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Report from Siggraph 98: The Art Gallery
In the midst of SIGGRAPH, the international conference featuring thousands of square feet of exhibition space filled with the latest and greatest in computer graphics and interactive technologies, is the art gallery which this year featured Touchware,a juried show emphasizing the element of "touch" at the interface between human and machine. Touchware Chair Joan Truckenbrod explains that the exhibit explores both the idea of psychologically "being in touch" as well as the physicality of touch.2 In their radically different approaches to the idea of touch at the interface between human and machine, the following selected installation projects provide a glimpse into the murky waters where the realm of what is referred to as "interactive art" resides.
Rebecca Allen and The Emergence Team - The Bush Soul UCLA The concept behind this piece derives from the West African belief that a person has more than one soul. One of these alternate souls is a type of soul that resides within a wild animal of the bush, while that animal also maintains a life of its own. In the interactive environment of The Bush Soul,the role of avatars and their relationship to humans is explored. Far from Africa’s bush, though only miles from Disney’s simulated African bush, here the avatar carries the participant’s "bush soul" into the "virtual bush" 3 as represented by the three screen projection system facing the human participant who controls the navigation of the avatar. According to Allen, the team is "interested in setting up a relationship (which is) abstract... (and has ) an unfamiliar alien feel as well as an organic feel." 4 What is important here, is the idea that "life" is attributed to everything in the virtual environment. Even the camera is alive: "We think of the camera as another creature following you," explains Loren McQuade, Emergence Team software designer. 5 Communication in this environment is nonverbal with feeling or emotion being evoked not through the use of language, but by the movements, gestures, and sounds of the characters in response to each other and the environment.
As with the wild animal, the avatar while theoretically carrying the human bush soul has its own set of behaviors; the human participant offers guidance to the avatar, but ultimately the avatars own set of behaviors might override the participants instructions. "Complex social environments can emerge from the interaction of simple behaviors", 6 mentions Allen. While the artists’ control over determining the final makeup of this environment is limited, thus supporting the idea that "emergence" is possible, it is not clear to the user that the user’s interaction has any influence on the environment besides navigational. Appropriating the West African idea of the bush soul, in order to create its virtual equivalent, seems problematic as anything more than a conceptual springboard for this project. The reliance on this idea - perhaps deeply spiritual within the particular West African culture to which it belongs - to fully carry the project appears to be a conceptual crutch and a meager attempt to incorporate the cultural other. In the end perhaps The Bush Soul is simply an artistic attempt at providing a showcase for the "Emergence" technology - " a PC -based real-time 3D Software system that supports an active, responsive, networked, virtual world"7 - that Rebecca Allen together with the Emergence Team, a group of UCLA computer science and design students, have developed.
Tammy Knipp - Case Study 309 After passing Case Study 309 several times, always intrigued by the constant line of participants waiting to sprawl themselves on the floor beneath a very heavy looking black box dangling from four rather light gauge chains, and precariously heaving and lurching directly above an upturned face, I decided to stop and pay closer attention. Here, Knipp had introduced perceived "risk" into the interactive art equation - and it was working.
Finally my curiousity was sufficiently mustered to entice me to stand in line in order to figure out what this was all about. Prostrate, face up, it was finally my turn to experience the machinery lurching close overhead. What had been merely a black box, was also a video monitor. After viewing the video it was time to give the next visitor an opportunity to question theirrole in this interactive piece. Relative to the interest evoked by viewing the overall spectacle of the installation as a passerby, the video itself was of little consequence. "Touch" it turned out had no place here. Rather the participant was a hostage of sorts, completely without opportunity to actively participate with the piece, but instead was acted upon. The viewer’s role was that of the observer no matter where one stood; as a passerby I watched the whole spectacle, including the phenomenon of ". Waiting in line" that had been incorporated into the work itself; waiting in line, now within the project, I watched the tense body under the precarious lurching box anticipating my own experience there; finally lying beneath the heaving box watching the video, I didn’t leave nor was I allowed to expand upon my role as observer. In all these positions the viewer is also an integral part of the work. The entire staging of Case Study 309was a performance with viewers, both outside and inside the piece, as the willing yet oblivious performers at the interface between human and machine.
