Art Events Data Table

During the Symposium, ISEA2000 participants will be able to look at a CD-Rom and WWW-site selection in the Galerie of the Forum des images.

Selected Websites  by: Angelique Anderson, Roca Antunez, Pat Badani, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Annette Barbier, Ricardo Barreto, Giselle Beiguelman, Paul Chan, Young-hae Chang, Jim Costanzo, Clay Debevoise, Dr. Hugo, Ollivier Dyens, Colette Gaiter, Ken Goldberg, Gabriela Golder, Valery Grancher, John Grech, Ursula Hentschlaeger, Ora Ito, Jecca, Ilia Johannson, Wolf Kahlen, Patrick Keller, Tamara Lai, Jeannette Lambert, Lise-Helene Larin, Lucia Lead, Paula Levine, Calin Man, Paul Marquardt, Elsa  Mazeau, Timothy Murray, Arghyro Paouri, Dominique Paul, Tania Malloa Ruiz Gutierrez, Bruno Samper, Manthos Santorineos, Antoine Schmitt, Stelarc, Brad Todd, Annette Weintraub, Maria Graciela Yeregui, Andre Zapp & Jody Zellen

During the Symposium, ISEA2000 participants will be able to look at a CD-Rom and WWW-site selection in the Galerie of the Forum des images.

Selected Websites  by: Angelique Anderson, Roca Antunez, Pat Badani, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Annette Barbier, Ricardo Barreto, Giselle Beiguelman, Paul Chan, Young-hae Chang, Jim Costanzo, Clay Debevoise, Dr. Hugo, Ollivier Dyens, Colette Gaiter, Ken Goldberg, Gabriela Golder, Valery Grancher, John Grech, Ursula Hentschlaeger, Ora Ito, Jecca, Ilia Johannson, Wolf Kahlen, Patrick Keller, Tamara Lai, Jeannette Lambert, Lise-Helene Larin, Lucia Lead, Paula Levine, Calin Man, Paul Marquardt, Elsa  Mazeau, Timothy Murray, Arghyro Paouri, Dominique Paul, Tania Malloa Ruiz Gutierrez, Bruno Samper, Manthos Santorineos, Antoine Schmitt, Stelarc, Brad Todd, Annette Weintraub, Maria Graciela Yeregui, Andre Zapp & Jody Zellen

During the Symposium, ISEA2000 participants will be able to look at a CD-Rom and WWW-site selection in the Galerie of the Forum des images.

Selected Websites  by: Angelique Anderson, Roca Antunez, Pat Badani, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Annette Barbier, Ricardo Barreto, Giselle Beiguelman, Paul Chan, Young-hae Chang, Jim Costanzo, Clay Debevoise, Dr. Hugo, Ollivier Dyens, Colette Gaiter, Ken Goldberg, Gabriela Golder, Valery Grancher, John Grech, Ursula Hentschlaeger, Ora Ito, Jecca, Ilia Johannson, Wolf Kahlen, Patrick Keller, Tamara Lai, Jeannette Lambert, Lise-Helene Larin, Lucia Lead, Paula Levine, Calin Man, Paul Marquardt, Elsa  Mazeau, Timothy Murray, Arghyro Paouri, Dominique Paul, Tania Malloa Ruiz Gutierrez, Bruno Samper, Manthos Santorineos, Antoine Schmitt, Stelarc, Brad Todd, Annette Weintraub, Maria Graciela Yeregui, Andre Zapp & Jody Zellen

During the Symposium, ISEA2000 participants will be able to look at a CD-Rom and WWW-site selection in the Galerie of the Forum des images.

Selected Websites  by: Angelique Anderson, Roca Antunez, Pat Badani, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Annette Barbier, Ricardo Barreto, Giselle Beiguelman, Paul Chan, Young-hae Chang, Jim Costanzo, Clay Debevoise, Dr. Hugo, Ollivier Dyens, Colette Gaiter, Ken Goldberg, Gabriela Golder, Valery Grancher, John Grech, Ursula Hentschlaeger, Ora Ito, Jecca, Ilia Johannson, Wolf Kahlen, Patrick Keller, Tamara Lai, Jeannette Lambert, Lise-Helene Larin, Lucia Lead, Paula Levine, Calin Man, Paul Marquardt, Elsa  Mazeau, Timothy Murray, Arghyro Paouri, Dominique Paul, Tania Malloa Ruiz Gutierrez, Bruno Samper, Manthos Santorineos, Antoine Schmitt, Stelarc, Brad Todd, Annette Weintraub, Maria Graciela Yeregui, Andre Zapp & Jody Zellen

During the Symposium, ISEA2000 participants will be able to look at a CD-Rom and WWW-site selection in the Galerie of the Forum des images.

Selected Websites  by: Angelique Anderson, Roca Antunez, Pat Badani, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Annette Barbier, Ricardo Barreto, Giselle Beiguelman, Paul Chan, Young-hae Chang, Jim Costanzo, Clay Debevoise, Dr. Hugo, Ollivier Dyens, Colette Gaiter, Ken Goldberg, Gabriela Golder, Valery Grancher, John Grech, Ursula Hentschlaeger, Ora Ito, Jecca, Ilia Johannson, Wolf Kahlen, Patrick Keller, Tamara Lai, Jeannette Lambert, Lise-Helene Larin, Lucia Lead, Paula Levine, Calin Man, Paul Marquardt, Elsa  Mazeau, Timothy Murray, Arghyro Paouri, Dominique Paul, Tania Malloa Ruiz Gutierrez, Bruno Samper, Manthos Santorineos, Antoine Schmitt, Stelarc, Brad Todd, Annette Weintraub, Maria Graciela Yeregui, Andre Zapp & Jody Zellen

During the Symposium, ISEA2000 participants will be able to look at a CD-Rom and WWW-site selection in the Galerie of the Forum des images.

Selected Websites  by: Angelique Anderson, Roca Antunez, Pat Badani, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Annette Barbier, Ricardo Barreto, Giselle Beiguelman, Paul Chan, Young-hae Chang, Jim Costanzo, Clay Debevoise, Dr. Hugo, Ollivier Dyens, Colette Gaiter, Ken Goldberg, Gabriela Golder, Valery Grancher, John Grech, Ursula Hentschlaeger, Ora Ito, Jecca, Ilia Johannson, Wolf Kahlen, Patrick Keller, Tamara Lai, Jeannette Lambert, Lise-Helene Larin, Lucia Lead, Paula Levine, Calin Man, Paul Marquardt, Elsa  Mazeau, Timothy Murray, Arghyro Paouri, Dominique Paul, Tania Malloa Ruiz Gutierrez, Bruno Samper, Manthos Santorineos, Antoine Schmitt, Stelarc, Brad Todd, Annette Weintraub, Maria Graciela Yeregui, Andre Zapp & Jody Zellen

During the Symposium, ISEA2000 participants will be able to look at a CD-Rom and WWW-site selection in the Galerie of the Forum des images.

Selected Websites  by: Angelique Anderson, Roca Antunez, Pat Badani, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Annette Barbier, Ricardo Barreto, Giselle Beiguelman, Paul Chan, Young-hae Chang, Jim Costanzo, Clay Debevoise, Dr. Hugo, Ollivier Dyens, Colette Gaiter, Ken Goldberg, Gabriela Golder, Valery Grancher, John Grech, Ursula Hentschlaeger, Ora Ito, Jecca, Ilia Johannson, Wolf Kahlen, Patrick Keller, Tamara Lai, Jeannette Lambert, Lise-Helene Larin, Lucia Lead, Paula Levine, Calin Man, Paul Marquardt, Elsa  Mazeau, Timothy Murray, Arghyro Paouri, Dominique Paul, Tania Malloa Ruiz Gutierrez, Bruno Samper, Manthos Santorineos, Antoine Schmitt, Stelarc, Brad Todd, Annette Weintraub, Maria Graciela Yeregui, Andre Zapp & Jody Zellen

During the Symposium, ISEA2000 participants will be able to look at a CD-Rom and WWW-site selection in the Galerie of the Forum des images.

Selected Websites  by: Angelique Anderson, Roca Antunez, Pat Badani, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Annette Barbier, Ricardo Barreto, Giselle Beiguelman, Paul Chan, Young-hae Chang, Jim Costanzo, Clay Debevoise, Dr. Hugo, Ollivier Dyens, Colette Gaiter, Ken Goldberg, Gabriela Golder, Valery Grancher, John Grech, Ursula Hentschlaeger, Ora Ito, Jecca, Ilia Johannson, Wolf Kahlen, Patrick Keller, Tamara Lai, Jeannette Lambert, Lise-Helene Larin, Lucia Lead, Paula Levine, Calin Man, Paul Marquardt, Elsa  Mazeau, Timothy Murray, Arghyro Paouri, Dominique Paul, Tania Malloa Ruiz Gutierrez, Bruno Samper, Manthos Santorineos, Antoine Schmitt, Stelarc, Brad Todd, Annette Weintraub, Maria Graciela Yeregui, Andre Zapp & Jody Zellen

During the Symposium, ISEA2000 participants will be able to look at a CD-Rom and WWW-site selection in the Galerie of the Forum des images.

Selected Websites  by: Angelique Anderson, Roca Antunez, Pat Badani, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Annette Barbier, Ricardo Barreto, Giselle Beiguelman, Paul Chan, Young-hae Chang, Jim Costanzo, Clay Debevoise, Dr. Hugo, Ollivier Dyens, Colette Gaiter, Ken Goldberg, Gabriela Golder, Valery Grancher, John Grech, Ursula Hentschlaeger, Ora Ito, Jecca, Ilia Johannson, Wolf Kahlen, Patrick Keller, Tamara Lai, Jeannette Lambert, Lise-Helene Larin, Lucia Lead, Paula Levine, Calin Man, Paul Marquardt, Elsa  Mazeau, Timothy Murray, Arghyro Paouri, Dominique Paul, Tania Malloa Ruiz Gutierrez, Bruno Samper, Manthos Santorineos, Antoine Schmitt, Stelarc, Brad Todd, Annette Weintraub, Maria Graciela Yeregui, Andre Zapp, and Jody Zellen.

This interactive multimedia installation leaves the visitor with a retinal afterimage and in doing so a 3-D sculpture is created within the visitor’s mind. Like dreaming with your eyes open, Retinal Memory Volume challenges our perception of physical and psychological reality.

This audio-sculptural installation seeks to draw parallels between today’s electronic trade and the silk trade; the cultural trade of past centuries between East Asia and Europe. The work cleverly fuses the technical language of electronics with visually decorative language of textile design.

Millenniumania shows whether people move at different speeds in different time-zones, depending on their individual time-sensation. A camera is installed in different locations which films pedestrians passing by. Each average speed of the pedestrians at one place defines the speed of each film in the 360 degree screen-installation. What results is an endless race between the pedestrian real-time and images from the different locations competing within the installation.

String figures were one of the earliest forms of moving image to accompany storytelling and song. Today, the words ‘digital’ and ‘string’ are woven into the language of electronic media. This interactive installation evokes the string games of the past as a metaphor for interactive digital games of the present and future.

When both the digital image and the human body can be broken down into individual building blocks, altered and reconstituted, how do we know what is real and not real? And does it matter? Using digital photographic processes as a metaphor for similar issues within genetic engineering, eugenics and cryonics, Stages, Elements, Humans is a powerful and spectacular take on the technological body.

Dream No. 36 is a spectacular projection work which jumps, glides, retakes, derives, borrows and deviates from the history of art and cinema to create a stunning multi-sensory work which strongly evokes the emotions of our most intense dreams.

A temporary media lab ‘Revolting’ in Manchester, UK.

Although having served us for centuries, Portable Architecture is usually considered to be of little importance – this exhibition explains that Portable Architecture is now more relevant than ever. Today in an evolving world, we need a form of architecture that can respond to change in a manner which is sensitive to widely differing social and cultural needs. This exhibition demonstrates the application of Portable Architecture in our present lives and suggests how it may shape our futures.

This is a new interactive touring exhibition from Film and Video Umbrella consisting of a number of specially commissioned short video works by Philip Lai, Jake Tilson, Jane & Louise Wilson and Graham Wood which respond to the notion of the Black Box – the apparatus that acts as the surviving remnant in the event of a crash.

Jake Tilson’s sound-based piece Personal Belongings juxtaposed snatches of everyday sounds with aircraft noise while Phillip Lai’s The Right Combination of Words Can Kill a Man cast a ghostly female figure speaking indecipherable words onto the video screen. Interference is the aesthetic here, the sense of something missing in the media transmission. Jane and Louise Wilson employed footage of fire-damaged interiors in one of their inimitable studies of uncanny space. Graham Wood’s Lament took lines from a Rilke poem about the light emitted from an extinguished star and set the test against a shimmering visual surface while Rory Hamilton installed a ghostlike virus in the touch-screen technology itself.

Pedestrian is a layered work which evokes the special resonance of urban space through the experience of walking, and in an encounter with ordinary objects. Part of a larger project which will include a interactive multimedia CD-ROM, artists book and still images, Pedestrian is a meditation on perception and place, and on the capacity of ordinary objects to trigger altered states of memory and reverie. Taking the form of a series of episodic elements which examine particular intersections of place, time and substance, Pedestrian employs the mundane to reveal the magical.

This Web-based work uses the interplay of text along with image, sound, and video to explore architectural form, mass culture iconography and oddities of human interaction as occasions for surprise and revelation. Pedestrian uses the metaphor of walking, as a means of navigating memory and consciousness. A walk through the City becomes the trigger for a rambling meditation on space, time and human interaction, seen through chance encounters with evocative objects. The narrative of Pedestrian Is composed of several discrete regions, each region providing a distinct visual and textual experience. From a hommage to the noir city films of the 50’s, to a ballet of everyday objects, or to an examination of store windows as shrines, Pedestrian provides an opportunity to explore the hidden meanings of the everyday.

