From Technological To Virtual Art

© 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Popper, Frank, 1918—

From technological to virtual art / Frank Popper.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-10: 0-262-16230-X ISBN-13: 978-0-262-16230-2 (alk. paper)
1. Multimedia (Arc) 2. Computer art. 3- Interactive art. 4. Arc and electronics.
I. Title.
N7433.92.P67 2007
776'.7—dc22
2004062532
Contents
SERIES FOREWORD vii
FOREWORD BY JOEL SLAYTON ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi
INTRODUCTION 1
I The Emergence of Virtual Art (1918-1983) 9
1 HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS (1918-1967) 11

Artistic Sources 11
Modern Light Art 13
Spectator Participation 29
Environmental Artistic Commitments 39
Technical Sources (such as Engineering and Inventions) 46
Other Sources (such as Science and Linguistics) 47
2 TECHNOLOGICAL ART AND ARTISTS (1968-1983) 49

Laser Art 49
Holographic Arc 52
Eco-cechnological Art 59
Computer Art 64
Communication Art 75
II Current Virtual Art and Artists (1983-2004) 87
3 MATERIALIZED DIGITAL-BASED WORK 89

Plastic Issues 89
Cognition Issues 110
Bioaesthetic Issues 118
4 MULTIMEDIA AND MULTISENSORIAL OFF-LINE WORKS 131
Language, Narration, Hypertext 131

Plastic Multimedia Issues 156
Synesthesia 161
Sociopolitical and Security Issues 175
5 INTERACTIVE DIGITAL INSTALLATIONS 181
Sensory Immersion 181

Reciprocal Aesthetic Propositions 220
Individual Commitments to Interactivity 248
Social, Environmental, and Scientific Commitments to Interactivity 275
6 MULTIMEDIA ONLINE WORKS (NET ART) 313

The Internet as a Social Communications Option 313
Personal Presence Online 355
Critical Artistic Attitudes on the Net 371
Telematic and Telerobotic Human Commitments 379
7 CONCLUSION 395
NOTES 399
BIBLIOGRAPHY 405
ARTISTS LIST 415
INDEX 429
Contents
Series Foreword
The arts, science, and technology are experiencing a period of profound change.
Explosive challenges to the institutions and practices of engineering, art
making, and scientific research raise urgent questions of ethics, craft, and care
for the planet and its inhabitants. Unforeseen forms of beauty and understand
ing are possible, but so too are unexpected risks and threats. A newly global
connectivity creates new arenas for interaction between science, art, and tech
nology but also creates the preconditions for global crises. The Leonardo Book
series, published by the MIT Press, aims co consider these opportunities,
changes, and challenges in books that are both timely and of enduring value.
Leonardo books provide a public forum for research and debate; they con
tribute to the archive of art-science-technology interactions; they contribute
to understandings of emergent historical processes; and they point toward
future practices in creativity, research, scholarship, and enterprise.
To find more information about Leonardo/ISAST and to order our
publications, go to Leonardo Online at <http://lbs.mit.edu/> or e-mail
<leonardobooks@mitpress.mit.edu>.
Sean Cubitt
Editor-in-Chief, Leonardo Book series
Leonardo Book Series Advisory Committee: Sean Cubitt, Chair; Michael Punt;
Eugene Thacker; Anna Munster; Laura Marks; Sundar Sarrukai; Annick
Bureaud
Doug Sery, Acquiring Editor
Joel Slayton, Editorial Consultant
Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (ISAST)

Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, and
the affiliated French organization Association Leonardo have two very simple
goals:
1. to document and make known the work of artists, researchers, and schol
ars interested in the ways that the contemporary arts interact with science and
technology and
2. co create a forum and meeting places where artists, scientists, and engi
neers can meet, exchange ideas, and, where appropriate, collaborate.
When the journal Leonardo was started some forty years ago, these creative
disciplines existed in segregated institutional and social networks, a situation
dramatized at chat time by the ‘‘Two Cultures” debates initiated by C. P. Snow.
Today we live in a different time of cross-disciplinary ferment, collaboration,
and intellectual confrontation enabled by new hybrid organizations, new
funding sponsors, and the shared tools of computers and the Internet. Above
all, new generations of artist-researchers and researcher-artists are now at work
individually and in collaborative teams bridging the arc, science, and tech
nology disciplines. Perhaps in our lifetime we will see the emergence of “new
Leonardos,” creative individuals or teams that will not only develop a mean
ingful art for our times but also drive new agendas in science and stimulate
technological innovation that addresses today’s human needs.
For more information on the activities of the Leonardo organizations
and networks, please visit our Web sites at <http://www.leonardo.info/> and
<http://www.olats.org>.
Roger F. Malina
Chair, Leonardo/ISAST
ISAST Governing Board of Directors: Martin Anderson, Michael Joaquin

Grey, Larry Larson, Roger Malina, Sonya Rapoport, Beverly Reiser, Christian
Simm, Joel Slayton, Tami Spector, Darlene Tong, Stephen Wilson
Series Foreword
Foreword
Joel Slayton
According co Frank Popper, virtual art is identified by a techno-aesthetic foun

dation enabled by che logic of the individual artists and informed by the extra-
artistic implications of their work. Popper describes a model of virtual art chat
is defined by epistemological, ontological, and ethical implications deriving
from “global virtualization,” the historically accelerated moment in which we
live, and through the existential changes effected on society and every indi
vidual as a result. By definition, Popper's is a model of ambiguous intention,
meant to play on the philosophical paradox between the virtual, the poten
tial, and the actual: “What is new in virtualism is precisely its virtuality, ics
potentiality, and above all its openness."
Born on April 17, 1918, in Prague, Popper has lived in Vienna, London,
Rome, and Paris. He is a renowned aesthetician, arc theorist, curator, teacher,
and critic. Popper’s books—Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (1968), Art,
Action, and Participation (1975), and Art of the Electronic Age (1993)—are
seminal publications. These books provide an impressive survey of artists and
artistic experimentation over the past thirty years. It is a lineage that purveys
innovations in light, movement, plasticity, system, process, and participation
as well as interaction with techno-scientific innovation. From Technological to
Virtual Art takes us on the next step in his journey to bridge concerns for a
humanization of technology through artistic imagination.
Art historical analysis of the virtual remains an open terrain—not empty,
but open. The topic is informed by the writings of Oliver Grau and
Christine Buci-Glucksmann, among many others. Popper’s hypothesis is that
virtual arc can be considered a new and refined version of technological art
(the subject of his Art of the Electronic Age), including at least three categories:
digital works and environments, hypermedia and Internet works, and works
in which interactivity and multisensoriality play a more radical role than
before. He stresses that "virtuality artists’’ have much in common with their
technology art predecessors but distinguish themselves through their techno-
aesthetic creative commitment—an aesthetic defined in part through their
pursuit of extra-artistic goals vis-a-vis the scientific and social order concerned
with basic human needs and drives. Virtual art is defined herein in terms of
its openness for creative action.
From Technological to Virtual Art is a panoramic examination of virtual art
and its historical roots. Not uncontroversially, Popper postulates an antire
ductionist analysis that situates artistic achievement within the objective of
humanizing technological virtualism. It is precisely from that perspective that
he argues neither against technology nor for virtual determinism, but rather
for an illumination of aesthetics that touches the culture of creativity.
Leonardo is pleased to include From Technological to Virtual Art in this book
series.
Foreword
Acknowledgments
I wish co thank all those who have helped to make this book possible—
in the first place, the artists who allowed me to use images of their work
as well as provided precious personal and aesthetic information. Among
these artists, Nikolas Gherbi and Gregory Chatonsky provided special aid
in the early stages of the book. My deepest gratitude goes to Joseph
Nechvatal, who throughout the evolution of this book gave me an invalu
able helping hand, culminating in an interview conducted by e-mail over
six weeks that allowed me to produce a revised manuscript at a decisive
moment in the editorial process. This interview was published nearly in its
entirety in the College Arc Association’s Art Journal in Spring 2004, vol. 63,
pp. 62-77.
I- offer special thanks co Douglas Sery, my editor at The MIT Press,
for his enlightened support and also for the outstanding help he gave me,
assisted by Valerie Geary, with the coordination of the illustrations for
the book. My thanks are also due to Sandra Minkkinen, the production
editor, to Cindy Milstein, the copy editor, as well as to the reviewers
who offered suggestions for improving the original draft of the
manuscript.
As to my gratitude co Roger Malina, the Leonardo/ISAST governing direc
tor and my long-standing personal friend whose backing and encouragement
I received throughout the whole of this undertaking, it goes well beyond a
simple acknowledgment, as it does with regard to the constant interest shown
in the evolution of this book by Joel Slayton, chair of the Leonardo Book Series
Committee.
I am also most grateful to Edmond Couchot who has come to my aid on
several occasions and provided me with critical information, as did Jean-Louis
Boissier, Jurgen Claus, Eduardo Kac, Ken Goldberg, Joel Boutteville, Carlos
Cruz-Delgado, Adam Berry, Julien Knebusch, and Annick Bureaud.
Throughout the book, * indicates that the text that follows is based on information
provided by the artist.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
This book is premised on three ideas. The first concerns the hypothesis that
contemporary virtual art can be considered a new and refined version of tech
nological art, which I explored and documented in exhibitions, articles, and
a book on the art of the electronic era. As such, virtual art represents a new
departure—new in terms of its humanization of technology, its emphasis on
interactivity, its philosophical attitude toward the real and the virtual, and its
multisensorial outlook.
The second idea posits that the artists practicing virtual art, alchough
having quite a few traits in common with more traditional artists, distinguish
themselves from them in many ways, especially through their techno-aesthetic
creative commitment. Presumably, some of these characteristic features can
already be found in a number of early-twentieth-century forerunners.
Third, I think that virtual artists generally pursue—apart from, or rather
linked with, aesthetic finalities—a certain number of extra-artistic goals that
appear to be of a scientific or social order, but that are in fact also concerned
with basic human needs and drives.
Let me first explain what I mean by the terms virtual and in particular
virtual art.
Technically speaking, virtual art includes elements of all art made with the
technical media developed in the late 1980s (or in some cases, a few years
before). One aspect at the time was that interfaces between humans and com
puters—for example, visualization casks, stereoscopic spectacles and screens,
generators of three-dimensional sound, data gloves, data clothes, position
sensors, tactile and power feedback systems, and so forth—allowed us to
immerse ourselves completely into images and interact with them. The
impression of reality felt under these conditions was provided not only by
vision and hearing but also by the other bodily senses. This multiple sensing
was often so intensely experienced that one could speak of it as virtual reality.
Thus, virtual signified that we were in the presence not only of reality itself
but also the simulation of reality.
A similar technical development took place at the same time with regard
to the Internet and the new communications landscape as well as other tech
nologies such as holography applied in conjunction with the above-mentioned
technical achievements.
Aesthetically speaking, virtual arc is the artistic interpretation of some con
temporary issues, not only with the aid of such technological developments
but through their integration with them. Such an integration—or combina
tion—allows for an aesthetic-technological logic of creation that forms the
essential part of the specificity of the virtual artworks I am describing in this
book, and that differ from other artworks in the sense chat the latter lack this
logic of creation based on the combination of current technical and aesthetic
issues.
As to epistemological, oncological, and ethical questions raised by the idea
of virtual arc flowing out of technological arc, one can ask if virtual art enlarges
the epistemological range of previous art tendencies, such as technological art.
The intelligible fact that virtual art encompasses many possibilities of actual
art would indicate that a supplement of truth is at stake. Whether we view
epistemology as the study of origins, nature, and the limits of human knowl
edge, or only as a quest for understanding nature scientifically, virtual art tries
to make the best of both worlds: the philosophical and the scientific. Conse
quently, virtualism can be considered an all-embracing area. We are in the
presence of knowledge that covers a multitude of natural and/or synthetic phe
nomena, which by its very virtuality and interactive objectives involves us in
an aesthetic context. This aesthetic context serves us on both the empirical
level of human learning/perception and the rationalist level by manipulating
new theoretical concepts independent from experience.
From an oncological point of view, contemporary virtual art represents a
departure from technological arc since it can be realized as many different
actualities. This can also be a useful way to understand the self insofar as the
self is truly virtual: it has many potentialities. Thus, the virtual seif can be
Introduction
transformed into an actual, living personality, as John Canny and Eric Paulos
observed in The Robot in the Garden) We are also close to Edmond Couchot’s
interpretation of virtuality and the virtual as a power opposed to the actual,
but whose function, technologically speaking, is a way of being (un mode d'etre)
via digital simulation that can lead toward a certain expression of the opera
tor’s subjectivity. This ontological tendency of virtual art can be clearly seen
in the works of many artists described in this book who have been using tele
presence and virtual reality devices in this way.
As I see it, virtual art can even play an ethical role in the present devel
opment of globalization by stressing human factors more than any other pre
vious art form—on the part of both the artists and the multiple users of art.
Virtual art could in fact impact in a critical and prospective way on global
ization. Ultimately (and idealistically), the overall human bias that I identify
within this book by example could tip the scales in favor of intelligent, ethical
control of nuclear and postnuclear technologies—in particular, the armaments
that will sooner or later find themselves in the hands of many collectivities.
This stance in favor of responsible conscientiousness would allow the new
technologies and ways of communication to be operated—both economically
and culturally—in the interests of all humankind.
The virtual model I propose has not only epistemological, ontological, and
ethical connotations but also aesthetic and philosophical “humanist” sides that
should allow us to better understand the multiple existential changes that our
society and every individual is undergoing at the present historically acceler
ated moment. I shall try to explain myself as far as virtuality and the contri
bution of virtual art are concerned.
As a matter of fact, I am trying to go one step beyond what Oliver Grau
and Christine Buci-Gliicksmann define as the social implication, or the aes
thetics, of the virtual. According to Grau, media art—that is, video, com
puter graphics and animation, Net art, and interactive art and its mosc
advanced form of virtual art (with its subgenres of telepresence arc and genetic
art)—is beginning to dominate theories of the image and art.
With the advent of new techniques for generating, distributing, and pre
senting images, the computer has transformed the image and now suggests
that it is possible to enter it. It has therefore laid the foundations for virtual
reality as a core medium of the emerging information society.
Buci-Gliicksmann approaches the aesthetics of the virtual through the idea
that the development of the new technologies of the virtual has caused a
Introduction
historic transformation that touches all artistic practices: the passage from the
culture of objects and stability to a culture of flux and instability. Thus, prem
ises in both art and architecture can be established that lead to an aesthetics
of transparency and fluidities.
If I accept and try to incorporate these points of view in my own theoret
ical approach to virtual art, I do so to take an additional theoretical step by
assuming that our wider consciousness—which is affected by technological
advancement—permits us to better assume both our intellectual and emo
tional human status at the beginning of rhe twenty-first century.
As to the method followed in constructing the chapters on current (approx
imately 1983 to 2004) virtual art and artists, I have established two lines of
discussion: the technical and the aesthetic.
The technical line leads continuously from materialized digital-based work
to multimedia online works (re: Net art), passing through multimedia
and multisensorial off-line works into the all-important interactive digital
installations.
The aesthetic line leads from cognitive to telematic and telerobotic human
issues in a coherent and uninterrupted, but not yet straight, line with a begin
ning and an end. Hence, it touches a good number of extra-aesthetic regions,
such as the political, economic, biological, and other scientific areas. These
areas are always treated with a certain distance and within an aesthetic
context—as well as with an aesthetic finality. This explains the globalized
open-endedness of virtual works.
What is new in virtualism is precisely its virtuality, its potentiality, and
above all its openness. For virtual art, this openness is being exercised both
from the point of view of the artists and their creativity and from that of the
follow-up users in their reciprocating actions. This openness implies a certain
amount of liberty and freedom for action and creation, but not to radically
destroy what happened before. This open-ended virtual state corresponds to
both the individual’s and society’s needs to come to terms with the flux and
the virtual dynamism that characterizes our present situation.
According to critics of modernism, what I am now calling virtual art can
be described as a purist rejection of both stylistic anarchism and historical tra
ditionalism. This is so inasmuch as these critics consider that postmodernism
eclectically combines a plurality of preceding artistic styles while reviving
history and tradition. Such critics maintain that complexity, contradiction,
Introduction
and ambiguity are favored in postmodernism over simplicity, purity, and
rationality.
There is no doubt that in the work of some virtual artists, many charac
teristics of either modernism or postmodernism can be found. But generally
speaking, in our emerging virtual era the stress is no longer put on questions
of style, purism, or historical tradition. If complexity and ambiguity are not
shunned, scientific rationality is equally admitted. In fact, the emphasis in
virrualism lies on techno-aesthetic issues linked to such notions as cognition,
synesthesia, and sensory immersion. Yet this aesthetic also pivots on individ
ual, social, environmental, and scientific options toward interactivity and neo
communication as well as on telematic and/or telerobotic commitments.
One could conclude provisionally that the artist’s status is somehow
lost in these multiple commitments. Yet I feel that the specificity of the virtual
artist is nevertheless sustained through the overall techno-aesthetic finality
he or she pursues and the very distance maintained toward the areas
when explored humanistically. As such, an all-embracing virtuality in art is
not really a counterrevolution against modernism and postmodernism; rather,
it widens considerably the spectrum of investigation open to the artist-
conceptor.
A main thread in this book, and the reason I stress the biographical decails
of the artists, is my desire to show how technology is—or can be—
humanized through art. It is true that something exciting happens when one
looks at a familiar subject not as a closed conceptual system but to find an
opening conceptual edge—in this case, the increasing humanization of tech
nological virtualism. That is what I have always practiced in my work as an
art historian and what can be seen in the expansive research here: that opening
edge.
This conceptual edge is even more important today as we learn that both
fundamentalist and modernist reductionist assumptions are not easily changed
by mere postmodern negations. What seems to be needed globally are mutat
ing conceptual models with which to think differently; or put another way,
connective conceptual models that are never just the completed or inverted
objectivity of the common conceptions. The technological into virtual dia
logue I illustrate here offers such a modulating model.
To further explain why I am committed to humanist values in the age of
virtualism, I must say that the notion of the human for me is not linked to
Introduction
the classical heroic idea stemming from the Greeks and the Romans.
Rather, the humanist notion symbolizes our basic human needs and personal
achievements.
This does not preclude us from also connecting this idea to wider—even
universal—issues, of course.
Virtual art enters the present antihuman and posthuman dialogue—a
context fraught with the most explosive antihuman and posthuman dangers—
precisely with the intention of humanizing technology by taking the need
for human survival into consideration—a survival, that is, concerned with
biology and freedom. Humans are beings who under all circumstances, try to
preserve their elementary needs for a certain amount of personal integrity and
liberty.
A virtual artist’s activities can deal with these fundamental issues while
preparing a blueprint for some working solutions along both personal and
universal dimensions.
The choice of the artists for this book was based on the predominance of
one of the techniques in their work as well as the predominance of an iden
tifiable aesthetic option. The order in which the artists are discussed in each
section thus follows these two lines of thought and argument. But the overall
consideration for these choices was whether, in the first place, the artists
entered into the category of the humanization of technology through the artis
tic imagination.
It is the combination of these two leading theoretical lines—illustrated
by the work and itineraries of these virtual artists—that make up the emerg
ing techno-aesthetic. This aesthetic is fostered by collective research in
laboratories or on the Internet in connection with a new attitude toward
communication that affects the working methods of both artists and
theoreticians.
The modern and postmodern artists I have included in the historical sec
tions of my book are there to explain, both technically and aesthetically, what
happened in the late 1980s and the 1990s when virtual art began to estab
lish itself. The real break during that period, however, took place when the
technological artists managed both to master the technical media, the Inter
net, the computer, and even holography and to combine them aesthetically
with the issues I am analyzing under the different subheadings in chapters 3
through 6. These sections include plastic, narrative, sociopolitical, biological,
and ecological issues even as they explore the main theme, virtuality in art—
Introduction
that is, the humanizing of technology through interactivity and neocommu
nicability as well as sensory immersion and multisensoriality.
The emphasis is on the different aspects—technical, aesthetic, and extra-
artistic—demonstrated by contemporary artists I have encountered personally
or on the Net. The more historical sections, chapters 1 and 2, are also based
very much on my personal experience. In this way, chapter 1 covers my own
personal itinerary from 1918 up to 1967, when I organized the exhibition
Lumiere et Mouvement at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris; indeed, for
many, 1967 marks the end of kinetic art and the preliminary phase of socially
engaged art as well as the beginning of a new technically dominated era in
art. The second chapter, running from 1968 to 1983—the year of the exhi
bition Electra: Electricity and Electronics in the Art of the Twentieth Century,
which I conceived—covers the different new technologies adopted by artists
and leads to what can be named the virtual or digitally assisted art of the
present. But these dates also correspond to some outstanding historical events:
1918 saw the end of the First World War, 1967-68 was the year of the student
revolution, and 1983 signaled the moment when a certain number of tech
nological innovations, such as the Internet, were becoming reality.
The main artistic sources of electronic or technological art can be found in
the areas of photography and cinema, conceptual art (intellectual, informa
tional, and environmental), light art (electric, electronic, and environmental),
the art of motion or kinetic art (opcical, mechanical, and natural movement),
cybernetic and programmed art, and participatory and environmental art.
Technological art was made up of several technically determined areas. In
the first, laser and holographic arc, artists used the laser in combined
visual/aural productions and long-distance environmental displays and applied
the laser to holography, both in extending its three-dimensional illusionist
characteristics and its recognition as the latest development in light art. Other
sections of technological art were concerned with the early stages of computer
arc, communication art, and techno-ecological art. Computer art was then
shown to function as a purveyor of abstract information rather than a tool or
medium, whereas communication art could already take the form of telemat
ics, interactive networks, and satellite art; techno-ecological works of art were
either directly inspired by natural phenomena or their scientific interpretations.
Another area of technological arc, video art, covered artworks on tape con
cerned with formal research and the recording of conceptual art events as well
as the use of juxtaposed cameras and monitors in video sculptures and
Introduction
environments. Video art has also inaugurated specific temporal factors—
instantaneity, spontaneity, and simultaneity—as well as the potential of cre
atively transforming images. Let me point out, however, that this book does
not deal with the large field of video, nor with that of cinema and electronic
music, with the exception of some cursory allusions in the text and bibliog
raphy references. These areas are closely related to the emergence of virtual
art from technological art, of course, but have always been autonomous—or
at least have become so in the 1990s. Thus, they are off the main investiga
tive track of my book. I set out here to find a satisfying definition of the
changes that occurred in art through its confrontation with digital technol
ogy by looking at artists who are considered primarily as coming from—or
working in—the fine arts.
In the historical chapters, I take most of virtual art's artistic origins as well
as some technical sources into account, but I try above all to give some general
and several individual examples of art movements and artists that can be
regarded as prototypes for the contemporary virtual artists described in chap
ters 3 through 6.
Chapter 3, the first of the sections on current virtual arc and artists, is
devoted to materialized digital-based work. This work, which at first sight
may resemble more traditional art, is nonetheless virtual (or virtualized) by
digital techniques and so takes on a totally different dimension. Although the
main aesthetico-technical category involved in chapter 3 is perception and the
image, the works can be subcategorized into plastic, cognition, and bioaes-
thetic issues.
Chapter 4 deals with multimedia off-line works. In addition co the main
theme of multisensoriality, it includes secondary aesthetic items such as lan
guage, narration, hypertext, and synesthesia as well as sociopolitical and secu
rity issues.
Chapter 5 is based on interactive digital installations and its main aesthetic
theme is indeed interactivity. It comprises such subthemes as sensory immer
sion and reciprocal aesthetic propositions, and looks at individual, social, envi
ronmental, and scientific commitments toward interactivity.
Finally, chapter 6, devoted co Net art and multimedia online works,
explores artistic communication via the Internet along with the secondary
aesthetic subjects of the Internet as a social communications option, personal
presence and critical attitudes on the Net, and telematic and telerobotic
human commitments.
Introduction
L H i
The Emergence of Virtual Art
(1918-1983)
Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)
Technological art has three principal roots. Firsc, technological art can be
traced back to artistic sources such as visual art, photography, cinema,
music, and more generally sound as well as architecture and other
environmental expressions. A second origin can simply be found among
technical sources such as engineering inventions and similar undertakings.
And a third important source can be detected in the different areas
of the natural and human sciences, in particular physics, biology, and
linguistics.
Artistic Sources
As regards the artistic sources, let me mention the wide scope of research on
the pioneers and pathbreakers of technological art that has been undertaken
by the members of Leonardo/Isast’s Frieda Ackerman Working Group, in
which I am myself a participant.1 It is of course impossible within the scope
of this book to study in detail the many artistic movements, or even mention
all the numerous artists and other personalities who have given rise to and
established this art.
Let me touch on some of these developments in a general way before select
ing one or two of these trends and illustrating them through examples found
in a few artists’ work. I will thus simultaneously show the origins and the
development of virtual arc as well as the personalities of the artists utilizing
virtual conditions.
A comprehensive study of the origins of technological and virtual art would
have to include the motion aspects of kinetic art with Vladimir Tallin and
Naum Gabo, the pioneers in real motion as an art medium; Len Lye, the
pioneer of experimental cinema and animation with his tangible motion
sculptures; Pol Bury, with his infinitesimal motion as a creative principle; and
Jean Tinguely, with his critic and ironic approach co the machine.
The luminous aspects of kinetic art, which had a vital influence on a
number of virtual artists, can be illustrated with the work of Thomas VXGlfred
(the Inmia artist), Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (who was a pioneer not only in light
art but also in the areas of photography, design, and education), Frank Malina
(with his lumidyne and reflectodyne systems), and Nicholas Schoffer (the
creator of luminokineticism and spatiodynamism) as well as the activities of
Gyorgy Kepes, Moholy-Nagy’s collaborator and successor at the new Bauhaus.
The luminous trend will be treated at some length hereafter as will the
problem of spectator participation in kinetic art—by focusing on one of its
protagonists, Yaacov Agam, a creator of plastic innovations with a religious
content. Within this context, mention will also be made of the Groupe de
Recherche d'Art Visuel de Paris, and in particular Yvaral, with his emphasis
on both the visual and participatory aspects of his work. In a more detailed
study, one would also have to discuss other perceptual and environmental char
acteristics in kinetic art, such as Victor Vasarely’s environmental constructions
and optical artworks as well as those of Jesus-Raphael Soto.
Another important artistic source of technological and virtual art leads
from the Dada movement to conceptual art via the happenings of the 1950s
and 1960s. Apart from the Dada artists and conceptual pioneers Marcel
Duchamp and Raoul Hausmann, special mention would be due to the Fluxus
Group and Allan Kaprow, the inventor of the happenings.
Many virtual artists were also influenced by pop arc, the new realism, and
arte povera; their protagonists, Yves Klein (with his stress on the Immater
ial) and Andy Warhol (with his repetitive screen printed, photographic, and
other mechanically produced images), and Joseph Beuys and his expanded
concept of art aimed at a total permeation of life by creative acts.
Other new media or virtual artists seem to have definite affinities with the
surrealist, psychopathological, and autodestructive trends. Gustav Metzger's
autodestructive and aucocreative art (with its aim of preserving our environ
ment) is key here along with the autodestructive period in Jean Tinguely’s
Chapter 1
itinerary, although other manifestations such as Jean Dubuffet’s art brut
warrant similar acknowledgment.
Within the vast domain of sound, music, and noise (whose strong influ
ence on contemporary technical creativity cannot be overestimated), Luigi
Russolo and his art of noises is seminal, as are the radical compositions of John
Cage.
Another significant source for the origins and the development of techno
logical and virtual art is the equally large domain of film, animation, and even
the nineteenth-century panoramas. The latter are developed by Oliver Grau
in both his dissertation and book on virtual art.2 In this area, pioneers like
Norman McLaren (with his films drawn directly on celluloid) should not be
forgotten.
Modern Light Art

Electricity and electronics are at the base of a trend that can be described as
modern light art. This work emerged at the beginning of the 1920s, and was
still expanding at the end of the twentieth and now into the early twenty-
first centuries. It is associated with video technology, the laser, holography,
cybernetics, the computer, multimedia, and the World Wide Web.
The principal sources of modern light art are, in the order of their appear
ance, electric stage lighting (which was introduced in the early 1880s), color
organs (and similar instruments based on some sort of correspondence between
visual and auditory experience), and cinematic projections.
In the forty years before the birth of modern light art in 1920—the year
when we can first speak of an attempt at synthesis and the use of light as a
valid general form of expression—theatrical performances had already used
electric light. Environmental light was to be enriched by a new dynamic, sym
bolic quality resulting from innovations in the use of directed light. The pio
neers in this field were Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig. The former
created a new “rhythmic space" with stage lighting, and the latter revealed
the pure movement of things “in silence" with this medium. It should be
stressed that Craig had already thought of creating a new art with light and
movement.
The startling theories and applications of Appia and Craig set off a world
wide renewal of stage setting by mobile lighting. Special mention must be
made of Loi'e Fuller’s American and European dance tournees from 1892

onward, and later, Sergei Diaghilevs Ballet Russes, 1918 1921, and the
Swedish ballet of Rolph de Mare, 1924. Later still there was a constant inter
play between the plastic arts, on the one hand, and the use of light in exper
imental theater at the Bauhaus as well as in Russia and Czechoslovakia, on
the other hand.
The second source for artists using artificial light as an art medium, the
color organs, can be traced back to the'eighteenth century. The French Jesuit
and mathematician Louis-Bertrand Castel invented an ocular harpsichord
(clavecin ocnlaire\ but there is some doubt as to whether he ever completed the
instrument, which after some hesitation, he decided to build in order to prove
his theories of “color-music.” Both his theories and experiments, however,
based on the principle of placing candles behind transparent colored tapes,
have had a direct influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists
working with this medium. Castel’s studies, and those of his followers, were
hampered by the belief in too close a relationship between musical and color
“intervals.” These were generally chosen arbitrarily when creating color
music, and great scientists like Isaac Newton or Clerk Maxwell did little
to dispel the unsound basic assumptions. After constructive criticism by
Hermann Helmholtz, and due to the impact of technological advancement
allowing greater intensities of light projections, the “analogy” theories were
gradually abandoned and research started to concentrate on the essential
problem of light, leading directly to the foundation of a new plastic art of
light in the early 1920s.
The third source of, or parallel influence on, this arc can be traced to the
invention and artistic applications of cinema. Here, especially noteworthy
experiments include Leopold Survage’s Rythmes colores (1912), the films of
Vicking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Dziga Vertov, Henri Chomecte, and Walter
Ruttmann, and Fernand Leger’s Ballet mecanique (1924). A close link between
the visual arts and the technical and aesthetic achievements of cinema was
established, and it found an extension in the combined research of cine
matographer and sculptor Len Lye and the “musicalist” and “cinepeintre” Henry
Valensi. In later developments in the art of light, Norman McLaren's tech
nique of graphic arc and sound was co play an important role. Starting in the
early 1950s, McLaren began using a special camera and projector invented by
his colleagues at Canadas National Film Board, which allowed him to create
3-D movies (1951), followed by several other experimental films. In any case,
cinema can be held chiefly responsible for the use of screens (or blank walls)
Chapter 1
as “support” for lighted images in a considerable number of works in the art
of light to this day.
Prior to the birth of this new art, che 1905—1910 period included pio
neering experiments by Danish artist and singer Richard Edgar Lovstrom,
alias Thomas Wilfred, the inventor of the clavilux and the art of lumia, as well
as by Adrian Bernard Klein and others, who all developed earlier techniques,
such as Bainbridge Bishop's and Alexander Wallace Rimington’s color organs.
These years also saw attempts by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin to
make projections on to a screen with an instrument, the clavier a lumieres or
tastiera per luce., which was treated on the same level as the orchestra. The first
performance of Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, which involved this projection in
conjunction with a rather unsatisfactory small screen, took place at Carnegie
Hall in New York in 1915, followed by che second at the Bolshoi Theatre in
Moscow in 1916. It should be kept in mind, however, that Scriabin’s inten
tion was to accompany his works with grandiose chromatic illuminations cov
ering the whole concert hall, and that he was only prevented by material and
technical reasons from realizing this project. It was roughly at the same time
that Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, bent on the visual interpretation of music,
worked on his “optophone” and gave his first performance at Moscow’s
Meyerhold Theatre.
None of this experimentation achieved the same degree of independence as
the work of Thomas Wilfred. In creating his lumia arc, he was from che oucsec
aiming ac an independenc and preferably silenc luminous art. The first com
plete clavilux instrument was perfected in 1919- It consisted of a large key
board with five manuals of sliding keys and intergrouping color couplers, a
battery of six main projectors, and a number of auxiliary floodlights. After
completing his clavilux, Wilfred developed other systems using lenses and
reflecting surfaces, and it is largely due to his personal efforts chat a certain
continuity can be established between the “heroic” period and the revival of
this art in che 1950s. The intervening period was a hard one, and it must have
taken all the faith and energy of isolated artists like Wilfred and A. B. Klein
to weather the difficult period. The advent of commercial cinema must be
classed among che many factors chat inhibited the development of disinter
ested research into the plastic properties of light—research that covered a wide
field in aesthetic terms. In Wilfred’s art, the main inspiration was drawn from
the environment, and he aimed directly at the emotions of the spectator: a
walk across New York City on a drizzly October night, a penetration through

a mobile tracery of characteristic steel structures, and pure expressions of hap
piness and exuberance are cases in point.
The second decisive trend in the establishment of modern light art in the
1920s is due to the research conducted by the Bauhaus masters and in par
ticular Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (an outstanding figure of the period through his
work as an artist, administrator, and teacher). His vast political and artistic
projects were based on the model of constructivism, a movement that wanted
to abolish any distinction between art and life, and integrate all artistic prac
tices within everyday existence. Constructivism wanted to reaffirm the cre
ative potential of each individual and work for the advent of a total person—a
rational, affective, and sensorial human being, the “new man.” What is of
interest in this context, though, is that Moholy-Nagy’s research was conducted
with the new media of his epoch: photography and film. These technical pro
cedures were anchored in his plastic experimentation with light, and these
endeavors constitute a link with present-day art forms utilizing the new tech
nologies of holography and interactive digital jnstallationSj both of which are
still largely dependent on the light element. From the early 1920s to 1930,
Moholy-Nagy elaborated his seminal Light-Space Modulator, Lichtrequisit, or
Light Prop for an Electric Stage (figure 1.1). In spite of its sculptural appear
ance, this construction was conceived and appreciated by Moholy-Nagy co a
great extent as a work on the borderline between the plastic arts and cinema.
In fact, what strikes the observer in this complex mobile work is the move
ment of light and shade projected on the walls and ceiling, and also the
varying reflections on the metal elements of the construction itself. The power
of the work, in effect, depends more on the reflection than on the original
material.
Other members of the Bauhaus, Kurt Schwerdtfeger and Ludwig
Hirschfeld-Mack, developed the idea of “reflected colored-light plays”
{Reflektorische Farblichtspiele) in the early 1920s. Schwerdtfeger created his
Reflektorische Farblichtspiele in such a way that the mobile light sources sent
their colored radiations through matrices so that the screen projections
were shifted progressively. Later, in Hirschfeld-Mack’s highly elaborated
Farblichtspiele (worked by himself and other performers), the parallel devel
opment of music, forms, and light was stressed. Multicolored planes were
built up organically from darkness to the most intense luminosity.
The Bauhaus masters had a strong influence on other artists, and already
in the early 1930s an original mind like Zdenek Pesanek, the Czech architect,
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 L£szl6 Moholy-Nagy, Light Prop for an Electric Stage, 1923-1930. © 2004
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Harvard University Art
Museum, Cambridge, MA. Courtesy of the Busch-Reisinger Museum.
developed some luminous kinetic constructions side by side with color organ
research, which had been continued by Baranoff-Rossine, Alexander Laszlo,
Raoul Hausmann, and others in the 1920s. Partly abandoned and partly
absorbed into cinema and the advertising world, the plastic art of light reap
peared around 1950. This event was marked by a general interest on the part
of widely differing artists (Gyula Kosice, Roger Desserprit, Lye, Yaacov Agam,
Bury, Tinguely, and others). But the new medium took hold due to the con
sistent work of Wilfred, Malina, Abraham Palatnik, and Nino Calos with light
projections of fluid forms on screens, and Schoffer’s three-dimensional con
structions with intense light effects. A few isolated figures, such as Israeli
artist P. K. Hoenich, conducted some parallel research with sunlight that also
helped establish light as a medium in its own right.

In the years preceding the advent of laser, holographic and video art, and
computer and communication art, however, the main research in light art
centered around luminokinetic experiments, .neon art, and environmental
light art.
Among the luminokinetic artists who mainly produced works that con
tinued the trend inaugurated by Wilfred, Malina ingeniously developed his
lumidyne system—an arrangement based, on electro-mechanical movement,
and consisting of incandescent or fluorescent light sources, colored transpar
ent discs painted in translucent colors thatiturn at a fairly slow speed, a plastic
sheet on which the main composition (often related to astronomical observa
tions) is traced, and a collecting screen. Palatnik and Calos had undertaken
similar researches in a poetic vein, the former with delicate pastel shades that
create sequences of distinct compositions, and the latter in an impressive
number of personal mobiles lumineux. Wilfred himself continued his studies
during that period and produced a considerable number of individual works
in the art of lumia as well as elaborate arrangements such as the Lumia Suitet
which was for many years exhibited in a sore of miniature theater at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In terms of the luminokinetic art trend based on the research of Moholy-
Nagy and his early collaborator, Kepes, head of the light and color depart
ment at the Bauhaus of Chicago, one of the most striking works was done by
Nicholas Schoffer, who apart from light organs with electronic keyboards and
light walls, specialized in lumino-dynamic constructions often reaching envi
ronmental proportions, as in the illuminated, fifty-two-meters-high Cybernetic
Tower (figure 1.2). This work operated as an adjunct to the spectacle Formes et
Lumieres^ designed by Schoffer for the facade of the neighboring Palais des
Congres in Liege. Still more ambitious environmental projects with light by
Schoffer await realization. An adaptation of one of them was proposed as a
replacement for the destroyed two World Trade Center Towers in New York.
Neon light as a principal material for sculpture appeared when Kosice pro
duced his Luminous Structures in Buenos Aires in 1946. Other outstanding
artists in this area are Dan Flavin with his “cool” installations (figure 1.3);
Bruce Nauman with his conceptual and critical approach; Francois Morellet,
who uses neon light arrangements in order to test the spectator s spatial and
architectural awareness; and Alexandra and Moira Sina, who defy capacities
to distinguish between illusion and reality. Other noteworthy artists in this
context are Stephen Antonakos, who produced interior as well as exterior neon
Chapter 1
Figure 1.2 Nicholas Schoffer, Spatiodynamic and Cybernetic Tower with sound effects, at
Lifcge, Belgium, 1961 © 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York I ADAGP, Paris.
pieces; Joseph Kosuth and his highly conceptual pieces written in neon; and
Martial Raysse, whose neon works allude to the artificiality of modern times
along with the innocence of a new way of life made possible by technology.
Neither should one forget Chryssa and her colored neon tube work contain
ing enigmatic symbols and alphabetic elements, and her attempts to bridge
the gap between classical Greek and present-day civilization; nor Piotr
Kowalski, who tries to extend the testing of the spectator’s physical aware
ness to both the poetic and environmental spheres (figure 1.4). And then there
is too Lucio Fontana, who not only created neon light works for an environ
mental, industrialized context such as Spatial Concept, a memorable ceiling

Figure 1.3 Dan Flavin, Untitled (to a Man George McGovern), 1972. © 2004 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York: Leo Castelli Gallery. Photo by Rudolf Burckhardt.
shown at the Ninth Triennale in Milan, but also elaborated more general
seminal theories of space in his writings and manifestos.
Octo Piene and Thorbjorn Lausten can also be singled out as artists who
developed the environmental dimension of light arc. The former connected
his preoccupation with light vibration to environmental concerns from 1968
onward and became a leading eco-technological artist devoted to what he
named sky art. As for Thorbjorn Lausten, he can be regarded as the leading
light artist in Scandinavia with a strong engagement in works and events
relating to the northern natural environment. Commenting on the relation
ship between the intellectual and sensorial aspects of light art on the occasion
of his 1995 installation titled Det Polare Raum (Now: The Polar Space}—
consisting of ten large computer-programmed wall projections on a ferry
boat—Lausten observed that “a central aspect of the project is to demonstrate
the close relationship between digital technologies, the human perceptive/
cognition system(s), and how we make or create our world.”
Chapter 1
In che electronic era prior to virtual art, light played a prominent role in
such forms of technological art as video art, video art combined with com
puter art, and particularly laser and holographic art. Light is now present, up
to a point, in most virtual arc, especially in multimedia off-line and online
works as well as interactive digital installations.
Different kinds of practices prevail in video art. First of all, the use of tech
nological means in order co generate visual imagery—including formal
research into plastic elemencs, but also the considerable range of recording
conceptual art actions or happenings—often concentrates on the artist’s own
body. There is also “guerrilla video, “ which involves recording everyday street
activity with a portable camera, generally for a political or pedagogical
purpose, as well as video works combining video cameras and cameras in video
sculptures, environments, and installations. Finally, there are the live per
formances and communication works that use video and combinations of
advanced video research, most often video with computers or holography. In
all these modalities and categories of video art, the presence of light is the

dominate component, ensuring the spectacular fascination with and very exis
tence of this art form.
The work of the prominent pioneer in this field, Korean American artist
and musician Nam June Paik, is a case in point. Ever since his first altered
television sets, his work titled The Moon Is the Oldest TV, or the color synthe
sizer developed in collaboration with Shuya Abe with its electronically
induced osmotic forms, artificial light (often as a dialectical element with
color) has remained an essential element for Paik. This becomes still more
evident in his large-scale video sculptures and installations (figure 1.5) as well
as his classic video performances with Charlotte Moorman.
Without the preeminence of light, the visual and spectacular element par
excellence, video art would not have progressed from its early antitelevision
attitude to a new outlook of considerable social significance, nor would it have
developed with a certain continuity and coherence from experimental film
techniques and aesthetics to new visual research.
As regards the passage from the optical to the digital, one can posit that
with the coming of the computer, new automatic processes for the generation
and the socialization of the image will emerge. The digital image, in fact, is
Figure 1.5 Nam June Paik, Tricolor Video, 1982. Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris.
Photo by Adam Rzepka.
Chapter 1
no longer—like the optical image in photography, cinema, and television—
the registering of an object that leaves a trace on a chemical or magnetic
support, but is instead a synthesis: that is, the result of a calculation where
the mathematics and the language of the programming are key. Yet since in
most works of computer art and now virtual art the necessity of visual appre
hension by the spectator remains essential, a combination with video screens
is often sought and light remains a prominent factor. Indeed, in this combi
nation of video and computers, a good number of artists have relied on the
former's spectacular and environmental qualities to counterbalance the latter’s
stress on conceptual, numerical elements.
Two examples are illustrative here. In her multimedia projection
installations, Margot Lovejoy often contrasts logical systems of order
and belief with their chaotic opposites, but light projections still play a
crucial part in her metaphoric presentations, as they do in Jeffrey Shaw’s
panoramic computer/video installations combining literary and spatial
insights.
In general terms, from the 1960s onward, computer art and digital art were
already developing fields that were revolutionary in both rhe sensorial and
intellectual spheres. A new appeal had been made to the visual field mainly
through the use of light projections on a screen, and this appeal was not aban
doned by the great majority of computer artists or, now, virtual artists. But
other senses, such as the aural and the tactile, were also developed in com
puter art as a sequel to optical, kinetic, and participatory art, and since the
beginning of the 1990s, find new impetus in virtual art. On the other hand,
calculated and programmed art combined with the achievements in concep
tual Art have opened up the enormous possibilities of the computer in the
area of full interactivity, by using it not only as a tool and a medium but a
purveyor of abstract-information and a generator of virtual realities in cyber
netic space. Some now-historical developments in this area are most impres
sive, such as Jaron Lanier’s works and those of other artists and engineers who
experimented with devices like eye phones, data gloves, and data suits involv
ing more than the visual sense. Nevertheless, it must be noted that even in
these works, light plays a decisive role, rendering the most abstract calcula
tion accessible to the human senses.
If we pass now to the area of laser and holographic art, we are again in the
mainstream of recent modern light art developments. In fact, one of the most
spectacular developments here involves the use of the laser (an acronym

for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), a device that
significantly increases the input of light, and produces a narrow and intense
monochromatic beam appreciated by artists for its narrow concentration and
directability.
The technical qualities of the laser have been used by many artists in holog
raphy, whereas its graphic characteristics found their aesthetic application in
the work of a few specific artists, either on an environmental urban scale or
in theatrical or other spectacular performances. Outstanding achievements in
environmental realizations include the work of Rockne Krebs, Dani Karavan,
and Horst H. Baumann; in the area of multimedia performances, such musi
cians and artists as Lowell Cross, Paul Earls, Iannis Xenakis, Joel Stein, and
Carl Fredrik Reutersward have been most significant.
Let me examine more closely the work of American composer and light
artist Paul Earls, who treated the laser as a musically responsive visual
medium. Basically, he used the laser beam for its unique physical character
istics: it travels across space without spreading, it retains its power at a dis
tance, it has a single wavelength composition, it embodies power and heat in
the form of light, and “its sensed character is of a living, vibrant, life-in-light.”
Laser images are created within the eye and che brain, which interprets fast
movements of light as lines rather than movement. These two-dimensional
images can take on three-dimensionality through animation and modulation,
which Earls achieved by the use of music and sound to expand, contrast, and
rotate the images.
As for holography, this is a two-step image-forming process in which an
intermediate record is made of the complex optical field associated with an
object. To produce a hologram, a single beam emitted from a laser is split into
two by a thin, semitransparent plate, producing a reference beam and a light
beam. The direction of the beams is controlled by mirrors. Because the beams
are narrow, a system of lenses and pinholes along their path spreads them out.
The light beam is directed to, and then reflected by, the selected object. When
the light beam is reunited with the reference beam, two sets of light waves
interact and form a pattern of interference fringes, which is recorded on pho
tographic film. This becomes the hologram, which when illuminated by the
laser organizes the light into a three-dimensional representation of the origi
nal object.
The holograph is not only a product or a tool but a statement of specific
effects based on an autonomous structure of its medium, light. As light is not
Chapter 1
only a generative principle but a subject and the basic substance of the holo
graphic image as well, the self-reference of light represents an essential form
for the articulation of the holographic message.
Holographic art, apart from being a form of optical illusion, constitutes a
specific phase in the history of light art. Illusionist tendencies have existed in
art since the earliest times and were at certain periods even considered an inte
gral part of Western art. The luminous phenomenon, with its curious ambi
guity between presence and absence, is at the heart of all holographic art and
can be compared to our perception of the stars, whose physical presence has
been superseded by the luminous wave that reaches our eye long after having
been emitted.
Dieter Jung, Georges Dyens, Stephen Benton, Andrew Pepper, Frithioff
Johansen, Sally Weber, and Doris Vila are among the most prominent laser
and holographic artists.
Dieter Jung is particularly fascinated by the rainbow and uses rainbow
holographic techniques to produce several holographic cycles: the multislit,
full-color holograms Butterfly (1982), Peather Shadows, and Into the Rainbow
(1983), and the multiexposure holograms Present Space (1984) and Different
Space (1985). These project their color fields in wide vertical bands in front
of and behind the image plane. They can be experienced as a spatially
indefinable artistic effect of changing colorful shadows of light that melt
into air.
In these holographic works, Jung seeks to combine the visual knowledge
acquired in his work as a traditional painter with his more recent experience
of the hologram. His goal is to stimulate spatial imagination, generate new
mental images, and visualize spatial fusion. For him, holography is an explo
ration of both the space and the illusion of light’s aesthetic qualities. Jung is
aware that holographic space cannot copy reality, and that the effect of holo
graphic space as well as its substantial existence derive solely from the self
creating energy of light, to which holography gives absolute reality. On the
other hand, Jung speaks of “fractal beauty” to qualify his holographic pro
duction. One of his projects using this technique consists of transposing a
poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, called Hologram, specially composed for
Jung. The poem begins with the words, “It is easy to build a poem in the air.
All you need are a few well-lit words, light-footed, light-fingered, light-
minded words.” The poem then offers thoughts on the fragility and transience
of human existence.

Like Jung, Georges Dyens is aware of the diaphanous, ethereal, and
luminous nature of holography. Holography provides a striking and poetic
contrast to the solid sculpture with which it is combined in Dyens’s
‘'holosculptures.” For Dyens, holography is both real and magical; it is about
light, and light is color. Holography offers him the creation of an infinite,
constantly moving space in which shapes move in a close relationship made
visible by external light. Light, symbolic of spirituality, plays an essential part
in Dyens’s work, as it does in the works of Benton, a shining example of a
successful combination of scientific and artistic creative talents. Benton, apart
from having been the director of the Center for Advanced Visual Research at
MIT, was the inventor in the field of white light transmission of “rainbow
holograms,” which allow an image to be viewed in a succession of spectral
colors, but he also successfully experimented in this area.
Chromatic preoccupations are at the heart of Andrew Pepper’s creations.
In his holographic monoprints, he gets light to pass through the hologram
by removing some of the surface of the holographic plate, thereby forming
new luminous drawings on the surface behind, or rather “releasing” them from
that surface. All his works are dominated by the idea and the feeling that
technological means must be associated with a global human experience in
order to enter frankly into the domain of the arts as well as truly impact on
the spectator, who is invited co react to the artistic statement in one’s own
way and thus encounter a parallel experience with that of the artist.
Johansen, originally a painter, has now explored the field of holography in
its own right, while Weber has created environmental holographic works, one
of which, titled Signature of the Source and created in 1997 for the Karl Ernst
Osthaus Museum in Hagen, Germany, focuses a shaft of light in space. The
column of light pierces the center of a circular window, and expands to hover
in space above and below the window surface. Visitors see light as rays of color
racing up and down and twisting around the work’s central core. Vila bases
her holographic works on the compelling fascination of images of light float
ing weightlessly in air. In her work, the extension of narrative metaphors point
beyond the visible to render a web of ideas and emotions, caught in large
volumes of color.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the variety of the uses of light with an aesthetic
purpose, as well as the diversity of the “universe” co which this phenomenon
metaphorically alludes, had already raised the question of whether artists do
Chapter 1
not actually aim at a more comprehensive meaning involved in the art of light
than a purely formal exploration of its effects.
The search for the answer, heralded in the catalog for the Kunst-Licht-
Kunst exhibition in Eindhoven in 1966, has ranged from technically oriented
commentaries on optical laws and physical and psychological responses, co his
torical and sociological contextualizations and semantic and metaphysical
speculations. Due to more recent developments in light art, this discourse has
gained precision and conquered new areas, in particular virtual art. The qual
ities of light and its generating of color, its self-creating power, and the special
effects based on the autonomous structure of che medium itself have all been
stressed. There is no doubt that both from a technical and an aesthetic point
of view, laser and holographic art are an outcome of light art’s principal char
acteristics. New theatrical aspects of light have been exploited in laser and
holographic art, the quest for a new visual language has been continued, and
the interplay between perception and illusion, between image and reality, has
received new impetus and found a privileged place in present-day technolog
ical and virtual arc.
Although interaction between sensorial and intellectual elements, as well
as the idea of participation between artist and the general public in many
countries, are present in computer and holographic Art, it is in the commu
nication arcs, artistically oriented networks, and certain eco-technological
works and performances that interactivity finds its purest expression.
Some communication artists rely on light insofar as they employ telemat
ics, the new electronic technology derived from the convergence of comput
ers and telecommunication systems, and in particular the central faculty of
the video system with its ability co facilitate interaction via the electronic
space of computer memory, beyond the normal constraints of time and space
chat apply to face-to-face communication. This is the case with pioneers
Jacques Polieri, Kit Galloway, and Sherrie Rabinowitz, and more recently
Roy Ascott and Fred Forest, two communication artists of quite different
orientations.
Jacques Polieri, whose Video Communication Games, installed at the 1972
Munich Olympic Games, was an early example of an electronic interactive
installation using multiple television monitors and giant video screens,
showed his simultaneous interactive video-transmission Men, Images, Machines
in 1983- It involved a satellite relay between Tokyo, Cannes, and New York,

and was projected on giant television screens in front of two thousand spec
tators, permitting them to see immediately the most recent Japanese and U.S.
productions exploring the two complementary areas of robotics and digital
imagery. In 1977, Kit Galloway and Rabinowitz, who form the Mobile Image
Group, produced a remarkable interactive composite-image satellite dance,
before devising in 1984 the Electronic Cafe, a project that combined six cul
turally distinct communities within Los Angeles in a telecommunications
image bank and database network.
Both Ascott and Forest have developed communication art right up to the
latest technical and aesthetic stages of virtual art. Their itineraries will be dis
cussed at some length in the next chapter.
I should add that a number of artists now engaged in the latest forms of
networking art, discussed in chapter 6 of this book, are still utilizing lumi
nous devices in order to communicate their aesthetic results.
In fact, a rich and varied field of experience and practice exists at present
in art and communication technology, and the introduction of integrated-
system digital networks has created unparalleled venues for interaction, com
bining elements of text, image, and sound in which the presence of light is
still required.
To Otto Piene’s early preoccupation with light vibration, an added envi
ronmental concern became apparent when he produced his first large-scale
outdoor sculpture, Light Line Experiment. In order to create environments and
at the same time enter as far as possible into Earth's atmosphere and even
beyond, Piene chose to work with different technologically operated devices.
These range from kinetic sculptures to programmed light installations, laser
light projections and scanning, computer processing, holography, and
telecommunications. At the multitechnological event Centerbeam in which
Piene participated as both an artist and an organizer, his Milwaukee Anemone
was flanked by laser projections on steam by Paul Earls and Joan Brigham as
well as holograms by Harriet Casdin-Silver. Piene’s preoccupation with the
natural elements—earth, air, fire, and water—led to the vast events organized
by him under the label of sky art conferences. The performances associated
with his sky opera Icarus > produced with Earls, involved the use of techno
logical media to explore the correspondence between indoor and outdoor
space. Light played an important part in this context since video made it pos
sible for the outdoor production of Icarus to be experienced indoors, the
limited space of the video screen substituting for the expanse of real and
Chapter 1
environmental space. Lasers and various light projections were used to suggest
sky, sun, and other large-scale natural phenomena lying beyond the confines
of traditional theatrical space. This electronic transformation reduced the
dimensions of the actual event, but increased the potential size of the viewing
audience. Piene’s deep implication in sky art can be gathered from his view
that technology helps to distribute and connect natural phenomena, while
artists keep it from dulling the senses and numbing the imagination. In a
context where light still plays a crucial role, vision and other sensory and
mental faculties can draw them all together—the limitations of humans, the
grandness of nature, and the most refined and far-reaching technology inspired
by science.
Jurgen Claus, another artist, teacher, writer, and organizer, after exploring
the elements of earth and water, turned his attention to the relationship
between water and light, particularly by creating solar energy sculptures using
photoelectric cells. This eco-technology was intended to take us into the solar
age. I will return to Claus’s eco-technological itinerary in the next chapter.
As we shall see, a preoccupation with light is also often present in the most
recent artistic interactive expressions concerned with artificial life.
Can one predict the coming developments within modern light arc? There
is no doubt that the future exploration of light by artists—technically, scien
tifically, and aesthetically—has enormous potential. As technology advances
at high speed in both its numerical and sensorial innovations, artists are eager
to keep pace. Among the many interactions between physical, psychological,
and aesthetic phenomena, the scientific fact that light possesses a singular
quality (since photons do not possess antiphotons, while all ocher particles
possess cheir antiparticles) could incite artists co exploit still more the speci
ficity of light energy. As to the vast aesthetic possibilities for luminous phe
nomena co be further explored by artists, let me mention light’s physical
characteristics of speed, duration, and rhythm; its spectacular and environ
mental qualities; its semiotic, cosmological, religious, and spiritual connota
tions; its lyricism; its immateriality; and its propensity to induce an expanded
consciousness in the onlooker, a preliminary to entering into the process of
creative interactivity.
Spectator Participation
In order to illustrate another important source of technological and virtual
art, spectator participation, already present in the happenings and the kinetic

art of the 1950s and 1960s, and which is now known under the enlarged
heading of interactivity, let me describe in some detail the itinerary of Yaacov
Agam. He is one of those artists who attempt to reconcile two apparently con
tradictory terms: scientific or technological progress with the biological and
spiritual survival of humankind. This artist played a historic role as a pioneer
of the kinetic art trend in the early 1950s when he introduced the fourth
dimension, time, into his works at a moment when the artistic environment
was still dominated by pictorial two-dimensional statements. But Agam is
also especially interesting in this context because he has never given up exper
imenting with diverse means—including those offered by all the advanced
technologies.
Defining Agam’s personality in just a few words is not easy. At first sight
he appears narcissistic. Yet one can also see Agam’s desire throughout his
career to deeply implicate the public in his works.
His Hebrew spirituality contradicts his enthusiasm for the constructivist
abstract, rationalist, social, and universalist ideas and practices of the Bauhaus
masters. It is true that among the masters there were a few mystical person
alities, such as Johannes Itten, who was in fact one of Agam’s teachers before
his arrival in Paris.
The key to Agam’s art, it seems to me, is in his determination co transcend
two types of opposition: on the one hand, between the individual and society,
and on the other, between spiritualism and rationalism, or indeed, between
metaphysics and rational logic.
To reconcile his metaphysical and rational penchants, Agam practices what
I would call the perceptible absence of the image in his work. This inspired
procedure is, of course, to be joined with the artist’s determination to conform
to the Bible’s teachings and especially the second commandment, which
prohibits the idolatry of graven images. Moreover, Agam draws some of
his inspiration from the Kabbalah—whose teaching sees the invisible in che
visible, the spiritual in the corporeal, and the reflection of the unknowable
God in everything—and probably che Talmud—che reading of which is
essentially an experience chat transcends che limits of logical and rational
thought.
As co the opposition of individual and society (does the artist create for the
public or only follow one’s own creative urge?), it is at the heart of the new
relationship between public participation and the artist’s responsibility. This
relationship began with kinetics, and continues in telecommunications art and
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computer art—developments that have been followed by Agam in most of his
artistic production.
With Agam, we might wonder whether this participation is calculated by
the artist—which would give a limited choice to the spectator—or if, on the
contrary, the notion of participation resides in the equality of two sensibili
ties: that of the artist, and that of the spectator. Is this invitation to partici
pate a situation in which the spectator reinvents art? Does it incite spectators
to become actors by both using all their senses ancTconsidering several tem
poral and dramatic factors? Or is it meant for the spectator to experience
freedom? (figure 1.6). To my mind, the last of these hypotheses seems the
most pertinent.
Agam has applied his aesthetic-religious approach for more than forty years
through polymorphic paintings, play objects, transformable sculptures, video
graphic and holographic works, and finally, works with effective and multi
directional movements—in order to try and create another reality made visible
by the works’ multiple metamorphoses—as well as through a series of mobile,
graphic, and chromatic compositions of an abstract geometric style permu
tated by computer and simultaneously broadcast on sixteen video monitors.
In one of these series, the artist tries to test the spectator’s visual capacities
and to have the viewer discover the entire recent past of optical art and kinetic
art by demonstrating the essential difference between the two in so far as the
latter introduces the fourth dimension, time, into the artistic universe. But
in these multidimensional works, Agam tends to go frankly beyond the visible
into what can be considered a fifth, unifying dimension-—the dimension of
constant change and the perpetual flux of reality.
How did Agam arrive at these expressions of highly advanced technolog
ical art?
In order to answer this question one has to bear in mind chat the intro
duction of advanced technology in Agam’s arc is only a phase in his quesc for
the absolute, co fulfill both his need for spirituality and his determination to
share the creative acc with the public.
It is worth recalling that as early as 1967, he had produced works of a tech
nical character with a metaphysical connotation, for which he coined the word
“tele art.” For Agam, this arc is meant to give humans a supernatural experi
ence, to allow them to create light through a word in the image of God. Fiat
lux, or racher, a new combination of the Promethean myth and Jewish
mysticism.

Figure 1.6 Yaacov Agam, Touch Me, 1990 onward. Sculpture.
But human beings are for Agam no abstraction. He sees the psychological
reality of a person in the great number of possibilities that lie dormant in
every human being. The only true task for an artist is therefore to make
humans conscious of the physical forces that surround them. ThlS_Cons£ious-
ness can only be achieved by liberating these forces through an aesthetic expe
rience. This experience must be an active one, involving a combination of the
human senses.
Chapter 1
Two remarkable works of tele art, Espace rythme “Que la lumiere soit” (1967)
and Peinture rythmeepar la lumiere (1956-1967), were presented in 1967 at the
Light and Movement exhibition at the Municipal Museum of Modern Art in
Paris. In the former, Agam showed the light element entirely free from its
relationship to extraneous objects or materials, utilizing the inner space of a
sphere (ingeniously constructed by Pierre Faucheux, the exhibition’s archi
tect), devoid of all objects or references. The sphere’s immaculately white,
curved inner surface was ready to receive and return all energies, especially
light and sound. The ideal conditions for Agam’s revolutionary aims were thus
provided: he no longer wanted to produce art objects, but to liberate the aes
thetic forces in humans by an audiovisual statement withoutintermediaries.
On the level of artistic research, there is an evident continuity between the
artist’s earlier work and the technically developed tele art works. Previously,
Agam’s aim had been to show the simultaneity of happenings by making an
appeal to the spectator’s bodily movement. Agam, like Marshall McLuhan and
John Cage, is aware that “everything happens at once.” Stress can be laid on
the relationships between the different coordinates. The special nature of time
can thus be demonstrated; it can be discovered by the spectator moving in
front of one’s own many-faced “polymorphic” pictures. Similarly in Agam’s
tele art works, and in a way also in his multidirectional and multidimensional
works later, the all-important life-giving element of light becomes noticeable
through the spectator’s action and perceptive awareness. In Espace rythme, as
soon as the action ceases, the spectator is plunged into darkness. Only the
manifestations of the spectator’s own energy transformed into sound will make
the light visible in purified space. In fact, one does not even see the light—
at least what Agam calls “figurative light.” Agam’s light surrounds the spec
tator, allowing the viewer to discover the sensation of pure light through a
chromatic light modulation. By isolating the phenomenon of the modulation
of pure chromatic light, Agam engenders the spiritual “forms” he is seeking.
In his tele art, as in his later series of multidirectional and multidimensional
works, a new aspect of form is revealed by following the different rhythms of
the modulation of light. While pure light was thus used for the first time in
Agam’s tele art as a medium for direct visual communication, in his later
works the relationships between light and color were developed to a high
degree.
Agam’s tele art works anticipated many other ulterior realizations in elec
tronic art. They were already a demonstration of how modern technological
means could be employed in what can be described as an artistico-scientifico-
technological cour de force. In Espace rythmt, for example, microphones and
architectural devices backed up simple electrical appliances, whereas in Pein
lure rylbmtepar la lumiere complicated electronic circuits, mechanical elements
rotating at high speed, and rapidly flashing lights with stroboscopic effects
entered into action.
But in order to understand how this pioneer of kinetic art managed to
influence those artists who made the passage from the mechanical to the elec
tronic era in art possible and established modern technological art as a phe
nomenon with an identity of its own, one also has to take into account the
creation of works by Agam in other branches of modern technological art such
as holographic, communications, video, and computer art as well as in the
combination of the latter two. Some of these works are important stepping-
stones both in the establishment of modern technological art and Agam’s
itinerary from his kinetic origins to his multidimensional, technological
achievements.
Agam’s contribution to the development of communication art and indeed
virtual art must be understood in the sense that at a certain stage a spectac
ular mutation was produced by the passage from spectator participation to
interactivity between the artist and the general public—and this has found
pure expression in the communications arts. Participation in Agam’s works,
as we have seen, plays a leading role. Agam is interested in sharing his knowl
edge and experience with others and holds that the artist’s research is by no
means a private area of development, which must be guarded against the
intrusion of the outside world. He instituted a course at the Carpenter Center
of the Visual Arts at Harvard University called “Advanced Exploration in
Visual Communication.” His students came from the sciences as well as the
artsT^ncThoneôFtEem'had any specialized knowledge of contemporary art.
Agam was therefore concerned to establish a common language for visual com
munication that would transcend all the divergent methods of viewing the
world.
But in order to go beyond the visible and the perception of definite forms,
Agam constantly employed the perceptible absence of images in vanishing
and recurring physical structures, and their different phases are always marked
by a conscious act, a creative participation of the public.
At the time of Agam’s polyphonic pictures, structural intervals as in music
corresponded to the spectator's movement, which became a constituent
Chapter 1
element of the work of art as it was perceived in space. Its different phases—
it will be punctuated, lengthened, shortened, raised, or lowered as the spec
tator proceeds—are the various states of the image.
Recently, in his multidimensional painting-sculptures—multicylindrical
works turning simultaneously backward and forward at different speeds—
Agam has gone beyond the time dimension. In his Super Polyimages and his
Galaxies and Super Galaxies, the perceptual absence of images is noticeable in
the fifth dimension, in which we can get a glimpse of its multimorphism,
multichromatism, multidirectionality, and multirhythmicality: the spectator
is no longer in the presence of a single entity, a single rhythm, but can now
perceive many related changes, comparable to listening to an orchestra versus
a single instrument. Thus, Agam has obtained in many ways and on several
levels interactivity between the artist and the work, and between the work
and the spectator.
It must be stressed that the environmental scale has played a critical
role at different moments of Agam’s artistic evolution. In his earlier
works, such as Double Metamorphosis, the spectator discovered a multiplicity
of combinations while changing positions in front of the work, while in
his later works, such as Agam Space (at the Forum Leverkusen) or the Salon
Agam (installed for a time at the Presidential Elysee Palace in Paris), the same
characteristics were applied in an environmental context. Agam reached
another stage when he introduced into this research the latest technological
achievements, as in his large-scale fire-water fountains, which have proved co
be a fascinating experience for a large number of people. The one installed
in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square consists of a huge sculpture (3.4 meters
high, 6.3 meters in diameter, and 5 tons in weight) placed in a reflecting
pool of water (12 meters in diameter). A computer activates the fountain
by synchronizing the rotation of the wheels (covered with a polymorphic
painting that changes chromatically) and the movement of fire and water with
the music. At particular moments (in tune with the music), fire spurts
forth amid the water. Here the fifth, unifying dimension is noticeable
(figure 1.7).
In his technically advanced works like Visual Music that incorporate recent
computer technology, Agam is pursuing a similar aesthetic. These works are
animated visual creations that open up new horizons: the observer is invited
to participate in going beyond the common experience of time, space, and the
environment as the images, which change and evolve unceasingly, are revealed.

The sixteen screens of these works receive independent images, comparable to
the instruments of an orchestra; they are all synchronized in a visual sym
phonic concert, with the computer as conductor.
Let me cite another example of an artist passing from the mechanical to
the electronic era in relation to the question of spectator participation. As a
founding member of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel de Paris, Yvaral
was perhaps the one who most constantly put the accent on the scientific and
artistic exploration of visual phenomena as well as the physical participation
of the spectator—one of the principal themes of the group. Whereas several
members of the group introduced physical movement into their propositions,
Yvaral stressed virtual movement and the spectator’s perception and cogni
tion, thereby making him a forerunner of certain virtual artists concerned with
the same issues.
Chapter 1
Ac an early stage in his work, Yvaral was exploiting psychophysiological
illusions involving line interference, such as the moire effect (which is
obtained by placing two grids of wire mesh in conjunction and thus allow
ing the formation of fringe patterns similar to those seen in moire silk), the
effect of dazzle, and the play of conflicting interpretations in black and white
as well as optical illusions relating to volume, such as the exploration of dif
ferent angles of viewing and the superimposition of elements in real space. In
his mobile cubes, for instance, the delicate interference effects created by black
lines and translucent materials is particularly arresting. Yvaral’s early experi
ence with the visual properties of materials such as Perspex, india rubber, and
vinyl thread began by relating these materials to the formal problems of super
imposition, displacement, and acceleration. His subsequent work branched
out into the use of transparencies, cubes, moire effects, structures, and games
that involved sensations of instability in the spectator when confronted with
networks of black and white in “optical acceleration.” From the 1970s onward,
his chromatic experiences attained environmental scale. A number of monu
mental optical works were accomplished in France such as the polychromatic
square with colored flagstones at Canet in the province of Roussillon (1987),
the polychrome murals of the facades of the town hall in Seyne-sur-Mer (1988)
and the Liberty Building in Narbonne (1989)—all conceived and executed in
collaboration with his father, Victor Vasarely. On the other hand, the large-
scale mural painting Saint Vincent de Paid at 105 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis
in Paris (1988) and the mobile polychrome sculpture Structure octa-tetra at the
agora of the French Telecommunications Company in Sophia Antipolis in
southern France (1992) are his independent personal achievements.
In the latter half of the 1970s, Yvaral took an important step forward when
he managed to create a link from his early optical research and interest in
science as a model for artistic creation with a subtle use of the computer for
the mathematical programming of a pictorial surface-.
For a long time, Yvaral had been impressed by images of repetition in the
area of crystallography. By placing clusters of atoms side by side, one can grasp
the difficult notion of infinity in its essence. Yvaral has built his work with
the computer around this observation associated with the notion and the prac
tice of the series, a term borrowed from mathematics. The idea of repetition,
that of infinitesimal change within a repetitious context, as well as conver
gence (when allied to a visual demonstration) lead to the possibility of access
to the troubling notion of infinity.

