When art meets technology! – The e-dossier of an MA research on teamLab

April 23, 2018

Final Hyperessay | There is love in New Media Art – Maurice Benayoun

Roy Ascott in his 1990 essay “Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?“ acknowledged that there are, amongst the critics of art involving new media “deep seated fears of the machine coming to dominate the human will and of a technological formalism erasing human content and values.” A series of questions that stemmed from those fears kept being asked since the dawn of the industrial revolution, such as whether telematics increase or decrease communication and how much information overloading has burdened us due to the advent of modern information technology, etc. Benayoun with his new media creation directly addressed many of these concerns with a humanistic approach, declaring there is love in new media art and that the human touch will not be easily erased as long as human content and values govern the media.

The award-winning New Media artist, theorist, curator, and a professor is born in Algerian‘s war zone and grew up in Paris. But having spent much of his time exhibiting and lecturing abroad, he sees himself as a global citizen. Benayoun even gave himself a Chinese name with profound Confucius meaning, MoBen, meaning “Do Not Run”. His work has won more than 20 international awards, including the Villa Medicis Hors les Murs, more than four Ars Electronica awards (including the coveted Golden Nica), Siggraph, Imagina, SACD and 4 International Monitor Awards. In 2014, MoBen was nominated for the Prix Ars Electronica Visionary Pioneer of Media Art award. Over 40 years, he has realised many outstanding art installations and interactive exhibitions employing various new media, including video, immersive virtual reality, performance, the Web, interaction technology, etc.

In 1995 when the Web was just emerging, Maurice Benayoun created the work The Tunnel Under the Atlantic. A virtual underground world is formed by blocks of layered images taken from the collections of the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. The visitors at the respective museums were equipped with VR “pickaxe” to dig a symbolic tunnel through the “cultural obstacles” in order to “meet” each other.

First meeting, The Tunnel under the Atlantic (1995)

Many visitors returned a few days in a row participating in the digging. Finally, it took six days for the first encounter to take place in the tunnel and the above video shows that exciting moment. It looked acutely familiar to that moment from fifteen years ago when Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinovitz brought the people from the opposite coasts of America together in Hole in Space. The lengthy digging process prompted us with the questions of what the visitors are after. While not knowing who awaits at the other end of the tunnel and not knowing what one will encounter on the way, there was a suspensive romance being established. It tickles the visitors to want to learn who they could possibly meet at the other end of a tunnel. This romance that is born in the virtual tunnel shows how the intention of wanting to connect will always trump media constraints.

A counterexample of how the machine might take the upper hand over human content and values is offered by World Skin (1997). It is realised in a CAVE environment, an immersive virtual reality room that frees the users from head-mount VR devices that confine their movement, won Maurice the Golden Nica Award in the interactive Art Category at the Ars Electronica Festival. A collage of war photographs and pictures from different war zones constitute the visual of a world of grim violence. The audio mimics the sounds of breathing, creating the effect as if in this world, to breathe is to suffer. Visitors may take pictures of the scenes with the cameras that are suspended from the ceiling, and immediately after the shutter is clicked, the frame disappears from the screen and is replaced by a white shadow. These pictures are then printed out and could be taken home with the visitors. A simple act of click, if performed by visitors of World Skin would appropriate a piece of the war zone, if performed by a sergeant controlling a drone would fire a missile that flattens a town in Syria. Essentially the artist warns us with this powerful artwork, machine could dominate human and we might not be that far away from Ivan Sutherland‘s projection in The Ultimate Display, “A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal. “

As technology advances fast, today a situation we constantly face is information overload, caused by the massive amount of information generated every day. It has been anticipated by Vannevar Bush‘s groundbreaking essay As we may think in 1945 and further referred to by Douglas Engelbart as “the complexity/urgency factor had transcended what humans can cope with.” Among the tons of information generated today by the global network, since 2005 Maurice Benayoun has been particularly intrigued in collecting data on human emotions globally. A series, named “The Mechanics of Emotion”, is born growing out of the idea that the Internet works like a nervous system of our world and that messages sent between users crossed “zones of pain and pleasure” near and far.

