Art Events Data Table

1. lost for words
2. found objects
3. sea change

Songlines is a ‘non-narrative’ narrative. Many texts were gathered, primarily folk myths from a diversity of cultures. These were laid in parallel to form a landscape through which a path might be laid. Points in common, archetypes such as emotional states, physical elements and structural signposts were used to build bridges between the sources to enable the path to travel as freely laterally as linearly.

This path was used as common to the various strands of the project. The path could be travelled with music, dance, video or animation. These various journeys having been made, the original landscape and path were discarded, leaving Songlines as a trace, a structure with the
ceremony and form of a narrative, but none of the content.

Sound: Joseph Hyde
Vision: Tamara Cater, Lorne Christie, Rosie Gunn, Joseph Hyde

This piece is concerned with chance, fate, destiny, or serendipity, (depending on the viewer’s spiritual inclination). It consists of three pinball bumpers positioned in a padded scalene triangle with a perspex base. The unit is mounted on a large spring and strained with three sprung adjustable wire ropes. A steel pinball is placed on the field of operation. When this machine is disturbed in any way the ball rolls along the surface inevitably colliding with a bumper. This then initiates a chain reaction firing the ball in an agitated manner around the surface which in turn further agitates the machine into a frenzy of agitated reactions. These reactions last from 10 seconds to five minutes.

They are totally random so neither the direction of the ball nor even the duration of the agitation it causes can be predicted. The three pinball bumpers have auxiliary contacts which, when closed, activate a remote solenoid positioned near the keys 0, 1, & SPACE on a computer keyboard.

These three solenoids and their activation allows for communication between the agitated machine and the computer to take place. 0 & 1 use binary code to choose a word from a programmed vocabulary, while SPACE verifies the choice and display it, allowing the selection of another word. In this way the crude playful machine communicates random and spontaneous movements that are interpreted by the computer.

The starting point for composing Ab ovo was the motion of a pendulum. This means that I have to imagine a sort of sound, perhaps a tiny air vibration caused by the passage of a pendulum, and represent it musically in an electroacoustic sound space. Ab ovo is the final abstraction of such a compositional process. Although the primal pendulum sound I made is no longer left in its original form, two aspects of the motion of the pendulum – periodicity, and the stopping of motion caused by some interference – are reflected in various ways throughout the piece.

However, you do not have to follow these relationships to enjoy this journey through my imaginary spaces and soundscapes. I would like to thank Anne Scarlett and Julian Taylor for their friendship and tolerance in providing some of the most remarkable source sounds. Ab Ovo was realised in the Electroacoustic Music Studio at the University of East Anglia. The first performance was given in ‘The Electroacoustic Voice I’ concert at the University of East Anglia on 1 November 1993.

“As soon as we become immobile, we are elsewhere: we dream in a vast world. Immensity is the movement of immobile man, immensity is one of the dynamic aspects of peaceful daydreaming”.
-Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Space.
Open, intimate, confused spaces.                                                                                                                                                                  Broken spaces, whirling, indecisive edges of the space.
Space-refuge, enclosed, maternal, space of reminiscence and associations.
Tumult or murmur in the space of a thousand reflections:
Escape.
The flight engenders a vertigo of multiple elsewheres.
Here… There…

Attempted encounter of heterogenous elements related by two criteria: one is sonic and denotative (the place of sound in space), the other symbolic and connotative (referring to the theme of wandering), both alluding to movement. These criteria determine the form and are its cement. The multiplicity of materials embody the ideas of “space” and “mobility”. This work integrates into its structure active elements of spatialization which have a semantic value.

To Jean-Francois, Denis and Claude Schryer. Espace/Escape was awarded a mention at the
“Stockholm Electronic Arts Award 1992″ and selected by the 1991 International Computer Music
Conference (ICMC) in Montreal.

The use of electronic and mechanical technology in art is a relatively new process in my work. My interest has developed from the abundance of electrical/electronic products that are so infused in our everyday lives. To recontextualise these products and their components into an art arena, with the theatrical composition of a sculptural installation, I can then begin to examine their socialising/desocialising effects on their human environment.

The cube/box form that I commonly use as a basic structure is always seen in relation to the scale of the human body. These boxes are much like very unsophisticated robots, with limited movement. By incorporating readymade electronic/mechanical devices as an aid to animate these box-like structures, the viewer can begin a dialogue between themselves and the `essentially’ inanimate object. The object never has much utilitarian function, if any. The sound component is always mechanised: recorded, computer voice text, or machine hum.
The Audio Body Suit is a development of previous works dealing with the dialogue between humans and machines. I have brought the machine into a more intimate space with the body. The speakers become a prosthetic-like device to, ironically, transmit speech from within the human body. From the outset it fails as a functional device the body sounds merely mimic the true sounds (a digital process) — just as the ‘skin’ has undergone a process from its original owner.

Four computer manipulated images of Madonna are mounted together, each identical in size and identical frame. The source of each is identical, but by applying different filters and icons they each are given their own identity.

I use the computer to emulate the silk screen process that Andy Warhol used in his images of Marilyn. Just as Madonna uses Marilyn’s images for herself, I use Warhol’s style in my Madonna images as a kind of double reference. Subtle changes in the original image allow for the continuous reproduction of work — Madonna’s identity changes with each new piece. In the same way that she markets herself as a product whose impact changes with her various styles, her computer identity is easily changed by some Japanese icons or a change of colour. Many more variations of the same image still exist inside the computer. These four are simply a selection. Each new version allows for subtle changes, retaining the ‘originality’ of digital information versus replicating the same image endlessly. Every piece is the original.

Marie, a 34 year old French-speaking Montrealer played by actress Paule Ducharme, appears to be lost in reverie. A visitor may try to get her attention: When clicking a mouse on the display, “Excuse me!”, Marie suddenly stares at you; then, clicking among new choices of questions like “Do you have the time?”, “Are you looking at me?” or simply “May I ask you something?” starts a conversation that will develop according to the visitor’s curiosity and Marie’s moods. The encounter may be cut short because of a lack of tact, or it may develop, among other topics, into intimate discussions of love in the context of a virtual relationship.

The course of the conversation is determined by the visitor’s choice from a set of approximately 300 questions or comments to Marie. The initial choice defines the language of the conversation: French, English or German. In the English and German versions, Marie’s answers are subtitled.

Portrait One is the first in a series of six interactive video portraits using the same hardware and soft-ware configuration: a 30-minute videodisc (Laservision CAV/NTSC), a television monitor, and HyperCard stacks on a Macintosh computer. In the current version of the installation, the ghostline image of Marie is produced by the reflection of the horizontal video screen on a glass plate facing the visitor.

This image evolved from a series of experiments working with light as an algorithmic entity. The work underscores the notion of computational synergistics — the feedback process between visual representation of computation and human thinking resulting in significantly greater awareness and understanding of the process — a synergy between mind and machine. Light is represented by symbolic elements within a procedural machine language. I based the work on a study of the ‘optical phenomena’ known as the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) and Aurora Australis (Southern Lights) — featureless, quiescent arcs of light which occur in the ionosphere, most often seen at high latitudes. They are caused by streams of fluorescing electrons, flushed from solar flares and trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field relentlessly forced toward the poles.

The procedural specification consists of symbolic replacement rules whose syntax is parsed and recursively applied by the machine. Symbols are interpreted as representing light, colour and textural components of the image.

I prefer to think of these as ‘optical forms’, polarised arcs of reflection and energy created from a handful of algorithmic rules: signals singing out into the void. Automatic, oblivious and yet inevitable.

During ISEA’94, the Gallery Otso in Espoo organizes a retrospective of Toshio lwai’s works from 1982-1994.

Toshio Iwai’s early works deal with the prehistory of cinema, while the large interactive installations of the mid-80’s connect Iwai to the cutting edge to image processing and interface design.

“A key to the world of Toshio lwai is provided by the title of a Japanese television program about his work, Another evolution of the moving image. While pinpointing the central theme of Iwai’s oeuvre – his playful yet insightful rethinking of the history of audio-visuality – the title also suggests the possibility that there are several histories of the moving image –. This history  proceeds chronologically from, say, zoetropes, flipbooks and Marey’s and Muybridge’s chrono-photographs to the classical film apparatus, then to broadcast television and finally to electronic and digital systems – video, synthetic computer animation, video games and interactive movies. Abandoning linear and chronological logic, Iwai’s approach emphasizes constant recycling and playful tinkering with technology. He simultaneously adopts the roles of the eccentric inventor (a la Tesla), the magician (a la Méliès), the savant historian of the audio-visuality and the contemporary media art hero“.1)

Toshio lwai refers to his dreams as a source of inspiration: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a painting or an object in front of you begins to move like an animation on the spot, unlike images projected on the screen or TV monitor?… I wish I could go into the animated space I made myself”.2)

According to the Japanese critic Yoshitomo Morioka, lwai’s works represent the
algorithmic image: “..if one phrase is to be chosen from among those characterizing them, be represented by the term Algorithmic Image, which, in turn, constitutes a concept impossible to ignore in obtaining a better understanding of the substance of our contemporary media environment and computer technology”.3)

This piece involves an interactive graphics display linked to a touch-sensitive screen, controlled by an Amiga 2000 computer with a 20 MB hard drive and using Amiga Vision, Deluxe Paint IV and DigiView 4.0 The screen displays a top and bottom section of a computer generated face, which the viewer can use to create their own customised computer generated head by using the touch sensitive screen. The features of the face change once the nose, eyes, mouth, hair and so on is touched. The display includes many variables, so that each time the display is used a different configuration of the face becomes possible. The display is never the same twice.

Consisting of over 180 digitised and computer generated heads whose design follows similar lines to my computer graphics work in general: crazy wacky characters, garish colours, and funky design. The work also puts to use other elements such as computer synthesised speech, animation, sound effects and music. Hack presents computer graphics in an interactive context, to demystify computer generated graph-ics in general and to bring the user into a new sphere of the interactive-creative process. Rather than simply being presented with a finished work, the user/audience is an integral part of the project’s realisation. The project takes the idea of the Frankenstein monster as one of its central themes.

Three small robot-dolls, each with a video camera-eye and microphone ears, are together in a mirrored space in the Museum. The walls of the space are high enough so that they cannot see over it, but low enough so that viewers in the exhibition space may watch them, and speak with them (though they are unseen by the robots). Each robot-doll is connected, via the Internet, to another space, in which their sight and hearing is seen by another viewer-ventriloquist as projected video and amplified sound. In each remote space, there is a control device, consisting visibility of a joystick and microphone. The viewer-ventriloquist there may drive around the robot-doll to which they are connected in the mirrored space, and when the remote viewer-ventriloquist speaks, their voice is “projected” through the robot-doll, amplified within it, and moving the robot doll’s mouth. In this way, three viewer ventriloquists may meet in the fourth (mirrored) room, and exchange with each other as they please. The space has physical limits for each robot-doll, like national borders, which they cannot cross.

‘A Digital Rhizome’ is an interactive CD ROM exposing a multiplicity of sites and plateaus. Comprising of a series of 43 navigable images immersed in a interlocking (queued) post-constructed media sound fields. ‘A Digital Rhizome’ takes its background from the theoretical writings of Deleuze and Guattari, in particular Mille Plateaux, volume 2 of Capitalisme et Schizophienie tracing the complex intermezzo of ideas and concepts that is the rhizomatic culture of becomings.

The internal construction relies on hyper-card, integrating various command structures to call on a reservoir of QuickTime movies, graphics and sound. There are a myriad of fibers and filaments with which to read the various connections made by the act of navigating these conglomerations. There is no systemic hierarchy of connection, although islands may form within the rhizome. The perception of connectivity is initiated and intuitively sustained as an exercise in nano-scale pattern recognition.

Certain part of your brain, which might have a role in ordering your vocal organs to make the ‘A’ sound, kicks into gear. Through devices, scientists can now tell what you are trying to say before you open your mouth. Although Virtual Haze’s simple mechanism only senses brainwave changes, it can still tell how you are reacting to what is happening around you.

Virtual Haze looks like a sort of arcade game. The difference: you can’t win unless you use your brain waves. If you don’t concentrate on fighting, the machine will counter your attacks – because the machine can detect the absence of your mind!

Created by The Digital Therapy Institute (DTI) which was formed at the end of 1991 as a multidisciplinary group, with members from various fields including art, music, science,engineering and therapy. Since then, DTI has been conducting research from diverse angle into the brain. The central members of DTI are Keisuke Oki (artist) and Henry Kuwahara (engineer and musician).

A video installation using six monitors and 6 VHS tapes was first realized at Kirin Plaza Osaka, 1993, using 6 CRV videodiscs instead of tapes. This tape version allows random combination among six monitors.

Combining the comical and the absurd, I realized six funny faces, which were manipulated by System G (Real time texture mapping developed by Sony), to animate the visual images of six Japanese vowels in Japanese and Roman alphabet.

The concept is developed from Jacques Derrida’s “Differance” in which the difference of “Image”, “Letter” and “Voice” works in space and movement. Thus six images of “AIUEO NN” differ and delay with the letters and the voices, realizing an example of multiculturalism.

Onyrisk offers an interactive surrogate travel through allegorical representations of dreamlike sequences. It is an experimental work that is set to develop tools for a new interactive art form. It is also meant to explore the limits of interactivity when applied to time-based material. The eerie texture of the visuals combined with an equivalent soundtrack enable a greater connection between the various components. The global interactivity of our work is enriched by its combinatorial potential. (Onyrisk is a play on French words: ony comes from the term onirisme which refers to the dream state; risk was added to qualify the unknown involved in the interactive experience.)

The whole concept is relatively simple. The visuals consist of modified film sequences that are stacked on two laserdiscs. Four different soundtracks of ambient music and loops can be constantly accessed (if you combine them, you could count on about ten reasonable combinations). This version of Onyrisk is played on a single Macintosh screen using a video switcher and a Raster Ops card. The system is entirely controlled by a Hypercard stack that also loads, when needed, Macromind Director animations (some of which are interactive).

Technically speaking, the installation is ‘low-profile’. There is however a highly complex Hypercard programming involved, in the form of an expert system that manages the connectibility of the audiovisuals and matches it to the hardware’s possibilities. Onyrisk is an attempt to implement true computer interactivity at a deeper level in audiovisual design, tracking and taking note of each of the viewer’s decisions before showing the next sequence. The texture of the piece is constantly readjusted by the intelligence at work in the expert system.

She Loves It, She Loves It Not is an interactive CDROM disc created by Christine Tamblyn in collaboration with Marjorie Franklin and Paul Tompkins. It contains texts, sound, movie clips and images about women’s use of technology in the past, present and future. Over the last two decades feminists have identified men’s monopoly of technology as an important source of their power; women’s exclusion from access to technological prowess is a crucial element in their dependence on men. This project addresses this issue from several different angles.

The viewer accesses a series of screens by clicking a mouse. The initial interface is a graphic image of a daisy. Each of the petals of the daisy represents a loop of screens with a particular theme: Memory, Control, Power, Communication, Violence, Homunculus, Labyrinth, Interactivity, The Other, Representation and Ideology. When a viewer clicks on a petal, the loop she has chosen begins. Each screen is composed of a headline, a block of text, a static image and several “buttons” that open up to various elements. The images are derived from various found sources, including  comic books, a catalog of robots, magazine advertisements and art works. The text concisely analyzes the topic from the perspectives of cultural studies, sociology and film history. A continuously looping sound is also associated with each screen. Special animated buttons allow viewers to read handwritten letters, watch Quicktime movie clips (digitized at 5 1/2 frames per second for a de-familiarizing effect) or see a “footnote” text with more detailed information about a specific topic. The text contains 84 screens and takes about an hour to view once in its entirety (in one possible configuration.) Because it is an interactive, non-linear piece, viewers can choose how long to spend with it, what order to view it in, whether to repeat or skip screens and whether or not to open buttons. The visual aesthetic of the piece has a handmade collage look; we have deliberately avoided the slick sterility of much computer art. Its content combines aspects of an academic essay or documentary film with a poetic series of associated links between graphic, film, text and sound elements. Thus,the project serves as a prototype exploring some of the new potentials of the interactive CDROM format. Both the form and the content of the work attempts to demonstrate how women might use and have used technology differently and how technology might adapt to female learning proclivities and female culture. An integral part of the project is the design of computer interfaces that are more user friendly for women. Because computers have evolved as tools built by men for men to be used in warfare, the current interfaces tend to have a violent, aggressive character. They are hierarchical, mirroring the militaristic male pyramid with its rigid chain of command.
Current interfaces also have a predominantly visual bias, privileging the male gaze and male strategies for control through surveillance of territory. Interfaces designed to be operated by women ought to be multi-sensory, personal, affective and dynamic. Our approach to redesigning the interface involves the creation of a female persona in cyberspace who serves as a guide to the system. The navigation buttons on each screen appear inside an image of this persona, and her voice gives instructions about how to proceed. By envisioning a more productive relationship between women and technology, the project will benefit women who are using new technologies in a variety of academic fields and artistic endeavors. It is designed to be exhibited as an art installation as well as to be used as an instructional resource for women students by providing positive alternatives to the negative stereotypes regarding women and technology often inculcated in early educational experiences. Just as feminist theorists have stressed the importance of women having access to the position of speaking subjects and “having a voice” in our culture, it is similarly important for
women to have role models for computer literacy as computers become an essential communications tool.

