software / controller / computer

[domestic] uses a software engine normally used to generate violent first-shooter video games in order to reconstruct a remembered childhood space where a dramatic event has taken place: a house fire.

The participant navigates an oddly constructed domestic space. Spaces alternate between claustrophobic hallways and rooms with seemingly endless ceilings, breaking with the visual conventions of 3D gaming in its more predictable interpretation of physical space. In [domestic], participants encounter an ambiguous rendering of scale. Family snapshots and shifting, morphing unstable texts line the surfaces of the space. The snapshots, soft-focus images of typical domestic scenes, are projected overwhelmingly large, bringing the perceived scale of doorways and rooms into question. The perfectly crisp and squared walls typical of computer game geometries further abstract the sense of space.

Players encounter fire in the space and are able to shoot “coping mechanisms” at the walls and at the growing fire in order to contain these as they threaten to consume the world and the player. These mechanisms are manifested as book covers from romance novels, popular as an escape from the mundane aspects of domestic life.

[domestic] functions as both a virtual, interactive installation and a flexible means of storytelling, where the navigator is free to explore and linger. There is a subtle anxiety between traditional 3D game conventions and discovery in the highly stylized nature of the [domestic] experience.The ‘house’ depicted is less a physical space as a psychic one, a container for memory, with texts lining and extruding from walls. Recalling simple childhood memories (“it was springtime. A little muddy”), the world offers conflicting impressions and suggests a gap in memory (for example, a staircase built from the word ‘reconstructed’).

The work provokes the questions, what are the ways space and memory are cognitively tied and can such ties be re-experienced? What role, if any, does narrative and memory have in contemporary computer games? How can we ‘see’ memory?

[domestic] premiered at the Playthings Exhibition in Sydney Australia in October 2003, organized by DLux media|arts.

Read about [domestic] in the 2006 book New Media Art

Additional credits:
Andrew Gerngross, weapons designer

software / controller / computer


[six.circles] is a 2 player conceptual game exploring cooperation and competition through the construction of simple geometic objects.

The goal is to be the first to construct a series of 6 circle forms while fending off viruses seeking to infect each piece. Players are obliged to periodically attach infected pieces to their chain of forms and have to negotiate and sacrifice to cooperatively prevent the spread of the disease, all while attempting to win the game. While one player generally wins, the structure of the game explores themes of cooperation, interdependence and conflicting goals in play.

If the player finds the case that all of the pieces of a given chain are infected, the infection changes with each turn to a full blown diseased piece which can no longer be assimilated into a circle. If an entire chain is diseased, it spawns new disease pieces with each turn. 

The game is inspired by the Six Circles mathematical theorem which states: within any triangle, any chain of circles that touch both their circular neighbors as well as two of the sides of the triangle is limited to a maximum of six circles. This dry geometric law subtly suggests a mathematical proof supporting the need for balance in any given community. Any large circle leaves less room for the remaining circles, suggesting sustainability. This theorem provides an approach towards collaboration within a community.  

Originally commissioned by the Wooloo (link to the site) organization for the show ‘Thank You’, an HIV awareness project raising funds for the creation of an HIV Education Center in the township of Khayelitsha, South Africa via online interactions with the art work.

[six.circles] premiered at Artists’ Space, SOHO NYC in December 2004.

Special thanks to Ruth Catlow & Joline Blais for their indispensable input
Technical Engineering + Additional Design: Christopher Egert
Game server hosting generously provided by the
Rochester Institute of Technology’s
Collaborative Multimedia Experience group
Information Technology Department

Many thanks to Jon Ippolito, Joline
Blais, and the University of Maine’s
Code & Creativity v3.0 :
“Games: Making and Unmaking the World”

software / network / computer

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure… At that time it was also hoped that a clarification of humanity’s basic mysteries […] might be found. …
There are official searchers, inquisitors.
I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words.

–Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” (1)

Information technology has become an indespensible element in communication, play, and work. For example, a recent study shows that a typical office worker relies more on e-mail communication than face-to-face contact to share knowledge.(2) Almost every computer user relies upon Internet search engines to gather information, seek entertainment, and find pleasure. Search engines are deeply embedded into daily activity-they are the primary way people in the 21st century seek information …”we depend upon them so utterly.” (3)

Searching the internet, however, is regularly confusing and chaotic. Like Borges’ inquisitors mentioned in the passage above, searchers are regularly besieged with lists of thousands of results, and no systematic keyword system has yet developed to standardize the language of the search.(4) Searching can be frustrating, and the material discovered is often inaccurate. Searchers themselves offer to the mix complicated requests, misspellings, and odd X-rated content descriptions; the kinds of things people search for might seem disturbing, petty, or peculiar.

Search engines map, through phrase-like inquiries, our desire to find knowledge. Monitoring such desires allows us to read and live through other people’s interests.(5) To further explore this very critical aspect of Internet life, I developed [search]. [search] is an internet-based application which explores the human desire for information and knowledge through real-time monitoring of internet search engine inquiries from around the world. This research ties in specifically with my internet-based artistic practice, pushing the performative, live, and user-influenced aspects of pieces such as [remotion] (2002), [collection] (2001) and [rootings] (2001).

The work conceptually explores everyday life: how do people use technology in their daily lives? What are the commonalities of human desire? How is the desire affected by the internet’s inherent immediacy? What kinds of language do people bring to search engines? Does the kind of language used by searchers tell us something about how people view the internet and technology? Do people search for material or experiential items? How much time do people spend searching for sex, drugs, or money? Do people spend an equal amount of time searching for friends, god, and spirituality? Are our human values exposed through search engines? What is the data most sought after?

[search] is programmed using the Lingo programming language. Users click on words in the live search feed as they find words in others’ searches which interest them. These words separate, and conduct their own searches on themselves. Users can drag two words together which interest them to produce associative searches.

At this point, who is the searcher? What is being searched?

Acknowledgements:

-This project was funded by a commission from the University of Colorado @ Boulder.
-Special thanks to Brian Brantner, software engineer on the project. He can be found at http://www.marcotte.com.
-AskJeeves.com is used for the search engine feed
-EAT: Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus, a psycholinguistic database, is used to search joint searches from dragged “wordcloud” items

____________

1 Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 1964, 55.

2 “Survey Shows Office Workers Rely More Heavily On E-mail Than Face-to-Face Contact to Share Knowledge; AIIM Attendees Surveyed on Work Practices.” Business Wire March 7, 2002, 2393.

3 Toto, Christian. “Web Wise.” Insight on the News, Dec 10, 2001.17:46, 32-34.

4 Guernsey, Lisa. “The Search Engine as Cyborg.” The New York Times. Technology Sect. Jn 29 2000.

5 Garrity, Bronwyn. “Some Cyberspace of Her Own: Escapes From the Dark Horrible Sucking Trail of the Lost Voice.” The Nation, March 19, 2001. 272:11, 25.

online software application

[the perpetual bed] is an online world that emulates my 91 year old grandmother’s experience during a hospitalization where she floated in and out of consciousness and coherence. The environment allows the participant to explore boundaries between the real world and a dreamlike state using animated photographs of people and places from my grandmothers life. Users can interact with each other from within a navigable, surrealistic narrative situated in the world of my grandmother’s dream-state. A hybrid between video, interactive art, installation, and animation, the game relies on the movement of the user to encounter experiences with transparent yet tangible beings, memories, and places engaged with when seeing space in alternate patterns.

[the perpetual bed] tells a story in an altogether different way — by allowing the participant to move through a story, to “happen” upon a scene, and to find his or her own meaning in this ever-enacted place. In this way, it is as though film fragments were taken from the cutting-room and suspended in space with a particular organizational logic.

Created using VRML coding, an early internet format for creating 3D objects and worlds online with which multiple viewers can directly interact across a range of networks, the project was well received in the interactive media/digital art/performance arena. A custom VRML browser was built to facilitate real-time performances where participants around the globe could leave artifacts, texts, and interact with others. Thus, participants in these performances can then leave their mark and become part of the story– through hints, impressions, dialogue –for the next viewer. This residue becomes part of the world, ready for the next participant to discover.