Emotion Forecast, 2011

Emotion Forecast, one of the works in the series, collects real-time data from search engines and then map them to 3200 cities, to anticipate the emotional wellbeing of 48 emotions pertaining to these locations in the next 2 days. The stock market display is adapted to question if too much importance has been attached to financial matters while people – the city’s principle raison d’être – are neglected.

Emotion Vending Machine

Emotion Vending Machine is another work from this series. Just as any other automatic vending machine, the user can choose among a list of products, only here the real-time emotions of the world are the products to be dispensed. (For example, “scared”, “ecstatic”, and “terrified”.) Based on the selection, respective “musical cocktails” will be dispensed to provide a cure. Additional to offering a wry twist on artist’s ongoing critique of consumerism, in asking visitors’ participation, the artist asked the fundamental question, “Beyond technology isn’t it people who are trying to have a better life?”

One of the features that sets humans apart from other beings is that we have the ability to experience a wide range of complex conscious experience, emotions. Darwin argued that emotions actually served a purpose for humans to survive and reproduce, thus essential to our very existence on this planet. By making the very humanistic expression, emotion, the subject of this series, big data as a technical, social, and political concept is highly romanticised and humanised. The Mechanics of Emotion represents the humanistic approach the artist used as a direct elimination of the fear that technology would overwhelm and dehumanise the arts.

In 2014 Benayoun curated the Open Sky Project, a video art exhibition that intent to enrich and enliven the urban skyline of Hong Kong with art and culture. It was envisioned on the 77,000 square meter LED screen of International Commerce Centre (a 108-storey, 484 meters tall commercial skyscraper), exhibiting artworks that are created site-specifically by cutting-edge media artists as well as exceptional works by up-and-coming young artists. The ICC media façade represents about half the surface of the Hong Skyline video displays, which are dominantly occupied by apathetic and bleak commercial advertisement boards

Jim Campbell, San Francisco based artist renown for his LED light works, contributed Eternal Recurrence, in which people gracefully swim in the pool/façade with the inherent gravity-defying up down motion forced by the shape of the building. Others also play with the gravity factor of the site, turning the façade into a video game screen. For instance, there are Tetris blocks falling from the sky and doodlers hopping up a never-ending series of platforms. Until it is halted in 2016, this program offered more than 100 artists and students, the opportunity to exhibit their work in the public space. According to my friends who have seen it, it is a truly “wonderful and inspiring” sight in the often too stuporous Victoria Harbour. Besides achieving the original intention of “enrich and enliven the urban skyline”, this project also softened a seemingly harsh and callous silhouette of the metropolitan skyline of Hong Kong. When the scene is shared by thousands of people, a romance that connects the entire city is born.

Often fascinated with the new visual technology made accessible to artists, as one of the most cutting-edge artists of our time, Benayoun understands technology merely functions as a vehicle. Similar to Vannevar Bush calling memex an “enlarged intimate supplement to one’s memory”, Benayoun agrees though technology has brought tremendous opportunities, it should serve, as a supplement, to better communication, to help people live happier and make the city a warmer place to be in. There should be no fear of machine dominating the human will, as long as the media is governed by love.

April 10, 2018

Final Research Hyperessay: Works Selection

The Tunnel under the Atlantic (1995)

The first VR installation to cross continents and real-time video used in a virtual reality environment.

This is a tele-virtual project linking the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. Visitors are invited to dig through blocks of layered images taken from the cultural history, creating a digging route of a unique experience made up of sounds and pictures amidst a three dimensional tunnel. While digging, the visitors can talk with their partners across the Atlantic Ocean. The sounds of their voices are anchored in space and they enable everyone to find out the directions where to meet the other. It took the first group six days to built and pave the symbolic space before the de visual meeting of the two-continent diggers.

World Skin (1997):

A virtual reality interactive 3D installation that discusses the relationship between war and media.

