his first home computer in 1978, his initial investigations into digital media were not through video games but drawings and musical compositions. These mainly visual forays into technology and creativity developed during several years in the engineering disciplines until a convergence of events led to a reframing

of his work in terms of media subversion and critical explorations of narra­

tives through the creation of various forms of "concurrent texts.” Lichty’s work is hard to qualify and quantify by genre or media as his devel­ opment of multivalent media narratives has included xerography, neon, video, sound, robotics, and Internet technologies. What remains continuous throughout his artwork is a critical engagement with issues of communica­ tion, the transmission of stories and concepts, and the mode in which human­ ity communicates those ideas through various media; what effects these

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

technologies have on society; and how artists can engage with these issues in

order to intervene in them. Lichty’s shift from purely aesthetic forms to the blurring of media, art, lit­ erature, and visual forms occurred in 1989- This shift entailed solidifying his foundation in philosophy and social theory to contextualize his then representationally based 2-D digital prints, thereby ushering in the incorporation of mass media appropriations and aphoristic wordplay. His work in the early ‘1990s was largely based around a series of pedagogical experiments in col­ laboration with sociologist Jonathan Epstein that mixed critical texts con­ cerning Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and other French poststructuralists with new media interpretations of these authors’ ideas. Americans Have No Identity, but They Do Have Wonderful Teeth debuted in Montreal in 1992 to a delighted Baudrillard, and was later republished on the Web in CTHEORY, an online journal. The Lichty/Epstein collaboration continued with the addi­

tion of musician Sam Seawell as the media group Haymarket Riot. This group created what was called by UCLA professor Douglas Kellner a series of “Post­ modern social theory rock videos,” which were successfully integrated as media texts into numerous U.S. university sociology programs throughout the late 1990s, and concurrently functioned as pedagogical tools and subversive

installations. The Haymarket Riot works served as inspiration for two main threads of the creation of multilayered concurrent texts or “transtexts.” One thread was the co-optation of mass media imagery as a critical tool for electronic culture,

and the other was the formation of new media texts that blend literary nar­ rative, prose, or scholarly discourse with nonlinear, dynamic, or spatial struc­ tures. These texts would start out as simple image-based hypertextual Web texts, and expand into larger essays and documentaries with numerous levels

of narrative through experimental interface structures as well as dynamically based meta- and subtexts. The first of these works, the Web-based (re)cursor (1994), consisted of three components; a linear numerical index for each of the ten Web pages, a virtual landscape, and an aphoristic lexica based on a theoretical passage, with each of the latter two media representing different

narrative arcs. The reader would then follow the various paths through the media text, hopefully perceiving the structural differences in the configura­

tions. The result of that piece was more abstract, as distinct levels of signifi­ cation for each narrative configuration were indistinct, and the user navigated the work similar to a cross between a hypertext essay and a slide show. Lichty’s

Chapter 4

online, multilayered media texts did not reach maturity until the latter half of the 1990s, when dynamic interface paradigms such as mind maps and associative mapping became available. While developing his multilayered narrative works, Lichty became known for his co-optation and subversion of mass media cultural forms through the Haymarket Riot video series. His jux­ taposition of media clips from sources as diverse as the film Atomic Cafe, the television series Star Trek, the Discovery Channel, and original 3-D anima­ tions mimicking contemporary broadcast design illustrated how the emergent communications technologies of the age—like the Internet and cable televi­ sion—were creating a culture in which society and individuals were commu­ nicating through multiple media and pop cultural referents with increasing

frequency and robustness. Lichty’s media critique of information overload and the subversion of commercial media techniques in video and on the Internet

through the use of new technology drew the attention of media theorist Douglas Kellner, and subversive artists such as RTMark, and produced several

collaborative media “texts” of varying kinds, including video projects and illustrative bodies of work. Over time, Lichty has worked with this tightly woven skein of interrelated concepts relating to media, cognition, and narrative, each time approaching the subject from a slightly different angle to cease out issues of form and rep­ resentation. For example, technologies for the investigation of various infor­

mational mapping strategies (mind maps and associative mapping) matured

in the late 1990s. The availability of these technologies signaled the shift from

deeply interlinked online texts to pieces that incorporated dynamic interface paradigms and cognitive mapping techniques. The course of development of Lichty’s works since Metaphor and Terrain (1998) progressively moved from academic topics to more socially engaged issues, and from singular structural/interface approaches to multiple interfac­

ing, color coding, and dynamic text overlays and annotation. Metaphor and Terrain questioned the concept of interface as artwork and clearly served as a

self-referential test platform for the new principles of narrative structures being employed. Another Lichty work, Grasping at Bits: Art and Intellectual Control in the Digital Age (2000), engaged directly with contemporary topics such as online artists’ conflicts with corporate agendas of intellectual property through a consideration of Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons. Besides the increased engagement with contemporary issues, Grasping at Bits incor­

porated no less than three redundant interfaces of differing structures, color

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

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coding, and dynamic annotation of the text, and earned an honorable mention at Ars Electronica 2000 (figure 4.2). Another of these concurrent texts, SPRAWL: The American Landscape in Transition (2000), relied less on the flashier dynamic interfaces and turned to

a geographic metaphor to take a more applied approach to creating a robust

nonlinear text. Also gone was the entirely lexical content; it was replaced with a combination of interactive panoramas, streaming video, and texts with dynamic annotation, thus converging social engagement (the urban expansion

Chapter 4

Figure 4.3

Patrick Lichty, SPRAWL: The American Landscape in Transition, 2000.

of the artist’s hometown), simultaneous media communication, and cognitive mapping techniques (figure 4.3). In 2000, SPRAWL won the Smithsonian Institution American Art Museum’s new media/new century award.

It is also difficult to summarize Lichty’s work without also taking a look

at his curatorial projects. Lichty’s advocacy of independent media led to Through the Looking Glass: Technology and Creativity at the Turn of the Second Millennium. Held in 2000, this project brought recognized and new names from every continent to a small regional arts center just outside Cleveland, Ohio. This tactical gesture was a critique of the pre—Whitney Biennial era of

Internet art, where the community of curators and artists encountered less social stratification through the connective nature of the Internet. Although this show was a survey of technological art at the turn of the millennium, it focused more directly on the nascent medium of handheld and nomadic

devices as platforms for artistic expression, and may have been the first in a series of exhibitions in various venues to approach this topic.

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

To address the work of Lichty is to consider the complexity of ways in which technological media have affected the modes of communication and the effects that these technologies have on the cultural milieu of technological

society itself. Nevertheless, the unifying threads of experimental narrative structure, media subversion, and a critical engagement with cultural issues weave themselves together into a unified whole as the work continually reassess these topics from differing approaches. His Rust Belt sense of angst born- from a childhood of media and technological saturation, combined with a fascination with scholarly and literary narrative as well as cognitive approaches to information design, continue to ensure works by Lichty that question the way electronic culture communicates while offering a sharp and

often humorous critique of postmodern media society. Some of Ken Feingold’s* works are literally capable of carrying on con­ versations. Feingold’s listening and speaking animatronic heads are digitally and neumatically activated lifelike silicone portraits that hear and understand English speech. They take art into the realm of interpersonal encounter, approaching and questioning the unpredictability and complexity chat lan­ guage and mind create between people (as well as between people and com­

puters), presenting new concepts of portraiture, and pointing co issues of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. The conversations chat these

figures carry on are neither completely scripted nor random; rather, the soft­ ware gives each Figure a “personality,” a vocabulary, associative habits, obses­ sions, and other peculiarities, all of which make their conversations quirky, surprising, and often hilarious. Some of Feingold’s works also involve digital projections in which the screens function as “mental projections” of the figures. The public can interact with the characters by engaging in conver­

sations with them, and one of these works even became accessible via the Internet (http: //www.kenfeingold.com/hinge). Feingold was born in 1952, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He attended

Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. In a work titled ChildhoodlHot & Cold

Wars {the Appearance of Nature) (1993-1994), Feingold undertook a search of his childhood with those images and sounds that he can remember, or see now, as having been formative for his personal understanding, his personal universe,

in which he grew up watching television. In fact, some of his earliest and most vivid sensory and emotional memories were of television programs.

In Feingold s Surprising Spiral (1991), the viewer can produce complex events built out of digitized and synthesized speech by touching the pages of

Chapter 4

a large sculpted book with their fingertips. The work is about the simultane­ ous sensations of ecstasy and emptiness that arise from the labyrinthine nature of traveling itself, and the organization of languages, thoughts, and percep­ tions. Images flow from one place in the world to another. One is walking through, or passing through, this view of the world along the way, with no end in mind. The images come from Japan, Argentina, Thailand, Scotland, and Sri Lanka, utterly without any conception of cinematic mise-en-scene. In his work Orpheus (1996), Feingold uses the computer co manipulate text from

Jean Cocteau’s film Orpheus (1950). The syntax is maintained with different words inserted. The computer program randomly pulls words from this matrix each time through the loop of the overall piece. In this way, the original syntax is fixed, but che poetry is variable and in “real time.” The work’s voice seems to come from a projection of a puppet head, called Orpheus, speaking from a place removed from ordinary traffic—such as a cave, an abandoned tower, or another obscure location. From time to time, the pupper head speaks, chough seemingly without repetition. The matrix is a kind of cross-section of the original screenplay. Robert Nideffer’s* linguistic and ludic engagement can best be discerned

in his elaborate head games by proxy. Proxy emerged out of a project titled Online Public Spaces: Multidisciplinary Explorations in Multiuser Environments

(OPS: MEME). It was a two-year grant-funded research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, campus that examined two critical aspects of knowledge acquisition as they relate to digital distribution: the

importance of context in shaping knowledge transfer, and the role of social communication and collaboration in altering and enhancing knowledge pro­

duction and assimilation. Initiated and directed by Victoria Vesna and Nideffer in 1997, OPS: MEME brought together experts from such diverse fields as computer science, the visual arts, the history of art and architecture, soci­ ology, and museum studies, and represented an exceptional cross section cov­ ering several disciplines and domains of intellectual interest.

Proxy, as one of the key OPS: MEME test beds, was designed as a new genre head game about agents and agency that utilizes multiple interfaces to share

information space (figure 4.4). Conceptual development for Proxy began as

part of the OPS: MEME project, but the technical research and development did not really get underway until late 1999 at the University of California, Irvine. The primary goal was co playfully, yet critically explore various kinds

of agent interaction through the construction of shared social spaces that

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

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dynamically mutate and evolve over time. Initial play spaces in Proxy included: Celebrity Profiles, Faculty Subjects, and Strategic Interests. Celebrity

Profiles, a play on the manufacture of personae as a commodity fetish, utilizes a marketing agent who acts as a personal promoter, assisting those who feel

they do not get the respect and recognition they deserve by notifying profes­

sional gatekeepers of their presence and worth. Faculty Subjects, a play on che institutional impetus to promote interdisciplinary collaboration within the context of academia, utilizes a double agent who works in ways that can run

counter to your information needs. Finally, Strategic Interests is a play on the covert monitoring and exchange of networked data, and it utilizes a secret agent to stealthily monitor, track, capture, and display other agents use and activity within the Proxy multiagenc system.

Chapter 4

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Proxy is an overtly academic, nondemocracic, text-driven, conceptually motivated, unpredictable, and often impenetrable set of rule-driven role-plays, none of which are ever made quite clear. It is most closely aligned with an online role-playing game thematically, though it represents a more openended, hybrid, and twisted creative form. It is a massively multiuser envi­ ronment in theory, but one in which “use” is not solely constitutive of human intervention in practice. In other words, it does not demand human presence and will in fact continue to play perfectly without you. The characters are pre­ programmed agents and bots of various types, both human and software. The aesthetic is minimalist and heavily textual on the surface, though many forms

of media and mediated exchange are possible. There is a scoring system chat becomes more apparent with use. Interaction is mediated and personified through three initially assigned, though continually modifiable, attributes:

alienation, ambition, and anxiety. The game is to keep your agent and agency in a psychological steady state, so to speak, as you begin to explore the constantly mutating multiuser environment with the assistance of a Mobile Agent Management (MAM) system written in che Java programming

language. Interaccion with the MAM system occurs through a variety of modes such

as desktop and laptop computers, or handheld and wireless devices like per­ sonal digital assistants and cell phones. One begins by submitting a request to create a new agent. This process assigns the unique personality attributes

that will be keyed co the requested agent. Once generated, players use what

is called a “phat-client” interface to ingest data (Web sites, documents, images, or anything retrievable through a Web browser) to be incorporated inco the agent as content. Some of this content gets automatically ingested

on start-up, based on bookmarked Web sices culled from installed browsers on the players’ operating system. Once the content is in place, players can submit search engine style requests, log in notifications about all access pat­ terns in relation to content, recommend other agents with relevant content to

view, and add more content as necessary. The content management compo­ nent of the MAM system provides two basic sets of services. The first set of services allows for the filtering, storage, and overall management of an agents

holdings, whether they are local or remote. Content may range from

static items such as documents and imagery, to references, to dynamic or real-time sources, such as Web sites and multimedia streams. The exact means

of content storage and querying is flexible. To access this content, a

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second sec of services is offered chat exposes a search interface capable of simple keyword queries. These returns can then be visualized in several ways, as raw ASCII text, HTML pages, or dynamically spatialized Java environments. The MAM system is best described as a set of tools and interfaces for the dynamic construction, distribution, querying, and rendering of an embod­ ied" collection of information. MAM is intended to provide a distributed public space for data storage and retrieval. When running the agent system, a range of features is provided, including: decentralized Web serving of data linked from a local disk or referenced via a remote URL; collaborative

Web browsing; translation services to and from English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and German for text-based chat communication and Web page viewing; unique data discovery and display methods oriented around agent personification; and a scalable, open-source, cross-platform

peer-to-peer architecture. MAM has been coded in Java as a stand-alone application that utilizes XML for agent communication. As such, it is highly flexible and modifiable through the simple editing of human-readable

preference files. Altering these files allows one to change many of the fundamental agent behaviors as well as the general look and feel of the

environment. In Proxy, traditional notions of client and servers are bypassed by contain­ ing the capabilities of both, allowing for decentralization of computing resources via mobile or transportable agents. Virtually anyone connected to the Internet becomes both client and server when running the MAM system.

Through this architecture, powerful content-centered communities can form, providing a dynamic infrastructure that facilitates context-driven collabora­

tion and communication. A number of visual interfaces have been prototyped for the Proxy test bed: a text-based virtual environment utilizing a Multiuser

Object Oriented (MOO) server, thick and thin Java applet clients, and a fullfeatured stand-alone Java application providing a variety of text-based, Web­ based, and spatialized graphic interfaces. The stand-alone application offers

menu options to communicate with the underlying MAM system. This tra­

ditional window application serves as a nexus linking together all the various components. A three-dimensional graphics engine has been implemented to help convey a sense of the underlying agent behaviors, which get mapped to

motion behavior and sound attributes, initially determined through a Web­ based questionnaire at the point of registering to use the system. Through the

Chapter 4

graphic interface participants can manipulate agent nodes in different ways, at the most basic level by simply moving them around or double clicking to expose the information the agent carries. This visualization mode is also useful for providing a better sense of system activity and use as well as interagent relationships. In Proxy, the overall interface design goal is to emphasize information as the aesthetic, privileging idea, language, process, and "context provision” for emergent agent behavior. One of the driving motives has been to develop strategies for rendering visible what tends to be taken for granted, kept hidden, or naturalized. This includes seemingly benign things like data access and navigation as well as more malignant or entrenched ideological structures,

specifically those manifest in relation to institutionalized systems of control such as art, academia, and the Net. The challenge comes not only in figuring out how to render those things visible but what to creatively do with them or say about them once that visibility is rendered. And finally, another driving

motive has been figuring out ways to play at the fringes of what constitutes

socially sanctioned forms of art making, game playing, and software engi­ neering. This fringe play is done in the interest of promoting a new kind of software development that is as much about dysfunctionality as it is about functionality, while facilitating more truly distributed, decentralized, and “out-of-control” data processing that serves to blur the boundaries between playtime and productive time (figures 4.5 and 4.6).1

Language with a particularly strong visual and environmental component as well as a critical content is at the heart of Jenny Holzer’s demarche. With her Truisms (1985), the artist strongly questioned common archetypes of Western civilization in a quite trivial, but no less pertinent manner: “the idiosyncratic has lost

its authority,” “men are not monogamous by

NATURE,” “IT'S CRUCIAL TO HAVE AN ACTIVE FANTASY LIFE,” “DYING AND COMING

BACK GIVES YOU CONSIDERABLE PERSPECTIVE,” “A SENSE OF TIMING IS THE MARK OF A GENIUS,” “YOU SHOULD TRAVEL LIGHT,” “VIOLENCE IS PERMISSIBLE, EVEN DESIRABLE OCCASIONALLY,” “WITH PERSEVERANCE YOU CAN DISCOVER ANY TRUTH,”

“THERE ARE TOO FEW IMMUTABLE TRUTHS TODAY,” "YOU ARE TRAPPED ON THE EARTH SO YOU WILL EXPLODE," “IF YOU’RE CONSIDERED USELESS NO ONE WILL FEED YOU ANYMORE," “USE WHAT IS DOMINANT IN CULTURE AND CHANGE IT QUICKLY,"

“THE FUTURE IS STUPID,” “SHOOT INTO INFINITE SPACE TO HIT A TARGET IN TIME AND CALL IT INEVITABLE” (figure 4.7).

