Art Events Data Table

I attended my father’s funeral in Korea. When I returned to the United States, I still felt a great sadness and the need to express my sorrow. As usual, I turned to my video camera. The title, Iris, is both the eye of the camera, which I opened to allow in a flood of white light that produced blurred images like the images I saw through my tears, and also the iris of my own eye. In Korea, a person opens his heart through the opening of the eyes. The style of the imagery conveys its meaning and emotional content more than the subject matter. The latter matters to the extent that the viewer is alienated from the passing figures who are merely anonymous, passing limbs and wheels, not whole individuals.

This film describes a crossing of the Grand Canal in Venice. During the voyage, objects related ééto the work of the painter Duchamp begin to appear. The disguises of the images lead us to a semiotic reading of their content. The film ends with an image of the painting, L’origine du Monde by Courbet, installed in place of the woman in Duchamp’s last work. During the film, the iconic objects therefore define the transformation from the Grand Canal to an installation to be viewed. The film makes a pastiche of creation by establishing a link between the centuries and culture, mixing the imaginary with the everyday.

In the beginning, a gray desert-like countryside, checkered with yellow lines. At the end, a very colourful picture, covered with organic materials and a labyrinth of human bodies. Between the two, a love story plays with our attention.

A co-production Agave s.a. / Canal+ / Club d’investissement Media with the participation of Centre National de la Cinematographie Nouvelles Technologies and Compte de Soutien a I’Industrie des Programmes Audiovisuels of France.

A ten-minute work for computer and video, it features two sequences, one of Superstars zooming in and a zoom out of Bernadetta and the explosion. Assistant: Kobe Matthys

A mixture between raves, poetry, video, contemporary art and media criticism, the collaborative and chaotic creative process of the local multimedia group Synergie offers a technological entertainment that has the curious laughing, provokes the bored and has you thinking while dancing. Created for ISEA 95 with minimal resources, I/O’s will be the occasion to unveil the results of their latest foray into the musical domain. The visuals accompanying the show and the rest of the evening will definitely show a touch of satyricism towards the “technology as an answer to all our problems” so often met these days.

Granular Synthesis have defined their work with video technology as an “audio-visual synthesizer”. Since 1992, they have developed “Modell” to present their investigations to the public. The motto of the current Modell 5 is motion control. The audience is confronted with four virtual clones of a human head re-animated by means of computer technology: a digital counter-design is generated on the basis of real-life actions by the performer Akemi Takeya. Each performance of Modell 5 is based on continuously developing basic material.

The audience is confronted with four virtual clones of a human head re-animated by means of computer technology: a digital counter-design is generated on the basis of real-life actions by the performer Akemi Takeya.

In 1912, using Mallarme’s vision of Debussy’s music, Nijinski created L’Apres-midi d’un faune for the Russian Ballet in Paris under the direction of Diaghilev. In 1987, Marie Chouinard choreographed her prelude based on Nijinski’s creation: a ground-based, profiled and horizontal opus awakening memories of Egyptian frescoes and Greek vases. The seven nymphs of the original work become dream-like creatures seen through light beams. Nijinski’s male character is here performed by a woman, a quite unusual occurrence.
Choreography: Marie Chouinard, dancer: Pamela Newell, coach: Daniel Hetier, lighting design: Alain Lortie, Costume design: Luc Courchesne, Louis Montpetit, Marie Chouinard, realization of the costume: Anne Remillard, Makeup: Jacques Lee Pelletier, Technical director: Axel Morgenthaler, Lighting: Philippe Dupeyroux, sound Engineer: Eddy Friedman.

Virtual reality is the emergent sixth sense. At the end of the 19th century, magicians and mediums used specially constructed furniture as gateways to the spirit world. Now we use video monitors, datagloves, force feedback sensors to view apparitions… fly among spirits.

Automatic Descriptions is inspired by the arcane technology of the Spiritualists and the magic of virtual reality. Hyperextended senses take us to places possibly visited by psychics and mystics. At the end of the nineteenth century, mediums used specially constructed furniture as gateways to the spirit world. At the end of the twentieth century, we use video monitors, datagloves, force feedback sensors to view apparitions. Using a phonograph and a “seance table” (a small wooden table with embedded ultrasound and Hall-effect sensors), I conjure voices from other worlds.

Presenting virtuoso music for humans and machines, this performance seeks to overload the senses, seduce the mind, re-configure the virtual ear and splay it across the room.

1st set: “Speed Spam” -an intense montage of text-audio-video-clips by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker and Steve Gibson, followed by live electronics by Steve Gibson and David Kristian.

2nd set: music from “SPASM” and “let the dead bury the living”, including the premiere of a video by Swedish film maker Bert Deivert.

An audience driven interactive fiction. The 1994 televised O.J. Simpson chase provides a starting point for this cinematic artwork. Although the chase included a famous star, a plethora of media gear, and took place near the heart of American fiction (Hollywood), we didn’t see a dramatic conclusion. The program polls the audience for demographic data and political views and generates a scenario specifically tailored for its consumption. This scenario begins with the actual chase, but quickly adopts a familiar structure in which heroes and villains struggle in cliffhanger moments.

Fleabotics is a spontaneously generated narrative in the tradition of free improvisation. They create a hypermedia drama through live video projections, onscreen text, electronic and acoustic musics. The improvised narrative unfolds by the graces of the players’ inter-wired media, the audiences’ attentions shifting from the created art to the creators themselves. The show was selected as a keynote event at this year’s International Computer Music Conference (Banff Center, Sept. 4th).

Fleabotics — Hypermedia improvisations for a group instrument: a peopled body and its collected brain, is a spontaneously generated narrative, articulates from the playground, elaborating the political metaphor inherent in the tradition of free improvisation. The instant cinema is shaped by all performers: contributing to the visual realm through MIDI controlled lighting, video mixing and switching, motorized character control and improvising on screen subtext. A feedback loop is effected by the images themselves playing music via the ‘Very Nervous System’.

With the assistance of: The Canada Council-Media Arts, Canada Council-Touring Office, Banff Centre of the Arts, Midivox, Eastside Wondertree Independant Elementary School of Vancouver.

A performance featuring mutant-like figures to whom video prosthetics have been transplanted. These videocreatures are colourful beings in constant mutation, true human sculptures radiating a Brazilian fragrance. Come and meet the Bolero Singer, the Videopuppet and the Electronic Clown.

This 1995 creation is the result of a one-year collaboration with the Institute for Studies in the Arts of Arizona State University (USA).

A multimedia theatre piece and an interactive environment, this work outlines a forensic investigation that becomes a simultaneous exploration of a city and investigation of a survival and a death. A child has been killed – the murderous gesture of an individual, or the result of a city crumbling under the weight of parasitic neglect? Through out the investigation, the pathologist contends with an identity swamped in technological dependence, while the coroner struggles with her own buried past, and the moral dilemma of the murdered child.

Genesis After Babel is a performance art “loop”. The creation theme of Genesis is used as a “language loop” to address Steiner’s theory expressed in “After Babel” of the impossibility of true translation between different languages. The loop should personify the image of the ancient uroboros (the serpent eating its tail), originally the symbol of the self-perpetuating image of Man; now come to represent the loop of technology’s self-generating inter-dependence within a world of created image and intelligence.

Created during a summer residency at Montreal’s Musk d’art contemporain, this Robert Lepage play is shown for the first time, in experimental form to the ISEA95 public, as the first draft of a theatre work in progress inspired by William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Through his unique treatment of space and scenic effects, Lepage gives new life to an inescapable character in the history of theatre in the western world by delving into family, insanity and bereavement issues. This latest creation completes the trilogy of solo shows begun with Vinci and followed by Les Aiguilles et l’Opium. The production of Elseneur is the result of the Musk d’art contemporain’s first residency experience.

I created this work by linking, in chronological order, fragments of my own original master tapes of composed music and sound design, made for television from 1989 to 1994. Taken out of its original context of television, this re-combining creates a new context that dictates what fits and functions. As in any environment, maximum fit is the basis for evolution and, by trial and error, these pieces fall together again to be Music.

The work consists of a series of performance pieces based on recordings and journal entries from my first trip to India. It is a dramatic treatment of my encounters with this culture and the surprises, difficulties and excitements it holds for many visitors from urban North American/European origin. In today’s performance of India Sound Journal, you will hear selected excerpts from this larger work-in-progress.

The composer plays in real time with the physical parameters (mass, gravity, forces) of a virtual pendulum which, in turn, triggers sounds according to its speed and position. Perceiving it only through the sounds it makes, one gets the feeling of “real” movement. Depending on the parameters’ values and on the sounds used, the results are either rather organic or very machine-like. An hypnotic swing plays hide and seek with sounds and memory, creating an atmosphere where nothing remains certain…

A musical composition for marimba and tape, its sonic sources are quotes from Varese and loops from various industrial sources pushed to the extreme limit of distortion. The sound of the marimba is thus transformed to merge with the tape. A work such as this could not have been possible without the complicity of its performer, Daniel Pancaldi (first North American graduate marimba artist) for whom it was created.

This work is the result of a live, on-stage art performance by Robin Noorda and Peter Sweenen, held on May 17, 1994 in the Jaarbeurs Utrecht, the Netherlands. The event was staged at the occasion of the Jaarbeurs’ first Imagination trade show, on digital imaging. The aim of the project was to cross space and time by means of a desktop video conferencing system, catching the Now Moment on a virtual canvas. Working simultaneously with artists in Boston, Sydney and Tokyo, we all had access to remote control cameras (pan, tilt, zoom & focus) on rooftops positioned at different locations all over the world. Each artist was able to grab images, manipulate them and include them in the collage in real time, while seeing the complete work in progress. The image was also projected in front of a live audience of some 500 people in Utrecht. Participating artists were Diana Roman (Boston), Sui Moritu (Tokyo), Josephine Grieve (Sydney), Peter Sweenen & Robin Noorda (Utrecht). Producer of the event was Wim van der Plas, The Netherlands.

Les vusions was commissioned by GMEB (France) for the 500th birthday of Francois Rabelais. Structures in the work are drawn from the sound and coherence of Rabelais’ language. In the title, the vowel i replaces the vowel u. The vowel u was treated in a particular fashion by Rabelais: prolonged, filtered, transposed. Analogous to the sound u is the sound of horns and brass. Their calling nature unifies the visionary possibilities of 1494 with those of 1994, particularly in South Africa.

This is an electroacoustic composition that explores the nature of earthquakes and their evolutionary patterns. The term was coined by a geologist after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake in describing how tectonic forces along each side of a fault line begin to move in opposite directions causing the rock to bend. The bending rock produces a great strain and in the weakest areas will fracture. This is followed by a rebounding on each side of the fracture. When a fault ruptures, the elastic energy stored in the rocks is released as heat and as elastic waves. The waves are the earthquake. Their intensity is measured by the storage of elastic energy and the duration or time it takes for the rebound to occur.