The CDROM requires a high-end Macintosh computer (MAC IIci or above with 6 RAM available), a color video monitor and stereo speakers to operate. It was programmed using Macromedia Director.

I am interested in applying techniques for photo-realistic rendering to non-representational objects. My current work explores reflection and refraction of light on/through transparent objects. My focus has primarily been on exploring surface and colour issues as applied to complex abstract models.

Although I have been using computers for ten years now, and supercomputers for the past three years, I am only beginning to explore what is really possible. Perhaps this is why I am so intrigued with using computers for my work.

“A Dialogue With Hunger” excavates a compressed image of desire from the history of optics and cinema as well as that of psychoanalysis. The spectator’s desire constitutes the foundation of the cinematic apparatus that is used here to trigger the film projector. The female body as the site of the imaginary becomes the locus of the colliding forces of desire and violence. Simultaneously, the projection sets in motion a dispersion of the spectator positions. Who is looking and who is being looked at?

Installation “A Dialogue With Hunger” is part of a series of work, in which I have challenged the pleasure of looking. This challenge is posited from a feminist point of view and elaborates the notion of gendered gaze commonly presented in feminist film theory describing the pleasure of looking and the pleasure of control allowed by the act of looking being made only available for the male gaze in traditional cinema, in which the female body is only presented as the object of the gaze. In my pieces I look for strategies for making this controlling gaze encounter itself and thus depriving the pleasure momentarily from it. Rather than an image to be looked at the installation “A Dialogue With Hunger” is intended to function as a lure, a trap for catching the spectator in the process of seeing him or herself being found out looking. The piece consists of a white podium with a stereo-graphic viewer, a movie projector and an infrared sensor. When the spectator looks down into the slides the infrared sensor triggers the movie projector and the spectator becomes illuminated by the film projection. However, when the spectator looks up, the projection is interrupted. The projector thus functions in a double role: it projects the image but it also suggests the existence of a filming apparatus as a controlling device. This  control does not only refer to the technical aspects of illumination and lens, but also to the psychological power of the film as the site of the imaginary in which the desire for mother’s body becomes replaced by the desire to see, but always remains unfulfilled. The images in the film loop reflect this process. The image of the infant being nursed fades into the recreation of the mirror scene in which I film myself through mirror. The latter also questions my identity as a female filmmaker and as the other of myself generated by these layers of reflecting and
penetrating surfaces. The stereographic image as the imaginary object of the gaze posits female body as the scene in which the violent forces of desire, fetishism, and anxiety collide.

My work is about the visual language of architecture I use this language to represent a world of fragments — remnants marked by traces of urban history in disintegration and regeneration. I am using imagery which evolves out of basic architectural structures and ornamentation. This vocabulary of forms began as a means of exploring pictorial structure but it has taken on other meanings for me. Architectural imagery, with its resonances and associations, has become a means of creating a continuum between the past and present; this work has become a reflection on change, creation and destruction.

In this series Disintegration/Reconstruction, I am working with an image of the dissolving city. The disintegrating and evanescent forms in these images are layered and stratified. I wanted this composite imagery to create a continuity between disparate forms and to reflect the discontinuity, rupture and devastation of the urban environment. Through these common elements of the architectural and ornamental vocabulary, are interwoven contrasts of embellishment and abandonment, connection and dislocation, beauty and ugliness, past and present. identity and anonymity.

This work incorporates photographic fragments of historical and contemporary structures as well as core elements of architectural language. I use altered photo fragments in which architectural conventions (such as window, column, arcade, frieze, vault, facade, and figurative ornament) are dematerialised, combined and layered. I also include vernacular artefacts of urban environments in the form of signage and frag­ments of type. Superimposed over this collage of fragments are transparent linear pattern elements which imply the grid of the city, architectural plans, and cloth patterns-the ‘fabric of the city’.

The composites are accomplished through use of a computer; the photo fragments are digitised, then altered, manipulated and repainted. Software enables me to selectively pick up parts of a photo­graphic image, to dissolve, process or manipulate that image, changing brightness, contrast, resolution and sharpness. I repaint these fragments, changing their focus, detail, edge and texture, and incorporate pattern elements which are transparently floated over the architectural elements.
I have chosen to work in a pixelated, low resolution mode, instead of using the capacity of the soft­ware to create photo-realistic images. The broken and fragmented quality of the images is consistent with my content and I like the contrast between the broken quality of the image seen close up and its more photographic reading at a distance. Additionally, the pixel/grid element represents a tie between my art in traditional media and the signature imprint of the computer.

The images in this series were output as tiled and laminated laser prints (79.7 x 119.4 cm and 73.7 x 97.8 cm). The grid of tiled pages which are laminated onto a single sheet also reintroduces an element of the patterning grid and repetition of the urban environment. Alternatively, some of the images in this series have been output as one colour photo-lithographs (29.2 x 36.8 cm).

The VNS Matrix (Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt) emerged from the cyber-swamp during a Southern Australian Summer circa 1991, on a mission to hijack the toys from techno-cowboys and remap cyber-culture with a feminist bent. VNS Matrix create hybrid electronic artworks which ironically integrate theory with popular culture.

VNS Matrix have come to electronic art through photography, film, video, music, performance, writing, feminism and cultural theory. The inpetus of the group is to investigate and decipher the narratives of domination and control which surround high technological culture, and explore the construction of social space, identity and sexuality in cyberspace. The project which they pursue is one of debunking the masculine myths which might alienate women from technological devices and their cultural products. They believe that women who hijack the tools of domination and control introduce a rupture into a highly systematized culture by infecting the machines with radical thought, diverting them from their inherent purpose of linear top-down mastery. Their first action was the dissemination of the ‘Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century’, which was placed in public sites, published in various academic, art and popular journals, and broadcast on community television and radio. The 6m x 3m billboard of the ‘Manifesto…’ has been widely exhibited. Their current project is the on-going  development of All New Gen, an interactive computer artwork, and installation piece which takes the language of the computer game as it’s discursive context. The component parts of All New Gen are lightbox mounted large scale transparencies, audio works, video and sculptural structures. All New Gen’s mission, as anarcho cyber-terrorist is to undermine the “chromo-phallic patriarchal code” (1) and sow the seeds of the new world disorder in the data banks of Big Daddy Mainframe…

The VNS Matrix are continuing their interrogation of the codes of popular technologies is their textual project ‘CorpusfantasticaMOO’ which sites itself within the mainframe of the Internet, the worldwide electronic communication network or the ‘information superhighway’ as the merchants of hype would have it.

The VNS Matrix have exhibited in Adelaide, Minneapolis and Chicago and will tour to Helsinki, London, Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne over the next year. VNS Matrix is a self-governing system (2), replicating in dangerous and unexpected ways, coming soon to a terminal near you…

My work is about the visual language of architecture I use this language to represent a world of fragments — remnants marked by traces of urban history in disintegration and regeneration. I am using imagery which evolves out of basic architectural structures and ornamentation. This vocabulary of forms began as a means of exploring pictorial structure but it has taken on other meanings for me. Architectural imagery, with its resonances and associations, has become a means of creating a continuum between the past and present; this work has become a reflection on change, creation and destruction.

In this series Disintegration/Reconstruction, I am working with an image of the dissolving city. The disintegrating and evanescent forms in these images are layered and stratified. I wanted this composite imagery to create a continuity between disparate forms and to reflect the discontinuity, rupture and devastation of the urban environment. Through these common elements of the architectural and ornamental vocabulary, are interwoven contrasts of embellishment and abandonment, connection and dislocation, beauty and ugliness, past and present. identity and anonymity.

This work incorporates photographic fragments of historical and contemporary structures as well as core elements of architectural language. I use altered photo fragments in which architectural conventions (such as window, column, arcade, frieze, vault, facade, and figurative ornament) are dematerialised, combined and layered. I also include vernacular artefacts of urban environments in the form of signage and frag­ments of type. Superimposed over this collage of fragments are transparent linear pattern elements which imply the grid of the city, architectural plans, and cloth patterns-the ‘fabric of the city’.

The composites are accomplished through use of a computer; the photo fragments are digitised, then altered, manipulated and repainted. Software enables me to selectively pick up parts of a photo­graphic image, to dissolve, process or manipulate that image, changing brightness, contrast, resolution and sharpness. I repaint these fragments, changing their focus, detail, edge and texture, and incorporate pattern elements which are transparently floated over the architectural elements.
I have chosen to work in a pixelated, low resolution mode, instead of using the capacity of the soft­ware to create photo-realistic images. The broken and fragmented quality of the images is consistent with my content and I like the contrast between the broken quality of the image seen close up and its more photographic reading at a distance. Additionally, the pixel/grid element represents a tie between my art in traditional media and the signature imprint of the computer.

The images in this series were output as tiled and laminated laser prints (79.7 x 119.4 cm and 73.7 x 97.8 cm). The grid of tiled pages which are laminated onto a single sheet also reintroduces an element of the patterning grid and repetition of the urban environment. Alternatively, some of the images in this series have been output as one colour photo-lithographs (29.2 x 36.8 cm).

This interactive art installation piece consists of a large screen with a dog leash out in front of it. When you first come upon it the screen is showing a sleeping dog (or a bouncy yelping one depending on how long since the last “walk”.) Picking up the leash wakes the dog up and off you go.

At first you are walking down a photo-realistic country lane, bouncy puppy dog in front of you and all. Sound effects give a sense of presence to the world, chirping birds, crickets, footsteps as you cross bridges etc. The leash is both your input device and the computer’s feedback device, it pulls you when the dog sees something off the road that it wants to investigate.  Depending on how compliant you are to the dogs wishes you will encourage more or less “mutations” of the environment. Over time image processing effects and fractionally generated scenery will eat away at the photo-realism and leave you walking through a stranger and stranger world. There is no end to how long you can walk as more scenery is constantly generated. Of course the dog gets tired after a while… Of particular interest is the novel force feedback that the leash provides as well as the realism of the imagery, at least until you have walked a long way and “evolved” a very strange world. The piece consists of a 3D Interactive Multiplayer, a custom force reflective electronic dog leash, custom software and large screen rear projection television.

My work is about the visual language of architecture I use this language to represent a world of fragments — remnants marked by traces of urban history in disintegration and regeneration. I am using imagery which evolves out of basic architectural structures and ornamentation. This vocabulary of forms began as a means of exploring pictorial structure but it has taken on other meanings for me. Architectural imagery, with its resonances and associations, has become a means of creating a continuum between the past and present; this work has become a reflection on change, creation and destruction.

In this series, Disintegration/Reconstruction, I am working with an image of the dissolving city. The disintegrating and evanescent forms in these images are layered and stratified. I wanted this composite imagery to create a continuity between disparate forms and to reflect the discontinuity, rupture and devastation of the urban environment. Through these common elements of the architectural and ornamental vocabulary, are interwoven contrasts of embellishment and abandonment, connection and dislocation, beauty and ugliness, past and present. identity and anonymity.

This work incorporates photographic fragments of historical and contemporary structures as well as core elements of architectural language. I use altered photo fragments in which architectural conventions (such as window, column, arcade, frieze, vault, facade, and figurative ornament) are dematerialised, combined and layered. I also include vernacular artefacts of urban environments in the form of signage and frag­ments of type. Superimposed over this collage of fragments are transparent linear pattern elements which imply the grid of the city, architectural plans, and cloth patterns-the ‘fabric of the city’.

The composites are accomplished through use of a computer; the photo fragments are digitised, then altered, manipulated and repainted. Software enables me to selectively pick up parts of a photo­graphic image, to dissolve, process or manipulate that image, changing brightness, contrast, resolution and sharpness. I repaint these fragments, changing their focus, detail, edge and texture, and incorporate pattern elements which are transparently floated over the architectural elements.
I have chosen to work in a pixelated, low resolution mode, instead of using the capacity of the soft­ware to create photo-realistic images. The broken and fragmented quality of the images is consistent with my content and I like the contrast between the broken quality of the image seen close up and its more photographic reading at a distance. Additionally, the pixel/grid element represents a tie between my art in traditional media and the signature imprint of the computer.

The images in this series were output as tiled and laminated laser prints (79.7 x 119.4 cm and 73.7 x 97.8 cm). The grid of tiled pages which are laminated onto a single sheet also reintroduces an element of the patterning grid and repetition of the urban environment. Alternatively, some of the images in this series have been output as one colour photo-lithographs (29.2 x 36.8 cm).

An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War is an interactive computer media artwork installation project that features early 1950’s East European personal and official Communist material in the form of home movies, video footage of Eastern European places and events, objects, books, family documents, Socialist propaganda, money, sound recordings, news reports, identity cards, etc. These are part of my collection of things and stories related to the Cold War that I have gathered during the past 20 years. These items, in the form of over eighty stories, have been arranged thematically in eight rooms superimposed on the original floor plan of the former Workers’ Movement (Propaganda) museum in Budapest – (the original contents of which have been in permanent storage since 1990). The Anecdoted Archive reflects my particular history in relation to the Cold War. Born in Budapest in 1950 near the end of the Stalin era, I fled with my family to the West during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

To Fall Standing features a video gun and stop-motion photographs in an interactive installation reminiscent of the shooting gallery at the carnival. A tiny video surveillance camera has been fitted into the barrel of an 1880’s shotgun in conscious reference to the photographic machine gun designed by renowned French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey in 1882 to capture the sequential movement of bird’s wings in flight.

Considered to be one of the earliest cinematic devices, Marey’s photo-gun (converted from a Colt revolving rifle) could be seen as the first in a lineage to the Gulf War ‘slam-cam’ or missile born camera.

“The fact that the renowned scientist Marey cast his experimental apparatus into the form of a weapon of violence (machine guns were devised exclusively for warfare) cannot help but make us wonder: how, in a few decades, did the photographic apparatus evolve from the camera obscura – a roomy and passive receptacle for the faint traces of light – into a bizarre phallic weapon without a projectile?” (DeMarinis, P., Catalogue, To Fall Standing, Artspace, 1993.)

The relationship between guns and the cinematic is made explicit as the viewer is invited to point-and-shoot, simultaneously effecting the strobes, sight-line image which appears on a bank of monitors (video effect designed in collaboration with Steven Jones).

My work is about the visual language of architecture I use this language to represent a world of fragments — remnants marked by traces of urban history in disintegration and regeneration. I am using imagery which evolves out of basic architectural structures and ornamentation. This vocabulary of forms began as a means of exploring pictorial structure but it has taken on other meanings for me. Architectural imagery, with its resonances and associations, has become a means of creating a continuum between the past and present; this work has become a reflection on change, creation and destruction.

In this series Disintegration/Reconstruction, I am working with an image of the dissolving city. The disintegrating and evanescent forms in these images are layered and stratified. I wanted this composite imagery to create a continuity between disparate forms and to reflect the discontinuity, rupture and devastation of the urban environment. Through these common elements of the architectural and ornamental vocabulary, are interwoven contrasts of embellishment and abandonment, connection and dislocation, beauty and ugliness, past and present. identity and anonymity.

This work incorporates photographic fragments of historical and contemporary structures as well as core elements of architectural language. I use altered photo fragments in which architectural conventions (such as window, column, arcade, frieze, vault, facade, and figurative ornament) are dematerialised, combined and layered. I also include vernacular artefacts of urban environments in the form of signage and frag­ments of type. Superimposed over this collage of fragments are transparent linear pattern elements which imply the grid of the city, architectural plans, and cloth patterns-the ‘fabric of the city’.

The composites are accomplished through use of a computer; the photo fragments are digitised, then altered, manipulated and repainted. Software enables me to selectively pick up parts of a photo­ graphic image, to dissolve, process or manipulate that image, changing brightness, contrast, resolution and sharpness. I repaint these fragments, changing their focus, detail, edge and texture, and incorporate pattern elements which are transparently floated over the architectural elements.
I have chosen to work in a pixelated, low resolution mode, instead of using the capacity of the soft­ware to create photo-realistic images. The broken and fragmented quality of the images is consistent with my content and I like the contrast between the broken quality of the image seen close up and its more photographic reading at a distance. Additionally, the pixel/grid element represents a tie between my art in traditional media and the signature imprint of the computer.

The images in this series were output as tiled and laminated laser prints (79.7 x 119.4 cm and 73.7 x 97.8 cm). The grid of tiled pages which are laminated onto a single sheet also reintroduces an element of the patterning grid and repetition of the urban environment. Alternatively, some of the images in this series have been output as one colour photo-lithographs (29.2 x 36.8 cm).