The Persistent Data Confidante is an on-line public service allowing for the anonymous transfer of secrets/confessions. Once participating parties tell the “confidante” their secret, they receive a confession from another anonymous user with similar interests. The secrets are then rated by the participants. Each secret’s”popularity” or intrigue will increase its probability of re-telling the future — thus the best secrets will “live on” while the more banal will “die-off”. The main points of reference for the work are:

1. Present-day, confessional,TV talk show culture;
2. Current US internet censorship policies, and
3. Artificial Life.

ad 1. Like a confessional talk show, The Persistent Data Confidante uses pop imagery and dramatic rhetoric to incite participation and fascination with charged “moral” issues.

ad 2. The work plays with recent US censorship policies noting that for www art galleries, a curated site places the responsibility to censor upon the site developer, whereas in an uncurated site the onus of responsibility rests on the contributor. In this strictly user-curated site, it places the judgment of “good taste” on anonymous users who’s approval ratings connote consent. Conversely, secrets of a dull or banal nature are presumably the most offensive to this community of internet users, and will probably be democratically eradicated.

ad 3. As secrets are retold (age), they become capable of producing sexual offspring. Each day, secrets that are mature (have lived for 100 re-tellings), and also popular (according to viewer ratings), will seek a compatible mate (one with similar content). These two secrets produce a new offspring which is composed of major clauses from these two parents. Newborn secrets are then forced to compete for user approval in the rigorous environment of the database if they are to live on to produce their own offspring.

This Mite component is of course referencing the manner in which secrets evolve in our verbal world—getting confused with others, and mutating uncontrollably as they are re-told. Our use of such a system is attempting to establish a parallel, verbal sociology of the net. The work is rather straight-forward for the individual participant, yet we hope to “set the stage” for a very complex, richly interactive social phenomena. Will users come to the site to live vicariously through the secrets of others; as exhibitionists to achieve pleasure in their anonymous confessions; or for reasons in-between these two poles? Which secrets will live to breed, and which will not be able to survive in the truly rigorous environment of the internet? What are the actual desires of principal internet users, when authorship and curatorial decisions are confidential and democratic.

This site consists of a series of java applets that use realtime high quality morphing techniques and statistical analysis to explore ideas relating to the body and identity. Historically different scientific belief systems have often been used as vehicles for the projection of other more dubious ideologies. Contemporary fields of research, for example the Human Genome Project seem just as prone to such tendencies. These pieces have developed from Elective Physiognomies, first shown at ISEA95. Elastic Masculinities is an exploration into the subjective experience of owning a body. In a culture obsessed with both self-observation and the observation of self by others, it seems most of us have a distorted body image. Bodies changes shape according to their state of mind and the cultural messages they’ve been digesting. Adjust the dimensions of the artist’s body, parameters include the size of chest, stomach, and penis. Classify the body according to heroic/cowardly, awkward/graceful etc… Compare your response with the statistical average.

“What do you think, do you like men with muscles? Is the new pressure on men’s appearance a balancing out of an old inequality between men and women or is it a similarly evil influence that must be stopped?”   _The Muscle Tussel New Weekly, 1996.

Survival of the Fittest uses a genetic algorithm. The user is able to evolve the artist’s face by clicking on a succession of faces. Each selected face becomes the parent for a new generation of facial variations. Over time different traits can be exaggerated or diminished according to the user’s choices. Ideas such as evolution have been misinterpreted in order to rationalize such pseudo-sciences as eugenics. These ideas of perfectibility are intrinsically linked to offensive notions of racial, moral and intellectual superiority

Where’s Your Pocket Protector? is a combined hardspace and virtual repository for collective digital identities proposed for ISEA97 to officially open at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and on the WWW on September 22-27, 1997. Participants will copy and save to their computer hard disks the template graphic from this web site and submit their finished entries as attachments via e-mail. I read recently on a listserv the opinion that art is always virtual, communicative, and interactive. Nowadays, it’s easy to be “geek”. As telecommunicators we have transformed our language and perception in order to be fluent in “computerese”. I proposed this project for ISEA97, partly because it will take place at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The School’s reputation is substantial as an academy for artists. As the site of my earliest art training, it is where I first learned to spill my proverbial artist’s “guts”. As a humanist, I wore my “heart on my sleeve;” as a visual communicator, I now wear it in my breast pocket. To obsess afterall, is to fetishize—arcane prophylactic or “temporary autonomous zone”.

Icons and symbols are used to convey messages belonging to the three times. Metaphors and Metonymies to engage… Is web publishing multimedia, or desktop publishing? Can we deliver an experience? The Past, the Present & The Future is a possible template of what can be done…

The Cup is an on-going web journal that explores my perception of women portrayed through our cultural history, literature, art, family custom and mass media. The image of the”cup” refers to its ancient symbolic origin as a representation of the female. In this project it appears as the familiar contemporary icon, the generic coffee cup. The content of this work is framed by personal experience in the form of anecdotes, stories, observations, letters, queries, common knowledge, and matter-of-fact statements. My intention is to form a media collage of found and manufactured material, everything from old sewing patterns and auto mechanics diagrams to performance art pieces. My work is an on-going study of women that is expressed through personal experience, observation, intuition, and invention — a sharing of common experience. The site is divided into seven sections (in various stages of development):

1. Garden Journal: The Fall from Grace (Eden): Horticulture and the concepts of nurturing and harvest… having babies… getting ideas… building a house;
2. Woman’s Journal: Written messages about women through the ages;
3. Calendar Girls: Preservation of body and canning food… “beauty”… resurrection and the plastic arts;
4. The Mind Wanders: Photo essays about travel;
5. Montana Color Theory: A theory of color mixing described through association with common household objects;
6. Dream Journal: Photo/sound pieces of an eclectic and often surreal nature;
7. Getting Jobs: Mother sister lover whore wife caretaker butcher baker cabinet-maker…

ArtAIDS is an artists’ Internet project that celebrates and commemorate the fight against AIDS Launched in November 1994, ArtAIDS aims to make a critical and creative contribution into the web. More directly, it tries to provide an opportunity for artists to include their work on a website with a specific content and context. ArtAIDS commissions new work from artists, exhibits work submitted via the net, and if possible gives technical assistance to artists whose health is impaired. This is not a health information project or a campaigning site. ArtAIDS tries to balance the role of a public access project with that of a commissioning arts agency. It raises funds to facilitate new work by artists, and often works in collaboration with other organizations to maximize opportunities and publicity. 1996 projects included a screen saver animation with artists group General Idea, in collaboration with adaweb and MOMA, NYC, and a 24 hour webcam and text project recorded on World AIDS Day 1996. ArtAIDS began as a ‘Day Without Art’ project in response to the lack of creative material that addressed AIDS as an issue on the web. Initially it took the form of a gallery of work by invited artists but with the clear intention of becoming an open submission project that invited any interested users to upload relevant artwork. It used the viral metaphor: its theme and structure emphasized the constant mutation and adaptation of artworks – a metaphoric subversion of the HIV virus. Underlying ArtAIDS is the theme that collaborative involvement has become an essential means for dealing with the social effects of AIDS. It aims to present a model of the way that networking can be creatively challenge the cultural and political isolation. This principle has continued through the evolution of the site to encompass more complex single artworks: on line poetry, performance events, director movies and animation’s. ArtAIDS works as an independent project led by an artists collective. Many of the contributions have been commissioned with the financial support of the Arts Council of England. A CD-ROM of the project will be released in Sept. 1997.

Welcome Back to the Empire is an Alternate History Internet project basing it self on the life of Alexander the Great moving forward in history through invented or real events. The combining of the three below noted platforms will assist us in the intention.

1. Platform 1: Alexander Ill of Macedonia had not died on June 13,323 BC in Babylon after his return from India but recovered from malaria and consolidated his forces. The Empire did not fall apart. He lived on, firmly ruling and expanding the empire. He undertook a successful expedition in Arabia as planned and conducted a serious reorganization of the Empire. The monetary policy was based on a uniform currency system. These will be the starting parallels of the project. The first platform is concepted on receiving of alternate history stories about the subject through the Internet, which will serve as a basis for the entire project. The participants should concentrate on essential questions. for instance: How will the existence of a strong universal state spreading over 3 continents with the utmost diverse cultures affect the lives of the people? How will the cultures interact one with another? Will this politically and otherwise strengthened cultural system known widely as Hellenism move to a higher merging of cultures. What will this mean on the economical, sociological, religious, educational and all of the other platforms you can imagine? How will the empire develop? What will the educational system be like? How will Alexander’s teacher Aristotle influence the Empire? Monotheism? Christianity, Islam? Will they be possible in the given parameters? If yes, how will they affect the Empire? If not, what will? Is the empire flexible enough to adjust to new beliefs?
2. Platform 2: The second part of the project is an archive concentrating on collecting images, sounds, various audio and video data from the region. It represents a virtual Museum of the Empire. People from the region or wider are invited to submit photographs, audio or video materials, via Internet. The sounds of this permanent collection could be of ethno or another origin, although they have to correspond to the cultural boundaries of the Empire. Should the conscience for the Empire expand, we will also do that with the geographical regions where the sounds and images are collected from.
3. Platform 3: Alternative Artists from Macedonia will visit the main knots in the Empire, passing thus from Europe to Asia. The knots are signified by the main battles fought by Alexander: Issus, Tyre, Gaza, Gaugamela—Arbela, Susa, Persepolis. The artists will cover the topography with audio&video footage investigating the historical conscience of the local population by investigate how the local communities perceive the past. Welcome Back to the Empire is a paradigm for the concept of alternative history and its impact on culture and civilization in general. The project focuses on urging a structural change of interest towards the gray zones of conscience. This alternative history project aims towards elevating the level of perceiving the strange and shifts the accent to a more elaborated form of abstraction. This should result with a new aesthetic organization of narration leading towards a true virtual space. In the ideal expansion of the project Alternative historians, graphic designers, and scientists would meet for the first time with the goal of influencing and creating virtual environments. Bridging the gap between the alternative history and technology is one of the goals of this project. The key question with which I am dealing is how to create a highly realistic simulation, to increase the pace of exchange of information, and retain the interest for these kinds of projects, in spite of their complexity. I perceive this project as a meeting spot of artists, writers and technicians.

In the context of the multimedia development and on-going digital space fractalization there is a question of the new media content, which captures us in a sort of synergetic state of semiotic alertness and unreadiness. Is the internet just a repository of infinite perceptual recombinations bound to be just another extension of the advertisement market, or is it a self-sufficient content generating zone, where concepts are shaped in-between the user’s mentality and the project of its symmetrical simulation embodied in the machine? Redetification is an attempt to reconstitute a classical Greek philosophical situation of meaning derivation by means of a dialogue in a manipulated context. On the basis of the Nettropics virtual world network and Basicray Spatialities Virtual Tools users will hold in-session dialogues with nettropic dwellers using human and virtual reality language as concept shaping tools. This project is fully interactive and uses customized shared world interface and VRML files of prebuilt synthetic conceptual terrains as a basis for mediasophical dialogues. Repositioning content generating activity in the synthetic space predetermines two basic architectural features of multiuser worlds: perceptual transgression and abstract validity. Within the context of content formatting activity a user’s ability to reconstruct an imaginary space on the basis of misleading perceptual markers and overloading patterns equals an ability to produce a philosophical statement in a discursive environment. In order to provide synthetic morphema’s for this bioelectronic statement the planes of shared virtual worlds are rendered with abstract simmulatory objects and scenes. Nettropic mailing list links the members of Reidetification network, and supports spurious memory exchange and traffic as a fundamental activity of a neural network involved in content production. Use the following address to join the content formatting network and participate.

The separation of media and various dimensions is well understood by those who engage in the creation of visual art using a computer. The hierarchical evolution from 2D to 3D to time-based art defines complex relationships with inherent boundaries and limitations. For the artist, the challenges are numerous as the structure of digital technology reinforces the separation of media. Computer simulation of traditional art media such as paint has taken form as 2D bitmapped work, whereas 3D computer imagery follows a tradition of architectural renderings and sculpture. Time-based work derives its heritage from performance, film, and animation. With such diverse inheritances, the merging of media and technological approaches to the creation of computer art presents challenges. Interactive multimedia has been praised as the medium in which multiple forms of expression come together to create a new form of communication. Yet, most WWW pages are static, devoid of 3 dimensional data, nor time-based, expressive work. An occasional animated gif often adds glitter to the page but does not often enhance the content. Sites that include VRML often do so as separate worlds that you enter via a window or application after leaving the 2D world of Web graphics. Sites that include Quicktime, MPEG, Shockwave, Java, QTVR, or other technologies that enable time-base expression often work with isolated content. The strength of the interactive multimedia movement on the Internet has not been its success in merging media but instead in its enabling of experiential interaction. Virtual communities are formed, and shared experiences emerge via global exchange of visual and text-based expression. Cultural and social boundaries disappear as individuals articulate meaning via interchange and collaboration. Structured events that harbor concepts of free exchange of visual expression, whether it be 2D, 3D or time-based, provide anchors that secure meaningful experiences. As Worlds Collide is a WWW based international collaborative art project that integrates the principles of 2D, 3D and time-based expressive worlds. Participants from across the globe are invited to collaborate in constructing images, 3D worlds, and time-based work that transcends the boundaries of any one medium. Interaction with the environment provides not only the ability to contribute but also the unfolding of shared creative vision. Influence and inspiration coupled with individual visual style and conceptual realization provide building blocks for the manifestation of collective creative outcomes. After the series of events that allow creative contributions, As Worlds Collide will stand as a monument to the universal idea of collaboration and shared creative expression. The realization of the project enables exploration of ideas and compositional strategies that differ from independent artistic outcomes. As we isolate ourselves from others in the confines of the digital technology-based habitat we have created, collaborative WWW art sites provide an outlet for those who recognize the importance of sharing visual ideas and experiences. As Worlds Collide attempts to satisfy this need while disintegrating the separation of media.

Simulating mental breakdown with an interface that dissolves and reassembles, The Roar of Destiny. . . combines “flooding” of memory flashbacks with a heightened awareness of background noises and an inappropriate intertwining of significant and insignificant life details. The primary structural device is a dissolving and reassembling interface that was derived from my experiences of mental breakdown caused by post traumatic stress syndrome. It is a “frozen interface” composed of relevant words that sometimes runs rigidly, under control down the sides and across the bottom of the primary text and sometimes fragments or is merged with the primary text. Three primary strains run through the work—a series of flashbacks to the home of a modernist sculptor somewhere in Arizona; the cabin on the south side of the Colorado males that is the narrator’s home at the time of the telling of the story; and a series of jumbled disordered flashbacks to nonlucid periods that at intervals seize the narrator’s mind. These flashbacks are characterized by a black”background’; by schizophrenic language breakdown, and by an appropriately hypertextual paranoia. Integrating visual components, The Roar of Destiny. . . represents these strains (that diverge, combine, diverge) using a combination of color and screen design shifts. The reader, like the narrator, is involved in a continual interior struggle between “normal” and “abnormal” thoughts, between the “real” and the “virtual between the murky, stark black backgrounded paths and the bluegreen backgrounded paths beside clear mountain streams. Begun in December, 1995 this work (like the narrator’s distorted memories) is in flux. In the past year, new screens have slowly been added and, with every addition, the links on other screens have changed so that a reader returning to the work may find the paths by which he or she previously navigated the work to have disappeared, been diverted and/or augmented.

