Global Eyes
Vibeke Sorensen, Professor of Film and Media Studies and
Research Fellow, Center for Film and Media Research
Department of Languages and Literatures, CLAS
Arizona State University, Tempe
September 27, 2006
Thank you for inviting me to the 3rd China International Cartoon and Digital Arts Festival (CICDAF). I am honored to be here and share this special event with you. It is a great opportunity for me to see so many beautiful works, and to learn more about you and your country. I want to thank the organizers of this Festival, as well as the Centre of International Cultural Exchange of China (CICE) and the Ministry of Culture, for taking so much care in making it so wonderful, for bringing so many talented artists and professionals together from around the world in a spirit of cooperation and joy. I also want to thank the city of Changzhou for graciously hosting us.
Introduction
I want to now tell you a little about myself. My professional background includes study in English literature and mathematics, as well as music and architecture. I have a graduate degree in film, video, and electronic media. I studied visual art, and moved from drawing and painting to photography, film, video, computer graphics and animation. Later I worked with networked digital media, including the world-wide-web and tangible media, to put it all together.
As a professor, I taught at California Institute of the Arts, where I was the Founding Director of the Computer Animation Laboratory, and Princeton University , where I held a joint appointment between Computer Science and Visual Art. I was Full Professor and Founding Chair of the Division of Animation and Digital Arts (DADA), in the School of Cinema-Television, at the University of Southern California from 1994 – 2005. And at the moment I am Professor of Film and Media Studies and Research Fellow in the Center for Film and Media Research at Arizona State University , in Tempe.
Denmark
I was born in Denmark, and I speak fluent Danish. I have been many years in the United States, where I live now, and that is why most of my academic and professional affiliations are there.
As I am representing Denmark as well as the US today, I would like to speak for a few minutes about my native country. Denmark is very small, with only 5.4 million inhabitants. Situated at the northern most part of the continent, it is part of Europe looking to the south, and part of Scandinavia, looking to the north. The Romans never settled there, thinking the people heathens unable to be civilized. Highly independent, the Vikings, my ancestors, were known for the fear they spread. But they were also farmers, fishermen, as well as artists and craftsmen who made beautiful jewelry as well as fast boats. My name “Vibeke” comes from the Sanskrit. The Vikings sailed west to North America via Britain, Iceland, and Greenland, and east to Russia and south, to Turkey and beyond. They brought some words back with them, including my name. My Indian colleagues have told me that “viveka” means “consciousness” in Sanskrit.
Scandinavia was the last part of Europe to be Christianized, at around 1050, and therefore many pre-Christian, indigenous concepts have survived. This includes rituals such as the burning of bonfires all along the beaches on the longest day of the year, the summer solstice, meant to insure that the sun would shine so that plants would grow. It was adopted by the Church and renamed “The Eve of St. John the Baptist” and unfortunately used to burn women who were considered witches, because they were independent or practiced homeopathic medicine. Nevertheless, Scandinavian women have always been independent. Since Viking times, land could be owned by women, and there was no such thing as an illegitimate child. The idea that women are equal to men is so basic to the culture that it is reflected in the structure of the language. In Danish, there are only 2 genders: common and neuter. Men and women are the same, and things are alive or not. The idea that there are many “gods” or “minds” and that they exist in everything that is alive, meant that everything needed to stay in balance as part of a larger living system, and therefore people should behave responsibly. This is very similar to contemporary consciousness studies, and more prominently, the ecology movement, which is very strong in Denmark today.
Hans Christian Andersen and Walt Disney
When students study Danish literature, it includes traditional folk tales as well as influential authors. Perhaps our most famous writer is the storyteller Hans Christian Andersen, who I understand is very popular here in China. 2005 was the 200th anniversary of his birth, and his legacy continues through books translated into many languages. In the United States, Walt Disney was inspired by his work and made animated films based on them, including The Little Mermaid (1989). There is a famous statue dedicated to her that still sits in the harbor in Copenhagen, the capital, welcoming sailors and visitors to Denmark. There is also a famous amusement park there called Tivoli which was a major influence on the design of Disneyland.
