GA2005
December 2005.
Carol-Ann Braun
Multimedia Artist
Paris, France.
Tel : 01 53 60 06 06
GENERATIVE
ART IN THE CITY
Abstract:
This paper will consider esthetic
issues raised by generative art installations at the Festival Premier Contact, organized in April 2005 by Le
CUBE/Art3000 on the outskirts of Paris, France. At a time when coded interfaces
have re-structured the relation between author, artwork, spectator and everyday
life, we would like to analyze two installations in particular : one using
photographic elements (Damaris Risch’s « At A Distance ») and another
relying on augmented video technology (Vincent Levy’s « Ghosts »). Our focus shall be on the emerging role of
interactive, generative art –signage in an urban environment.
We shall contrast elements of continuity and
discontinuity between 20th century « photographic esthetics » (our
term) and coded, “augmented”, forms of representation. The status of image is at the center of
our analysis, as well as role of the
devices used to create both open and autonomous forms of
representation. We shall focus on
temporality as it relates to scale: programmed behavior in the context of
pedestrian flows; opacity and slowness as a form of media identity; and the
limits of generativity in a dialogic situation.
Conversations with a billboard
Outstanding examples of generative art work were
featured in the « First Contact Festival » (http://www.festival-1ercontact.com/),
set up this spring in the streets of the city of Issy-les Moulineaux, a hi-tech
suburb of Paris. Organized by LeCUBE/ART3000
(France’s largest multimedia art center) the Festival was curated by Florent
Aziosmanoff, LeCUBE’s Art Director. He
selected a dozen artists whose work was framed in outdoor displays placed at
strategic intersections of the city.
Each outdoor display contained a
hard-drive, laser beams, discreet cameras, hiding the artifice enabling them to
respond to a passerby’s presence. The interactivity proposed was not of the
simple stimulus-response kind. LeCube specializes in what is called, in French,
« l’art comportemental, » or “behavioural art”, self-generating work
programmed to take into consideration a variety of external factors. It doesn’t
« wait » to be activated ; nor does it simply generate images without
taking into consideration input from without.
The work selected had both a degree of autonomy in relation to its environment
and a capacity to respond to external stimuli, creating renderings in
« real time » all while existing in reciprocity with its
surroundings.
Within these parameters, the works were quite varied. Only three
examples will be analyzed here, chosen for the different ways in which they
illustrate the potential of these new art forms placed in an urban
setting. The works raise difficult
questions. These are more than experiments
situated in a lab or gallery setting. Indeed, the curatorial intent behind the
“First Contact Festival” is quite ambitious.
It assumes that the general public is ready to include interactive art
among its daily activities. It also
questions the scope of imagery in an urban environment, challenging not only
the use of images, but also the relation expected between images and their
viewers.
Artist Damaris Risch‘s « A Distance », for example, consisted
of a life-size self-portrait encased in an upright plexiglass display. Risch’s
piece was structured around a semantic map, which organized more than 100 still
photographs into related sequences. The
piece was programmed with Virtools (used for creating interactive games)
coupled with a neural network. The sequence of portraits displayed depended on
ambient noise levels, the time of day, the « mood » of the work
itself and the movements of the passerby.
All these factors contributed the expression of the self-portrait, at
times innocent, duplicitous, kind, or spiteful. The display promoted nothing. It was not a medium for selling a
product, but a work which stood for itself, as a means of engaging the passerby
in a silent conversation.
Ill. 1.
Damaris
Risch, “A Distance”, produced by the Atelier/LeCUBE (programming with Virtools
by Didier Bouchon.) Photo @ Romain Osi, 2005.
A new form of « sign language »...for a new kind of sign?
One could argue that, yes, such interactive electronic signs are
unprecedented in the history of art, and in the history of the commercial
billboard. Since when has it been so easy to stop on a street corner and link
up with an artificially intelligent portrait of a young woman?
then again, , Risch’s outdoor self-portrait, however seemingly
responsive, is a manipulative device that provokes us into baring part of our
own personality to...ourselves, at a moment when we are surrounded by busy
strangers.
Life media vs art media
Is generative and interactive art in the streets that
extraordinary a change in our urban landscape ?
Pushing art out of the studio and into the street is
not new. Nor is transgressing the thin line between « life media and
art media .»[1]
Incorporating the « banal » in art has become standard procedure in
the effort to renew academic art forms. A subway ticket in a painting,[2]
LED panels fixed to the walls of a museum[3],
or the sounds of traffic in a piece of music,[4]
are all familiar ways of exploring the limits between the everyday and
esthetics.
The city has had a constant role to play in this
process. Electrical signage, the increasing presence of printed, multicolored
posters in the streets, the glass displays of large department stores, all led
to the emergence of what Gustave Kahn
called, in 1901, “The Esthetics of Street Life.”[5]
Several years later, Marinetti, founder of the Italian Futurist movement, would
claim that the city was in and of itself a « moving, ephemeral work of
art. »[6]
It is important to note in passing that Marinetti was
fascinated by the prosthetic nature of technology. In an essay entitled “Man
Multiplied and the Reign of the Machine”, he described, in visionary terms, the
identification of man with machine, and machine with man. “Wings lie dormant in man’s flesh.” [7] He wrote of man’s “powerful physiological
electricity,” [8]
of a future when man could both externalize his dreams and find, in machines, a
sensitive and intelligent counterpart. Augmented man and augmented machines
were also part of the Futurist’s “cityscape”— stage for liberated individuals
to assert their autonomy and power in the face of the establishment.