Flame War is an interactive, collaboratively created website that (postulating that we are on the frontiers of a more mind-based way of existence) highlights the Primitive nature of the current state of the Internet where sometimes it seems that the object is to take as much territory as possible and to behave as rudely as possible in the process. As Americans moved west in the 19th century, the behavior of humans to each other was seldom mitigated by the veneer of polite society. The barroom brawl, the shootout, the holdup, the hanging, the massacre, the hunt, the constant struggle for existence, the taking of territory, were commonplace in this place and time. In this comparable new Internet territory in the late 20th century, we do not always behave as we would in our homes or in “meat time” work places. In this continually evolving, mind-driven virtual world, we compete with colleagues for virtual territory — often revealing raw animal instincts as we exchange insulting or sexually explicit phrases that would never pass our lips at a real workplace, conference, or social gathering. Flame Wars consists of a series of targets that range from Bill Gates to a “bozo of your choice;” a battleground that displays submitted flames; and a scoreboard. Flaming a target adds to the target’s territory. However, adding your name to the list of flame-throwers increases *our* collective, collaboratively produced territory. As of mid July, because many users flamed Bill Gates but did not identify themselves, Bill Gates holds the most territory.

Creation of Change was a collaboration graduation project among students from three faculties:fashion design, interaction design and graphic design. It involves developing a digital trend book on cd-rom that aims at informing and inspiring designers from various disciplines. The idea originates from our interest in the mutations of the society, which underlie the future evolution of design. We consider a design-dictation expiring in the future and hope that the ‘audience’ will be more involved in a design process. Information transfer from the designer to the consumer will become information exchange. Trend forecasting was until now presented as a linear story, what allowed the dictation of few people over the changes in design. Non-linear, interactive storytelling should make forecasting more ‘democratic’: The forecasters are not dictators any more, but more something like ‘foretellers’ in the middle-ages: they bring bits and pieces of news important for a particular location of the (global) village, entertaining the people with their intriguing atmospheres, but it’s up to the people themselves make their own associations and connections to their own situation. Creators of future stories are therefore not only the people gathering information and visualizing it, but also the people from audience themselves. The notion of author and receiver is beginning to blur. The language that forecasters-storytellers could use is a hybrid between visual, scientific, symbolic and ‘common’ (oral) language. The only media that allow the dynamics of this integrated language are new-digital media. Not only because they converge different disciplines, but because the essence of these media is constant change and dynamics, likewise the essence of the main topic of forecasting stories—the future. Within the narrative environment of Creation of Change the participant switches between the stories, following own interests and intuition, creating their own yarn about the future. The “switching” between the items and story-lines should be tactile and natural. Therefore we developed a”sensitive” interface, where the user has to draw and push the icons (symbols for linked items). The prototype shows the complex system of integrating different media into a structure of S stories, visualized in sometimes interactive animations with relevant text in between. The interaction within the animations should provide a stronger feeling about the content (for example, one of the items deals with the chaos within today’s cities, a chaotic way of interaction will let the user ‘feel’ frustrated by this chaos). When a story is created in and for an interactive medium, the roles of influence change: instead of the stories becoming a part of our lives and swaying our experience, we are the ones who enter in the world of stories and our actions are influencing the story’s environment. At least, theoretically. Up to now, the language used to tell an interactive story was not ‘elastic’ enough to allow a simultaneous influence of the user and his/her immersion in the story. Can this be changed?

Jumla is a web document where I link photographs which I took in Jumla, an area of Western Nepal where I was working with development issues, with textual commentary. It has four paths that you can follow to come to a circular end. I have taken my photographs and altered them digitally, then critiqued and commented on ideas of photography, technology, development and power through them.

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Moscow in Sept. 1990 was a city on the edge of historic change; hovering somewhere between perostroika and collapse, between reform and disintegration. Manzeh Squat is the recording of a mas, pro-democracy demonstration held in the gigantic traffic plaza just outside the Kremlin walls. It is a kind of audio advent calendar of the last days of the Soviet Union. Manzeh Square is a 3-D photo-composite made from Hi-8mm video stills that scrolls in a 360° Quicktime VR panorama, controlled by the viewer. As the image revolves, a general audio ambiance track of crowd and broadcast speeches plays. Of special interest is that one can select particular individual faces within the crowd, and by clicking the cursor, activate the ‘interior monologue’ of the person (voice-over in Russian with English subtitles). The site also allows the viewers to write their own thoughts into a read-only archive. This is the premiere of this work in this form. The original images come from a videotape, MOSCOWX, which first was shown as a video diary of Moscow 1990 as a video selection in the New York Film Festival.

The shape of a city at a single moment is a freeze-frame, a snapshot, of that city’s spatial language, in the same way that a dictionary is a snapshot of a verbal language. The language itself is in constant transformation; the language that exists at this moment contains within itself the ruins of every previous moment, the archaic usages, the forgotten expressions that have lost all meaning except as a faint twinge in the minds of those who live in that place and remember that phrase — or, in a city, that building, that alley, that shape of the skyline, from their childhood. Shift City is a project! Mended to create a city native to the Internet, an environment not just navigable but inhabitable as a cultural context. Thus far, cyberspace, as represented in the public consciousness by the Internet, has functioned largely as a medium for the dissemination of information; the illusion is presented of a single, self-contained endless’field of information, representation and analysis. No longer does the photograph of a building, for instance, exist in isolation as an object of contemplation; it becomes a single object lost in a sea of images, interwoven with words sometimes indistinguishable from the images themselves. Out of the myriad fragments of information arises a new context, with its own inherent meaning. The “space” of cyberspace is filled. Space acquires meaning not by assuming the illusions of depth or navigability, but through its ability to contain narrative. Shift City borrows the notion of motif from folklore as an object, place or person that implies a narrative from which it is part. The implementation of motifs, placed in relation to each other, arising from the context of the artist but not merely expressive of it, allows the audience to arrange their own meaning out of the perception of various pieces whose relation is specific but implicit. The Shift City Website consists of a series of maps, each transparent, layered onto each other, so that the total juxtaposition of layers add up to a representation of both the physical and cultural contexts of a city. Each map has a different character (“traffic”, “hydrants”, “history”), and is made up of links to individual projects representing in words and images a physical or narrative motif taken from the experiences of the artists in New York and Dublin. One project, for instance, explores a single room; an element in the “skyline” map meditates on the nature of television antennas. Internet installations like Shift City exist in both space and time; virtual architecture gains an implicit narrative through the audience’s sequential experience of the space, and hypertext narrative acquires a space in which to unfold. In this way the new electric arts form a new environment that celebrates, in Marcos Novak’s words,”a liberating and confident openness to discontinuity”. The maps of Shift City, seen at any one moment, are a snapshot of an ongoing building process; Shift City could continue to grow and transform on the Internet forever.

Once upon a moment is a project evolved from various experiments in the field of interactive film, photography and story telling. It is conceived as a convergence between traditional disciplines and new media, that should grant a surplus value of interactivity to the final outcome of the project: interactive film. Before linear film was developed, the base of early cinema were loops. As we are standing at the beginnings of interactive cinema, and facing the same problems of storage (and output) capacity as the early media, loops are re-entering the stage, again. They are build of a respectively small amount of data, but can contain a complex narrative. A loop is theoretically never-ending, what allows constant dynamics in the output: the duration of the film is very flexible, it can last as long as a linear film would last (if the viewer chooses his next step by seeing the loop only one time), it can be extended until a day, or compressed until exclusively choice-moments… in each case, the image will keep moving. The ‘next’ frame, during the viewing, isn’t defined by the director, as in traditional film. Viewer can benefit from the repetitive nature of a loop to learn more about an event, for during repetition of the same 5 seconds-piece, he can ‘see’ and remember a larger amount of information than during 5 seconds of a linear film. With Once Upon a Moment, we aim at avoiding ‘choice-moments’, where the movement of the image stops and the viewer is asked to make a decision about the development of the story. By integrating photographical and filmic-elements in the context of interaction, we try not to ‘tear the viewer loose’ from the fabula, but allow him to navigate transparently through the events. Filmic choice-moments are made possible by the usage of loops and Photographic-Interactive-Parallel-Sequence (PIPS), an example of interactive  photography, where the sequences don’t evolve in time but in space, allowing the viewer to steer through the moment. Content of Once Upon a Moment is a short science-fiction story created for a loop-based film. It emerged from the study of usage of  rhythm and repetition in formulaic narratives. The story has a linear structure build of various episodes, whose ‘organization’ in time isn’t strictly fixed. Narrative ‘mystery’ is here shifted into a ‘collage’ of patterns, allowing the existence of ‘association’ space. The usual plot-development from introduction through conflict to solution is in the story shifted into a more ‘life-like’ experience, built of routinized cycles with a few tense moments of action in between, moments where many narratives converge and one is forced to make, often unconsciously, a decision and steer the future of the story. The viewer should learn to interact with the narrative as if it were a physical body: it can follow or fight his decisions, seduce him to follow a path, or keep mourning the same sentence until he decides to take an action.

During the last two years I have been engaged on a journey into the unknown: Searching for art on the net, trying to see it all, attempting to understand the possibilities and potential. An art site is now very different from the electronic catalogues prevalent several years ago. I have been realizing this journey both has a spectator and a creator. While traditional artists are also consumers of art, net based art allows for a dynamic interaction that totally changes the balance between artist and viewer. Questions raises questions concerning art on the net. The roles of the artist and audience are interlaced. The questions could be raised by the artist or the audience. The answers are in the medium itself. The questions are obvious, the answers can become perceptible traveling in the site. Different paths, different viewers, different moods offer altered answers. The site is organized in a straightforward manner, but navigation options can be manipulative, side-tracking the viewer from the main road, creating different contexts offering different interpretations. The experience of the journey is the experience of the site. I wish to convey the feeling of the speed of change. Speed and WWW are at this time a contradiction of terms. Probably the most common characteristic of art on the net is the time it takes to view this art. In many ways this is a sketch, a skeleton of a site that one day when bandwidth allows will be executed in the way it was meant to be. For now I hope that the viewer will be engaged in the journey, completing missing images in his imagination, engaged in the experience, thus becoming a collaborator in the creation of the site.

GEL#1 is a virtual arts festival. Artists, organizations, and collectives around Australia will be invited to put forward proposals for web-based work/events that involve the use of a CUseeme camera. 15 successful applicants will be supplied with a camera and a window of two to three months, during which they can experiment and create their work. An Artistic Director/Cyberturg will be appointed to provide content focus and curate these pieces into one cohesive website to deliver a week long program of events to coincide with ISEA97. Contemporary artspaces around Australia will be approached to showcase GELS#1  during the same week.
This project is supported by Contact, a youth culture company that has a proven record in the delivery of projects that ensure access to equipment and skills for young artists. Contact is supported in this project by the Brisbane City Council (local government) through its local festivals grants program. Virtual Artists (Adelaide Cyberfringe) has offered to support the project with webspace, access to a Cuseeme reflector and technical support. Nervous — objects is currently seeking the support of QANTM CMC (Queensland and Northern Territory Multimedia) a Brisbane based co-operative multimedia centre (federal government initiative) and contemporary art spaces around Australia.

Paris-based Radio TNC, produced by TNC Network, was launched in September 1995 as the Net’s first offbeat cyber radio. Since February 1996, a truly international and high profile crew of guest hosts has taken turns at TNC’s legendary on-line microphone. For a long time, Radio TNC was one of the very few platforms on which radio – with its techno-aesthetic possibilities, its historically relative nature, its material constraints and limitations — was linked up to the Internet in a consistent fashion and in all conceivable combinations. Radio TNC integrated several European public broadcasting stations into network events and introduced them to the concepts of network-linked production processes. The latest project to come out of TNC networking is the Clone Party, a refinement of and an expansion upon the production pattern developed in the Crash Party. The setting of the Clone Party proceeds from a cognitive model which, during the course of its design for the purpose of exploration of (genetic engineering) possibilities, generates its own form of practice: Ian Wilmuts epoch-making success with Dolly… When partygoers around the world squeeze into their blue-genes and link up in a global cyber party between the laughter and the tears to dance the Body Sampling Step in celebration of the upcoming cloning of human beings, the interpenetrating of fiction and reality will have already brewed up such a high-proof cocktail that we random-generated beings will have our heads spinning long before the hangover sets in… Between February 1996 and June 1997, Radio INC web cast the interactive cyber fiction The Great Web Crash, that culminated into the Crash Party, a global network-radio event between Osaka, San Francisco, New York, Paris, Berlin,Vienna, Linz and Amsterdam. The setting for the Crash Party was a mix of carefully measured dosages of cybercliches and techno-catastrophism. The storyline of the Great Web Crash and its victims disappearing into virtual oblivion had tremendous appeal both to an 11-year-old nerd as well as to a media activist of a more mature age, triggered inputs and turned the Crash Party into an immersive-participatory network event.

“Spraying the walls” through a real-time-interaction push-media application located on the WWW. Invited participants (and anybody with access to the password) can contribute to the show with text and image via the Internet and thus actively work with the environment from anywhere in the world. Slogans, images and other visual signals are transmitted and will be beamed into the exhibition space. The basic display unit for a “remote viewing” installation consists of a PC with sound card with a direct connection to the Internet. Using a web browser connected to one or more data beamers project the self refreshing screen/image. Remote Viewing uses a 24 hour RealAudio Channel.

“Whatever we do, we are communicating and interacting all the time; rapport is a tool that gives instant access to other minds”     —EI Iblis Shah, The Book of Half-Truth

One CIA mind control project in the 50s, aimed at finding ways to protect the security of agents in the field, was project BLUEBIRD. It attempted to discover means of conditioning personnel to prevent unauthorized extraction of information. During the project, another goal was established-the evaluation of the offensive uses of unconventional interrogation methods, including the use of hypnosis and sophisticated combination of drugs. Later renamed Project ARTICHOKE, the objective was the creation of a “Manchurian” killer marionette with an electronically blanked memory, while MKDRACO was developing brain telemetry and intra-cerebral control devices, implanting micro-receivers in the frontal or temporal lobes. Various other projects like STARGATE investigated possibilities of using telepathic control or remote viewing, for military purposes. Other initiatives: Senso-Linguistic Infiltration Programs (SLIP), Telepresent Contagious Postures (TCP), Propaganda Propulsion Project (PPP), Mac Believe, Cybercratic Conspiracy Command Control Intelligence (C4I), Intelligent Pandemonium (IP), Infobody Biofeedback Modulation (IBM), Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS), Meme Slaves (MS), and Leviathan Supersystems.

