[LEAuthors] Leonardo Electronic Almanac vol.12 no.1 January 2004
MIT Press
lea at mail-mitpress.mit.edu
Tue Jan 20 18:45:56 EST 2004
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Leonardo Electronic Almanac volume 12, number 1, January 2004
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ISSN #1071-4391
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| CONTENTS |
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INTRODUCTION
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< LEA Special Issue - Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission and Music >
< Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 13 2003 - Table of Contents >
FEATURES
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< Performance Space Meets Cyberspace: Seeking the
Creative Idiom and Technical Model for Live Music
on Broadband, by Michael Bussière >
< The Gallbladder Sonata: Transmission Time on
the Internet, by Marlena Corcoran >
< Mediating (through) Imagination: Web-based Sound Art, by Trace Reddell >
LEONARDO REVIEWS
----------------
< The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and
Popular Culture, Reviewed by Pia Tikka >
< Enough, reviewed by George Gessert >
< The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, reviewed by Allan Graubard >
LEONARDO ABSTRACTS SERVICE
--------------------------
ISAST NEWS
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< Leonardo Call For Papers: 7th Workshop on Space and the Arts >
< Leonardo/ISAST collaboration with ISEA 2006 >
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| INTRODUCTION |
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LEA SPECIAL ISSUE - GROOVE, PIT AND WAVE: RECORDING, TRANSMISSION AND MUSIC
IN CONJUNCTION WITH *LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL* VOLUME 13
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.
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.
*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 Bussière, 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.
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.
LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL
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.
LMJ13, "Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording,
Transmission and Music," can be purchased via the
MIT Press at http://mitpress.mit.edu/LMJ or
journals-orders at mit.edu.
More info about the issue is available at: http://lmj.mit.edu.
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[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.]
LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, VOLUME 13 2003 - TABLE OF CONTENTS
< Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission and Music >
INTRODUCTION
< Nicolas Collins: Groove, Pit and Wave >
ARTICLES
< Peter Manning: The Influence of Recording
Technologies on the Early Development of
Electroacoustic Music >
< Yasunao Tone: John Cage and Recording >
< Douglas Kahn: Christian Marclay's Early Years: An Interview >
< Nick Collins: Recursive Audio Cutting >
< David First: The Music of the Sphere: An
Investigation into Asymptotic Harmonics,
Brainwave Entrainment, Gestural Improvisation,
and the Earth as a Giant Bell >
< Matthew Burtner: Regenerative Feedback in the
Medium of Radio: *Study 1.0 (FM) for Radio
Transceiver* >
< Guy-Marc Hinant: Artist's Notebook: TOHU BOHU -
Considerations on the nature of noise, in 78
fragments >
< Caleb Stuart: Damaged Sound: Glitching and
Skipping Compact Discs in the Audio of Yasunao
Tone, Nicolas Collins and Oval >
< Álvaro Barbosa: Displaced Soundscapes: A Survey
of Network Systems for Music and Sonic Art
Creation >
< Holger Schulze: Hand-Luggage: For a Generative Theory of Artifacts >
< Sérgio Freire: Early Musical Impressions from Both Sides of the Loudspeaker >
EXTENDED ABSTRACTS
< Christopher Burns and Matthew Burtner:
Recursive Audio Systems: Acoustic Feedback in
Composition >
< Michael Bussière: Performance Space Meets
Cyberspace: Seeking the Creative Idiom and
Technical Model for Live Music on Broadband >
< Marlena Corcoran: *The Gallbladder Sonata*:
Transmission Time on the Internet >
< Trace Reddell: Mediating (through) Imagination: Web-Based Sound Art >
< Tobias C. van Veen: Turn/Stile: Interpreting
Udo Kasemets' *CaleNdarON* for a Single Turntable
with Treatment and Surfaces >
LMJ13 CD COMPANION
< Splitting Bits, Closing Loops: Sound on Sound, Curated by Philip Sherburne >
TRACKLIST AND CREDITS
CD INTRODUCTION
< Philip Sherburne: Splitting Bits, Closing Loops: Sound on Sound >
CD CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
< AGF, Leo's Code >
< M. Behrens, For the Further Consequences of Reinterpretation >
< Alejandra and Aeron, Village Football >
< DAT Politics, Bag >
< Stephan Mathieu, A Microsound Fairytale (Conclusion) >
< Francisco López, Untitled #115 (Part 1) >
< Francisco López, Untitled #115 (Part 2) >
< Institut fuer Feinmotorik, Slo >
< Janek Schaefer, Rink (excerpt) >
< Steve Roden, OTR >
< Scanner, Spirit Trace >
< Stephen Vitiello, Slow Rewind >
2003 LEONARDO AND LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL AUTHOR INDEX
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| FEATURES |
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PERFORMANCE SPACE MEETS CYBERSPACE: SEEKING THE
CREATIVE IDIOM AND TECHNICAL MODEL FOR LIVE MUSIC
ON BROADBAND
by Michael Bussière (media artist and educator),
Sonic Design Interactive Inc., 12 Clarey Avenue,
Ottawa, Ontario, K1S 2R7 Canada.
