Ars Electronica Reviews
One of my favorite projects here didn't start that way at all. Winner of the big prize in the Interactive Art category is called Milk Project. Before I went to see the documentation of the project today, I found the idea somewhat routine, although that probably comes from having had my attention focused on electronic projects that use global positioning systems for several years.
Here's the catalog description:
Enabling us to catch a glimpse of the points of intersection where the paths of goods and people cross and material as well as immaterial transactions are consummated across the borders separating nations and cultures, and revealing thereby interconnections on a larger scale is the agenda of "MILKproject", the winner in Interactive Art. GPS technology makes it possible to trace the path of milk being shipped from Latvia to the Netherlands. GPS-visualization, sound recordings and photographs of the human beings involved are blended together into a one-of-a-kind installation that enables viewers to comprehend trade routes passing through various different cultural spheres.
But at the centerpiece of "MILKproject" are, above all, the stories of human beings. The path of a commercial product, milk, serves as the narrative thread that ties together the amazing variety of lifestyles and worlds of personal experience at the interface of Eastern Europe and Western Europe.
Tracing the path of milk shipments could only possibly be interesting, from my point of view, for seeing its path visualization maybe once or twice. The project became a completely different one once I actually sat down at the exhibit and read and listened to the farmers and farm families watch the visualizations and make anecdotal comments about what was happening along those paths. Seeing their visualizations unfold with the only boundary lines drawn being the paths of milk shipments around Europe was a fascinating representation of the route maps without political boundaries. It almost appeared as though a new land were being presented. Hearing their joyful surprise when they realized that the cows really did go up to one particular part of the pasture drew me into the project in a way that was much less smarty-pants than many GPS projects.
The Ladder conceived of by John Gerrard is a mixed reality installation. The backstory of the project turns on a boy or small man who stands atop a ladder, looking out a small window to the world outside. He reports in abstract terms (color, speed, shape) the things he sees outside. It's a contemplative piece, with chairs in the room for people to sit and wait for him to say something. The viewport to this boy's world is a computer screen that's mixing the live video from within the room with a digitally composited rendering of the boy at the top of the ladder. So, the mixed reality part is the composition of the boy at the top of the ladder. Everything in the scene except for the boy are "live"; the boy is composited in and properly registered (although peculiarly scaled) at the top of the ladder. The computer monitor is on a rig so that you can pan it across the room and, magically, the boy stays at the top of the ladder.
I was initally curious about the piece mostly because of the orientation business. Panning and re-aligning the magic viewport is related to my interest in orientation sensitive interfaces. Frankly, I found that part a bit unnecessary — it seemed to be an overwrought component of the project and more a bid at doing some technical wizardry. There was no compelling reason to actually move the viewport, at least from the perspective of the boy's narrative. He was standing still, on top of a ladder, not moving, so there was no reason, really, to move the viewport through which one sees him.
What was he looking at? A firewire camera on the other side of the built wall and pointing out onto the street was what allowed the boy to see. When I saw the project, he mostly hmmm'd and whistled, or made other non-specific comments. So, not super exciting. A unique and promising concept that could've been better executed, in my humble opinion.
Fallen Art another Prix Ars winner. I don't know what to say about this one. I saw it at SIGGRAPH for the first time and found it upsetting and really didn't want to see it at Ars Electronica, but they showed it at the award gala and so I just dealt.
Here's why I've been told I should appreciate it: art is as much about life as it is about death; death, what death means and how we represent it can be about hope, possibility, vitality and the enduring spirit of humanity.
That's the usual smarty-pants turn on art that represents life and vitality through art.
So, there's that.
My first reaction at SIGGRAPH was much more visceral. I couldn't find a point of entry for thinking through an analytic take on the content. I wanted to walk out but that would've meant an embarassing climb over a bunch of rapt attendees. It wasn't until a pal here said she loved it and I asked why that I heard someone's reasonably articulate take on what the short meant. It was the art and death thing, which I could understand, but not what I really believed.
What I saw were soldiers given meaningless medals with a meaningless commendation ("blah, blah blah blah, blah") by a sadistic sargent who booted them mercilessly off a 1000 foot tower to their revolting death. A walking-dead technician guy with those menacing small round metal frame glasses (evocative of Dr. Joseph Mengele in my opinion) was standing a the ready at the spot where the soldiers were splattered on the ground. He took their photo and handed it to a hapless aide who clearly feared disrupting Mengele's attention lest he be made to climb the tower himself. The aide ran the photo of the freshly splat soldier to a disgustingly slothful ogre-general in an abandoned warehouse who put the photo into a machine that then played, flip-book style, through hundreds of splat photos that were choreographed to look as though the dead soldiers were actually dancing a dance of celebration. Ogre-general danced himself, revealing a hidden desire for a vitality that he now lacked with his labored breathing and encumbering, disgusting, slothfully slothful girth.
So, in brief — this isn't an animation about death begetting life when you think about whose death begets whose life. It's about the mindless sacrafice that zillions of powerless people have gone through for the sadistic, hedonistic pleasure of a few powerful sloths.
Sounds familiar.
Jumping Rope is one of my favorite exhibits in the Ars Electronica Center (along with Tenori-On, which others have written plenty about.) In this project, you're goaded into jumping a virtual rope by a bunch of different characters on either side of the virtual rope. It's fun, mostly because the characters who encourage you to jump. They're all done with video, not computer animation, that somehow makes it seem wonderfully retro.
Whoa. reacTable (..get it?) is a truly reactable table. I'm generally a fan of the idea behind interactive tables, but this one rises to a whole new level. It's so much more than the all-too-familiar gee-whiz eye candy tables because, firstly, it's a musical instrument with a good deal of sophistication and performability (not just blips and bleeps, although novices were able to produce those fairly easily) the interaction has a good bit of depth to it and the visualizations go a long way to providing really compelling visual clues as to what your interaction is doing. There's going to be a performance of this table this evening, so I suspect I'll have more to say later. But, in the meantime, I can say that it's interaction modality includes a variety of blocks encoded with a visual tag that gives each block different kinds of functionality. Some blocks are "effectors", others are sound sources, etc. Similar in some ways to the wires and boxes of Max/MSP, only the wires resonate with their effects and the boxes visual propogate their sound or functionality in a very cool way. Certain boxes can be "paired" by touching them together and then moving them apart that they interact, but can be moved to other parts of the table. Just very cool. Sadly, when I went by to see it after the opening (anticipating smaller crowds) the piece was down, persumably moved to set up for the performance this evening.
Life: A User's Manual is another stand out.
Those cans are actually 2.4GHz antennas tuned to pick up video signals from wireless video cams. The monitors become battery powered when the salvage cart is taken out to the streets and display whatever wireless video camera image is in range - surveillence, baby monitors, surprises..
The title 'Life: a user's manual' is taken from a novel of the same name by Georges Perec. 100 chapters long, his novel tells the story of a ten story building in Paris, each chapter used to describe an apartment, its interior and the stories of its inhabitants, both present and past. As observers, we are led through a sequence of readings and views as we mentally navigate from one apartment to the next.