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Figure 4.5

Robert Nideffer, creepy-comics.com, 2003.

Holzer has been experimenting with electronic media since the early 1970s, when she first introduced her signature truism posters to the people

of New York. From the political (“government

is a burden on the

to the nonsensical (“everything interesting is new”), Holzer’s truisms are a distinctive fixture of postmodernism. Her massive LED signs

people")

have been installed along the streets of San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, Toronto, and London. In the 1980s, Holzer also used television broadcasting as an artistic medium, purchasing commercial airtime to reach a larger audi­ ence. In the 1990s, she integrated computers into her work, such as her virtual reality exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo in 1993- Investigating new

forms of expression within the public sphere has naturally led Holzer to work on an interactive Web project, Please Change Beliefs. Holzer’s themes as well as her views about life, death, war, or sexuality—

all burning taboos in most Western societies—appear in the most common everyday urban environments by means of easily accessible technologies.

According to the artist, her texts function as comments on the same envi-

Chapter 4

Figure 4.7

Jenny Holzer, Untitled with Selection from Truisms, 1985. © 2004 Artists Rights

Society (ARS), New York.

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ronment that they fit into, stimulating awareness of our social conditioning as conveyed by the very landscape in which we may be confronted by her work. On the other hand, in Truism 33 she created a Web event that used truisms as a way to understand contemporary culture in a more sophisticated manner. Confronted by blinking, changing truisms, Web visitors selected a concep­ tual category—for example, belief and change—and then got to vote via check boxes. A cumulating total shows the fate of the various truisms. Here is a sample of the sayings under the belief category: “A little knowledge can GO A LONG WAY,” “A LOT OF PROFESSIONALS ARE CRACKPOTS,” "ABSOLUTE

SUBMISSION CAN BE A FORM OF FREEDOM.”2

Estonian artist Raivo Kelomees also likes to engage in linguistic games. With his semantic CD-ROM tokyocity.ee, he wanted to create a geographically "impossible” domain named precisely tokyocity.ee, which should be empty, like

a zero site giving negative information, a site with one link only. Tokyocity.ee draws on the artists personal experiences with one city: Tokyo—megatown,

supercity, conglomeration, agglomeration, total accumulation, and supernatu­ ral hybrid. Kelomees was interested in his experiences that arose while staying in this city-machine. But he found that the myth about Tokyo was greater than the city itself. There, everything seemed smaller and the dimensions

were on a human scale. The city can be considered a functional machine organized around a nationally noncharacterized environment. Kelomees’s

prevailing experiences in Toyko were not with people, buildings, and architec­ ture but with time. His experiences were also about an invisible matter and

how the invisibleness of Tokyo differed from what is habitually invisible elsewhere. For his CD-ROM, which has‘also been shown in conjunction with an

installation and whose video fragments were shot from the Tokyo circle railway, the Yamanote line, the artist chose a title that combined the under­

standable word tokyocity with Estonia’s domain name endings, .ee. The textual point of view dominates in a good number of Jean-Louis

Boissier’s* interactive installations using videodiscs {Le bus [1985] and Pekin pour memoire [1986]) and later computers {Album sans fin [1989], Globus oculi

[1992], Flora Petrinsularis [1993, released through ZKM Artintact no. 1 in 1994] (figure 4.8), Tabula rasa—Memoire des crayons [1995-2001], Mutatis mutandis [1995], Le billet circulaire [1997], La deuxieme Promenade [1998], Moments deJean-Jacques Rousseau [2000], La morale sensitive [2001], and Le petit manuel interactif [2001]).3

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Figure 4.8 Jean-Louis Boissier, Flora Petrinsularis, 1993. Interactive installation. Table with interface device and camera recognition. Computer with CD-ROM. Produced at ZKM in

Karlsruhe. © 1993 by Jean-Louis Boissier.

Boissier was born in 1945 in Loriol-sur-Drome, France. After studying

mathematics and physics, he became involved in graphic design, photogra­

phy, experimental cinema, and installation art. He participated as early as 1969 in the creation of the arts department at the University of Paris 8 (for­ merly Vincennes, now Saint-Denis).

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In the 1970s and 1980s, he studied the history and aesthetics of modern and traditional Chinese arts, curating several exhibitions on the subject. In the early 1980s, as an artist, researcher, and exhibition curator, he was one of the pio­ neers of interactivity in art. Boissier participated in the creation of various exhibitions dedicated to new media art; Electra in 1983, Les Immateriaux at rhe Centre Pompidou in 1985, Image calculee at the Cite des sciences et de l’industrie from 1988 co 1990, Passages de l’image at the Centre Pompidou in 1990, and Machines a communiquer at che Cite des sciences from 1991 to 1992. From 1990 to 1996, he curated the biennial for interactive arts, Artifices, in Saint-Denis. From 1991 to 1997, he curated the Revue virtuelie (Virtual Review) at the Centre Pompidou. At the Laboratory for Interactive Aesthetics, which he founded in 1990 at the University of Paris 8, he developed a series of videodiscs on the subject of digital images, che CD-ROM of the 3eme Biennale d’arc concemporain de Lyon {Reunion des

JAusees Nationaux, 1995), the CD-ROM hctualite du virtuel for the Centre Pompidou (1997), and directed a series of collective artistic research experiments on the creation of figures and instruments of interactivity, and on

interactive gestures. Boissier’s interactive approach to space and gesture, language and signs,

moments and sensations, continues to play a part in his current research on interactive narrative. His artistic, theoretical, and experimental activity com­

bines at once technological, semiological, and aesthetic dimensions. This research seeks modes of the interactive image in which the traditions of pho­ tography, cinema, and video are explicitly addressed. Interactivity is consid­

ered a form, constitutive of the image to the same degree as its referential aspect (figure 4.9). Boissier created numerous CD-ROMs, interactive video installations,

and Web sites using as a common thread: Rousseau’s writings. Boissier’s

work can be considered a reflection on image and writing; the capture of fiction and rhe real; wandering or strolling and the act of collecting, memory inscription, and its access; and relation as something that connects and relates. From this research, the notion of the interactive moment emerged, creating the basis for an interactive story and in fact an interactive cinema.

The concept of the image relation tends to summarize the functional and

aesthetic characteristics of this type of image. It is based on a series of theo­ retical and experimental notions-—namely, the notion of capturing, or record-

Chapter 4

Jean-Louis Boissier, La Morale Sensitive, 2001. Interactive installation.Table with infrared sensor device, and chair, including Moments de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. CD-ROM, Paris, Gallimard Computer, video projection, 80 x 70 x 60 centimeters. Produced at Centre pour I'image contemporaine, Geneva. © 2001 by Jean-Louis Boissier. Figure 4.9

ing, interactivity and then reinstating it, creating an interactive writing in which interactive figures are employed in the analysis of events, using the ges­

tures and the sensations that constitute this interactive writing. Second, the notion of an interactive perspective, referring by analogy co optical perspec­

tive, is designed as a system of representation of gestural interactions, with the mutations and temporal events they employ. And finally, the notion of

an interactive video mise-en-scene is based on a series of specific procedures concerning the shooting of the image, defining specific relationships between place and the interactive model, with specific methods in the direction of actors. In this context, technical principles were developed in a process

that can be described as interactive chronophotography and in which the image is employed as an interface, with variations added to cinemato­

graphic parameters, thereby varying the speed or succession of the semiotic

regime.

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Language and creative writing also underlie George Legradys* multime­ dia productions. His interactive CD-ROM catalog titled From Analogue to Digital, published in 1998 on the occasion of a two-museum retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Art, traced methodologies and approaches in his earlier photographic practice that are critical components of his current work in interactive media. A quote from the National Gallery’s press release describes his focus as investigating "the aesthetic and political issues in an exploration of the ‘real.’ [Legrady] challenges his viewers to consider the discrepancy of an image that looks natural on the surface but is actually manufactured, challenging conventional notions of visual representation. His more recent works with digital tech­ nologies and interactivity address notions of memory, identity and history of

media manipulation and simulacra.” This working method of analyzing the staging and authority of media and

other cultural representations through recently available digital technologies reaffirmed Legradys approach to function within the framework of a cultural

discourse and prefigured his digital media work of the 1990s.

Legradys work of the past twenty years reveals an engagement with a series of complex questions concerned with the intricacies of information process­ ing as mediated through camera and computer technologies. His studies in

fine arts photography, art theory, and visual anthropology led him to docu­ mentary photography, which was soon followed by photographic projects that integrated pictorialism with formal, conceptual, and theoretical models through to examine the conventions of the photographic medium itself. The semantics of photographic representation and the production of

cultural and syntactic meaning generated through the photograph’s mechan­ ical and technological visualization were the key investigative topics in his predigital work. Legrady learned computer programming in the early 1980s with the intention of importing the investigations from the photographic to the digital. This led to an interest in computer programming as a symbol-

manipulative language, in which the activity was also a form of creative writing practice. From mid-1970s work such as A Catalogue of Found Objects, in which he

documents a site by collecting a sampling of cultural objects found there and

organizes these into a data bank systematically presented co look like com­ puter-processed information, Legrady already incorporated methodologies that are fundamental to his digital media art today. These include archaeo­

Chapter 4

logical or archive classification, sampling and fragmenting of information, recontexcualizing found materials, strategies of linguistic and semiotic struc­ turing, the analysis of cultural narrative construction, and other modes of information management that have entered art practice through che con­ ceptual arc movement of the 1960s. Legrady was a visiting professor of photography at Cal Arts in rhe early 1980s, and during this time, he was introduced to computer programming at che University of California, San Diego, in the studio of artificial intelli­ gence pioneer artist Harold Cohen. During this same period, Legrady’s

photographic work expanded to include a series of investigations about the iconographic metalanguage of corporate advertising and the representation of international political conflicts through a research project on Socialist icono­

graphy in Eastern Europe and China. (The combination of information analy­ sis, cultural critique, historiography, and digital programming coalesced at

the time of the Iran Contragace (1987) into his first digital media installa­ tion, From Signal to Noire. This cook place at a gallery in a Santa Monica shopping mall in which he installed computers and transformed the gallery

space into a working office that he attended daily, writing image-processing computer codes that functioned as “viruses,” which he then used co process digitized television media images of politician and news anchor talking heads by “cleansing” the portraits of metaphoric “extra or noisy data.” Legrady’s visually based work in digital media arts began in che mid-1980s when he applied custom-produced image-processing techniques to digitized

photographic imagery, facilitated in part by the introduction of the AT&T Targa Truevision imaging system for the IBM AT, one of the first affordable

systems to produce photographic-quality imagery. Examples of these works and a text that addressed che impact of computerized processing on che question of belief in the photographic image was presented in one of che first exhibitions dealing with che intersection of computer technologies and pho­

tographic representation. Curated by Jim Pomeroy and Marnie Gillet at the San Francisco Cameraworks in 1988, the exhibition included artists and the­

orists who explored the social and cultural implications of digital technolo­ gies. Legrady’s work produced between 1986 and the early 1990s consisted

of digital still-photographic images based on algorithm-generated processes that addressed mathematical, visual, semantic, and cultural issues coming out of the discussion surrounding Claude Shannon’s information theory, a form

of mathematics turned into philosophy. This series—which implemented

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works .

two-dimensional convolutions and other image-processing algorithms to ini­ tially transform and embed information into images, and later generate pure abstract images out of the play between signal and noise led to Legradys first interactive work, Equivalents II (1992), introduced in the traveling Iter­

ations exhibition curated by Timothy Druckrey in 1993 shown again in the 1995 Photography after Photography exhibition at the Institute of Contem­ porary Art in Philadelphia. The intention underlying Equivalents II was to produce abstract, blurred, shaped imagery purely from algorithmic equations, but imagery that was believable and realistic enough to seem partially photographic. Whereas recent digital media works have emphasized the phenomenological

—for instance, visualizing the ’‘imagined’’ through topics such as disembodi­ ment, simulation of the real, and cyberspace—Legradys work is consistently grounded within the domains of the historical and the sociological as well as the

rhetoric of narrative and poetics—that is, all coming together to explore how the structuring mechanisms of technology, computer programming language, and

data structures such as databases can be used as forms of aesthetic authorship and expression. Apart from Equivalents //, this can be seen in the widely exhibited An

Anecdoted Archivefrom the Cold War (published as a CD-ROM in 1994), first shown at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (1993) and then the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1994), and Slippery Traces (1996), shown at Projects Studios One (1998) as part of the Deep Storage traveling exhibition. Tracing, a two-screen installation exhibited at the Museum of Contem­

porary Art in Los Angeles (1998) and the Kunst und Ausstellungshalle in Bonn (1997), Sense of Place, shown at the Centre Contemporain Saint-Gervais in Geneva (1998), and Transitional Spaces, created for the new Siemens world headquarters in Munich (1999), all continue to play with the cultural situa­ tions present in Legradys interactive work such as the contrast of divergent

cultural perspectives (being in and out of technological culture as well as geo­ graphic and cultural identity shifts between East and West). What is differ­ ent is the introduction of an additional area of investigation: the integration of the spectators’ presence and movements as influential components of the

changes in the presented content, registered through camera-tracking and motion-sensing devices, as a means to control the events processed by the com­ puter. Sensing Speaking Space (2002) is the most recent work to address this form of interactivity, shifting the focus fully to explore the poetics of presence

and movement through a feedback interaction that wipe information away

Chapter

4

Figure 4.10 George Legrady, Sensing Speaking Space, 2002. Installation at the San Fran­ cisco Museum of Modern Art. Photo by George Legrady.

and brings it forch (figure 4.10). Legrady explains his reasons for integrating the audience, stating that in an electronically networked society, real space

becomes meaningful again as “the site where our bodies come into contact with the technological devices by which we participate in virtual space.”4 His most recent project, Pockets Full of Memories, conceived as an installa­

tion on the topic of the archive and memory, was exhibited on che main floor

of the Centre Pompidou National Museum of Modern Art in Paris through­ out summer 2001 (figure 4.11). During this time, approximately twenty thousand visitors came to view the installation and participated by con­

tributing objects in their possession, digitally scanning and describing them.