Contemporary Danish Animation: Lejf Marcussen
The most well known contemporary Danish animator is Lejf Marcussen, who works in non-verbal film, inspired by music and motion. He received the Norman McLaren Heritage Award a few years ago for his body of work, started in 1977. It is visually and conceptually inventive, combining photography, painting, and 3D computer animation. His film, Den Offentlige Rost (The Public Voice, 1988) is considered a masterpiece. As the late historian William Moritz wrote in 1997:
“ The Public Voice starts with a painting by Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux and appears to zoom in on a detail, but the zoom continues into imaginary space, finding impossibly complex images hidden inside the smallest spot of each passing figure, until finally the zoom pulls out again, revealing a completely different set of details.
These include a portrait of Salvador Dali and a portrait of Marcussen himself. The dazzling transformations often bear a satirical or marvelous surprise in the suggestion that such a thing might turn into or conceal another object. Today when viewing the film, one thinks, perhaps, of computer morphing, but Marcussen accomplished his transformations entirely by hand, and rather more subtly and intricately than the later electronic effects -- above all with a complexity of ideas usually missing from ‘special effects.' ”
Marcussen's film Sten (The Stones, 1982) explores the idea that living beings inhabit stones and rocks. His most recent computer animated film Angeli (2002) is based on the dreams of patients in a hospital.
People, Place and Peace
Denmark has salt water, sand, herring, potatoes, cows, a few pigs, and windmills. But it is the people, and their “knowhow,” that are considered the most valuable natural resource. Therefore, education and health care are priorities, and the main focus today is on medicine, Information Technology (IT), and innovation in the global environment. Such a small country has always to be concerned with keeping pace, and keeping peace, with the outside world, which is very close by, just a short boat ride away. And it comes closer, even faster when images fly at the speed of light through the network.
The Cartoon Crisis
The Danes were surprised when some of their cartoon images caused a huge international problem last year. The Cartoon Crisis, as it was called, put Denmark in the news around the world. It was a very complex situation, and I can understand both sides. I am bringing up the subject now because it is a strong example of how powerful images and media can be. It is very difficult to have an international visual language, and that is why it needs to be developed with sensitivity towards all cultures.
Cultural Difference is Not Just a Joke
The Cartoon Crisis revealed fundamental differences about what constitutes humor, especially when it is cultural difference itself that is seen to be amusing. Even though it is fairly innocuous on a local level within social groups, on the global level it can have serious consequences. To those who are the object of such jokes, it can be very hurtful, seen as disrespect and ignorance. So it has to be done with care, and some knowledge beforehand of how it will be received away from home, as part of a much larger public discussion.
Differing Role of Images
Another major difference is the role of images themselves. In some cultures images are not considered visual metaphors. Instead, they are thought to be the thing itself, actual embodiments of deities, spirits, and so on. It is therefore a problem for people in these cultures to make or view drawings of them. But for others, including most ethnic Danes, images are visual metaphors, functional devices for exploring ideas, including religion and social problems. People need to understand these fundamental differences about each other.
Complexities of Global Visual Culture
Most people in the world live and think locally, despite the internet. So this crisis underscores the complexity of visual culture in the digital age, and shows how unprepared most people are to engage it. We are having a global multicultural visual discussion. It is so plural and so big, that it behooves us to learn as much as we can about the world and develop strategies, especially through visual art, the core language of global telecommunications, for living together peacefully.
More than anything else, we need to learn the history of the world from the point of view of the people who live it, and this means engaging folk as well as fine art, and indigenous films. In the past, fragmentation and destruction of images and other forms of cultural memory was a main technique used by cultures in conflict to destroy each other. A clever strategy for survival was juxtaposition and syncretism (ie. when images appear the same one could survive by taking a new name or association). Fortunately we have surviving images from many otherwise disappearing cultures because of this syncretism as well as other creative forms of image transfer.
For a culture to survive, however, it needs more than just the images, it needs the meaning of the images, too. And this is encoded in stories, or the narrative. That is why it is so important in new media for the images be brought to it by the native people, and through their own stories.
Now that we are in a much wider global cultural exchange with new possibilities for image transfer and integration, we can explore a range of methods for combining them. But we need to be careful to do this in a spirit of respect, and consider the consequences. The very same media that can destroy memory can also restore or reclaim it, and if we are clever, give it new life that can enhance rather than diminish our collective human heritage, building upon its great beauty and richness for the benefit of everyone.
We can begin to address the issue of preservation of handcraft, in particular, which is being replaced quickly by massed produced items, despite the fact that it is generally considered to be of much higher quality both technically and esthetically. We can develop respectful ways to transfer it to digital media that will not only give these media a much more human and natural quality, but will likely help establish greater appreciation for it. It will also help us to be more in contact with our material and natural world that we ultimately depend on for survival.