Sensorium - BeWare02 Sensorium’s BeWare02 offered an intriguing approach to dynamically mapping world temperature data gathered by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) polar orbital satellite. According to the speed at which the satellite was travelling, photographic images collected by the NOAA satellite were projected and updated on a plate atop the 4 inch by 6 foot surface of a waist-high wall. The infrared images were analyzed by their temperature data which was used to control Peltier devices attached to the underside of the plate. In running one’s hand over the smooth plastic plate, in effect, one ran one’s hand over the surface of the earth perceiving tactically the temperature change encapsulated as a longitudinal band stretching between the North and South poles.
The collaborative team composing Sensorium is openly unconcerned about whether its projects reside in the domain of art, science, or education. An especially innovative approach to data mapping, this hybrid project allows the viewer to cross from one field of inquiry to another. In delivering information impossible to read at its ordinary magnitude, this piece was something akin to a tactile version of the Eames’ 1970s film "Powers of Ten". Sensorium’s approach to data mapping with BeWare02, involving a unique approach to issues of scale, offered the user not only the opportunity to perceive the living planet in a new way, but also offered a tactile experience of the living network, the Internet.
David Small and Tom White - Stream of Consciousness MIT ACG group - The Media Lab Stream of Consciousness incorporated a "liquid haptic interface", a hardware device used to interact with a word association database, into an abbreviated Japanese garden plot. Testifying to the popularity of this piece during the four day art gallery show, the garden’s bench where visitors stopped to rest and interact with the piece was rarely empty. By applying pressure to a soy sauce filled bladder, the primary feature of the liquid haptic interface, the user manipulated the flow of words projected onto the stream of water flowing through the garden plot. The resulting poetic associations were the result of a collaboration between human and machine.
The use of the miniature garden plot was reminiscent of similarly scaled plots found in the garden show section of the local county fair. Neither White nor Small seemed aware of this association, preferring to characterize Stream of Consciousness as a place to meditate. This piece exhibited some intriguing technology and at first glance it seemed solid. However, upon delving deeper, fissures in the conceptual makeup of Stream of Consciousness became apparent. When probed on the connection between meditation and language, neither artist had a response as to how they related and claimed that this was the first time this aspect of their piece had been questioned. 8 (Considering the popularity of this piece, I wondered what had been asked.) According to the exhibition catalog, the intentionality of the piece was clear: "The project attempts to bring the computer into the garden in harmony with stone, water, and plant materials."9 A follow up question to this statement might be: Why?
The Center for Metahuman Exploration - Project Paradise Carnegie Mellon University The Center for Metahuman Exploration was presumably not as interested in exploiting the telepresent robotic functioning of Project Paradise to attract viewer attention as presenting the spectacle of real time video feed of one naked person touching another. The video display monitor stood at the heavily trafficked crossroads of the Touchware and Enhanced Realities shows, positioned immediately outside the concealed installation whose inside it was revealing. Word of this captivating footage apparently traveled very quickly around SIGGRAPH - well beyond the temporary walls of the art gallery, as was noted by several of the video viewers on various occasions.
While Project Paradise’s Adam and Eve, male and female, characters were contained in an upright cylindrical, approximately 6 foot diameter holding tank, a solid line of participants waited at one of two unmarked telephone booth style structures placed 50 feet on either side of the tank. For the better part of the exhibition, the lines were predominantly, if not entirely, male in their makeup. When questioned on the significance of this occurrence, a representative of the The Center for Metahuman Exploration commented that "this is because visitors to SIGGRAPH are mainly male" 10 - according to him this demographic was correlative with the visitorship to SIGGRAPH and not in any way due to the content of the piece or the perceived participation of the user in this project. Upon finally arriving in one of Project Paradise’s control booths, a participant would be able to control the arm movement of either the Adam or Eve character depending on which line they had chosen to stand in and subsequently which booth they had found themselves in. While the user didn’t control the hand movement, but only general arm movements of the individual in the holding tank, the characters took it upon themselves to maneuver their fingers. At times one of the character’s arms would be maneuvered toward the other without being close enough to touch, and the character’s fingers would stretch eagerly toward their tank companion’s body without reaching it. Likewise these characters exhibited what might be termed "emotion"; most often the tank companions’ expressions shifted between bored banal to sensual anticipatory. Thus, like the avatars in The Bush Soul, these avatars were already programmed with their own behaviors. According to the Touchware gallery write-up for this piece these characters are avatars, which the human participants inhabit. "Through the empathy invoked by the human avatars, Project Paradise extends traditional telepresence to engage in sending and receiving human will and emotion."11 The sincerity and import evident in the exhibition catalog description of this piece doesn’t let on to the obvious element of humor apparent here.
