Collaboration in Place, Communication for Change, Creativity and Notation

Singapore.
Day three at ISEA 2008 starts with a paper by Nedine Kachornnamsong, who has developed an art installation for Copenhagen airport. She begins by reflecting on the purpose of such an installation - most travellers are likely just to move quickly and painlessly through the airport space, rather than linger and appreciate the art. What is the sense of place that exists in an airport?

Copenhagen is a hub for Scandinavian air travel, and acts as a transit airport for transfers into the nordic countries. It incorporates a great deal of Scandinavian design (including significant use of wood in interior spaces); for an airport, it's a very pretty space, but this may remain secondary to many travellers for whom the airport remains simply a transitional space. What is remembered, mostly, are the bad experiences travellers may have - delays, lost luggage, unfriendly staff.

Place is implicated with psychological rather than physical interaction; a place cannot exist without people, and the interaction between them forms the place. It is possible, then, for places to exist even in the absence of physical space - as social networking Websites demonstrate, for example. Here, personal interactions make the place more or less welcoming, friendly, interesting, comfortable, and so on. This is a different form of interaction than face-to-face, but there is a clear sense of place here nonetheless.

The sense of place in cyberspace may be derived in part from physical experience, but interacting in cyberspace requires us to operate at a higher level of abstraction from the spatial. We are forking our personal cosmology in order to operate in such abstract places. The sense of place in cyberspace enables us to build up a set of rules for communicating with others.

How can a sense of place be reestablished at the airport, then? Nedine spent around a week at the airport, staying there, eating there, reading there, even sleeping there, as a kind of quick-and-dirty ethnography. This happened to take place at the same time as recent controversies around the publication of derogatory cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad in Danish newspapers - a particularly tense time at the airport especially for those looking clearly 'foreign'.

Ultimately, Nedine spent a good deal of time observing others, and found that the airport toilet cubicles provided her with the best quiet space. She developed an installation called "Washroom Notice" for this space, then - as a space, the toilets were likely to provide the most likely environment in which travellers were going to engage with art installations. The installation had a world map on which travellers could place stickers for where they were going, and where they would want to be going. Additionally, she provided spaces for travellers to share some thoughts (a kind of artistically sanctioned toilet graffiti) - sharing ideas with other travellers, drawing elements into a picture of an airport lounge.

The next speaker is Aleksandra Dulic, whose interest is especially in situated media. She begins by distinguishing between space (a physical or virtual environment, but abstracted and organised through spacial metaphors) and place (a social environment defined through activity, through which shared practices and communities may emerge and which contains physical, emotional, experimental and cultural reality). A place, then, is a setting for action.

There is also a distinction between traditional and post-traditional environments here: pre-modern places organised through ritual, collective memory, and acting as a framework for communal action; modern places organised through reflexivity and managed through symbolic tokens and expert systems, in which there is a disjunction and disembedding of space and time (media, especially electronic media, play a significant role in this process).

The global sense of place is of place as process, then, as a meeting place where global and local concerns intersect. This can be addressed through situated media: physically grounded systems which provide and embody information in context (beginning with intelligent architectures and intelligent spaces, but also moving well beyond this - how do local social structures connect with information?).

Aleksandra relates this to shadowplay performances in Bali (which are also interactive and deal with media): these always take place in a ritual, traditional context, and are governed by the desa / kala / patra distinction (space / time / context). Each artistic event integrates the local realities of these three dimensions into the performance. Following Brecht, such art is "a hammer which shapes reality". This takes place in the context of a ritualisation of society; a social transformation and regenerative renewal of culture; an articulation of cultural identity through experience and participation; and the democratisation of the media.

Aleksandra now points to a number of artworks which operate using such principles - projects like Ring of Blue in India, for example, which investigate local issues and embed these into performances on the market square, building on the statements of locals and encouraging further reponses from locals during and following the performance. This democratises the process by placing diverse voices on the same stage.

There is a sense here of liminal cultures existing at the threshold between different opportunities and states of being - a threshold between the 'me' and 'not me', the participant's ritual self and their projected self, between ordinary social or biological states and open exploration. For participants, this opens up the possibility of transformation (from the old to the new), while facilitators and actors involved engage in transportation - temporarily assuming new roles and then returning to their regular selves.

Similar processes apply for moves between the tangible and the abstract, for which the interface offers a liminal technological space. Here, it is possible to move from cultura code, local knowledge, and craft to data capture, analysis, and abstraction (and back). A project like Sacred World does this.

The next speaker is Michael Century, who shifts our focus to media art history. He notes the role of notation as a symbol system to produce non-ambiguity in describing art (here, mainly music) - it permits a distinction between the constitutive and the contingent properties of the work, transcending the limitations of time and the individual. Notation enables the preservation and distribution of the work, but also becomes a routine as it is locked into specific physical instruments. Patch programming (such as analogue cord connection graphs for the Moog synthesizer) are a form of expressive notation, too.

Michael now introduces the idea of the distributed temporal object - a layering of the present with recollections of the past and anticipations of the future that allows a diagram of moments of temporal series in the history of art forms (tracing the development of the oeuvres of individuals and artistic groups, cross-influences, etc., and incorporating various forms of protention and retention of artistic influences).

Michael applies this to performance video art in Chicago in the 1970s, performing image processing on the fly using patchwork-programmed analogue image processors. This work was well-documented, enabling others to copy such work on a non-commercial basis (this sharing approach was known as the 'distribution religion' - a kind of anti-notational oral culture perpetuated through passing on knowledge, but eschewing notation as this could limit experimentation by other practitioners). Nonetheless, students did invent their own personal notations. Such electronic visualisation can be described as a 'technology of the self' - the imagination of the user encoded into the technological control structures of the instrument. No repertory or notational scheme was established - there was simply a community bound by a common instrument.

The language Max, emerging from a Parisian music-science centre, can be used as a second case. It aimed to coordinate formally notated musical works with real-time musical expression, using computers and electronic instruments. The 4X synthesiser used here again had almost no formal documentation; expertise was meant to be passed on through oral tradition. A formally written piece of music was created in which all the components are not set but waiting for information coming from the instrument.

This singular instance of solving a problem eventually led to the development of a number of streams of the Max language, which encapsulates four different levels of participation (system admin, writing new external objects, configuring new patches, or simply performing existing patches). Max has become an ecosystem, not simply a language, and it helps to keep alive what is now almost a canonic system of interactive works - without resorting to special hardware or proprietary software. Max now supports cumulative, distributed instrument building and notational reproduction.

Finally, Michael highlights the Loops project which builds on the motion capture of a performer's hands and turns this into the score for the performance work. Contrary to Max's philosophy, this provides an opportunity for a new environment for authoring works, using both textual programming and a visual notational form - and both the Loops artwork itself and the Field meta-authoring tool have been open-sourced of further development by the wider community.

So, we can understand these creative communities as mediated by socio-technical assemblages of notations, instruments, and repertories of works linked by relations of anticipation and reproduction, protention and retention. They can be described as distributed temporary objects.

Technorati : Copenhagen Airport, ISEA 2008, collaboration, community, creativity, place, space
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