This information eventually became an archive of approximately 3,300 objects that was stored in a database and continuously organized by the Kohonen

SOM, a neural-net-based self-organizing map algorithm that positioned objects of similar value near each other on a two-dimensional map. The map of objects was projected in the gallery space and was also accessible online (www.pocketsfullofmemories.com), so individuals in the gallery and at home

could review che objects and add comments and stories co any of them. The

archive of objects consisted of objects that museum visitors carried with them—for instance, such common items as cellular phones, keys, coys, cloth­

ing, personal documents, currency, reading materials, and so on. The size of the scanning box was che only limiting factor that determined what could be

added to che archive. Surprisingly, the database eventually collected an unusual number of scanned heads, hands, and feet, thereby extending che

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

Figure 4.11

George Legrady, Pockets Full of Memories. Spectators at the Pompidou Center,

2001. Photo by George Legrady.

archive from simply being a collection of objects to encoding it with the corporeal presence of the contributors. Supported in part by a grant from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art,

Science, and Technology in Montreal, Canada, Pockets Pull of Memories became a collaborative project with specialists from diverse disciplines and institu­ tions contributing their expertise. The media lab at the University of Art and

Design in Helsinki implemented the self-organizing map algorithm. The Center for Culture and Communication in Budapest produced the touch

screen data collection station and database. The design team Projekttriangle from Stuttgart created the visual identity of the exhibition and the software.

The Internet implementation was developed at the University of California, Santa Barbara? Plastic Multimedia Issues

I have already discussed plastic issues in materialized digital-based works that were intimately related to the aesthetic problems involved in graphics, paint­ ing, design, sculpture, photography, and architecture, and in their turn, line, color, form, patterns, composition, movement, rhythm, light effects, and spatial representation.

Here, I am concerned with plastic issues in the technical category of specific multimedia works. The aesthetic problems involved here will find

Chapter

4

some original techno-aesthetic solutions clue to the utilization of drawing and painting machines as well as extensive computer programming. Plastic issues within a multimedia context dominate in Harold Cohen’s drawing and painting machine, AARON. Cohen headed the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at the University of California and is now emeritus professor there, but his artistic career began well back in the 1950s after he had studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London. His significant breakthrough came when he encountered computers and pro­ gramming in 1967. This engagement with computer programming has involved Cohen with issues of representation in a unique way. During the 1960s Cohen represented Great Britain in the Venice Biennale,

participated in Documenta 3, and also was in the Carnegie International and many other key international shows. During this period the most important painterly problem for Cohen became the question of how the marks an artist makes in creating an image become significant to humans. This is an essen­

tial and important question. The beginnings of an answer to this question were first exhibited in his Three Behaviours for Partitioning Space show in 1972 where he looked into the query of how we read marks as visual information

and not abstract smudges. Here Cohen choose co work with the bare essen­ tial components that define coherent markings, and this involved him with issues of interaction between the artist, the machine, and the audience. Cohen

concluded that this transference of meaning required a large degree of lucid­ ity in the operation between artist and viewer, and in chat transparency and lucidity rest human significance. For Three Behaviours for Partitioning Space, Cohen programmed a computer

with uncomplicated instructions for dividing visual space. His computer then

executed a series of unique drawings based on this set of simple instructions and in the process stimulated the viewer’s innate proclivity co realize meaning. Cohen thus concluded chat an indispensable characteristic of the artist/viewer affiliation is the ability of the artist to create a work that will stimulate the viewer’s preference to find, or impose, meaning. This work furthered his con­

tinual commitment co building a machine-based simulation of the cognitive processes underlying the human act of drawing. As testament to Cohens achievement in this regard, in more than two decades AARON has produced

many thousands of drawings. On the basis of this early work Cohen was invited in 1971 to spend two

years at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University as a guest

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

scholar. In pursuing further this phenomena of computers and human meaning, Cohen published a paper in 1973 titled "Parallel to Perception: Some Notes on the Problems of Machine-Generated Art.” In this paper Cohen worked out his conception of meaning by considering what a computer can do that will emulate human perceptual processes. Cohen recognized that an important aspect of human perception is feedback, so he began to work with

feedback in his drawing machine AARON. Cohen’s goal was to generate a plausible representation of human art creation for the computer to follow. Thus he gave AARON the ability to find out what it was doing with marks, based on some preset goals. This feedback would then instruct AARON on how to proceed. Such an approach is fundamental to todays work in artificial

intelligence and artificial life. Through AARON Cohen developed a better understanding of how humans create images. Cohen saw that one of the chief motives people have for creat­

ing images is to externalize what they see in their inner mind’s eye. Further­ more, he observed how children make images, and this lead Cohen to shift AARON toward representational and figurative drawing. Cohen had observed young children scribbling and noticed that they create a mental connection

between what they scribbled and something in their world. He identified this connection as basic to representation and called it the embodying procedure or outlining.

In 1979 his AARON project created a 100-foot mural for the San Fran­ cisco Museum. In the following year Cohen has a crucial dialogue with com­

puterscientist Rick Hayes-Roth concerning the connections between artificial

intelligence and drawing. Hayes-Roth challenged Cohen to have AARON bring into being representational drawings. The resulting programming changes to AARON made it capable of executing representations of animals. By working with drawing and computers in such a manner, Cohen real­

ized that computer intelligence demands a new way of human thinking, and

thus he created a unique perspective on art. Bolstered by the insight, he began to explore in depth the programming aspect of computers, which had at the outset been an appealing hobby. At that point Cohen became even more fas­

cinated with the parallels between human thought processes and computer intelligence. Cohen thought that it might be possible to use the computer as a way of testing his theories about arc and intelligence.

Through this phase of AARONs evolution, Cohen discovered the basis of

what he saw as building blocks chat underlie all the images we see. Now

Chapter 4

Cohen saw the closed forms, based on straight lines, angles, and scribbles, as elementary forms because our eyes act as an edge-detector when we look at

them. Such an approach relates to certain ideas of Kandinsky and Paul Klee as well. Cohen’s ongoing program AARON soon became capable of producing original “freehand” drawings in museums and science centers in the United

States, Europe, and Japan and is a central reference for those artists interested in drawing and painting machines. Beginning in 1995 Cohen extended AARON’s capabilities from drawing co painting with an exhibition at che Computer Museum in Boston. Cohen’s

work has attracted increasing media attention. Discovery OnLine broadcast the painting machine in action directly from his studio onto the World Wide Web in 1996, and AARON has been featured on a number of TV programs. AARON is permanently exhibited in the Computer Museum in Boston.6

Another multimedia artist concerned with plastic issues is Roman Verostko. In his essay “Explanation of Algorithmic Art,” he explains his debt to early abstract artists and the new power that the computer offers for explor­ ing abstract forms. According to Stephen Wilson, most of Verostko’s work over the last forty years has been with pure visual form ranging from con­

trolled constructions with highly studied color behavior co spontaneous brush­ strokes and inventive nonrepresencational drawing. Such art has been variously

labeled as “concrete,” “abstract,” “nonobjective," and "nonrepresentational.”

In its purest form, Verostko’s art holds no reference to other reality. Rather, one contemplates the object for its own inherent form, similar to the way one

might contemplate a flower or a seashell. With the advent of computers, Verostko began composing detailed proce­ dures for generating forms that are accessible only through extensive computing. His present work concentrates on developing the program of procedures for investigating and creating forms. Verostko suggests that every artist who works with computer programs uses algorithms—it s just that they

have been written by someone else. As artist and art historian Stephen Wilson writes, the extent to which artists understand and can control technologies is a perennial issue in technological and scientific art.7 Verostko holds the view

that the more an artist understands, the more power that artist has to explore

and adapt the technology for art as well as contribute to the cultural discourse

about chose technologies.

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Within the pitch and toss of postmodern attitudes and their subsequent practice, digital graphics software appears to be emerging as the nec plus ultra methodology for a novel mixing of pictorial codes. It is this assumption that corralled Frank Gillette’s* flexible interests while focusing his attention on the spectrum of possibilities opened up by such a protean medium. Drawing together a cascade of polysemous ingredients into common pictorial venues was and remains the initial spur that provoked compositions like Gillette’s Afflicted Magician 7. It is among Gillette’s aims that “a wobbly balance" of combinatory visual prosody linked with both risible and grave content is an essential characteristic of this work. An additional correspon­ ding element of intent is the entire issue of diametric opposition implicate in pictorial structure. Calculated ambiguities are the result. These results, in turn, generate various types of pictorial ambiguity within which a range of subsets come into a blizzard of play. Spatially sliced interactions between dis­ parate constituent parts match juxtapositions of divergent association. And these contrary associations simultaneously meld into and reflect the pictorial structure itself. Saltatory shifts, multivalenced resonances, and blatant downright contra­ dictions pivot and spin amid a somehow recognizable but scrambled hornet’s

nest of anamalous connections. And this dicey nest culminates in a simple con­ sonant point: myriad internal paradoxes resolve in the potent and peculiar exclusivity of pictorial coalescence, of divergent elements becoming convergent through an elixir governed by paradoxical attraction. Refractory and mischie­

vous riddles thus acquire a distinct emotional tone, a quality of cognitive dis­ sonance, an etherealized though melancholic buoyancy that arrives at

inscrutable “solutions” finally defining the pictures themselves—in terms that are unique to themselves. Perhaps more simply put: these pictures address

and embrace a Active realm, a mise-en-scene, encouraging the experience of optical, visual, or perceptual ambiguity. They are intended to invite a viewer into the experience of unfamiliar pictorial space, populated with quasi­ familiar entities, visages, and/or convergences. Moreover, their intent flirts with the influence of Agon. That is, their modus operandi consciously appropriates a selective range of historical sources, references, and methods; their appoint­

ments engage and manipulate previous structural and iconographic modalities.

Gillette maintains that 95 percent of the things that you see done with computers, for example, are cyberkitsch. The trick is not to be overwhelmed

by the cyberkitsch but to search out those things that are of real significance

Chapter

4

and, on occasion, have serious affects on the rest of the art world. He contends that this is a tool or a medium in the same tradition as photography, perhaps film, and other things, although it has a unique status: it is digital. Digital means chat it is not an analogue. For example, the image on the screen is not what it seems to be. It is an appearance of a code. So when we say digital, we ultimately mean the manifestation of that image with a long alphanumeric series of zeros and ones with occasional breaks. Cyberspace is an ethereal electronically mediated domain of the mind, an extension, in the Marshall McLuhan sense of the mind. For example, just like

a crutch is an extension of an arm, cyberspace is an extension of the mind. We have evolved this extension. Gillette thinks it began with Thomas Edison’s invention of the electric light. Ever since the invention of the electric light­ bulb, we have become addicted to all of the embodiments of the electronic. For Gillette, the passage from the electric to the electronic was a big shift in terms. Synesthesia

Synesthesia—which is sometimes combined with the Gesamtkunstwerk (total

work of art) idea and of course the major theme of this section, multisensoriality—has been explored by nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers like Richard Wagner, Aleksandr Scriabin, and Olivier Messiaen as well as curious spirits like Pere Castel in the eighteenth century or Frederic Kastner in the

nineteenth century. These experiments were followed by numerous practi­ tioners of the color organ and a number of artists at the beginning of the twen­ tieth century such as Mondrian and Kandinsky. Synesthesia has also been a major theme of artistic research since the 1950s, when technological innova­

tions in electronic and digital images and sound offered new possibilities for the performance of synesthetic experiments. More recent experiments seem to mainly involve the physical or electronic

translation of music and sound into images and animations. Less attention has been paid to the psychological, perceptual, and emotional impact of

synesthetic performances. In comparison with the psychologically oriented

experiments of Scriabin, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and more recently Yaacov Agam, and David Hockney’s favoring of an association of music, shape, color and space, current artistic experiments seem more oriented to the physics of

synesthesia—electronics and computer programming.

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

With the advent of virtual art, new media and the Internet enable us to experience different kinds of information of a specifically telematic nature, and for this reason it effectively differs from the usual forms of communication. By linking the concepts tele and synesthesia together, Belgian artist and theoretician Hugo Heyrman* deals with the fact that the transmission of data

creates a synesthetic effect: tele-synesthesia. At the end of the twentieth century, the practicable units of time became digitized, magnified, and in­ credibly accelerated. The modalities of our sensorial perception became interactive by means of electronic mechanisms of control and selection. The tele-culture that is emerging from this fact is subjecting both the perceptual

and the conceptual to continuous revisions. At present, the concept of synesthesia is not only connected to the Gesamtknnstwerk notion but to the category of the theatrical—yielding an attack on the sensorium commune (the central point of convergence of the nervous system). We know that one stimulation of the senses automatically

leads to another by means of association. Therefore, synesthesia is an impor­ tant factor in every creative act and each form of interpretation. The same goes

for mediums, but in this case, it takes place on a metalevel of a cybermedia chat blurs the boundaries between internal and external spaces. A quintessential point of Heyrman’s thesis is the postulate that this blur­

ring of boundaries can be considered a question of subtle synesthetic gradua­

tions, and because of the blurring of differences (between what is here and what is there), our senses become tele-senses. Virtual worlds have already emerged in a great many divergent domains.

One can find applications in the field of the arcs, scientific visualization, virtual universities, cinematographic animation and simulation, teleconferencing,

tele-jobs, virtual voyaging, virtual museums, virtual sports, virtual robots, tele-shopping, tele-medicine, tele-studying, and che like. Virtual reality not only makes che inconceivable quice conceivable but equally makes it functional—the latter in order to demonstrate that these new media do in fact bring about a synesthetic effect.

If synesthesia is a sensorial faculty chat refers to a blurring of the normal

differences and borders between the senses, then image and sound inter­ mingle, and at cimes feeling and caste intermix—in short, all sensorial inter­ relations are possible. The hypothesis Heyrman is testing boils down to che

following assessment: our consciousness, body, and senses will be confronted with new experiences, with synesthetic qualities that are instantaneous and

Chapter 4

above all multisensorial as a result of the new media, with their proliferation of informatics and knowledge.

Heyrman’s theory of tele-synesthesia is based on the fact that synesthesia is a natural, uninhibited impulse condition of the senses and intelligence__ the fundamental principle that underlies our aesthetic sensations. The hypothesis consists of this: a new kind of digital tele-contact emerges, tele-synesthesia. It is as if Albert Einstein and Rene Magritte were to meet each other in a virtual environment. Digital tele-contact and corresponding tele-synesthesia are new types of human experience. And the digital revolu­

tion continues: hypernetworks result from the fusion of telecommunication with multimedia. We are witnessing a process of continuous technological

integration, such as fuzzy logic (vague, blurred logic). Fuzzy logic is a type of technology that enables computers to be programmed in such a way that they can simulate/imitate the inaccurate, imprecise manner of humans. Arti­ ficial intelligence represents another aspect of technological integration. In this context, Pattie Maes, an associate professor at the MIT Media Laboratory, has developed a new form of cloning: virtual software agents that are able to defend your personal desires and interests in cyberspace. They constitute a sort

of digital alter ego that can act in your name as well as protect you against yourself. One could summarize the tele-synesthesia hypothesis as follows:

1.

Tele-synesthesia is the synesthetic principle, that is expanded and

extended by means of the new media: the traveling senses. 2.

Tele-transmission of images, texts, sounds, data, and graphics, as well as

other types of signals, tele-haptic experiences, speech recognition, and emo­

tional computers are at present being developed. 3. Telecommunication and conceptual creativity give way to new synesthetic

experiences and consequently change our conception of the world. One can also see tele-synesthesia as virtual interactions between the tele­

senses, developed by means of new technological means in order to overcome the constraints of the human senses. Tele-synesthetic experiences are impor­ tant explorations as they offer better insight into the nature of both our natural

senses and our electronically empowered/enhanced senses. Indeed, our senses constitute our most vital source of information with regard to sensorial adap­

tation to the environment.