michael at sonicdesign.fm
ABSTRACT
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.
_____________________________
BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
EXPERIMENTS AND DEMONSTRATIONS
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
TECHNICAL FINDINGS
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Remote control options. To what degree can
remote technological intervention further
encourage participation?
CONCLUSIONS
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.
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.
Video documentaries for all events in this series
are available for viewing at:
http://www.marsville.tv
_____________________________
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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.
_____________________________
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. I use the term "videoconference," which
typically describes a point-to-point business
application, for convenience only.
2. Michael Benedikt, in *Cyberspace: First Steps*
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) p. 126
3. This includes that which is enabled by technological intervention.
4. ISDN supports data transfer rates of 64 Kbps,
or the equivalent of a phone line.
5. H.323 offers IP conferencing rates up to 1.5 Mbps.
6. John Cage, *Silence* (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1961) p. 57.
7. CA*net4 is Canada's national optical Internet,
devoted to research of advanced broadband
applications. See http://www.canarie.ca.
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.
9. John Cage, *A Year from Monday* (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 1963) p. 89.
10. See Marcos Novak, *Cyberspace: First Steps* (see [2]), p. 226.
_____________________________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Bussière 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, Bussière received two
national gold prizes in 1987 from CAPAC.
Bussière'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.
In recent years, Bussière 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.
Bussière 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.
ARTICLE RECEIVED 10 NOVEMBER, 2003
==========================
*THE GALLBLADDER SONATA*: TRANSMISSION TIME ON THE INTERNET
by Marlena Corcoran, Barer Strasse 54A, D-80799 Munich, Germany
corcoran at anglistik.uni-muenchen.de
*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.
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.
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].
SONATA AS TEXT
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:
http://lea.mit.edu)
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].
THE COMPUTER AS A KEYBOARD INSTRUMENT
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.
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.
CONCERT OUT OF SYNCH
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.
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.
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:
"This is the sym-pho-ny
That Schubert wrote
And never fin-ished" [7].
As poets and musicians have long known, sometimes it just doesn't work out.
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].
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.
TRANSMISSION AS FEEDBACK
Three short audio files, recorded at the Munich
performance of *The Gallbladder Sonata*, are
posted at http://lea.mit.edu. 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:
"Es war ein' chinesische Eisenbahn
Da sass ein chinesischer Mann."
"(There was a Chinese railway.
There sat a Chinese man.)"
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.
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.
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.
SHHHHH--IT'S MUSIC
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........."
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].
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?"
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*.
TIME IS A RIVER - BUT NOT THE ONE YOU THOUGHT
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.
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.
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.
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.
MY TIME IS UP
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.
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:
"Shake on it! Done!
And should I ever say,
Stay! You're beautiful,
You moment, you!
Then lock me up.
I'll go down glad.
The death bell knolls.
Your job done,
The clock may stop, the hands fall.
My time is up" [11].
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:
"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone. . ." [12].
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.
_____________________________
NOTES AND REFERENCES
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.
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:
http:/www.marlenacorcoran.com/gallbladder/index.html.
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*.
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.
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.
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.
7. I do not know who created the mnemonic device,
though I remember my mother singing it tunelessly.
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:
http://www.fortda.org/origin.html. The relation
between the fort-da game and Lacan's mirror stage
is discussed at:
http://www.barbery.net/psy/fiches/fort-da-miroir.htm.
9. Freud discusses the death instincts in [8], pp. 38-64.
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.
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.
12. see [10].
_____________________________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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).
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
www.marlenacorcoran.com.
ARTICLE RECEIVED 23 NOVEMBER, 2003
=============================
MEDIATING (THROUGH) IMAGINATION: WEB-BASED SOUND ART
by Trace Reddell, Digital Media Studies, Sturm
Hall 216B, University of Denver, Denver, CO
80208, U.S.A.
treddell at du.edu
WWW: http://www.du.edu/~treddell
INTRODUCTION: THE TELHARMONIC BROWSER
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
CRITMIXERS AND SOUNDTEXTS
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.