My work is about the visual language of architecture I use this language to represent a world of fragments — remnants marked by traces of urban history in disintegration and regeneration. I am using imagery which evolves out of basic architectural structures and ornamentation. This vocabulary of forms began as a means of exploring pictorial structure but it has taken on other meanings for me. Architectural imagery, with its resonances and associations, has become a means of creating a continuum between the past and present; this work has become a reflection on change, creation and destruction.

In this series Disintegration/Reconstruction, I am working with an image of the dissolving city. The disintegrating and evanescent forms in these images are layered and stratified. I wanted this composite imagery to create a continuity between disparate forms and to reflect the discontinuity, rupture and devastation of the urban environment. Through these common elements of the architectural and ornamental vocabulary, are interwoven contrasts of embellishment and abandonment, connection and dislocation, beauty and ugliness, past and present. identity and anonymity.

This work incorporates photographic fragments of historical and contemporary structures as well as core elements of architectural language. I use altered photo fragments in which architectural conventions (such as window, column, arcade, frieze, vault, facade, and figurative ornament) are dematerialised, combined and layered. I also include vernacular artefacts of urban environments in the form of signage and frag­ments of type. Superimposed over this collage of fragments are transparent linear pattern elements which imply the grid of the city, architectural plans, and cloth patterns-the ‘fabric of the city’.

The composites are accomplished through use of a computer; the photo fragments are digitised, then altered, manipulated and repainted. Software enables me to selectively pick up parts of a photo­ graphic image, to dissolve, process or manipulate that image, changing brightness, contrast, resolution and sharpness. I repaint these fragments, changing their focus, detail, edge and texture, and incorporate pattern elements which are transparently floated over the architectural elements.
I have chosen to work in a pixelated, low resolution mode, instead of using the capacity of the soft­ware to create photo-realistic images. The broken and fragmented quality of the images is consistent with my content and I like the contrast between the broken quality of the image seen close up and its more photographic reading at a distance. Additionally, the pixel/grid element represents a tie between my art in traditional media and the signature imprint of the computer.

The images in this series were output as tiled and laminated laser prints (79.7 x 119.4 cm and 73.7 x 97.8 cm). The grid of tiled pages which are laminated onto a single sheet also reintroduces an element of the patterning grid and repetition of the urban environment. Alternatively, some of the images in this series have been output as one colour photo-lithographs (29.2 x 36.8 cm).

“The opposition between hearing and staring finds its strange union with the diamond stylus, a diamond above all that writes out sound as well as reflects light”.       

 –Duncan Smith, The Age of Oil

A series of interactive sculptures that play ancient phonograph records with laser beams. The reflections of light from the walls of the groove carry the audio information to photoelectric devices where it is translated first into an electrical signal, then into sound by a loudspeaker.

The resultant sounds range from recognizable to distorted, something like a distant shortwave radio or a haunting bit of a melody just barely remembered. The arrangement of optics, motors and light allow random access to the grooves of the records, permitting distortion, disarrangement and decomposition of the musical material. Each Edison Effect player is a meditation on some aspect of the relations among music, memory and the passage of time. Our sense of time, memory, and belonging have all been changed by the exact repetition implicit in mechanical recording. The needle in the groove, no less than the needle in the vein, is one symbolic emblem on our quixotic quest for the perfect moment of fulfillment. Re-played here, without needles, the record becomes what it really is: a holographic object, a simultaneous smorgasbord to be consumed in the order and taste we see fit. The raw and raucous noises of the record surface commingle with the sounds inscribed in the groove, creating a havoc of misinterpreted intentions and benign accidents. The phonograph and the photograph have a coeval history of influence and development. The Edison Effect players demonstrate the photographic nature of acoustic recordings. These pinhole (or needlepoint?) pictures of sounds long vanished project the shadows of sounds. Holograms, gamma rays, goldfish and cuneiform serve to emphasize the parallel narrative of the mechanization of image and sonic inscription.

Al & Mary Do the Waltz (1989)
A turn-of-the-century Edison wax cylinder of Strauss’ “Blue Danube Waltz” is turned on a paint roller rotated by a motor and rubber band. A laser beam is focused on the groove of the cylinder and its reflections are translated into sound. The laser beam passes through a bowl of goldfish who occasionally interrupt the beam to produce uncomposed musical pauses.

lch auch Berlin(er) (1990)
A tribute to the Berlin(er) brothers, Emil, Irving, and John Fitzgerald. A gelatin dichromate hologram of a 78 rpm record of the “Beer Barrel Polka” is rotated on a transparent turntable and played by a green laser. Once I realized that only light reflections were needed to make the recorded grooves audible, it became apparent that a hologram (the memory of light reflecting from a surface) would suffice to play music. Here, sans needle, sans groove, the band plays on.

Fragments from Jericho (1991)
An authentic recreation of what is probably the world’s most ancient audio recording. A clay cylinder inscribed (by intention or accident?) with voices from the past. By gently turning a large black knob, you can direct the laser beam across the surface of the turning clay vessel to eavesdrop on vibrations from another age.

Un-raveled Melody (1993)
Mechanical recording exerted its effects upon music composition by coercing preexisting rondo forms into ever tighter spirals. A hologram of Ravel’s “Bolero” cycles forever, as the laser beam weaves its path along the dance floor.

Rhondo in Blew a Ia Cold Turkey (1993)
A 78 of “Rhapsody in Blue” is erratically scanned by a laser beam emitting from a hypodermic syringe. We may contemplate the addictive act of record listening as Oscar Levant plays himself playing Gershwin in another tired remake of “An American [Junkie] in Paris.”

The Virtual Body is at once a scientific instrument, an aesthetic object, and a postmodern magic box. It simulates the rococo salon in miniature and extends the rococo intoxication and upheaval of the senses into the new technological condition. The column sitting in the room with its pulsing, vibrating, glowing box beckons the viewer to peer into the top, only to be met by his or her own eye peering back through the ceiling. The gradual shift from ceiling to tracking floor collapses the space, causing the spectators to fall into, travel within, and lose themselves inside the phenomenon. With this magic box there is an erasure of physicality, as if not only the room has collapsed, but also our knowledge of the body within space. This twist engages and traps the spectator who becomes at once spectator/object, participant/subject, creating an intense and new aesthetic site.

Breath is an interactive installation in which the breathing of the user finds its abstract transformation in moving images and sound. The regulation of one’s breath is not a simple matter. On the one hand it is possible to influence it consciously, while on the other hand inhaling involuntarily leads to exhaling and vice-versa. The real-time processed image, which is an aesthetic frame of a dynamic image world, is based on parameters that can be influenced by monitoring the user’s breath through an interface. The resulting image is a visualisation of the user’s breathing which in turn influences their subsequent breathing patterns and measured values. As a result, a circuit between inside and outside is established.

In the initial state the image is an ordinary structure (made up of 400 polygons) which moves in space -alone or in groups- but always interdependent of each other.
A sensor belt connects the user to the computer. The belt measures the frequency and volume of the external breathing. The breathing rhythm causes the structure to oscillate. The oscillation triggers image and sound.
The changes in breathing frequency control the image processing. The regular breathing of the user makes the images ‘come alive’; irregular breathing ‘kills’ them.
Breath is a temporal stethoscope. Perception in/of time becomes possible through the observation of the present image structure which vanishes in the next instant (but still visible as an imprint). The image emerges out of a connection between past tendencies and current influences.

My work is, for me, a way to make tangible and give form to things that are intangible and formless. It deals with sex, violence, corporeality, experiences, memories, madness, desires and passions: things that are nebulous, changing, and not necessarily physical or tangible. I attempt to represent these things in order to be able to live with them.

I am interested in creating work that has intensely personal and corporeal subject matter as well as my own blood and clutter At the same time this is achieved using a technology that is often associated with the impersonal, with slickness, cleanness and the commercial world. However, this very contradiction allows for and parallels the shift­ ing associations of the work I make.

‘CyberSM III’ uses the human body as the interface for a dialogue through touch. To further complicate matters, the participants in this dialogue are physically separated. They must carry on this dialogue over the Internet.

In the installation, participants at 2 locations wear suits connected to each other over the Internet. These suits contain hot zones which generate various forms of physical stimuli and sense the touch of a participant’s hand. When a participant touches one of the zones on their suit, several things happen: the local computer sends a message to the remote computer telling where, and with what intensity the participant has touched the suit; the remote computer then starts a stimulus in the same area, and with the same intensity as the local touch, i.e., the computers send the touch across the network, and continue it through the remote suit. The computers then enhance the local participant’s perception of the touch with sight and sound. A display projected in front of the participant shows the location and intensity of the touch, while the computer plays sounds corresponding to the touch. Once the local participant removes their hand from their suit, the computer enhanced touch continues until that zone is touched again. Participants can control the intensity and location of these touches by touching their own suits in varying manners, or they can speak to the remote participants, and ask to be touched in other ways. The ‘CyberSM III’ installation creates a full environment of touch, images, and sound, but the interaction, the dialog, takes place only through touch

Dieter Jung sees in the hologram a means of preying on and capturing the precise instant at which light, perception and consciousness coincide at a single point — the point at which reality is meant to be created. In other words, Jung is a catcher of rainbows. His compositions involve rectangular, trapezoidal, parallelogram-like or rhomboid fields of colour, graduated in an optically staggered sequence, which appear to be diagonally offset against each other. The virtual appearance of Jung’s computer holograms is thus translated into the classic medium of painting. The onus of completing the simulation of movement passes to the consciousness of the observer, demanding active participation instead of passivity.

The sense of confusion caused by Jung’s ‘paintings’ stems from the general relativity of spatial con­texts. Like actors announcing their message from the stage (because it cannot be resubstantialised in any other way) the third dimension can only be a plane of projection by which the fourth dimension is rendered tangible.

Our observation thus arrives at an important point: it touches on a central issue. Holograms that serve solely to transform the three-dimensionality of objects in the outside world into spectral images have failed to exploit the essence of the hologram and have therefore disregarded its true quality. This quality consists in the fact that the hologram is a vehicle capable of projecting the presence of a dimensionality beyond the third dimension. The concept of the fourth dimension has already been used in such an inflated way that it has become jaded and imprecise. It could mean anything. This is why there should be no mention of the fourth dimension, only of determining one of the dimensions situated beyond the three conventional dimensions. It is this added dimension, together with the perception of light, that constitutes the point of convergence of the space within and the space without. where the light of consciousness is sparked. I would like to call them dimensions of consciousness. The rainbow is the allegory.

Dieter Jung sees in the hologram a means of preying on and capturing the precise instant at which light, perception and consciousness coincide at a single point — the point at which reality is meant to be created. In other words, Jung is a catcher of rainbows. His compositions involve rectangular, trapezoidal, parallelogram-like or rhomboid fields of colour, graduated in an optically staggered sequence, which appear to be diagonally offset against each other. The virtual appearance of Jung’s computer holograms is thus translated into the classic medium of painting. The onus of completing the simulation of movement passes to the consciousness of the observer, demanding active participation instead of passivity.

The sense of confusion caused by Jung’s ‘paintings’ stems from the general relativity of spatial con­texts. Like actors announcing their message from the stage (because it cannot be resubstantialised in any other way) the third dimension can only be a plane of projection by which the fourth dimension is rendered tangible.

Our observation thus arrives at an important point: it touches on a central issue. Holograms that serve solely to transform the three-dimensionality of objects in the outside world into spectral images have failed to exploit the essence of the hologram and have therefore disregarded its true quality. This quality consists in the fact that the hologram is a vehicle capable of projecting the presence of a dimensionality beyond the third dimension. The concept of the fourth dimension has already been used in such an inflated way that it has become jaded and imprecise. It could mean anything. This is why there should be no mention of the fourth dimension, only of determining one of the dimensions situated beyond the three conventional dimensions. It is this added dimension, together with the per­ception of light, that constitutes the point of convergence of the space within and the space without. where the light of consciousness is sparked. I would like to call them dimensions of consciousness. The rainbow is the allegory.

In this session, I will present my work using artificial life techniques, emphasizing real-time, physically-based stick figures whose anatomy and behavior can evolve. I have been using emergence in generating images and animations for many years. My work is an attempt to advance the art of artificial life – an art which can evolve potentially towards immense complexity and expressivity, which would be impossible using top-down design strategies. I have always used the computer as a medium for generating emergent art forms, from my early experiments with fractal and cellular automata, to later developments using evolutionary algorithms. I would like to step through my development as an artificial life artist, and to site the works of other artists and thinkers working in similar ways.

Oasis is an interactive environment on the WWW where information can be stored and searched. The landforms themselves are dynamically altered in relation to what and where it is buried. Hyper media links including audio are layered in the terrain. You can see others users roaming the terrain as you move around.

Ezrom’s Room consists of images with a bar-cion between images and objects and about the migration of meaning back and forth at the site of reception and in the mind of the viewer. “It is only that the jerky dance and the mumbled verse reassure us that we are not completely alone.” (excerpt from the work).

Shaolin Wooden Men are digital media constructs whose “bodies” are made of sound. Virtual personalities of a culture increasingly fascinated by the synthetic, they perform and release their sound in collaboration with human participants.”We are never what you think we are.” In We are Sound, the S.W.M. invite you into a “media temple” to demonstrate their mission to “Reconstruct the sonic landscape in order to preserve imagination”.

This work creates a poetic network that deals with notions of sensuality in cyberspace. A “set” of stills with superimposed poetic texts forms a series of panoramas on a data projector. The viewer navigates this architectural/spatial poem by clicking on a different part of the image/ screen. A separate (moving) video is triggered from this same menu and a third screen presents a generator which automatically generates a new poem by selecting works from the “mapped” spaces, and re-ordering them every fifteen seconds. This project was completed with funds granted through the SIEMENS Stipendium at the ZKM- Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe Germany. Programming by Christian Ziegler. Special Thanks to Jeffrey Shaw.

The viewer navigates this architectural/spatial poem by clicking on a different part of the image/ screen. A separate (moving) video is triggered from this same menu and a third screen presents a generator which automatically generates a new poem by selecting works from the “mapped” spaces, and re-ordering them every fifteen seconds.

Frontiers of Utopia allows viewers to become interactive time travelers. It presents the politics of the ideal society from the points of view of eight female characters from the 1900’s, 1930’s, 1960’s and the 1990’s. By illustrating the various moods, criticisms and attitudes toward Utopia, the work presents a rich tapestry of ideas, attitudes, locations and historical perspectives. The viewer can speak to the virtual characters and can attend a virtual dinner party where all the characters and their personal objects are available for comparison.

Frontiers of Utopia allows viewers to become interactive time travelers. It presents the politics of the ideal society from the points of view of eight female characters from the 1900’s, 1930’s, 1960’s and the 1990’s. By illustrating the various moods, criticisms and attitudes toward Utopia, the work presents a rich tapestry of ideas, attitudes, locations and historical perspectives.

This is an interactive artwork that combines 2-D and 3-D art, animation, music, sound and the recorded spoken word to engage the viewer in a unique multimedia experience. The user clicks on a drawing in one corner of the screen: it becomes alive and a spoken narrative begins. The user clicks on another area: the page transforms and now a sculpture rotates in the foreground. The artwork is dynamic, fluid, responsive. It evokes the qualities of a hierarchic domain where ideas become reality, thoughts become words and feelings become images. The work is based on my research on simulated environments, leading me to the view that it is not literal verisimilitude that is important as much as the embedding of an author’s viewpoint within a structure that allows for freedom of interpretation. Adam Naming the Animals asks the viewer to participate and become a co-constructor of experience.

The user clicks on a drawing in one corner of the screen: it becomes alive and a spoken narrative begins. The user clicks on another area: the page transforms and now a sculpture rotates in the foreground. The artwork is dynamic, fluid, responsive. It evokes the qualities of a hierarchic domain where ideas become reality, thoughts become words and feelings become images.

The viewer is wrapped in the light of a video projection beaming from a device, where the subject’s reflection is perpetually represented. An evocative soundscape further enhanced by the strength of its imagery, the work exists as a leap forward into an uncharted universe revealed only through its own technology. This apparently playful interaction between reflection and integration questions the relationship between the individual and the mass, being so close, yet so far, possibly unreachable, the unfathomable space between a galaxy and the single cell within it.

The viewer is wrapped in the light of a video projection beaming from a device, where the subject’s reflection is perpetually represented. An evocative soundscape further enhanced by the strength of its imagery, the work exists as a leap forward into an uncharted universe revealed only through its own technology.

This artwork is an installation employing computer processed video imagery and the oscillations of a helium/neon laser. The format for this installation is a cycle of visual phenomena of approximately twenty minutes in length where the viewer is presented with two kinetic systems. On an 8×8 foot rear projection screen is projected the light of a scanning laser and a video beam. A high quality sound system (employing a tube amplifier) is used to reproduce the music which drives the laser beam through scanning mirrors to create a ‘real time’ display These video projected images create a dynamic visual tension with the scan of the helium/neon laser due to the changing phase relationships between the two images. The images are abstract and strikingly calligraphic. The selected work is produced by composer David Hykes and the Harmonic Choir.