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

□

Heyrman signs his artworks with the name Doctor Hugo. Born on Decem­ ber 20, 1942, in Antwerp, where he currently lives and works, Doctor Hugo originally opted for a musical education, but transferred to the visual arts. He graduated from the Royal Academy and became a laureate of the National Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp. In addition, he studied nuclear physics during one year at the State Higher Institute for Nuclear Energy. He obtained his doctorate at the Universidad de La Laguna, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, with a dissertation on art and computers. In 1995, Doctor Hugo coined the terms tele-synesthesia and post-ego. Since 1993, he has been a working member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts in Brussels, and since 2000, the Belgian representative of the International

Synesthesia Association. During the 1960s, Doctor Hugo profiled himself as an avant-garde artist with happenings as well as film and video experiments. His Mobile Museum for Modern Media took a "Continental Video and Film Tour” through Belgium, Germany, France, and the Netherlands from 1970 to 1973- For his “street-life” paintings, he was elected laureate of the Jeune Peinture Beige (Young Belgian Painters) (1974), Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. With the theme “ways of seeing,” Doctor Hugo explored the possibilities of painting in an existential series: Water, Light, Time’, A Vision Is Finer Than a Vieta', and

Aiodels of Reality. Since 1995, Doctor Hugo has become one of the pioneers in Net art. He took part in various Net.art projects, including the ALT-X-site Being in Cyberspace and Revelation at ISEA 2000 (10th International Symposium on Elec­ tronic Art), Paris. In the series Fuzzy Dreamz (1998), he transformed his new media experiences into painting and vice versa. Let me add that che Parisian journal Revue Synesthesie* has presented a great number of artists, some of them closely related to the theme here.

The combination of vision, hearing, taste, and touch has been particularly favored by a number of artists in this section. Such a multisensorial or intersensorial preoccupation can be discerned in

Jean-Pierre Giovanelli’s* installations—for example, his digital image instal­ lation Stable Ntouvant (J 998) at Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris during the exhibition Virtual Art: Interactive and Multisensorial Creations (figure 4.12).

The basic, complex theme of is created in its most essential and reduced form: tissue papers, some real, others simulated on a computer, are respectively pre­ sented as surging out of a box and then are projected on a screen. Despite the

Chapter 4

Jean-Pierre Giovanelli, Stable Mouvant, 1998. Created at Espace Landowski, Boulogne-Billancourt.

Figure 4.12

likeness between the real tissue papers and the simulated ones, the artist’s approach does not favor any confusion between the real and virtual objects.

This subtle but fundamental point makes all che difference between Giovanelli’s installation and laboratory experiences on virtual reality or che illusionistic encercainments ac so many amusement parks. Giovanelli’s installation

stresses che dichocomy between the two states of reality. As far sound, on one of the installation’s real sides (che real/real side) it is that of an improbable tornado, and on the ocher side (che virtual/real side) we hear the rumor of

creased papers. The final aim of che installation is to establish a clear

distinction between the categories of reality and virtuality. Giovanelli is not only an artist who intervenes and participates in differ­ ent artistic movements but also an architect of multimedia installations. From

1977 onward, he has authored a number of interventions based on his com­ mitment as member of two collective undertakings: the Sociological Arc and

che Aeschecics of Communicacion groups.

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

In 1978, Giovanelli developed an intervention process on art criticism at the Fine Arts Museum in Nice, France, followed by a critical attack on all structural myths such as authenticity, identity, and celebrity. Starting in 1985, Giovanelli’s intervention system approached the specific field of communication networks. It was then that the sociological operator transformed himself into a communication and installation artist and archi­ tect. His first important environmental work was SOS Third World, which was shown in Nice in 1994. In it, sand slits up a television screen on which stream past the satellite images of our advanced technological world, and the onlooker must ceaselessly sweep the sand aside. Giovanelli invites us to share the thought that the proliferation of satellite images broadcast on television

screens should legitimately give a direct and comprehensive grasp on reality, which is constantly subjected to the feverish investigation and accumulation

of information. In 1996, he created an installation called 10 (Italian for “myself’), which was first shown in Genoa and could be considered a technological material­ ization of a metaphor where the image of a drop of water, ceaselessly falling, is projected on a dark, oily surface overhung by a heavy rock, while on the same surface the reflection of a mouth is reading the wise texts of Laotzu’s Tao philosophy. According to philosopher Mario Costa, three levels of meaning and interpretation can be established with regard to this installa­

tion: the sociological, the psychological, and the metaphysical. Sociologically speaking, in Costa's view, 10 alludes to the binary substance of the digital uni­ verse that is about to substitute itself for the human one. On a psychological

or symbolic level, Costa claims that this installation refers to an eternal mater­ nal archetype or symbol, whereas on an ontological or metaphysical level, 10

could constitute a meditation on several aspects of time: real time through the falling drops of water, simulated time through tape recordings, the time of perception, and the metaphoric time of being.9

Two years later, Giovanelli exhibited his multimedia installation MA: On

Milk, Mother, and Death, in Turin, Italy. This video event took place in a cubic­ shaped darkroom that was crossed from top to bottom by a cone. The opening

of the cone was plunging on a round of old men’s faces seized in a gyratery move­ ment of milk contained in a semivisible tub; traces of light on the ground com­

posed a kind of pearl necklace. The circular movement of the necklace took up

the milk movement while one could hear continuous childlike babbles through

hidden loudspeakers. MA was an installation that not only made an appeal to

Chapter 4

vision but also to hearing and taste. The milk basin installed with audio effects received the projected image of an old man who could be the symbol of knowl­ edge. The spectator who entered this installation could symbolically drink with their hands By destroying the image, which immediately reconstructed itself.

The whole of the installation could in fact be considered a mother. The visitor had at their disposal several possible entrances and exits from which to choose, and this choice had meaning: either death, which the spectator saw in front of them if they followed a circular direction, or life, if they took a straight path in space/time celebrating our material existence. The symbolic meaning of this installation as a modern oracle could also be interpreted as one that has immor­ tality as its subject. In any case, an appeal was made to the spectator not only to meditate on this theme but also, by the very fact of being invited to drink images of milk, to participate physically in this work of art.

In yet another multimedia installation, Olea Nostra (Oil Civilization), con­ ceived in 1998 and shown at a biennial event in Rome one year later, Giovanelli treated oil as a paradoxical liquid. In his earlier installation 10, this

liquid—black and dirty, a residue of oil change—was treated as a symbol of our surroundings soiled by a disturbed industry, by factory and machine pol­

lution. The oil in Olea Nostra was clean and transparent, symbolizing the fatty juice that under plural forms, has fed the people of the Mediterranean basin for millennia. The installation’s purpose was to make us think of the many contradictory aspects of our society (figure 4.13). This was also the case in the multimedia installation Black and White Global Jackpot, exhibited by

Giovanelli in May 2000 in Nice. In this work, two dustbins full of garbage

(in fact, empty packages) symbolically placed us before the unsolvable con­ tradiction of consumer society. The writings one discovered on opening the dustbin lids (“black” on one, “white” on the other) referred less to a racial problem than to a famous whiskey label, and hence to a world economy adver­

tisement where the only way that is proposed to us is worldwide consumerism. As art critic Francis Parent remarks, this installation questioned not only our present-day society but also that of the future. In fact, according to Parent, Giovanelli's installation pointed to a type of society where human beings, whatever their skin color or their sex, are worth less than garbage; it is a society in which the paradoxical “buying" will be the jackpot we are bound

to win, and yet it is a society that also invites us to intervene. It is here that Giovanelli’s sociocritical art can play a role by allowing the public to ques­

tion itself and perhaps modify the course of events, adds Parent.

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

□

Figure 4.13

Jean-Pierre Giovanelli, Olea Nostra, 1998. Here exhibited at Art House Gallery,

Los Angeles in 2004.

The sensitive perception of the human body is the outstanding feature in Diana Domingues’s* The Reverse Side of the Body (1997). Domingues offers poetic moments of this apprehension of the body scrutinized by the most

advanced technologies. Medical iconographies show the pumping of a heart in an ultrasound scanning, viscera in video laparoscopies, and a womb with a fetus and lung’s visions. These high-performance technologies let us see and listen to worlds of human bodies in action never known before. Organs, sur­ faces, hollows, recesses, and body pieces are all exposed; the reverse side of the

body is spread via the Net. Each screen offers invitations: “TOUCH” (like touch my body). When the participant accepts TOUCH on the computer screen, they touch flesh or membranes, they enter the cardiac flow and go to

many other territories within human bodies. Poetics, historical and scientific

texts, human body graphics, and a red screen as immaterial blood are also

offered. The participant engages in a dialogue with the vital human body con­ nected to the artificial energy of the technology.

Chapter 4

Domingues s statements, analogical scanned and synthetic images, are put on the home pages. Several images are animated; others offer a zoom in their microstructure. The ultrasound scanning echographic images are made by the computer, which receives through a sensor or sonar the signal of the body and

transforms sound into images. Computerized tomographies show thin slices of the body. The video laparoscopies are recorded by a microcamera, which registers travels on the viscera and lungs during a surgery. The artist uses the medical devices in special laboratories with technicians to produce these sit­ uations. Photographic images, electrocardiogram graphics, and mixed texts in many different languages are also offered through a hybrid construction. All

this data is electronically created by some programs like Adobe and finally placed on the World Wide Web using HTML language. The user can inter­ act by opening other home pages and can also provoke animation. For Domingues, touch is the greatest bodily sense. It is che most impor­ tant of our senses to the process of sleeping and waking, and provides aware­

ness of depth, thickness, and shape. We feel, we love, and we hate, we are susceptible and touched, due to the tactile corpuscles of our skin. Our skin is

a magic mirror, which receives and gives back most wonderful situations. Domingues combines artistic and intellectual skill. She is a professor and

researcher at che University of Caxias do Sul in Brazil. As a multimedia artist, she explores the electronic process of images through interactive installation

videos such as TRANS-E, My Body, My blood (shown in Chicago in 1997), which provided a real-time dialogue with electronic memories and “visions.”

Her current project, Art, Technology, and Communication: Creation and Interac­ tivity, examines the artistic and aesthetic dimensions of technologies through

electronic processing signals, computer animations, interfaces, sensitive

systems, neural networks, interactive installations, Web arc, and robotics events. As illustrated above, Domingues is interested in the symbiosis of bio­ logical and artificial bodies. Multisensoriality linked to eco-technology is one of the major preoccupa­ tions of artist and curator Nina Czegledy.* She has a highly original way of

looking at natural phenomenon like the aurora borealis. According to Czegledy, the aurora borealis, or northern lights, is one of the most magnifi­

cent, mysterious, and provocative of natural phenomena. Since time imme­ morial, the enigmatic auroral display has bewitched and fascinated

humankind. Virtually every northern folklore contains references to the

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

aurora. From biblical quotes to rare Mediterranean sightings and descriptions by Greek and Roman philosophers such as Aristotle and Lucius Annaeus Seneca, from medieval Scandinavian sagas such as the king’s mirror to Inuit folklore, stories, and myths, tales of auroral displays have served an important role in explaining the natural world around us. Many of the early “scientific” explanations were a curious mixture of speculation and reality. In 1715, Jonas Ramus, a Norwegian priest, postulated in his book Norriges Descriptions that the northern lights were caused by the periodic eruption of a colossal amount of subterranean heat beneath Greenland. Intriguingly, his speculations also contained references to magnetic forces related to the North Pole. Today, the explanations of modern science have their own truths regarding the aurora. Solar eruptions, electrons and protons discharged from the Sun, are considered one of the original causes of the phenomenon. Following artists in the past and in particular Georges Vantongerloo, who was fascinated by this natural display, Czegledy succeeds in expanding the physical presence of

the aurora borealis into a unique and universal media event as a curator. She organized Auroral Myth: Terrestrial Realities in 1998 at the InterAccess Elec­ tronic Media Arts Centre in Toronto with works by artists like Douglas Back, Paul Davies, Catherine Richards, Victoria Scott, and Neil Wiernik. By working with various aspects of the mysterious, invisible, and inaudible elec­ tromagnetic energies that permeate our daily life, the participating artists

explored the relationships between transcendental forces and the life of ordi­ nary human beings. Richards, for example, examined the nebulous lines, the

indistinct layers, and the blurred boundaries separating the human body from its environment. Her exhibit, Curiosity Cabinet, created a remarkable experi­

ence for the visitor. In the closed circuit of the cabinet, the participant/visitor is supposedly shielded from magnetic interference, and becomes “unplugged” from the constantly “plugged-in" state of our contemporary surroundings.

With its shimmering copper-meshed walls and magnetic-free interior, che cabinet simultaneously alludes to presence and absence, existence and dis­ placement, in an electromagnetically charged world. On the other hand, in

his interactive installation Persistent Invisible Fields, Davies articulates a generally felt mistrust of unseen forces hiding behind the surrounding litter. Davies provides us with a radiation meter, which serves as a pair of magic glasses that allow us to explore the true nature of ordinary and everyday

objects. Armed with this aid, we can challenge, examine, and expose the hidden nature of technology in our daily lives. Among fundamental forces,

Chapter 4

gravity tends toward stagnation and heat by dissolution toward chaos. Only magnetism points to unification, and allows for variation and mobility. It is directive and formative, aiding unseen sources of energy in the arranging of Earth’s organisms. As for Scott, her interest in personal and technological transformations led her to direct and indirect investigations of various life forces. Resembling a magnetic coil, the Celtic knot in Scotts installation

Warm taps into the energy cycle of developing organic life. Worms, lounging underground, provide a source of energy, contributing to the process of per­ mutation. This, in turn, will change the appearance of the heating coil. By evoking the mobile, formative metaphor of magnetic forces, Wann presents a

new electronic allegory of the spirit and the body. In another exhibition, titled Choice, Czegledy presented three interactive installations, UCBM3 (You Could Be) by Nell Tenhaaf, Burn by Victoria Scott, and One Year of Birth Control by Simone Jones, at the Stockholm Electronic Art Festival in 1999. The work of these Canadian women artists addressed the contradictions and possibilities of interactivity. The word choice implies options, alternatives, an occasion for decisions. Choice is a seductive term, sug­ gesting freedom, even democracy. Nevertheless, it was useful to consider whether the digital domain furnished with preconceived computer games, programmed virtual art, and embodied interactive sculptures allowed much actual freedom of choice to remain. The Choice exhibition created a special environment by subverting the conventions of gambling and spirituality. Each artist reflected on the culture of these conventions as well as the paradigm shifts affecting our experience of reality. An interactive works exhibition more closely related to the multisensoriality theme, titled Touch-Touche, was organized by Czegledy in 1999, and was toured Canada in 2000 and 2001. For Czegledy, the invitation co touch is a bold proposition. Touching implies intimacy, a controversial notion in an age when direct contact is increasingly replaced by remote control. In our visu­ ally privileged culture, only our eyes are encouraged to investigate, to explore; our hands are supposed to be off-limits. Five artists participated in this exhi­ bition. Thecla Schiphorst contributed Bodymaps, which were artifacts of touch constructing a space inhabited by the body as mediated by technology. The installation employed electric field sensor technology, in which the viewers proximity, touch, and gestures evoked moving sound and image responses from the body contained and represented within the installation space. Images of the body were stored on a videodisc. The body of the artist (and a digitally

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

represented body) were projected onto a horizontal planar surface. The surface was covered in white velvet, creating a sensual and unexpected texture that left “traces” of handprints, creating a relationship to memory, an inability to escape the effects of one’s touch. An accompanying soundscape was con­ structed in such a way as to create an intimate local sound response based on hand movements over the surface. Schiphorst’s work is informed by her back­ ground and formal training in both dance/movement studies and computing science. She attempts to integrate models of scientific representation with physical body experiences. Schiphorst is especially interested in how the knowledge of movement and the body can affect and inform the design of

electronic computer technology as well as work created with (or through) that technology. All movement in her video images was not created in the typical directorial mode of “seeing the shot” and constructing the visual material

based on visual rules of composition. Instead, all movement was generated from within che body, as dictated by elemental states such as drowning, float­ ing, shivering, crawling, uncovering, and hiding. In Daniel Jolliffe’s Room for Walking in the Touch-Touche exhibition, the

viewer encounters only a wheeled wagon when entering the exhibition space. Part sculpture, part electronic interface, this is how che viewer experiences che work. The sculpture references the shape of a child’s wagon, on a bit larger scale,

and contains a projection screen in lieu of the wagon’s bed. On che screen, an image from the same perspective as the gallery floor can be seen. With some

physical exertion, che viewer is able to move the wagon to anywhere in the gallery space by means of a handle. This work on behalf of the viewer changes the image on the screen in relation to their movement, suggesting that they are visually cracking across an imaginary groundwork. Room for Walking con­

tains a single still image within che actual sculpture that reveals itself bit by bit through the viewer’s physical work. To see the entire image, the viewer has

co move, with some difficulty, through the entire gallery, over all the floor space.