I think we will see that there is much in common across our many cultures, partly because of exchange of images and knowledge in the past, but also because of our common humanity. We need to reinforce this. By seeing through “other” eyes we will better understand that they are “our” eyes. Together, we are all one family of man, one people with many faces, all sharing a common destiny on our common planet.
Experimental and Ethnographic Animation
These commonalities are beautifully expressed in world art, and animation and digital media have special integrative properties that help assimilate them. A common digital foundation brings together physical media, including drawing and painting, music, puppets, but also photography, film, live action and special effects. It combines media, processes, content, and production, in ways that provide vast conceptual and creative possibilities. There is a fusion of media, potentially open to all cultures for self-expression using their own images and stories, and that is why it is one of the fastest growing areas of creative activity in the world.
Experimental animation in particular has a history of innovating new techniques as a by-product of crossover of cultures through the integration of moving images. It is where “dynamic pluralism” serves as a main catalyst for research and development of new technologies, especially the U. S. entertainment industry. Projects that explore how the mind works to see and connect patterns across time and space have been unconsciously quoted in films all over the world. For example, the pioneering artist Len Lye, from New Zealand , used animation to externalize how the mind works to transform images in the 1930s. He transferred the technique of indigenous batik printing from fabric to film, making beautiful hand printed pieces that were also the first multi-color film processes ever made.
The images people make show what and how they think, their relationships to nature and the earth. It is the way people negotiate ideas when it is necessary to transcend the limitations of spoken language, and this will increase. One can see experimental animation as a new kind of ethnography that integrates movement, folk and fine art with documentary. It is beginning to include scientific imaging as well, and this will have a growing importance in global discourse, especially in regard to the ecology where cultural diversity and biodiversity are seen as linked.
I would like to now describe a few examples of the kind of animation that I am talking about.
A good example of ethnographic animation is Watunna, made by Stacey Steers in 1989. Narrated by Stan Brakhage, it "depicts five stories from the creation myths of the Yekuana Indians of the Upper Orinoco River in Venezuela, and employs colorful metamorphosing designs based on motifs" reflective of nature "from Yekuana art, as well as from other pre-Columbian, African, and South Pacific traditions."
In Brazil, Prof. Heitor Capuzzo directs the midia@rte Laboratory at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte (UFMG), which has been producing innovative projects that explore the cosmologies of native peoples of the world by bridging their arts, especially puppet theatre, with expanded forms of digital animation such as synthethic characters, computer games, and interactive multimedia installations. He is also very interested in working together with Chinese artists and scholars to learn more about China, especially cut outs and classical animation from Shanghai. You can see his website here: http://www.eba.ufmg.br/midiaarte/index_eng.html
A series of wonderful documentaries that raise questions about the technological transformation of the planet is Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy: Koyaanisqatsi (life out of balance), Powaqqatsi (life in transformation), and Naqoyqatsi (life as war). They include beautiful cinematography and time-lapsed images recorded all over the earth, as well as stunning visual effects. His website is: http://www.koyaanisqatsi.com/
In the popular music world, the U. S. singer Michael Jackson produced “Earth Song,” a music-video work that employs live film footage from around the world, including destruction of the rainforest in Brazil and poaching of elephants in Africa, in order to bring attention to problems of environmental destruction. He used special visual effects to show hope that it can be reversed. You can see the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imc2-qzfRs8&mode=related&search
Former U. S. Vice-President Al Gore recently completed a film and book called “An Inconvenient Truth” that brings the crisis in global warming to public attention. He used scientific animation together with live action to tell the gripping story of what is happening to our ecosystem today. His website is at: http://www.climatecrisis.net/
Also in Brazil, biochemist Prof. Leopoldo de Meis of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), is making scientific animation integrating visual art, as well as theatre and folk art, to make the bridge between culture and science through storytelling. He has made several important DVDs that have been disseminated throughout Brazil.
Stories today are increasingly about changes in the natural world, as well as people living between cultures who are displaced or in diaspora as a result of human or natural disasters. We need to welcome their special points of view and ways of life, and learn from them. We are all part of it, we are all connected, and it is our collective human condition.
What do you think a global “song” or “global narrative” could be?