One of Yvaral’s series of computer graphic paintings, Synthetized Mona Lisa
(1989), is comprised of twelve visual studies based on a numerical analysis
that breaks down an image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa into measurable
elements. The strictly geometric structures of these studies makes possible not
only the reconstitution of the original image but also the construction of a
different image, a different face, with the same elements (figure 1.8). For
Yvaral, any whole form can be considered a geometric combination of ele
♦♦♦
ll
1
•Y \\
Figure 1.8 Yvaral, Mona Lisa Synth^tisee, 1989.
Chapter 1
mentary units available for reconstruction, and it is in the systematic exploita
tion of this field that the artist hoped to create visual phenomena in which
figuration and abstraction are no longer in opposition.
Other series consist in numerized variations incorporating the portraits of
such different personalities as Salvador Dali, Simon Bolivar, and Blaise Pascal.
In all these works the artist tries to establish, with the aid of the computer,
a digital art based on his previous research of a geometric vocabulary and his
desire co codify, recurrent visual phenomena.
In other words, in these series, Yvaral has tried to visualize exhaustively all
the details of an essential cultural image while also attempting to illustrate
the new formula for the manipulation of an image in a time of advanced
technology.
A good example of how the passage from the participation of the specta
tor to a true interactivity is favored the computer and the Internet can be dis
cerned in the activities of Carlos Cruz-Diez. Starting in the mid-1950s, this
Venezuelan artist was installing manipulable works in the street followed by
a series of realizations that aimed at the aleatory and the ephemerous by cre
ating situations in constant mutation that allowed for the perception of dif
ferent aspects of the chromatic world.
In changing the manipulable support to a digital one, Cruz-Diez managed
co increase the possibilities of communication. In a work like Experience cbro-
matique aUatoire interactive^ conceived for and assisted by computers, the public
enters into the spirit and the intimacy of the artist’s research, like an inter
preter approaching a musical score (figure 1.9).
With a similar idea in mind, Cruz-Diez has created an exhibition titled
From Participation co Interactivity—featuring his works from 1954 to
2003—that can be transmitted by the Internet to any location, and then
installed there without the usual costs for packing, transportation, and
insurance.
Environmental Artistic Commitments

In terms of the global involvement of an artist in the issues of the day, the
itinerary followed by Gustav Metzger seems extremely relevant to the exis
tential commitments of a good number of contemporary virtual artists. It
would be rewarding co scudy in more detail elsewhere the relationship
among psychological, social, technical, and aesthetic factors in Metzger’s
career. But let me single out a few aspects of this itinerary here. On the

Figure 1.9 Carlos Cruz-Diez, Experience chromatique ateatoire interactive (.interactive
Random Chromatic Experience), 1995.
psychological side, one should never forget chat as a stateless exile, Meczger
has developed a particular sensitivity to the dangers that threaten the
individual in this world, but at the same time, this has also created in him a
special awareness of the dangers that threaten the community and the world
as a whole.
These preoccupations can be discerned at those different stages in his career
where the relationship between aesthetic and technical factors have found sig
nificant expressions and manifestations.
Already at the beginning of the 1960s, in his demonstrations of autode
structive (and autocreative) art, when he was painting in acid on nylon screens,
Metzger considered that the tension of forms in transformation acting directly
on parts of the body could lead co feelings of liberation and intense pleasure.
Yet by setting up large-scale, industrially produced sculptures in a process of
disintegration, autodescructive art, through the aesthetic of revulsion, could
lead people co a rejeccion of many aspects of our civilization.
Chapter 1
Similarly, in his chemical demonstrations in the mid-1960s, when he pro
jected images of liquid crystals undergoing a form of perpetual transforma
tion induced by heat, Metzger’s intention was to create a tension between his
autocreative art of change, growth, and movement and autodestructive decay
as natural forces run their course. In these dramatic performances, Metzger
was demonstrating the color changes of chemicals and trying to get close to
the transformation processes of nature with the aid of his liquid crystals placed
between polarized screens. By heating them and letting them cool, he was
able to project a constantly changing imaging of translucent color as the
chemical broke down.
In the 1970s, while lecturing on the ethics and aesthetics of the
art/science/technology link, he conceived a commentary on the pollution
problem. First he presented an adapted car, the Mobbile., whose exhaust led
into a plastic box on top of it, during part of the Kinetics exhibition held in
London in 1970. Two years later, his project KARBA 1970—1972, prepared
for the Documenta 5 exhibition in Kassel, Germany, consisted of a large clear
plastic tube into which four cars were to discharge their exhaust fumes during
the duration of the manifestation.
Metzger’s main concern with the sociological implications of androids and
the computer, and generally with the social implications involved in both
science and art, were all noticeable in The Button, which he prepared for the
Electra exhibition in Paris in 1983- This complex, high-tech, multimedia
environment with spectator participation addressed the strategy of mutually
assured destruction. By alluding to the controversy surrounding atomic
weapons and trying to involve the museum visitor as much as possible in this
problem, Metzger expressed the opinion that it was the art world’s duty to
engage in this kind of discussion.
In the 1990s, Metzger was increasingly involved in the battle for the pro
tection of nature. He had been concerned about this problem ever since 1964,
when he produced his manifesto on random activity in material/transforming
works of art. In it, he observed that nature was in constant motion, that mate
rial/transforming art showed this motion objectified to a maximum, and that
the artist stands in a new relation to nature. Already at the beginning of the
1990s, Metzger took up a particularly strong position with regard to what he
called damaged nature. He held that the notion of the environment, as
employed by industrialists and politicians, was misleading, and represented
a smoke screen in order to maintain profits and power. In this context, the

environment was used to obscure the fact that nature, a symbol for continu
ity and permanence, was both necessary to our well-being and our memory.
In fact, Metzger makes a clear distinction not only between human-made
and natural environments but also between the environment, nature, and
human nature. He is always conscious that human-made technology can be
used to either destroy nature or further human endeavors such as artistic cre
ativity. Metzger remarks that even though Earth is overrun with waste and
poison, the information explosion has occurred and the personal computer has
been launched. His theoretical position in 1995, based on his considerations
of autodestructive art, but also his commitment co autocreative art, was that
thousands of new techniques could be developed in the autocreative arc of the
future. He stated that the biological sciences, bioengineering, and various rev
olutionary forms of technology, then in their initial stage, were important for
this art. To illustrate this, Metzger produced in 1992 an earth minus envi
ronment manifestation and recommended Santiago Calatrara’s project for the
unfinished Church of St. John the Divine in New York—an artistic project
that intended to complete this building with the creation of a glass roof with
a “bioshelter” for about forty living trees.
Metzger, with his courageous commitment to the protection of nature and
his interest in all technological developments, remains an outstanding eco-
technological artist at a moment when virtual arc, with its emphasis on tech
nique in service of humanity, represents a new departure.
Jean Tinguely can be considered both a continuator of Francis Picabia’s
machine aesthetic and a forerunner of robotic art, telerobotics, and telepiste-
mology as well as a commentator on the relationship between human and
machine intelligence. A good number of these developments can be detected
in Tinguely’s works of the autodestructive period. For Tinguely, the machine
incarnated human intelligence, and both the machine’s beauty and its capac
ity for movement help explain its attraction for him. Thus, we can expect that
the metamorphoses of the machine will bring about a corresponding dynamic
effect in a spectacle that reaches the “summit of absurdity” through its own
intrinsic logic. Tinguely created machines that work for nothing and subse
quently have to destroy themselves. He avoided the pitfail of protesting
against an existing—and therefore acceptable—situation, in which the sym
bolism would be no more than photographic. In effect, he succeeded in
making such demonstrations a kind of mirror on the absurdity of the social
and psychological situation—but at the same time, he contrived to show the
Chapter 1
absurdity of the absurdity, and led us out through manifestations concerned
with truth and liberty.
Tinguely’s influence can be explicitly recognized in the works of such con
temporary virtual artists as Ken Goldberg and his The Robot in the Garden as
well as Jean-Paul Longavesne and his large networking painting machines.
After having described in some detail the personalities and itineraries of
pioneering artists who could have had an influence on present-day techno
logical and virtual artists from the point of view of kinetic and light phe
nomena, participation or interactivity of the spectator, or social and
environmental commitments, let me single out an artist who could also be
considered a model of this kind, but also from the angle of the relationship
between art and science.
Frank Malina was born in Brenham, Texas, and grew up in a household
devoted to music. In 1920, when he was only seven years old, his father took
the family back to Czechoslovakia, and stayed on in Moravia for five years.
Malina went to school there, but he was already passionately interested in
drawing as well as stories involving balloons and aircraft. He read Jules Verne’s
Voyage to the Moon in Czech, and this story remained at the back of his mind.
(Forty years later, in I960, he proposed to the International Academy of Astro
nautics in Stockholm, that a committee be established to prepare a staffed
research laboratory on the moon for the use of all nations.) When he returned
to the United States in 1925, he covered his room with pictures of his per
sonal heroes at the time: Benjamin Franklin and Charles Lindbergh. Perhaps
prepared by his regular reading of popular mechanics and science magazines,
or more ambitious literature such as Automobile Boys or Tom Swift—both full
of technical stories that are nowadays amalgamated into science fiction—
Malina decided to become an engineer. He completed a BS in 1934, and
received a scholarship for graduate studies at the California Institute of Tech
nology at Pasadena, earning a considerable portion of his expenses there by
illustrating technical books. When he met Theodore von Karman, the
eminent aeronautics theoretician, in 1936 at the institute, he was asked to
prepare illustrations for Karman and Maurice A. Biot’s book Mathematical
Methods in Engineering.
Thus, the foundation for Malina’s double personality as a scientist and an
artist was laid during his childhood. His scientific personality can best be
understood by looking at his main activities in the fields of engineering and
natural science: rocket propulsion, astronautics, and geophysics. As a matter

of fact, he designed and launched America’s first successful high-altitude
rocket in 1$M5. His artistic personality can be characterized not only by his
constant introduction of scientific observations and theories into his artistic
experiments but also by his attempts to grapple with problems and relation
ships such as those between figurative and abstract art, daylight and artificial
light, virtual and real movement, as geometric, surrealist, and realist subject
matter.
Malina’s artistic venture involved a long period of incubation and then a
struggle for ideas, culminating around 1953 in a break from the traditional
two-dimensional medium. This was followed by a series of experiments in
tension, transparency, electric light, and movement, all of which were intro
duced at certain intervals in his work. Malina often conducted parallel research
in the different media and systems that he had elaborated, however.
Apart from the choice in form of artificial light and its many possibilities,
including movement, Malina’s electro-painting period was an experimental
phase that taught him a considerable amount about the transparency of color
and use of translucid surfaces.
The result, as mentioned earlier, was his four-component system, which he
named lumidyne, from 1956 onward, he produced the main body of his work
with this system. The four parts of this system are lights, motor-driven
movable elements (motors), a transparent plate (a stator), and a translucent
diffusing screen. For the illumination, Malina essentially used fluorescent
tubes and incandescent lights mounted on a backboard. The main features of
the lumidyne system are the judicious combination of the four elements
forming the artwork, the spacing between these elements (which could
become the essential factor in the final composition), and the fact that with a
nominal power input, these narrow boxes can still be hung on a wall (or if
murals, worked into the wall).
The subject matter of the pictures from this period was still dominated by
the unseeable scientific world. But equal importance was now placed on color
and color transformations through various light sources, resulting in a variety
of movements with multiple aesthetic intentions (figure 1.10).
Although Malina still made pictures with the lumidyne system, his ulte
rior visual researches were mainly concerned with the reflection of light. His
newly developed reflectodyne system had considerably changed his artistic
attitude. The fact that he was no longer employing paint on static or rotat
ing surfaces, but that a surprising variety of forms was almost spontaneously
Chapter 1
Figure 1.10 Frank Malina, The Cosmos, 1965. Kinetic mural, lumidyne system, for Perga-
mon Press (Oxford, UK, 1965).
created and then had to be controlled and directed by the artist, had changed
the order of creation, recontextualizing such important problems as the rela
tionship between the subject matter and its formal expression. Previously,
Malina started out with a definite visual and emotional experience, so that he
could speak without difficulty of a picture’s subject matter and unhesitatingly
give it a title. Now, he was faced with a welter of forms that took on their
subject matter slowly, and the title for a refiectodyne picture could only be
found at the conclusion of this creative process.
On a purely technical level, the new refiectodyne system was composed
of four elements: a light source, a color wheel, reflecting surfaces, and a

diffusing screen. But this system also opened up other possibilities because
music and sound could easily be integrated into this type of picture.
Malina also invented the polardyne system—where polarizing sheets were
used to cause color changes in images—as well as an audio-kinetic system—
where the motion of the disks was coupled with microphones that picked up
ambient sound.
Even with the most modern inventions of the time—such as perfected pho
toelectric cells, cathode-ray tubes, and other devices used in television and
cybernetics—a considerable number of experiences would have been necessary
before an aesthetically interesting blending of sound structure elements such
as frequency (or amplitude), intensity, overtone structure, and “envelope”
(namely, growth, duration, and decay) with visual elements such as color sat
uration, light intensity and frequency, lines, and outlines (forms) could have
been achieved, and the problem of parallel composition really envisaged.
Despite Malina’s foresight, it would take another generation of artists and
engineers to arrive at satisfactory developments in this field.
Technical Sources (such as Engineering and Inventions)
Turning now to the purely technical sources of technological, multimedia, or

virtual art, Randall Packer and Ken Jordan’s 2001 book Multimedia: From
Wagner to Virtual Reality is particularly helpful.3 Packer and Jordan study the
careers of the pioneers of multimedia art and the birth of the new medium in
a remarkably thorough way, and collect a good number of significant texts by
these pioneers under the headings of integration, interactivity, hypermedia,
immersion, and narrativity. For them, integration is the combining of artis
tic forms and technology into a hybrid form of expression; and interactivity
can be interpreted as the user’s ability to manipulate and affect one’s experi
ence of media directly, and to communicate with others through media. The
hypermedia are for these authors the linking of separate media elements to
one another to create a trail of personal association; immersion is the experi
ence of entering into the simulation or suggestion of a three-dimensional envi
ronment: and narrativity concerns the aesthetic and formal strategies that
derive from the above concepts, which result in nonlinear story forms and
media presentations.
For Packer and Jordan, the concept of integrated, interactive media has a
long history—an evolution that extends for more than 150 years. It runs from
Chapter 1
Richard Wagner to Ivan Sutherland, the inventor of the Sketchpad (1965),
one of the first versions of intergraphics software; from Vannevar Bush, the
inventor of a mechanical device, a differential analyzer, the Memex, to Bill
Viola. In 1939, Bush had already produced some ideas for a personal com
puter, and he determined the chief characteristics of multimedia in 1945. In
Packer and Jordan’s book, an allusion is also made to Norbert Wiener and his
groundbreaking theory of cybernetics. Other outstanding nonartistic person
alities—inventors of decisive engineering advances—discussed in this book,
which also contains extracts of their thought, are J. C. R. Licklider, Douglas
Engelbart, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, Marc Canter, and Tim Berners-Lee. An MIT
professor and computer scientist, Licklider treated the computer as a creative
collaborator; Engelbart helped augment human intellect through the ideas of
bitmapping, windows, and direct manipulation through a mouse; and in the
1970s, Kay laid the foundation for the future architecture of information, and
with his dynabook, digital multimedia came into being and the personal com
puter was born. As for the philosopher Nelson, he invented an elaborate
system (XANADU) for the sharing of information across computer networks
and his hyperlinks connected discrete texts in nonlinear sequences (hyper
texts), thereby challenging linear narrative. Canter invented the first com
mercial multimedia authoring system of closed systems, the CD-ROM, and
interactive installations, open systems using a computer network; in 1989,
Berners-Lee, a British engineer, invented the World Wide Web, which became
an international phenomenon, a global media database, just five years later.
Other Sources (such as Science and Linguistics)
Stephen Wilson’s comprehensive 2002 book Information Arts: Intersections of

Art, Science, and Technology is an outstanding survey of the scientific sources of
technological and virtual art.4 Here, one can find references to biology,
animals and plants, ecology, medicine, and the body as well as examples of
artists working with microbiology. Sources in physics, nonlinear systems, nan
otechnology, materials science, geology, astronomy, space science, global posi
tioning systems, and cosmology are mentioned with respect co artists inspired
by these domains. Ocher sources such as mathematics, algorithms, fractals,
genetic art, and artificial life are also treated in Wilson’s book, along with
many aspects of telecommunications, sound installations, robots, and digital
information systems including computers. This book is not only a panorama

of artistic concerns with historical and topical scientific and technological
matters but also offers exceptional insights into the aesthetic options of the
many artists discussed here by an author who is an artist himself.
There are, of course, a vast number of other possible scientific and cultural
domains as secondary sources for technological and virtual art. Some of them
will appear in the following chapters when I discuss the itineraries of artists
whose work leads from the mechanical to the electronic era, and even more
so in my detailed analysis of the work, aesthetic options, and personal com
mitments of the artists engaged in the passage from technological to virtual
art as well as contemporary virtual art itself.
Chapter 1
□
Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)
In this chapter, I emphasize the various itineraries followed by technological

artists insofar as they serve as models or references for the demarche of the
artists practicing virtuality. I examine some of these itineraries from both an
aesthetic and a technical point of view, following an order that differentiates
laser art, holographic art, and eco-technological art, buc above all stresses the
importance of computer art and telecommunications art for the establishment
of a virtual art. Although video art has a crucial history and development, as
does cinema and electronic music, I shall not deal with them in this and the
following chapters except for some allusions in the text and the bibliography,
since these areas have been or are now autonomous.
Laser Art
The first of these itineraries is devoted to Dani Karavan, who I mentioned

earlier. He is an environmental artist who creates on-sice sculptures and
installations with various traditional but also modern means, such as the
laser beam.
Karavan was born in 1930 in Tel Aviv, where his father was a town engi
neer and planner. As a result, the Israeli sculptor spent his entire childhood
on a constantly evolving site, and the conquest by the town of the desert is a
phenomenon that marked this artist’s imagination and sensibilities forever.
After his art training in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Karavan went to Florence
in 1956 to study fresco techniques. Back in Israel in 1957, he integrated
bidimensional murals into architecture. In 1963, Karavan opened a new
chapter in his work with a minimalist and conceptualist sculpture of monu
mental and symbolic bent, titled Monument of Life. It was done near Beersheba
in the Negev desert.
Karavan’s environmental installations are generally constructed with the
aid of such traditional sculptural materials as wood, stone, or white concrete,
but also with natural elements such as grass, olive and cypress trees, water,
wind, and sunlight.
The laser was introduced to Karavan’s artistic repertoire toward the end of
the 1970s, but he had already become familiar with the technique and its aes
thetic possibilities when he collaborated with the Czech scenographer Josef
Svoboda, and also during his research at MIT in Cambridge and the Weiz-
mann Institute in Israel. The laser became a prominent part of his work in
1978 at a spectacular demonstration titled A Tribute to Galileo. In this work,
a powerful laser symbolically joins Sangallo’s Belvedere Fort in Florence’s
suburbs to the cupola of Brunelleschi’s Duomo (figure 2.1). In 1983, Karavan
executed another environmental work, The Bridge., which linked the left and
right banks of the Neckar River with a laser beam extending between the
castle standing over the town of Heidelberg and the trail on the other side
known as the Philosopher’s Walk. That same year at the Electra exhibition in
Paris, he used two vivid-green laser beams to join the city’s Museum of
Modern Art, where the exhibition was being held, with the nearby Eiffel
Tower and the district known as La Defense to try to make tangible the
relationship between historical and modern events, as well as architectural
and technological creations, and especially to illustrate the mutation of the
mechanical era into that of electronics.
More recently, Karavan, ever faithful to the introduction of the laser in
combination with more traditional sculptural and environmental materials,
has been developing an urban project in the new town of Cergy-Pontoise near
Paris. A laser beam follows the town’s main street as both a directional sign
post and a decorative element. But it is meant to be projected much further
in order to symbolically link Cergy-Pontoise with one of the leading districts
of Paris, the Etoile, without forgetting the historical monuments, like
Versailles, along the way.
To better understand not only Karavan’s artistic commitments but also his
sociopsychological intentions, it is helpful to refer to Theodor Adorno’s
aesthetic theories. For Adorno (and up to a certain point, also for Karavan),
Chapter 2
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wirsswisrpr .... '•^.4^ llwwrR||W
Figure 2.1 Dani Karavan, A Tribute to Galileo, 1978. Laser display in Florence, Italy. Photo
by Peter Szmuk.
arc is neither a reflection of reality nor an aspect of ideology, as various dog

matists would have it. It is a witness to history—that is, accumulated expe
riences and suffering—as well as a place of desire. Aesthetics is therefore the
ferment and promise of a free world. Karavan’s urban environment in Nurem
berg, Way of Human Rights (1993), bears witness to this.
From the beginning of his artistic career, Karavan’s socioaesthetic position
has never wavered. His attempts to conquer space are linked to a veritable sol
idarity with his fellow citizens. His research has always leaned toward socially
oriented urban planning. This has enabled him to be accepted as both an artist
and an individual without ever distancing himself from his immediate
encourage or those he works with when carrying out projects in other
countries.

Karavan is an artist who combines an exceptional awareness of the physi
cal and psychological implications related ro the history and geography of a
site. The introduction of advanced technology in his work not only represents
a possible transcending of human limits but testifies to a firm determination
on his part to be of his time by assuming the implications of cultural and
political circumstances.
Karavan is a good example of an artist whose penchant for utopian issues
is compensated for by a social and aesthetic commitment hie et nunc.
Holographic Art
The relationship between virtual art and holographic art has been much
neglected. Indeed, I think that virtual art can neither be limited to digital
and computer art, nor to a narrow definition of information art. Virtual art is
in reality a larger development of technological art in which a good number
of holographic art elements along with attitudes adopted by holographic
artists, such as the virtualization of the third dimension and the way light is
experienced, continue to play their part. For this reason, I will describe
in some detail the itinerary followed by Margaret Benyon and Harriet
Casdin-Silver.
Margaret Benyon is one of the pioneers in the area of laser and holographic
art. Her originality concerns both the technical and aesthetic aspects of holo
graphic art.
In fact, Benyon has used a number of techniques such as laser-lit mono
chromatic holograms, three-dimensional object holograms, reflection holo
grams, and rainbow holograms for a multiplicity of purposes, with the aim
of bridging the gap between high technology and ordinary human percep
tion. She has utilized holography as a reminder of the immaterial dimensions
of the material world as well as a mass-communication medium for
questioning and subverting stereotyped thinking, before making pulsed laser
holograms of human beings themselves.
At the beginning, the sole technique available to her as a female holo
graphic artist working alone in Britain was the laser transmission hologram,
which could only be exhibited with specialized light sources and in darkened
conditions (figure 2.2). Her early pieces continued her preoccupations as a
painter within holography, but she later used the unique aspects of the
Chapter 2
Figure 2.2 Margaret Benyon, Bird in Box, 1973. Laser transmission hologram.
medium to introduce unfamiliar notions about space, time-reversed imagery,

and double exposures in which two solids seemed to share the same space.
Benyon made “nonholograms” that showed motion invisible to the naked eye,
“solid holes” and "three-dimensional silhouettes.” In 1972, she began to
make holograms addressing societal dangers, which she saw arising from the
increased sophistication of holography and technology generally.
In the phase that followed in the mid-1970s, Benyon adopted an associa
tive, cross-cultural, and even holistic approach catalyzed by holography. Her
Cosmetic Series stems from the idea that the use of our bodies, painted for the
ritual of dance, is likely to have preceded cave painting as the first expression
of human culture. The images of the Cosmetic Series adopt a form appropriate
to the present day in making use of the pulsed hologram. The pulsed laser
“freezes" moving subjects for the duration of the holographic exposure and
enables the artist to make three-dimensional images of real people. Sometimes
the laser beam has been used in the double-pulse mode. The dark and light

fringes that can be observed on the skin in Facial Codes (1985), for example,
allows the viewer to directly see the pattern of outer and inner body move
ments, in an interferometry of emotions.
The images from the Female Cosmetic Series show faces of young women,
painted to make themselves beautiful. These women collaborated in painting
themselves with cosmetics used in pulsed holography to counteract the bleach
ing and penetrative effects of ruby laser light. In a work such as Sophie (1986),
a carefully registered painting is placed underneath the hologram so that
both become fused into one image. The underlying idea for the Female
Cosmetic Series came from the “retouch,” the holographic image obtained
through mixed media, and the series presents female stereotypes through col
laboration, within the scenario of cosmetic beautification adopting an ironic
attitude to kitsch and bad painting. For the Male Cosmetic Series, Benyon’s idea
consisted in a search for male enhancement through use of paint. Beautifica
tion was superseded by the author’s response to male authority, and a choice
was made to use authoritative male stereotypes such as the military man, the
caveman, and the master artist. The portraits of Richard Hamilton illustrate
the last of these stereotypes. Here, holograms show the stages of his involve
ment in time with painting on a sheet of glass in front of his face. They allude
to his initial engagement, the changes made to the distribution of the paint,
his use of the shadows it cast on his face, and the paint drying between
exposures.
In both the Female Cosmetic Series and the Male Cosmetic Series, the ideas
underpinning the portraits are cultural, sociopolitical, art historical, docu
mentary, psychological, and personal. Cosmetic refers here also to the origi
nal Greek when cosmos meant proportion, reason, and order. These works tend
to bridge the gap between the inner self and the outer world. In the female
series, the artist tries to obtain a regeneration of herself through younger
women, whereas in her male series she is trying to come to terms with male
authority. In both cases she tries to modify the ideological plan by outer, real-
life issues such as gender and racial identity and social stereotyping.
Since the mid-1990s, Benyon has developed her Cornucopia Series in an
attempt to “naturalize” holography. The underlying notion is that everything
in the world around us can be defined as natural, but we see some things as
more natural than others—say, trees and mountains as opposed to concrete
and machines. Images of the former are seemingly less “made” by people. They
are not seen as significant on their own, but when combined together in abun
Chapter 2
dance they are intended to recontextualize the hologram as organic and easy
to live with, rather than the product of an alien technology. Compared with
the pictorial Cosmetic Series, the Cornucopia Series looks elegant and lively, but
distant, ambient, and environmental. The holograms in this series are chosen
for their sensuous appeal, to explore making the hologram comfortable to be
around. With a sense of abundance, flowers, shells, and coral-like concrete
appear to spill out of the darkness and push the edges of the frames.
As Cornucopia suggests natural abundance, so Benyon’s Fem explores how
some aspects of abundance—fertility, decoration, chaos, or lack of rational
ity—have been viewed negatively and used to define female roles and charac
teristics. In unpacking such biases, many contemporary women artists have
emphasized the importance of links between personal, social, and political
experiences so that women’s experiences can be understood and asserted.
Benyon creates holograms that examine and attempt to bring together what
may be seen as feminine and masculine characteristics. She uses technology,
often stereotyped as hard and masculine, to make images that relate to female
concerns and perceptions of the world. In Cornucopia CaidiFlowers (1993), for
example, an open-aperture film transmission hologram whose subject is a
circle of flowers centered on a cauliflower, the premise is abundance and ful
fillment. An efflorescent central floweriness is suggestive of female sexuality.
Chromatic dispersions abstract the image, except where it clusters around the
image plane as white.
The extraordinary technical variety and aesthetic richness of Benyon’s holo
graphic work can best be appreciated when one discovers that she makes holo
grams, rather than paintings, because they are a purer way of connecting with
those early, preverbal memories that are experiences of light.
Harriet Casdin-Silver is another outstanding holographic artist whose
subject matter—the human body—is presented in relationship to social,
political, and gender issues. Although the intense use of the holographic tech
nological medium is an essential element in Casdin-Silver’s artistic itinerary,
her artistic and feminist commitment is its decisive feature.
Before discovering the aesthetic possibilities of holography in 1968,
Casdin-Silver had been constructing stainless steel environments that incor
porated sound, lighting effects, and participation from spectators, who entered
her installations draped in Mylar fabric, thereby blending, in both texture and
color value, with the steel. In searching for lighting that was more sophisti
cated, Casdin-Silver discovered holography and its luminous and spatial

possibilities. She finally opted for holography as her principal artistic medium
and began by using laser lights alone co form the initial configurations, elim
inating the object altogether. For a while she deviated from her original aim
of communicating feminist and sociopolitical ideas to concentrate on the
phantasmagoria she could create in the laboratory with her laser light con
figurations and the freedom they generated to expand holographic techniques.
Casdin-Silver’s holograms fully materialized when she started, in 1972, to
work with the engineer and inventor of rainbow holograms, Stephen Benton.
Their first collaboration was Cobweb Space, containing both a laser transmis
sion hologram and a white-light transmission hologram. In this work, the
artist’s first concern was the composition, but a problem existed in that the
chosen pattern of light was two-dimensional, whereas the intended aim was
three-dimensionality. A second-generation factor of the white-light transmis
sion system solved this problem by rounding the image.
After having created (in collaboration with Benton) a number of multi
colored, white-light transmission holograms and some laser transmission
holograms, Casdin-Silver joined Brown University, where she produced the
Sphere series, composed entirely of laser light (there was no real object in the
optical system).
From this point onward, and in part because of her feminist position,
Casdin-Silver undertook the conceptualization and technical production of her
holograms alone. Starting in 1975, after having used the laser light in many
forms, she realized her sociopolitical commitment through holographic art—
in Phalli, for example.
In 1976, after moving to the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT,
her interest in environmental art received new impetus, resulting in the Equiv
ocal Forks, Series I and II. Made with spectral colors, the Forks II Series formed
part of the center’s collective environmental outdoor sculpture, Centerbeam,
first presented in 1977 at documenta 6 in Kassel. A year later, it was
exhibited near the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum in
Washington. The project included the manipulation of holographic images
by mirror trackers (most of the holograms were using a solar tracking system).
To reconstruct images by themselves, spectator-participants could manually
manipulate two additional trackers.
Following this installation, Casdin-Silver engaged herself more closely with
feminist issues in pieces such as A Woman, Compton I and II (figure 2.3), Beth
and Karen, and the development of interactive environments whose prototype
Chapter 2
Figure 2.3 Harriet Casdin-Silver, Compton (front), © 1978. Segment of integral hologram.
was her stainless steel work, Exhaust (1968). Her more recent works include
holograms created at the Ukrainian Institute in Kiev in 1989 and shown at
the Museum of Holography in New York in 1991 > as well as her collabora
tion with the United States and Hologram Industries in Paris, resulting in a
hologram titled The Venus of Willendorf ’91, which replaced a fertility figure
with a live model. Ikony, one of the three installations at the Museum of
Holography, can be interpreted as symbolic of the relationship between reli
gion and mass media; it also comments on the fear that the collapsed author
itarianism of the Soviet Union would be assumed by the church.
In even more recent work, Casdin-Silver has produced many life-size
figures, including images of a primal earth goddess/hermaphrodite. The
artist eschews the body beautiful, even when her subjects are youthful and

attractive, or unremarkable, as in Ophelia (1992). She finds ways to cut up and
juxtapose their images in order to set up a speculative, allusive dialogue about
the physical state. At the same time, her most recent images are of unques
tionable artistic value. Always a colorist, Casdin-Silver’s LondonlPoint Reyes
series exploits both technical acuity and color sense in its striking saturations
of blood red, fiery orange, icy blues, and purples. Red and blue human nudes
emerge from “awesome images,” and these nudes show disembodied light,
impressive skin color, and romantic flame. Other works are more decorative
and fractured. The sculptural lines and curves of Kathryn of Dunes (1994), for
instance, are echoed in the tiny crescent tattoos on Kathryn’s breast and shoul
der—the latter only revealed at certain viewing angles. The awkward pose of
Ian (1994) or Renata (1994) induces the notion that these subjects are forced
into contained spaces. The subjects of this series are strangely closed off,
self-reflective, and contemplative even when only parts of their bodies are on
display, suggesting that these images delve the psyche more than the physi
cal. This is particularly the case in Casdin-Silver’s self-portraits Pink Corpse
(1992) and 70 + 1 (1996), which are most certainly seen from an interior
mental place, and where the artist takes on her own destiny, without any
hesitation.
Human intensity and myriads of multiplications can also be discerned in
Dynishka and Sue (1996) and Casdin-Silver’s dedicatory pieces. One of them,
To Van Eyck and Bosch (1994)—life-size reflection holograms on steel (8 X 10
feet)—shows Jan van Eyck’s Adam and Eve as composite figures of both genders
and, between them, a back view of the human body, inspired by the Hell panel
of Hieronymus Bosch.
In a retrospective one-person exhibition at the DeCordova Museum and
Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, in 1998, Casdin-Silver’s life
achievement became clearly visible. It established, beyond doubt, her historic
contribution to holographic and feminist art, as well as her own aesthetic
specificity as a great colorist and a media artist intensely concerned by the
human physical and mental state.
Lately, the independent area of holographic art forming an essential part
of technological art in the 1970s and 1980s has approached the virtual domain
not only by the persistence and augmentation of the virtualization of the third
dimension and the way light is experienced in recent holographic works but
also because a number of artists—particularly Vito Orazem and Dieter Jung—
have been combining holography with video and computer animation in their
Chapter 2
plastic works and environments. At the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne,
for example, Jung has developed and directed various media compositions of
this kind, which he terms “multimedia holography.”1
Another interesting development in terms of bringing together holo
graphic art and virtuality has been elaborated by Vicente Carreto in his study
of virtual holography by comparing holography with sci-fi narratives.2
Eco-technological Art
One cannot neglect the area of ecological, or more precisely eco-

technological, art in the development of virtual art. The itineraries of James
Turrell, Jurgen Claus, and Piero Gilardi provide good illustrations of this fact.
A prominent contemporary light artist like James Turrell, who certainly
has had an influence on artists discussed in the following chapter on endur
ing digital-based work, can also be seen in an ecological context. Turrell forces
us to see light because in his works there is no object to look at. At a purely
perceptual level, light as an independent phenomenon is the object in his
work. In attempting to contain pure light and draw the viewer’s attention
to it, Turrell not only asks us co consider the elements of perception but
invites us to experience the wonder of a natural phenomenon: light in and of
itself.
The faith in nature and the dynamic preservation of its powers in a context
dominated by high-tech inventions is basic co che work of eco-technological
artist and theoretician Jurgen Claus. Ac an early stage, Claus was principally
concerned with artistic events in which water, as one of the fundamental
elements of the physical universe, was predominant. In che second half of che
1960s, he began to develop spaces using electricity and electronics. He wanted
to install a “fluid space” in which images from film and slide projections
appeared simultaneously in order to create multidimensionality. When Claus
started to work in the naturally multidimensional space found underwater,
his experiences affected his artistic concepts. He used electricity and elec
tronics as extensions of human sensory organs; light was as important as
acoustics, and both related to his physiological reactions.
In his Planet Ocean project, Claus was concerned with the ecologization of
technology based on the physical sciences. It involved, besides water, two
lasers, two video cameras, neon light, and a mirrored sphere representing
Earth. The work attempted to act as a metaphor for the profound changes in

our perceptions of our planet and planetary system as we move toward holis
tic awareness of the physical universe.
After exploring the elements of earth and water, Claus turned his atten
tion to the relationship between water and light, particularly by creating solar
energy sculptures using photoelectric cells. This eco-technology is intended
to take us into the solar age (figure 2.4).
In his Sun Sculptures I, II, and III, Claus used solar energy to produce elec
tricity underwater from photovoltaic cells mounted on floating platforms on
the ocean’s surface. The cells transformed natural solar energy into electricity,
which was then stored in batteries. This electricity was used to bring light
to the twenty-four-hour cycle of the light-blue and dark-blue illumination of
Figure 2.4 Jurgen Claus, Solar Energy Sculpture. © 1987 by Jurgen Claus.
Chapter 2
Planet Ocean. Thus, natural light was needed to visually evoke the complex
structures and colors of an underwater environment.
These Sun Sculptures, on which Claus has been working for several years,
are vertical constructions with a projected height of approximately thirty
meters in their final stage. They have wings furnished with solar cells that
follow the position of the sun by means of a computer, which Claus calls a
SOLART Expert System. This is a computer graphics interaction system
through which images and information can be called up. The data bank con
tains technical and environmental information—for instance, about light,
photovoltaics, and the distribution of natural energies in the landscape. This
facility is necessary since these sculptures are in a real sense responsive,
environmental, energy-transforming systems.
As regards the outlook for artistic expert systems, according to Claus, one
has to search for new and more specific connotations within the artistic and
scientific matrix. In his view, such basic connotations—indeed, a new kind of
paradigm or metaparadigm—are related to the fact that "organic" machines
made by artists, engineers, and scientists using electronic technology at its
most advanced stage (including responsive interaction in an ecologically
responsible way) could serve human and natural survival and/or vital recon
struction as metaphors, symbols, and realities (figure 2.5).
In his Carousel of Suns, created in collaboration with his wife, Nora, for the
1991 Artists and Light exhibition at the Manege in Reims, France, Claus
occupied a space with a surface area of 530 square meters. This installation
was bathed in a bluish light, and argon gas writing served as a metaphor
announcing the solar age. Two circles made up of three suns rotated slowly,
intersecting with each other in a radiance of yellow light. A laser beam trav
eled across this space at different points. This beam was not only the result
of its material source, argon or krypton, but an outcome of the manner in
which it lingered in a veil of mist—in other words, it was also the result of
the way it blended into the environment. This work, produced by various
technological means, was intended to be perceived and interpreted as a single
form, and an illustration of the unity between natural and human-made
environments.
After two years of preparation and several preliminary events, Claus’s mul
tiple eco-technological activities as artist, writer, educator, and organizer cul
minated in the summer of 1995 in a SolArt Global Network, conceived of as
a collective cosmic rally, a model of humanization.
•Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

Figure 2.5 Jurgen Claus, SOLART Expert System. © 1987 by Jurgen Claus.
Piero Gilardi’s principal aim is co reconcile apparently irreconcilable terms

like nature and technique (or ecology and technology). This concern was already
visible in che early 1960s in a first sculptural phase in which he produced
what he calls his Tappeti-natura. The “natural carpet” is seen as a rectangular
block of polyurethane covered by a rubbery crust that was cut out in a forest,
a riverbed, or a pebble beach. In shore, a piece more real than nature but not
“realistic.” This means an ecological awareness before its time chat took the
form of humor, fiction, and especially artistic creation. A little later, Gilardi
would extend his natural carpets to environmental dimensions directly in the
landscape.
This phase of countryside creations, comparable to land art, was followed
by another entirely devoted to the theoretical analysis of the period’s other
new tendencies: arte povera and antiform as well as aesthetic-political events
in Third World countries.
Around 1985, Gilardi resumed his plastic activities as such after an
excursion into therapeutic art in different Italian psychiatric hospitals. He
introduced advanced technology in an attempt co work out a technological
Chapter 2
megasculpture project titled Ixiana, which was to take the form of a gigan
tic “bionic doll,” inside which visitors would be able to exercise their cre
ativity on interactive equipment involving the use of the body and the senses.
The project was never carried out because of its cost, but Gilardi continued
his work in the same direction, especially with the “installation" called
Inverosimile {Unlikely) in which the spectator can circulate between three rows
of artificial vines that react to one’s movements.
Gilardi’s dramatic, allegorical, and ecological intentions can be gathered
from the fact that throughout the Inverosimile performance, the audience
becomes in a certain way coauthor of an electronic choreography. This comes
about by means of an interactive program that converts the spectator’s ges
tures into a series of sounds, lights, and movements. Such choreography lends
meaning to the undercurrent of sounds that flow on until the final “dance” of
the vines. These sounds are reinforced by a series of projected images that
allow the free development of a psychodramatic group experience: from the
dread of night (moon) to a daytime action (sun) that transcends the conflict
(fire), a rebirth into the world (water) is achieved, and hence a new sense of
human kinship is born. Making simulation an active principle in this work,
Gilardi composes events that bear the trace of a manipulation—artificial intel
ligence—while reminding us of the refinement with which baroque cheater
organized a world dominated by the seeing eye, precipitating a vertigo of
metamorphoses.
In his interactive installation North versus South (1992), Gilardi developed
the principles of transformation, simulation, and interactivity still further, but
this time with an added political flavor. North versus South is essentially a sym
bolic system simulating rhe possible developments of the general imbalance—
in terms of political and military control, the technological monopole, and
cultural hegemony—between northern countries and those situated in the
South. In order to become familiar with this installation, the public has to
climb onto a spherical platform in constant rotation, symbolizing the world.
There the visitor can identify six different zones of audition, which one can
utilize in the manner of radio sets, and which illustrate the possible evolution
and involution of the different problems raised in this context.
In a more recent project titled Survival (started in 1994), Gilardi wants co
cesc—wich che aid of a game environmenc in which che psychophysical sub-
jeccivicy of che individual inceraccs wich a compucer program chac simulaces
che conscruccion of a simultaneously evolving urban living quarter—the

possibilities of making future cities not only the site of conflicts or of geopo
litical inequalities but also the site for satisfying the inhabitants’ various intel
lectual and affective ambitions and desires, while also liberating them from
their narrow dependence on economic contingencies.
Like other artists of this tendency interested in techno-ecology in its widest
sense, Gilardi highlights the irreplaceable qualities of our environment by
using natural forces as a model for urban life and adds to it the sophistication
of the most advanced technologies in order to bring out the strength of artis
tic expression in a contemporary context. Whether a matter of simulation, a
re-creation of natural elements, or a combination of natural and artificial
factors, we are always in the presence of an attempt to reconcile two appar
ently contradictory terms: scientific or technological progress against bio
logical and spiritual survival for humankind.
Computer Art
In the area of computer art, Vera Molnar* is a pioneer who has pursued with
admirable perseverance a critical, disciplined itinerary from her early engage
ment with geometric, mathematical abstraction to her personal, yet rigorous
expression with the aid of computers.
She started painting in an abstract geometric style in 1947 when still at
the School of Visual Art in Budapest and began working with what she calls
an imaginary machine from 1959 onward, until she discovered the benefits of
the actual computer in 1968.
Her early engagement with programmed art also dates to I960, when she
helped found the Centre de Recherche d’Art Visuel in Paris. This group of
artists put the accent, as the name implies, on an almost scientific attitude
toward visual phenomena, particularly perception and cognition. Works like
InterruptionIContinuation and Bleu+bleu vert-H>ert illustrate the period preceding
Molnar’s computer pieces.
According to Molnar, the computer can serve four purposes. The first con
cerns its technical promise—it widens possibilities with its infinite array of
forms and colors, particularly with the development of virtual space. Second,
the computer can satisfy the desire for artistic innovation and thus lighten the
burden of traditional cultural forms. It can make the accidental or random
subversive in order to create an artistic shock and to rupture the systematic
and the symmetrical. Third, the computer can encourage the mind to work
Chapter 2
in new ways. Molnar contends that artists often pass far too quickly from an
idea to the realization of a work. The computer could create images that can
be stored longer, not only in a data bank but also in the artist’s imagination.
Finally, Molnar thinks that the computer can help the artist by measuring the
physiological reactions of the audience—their eye movements, for example—
thereby bringing the creative process closer to its products and their effects.
Molnar has applied these considerations to the images she makes. In Trans
formations, for example, she uses arrangements of simple elements, due to both
her aesthetic preference for simple geometric patterns like squares, circles, and
triangles, and her interest in creating works of art in a much more consciously
controlled and systematic way. Her exploration of the way in which intuitive
knowledge may be reinforced by conceptual processes depends on a strict
methodology. Molnar has made use of a computer with terminals like a plotter
and/or a cathode-ray tube screen. One can speak here of a global computer
graphics method—that is, one where the image is conceived and treated for
the computer, which almost creates it.
With these ideas and this method in mind, Molnar has created such early
computer works as (Des)ordres (1969) and a series of works titled Molnart
(1974—1976), among them Parcours (1976). In One Percent Disorder, followed
by Art Is a Mistake in the System (a reference to Paul Klee’s ideas on the subject),
she introduced, step by step, an increasing amount of disorder or irregularity
into a regular set of elements so as to obtain a special kind of visual artistic
experience (figure 2.6).
From 1984 to 1988, Molnar produced a particularly original work, Aty
Mother’s Letters. It was an attempt at simulation, through the artificial re
creation of the handwriting of the artist’s mother. This work represents two
different approaches: to get as near as possible to the formal aspects of hand
writing; and to reconcile the ill-balanced aspects of letters (in this case, almost
regular on the left-hand side, and close to chaotic on che right-hand side) and
a classical method of picture composition, working with principles such as
symmetry, rebalanced asymmetry, or countercomposition. The drawings were
done with che help of a compucer and a ploccer, except for one series, where
che arcisc used a printer instead of a plotter. The last pieces show the over
lapping of plotter tracing and actual handwriting in a kind of dialogue
between a human being and a machine.
From 1990 onward, Molnar has continued to develop her works and instal
lations with the aid of a computer. She has produced such works as Sommaire,

Figure 2.6 Vera Molnar, Comment faire sortir le carre de ses gonds? 1988. Shown at the
Festival des arts 6lectroniques, Rennes, France.
'Variations Sainte Victoire, and Rectangles chevauchants, and she considers chat in
these works, she has managed to assume the role of both the human hand and
the artificial software program.
The methods employed by the artist with the assistance of a computer have
varied to a certain extent. Her first method consisted of making thousands of
variations on a computer screen with a plotter, looking at and comparing them
without haste, and then making a choice of a certain number among the dif
ferent variants, before executing one or two images by hand on the canvas
without changing anything from che computer-generated version.
At a later stage, she modified her working method. The departure remained
identical, bur this time no choice was made in advance, and she did not
execute a painting immediately afterward. It was only some years later that
the artist took up the subject again without looking at the previous versions
created by the computer. The time lag in which the theme became decanted,
purified, and clarified thus enabled the artist to create a condensed version of
the subject on a canvas.
A third stage was reached when Molnar rapidly produced two or three
sketches by hand without much preparatory work, and then used a computer
Chapter 2
to create pictures from the sketches. Molnar then displayed both the sketches
and the pictures on a wall in order to see the versions that she had not thought
on her own. In this way, Molnar could compare the products of pure imagi
nation in their basic state and those of imagination manipulated by a machine.
Molnar’s method nowadays consists in a to-and-fro passage between her
manual working bench and her automatic plotter. This method allows her to
rectify the program at every stage with regard to the manually created ver
sions, and vice versa, to modify the hand-produced versions following certain
happy and fortuitous results from the computer program. This can be con
sidered a fruitful confrontation between the machine, which often produces
something quite rough, and the human hand, which has a tendency to civi
lize the computer’s excesses.
At times, the artist also managed to combine in the same graphic work
the human and the machine product, which can be seen as one of the tem
porary compromises in the dialogue that the artist has engaged in this cre
ative game destined, in the first place, to investigate the workings of the
artistic mind.
In the hypercube works of Manfred Mohr,* the plastic elements are treated
with great rigor in the spirit of algorithmic art. Mohr’s work is founded on a
constructivist aesthetic, although he lacks the typical constructivist back
ground. Mohr detached himself from spontaneous expressions and, in the
mid-1960s, turned to a more systematic, geometric form of expression. It was
mainly the writings of German philosopher Max Bense and French composer
Pierre Barbaud that radically changed Mohr’s thinking—pointing to a
rational construction of art.
The invention of rules, or algorithms, is foundational for Mohr’s algori
thmic art. These “conceptual rules” are not necessarily based on already
imaginable forms but often on abstract and systematic processes. They are
parametric rules, which means that at certain points in the process, choices
have to be made as to which way a calculation should continue. In many
instances, random decisions are employed. Random decisions are switching
points that ensure a value-free method of moving the program ahead. They
can either be a choice of yes/no, a choice among many equal elements, or a
choice to distribute elements statistically over a surface. Even though Mohr’s
work process is rational and systematic, its results can be unpredictable. Like
a journey, only the starting point and a hypothetical destination is known.
What happens during the journey is often unexpected and surprising.

Since 1973, Mohr has been concentrating on fracturing the symmetry of a
cube (including n-dimensional hypercubes since 1978), using the cubes
structure as a "system” and an “alphabet.” What interests him are the
two-dimensional signs (Slres-grapbiqites) and the visual ambiguity resulting
from the projection of the cube's lines from higher dimensions into two-
dimensions. The artist describes the signs as unstable because they evoke
visual unrest. The disturbance (or disintegration) of symmetry is a basic gen
erator of new constructions and relations. Mohr’s artwork is always the result
of a calculation. At the same time, however, it is not a mathematical art but
rather an expression of his artistic experience. The rules he invents reflect his
thinking and feelings. It is not necessarily the system or logic of his work he
wants to present but the visual invention that results from it. Mohr’s artistic
goal is reached when a finished work can dissociate itself from its logical
content and stand convincingly as an independent abstract entity.
Algorithms, I might add, can become extremely complex—that is, com
plicated and difficult to survey. In order co master this problem, in 1969 Mohr
decided that the use of a computer would be necessary in his work. Only in
this way is it possible to superimpose multiple rules without loosing track of
the general concept. It is inevitable that the results—that is, the images—are
difficult to understand at first glance. The information is deeply buried, and
a certain participation is demanded from the viewer—a readiness to interro
gate this material. Each of Mohr’s works is based on a subset of a defined struc
ture, ranging from cubes to 6-dimensional hypercubes. Unable to detect che
complece system, the viewer nevertheless notices a strong visual force holding
everything together. Such a force is created by che logic of che inherent rela
tionships in the underlying structure. This is a critical point: Some viewers
will panic and reject this unknown and “inhuman” force, while others will
gladly acknowledge it as a reassuring starting point. Even though all of Mohr’s
work can be verified and rationally understood, this does not mean that there
is no room for imaginative associations. On the contrary, the rational part of
his work is limited basically to its production. What the viewer experiences,
understands, learns, interprets, or imagines because of che presence of the
artwork remains quite personal. In Mohr’s opinion, an artwork is only a start
ing point, a principle of order, an artist’s guidelines, intended to provoke the
viewer to continue che investigation (figure 2.7).
The following work phase was made up of laserglyphs, for which diagonal
paths through six-dimensional hypercubes were cut from steel plates with a
Chapter 2
laser. In 1998, Mohr starred co use color (after using black and white for
more chan chree decades) co show che complexity of the work through
differentiation.
Poec and arc historian Eugen Gomringer describes Mohr as a cubist in the
computer age? He observes chat few artists over the last three decades have
done such thorough research and accomplished so much in the field of con
structivist aesthetics using a computer as Mohr has. The graphic linearity in
his black-and-white works might convey che idea chat the author is a math
ematician, yet it is the artistic spirit (the artistic “gravity”) behind the way
Mohr defines and solves che plastic problems involved that predominates in
his work. In his endeavors, he has experimented with dimensions chat resulted
in generative processes—dimensions not accessible to perception and intu
ition, and yet still depictable.
Sonya Rapoport* is another pioneer in computer art. Her Anasazi (1978), a
collaborative work with archaeologist Dorothy Washburn, eventually evolved
into an interactive installation titled Shoe-Field (1986). Washburn’s research

produced computer printouts that depicted graphic structures for helping
archaeologists determine behavior patterns of cultural growth and change—a
subject that stimulated Rapoport’s sensibilities. Rapoport responded to the
data on Anasazi pottery fragments (AD 450-1300) by drawing patterns that
could be read as a “language” to track the relocation of the Anasazis. In 1978,
the Peabody Museum at Harvard University hosted this work.
An image of a Mexican-style sandal on a ceramic foot effigy triggered further
steps in Rapoport’s journey into new genres—multiple phases of computer-
assisted interactive installations lead to interactive books and interactive Inter
net pieces. These were sponsored by the California Art Council ACEN
Telecommunication Project in 1988. Rapoport then constructed a database of
the attributes of forty-one pairs of her shoes. This self-analysis extended to
interactivity with others about why they wear their shoes. Rapoport began Shoe-
Field (her sixteen-year-long series of interactive installations about the shoes
people wear) at an event called "A Shoe-In” at the Berkeley Computer Center
in 1982. People who entered the store were asked questions about the shoes
they were wearing: “Where did you get those shoes?” “Why did you buy
them?” The answers were typed into a simple computer database, and the shoes
were photographed and placed on a stand in the computer store. Using an MS-
DOS computer, Rapoport fed the data gathered from seventy-two participants
at her Shoe-In into a field theory program that calculated and organized it into
a diagrammatic form. The idea was to see if qualitative data would reveal quan
titative information about people. Over several years, with the help of several
programmers, a “shoe-field” was developed. Through a complex system based
on, among other things, how interactive participants were in general—and
with their shoes—an ASCII graphic of the event was printed out (and eventu
ally enlarged to seventeen feet with shoe image transparencies pasted in their
respective places) that showed the relationship of the shoe respondents to each
other. In addition, Rapoport developed the capacity to print out individual
shoe-fields so that in future installations, participants could receive personal
ized printouts and shoe psyche readings.
In 1986 interactive installation at Media in San Francisco, the photographs
taken at the Berkeley Computer Center and the shoe-field printouts were
incorporated into a new series of computer-based questions and answers that
further shaped Shoe-Field. Participants in the Media event actually sac down
at a computer, typed in their responses, and went home with individual shoe
field printouts. Every participant s response became part of the total data that
Chapter 2
continued to shape Shoe-Field. Thus, Shoe-Field was a fully interactive series of
works. The information that participants supplied was incorporated into che
work itself (figure 2.8).
Originally an abstract expressionist, Rapoport scarred producing digitally
assisted artworks in 1975. The pieces evolved into interactive multimedia
installations. Since 1994, she has applied her aesthetic concepts to creating
artworks for the Web.
Figure 2.8 Sonya Rapoport, Shoe-Field, 1986. Participants selected either a pillow, an
antique cobbler's stand, or a plywood square on which to place their shoes while they answered
shoe questions. The data was compiled into a field theory program that generated a schema of
positive and negative responses.

Art historian Ernestine Daubner makes the following comment:
What is so interesting in Sonya Rapoport’s Web works, is the manner in which they
merge cultural inscriptions (past and present discourses), making evident that our
models of thought have not radically changed. We are still operating in the same kind
of framework or paradigm. Even though these works function as ironic critiques of
cultural constructs and customs, past and present, they also include metaphors of
transformation and alternate ways of being: the possibilities of morphing, of recon
structing personal traits and collective customs. Most significant is the notion of trans
gender, transethnicity, transculture, transgenics, trans-... as a means to crossover,
fuse, or meld disparate, often hierarchical, elements on the one hand, and to reveal
the ethical and moral implications on the other.4
Rapoport’s awareness of diverse cultures became evident in her projects in

1972 when she superimposed her vocabulary of art shapes on geologic survey
charts of Japanese internment camps. This initiated Rapoport’s ongoing dis
course with "ready-made” background surfaces.
Rapoport eventually replaced the geologic survey charts with computer
printouts. The fifty-foot-long Genesis (1976), in which a drawn overlay of
cryptic letters was color coded to designate "place” in a biblical verse. Genesis
vias significant in that it introduced religion as a topic and color coding as a
methodology. It also led Rapoport to visually decode computer printouts of
scientific research.
In 1978, a three-year overview of Rapoport’s “drawings” was presented at
the Union Gallery at San Jose State University in California. As the then direc
tor Stephen Moore explained in the published catalog:
Rapoport moved into a format flexible enough to allow room for expression of her ideas
concerning the relationship of the artist to, and function within, her/his culture. While
"drawings” is certainly an accurate generic term for this work, it is at the same time
perhaps misleading, for Sonya’s art is overwhelming in a sense that few drawings are,
both in terms of scale and content. To a large extent this is because the base for each
drawing is an actual computer printout (averaging some ten feet in length) on which
she applies her own symbolic interpretation of the subject matter; using color pencil
and/or transfer drawing, Sonya creates a dense color-field which is as intense literally as
it is visually. Paradoxically, then, the work is at once both scientific and personal; direct
parallels are drawn between the research subject/results and the artist’s life/environ
Chapter 2
ment, humanizing che computer data and so providing that quality of intimacy long
associated wich drawings. Still, there is more; while the verbal concent is relevant both
literally and symbolically, so does the color function in a dual manner: color coding is
employed throughout, allowing the viewer to “read" the drawing in a nonliteral way
by visually associating a given color with its respective subject ... by “decoding" the
computerized archaeological/research data—chat is, converting it to representative
symbols, and “encoding"—placing into computer format illustrations of her relevant
personal material, Sonya enables each drawing co function as an information system
which presents an intensity of content and relationships in an aeschetic context. And
yet, the foregoing is only descriptive, noc definitive; there remain complexities and
nuances that appear as one studies the work, and absorption in che drawings is invari
ably rewarded wich still another discovery or insight. By developing her own visual lan
guage system within a scientific format, Sonya Rapoport fuses traditional concerns of
che artist wich contemporary involvement with information and language structures,
producing a synthesis of aesthetics and technology?
Starting in 1980, Rapoport worked directly on computer forms—decod

ing and encoding them. In one series, in conjunction with the Nuclear Science
Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, she transcribed into
imagery the chemical/physical process of making gold. This transmutation
process results in a change of identity in the chemical element, a regenera
tion, a new use—which lead to Rapoport’s transgenic works, The Transdertnal
Patch (1993), The Transgenic Bagel (figure 2.9) (1994), and Redeeming the
G>»e(2001).
In Biorhythm (1980), Rapoport juxtaposed a technologically based analysis
of her emotional condition with a psychologically derived analysis from her
daily pictorial recordings. In a 1983 related interactive installation, partici
pants’ hands, expressing their emotional state, were photographed and read
by a palmist. The subliminal tones of computer control prevailed, and later
surfaced as a sci-fi phenomenon in che work The Computer Says I Peel. . .
The photographs of the gestures from Biorhythm were correlated with Asian
Indian mudra gestures to reveal astonishing similarities. The cross-cultural
images and che transcultural meanings inspired DigitalMudra, an inscallation
in which parcicipancs used a computer co creace poecic phrases wich ancienc
mudra word meanings and classic mudra dances.
Rapoport’s experiments wich information structures, different ways of
layering information, and use of the audience as author continued in her later

•Stick)} •rm’’
Bagel Plasmid Vector
Figure 2.9 Sonya Rapoport, The Transgenic Bagel, 1994. Interactive computer artwork that
parodies recombinant gene splicing of selected traits. The genetic formula has been created and
is impregnated into the bagel DNA fragment. Cream cheese is applied to anneal the fragment
with the bagel vector.
interactive works: Objects on My Dresser (1979-1982), Sexual jealousy: The
Shadow of Love (1984), The Animated Soul: Gateway to Your Ka (1991), and The
Transgenic Bagel. According to critic Barbara Lee Williams,
Sonya Rapoport's Web projects provoke a flurry of questions about science, history,
Judaic theology, and feminism. From The Transgenic Bagel—a parody on recombinant
gene splicing which allows the viewer/participant to impregnate a bagel with the
genetic formula of a desired trait (the bagel then serves as the transgenic or gene trans
fer vehicle)—to Make Me a Jewish Man—an exploration of alternative masculinity and
how to attain it—her biting wit and aesthetic sensibilities alternately bemuse and
delight. Here, at last, is an artist who uses the Web to create interactive artworks that
could not exist as beautifully or provocatively in any other medium.6
Rapoport’s Web work in 2001, Redeeming the Gene, Molding the Golem, and
Folding the Protein, continues with the gene-splicing theme.
Joan Truckenbrod* is yet another pioneer in computer art. Ever since the
early 1980s, she has been concerned with creative computer imaging, and has
produced fluid, layered images that reflect a sensitive integration of visual and
conceptual aspects of the way we view che natural world and the innovative
potential of technological and virtual art for combining them. Truckenbrod has
created a “conceptual lens” through which she visualizes the invisible layers of
natural phenomena and weaves the visual layers into amorphous networks.
In a statement titled “Electronic Rituals: Voices of Fire," she says, “My
images are the site of a paradox. Beauty on che surface is pieced with che
curmoil underneath that bubbles up serendipitously through the thin surface
of the image.”
Truckenbrod’s images are not the crisp, bright ones in a mirror, but hint
at an image that pulsates with sheets of rain. The image as ritual spirit has
been summed up by the pounding of the rain and the cover of darkness (figure
2.10).
Communication Art
I have already mentioned the importance of communication art as an

antecedent for several sections of virtual art. The itineraries followed by Roy
Ascotc, Fred Forest, and Willoughby Sharp are the most shining examples of
this progression.

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Chapter 2
Roy Ascott* was among the first artists to launch an appeal for total spec
tator participation: for him, the strict antinomy between action and contem
plation needed to be abolished. Ascott aimed to achieve a wider “cybernetic”
awareness by acting on the psychology of the observer, who was invited to
regroup the elements of the technological universe and exploit certain of its
meanings. Although the concept of participation in Ascott’s demarche is pri
marily didactic in character, it may best be described as cybernetic. At first,
Ascott was concerned with creating “triggers,” thereby initiating creative
behavior in the observer. His justification in adopting a “cybernetic stance” is
based on the following considerations. Modern art, he claims, is characterized
by a behaviorist tendency in which system and process are cardinal factors. As
distinctions between music, painting, poetry, and so on, become blurred and
media are mixed, a behaviorist synthesis evolves in which dialogue and feed
back within a social structure indicate the emergence of a cybernetic vision
art as well as science. The different artifacts produced by Ascott, although far
from neutral in visual terms, have had from the outset a cybernetic purpose,
which may be defined as inculcating creativity or eliciting creative behavior
from the spectator. But Ascott wanted to go beyond the incorporation of
behavioral triggers with feedback in his work by putting the spectator in a
position to handle ideas on their own. The spectator was co both make deci
sions and react physically to the work.
For Ascott, cybernetics was also a psychological phenomenon that could be
utilized directly in educational projects. He exploited the effects of familiar
objects in an unusual context, inviting the spectator or pupil to alter the rela
tionship of the various elements. It was up to the spectator to find out the
latent possibilities contained in each work.
Ascott has also worked on the development of an elementary course in art
education. In fact, it might be said that the primary concern of all his artis
tic enterprises during che 1960s, whether they went under che name of
“chance-paintings” or “kinetic constructions," was with the education of the
spectator. This ties in with the way he defined his works as structures subject
co the same human pressures and likelihood of transformation as our purely
intellectual notions. Ascott went on to consider che fucure of art as a cyber
netic activity or discipline.
Ac present, Ascott is one of the most outstanding artists and theoreticians
in che field of telematics. It was Simon Nora and Alain Mine who coined the
term telematics in 1987 to describe the new electronic technology derived from

che convergence of computers and telecommunication systems, incorporating
the telephone, the telex, and the fax. The process of “telematization" was most
clearly seen in the ubiquitous and rapid growth in France since 1980 of
Minitel, the public videotex system that enables widespread interaction
between users and databases across an enormous range of services.
Ascott has put to good use the central feature of the video system: its ability
to facilitate interaction via the electronic space of computer memory, and
beyond the normal constraints of time and space that apply to face-to-face
communication. His projects employing telematic media and interactive par
ticipation include The Pleating of the Text: A Planetary Fairy Tale (in homage
to Roland Barthes’s The Pleating of the Text), devised for the Electra exhibition
at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris in 1983. It involved the cre
ation of a text by the “dispersed authorship” of groups of artists located in
eleven cities around the world, each group participating through an electronic
network. The story developed gradually as a piece of text was logged in daily
from each terminal. Most of the terminals were linked to data projectors so
that the text being generated could be publicly accessible.
For Ascott, the art of our time is one of system, process, participation, and
interaction. Given that our values are relativistic, our culture pluralistic,
and our images and forms evanescent, it is the processes of interaction
between human beings that create meaning and consequently cultures.
Hence, those systems and processes that facilitate and amplify interaction are
the ones that will be used by artists in order co encompass a world audience,
with the aid of telematic systems based on computer-mediated cable and
satellite links.
In accordance with this philosophy, Ascott created an elaborate and
complex multimedia interface as part of the Electronic Arcs Festival of Art
and Technology (Ars Electronica) in Linz, Austria, in 1989- Aspects of Gaia:
Digital Pathways across the Whole Earth was a computer-networking project and
interactive installation conceived in collaboration with Peter Appleton,
Machias Fuchs, Robert Pepperell, and Miles Visman. It involved interaction
in electronic data space between artists, musicians, scientists, and other
creative individuals from a number of different countries, and produced rep
resentations of Earth (Gaia) from a multiplicity of perspectives: scientific, cul
tural, spiritual, and mythological (figure 2.11). Conceived of within the
tradition of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or more appropriately Gesamtdatenwerk, these
connecting pathways constituted a kind of conceptual umbrella or digitized
Chapter 2
Figure 2.11 Roy Ascott, Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways across the Whole Earth, 1989.
Photo by Felix Nobauer, Linz.
noosphere aspiring co planetary harmonization via the creative and energiz

ing transformation and reconstitution of digital images, texts, and sounds,
which could be accessed and interacted with at many locations around the
world.
Virtual space, virtual image, and virtual reality are also categories of expe
rience chat can be shared through telematic networks conceived by Ascott.
They too allow for movement through cyberspace and engagement in a hyper
reality with the virtual presence of ochers who are physically removed. With
a headset, data glove, or other data wear, these interactions along with the
feelings and the perceptions created in this way are experienced as real.
According to Ascott, the passage from real to virtual should be seamless, just
as the changes to social behavior deriving from the omnipresent human/
computer symbiosis are flowing unnoticed into our individual psyches.
Nowadays, the five defining features of Ascott’s art and indeed of the art
of our time, which so conspicuously differentiate it from the art of earlier eras,
are: connectivity, whether part to part, person to person, or mind to mind;
immersion into the whole, and thus the dissolution of subject and ground;

interaction as the very form of art, such that art as behavior of forms has become
arc as a form of behavior; transformation via the perpetual flux of image, surface,
and identity; and emergence, the perpetual coming into being of meaning,
matter, and mind.
A particularly important recent feature in Ascott’s itinerary is che rela
tionship between telematics and consciousness. He has coined the term tech-
noetic aesthetic in order to describe the specific relations between art, mind, and
technology (cech-noetics = technology + mind). The technoetic aesthetic is
not only supposed to enable us to explore consciousness in new ways but may
lead us to distinctly new forms of arc, new qualities of mind, and new con
structions of reality.
According to Ascott, consciousness is now at che forefront of research in
both science and art. Science, in trying to explain consciousness, faces the most
intractable of problems. In this endeavor, many disciplines are brought into
play. While consciousness for the artist is something more to be navigated
than mapped, and more to be reframed than explained, it too poses an over
arching challenge. The mystery of consciousness may be the final frontier for
both science and art, and perhaps their point of convergence. Certainly, objec
tivity and subjectivity intermingle there. It may be the space in which art’s
classical concern with representation and expression gives way to processes of
construction, emergence, and evolution—a space in which both the self and
its reality can be redefined and transformed.7
As for Fred Forest,* he is an artist who operates on the edge of the artis
tic field. One could even say that in his case, art has left its own area to enter
that of media, even advertising.
Yet a careful analysis of Forest’s itinerary and activities reveals that he is a
veritable artist; his options and behavior are those of a creator of new values
of an aesthetic order obtained through communications work—provocative
work, for sure, but sensitive nevertheless. This process is illustrated not by
the production of tangible and physically realized objects but by the produc
tion of communications systems and diverse situations.
To grasp the meaning of the relationship between subjective and social
factors in Forest’s work, it is useful to look briefly at his background. From
1954 to 1970, Forest was a postal and telecommunications inspector in
Algeria. He was also a painter then, and in 1970, took a decisive step: Forest
became an artist of communications, inaugurating inventive and creative work
in human networks and relations.
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Such an existential transformation is not entirely miraculous. It has to be
seen in the context of 1968—1970, a period when counterculture movements
assimilated life with art and highlighted each person’s daily creativity. Forest’s
existential transformation was also linked to the introduction of advanced
technology. He was among the first in France to use video and closed-circuit
television in his art. In 1970, he presented an audiovisual show at the
Universal Exhibition in Osaka before making a more direct use in the press
and other mass media around the world. His communication systems utilize
the telephone, radio, television, telematics, and cable.
Among the numerous events organized by Forest, I want to single out his
October 1973 Sociological Walk in Brooklyn—Sao Pa/ilo, in Brazil. After placing
daily advertisements in the local newspapers and on local radio urging the res
idents of Brooklyn and Sao Paulo to phone the art museum in order co sign
up for chis event, Forest invited the participants to walk with him through
the district according to a preplanned itinerary. At different stages, the group
visited a local music shop, a fruit vendor, a cobbler, a bank, a supermarket, a
church, and an art gallery. Forest was aiming to investigate a localized urban
area through its different business, administrative, and cultural vocations.
With the participants’ help he wanted to experience daily reality, reveal
internal relationships, and create microcommunication events enabling the
establishment of information circulation through direct intervention in the
milieu.
Forest’s artistic career has also been marked by member in the
Sociological Art Collective, active until the end of the 1970s, and then
the Communication Aesthetic Group. Each of these movements united plastic
artists and theoreticians (sociologists and aesthetic thinkers), and gave them
the chance to show individually as practicing artists after having tried to work
out a common theory.
At the beginning of the 1990s, Forest then devoted himself to producing
electronic-diode newspapers that unite two characteristics of his procedure:
limited appearances in the mass media and che use of advanced technology.
One of the works of this type, The Bible Culled from the Sands (1991), origi
nally called The Electronic Bible and the Gulf War, shows a luminous parade of
quotes from the Old Testament simultaneously with excerpts from newspa
per articles reporting on Gulf War battles. Long lists of military equipment
are juxtaposed with long genealogies taken from the Bible. Here, Forest wants
co draw actencion co che face chac hiscory can repeac icself through similar

speeches. He obviously does not care about the stereotypical statements made
by politicians and military leaders.
All of Forest’s manifestations that can be inserted into sociopolitical news
are provocative and critical by nature, but they incite one to think, even if
they grate because of their aggressiveness. In the end they work as questions,
communications, and an interactivity that all confirm Forest’s artistic aims.
This is also the case in one of his most recent works, La Machine a travailler
le temps (1998), where he offers the spectator/manipulator the opportunity to
shorten or accelerate the flux of time in both the physical space of an instal
lation and the virtual cyberspace of the Internet (figures 2.12 and 2.13).
An early organizer and theoretician in kinetic, luminous, and video art,
Willoughby Sharp* has devoted much of his professional life to electronic
communications art and using the new electronic technologies creatively. Born
in 1936, Sharp grew up in the home of network television, Manhattan, so it
was not unusual that once he had decided to express himself “artistically,” he
would take as his “brush” the first SONY portable video recording system,
the 1600 Porta-Pae. His immersion into the television of the late 1940s and
1950s totally reorganized his adolescent imaginative life. Sharp’s preteen con
sciousness flipped from a one-at-a-time focus on objects to an all-at-once flow
of television personalities in process. Almost instantly after DuMont televi
sion sets began to dominate living rooms and lives in 1948, television took
control of Sharp, and he was transformed from just watching “Uncle Miltie”
Figure 2.12 Fred Forest, La Machine A travailler le temps, 1998. Installation view at the
Centre culturel Landowski, Boulogne-Billancourt, France.
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Figure 2.13 Fred Forest, La Machine A travailler le temps, 1998. Centre culturel Landowskt,
Boulogne-Billancourt, France.
to being him. Sharp’s video performance pieces during che pioneering period
of video arc utilized SONY’s primitive reproduction tools co capcure his own
face and body through various LSD-induced scream-of-consciousness states.
His actual reality became a depchless image. Sharp became a screen portray
ing traumatic psychodramas depicted his extremely intimate, personal rela
tionships with his mother, father, and daughter as well as the women he loved.
During this same period, as publisher of Avalanche magazine (1968—1976),
Sharp became aware of che fact that while che art concent of this publication
was appropriate (it was, after all, almost exclusively devoted to major artists
explaining their mostly deeply felt creations), the carrier was not. Sharp and
his associates had not yet learned Karl Marx’s wisdom concerning the need co

own rhe means of production. The printer owned the presses; the Avalanche
editors basically worked to pay the printer for services.
At about this time, Sharp refocused his efforts to communicate electroni
cally. After several years of experimenting with slow-scan television, fax, and
alphameric computer communications systems in rapidly expanding geo
graphic nodal networks, his team was ready to let satellites carry the messages
of art. As a result of A Grand Collaboration involving scores of artists, using
the NASA Hermes advanced technology communications satellite, a transcon
tinental, bidirectional transmission between cable television systems in San
Francisco and New York was established and maintained for three days in Sep
tember 1977. But this project, The Send-Receive Two-Way Demo, also failed
Marx’s rule and created oppressive financial debts for the sponsoring nonprofit
art organizations, the Center for New Art Activities, Inc. and the Live Pro
jection Point of the Franklin Street Arts Center, Inc., both in New York.
During the following decade, the energy, creativity, and collaboration that
had been built up slowly in the New York’s downtown art community dissi
pated. Neofigurative painting began to rule. Conservative forces now took
over, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency that had
financially underwritten much of the most interesting experimental media art
of the previous period, withdrew such support. Artists who never dreamed of
being represented by a commercial gallery were now showing worldwide,
some setting astronomical secondary auction prices.
Sharp’s personal response to this new cultural climate was to become an
art dealer. In September 1988, he opened the Willoughby Sharp Gallery in
Manhattan’s SoHo. Here again, the content was correct art. But the carrier,
an expensive physical space, was not. There were few sales, but Sharp held on
for more than three years as a gallery owner until he went private.
During the previous eighteen years, Sharp had been studying, writing, and
teaching “teleculture.” He had closely followed the dramatic development of
computer hardware/software, but was taken by surprise by Tim Berners-Lee’s
HTML and Marc Andersen’s MOSIC, which provided the foundation for
Netscape’s browser and the Internet. Sharp quickly realized that he was
extremely lucky. The Internet could give him a second life, a professional
rebirth. He secured sharpgallery.com as his URL and reengaged most of the
artists who he had represented. Photographs of their works were posted on his
site for sale, and some works even sold. The Internet allowed Sharp to get
back to work as an online art dealer. As such, with modest start-up expenses,
Chapter 2
little overhead, and ownership of his means of production, he became more
effective in his goal of communicating art. As Sharp began to understand the
extraordinary power of this new communications tool, the Internet, he
became engaged in allied aspects of its reach. E-mail gave him access to a
greatly expanding art audience. In 1991, to complement the work of
sharpgallery.com, Sharp started publishing TSARt a weekly listing of inter
national art events. This provided him with a worldwide personal communi
cations channel with great potential marketing benefits. Realizing that the
price of art on his site was in excess of what people were spending, he decided
to diversify. Since he had been conducting audiovisual interviews with artists
since the 1960s, why not take this old (but still relevant) art information and
reformat it onto contemporary media like DVDs and CDs. This simple act
would complete the circle of his life/work—a completeness previously
unimaginable. It is this personal “grand unification project” that currently
engages him.8
In describing the personal itineraries of the above-mentioned technologi
cal artists, some of whom are taking a prominent role in the virtual art of the
present, I did not want to put the emphasis on the specific traits in their work
that constitute a precise reference to later works by them or other virtual
artists. Rather, it was my intention to recall the technical, artistic, and human
climate that can be observed in each one of these itineraries, and that can allow
for a more global appreciation of the atmosphere in which contemporary
virtual art is taking place.

____ I ,T" I____
Current Virtual Art and Artists
(1983-2004)
Materialized Digital-based Work
In this chapter, che aesthetic emphasis is on the interplay becween the image
and the concept as well as perception and representation. I will explore three
subthemes found in the work of the artists discussed here: plastic, cognition,
and bioaesthetic issues. As in the three chapters that follow, I will take into
account one of the main concerns of this book: illustrating che complete per
sonal, technical, and aesthetic scope of the virtual artists through their art
works, social commitments, and relationship with the public—particularly
with the spectator-participant.
Plastic Issues
The plastic issues in materialized or substantiated digital-based works are

intimately related to the aesthetic problems involved in graphics, painting,
design, sculpture, photography, and architecture—and in turn, with line,
color, form, patterns, composition, movement, rhythm, light effects, and
spatial representation. The artists in this section are all using digital tech
nology so as to arrive at new results by applying their personal techno-
aesthetic creative method in combining digitized methods with selected
plastic issues.
In this way, digital printmaking and photography can be found in Victor
Acevedo’s* The Lacemaker (1996), his most well-known work. As Acevedo has
written of this work, “It is an homage to the famous same-titled seventeenth
century painting by Johannes Vermeer. The original photograph at the heart
of my image was taken on New Year’s Eve 1995. It was not consciously posed;
I caught my subject emulating the posture of The Lacemaker simply by hap
penstance.”1 This statement underscores Acevedo’s interest in everyday life as
seen, recorded, and then digitally refashioned into a kind of metaphysical pho
tographic archive. In fact, the main intent of Acevedo’s work is to explore the
structure of space by revisioning pictures taken from everyday life. Toward
this end, he builds various geometric space frames using 3-D modeling soft
ware and then composites these purely synthetic structures into the pictorial
space of digitized photographs. The use of these particular geometric matri
ces—that is, networks of triangulated or semispherical polyhedra—and the
graphic tension achieved by juxtaposing them with photographic mappings
of visual data is an opportunity to represent spatial field phenomena in a way
that is noncubic and noncubist. Moreover, the use of digital-imaging tech
nologies allows Acevedo the facile use of photographic realism with its native
and various perspectival mappings to be put back into the abstract and
metaphoric mix.
Acevedo's inspiration for these geometric structures springs from the
notion of the void matrix. Some Eastern mystics describe this as the univer
sal substrate of being—from which all life-forms emerge and then ultimately
return to. The void matrix metaphor is one of the key concepts discussed in
Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics.2 This book explores che parallels between
the description of subatomic particle phenomena by Western physicists and
descriptions of reality found in the major forms of Eastern mysticism.
Acevedo’s graphic visualization of the void matrix is achieved by his adoption
of various geometric structures, which are detailed in R. Buckminster Fuller’s
Synergetics) The primary polyhedral net or space frame for this use is the
isotropic vector matrix. This is an all-space-filling network made up of alter
nating octahedra and tetrahedra.
In the traditional model of pictorial space, we are taught that there is figure
and ground and then empty space between them. Cubism attempts to deal
with the underlying structure of things by applying a system of planar abstrac
tion to the figures or objects and che structural environment around them. By
virtue of it being modernist painting, the familiar real-world optical phe
nomenology codified in Renaissance perspective is lost, as is the late nine
teenth century s technologically born photographic realism. Pablo Picasso’s
and Georges Braques use of collage exemplifies another order of realism,
however the collaged fragments ultimately play a role that conforms co the
Chapter 3
push-pull orthogonal principles of their painting. In Acevedo’s work, we are
presented with a graphic metaphor that allows us to revisit this territory
anew.
It is interesting to note that Acevedo produced a significant body of work
in traditional media, primarily painting and drawing, during the years 1977
to 1985. He made his last oil painting in 1984. Thereafter, he adopted com
puter graphics as his primary medium. His interest in geometric structure
and periodic space division has continued to be an integral part of his digital
work.
Acevedo’s important early works from his traditional media phase are Four
Fold Rotational Wasp (1980), Slated Breakfast-Visceral Analytic (1981), and
Macro Synapse-Cuboctahedron Periphery (1982). Their graphic approach easily
suggests the nature of Acevedo’s future digital work. In spring 1983, he
created the graphite drawing Void Matrix Lattice. Acevedo has described this
period as one of the most influential in his formative years as an artist. His
first successful digital image is called Ectoplasmic Kitchen (1987). This work
was shown in public for the first time in February 1988. By 1989, Acevedo’s
work would display clear evidence of his new methodology through its
use of 3-dimensional modeling software to build the geometric components
of his pictures. He now used the PC-based Cubicomp, an early desktop 3-
dimensional modeling and animation system that enabled him to construct
mathematically accurate polyhedra. Noteworthy works from 1991 include Tell
Me the Truth and 6.26.27.86, and then later Axis, and NYC '83-85, both
from 1993. In 1994, he began using Soft-Image, a high-level 3-dimensional
modeling and animation software running on the SGI (Silicon Graphics Incor
porated) platform and later Windows NT. That same year, he created the first
version of a digital image called Skull. Acevedo’s work evolved as he now
entered into his “silver geometry” phase. This coincided with his fall 1995
move from Los Angeles to New York City. He became an artist-in-residence
at the School of Visual Arts and, in 1997, began teaching there. Two of
Acevedo’s most well-known works, The Violinist and The Lacemaker, mentioned
above, date from this time (1996) and mark Acevedo’s definite entry into the
virtual art domain from the technological arc area.
Today, Acevedo explores his signature metaphor in the time-based realm,
working with digital video software like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Aftereffects.
Recent digital prints by Acevedo include Eric in Orense (2001) and the com
panion David in Orense (2001) as well as Nil Cynthesis (2003)-

Geometric considerations are at the heart of the iterative hyperstruccures
and the abstract digital wall prints of French artist Pascal Dombis.* Dombis
has an engineering background, which has helped him to develop his own
programming technique as he writes his own algorithms using computer lan
guage and a fractal iterative loop. Through this programming technique,
Dombis manipulates computer-generated visual hyperstructures, which he
then synthesizes into abstract digital wall-print fields. These visual fields over
throw, or at least displace, modern rationality in favor of unpredictable emer
gences of patterns.
Dombis began to use the computer in his artwork in the late 1980s. At
that time, he started to manipulate the computer file as a printmaking plate—
using computer prints as a substitute for traditional prints. But the computer
output was just one element in his mixed-media work then—work that
included all kinds of elements like painting materials, ropes, and metal (all
assembled to form rather theatrical installations falling somewhere between
painting and sculpture). Then, in the early 1990s—through his discovery of
fractal geometry and its unlimited possibilities for computer-generated
geometries—Dombis gradually got rid of all traditional painting and sculp
ture material, and concentrated on exploring the new conceptual space that
emerged through self-programmed iterative hyperstructures. We are here
already at the heart of the virtual art sphere.
Today, Dombis methodically uses an elementary warped prototype as his
computational starting point to achieve self-programmed iterative hyper
structures so as to advance a complex pictorial space in which he addresses a
miscellaneous collection of network issues such as complexity, perpetuation,
enrichment, and chaos. By commencing with a singular and uncomplicated
warped constituent (a lonely curve or a diminutive portion of an arc), and
by reproducing it computationally with perseverance, Dombis achieves an
intensely elaborate geotectonic optic structure rich in associative significance.
Into Dombis’s virtual matrix rushes a relentless machine logic bent on achiev
ing a contemporary techno-hyperirrationality.
To achieve this hyperirrationality, Dombis always starts with a singular
rational and uncomplicated geometric element, and then reproduces it in an
iterative loop. During the first loops of the iteration, the starting element can
still be recognized, but a structure is soon created that contains a large number
of this initial element.
Chapter 3
Using the computers calculational power, Dombis can generate structures
made up of tens of thousands to several million single elements. The result
ing configuration would be impractical to generate by hand. Indeed, it would
not be possible to anticipate what the final structure would look like after the
completion of the calculation process without the computer’s calculational
power. This is the unforeseeable result that first attracted Dombis when he
discovered the fractal loop’s potentialities. Just a tiny change can generate
completely different visual results, leading to infinite combinations of
geometric structures.
One of che interesting elements in Dombis’s work is the extreme variety
of che oucput he can generace with his simple algorithm. Because he can add
some randomness into his work, Dombis can produce an endless number of
combinations and chaotic images, depending on the random calculation used.
Hence, from che same file, Dombis can produce an infinite variety of struc
tures—because at each calculation the random seed is reinitialized, leading to
a different output.
Dombis terminates his loop process at the point just before what Severo
Sarduy calls “blackout” (fulfilment of all possibilities). According to Sarduy
in his book Barroco, if a structure is developed incessantly, it will end up as a
perplexed all-black facsimile of itself and thus attain its own “blackout.”4
Once calculated to a point prior to blackout, Dombis uses large-format
digital printers to output his germinated hyperstructures. Dombis’s work then
invades gallery or museum space in site-specific installations where his hyper
structures are designed to fit on walls (figures 3.1 and 3.2). Moreover, Dombis
has developed several large pieces for outdoor urban sites—the largest being
in 1999 in Metz, France, for a thirty-meter window in an art school. This
piece, which could be seen from the city center, was composed from an arced
ribbon interlaced and flowed in such a way as to give a baroque rhythm to
the architectural setting. From far away, people could follow the blue, red, or
purple curves. Getting closer, Dombis’s work generated a vertigo where the
viewer got lost in a chaotic accumulation of details.
Dombis’s work is truly optic, and the observer’s position is important in
his work. In front of Dombis’s monumental pieces, the observer can feel an
immersive sensuousness by moving back and forth.
The multiplicity of networked rhizome worlds is reinforced in Dombis’s
2001 works through the use of lenticular material. Lenticulars are optical

Figure 3.1 Pascal Dombis, Rizong III, 1999. Digital wall drawing, 9 x 4.3 meters.
lenses that allow several images to fit into one: when looking at a lenticular
image, as the observer’s angle or view changes, the observer can see first one
image, then another—revealing progressively the different images. This tech
nique is employed by Dombis in large print works that generate different
potentialities for his incense geometric calculations. Here, he shows the
progress of his mathematical iteration loop in which the original motif dis
appears into the scrolling network (just before the blackout) or he explores
the different status of his structures, at different scales—all integrated in a
virtual collection of networked images.
In a 2001 installation for a Paris event on the computer virus theme called
Festival Virus (organized by Artekno), Dombis installed a printer in the
middle of a gallery room and continuously printed the same file. Because the
file included some randomness, each printout was a different variation on
the same formula. The printouts were then hung on the gallery wall, creat
ing a room full of nearly one hundred different variations.
It is interesting to note that Dombis sees his iterative computational
methodology as a kind of arte povera within the new technology. Certainly,
Chapter 3
■t
Figure 3.2 Pascal Dombis, Antisana 1, 2000. Digital wall drawing, 8 x 3.8 meters.
Dombis uses the computer for its original and primitive essence: a power
ful computational tool that can reproduce simple calculation incessantly. But
because Dombis writes his own algorithms and programs, he has control over
his germinating artwork. It helps him too in his creative process by explor
ing other computer language techniques and making programming mistakes
that turn out to be new explorations in his geometric hyperstruccures.
Turning to Matthias Groebel* his system of making computer-robotic-
assisted paintings involves unifying painting and computer techniques. The
artist initially choose television images as an image source (and makes small
alterations on them). Thus, his approach is the incorporation of the contem
porary experience of television perception altered now by digital media rec
ognizing itself in painterly terms. Groebel also makes extensive use of text
elements, normally taken from the television screen—or as for his american
beauty series, Chinese script ripped from video CDs (figure 33). Moreover,
there are several elements that contribute further to the complex structure
of Groebel’s work. On the one hand, there is his obsession with traditional

Figure 3.3 Matthias Groebel, american beauty #6,2001. Acrylic on canvas, 59 x 39.4 inches.
painting techniques—an obsession that allowed him to develop his system of

applying layers of color, which give a convincing sensation of traditional
painting to the television-based images with which he works. His use of an
airbrush delivery system also results in the blurring of points of color, and
this too conveys a painterly aesthetic. At the same time, the recognizable line
structure and pattern of che television screen remains evident, and so the
viewer is reminded of the images’ source.
Chapter 3
The choice and manipulation of the sampled television images, however,
makes it clear chat Groebel’s work is not about media theory or even really
about television. First, it is an aesthetic composition; none of Groebel’s can
vases ever match the precise proportions of a television screen. Also, even
though the television images come from different television sources, they are
never identifiable. There are no politicians, no actors, and no familiar feces
(figure 3.4). The original context of the already obscure material gets lost
completely during the production process. Groebel’s working penchant for
watching television with the sound turned off so as to accumulate huge,
unsorced files of still images on his hard drive does not permit a proper tracing
Figure 3.4 Matthias Groebel, american beauty #10, 2001. Acrylic on canvas, 39.4 x 39.4
inches.

back of the image source or context. There is no process of identification left.
All that remains is a feeling of a bleached-out memory around these images
a feeling that is not committed at all to the knowledge of their original context
or meaning. Hence, Groebel uses today's capture technology to forget specific
context so as to address the cultural memory in general—in the abstract.
As for his background, Groebel was born in 1958 in Germany. He was first
trained as a naturealist. It was through this scientific training that he initially
developed his art ideas, within the isolation of a German province. At that
time, he continued painting using traditional hand techniques, the results of
which were never shown in public. Through this period of growth, Groebel
intensely studied painting procedure, photography, chemical reactions, and
computer programming.
When Groebel decided to move to one of the centers of the contemporary
art scene in the late 1980s, Cologne was the judicious choice. During that
move, Groebel brought with him his first version of a painting apparatus that
he had been developing. This machine, which became completely functional
in 1990 and subsequently has turned into an ever-more-sophisticated tool over
the years, applies pigmented acrylic colors onto traditional canvases. Groebel
built this robotic apparatus from scratch, hacking together bicycle compo
nents, parts of an airbrush, and a big glass window that kept clouds of color
from floating throughout the entire room. Groebel’s basic idea for this robotic
apparatus was to use it in the movement of television images from their tel
evision context onto painted canvases. In this respect, then, Groebel’s claim
that he had to become a hacker to go on as a painter is justified. Indeed, it is
through hacking that he takes the position of a painter to an immanently
contemporary level.
While Groebel has kept to the basic parameters of his work, he has come
up with different groups of compositions within the last few years—for
example, his use of the human body. The human body (or parts of it) occurs
in Groebel’s work not only as a subject but as a scale device within the virtual
space of the paintings. The body is never less than life-size.
Groebel’s representation of space, as related to the physical size of the
canvas, is another one of the intriguing aspects of his work. His perspective
is that of a low-resolution television camera—the view that has changed our
idea of the world more than any other development over the last fifty years.
He has also produced a whole series of abstract-looking paintings called
Hacked Channels that come from encrypted satellite channel transmissions. The
Chapter 3
illegal hacker software Groebel uses for decoding the signals fails to com
pletely restore the images to their state of legibility, resulting in a strange
whirlwind—a sort of semifigural milieu.
When one visits Groebel’s studio, one sees him working on a new device
that uses a laser beam to virtually burn wax color into the canvas. So, all told,
while che modus operandi for his art remains primarily technologically con
ceptual, there exists an element of undisguised intuition about his work—
mixed with a deep-seated scientific indoctrination and a love of good painting.
As cultural critic Helen Sloan puts it, “What makes Groebel’s work so refresh
ing is its odd positioning between che underground and the traditional.
Groebel uses the devices of computer subculture to place them firmly within
the language of arc and its history.’’5
An original way to treat the plastic issue of patterns in a technologically
determined manner can be found in John F. Simon’s* Every Icon Is aJava Apple.
It systematically generates every black-and-white combination of the e-pixel
grid that composes digital screen icons. Simon is one of che few artists who
not only uses the computer as a tool but also knows how to program it and
design software. He merges both vocations in Every Icon (1997), which was
featured in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Every Icon is composed of a 32 X 32
inch square grid. At first, every square is white. Then, as the software launches
and the program progresses, che grid proceeds co feacure every possible per-
mucation of black-and-whice squares—until eventually, every square is black.
He also likes co take conceptual ideas from the Bauhaus and Sol LeWitt, and
then write them into his software.
In 1997, Simon also created Color Balance, a Web site installation chat
behaves like a scale by utilizing a horizontal bar with weighing pans at either
end. Rather than standard weights, the items placed in the pans are rectan
gles of color. The balance shifts back and forth as rectangles are added and
removed. Although color is perceptual and has no mass, Color Balance is an
environment where a color’s weight is measurable. The weight of an object
cannot be compared to its visual appearance. Yet the word heavy indicates both
objects of great weight and colors with visual dominance. One way to recon
cile these immeasurable definitions is to represent color as a number. When
color is digitized, its quality becomes a quantity. Simon refers to Klee’s note
books in which he describes a model for understanding color based on balance.
Klee defines color using three parameters: extension, tone, and character. Color
Balance defines the extension of a color to be the square pixel area of its

rectangle. Tone and character are represented by a single number: the sum of
the red, green, and blue color components. In Color Balance, the weight of a
color is the product of the extension and the color value. Color Balance allows
the viewer to manipulate the size and color of the rectangles on the scale.
Klee’s example, as well as many other experimental configurations, may be
produced with this system.
In terms of his background, Simon is a Louisiana native who completed
his master’s in fine arts at the New York School of Visual Arts in 1987. In
the years after graduation, Simon taught at the School of Visual Arts and
worked as a programmer.
Simon’s recent pieces conform to a more traditional concept of artwork—
they are shown not on a computer terminal but on flat liquid-crystal diode
monitors, framed as if they were paintings. Color Panel vl.O (1999) looks like
a geometric abstraction by Klee or Mondrian, but it is really a computer
program that will undergo millions of permutations (figures 3.5, 3.6).
Such plastic themes as the portrait and still life find a most original inter
pretation in the techno-aesthetic devices applied by Steve Miller* in his flat
based work, including paintings and digital iris prints. The artist uses his
Figure 3.5 John F. Simon, Color Panel v 1.0, 1999. Courtesy of the artist and the Sandra
Gering Gallery.
Chapter 3
Figure 3.6 John F. Simon, ComplexCity, 2000. Courtesy of the artist and the Sandra Gering
Gallery.
personal high-tech and digital-imaging systems to explore the body (the por
trait) as well as the objects of the environment (still life). Miller’s large-scale
“interior human portrait” prints and paintings use medical technology such
as radiographs, x-rays, magnetic resonance imagings, sonograms, electro
cardiograms, and CAT scans (figures 3.7, 3.8).
For an artist like Thomas Bayrle,* technical elements changed his eminently
pictorial work. Originally relying on simple pictograms for his compositions,
in the 1960s he began to condense together the prefabricated parts that con
struct what can be called superimages. Nowadays, Bayrle perceives the points
that make up a nose, for example, as individual spaces or lively beings. For him,
a complete picture’s quality depends on the amount and the quality of its indi
vidual parts. Today, people know that a single cell means life and is therefore
an individual being. Bayrle considers that he has worked for decades in a
Sisyphean way in trying co solve the problem of how to recognize his object
and portray it adequately. In this respect, the computer has proven invaluable
for his work, as it has for another German artist, Tobias Trutwin,* who is invest
ing plastic problems with certain extra-artistic issues always linked to aesthetic
finalities. Trutwin utilizes transparent materials for his installations—in

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particular, transparent images generated by computer—and incorporates dif
ferent references into them, based on his interest and research not only in the
artistic and philosophical fields but also on themes belonging directly to the
ology and science. Furthermore, Trutwin creates transparent walls constructed
with the aid of plastic bottles, pearl curtains, and transparent chairs.
Trutwin was originally not a painter but a photographer. In 1992, he
started to mix images on the computer. He initially presented these images
in large luminous boxes, but made use of a new technique toward the end of
1997: he transposed his images onto large glass slides with the aid of a trans
parent, inalterable silicon glue, which represented a quite original technical
option. Trutwin presents his glass pictures in three ways. First, they can be
presented in boxes where the light is projected from behind. Trutwin rarely
uses this technique, however, since the same presentation is widely used in
publicity. A second way of presenting his large glasses is in the form of a stele.
This is Trutwin’s preferred technique since it allows the spectator to choose
one’s own point of view and makes the spectator participate more intensely
in the creative process. A third way to present these images is by means of
suspension hooks placed on a wall, this has the advantage of allowing the
images to be treated as a series of windows due to reciprocal projection
processes, and it alludes also to church windows.
Trutwin refers to the biblical anathema against images in the sense that by
observing the illumination face-to-face, in most cases a strong light reflex is
created. This prevents the visitor consuming the totality of the image. Instead,
the spectator will be forced to change their point of view if they want to see
the parts of the picture that are covered by reflections. At the same time, such
an illumination ensures that the observer is reflected in the glass. This is a
desired phenomenon and not an unwanted technical side effect. The mirror
ings constitute an integral part of the artist’s work, without which the con
stitutional, symbolic artistic act of self-recognition would be greatly reduced.
Through the mirroring, the observer will also be integrated into the image
world. The spectator, when placed between the source of light and the glass,
casts a shadow directly onto the picture. More precisely, this shadow will not
be visible on the glass; but as already mentioned, since it is occupied by the
mirrored image, the shadow is only visible on the wall projection. The face-
to-face observer destroys the projection by looking. This has become the
strongest reference for the biblical anathema with which Trutwin has been
concerned for many years.
Chapter 3
Another aspect of Trutwin’s work results from his interest in the virus
problem. This manifests itself by the fact that in his view, viruses correspond
more to dead elements of information than to living beings, entering another
cell in order to empower themselves through and manipulate the cellular
machinery.61 will return to this problem when I discuss bioaesthetic issues in
materialized digital-based works later in this chapter.
An original way to realize one’s ambitions as a designer with the new media
was chosen by John Maeda in creating a 480-page book titled Maeda@Media
(2000) as a retrospective of his personal work. This work can be viewed as a
manifesto, a finely crafted manual, and an inspirational book.
As director of the Aesthetics and Computation Group, an experimental
research studio founded in 1996 as the successor to the Visible Language
Workshop, Maeda took a leading part in the group’s efforts to involve the
design and art community in the introduction of the underlying concepts of
computing technology into the design area.
Maeda was born in 1966 in Seattle. After receiving a PhD in 1992 at the
Tsukuba University Institute of Art and Design in Japan, he became associ
ate director of the MIT Media Laboratory, where he is also Sony Career Devel
opment professor of media arts and sciences as well as associate professor of
design and computation. In 1999, he published Design by Numbers. This book
is a reader-friendly tutorial on both the philosophy and nuts-and-bolts tech
niques of programming for artists.
Practicing what he preaches, Maeda composed Design by Numbers using a
computational process he developed specifically for the book. He introduces
a program available on the Web, which can be freely downloaded or run
directly within any Java-enabled Web browser.
Throughout his books, Maeda emphasizes the importance of understand
ing the motivation behind computer programming as well as the many
wonders that emerge from well-written programs. Sympathetic to the “math
ematically challenged, “ he places minimal stress on mathematics in the
first half of the book. Because computation is inherently mathematical,
the book’s second half uses intermediate mathematical concepts that gener
ally do not go beyond basic algebra. The reader who masters the skills so
clearly set out by Maeda will be able to exploit the true character of digital
media design.
Print media are at the heart of Joseph Scheer’s* works, but he also has
developed a number of video and Web-based projects.

