Assignments

Due next week: January 30

Reading

• Norbert Weiner, “Cybernetics in History,” 1954, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality
• Roy Ascott, “Behavioral Art and the Cybernetic Vision,” 1966, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality

Research Critique

Each student will be assigned a historical artwork to incorporate into into their research and critique from the following list of works that were created in collaboration with Billy Klüver:

• Nam June Paik, work: Magnet TV, 1964
• John Cage, work: Variations V, 1965
• Robert Rauschenberg, work: Soundings, 1968

Write a short 300 word essay summarizing the assigned essays, and apply your understanding of the concepts of interactivity and cybernetics to your assigned work, and how it expresses ideas found in the readings. Use at least one quote from each reading to support your research and analysis.

The goal of the research critique is to conduct independent research by reviewing the online documentation of the work, visiting the artist’s Website, and googling any other relevant information about the artist and their work. You will give a presentation of your research in class and we will discuss how it relates to the topic of the week: Interactivity, with a focus on cybernetics.

Here are instructions for the research critique:

• Create a new post on your blog incorporating relevant hyperlinks, images, video, etc
• Be sure to reference and quote from the reading to provide context for your critique
• Apply the “Research” category
• Apply appropriate tags
• Add a featured image
• Post a comment on at least one other research post prior to the following class
• Be sure your post is formatted correctly, is readable, and that all media and quotes are DISCUSSED in the essay, not just used as introductory material.

Be prepared to synthesize and present your summary for class discussion next week.

Outline

OSS

Review of research, authoring, and documentation techniques in OSS. A discussion of best practices and how and why they need to be applied to our work this semester. Reprise of techniques covered in the first week (see Syllabus).

Discussion of Overview

We will review the Overview essay from Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. A discussion of each student’s Research Critique, and how the essay might have altered/impacted/reinforced perspectives on the historical roots of new media.

Notes and Questions about the Reading

What was Vannevar Bush implying when said: “The human mind… operates by association,” and what was the impact of this observation on the history of personal computing? And what did he mean with the title of essay:  “as we may think,” and how is that comment important to our overall understanding of personal computer?

Norbert Wiener understood that the quality of our communication with machines effects the quality of our inner lives. Why is this? This discussion will provide a glimpse of our deeper study of cybernetics next week.

What do you think Douglas Engelbart was referring to when he described online computing as a means to “augment human intellect?” How do online systems of knowledge, sharing, collaboration, and distribution (such as OSS), augment human intelligence? How did networked computers stimulate collaboration? Again, we can refer to OSS for our own implementation of his ideas.

Alan Kay declared the personal computer a medium in its own right, a “meta-medium.” What did he mean by this? Why is the computer not just a tool, but a medium, a meta-medium.

We will discuss Wagner in more detail, but what is the relationship between Alan Kay’s notion of the “meta-medium,” and the Gesamtkunstwerk, or Total Artwork as theorized by Richard Wagner to describe his approach to opera?

Why do you think the Italian Futurists in the early 20th felt that cinema was the most important art form, which, they claimed, had a “totalizing” effect on human consciousness. How can we apply the origins of cinema, in particular the Lumiere Brothers to this statement?

How were the “Happenings,” a form of performance artist the emerged in the 1950s in the work of John Cage, Allan Kaprow, and others, important to our understanding of the integration of the arts as well as the changing role of the viewer?

Why was Ivan Sutherland’s statement from 1969 so prescient: “The ultimate display, would be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter,” and how is it important to our understanding and experience of contemporary media, virtualization, and digital simulation?

Scientist and artist Scott Fisher said in the late 1980s that “Immersive environments could give birth to a new form of participatory, interactive electronic theater.” How has this glimpse into the future been realized, how are immersive experiences in virtual reality now commonplace in both art and popular culture?

What did Ted Nelson mean when he said:  “the structures of ideas are not sequential?” How does this relate to the concept of hypermedia, and to the way we access, read, interact, edit, and record digital information?