The UNESCO Digi-Arts Portal and Art Beyond Borders
The UNESCO Digi-Arts Portal helps teach young digital artists around the world how to use digital media creatively, providing cameras to document their lives and environments, and teaching them how to edit and put them on the internet for others to see. Their website is at: http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=12403&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
Independent artists such as Lyn Bishop traveled with her husband around the world, taught and participated in workshops at art schools and studios from India to Spain , using digital photography and printing to make hand made books. She made a beautiful project called “Global Fusion”, which included a web-magazine posted on a regular basis so that people could follow and communicate with them during their travels. The website is here: http://www.onelove.com/
There is also an international group based in Japan called “Artists Without Borders” and they are using art to help relieve the suffering of victims of war, especially children. Their website is here: http://www5a.biglobe.ne.jp/~artWB/e04.html
Other beautiful projects combining documentary, painting and digital art are the personal travel journals of the late news photographer Dan Eldon, who tragically died some years ago while covering the war in Somalia. There is a wonderful website with images that his parents made in his memory. They established The Creative Visions Foundation to further his ideas and works, which “supports people, especially the young, who use media, technology and the arts to create awareness of social, environmental or humanitarian issues and effect positive change in local and global communities.” You can see samples of Dan Eldon's books here: http://daneldon.org/
I have a student now at ASU, Davina Reeves, who is inspired by these projects, and is planning something similar, combining photography, animation, video, and image processing, with text to be uploaded to the world-wide-web as she pursues her research in religion in Turkey next spring, 2007. She hopes this will help students in both countries learn about each other, and build bridges through expanded forms of digital documentary and animation.
Art across borders is growing, including telematic multimedia projects such as the work of my ASU colleague, Professor John Mitchell. He is making live networked performances using software called MAX/MSP and Jitter, with artists in Germany , Brazil and the US . Information about him is here: http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000758.html
There are many alternative networks, such as the International Alliance of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of Tropical Forests ( http://www.international-alliance.org/ ), and the Australian Network for Art and Technology ( http://www.anat.org.au/ ) which works to integrate art, culture, science and technology, including independent web-based co-productions. Mobile media, including digital cameras and cell phones equipped with Global Positioning Systems (GPS), as well as small sensors are increasingly ubiquitous. It is my view that the 75% of the planet that is not yet connected, that expresses itself mainly through material culture will be gradually integrated. This will serve not only to preserve that which is disappearing, but catalyze innovative new possibilities for creative collaboration.
My view is that we need everyone and their best ideas in this global mix. Those that are most visionary and imaginative can also be the most fragile, so it is very important to bring entry in ways that are nurturing, that emphasize cooperation and not competition. This is what the world needs now. We do not need more war, violence, or deaths. On the contrary, the world needs peace and peaceful ways to achieve it.
As the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen said about Denmark, a civilized society is not one that is based on inequality. We need to make sure that everyone has the same opportunities. The same is true thinking globally.
A United Nations of Animation and Digital Arts
The idea I had when building the Division of Animation and Digital Arts (DADA) at the University of Southern California (USC) was to create a kind of “United Nations of Animation and Digital Arts.” Informed by the model of the National Film Board of Canada, and inspired by my great mentor and friend, the late Mr. John Hench of Disney, my goal was to bring the richness of the world's cultural traditions to the field of animation and digital art as a way of expanding visual language while at the same time building bridges of understanding between them. It would catalyze development of a more inclusive and intelligent world language, and foster humanistic uses of technology that could help improve the human and world condition.
The idea was to make a living laboratory, a model of the world community where visual and multi-media dialog among nations could take place in a face-to-face environment. I succeeded in having about 75% international people, including students, staff, and faculty. With about 50 students in the graduate program, and a growing undergraduate program, we had about 300 projects in-progress at any one time. It also included artists-in-residence from around the world. I wanted to have scientists-in-residence too. To me, the definition of a “World Class Program” was not the biggest thing in Hollywood, but the most international.
When I went to ASU, the idea was to make a post-graduate program similar to DADA that would be a place for advanced artists and researchers, including professionals from industry to work on personal artworks and experimental projects. Animation and digital art would be vehicles for more deeply exploring scholarship, as well as world cultures and cosmologies, especially human relationships to nature. Hopefully, it would help address larger problems such as the disappearance of species due to global warming. These problems and possibilities are so complex that it is likely that solutions will not come from single fields, but rather from transdisciplinary activity. And because all of the major problems involve dynamic phenomena, animation will inevitably be involved. That is why the “big picture” approach was to integrate cinema with art and science.
