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Leonardo Electronic Almanac volume
12, number 1, January 2004<br>
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ISSN #1071-4391<br>
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<br>
INTRODUCTION<br>
<b>------------<br>
<br>
</b>< LEA Special Issue - Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording,
Transmission and Music ><br>
<br>
< Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 13 2003 - Table of Contents
><br>
<br>
<br>
FEATURES<br>
--------<br>
<br>
< Performance Space Meets Cyberspace: Seeking the Creative Idiom
and Technical Model for Live Music on Broadband, by Michael Bussičre
><br>
<br>
< The Gallbladder Sonata: Transmission Time on the Internet, by
Marlena Corcoran ><br>
<br>
< Mediating (through) Imagination: Web-based Sound Art, by Trace
Reddell ><br>
<br>
<br>
LEONARDO REVIEWS<br>
----------------<br>
<br>
< The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture,
Reviewed by Pia Tikka ><br>
<br>
<b><</b> Enough, reviewed by George Gessert ><br>
<br>
< The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, reviewed by
Allan Graubard ><br>
<br>
<br>
LEONARDO ABSTRACTS SERVICE<br>
--------------------------<br>
<br>
ISAST NEWS<br>
----------<br>
<br>
< Leonardo Call For Papers: 7th Workshop on Space and the Arts
><br>
<br>
< Leonardo/ISAST collaboration with ISEA 2006 ><br>
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<span
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<br>
LEA SPECIAL ISSUE - GROOVE, PIT AND WAVE: RECORDING, TRANSMISSION AND
MUSIC<br>
IN CONJUNCTION WITH *LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL* VOLUME 13<br>
<br>
Despite Thomas Edison's assumption that the gramophone was nothing
more than a sonic autograph album - suitable only for playing back the
speeches of famous people - over the last 100 years recording has
radically transformed the composition, dissemination and consumption
of music. Similarly, the businesslike dots and dashes of Morse and
Marconi have evolved into a music-laden web of radio masts, dishes,
satellites, cables and servers. Sound is encoded in grooves on vinyl,
particles on tape and pits in plastic; it travels as acoustic
pressure, electromagnetic waves and pulses of light.<br>
<br>
The rise of the DJ in the last two decades has signaled the arrival of
the medium as the instrument - the crowning achievement of a
generation for whom tapping the remote control is as instinctive as
tapping two sticks together. Turntables, CD players, radios, tape
recorders (and their digital emulations) are *played*, not merely
heard; scratching, groove noise, CD glitches, tape hiss and radio
interference are the sound of music, not sound effects. John Cage's
1960 *Cartridge Music* has yet to enter the charts, but its sounds are
growing more familiar.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
*Leonardo Music Journal* Volume 13 (LMJ13) and this accompanying
special issue of LEA (the first of two) focuses on the role of
recording and/or transmission in the creation, performance and
distribution of music: contributing their thoughts on these topics
here in LEA are, in this issue, Michael Bussičre, Marlena Corcoran
and Trace Reddell; and in the February issue, Christopher Burns with
Matthew Burtner and Tobias C. van Veen. In the print issue, these
topics are discussed by Peter Manning, Yasunao Tone, Douglas Kahn with
Christian Marclay, Nick Collins, David First, Matthew Burtner,
Guy-Marc Hinant, Caleb Stuart, Álvaro Barosa, Holger Schulze,
Sérgio Freire and Philip Sherburne.<br>
<br>
LMJ13 includes *Splitting Bits, Closing Loops: Sound on Sound*, an
audio CD curated by Philip Sherburne. The CD features pieces from an
eclectic mix of composers/performers: AGF, M. Behrens, Alejandra &
Aeron, DAT Politics, Stephan Mathieu, Francisco López, Institut fuer
Feinmotorik, Janek Schaefer, Steve Roden, Scanner and Stephen
Vitiello.<br>
<br>
LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL<br>
<br>
The LMJ series is devoted to the aesthetic and technical issues in
contemporary music and sonic arts. Currently under the editorship of
Nicolas Collins, each thematic issue features artists/writers from
around the world, representing a wide range of stylistic viewpoints,
and includes an audio CD or CD-ROM. LMJ is available by subscription
from the MIT Press.<br>
<br>
LMJ13, "Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission and Music,"
can be purchased via the MIT Press at<u>
http://mitpress.mit.edu/LMJ</u> or<u> journals-orders@mit.edu</u>.<br>
<br>
More info about the issue is available at:<u>
http://lmj.mit.edu</u>.<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
[Ed. note - Following is the complete table of contents for LMJ13
(information available at the above-mentioned links). This is provided
for reference and is different from the table of contents of the
present issue of LEA.]<br>
<br>
<br>
LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, VOLUME 13 2003 - TABLE OF CONTENTS<br>
<br>
< Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission and Music ><br>
<br>
<br>
INTRODUCTION<br>
<br>
< Nicolas Collins: Groove, Pit and Wave ><br>
<br>
<br>
ARTICLES<br>
<br>
< Peter Manning: The Influence of Recording Technologies on the
Early Development of Electroacoustic Music ><br>
<br>
< Yasunao Tone: John Cage and Recording ><br>
<br>
< Douglas Kahn: Christian Marclay's Early Years: An Interview
><br>
<br>
< Nick Collins: Recursive Audio Cutting ><br>
<br>
< David First: The Music of the Sphere: An Investigation into
Asymptotic Harmonics, Brainwave Entrainment, Gestural Improvisation,
and the Earth as a Giant Bell ><br>
<br>
< Matthew Burtner: Regenerative Feedback in the Medium of Radio:
*<i>Study 1.0 (FM) for Radio Transceiver* ><br>
<br>
</i>< Guy-Marc Hinant: Artist's Notebook: TOHU BOHU -
Considerations on the nature of noise, in 78 fragments ><br>
<br>
< Caleb Stuart: Damaged Sound: Glitching and Skipping Compact Discs
in the Audio of Yasunao Tone, Nicolas Collins and Oval ><br>
<br>
< Álvaro Barbosa: Displaced Soundscapes: A Survey of Network
Systems for Music and Sonic Art Creation ><br>
<br>
< Holger Schulze: Hand-Luggage: For a Generative Theory of
Artifacts ><br>
<br>
< Sérgio Freire: Early Musical Impressions from Both Sides of the
Loudspeaker ><br>
<br>
<br>
EXTENDED ABSTRACTS<br>
<br>
< Christopher Burns and Matthew Burtner: Recursive Audio Systems:
Acoustic Feedback in Composition ><br>
<br>
< Michael Bussičre: Performance Space Meets Cyberspace: Seeking
the Creative Idiom and Technical Model for Live Music on Broadband
><br>
<br>
< Marlena Corcoran: *The Gallbladder Sonata*: Transmission Time on
the Internet ><br>
<br>
< Trace Reddell: Mediating (through) Imagination: Web-Based Sound
Art ><br>
<br>
< Tobias C. van Veen: Turn/Stile: Interpreting Udo Kasemets'
*CaleNdarON* for a Single Turntable with Treatment and Surfaces
><br>
<br>
<br>
LMJ13 CD COMPANION<br>
<br>
< Splitting Bits, Closing Loops: Sound on Sound, Curated by Philip
Sherburne ><br>
<br>
<br>
TRACKLIST AND CREDITS<br>
<br>
<br>
CD INTRODUCTION<br>
<br>
< Philip Sherburne: Splitting Bits, Closing Loops: Sound on Sound
><br>
<br>
<br>
CD CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES<br>
<br>
< AGF, Leo's Code ><br>
<br>
< M. Behrens, For the Further Consequences of Reinterpretation
><br>
<br>
< Alejandra and Aeron, Village Football ><br>
<br>
< DAT Politics, Bag ><br>
<br>
< Stephan Mathieu, A Microsound Fairytale (Conclusion)
></font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
< Francisco López, Untitled #115 (Part 1) ><br>
<br>
< Francisco López, Untitled #115 (Part 2) ><br>
<br>
< Institut fuer Feinmotorik, Slo ><br>
<br>
< Janek Schaefer, Rink (excerpt) ><br>
<br>
< Steve Roden, OTR ><br>
<br>
< Scanner, Spirit Trace ><br>
<br>
< Stephen Vitiello, Slow Rewind ><br>
<br>
<br>
2003 LEONARDO AND LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL AUTHOR INDEX<br>
<br>
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FEATURES
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<br>
PERFORMANCE SPACE MEETS CYBERSPACE: SEEKING THE CREATIVE IDIOM AND
TECHNICAL MODEL FOR LIVE MUSIC ON BROADBAND<br>
<br>
by Michael Bussičre (media artist and educator), Sonic Design
Interactive Inc., 12 Clarey Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario, K1S 2R7
Canada.<br>
<u>michael@sonicdesign.fm<br>
<br>
<br>
</u>ABSTRACT<br>
<br>
Initiatives throughout the post-industrial world are supporting the
proliferation of advanced networks that connect governments with the
public, research facilities with one another and consumers with new
content portals. While this is currently the domain of the engineer,
there is an acknowledgement through public policy and targeted
investment that wider deployment of these networks is on the horizon
and that this deployment is dependent on the creative insights of
media artists to devise new forms of content. The following article
documents a series of tests involving the creation and presentation of
musical content within a distributed environment on Canada's CA*net3/4
- the world's first national optical Internet research and education
network.<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT<br>
<br>
To begin, I write as a multi-media artist and educator (trained in
computer music), not as a computer scientist or engineer. I was
invited in 2001 by a consortium of several Canadian research agencies
to participate in a national project to develop content for CA*net4.
My experience as a composer, producer and music technologist led me to
create a series of initial investigative events (as outlined in this
article), focusing on the creation and presentation of experimental
multimedia over high-speed networks with particular emphasis on live,
interactive performance forms. These initial events evolved through
ever-increasing levels of technical complexity, while furthering the
participants' experience of a "distributive performance
environment" (my term for performance taking place among several
geographical locations).<br>
<br>
We addressed some of the following questions: Is there a definitive
continuum from audience member, to spectator, to inter-actor (i.e. why
do theatrical performances have "audiences," and sporting
events have "spectators")? Can music incorporate network
latency (that is, time delay from one point to another) as a
fundamental design challenge? Is there an historical repertoire that
was written almost in precognition of latency as a context? Does this
repertoire anticipate a new network-based musical idiom? And finally,
what is the proscenium of cyberspace? This project continues to this
day.<br>
<br>
Strictly speaking, the video-conference medium cannot be described as
transmission [1], where content radiates from a single point of
origin. It is rather an unfolding, a re-distribution of space, in
which access points co-determine the experience and content and in
which no one perspective outranks another. The perceptual consequences
of each locale are unique. If we start from Michael Benedikt's
proposition that "space presents itself to us in the 'freedom to
move'" [2], then performance space is defined by specific
restrictions of that freedom. With rare exception, contemporary
performance space exists on one side of a line, beyond which the
spectator cannot pass. The proscenium, rooted in ritualistic
traditions, acts as a divider separating the "sacred" space
of the performer from the access space of the observer. The observer
hands near-total control of the personal experience, for a period of
time, over to the creators of the event. Cinema presents probably the
most profound example of such an agreement, presenting the
"performance" in absence of the "performer" within
a ritualized social space. In the case of distributive performance,
the penetration of virtual portals into performance spaces enhances
the sensation of physical movement with a set of traversable
pathways.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
This project, *Performance Space meets Cyberspace*, further assumes
the core premise that the only truly interactive experience is that of
person-to-person "live" communication [3], as opposed to
machine-simulated interactivity, which suggests a different set of
intentions. Hints of this are found in television viewing habits of
English-speaking Canadians, who watch a great deal of pre-packaged
foreign (i.e. American and British) television content. The attribute
of foreign-ness is generally discounted, as is the case with other
globalized consumer products. Pre-packaged television, like commercial
urban radio, has, after all, taken on a kind of worldwide timbre,
tempo and formulation. The exception for Canadian viewers is the high
degree of consumption of live-to-air domestic programming, namely news
and sports. In effect, the live-ness of the content is apparently
associated with the intimacy and immediacy of home. Intimate media is
further achieved when an intrusive capture device, such as a camera
(typically interpreted as being "aimed" at an individual),
is re-contextualized as an extension of one's physical presence. This
is perhaps most profoundly felt when one views a feedback loop of
one's tele-presence onscreen at a remote location: a remarkable
"house of mirrors" effect, enabled by distributive
technology.<br>
<br>
National context is particularly relevant here, as this ongoing
project is partially funded by the Canadian government. The principal
public policy issue is one that faces most nations that are on the
World Wide Web: how is national identity expressed and supported
outside of the English language and beyond the sphere of dominance
held by the United States? Public policy in Canada (and France, for
example) is addressing similar challenges with respect to cinema. The
added complexities in the Canadian context include official
multiculturalism (with 21% of the population born abroad), official
bilingualism, a northern climate and remote communities scattered
about the world's second largest country.<br>
<br>
EXPERIMENTS AND DEMONSTRATIONS<br>
<br>
Phase one of this project consisted of four experiments conducted
among classrooms, studios and labs in five locations, across six time
zones. Content was designed to increasingly challenge CODEC
(compression/decompression), capture technologies and network
capacity. The so-called "last kilometer" was a recurring
challenge, meaning that connectivity is only as broad as the tightest
link in the chain. Master control for all four events was located in
Ottawa, Canada's capital.<br>
<br>
The first event took place on 25 October, 2001 and connected the
Luscar Digital Recording Studio of the Banff Centre for Continuing
Education (Banff, Alberta, Mountain Time) with Carleton University in
Ottawa (Eastern Time). The participant group was an undergraduate
course in computer music at Carleton University, who occupied a
video-conferencing classroom furnished with desk microphones, six
large suspended monitors, front and rear cameras and a control
lectern. The space, clearly retrofitted from a conventional classroom,
is an excellent example of how *not* to design a cyberspace portal -
all capture and presentation technology was oriented from the ceiling,
discouraging a natural feeling of penetration into and from a remote
location.<br>
<br>
Carleton's facility utilized a V-Tel H.320-based video-conferencing
unit served by six ISDN lines, leased from Bell Canada [4]. The Banff
system, known as the Client Learning Environment (CLE), is built on a
VCON ViGO H.323-based CODEC [5], and was installed in Banff's Luscar
Studio for this event. The incompatibility with H.320 was resolved via
the University of Ottawa's Accord gateway, which served as the
multipoint control unit.<br>
<br>
The lesson plan included a discussion of the video-conferencing setup
itself, with numerous questions from students regarding its
configuration. A Banff associate audio engineer provided a tour of the
Luscar studio and fed the CLE a variety of musical projects and test
materials. Luscar is built around a Euphonix CS-3000, 56-channel
digitally controlled analog console with a 24-track digital recorder.
