[Final Hyperessay] teamLab – Graffiti Nature: Lost, Immersed and Reborn (2018)

 

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.

 

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/assets/img/data/1785/bild.jpg

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.

 

Resources:

 

Careers | teamLab / チームラボ. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.teamlab.art/careers/

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

Roy Ascott, “Behavioral Art and the Cybernetic Vision,” 1966, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality

Ultrasubjective Space | teamLab / チームラボ. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.teamlab.art/concept/ultrasubjective-space

Fisher, S. (1989). Virtual Environments. In Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality.

Milgram, Paul & Kishino, Fumio. (1994). A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays. IEICE Trans. Information Systems. vol. E77-D, no. 12. 1321-1329.

Ivan Sutherland, “The Ultimate Display,” 1965, Wired Magazine

Artist Selection: teamLab

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.

Virtual Insanity

[On Social Broadcasting: A Communications Revolution]

 

|| During the Art of the Networked Practice 3-day (or night) symposium that took place from 29th-31st March 2018, I got to listen to very insightful speakers and witness before my very eyes how far art has grew simultaneously with technology. It is amazing to think how unfathomable all of these works would have been way back when the social broadcasting tools and platforms were just made available.

Groups like Videofreex were filming using the Sony Portapaks to create simple films, who would have thought how far this form of art could come?
https://videofreex.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/img_2520.jpg

 

Since then, social broadcasting has been used as a medium by artists to explore how communication and interaction between people can be altered through it. Annie Abrahams mentioned about how this change is not necessarily better or worse, but rather, just different. In her keynote speech, Maria Christochatzidolou (MariaX) questions the development of social broadcasting art by sharing a myriad of examples of works that use social broadcasting to push the boundaries of art even further.

 

MariaX giving her keynote speech on Telematic performances and the ways they have experimented with and changed the way people communicate.

For one, social broadcasting changes the way we perceive interactivity.

MariaX introduced the concept of the use of technology to bring people together into the same ‘Space-time continuum’, where people can transcend geographical boundaries and be brought together over the metaphysical ‘Third Space’ (coined by Randall Packer). This greatly enhances the opportunities for collaboration and allow more artists to practice the art of Do-It-With-Others (or DIWO), advocated by groups like Furtherfield and Blast Theory.

Throwback to our lesson about Furtherfield where we discussed how it hosts artists in a community that allows for the exchange of ideas between people of different expertise, producing fresh and creative ideas, a successful product of DIWO.

Together with DIWO came the concept of giving up the ownership of the performance partially, if not fully to audience members, such that they had the power to influence the outcome of it. One example of this is Kit Galloway’s and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s ‘Hole in Space’, which was part of their satellite art projects in collaboration with NASA. People from different cities were pulled together into the same metaphysical space through the ‘hole in time’ and the way they responded was completely unrehearsed, as with how some of them even started to organise meetings with their family or friends.

MariaX defined the interactivity of social broadcasting as ‘the performer being affected by the audience, and the audience affecting the performer’.Annie Abraham’s Entanglement Training performance was also a far cry from a passive delivery, rather, performers (some of which she has never met) were able to work alongside her.

 

Annie Abrahams and her co-performers whose actions were slightly rehearsed but nevertheless completely unpredictable and out of her control during the performance itself in Entanglement Training: Ensemble.

In the case of the symposium, I was participating in the act of DIWO literally just by typing in the chatroom. The performers were able to interact with the online audience and this allowed for a collaborative act of helping each other understand the works and the intentions behind them. Essentially, this flattens out the hierarchy between performers and audiences and changes the way we perceive artists to work and interact with their audiences (contrary to the idea that artists worked in isolation in their own studio space).

 

Next, social broadcasting has changed the expectations of human interaction as new dynamics are introduced with this new medium.

Social broadcasting nevertheless allows us to be hidden behind our screens in a safer environment that in real life where physical confrontation is a possibility. We discover this and over time, we find ourselves trying to paint the most ideal picture of ourselves online, trying to polish our ‘Digital Identity’, which is a re-imagination of ourselves, and our tele-presence projected into the ‘Third Space’.

 

xXxtra.Princesses’ use of Snapchat filters to paint an idealised picture of themselves as a digital entity.

In actual fact, the use of the Third Space encompasses the technical issues such as connection that come with it. To have the ‘Third Space’ in co-existence and seen in totality with the local and remote spaces would be to also accept the faults that comes with it, just like how we do not act in a perfectly rehearsed manner in real life, for that would be way too unnatural (the word in itself suggests that it is not characteristic of a living creature).

 

Arcangel Constantini also showcased one of his newest projects ‘bakteria.org’ that makes use of technical fault as a style, with the noise distortion soundscape and code glitch as a font type that gives rise to a unique and recognisable style. His little bacteria illustrations also represent how information is spread across the Third Space just like how bacteria spreads amongst people.