New pop media entities manufactured for you. We are never what you think we are. We inhabit the pop culture landscape of digital/analog media, integrated as new intelligent Super Deformed media bytes. Our mission is to reconstruct the sonic landscape in order to preserve imagination.

Yellow Simulation is a composition of 49 computer generated images. The individual prints are made using a program called “Automatic Sketch Artist” with compositional data set to favor “yellow”. The presented prints show only examples of the process “yellow”. These moments, taken from a dynamic image can never fully describe the algorithmic process but only simulate it. A peculiarity of “Yellow Simulation” is the non-chronological order of the prints. As the composition is set for a dynamic aesthetic, it became necessary to find a complimentary static composition. “Yellow Simulation” therefore does not show a simple sequence of moments, but rather a specific static composition.

This animation is based on a representation of the data structure that comprises the music: one “sees” the music as one hears it. The piece has its basis in the idea of exploring a set of ratios through synthetic and natural sound. The timbres of the piece are composed without regard for the referentiality of the recorded material but rather with a strictness in relation to the ratios. The first part is realized through synthesis only, with the introduction of natural sound in the middle of the piece.

This piece is a dialogue between a turntable manipulator and an electroacoustician at a sound console. Using scratches, bumps, varying speeds and collages, they improvise in order to integrate the sonic matter of vinyl records, an outdated technology and reuse it as a new instrument for artists in search of innovation. At the turntable: Martin Tetreault, a vinyl dj sonic composer working in theatre, visual arts, performances and music. An ACREQ commission with the support of the Canada Council, with thanks to Lynda Clouette, Alain Thibault, Radio-Canada, Mario Gauthier, Raffi Armenian, Henri Bergeron, Edgar Fruitier and Ginette Bellavance.

This is a first perusal through material assembled during a stay in South India in 1994-95.­ After images of a blackened sub-continent and its uncertain modernity, of the stunned silence of the sholas and the quiet rage of daily transactions. Shola-INversion is the documentary of an unconditional welcome… Sound was treated with a number of frequency-domain and time-domain processes.

In the form of a triptych, this piece presents two fantasies on mechanical movement (Move) and on the working of our imagination (Syntasia). Fantasia was realized at the Squeeze studio and at Concordia University, with the help of grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec, and the Canada Council. The piece was commissioned by (‘Association pour la creation et la recherche en electroacoustic du Quebec (ACREQ).

Jurel is based on flamenco music which can be very virtuosic, combining singing, guitar, clapping, dancing and “jaleos” (shouting to encourage dancers and guitar performers). The whole result is a rhythmically precise and coherent mix of sounds and music with strong drive and expressivity. I have extrapolated a new type of flamenco based on its own elements. The title comes from a phrase used to encourage performers: “Vamos ya, jurel” (go ahead, jurel). Jurel was produced at the LIEM-CDMC Laboratory (Madrid) and the GMEB (Bourges).

Anchorings/Arrows is built up of sounds from a number of different acoustic instruments, computer-processed and then digitally mixed. We tried out a particular acoustic idea, that of a continually varying acoustic space where no sound stays at any fixed point. The work may be seen as a tribute to music, anchored in music history, but also pointing towards the wonderfully mysterious and mythical future. This work received an honorary mention at Prix Ars Electronica ’93.

Anchorings/Arrows is built up of sounds from a number of different acoustic instruments, computer-processed and then digitally mixed. We tried out a particular acoustic idea, that of a continually varying acoustic space where no sound stays at any fixed point.

“…here, on the roof of the world, I feel a shadow of uneasiness… It’s not at all the height, nor the kind of suction exerted by the abrupt depths and its emptiness which troubles me. It’s an altogether different emptiness which affects an altogether different sense… the essence of solitude…” (Paul Valery, Le Solitaire). Le vertige inconnu (Unknown Vertigo) is a commission from the GMEB. It was selected for ICMC (International Computer Music Conference) 1994 in Denmark and received the Stockholm Electronic Arts Award that same year.

These lines from John Ashberry’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror describe the behavior of the sound objects I worked with: “Like a wave breaking upon a rock, giving up its shape in a gesture which expresses that shape”. Events in WaveBreak are nearly devoid of any steady-state; each event evolves continuously toward the next, the outcome remaining uncertain until the event has already passed. This concentration upon the unfolding of individual sounds results in a kind of monody, although at some points more than one soundstream is presented.

A game of ambiguity. Hesitation between sense and sound, the said and the suggested, the face and the mask, the real and the virtual. Uncertainty between opaqueness and transparence. Music of illusion. Dedicated to Claude Vivier and an homage to the composers of “Evenements du neuf”: Evangelista, Gougeon, Rea. Mutation of the musical instrument: mobility, relief, color among the shadows.

Hybris is a work scored for g-flute, bass clarinet and Kyma/Capybara, a real-time DSP system. Each of three parts represents a different sonic environment emerging from algorithms which transform the instrumental sounds. Especially relevant is the processing technique of real-time polyphonic time-shifting. The performance is a process of exploration by means of which an actual shape is given to only a subset of the potential emerging musical properties, while other unheard possibilities remain submerged in the realm of the virtually available.

This work is an interactive software composition for voice and percussion (sacred objects stepped on). On stage, musicians evoke and respond to musical behaviours defined by the composer’s software (people glimpsed through hotel windows). The result is a real-time collaboration between performers, software, instruments, and any tempted spirits (hidden marks of beauty). This work was commissioned with the assistance of the Canada Council. Daniel Scheidt -software; Erin Michie – text; Fides Krucker -voice; Trevor Tureski – percussion.

Der Raum Traum (1994) uses as its sound material the rubbing and beating of an empty petrol can. Distrak-Sillalla (1992) is based on a search for a compositional language in relation to the sound materials, which in their acoustic profiles are a collection of cultivated concrete sounds (natural objects, machines). Plastique sans titre (1994) is based on three different sound characters: the recording of a plastic bag, the aforementioned petrol can, and water.

Der Raum Traum (1994) uses as its sound material the rubbing and beating of an empty petrol can

The Language of Dream is an electroacoustic performance piece using a system of laser beams and optical sensors to detect the gestures of a performer. Signals are sent to a computer which responds by initiating various sound events. The laser beams originate at a point above and behind the performer, and are directed toward sensors along the front edge of the stage. This forms an angled, fan-shaped array of beams that provides the audience with strong visual feedback relating the gestures to the sound.

Unes, Voix de Basse arose from a meeting with Jean Pierre Robert, instrumentalist and author of a work on contrabass playing styles. The tape part, with which the player is in constant relationship in terms of sound, is conceived as a unique instrument in its own right. The instrumentalist draws upon the colours of the tape for the sound materials of the live instrument. The piece functions either as a mixed piece with tape, or employs digital sequences triggered by the player.

Migrations is a live electronic work. The sounds of the work are for the most part recordings produced using light-sensitive microphones. Other sounds are obtained by friction on materials whose resonance has been amplified. The sounds take their place in a temporal series determined by the working of a group of electronic “keys”. These keys are directed by several audio cassette players which are never positioned in exactly the same manner so that the relationship between the sounds remains largely unpredictable.

The sounds of the work are for the most part recordings produced using light-sensitive microphones. Other sounds are obtained by friction on materials whose resonance has been amplified. The sounds take their place in a temporal series determined by the working of a group of electronic “keys”. These keys are directed by several audio cassette players which are never positioned in exactly the same manner so that the relationship between the sounds remains largely unpredictable.

In a Visible Darkness uses sounds which originate from collaborations with Pink Ink Theatre and Ghanaian musician-dancer Modesto Amegago. You are in a concert hall. The lights have been dimmed. It is time to listen for images. In effect, it is time to hear what is normally seen. The acousmatic story-tellers and listeners see the “music” the same way that Homer “saw” a sunrise.

Reaching For Tomorrow was composed in the spring and summer of 1995 at the Simon Fraser University Sonic Studio.

Crystal Music is a music of forms, colors and materials that stand out due to their kinetic energies and the perspective given them in the interior space of the work. Like stained glass, the material has been expanded, ground, transmuted in the fiery furnaces of experimentation. Like crystal, it has been chiseled by the imagination which gives to these transparencies the power of illusion. The work was composed for the most part using the Common Lisp Music program of Bill Schottstaedt of CCRMA (Stanford University) during 1992-1993.

Improvised and composed works are performed using the computer as an integral member of a musical ensemble. The players have extensive experience in performing with artificially-intelligent composition software. A new improvisation environment is presented in which the software tracks and responds to an integration of the contributions of several players, including the program itself. The computer analyzes data from a sax/bass clarinet and violin (Kimura) via a pitch-to-MIDI converter and then generates another voice in an ensemble texture in real time.

A concert suite made from music composed for a radio adaptation of The Little Prince>> by Antoine de St-Exupery that was produced for Radio-Canada by Odile Magnan to whom it is dedicated. It is the third piece of a cycle on the use of the voice in acousmatic music, mostly with onomatopoeias. It was composed in 1995 through a grant of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec and commissioned by the Banff Centre for the Arts with the financial help of the Canada Council for the 1995 International Computer Music Conference.

The creation of this work was rendered possible by the technological limits of the UPIC real-time computer, a system developed under the instructions of composer Iannis Xenakis. Its strength resides in the graphical interface controlling a 64-bit Fujitsu DSP chip. The hardware allows for 64 waveforms to be played at any time within a range of 2 to 20 khz! My experience with this system was garnered over a period of five years. Timbre is used as a variable to create this poetic atmosphere. In at least one part of the piece, I am reminded of the classic of this genre Gesang der Jünglinge by K. Stockhausen…

The Shadow of the Mosque is a variation on the soundscape which surrounded me during a year-long stay in Central Java, Indonesia. Processed soundscape recordings, transfigured Tibetan Buddhist horns, Catholic funeral hymns in Javanese, all represent profound elements from my aural frame-of-mind. Mantra-Pande is a tape piece utilizing samplers, analog and digital signal processing, brass bells, and soundscape recordings. A Panda is a member of the fire and metal working clan of Hindu Bali. In preparation for forging the iron and bronze ceremonial daggers and musical instruments, a period of intense spiritual preparation takes place.

This work explores the psychological power of combined aural and visual symbolism. Certain classes of sounds and images may be imprinted on our genetic memories or our collective unconscious. They may stir within us memories from ancient times, from before our birth, or even from before the origin of our species, generating profound and unpredictable emotional resonances unique to every listener. The work employs Buchla Lightning, computer electronics, live processed sounds and speech, tape, and a photomontage projection with photography by Egon Dubois.

Curator Statement:

The Symposium will be building its own virtual architecture and inviting artists from around the world to play a part in the TISEA telecommunity. This networked environment will be available through public access terminals at TISEA and will include biographical material, an online library and an electronic forum called “Virtual Cultures on the Net”, pulling in responses from around the world.