This artwork is an installation employing computer processed video imagery and the oscillations of a helium/neon laser.

In this electronic installation, the attempt to reconstruct self-determination in new media environments focuses on the meeting of body and machine: a cyborg state of half metal and half flesh. The spectator/participant climbs inside the cabinet, a ‘safe’ house, an impermeable skin from the electronic and magnetic sea. The doors are also made of copper screening and the spectator will be seen, on display, from the outside through the doors. The cabinet of copper conducts the upper RF spectrum. In effect, it collects the electrical spectrum and conducts it into the earth. The effect of the copper mesh is the visible keeping the invisible at bay. The box is grounded by connecting it with a thick braided copper wire to the neutral on a power outlet. The energy then has a pathway back to earth.

The title of this work refers to formal explorations produced by algorithmic techniques, the neuron network, cellular automata and lambda calculus. Two of these are presented in books standing on lecterns. Each book suggests different views and presents the development steps of a Morphology in a simple (clear line) graphic mode, as precise as an illumination. Speakers broadcast a sound sequence based on the same digital gene as that of the Morphology. An image of the same model is projected on one a third lectern stelas. On its back, graphics from the same gene are shown in geometric form.

The Transgenic Bagel is an interactive computer-assisted artwork based on a gene splicing theme. The initial interaction, affecting the sound component, occurs when participants “play” a simulated slot machine to “win” a character trait. This gene trait, excised from a mythological animal residing in Noah’s virtual ark, is processed, engineered, and impregnated into a DNA plasmid bagel. Participants can accept the gene by eating the transgenic bagel, or trade the trait. How they plan to use it is another interactive feature.

This work is a series of three paintings on canvas, the culmination of several years of work investigating the convergence of biology and technology. These prints are the products of an attempt to re-sequence human biology, my biology, through the technological systems of printmaking and digital media. Their conception and construction have helped to effectuate a reconstruction of my body as a partially digitized organism immersed in a nutrient-rich environment.

This work is our impression of the world as a distortion shaped by our fears. In ASYLUM, I am showing mental distortions translated into physical distortions. Each character is unique, but all are created from pictures of myself. The project consists of an interactive environment with several cells and inmates and an external ambience made of large format color photographs and video loops.

The artistic inspiration for this work comes largely from the author’s readings in mythology, psychoanalysis and semiology. Her preoccupations are of a symbolic nature. For her, this work is a tribute to women, the place they have carved at this end of the century, taking more than 3,000 years to see Venus reborn and admired in all her dignity! This work is made up of 35mm photos scanned onto a CD-Rom and processed on a computer using Photoshop.

This work is made up of 35mm photos scanned onto a CD-Rom and processed on a computer using Photoshop.

1. SKIN: Surface/Self. As surface, skin was once the beginning of the world and simultaneously the boundary of the self. What senses the world also becomes the means by which the body becomes inscribed. But now stretched and penetrated by machines, skin is no longer the smooth, sensuous surface of a site or a screen. Skin no longer signifies closure. The rupture of surface and of skin means the erasure of inner and outer. The shedding of skin…

2. INTENTION: Insertion. To position an art work inside the body. An electronic structure in an internal tract. The body becomes hollow, with no meaningful distinction between public, private and physiological spaces. Technology invades and functions within the body not as a
prosthetic replacement, but as an aesthetic adornment. As a body, one no longer looks at art, does not perform as art, but contains art. The hollow body becomes a host, not for a self or soul, but simply for a sculpture.

3. STRUCTURE: Motions/Functions. Fabricated with implant quality metals such as titanium, stainless steel, silver and gold, the sculpture is a domed capsule shell containing a worm-screw and link mechanism. It is actuated by a flexi-drive cable connected to a servomotor and controlled by a logic circuit. The capsule opens and closes in three sections extending and retracting. An instrument array light and piezo buzzer make the sculpture self-illuminating and sound-emitting.

4. PROCEDURE: Probe/Extract. The stomach was emptied by withholding food for about 8 hours prior to insertion. The closed capsule, with beeping sound and flashing light activated,  was swallowed and guided down tethered to its flexi-drive cable to the control box outside the body. once inserted into the stomach, an endoscope was used to inflate the stomach and to suck out excess body fluids. The sculpture was then arrayed with switches on the control box. Documentation was done using video endoscopy equipment. Even with a stomach pump, excess saliva was still a problem, necessitating hasty removal of all probes on several occasions…

5. SPECULATION: Internal/Invisible. It is time to recolonize the body with  micro-miniaturized robots to augment our bacterial population, to assist our immunological system and to monitor the capillary and internal tracts of the body. There is a necessity for the body to possess and internal Surveillance system. The internal environment of the body would contour the microbots behavior, thereby activating particular tasks. Temperature, blood chemistry, the softness or hardness of tissue and the presence of obstacles in tracts could all be primary indications of problems that would signal microbots into action. The biocompatibility of technology is not due to its substance but to its scale. Speck-sized robots are easily swallowed and may not even be sensed! At a nanotechnological level, machines will navigate and inhabit cellular spaces and manipulate molecular structures.

Stairs are links between architectural units. They serve as an interface between inside/ outside, up/down. In this sense a staircase is a passage, a transitional space rather than a room of its own. It is a space of movement.

The project series Link, started in Bolzano and Vienna in 1993, attempts to draw attention to specific localities. At the staircase of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki the sounds of walking people, which are usually audible on the stairs, will be superimposed by sounds especially designed for the circumstances. By covering the staircase with an orange carpet the visitor is confronted with a new sensual impression when walking up the stairs. Not only his auditory environment has changed – his visual and his tactile surroundings have been altered as well. As a consequence the visitor’s perception of a well known place is altered fundamentally.

Night Light is about the constructed environment. The images in this series are drawn from the landscape of industrial enclaves, highways and commercial strips unified by night and artificial light.They represent a mysterious and distorted world of exaggerated and unnatural color, reflected light, and fragments of illuminated signage. This landscape of factories and shopping strips is uninhabited, except for the blazing neon which accentuates its desolation and underlines a troubling separation from nature and the threat to environment, identity and community. Night Light constructs an animated environment of fragments, evoking the dynamism of an urban and industrial landscape lacking human presence. This fragmentation, and the process of layering and compositing, is the means of “remanufacturing” the built environment. The complete and intrinsic mutability of the digital fragment, ephemeral and ambiguous, moves beyond montage into the disintegration and reconfiguration of the image.

My work is rooted on computers and concerned with the idea of landscape. This is viewed in a broad sense, including imagined and real, external and internal, photographic and pictorial, existing and virtual spaces. I have become very interested in the play between these different types of environment and the effect the new dimension of computer space can have on our changing perception of real space and conventional representations of pictorial space.

DWTKS: Dialogue with the Knowbotic South- strategies for a changing view on nature concepts; a map of a dynamic information-landscape providing a form of interaction with multi-local/present data fields in electronic networks.

Following the example of the manneristic representations of 4 Continents as ‘Kunst und Wunderkammern’ by the Antwerp painter Jan van Kessel (1627-1679), Knowbotic Research (KR+cF) devises a knowledge space, a model of a Computer Aided Antarctica.  In his series of four paintings, Jan van Kessel portrayed cultural knowledge representations of the four continents known in his day. KR+cF in its DWKTS installation, limits the material to the available computer-processed information on current antarctic research as it appears in public data networks. The immaterial character of these virtual antarctic ‘substance’ can only develop meaning and effectiveness (much as in the 17th century) if these items are developed in independent constructs, which never the less remain in distance but related to their antarctic reference subjects. As the given empirical facts are both real and fictitious, the data space give rise to phenomena which are difficult to conceptualize – a Computer Aided Reality. We still lack the denotative tools to describe the development process leading from the real-world extraction of data to the emancipated operationally of these virtual spacecapes. KR+cF designs knowbots, devices operating as spatially and temporally dynamic interfaces for the observer’s interactive navigation through the information landscape. These data bodies incorporate data sets of current antarctic research projects, which symbolize direct real-time links to the reference subjects occurring in scientific research and the underlying natural events at the South Pole. local computed model of the DTWKS environment at ISEA. Connected to a World Wide Web Server, the visitor, equipped with a virtual eye, can dial himself at a mobile terminal into the DWTKS project. He/she enters the territory of a ‘virtual antarctica’… This dynamic data map visualizes the effectiveness of data environments, and specifically the multifunctionality of the ‘order imposing’ knowbots, by transporting it from the immaterial data space of the Internet into the real space of the installation in Helsinki. DTWKS – Installation offers the simultaneous interaction inside and outside of the dynamic data map with multi-present knowbots. The visitor navigates parallel in a global area in the Internet as well as in a local computed model of the DTWKS environment at ISEA. Connected to a World Wide Web Server, the visitor, equipped with a virtual eye, can dial himself at a mobile terminal into the DWTKS project. He/she enters the territory of a ‘virtual antarctica’. . This dynamic data map visualizes the effectiveness of data environments, and specifically the multifunctionality of the ‘order imposing’ knowbots, by transporting it from the immaterial data space of the Internet into the real space of the installation in Helsinki.

See Banff! bears a strong – and intentional – resemblance to an Edison kinetoscope, which made its public debut one hundred years ago in April 1894. It achieved instant popularity, but was short lived. One and a half years later, in December 1895, the Lumiere brothers publicly exhibited projected film for the first time, and cinema as we know it was born. The kinetoscope became a transitionary symbol during a turbulent era in the media arts.

Physically, SEE BANFF! is a self-contained unit about the size of a podium, made out of walnut and brass, with a viewing hood on top and a crank on the side, as well as a selector for choosing one of the silent “views.” These views were filmed around Banff and rural Alberta in autumn 1993. They were recorded with two stop-frame 16mm film cameras mounted on a “super jogger” baby carriage.  Stereoscopic recording was either triggered by an intervalometer (for time-lapse) or by an encoder on one of the carriage wheels (for dollies and movie maps). Since the filming was “stop-frame” (rather than “real-time”), time and space appear compressed. The imagery is part of an investigation of the role of media and its relationship to landscape, tourism, and growth. Recordings were made dollying along waterfalls, glaciers, mountains, and farmland; movie mapping up and down popular natural trails; and time-lapsing tourists. See Banff! looks and feel like a real kinetoscope. Turning the crank allows the user to browse back and forth, to “move through” the material. See Banff! is an interactive stereoscopic  kinetoscope installation. It is based on footage recorded during the third and final phase of Michael Naimark’s “Field Recording Studies”, a project in the Art and Virtual Environments program of the Banff Centre for the Arts, produced in collaboration with Interval Research in Palo Alto.

Anthroposcope is an interactive microscope, which connects the pulse of a human viewer to virtually growing and evolving micro-organisms in the viewfinder of a Carl Zeiss microscope. By attaching a small pulse sensor onto his finger the viewer will be connected to the microscope. This pulse sensor now analyzes the frequency and amplitude of the human pulse; data and information like speed of the heart beat, magnitude and strength of the pulse get measured. These data differ from viewer to viewer, they directly effect the growth and evolution of the virtual organisms living in the space of the real virtual microscope.

By using the functions of the microscope the viewer now can explore these organisms. A fine and coarse zoom as well as the specimen plates movement in x-, y- and z coordinate will enable the viewer in the exploration and discovery of new organisms. These organisms evolve constantly different, since they are linked to the viewer’s individual heart beat and pulse. Their rate of growth, their size and their movement are effected by the frequency and amplitude of the viewer’s personal pulse. The viewer acts as a randomizing factor, since the influence on his own pulse is certainly restricted. Still, he can try to change his pulse by breathing stronger or for example by causing more pressure in his blood cycle. The ability of using the microscope as well as the skill of influencing the own pulse will enable the viewer in the discovery of new worlds of micro organisms. As a difference to the first version of “Anthroposcope” this second improved version contains virtual organisms that are not pre-defined but created in real-time through the viewer’s pulse. The viewer will be able to focus upon specific organisms, he can “catch” them with the movement of the specimen plate and also zoom deeper inside them in order to explore deeper levels of organic growth. All micro-organisms are three-dimensional, they move in space and react simultaneously to the viewer’s decisions. In a way they directly react to the viewer, but are still somehow independent, since they are connected to the pulse, which follows its own rules.

The forms are characterized through “development in time”, which means that they are created in real-time, without predesign. This ability of real-time design is a feature that has been developed by Mignonneau & Sommerer also for the “A-Volve” interactive environment, where virtual organisms are created in real-time through the viewer’s design. These animal like creatures live in the space of a water filled glass pool and interact with the  hands of the viewers in the water. The concept of real-time creation of forms as well as the combination of viewer’s personality and the individuality of organic virtual organisms are characteristics for the “Artificial Biotope” created by Sommerer & Mignonneau. Individuality is a main characteristics of life; it constitutes the minute differences between individual. All virtual reality installations of Sommerer & Mignonneau, as they are “Interactive Plant Growing”,  “Anthroposcope” and “A-Volve” deal with this relationship and work on the visualization of virtually living organisms that are produced and influenced by the viewers individuality and his personal decisions. “Anthroposcope” is, so to speak, a counterpart to the installations “Interactive Plant Growing” and “A-Volve”. Both installations reflect the individuality of several visitors at the same time, by producing a virtual environment characterized through the interaction between real and unreal, life and artificial life. “Anthroposcope” is a virtual environment that is to be used only by one person at the time. In a way it is a more personal experience, since the viewer will interact and focus upon his own internal microorganisms. In this enhanced version other viewers will also share this experience, they will be able to watch the images of the viewfinder on a large projection screen outside.

This is a multicolor hologram with three levels of superimposed images that can be viewed separately or as simultaneous overlapping transparent image. The images are reconstructed in two different color spectrums by three lamps. The illumination of each image is controlled by the spectator, who walks into or out of a motion detection area located in front of the hologram (ultrasound system). The system divides into three zones:

Zone 1: Outside the installation (blue-violet images)
Zone 2: Inside the installation (average viewing distance). The images are green and orange.
Zone 3: Inside the installation, but very close to the hologram. No lights go on. No images.

The phrase “Nulle part” (nowhere) is superimposed over pictures of the planet. This phrase is semantically connected to other words engraved on transparent or black plexiglass. The other words are “ici” (here), “là” (there) and “ailleurs” (elsewhere). The textual and iconographic reading is both spatial and temporal, with a focus on polyvalent linearity, since the five words can be read in any order. The “Galileo” installation is in dialogue with my 1992 installation, “Gaia”, in a relationship that is at once in opposition and continuous to the mythological reference – an archaic vision of the universe – and exact science – the modern vision of the universe.

The series Legend includes the computer generated images processed by a variation of the ray tracing algorithm. Un-normalized shading system provided rather complicated features of the surfaces of hyperbolic paraboloid in the Cartesian coordinates. For me, the most interesting aspect of the creative work with computer is the ability of the formula driven image generation. Manipulating the parameters of quadratics and the definitions, such as lighting, surface attributes, location and colors, provides rarely attractive and often boring results. Three years of experience in this series will not make me a master of image control; trial-and-error is the sequence of my way. The yield rate is very low. However, I believe I can find many more good scenes in the mine. The computer is not a tool to process existing images, but a colleague to create images with.

The Computer Virus Project is a new, entirely ocular procedure of cultural criticism. The Computer Virus Project strives to develop a field approach to the problems of visual representation in order to reveal hidden casual operations in the kaleidoscopic transformations of contemporary art and social history. Our contemporary technological image environment has created a unique social process that reshapes both art and other technologies alike. Our current international, visually oriented self-consciousness extends all visual modalities into an electronic unified field of continuity and non-verbal connections. With The Computer Virus Project we can imagine new shapes and structures of human interdependence and abrupt reorganizations of imaginative life. Such a change is always delayed by the persistence of older patterns of perception. Thus, The Computer Virus Project proposes that a nonverbal approach towards the creation of a critical art, conscious of the major factors which art has set into motion during the past 25 years, can elucidate a principle of social and artistic change not yet fully realized. The inevitable drive for “closure” and completion in comprehension based on a series of wordy historical observations of our cultural environment can be found elsewhere. The Computer Virus Project proceeds on the basic understanding that verbal language is a metaphor, which not only stores but also translates experience from one mode to another. The Computer Virus Project will provide a depository of visual images for others to verbally transmute.

Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that we become collectively conscious. This collective awareness and interplay is global in extent. A purely visual interplay with all extensions of our human functions and tastes is now
necessary for the progressive integration of our many separate qualities. The Computer Virus Project will seek to problematize the normal linear depiction of visual concepts in favor of a multilinear process. It will not have one singular point of view or a fixed position from which it depicts the visual unfolding of events. Rather it looks for an operative dynamics of all visual data. The dynamics will encase a critical non-verbal discussion as images are deranged to comment each other (while suspending final judgment). Through this process we can transcend the limitations of our own assumptions via a critique of them.