Its developer, Professor John Celona, associate dean of fine arts at
the University of Victoria, provided a demonstration of leading edge
computer music software. The lack of auxiliary video inputs prohibited
the connection of a second computer to the CLE; a solution was found
by simply utilizing a camera and second monitor.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
The event was characterized by a 1-2 second perceivable delay, which
made conversation clumsy, although overall stability supported a
naturalistic continuity in the lesson plan. There were occasional
freezes and pixilated video effects and the audio suffered when a
signal was rich enough to saturate the bandwidth. A test of Luscar's
console sent a variety of instrumental (mono) mixes to the CLE. It was
discovered that an overly demanding audio track would cause sound to
deteriorate into an indiscernible garble. In addition, inexplicably,
the "density" of the mix (number of tracks, signal
characteristics) also provoked this breakdown. Microphones left open
at both locations also led to intolerable audio.<br>
<br>
Event number two took place on 27 November, 2001 and extended the
participatory dimension into the realm of distributive performance. In
attendance at Carleton were 18 first-year students enrolled in a
course titled "Introduction to Media and Technology in Art and
Culture." The Banff contingent was comprised of 10 visual and
media artists participating in "SloMo," a thematic residency
whose subject was the analysis, measurement, effect on and
manipulation of time by the artist. Appropriately, the residency's
launching point was the following quoted observation from Marshall
McLuhan, which headlined the Banff Centre's descriptive document, one
that dovetailed elegantly with this project: "Today, the
instantaneous world of electric information media involves all of us,
all at once. Ours is a brand new world of all-at-onceness. Time, in a
sense, has ceased and space has vanished" (from *On McLuhan:
Forward Through the Rear View Mirror*, 1966).<br>
<br>
We developed a week-long collaborative effort between the SLoMo
residents and sonic design students at Carleton. The interwoven themes
of time, art and perception led to the repertoire of John Cage as a
catalyst for exploration (indeterminacy being time dependent). At
17:00 MT on Tuesday, 27 November, I conducted a performance of Cage's
*Imaginary Landscapes No. 4* (1951) for 12 Radios. This work is an
early example of a music that combines human performance gestures with
electronic instrumentation. Its unique character is entirely dependent
upon location and time of day for its content. It is the perfect music
for realization within the inherent attributes and limitations of a
videoconference, with respect to an aesthetic point of departure
(remoteness rendered locally, time/space layering, "captured"
content, signal manipulation, etc.). *Imaginary Landscapes No. 4* is
also an excellent example of the content inhabiting the medium and
being highly, inherently suited to the medium. The work utilizes
changes in radio frequencies and volumes to articulate a temporal
strategy "based on a number of measures having a square root, so
that the large lengths have the same relation within the whole that
the small lengths have within a unit of it" [6]. Indeterminate
events occur as a result of geography, time of day, radio programming
and human intuition. I believe this to have been the first distributed
broadband rendering of a John Cage work.<br>
<br>
Several tests and rehearsals took place prior to the event, and three
executions of the work were realized and recorded. The CLE unit was
deployed again, this time in a boardroom equipped with a compatible
ISDN connection, meaning that no bridge through Ottawa University was
required. While bridging costs were eliminated, there were now
long-distance costs incurred. The direct dial-up improved the delay
and signal quality, although a transfer speed limited by ISDN meant
that overall performance upgrades were negligible. All in all, this
event was very compelling and produced a lot of laughter and
enthusiasm.<br>
<br>
On 9 April, 2002, audiences in Ottawa and Kanata, Ontario were
connected with St. John's, Newfoundland (Atlantic Time plus one
half-hour) in a large-scale interactive performance event. Carleton
University's sonic design students presented creative projects in
digital media and performance and collaborated with musicians at Holy
Heart High School in St. John's, for what I believe to be the first
student work composed for a multimedia broadband event. Of all the
events in the series, this was by far the most elaborate in terms of
programming and technology.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
This event was co-produced with the National Research Council of
Canada (NRC) and the Virtual Classroom of the Communications Research
Centre (CRC). Dr. Martin Brooks of the NRC's Institute of Information
Technology led the technical team. The CRC "BADLAB" was set
up as the master site, with Carleton and St. John's connecting to CRC
as interactive sites. The event's backbone was CA*net3 [7]. The
BADLAB, St. John's and Carleton University were all connected to
CA*Net3 via CRC GigaPOP [8], Memorial University of Newfoundland
GigaPOP and ONet GigaPOP, respectively. Three high-end Pentium boxes
running Linux utilized ISABEL, a conferencing application designed to
create multi-media, multi-point distributed events.<br>
<br>
Three workstations were set up at Carleton, with two running as
separate interactive sites equipped with cameras to capture the
audience and performers, and the third to act as flowserver (the
computer dedicated to streaming data from point to point). This
flowserver in turn connected to the CRC flowserver to compensate for
limited bandwidth to the architecture building. CA*net3 was accessed
via the university ethernet, whose bandwidth provided 10 Mbps
(megabytes per second) of transfer, although actual transfer speeds
were affected by general network activity on the campus at the time of
the event. The single workstation in St. John's would connect directly
to the CRC flowserver.<br>
<br>
A principal goal of this event was the merging of interactive
cyberspace with a large performance venue. Projections were utilized
to create a sense of presence in the main audience venue at Carleton.
Data projectors cast light on adjoining wall surfaces, offset by a
90-degree angle. ISABEL provides multiple programmable window sets
within each projection. This, for example, made possible a kind of
theatrical depiction of actors facing one another in a naturalistic,
conversational style. However, the scale of the projections produced a
kind of cinematic amplification. Furthermore, roving cameras allowed
me (as director and host located across town at the CRC) to remotely
"reach" into the locations and provoke participation from
the audience. Indeed, the traditional distinction between audience and
performers was deliberately blurred through a variety of engagement
devices. <br>
<br>
The main venue on the Carleton campus was not an electronic
presentation space. The closest ethernet port was several meters
outside of the site in a small meeting room and the 10 Mbps nominal
connection speed at this port was seriously hampered by general
network activity on the campus. This resulted in a recurring freeze
effect to and from Carleton, although the connection from CRC Kanata
to St. John's was unaffected. A fundamental challenge exists in
locating a public performance facility that is directly wired to
broadband. Such a facility would also require professional caliber
presentation systems found in conventional theater, stage or
television production.<br>
<br>
Of participants' responses, two were particularly noteworthy. The
usual shyness of being on-camera was very evident among the students
and the default posture was to attempt eye contact via the
videoconference. Participants tended to address projections rather
than cameras, tending towards eye contact and facial images.
Participants occasionally had to be directed away from the projected
facial image of a conversational partner and towards the camera lens.
The makeshift venue also produced clumsiness with respect to more
normal videoconference interaction. Separate monitor kiosks would
allow an individual to engage in cyberspatial conversations on a more
human scale, with split video feeds generating the large-scale
audience depiction. Issues relating to theatrical lighting, audience
illumination and large-scale projections also require some kind of
solution. The challenge in using Linux-based computers was the
non-commercial, non-thoroughly tested nature of the operating system.
Applications, drivers, etc. were rife with incompatibilities, with
devices, such as the data projectors, failing without
warning.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
Students were guided to explore creative musical/multimedia that best
exploited the idiomatic nature of a network-based, ageographical
performance medium. The program included a musical multi-media work by
Carleton student Nic Paradis (localized in Ottawa), videos and a
networked game and audience interaction between St. John's, Ottawa and
Kanata. The evening concluded with a unique musical performance work,
composed by sonic design/music student Barry Promane. I believe it to
be the first student work composed for the broadband medium. The
Promane work was scored for chamber group (located in St. John's) and
spoken word performer (located in Ottawa), an idiom chosen to
accommodate inherent delays and brief network freezes while avoiding
the necessity of common time. A second version employed pre-taped
material of a St. John's musician reading the text. Once again, this
event was met with great excitement and enthusiasm. My personal
reaction was one of adrenaline and presence amplification. It was an
electric, larger-than-life kind of experience, balanced with a touch
of controlled chaos.<br>
<br>
I returned to the Banff Centre on 27 November, 2002 for the final
event of phase one. As was the case at the start, this event connected
Banff with a class in Ottawa for a studio tour with demonstrations.
The CLE was again deployed; this time with extended audio, VGA and
NTSC (National Television System Committeee) video inputs via mixers.
Cabling allowed for a walk-about from room to room, with a floor crew
including a switcher/director, two cameramen and a floor director.
Students in Ottawa were located off-campus in an auditorium of the
National Research Council. While the NRC is a primary node of CA*net3,
Banff's connectivity was again influenced by local network activity.
However, the point-to-point connection exhibited dramatically improved
audio and video quality.<br>
<br>
Students were again given a demo/tour of Luscar, plus the Rice Studio
television and video production facility. Rice includes a fully
equipped 2500-square-foot studio space with cyclorama and computerized
lighting board. The production complement includes a Panther dolly,
portable crane and an extensive lighting package with both Tungsten
and HMI lamps. Visually, the project now began to approach broadcast
quality.<br>
<br>
Following the tour, students presented electroacoustic/audio projects
from Ottawa. One project, entitled *Among Trees*, stood out for its
thematic content. Its creator, Craig Aalders, describes the work as
"encouragement for and the awareness of true individual identity
and the relation that one's identity has in the overall global
community." Aalder's work can be described as
trance-electroacoustic with embedded and processed spoken word. The
text reflects on an individual's search for identity through a retreat
into the depths of a forest. We took advantage of our central location
in Banff National Park, took a camera into the forest and created
location footage for synchronous visual playback. The synchronicity
was further exaggerated by the date and time link to another imaginary
landscape, exactly one year to the hour after our Cage
performance.<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab><br>
I feel this final point requires a purely subjective indulgence. Our
experience with broadband has produced evidence of a subtle emergent
property. Does a distributed experience of presence alter our quality
of response (as distinguished from intellectual processes)? Perhaps it
is an awareness of something larger than normal time/space, human
sentience smeared about an inter-operational multi-location reality,
the paradox of sharing space while dwelling in separated spaces.
Music's invisible spatial nature perhaps illuminates this effect. Do
synchronicity, consciousness and musical and aesthetic phenomena
interlace with a greater elegance, by virtue of, and enhanced by, this
medium? "Everything at once, no matter when/where we are?",
as Cage speculates [9]. If cyberspace is indeed a habitat for the
imagination [10], then perhaps live cyberspace is the habitat of the
spontaneous expression of the psyche?<br>
<br>
</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000">TECHNICAL FINDINGS<br>
<br>
A number of significant production issues emerged from these early
experiments, all of which relate to the merging of public performance
space with cyberspace. In its present phase, this project is
introducing production techniques derived from television and cinema,
as well as developing original solutions to address the following
objectives:<br>
<br>
</font><font face="Symbol" color="#000000">…</font><font
face="Courier New" color="#000000"> Lighting. Large projections,
monitors, performers and a participatory on-camera audience all
require that specific solutions be resolved within the same physical
space, and cyberspace.<br>
</font><font face="Symbol" color="#000000">…</font><font
face="Courier New" color="#000000"> Audio. Increasing the capacity of
audio transmission to a stereo (and possibly surround 5.1) format, to
better suit musical events and to create an ambient envelope that more
readily expresses the feeling of a physical space that has been
virtually "transposed" from one location to another.<br>
</font><font face="Symbol" color="#000000">…</font><font
face="Courier New" color="#000000"> Performance space design. Devise a
solution that allows for large-scale presentations and human scale
interaction to co-exist within the same event, among other issues.<br>
</font><font face="Symbol" color="#000000">…</font><font
face="Courier New" color="#000000"> Audience/participant engagement.
Through applied evaluation with focus groups, this project will seek
to position the threshold between audience and participant and will
experiment with various creative methods of "reaching through"
a portal to engage participation at another location.<br>
</font><font face="Symbol" color="#000000">…</font><font
face="Courier New" color="#000000"> Remote control options. To what
degree can remote technological intervention further encourage
participation?<br>
<br>
<br>
CONCLUSIONS<br>
<br>
Computer-generated realities can be defined simply as a light source
with associated audio elements. Comparisons with other light-source
media are therefore unavoidable. Distributive performance requires
sophisticated production to hold its own against the formalism and
refinements of conventional television, cinema, gaming, etc. The
current state of broadband harks back to the days of live television,
to an era where the old medium of the proscenium became the content
(as seen in numerous staged television shows of the early era),
finally displaced by an exposed television sensibility with resident
attributes. Similarly, broadband holds the potential for revealing a
creative idiom for new musical and other performance forms.<br>
<br>
Finally, there is the issue of public deployment and the eventual
opportunity to test a streaming method to make such an event readily
available to a larger audience on the Web. In this instance, new
issues such as content and participation controls, bandwidth
management and so forth, enter the picture.<br>
<br>
Video documentaries for all events in this series are available for
viewing at:<u> http://www.marsville.tv<br>
<br>
<br>
</u>_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS<br>
<br>
With special thanks to Sara Diamond, Tom Montvila and Shannon
Mcdonnell of the Banff Centre, Peter Homulos, Deputy Minister of the
Department of Canadian Heritage and Dr. Martin Brooks of the NRC. Also
all of my daring, inventive students.<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