Scheer is a professor of print media, the chair of the Division of Two-
Dimensional Studies and Electronic Arts, and codirector/founder of the Insti
tute for Electronic Arts at the School of Art and Design, Alfred University.
He uses technology to reexamine nature through interpretive collecting and
visual recording.
For example, Scheer exploits the strange beauty of moths, whose varieties
seem to be infinite. These insects are generally considered to be obnoxious,
but with the help of more than one hundred thousand images of moths on
the Net to choose from and with a powerful scanner, he manages to produce
admirable printed works of art (figures 3-9, 3.1O).7
The work of Michael Rees* emanates from computer-aided design (CAD).
His main project, Artificial Sculpture (2002), with its tangled hierarchy,
combines various objects and media. He made the installation with hand-
assembled sculptures created with CAD and 3-D printing (rapid prototyp
ing). The project also involved an animation of the CAD designs and the early
conceptual drawings. Moreover, it utilized a piece of software called Sculp
tural User Interface that synthesizes language, image, and object in an envi
ronment that can generate all three.
Figure 3.9 Joseph Scheer, Catocala Concumbens, 2003. Iris print on watercolor paper, 34 x
46 inches.
Chapter 3
Figure 3.10 Joseph Scheer, Yponomeuta Multipunctelle, 2003. Iris print on watercolor paper,
34 x 46 inches.
Artificial Sculpture is a kind of “thinker toy.” It is modular (fingers, legs,

handles, connectors, and bodies are designed to snap together) and can be seen
as a language that grows exponentially. The modules were created with CAD
and output in 3-D printing. The masters were then silicon molded, and mul
tiple parts were manufactured from the molds. The final objects were assem
bled manually into the elements of a larger sculptural installation. They follow
a strict branching structure that sprouts fingers on their ends. As such, they
are hierarchical structures that combine a global language (the assembly of
the Y-branches from PVC pipe) and a colloquial language (the legs, the fingers,
the handles, and so on).
The Sculptural User Interface sequences projected onto a gallery wall are the
basis for the installation’s sculptures. They suggest ways that they might move,
defy gravity, and inhabit space, and refer viewers to the artist’s early conceptual
drawings, which indicate the scope of the work. The Sculptural User Interface
software (available to viewers on the installation's computer) is a combinatory
program that employs all the objects seen in the installation. Users can interact
with the program graphically via a keyboard by typing letters or words to gen
erate sculptures. It is, then, a kind of social sculpture (figures 3.11 and 3.12).

Figure 3.11 Michael Rees, Artificial Sculpture, 2002. Detail of the ancillary installation with
workstation and its projection of the Sculptural User Interface.
: Sculptural User Interface: Wittgenstein’* game 1 alphabet

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Figure 3.12 Michael Rees, Artificial Sculpture, 2002. Screen shot of the Sculptural User
Interface.
Chapter 3
The physical sculptures in the installation and the software sculptures float
ing in projected space are two sides of the same coin for Rees. They share some
similarities, but are also drastically different. The physical sculpture modules,
although momentarily frozen in this installation, can and will grow into
complex objects in the same way that the software grows sculptures. The phys
ical sculptures, however, have weight, texture, gravity, and a physical pres
ence. The software has none of this. The software is unconstrained by these
elements and facilitates a kind of infinite growch of form based on language.
Strangely, each approach to sculpture—the physical and the virtual—informs
the other. Stranger still, each can become the ocher. It is a kind of hall of
mirrors, but one in which the viewer never stands between the mirrors, except
by implication.
For Rees, the easiest critique of che investigative work chat employs the
computer and its output media is that it is driven too thoroughly by tech
nology. He observes that we have been living some thirty-five years now with
the issues of digital technology and art, and many of the early investigations
were full of hope and promise yet to be delivered. Ac the same time, we under
stand chat che media is the message or, to put it differently, we know things
within their context. For Rees, art gets interesting to the rarified elite when
it can be critical of its media, when it can query and investigate itself beyond
the initial seductive impact of its presence. It is at its best when it becomes
self-conscious.
The cools of imagination have accelerated at the speed of light. Many of
Rees's sculptures are generated with lasers that harden photopolymer, fulfill
ing the real meaning of photography—to write with light. As we get nearer
and nearer to the speed of light, things are looking very strange indeed.
Rees has begun co focus on the comparative problems of artificial intelli
gence against che backdrop of his work from 1992 co 1995. Alchough more
clumsy chan his new work, these early sculptures had an instinct of artificial
intelligence about them and were loosely based on che problems of creating
organisms chat were simple “input/oucput” devices. These input/output
systems consisted of fingers cast from the artist’s hand and arranged around
long PVC pipes. Just as they referenced zoological study and classification
they also looked coward intuitive systems like palmistry or phrenology—
systems that may or may not be false. They used realistic objects as signifiers
for language systems—quite the opposite of abstractions, and yet extremely
abstract. They referred to Hindu sculptures and their mudras, yet combined

with fingers cast so delicately a palmist could read their lines. They looked as
if they were grabbing and letting go. Something still begged within the work
that with the advent of artificial intelligence, acquired a new dimension.
Cognition Issues
As far as the link between aesthetics and perception and cognition issues in
materialized digital-based works goes, it is founded on the interpretation of
the spectator problems already present in the works of artists of the 1950s
and 1960s belonging to the op art and nouvelle tendance (new tendency)
movements. A natural predecessor co virtual art, op art drew attention to the
spectator’s individual, constructive, and changing perceptions—and thus
called on the attitude of the spectator to increasingly transfer the creative act
onto themself. Op art beckons forth a consideration of the enlargement of che
audience’s normal participation, both in regard to che spectator’s ocular apti
tude co instigate variations in the perceived optic as well as their capability
to produce kinetic and aggregate exchanges on or within the artwork itself.
Thus, even within modernism one can begin co find the seeds that grew into
what I am calling virtual arc. One can already notice here che possibilities of
an enlarged perception and cognition in the public chat was solicited by the
members of the nouvelle tendance and other op artists, including chose specifi
cally concerned with programmed and permutacional art. Their activities not
only formed a basis for che development of spectator participation into a still
more global interactivity in the virtual era but also included such plastic
phenomena as virtual movement, virtual vibration, virtual light, and vircual
colors, both “musical” and environmental. A certain number of problems of
an aeschecico-psychological or a philosophical nature were therefore raised, all
linked to the interpretation of che terms of perception and cognition. If the
ordinary sense of perception can be associated with the intuitive recognition
of an aesthetic quality, its philosophical sense means che action by which the
mind refers its sensations to external objects as causes. The philosophical sense
of cognition is both more general and more restrictive. It means an action or
faculty of knowing, perceiving, and conceiving—as opposed to emotion and
volition; in other words, etymologically speaking, it means an apprehension
of knowledge. But the difference between perception and cognition is not only
due to a historical linguistic development but shows a new attitude toward
experimental psychology and the virtual environment.
Chapter 3
The artists in this section are trying to find new solutions to these prob
lems through the application of new technologies. Their techno-aesthetic
stance is achieved progressively by starting from research on the discovery of
the cognition dimension of the human senses and applying it to virtual envi
ronments where the spectator’s interactive implication plays an important
role. Such is the practice of Monika Fleischmann,* whose work is concentrated
on conceiving virtual plots and interfaces as well as support processes of com
munication with the aid of poetry and the imagination. She is also concerned
with the mediatization of the human body, and has set out to create forms of
a new culture in the area of interactivity and network communication. Her
principal works have mostly been elaborated in close collaboration with
architect Wolfgang Strauss.
Fleischmann’s artistic itinerary can be captured under three headings:
work accomplished within the ART + COM group, work in the ARTWORK
context, and work as a participant of the German National Research Center
for Information Technology (GMD) at the Birlinghoven Castle in Sankt
Augustin, near Bonn.
Her projects developed as a founder and a member of the ART 4- COM
group. Elektronisches Musterhaus {Electronic Model House), one of her principal
research projects with ART + COM, was conceived for the Berlin Senate and
realized between 1988 and 1992. During che first stage, she investigated che
impacc of lighc, acouscics, and macerialicy, laying special scress on che rela
tionship between image and sound. During the second stage, Fleischmann
explored the computer as an instrument for planning, and in the process, a
number of didactic models were created.
Fleischmann’s various projects developed within che ARTWORK context,
from 1988 to the present. At first, she elaborated projects such as Woman and
Economics', in 1991, she participated in an architecture competition with
computer simulation. Two years later, Fleischmann produced an educational
study for the Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Linz, Austria, and in 1994, she
conceived an art and communication environment in Japan. She subsequently
worked on a computer-based study of the relationships between arc, culture,
and the new media in Germany.
Fleischmann’s main contribution to the art and technology area was
realized under the auspices of the GMD. In 1992, she undertook a study
for a virtual design environment titled Imagination at Work, followed by The
House of Illusion, in which one comes across objects that have seemingly

independent lives. This work was created to celebrate GMD's twenty-fifth
anniversary. That same year, Fleischmann won the Golden Nika Prize for
interactive art at the Ars Electronica exhibition in Linz with her Home of the
Brain, a work concerned with the visualization of the telecommunications
future. She took up the theme again in 1998 as an artistic concept for a multi
user space, focusing on the notion of virtual space as a stage setting, and the
behavior and interactions of the public in an extended gallery space.
During the 1992-1994 period, Fleischmann developed several other
research projects: a spatial interface intended for the navigation of virtual
spaces through walking titled The Spatial Navigator, and other works based
on the Narcissus myth as a privileged form of self-reflection. This theme
became one of her main preoccupations. It was the subject of two interactive
installations in 1993, Rigid Waves and Liquid Views. The former was a
theatrical production conceived as a meeting place for the observer with
themself. In this work, Narcissus communicates with his reflection, which he
cannot touch. Rigid Waves transforms the acoustic mirroring of Narcissus and
Echo into a visual form. It is a virtual mirror that does not reflect but rather
recognizes. Narcissus gives up his body to his mirror image, and his move
ments become an illusionary echo. As the observer approaches the mirror, one
is confronted with an image that does not correspond to the normal percep
tion of things. The observer sees themself as an impression, as a body with
strangely displaced movement sequences, and ultimately, as an image in a
mirror that disintegrates as soon as the observer comes too close. Sight and
movement, approaching and distance, are triggers for these unusual images.
They are an attempt to see oneself from the outside, to stand side by side with
oneself and discover other hidden “selfs” (figure 3.15).
The central theme of Liquid Views is the well in which Narcissus discovers
his reflection. He initially sees water as someone else, as another body. Like
the small child in the various “mirror stages” described by Jacques Lacan, Nar
cissus decides to recognize his fictitious body as himself. Looking into the
well—the digital universe—also functions as a metaphor for one’s own image
on the Internet. Enticed by the water simulation, their own image, or the
sound of water, most visitors to this installation couch the surface of the water,
which is in reality a touch-sensitive glass surface that causes the image to dis
integrate. At the same time, the visitors are unaware that they can be observed
and consequently behave rather freely. The computer, however, is able to
store the images secretly, thus retaining the visitors’ facial expressions and
Chapter 3
Figure 3.13 Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Liquid Views, 1992/93.
behavior. The installation has the objective of arousing the visitor’s curiosity
and seducing them to undertake actions that bring chem into contact with
their own senses (figure 3-13).
In 1995, Fleischmann started developing che human body theme in the
Skywriter and its interface Virtual Balance. In this arrangement, navigation
through body balance is achieved by way of writing in the sky and leaving
marks as a metaphor for surfing on the Net. A lighted trace helps to find one’s
bearings in the virtual space. The Skywriter can fly apparently effortlessly with
the aid of the Virtual Balance. The latter is a navigation system for con
trolling images through the use of the human body. It is also a means for
observing the effect of images on che body, and consists of a computerized
platform with three weight sensors controlled by changes in the position of a
person’s center of gravity by means of weight displacement or slight move
ments. Thus, the visitor, by using one’s body balance, can navigate through
virtual landscapes (figure 3-14).
Fleischmann’s most recent projects are concerned with the shape of
consciousness through computer-assisted virtual environments, with

Figure 3.14 Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Virtual Balance, 1994/95.
perception and cognition through the development of the senses as well as the
relations between art, culture, and entertainment in electronic arenas of
performance.
Mathieu Briand* uses new technologies to immerse the spectator into che
artwork, but always plays with the spectator’s point of view so as to let them
wonder about the reality of their own perceptions. For example, Briand has
created works where he disorients the spectator, who is equipped with an
immersive head-mounted display, by showing the space through the eye of a
video camera mounted on top of the helmet, but sometimes also through the
eye of another spectator wearing the same device. Video inputs are swapped
randomly between spectators, and they never know if what they see is their
visual perception or another’s. This examines the issue of self-perception and
self-consciousness. With Briand, we are moving away from the paradigm of
the map, which has been put forward to investigate modern and postmodern
art, to the paradigm of the path, with both a subjective point of view and a
cognitive aspect. No one ever knows the totality of the map, no one can picture
Chapter 3
the virtual territory that lies fragmented in the mind of each spectator. It is
the mesh of the subjective paths followed by the spectators and exchanged
among them chat creates the overall system of meanings.8
A subtle way of showing the hiatus between perception and cognition is
demonstrated by Joachim Sauter* in his work Iconoclast (1992), also known as
Zerseher, in which the observer finds himself in a museum environment. A
golden-framed picture (flat screen) is hanging on a wall. On coming closer,
the viewer notices that the exact spot of the picture one is looking at changes
under one’s gaze. Behind the screen, an eye tracker is installed. A camera is
pointing at the viewer’s eyes in the process. The eye tracking software
analyses the video signal and locates the reflections of an infrared-light source
in the viewer’s eyes. With this, it can calculate exactly which part of the paint
ing the viewer is looking at. An algorithm is then distorting the picture
exactly at these coordinates. This means that as soon as the viewer looks at a
particular part of the picture, this part is distorted.
The viewer is consequently forced to interact with the picture without
doing anything other than what one usually does with a picture (namely, look
at it). This then turns into a conscious “distortion viewing” of the picture
after a short period of time. In this work, Sauter has promoted the computer
medium as an interactive installation with computer scientist Dirk Lusebrink.

Born in 1959, Sauter studied visual communications and film in the early
1980s. He already used the computer during his university days as a tool for
his graphic, cinematic, and architectural work, and has focused on artistic and
design work with the computer since this time. In the mid-1980s, he was one
of che early media artists who did not just view the computer as a new tool
but instead attempted to promote it as an equal and independent medium
along with painting, graphics, sculpture, architecture, and film. His works
concentrated here on experimental investigation of the new language and
grammar of computer-based art and media design. Computer-based arc and
design, in Saucer’s opinion, are based on a language inherent to the new tech
nology. Just as a film language developed at the beginning of the twentieth
century from film technology, based on che montage of the film material, a
language and grammar of interactive media has developed ar the end of the
twentieth century based on interaction, multimedia capabilities, and network
interaction. In che first half of the 1990s, Sauter mainly concerned himself
with virtual, three-dimensional, interactive space. This work involved the
artistic and design investigation of navigation in virtual rooms, the transfor
mation of information into virtual objects, and the interaction with the infor
mation architectures that arise in the process.
Sauter’s key work, The Invisible Shape of Things Past (1995), was again real
ized with Lusebrink. In this project, they developed a concept based on the
camera parameters (position, orientation, focal length) for transforming films
into three-dimensional, virtual objects. The “film objects” that arise in the
process are, for one thing, readable information architectures that can be inter
acted with; for another, the objects promote a new approach co modeling
architecture, which is then meant to be built with these same objects.
At the end of the 1990s, Sauter focused on the augmentation of the real
world with the virtual world (as in the case of virtual stage settings, for
example), and the development of physical and synthetic interfaces for navi
gation in virtual information spaces.9
An original way of dealing with the problem of cognition is che basis of
the interactive computer installation Focus (1998) by Tamas Waliczky.* This
work is made up of hundreds of photographs and can be viewed equally as a
personal, digital photo album as well as a metaphoric vision of Europe. Start
ing with the blurred, simulated photograph of an imaginary street on which
a crowd of people have gathered, it is possible to investigate individual
members of the crowd and the relationships between them. The camera in
Chapter 3
this case is the interface. Waliczky also produced a CD version of this instal
lation titled Focusing and a second version of Focus for the International
Academy of Media Arts and Sciences in Gifu, Japan, in 1999.
Another aspect of how Waliczky approaches the problem of cognition can
be seen in his computer animation Sculpture, which was performed as part of
Mesias Maiguasca’s opera The Enemies during the Multimediale 5 exhibition
in Karlsruhe, Germany. This work, at the center of Waliczky s plastic and
religious preoccupations, was shown again in 2000 under the title Time-
Space Sculptures. In the dream sentences of The Enemies, Waliczky wanted to
visually represent the way our temporal structure differs from that of God.
He thought that this question was the key issue of the piece. On the basis of
floating everyday movements and gestures—such as walking, jumping,
waving, and so forth—he built three-dimensional sculptures with the com
puter that he called “time crystals,” for they preserve in frozen form brief
moments of an individual’s life. These crystals exist simultaneously alongside
each other in space, and a virtual camera (whose viewing angle represents to
some extent che vantage point of God) can observe them from any desired
location. By traveling through the time crystals, the camera can reproduce the
original movements, but from a diverse range of perspectives and at varying
speeds.
In order to understand Waliczky’s theological attitude in this work, it may
be necessary to mention that he contends that for us humans, who are limited
in time and space, time is a one-dimensional affair. We can only move along
one axis, which we define in coordinates of “pasc-present-future.” And sadly
enough, even in this simple dimension, we are able to travel in one dimen
sion only—namely, forward. But for God, who is eternal and thus his dimen
sions are infinite, Waliczky observes that time is perhaps a four-dimensional
quantity, for God can see all three-dimensional existences simultaneously and
at any point in time. Therefore, for God it is a simple matter co change at
will our perception of time.
Born in 1959, in Budapest, Hungary, Waliczky started out by creating
cartoon films (1968-1983); parallel with this activity, he worked as
painter, illustrator, and photographer (figure 3-16). He began working with
computers in 1983- In 1999, Waliczky started on a computer animation titled
The Fisherman and his Wife, which was completed one year later and received
a number of prizes. This work’s story line is based on a German folktale and
its visual animation is based on shadow theater. Every virtual puppet, tree,

Figure 3.16 Tamas Waliczky, Gramophone, 1989. ORTF, Linz, Austria.
flower, or house in it is hand drawn by the artist, scanned in, and used as a
texture map on two-dimensional polygonal forms positioned in the three-
dimensional space. At first, the scenes are illuminated with only one light
source, but as the story goes on, more and more puppets have their own light
sources, casting shadows of other puppets or objects into the scene. The work
uses the lights and the shadows to visualize relations between humans, reality
and virtuality, reality and desires as well as reality and dreams.
Bioaesthetic Issues
The actual and theoretical breakthroughs concerning the understanding and

potential control of the organic world through virtual means have widely
influenced a great number of virtual artists. Although these understandings
lead to significant cultural questions about the nature of being human—
and are of great importance for virtual art as a whole—in this section I
will only consider the bioaesthetic issues in materialized digital-based
works as influenced by biological problems such as the genome and other
Chapter 3
genetic theories and discoveries, the bionic code, lively movement, and
viruses.
Media organisms (artificial life-forms cultivated in the plasma of popular
culture), bionic codes, and subjective ecosystems over the Internet all consti
tute highly original contributions by artist Ebon Fisher* to the latest devel
opments in bioaesthetic research.
Fisher collectively named his creations and the world they inhabit “Nerve
pool.” This is a bionic world, in which many of the codes operate as ritual
elements. Nervepool was born when Fisher, while still living in Pennsylva
nia, began spray painting simplified drawings of nerve cells on surfaces around
Pittsburgh. At an early stage, Fisher had already decided to abandon tradi
tional art for science and technology in order to search for more universal
meanings. He thought that art had lost touch with everyday life. When in
1981 he "tagged” Pittsburgh with diagrams of neurons, this crude displace
ment of biological science into the streets marked the beginning of a long fas
cination with the living properties of information.
During the 1980s, Fisher experimented with a variety of “media rituals."
These rituals focused on the immediacy of body experience and community
based culture, through massive participatory art events in a neighborhood.
They were also efforts at exploring new ways to build vital convergences of
humans and media technology.
At the beginning of the 1990s, Fisher lived in the close-knit artists’ neigh
borhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His work involved the interface of
media, technology, and industry with the human environment of a small com
munity and the individual. He was thrilled by the many possibilities of global
communication within the intimacy of the small artists’ communities.
Since 1992, Fisher has been cultivating bionic codes. A Bionic code can be
seen as a problem-solving routine for human behavior as it is exercised in the
realm of networks and cyberspace. Fisher’s first bionic codes were developed
based on a series of theatrical experiments involving communication systems
among audience members. His bionic codes have been formalized as a series
of diagrams and statements that “float” in the "infosphere” in a variety of
media.
Although Fisher’s bionic codes also draw on numerous spiritual and roman
tic traditions, they are not meant to be prudish or invoke sin. Rather, the
codes are fertilized by wild invention and a need, in this cynical age, to unleash
some positive disturbances. They are not rules. They are an optional and

flexible system of social algorithms; they are problem-solving devices to be
utilized in any combination.
Fisher’s Wigglism Manifesto, a project that started in 1996, followed his
abandonment of the "integration” concept as a philosophy of organic fusion
in favor of “wigglism,” with its emphasis on lively movement, which is a
quality possessed by many healthy, integrated systems and organisms. Wig
glism can be considered an effort at moving our collective gaze away from
both art and science, and toward the nurturing of life in the broadest, nonob
jective, and nonhuman sense. It is an attempt to seed a form of “subjective
ecology.” This leads, among other things, to a decentered authorship where
one creates with the community, the medium, and nature. Many Eastern tra
ditions, such as the Japanese tea ceremony, extend authorship and identity
into the mists of the tea garden. Wigglism is also indebted to the elegant call-
and-response method of many African cultures, a long-standing tradition that
North European cultures are just beginning to emulate (figure 3.17).
Another original contribution to the bioaesthetic area with the aid of mate
rialized digital-based devices is Joseph Nechvatals* computer-robotic-assisted
paintings and computer animations. These have exhibited a particularly
original research commitment: the Computer Virus Project. This open scheme
can be described as Nechvatals experiment with computer viruses as a
creative strategy.
Nechvatals highly inventive Computer Virus Project, which was first created
and exhibited at the Saline Royale in Arc-et-Senans, France, in 1993, is obvi
ously closely linked to the spread of biological and computer viruses. To begin
with, Nechvatal uploaded all of his earlier pictorial work (his “body" of work)
into a powerful computer. He then introduced a basic computer virus into the
iconographic database. Next, selected visual results were both painted by
robotic means onto several classical canvas supports and used in the
construction of a computer animation that documented the viral attacks.
At the end of 2000, Nechvatal took a further important step: he finished
the first phase of the reworked Computer Virus Project and brought it into the
realm of artificial life—that is, into a synthetic system that exhibits behav
iors characteristic of natural living systems, or in his case, viruses. The new
phase actively—and visually—propagated viral attacks on Nechvatals image
files from his “ec-satyricon 2000 (enhanced) bodies in the bit-stream (com
pliant)” series in real time, and so one might say, addressed some fundamen
tal questions about the nature of life and death by simulating life/deathlike
Chapter 3
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’MEDIA SPORE: 3-PRONC FOCAL ENTITY.’

TCTT-SlTt, WILLlAMSBurc. BROOKLYN, l»i BIONIC COOK DESCENDING INTO OLULO
ZOACOOE. 'EQUALIZE SEDUCTION.’ PROJECTED
AT PS 1 MUSEUM. New YORK. 2000
(OMITal Animation. I MS)
Figure 3.17 Ebon Fisher, The Evolution of a Media Organism, 2004.
phenomena on the computer. Here, viral algorithms—based on a viral bio

logical model—are used to define evolutionary processes that are then applied
to the image files used to create new-sprung computer-robotic-assisted paint
ings. Each virus was localized on a cell and allowed to perceive the color of
the cells close to it. Moreover, each virus has an energy level, and at each turn
a small amount of energy is lost. If the energy of a virus is too low, then the
virus dies. A virus has its own program that defines its behavior, and each
program is initially randomly generated, employing a user-defined instruction

sec, which governs the chromatic, luminous, and resonant behavior of the
virus.
Originally a painter and performance artist, Nechvatal, born in 1951 in
Chicago, has worked with ubiquitous electronic information and computer
robotics since 1986. Like his earlier 1980s’ gray drawings, photomechanical
blowups, and computer-robotic-assisted paintings, Nechvatal’s virus-laced
work creates a densely saturated visual space for us to decode. Sensual frag
ments of soft human form are more clearly visible now, however. This arous
ing flesh (or more accurately, postflesh) provides a vigorous combat zone
in which the deterioration of the bacillus-like viral infection is enacted.
Though stressing sensuality in the virtual age, such paintings as viral attack:
transmission, viral attack: the inquest Of the hOrrible, viral attack: regrets, or viral
attack: piTy thoroughly express Nechvatal’s existential as well as artistic
commitment.
One way of looking at Nechvatal’s development since his first shows in
New York City’s alternative spaces in the late 1970s would be in terms of the
various media with which he has chosen to work. He has made major shifts
in presentation without markedly altering his art’s complex structure—a
structure based primarily on ideas about telecommunications technology. Yet
the succession of pencil drawings, photocopying, photomechanical enlarging,
sculpture, and computer-robotic-assisted painting only tells part of the story.
In fact, in order to understand fully Nechvatal’s most recent artistic produc
tivity, one has to look at his mournful attitude toward technology in general
and his existential commitments.
In 1983, Nechvatal wrote: “Images of mass annihilation wrought by tech
nology now provide the major context for our art and our lives ... for when
technology relieved much of man’s fear of nature, it replaced that fear with
one of technology itself.”10 At the time, he was working with photomechan
ical blowups of small apocalyptic graphite drawings. But in 1986, Nechvatal
took the first decisive virtual step in his career as an artist by adopting the
latest informatics technology. From 1993 onward, the biological concept of
the computer virus entered as a leading idea in his artwork.
Before analyzing this move in more detail, let me mention another aspect
of Nechvatal’s aesthetic commitment. He has stated that the focus of his art
is the interface between the virtual and the actual—what he terms the “virac-
tual.” Indeed, the basic premise of his computer-robotic-assisted paintings is
the exploration of the viractual realm in painterly terms. So here the tradi
Chapter 3
tion of painting is refreshed while under the influence of today’s high-
frequency, electronic, computerized environment.
For Nechvatal, art is now a matter of creating actual, palpable, aestheti
cally rich sensations linked to both the tragic and rapturous aspects of
virtualizing technologies. The function of his viractual art is to create, by
extenuation, poignant aesthetic percepts that sensitize us to the joys and the
sorrows of our own time. Thus, his art is about personal investigations into
the conditions of viral virtuality—conditions that are not quite historically
assessable yet. The general fin de siecle ornamental excess of Nechvatals work,
however, also offers a joyous, perhaps even ecstatic, metaphor for our current
computational conditions—and perhaps for our future expansive conditions
of technological-aesthetic being. In the rising and collapsing of alternative
visualizations and unordered revelations encountered in his work, the circuits
of the mind find an occupation exactly congruent with today’s techno-
informatic structures (figures 3.18 and 3.19).
Nechvatals early preoccupation with apocalyptic fear, mental anguish,
illness, and death have not disappeared from his virtual projects. Yet these
feelings are now artistically realized within an up-to-date virtual framework
that has allowed him to come fully to terms with our foremost present-day
emotional complexities.
With the aid of powerful computers, another artist, Karl Sims, has pro
duced installations generating genetic images of enormous complexity. Sims
puts the spectator in an original position in front of these images. The prin
ciple of massively parallel data processing, also known as “fine-grain” calcu
lating, is co spread out the computer’s tasks among several thousand simple,
interconnected processes. The computer’s architecture resembles a nervous
system, with enormous quantities of data being processed at great speed,
enabling the system as a whole to retain its “real-time” qualities and interac
tivity. Sims’s purpose is to plot reputedly chaotic phenomena, irreducible to
mathematical formulas, in visible forms that achieve a high level of simili
tude while also selecting the resulting random images from an aesthetic and
creative point of view. His final aim is to activate the aesthetic awareness of
the public in an up-to-date scientific context principally concerned with
genetic problems and artificial life in particular. In 1991, he created a work
called Panspermia based on genetic art ideas. This environment generated a
rich array of computer graphics and then allowed the viewers co select which
images they liked best, subsequently using, techniques of artificial evolution

Figure 3.18 Joseph Nechvatal, Orgiastic abattoir, 2003. Orgiastic abattoir, computer-robotic-
assisted acrylic on canvas, 44 x 66 inches. © 2003 by Joseph Nechvatal. Private Collection.
co promote features of those images in the next generation. He hoped his

installation would instill an appreciation of biological life.
Sims studied computer graphics at MIT’s Media Lab and life sciences as an
undergraduate at MIT. He had been a computer animator with Whitney/
Demos Production in California, and a researcher with Thinking Machines,
and subsequently led GenArts, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which
created special effects software for the motion picture industry.
Chapter 3
Figure 3.19 Joseph Nechvatal, Debauched Tissue Exstasis, 2002. Computer-robotic-assisted
acrylic on canvas, 76 x 51 inches. © 2003 by Joseph Nechvatal. Private Collection.

In contrast to Sims’s Genetic Images (1993), a media installation that only
allowed the interactive evolution of abstract images, his Galapagos (1997)
installation was a work that permitted museum visitors to interactively
evolve three-dimensional animated forms. Viewers had an important role in
guiding the evolution through their “artistic selection” by stepping on
footpads in front of monitors displaying the graphic forms they wanted to
promote. As Sims noted, “Perhaps someday the value of simulated examples of
evolution such as the one presented in this exhibit will be comparable to the
value that Darwin found in the mystical creatures of the Galapagos Islands.”
He described to audiences their role as breeders: The process in this exhibit is
a collaboration between human and machine. The visitors provide the aesthetic
information by selecting which animated forms are most interesting, and the
computers provide the ability to simulate the genetics, growth, and behavior
of the virtual organisms. But the results can potentially surpass what either
human or machine could produce alone. Although the aesthetics of the partic
ipants determine the results, the participants do not design in the traditional
sense. Rather, they use selective breeding to explore the hyperspace of possible
organisms in this simulated genetic system. Since the genetic codes and com
plexity of the results are managed by the computer, the results are not con
strained by the limits of human design ability or understanding.
Suzanne Anker* is another visual artist and theoretician who works with
genetic imagery. Her main interest concerns the intersection between arc and
genetics. Anker’s principal series of works include the installation Codex:
Genome (2000), shown at Universal Concepts Unlimited; Genetic Tableaux: Sym
bolic Planet (Constellation) (2000), which consisted of silk screen and acrylic on
a wooden panel; and Differences and Repetitions (2000), which was created with
computer-generated foam and acrylic on Plexiglas. In 1994, she curated Gene
Culture: Molecular Metaphor in Contemporary Art at Fordham University, the first
exhibition devoted entirely to the intersection between genetics and art.
In her essay “Virus and Pearls: The Materialization of Culture,” Anker
quotes Jean Baudrillard, saying, “The onslaught of viruses and their strate
gies have in a sense taken over the work of the unconscious.” She continues:
“Cryptograms and hyperfictions, cybersex and smart drugs, cranspecies germ
lines, body-part-commodities, are Cultural buzzwords, all hovering in the
media, encoding with their signature the information eruption of the cyborg
and the technofix. From the metacognitive to the manic, from the substitu
tive to the social, codes have become our operative conductor.”11 Later in the
Chapter 3
essay, Anker refers to Richard Dawkins, who discusses the relationship of
natural evolution to cultural evolution. In The Selfish Gene Dawkins
wrote, “A meme is a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.
Examples of memes are units, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of
making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the
gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm and eggs, so memes prop
agate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process
which in the broad sense can be called imitation.” Anker’s comment in her
essay is, “Whereas the gene can determine species potentia (and not behav
ior), the meme can only take into account the concepts of cultural conscious
ness. Neither prediction nor market manipulation can formulate the infinite
varieties of cultural forms. One consequence of this line of reasoning sets up
a molecular politic in which social and cultural theories encapsulate an anthro
pomorphized natural world. To metaphorically separate cultural theory from
the body politic is one function of the precincts of art."
According to Anker, the virus is either a simple organism or a complex
molecule—a parasite-like predator wandering around in search of a home, a
transitive postmodern body, incapable of its metastatus without its reliance
on living cells, to be used as a translational system. The pearl, a synchronously
abnormal growth—the result of an irritant or a virus—enters the establish
ment as a gem. Secretions giving form to entities is our reliance on cultur
ing, on interchanging error with procreative capacity. Culturing has linked
art production with other incorporations of foreign bodies—bodies of cogni
tive resources once thought to be outside the domain of visual art. Like a virus
or a pearl, visual art is an altered mutation within this transformative
epoch.12
And finally, I want to discuss Yoichiro Kawagushi,* a prominent Japanese
artist operating principally in the area of animated computer graphics. He has
built most of his oeuvre around a visual interpretation of the sea world.
In his work titled Float (1989), the floating movement of marine animals
has been closely observed and depicted by computer graphics. An assemblage
of metallic balls is used in this work to form a curved surface, whose texture
expresses the skin color of organisms living in the subtropical islands, such as
marine plants and sea cucumbers.
In Embryo (1988), the initial world of life development is programmed with
a similar processing multimacro-computer system, which combines ray
tracing transparency effects with a dynamic flow of images. The rhythm of

the pulse is here likened co the rocking of waves and the movement of sea
anemone feelers, and calculated by derivative composite functions. Thus, this
piece presents flexible-textured objects that are concerned with birth, energy,
and growth from the artistic point of view. In fact, Kawagushi’s boyhood was
primarily spent diving into the sea to catch fish, digging for the shellfish
hidden away among rocks, and feasting his eyes on beautiful coral clusters.
The images and color tones he experienced then form the basis of his mental
pictures and imagery today. The shapes in Kawagushi’s works are of sea plants
and mollusks, which do not look at all like organisms living aboveground.
The colors also reflect the hues of fish and radiant coral found in southern
waters around the artist’s native tropical island.
In these filmic and high-definition synthetic video images, high-definition
computer graphics offer a new way create forms that were impossible to reach
through painting and sculpture. High-definition, three-dimensional com
puter Graphics is a field in which the surface of objects can undergo changes
in shape and color in coordinated movement. For Kawagushi, it is a question
of how well this “skin” can be represented, and although the process of per
fecting this involves much trial and error, it is absolutely necessary for the
artist to find a means of expressing the inner life of the tropical fauna. In order
to achieve this, he resorts to an original spatial representation of underwater
phenomena as well as a vivid and sharp animation process depicting meta
morphic events.
In fact, in this visual world inspired by the sea world—with its light and
its movements—the creatures that live in it are in permanent mutation. They
can be situated between the vegetal and the animal; they are completely
hybrid beings. They have no determinate contours, no bones; they deploy their
arborescent pseudopodia, inflate or retract; they wriggle and blossom all the
time, and their forms repeat themselves, sometimes recurrently. Their flesh
reduces itself to a simple luminous envelope, to a membrane without a pli,
without asperities and without thickness: they are semitransparent. And this
skin, brilliant as if it were mercury, reflects partially both the world in which
it is immersed and the body to which it belongs, in a fascinating mirror game
where the object merges and confounds itself with its reflection. The light
reminds us, with the aid of the sophisticated technology of ray tracing, of the
subtle art of lacquer, porcelain, and mother of pearl, the art of the mat
and the brilliant, the art of reflection, which is one of the characteristics of
Japanese art. And one can find in this original predilection for organic forms
Chapter 3
in perpetual metamorphosis an ancient Japanese notion that expresses the
instability of beings in an ephemeral universe.
Technically speaking, Kawagushi’s method consists in adopting a mor
phogenetic model for the formation of soft and curved surfaces. This model
is a means for allowing the representation and rendering of dynamic images
through a specific system based on so-called metaballs. This device permits
contractions and expansions of forms, thereby reproducing natural morpho
logical patterns.
Thus, Kawagushi’s principal aim remains the illustration and interpreta
tion of all aspects of tropical underwater life with the aid of the latest avail
able technological devices and others invented for this very purpose.
In this chapter, we have seen a great variety of secondary aesthetic and
extra-artistic preoccupations of artists producing materialized digital-based
work. Yet the most striking feature was the intervention of the computer in
their artistic itinerary in an innovative way in order to solve such basic tra
ditional plastic problems as bi- and tridimensionality in their images and con
structions as well as in the elaboration of appropriate visual and perceptual
strategies for an original implication of the spectator. As such, these artists
also illustrate one of the prominent aspects of virtual art as a new develop
ment of technological art.

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Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line
Works
Aesthetically speaking, most of the multimedia off-line works discussed

in this chapter entertain the problem of multisensoriality and sometimes
synesthesia. Subthemes include the notions of hypermedia, cross media, and
intermedia—and particularly the hypertext concept—as well as other ques
tions connected with language, narration, and linguistics. To some extent, the
phenomenon of hybridization also enters into consideration here, along with
some plastic multimedia problems as well as sociopolitical, ecological, edu
cational, and security issues. As for the virtual artists, I will examine their off
line commitments to the public and particularly the spectator-participant.
Here, a thread from multisensoriality, multimedia, off-line works to interac
tive ones will become apparent.
Language, Narration, Hypertext
The literary and linguistic aspects of multimedia off-line works are an indi
cation of the large spectrum open in virtual art, where it is not only the multi
sensoriality that strikes the observer but also the poly-artistic nature of this
work. Certain types of virtual art thus correspond to earlier attempts at cre
ating total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk). In any case, the text in some works can
be of vital importance, and it underlines the fact that the humanist approach
is a confirmation that even in this highly complex multisensorial area, lan
guage is the most human trait of all. I am convinced that language plays a
decisive part in our wider consciousness—which is affected by technological
advancement—thereby permitting us to better assume both our intellectual
and emotional human status at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
My basically neohumanist attitude was originally informed by the thought
of literary figures like, among others, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Robert
Musil, Elias Canetti, Vladimir Nabokov, and Primo Levi. These authors anti
cipated or described, each in their own manner, the defining events that made
up twentieth-century tragedy—a tragedy that combined bureaucratic obses
sion, widespread persecution, and outright murder with the misuse of tech
nology. This explains my positive attitude as an alternative art historian. I
fully take into account the literary and narrative aspects of the multimedia
and multisensorial works discussed here, and argue that they could play a part
in the rehabilitation and prospective powers of technology at the turn of this
new century.
As we have seen regarding the narrative implication of multimedia off-line
works, Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, in their “overture” to their book on
multimedia, view narrativity as the center for the aesthetic and formal strate
gies that derive from the concepts of integration, interactivity, hypermedia,
and immersion that result in nonlinear story forms and media presentations.
The hypermedia are for these authors the linking of separate media elements
to one another in order to create a trail of personal association. Packer and
Jordan also give narrativity a prominent place in their book’s final chapter,
selecting texts by such different authors as William Burroughs, Allan Kaprow,
Bill Viola, Lynn Hershman, Roy Ascott, Pavel Curtis, and Pierre Levy.
Hypertexts as well as other narrative developments and communication
issues can be found in a number of works in this section. Jean-Pierre Balpe,*
an eminent practitioner and theoretician in the area of hypertext, created
Trajectoires, an interactive and generated detective novel made by the
groupe@graph group. The structure is based on ninety-six pages, each page
being composed of five different objects: a title, an epigraph, a written text,
a visual artistic architecture proposal, and a generated text. The work’s pages
are virtual objects, but they should not be confused with the screen page,
which is only considered a visual display. A page can then, according to some
dynamic internal constraint, appear on one to x screens. These pages are free
from any external linearity; the circulation mode between them is built
according to mathematical rules that are fully integrated into the fiction or
the pages are made randomly, or again as the result of local choices made by
the reader. Each element of the page has its own actualization constraints,
Chapter 4
running from the text—which remains the same in form and content what
ever its reading or whenever the reading occurs—to the generated text—
which only appears at the time of a specific reading. The title, the epigraphs,
or the plastic proposals, each following specific rules, could appear different
from one previous reading to the next, even if at the same time the internal
fictional coherence prevailed. All those possibilities do not use the technique
for their own end but try to answer particular needs of fictional expression.
It is not possible to show here either the range of offered possibilities or
the writing choices made. In all, they respond to a particular conception of
detective fiction, insofar as any detective fiction should be a challenge to the
reader’s perspicacity. In this perspective, the reader should always try to under
stand what is happening: an enigma, the true or false clues, the hypothesis of
the construction, and the anticipation of the final answer. The particular pleas
ure of the detective story is in this hide-and-seek game. Trajectoires is, for
instance, built on a “conventional” enigma: twenty-four principal characters,
beginning from August 1, 2009, receive some death threats and encounter
increasingly severe accidents. They must find out who is guilty before August
24. As a matter of fact, the reader takes up the position of a detective when
looking for clues and is supposed to stop the mass murdering. But since che
clues are infinite, no reading could possibly explore them all. Some of them,
however, made by generators, can appear only once. The more the reader reads
over the text, the easier it gets co solve the enigma, which is based on a
complex set of events. The purpose is to simulate reality where context, back
ground events, and more or less risky encounters reveal a different vision of
the world. Interactivity, a set of information, reading, and generacivicy aim to
define a consistent ficticious world where every secondary rhetorical object
plays a specific part. What matters is not to discover fixed formulas for a
unique event but rather che multiple formulas for complementary events.
Reading is reading over, but it is also comparing the different readings. The
reader—as an individual or a group—does not stand outside che fiction but
is one of its main elements.
Here is one possible version of a generated page from the Trajectoires novel:
It is a day, a summer day, rhe sky spreads! At the time when the sun leaves the city
and when the darkness is about co chase che light. The landscape seems to close upon
itself! The swifts’ call challenges the sky: the slaughter’s tip cart arrives on the Grfcve
square. The sky is a sky: the sun burns. Decent people are rushing over. . . . Two
Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works

women carrying muddy children are begging. Red cares arrive on rhe Greve square,
the soldiers are walking behind them: a young woman is climbing the scaffolds stairs
going toward the executioner: the blue sky is a mockery—sky so turquoise! Someone
in the crowd asks somebody else: “Who is it?” The answer is heard, A nasty cor
rupted person”; in no time, she is lying on the plank, the execution-master actions
the blade—on the blue sky there are only crows adding black spots—the blood spurts
out in streams. The executioner turns toward the crowd as if he was expecting some
applause! The blood flows in such quantity that the earth cannot soak it up, while the
quality of the sky is of infinite transparency! One of the executioner's assistants grabs
the head by the hair and shows it to the mob, and slaps it! Nobody talks, the silence
is total, almost religious!
Whether this page comes before or after another is of no importance

because the reader has already figured out beforehand, through a large number
of clues while reading other pages, that the novel takes place during two “his
torical” periods: the first from August 1 co August 29, 2009, and the other
from August 1 to August 29, 1793- A number of clues refer to 1793, and the
date chat appears on one of them (Nonidi 19 Thermidor an I) is used for its
redundancy value because, in fact, this inscription is quite unreadable. Yet on
each of these pages, several events tend to shape a local temporality.
As Balpe explains, linearity in generative writing tends to be restricted
inside a sentence and has almost a syncaxic form. Those independent sequences
allow, if desired, a random production that provides the narration with a
narrative background and nourishes the narration itself. This articulation
between layers of linearity enables the narrative generation. Since the narra
tive is controlled by a strong structure, which means a thick and attractive
network of clues, all that is needed is to respect the local linearity so that it
becomes a true narrative, which can then be read interactively, hypertextually,
or generatively.
The interest that Patrick Lichty* shows in multifaceted narrative can be
discerned in his Terminal Time (1999), an artificial intelligence—based interac
tive documentary done in collaboration with the Recombinant History Appa
ratus (Steffi Domike, Michael Mateas, and Paul Vanouse). Terminal Time
combines an algorithmic approach with historical narrative, based on an ide
ological bias and founded on responses to questions posed to the audience.
Asked to contribute a mass media look” to the title and promotional graph
ics for the project, Terminal Time is one of the few projects that Lichty was
Chapter 4
TemHmlTime’fe^rcuttfng edge/audlence-pc
history engine combining mass participation^
real-time documentary.graphlcs andartificial
Intelligence tobring you the history you des
Each half-hour-clnematic experienced oust
YOUR valuesjblases^nddesires^d-
Figure 4.1 Patrick Lichty, Terminal Time, 1999. In collaboration with Steffi Domike, Michael
Mateas, and Paul Vanouse. Visual design by Patrick Lichty.
involved in that incorporated the subversive co-optation of broadcast media

forms and experimental forms of narrative (figure 4.1).
Lichty, an artist, curator, and writer, was born in 1962. His midwescern
working-class lineage also includes a long line of artists and musicians.
Lichty’s fascination with technology and art began in the early 1970s, when
he incorporated electronics into fanciful “devices.” On receiving his first home
computer in 1978, his initial investigations into digital media were not
through video games but drawings and musical compositions. These mainly
visual forays into technology and creativity developed during several years in
the engineering disciplines until a convergence of events led to a reframing
of his work in terms of media subversion and critical explorations of narra
tives through the creation of various forms of "concurrent texts.”
Lichty’s work is hard to qualify and quantify by genre or media as his devel
opment of multivalent media narratives has included xerography, neon, video,
sound, robotics, and Internet technologies. What remains continuous
throughout his artwork is a critical engagement with issues of communica
tion, the transmission of stories and concepts, and the mode in which human
ity communicates those ideas through various media; what effects these

technologies have on society; and how artists can engage with these issues in
order to intervene in them.
Lichty’s shift from purely aesthetic forms to the blurring of media, art, lit
erature, and visual forms occurred in 1989- This shift entailed solidifying his
foundation in philosophy and social theory to contextualize his then repre-
sentationally based 2-D digital prints, thereby ushering in the incorporation
of mass media appropriations and aphoristic wordplay. His work in the early
‘1990s was largely based around a series of pedagogical experiments in col
laboration with sociologist Jonathan Epstein that mixed critical texts con
cerning Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and other French poststructuralists
with new media interpretations of these authors’ ideas. Americans Have No
Identity, but They Do Have Wonderful Teeth debuted in Montreal in 1992 to a
delighted Baudrillard, and was later republished on the Web in CTHEORY,
an online journal. The Lichty/Epstein collaboration continued with the addi
tion of musician Sam Seawell as the media group Haymarket Riot. This group
created what was called by UCLA professor Douglas Kellner a series of “Post
modern social theory rock videos,” which were successfully integrated as
media texts into numerous U.S. university sociology programs throughout the
late 1990s, and concurrently functioned as pedagogical tools and subversive
installations.
The Haymarket Riot works served as inspiration for two main threads of
the creation of multilayered concurrent texts or “transtexts.” One thread was
the co-optation of mass media imagery as a critical tool for electronic culture,
and the other was the formation of new media texts that blend literary nar
rative, prose, or scholarly discourse with nonlinear, dynamic, or spatial struc
tures. These texts would start out as simple image-based hypertextual Web
texts, and expand into larger essays and documentaries with numerous levels
of narrative through experimental interface structures as well as dynamically
based meta- and subtexts. The first of these works, the Web-based (re)cursor
(1994), consisted of three components; a linear numerical index for each of
the ten Web pages, a virtual landscape, and an aphoristic lexica based on a
theoretical passage, with each of the latter two media representing different
narrative arcs. The reader would then follow the various paths through the
media text, hopefully perceiving the structural differences in the configura
tions. The result of that piece was more abstract, as distinct levels of signifi
cation for each narrative configuration were indistinct, and the user navigated
the work similar to a cross between a hypertext essay and a slide show. Lichty’s
Chapter 4
online, multilayered media texts did not reach maturity until the latter half
of the 1990s, when dynamic interface paradigms such as mind maps and
associative mapping became available. While developing his multilayered
narrative works, Lichty became known for his co-optation and subversion of
mass media cultural forms through the Haymarket Riot video series. His jux
taposition of media clips from sources as diverse as the film Atomic Cafe, the
television series Star Trek, the Discovery Channel, and original 3-D anima
tions mimicking contemporary broadcast design illustrated how the emergent
communications technologies of the age—like the Internet and cable televi
sion—were creating a culture in which society and individuals were commu
nicating through multiple media and pop cultural referents with increasing
frequency and robustness. Lichty’s media critique of information overload and
the subversion of commercial media techniques in video and on the Internet
through the use of new technology drew the attention of media theorist
Douglas Kellner, and subversive artists such as RTMark, and produced several
collaborative media “texts” of varying kinds, including video projects and
illustrative bodies of work.
Over time, Lichty has worked with this tightly woven skein of interrelated
concepts relating to media, cognition, and narrative, each time approaching
the subject from a slightly different angle to cease out issues of form and rep
resentation. For example, technologies for the investigation of various infor
mational mapping strategies (mind maps and associative mapping) matured
in the late 1990s. The availability of these technologies signaled the shift from
deeply interlinked online texts to pieces that incorporated dynamic interface
paradigms and cognitive mapping techniques.
The course of development of Lichty’s works since Metaphor and Terrain
(1998) progressively moved from academic topics to more socially engaged
issues, and from singular structural/interface approaches to multiple interfac
ing, color coding, and dynamic text overlays and annotation. Metaphor and
Terrain questioned the concept of interface as artwork and clearly served as a
self-referential test platform for the new principles of narrative structures
being employed. Another Lichty work, Grasping at Bits: Art and Intellectual
Control in the Digital Age (2000), engaged directly with contemporary topics
such as online artists’ conflicts with corporate agendas of intellectual property
through a consideration of Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons. Besides
the increased engagement with contemporary issues, Grasping at Bits incor
porated no less than three redundant interfaces of differing structures, color

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2000.
coding, and dynamic annotation of the text, and earned an honorable mention
at Ars Electronica 2000 (figure 4.2).
Another of these concurrent texts, SPRAWL: The American Landscape in
Transition (2000), relied less on the flashier dynamic interfaces and turned to
a geographic metaphor to take a more applied approach to creating a robust
nonlinear text. Also gone was the entirely lexical content; it was replaced with
a combination of interactive panoramas, streaming video, and texts with
dynamic annotation, thus converging social engagement (the urban expansion
Chapter 4
Figure 4.3 Patrick Lichty, SPRAWL: The American Landscape in Transition, 2000.
of the artist’s hometown), simultaneous media communication, and cognitive

mapping techniques (figure 4.3). In 2000, SPRAWL won the Smithsonian
Institution American Art Museum’s new media/new century award.
It is also difficult to summarize Lichty’s work without also taking a look
at his curatorial projects. Lichty’s advocacy of independent media led to
Through the Looking Glass: Technology and Creativity at the Turn of the Second
Millennium. Held in 2000, this project brought recognized and new names
from every continent to a small regional arts center just outside Cleveland,
Ohio. This tactical gesture was a critique of the pre—Whitney Biennial era of
Internet art, where the community of curators and artists encountered less
social stratification through the connective nature of the Internet. Although
this show was a survey of technological art at the turn of the millennium, it
focused more directly on the nascent medium of handheld and nomadic
devices as platforms for artistic expression, and may have been the first in a
series of exhibitions in various venues to approach this topic.

To address the work of Lichty is to consider the complexity of ways in
which technological media have affected the modes of communication and the
effects that these technologies have on the cultural milieu of technological
society itself. Nevertheless, the unifying threads of experimental narrative
structure, media subversion, and a critical engagement with cultural issues
weave themselves together into a unified whole as the work continually
reassess these topics from differing approaches. His Rust Belt sense of angst
born- from a childhood of media and technological saturation, combined with
a fascination with scholarly and literary narrative as well as cognitive
approaches to information design, continue to ensure works by Lichty that
question the way electronic culture communicates while offering a sharp and
often humorous critique of postmodern media society.
Some of Ken Feingold’s* works are literally capable of carrying on con
versations. Feingold’s listening and speaking animatronic heads are digitally
and neumatically activated lifelike silicone portraits that hear and understand
English speech. They take art into the realm of interpersonal encounter,
approaching and questioning the unpredictability and complexity chat lan
guage and mind create between people (as well as between people and com
puters), presenting new concepts of portraiture, and pointing co issues of
artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. The conversations chat these
figures carry on are neither completely scripted nor random; rather, the soft
ware gives each Figure a “personality,” a vocabulary, associative habits, obses
sions, and other peculiarities, all of which make their conversations quirky,
surprising, and often hilarious. Some of Feingold’s works also involve digital
projections in which the screens function as “mental projections” of the
figures. The public can interact with the characters by engaging in conver
sations with them, and one of these works even became accessible via the
Internet (http: //www.kenfeingold.com/hinge).
Feingold was born in 1952, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He attended
Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. In a work titled ChildhoodlHot & Cold
Wars {the Appearance of Nature) (1993-1994), Feingold undertook a search of
his childhood with those images and sounds that he can remember, or see now,
as having been formative for his personal understanding, his personal universe,
in which he grew up watching television. In fact, some of his earliest and most
vivid sensory and emotional memories were of television programs.
In Feingold s Surprising Spiral (1991), the viewer can produce complex
events built out of digitized and synthesized speech by touching the pages of
Chapter 4
a large sculpted book with their fingertips. The work is about the simultane
ous sensations of ecstasy and emptiness that arise from the labyrinthine nature
of traveling itself, and the organization of languages, thoughts, and percep
tions. Images flow from one place in the world to another. One is walking
through, or passing through, this view of the world along the way, with no
end in mind. The images come from Japan, Argentina, Thailand, Scotland,
and Sri Lanka, utterly without any conception of cinematic mise-en-scene. In
his work Orpheus (1996), Feingold uses the computer co manipulate text from
Jean Cocteau’s film Orpheus (1950). The syntax is maintained with different
words inserted. The computer program randomly pulls words from this matrix
each time through the loop of the overall piece. In this way, the original syntax
is fixed, but che poetry is variable and in “real time.” The work’s voice seems
to come from a projection of a puppet head, called Orpheus, speaking from a
place removed from ordinary traffic—such as a cave, an abandoned tower, or
another obscure location. From time to time, the pupper head speaks, chough
seemingly without repetition. The matrix is a kind of cross-section of the
original screenplay.
Robert Nideffer’s* linguistic and ludic engagement can best be discerned
in his elaborate head games by proxy. Proxy emerged out of a project titled
Online Public Spaces: Multidisciplinary Explorations in Multiuser Environments
(OPS: MEME). It was a two-year grant-funded research project at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, campus that examined two critical
aspects of knowledge acquisition as they relate to digital distribution: the
importance of context in shaping knowledge transfer, and the role of social
communication and collaboration in altering and enhancing knowledge pro
duction and assimilation. Initiated and directed by Victoria Vesna and Nid-
effer in 1997, OPS: MEME brought together experts from such diverse fields
as computer science, the visual arts, the history of art and architecture, soci
ology, and museum studies, and represented an exceptional cross section cov
ering several disciplines and domains of intellectual interest.
Proxy, as one of the key OPS: MEME test beds, was designed as a new genre
head game about agents and agency that utilizes multiple interfaces to share
information space (figure 4.4). Conceptual development for Proxy began as
part of the OPS: MEME project, but the technical research and development
did not really get underway until late 1999 at the University of California,
Irvine. The primary goal was co playfully, yet critically explore various kinds
of agent interaction through the construction of shared social spaces that

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dynamically mutate and evolve over time. Initial play spaces in Proxy
included: Celebrity Profiles, Faculty Subjects, and Strategic Interests. Celebrity
Profiles, a play on the manufacture of personae as a commodity fetish, utilizes
a marketing agent who acts as a personal promoter, assisting those who feel
they do not get the respect and recognition they deserve by notifying profes
sional gatekeepers of their presence and worth. Faculty Subjects, a play on che
institutional impetus to promote interdisciplinary collaboration within the
context of academia, utilizes a double agent who works in ways that can run
counter to your information needs. Finally, Strategic Interests is a play on the
covert monitoring and exchange of networked data, and it utilizes a secret
agent to stealthily monitor, track, capture, and display other agents use and
activity within the Proxy multiagenc system.
Chapter 4
Proxy is an overtly academic, nondemocracic, text-driven, conceptually
motivated, unpredictable, and often impenetrable set of rule-driven role-plays,
none of which are ever made quite clear. It is most closely aligned with an
online role-playing game thematically, though it represents a more open-
ended, hybrid, and twisted creative form. It is a massively multiuser envi
ronment in theory, but one in which “use” is not solely constitutive of human
intervention in practice. In other words, it does not demand human presence
and will in fact continue to play perfectly without you. The characters are pre
programmed agents and bots of various types, both human and software. The
aesthetic is minimalist and heavily textual on the surface, though many forms
of media and mediated exchange are possible. There is a scoring system chat
becomes more apparent with use. Interaction is mediated and personified
through three initially assigned, though continually modifiable, attributes:
alienation, ambition, and anxiety. The game is to keep your agent and
agency in a psychological steady state, so to speak, as you begin to explore
the constantly mutating multiuser environment with the assistance of a
Mobile Agent Management (MAM) system written in che Java programming
language.
Interaccion with the MAM system occurs through a variety of modes such
as desktop and laptop computers, or handheld and wireless devices like per
sonal digital assistants and cell phones. One begins by submitting a request
to create a new agent. This process assigns the unique personality attributes
that will be keyed co the requested agent. Once generated, players use what
is called a “phat-client” interface to ingest data (Web sites, documents,
images, or anything retrievable through a Web browser) to be incorporated
inco the agent as content. Some of this content gets automatically ingested
on start-up, based on bookmarked Web sices culled from installed browsers
on the players’ operating system. Once the content is in place, players can
submit search engine style requests, log in notifications about all access pat
terns in relation to content, recommend other agents with relevant content to
view, and add more content as necessary. The content management compo
nent of the MAM system provides two basic sets of services. The first set of
services allows for the filtering, storage, and overall management of an agents
holdings, whether they are local or remote. Content may range from
static items such as documents and imagery, to references, to dynamic or
real-time sources, such as Web sites and multimedia streams. The exact means
of content storage and querying is flexible. To access this content, a

second sec of services is offered chat exposes a search interface capable of
simple keyword queries. These returns can then be visualized in several
ways, as raw ASCII text, HTML pages, or dynamically spatialized Java
environments.
The MAM system is best described as a set of tools and interfaces for the
dynamic construction, distribution, querying, and rendering of an embod
ied" collection of information. MAM is intended to provide a distributed
public space for data storage and retrieval. When running the agent system,
a range of features is provided, including: decentralized Web serving of
data linked from a local disk or referenced via a remote URL; collaborative
Web browsing; translation services to and from English, French, Italian,
Portuguese, Spanish, and German for text-based chat communication and
Web page viewing; unique data discovery and display methods oriented
around agent personification; and a scalable, open-source, cross-platform
peer-to-peer architecture. MAM has been coded in Java as a stand-alone
application that utilizes XML for agent communication. As such, it is
highly flexible and modifiable through the simple editing of human-readable
preference files. Altering these files allows one to change many of the
fundamental agent behaviors as well as the general look and feel of the
environment.
In Proxy, traditional notions of client and servers are bypassed by contain
ing the capabilities of both, allowing for decentralization of computing
resources via mobile or transportable agents. Virtually anyone connected to
the Internet becomes both client and server when running the MAM system.
Through this architecture, powerful content-centered communities can form,
providing a dynamic infrastructure that facilitates context-driven collabora
tion and communication. A number of visual interfaces have been prototyped
for the Proxy test bed: a text-based virtual environment utilizing a Multiuser
Object Oriented (MOO) server, thick and thin Java applet clients, and a full-
featured stand-alone Java application providing a variety of text-based, Web
based, and spatialized graphic interfaces. The stand-alone application offers
menu options to communicate with the underlying MAM system. This tra
ditional window application serves as a nexus linking together all the various
components. A three-dimensional graphics engine has been implemented to
help convey a sense of the underlying agent behaviors, which get mapped to
motion behavior and sound attributes, initially determined through a Web
based questionnaire at the point of registering to use the system. Through the
Chapter 4
graphic interface participants can manipulate agent nodes in different ways,
at the most basic level by simply moving them around or double clicking to
expose the information the agent carries. This visualization mode is also useful
for providing a better sense of system activity and use as well as interagent
relationships.
In Proxy, the overall interface design goal is to emphasize information as
the aesthetic, privileging idea, language, process, and "context provision” for
emergent agent behavior. One of the driving motives has been to develop
strategies for rendering visible what tends to be taken for granted, kept
hidden, or naturalized. This includes seemingly benign things like data access
and navigation as well as more malignant or entrenched ideological structures,
specifically those manifest in relation to institutionalized systems of control
such as art, academia, and the Net. The challenge comes not only in figuring
out how to render those things visible but what to creatively do with them
or say about them once that visibility is rendered. And finally, another driving
motive has been figuring out ways to play at the fringes of what constitutes
socially sanctioned forms of art making, game playing, and software engi
neering. This fringe play is done in the interest of promoting a new kind of
software development that is as much about dysfunctionality as it is about
functionality, while facilitating more truly distributed, decentralized, and
“out-of-control” data processing that serves to blur the boundaries between
playtime and productive time (figures 4.5 and 4.6).1
Language with a particularly strong visual and environmental component
as well as a critical content is at the heart of Jenny Holzer’s demarche. With
her Truisms (1985), the artist strongly questioned common archetypes of
Western civilization in a quite trivial, but no less pertinent manner:
“the idiosyncratic has lost its authority,” “men are not monogamous by
NATURE,” “IT'S CRUCIAL TO HAVE AN ACTIVE FANTASY LIFE,” “DYING AND COMING
BACK GIVES YOU CONSIDERABLE PERSPECTIVE,” “A SENSE OF TIMING IS THE MARK
OF A GENIUS,” “YOU SHOULD TRAVEL LIGHT,” “VIOLENCE IS PERMISSIBLE, EVEN
DESIRABLE OCCASIONALLY,” “WITH PERSEVERANCE YOU CAN DISCOVER ANY TRUTH,”
“THERE ARE TOO FEW IMMUTABLE TRUTHS TODAY,” "YOU ARE TRAPPED ON THE
EARTH SO YOU WILL EXPLODE," “IF YOU’RE CONSIDERED USELESS NO ONE WILL FEED
YOU ANYMORE," “USE WHAT IS DOMINANT IN CULTURE AND CHANGE IT QUICKLY,"
“THE FUTURE IS STUPID,” “SHOOT INTO INFINITE SPACE TO HIT A TARGET IN TIME
AND CALL IT INEVITABLE” (figure 4.7).

Figure 4.5 Robert Nideffer, creepy-comics.com, 2003.
Holzer has been experimenting with electronic media since the early
1970s, when she first introduced her signature truism posters to the people
of New York. From the political (“government is a burden on the
people") to the nonsensical (“everything interesting is new”), Holzer’s
truisms are a distinctive fixture of postmodernism. Her massive LED signs
have been installed along the streets of San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York,
Toronto, and London. In the 1980s, Holzer also used television broadcasting
as an artistic medium, purchasing commercial airtime to reach a larger audi
ence. In the 1990s, she integrated computers into her work, such as her virtual
reality exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo in 1993- Investigating new
forms of expression within the public sphere has naturally led Holzer to work
on an interactive Web project, Please Change Beliefs.
Holzer’s themes as well as her views about life, death, war, or sexuality—
all burning taboos in most Western societies—appear in the most common
everyday urban environments by means of easily accessible technologies.
According to the artist, her texts function as comments on the same envi-
Chapter 4
Figure 4.7 Jenny Holzer, Untitled with Selection from Truisms, 1985. © 2004 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York.

ronment that they fit into, stimulating awareness of our social conditioning
as conveyed by the very landscape in which we may be confronted by her work.
On the other hand, in Truism 33 she created a Web event that used truisms
as a way to understand contemporary culture in a more sophisticated manner.
Confronted by blinking, changing truisms, Web visitors selected a concep
tual category—for example, belief and change—and then got to vote via check
boxes. A cumulating total shows the fate of the various truisms. Here is a
sample of the sayings under the belief category: “A little knowledge can
GO A LONG WAY,” “A LOT OF PROFESSIONALS ARE CRACKPOTS,” "ABSOLUTE
SUBMISSION CAN BE A FORM OF FREEDOM.”2
Estonian artist Raivo Kelomees also likes to engage in linguistic games.

With his semantic CD-ROM tokyocity.ee, he wanted to create a geographically
"impossible” domain named precisely tokyocity.ee, which should be empty, like
a zero site giving negative information, a site with one link only. Tokyocity.ee
draws on the artists personal experiences with one city: Tokyo—megatown,
supercity, conglomeration, agglomeration, total accumulation, and supernatu
ral hybrid. Kelomees was interested in his experiences that arose while staying
in this city-machine. But he found that the myth about Tokyo was greater
than the city itself. There, everything seemed smaller and the dimensions
were on a human scale. The city can be considered a functional machine
organized around a nationally noncharacterized environment. Kelomees’s
prevailing experiences in Toyko were not with people, buildings, and architec
ture but with time. His experiences were also about an invisible matter and
how the invisibleness of Tokyo differed from what is habitually invisible
elsewhere.
For his CD-ROM, which has‘also been shown in conjunction with an
installation and whose video fragments were shot from the Tokyo circle
railway, the Yamanote line, the artist chose a title that combined the under
standable word tokyocity with Estonia’s domain name endings, .ee.
The textual point of view dominates in a good number of Jean-Louis
Boissier’s* interactive installations using videodiscs {Le bus [1985] and Pekin
pour memoire [1986]) and later computers {Album sans fin [1989], Globus oculi
[1992], Flora Petrinsularis [1993, released through ZKM Artintact no. 1 in
1994] (figure 4.8), Tabula rasa—Memoire des crayons [1995-2001], Mutatis
mutandis [1995], Le billet circulaire [1997], La deuxieme Promenade [1998],
Moments deJean-Jacques Rousseau [2000], La morale sensitive [2001], and Le petit
manuel interactif [2001]).3
Chapter 4
h
Figure 4.8 Jean-Louis Boissier, Flora Petrinsularis, 1993. Interactive installation. Table
with interface device and camera recognition. Computer with CD-ROM. Produced at ZKM in
Karlsruhe. © 1993 by Jean-Louis Boissier.
Boissier was born in 1945 in Loriol-sur-Drome, France. After studying

mathematics and physics, he became involved in graphic design, photogra
phy, experimental cinema, and installation art. He participated as early as
1969 in the creation of the arts department at the University of Paris 8 (for
merly Vincennes, now Saint-Denis).

In the 1970s and 1980s, he studied the history and aesthetics of modern and
traditional Chinese arts, curating several exhibitions on the subject. In the early
1980s, as an artist, researcher, and exhibition curator, he was one of the pio
neers of interactivity in art. Boissier participated in the creation of various
exhibitions dedicated to new media art; Electra in 1983, Les Immateriaux
at rhe Centre Pompidou in 1985, Image calculee at the Cite des sciences et de
l’industrie from 1988 co 1990, Passages de l’image at the Centre Pompidou
in 1990, and Machines a communiquer at che Cite des sciences from 1991
to 1992. From 1990 to 1996, he curated the biennial for interactive arts,
Artifices, in Saint-Denis. From 1991 to 1997, he curated the Revue
virtuelie (Virtual Review) at the Centre Pompidou. At the Laboratory for
Interactive Aesthetics, which he founded in 1990 at the University of
Paris 8, he developed a series of videodiscs on the subject of digital images, che
CD-ROM of the 3eme Biennale d’arc concemporain de Lyon {Reunion des
JAusees Nationaux, 1995), the CD-ROM hctualite du virtuel for the Centre
Pompidou (1997), and directed a series of collective artistic research
experiments on the creation of figures and instruments of interactivity, and on
interactive gestures.
Boissier’s interactive approach to space and gesture, language and signs,
moments and sensations, continues to play a part in his current research on
interactive narrative. His artistic, theoretical, and experimental activity com
bines at once technological, semiological, and aesthetic dimensions. This
research seeks modes of the interactive image in which the traditions of pho
tography, cinema, and video are explicitly addressed. Interactivity is consid
ered a form, constitutive of the image to the same degree as its referential
aspect (figure 4.9).
Boissier created numerous CD-ROMs, interactive video installations,
and Web sites using as a common thread: Rousseau’s writings. Boissier’s
work can be considered a reflection on image and writing; the capture
of fiction and rhe real; wandering or strolling and the act of collecting,
memory inscription, and its access; and relation as something that connects
and relates. From this research, the notion of the interactive moment
emerged, creating the basis for an interactive story and in fact an interactive
cinema.
The concept of the image relation tends to summarize the functional and
aesthetic characteristics of this type of image. It is based on a series of theo
retical and experimental notions-—namely, the notion of capturing, or record-
Chapter 4
Figure 4.9 Jean-Louis Boissier, La Morale Sensitive, 2001. Interactive installation.Table with
infrared sensor device, and chair, including Moments de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. CD-ROM,
Paris, Gallimard Computer, video projection, 80 x 70 x 60 centimeters. Produced at Centre
pour I'image contemporaine, Geneva. © 2001 by Jean-Louis Boissier.
ing, interactivity and then reinstating it, creating an interactive writing in

which interactive figures are employed in the analysis of events, using the ges
tures and the sensations that constitute this interactive writing. Second, the
notion of an interactive perspective, referring by analogy co optical perspec
tive, is designed as a system of representation of gestural interactions, with
the mutations and temporal events they employ. And finally, the notion of
an interactive video mise-en-scene is based on a series of specific procedures
concerning the shooting of the image, defining specific relationships between
place and the interactive model, with specific methods in the direction
of actors. In this context, technical principles were developed in a process
that can be described as interactive chronophotography and in which
the image is employed as an interface, with variations added to cinemato
graphic parameters, thereby varying the speed or succession of the semiotic
regime.