These archaeological, sometimes awkward movements of che viewer serve to uncover not only che image itself but the experience of moving over an alter­

nate, sometimes kinesthetically unnatural terrain. The sculpture’s main effect lies in the process of how the viewer becomes involved with the work. Each

piece requires a physical exertion that points toward a kinesthetic experience for the viewer. Through these efforts, the viewer becomes aware of both their

physical relation to the object and the rules of the hidden technologies con­ tained by the sculpture. As the viewer begins to “interact” with this work, their

Chapter 4

perceptual interest shifts inevitably to a more bodily level, where they begin to investigate the work physically. At this level of involvement with the work, the viewer is forced into the position of reconciling the visual experience of the object with the perhaps stronger kinesthetic bodily image of the simple tech­ nology and effect contained within the sculpture. Then there is 10 Meditations on a Song by Olivia Newton-John (1999) shown by Johanna Householder in the Touch exhibition curated by Czegledy. House­ holder contends that if these visual works happen to employ complex techni­ cal systems, this is to her only an indication of the attention that their makers have paid to their own physicality. These are body extensions. Like a camera

extending the eye, these works are about the extension across space and time of the haptic and proprioceptive senses. Miroslaw Rogala* created multisensorial and synesthetic interaction in a technically combined statement in the form of both a CD-ROM and an inter­ active installation. In fact, his work Lovers Leap (1995) exists as an immersive, panoramic, perspectival environment that includes an interface suitable for

interactive and noninteractive experience for individuals and crowds. Accord­ ing to Rogala, movement through space is a physical aspect while movement through perspective is a mental construct—one that mirrors other jumps and disjunctive associations within the thought process. This movement is explored in an attempt to create a physical space that is a model of a mental

process. When the viewer enters the space, they become aware that their movements or actions are changing the view, but don’t necessarily realize how. This means that the viewer is not really in control, but simply aware of their

complicity (figures 4.14 and 4.15). Turning to Rogala’s background, he was born in 1954 in Poland, and was

educated in the arts with a background in painting, photography, poetry, and

music. He made the transition from using these separate forms of expression by employing a unified multimodal approach that he called “video theater’ or “wand theater.” When Rogala moved from Poland to the United States in 1979, he remained attached to his early works, which inspired a need to search for a medium that could synthesize the intrinsics of individual media and

the desire to seamlessly cross the boundaries of each medium without losing the intensity, density, and precision in an effort to continue the same idea in

different media. Pulso-Funktory, created in Poland between 1975 and 1979, was his early predigital, interactive, installation sculptural work. The focus of the display were the six rectangular, wooden panels with neon lights.

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

Figure 4.14

Miroslav Rogala, Lovers Leap, 1995. Computer study.

Chapter

4

The work invited the viewer-user—(v)user—to touch “on" or “off” the switchers-indicators that control the light display. The sounds were produced using original sound generators from 1970. This installation allowed for at least six persons—(v)users for a multiple switching interaction. This idea was further developed in Rogala's work from the late 1990s, which allowed for multiple (v)user physical and virtual interaction. On arriving in the United States, Rogala was anxious to study and work with new media, and was fas­ cinated by the new landscape, sunsets, and the scale of skyscrapers. He was inspired looking at the panorama and felt some kind of freedom. From 1980 to 1990, he created a photographic documentation and a series of dynamic body performances. Utilizing lasers, light objects, and flashlights during long film exposures, he also documented the trace of laser light as well as slide pro­ jections. In this way, the body and its gestures were reflected in a visible, cal­ ligraphic, hand-gestured, and hand-depicted writing-in-space. Duration and

process were introduced into the artwork. Rogala recorded his streams of

thoughts in words and poetic verses, intuitively laying the groundwork for his later wand-interactive, nonlinear storytelling works, or his wand theater. Sociopolitical and Security Issues

Sociopolitical, educational, and security issues in off-line works are at the center of several artists' preoccupations in this section. These concerns go from imaginative prosocial environmental applications of virtual reality to more critical attitudes regarding ethnological issues, but also to security and out­ right survival in an attempt to redirect the techniques, tools, and tenets of industrial science away from the military and warfare. Some of these issues, and in particular those associated with the environ­

ment as well as the teaching and the design of a computer-based interactive

fantasy system, are at the heart of Brenda Laurel’s* artistic commitments. Her virtual environment project Placeholder comprised three natural environments in the Banff area in Canada. Cosponsored by the Banff Centre for the Arts and Interval Research, the project was completed in 1993 with the assistance of Laurel's principal collaborators, Rachel Strickland, Rob Tow, and Michael Naimark. Laurel codesigned and produced the project. In addition to the

"capture" of actual environments, the project was novel in several other

respects. It was among the first head-mounted virtual reality worlds to inte­

grate the actions of two participants simultaneously. Simple hand-tracking

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

□

devices (designed by Steve Saunders) allowed participants to use both hands. The piece also allowed participants to enter into the bodies of various animals and to experience their distinct locomotive and sensory capabilities. In addi­ tion, the environment supported the construction of narratives through the virtual device of "voiceholders.” The purpose of the Placeholder project, Laurel says, was to create an example of an imaginative, prosocial application of virtual reality that might serve to expand the medium's definition. Laurel began working with interactive media in 1976, during her gradu­ ate studies in theater at Ohio State University. Her involvement as an actor, director, and writer with agitprop, participatory, and improvisational theater helped her to see the parallels between the worlds of theater and interactive technology. Her first interactive designs were fairy tales developed for the CyberVision computer, a machine with 2K of usable RAM. “With no expe­

rience in animation, I reinvented the wheel several times," Laurel explains. She did cell animation and font design for the CyberVision platform, and also developed the first automated lip-synching program on a microcomputer.

At Atari, Laurel directed software strategy and design for the early Atari home computer. While games were a staple of this work, Laurel’s team also explored the genre expressive and creative tools. After two years, Laurel moved to Atari Systems Research. Under the direction of Alan Kay, she was finally able to bring her interest in computers and theater together in an exploration

of how technology might be used to create satisfying interactive fantasy. This work led to her PhD thesis, “Toward the Design of a Computer-Based

Interactive Fantasy System,” for which she received her degree in 1986. She subsequently authored a book based on this research, Computer as Theater,

in 1991. From 1992 to 1996, Laurel conducted a massive research study on gender

and technology under the aegis of Interval Research Corporation. This work led to her founding a company, Purple Moon, devoted co designing interac­

tive media for girls. Laurel oversaw the creation of a cast of characters and interrelated narrative worlds. During its life, the company produced eight

CD-ROMs, a highly successful Web site, and an array of other products. The goal of the work was co meec girls where chey are in life and give chem emo­

tional rehearsal space for dealing with the issues most important to them. In

1999, the company was acquired by Mattel, which shortly thereafter closed its interactive division. What remains of the Purple Moon world are an ongoing series of books for young readers, published by Scholastic.

Chapter 4

Although the company did not lavish financial rewards on its founders and investors, Laurel considers it to have been a cultural success. She thinks that the company touched the lives of millions of girls and made a difference in their comfort level with technology. Laurel reflects on the lessons of Purple Moon and its mission in Utopian Entrepreneur, published by The MIT Press in 2001. In the book, she puts forward the idea of culture work as a goal for artists and entrepreneurs who are willing to engage popular culture for social change. Laurel currently teaches in the graduate media design program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Her year-long studio course challenges first-year graduate students to create a body of transmedia content, employing at least three different media types, on a topic involving socially positive goals. The 2000-2001 studio produced a project called Code 23, which integrated video, Web, and print to raise awareness of che human genome project among teenagers.

A critical sociopolitical stance combined with che deviation of che techni­ cal means can be discerned in the activities of the Survival Research Labora­ tory,* which was conceived and founded by Mark Pauline in November 1978.

Since its inception, the laboratory has operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to redirecting the techniques, cools, and tenets of indus­ try, science, and the military away from their typical role in che production

of warfare. The laboratory has staged over forcy-five mechanized presentations in the United States and Europe since 1979- Each performance consists of a unique set of ricualized interactions between machines, robots, and special effects devices, employed in developing themes of sociopolitical satire. Humans are present only as audience or operators. Several of Nil Yalter’s* works contain an ethno-critical message concern­

ing behavior, attitudes, and perceptions through the human body, objects, and sociopolitical and other issues (figure 4.16). As an artist of Turkish origin, she is at times attracted by the codes and the technology of Occidental culture,

but often she is nostalgic for the richness and the specificity of her own culture. She investigates the mythology and rituals, language and symbols, of the two

different cultures through which she navigates. Her working tools vary from

painting and drawing to photography, video installations, and the digital coding possibilities offered by the new technologies. The fact of using several media for each work enforces the stereophonic character of her work, which

runs through the same themes with different contents. The hermetic and

multifaceted character of Yalter’s work can be decoded through different

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

Figure 4.16

Nil Valter and Nicole Croiset, Rituals, 1980. Video sculpture.

readings—one of them being the examination of the inner relations between the different works, and the other being the study of inner reactions of each

issue in dialogue with her working method.

In 1973, during an installation work at che Museum of Modern Art in Paris, Yalter had a Sony portapack black-and-white video recorder in her hands and it fascinated her. From 1973 to 1986, she did a great deal of video work (installations, performances, and so on). She exhibited these works along with

photographs, paintings, drawings, and objects. Yalter started working with computers in 1985. Her first experience was a video colorizer that she used

in a video installation called Tele-Totem in Angouleme, France. In 1988, for the festival of Electronic Arcs in Rennes, she realized a video installation on

Egypt titled Pyramis 011 le Noyage d’Eudore for which she used a computer named Silver. This computer created different two-dimensional effects on the video­

tape. In 1989, she worked on a new computer, Graph9, and combined video

with two-dimensional virtual images in an installation called Hommage an Marquis de Sade.

Chapter 4

Yalter received a scholarship in 1992, and went to. Marseille to learn and work on a Silicon Graphics Iris 4-D (with Anyflo software, created by Michel Bret). After three months of hard work, she prepared the basis of a video instal­ lation with Florence de Meredieu: Television la Lune. In this composite image work (real and virtual three-dimensional images), three points were impor­ tant to Yalter: (1) not to be able to distinguish the real images from the virtual ones, (2) to surprise the software and even search for its shortcomings—for example, to mix up the functions of perspective and nonperspective—and (3) to create an invisible mental language between herself and the computer. In 1993, after a fourteen-year absence, Yalter went back to Istanbul, Turkey, her country of origin, for an exhibition. She was greatly influenced by the mosaic compositions of the Byzantine church of the Chora. Back in Paris, she painted a series of twenty-eight variations on the Chora and wanted to

construct a visual digital environment in which several aesthetic themes were interwined. The interaction of the mosaic and the pixel made her think of the theoretical and pictorial work of Kasimir Malevitch. She wanted to construct

an interactive CD-ROM with a personal computer. David Apikian and Nicole Croiset, two other media artists, joined Yalter in this project. Croiset had a

Macintosh Quadra at her place, so they started working together there. When

the computer broke down after four months, Yalter replaced it with a Power PC Macintosh, which had just come out. They finished the work in 1995. In

the exhibition form of Pixelismus, the viewer is surrounded by the painted variations and is invited to navigate through the eight chapters of the CD-

ROM, each one generated by a Malevitch text. This CD-ROM encloses dif­

ferent digital media forms: video, three-dimensional virtual animations, sound, still images, and interactivity. From 1996 to 1998, Yalter organized three creative workshops with Arc-

El (Joel Boutteville and Annick Bureaud) using computers, digital video

cameras, and adequate software for the French public enterprise (Electricite de France.) Ac the end of these three years, the three originators asked other artists to create an interactive CD-ROM to be sent to 180 participants. This

CD-ROM now includes virtual and real images made by nonartists along with Yalter's own artistic interpretation of these images. From 1996 on, Yalter worked on four other CD-ROMS: Terra Nomade (1997), on the subject of Turkish immigrant workers in Europe; Virtual Poetry (1999), an anthology of

modern Turkish poetry; Histoire de Peau (2003), a personal work on Yalter s

Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

own aging artist’s body; and Kannibal (2002), an allegory on the horrors of modern cannibalism. Working with a personal computer in her own studio opened up new horizons of creativity for Yalter, but it also isolated her from the rest of the art world. She thinks that new art collectives should be created from now on. We have seen in this chapter that the traditional problems connected with the correspondence of both the senses and the arts, multisensoriality and the multiartistic, spanning at least from the Gaamtkunstwerk to recent artistic synesthesia expressions, have found an entirely new form of expression and aesthetic existence due to the digital multimedia conception of work, which sometimes takes the technical form of a CD-ROM. Language as well as plastic expressions have both had a part in this development. The spectator/ participant was often implicated with several of their senses in these artistic expressions. It is this original combination between multisensoriality and interactivity that characterizes the majority of the works and projects dis­ cussed in this chapter, and that constitutes one of the principal elements of virtual art. But interactivity alone is another of the main characteristics, perhaps even the most important one, of this art, as we will see in the next chapter.

Chapter

4

Interactive Digital Installations

All che artists in this chapter have created works chat fall into the category of interaccive/virtual online environments. While this technical-aesthetic cate­

gory is dominant in their artistic productions, all of these artists have pro­ duced works that fit into different aesthetic subcategories such as sensory

immersion, reciprocity in aesthetic propositions, and individual, social, envi­ ronmental, and scientific commitments toward interactivity. In fact, most of the works described here have as their principal theme interactivity with the spectator. Interactivity can be interpreted as the ability of the user to manip­ ulate and affect one’s experience of media directly, and to communicate with others through media. Sensory Immersion

If for some immersion is the experience of entering into the simulation or sug­ gestion of a three-dimensional environment, for others it can also be an intel­

lectually stimulating process. In most cases, past and present, immersion is mentally absorbing; it is a process, or a change, or a passage from one mental

stage to another. Immersion is characterized by diminishing critical distance

from what is shown and increasing emotional involvement in what is hap­

pening. Regardless, immersion is undoubtedly key for any understanding of the development of sensorial interactivity in digital installations and the

passage from technological to virtual art.

Immersive images integrate the observer in a 360-degree space of illusion, or immersion, with unity of time and place. As image media can be described

in terms of how they organize and structure perception and cognition, virtual immersive spaces must be classed as extreme variants of image media chat on account of their totality, offer a completely alternative reality. They offer the observers the option of fusing with the image medium, which affects sensory impression and awareness. Salient here is Myron Krueger, one of the undisputed pioneers of interac­ tive art. In his Videoplace (1970) installation, visitors are placed in a computergenerated graphic world, inhabited by other human participants and graphic creatures, in which the laws of cause and effect can be composed from moment to moment. Krueger was the first artist to focus on interactive computer art as a composition medium. In the process, he invented many of the basic con­ cepts of virtual reality by developing unencumbered, full-body participation in computer-created telecommunication experiences. He also coined the term

artificial reality in 1973 to describe the ultimate expression of this concept. Krueger earned a BA in liberal arts from Dartmouth College, and MS and PhD degrees from the University of Wisconsin. His 1974 doctoral disserta­ tion defined human-machine interaction as an art form. It was later published

as Artificial Reality (Addison-Wesley, 1983), and significantly updated as Artificial Reality 11 (Addison-Wesley, 1991). Since 1969, Krueger has created interactive environments in which the computer perceives the visitors’ move­ ments through sensory floors and video cameras, and then responds through electronic sounds and environmental scale displays. The aesthetic theme of sensory immersion is treated in an original techni­

cal way in Scott Fisher’s Boom (1995), a binocular vision interface device that enables people to feel as if they are actually present in a different place and

time. Fisher calls this kind of virtual reality "telepresence.” It involves three

technologies in combination that enable sensory immersion—chat is, they sur­ round the user with a sensory field that mimics input from the real world. These technologies are not only wide-angle stereoscopic visual displays

immersing users in three-dimensional visual environments but also threedimensional, binaural audio displays that allow sounds to be localized in virtual space as well as instrumented input devices that track users’ bodies as

they move about and manipulate virtual objects.