There has been a recent proliferation of video cameras on the World Wide Web. These cameras provide documentation, surveillance, and a very specific representation of the camera owners and their surroundings. Ordinary people and places around the world are instantly subject to becoming part of the mass culture – and are potentially also subject to cultural recycling. The Multi-Cultural Recycler, in addition to its tongue-in-cheek attempt at performing cultural recycling on ordinary situations, also examines the meetings and collisions of all of these disembodied representations out in “cyberspace”. When a visitor accesses The Multi-Cultural Recycler, s/he is presented with two options for how to “start” the Recycler:

• Option 1) The Random Recycler: The Recycler selects two or three camera websites from anywhere in the world at random, and captures the live or latest image from their cameras. The Recycler then performs digital image processing on these images to “recycle”them into a new image – a new object of “Web art. Since the actual process used is also selected at random, each access to the Recycler site produces a unique image.

• Option 2) Make Your Own Cultural Compost! If the visitor selects this option, s/he is presented with menus from which s/he can select the source cameras to be recycled. The visitor may also select, in place of a camera, the immediately previous “recycled” image, or one of the recycled images from the Gallery page. Since these previously recycled images were created by other visitors to the site, visitors have the opportunity to perform “cultural recycling” on each other’s work.

Whichever camera selection option the visitor chooses, the live or latest images will be captured from their websites, and processed through one of roughly twenty image processes. These processes vary — some combine the images through the use of mattes; others create collages through repetition and superimposition of the images. All of the processes result in both juxtaposition and merging of the original images, creating a collage which is a document of their relationship as fragments of Web culture, and of their chance meeting in cyberspace. After recycling, visitors may wish to exhibit their finished artwork in the Multi-Cultural Recycler Gallery. The Gallery is comprised of six “recycled” images posted by visitors to the site. In keeping with the idea of cultural recycling as a virtually immediate occurrence in society, the Gallery immediately updates with each posting to display the new image as an object of art. Each image is displayed along with its creator’s name and optional linked URL. Thus, the visitors become, like the web camera subjects, part of the ‘famous’ of the web — and therefore, their work becomes fair game for future visitors-cultural recycling. Visitors can also look in The Recycling Bin to see the source images that comprised their “recycled” image. From The Recycling Bin they can link to the images’ original websites to learn their actual context.

This is a part of a project called Invisible Objects that is now going on. This project is that by challenging myself, I try to create real sound, push the use of technology and content in a live situation to the limit and make interactive music with sound, sound resource and software. The most important thing is that all of the music is improvised and played in a solo format. All composition, Performance, Sound Restructure by Otani.

Instruments: Computer Macintosh PowerBook 540C
Software: IRCAM MAX for Macintosh
Patches for improvisation made with MAX by myself
Realtime play&sampling software developed on C++.
Sampler: Ensoniq ASR-10

When originally designed, MAX Patches was created for improvisation. It was for SOLO Play. It is now developing so that it will be used for Duet and with orchestra. Realtime play &sampling software can communicate Ensoniq sampler via SCSI. This uses sound resource on Macintosh. Access is simple and fast. It plays with a Macintosh keyboard. Each sound resource can set loop, reverse, pitch bend, and modulation.

This work, composed quadrophonically for the Bunker 91 festival in Antwerp, Belgium, illustrates the theme Eros & Thanatos with mainly two types of sound materials:

—Spinning sounds of water are treated first by filtering and it transports one into its vortex. Then, trough the analysis of their energy and frequency content, the microscopic and chaotic nature of flowing water is revealed. This will lead to a polyphony of notes which are distributed on four acoustical chains, symbolic of life where a large amount of external stimuli, often contradictory, will sometimes significantly modify a lifetime. A feedback loop has been added to the analysis system and enables the system to react according to its own history.

—Extracts of poems by Baudelaire have been fragmented, transformed, assembled and projected in the auditory space. The evolution from micro-montage to a full sentence, goes through a succession of words whose assembly adds to perturbing mental images born of a combination of pleasure and pain, love and death.

Obsession won the Audience Prize ex-Aequo at the 1991 International Noroit—Leonce Petitot Competition in Arras, France.

My previous tape piece, Altered Images, was concerned with the dual interpretation of the word “image” on both aesthetic and sonic levels. Onset/Offset is concerned, even more than before, with exploiting the interplay between the original “meaning” of sound objects and their spectro-morphological characteristics. Thus, there are many recognizable sounds in this piece which can, and should, be perceived on both levels—the sound of a key in a lock is on one level refers to the action of unlocking a door, but on another, is also interesting as a pure sound in itself. Onset/Offset was realized in the Electroacoustic Music Studios at Northern College, Aberdeen and at the University of Birmingham in April 1996. It received an Honourable Mention in the Stockholm Electronic Arts Award, 1996.

Winter is the second half of The Two Seasons, which was commissioned by the Charles Linehan Dance Company with funds from the Robin Howard Trust. The complete work consists of two sections, Summer and Winter, each of approx. 14 minutes duration, and a brief transition section. Summer and Winter have identical temporal structures, and share some common and related material. The choreography in each section is identical, only danced by different dancers. The effect is of viewing a single landscape in different seasons and may be likened to the series paintings of Claude Monet. A unique relationship between the music and the dance is established in which the choreography reinforces the structural relationships between the two pieces of music while the music serves to differentiate the two dances. The Two Seasons was first performed at The Place Theatre in November 1995 and has since had numerous performances including Spring Loaded 96,Woking Dance Umbrella 97, Nottingham Playhouse, and a tour of Estonia and Finland. Winter is presented here as a concert work in its own right. It is the first performance in this form.

Jalopuun Takao is text/sound composition using several languages and texts. It is composed using digital sound processing techniques and multitrack recorders. Jalopuun Takao tries to combine the textual content with culturally originated musical context.

Rituellipses (1993-96), movements for ellipses, verticals, curves and transverses, was realized at Musiques & Recherches Studio (Ohain, Belgium). It has received special mention for the Stockholm Electronic Arts Award (1993) and Ars Electronica (1995). The basic source materials are percussion (metal, wood, PVC), voices (adolescent, woman, man), blowing in blowpipes, whistling, and “chapman stick” guitar playing. Even if I dance silently, I can only dance musically. Rituellipses is a music of “sounds in movement”, made by and for dance. The sonic objects, made from fragments of concrete or instrumental musical patterns, are pulled along as if by a centrifugal force. They follow each other in continuous rotational movements which only silence can dissemble. These studies of trajectory combinations are developed in short movements alternately lively, calm, restrained or uninhibited. An equilibrium was achieved when the whole appeared to be multipliable, complete yet open. The memory of two film scenes, by A. Tarkovski and the Taviani brothers, have been with me throughout the creation of this work. They were about the relationships that each of us can have with a tree, an object of archaic worship which, like stone, seems to carry the traces of lost wisdom. It is their impression which feeds the spirit of the piece.

This electro-acoustic piece illustrates certain issues that are part of my compositional research. Primarily this involves the concept of sound-gesture as a means of communication. Recorded sources are transformed by various procedures, developing them above anything one would hear in the natural world. These “supra-natural” sounds can be described as exaggerated sonic sign stimuli, or sound-symbols. They affect an audience through the listener’s own innate knowledge of gestural behavior, eliciting an empathic response.

Based on my description of sounds as symbols, I develop the analogy between music and myth (myth being a language of symbols). In Hidden Courts, myth is used as a structural device. I avoid simplistic programmatic interpretations by deriving the structure from many myths that share the same archetypal pattern, rather than following a particular tale. The concept of an unattainable paradise is the basis of Hidden Courts, an ideal state of which we can only ever have brief glimpses throughout our lives. The climactic point in the piece corresponds to a sudden vision of this eternal beauty. However, to provide a context for this moment, a primarily musical discourse is built up throughout the piece. The title of my piece refers to the Court of Joy in Arthurian legend, an otherworldly realm where only happiness is known.

“If ever you are to come into this cloud and live and work in it, as I suggest, then just as it were above you, between you and God, so you must also put a cloud of forgetting beneath you and all creation.”   —Chapter 5, Cloud of Unknowing (Anon, 16th Century)

This work has arisen from my experiences of Zen meditation in a Roman Catholic context. It is both a prayer and equally a reflection on meditation. It is not, however, a substitute for silence. Cloud of Forgetting has been referred to as a “hyper-meditation”. It was realized at The Electro-acoustic Music Studios at The University of East Anglia, February, 1996. Cloud of Forgetting is dedicated to Thomas Zimmermann.

Invisible Crowds is about personal experiences of space, particularly mental and emotional space. It is expressive of contradictory feelings of wanting solitude, but of also wanting company; of wanting peace, but of being unable to stop for long enough; of wanting the space to concentrate and work, but being besieged by a thousand and one conflicting thoughts and feelings. It moves at different times from repose to restlessness and back again. The sound material is recorded exclusively from metallic objects and the rich associations of bells, alarms and gongs are used to underpin the emotional states expressed in this piece.

Performed by Cathy Kuehn, alto flute, and Gary Schulte, violin.

Time Travel is a music composition for alto flute, violin, digital sampler, and sound effects processors. The alto flute provides the musical material that propels the work, employing a variety of brief motives and sounds that are highly suggestive of a timeless quality.The violin develops the flute’s material, providing a contrast in both sonic quality and style. Sound from the instruments are recorded both prior and during performance onto a digital sampler, and is transformed into multi-dimensional sound environments. The work incorporates a combination of notated and improvised content, blending the consistency of prescribed material with the vibrancy of improvisational and indeter-minate elements. Candy Kuehn performs the alto flute, and the violin is played by Gary Schulte. Craig Harris performs the EDI digital sampler and sound processing.

Performed by Julia Bentley, soprano, Peace, for soprano and tape, presents a succession of sound-images from the ancient to the modern. The primordial white noise and simple hums are followed by chant-like textures, tribal or primitive societal sounds, ringing bells (perhaps church bells), and violent sounds of war. The piece and the performer are eventually destroyed by this “progress” in a series of brutal explosions. A brief return of the simple hums is quickly destroyed again in a rather pessimistic conclusion.

The tape part for Peace was created using a mixture of old and new technologies from tape splicing of recorded sounds, to Moog and Electrocamp analog synthesizers, to computer sequenced Yamaha and Roland digital synthesizers. The voice parts on the tape are based on processed recordings of the voice of Melanie Mitrano, for whom the piece was written. The center of this?Tumult is struggling to find a voice that the violent rhetoric of the tape finally silences.

Concert suite composed from two sound sources: the music commissioned by Radio-Canada for the radio play adapted from The Little Prince by Antoine de St-Exupery (produced by Odile Magnan in 1994), from which one will retrieve the main themes, and the voices of the actors who have participated to the radio play. Le renard et la rose is the third piece of a cycle undertaken in 1991 (…Eclats de voix and Spleen were the first two parts of that cycle) based exclusively on the use of the voice and more particularly on the use of the onomatopoeia, considered as the only case in the human language where the sound describes directly the object, the gesture or the feeling that one wants to communicate, opposed to its abstract representation, the word. The work is divided into five sections which represent as many states of the adult age, associated with different sound parameters: chattering and rhythm; nostalgia and timbre; anger and dynamic; lassitude and space; and finally, serenity and texture. One will find successively the themes of The Little Prince: The King, The Businessman, The Conceited Person, the Rock of Birds, The Desert Well, A Flower, The Rose, The Baobabs, The Lamplighter, The Water Pills Tradesman, The Fox and The Geographer. The piece was awarded the Golden Nica (First Prize) at the Prix ArS Electronica 1996 (Linz, Austria).

Performed by Paul Hoffman, piano

The more time passes, the more I am fascinated with putting together musical ideas that are on the surface seemingly unrelated in order to see how they effect and transform each other, how their interactions generate form building energies. The tensions from their contrasts, the rhythms within each event, how each idea unfolds and develops, the rhythms with which the events succeed or interrupt each other… all these elements form the dynamic of my work. They are ensembles of things that generate a world of complexities, intertwinings, symmetries and asymmetries, turbulence, provocations, moods, much like the multifarious life experiences—both day to day and in the long run. The result is a unique form, a completed blend, rather like a reflection of a series (a collection) of events in life that you perceive as a local whole. A pluralistic universe in the best Jamesian tradition. The relationship between the piano and the computer generated electronic sounds is, on the other hand, rigorously worked out with extreme precision. The pitch structure provides the basis for the cniintic or vice versa a certain kind of sound yields the basis for the intervals and their specific pitches. And they too mutually influence each other. A continuous cooperative “a due”.

The electronic sounds were generated entirely by the composer’s MUSIC30 program for digital sound synthesis running on the Spirit30 accelerator board for PC, by Sonitech Intl (Wellesley, MA.). The title of the work comes from an essay by Michel Serres, which captures rather nicely the sense of the music, the sense of the composition.

“Here is the complement of the model. Given a flow of atoms, by the declination, the first tangent to the given curve, and afterward by the vortex, a relatively stable thing is constituted. It stays in disequilibrium, ready to break, then to die and disappear but nonetheless resistant by its established conjunctions, between the torrential flow from the upstream currents and the river flowing downstream to the sea. It is a stationary turbulence.”   —Michel Serres, on Lucretius

First Tangent to the Given Curve has been recorded by Daniele Roi on a Capstone CD.

In the early 70’s, I built a 30-string zither. It has been reborn in fitting mid nineties fashion: joined to my computer and triggering Max “patches” or programs which control various signal processors and synthesizers as I play. There is a strong visual component to this work – reflected in various objects used to play the zither.

Joan is Back. . . is an interactive composition for computer, processed sounds and synthesizers. The work was realized at the Computer Music Conference in Brazil in1996, at CNMAT (U.C. Berkeley Center for New Music and Audio Technologies) and Ms. Matheus’ private studio. It explores timbral space, visual space and gesture using the Lightning II alternative MIDI controller designed by Don Buchla. The structure consists of multiple layers: A through-composed stratum and a collection of themes whose ultimate order is determined in real time by the performers’ gestures in space with the Lightning wands. The score is written in the MAX programming language for Macintosh.