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
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.
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.
: CRITMIXERS
*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.
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.
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.
: SOUNDTEXTS
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
PERFORMANCES AND WEBCASTS
One cannot have control "over" that of which one
is part, or even formulate it completely - one
can only participate more deeply in it.
-- Ronald Sukenick [15]
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.
: THE INTERNET DOWNLOAD SOUND OF GALACTUS ZEIT
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.
: RADIO PHARMAKOPOLIS
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.
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.
: PHARMAKON.T (DJ WEBSPINNA) AND PBS
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.
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.
_____________________________
NOTES AND REFERENCES
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:
http://www.obsolete.com/120_years/.
2. See Lisa Gitelman, *Scripts, Grooves, and
Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the
Edison Era* (Stanford, CA: University of Stanford
Press, 1999) p. 16.
3. See http://www.altx.com/audio.
4. From the liner notes to Alt-X Audio #1 (1997).
5. See http://www.markamerika.com/filmtext/.
6. See http://www.alphanumericlabs.com.
7. See http://www.csulb.edu/~gbach/.
8. See http://www.electronicbookreview.com.
9. Jacques Derrida, in *Disseminations*, trans.
Barbara Johnson (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1981) p. 127.
10. See [9] p. 127.
11. See http://www.stasisfield.com/space/present/palimpsest/.
12. See http://www.stasisfield.com/space/present/index.html.
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
http://www.esoteric-sensationalism.com/.
14. See http://www.notype.com.
15. Ronald Sukenick, *In Form: Digressions on the
Act of Fiction* (Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1985).
16. See http://www.du.edu/~tpotts/chanceoperations.html.
17. See http://alien.mur.at/radiotopia.
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:
http://www.stasisfield.com/space/present/index.html.
19. See L. Gitelman [2] p. 228.
20. See http://www.djrabbi.com.
21. See http://www.pharmakopolis.com/adapt/.
22. See http://www.usdat.us/.
_____________________________
WORKS AND PERFORMANCES BY TRACE REDDELL
"LITMIXER: The Literary Remediator," in
*Electronic Book Review*, No. 12, edited by Mark
Amerika, Joseph Tabbi, and Cary Wolf,
http://www.electronicbookreview.com (2001).
*Machinery for Dreaming,* as part of The
Palimpsest Project, curated by John Kannenberg,
Stasis_Space, http://www.stasisfield.com (2002).
*Eliot's Magic Lantern*, in The Audible
Still-Life, curated by John Kannenberg,
Stasis_Space, http://www.stasisfield.com (2003).
AS GALACTUS ZEIT:
"An Evening of Chance Operations," hosted by
Tyler Potts,
http://www.du.edu/~tpotts/chanceoperations.html,
13 March, 2002.
"sonicPOP," at visualsoundings, Museum of
Contemporary Art, Denver,
http://www.du.edu/~treddell/events.htm, 17
October, 2002.
Radio Pharmakopolis, OpenAir Radiotopia, Ars
Electronica 2002, http://alien.mur.at/radiotopia,
10 September, 2002.
AS PHARMAKON.T (DJ WEBSPINNA):
"Music for Ruins," The A:D:A:P:T Festival, Museum
of Contemporary Art, Denver,
http://www.pharmakopolis.com/adapt/, 15 May, 2003.
pharmakon.t, webspinna set, DJ Rabbi, http://www.djrabbi.com, 2003.
PBS, Open Air: Open Radio 03, Barcelona, Spain,
http://openserver.cccb.org/, 29 September to 3
October, 2003.
PBS, "Department Works, Mixologies, and
Transformations," U.S. Department of Art and
Technology, http://www.usdat.us/tel-span, 22
August to 6 October, 2003.
ADDITIONAL REFERENCES
Alt-X Audio, http://www.altx.com/audio, 1997-2003.
Mark Amerika, Chad Mossholder and John Vega,
*Filmtext 2.0,*
http://www.markamerika.com/filmtext/, 2002.
August Highland, *Alphanumeric Labs*, http://www.alphanumericlabs.com, 2003.
Glenn Bach, http://www.csulb.edu/~gbach/.
_____________________________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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:
http://www.du.edu/~treddell/.
ARTICLE RECEIVED 18 NOVEMBER, 2003
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________
| |
| LEONARDO REVIEWS |
| 2004.01 |
|_________________________________|
_________________________________________________________________________
*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.