Language and creative writing also underlie George Legradys* multime
dia productions. His interactive CD-ROM catalog titled From Analogue to
Digital, published in 1998 on the occasion of a two-museum retrospective at
the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary
Art, traced methodologies and approaches in his earlier photographic practice
that are critical components of his current work in interactive media. A quote
from the National Gallery’s press release describes his focus as investigating
"the aesthetic and political issues in an exploration of the ‘real.’ [Legrady]
challenges his viewers to consider the discrepancy of an image that looks
natural on the surface but is actually manufactured, challenging conventional
notions of visual representation. His more recent works with digital tech
nologies and interactivity address notions of memory, identity and history of
media manipulation and simulacra.”
This working method of analyzing the staging and authority of media and
other cultural representations through recently available digital technologies
reaffirmed Legradys approach to function within the framework of a cultural
discourse and prefigured his digital media work of the 1990s.
Legradys work of the past twenty years reveals an engagement with a series
of complex questions concerned with the intricacies of information process
ing as mediated through camera and computer technologies. His studies in
fine arts photography, art theory, and visual anthropology led him to docu
mentary photography, which was soon followed by photographic projects
that integrated pictorialism with formal, conceptual, and theoretical
models through to examine the conventions of the photographic medium
itself. The semantics of photographic representation and the production of
cultural and syntactic meaning generated through the photograph’s mechan
ical and technological visualization were the key investigative topics in his
predigital work. Legrady learned computer programming in the early 1980s
with the intention of importing the investigations from the photographic to
the digital. This led to an interest in computer programming as a symbol-
manipulative language, in which the activity was also a form of creative
writing practice.
From mid-1970s work such as A Catalogue of Found Objects, in which he
documents a site by collecting a sampling of cultural objects found there and
organizes these into a data bank systematically presented co look like com
puter-processed information, Legrady already incorporated methodologies
that are fundamental to his digital media art today. These include archaeo
Chapter 4
logical or archive classification, sampling and fragmenting of information,
recontexcualizing found materials, strategies of linguistic and semiotic struc
turing, the analysis of cultural narrative construction, and other modes of
information management that have entered art practice through che con
ceptual arc movement of the 1960s.
Legrady was a visiting professor of photography at Cal Arts in rhe early
1980s, and during this time, he was introduced to computer programming
at che University of California, San Diego, in the studio of artificial intelli
gence pioneer artist Harold Cohen. During this same period, Legrady’s
photographic work expanded to include a series of investigations about the
iconographic metalanguage of corporate advertising and the representation of
international political conflicts through a research project on Socialist icono
graphy in Eastern Europe and China. (The combination of information analy
sis, cultural critique, historiography, and digital programming coalesced at
the time of the Iran Contragace (1987) into his first digital media installa
tion, From Signal to Noire. This cook place at a gallery in a Santa Monica
shopping mall in which he installed computers and transformed the gallery
space into a working office that he attended daily, writing image-processing
computer codes that functioned as “viruses,” which he then used co process
digitized television media images of politician and news anchor talking heads
by “cleansing” the portraits of metaphoric “extra or noisy data.”
Legrady’s visually based work in digital media arts began in che mid-1980s
when he applied custom-produced image-processing techniques to digitized
photographic imagery, facilitated in part by the introduction of the AT&T
Targa Truevision imaging system for the IBM AT, one of the first affordable
systems to produce photographic-quality imagery. Examples of these works
and a text that addressed che impact of computerized processing on che
question of belief in the photographic image was presented in one of che first
exhibitions dealing with che intersection of computer technologies and pho
tographic representation. Curated by Jim Pomeroy and Marnie Gillet at the
San Francisco Cameraworks in 1988, the exhibition included artists and the
orists who explored the social and cultural implications of digital technolo
gies. Legrady’s work produced between 1986 and the early 1990s consisted
of digital still-photographic images based on algorithm-generated processes
that addressed mathematical, visual, semantic, and cultural issues coming out
of the discussion surrounding Claude Shannon’s information theory, a form
of mathematics turned into philosophy. This series—which implemented
Multimedia and Multisensorial Off-line Works .

two-dimensional convolutions and other image-processing algorithms to ini
tially transform and embed information into images, and later generate pure
abstract images out of the play between signal and noise led to Legradys
first interactive work, Equivalents II (1992), introduced in the traveling Iter
ations exhibition curated by Timothy Druckrey in 1993 shown again in the
1995 Photography after Photography exhibition at the Institute of Contem
porary Art in Philadelphia. The intention underlying Equivalents II was to
produce abstract, blurred, shaped imagery purely from algorithmic equations,
but imagery that was believable and realistic enough to seem partially
photographic.
Whereas recent digital media works have emphasized the phenomenological
—for instance, visualizing the ’‘imagined’’ through topics such as disembodi
ment, simulation of the real, and cyberspace—Legradys work is consistently
grounded within the domains of the historical and the sociological as well as the
rhetoric of narrative and poetics—that is, all coming together to explore how the
structuring mechanisms of technology, computer programming language, and
data structures such as databases can be used as forms of aesthetic authorship and
expression. Apart from Equivalents //, this can be seen in the widely exhibited An
Anecdoted Archivefrom the Cold War (published as a CD-ROM in 1994), first shown
at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (1993) and then the
Centre Pompidou in Paris (1994), and Slippery Traces (1996), shown at Projects
Studios One (1998) as part of the Deep Storage traveling exhibition.
Tracing, a two-screen installation exhibited at the Museum of Contem
porary Art in Los Angeles (1998) and the Kunst und Ausstellungshalle in
Bonn (1997), Sense of Place, shown at the Centre Contemporain Saint-Gervais
in Geneva (1998), and Transitional Spaces, created for the new Siemens world
headquarters in Munich (1999), all continue to play with the cultural situa
tions present in Legradys interactive work such as the contrast of divergent
cultural perspectives (being in and out of technological culture as well as geo
graphic and cultural identity shifts between East and West). What is differ
ent is the introduction of an additional area of investigation: the integration
of the spectators’ presence and movements as influential components of the
changes in the presented content, registered through camera-tracking and
motion-sensing devices, as a means to control the events processed by the com
puter. Sensing Speaking Space (2002) is the most recent work to address this
form of interactivity, shifting the focus fully to explore the poetics of presence
and movement through a feedback interaction that wipe information away
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Figure 4.10 George Legrady, Sensing Speaking Space, 2002. Installation at the San Fran
cisco Museum of Modern Art. Photo by George Legrady.
and brings it forch (figure 4.10). Legrady explains his reasons for integrating
the audience, stating that in an electronically networked society, real space
becomes meaningful again as “the site where our bodies come into contact
with the technological devices by which we participate in virtual space.”4
His most recent project, Pockets Full of Memories, conceived as an installa
tion on the topic of the archive and memory, was exhibited on che main floor
of the Centre Pompidou National Museum of Modern Art in Paris through
out summer 2001 (figure 4.11). During this time, approximately twenty
thousand visitors came to view the installation and participated by con
tributing objects in their possession, digitally scanning and describing them.
This information eventually became an archive of approximately 3,300 objects
that was stored in a database and continuously organized by the Kohonen
SOM, a neural-net-based self-organizing map algorithm that positioned
objects of similar value near each other on a two-dimensional map. The map
of objects was projected in the gallery space and was also accessible online
(www.pocketsfullofmemories.com), so individuals in the gallery and at home
could review che objects and add comments and stories co any of them. The
archive of objects consisted of objects that museum visitors carried with
them—for instance, such common items as cellular phones, keys, coys, cloth
ing, personal documents, currency, reading materials, and so on. The size of
the scanning box was che only limiting factor that determined what could be
added to che archive. Surprisingly, the database eventually collected an
unusual number of scanned heads, hands, and feet, thereby extending che

Figure 4.11 George Legrady, Pockets Full of Memories. Spectators at the Pompidou Center,
2001. Photo by George Legrady.
archive from simply being a collection of objects to encoding it with the

corporeal presence of the contributors.
Supported in part by a grant from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art,
Science, and Technology in Montreal, Canada, Pockets Pull of Memories became
a collaborative project with specialists from diverse disciplines and institu
tions contributing their expertise. The media lab at the University of Art and
Design in Helsinki implemented the self-organizing map algorithm. The
Center for Culture and Communication in Budapest produced the touch
screen data collection station and database. The design team Projekttriangle
from Stuttgart created the visual identity of the exhibition and the software.
The Internet implementation was developed at the University of California,
Santa Barbara?
Plastic Multimedia Issues
I have already discussed plastic issues in materialized digital-based works that

were intimately related to the aesthetic problems involved in graphics, paint
ing, design, sculpture, photography, and architecture, and in their turn, line,
color, form, patterns, composition, movement, rhythm, light effects, and
spatial representation.
Here, I am concerned with plastic issues in the technical category of
specific multimedia works. The aesthetic problems involved here will find
Chapter 4
some original techno-aesthetic solutions clue to the utilization of drawing and
painting machines as well as extensive computer programming.
Plastic issues within a multimedia context dominate in Harold Cohen’s
drawing and painting machine, AARON. Cohen headed the Center for
Research in Computing and the Arts at the University of California and is
now emeritus professor there, but his artistic career began well back in the
1950s after he had studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London.
His significant breakthrough came when he encountered computers and pro
gramming in 1967. This engagement with computer programming has
involved Cohen with issues of representation in a unique way.
During the 1960s Cohen represented Great Britain in the Venice Biennale,
participated in Documenta 3, and also was in the Carnegie International and
many other key international shows. During this period the most important
painterly problem for Cohen became the question of how the marks an artist
makes in creating an image become significant to humans. This is an essen
tial and important question. The beginnings of an answer to this question
were first exhibited in his Three Behaviours for Partitioning Space show in 1972
where he looked into the query of how we read marks as visual information
and not abstract smudges. Here Cohen choose co work with the bare essen
tial components that define coherent markings, and this involved him with
issues of interaction between the artist, the machine, and the audience. Cohen
concluded that this transference of meaning required a large degree of lucid
ity in the operation between artist and viewer, and in chat transparency and
lucidity rest human significance.
For Three Behaviours for Partitioning Space, Cohen programmed a computer
with uncomplicated instructions for dividing visual space. His computer then
executed a series of unique drawings based on this set of simple instructions
and in the process stimulated the viewer’s innate proclivity co realize meaning.
Cohen thus concluded chat an indispensable characteristic of the artist/viewer
affiliation is the ability of the artist to create a work that will stimulate the
viewer’s preference to find, or impose, meaning. This work furthered his con
tinual commitment co building a machine-based simulation of the cognitive
processes underlying the human act of drawing. As testament to Cohens
achievement in this regard, in more than two decades AARON has produced
many thousands of drawings.
On the basis of this early work Cohen was invited in 1971 to spend two
years at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University as a guest

scholar. In pursuing further this phenomena of computers and human
meaning, Cohen published a paper in 1973 titled "Parallel to Perception:
Some Notes on the Problems of Machine-Generated Art.” In this paper Cohen
worked out his conception of meaning by considering what a computer can
do that will emulate human perceptual processes. Cohen recognized that an
important aspect of human perception is feedback, so he began to work with
feedback in his drawing machine AARON. Cohen’s goal was to generate a
plausible representation of human art creation for the computer to follow.
Thus he gave AARON the ability to find out what it was doing with marks,
based on some preset goals. This feedback would then instruct AARON on
how to proceed. Such an approach is fundamental to todays work in artificial
intelligence and artificial life.
Through AARON Cohen developed a better understanding of how humans
create images. Cohen saw that one of the chief motives people have for creat
ing images is to externalize what they see in their inner mind’s eye. Further
more, he observed how children make images, and this lead Cohen to shift
AARON toward representational and figurative drawing. Cohen had observed
young children scribbling and noticed that they create a mental connection
between what they scribbled and something in their world. He identified this
connection as basic to representation and called it the embodying procedure or
outlining.
In 1979 his AARON project created a 100-foot mural for the San Fran
cisco Museum. In the following year Cohen has a crucial dialogue with com
puterscientist Rick Hayes-Roth concerning the connections between artificial
intelligence and drawing. Hayes-Roth challenged Cohen to have AARON
bring into being representational drawings. The resulting programming
changes to AARON made it capable of executing representations of animals.
By working with drawing and computers in such a manner, Cohen real
ized that computer intelligence demands a new way of human thinking, and
thus he created a unique perspective on art. Bolstered by the insight, he began
to explore in depth the programming aspect of computers, which had at the
outset been an appealing hobby. At that point Cohen became even more fas
cinated with the parallels between human thought processes and computer
intelligence. Cohen thought that it might be possible to use the computer as
a way of testing his theories about arc and intelligence.
Through this phase of AARONs evolution, Cohen discovered the basis of
what he saw as building blocks chat underlie all the images we see. Now
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Cohen saw the closed forms, based on straight lines, angles, and scribbles, as
elementary forms because our eyes act as an edge-detector when we look at
them. Such an approach relates to certain ideas of Kandinsky and Paul Klee
as well.
Cohen’s ongoing program AARON soon became capable of producing
original “freehand” drawings in museums and science centers in the United
States, Europe, and Japan and is a central reference for those artists interested
in drawing and painting machines.
Beginning in 1995 Cohen extended AARON’s capabilities from drawing
co painting with an exhibition at che Computer Museum in Boston. Cohen’s
work has attracted increasing media attention. Discovery OnLine broadcast
the painting machine in action directly from his studio onto the World
Wide Web in 1996, and AARON has been featured on a number of TV
programs. AARON is permanently exhibited in the Computer Museum in
Boston.6
Another multimedia artist concerned with plastic issues is Roman
Verostko. In his essay “Explanation of Algorithmic Art,” he explains his debt
to early abstract artists and the new power that the computer offers for explor
ing abstract forms. According to Stephen Wilson, most of Verostko’s work
over the last forty years has been with pure visual form ranging from con
trolled constructions with highly studied color behavior co spontaneous brush
strokes and inventive nonrepresencational drawing. Such art has been variously
labeled as “concrete,” “abstract,” “nonobjective," and "nonrepresentational.”
In its purest form, Verostko’s art holds no reference to other reality. Rather,
one contemplates the object for its own inherent form, similar to the way one
might contemplate a flower or a seashell.
With the advent of computers, Verostko began composing detailed proce
dures for generating forms that are accessible only through extensive
computing. His present work concentrates on developing the program of
procedures for investigating and creating forms. Verostko suggests that every
artist who works with computer programs uses algorithms—it s just that they
have been written by someone else. As artist and art historian Stephen Wilson
writes, the extent to which artists understand and can control technologies is
a perennial issue in technological and scientific art.7 Verostko holds the view
that the more an artist understands, the more power that artist has to explore
and adapt the technology for art as well as contribute to the cultural discourse
about chose technologies.

Within the pitch and toss of postmodern attitudes and their subsequent
practice, digital graphics software appears to be emerging as the nec plus ultra
methodology for a novel mixing of pictorial codes. It is this assumption that
corralled Frank Gillette’s* flexible interests while focusing his attention on
the spectrum of possibilities opened up by such a protean medium. Drawing
together a cascade of polysemous ingredients into common pictorial
venues was and remains the initial spur that provoked compositions like
Gillette’s Afflicted Magician 7. It is among Gillette’s aims that “a wobbly
balance" of combinatory visual prosody linked with both risible and grave
content is an essential characteristic of this work. An additional correspon
ding element of intent is the entire issue of diametric opposition implicate in
pictorial structure. Calculated ambiguities are the result. These results, in
turn, generate various types of pictorial ambiguity within which a range of
subsets come into a blizzard of play. Spatially sliced interactions between dis
parate constituent parts match juxtapositions of divergent association. And
these contrary associations simultaneously meld into and reflect the pictorial
structure itself.
Saltatory shifts, multivalenced resonances, and blatant downright contra
dictions pivot and spin amid a somehow recognizable but scrambled hornet’s
nest of anamalous connections. And this dicey nest culminates in a simple con
sonant point: myriad internal paradoxes resolve in the potent and peculiar
exclusivity of pictorial coalescence, of divergent elements becoming convergent
through an elixir governed by paradoxical attraction. Refractory and mischie
vous riddles thus acquire a distinct emotional tone, a quality of cognitive dis
sonance, an etherealized though melancholic buoyancy that arrives at
inscrutable “solutions” finally defining the pictures themselves—in terms that
are unique to themselves. Perhaps more simply put: these pictures address
and embrace a Active realm, a mise-en-scene, encouraging the experience of
optical, visual, or perceptual ambiguity. They are intended to invite a viewer
into the experience of unfamiliar pictorial space, populated with quasi
familiar entities, visages, and/or convergences. Moreover, their intent flirts with
the influence of Agon. That is, their modus operandi consciously appropriates
a selective range of historical sources, references, and methods; their appoint
ments engage and manipulate previous structural and iconographic modalities.
Gillette maintains that 95 percent of the things that you see done with
computers, for example, are cyberkitsch. The trick is not to be overwhelmed
by the cyberkitsch but to search out those things that are of real significance
Chapter 4
and, on occasion, have serious affects on the rest of the art world. He contends
that this is a tool or a medium in the same tradition as photography, perhaps
film, and other things, although it has a unique status: it is digital. Digital
means chat it is not an analogue. For example, the image on the screen is not
what it seems to be. It is an appearance of a code. So when we say digital, we
ultimately mean the manifestation of that image with a long alphanumeric
series of zeros and ones with occasional breaks.
Cyberspace is an ethereal electronically mediated domain of the mind, an
extension, in the Marshall McLuhan sense of the mind. For example, just like
a crutch is an extension of an arm, cyberspace is an extension of the mind. We
have evolved this extension. Gillette thinks it began with Thomas Edison’s
invention of the electric light. Ever since the invention of the electric light
bulb, we have become addicted to all of the embodiments of the electronic.
For Gillette, the passage from the electric to the electronic was a big shift in
terms.
Synesthesia
Synesthesia—which is sometimes combined with the Gesamtkunstwerk (total

work of art) idea and of course the major theme of this section, multisensori-
ality—has been explored by nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers like
Richard Wagner, Aleksandr Scriabin, and Olivier Messiaen as well as curious
spirits like Pere Castel in the eighteenth century or Frederic Kastner in the
nineteenth century. These experiments were followed by numerous practi
tioners of the color organ and a number of artists at the beginning of the twen
tieth century such as Mondrian and Kandinsky. Synesthesia has also been a
major theme of artistic research since the 1950s, when technological innova
tions in electronic and digital images and sound offered new possibilities for
the performance of synesthetic experiments.
More recent experiments seem to mainly involve the physical or electronic
translation of music and sound into images and animations. Less attention
has been paid to the psychological, perceptual, and emotional impact of
synesthetic performances. In comparison with the psychologically oriented
experiments of Scriabin, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and more recently Yaacov
Agam, and David Hockney’s favoring of an association of music, shape, color
and space, current artistic experiments seem more oriented to the physics of
synesthesia—electronics and computer programming.

With the advent of virtual art, new media and the Internet enable us to
experience different kinds of information of a specifically telematic nature, and
for this reason it effectively differs from the usual forms of communication.
By linking the concepts tele and synesthesia together, Belgian artist and
theoretician Hugo Heyrman* deals with the fact that the transmission of data
creates a synesthetic effect: tele-synesthesia. At the end of the twentieth
century, the practicable units of time became digitized, magnified, and in
credibly accelerated. The modalities of our sensorial perception became
interactive by means of electronic mechanisms of control and selection. The
tele-culture that is emerging from this fact is subjecting both the perceptual
and the conceptual to continuous revisions.
At present, the concept of synesthesia is not only connected to the
Gesamtknnstwerk notion but to the category of the theatrical—yielding an
attack on the sensorium commune (the central point of convergence of the
nervous system). We know that one stimulation of the senses automatically
leads to another by means of association. Therefore, synesthesia is an impor
tant factor in every creative act and each form of interpretation. The same goes
for mediums, but in this case, it takes place on a metalevel of a cybermedia
chat blurs the boundaries between internal and external spaces.
A quintessential point of Heyrman’s thesis is the postulate that this blur
ring of boundaries can be considered a question of subtle synesthetic gradua
tions, and because of the blurring of differences (between what is here and
what is there), our senses become tele-senses.
Virtual worlds have already emerged in a great many divergent domains.
One can find applications in the field of the arcs, scientific visualization, virtual
universities, cinematographic animation and simulation, teleconferencing,
tele-jobs, virtual voyaging, virtual museums, virtual sports, virtual robots,
tele-shopping, tele-medicine, tele-studying, and che like. Virtual reality
not only makes che inconceivable quice conceivable but equally makes it
functional—the latter in order to demonstrate that these new media do in fact
bring about a synesthetic effect.
If synesthesia is a sensorial faculty chat refers to a blurring of the normal
differences and borders between the senses, then image and sound inter
mingle, and at cimes feeling and caste intermix—in short, all sensorial inter
relations are possible. The hypothesis Heyrman is testing boils down to che
following assessment: our consciousness, body, and senses will be confronted
with new experiences, with synesthetic qualities that are instantaneous and
Chapter 4
above all multisensorial as a result of the new media, with their proliferation
of informatics and knowledge.
Heyrman’s theory of tele-synesthesia is based on the fact that synesthesia
is a natural, uninhibited impulse condition of the senses and intelligence__
the fundamental principle that underlies our aesthetic sensations. The
hypothesis consists of this: a new kind of digital tele-contact emerges,
tele-synesthesia. It is as if Albert Einstein and Rene Magritte were to meet
each other in a virtual environment. Digital tele-contact and corresponding
tele-synesthesia are new types of human experience. And the digital revolu
tion continues: hypernetworks result from the fusion of telecommunication
with multimedia. We are witnessing a process of continuous technological
integration, such as fuzzy logic (vague, blurred logic). Fuzzy logic is a type
of technology that enables computers to be programmed in such a way that
they can simulate/imitate the inaccurate, imprecise manner of humans. Arti
ficial intelligence represents another aspect of technological integration. In
this context, Pattie Maes, an associate professor at the MIT Media Laboratory,
has developed a new form of cloning: virtual software agents that are able to
defend your personal desires and interests in cyberspace. They constitute a sort
of digital alter ego that can act in your name as well as protect you against
yourself.
One could summarize the tele-synesthesia hypothesis as follows:
1. Tele-synesthesia is the synesthetic principle, that is expanded and

extended by means of the new media: the traveling senses.
2. Tele-transmission of images, texts, sounds, data, and graphics, as well as
other types of signals, tele-haptic experiences, speech recognition, and emo
tional computers are at present being developed.
3. Telecommunication and conceptual creativity give way to new synesthetic
experiences and consequently change our conception of the world.
One can also see tele-synesthesia as virtual interactions between the tele
senses, developed by means of new technological means in order to overcome
the constraints of the human senses. Tele-synesthetic experiences are impor
tant explorations as they offer better insight into the nature of both our natural
senses and our electronically empowered/enhanced senses. Indeed, our senses
constitute our most vital source of information with regard to sensorial adap
tation to the environment.
□
Heyrman signs his artworks with the name Doctor Hugo. Born on Decem
ber 20, 1942, in Antwerp, where he currently lives and works, Doctor Hugo
originally opted for a musical education, but transferred to the visual arts. He
graduated from the Royal Academy and became a laureate of the National
Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp. In addition, he studied nuclear
physics during one year at the State Higher Institute for Nuclear Energy. He
obtained his doctorate at the Universidad de La Laguna, Santa Cruz de
Tenerife, with a dissertation on art and computers. In 1995, Doctor Hugo
coined the terms tele-synesthesia and post-ego. Since 1993, he has been a working
member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts
in Brussels, and since 2000, the Belgian representative of the International
Synesthesia Association.
During the 1960s, Doctor Hugo profiled himself as an avant-garde artist
with happenings as well as film and video experiments. His Mobile Museum
for Modern Media took a "Continental Video and Film Tour” through
Belgium, Germany, France, and the Netherlands from 1970 to 1973- For his
“street-life” paintings, he was elected laureate of the Jeune Peinture Beige
(Young Belgian Painters) (1974), Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. With the
theme “ways of seeing,” Doctor Hugo explored the possibilities of painting
in an existential series: Water, Light, Time’, A Vision Is Finer Than a Vieta', and
Aiodels of Reality.
Since 1995, Doctor Hugo has become one of the pioneers in Net art.
He took part in various Net.art projects, including the ALT-X-site Being in
Cyberspace and Revelation at ISEA 2000 (10th International Symposium on Elec
tronic Art), Paris. In the series Fuzzy Dreamz (1998), he transformed his new
media experiences into painting and vice versa.
Let me add that che Parisian journal Revue Synesthesie* has presented a great
number of artists, some of them closely related to the theme here.
The combination of vision, hearing, taste, and touch has been particularly
favored by a number of artists in this section.
Such a multisensorial or intersensorial preoccupation can be discerned in
Jean-Pierre Giovanelli’s* installations—for example, his digital image instal
lation Stable Ntouvant (J 998) at Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris during the
exhibition Virtual Art: Interactive and Multisensorial Creations (figure 4.12).
The basic, complex theme of is created in its most essential and reduced form:
tissue papers, some real, others simulated on a computer, are respectively pre
sented as surging out of a box and then are projected on a screen. Despite the
Chapter 4
Figure 4.12 Jean-Pierre Giovanelli, Stable Mouvant, 1998. Created at Espace Landowski,
Boulogne-Billancourt.
likeness between the real tissue papers and the simulated ones, the artist’s
approach does not favor any confusion between the real and virtual objects.
This subtle but fundamental point makes all che difference between Gio-
vanelli’s installation and laboratory experiences on virtual reality or che illu-
sionistic encercainments ac so many amusement parks. Giovanelli’s installation
stresses che dichocomy between the two states of reality. As far sound, on one
of the installation’s real sides (che real/real side) it is that of an improbable
tornado, and on the ocher side (che virtual/real side) we hear the rumor of
creased papers. The final aim of che installation is to establish a clear
distinction between the categories of reality and virtuality.
Giovanelli is not only an artist who intervenes and participates in differ
ent artistic movements but also an architect of multimedia installations. From
1977 onward, he has authored a number of interventions based on his com
mitment as member of two collective undertakings: the Sociological Arc and
che Aeschecics of Communicacion groups.

In 1978, Giovanelli developed an intervention process on art criticism at
the Fine Arts Museum in Nice, France, followed by a critical attack on all
structural myths such as authenticity, identity, and celebrity.
Starting in 1985, Giovanelli’s intervention system approached the specific
field of communication networks. It was then that the sociological operator
transformed himself into a communication and installation artist and archi
tect. His first important environmental work was SOS Third World, which was
shown in Nice in 1994. In it, sand slits up a television screen on which stream
past the satellite images of our advanced technological world, and the onlooker
must ceaselessly sweep the sand aside. Giovanelli invites us to share the
thought that the proliferation of satellite images broadcast on television
screens should legitimately give a direct and comprehensive grasp on reality,
which is constantly subjected to the feverish investigation and accumulation
of information.
In 1996, he created an installation called 10 (Italian for “myself’), which
was first shown in Genoa and could be considered a technological material
ization of a metaphor where the image of a drop of water, ceaselessly falling,
is projected on a dark, oily surface overhung by a heavy rock, while on the
same surface the reflection of a mouth is reading the wise texts of Lao-
tzu’s Tao philosophy. According to philosopher Mario Costa, three levels of
meaning and interpretation can be established with regard to this installa
tion: the sociological, the psychological, and the metaphysical. Sociologically
speaking, in Costa's view, 10 alludes to the binary substance of the digital uni
verse that is about to substitute itself for the human one. On a psychological
or symbolic level, Costa claims that this installation refers to an eternal mater
nal archetype or symbol, whereas on an ontological or metaphysical level, 10
could constitute a meditation on several aspects of time: real time through
the falling drops of water, simulated time through tape recordings, the time
of perception, and the metaphoric time of being.9
Two years later, Giovanelli exhibited his multimedia installation MA: On
Milk, Mother, and Death, in Turin, Italy. This video event took place in a cubic
shaped darkroom that was crossed from top to bottom by a cone. The opening
of the cone was plunging on a round of old men’s faces seized in a gyratery move
ment of milk contained in a semivisible tub; traces of light on the ground com
posed a kind of pearl necklace. The circular movement of the necklace took up
the milk movement while one could hear continuous childlike babbles through
hidden loudspeakers. MA was an installation that not only made an appeal to
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vision but also to hearing and taste. The milk basin installed with audio effects
received the projected image of an old man who could be the symbol of knowl
edge. The spectator who entered this installation could symbolically drink with
their hands By destroying the image, which immediately reconstructed itself.
The whole of the installation could in fact be considered a mother. The visitor
had at their disposal several possible entrances and exits from which to choose,
and this choice had meaning: either death, which the spectator saw in front of
them if they followed a circular direction, or life, if they took a straight path in
space/time celebrating our material existence. The symbolic meaning of this
installation as a modern oracle could also be interpreted as one that has immor
tality as its subject. In any case, an appeal was made to the spectator not only to
meditate on this theme but also, by the very fact of being invited to drink images
of milk, to participate physically in this work of art.
In yet another multimedia installation, Olea Nostra (Oil Civilization), con
ceived in 1998 and shown at a biennial event in Rome one year later, Gio-
vanelli treated oil as a paradoxical liquid. In his earlier installation 10, this
liquid—black and dirty, a residue of oil change—was treated as a symbol of
our surroundings soiled by a disturbed industry, by factory and machine pol
lution. The oil in Olea Nostra was clean and transparent, symbolizing the fatty
juice that under plural forms, has fed the people of the Mediterranean basin
for millennia. The installation’s purpose was to make us think of the many
contradictory aspects of our society (figure 4.13). This was also the case in
the multimedia installation Black and White Global Jackpot, exhibited by
Giovanelli in May 2000 in Nice. In this work, two dustbins full of garbage
(in fact, empty packages) symbolically placed us before the unsolvable con
tradiction of consumer society. The writings one discovered on opening the
dustbin lids (“black” on one, “white” on the other) referred less to a racial
problem than to a famous whiskey label, and hence to a world economy adver
tisement where the only way that is proposed to us is worldwide consumerism.
As art critic Francis Parent remarks, this installation questioned not only our
present-day society but also that of the future. In fact, according to Parent,
Giovanelli's installation pointed to a type of society where human beings,
whatever their skin color or their sex, are worth less than garbage; it is a
society in which the paradoxical “buying" will be the jackpot we are bound
to win, and yet it is a society that also invites us to intervene. It is here that
Giovanelli’s sociocritical art can play a role by allowing the public to ques
tion itself and perhaps modify the course of events, adds Parent.
□
Figure 4.13 Jean-Pierre Giovanelli, Olea Nostra, 1998. Here exhibited at Art House Gallery,
Los Angeles in 2004.
The sensitive perception of the human body is the outstanding feature in

Diana Domingues’s* The Reverse Side of the Body (1997). Domingues offers
poetic moments of this apprehension of the body scrutinized by the most
advanced technologies. Medical iconographies show the pumping of a heart
in an ultrasound scanning, viscera in video laparoscopies, and a womb with a
fetus and lung’s visions. These high-performance technologies let us see and
listen to worlds of human bodies in action never known before. Organs, sur
faces, hollows, recesses, and body pieces are all exposed; the reverse side of the
body is spread via the Net. Each screen offers invitations: “TOUCH” (like
touch my body). When the participant accepts TOUCH on the computer
screen, they touch flesh or membranes, they enter the cardiac flow and go to
many other territories within human bodies. Poetics, historical and scientific
texts, human body graphics, and a red screen as immaterial blood are also
offered. The participant engages in a dialogue with the vital human body con
nected to the artificial energy of the technology.
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Domingues s statements, analogical scanned and synthetic images, are put
on the home pages. Several images are animated; others offer a zoom in their
microstructure. The ultrasound scanning echographic images are made by the
computer, which receives through a sensor or sonar the signal of the body and
transforms sound into images. Computerized tomographies show thin slices
of the body. The video laparoscopies are recorded by a microcamera, which
registers travels on the viscera and lungs during a surgery. The artist uses the
medical devices in special laboratories with technicians to produce these sit
uations. Photographic images, electrocardiogram graphics, and mixed texts in
many different languages are also offered through a hybrid construction. All
this data is electronically created by some programs like Adobe and finally
placed on the World Wide Web using HTML language. The user can inter
act by opening other home pages and can also provoke animation.
For Domingues, touch is the greatest bodily sense. It is che most impor
tant of our senses to the process of sleeping and waking, and provides aware
ness of depth, thickness, and shape. We feel, we love, and we hate, we are
susceptible and touched, due to the tactile corpuscles of our skin. Our skin is
a magic mirror, which receives and gives back most wonderful situations.
Domingues combines artistic and intellectual skill. She is a professor and
researcher at che University of Caxias do Sul in Brazil. As a multimedia artist,
she explores the electronic process of images through interactive installation
videos such as TRANS-E, My Body, My blood (shown in Chicago in 1997),
which provided a real-time dialogue with electronic memories and “visions.”
Her current project, Art, Technology, and Communication: Creation and Interac
tivity, examines the artistic and aesthetic dimensions of technologies through
electronic processing signals, computer animations, interfaces, sensitive
systems, neural networks, interactive installations, Web arc, and robotics
events. As illustrated above, Domingues is interested in the symbiosis of bio
logical and artificial bodies.
Multisensoriality linked to eco-technology is one of the major preoccupa
tions of artist and curator Nina Czegledy.* She has a highly original way of
looking at natural phenomenon like the aurora borealis. According to
Czegledy, the aurora borealis, or northern lights, is one of the most magnifi
cent, mysterious, and provocative of natural phenomena. Since time imme
morial, the enigmatic auroral display has bewitched and fascinated
humankind. Virtually every northern folklore contains references to the

aurora. From biblical quotes to rare Mediterranean sightings and descriptions
by Greek and Roman philosophers such as Aristotle and Lucius Annaeus
Seneca, from medieval Scandinavian sagas such as the king’s mirror to Inuit
folklore, stories, and myths, tales of auroral displays have served an important
role in explaining the natural world around us. Many of the early “scientific”
explanations were a curious mixture of speculation and reality. In 1715, Jonas
Ramus, a Norwegian priest, postulated in his book Norriges Descriptions that
the northern lights were caused by the periodic eruption of a colossal amount
of subterranean heat beneath Greenland. Intriguingly, his speculations also
contained references to magnetic forces related to the North Pole.
Today, the explanations of modern science have their own truths regarding
the aurora. Solar eruptions, electrons and protons discharged from the Sun,
are considered one of the original causes of the phenomenon. Following artists
in the past and in particular Georges Vantongerloo, who was fascinated by
this natural display, Czegledy succeeds in expanding the physical presence of
the aurora borealis into a unique and universal media event as a curator. She
organized Auroral Myth: Terrestrial Realities in 1998 at the InterAccess Elec
tronic Media Arts Centre in Toronto with works by artists like Douglas Back,
Paul Davies, Catherine Richards, Victoria Scott, and Neil Wiernik. By
working with various aspects of the mysterious, invisible, and inaudible elec
tromagnetic energies that permeate our daily life, the participating artists
explored the relationships between transcendental forces and the life of ordi
nary human beings. Richards, for example, examined the nebulous lines, the
indistinct layers, and the blurred boundaries separating the human body from
its environment. Her exhibit, Curiosity Cabinet, created a remarkable experi
ence for the visitor. In the closed circuit of the cabinet, the participant/visitor
is supposedly shielded from magnetic interference, and becomes “unplugged”
from the constantly “plugged-in" state of our contemporary surroundings.
With its shimmering copper-meshed walls and magnetic-free interior, che
cabinet simultaneously alludes to presence and absence, existence and dis
placement, in an electromagnetically charged world. On the other hand, in
his interactive installation Persistent Invisible Fields, Davies articulates a
generally felt mistrust of unseen forces hiding behind the surrounding litter.
Davies provides us with a radiation meter, which serves as a pair of magic
glasses that allow us to explore the true nature of ordinary and everyday
objects. Armed with this aid, we can challenge, examine, and expose the
hidden nature of technology in our daily lives. Among fundamental forces,
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gravity tends toward stagnation and heat by dissolution toward chaos. Only
magnetism points to unification, and allows for variation and mobility. It is
directive and formative, aiding unseen sources of energy in the arranging of
Earth’s organisms. As for Scott, her interest in personal and technological
transformations led her to direct and indirect investigations of various life
forces. Resembling a magnetic coil, the Celtic knot in Scotts installation
Warm taps into the energy cycle of developing organic life. Worms, lounging
underground, provide a source of energy, contributing to the process of per
mutation. This, in turn, will change the appearance of the heating coil. By
evoking the mobile, formative metaphor of magnetic forces, Wann presents a
new electronic allegory of the spirit and the body.
In another exhibition, titled Choice, Czegledy presented three interactive
installations, UCBM3 (You Could Be) by Nell Tenhaaf, Burn by Victoria Scott,
and One Year of Birth Control by Simone Jones, at the Stockholm Electronic
Art Festival in 1999. The work of these Canadian women artists addressed
the contradictions and possibilities of interactivity. The word choice implies
options, alternatives, an occasion for decisions. Choice is a seductive term, sug
gesting freedom, even democracy. Nevertheless, it was useful to consider
whether the digital domain furnished with preconceived computer games,
programmed virtual art, and embodied interactive sculptures allowed much
actual freedom of choice to remain. The Choice exhibition created a special
environment by subverting the conventions of gambling and spirituality. Each
artist reflected on the culture of these conventions as well as the paradigm
shifts affecting our experience of reality.
An interactive works exhibition more closely related to the multisensori-
ality theme, titled Touch-Touche, was organized by Czegledy in 1999, and was
toured Canada in 2000 and 2001. For Czegledy, the invitation co touch is a
bold proposition. Touching implies intimacy, a controversial notion in an age
when direct contact is increasingly replaced by remote control. In our visu
ally privileged culture, only our eyes are encouraged to investigate, to explore;
our hands are supposed to be off-limits. Five artists participated in this exhi
bition. Thecla Schiphorst contributed Bodymaps, which were artifacts of touch
constructing a space inhabited by the body as mediated by technology. The
installation employed electric field sensor technology, in which the viewers
proximity, touch, and gestures evoked moving sound and image responses
from the body contained and represented within the installation space. Images
of the body were stored on a videodisc. The body of the artist (and a digitally

represented body) were projected onto a horizontal planar surface. The surface
was covered in white velvet, creating a sensual and unexpected texture that
left “traces” of handprints, creating a relationship to memory, an inability to
escape the effects of one’s touch. An accompanying soundscape was con
structed in such a way as to create an intimate local sound response based on
hand movements over the surface. Schiphorst’s work is informed by her back
ground and formal training in both dance/movement studies and computing
science. She attempts to integrate models of scientific representation with
physical body experiences. Schiphorst is especially interested in how the
knowledge of movement and the body can affect and inform the design of
electronic computer technology as well as work created with (or through) that
technology. All movement in her video images was not created in the typical
directorial mode of “seeing the shot” and constructing the visual material
based on visual rules of composition. Instead, all movement was generated
from within che body, as dictated by elemental states such as drowning, float
ing, shivering, crawling, uncovering, and hiding.
In Daniel Jolliffe’s Room for Walking in the Touch-Touche exhibition, the
viewer encounters only a wheeled wagon when entering the exhibition space.
Part sculpture, part electronic interface, this is how che viewer experiences che
work. The sculpture references the shape of a child’s wagon, on a bit larger scale,
and contains a projection screen in lieu of the wagon’s bed. On che screen, an
image from the same perspective as the gallery floor can be seen. With some
physical exertion, che viewer is able to move the wagon to anywhere in the
gallery space by means of a handle. This work on behalf of the viewer changes
the image on the screen in relation to their movement, suggesting that they
are visually cracking across an imaginary groundwork. Room for Walking con
tains a single still image within che actual sculpture that reveals itself bit by
bit through the viewer’s physical work. To see the entire image, the viewer has
co move, with some difficulty, through the entire gallery, over all the floor space.
These archaeological, sometimes awkward movements of che viewer serve to
uncover not only che image itself but the experience of moving over an alter
nate, sometimes kinesthetically unnatural terrain. The sculpture’s main effect
lies in the process of how the viewer becomes involved with the work. Each
piece requires a physical exertion that points toward a kinesthetic experience
for the viewer. Through these efforts, the viewer becomes aware of both their
physical relation to the object and the rules of the hidden technologies con
tained by the sculpture. As the viewer begins to “interact” with this work, their
Chapter 4
perceptual interest shifts inevitably to a more bodily level, where they begin to
investigate the work physically. At this level of involvement with the work, the
viewer is forced into the position of reconciling the visual experience of the
object with the perhaps stronger kinesthetic bodily image of the simple tech
nology and effect contained within the sculpture.
Then there is 10 Meditations on a Song by Olivia Newton-John (1999) shown
by Johanna Householder in the Touch exhibition curated by Czegledy. House
holder contends that if these visual works happen to employ complex techni
cal systems, this is to her only an indication of the attention that their makers
have paid to their own physicality. These are body extensions. Like a camera
extending the eye, these works are about the extension across space and time
of the haptic and proprioceptive senses.
Miroslaw Rogala* created multisensorial and synesthetic interaction in a
technically combined statement in the form of both a CD-ROM and an inter
active installation. In fact, his work Lovers Leap (1995) exists as an immersive,
panoramic, perspectival environment that includes an interface suitable for
interactive and noninteractive experience for individuals and crowds. Accord
ing to Rogala, movement through space is a physical aspect while movement
through perspective is a mental construct—one that mirrors other jumps and
disjunctive associations within the thought process. This movement is
explored in an attempt to create a physical space that is a model of a mental
process. When the viewer enters the space, they become aware that their
movements or actions are changing the view, but don’t necessarily realize how.
This means that the viewer is not really in control, but simply aware of their
complicity (figures 4.14 and 4.15).
Turning to Rogala’s background, he was born in 1954 in Poland, and was
educated in the arts with a background in painting, photography, poetry, and
music. He made the transition from using these separate forms of expression
by employing a unified multimodal approach that he called “video theater’
or “wand theater.” When Rogala moved from Poland to the United States in
1979, he remained attached to his early works, which inspired a need to search
for a medium that could synthesize the intrinsics of individual media and
the desire to seamlessly cross the boundaries of each medium without losing
the intensity, density, and precision in an effort to continue the same idea in
different media. Pulso-Funktory, created in Poland between 1975 and 1979,
was his early predigital, interactive, installation sculptural work. The focus
of the display were the six rectangular, wooden panels with neon lights.

Figure 4.14 Miroslav Rogala, Lovers Leap, 1995. Computer study.
Chapter 4
The work invited the viewer-user—(v)user—to touch “on" or “off” the
switchers-indicators that control the light display. The sounds were produced
using original sound generators from 1970. This installation allowed for at
least six persons—(v)users for a multiple switching interaction. This idea was
further developed in Rogala's work from the late 1990s, which allowed for
multiple (v)user physical and virtual interaction. On arriving in the United
States, Rogala was anxious to study and work with new media, and was fas
cinated by the new landscape, sunsets, and the scale of skyscrapers. He was
inspired looking at the panorama and felt some kind of freedom. From 1980
to 1990, he created a photographic documentation and a series of dynamic
body performances. Utilizing lasers, light objects, and flashlights during long
film exposures, he also documented the trace of laser light as well as slide pro
jections. In this way, the body and its gestures were reflected in a visible, cal
ligraphic, hand-gestured, and hand-depicted writing-in-space. Duration and
process were introduced into the artwork. Rogala recorded his streams of
thoughts in words and poetic verses, intuitively laying the groundwork for
his later wand-interactive, nonlinear storytelling works, or his wand theater.
Sociopolitical and Security Issues
Sociopolitical, educational, and security issues in off-line works are at the

center of several artists' preoccupations in this section. These concerns go from
imaginative prosocial environmental applications of virtual reality to more
critical attitudes regarding ethnological issues, but also to security and out
right survival in an attempt to redirect the techniques, tools, and tenets of
industrial science away from the military and warfare.
Some of these issues, and in particular those associated with the environ
ment as well as the teaching and the design of a computer-based interactive
fantasy system, are at the heart of Brenda Laurel’s* artistic commitments. Her
virtual environment project Placeholder comprised three natural environments
in the Banff area in Canada. Cosponsored by the Banff Centre for the Arts and
Interval Research, the project was completed in 1993 with the assistance of
Laurel's principal collaborators, Rachel Strickland, Rob Tow, and Michael
Naimark. Laurel codesigned and produced the project. In addition to the
"capture" of actual environments, the project was novel in several other
respects. It was among the first head-mounted virtual reality worlds to inte
grate the actions of two participants simultaneously. Simple hand-tracking
□
devices (designed by Steve Saunders) allowed participants to use both hands.
The piece also allowed participants to enter into the bodies of various animals
and to experience their distinct locomotive and sensory capabilities. In addi
tion, the environment supported the construction of narratives through the
virtual device of "voiceholders.” The purpose of the Placeholder project, Laurel
says, was to create an example of an imaginative, prosocial application of
virtual reality that might serve to expand the medium's definition.
Laurel began working with interactive media in 1976, during her gradu
ate studies in theater at Ohio State University. Her involvement as an actor,
director, and writer with agitprop, participatory, and improvisational theater
helped her to see the parallels between the worlds of theater and interactive
technology. Her first interactive designs were fairy tales developed for the
CyberVision computer, a machine with 2K of usable RAM. “With no expe
rience in animation, I reinvented the wheel several times," Laurel explains.
She did cell animation and font design for the CyberVision platform, and also
developed the first automated lip-synching program on a microcomputer.
At Atari, Laurel directed software strategy and design for the early Atari
home computer. While games were a staple of this work, Laurel’s team also
explored the genre expressive and creative tools. After two years, Laurel moved
to Atari Systems Research. Under the direction of Alan Kay, she was finally
able to bring her interest in computers and theater together in an exploration
of how technology might be used to create satisfying interactive fantasy.
This work led to her PhD thesis, “Toward the Design of a Computer-Based
Interactive Fantasy System,” for which she received her degree in 1986. She
subsequently authored a book based on this research, Computer as Theater,
in 1991.
From 1992 to 1996, Laurel conducted a massive research study on gender
and technology under the aegis of Interval Research Corporation. This work
led to her founding a company, Purple Moon, devoted co designing interac
tive media for girls. Laurel oversaw the creation of a cast of characters and
interrelated narrative worlds. During its life, the company produced eight
CD-ROMs, a highly successful Web site, and an array of other products. The
goal of the work was co meec girls where chey are in life and give chem emo
tional rehearsal space for dealing with the issues most important to them. In
1999, the company was acquired by Mattel, which shortly thereafter closed
its interactive division. What remains of the Purple Moon world are an
ongoing series of books for young readers, published by Scholastic.
Chapter 4
Although the company did not lavish financial rewards on its founders and
investors, Laurel considers it to have been a cultural success. She thinks that
the company touched the lives of millions of girls and made a difference in their
comfort level with technology. Laurel reflects on the lessons of Purple Moon
and its mission in Utopian Entrepreneur, published by The MIT Press in 2001.
In the book, she puts forward the idea of culture work as a goal for artists and
entrepreneurs who are willing to engage popular culture for social change.
Laurel currently teaches in the graduate media design program at the Art
Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Her year-long studio course
challenges first-year graduate students to create a body of transmedia content,
employing at least three different media types, on a topic involving socially
positive goals. The 2000-2001 studio produced a project called Code 23,
which integrated video, Web, and print to raise awareness of che human
genome project among teenagers.
A critical sociopolitical stance combined with che deviation of che techni
cal means can be discerned in the activities of the Survival Research Labora
tory,* which was conceived and founded by Mark Pauline in November 1978.
Since its inception, the laboratory has operated as an organization of creative
technicians dedicated to redirecting the techniques, cools, and tenets of indus
try, science, and the military away from their typical role in che production
of warfare. The laboratory has staged over forcy-five mechanized presentations
in the United States and Europe since 1979- Each performance consists of a
unique set of ricualized interactions between machines, robots, and special
effects devices, employed in developing themes of sociopolitical satire.
Humans are present only as audience or operators.
Several of Nil Yalter’s* works contain an ethno-critical message concern
ing behavior, attitudes, and perceptions through the human body, objects, and
sociopolitical and other issues (figure 4.16). As an artist of Turkish origin, she
is at times attracted by the codes and the technology of Occidental culture,
but often she is nostalgic for the richness and the specificity of her own culture.
She investigates the mythology and rituals, language and symbols, of the two
different cultures through which she navigates. Her working tools vary from
painting and drawing to photography, video installations, and the digital
coding possibilities offered by the new technologies. The fact of using several
media for each work enforces the stereophonic character of her work, which
runs through the same themes with different contents. The hermetic and
multifaceted character of Yalter’s work can be decoded through different

Figure 4.16 Nil Valter and Nicole Croiset, Rituals, 1980. Video sculpture.
readings—one of them being the examination of the inner relations between

the different works, and the other being the study of inner reactions of each
issue in dialogue with her working method.
In 1973, during an installation work at che Museum of Modern Art in
Paris, Yalter had a Sony portapack black-and-white video recorder in her hands
and it fascinated her. From 1973 to 1986, she did a great deal of video work
(installations, performances, and so on). She exhibited these works along with
photographs, paintings, drawings, and objects. Yalter started working with
computers in 1985. Her first experience was a video colorizer that she used
in a video installation called Tele-Totem in Angouleme, France. In 1988, for
the festival of Electronic Arcs in Rennes, she realized a video installation on
Egypt titled Pyramis 011 le Noyage d’Eudore for which she used a computer named
Silver. This computer created different two-dimensional effects on the video
tape. In 1989, she worked on a new computer, Graph9, and combined video
with two-dimensional virtual images in an installation called Hommage an
Marquis de Sade.
Chapter 4
Yalter received a scholarship in 1992, and went to. Marseille to learn and
work on a Silicon Graphics Iris 4-D (with Anyflo software, created by Michel
Bret). After three months of hard work, she prepared the basis of a video instal
lation with Florence de Meredieu: Television la Lune. In this composite image
work (real and virtual three-dimensional images), three points were impor
tant to Yalter: (1) not to be able to distinguish the real images from the virtual
ones, (2) to surprise the software and even search for its shortcomings—for
example, to mix up the functions of perspective and nonperspective—and (3)
to create an invisible mental language between herself and the computer.
In 1993, after a fourteen-year absence, Yalter went back to Istanbul,
Turkey, her country of origin, for an exhibition. She was greatly influenced by
the mosaic compositions of the Byzantine church of the Chora. Back in Paris,
she painted a series of twenty-eight variations on the Chora and wanted to
construct a visual digital environment in which several aesthetic themes were
interwined. The interaction of the mosaic and the pixel made her think of the
theoretical and pictorial work of Kasimir Malevitch. She wanted to construct
an interactive CD-ROM with a personal computer. David Apikian and Nicole
Croiset, two other media artists, joined Yalter in this project. Croiset had a
Macintosh Quadra at her place, so they started working together there. When
the computer broke down after four months, Yalter replaced it with a Power
PC Macintosh, which had just come out. They finished the work in 1995. In
the exhibition form of Pixelismus, the viewer is surrounded by the painted
variations and is invited to navigate through the eight chapters of the CD-
ROM, each one generated by a Malevitch text. This CD-ROM encloses dif
ferent digital media forms: video, three-dimensional virtual animations,
sound, still images, and interactivity.
From 1996 to 1998, Yalter organized three creative workshops with Arc-
El (Joel Boutteville and Annick Bureaud) using computers, digital video
cameras, and adequate software for the French public enterprise (Electricite
de France.) Ac the end of these three years, the three originators asked other
artists to create an interactive CD-ROM to be sent to 180 participants. This
CD-ROM now includes virtual and real images made by nonartists along with
Yalter's own artistic interpretation of these images. From 1996 on, Yalter
worked on four other CD-ROMS: Terra Nomade (1997), on the subject of
Turkish immigrant workers in Europe; Virtual Poetry (1999), an anthology of
modern Turkish poetry; Histoire de Peau (2003), a personal work on Yalter s

own aging artist’s body; and Kannibal (2002), an allegory on the horrors of
modern cannibalism.
Working with a personal computer in her own studio opened up new
horizons of creativity for Yalter, but it also isolated her from the rest of the
art world. She thinks that new art collectives should be created from now on.
We have seen in this chapter that the traditional problems connected with
the correspondence of both the senses and the arts, multisensoriality and the
multiartistic, spanning at least from the Gaamtkunstwerk to recent artistic
synesthesia expressions, have found an entirely new form of expression and
aesthetic existence due to the digital multimedia conception of work, which
sometimes takes the technical form of a CD-ROM. Language as well as plastic
expressions have both had a part in this development. The spectator/
participant was often implicated with several of their senses in these artistic
expressions. It is this original combination between multisensoriality and
interactivity that characterizes the majority of the works and projects dis
cussed in this chapter, and that constitutes one of the principal elements of
virtual art. But interactivity alone is another of the main characteristics,
perhaps even the most important one, of this art, as we will see in the next
chapter.
Chapter 4
Interactive Digital Installations
All che artists in this chapter have created works chat fall into the category of
interaccive/virtual online environments. While this technical-aesthetic cate
gory is dominant in their artistic productions, all of these artists have pro
duced works that fit into different aesthetic subcategories such as sensory
immersion, reciprocity in aesthetic propositions, and individual, social, envi
ronmental, and scientific commitments toward interactivity. In fact, most of
the works described here have as their principal theme interactivity with the
spectator. Interactivity can be interpreted as the ability of the user to manip
ulate and affect one’s experience of media directly, and to communicate with
others through media.
Sensory Immersion
If for some immersion is the experience of entering into the simulation or sug
gestion of a three-dimensional environment, for others it can also be an intel
lectually stimulating process. In most cases, past and present, immersion is
mentally absorbing; it is a process, or a change, or a passage from one mental
stage to another. Immersion is characterized by diminishing critical distance
from what is shown and increasing emotional involvement in what is hap
pening. Regardless, immersion is undoubtedly key for any understanding of
the development of sensorial interactivity in digital installations and the
passage from technological to virtual art.
Immersive images integrate the observer in a 360-degree space of illusion,
or immersion, with unity of time and place. As image media can be described
in terms of how they organize and structure perception and cognition, virtual
immersive spaces must be classed as extreme variants of image media chat on
account of their totality, offer a completely alternative reality. They offer the
observers the option of fusing with the image medium, which affects sensory
impression and awareness.
Salient here is Myron Krueger, one of the undisputed pioneers of interac
tive art. In his Videoplace (1970) installation, visitors are placed in a computer-
generated graphic world, inhabited by other human participants and graphic
creatures, in which the laws of cause and effect can be composed from moment
to moment. Krueger was the first artist to focus on interactive computer art
as a composition medium. In the process, he invented many of the basic con
cepts of virtual reality by developing unencumbered, full-body participation
in computer-created telecommunication experiences. He also coined the term
artificial reality in 1973 to describe the ultimate expression of this concept.
Krueger earned a BA in liberal arts from Dartmouth College, and MS and
PhD degrees from the University of Wisconsin. His 1974 doctoral disserta
tion defined human-machine interaction as an art form. It was later published
as Artificial Reality (Addison-Wesley, 1983), and significantly updated as
Artificial Reality 11 (Addison-Wesley, 1991). Since 1969, Krueger has created
interactive environments in which the computer perceives the visitors’ move
ments through sensory floors and video cameras, and then responds through
electronic sounds and environmental scale displays.
The aesthetic theme of sensory immersion is treated in an original techni
cal way in Scott Fisher’s Boom (1995), a binocular vision interface device that
enables people to feel as if they are actually present in a different place and
time. Fisher calls this kind of virtual reality "telepresence.” It involves three
technologies in combination that enable sensory immersion—chat is, they sur
round the user with a sensory field that mimics input from the real world.
These technologies are not only wide-angle stereoscopic visual displays
immersing users in three-dimensional visual environments but also three-
dimensional, binaural audio displays that allow sounds to be localized in
virtual space as well as instrumented input devices that track users’ bodies as
they move about and manipulate virtual objects.
Fisher is an artist and a researcher. According to Stephen Wilson, Fisher
has long been concerned with the creation of immersive first-person worlds
in contexts such as MIT’s Architecture Machine group and NASA’s Virtual
Environment Workstation Project, which conducted innovative research on
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key virtual reality technologies such as head-coupled displays, data gloves, and
three-dimensional audio technology. In addition to Boom, Fisher has created
other three-dimensional immersive environments such as Menagerie (1993)
where users are confronted with a world full of synthetic creatures that man
ifest animal behaviors and different kinds of responses to the visitor’s actions.’
The artistic itinerary of French theoretician, plastician, and educator
Edmond Couchot,* led him quite logically toward the problem and the appli
cation of sensory immersion. Couchot first attempted a plastic synthesis
between gestural painting and kineticism. Then he became interested in spec
tator participation and created (between 1965 and 1973) a series of cybernetic
devices that he called “musical mobiles”—a system that reacts to sound stim
ulations (music, voices, different noises) and instantaneously proposes some
visual interpretations where the automatism is blended by an intervention
depending on hazard. Since microcomputers had yet to be invented, Couchot
experimented with electronic circuits and was in touch with engineers at IBM
and Texas Instruments. In 1964, he constructed a machine called Semaphora I
that was sensible to Hertzian waves. One turned a button to change a radio
program, which in turn changed the luminous structures and mobiles. In Paris
in 1965, Couchot then produced Semaphora II, capable of perceiving music,
under the sponsorship of the French radio network ORTF’s Groupe de
Recherche Musicale. A third mobile, Semaphora III, shown in 1966 at the
Athenee Theater in Paris, was built along the same lines, but had a more
complex behavior. Couchot participated in other exhibitions, such as the 1968
Cinetisme, Spectacle, Environnement in Grenoble, France, where he showed
Animation for a Swimming Pool, a luminous device responsive to swimmers’
sounds and movements in a pool—a work that anticipated by twenty years
the immersion situation of virtual reality. In 1973, he received a commission
from the French Ministry of Culture to create Orion, a luminous eight-by-two-
meter wall automatically generating successions of luminous constellations,
whose sources are animated by pulsations that beat at always renewed rhythms
and that are defined by stochastic parameters in which the spectator is able
to partially intervene.
In 1969, with the creation of the fine arts department at the experimental
University of Vincennes, near Paris, Couchot began teaching. He was also for
tunate to meet a group of like-minded researchers, informaticians, and artists
(painters and musicians) at the university such as Michel Bret, Herve Huitric,
and Monique Nahas. Couchot then founded, with Marie-Helene Tramus, a

new department then called Arts et Technologies de 1’Image, which he
directed until 2000. This was the first institution in France to offer students
a serious technological curriculum with artistic ends and a PhD option. At
the same time, Couchot participated in the digital images research section of
the university, for which he remained responsible until 1995.
The potentialities of computer science and technology in real time allowed
Couchot to develop his work with digital interactivity. A permanent preoccu
pation for him was the question of how to associate the creation of a work with
the larger body to which it belonged. The double-montage apparatus seme a
tout vent (I Sow to the Four Winds) (1990) is a good illustration (figures 5.1 and
5.2). On the other hand, Couchot has helped organize several exhibitions—
particularly Electra, at the Musee d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1983,
with a room dedicated to the digital image—where for the first time in France
interactive works on the computer were presented to the public.
Considering himself an “intermittent artist” on the borders of the “con
temporary art” system, Couchot devotes more and more time to theoretical
activities. Fascinated with the sciences and the techniques, and in particular
cybernetics, he has participated since the early 1960s in the Societe frangaise
de Cybernetique, which brings together informaticians, mathematicians,
architects, plasticians, and others. Couchot has written more than eighty arti
cles (translated into many languages) and two books on the digital image. His
first book, Images: De I’optique au numerique (1988), builds on his dissertation
and deals with the advent of a new figuration system based on digital simu
lation.2 Here, Couchot analyzes the passage from the optical to the digital,
and the relationships the figuration techniques maintain with the visual arts
and culture. While the former incited us to represent the real or show the
shortcomings of its representation, the latter invites us to simulate it. The
digital image opens up toward a virtual universe, to be lived and relived indef
initely, without ever being actualized. It radically overturns the symbolic
economy of our system to represent the world. Our culture now depends on
the capacity co understand this new image, to experiment and dream with it.
Couchots second book, La Technologie dans Fart: De la photographie a la rfalite
virtuelie (1998), analyzes che grip that technology—and with it, science and
reason—has on art, without many people being aware of it? In order to under
stand the complexity and the extent of this influence, the author draws his
readers into a circuit that starts with photography and finishes at the most
advanced point of the digital. During this itinerary, Couchot reintroduces
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Figure 5.1a-c Edmond Couchot and Michel Bret, 1 Sow to the Four Winds, 1990.
Figure 5.2a-c Edmond Couchot and Michel Bret, I Sow to the Four Winds, 1990.
some of the key questions raised by Charles-Pierre Baudelaire concerning
modernity, revisits a certain number of characteristic works, and presents some
new works from an original point of view—exploring the relationships that
establish themselves between the subject and the automatisms of the machine.
Couchot shows how these relationships have evolved from photography,
cinema, and television, and what they became under the growing and irre
pressible hegemony of the digital at a time when humans are connected with
the machine via ever-more-subtle interfaces.
In collaboration with the Centre de Recherche, Couchot is now analyzing
the evolution of digital interactivity modes. He notes a change in the sciences
of artificial intelligence and artificial life (connectionism, genetics, and roboc-
ics) that considerably modifies the relationship between humans and machines
formerly founded on a stimulus-response logic. Machines are now invested
with partially autonomous and human behavior. The digital tools utilized by
artists are developing further, thereby encouraging artists to explore new prac
tices where the body and the thought of the body are asked to play new roles.
Simultaneously, Couchot asks questions about the situation of art criticism
and proposes a new type of criticism that would go beyond its traditional
function of legitimation.
In their installation La Ftinambule Virtnelle (2000—2001), Michel Bret* and
Marie-Helene Tramus, propose that the spectator become, for one instant, a
tightrope walker. Using a handheld balancing pole, the spectator interacts
with a virtual tightrope walker, whose image is projected on a large screen.
The face-to-face interaction between the two “actors” consists of a balance
unbalance game. A sensor, attached to the balancing pole, sends position and
orientation data to a computer, which interprets the data in real time as forces
acting on the virtual dynamic actor, controlled by means of neural networks.
In this way, the actor develops autonomous motion strategies acquired during
this period of learning. More chan a simple feedback, this system is an artifi
cial being, albeit an elementary one, but showing some of the properties of
life. For instance, the generalization characterizing the neural networks gives
the virtual actor the capacity for potentially unlimited reactions—not learned,
but nevertheless appropriate. This intelligence appears as an emergent pro
priety of the interactions between the virtual actor’s elements (artificial
neurons), the data from the environment, and the actor’s own structure (the
simulated human body). The spectator/parcicipant thus develops autonomous
gestural strategies acquired during the learning period, the face to face

between the two actors, the virtual and the real ones, evolves around an aes
thetic game between equilibrium and disequilibrium.
The development of this device has facilitated the creation of another Bret
and Tramus installation, Danse avec Moi (2001), where the spectator is invited
to react in real time with the image, but now the virtual dancer is projected
on a large screen by means of a gyroscopic pickup, which the spectator wears
on a belt (figure 5.3). The speed variations of the pickup's changing position
are interpreted by a computer as forces acting on the model of a body who
reacts in an appropriate fashion and according to its apprenticeship with the
aid of neuronal circuits. In front of the spectator in motion, the virtual dancer
improvises the steps that result from a compromise between the acquired
strategies of reequilibrium and the dance movements, on the one hand, and
the spectator’s gestures, on the other. In this way, an original artistic context
emerges from the interaction between the spectator and the artificial being,
which possesses a certain autonomy and a certain capacity for gestural inven
tion. This context is close to a real, unexpected situation that suscitates
improvisation, invention, imagination, and surprise.
Figure 5.3 Michel Bret and Marie-H6lfcne Tramus, Dance with Me, 2001.
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Regarding Bret’s personal, intellectual, and artistic itinerary, his predilec
tion for mathematics was always intimately linked to his plastic preoccupa
tions. He examined problems concerning spatial representation and
particularly non-Euclidean geometry. These theoretical considerations found
a response in his pictorial practice, which was very much influenced by modern
art (surrealism, abstract art, and op art), and during his travels to Paris, Bret
never failed to visit che Museum of Modern Art, che Louvre, and che Palais
de la Decouverte (che Science Museum).
In 1964, Brec decided on a teaching career and passed che appropriate
examinations at the University of Lyons. With a desire to discover other cul
tures, he left France for seven years on a teaching itinerary that took him to
North Africa, South America, and Asia. He combined this with an intense
pictorial production featuring che Sahara and Arabic calligraphy, artisanship,
and music, along with works influenced by pre-Columbian civilizations, che
music of the barrios of Caracas and Rio de Janeiro, and the art of the Indians
of che Amazonian forescs. Ocher influences came from Middle Eastern
mosques, Persia, Indian and Thai temples, the music of Bali, and che Viet
namese and Chinese civilizations. These new, for Brec, perceptions, sounds,
aesthetic areas, and cultures were all translated into paintings.
In 1975, Brec joined Herve Huitric at the Department of Art and Informa
tion at the University of Paris 8 in Vincennes, and after studying che elements
of information science, started programming images himself at a time when
microcomputers were still quite rudimentary and lacked software. For Brec this
was advantageous since everything had co be invented. He did not lose sight of
his painterly preoccupations, but simply added movement to them. His pic
tures became interactive programs in real time and synthetic digital films. After
finishing a dissertation of a new kind, at the border between arc and what was
beginning to be called “new technologies,” Brec produced “live” concerts with
the musicians of the Arc et Informatique group in 1980, during which elec
tronic music and interactive images were generated in real time. Using a micro
computer, Bret controlled colored animations chat followed the music with the
aid of an interactive program (a kind of “image instrument"), which he had
written as “assembler.” From then on, this instrument replaced his paintbrush.
As he penetrated the world of informatics, he became more and more interested
in its languages, conceiving an original system (Anyfo, entirely invented by an
artist) whose basic premises were plastic and technical, in that order. Bret
strongly criticized commercial software written by engineers, who often lacked

any artistic culture and thus inserted into their code an implicit aesthetic factor
that, as an artist, Bret refused entirely. Bret was foremost critical of the limited
perspective, provided to artists through use of the software. He also criticized
methods of animation based on traditional techniques, the modeling of objects
considered as belonging necessarily to a three-dimensional scene, and the
“entirely mouse” option that kept artists in a purely manual role, far away from
the potentialities of the machine.
From the 1990s onward, Bret took an interest in behaviorist animation,
which broke radically with classical digital objects in order to come closer to
life. This corresponded well with interactivity that rehabilitated the role of
the body and participation.
In 1995, Bret discovered the literature of connectionism and he constructed
neuronal circuits in the form of small brains, which he then grafted onto his
creatures. At once they took on a certain autonomy, thereby allowing Bret to
experiment more freely with his creations.
At the same time, the problem of interactivity remained one of Bret’s main
preoccupations, and with Couchot and Tramus, he conceived several interac
tive artistic installations, beginning with La Plume et le Pissenlit (1998), then
La ftinambule virtuelle and Danse avec moi., as mentioned above. All these exper
imentations led these artists to take an interest in connectionism and evolu
tionism, and led Bret to devise his genetic algorithms. These artists’ interest
in the problem of spectator perception/action as well as virtual beings enticed
them to study the historical sources of information science and technology, in
particular the intelligent machines of Alan Mathison Turing, the automates
of Isaac Newman and Chris Langton, and the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener.
They utilized the latest discoveries in neuroscience and placed the body at the
center of their artistic concerns—not the realistic body of digitality but the
one that had to do with the feelings and the actions of the spectator, who may
discover through this interactivity a new kind of perception, one’s own as well
as that of the machine. One can now speak of artificial life and reevaluate the
status of the creator, the artwork, and the spectator. But the fundamental point
resided in the convergence of artistic practice with scientific models—
something no longer realized on a calculable mode but a living one. As a con
sequence, performance art such as dance, music, and the circus appeared to be
a privileged area for artistic investigation, and even today, Bret and Tramus
continue to experiment in this arena.
Chapter 5
Tramus* has long been attracted both to the creation of images and theo
retical reflection, and she simultaneously studied visual arts at the University
of Paris 8 and philosophy at the Paris 8 and Paris 1 universities. At the begin
ning of the 1970s, she practiced documentary photography before discover
ing video a few years later, thereby allowing her to develop an artistic
demarche by experimenting with this medium and creating a series of mul
tiscreen installations on the theme “filming time/'After photography and
video art, Tramus discovered digital images, with all their artistic potential
ities, and participated in the creation of several digital films. In 1984, she
helped found the Art and Technology of the Image Group at the University
of Paris 8, in the company of Couchot, Bret, Huitric, and Nahas. Spectator
participation constituted the leading idea at the time of how to traverse the
different techniques of image automatization, including photography, video,
and digital images. As a result of the added depth to this question in light of
digital interactivity, Tramus started creating interactive artistic installations.
In 1989, she conceived Speakerine de Synthese, a three-dimensional digital face
that spoke in real-time phrases, introduced via a computer keyboard. In the
installation Corps et Graphie (1997), Tramus invited the spectator to become
a choreographer and compose a kind of vegetal organism in real-time motion
with the aid of several digital female dancers, and thus through interactivity,
to substitute the bodily movement in the midst of an aesthetic experience. If
interactivity again radically questioned the traditional relations between the
artist, the artwork, and the spectator, the introduction of a logic of autonomy
into these relationships rendered them still more complex and profound, since
this entailed putting the spectator in direct contact with the simulation of
human beings, imaginary organisms, and simple images. This direction con
tinues to orient Tramus’s present-day research, in collaboration with Bret,
including the above-mentioned La Funambnle ViriaeUe and Danse avec Moi.
Tramus and Bret are planning to present the devices for the latter to real acro
bats so that these performers can add their competence to it and allow the
system to evolve. The two artists also plan to let several virtual dancers inter
act with real dancers so as to create new choreographic effects.
Osmose (1994-1995) and Ephemere (1997-1998) by Canadian artist Char
Davies* are impressive immersive interactive environments. To experience
these works, participants (or “immersants,” as Davies calls them) don a stereo
scopic head-mounted display (in Davies’s opinion, still the most effective way

to enable sensations of full-body immersion in an all-encompassing space). The
immersant also wears a vest that tracks breathing and balance—a strategy
intended to reaffirm the role of the subjectively lived body in virtual space.
The graphics in both works, true to Davies long-established visual sensibility,
consist of soft-edged, luminous, semitransparent forms set among flowing
particles.
The first realm encountered in Osmose is a three-dimensional Cartesian grid,
but with the immersant’s first breaths, this gives way to a clearing, surrounded
by a forest. One can, through breath, endlessly float through this forest; or
enter the clearing’s lone tree and the interior of its leaves; or sink into a pond
and its oceanic abyss; or rise above the clearing into the clouds or descend into
subterranean depths among translucent roots and rocks. Two additional
realms—the philosophical text above and the software code below—function
as conceptual parentheses around the work (figure 5.4). The sounds in Osmose
were originally sampled from male and female voices uttering phonetics, then
digitally processed and localized in three dimensions. The sound is then gen
erated on the fly, in real time, responding like the visuals to changes in the
immersant’s head and body position, direction and speed. After fifteen minutes
of immersion, a symbolic lifeworld appears and then irretrievably recedes,
bringing the session to an end.
In Ephtmere, Osmose's iconic repertoire of trees, rocks, and streams is
extended to include body organs, arteries, and bones, suggesting a symbolic
correspondence between body and earth. While Osmose consists of a dozen
spatial realms, Ephemere is structured into three levels: landscape, subterranean
earth, and a substratum of interior body flesh. Ephemere is structured tempo
rally as well: its landscape changes continually, passing through diurnal/noc-
turnal cycles and seasonal transformation; its subterranean boulders give way
to body organs; they in turn transform to bone. Throughout che experience,
various elements come into being, linger, and pass away, with the timing of
their appearances dependent on the immersant’s position, slowness of move
ment, and steadiness/duration of gaze (figure 5.5). A striking example are che
dormanc seeds chac when accivaced by a gaze, allow encry into cheir bloom
ing’s luminous space. The river (also an underground scream or a vein/arcery)
has a gravicacional pull thac propels che immersanc along while randomly
transforming the surrounding spatial realm. Such transformations are also
aural, and che sound is thus in a constant state of flux. Finally, depending on
the immersant’s whereabouts after a dozen minutes within the work, there are
Chapter 5
Figure 5.4 Char Davies, Osmose: Subterranean Earth, 1995. Digital frame captured in real
time through a head-mounted display during a live performance of the immersive virtual envi
ronment Osmose.