Global Eyes, the 2007 ACM SIGGRAPH Art Gallery
I am trying to realize this idea now through the 2007 ACM SIGGRAPH Art Gallery, Global Eyes. My 2 guiding principles are:
1. Ethics is esthetics, and the purpose of ethics is to make a more just world.
2. Respect is the minimum and not the maximum.
We will be working closely with the Guerilla Studio, which is an extensive on-site laboratory for attendees to make works in print, sculpture, 2 and 3D animation, including motion capture. I am trying to find funding to bring as many people from around the world to SIGGRAPH as possible, so people can have contact with each other and share their works directly. This is the Call for Participation, and I encourage you all to submit work to it. The web link is here: http://www.siggraph.org/s2007/presenters/art/
My Personal Work in Computer Animation: Stereoscopic Animation and MAYA
Over the years, I have tried to contribute to making a better world, step by step, not only by creating artworks, but by developing new methods for working across fields. I built transdisciplinary and transcultural educational and research programs. My goal was always to open space for other people, including through software put into the public domain, and by making pieces that invite the public or performers to participate. My works backgrounds technology and foregrounds people, even if doing nothing more than providing a contemplative, meditative environment for a person to observe their own thinking. My recent work asks the audience to interact with a process, making each experience unique.
This includes development of the Interactive Stereoscopic Animation System at the San Diego Supercomputer Center , supported by the National Science Foundation from 1988-92. A system for interacting with dynamic mental models, it focused on transferring visual art and animation concepts to scientific visualization, so that exploration of molecular models could be done from a more nuanced perceptual approach at human scale. I made the stereoscopic work MAYA, which you will see in 2D in the show, as a comment on the conflict between illusion and reality, to specify parameters of the software.
Stereoscopic depth perception is based on the fact that we have 2 eyes separated by about 2.5 inches, which results in each eye seeing a slightly different image. Our brain fuses these images, interpreting horizontal parallax as distance. In the computer, we can work with depth cues and parallax parameters individually, allowing us to construct new spatial experiences unique to the computer. The software we created was made freely available through the San Diego Supercomputer Center , where it was used by scientists, artists, and architects. What was unusual about it was that groups of researchers, rather than single individuals, could see and interact with the same moving stereoscopic 3-D model in real-time.
The Global Visual Music Project
In 1996, a 3 year grant from the Intel Research Council was awarded to the Global Visual Music Project to realize a vision of collaborative animation, what I called “liquid architecture” or “visual music”, for real-time performance with networked improvising musicians. I had been thinking about this since 1972 when I was traveling in Morocco and imagined a way to transcend spoken language barriers. I was a violinist studying architecture, and I wanted to play the buildings, so to speak, together with other artists around the world. I thought space and visual art could become a dialog, or jam, like jazz music by using a combination of cameras, electronic instruments, computers and satellites (to connect countries). I didn't know at the time that I would have to help invent such a system.
In 1996 I began collaboration between myself, composer-programmer Rand Steiger, and Miller Puckette, author of MAX, a programming language used widely for multimedia applications and computer music. The three of us had a fluid collaboration, each offering our individual expertise (me-visual direction; Rand-musical direction, and Miller software), while also having a broad and deep mutual respect that allowed us to enter into each other's domains freely, by open discussion, suggestion, and even direct action.
Miller was working on a new computer language similar to MAX called Pure Data (Pd) that would allow non-programmers, including musicians and visual artists, to program according to the patch programmable paradigm used in audio and video synthesizers, sort of like real-time flow charts. His software allows a person to take data from any source (physical or virtual), process and transform it in any way, and then output it again to any other source (virtual or physical). Used primarily for computer music, we wanted to extend Pd to images and spaces. We worked with Mark Danks, a student of Miller's at U. C. San Diego who is now at Electronic Arts, to develop GEM (Graphics Environment for Multimedia) as an extension to Pure Data. The resulting software environment integrated 2 and 3D computer graphics and animation, video, audio and image signal processing, audio synthesis, and networking. It too is in the Public Domain, freely and easily available on our website at http://visualmusic.org
We worked on Pd and GEM while at the same time realizing Lemma 1 and Lemma 2, networked performance works for multiple live improvising musicians.