NOTES AND REFERENCES<br>
<br>
1. I use the term "videoconference," which typically
describes a point-to-point business application, for convenience
only.<br>
<br>
2. Michael Benedikt, in *Cyberspace: First Steps* (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1991) p. 126<br>
<br>
3. This includes that which is enabled by technological
intervention.<br>
<br>
4. ISDN supports data transfer rates of 64 Kbps, or the equivalent of
a phone line.<br>
<br>
5. H.323 offers IP conferencing rates up to 1.5 Mbps.<br>
<br>
6. John Cage, *Silence* (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1961)
p. 57.<br>
<br>
7. CA*net4 is Canada's national optical Internet, devoted to research
of advanced broadband applications. See<u>
http://www.canarie.ca</u>.<br>
<br>
8. GigaPOP means gigabit Point of Presence and is a network access
point that supports data transfer rates of at least one gigabyte per
second (Gbps). Only a few gigaPOPs currently exist.<br>
<br>
9. John Cage, *A Year from Monday* (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 1963) p.
89.<br>
<br>
10. See Marcos Novak, *Cyberspace: First Steps* (see [2]), p. 226.<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
ABOUT THE AUTHOR<br>
<br>
Michael Bussičre is a multimedia artist specializing in computer
music. He has been making computer music and multimedia since the mid
1980s, when he shared the stage of the Toronto's Dumaurier Theatre
Centre with Australian performance artist Stelarc. A graduate of the
University of Toronto and the State University of New York, Bussičre
received two national gold prizes in 1987 from CAPAC.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
Bussičre's works have been commissioned and presented by such venues
as the Summit of the Americas, Boston's School of the Museum of Fine
Arts, Chicago's Ravinia Festival, Bourges (France) Festival, Video
Roma, The Banff Festival of the Arts, Music Toronto, the Dumaurier
Theatre Centre and the Canada Dance Festival, as well as being
broadcast nationwide on CBC Stereo and Radio-Canada.<br>
<br>
In recent years, Bussičre has turned his attention to the
development of interactive installations that expand current notions
of computer music as a performance form. One such work is the
VIP, a highly popular, interactive computer music sculpture
commissioned for the Festival Plaza in front of Ottawa City Hall.<br>
<br>
Bussičre directs Carleton University's Diploma in Sonic Design,
where he is an adjunct professor to the music program and the School
of Architecture's Immersive Media Studies graduate program. He
recently founded Sonic Design Interactive Inc. to conduct experiments
in interactive art and to investigate the creative possibilities of
performance-based broadband content.<br>
<br>
<br>
ARTICLE RECEIVED 10 NOVEMBER, 2003<br>
<br>
<br>
<font size="-2">==========================<br>
<br>
<br>
</font>*THE GALLBLADDER SONATA*: TRANSMISSION TIME ON THE INTERNET<br>
<br>
by Marlena Corcoran, Barer Strasse 54A, D-80799 Munich, Germany<br>
<u>corcoran@anglistik.uni-muenchen.de<br>
<br>
<br>
</u>*The Gallbladder Sonata* is an improvisation combining sound,
narrative text, Internet and live performance. The uncontrollable
speed of internet transmission is a second-by-second co-determinant of
the tempo of the piece. The traditional order of musical events -
namely composition, then performance, then transmission - here becomes
one single event. What is performed is the act of composition and the
order in which the improvised responses are uploaded and displayed
depends on the eddying currents of transmission time on the Internet.
The new medium - of composition and performance, not merely of
distribution [1] - raises questions about the aesthetic apprehension
of time. Music is par excellence the art of time and the new medium of
the Internet has something to teach us about our experience of time
itself.<br>
<br>
The first version of *The Gallbladder Sonata*, performed in 1998 [2],
began with free-flowing time - and gall - which, in a crisis, was
blocked. An ultrasound interlude (which is inaudible) followed this
section and then, surgery. A five-part drip motif in uncertain time, a
significant technical failure and an interactive free-for-all waltz
brought *Gallbladder One* to its bilious conclusion.<br>
<br>
In fact, the first version of *The Gallbladder Sonata* was a strictly
textual online performance, where the logged-in audience heard no
sound whatsoever, making it the most radical of the three performances
to date. It stressed the temporal rather than the acoustic dimension
of music as part of my ongoing inquiry, "What is music without
sound?" - a question especially meaningful to me, in that I was
born hard of hearing [3]. A second work in this series is *Stay
(Tuned)*, a silent aria employing elements of American Sign Language
and intense listening, which I performed as part of Ione and Pauline
Oliveros' *Lunar Opera: Listening For Tunes* at Lincoln Center in
2000. These two works were performed together in Munich in 2000 [4]
and in Mainz in 2001 [5].<br>
<br>
SONATA AS TEXT<br>
<br>
As at a classical concert, the main performer of *The Gallbladder
Sonata* was seated in front of the audience before an instrument. The
performer's costume, which looked like crumpled paper along with a
mask made of manuscript fragments, stressed the important role of
text. In the performance, the text is projected in large format and is
produced not only by the performer on stage, but by several other
online performers, who were logged on at physical locations ranging
from California to Germany. (Photo and audio documentation of the
performances can be seen and heard at:<u> http://lea.mit.edu</u>)<br>
<br>
The narrative text called into being a strange and abstract concert
hall in which characters, such as "Stage.Hand," and
conceptual entities, such as "sound" (later morphed to
"ultrasound"), dragged around furniture and handed out
programs to the late arrivals, "John.Cage" and
"Beethoven.de." Direct address to the audience included them
in the imaginary stage setup, which functioned like a prologue that
was an integral part of the performance. Within this text, a character
named "Stay (Tuned)" sat down at a minutely-described
imaginary piano to perform the sonata within the sonata
[6].</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
THE COMPUTER AS A KEYBOARD INSTRUMENT<br>
<br>
On the physical stage, too, "Stay (Tuned)," played by
myself, sat at a computer as one would at a concert piano, ready to
produce the auditory component to *The Gallbladder Sonata*. The
acoustic dimension of the performance was created in the concert space
by the monumentally amplified sound of the main performer's typing. A
microphone lay close to the keyboard and the sound of composition was
carried over loudspeakers. One heard Stay typing, at different speeds
and with different levels of passion. The sound is thus the sound of
the keys themselves.<br>
<br>
Usually, depressing the keys is understood strictly as the means to an
end. In a piano concert, for example, the keys are struck as a means
to activate the piano strings. The barely audible sound of the keys
themselves is hardly perceived; it is beside the point. In *The
Gallbladder Sonata*, this sound is not a means but an end: the
keyboard itself is the instrument. The percussion produces sound - and
also lyrics.<br>
<br>
CONCERT OUT OF SYNCH<br>
<br>
During this performance, the unpredictable rate of delay in
transmission on the Internet resulted in discordant timing of the
visual and auditory levels of the performance. That is, one saw and
heard the performer, Stay, enter data, which appeared on the screen
only after an unpredictable, usually brief, delay. This décalage
made attending *The Gallbladder Sonata* unlike going to traditional
concerts, whose visual and auditory dimensions are so well integrated
that we never even think about it: the pianist hits a key and we
immediately hear that note. The disruption of synchronicity in this
case exposes our voyeuristic expectations of concert performance: we
want to see the performer make the music. In *The Gallbladder Sonata*,
however, several different tempi were in force. What one heard in the
performance space, saw onstage and read on the screen happened in
different time frames. It bears note that not even the amplified
sounds of typing corresponded one-to-one with the letters that
appeared on the projection screen, because only one performer's
keystrokes - Stay's, onstage - were audible.<br>
<br>
With the displacements occasioned by such a mode of composition,
performance and transmission sometimes segue into frank failure.
Things can get too complicated or take too long. At the extreme,
transmission speed on the Internet can grind to a complete halt and
lag becomes a computer crash. This too was incorporated
improvisationally into the sonata. Such complexities of form were
echoed in the content, as the improvised text referred increasingly
often to failure. The transmission thus fed back into the
composition.<br>
<br>
Comic relief was provided by the words of a mnemonic device whose text
and tune were meant to recall the sound of another problematic work,
abandoned by its composer. The inane lyrics are meant to help
schoolchildren prepare for tests in which they are asked to identify
music and are sung to the melody of the subsidiary theme of the first
movement of *Symphony no.8, B minor*, by Franz Schubert:<br>
<br>
"This is the sym-pho-ny<br>
That Schubert wrote<br>
And never fin-ished" [7].<br>
<br>
As poets and musicians have long known, sometimes it just doesn't work
out.<br>
<br>
Why do this? Why play with time, and let the time of transmission play
with us? Perhaps *The Gallbladder Sonata* serves as a form of
"fort-da" exercise, as Freud analyzes it in *Beyond the
Pleasure Principle* [8]. The structure of the fort-da performances is
similar to Freud's great insight into the death instincts: not only
that we are drawn to death, but that we vacillate between the great
poles of the sexual and death instincts [9].<br>
<br>
The artistic exercise of submitting to the uncontrollability of
transmission time on the Internet invites us to rehearse our desire
and fear of the most significant thing about our subjection to time
and the most radical form of failure: death. Time, failure and death:
playing, in all seriousness, with poetry and music, sight and sound,
the performance of *The Gallbladder Sonata* is a musical rehearsal for
the ultimate experience in time that we fail to control: we do not
know the hour of our death.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
TRANSMISSION AS FEEDBACK<br>
<br>
Three short audio files, recorded at the Munich performance of *The
Gallbladder Sonata*, are posted at<u> http://lea.mit.edu</u>. In the
first audio clip, one hears Stay compose a scene involving three
characters: Stay, the Ghost.of.Stay's.Mother and the
Ghost.of.Stay's.Mother's.Mother. The ghosts enact, at a
characterological level, the effect of an echo at an auditory level:
as can be seen in their names, the characters echo through three
generations, much as an acoustic echo repeats a sound wave over time.
Stay asks the ghosts if they remember a "patty-cake" song,
through which children learn to keep time by clapping. It is a song
from around 1900, when Kaiser Wilhelm had a railway constructed from
Berlin to Beijing. The railway turned out to have a surprising
feedback mechanism, in that it not only transmitted German-ness to
China:<br>
<br>
"Es war ein' chinesische Eisenbahn<br>
Da sass ein chinesischer Mann."<br>
<br>
"(There was a Chinese railway.<br>
There sat a Chinese man.)"<br>
<br>
In the clip, one hears me type the text, pause to sing it silently to
myself and clap three times at the end of each line, at the projected
words "Eisenbahn" or "Mann." This is another
instance in which the transmission feeds back into the composition and
performance. The audience hears the words being typed, then with some
delay sees the words on the projection screen, then hears the lyrics
replayed as clapping.<br>
<br>
In the second and third audio clips, the playing is loud, fast and
passionate. The sound of banging on the keys is a sensory correlate of
the intensity of thought in the process of composition. At one point,
I type a long, empty space in the projected text. While the screen
displays a long blank, the auditory level of the performance is, on
the contrary, particularly intense: one hears the rapid jangling of
the space bar on the keyboard. Like the auditory pauses in the first
clip, the visual blanks here mark the gestures of composition. The
clip ends in another instance of the three beats, which reminds us of
the lesson of the Chinese railway song: lyrics and sound are separable
and sometimes the feedback is not what you expected.<br>
<br>
With regard to the clips, my point again is that what one would
normally regard as an artifact of keyboard performance, namely the
sound of depressing the keys, is here elevated to the status of music.