Participating Systems:

– American Indian Telecommunications/Dakotaa BBS
– Artsnet
– Arts Wire
– Usenet
– The Well

An interactive telematic terminal operated by Scot Art, Jason Gee and System X, Telemat is a guided tour of the virtual terrain of the global network. The visitor is taken through a dataspace which has no physical walls, and may well encompass the world, or may lie in some other direction. The dataspace has been interactively ‘designed’ from the ground up by a small group of artists over the preceding two years. The interaction has been via System-X, a Sydney-based telecommunications system for artists working in the electronic domain.

Telemat provides interaction via a store-and-forward mechanism between visitors, System-X artists and denizens of the global net. It also incorporates a display terminal for image and sound from the virtual gallery, a System-X project that allows visual and sonic artists to share work and collaborate via the system. Telemat, like System-X seeks to originate critical thought about the nature of information storage and control, data networks, and how art might be practised in this media. Above all, it seeks to provide a context for participants, local and telematic, to provide their own content.

Producers Statement

Radio broadcast

We live in a shrinking world. Previously we began by exploring the world around us. Having explored that world we then began to explore the world that was beyond us, the extraterrestrial world. Whilst that project remains unfinished we have now begun to explore another, more intimate world – one that we hardly realised existed before the invention of the microscope: the atomic world.

Nanotechnology is the latest buzzword in the jargon of astrophysicists, molecular biologists, and chemists – the development of which straddles each of these diverse disciplines. lt is a development that entails a molecular revolution in the way we are able to perceive and deal with the very building blocks of matter. The term nano, meaning a billionth, is an indication of the terms of scale that the new technology deals with.

This program is a fragmented sound map which seeks to image the terrain of fundamental quantum reality. It is a strange world of paradoxical reality. Invariably, when scientists talk of the atomic world, they begin talking about the blurring of the fundamental distinction between energy and matter.

The venture into this endophysical realm has been touted as “the most powerful technology that the world has yet developed”. This being so it is seen as a portent of things to come: the abolition of disease, increased longevity, minimised environmental pollution and the like. Yet the new technology has its critics who are concerned about the moral and ethical dilemmas which they see as the outcome of the development of such a radical technology.
The voices of the following will be heard during the program:

1. K. Eric Drexler, Visiting Scholar, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University
2. Jean-Marie Lehn, Universite Louis Pasteur, Nobel Prize for Chemistry 1989
3. Richard P Feynman, Nobel Prize for Physics 1965
4. Ralph Merkle, Xerox, Palo Alto Research Centre
5. Stuart Hameroff, anaesthesiologist, Department of Anaesthesiology, University of Arizona
6. Lester Milbrath, Emeritus Professor, Environment and Society,
7. Suny Stephen Mill, Centre for National Policy Research, Department of Sociology, University of Wollongong

Executive Producer: Tony McGregor
Producers: Brad Miller and Peter Lowe
Mix: Andrew Clarke-Nash
Original recordings: John Jacobs, Ian Andrews and Jason Gee
Pre-production: Steve Tilleys
Special Thanks: Roz Cheney, Heather Grace-Jones, Simon Mahoney and Gary Bradbury

This is a mobile sound environment project consisting of 7 ‘Audio Ballerinas’ wearing electro-acoustic skirts. This performance series was created on commission for the festival ‘Les Arts au Soleil’ (the ‘Arts in the Sun’) in summer of 1990 for the Lille, Pas-de-Calais area of France.

The female performers wear ‘Audio Tutus’ that are equipped with digital memories and looping devices (essentially mini-samplers) that enable them to interact directly with their environment by recording live sounds and then processing and amplifying them.

In addition to being able to digitally record musical instruments or voices in their proximity, they are also equipped with radio receivers, contact microphones, amplifiers and light sensors that enable them to produce, mix, and multiply their own sounds and compose them as a multi-acoustic and environmental concert.
Each electronic tutu (approximately 20 watts, 12 volt) is made of plexiglass and powered by either solar cells or batteries depending on whether they are performing indoors or outdoors, at night or in the daytime.

“Mutual Interactions” (1992) for two voices and two samplers with Lightning MIDI controller. Collaboration with Amanda Stewart. Emergency solo version performed by W. Burt, electronics and voices at Third International Symposium on Electronic Art, Sydney, Nov. 13, ’92 (10 mins)

We collaborate because it’s fun. It’s fun to explore the voice. It’s fun to be in a situation of feedback between people, their voices, and machines. It’s fun to be in an artistic situation where you don’t know what’s coming next. It may also be politically useful, socially responsible, and helpful to develop both our own consciousnesses and abilities and those of friends

It seems to be the accepted theory that the prehistory of Performance Art in this century began when the first Futurist Manifesto was published in 1909 by Filippo Tommasso Marinetti. The main concept of the writing was to attack the establishment value of the arts in that time. The movement created art works negating the limit and boundary of the old art concept. 80 years later, having seen Dada, Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, Happenings, Events, and Fluxus, the core concept of the 1990’s Performance Art somehow still seems to resemble that of Futurism. Should we, performance artists in the 1990’s, be criticised as repeaters?

Or…

Should we blame societies which always have narrow sectionalism, or which only reluctantly allow interdisciplinary/inter-cultural discipline? (Do inter-cultural practices exist without leaning against the stronger culture?) It could be said that one of the functions of performance art has been working as anti-thesis. In the unstable, uncertain situation (as always) of the 1990’s Performance Art, being empowered by electric technology, will survive as a tool to resist exclusionism, closedness, and conservatism.

Melissa Lovric works with movement, computer generated slides and electronically interactive sound in her productions. Her movement piece for TISEA is for two dancers and draws primarily upon her studies in Japanese butoh dance.

This performance dance piece explores the interactive relationship between the performer’s movement, effects on lighting, sound, text and image. LifeForms, a 3 dimensional choreographic tool, is used to create movement for the performer as well as for the virtual performers and images projected into the space. The performer, wearing a wireless microphone controls lighting intensity, colour, and trajectory, via voice and pressure activated triggered events. The performer serves as a link via her own voice, body and movement, and the computer as midi interpreter connecting projected human forms, images, sound, and active moving light sources.

Frastagliate Onde is a composition based on an Italian translation of an anonymous Greek fragment. The Italian translation of this text is very interesting for its particular speech sounds. The piece has been developed from an analysis of a recitation of the text. The phonetic content of each word is processed in several modes. Every sound has been created using only the base text.

Traverser les grandes eaux is inspired by a phrase frequently encountered in the French translation of the I Ching: “It is advantageous to cross the great waters”. It is a prelude to a suite of sixty-four pieces under one minute in duration, inspired by the hexagrams of the Book of Changes. Pleine lune is an excerpt from Nuits sans parole. It plunges you into the sleepless, indigo night. Reponse impressionniste was created using sounds produced by the SYTER system (GRM, Paris).

Vôo is dedicated to the “nautas cosmicos, acuaticos e intelectuales.” – the discoverers and explorers of the universe, the seas or the mind. With the multilingual text being treated in a kaleidoscopic way, the composer tells the story of the opening of a new world – complete with the beauty and tragedy of unintended consequences.

The French writer Marcel Proust had an extremely acute sense of smell. Detailed, poignant descriptions of fragrances are frequent throughout his series of novels “Remembrance of Things Past”. I am extracting Proust’s olfactory descriptions from his novels and working them into an audio installation. All of the acoustic material in the installation are derived from French and English texts read by a woman and a man. At times, the texts are absolutely clear and intelligible. At other times, the text is transformed electronically to produce sweeping, slowly evolving gestures, in the relaxed style of Proust’s prose. The electronic transformation of the text is done using “Wave” signal processing software.

All of the acoustic material in the installation are derived from French and English texts read by a woman and a man. At times, the texts are absolutely clear and intelligible. At other times, the text is transformed electronically to produce sweeping, slowly evolving gestures, in the relaxed style of Proust’s prose. The electronic transformation of the text is done using “Wave” signal processing software.

This work is concerned with transformations between timbre and pitch. Five sound masses are transformed primarily by an elliptical filter. The sound masses were created by sampling a spoon hitting a pot lid. This source sound was stretched, reversed and transposed and then layered to produce the sound masses. Other Cmix processing involved room simulation and flanging to create a sensation of a slow pulsing timbre. This work perhaps reflects the Buddhist and Taoist ideas of a connection between the one, the “self” and the many manifestations in the world.

Five sound masses are transformed primarily by an elliptical filter. The sound masses were created by sampling a spoon hitting a pot lid. This source sound was stretched, reversed and transposed and then layered to produce the sound masses. Other Cmix processing involved room simulation and flanging to create a sensation of a slow pulsing timbre.

Traces is the third in a series of compositions for soloist and interactive electronics. The electronic requirements of these pieces are kept to a minimum. A Macintosh computer, a pitch-to-MIDI converter and a single commercial synthesizer. Software, written using the Max programming language, responds to the live performance, and controls all aspects of the electroacoustic sounds that are produced by the synthesizer. The piece explores the relation between melody and harmony by granulizing and rapidly repeating the melodic material presented by the clarinet.

Traces was commissioned by Jean-Guy Boisvert with the assistance of the Canada Council.

These three pieces are computer-generated compositions realized at the Brooklyn College Center Computer Music directed by Charles Dodge.

Notes on the obliteration of language and memory            Throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s, the American government saw Vietnam as a sinister and mortal enemy. Twenty years later, Vietnam is seen as an unexploited market for American business, a source of cheap labor for American industry, and a tourist opportunity for American vacationers. This program brings together the voices of participants and their successors for a look at the war and what it did, and continues to do. The work is a personal essay, integrating the methods of feature, drama, and acoustic art.

In his electroacoustic work, the composer has explored ways of manipulating technology to extend the sound world of Andean instruments. This program of works for charango and tape includes his own Wounded Angel and two pieces recently composed for him: Lucero by Michael Rosas Cobian (special mention at Ars Electronica ’93) and Erinyes by Andrew Lovett.

Sub-titled Resonance #1 for clarinet and tape, this piece was commissioned by Francois Houle with assistance from the Canada Council. It was premiered on November 7, 1994 at a Vancouver New Music Society concert and is featured on the CD L’Ivresse de la vitesse on the Empreintes DIGITALes label.

This is a radiophonic work, the third part of a trilogy. Seven dances in lines and colours are transformed into musical scores. Each sequence is composed of numerous sounds determined by the segment’s position in the score. The one hundred and thirty-seven sounds are derived from diverse sources. The final work exists in German and French language versions for stereo radio as well as an eight-track version for public performance on CD accompanied by slide projections.

This three-movement work is part of an ongoing research on the theme of the body and its absence in listening to music. All of the sounds (electronically elaborated) originate from a bass recorder. The piece is presented with a real recorder on a stand, the audience around it, and four loudspeakers around the audience. It was realized with the PODX system at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby (Canada) and at Agon in Milan (Italy) using real-time granular synthesis and block-reading technique.

All of the sounds (electronically elaborated) originate from a bass recorder. The piece is presented with a real recorder on a stand, the audience around it, and four loudspeakers around the audience.