Figure 5.5 Ghar Davies, Ephem£re\ Forest Stream, 1998. Digital frame captured in real time
through a head-mounted display during a live performance of the immersive virtual environ
ment Ephemere. *
multiple endings, whereby the rich flows of color, texture, and sound begin
to fade, leaving only autumn leaves, ashes, or embers falling in empty space.
While the central experience of these two works is immersive, there is a per
formative aspect as well: during public exhibitions, the solitary journeys of
participants are video projected (sometimes stereoscopically) so that an audi
ence can follow the visual/aural explorations in real time as they unfold from
the participant’s subjective point of view. Ac the same time, the audience can
watch a silhouette of the participant's body. The projection of this gesturing
body shadow alongside the real-time video projection serves co poeticize che
relationship between the participating body and the resulting visual/aural
effects—and most important, draws attention co the body’s grounding role in
virtual space.4
Chapter 5
In both Osmose and Ephtmere, Davies proposes an alternative virtual reality
that resists the usual trajectory through the employment of specific design
strategies, such as a user interface based on the tracking of breath and balance
as a means of countering the disembodying tendency of virtual reality. Davies’s
use of multilayered semi transparency in the graphics is intended to subvert
the conventional aesthetic of hard-edged-objects-in-empty-space—in her
view, a striving for mimeticism that upholds Cartesian dualities. Davies’s work
eschews hand-driven interface devices on the basis that they reflect/reinforce
a controlling and dominating stance toward the world. Her work encourages
a contemplative mode of exploration whereby unexpected and subtle percep
tual confusions might occur, instead of the usual high-speed shoot-and-kill
scenario that rewards violence and aggression.
The immersive virtual environments of Davies are the fruit of more than
twenty years of artistic practice dealing with nature, psyche, and embodied
perception. Her work effectively demonstrates that the medium of virtual
reality is capable of communicating sensibilities other than those with which
it is commonly associated. Far from adhering to the techno-utopian view of
cyberspace, Davies considers the phenomenon of virtual reality to be a reflec
tion of che Platonic/Newtonian/Cartesian philosophical tradition and the
military-scientific-industrial complex from which it has sprung: a medium
whose conventional design metaphors reinforce the dominant Western world
view by proposing a realm ruled by mind, where flesh is absent and there is
no dirt. While some believe bodies and nature are outmoded metaphors,
Davies considers such faich in engineering silicon as a means of delivery into
immortal omnipotence symptomatic of an almost pathological denial of our
bodily embeddedness in the biological matrix of Earth, and as such, the classic
testosterone-induced dream.5
Davies envisions virtual reality as a means of undoing habitual assump
tions about our being-in-the-world. She approaches the medium as a
visual/aural spatial/temporal arena for perceptually “changing space” in the
sense meant by the French philosopher and essayist Gaston Bachelard: “By
changing space, by leaving the space of ones usual sensibilities, one enters
into communication with a space that is psychically innovating. . . . For we
do not change place, we change our Nature.”6 In short, Davies’s goal is to use
virtual reality as a means of temporarily collapsing boundaries between subject
and object, interior and exterior, self and world—in order to facilitate a
refreshing of perception, thereby potentially resensitizing participants to the

extraordinariness of being alive, sentient, and embodied, here now, among all
this, briefly immersed in the flow of life through space and time.
Davies began her career in the late 1970s as a painter and filmmaker. Her
research into embodied perception and non-Cartesian spatialities dates back
to 1980, when she began exploring the effects of her own extreme myopic
vision: a dramatically altered world in which hard edges, separate objects, and
indeed all distinctions between things disappear, dissolved in light. (This
work laid the foundation for her unique visual aesthetic of multilayered semi
transparency, as later seen in Osmose and Ephtmere.') During the mid-1980s,
Davies continued this research, exhibiting a group of paintings called Espaces
Entrelacfc—that is, interlaced spaces. Subsequently, an increasing desire to rep
resent nature as perceptually enveloping caused Davies to seek a means of
going beyond the painterly two-dimensional picture plane, and precipitated
her interest in the virtual three-dimensionality of computer graphic space.
Driven by the force of her artistic inquiry, Davies became a founding direc
tor of what arguably became the world’s leading computer-animation software
development company, Softimage. As head of visual research from 1988 to
1997, Davies became well versed in the commercially driven biases in the tech
nology. With the intent of subverting these conventions, she produced a series
of three-dimensional computer-generated still images (the Interior Body Series,
1990—1993) Using complex lighting techniques and semitransparency co rep
resent non-Cartesian spaces and suggest a metaphoric coequivalency between
the interior lived body and nature. These images received numerous awards for
their rich unconventional sensibility and were exhibited as large-scale light
boxes around the world. Even though che images were constructed and rendered
as three-dimensional scenes, however, they ultimately remained two-dimen
sional because of the output medium; for Davies, this posed a huge limitation.
In mid-1993, Davies began writing about the potential of immersive
virtual environments as a more effective means of “crossing the picture plane”
into enveloping three-dimensional space—and laid out her intentions for sub
verting conventional approaches to virtual reality. In early 1994, she assem
bled a team (John Harrison and Georges Mauro, with Dorota Blaszczak and
Rick Bidlack on sound) and embarked on the production of Osmose.
Fifteen co twenty thousand people have to date been individually immersed
in Davies’s virtual environments, in exhibitions held at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art (2001), the National Art Gallery of Canada (1998),
che Museum of Monterrey, Mexico (1997-1998), and rhe Barbican Art Centre
Chapter 5
in London (1997), to name only a few. Many participants have reportedly
expressed astonishment at their paradoxical perceptual experience, and some
have been so emotionally overcome they have cried. As one person remarked
in a letter to the artist: “(The work] heightened an awareness of my body as
a site of consciousness and of the experience and sensation of consciousness
occupying space. It’s the most evocative exploration of the perception of con
sciousness that I have experienced since I can’t remember when."
Davies is currently involved (through Immersence, the research and devel-
opment/production company she founded in 1998) in porting Osmose and
Ephemere from high-end hardware to personal computers, and in developing
strategies for further work. She continues to write and lecture widely, most
recently at Cambridge Universicy for the sixteenth Darwin College Lecture
Series on Space, and among other honors, has been awarded an honorary doc
torate of fine arts from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and the
regent’s lectureship at the University of California, Los Angeles.
For over thirty years Rebecca Allen* has investigated a variety of techno
logical forms of expression including 3-D computer graphic animation, music
videos, TV logo production, video games, large-scale performance works, arti
ficial life, multisensory interfaces, interactive installations, and virtual reality.
Allen is not interested in technology for its own sake, however. Rather, she is
interested in a technoculture that humanizes technology even while main
taining a critical stance toward it. Or perhaps one can say that it is her crit
ical approach toward technology that helps humanize it. Allen demonstrates
this critical approach with her concern with artistic quality and the concep
tual integrity of her work—a conceptual integrity that stresses the effect on
the mind of the immersant/user. Indeed her main concern appears to be the
investigation of the perceptual and cognitive processes of the immersant/user
in conjunction with the technological apparatus with which she is engaged.
Her approach is based on a belief in technology however, but technology as a
means of expanding human potential by provoking people to become smarter.
Not just intellectually smarter, but smarter about their own emotional reac
tions co technology. Thus she approached technology from an almost expces-
sionistic angle, where human feeling and emotional reaction predominate the
art. Such an approach is taken in an attempt to help people today live with
the overload of information to which we are exposed on a regular basis.
Her work strives to demonstrate how the technological landscape (which we
cannot escape) can be paradoxically dominated by human needs. By the

immersant/user experiencing a space where digital and physical realities
merge and by interacting with her intricate digital characters, Allen exposes
her audiences to experiences where our carnal bodies and virtual data bodies
coexist and interact comfortably. This is Alien’s long-standing vision, a vision
that acknowledges that we cannot escape the realm of the technological, but
we need to take control of it, adjusting it to our needs as humans. By explor
ing advanced electronic tools Allen helps us understand where technology is
most active in our lives.
Allen began her exploration of the relationship between art and technol
ogy as an art student at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the early
1970s where Allen's prime influences were the art and technology movements
of the early twentieth century: the Bauhaus, the Futurists, and the Construc
tivists, primarily. Using a state-of-the-art computer system called Vector
General, and an early program that could interpolate 2D drawings, Allen
realized her first computer animation in 1974.
After RISD, Allen worked for a short time as a graphic designer for a fur
niture company. However she found this work tedious, and so kept looking
for other avenues of expression involving art and technology for her creative
expression. In due course she was accepted as a special student to MIT where
she enrolled in a course on computer graphics taught by Nicholas Negro
ponte. In 1978 Allen became a graduate student at MIT and began her work
with the Architecture Machine Group, an experience of immersion into inter
active media that opened her resourceful mind to the possibilities of digital
technology. Through this exposure to high technology and advanced render
ing processes in 3-D space, she was able to realize a number of projects that
have become classics, above all the Aspen Movie Map and Personalized
Movies, also known as Movie Manuals. Allen then decided to follow her inter
est in computer animation because she wanted to realize a quality of color
and resolution that interactive images could not yet make available. She
therefore joined the Computer Graphics Laboratory at New York Institute
of Technology (NYIT), one of the leading centers for advanced 3-D com
puter graphics by the late 1970s. The NYIT Computer Graphics Lab had
superb computational facilities, and this technological potential was coupled
to no specific utilitarian market agenda. Thus the pairing of freedom with
technological potential served to stimulate and formulate Alien’s art in a con
structive fashion, which she continues to draw strength from to this day. There
were no requirements to create commercial software packages for the market
Chapter 5
at the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab—the focus was on the free exploration
of computer graphics and animation. However, at the lab, Allen created some
much-commended commercial work, including her EMMY-award-winning
opening sequence for CBS’s Walter Cronkite’s Universe. She also began to create
her own computer-animated artworks, including Steps (1982), which was
inspired by Oscar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus theater. Allen also realized a
computer-animated figure of St. Catherine for the film version of Twyla
Tharp’s performance piece The Catherine Wheel (1983). This animated figure
was the first computer-generated human to appear on television.
At the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, Allen created some of the earliest
music videos that utilized computer animation—for example, her Adventures
in Success (1983) and Smile (1983) for WillPowers at Island Records. She also
achieved acclaim for the music video Musiqtte Non Stop for Kraftwerk in 1986.
These music videos contained original, and very arduous, computer anima
tion sequences, especially rotating 3-D faces and subtle facial expressions that
became the best known characteristics of Alien’s work. This Kraftwerk video
Musique Non Stop is considered today to be one of the icons of technoculture.
Its imagery has been cited in a myriad of techno contexts, including posters
and flyers for techno raves to Nam June Paik’s multiscreen video installations.
Following her experience at the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, Allen
moved to Los Angeles to teach at the University of California Los Angeles
(UCLA). Allen was shortly thereafter invited by the Art Future festival in
Barcelona to bring to fruition several projects in Spain, including installation
works, computer animations for the World Expo in Seville, the Olympics in
Barcelona, and the TV series El Arte del Video. She also worked on perform
ance projects with the legendary Spanish performance group La Fura dels Baus.
Given her interest in creating real-time high-resolution 3-0 virtual worlds,
Allen shortly thereafter joined Virgin Interactive Entertainment, a video game
company, as creative director, executive producer, and 3-D visionary. Allen
worked on a number of games, including Demolition Man for 3-DO. Fol
lowing this experience, she accepted a position at a new department of
Design/Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles.
Recently Allen has created a series of multiparticipant, artificial life,
immersive projects called The Bush Soul where visitors may enter and experi
ence lush networked worlds. The title The Bush Soul is based on a West African
principle that a person has more than one soul and that there is a style of soul
called the “bush soul" that exists within an untamed animal in the bush. In

The Bush Soul, avatars amalgamate artificial life tendencies with those of the
immersant through the use of voice and gesture—as the a-life forms respond
using tactile feedback. This is consistent with Allen’s earlier work in that her
work has always concentrated on inserting the presence of the human into the
activity of the machine, a concern she dealt with by slotting human atten
dance into the computer by requiring the human to interact with The Bush
Soul. To create The Bush Soul, Allen received a grant from Intel Corporation
that allowed her to put together a team of computer science and design stu
dents whose goal it was to create a game engine system (called Emergence)
based on artificial life technology. Allen then used the Emergence engine to
formulate a complex virtual world populated by odd creatures with unantic
ipated behaviors. The first piece was called The Bush Soul, but the title became
a general term for a series of three related, but slightly different installations
(figures 5.6, 5.7).
In The Bush Soul an immersant’s “soul"—which is represented as a bubble
of pulsing liveliness—enters a virtual bush world that appears to be animate
and responsive to the immersant’s actions. Through a-life programming, a
Bush Soul character can be endowed with apparent "feelings” toward any object
in the Bush Soul world, feelings that compel a character’s movements and influ
ence its reactions. As an immersant explores the environment of The Bush Soul,
his or her “soul” may be said to dwell in the body of certain artificial life
forms. Although the immersant’s experiences within The Bush Soul are per
Chapter 5
ceptibly influenced by video game formats, unlike with typical video games,
Bush Soul contains no conclusion or finality, only continual exploration and
pleasure.7
The Tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean (1995), a tele-virtual event by Maurice
Benayoun* presented simultaneously at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal in September 1995, was a sensory
manifestation that favored dialogue between different people. The voice of the
interlocutor here was not only an instrument for an individual message but a
compass that leads to an ultimate goal, which is an encounter. In this work,
the participants delve into images of the past in order co provoke this
encounter (figure 5.8).
Both The Tunnel around the World (2002) and The World Nerve Tunnel (Far
Near) (e-motion) (2000-2001), an installation of local televisual reality, induce
people to meet each other in the same space, through images and sounds.
Whereas the Tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean linked tunnel “diggers” thou
sands of miles away, Far Near functions as a network so as co create a tech
nological distance between people actually in the same place. This network
operates like a huge nervous system, making the diggers sensitive to human
pain and humanity’s anguishing trouble zones. A signal linking the dig
gers follows a random path around the planet via the Internee. Through war
areas, terrorist sites, and places marked by famine, misery, drought, and

Figure 5.8 Maurice Benayoun, The Tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean, 1995. Tele-virtual
installation at the Pompidou Center in Paris and Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal.
© 1995 by Maurice Benayoun.
dictatorships, the signal’s path is projected on the wall of a tunnel. When the
Internet signal passes through one of these troubled zones, graphically repre
sented by colors, a communication between the diggers is established.
Benayoun began his long itinerary as video and multimedia artist with a
number of photographic works and short video films. He took a big step
forward in 1985 when he realized a series of video projects, Pieces a conviction^
that permitted him to work in certain well-defined situations after placing
the spectator into a state of immersive interactivity. In 1992-1993,
Benayoun selected a number of artists to produce works meant to be realized
using a virtual reality technique, to be later applied by him, as a principle,
in some virtual reality installations. These artists’s works were gathered
together in a collection of contemporary art that Benayoun named Art after
the Museum. For him, the museum generally represents the dead memory of
art; in his collection, on the other hand, he was trying to create a living
memory by including only works that represented a sequel to the practice of
Chapter 5
each artist and by taking into account the peculiarities of their environment.
Benayoun’s collection already involved the notion of virtual space that led him
to explore the possibilities of the digital image and the interactivity of the
spectator.
In 1989, influenced visually by cartoonists and intellectually by writers of
science fiction and the literature of the fantastic, he created the Quarxs series,
which involved more advanced animation techniques such as three-
dimensional high-definition images and thirty-five-millimeter film. The
Quarxs, purely imaginary and invisible odd beings that are supposed to be
found anywhere in our environment, served as a pretext for Benayoun to
explore the immediate environment and the limits of scientific understand
ings of reality with the aid of new techniques. Since the 1980s, Benayoun had
examined the areas of communication and technology in an attempt to cross
in a facetious manner the territories shared between art and reality; with the
Quarxs series, he quickly leaves digital images in favor of installations employ
ing networks and virtual reality devices.
In 1994, he asks his Big Questions, a series of interactive virtual reality
installations and Internet realizations. The first of these, Is God Flat? is fol
lowed a year later by Is the Devil Curved? In the first, a playful and labyrinthic
quest for God’s image, participants are invited to dig into brick walls, whereas
in Is the Devil Curved? a piece that includes voluminous figures with intense
seductive qualities, the user intervenes in a blue sky littered with clouds.
Both of these works of virtual reality are based on the same principle: We
are in a closed room from which we can only escape if we dig through some
corridors in real time and a three-dimensional material. The base of the archi
tectural elements is reconstructed by each image. The spectator can choose
any direction on a horizontal level. The constructed corridors remain in the
computer’s memory and can be arranged in such a way as to constitute an
architectural space of great complexity. Fundamentally, digging is a metaphor
here for the spectator’s creation of the very world they are exploring. In other
words, the visitor benefits from their overall power—due to the fact that the
world one explores is being constructed around one’s movements—but at the
same time, the visitor is confronted with the impossibility of finding an exit,
a way to escape from the fatality of a world chat is only a trace of what one
produces.
Benayoun asks a third question: And What about Me? (1995). This inter
active Internet work does not involve any foraging but instead presents the

world from a two-dimensional aerial point of view. One can freely choose a
part of the world and throw oneself on it like a small pebble or a grain of
sand, which in falling on the earth, deforms the continent it touches. Thus,
the world is provisionally modified by our presence. In a second part of And
What about Me? everyone has the chance to participate in rewriting the world’s
creation.
Benayoun’s concern with the aesthetic specificity of artistic endeavors in a
highly technical environment as well as the stress he puts on processes and
not the final result are apparent not only in his Virtual Tunnels series but also
World Skin, Crossing Talks, and Art Impact.
One of the most impressive works created by Benayoun, World Skin: A Safari
into the Land of War was first shown at the Ars Electronica exhibition in Linz,
Austria, in 1997 (figure 5.9). Benayoun claims that by taking photographs, one
can rip the skin off the body of the world. This work is intended to show the
Figure 5.9 Maurice Benayoun, World Skin: A Safari into the Land of War, 1997. Immer
sive installation, screen shot. © 1997 by Maurice Benayoun.
Chapter 5
status of the image in the process of getting a grip on the world. The rawest
and most brutal realities can be reduced to an emotional superficiality in our
perception. Acquisition, evaluation, and understanding of the world constitute
a process of capturing it.
In sharp contrast to the video games that transform people into passionate
warriors, here the audio unmasks the true nature of apparently harmless
gestures and seeks to provide a form of experience rather than a form of
comprehension. Some things cannot be shared. Among them are the pain and
the image of our remembrance. The worlds to be explored here can bring these
things closer to us, but always simply as metaphors, never as a simulacrum.
As for Crossing Talks (1999), it immerges us in a space of noncommunica
tion, but takes as its model the exchanges occurring on the Internet. This
work is a complex device that closely resembles a communications process on
a network and gives the user the ability to find themself with others in cyber
space. Yet the purpose of Crossing Talks is not to justify the status of the
exchanges on the Internet but rather to reassess the problems of representa
tion and communication with regard to the world as a whole, and to stage
settings that provoke a worldwide dialogue.8
On the other hand, Art Impact: Collective Retinal Memory—an installation
presented simultaneously at the Pompidou Center from June 20 to July 4,
2000 and on the Internet as a window opening on the possibilities of spher
ical photography—gave visitors the feeling of being at an exhibition—in this
case, the Beauty and Its Sequels (La beaute et apres) show, held in Avignon,
France. Whereas this latter exhibition juxtaposed artistic creations and frag
ments of nature chosen for their aesthetic qualities, Art Impact added neigh
borhood places that lacked any aesthetic connotation, such as supermarkets
and slaughterhouses. Art Impact was conceived as a collecive retinal memory,
an original and amalgamating device that allowed visitors to construct a new
visual space by displacement.
Benayoun is an artist preoccupied with images of war and destruction, and
more so with new forms of exchanges and encounters on a worldwide scale as
well as new definitions of space as architecture constructed by displacement
or by the visitor who is constantly placed in the center of the world. But it
is Benayoun’s inquiry into the relationship between the virtual and the real
that ties his whole production together. For him, the virtual and its vicissi
tudes, beyond any worship of digital simulation, offer the possibility to dis
cover and experience a new deciphering of the real.

Installations such as Solitary (1992) and Shadotvs (1993) by Simon Biggs*
adopted an ultraminimalist approach to fully interactive and immersive envi
ronmental works that focused on the interaction not between the human and
the machine but between the human and human. These computer-mediated
spaces, employing large-scale data projection with remote visual sensing
systems, functioned co bring people into encounters with one another that
involved challenging, even paranoid, dynamics. The participants in such
works experienced extreme sensory deprivation contrasted with monumental
images of the human form that somehow always seemed on the flickering edge
of being, suggesting their own, and that of their viewers, mortality in these
intensely dark but highly charged spaces (figure 5.10).
Biggs first programmed an IBM 360 mainframe computer in Fortran IV
to produce an image in the Adelaide 1978 program. Since then, he has fol
lowed a consistent trajectory wedding experimental art and digital technolo
gies. Initially active as a painter, Biggs first utilized the computer as an aid
in che concepcualizacion and produccion of images, and lacer, chrough che
Figure 5.10 Simon Biggs, Solitary, 1992. Installation photo of viewer interacting with pro
jection, Gallery Otso, Helsinki, Finland.
Chapter 5
use of programmed systems, as a way to automate the entire image-making
process. The abundance of visual material led the artist to begin exploring
animation and, on realizing the limitations of such an approach, a combina
tion of conceptual and installation art with integrated, automated, computer
visualization systems in the early 1980s. For Biggs, the aesthetic and con
ceptual possibilities of the code itself was of at least equal importance as the
resulting image streams.
In 1983, Biggs produced his first installation incorporating computer
generated automata—something akin to a simulated fungus or virus. Dis
played live on a monitor, and placed between a tank containing fish and a rock
covered with slowly growing crystals, the thematic intent of The Reproductive
System was clear. Biggs further developed this practice over the next few years,
introducing live video feedback systems and interactive systems using remote
vision-sensing systems, which he had begun to develop when an arcist-in-
residence at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisa
tion in Sydney in 1984.
Biggs left Australia and settled in London in 1986. In 1987, he became
an artist-in-residence at what is now the Centre for Electronic Arts at
Middlesex University. His geographic relocation also led to an artistic
reassessment, which was reflected in the visual character of his work. Gone
were the earlier abstract-symbolic and mathematical images; they were
replaced by a rich visual aesthetic reminiscent, at least on the surface, of
medieval illuminated manuscripts and stained glass. His work continued co
engage with computing technologies and automated systems, but within a
broader sociopolitical and historical context. The computer had become not
just a means but a primary metaphor at the heart of his work. Projects such
as Golem (1988) and Alchemy (1990) are exemplary of this period.
Biggs’s work of the lace 1980s—using compucer animation, interactive
installation, and other related media—was visually dense and rich, and almost
as overburdened with theoretical concerns as it was with medieval and baroque
ornament. Thus, the work he began to produce in che early 1990s arrived as
a dramatic contrast.
In works such as Halo (1998-1999), Biggs has taken his interest in the
monumental, elusive, and interactive space to high levels of physical scale and
audience engagement, retaining a distinctively rigorous and disciplined
approach. In Halo, naked human figures fly fifteen meters above the viewers’
heads, circling as if magnetically drawn to their own destruction and thus

forming enormous halos of light from contorted human forms around the
viewers’ heads, ultimately falling to the ground to confront the viewers, life
size, with illegible groans and screams. The impact of such works, due to the
physical scale, volume of sound, and character of the imagery, is a visceral
experience; because of the hair-trigger and user-oriented interactivity, it is also
an immediate experience.
The artist’s interest in the. human form as a metaphor for the human condi
tion has been reflected in works like As Falling Falls (1996), Document (1996),
The Waiting Room (1998), and Parallax (2001) as well as in his collaborations
with choreographers such as Stephen Petronio (New York) and Sue Hawksley
(London), complemented by working with composers experienced in live-art
scoring such as Stuart Jones (London) and Hans Peter Kuhn (Berlin).
Biggs’s interest in the human body as an image of the mortal is comple
mented by his interest in and use of language. Although Biggs is known for
his theoretical writings on new media art, for him language is not primarily
a means of expression but a means of coming to be. For this artist, language
is the defining instrument of the human and the computer as a model or
metaphor for this. In works such as The Great Wall of China (1996), Halo, and
Mozaic (1999), Biggs deploys language in autodestructive mode. The texts are
auto-generated by computers employing sophisticated generative grammar
software embedded in behavioral logic and interactive systems. The users do
not so much read the texts but are read by them as the texts bring themselves
dynamically into being.
This interest in the textual as well as the visual has paralleled Biggs’s
engagement with the Internet as an artistic medium. Where once Biggs would
have complemented his core installation-based practice with works on
video, or later CD-ROM, since 1995 the Net has come to take this role in
his practice. For example, The Great Wall of China, while existing as an instal
lation and a CD-ROM, had its genesis on the Web, and Babel (2001) can only
exist on the Web as a multiuser interactive telematic work engaged as much
with the aesthetics of the database and the Web browser as it is with images
or texts.
In projects such as Babel, the artist is developing works where the computer
comes to function as a kind of paranoia-inducing extrasensory perception
machine. In this and other recent works, such as the immersive installation Par
allax, the viewer is confronted not only with their particular view and experi
ence of a thing but also with that of all others who are viewing the work at that
Chapter 5
time, whether in situ as an immersive installation or online as a Web site (or
as a hybrid of these two media) (figures 5.11 and 5.12). These works are con
cerned with the immersion of self in the collective production of meaning, the
mechanisms at the center of being and becoming human, and what happens
when we are exposed to this process of collective poesis without the mediation
of individuality or a particular point of view. In a sense, these projects can be
seen as phenomenological metaphors for the disappearance of self as we drown
in an information and language overload of our own manufacture.
Throughout his practice, Biggs has pursued and developed a thematic
concern with what it is to be human and how we are mediated by language,
our technologies, and our representations of ourselves and the world. His is
perhaps a romantic and apocalyptic vision, although often leavened with a
dark humor that lends a tragicomic dimension to his work. For Biggs, tech
nology has never been an end, or a fascination, but simply an essential, even

Figure 5.12 Simon Biggs, Parallax, 2001. Installation simulation showing three screens.
defining, characteristic of the human and thus the seif. It is perhaps for this
reason that he has never bothered to distinguish between that produced by
automata or the author’s own hand, for perhaps it is false to distinguish
between the self and its attendant machines, just as the Western distinction
between mind and body has proved a false dualism in recognition of the
complex, problematic, and polyvalent relations between self and other.
Vectorial Elevation (2000), a large-scale interactive installation by Rafael
Lozano-Hemmer,* transformed Mexico City’s historic center using robotic
searchlights controlled over the Internet, visitors could immerge themselves
in this luminous environment, and using the Web site, design ephemeral light
sculptures over the National Palace, city hall, the cathedral, and che Templo
Mayor Aztec ruins. The sculptures, made by eighteen xenon searchlights
located around Zocalo Square, could be seen from a ten-mile radius and were
sequentially rendered as they arrived over the Net. The Web site featured a
three-dimensional Java interface that allowed participants co make a veccorial
design over the city and see it from virtually any point of view. When the
Chapter 5
project server in Mexico received a submission, it was numbered and entered
into a queue. Every six seconds, the searchlights would orient themselves auto
matically and three Webcams would take pictures to document a participant’s
design. An archive page was made for each participant with comments, infor
martion, and watermarked photos of their design. A notification e-mail
message was sent once the archive Web page was done. Vectorial Elevation
received participants from over eighty-nine countries and all regions of
Mexico. To facilitate access, free terminals were also set up in public libraries
and museums all over the country. Zocalo Square’s monumental size makes
the human scale seem insignificant; for some Mexican scholars, the square is
emblematic of a rigid, monolithic, and homogenizing environment. Search
lights themselves have been associated with authoritarian regimes, in part due
to rhe military precedent of antiaircraft surveillance. Indeed, the Internet itself
is a legacy of a military desire for distributed operations control. By ensuring
that participants were an integral part of the artwork, Vectorial Elevation
attempted to establish new creative relationships between control technolo
gies, ominous urban landscapes, and a local and remote public. It was intended
to interface the postgeographic space of the Internet with the specific urban
reality of the world’s most populous city (figures 5.13 and 5.14).
Lozano-Hemmer is a Mexican Canadian electronic artist who works in rela
tional architecture, technological theater, and performance art. His work has
been shown in over a dozen countries and his writings have been widely pub
lished. With the support of the Telefonica Foundation in Madrid, he curated
Arte Virtual (1994), an electronic art exhibition in an abandoned subway
station. He also organized and moderated the fifth international conference on
cyberspace, SCYBERCONF, and initiated the Life X.O art and a-life compe
titions (figure 5-15).
In Handsight (1993), an interactive computer graphic environment by
Agnes Hegediis, the spectator seizes in their hand the interface in the form
of an eyeball. The eyeball activates a symbolic image into digital images cal
culated in real time and projected in front of the viewer on a circular screen.
The represented objects refer themselves to those contained in a small bottle
painted in 1883 by a Hungarian artist, who faces the screen on the other side
of the globe.
Digital technology produces systems that treat information in atoms and
fragments. These physical properties have profoundly influenced our concep
tual and philosophical approach to the world of information. We benefit thus

XS3W
Figure 5.13 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Vectorial Elevation: Relational Architecture 4,

1999-2004. Shown here at the Place Bellecour in Lyon, France. Photo by Rafael Lozano-
Hemmer.
from a kind of liberty that consists in the utilization of meanings isolated

from their original context—meanings that we transfer into other construc
tions. Hegediis is fascinated by the tension created between our cultural her
itage and the discontinuations produced by the new technologies. All her
works possess a symbolic meaning inasmuch as they represent a moment of
emotion and reflection in a personal history that becomes “objectivated.”
Handsight is a kind of theater of the memory of the symbolic objects of her
past works, which have been assembled in a virtual space with another series
of symbolic objects—in votive offerings found in the Hungarian tradition. In
this way, an experience emerges that neither belongs co the artist nor che pasc,
but becomes an autonomous interactive event in the present. The finality of
this work consists in the emphasis laid on some aspects of virtuality such as
telepresence, bodily separation, and the reincroduction of the function of the
senses. Another goal of this work is the creation of a reciprocal relationship
between the virtual and the real by means of a measurable change in a spe-
Chapter 5
Figure 5.14 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Vectorial Elevation: Relational Architecture 4,
1999-2004. The 3-D virtual interface for participants to make their own light designs over the
Internet.
cific physical object and its representation in other spaces and dimensions.
This takes place in the orbit of a visual environment in which the plastic
representation is constituted by a spherical anamorphosis that represents
enlarged perception—an endoscopic eye. The thematic structure of this work
is intended to be a projection directed toward the outside of psychological and
symbolic spaces. All elements melt clearly into each other in an environment
that consists of three principal parts: a large circular surface for video projec
tions, an interactive ocular interface in the form of an eye, and a transparent
vault with a hole into which this “eye” is placed. This vault furnishes the
observer with an endo-spatial environment whose manual exploration leads
directly to the representation of the virtual domain.
The immersive virtual reality installations by Mark W. Palmer* are con
ceived through a philosophical immanence. In terms of Palmer’s work, whac
the artist/philosopher enjoys about the digital is its immateriality and the
fact that this can be experienced through an embodied sensuality—and the

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Figure 5.15 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Amodal Suspension: Relational Architecture 8, 2003.

An interactive installation where cell phone and Internet messages sent via www.amodal.net
are visualized over the city sky with a network of searchlights. Commissioned for the opening
of the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Japan. Photo by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.
possibilities this gives us to rethink our habitual relations with the world—
which is according to Palmer what the power of art is all about. Discourses
concerning the digital have sought not so much to situate the digital but to
claim for it something beyond previous experiences. Within this context, the
“new” is often considered revolutionary in itself. But revolution radicalizes
rather than replaces norms. This characteristic can be seen in political revo
lution, which does not replace government but governments. The revolu
tionary is therefore paradoxically already known only through other
inadequate means.
Within fine arc and philosophy, space and time have traditionally been the
medium within which things are presented or represented. Consequently,
space and time are thought co be homogeneous and without quality, revealed
Chapter 5
only indirectly by that which fills them. In the move from sculpture to instal
lation art, however, Palmer’s work began to shed its relationship with the
object as such and became concerned with the sensibility of space. The
shorthand way that Palmer has always referenced this describes what has
become almost a cinematic cliche. This is the moment when, at an instance
of shock or realization in a film, the camera draws back while simultaneously
zooming in on its subject, creating the feeling that the space is expanding
around the subject. Both space and time are disrupted in this moment as the
narrative flow of the film is also disrupted during its execution. This was
recently given an additional twist in the opening scene of the Wachowski
brothers’ film The Matrix as the viewer is spun around a figure in the middle
of an action scene.
Making work that dealt with this sensibility as part of Palmer’s PhD meant
that he also had to theorize space such that it was not merely a measurement
or absence between positive values but “something” with an affective poten
tial. Moreover, having used digital techniques as a means to facilitate work,
Palmer increasingly became aware of how it was radically informing the
sensibility of his work. It was becoming a medium in itself, and Palmer was
faced with the task of developing a theory adequate for digital as well as real
spaces.
There is a common problem at the root of the claims made for digital and
physical spaces. Many who have attempted to theorize the digital have
adopted the language of the sublime—a language that even if it has been peri
odically rejected, has formed a cornerstone of aesthetic theory. Indeed, the
transcendental has underpinned ontology since Parmenides. The shearing of
the world of experience from its “organizing” principles has become axiomatic
of the quest for immutable and eternal truths, whether we discover these in
Plato’s forms or the laws of science. The corollary of this is that we too have
been split into a body and a soul or a “thinking substance.” The extent to
which this has informed contemporary thought can be seen in a brief com
parison of Plato and sci-fi writer William Gibson.
In his Phaedo, Plato records Socrates’ readiness to embrace his execution
due to “fact." It has been shown that if we are ever to have pure knowledge,
we must escape from the body and observe matters in themselves with the
soul itself.
In Gibson’s Neuroniancer (1984), his antihero, Case, is described after his
criminal employers exacted their revenge for the theft of their “assets,

damaging Case’s nervous system and destroying his ability to enter cyber
space. For Case, who had lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, this
spelled disaster. In the bars he had frequented as a cowboy hotshot, his elite
stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat.
Case ultimately fell into a prison of his own flesh.
As Michael Heim argues in his book Virtual Realism, “Cyberspace is
Platonism as a working product.” But Palmer does not believe in belaboring
this point; the parallel should be obvious. What we should remember is that
the transcendental and the notion of pure knowledge is not limited to Greek
philosophy and cyberculture. There is perhaps no clearer indication of this
stance than the conclusion to A Brief History of Time, in which Stephen
Hawking states that the discovery of a complete theory of everything would
be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind
of God.9
The tendency to think of the digital in this way has no doubt been com
pounded by the convenient analogy of “software" and “hard-ware.” But how
could one consider che work of art separate from the senses? How can the
mind/body duality implicit within such an ontology be maintained? When
almost every other discipline has worked against the notion of such a divide,
this seems willfully perverse. If we cake the case of sculpture, its physicality
immediately challenges this divide. Minimalism looked toward phenomenol
ogy, and particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s version, as a means to address
this and bring the body back into che consideracion of che aeschecic, buc che
problem inherent in this is that phenomenology is still a transcendental phi
losophy. Even chough Merleau-Ponty makes che body central to his phenom
enological investigations, it is still (arguably) the substitution of one kind of
a priori for another.
If we return to the consideration of the new media, what is remarkable is
chat a transcendental approach flouts the discoveries chat have been made
through the digital. While claiming that the digital is transcendental, refer
ences have been made co “emergent” phenomena, “order for free,” and “the
whole being more than the sum of the parts.”10 This has been interpreted as
an indication of a “higher” or transcendental principle. But we must be careful
as this imposes "order" on "disorder" and does violence to che nature of these
discoveries, for there is no order prior co the running of the system; order
arises from the system itself. This demands a radically different way of think
ing. It is here that we require an immanent rather than a transcendental ontol
Chapter 5
ogy. This is not a small task, and it is the theme of the theoretical research
that Palmer is presently involved with, but if one wished to examine these
issues, they are central to Spinoza and in particular Gilles Deleuze’s reading
of Spinoza. Indeed, it can be argued that the Deleuzean project means nothing
unless one grasps the implications of an immanent ontology. But this is not
the place to expand these concerns; rather, the question is, What does this
mean for practice?
A transcendental ontology means that the aesthetic references other experi
ences (or as in Immanuel Kant the sublime involves a negative representation).
Within an immanent ontology, the aesthetic is an event affecting sensibility
itself. Rather than being a blank page on which events are written, space and
time become a part of the event itself. So if we were to return to the example
of our cinematic cliche, it is as if our assumptions about the world fall back
during this moment of realization and the dynamics of an immanent ontology
within which space and time play a part are revealed, literally within a vortex
of being. But this experience is always an embodied one. This is where work
such as Char Davies’s Osmose has been so significant. Osmose involves
an embodied viewer within an environment in such a way that they are
kinesthetically enmeshed within that space. Yet Osmose is still conceived within
a transcendental ontology—something that can be confirmed by either reading
Davies’s statements about her work or simply looking the work itself. In one
essay she comments, "Soon after this paper goes to press, the stream will have
slowed to a trickle, the forests will have leafed and faded and the apples will be
ripening. Even on the most tranquil of days, a powerful force pours through
here, through every element and creature. This river of life and time, the
inexorable force that pours through all things, is what concerns me.”11
Here the transcendental nature of Daviess project is made evident. If an
“inexorable force . . . pours through all things," it can only be a vitalism that
animates otherwise inert matter. In a piece written with her collaborator John
Harrison they state, “We wanted Osmose to be a solitary, intimate experience,
one in which connection is made to the ‘depths’ of one's own self, not to other
people.”12 Because of this, the immersant is placed behind a screen on one side
of the installation and their display is projected (for an effectively passive audi
ence) on a screen on the other side. The images of immersed viewers used to
document the piece share a remarkable likeness to J. M. W. Turner’s paint
ings of angels. The other screen then becomes a portal on another world, a
transcendental realm that this figure occupies.

Because of display technologies and the paradigms on which computers
have been based, it has become an all-too-frequent phenomenon to have a
single viewer controlling an environment—an environment that is then pro
jected within a darkened space for the benefit of other users. Often referred
to as installations, these are of course a million miles away from installation
itself. The challenge within new media is to overcome this constraint in such
a way as to provide an immersive experience for all its users.
Palmer’s own work comes from his prior experience working with the
problem of "introducing” shifts in the sensibility of space through installa
tion. An example of this early practice is his Untitled (1994). It was during
this time that Palmer first experimented with computer-aided design/
computer-aided manufacturing. At first the temptation was to model things
that he might have made via other means. But a subtle shift in his work began
to emerge. Rather than merely a new tool, the new media was beginning to
effect the way in which Palmer approached his work in physical environments.
It was almost as if the “plasticity” of space within the computer-aided design
environment was starting to effect the objects through which Palmer was
trying to effect physical space.
Trained in the early 1980s, Palmer had been immersed in an ethos domi
nated by the notion of “truth to materials” coupled with a work ethic that
believed it was through a physical interaction with these materials that one’s
work would emerge. This colored his initial relationship to the digital. Indeed,
his sense was that immersive spaces would prove to be a poor second to phys
ical spaces because of what appeared to be a paucity of physical involvement.
But to take this attitude is to ignore the qualities offered by the digital. If
artists continually look at the digital as a way to reproduce what is already
known through other means (albeit faster or as an alternative reality), how
will we ever discover the qualities of the digital itself? Initially, Palmer’s work
made references'to physical objects, but increasingly it utilized geometric
primitives with architectural settings to “presence” space, leading to work
such as Resonance and Transience (1996). Almost without realizing it, Palmer
started creating increasingly minimal work such as Shift (1996), as if the
search for che sensibility that the artist was interested in meant the removal
of such physicality.
At this point, Palmer decided that he wanted to work with immersive
virtual reality. Having experienced Osmose, he became convinced that one could
have a physical embodied relationship to such a sensibility without needing
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co so literally contain che physical itself. Palmer’s Closeness and Distance (1997)
was the result. This work utilized the hanging of a large number of fishing
weights on a grid. Whereas in many pieces chat have hung objects as a means
of presenting che piece, in this work the hanging was the piece. The grid of
fine nylon filaments were barely visible if one stood still, however as soon as
one started moving around the piece, the moire patterns set up by che grid
caused che space co quiver (a cechnique also used in Resonance and Transience
via the use of mesh sheets).
The use of immersive virtual reality followed from these works. Although
Palmer had been adding a dynamic element to his work for a period of time
through the use of moire patterns, the prospect of using virtual reality radi
cally extended this dynamism. He had tended to view the possibilities of
virtual reality as being defined by the presentation of largely static work until
he visited firms that sold this equipment. Yet the sense that one could use
code co sec up dynamic environments was the start for Palmer of thinking
about these environments in an entirely different way. Whereas Palmer’s
points of reference had largely been based within sculpture and installation
(despite his use of the cinematic to describe his interests), suddenly the
possibility of an entirely dynamic environment opened new ways of contex
tualizing this practice.
Having partially overcome the learning curve involved in developing virtual
reality environments, Palmer made the installation 1261 Days (1999). This was
a “provisional” piece of work in many ways. He aspired to create an environ
ment where various elements played a part in the dynamic unfolding of ocher
events. Instead these were alluded co. The paper hung as part of the installa
tion reacted to people’s movements through the space, although delayed as the
vortex caused by their passage formed in such a way as to move the paper. This
corresponded to che screen-based display and the virtual environment entered
via a head-mounted display. Within this, a tracking system similar to Osmose
was used. Palmer’s experience of Osmose, however, had convinced him that chest
volume was not a good means to navigate an environment. Natural as it might
be to somebody who dives (as Davies does), it is not easily mastered by chose
not accustomed to such activity. Palmer decided to attach a sensor to che hand
so that if one raised one’s hand, one would float up, and if one lowered one’s
hand, passing through a neutral position, one sank.
Since that time, Palmer has been working on a system that reads audiences’
movements through a space and then utilizes this data co affect events within

the virtual. This was used in a work called Interstices (2001). Palmer has
also recently started work in collaboration with research departments at
Cambridge University. The aim is to create an environment within which
users become the source of turbulence in a virtual environment. Such a system
is full of possibilities. For instance, it might be possible to make a system that
creates “noise" within its dynamics without users. On entering the system,
though, users will not only create turbulence but affect the underlying dynam
ics of the system. The piece will then change dynamically over a period of
time. Such work will be immanent in nature, exploiting the qualities that are
to be discovered within the digital—and in Palmer’s view, this is the future
of digital arts.
Reciprocal Aesthetic Propositions
Reciprocal aesthetic propositions in interactive digital installations raise the

problems of innovation, openness, and freedom with regard to virtualism.
What is new in virtualism is precisely its virtuality, its potentiality, and above
all its openness. This openness is being exercised both from the point of view
of artists and their creativity and from that of the follow-up users in their
reciprocating actions. The point here is that this openness implies a certain
amount of liberty and freedom for action and creation. This open-ended
virtual state corresponds to both the individual’s and the society’s needs to
come to terms with the flux and the virtual dynamism that characterizes our
present situation.
If we take a short historical look at the notions and the practice of partic
ipation and interactivity, and their differences in passing by the notions of
quasi-interaction and interface, we discover that the key question is that of
freedom. Here, a certain amount of freedom has been calculated by the artist
in advance into the artistic proposition, allowing for some genuine reciprocal
creative activities.
Artificial intelligence can play a role in this art context emerging out of
the 1960s, when participation was understood to mean inclusion at a con
templative and an intellectual as well as a physical level. In addition to the
development of plastic artworks that courted participation of this sort, the
spectator was often invited to take part in something resembling a ritual cer
emony or a tribal celebration. A distinction should be made here between par
ticipation and interaction on the basis of the different degrees of spectator
Chapter 5
inclusion afforded by various technological means. Participation is thus a
term that describes a specific relationship between the spectator and an exist
ing artwork, in which the spectator assumes the role of participant, but not
author.
As for the notion of interactivity, the degree of autonomy of the spectator
is the most important factor in its determination. The phase of spectator par
ticipation or involvement of the public moved to a higher level with the devel
opment of autonomy. Only when the artist specifies freedom can the spectator
really enter into the creative process. This entry is dependent on a balance
between aesthetic fantasies and technical realities. In fact, the application of
computer, telecommunications, and audiovisual technology to art in the late
1980s represented a new departure, and thus the birth of virtual art is closely
related to the use of the term interactivity. The notion of participation was
replaced by that of reciprocal interactivity as the idea of spectator autonomy
Public intervention also entered a new phase here. Sensory involvement of

the public—something that has been practiced through feedback control in
cybernetic environments since the 1960s—gives artwork infinite variability
and goes far beyond mere participation. Body tension, voice, and so on, are
used as control instruments, and these also reappear in more complex forms
in the 1980s. In today’s virtual art, high-tech user interfaces, based on
microprocessors, enable the construction of comprehensive physical, sensual-
emotional, and mental-conceptional works. The exploitation of this potential
has brought about changes in image production. The type of interactivity that
brings all-around creativity into a wide public context, and permits various
kinds of signals such as image and sound in one system, is based at present
on the connectionist improvement of artificial intelligence systems.
Such problems are at the base of Jean-Paul Longavesne’s* research.
Longavesne’s networking painting machines—which produce large-scale
images in the spirit of works by Jean Tinguely, Bill Viola, and Nam June
Paik—explore the spaces of representation and che interface between the real
and the virtual world.
The installation of these painting machines consists of hardware and soft
ware linked to the rest of the world (and each other) through local and inter
national networks. The collective creation grows through networked response
and interchange. Most of che works are creaced in collaboracion, sometimes
using video Webcams.

Longavesne’s work has always shown a special interest in this collaborative
creation as well as “unseen" forms and memories—those forms that appear
original and are of a type we have not seen before, as in the Conflict series,
Video Waves, or later creations like the Invisible to Visible series, which included
Big Bang One (1995), Virtiialscapes (1995), and Virtual Identities (1998). Each
of these series has distinctive formal qualities associated with its “form gen
erators." These works are made with intentional representations in mind,
and the titles are often derived from evocative qualities associated with the
work. The viewer’s own experience and interpretation complements and com
pletes the work (figures 5.16 and 5.17).
According to Longavesne, robotic arc has now returned to che tactile
through digital creation. In our new hypermedia society, the expansion of net
worked communications, the proliferation of images, sounds, faxes, videos,
and data in electromagnetic space, and the hybridization of digital and analog
create new virtual spaces where artists find the power to make themselves
known and are able to create new relationships.
A striking example of this was provided by Telenoia\ Around the World,
an interactive performance that took place on Halloween in 1992, in
Chapter 5
Figure 5.17 Jean-Paul Longavesne, Big Bang 1,1995. The From Hot to Cool Memories per
formance was part of Big Bang I, a primal painting created automatically in an art gallery
during Siggraph '95 in Los Angeles.

collaboration with Roy Ascott, Kit Galloway, and Derrick de Kerckhove,
among others. This worldwide collaborative art project using Longavesne’s
painting machine involved digital image manipulation and networked inte
gration of visual and voice communication.
Since Telenoia utilized the Internet as a means of collaborative creation and
exchange of visual imagery, and focused on inclusion and development of a
collective experience, the performance demonstrated how the creative process
is altered by digital communication using software and hardware as well as
visual collaboration using picture telephones, videophones, fax machines, e-
mails, modems, and so on. Because hardware, software, and networking capa
bilities vary from location to location, involvement in the Telenoia performance
ranged from manipulated images to videophone or networked video per
formances or merged manipulated images and documents on a Web sice. Par
ticipants from around the world created a nonnarrative progression of digital
painted images. Using the Web and network technologies through the
network painting machine, the artists, collaborated in building an image
structure chat reflected the multiplicity of this twenty-four-hour experience.
It illustrated a telematic connectivity, mind to mind, across the globe. Yet
Telenoia focused on individual creative decisions in the context of a creative
creation and managed to maximize the integration of digital input devices
and networked visual communication, thus enhancing the creative possibili
ties in general. Some of che artists used traditional means of communication,
such as the mail and the telephone, while others experimented with satellite
and cable transmission. Telenoia s final aim was co celebrate the networked con
sciousness of global connectivity.
Longavesne, in addition to being a color consultant and digital artist, is a
university-trained engineer and professor at the University of Paris Xi-Orsay
and a lecturer at UQAM (Universite du Quebec a Montreal). In 1986, he
installed a digital system for the acquisition, classification, and communica
tion of color at the Manufactures Nationales de Tapisseries in Beauvais, the
Gobelins, and the Savonnerie, thus following the work of Eugene Chevreul
undertaken 150 years earlier.
In elaborating the concept of direct paintings on the perceptive spaces of
color and pictorial information art, Longavesne participates as an artist and a
plastician in various international manifestations on the Net under the pseu
donym Quark. For instance, in 1992 Quark participated in che exhibition Cal-
ifornie: Mythe ou Realite at the Cite des Arts et Nouvelles Technologies in
Chapter 5
Montreal. This video installation allowed him to create a live series of pic
tures titled Video Waves over a four-month period. The waves came in through
a video Webcam sited in Montreal’s old Port.
In 1993, Longavesne founded the @RT+COM Gallery on the Web where
artists worldwide exhibited or created works with the aid of the Internet.
Longavesne also created a series of canvases (1992) dedicated to the work
of Ed Paschke, a well-known contemporary painter from Chicago. These
paintings and drawings attempted to explore the dualities of life through
several vehicles—natural versus artificial, night versus day, underwater versus
sky, television technology versus the intelligence of a chicken, and life versus
metaphor. The colors were invented and added to the basic documentary mate
rial, which was always in black and white, and the forced contrast and artifi
cial look of the 1960s became a kind of chromatic reference to the media
environment surrounding us—a world in which dreaming in color is the
norm. The power of the works lies precisely in the fact that the complex
processes are not apparent; it is first and foremost a classic blend of form and
color well adapted for airbrush creations.13
Longavesne’s Big Bang, a canvas with a 360-degree map of the whole
sky, shows the relic radiation from the big bang from the microwave
background discovered by Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory astrophysicist
George Smoot’s research team. In Los Angeles, during a live performance at
Siggraph ’95, a networking painting machine, receiving data from the
Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, created a large canvas from data
received through a Net connection with the Lawrence Berkeley Lab Institute
of Astrophysics. The colors represented temperature variations, with red indi
cating regions that are .001 percent warmer and blue indicating regions that
are .001 percent cooler than the average temperature of 2.7 degrees above
absolute zero.
Reciprocal aesthetic propositions for interactive digital installations of a
spiritual nature are at the heart of Sophie Lavaud’s* work. Her approach fits
into a changing path that has led her from painting to interactive digital
creation, from the completeness of a painting to the infinity of directions
and viewpoints on the virtual Web, from solidity to fluidity. She incessantly
prompts us to redefine our position between the meditative contemplation of
appearances and the action on the image and ourselves. Lavaud is not inter
ested in things for their look, their external aspect as described by Western
cultures; she is interested in how things move and change, according to the

Eastern vision of the Yi-jing, “living” life rather than “still” life, the chang
ing conditions of matter.
Starting around 1984, Lavaud dedicated much time to observing the body
in motion (models or professional dancers) and, through drawings, she trans
lating the pure essence of its movements. As part of a working group that
included choreographer and dancer Jean-Marc Matos (who studied with Merce
Cunningham in the United States), she produced scenographies that allow for
the permutation of roles and positions within the working model observer,
thereby creating image spaces. In so doing, she developed a working method
that involved drawing while moving around one or more models, who were
themselves moving in relation to one another. Unlike the easel painter facing
their environment, her position as an observer was from within the scenogra-
phy. Her observation work served as preparation for a series of paintings,
whose composition was deeply influenced by the structuring of the “original
plan” so dear to Wassily Kandinsky, whose 1985 retrospective at the Centre
Pompidou in Paris had a big impact on her. This exhibition, which followed
a her transatlantic crossing on a sail boat, complemented Lavaud’s own expe
rience of life at sea. This confrontation with the ocean liquid and moving mass,
gave rise to a series of paintings such as Centre Lttmiere-Eleu (1995). She then
continued her painting work throughout the early 1990s with quasi
monochrome creations called Dynamic Systems or Entropies that tended increas
ingly toward the portrayal of evolving shapes, of the moment when matter
can switch from one state to another and deliver its trapped potentials. In
these paintings, matter behaves like particles in a “dynamic system,” which
reaches an equilibrium between order and chaos. At the same time, around
1986, she started using computers and graphic palettes to create two-
dimensional images, and then she trained in the world of three-dimensional
and animated computer-generated images. Consequently, her paintings
evolved in the shape of “installations” in the gallery environment. An instal
lation such as Dynamiqne tridimensionnelle (1991) set eight altuglas (a clear
medium resembling glass) panels—screen printed with clear inks and viewed
by the moving eye of the public walking around it—in space through the
superimposition or decomposition of different layers of paint. In 1994, Hexa
gramme, a digital image installation thermal printed on rhodoid, was exhib
ited at the Procr£art Gallery in Paris. Hexagramme involves suspended images,
animated by the slight air movement created by visitors, who can choose co
switch on or off neon lights that illuminate the set, thus changing how one
Chapter 5
perceives the work, which is designed in a spirit close to kinetics. This instal
lation was the basis for the first 1994 version of the virtual reality installa
tion Centre-Lumiere-Blen, which Lavaud calls her “dematerialized painting for
an interactive installation" (figure 5.18).
The body and its relation to space has always been the focus of Lavaud’s
pursuits (her practice of painting, theater, and dance, but also martial arts
such as Taishindo). With Centre-Lumiere-Bleu^ she sets up a confrontation
between the body of the audience involved and her emotions using the per
ception of the light vibration of the set, which has become “energy/matter.”
In the installation’s first version, the public was invited to enter an enclosed
space of about 98 square feet through two openings placed to the right and
the left of a white wall, on which hung the painting Centre-Lumiere-Bleu. The
installation space was dark. Facing the public, a screen around 7 feet high and
9 feet wide displays (by overhead projector) the calculated image derived
from computer data emitted in real time by a position sensor placed on the
spectator’s head (on a set of headphones) as soon as the latter moves in the
electromagnetic field created by the sensor aerial.
Centre-Lumiere-Bleu allowed the public, with the position sensor as
interface, to navigate bodily through the layers of a virtual painting, a digital

environment modeled from one of the pictorial works that the artist designed
by dynamic architecture in space. The picture was digitalized, then dissected
into six layers whose overall structure matches a hexagram from the Book of
Changes: The Yi-Jing (the Chinese ancestral divinatory treaty), resulting in a
fragmentation and a distribution of the work-space, its original flat surface
(Kandinsky’s original plan), by space conditioning the painting. Thus, the
public experiences greater eye mobility, shifting points of view, and nonlin
ear movements. In a second version of Centre-Lumiere-Bleti (1995) coproduced
with the Aubervilliers Metafort, visitors could also trigger audio and visual
events when they came close to a freely rotating component. The trigger
device had been undergoing development since 1995, through a working
process, just as a piece of software evolves into different versions each time it
is displayed. In the work’s installation form (which Lavaud calls a "multime
dia device” because it involves a variety of media in space—paintings, fixed
and moving info-graphic images, video displays, and sound), interactivity is
presented as a production. Computer programming sets the potential aesthetic
parameters of the relationship between the physical space (metrics such as our
position, the direction of our gaze, the speed of motion, and our gesture
parameters) and the virtual environment. This is a multimode approach com
bining images, sounds, languages, and gestures (figure 5.18).
Fluidity is the main attraction for Lavaud in the computing support.
The culture shift she brings about, enabled by the digital era, consists in no
longer creating a fixed or animated image for viewers but a simulation in
which viewers are immersed, becoming acting and reacting players in the fea
tured environment. By experimenting with the computing support, Lavaud
opens up a field of thought that beyond aesthetics, prompts viewers into
reviewing themselves as individuals immersed in a universe inhabited by the
machine. Individuals therefore need to find serenity, not in the mirage
created by technical tricks, but within themselves. Just as in real situations,
Lavaud forces the interactors to make decisions, to question their own posi
tion within a society that is forever moving forward faster and further. Her
artistic approach is combined with a citizen’s active resistance against main
stream social and cultural values: speed, competition, aggression, violence, and
soliciting.
Cyber-Light-Blue—(Treated in 2000 with the help of the festival @rt-
Outsiders and an award winner in the May 2001 multimedia design compe
tition organized by NOOS, the cable television and Internet provider in
Chapter 5
Paris—while fitting in with the technical constraints typical of the Net, is an
extension of the networks of the multimedia device in Centre-Liimiere-Bleu. A
poetic cyberjourney (also available on a customized CD-ROM and soon in a
networked design) involving the aesthetics of Internet users’ communications
media in an emerging networked and interfacing form, Cyber-Light-Blne
enables Internet users to step over a series of levels with a keyboard and a
mouse in a sequence of spaces opening complementary fields of perception,
generators of senses. A metaphor for the concept of interactivity, Cyber-Light-
Blue is a layered space where the relationship between virtual and human
occurs. With this hypermedia structure design, Lavaud not only renews a
genre between poetry and pictorialism. She also creates a new, truly network
specific genre, a kind of “hyperpicture” or “extended picture”—a total arc
utopia dreamed of by Dadaists, futurists, constructivists, Kandinsky, and che
Bauhaus as well as Duchamp, who as early as the beginning of che twentieth
century exposed painting as a retinal limitation that results from poetry to
literary expression, from plastic art to the involvement of shapes and colors,
from movies to the setting of animations. This is a short journey where anyone
can direct and choose their own initiatory and interactive wanderings in the
bluish folds of a cyberspace in slow motion. Ac the controls of their keyboards,
just like drunk ship captains, Internet users both pick their way and are
“picked” by it. They never retrace their own steps. They never look back. A
pixel light always shines in front of their eyes, and when they change direc
tion, they open the doors of written language with a mouse click.
Lavaud’s Techno-Mariage (Techno-Wedding), which utilized the virtual reality
techniques and the Internet, and was coproduced with Fred Forest in March
1999, is a living picture: an event spectacle in situ, associated wich the per
sonal life of the artist where there is neither scene nor auditorium, but an open
space continued in cyberspace. In fact, Techno-Mariage is a hybridization of dif
ferent media—video projections, virtual reality programs, the Internet site,
Webcams, connections at a distance via the Internet, diffusion on the Inter
net as real video, and sound creations—that transform the interactive hall of
the municipal council in che town of Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris (utilized
for che occasion as a wedding room) into an open space for “Internauts" beyond
any physical or geographic frontiers. The real wedding celebrated at the town
hall in Issy-les-Moulineaux, apart from its mediatic impact, became part of a
social and civil context, and belonged no longer to a space dedicated to art.
Techno-M.ariage was an autonomous work that played on the superposition of

che different physical and virtual spaces. Telescoping time and space, several
levels of reality were superposed, mixed, and incerplayed: the virtual creatures
who reacted in real time to the movements of the real spouses, the images of
the mayor, the public and the spouses reinjected in real time by a camera into
the virtual reality program.
For Lavaud, such work allows her co continually question how the notion
of space is linked to chat of the real time of exploration, and how space and
time evolve with the utilization of new media. With the aid of different
devices, Lavaud is able to operationalize her notion of space-time, and find an
articulation by scenorizing, scenographizing, and giving in sensorially and/or
cognitively in order to perceive the relation, between human language and
that of che machine, between gestures and images/systems, and between
people themselves. Across the notion of “relational spaces,” Lavaud explores
itineraries, movements, states of presence, and modes of being, and thus allows
forms to emerge co live with them and make them alive.
Another artist, Kenneth Rinaldo,* is best known for his interactive sculp
tures that evolve artificial, lifelike behaviors in conjunction with participants.
The possibility chat a robot could cohabitace wich a fish, creating an intelli
gent, responsive environment and an alternative kind of ecology, is explored
in Rinaldo’s Delicate Balance, a sculpture exhibited ac che V2 Dutch Electronic
Festival in 1995. In the work, a Siamese fighting fish is given control of che
direction that its own fishbowl travels along a cightwire. In designing a robot
that responds to a fish’s movement, Rinaldo is asking questions about che
transparency of electronic interfaces. Does the fish “know” it is in control of
its environment? The fish becomes the cyborg as the structure allows it to
manipulate its environment with machine control. This piece also explores an
animal’s ability co mentally map an augmented environment.
The concept of enabling fish to expand a local environment and “virtually”
leave a tank was further developed in Mediated Encounters, exhibited in Imag
du Futur in Montreal in 1996. Looking at the aggressive behavior of male
Siamese fighting fish led Rinaldo co ask, What would happen if two fish, who
would normally fight to the death, controlled separate robotic fishbowls?
Would they use this new control co meet each ocher and compete across che
gap between che robotic bowls? In this work, the natural ability of these fish
to see outside their tank, coupled wich multiple sensors, allowed them co
determine the direction and speed of the robotic structures that carried them.
Though che fish clearly used che interface, Rinaldo’s optimistic desire that
Chapter 5
they would learn how co meet each ocher with the interface was never entirely
evidenced. He notes that “future attempts will incorporate goldfish as research
has shown chat they are able to mentally map their environment.”
Since 1989, Rinaldo’s work has consistently engaged a multiplicity of dis
ciplines—artistic, scientific, technological, and ecological—with its inquiry
into the intersection between technological and organic systems.
Though there is an emphasis on materiality, sensuality, and form in
Rinaldo’s early sculptures—made from combinations of fiber optics, yams,
worms, eggs, and potatoes—this has always been balanced with a concern for-
a larger cultural dialogue. His long-standing interest in the morphology of
natural and technological systems as they relate to intelligence is apparent in
Technology Recapitulates Phylogeny. The title is a play on Ernst Haeckel’s idea
that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, in which the growth of the human
fetus recapitulates certain phylogenetic stages through which life has evolved.
This sculpture brings together tree roots, clumps of tube-fex worms, and
circuit boards to reveal the branching structures that exist in all three. The
piece looks to tree structures as the most efficient matter, energy, and infor
mation distribution network. The worms form an emergent clump that senses
the world and acts as a single organism. Rinaldo’s investigation into other
highly integrated tree structures such as brains, very large-scale integrated cir
cuits, and the Internet has led to his theory that “there is an inevitability to
the evolution of intelligence, be it biological, technological or a combination
of both.”
The space between bodies and time—both in the telling of a story, in the
relationships of the characters through whom the tale unfolds, and through
the interface—is central to Toni Dove’s* interactive environments. This inter
face engages a viewer physically in a structure that mirrors the bodies of viewer
and character, and imitates and creates metaphors for the processes—both
physical and verbal—through which we come to know each ocher. The fusing
of the viewer’s body with the story structure functions both as embodiment
and its absence. It is as if the viewer haunts the movie—a telepathic trace left
behind in the story and the characters on the screen. Artificial Changelings
(1993-1998) is an interactive narrative installation that uses a video motion
sensing device co track the location and the movement of a viewer standing
in front of a dimensional rear-projection screen (figures 5.19 and 5.20). A
romance thriller about shopping, this interactive movie follows the life of a
kleptomaniac in nineteenth-century Paris during the rise of the department

Figure 5.19 Toni Dove, Artificial Changelings, 1993-1998. Installation still from the exhi
bition Wired, Art Center for the Capital Region, Troy, New York.
store, Arathusa, who is dreaming about Zilich, an encryption hacker in the

future with a mission.
Standing in front of a large screen, viewers interact with characters using
floor triggers and motion-sensing videos. A viewer’s body moves the charac
ter’s body, generating speech, music, and changes in che video image. A viewer
can move back and forth between the centuries of the piece, navigating
through time and space.
Artificial Changelings has been internationally recognized as innovative in
interactive storytelling and immersive interface design. Stephen Johnson, che
author of Interface Culture^ has praised Artificial Changelings for using "tech
nology to advance a genuine artistic vision,” while Bill Jones in ArtByte
Magazine says the installation “not only sets a new mark for interactive works,
but opens the door co a new form of aesthetic experience where che viewer
Chapter 5
Figure 5.20 Toni Dove, Artificial Changelings, 1993-1998. Video stiff, Zilith in the time
tunnel 1998.
joins a fictional character through the interface in an uncanny way that

changes forever our conceptions of object and subject, narrative and fiction.”14
Dove is an artist who works with electronic media, creating interactive
narrative projects with digital video and sound, presented as performance, instal
lation, and more recently on DVD. She has created projects in virtual reality for
interactive laser discs, radio, linear videos, and artist’s books (figure 5.21).
Dove’s Mesmer: Secrets of the Human Frame, a computer-driven slide installa
tion with a sound crack, projects images onto a wall and a net hung on a ladder,
creating hologram-like three-dimensional effects. Computerized dissolve
equipment produces sequences of images that are animated somewhat like a
film. A piece about shifting concepts of identity mirrored in cultural represen
tations of automatons, robots, androids, and cyborgs, Mesmer: Secrets of the
Human Frame was part of the 1990 Art in the Anchorage exhibition sponsored

by Creative Time. A radio version of the piece was aired by New American
Radio, a book based on this exhibition was published by Granary Books in
spring 1993, and an essay by the artist on the piece appeared in the summer
1992 edition of the New York University drama journal, The Drama Review.
Her performance/installation The Blessed Abyss: A Tale of Unmanageable
Ecstasies, debuted at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris
as part of the performance series Performing Bodies and Smart Machines,
which Dove cocurated with Helen Thorington of New Radio and Performing
Arts and Jeanette Vuocolo of the Whitney Museum. The series dealt with
issues of the body and technology across a number of disciplines. The Blessed
Abyss was about excesses—about private voices and public ecstasy, and the
transgressive power of eroticism. The piece combined multiple computer-
programmed slide projectors and video on three-dimensional screens with a
sound track commissioned by New American Radio for its 1991—1992 series.
The piece ran in October 1992 as an installation at the Thread Waxing Space
in Soho and was presented at the New School in spring 1993 as part of the
Franklin Furnace performance series.
Dove next developed a virtual reality world, Archeology of a Mother Tongue
(1995) at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada with Michael Mackenzie.
Chapter 5
The inscallation/performance was sponsored by the Banff Centre for the Arts,
Art Matters, Inc. in New York City, and a Canada Council Media Grant, and
combines interactive computer graphics, laser disc video, and slides with
interactive sound. Archeology of a Mother Tongue represents Dove’s first use of
interactivity and the beginning of work that becomes responsive as well as
immersive.
In Archeology of a Mother Tongue, a player navigates with a small plastic
camera to “look” around along with a glove to start and scop and to touch
objects in the virtual space. Our point of view is that of the coroner, one of
che two main characters. It is her dream—a memory (forgotten in waking life)
of being adopted as a child from the city to which she is returning co inves-
tigace che murder of a child. There are chree environments: the architecture
of her dream, a rib cage transport plane that inverts co become an airline ter
minal, and a hand and a skull that are che pathologist’s laboratory (the second
main character). The environments together create a virtual body that a player
navigates, often as che “driver” for an audience, triggering narrative sequences,
sound events, and memories in a forensic voyage through the body and
the city.
Dove then completed a video installation in Times Square, Casual Workers,
Hallucinations, and Appropriate Ghosts, sponsored by Creative Time and the
Forty-second Street Development Corp, for the Forty-second Street Arc
Project Exhibition. The piece tracks the metamorphosis from a choreography
based on the gestures of Jean-Martin Charcot’s “cheater” of hysteria to that of
female martial arts heroines. This is accompanied by a narrative of distur
bances in the fabric of human intimacy followed by a three-minute symphony
constructed entirely of screams. The piece was situated at the end of a row of
adult video stores and presented an alternative view of che subject matter at
hand on Forty-second Street. Sound and video were seen and heard from the
street.
At this point, Dove began to develop a theory and an authoring system for
interactive narrative based on the concept of an embodied interface—an inter
face that would allow a viewer to interact physically with a movie. In a tra
ditional film, the position of the viewer (voyeur) is physically passive—the
process of spectacorship is physically still. The film becomes the eyes; the point
of view of the spectator and che body is forgotcen—we enter the screen. Even
in action movies, which use che eyes as a visual trigger into the Internet of
the sensorium to produce physical thrills, the body is largely left behind. It

is inactive, or on the shelf so to speak. In a responsive interface, the body is
active and the experience becomes embodied. A viewer is simultaneously
aware of their body, “in” their body, and “in" the screen. The space between
body and screen is activated. This charged space is a key characteristic of telep
resence. It is the space through which the body extends itself into the movie
or the virtual space. It is the invisible experience of the body's agency beyond
its apparent physical edge. An engagement with interface design evolved from
these concepts is part of what makes Dove’s work unique.
Reciprocal aesthetic propositions dominate the whole of Jeffrey Shaw’s*
artistic production. His interests gradually developed from participatory envi
ronmental preoccupations to the lacest achievements in computer-assisted and
computer-generated virtual reality art. Shaw, a Briton, lived in Australia and
the Netherlands, and then spent several years in a prominent position at the
Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany before return
ing to Australia. As an artist, he has systematically followed the path from
spectator participation to interactivity, now one of the prominent keywords
in computer art and high-tech art in general. Shaw has been intensely involved
in spectator activation—a strong social and psychological option for many
high-tech artists—since the 1960s, when as a member of the Eventstructure
Research Group in Holland, he produced works consisting mainly of air
inflated tubes that enabled spectators to walk on water. Since then, through
various stages, Shaw has developed the intense interactivity between the spec
tator and the installation through the use of the combined technologies of
video and computers in works such as The Legible City (1990) and The Virtual
Museum (1991). The basic idea of this kind of spectator participation found
its application in The Legible City, conceived with the Dutch artist Dirk
Groeneveld. This impressive interactive computer/video installation was, in
the first place, limited to a partly real, partly imaginary, bicycle ride through
Manhattan, but was later extended to also include the city of Amsterdam
(figure 5.22). In this work, the psychological identity of “the city” is made
tangible as a three-dimensional literary architecture through which the spec
tator travels interactively on a bicycle. Its streets, intersections, squares, and
so forth, form the ground plan for a spatial ordering of words and sentences,
and bicycling in that city is a journey of reading. A large-screen video image
is generated by means of a computer-graphic three-dimensional animation
system connected to electronic sensors on the handlebars and the pedals of an
immobile bicycle. The image responds in real time to instructions concern
chapter 5
Figure 5.22 Jeffrey Shaw, The Legible City, 1990.
ing direction and speed that result from the action of the person who is
“riding” the bicycle. The urban architecture of words and sentences in this
work is based on historical chronicles of Amsterdam and statements made by
people linked with the city of New York.
Shaw took an additional step toward interactivity, related this time still
closer to virtual reality technology, with his Virtual Museum (1991), an inter
active installation of synthesized images observable from a swiveling chair.
In this work, the viewer penetrates the walls of a real room to view an
imaginary museum room containing paintings, then one containing sculp
tures, one with cinematographic images, and finally, one with calculated com
puter graphics. Two subsequent works, The Golden Calf (1994) and Place: A
User's Manual (1995), viewers to experience virtual space through artificial
devices and interfaces. In The Golden Calf, an LCD color monitor is connected
to computing machinery by a cable running through a white pedestal. The
viewer picks up and holds this monitor in their hands. The screen shows a
representation of the pedestal with a computer-generated image of a golden
calf on top. By moving the monitor around the actual pedestal, the viewer
can examine the golden calf from above and below as well as all sides. Thus,
the monitor functions like a window that reveals a virtual object apparently

located in che real space. Place: A User's Manual extends the tradition of
panorama painting, photography, and cinematography co simulation and
virtual reality. The viewer can interactively rotate a projected image around a
circular screen and so explore a virtual three-dimensional space constituted by
an emblematic constellation of panoramic photographic landscapes.
Apart from making full use of all technological advances in order to incorpo
rate them in his artistic research, Shaw utilizes stereoscopic headgear, data gloves,
and data suits as well as the latest communication linkups in his projects.
The main issue in Perry Hoberman’s* art is also that of reciprocity and
interactivity between the spectator and technology. He has explored these con
cepts by utilizing obsolete equipment, such as bar codes, as well as avant-
garde, experimental technology, including virtual reality. Hoberman’s notion
of interactivity is a purely postmodern sensibility, enabling the observer to
participate in his artworks in a completely active way. In addition to inter
activity, he also embraces the concept of immersion, which could easily be
regarded as another method to prompt the viewer’s participation. Hoberman
deals most extensively with responsive surroundings and experiences to help
focus the spectator on the possibilities of objects and images in relation to the
audience.
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Hoberman’s art is his ability (and
desire) to marry childlike play with complex, intellectual theory, evident in
works such as Cathartic User Interface (1995), in which the installation visitor
throws balls at computer keyboards mounted on the wall as a method of
prompting triggers and projections throughout the gallery environment.
Hoberman has remarked that he likes to manipulate popular culture through
technology filters so that the viewer experiences bizarre images, sensibilities,
and content rather than staid, familiar simulations.
Until the mid-1980s, Hoberman focused mostly on saturating environ
ments, much in the way cinema dominates the viewer’s experience. Then in
the mid-1980s, he progressed more and more toward utilizing interactive and
noninteractive devices to involve the spectator. In Sorry, We’re Open (1997),
Hoberman plays with the office environment gone haywire as a metaphor
for the banality and monotony of such interior spaces. Computers are pro
grammed to enact effects that grind pencils into nubs, among other mindless
activities so common to che workplace. The aggravation and rancor of such
spaces are depicted as inverted funhouses for the viewer to meditate on the
alienating spaces provided by corporate life.
Chapter 5
Hoberman is also intrigued by the idea of the interface. This is evidence in
his work Bar Code Hotel (1995), where each participant who checks into the
hotel is issued a set of 3-D-glasses and a bar code wand. The viewer uses the
wand on the bar codes permeating the environment co stimulate a wide
array of effects and projections. Technology is both a fun, stimulating activity
and a controlling feature that dominates the audience’s surroundings and
experience.
Hoberman has been a great communicator on many aspects of arc and
science, and has spoken widely on technology, specifically the Internet and
virtual reality, and its implications for providing art content. In addition co
his visually related projects, he has worked extensively with sound and per
formance artist Laurie Anderson as an art director on her various projects.15
In Stephen Wilson’s opinion, Hoberman’s installations expose the cultural
underpinnings of technology in works that are simultaneously humorous and
troubling, Faraday’s Garden (1999) in particular presented the viewer with a
hodgepodge of consumer appliances such as radios and power tools along with
image-projecting machines. Ironically commencing on issues of control, the
appliances automatically sprung into action, tripped by security footpads, as
viewers moved about the space.16 In Faraday's Garden the machines wait
silently, ready to be activated at any moment by the footfalls of the public.
When stepped on, the switch matting triggers the various machines and
appliances, creating a kind of force field of noise and activity around each
viewer. As the number of participants increases, the general level of cacoph
ony rises, creating a wildly complex symphony of machines, sounds, and pro
jections. The machines and accessories (such as tapes, films, slides, and records)
are collected from thrift stores, flea markets, and garage sales. Since these
objects, span the entire twentieth century, movement around the room also
functions as a kind of time travel. All wires and switches are left exposed, cre
ating an intense environment of electrical current.
The interactive trend based on reciprocity is exemplified in N0EM1 *
an interactive musical sculpture created in 2002 in Paris, rhe collaborative
team (which calls itself Music2eye) of Didier Bouchon, Stephane Maguet, and
Stephane Sikora. NOEMI is a real-time musical interactive system that
confronts a human player with the musical choices (and corrections) of an
autonomous artificial intelligence. The resulting interaction between human
and machine is played out as a strange musical game. As the human partici
pant plays the electric keyboard—either well or poorly—NOEMI responds

1
Figure 5.23 Music2eye, NOEMI, 2002. C++, polyester resin, fiberglass, 160 x 60 x 30 cen
timeters. Art-Metz Festival, France.
musically, generally by encouraging the player to play better (chat is, more
harmoniously) (figure 5.23).
NOEMI represents a collaborative creative process between human and
machine based on feeling, in that the machine’s behavior is a result of its
moods and tastes, which in turn are based on the way people interact with it.
As a novice, NOEMI is programmed co “wane" co become a talented musi
cian, able to improvise and engage in.musical dialogues with other human
Chapter 5
players. In order to adapt its behavior to the level of the player, however,
NOEMI has to learn how to make a distinction between experienced players
and total beginners. NOEMI evaluates the quality of the musical exchange
produced and may even shorten the human/machine interaction when it has
been disappointed by the human’s performance. When encountering still more
musicians, NOEMI improves its capabilities to play in order to produce high-
quality music that is half-human and half-machine.17
In Exchange Fields (2000) by Bill Seaman*, the central question was the
generation of a new kind of reciprocity and interface. How might an em
bodied experience of interface be layered into the content of an interactive
media/dance comprised of video, text, a sculptural installation, and music?
Exchange Fields sought to develop a novel interface strategy by eliciting
culturally determined environmental “behavior in relation to objects’’ as a
grammar of gesture that could be used as input for the reacting system. The
work attempted to tap into prelinguistic environmental knowledge related to
the use of particular varieties of objects. A series of furniture/sculptures were
developed. Each furniture/sculpture was designed with a unique implied “sug
gestion” of how the body might be positioned in relation to that object. This
suggestion was nonlogocentric. It was embodied in the form of the physical
interface itself and reinforced through linguistic captioning affixed near the
work. The participant experienced a dynamic relation brought about through
their embodied physical positioning. This “gesture” functioned as input for a
computerized system that dynamically links output consisting of prerecorded
performance/dance images (video) and sound/These have been choreographed
in relation to the particularity of that embodied position. For each unique fur
niture/sculpture, a set of related dances was recorded. A linear text and musical
composition became layered with the sounds and the images that were trig
gered by users. It was the physical engagement of the participant relative to
the visual and audible output that gave the work its artistic experiential
content and power (figures 5.24 and 5.25). Exchange Fields was commissioned
for the Vision Ruhr exhibition in Dortmund, Germany, which incorporated
the recorded dance and choreography of Regina van Berkel. The programmer,
Gideon May, also became involved in this project.
Seaman has explored text, image, and sound relationships through diverse
technological means since 1979- He is self-taught as a composer and a musician.
Certain early works stand out as precursors to his interactive oeuvre. One
simple yet interesting early work was titled Device for Architectural Inversion

Figure 5.24 Bill Seaman, Exchange Fields, 2000. Detail of interface, back.
Figure 5.25 Bill Seaman, Exchange Fields, 2OOO.Three-dimensional model of installation by

Casio Container.
Chapter 5
(1979). The work was facilitated by the simple technology of a pair of glasses
that had two mirrors affixed to the front at a forty-five-degree angle. When a
participant wore the glasses, it appeared that they were walking on the ceiling.
Thus, a strange conflation of actual space with a displacement of actual
space was facilitated. The participant experienced an uncanny sense of
architectural displacement. The work .apt.alt. (1981) explored the creation
of a generative text system. Three words were designated for each elemenc
in the periodic table. The notion was that any compound could be used as
a kind of algorithm co derive new poems, repeating relevant lines in
relation to the chemical formula. The system created a form of compound
poetry examining the periodic table of elements in a literal and metaphoric
manner.
A second early work titled Architectural Hearing Aids (1981), a collabora
tion with the now-deceased artist Carlos Hernandez, looked at the relation
ship of actual architecture to sound, text, sculptural, and performative
elements. One might call this an early example of “augmented reality.” A
series of sound systems were installed in a Cherokee Chief wagon including
a speaker on the roof of the vehicle. A one-hour-and-forty-minute tour of
San Francisco and the Marin headlands was driven on twenty-one evenings.
Three participants per evening went on the tour. Many architectural
landmarks and vicinities in San Francisco were included in the tour—tunnels,
the swerving Lombard Street, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Palace of
Fine Arts were just of few of the places observed. Seaman described the work
as an “inverted film.” Seaman had composed music to qualify the meaning
of the architecture, which was being treated as a massive Duchampian
ready-made. He provided a live mix from a series of tape recorders in the front
seat.
The next period in Seaman’s oeuvre employed video as a poetic technolog
ical vehicle, exploring sound, image, and text relations within a slow-pulsing
hypnotic video space. Both linear capes and video installations were produced.
The tapes S.He (1983), Telling Motions (1986), The Water Catalogue (1984)
(commissioned by the Contemporary Art Television Fund), Shear (1986), and
Boxer’s Puzzle (1986) with Ellen Sebring were produced during this period.
Central to all of these works was the artist's voice, delivering the text in either
spoken or sung form. Two significant installations were produced: Water Wheel
(1985), a seven-channel installation presented through a circle of monitors,
incorporating material from The Water Catalogue} and The Design of the Grip

(1989), a nine-channel video/sound installation with related written text.
Here, the important concept was the “sound pun”—where one sound was used
as “folie” for nine different simultaneous images. The installation work S.He
(On a Train) (1995) presented the S.He video in the context of a moving train,
thereby enabling passengers to look at both actual and prerecorded material.
In these early works, film was shot and transferred to video in order to explore
particular qualities of light as well as choreographed landscape and architec
ture. The texts in the work often examined puns, wordplays, and polyvalent
language. The material qualities of both film and video were manipulated for
these works to explore both slow-motion and pulsing stop-motion qualities,
which were in turn carefully layered with the musical score.
The first major interactive work by Seaman was The Watch Detail (1990).
Video images, sound, and text that addressed the subject of time were explored
interactively. This work employed Macintosh Hypercard media, used to
control an interactive laser disc. Thus, the work became a metamedia time
piece. A large database of time-oriented images and texts could be navigated,
juxtaposed, and/or reoriented in time. The media time of the image could also
be scrutinized; a participant could move forward, backward, and stay still as
well as move fast-forward and fast-backward. An elaborate poetic text made
of short individual observations about time was made available to the system
user. The participant could juxtapose any of the video and still material, move
from chapter to chapter, edit segments, trigger sequences of encoded database
material in relation to chosen selected textual criteria, view a sec of still images
with text superimpositions, or view material in a linear mode. A linear video
also exists with this title.
Seaman’s second major interactive installation was The Exquisite Mechanism
of Shivers (1993). Ic should be noted that many of Seaman’s works were shown
in different states and/or alternate contexts. Each version of the work informs
other versions in varying ways—that is, this work appears as an interactive
installation with a single projection, a in ten-screen video wall version, in a
Japanese/English version (Ex.Mech) [1994]), and as a thirty-minute linear
video as well as a CD-ROM published in Artintact 1 (1994). The work explores
the construction of an audiovisual sentence with ten segments. Each segment
has a related piece of music, a specific spoken piece of text, and a time-based
section of video. The work’s template has thirty-three variables for each
modular section of the audiovisual sentence—hence, the linear work is com
prised of thirty-three sentences. Interactive versions of the work enable the
Chapter 5
system user to substitute different modular variables and generate new audio
visual sentences. These substitutions always facilitate the generation of a
grammatically correct sentence. Because each of these modules is polyvalent
in terms of their meaning, the work is always emergent. One can also use
automated chance methods to derive new audiovisual sentences. A linear video
also exists with this title and dace.
Another Seaman work, Abstraction Machine/Erotic: The Voyeur of Light
(1994), was a site-specific installation in room thirty-three at the Regents
Court Hotel in Sydney, Australia. A security viewer was inverted in che door
so that visitors could look into che room, and a generative cexc presented via
computer was visible through the eyepiece.
Passage Sets/One Pulls Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue (1995) was an interac
tive installation that functioned as an elaborate navigable audiovisual poem.
Seaman worked with programmer Chris Ziegler on this work. Three projec
tions comprised che installation, where one video and two data projections
were presented as a triptych. The central projection enabled the participant
to navigate through a 150-image panorama, with text superimposed over the
image. The participant could navigate spacially by moving over che surface of
che images—moving lefc, righc, up, and down through an image grid pre
sented on the central screen. Each image was tied to a related section of video,
music, and cexc and further images were called up by visitors touching their
picks of pictures of Australia on a screen. The video presented a spoken version
of the same text that was scattered over the image’s surface. The system user
could also select words and/or phrases from the image, which led them to a
poem generator. All of che language from che work was included in four scroll
ing lists that enabled che participant co build new poems or generate random
selections. Each of these selections could be used to navigate back to che
context of the panorama that they were drawn from. The user could explore
meaning in relation to shifting contexts, thus both emergent meaning as well
as the experiential observation of meaning alteration was observed in the work.
A third screen showed the computer constantly generating new poems lines,
drawing from a related poem generator list co the one presented center screen.
The World Generator/The Engine ofDesire (1996-present) marks an expansion
ofSeaman’s work into the realm of virtual environments (figures 5.26 and 5.27).
In collaboration with programmer Gideon May, Seaman authored a complex
generator chat enables users of che system to construct and navigate virtual
worlds by making choices from a spinning virtual interface of container wheels,