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*.
These and the rest of the month's offerings are at www.leonardoreviews.org.
Michael Punt
Editor-in-Chief
Leonardo Reviews
_____________________________
Leonardo reviews posted January 2004:
Absurd Summer, by Koji Asano
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Anecdotal Theory, by Jane Gallop
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Creation: Life and How to Make It, by Steve Grand
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell
A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720, by Barbara J. Shapiro
Reviewed by Michael Punt
Digital Creativity: A Reader, edited by Colin Beardon and Lone Malmborg
and
Digital Media Revisited, edited by Gunnar
Liestol, Andrew Morrison and Terje Rasmussen
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader,
edited by Claudine Frank; translated by Claudine
Frank and Camille Nash
Reviewed by Allan Graubard
The Eighth Day: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo
Kac, edited by Sheilah Britton and Dan Collins
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New
Media, edited by Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R.
Kendrick
Reviewed by Dene Grigar
Els Altres Arquitectes (The Other Architects),
Museu de Zoologia, Barcelona, Spain
Reviewed by Dennis Dollens
Enough, by Bill McKibben
Reviewed by George Gessert
Genetic Architectures / Arquitecturas genéticas, by Alberto T. Estévez et al.
Reviewed by Rob Harle
Hacker Culture, By Douglas Thomas
Reviewed by Eugene Thacker
In the Garden, CD by Yusef Lateef, Adam Rudolph, Go: Organic Orchestra
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination, by Maynard Solomon
Reviewed by Richard Kade
Masks of the Universe: Changing Ideas on the
Nature of the Cosmos, by Edward Harrison
Reviewed by Rob Harle
Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen
in the 20th Century, by Scott Bukatman
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
The People's Music, Jon Rose
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet
Modernity 1917-1941, by David L. Hoffman
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and
Popular Culture, by Roger N. Lancaster
Reviewed by Pia Tikka
Undead Science: Science Studies and the Afterlife of Cold Fusion, by Bart Simon
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Vingt Chansons pour Jean Cocteau (Twenty Songs
for Jean Cocteau), by Maurice Methot
Reviewed by Chris Cobb
_____________________________
THE TROUBLE WITH NATURE: SEX IN SCIENCE AND POPULAR CULTURE
By Roger N. Lancaster, University of California
Press, Berkeley, 2003. 442 pp., illustrated.
Trade, $55; paper £15.95. ISBN: 0-520-20287-2;
ISBN: 0-520-23620-3.
Reviewed by Pia Tikka, Researcher in University
of Art and Design, Hämeentie 135 C, 00560
Helsinki, Finland.
Pia.Tikka at uiah.fi
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."
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.
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.
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.
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."
NOTES AND REFERENCES
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.
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).
3. L. Barrett, R. Dunbar, J. Lycett, *Human
Evolutionary Psychology* (New York, NY: Palgrave
Publishers Ltd, 2002).
_____________________________
ENOUGH
by Bill McKibben. New York: Henry Holt, 2003. $25.00 hardcover. ISBN:
0-8050-7096-6.
Reviewed by George Gessert
ggessert at igc.org
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
_____________________________
THE EDGE OF SURREALISM: A ROGER CAILLOIS READER
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.
Reviewed by Allan Graubard, 2900 Connecticut
Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20008, U.S.A.
a.graubard at starpower.net
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
_____________________________
CREATION: LIFE AND HOW TO MAKE IT
By Steve Grand, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000. Paper, 218 pp. Illus. b/w. ISBN:
0-674-00654-2:
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell
pepperell at ntlword.com
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
_______________________________________________________________________
______________________________
| |
| LEONARDO ABSTRACTS |
| SERVICE |
|______________________________|
________________________________________________________________________
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.
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 leo at mitpress.mit.edu.
_____________________________
AUTHOR
Robin Petterd
robin at otheredge.com.au
LANGUAGES FAMILIAR TO THE AUTHOR
English
THESIS TITLE
Liquid Sensations: Evoking Sensory Experiences
with Interactive Video Installation Art
ABSTRACT
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
KEYWORDS
Interactive, installation, sound, video,
immersive, water, aquatic, sensory, experience,
studio based
YEAR PUBLISHED/EXAMINED
2002
URL
http://www.artschool.utas.edu.au/petterd/
ORIGINAL LANGUAGE OF THESIS
English
COPYRIGHT OWNERSHIP
Robin Petterd
THESIS SUPERVISOR(S)
Geoff Parr, University of Tasmania, Faculty of Arts, School of Art (Hobart)
Geoff.Parr at utas.edu.au
Bill Hart, University of Tasmania, Faculty of Arts, School of Art (Hobart)
Bill.Hart at utas.edu.au
UNIVERSITY / PROGRAM AFFLIATIONS
University of Tasmania
THESIS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST: University of Tasmania Library
_______________________________________________________________________
______________________________
| |
| ISAST NEWS |
|______________________________|
_______________________________________________________________________
LEONARDO CALL FOR PAPERS: 7TH WORKSHOP ON SPACE AND THE ARTS
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.