This is a collection of short improvisational pieces for electronic sounds and percussion and (occasionally) other instruments. Several of the pieces are abstractions of jazz classics, sometimes recognizable, sometimes not. The songs provide a starting point, a way of thinking about the music, and a lyrical surface to an underlying complexity. With Jon Williams.

This is an experimental work attempting to integrate critical and creative approaches. It is conceived as a collaboration between a performer-composer and a sound theorist who found themselves closely engaged in similar ideas. In the “philosophonics of space”, a paper presented at ISEA 94 by Frances Dyson, she described a new context in which to “hear” a particularly sound-drenched text by Derrida, Cendres (1987). In Cendres, Derrida asks how the traces of being, the cinders still burning in our memories of the Holocaust, still calling within the silence of cultural amnesia, can be made into sound. The same sonic perspective which Dyson explores in her paper had also provided the impetus for Michael Century’s work-in-progress Cendres-Fragments (93-94) for a live pianist, player piano and computer software.

La guerra dei dischi (The Records War) is a radio-film with text by Stefano Benni based on the novel Terra!. It features the voices of Giovanna Mori, Mirella Mazzeranghi, Rosa Masciopinto, Giorgio Battistelli and Marco Carlaccini, as well as Fernando Fera, electric guitar, Federico Mondelci, saxophone, and Luigi Ceccarelli, sampling, programming and mixing. The work is edited by Maurizio Giri, and was produced at the Centro Produzione Informatica Musicale (Rome) by RAI-Radiotre and Centro Produzione Informatica Musicale.

This is an interactive rhythm piece using six to twelve players at stations separated by about fifty feet. Each station consists of a small computer-music system with its own loudspeaker. The stations are connected by one MIDI cable, creating a single data chain. A master-controller station sends timing pulses and coordination signals to the satellites. The location of stations is used to exploit the distance and resonance effects of the performance space, so that the environment itself is played like the membrane of a drum.

Each station consists of a small computer-music system with its own loudspeaker. The stations are connected by one MIDI cable, creating a single data chain. A master-controller station sends timing pulses and coordination signals to the satellites.

Mary Stuart was removed from her subjects for the last 14 years of her life. She spent most of her period of incarceration alternately writing letters to rally support for her release and embroidering tapestries of exotic and mystical beasts.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair to me” -German fairy tale

She was executed on the 8th of February, 1587. Her English captors went to great lengths to dispose of blood-stained remnants of the act so that no holy relics could circulate and inspire a Scottish backlash.

“I felt in my hands and in my heart a confused, singular, continual, sensual desire to bury my fingers in this charming rivulet of dead hair.” -Guy de Maupassant, A Woman’s Hair.

When the executioner held aloft the dead Queen’s head, the auburn tresses in his hand came apart from the skull and the head fell to the floor, revealing her real, prematurely greyed hair.

“All your hair, Melisande, all your hair is falling from the tower! I am holding it in my hands, against my mouth, in my arms… It lives like birds between my fingers, and it loves me, loves me more than you”. -Maeterlinck, PePeas et Melisande

The Host Body/Coupled Gestures: Event for Virtual Arm, Robot Manipulator and Third Hand is a computer generated human-like manipulator interactively controlled by VPL VR equipment. Data Gloves with flexion and position-orientation sensors and using a gesture-based command language allow real-time intuitive operation and additional extended capabilities. Functions are mapped to finger gestures, with parameters for each function allowing elaboration — for example the continuous rotation function can apply to the fingers as well as the wrist and the speed can be varied It is also hoped that hand state and motion gestures will also be recognised. The Cyber Glove, with finger abduction and thumb roll sensors will allow a more extensive gesture language. Another strategy that has been used is to only depend on a small number of gestures — with different functions mapped in different tables. By swapping tables, it is possible to access a new set of functions and parameters.

An Arm Editor allows the Virtual Arm to be customised for particular performances and virtual tasks — not being limited by anatomical or engineering constraints of the real world. Use of Limiters provide constraints that define the functional motion. The Virtual Arm is able to behave ambidextrously —as a left hand or right hand by switching the user’s control and simulating hands.
Some of the Virtual Arm’s extended capabilities include ‘stretching’ or telescoping of limb and finger segments, ‘grafting’ of extra hands on the arm and ‘cloning’ or calling up another arm. The ‘record and playback’ function allows the sampling and looping of motion sequences. A ‘clutch’ command enables the operator to freeze the arm, disengaging the simulated hand. For teleoperation systems such features as ‘locking’ — allowing the fixing of the limb in position for precise operations with the hand; in ‘macro mode’ complex commands can be generated with a single gesture and in ‘fine control’ delicate tasks can be completed by the transformation of large operator movements to small movements of the Virtual Arm.
Gesture interaction is an effective and efficient means of remote controlling robot manipulators. As the Virtual Arm is a generalised or universal robot with extended capabilities, it may be useful for tele-operation environments or it can be seen as a sophisticated human-like manipulator for handling objects in a virtual task environment.

Host Body/Coupled Gestures: Event for Virtual Arm, Robot Manipulator and Third Hand is an interactive event that controls counterpoints and choreographs the motions of the virtual arm, a robot manipulator, an electronic third hand and the arms of the body. It combines real-time gesture control of the Virtual Arm, pre-programmed robot scanning, symbiotic EMG activation of the Third Hand and improvised body movements. Sensors on the head and limbs allow the body to switch images from cameras positioned above the body, on the robot manipulator and from a miniature camera attached to the left arm — with the Virtual Arm being the default image. A relationship between body posture and images is established, with body movements determining the flow of images on the large screen — displayed either singly, superimposed or in split configurations. Amplified body and machine signals acoustically configure the virtual and robot operations. There is an interface and interplay of virtual and machine systems; of simulation and physical action; of actuation and automation. The interest is how electronic systems can extend performance parameters and how the body copes with the complexity of controlling information video and machine loops on-line and in real-time. The artist has always been intrigued by the phantom limb effect that amputees often experience —the body can now experience an additional virtual arm.

“God is perhaps not so much a region beyond knowledge as something prior to the sentences we speak”
-Michel Foucault

In many of my recent songs for synthesised voice I have treated speech melodies as musical material. By a process of computer analysis and re-synthesis I extract the melodic line of spoken language, involve it in a variety of compositional transformations, and apply the result to digital musical instruments. Along the way, the original voice becomes more or less disembodied, but retains much of the original spirit and meaning. With the computer analysis model I can alter voicing — changing the speech into drones or whispers, articulation rate — speeding or slowing the speech independent of pitch, as well as a variety of other effects (many of which sound unfamiliar but agree with the kinematics of the vocal tract). As I compose, I listen and I think. I choose vocal sources that interest me, particularly the voices of evangelists, hypnotists and salesmen because of their great confidence and enthusiasm.

A computer-animated fantasy about virtual worlds (hardly in its infancy back in 1992).

Half knight in shining armour, half shrimp, Virtus, our virtual double, explores a labyrinth, a metaphorical stand-in for cyberspace. He whisks like the wind through a maze of tunnels, encountering chimerae and mysterious fighters on his way.

1992, 5:15 min, color, sound

This tape takes the alphabet as its theme. By addressing the location or positioning of letters within the alphabet as ‘enforced’ (or predetermined) edits, it questions this given structure and at the same time attempts to exhume some of the possible shamanic origins of the shape of the letters in the English version of the Latin alphabet.

Here Callas employs his signature computer animation to create a dynamic pictorial landscape.

Producer: Ring World. Postproduction Co-sponsors: Batsu Four co, Ltd. Music: Ra.

A lyrical piece delving into corporiality and featuring the first appearance of the vanitas motifs that were to dominate my work from then on.

The animation was programmed and rendered while I was Artist in Residence at the old Computer Graphics Lab at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1991. The installation version was commissioned by Video Positive ’93 (now FACT), Liverpool. It was also exhibited at “British Artists of the Nineties” show at Kunstwerke in Berlin in 1993. After this experience I pretty much gave up installations and stuck to screen based work – life’s too short.

Digital and video animation, 6 mins, U-matic SP, 1992.

(Video installation, 4 monitors and video decks, 1993)

The XONS are a tribe of diminutive skeletons that come in all sorts of monstrous and comical shapes and sizes. They move about frenetically and play tricks on one another amidst the flames of hell.

The saga of Les Xons tells of their loves and their games, the battles they wage and the children they beget, the epidemics that wipe them out and their miracle cures, the fuel that keeps them going…on their planet of fire.

There are many different XONS : One-Armed Goliath, Lady Lambchop, Torototem, Homo Longus, Baby Boom, Spidergirl, Bibendame, the germs Minus and Virus and the Simplus cousins are a boisterous bunch as it is, but the family’s growing by leaps and bounds, for XONS know all sorts of unorthodox methods of reproduction.

The moment they move an inch, XONS make a horrifying hullabaloo. Even their slightest gestures scrape, bang and rattle to generate a frenetic beat, which is what makes Les Xons series a musical, too.

Pilot 1 : CRAC – CRAC (“SHTUP – SHTUP”) (length : 40”) enlightens us as to the probable genesis of the planet of the XONS : viz. a quickie.

Pilot 2 : BASTON (“ROUGH-AND-TUMBLE”) (length : 1’) shows us how Minus, Baby-Boom’s son, goads and eventually tussles with Legless Cripple-On-Wheels.

Apart from those two pilots the saga was not produced

Screening 2’15”

This computer animation depicts the upcoming struggle between the virtual and physical sides of our selves, where our bodies are left behind as technology enhances our ability to exist in purely virtual worlds. A collection of techniques were used to create this piece. Particle systems were used to disassemble and reconstruct various images. Artificial evolution and interpolation of 3D parametric shapes allowed the creation of unusual surface transformations. Morphing techniques produced smooth transitions between faces, and various image processing, warping, and compositing techniques were also employed.

Software and Animation: Karl Sims
Music: Peter Gabriel, John Paul Jones
Thanks to: Lew Tucker, Jim Salem, Gary Oberbrunner, Matt Fitzgibbon, Dave Sheppard, David Marvit, Kleiser-Walczak, & Keith Waters
Produced for: Art Futura and “Memory Palace” at the 1992 World’s Fair in Spain
Hardware: Connection Machine CM-2
For further technical information, see:
“Particle Animation and Rendering Using Data Parallel Computation” K.Sims, Computer Graphics (Siggraph ’90 proceedings), Aug. 1990, pp.405-413.
“Interactive Evolution of Equations for Procedural Models” K.Sims, The Visual Computer, Aug. 1993, pp.466-476.

Screening; Computer animation, 1990. Two versions: one is 4’35” long, the other is (with documentary parts) 15′.

An animated journey through the abstract colors, compositions, and constructions of the Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy.