These works are intentionally made as “precious objects” to heighten their formal relationship to illuminated sacred manuscripts. Chaotic digital scripts have been transformed with an “electronic scriptor”, a plotter, following procedures reminiscent of the medieval scriptorium. All works are executed with a multipen plotter using original instructions to generate the entire piece including the scripts, headers and illuminated “initials”. The program employs randomly cast control points in its form generating procedures. In several works the illuminated “initials” identify form generators of special visual interest.

These works invite us to savor both the  beauty and the mystery of their coded procedures – not so much for their stark logic as for the grace and poetry they yield. The procedures provide a window on unseen processes shaping mind and matter. By doing so they become icons illuminating the mysterious nature of earth and cosmos.

Based in part on the mythological story of Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens, Last Call refers both to the promise of desire and the desire of promise. In it, a set of sails constructed from metal wire resonate with the movements of visitors, and this resonance is broadcast by speakers placed at a distance. When a visitor is near the sails, they can hear their image calling to them; as they move towards the speakers, the sound of their image fades away.

Chain Reaction is a worldwide collaborative art project that involves digital image manipulation and networked integration of the visual environment. Participants from around the world collaborate with ISEA95 attendees to create a nonlinear progression of digital images. The project utilizes the World Wide Web and network technologies to enable the participants to collaboratively build a structure of images that reflect the multiplicity of the Internet experience.

By reproducing the triangulation exercise of sailors to get their bearings, this sound installation reproduces, in a virtual space, a triangle of sounds captured in real time at points located in the South of Ireland (Fastnet), the Northern tip of France and the Western tip of Spain (Cape Finisterre). The “viewer/navigator” can move with these bearings by using his ears and the weather information transmitted to the screen, thereby enriching his perception in order to better face the elements emerging from the original database.

Viewers navigate through a maze of three hundred interconnected postcards representing a diverse range of topics. Each postcard contains approximately five hotspot or links, each of which, when selected by the viewer, leads to a different image. The hotspots links are based on literal, semiotic, psychoanalytic, metaphoric or other connections. A database algorithm keeps track of each move, weaving a second level story based on the sequence of the viewer’s choices. This statistical analysis, or metaphoric trace is constantly updated and adjusted.

This is an interactive work. By touching a screen, the spectator explores a narrative and imaginary space centered around the city. Through interaction, the traces and contrasts of the work bring the user’s senses to light in a dream-like universe where sight, sound and touch are awakened. Silk-screen prints and projected images complement the installation.

Within his last ten years at the Frankfurt Ballet, the choreographer William Forsythe has developed his own language of modern dance. In doing so, he has introduced a paradigm shift. Body, space, time and motion have been redefined. Since 1994, in cooperation with the Center for Art and Media Technology of Karlsruhe, a digital dance school has been developed as an interactive computer installation at the Multimedia Lab of the ZKM. In close cooperation with William Forsythe and Nick Haffner, Kuchelmeister and Ziegler have developed an interactive archive which enables dancers to study Forsythe’s theory.

This work is a series of computer images presented as framed photographic prints and accompanying texts. The theme concerns a fictional scenario in which an artificial life form undergoes therapy. The work deals with emerging studies in consciousness which are represented visually through the use of light and dark, and enclosed and open spaces. The images are generated through the artist’s own platform RaySculpt, designed for the exploration of subtleties of lighting and surface effects.

This work is a series of computer images presented as framed photographic prints and accompanying texts.

The migration of artists to the Internet heralds the Post-Aesthetic Age. Believing that all types of human development are related, the future of Art and the aesthetic sense can be predicted from other models of human evolution. Recent genetic studies have confirmed that large scale homogenization weakens the gene pool because of loss of diversity. Global cultural homogenization has begun with McDonalds, MW, and CNN and can only accelerate with the popularization of the Internet. The analogy with genetic evolution forces the conclusion that the Internet will first produce an explosion of artistic interest subsiding into a global homogenization of taste.

“New dance” draws on knowledge of kinesiology, anatomy and improvisation and can offer modern man the opportunity to bind together mind and body. On the other hand, science defies gravity: the astronaut is submitted to “space sickness”, an illness of adaptation. At the CNES, I have developed a sensorial and gestural training program in microgravity using dance techniques. This has transformed my own dance and allowed for the creation of a new choreographic form on the theme of weightlessness. This quality of movement links the organic side of humans to the more impersonal side of new technologies.

In September 1991, for the first time ever, the choreographer and dancer performed a parabolical flight in weightlessness above French soil. Since then, she has pursued her research at the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales in an attempt to develop a training program using dance techniques adapted for astronauts. Other flights during which the artist invited dancers and non-dancers have followed. The object of this film is to show her goals: take art, dance in particular, into the realm of technology and give it back its essential, albeit unexpected role.

This project of video-choreographic installations is an arrangement of sequences composed of the maritime episodes from Circumnavigation and Totempol, a hybridization of sequences filmed in Vancouver with digital sequences elaborated using the software Life Forms. A map is created by the simultaneous and fragmented recomposition of recurrent sequences appearing in different episodes. A type of catalogue where each staged space opens like a rubric, and of which the body in search of passages of dance is the through-line.

On top of a box hangs a monitor surrounded by petri dishes containing bacterial cultures. The box is an information greenhouse. Inside the greenhouse, a computer randomly chooses from a library of approximately fifty images. A cellular automata-algorithm slowly changes the image on the monitor. The image decays. Information-mould grows on the image. The growth rate is controlled by measuring the heat radiation from the surroundings. The audience is part of the system and inevitably alters the image.

This multimedia piece is about my father’s personal odyssey. Born in America, raised in Japan, he returned to America when he was nineteen. When the war began, we were all put in Manzanar, a “relocation camp”. A year later they asked internees if they would like to volunteer for the U.S. Army. They would not recognize your citizenship rights, but they would let you volunteer to serve the same country who had deprived you of those rights. Due to my father’s work for the U.S. Army’s Intelligence Unit, they awarded him the Legion of Merit, the highest non-combat medal in the service. He was then made Head of the Interpreters Unit for the Tokyo War Crimes Trials.

This system is an interactive installation which enables two individuals to produce images, sounds and light when they touch each other. Under the theme of “communication between individuals through tactile perception”, this system focuses on the value of the primitive tactile perception in the computer age where image communication through pseudo-experience, such as virtual reality, is developing.

This system is an interactive installation which enables two individuals to produce images, sounds and light when they touch each other.

This work fills in a mathematical idea with evocative images and text. 17 topologically unique divisions of square become bites out of a piece of toasted bread; the number 17 recurs as 17 phanar symmetries of a spiral motif on cloth. The cloth might recall waves on an ocean, or trade across oceans. The toast floats over the cloth, while on the toast silhouettes of islands filled with text suggest a linkage of colonization to consumption of information.

This work is about the re-recording of the life experiences of a group of people detained in a maximum security mental hospital. It is a mirror to ourselves (“normal society”) and our amnesia when confronted with the excesses of our society, a nightmare that leads to misinformation and fear about mental health systems. This mental space is where strong fictions lie and invisibly glue together the mirror from which we view our own sanity. This is a rehearsal of memories not quite forgotten.

The production of this interactive program has been commissioned by Video Postive 1995 and the construction of the artwork is set to take place during January to April 1995.

In this work, the spectator can glance, through the eye of the movable periscope, at the objects of a woman’s room; they can interact with this woman, present to the screen: according to whichever object is looked at the bed, the clothes, she will undress or dress herself. The spectators however are only experiencing on illusion of control and of voyeurism: they will be frustrated. Breaking traditional narrative structures, the author manipulates electronic language in order to explore social archetypes. A presentation of the art gallery La Centrale as part of De la Lumiere an Exhibition organized in collaboration with Dare-dare, Daziboo and SKOL for the 1995 Mois de la Photo.

This work is drawn from the animation in progress Astroturf which tells the story of how humans are de-evolving through their interaction with new technology. My work is an attempt to re-define the “graphic” in 3D computer graphic aesthetics, while drawing on a broad range of graphic influences and sensibilities, from cartoons, 1950’s sci-fi, experimental animation, comic books, movies, computer games, to fine art, low art and anything else in between.

Shy Exhibitionist is a wood-fired ceramic sculpture with sensors, servers and strobes which is active when no one is in close proximity and becomes and dormant when approached. When making it, I thought about possums, crickets and turtles.

Germ Orginally Monstruous Caused is a computer controlled interactive audio installation that focuses on the discovery, illumination, recognition and understanding of childhood memories; monsters locked in our unconscious are not normally accessible to “audio therapy” session is created using the eleven channel Shadow System. Light sensors placed on the walls, roof and floor of an empty, darkened room monitor the light levels from flashlight beams in the hands of the public. Custom software designed with MAX monitors the sensors and converts lights intensity levels into performance data which is in turn used by the sound producing modules and the audio mixer. The public performs the audio work with flashlights in real time.

On the computer that is part of this installation, viewers see Raoul Pictor in his studio. The painter looks for inspiration, walks about, contemplates his work, dips his paint brushes in dripping paint pots and brushes the canvas in powerful strokes. He sometimes interrupts himself to consult a book or to improvise melodies on the piano. His daily routine is driven by the beat of his various activities. When he completes the painting, we see a copy emanating from a computer printout. Raoul Pictor completes an average of four paintings per hour while going to billions of proposals located in his memory.

I saw this electronic view of the stratosphere as a metaphor for the human condition. We have literally replaced the process that is human consciousness onto a global scale. This scale, and working with an aerial view also sits well with my interest in this particular type of perspective.

There is a database with descriptions and images of spherical Objects. The visitor can consult this database an create an almost infinite quantity of relationships between the Objects. For ten years I have constructed and collected balls. I chose the simplest type to begin with, an exploratory vehicle towards a new form of sculpture. In 1989, during by exhibition Gaçon Schaft Ordnung in the Schedhalle in Zürich, I began describe and classify these spheres using a computer. When taking into account these different classifications, the variety of criteria, and the physical aspect of the Objects in contrast to their digitized counterparts, the concrete begins to blends with the indescribable.

The work is part of the artist’s ongoing artistic process which questions in particular the modalities which relate the city to the body, underlining the transformation from citizen to consumer. It will occupy the commercial space altering the primary purpose of promotional videos. The artist will take landmarks and systematize different sensorial experiences codifying the fusion of the body-city. Five video tapes representing the five senses will be shown by television monitors installed in city businesses, each one associated with a particular sense. This work is presented by the art gallery La Centrale as part of De la lumiere, an exhibition organized in collaboration with Dare-dare, Dazibao and SKOL for the 1995 Mois de la photo.

From a distance, Flora Floor looks only like a dark, glassy surface. But those who accept the invitation to “please walk on the glass” will feel as though they’ve entered a lush world. Holograms depicting a variety of botanical imagery project up from the glass surface, creating the unique sensation of walking on and through the flora and rocks. Simultaneously, a motion detector cues a recording of wild sounds, completing the sensual transformation from hushed gallery to botanical oasis.

The Afterlife Portraits consists of 20 images, each consisting of two elements: a human body and an architectural space. The subjects are people who have influenced me and left a lasting resonance. This resonance is the afterlife that the person leaves in my memory. The associated architecture is the place with which I associate them most strongly. The portraits examine the relationship of photographic to digital imaging technology and the manner in which the digital image is defining new ways of interpreting visual information.

The frozen electronic image has a temporal, tactile quality that is peculiar to the medium, and unattainable by any other means. In this work, movement of the video camera around and through buildings allows the “collaging” into one frame of multiple points of view. The viewer has the unusual opportunity of examining the stills, while hearing and seeing the highly kinetic videotape from which the stills were captured. This work adds a new facet to both mediums, creating a form of conceptual architecture.

The frozen electronic image has a temporal, tactile quality that is peculiar to the medium, and unattainable by any other means.

This work is a fantasy game, a visit to the movies, an exhaustive catalogue of four-letter words, interviews with representatives of five continents. All this is the beginning of a voyage of discovery. The observer decides how to interact with the program and creates his or her own story. “Die Veteranen” are interactive players equipped with constantly changing faces. A free interaction between computer and observer becomes possible. There is no goal and no established plot. The focus is on the observer discovering the unknown.

This multimedia work reflects the existential concept of man in his environment. It develops in time and space thanks to a computer-assisted electronic system. It’s three parts are: The Holosculpture, a concept of our world through stones, holograms and music; The Words, projected in the space while the action of the holosculpture is subtly slowed down; and a video, Vertigo terrae, projected on a wide screen and giving another feeling of the same concern. Electroacoustic music: Marcelle Deschénes, Editing: Gabrielle Schloesser, Electronics: Martin Pelletier, Assistent: Raynald Tremblay. This installation has been made possible by the Canada Council, the Université du Québec é Montréal and MGD Productions (Montréal).

The piece is about spending a moment in someone else ‘s heard. It’s an exploration of how we have become extensions of our brains. The body is disappearing and being replaced by our thoughts. Moving between extroversion and introversion in an instant, Information Woman exists as an apparition in cyberspace, simultaneously existing in many places. The beach in her elbow represents our ability to live apart from real time in thought while in “reality” our body remains locked in the space/time continuum we call home.

This work addresses a space within which one can travel, a space which is is places working together to create an entirely new environment. An index tells the user how to move around the space, using a fourteen-inch monitor and a mouse. The user encounters the index several times during a visit, but only once at the beginning. One meets parts of the summary scattered in all nine places visited, allowing one to return to the beginning but never twice in the same way.

This metaphorical electroacoustic installation is a system of aquariums, an attempt to produce an optimal acoustic milieu for fish, free of mechanical noise and provided with pleasant. Metaphorically, the fish, who are extremely sensitive to vibrations, represent human beings, all too often subjected to intense noise pollution in domestic and work places.

The work is an ecosystem composed of sensitive and expressive cybernetic organisms, a hybrid between nature and the artificial, addressing the level of simulacra to implant artificial life. The installation is comprised of a network-society of sixteen submarine robotic units coexisting in a common basin around which viewers can circulate freely. Each organism is composed of a pneumatic actuator, a speaker, a light source and sensing device. The choice of an aquatic environment comes from the quest to recreate unusual habitats using robotics organisms, a space which also acts as a catalyst of new possibilities for sound and light diffusion.

About thirty women donated body parts and speech to Cyberflesh Girlmonster. Their flesh has been fused, animated and made interactive alongside digital videos, stories and related physiological information. There is no clear controllable interface or menu and the user moves around relatively blindly. This is a work of conglomerate monstrous femininity, a macabre, comic representation of murderous and real life schlock-horror.

Throughout history, artists have produced drawings. As an art form, drawings are more related to writing than to painting. Drawings are a unique and rich domain of an artistic involvement and expression. It is my hypothesis that there exists a comparably rich domain of algorithmically-generated drawings. Such drawings should exploit algorithmic techniques, should not be reproducible by hand, should reveal their machine origins, and should display distinctive and unique features as well as strong calligraphic qualities.

Each of ninety-six black and white images are associated with a sound sequence and an eight-word code. The words and sounds describe the image in a literal or connotative fashion. The images, sounds and texts are stimuli, excitations destined to sensitize the spectator-actor to his past. Voyage No. 17 is a “Memory Machine” that continually obliges the spector-actor to explore his own memories in order to relieve the memories which he will then search via a conical memory scheme.

This work explores the relationship between subjectivity and cities through the metaphor of a “table of elements” of subjective experiences. Produced as a specifically CD-based experience, the work concentrates on the interpretive process of the user as the focus of interaction, rather than a more limited notion of “interactivity” as a navigational schema.

The User Unfriendly Interface is designed to make you think twice about trusting computers, posing the question, “Why do computers want to be friends with us?” The work subjects the user to a process which includes not only answering impertinently personal questions, but also accepting the damning judgments passed by the computer on diverse aspects of your personality, including your sexual orientation, your ideology and your probability of being human.

This work centers around the human body. It treats the body as a repository for memory and emotion and allows the viewer to navigate this terrain by using the human figure as both map and metaphor.

This video installation and multimedia performance questions the present modes of perceiving reality. A perceptual context where technology and the concept of nature exist in a perpetual state of displacement, dislocation and interaction. The work creates a synthesis between technological and natural phenomena: videographic, and multimedia devices interact with optical devices and metaphor of our present ways of apprehending the world.

The work creates a synthesis between technological and natural phenomena: videographic, and multimedia devices interact with optical devices and metaphor of our present ways of apprehending the world.

This work is the fruit of research carried out at the Art-Science interface concerning relationships between the sonic and visual domains. Sound objects are digitized and submitted to a sonographic analysis. The scientific images thus obtained are reworked within particular aesthetic perspective and result in Cibrachrome images. Sound is transplanted to the visual domain without any cognitive intention. The problem lies in the pertinence of the translation of forms from sensorial field to another.

The scientific images thus obtained are reworked within particular aesthetic perspective and result in Cibrachrome images.