Space: Science, Technology and the Arts (7th Workshop on Space and the Arts)
18-21 May 2004
European Space Research and Technology Centre
(ESA-ESTEC) Noordwijk, The Netherlands
ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
OBJECTIVES
The Workshop on Space: Science, Technology and the Arts aims to:
· Provide a platform where new ideas and
experiments relating to the interaction of space
science, technology and the arts can be exposed
and debated
· 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
· Provide a meeting place where new space-art and
technology projects can emerge and new teams and
partnerships can be built
· Nurture a domain of space activities, which is
becoming more recognized in both the space
community and in the mainstream art world
· Disseminate the ideas and projects by publicizing the results of the event
SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS
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.
Abstracts, limited to one A4-size page, should be
submitted via the online form available at
http://www.congrex.nl/04c20/
The abstract should be in English and include:
· Workshop name
· Title of presentation
· Name and affiliation of authors
· Full contact details of presenting author,
including postal and e-mail addresses, phone and
fax
The deadline for abstract submission is 29 February 2004.
Following acceptance, a complete paper will be
required and the author(s) will be invited to
register for the Workshop.
TIMETABLE
29 February 2004 - Deadline for abstracts
15 March 2004 - Notification of acceptance
20 April 2004 - Preliminary program
7 May 2004 - Deadline for papers
18-21 May 2004 - Workshop
WORKSHOP TOPICS
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:
· the impact of space technologies on the arts and vice-versa
· the transfer of space technologies to art and design
· the role and involvement of space bodies in the arts
· designing art for the space environment - the requirements, the limitations
· synergies between the arts and space communities
· the interaction between space, arts and the public
· space and the new media arts
· using the arts to explore space
· the arts in orbit _ use of the ISS for artistic and cultural expression
Authors need not, of course, limit themselves to these topics.
ORGANIZATION
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.
HOTEL ACCOMMODATION
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.
VENUE
Postal address: European Space and Technology
Centre P.O. Box 299 2200 AG Noordwijk (The
Netherlands)
Visiting address: European Space & Technology
Centre Keplerlaan 1 2201 AZ Noordwijk (The
Netherlands)
General telephone number: Phone: +31 71 5656565 Fax: +31 71 5656040
COMMITTEES
Programme Committee: Annick Bureaud (Leonardo/OLATS)
Roger Malina (International Academy of Astronautics)
David Raitt (ESA)
Arthur Woods (OURS Foundation)
Advisory Committee:
· MIR Consortium (Microgravity Interdisciplinary Research Consortium)
· Nicola Triscott, Rob La Frenais (The Arts Catalyst, London, England)
· 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)
· Marko Peljhan (Projekt Atol, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
· Alex Adriaansens, Anne Nigten (V2_Organisation, Rotterdam, Netherlands)
· Masha Chuikova (Multimedia Complex of Actual Arts, Moscow, Russia)
· Jean-Luc Soret (Paris, France)
· Kara Szathmary, (International Association of
Astronomical Artists, Quebec, Canada)
· Patrick Gyger, (Maison D'Ailleurs, Yverdon,
Switzerland) Frank Pietronigro (Zero Gravity Art
Consortium, San Francisco, USA)
CONTACT
Any questions concerning the Space: Technology
and the Arts workshop should be sent to:
workshop2004 at arsastronautica.com
BACKGROUND
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.
The topics of the past six workshops have been:
1997 - "Artists as Space Explorers"
1998 - "Space Art / Earth Art"
1999 - "Cultural Perspectives on Space"
2000 - "Life in Space"
2001 - "Outer Space - Cyber Space"
2002 - "The Collaborative Process in Space Art"
Documentation about each past workshop is online
on the Leonardo/OLATS web site at
http://www.olats.org
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.