Story-board and producer: John Halas
Design and animation: Tamás Waliczky
Music shorter version: Llászló Kiss, longer version: Boris Karadimchev

Screening 14’6″

Paradise Tossed (1992) is a dreamy computer animated survey of technological terrain, idealism and design from four young women’s points of view. It uses Macro-mind Director’s lingo to access sections of a twelve minute 3D animation on a Sony laser-disc player. The menus arc laid out like pages from a photo album and by touching the screen the participant can not only choose segments to be played on another screen but can also construct timeless associations. Margaret Mead once said:
Utopia is built on the great diversity of human propensity and gift and it must be in terms of modem information theory, redundant enough to catch the developed imagination of each different member of society.
This insight into the redundancy of the human condition was inspirational as a beginning point for research that led me to a series of archetypical assumptions. Carrying on from Machinedreams, my last interactive work continued to research and compare eras (1900s, 1930s, 1960s and 1990s), conscious that although they exist a generation apart, together they encapsulate the tremendous extent of environmental and domestic change we have witnessed since the beginning of this century. It occurred to me that interactivity could provide people with archetypical scenarios that they would be curious to visit, and in doing so may question the reason for their choices and why so many people’s ideals were similar. [source: tandfonline.com]

“In Jill Scott’s new work Paradise Tossed the ironic artifice of digital electronic imagining as a televisual and allegorical intertextual rendering of meditative landscapes of domestic technology cannot be avoided. The directness of this piece is transformed into a surreal investigation of female identity.” _Variant, no date

As revealed in the seminal book The Pink Violin, the Australian composer, theorist and violinist Dr. Johannes Rosenberg predicted that after the demise of Communism and Capitalism would come The Age of Shopping. He also identified two important characteristics that the culture industry of this period would develop – firstly an obsession with technical process for its own sake and secondly, a contemporary art and music world largely empty of any creative content. A culture where the constituent parts have been removed from their context (meaning) and all voices, authentic, original or otherwise, continue to exist only as easily identifiable, sellable product. Content as a recognizable idea has ceased to exist because all the “content” has become interchangeable – it wouldn’t matter what is going on providing there is evidence that something is going on. A merely quantitative world of massed copies and fakes. All music, whatever its origin, status or supposed function would exist now in a digital dream time that the originators of ‘muzak’ could never have imagined. Rosenberg envisaged the music supermarket of today – a place where the tins on the shelf are interchangeable; the labels looking different but the content (once bought) would be all the same.

For the best part of 20 years now, Jon Rose, “The Paganini of New Music” (according to a New York Times critic) has been de- and re-constructing the violin and its music in an attempt to formulate an alternative and personal history for the instrument. He has taken Johannes Rosenberg’s rather extreme ideas at their word – hence the existence of this project Violin Music in the Age of Shopping. Placing the violin in a global shopping context does seem to be the next logical step in Jon Rose’s gesamtkunstwerk approach to music. Contexts, histories, functions, imagery and meanings are all up for sale in this current culture-vulture project. Shopping will of necessity be a satirical piece with political intent.
The Chaotic Violin is another of Jon Rose’s interactive violin/computer pieces – this time his violin bow acts as a MIDI controller. The 32 mapping tables of the program can be set to work within the standard chromatic scale or choice of notes can be generated by random generator, algorithms, or methods of interpolation between fixed points. Superimposition of these structures in real time lead to very complex patterns but these patterns nevertheless always retain a high degree of self-similarity. This complexity must also operate in an ever changing mode because of the adjacent violin performance operating in parallel, against or with it – ie. those physical actions, movements and techniques of the violinist.

Screening 11′, 1991

“A mad scientist develops a computer virus designed to manifest itself as a biological life-form which wreaks havoc with an unsuspecting computer nerd.” screenaustralia.gov.au/the-screen-guide/t/k-rad-man-1991/4769

“A mad scientist, a techno-nerd and a deadly computer virus form an ultra vivid hyper-reali­ty in this computer generated comic strip.” miff.com.au/festival-archive/films/id/20261

“Haig is in fact exemplary of the migration to interactive media by artists who had formerly worked either exclusively or partially with video. Haig’s early experiments with analogue video in the late 1980s shifted to take advantage of the `pixelated image and the crude, “computerish” look’ of the domestic Amiga system, as evidenced in K-Rad Man, a 1992 animation about computers and their increasing domesticity. (He was actually turned on to the idea of the Amiga after having seen a video of Andy Warhol ‘painting’ a digital portrait of Debbie Harry at the official launch of the Amiga in New York in 1985.)” _Matthew Perkins (ed.): Video Void, Australian Video Art, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2018

Director, Writer and Producer Ian Haig, Dir. of Photography Martine Corompt.

2’20”
Software: Advanced Visualizer by Wavefront.
Hardware: Silicon Graphics Workstation.
Created at the NC Super Computer Center, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA

_Michael Strum in 2024

Primordial Dance is an experimental animation containing a progression of abstract textures and colors. It is a study of emerging and transforming mathematical equations. These effects were created using an interactive process of “artificial evolution.” The artist and computer collaborate to produce images and movements that neither could easily produce alone. The computer generates and displays a collection of experimental abstract images. The artist chooses the most aesthetically interesting images, and those survive and are “bred” to produce a new collection of images. The equations, or artificial genes, of the survivors are copied, mutated, and mated by the computer to generate new offspring pictures. This process of variation and selection is repeated, and with each cycle more complex and interesting results can occur. Finally, movements are created by performing “genetic interpolations” between these evolved images. This piece contains a series of these interpolations applied to various sets of evolved images. karlsims.com/primordial-dance.html

Software and Animation: Karl Sims
Music: David Grimes, Target Productions
Drums: Jim Salem, Abbi Spinner, Ken Schachat, Seth Goldstein
Thanks to: Peter Schroeder, Lew Tucker, Gary Oberbrunner, Matt Fitzgibbon, & Dave Sheppard
Hardware: Connection Machine CM-2

For further information see:

“On the origins of a 13-second segment of Primordial Dance: a brief Karl Sims interview with commentary” Glenn Smith, Digital Creativity, January 2020.
“Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics” K.Sims, Computer Graphics (Siggraph ’91 proceedings), July 1991, pp.319-328.
Genetic Images interactive exhibit where visitors evolve abstract still images.

Pépin géant (Giant glitch) is a sculpture (1937) by Jean Arp (known as Hans Arp, 1886, Germany – 1966, Switzerland). This film is made after the sculpture

This is a commission for the series “Art at Play”, a program of 20 1-minute clips devoted to works from the National Museum of Modern Art at the Center Georges Pompidou.

Design and production: Cécile Babiole, computer-generated images: Jean-Christophe Bernard (Transformer), Music: Gerome (NOX), Production: Center Georges Pompidou, Pandora, UMT, Resource image, 1991

2 of a series of 10x3min films

What is the difference between a window and a television?

In the streets of Paris, Moscow, New York, Tokyo, Rio and Dakar, Sandra Kogut invited the passers-by to use individually, during 30 seconds, a booth equipped with a camera. From that elementary situation, she worked out Parabolic People, to talk about the connections between people, that exist beyond the cultural or linguistic barriers.
This series is ment to be shown in any country with no need to add subtitles or translation. Moments of breathing, humour, emotion, pleasure, Parabolic People is a joyous essay of a ”universal” TV piece.

This work is one of a series of pieces called Tavola in which the timbre and dynamic possibilities of the musical instruments were studied. Tavola IV, dedicated to the viola and nicknamed “of the rustle”, utilizes the sound possibilities offered by this string instrument . The original idea was to focus on a sound universe that is usually very difficult to hear, that made up of attack transitories, rustles and infrasound.

Ellipsis is a work for female singer and tape which seeks to embody a ritual celebration of women’s spiritual power and psychological empowerment. Three imagistic cycles emerge: The Age of Darkness, Creating a New Space, and The Age of Resonance. The singer performs with a wide variety of vocal sounds, and the tape part is constructed from sampled acoustic string sounds, FM synthesis, and multitrack layering of the voice of Fides Krucker.

One of the most fascinating aspects of electroacoustic music is its ability to indulge in a multifaceted and paradoxical listening environment. As one’s perception gradually discovers and uncovers deeper levels within the structure, new illusions and allusions jostle to the front of one’s attention. Puzzle Wood is a small forest nestled in the southwest of England. Local myth has it that many souls are still left wandering its paradoxical pathways. Lose oneself within Puzzle Wood and escape deeper into one’s own thoughts and imagination.

Cronicas de Ultrasuelio (1992) is inspired by the poetic musicality, irrealism and polylyricism of the unique Catalan and major Hispanic writer J.V. Foix (1894-1987). This piece is for clarinet and electronics. It is an adaptation of a piece for oboe and keyboard-controlled FM digital synthesizers. Commissioned by Urugayan Leon Biriotti in 1992 with the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts. The piece was awarded at the 1994 Helsinki International Rostrum of Electroacoustic Music.

This is a CD-ROM magazine of interactive art published as “a rare opportunity for works that require interaction with the viewer” by the ZKM/ Zentrum fur Kunst and Medientechnologie (Center for Art and Media) of Karlsruhe, Germany. Its first edition was presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1994. These two editions include work by Jean-Louis Boissier (Flora petrinsularis), Eric Lanz (Manuskript), Bill Seaman (The Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers), Luc Courchesne (Portrait One), Miroslaw Rogala (Lovers Leap) and Tamas Waliczky (The Forest). The accompanying book includes articles by Christoph Blase, Jean Gagnon, Timothy Druckrey and Anna Szepesi.

Interactive videodisc installation, a retrospective of the MultiMediale 4, the biennale of new media art held at the ZKM/Karlsruhe (Germany), May 12-25, 1995. The mediated landscape is a digital topography whose network cosmography mirrors the real world into a televirtual imaginative and social space. In this new landscape, the traditional boundaries all come into question: inside/outside, reality, fiction, I and the other. Art invents new relationships that imbue the bountiful emptiness of the New Found Land with meaning. The installation New Found Land was co-produced by the Museography Laboratory of the University de Montreal.

I am interested in how artists can employ digital technology as a medium to explore their traditional obsessions such as the meaning of power, desire and death. A computer is the ideal instrument for causing meanings to collide, fluctuate and flow into each other—and to play with the tension between authenticity and simulation in the space between intention and chance. Each viewer/user navigates a unique path through a digital collage of layers and loops of appropriated images, sounds, voices and texts.

(Sub-title: Anomalous human-machine interactions involving a Pseudo random number generator (Pseudo REG) and ArtREG.) In 1979, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program was established to study anomalous consciousness-related phenomena of possible relevance to basic physical science and engineering practice. A large number of controlled experiments have been conducted in which an operator’s intention has been proved to have a direct effect on the behavior of sensitive physical devices. In Black Box, participants are invited, both individually and in groups, to interact directly with PEAR software. A body of data will be collected and forwarded, raising such questions as possible gender “signatures” and remote effect.

The Zenotrope devices or modules consist of an electric motor, a liquid crystal display screen, housing, and wire supports. The kinetic motion that these devices produce is to spin the liquid crystal display screen at various rates. (Sponsored by Sony, Australian Film Commission, ANAT, College of Fine Arts.)