The technology of representation itself has also been
a factor in the opening up of traditional art forms to the outside world. The
camera, a “picture machine,” is at the root of Futurist esthetics and the
Futurist’s ambition to free the artist from institutional constraints. Poised
half-way between the outside world and the roaming eye of the
flaneur-become-picture-taker, cameras freed image-making from academies. One
man, one picture-making device…and the world.
Today, cities today are jam-packed with an
extraordinary number and variety of representations of men, women, children,
cars, toys, clothes, perfumes, landscapes, often reproduced on a very large
scale. The large images that surrounded us reinforce the “moving and ephemeral
entity” that we call the city. They
provide an imaginary stepping stone to a larger “body politic”.
They also contribute to what Guy Debord, the founder
of the Situationist International (late 1950s) has called « the society of
the spectacle. » By ‘spectacle’ Debord
was not referring to images as decorative elements, but as mediating forces,
determining social interactions and our view of reality:
“ In
all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising,
entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the
omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the
sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both
form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the
conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the
constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of
the time spent outside the production process. » [9]
Signs, the content they vehicle and their
urban context are all elements of a common ideological framework.
The question then is to what extent does interactive,
generative art in the streets of the city reinforce “the society of the
spectacle”, or, on the contrary, help change our relation to the
representations which surround us?
Private/public spaces
At the heart of such questions are issues of scale and
the relation of private and public spaces.
Mediated extension of human presence in
the city exists when we talk on a cell phone in public. Talking into a
hand-held instrument, however, entails erecting invisible barriers around our
public presence. It is as if we were
talking out loud to ourselves. In such
an instance, technology reinforces social exchange on a one to one basis, in a
process quite independent of the esthetic issues raised by the scale of public
signage. “Outdoor art”, by definition, transcends the private sphere, at least
in part.
Jean-Pierre Balpe. “Fiction d’Issy”, Photo @ Romain Osi, 2005.
Of works shown at the “First Contact Festival”, one in particular
straddled both ends of this public/private dynamic. “Fiction d’Issy,” a love story/installation by Jean-Pierre Balpe
(professor at l’Université de Vincennes, Paris VIII) linked portable phones and
networked, public signs. Passerby dialed up a special number; they then hit any
key between 0 and 9 to read different sentences automatically generated by a
program; they validated an option (or not) and then sent it off to the large
yellow and black municipal bulletin boards. « Fiction d’Issy » had everyone
wondering who wrote what over several square kilometers. (The entire ongoing
novel is available at http://www.fictionsdissy.org
).
In this instance, without a doubt, interactive and generative art creates
a new balance of intentions, gestures and voices in a public space. The hybridization of scale and dialogue in
this kind of “spectacle” is quite new. Generated content, created
algorithmically — and so, in a sense, without human intervention, — is re-cast
by an individuals’ desire to see a story move in one direction rather than
another. A hand-held and private
technology broadcasts this choice city-wide.
“Participation” here is indeed enabled by technological means. It enhances man’s ability to affect his
visual environment.
Augmetned images
There is a more subtle aspect to the hybridization of the productive
processes characteristic of generative art-signage. It has to do with kinds of
« image/signs » within each electronic billboard, mixing reality and
« real-time » renderings.
The best example of this at the « First Contact Festival » was
Vincent Levy’s « Fantômes »
(which means ‘ghosts’ in French). His
electronic billboard was, in effect, a « video-sign » and, like
many video installations, it worked like a mirror, incorporating the spectator
as an element of the sign itself. If a viewer lingered in front of the sign,
his image, at first ghost-like, gradually became more precise; with time, the
program would « hold on to it », and store it in memory. At different
points in time, the program brought up images of previous viewers it had
decided to « remember » and « represent » in turn. It also
displayed images of fictional, pre-recorded characters, like a child dressed up
as a clown.
Vincent Lévy, “Fantômes”, co-produced with LeCUBE/ART3000, programming
Didier Bouchon with Virtools, Photo @ Romain Osi, 2005.
“Augmented video” of this kind isn’t just another « medium »
but a mediator in a narcissistic game of representations. It isn’t a reflective
mechanism, but a thinking one, making it impossible to ignore the fundamental
shift that separates this “art in life” from 20th-century counterparts. The interactivity here is between spectators
and signs endowed with an artificial intelligence that understands them. The
work interprets their real presence as a kind of “sign.” It digitizes them into
its own world, and asserts a presence of its own. Just as the spectator
interprets the symbolic language of an artwork, here the artwork interprets the
spectator’s world as a set of symbols. Part of our world—part of our body
language or spoken language—has been digitized and has become food for thought
for a sign-become-author-and-viewer both. In a sense, this new technology has
allowed for us to participate in images and for images to participate in our
lives, differently. One can’t
help but recall Marinetti’s vision of man’s symbiosis with machines. This time, however, it is not man who is
augmented by technology, but the image itself.