Co-created with Jean-Baptiste Barrière, World Skin is a Photo Safari in the Land of War, where visitors are placed in an immersive installation and armed with a camera.By operating photo cameras that are suspended from the ceiling, visitors take pictures of the war scenes and experience how the camera becomes a ‘weapon’ that enables them to wipe out the projected images. It is awarded with the Golden Nica, Ars Electronica 1998. The work prompts us to think about the status of the image and the relationship between war and media. As well as what it is that the photographers appropriate when they press the button.

http://benayoun.com/moben/2014/05/29/emotion-winds/

Emotion in Space (2014):

An interactive Internet-based installation playing with data streams, attempting to capture the emotional state of different cities.

Hundreds of thousands of data are collected from 3200 of the largest cities around the globe through the web on a daily basis. These help build maps of the world’s emotions updated every 30 minutes. The resulting emotion streams leave the earth, carried by the winds of the world. Visitors play the emotion streams like the strings of a musical instrument. Their fingertips, tracked by Leapmotion sensors, contribute to revealing the nuances of these emotions. As we move our fingertips towards each city-source, the sound becomes a crowd, distinguishing the temporal emotional state of different cities.

Open Sky Project (2014):

An example of Urban Media Art, showcasing works created by artists and students in Hong Kong City University.

Curated by Maurice Benayoun, Open Sky Project, allowing artists (Open Sky Gallery), and students (Open Sky Campus) to conceive and present works for one of largest screen in the world, the ICC media façade (70 000m2). This program offered more than 100 artists and students, the opportunity to exhibit their work in the public space. The ICC media façade represent about half the surface of the Hong Skyline video displays.

April 3, 2018April 6, 2018

Final Research Hyperessay – Artist Selection

Maurice Benayoun

New Media Artist, Theorist and Curator

Maurice Benayoun (aka MoBen or 莫奔) (born 29 March 1957 in Mascara, Algeria) is a French pioneer new-media artist and theorist based in Paris and Hong Kong. His work employs various media, including (and often combining) video, immersive virtual reality, the Web, wireless technology, performance, large-scale urban art installations and interactive exhibitions.

His works demonstrate the interdisciplinarity through the integration of art and technology. Various multimedia concepts and paradigms (i.e. integration, interactivity, hypermedia, immersion, collaboration, telematics, net culture etc.) are well represented in his prolific career in the past twenty years.

MoBen’s work has won more than 20 international awards, including the Villa Medicis Hors les Murs, more than four Ars Electronica awards (including the coveted Golden Nica), Siggraph, Imagina, SACD and 4 International Monitor Awards. In 2014, MoBen was nominated for the Prix Ars Electronica Visionary Pioneer of Media Art award.

April 3, 2018

Symposium Hyperessay: On History and Challenges of Social Broadcasting

The means of social broadcasting have been constantly evolving, and due to the various tools involved, the purpose of social broadcasting-conveying content to an intended audience-has gone through various challenges posed by the limitations of the tools themselves. Often with the emergence of the new tools, the limitation of the old ones are shattered, but the new model has its own restrictions. As we find ourselves increasingly submitting to a world of mediating experiences, and constantly being bombarded by various kinds of social broadcasts, it is essential to understand the history of the evolution of social broadcasting so as to understand a pressing question: What are the limitations inherent to today’s social broadcasting tools?

Under feudalism, the only communication channel is a top-down one-way announcement from the ruling class to its citizens. Early forms of newspapers were born as early as the 8th Century in China, called Kaiyuan Za Bao (“Bulletin of the Court”) publishing government news.

By the 1830s, high speed presses could print thousands of papers cheaply, so what we know today as newspaper-low cost daily papers-started to appear in major cities globally.

Since then, mankind has witnessed a series of technical explosion. In the field of social communications, there are new means becoming available every decade. More importantly, these messages now reach a massive amount of audience that is unimaginable in the past. For example, The Royal Christmas Message in 1938 is allegedly heard by “four out of five homes” in England itself by radio, and in 1957, 150 Million audience worldwide since it is first broadcasted on TV.

Queen Elizabeth gave the first ever televised Royal Christmas message in 1957

Technology keeps progressing, introducing to social broadcasting tools like VR and immersive cinematic environments, such as Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome, that make the “suspension of disbelief” almost becoming reality. However, up until this point in history, the model of communication remains one-to-many, which could hardly satisfy mankind’s pursuit of autonomy and freedom.