Keith Roberson - Litt’l Havoc In contrast to all the elaborate funding driven projects brought to SIGGRAPH by the likes of MIT, UCLA, Carnegie Mellon, Ars Electronica, was Litt’l Havoc. Keith Roberson collected "stuff", low tech stuff, all free, in order to devise his response to how most interactive art is put together - that is, as he related, "it’s reliance on supreme technology, over stimulation, and austere, formal qualities"12 Roberson referred to his piece as "dumpster art" and freely related its zero budget and no financial support status.
Litt’l Havoc’s computer interface consisted of a monitor situated face-up in a shopping cart and surrounded by various odds and ends, including oranges. User interaction involved pushing the cart which in turn manipulated an upside down mouse/tennis ball apparatus. This apparatus would cause the onscreen program, featuring the artist pushing his own cart through "absurd environments of old post cards, NASA space imagery, and historic street scenes of Florida " 13 to change. In a more general light, the shopping cart and its associations with consumerism as well as being a "home" for the homeless can be seen as a bridge between the worlds of the technology "haves" and "have-nots" thus drawing attention, in its own Litt’l way, to an issue otherwise unaddressed at SIGGRAPH.
Maurice Benayoun - World Skin Musical Composition by Jean-Baptiste Barriere After waiting in yet another line, I entered the makeshift room along with seven others to embark on my first experience in a CAVE. Upon donning a pair of 3D glasses the docent provided us with instructions, which included relating that one of us would be the "bus driver" while the others would act as "photographers". All grasped their appropriate devices - camera or, in the case of the driver, the joystick - and the journey began.
While the driver determined the course by which the entire group navigated the terrain, photographers were busy snapping photos in what appeared to be a war torn landscape, bleak, muted, eerily shifting between two dimensional surfaces and three dimensional spaces; moving through the 3D environment, we passed objects only to find that they were without dimension. With their cardboard cutout appearance, they lacked depth both literally and figuratively; whether the photo captures anything more than the surface of what occurs in such a landscape became a probing question. As the photographers dutifully snapped photos, no doubt with as much vigor as nearby Disney’s African Safari tourists from their bus simultaneously did, the landscape began to disappear; it was slowly blotted away by white space. The camera here acted as an eraser, or more accurately a weapon of extinguishment. In this ravaged landscape "shooting the camera" and "shooting a gun" was correlative - the relationship between the photographic image and death is wonderfully brought to the fore by World Skin. As well, the privileged status of the image of the real over the "real" is made readily clear. The viewer/ participant is implicated in the "death" of the landscape even after they’ve departed the CAVE. Upon exiting the CAVE participants were able to retrieve the "photos" they’d taken; a printer provided the images, i.e. the extinguished elements, of the session’s photo shoot. _________________________________________________
In the context of the art gallery, presumably art is found. Though, even with the authority that this context lends to labeling something as art, it is unclear as to how some of the work found in Touchware might be deemed art rather than something else. The murkiness of the territory known as "interactive art" becomes further obscured when these pieces are set against interactive encounters found at nearby Disney’s Wild Kingdom with its simulated African Safari complete with simulated 1000 year old Baobob trees, hippos, and a poacher-capturing adventure. Disney City provided further exploration of the relationship between humans and avatars with such treats as "human pinball", where graphical pinballs acting as avatars for the human participants could be maneuvered using one’s entire body, and Aladdin’s Magic Carpet ride, where the human participant could explore and interact in a virtual environment represented by an avatar in the form of a monkey. These experiences provided an interesting benchmark by which to compare human participation in "interactive art" as opposed to the interaction between human and machine that is not framed by the art context.
1. Electronic Art and Animation Catalog - p. 2
Touchware jury:
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