I consider the computer an associative instrument capable of poetic relationships, as well as a transformative instrument, because data deriving from any modality can be transformed into any other modality (such as sound into image and vice versa). By changing modality, we can understand the data in new ways, and make new connections. My interest in visual-music and multi-modal performance and art is to extend the relationships between the senses beyond 1:1 associations, to new relationships that explore deeper connections between memory, dream, and consciousness by incorporating live human gesture and improvisation.
Transformation, central to Pure Data, is fundamental to life. We are attracted to it naturally and unconsciously because change is the condition of life. We instinctively recognize organic gesture everywhere because in it we see the mystery of our own existence. So the “big questions” in life (such as why we are born, live and die) are those that shape my interest in computing.
We are all in constant transformation, morphing all the time. We are a fluid amalgam or liquid architecture, of influences and memories, personal and social, private and public, physical and mental. Our memories are constantly being updated by our minds and bodies. This fluid quality of memory is similar to dreaming, because dream, according to contemporary brain research, is memory freed from stasis and normal logical processes. Networked multimedia has similar qualities, as it is also dynamic shared or collective memory, and can be part of unusual processes. That is why I consider it a kind of collective dream. With networked real-time animation it is a kind of shared lucid dream.
In Lemma 2, I wanted to explore this idea directly. I asked participating musicians to write down their dreams for inclusion in the piece as text elements that they would interact with in the performance (in the text section). Interestingly, Vanessa Thomlinson's included almost the exact imagery I had already made (although she had not yet seen it). There was a ladder on a surface that became water, and in her dream she is holding onto a ladder as though it were a boat. In my animation, a ladder fell from space down to the earth and landed on a surface that changes between water, air, fire, and earth. In the performance, the musicians interacted with the surfaces, holding on to the ladder through their music. There are 13 sections in Lemma 2, each one with a different process and structure for associating musical gesture with spatial images, ranging from pure abstraction (non-objective) to representational imagery, and highly formal relationships to free associations between the music and animation.
The performance of Lemma 2 involved 4 performers in 2 cities. Two of them, Steven Schick (drumset) and Anthony Davis (piano), were at Columbia University in New York City, and the other two, Vanessa Thomlinson (percussion), and Scott Walton (piano), were at Intel Headquarters in Hillsboro, Oregon. Each site had two computers, one for graphics and one for sound. Each site was running the same program on both computers and had similar (but not exactly the same) databases so that it would be a synchronized, unique performance.
The computers were linked together by an ISDN network so each could send and receive data from the other, and this was used to trigger transformations of the sound and images in real-time. The musical gestures were captured with microphones (no wires were placed on the musicians, so as to free them from encumbrances), their signals analyzed and converted to data, which was then sent through the network to be reanimated and re-synthesized at the distant site. The distant musicians were heard at each site coming from speakers in the back of the halls, effectively scaling the 2000 miles of separation to about a hundred feet, so that all 4 musicians could be heard, spatially distinct, at the same time.
Both performance sites included a large projection screen showing the locally generated real-time animation that responded to both local and distant signals. In effect, each musical instrument was extended into the visual domain, and vice versa, becoming a new visual-musical instrument that transforms itself with each new process, a meta-instrument, which is itself an instrument of transformation when interacting with the shared virtual space. This project allowed us to explore the effect of distance and latency on live improvised performance, as well as the possibilities for new associations and transformations between musical and visual gestures.
Lemma 1 and Lemma 2 involved real, physical musicians in real, physical spaces interacting physically with virtual space. They explored the terrain of physical-digital interaction using sound and space, and integrated the virtual world with the physical. Physical interaction of the musicians was required for the piece to be completed. It was also a collaborative and social process.
Installation Works
I used the same system, Pure Data and GEM, for my installation works. I wanted to put the virtual world inside the physical world, and background the technology while foregrounding people. I wanted to involve more of the senses, incorporating the entire body and the audience directly in the work, connected even more deeply with memory and its transformation.
Memory: Morocco
Morocco Journal (1995) explores personal and cultural memory. It is based on actual experiences in Morocco in the 1970s. Similar to the works I mentioned at the beginning of my talk, I kept a travel journal then, which I called an “open journal,” because people I met could write or draw in it, and represent themselves directly.