How did Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web emerge from ideas originally pioneered by Vannevar Bush, and then building on the concept of augmented intelligence (Englebart), hypertext (Ted Nelson), and the emergence of the graphical user interface (Kay)?

How does this statement by Roy Ascott, help summarize our discussion of the historical roots of new media: “meaning is not something created by the artist, distributed through the network, and received by the observer. Meaning is the product of interaction between the observer and the system, the content of which is in a state of flux, of endless change and transformation.”

For discussion from the conclusion of the Overture:

This project serves as a poignant reminder of the intentions of multimedia’s pioneers. Their words, typically written during the heat of invention, convey a passionate involvement with higher ideals. To a remarkable degree, these scientists, artists, and theorists share a commitment to forms of media and communications that are non-hierarchical, open, collaborative, and reflective of the free movement of the mind at play. It is, in sum, an extraordinary vision. But whether we will achieve it is an unresolved question.

Integration of the Arts

This week we are focusing on the integration of the arts through Richard Wagner’s opera as well as the early electronic works by the Swedish engineer Billy Klüver and his collaborators. We will study these forms of music drama and early art and technology  as a precursor to contemporary digital multimedia. While we can think of the computer screen as a virtual space for integrating the various media of image, sound, text, and motion, in fact, this form of synthesis has a long history that extends from 19th century opera to 20th century installation works. The following exemplify this evolution by demonstrating the quality of invention  that emanates from breaking the boundaries of a single art form, towards an interdisciplinary integration of materials, artistic media, ideas, technologies, and spatial configurations.

Richard Wagner and the Gesamtkunstwerk

“Whereas the public, that representation of daily life, forgets the confines of the auditorium, and lives and breathes now only in the artwork which seems to it as Life itself, and on the stage which seems the wide expanse of the whole World.”

German opera composer Richard Wagner believed that the future of music, music theater, and all the arts, lay in an embrace of the Gesamtkunstwerk or total artwork, a fusion of the arts that had not been attempted on this scale since the classic Greeks. In 1849, Wagner wrote the essay, The Art-work of the Future, defining the synthesis of the arts in which opera served as a vehicle for the unification of all the arts into a single medium of artistic expression.

The Festspielhaus (Festival House) Theater opened in 1876 in Bayreuth, Germany, where Wagner applied his theatrical innovations to his most recent work, The Ring of the Nibelung, an epic four-part music drama loosely based on the based loosely on characters from the Norse sagas:

It follows the struggles of gods, heroes, and several mythical creatures over the magic ring that grants domination over the entire world. The drama and intrigue continue through three generations of protagonists, until the final cataclysm at the end of the final opera Götterdämmerung. – Wikipedia

Through his production of the Ring and other works, Wagner invented many conventions for the theatre, including: darkening the house, pillared surround-sound reverberance, the orchestra pit and sound reflection, and the revitalization of the Greek amphitheatrical seating to focus audience attention on stage. This approach to opera foreshadowed the experience of virtual reality, in that it was intended to immerse the audience in an imaginary world constructed for the stage: the proscenium arch as an interface into a virtual environment.

In the following video showing excerpts of Das Rheingold, the opening opera of the four-part Ring, Wieland Wagner, the grandson of Richard Wagner explains (in German with subtitles) how the theater and its components function as a portal into a virtual realm:

“For the first time the auditorium was darkened, thus eliminating all sense of reality for the audience.”  – Wieland Wagner

As Wieland Wagner explains, one is led directly into a virtual world via the opening of the curtain from the center, as the audience enters into the immersive environment of the stage.

In Richard Wagner’s the “Artwork of the Future” (1948), in which he laid out his theory of the gesamtkunstwerk and the synthesis of the arts, the composer essentially describes a rejection of lyric opera, which the he considered hopelessly superficial, a tired showcase for pompous divas. Yet the implications of this landmark publication go well beyond the transformation of opera. Wagner believed that the future of music, music theater, and all the arts, lay in an embrace of the “collective art-work,” a fusion of the arts that had not been attempted since the classic Greeks.