In about five years, we will be greeting the new millennium. The first people to formally welcome the event will be those situated west of the international date line. will have to wait 24 hours. As the earth turns, each of us will clock midnight at different times depending on where we are located in the planisphere. I would like to stretch this precious instant into a midnight that repeats itself every hour for a duration of 24 hours. Using Internet as the medium of expression, I will create, through a community of international artists, an artwork representative of the “millennium” midnight. At (SEA 95, a prototype of this work will be presented, based on a community of approximately 30 participants worldwide (Paris, New York, Montreal, Banff, Santa Monica, …).

This continues a series of images that began in 1974 which explore the potentials of marking complex images from very simple marks. The image was created using geometric tools in Adobe Freehand, and then converted in Photoshop for rasterization and further image processing. I remain concerned about the metaphorical allusions, that are embedded in these software tools. I believe that unconsidered use of such tools encourages the proliferation of “post modernist” illusion and appropriation. In my own work, I hope to build a bridge between modernist concerns with “intrinsic” qualities of the computational metamedium and these “simulatory” qualities of metaphor-based “user-friendly” technology.

The image was created using geometric tools in Adobe Freehand, and then converted in Photoshop for rasterization and further image processing.

The Krachtgever (Invigorator) consists of twenty-eight wooden boxes. The boxes are joined together with metal springs, both horizontally and vertically. A computer controls seven oscillating motors, which are attached to the boxes. Driven and natural frequencies of this spring-based construction are so attuned to each other that movements and sounds created by the installation can change almost imperceptibly from order into chaos and vice versa. The role of the computer is paradoxical: it can be foresee only partly the physical outcome of its decisions. This work was created with the support of Fonds voor Beeldende kunsten, Vormgeving en Bouwkunst (Amsterdam, Netherlands) and the University of Twente (Enschede, Netherlands); it is presented with the support of the Gaudeamus Foundation, the Mondriaan Foundation (Amsterdam) and ARTEC – Nagoya (Japan).

Thanks to Flyers Generator, Tekno-Mind offers you the opportunity to positively infiltrate all of the world’s networks and to distribute the spirit of Techno-connection. This software allows you to create a flyer, an image-tract which promises unimagined mental pleasures and, in an illegal but positive manner, and to simulate its transformation into a techno-artistic virus that can be virtually distributed to all networks.

This software allows you to create a flyer, an image-tract which promises unimagined mental pleasures and, in an illegal but positive manner, and to simulate its transformation into a techno-artistic virus that can be virtually distributed to all networks.

The installation La conscience des limites (Gaia) includes a steel hemispheric structure, 8 multi-colour rainbow holograms, as well as an interactive light control system which divide the viewing space in two parts by means of a sonar signal. This is a work relating to our archetypal representations of the terrestrial globe. GAZA, the mother planet, is evoked through the holographic and luminous alternance of images and the mental model of the Earth is called into question, in a state of survival and uncertainty.

The installation La conscience des limites (Gaia) includes a steel hemispheric structure, 8 multi-colour rainbow holograms, as well as an interactive light control system which divide the viewing space in two parts by means of a sonar signal.

Are you tired of being weak, of not knowing how to act in a world in constant mutation? Tekno-Mind can solve your problems with a new type of “schizo-hygienic” interactive installation. Using a muscle-building system equipped with a digital interface, you can stretch words on a screen, or in the form of a mission, discover a new way of life, all while building your muscles. Each mission becomes a new challenge that will quickly transform you into a “Super-Schizo-Man” moving about in Cyber­Ambiance.

The artist has been exploring the relationship between the human body and new technologies for several years, usually integrating photographic transparencies or video in her works. In this work, she uses photographic images, an on-site camera, and video and computer transformed images in order to project the body into technological space, dematerializing and fragmenting it by various processes. Her work raises numerous questions about the influence of communications, of altered human images and of biotechnology on the personal and the social identity of human beings. This photographic installation is presented by the art gallery La Centrale as part of De la lumiere an exhibition organized in collaboration with Dare-dare, Dazibao and SKOL for the 1995 Mois de la photo.

In this work, she uses photographic images, an on-site camera, and video and computer transformed images in order to project the body into technological space, dematerializing and fragmenting it by various processes.

R-0-M is an interactive installation using a computer and a photoelectric detector video camera. R-0-M is a database of texts. These texts belong to an imaginary being, a hybridization between man and the machine, a cyber. His memory is a very fast animation. It can be stopped with the hand to make reading possible.

Flora Petrinsularis associates to a real book an other one, a virtual book to be flipped through on the screen. At any moment, the computer “sees” the page where the book is open to offer other levels of reading. The real book is composed of two parts, with quotations of The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a small herbarium including flowers collected in the very same places where Rousseau botanized. The virtual book opens interactive sequences of animated images and sounds. For each quotation, there is a video illustration, like an engraving, focused on a character from the short love scenes, in the very moments of outburst, selected from The Confessions. For each flower, the memory of the plant gathering and its metamorphosis into an image is presented. The work underlines the passage between two forms of books, or movies, one of a traditional and the other of a future format, and is based on a literary masterpiece which is always to be discovered. The interactive setting tries to make an interpretation of The Confessions that refers exclusively to the text itself, to its secret or revealed motivations as an exemplary self-analysis.

Media artist Marita Liulia was born in 1957 – into the heyday of Finnish modernism. Consisting of more than 500 manipulated images, Maire (1993) illuminates the full sweep of modernist visions by covering a wild variety of topics that range from art to industrial design, from architecture to cartoons, from interior decoration to utopias of a whole world designed along ‘ marimekko lines. In elucidating its themes the work gives voice to modernist artists and their works, as well as to theoreticians of different periods.

The critical strategy of the work – approaching modernism as a cultural phenomenon – is realized by juxtaposing different visions and products. The central actor in the work is the viewer who, with the computer’s aid, can construct his/her own view of modernism. Maire has several paths to traverse; from the exhilarating modernist “flea market” you can move over to the quagmires of theory or to contemporary criticism; after having listened to the artists you can see for yourself what kind of art they actually produced. The principal path is reserved
for Maire Gullichsen who is a pivotal figure in the work– a “prototype of a modernist”.

The work is shown permanently in Pori Art Museum. A CD ROM will be published in September 1994.

Personal Statement
The question of what existed before language is impossible to answer, as our consciousness  resides entirely within a perception through language. Language is a technology, created to perceive a very different reality from the one without it – if, indeed, there was one at all. In the same way language is a technology, so too are video cameras, computer systems and  telephone networks. But, whilst the technology of language is deeply embedded within our consciousness, and accepted as ‘naturally’ human, new technologies are still considered alien, and, in many ‘virtual cases’, very frightening. However, the fear is not with the technology in itself, but with the fear of forgetting what existed before it. We are in another period of transition from language to medi-age, it is impossible to speculate when and what will change, but when the question of what existed before ‘medi-age’ arises – if, indeed, there is such a question – the transformation will have happened.

Conceptual Statement
This project, between The ZKM-MultiMediale 3, Karlsruhe, and The Badisches Landes museum, Karlsruhe, is my third ISDN based telematic installation in succession. Preceded by ‘Telematic Dreaming’ in June 1992, and ‘The Telematic Séance’ in April 1993. The basic system of sending a live chroma-keyed video image, via an ISDN telephone line, from one site, to a chromakey  system situated in another site, has remained consistent throughout each of these works.
In this new project, two users, one situated in The ZKM-MultiMediale 3, and the other in The Badisches Landes museum, will be sitting on sofas, watching themselves sat next to the user in the opposite location, on separate monitors. A simple system of video cameras and chromakey mixers will allow each user to move freely within their own physical environment, whilst having complete mental interaction in the telepresence environment. The system works like a mirror that reflects the viewer within another persons reality, creating a telematic out-of-body experience. The possible interaction is completely open ended, and entirely dependent on the users participation. A third visual interplay is made by a prerecorded videotape that runs concurrently behind the two users. The prerecorded video image acts as an additional dialogue, creating specific contexts for new possible modes of communication.

Summary Statement
During the realization of ‘Telematic Dreaming’, my first ISDN based project, produced in Finland, June 1992, I discovered the ability to exist outside of my own space and time. A live video projection of my body, on a bed 500 miles away, was psychologically alarming. The semiology of the bed evaporated the technology of teleconferencing, and the implications of being in bed with ‘me’ was all that remained. In this new work I have decided to use a tv-sofa zapping scenario as an interface to carry the semiology that will deem the underlying ISDN technology
invisible.

IDEA-ON>! presents the manifestation of fragments of my own personal reality in what appears to be a living, breathing world. The approach to multimedia rejects traditional flat user interface design, and offers the user many different forms of engagement through four “new realities”, each prototyping different aesthetic, structural and communication based approaches to virtual space. It is interactivity for interactivity’s sake, experimentation with what is possible, experience based as opposed to information based. Things may happen without user interaction, more obscure exploration may be required to find hidden places, or responses given by the objects and beings will vary, often following a surreal kind of logic.

Visiting the IDEA-ON>! installation can be likened to visiting a sacred site where spirits and myths reside. The information space inside the computer becomes a dreaming or meditational space, a manifestation of the subconscious where the objective contents of thoughts are stored
for others to explore and experience. Similar in the way pre-linguistic societies would have a shared body of myths and legends which made up their perception of the universe, a world like IDEA-ON>! jumbles together many things towards a prototype of a dreamlike, surreal, communal cyberspace in which people dream, create, imagine, and play with thought and form.

The Talking Picture is a painting: a framed piece of cloth on the wall, a picture separated from the surroundings, to be looked at from a convenient distance. In the picture there is a woman: the classical subject matter of art in all styles and techniques, the eternal object to be looked at and depicted.

But the work is also a performance: the woman is moving and changing, talking and gesturing. She is before us like a theatre actor, physically present. Only the stage is not present in the spectator’s space, but miles away. The life of the picture comes from elsewhere. So it is like a TV-show or a movie? Partly, yes, but suddenly the woman in the picture turns to the spectator and addresses him or her. There are portraits whose gaze seems to follow you wherever you move in the room; an uneasy feeling of somebody peeping at you. Here it really is true. You
look at the eyes of a seeing picture. The woman opens a conversation, reacts and answers to the impulses of the spectator – or participant. The dialogue has no script like in a play, it doesn’t follow a network of programmed choices like in a computer – it evolves from speech act to
another, like everyday communication. And even the spectator is not bound by preexistent rules: he or she can talk, gesture, make contact – or run away. So it is actually just everyday communication, a conversation and not an artwork? Yes, but the conversant is somewhere else and the communication is highly visual. A telephone conversation with pictures, a tele-communication? Partly yes, but here a third party is involved in the dialogue – the manipulator, who works the live image. A manipulated live narrowcast. After all, it is a framed picture, and not reality framed.

Virtual Characters and Virtual Stage: in April 96 we presented the pilot ‘Muybridge’ at the MIPCOM in Cannes. In this paper I want to tell you about “The making of Muybridge’… ‘Muybridge’ is one of a series of five art programs of 25 minutes each. The episodes are based on great, but not always well known or recognized, inspirators and pioneers from the late 19th century, the previous ‘fin the siecle’. each episode is a piece of music, dance, design and animation mixed with very short fragments of graphical historical information.The first episode is about Eadward Muybridge, a photographer who unintentionally laid the foundation for the cinema. The other episodes will cover the life and works of Tesla, E. Plankhurst, Max Planck, Freud. Framework and Techniques used: Each episode is an artistic interpretation of the life and work of the protagonist. ‘Horses in the Air’ is visualized by integrating traditional as well as the latest techniques and disciplines in order to connect the fin de siecle of the 20th century. Unprecedented combinations of disciplines and formed to stretch the boundaries of contemporary television production. In this way each episode will obtain an different approach in contents, character and design.By means of the use of virtual stage, motion capture and computer animation new ways of expression and visualization are being explored. The combined choreography of the dancers and their co-players which only exist in cyberspace do cause a dynamic tension.Although dance has an important role one cannot say that the episodes are purely dance pieces. Movement is the most important ingredient. The movements of the dancer or dancers function as a kind of animation controller. In some episodes the tool of dance as an animation controller are replaced by other to be captured movements, for instance a moving hand or a movement in the music.This new approach in the way of handling the contents, the cooperating disciplines and the innovative realization techniques will result in a ‘state of the art’ series of television programs.

Admiral Flipside is one crazy sea-dog. Driven by a darker than black alter-ego he embarks upon a bizarre voyage of destruction and self discovery. Haunted by his subconscious he is driven by ghostly manifestations into a surreal world of circus and theatre inspired by Sebastian Brant’s 1494 book ‘Das Narrenschyff’-(The ship of fools). Unbeknown to him he is the leading actor in a stage play based on the ship of fools. He leads the witless fools on a disastrous voyage to find ‘Narragonia’ (Fools utopia). Flipside finds himself the sole survivor after the ship is set upon by fire breathing monsters from the deep. He is washed up on the very beach that he left many years ago, only to discover his innocence waiting for him. Here at last, after so many long years searching, he is forced to confront the grim reality that is himself. These short films combine computer animation, Traditional animation, video and concepts of theatre to produce a bizarre visual story.

In her work DOOM (by which she means ruin), Monika Karasova presents a short story taking place in a 3D animated landscape with symbolic objects, which should sensually induce motion in space and its surpassing. Neither for the author, nor for the viewer the very story should be too important, because it is his story – he is the one who enters the story, the space. The visual effect is underlined by suggestive music by Roman Dzupinka. Its monumentality contributes the clear spatial feelings. The author relies on the overall emotional effect of her work.

A Sunday afternoon in a small town. A man walks into shot. A little girl’s voice is heard calling the man : “Hey you!!” The man turns around and looks straight into the camera and is instantly “turned to stone” …… Medusa is at it again!

For a few years, we have been witnessing an impressive evolution in computer graphics due to the rise of new “tools” of the Virtual. The various shape or motion acquisition tools now make possible an achievement of a realism to the extent of movie quality. In particular the improvement of laser based devices makes easy fast and high resolution modeling at all scales. Of course we are not yet able to synthesize entirely any given scene, but the trend that brings synthesis always closer to reality provides the artists with a new fascinating domain for creation.

For the past two years I have been intensively involved in combining 3-D animation with electronic music. This has resulted in various abstract video films, clips and a science fiction film. More recently I have also begun to explore combinations including real space too, specifically, the flat image in space, and projection methods with regard to people and architecture. Almost as a counterpart to the production of electronic images, I also have a growing interest in primitive sound sculptures of wood, metal and water and the possibilities of existing conditions such as balance, gravity, cold and warmth and distance. In addition, I have been active as a volunteer producing children’s television at the University Hospital, Leiden. I am sure I have done other things, but I can’t remember them!

From Russian dolls and the party game “Pin the tail on the donkey”, “Doll” finally emerged as an animated freak show attraction. A freak trapped in the cartesian space of Harriet’s 3D paste up program, which through trial and error developed arms and legs and avoided a lengthy narrative, only to end up inside Leonardo’s universally recognizable World In Action drawing. Was that it’s destiny ? Or was it being manipulated by some vey intelligent circles and squares?

Gridlock is a unique blend of computer graphics, traditional animation, sex and violence. The piece is based on a series of vigorous graffiti style figures struggling with a computer generated mesh or cage. This is intended to bring together the spontaneity of traditional animation to the poise and control of computer animation, to create a tension between the grid and the creatures and their interaction. This approach is similar to William Blakes theory of the relation between energy and reason, as practiced in his engravings, where reason is embodied by line and energy by color and texture. This piece could be thought of as an equivalent in a modern medium. Technical Notes Gridlock was produced by video grabbing several sequences of hand drawn animated figures and rotoscoped film clips. These were combined with 3D and 2D computer animation and further processed, recolored and retimed. An interactive disk version of Gridlock produced in Director also exists and is available on the internet. An interactive TV program is also underway.

“A fusion of iconic figuration and synthetic abstraction towards a language for the visual expression of electronic music.”

Inspired by the sounds and structures of techno music, the Psy-Vision project represents a set of prototypical language elements for the visual expression of this new sound. Elements of this language include textures, spaces, icons, movements, colors, and animated figures which are extruded into the abstract three-dimensional space of the computer. This video experiments with electronic communication and digital semiotics, exploring the increasingly significant relationships that humans have with virtual spaces and virtual images. These evolving relationships shape and reflect human identity. A central concept to this new way of seeing media-space is the creation of figures that are iconic in form, often remapping other cultures and meanings onto these forms. Consequently, the codes of our contemporary media-space have been sampled, reformed and mutated in Psy-Vision, deliberately detached from any narrative context. This allows the figures and forms to become “visual instruments” whose actions and movements are played in sequence like music. These sequences consequently create visual constructions that represent the sound and evoke mood and atmosphere. Dimensions of time and space are intrinsic elements in the structure into which the forms of Psy-Vision are placed. A key feature of the iconic forms that populate these digital realms is their capacity to mutate and reconstruct themselves in varying modes of representation. This fluctuation and mutation of meaning is a characteristic unique to electronic space, where information can be mapped in multiple ways depending on how its meaning is defined. The techno sound can be said to represent, among many other things, humans exploring the language of machines. The sounds are a manifestation of the ongoing development of relationships with machines and how we perceive their role in our lives. The music, which ranges from minimal abstract frequencies and rhythms to densely layered soundtracks and mutant karaoke, is spatial and experiential in nature and thus ideally suited to being mapped into virtual space. On top of the basic elements of this spatial language, different visual styles are superimposed giving each track in the Psy-Vision sequence it’s own identity and place. The intention is not to create a Virtual mirror of reality, but to create imaginative new spaces, spaces that provide a “natural” place for this music to reside. Each visual space becomes the home to a particular symbolic form, which is explored over the four to five minute duration of each phase. It is in these new evolving spaces that electronic communication systems will grow, offering more suitable ways to describe “identity” in places that do not really exist. Although these images and sounds draw upon a wide range of existing cultural meanings, their representation in virtual space is relatively new to us. Thus their deeper meanings will evolve as they are absorbed into our culture.