A computer animation combined with live video, it depicts three runners followed by a camera down a foggy street in a small German village. To virtualize it, the author has moved the vanishing point to the closest possible position next to the viewpoint. The further the object is from the viewer, the larger it appears and vice versa. You can notice this effect on the runners too. Their size is the same, a reference point on this inverted image.

A computer animation combined with live video, it depicts three runners followed by a camera down a foggy street in a small German village. To virtualize it, the author has moved the vanishing point to the closest possible position next to the viewpoint.

My work is created through a creative exploration of morphological relationships. I use images of the ‘real’ in animate and inanimate nature. I then manipulate and compose these images in the computer in multiple layers, using computing as an artistic language and means of discovery, rather than a production tool. I reveal invisible, yet inherent layers of images from the ‘real world’. Through adding and subtracting pixel values from two or more different images or applying algorithms to those values, I literally dis-cover the unseen virtual beauty.

I use images of the ‘real’ in animate and inanimate nature. I then manipulate and compose these images in the computer in multiple layers, using computing as an artistic language and means of discovery, rather than a production tool.

Nine portraits are made from thousands of little films. The work was processed on Silicon Graphics machines (VGX) by a special program from Kobe Matthys. Assistants: Youg-Chul Bayrle, Stefan Muck, Kobe Matthys.

The work was processed on Silicon Graphics machines (VGX) by a special program from Kobe Matthys.

The ‘i =’ Series- Interaction as Improvisation not Imposition The ‘i =’x series of installations and performances were intended to explore the notion of “interactivity” and what constitutes “art” in the current technological age. Central to the work is a focus on human/human and human/compute communication by a subversion of surveillance and control.

Data acquisition, fear, personal life, files, privacy, security, safety, freedom… a maze of contradictory needs and desires. We know the world better than we ever have before; our fear and unease grow steadily. The omnipresent security camera is the sign of this knowledge and fear. It represents a fundamental trade: the surrendering of individual space for protective environment. It offers the reality and illusion of safety through information. For the past few years, my work has focused on the contradictions quietly bubbling beneath the surface of the information grid.

Perfume is forgetful of the flower. Similarly, these images, drained of their essential elements by digitization, are fragments, the very essence of these images. Work with a computer dematerializes the image. The virtual and nomadic image is the site of all possible formal transformations. Work on this fugitive, immaterial image creates a new relationship with the body. The labyrinthine universe of the image corresponds to a construction which is no longer the projection of a way of seeing onto a canvas, but a blind process, a strategy in face of the established systems. This “look without a view” calls upon other feelings and mobilizes other emotions.

This installation uses an interactive sound and video system to explore three representational categories (sportsman, musician, threat) while underlining the presumptive power of the Black male gaze. It centers upon a single large video monitor or video projection placed at one end of the gallery. On the monitor is a closely cropped head of a black male, staring into space, occasionally shifting, with constantly changing backgrounds. Facing this monitor are three lecterns set on low wooden bases from which animated heads launch into verbal anecdotes exploring different aspects of black male visibility in humorous, provocative or confrontational ways.

This installation uses an interactive sound and video system to explore three representational categories (sportsman, musician, threat) while underlining the presumptive power of the Black male gaze. It centers upon a single large video monitor or video projection placed at one end of the gallery.

In September, 1940, on the Franco-Spanish border, the German Jewish philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin committed suicide, escaping the Gestapo. He was 48. During the summer of that year, with reference to his most valued possession, the painting Angelus Novus by Paul Klee, Benjamin had written: “His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The Angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Walter Benjamin is probably best known in Australia for his essay ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ which he wrote in 1936, while in exile in Paris. Since the heady days of 1968 this essay has been a central text for cultural theorists of the left who have wished to explore the complex phenomena of mass culture in ways that are not simply pessimistic.

The ‘age’ of electronic or digital based art (re)production has not transcended the contradictions of the contexts in which it is produced, nor has it transformed them. Indeed, the aestheticisation of cyberspace can be seen yet again unfurling its banner of ‘progress’ in an allegory of the ‘return of the same’.
There is a photograph taken by an unknown photographer in London in 1940, showing the ruins of the Holland House library in Kensington. This is the image with which Lyotard announced his immateriais exhibition in Paris in 1984.) The roof of the library has collapsed while book shelves full of books remain. Debris piled up in the centre of the frame, the sky where the roof once was, create a vortex, a perspective which seems to draw the spectator through the image into its background. But there are three figures here: three men, each with certain characteristics. They all face away from the catastrophe which divides them.

With hands in pockets one man casually observes volumes on the shelves. Another stands facing the books, absorbed in reading. The third is about to select a book from the shelves, bending slightly, caught at this moment, in the act of choice. The image evokes a sense of history; the past, the ‘future’ and the present. Unlike the characters depicted in the image, the spectator has a sensation of rapid movement both into the empty vortex while simultaneously being blown backwards, out of the frame, while the debris piles up before us. In the still photograph all of this is present, at a standstill. Somewhere near-by a firestorm is raging.

One Way Street: an exploration of themes and ideas in Benjamin’s works, places his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in the ruins of the Holland House library. One Way Street works both against the grain and within the genre of the bio-pic’. The film works as a kind of ‘teaser’, a speculative reflection on the texts of Benjamin; it presents an introduction on some central ideas and provides biographical background. Interviews with leading English language scholars, such as Susan Buck-Moors and Gary Smith, convey the sense of excitement and significance that Benjamin’s work has generated. A montage structure and a heightened visual style evoke themes and qualities of Benjamin’s writings.

WAX: Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees is set in Alamogordo, New Mexico (1983), where the main character, Jacob Maker, designs gun sight displays at a flight simulation factory. Jacob also keeps bees. His hives are filled with ‘Mesopotamian’ bees that he has inherited from his grandfather. Through these bees, the dead of the future begin to appear, introducing Jacob to a type of destiny that pushes him away from the normal world, enveloping him in a grotesque miasma of past and synthetic realities. The bees show Jacob the story of his grandfather’s acquisition and fatal association with the ‘Mesopotamian’ bees, in years following the First World War. The bees also lead Jacob away from his home, out to the Alamogordo desert, slowly revealing to him their synthetic/mechanical world, which exists in a darkness beyond the haze of his own thoughts. Passing through Trinity Site, birthplace of the Plutonium bomb, Jacob arrives at a gigantic cave beneath the desert. There, he enters the odd world of the bees, and fulfills his destiny. Travelling both to the past and the future, Jacob ends at Basra, Iraq, in the year 1991, where he meets a victim that he must kill.

Independently executed over six years, WAX combines compelling narrative in the realistic/fantastic vein of Thomas Pynchon or Salman Rushdie with the graphic fluidity of video technique. The result is an odd, new type of story experience, where smooth and sudden transpositions of picture and sound can nimbly follow and fuse with fantastical, suddenly changing, and often accelerated narrative. The result resembles story-telling in animated film. Yet location photography and archive research form the backbone of the piece. WAX provides an example of a new type of independent ‘electronic cinema’ that will become more common as the 1990’s progress.

Petit Mal is a lightweight, autonomous mobile device which displays interactive emergent behavior in real space. It explores indoor public spaces and responds to people. Petit Mal is a piece of “reflexive technology” which seeks to offer a commentary on modern robotics. Changes in behavior are a product of an ongoing sense of its own ‘body’. A Petit Mal in neurological terminology is a short lapse of consciousness. The project was conceived in 1989 and built from 1993 to 1995.

Petit Mal is a lightweight, autonomous mobile device which displays interactive emergent behavior in real space. It explores indoor public spaces and responds to people. Petit Mal is a piece of “reflexive technology” which seeks to offer a commentary on modern robotics.

This interactive media work deals with gambling and spirituality. The viewer sees, on three LCD video displays set into the face of a slot machine, the same woman’s face with hands covering her eyes, ears and mouth (the Buddhist motif of “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”). Pulling the slot machine arm activates scrolling video imagery from three thematic areas. This gradually increases in speed, then stops suddenly, in staggered sequence, on one of nine possible combinations of the woman’s face.

The viewer sees, on three LCD video displays set into the face of a slot machine, the same woman’s face with hands covering her eyes, ears and mouth (the Buddhist motif of “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”).

Immortal Images is a CD Rom about that imperishable part of the Western heritage, the Greek and Roman mythologies. The presentation, by Ginette Paris and the team of the De Seve Multimedia Lab, will show the work in progress and discuss the challenges involved in the presentation of a complex body of interrelated texts, symbolic images, music, animation. Produced with Pierre Guimond, visual artist and professor of communications; Gilles-Zenon Maheu, founding director of the De Seve Multimedia Lab at the University du Quebec a Montreal and fifteen multimedia artists and programmers.

The use of virtual reality models is particular to this system of depth discrimination. A perceptual response to changes in pictorial space can be conditioned by how the viewer may be orientated to an implied or simulated depth. Virtual pictorial space is therefore fundamentally a system of orientation, where the viewer may become relocated or dislocated from an immediate or physical frame of reference.

The subjective experience of perceptual depth discrimination is for me more consistent to a curvilinear visual space that is particular to the peculiar frame of reference of the viewer. Virtual reality systems however are based on an empirical system of linearity. The distinction between the world of immediate and subjective experience and the empiricism of science becomes blurred when ambiguities in visual perception are labelled as incorrect by the interpretation of linear measurement. This results in an assault on the perceptual autonomy of the spectator by conditioning a dependence to this model of field orientation.

As stated by the mathematician Luneburg in 1956: “Visual straightness differs from the straightness we attribute to a total act of perception to objects manufactured with increasing perfection in our physical surroundings.”

Immerce is an interactive multimedia system created for a planned visual database of the dances of Merce Cunningham. The system has been defined from a position where one is not seeking solutions with known methods but instead seeking experience and discovery through a process of exploring the unknown. The current version of Immerce is a minimal prototype of the eventual system under development. Consequently, not all of the elements described are fully operational and the archival materials represent only a small fraction of the full database. This prototype is not available for commercial presentation. Funding is being sought to complete the work.

Produced by the collective: VNS Matrix
The ALL NEW GEN images presented for TISEA are the first part of a work in progress towards an interactive installation. ALL NEW GEN critiques a highly influential form of technology the ‘Gameboy’ hand held computer games, originally developed by the Japanese company Nintendo. ‘Gameboys’ have been on the market now for several years, gaining immense popularity with children and (in particular) adolescent boys. In the ‘Gameboy’ worlds exemplified by Nintendo’s Donkey Kong and Super Mario and Sega’s Sonic Hedgehog the rationale is simple here is a hero and an enemy (or more precisely, a hero who engages with multiple manifestations of enemies and hazards).

ALL NEW GEN is a new contender on the market, a ‘Gamegia whose enemy is the computer terminal “Big Daddy Mainframe”, the essence of a futuristic omnipotent military-industrial com-plex. With her posse of Homegirls, ALL NEW GEN ‘s mission of sabotage is to act as a virus in the terminal, infiltrating and corrupting the databanks. She is the modem of Big Daddy’s discontent, the ultimate mercenary of slime.