Included in VRML-ART 2000, an internationally juried show of VRML artwork. Other venues include the Web3D-VRML Symposium in Monterey California (2000) Siggraph (2000) and Alterites: Interdisciplinarite & Pratiques “Feminines” de l’espace Conference at Ecole d’Architecture Paris-Villemin (1999).

software

[phage] is an application that scans the user’s hard drive and randomly selects images, snippets of text, sounds and other content to create a continually shifting visual spatialization of the user’s information. Dredging through countless images, sound files, cached web files, and emails, the program creates a living visual and sonic memory map. These maps reflect numerous overlapping relationships and cultures: the mechanics of the machine and technology are visible through the thousands of invisible files necessary to run common software. Usually ignored and unknown to most users, these obscure bits of text and code, in the non-hierarchical selection process of [phage] are as likely to be highlighted as the family photos or downloaded articles. Artifacts from the participant’s interaction with the machine and the content stored within are also reflected in these free-form maps.

In creating continually shifting audio-visual sculptures from our own data, [phage] distributes authorship between programmer, operating system, and users. The participant experiences in surprise the contents of the computer’s memory — and by extension, revisits their own activities: a palimpsest of their life experiences emerges. [phage] questions the command and control paradigms which created the computer in the first place.  [phage] levels the playing field for every bit of data, wrestling creative control from the hierarchical tyranny of the operating system. The free form, sometimes dream-like results present a portrait equally compelling and mundane.

[phage] does not harm the user’s system and operates on the principal of bacteriophage, a type of constructive virus preying on bacteria and thought to be the most widely distributed and diverse entities in the biosphere.  Unlike bacteriophage, the digital [phage] participants must consent before allowing their system to be ‘infected’.

“Mary Flanagan’s [phage] offers an alternative visualization of electronic information–but instead of browsing the Internet, it browses your hard drive. A…program that thinks it’s a psychoanalyst, _Phage_ dredges up random images, texts, and sounds from the nooks and crannies on your C drive. You’ll be surprised what’s lurking in the depths of your computer’s unconscious.”

–Jon Ippolito, curator of Media Arts, Guggenheim Museum, NYC, 2000.

“…The human mind…operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain…the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature. Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially…to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.”

–Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945

[phage] was a winner in the DIGITAL 2000 International Competition & Exhibition sponsored by
Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI)

Email is now so pervasive and so essential to our lives that it’s difficult to remember how we communicated prior to its emergence. The ramifications of the nearly wholesale replacement of our physical voice with a detached written text continues to be felt everywhere email is used, whether connected to work or play, intimate exchange or legal agreements. How do we sound to those reading our emails, and how does the email from others sound to us? How do these voices shift when the recipient or the subject matter changes, and why?

As system designers, we are interested in the myriad of ways computer technology permeates and shapes our everyday lives. Email, easily the most widely used and standardized form of new media communication, has changed us in ways we are only beginning to examine, particularly in its complex effect on our relationship to language.

[ineffable] is a computer application which interprets emails between two correspondents and creates audio and visual ‘maps’ of language from the words used. The program reveals how our repeated phrases and stock answers encode the kinds of sounds we make, exposing the varied ‘voices’ we employ within the digital realm. The aggregate of our message’s phrases and the timeline in which they are sent and received constitute a potential map of interpersonal experiences (the external world) as well as how the user relates to the context of digital communication. The program uses all of these factors to generate distinctive portraits of our day to day communication. It functions as an experimental system which reconstitutes the “sound in one’s head” created when reading and writing as a synaesthetic experience. The viewer encounters a set of dynamic sonifications and visualizations from each set of correspondences in a split stereo sound environment.

HOW [ineffable] WORKS:

The application analyzes multiple factors from a cache of email messages. In addition to using the words, it also examines the chronology (including frequency and gaps between messages) as well as the length of each communication. [ineffable] then creates a pair of digitally animated maps representing each half of the conversation, switching between a moving line map and a ‘voice organism’ color collage generated by the system. The moving line map illustrates sound structures encountered by the system. It shows the frequency of the phonemes created by the email in the line’s thickness and color. The program’s voice organism visualizes time and the change in voice through time. It increases and decreases in complexity and transparency depending on the dates in between correspondences. Consistency of the ‘sound voice’ results in a consistent visual mapping, as derived from the general phonemic sounds found by the system. Changes in the ‘sound voice’ change the organism. The program also locates ‘sound signatures’ within the texts and generates a representative word from the aggregate of a user’s most frequently used sounds. For example, if a writer uses many “mmm”s and “ers” the word generated could be “murmur”. These are displayed under the visualization and change over time.