Brief attempt to show and make visible dreams. Materials present in this sequence: liquids, water, mercury, exchanging their matter, formspheres, drops, tunnels, are the symbols created by the subconscious for a visual expression of archetypal ideas. Those archetypes are found in all civilizations, all cultures, throughout the ages. The application of computer graphics has been for me the occasion to use my previous studies and experience while synthesizing them together. I think, you can forget about material constraints and consequently be freer in expression and creation with computers. For me, the computer represents the whole human scientific and spiritual experience so that it is a universal “tool” for the artist.

With so much attention these days focusing on the utopian, new age promise of new technology… whether it’s a Microsoft slogan on a billboard, an editorial in a computer trade mag or an artists’ statement in an electronic art show catalogue, the rhetoric can often read the same: New and emerging technologies are opening the door to limitless possibilities…I am somewhat suspicious of the glowing pronouncements concerning the impact of technology on our lives, in response my work deals with themes of technological dystopia, devolution and mutation – a world of malfunctioning Frankensteinian machines, grotesque human bodies and asocial computer nerds…and where technology is simply a more efficient means of going backwards… Much of my work is concerned with redefining the aesthetic in contemporary computer graphics, looking towards the realms of Pop art, and comic culture, while attempting to bridge the ever increasing gap between the world of technology, art and popular culture…

Our piece is entitled “Runs”, and tells a short story about “people in locomotion”. Walking and running are such are such common activities; but where do we usually go to? This is about a very worth wile place to visit which rewards the visitor with great satisfaction. Besides the artistic value, please note its scientific component: the walking and running sequences were not key-framed or motion-captured, but generated by your interactive, real-time procedural locomotion system. The data were then imported into Softimage which we used for all the modeling, facial animation, fine-tuning and rendering. This way, it was very easy, for instance, to produce several figures all running at the same beat to match to sound of the foot steps.

Galileo’s First Glimpse characterizes the moment when Galileo viewed through his first telescope. In an instant the world that has been intersects with the world of possibilities. The synapse created in their intersection transforms perception, and the world can never be seen in the same way again. These moments of dramatic metamorphosis provide opportunities to examine our existence and our goals as individuals, and as members of a global and universal community. The music incorporates recorded and transformed vocal tones, digitized water-phone performed on a sampler, and gentle synthesized tones, woven into a fabric of merging and converging sound worlds. Graphics are created by Lorren Stafford, using a system for converting sound signals into visual representations based on Fast Fourier Transforms, in an interactive setting for manipulation patterns, palette and motion. Galileo’s First Glimpse was created for live performance, and was premiered at the 1995 Divergent Streams/Convergent Dreams festival in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The excerpt presented at ISEA96 is from a video version that had its premiere at the VIII Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing.

Law of Averages takes place in a lush garden. The temptation in this garden, is an interactive theater called The Big Ghost. Vynola, an exotic Bird-like creature, is the bawdy tour guide in this endlessly exciting Cyber world (as long as the viewers have money to pay for it.) Destitute people, addicted to this entertainment, are frequently in the vicinity of the theater. Every one has a place that they live, some of them have a wall or two. They all have a couch and a TV because it helps them think. The Big Ghost is the only actual building in this garden.

My work is informed by the politics of technology, sex and society. As I developed this project it became clear that the key to this work is in the portrayed environment. It is an environment full of contradictions. While it is a lush world, the plants and flowers are frequently personified spewing pollen, eating things or stretching their stamens out to rub against each other. The Big Ghost is a monolithic structure amid the trees. The name, The Big Ghost, was used by Chief Kanhonk of the Kaiapo Indians, in the Brazilian rain forest to describe television. The Kaiapo Indians have no written language, their history was handed down through story telling. Television became a substitute for that story telling so a generation grew up with no interest in their history.

In Law of Averages, The Big Ghost is not just an evolved constantly exciting entertainment. It is an addictive substitute for all interpersonal relationships. There is an additional unseen layer of control that is also being exercised in this garden. Its presence is represented only as stone slabs with directives giving exacting and restrictive guidelines on how to live your life. These slabs enter as scene dividers and they are carved with statements like: Trust Your Government, Aspire to Wall to Wall Carpeting, Buy Life Insurance, Be Caller #7 and Win the Free Dinner. Through out the animation, the narrator speaks in first person of “I” and “you”. No further names are given as the relationship unfolds: I meet you at a party where you are dancing so wildly you are politely escorted out. When I come to your place you have two cats, the evil cat breaks a bottle and becomes difficult to put out for the night. I see you at a bar when you said you had to work and imagine the fight we could have. I want to call a friend and talk to them about you, but everyone in my phone book is dead.

The main conflict arises between this relationship and the relationship the narrator believes he has with Vynola in the Big Ghost. The animation is ambiguously resolved in companionship while The Big Ghost looms in the back ground. With this work I wanted to present an allegorical look at complex issues of contemporary gay life. I did not want to present a happily arrived at conclusion. I wanted to show imperfect characters making decisions about daily events while enduring the complications of technology, overly simplified doctrines for living, their pets and each other.

Limbes, ten or so sequences supported by a narration, tells the memories of a baby in the womb. The film begins like science fiction. But as evidence mounts, we realize that the birth is imminent, and it becomes clear that the narrator is a human being in gestation. This story of initiation invites us -through virtuality- to reflect upon the concept of materialization the process by which things take form. And what if… matter did not exist…and what if the world and the objects we know were just a fine film, with no thickness to it…infinitely folded it on itself a fractal, thereby creating the illusion of mass? And what if…the inside and the outside had no consistency…and what if all matter were nothing but this remarkably deformable envelope sometimes touched by a breath..fashioning the appearance of a being, with an inside and an outside..then the other way round? And what if…being born meant creating a new fold…making it swell until it formed a bubble…tore the wall and escaped…leaving the mark of a navel? And what if…dying meant delving once more into the folds of this huge sheet of flesh? And what if…life were just a stage curtain, and the actor just the wind ruffling the curtain?

Bruges, in the Middle Ages the Venice of the north, locked between land and sea and beset by the misfortune of time. Plagued by natural disasters and the calamities that lie its heart and faced with decline, the city struggles towards its Renaissance… In the heart of that city works a painter, an inspired alchemist in search of new materials. There he mixes his breath with oil and pigments, condenses color and light, transparency and solidity. The secret of oil painting he discovers will offer immortality to his city. This film shows us the middle ages as seen through the imaginative eyes of the Flemish masters and does not restrict itself to a faithful reconstruction of historical fact. It shows a world of fantasy that combines legends and popular and religious rituals, while creating a story, searching for meaning and relinking fantasy with reality, the true with the not so true. Some of the characters seem like points of reference in this fantasy world as they merge with details from paintings by Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, Pieter Bruegel and Hieronimus Bosch. They bring to light what archives have kept hidden: the secret of oil painting discovered more than five hundred years ago and kept stored behind the heavy and elusive silence of stone…

Hard & software featured:

Image processing: Henry Paint Box (Quantel) Flame (Discreet Logic)
Video editing: Video Cube with Photoshop Edit Box (Quantel)
Audio morphing: AudioSculpt (IRCAM)                                                                                              Audio editing: Sound Designer Deck

Location Intersection began as a document by Jeep Johnson of the show Between Water and Sand by Dana Dorosh that was on exhibit at the A.I.R. gallery in the spring of 1994. Initially the work was recorded to show a representation of Dana’s work. As we began the editing we soon became unsatisfied with the “traditional” approach of documentation. We began exploring how we could add another dimension to the material. We started to alter and digitally manipulate the images in MAC based computer programs such as Adobe After Affects and Adobe Premiere. We then edited the material in the MAC using the Media 100 system. The results were very exciting. We eagerly continued down that path and started to integrate related visuals like a series of sand dune shots, aerials over the midwest, and still photographs of cityscapes. We found that in the digital domain the computer was able to integrate every kind of image we wanted to works with. Quickly we were able to create what felt like an infinite amount of materials to draw from. We continued developing distinct treatments for each section. We took similar approaches with the sound track as we did with the picture. Recording sounds, inputting them into the computer and manipulating them in the digital domain. We discovered that similar to the images, the sound we could create and manipulate were endless. The computer facilitates the creation of a new space in reality. Unique juxtapositions emerge. We shot a gallery scene, removed the walls, and replaced them with an aerial image from the midwest. Time and location became the elements of a new language. The video reflects the integration of digital technology with traditional photography, video, painting and all other mediums. We are exploring this new language as we create it. The video was co-directed by Daria Dorosh and Jeep Johnson. It was shot and edited by Jeep Johnson with constant input from Daria Dorosh. The digital images were the result of intensive collaboration between both artist. The process flourished with a successful collaboration.

Inside Round is about the mind, flabbergasted in the face of existential absurdity. Reflecting upon the outside ongoing life it is exposed to and being an isolated world of its own at the same time. We create the world we belong to. We belong to a world we did not create. Feet on the ground, head in the sky. Bustle all around us, stars out of reach above. A multimedia piece involving computer music and computer animation combined with prerecorded video. The picture and the music are equally significant. The relationship between them, which is complementary most of the time, is crucial to the piece – its expressivity and dynamics emerge from their interaction. The idea was to express the feeling of ‘existential loneliness and absurdity’, as a fundamental state of mind, by using extremely simple, elementary forms and gestures, which seemed appropriate for achieving that result. Inside Round is a contemplative piece and in a way could be even called minimalistic.

This music was composed in 1995 for the one hundredth anniversary of cinema on the silent film “Jeux et de la vitesse” realized by Henry Chomette in France in 1925. It was commissioned by the Societe Philharmonique de Bruxelles and by the Cinematheque Royale de Belgique, with an ADAT tape playing the music. The music was composed in hexaphonic format and most of the sound materials where generated by areal-time multichannel granular morphing algorithm developed at the Polytechnic Faculty in Mons, Belgium, and running on the IRCAM Sound Processing Workstation.

The older brother of Rene Clair, Henry Chomette made some experimental movies. This one is made out of retrieved fragments of pictures celebrating Paris as a town in perpetual movements. Most of the film is a long hypnotizing run through Paris by train and by boat. The music accentuates the impression of speed and the constantly moving rhythmical and hexaphonic spatial sound textures surround the audience, creating spinning movements as well as a sort of music traveling. Passing through tunnels and under bridges becomes almost a physical

“Panini Stickers” is performed by [THE], Ed Harkins and Phil Larson of the University of California at San Diego Music Department with video by Vibeke Sorensen of the School of Cinema – Television, University of Southern California. This piece is a development of a project originally prepared in 1959 for bassoon and dancer (dancer). It was premiered on national state radio (Birdies) as part of a video for a California political convention.

I have always been fascinated by the sounds of piano tuning and wanted to write a piece based on the ritualistic atmosphere it can evoke before a concert begins, a kind of aural preludium. A good piano tuner is a music maker in his own right. He restores anew the raw materials used by the composer and performer according to the tuning of the day, laying the foundation for the realization of their music. Every tuner has his own working rhythms combining the shifting of the hammer to a new tuning pin, playing the key to be tuned, adjusting the hammer to move the string onto the “right spot”. A tuner is continually listening to the speed of beats between intervals to determine the accuracy of his work and has his own special checks and controls to engineer a harmonic balance over the keyboard. These rhythms and the melodic and harmonic elements drawn from the equal temperament tuning were the source of the musical materials in the piece. I used the Yamaha Disklavier because I wanted to have the freedom to write for the piano without the technical limitations of a pianist and yet employ an acoustic instrument. Using the notation software Finale in a computer provided the means to write not only the notes but, also, to program the “interpretation” for the concert. Because a human performance is never entirely possible using a computer, the slightly mechanical sound produced on the Disklavier gave a quality I was looking for – “the piano tuning that became realtime music”.

This work is one of a series of pieces called Tavole 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 that the string instrument allows. The timbre has a very important part. The original idea was to point out on a so and universe that usually is very difficult to hear and made up of attack transitoriness, rustles and infrasound. These kinds of sounds are normally not utilized in music. The aim is to work into the sound, directly modeling the acoustic material. The formal organization of the piece is developed starting rom single notes that were articulated following timbre principles. The sound discovery and the hypnotic movement were realized with the purpose of extending the perception of space-time. The premiere performance of Tavola IV was given at the Computer & Art Festival in Padua on the 24th of February 1994. The piece received the second prize at the XVI International Competition “L. Russolo” and is recorded on CD (Fondazione Russolo Ef. Er. P94.).

Performs duo pieces from THE H.A.L.I. CONFIGURATION: Bass clarinet & electric guitar with direct MIDI control of AKAI/EPS-samplers (o.a. tuned microtonally and using grain-synthesis) & effects processors. “SAMPLIFIED”; 35 minutes piece in 5 movements “HOW TO MOVE A H.A.L.I YARD”; 30 minutes piece in 3 movements. The pieces expanding sound material uses 12,19,24,31 & 53 tones in the octave. The original sounds for the pieces are programmed into the 2 samplers, so they continuously can be modulated and move inside the speaker-set-up via the bass clarinets and the el. guitars MIDI-interfaces. The harmonic and melodic material is developed on the basis of the relation between the digital microtonal and the analogue diatonic instrumentarium/gearium.

Jorgen Teller; Cazio MIDIguitar w. EPS-sampler, DP-4 effect w. realtime ctrl., distortion, “wah”.

Jakob Draminsky Hojmark; Bass clarinet with IVL-pitchrider to AKAI S-1000-sampler, ZOOM 9030 effect w. realtime ctrl.

The aesthetic images which occur in the mind of the listener during the performance of a piece of music and how they relate to the way the music is perceived are the concern of the composer. The placement of sound images in three dimensional space when performing electroacoustic music on tape over a number of loudspeakers and how this imaging relates to the way the music is perceived by the listener is the concern of the sound diffuser. As a composer and performer of electroacoustic music on tape, I wanted to create a work in which I could investigate and explore these two aspects of “image”. There is an interplay between the real image and the altered image throughout the work. Sometimes a sound may be recognized and associated with one in the real world, but these images change over time, as does their associated “meaning”. Similarly, the position of the sound image is constantly changing, sometimes slowly, at other times rapidly, and the breadth and depth of these changes are of course enhanced when the piece is performed over a multi-channel diffusion system. Altered Images was realized in the Electroacoustic Music Studios at Northern College, Aberdeen and at the University of Birmingham in August 1995. It was premiered in Montreal in January 1996.

I am an improvisational musician using computers, a participant in a network of Japanese musicians, and I have organized projects. My project “Invisible Objects”, utilizing two Macintosh Powerbooks, is a challenge to myself to create real-time sound, play improvised music, in real-time interaction with the computer, pushing the use of technology in a live situation to the limit. All composition, performance and restructure is by myself. Other projects in which I have been involved are the “Realtime conducting system” which I created and developed, using Macintosh Ethertalk and Internet, and “OTOMO Yoshihide”, working together with Sampling Virus.

A short program of interactive works for violin and computers. The program consists of the European premiere of EFFECTIVE (1996) by Robert Rowe, for violin and effect processor; ETUDE (1992) by Kimura, an improvisation work for violin and interactive computer system; TOCCATA (1935) by Conlon Nancarrow, a work for player piano (MIDI piano) and violin.

Sound & Fury is the title of a whole “class of compositions”. Each piece has properties similar to all the other pieces in the class, but it also reveals individual features at every single public appearance.The concert performance features at least to levels of interaction: musician/computer and computer/environment (via controlled acoustical feedback). The details and the general layout of the music are experienced as emergent phenomena brought forth by the dynamical system constituted by these interactions. All sounds in Sound & Fury are generated in real-time with a fairly peculiar sound synthesis technique devised by the composer, functional iteration synthesis. This is a method of “nonstandard” digital synthesis of sound, i.e. a method which abstracts from known acoustical models (and especially from the Fourier acoustical paradigm). “Nonstandard” approaches to sound synthesis represent an area of research unique to computer music (among the pioneers in nonstandard synthesis of sound are I. Xenakis and G.M. Koenig). Functional iteration synthesis is modeled after the mathematics of “chaos theory”. However, Sound & Fury utilizes such mathematical models not only for the generation of sound, but for the generation of the musical structure itself, as it unfolds in real time. Every performance reveals paths and trajectories of sound of its own, due to different starting parameters set up by the performer. In this way, every performance reflects-in its timbres and textures, in the timing of its pace and rhythm-the notion of “temporal horizon”, the “long-term unpredictability” of events (popularly known as “the butterfly effect” ), a common feature of dynamical systems-not only natural systems, but also social and cultural systems. And the unpredictability, as WI, of our experiences and life. (Hence the title, drawn from Shakespeare’s The Tempest).