Performed by Jeffrey Krieger on e-cello. In The Myth of Acceptance (1991), using extensive sampling techniques, I attempt to create an expressive sound world through the juxtaposition of domestic, urban, animal, and human as well as more traditional musical sounds. For me, images of everyday objects and everyday sounds possess a certain mythology when they are combined and juxtaposed in surprising ways. They release a powerful impression of contemporary thought. My hope is to make sense of our aural environment through this fusion/fission of sound.

The Myth of Acceptance started as a work that made a comparison between the mindless virtuosity that sometimes occurs in both classical and popular musics to athletic events. These sounds are combined throughout the beginning of the piece, but gradually change into sounds that to me reflect the nature of why we work and struggle and the myth of acceptance we hope to achieve.

The work is written for electronic cello, with pitch transposer and a pre-recorded tape consisting of sampled sounds. The Myth of Acceptance was written for Jeffrey Krieger and commissioned by a grant from the Jerome Foundation administered by the Minnesota Composers Forum.

I composed Tierra Y Sol in 1996 with the sonorities of musical traditional instruments typical from the Andes mountains on my mind. the blend of pitch and noise in their spectrums, the articulations, the intonations, the way the musical phrases are played by peoples (non-professional musicians) from the country or the streets of some cities of South America, attract me to compose this piece.

All sonic materials were derived from ancient Andes wood-wind instruments like quenas and mohocenos; cross-culture musical instruments like charangos, and even the classical guitar (introduced to America during the Spanish colonization); and from the voice of a folk singer, still living in the mountains.

With Tierra Y Sol I am trying to reflect not only the sonorities from the Andes mountains, but also the pace, the mood, the different way of changes, the hopes 9or non hopes), the times of the people’s vital cycle living high on the mountains of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, north of Chile and Argentina. This piece is for me a kind of connection past-present-future, or primitivism-hyper technology, or south-north or simpel-complex … and maybe also a self-examination of my (our) culture style/rhythm/focus on life.

For electronic wind instrument, interactive computer and synthesizers.

During his lifetime, Galileo’s theories about the earth as a celestial body revolving around the sun put into question many of the doctrines supported at the time by the Catholic church. One such doctrine placed man as a divine creature living on an earth residing at the center or the universe. The suggestion that the earth might actually be one of many celestial bodies circling the sun put into question some of the “literal” explanations held by the church and, therefore resulted in the scientist taking severe admonitions from the papal powers. The mathematician’s struggle to stand firm in his beliefs lasted the whole of his life until he, under great duress, recanted the theories and promised to deny their validity in published works. Using the life of Galileo as a point of inspiration, this work examines the nature of exploration and discovery as an exciting, often dangerous, enterprise. In this piece, the performer plays a written score, the computer follows along, makes musical decisions, and performs its own accompaniment using algorithms in real time. Galileo was composed while the composer worked at Glasgow University (Scotland) on an honorary research fellowship in 1996.

Performed by Todd Welbourne, piano.

Divided We Speak is an interactive media laboratory for Miroslaw Rogala’s Divided We Stand (An Audience Interactive Media Symphony in Six Movements) featuring (Art)n Laboratory PHSColograms/Virtual Photography with interactive sounds. This work is being presented at the MCA Video Gallery Presentation from August 30 through November 9, 1997, and at the MCA Electronic Gallery from September 16 through November 9, 1997. An artist’s gallery talk featuring Miroslaw Rogala with (Art)n, Alan Cruz, Steve Boyer and Mac Rutan will be presented Saturday, September 27.

I first developed the Light Dance art form in 1987 as a graduate student at the M.I.T Center for Advanced Visual Studies. I was a painter and a former N.C.A.A. national champion gymnast, and I wanted to extend my experience of movement from the confines of my body into the public space. I built a projector that cast a sheet of light from my back to the boundaries of the room, a light-line circumscription that defined space through the swinging and pirouetting rhythms of my body on the parallel bars. A series of tools and performances followed: multiple planes of light directed by my arms and legs; a stick figure of light composed of line projections from each section of my limbs; circles of light that expand and contract with the changing position of my body in space; then costumes of mirror, diffraction grating and other optical materials that respond to light beams from distant sources. All the various “Light Dances” are silent, space-defining performances where I articulate light phenomena with my body. As a fellow at the Academy for Media Arts, Cologne, since February 1997, I’ve expanded the art with a series of two meter cubic spaces for Light Dance. Body-mounted projectors inside cast light through walls of optics into the outer, populated room; the body is transformed into holographic objects, moire’ patterns, or planar and cubic light forms that move in a simulated 3D space imaged on the boundaries of the outer space. The next phase of the project at the?Academy of Media Arts will focus on the development of light instruments and costumes as interface tools for optical motion tracking systems and performance with the resulting computer generated extensions of my body, video projected into the space.

‘By transforming the metaphor of Sisyphus with synthetic soles, one does not transform the secret of the stone. Pedestrian’s movements build physics of momentum, art, love and technology, the stone never falls from the moebius strip’.

Kinetics are the signs of a living system in action. The composer wishes to extend VR technology to nourish the human listening capacity as to guide our actions in an environment. The computational space is configured for an intelligible representation of a system of references in which the living system performs its movements with an ecological orientation. the sense of ecology intersects both internal and external orientation towards one’s own body and environment. This empowers as observer as a performer.

Beyond the notions of space in terms of moving objects bound in physical space, a complex space can be functionalized in computational space such that an observer/performer can access and interact with the computational processes, and generate traces as well. In this case the traces are the record of kinetic movements associated with the computational processes. The kinetic movements are inseparable from the processes, as the movements are guided and motivated by the total action reports and evaluations based upon visual and auditory feedback.

Rolling Stone is created and performed using ScoreGraph, an object-oriented software environment. ScoreGraph was developed for configuring virtual reality applications by specifying the connectivity and synchronization of parallel processes computing numerical models of time and space. These include graphical objects and scenes, physically-based models of dynamic systems, control signals from hardware interface devices and models for sound synthesis. ScoreGraph allows these models to be computed asynchronously and to exchange control signals for synchronous display in real-time. An interface protocol enables the run-time specification of aspects of the spatial layout, visual display, numerical simulations and control signal synchronizations. The temporal nature of events are sometimes non-linear and sometimes linear, requiring a protocol with attributes of both a directed graph and a musical score.

Rolling Stone is performed using CyberBoots, foot-mounted pressure sensors, attached to a fuzzy logic inference process. The fuzzy logic observes continuous pressure changes and recognizes discrete temporal and positional patterns such as walking and leaning. Sound is produced by real-time software synthesis on multiple computers running in parallel, controlled by virtual events. The CyberBoots and the ScoreGraph and Sound Server environments were created by the Audio Development Group at NCSA. The graphical display is supported by the CAVE libraries developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago. Rolling Stone is produced by Robin Bargar.

For the past five years, I have focused my artistic efforts on my Magic Sandbox. To experience this dreamlike environment, visitors enter into a darkened space, where they are enveloped in a meditative stream of sound. As their eyes adjust to the dark, visitors begin to see a richly colored magic carpet / floating mysteriously in the center of an indeterminate space. Constantly evolving waves of color and form appear to flow through the carpet in harmony with the sound, inviting the visitor to approach. Visitors soon distinguish images of sacred gardens, elemental forms, natural processes, and cosmological events, at once archaic and contemporary, all floating on a bed of soft and rumpled sand. Children immediately move into the center of the carpet where they push and pour the sand, the saturated light, and the animated images. Older visitors line the edge of the image zone where they stroke the sand and bath in the reflected light and soothing sound.Visitor response has been so positive that I am creating a new generation of work for the Magic Sandbox. At a formal level, this collaborative artwork is actually a system of concepts, maps, images, data, and sounds, put into motion on computers using multiple layers of custom-built computer software. The output of this system includes stereophonic, data-driven music coupled to animated images projected onto a dimensionalizing floor surface. The work is presented in a human-scale, shared, immersive environment designed to empower each visitor is personal virtual reality, i.e., her imagination.

Gallery Guide is a virtual reality performance that could not exist without computer technology however in the way that it operates in the time and place of its own performance it can be linked to earlier pre-computer work in the nineteen seventies and eighties, in film and film/ performance works, video and video performance pieces, and more recently in site specific public sculpture. All of these art forms can be used so that they require the viewer to re-negotiate their relationship with the work. In the case of the performance. Gallery Guide this “re-negotiation” is carried out through the performer in the role of a gallery guide who performs the task of taking an audience around an exhibition. The exhibition has been three dimensionally produced as a computer model and is simultaneously projected behind the performer who talks us through the show. As the “tour” progresses the performer provides us with animated explanations of what we see before us, the absurdity is that he is explaining the computer generated gallery and the works in it as if they were real and is consequently stretched to make sense of the phenomena that he encounters. By having to resort to physical reality for answers to what is found in the virtual gallery the performance inevitably makes reference to existing paradigms and aesthetics for art practice. It is within these references that a lot of the humor of the piece lies as the conceit of much contemporary art is made apparent and the role of “The Gallery” in sustaining this status quo is observed. If we are currently experiencing the equivalent of an Industrial Revolution the effects of which reach into all aspects of our collective and individual lives then “the gallery”cannot stay outside of these changes if it is to continue to consider it’s position in relation to society as significant. As levels of visual literacy rise through ease of access to computers so do audience expectations for visual art and what might be found in art galleries. The worlds of art, education, and entertainment are overlapping in a way that is creating a new media landscape it is the job of artists to be our “Guides” through this new landscape.

The Faust Space as an environment in which theatrical devices and computer technology react together to create the alchemical magic of an ancient horror story. The work is a durational installation including elements of live performance alongside video, sound and digital imagery. Snatches of narratives, action, sequences of images and sound are presented as a montage over which the viewer is offered an element of control.

The Faust Space is inspired by the legend of Faust, one of the oldest in literature and one which crops up?frequently in folklore throughout the world. In all versions of the tale, Faust is a man of extraordinary intelligence who becomes bored with what the natural sciences and conventional learning can offer and starts to dabble with supernatural powers. He learns how to communicate with the spirit world and so meets Mephistopheles, a servant of the king of demons, Lucifer. Mephistopheles offers Faust a deal – he will serve him faithfully for 24 years, sharing with him his supernatural powers, but after that Faust must give his immortal soul to Lucifer and spend eternity in hell.

The story touches on universal themes which are ripe for re-examination today in the light of a changing world?in which technology offers various means of faking reality, superseding nature and dodging mortality.

The Faust Space gives the spectator the opportunity to interact with the piece via various interfaces – some very apparent, some invisible, as it explores themes of magic, fantasy, illusion and con-tricks. The work invites the spectator into a charged atmosphere and responds to their active involvement in space. In do doing it foregrounds how interfaces become articulate on the subject of interactivity. It questions the extent to which the interactive spectator is offered real freedom of choice or whether interaction is a mechanism that ultimately denies the spectator the creativity it purports to offer. These issues resonate with aspects of Faust’s deal, which while seeming to offer ultimate powers transpires as little more than a con-trick. The Faust Space also shows how technology can erase the difference between a present and remote audience and a present and remote artist.

The work makes use not only of computers and video but also of low-technology and theatre illusions such as the “Pepper’s Ghost” trick. It draws parallels between theatre traditions and new technology. Theatre has much in common with Virtual Reality. It has, for thousands of years, been a place where illusion and reality are mixed, where spectators interact with the artwork, where fictional locations are created and where real-time is altered. Many of the issues relating to interactivity have already been anticipated and played out in the theatres. Theatre is a valuable reference point as we consider how interactivity affects the making of art.

Since 1983 Benoit Maubrey and his international AUDIO GRUPPE have been building electro-acoustic clothing and suits. These are clothes equipped with loudspeakers, amplifiers, and 257 K samplers that enable them to react directly with their environment by recording live sounds, voices, or instruments in their proximity, and amplifying them as a mobile and multi-acoustic performance. Additionally they also “wear” radio receivers, contact microphones, light sensors and electronic looping devices in order to produce, mix, and multiply their own sounds and compose these as an environmental concert. The performers are also use rechargeable batteries and/or solar cells which ensures them complete mobility both indoors and outdoors.

The central issue of interactive works lies in a non-linear approach toward the articulation of time. Of course every work consists of many temporalities e.g. narrative time, a viewer’s time, a performer’s time. A work can become “interactive” avant la lettre, even if it doesn’t actually require input from it’s viewers, when some aspect of its temporal foundation escapes linear sequence. Only in this circumstance can we think of a work as interactive in the sense that it communicates in a different way from non-interactive works. Non-linearity can be achieved in countless ways with or without the devices of New Technology. The conditions under which non-linearity of structure results in interactivity are complex but describable.

In this lecture-performance we will attempt to both describe and enunciate some of these conditions – both in words and in the structure of the presentation. Multiple streams of live voice, pre-recorded and digital processed text, projected image, and performed music will be performed, setting up a texture of ideas and sounds more like a web of association than a linear lecture. The powers are possibilities of a non-linear, interactive articulation of ideas will be argued for and, we hope demonstrated.

Opening Event

Chance Encounter is a short computer generated animation in which the central concept is the boundary between the inside and outside of the body. The piece symbolically explores what is allowed to cross that division and how it informs our notion of self and identity with a specific reference to how gay men and other minorities have that boundary violated by culture through mis-representation.
Looking at the relationship between the biological, corporeal body and the social, culturally produced imaginary body informs our physical and intellectual sense of self. The animation therefore develops ideas around what is allowed to be consumed—to be penetrated—by language, food, infections and ideology.

Throughout the animation the body is depicted as fictional landscapes — islands. This introduces two other concepts. One is the notion of the’natural/normal’ in relation to the body or land. Both have been culturally fetishized as being timeless, natural and basic. Photography is often used as evidence of what is natural and normal, reinforcing social norms of race, gender and health. The piece attempts to produce a photographic aesthetic similar to that of the Fine Art Black and White print.

Secondly, metaphors of space, location and geography are often used within cultural theory in relation to identity — history is defined as a space where minority groups have to define or map themselves a place for visibility. A pernicious use of this metaphor has been in the study of AIDS, locating the epidemic in ‘islands of illness,’ identifying the affected communities as other — across a boundary.

The islands in the animation are invaded, colonized by the fragments of data and information that travel though undefined internal spaces. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has similar concerns or would like to read the full 6000 word paper that accompanied the animation. I intend to develop the piece further during 1997 with a new soundtrack and additional sequences.

The New York subway becomes the location for a 3D animation, transforming the everyday commute into an experience of images and sounds which merge reality with the extraordinary. Viewers become an integral part of the action and emotions of an unpredictable subway excursion via the manipulation of 3D animation, computer graphics, real time video, and a mixed soundtrack of electronic music and digital sound effects.