Fisher is an artist and a researcher. According to Stephen Wilson, Fisher

has long been concerned with the creation of immersive first-person worlds in contexts such as MIT’s Architecture Machine group and NASA’s Virtual

Environment Workstation Project, which conducted innovative research on

Chapter 5

key virtual reality technologies such as head-coupled displays, data gloves, and three-dimensional audio technology. In addition to Boom, Fisher has created other three-dimensional immersive environments such as Menagerie (1993) where users are confronted with a world full of synthetic creatures that man­ ifest animal behaviors and different kinds of responses to the visitor’s actions.’ The artistic itinerary of French theoretician, plastician, and educator Edmond Couchot,* led him quite logically toward the problem and the appli­ cation of sensory immersion. Couchot first attempted a plastic synthesis between gestural painting and kineticism. Then he became interested in spec­ tator participation and created (between 1965 and 1973) a series of cybernetic devices that he called “musical mobiles”—a system that reacts to sound stim­

ulations (music, voices, different noises) and instantaneously proposes some visual interpretations where the automatism is blended by an intervention depending on hazard. Since microcomputers had yet to be invented, Couchot

experimented with electronic circuits and was in touch with engineers at IBM and Texas Instruments. In 1964, he constructed a machine called Semaphora I that was sensible to Hertzian waves. One turned a button to change a radio program, which in turn changed the luminous structures and mobiles. In Paris

in 1965, Couchot then produced Semaphora II, capable of perceiving music,

under the sponsorship of the French radio network ORTF’s Groupe de Recherche Musicale. A third mobile, Semaphora III, shown in 1966 at the Athenee Theater in Paris, was built along the same lines, but had a more complex behavior. Couchot participated in other exhibitions, such as the 1968 Cinetisme, Spectacle, Environnement in Grenoble, France, where he showed

Animation for a Swimming Pool, a luminous device responsive to swimmers’

sounds and movements in a pool—a work that anticipated by twenty years the immersion situation of virtual reality. In 1973, he received a commission

from the French Ministry of Culture to create Orion, a luminous eight-by-twometer wall automatically generating successions of luminous constellations,

whose sources are animated by pulsations that beat at always renewed rhythms

and that are defined by stochastic parameters in which the spectator is able to partially intervene. In 1969, with the creation of the fine arts department at the experimental

University of Vincennes, near Paris, Couchot began teaching. He was also for­ tunate to meet a group of like-minded researchers, informaticians, and artists (painters and musicians) at the university such as Michel Bret, Herve Huitric, and Monique Nahas. Couchot then founded, with Marie-Helene Tramus, a

Interactive Digital Installations

new department then called Arts et Technologies de 1’Image, which he directed until 2000. This was the first institution in France to offer students a serious technological curriculum with artistic ends and a PhD option. At the same time, Couchot participated in the digital images research section of the university, for which he remained responsible until 1995. The potentialities of computer science and technology in real time allowed Couchot to develop his work with digital interactivity. A permanent preoccu­ pation for him was the question of how to associate the creation of a work with the larger body to which it belonged. The double-montage apparatus seme a tout vent (I Sow to the Four Winds) (1990) is a good illustration (figures 5.1 and 5.2). On the other hand, Couchot has helped organize several exhibitions— particularly Electra, at the Musee d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1983, with a room dedicated to the digital image—where for the first time in France

interactive works on the computer were presented to the public. Considering himself an “intermittent artist” on the borders of the “con­ temporary art” system, Couchot devotes more and more time to theoretical

activities. Fascinated with the sciences and the techniques, and in particular cybernetics, he has participated since the early 1960s in the Societe frangaise de Cybernetique, which brings together informaticians, mathematicians, architects, plasticians, and others. Couchot has written more than eighty arti­

cles (translated into many languages) and two books on the digital image. His

first book, Images: De I’optique au numerique (1988), builds on his dissertation and deals with the advent of a new figuration system based on digital simu­ lation.2 Here, Couchot analyzes the passage from the optical to the digital, and the relationships the figuration techniques maintain with the visual arts

and culture. While the former incited us to represent the real or show the shortcomings of its representation, the latter invites us to simulate it. The digital image opens up toward a virtual universe, to be lived and relived indef­

initely, without ever being actualized. It radically overturns the symbolic economy of our system to represent the world. Our culture now depends on the capacity co understand this new image, to experiment and dream with it.

Couchots second book, La Technologie dans Fart: De la photographie a la rfalite virtuelie (1998), analyzes che grip that technology—and with it, science and

reason—has on art, without many people being aware of it? In order to under­ stand the complexity and the extent of this influence, the author draws his readers into a circuit that starts with photography and finishes at the most

advanced point of the digital. During this itinerary, Couchot reintroduces

Chapter 5

Figure 5.1a-c

Edmond Couchot and Michel Bret, 1 Sow to the Four Winds, 1990.

Figure 5.2a-c

Edmond Couchot and Michel Bret, I Sow to the Four Winds, 1990.

some of the key questions raised by Charles-Pierre Baudelaire concerning modernity, revisits a certain number of characteristic works, and presents some new works from an original point of view—exploring the relationships that establish themselves between the subject and the automatisms of the machine. Couchot shows how these relationships have evolved from photography, cinema, and television, and what they became under the growing and irre­ pressible hegemony of the digital at a time when humans are connected with the machine via ever-more-subtle interfaces. In collaboration with the Centre de Recherche, Couchot is now analyzing the evolution of digital interactivity modes. He notes a change in the sciences of artificial intelligence and artificial life (connectionism, genetics, and robocics) that considerably modifies the relationship between humans and machines

formerly founded on a stimulus-response logic. Machines are now invested with partially autonomous and human behavior. The digital tools utilized by artists are developing further, thereby encouraging artists to explore new prac­ tices where the body and the thought of the body are asked to play new roles.

Simultaneously, Couchot asks questions about the situation of art criticism and proposes a new type of criticism that would go beyond its traditional function of legitimation. In their installation La Ftinambule Virtnelle (2000—2001), Michel Bret* and Marie-Helene Tramus, propose that the spectator become, for one instant, a

tightrope walker. Using a handheld balancing pole, the spectator interacts with a virtual tightrope walker, whose image is projected on a large screen.

The face-to-face interaction between the two “actors” consists of a balance­ unbalance game. A sensor, attached to the balancing pole, sends position and orientation data to a computer, which interprets the data in real time as forces acting on the virtual dynamic actor, controlled by means of neural networks.

In this way, the actor develops autonomous motion strategies acquired during this period of learning. More chan a simple feedback, this system is an artifi­ cial being, albeit an elementary one, but showing some of the properties of life. For instance, the generalization characterizing the neural networks gives the virtual actor the capacity for potentially unlimited reactions—not learned,

but nevertheless appropriate. This intelligence appears as an emergent pro­ priety of the interactions between the virtual actor’s elements (artificial

neurons), the data from the environment, and the actor’s own structure (the simulated human body). The spectator/parcicipant thus develops autonomous

gestural strategies acquired during the learning period, the face to face

Interactive Digital Installations

between the two actors, the virtual and the real ones, evolves around an aes­ thetic game between equilibrium and disequilibrium. The development of this device has facilitated the creation of another Bret and Tramus installation, Danse avec Moi (2001), where the spectator is invited to react in real time with the image, but now the virtual dancer is projected on a large screen by means of a gyroscopic pickup, which the spectator wears on a belt (figure 5.3). The speed variations of the pickup's changing position are interpreted by a computer as forces acting on the model of a body who reacts in an appropriate fashion and according to its apprenticeship with the aid of neuronal circuits. In front of the spectator in motion, the virtual dancer improvises the steps that result from a compromise between the acquired

strategies of reequilibrium and the dance movements, on the one hand, and the spectator’s gestures, on the other. In this way, an original artistic context emerges from the interaction between the spectator and the artificial being, which possesses a certain autonomy and a certain capacity for gestural inven­ tion. This context is close to a real, unexpected situation that suscitates

improvisation, invention, imagination, and surprise.

Figure 5.3

Michel Bret and Marie-H6lfcne Tramus, Dance with Me, 2001.

Chapter 5

Regarding Bret’s personal, intellectual, and artistic itinerary, his predilec­ tion for mathematics was always intimately linked to his plastic preoccupa­ tions. He examined problems concerning spatial representation and particularly non-Euclidean geometry. These theoretical considerations found a response in his pictorial practice, which was very much influenced by modern art (surrealism, abstract art, and op art), and during his travels to Paris, Bret never failed to visit che Museum of Modern Art, che Louvre, and che Palais de la Decouverte (che Science Museum). In 1964, Brec decided on a teaching career and passed che appropriate examinations at the University of Lyons. With a desire to discover other cul­ tures, he left France for seven years on a teaching itinerary that took him to North Africa, South America, and Asia. He combined this with an intense

pictorial production featuring che Sahara and Arabic calligraphy, artisanship, and music, along with works influenced by pre-Columbian civilizations, che music of the barrios of Caracas and Rio de Janeiro, and the art of the Indians of che Amazonian forescs. Ocher influences came from Middle Eastern

mosques, Persia, Indian and Thai temples, the music of Bali, and che Viet­ namese and Chinese civilizations. These new, for Brec, perceptions, sounds, aesthetic areas, and cultures were all translated into paintings. In 1975, Brec joined Herve Huitric at the Department of Art and Informa­ tion at the University of Paris 8 in Vincennes, and after studying che elements of information science, started programming images himself at a time when

microcomputers were still quite rudimentary and lacked software. For Brec this was advantageous since everything had co be invented. He did not lose sight of his painterly preoccupations, but simply added movement to them. His pic­ tures became interactive programs in real time and synthetic digital films. After

finishing a dissertation of a new kind, at the border between arc and what was beginning to be called “new technologies,” Brec produced “live” concerts with the musicians of the Arc et Informatique group in 1980, during which elec­

tronic music and interactive images were generated in real time. Using a micro­ computer, Bret controlled colored animations chat followed the music with the aid of an interactive program (a kind of “image instrument"), which he had

written as “assembler.” From then on, this instrument replaced his paintbrush.

As he penetrated the world of informatics, he became more and more interested in its languages, conceiving an original system (Anyfo, entirely invented by an

artist) whose basic premises were plastic and technical, in that order. Bret strongly criticized commercial software written by engineers, who often lacked

Interactive Digital Installations

any artistic culture and thus inserted into their code an implicit aesthetic factor that, as an artist, Bret refused entirely. Bret was foremost critical of the limited perspective, provided to artists through use of the software. He also criticized methods of animation based on traditional techniques, the modeling of objects considered as belonging necessarily to a three-dimensional scene, and the “entirely mouse” option that kept artists in a purely manual role, far away from

the potentialities of the machine. From the 1990s onward, Bret took an interest in behaviorist animation, which broke radically with classical digital objects in order to come closer to life. This corresponded well with interactivity that rehabilitated the role of the body and participation. In 1995, Bret discovered the literature of connectionism and he constructed neuronal circuits in the form of small brains, which he then grafted onto his creatures. At once they took on a certain autonomy, thereby allowing Bret to

experiment more freely with his creations.

At the same time, the problem of interactivity remained one of Bret’s main preoccupations, and with Couchot and Tramus, he conceived several interac­ tive artistic installations, beginning with La Plume et le Pissenlit (1998), then La ftinambule virtuelle and Danse avec moi., as mentioned above. All these exper­

imentations led these artists to take an interest in connectionism and evolu­ tionism, and led Bret to devise his genetic algorithms. These artists’ interest in the problem of spectator perception/action as well as virtual beings enticed

them to study the historical sources of information science and technology, in particular the intelligent machines of Alan Mathison Turing, the automates

of Isaac Newman and Chris Langton, and the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener. They utilized the latest discoveries in neuroscience and placed the body at the center of their artistic concerns—not the realistic body of digitality but the one that had to do with the feelings and the actions of the spectator, who may discover through this interactivity a new kind of perception, one’s own as well as that of the machine. One can now speak of artificial life and reevaluate the

status of the creator, the artwork, and the spectator. But the fundamental point resided in the convergence of artistic practice with scientific models— something no longer realized on a calculable mode but a living one. As a con­ sequence, performance art such as dance, music, and the circus appeared to be a privileged area for artistic investigation, and even today, Bret and Tramus continue to experiment in this arena.

Chapter 5

Tramus* has long been attracted both to the creation of images and theo­ retical reflection, and she simultaneously studied visual arts at the University of Paris 8 and philosophy at the Paris 8 and Paris 1 universities. At the begin­ ning of the 1970s, she practiced documentary photography before discover­ ing video a few years later, thereby allowing her to develop an artistic demarche by experimenting with this medium and creating a series of mul­ tiscreen installations on the theme “filming time/'After photography and video art, Tramus discovered digital images, with all their artistic potential­ ities, and participated in the creation of several digital films. In 1984, she helped found the Art and Technology of the Image Group at the University of Paris 8, in the company of Couchot, Bret, Huitric, and Nahas. Spectator

participation constituted the leading idea at the time of how to traverse the different techniques of image automatization, including photography, video, and digital images. As a result of the added depth to this question in light of

digital interactivity, Tramus started creating interactive artistic installations. In 1989, she conceived Speakerine de Synthese, a three-dimensional digital face that spoke in real-time phrases, introduced via a computer keyboard. In the installation Corps et Graphie (1997), Tramus invited the spectator to become a choreographer and compose a kind of vegetal organism in real-time motion with the aid of several digital female dancers, and thus through interactivity,

to substitute the bodily movement in the midst of an aesthetic experience. If interactivity again radically questioned the traditional relations between the

artist, the artwork, and the spectator, the introduction of a logic of autonomy into these relationships rendered them still more complex and profound, since this entailed putting the spectator in direct contact with the simulation of

human beings, imaginary organisms, and simple images. This direction con­ tinues to orient Tramus’s present-day research, in collaboration with Bret,

including the above-mentioned La Funambnle ViriaeUe and Danse avec Moi. Tramus and Bret are planning to present the devices for the latter to real acro­ bats so that these performers can add their competence to it and allow the system to evolve. The two artists also plan to let several virtual dancers inter­

act with real dancers so as to create new choreographic effects. Osmose (1994-1995) and Ephemere (1997-1998) by Canadian artist Char Davies* are impressive immersive interactive environments. To experience

these works, participants (or “immersants,” as Davies calls them) don a stereo­

scopic head-mounted display (in Davies’s opinion, still the most effective way

Interactive Digital Installations

to enable sensations of full-body immersion in an all-encompassing space). The immersant also wears a vest that tracks breathing and balance—a strategy intended to reaffirm the role of the subjectively lived body in virtual space. The graphics in both works, true to Davies long-established visual sensibility, consist of soft-edged, luminous, semitransparent forms set among flowing

particles. The first realm encountered in Osmose is a three-dimensional Cartesian grid, but with the immersant’s first breaths, this gives way to a clearing, surrounded

by a forest. One can, through breath, endlessly float through this forest; or enter the clearing’s lone tree and the interior of its leaves; or sink into a pond and its oceanic abyss; or rise above the clearing into the clouds or descend into subterranean depths among translucent roots and rocks. Two additional realms—the philosophical text above and the software code below—function as conceptual parentheses around the work (figure 5.4). The sounds in Osmose

were originally sampled from male and female voices uttering phonetics, then digitally processed and localized in three dimensions. The sound is then gen­

erated on the fly, in real time, responding like the visuals to changes in the immersant’s head and body position, direction and speed. After fifteen minutes of immersion, a symbolic lifeworld appears and then irretrievably recedes, bringing the session to an end.