In ALL NEW GEN, VNS Matrix continue their commentaries on the relationship of the body to computers, ethics and technological develop-ment and the representation of gender roles in popular culture.

Physically, the works are Canon CLC 500 prints face mounted to acrylic. The two outer panels are digitised images taken by an ion camera of an intersection in the city of Brisbane. At this intersection pedestrians may cross to any corner they wish. The centre image is of a cellular automation. I used these images together because of the obvious parallels and humour. This is an example of how some of my work concentrates on the philosophical parallels between the relationship of the individual and society with technology and scientific advances.

Lying on the table is a bronze cast relief map of a non-specific landscape, and a magnifying glass. The surface of the map is divided into eight areas, one of which is a built-in monitor screen. Central to the work is a laser disk with which the viewer can access a sequences of images. When the observer moves the magnifying glass from one zone to another, the images on the monitor respond accordingly. Each of the areas on the map also has an aspect of depth which becomes visible to an observer who spends more time in one area. The sequences related to depth are arranged according to movement, place, people, text, and sound.

Lying on the table is a bronze cast relief map of a non-specific landscape, and a magnifying glass. The surface of the map is divided into eight areas, one of which is a built-in monitor screen.

This video and slide presentation will focus on a number of multimedia installations I have worked on since 1993. Starting with the Digital Garden series (1992) and ending with the Drive: Motion Landscapes (1995) project, the talk highlights the use of multi-channel video and computer-aided systems to create complex audio-visual environments concerned with the nature of the artificial environment in the latter part of this century.

Interaction can be defined as an intelligent response, in terms of changing lights, sounds, music, images, animation, moving objects etc., to an action by a performer, a member of the audience or the natural environment. To add such interaction to their art or performances, artists have to engage in a costly and difficult dialogue with highly-skilled technical persons to realize their ideas. Three types of systems can be identified upon analyzing the resulting art. Interactive Installations, Interactive Performance Spaces, and Wearable Interactive Performance Systems. A data acquisition and processing system based on MIDI and MAX is proposed to facilitate for the artist the design of these types of art.

A data acquisition and processing system based on MIDI and MAX is proposed to facilitate for the artist the design of these types of art.

This work is a subjective statement about the relationship between the elusiveness of language and the unpredictable and turbulent behavior of nature. This relationship is suggested when the viewer perceives words breaking down and reconstructing other words in an immaterial holographic space. The words are perceived only for a brief moment and are interrupted by the presence of other animated words.

This relationship is suggested when the viewer perceives words breaking down and reconstructing other words in an immaterial holographic space.

Memories are the sources of my work. They are essential for the development of my ideas. I have discovered that my work was nostalgic even when I thought that I had arbitrarily chosen some particular shape over another. Memories have been furiously pouring images and context into my existence, now memories are my tools. Sentimentality is also inherent to the conceptual quality of my work. It is present in the sound of tangos and in the language found in the radio shows that I listen to during the long afternoon hours. Sentimentality is part of the colour in which my mother would dress for a walk in the park. It is also an important part of the vocabulary which certain objects have. Objects can carry a semantic quality. The cultural background in which they interact can be purely emotional, making them abstract with their complexity.

I believe in the coexistence of fantasy and reality. For me the division between what is real and what is not doesn’t exist. This affirmation is unquestionable. Many works of art have come out of this ground of thought. In my life, dreams are the medium from which my own destiny has a present and a body. It is my desire to suggest or to perceive the scenario for a concrete dialogue to exist. The mediums that I use are distinguished by this interactive concept of emotional reality and fantasy.

Computers are for me the path for developing imagery. They allow me certain freedom to choose and discard from a wide panorama of images. Conceptually they are a matter of magic. With them, the properties of light can unfold into and image. They take me to the most intimate levels of the image. To the source of colour and forms. The physical qualities of nature that can be found provide the tools for the inexperienced to go ahead and create other levels of life. My hope is to make my work’s existence have a meaning in this interaction of the past and the present. I use electrical devices to show my work. I do this so that the electrical light qualities from the medium will be carried on into the viewer’s experience. This doesn’t happen by copying nature but unfolding nature’s meaning.

As in previous projects, I have been interested in drawing some parallel thoughts regarding depths of ‘physical’ ideas, within the area of computer generated art and related operational procedures as well as in terms of what I call “The Human Body Landscapes” (cells and cell structures) and the interactional relations between these systems. The majority of my works are centered around the concepts of art and technology, incorporating references to the human body, its cells and their structures. Moreover, the question of religion and its relevance within past and present times. Within the practice of fine art and in many other situations, it is these concepts that hold particular significant interest to our society of speed, mechanical and technological growth.

The question of where do we belong and why is often asked, as theologies and scientific theories are not compatible, nor trying to be (perhaps due to the false pretences and ignorant attitude by the earlier?). The old, perceived ideas and accepted forms of expressions are no longer suited to the present day conditions, so trying to identify these concepts and relating them to the close proximity prove to be of concern, and usually come with serious (self) doubts rather than an investigative and explorative approach.

Like most, my works are heavily reliant upon my own ‘personal’ experiences and symbolisms from past and present momentums of time, the images that hold significance for me. Within the above mentioned figurative appropriations that reach beyond the surface structure.to solidify these concepts, I work with the combinations of the above and electron-microscopic images of human body cells magnified up to 500,000 times.

The Adoration of St. Sebastian is about our misconceived sentiments and emotions within our past and present beliefs.

The idea is to create a photograph of a memory of the art around us, to photograph toward the inside of our mind. A picture or a painting never exists alone. It is always a part of a series of a higher wholeness. Each exists exposed to our memory for a period of time, and the impression of each creates a segment of the wholeness. When the wholeness is completed it becomes a memory and is left in the mind as a feeling.

I take a painting, art, and I subject it to the 20th century grid of the TV tube. I force it into the archetype of a present in order to photograph it. I destroy the existing art by imposing one layer of it over the other again and again until the moment when I feel that they have become a self-existing wholeness. A layer can be a whole or a part of a work selected by mind in the process of observation of the art. And that is the picture of a memory of the art that has been stored in our mind.

I love science, technology, computers – Adelbrecht is all of that. Adelbrecht functions autonomously and has some knowledge about the world. He is not intelligent, in that he can’t adapt to an environment that changes unpredictably. People often ask me: “Why don’t you use a faster processor” or “Wouldn’t neural nets make him really intelligent?”. To be a work of art, none of this is necessary. He needs not to be as intelligent and as powerful as can be, he needs to be interesting.

The making of Adelbrecht has been, and still is, much more difficult than I thought. Working as an independent artist in a not well known field is a tricky business, given limited means to do research (even though I have received substantial funding from the Dutch Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture and much help of all sort from institutions and people).

On Art: A work of art always is ‘about something’ it tells things without or within words: implicitly. What it implies and how — through which technologies and in which style — is up to the individual artist. ART HAS NO DUTY.
Implicit goals as opposed to explicit goals, is the difference between ‘art’ and what we name the rest of things people wish to do. A work of art can be said to have quality: how much it grabs the beholder, how well it implies. Quality does NOT determine if something is art. (A bad cigar still is a cigar.)

Except when using one’s own body or found and not changed objects, art can only be established through technology, be it charcoal, paper, paint, welding, or electronics. From the viewpoint of art, there is no difference between a painting and a work made from computers.

A Memory Project is an interactive exploration of memory and forgetfulness in humans and computers. The content is presented from two perspectives: the scientific and the artistic. Areas of interest on the scientific side include the physiology of memory, the psychology of memory, epistemology, artificial intelligence and neural networks. The artistic side poses questions about the relationship of humans to computers. The project unfolds temporally in two parts. Part 1 looks at memory; Part 2 looks at forgetfulness. The system reflects this change by beginning to forget itself. Menu choices disappear. Sections which were once available are now forgotten. The cartoon agent ‘Bob’ serves as host and personification of the project. When the system begins to forget, it is through Bob that this forgetting is translated to the user.

While the methodologies of art and science may differ, and their social values under capital appear at odds, their systems of representation have interesting commonalities and contingencies. Both encode and reproduce dominant ideologies indirectly and through application. Just as the landscape tradition in art has historically presented an order of human construction as a mythic range of immutable essences, representations of space provide a frontier metaphor for universal wonder and continuity. Landscape and representations of space mirror the phenomenological desires of both science and art which at various times, regard the earth as a finite inherited commodity or an infinite natural disorder that must be tamed through measure and map.

June Savage’s wall clocks, whose faces have been replaced by abstract imagery derived from satellite photographs, inhabit an immaterial globe, a world surveyed in data relations, a world of information exchange. Banked in an ordered visual display upon whitewashed art gallery walls, they appear here like radar scanning devices. Only their second hands remain, steadily traversing obscure terrain in a cycle bound to repetition. Without a point of reference or scale of measure their movement proceeds without limit or intrinsic, rational meaning. They appear as instruments in the service of an undisclosed imperative to monitor, to measure, to survey, but their purpose is classified, and access to the nature of their data remains unavailable except to authorities.

As metaphysical tropes, they may mark the endlessness of time against the uncertainty of matter. Yet the Sublime of nature exists here only as a motif in perverse subjugation. The worlds represented within these small circles, enclosed by these clock frames, measure against the satori moment described by astronauts who experience the earth’s biosphere in overview from space beyond. The clocks’ moving hands describe technology’s relentless circumscription as functionary to a pre-existent ideological apparatus. The images they scan suggest dynamism but present here as still frames, mute, unchanging, ordered, controlled. In their quiet abstraction, they bring certain constituent and referential elements to the fore, supporting a silent interrogation of contexts, specifically the social conditions by which technology, science, and art have developed and are applied.

I have been engaged in computer-aided art since 1985. First I created thermal-transfer handprints in small sizes (around 70 x 100 cm). Searching for an efficient method to create larger picture-sizes without having to reproduce them photographically, I began to utilise the facilities of a computer controlled airbrush. After a friend of mine in Great Britain installed such a machine for commercial applications and after some tests I decided to use it for my own artificial works.

In my pictures I design models of technical and biological territories. In varying the matrix of the screen within the medium itself, I reflect the circulation of the digital images until the pictures become stabilised in their analogue print-outs. Scanned fragments of reality (which seem quite calculated), expressive traces of paint (computed electronically), and simulations of light and shadow melt into an unsolvable unity. These elements lapse into the surface of the picture without any intermediate medium. To me, these canvases provide a place to experiment with the truth of visual statements.

The fundamentals of how we relate to the world of matter and man-made objects are shrouded in myth. We consume and discard what we make as we consume and discard life, forgetting that even the things we make have a story to tell. Whatever the form is in material terms, whether woodcarving or electrical technology, the relationship between them are only changed by the language of the material.

