History of Design – Artist Manifesto: START WARS; GROW ART!!
My current main Manifesto is “START WARS!!! Grow art!” (Disclaimer: No we should not start actual wars). It takes the form of a propaganda-looking poster that was using during regimes to grab the attention of and communicate ideas to the masses.
The idea behind it is that design is by humans, for humans. Throughout history, artists and designers have used their works as a form of universal language to challenge an ongoing mindset. This is evident in movements such as Dada, where even Dada went against himself, Streamlining after the Machine Age, and even today we are trying to marry the idea of using technology into human-centric designs. Usually after periods of dispute, strong assertions were made using art to communicate to the masses and propose to them potential directions they could drive society towards as fellow members of society. They may not have been the most aesthetically pleasing (even that is subjective), but what mattered was the philosophy behind the works and the process of creating them. The most successful movements often differentiated themselves with stark contrasts with movements before, or coexisting with them.
So my vision statement and call to action would be for designers to aim to have a larger outreach and get more people to participate in expressing their personal opinions and owning their rights to having an opinion and making them feel that it that matters in society. As such, they have to be well-informed about the world around them and investigate disputes and their underlying reasons and encourage discussion about the current state of society and not just accept society as it is.
|| For this creative response assignment, we had to do a bauhaus-inspired design while putting the context of Singapore into consideration.
Something that is really iconic to Singapore is the void deck space. In the past, void decks used to be places where residents could gather and conduct social activities, but with the myriad of rules of placed on permitted activities and control of the usage of this space, most residents would not choose to spend their free time chilling in the void deck and bonding with their neighbours. Coincidentally, a while back I took a photo of a void deck at my house which reminded me of how barren and boring void decks are. Being a resident of the HDB high rise flats community, I have always wished for residents to be given a chance to exercise creative freedom in our own living spaces.
voiddeck(); photo by me
This led me to think about a potential place to start: l e t t e r b o x e s.
Uniform and made of cold aluminium (both figuratively and literally), their current design really does not do much but emphasise the desolation of the void decks. Some residents even choose to lock the slits of their letterboxes because they want to avoid spam advertisements from being shoved in. In my opinion, I think the saddest thing is that residents do not even send each other any greeting cards, or any forms of letters. :’D
Inspired by the features of Bauhaus design, which is the consideration of functionality with form, geometrical shapes that are simple for mass production, I came up with a potential design for letter boxes in void decks (below)! The letterboxes are in hexagonal shapes, which not only are a really strong structure based on physics, but also resembles a beehive and represents how residents are living in a community like bees would. (hexagons would also make a lot more space for slightly thicker mail). The shapes are all relatively rounded off so that they appear more organic and less stiff, and the use of vibrant primary colours would give a splash of liveliness and congeniality to the entire void deck area.
Bauhaus-inspired letterbox design by me (Yue Ling)
I would be so incredibly happy if this sort of design were to be a reality in the future. *shamelessly hypothetically patents own design* :’D
Although a void deck literally means empty level, I really doubt it has to remain as a purely empty space. Something like a Bauhaus letterbox design would definitely do much to bring a sense of playfulness and conviviality within the living spaces of Singaporeans.
Image taken from: https://www.teamlab.art/images/pc-l/16315 (edited) teamLab: Graffiti Nature – Lost, Immersed and Reborn (2018)
One of teamLab’s most recent art installations Graffiti Nature: Lost, Immersed and Reborn (2018) is situated in Amos Rex, an art museum in Helsinki, Finland. It is just one of the many exhibitions that teamLab has globally in countries such as France, Japan, and even Singapore. teamLab is based in Japan and is an “art collective” of “ultra-technologists” that consists of engineers, programmers, CG animators, graphic designers, editors and many more positions and is headed by Toshiyuki Inoko. The interdisciplinary nature of their team is well-reflected in their art installations that often deal with using light as paint and the world as their canvas (Mun-Delsalle, 2018). teamLab utilises interactivity and advanced technology used in the development of hypermedia to blur the boundaries between the physical and virtual world and elevate the extent of immersion in Lost, Immersed and Reborn.
Interactivity is a forte of this installation, and further enhances its immersive quality. In Nobert Wiener’s Cybernetics in History, he discusses about the role of an artist as a ‘steersman’; a designer of a ‘catalyst’ that enables a stable reciprocal exchange between human and machine (Wiener, 1954) and we are able to project this concept unto the context of Lost, Immersed and Reborn.