Figure 5.26 Bill Seaman, The World Generator/The Engine of Desire, 1996-present. Menu
system detail, container wheels.
Figure 5.27 Bill Seaman, The World Generator/The Engine of Desire, 1996-present. ZKM
installation, physical interface.
Chapter 5
from a physical interface table. These container wheels house a series of differ
ent media elements and processes including three-dimensional objects, two-
dimensional images, poetic texts, musical loops, and digital movies as well as
processes relevant to the entire world. The system user can also explore a set of
built-in chance processes to construct worlds. Participants can do what Finnish
technology and media researcher Erkki Huhtamo calls “world processing,”
enabling them to edit and alter the virtual world as well. One can also attach
behaviors to the media elements, apply still and movie texture maps to them,
and make the media elements transparent. When the participant navigates
through the virtual world, a new sound mix is made for each user—Seaman
calls this recombinant music. The work explores examines meaning and is dif
ferent for each participant. A networked version of the work, which has been
shown internationally, enables people in two parts of the world to inhabit and
operate within simultaneous copies of the same environment, communicate via
videophone, and view the alternate participant as a video avatar. This avatar
shows the relative position of the alternate participant within the virtual space.
A Japanese version of the work has also been authored. A third large-scale
version has been authored for the visualization portal at the University of Cal
ifornia, Los Angeles; this version is visible on a 160-degree screen, with liter
ally hundreds of objects/images in the environment. Seaman’s dissertation,
“Recombinant Poetics: Emergent Meaning as Examined and Explored within
a Specific Generative Virtual Environment" (1999), discusses the work at great
length, and is available online through the Langlois Foundation.
His subsequent works go still further in the generation of reciprocity and
interface—as in Exchange Fields (2000), already mentioned above—but they
particularly touch the poetic sphere in Red Dice/Des Chiffres (2000) and Inver
sion (2001—present) Red Dice/Des Chiffres uses Un coup de des jamais n’abolira le
hasard (Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance) by Stephane Mallarme and an
interactive audiovisual metatext by Seaman. Large-scale projections of both
the interface and the visual portion of Seaman’s audiovisual work are pre
sented. The piece enables the user to view and listen to Mallarme’s text
through the use of a Pen/WACOM tablet interface, a battery-powered, cord
less, pen-shaped computer cursor and input device, first launched into the
Japanese market in 1983. When the pen touches on words, they are subse
quently spoken. Small video icons are called up that register the potential to
trigger related segments of Seaman’s audiovisual text. The work also incor
porates a “recombinant” section enabling the user to reorder Seaman’s video,

generate a new sound track by choosing from 144 different musical sections—
layering up to seven at a time—and recombine Seaman’s texts via the pen
interface. The work functions as a companion piece to Passage SetslOne Pulls
Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue, which was also influenced by the Mallarme text,
while Inversion is a new dance/installation, a collaboration with dancer/chore-
ographer Regina van Berkel that explores the topic of nanotechnology through
a poetic text, a musical score, Seaman’s Hybrid Invention Generator functioning
in an auto-generative mode, two linear videotapes, a set of sculptural elements,
and variable lighting.
The Hybrid Invention Generator (2001—present) itself looks at “machinic
generics.” Users of the system can scroll through a series of inventions, choose
two different inventions, and generate the visualization of a hybrid invention.
An underlying logic defines a functional connection between the differing
inventions. The work functions as an installation as well as on the Internet.
Individual Commitments to Interactivity
A number of artists in the section that follows have produced works that are
predominantly concerned with the individual. Anthropological and biologi
cal considerations also enter into the conception of these interactive environ
ments. Thus, the human body is a privileged theme of discussion and
experimentation, and it is explored as a cultural experience of rhe human being
or as a pretext for ludic commitments.
The status of the human body is also questioned in these works in relation
to the cyborg and artificial perception systems. A new way of including the
history of performance art is attempted by a number of artists in this section.
Some of the artists refrain from concerning themselves with genetic mutations
or the contamination of the species, and instead put the accent on the human
being, on human dreams, emotions, and reflections on life. Technology in this
context again becomes a privileged instrument for visual evocation. In fact,
all these individual commitments to interactivity in digital installations have
a clearly neohumanist tendency in common, based on the rehabilitation of the
surviving individual in an area where technology is used to favor the well
being and the physical and intellectual ambitions of the human.
A good example of the digital and virtual, but also personal, commitment
to interactivity is Peter d’Agostino’*s Double You (and X, Y, Z) (1981-1986).
This is an interactive videodisc that can be viewed either from beginning to
Chapter 5
Figure 5.28 Peter d'Agostino, DOUBLE YOU (and X, Y, Z), 1981-1985. Philadelphia
Museum of Art.
encl in a linear fashion or used in the interactive mode for which it was pri
marily designed (figure 5.28). Interactively, through an initial set of choices,
the videodisc branches the participant through various "tasks” that can be
played like a game. The game, however, is predicated not on “winning” and
“losing” but on making various discoveries. The subject of Double You (and X,
Y, Z) is the acquisition of language, yet the underlying structure of the work
is derived from another source: physics. The four-part structure of the piece
is based on the four forces now believed co cause all physical interactions in
the universe: light and gravity along wich scrong and weak forces. Through
analogy and mecaphor, these concepts serve to parallel four periods of early
language development. They are light (the birth), gravity (first words), strong
forces (sentences), and weak forces (songs). This last source reveals the origin
of the title Double You (and X, Y, Z)\ it is a children’s song that concludes
wich "now I know my ABCs, next time won’t you sing with me.” In radically

changing the hierarchical system of artist/viewer relationship, d’Agostino’s
videodisc heralds an image-making process in which the duration, density,
and subsequent meaning of the image/sound lies in the viewer’s actions. It is
thus a work that approaches cyclic thought processes of a more sophisticated
and open-ended nature than linear narrative structure. That d’Agostino has
chosen the acquisition of communication skills as his subject indicates the
potential of acquiring a new and complex vocabulary and establishing new
patterns of thought.18
d’Agostino’s VRIRV: A Recreational Vehicle in Virtual Reality takes viewers
on a drive through a virtual reality theme park in a technological vehicle
(figure 5.29). The work explores the displacement and disembodiment of a
technologically determined culture that comingles video games and comput
erized war.
The artist refers to VRIRV as a form of critical virtuality. The critique inher
ent in this work is that recent hybrids of virtual reality and online networks
are creating hypertheaters of the absurd, a high-tech forums that seem anal-
Figure 5.29 Peter d'Agostino, VR/RV: A Recreational Vehicle in Virtual Reality,

1992-1993. Banff Centre for the Arts.
Chapter 5
ogous to the fuction and practicality of the “self-contained comports" of a
motor home or caravan.
One manual for recreational vehicle owners promises “many miles of
virtually trouble-free travel." In the case of d’Agostino’s VR/RV, there is a
reversal of map and territory. The recreational vehicle drives though a com
puter-generated landscape—a three-dimensional map—onto two-dimensional
video images, which are projected so as to form a new mediated territory.
Floating within this computer-simulated environment, these electronic video
billboards are staging areas for inserting memories of utopian visions and
dystopian nightmares (including the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the
computerized “smart bombs" of the first Gulf War) that are a consequence of
twentieth-century technology.19
A strongly personal note can be discerned in the real/virtual portraits
created by Catherine Ikam,* in collaboration with Louis Fieri. Ikam is
interested in elaborating artistic devices that serve as support for the appear
ance and the disappearance, for the sudden looming up and total absence, of
images. She is also intrigued by the notion that the human face can be a place
for disorientation. For Ikam, digital technologies allow the portrait to change
entirely: it is no longer the ultimate reference of identity but an artifact, a
model, that can be indefinitely manipulated. The portrait is no longer linked
to a chemical, argent, or magnetic support but is now capable of any and all
transformations. It is no longer a trace, attesting to what has been, but a
becoming. In fact, an ambiguous dialectic can establish itself between the
original and all its doubles.
Ikam refers herself to the ancient technique of wax masks. The image that
can be obtained with a laser is not very different: we are in the presence of a
digital cast without depth and yet with great flexibility that constitutes the
raw material for all the manipulations that are to follow. It becomes easy after
ward to modify at will all the parameters of the face and its environment. This
is also a work on the relational space of the portrait. The usual exterior/inte-
rior distinction no longer applies. The work becomes a portrait in depth; the
face becomes an empty envelope. The lacquered texture of the skin acts like
a mirror on which a virtual light source is reflected, thereby creating an addi
tional distance. Moreover, it becomes possible to appreciate a face with expres
sions that have never been its own because they are calculated by a computer.
One can simulate an encounter in a virtual place between several persons
who have never before seen each other, or one can give different models of

behavior co a person to allow them to interact in real time with a visitor.
Stephen Wilson remarks that in The Other (1992), for example, Ikam and Fieri
"create ‘emotional fiction’ digital video projections of 3-D characters that seem
co track the audience and indicate emotional expression.”20
Since 1980, Ikam has been working on the concept of identity in the elec
tronic age, including as a research fellow at MIT. She is mainly interested in
interactive virtual environments in real time. Her first virtual portraits were
presented in 1995 at the Biennial Exhibition for Contemporary Art in Lyons,
France, and her The Messenger was shown the same year at an exhibition in La
Defense near Paris. In 1996, she showed Alex at the inauguration the Insti-
tut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) exhibition
space in the Pompidou Center in Paris (figures 5.30 and 5.31).
A different attitude toward human beings can be discerned in a work like
Cyborg Detector by Erich Berger*, created in collaboration with Patricia Fut-
terer and Sandy Stone. In this installation, cyborgs were no longer treated as
prototypes (models or paradigms) for a new cultural identity. Rather, the vis-
Chapter 5
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O I
yJ " --- 1
I'’ -:>%■-<-
r...
Figure 5.31 Catherine Ikam and Louis FI6ri, Lui, 2003.
itors’ habits and cultural attitudes with regard to technology and cybercul
ture were measured with the help of a system of metal detectors, which
allowed visitors to determine the degree and the content of the cyborg
problem present in their behavior and mind. In fact, it was not the technical
calculation by a machine or the classification into humanoids and cyborgs that
would determine the status of human beings realistically. The last and most
important question visitors had to answer was whether they were cyborgs
themselve.
Berger has participated in numerous projects including World Skin (1998),
Telematic Dreaming (1997), Interface hutodrom (2000), and Telezone (1999—2003).
The last can be regarded as a typical example of present-day cooperation
between high-tech operators. Thus, Berger was charged with the project coor
dination of TeleZone, which was built on many ideas from Ken Goldberg’s earlier
Telegarden (1995) and allowed a community of people to collaboratively create
architectonic structures—and by extension social structures—at a distance.
A similar stance can be observed in the autonomous robotic artwork Petit
Mai (1992—1995) by Simon Penny,* who creates art derived from artificial
life ideas.
Penny is an Australian artist, theorist, and teacher in the field of interac
tive media art. His art practice consists of interactive and robotic installations,

which have been exhibited in the United States, Australia, and Europe. In an
early work, Chronic Rebus Generator (1985), a simple kinetic machine, the pages
flip over continually. The red text reads: “These cloud capped towers, these
gorgeous palaces.”21
Penny’s project Traces (1999) is a telematic interactive environment using
networked CAVEs (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) with machine
vision sensing in each CAVE. Traces senses body motions and transmits
abstract representations of them, which are then projected in networked
CAVE virtual reality environments. Gradually, the traces take on artificial lives
of their own. This project is a development of the direction pursued in Penny’s
machine vision-driven interactive digital video installation Fugitive, first
shown at ZKM (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie) Multimediale
Five in 1997, and again at the 1998 European Media Art Festival in
Osnabruck. Other recent projects of his include the emergent complexity
sound installation Sympathetic Sentience (1995 onward), which included three
versions and was done in collaboration with Jamieson Schulte, and the
autonomous robotic artwork Petit Mai described above.
Public performance also plays an important part in the work of several
artists discussed in this section. Although contemporary virtual performance
artists such as Stelarc, Stahl Stenslie, or Orlan utilize elements from the history
of performance art in their works, their introduction into an aesthetic
problematic of technical innovations such as cultural interfacing, tele-tactile
communication, or the creation of a synthetic personality justifies their pres
ence here as shining examples of the passage from earlier body commitments
and ideas on the close relationship between art and life to performance and
live art in the present biologically and anthropologically tainted virtual
context.
Stelarc*, an Australian, has led the way in the exploration of the body,
technology, and culture interface. Since the 1970s, he has conducted an
extraordinary series of international performances and installations in which
his body and technology meet in the arena of cultural inquiry. His works poet
ically oscillate between the light of optimism and the shadow of aversion as
he explores the posthuman world of possibility. For Stelarc, skin is the bound
ary for the soul and the self; it also represents the beginning of the world.
Once technology stretches and pierces skin, skin as a barrier is erased, and the
desire to locate the self simply within a particular biological body is no longer
meaningful. What it means co be human is being constantly redefined, accord
Chapter 5
ing to Stelarc. Humans have created technologies and machines that are much
more precise and powerful than the body. In Stelarc’s view, technology defines
what it means to be human. Technology is not an antagonistic, alien sort of
object; it is part of our human nature. We should not be afraid, then, of incor
porating technology into the body.
Stelarc’s body-based explorations include Stomach Sculptures (1993) which
involve the placing of devices in the stomach as “aesthetic adornments” and
fiberscopic video presentations of the experience; Amplified Body (2000) per
formances based on amplified body processes including brain waves (EEG),
muscles (EMG), pulse (plethysmogram), blood flow (Doppler flow meter), and
other transducers and sensors that monitor limb motion and indicate body
posture; and Stirnbo (2000), an installation offering a touch-screen interface for
activating muscle stimulation at those places where the body jerks and moves
in response. Added capabilities in Stelarc’s work include replay and remote
activation via the Web; Third Hand (1980 onward) projects characterized by
a manipulabie robotic arm that is attached to the body and activated by the
host via an EMG (sometimes from other body areas) or tele-operated by others;
and Net-control projects where body stimulators are connected to the Inter
net and the levels of Internet activity are then reflected in body activity (figures
5.32 and 5.33).
In several of these performances, Stelarc wires his body up to the Internet,
either to reflect general activity levels or to allow specific individuals to
tele-operate his body. In ParaSite (1997), he uses images acquired via the Inter
net to map particular muscle stimulation. In PingBody (1996), Stelarc (located
in Luxembourg) had his muscles stimulated by Web viewers in remote cities
(Helsinki, Paris, and Amsterdam). In some of these PingBody performances,
he linked his muscles directly co Net activity levels (using the length of time
for a message co be sene and returned to a location as an indicator of the
Internet’s traffic in particular locations).
Part of what fascinates Stelarc is telecommunications: How can we create
composite, remotely linked bodies that question traditional notions of “own
ership” and locating the self? Telepresencly linked bodies can create a shift
ing, sliding awareness that is neither “all-here” in this body nor “all-there” in
those bodies. The Internet here is seen as being structured so as to scan, select,
and switch automatically interfacing clusters of online bodies in real time.
In CyberSM, a real-time, multisensory communication system for two par
ticipants by Stahl Stenslie,* an attempt is made to solve the problem of how

AMPLIFIED BODY
1. EEG (BRAINWAVES)
2. POSITION SENSOR (TILTING HEAD)
9. NASAL THERMISTOR
4. ECG (HEARTBEAT)
6. EMG (FLEXOR MUSCLE)
e. CONTACT MICROPHONE (HAND MOTORS)
7. PLETHYSMOGRAM (FINGER PULSE)
8. KINETIC ANGLE TRANSDUCER
9. POSITION SENSOR (BENDING LEG)
10. EMG (VASTUS MEDIALIS MUSCLE)
11. ULTRASOUND TRANSDUCER
(RADIAL ARTERY BLOODFLOW)
12. POSITION SENSOR (LIFTING ARM)
INVOLUNTARY BODY
13. STIMULATION RHS BICEPS
14. STIMULATION LHS DELTOIDS
15. STIMULATION LHS BICEPS
16. STIMULATION LHS FLEXORS
17. STIMULATION LHS HAMSTRINGS
18. STIMULATION LHS CALVES
THIRD HAND
A. GRASP/PINCH (CLOSE)
B. RELEASE (OPEN)
C. WRIST ROTATION (CW)
0. WRIST ROTATION (CCW)
E. TACTILE FEEDBACK
r^^>Aii
-S 17 u
□4
1
INVOLUNTARY BODY/ THIRD HAND
Figure 5.32 Stelarc, GH/JZ: Anatomical Exoskeleton, 2003.
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Figure 5.33 Stelarc, Event for Amplified Body, Laser Eyes, and Third Hand, 1986. Maki
Gallery, Tokyo, Japan. Photograph by M. Merritt. © 1986 by Stelarc.
to establish tele-tactile communication. The first link took place in fall 1993,
interconnecting participants in Paris and Cologne, thereby allowing them to
physically stimulate one another remotely by touch. The tele-haptic commu
nication was made possible through the use of sensorial suits worn directly
on the participants’ bodies. In line with the sadomasochistic-inspired world
design of these suits were constructed from materials such as rubber
and latex as well as different kinds of "rough” sensorial stimulators/effectors,
mounted both inside and outside the outfit. The gear was placed on the

erogenous zones of the body—that is, on the more sensitive parts of the limbs,
the breasts, the anus, and the genitals. The main effectors were different kinds
of mechanical vibrators, some of which extended themselves from the back,
between the legs, and up toward the breasts. Other effectors were electric
shock stimulators and heating pads. As Stenslie notes, the effects of the effec
tors of this first sensorial suit system were more spectacular and intrusive
rather than fine and subtle. On the other hand, the suits were designed not
to convey sweet caressing but the shock of the other’s corporeal presence. The
stimuli sufficed to cause sexual sensations—technically seen even to the point
of an orgasm. Although Stenslie’s bodysuits are eye-catching, their design is
the product of pure functionality, aimed at corporeal manipulation/stimula-
cion. The artist, as an interface designer, has become particularly known for
such bodysuits and he later constructed several others.
Originally trained as a classical sculptor at the Art Academies of Oslo and
Dusseldorf, Stenslie has worked with the computer since the early 1990s to
create multisensorial perception manipulative systems. In 1993, he became
one of the fathers of cybersex when he conceived and builc the above-
mentioned CyberSM project as well as the world’s first full-body tele-tactile
communication system in collaboration with Kirk Woolford.
In his early works, Stenslie focused on the human body as an interface for
physical experience. Through the haptic bodysuits of CyberSM. (1993) and
Stenslie’s later project inter_skin (1993), an autoerotic communication system
connecting two or more users, the human body becomes not just a canvas for
extraordinary corporeal sensations but also a space to construct new identities
and conceptions of the self.
Technologically, Stenslie’s work emphasizes the computer’s versatility as a
universal tool to read and write data outside the “black box.” Whereas using
a desktop computer is generally viewed as a “natural" experience, Stenslie
redesigns the computer and its interfaces to expand the corporeal, sensual
limits of technology. One way to overcome the sensory confines of current
computer-mediated communication is by designing multisensory environ
ments. In the case of CyberSM, the innovative aspects of the project are found
not just in the bodysuits themselves but in the multisensorial system result
ing from the combination of interactive 3-D graphics, voice communication,
and the haptic bodysuits. In relation to the impact of multisensorial virtual
reality communication systems on the formation of both personal experience
and identity (or identities), Stenslie writes that “the question is no longer what
Chapter 5
or who I am, but all chat I can be.”22 His experiments show that technology
can have a dramatic impact on the formation of self.
An especially interesting part of his projects is the contextual design,
meaning the combination of advanced interactive systems with explicit envi
ronmental design. Stenslie carefully plans the construction of the ambient
setting in and around the installations themselves. Inside Stenslie’s installa
tions, users are required to “dress in feelings." In his early work CyberSM, chis
was evident in the users’ ritual dressing in bodysuits; by entering the instal
lation, users had to dress to experience (cyber)sex. Psychophysically speaking,
chis dress up induces phenomena of projections and expectations long before
anything is actually experienced. This kind of contextual design becomes even
more evident in Stenslie’s later installations sen$e:less (1996) and Solve et Coagula
(1996). In these works, he combines interactive art with sophisticated sculp
tural design.
Stenslie’s projects are both artistic expressions of as well as experiments
with the complex arc of manipulating our senses. To perfect his perception-
manipulative systems, he has recently focused on basic human-machine
systems—as opposed to the human-machine-human communication projects
of CyberSM and inter_skin. In Solve et Coagula, he developed a complex sensory
organism, what he called a “cyborganism," consisting of an intelligent
machine corporeally networked to the body of the human participant. In his
artist’s statement about the exhibit, 1996, Stenslie describes the installation’s
focus on an emotional phenomenon as follows: “Mating man and machine
through a multisensorial, full duplex sensory interface the installation net
works the human with an emotional, sensing and artificially intelligent crea
ture; it mates man with a machine turned human and everything that goes
with it: ecstatic, monstrous, perverted, craving, seductive, hysterical, violent,
beautiful.’’
The installation is a multisensorial perception and manipulation device
with high-sensory resolution. It uses several modes of interaction to both read
and influence the user. On entering the oval, shell-like construction of the
installation, the user is visually immersed in the real-time virtual reality world
of the inner body of the creature. The bodysuit worn by the user serves as an
intelligent, two-way communication interface to the creature. Through more
than 120 effectors (physical outputs), the suit provides tactile stimuli so
that the creature can touch the user’s body. The suit is capable of inducing
sensations of complex touch patterns as well as being pushed and pulled.

Synesthetically synched wich the three-dimensional visuals and the audio, the
user feels their body invaded by "organic-like” sensations. The creature senses
the body condition of the human through the suit’s built-in pressure- and
biosensors. Through spatial, three-dimensional sound based on real-time
granular synthesis and projected from the eight loudspeakers, the user is
immersed in a moving audio pattern of the creature’s constantly changing
virtual body, surrounding and enclosing the user inside the creature itself. The
main modes of user interaction are through head and movement cracking,
pressure sensors, and real-time voice analysis. The installation constantly mon
itors the user’s body and movement in response to the output. By corporeal
feedback loops, it tries to manipulate che user inco che right affective pattern
fit to “feed” the creature’s need for sensual stimulus. Solve et Coagula raises
important questions of what happens when the machine turns human, and
the human turns machinelike. Stenslie describes his experiments wich the
sensual merging of human and machine as symbiotic interactive systems. Fun
damental for such systems is the loss of individual control over interactive
events in order to gain an intensified experience on a symbiocic level—that
is, as an intimate association between two different entities.
Looking at Stenslie’s body of works it becomes apparent how he uses media
art as an arena for extreme experiments—extreme in the sense that he trans
gresses conventions of thinking and (technological) use. One of his artistic
visions is that artists must rethink strategies for innovation. One example is
how he portrays artistic value as something found not just in expressions of
ideas but also by recombining media into new configurations and even new
technologies. The fact that he invented the world’s first cybersex system is an
indication of how media artists can contribute to the development of tech
nologies and not just dse them.
Stenslie’s emphasis on extreme experiments in order to push the limits of
technology and perception has the unexpected, but consciously intended effect
of raising ethically important questions. CyberSM. questions emotional phe
nomena like affection, proximity, and care, and their positions in or absence
from online (cybersex) communication. On the basis of his experience with
technologically induced sensations, Stenslie formulated his "Terminal Sex”
statement for Ars Electronica 2000. Here he raises troubling questions about
sex and reproduction in the future: “As we today print words on paper, in the
future we will print life. Then, what kinds of life will we print? Life in the
image of fashion?”
Chapter 5
Stenslie’s adventures into extreme sensations in interactive environments
provide an empirical basis for making better-qualified ethical judgments about
the use of future technology. His goal with media art is to make it an arena for
extreme experimentation, an arena for “distortion and feedback.” Then media
art might, as Donna Haraway puts it, become a tool to think with. As Stenslie
says, “Extreme media art experiments are not about getting right, or doing the
right things, but about making the most interesting mistakes.”
As for Orlan,* now also a multimedia and performance artist, until recently
she had principally utilized plastic surgery on her face—with the aim of
making her face into a synthetic personality calculated by computer accord
ing to certain physical and psychological characteristics of mythological
heroines like the huntress Diana (chosen for her strength), Psyche (for her
inquisitiveness), and Venus (for her freedom of behavior), whose images have
had a strong impact on the history of arc. These female models were chosen
not for their beauty but for their strength of character, since Orlan, who pos
sesses great natural beauty herself, had nothing to gain in this respect—co che
contrary, she had everything to lose (figure 5.34).
Figure 5.34 Orlan, Autoportrait. Detail from a computer-dispatched multiple-screen video

installation titled "Mise en scfcne pour un grand FIAT." Toulouse, France: Forum des arts et
univers scientifique et technique, October 1986.

Between 1965 and 1975, Orlan, who had just graduated from l’Ecole des
Beaux Arts in St. Etienne, France, participated in the metaart and body art
movements. She realized actions in the street and tableaux vivants similar to
those of the American Living Theater. These were shortly followed by public
presentations of her own naked body in the posture of an odalisque by Jean-
Auguste-Dominique Ingres, with the difference that Orlan was stretched out
on some bedsheets that had been stained, according to Orlan, by the semen
of her various lovers. This work, in the feminist spirit of the 1970s, repre
sents the diversion of an image and a challenge to the male authority of a
master painter.
A still more aggressive phase of her work was reached in 1977 on the
occasion of her performance The Artist’s Kiss, which was presented at the
International Fair of Contemporary Art in Paris. The artist offered the spec
tator-customer a kiss for five francs (one dollar) or more, depending on the
duration of the kiss or the trouble taken in its execution. The assimilation
made between the woman, the prostitute, and the artist must here be taken
as a denunciation of the image that society projects not only on women artists
but on all artists, who were at the time considered prostitutes of capitalist
society. The scandal was great, and Orlan became famous. This allowed her
to develop still more provocative ideas and gestures, with the aid of always
more advanced techniques.
At that juncture, Orlan realized a series of performances in which the term
performance must be understood in its basic meaning: an exploit in a sports
event. In these performances, the artist proposes herself as a metre-etalon (a play
on words since the term can mean a standard of measure and a stallion) by
calculating the dimensions of some official and cultural sites like the Cencre
Pompidou and the Louvre in Paris, or St. Peter’s Square in Rome. This meas
uring was done by means of her own body, lying stretched out on the ground,
then rising to her feet, and again stretched out on the ground, as often as nec
essary. Such a physical effort did not go without any aches in the articulations
nor without an intense fatigue, but until then, Orlan did not go further in
her sacrificial performances than other European or U.S. body artists. In 1978,
at the same time as other measuring performances of public sites, she under
took a new series of performances that were slightly more reassuring, and in.
which she offered up her body half covered by draped veils in the manner of
a baroque statue for public contemplation. She considers and calls herself a
Saint-Orlan—that is, another version of a woman as a prostitute and a witch.
Chapter 5
This represents again a kind of ironic denunciation of the conventional vision
that society has of women.
In 1979, Orlan used an untoward event to reach a new level in the dra
matic presentation of herself. She had been invited to participate in an artis
tic manifestation in which she was to execute one of her earlier performances,
but at the last moment was prevented from doing so by a gynecological acci
dent; an urgent operation was necessary. Orlan decided to have the operation
videotaped and then retransmitted on the spot where the manifestation was
to take place. It must be stressed that at the time, everyone was still fully
immersed in the countercultural ideology of the 1960s and 1970s chat upheld
the principle of “Art is Life.” This surgical operation can be considered an
undeniable success for two reasons. The first can be deduced from the artist’s
implicit statement, “If I cake che risk to show you this, I am invincible and
in full control of myself and of my body,” while che second reason, also quite
reassuring, is contained in the artist’s message, “Don’t be afraid."
It then cook Orlan about ten more years to give a concerted sequel to this
unpremeditated operation-performance. In 1990, she underwent her first vol
untary surgical operation with the intention of re-creating her face and her
whole person as an open-ended work of art in progress. Prior co chac, she had
pursued and developed her series MesuRages (1964-1983) and also Saint
Orlan. She also produced, as part of “The Documentary Study: The Drape-The
Baroque” (1983 onward), Apparition of Saint Orlan and Reincarnation of Saint
Orlan (1990) which finally led to several successive surgical disincarnations
and reincarnations to which she herself gave the name carnal arc.
Her surgical intervention-performances have from che beginning been
highly cheacrical. The surgeon and che operating team wore some quite
becoming costumes while the artist—with makeup on her face, her hair care
fully dressed, clothed in haute couture garments, and of course, under local
anesthesia—recited some texts on arc and her own artistic work, accompanied
by baroque, rock, or funk music. All these performances were filmed and
retransmitted by satellite to museums and arc galleries. Afterward, the artist
kept a sort of photographic diary of the different phases of the cicatrization
of her face, and produced some installations and postcards with these images.
In 1996, Orlan realized her ninth operation-performance, the most radical
being an implant of cwo protruding silicon places on both sides of her temple,
thus conjuring up an vision of two demonic horns ready to pierce through the
skin. She had in mind a refusal of che cradicional notion of beauty and was

even trying to embroil the notion of gender. Somehow in opposition to this,
it is possible to detect a strong quest for identity in most of her self-portraits,
although a variable mobile identity is also put forward by the artist.
At present, Orlan intends to abandon the surgical interventions on her face
because the metamorphoses she wanted to obtain are unrealizable; moreover,
they have been made unnecessary through the existence of virtual images, with
whose help Orlan can now permanently produce a varying multiethnic iden
tity. In order to achieve this, she now mixes her own already multiplied image
with reproductions of African and Asian masks or faces from Egyptian paint
ings and Mayan statues, among others. It is clear that Orlan has not gone back
on her first personal commitments while continuing to practice a sociocultu
ral politics of the image.23
A personal note can also be detected in John Klima’s* ludic engagement.
One easy example of this is his installation Go (2000), which consists of cor
responding virtual and physical gaming environments. Loosely based on the
Japanese game called Go, Klima’s game has two goals: to capture robots and
buy drawings. The physical game board is a 16 X 24 foot map of the earth,
made from 16 X 20 inch drawing pads arranged in a grid on the floor. Each
page of the drawing pad equates to a monetary denomination. The drawings
on the pads are created by four fully autonomous robot bugs that run on
batteries and have pens attached to them. Individual game board drawings
can be purchased on a “cash-and-carry” basis. When a robot’s battery is low,
the robot seeks light and moves into one of eight illuminated robot recharg
ing stations, which are positioned on eight countries on the game/drawing
board. Suspended above the game board is an eight-foot balloon. The virtual
gaming environment, a spinning image of the earth, is projected onto this
balloon. In the virtual game, each country (and its corresponding charging
station) on the physical game board is represented by a disk. Visitors to the
installation manipulate the projection interface and turn the charging stations
on and off by moving little communication satellites into the proximity of
the disks. This way, they determine the path of the robots and the resulting
drawings.
Klima’s installation Fish (2000) consists of a virtual gaming environment
and its analogous physical installation. The game is played from an arcade
cabinet, requiring players to deposit a quarter. The players’ goal is to get their
virtual goldfish avatar to the safety of the “hero tank’’ by traveling through
treacherous, predator-infested waters. If the game goldfish makes it to safety,
Chapter 5
a live goldfish is automatically released from a holding area into a large bowl
with other “saved" goldfish. If it doesn’t, the live goldfish is released into a
tank with a live oscar fish and is subsequently devoured.
In the desktop installation Guestbook (2000), Klima employed his original
cwenty-five-year-old Radio Shack TRS-80 computer as the gallery guestbook;
the visitor is asked to sign not with their name but with a valid credit card
number. The “mass storage device” on the TRS-80 is a standard audiocassetce
recorder, but instead of being stored to tape, the card number is played as data
sound (similar to modem noise) through a speaker. A microphone connected
to a contemporary computer records this sound and translates the sound data
into a unique three-dimensional geometric object. The visitor may then
preview and even purchase the object as an actual, physical three-dimensional
print, known as a stereolithograph, that can be held in the hands and dis
played on a shelf.
Addressing the nature of multiple manifestations around a core concept,
Klima created Optimus (analog glasbead vl) (2000). Consisting of sixteen mod
ified radios attached to a ring and eight small joysticks mounted to a sphere,
Optimus is an analogue equivalent to the artist’s popular “glasbead” digital
sound object (www.glasbead.com). Similar to glasbead, the viewer is invited
to “make it sound good” by manipulating the joysticks. The viewer may tune
the radios to any stations and dynamically play the volumes on each radio. A
wide variety of soundscapes can be achieved through tuning to talk radio or
the white noise “between channels.” The sixteen radios mounted on a ring
create an intriguing sound spatial ization. Versions two and three of the
“analog glasbead” actualize the same concept, but with greater numbers of
radios and joysticks, and a variety of radio sources such as weather, air traffic
control, police scanners, citizens-band radio, and so on.
Klima’s Ecosystem2000> a digital artist’s portrait of economic Darwinism,
uses animated birds and trees on a giant screen to represent the turbulence of
global markets (figure 5.35). The project, which occupied a whole room at
BitStreams, the Whitney Museum’s exhibit, digital art looked like a giant
video game. Klima’s canvas is an eight-square-foot screen. Flocks of different
kinds of birds fly around a virtual world with treelike structures and various
surfaces. A joystick in front of the screen allows a viewer to navigate through
the universe. It all looks sort of familiar, like a video game—until you read
the project’s description on the wall and realize that the birds represent dif
ferent currencies, and the trees are symbols for stock market indexes around

Chapter 5
the world. Thanks to a real-time data feed from CNN’s Web site, the ecosys
tem constantly changes depending on what is happening in the capital
markets on a given day. The more volatile the currency, the more active the
flock. When the daily volatility of a currency exceeds twice the annual average,
the flock feeds on the tree representing the country’s leading stock market
index. And if the volatility exceeds three times the yearly average, the flocks
attack each other. The project conveys a sly and playful commentary on the
Darwinistic nature of global capitalism. Ecosystem2000 does not break any
laws, yet it is infused with a distinctly subversive spirit.
Born in Redondo Beach, California, Klima grew up in Albany, New York.
In 1980, when he was fifteen, he got his first computer, the above-mentioned
TRS-80, and started writing computer games. He attended the State Uni
versity of New York at Purchase, and in 1987 earned a BFA in photography.
After college, Klima moved around a great deal, living in New Orleans,
Chicago, and Seattle. He rekindled his interest in programming when he used
a computer to design some furniture. To support himself, Klima did some
freelance programming for Microsoft, and when he moved back to New York
in 1994, Dun and Bradstreet hired him as a freelance database programmer.
He began working on a variecy of paintings, photos, and multimedia proj
ects. One of them, Zodiac (1999), was a calendar and clock based on the
Chinese zodiac.
For his most recent piece, titled Earth (2001), Klima is attempting co syn
thesize and meld his various approaches in order to present a work of extreme
internal complexity that is both easily accessible and intuitively navigable
(figure 5.36). The basic concept of Earth is the artist’s aesthetic representation
of multiple geographically specific real-time and databased information
sources. This data is not intended to convey useful information since Earth is
not a tool; che data is interpreted and visualized by the artist with an eye
toward its aesthetic presentation. The specific information is purposefully
stripped of its literal content. By visualizing multiple data sources simulta
neously, Earth presents an alternate view, as if one were witnessing Earth with
different eyes and a different mind.
Earth exists as a limited edition of eight “handmade” computers, joined in
a multiuser environment. Each owner of an edition of Earth is represented in
the work by a satellite, positioned in orbit at the individual’s current viewpoint.
In this way, Earth uses the capabilities of the medium to establish a unique
form of art collecting. When a collector possesses Earth, one becomes part of a

Chapter 5
collecting community. Each of the eight editions of Earth are represented in the
individual edition, and each is connected to the others. Earth also has an online
component: a functionally reduced public version of the software. In this
version, the viewer has stringently limited access to the data. When the viewer
runs the software on their home computer, the data they are currently viewing
is subsequently also represented in the limited edition version. The owners of
the editions are informed of the activities of the general public. The final com
ponent to the Earth system is a single piece of software, the Overview. In this
unique compilation, the collector’s viewpoints and the general public’s view
points are all combined to form a singular image of Earth activity.
To illustrate Klima’s personal and artistic position after the events of Sep
tember 11, 2001, let me mention that he was asked at that moment to produce
an online work that was broadly accessible and quickly download able—a dif
ficult task considering the technology he normally utilizes. The work’s title,
The Great Game., provides crucial references about its aim. The viewer is
presented with a window depicting a terrain map of Afghanistan. Superim
posed oil the map, which can be fully rotated to modify both distance and
perspective, are icons representing the progress of the Western campaign
against the Taliban regime. These icons represent the available personnel and
material, the weapon systems deployed, and discrete munitions delivered to
various targets within the area of operations.
The title refers to the diplomatic, political, and military “sideshow” that
has taken place in that region from recorded history onward, and that reached
its (literary) cynosure during the nineteenth century as the British Empire
alternately combined or skirmished with other European powers to prevent
czarist Russia from acquiring ice-free ports (and so threatening British hege
mony on a global scale)—although all the major powers of the day were
involved, including China. The Great Game itself more specifically refers to
the intelligence and espionage component of this struggle, and has been
immortalized in many of the works of Rudyard Kipling and other writers of
the period. Klima observes that this is how the conflict has been presented in
the West: supposedly a short, sharp military action designed to topple the
Taliban from power, and thus allow for Western special forces to root out the
al Quaeda terrorist network and its purported head, Osama bin Laden. In
selecting this textual figure (the war in Afghanistan), Klima returns to a trope
now receiving long overdue attention, and one that he has long advocated and
already demonstrated his mastery over: computer games. He contends that

while people are dying, millions (if not billions) of dollars’ worth of the
Western arsenal are being expended, and yet when this data is presented to
the viewer through a computer, what is it, what does it become? Klima’s
answer is that the signifiers that tell us that this is other than a game, other
than an amusement or pastime, are things we must supply ourselves. The
partial news blackout surrounding the campaign, so disappointing to the
mass-media audience who found in the Gulf War a sort of remote fireworks
display, leaves little information beyond the organically valueless ciphers
Klima employs by way of the icons used to convey information on the war’s
progress. So it is given to the viewer to take those icons (the information is
updated on a daily basis) and make the critical determinations that separate
“sign” from “symbol."
As he did in a much earlier work titled Serbian Skylight (1999) (which dealt
with the Yugoslav War) and in Fish, Klima again asks us to verify sureties as
to what is real, what is simulated, and what is the game designer’s fancy. We
are asked co define, not perhaps for all time but for chis exact moment, how
clearly we comprehend the differences between the mediated evidence of the
momentous events we are presented with and our own conditioned responses
to the media itself and to the games and amusements that increasingly have
so many vectors in parallel or actually in common with it. That diplomats,
soldiers, politicians, and historians can refer to life-and-death struggles as
“games” is certainly no longer a cause for scandal; that every nation’s military
employs games and simulations to gauge their respective force’s effectiveness
is surely no longer news. Yet in Klima’s work the vector of information
reverses its field: Are we looking at a game representing a war or a war rep
resenting a game? The status of what were formerly clearly subject and object
are now made co loop—the circuit is complete, so to speak.
Anyone who has played a few strategy games on a computer will know how
such programs make use of icons and how they are employed as the signage
germane to game play. Yet icons are also used in military briefings, and there
they are not signs at all but potent and perhaps fragile symbols—of human
life, of vast amounts of money, perhaps of political will itself. According to
Klima, wars will no longer be televised as wars have been up to now. Though
the technology now exists to allow live-streaming “battle-cams” accessible by
anyone with a computer, none will be employed for "reasons of security” (valid
in theory, indeterminate in practice). So it is left to us to experience Klima’s
The Great Game, see that the map is called “the game board,” understand that
Chapter 5
the icons are said to be “pieces,” and muse yet again (as we are called to do
whenever we see Klima’s work) on the nature of mediation, on what we gain
by it and what it costs us, on how “real” reality itself has become through
nothing more than the various agencies of its representation.
David Rokeby,* another artist with a personal commitment to interactiv
ity, has focused his work on interactive pieces that directly engage the human
body or involve artificial perception systems. He was one of the pioneers of
motion-sensing art and is well-known for his installations that sense human
motion using video image processing. Some of these events invite participants
to explicitly move their bodies in order to “play" the system; others monitor
people’s motions more unobtrusively. Very Nervous System, first created in 1986,
is a classic in the field. Very Nervous System is a series of interactive sound instal
lations that use video image processing to detect visitors’ motions and gen
erate synthesizd sound in response. The mapping of motion to sound is
complex and dynamic. Rokeby wants to move against the limitations and the
predictable definitiveness of standard interfaces. He describes how he seeks to
create transforming experiences that lead visitors to new insights into their
motion in normal space and suggests that the diffuse “resonant” nature of
interaction can create an almost “shamanistic” experience. It is important to
understand that Very Nervous System is not a control system. It is an interac
tive system, in which neither partner in the system is in contro. Interactive and
reactive are not the same thing. The changing states of the installation are a
result of the collaboration of the two elements. This work only exists in this
state of mutual influence. The relationship is broken when the interactor
attempts to take control and the results are unsatisfying. The interactive Very
Nervous System is now being used to enable a paralyzed woman to speak and
write. It is also currently being used by composers, video artists, and medical
facilities in many parts of the world.
Rokeby, a sound and video installation artist based in Toronto, Canada,
has been creating interactive installations since 1982. His work has been
performed/exhibited in shows across Canada, the United States, Europe, and
Asia. He received the Petro-Canada award for media arts in 1988, the Prix
Ars Electronica award of distinction for interactive art (Austria) in 1991 and
1997 (with Paul Garrin), and the British Academy of Film and Television
Arts award for interactive art in 2000.
Rokeby’s first interactive sound installation was Reflexions. He constructed
some bulky 8x8 pixel video cameras, connected them to a wire-wrapped card

in an Apple computer that digitized the images, and wrote a program. This,
in turn, controlled a Korg MS-20 analog synthesizer to make sounds in
response to the movements seen by the cameras. Movement also controlled
the volume of two tape loops of water sounds. The synthesizer and water
sounds were mixed individually to four speakers arranged in a tetrahedron,
one on the ceiling and three in a triangle on the floor. The sounds would move
around you in addition to responding to your movement. Reflexions always had
a visual component. In the first version (1983), a second Apple was generat
ing abstract textures and patterns in relation to movement. In 1984, Rokeby
generated, again on an Apple, images of tetrahedra that rotated and flexed in
response to your position in the space. Rokeby would present the video images
on three monitors underneath the cameras. These images had the unwanted
effect of making people very passive in the space. This seemed to Rokeby a
common response to video screens before the age of ubiquitous video games
and personal computers.
Since that time, Rokeby has created a rich diversity of installations that
explore a variety of cultural, conceptual, and personal themes. He often focuses
on the limitations of conventional interfaces and interactivity, and investigates
noncontrol-oriented interactivity.
Rokeby explores the assumptions that guide human perception. In the first
version of Silicon Remembers Carbon (1993—2000), the central element is a large
video image projected down onto a bed of sand on the floor of the installa
tion space. Visitors’ movements subtly affect the mixing and dissolving of
video images and sounds. Each visitor leaves traces that affect the experience
of the work for later visitors. The installation presents a fragile illusion, a con
sensual hallucination, requiring the visitors’ participation for its continua
tion—through their body movements, a willingness to blur their eyes slightly
to hide the scan lines, and their ability to project depth onto the flat image.
They are offered a range of possibilities from sustaining the illusion by creat
ing and maintaining distance to dispelling it by stepping into the illusionary
space itself (figure 5.37). For the artist, the visitors’ movement through this
range of possibilities represents a more important interaction than che direct
interaction with the technical system itself. While the 3 X 4 meter video
image is projected from above onto the bed of sand, there are also half-meter
walkways forming a frame around the image. The interior of the enclosing
space is completely black. A speaker hangs in each of the four corners above
head height. Four modified infrared sensors register the amount of movement
Chapter 5
Figure 5.37 David Rokeby, Silicon Remembers Carbon, 1993-1995. Installation shot, Lowry
Centre, Manchester, England. Photo by David Rokeby.
occurring along the four sides of the image. Two floor-level cameras look across
the image from opposite corners, registering movement only if someone in
the installation steps onto the sand and begins reflecting the light of the pro
jected image. When one enters the empty installation, a single video clip is
playing out across the sand. Most likely the image is of water (beach waves,
water under a bridge in Toronto, passersby reflected in the canals of Hamburg,
shadows and reflections in street puddles, and so forth). The image creates the
illusion of depth, and the sand sinks underneath it. It is not clear that the
“screen” is sand. People look around, then reach surreptitiously down through
the depth of the image to the dry sand. Movement along a walkway is sensed
by one of the infrared sensors, which sends an analog voltage roughly repre
sentative of the amount of movement. This signal causes a second image from
the other disk to be dissolved in along the side where the movement took
place. The second video clip is selected by a program from the possible clips
on the disk, based on the side of the frame where the current movement began.
The new image usually contains shadows or reflections of people along the
edge of the clip that is visible. One tends to interpret those reflections and
shadows as images generated by people actually in the room, either oneself or

others, rather chan something present in the image itself. So this installation
is some sort of fake reflecting pool, an inversion of Narcissus’s experience.
Whereas Narcissus’s tragedy is that he cannot recognize himself in his reflec
tion, the visitors co the space would find themselves identifying with shadows
and distorted reflections that had only a circumstantial relation to them. The
identification is both momentary and elusive. Rokeby’s intention is to play
along the boundary of identification.
Another of Rokeby’s creations, Universal Translator (1999), is an interac
tive sound and video work focused on the sound hardware of the human body.
The mouth/voice interests Rokeby for a number of reasons. For one, it is where
the body meets language (where the physical meets the abstract). It is an
extremely articulate output device as well. We tend to identify strongly with
our voice, and so interactions that involve and transform our voice usually
communicate quite strongly and directly to us. The interface for this work is
a microphone with a microvideo camera embedded in its head so that the
camera looks directly at rhe mouth from close up. The sound of the voice and
the video of the moving lips are captured by computers. These sounds and
images provide most of the content, and are used to control most of the inter
activity of the work. A computer monitor faces the interactor and displays the
processed mouth images. Sound is recorded into computer memory, and is
immediately available for analysis, processing, and output. The sound is ana
lyzed for phonemic concent and vocal intensity information. This information
is used to control various aspects of the sound processing and output. Incom
ing sound is fed into a live granular synthesis system so that the sound may
be stretched (with or without pitch shift), shortened, shattered, and diffused
in various ways. The incoming audio is also chopped into syllable-like frag
ments that are stored and replayed in response to features in the incoming
audio. As a result, a dense, hovering sound world is constructed using only
the sounds provided over the recent past by the interaccors. The video aspect
of this work is intended co be secondary co the audio. The screen is initially
black. When the microphone hears a sound, the video of the mouth fades up
into visibility, fading out again when the sound is finished. When no sound
is heard for some time, shore video clips appear chat comment on the rela
tionship between language and the body (figure 5.38).
Yet another of Rokeby’s installations, Giver of Names (1991 onward), is a
system that describes objects presented to it in poetic and metaphoric ways.
It is made to recognize objects placed by visitors on a pedestal in front of its
Chapter 5
Figure 5.38 David Rokeby, N-CHA(n)T, 2001. Installation shot, Walter Phillips Gallery,
Banff Centre for the Arts. Photo by Don Lee and David Rokeby.
camera eye. Commenting on human processes of categorization, the computer

names che object with its speech-synthesized voice and sometimes shares in
its ruminations. The names it speaks are not always simple objective descrip
tors. Rokeby notes in che artist’s statement for the project that one "aim is co
highlight the eight conspiracy between perception and language, bringing
into focus the assumptions chat make perception viable, but also biased and
fallible, and the way language inhibits (or alternatively enhances) our ability
to see’’ (figure 5.39).
Social, Environmental, and Scientific Commitments to Interactivity
At first sight, a good number of artists show less personal commitments than
the ones mentioned above—or rather, they adopt a wider angle of vision more
concerned with social, environmental, and scientific issues. Yet even with the
artists discussed below, basic human issues are never neglected in their work.

Figure 5.39 David Rokeby, Seen, 2002. Installation shot, Canadian Pavillion of the Venice
Biennale of Architecture. Photo by David Rokeby.
The richness in these attempts to create significative digital installations that

cover social, environmental, and scientific issues treated from a techno-
aesthetic point of view can be gathered from the great variety of themes
covered by these artists. Social issues include the reassessment of che lives of
simple workers, surveillance methods, and social portraiture in the age of
hypermedia virtuality as well as environmental concerns. Scientific issues are
dominated by biological, biochemical themes that are brought into relation
ship with art as a living system.
One of these social issues can be discerned in a work called Frontiers of
Utopia (1995), an interactive piece about the lives of eight idealists by Jill
Scott.* Scott’s extended interest in “FemmTech” resulted in the virtual char
acter studies for Frontiers of Utopia (funded by the Australian Film Commis
Chapter 5
sion), housed in a cinema space with custom-built sculptural and photo
graphic interfaces. Although the work was made in Australia at the Film and
Television School, and produced by the Sydney interactive media company
Monitor Interactive Systems, Scott had already moved from Australia to
Germany to teach in 1992. Hans Peter Schwarz, director of the ZKM Media
Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany, invited Scott to complete the programming
and the interfaces for the large-scale Mac version of Frontiers of Utopia at the
ZKM Medialab in Karlsruhe, and as a result the ZKM has purchased this
version of the work.
While in Germany, Scott created the piece Beyond Hierarchy? (2000) within
the exhibition Vision-Ruhr in Dortmund. This work presented excerpts from
the personal lives of twentieth-century Ruhr region workers in the form of
virtually reconstructed characters. The audiences were invited to meet Sophie,
an ammunition factory worker in 1918; Piotr, a Polish miner in 1932; Lotte,
a miners’ kitchen worker in 1952; Misha, a Czech car mechanic in 1971;
Ahmet, a Turkish worker in the recycling industry in 1983; and Sabine, an
electronic technician on a cell phone assembly line in 1999-
As editor Marielle Hahne suggests, in the installation, the artist projected
these virtual characters onto an atrium as a metaphor for the ideals that all
six workers shared in common: the desire for better working conditions and
an easier lifestyle. For Scott, history is about ordinary people and their levels
of collective desires and struggles—an interest she has shown in many earlier
works such as Frontiers of Utopia. The six characters were played by actors with
scripts based on the research of real lives found in oral history archives, books,
and state and film archives from the Ruhr region. In Beyond Hierarchy? Scott
portrayed these characters with admiration, capturing their robust and humor
ous nature as well as some of the difficult aspects of their working lives. The
audiences found themselves in a fiction film, where individual viewers could
choose how much they wanted to unfold history and how much they wanted
to involve themselves with the idealisms of these workers.24
The characters could also “meet over time"; they could be triggered to have
conversations in front of actual documentary footage from famous demon
strations on che streets of Dortmund, Duisburg, Bochum, and Essen—cities
in the Ruhr region. In this way, Beyond Hierrarchy? provided the public with
a Brechcian view of industrial “progress” illustrated by historical examples.
Within the Beyond Hierarchy? installation, however, two particular senses
of irony were prevalent, due to the fact that “the chair interfaces” offered a

different metaphor for the viewer than the "secret handshake interface” at the
top of a staircase. First, while sitting in the chairs, the public was in control
of the workers through manipulation of the interface. Alternatively, in the
secret handshake interface, a simulated handshake between two viewers caused
the virtual characters to meet on the street in front of the various famous
twentieth-century Ruhr region demonstrations. This action fused the role of
the viewer and that of the filmed workers together on the same hierarchical
plane. As such, the audience might be surprised to find that some of the
workers stopped their work to react in an unusual way.
Beyond Hierarchy? changed the hierarchy of the installation space, the
Verwaltungshalle (the regional administrative seat). Historically, the real
workers were rarely allowed to enter the building. By elevating workers to all
levels of the Verwaltungshalle, Scott subverted the hierarchical architecture
of the site itself and therefore celebrated these workers’ ideals. It was through
the character of Sabine, the electronic technician of 1999, that the audience
could also see into the ideals of the new century. Sabine suggested that if the
Ruhr region wanted to attempt to undergo a transformation from manufac
ture in service-based industry, massive retraining programs would be required
as well as the novel creation of different network-based nonhierarchical indus
try structures.
As for Scott’s own background, she was born in Melbourne, Australia, in
1952. In 1973, she completed her studies of film, art, and design at the
Prahran Institute of Technology in Melbourne. From 1975 until 1982 she
lived in San Francisco, where she received an MA from the department of
communication at San Francisco State University. In addition, she became the
director of the alternative gallery Site, Cite, Sight. Scott returned to Australia
in 1982, and lectured on media at the University of New South Wales, College
of Fine Arts, Sydney. Simultaneously, she worked on the development of com
puter-based 3-0 animation and interactive art. In 1992, she was invited to
the Hochschule fur Kunst in Saarbriicken, Germany, as a guest professor of
computer animation, and she received an honorable mention for interactive
art at the Ars Electronica in 1994. From 1994 until 1997, Scott was an artist
in-residence at the ZKM/Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe
and a project coordinator for the ZKM Media Museum.25 She was also a
research fellow (1994-1997) at the Center for Advanced Inquiry into Inter
active Arc at the University of Wales, where she earned a PhD in media phi
losophy as part of her own synthetic image analysis. Her doctorate dealt with
Chapter 5
che relation between the history of digital images of body and gender repre
sentations and the new technologies of science and fiction (microbiology and
artificial construction). The three-part completed work and her dissertation,
“Digital Body Automata,” were both on display in che ZKM Medienmuseum.
The chree cechnologies used here are echer-netted Macintoshes linked co
“smart sculptures” (a figurative history), a real-time-identity virtual reality
game through parts of che human body with Performer and custom software
from Silicon Graphics (“Interskin”), and a custom-built software body detec
tor linked through personal computers to form a digital video wall. This
installation includes the Australian 3-DIS software co control the animation
of a pneumatic robot (“Immortal Duality”).
Robert Atkins wrote: “For over twenty-five years of synthetic production
and planning, Scott has formulated a way of working that places her more in
the role of either a director/scriptwriter of interactive artworks or an interac
tive director. This role includes research, production, writing, graphic design
and construction, designing interfaces, engaging the right people, and finding
industrial and cultural collaborators.
A large part of this work requires knowledge of recent computer cech
nologies and scientific discoveries including an analysis of che current dis
course and theoretical questions surrounding the potential of technological
applications. Being an interactive director requires the development of a
personal digital aesthetic, but the practice also implies the transformation
of the somatic and interactive roles of che viewer, che invention of new
forms of relevant dialogue, and the investigation of new spatial/temporal
perspectives.”26
In collaboration with the Construct Internet Design firm, Lynn Hershman
Leeson,* an artist who explores interactive telepresence, created Difference
Engine 3 (1998), where physical and remote viewers can encounter each other
in physical and virtual tours of the ZKM Medienmuseum in Karlsruhe. Three
biodirectional browsing units (EBUs) are available to inspect the museum via
live digital cameras. Physical viewers can aim the EBUs co see different pro
jected views of the virtual museum, and remote Internet visitors can position
the EBUs to see different views of the physical museum. Physical viewer
images are digitized and attached to avatars roaming the virtual museum,
which can interact with other physical viewers or remote viewer avatars. Her
shman Leeson designed the installation to reflect on concepts such as surveil
lance, voyeurism, and digital absorption. In fact, this celerobotic sculpture

features museum visitor-replicating avatars that have a life cycle all their own
within a multiuser environment.
An earlier Hershman Leeson work, Tillie the Telerobotic Doll (1995—1998),
allowed viewers to control the directional gaze of two dolls in a setting where
views were confounded by the presence of mirrors.
In another work, Room of One’s Own (1990—1993), the direction of a viewer’s
glance was tracked. Viewers looked into a tiny interactive peep show of a
bedroom with objects, while a protagonist chided the viewer for their
voyeurism. The work reflexively used this capability to lead the user to con
sider the history of the male gaze in Western history. In America's Finest
(1993—1995), Hershman Leeson activated the culturally loaded objects of the
rifle and the rifle sight. She allowed the user to “aim” the gun, which she notes
is similar co the intrusive power of the gaze.
Hershman Leeson, a professor of art at the University of California, Davis,
is an artist who has worked with many media, including photography, video,
and installations (figures 5.40, 5.41, and 5.42). A consistent theme in her
work is how people engage media-derived fantasies. But she has also created
a number of interactive computer installations as models for the dynamics of
human relationships. In the late 1970s, she pioneered the use of interactive
artworks with her innovative videodisc Lorna (1979—1983). Using a remote
control, viewers tried to liberate Lorna from her fear-dominated life and access
aspects of her thought via objects in the scene. Deep Contact (1984-1989),
another videodisc project (completed in collaboration with Sara Roberts),
required viewers to voyeuristically explore a garden populated by mysterious
persons by touching the image of their guide’s body on che screen.
The concepc of che viewer as choreographer underpins the installations
Handle with Care (Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, 1993) and
Audiozone (part of the 1994 exhibition V-topia, Tramway, Glasgow) by Susan
Collins.* While Handle with Care was a direct, evocative response to the pre
vious function of che museum sice as a railway warehouse, and engaged ics
audience with che sice’s history, Audiozone played off the expectations of visi
tors co a “major show of inceractive arc” by constructing a parallel, three-
dimensional audio world (heard only through headsets) that stroked, seduced,
and ultimately manipulated the viewer in an irreverent piece whose goal was
to encourage the participants to question just who is in control. As Helen
Sloan wrote of the work in her essay “Suspended Disbelief,”
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xz xz
agent ruby mood swing diagram
Figure 5.41 Lynn Hershman Leeson, Agent Ruby, 2000-2003. Agent Ruby is an artificially
intelligent Web agent shaped by encounters with users, thereby simultaneously situating Ruby
in real and virtual worlds, http://www.agentruby.com.
The pieces are essentially a form of virtual reality, but without the cultural baggage
associated with VR [virtual reality]. There are no supernatural avatars; representations
of 3-D spaces such as other worldly alien or spiritual landscapes; virtual art galleries;
or walks around celebrity houses. Collins’s terrain centres around che everyday
encounter; day to day living in the commuter belt or a seaside town; and the chance
meetings we have with complete strangers. The work is suggestive and asks the viewer
to project their own narrative around each situation. Like still photographs or an inci
dental but well observed scene in a film, Collins entices the viewer to become
immersed in che before and after of the projections. It is about the kinds of situations,
familiar to everyone, that provide a combination of amusemenc and embarrassment.
The work is economical using every aspect of che projeccion and location whether ic
is a railway station, foot tunnel under a river, a nightclub or even an arc gallery. All
Chapter 5
•1
Figure 5.42 Lynn Hershman Leeson, Synthia Stock Ticker, 2000-2003. Synthia reacts in
real time to changing stock data.

these contexts are worked carefully into the viewer’s negotiation of the work.27 (figures
5.43 and 5.44)
Collins, a fine artist who works across disciplines, began working with
computers in 1986 while still a student at the Slade School of Fine Art in
London. She spent the 1990-91 academic year in the arc and technology
department at the School of the Arc Inscicuce in Chicago as a Fulbright scholar,
Figure 5.43 Susan Collins, Audiozone, 1994. Installation detail, NAME Gallery, Chicago,
1996.
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and in 2001 completed a PhD at the University of Reading, England. Her
dissertation, “Inhabited Content: An Exploration into the Role of the Viewer,”
was partly written in the form of an interactive dialogue using the Internet
chat room genre. Collins has exhibited works ranging from computer imaging
and animation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to interactive, Internet, and
site-specific installation from 1992 onward. In making work as a response to
a given site or situation, Collins’s installations—usually incorporating audio

and video, and some level of viewer interaction or participation—aim to
engage the viewer in an inquiry or reinterpretation of their role within spe
cific, often everyday contexts. The installations attempt to make the audience
recognize and question accepted behavior in public situations while also
showing, through the juxtaposition of images, sounds, and site, the oddity of
the kind of social interaction regarded as mundane.
For instance, in publicly sited installations such as Collins’s Introductory
Exchanges (Woolwich Foot Tunnel, London, 1993), pedestrians walking under
neath the Thames River were forced to step over video-projected “puddles.”
Pedestrian Gestures (Hull, Manchester, and Nottingham train stations, 1994)
intervened with commuters through the projection of an animated trompe
Foeil of hands, mouths, and eyes that when approached, triggered a sensor-
driven set of audio and computer-animated responses including voices making
short exclamations such as “A-hem” and “Excuse me/’ The site is central to
these works, and the viewer becomes active as a collaborator and (an often
unwitting) participant, constructing individual and often independent narra
tives depending on the pathway chosen through the space.
The role of the viewer as fundamental to both the interpretation and real
ization of the work is not confined to Collins’s publicly sited works, however.
In Conversation (first shown in Brighton in 1997, and subsequently shown in
Amsterdam, Helsinki, Cardiff, and Berlin from 1997—2001) was an inter
vention that bridged the spaces of gallery, street, and the Web—providing
the means for two people, one on the street and one on the Internet, to have
a live conversation with each other. It was the combination of giving the
viewer the opportunity to “inhabit” the work and become active rather than
reactive in its realization, and the desire to see what would happen when
bringing together these two distinctly different kinds of public space—the
street and the Internet—that created the context for the work. On the street,
passersby encounter an animated mouth projected onto the pavement and,
through loudspeakers, can hear voices triggered by Internet users crying to
strike up a conversation. When they reply, a concealed microphone and sur
veillance camera documents and transmits their responses via streaming media
software onto the Internet. On the Internet, the streaming media means that
browsers can see the street through the surveillance camera image and hear
the people on the street through the microphone. They can also type messages
that can be sent via the Net to a computer at the street site. These messages
are converted into speech, played through loudspeakers and heard by the
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person on the street. The gallery installation consists of a large-scale video
projection of the video/audio stream. The effect of this is to frame the street
in a way that creates something that appears almost as a live film noir, unfold
ing in real time. The work only happens when it is active (that is, live and
located) and inhabited by Web browsers, although there is also a growing
archive of text logs and some video clips kept on the Internet site that can be
browsed when the work is off-line. Many of the communications appear to
center more on verification than conversation—Who are you? Where are you
from? (street), or Are you really there? If so, can you wave your hand? (Net).
Indeed, parallels could even be drawn with psychic media in terms of both
the necessity for verification as well as the desire to reach out and make contact
with this distant or absent other. When there are no people on the street, the
Net users can take over, corresponding to each other and effectively turning
the public space of the street into a public Net space. A sense of both absurd
ity and tragedy emerges from In Conversation. On many occasions the work
can be seen as a humorous, almost feel-good piece, and yet work like this can
also serve to emphasize the increasing sense of physical and emotional isola
tion existing in “real” space.28 Sloan describes it this way:
Ultimately you could say Collins’ interest lies in teasing out those things in our envi
ronments that are virtual, but that we take for granted as mundane and unimportant.
The deep texture of sounds and architecture, social etiquette and gaging of mutual
personal space, the tacit understandings that shape the way we relate to other people
and move around the city. Qualities of that which has happened or, importantly, that
which could happen. The things which can be as oppressive as they are liberating and
that, like a blind person moved off the correct route home, we only notice once their
order is upset.29
In Encyclopedia Chiaroscuro (1987) by Luc Courchesne,* the movement of

the spectators is used to edit the program into a hypervideo experience. In
this interactive video installation for computer with motion detector and push
button, laserdisc player and video monitor with input and output devices
addressing the spectator-turned-visitor, a more or less immersive space is
defined. Minimally, the work consists of a bare computer, but in most cases
an attempt is made to integrate equipment, content, and visitor into a coher
ent environment. This project taught the artist the importance of building
familiarity into the interactive piece so users feel comfortable within it. The

content of Encyclopedia Chiaroscuro was divided into four parts, representing
the artist’s own cosmogony: people, places, ideas, and light. These parts were
then organized into a virtual object—made of nodes and links—that was
designed to be manipulated in real time. The artist's intention was to use and
interpret the visitors’ movement, using an infrared sensor placed in front of
the screen, to navigate within this structure and form a video stream in real
time from a substantial bank of video sequences related to each of the four
poles. As a result, each visitor conducted their own personal exploration of
this cosmogony. Stillness was, for example, interpreted as interest and pro
duced a continuity in the “story line." On the contrary, movement broke this
continuity, as if the program were trying to regain the visitor’s attention.
Noticing that their movements impacted on the succession of images, visi
tors generally engaged in a sort of dance with the installation. To relieve the
frustration felt by a good number of the visitors who wished for more control,
Courchesne added a push button that instructed the program in the way
the infrared sensor did. Instead of being reactive, the installation became
participatory. As a result, the work began to be understood as a kind of
scratch-video apparatus meant to be brutalized.
As Courchesne was embarking on a new project, one question kept sur
facing for him: What metaphor could help integrate technology and content
so that visitors would be drawn to engage immediately with the work? Por
trait One (1990) was an attempt to answer this query. It was an interactive
video installation for computer with touch pad, laserdisc player, and video
monitor (figures 5.45 and 5.46).
This process of building complexity through addition makes it almost
impossible to visualize the structure of the work other chan in a very schematic
way. In Portrait One, every interaction starts and finishes with Marie looking
away, apparently absorbed in her thoughts. Any line of interaction will take
the visitor through some of the content, to explore some of the topics and
define some kind of relationship; and no matter what, it will always end with
Marie returning to a contemplative mood. One ironic measure of success felt
by visitors with the character in Portrait One has been how long can one carry
on the conversation before being “dumped.” In fact, not unlike in real life,
showing sensitivity for the character usually creates more room for conversa
tion, which translates into better-developed topics and longer conversations.
Overall, the installation has been successful in shifting the debate from the
technology used to the aesthetics of interactivity. Because che metaphor of
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conversation is so strong, once a visitor decides co suspend their disbelief, the
work’s imperfect mechanics and crude interactive mode are forgotten, and the
experience remains consistent and coherent no matter what happens.
Besides developments in the conversational structure, the technique
Courchesne used to display video images further helped enrich the experience
of an encounter becween the visitor and the virtual character. In Portrait One,
instead of placing a monitor in front of the viewer, the artist used glass to
reflect the video image in space. This was originally designed in order to
superimpose the computer and video screens and creace a single visual object
for the viewer. It turned out that watching the video reflection instead of the
source image lessened the reference to video and television, and enhanced the
impression of Marie’s presence. It thus helped transform the installation into
a conversational space.

Figure 5.46 Luc Courchesne, Portraits. Installation, 1990-1993.
From the single character in Portrait One, Courchesne built Family Portrait
(1993), an interactive video installation using four networked computers with
trackballs. Family Portrait is meant to be an encounter with a virtual society.
It is built around four stations defining a space thac was intended as a forum
where the society of visitors met with a society of virtual beings. When the
dynamics and connections between the virtual characters became apparent,
visitors were often forced into a similar interaction among themselves.
Courchesne used video projectors to enlarge the representation of characters
and show more of their bodies. As in his Portrait One the artist reflected images
on large glass plates to give the impression that both visitors and virtual char
acters inhabited the same museum gallery. This approach to installation,
sometimes referred to as augmented reality, is interesting in that it achieves
a good degree of immersivity without the expense of covering the whole space
with images. In Family Portrait, in order to strengthen the illusion of a
growing relationship between a character and a visitor, “levels of intimacy”
Chapter 5
are added to che conversational structure. At first, the questions are general
and quite banal (level 1); then, after proper introductions (transitions 1—2),
che discussion develops to cover what the character does, how it does it, and
perhaps what its motivations and beliefs are (level 2). As the conversation
edges into personal considerations, the character will test the visitor to decide
whether or not the conversation should go any further (transitions 2—3). In
the affirmative, the character will likely agree to discuss quite personal issues
and show its feelings (level 3); at that point, if its mood (generated at random)
is properly dealt with by the visitor (transitions 3—4), the character may end
up confessing something that they have “never told anyone" (level 4) and this
ends the encounter. The eight characters in Family Portrait can be addressed
individually, but to get a sense of who they are in relation to one another, you
have to meet with several of them. In the process, the structure of the group
becomes apparent and produces an account of what it was like to live in
Marseille in summer 1992.
A society of virtual beings is made of networked individual systems. As
new virtual beings are added, each capable of hosting one active visitor, the
installation grows from a single-user to a multiuser system. A better balance
is thus achieved between the society of virtual beings and the society of visi
tors. One possible outcome may be a forced interaction between visitors, as a
response to the interaction among virtual beings.
If in all Courchesne's interactive work the visitor’s experience typically ends
with their decision to leave, in his Hall of Shadows (1996), there is a definite
end that can be attained when the installation shuts down for a moment,
before it resets and the characters return to their initial life. To get to this
point, visitors have to understand the idea, implicit in the title, that the char
acters are actually the visitors’ own shadows. In Hall of Shadows, Courchesne
accumulated data on a particular conversation between a visitor and a char
acter to construct a context for the encounter; the character is made to remem
ber this data for use later as the dramatic line develops. This feature made it
possible, for example, for a character to “know" the name, sex, age, origin,
and occupation of a visitor, and then use this data when introducing this
visitor to other members of the virtual group.
In another of Courchesne’s interactive video installations, Passages (1998),
visitors can convince the characters, four New Zealanders, to take them to one
of their secret and favorite places in and around Wellington. This piece, com
prising two networked computers with touch pads, two video projectors, and

two laserdisc players, was Courchesne’s first attempt to take the action outside
the confines of a gallery. For this work, which featured both people and land
scapes, he used reflection on glass plates and favored the ghostly presence of
the characters to the continuity of the landscape, with the result that the two
sections of the panorama are significantly split apart (figure 5.47).
Born in 1952 in St-Leonard d’Aston, Quebec, Courchesne studied at the
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax (BA in communication
design, 1974), and MIT (MA in visual studies, 1984). He began his explo
rations in interactive video in'1984 when he coauthored Elastic Movies, one of
the earliest experiments in the field, with Ellen Sebring, Benjamin Bergery,
Bill Seaman, and others. Based in Montreal, Courchesne is a professor of design
at the University of Montreal and president of the Societe des arts tech-
nologiques.
Joel Slayton,* an absolute advocate of collaborative systems and structures,
has created works in telepresent robotics, automated surveillance, and emer
Panoscope360
Diameter: 18 feel ( 5.5 m |
Copacily: 10
Figure 5.47 Luc Courchesne, Panoscope 360° 2000.
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gent behavioral systems, such as Telepresent Surveillance (1996) and Landscape
Painting as Countersurveillance of Area 51 (1997). His Telepresent Surveillance
installation confronted visitors with three mobile robots, each outfitted with
wireless video surveillance cameras. Using interprobe communication, these
robots patrolled their spaces looking for warm body targets (figure 5.48). The
robots interacted with each other and viewers, and broadcast video of
their point of view on the Internet. This evolving artwork/research project
incorporating autonomous robot surveillance probes and the Internet attempts
to characterize a form of media experience derived from the activities of intel
ligent machine agents designed to enable telepresent viewing.
On April 25 and 26, 1997, a team of media artists led by Slayton collab
orated on a site-specific conceptual artwork, Landscape Painting as Countersur
veillance of Area 51, in the remote high desert region of south central Nevada
known as Area 51. This vast desert region is the locus of U.S. military exper
imentation and research, including nuclear, flight, and experimental weapons
testing. On the afternoon of April 25, the artists arrived in trucks and auto
mobiles with the intention of staging a conceptual site-based work involving

landscape painting as a form of councersurveillance of Area 51. Trespassing,
photography, videography, filming, and sketching are all strictly prohibited
within Area 51. Breach of the area's security is enforced by “Como-Dudes,”
an unidentifiable policing force equipped with surveillance technology. Over
the next few hours that day, the artists conducted informal discussions with
locals, reviewing photographs and paraphernalia on display, explaining their
mission, seeking advise, and strategizing on how to proceed. On the morning
of April 26, the art team entered Area 51; the Como-Dudes’ immediately
appeared, taking up surveillance positions. Over a period of five hours, the
artists produced individual paintings using acrylic or oil paint. No direct
contact was made with the Como-Dudes, although their presence was con
tinuous, and overt surveillance of the project was evident. The paintings were
finally displayed in an exhibition. On that occasion, the social banality of land
scape painting and painters was explored as a means of countersurveillance by
the surveyed, serving as a no-threat typology of threat. The use of new media
technology to paint landscapes of Area 51 was considered both interesting and
provocative. In the context of the Area 51 phenomena, landscape painting was
clearly relevant as a form of critical discourse on the nature of information
culture and information systems.
A recognized artist, writer, and theoretician, Slayton has long been inter
ested in making work that is a direct critique, analysis, or illustration of a set
of theoretical positions regarding the nature of information. He has been influ
enced by the research of Humberto Maturana and Gordon Pask, both of whom
deal with issues of emergent behavior, autopoieses, surveillance, and social
semioses. Slayton has worked in many different contexts and attempted to
explore the concreteness of general concepts such as entailment mesh, con
versational and learning systems, telepresence, information mapping, database
visualization, social software, and so on.
Slayton is currently a professor of digital media art at San Jose State
University, where he also serves as director of the Computers in Art, Design,
Research, and Education (CADRE) Laboratory, one of the oldest academic
centers in the United States dedicated to the exploration and research of
digital forms of art. He is the executive editor of SWITCH, the online journal
of critical and theoretical discourse.
Regarded as a pioneer in digital media, Slayton was an original member
of the Visible Language Workshop at MIT. His media installations, perform
ances, and print works have been featured in exhibitions internationally. Per
Chapter 5
formance and theatrical works by Slayton including DoWhatDo, Conduits, 98.6
FM preceded Landscape Painting as Countersiirveillance of Area 57 as well as
RCSP and YDSTYDS with che C5 Corporation. Slayton founded C5, a Silicon
Valley upstart specializing in theoretical models, analyses, and tactical imple
mentations of information technology. Both an artwork and business simul
taneously, this corporation/research organization is dedicated to the pursuit of
new developments in technology, theory, and art. C5 presents the full regalia
of a corporate structure including finance, governance, marketing, and
research elements. Visitors can read corporate reports, inspect research reports,
buy stock, and so on. Slayton explains the rationale on the C5 Web site
(http: //c5 .sjsu.edu/index.html):
Advances resulting from intratheorecic reductionism have resulted in che exploration

of unique models in which cascading and parallel considerations of hyperstructural-
ism and contextuality are significant. Indeterminate information systems (brains and
computers) are impetus for research and exemplification of fundamental principles
which can be used for tactical surveillance and strategic analysis involving new forms
of knowledge representation. The complex phenomena of self-organization, diffusion,
cues, presence, richness, ambiguity, uncertainty, complexity, evolution, inferencing,
and entanglement are common themes for experimentation at C5. C5 is the corpora
tion of acculturation. The sciences of the artificial are stimuli redefining the nature of
group formations and operations management resident in technology enterprise.
Systems analysis and information mapping are the contemporary substance of
data perception, of which the artifact is interface. C5 solutions are informed
by collaborative expertise, including implementations of artificial intelligence,
bioengineering, public relations, liquid computing, emergent behavioral systems,
biometrics, virtuality, cognitive psychology, semiotics, anthropology, literary criti
cism, military studies, library science, and art. Theory is product.
As Slayton states in his article “Ontology of Organization as System,”

written in collaboration with Geri Wittig,
Research into knowledge representation is resulting in a new generation of techniques

and tools designed to automatically and intelligently assist humans in analyzing
complex forms of data to discover useful information. Prediction of systems behavior
of an organization from knowledge of its goals and its outer environment, with only
minimal assumptions about the inner environment, is delimited to perceptions based
□
on assumptive models and causal functionality. Emergence of knowledge from
complex data structures may also include non-model and non-probabilistic-based
strategies. Such an approach suggests new forms of data acquisition involving the
emergence of interesting information from ambiguous (non-productive or non-
descriptive) systems. The strategy of discovering interesting information by revealing
the nature of complexity present in a system represents a provocative theoretical
problem with implications influencing our fundamental understanding of the basis of
knowledge acquisition and its representation.50
Richard Brown’s* large-scale sculptural installation, Biotica (1999), pro

ducing an interactive and immersive experience of artificial life, extends the
simulation of time-based physics to include chemical and biological processes.
Biotica sets out to question our perception of what it is for something to be
thought of as alive. This was achieved through the creation of primitive arti
ficial life creatures based on dynamic three-dimensional neural nets (figures
5.49 and 5.50). The creatures exhibited complex behavioral patterns in
response to each other and the viewers’ virtual presence in a simulated three-
dimensional liquid space. Participants stand in front of a large conic struc
ture—which is covered by a three-dimensional virtual space projection—and
use their arms to fly (like Superman) amid the artificial life creatures. The
work challenges participants by making them feel like subjects of an immense
Figure 5.49 Richard Brown, Biotica, 1999. Installation, Museum of Science and Industry,
Manchester, England, 1999; also exhibited at Siggraph 2000.
Chapter 5
technological power, the participants are also confronted by alien creatures of
a form one might see in a microscope. The production of the work resulted
in the publication of a book, Biotica: Art, Emergence, and Artificial Life, which
reveals many of che research strands and technical challenges the team met in
creating Biotica.
In general, Brown explores the interrelated concepts of time, space, and
energy using a wide range of media and .techniques, including electronics,
high-voltage electricity, real-time computer graphics, and electrochemical
reactions. His projects may be seen as experiments that both raise our
perception of higher dimensions and question the empirical subject-object
relationship of materialistic science and modernist thinking. Browns work
often refers back to che traditions of alchemy, where science, philosophy, and
mysticism can be seen as entwined and inseparable.
The idea that we may be internally influenced through the manipulation
of objects and the carrying out of processes is key in Brown’s work. Alembic,

an interactive installation first shown in 1997 embodies this idea through the
application of immersive unencumbered virtual reality techniques. Viewers
wearing 3-D glasses are able to influence the contents of a virtual alembic
simply by walking around a circular floor projection. Alembic was created at
the same time as Osmose by Char Davies and may be viewed as one of the only
contemporary virtual reality artworks of the time. In Alembic, however, Brown
does not attempt to simulate a perceived reality but takes the completely
opposite approach of abstraction, conveying the four alchemical states of
matter through movement and interactive behavior rather than visual repre
sentation. Brown uses the phrase “dynamic form” to describe this approach—
an idea inspired by his interests in cognition and the fourth dimension. He
found that his quest to produce Alembic challenged of a number of conven
tional paradigms within virtual reality—namely, the use of headsets and cum
bersome interactive devices, and the modeling of static architectural spaces.
These conventions were overturned in Alembic through che creation of a shared,
interactive, three-dimensional space that responded to body movements with
real-time changes of form.31
Alembic (1997 onward) represents an early outcome of Art as a Mode
of Enquiry (2000), a research strand Brown initiated while in the
computer-related design department at the Royal College of Art, London. The
research methodology is driven by Brown’s quest to produce artworks that
may challenge the conventional technologies of the time, suggesting new par
adigms, and through necessity produce innovative technical possibilities and
solutions.
Brown’s primary aim is che production of artworks that underline our
limited understanding of complex processes and time-based phenomena.
These themes were developed further wich support from Intel in the produc
tion of his subsequent artificial life works Biotica (2000) and che Neural Net
Starfish (2000).
The Neural Net Starfish may be seen as a popularization of che ideas in
Biotica. It was firsc shown in the Mind Zone of London’s Millennium Dome,
and received great acclaim from the public and the press. The work was
designed to be accessible and immediate, demonstrating che principles of arti
ficial life in a clear and entertaining manner. A virtual starfish projected onto
a table reacted co a viewer’s hand gestures by reaching out a tentacle coward
their hand and recoiling rapidly in a lifelike manner if their hand moved coo
quickly (figure 5.51).
Chapter 5
Figure 5.51 Richard Brown, The Mimetic Starfish, 2000. First exhibited in the Mind Zone,
Millennium Dome, London, 2000, and then in Toronto, Canada, 2002, in Melbourne, Australia,
2002, and at Peterborough Digital Arts, Peterborough, England, 2003.
Brown’s hybrid background in arc and science gives him the technical
prowess to use a variety of media in order to express and explore his ideas.
This may be seen in his recent project che Preservation of Entropy (2001), an
alchemical work that amalgamates glassblowing, chemistry, electronics, and
computer programming. Brown’s Preservation of Entropy was created while he
was an arcisc-in-Residence at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. The
work once again examines notions of time and process, revealing hidden and
complex emergent electrochemical processes to the viewer through monitor
ing programs and a time-lapse Webcam.
Brown's work engages che senses and resonates with our consciousness in
a deep and suggestive manner. The artist is attempting to evoke alternative
mental spaces of contemplation, creating experiences that suggest new ways
of conceiving and understanding ourselves in relationship to an infinite space
time continuum.