The variety of sound effects that can be created is greater than one
might think, and these correspond to different mental activities,
including pausing to reflect or singing to oneself. The sound is
related in various and complex ways to the production of the
visualized lyrics. The computer is a keyboard instrument, and the
sound of *The Gallbladder Sonata* is the sound of thinking.<br>
<br>
SHHHHH--IT'S MUSIC<br>
<br>
The key comic element in the first performance of *The Gallbladder
Sonata* was a technical failure on the New York-based internet art
show, *Here's Pangloss!* When it came time for me to play the strictly
textual piano, Pangloss invoked the so-called "gag" command
to silence the audience and clear the screen for the sonata (the gag
command suppresses the display of any lines typed in by a player or
group of players so gagged). Unfortunately, instead of gagging the
audience, Pangloss gagged me. Every time I uploaded a line of the
sonata, the screen displayed the bounceback message:
"........Shhhhh........."<br>
<br>
We continued to read the perplexed comments of the still-ungagged
online audience members, wondering what kind of musical performance
this could be, consisting of the repeated instruction, "shhhhh"
- "be quiet." In the ensuing pandemonium, Pangloss offered
me the chance to replay the sonata. However, I accepted the failure as
art, and replied in the words of Keats, that: "Heard melodies are
sweet, But those unheard are sweeter" [10].<br>
<br>
I hung around online after the show, chatting despondently with
another artist. "Do you have any idea," I asked, "how
long I worked on the unperformed sonata?" She nodded. "It's
always like this," she said. "Horrible. Every single week, a
disaster." It had been her turn the week before. "The real
question," she said, "is: Why do we even agree to be on the
*Here's Pangloss!* show?"</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000">We considered this
silently for a long time. In a sense, the second and third versions of
*The Gallbladder Sonata* are my response to this question; why, time
and time again, we are drawn to fail. Maybe the sonata should be
retitled *The Death Instinct*.<br>
<br>
TIME IS A RIVER - BUT NOT THE ONE YOU THOUGHT<br>
<br>
In earlier, happier times - at least, the fairy-tale version of them -
a composer might have sat down and said, "Alright, I will now
compose a work in three-quarter time." Later, at each
performance, the conductor would raise a baton and every musician
would keep the beat. *The Gallbladder Sonata* tries to loosen our grip
by playing with irregular, uncontrollable and very contemporary
modalities of time. Transmission time on the Internet affords
performers an unprecedented opportunity to work with one such
contemporary form of time, namely time zones; both those defined by
distance from the Greenwich Meridian and those that arise of
themselves. Working with performers spread over several time zones
poses practical difficulties, but yields the highest probability of
generating the peculiar nature of time as it is formulated in traffic
patterns on the Net.<br>
<br>
The main characters in the third performance of *The Gallbladder
Sonata* were logged on in Irvine, California; Austin, Texas; Atlanta,
Georgia and Mainz, Germany. Our data input traveled to the server of
the Post Modern Culture MOO at the Institute for Advanced Technology
in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. That server then
relayed the developing series of lines back to all concerned,
including the live audience.<br>
<br>
A lot can happen in the meantime. Most importantly, the various events
do not affect each of us in the same way. It would be incorrect to
think that the Internet, as a whole, is running either quickly or
slowly. For instance, lag - waiting time - may set in in one part of
the Internet and not affect another. A particular server may have
hardware problems. A router serving an entire region may slow down due
to overload. If Texas were busy, the character "sound's"
lines may have had to wait longer at times than mine, though sound and
the IATH server were on the same side of the Atlantic, while I was in
Germany, six time zones away. And of course, there are those rare
times when everything runs splendidly.<br>
<br>
The old metaphor that time is a river still holds true - but it is not
the river we thought we knew, a river that flows smoothly forward and
never back. Time flows more like a burbling stream that falls rapidly
in cascades, swirls back on itself, stagnates in pools, leaps up when
it hits rocks and yes, sometimes flows smoothly on. To account for
this kind of irregular movement in flowing water, mathematicians have
developed chaos theory. *The Gallbladder Sonata* too works with
complex forms of time: time that can be local, or fractal, or
something we were not expecting at all. Artists, as well as
scientists, must exercise our imaginations in such new ways of
thinking. Musicians and music theorists are well positioned to work
with and reflect on the burbling time of the Internet.<br>
<br>
MY TIME IS UP<br>
<br>
While such thinking, and such music, may seem new and strange, I
believe that in fact they accord very closely with the way people
experience time, and not only on the Internet. Our experience of time
can be a factor of attention: time flies when we are listening
intently and crawls when we are bored. Our sense of time is affected
by emotion: time flies when we are joyous and crawls late at night in
the hospital.<br>
<br>
Perhaps the most significant aspect of time for us mortals is that, as
in *The Gallbladder Sonata*, we are at its mercy. *The Gallbladder
Sonata* interacts with two great poetic moments in the history of, as
it were, "stay-tunes": poetry that speaks to our urge to
capture time. Fragments of these intertexts appear scattered in the
improvised text of *The Gallbladder Sonata*, quoted increasingly
frequently and fully by the performers, and gathering force toward the
conclusion, as our time comes to an end. The first intertext is from
Goethe's *Faust*. In this scene, Faust strikes a pact with
Mephistopheles, agreeing that at the moment Faust begs time to stop,
his soul will be forfeit:</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
"Shake on it! Done!<br>
And should I ever say,<br>
Stay! You're beautiful,<br>
You moment, you!<br>
Then lock me up.<br>
I'll go down glad.<br>
The death bell knolls.<br>
Your job done,<br>
The clock may stop, the hands fall.<br>
My time is up" [11].<br>
<br>
The second intertext is from "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats'
great apostrophe to a moment frozen in time, where the figures
pursuing are always striving after and never reaching the figures who
flee, round and round on the urn:<br>
<br>
"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard<br>
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;<br>
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,<br>
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone. . ." [12].<br>
<br>
Is there music without sound? The artifactual sound and discordant
visual dimension of *The Gallbladder Sonata* attempt to "pipe to
the spirit" and create music that works with our problematic,
contemporary sense of time. The new medium of the Internet offers us
an indeterminate, uncontrollable tempo in which to explore new forms
of interplay among composition, performance and transmission.<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
NOTES AND REFERENCES<br>
<br>
1. Throughout this essay, "transmission" is understood to be
the equivalent of "distribution" for the internet-based
version of a work like *The Gallbladder Sonata*. While some audience
members were gathered in a performance space, others were online,
receiving the transmission and, at points, also contributing to
it.<br>
<br>
2. *The Gallbladder Sonata* premiered in 1998 on the internet show,
*Here's Pangloss!* (Heather Wagner, host, New York). Pangloss invited
digital artists to talk about and/or perform their work. The text of
*Gallbladder One* is posted at:<u>
http:/www.marlenacorcoran.com/gallbladder/index.html</u>.<br>
<br>
3. Rhythm, especially the interplay of sound and silence, is one
important element of music as time-shaping; repetition is another. The
dissonance between sound and text in the performance reflects the
décalage, for me, between noise and meaning. The acoustic dimension of
*The Gallbladder Sonata* is percussive and related to touch; the feel
as well as the sound of my fingers playing draws me to work with a
keyboard instrument. I would like to thank Mary Johnson, editor of
*Ragged Edge: The Disability Experience in America*
(http://www.raggededgemagazine.com) for featuring the Munich
performance on the cover of the online edition of *Ragged Edge*.<br>
<br>
4. *Stay (Tuned)*, including *The Gallbladder Sonata*, was performed
online/offline at the Maximiliansforum, Munich, Germany, in 2000,
presented by the Mathias Kampl Gallery. For their help with the live
event, my thanks go to Mathias Kampl, Detlef Hartung and Christian
Ziegler. The online cast included myself, Antoinette LaFarge and
Laurent Oget. Laurent Oget also programmed the online theater we used
for both *Gallbladder Two* and *Gallbladder Three*, below.<br>
<br>
5. *Stay (Tuned)*, including *The Gallbladder Sonata*, was performed
online/offline a third time at the Mainz intermediale, *Art Happens!*,
which ran parallel to the Performance Studies International 7
conference in Mainz, Germany, in 2001. For their help with the live
event, I am very grateful to Ute Ritschel and Christian Ziegler. The
online cast included myself, Kari Banta, Antoinette LaFarge and
Laurent Oget.<br>
<br>
6. In one movement, the characters "Stay (Tuned)" and
"sound" played together. Far from being passively determined
by the wishes of the composer/performer Stay, sound had its own ideas
about the sonata. The movement thus dramatized a struggle between the
composer and the music.<br>
<br>
7. I do not know who created the mnemonic device, though I remember my
mother singing it tunelessly.<br>
<br>
8. This refers to Freud's description of a small boy's
"disturbing habit" of repeatedly throwing away small objects
and then gathering them. Freud understands this once he sees the boy
playing a game in which he makes a bobbin on a string disappear and
return, while exclaiming a childish version of the German words
"fort" ("gone") and "da"
("there"). The games are related to the absence and
reappearance of the child's mother and the interplay of the child's
instincts for renunciation and for satisfaction. This is discussed in
Sigmund Freud, *Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund
Freud*, translated from the German under the general editorship of
James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, vol. 18 (London:
Hogarth Press, 1955) pp. 14-16. The passage can be found on the
Internet at:</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New"
color="#000000"><u>http://www.fortda.org/origin.html</u>. The relation
between the fort-da game and Lacan's mirror stage is discussed at:<u>
http://www.barbery.net/psy/fiches/fort-da-miroir.htm</u>.<br>
<br>
<br>
9. Freud discusses the death instincts in [8], pp. 38-64.<br>
<br>
10. John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," lines 11-12, in *The
Poems of John Keats*, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1978) p. 372.<br>
<br>
11. This is my translation of the text that is cited in the original
German in *The Gallbladder Sonata*, namely lines 1698-1706 from the
study room scene in *Faust*, Part One. This translation suits *The
Gallbladder Sonata* in that it is staccato. It has an effect on
contemporary English not unlike that which Goethe's language had on
the German of his time. For example, the phrase - perhaps the most
famous in all of German poetry - "Verweile doch" - is
deliberately, audaciously, and accurately translated by the name of
the main performer of *The Gallbladder Sonata*: "Stay." For
a modern edition of *Faust*, see: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, *Werke,
Kommentare und Register*, vol. 3, ed. Erich Trunz (Hamburg: Christian
Wegner Verlag, 1972) p. 57.<br>
<br>
12. see [10].<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
ABOUT THE AUTHOR<br>
<br>
Marlena Corcoran's most recent acoustic work was *Turp Girl*, a series
of narratives on Berlin radio (2003). Her internet play, *The Birth of
the Christ Child: A Divine Comedy*, was published in *PAJ: A Journal
of Performance and Art* (2003). Her video, *Agnus Dei: Lamb of God
Laundromat*, was shown twice in England (in 2001 and 2003) and at the
Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival (2002). *The Gallbladder
Sonata* premiered online in 1997 and was performed for live audiences
in Munich (2000) and Mainz, Germany (2001). She performed her silent
aria, "stay (tuned)," in the *Lunar Opera*, by Ione and
Pauline Oliveros, at Lincoln Center in 2000. She frequently performs
with the online improvisational theater group, The Plaintext Players
(Venice Biennale 1997, documenta X and many other venues).<br>
<br>
Corcoran's articles on new media theory have appeared in *Leonardo*
and other journals in the U.S. and Europe. She is writing a book on
the role of time in digital media. Links to many of her publications
and projects can be found at<u> www.marlenacorcoran.com</u>.<br>
<br>
<br>
ARTICLE RECEIVED 23 NOVEMBER, 2003<br>
<br>
<br>
=============================<br>
<br>
<br>
MEDIATING (THROUGH) IMAGINATION: WEB-BASED SOUND ART<br>
<br>
by Trace Reddell, Digital Media Studies, Sturm Hall 216B, University
of Denver, Denver, CO 80208, U.S.A.<br>
<u>treddell@du.edu<br>
WWW: http://www.du.edu/~treddell</u><br>
<br>
<br>
INTRODUCTION: THE TELHARMONIC BROWSER<br>
<br>
The web browser functions as an imaginative cultural interface that
intertwines various strands of media. The browser remediates the
readable surface of the printed page, radio, television, digital
cinema, video games and more into a singular navigational device.
Contextualized by the iconic conventions of the desktop-themed
workspace, the browser participates in a general environment of
datashare, in which digital utilities as divergent in function as word
processors and granular synthesizers form hybrid technologies. Even
without resorting to data-bending contortions, the acts of
content-gathering and sampling, composition, performance, publication,
transmission and distribution have increasingly complex ways to share
information and modify each other's output. In the set of multimedia
pieces that I will introduce here, the acts of writing and reading
become digital audio performances that extend the theoretical practice
of the literary critic into the domains of information access,
retrieval and reproduction. In these works, the web browser acts as a
literary transmitting device that invites participation from the
receiver at several different levels. I will also discuss recent live
performances and webcasts that incorporate the web browser into my own
audio composition practices. Browser buttons, the layered windows of
the graphic user interface, assemblages of plug-ins, embedded or
downloadable sound files and media playback devices fuel aleatory
improvisations and experimental DJ sets.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
I am interested in the degree to which the browser serves as an
analogy for the creative imagination, and how we imagine the world
into being through juxtapositions of multiple sensory inputs. My work
constructs an imaginary browser, a device in imagination that first
broadcasts the world to us across channels of sensory experience and
then provides us access to lucid participation in the flow of this
transmission.<br>
<br>
I measure the charge generated within the browser's zone of blurred
media and their content in terms of its "telharmonics." This
term, while embedding this work with an important historical layer,
serves as shorthand for a poetics of digital convergence as networked
telephony technologies mix with the forms and phases of musical
activity in order to generate new modes of transmission and reception
in shared imaginative space. Historically, I have in mind the
Telharmonium, invented by Thaddeus Cahill in the early twentieth
century [1]. In various models of the Telharmonium, two or three
velocity-sensitive keyboards were attached to a massive array of
sine-wave rotors. The device transmitted orchestral tones from a
generator in the basement of Cahill's New York Electric Music Company
over phone cables to various hotels, restaurants and private homes.
Cahill's subscription music service anticipated both Muzak and
Internet radio services, but immobility and inadequate bandwidth
finally ruined him - his sound-generating dynamo weighed almost 200
tons, proving exceedingly difficult to move, and the signal corrupted
reception on parallel phone lines. Cahill went bankrupt before the
twentieth century was a decade old.<br>
<br>
I retrieve the "telharmonic" principle as a way to describe
a more recent convergence, along the lines of Cahill's intermingling
of electric music performance with telephonic broadcast. Lisa
Gitelman's analysis of emerging technologies in the Edison era points
to the creative significance of those historical episodes in which all
new media, in failure or success, in rejection or in erratic, faddish
appropriation, inspire conflicted cultural moments of
self-consciousness about the making of meaning [2]. New media *as* new
media all inspire a flicker in which the textual and other operational
characteristics of old media seem particularly illuminated and, at the
same time, decentered and decentering with regard to perception,
authorship, reading and the like.<br>
<br>
I believe that the convergence of prior media into new forms during a
time of technological hybridization provides a precarious opportunity,
at once clarifying and destabilizing. This is the opportunity to
examine, and potentially direct, the embodiment of experience in
imaginative cultural forms - the forms that provide our experiences
with meaning and value. My work takes advantage of just such a highly
energetic episode of Internet history in an effort to participate more
deeply in the ongoing process of building our collective culture
through the exchange of imaginative forms. In so doing, my work
situates the web browser as a site of renewed telharmonic activity
that cancels some of the major drawbacks of Cahill's Telharmonium by
aligning with portable, decentralized and multilateral
technologies.<br>
<br>
CRITMIXERS AND SOUNDTEXTS<br>
<br>
Electronic literature on the Web has only lately come to explore the
possibilities of digital sound art and webcasting. Alt-X Audio is the
first site that I can think of [3]. Their premiere webcast streamed
from the now-defunct servers of GoGaGa Radio (Boulder, CO) in 1997.
Largely the affair of Alt-X Director Mark Amerika and Erik Belgum, a
writer of "ambient literature," the show promoted itself as
"Streaming Word-Dub. Binary Dissonance. Situational Performance.
