martin
bonadeo |
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| topography projection: mulholland drive group project developed with Michael Chu & Scott Hessels multimedia installation japan media arts festival tokio 2005 prototype shown at UCLA's wooden center los angeles 2004
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| description | concept & references | prototype | conclusion | The concepts behind this minimalist sculpture are surprisingly complex. The work fits well into some contemporary research in ambient telepresence—the transformation of space as a form of GUI. Ambient telepresence is about awareness, not communication, and points to a trend to make use of the entire physical environment as an interface to remote digital information. Instead of various information sources competing against each other for a relatively small amount of real estate on a screen, information is moved off the monitor and into the physical environment. Working with ambience is an interesting subgenre of telepresence where temperature, sound, lighting, etc. are the interface. Additionally, the sculptural relationship with an environment relates to the 1960’s Land Art movement and “Mulholland Drive” functions as a mediated earthwork. As we struggle for a clear definition of ‘interactive’, we settle for its characteristics and goals. It is art that senses, responsive work. It is a world unfolding where the subject, the audience, and the characteristics of the piece are all in flux...it is art constructed as a context for experience. In the late 1960’s, a rebel group of sculptors created a movement that produced a body of art that considered this ‘interactivity’ with environment. The Earthworks movement celebrated art as a spatial event--sculpture was viewed as malleable, changing, entropic, and participatory. Earthworks connected physically with their environments and were designed to react to the forces found there. This emphasis on time and process forced viewers to look at the dynamics of the elements in the environment. One had to experience different stages of the system to experience the whole work…which had its own life span. Finally, the narrative experience of this sculpture leads us to consider the concept of cinema without image…the work is intensely cinematic but uses projection as image, not medium. As artists, we stripped cinema of its screen and its image, attempting to create a cinematic experience with only the component of projection—can a beam of light tell a story? In “Mulholland Drive”, the movement of the lights creates a spatialization of the journey—we experience the drama of the course by hearing the engine speed up on the straight sections and seeing the dramatic light angles reflect the hairpin curves. In 1968 Earthworks artist Robert Smithson pioneered the sculptural concept of ‘non-sites’. These pieces consisted of materials gathered from several sites, usually rocks or minerals, that he then regrouped in geometric containers and displayed. "I created a dialectic of site and nonsite. The nonsite exists as a kind of deep three-dimensional abstract map that points to a specific site on the surface of the earth...designated by a kind of mapping procedure" (Smithson). The nonsite becomes an abstraction, a mapping source, which references the real/actual site from which materials are taken. Instead of rocks, “Mulholland Drive” gathers data and presents it as a non-site. Interestingly, a new form of ‘drawing’ reverses the interactivity with the environment. GPS Drawings are made by traveling along the shapes and squiggles using Global Positioning System (GPS). “In essence GPS Drawing is about recording lines using ones journey as a mark making medium. The GPS receiver automatically records your journey like a geodesic pencil.” (www.gpsdrawing.com) We are just beginning to explore topography as a tool for the creation of artwork. Haruki Nishijima’s “Remain in Light " is a light representation of data—here ambient audio is captured and then translated into light and motion. His sensing device is a ‘net’…to capture sound. “By waving this net while walking, we become aware of not only the condition of the space but also the actual situation of our communications monitored by information.” (www.ima.fa.geidai.ac.jp) Hiroshi
Sugimoto’s time-lapse photographs of the duration of a film
reveal a bright, white screen. His work, although in a cinematic environment
of classic movie palaces, emphasizes the light of the projection.
Sugimoto’s ethereal images are limited by his static medium
and in “Mulholland Drive”, we hope to animate the projection
and consider the role of nonimage- based cinema with sensed interactivity. In a large dark space filled with fog, two robotic lights will recreate the terrain of Mulholland Drive through changes in angle and sound. Audience members will be able to wander through the fog and immerse in the ambience. On May
12, 2004 at 11:00pm, the artists outfitted a Honda Civic to capture
the angle, direction, location, speed, and engine rpm data of a drive
along the section of Mulholland Drive between Beverly Glen and Coldwater
Canyon. Tilt was captured through a sensor, run through a battery-powered
EasyIO board, and saved on a laptop running tilt measurement software.
GPS was captured on a portable sensor and downloaded to a computer
at a later time. RPM data was sensed via an engine-mounted microphone
wired into a laptop running a sound capture software. The rpm data
was also captured through a digital video camera directed at the dashboard
tachometer. The process and configuration was documented with a digital
still camera. The captured data was then loaded into Director and
a three-dimensional path was created. Additionally, the artists created
an animation of the lights to confirm our direction with the project.
The engine recording was converted into a MIDI file and manipulated
in several different softwares to discover whether a ‘melody’
was possible—variations in instrumentation, tone, and distortion
were explored. In the end, a mix of the original recording (compressed
to enhance the rev sound) and a low orchestral conversion was selected.
Using Kolo as midware, the DMX interface was configured to control
two robotic lights. Although
we were aiming for a passive interactivity generated by programmed
ambience, we are intrigued by the conceptual framework of “Mulholland
Drive” and can project several directions to pursue after this
initial prototype. A database of several roads that were previously
captured could present the visitor with the option to ‘choose
their own journey’. In an impossibly sensed future, we could
even show them their own drive home by using archived GPS and altitude
data. We’ve also considered the live modification of the ‘score’
as an interactive feature—the user could use a slider to adjust,
the amount of processing of the engine rev data, from the ‘true’
sound to an extreme abstraction like orchestration. Finally, the vision
of a live capture and presentation of a journey could prove interesting…even
moving beyond roads to roller coasters and fighter planes. An audience
could watch a sculptural interpretation of a live topographic event. One of
cinema’s miraculous tools is the creation of an environment,
a window into a world that is designed by its author. But can the
process be reversed? Can environment create art? New media technologies
are introducing the possibility of environmental agency in sculptural,
cinematic, and narrative construction. Space can now become a protagonist,
not metaphorically but literally, in the creation of the moving image.
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