The interactive artworks by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau*
focus on the concept of art as a living system. Sommerer and Mignonneau
have been working at the borderline of art and biology since 1992, using
biological principles to create interactive artworks that integrate artificial life
and real life by means of human-computer interaction. Through this interac
tion, intuitive and natural interfaces, and evolutionary image processes, these
installations allow visitors to become essential parts of the systems by trans
mitting their individual behaviors, emotions, and personalities to the works’
image processes. Images in these installations are no longer static, predeter
mined, and predictable but "living systems” themselves, representing minute
changes in the viewers’ interactions with the works’ complex image
structures.
In 1992, Sommerer and Mignonneau developed the concept of linking
natural interfaces to evolutionary image processes. They started working with
evolutionary biology and became increasingly intrigued by how natural evo
lution can function as a tool for creation. Sommerer and Mignonneau. adopted
evolutionary image processes to create process-oriented art instead of pre
designed, predictable, and object-oriented art. The potential rewards of devel
oping, emerging, and evolving image processes became the focal point of their
artistic investigations. Instead of presenting the audience with handcrafted
artifacts or art objects, their aim was to create process-oriented artworks. Com
bining their different backgrounds in botany, art, sculpture, electronics, and
performance, Sommerer and Mignonneau created their first interactive com
puter installation, Interactive Plant Growing (1992). This work was later called
epoch making as it defined a new idea of natural interfaces and intuitive
human computer interaction. In this interactive installation, users could inter
act with real and artificial plants. Users initiated and controlled the growth
of computer-generated artificial plants on a projection screen by couching real
plants. The users’ body tensions were captured through the living plants and
used co control the growth of various artificial plant algorithms. By touching
or merely approaching the living plants, users could collectively grow and
create different artificial plants that were direct expressions and interpreta
tions of their interactions with the real plants.
In 1994, Sommerer and Mignonneau introduced their interactive computer
installation A-Volve, one of the first systems where users could actually create
artificial creatures, interact with them, and watch them evolve. In collabora
tion with evolutionary biologist Tom Ray, the two artists applied artificial life
Chapter 5
algorithms to interactive arc. In A-Volve, users created artificial life creatures
by drawing two-dimensional shapes (a section view and a side view) on a couch
screen co produce chere-dimensional jellyfishlike forms thac started co live and
swim in a wacer-filled glass pool. A creature’s shape, locomotion, and behav
ior were solely decided by its genetic code, derived from the drawings created
by the users. Once created, the creature appeared in the pool, where it started
to interact wich che other creatures, prey on them, mate, and evolve. Users
were also able co touch the creatures wich their hands in the water, and so
could further influence the faith, behavior, and evolution of these artificial
creatures.
Sommerer and Mignonneau then went on co create an interactive computer
installation called Phototropy (1994). Phototropy is a biological expression
describing the force chat makes organisms follow light in order to get nutri
tion and hence survive. In Phototropy II (1999), computer-generated virtual
insectlike organisms such as bees, moths, and dragonflies followed and fought
for light. The real physical light of a lamp nourished these virtual insects by
giving them life-supporting energy. The artificial creatures followed che light
and tried to reach its central focus. Every time visitors moved the lamp’s beam,
the creatures would follow in order to get the maximum light nutrition, and
the visitors’ influence would extend itself into every aspect of the creatures’
lives and their very survival. In fact, users could interact with vircual insects
by using a normal flashlight. By lighting parts of a 3 X 4 meter screen, users
activated and fed virtual insects living inside three-dimensional cocoonlike
shapes. An in-house light-detection system measured the position and inten
sity of the light that shone through the flashlight onto the large projection
screen. As users moved che light spot onto different parts of the screen, virtual
insects appeared and followed the light’s beam, feeding on the “energy” of the
real light. Users could thus “feed” the creatures with light or eventually kill
them if they provided too much of it.
In 1997, the ICC-NTT Intercommunication Museum in Tokyo commis
sioned Sommerer and Mignonneau to develop a work for its permanent col
lection. The two created an Internet-based artificial life environment called
Life Spades. This work consists of a Web page thac allows users to type and
send text messages via the sice’s graphic user interface. The text is then used
as a genetic code co create three-dimensional autonomous creatures that start
to live and move in the physical space of the Life Spades environment at the
museum. Here, on-site users can interact with these creatures as well—users
interactive Digital Installations

can catch them, clone them, or reproduce them. Online users can also inves
tigate the faith of their creatures by checking their curriculum on the Life
Spades Web site. In 1999, Sommerer and Mignonneau created a stand-alone
version called Life Spades //, which additionally featured a feeding function;
users could feed their creatures by providing them with specific text charac
ters. As a result, a complex adaptive system that displays artificial life char
acteristics such as open-ended evolution, adaptability, and complex behaviors
Having applied artificial life principles such as artificial genetics, muta

tion, breeding, and evolution to interactive artworks since 1994, Sommerer
and Mignonneau started to apply artificial life to art on mobile phones in
2001. Their first prototype system, IK1-IKI Phone, allowed users to create and
share virtual characters on Web-enabled mobile phones. At the time, Som
merer and Mignonneau’s research interest shifted more and more toward the
exploration of complex adaptive systems, and they subsequently became inter
ested in complex system theory. One of their recent interactive systems deals
with complex information and complex image and sound data from the Inter
net. This system, Riding the Net (2000), also presents a novel approach to
browsing the Internet in a more intuitive and entertaining fashion. While two
users talk and communicate with each other, keywords of their communica
tion are picked up by the system’s speech-recognition engine. These keywords
are then used to search and download corresponding images from the Inter
net. When users, for example, speak about “houses” or “flowers,” different
images of “houses” or “flowers” are downloaded. As there is usually a vast
amount of images available for each keyword, users see new image icons
constantly retrieved from the Internet. All the images are then collectively
displayed in 3-D on the system’s interactive window and streamed from the
respective view of each user. As images come from either the left or right side
of the screen, they all stream toward each other before they leave the screen
and are replaced by new images derived from new keywords spoken by the
two users. The entire image scenario on the window surface constantly changes
since it is a direct interpretation of the users’ dialogue and communication
with each other. Both users can also touch the image icons on the screen: this
halts the images temporarily so users can look at specific image icons in more
detail. When they do this, the exact URLs for these specific image icons can
be downloaded onto a separate computer screen so users can find out where
the images came from and what they refer to. Riding the Net provides an enter
Chapter 5
taining and playful way to browse the Internet, and users become intensively
engaged in the vast amount of visual information available from and presented
by the system. They can control the content of what they are watching
through their own decisions, dialogue, and interaction.
In 2001, Sommerer and Mignonneau were also commissioned to develop
a new interactive artwork for the Living in the Future Housing exhibition in
Malmo, Sweden. They created a caveiike room called The Living Room. This
interactive space consists of four large-scale projection screens, which estab
lish an intelligent, interactive image, sound, and voice environment that
comes “alive” and starts to “sense" when users enter and interact with this
room. Like a perfect surveillance system, all user sounds, voices, gestures, and
motions are detected through state-of-the-art camera tracking as well as
sound- and voice-recognition systems. When the various users start to inter
act and communicate with each other within this room, they also start to com
municate with The Living Room. As if it were an intelligent organism, The
Living Room reacts to users by interpreting the collected position and speech
data in the form of images and image elements displayed on the room’s four
large projection walls. All images and image elements are directly streamed
from the Internet. Since the users’ position, movement, and voice data are con
stantly changing, the images streamed from the Internet are constantly chang
ing too. Due to the almost unlimited amount of image data available on the
Internet, users will become completely engulfed in this virtual information
space. Besides interpreting the users’ interactions and conversations visually,
The Living Room also uses this data to stream voice and sound data from the
Internet. Conceptually, The Living Room plays with ideas of surveillance, detec
tion, intelligence, interpretation, misinterpretation, and communication. The
work provides a feeling of immersion for users into a constantly changing and
dynamic data space, full of complex and unpredictable image, sound, and
voice data.
Through their various interactive projects, Sommerer and Mignonneau
have created artworks that are no longer static or predefined but instead
become processlike living systems, described in Art as a Living System, a series
of essays in Leonardo. These works are characterized by complex and dynamic
interactions between real and virtual entities. Users who participate in these
works become an essential part of the image processes by providing data and
information that these systems use, interpret, transform, develop, and
evolve.

A number of artists have made use of hybridization or the “hybrid image,”
a form of visual representation that interconnects with and borrows from dis
ciplines like drawing, photography, or video, and can be presented in an infi
nite range of sequences or variations. Hybrid images may be presented on a
variety of media or, conversely, showcased in virtual form. They can be used
to explore various formats including virtual reality environments, video instal
lations, and “digital engravings.” Some artists also endeavor to contribute to
an important evolutionary transformation in digital media by synthesizing it
with space, time, and biology, allowing for an exploration of hybrid strategies
for present and future artistic expressions.
There is no doubt that the four principal virtual reality installations by
Miguel Chevalier*—Turbulences numeriques (1996), Peripheric (1998), Nuage
fractal (2000), and MetapoUs (2001—2002)—owe their originality to the artist’s
experimentation with three “techniques”—hybridization, interactivity, and
networking—that enable him co fully exploit che possibilities offered by the
digital medium (figure 5.52). All four works are entirely digital and are ani
mated by computer in real time. The spectators’ movements inside the instal
lation spaces are captured by sensors and translated by a software controller,
which varies the images being projected accordingly, thereby creating an
interaction between viewer and artwork—or yet another form of artificial
life—and breaking the linear or sequential narrative co which media such as
film or video have accustomed us.
In a sense, such artworks have no fixed temporal existence but are instead
generated by time itself. Indeed, Chevalier has already envisioned artworks
that interact and evolve wich their environment, the cycle of the seasons, cli
matic conditions, or the calendar. This reflects the fact that Chevalier’s moti
vation as a visual artist lies in exploring the relationship between art, reality,
and contemporary society.
In 1982, after studying fine and decorative arts at Ecole des beaux arts and
Ecole des arts decoratifs in Paris, Chevalier defined the cardinal points for his
artistic inquiry as painting, photography, video art, and “new media.” His
work since the early 1990s, which has consistently mirrored the developments
and applications in these fields, is a resounding confirmation of this early
direction.
Chevalier’s art examines the modern age’s relationship with technology by
taking art history as its starting point and reformulating its essential refer
ences using computer tools. His imagery is inspired by an obsession with the
Chapter 5
networks that structure contemporary society and the traffic—people, data,
goods, or capital—that flows through them.
As an artist working with new technologies in rhe perpetually shifting
and evolving category known as new media, Chevalier has embraced
successive developments in the field of computer-generated imagery. His
work combines still and animated pictures, virtual objects, and environ
ments rendered in 2-D and 3-D, with random imagery or real-life
representations.
Through his experiments with new forms of representation, Chevalier has
pioneered the hybrid image mentioned above. This has led Chevalier to
explore various formats including virtual reality environments, video instal
lations, and digital engravings, and even to create Web sices to presenc two
pieces, 101 Dalmatiens (1998) and Massivement Parallels (1997).

Chevalier believes that art is a mirror for the society we live in. Several of
his works—including Interconnections (1988), with its binary code representa
tions of coins, or Ordres d’Achat (1990), a series of works printed on rolls of
carpet taken from the trading floors of stock exchanges—lampoon a world in
which human exchange and interaction has been successively dematerialized
or disembodied through the influence of technology. Similarly, Antres natures
(1993—1994), which takes the traditional Japanese garden as its inspiration,
presents a controlled environment in which nature has been domesticated,
ordered, and arranged in a synthetic, artificial manner.
In Aller-retour Tokyo/Kyoto (1994), Chevalier asks us to consider whether the
world's metropolises, with their ever-expanding sprawl of uniform, suburban
“garden cities,” are not yet another “artificial universe.” His monumental
Image, puissance infinie (1995), which was created for the Japanese port of
Fukuoka, is a 10,000 square meter work formed by 2,500 inflatable cylinders
that serve as pixels for a gigantic floating computer screen. The screen display
is a digital transposition of the city’s grid system.
In considering the relationship between image and reality, Chevalier does
not set out to create new imagery since he believes that society already pro
duces and consumes a surfeit of images without necessarily exploiting their
potential. Instead, he prefers to recycle existing images, thereby demonstrat
ing that what sometimes appears banal often has unimagined layers of
meaning after further inspection. The pixelated image, whose structure and
form is revealed by juxtaposed blocks of color, thus becomes an object that
can be analyzed in terms of its structure and composition. And by extension,
the deformations, transpositions, and alterations made to such images are a
semiological study of living matter.
Other Chevalier works are ideally suited for exhibition oucside the
traditional gallery or museum contexts. Tableaux de bord (1991), which uses
closed-circuit television footage from security cameras in Montreal’s Mirabelle
Airport, is an elegant example of this decontextualization. Footage from the
security cameras was recycled and retransmitted to passengers in the airport’s
departure lounge, thereby transforming the public place into an exhibition
space and the spectator into an actor.
Similarly, during the 1992 winter and summer Olympic Games in
Albertville (France) and Barcelona, respectively, Chevalier used giant screens
installed at the foot of ski slopes or in the Olympic stadia to project one-
minute sequences presenting highlights from each day’s events. Here, as in
Chapter 5
much of his work, Chevalier succeeded in reversing the role of the audience,
which had come to attend a sports event, as well as that of the artist, who had
co constantly rework his art form to the requirements of the games so as co
scage a differenc “performance” each day for thousands of spectators.
For Chevalier, the computer is the ideal tool with which to dissect the uni
verse of visual representation, modern society, and our environment (figure
5.53). In this way, information technology provides yet another example of a
medium that is being reappropriaced by artists. There is no doubt that the
fundamental message behind this movement remains that of the living artist
and not the machine.
In his experimental interactive network environments, Shawn Brixey*
endeavors to contribute co the important evolutionary transformation in
digital media—which attempt to synthesize space, time, and biology—
through the exploration of hybrid strategies. Brixey’s works look at what high
technologies can offer in terms of new forms or even beauty. His works require
the most contemporary robotics in order to experiment with new art forms
that aspire to a concrete aesthetic goal.
Since 1986, Brixey’s research has basically deployed a wide range of new
signal-transmitting devices. These devices are at che core of experiments

such as Photon Voice, a light-encoding and light-transmitting installation/
performance designed to encode sound, images, and motion into sunlight
(1986), and Aqua Echo (1987), an interactive ice crystal nucleation installa
tion and performance. In Aqua Echo, the installation space was specially engi
neered to allow the growth of microscopic ice crystals (snowflakes) to be based
on direct environmental changes produced by performance activities. Super-
pure and supercooled water was used to record these events on a microscopic
(atomic) scale, and then used as nucleation seeds to grow large-scale prismatic
ice forms.
Brixey continued to experiment with data transmission in numerous other
works. Sky Chasm (1987) was an audible holography and light-transmission
outdoor installation in which an ultrasensitive laser sculpture measured the
speed of light, and made audible human interaction through a night per
formance, then encoded and transmitted sounds recorded the previous evening
into the morning sunlight, finally transmitting the results to participants
seven kilometers away. Aurora (1988) consisted of hand-cut synthetic crystals,
grown at a high pressure/temperature in an autoclave; the work created con
stantly changing spectral colors as human shadows interfered with a battery
of computer-controlled polarized projectors and analyzers. In Celestial
Vaulting (1990—1992), an interferometric holography installation, real-time
optical/laser holograms read the minute quantum fluctuations of an individ
ual’s presence, creating both light and audible sound. In another installation,
Instruments of Material Poetry (1992—1996), radiation pressure (the kinetic
momentum of photons) from a fifty-million-candlepower white-light (xenon)
source constructed an alternative gravitational system that levitated and ani
mated microscopic poetic events in a vacuum chamber. In it, the xenon light
was “voice modulated" and emitted a poetry-encoded (sound-encoded) beam
with enough intensity to overpower the local field of gravity for small objects.
Trapping tiny graphite particles at the center of the vacuum chamber caused
a small, brilliant galaxy of particles to form. Mirroring celestial mechanics, a
closed-circuit video/microscopy system for viewing real time in stereoscopic
3-D showed the tiny “universe’s” sculptural shape as constantly changing, yet
confined by the laws of physics to endless echo poems encoded in the light.
Rtixeys Alchymeia (1996-1998) was a genetically engineered ice crystal instal
lation in which human hormones (sceroids) provided nucleating agents to
guide crystal growth, reflecting our presence in the crystals’ atomic architec
ture (figures 5.54 and 5.55).
Chapter 5
Figure 5.54 Shawn Brixey, Alchymeia, 1996-1998. Installation view of sterile hybrid freezer,
ice crystal (cells) housing assemblies, electronic instrumentation, video microscope, and "live"
Web cast server via video microscopy equipment.
Epicycle (1998—2000) was a large-scale, telepresence art installation

designed for Expo 2000 and the Sydney Olympic Games. It used “live” Web
transmission of video images of the sky—from Earth’s twenty-four time
zones—to digitally remap the axis of Earth’s rotation to the installation
site in either country. Twenty-four outdoor video cameras monitoring the
apparent brightness of the sky in each of Earth’s time zones transmitted a
simultaneous “real-time” signal co the Expo and the Olympics. Each “live”
feed was linked to one in a sequence of twenty-four high-resolution video dis
plays forming a large continuous ring of Earth’s twenty-four-hour horizon. On
the hour, each live video “time zone” transmission was routed from one video
display to the next position, digitally counteracting Earth’s rotation. Exhibi
tion visitors stood simultaneously “telepresent” in all of Earth’s time zones,
on a seamless digital video horizon that revolved around them.
Liquiescence (2000), a collaborative work, was a site-specific installation
using both architectural and digital media elements to suggest a spatial and

Figure 5.55 Shawn Brixey, Alchymeia, 1996-1998. Detail of cloned ice crystals. The top row
of crystals are original crystals grown from ultrapure water doped with human hormones. The
bottom row are cloned crystals grown from microscopic samples of the top row.
temporal experience in a constant state of “becoming.” Neither solid nor

liquid, the project evoked rhythm, motion, and perpetual transfiguration in
the indeterminate zone between light and shadow, time and space, figure and
field. Liquiescence revealed these investigations through three temporal con
structions coalescing environmental, digital, and biological information into
a new meaning. Another Brixey project, Eon (2001), used the mysterious phe
nomenon of sonoluminescence—the process by which sound in water can be
converted directly into light—and the Internet to extend Brixey’s current
artistic research in the fields of telepresence and telepistemology: the way we
know, construct, and trust experiences mediated by technology.
Brixey is specifically interested in the recording and transformation of artis
tic impulses and poetic experiences through radically new materials, tools, and
spaces. His artwork attempts to emotionally address the impact of advanced
technology on artistic expression. Traditional artistic sensibilities play a crit
ical role in the creation of this work, yet they are not always easily imported
into these new environments, and often must be redefined in light of new
materials and meaning. The use of advanced technology has so greatly
Chapter 5
increased the ability to address and extend Brixey’s artistic research that he
has begun to project a new kind of poetic interaction into the actual mechan
ics of the microscopic and macroscopic realms. He describes these artworks as
"material poetry”—art made from the expressive interaction of discreet forms
of matter and energy. Produced neither through traditional reductive nor
additive art processes, these new works are instead taught how to build
themselves, encoded with a type of telematic goal of their own.
As we have seen, varied forms of spectator interactivity and immersion have
been practiced by contemporary artists in their digital installations. But
another important aspect of virtual art has come to the fore in most of their
works: the dialectical position between reality and virtuality occupied by
them. This can be discerned in numerous artistic propositions in this section
since the works consist of both a tangible, physical component and a corre
sponding Web part. In fact, many artists feel that the presence of a visible,
tangible, or audible element in a highly developed technical proposition is
necessary for their work to remain in a clearly perceptible aesthetic sphere that
can still be described as art.
Nevertheless, as the next chapter will discuss, one can also appreciate artists
whose works principally stress che latest developments in communication
technology, with their aesthetic predominance toward communication issues.

□
Multimedia Online Works (Net Art)
This chapter discusses some multimedia online works by present-day artists

and in particular the Internet work often described as Net art. The main topic,
which to some extent can be found in all the works in this section, is com
munication. Yet I also take into account the full implications of the Internet
condition and the Internet upheaval. So such notions as telepresence and
telematics are part of the discussion here too, along with an analysis of some
of these works and their interface with the spectator.
As to the subthemes treated here, I will follow a line that leads from the
Internet as a social communications network to works connected with telem
atic and telerobotic human commitments, touching on the problems of per
sonal presence online and critical artistic attitudes on the Net.
The Internet as a Social Communications Option
The Internet became a social communications option at a moment when, as

I see it, technological art gave birth to virtual art at the beginning of the
1990s. I call this event, so full of unaccustomed possibilities, neocommuni
cability. It was an event associated not only with radical technological
changes—such as che latest computer developments and the wider use of the
Internet and cell phones—but also with an aesthetic change that concerned
artistic intercommunication on a wider and more personal scale.
This phenomenon can be traced from the now-classic writings of Rene
Berger on art and communication to Mario Costa’s symposium Artmedia 8,
which was held in Paris in 2002 at the Aesthetics of Communication sym
posium. Neocommunicability can even be found at a certain moment in the
works of prominent early communications artists like Roy Ascott and Fred
Forest. In the case of Ascott, this change took place when he introduced the
notion of consciousness into his research. As for Forest, we see it when he
inserted ludic interactive devices into his critical statements.
The artists in this section have achieved neocommunicability in different
ways. These range from online collaboration, sophisticated communication
platforms, and situation-specific events, to e-mail discussions and online
forums, to publicizing the corporate subversion of the democratic process.
Combining audience intervention with this neocommunicability is a perma
nent preoccupation for most of the artists here. For these artists, this includes
research into identity issues and the shifting perception of people have of their
lives and themselves in the technological age. Furthermore, the artists
described here investigate new communal structures, create knowledge sys
tems, and practice information visualization.
It is the combination of the two leading theoretical lines in this book, the
technical and the aesthetic—illustrated by the work and itineraries of artists
concerned with virtuality—that makes up the online techno-aesthetic in this
section. This aesthetic is fostered by collective research in laboratories or on
the Internet in connection with a new attitude toward communication: the
neocommunication described above that affects the working methods of both
artists and theoreticians.
The social communications option in multimedia online works is antici
pated in two early experimental computer animations by Andy Deck*, Work
in Progress (1992) and Ad Infinitum (1994), both forerunners to Deck’s time
based online projects such as DraWarD (1996), Grafficjam (1999), and Open
Studio (2000). In each case the images unfold like time-lapse films. In the
online works, however, the viewer is invited to participate, through the
medium of the Web browser, in the production of unique collaborative
imagery. At the same time that the Web became the central venue for Deck’s
work, controversies about online decency and ownership of intellectual prop
erty were calling into question the future of freedom of expression online.
Deck adopted an activist agenda to demonstrate the value of independent and
uncensored media sources.
In fact, Deck is an artist who started making what he has called “public
art for the Internet” in 1994. Since then, Deck has been at the forefront of
Chapter 6
aesthetic research into the creative possibilities of the Internet as a medium.
Responding to one of the unprecedented characteristics of this artistic context,
Deck began to create work that involved online interactivity. Simultaneously
his artistic function expanded and shifted. In addition to being an image pro
ducer, he started to act as a collaborator, cyberspace architect, and program
mer. In organizing online collaboration, he also began to adopt some of the
responsibilities usually associated with curators and moderators? Deck took
to using the Internet for the distribution of his art in 1994. He brought his
painterly concerns into this arena with process and series, which had led him,
in 1990, to start exploring che possibilities of the digital image. With Space
Invaders Act 1732 (1997), he reworked the familiar arcade video game, replac
ing che original space invaders with the logos of "menacing” multinational
corporations. In the course of play, one finds the Web sites of independent
activists who criticize the business .practices of specific "corporate invaders.”
Although the piece resembles a game, it functions like a culture jammer’s
search engine. Commission Control (1999), which concerns media coverage of
the war in Yugoslavia, is another genre-bending piece that combines media
criticism with visual art. These hybrid projects that straddle activist and aes
thetic terrain have encouraged new audiences for art on the Internet.
Another work, Open Studio, (figure 6.1) was presented as part of the Open
Source Lounge exhibition in Athens in 2000. As curator Steve Dietz observed,
“Unlike the proprietary code of Adobe Photoshop™, if one does not like the
worldview that Open Studio software instantiates, reprogram it. This is an
increasingly important avenue of freedom of expression—the basis of intel
lectual diversity—in a world where everything from everyday phrases to new
life-forms are trademarked, registered, and copyrighted corporate property.”2
The public domain was once again the theme in Deck’s 2001 work Bardcode.
In this piece, he presents the complete wricings of Shakespeare, the bard, as
bar codes. The work critically reflects on the increasing use of digital media
that must be read using licensed software decoders. Encountering the “Bard
cast” section of the project, which “streams” the lines of Shakespeare’s plays
in a sequence of black-and-white lines, one recognizes the tension between
technological “coolness” and an ominous, spreading, dysfunctional condition.
Deck has written that “terms like ‘free’ and ‘open’ are bandied about quite a
lot these days with respect co software, and even arc; but it is worth pene
trating the promotional veneer to determine in what ways things are free,
and whether emerging interactive media systems offering information and
□
Chapter 6
entertainment are liberating as well as cost-free" (personal correspondence,
2002).
Throughout Deck’s work one encounters a desire to understand the poten
tial of the Internet as a social network and an aesthetic context. Deck’s career
is marked by the emergence of a distribution system that for the first time,
gives independent artists the opportunity to reach audiences in a way com
parable to the mass media of television and radio. Like many artists of his
generation, Deck has exchanged the sometimes isolated working space of the
painter for the “open studio" of the Web.
The Internet as a social communications platform is at the heart of Alex
Galloway’s* undertaking. Galloway began his career as a writer and theorist.
In 1996, he joined forces with Mark Tribe, an artist and entrepreneur who
had founded a fledgling art organization called Rhizome (http://rhizome.org).
Part community center, part avant-garde art laboratory, Rhizome grew from
a simple e-mail list connecting the disparate digital art scene to a sophisti
cated communications platform linking thousands of users around the world.
Within the Rhizome network—a bustling maelstrom of text and imagery—
the difference between critical writing, social space, and art making quickly
began to vanish. Thus for Galloway, there was little difference between his
personal work and the “social sculpture” (to use Joseph Beuys’s terminology)
manifested in the Rhizome network. In fact, argues Galloway, Rhizome as a
whole is a type of massive social artwork.
This vitalism forms the crux of Galloway’s networked art. His medium is
an unusual one. It is computer code—the same code at the heart of today’s
most sophisticated software products. Yet this code is not unfeeling and cold;
it is instead able to act on behalf of the artist, creating new spaces for arc
making. Galloway writes that “code is a language, but a very special kind of
language. Code is the only language that is executable.”3 As Sol LeWitt wrote
of Galloway several decades earlier in his "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” the
artist is concerned less about making art than about using code to make “a
machine that makes the art.”4 This machine exists only within the brain of
the computer, but it is a vital, generative machine that is able to create expe
riences, spaces, and images.
One such “generative machine” is Galloway’s interface artwork StarryNight
(1999 onward), created in collaboration with Mark Tribe and Martin
Watcenberg. StarryNight uses a simple visual metaphor. It depicts a night sky
with stars scattered across it. When a new text is read for the first time on

the Rhizome Web site, it appears on the StarryNight interface as a dim star.
Each time a text gets read again—by any Internet user around the world—
the corresponding star gets a bit brighter. Over time, the page comes to resem
ble a starry night sky, with bright stars corresponding to the most popular
texts in the database, and dim stars corresponding to less popular ones. In this
way, StarryNigbt comes to represent the behavior of an entire community of
computer users. It has no goal in sight but rather creates itself along the way,
reinforcing and counterposing itself. As one reviewer wrote, “The elegant Star-
ryNight interface is both a nod to van Gogh’s nineteenth-century masterpiece
and a twenty-first-century experiment in making the Rhizome community a
generator for art.”5
Galloway began next to experiment with the genre of the screen saver. A
screen saver imposes unique limitations on the artist. Screen savers are
designed co appear whenever a computer is inactive for a period of time. The
screen saver springs to life whenever the computer user is not present.
Thus, in offices, cybercafes, or other public spaces, che screen saver acts as a
replacement for the user, a type of avatar for our own absence, a type of public
art. Because of this, screen savers are unable to be interactive, for whenever
che user returns and touches the mouse or keyboard, the screen saver
disappears.
Galloway engaged these limitations in Every Image (2000), a networked
screen-saver application. Every Image premiered in the groundbreaking exhi
bition Refresh: The Art of the Screen Saver, and since then has been featured
in several museums and festivals around che world. The arcwork is a type of
digital collage, using the Rhizome image library as its raw material. Every
Image selects an image at random, performs real-time manipulation of it, and
serves it back to the user. In accordance with Galloway’s aesthetic philosophy,
the actual content of the collage is of little import. Instead, the algorithm
itself—che set of visual instructions used to overlay a patina onto each
image—becomes the moment of artistic creation.
In 2000, Galloway helped form the Radical Software Group (RSG). While
the name alludes to the Radical Software Group of the early 1970s, Galloway’s
new collective specializes in the development of software products (not video
art, as was the focus of the earlier group). RSG’s first product is an installa
tion artwork called Carnivore (2001). Inspired by the controversial FBI soft
ware of the same name, Carnivore performs an electronic wiretap at its
installation locale. The resulting data is vividly animated through a series of
Chapter 6
artist-made interfaces. Since no two data networks are alike, each installation
of Carnivore takes on the personality of its site. It responds like a living organ
ism to the motions of each user. Do hackers read private e-mail? Are personal
demographics being bought and sold on the Net? Carnivore tackles these ques
tions head-on, and tests one’s understanding of both the public and private
spheres. More than a simple parody of its FBI predecessor, Carnivore breaks
new ground by exposing data normally hidden to the hand of the artist. The
piece inverts the conventional wisdom on Internet privacy by taking the most
dramatic step possible: full surveillance—thereby creating a new form of
public art for the Net.
Continuing to work under the RSG moniker, Galloway expanded into the
world of video games, focusing on the Nintendo Game Boy platform. As the
highest-selling portable computer in history, the Game Boy is an environment
ripe for art making. Galloway’s first work is an artist’s series of Game Boy
cartridges titled 2 x 2 (2001). Each cartridge contains a linear animation
based on a feature film. The film is degraded using a custom compression
scheme to a resolution of 2 X 2 pixels, then reformed to fit the Game Boy screen.
Galloway’s “films” run in real time, but they are so low in resolution that the
source footage is entirely unintelligible. Instead, pure formal abstraction
becomes paramount, as black-and-white squares strobe gently on the screen.
Mark Tribe,* Galloway’s associate at Rhizome or rather Rhizome’s founder,
first became interested in digital media in 1990. Fresh out of college, Tribe
was living in San Francisco, making video and painting while holding down
a day job. At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, he saw a show that
included installations that used a hypercard and a laser disc to create an inter
active multimedia narrative. Tribe was fascinated by the ways in which these
new tools seemed to put the theories ofJean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, and
Jacques Lacan into practice.
As a graduate student in the visual arts department at the University of
California, San Diego (UCSD), Tribe moved from painting and video to instal
lation and situation-specific events in his work. These events, which might
be described as latter-day happenings, ranged from Keep Back the Tide (1993),
a sit-in demonstration against the tide on a beach in Santa Barbara, to Carpark
(1994), in which Tribe and his collaborators, Nina Katchadourian and Steven
Matheson, sorted thousands of cars into various parking lots according to
color, forming a giant color wheel visible from the sky. Tribe’s intention with
these projects was to transform particular features of everyday situations

(going co che beach, parking your car) inco opporcunicies for concemplacion
and aeschecic appreciacion.
In 1993, he became inceresced in che Incernec as a space for arc making and
sec ouc co read every cyberpunk novel he could gee his hands on. He also got
a dial-up connection through UCSD and started exploring che Internet, from
Usenet newsgroups such as alt.art.com to AOL’s suburban cyberscapes. This
research led to his participation in Vital Signs, a collaborative group of UCSD
graduate students and faculty that developed Apparitions (1994), an ambitious
virtual reality installation for inSITE 94, an international biennial in San
Diego and Tijuana. In August 1994, Tribe published a Web-based catalog for
Apparitions. From this experience, he learned that virtual reality was not as
interesting as che cyberpunk novels made it sound and that the future of the
Internet, at least in the near term, had more to do wich hypertext than with
immersive 3-D environments.
In 1995, Tribe moved to Berlin, Germany, where he worked as a Web
designer at Pixelpark, a multimedia firm, and continued to make arc. He was
invited by Eva Grubinger co parcicipace in Computer-Aided Curating (C@C),
the first online gallery space for Web-based art. For C@C, Tribe made Traces
ofa Constructed City (1995), a Net art project that displays digital photographs
of Berlin construction sites via an image map of the city. Through C@C, he
also met Pit Schultz, che Berlin-based artist who, with Geert Lovink, founded
neccime, an e-mail list and Web-based archive focused on the theory and pol
itics of networks.
Later that year, while attending a panel on Web design at the Dutch Elec
tronic Film Festival (DEAF) during which Jane Prophet described the com
munity thac had formed around her Technosphere project, Tribe saw the need
for a nectime-like e-mail list/Web archive focused on new media arc—an
online platform where people around the world who work with contemporary
art and emerging technologies could share information and develop a mean
ingful critical dialogue. At the time, there were no e-mail lists or Web sites
that were international in scope and concentrated exclusively on new media
art. Festivals and conferences like DEAF, Ars Electronica, ISEA, and Siggraph
were che only places where artists, curators, and critics could see each other’s
work and discuss it. Tribe believed that an online forum for the presentation
and discussion of new work could be more inclusive and ongoing than these
off-line events. He also felt that a focused critical discourse was crucial to the
development of new media arc.
Chapter 6
In February 1996, Tribe launched the Rhizome e-mail list. As the list grew,
he prepared to relocate to New York City, where he felt the climate was more
favorable for Internet start-ups. By July 1996, Tribe and his partners had
launched the Rhizome.com Web site, which featured a searchable archive of
the e-mail discussions, and had written a business plan with which he hoped
to raise start-up capital. It became clear after several meetings with potential
investors, however, that Rhizome’s market was too small to either attract
investment or build a viable business. So Tribe started a second business—a
stock media library for Web developers called StockObjects—that attracted
investment capital and paid for Rhizome as a marketing expense.
During this time, the Rhizome e-mail list grew quickly. As the number of
postings per day increased, Tribe set up a second e-mail list, Rhizome Digest,
that consisted of a single weekly e-mail, edited to include the most interesting
and relevant posts from the previous week. Subscribers could then choose
between Rhizome Digest and the original unfiltered list, which was renamed
Rhizome Raw. This set up a dual structure: an open communication channel
combined with a more selective distribution channel that became an important
model for other programs at Rhizome. At the core of the Rhizome Web site
was a database of “text object” articles that had been selected from the e-mail
discussion, indexed, and then paired with an illustrative image. Each text
object consists of a text, an image, and metadata such as the author’s name,
URLs, dates, keywords, and so forth. As the text archive grew, this metadata
became increasingly important in that it enabled effective searches and
innovative interfaces. StarryNight, described above, was one such interface. By
February 1998, Rhizome no longer served a viable marketing function for
StockObjects. Rather than transform Rhizome into a more commercial Web
magazine or shut it down, Tribe opted co keep Rhizome alive and true to its
roots by spinning it off as an independent nonprofit organization and renam
ing it Rhizome.org. After a year of barely surviving on individual contribu
tions, Rhizome.org started to attract financial support from foundations and
government agencies. This enabled Tribe to develop several new programs,
including the Rhizome Artbase, an online archive of Net art founded in 1996,
and OpenMouse, a monthly open mike—style event for new media artists.
The Rhizome.org community continued to grow at an accelerating rate. By
February 2001, Rhizome.org had over 6,000 e-mail subscribers, and 15,000
people visited the Rhizome.org site that month, generating over 4,000,000
hits.

Victoria Vesna* has also developed a large collaborative project. Her Build
ing a Community of People with No Time (notime) (2001—2002) is a series of proj
ects taking place on the Net and in physical public spaces. It is conceived to
raise questions about perceptions of time and identity as we overextend our per
sonal networks through communication technologies. There are three mani
festations of notime, all interconnected and networked: a Net project, a physical
installation, and a performance involving cell phones (figure 6.2). Notime was
part of the traveling exhibit called Telematic Connections: The Virtual
Embrace. Another large networked collaborative project by Vesna, Bodies
INCorporated, was installed as a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Art Insti
tute and the ArtHouse in Dublin in 2000. Bodies INCorporated comments on
the corporate culture of the Net and allows people to construct virtual bodies
on the Net. Created in 1996, it is still active almost ten years later. Related
exhibits appeared in the 1996 SIGGRAPH Art Show in New Orleans, the
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Barnsdall Municipal Gallery in Los Angeles,
the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Machida Museum of Graphics in Japan.
Figure 6.2 Victoria Vesna, notime, 2001-2002. Networked interactive installation, in col
laboration with software artist Gerald de Jong and David Beaudry on audio, Oklahoma Museum
of Art. Photo by Victoria Vesna.
Chapter 6
In her works on the Internet, Vesna examines che meaning of social com
munity on Web and the evidence of new communal structures in a global,
networked society. Attempts at establishing such structures are presently
based almost exclusively on che e-commerce system—that is, social constructs
are based on people who have the same needs and satisfy them in a virtual
marketplace. The diverse paths taken by che transferred information (where,
for instance, our request co purchase someching or our credit card number
goes) can be reconstructed as a story of its own. Vesna’s Datamining Bodies,
exhibited at Ruhr Visions in an old mine in Dortmund, Germany, in
1999, would like to return this invisible and impersonal flow of information
to a physical form (figure 6.3). The network project examines three essential
notions: data mining (the origin and che pach of informacion), network
topologies (the cartographic representation of information densicy and path
ways), and online communicies (social communities on the Internet). Each of
these three main points represents an area in which computer industry research
is presently focused. When one cakes a closer look at any one of these, it
becomes obvious that they were developed on the basis of purely commercial
interests and do not correspond to people’s need for communication wich
each other. Hence, Datamining Bodies is searching for an alternative
Figure 6.3 Victoria Vesna, Datamining Bodies in the Ruhr, 2001. Interactive installation, in
collaboration with Gerald de Jong and David Beaudry, coal mine, Ruhr, Germany.

approach, in which such networks could play a positive role in helping us
co fully develop our personalities. It is an attempt to offer a network of
knowledge and expanded consciousness to everyone, beyond the realm of
e-commerce.
Vesna’s work has moved from performance and video installations to exper
imental research that connects networked environments co physical public
spaces. She explores how physical and ephemeral spaces as well as communi
cation technologies affect collective behavior, how they shift perceptions of
identity in relation to scientific innovation.
In 2001, Victoria Vesna started a close collaboration with famed nan
otechnology scientist James Gimzewski that resulted in a piece called
Zero@Wavefanction:nano dreams & nightmares, which premiered at the Biennial
of Electronic Arts in Perth, Australia. Following this successful work, they
embarked on a large collaborative piece that was installed at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art. Together with several architects they were inspired
by Buckminster Fuller’s work to create nine interactive, modular, experien
tial spaces using embedded computing technologies to engage all of che senses
to provoke a broader understanding of nanotechnology and its cultural ram
ifications. The various components of “nano” were designed to immerse the
visitor in the radical shifts of scale and sensory modes that characterize nan
otechnology, which works on the scale of a billionth of a meter. Much of the
experience from her earlier work dealing with distributed presence was
brought into this large exhibition that explored how remote control of mol
ecules and building worlds from bottom up may affect our social structures
and indeed our collective consciousness. Victoria Vesna and Gimzewski are
currently collaborating on cellular trans_actions: nanobods, a cell phone work
that utilizes his research on sounds produced by living cells and further
explores the intersection of art, science, technology, and our social environ
ments (figure 6.4).
Margot Lovejoy’s* development as a digital and a Net artist grew out of
conceptual mixed-media work in printmaking, photography, and artist’s
books in the 1970s. Today, she sees her work as a developmental continuum
crossing over media to where she is now creating digitally based Web works
that rely fundamentally on participation and communication.
Interested in the relationship between illusion and reality as themes for her
early work, she explored the major shift in representation that took place when
photography’s tonal structure was superseded by digital means, with its poten-
Chapter 6
Figure 6.4 Victoria Vesna, Nano, 2003-2004. A series of interrelated installations.
rial for total image manipulation and control. By 1984, she began to create
large computer-programmed, projected installation works. This shift opened
up a major new area of investigation that brought her work into connection
with the visual language of film, and included sound, movement, multiple
images, and aspects of sculpture.
Influenced by film theory, she started to use montage as a major principle in
her work. Filmmaker Sergey Eisenstein described montage as a theory
of visual relationships wherein vital missing information (significance or
meaning that could not be contained in the actual picture) is hidden in the rela
tional space between two or more contrasting images. Here, a kind of struc
tural tension generates thinking and questioning, resulting in a dynamic form
of communication as the spectator must participate in discovering meaning by
lining up split screens to gauge the gap between the images. This fascination
with audience interaction and communication has stayed with Lovejoy since
then, becoming fundamental to her contemporary work in digital media.
The concent of her work expanded dramatically from the mid-1980s, and
became a way of gaining insight into the deeply felt social issues she wished

to interpret and dramatize for others. These thematic issues now defined her
works content, and reveal influences from mythology, anthropology, and
history as well as feminist and postmodern theory. Lovejoy also began writing
about the relationship between art and technology. The theoretical research
that informs her writing is a further influence.
An example from this period is Lovejoy’s Labyrinth (1988), a multimedia
projection in three rooms that explores the power of the media to create false
consciousness by controlling cultural identity. It asks questions about the roles
of the observer, and the observed, and the power relations between them. It
deals with the way we are perceived by others, and how cultural constructs
and stereotypes control our feelings about ourselves. Surveillance cameras fol
lowed viewers through a labyrinth to the main viewing area, which contained
five contrasting screens with moving images and sound. This project was made
possible through a grant from the.Guggenheim Foundation and also resulted
in Lovejoy’s artist’s book of the same title.
By 1995, when Internet browsers developed to the point where it became
possible to develop artists’ Web works, Lovejoy embraced the new medium
as ideal for the interactive communication goals of her work. She produced
her first Web site as a follow-up to a large video/digital installation memo
rial, Parthenia (1995), dedicated to victims of domestic violence. Produced
through an Arts International grant, the work was sited at the Queens
Museum in New York. Lovejoy worked with community groups to collect
personal drawings and writings by victims of domestic violence. These were
displayed on the tall, black walls surrounding the installation. By revealing
their own experiences publicly and cross-culturally, participants in the
project served to “break the silence’’ about one of the most pervasive and
least recognized human rights issues in the world today. The Parthenia
Web work became a community-based memorial space (rather than a
temporary museum exhibition) where further stories could be entered
and read, and where linked domestic violence resources were available
along with a database of national and international statistics. Parthenia
became part of adaweb.com, a pioneering Web site (now archived by the
Walker Art Center) developed by Benjamin Weil, who was then acting as a
consultant to artists struggling with the many vicissitudes of working in this
new medium.
From the beginning, Lovejoy was interested in the community-based
potential of Web works as a medium. She thought of a Web site as a means
Chapter 6
to “learn" from the interaction of participants. When participants contribute
the results of their interaction, they become “collaborators.” While Lovejoy
continued to create projection installations such as Storm from Paradise
(2000) and experimented with a complex, interactive, multiuser installation,
SALVAGE (1999), that made use of new software and programming tech
niques, she was not satisfied with the level of participation, response, and
meaningfulness to be derived from these works. It was not until she began to
produce TURNS (www.myturningpoint.com) in 2001, when Web tech
nology became more advanced, that she was able to fully develop a com
prehensive system for engaging contributors—a system that could more
dynamically evolve and respond through contributor collaboration. This shift
in her work signaled a willingness to relinquish the traditions of authorship.
She started to design T U R N 5 as a fully participatory experience—one chat
privileges the experience of the audience over che artist’s intentions. The artist
becomes more of an ethnographer, creating a “frame” or context chat provides
an environment for learning and exchange (figure 6.5).
Such community-based systems utilize processes of exchange, learning, and
adaptation, and are built on the premise that meaning in a work of arc is
■piw .ij >jh
Figure 6.5 Margot Lovejoy, TURNS, 2001-present. Multiuser table installation.

dependent on exchange and communication between individuals and groups.
Such systems provide a context for participants to reflect on their personal
understandings about their own social and political contexts.
TURNS (exhibited in the 2002 Whitney Biennial) is designed as a par
ticipatory experience as though one is taking a walk on a beach, reviewing
turning points in one’s life, and then deciding to share a significant one while
being in contact with others’ stories. Stories are represented as pebblelike
shapes that can be opened and returned to the narrative pool. Visitors to
TURNS can contribute their narrative and browse stories according to cat
egories such as education, relationships, health, trauma, family, immigration,
or war. The anthology section of the site allows users to reorganize the stories
through multiple criteria—such as ethnicity or the time at which the turning
point was experienced—and access related databases. People may also con
tribute and draw a “life map,” visually representing the course of their lives.
TURNS provides connections to lives lived under many circumstances
and time periods. Seen through relational filters, lenses, and links, one’s story
is understood as part of social memory. The site is also a reflection on the ways
new media are influencing and changing notions of the individual in a social
context. With its possibilities for creating networked communities and
relational databases, the Internet becomes a form of collective social
consciousness.
Lovejoy sees that even though TURNS offers the accessibility of a Web
based project, it is still important for the work to be repurposed as installa
tions and exhibited in public places such as museums, galleries, community
centers, and libraries. These exhibitions could have accompanying public
workshops that encourage public participation in story writing or memory
mapping as part of a continuing cultural process.
Lovejoy is also the author of the seminal book Postmodern Currents: Art and
Artists in the Age of Electronic Media, as well as some visual books: Labyrinth
(1991), The Book of Plagues (1994), and Paradoxic Mutations (1994).6 Her
numerous other multimedia projection installations include Azimuth XX: The
Logic Stage (1986), an examination of formal perceptual and representational
issues, and Cloud Stage V (1987), intended as a metaphor for the illusory, the
baroque, the romantic, and the idealist. Her well-known work Black Box
(1992) was based on a sci-fic scenario where an epidemic has created the need
to resort to technological means to reproduce the human species. All these
works, along with the ones described earlier, are witness to the fact that the
Chapter 6
arcist combines plastic preoccupations within the new media with broad
interests in several fields.
A seminal online and off-line forum for new media art and theory, The
Thing, was founded in 1991 by Wolfgang Staehle* in New York. The Thing
began as a bulletin board system focusing on contemporary art and cultural
theory, and moved its wares onto the Web in 1995.
Born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1950, Staehle studied for two years at the
Freie Kunstschule. He has been living in New York City since 1976. At the
School of Visual Arts Joseph Kosuth was teaching a class and Marshall Blonsky
was giving a semiotics class. Staehle started getting interested in semiotics as
a result of taking both classes. He also saw a show in Berlin called Welt aus
Sprache (World out of Language) that was dealing with semiotic phenomena.
But at the time, there was no way in Germany to associate the study of these
areas at one university. So he went to the United States, where he got involved
with video in the early 1980s and founded with friends a television magazine
called After Art, which reported on the downtown scene, the arts, the clubs,
and the performances.
Staehle is now widely recognized as a pioneer of the Internet art scene, and
his video and new media works have been exhibited worldwide. His work
Empire 2411—a live image of the Empire State Building in New York—was
included in the net_condition show at the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medien-
technolozie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe (1999) and in the Loans from the Invisible
Museum exhibition at Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco (2000). He
had solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1993) and the
Marimura Art Museum in Tokyo (1990). Staehle’s 2001 installation at the
Postmasters Gallery consisted of three Web transmissions offering an instan
taneous compression of time and space. When this installation opened at the
beginning of September 2001, what could be seen on the three gigantic video
screens located on the gallery walls were live images changing every four
seconds of three different urban landscapes of the world. One of the walls
showed the upper part of the television tower in Berlin, another depicted an
eleventh-century monastery from the Comburg area of Germany, and the last
presented a panoramic view of Lower Manhattan from Brooklyn. These three
live projections were almost like monotonous-looking photographs. The only
variations that could be observed were small diurnal and meteorological
changes to the landscapes, and some birds that would come and go. Yet all
that changed on September 11, when che Lower Manhattan camera recorded

each second of the attacks on the Twin Towers. The artist’s representative at
the gallery watched the towers vanish, as stunned as the rest of the world.
Fulfilling one of its functions, the work documented the events that happened
that day. The function of the cameras, which were intended to record ordi
nary and almost motionless events, had been altered by a cruel destiny, leaving
the world in a state of sadness and expectation, and making us think about
the future: the sensational and the preestablished. Today, the cameras keep
recording the same landscapes that have been altered, as in the case of New
York. They keep recording not only the imprints of natural events (sunsets,
rain, and so on), but also the ones made by human beings.
The overall conceptual focus of Tina LaPorta's* artwork is an exploration
of the Internet’s impact on the expression of identity. She has been commis
sioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Alternative Museum,
and turbulence.org to create Web-specific art projects. LaPorta, a New York
City media artist, intends to make art that comments on our lives and the
shifting perceptions of ourselves in this technological age. For example, her
Ffiture_body Version 1.0 (1999) is a Web-specific work that looks at the dis
embodied and dislocated nature of online subjectivity within the global net
worked environment of the Internet. Using the model of the network as a
platform for distribution, Futnre_body Version 1.0 examines the separation of
the corporeal world implied by the use of telecommunications technology. In
this piece, LaPorta works with the abstracted image of the female figure. She
suggests that as one enters the zone of cyberspace, embodiment appears to
become completely removed from the organic—but in fact, the subject splits,
doubling itself by being present in two parallel spaces: the physical location
of the corporeal world, and the virtual realm of the Internet. The subject’s
experience becomes frayed or dispersed, implicating the network as an inte
gral aspect of our fragmented contemporary lives. Foregrounding the rela
tionship between technology, the body, and female, subjectivity, Future_body
Version 1.0 (1994) and another of LaPorta’s early Net works, Translate { }
Expression (1994), explore both the potentialities and the meaning(s) of pres
ence, absence, and the desire for connectivity within a global networked envi
ronment. Indeed, Translate { } Expression poses this as its central question:
What does it mean to be embodied in a high-tech world?
In 1993 LaPorta began working with three-dimensional wire-frame models
of the female figure, questioning with her artistic practice the ways in which
human subjects interface with machines. Representing the figure as com
Chapter 6
pletely constructed by computer technology and distributing its image as such
on the Internet suggests that communications technologies and biotechnolo
gies are potent tools for reconceptualizing embodiment in the age of
information. If the fertility figures of Paleolithic times bound women to the
natural world, LaPorta’s digitally constructed images achieved the polar
opposite effect, linking the female image to the synthetic world of computer
technology.
Distance.portal is the portal site for a body of Web-based work LaPorta
began during summer 1999 and completed in February 2001. Her works here
focus on the cultural impact technology has on identity and social relations.
This body of work, as a whole, marks a certain departure for LaPorta—an
opening of her creative process to fold dialogue, communication, and networks
into her online artistic practice (figure 6.6).
The CUseeMe 1999 environment becomes the inquiry platform for
LaPorta’s work distance, 1999 which explores the desire for communication
□ {?] Distance: On-Line.... Virtual
■!
I ®Loo*i rnoohine zone
Figure 6.6 Tina LaPorta, Distance, 1999.

between geographically separated participants mediated by the surface of the
computer screen. This work addresses the social function of the Internet as a
stage for human relationships, exchanges, and communication.
LaPorta began to log on to video-conferencing reflector sites because she
was interested in the emerging social space that the Internet supported. While
photographing the video and chat windows that appeared on her computer
screen, she became a voyeur seduced by the online world of real-time inter
action. The real-time interactions within the CUseeMe reflector sites place
observers and participants alike in the presence of real, embodied subjects.
The CUseeMe forums became the context through which LaPorta could
establish a form to represent women as subjects within this social network.
By combining both visual images drawn from video with strings of fictional
text, she began to construct a temporality based on a language of communi
cation written from a female point of view. As the viewer moves through the
work, the linked text is narrated by an unseen woman. Inside the text, the
construction of language is a conscious act of placing “she” in the subject
position. This underscores the primacy on the part of the text’s author, to rec
ognize herself as a communicating subject and to draw attention to a desire
for communication on the part of women within this global networked
environment.
Distance in Real-Time (1999) is a piece that marks a distinct turning point
in LaPorta’s working method. Here, LaPorta examines the various ways in
which she is able to fold the online digital community into her artistic prac
tice (figure 6.7). She composed a series of philosophical questions, sent these
questions out to several e-mail lists, and then posted the incoming responses
on her Web site. The questions initiated a series of send/receive loops that
would become integral to many of her future works.
In Eye to the Ear Remix (2000) and Dystopia Mix (2001), LaPorta took the
same series of questions and began to interview and record local New York
City Internet artists. She then interwove their voice responses into a sound
piece embedded within a single-screen work. In Eye to the Ear Remix, she
included the questions as a form so thac the audience logged on to the Web
site would be encouraged co contribute their comments as well.
In Re:mote_corp@REALities (2001), LaPorta continues her inquiries regard
ing the nature of online communication in an era obsessed with technology
(figure 6.8). This work as a whole has the combined effect of functioning like
an extended, self-reflexive conversation caking place in both real and delayed
Chapter 6
ET! 'NetscMe:TlnaU?aita':Dlitence'inf
TlnaLaPoni
Dimdce io Reai-Time: in eye to tfie eir renlx
G2ir.aTiHDjj:c6
'trmirfiMriino—wjm
Figure 6.7 Tina LaPorta, Distance in Real-Time, 1999.
time, simulating the experience of the voyeur logging on to a video chat room.
While the interface allows the viewer to click on an image, video windows
and a chat stream are displayed on the viewer’s browser. The text was sampled
and remixed over an extended period of logging on to various live chat ses
sions in which the artist shifts from being a voyeur to becoming a participant.
The piece presents a nonlinear hypertextual way of experiencing a work in
fragments while simultaneously windows replace “liveness” with sampled
media.
In contrast to the works in distance.portal (2001), voyeur_web (2002) directly
explores liveness as transmitted through the medium of the Internet. This
single-screen work links to several live Webcams from around rhe globe, each
placed in a corresponding room from a domestic interior space. The utiliza
tion of the floor plan image functions as both a navigational interface
structure, and perhaps more important, a way to call attention to the inter
play between the public and private spheres, which appear to become less and

o Netscape: Tina LaPorta I Re:mote.corp@flEALItlcs
Figure 6.8 Tina LaPorta, Re:mote_corp@REALities, 2001.
less demarcated on the Internet. If the home represents a private space and
the Web a public site, Webcams then become a window on, or an invitation
to look at, the everydayness of the inhabitants of these sites. The distance
between the watcher and the watched is quite clear, and those who are being
watched set the stage for their own exhibitionism—to be seen is to exist. The
floor plan maps the gaze of the voyeur, regardless of whether the cam exists
for the gaze of the Web surfer or the spouse away at work. Click on a room
and a new window opens a stop-frame image hyperlinked from a live cam.
Over time, the frame refreshes and glimpses of a body occupying its own per
sonal space appear on the viewers desktop. Repeat views reveal new charac
ters, the absence of the main character, a pause of the cam, or a change of its
location.
On the other hand, G. H. Hovagimyan’s* artworks can be viewed as involv
ing three main areas of investigation: telecommunication art as exemplified
by Art Dirt (1996-1998) and Collider (1998-2000), digital performance art
as exemplified by Artdirt Im-Port (1996) and A SoaPOPera for Laptops
(1997—2000), and Net art represented in various Web projects including Faux
Conceptual Art (1994) and Art DirectlSex, Violence, and Politics (1995).
Chapter 6
In Art Dirt, Hovagimyan engages in a roundcable discussion on copies
involving digital arc (figure 6.9). In Collider, he uses a dialogue between
himself and another digital artist (figure 6.10). These works are both pre
sented as screamed audio and video over the Internet. They are also archived.
The archives may be accessed via the Web. Both works are extensions of earlier
types of conceptual art practices. If Hovagimyan were co trace a historical
path, he would start with the Joseph Beuys’s idea of social sculpture. Follow
ing chis would be his involvement with video performance art in rhe 1970s,
and no wave cinema and punk arc in the 1980s. What this historical thread
indicates is a group communication activity that leads to aesthetic insight and
refers to various mass-media forms as both its subject and its object (the
vehicle for presentation). In the 1990s, Hovagimyan extended these forms into
the digital arena of the Web. He sees this as having interesting implications.
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Figure 6.9 G. H. Hovagimyan, Art D/rt, 1996-1998. Streamed video talk show (Victor
Acevedo on left side, and G. H. Hovagimyan on right). Screen shot from Walker Art Center
Archives.

Figure 6.10 G. H. Hovagimyan, Collider, 1998-2000. Streamed video talk show (screen grabs
from thirty shows). Courtesy of thing.net.
Chapter 6
What he has been doing is creating a personal media form and narrowcasting
it over the Internet. In an information society, everyone has the means of pro
duction—the product being information. Whether or not people are aware
of it, Hovagimyan believes a postmedia information society is beginning to
emerge. This means that mass-production, mass-distribution broadcast modes
are being supplanted by a digital immersive-information environment. In this
new environment, it becomes important to project a Web persona, which one
creates using personal media.
Hovagimyan’s investigation of digital performance art started with Artdirt
Im-Port, an installation shown within the PORT: Navigating Digital Culture
exhibition at MIT’s List Visual Arts Museum (organized by artnetweb in 1996).
For Port-MIT, he created two Web-jam remote events—one for the opening,
and one for the closing. For the opening, Hovagimyan was at the Ecole d’Art
at Aix-en-Provence in France, where he hosted a series of performances thac
were streamed over the Internet to screens at MIT. For the closing, he invited
people for a CuseeMe session and also had digital musicians scream Real Audio
files from around che world. He then did a live mix of the streamed video and
audio at MIT. The audience also participated in the CUseeMe session. For A
SoaPOPera for Laptops, Hovagimyan worked with media artist Peter Sinclair,
who lives in Marseille (figure 6.11). Hovagimyan had been working with cext-
to-speech as a logical extension of his text based on conceptual art and per
formance work. Sinclair and Hovagimyan have created a sort of bricolage robot
performance croupe. Parc of whac Hovagimyan has been doing with Sinclair is
telematically projeccing performance arc into the robot/vehicles.
Hovagimyan’s works involving Net art are an extension of the postmodern
discourse into the digital arena. They are critiques of postmodern practices as
well as che art world’s enormous marketing and distribution mechanism. The
arcist’s position in this respect is co avoid commodification, and co present as
many alternative models for what an artwork is and how artistic practice may
be defined for the twenty-first century. Hovagimyan’s Web sice Faux Concep
tual Art (1994) is a prank piece, a send-up, of appropriation arc. This site also
hosts the first do-it-yourseif Internet artwork, Video Affirmations (1994). The
work allows people to print out cexts and paste them up in a room. The artist
has received many e-mails from people who have done just that. The Web site
Art Direct/Sex, Violence, and Politics is a critique of U.S. mass media. This work
is also a challenge co those who would censor Internet art. The major piece
on the Web work is BKPC (Barbie & Ken Politically Correct) (1994). Mattel,

Figure 6.11 G. H. Hovagimyan, A SoaPOPera for Laptops, 1998. Four performers at rest
(Princess, left; Fred, facing forward; Ralph, right; and Kathy, rear).
Inc., the manufacturer of Barbie dolls, unsuccessfully tried to force The

Thing—the computer network host—to remove the piece, citing copyright
infringement. Another piece on this Web site, Pray for Death (1995), uses the
slowness of the Internet to create an animated montage. What this piece
points out is the difference between digital art and other screen-based art.
Digital art is rendered in real time on the screen and through loudspeakers.
Hovagimyan is interested in using the peculiarities and faults of computer
systems as an aspect of the work. A third piece of this Web work, Tactics for
Survival in the New Culture (original 1974, hypertext version 1995), is the
clearest example of how Hovagimyan extends an earlier conceptual art piece
done in 1974 to hypertext on the Web.
Most of Hovagimyan’s work blurs the lines between media forms and has
been presented in a variety of formats—or at least has that capability. For
instance, &rt Dirt and Collider draw some of their aspects from a television
talk show, but in reality they are also artworks. Hovagimyan’s collaborative
Chapter 6
work A SoaPOPera for Laptops may be inspired by pop media, computer music,
and robotics, and yet it does not really fit neatly into those categories. Indeed,
his Net art projects have a similar problem insofar as they sit uncomfortably
balanced between hard-core coded art and information pranksterism, on the
one hand, and media critique, on the other. In order to propose a trajectory
for new media art, Hovagimyan feels one has to encompass the teleology of
previous media and art forms.
In a more generalized discussion of aspects of digital art, certain issues seem
to be peculiar to digital art. For instance, the elimination of both a discreet
art object and an encapsulated time-based performance are hallmarks ofdigital
art. How this differs from earlier forms of conceptual art is simply this: time
based work always has a beginning and an end. Conceptual art tends to rely
on a substituted discreet object such as a photograph and/or a text. How rhe
work is presented and received is also quite different. Digital art depends on
the Internet to give it meaning. This means that all the other existing systems
for presenting art have little impact on how the works are perceived. With
digital art, Net culture is what validates the artwork. Indeed, Hovagimyan
feels there has been a massive rupture between postmodern systems and new
media systems just at the point where postmodernism has secured its ascen
dancy as the dominant form of artistic practice.
Perhaps by discussing the structure of a Web jam one can clarify some of the
differences in new media or virtual art. The two Web jams Hovagimyan organ
ized depended on two types of locations. The main gathering place for all the
artists was a reflector site on the Internet. The actions occurred in this virtual
space. People who accessed this via the Web also had various physical activi
ties happening at the same time. This might entail a group of people standing
around a computer, sometimes paying attention and sometimes ignoring the
whole thing. At the MIT List Visual Arts Center, people were also physically
engaged in parts of the Web jam or they immersed themselves in the four
screens. The structure was one of distributed nodes that had a loose communi
cation motif. The performances were streamed into this mix. In the first Web
jam, Hovagimyan was a performer/host at a remote node. In the second, he per
formed a remix of the information that was being streamed to the reflector sites.
He then presented the information in the physical space. In a certain sense, the
artist performs the function of an information filter organizing the data streams.
In A SoaPOPera for Laptops, Hovagimyan projected himself into the com
puters via text-to-speech. Sinclair, his partner in this and other works, has

matching aesthetic concerns as well as a facility for creating both the under
lying programming structure and the physical/mechanical manifestation.
Indeed, working with computers tends to create collaboration. The networked
structure of information processing naturally lends itself to cooperative pro
jects. Over the course of several works, Hovagimyan and Sinclair have been
moving into a symbiotic relationship with computers as the coperformers and
the cocreators of the artwork. In their piece Heartbreak Hotel (2000), they have
begun a process of removing the author by using text generators to create the
texts that the virtual characters speak.
Hovagimyan’s first Internet artwork was executed before the advent of the
Web. This work was done on the computer bulletin board The Thing in fall
1994. Hovagimyan presented BKPC as a series of digital images that bulletin
board users could download and collect on their computer—twelve images a
week for twelve weeks. He discovered that a gallery owner in Soho had down
loaded che images onto his computer and was using them as screen savers.
Hovagimyan found this to be quite amusing. He had circumvented the stan
dard mode of distributing work of arc. The work was being displayed in a
prestigious gallery without going through the normal routes. Later, the
artist incorporated the work on his Web site, Art Direct/Sex, Violence, and
Politics (www.thing.net/~gh/artdirect/). The basis of Net art or browser arc is
HTML. This is the code used on the Internet to organize pictures and text
into a page format. Hovagimyan found this to be a perfect way to extend his
conceptual art practice onto the Internet. A second wave of Javascript coders
have taken to deconstructing the browser environment to create art. One of
the more telling practices by artists working with computers is che subver
sion of che tools and che modes of presentacion created by software program
mers for che supposed mass market. Hovagimyan feels that the Internet is just
beginning to break with past media forms even as it defines its own context.
If he were to postulate on its future, he would say that once fiber-optic broad
band networks become widely available, this will signal the beginning of an
independent medium.
The Internet as a social communications network informs most of Mark
Amerika’s* undertakings, from his creative writing to creating and curating
Internet literary and visual enterprises. In 1995, he applied to Brown
University’s graduate program in creative writing so that he could focus his
investigations on integrating animated and still-life digital images, electronic
sound, and computer programming into his evolving stories. He was accepted
Chapter 6
to the university and, as a creative writing fellow, immediately began devel
oping the GRAMMATRON project, a multimedia narrative for network-
distributed environments (figures 6.12 and 6.13).
His work at Brown introduced him to the computer-supported, collabo
rative work environments available on campus, and he began spending
a great deal of his time moving between the creative writing program,
the National Science Foundation-supported Computer Graphics Lab, and the
cross-disciplinary Multi-Media Lab. GRAMMATRON was released on the
Internet on June 26, 1997, and that day the entire New York Times arts@Iarge
□ ©Abe Golam
Abe Golain
Abe Golain, legendary info-shaman, cracker of the sorcerer
code and creator of Grainmatron and Nanoscript, sat behind
his computer, every speck of creative ore long since excavated
from his bumt-out brain, wondering how he was going to
survive in the electro sphere he had once called home. His
glazed donut eyes were spacing out into the vast electric desert
looking for more words to transcribe his personal loss of
meaning. “I'm Abe Golam, an old man. I drove a sign to the
end of the road and then I got lost. Find me."
Figure 6.12 Mark Amerika, GRAMMATRON: Abe Golam, 1997. Internet artwork,
www.grammatron.com.

□ @ seeing-form EOS
seeing-forin
* in., •■hl
. ... ,
ih
•
"The creature’s forehead has;a gramalogue branded on the
skin. A ritual tattoo tliat demarcates the way to seeing, (this _
<111 way to seeing, of getting iivbetween the cracks of .
standardized digital being, is called Seeing-Form). The 1 • ■
gramalogue is puffy and filled with a poisonous pus tliat
slightly oozes out of the illegible hieroglyphics tliat spell
GRAMMATRON's fate. This unerasable blood-and-pus-
stained signature is an unreadable mark tliat fills the space '
X above the eyes in a way tliat disrupts the sense of presence
I
the creatxire (fekes yoUjOUt with." y 1 j |' \ ,/||.
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to
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0
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. . ■ ■• .• ' • ri i.. ••••. i.iid

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Figure 6.13 Mark Amerika, GRAMMATRON: Seeing-form, 1997.
column was devoted co the work. Within weeks of its initial release, che site
was reviewed in venues such as the New York Times, MSNBC’s The Site, Reuters
International, Wired, the Village Voice, and Time Digital. Other feature articles
have since appeared in major news venues and art publications throughout
North America, Europe, Australia, South Africa, and South America.
After this initial round of attention, it became clear to Amerika that one
of the challenges presented by artwork released on the Internet is its exhibi
tion context. Once an artist creates a unique work of Internet arc, it is quite
simple co get this work into the public domain and locate an audience. In
Chapter 6
many ways, Internet artists do not need museums or gallery spaces to show
case their work, and many Web artists are quite capable of attracting larger
audiences to their work.
Having said that, as one of the first Internet artists to attract unexpected
international attention to their work, Amerika found it very important to
work with various museums and festival organizers so that this work would
be taken as seriously as art produced in other media. Soon after releasing
GRAMMATRON, he cocurated a network exhibition of Internet art at Alc-X
titled Digital Studies: Being in Cyberspace (1997). This online-only art show
exhibited the work of seventeen international artists and three keynote speak
ers, who contributed essays to the site so as to help contextualize this radical
new curatorial practice and emerging art form. For the first time in art history,
art appreciators all around the world were able to visit this art show online,
wherever their computer was located. This model of online art curation, where
che show features work created specifically for the Internet medium, has since
been practiced by major museums worldwide including the Whitney Museum
of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Ars Electronica Center in
Linz, Austria.
The Digital Studies: Being in Cyberspace show at Alt-X, in turn, created
opportunities co exhibit and/or perform GRAMMATRON. The work has since
been exhibited in over twenty-five international art shows including the
Guggenheim Soho’s Cyberatlas, Ars Electronica, the International Symposium
of Electronic Art, Siggraph, the Museum on che Web’s Beyond Interface show,
che Adelaide Arcs Festival in Souch Australia, the Virtual Worlds conference
in Paris, and the International Biennial of Film and Architecture in Graz.
Amerika started his artistic career as a novelist and a short story writer.
His first novel, The Kafka Chronicles (FC2/Black Ice Books), was published
in 1993 and is now in its third printing. His second novel, Sexual Blood
(FC2/Black Ice Books), has been translated into Italian as Sangue Sessuale. In
1995, he also published two anthologies: Degenerative Prose: Writing beyond Cat
egory , coedited with Ron Sukenick (FC2/Black Ice Books), and In Memoriam to
Postmodernism: Essays on the Avant-Pop, coedited with Lance Olsen (San Diego
State University Press).
In parallel co developing his practice as a literary artist, he began explor
ing the potential of the Internet co blur the distinction between the literary,
visual, conceptual, and performance arts. In 1993, he founded the Alt-X
Online Network. Generally considered one of che oldest surviving art and

writing networks on the Internet, the site has an international reputation for
publishing and exhibiting state-of-the-art online content including Internet
art shows, multimedia hypertexts, the electronic book review and forum, Net
radio, 3-D narratives, and numerous electronic publications (virtual reprints
of out-of-print books as well as collections of fiction, interviews, nonfiction,
and critical theory). Throughout his tenure as the site’s director, Amerika has
approached Alt-X as a research and development platform that investigates
the emerging forms of Web narrative and Internet art design. His current
research and creative work is expanding so that he may investigate some of
the emerging new media publishing technologies that challenge old economic
models of cultural production.
To this end, in summer 2001, the Alt-X site, with Amerika serving as pub
lisher, began releasing full-length e-books and other experimental electronic
titles created for personal digital assistants. Amerika has said that this elec
tronic publishing venture is meant “to bring Web-readers a must-have library
of uncategorizable writing being produced by some of the most provocative
artists in contemporary new media culture.” When he launched the new e-
book section of the site in July 2001, he was quoted as saying, “As digital
’writing makes its footprint into the electrosphere, we no longer ask What is
literature? but, more importantly, What is literature’s exit strategy?”
Alt-X has been asking that latter question ever since its inception. In the
mid-1990s, as the Alt-X site began attracting more attention from the visual
arts community, Amerika started reconfiguring his own literary practice to
better reflect the Internet stories he was beginning to develop.
In November 1998, Amerika was awarded an Australia Council for the
Arts grant for new work as part of the initial launch of the council’s New
Media Fund. In this instance, he was the only non-Australian to be awarded
such a grant during that funding cycle. He chose to use the grant to begin
his second major Internet project, PHON: E: ME (1999). PHON: E: ME was
further commissioned by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Perth
Institute of Contemporary Art in Perth, Australia in spring 1999.
Whereas the GRAMMATRON project focused on the role of text, animated
images, and specially programmed hypertext links in creating online narra
tive art, the PHON: E: ME project emphasized the development of a stream
ing audio narrative, and featured new animation technology that allowed
Amerika to experiment with moving text, innovative typography, and
advanced programming languages.
Chapter 6
Just as Beuys asked us to see his objects and performances as stimulants
for the transformation of contemporary art practice into what would become
the development of a new kind of social sculpture, "an expanded concept of
art," Amerika's PHON: E: ME Web project asked its audience of Net-
connected, interactive participants to expand their concept of what a writing
practice is. In the PHON: E: ME project, Amerika’s remixes of text, sound,
and animated graphics blurred the borders between written, spoken, and
sculpted visual form. Like GRAMMATRON before it, the project was com
posed using most of the state-of-the-art new media technology available ac
the time (shock wave animation, MP3, streaming audio, advanced program
ming languages, and so forth), and taking place on the Web, continued
Amerika’s mission to call into question how a work of art is composed, exhib
ited, and distributed in the age of global computer networks.
PHON: E: ME is part oral narrative, part experimental sound collage, part
written hypertext, and part virtual art gallery. It consists of scores of original
sound, text, and animated video fragments that when interweaved, tell the
story of a fictionalized concept-character whose name is constantly changing
(Digital Being, the Network Conductor, the New Media Economist, NoMo
PoMo, and so on)—an all-pervasive entity that lives in cyberspace. Nestled
within its Shockwave interface is a complex "concept album” about concep
tual art, with compositions titled "Network Congestion: Still-Life with Arti
ficially Constructed Psychobabble” and "On:e.” Just as many of the concept
albums of the past were narratively driven, so was PHON: E: ME, but in this
instance the story only becomes apparent by wandering through the interface,
conducting the launch of sounds and story texts embedded in the piece’s
“hyper: liner: notes,” a cluster of over eighty writing fragments that are ran
domly generated by interacting with the online site. The sound works were
composed with a specially programmed speech synthesizer that uses the artist’s
own voice. This tailor-made synthesizer, developed with sound artist Erik
Belgum, was created by sampling the artist’s voice as he spoke all of the
phonemes of the English language. The artists then used a computer program
to generate a completely new-sounding language utilizing those sampled
phonemes as source material.
The year 2001 was transitional for Amerika in that he began looking more
to the off-line world for inspiration, and soon started using all of the source
material he was accumulating from his FILMTEXT project to experiment
with what he soon called “live writing events,” the first of which took place
□
in Lucerne, Switzerland, as part of an electronic literature and music festival.
In an e-mail dialogue Amerika arranged with British sci-fi novelist Jeff Noon
as part of Amerika’s ongoing net.dialogue series at Rhizome Internet, Amerika
said:
I’m just wondering how to take some of these ideas (techniques) and use them to
amplify these writerly effects in live performance. I found that using the net, the
WWW, was very helpful. So that in Lucerne, while we were doing the live, improv
isational sound-writing remix, I was also projecting my laptop’s wireless connection
to the WWW and grabbing data off the network in real-time and sampling what I
needed from it right into the new story, remixing as I wrote it, and then using the
sounds to further distort the narrative’s generative meaning (or meaning-potential).7
Similarly, knowledge as a social communications option on the Internet is

at the center of the agenda of Knowbotic Research (Yvonne Wilhelm, Alexan
der Tuchacek, and Christian Huebier*). This collective undertaking was estab
lished in 1991, and since then the media art group has been experimenting
with formations of information, interface, and networked agency. The group’s
more recent projects present artistic practice with media as an attempt to find
viable forms of intervention in the new public domain. Since 1998, the art
group has taught and conducted research at the new media department, which
the group also cofounded, at the University of Art and Design in Zurich.
Knowbotic Research is an interdisciplinary German/Austrian artist group
known in the first place for its investigations of knowledge systems and
information visualization. Its IO_DENCIES (1997—1999) environment, which
focused on diverse international urban environments—such as the megacities
of Tokyo and Sao Paulo—facilitated collaborative art projects and the emer
gence of insights about urban processes (figures 6.14 and 6.15). Its system
represented the forces of the city visually via live Internet data and let remote
participants intervene directly in the representation. By using special tools
(“attractors"), Internet users could intervene in these force fields. Every mod
ification in these zones changed the flows, and these interventions were dis
played immediately. Users not only saw the changes and the consequences
of their own interventions, however, but also the interventions and desired
changes effected by other users working in the same hypothetical urban area.
In this way, users gained a deeper insight into the complexity and inner con
nections of networked connective agency.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.14 Knowbotic Research, Data Raum: Mobile Klange (Simulation Space), 1998.
Collage of elements from IO_DENCIES, S3o Paulo.The magnetic force field table, at the instal
lation at Deaf98, V2 Rotterdam. Collage by KR + cF, with an image of Jan Sprij.
Knowbotic Research has won many awards for its investigations of che
nature of information in the contemporary technology-mediated world. As a
collaboration between artists and scientists, the group creates installations and
projects that allow participants to enter data space to interact in unprece
dented ways. Projects have focused on architecture, sound, urban experiences,
and scientific research enterprises. The group seeks to understand the new real
ities developing from the collision of physical and network experience. For
example, its SMDK: SimulationSpaceMosaic ofMobile Datasounds (1993) allowed
visitors to navigate a virtual reality world composed of data (figure 6.16).
As Stephen Wilson remarks, the installation Anonymous Muttering (1996)
presented visitors with a physical sound-and-Iight experience that was a
manifestation of underlying information structures created locally and via Net
contributions. Knowbotic provided interfaces that let people inspect and
manipulate that structure. This particular installation can be thought of as an

Figure 6.15 Knowbotic Research, lO_DENCIESt 1997. Screen shot of the collaborative
interface that shows the urban profile of hinode, passenger terminal,Tokyo. Image by KR + cF.
experimental illustration of the group’s understanding of possible configura

tions of the larger culture. The work presented events composed of fleeting,
initialized, and found singular moments. What happens cannot be traced back
to references in real space.8
The arc historian Oliver Grau carefully analyzes the group’s Dialogue with
the Knowbotic South (1994—1997) as a “space of knowledge.”9 This virtual
installation processes scientific data from research stations’ networked data
bases to create a changing abstract representation of che Antarctic. It visual
izes and maps this deserted, yet scientifically well-documented continent in a
virtual scenario, but does so in a totally nonmimecic way. In Dialogue with the
Knowbotic South, the data from the networks is visualized as changing star
bursts of pixels bn large projection screens in a dark room. The data is col-
Chapter 6
Figure 6.16 Knowbotic Research, SMDK: SimulationSpaceMosaic of Mobile Datasounds,
1993. Visualization and visitor with navigation interface. Image by Christoph Wirsing.
leered and activated by software agents—the knowledge robots or “know-

bots.” The image space consists of complex dynamic fields where exchange
and interaction take place between the human visitors and the knowbots and
poetic software machines. The data, arranged in the virtual space like con
stellations of stars, is pulled together, as if attracted by a magnet, and then
burst apart again, like supernovas. The installation also presents the physical
topology of several research and monitoring stations in the Antarctic on a
plastic film on the floor. The artificial space can be experienced both virtually
and abstractly; the user navigates by moving a touch wand, an interface rem
iniscent of the joystick. Wearing a headset with a minimonitor—the “private
eye”—in front of one eye, the visitor explores the glowing, rotating data fields
and correlated metallic sounds that produce an extraordinary feeling of space.