Wagner was convinced that the separate branches of art — music, architecture, painting, poetry, and dance – would attain new poetic heights when put to the service of the drama, which he viewed as the ideal medium for achieving his vision. His totalizing approach to music theater also foreshadowed the experience of virtual reality. Scenic painting, lighting effects, and acoustical design were intended to render an entirely believable virtual world, a new sense of reality, in which the proscenium arch becomes the interface to the stage environment.

Richard Wagner defined his vision of the artwork of the future as a new interdisciplinary form, the integration of all the arts into a single form of expression. Here is how he lays out his theory in The Artwork of the Future:

1. Drama – The idealized vehicle of Wagner’s interdisciplinary vision. All the arts serve the purpose of articulating the drama as the highest level of human expression.

2. Architecture – The structure for staging the drama, the interface between the theatrical work and the audience.

3. Painting / Scenery – The frame of the painting is dissolved and spills out into the spatial configuration of the stage. The visual artist also turns to light to achieve his effects, thus painting with light.

4. Dramatic Action – This integration of the arts must ultimately serve the acting out of the story that takes place on stage. The live performance is at the center of the dramatic or narrative form.

5. Artistic Man – The performer is the vehicle for the unfolding of the narrative. The physical body is in its own sense an interdisciplinary entity, the integration of movement, speech, and singing.

6. Music – The highest form of expression, according to Wagner, the emotive vehicle that transports the performer and in turn the audience. The orchestra is the “organ” of the drama, besides the voice, the primary instrument of expression.

While Wagner’s hyper-romantic rhetoric may seem archaic today, there is acumen and foresight in Wagner’s approach to the integration of the arts, which illuminates contemporary notions of interdisciplinary media art.

Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)

“The new interface I will define is one in which the artist makes active use of the inventiveness and skills of an engineer to achieve his purpose. The artist could not complete his intentions without the help of an engineer. The artist incorporates the work of the engineer in the painting or the sculpture or the performance.” – Billy Klüver

In the late 1950s, the Swedish-born engineer Billy Klüver worked on laser systems for Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. He became the chief catalyst for the art and technology movement that was launched dramatically in the spring of 1960, at the Museum of Modern Art, with Jean Tinguely’s infamous self-destructing kinetic sculpture, Homage to New York. Klüver’s participation in this work, with its paint bombs, chemical stinks, noisemakers, and fragments of scrap metal, inspired a generation of artists to imagine the possibilities of technology, as the machine destroyed itself, in Klüver’s words, “in one glorious act of mechanical suicide.”

Klüver proposed the active and equal participation of the artist and engineer in the creation of the artwork. In this collaboration, he believed that the engineer required the participation of the artist, who as a “visionary about life” and an active agent of social change, involved the engineer in meaningful cultural dialog. At the same time, he felt that the artist, in the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg’s famous credo “to close the gap between art and life,” had an obligation to incorporate technology as an element in the artwork, since technology had become inseparable from our lives.

Billy Klüver, “Northeastern Power Failure,” 1966, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality

Billy Klüver, says in the article, “for Aristotle, Techne means both art and technology.” What is the significance of his thinking, which art and technology are conceived as integrated and deeply intertwined. We can think of this as the “new techne” and how has this idea developed since the 1960s? Whereas Klüver viewed this integration as requiring collaboration between artists and engineers, how have artists today changed in their relationship to technology?

In Klüver’s thinking, what are the essential differences between the artist and the engineer? How do they think and create differently? What are their respective concerns?

Why do you think Jean Tinguely had developed the idea of a self-destructing sculpture? And why did this work require the resources and expertise of the engineer?