Special preview for ISEA96 delegates of Stacey Spiegel’s project ‘Safe Haven’: a harbor simulator of Marine Safety featuring a 360-degree Virtual Reality environment for experiencing the multicultural city of Rotterdam.

Interactive Virtual Drama: Body Communication Actor “MIC” and Poetic Communication Actress “MUSE”

Why do people, regardless of age or gender, have an affinity for objects manifested in the human form? From the earthen figures of ancient times to mechanical dolls, teddy bears and robots, is it not true that man has conceived such objects in his imagination, then formed attachments and transferred emotions to them? We address the issues of communication and the esthetics of artificial life that possess this “human form” in modern society, both from artistic and engineering standpoints. As we create a virtual life that is nothing short of an artificial life, and communicate with this life itself, we have to ask where our future is leading us. An example is presented in which emotions are interpreted from human voices, and emotional responses are triggered within the interactive setting of Maturing Neuro-Baby , “MIC & MUSE.” “Neuro-Baby” (NB) is a communication tool with its own personality and character, including emotional modeling, such as reacting to changing voices, facial expressions and behavior. Based on the experiences of developing the early version of NB, we started the development of a revised version, “Maturing Neuro- Baby”. The basic improvements in Maturing Neuro- Baby are the following. The Neuro-Baby character customizes itself to individual human communication partners by learning. Leaning is achieved by Artificial Neural Networks(ANN) mapping from the input signal emotional state of the NB (recognition mapping), to an appropriate expression showing the response by the NB (expression mapping). “MIC” is a male child character. He has a cuteness that makes humans want to speak to him. MIC recognizes several emotions (joy, anger, surprise, sadness, disgust,  teasing, fear) from the intonation of the human voice. People use a microphone when communicating with MIC. For example, if one whistles, MIC’s feeling will be positive and he will respond with excitement. If the speaker’s voice is low and strong , MIC will feel poorly and become angry. “MUSE” is a goddess. She is very expressive, has refined manners, is feminine, sensual, and erotic. MUSE’s emotions are generated by a musical grammar. For example (joy — rising musical scale, anger— vigoroso, sadness — volante, disgust— discord, teasing— scherzando, fear– pesante) People can communicate with MUSE in an improvisational manner by means of a musical installation. From the standpoint of an artist, it is interactive art based on communication and on creatures that have a real ability to participate in an interactive process. Moreover, we think that by selecting a “human” – the creature with which we realistically communicate the most – we establish a condition that demands a creative character from a creature. From an engineering standpoint, we have come to the conclusion that if we want to create life-like characters, we have to develop non-verbal communication technologies. These are expected to give characters the capability of achieving heartfelt communication with humans by exchanging emotional messages. These life-like characters, or “androids”, will unravel a new point of view in a new direction which allows the blending of art, computer science, psychology, and philosophy in a kind of novel research on realistic human expression.

The Multi Mega Book project is an electronic book sculpture composed of 24 mobile Maxi-Pages. At the top of the Maxi-Pages is placed a screen, on which the content of the Virtual book: animated images, video, still images are projected. The MMB structure is 6 Mt. large, 3,70 Mt. heigh, 3 Mt. deep. The Maxi-Pages are multi-medial panels composed with fixed images and a map of interactive word-symbols. They have their own content, their function, their interactivity. The Maxi-Pages have integrated loudspeakers which allows for it’s own sounds and music. The audio is composed of sounds and music which represents the diverse themes contained in the MMB. The Maxi-Pages are synchronized with the screen. They are different levels of interactivity between the images placed in the Maxi-Pages and the animated films projected on the screen.

The concept for this work is both musical and visual, and the following description will contain information relevant for both aesthetic domains. Knowledge from the natural sciences paired with computer technology has opened up new perspectives within the arts. It is now relatively easy to use cross-disciplinary mapping to display the same idea; the same data structure in several ways. The construction of this work is one of many possible mappings, and the animation is based on a direct representation of the data structure that comprises the music, one “sees” the music as one hears it. In addition to their art qualities, mappings like this can very well be considered pedagogic as well, as an entry into the current debate about musical representation. With the development of user interfaces that will allow the user to find his or her own visual way through the music, these kinds of mappings would share common borders with the VR field. Technically, the work has been realized first as music, and the piece was processed through an FFT analysis of the same type used to make sonograms. This was our preferred kind of analysis because of the visual results it yielded. The data set was then structured to make it available to the program used for the creation of the model that was later “filmed”. The result is an experience of flying over/under/through the music as it is being played.

“Changes” is a one-minute video about images, that change. To me computer graphics is all about that – changes. That you might and indeed can work with 10-100 different versions of a picture. Computergraphics give you the ability to change and work on your impulses with no risk what-so ever. The motifs are things that interest me. Pretty women that become strange and frightening creatures. Cats that become cat-flowers or dressed up in men4s suits. Women4s faces that are mixed with leaves of flowers so they appear to be beautiful – though a bit sad. The result is kind of strange – but pretty. Frightening but moving. I like the dark sides of human emotions, pictures that are both eshetically appealing as well as deeply disturbing. So that is what my video is: Kind of pretty, kind of distubing. This is no real story-line in my video – it is simply based on the pleasure of looking. The simple pleasure of: not knowing that is going to happen next.

Music by the danish composer Anne Linnet.

Produced with support from Aarhus Filmworkshop.

After they took away the dead body of my mother I made photocopies of everything that was around her. Medicines, electrocardiograms, the paper with her diagnosis of terminal cancer, prints, her praying book, her sewing case. Then I passed the photocopies on cells and made cartoons with them, a friend included stains. This video contains the remains of my mother: I’m floating on procaryote-eucaryote fluids. I’m evolving towards an ecosystem governed by microbes. I’m between the nucleation of water and a dead planet. I’m under a panespermic government. Even if my belly boils, I prefer the cruelty of a coating of blood-hairsperm.

301 Nails… is a continuation of a series of work which considers destiny. Set in a gambling casino, near a boxing ring next to the big church behind the race track. The protagonist and “Spider” duck weave their way through the day’s events tempting fate with their own prophesies. They finally end up skipping town and head to the big game up in Mesmorosa only to come to a screeching halt.

The Possible Fog of Heaven is a consideration of the dimensionality of metaphysics and the metaphysics of dimensionality. Elvis speaks for the first time from the afterlife, describing in voice over and graphic text, his experience in Heaven. The Structure of the tape follows the King’s last prescription.

My film is based upon historical sources from Bulgarian art. I have drawn upon the pure, traditional art of my country, expressed in thousands of icons created over the centuries. Their Biblical content has been developed into a direct participant in the action of the film. The script concerns the destiny of a motherless child. Its subject is the birth of a child, as seen through the eyes of one person. It seeks to convey very specific emotions, without personal sensation. In this way, the film functions as a testament – father to son, artist to public. In creating the film, I have also drawn on the methods of psychodrama. My appearance in the role of Madonna shows that a man can also love a child very much. The moment of physical death is fused with the role of the Savior – but with a notebook in his arms rather than the Bible, the book of traditional knowledge. In that way the films accent is on the human problems of a new world and change accomplished by reaching for knowledge and wisdom. As the text of the final song says, “When you are in a blind alley Beaten down, boxed in by four walls. Make your own new way from all the cut-off paths. Be on the move again”.

GMS is part of The Mutant Genome Project (TMGP), an ongoing project that deals with the effects, and prevailing authority, of medical technology in contemporary society. The work takes its impetus from the worldwide Human Genome Initiative which aims to map and document all human genetic material, with a view to being able to change it. The motivations behind this scientific research are entirely admirable; scientists working to rid the world of genetic disease. TMGP operates at the point where the rarefied world of altruistic genetic research meets the prosaic world of consumer medicine, where drug companies have to make a profit for their shareholders. TMGP asks the question – who makes the decisions and whose interests do these serve. In a world where every part of our superficial bodies can be surgically altered to conform to an increasingly global ideal, and where there is an imperative to provide the best for yourself and for your family, and where the desire to fulfill these obligations are constantly exploited by advertising and the mass media; TMGP asks, ” could genetic engineering become the cosmetic surgery of the future?” TMGP is fictitious bio-technology company that markets genetically engineered, ‘designer babies’ called LUMPs (Lifeforms with un-evolved mutant properties) – supposedly the first prodigy of the Human Genome Initiative.

LUMP is a cute lovable baby with six eyes and no legs; it is very intelligent and it is immune to all known deceases. LUMP represents the human body redesigned by an engineer for maximum efficiency with a high ‘safety profile’. GMS, the proposed installation for ISEA96 takes the form of three large format, computer generated photographs and a Macintosh-based, interactive multimedia that emulates and critiques medical advertising and ideology. LUMP is seen as a pristine, 3D modeled form with the sort of beautiful, shiny surface that suits marketing objectives more than reality. The GMS interactive shows people what they would like to see rather than what they are actually buying; a fleshy mass with a cocktail of genes that might have an unforeseen effects on our evolution. The interactive gives the user a sense that they are in control much like with any other computer game; self-consciously oversimplifying the whole process, by reducing LUMP to a hastily digested commodity with a price tag. This brings the whole ‘interactive advertising’ process to the surface. The viewer as a customer designs their ideal baby by choosing options in the same way one would chose a new car or a home loan (the interactive is based on laptop-bases home loan simulators advertises on Australian television). In the installation, this cute and bloodless process is contrasted with a series of three1.3 m square digital photographs depicting the visceral anatomies of the LUMPs. These almost Caravaggio-esque image combine 3D renderings of dead LUMPs, dissected with anatomically accurate interiors rendered by hand directly into the computer via a pressure sensitive realities of 3D modeling with the speciously ‘warm and fuzzy’ techniques of traditional medical illustration. When the viewer sees the animation of their ‘supposedly’ perfect child contrasted with the dark realities of dissection, it is evident that while their creation supposedly satisfies all their desires and is certainly cute, it is not human – at least not as that term is currently understood,. Animated LUMP may seem appealing but the idea is disturbing. However, TMGP is not good or bad – it’s just there, and it may be a reality in the near future. The work can’t afford to be moral about the issue of genetic research, because it is too important. What TMPG is really saying is that it is an issue too important to left only for the medical scientific community to deal with it. We could be at the beginning of the most potentially revolutionary era in human ‘being’, potentially able to redesign ourselves, or our children, from scratch. TMGP wants nothing more than to be an ironic participant in the discussions that should take place.

“The Mutant Gene & Tainted Kool-Aid Sideshow CD-ROM” (completed October 1995) is a navigable interpretation of a series of performances I staged in 1994, by the same name. The performances incorporated live and prerecorded, multiple-monitor and projected video, animation, text, both sequenced and live instrumental music, as well as the use of dramatic artifacts and performance elements such as masks and dance. Beginning with the psycho-dramatic confession of an extraterrestrial, the piece journeyed into a series of multicolored, entropic landscapes. My intent with the performances, and the use of technology was to create alternate or augmented realities for an audience. I wished for the audience to be immersed in an environment of sound, light and motion, which often paralleled the content – in essence, making certain fantasy states real. A complete written description of the performances was published in Leonardo (Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences & Technology), The Special Virtual Reality Section, Volume 27, Issue 4. The CD-ROM emerged from a desire to break down the linear constraints of a performance to create a more personal “circular” experience, where an individual can explore the environment in any order, without being guided as a collective “audience” through various states. It was created on a Macintosh 660 AV, a Commodore Amiga 2000 and the equipment at the Experimental Television Center. It is entirely self-produced and self-published, and is available for the Macintosh.

Since I started making collages with paper and glue when I was a teenager in Texas–and selling them on the walls of local Mexican restaurants for $50 a pop – I have always been interested in finding images and recombining them in new and different ways, so that the meaning of the new object subverts the meaning of the original image. I have tried to use original documents to tell certain stories, unintended by their original makers. Point of view is expressed by the selection of documents, and their juxtaposition. Not until many years later–when Barbara Kruger reviewed my work in Art Forum–did I learn that the form I was working in was called “appropriation art.” In The Atomic Cafe, we attempted to combine the principles of cinema verite and appropriation art–in the tradition of the great anti-fascist, John Heartfield, and Robert Coover’s The Public Burning– to produce what we used to call “compilation verite.” The images we appropriated were ephemeral films, created by the United States government, designed to make people stop worrying about the atomic bomb and threat of nuclear annihilation. We recombined these images, so that they highlighted the absurdity of the pro-bomb propaganda and also revealed how deathly afraid Americans were of atomic war in the 1950s. In my novels, essays, and short stories, I appropriate (and reassemble) my own life. With my CDROM Public Shelter, I tried to expand this found footage concept to the field of multimedia. The CD-ROM format is ideally suited for this kind of approach and even allows one to expand and elaborate on it with the addition of vast quantities of text. I was thus able to add another layer of content to the mix, along with the sounds, videos, and still photographs which I have worked with in the past. We can now go from the CD-ROM directly into cyberspace with the click of a mouse. The CD-ROM thus becomes merely a starting point for an experience that is completely unique and not controlled by us, the artists. Multimedia is thus a perfect and appropriate venue for both political art and intellectual discourse. Not only is it participatory–by its very nature forcing one to actively engage the material, rather than passively receiving it – but it also allows pauses for thought and reflection. Because they are not limited by time, multimedia artworks can offer complexity and background, both visual and textual. They can deliver whatever it takes to achieve understanding. Producing sites on the World Wide Web allows me to combine my writing, filmmaking and multimedia work with both internal links (hyperfiction) and external links to other Websites. This allows me to expand the concept of appropriation indefinitely, into cyberspace.

An interactive art work on CD-ROM “The World’s Greatest Bar Chart” takes a serious but humorous look at humanity’s obsession with comparative measurement, a phenomenon particularly cultivated in capitalistic nations like the United States. The piece’s structure is based on the analytic bar chart used by businesses universally, but in this case juxtaposing everything from vitamins to whales to bomb sites. There is an additional irony to the piece in that such an illogical construction arises from the tools and language of the ultimate machine of logic and measurement, the computer. “What makes this multimedia artwork significant is that it succeeds in transcending the inherent limitations of its medium. Although the cyber-painting’s enigmatic interface is based on the structure of a traditional bar chart, it invokes a distinctly sensory quality through the use of images, color and sound.

Leicester Square is the cinema centre of London. Tourists come in their thousands every day. Families argue about Pizza Hut or Burger King. People walk to work, mill about, carry bags, check maps and watches, and complain about the shoes they’ve just bought. Using an electronic camera every day for several weeks I collected my data. I toyed around with these images for a while, before finding these patterns, sometimes using arbitrary backgrounds (dishwasher interior, sex shop), sometimes getting more filmic. As someone who mixes the digital in with the painterly – my paintings are much larger and now use a stencil technique to bring in the Mac processed stuff – I’ve been anxious about keeping in contact with the very ordinary world we actually live in. I suppose I’m an abstract painter in some ways, but don’t like being that way. So instead of wafting to fantasy land (the destination for many of these distracted pedestrians, maybe going to the interactive rock museum) I use software to keep my eye on what’s around me…its mysterious beauty.

The Scribe: an electronic scriptor. While circumstances have prevented the physical presence of The Scribe at ISEA96, this document, along with the artist’s slides and brief informal video, provide information on The Scribe (and its historical origins). The Scribe is essentially a “personal expert system” consisting of a multi-pen plotter driven by original code. Developed over a period of 15 years this robot-artist literally “grows” visual forms from randomly generated bits of information. Drawing from a bank of technical pens The Scribe automatically executes art-works on archival quality rag papers. The software has accumulated thousands of lines of code, and has come to embody artistic procedures evolved from the artist’s earlier work as a painter. All form-generating routines operate within parameter limits that are preset by the artist. The Scribe then works on its own, making form generating decisions within those parameters. This includes ink pen choices.

Interpretation

The Scribe, an electronic “scriptor”, is our equivalent of the medieval manuscript illuminator who worked in the scriptorium. Random bits of information are transformed by The Scribe into visual forms which celebrate the information processing procedures that drive our culture. The Scribe employs a pseudorandomizer to cast around for working parameters to initiate yet one more form. Laboring under a set of artistic procedures evolved over a period of years, the machine hesitates, reaches for a pen and proceeds to execute pen strokes . It does so with the same “seeming” intelligence of those ubiquitous machines whose algorithms control more and more of our daily routines. Through its drawing activity The Scribe invites us to ponder the nature of the human-machine intercourse so pervasive in today’s culture.