Dialogic form
The French new media theorist, Philippe
Dubois, insists that new media are simply new tools for old themes. “La nouveauté éventuelle de celles-ci n’engage en rien leurs fins,
donc leurs effets de representation…. Elle agit comme leurre, elle aveugle,
elle détourne, en s’exhibant à elle-même comme sa propre finalité…Les dites
“dernieres technologies” ne font en fait jamais rien d’autre que réactiver de
très anciennes questions de representation….”[10] For Dubois, esthetic innovations are
independent of the tools used.
Of course, when seen in absolute terms, a
screen can be used for any purpose, including the most retrograde. And the “imaginary world” which we project
upon the most rudimentary forms does indeed reveal how much meaning is in the
eye of the beholder. The French media
theorist Francois Jost insists that “la
signification aussi bien que la valeur esthétique dépend de l’attribution d’une
intentionalité. »[11] The understanding of intent lies in the mind’s eye: only the spectator
can attribute « intention », be it artistic or not.
I would like to argue here that the
transparency attributed to media by these two theorists is symptomatic of their
overriding preoccupation with cinema and photography. The indexical nature of these media contribute to the way images
in general have been understood. Philippe Dubois writes, « …les
machines, en tant qu’outils sont des intermédiaires qui viennent s’insérer
entre l’homme et le monde dans le système de construction symbolique qu’est le
principe meme de représentations. »
Hard to
disagree there, but it’s the next step in his argument that reveals the influence of what are now
« old media » on his thinking.
He goes on to define an image as a relation between a subject and
reality.[12] The word here that is most problematic is “subject”. Is the subject the artist or the
viewer? The fact that one (the viewer) can
so easily be substituted for the other (the author) reveals Dubois’ bias, and
the influence of the photographic esthetic on his understanding of
representation. Here, an image is a reflection of reality through the eyes of a beholder…who
is holding a camera, and with whom the spectator identifies, quasi-seamlessly.
But what of the “behaviouristic” image,
augmented by programming? What of the code behind the generated forms on the
screen? What of the
imaginary realm, - quite independent of any representation of the outside
world, - created by a medium that resists and responds to the viewer,
physically?
If one suspends disbelief for a split
second, the image displayed in a piece such as “A distance” or “Fantomes” is
more than a representation. It has a theatrical presence which changes its
status of an “image” into that of an “imaginary character” that responds to us
in a dialogic manner. The image displayed is only a facet of a hidden program,
a coded set of intentions: the
intention of an author-programmer, and that of an autonomous program capable of
inventing variations within a given framework.
In a more formal sense, the sign also
represents itself. It has both a
material and psychic opacity which are part and parcel of the imaginary
identity of the represented interlocutor.
Levy’s augmented video piece illustrates this quite well: the piece selects what it wants to see, what
it wants to record and what it wants to project. Part of its intelligence resides in its capacity to resist
transparency, so to speak.
Jean-Louis Weissberg has repeatedly
pointed out the new role of the spectator in digital interactive media, coining
the French phrase “spect-acteur.”[13] Thanks to code, the “reader” of interactive media determines the
work’s final shape. In the process, the “reader” becomes a “writer” of sorts,
and co-author of the work. This added
layer of intentionality changes the status of the image, no longer an interface
between an extant world, a medium and an eye.
It loses its indexical relation to the outside world. Authorship is
shared with the medium itself, via code and the underlying ideas which
determine the eventual shape of the representation on the screen.
With generative art, this imaginary
“structure” determines a new type of dialogical form,
with evident links to theater.
(It is tempting to rename the Futurist’s “electrical theater” and call
it “electronic theater”.) What is new here, however, is the transformation of
actors into “agents”, and the transformation of the stage into a sign, become
dialogic medium in and of itself.
Generative art augments the “image” to such an extent that ti can no
longer be considered interface. It is a
dialogic partner in an evolving and open “representation”.
As for us, the passer-by, our role has changed as
well. Of course, as “spect-actors” we
retain part of our now familiar status when confronted with electronic
art. However, we are no longer confined
to a mouse-screen interface and the sanctuary of
laboratories, desk-top or closed gallery spaces. By placing generative art at street intersections, the “First
Contact Festival” has engaged art in an open, social process.
This raises many interesting new questions, in part
evoked by authors such as Craig Saper[14]
when discussing “socio-poetic” networked art’s link to precedents such as
Fluxus. However, the weight behavioral
art as a medium in and of itself,— the
weight of its interactive and generated code,— implies an entirely new esthetic
field, far from the indexical realm of twentieth century technologies. Form, here, is not “open” in the modern
sense of the word. On the contrary, it
is thickly embedded in a form of technology which has given the “sign” a
prosthetically enhanced presence. The
outside world is a small element in a new set of mental and physical
structures, attuned to a new, dialogically structured representation, with new
rhetorical horizons.
Carol-Ann Braun