In both Field Painting and Oracle, the technology is transparent, meaning it is embedded into and integrated with a painting and found objects. Why do you think it was so important to devise elaborate technological solutions to, in a sense, “hide” the technology in the creation of artworks that are at least partially traditional works of painting and sculpture.

Klüver points out:

All these examples have on thing in common: they are ridiculous from an engineers point of view.

Why would he still think it is important for engineers to collaborate with artists, despite the lack of “purpose” in terms of engineering and science? He then goes on the say:

 I am an engineer and as such, only raw material for the artist.

What does he mean by this? How does the engineer function as material for the artist? Does this make any sense today, when art and engineering is so deeply integrated into contemporary art practices?

Here is a provocative statement by Klüver:

He is, as I said, no visionary about life. But the artist is a visionary about life. Only he can create disorder and still get away with it.

This takes us back to the “impractical” nature of the artist and their artistic problems to be solved by the engineer. What is Klüver saying about the artistic tendency to produce disorder, sometimes chaos, sometimes destruction in their works, and what does the engineer gain through their collaboration with the artist? Is there something deeply human and illuminating about the artist’s desire to create works that explore the boundaries of order, which is so crucial to the engineer?

Klüver sums up his distinction between the artist and the engineer, when he says:

What I am suggesting is that the use of the engineer by the artist will stimulate new ways of looking at technology and dealing with life in the future.

He concludes by suggesting that even the great Northeastern power failure, which produced a blackout in New York City in 1964, was a kind of “Happening,” or revelation of how humanity is capable of creating chaos through technology.

E.A.T. (Experiments in Art & Technology)

In 1966, Billy Klüver, along with artists Robert Rauscenberg and Robert Whitman, founded E.A.T. as an organization to support collaboration between artists and engineers. It began in New York

E.A.T.’s contribution to the social dialogue of the 1960s and ’70s was the idea of one-to-one collaborations between artists and engineers. E.A.T. opened up exciting possibilities for the artists’ work by finding engineers willing to work with them in the artists’ own environment. Together the artist and the engineer went one stop beyond what either of them could have done separately. But perhaps more importantly, the artist-engineer collaboration was the training ground for larger-scale involvement in social issues for both the artist and the engineer.

Timeline of Works

A timeline of creative works by Billy Klüver from 1960-1970, collaborating with renowned artists including: Jean Tinguely, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, et al.

Variations V, a collaboration with John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, et al. In this work, dancers trigger a sensor mounted on stage such their movement activations changing slide projections. John Cage and collaborators perform an electronic musical accompaniment to the dance.

Silver Clouds, a collaboration with Andy Warhol, in which “pillows” were created with scotchpak material to form floating sculptures:

A video of Silver Clouds from Artisphere in Arlington, Virginia:

We will conclude our discussion of Billy Klüver with the Pepsi Pavilion, an ambitious art and technology project created for the Expo 1970, Osaka, Japan. The exterior of the Pavilion included a Buckminster Fuller-style geodesic dome, “Floats,” kinetic sculptures, towers that lit the Pavilion, and a fog sculpture that enshrouded the Pavilion in mist.

“The initial concern of the artists who designed the Pavilion was that the quality of the experience of the visitor should involve choice, responsibility, freedom, and participation. The Pavilion would not tell a story or guide the visitor through a didactic, authoritarian experience. The visitor would be encouraged as an individual to explore the environment and compose his own experience.” – Billy Klüver

The interior of the Pavilion included a 210 degree spherical mirror, which produced “real images,” upside down three-dimensional reflections of the viewer, creating a highly interactive experience.

The following video is a documentary of the Pepsi Pavilion. We might consider how the Pavilion resembles Wagner’s theater, as an immersive experience, a gesamtkunstwerk, a totalizing environment that integrates all the arts into a single space, a space that seems to transcend or move beyond reality as a virtual world.

Next Week’s Assignments

Review next week’s assignments, including the format of the research critique and works to be studied.