Net.Radio [4]." "Net.Radio" was still fresh enough to
seem more a part of cyberprose than the vernacular. Most of the early
literary webcasts I recall were heavy with recognizable spoken-word,
but later experiments became increasingly processed and
indecipherable, as complicated digital editing technologies worked
their way into even modest home studios. In terms of sonic parallels,
I am tempted to trace a 6-year lineage from the domains of Laurie
Anderson into the granular microsound poetics of Scanner and Kim
Cascone, but this lies beyond the scope of the present
article.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
For several years, literary internet radio art mostly bypassed the
browser in favor of plug-ins (programs that function independently of
the web browser), particularly stand-alone media players like Real<br>
Player, which copied the typical radio console for its interface and
turned the home computer into a tuner scanning on a global scale. The
more the listener could run the radio application in the background
and continue routine work or net-surfing, the better. Recent
innovations in the field of Web-based audio delivery are blessed by
fatter bandwidths and more sophisticated platforms for embedding sound
within open browser windows. More importantly, software such as
Macromedia's Director and Flash can run scripts that deepen the usual
"click'n'scroll" browser experience into complex
interactions, so we now find such sound-heavy works of literature as
the "Filmtext" project (2002) of Mark Amerika, Chad
Mossholder (Twine) and John Vega [5], as well as August Highland's
"Alphanumeric Lab Series" (2003) [6]. These are largely
opaque hypermedia works that construct narrative through ambience or
evoke poetic resonance by means of driving, fragmented beats. More
subtle in delivery but compelling in conception and content are Glenn
Bach's drifting, sonified poems [7]. Bach explores composition in
terms of data-sharing, so that blur across file formats corresponds to
a similar synaesthetic mingling of sensory domains.<br>
<br>
My own literary sound work began in 2000, from the assumption that
literary critics must also explore the performative dimensions of
networked sound environments - especially as a way to comment on
networked sound environments. Central to three of my web-based
multimedia projects, spanning the past three years, is a desire to
refigure literary actions (writing, publication and reading) in terms
of digital audio's media and strategies for sample-based composition
and remixing, networked performance and webcasting.<br>
<br>
: CRITMIXERS<br>
<br>
*Litmixer: The Literary Remediator* appeared in November 2001 in the
"music/sound/noise" issue of the *Electronic Book Review*,
edited by Mark Amerika, Joseph Tabbi and Cary Wolfe [8]. *Litmixer*
applies the tools and strategies of the DJ to the performance of
literary interpretation and critical speculation. The project consists
of two pieces: an interactive multimedia application for the Web and
an accompanying critical discussion, housed in the format of a user's
manual. The multimedia component of *Litmixer* is what I call a
"groove-book," an imaginary technical hybrid between a
Roland Groovebox and a book. The literary sampler comes with 14 banks
of spoken word samples, plus additional banks of glitchy beat patterns
and ambient backdrops. *Litmixer* allows the user to remix my own
reading of passages from Jacques Derrida's 1968 article, "Plato's
Pharmacy" [9]. The user's manual that accompanies the *Litmixer*
features my fairly straightforward critical article, "The
Literary Remediator," which draws attention to itself as an
experience of mixed quotations, remastered theories and speculative
tracks.<br>
<br>
The treatment of Derrida's work on Plato holds the two elements of the
project together, particularly with three main resonances: first, I
was attracted to Derrida's emphasis that hearing something incorrectly
is still productive of meaning. Second, the work actually progresses
by a series of literary echoes, reverberations and overtones, which
cause the ear to hear incorrectly. Finally, Derrida provocatively
constructs a model of imagination that provides a technological
corollary to the transcendental imagination of metaphysics. The pages
of "Plato's Pharmacy" spin multiple nuances of the single
word "pharmakon" into a complex sonic mesh. The mix
functions as the medium *and* activity of imagination, "the
medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that
links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross
over into the other [10]." Reading this passage, I was struck by
its suggestion of the DJ's mixing desk, with its channel-level sliders
and cross faders, and the stack of sources waiting to be dropped into
the on-flowing mix. Derrida was "spinning"
Plato.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
Thinking of Derrida's work as a "remix" of Plato's *Timaeus*
prompted my creation of a device that could transmit a critical
reading of the Derrida article through a DJ-inspired medium, a
"critical mixer," or "critmixer" for short. As a
mode of theoretical writing, the literary mixer operates in the real
time of the performative act of re(ad)-writing. The "critical
gloss" function of traditional literary theory thus turns to
digital signal processing as a means of generating new readings of a
primary text. Distributed over the performative platform of the web
browser, *Litmixer* also offers a model of publishing critical theory
geared more toward an audience familiar with browser-based soundtoys
and VST plug-ins than traditional academic channels.<br>
<br>
: SOUNDTEXTS<br>
<br>
My two more recent multimedia projects move away from browser-based
interactives to explore the literary, critical potential of
databending, particularly text-to-audio conversion. I created
*Machinery for Dreaming* for the Palimpsest Project, an ongoing
"remix" exhibit at John Kannenberg's Stasis_Space gallery,
which launched 30 September, 2002 [11]. This work in multiple media
was followed in the summer of 2003 by another Stasis_Space
contribution, *Eliot's Magic Lantern,* for The Audible Still-Life
[12]. In these projects, I construct "soundtexts" by using
data derived from .txt (text) files to generate various layers of MIDI
events. The main audio pieces of each project derive from the writings
of Thomas De Quincey, *Confessions of an English Opium Eater* (1821)
and *Suspiria de Profundis* (1845). In some cases I would work from
large chunks of unaltered text, while in others I used Esoteric
Sensationalism's Cut'N'Mix program [13] - a four-channel .txt mixer
that parses out Burroughsian cut-ups - to remix shorter vignettes. I
then processed the batch of .txt files in various sets to generate raw
MIDI data based on numerical information from the documents.
Recurrence of key words corresponded to note messages, including start
time, duration and pitch, while total word count and the number of
sentences and paragraphs determined velocity values and continuous
control settings.<br>
<br>
In each case, information from the longest, unaltered sections of the
De Quincey documents was used to compose primary scores for the
completed pieces, which were performed through a bank of software
synthesizers. The shorter cut-ups were used exclusively to create
continuous control values for audio effects such as aftertouch,
sustain, pitch bend and modulation of parameters, which changed
according to a given synthesizer. This MIDI data was also used to
automate control over reverb and delay plug-ins applied to the
combined output of the layered synthesizer tracks.<br>
<br>
In both cases, the finished soundtext projects are a proliferation of
multiple file types. In the Stasis_Space exhibit, *Eliot's Magic
Lantern* includes a digital photograph of a posed still-life with
books and a field recording of the home library that also contributed
source material to the finished audio piece. Taken as a set, each
element presents an experience of information in terms of multiple
objects related along microlines of influence and relation, usually in
occulted fashion. *Machinery for Dreaming* includes the entire audio
piece for streaming or download, as well as a set of the cut-up .txt
files generated out of De Quincey's *Opium Eater* and a few of the
MIDI files generated from the text.<br>
<br>
The first round of entries in The Palimpsest Project are meant to
provide opportunities for other artists to build layers of their own
material from these sources, thus adding new layers to the palimpsest.
The multiple file types therefore expand avenues into the ongoing
exhibit, which situates the delivery of content as an opportunity for
gallery visitors to become producers and distributors in their own
right.<br>
<br>
Ongoing explorations of literary databending include an upcoming
release on No Type's Sine Fiction sub-label, an ongoing thematic
project in which various artists compose soundtracks to classic
science-fiction novels. One of my projects, Galactus Zeit, will
contribute a soundtrack to Philip K. Dick's novel, *Radio Free
Albemuth*, largely based on data-conversion scores and thus continuing
my fascination with the intersecting literary and sonic forms of
composition as well as with imagination as a form of broadcast
technology [14].</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
<br>
PERFORMANCES AND WEBCASTS<br>
<br>
One cannot have control "over" that of which one is part, or
even formulate it completely - one can only participate more deeply
in it.<br>
-- Ronald Sukenick [15]<br>
<br>
In recent performances at Denver's Museum of Contemporary Art and the
University of Denver, I have worked with the browser as a tool for
spontaneous composition. Under the project names of Galactus Zeit and
pharmakon.t (DJ Webspinna), I have used Internet search engines,
multiple browser instances, embedded audio files, links for direct
file download and assemblages of plug-ins and playback devices as the
key components of live aleatory pieces and DJ sets. I have also
brought these approaches to experimental webcasts.<br>
<br>
: THE INTERNET DOWNLOAD SOUND OF GALACTUS ZEIT<br>
<br>
In my Galactus Zeit performances, the Web browser's search engine
becomes a generative tool for sound work, inspired by John Cage's
*Imaginary Landscape No. 4.* Based on the theme of a particular event,
keywords and file types are arranged in various combinations and fed
into a search engine. This search yields web pages that contain
embedded or linked audio files. Unpreviewed audio content is then
downloaded throughout the performance and fed directly into software
samplers with granular "slice'n'loop" sequencers. The
resulting live set consists of improvised sequences of abstract sonic
textures, cascading sheets of noise, minimal melodic phrases and short
slices of recognizable spoken word. At Tyler Potts' Evening of Chance
Operations, held at the University of Denver in Spring 2002 [16],
search phrases such as "audio chance evening" and
"chance operations .wav" brought up web pages with sound
files ranging from an ambient field recording entitled
"rainforest evening" to a news clip in which Bob Dole
described his chances of surviving an open-heart operation. Audience
members interacting with computers projected throughout the concert
hall suggested additional search combinations. I soon had a folder of
more than 50 files for sampler processing. In this case, the browser's
text-based search engine establishes an interface between the Internet
as a file distribution resource and compositional device.<br>
<br>
: RADIO PHARMAKOPOLIS<br>
<br>
The Radio Pharmakopolis webcast streamed from the Digital Media
studios at the University of Denver on 10 September, 2002, as part of
the OpenAir Radiotopia at the Ars Electronica 2002 Festival [17]. For
this event, I collaborated with fellow browser-based DJ em.chia
(Matthew Chiabotti) [18]. Our two-hour set sampled and re-processed
several other live Radiotopia streams; audio files made available
through OpenAir's "Input" database and "Transformation"
mixer; and a variety of other webcasts and pages with embedded audio
files. We also remixed our own stream to generate digital delays and
feedback loops. In keeping with the Open Air project's emphasis on
multilingual content, our performance drew heavily on online
newscasts, sermons, lectures, talk shows and interviews. Throughout
the performance, I worked on a computer with granular synthesizers to
reprocess both downloaded files and incoming streams. I sent this mix
out as its own stream, which em.chia then incorporated into his own
browser-based webmix.<br>
<br>
The collaborative elements of the OpenAir Radiotopia were many. We
witnessed multiple layers of global webcast, broadcast and remixes of
signals both streamed over the Net and played over live P.A. in Linz,
Austria. The close loops of webcasters reworking each other's live
streams points contemporary webcasting to the telharmonic model as
well as back to the origins of early radio, when operators resisted
the idea that broadcast might become a unilateral mode of passive
entertainment, rather than something that people did with each other,
a mode of conversation [19]. Since the Radiotopia event offered a
global festival of re-processed files and streams, participating
through the Radio Pharmakopolis performance was a natural stage in the
development of my own recent works and live sets using the web browser
as a source for imaginative revitalization of our connections to the
world and others.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
<br>
: PHARMAKON.T (DJ WEBSPINNA) AND PBS<br>
<br>
I have several current projects that continue to explore the
possibilities of the webmix as applied to live performances and
webcasts. Under the moniker of pharmakon.t (DJ webspinna), I am part
of the DJ Rabbi collective, a performance group creating various
digital remixes of important texts defining political, religious and
media cultures [20]. Pharmakon.t performed at the A:D:A:P:T Festival
of digital media, held at Denver's Museum of Contemporary Art on 15
May, 2003 [21]. Here, I worked entirely from multiple streams and
embedded MP3 files submitted for inclusion in an online compilation
related to the festival. I have also released several webmixes at the
djrabbi.com site, and recently scored the audio for a digital remix of
Guy Debord's *Society of the Spectacle*, largely based on .txt-to-MIDI
conversions of Debord's text. I have also formed the Bureau of
Pharmakogeographical Surveying, a division of Randall Packer's U.S.
Department of Art and Technology [22]. PBS, the broadcasting wing of
this bureau, provides a web-content corollary to Packer and Wesley
Smith's Media Deconstruction Kit, which remixes and processes live
commercial news broadcasting in concurrent, alternate streams. PBS
launched its first webcast on 1 October, 2003, as part of the Open
Air: Open Radio event in Barcelona. A channel of Randall Packer's
"Department Works, Mixologies, and Transformations" exhibit
(22 August - 6 October, 2003), the PBS project brings my interest in
databending to visual content as well, with reprocessed screengrabs of
text and imagery from the Web forming the basis of streaming video
mixes.<br>
<br>
As used in my live performances, the web browser becomes an
improvisational vehicle for deepening imaginative engagement with a
world characterized in terms of information access and bandwidth
speeds. It does so by playing with the presence of spontaneous
microstructures, meaningful designs and new threads forming within the
massive weave of data-trails throughout the Internet. Reconsidering
the processes of audio composition and distribution in terms of the
browser function, I attempt to sustain a connection to the outside
world through an imaginative form, distributed in point of origin but
drawn together through communication networks and filled with the raw
creative charge generated by the transformation of
information-clusters through sequences of unforeseen associations. I
enact this process by looking to the web browser as a fairly
transparent avenue into content and technique. This transparency
reveals the process of composition as the ongoing exchange of
multilateral transmissions between the mind and the shifting content
on the screen.<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
NOTES AND REFERENCES<br>
<br>
1. See Thom Holmes, *Electronic and Experimental Music*, second
edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) pp. 44-52. Also see the
section on Cahill at the "Electronic Musical Instrument
1870-1990" Web site:<u>
http://www.obsolete.com/120_years/</u>.<br>
<br>
2. See Lisa Gitelman, *Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines:
Representing Technology in the Edison Era* (Stanford, CA: University
of Stanford Press, 1999) p. 16.<br>
<br>
3. See<u> http://www.altx.com/audio</u>.<br>
<br>
4. From the liner notes to Alt-X Audio #1 (1997).<br>
<br>
5. See<u> http://www.markamerika.com/filmtext/</u>.<br>
<br>
6. See<u> http://www.alphanumericlabs.com</u>.<br>
<br>
7. See<u> http://www.csulb.edu/~gbach/</u>.<br>
<br>
8. See<u> http://www.electronicbookreview.com</u>.<br>
<br>
9. Jacques Derrida, in *Disseminations*, trans. Barbara Johnson
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981) p. 127.<br>
<br>
10. See [9] p. 127.<br>
<br>
11. See<u>
http://www.stasisfield.com/space/present/palimpsest/</u>.<br>
<br>
12. See<u>
http://www.stasisfield.com/space/present/index.html</u>.<br>
<br>
13. Esoteric Sensationalism is a web site devoted to an exploration of
techniques for experimental electronic composition in text and sound.
Drawing on the traditions of William S. Burroughs' literary cut-ups
and cassette tape "drop-ins," C.P. Bryant's program is a
four-channel .txt-file mixer that parses out "cut-ups." I
used this program to remix shorter vignettes out of longer texts.
