Blurring Physical and Digital Spaces

Singapore.
The post-lunch session on this third day of ISEA 2008 starts with Anke Jakob, whose interest is in the synthesis of digital image and physical space - one hot area for this at the moment is the visualisation of data in tangible objects, for example. Such approaches are hybrid, ambiguous, inconsistent, and equivocal; that is where the interest lies.

Anke now notes a number of examples for this - including the Galleria department store in Korea, whose entire facade acts as a large video screen; the facade of Moorfields Eye Hospital in London with its multicoloured lighting on myriads of aluminium louvres; and the facade of BIX at the Kunsthaus Graz, resembling something like a giant illuminated zeppelin. Further, clothes which act as wearable video displays fall into this category as well.

The digital display, then, has moved into a number of new areas in recent times, and serves as far more than simply a data display, fulfilling aesthetic functions instead. Anke's own work has taken a slightly different slant - projecting digital patterns and images onto human bodies, thereby fusing different visual entities and looking deceptively real while not leaving any trace. Such projections exist between the real and the virtual; projection becomes a method of exploration.

Anke has explored the use of various other materials, also including reflective, transparent, or semitransparent fabrics and foils (which allow for the creation of more three-dimensional works, expanding surfaces into spaces); screenprinting can also be used here to modify the surfaces themselves. Further, moving around within the space of the installation also opens up new vistas to the viewer, and/or allows for a collaboration with performers working within the installation space. (Anke now shows a few examples of this work - very beautiful.)

Further opportunities for this work include the exploration of light-sensitive substances (where the printed surface modifies the projection, altering the digital image) or using organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) in screen-printing techniques.

Next up is Eric Kabisch, presenting his work Datascape: a digital world that is coextensive, correlated, and mutually embodied with the planet Earth itself - it is a substrate of Earth, is driven by datasets describing physical locations in the world, and movement through the physical world also drives movement within Datascape. Datasets here include any number of existing sources (geographic, social, online, etc.) - and the project can be described as a kind of reality jamming, then.

Eric now moves on to consider the idea of virtuality, of cyberspace as a non-physical space within the computer. This has been undermined by a stronger understanding of the connections between online and offline worlds - the outward flow from synthetic into physical worlds, for example, and the embedding of the digital into the physical. But our physical world has always already been a hybrid stew of technocultural artefacts and practices, Eric notes - so 'virtuality' is anything but new.

A better description is one which builds on the idea of hybridity (and hybrid ecologies), then: through continuing practice, technologies and methodologies become slowly hybridised into what we consider to the the 'real' world. This is a process of digitising the world (representing it) and then reembedding these data back into the world, through digitalisation. The cycle here is one of sensing (gathering data), narrative (making stories from the data), and propagation (where these stories affect the way we act in the world). This maps also onto a cycle from individual to group to institution.

What emerges from this are code-spaces (and Eric uses air travel as one example, regulated as it is by homeland security data; another is geodemographics, where people's profiles are understood through the areas - at a level of suburbs or even city blocks - in which they live, and marketing is then targetted towards such specific profiles). From this perspective, databases are a substrate of our embodied world.

Datascape, then, makes this substrate tangible and allows participants to impose their own narratives onto it. It can be explored in a stationary installation, or in a specially-equipped car that provides information on the area within which it is currently located. This is able on the one hand to translate a data ontology to a representational ontology: points, lines, and polygons on the one side are no longer translated one-to-one to the other, but to a more complex range of symbols, behaviours, zones, forces, paths, links, portals, and sounds. On the other, it moves from a panoptic to a local form of legibility: it reaffirms the local context which is often lost from a panoptic, god's-eye view of geo-data.

Jean Ippolito is next. She notes that since the 1950s and 60s, artists have been trying to undermine the physical place of the art object (as in performance art, for example); she runs through a few examples of such works through the past decades. Some such artworks are also distributed across multiple sites, online, and/or collaborative between multiple participants. A few such works create physical structures to map out their internal virtual spaces, or map out real spaces using a virtual structure. In other words, there is a transfer here from the physical to the virtual, from the virtual to the physical, or from a geographic place to a collected documentary resource.

In old media, authors tend to establish a virtual, fictional place. In new media, the same happens, and it happens in the first place similarly through words; however, we are also able to use avatars to place ourselves into these works. Jean notes a number of recent Asian artworks which play with words - quite literally, by building on non-sensical Chinese characters - and she also notes the religious emphasis on the word itself as divine.

In new media, the combination of words, images, sounds, and other elements significantly changes the role of the word in itself, and therefore of the places and spaces - the worlds - described by words; Jean also notes a number of new media works which explore evolutionary developments of organisms and/or place avatars in ecosystems (it's difficult to follow the thread of this presentation here). There are also some examples here of artists placing their 'avatars' (here not in a virtual world sense) in past or future art contexts, and a few other cases. More examples combine physical objects with top-down projections of virtual characters.

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