This piece partly compares the memories as written today with the records from my journals and other memory fragments at the time, including photography of the actual experiences. The computer was used to connect and associate them, making links in an additive process, by free association during the process of remembering.
After some time connecting memory fragments, I looked to see if a pattern was emerging. I was surprised to discover the shape of a conch shell. The initial memories were aligned like a wheel, each story relating in time to the one next to it. But then the first level of stories had several branches to other memories, and each of those had more branches. From the side, the wheel model looked like a cone, with the first layer the top and the last layer the large circle at the bottom. When the first layer connected to the last and then to the second last, and so on, a 3-D pattern or model of connections between memory fragments took shape. It was a three dimensional spiral, or a conch shell.
My memories of Morocco were re-activated by a visit to Southern France in 1998, as I was in the same place then as during the trip to Morocco in 1972. Being there again physically, and smelling and eating Moroccan food, brought forth a flood of memories, including layers of the intervening 25 years of new memories such as second hand experiences from movies and paintings, books, and recorded and live music. The smells connected the memory fragments in the mind, separated by distance and time, and the associations between them became a complex, linked narrative. I wanted to explore this dynamic layering of memories, personal and cultural, in my work, and address their constant shifting and transformation as the context changed.
I was fascinated by the subjective nature of memory based on physical interaction with the senses, most especially the powerful role of smell, but also the role of physical memory. I was aware of having been there before, like a deja-vu, because the same physical patterns were repeated, that is being there again and responding to the environment with similar movements of one's body and limbs, the hands picking up and touching similar objects, feeling their textures again. All of these different ways of remembering, and the resulting complex narrative, inspired me to do the same in my work. The actual layering and association of memory fragments could be realized using digital multimedia to activate all of the senses.
I wanted to put the entire body into a physical-mental space, a physical-digital space that would externalize this process of dynamic memory. In Morocco Memory II, I wanted to use the following:
• smell: as a way to trigger memory in people and use it to activate and engage interaction: spices
• body movement , or body memory, muscular, physical memory: walking in the space while holding and moving things freely, there should be no wires on input devices, they must be organic and appear "low tech"
• touch , organic materials that have their own/other memories encoded in them but have symbolic meaning to us: spices and boxes, spices are living physical memory of mixing cultures of thousands of years, the surfaces should be “rich” texturally and the objects should be “rich” symbolically
• sound: music and sound fragments should fill the space and immerse the body, bathe the entire body in sound, sonic memory
• body space: actual space should surround and immerse the body, including all of the senses, without any encumbering technology. It should be interactive with the virtual world, which should be embedded within the physical: a small house
• screen space, the screen should be a “space” and not just a surface: human scale and part of the house, not just something placed on top of it. It should be a kind of skin or semi-permeable membrane of a cell, wherein/upon the physical and the virtual space meet and send messages back and forth
• images: on the screen should be for externalizing interior thoughts, feelings, and memories as well as creating space and transforming experience into memory; they transmit movement, shape and color, connecting that which is living in us to the life in the images and the memories connected with them. The visual gestures, moving images, or animation, tell us on an instinctive level that they and we are alive
• light: articulates space and the body in it. It is a powerful visceral awareness of being in a real space. It is a very strong part of memory: use light as part of the interaction with virtual space and extend the images off of the screen by surrounding the screen with colored light
• content: multicultural/subjective identity, something fluid and changing
The house was made of wood and satin, and the design between Danish folk architecture and Moroccan polyhedral structures. I was especially impressed by the 3-D, stained-glass lamps. The glowing luminescence of the house in Morocco Memory II derives directly from them. The interface is 6 Moroccan wooden boxes with spices in them. All have embedded chips that transmit signals via radio waves to a remote receiver and computer. The transmitters and receiver were made by James Snook, of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla. Rand Steiger worked on the music, and both he and Miller Puckette helped with the programming.
There were 66 lexia, or short stories, in Morocco Memory II. In total, there are over 3000 still images that constantly transform, and 100 audio and movie fragments. They are layered and navigated through opening and closing boxes, recombined each time someone opens and closes a box. When a box is opened, sound fragments play, and the piece is activated, lights change in the space around the interactor, and a selection from the visual and sound database takes place. Each time another box is opened, another layer of material is juxtaposed. When all of the boxes are open, theoretical texts appear for contemplation. When all of the boxes are closed, the piece stops, colored lights fade, and white lights go up over the table in the space, focused on the boxes. The computer keeps track of each box, and knows whether it is open or closed, how many boxes are open (and closed), and in what order they were opened (and closed). This is the information used to navigate and recombine the data. As a result, there is an almost endless number of ways of to traverse it and create new associations.