See<u> http://www.esoteric-sensationalism.com/</u>.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
14. See<u> http://www.notype.com</u>.<br>
<br>
15. Ronald Sukenick, *In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction*
(Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985).<br>
<br>
16. See<u> http://www.du.edu/~tpotts/chanceoperations.html</u>.<br>
<br>
17. See<u> http://alien.mur.at/radiotopia</u>.<br>
<br>
18. Em.chia's browser-based DJ mix, "metaxalogical mo(u)rning
methods," is included in the Palimpsest Project exhibit (2002) at
the Stasisfield site:<u>
http://www.stasisfield.com/space/present/index.html</u>.<br>
<br>
19. See L. Gitelman [2] p. 228.<br>
<br>
20. See<u> http://www.djrabbi.com</u>.<br>
<br>
21. See<u> http://www.pharmakopolis.com/adapt/</u>.<br>
<br>
22. See<u> http://www.usdat.us/</u>.<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
WORKS AND PERFORMANCES BY TRACE REDDELL<br>
<br>
"LITMIXER: The Literary Remediator," in *Electronic Book
Review*, No. 12, edited by Mark Amerika, Joseph Tabbi, and Cary Wolf,
http://www.electronicbookreview.com (2001).<br>
<br>
*Machinery for Dreaming,* as part of The Palimpsest Project, curated
by John Kannenberg, Stasis_Space, http://www.stasisfield.com
(2002).<br>
<br>
*Eliot's Magic Lantern*, in The Audible Still-Life, curated by John
Kannenberg, Stasis_Space, http://www.stasisfield.com (2003).<br>
<br>
</font><font face="Symbol" color="#000000">…</font><font
face="Courier New" color="#000000"> AS GALACTUS ZEIT:<br>
<br>
"An Evening of Chance Operations," hosted by Tyler Potts,<u>
http://www.du.edu/~tpotts/chanceoperations.html</u>, 13 March,
2002.<br>
<br>
"sonicPOP," at visualsoundings, Museum of Contemporary Art,
Denver,<u> http://www.du.edu/~treddell/events.htm</u>, 17 October,
2002.<br>
<br>
Radio Pharmakopolis, OpenAir Radiotopia, Ars Electronica 2002,<u>
http://alien.mur.at/radiotopia</u>, 10 September, 2002.<br>
<br>
</font><font face="Symbol" color="#000000">…</font><font
face="Courier New" color="#000000"> AS PHARMAKON.T (DJ WEBSPINNA):<br>
<br>
"Music for Ruins," The A:D:A:P:T Festival, Museum of
Contemporary Art, Denver,<u> http://www.pharmakopolis.com/adapt/</u>,
15 May, 2003.<br>
<br>
pharmakon.t, webspinna set, DJ Rabbi,<u> http://www.djrabbi.com</u>,
2003.<br>
<br>
PBS, Open Air: Open Radio 03, Barcelona, Spain,<u>
http://openserver.cccb.org/</u>, 29 September to 3 October, 2003.<br>
<br>
PBS, "Department Works, Mixologies, and Transformations,"
U.S. Department of Art and Technology,<u>
http://www.usdat.us/tel-span</u>, 22 August to 6 October, 2003.<br>
<br>
<br>
ADDITIONAL REFERENCES<br>
<br>
Alt-X Audio,<u> http://www.altx.com/audio</u>, 1997-2003.<br>
<br>
Mark Amerika, Chad Mossholder and John Vega, *Filmtext 2.0,*<u>
http://www.markamerika.com/filmtext/</u>, 2002.<br>
<br>
August Highland, *Alphanumeric Labs*,<u>
http://www.alphanumericlabs.com</u>, 2003.<br>
<br>
Glenn Bach,<u> http://www.csulb.edu/~gbach/</u>.<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
ABOUT THE AUTHOR<br>
<br>
Trace Reddell is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media Studies at
the University of Denver, Colorado and the graduate director of the
M.A. program in Digital Media Studies. Trace teaches courses in
digital audio production, the critical theory and praxis of
technoculture and digital research methodologies. He guides numerous
graduate research projects and directs the DMS program's digital
art/theory journal, *Perspective House*. Trace received a Ph.D. in
English Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1996.
Since that time, he has sought to articulate a digital poetics taking
shape at the intersection of multimedia production, networking
technologies, media theory, literary criticism and the history of drug
culture. Trace's works may be found at Electronic Book Review,
Stasis_Space, DJ Rabbi.com and on several microsound.org compilations,
The Communications of Tomorrow label, Open Air Radiotopia (Ars
Electronica 2002), Platoniq's Open Radio Festival (Barcelona 2003) and
the U.S. Department of Art and Technology's Tel-SPAN project. His
publications include articles in *Leonardo Music Journal* and
*Leonardo Electronic Almanac* and *Contemporary Music Review*. Trace
edits an ongoing thread at *Electronic Book Review*
(music/sound/noise) and produces shows for Alt-X Audio. He curates the
monthly visualsoundings series of electronic music at Denver's Museum
of Contemporary Art. He also founded Denver's first annual digital
media festival, A:D:A:P:T, in Spring 2003. More may be found at
Trace's website:<u> http://www.du.edu/~treddell/</u>.<br>
<br>
<br>
ARTICLE RECEIVED 18 NOVEMBER, 2003<br>
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| LEONARDO
REVIEWS |<br>
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2004.01 <span
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<br>
*Leonardo Reviews* opens the new year with a bumper crop of no less
than 25 reviews, including the first by Eugene Thacker, our most
recent addition to the panel. Eugene is Assistant Professor at Georgia
Tech's School of Literature, Communication and Culture. He is also the
author of *Biomedia* and part of the Biotech Hobbyist collective. We
are also delighted to open the year with an addition to the *Leonardo
Reviews* editorial team; Dene Grigar, already familiar to most of us
as a very active reviewer, will be undertaking some editorial work,
directing her interns in preparing the texts prior to publication.<br>
<br>
Obviously, with 25 substantial reviews to choose from, the task of
featuring one or two for *Leonardo Electronic Almanac* becomes
increasingly difficult and inevitably more subjective. Along with Roy
Behrens' economical reports, this month we have a raft of new reviews
by Mike Mosher and contributions from Chris Cobb, Dennis Dollens, Rob
Harle and Stefaan van Ryssen. Highlighted here are four reviews of
special interest: Pia Tikka's report on *The Trouble with Nature: Sex
in Science and Popular Culture* identifies a growing criticism of
genetic determinism that seems to have gained ground recently. This
debate is given considerable depth with George Gessert's review
article stimulated by *Enough*, by Bill McKibben. We are reminded of
the relevance of these discussions to art and art historians in *The
Edge of Surrealism*, reviewed here for us by Allan Graubard, and
Robert Pepperell's discussion of Steve Grand's book, *Creation: Life
and How to Make It*.<br>
<br>
These and the rest of the month's offerings are at<u>
www.leonardoreviews.org</u>.<br>
<br>
Michael Punt<br>
Editor-in-Chief<br>
Leonardo Reviews<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
Leonardo reviews posted January 2004:<br>
<br>
Absurd Summer, by Koji Asano<br>
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen<br>
<br>
Anecdotal Theory, by Jane Gallop<br>
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen<br>
<br>
Creation: Life and How to Make It, by Steve Grand<br>
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell<br>
<br>
A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720, by Barbara J. Shapiro<br>
Reviewed by Michael Punt<br>
<br>
Digital Creativity: A Reader, edited by Colin Beardon and Lone
Malmborg<br>
and<br>
Digital Media Revisited, edited by Gunnar Liestol, Andrew Morrison and
Terje Rasmussen<br>
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher<br>
<br>
The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, edited by Claudine
Frank; translated by Claudine Frank and Camille Nash<br>
Reviewed by Allan Graubard<br>
<br>
The Eighth Day: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac, edited by Sheilah
Britton and Dan Collins<br>
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher<br>
<br>
Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media, edited by
Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick<br>
Reviewed by Dene Grigar<br>
<br>
Els Altres Arquitectes (The Other Architects), Museu de Zoologia,
Barcelona, Spain<br>
Reviewed by Dennis Dollens<br>
<br>
Enough, by Bill McKibben<br>
Reviewed by George Gessert<br>
<br>
Genetic Architectures / Arquitecturas genéticas, by Alberto T.
Estévez et al.<br>
Reviewed by Rob Harle<br>
<br>
Hacker Culture, By Douglas Thomas<br>
Reviewed by Eugene Thacker<br>
<br>
In the Garden, CD by Yusef Lateef, Adam Rudolph, Go: Organic
Orchestra<br>
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher<br>
<br>
Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination, by Maynard Solomon<br>
Reviewed by Richard Kade<br>
<br>
Masks of the Universe: Changing Ideas on the Nature of the Cosmos, by
Edward Harrison<br>
Reviewed by Rob Harle<br>
<br>
Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century,
by Scott Bukatman<br>
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher<br>
<br>
The People's Music, Jon Rose<br>
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher<br>
<br>
Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity 1917-1941, by
David L. Hoffman<br>
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher<br>
<br>
The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture, by Roger
N. Lancaster<br>
Reviewed by Pia Tikka<br>
<br>
Undead Science: Science Studies and the Afterlife of Cold Fusion, by
Bart Simon</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000">Reviewed by Michael R.
(Mike) Mosher<br>
<br>
Vingt Chansons pour Jean Cocteau (Twenty Songs for Jean Cocteau), by
Maurice Methot<br>
Reviewed by Chris Cobb<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
THE TROUBLE WITH NATURE: SEX IN SCIENCE AND POPULAR CULTURE<br>
<br>
By Roger N. Lancaster, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003.
442 pp., illustrated. Trade, $55; paper Ł15.95. ISBN: 0-520-20287-2;
ISBN: 0-520-23620-3.<br>
<br>
Reviewed by Pia Tikka, Researcher in University of Art and Design,
Hämeentie 135 C, 00560 Helsinki, Finland.<br>
<u>Pia.Tikka@uiah.fi<br>
<br>
<br>
</u>If there is any "trouble" with nature, it must be a
cultural phenomenon, conceptualized by human beings only. In this
vivid, sharp and fun-to-read study, anthropologist Roger Lancaster
describes his "trouble" from the perspective of social
constructionism. His criticism points out that the popularized
pseudo-scientific claims about nature and laws of evolution applied to
social life sustain identity politics that tend to be conservative,
and even harmful, where they ought to be "as radical as reality."
Lancaster is concerned about what he calls "genomania" - the
rise of naturalizing tendencies in society, shaped by sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology and put forward by short-sighted media. These
tendencies nest reactionary attitudes, giving "natural"
explanations to unjust institutions, e.g. gender inequalities, racism,
class stratification, war; even genocide. According to Lancaster, they
ultimately derive from the maximalist logic of "genetic
competition" and heteronormativity, thus undermining the progress
in acknowledging rights of sexual marginal groups as well as squeezing
a range of other real-life diversities to the edge of socio-political
"normalcy." <br>
<br>
The book includes a wide range of examples from popular culture,
carefully analyzed and exposed with witty irony by Lancaster. In the
process of reading, I started to pay attention to how the views of
sociobiology and evolutionary psychology invade my everyday
communication channels. In one of the cases, a personal e-mail to a
group of female friends casually cites in length the research by Laura
C. Klein et al. [1], which suggests that when a woman is in a
stressful situation, instead of the male "fight-or-flight"
response, the hormone oxytocin is released, encouraging her rather to
tend to the children and gather with other women. In another case, an
*International Herald Tribune* columnist celebrates the fact that a
particular scientific book supports his intuition about the difference
between male and female brains: "Men - because of a tragic
genetic flaw - cannot see dirt until there is enough of it to
support agriculture" [2]. These extracts, from both private and
public media, taken more or less seriously, can be seen to implicate
what Lancaster is most critical of - the idea of heteronormality as
the dominant sociocultural (and assumed ancestral) environment.<br>
<br>
Before getting Lancaster's book in my hands, I read an extensive
approach to human evolutionary psychology [3], in which I was amazed
to find research questions like "Why do women live after
menopause?" So, I agree with Lancaster's notion that evolutionary
psychology seems to reduce some of the socio-cultural complexity to
simplicities: women are genetically oriented to social communication,
household and children, while men are for fighting, football and other
goal-directed aggressions. All other social gender diversities are
recognized only in relation to these evolutionary necessities.<br>
<br>
Lancaster's criticism is aware that the ossified sexual identities
embodied in reproductive goals, combined with the idea of unchanging
human nature drawing from imaginary ancestral life's form, are not the
"trouble" of only natural reductionism, but also appear as a
pitfall for lesbian/gay studies, queer theory and related forms of
critical culture studies. He reminds us that if alternative views are
established on the domain regulated by these pre-conceptual premises,
there will be no real possibility for flux of radical changes.<br>
<br>
According to Lancaster, the "natural" or "necessary,"
or the point where biology and culture meet, cannot be determined by
genetic algorithms adapting to the environmental survival game.
Instead, it confirms the biological consequences of actual social
arrangement - the cultural plasticity relating sexuality, gender and
the family. In my view, this is not in direct conflict with the
evolutionary psychological view, which suggests the phenotypic
plasticity. The complexity of human behavior, based on an organism's
ability to learn from experience, derives from a wide range of
demographic, ecological and social environments. Maybe all the
"trouble" reflects the need for dialogue in relation to the
emergence of novel cross-disciplinary perspectives. Even more so, if
it is about learning it needs to be, in Lancaster's words, "as
radical as reality."</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
<br>
NOTES AND REFERENCES<br>
<br>
1. This citation refers to research by S. E. Taylor, L. C. Klein, B.
P. Lewis, T. L. Gruenewald, R. A. R. Gurung and J. A. Updegraff,
"Female Responses to Stress: Tend and Befriend, Not Fight or
Flight," in *Psychological Review*, Vol. 107, No. 3, pp.
41-429.<br>
<br>
2. D. Barry, "True Fact: Guys Brains Really Are Different,"
in the *International Herald Tribune*, No. 37545, p. 22, (22-23 Nov.,
2003). Barry refers to the book by M. Gurian, *What Could He Be
Thinking? How a Man's Mind Really Works* (St. Martin's Press,
2003).<br>
<br>
3. L. Barrett, R. Dunbar, J. Lycett, *Human Evolutionary Psychology*
(New York, NY: Palgrave Publishers Ltd, 2002).<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
ENOUGH<font size="-1"><br>
<br>
</font>by Bill McKibben. New York: Henry Holt, 2003. $25.00 hardcover.
ISBN:<br>
0-8050-7096-6.<br>
<br>
Reviewed by George Gessert<br>
<u>ggessert@igc.org<br>
<br>
<br>
</u>Will biotechnology give us wings? Make us posthuman? Damage us
irreparably? These are a few of the possibilities that Bill McKibben
considers in his book, *Enough*. According to McKibben, biotechnology
will soon be able to deliver better health, greater intelligence,
longer lives, genetically determined happiness and maybe even dazzling
good looks. However, if we pursue these goals through germline
engineering, the costs will be prohibitively high. According to
McKibben, germline engineering, which involves making genetic changes
that can be inherited, will "break us free from the bonds of our
past and present" and make our children into "putty."
This will lead to an "arms race" of all against all, in
which parents will be forced to engineer their offspring or practice
neglect comparable to child abuse. Every engineered baby will be
followed by more advanced models. "Once the game is under way,"
McKibben warns, "there won't be moral decisions, only strategic
ones." A host of unprecedented family problems will arise.
Children will acquire characteristics of consumer products. There will
be children seen as "upgrades" from older siblings, and
"lemon" engineered children. Some parents will suffer
buyer's remorse. Consumer decisions will create a genetically based
class system and this will eventually lead to new, posthuman species,
with interspecific violence to follow.<br>
<br>
McKibben's warnings about "keep-up-with-the-Joneses" genetic
engineering bear consideration if only because his picture of the
future derives from predictions made by advocates of germline
engineering. For example, in his 1997 book *Remaking Eden*, Lee
Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton, wrote that germline
engineering to eliminate severe inherited disease would "ease
society's trepidation" and open the door to other sorts of gene
enhancement, such as improving intelligence. Silver
"conservatively" speculates that by the year 2350, society
may be divided into 10% "GenRich", or genetically enhanced
individuals, and 90% "Naturals," or unenhanced individuals.