Cybernetics in the context of Lost, Immersed and Reborn. (by Tan Yue Ling)
In this digital interactive installation, a virtual ecosystem made of projected light fills up the entire room. Participants invited to interact with the myriad of virtual flora and fauna within by colouring in templates with contours of animals and flowers and scanning their drawings. Once their drawings are scanned, they are immediately transformed into animated graphics that appear three-dimensional and join the rest of the virtual ecosystem where participants are then able to illicit responses by ‘touching’ them. The flora and fauna to which they react differently when ‘touched: the animals within the ecosystem can ‘eat’ each other, if participants do not move, more flowers will grow, if participants step on the animals, they explode into a splat of colours. teamLab uses light as canvas, essentially incorporating real life characteristics of nature into this virtual ecosystem.
How it works:
The idea of entropy within this piece is evident with how teamLab partially gives up ownership of the artwork to participants, who have the freedom to create and interact with whichever virtual element to illicit whatever response they chose to evoke. teamLab’s use of sensors reminds me of John Cage’s Variations series, whereby kinaesthetic sensors were used to record and evoke different artistic outcomes. In Variations V, the dancers were the participants who created different sounds using their movements while in Lost, Immersed and Reborn, the public are the participants who created different visual outcomes within the space using their movements which are similarly detected by sensors.
Since participants’ actions were unpredictable, the visual dynamic of the room was constantly changing in an unprogrammed and indeterminate manner, in the sense that every other day, the change in the room’s appearance would be different from the day before. With reference to Roy Ascott’s quote on interactive art:
“Interactive Art must free itself from the modernist ideal of the “Perfect Object.” (Ascott, 1966)
teamLab has successfully facilitated an organic outcome in Lost, Immersed and Reborn resulted from the unpredictability of participant’s actions, something that would not be achievable without the participation of both man and machine. Giving participants the responsibility of creating the artwork heightens its immersive factor since participants feel like they exist in and are able to affect the virtual world.
Undoubtedly, technology is the backbone of teamLab’s artworks, including Lost, Immersed and Reborn. The state-of-the-art technological devices that teamLab employs bank on a long history of technological development. Earlier works such as Sensorama were limited by the level of advancement in technology.
Sensorama by Morton Heilig http://www.mortonheilig.com/InventorVR.html
In Sensorama (which was launched in 1960) although technological features such as chemical smell simulation and binocular vision was incorporated, interactive features like a knob or joystick which would translate physical force into a response in the virtual world was largely absent. This made the experience still rather passive and consequently less immersive.
A later example of Aspen Movie Map (launched in 1978) had a touchscreen function which enabled participants to make associative and non-linear choices along the drive route. However, there were still limitations such as only enabling the participant to view the route in intervals of 10 feet and only being able to move in a fixed number of directions and made it hard for participants to be fully immersed in the virtual driving experience.
Aspen Movie Map http://www.inventinginteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Aspen_armchair.jpg
In contrast to these rudimentary works, the advancement of technology has achieved immense amount of success in enabling the recreation of elements of reality into the virtual world. Current new media is able to expand the physical world by transcending its boundaries. teamLab uses software such as Unity to generate three-dimensional graphics from the scanned images in Lost, Immersed and Reborn. In this way, art is transferred from a physical medium to a digital medium that acts as a representation of participants’ telepresence in this virtual ecosystem. The virtual ecosystem also acts as an ‘informational surrogate’ (Fisher, 1989) that stores a large volume of digital data that helps to mimic nature in a digital medium, for example how the movements of a lizard are replicated in the virtual environment. The flattened three-dimensional graphics also showcase teamLab’s “Fold, Divide or Join” principles of viewer centricity inspired by the concept of Ukiyo-e as Japanese ultra-subjective space, essentially creating a stereoscopic and kinaesthetic visual within a physical room to better simulate a first-person immersive experience.
“Multiple points of view places an object in context thereby animating meaning.” – Scott Fisher in Virtual Environments (Fisher, 1989)
The hardware used in Lost, Immersed and Reborn, includes the use of stereoscopic sound devices, light projection and sensors, which allow participants to be immersed seamlessly into the organic virtual ecosystem, choosing where they want to go and where they want to touch to evoke a response. The pace at which the animals move or respond is controlled by the participants, and not passively moving in a programmed manner at a fixed time interval. With the help of technology, the potential for an installation to grow as an ‘informational surrogate’ becomes immense and the number of possible ways to duplicate reality increases as well.