As the need for self-expression grows in a more globalised and decentralised world, our social broadcast starts to embrace a many-to-many scheme. The very first attempt is by Videofreex in the late 60s, who not only aired the first private TV channel from a communal house but also made it interactive by responding to audience’s feedback concurrently by telephone, marking the birth of Citizen Journalism.

With the popularisation of many-to-many social broadcasting tools, such as social networks, podcasts, Youtube, in the face of this new democracy of social media, anyone can be a producer, sharing their stories and creating conversations with their audience. Upon close scrutinisation, we will realize the tendency of these tools expanded into becoming a “(many-to-many)-to-(many-to-many)” mechanism. This online symposium, which was hosted from the third space, inviting global participation and interaction, provided us a vigilant lookout to our multi-threaded social broadcasting model.

Art of the Networked Practice. Online Symposium

First of all, a multi-threaded model rejects concentration. For as long as there have been words and pictures, the people of the world have been consuming media. However the overall media consumption has immensely increased over time, from the era of the introduction of motion pictures, to the age of social networks and now the internet. This symposium took place on the platform Adobe Connect, whereby multiple conversations between hosts, host and audience, audience and audience co-exist in one setting. One has to constantly make conscious decisions as of which channel takes precedents over others, while digesting information concurrently from that channel, reserving a fraction of the brain to process the rest.

Multitasking while navigating through the first day of the symposium

Secondly, participation is never predictable. Often in today’s social broadcasts, audience are expected to provide feedbacks and this interaction generates new content as the event unfolds. For instance, in the performance piece Online En-semble – Entanglement Training: Directed and performed by Annie Abrahams and others, NTU students are credited as collaborators for their input in the chat section. In this case, the unpredictability of the participation is favourable to the completion of the artwork. However, while the contribution from spectators are encouraged, it is crucial to be alert that it has happened a few times in social broadcasting platforms such as Facebook Live and Periscope, people committed suicide on camera after receiving assault and encouragement from online audience.

When Social Media Goes Too Far. www.zerohedge.com

Last but not least, this multi-threaded model tends to produce more phatic expression, resulting in unwanted simplification in communication. In linguistic, A phatic expression is communication which serves a social function such as small talk and social pleasantries that don’t seek or offer any information of value. For example in the case of online communication, one can often spend too much time in meaningless conversation such as, “hello?”, “can you hear me?”, “I can hear you, can you hear me?”, “How do you do?” caused by network issues such as bandwidth, latency and the feeling of alienation. Annie Abrahams’ performance directly addresses such concern by having each performer reading out loud their network latency. Additionally, the Internet performance work, igaies, by internationally renowned Chicago glitch artist Jon Cates (US) and collaborators that took place on Day 3 of the symposium, also criticised the hyper-mediatising and phatic expression generation nature of the current multi-threaded communication today, by carefully orchestrating fragmented visuals, audios, and the occasionally dropping off and coming back of the collaborator to form a poetic performance of “small miraculous mistakes and moments of beautiful brokenness.

Screenshot of igaies, Day 3 of the Symposium

Drawing from historical experiences, the break-through in communication tools occurs with the advancement in technology; but the way the tools are being utilised, are anticipation made by visionaries even before the technology existed. The challenges social broadcasting faces today are immense, with rejection of concentration, unpredictability of participation, and generation of phatic expression being the top three among others. To deal with these challenges, Susan Sontag’s advice from Against Interpretation in 1966 may still be relevant.

Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience…What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, 1966

With the amount of information available to us from social broadcasting, it is time to sharpen our senses to commit to concentration, to the provision of better guidance to participation from content producers, and to promise more conversations that are cordial and substantial.

March 20, 2018March 20, 2018

Research Critique: Annie Abrahams, The Big Kiss (2008)

Since its invention, the Internet was seen as a technological marvel that truly transforms our world into a McLuhanesque global village, where information gets from one end to the other in a blink. Moreover social media made it feel like we know the things that are going on in our friends’ and families’ life effortlessly. Yet people often talks about preferring face-to-face conversation and feeling lonely despite connected. Why so? What exactly is missing from a mediated human interaction?