In Ephtmere, Osmose's iconic repertoire of trees, rocks, and streams is extended to include body organs, arteries, and bones, suggesting a symbolic correspondence between body and earth. While Osmose consists of a dozen spatial realms, Ephemere is structured into three levels: landscape, subterranean

earth, and a substratum of interior body flesh. Ephemere is structured tempo­ rally as well: its landscape changes continually, passing through diurnal/nocturnal cycles and seasonal transformation; its subterranean boulders give way to body organs; they in turn transform to bone. Throughout che experience,

various elements come into being, linger, and pass away, with the timing of

their appearances dependent on the immersant’s position, slowness of move­ ment, and steadiness/duration of gaze (figure 5.5). A striking example are che dormanc seeds chac when accivaced by a gaze, allow encry into cheir bloom­

ing’s luminous space. The river (also an underground scream or a vein/arcery)

has a gravicacional pull thac propels che immersanc along while randomly transforming the surrounding spatial realm. Such transformations are also

aural, and che sound is thus in a constant state of flux. Finally, depending on the immersant’s whereabouts after a dozen minutes within the work, there are

Chapter 5

Figure 5.4 Char Davies, Osmose: Subterranean Earth, 1995. Digital frame captured in real time through a head-mounted display during a live performance of the immersive virtual envi­

ronment Osmose.

Interactive Digital Installations

Figure 5.5 Ghar Davies, Ephem£re\ Forest Stream, 1998. Digital frame captured in real time through a head-mounted display during a live performance of the immersive virtual environ­ ment Ephemere. *

multiple endings, whereby the rich flows of color, texture, and sound begin to fade, leaving only autumn leaves, ashes, or embers falling in empty space.

While the central experience of these two works is immersive, there is a per­

formative aspect as well: during public exhibitions, the solitary journeys of participants are video projected (sometimes stereoscopically) so that an audi­

ence can follow the visual/aural explorations in real time as they unfold from the participant’s subjective point of view. Ac the same time, the audience can watch a silhouette of the participant's body. The projection of this gesturing body shadow alongside the real-time video projection serves co poeticize che

relationship between the participating body and the resulting visual/aural

effects—and most important, draws attention co the body’s grounding role in virtual space.4

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In both Osmose and Ephtmere, Davies proposes an alternative virtual reality that resists the usual trajectory through the employment of specific design strategies, such as a user interface based on the tracking of breath and balance as a means of countering the disembodying tendency of virtual reality. Davies’s use of multilayered semi transparency in the graphics is intended to subvert the conventional aesthetic of hard-edged-objects-in-empty-space—in her view, a striving for mimeticism that upholds Cartesian dualities. Davies’s work eschews hand-driven interface devices on the basis that they reflect/reinforce a controlling and dominating stance toward the world. Her work encourages a contemplative mode of exploration whereby unexpected and subtle percep­ tual confusions might occur, instead of the usual high-speed shoot-and-kill

scenario that rewards violence and aggression. The immersive virtual environments of Davies are the fruit of more than twenty years of artistic practice dealing with nature, psyche, and embodied perception. Her work effectively demonstrates that the medium of virtual reality is capable of communicating sensibilities other than those with which it is commonly associated. Far from adhering to the techno-utopian view of cyberspace, Davies considers the phenomenon of virtual reality to be a reflec­ tion of che Platonic/Newtonian/Cartesian philosophical tradition and the

military-scientific-industrial complex from which it has sprung: a medium

whose conventional design metaphors reinforce the dominant Western world­ view by proposing a realm ruled by mind, where flesh is absent and there is no dirt. While some believe bodies and nature are outmoded metaphors, Davies considers such faich in engineering silicon as a means of delivery into

immortal omnipotence symptomatic of an almost pathological denial of our

bodily embeddedness in the biological matrix of Earth, and as such, the classic testosterone-induced dream.5 Davies envisions virtual reality as a means of undoing habitual assump­

tions about our being-in-the-world. She approaches the medium as a

visual/aural spatial/temporal arena for perceptually “changing space” in the sense meant by the French philosopher and essayist Gaston Bachelard: “By

changing space, by leaving the space of ones usual sensibilities, one enters

into communication with a space that is psychically innovating. . . . For we do not change place, we change our Nature.”6 In short, Davies’s goal is to use virtual reality as a means of temporarily collapsing boundaries between subject

and object, interior and exterior, self and world—in order to facilitate a

refreshing of perception, thereby potentially resensitizing participants to the

Interactive Digital Installations

extraordinariness of being alive, sentient, and embodied, here now, among all this, briefly immersed in the flow of life through space and time. Davies began her career in the late 1970s as a painter and filmmaker. Her research into embodied perception and non-Cartesian spatialities dates back to 1980, when she began exploring the effects of her own extreme myopic vision: a dramatically altered world in which hard edges, separate objects, and indeed all distinctions between things disappear, dissolved in light. (This work laid the foundation for her unique visual aesthetic of multilayered semi­ transparency, as later seen in Osmose and Ephtmere.') During the mid-1980s, Davies continued this research, exhibiting a group of paintings called Espaces

Entrelacfc—that is, interlaced spaces. Subsequently, an increasing desire to rep­ resent nature as perceptually enveloping caused Davies to seek a means of going beyond the painterly two-dimensional picture plane, and precipitated her interest in the virtual three-dimensionality of computer graphic space. Driven by the force of her artistic inquiry, Davies became a founding direc­

tor of what arguably became the world’s leading computer-animation software development company, Softimage. As head of visual research from 1988 to 1997, Davies became well versed in the commercially driven biases in the tech­ nology. With the intent of subverting these conventions, she produced a series of three-dimensional computer-generated still images (the Interior Body Series,

1990—1993) Using complex lighting techniques and semitransparency co rep­ resent non-Cartesian spaces and suggest a metaphoric coequivalency between the interior lived body and nature. These images received numerous awards for

their rich unconventional sensibility and were exhibited as large-scale light boxes around the world. Even though che images were constructed and rendered as three-dimensional scenes, however, they ultimately remained two-dimen­

sional because of the output medium; for Davies, this posed a huge limitation. In mid-1993, Davies began writing about the potential of immersive virtual environments as a more effective means of “crossing the picture plane” into enveloping three-dimensional space—and laid out her intentions for sub­ verting conventional approaches to virtual reality. In early 1994, she assem­ bled a team (John Harrison and Georges Mauro, with Dorota Blaszczak and Rick Bidlack on sound) and embarked on the production of Osmose.

Fifteen co twenty thousand people have to date been individually immersed in Davies’s virtual environments, in exhibitions held at the San Francisco

Museum of Modern Art (2001), the National Art Gallery of Canada (1998),

che Museum of Monterrey, Mexico (1997-1998), and rhe Barbican Art Centre

Chapter 5

in London (1997), to name only a few. Many participants have reportedly expressed astonishment at their paradoxical perceptual experience, and some have been so emotionally overcome they have cried. As one person remarked in a letter to the artist: “(The work] heightened an awareness of my body as a site of consciousness and of the experience and sensation of consciousness occupying space. It’s the most evocative exploration of the perception of con­ sciousness that I have experienced since I can’t remember when." Davies is currently involved (through Immersence, the research and development/production company she founded in 1998) in porting Osmose and Ephemere from high-end hardware to personal computers, and in developing strategies for further work. She continues to write and lecture widely, most recently at Cambridge Universicy for the sixteenth Darwin College Lecture Series on Space, and among other honors, has been awarded an honorary doc­ torate of fine arts from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and the regent’s lectureship at the University of California, Los Angeles. For over thirty years Rebecca Allen* has investigated a variety of techno­

logical forms of expression including 3-D computer graphic animation, music

videos, TV logo production, video games, large-scale performance works, arti­ ficial life, multisensory interfaces, interactive installations, and virtual reality. Allen is not interested in technology for its own sake, however. Rather, she is interested in a technoculture that humanizes technology even while main­ taining a critical stance toward it. Or perhaps one can say that it is her crit­ ical approach toward technology that helps humanize it. Allen demonstrates

this critical approach with her concern with artistic quality and the concep­ tual integrity of her work—a conceptual integrity that stresses the effect on the mind of the immersant/user. Indeed her main concern appears to be the

investigation of the perceptual and cognitive processes of the immersant/user in conjunction with the technological apparatus with which she is engaged.

Her approach is based on a belief in technology however, but technology as a means of expanding human potential by provoking people to become smarter.

Not just intellectually smarter, but smarter about their own emotional reac­ tions co technology. Thus she approached technology from an almost expces-

sionistic angle, where human feeling and emotional reaction predominate the art. Such an approach is taken in an attempt to help people today live with the overload of information to which we are exposed on a regular basis.

Her work strives to demonstrate how the technological landscape (which we

cannot escape) can be paradoxically dominated by human needs. By the

Interactive Digital Installations

immersant/user experiencing a space where digital and physical realities merge and by interacting with her intricate digital characters, Allen exposes her audiences to experiences where our carnal bodies and virtual data bodies coexist and interact comfortably. This is Alien’s long-standing vision, a vision that acknowledges that we cannot escape the realm of the technological, but we need to take control of it, adjusting it to our needs as humans. By explor­ ing advanced electronic tools Allen helps us understand where technology is most active in our lives. Allen began her exploration of the relationship between art and technol­ ogy as an art student at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the early 1970s where Allen's prime influences were the art and technology movements of the early twentieth century: the Bauhaus, the Futurists, and the Construc­ tivists, primarily. Using a state-of-the-art computer system called Vector General, and an early program that could interpolate 2D drawings, Allen realized her first computer animation in 1974.

After RISD, Allen worked for a short time as a graphic designer for a fur­ niture company. However she found this work tedious, and so kept looking for other avenues of expression involving art and technology for her creative expression. In due course she was accepted as a special student to MIT where she enrolled in a course on computer graphics taught by Nicholas Negro­

ponte. In 1978 Allen became a graduate student at MIT and began her work with the Architecture Machine Group, an experience of immersion into inter­ active media that opened her resourceful mind to the possibilities of digital technology. Through this exposure to high technology and advanced render­

ing processes in 3-D space, she was able to realize a number of projects that

have become classics, above all the Aspen Movie Map and Personalized Movies, also known as Movie Manuals. Allen then decided to follow her inter­ est in computer animation because she wanted to realize a quality of color

and resolution that interactive images could not yet make available. She therefore joined the Computer Graphics Laboratory at New York Institute

of Technology (NYIT), one of the leading centers for advanced 3-D com­ puter graphics by the late 1970s. The NYIT Computer Graphics Lab had superb computational facilities, and this technological potential was coupled

to no specific utilitarian market agenda. Thus the pairing of freedom with

technological potential served to stimulate and formulate Alien’s art in a con­ structive fashion, which she continues to draw strength from to this day. There

were no requirements to create commercial software packages for the market

Chapter 5

at the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab—the focus was on the free exploration of computer graphics and animation. However, at the lab, Allen created some much-commended commercial work, including her EMMY-award-winning opening sequence for CBS’s Walter Cronkite’s Universe. She also began to create her own computer-animated artworks, including Steps (1982), which was inspired by Oscar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus theater. Allen also realized a

computer-animated figure of St. Catherine for the film version of Twyla Tharp’s performance piece The Catherine Wheel (1983). This animated figure was the first computer-generated human to appear on television. At the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, Allen created some of the earliest music videos that utilized computer animation—for example, her Adventures in Success (1983) and Smile (1983) for WillPowers at Island Records. She also achieved acclaim for the music video Musiqtte Non Stop for Kraftwerk in 1986.

These music videos contained original, and very arduous, computer anima­ tion sequences, especially rotating 3-D faces and subtle facial expressions that became the best known characteristics of Alien’s work. This Kraftwerk video Musique Non Stop is considered today to be one of the icons of technoculture. Its imagery has been cited in a myriad of techno contexts, including posters

and flyers for techno raves to Nam June Paik’s multiscreen video installations.

Following her experience at the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, Allen moved to Los Angeles to teach at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Allen was shortly thereafter invited by the Art Future festival in

Barcelona to bring to fruition several projects in Spain, including installation works, computer animations for the World Expo in Seville, the Olympics in

Barcelona, and the TV series El Arte del Video. She also worked on perform­ ance projects with the legendary Spanish performance group La Fura dels Baus. Given her interest in creating real-time high-resolution 3-0 virtual worlds, Allen shortly thereafter joined Virgin Interactive Entertainment, a video game

company, as creative director, executive producer, and 3-D visionary. Allen worked on a number of games, including Demolition Man for 3-DO. Fol­ lowing this experience, she accepted a position at a new department of Design/Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles. Recently Allen has created a series of multiparticipant, artificial life, immersive projects called The Bush Soul where visitors may enter and experi­ ence lush networked worlds. The title The Bush Soul is based on a West African

principle that a person has more than one soul and that there is a style of soul called the “bush soul" that exists within an untamed animal in the bush. In

Interactive Digital Installations

The Bush Soul, avatars amalgamate artificial life tendencies with those of the immersant through the use of voice and gesture—as the a-life forms respond using tactile feedback. This is consistent with Allen’s earlier work in that her work has always concentrated on inserting the presence of the human into the activity of the machine, a concern she dealt with by slotting human atten­ dance into the computer by requiring the human to interact with The Bush Soul. To create The Bush Soul, Allen received a grant from Intel Corporation that allowed her to put together a team of computer science and design stu­ dents whose goal it was to create a game engine system (called Emergence) based on artificial life technology. Allen then used the Emergence engine to

formulate a complex virtual world populated by odd creatures with unantic­ ipated behaviors. The first piece was called The Bush Soul, but the title became a general term for a series of three related, but slightly different installations (figures 5.6, 5.7). In The Bush Soul an immersant’s “soul"—which is represented as a bubble

of pulsing liveliness—enters a virtual bush world that appears to be animate and responsive to the immersant’s actions. Through a-life programming, a Bush Soul character can be endowed with apparent "feelings” toward any object in the Bush Soul world, feelings that compel a character’s movements and influ­ ence its reactions. As an immersant explores the environment of The Bush Soul, his or her “soul” may be said to dwell in the body of certain artificial life forms. Although the immersant’s experiences within The Bush Soul are per­

Chapter 5

ceptibly influenced by video game formats, unlike with typical video games, Bush Soul contains no conclusion or finality, only continual exploration and pleasure.7 The Tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean (1995), a tele-virtual event by Maurice

Benayoun* presented simultaneously at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal in September 1995, was a sensory manifestation that favored dialogue between different people. The voice of the interlocutor here was not only an instrument for an individual message but a

compass that leads to an ultimate goal, which is an encounter. In this work, the participants delve into images of the past in order co provoke this

encounter (figure 5.8). Both The Tunnel around the World (2002) and The World Nerve Tunnel (Far

Near) (e-motion) (2000-2001), an installation of local televisual reality, induce people to meet each other in the same space, through images and sounds. Whereas the Tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean linked tunnel “diggers” thou­

sands of miles away, Far Near functions as a network so as co create a tech­ nological distance between people actually in the same place. This network

operates like a huge nervous system, making the diggers sensitive to human pain and humanity’s anguishing trouble zones. A signal linking the dig­ gers follows a random path around the planet via the Internee. Through war areas, terrorist sites, and places marked by famine, misery, drought, and

Interactive Digital Installations

Maurice Benayoun, The Tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean, 1995. Tele-virtual installation at the Pompidou Center in Paris and Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. © 1995 by Maurice Benayoun. Figure 5.8

dictatorships, the signal’s path is projected on the wall of a tunnel. When the

Internet signal passes through one of these troubled zones, graphically repre­ sented by colors, a communication between the diggers is established. Benayoun began his long itinerary as video and multimedia artist with a number of photographic works and short video films. He took a big step forward in 1985 when he realized a series of video projects, Pieces a conviction^ that permitted him to work in certain well-defined situations after placing the spectator into a state of immersive interactivity. In 1992-1993,

Benayoun selected a number of artists to produce works meant to be realized using a virtual reality technique, to be later applied by him, as a principle,

in some virtual reality installations. These artists’s works were gathered

together in a collection of contemporary art that Benayoun named Art after

the Museum. For him, the museum generally represents the dead memory of art; in his collection, on the other hand, he was trying to create a living memory by including only works that represented a sequel to the practice of