Morocco Memory II is not about forgetting, but rather about freeing memory from stasis. It is about activating, engaging, and exploring it in new ways that engage the entire body, and transforming memory into new narratives through dynamic association and interaction. (Please see http://visualmusic.org/text/MMdoc.htm for more information.)
Nature: Sanctuary
Finally, I would like to discuss Sanctuary. Completed in September of 2005, its World Premiere took place on October 17, 2005 at Gallery One-One-One at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. (Please see http://visualmusic.org/Biography/SanctuaryDesc.htm )
It is an interactive architectural installation based on cross cultural interpretations of ‘safe haven', focusing on natural and spiritual sanctuaries, and the common need for safety by all creatures of the world. That is why I consider it a “global poem of peace.”
Combining painting and photography, animation and documentary, poetry from many writers and thinkers, the work employs tangible media in navigating images, sounds, texts, and movies recorded in many countries, including Italy, Bali, Bolivia, Japan, France, Brazil, Denmark, and China.
Similar to Morocco Memory II, it uses real objects, including live plants, inside an architectural space so that the entire body and all of the senses are engaged, including vision, hearing, touch and smell. The technology used to send signals from the physical to the virtual space, is non-invasive, primarily capacitance. The small house (20'wide x 20'deep x 14' tall) is made of wood and natural materials, with 4 wall-sized screens (3 used in Canada due to ceiling height restrictions) and a floor with a special entranceway that allows people in wheelchairs to enter. The design is influenced by Japanese Buddhist Temples and Native American use of stretched hides, used both for writing and shelter, and because of the back projection of constantly changing images, the piece appears to be a glowing and breathing small house. At times the “walls” appear to be windows opening onto wide landscapes. Other times these “windows” become surfaces, enclosing the space, making a contemplative place for interacting peacefully with thoughts and living things.
An alternative to and comment on the Virtual Reality ‘CAVE', Sanctuary is not a closed box that isolates people from the immediate physical and natural environment. Because the sides are rotated open, people can walk freely in and out, making a continuous integration of interior and exterior physical and digital spaces. The path, an entryway, has a table with a special bowl of water on it, and this prepares the visitor for entrance into what is intended to be a kind of magical space where the mind and body, or soul, can be transformed. Like a ritual, the goal is to cause this transformation, step by step, of putting the person back into harmony with the universe. The water senses the person's hands touching it, and this causes initial changes in the sound environment. When people walk forward and enter inside the sanctuary to sit, the surface of the stools are sensitive, and this too causes changes. When the person touches the living plants, selected for their special tactile and responsive qualities, this affects additional changes. In general, by using organic materials and objects familiar to people in the physical world, they know implicitly how to interact. They do not need instructions. This means that people from a wide range of backgrounds feel more welcome, and more at ease, than in what can otherwise be an alienating high technology environment.
Thousands of media elements from around the world, including digital photography and digital video, are rear projected onto the screens, and acoustic and digital music, composed by Shahrokh Yadegari, move around the space. Text and poetry, including quotes from Native American thinkers, the Dalai Lama, Buddha, and others, are layered over the images as people interact. In order to navigate and transform the digital media materials, people touch living plants, water, and physical objects, rather than joysticks or computer hardware. No encumbering equipment is worn by users/interactors, as capacitance sensors detect touch in transparent and non-invasive ways. Because combinatorics and indeterminacy are used in real-time processes running on the computers, an emergent system results where each interactor/user has a unique experience.
Sanctuary is a dynamic multi-sensory environment where individuals as well as groups can contemplate, and interact in alternative ways. By including living plants, people are reminded that they too are alive, part of an ecosystem, and that actions have consequences that affect the whole. And like plants and all of life, people are fragile, and need a place of peace and safety in order to survive. The whole world is a sanctuary.
Conclusion
What is the goal of all of this? The purpose is to help us become better human beings, with greater conscience and compassion. It is meant to help us live in the world, and not apart from it, in peace and harmony, and protect it for generations to come. Global visual culture can help us share ideas about how to achieve, or at least move toward, these goals. Thank you very much for your attention today.
For more information please see http://vibeke.info