Ross, a young boy, is riding in a boat watching a perpetual motion machine powered by mice. Ross eats a sandwich and becomes tired. The sound of Charles Lindbergh’s plane awakes an anxiety within Ross and prompts him to wake. The language which is spoken is an imaginary scripted dialect. This piece incorporates both film and 3-D computer animation. The boat, the mechanism, and the mice were constructed from within the computer environment, while the water and the boy were captured on film.

Communication with others is largely driven by a need to affirm one’s existence. The explosion of computer-based virtual environments and on-line communication has in many ways reinforced the need to convey thought and intention in ways other than a physical presence. Evolving technologies drastically condense distance and time, reducing correspondences that may have previously taken days or weeks to a matter of minutes, or even seconds. This accelerated interaction brings both a sense of distance, and an equally compelling sense of intimacy. Without a shared physical presence, subtle information is omitted that might enrich the meaning of a given exchange; facial reaction and gestural response are hidden, removing an important unspoken context to the dialogue. A rapid exchange between strangers may become peculiarly intimate, with the absence of clues or physical context to guide its true intentions.

As electronic communication expands to allow for casual “conversation” with others in a real-time, visual environment (rather than simply text), the appearance and the role of the digital environment itself becomes increasingly important. While the “presence” of the individuals involved in the conversation may remain absent visual patterns we intuitively seek in our daily experiences that may serve as a model for virtual environments. This animation is a study in recreating acutely felt emotional moments which surface fleeting physical reactions such as tension, pressure, or even euphoria. The resulting abstract structures set an understanding for the viewer of a particular place and mood, as the point of view drifts from real spaces to imaginary ones. The forms of each “architecture” recall parts of the human body that are at the centers of these sensory experiences. Surfaces textured with hand-drawn images are constantly in motion, shifting their shapes and boundaries in correspondence with mood.

At the opening of this tape, the viewer enters the Internet along with the producer, who uses a pseudonym in order to interview people who engage in a highly problematic and taboo practice — Nazi-fetish based sadomasochism. The artist uses video images created directly on the computer, and stories from the archive of her own memory to ask such questions as: How does history affect the body? How are cultural memories transmitted? And, when historical events become part of a culture’s discourse, how does the meaning of the original event shift? Because all of the interviews for this highly experimental documentary were conducted on the Internet, the tape also questions both traditional documentary practice, and the virtual construction of identity on the Internet.

unbroken pieces is an abstract computer animation exploring the relationship between unity and disjunction. The work addresses the arbitrary nature of distinctions such as chaos and order, amorphous and solid, flatness and volume. unbroken pieces makes extensive use of spatial and temporal rhythms, as well as spatial ambiguity, in expressing these similarities and contradictions.
To demonstrate these thematic contradictions, unbroken pieces utilizes 3D and 2D computer graphic techniques to create spaces which could not exist in the physical world. Reflection, refraction and transparency, are used in the amorphous opening environment, while texture mapping and multi-layer compositing techniques are used throughout the piece to create spaces which have the feeling of being simultaneously two and three-dimensional. The integration of the amorphous imagery throughout the various phases of the piece builds on the theme of unity among the apparently dissimilar.
A work in the abstract film category known as “visual music,” the piece progresses through a structure of thematilland [sic!]. Like the animation, the music is structured so that the sections of the piece have very distinct identities and initially seem quite different, but are later revealed to be unified in theme, liveness of appearances, the arbitrary nature of classification and stratification, and the ultimate dissolution of apparent stability. In unbroken pieces, I was interested in using formal devices to express these general concerns of ambiguity and instability on an abstract level.

The title unbroken pieces refers to the unity of the divisions between the parts of the whole. This is demonstrated through the ambiguity of the separations between elements within the frame, but primarily through the divisions between the seemingly dissimilar, yet unified, pieces which comprise the structure of the work.

The music for unbroken pieces was written by Kent Clelland. Like the animation, the music is structured so that the sections of the piece have very distinct identities and initially seem quite different, but are later revealed to be unified in theme.

PHANTASMsex/schemeland is an animated passage through dimensions of sub-erotic figment and phantasm. Its premise is loosely based upon a diagram by Sigmund Freud, which attempted to conceptually map the circuits for sexual attraction and libidinal drive. PHANTASMsex/schemeland animates a circuit through an illusionary psychosexual space absently haunted by sub-erotic spectres. In its installation version, PHANTASMsex/schemeland is presented as a projection of an endlessly repeating loop of the animation at varying frame rates. The screened version presents one loop of the animation at a steady, full motion frame rate.

The animation was largely produced at the Digital Art Research Facility Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania.

This short tape is related to a feature-length work I am in the middle of at present. That feature is also called The Telepathic Motion Picture of THE LOST TRIBES, and is about a film studio in Japanese-controlled Manchuria during the 30’s -50’s… however, this world is under the spell of both an alternate history and different physics. The short presented here could be considered as an approximate reconstruction of the sort of work done at the studio, Manchu Edison; and as such can even be thought of as the eponymous telepathic motion picture of THE LOST TRIBES, a strange little film made for export at a difficult time in the studio’s history.

Nigel Jamieson’s sculptural practice and intellectual interest in Baroque aesthetics and allegorical expression influenced the development of electronic anamorphosis. Anamorphic images develop via the mobility of bodies, producing meaning through gestures. Anamorphic video subverts the cartesian space of 3D computer graphics, and criticizes the “naturalism” of video by becoming “point of view on point of view”.

Specular images and distorted perspectives recall subjective”point of view” in relation to the object and separate, playing out a dance of reflected desires according to an allegorical logic of mobility, metamorphosis, and theatricality.

In Circulations, Jamieson furthers the development of anamorphic video by creating a moving cylindrical anamorphic using 3D computer graphics technology. Two performers join and separate, playing out a dance of reflected desire.

New York based Media artist Kristin Lucas presents her first major project in Britain. Screening Room a dynamic new video installation introducing a sens of ’70s optimism with a strong element of computer -based culture. The work becomes a window of opportunity: the ultimate surveillance system, home theatre, computer and/or game screen.

Willie Doherty’s highly acclaimed video and photographic work has grown out of the experience of his immediate environment in Derry, Northern Ireland. This forms the psychological and physical backdrop to ‘Somewhere Else’, his most ambitious video work to date, which has been specially commissioned for revolution98. Somewhere Else will form part of an expansive exhibition of Doherty’s work tracing his prodigious output over the past ten years.

A collaboration between the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology (FACT) and Tate Gallery Liverpool.

Including:

1. Paul de Marinis [USA] – Dinner at Ernie’s and a Flaw in the Decor
2. Mike Guida & Mark Winstanley [Eng] – Incubator
3. Madelon Hooykaas & Elsa Stansfield [Neth] – Table of
Reorientation
4. Simon Penny [Australia/USA] – Petit Mal

Inspired by the seminal 1968 exhibition at the ICA, ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’, ‘star dot star’ examines the influence that electronic art from the 1960’s has had on current practice. It draws attention to the extensive – but often overlooked in the wider picture – history of computer use in the production of art in the last 30 years and attempts to debunk the ‘newness’ often attributed to artworks using new technology.

star dot star exhibition and catalogue curated and edited by Helen Sloan. Catalogue contributors: Lisa Haskel, John Lansdown, Jasia Reichardt. Due to spatial limitations, this is an abridged version of the Site Gallery touring exhibition. The full exhibition also includes work by Natalie Jeremijenko, Tessa Elliott & Jonathan Jones Morris.

The office of Greg Lynn FORM has recently been producing buildings by using animation software for their “automatic” design, rather than the more traditional architectural approach of VR simulations and CAD renderings. The cinematic special effects and animation industry has developed useful tools for investigating deformable surfaces and physical forces. In animation, a form is not just modeled using its internal parameters, but also by a mosaic of other fluctuating forces, including gravity, wind, turbulence, magnetism and swarms of moving particles. We can use these gradient fields as architectural analogies for pedestrian and automotive movement, environmental forces such as wind and sun, urban views and alignments, and intensities of use and occupation in time. The result of this interaction between a generalized organization and particular external constraints is a design process that has an undecidable outcome; which mandates an improvisational design attitude. This shift from determinism to directed indeterminacy is also central to the development of a dynamic design method which uses topological geometries that are capable of being bent, twisted, deformed and differentiated while maintaining their continuity. Greg Lynn FORM has been using stereo lithography for model building and this exhibition has several extremely small, extremely precise resin models built by computer controlled laser. The accompanying video demonstrates the use of animation software for modeling the forces that dynamically shape a building.

This project can best be described as a computer aid video/kinetic-sculpture installation. The physical structure of the piece is made up of 2 separate units, identical in construction. Each unit consists of the following: 19″ video monitor encased in a 2’x 2’x 2′ wooden box suspended 2.5′ from the floor with the support of chains, video screen facing downward. Chains are attached overhead to a vertical wood metal construction measuring 4’w x 4’d x 11’h, simulated auto-mechanic creepers (the viewing vehicle) with attached computer driven electronic massage units The intended viewing perspective of each unit is from beneath. The participants are invited to lay backside-down on the creepers and roll under the suspended video monitors. Both units are assembled and fabricated in an identical fashion; however, each unit contains different video sequence correlating to a particular physical sensation created by the electronic motors. The motion depicted on the video corresponds to the rhythmic motion (e.g. massage devices). Both units are controlled by an electronic activated auxiliary devices utilizing time code.

Through the use of mixed media, immediate perceptions are altered, thereby creating multi-sensory experiences. The installation subverts the traditional viewing perspective to a vulnerable (horizontal) position, while also blurring the line between two-dimensional time-based imagery and three-dimensional tactile experience. Both visual and audio elements of the video pieces are simultaneously experienced in the physical domain, thus challenging perceptions of reality through illusion.

“It will speak a secret language, and leave behind documents not of edification, but of paradox”
—Hugo Ball

Hypnagogue is a collaboration between artist/musician Perry Hall, and architect/multimedia designer Ed Keller, which adopts a multimedia format (authored in mTropolis) suitable for CD-ROM and installations – that of navigable spaces accessible through stills, animations, digitized video, and QTVR. Thirty paintings and eight digital architectural spaces are the sites within which over 80 sound elements (all recorded in 44.1 kHz stereo), written text, live actors and computer generated characters become event sequences that the viewer/listener may interact with. Using a highly detailed, enigmatic, and complex computer generated environment, which the viewer/listener navigates largely at will, an open, non-linear time sequence is developed, problematizing traditional notions of the boundaries between space, sound, image, narrative, and the enunciative and mechanic gradients that establish these categories. The form of Hypnagogue, and its elements, were greatly influenced by a body of work including the collage novels of surrealist painter Max Ernst, the films The Stalker and Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky, the work of artist Brian Eno and writer Jorge Luis Borges, the architecture of Gaudi, Terragni, Scarpa, and many others. CONCEPT, STRUCTURE AND INTERFACE Navigation (montage) takes place as the viewer/listener mouses over paintings and through spaces on screen. There are several modes of navigation which correspond to varying types of intensity of narrative, image and sound in the project:

1. movement from still to still throughout much of the project;
2. in areas of intensity, the stills themselves become activated by the presence of characters or objects;
3. in moments of intensity in the paintings, the surface of the work folds into itself to become a nested montage or quasi cinematic QTVR picture plane;
4. in key locations one’s point of view is drawn briefly into animations;
5. and in the concluding environment, one navigates through the fluid panoramic space of multiple QTVR nodes.

Quasi-filmic modulations of the flow of time are accomplished through these alternative techniques of montage. Certain rhythms are set up by the transitions from frame to frame which reflect the partition of time into somewhat linear segments—a division of time which is radically altered in the QTVR spaces. The project uses hybridized painterly, musical, architectural, and filmic techniques to explore a sensibility concerned with intensities and effects while questioning the enunciative machines typically developed in narratives of space, sound, image. For instance, space flows continuously between the architectural sites that contain paintings into the paintings themselves, which are navigated as spaces as well (erasing/questioning boundaries between surface and depth in the picture plane) through enhancement of their innate spatiality and the ability to make scale fluid in the digital realm (most of the paintings themselves are extremely small, ranging from 10″ square to as small as 1 inch square). This transition is accompanied by shifts in the sonic environment, and might include (for example) a series of movements from still to still, to a still frame which one then exits via a Quicktime movie, that leaves one inside a QTVR node, which after a specified period of time transitions one into another space.

This installation questions the role of information technology, both in relation to the body, and for its intentional function as a means of communication. Within a darkened space, a chair and laptop computer are suspended in the center of the room, in a pre-morphed state. The walls surrounding the chair are images of telephone poles and connecting lines, which were manually stamped on the wall in binary code. The chair itself dates roughly to the beginning of the 20th century, and was modified to accommodate the insertion of the laptop computer: the seat compacted to the scale of the laptop, and the legs slightly crippled. The screen is positioned in an eroticized relationship to the chair, and runs an animated personal text loop. This eroticism is ambiguous in its relationship to the chair subject: it may be seen as an imposition of the technology itself, or an extension of the users desire. In reading the text from behind, the viewer is placed within a voyeuristic context, within this techno-antique hybrid state. The information that is questioned within the text loop is evidenced on the surrounding walls; the irony of the digital code, itself so unseen and immediate, manually labored into strings of information that connect or collapse upon themselves.

The Western Avenue Project documents and demonstrates opportunities for linkages between landscapes and digital technologies as found along Western Avenue, the longest street in Chicago. It consists of a structure built of steel, wire, fabric, wood and fiberglass; the structure will support a series of digitally altered videos, photographs, sound compositions, drawings and writings. At the close of the installation, the construction will continue as part of the Digital Geography web site.
The digital geography for Western Avenue will include four components: invisible structures, mutable networks, bits and blocks, and captured landscapes. Invisible structures are unseen but saturating technologies that either fall away or over-determine results, and include landscaping materials and computer software. Mutable networks are informal and spectacular linkages that locate event, such as car-lot decorations and the World Wide Web. Bits and blocks are multiples, surfaces, containers and Patterns, that taken collectively, make organic and formal information, and are manifested in the flow of traffic and computational capacity. Captured landscapes are organic documents that have the potential to become critical counterpoints to planning strategies which seek to keep the natural and the artificial distinct, and include the orphaned gardens created by traffic planners and satellite biodiversity analysis. Each of these components erases distinctions between the natural and the artificial and contributes to the creation of something we call ‘manywheres’: localities influenced or even produced by forces, systems or events acting from great and small distances. Our intention for the installation at ISEA is to represent Western Avenue in terms of an emerging geography of manywheres unencumbered by nostalgia for some genus loci and unwilling to submit to the kind of deterritorialization and displacement that makes the urban interstice into a bland anywhere.

