Interdependence and Interactivity in New Media Art

Singapore.
The post-lunch session on day three of ISEA 2008 continues with Rosanne Marshack. She begins by outlining the Buddhist idea of interdependence, where the existence of certain conditions brings about the existence of other conditions. All things are interconnected, in other words - and all phenomena are perceptual, based on previous experience.

Cause and effect can apply to different types of conditions - conditions of physical objects, living things and heredity, the workings of the mind, and behaviour and ethics. Rosanne's work with Rick Valentin explores such cause-and-effect chains. One such project was Eggpass, asking participants to pass on twelve numbered eggs from one to another, and the life stories of these eggs are on the Eggpass Website (one even has its own Friendster page).

These eggs, then, bridge the gap between the virtual and physical environment; a future project could use a kind of social tamagochi instead of the egg (requiring participants to pass on the object frequently to keep it 'alive', perhaps even tracking its movement using GPS). Additionally, applications like the iPhone 'Near Me' tool (which shows images taken by others from close to where the user is currently located) show further possibilities - tying the data generated by the project itself together with other data sources.

Angela Main is next; for a long time, her interest has been in shifting consciousness through collective experience - often in the context of large-scale events (involving some 3-5000 people). She's moved from here to an engagement with the Feldenkrais method, which enables users to sense small differences in their environment and understand their own habitual practices and processes, allowing for more spontaneity and better adaptation to new circumstances. This is a form of enquiry into the self, in other words - understanding one's self-image and daily performance of the self.

Her work explores such issues; one work playfully built on the narcissus myth, it shows participants their own image on screen in various forms, similar to what happens in the surveillance cameras in supermarkets or the video screens in stadiums. There is a difference to be made here between the fixed gaze without eye movement (which is seen to be aggressive or threatening) and the softened gaze (non-threatening, related to play or learning).

This leads to the use of these ideas in immersive mixed-reality environments, then, and Angela shows an example of a work that she's done with green-screen technology allowing kids to 'wear' animal faces and move in a virtual environment - seeing the results of this interaction on a screen in front of them. A further project applies this to evolution and ecology - allowing its participants to explore their evolutionary history.

OK, I'm going to skip the last presenter in this session - sorry, Carl Skelton - as I'm off to the launch of the Ruhrgebiet's bid for ISEA 2010. More tomorrow...

Technorati : ISEA 2008, interactivity, interdependence, new media arts
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