 

 

Annie Abraham’s works are quintessential to this very theme. In Entanglement Training – Ensemble, her co-performers followed her protocol to read out the latency in their connections, indicating how all of them are never really existing in the exact same moment in the Third Space, which may be a state which technology could ideally bring us to. However, she makes the latencies the very subject of her work and in turn explores the beauty of this imperfection of the medium to create a rhythmic, choreographic performance that really enchants the viewer.

 

 

“one millisecond”. “138”

“Excellent”

“Status”

“Connection status”

 

Annie Abrahams’ works are about the ‘sloppy’ side of people online and the intimacy between people. She likes to trap her co-performers in a state of ‘No Exit’ such that they are forced to expose their “messy and malleable” sides, prominent in her other works such as The Big Kiss and Angry Women. This shows how the digital medium is far from perfect and by making these faults the main subject of her works, we are continuous exposed to them and they are more normalised. In this way, we learn how to accept and embrace these imperfections more.

Annie Abraham’s work shops with our class!! We learned how it felt like to be following a protocol and it was surprisingly a lot harder than I thought because we could not rehearse any timings with our groupmates and we just had to give up control and let whatever happen happen naturally. This liberating effect was really enlightening and now I really appreciate Annie’s works even more than ever.

 

As the saying goes: ‘to err is human, to forgive is divine’. Then, following this train of thought, artists that work around the concept of the fault in human behaviour and technical glitches have already achieved a certain level of divinity. They have the power to change the way we anticipate the way our interactions online will proceed, and encourage us to embrace these imperfections as part of our newly established communication medium.

 

Last but not least, social broadcasting changes the way we want our new form of interaction to grow towards. 

 

After being aware of these faults and learning how to embrace them, where do we go from there?

 

With a new world comes new laws to maintain some sort of order. New morals and ethics will arise and they will definitely be different from that of the real, physical world. MariaX brings up the issue of “Telematic Abuse” experienced by a performer where although her physical body was not abused, the abuse was directed towards a fictional existence of her real corporal body. How will we define laws that resist this sort of acts? Can they even be counted as legitimate abuse? These are definitely new questions that will arise as we continue to develop in telematic arts.

 

During the symposium, the ethics of respect was questioned when audience members were conversing in the chatroom while the performance was ongoing and apparently some people thought it was rude was others did not. Whereas, it is expected that people stay silent when watching a performance in real life since they are occupying the same space and may affect the performance.

 

During the performance of
#exsanguination, the audience members were discussing about the significance of the leeches in the performances.

 

Social broadcasting also gives people the ability immortalise a moment, as seen in from works like Ant Farm’s Blast Theory. This can be wielded as a tool to call for action by the wider public. We can see this in The Pixelated Revolution 2012 by Rabih Mroue, where a victim continues to film a sniper who is hunting him down and eventually shoots him. The very fact that he does not stop filming shows that he believes that the recorded video will be able to serve as a form of evidence later on. The way that we use this form of evidence is even prevalent today in court legislation.

Telematic Dreaming by Paul Sermon allows the artist to interact with audience members within the intimacy of the bed space. Whether the same social norms and rules apply to this situation is still largely unexplored.

 

 

 

Station House Opera also staged At Home in Gaza and London (2016) which  also uses the technique of ‘dissolving’ to impose two images together to form a mutual performance space, where people could occupy each other’s’ homes, streets and social spaces, such that it focuses on the situation of people in Gaza, contrasting storytelling of Gaza versus theatre in America. This highlights the political isolation of people in Gaza and acts as a coping mechanism with the temporary relief of technology for them.

 

 

In conclusion, social broadcasting has revolutionised the way we communicate. It has changed our perception of interactivity, our expectations of interaction on this new medium and the direction where we want these new developments to head towards. Whether we like it or not, the ‘Third Space’ has already invaded and influenced our real world; whether we want to maintain its position as a partially isolated platform, separate entity, or continue to learn about it and embrace its faults to assimilate our physical world with the Third Space seamlessly is up to us to decide. We must continue to seriously consider the limitation of each form of interaction and find a way to strike a fine balance so that we can enjoy the best of all spaces.

 

 

Resources:

————–

Keynote Maria Chatzichristodoulou, artist Annie Abrahams, and artist Matt Adams/Blast Theory
 
Jon Cates / Chicago performance
 
Annie Abrahams performance
 
Keynote Matt Adams / Blast Theory
 
Social Broadcasting
 
The Symposium Website also has program information and participant bios
Bakteria.org by Arcangel Constantini: http://bakteria.org/
MariaX interviews Annie to gain insight to her work:

Annie Abrahams. Allergic To Utopias