Cities that become centres of the world are compelled to 24 hour activity in all their systems. 24 hour cities must have all kinds of functional systems and various faces operating at all times. Suppose I cut that face with a sound that the city has uttered. What kind of changes could one see in this noise over a 24 hour period?

In this installation a microphone monitors the sounds of the local environment outside of the gallery. These sound signals are then translated into light, allowing me to explore changes in the city’s noise/light modulations over time, by corresponding the frequency range with colours and the volume with luminosity.

Neon, microphone, sound dimmer control for neon
3.2 x 5 x 3.6 m

Fine Art, Fine Chess, Fine Data combines the visual use of a cellular automata implemented onto chessmen by Georg Mohleck with chess compositions by the mathematician Michael Schlosser. The work involves prints of Roman and Teutonic creations on the wall, a chess game and a computer inviting the visitor to compose, re-compose or simply play a game of chess. Data creations in the visual field and the aesthetics of chess compositions face analogous problems: choice.

These works are part of an ongoing series installations in relation to Nature and Diversity, addressing the notion of the ‘Physical Space’, from a feminine perspective, using integrated Video, Photography, Photocopy and Computer generated image and text. Since 1980, Lucille Martin has been working primarily with photocopy and related media to represent the body. Known in particular for the series Bodyworks (created by placing the body on the office copier), she has been creating installations which draw together visual and aural impressions to present social, political and environmentally informed works.

As a Visual Communicator the choice of technology has been central to the nature of the work, frequently drawing together complex ideas, layers of information criss-crossing culture, myth, spirit and reality. This interwoven methodology seems to be duplication for the technique itself collaging of image and idea, through the multi-media function.

These works are the result of an automated process. I design a program which relies on randomly generated numbers and parameters supplied by myself, to produce a series of abstract, rather architectural images. These pictures Shroud and Closeup, are two out of hundreds of various outcomes. Closeup is in fact a highly magnified section of Shroud (magnified twenty times).

The process I use to create images is recursive, or fractal. All that is defined at the beginning is a set of rules specifying in rough terms how to arrange and colour the basic elements of the image. However, the basic elements themselves are images made using the same general system of rules, and so on ad infinitum. This is why Closeup is just as fascinating and detailed as Shroud, and why a closeup of Closeup would be as well. Each image contains twenty eight million pixels. The images were computed using an AT&T Pixel Machine, a supercomputer specially designed for producing very complex computer graphics.

The piece consists of two 70cm video screens, one viewed through a 850mm x 720mm aperture of fluorescent orange ripstop nylon, and the other through paper-mache aperture culled from the pages of an illustrated encyclopedia.

Each screen presents part of a larger than lifesize face. A young boy and a middle-aged man peer out at the world and away from each other. A blurred landscape passes behind them.

The two fragmentary video portraits are cycled off laser discs, allowing a high resolution continuous loop of a short clip.

This installation shows six plastic toy-TVs (with motor drives) that mechanically move a band of images across the screen of the TV-box. The design of these custom-built bands is based on the graphical user interface of the Apple-Macintosh. It displays a command line on top of the band, a series of icons on the bottom and pixelated images in the main screen.

The images are constructed out of rough 3D pixels, created with a simple paint program. The command line presents words that contain a double meaning that relates to machine language as well as to human values. The icons depict typical cliches of the modern technological world and symbols of inherited traditional values.

The discarded parts of a microfilm printer are assembled together on a photographic tripod to create a device which attempts to demonstrate an alternative thinking. A thinking which does not require an historical construct. Modifications have been made to the printer so that a computer graphic which has been placed in the optical centre of the projection plane can be projected onto a screen symbolising the future. The image is reversed and rotated by the motorised optics of the printer components The graphic represents both a human component and a physical component through the choice of colour and design. The graphic is rotated slowly around the optical axis of the projector to symbolise the nature of the human world.

The Instrument for Illuminating the Future deals with the idea that humans perceive the world around them in an historical fashion. It is not necessary for computers to do this: My work confronts this paradigm by using the discarded parts of a microfilm printer to project a computer-graphic into the future. The microfilm construct requires the future. Science is now evolving unique constructs where these questions can be solved using mathematical logic. I believe computers will develop new algorithms currently not accessible to humans. Algorithms which are based on solving the questions raised in my work. The metaphysical point addressed by the idea of projecting into the future would become a model for non-human thinking where the solution of the question can only be resolved using processes which now appear alien. Humans will soon have to accept that the future can be mapped and that the thinking behind these new equations is not linked to a human’s ability to perceive. Humans may not be able to understand this data thinking, at least with the constructs we now use. Humans, therefore, must apply themselves to the task of formulating a kind of Godel thinking which can utilise the advances of computers and science not from the point of view of harnessing them but understanding this new knowledge disclosed by them.

An industrial robot — with neither face, nor legs, and only arms and hands that move and manipulate objects — is the direct outcome of functional design. Fixed steadfast to is predetermined program on the factory floor, the robot solicits very little emotion from the observer. The machine has no interest in you and is therefore unlikely to arouse affection. MA-1 is interested in you. Its primary function is to respond to you. MA-1 waits for you.

We often find an uncanny feeling when a machine responds to our movement, interpreting our body language. An uneasy sense of life emerges from an inanimate object. Here, movement arises where we anticipate stillness, and stillness where we expect movement.

This series reflects my interest in using the computer directly as a drawing device to produce work that could only have resulted from interaction between artist and an electronic toolbox. I’ve tried to give each piece a gestural sense of hand while at the same time never denying the digital basis of the work.

Blind Man’s Bluff is a piece which refers to the gathering and analysis of seemingly disconnect-ed pieces of data inviting the viewer to mix, match and sort the visual information. It was inspired by seeing video footage generated from stereo pairs of satellite photos at SIGGRAPH.

In association with the Australian Film Commission. Projected animation from a video laser disk covers an entire wall within the space and is controlled via a small touch screen interface. Many of the objects in the installation relate in some way to the video sequences. There is no start or end to the work; as the user progresses, the software ‘learns’ about which areas the user is exploring and responds with inter-related options. Produced in association with the Australian Film Commission.

This work is the result of a research on the permanence of holograms placed in natural climatic conditions. It is a cubic holosculpture of which each side is a holographic screen showing fleeting images linked to the movement of the sun.

Megalopolis is a simulated and animated maze that can be run on the Macintosh computer. It is located underground and critically examines the effect of space on the human condition. The “viewer” of the artwork does not interact with it, but becomes sensitive to the urban space while trying to navigate through the environment. Disorientation features predominantly in contemporary urban space, the human body becomes confused with its simulated surroundings. Faceless people are caught dissolving into the cold fabric of urban space and recesses.

Megalopolis is a simulated and animated maze that can be run on the Macintosh computer.

In my interactive paintings, seemingly unrelated forms coexist immediately and directly. Some make use of still images grabbed from video or geometric industrial patterns, sides of buildings, details of industrial machinery, or other decaying industrial/human-made forms interacting with nature, but never nature by itself. The idea of the “obstacle” in these works, where a painting can never be seen without a piece of another painting in the way, is particularly interesting to me. One is forced to accept coexisting influences.

This cd-rom takes a look at the history of the use of noise and found sound in twentieth century musical composition and performance, including Varese, Cage, Stockhausen, Reich, Zorn and contemporary ‘Industrial’ music (Einstijrzende Neubauten, Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly). Restless Machines takes a look at contemporary ‘Industrial’ music in the same light as the historical development that began with the Italian Futurists and looks at the ‘Industrial’ movement as part of a larger cultural phenomenon.

Artists who work in hybrid cultural forms do not have an adequate medium of representation or discourse which can provide a mechanism for a retrospective viewing and contemplation of the full complexity of the work. The conventional cultural venues are no longer able to contain, or provide for emergent forms of social and cultural interaction. Hybrid is a CD-ROM system for visual artists capable of providing a virtual venue for exhibition materials, artists’ work, concepts and biographical details.

The Cell Project is a National Science Foundation interdisciplinary project. The event focuses on the structure, functions and communication systems of the living cell. A “Renaissance team” of artists, computer scientists, biologists and multimedia experts from Carnegie Mellon University are in the process of transforming Pittsburgh’s Buhl Planetarium into a group immersive visualization environment. The event will place the audience inside a microscope where they will interact with startling new images of the cell.

These prints are excerpts from a series entitled “Playing Dress Up” in which I investigate issues of cultural identity as expressed through costume. I begin from photographs I’ve taken of members of my family, including myself. I present us in costume–sometimes in historical or ethnic dress, and often with toys or other attributes. Rather than using montage, or extreme distortion and filtering, these are seamless tableaux that maintain their connection to the photographic lens and the moment of exposure.

In this video sculpture, two monitors are modified by using a newly-adapted version of the original Wheatstone Stereoscope (1838). The 2D video screens are extended through an exploration of volume, perspective and movement as components of three-dimensional perception. The content focuses on our understanding of space and the conceptual guidelines which determine it. The representations of “space” and “body” are shown as visual molds of different belief systems. The stereoscopic technique constitutes a formal extension of the content.

Physiognomy is the reading of a person’s character from the physical features of their face. It raises questions about the nature of identity, to what extent is identity essential, to what extent constructed. We are told not to judge a book by its cover, yet we obviously use non-verbal means of communication. The rigid schematism of a physiognomical treatise demonstrates a desire for exactness in the knowledge of these inexact things. Contemporary fields of scientific research, eg. the Human Genome Project, seem just as prone to tendencies of over-simplification as those of the enlightenment.

Automatic Sketch Artist employs a set of composition rules specific to each “automatic sketch artist” that, through the generation of data figures, produces “dynamic pictures”. The program also manages a dynamic modification of the structure and process of the presentation. An interactive version allows the visitor a choice of different versions of the Automatic Sketch Artist. Still pictures are captured through this process, further modified by paint programs, and then presented as photos.

A touch-screen interface has been developed for the multiple muscle stimulator. This allows the body’s movements to be programmed by touching the muscle sites on the computer model. Although we already have remote-control robots, it might be advantageous in certain situations (in non-hazardous locations) to complete a remote task by borrowing the arm of another person’s body – especially since that remote stimulated arm is connected to an intelligent, mobile body. As well as completing a task, it would also be possible to condition a skill by sequential stimulation. And instead of seeing this as remote control, it is better conceptualized as the displacement of motion from one body to another body – in another place.

Audio Pendulums is an interactive sound installation for the outer facade of the Lasipalatsi (Glass Palace) in Helsinki.

The seven audio pendulums are steel pipes, 11 meters long and painted blue. They are suspended in front of the building at 5 meter intervals. A video camera mounted outside transmits a picture of the audio pendulums swaying in the wind to a computer system, which then generates a digital image of the movement. The computer program thereby records the movements and transforms them into audio signals, the volume of which depends on the extent of the movement. Each pendulum is allocated a tonal surface on the pentatonic scale. The result is an electronic audio environment which blends with the existing natural sounds, such as rustling leaves, the voices of passers-by, street traffic, etc. to generate an overall audio experience.