Currents of conditioned cold air, the temperature of which derives from data
recorded by meteorological stations on the sixth continent, is blown into the
installation space. The visitor encounters a polysensorial environment in this
work. The combination of physical and virtual components that represent the
multiple layers of the real was created years before hybrid artworks of this
kind appeared in the discussion of “mixed realities.”
Another collective undertaking on the Net, the RTMark Group*, has as
its primary goal to publicize corporate subversion of the democratic process.
To this end, the group acts as a clearinghouse for anticorporate projects. For
example, Counteracting Anti-Corporate Activism on the Web was an online
seminar conducted on June 20, 2001, by the Public Relations Society of
America to impart information to corporate customers on current trends in
online anticorporate activism and ways to counteract it. The seminar origi
nally cost $225, but it was made available free of charge to activists thanks
to an anonymous RTMark contributor.
The seminar covered a wide range of topics, including ways to spot dissi
dent activity online, and ways of combating it through “positive statements”
and/or legal accion. The overarching theme of the seminar was the difficulty of
protecting a corporate image against citizen activism on the Internet, an open
forum where there are no copy editors or censorship committees (figure 6.17).
Other projects by RTMark combat the criminalization of dissent. In
response to a World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel in New York City, RTMark contributors sponsored several new
projects to fight the corporate takeover of public space and expression: the
“reaming” of the WEF’s Web site with automatic parody software, “ready-to-
revolt” smart clothing, tear gas tennis, a virtual sit-in on the WEF’s Web site,
avoidance/destruction of surveillance cameras, and street-writing bicycles.
Among the new ways to avoid or destroy video surveillance suggested by
RTMark to help citizens regain some of their privacy was an interactive map
that showed walkers the path of least surveillance between any two points in
Manhattan. For chose who wanted to take a direct route, an anonymous group
explained how to disable inappropriate cameras.
An anonymous contribution also allowed che distribution of a tool chat
turns any bicycle into a street-writing device. It was an efficient way to get a
message our on che street—to be repeated continually.
Concerned by the new police and government tendency to treat any social
movement as criminal, the group developed and deployed functional fashions
Chapter 6
We're building
a better wrench.
®tmark
Bringing IT to YOU!
www.rtmark.com
Figure 6.17 RTMark Group, We're Building a Better Wrench, 1998.
for protest. Colorful costumes were fitted with padding at che shoulder and
rib regions to ward off bacon blows as well as miniacure video cameras and
cransmiccers to broadcast police brutality live to remote recorders.
Athletes were recruited for a tear gas tennis team, which would methodi
cally catch and return tear gas canisters at a demonstration before they landed
among protesters. Since protests often turn violent because of police actions,
like shooting people with tear gas canisters, this project opposed the violence
with some sporting fun and helped keep some protesters from getting seri
ously injured.
RTMark posted reasonable cultural dividends for its investors in 2001, but
the gains were bittersweet as civil liberties went up in smoke and authoritarian
regimes instituted repressive policies on the ruins of the World Trade Center.
The main dividends of 2001 included impostors char passed as the World
Trade Organization at a Textiles of the Future conference and on European Mar
ketwrap, a prime-time program on CNBC, apart from the conference session on
techniques to counter anticorporate activism mentioned above. Other RTMark
activities in 2001 included a medieval-like catapult used to hurl stuffed
animals over the “fortress walls” erected in Quebec City to seal off the Free

Trade Agreement of the Americas meeting, and thousands of brochures adver
tising “deportation class” seating that were secretly placed in airplane seat
pockets to illustrate how commercial airlines traffic in unwilling human cargo.
One should note particularly the realization of the RTMark Group on the occa
sion of the 2001 G8 protests in Genoa, when one thousand vanity mirrors were
distributed and were used to reflect the sun into the eyes of attacking police
officers. This Archimedes Project (2001) saw the day when the World Bank can
celed its meeting in Barcelona in fear of protests. It was rumored that the G8
would hold its Genoa meeting offshore, to insulate itself from citizen concerns.
In response, a group of activists turned to Archimedes. According to legend,
this ancient Greek mathematician used several large mirrors to focus the heat
of the sun onto invading Roman ships, burning them to a crisp and thus saving
the city of Syracuse. Although the G8 decided to hold its meeting on land, in
a highly fortified "red zone,” the Archimedes Project organizers went ahead with
their plans. Volunteers from the Makaya Refugee Camp distributed the pile of
pink, blue, black, and purple mirrors co a thousand activists, who used the
mirrors to focus sunlight on police helicopters, tanks, and other assault vehi
cles as well as into the eyes of the police (figure 6.18).
A strong sociopolitical commitment can also be detected in the work of
Ingo Gunther* (figure 6.19). His vision of a Refugee Republic, a work devel
oped from 1996 onward, is dominated by the fact that he believes refugees
and migrants represent not merely a problem but also a solution in terms of
Figure 6.18 RTMark Group, Archimedes Project, 2001.
Chapter 6
I
^REPUBLIC
Figure 6.19 Ingo Gunther, State Branding, 1993.
a global capital infrastructure. If configured as a transglobal Net that indi

cates its own form of statehood, the world’s refugee population as a whole is
the best candidate for a socioeconomic and political/ideological avant-garde
for the millennium. A Refugee Republic may become a model state for the rest
of the world, which heretofore has relied on the gradual modification of
exhausted historical, sociopolitical structures. On a map, Gunther depicts an
imaginary territory symbolizing the size of a republic of refugees. He con
siders that if it were possible for the worldwide refugee population to take
with it a proportional part of its country (measured at the worldwide average
of approximately thirty-seven people per square kilometer), it could piece
together a state the size of France, Germany, England, and Italy combined (or
the size of Mongolia alone) (figure 6.20). Refugee Republic is a concept based
on che ever increasing number of refugees, displaced persons, and migrants
worldwide. It is attempting to address the issues associated with this condi
tion. Refugee Republic maintains thac refugees are essentially unrealized capital
and that their involuntary fate as an international avant-garde can be turned
into productive assets.
J-
Refugee Republic is a
concept based on the
ever increasing number
of refugees,
displaced persons
I and migrants.
Refugee Republic is
attempting to address
. the issues associated
wllhlhls condition.
Refugee Republic
maintains that refugees
□re essentially unrealized
capital and that their
Involuntary fate
of an international
avant-garde can
be turned into
productive assets.
Figure 6.20 lngo Gunther, Refugee Republic, 1996-present. Image of home page/navigation
for www.refugee.net.
Born in 1957, Gunther grew up in the city of Dortmund, Germany, in the

1970s. Travels took him to northern Africa, North and Central America, and
Asia. He studied ethnology and cultural anthropology at Frankfurt Univer
sity in 1977 before transferring to the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, where he
obtained a scholarship for a residency in New York City in 1983.
Gunther’s early sculptural works with video led him to more journalisti
cally oriented projects, which he pursued on television, in print, and in the
art field. Based in New York, he played a crucial part in the evaluation and
interpretation of satellite data gathered from above political and military crisis
zones in the 1980s; the results were distributed internationally through print
media and television news. The goal was to make previously inaccessible mil
itary and ecological information public in order to directly impact and stim
ulate political processes. This work was shown at the Documenta 8 in Kassel,
Germany, in 1987. Since 1989, Gunther has used globes as a medium for his
Chapter 6
artistic and journalistic interests—for instance, in World Processor (from 1989
on)—and particularly for his extensive research into the refugee problem.
Personal Presence Online
The personal note and the human presence online in Net virtual art are key
co the main theme of virtuality in art as I understand it—that is, the human
izing of technology through interactivity and neocommunicabilicy as well as
sensory immersion and multisensoriality. All of these works discussed here
enter entirely into the category of the humanization of technology through
the artistic imagination and illustrate perfectly my overall contention—
showing the passage from technological to virtual arc through the humaniza
tion of the machinic through artistic imagination.
As already mentioned in the introduction co this book, from an oncologi
cal point of view, contemporary virtual arc represents a new departure from
technological art since it can be realized as many different actualities. This
can also be a useful way to understand the self insofar as the self is truly virtual:
it has many potentialities.10 Thus, the virtual self can be transformed into an
actual, living personality. Moreover, virtuality and the virtual can be inter
preted as a power opposed co the actual, but whose function, technologically
speaking, is a way of being of digital simulation that can lead toward a certain
expression of the subjectivity of the operator. This ontological tendency of
virtual art can be clearly observed in the works of a good number of artists
described in chis seccion.
As I said before, vircual arc can even play an ethical role in the present
development of globalization by stressing human factors more than any ocher
previous art form—both in regard to che artists and the multiple users of the
arc—and it could have an impact in a critical and prospective way on this
globalization.
A personal note and an inalterable human presence dominates online mul
timedia works such as the art network Is There Anybody out There? (launched
in 1998) by Igor Stromajer*. Here, Stromajer deals with loneliness/commu-
nication, especially the loneliness chat one can experience in cyberspace,
behind one’s computer window, and in outer space—a loneliness expressed
through the emblematic figures of cosmonauts Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin
and Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova. In space, they were the only humans
“there” at the time (che beginning of the 1960s), with no one co share che

extraordinary moments they were living. In Stromajer’s view, the two cosmo
nauts represent the Adam and Eve of our new era. In this work, Gagarin and
Tereshkova become kinds of icons, part of a saga and real history. Through
them and their symbolic value, space has become part of history, of our life,
something “usual" (figures 6.21 and 6.22).
Among other interactive Web art projects developed by Stromajer, O.html
(1996) operates with a well-known repertoire from computer games and the
Internet. On entering, the user is confronted with warning messages hinting
at limited access (“Access denied”) and is asked to enter a password. If the
user chooses the right one, they are permitted access to the different levels of
O.html'. the body observation section, the communication area, the plain of
provocative intelligence, and the archives of conditions. All of these levels are
linked to sound files. Josip Broz Tito speaks to the nation, the U.S. president
explains the geopolitical role of the United States, Kraftwerk counts in reverse
Figure 6.21 Igor Stromajer, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, 1997.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.22 Igor Stromajer, Gagarin, 1997.
and suddenly there is Neil Armstrong’s voice from 1969, telling us about the
great leap for humanity. The O.html project is an archive of historical techno
imagination and world politics with a grain of melancholy. At che end of che
tour through this complex project, Stromajer confronts the visitor with the
following words: “Internet is the most primitive medium ever.”
Like other Stromajer projects, GSMart (1999) is a good example of “clas
sical” Net art conceptualism, using the tools and possibilities of the Web in
matters of design, interactivity, connectivity, delay, and so forth, for artistic
realizations that are only possible in this medium.
In another Net art project, i want to share you—what are you doing to
me? (quero partilhar-te—que me fazes?} (2001), created by Stromajer in
collaboration wich Bojana Kunst for Thought, Science, and Interdisciplinary
Projects, an international conference on cyberculture held at the Serralves
Museum in Porto, Portugal, in October-November 2001, che artist seized
the occasion to declare that he was fully equipped for a highly emotional

experience. He managed to disappear deeper and deeper into the whiteness of
the landscape, with the sites opening in the subtle and repetitive rhythm of
images, voices, and music. Everything here was short, clean, and basic. One
traveled through the emotional labyrinths that emerged from the intestines
of linked networks. The artist or the user shared the rhythm of these paral
lel, flickering landscapes revealed in front of them, intriguing them, seduc
ing them with their spaceless speech and imagery. No emotion, just a glimpse
of it; no feeling, just the pain of it; no happiness, just the sound of it; no talk,
just the word of it; no passion, just the climax of it could be experienced. The
intimate landscapes play here with the illusions of mobility, possession, and
boundlessness, surprising the participant with their inner history and touch
ing the user with their surprising analogies. We are in the presence of a
network of liquid emotion, a fusion of the visible and the invisible. The bonds
between the incongruities and spanned incommensurables may seem playful,
but they are not innocent. Playfulness is just a mask for a serious adventure
taking place on the intimate landscapes. There is a clear threat of emotional
attachment. Who provokes the user and who gets provoked? Who fills the
user with lust and who is lustful? Who is mobile and who is frozen? Danger
resides in the intimate link. What happens if the other loves you too much?
Stromajer is an artist specializing in mobile Internet art and intimate com
munication art projects, and he has participated in many international con
temporary art exhibitions and festivals in Europe as well as North and South
America. But he is also the creator of the Intima Virtual Base Web site (1996).
The basic substance of his works are the intimate, the ascetic, and interactive
aesthetics, and the key words for all his activities are seclusion and ascetics.
These imply intimacy, which after all is emphasized in the name of his
artistic mark, Intima. A true seeker of the emotional, intimate, and personal
aspects of the Internet, and a militant striving to infuse this space with human
warmth, Stromajer’s virtual base, intima.org, is welcoming and alluring, and
yet nonlavish and nonseductive, in its appearance. Stromajer is one of the most
versatile artists on the Net, and the first cantor of HTML. His challenging
works reinvent Internet navigation and the narrow relationship between the
network and fiction. A recent navigational digital Web movie titled
Sprinkling Menstrual Navigator (Sice Internet, Collection du MNAM-CCI,
Centre Pompidou) combines movies with written instructions that are alter
nately philosophical (“enjoy your sadness”), pragmatic (“enter by clicking
enter signs”), or a synthesis of the two (“free your mind and che resc will
Chapter 6
follow"). The viewer then manipulates the work by clicking on individual film
sequences. The resulting “short stories" rely on popular culture and individ
ual (subjective) associations to create their full content.
A most telling example of personal engagement can be seen in Gregory
Chatonsky’s* Web installation Incident of the Last Century: Sampling Sarajevo
(1998), in which the artist asks the question, In which ways have human
beings and the new technologies become inseparable? (figure 6.23). By going
back to the nineteenth century and its visual and technological inventions,
and by introducing a human element—a true or fictional encounter between
two persons, a man and a woman—Chatonsky produces an aleatory narrative
in which several independent tales progress on the screen. The technical
control of the narrative development in this work is always subject to an inci
dent—an incident that in the mind of the artist, always forms part of any
technical or human commitment and consequently any human destiny.
Figure 6.23 Gregory Chatonsky, Incident of the Last Century: Sampling Sarajevo, 1998.

Chatonsky, a young video and communication artist, has already realized
a considerable number of projects that illustrate the enormous potentialities
of the new technological media and in particular those connected with the
Internet.
Since 1989, he has produced various video artworks and video installations,
and became a founding member of the experimental Web platform www.
incident.net. Between 1995 and 1998, he took a leading part in the creation
of the CD-ROM Memoires de la deportation (Memory of the Deportation), which
received the Mobius Prize in 1999. This CD-ROM contains a considerable
amount of information regarding the vicissitudes of the arrest, internment,
and deportation of French citizens who had joined the Resistance during the
period of National Socialism, and those who were branded as Jews by the
German Nazis and their French collaborators. But this CD-ROM also con
tains a number of references to the nature of the Nazi regime and the fate of
those other European citizens who were exterminated under racial pretexts.
Chatonsky’s critical commitment is open to the scientific, social, and techno
logical issues of the twenty-first century, but he believes these concerns cannot
be entirely isolated from this dramatic event that marked the twentieth
century.
On the Web site Revenances (2000), created in collaboration with artist
Reynaid Drouhi, Chatonsky enters the realm of the fantastic without aban
doning his basic commitment to the memory and reassessment of the tragic
aspects of the twentieth century. On this site, the artists give their own version
of one of the most widespread beliefs of the afterlife—that is, the belief that
a person can return to the world in another shape: as a ghost, a specter, or a
wraith, the invisible double of the deceased taking over after death. Accord
ing to this belief, although ghosts are not of this world and are invisible
and intangible to the living, they are still present and can reveal themselves
through a medium, in a topical space of communication between the living
and the dead. Chatonsky alludes to and creates a narrative of the characteris
tics of the technological nightmare, the “original iterability,” and the “irre-
ductible virtuality of space and time,” as articulated in Jacques Derrida’s
thought.
A particular way of dealing with present-day problems concerning space
can be discovered on a Web site and installation named The Last Stone (2001),
in which Chatonsky juxtaposes a consultable Web site with two installations,
one situated in Japan and the other in France. This work is based on the idea
Chapter 6
that virtual space is a paradox and that an interlocutor who is walking in a
digital garden can discover another, real garden of which the interlocutor was
not aware, and which only became visible through that person's own dis
placement. In fact, Chatonsky reconstructs on the Internet a famous garden
in Kyoto that is composed of fifteen stones, but where the visitor cannot see
more than fourteen stones from any single vantage point and needs to move
in order to know that there is in reality a fifteenth stone to be discovered.
Chatonsky s intimate knowledge of the Internet informs most of his proj
ects. On his Web realization Soiis-Terre {Underground or subnetwork), produced
for the Paris subway, a close parallelism between the metro system and the
Internet is established by carefully treating what is similar and what is dif
ferent in their specificity as networks—a term that applies to both of them.
According to Chatonsky, they are different and distant insofar as the subway
is marked by the history of the last century with its utopian ideas, but they
are close and similar to each other since they favor relationships between
human beings: in the case of the subway, below ground, and in the case of the
Internet, all over the world with its binary system. Both offer the same pos
sibility of encounters between “travelers.”
Travelers in a sense are also the inhabitants of a town like Saint Petersburg
who confer an identity to the town by their walking on the streets and their
different ways of displacement. On Chatonsky’s Web installation site Repara
tion (2000), the user moving in the streets of Saint Petersburg advances pace
by pace, click by click, each frame being constituted by a fragment of a street.
The sky, the ground, and the horizon in front of the user, the house fronts to
the right and the left of the user, can be changed and manipulated. Through
the multiple movements and interventions of the “interactor,” a new way to
“communicate” is being established, conferring its present identity to Saint
Petersburg. It is in fact the inhabitants of the town who, by their appropria
tion and movements, have deviated the original town plan, thereby creating
a different topography, a parallel space that exists only in passing, in flux, and
that is only perceptible through a Web site on a network like the Internet.
On two other Web sites, La Vitesse du Silence (1999) and Double V//e (1998),
the interactivity with the spectator-participant is related to the speed of light,
the speed of sound, and the duration of life. On the first of these Web sites,
the silence resides in the distance of conversation, in the interval the sound
needs to become audible to a distant interlocutor. The second, Double Vue, is
based on the photographic interstice and the doubling of the narrative,
□
between the voice of thought and the voice of speech, that haunts all
fiction.
Silence, memory, and human presence in an age of motion, new media, and
new ways of life, are the artistic messages of Chatonsky, who is ready to accept
the past, the present, and rhe future with their paradoxes on the condition
that one remains aware of all their implications.
In a personal way as well, Pamela Jennings* has explored issues of identity
and otherness in contemporary Western society. Her projects include the CD-
ROM Solitaire: dream journal (1995), which is a document of self-discovery that
unfolds dense layers of heterogeneous material culled from personal and
popular memory that are revealed with each successful move made on a check-
ers-like game interface. Her Art-l-Fronic sculpture (1996), “the book of ruins
and desire,” is an interactive, mixed-media sculpture and a companion project
to the CD-ROM Solitaire: dream journal. The user manipulates and explores an
intimate world about desire, communication, and emptiness by physically
interacting with the metal pages of the structure. On the other hand, Jennings’s
CD-ROM Narrative Structures for New Media. (1997) is a forum for defining the
developing theory of parallelism in design thinking by comparing an eclectic
group of Western and non-Western narratives and scientific theories. The book
Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video, edited
by Phyllis R. Klotman and published by the University of Indiana Press,
includes Pamela Jennings’s work in the historical canon of African American
media makers who are creating with new technology tools.
In 2000, Jennings participated in a gathering of international interactive
artists, the Third Annual Digital Arts Symposium held April 6—7 at the
College of Fine Arts of the University of Arizona, and helped draft the state
ment Interfacing the Future with Distributed Minds/Negotiated Spaces.
This statement proposed to establish a framework for developing an inclusive
immersive and interactive environment mediated through a minimally evasive
intelligent agent technology. The framework incorporates knowledge naviga
tion of a collective consciousness in a physical environment. A continuously
responsive and cyclic-augmented environment will emerge that places both
the observer and the observed in a fluid environment that blurs the borders
between the physical structure and its visitors, and maintains a memory trace
°f previous encounters. A primary goal is to explore and exploit the cultural
constructs that estranged people bring to this space, and che collective learn
ng that can emerge in this shared sociocultural, institutional, and historica
Chapter 6
Figure 6.24 Paul Sermon, Telematic Dreaming, 1992.
social matrix. This involves harvesting, through data mining, unspoken nar
ratives, poems, and possibilities chat exist as people share a common physical
environment.
Paul Sermon* is an artist committed to the practice of inserting human
presence into virtual art by a method that is called telepresence. His well-
known, significant, and invocative installation Telematic Dreaming consists of
a live telematic video installation that links two distant geographically dis
persed locations (in fact beds) together via a 2MB ISDN telephone line (figure
6.24).
In 1992 Sermon produced Telematic Dreaming for the Koti exhibition at the
Kajaani Art Gallery in northern Finland with the participation of Helsinki
Telegalleria. It now is part of the permanent collection of The National
Museum of Photography, Film and Television, which is locaced in Bradford,
England.
The humanizing power of Telematic Dreaming allows the participant co
study him or herself from an innovative and novel perspective as Telematic
Dreaming projects a video image of a single user/performer (who is lying on a
bed) in one location to a similar situation in the other location. Each partic
ipant sees the other projected onto che bed in which they rest—and chat they

now virtually share. This virtual sharing produces wonderfully strange sensa
tions in the user/performers that are achieved by situating a camera next to
each projector. This sensational arrangement works by transporting an image
of the projection back to monitors close to the both beds. Thus this looping
effect creates immediate real-time compound and semitransparent conse
quences that are both pleasurable and thoughtfully provocative. Here cool sys
tematic telecommunications technology is connected to and intertwined with
hot (and sometimes uncomfortable) mental-physical meanings, meanings that
build on a calculated theatrical production based on the hazy connotations of
a bed as a telepresent projection surface. Human feelings connected to touch
ing and looking and sharing are stimulated in such a virtual environment. As
such, Telematic Dreaming provides the participant with a set of emotional com
plexities based, however, on bringing present the human form telematicly and
virtually over great geographical distance. This feeling of being present and
distant simultaneously is central to Sermon's aesthetic.
Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming creates an interesting half-virtual and half- •
actual situation/environment for the participant while raising quite a few
cultural themes associated wich telecommunication in general. For example,
through Telematic Dreaming one may examine che long-standing theme of the
physical body’s relationship to virtual representations of the human body. And
this strange intimacy suggests che general condition of being connected
through communication to anonymous partners. In 1997 Sermon created The
Tables Turned, a real-time telematic installation that linked two remote sices
via broadband telephone lines. With The Tables Turned, two participants sit at
two disconnected tables but are able to observe a video image of themselves
sitting at the same table with the participant from the other remote sice. The
situation created is much like that of Telematic Dreaming but without the erotic
overtones. Rather the situation here augments and puts forward possible
means of informal contact between the participants. The Tables Turned was pro
duced for the ZKM Media Museum and exhibited at the ZKM Multimedial
5 in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Building on the impact of Telematic Dreaming and The Tables Turned, Sermon
next created in 1999 another provocative yet humanizing telematic work he
called A Body of Water. A Body of Water was a site-specific telematic installa
tion connecting the shower room of the Ewald/Schlaegel and Eisen mine
in Herten with the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, both in
Germany. In A Body of Water images of the visitors in the shower room in
Chapter 6
Herten are mixed with images of the museum visitors in Duisburg and appear
on the side of a screen produced by water. Past film footage of miners taking
a shower are also projected onto the other side of the water screen.
Also in 1999 Sermon created a telematic work he calls No Simulation Like
Home, which connects two indistinguishable architectural-like spaces—space
with a number of rooms representing the interior of a conventionally terraced
residence—by videoconference techniques using webcams and security
cameras. As with Telematic Dreaming, two separate telepresent participants
are then allowed to live together in the same virtual living environment
simultaneously.
Paul Sermon’s contribution to virtual art is the injecting of the intimacy
of human interaction, in a quite compelling and personal way, into che tech
nological systems of our time (figure 6.25).
Techno-ecology and techno-romanticism are two of the most recent devel
opments in online multimedia Net art. N. Katherine Hayles, a professor of
English at the University of California, Los Angeles, claims that techno
romanticism “provides the most comprehensive philosophical and cultural

context for understanding information technologies that I have ever seen.”
Techno-ecological romanticism is a wide concept that encompasses art, but
also other transformations in human activities. Professor of architectural
computing Richard Coyne’s look at techno-romanticism is a remarkable
contribution to this subject. For the past two decades, pundits have
championed computer technology as the tool for unifying humanity through
interconnectivity, the restoration of community, the revitalization of democ
racy, and the notion of a new humanitarian whole. In his book Technoromanti
cism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real, Coyne explores how
this digital romanticism—which encompasses Marshall McLuhan’s utopian
vision of social reintegration all the way to the “new realities” of cyberspace—
is eminently rooted in Enlightenment thinking and the romanticism of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Coyne also posits alternative theories to
techno-romanticism (for example, pragmatism, hermeneutics, surrealism, and
deconstruction) in order to provoke new narratives of computing.
For an artist like Stephan Barron,* techno-romanticism is a personal,
spiritual quest in the area of technological art that must be based on ethical
principles in order co give it a meaning and a soul. His varied multisensor
ial, multioriented, and multipurpose projects and realizations form a whole
through the theoretical positioning of the artist as a techno-romantic. In his
opinion, technological progress must be accompanied by a parallel develop
ment of the human spirit. This new anthropological stage consists in a person’s
adaptation to their new power over nature and over other persons. This
increase in the powers of technology should be accompanied by an increase in
the powers of consciousness. This new phase in human consciousness and
activity is theorized and formulated by an ecological option taking different
spiritual, corporeal, economic, and social forms. A focus on ecology, as the
study of interactions between different living beings and their environment,
would imply that any attempt to disequilibrate the biosphere should be inter
preted as a menace to humankind.
Barron, who has used the notion of techno-romanticism since 1995, studied
engineering before becoming a communications and new media artist. In the
early 1980s, he realized a number of performances utilizing transatlantic com
munication facilities such as telefax and radio before making use of advanced
technologies such as the computer and the Internet in an attempt to provoke
planetary consciousness and an ecological sensibility in his audience—an
Chapter 6
undertaking chat could thus be described as artistic techno-ecology or
techno-romanticism.
Among Barron’s early projects was Orient-Express (1987), a reflection on
space and travel in an era of instantaneous communication. This work was fol
lowed by Traits (1989), a straight line drawn by Barron and his partner Sylvia
Hansmann that pursued the Greenwich meridian. The purpose was to estab
lish a new representation of one of the first symbols of humanity, the line, a
mental representation chat integrated space, time, and the human imagination.
In 1994, Barron created Le Bleu du Ciel, in which two computers—one
located in Tourcoing, in northern France, and che other in Toulon, on the
Mediterranean Sea—were connected by telephone. The computers calculated,
in real time, che average of che colors in the northern and southern skies. A
similar planetary interactive installation was shown in 1995, operating
between Paris and Munich, and this device now forms part of a project in
which two monochromes calculated in real time by two computers—one in
France, and the other in Japan—are to be made visible by a video projector.
In Ozone (1996), measurements taken of ozone produced by automobile
pollution in the city of Lille, in northern France, and measurements taken of
ultraviolet radiation coming through the ozone layer were transformed by
Barron into sounds via the Internet, and were then projected onto the streets
of nearby Roubaix and the garden of the Old Treasury Building in Adelaide,
Australia (figure 6.26).
This installation was conceived as a metaphor for an “ozone pump” between
the ozone produced by pollution and che naturally produced ozone, between
Europe and Australia, between humans and nature. In a poetic way,
Ozone illustrates what is considered to be a major ecological problem for
Australians—that is, the hole in the ozone layer. A paradox is apparent in the
dissemination of ozone: it is produced in too-large quantities by cars in cities,
but is now depleted in the stratosphere. The hole in the ozone layer has caused
an alarming increase in skin cancer cases in Australia. The ozone project
expresses a mixture of unease and astonishment in the face of terrestrial phe
nomena. It also expresses the immateriality and complexity of phenomena chat
contemporary humans must face.
In December 2000, an entirely interactive online artwork was launched by
Barron under the name Com-post, in which Web surfers were invited to send
in their texts by e-mail. All forms of writing—poetry, texts expressing love
□
Figure 6.26 Stephan Barron, Ozone, 1996.
and hate, or utopian views—are accepted in this project and all are then com
posted. For Barron, composting on the Internet is a celebration of slowness
during a time of instantaneousness. His project is a jubilant look at the micro-
cosmic and microscopic in an interrelated and interdependent world. The
artwork praises everyday individual gestures related to a collective whole
(figure 6.27).
Chapter 6
i.
Figure 6.27 Stephan Barron, Com-post, 2000. Screen picture from online artwork,
http://www.com-post.org.
Another Barron project, Contact (2001), is a planetary installation that con

sists only of two copperplates, placed in two different countries, that relay
their temperatures by telephone and so make one feel the temperature varia
tion between two distant locations.
Techno-romanticism, with a mystical flavor, is the leading idea that informs
Nikola Gherbi’s* Tbs Mandala of Aleph, an installation conceived and realized
between 1995 and 1998. It was installed in the transept of a little Gothic

church in France in 1999 and aimed ac the structural inclusion of the specta
tors body as the final goal of a holistic work whose significant details revealed
themselves when perceived from selected viewpoints. Anamorphic, radial
visions and other unexpected sights emanated from this work, which Gherbi
describes as a “true 4-D network." Indeed, in an artistic objectification of mys
tical duality, which abstracts from the world itself its proper transcendence,
those celled views structurally enclosed in a rhizome (whose entirety reiterates,
in a fractal manner, the design of its own elements) were like so many open
ings for a transfigured perception. The four sides of this wide, fractal structure
made of welded iron and stressed strings, and that included gems and various
other objects, were materializing within the church’s space as four perspectives
in what could be considered a common unifying mystical vision: Jewish (the
sefirot tree of the Kabbalah: The Tree of Life), Christian (unio myslica\ Love Objec
tified), Ismaelic (journeys to Hurqalya: An Imaginary Vision of the Architect’s
Belly), and Tantrist {DiamondConsciousness). This scheme is the basis for the mys
tical paradigm of the entire work. Other mystical traditions are alluded to
through four suspended sculptures, sustained in the optical perspective of com
puter-assisted icons framing the space of the central cell in which cleaved
mirrors entice the viewer to experience a quite mystical emptiness, quite close
to traditional expressions of ultimate conscious states. Furthermore, and as an
invitation for a complete “circumambulation” around this palace of wisdom,
four single mandala-like structures—microinstallations involving technical
elements such as camcorders, tape recorders, and television sets—were scat
tered in a wide circle, each one questioning the visitor’s face and trying to
engender spiritual awakening.
From the early 1990s on, Gherbi has built up a complex media work
based on the question of art as a possible way to objectify a mystical
content and especially ecstasies as described in several local traditions. Gherbi
tries to disengage a common plastic purpose from them as a vision of
universality.
According to what theoretically seems to be a post-jungian interpretation
of mysticism elaborated in two academic studies {le Mandala d’Aleph and
Liberer I’Dniversel: Modernity Mystique, Eternite), Gherbi investigates
the mystical human quest and its objectification as a probable fixed
point around which many aspects of our holistic contemporaneity may be
understood. The universality of the mystical phenomenon finds true expres
sion here.
Chapter 6
Critical Artistic Attitudes on the Net
The critical artistic attitudes of virtual artists on the Net can go from a desire
to ensure artistic independence in an age of administrative, economic, and cul
tural constraints, to the outright subversion, submergence, and disruption of
systems of communication and information by means of undressing the pre
coded world.
At the same time, some artists in this section demonstrate how the Web
can be a space for experiencing art—a space with its aesthetic rules, and a
privileged place for converting information into imagination. Yet ocher artists
adopt a critical attitude on che Net in order to show up, use, or try to trans
form existing audio, image, or architectural environments.
An outstanding example of the subversive and at the same time artistic
possibilities of the Web can be found in the statements of JODI* (JOan
Hemskeerk and Dirk Paesman) such as OS'S/****, which instaurates che
browser as a place for visual arc. (figures 6.28 and 6.29).
The JODI sice is famous for its visual pyrotechnics and its commentary on
the “clean" information design of the Web. The site is a complexly inter
linking set of visually challenging pages chat contain Web interface and
markup elements. Many of che animations move objects around in ways not
often seen—for example, bouncing text. The site is full of conceptual jokes
about how the Web works. For instance, if you enter a page address thac does
not exist, the site takes you to an elaborate visual sequence built around
graphic renditions of che text “404," the code for a page not found.11
The JODI team describes their working method as follows:
We never choose to be Net artists or not. It happened that we started to make things
on the computer, about things inside the computer. And where is the Internet anyway?
Is it out there or just here in front of your cursor? Your browser’s cache is filling up
with stuff that is stored on your hard disk all the time. You can browse in and ouc
with the same programs; to disconnect Net art from the local computer system would
be simplifying. There are a lot of modifications on the Net. We played with some of
them, but none focused on the game as a vision machine and how it creates the illu
sions of depth, with movement codes, etc. We undress this pre-coded world in dif
ferent stages by making versions of che same game over and over.
Whenever we start a project and have our first results, for us it is fun, because
we see the first time what we can do, as in beta versions. Then of course we always
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Chapter 6
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underestimate the amount of work to finish and the problems that have co be solved,
and we end up hating the things we loved. But we always start out of fun and curios
ity. We make abstractions of existing popular code, and we dress/undress this code
wich graphics we believe express che underlying code better. A formalist exploration
of reduction, opening up a view to the underlying codes to better understand our own
user/player behavior.
A good example of a critical stance on the Net in view of asserting artis

tic independence is provided by Nicole Stenger’s* undertakings. In her case,
the focus is on the artistic and technical possibilities of cinema. In Faux
Cinema (1998-1999), for instance, Stenger cook free cinematic images and
transported them into the multimedia online domain; this Web device
elaborates several “Web books” and “faux films” a year.
According to Nicole Stenger, My Faux Cinema is a convergence of three
factors:
Her computer know-how, a sudden mutation in the hardware market, and the amazing
cornucopia, the first wave of dot-coms. Both the spirit of information sharing of the
Hackers’ Conference and che Open Source Movement, and the options of Microsoft,
relayed by euphoric start-ups, levitating with che power of high-flying stocks and
advertising banners, makes free access, free software, free images, applets, music files,
etc. the law of che Net. By its lavish usage of recycled Net material: animated Gifs,
sound files, or javascripcs, Aly Faux Cinema is a perfect example of che self-sufficient
Net economy, (figures 6.30 and 6.31)
During the winter of 1997—1998, the Net revolution was made concrete
by a tidal wave of affordable personal computers that swept away che cold
war—funded silicon graphics computers (SGIs), and brought real-time
graphics and sound plus a 56 K modem to the U.S. mainstream and Stenger.
Overnight, anyone could open a whole motion picture studio in their living
room—-or rather, a faux cinema.
When Stenger published her first virtual reality modeling language
(VRML) piece, Eternal Shelves, in January 1996 on Web Inc. in San Francisco,
she brought to the development of the Web three years of text-based Inter
net communication—The Well (1989-1991), The Media Lab (1989-1991),
and Narrative Intelligence (1991—1992)—and thirteen years of three-
dimensional imaging with three major productions—the French saga Gallia
Chapter 6
Figure 6.30 Nicole Stenger, My Faux Cinema, 1998-1999. Homepage, 2002.
and Popureve (1987—1989), and the first immersive virtual reality movie,
Angels, done at MIT and the Hitlab between 1989 and 1992. It is therefore
only natural she embraces VRML, the extension of virtual reality to the Web,
as a first means of expression, even before moving to HTML.
From the simultaneous rendering of the various patterns of time in Gallia
or Popureve, co the branching of environments in the virtual reality movie
Angels, Stenger has formulated new art forms in emerging technologies. Her
Web books—To Dream or Not to Eat (1998), California Trilogy (1996-2000),
Nature (2000), and Nanfei in Waspland (2000)—are another example of
Stenger’s innovative arc. Each is a book of Web pages, with a cover, seven co
twelve pages or so, an introduction, a conclusion, and a story. A multimedia
form, che Web books have text, static or animated, animated Gifs, animated

Figure 6.31 Nicole Stenger, My Faux Cinema, 1998-1999. Still from the Web book Nature,
2000.
VRML, and a specific sound composition. In 2000, after the monumental

Trilogy, Stenger decided co privilege lighter-weight work, with speed and
spontaneity; the Web books became oeuvres Ugeres.
Stenger’s faux films (Fresh! in 2000, and Bitchery in 2001) are stylistic plays
with the idea of the moving image. They take advantage of Javascripts defin
ing layers in the HTML, allowing them to slide on cop of each ocher. In che
faux films, cexc, but also Java applets and VRML environments, move over
the background wich a mouse or via a program.
In Eternal Shelves (1996) and Chambers (2001)—two pieces in which VRML
is conceived as pure, location-based virtual reality—all VRML work is embed
ded in the HTML, a choice originally made to curtail downloading time, but
thac soon achieved a stylistic status, wich VRML windows varying in shape and
size, so miniature at times (such as in San Francisco, 1996-1999) that they are
more of a humorous statement about three-dimensional work. From 1999 on,
as the growing availability of applets and Javascripts offered dynamic options
Chapter 6
for text, Stenger moved to a straightforward or rhythmic scrolling, removing
heaviness from the Web page and enhancing the fun spirit of the site.
Though Stenger had integrated sound as early as her first exhibition, Tout
s’eclaire (1981), had been trained in computer sound at IRCAM with Dan
Timis in 1985—1986 (which led to the Splenditella installation at Cartier in
1986), and had worked with several French and U.S. composers (Jacques
Lejeune of Groupe de Recherches Musicales of the ORTF (Prench Radio
Company) GRM, Diane Thome of the University of Washington, Philippe
Drogoz, and Horia Surianu), My Faux Cinema was her first independent work
with sound, made possible by innumerable MIDI, Wav, and Au format sound
files on the Net as well as user-friendly sound-editing software. Her musical
intervention takes two forms. First, on each Web page, there is a different
MIDI file or an arrangement of a MIDI file as the music theme, and one or
more wav or au files as sound effects. Second, as pages get turned—namely,
in the Web books—a composition evolves, made of the different musical
pieces on each page, harmoniously combined. In Nature, the music is jazz; in
Nanfei in waspland, it is disco, or a totally eclectic medley. Creatively, this
composition happens in the early stages of the Web book, while technically,
it is included in the VRML, to bypass the sound limitations of Web browsers,
by being directly read by the VRML browser (Cosmoplayer and later Cortona).
One of Stenger’s main themes is California and its two major cities: San
Francisco with its crowded streets, and Los Angeles with its freeways. Cali
fornia’s culture—cartoons, video games, piercings, AIDS, violence, hippies,
gay life, the daily interaction with the most diverse population in the world
and so on—is at che core of the California Trilogy, but present all over My
Faux Cinema.
On her arrival to San Francisco in 1993, the major cultural shock for
Stenger was the rediscovery of Asia, this side of the Pacific Rim, as she learned
Mandarin. Memories of past travels, daily life observations, friendships, and
love stories feed two of her Web books: Lasia (1999) and Nanfei in Waspland.
As the century came to an end, love moved online, to develop in che Feed
Loop or Yahoo Personals. E-mails and chat rooms now provide emotional sub
stance and sexual fantasy, as Stenger explored in To Dream or Not to Eat. Lasia,
and Nanfei. in Waspland.
Artificiality, the law of la-la land, is at the core of Stenger s LOS ANGELES
2000 and its panoramic VRML Day-Glo, but also of Nature, where a prank
ish humor about the merits of nature versus the human-made world (‘Nature

is inferior co technique”) brings plastic-looking animals in the HTML to
confront virtual creatures in the VRML for a dead-end comparison. The
nostalgia for green things, and its compensation by an extreme color satura
tion of natural landscapes, dominates in Fresh! but Bitchery, a jaded musing
about the United States with strong rap mannerisms, also pushes the color
green to its limit. In what seems like a lost battle against the “sword sticks”
(in Nature'), cartoons invade My Faux Cinema, and are seen everywhere, with
the repeated usage of animated Gifs as a counterpoint to the VRML. In Los
Angeles 2000 and Homepage (1996-2004), Christmas music is pervasive, a
pathetic reference to U.S. kitsch and California’s nonexistent winters.
Although Aly Faux Cinema can be seen as a reflection of Stenger’s move to
California, many other variables are present as well: the influence of Asia, che
opening up of European borders, and the ascendance of the Web. Grown in
che backyard of its overpowerful neighbor Hollywood, Aly Faux Cinema, wich
ics lighthearted and dark humor, its strength and durability in the face of the
first dot-com demise, is Stenger’s declaration of territorial and artistic inde
pendence (figure 6.32).
Figure 6.32 Nicole Stenger, My Faux Cinema, 1998-1999. Still from the Web book Nature,
2000.
Chapter 6
According co Scephen Wilson, a highly critical and innovative attitude
toward the environment can be discerned through both the visually and con
ceptually stimulating new expressions within che architectural and urban areas
created by Marcos Novak*. He is developing ideas of “liquid architecture”
and transarchitecture chat examine the use of physical spaces as portals co
virtual space. Liquid architecture is an architecture chat breathes, pulses, and
leaps as one form and lands as another. It is an architecture without doors and
hallways, where the next room is always where the architect requires it to be.
Novak’s work with computer-generated architectural designs is conceived
specifically for the virtual domain. His immersive, three-dimensional creations
are responsive to che viewer and cransformable through user interaction.
Exploring the potential of abstract and mathematically conceived forms,
Novak has invented a set of conceptual tools for thinking about and con
structing territories in cyberspace.
Novak is also preparing for the ascension of virtual space as our principal
architecture. Thus, his transarchiteccure explores the idea that physical and
data architectures will merge into new hybrids in the future.12
When Novak introduced the concept of liquid architecture, a fluid,
imaginary landscape, he suggested a type of architecture cut loose from the
expectations of logic, perspective, and the laws of gravity, one that does not
conform to the rational constraints of Euclidean geometries. He views transar
chitecture as an expression of the “fourth dimension” that incorporates time
alongside space among its primary elements. Novak’s liquid architecture
bends, rotates, and mutates in interaction with the person who inhabits it. In
liquid architecture, science and art, the worldly and the spiritual, the contin
gent and the permanent, converge in a poetics of space.
Telematic and Telerobotic Human Commitments
I have followed an aesthetic line from visual perception and cognition to a

good number of primary and secondary aesthetic commitments and options.
In this section, it is only a short step from visual/conceptual critical artistic
expressions to the new technical possibilities of telematics and telerobotics.
Yet in this highly technical area, the humanization of technology by an artis
tic endeavor is particularly striking.
The artists in this section practice schematic mappings of physical space,
video feedback in real time, and actual robotic movement. Human/machine
□
interfaces created over the Net are explored in these artists’ works, and a con
vergence of networks and robotics is operated on. Robotics is also connected
by some of these artists with other areas such as narrativity, archaeology, and
postpainterly preoccupations. But the coupling of telecommunications and
telerobotics with human friendliness concerns most of them.
The telerobotic art of Ken Goldberg* promotes a fascinating exploration
into both the theoretical and the technical characteristics of telecommunica
tions. Goldberg’s interest in these issues was initially demonstrated in 1994
when he connected a robot to the internet for the first time. Through this
engineering project, titled The Mercury Project, Goldberg became increasingly
fascinated by the resulting issues the telerobotic process suggested. Indeed he
detected a strong philosophical aspect at work, which interested him to a great
extent. Consequently, the following year Goldberg created what became to be
known as his signature piece: The TeleGarden. The TeleGarden was more than
another telecommunication piece, however, as this time he included in the
work a living garden that contained a miniature parcel of petunias, peppers,
and marigolds—all of which must be seeded and watered via a robotic arm
controlled over the internet. To do so, Goldberg set up a live video camera
that monitored the garden and allowed others to participate in its care.
Anyone from a networked computer, anywhere and at anytime, could
observe the state of the garden and intervene telerobotically in watering the
garden, so long as they were willing to make their e-mail addresses available
to the emerging group of caretakers who made up the human component of
the work (figures 6.33, 6.34).
By connecting the virtual (and thus immaterial) aspect of telecommunica
tions to an actual physical result, Goldberg found the basis of what would
prove to be his central message concerning the humanization of technology:
the power of an aesthetic meditation on telepresence co suggest phenomeno
logical ramifications. By connecting the corporeal with virtual control and
feedback in real time with actual robotic movements, Goldberg sec ouc che
issues of che human/machine incerface in clear and compelling cerms, which
he called telepistemology.
Goldberg coined rhe term telepistemology because he saw that questions
of crust and belief were central to The TeleGarden, with its implied examina
tion of human thinking (the basis of epistemology). Such large questions are
brought forth by the conditions Goldberg created, conditions that demanded
of the participant a willingness to manipulate the world at an immense dis-
Chapter 6
Figure 6.33 Ken Goldberg, The TeleGarden, 1995-present. Networked robot installation at
Ars Electronica Museum, Linz, Austria, http://telegarden.aec.at. Codirected by Ken Goldberg
and Joseph Santarromana, with the project team of George Bekey, Steven Gentner, Rosemary
Morris, Carl Sutter, Jeff Wiegley, and Erich Berger. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.
tance. Issues concerning detachment and responsibility are raised in The

TeleGarden by the connecting of electronic networks and robotics over the
internet to human wills and desires. Goldberg is working with an important
subject here, as such epistemological questions as chose of faith and trust are
central to telepresence: the extent co which a participanc feels essentially in
attendance within a mediated situation or virtual environment.
Since The TeleGarden Goldberg has gone on co examine other epistemo
logical issues with such pieces as his Legal Tender (1996-97). Legal Tender made
accessible to participants the opportunity to destroy American dollars (which,
if che money is real, is a federal crime in che United States) via telerobotic
interactivity. In 1998 Goldberg created a piece he called Alon, which entailed

Figure 6.34 Ken Goldberg, Ouija 2000. (1999-ongoing) Networked tele-robotic installation
for many online participants. Whitney Biennial 2000. Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum.
Ouija 2000 couples epistemology with the esoteric pursuit of mysticism. Photo by Robert
Wedemeyer.
the mapping of data in real time. This telerobotic work featured connecting
a Java interface to a live seismograph. In 2000 Goldberg created perhaps his
most telepistemologically suggestive piece to date—a work he called Ouija.
Ouija allows multiple users from around rhe world to access and make use of
a Ouija board so as to, hypothetically, communicate with spirits from che
virtual beyond.13
The problem of robotics can also be found in the work of Adrianne Wortzel*,
albeit closely connected with narrativity, archaeology, and postpainterly preoc
cupations. In addition to fictive Web works, the artist has explored narrative
and new technologies in robotic installations and multimedia performance pro
ductions. Two works in particular amplify her contributions co che field: Cam
ouflage Town, a celerobocic installation commissioned by the Whitney Museum
of American Art for the exhibition Data Dynamics Art (March 21-June 10,
2001); and developed at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science
and Art and Sayonara Diorama, a production with robots, live performers, and
responsive remote performances via video conferencing (performed on March
28 and April 4, 1998), produced with an artist-in-residence grant at Lehman
College Art Gallery in New York and funded by the Electronic Media and Film
Program of the New York State Council on the Arts.
Chapter 6
In Camouflage Town, a physical programmable robot/actor served as the
bridge between people on the Web and people in the actual museum space.
Both could communicate with each other through the robot. Each interact
ing viewer would informally project emotions and character on the roboc,
which in turn reflected on the participant, who then had the opportunity to
respond, in or out of character. The artist also famished the robot, whose name
was Kiru, with an underlying personality that emerged when no one was con
trolling it remotely on the Web from anywhere in the world or the laptop in
the museum. In terms of content, the groundbreaking element here was
having a tangible avatar serve as the literal node linked between the real and
the virtual, pushing the envelope in terms of human/robot interaction.
The robot in this piece was comprised of many systems; the innovation was
in the endeavor to make these systems handshake with each other to create
the illusion of a holistic being. Required were a navigation system (so the
robot would know where it was at all times), a collision control, speech (both
speech and text input by visitors to the Web site and the museum and pre
recorded speeches for when the robot is not viewer controlled), motion (both
autonomous and viewer controlled), vision (displayed on the robot and also
streamed over the Web), and gestures (“head" motions coordinated to the pre
recorded speeches). The interactive audiovisual streams consisted of one stream
from the robot’s “eyes” and one from surveillance cameras through the
museum is lobby and lobby gallery space.
As for the robot’s personality, Kiru was a cultural curmudgeon, who toured
the first-floor gallery and lobby of the museum. Kiru told the story of
Camouflage Town, a decoy virtual town for the practice of military maneuvers
and wars, so that Real Town could remain intact. In addition to ocher duties,
Kiru was the master of juxtapositions for Camouflage Town, compulsively
collecting and reciting opposites in order co keep the scales of consideration
balanced.
Wortzel’s Sayonara Diorama was a multiple-site, electronic media perform
ance featuring the artist’s Globe Theater Repertory Company of Robots and
human actors (figure 6.35). It included a prerecorded video backdrop, live
video performances from six remote locations (which were projected on the
theater’s side walls), and the display of what the robots saw as part of the stage
set—that is, che robocs would be looking in turn ac the audience, che Web-
cascs, and che human accors. Sayonara Diorama was written, produced, and
designed by che arcisc wich the paradigm of theater in mind. The scenario is

Figure 6.35 Adrianne Wortzel, Globe Theater: Sayonara Diorama, 1998.
a Active second voyage of the Beagle, during which the volatility of Charles
Darwins and Captain Robert Fitzroy’s arguments on organized religion cause
a virulent storm that shipwrecks the Beagle. Darwin surfaces on an island
inhabited by the “monstrous races," Pandora, and insect-robots. Darwin
begins to examine them. The play becomes an argument between the charac
ters about who really has the best evolutionary adaptations. In the end, they
all decide to favor the process with celebration, rather than the product. The
artist successfully incorporated all the traditional elements of theater with all
the moving-target qualities of cyberspace.
Sayonara Diorama also reflects the artist’s interest in medieval mappe-
monde. These maps depict the world as a flat disk occupied by literal ren
derings of biblical locations, events, and characters. Jerusalem is at the center.
The monstrous races, deformed and unformed humans depicted since the third
century on maps and in sagas as populations in unknown territories east of
the Nile, are relegated to the edges of this flat earth. These maps evidence at
Chapter 6
least four dimensions, designating locations simultaneously with stories
layered through time, a blend of geographic and historical signposts. The
artist uses these medieval maps as a model for depicting cyberspace.
Wortzel was originally an abstract painter who studied with the American
painters Burgoyne Diller, Ad Reinhardt, and Jimmy Ernst at Brooklyn
College, and with Mark Rothko at Hunter College in her native city of New
York. Her paintings, depicting abstracted renderings of elements of architec
tural antiquity, presented a frontal facade to the viewer, thereby implying
another painting or world behind the empirically evident painting. That is,
a highly visible painting functioned as a veil for a deeper painting hidden
behind the facade. A viewer would become aware over time that this facade
was merely a decoy camouflaging another, truer (though virtual) painting
behind it. This true painting could be sensed but never seen and was kept
safe from consideration as a painting by its decoying disguise. The frontal
foreground painting (the disguise) was a commodity; the true ineffable paint
ing could not be commodified. This penchant for decoying the virtual with
the real, creating a scenario where the virtual was sensed to be more “real”
and valuable than the empirically “real," along with the deployment of irony
in that scenario, follows through in the artist’s transition to working with new
technologies.
In the early 1990s, Wortzel also entered into other creative disciplines that
in themselves were not conclusive for her, but that did evidence a potentially
combinatory power in some other arena that as it turned out, was just emerg
ing on the horizon. The disciplines were the writing of fictive episodes,
written in text and imaged through video and still photography, and the cre
ation of rather emblematic etchings. Even though these technologies were not
new per se, they were new for Wortzel.
In early 1994, while pursuing an MFA in computer arts at the School of
Visual Arts, Wortzel was exposed to Internet technologies, particularly the
beginnings of the Web. She wrote that “the Internet’s possibilities for global
communication, self-publishing, real-time reporting, an always-up-to-date
encyclopedic body of knowledge, and, most of all, for the hypertextual telling
of stories that have no beginning, middle or end, provide an arena for the end
of designating where one artistic discipline ends and another one begins.”
Wortzel’s first fictive hypermedia Web piece, The Electronic Chronicles, pub
lished online in 1995, was the story of an archaeological dig of the future,
conducted by the Casaba Melon Institute Twin Lions Cornerstone Expedition

Team. This team retrieved early-twenty-first-century electronic documents
from oblivion at the Twin Lions Building excavation site at the epicenter of
the resurrected bedrock island known as Man-Hat-10. Documents included a
whirled history and other sagas of our times in a hypermedia stew.
The characters created in The Electronic Chronicles emerged from that work
as personalities who segued into other arenas of publication and broadcast. For
example, MusEleanor, a muse who lived through all of time while simulta
neously inspiring and irritating artists throughout the centuries, was inter
viewed in publications and on Webcast shows as herself, rather than as the
artist. This emergence of characters from one medium to the next was part of
the pioneering of repurposing of information in different media or venues by
artists in order to reach different audiences and convey relatively different mes
sages via the same content. The irony in manipulating the same information
in different contexts for a completely different message is a primary force in
Worczel’s work.
Wortzel has also produced international performative Webcasts, and was
cohost and content provider for Art Dirt., a weekly, live, video-streamed
interview-format Webcast originating from Pseudo TV in New York from
1996 through 1998.
In 1997 and 1998, during tenures at the Polar Circuit Artist Residencies
in Tornio, Finland, Wortzel produced a series of Webcasts from the Tornio
School of Media Arts at Lapland University, streamed via Pseudo Programs,
Inc., in New York, featuring the real-time work of Polar Circuit residency
artists. The following year she conducted a workshop in MOO theater, and
subsequently produced a worldwide interactive collaborative MOO perform
ance of the Finnish national epic poem Kalevala titled KALEVALA MOO.
The artist endeavors to construct work that mirrors the structure of the
Internet itself—that is, where elements of each project form the nodes and
links that actualize a dynamic process for creating work that transcends the
sum of its parts, rendering a profound, dynamic, and ventilated statement that
allows for interactivity and its happy accidents. Wortzel specializes in marry
ing unbridled imagination to narrative content development and discerning
che most fitting technologies for specific content delivery?4
Wortzel is the artistic director for the Robotic Renaissance Project at che
Cooper Union for che Advancement of Science and Art, an undergraduate
school in New York City, where she is collaboratively developing a perma
nent telerobotic theater. She hopes to make this a laboratory and theater where
Chapter 6
the telerobotic technology is transparent and can be used by creative people
from all disciplines to create scenarios for Webcasting (figures 6.36 and 6.37).
The highly technical human commitment of Eduardo Kac* is clearly
evident in both his telepresent and transgenetic realizations.
In 1986, several years before the full advent of the Internet, Kac first pro
posed the term telepresent art, which can be defined as the coupling of telecom
munications and telerobotics—that is, the projection of one’s sense of presence
to a remote space. Telepresent art can also be defined as a remote agency—
that is, the ability to affect a remote physical space through the network.
Besides simply coining the term, however, Kac was a pioneer of this art form.
His telepresence artwork Ornitorrinco was constantly developed between
1989 and 1996. Ornitorrinco, which means platypus in Portuguese, is Kac’s
name for both a series of telepresent art installations and the telerobot used
to realize them. This noun was chosen as the robot’s name because of the
unique nature of the platypus, which is popularly thought of as a hybrid of

bird and mammal. Kac’s objective was to imply a kinship between the organic
(animal) and the inorganic (telerobot).
Ornitorrinco events always involve at least two locations that are geograph
ically remote from each other. The events also implicate one or more members
of the public, who navigate at a remote location by pressing keys on a tele
phone keypad and receive visual feedback in the form of still or moving images
on a computer or video monitor. The first international Ornitorrinco event
linked Chicago and Rio de Janeiro in 1990; another, Ornitorrinco in Eden,
spanned the placeless space of the Internet with physical spaces like Seattle,
Chicago, and Lexington, linking these three nodes of active participation with
multiple nodes of observation worldwide.
Other important telepresent artworks by Kac include Rara Avis (1996) and
Uirapnrn (1999), which received a reward at the Inter Communication Center
(ICC), Tokyo Biennal that year.
Chapter 6
Transgenic art is an art form based on the use of genetic engineering to
transfer natural or synthetic genes to an organism in order to create unique
living beings. Kac is conscious of the fact that this must be done with great
care, with an acknowledgment of the complex issues raised, and above all,
with a commitment to respect, nurture, and love the life thus created. Yet
Kac insists that the formal and genetic uniqueness of the animal is not the
only component of the GFP Bunny artwork; the artwork also includes at its
core an ongoing dialogue between professionals of several disciplines and the
public on the cultural and ethical implications of genetic engineering.
Kac is an artist whose works deal with issues ranging from the mythopoe-
ics of online experience to the cultural impact of biotechnology, from the
changing condition of memory in the digital age to distributed collective
agency, from the problematic notion of the "exotic” to the creation of life and
evolution.
In 1980, after creating a performance group focused on public interven
tions that undertook regular performances on beaches, squares, and television
as well as in theaters, Kac conducted experiments with multiple media and
processes, including graffiti, photography, and visual poetry. This led in 1983
to his invention holopoetry. His holographic poems are essentially holograms
that address language both as material and subject matter. These holograms
do not rest quietly on the surface. When the viewer starts to look for words
and their links, the texts will transform themselves, change in color and
meaning, coalesce, and disappear.
From 1994 onward, Kac expanded telematic art into the biological domain,
creating an art form that he called biotelematics. His first biotelematic work
was Essay concerning Human Understanding (1994). This was followed by Tele
porting an Unknown State (1994-1996), a classic telematic artwork, and Time
Capsule (1997). This latter work required considerable courage since che artist
had a microchip with a programmed identification number subcutaneously
inserted into his left leg at an event that took place in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Kac
placed his leg into a scanning apparatus, and his ankle was then Web scanned
from Chicago. He subsequently registered himself with a Web-based animal
identification database, originally designed for the recovery of lost animals. It
was the first time a human being was added co the database—Kac registered
himself as both an animal and an owner. The event was shown live on televi
sion in Brazil and on the Web.

In 1997, Kac proposed che term Biorobotics in the context of che artwork A-
positive. Biorobotics proposes that in che future, robots will have biological ele
ments inside their bodies in order to perform specific functions. This was
followed one year later by the coining of the phrase transgenic art for a project
that envisaged che creation of a green, fluorescent dog and its social integra
tion. In 1999, Kac first presented his transgenic artwork Genesis at Ars
Electronica in Linz, Austria. This work explores a synthetic gene created by
translating a sentence from the biblical book of Genesis into DNA base pairs.
The biblical sentence reads: “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea,
and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the
earth.” On the Internet, participants can mutate bacteria that contain the gene,
thus changing the meaning of the biblical sentence (figures 6.38 and 6.39).
The next year, Kac created the revolutionary transgenic artwork GBP
Bunny (figure 6.40). A strong biological commitment is at the heart of Kac’s
GFP Bunny. The green fluorescent protein (GFP) rabbit, named Alba, was
created in 2000 with EFGP, an enhanced version of che original wild-type
green fluorescenc gene found in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria. The GFP Bunny
Figure 6.38 Eduardo Kac, Genes/s, 1999. Detail from transgenic. Net installation. Courtesy
of Julia Friedman Gallery, Chicago.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.39 Eduardo Kac, Genesis, 1999. Detail of transgenic Net installation. Courtesy of
Julia Friedman Gallery, Chicago.
artwork also includes an ongoing dialogue between philosophers, scientists,

lawyers, and others—debates about concepts such as normalcy, purity, and the
social integration of the rabbit through the Free Alba! artistic campaign
(photographs, T-shirts, and an Alba flag). Although this work can be seen
as belonging co a long historical current that seeks to merge art and life, a
more precise connotation reduces it to an event founded on biological
factors.

NATURE
Figure 6.40 Eduardo Kac, GFP Bunny, 2000. Seven posters from a series of simultaneous
public interventions that also included lectures, street conversations, published articles, and
television and radio broadcasts. Courtesy of Julia Friedman Gallery, Chicago.
Kac’s recent transgenic artwork, The Eighth Day (2001), provides the public
with the unique opportunity to experience a spectacular ecology of glowing
green creatures, and thus to critically reflect on the social and cultural impli-
cations of biotechnology. The Eighth Day brings together a biological robot
(biobot) linked to che Internet, GFP fish, GFP mice, GFP amoeba, and GFP
plants, along with video footage and sound of the ebb and flow of moving
Chapter 6
water. In order to approach the transgenic ecology, the viewer “walks on
water.” Gentle, recurring sounds of waves emanate from the four corners of
che room. In the cencer of this tranquil environment, a fluorescent ecology of
living creatures emerges. The living creatures and the biobot are enclosed in
an environment under a ventilated, clear, Plexiglas dome, thus rendering dra
matically visible what it would be like if these creatures in fact coexisted in
the world at large. As a self-contained artificial ecological system it resonates
with che work’s title, which adds one day to the period of the world’s creation
as narrated in che scripcures. All transgenic creatures in The Eighth Day express
the gene that produces GFP. By enabling local and online participants to expe
rience che environment inside a dome from the point of view of the biobot,
The Eighth Day creates a context in which participants can reflect on the
meaning of a transgenic ecology from a first-person perspective.
The impact of Kac’s transgenic arc, and in particular che daring creation
of new animals, on the contemporary art scene has been considerable. But
looking at his works as a whole, one can see the artist’s audacious inventions
and achievements as a decisive contribution in che realm of biotechnological,
telecommunication, and humanistically oriented virtual arc. His works
introduce a vical meaning to what has been known as the creative process
while also investing the artist-inventor with an original social and ethical
responsibility.

I
s
c;
L
□
Conclusion
At a time when it has become commonplace to say that technology can be

used either for negative—even catastrophic—ends or, on the other hand, to
procure prosperity for the majority of humankind, I am intrigued by the work
of artists who not only introduced new technologies into their artistic under
takings but also embraced the inner workings of these technologies (with all
their aesthetic and extra-artistic implications) so as to create enlarging works
chat have a critically constructive social importance. As an art historian, I have
continually been interested in the marginal nature of che cechnological crends
in arc. But I have recently been struck by the fact that in spite of their mar
ginality, the artists examined here represent a certain continuity of purpose.
In examining the spectrum of che artists contemplated here, I see that my
personal agenda has moved from a more general interest in artistic movement
and light to the more specific trend of kinetic art, and then logically, to par
ticipatory, electronic, and virtual art.
In this book on virtual arc we have seen the great diversity, variety, and
richness of this art, and the different itineraries followed by the artists engaged
in the virtualization of art and the subsequent humanization of technology. If
this vibrancy, to my mind, can be considered an answer to the detractors of
technological art—and more generally, of art made by way of new technol
ogy—it can also be considered a complement to the work of thinkers like
Pierre Levy, who after analyzing, with much subtlety, the virtualization of che
body, the text, language, the economy, technology, and collective intelligence
gives art an important place in his presentation of evidence.
As it has gradually developed out of technological art (as traced along the
virtual artists’ itineraries since the early 1980s), virtual art enables us to appre
hend its principal aesthetic attributes. Its primary traits are innovation in
visual and multisensorial perception, interactivity, and the development of
aesthetic communication techniques. In the historical chapters, we have also
seen a number of these characteristics in the works of the pioneers and
pathfinders, as well as in those of the technological artists who started their
research already in earlier periods and so foreshadow the techno-aesthetic
achievements of virtual art.
I want to discuss again the term virtual art, which I am using to describe
these large developments. In fact, such terms as new digital art, new informa
tion art, or new technological art could also have been used for this development;
but these terms would be rather restrictive for what I consider an enormous
development due to technical and aesthetic advances. Technically speaking,
virtual art comprises not only enduring digital-based work, multimedia
off-line and online productions, and interactive digital installations but also
what can be identified as a techno-aesthetic within these categories. Indeed,
certain artistic experimentation has shown chat potentialities of the purely
technical side are sometimes already contained in the working logic of certain
artists.
As for che aeschetic advances of virtual art, they are due co che potentiali-
ties given co the individual artists to develop these techno-aesthetic categories
in connection with plastic, narrative, sociopolitical, biological, ecological, and
still other issues. If the term virtual in this context involves a certain ambi
guity because it is meant to play on a philosophical paradox between che
virtual, the potential, and the actual (and even between the virtual and the
real), this can only be considered an advantage of virtual aesthetics, since most
of the works presented in this book have that quality of open reciprocity and
global communication. If this book also puts the accent on the virtual artist,
that is done not only to stress the point chat the artists discussed here have
often taken a stance on the issues mentioned before, but to emphasize that
these artists possess both virtual, potential, actual, or real qualities as well.
Indeed, they also possess qualities thac are common co mosc arciscs.
I have found this hypothesis confirmed by the study of these artists con
cerned with virtuality. Their commitments are not only techno-sociopolitical
and plastic but also human to an intense degree. Given the context of current
history, this human commitment takes on a special significance. But it also
Chapter 7
has co be linked to the various other aesthetic commitments of these artists
in order to establish their full import.
Plastic techno-aesthetic commitments, like those developed by artists
mainly producing enduring digital-based works, are simultaneously also
human commitments. This is equally the case for artists principally concerned
with multimedia off-line works—for example, painting machines. Human
values attached co plastic issues can also be found in Net art that investigates
subversive possibilities—those works using fragments and broken lines of
images from the Web as raw materials, for example. Close co these plastic
commitments, other creative activities undertaken by interactive digital
installation artists contain clearly human options too. This is che case in net
working painting machines, dematerialized paintings, complex generating
genetic images, and new kinds of interfaces.
The participatory/interactive tendency linked to human values is evident
in a number of digital environments as well—in particular, in such works as
interactive artificial reality installations with unencumbered full-body partic
ipation in the human/machine relationship, in telepresence sensory immer
sion works, and in the relationships that establish themselves between the
subject and the automatism of the machine. Ocher digital installations are
concerned with the subjectively lived body in virtual space; these works can
offer a possibility to discover and experience a new deciphering of the real.
Such a relationship is also found in interactive and immersive installations
and online works that establish a relationship between human and human (not
only between human and machine). In fact, interactivity as a human value can
be frequently found on the Net in conjunction with tele-action, interconnec
tivity, and robotics. The human commitment in these works is generally a
complete insertion of the human body in the creative process. This commit
ment is also evident in art that works with artificial life-forms or computer
viruses, and in works that function as creative provocations simulating
life/death phenomena (and more generally, genetic images).
On the other hand, human issues that stress the mind can be found in the
works of artists concerned with narration, language, and hypertexts—for
example, in generative writing and multifaceted narrative. As for sociopolit
ical, educational, and security issues (which are necessarily linked to human
values), they include themes of political satire developed by redirecting tech
niques away from industry, science, and the military. Automated surveillance
and emergent behavioral systems are also representative of this tendency, as
Conclusion
are works connected with the importance of independent, uncensored media
sources in creating public art on the Internet. Moreover, collective participa
tion in collaborative projects with virtual generative machines have been
realized, as well as physical installations and performances to create mean
ingful social community on the Web. The objective of these all-important
communication commitments could be to save the human being from soli
tary isolation in the new technological and social context. In fact, many virtual
artists have tried to overcome the contradiction between this aspect and the
actual isolation of the media artist in front of one’s computer. For example,
artists have attempted to combine telecommunication art with digital per
formance and Net art, and they have also tried out multimedia narratives for
network-distributed environments.
As for the techno-aesthetic characteristics that establish the specificity of
the virtual artists of digital media, the features are demonstrated by the mul
tiple ways these artists have introduced che technical innovations of their time
into their aesthetic research. On che ocher hand, chese arrises’ all-embracing
quality is their human commitment, which confirms without any doubt their
status as artists representative of our electronic times. For me, che presence of
chese artists on the cultural scene—not only in cyberspace but also physically
in the United States, Europe, and increasingly, ocher countries and regions—
is a token in favor of a propitious adaptation by present and future genera
tions co che implications of global virtualization.
Chapter 7
Notes
In all chapters,* indicates that the text that follows is based on information pro
vided by the artist.
Introduction
1. John Canny and Eric Paulos, “Tele-Embodiment and Shattered Presence: Recon
structing che Body for Online Interaction,” in The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and
Telepisientology in the Age of the Internet, ed. Ken Goldberg (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2000), 294.
Chapter 1
1. Frieda Ackerman Working Group, http: //www.olats.org/setF4.html.

2. Oliver Grau, Virtuelie Kunst in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Visuelle Strategien (Berlin:
Reimer, 2001), and Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2003).
3- Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, eds., Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).
4. Stephen Wilson, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).
Chapter 2
1. See Annette Hunnekens, "Expanded Picture," in Holographic Network, ed. Dieter

Jung (Bramsche, Germany: Rasch Verlag, 2003), 78-79-
2. See Vicente Carreto, “Virtual Holography,” in Holographic Network, ed. Dieter Jung
(Bramsche, Germany: Rasch Verlag, 2003), 124—129.
3. Eugen Gomringer, “Manfred Mohr: Cubist in the Computer' Age,”
http://www.emohr.com/ww2_out.html.
4. Ernestine Daubner, e-mail message to Sonya Rapoport, July 17, 2001. See also
Ernestine Daubner, “Manipulating Genetic Identities: The Creation of Chimeras,
Cyborgs, and (Cyber-)Golems,” Parachute 105 (Winter 2002): 87.
5. Stephen Moore, “Sonya Rapoport’s Drawings” (catalog, Union Gallery, San Jose
State University, California, 1978).
6. Barbara Lee Williams, e-mail message to Sonya Rapoport, July 14, 2001. Notes
from a lecture series on contemporary women artists in an art history course at
Dominican University, San Raphael, California, spring 2001.
7. See Roy Ascott, "Seeing Double: Art and the Technology of Transcendence,” in
Reframitig Consciousness: Art, Mind, and Technology, ed. Roy Ascott (Exeter: Intellect
Books, 1999), 66-71.
8. This section is based on an autobiographical piece written by Willoughby Sharp
on Independence Day, July 4, 2003, in New York.
Chapter 3
1. In 1999, Acevedo's The Lacemaker was featured in the ACM/SIGGRAPH docu

mentary The Story of Computer Graphics.
2. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1976).
3. R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics (New York: Macmillan, 1975), and Synergetics 2
(New York: Macmillan, 1979).
4. Severo Sarduy, Barroco (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1974).
5. Helen Sloan, “Art in a Complex System: The Paintings of Matthias Groebel,” PAJ:
A Journal of performance and Art 70, vol. 24, no. 1 (January 2002): 127-132.
6. See also Ludger Schwarte, “Hachis Transparent, L’Art de Tobias Trutwin” in Pixel
(June 1998), reprinted in Mazarine (Fall 1999); Ludger Schwarte, “Quand y-a-t-il
image—Sur Tobias Trutwin”; Francoise Cohen, Sonia Criton, Marc Donnadieu,
Christian Gattinoni, Pierre Guislain, eds. Les Trahisons du module, exhibition catalogue
(Paris/Le Havre: Les Semaines Europeennes de l’image, 2000), 32—33-
7. See also Joseph Nechvatal “Origins of Virtualism: An Interview with Frank Popper,"
Art Journal 63, no. 1 (Spring 2004) 62, 64.
8. For more on Briand, see Philippe Codognet, Catalogue de I'exposition (Marseille,
April 2001). See also Philippe Codognet, “Ancient Images and New Technologies:
The Semiotics of the Web,” Leonardo 35, no. 1 (January 2002).
Notes to Pages 71-150

9- Since che late 1990s, Sauter has been working on projects in which he uses the sur
faces of objects in space as dynamic, interactive, and intelligent surfaces like dynamic
tables: floating numbers, dynamic clothes, and surfaces of spaces and buildings,
http://www.artcom.de/index.php?
10. Joseph Nechvatal, “Epic Images and Contemporary History,” Real Life Magazine,
no. 11/12 (Winter 1983).
11. Suzanne Anker, “Virus and Pearls: The Materialization of Culture,” New Arts
Program 1, no. 2 (1995) 14-15.
12. See http://geneculture.org.
Chapter 4
1. See also Christiane Paul, Digital Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003);
Lawrence R. Rinder, Chrissie Iles, Christiane Paul, Debra Singer, Whitney Biennial
2002 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002, distributed by Harry N.
Abrams Inc., New York); Biennale of Electronic Arts, BEAR 02. 2002, (Perch, Western
Australia: Curtin University of Technology, 2002).
2. Quoted in Stephen Wilson, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and
Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 573.
3. See also Timothy Murray, “Digital Fetish/Sensorial Cartography: Jean-Louis
Boissier,” CTHE0RY: Technology, Culture, and Theory 23, nos. 1-2, article 77,
www.ccheory.nec. and the exhibition Contact Zones: The Arc ofCD-Rom (curaced by
Timochy Murray, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1999), http://concacczones.
cit.cornell.edu.
4. George Legrady, “Intersecting che Virtual and rhe Real: Space in Interactive Media
Installations,” http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/gl studio/.
5. See http://transliceracies.english.ucsb.edu/post/conference-2005/participants/george
-legrady; http://www.georgelegrady.com/; http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legtady/glWeb/
Projects/projectslisc.hcml; http://www.fondation-langlois.org/legrady/
6. See also Pamela McCorduck, AARON’S Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence and the
Work of Harold Cohen (New York: Freeman, 1991).
7. Wilson, Information Arts, 315-317.
8. See Cretien van Campen, “Artistic and Psychological Experiments with Synesthe
sia,” Leonardo 32, no. 1 (1999): 9-14; and Greta Berman, "Synesthesia and the Arcs,”
Leonardo 32, no. 1 (1999): 15-22.
9. Mario Costa, “Giovanelli e le mecafore tecnologiche, ’ 10 Exhibition Catalog (Genoa:
Gallery Leonardo V-Idea, 1996).
10 Francis Parent, preface to the catalog for rhe exhibition Global Jackpot: Black and
White (Nice: Art Jonction, 2000).
□
Chapter 5
1. See Stephen Wilson, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 712.
2. Edmond Couchot, Images: De Toptique an numerique (Paris: Hermes, 1988).
3. Edmond Couchot, La Technologie dans Tart: De la photographie a la rtalilt virtuelie
(Nimes, France: Editions Jacqueline Chambon, 1998).
4. Char Davies, "Ephemere-. Landscape, Earth, Body, and Time in Immersive Virtual
Space,” in Reframing Consciousness: Art, Mind, and Technology, ed. Roy Ascott (Exeter:
Intellect Books, 1999), 196-201.
5. Ibid.
6. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, (New York: Orion Press, 1964).
7. Rebecca Allen was interviewed by Erkki Huhtamo from 2000 to 2003 in Los
Angeles.
8. For World Skin. A Photo Safari in the Land of War and Crossing Talks, the audio work
was done by Jean-Baptiste Barriere; the Quarxs series was conceived in collaboration
with the cartoonist Francois Schuiten.
. From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New
9. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time1
YBrk: Bantam Books, 1988).
10. “Complexity: Art and Complex Systems” exhibition (September 14—November
24, 2002) at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (State University of New York). For
further information about the philosophical background, see Isabelle Stengers, Power
and Invention: Situating Science (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997).
11. Char Davies, “Eph^mdre: Landscape, Earth, Body, and Time in Immersive Virtual
Space," in Refraining Consciousness, ed. Roy Ascott (Exeter: Intellect Books, 1999),
196-201.
12. Char Davies and John Harrison, “Osmose: Towards Broadening the Aesthetics of
Virtual Reality,” Computer Graphics A, 1996.
13. See Paschke exhibition catalogues, translations by Caroline Taylor and Florence
Poncet (Paris: Galerie Darthea Speyer, 1989, 1995).
14. “Conversation with Toni Dove and Brian Massumi,” with an introduction by Bill
Jones, Artbyte Magazine, (January—February, 1998-99): Toni.
15. See Rose Lee Goldberg, Laurie Anderson (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000).
16. See Wilson, Information Arts, 393—394.
17. See Music2eye Web site, http://www.music2eye.com/noemi.
18. See Peter d’Agostino, “Double You (and X, Y, Z). An Interactive Videodisk”
(leaflet, Philadelphia Museum of Art, April 18—July, 1987).
19- See Peter d’Agostino, Interactivity and Intervention, 1978-99 (catalogue, Lehman
College Art Gallery, New York, March 16-May 15, 1999).
20. See Wilson, Information Arts, 803.

21. Quotation from William Shakespeare, The Tempest, in The Arden Shakespeare, edited
by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons
Ltd., 1999) Prospero Epilogue 9, 285-286.
22. Stahl Stenslie, "Wiring the Flesh: Towards the Limits and Possibilities of the
Virtual Body,” Ars Electronica ‘96. Nemesis The Future of Evolution (Vienna/New York:
Springer Verlag, 1996).
23. See Aline Dallier,"Orlan," in Contemporary Women Artists (Detroit: Sc. James Press,
1999), 502-503.
24. See Marielle Hahne, “Media Arc by Jill Scott," in Coded Characters, ed. Marielle
Hahne (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2003).
25. See Hans Peter Schwarz, Media Art History (Munich: Prestel, 1997), 136, 176.
26. See Robert Atkins "Progressive Ideals and Political Engagement in Jill Scott’s
Arc," in Coded Characters, ed. Marielle Hahne (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz
Verlag, 2003).
27. See Susan Alexis Collins, “Inhabited Content: An exploration into the role of
che viewer chrough the realisation of In Conversation and other works," PhD diss.,
The University of Reading, 2001, http://www.susan-collins.net/inhabiced_content .
pdf.
28. Helen Sloan, "Suspended Disbelief: The site-specific work of Susan Collins,” in BN I
& Lighthouse Catalogue, ed. Bernhard Living, 1997, http://www.inconversation.com/
texcs/suspendeddisbelief.html.
29. Helen Sloan, “All Things Bright and Beautiful," http://www.metamuce.com/
doc/issue8/susan.hcm, profile in Mute 8, by Pauline Van Mourik Broekman, 1997,
http://www.metamute.com.
30. Joel Slaycon and Geri Wittig, “Oncology of Organization as System,”
http://cadre.sjsu.edu; hccp://surveil.sjsu.edu.
31. Richard Brown, “Virtual UnReality and Dynamic Form: An Exploration of Space,
Time, and Energy," Leonardo 33, no. 1 (May 2000).
Chapter 6
1. See Andy Deck, “Curatorial Algorithms and Malleable Aesthetics," Millennium

Film Journal, no. 34 (Fall 1999)-
2. Steve Dietz, “Outsourcing Creacivity? The Audience As Artist” (catalog, Open
Source Lounge, Athens), 16.
3. Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2004), 165.
4. Sol LeWict, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthol
ogy, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
5. l.D. Magazine (June 2001).

6. Margot Lovejoy, Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media,
2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 199?)
7. http://www.rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=1743&page=l
8. See Stephen Wilson, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 836-841.
9. See Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2003), 213.
10. See John Canny and Eric Paulos, “Tele-Embodiment and Shattered Presence:
Reconstructing the Body for Online Interaction,” in The Robot in the Garden: Telero
botics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, ed. Ken Goldberg (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2000), 294.
11. See Wilson, Information Arts, 591-592.
12. Ibid., 548, 634, 716, 828.
13. See Peter Lunenfeld, “Goldberg, Ken,” in Contemporary Artists, ed. Sara and Tom
Pendergast, 5th ed. (Detroit: St. James Press, 2001), 1:605.
14. For ELIZA—A computer program, see http://elizaredux.org; http://i5.nyu.edu/
~mm64/x52.9265/january 1966.html. For the study of natural language communica
tion between man and machine, see Joseph Weizenbaum, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering, Communications of the ACM 9, no.
1 (January 1966): http://cs.boisestate.edu/~amit/teaching/557/lab/eliza.html. See also
brochure for the exhibition “Data Dynamics” curated by Christiane Paul, The
Whitney Museum of American Art, March 22-June 10, 2001, as well as Peter
Schmideg, a hyperinterview with Adrianne Wortzel. March 17, 2002, text originally
online at http://www.wigged.net/html/news.html.

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From Technological To Virtual Art

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© 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Popper, Frank, 1918—

SERIES FOREWORD vii

FOREWORD BY JOEL SLAYTON ix

I The Emergence of Virtual Art (1918-1983) 9

1 HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS (1918-1967) 11

2 TECHNOLOGICAL ART AND ARTISTS (1968-1983) 49

II Current Virtual Art and Artists (1983-2004) 87

3 MATERIALIZED DIGITAL-BASED WORK 89

Bioaesthetic Issues 118

4 MULTIMEDIA AND MULTISENSORIAL OFF-LINE WORKS 131

Language, Narration, Hypertext 131

5 INTERACTIVE DIGITAL INSTALLATIONS 181

Sensory Immersion 181

6 MULTIMEDIA ONLINE WORKS (NET ART) 313

ARTISTS LIST 415

Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (ISAST)

ISAST Governing Board of Directors: Martin Anderson, Michael Joaquin

According co Frank Popper, virtual art is identified by a techno-aesthetic foun­

Modern Light Art

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Figure 1.8 Yvaral, Mona Lisa Synth^tisee, 1989.

Environmental Artistic Commitments

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

Technical Sources (such as Engineering and Inventions)

Turning now to the purely technical sources of technological, multimedia, or

Other Sources (such as Science and Linguistics)

Stephen Wilson’s comprehensive 2002 book Information Arts: Intersections of

Historical Antecedents (1918-1967)

In this chapter, I emphasize the various itineraries followed by technological

The first of these itineraries is devoted to Dani Karavan, who I mentioned

arc is neither a reflection of reality nor an aspect of ideology, as various dog­

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

medium to introduce unfamiliar notions about space, time-reversed imagery,

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

One cannot neglect the area of ecological, or more precisely eco-

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

•Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

Piero Gilardi’s principal aim is co reconcile apparently irreconcilable terms

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983)

Rapoport’s awareness of diverse cultures became evident in her projects in

Starting in 1980, Rapoport worked directly on computer forms—decod­

According co Frank Popper, virtual art is identified by a techno-aesthetic foun

arc is neither a reflection of reality nor an aspect of ideology, as various dog

Starting in 1980, Rapoport worked directly on computer forms—decod

noosphere aspiring co planetary harmonization via the creative and energiz

«MA5 W.h 4/11 II Illi Al Bn \hv\ A> vN'A •HKt?' *^5!?

phenomena on the computer. Here, viral algorithms—based on a viral bio