The Big Kiss (2008) by Annie Abrahams, live Webcam networked art, performed by Abrahams and Mark River

In 2008, Annie Abrahams created a performance installation, The Big Kiss, which invites members of the public to kiss her telematically. Their imageries appeared in the same video space, but the participants are from different geographical spaces. The “kiss”, made of a string of code and number, was transmitted through wires, transmitters, satellites, receivers, and other electromagnetic systems, before finally landing on the other pair of lips. A much bigger group of “participants” are involved as opposing to the conventional kiss, thus a truly “big” kiss.

Out of some of the most famous imageries of kiss in art history, such as Marc Chagall’s painting depicting the happy couple kissing, the photograph of Kissing the War Goodbye, one of the most daring and intense representation is the performance piece Breathing In/Breathing Out by Marina Abramovic and Ulay. By sharing their breath until the verge of passing out, they question the physical and mental limits of the human body through a kiss. Anyone who has watched the performance felt that intensity. In a rather loosely constructed comparison, The Big Kiss, in which the act of the kiss appears to be much less passionate, more gestural, almost etiquette like, came short of intensity. Perhaps, because touch, voice, and body signals, which we know are important for communication from traditional psychology, are deprived in the machine mediated experience. Indeed it feels, like how Abrahams put it, “closer to a ‘drawing à deux’ session than to a real kiss.”

Breathing In/Breathing Out. Marina Abramovic and Ulay. 1977.

With The Big Kiss, Abrahams asks a crucial question, if the mediated kiss felt alienated for the missing of these senses, what would the disembodied human interaction lose in this machine dominated society?

Robert Plutchik, Wheel of emotions

One thing we are witnessing is the simplification of emotional expression in online communication. As seen in psychologist Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of emotions, emotions are complex conscious experience. This wide range of emotions are no where to be found in the generic response options provided, for instance, by Facebook.

Facebook reactions

Abrahams points to the same direction in the article that summarises her practise, Trapped to Reveal – On webcam mediated communication and collaboration, it is likely human communication are made “easy, clean, and free of danger” to not to display the “ordinary, vulnerable and messy aspects of human communication.”

In summary, Abrahams suggests that technology at large might isolate people due to its disembodied experience and while this superconnected loneliness is experienced more and more, it is crucial to be skeptical “when people started discussing, dreaming of and glorifying the advantages of Internet collaborations“.

March 13, 2018

Research critique: Telematic dreaming, 1992

In 1992, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz concluded the captivating article “Welcome to Electronic Café International,” with the following line.

If the arts are to take a role in shaping and humanising emerging technological environments, individuals and arts constituencies must start to imagine at a much larger scale of creativity.

The same year, Paul Sermon created the above work Telematic Dreaming, positioning two beds, one in Finland, and the other in England, and linking them by projecting their respective realtime images onto each other. By doing so, Sermon enabled human interaction between the performer in one space, and the the visitor in the other with technologically mediated tools, acknowledging the concern of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz that technology might lack temperature, warmth, human touch, filling this gap which Roy Ascott refers to as “deep-seated fears of the machine coming to dominate the human will and of a technological formalism erasing human content and values.”

As comparing to Kit Galloway and Sherri Rabinowitz’s work Hole-in-Space 1980, an earlier example realised with similar technology, Sermon created a more personal environment in Telematic dreaming by introducing a bed to the setting. Often associated with relaxation and intimacy, the notion of a bed elevated a sense of privacy in the visitors. The possible forms of interaction emerged between the telematic participants over a bed in the Third Space, such as “touching” each other gently and simply resting and gazing into the others, thus appeared much humanised, and warmer.

To highlight the human factor that defines the work, Sermon also confines the possible senses engaged by excluding the transmission of the realtime sound component, thus prompted the participants to primarily “see with our hands and touch with our eyes”. Hence a nearly spiritual interchange between the participants is established. This connection, this new level of consciousness and creativity, Roy Ascott would say there is love.