The GenRich would control everything: the economy, the media,
entertainment, "the knowledge industry," art. Silver
envisions Homo sapiens divided into four species by 2600, and by 2750
into more than a dozen. Eventually, millions of human-derived species
may be scattered across the galaxy. Silver's vision of the distant
future is epic and he is a lucid writer, especially when he describes
biotechnological techniques. However, he has a weakness for absurdly
grandiose statements such as "We, as human beings, have tamed the
fire of life." He also gives very limited attention to the
suffering that biotechnology is almost certain to produce.<br>
<br>
McKibben argues that germline engineering will not only damage
families and cause social disruption, but will lead to widespread loss
of meaning. Biotechnology, he believes, is the culmination of a long
historical process, greatly accelerated by the industrial revolution,
that favors individuals over context and leads to empowered but
pitifully isolated and disconnected people. Germline engineering will
eliminate the last source of meaning: the individual self. This will
take place because an engineered "self" is not a true self,
but something more like a robot. "We will float silently away
into the vacuum of meaninglessness," he writes.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
McKibben doesn't use the word "soul," but that is what he
suggests when he characterizes the true self as a
providentially-given, unchanging essence and a primary source of
meaning. However, this concept of self is a cultural construct.
Buddhist and other civilizations have flourished without cultivating
it, and without unleashing epidemics of meaninglessness. Science
conceptualizes human beings as exquisitely intricate electro-chemical
phenomena operating within much larger, almost infinitely complex
material contexts. According to common, present-day cultural values,
we already bear qualified comparison to robots.<br>
<br>
Since McKibben's concept of the self is nostalgic and dubious, his
argument that engineered people will be essentially different from the
rest of us is also dubious. He provides no convincing evidence that
for them, life will not continue to be a succession of surprises,
intermittently a profound mystery and mathematically so improbable as
to constitute a miracle.<br>
<br>
This is not to say that germline engineering may not reshape our
species or cause suffering. Quite the contrary. McKibben does a
service by highlighting some profoundly troubling possibilities. He
argues that we may already have gone far enough along certain
technological paths. He favors some kinds of innovation, for example
gene therapies that are somatic and not inheritable, but draws a line
at germline engineering and at the world-destroying potentialities of
robotics and nanotechnology. He believes that anything with the power
to make us posthuman should arouse our deepest skepticism. The
momentum of the new technologies may be difficult to stop, but
momentum is merely inertia and has never had anything to do with
progress - that is, if progress consists of movement toward human
fulfillment. More to the point, we cannot predict the future. McKibben
believes that flat statements that technological innovation is
inevitable are ruses to stop discussion before it can begin.<br>
<br>
What drives technological innovation? McKibben quotes leading
innovators to suggest that in our time a basic force is hatred of
life. For example, robotics pioneer Hans Moravec, reflecting on an
Isaac Asimov story about an android who wanted to become a human, said
(with his typically aggressive use of the second person) "Why in
hell do you want to become a man when you're something better to begin
with? It's like a human being wanting to become an ape. 'Gee, I really
wish I had more hair, that I stooped more, smelled worse, lived a
shorter life span.'" No doubt Moravec speaks for many. The very
widespread belief that we may go extinct arises both from awareness of
the immense destructive power of high technology and from disgust with
what we are, or have become. Today there are plenty of reasons to
loath our species. Who has not felt at one time or another that we
deserve to go extinct? McKibben acknowledges this inner crisis, but
does not address it. His appeals to reason and essential goodness are
inadequate in the face of extinction's appeal and the misanthropy of
leading scientists. This is the most serious weakness of the book.<br>
<br>
I am less sanguine than McKibben about who we are, which paradoxically
makes me less pessimistic about the prospect of germline engineering.
He points out that for a while, germline engineering will be extremely
expensive, so only a small minority will be able to afford it, but he
does not explore implications of this. From a Darwinian perspective,
wealth today functions counter-intuitively: it affords no obvious
evolutionary advantages. In fact, there is an inverse relationship
between income and education on the one hand, and number of offspring
on the other. As a group the poor, or rather the relatively uneducated
working poor, are indeed blessed when it comes to progeny. The rich
tend to be Darwinian losers.<br>
<br>
Furthermore, no one really knows how biologically advantageous, as
distinct from socially advantageous, characteristics such as slimness,
athletic ability and intelligence are. Unless they produce more
progeny, they have no Darwinian advantages. A potato-shaped,
dim-witted nonentity with a swarm of children is biologically superior
to a brilliant public figure, streamlined as a cheetah, and childless.
In other words, from an evolutionary standpoint it may not matter
whether most of the germline manipulations that McKibben mentions take
place: they may amount to genetic froth. The market has always
generated froth. Capitalism, which moved onto the world stage with
trade in sugar and tobacco, involves bypassing our evolutionary
defenses and exploiting our genetic weaknesses. We are the animal who
plays tricks on itself. Consumer culture is the trickster spirit
incarnate.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
McKibben makes a convincing case that we would be wise to favor
sustained public debate about germline engineering and to exercise
great caution about this immensely powerful and potentially disruptive
technology. However, if our society does go down the path of germline
engineering, there is something to be said for having the rich, the
well-educated, and the self-loathing conduct the first experiments on
their own children.<br>
<br>
When the poet Edith Sitwell was a child in the 1890s, she had a slight
curvature of the spine. In her autobiography she tells how her father,
Sir George Sitwell, who would tolerate no imperfections in his
offspring, had her subjected to the best available medical treatment
of the time. "The steel Bastille" was a metal contraption
that encased young Edith's body and caused her excruciating pain. Only
the rich could afford this particular torture, or permit this
particular childhood. It is not inconceivable that humanity will learn
important lessons from the rich about the consequences of germline
engineering, just as earlier generations learned from the cruel and
useless medical treatments that premodern doctors inflicted on
aristocrats and their children. One doesn't have to agree with every
detail of McKibben's argument to believe that today most of what we
need to learn is what not to do.<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
THE EDGE OF SURREALISM: A ROGER CAILLOIS READER<br>
<br>
edited by Claudine Frank; translated by Claudine Frank and Camille
Nash. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, U.S.A., 2003. 423 pp. Trade,
$79.95; paper $22.96. ISBN: 0-8223-3056-3; ISBN 0-8223-3068-7.<br>
<br>
Reviewed by Allan Graubard, 2900 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC
20008, U.S.A.<br>
<u>a.graubard@starpower.net<br>
<br>
<br>
</u>Roger Caillois holds a distinct place among French intellectuals
between the two world wars and after the defeat of Fascism. First seen
as a member of the Paris surrealist group (from 1932-34), he
contributed to the then vital discussion on the origins of myth by
balancing his interest in poetry, as a project of being and a means of
becoming, with a scientist's rationality through the lens of biology.
His attempt to bridge the distance between the two provided him with a
particular view of how acute the project is, given the values each
term promotes, the traditions they stem from, and the variable
confusions attending "rapprochement." That we are still prey
to a general failure here, which Caillois could not extricate himself
from, does not in the least diminish the project's urgency, especially
now with technology's ever more attractive simulations that the two
are merging at last - and that the "absence of myth," a
subject that compelled so much comment during Caillois' time, no
longer matters.<br>
<br>
I do not know what Caillois would have made of all this, save for
returning perhaps to his analysis of biology as a basis for myth,
eschewing much else as a detour, and his fascination with mimicry in
the insect world - the subject of his influential 1937 text, *The
Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis* - all in the service
of an attempt to discern, as he put it, a "lyrical ideogram"
as an objective nexus where poetic thought and lucid reason
intersect.<br>
<br>
Caillois' contestive spirit here also characterizes him and our
current interest in him, at least in terms of the world we know and
our need for forceful intellects with wide-ranging passions, free from
careerism or institutional constraints - a freedom that Caillois
advocated more in principle than in fact. But of course it was there,
an animating force and a horizon toward which to turn, as he did. In
this regard, his break with surrealism as being overly
"indulgent" on the side of poetry is also born from a desire
to recast the movement's focus on myth and myth-making: from its
collective origins and orphic cast to its sectarian momentum, social
economy and general phenomenology.<br>
<br>
It is here as well that we can chart his collaboration with Georges
Bataille, his work with Michelle Leiris and Jean Paulhan, his
arguments with Levi-Strauss, whether for good or ill, during and after
the College of Sociology (which Caillois helped to form and sustain).
Among his other accomplishments, I include *Les Lettres francaise*,
which Caillois launched from his inter-war exile in Argentina
(1941-1947) and the magazine *Sur*, edited by Victoria Ocampo, in
which he played a pivotal role, along with the UNESCO-sponsored
"transdisciplinary" journal *Diogenes*, which he established
as editor in 1952, and, of course, his books.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
Thus has Claudine Frank given us a sampling of Caillois' texts in
translation, the most complete in English so far, written over four
decades (from 1934 to 1978), along with informative introductions to
each period, at times to each text. Indeed, I am indebted to Frank for
the historic frames she provides despite her passing disputes with
other commentators, which may be of interest to experts alone, and her
occasional opacity.<br>
<br>
I have mentioned myth, myth-making and the absence of myth; I do so
again. It is the ground Caillois believes his own, at least as far as
his analyses take him. But as Caillois' thought matures, his sense of
the poetic, its orphic heritage, and myth change. He comes to
recuperate a type of formalism that reason embraces as an epitome of
Western civilization and which Breton, for one, repudiates (see
Breton's brilliant response to Caillois' thoughts on poetry in *Ars
Poetica*, coauthored with Jean Shuster, which appears in the
surrealist review *BIEF/Jonction surrealiste*, no. 7, June 1959). Nor
is this repudiation an abstract or literary affair. It focuses on the
heart of a dispute that anthropology finally came to grips with and
which Aime Cesaire targeted in his scorching critique of Caillois'
defense of Western civilization and the blind eye he turned to its
murderous impulses; a critique to which I refer readers of Caillois as
a clarifying lens (see Cesaire's *Discourse on Colonialism*, first
published in 1955 by Editions Presence African, republished in
translation several times thereafter). <br>
<br>
Who was Roger Caillois? Certainly, this book will help us draw the
character. Will it also act as a mirror to the reader and the
intellectual or poetic currents that resonate within him or her? That
is another question. It is not a small one.<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
CREATION: LIFE AND HOW TO MAKE IT<br>
<br>
By Steve Grand, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Paper,
218 pp. Illus. b/w. ISBN: 0-674-00654-2:<br>
<br>
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell<br>
<u>pepperell@ntlword.com<br>
<br>
<br>
</u>Steve Grand is a popular science writer in the best tradition of
the genre. He is motivated by the need to explain, to popularize, an
intellectual vision in which he passionately believes, a vision driven
by his sustained investigation into some deeply perplexing scientific
questions: What is life? Can living processes be replicated? What is
consciousness and can it too be replicated? Anyone who has seen or
heard him speak will know this passion is fuelled by his conviction
that some of the greatest enigmas in human thought (the nature of life
and consciousness) are not only explicable but susceptible to
synthetic regeneration, given the appropriate tools and methods. Hence
the claim made on the book's subtitle would be, for Grand, a
reasonable summary of his project rather than, as it would be for
others, a ridiculously bombastic declaration.<br>
<br>
Grand's approach is essentially synthetic rather than analytic. He
takes contemporary ideas in physics, mathematics, biology, computer
science and neurology and synthesizes a coherent, transdisciplinary
model that has the benefit of being more that purely theoretical. His
previous experience as the inventor of the artificial life computer
game *Creatures* and his more recent work constructing
"artificial beings" give him a practical insight into the
problems of generating complex behavior with computer code.<br>
<br>
To summarize his position, he advocates a theory of emergence, which
is to say that the properties of natural phenomena, such as
intelligence and life, emerge from the interaction of a multitude of
variables without being reducible to any one of them. Nor can any one
variable be said to be the first or final cause of any particular
event. Even the notion of control we associate with, for example,
human agency is seen as the effect of some prior cause or causes
rather than as a determining influence itself. Higher order phenomena,
such as consciousness, are less the attributes of a particular
substance than consequences of the behavior of a certain pattern or
arrangement: "Consciousness cannot therefore be a property of
matter, only a property of certain *configurations* of matter"
(p. 38). It is these principles that Grand seeks to implement through
computer simulations, thereby creating virtual laboratories for
exploring the creation of life, intelligence and
consciousness.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
The nub of Grand's formula for the creation of life is to combine a
number of mechanical building blocks such as modulators, transducers,
differentiators and integrators (what he calls "God's LEGO
set"), each relatively simple but capable of producing complex
behavior when acting in concert. Crucial to the whole enterprise is
the provision of some basic impulses and drives, like the need to eat,
communicate, learn and mate, without which, he argues, a living thing
would lack purpose. All these behaviors can be simulated in a virtual
world-space wherein the life, or computer code behaving as life, is
born: "Our task is not to program in intelligent behavior, but to
enable such behavior to emerge from simulated objects that embody the
cybernetic properties from which life emerged in the natural world"
(p. 147).<br>
<br>
Grand has an engaging style, his arguments are almost always
persuasive, and his examples and analogies genuinely illuminating.