Chapter 5

each artist and by taking into account the peculiarities of their environment. Benayoun’s collection already involved the notion of virtual space that led him to explore the possibilities of the digital image and the interactivity of the spectator. In 1989, influenced visually by cartoonists and intellectually by writers of science fiction and the literature of the fantastic, he created the Quarxs series, which involved more advanced animation techniques such as threedimensional high-definition images and thirty-five-millimeter film. The Quarxs, purely imaginary and invisible odd beings that are supposed to be found anywhere in our environment, served as a pretext for Benayoun to

explore the immediate environment and the limits of scientific understand­ ings of reality with the aid of new techniques. Since the 1980s, Benayoun had examined the areas of communication and technology in an attempt to cross in a facetious manner the territories shared between art and reality; with the Quarxs series, he quickly leaves digital images in favor of installations employ­ ing networks and virtual reality devices. In 1994, he asks his Big Questions, a series of interactive virtual reality installations and Internet realizations. The first of these, Is God Flat? is fol­

lowed a year later by Is the Devil Curved? In the first, a playful and labyrinthic

quest for God’s image, participants are invited to dig into brick walls, whereas in Is the Devil Curved? a piece that includes voluminous figures with intense

seductive qualities, the user intervenes in a blue sky littered with clouds. Both of these works of virtual reality are based on the same principle: We are in a closed room from which we can only escape if we dig through some

corridors in real time and a three-dimensional material. The base of the archi­ tectural elements is reconstructed by each image. The spectator can choose any direction on a horizontal level. The constructed corridors remain in the

computer’s memory and can be arranged in such a way as to constitute an

architectural space of great complexity. Fundamentally, digging is a metaphor here for the spectator’s creation of the very world they are exploring. In other

words, the visitor benefits from their overall power—due to the fact that the world one explores is being constructed around one’s movements—but at the

same time, the visitor is confronted with the impossibility of finding an exit, a way to escape from the fatality of a world chat is only a trace of what one

produces. Benayoun asks a third question: And What about Me? (1995). This inter­ active Internet work does not involve any foraging but instead presents the

Interactive Digital Installations

world from a two-dimensional aerial point of view. One can freely choose a part of the world and throw oneself on it like a small pebble or a grain of

sand, which in falling on the earth, deforms the continent it touches. Thus, the world is provisionally modified by our presence. In a second part of And

What about Me? everyone has the chance to participate in rewriting the world’s creation. Benayoun’s concern with the aesthetic specificity of artistic endeavors in a highly technical environment as well as the stress he puts on processes and not the final result are apparent not only in his Virtual Tunnels series but also

World Skin, Crossing Talks, and Art Impact. One of the most impressive works created by Benayoun, World Skin: A Safari into the Land of War was first shown at the Ars Electronica exhibition in Linz,

Austria, in 1997 (figure 5.9). Benayoun claims that by taking photographs, one can rip the skin off the body of the world. This work is intended to show the

Figure 5.9 Maurice Benayoun, World Skin: A Safari into the Land of War, 1997. Immer­ sive installation, screen shot. © 1997 by Maurice Benayoun.

Chapter 5

status of the image in the process of getting a grip on the world. The rawest and most brutal realities can be reduced to an emotional superficiality in our perception. Acquisition, evaluation, and understanding of the world constitute a process of capturing it.

In sharp contrast to the video games that transform people into passionate warriors, here the audio unmasks the true nature of apparently harmless gestures and seeks to provide a form of experience rather than a form of comprehension. Some things cannot be shared. Among them are the pain and the image of our remembrance. The worlds to be explored here can bring these things closer to us, but always simply as metaphors, never as a simulacrum. As for Crossing Talks (1999), it immerges us in a space of noncommunica­ tion, but takes as its model the exchanges occurring on the Internet. This work is a complex device that closely resembles a communications process on a network and gives the user the ability to find themself with others in cyber­ space. Yet the purpose of Crossing Talks is not to justify the status of the exchanges on the Internet but rather to reassess the problems of representa­ tion and communication with regard to the world as a whole, and to stage settings that provoke a worldwide dialogue.8 On the other hand, Art Impact: Collective Retinal Memory—an installation

presented simultaneously at the Pompidou Center from June 20 to July 4, 2000 and on the Internet as a window opening on the possibilities of spher­ ical photography—gave visitors the feeling of being at an exhibition—in this case, the Beauty and Its Sequels (La beaute et apres) show, held in Avignon, France. Whereas this latter exhibition juxtaposed artistic creations and frag­

ments of nature chosen for their aesthetic qualities, Art Impact added neigh­

borhood places that lacked any aesthetic connotation, such as supermarkets

and slaughterhouses. Art Impact was conceived as a collecive retinal memory,

an original and amalgamating device that allowed visitors to construct a new

visual space by displacement. Benayoun is an artist preoccupied with images of war and destruction, and more so with new forms of exchanges and encounters on a worldwide scale as well as new definitions of space as architecture constructed by displacement

or by the visitor who is constantly placed in the center of the world. But it is Benayoun’s inquiry into the relationship between the virtual and the real that ties his whole production together. For him, the virtual and its vicissi­ tudes, beyond any worship of digital simulation, offer the possibility to dis­

cover and experience a new deciphering of the real.

Interactive Digital Installations

Installations such as Solitary (1992) and Shadotvs (1993) by Simon Biggs* adopted an ultraminimalist approach to fully interactive and immersive envi­ ronmental works that focused on the interaction not between the human and the machine but between the human and human. These computer-mediated spaces, employing large-scale data projection with remote visual sensing systems, functioned co bring people into encounters with one another that involved challenging, even paranoid, dynamics. The participants in such works experienced extreme sensory deprivation contrasted with monumental images of the human form that somehow always seemed on the flickering edge of being, suggesting their own, and that of their viewers, mortality in these intensely dark but highly charged spaces (figure 5.10). Biggs first programmed an IBM 360 mainframe computer in Fortran IV to produce an image in the Adelaide 1978 program. Since then, he has fol­ lowed a consistent trajectory wedding experimental art and digital technolo­

gies. Initially active as a painter, Biggs first utilized the computer as an aid in che concepcualizacion and produccion of images, and lacer, chrough che

Figure 5.10 Simon Biggs, Solitary, 1992. Installation photo of viewer interacting with pro­ jection, Gallery Otso, Helsinki, Finland.

Chapter 5

use of programmed systems, as a way to automate the entire image-making process. The abundance of visual material led the artist to begin exploring animation and, on realizing the limitations of such an approach, a combina­ tion of conceptual and installation art with integrated, automated, computer visualization systems in the early 1980s. For Biggs, the aesthetic and con­ ceptual possibilities of the code itself was of at least equal importance as the resulting image streams.

In 1983, Biggs produced his first installation incorporating computer­ generated automata—something akin to a simulated fungus or virus. Dis­ played live on a monitor, and placed between a tank containing fish and a rock covered with slowly growing crystals, the thematic intent of The Reproductive System was clear. Biggs further developed this practice over the next few years, introducing live video feedback systems and interactive systems using remote vision-sensing systems, which he had begun to develop when an arcist-inresidence at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisa­ tion in Sydney in 1984. Biggs left Australia and settled in London in 1986. In 1987, he became

an artist-in-residence at what is now the Centre for Electronic Arts at Middlesex University. His geographic relocation also led to an artistic reassessment, which was reflected in the visual character of his work. Gone

were the earlier abstract-symbolic and mathematical images; they were replaced by a rich visual aesthetic reminiscent, at least on the surface, of

medieval illuminated manuscripts and stained glass. His work continued co engage with computing technologies and automated systems, but within a broader sociopolitical and historical context. The computer had become not

just a means but a primary metaphor at the heart of his work. Projects such as Golem (1988) and Alchemy (1990) are exemplary of this period. Biggs’s work of the lace 1980s—using compucer animation, interactive installation, and other related media—was visually dense and rich, and almost

as overburdened with theoretical concerns as it was with medieval and baroque ornament. Thus, the work he began to produce in che early 1990s arrived as a dramatic contrast. In works such as Halo (1998-1999), Biggs has taken his interest in the

monumental, elusive, and interactive space to high levels of physical scale and audience engagement, retaining a distinctively rigorous and disciplined approach. In Halo, naked human figures fly fifteen meters above the viewers’

heads, circling as if magnetically drawn to their own destruction and thus

Interactive Digital Installations

forming enormous halos of light from contorted human forms around the viewers’ heads, ultimately falling to the ground to confront the viewers, life­ size, with illegible groans and screams. The impact of such works, due to the physical scale, volume of sound, and character of the imagery, is a visceral experience; because of the hair-trigger and user-oriented interactivity, it is also

an immediate experience. The artist’s interest in the. human form as a metaphor for the human condi­ tion has been reflected in works like As Falling Falls (1996), Document (1996), The Waiting Room (1998), and Parallax (2001) as well as in his collaborations with choreographers such as Stephen Petronio (New York) and Sue Hawksley (London), complemented by working with composers experienced in live-art scoring such as Stuart Jones (London) and Hans Peter Kuhn (Berlin). Biggs’s interest in the human body as an image of the mortal is comple­

mented by his interest in and use of language. Although Biggs is known for his theoretical writings on new media art, for him language is not primarily a means of expression but a means of coming to be. For this artist, language

is the defining instrument of the human and the computer as a model or metaphor for this. In works such as The Great Wall of China (1996), Halo, and Mozaic (1999), Biggs deploys language in autodestructive mode. The texts are

auto-generated by computers employing sophisticated generative grammar software embedded in behavioral logic and interactive systems. The users do not so much read the texts but are read by them as the texts bring themselves dynamically into being. This interest in the textual as well as the visual has paralleled Biggs’s

engagement with the Internet as an artistic medium. Where once Biggs would

have complemented his core installation-based practice with works on video, or later CD-ROM, since 1995 the Net has come to take this role in

his practice. For example, The Great Wall of China, while existing as an instal­ lation and a CD-ROM, had its genesis on the Web, and Babel (2001) can only exist on the Web as a multiuser interactive telematic work engaged as much

with the aesthetics of the database and the Web browser as it is with images or texts.

In projects such as Babel, the artist is developing works where the computer comes to function as a kind of paranoia-inducing extrasensory perception

machine. In this and other recent works, such as the immersive installation Par­ allax, the viewer is confronted not only with their particular view and experi­

ence of a thing but also with that of all others who are viewing the work at that

Chapter 5

time, whether in situ as an immersive installation or online as a Web site (or as a hybrid of these two media) (figures 5.11 and 5.12). These works are con­

cerned with the immersion of self in the collective production of meaning, the

mechanisms at the center of being and becoming human, and what happens when we are exposed to this process of collective poesis without the mediation of individuality or a particular point of view. In a sense, these projects can be

seen as phenomenological metaphors for the disappearance of self as we drown in an information and language overload of our own manufacture.

Throughout his practice, Biggs has pursued and developed a thematic concern with what it is to be human and how we are mediated by language, our technologies, and our representations of ourselves and the world. His is perhaps a romantic and apocalyptic vision, although often leavened with a dark humor that lends a tragicomic dimension to his work. For Biggs, tech­

nology has never been an end, or a fascination, but simply an essential, even

Interactive Digital Installations

Figure 5.12

Simon Biggs, Parallax, 2001. Installation simulation showing three screens.

defining, characteristic of the human and thus the seif. It is perhaps for this reason that he has never bothered to distinguish between that produced by automata or the author’s own hand, for perhaps it is false to distinguish

between the self and its attendant machines, just as the Western distinction

between mind and body has proved a false dualism in recognition of the complex, problematic, and polyvalent relations between self and other.

Vectorial Elevation (2000), a large-scale interactive installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer,* transformed Mexico City’s historic center using robotic

searchlights controlled over the Internet, visitors could immerge themselves in this luminous environment, and using the Web site, design ephemeral light sculptures over the National Palace, city hall, the cathedral, and che Templo Mayor Aztec ruins. The sculptures, made by eighteen xenon searchlights located around Zocalo Square, could be seen from a ten-mile radius and were

sequentially rendered as they arrived over the Net. The Web site featured a three-dimensional Java interface that allowed participants co make a veccorial design over the city and see it from virtually any point of view. When the

Chapter 5

project server in Mexico received a submission, it was numbered and entered into a queue. Every six seconds, the searchlights would orient themselves auto­ matically and three Webcams would take pictures to document a participant’s design. An archive page was made for each participant with comments, infor­ martion, and watermarked photos of their design. A notification e-mail message was sent once the archive Web page was done. Vectorial Elevation received participants from over eighty-nine countries and all regions of Mexico. To facilitate access, free terminals were also set up in public libraries and museums all over the country. Zocalo Square’s monumental size makes the human scale seem insignificant; for some Mexican scholars, the square is emblematic of a rigid, monolithic, and homogenizing environment. Search­ lights themselves have been associated with authoritarian regimes, in part due to rhe military precedent of antiaircraft surveillance. Indeed, the Internet itself is a legacy of a military desire for distributed operations control. By ensuring that participants were an integral part of the artwork, Vectorial Elevation attempted to establish new creative relationships between control technolo­ gies, ominous urban landscapes, and a local and remote public. It was intended

to interface the postgeographic space of the Internet with the specific urban reality of the world’s most populous city (figures 5.13 and 5.14). Lozano-Hemmer is a Mexican Canadian electronic artist who works in rela­ tional architecture, technological theater, and performance art. His work has

been shown in over a dozen countries and his writings have been widely pub­ lished. With the support of the Telefonica Foundation in Madrid, he curated Arte Virtual (1994), an electronic art exhibition in an abandoned subway station. He also organized and moderated the fifth international conference on cyberspace, SCYBERCONF, and initiated the Life X.O art and a-life compe­

titions (figure 5-15). In Handsight (1993), an interactive computer graphic environment by Agnes Hegediis, the spectator seizes in their hand the interface in the form

of an eyeball. The eyeball activates a symbolic image into digital images cal­ culated in real time and projected in front of the viewer on a circular screen.

The represented objects refer themselves to those contained in a small bottle painted in 1883 by a Hungarian artist, who faces the screen on the other side

of the globe. Digital technology produces systems that treat information in atoms and

fragments. These physical properties have profoundly influenced our concep­ tual and philosophical approach to the world of information. We benefit thus

Interactive Digital Installations

XS3W

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Vectorial Elevation: Relational Architecture 4, 1999-2004. Shown here at the Place Bellecour in Lyon, France. Photo by Rafael LozanoHemmer. Figure 5.13

from a kind of liberty that consists in the utilization of meanings isolated from their original context—meanings that we transfer into other construc­ tions. Hegediis is fascinated by the tension created between our cultural her­ itage and the discontinuations produced by the new technologies. All her works possess a symbolic meaning inasmuch as they represent a moment of

emotion and reflection in a personal history that becomes “objectivated.” Handsight is a kind of theater of the memory of the symbolic objects of her

past works, which have been assembled in a virtual space with another series

of symbolic objects—in votive offerings found in the Hungarian tradition. In this way, an experience emerges that neither belongs co the artist nor che pasc, but becomes an autonomous interactive event in the present. The finality of

this work consists in the emphasis laid on some aspects of virtuality such as telepresence, bodily separation, and the reincroduction of the function of the

senses. Another goal of this work is the creation of a reciprocal relationship

between the virtual and the real by means of a measurable change in a spe-

Chapter 5

Figure 5.14 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Vectorial Elevation: Relational Architecture 4, 1999-2004. The 3-D virtual interface for participants to make their own light designs over the Internet.

cific physical object and its representation in other spaces and dimensions.

This takes place in the orbit of a visual environment in which the plastic representation is constituted by a spherical anamorphosis that represents

enlarged perception—an endoscopic eye. The thematic structure of this work is intended to be a projection directed toward the outside of psychological and symbolic spaces. All elements melt clearly into each other in an environment

that consists of three principal parts: a large circular surface for video projec­ tions, an interactive ocular interface in the form of an eye, and a transparent

vault with a hole into which this “eye” is placed. This vault furnishes the observer with an endo-spatial environment whose manual exploration leads

directly to the representation of the virtual domain. The immersive virtual reality installations by Mark W. Palmer* are con­ ceived through a philosophical immanence. In terms of Palmer’s work, whac the artist/philosopher enjoys about the digital is its immateriality and the

fact that this can be experienced through an embodied sensuality—and the

Interactive Digital Installations

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