This can be best represented by the Reality-Virtuality Continuum (below) which presents the entire possible spectrum of immersive works as a category:
A representational figure of the reality-virtuality continuum as proposed by Proposed by Milgram and Kishino in A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays (1994).
It can be observed through previous VR works that as time passes, developments in technology allow for the creation of more complex systems featured in installations that expand the boundaries of computer-human interface towards invisibility, essentially pushing more VR works towards the direction of reality (i.e. augmented reality games like Pokemon Go or camera filters). As an installation that incorporates virtual reality (VR), Lost, Immersed and Reborn is eligible to be considered on the reality-virtuality continuum (Milgram, Paul & Kishino, Fumio, 1994) (Fig. 1) as augmented virtuality since it incorporates real time information into a largely virtual world.
In Lost, Immersed and Reborn, there are various modes of interaction including scanning, touch sensors and sound by which physical force translates to digital response. However, many elements that could potentially make it “The Ultimate Display” (Sutherland, 1965) which is defined to be “a room which a computer can control the existence of matter”. The perfect sandbox would give complete liberty in terms of decision making, engage all five senses and resemble reality so closely that there is suspension of disbelief without thought. teamLab’s design philosophy of bringing people together and co-creativity reflect extremely well in Lost, Immersed and Reborn, even if it’s within a virtual space. Perhaps in future artworks, teamLab might be able to explore the incorporation of other cues that engage more senses simultaneously such as smell and taste; the possibilities of immersion to explore are virtually endless.
Mun-Delsalle, Y. (2018, August 13). Japanese Digital Art Collective TeamLab Imagines A World Without Any Boundaries. Retrieved September 7, 2018, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/yjeanmundelsalle/2018/08/13/japanese-digital-art-collective-teamlab-imagines-a-world-without-any-boundaries/#6d884bd554af
Wiener, N. (1954). Cybernetics in History. In Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality.
T. (2018, August 29). Graffiti Nature: Lost, Immersed and Reborn. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kccLykuaNSo&t=9s
Teamlab: Graffiti Nature – Lost, Immersed and Reborn https://www.teamlab.art/images/pc-l/16319
It was tough choosing an artwork from Teamlab’s amazing range of works but I have settled for their Graffiti Nature – Lost, Immersed and Reborn that best exhibits the aspects of interactivity, hypermedia and immersion.
Participants are able to colour in a stencil of aplant or an animal such as a lizard or frog. Their own personalised plant or animal will then be scanned and digitalised, essentially transforming them into virtual beings that join other animals in a virtual ecosystem that fills up the entire room, submerging participants with the experience of being in a whole new world. Participants are then able to interact with the digitalised animals and plants by making contact with them on the surface of the wall or floor, through the help of sensors. Within this virtual ecosystem, the animals can either replicate or be eaten up by other animals, simulating the nature of wildlife in real life.
Universe of Water Particles on Au-delà des limites https://www.teamlab.art/images/pc-m/14757
For my Final Research Hyperessay, I am stoked to find out more about teamLab, an artist collaborative group based in Japan that currently is having one of their exhibitions Future World in Singapore! Since I’m taking Viscomm and Programming, I find their works really relevant and hope to learn more about their design philosophy.
Design started back in the cavemen times. When society first began, design was born out of the need to get it to function and make it easier for people to carry out tasks. Be it for cooking and rituals, where pottery was needed, to transportation, where wheels were invented, to mysterious structures like the Stonehenge, people had to refine design decisions to get society functioning more efficiently.
![[Final Hyperessay] teamLab – Graffiti Nature: Lost, Immersed and Reborn (2018)](https://oss.adm.ntu.edu.sg/ytan147/wp-content/uploads/sites/1785/2018/09/teamlabfeature.jpg)
![[Artwork selection] Teamlab: Graffiti Nature – Lost, Immersed and Reborn](https://oss.adm.ntu.edu.sg/ytan147/wp-content/uploads/sites/1785/2018/09/teamlab-lost-immersed-reborn.jpg)