Given the complexity of the subject matter, the text moves at a lively
pace, yet without compromising the seriousness of his thesis. I have
to admit that in my case Steve Grand was preaching to the converted,
but I hope this book will have a wider impact, in particular on those
in the AI and A-Life communities, and indeed in the scientific
community in general, who seek to reductively analyze complex
phenomena. Although the book might be criticized for sometimes
conflating life, intelligence and consciousness, nevertheless
*Creation* stands as a model of clear, independent thought,
impassioned reason and well-founded speculation.<br>
<br>
_____________________________________________________________________<span
></span>__<br>
<br>
<span
></span>
______________________________<br>
<span
></span>
| <span
></span
> <span
></span> |<br>
<span
></span>
| LEONARDO
ABSTRACTS |<br>
<span
></span>
|
SERVICE
|<br>
<span
></span>
|______________________________|<br>
<br>
_____________________________________________________________________<span
></span>___<br>
<br>
<br>
The Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS) is a listing of Masters and
Ph.D. theses in the art/science/technology field, for the benefit of
scholars and practitioners.<br>
<br>
LEA also maintains a discussion list open only to faculty in the
field. Students interested in contributing and faculty wishing to join
this list should contact<u> leo@mitpress.mit.edu</u>.<br>
<br>
_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
AUTHOR<br>
Robin Petterd<br>
<u>robin@otheredge.com.au<br>
<br>
</u>LANGUAGES FAMILIAR TO THE AUTHOR<br>
English<br>
<br>
THESIS TITLE<br>
Liquid Sensations: Evoking Sensory Experiences with Interactive
Video Installation Art<br>
<br>
ABSTRACT<br>
This project has developed methodologies for evoking sensations using
interactive video installation art. The research has resulted in three
interrelated video installations about the experiences of entering the
sea, shallow breath diving and floating under the surface of the
water.<br>
<br>
The installations have been developed through studio-based methods by
a solo artist working on all aspects of the process. The project's
methods have been focused on the imagery and sounds and the placement
of these elements in the gallery, the development of a system where
interaction is an integral part of the viewer's engagement with the
works. The exegesis and accompanying CD-ROM summarize this
process.<br>
<br>
The physical sensations associated with water were chosen because they
are immersive experiences that have a personal resonance for the
investigator. Suggesting the sensory experience of submersion in water
has many challenges. Interactive video installations can meet some of
the these challenges.<br>
<br>
Our bodies are more than 90 percent water; we wash in it; we play in
it; we need it to survive. While our bodies are mostly water, it is an
environment with which we have an uneasy physical relationship as
there is always the risk of drowning. Humans find pleasure in this
struggle with an alien environment. The contrasting aspects of the
experience are what this project seeks to suggest.<br>
<br>
This project is part of the tradition of depicting water in the
history of visual arts. Other contemporary artists use water as part
of their practice. The exegesis examines some of these contemporary
artists' works and related practices with time-based media that have
informed the studio-based experiments.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
New technology offers unprecedented means of making art. Technological
development has been rapid and there exists a gap between the
pioneering use of new technology and later detailed exploration. This
has created a need for research to be undertaken. The approach this
project has taken is to apply the well-tried technologies of
interactive video and to explore the application of those technologies
and related methods in detail. This has resulted in an exhibition of
works that contribute to the area of interactive video installation
art as a medium to evoke sensory experiences. The contribution this
project has made is to create experiential art that evokes sensory
experiences related to being in aquatic environments. It has enhanced
the viewer's engagement with the works by using unobtrusive sensing
and temporal sampling techniques and has developed methodologies for
producing interactive video installations to evoke sensations.<br>
<br>
KEYWORDS<br>
Interactive, installation, sound, video, immersive, water, aquatic,
sensory, experience, studio based<br>
<br>
YEAR PUBLISHED/EXAMINED<br>
2002<br>
<br>
URL<br>
<u>http://www.artschool.utas.edu.au/petterd/<br>
<br>
</u>ORIGINAL LANGUAGE OF THESIS<br>
English<br>
<br>
COPYRIGHT OWNERSHIP<br>
Robin Petterd<br>
<br>
THESIS SUPERVISOR(S)<br>
Geoff Parr, University of Tasmania, Faculty of Arts, School of Art
(Hobart)<br>
<u>Geoff.Parr@utas.edu.au<br>
<br>
</u>Bill Hart, University of Tasmania, Faculty of Arts, School of Art
(Hobart)<br>
<u>Bill.Hart@utas.edu.au<br>
<br>
</u>UNIVERSITY / PROGRAM AFFLIATIONS<br>
University of Tasmania<br>
<br>
THESIS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST: University of Tasmania Library<br>
<br>
_____________________________________________________________________<span
></span>__<br>
<br>
<span
></span>
______________________________<br>
<span
></span>
| <span
></span
> <span
></span> |<br>
<span
></span>
| ISAST
NEWS |<br>
<span
></span>
|______________________________|<br>
<br>
_____________________________________________________________________<span
></span>__<br>
<br>
<br>
LEONARDO CALL FOR PAPERS: 7TH WORKSHOP ON SPACE AND THE ARTS<br>
<br>
Leonardo is pleased to announce its co-sponsorship of the 7th Workshop
on Space and the Arts. Deadline for submission of proposals is 29
February 2004.<br>
<br>
<br>
Space: Science, Technology and the Arts (7th Workshop on Space and the
Arts)<br>
<br>
18-21 May 2004<br>
European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESA-ESTEC) Noordwijk,
The Netherlands<br>
<br>
<br>
ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS<br>
<br>
"Space: Science, Technology and the Arts" is the theme of
the 7th workshop on space and the arts, which is being co-organized by
the European Space Agency (ESA), the International Academy of
Astronautics (IAA) and its Commission VI, Leonardo/OLATS and the OURS
Foundation. It is scheduled to be held at ESTEC - ESA's European Space
Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, The Netherlands from
18-21 May 2004.<br>
<br>
Since the birth of space exploration, artists and space scientists
have inspired each other in the development of humanity's space
programs, regularly exchanging information, ideas and visions. Artists
working with space subjects and themes invariably become heavily
involved in both the physics and the technologies of space _ either as
a muse, a metaphor, a subject or as a tool necessary for the
development of their artistic creations. Artists, wanting to explore
space on their own artistic terms, often must become very
knowledgeable about the utilization of space technologies, materials,
mechanisms and procedures in order to develop feasible art works and
projects as such projects are subject to the same conditions and
regulations governing scientific experiments designed for space. Such
activities have broadened the idea of space exploration within the
space community while making space exploration understandable in other
ways and accessible by a larger public.<br>
<br>
Now that the International Space Station (ISS) is nearing completion,
the ISS partners have begun to investigate how this orbital facility
can be utilized, not only as a platform for scientific
experimentation, but also as a platform for cultural exploration and
expression. This creates a new opportunity and challenge for artists
and other cultural professionals to work closely together with space
scientists, engineers, technologists and administrators in developing
new concepts, projects and strategies.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000"><br>
The Space: Science, Technology and the Arts workshop promises to be an
important and pivotal event as it provides a unique opportunity for
professionals in the space and the arts communities to meet, discuss
and exchange new ideas related to the cultural exploration of
space.<br>
<br>
Presentations are being solicited from space scientists, engineers,
technologists, artists, writers, journalists, art critics, curators
and philosophers who have a developed interest in the aims and theme
of the workshop.<br>
<br>
OBJECTIVES<br>
<br>
The Workshop on Space: Science, Technology and the Arts aims to:<br>
<br>
· Provide a platform where new ideas and experiments relating to the
interaction of space science, technology and the arts can be exposed
and debated <br>
· Provide an environment where people, especially artists and other
"culture professionals," together with space scientists and
engineers can exchange ideas and projects about space from the
perspective of their unique backgrounds, education and experiences<br>
· Provide a meeting place where new space-art and technology
projects can emerge and new teams and partnerships can be built<br>
· Nurture a domain of space activities, which is becoming more
recognized in both the space community and in the mainstream art
world<br>
· Disseminate the ideas and projects by publicizing the results of
the event<br>
<br>
SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS<br>
<br>
Participation in the workshop will be limited to a maximum of 40
persons and participants will be selected upon review of abstracts of
presentations proposed for the workshop.<br>
<br>
Abstracts, limited to one A4-size page, should be submitted via the
online form available at<u> http://www.congrex.nl/04c20/<br>
<br>
</u>The abstract should be in English and include:<br>
<br>
· Workshop name<br>
· Title of presentation<br>
· Name and affiliation of authors<br>
· Full contact details of presenting author, including postal and
e-mail addresses, phone and fax<br>
<br>
The deadline for abstract submission is 29 February 2004.<br>
<br>
Following acceptance, a complete paper will be required and the
author(s) will be invited to register for the Workshop.<br>
<br>
TIMETABLE<br>
<br>
29 February 2004 - Deadline for abstracts<br>
15 March 2004 - Notification of acceptance<br>
20 April 2004 - Preliminary program<br>
7 May 2004 - Deadline for papers<br>
18-21 May 2004 - Workshop<br>
<br>
WORKSHOP TOPICS<br>
<br>
Presentations can be about any aspect or issue related to Space:
Science, Technology and the Arts. Since the scope of the workshop is
large, potential authors might like to consider submitting abstracts
for papers addressing such topics as:<br>
<br>
· the impact of space technologies on the arts and vice-versa<br>
· the transfer of space technologies to art and design<br>
· the role and involvement of space bodies in the arts<br>
· designing art for the space environment - the requirements, the
limitations <br>
· synergies between the arts and space communities<br>
· the interaction between space, arts and the public<br>
· space and the new media arts<br>
· using the arts to explore space<br>
· the arts in orbit _ use of the ISS for artistic and cultural
expression<br>
<br>
Authors need not, of course, limit themselves to these topics.<br>
<br>
ORGANIZATION<br>
<br>
The Workshop will begin with a "welcome event" on Tuesday
evening, 18 May 2004. The three-day formal workshop will take place in
the Einstein Room of the main ESTEC building on 19-21 May 2004 and
will consist of oral presentations from both invited and contributing
speakers. There will be no charge for participation in the workshop.
Travel and accommodation expenses are the responsibility of each
participant.<br>
<br>
HOTEL ACCOMMODATION<br>
<br>
A reasonably priced hotel with half-pension has been reserved in the
nearby town of Noordwijk and booking information will be sent to all
participants that are accepted. Transportation to and from the hotel
and ESTEC will be provided.<br>
<br>
VENUE<br>
<br>
Postal address: European Space and Technology Centre P.O. Box 299 2200
AG Noordwijk (The Netherlands)<br>
<br>
Visiting address: European Space & Technology Centre Keplerlaan 1
2201 AZ Noordwijk (The Netherlands)<br>
<br>
General telephone number: Phone: +31 71 5656565 Fax: +31 71
5656040<br>
<br>
COMMITTEES<br>
<br>
Programme Committee: Annick Bureaud (Leonardo/OLATS)<br>
Roger Malina (International Academy of Astronautics)</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000">David Raitt (ESA)<br>
Arthur Woods (OURS Foundation)<br>
<br>
Advisory Committee:<br>
· MIR Consortium (Microgravity Interdisciplinary Research
Consortium)<br>
· Nicola Triscott, Rob La Frenais (The Arts Catalyst, London,
England)<br>
· Roger Malina, Annick Bureaud (Leonardo: Leonardo/OLATS Observatory
for the Arts and the Techno-Sciences, Paris, France, and
Leonardo/ISAST International Society for the Arts, Sciences &
Technology, USA)<br>
· Marko Peljhan (Projekt Atol, Ljubljana, Slovenia)<br>
· Alex Adriaansens, Anne Nigten (V2_Organisation, Rotterdam,
Netherlands)<br>
· Masha Chuikova (Multimedia Complex of Actual Arts, Moscow,
Russia)<br>
· Jean-Luc Soret (Paris, France)<br>
· Kara Szathmary, (International Association of Astronomical
Artists, Quebec, Canada)<br>
· Patrick Gyger, (Maison D'Ailleurs, Yverdon, Switzerland) Frank
Pietronigro (Zero Gravity Art Consortium, San Francisco, USA)<br>
<br>
CONTACT<br>
<br>
Any questions concerning the Space: Technology and the Arts workshop
should be sent to:<u> workshop2004@arsastronautica.com<br>
<br>
</u>BACKGROUND<br>
<br>
Under the title "Rencontres du 13 avril," a series of small,
one-day Workshops on Space and the Arts was co-organized by
Leonardo/OLATS, the OURS Foundation and the International Academy for
Astronautics between the years 1997 and 2002. Held in
Boulogne-Billancourt, a suburb near Paris, these workshops attracted
leading space scientists, engineers and artists on specific themes
chosen to generate exchanges between artists and scientists concerning
the cultural impact of space activities.<br>
<br>
The topics of the past six workshops have been:<br>
<br>
1997 - "Artists as Space Explorers"<br>
1998 - "Space Art / Earth Art"<br>
1999 - "Cultural Perspectives on Space"<br>
2000 - "Life in Space"<br>
2001 - "Outer Space - Cyber Space"<br>
2002 - "The Collaborative Process in Space Art"<br>
<br>
Documentation about each past workshop is online on the Leonardo/OLATS
web site at<u> http://www.olats.org<br>
<br>
</u>In order to provide a wider forum for the interaction of the
scientific and technical community with artists, the 7th Workshop on
Space and the Arts is being held at the European Space Agency's large
R&D establishment, ESTEC, in The Netherlands.<br>
<br>
LINKS<br>
<br>
<u>http://www.esa.int</u><br>
<u>http://www.estec.esa.nl</u><br>
<u>http://www.estec.esa.nl/conferences</u><br>
<u>http://www.iaanet.org</u><br>
<u>http://www.olats.org</u><br>
<u>http://www.leonardo.info</u><br>
<u>http://www.ours.ch</u> <br>
<u>http://www.arsastronautica.com<br>
<br>
</u>_____________________________<br>
<br>
<br>
LEONARDO/ISAST COLLABORATION WITH ISEA 2006<br>
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA<br>
<br>
We are pleased to inform the Leonardo network of our involvement in
the ISEA 2006 conference. The city of San Jose has been selected by
ISEA to host the 2006 conference. Steve Dietz will serve as the
Symposium Director.<br>
<br>
Leonardo/ISAST, under the leadership of ISAST Advisory Board chair
Beverly Reiser, will collaborate with the 2006 ISEA Symposium in a
number of areas, including:<br>
<br>
a) Facilitating of the Pacific Rim New Media Centers summit in
connection with the Leonardo Global Crossings (Cultural Roots of
Globalization) project.<br>
<br>
b) Publications dedicated to documenting the work of emerging artists
and of new media programs internationally. The publications will be
produced as part of the Leonardo Experimental Publishing Project,
under the direction of Pamela Grant Ryan.<br>
<br>
Leonardo/ISAST welcomes involvement and suggestions from the members
of the Leonardo network.<br>
<br>
For further information, go to
<<u>http://www.leonardo.info/</u>>.<br>
<br>
_____________________________________________________________________<span
></span>____<br>
<br>
___________________<br>
| <span
></span> |<br>
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Andre Ho: Web Concept and Design Consultant<br>
Roger Malina: Leonardo Executive Editor<br>
Stephen Wilson: Chair, Leonardo/ISAST Web Committee<br>
<br>
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Irina Aristarkhova, Roy Ascott, Michael Naimark, Craig Harris,
Julianne Pierce<br>
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Machan<br>
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fAf-LEA corresponding editors:<br>
Ricardo Dal Farra, Elga Ferreira, Young Hae-Chang, Fatima Lasay,
Lee</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" color="#000000">Weng Choy, Jose-Carlos
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