LINKS
http://www.esa.int
http://www.estec.esa.nl
http://www.estec.esa.nl/conferences
http://www.iaanet.org
http://www.olats.org
http://www.leonardo.info
http://www.ours.ch
http://www.arsastronautica.com
_____________________________
LEONARDO/ISAST COLLABORATION WITH ISEA 2006
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA
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.
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:
a) Facilitating of the Pacific Rim New Media
Centers summit in connection with the Leonardo
Global Crossings (Cultural Roots of
Globalization) project.
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.
Leonardo/ISAST welcomes involvement and
suggestions from the members of the Leonardo
network.
For further information, go to <http://www.leonardo.info/>.
_________________________________________________________________________
___________________
| |
| |
| CREDITS |
| |
|___________________|
Nisar Keshvani: LEA Editor-in-Chief
Michael Punt: Leonardo Reviews Editor-in-Chief
Patrick Lambelet: LEA Managing Editor
Andre Ho: Web Concept and Design Consultant
Roger Malina: Leonardo Executive Editor
Stephen Wilson: Chair, Leonardo/ISAST Web Committee
Editorial Advisory Board:
Irina Aristarkhova, Roy Ascott, Michael Naimark, Craig Harris, Julianne Pierce
Gallery Advisory Board:
Mark Amerika, Paul Brown, Choy Kok Kee, Steve Dietz, Fatima Lasay, Kim Machan
fAf-LEA corresponding editors:
Ricardo Dal Farra, Elga Ferreira, Young Hae-Chang, Fatima Lasay, Lee
Weng Choy, Jose-Carlos Mariategui, Marcus Neusetter, Elaine Ng and Marc Voge
_________________________________________________________________________
___________________
| |
| LEA |
| WORLD WIDE WEB |
| ACCESS |
|___________________|
For over a decade, Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) has thrived
as an international peer-reviewed electronic journal and web
archive, covering the interaction of the arts, sciences and
technology. LEA emphasizes rapid publication of recent work and
critical discussion on topics of current excitement. Many
contributors are younger scholars and artists, and there is a slant
towards shorter, less academic texts.
Contents include Leonardo Reviews, edited by Michael Punt,
Leonardo Research Abstracts of recent Ph.D. and Masters theses,
curated Galleries of current new media artwork, and special
issues on topics ranging from Artists and Scientists in times of
War, to Zero Gravity Art, to the History of New Media.
LEA is accessible using the following URL: http://lea.mit.edu
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________
| LEA |
| PUBLISHING |
| INFORMATION |
|_________________|
Editorial Address:
Leonardo Electronic Almanac
Studio 3a, 35 Place du Bourg-de-four
1204 Geneva, Switzerland
E-mail: <lea at mitpress.mit.edu>
_________________________________________________________________________
Copyright (2004), Leonardo, the International Society for the
Arts, Sciences and Technology
All Rights Reserved.
Leonardo Electronic Almanac is published by:
The MIT Press Journals, Five Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142
U.S.A.
Re-posting of the content of this journal is prohibited without
permission of Leonardo/ISAST, except for the posting of news and
events listings which have been independently received.
Leonardo/ISAST and the MIT Press give institutions permission to
offer access to LEA within the organization through such
resources as restricted local gopher and mosaic services. Open
access to other individuals and organizations is not permitted.
_________________________________________________________________________
< Ordering Information >
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=4&tid=27&mode=p
Leonardo Electronic Almanac is free to Leonardo/ISAST members and
to subscribers to the journal Leonardo for the 2004 subscription
year. The rate for Non-Leonardo individual subscribers is $35.00,
and for Non-Leonardo institutional subscribers the rate is
$77.00. All subscriptions are entered for the calendar year only.
All orders must be prepaid by check (must be drawn against U.S.
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Express. Where student subscription rates are available, a
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Note: In order to place orders electronically, you must be using
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the security features necessary to use this interface. Please use
the addresses below to submit your order. Address all orders and
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TEL: (617) 253-2889 (M-F, 9-5)
FAX: (617) 577-1545 (24 hours)
For questions contact:
journals-orders at mit.edu (subscriptions)
_________________________________________________________________________
________________
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| ADVERTISING |
|________________|
Leonardo Electronic Almanac is published monthly -- individuals
and institutions interested in advertising in LEA, either in the
distributed text version or on the World Wide Web site should contact:
Leonardo Advertising Department
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_________________________________________________________________________
____________________
| |
| ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS |
|____________________|
LEA acknowledges with thanks the Rockefeller and
Ford Foundations for their support to
Leonardo/ISAST and its projects.
_________________________________________________________________________
< End of Leonardo Electronic Almanac 12 (01) >
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