To generate the audio component, several tracks are created in response to the email data. First, phoneme sounds are assigned to an “instrument” created in the programming API Jsyn. Phonemes sampled from human voices are also played back in the rhythm of the email’s syllabic structure.

{it is unnecessary to add info here about you, as it’s available elsewhere on the site. Info on your collaborator is more relevent}:

COLLABORATORS:

This project is a collaboration between New York artist-scientists Mary Flanagan and Andrew Gerngross. Gerngross is a full time writer with a background in film-making and software engineering, among other talents.

[ineffable] premiered at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics Art Gallery in August 2004.

the habituation cage was a 24 hour, site specific performative experiment organized and masterminded by Sara Diamond of Code Zebra and enacted at the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival in Rotterdam, March 2003.

I was locked in the paraSITE structure for 24 hours with Tom Donaldson, another inventor.

In our time together, we detailed many possible inventions, approaches, formulae, and artworks for exploring issues surrounding technology and intimacy, time and space in games, and other fabulous topics.

Tthe Dutch Electronic Art Festival is an international and interdisciplinary bi-annual festival organized by V2_Organisation in Rotterdam (Netherlands), the Institute for the Unstable Media. DEAF presents an exhibition of interactive installations, WWW-sites, CD-ROMs and live performances, seminars, workshops and an academic symposium. The event brings together a varied group of visitors, artists and critics from home and abroad and attracts a growing and diversifying audience. DEAF has established itself as one of the major European media art events. It is a showcase for recent, in part specially commissioned artwork, as well as a forum for critical debate. The festival creates synergies between different art disciplines and fields like robotics, architecture, bio-technology or economics.

created by Mary Flanagan, Wu Fu Che, + Ho Chien Chang

Cyberspace is a socially mediated construction, made clear through the use of avatars, or personal representations in virtual worlds. By putting ourselves into digital worlds, we lose the self and become one with virtual spaces’ new elements. It seems that an aspect of identity is released as an electronic element. By putting ourselves into digitally constructed realities, we call into question the nature of the self in a digital culture and the ways the new selves are created. What are the elements which construct that reality? What is our relationship with the virtual personae and figures we create in online space? What is our relationship to our own data, our bodies sampled with the latest digital technology?

But what is, in fact, natural? Digital culture’s dominance, and ultimately, construction of landscapes and bodies has been a way to create new cosmologies, new elements. The creation and discovery of elements is a fundamentally human endeavor, as are the creations of new systems of representation, identities, and experiences in VR. We work to abstract and distort reality in order to apprehend it. Like language, we name, categorize, and quantify our surroundings.

[unnatural elements] presents images of researchers/artists from Taiwan and the USA which demonstrate that the conversion from the image of the physical body to the image of the virtual is not the typical smooth computational process Hollywood would have us believe.

The images featured in [unnatural elements] show the effects of the creation of a digital nature and digital elements. Most researchers working in 3D technologies strive for “perfection.” However, our team was interested in sampling one real and watching the translation between earthbound identities and virtual ones. What would human data create in cyberspace? The images were created by using 3D head scans of the artists from composited images produced by a video camera and stitching them together with custom software. Interestingly, the process generated “natural” eruptions inherent to the heads, and each scan seemed to take on forms reminiscent of “natural” eruptions we see in earth, fire, water and wind.

Here, our new bodies erupt with artifacts and take on unexpected resemblances to earthbound natural elements. The “random” patterns we see in rocks, water, and other natural elements are not random at all but naturally occurring algorithms. Thus the computer, in creating artifacts, is effectively doing nature’s work. In a sense the computer is much more “real” (disturbingly so) than WE are – when it creates artifacts it is acting on “natural” algorithms.

Offering us a way to critically examine the body in cyberspace and our conventions and ideals of interactive avatars and the drive for 3D art “realism,” these pieces work to provoke a dialogue about the real and “natural” our media is trying so desperately to produce in digital space.

This collaboration was made possible by funding from the U.S. Fulbright Scholar Program and the Foundation for Scholarly Exchange, 2001, and took place in Dr. Ming Ouyoung’s CML, NTU, Taiwan.