February 27, 2018February 27, 2018

Research Critique: The Eternal Frame, 1975

The Eternal Frame, 1975, Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco

The Eternal Frame (1975) is the artists’ re-enactment of the infamous J.F.K assassination in 1963, which is captured on Zapruder’s home video recorder. The collaboration is done by Ant Farm, a collective of radical architects who works with video, performance, and installation in the late sixties and seventies, and T.R. Uthco, a San Francisco-based multi-media performance art collective that engaged in satirical critiques of the relation between mass media images and cultural myths, using irony, theatricality, and spectacle as its primary strategies.

What’s re-staged, to be precise, is not the actually historical event of the assassination, but these moments captured on Zapruder’s film, the single most viewed video clip in the world and help mold Kennedy’s tragic death into a symbolic event globally.

Historically, according to Wikipedia, there are more then 30 attempts to assassinate an US president and four sitting presidents have been killed, all of them by gunshot: Abraham Lincoln (the 16th President), James A. Garfield (the 20th President), William McKinley (the 25th President) and John F. Kennedy (the 35th President).

Washington Post advocates that “if the presidency is to be evaluated on its actual merits, John F. Kennedy was not a good president.” Then what makes JFK so adored and remembered? What makes the assassination of JFK so impactful, seemingly even more impactful than the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who lead the country through Civil War?

The answer is probably, television.

The first televised presidential debate on the 26th September, 1960. Between JFK and Richard Nixon.

Today we see images, still or moving, almost everywhere. On billboards, in magazines, on bus placards, on TV and computer screens, they are so compelling that we cannot not watch them. This power of images in the age of technical reproducibility has been discussed as early as in 1936 in Walter Benjamin’s influential essay “Works of Art”. He claimed that “…art underwent a fundamental metamorphosis, losing its status as a unique object tied to a single time and place (it’s aura), but gaining in return a newfound flexibility, a capacity to reach a larger, indeed mass audience, and to effect a hitherto unimagined political impact.” Perfectly exemplified by the case of John F. Kennedy, he was this first US president whose character is shaped so lively and vividly by images. He used the media to his own advantage to win the election, and tragic as it is, he was brutally killed, which was captured and broadcasted by television to the whole world.

As a simulation of the Zapruder’s film, The Eternal Frame made us see clear that what the world remembers of JFK owes much to the media experience of a historical event, which is possibly a singular and altered version of the actual event. Doug Hall who acted as Kennedy, the artist president, also clarified in 1984 that “the intent of this work was to examine and demystify the notion of the presidency, particularly Kennedy, as image archetype….”.

It is of no surprise that the assassination of JFK becomes a matter of interest to Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco, for Constance M. Lewallen described the social environment at that time in Still Subversive After All These Years as “tremendous cultural ferment, especially in San Francisco, where the free speech movement, centered just east of the city at the University of California at Berkeley, was followed by passionate antiwar demonstrations.”

February 13, 2018February 13, 2018

Research Critique: Char Davies, Osmose (1995)

In Osmose, Char Davies employed Virtue Reality (VR) to create an immersive experience of an imaginary world. Here the viewers are invited to wander a multi-dimensional space which is in a way lifelike but not exactly resemble the real physical world we live in. (e.g. the gravitational rules don’t quite apply here.) The navigation through Osmose is done through immersants’ own breath and balance. Davies aimed to provide a ‘first-person’, interactive point of view that can offer multi-dimensional experience.

Still from Osmos (1995), Char Davis

As opposing to image realism, which is one the main pursuits of Media Technology of the time according to Scott Fisher’s 1989 essay“Virtual Environments“, the visual aesthetic of Osmose is semi-representational/semi-abstract, which serves to ‘evoke’ rather than illustrate. This rather poetic and abstract experience, as reported by the artist in 1998 have elicited a series of “unusual” sensations, experienced by participants immersed in “Osmose”:

a feeling of being somewhere else, in another “place”

losing track of time

heightened awareness of their own sense of being

a deep sense of mind/body relaxation

an inability to speak rationally after the experience

a simultaneous feeling of freedom from physical bodies and acute awareness of them

intense emotional feelings, euphoria and overwhelming sense of loss when the session ends.