The Digital Geographies Project is meant to defy the construction of cyberspace as a so-called “total environment”, that is supposedly “more real” than our everyday experience. At the same time, we are not proposing the development of technologies for a utopian recovery or improvement of the natural (a recapitulation of the ‘perfected’ nature of traditional landscape design). We are concerned with elaborating architectural and design practices by using the computer as a tool to construct information surfaces which are connected to, and depend upon, the surface of the earth. The result is what Deluze would call the actualization of the virtual, that is, not a repetition of what is already given as possible, but a materialization of the new. We think of the work as an architectural investigation where our discoveries are documented in building and where information and accident yield invention.

The gallery is a frame for an experimental landscape. The gallery’s surfaces become a field condition where landscapes come under the influence of the digital. This field of screens and surfaces, read as barriers, furniture and displays, functions in a manner that suggests the fluid, pliant expanse of the landscape garden, so that the gallery is something other than a container for the display of objects. These surfaces and terrains will act as information contours that make space by concealing, intercepting, protecting and displaying information. The constructions have the potential to move outside the gallery garden, digitally, in the loop they make back to the net through the web page, and conventionally, in their life as prosaic objects that can be put to many uses. The installation functions at numerous levels—to disseminate information, to act and react to input, to house an event.

Components: Includes office furniture and accessories to customize your office to your non-English speaking clientele and remind your bi-lingual employees to stick to English whenever the client walks out the door. Central to the installation is the Transparent Image Design Studio: Culture Encounter Desk with hinged front panel to be flipped up whenever non-English speaking clientele enter the office. The desk is made of stained maple with Sunshine Yellow Formica on the underside of the front panel. Inset into the Formica underside are”cultural accessories” such as bilingual coffee mugs and bilingual newspapers. Other English Plus components include a rotating plant stand (with Spanish Moss on one side, and English Plus on the other), a rotating flag accessory (where at the press of a button, your customer’s native flag appears), a bilingual welcome plaque (which switches from “Welcome” to”Bienvenido” at the push of a button), and a Peters Projection map (which represents the various continents in proportion to actual relative land mass, such that South America and Africa are larger than North America and Europe) inset into a Venetian blind. With the Culture Encounter Desk and the English Plus accessories, switching back and forth between languages is as easy as pressing a button! Also included in the installation is an audio track with narratives of bilingual office workers from the Miami area describing their experiences working in bilingual.

The visitor is transformed into a virtual tourist equipped with a camera and projected in three-dimensional representations of a battle-field (constituted by news photographs, mostly from Bosnia war). Each time he pulls on pulling the trigger, which progressively reveals itself as that of an automatic weapon, peals off a part of «the skin of the world» : the visual field encompassed by the view-finder subtracted, vanishes out of the world. An investigation of our trouble relationship to war representations.

Software: Patrick Bouchaud, David Nahon & Kimi Bishop
Production of the Future lab of the Ars Electronica Center in Linz With the help of ZA production, Barco, and Silicon Graphics France

1998, France

conFiguring the CAVE is a computer based interactive video installation that assumes a set of technical and pictorial procedures to identify various paradigmatic conjunctions of body and space, where the human figure is used as a psycho-geographical locus for multiform spatial representations. conFiguring the CAVE was one of the first art works to be created using the CAVE, a unique form of virtual reality environment developed at University of Illinois in the eighties. The work was commissioned in 1997 by the NTT ICC InterCommunication Center in Tokyo, presented here in a new version for two frontal screens.

Musical Composition: Les Stuck.

Technical support: Derek Hauffen.

Motion analysis for music: Jonathan Bachrach.

Production: ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Boctok Tokyo & David D’Heilly, Germany.

ISEA2000 is meant to be an instantaneous photograph of today’s digital creation. The exhibition Beyond the screen, is proposing a selection of digital and interactive works which are expressing artists’ will, beyond technological drifts, to engage the medium without restriction and without exclusion. Techniques and practices are coexisting and contaminating each others in an usage liberated from contemporary categories. From printed matter to virtual reality, these installations reveal themselves, beyond the device, a discourse, beyond Image : the meaning to live in a recasting of roles and processes dedicated to art.

Presented in the chapelle and other spaces of the Ecole nationale superieure des beaux-arts de Paris, this exhibition happens in a more general framework including colloquium, meetings, presentations of students works in crossed interaction with the artistic formation process of the School.

The Ecole nationale superieure des beaux-arts (National Fine Arts School) is counting 680 students from over 50 countries and 60 international artists/teachers. The involvement of Ensba in ISEA2000 was obvious because of the specificity of its teachings which together with the practice of painting, drawing and sculpture, gives a large space to the field of e-multimedia. Video, sound, computer technology and the web, photography, installation and performance are fully represented in the workshops, the technical bases, through the commitment of professors and guest artists, through the research program established in 2000 and the Master multimedia-hypermedia.
This event allows to present not only works from international important artists in the electronic arts, but also propositions by students committed to this field of creation.

Coordination: Martine Bour for the CIREN/Universite Paris 8 & Nicolas Aubrun for the Ensba.

Scenography: Anna Adahl.

Production: Ensba and CIREN/Paris 8.

CIREN is an Interdisciplinary Center for research on digital aesthetics, laboratory of Universite Paris 8, created in partnership with the Ministere de la Culture.

‘Cantan un Huevo’ had been around ever since the remarkable recordings we made on the boat from Kiel to Oslo. Imperceptibly the boat had vibrated and caused the bottles of alcohol standing on the shelves in the tax-free shop to rattle, the effect was quite hallucinatory. The vibration was a lovely long, slow wave which caused sound to swell up out of nothing and to fade back in the same way. Over and over again.

Cantan un Huevo, Model II is made up of nine shaking-tables, built of lots of metal springs. Nine computer-controlled oscillating motors cause them to vibrate. Bottles which are placed on these tables tic against each other. A subtle celebration of sound in which a desire can still be uncovered.

ORLAN  refuses the ‘interior exil’ in a given body and proclaims everyone’s right to become themselves in the body of their choice, whether real or virtual. ORLAN works on this renaissance by means of resolutely contemporary technological and artistic tools such as the scalpel and prostheses of cosmetic surgery, performance, and the cut and paste function of digital software. ORLAN debates ‘live’ the burning issues of today’s society, from the ethics of biotechnological manipulations, the individual’s rights over his or her own body, and the physical/cultural hybrid of identity, to aesthetic norms. In both her performances and works, her explosive art makes us reflect upon the possible future of the mutant body. This CD-Rom presents the interactive trajectory of this unconventional artist — a digital woman, revolutionary and fascinating- through photographs and videos, and interviews and texts by today’s leading critics.

There tend to be two types of digital image: first of all the photographic image, equally a component of digital video, secondly graphics and images close to comic strips. I try to create another type of image that comes under figurative painting.

Working with software of great technical flexibility, Florian Schneider rids himself of the constraints of pictorial matter, allowing him to make a fuller exploration of imagination and memory. Women’s faces take form, touch by touch. Painted without a model, either living or photographic, these portraits of strangers are developed in a fictional and poetic genealogy.

Rather than deposing painting, digital techniques allow to continue here practicing it while extending its methods: painting without paint.

The act of painting is not defined by the materiality of the medium, that is to say the canvas, brush or the famous smell of turpentine. For me, it’s the hand, the line and the liquidity of the matter which define it as such. Virtual painting defends not only the act of painting, but also makes it possible to experience tangible and sensitive immateriality.

Since 1982 Miguel Chevalier’s work is characterized by an exploration of today’s technologies. His field of investigation finds its sources in Art history whose essential data he reformulates using computer tools. His themes relate to his observation on flows and networks that organise our contemporary societies. He has established himself internationally as one of the pioneers of virtual and digital art. The images he reveals constantly question our relation to the world.

Numerous personal and group exhibitions in France and abroad have enabled him to develop a very personal approach, in particular at the Musee d’Art Moderne de Paris in 88, at the ARC, at the Vivita Gallery in Florence, Italy in 89, at the Centre G. Pompidou Visions Urbaines in 94, at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, The Magic of Numbers in Germany in 97, at the Espace Cardin, Peripherie, in Paris in 98 and at the Biennial of Kwangju in Korea in March 2000.

The CD-ROM presented is composed of extracts from 12 interactive and video installations. It was made with the collaboration of Christine Buci-Glucksmann and completes the monograph published this year by the publishing house Editions Flammarion.

Word Pool is an installation piece which user can play with words in unusual (but in a sense, obvious) manner. Experiencer will be able to interact with the text swimming around the pool by making a ripple in the water or by opening the faucets and draining the words out. The texts will be treated as if they are in the form of liquid throughout his or her experience. This is one of the continued exploration of alternate ways to interact with words.

Free Range Appliances in a Light Dill Sauce is an exploration of anthropomorphic qualities inherent in household appliances and an irreverent look at the meaning of ‘smart’ appliances. Kitchen gadgets are liberated from their mundane existences and taught motor skills; enabling them to fully realize their suppressed ambulatory desires.

How to be elsewhere while staying here, to stay here while going elsewhere and so on.

Virtual Worlds are not virtual reality environments, nor are they elaborate special or digital effects. But nonetheless they are virtuality!

At ArtProcess, the height of postmodernism, Olga Kisseleva is presenting, ‘in real life’, ‘real’ virtual worlds that have not undergone any computer pro¬cessing. It is an installation of photographs and text that lets us see a series of pictures whose subjects are the large cities of the world. But New York, for example, is not necessarily represented by New York; the very beautiful view of Istanbul may not have been taken in that city; and is that typical scene of Beijing really of Beijing? It is up to you to make out the real city from the virtual city, but be aware there is no indication given for identifying the true from the false. But is it really important?

This exhibition is the first event of a series of projects that will take various forms depending on the places they are received — exhibitions, performances, tours, publications and so on. The projects may indiscriminately call upon means of traditional techniques or advanced technology. ‘Virtual reality’ will be the central theme of each of these productions.

Interactive installation at IRCAM, salle Igor Stravinsky

A meeting with a virtual character, Elle (She), living only in the memory of the computer. Elle is a digital avatar using behavior models. The visitors’ presence and motions of the visitors are analyzed in real-time and allow a first interaction with Elle. Their voices are then captured in real-time and is influencing File’s own voice, thanks to a new voice technology and spatialization from IRCAM. A strange meeting both audio and visual, a first step towards a musical dialogue!

Virtual Reality Installation by Catherine Ikam and Louis-Francois Fleri Music by Pierre Charvet. Sound Processing: Ircam, Centre Pompidou (Karim Haddad, Geoffrey Peeters, Xavier Rodet and Norbert Schnell) Image processing and detection: Institut Image ENSAM

Salon d’actualite

This exhibition consists of a multimedia survey on the dynamics and trans-formations in contemporary urban space by Charlotte Pochhacker, in charge of [art.image] and the two-yearly Graz Media + Architecture conference.

With:

1. A. Muntadas
2. S. Bitter & H.Weber
3. Bureau of Inverse Technologies
4. E. Opsoner
5. H. Asselsbergh & R. Vissers
6. Knowbotic Research
7. M. Muller
8. Dellbruge & de Moll
9. R. Bunchoten
10. Forced Entertainment
11. M. Kobe+Agency

This exhibition gives an outline of German and international artistic production in the field of new media. It includes 25 works produced between 1997 and 2000 on film, CD-Rom and the Internet. In parallel, Media Art Action (1960 — 1980) and Media Art Interaction (1980 — 2000) provide a CD-Rom panorama of the history of media development.

‘Update 2000’- an update of theme-based software- presents the paradoxical and multi-facetted beginnings of media art, where current affairs are very much present including fashion, trends, or political, social and artistic contexts. An endless flow of commercial visual codes, productivity outbidding, or ironic radicalization of systems and contexts in the media; the refusal to believe that our information society implies progress; social normality and a power struggle in an Orwell-type ‘Big Brother’ state; a new liberal economy, artistic and social practices in the network community, emphatic concept of participating in the web and its limits; illustrations of these numerous contradictory aspects of the information society.

According to the Nibelungen myth, the world’s most famous treasure ever produced was thrown in the Rhine river near the town of Worms (Germany). At the core of its principle is a Ring that can provide an inexhaustible source of gold, love and joy for its holders as long as it is not used for their own personal power. From the beginning of time, the people of Worms have always known this treasure to be lying beneath the city waters’. This kind of invisible monument structures their imaginary with more strength than the rare visible monuments remaining after the city multiple destructions. The museum of the Nibelungen (opening 08-2001) is a passage from the common space of the city into the poetic space it shelters, from the daily life into the everlasting myth. The outcome is the virtual environment The Treasury of the Nibelungen with images, musics and sounds generated in real time by the visitors wanderings.

Production, concept & art direction: A+H (Olivier Auber & Bernd Hoge)                                                                                                                                        VR development (AAASeed): Emmanuel Maa Berriet                                                                                                                                                                 Music, sound design and real-time musical software: Thierry Fournier

Installation of a digitally interactive choreography.

Based on the leitmotif of a diary and inspired by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar’s poem ‘Le bucher ou brule une’ (The Fire on Which She Burns), La morsure takes as its central theme issues of desire and betrayal in a couple’s relationship. Choreography, video art, poetry and computer technology converge in the experimentation with a narrative generator, touch sensitive interactivity and choreographic gesture as means to tell a story. The installation alternatively places the spectator in the role of a passive witness to the couple’s story and as a participant or judge influencing the course of the narrative and being ‘responsible’ for its outcome through manipulations with the interactive program.

Some artists make computer programs that work as much like tools as like works of art: matrices whose live uses become a means of visibility. This type of digital work needs to be manipulated, configured onto a machine and to be shown. We call their presentations ‘demos’ rather than ‘exhibits’. Teleferique is a downloading site, or a shared office space on the Net.

In collaboration with the Galerie le Sous-Sol and the help of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, Plastic Arts Delegation (CNAP). Grant for first exhibition.

Interactive video installation at GLAZ’ART

Imagine approaching a shoddy, old television set. On the screen you see a close-up of a person’s eye, pixelated and occasionally flickering from bad video resolution. On a brass stand in front of the set, slightly below your shoulders stands a child’s pinwheel. If you blow on the pinwheel the eyeball on the television screen reacts instinctively. Blow softly for instance, and the eyelid squints, blow hard and the eye closes up as if to protect itself from your breath.