Norberg-Schulz has made the assumption as early as in 1971 that “a mobile, wholly-changing environment can be disorientating”; however it is still powerful to think how impactful a 15 minutes virtual experience could do to impact our physical well being, especially people experiencing “an inability to speak rationally after the experience”. In connection to Ivan Sutherland’s 1965 vision to the ultimate display, the Wonderland into which Alice walked, the world where the existence of matters are manipulatable, what struck me is that the most powerful display one could imagine might be achievable in the realm of the mind. If we could actually prove the dualism of body and mind, perhaps the virtual chair would be actually good enough to be physically sit in, or at least in the mind of the immersants.

Totem from the movie Inception that could tell a dream from reality

February 5, 2018February 5, 2018

Research Critique: Lynn Hershman, “Deep Contact”, 1989

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Deep Contact, 1984-89.

Deep Contact (1988) by female artist Lynn Hershman Leeson is one of the first interactive artworks using touchscreens. Marion, the girl in blue in the video, calls out to visitors: “Try to reach through the screen and touch me. Touch me! Try to press your way through the screen.” Depending on the part of her body touched, a personalized narrative will unwind.

Vannevar Bush held the conference that gathered all the brilliant minds together at the end of WWII, encouraging inventions to extend man’s powers of the mind. His vision was realised perfectly and beyond his imagination by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, who built the prototype of today’s handy personal computer in the 70s, “Dynabook”. The significant reduction in the size of storage, as well as new ways to input and output information made the light-weighted touchscreen used in Leeson’s work possible.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Deep Contact, 1984-89, Installation with Microtouch monitor, interactive video, screen, DVD

In 1972, Kay described the main function of Dynabook at the ACM National Conference in Boston this way, “we think that a large fraction of its use will involve reflexive communication of the owner with himself through this personal medium, much as paper and notebooks are currently used…” This reflexive communication is achieved by allowing the users to “mold and channel its power to his own needs.” The programmable nature of Dynabook thus paved way for the construction of a personalised dialogue one could have with a machine host in Deep Contact.

Lastly, this artwork is quite thought-provoking for its feminist message. But I want to address how Leeson suggested the possibility of human desires getting way out of control in an information age. Bush have criticised “the applications of science…have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons” (at war). However out of war, soon after everyone is empowered with such a tool that helps to get things organised, especially with the invention of internet, problems like cyber bullying, addiction, illegal contents, and physical inactivity start to emerge. Among these problems, the anonymity of the digital medium brought one of the urgent threat. One can imagine the recruitment of terrorists, a ISIS member put up a trustworthy mask online and then call out to the curious innocent minds out there, “Try to reach through the screen and touch me. Touch me! Try to press your way through the screen.”

January 30, 2018January 30, 2018

Peace can be Realized Even without Order

Many example artworks we covered in class today have shown artists tend to bring entropy to a system, “the more chaotic the better”, while engineers like to bring things under control. e.g. John Cage’s Variation 5, Robert Rauchenberg’s Soundings, Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, etc.

Here is an interactive work by Japanese collective teamLab, which presents a reverse narrative. The 80 independent hologram figures play instruments or dance, while they exist independently and don’t really leave the spot, their rhythm and degree of movement are responsive to the sound of their neighbours. When there’s no visitor moving around, their movements and music are in sync, and the scene is rather harmonious. The system has the lowest entropy at this point. When visitors enter, the nearby dancers are interrupted. The participation caused the entropy to increase.

The work is inspired by a traditional Japanese dance festival. The below paragraph is taken from teamLab’s website:

In Japan, there is a primitive dance festival called the Awa Dance Festival dating back so far that its origins are unknown. Groups of individual dancers play music and proceed around the town arbitrarily. Groups play their own music as they like and dance as they like. Interestingly, for some reason, the music forms into a peaceful order across the whole town. Dancers who randomly meet other groups of dancers gradually and subconsciously match the tempo of their music with that of the other group. This is not due to any set of rules; it just feels right and happens without conscious choice. It seems that when people are set free from their inhibitions, an extraordinary peaceful feeling prevails despite the lack of any order to the dances. Perhaps this is how people of ancient times maintained a feeling of peacefulness.

More about the work, click here.