Pinwheel is an exercise in simplicity and minimalism in interaction. The installation gives no clues to its operation.

CD-Rom projection at GLAZ’ART

Stories from Paradise is a multimedia melodrama that makes use of non-linear techniques to explore interactive storytelling and social critique. It is composed of three absurd stories that develop independently and can be viewed in different ways depending on the viewer’s choices. At the end of the movie the three stories come together in a single final scene.
Each story is divided into absurd scenes that represent some of the phobias, fears, and delirium of our contemporary society: consumerism, extreme individualism, and obsession with health and sex. The three stories incorporate excerpts of real life interviews, and clips from TV and movies, blurring the line between reality and fiction, cliché and everyday life.

Artist Statement

Digital photographies at GLAZ’ART

My images are the site of paradox. Beauty on the surface is pitted by the turmoil underneath that bubbles up serendipitously through the thin surface of the image. Looking out through the car windshield on a dark stormy night, the facial image is torn by shreds of the outside world flowing down the windshield with the pouring rain. It appears as an animating force peering out from behind the shadows, even more clear with the strikes of lightening. The image as ritual spirit has been summoned up by the pounding of the rain and the cover of the darkness. My «body world» experiences jarred my way of being in the world. The social world, the natural world and more so the intimate world warped like the chaotic molecules in the stretch of a rubber band. Words were silenced… simultaneously with an explosion of connections to the intimate dimensions of nature. Intensified in my everyday experience, wind brings tears as it patterns the sunshine with shadows of trees and undulating leaves. Colors embody light molecules themselves. charging molecules, reshaped with light as my patterns, patterns of my body, of my soul are reshaped with blasts of light. Winds moves the water, continuously reforming the pattern of one’s life, translucent layers move spontaneously to reveal and conceal simultaneously. Like firelight in a ceremonial dance protecting the secrecy of symbolic forms painted on one’s body.

Marita Liulia is an artist, and a pioneer in multimedia. Her ‘Maïre’ was one of the first artworks to be produced as a CD-Rom. Then, ‘La Garce ambitieuse’ brought her world-wide fame and several awards, including the International Mobius Award, the Ars Electronica and the Finnish State award. In her multimedia works, Marita Liulia combines research, entertainment and technology, with a spiritual sense of humor into the bargain.

My ambition is to seduce the spectators and push them into action. I want them to become aware of what they are thinking, so that they can either draw benefit from it, or challenge it.

Curator Statement

Who has never worn those red and green glasses used for watching films in 3D? Well, that relatively familiar technique hides a host of others, many of them little known, and as complex as the phenomenon of 3D vision is fascinating. With Paris in 3D, the Musee Carnavalet is offering to take visitors on a journey into the third dimension while giving them a novel look at the history of the French capital. From the first stereoscopic views (1850s) to the latest virtual reality technologies, here are 150 years of Paris and the Parisians, brought to us in 3D and seen from a new angle. The exhibition covers an attractively wide range of themes, with plenty of surprises including the barricades of the Commune, the funeral of Victor Hugo, a police register, the Bal Mabille, a bio-scope disk, the Dessous-des-Berges (Under the Banks) garden in 2015, a hologram dress by Olivier Lapidus.

Works by contemporary artists, interactive games and audiovisual displays will make the experience and principles of 3D vision vividly clear in this exhibition designed by the Architecture Studio agency.

Symbiosis examines the growing associations between traditionally tectonic architecture, and the virtual architecture of the ether. It exists in this exhibition as two physically disparate spaces engaged in a cyclical relationship. The first is called Sense, and the second is called Synthesis. In each of these spaces, participants can interact with the physical architecture, and in so doing formulate, create and mutate a new public architecture in virtual space. The piece explores the possibilities of interactive, multi-participant environments, both physical and virtual, where the architectures in question generate an inter-related dialogue with sounds and virtual structures, and transmutate in response to participant interactions with the physical part of the installation. Whereas in the past, our bodies were mere inhabitants of architecture, It is now possible to create an environment where our physical interactions with architecture begin to delineate virtual functions. We are searching for all of the physical links to the ever-increasing virtual architectures that make up our lives. We are now immersed in an age where through such technologies as video and virtual reality, and with the aid of sensors, our roles as inhabitants of our everyday shelters begins to evolve. We can now become active agents to the spaces we inhabit, our gestures effecting the virtual as well as affecting the physical architectures that surround us. In this regard, it is hoped that Symbiosis will begins to transcend the traditional boundaries inherent to the practice of architecture. As an added exploration of the Beyond Shelter installation, Symbiosis will stage a performance of Synergy, a media play in seven acts, which examines the nature of the screen, as well as our interaction with it. During its exhibition, Symbiosis will continue to evolve in response to the dialogues it generates.

Stock markets, wars, power struggles, environmental problems, murders, and more — we always try to find out what’s behind the headlines on television news or what’s to be read between lines of newspaper articles. It’s easy to see that there are many causal relationships lying under the surface of the daily news. All the small particles of cause interact with each other, to become social phenomena at the final stage. Evening news programs on TV can work toward family ties, providing a time for sharing common subjects with other family members. Yet 24-hour news programs like CNN or BBC Satellite can turn us into world news addicts. We can hardly stop watching news programs. They bring dramatic spectacles to our homes in real time, as do music and sports channels. News seems to influence our feelings, thoughts, behavior and attitudes in everyday life. All of human activity reflects the mechanical, materialistic elements which form the world. This the traditional sociological view point, but it is being turned upside-down. We should now start interpreting society through the methods of biology. Social structure needs to be seen as a biological system rather than a material system. Applying this interpretation to news, the reflection of our social structure in all of our activities is based on biological reasons, since individuals’ activities can be understood in the context of biological rules. The latest theories in financial analysis —as well as other fields— derive largely from biological findings. (Theories based on “complex systems” are a good example). Darwinian competition, too, is being applied to those theories.

For ISEA97, I will set up a closed circuit information flow, a virtually-created “news program”, which consists of TV news images, newspaper articles and financial market reports. News contents can be categorized by a “favorability” score indicated by the audience’s brainwaves. Brainwave data, in this case, depicts the audience’s subconscious. In between the human response and news factors, there would be an agent which indicates the audience’s state of mind. There would be 4 degree of “favorability” in responding to news: very favorable, favorable, neutral, and unfavorable. Depending upon the “favorability” indicated by measured brainwaves, the agent would modify the news and financial market reports that it calls up. The more the audience indicates favor, the more the agent “grows”,  like a biological entity. If the agent grows to a certain degree, it starts breeding. The agent has a life span, so that it will have to mature within a given period of time. Otherwise it cannot bear descendants. If agent fully is developed when it breeds, it can produce genetically strong descendants.

The result of the whole process above can be output as a graph in a financial report. The audience can see various types of news and find out how their minds relate the news factors at the same time a computer detects how an audience’s brain is behaving.

This highly interactive work, using realtime digital feedback algorithms in the image and sound domain, encourages the audience to explore a complex process of sonic and luminous flux: a continuous synthesis of image and sound folding back into itself, hovering on the boundary between order and chaos. Interacting with the work allows the audience to explore an endless variety of complex and unique visual and aural forms. The work is a homage to Poincare (1854-1912), one of the early mathematical pioneering explorers of chaos and feedback. He asserted that the aesthetic rather than the logical is the dominant element in mathematical creativity. In an age before computers, his work on celestial mechanics led him to discover the first description of chaotic limit sets in history. He visualized complex chaotic processes in his head, and even expressed the fear that these might defy analysis forever. Software: Custom code in C++ and Inventor. CSOUND synthesis software. Hardware: SGI workstation with Impact Graphics. HiFi sound system.

Items 1-2,000 collapses western medicine’s fracturization of the body with industrial itemization techniques into a strange rationalization apparatus. A human body is half submerged in a block of wax, in a manner reminiscent of how biological specimens are fixed in a “microtome” (a machine which cuts wax embedded specimens into thin slices). A sheet of glass rests inches above the figure like a cover slide used atop specimens in microscopy. This glass is affixed with barcodes, which correspond to internal organ locations of the figure underneath. Participants interact with the work as anatomy students would a cadaver: They use a stainless steel barcode scanner much like a scalpel—slicing horizontally across the figure to reveal the hidden target organ on twin video monitors. These video sources seemingly shuffle though digitized body slices from the location of one scan to the next.The more familiar use of barcodes and scanning procedures however are not lost, and this surgical role blurs with that of cashier—commodifying and extracting value through the denial of the body as whole (rather a rational composite of itemized parts.) Certain scans access animated recollections from my experiences as a student in the anatomy morgue.These recollections are somewhat poetic and address the phenomena of de-humanization of the corpse as it is de-constructed and subsequently re-configured through dissection.These musings question the rationalization processes of western bio-medical practice and search for a point of empathy with the human subject.The sliced human data-set used for Items 1-2,000 is exported from the National Institute of Health’s Visible Human Project: a multimillion dollar endeavor, in which a death-row inmate was given lethal injection, embedded in a wax-like gelatin, and sliced into 2,000 slices which were photographed and digitized. Certainly Foucault would have found the Visible Human project fascinating as the disciplined body of the prisoner is subjected to the ultimate surveillance process (minute dissection) and his body, essentially”drawn and quartered” in the ultimate spectacular punishment. The recollection movies contain varied image sources. Some diagrams are appropriated from student dissection manuals; other images are scanned from my own sketchbooks (near the end of my pre-med studies, I often returned to the anatomy lab after hours to make pen and ink drawings of the corpse); while others utilize medical data sets which I have de-convolved using bio-medical software, at Pittsburgh’s Science and Technology Center.

The installation deals with the flatness of the primary icon of our digital culture — the monitor. Any information on the monitor is “flat”; the idea of 3D in an electronic landscape is just an idea —a complicated mental accomplishment to trick spatial sensation. Along one corner of the gallery two rows of four monitors each are hanging from the ceiling. Forming a right angle with four monitors on each side, the corner itself becomes the crucial object in space. The image on the eight monochrome monitors is a static grid of vertical thin lines without any spatial depth. A second circular grid of vertical thin lines moves very slowly from the left outside monitor to the center monitors to the right outside monitor. At the same time an additional circular grid progresses in a symmetrical movement from the right to the center and to the left. Another lethargic temporal cycle is defined by the gradual dissolve of the grids by lowering the contrast of the dark and light lines till they merge in a monochrome flat color — all monitors show the same monochrome rectangle. The spatial movement comes to a halt until the contrast is increased and the grids become visible again. Three sound sources (left/center/right) are synchronized to all spatial movements on the monitors and the slow dissolve of the grid. Short acoustic signals follow the movement of the grids and the level of the grids’ contrast defines the volume of the tones. As soon as the grid dissolves into the monochrome color the differentiated sound signals fade into a uniform and even flow of gray noise. When the visual grid comes back the tones emerge again and the gray noise fades out slowly. Our attention is slowed down and focused on the gradual changes in time that characterize our perception of space. Space itself cannot be experienced by our visual sense because it is empty, void. We only see the ‘object’ next to it, the walls idealized as planes. A plane is the opposite of space but it defines space in the only possible way as its negative. The plane itself is only present in its (negative) relationship to space. We can think of a single plane but its only ‘place’ is imagination. In case of planes as the surrounding of space we see them as simple geometric shapes. Their boundaries are idealized as lines. A line is the opposite of a plane but it defines a plane in the only possible way as its negative. The phenomenology of our spatial perception is chronological. We don’t see “space”, we see changes in our visual field interpreted as “something new” that reminds us of a previous experience called “space”. The next spatial/visual change enables us to re-interpret the first idea of this space and limits this interpretation to certain possibilities — we measure, we start to count.

Interactive Poem is a new type of poem, created by you and a computer agent, collaborating in a poetic world full of inspiration, emotion and sensitivity. The concept of this interactive poem is based on conventional poetry, but goes beyond traditional limits by introducing the capability of interaction. You and a computer agent create a dialogue by exchanging short poetic phrases, and through this exchange produce a new poetic world that integrates the poetic world of the agent with your own.

Interaction: A computer agent called “MUSE” who has been carefully designed with a face suitable for expressing the emotion of a poetic world, appears on the screen. She will utter a short poetic phrase to you. Hearing it allows you to enter the world of the poem and, at the same time, feel an impulse to respond by uttering one of the optional phrases or by creating your own poetic phrase. Exchanging poetic phrases through this interactive processes allows you and MUSE to become collaborative poets who generate a new poem and a new poetic world. The interaction mechanism operates as follows.

1)    When MUSE utters a phrase, the recognition process is activated. A participant then utters a phrase and it is recognized by the phrase recognition function, which uses the lexicon subset corresponding to the next set of phrases in the transition network. At the same time, emotion contained in the utterance is recognized by the emotion recognition function.

2)    Based on information pertaining to recognition and the transition network, reaction of the system is decided. The facial expression of MUSE changes according to the results of emotion recognition, and the phrase MUSE utters is based on the results of phrase recognition and the transition network. The background scene changes as the transitions continue.

3)    In the above stated manner, poetic phrases between MUSE and the participant are consecutively produced.

The speech recognition unit has two different speech recognition functions: phrase recognition and emotion recognition. To recognition each phrase uttered by a participant, HMM (hidden Markov model) based speaker-independent speech recognition technology has been adopted. Each phrase to be uttered is represented in the form of a phoneme sequence and is stored in the lexicon. To simultaneously detect the emotional state of a participant, the emotion recognition function is introduced. A neural network architecture has been adopted as the basic architecture for emotion recognition. This neural network is trained by using the utterances of many speakers to express the eight emotional states of joy, happiness, anger, fear, teasing, disgust, disappointment, and emotionless. As such, speaker-independent and content-independent emotion recognition is realized.

Internationally renowned artist Perry Hoberman brings his work to the UK for the first time, with the exhibition of a new commission, System Update, and an earlier work, Faraday’s Garden. Hoberman re-functionalises the everyday environment, combining high level new technology with familiar mundane materials, viewing the contemporary proliferation of consumer goods and gadgets with a mixture of affection, irreverent pranksterism and intelligent satire.

Internationally renowned artist Perry Hoberman brings his work to the UK for the first time, with the exhibition of a new commission, System Update, and an earlier work, Faraday’s Garden. Hoberman re-functionalises the everyday environment, combining high level new technology with familiar mundane materials, viewing the contemporary proliferation of consumer goods and gadgets with a mixture of affection, irreverent pranksterism and intelligent satire.