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Here at the Daniel Langlois Foundation I am researching a project called “Experience in the Archive”. Here is the abstract of the research:

Experience in the Archive champions the central role of human experience in the way we research and document New Media Art. The subjective, lived experience of the audience is a central concern in contemporary culture, which finds particular expression in New Media Art from the 1960s to the present day. With its emphasis on interaction, dematerialisation, systems and generative process, audience experience is often the content, location and driving force of New Media Art. However descriptions of that experience, either first or second hand, written or recorded are rarely prioritised in the documentation of the work. This project will survey ways in which audience experience currently figures in documentary and archival practice. It will develop and assess methods for documenting audience experience and propose ways for making experiential material available through archival structures.

Since my arrival in September I have been developing the idea of an ORAL HISTORY of new media art. The archive here is full of the most marvelous things (a post on this to follow), but what is clearly missing is the lively, vital voice of first hand audience accounts. These exist in a somewhat formal way in reviews from professional critics (which vary from those who self-consciously base their reviews on their own experience to those that attempt to create a more “impartial” art historical evaluation of a work). They exist sometimes in video based artwork documentation, some of which is fabulous. But these usually serve the double purpose of documentation and marketing – so are highly edited for optimum presentation of the work. They also rarely include spoken or transcribed accounts, favoring observational video footage; the voices of the participants are rarely heard.

The audience is a kind of silent majority in the historical records of new media art; much talked about but never heard from. I turned to the field of Oral History originally to find some precedents, models and guides to good practice in recording, cataloguing and preserving accounts of individual experiences. But I also began to see the great relevance of the aims of the oral history movement to my project:– to redress a historical imbalance, born of a power imbalance, in the kinds of information and experiences that are recorded and valued, and made available to people in the future.

Of course one of the big problems of recording audience experience is the time and labour it requires, and one person, or one organization, can make only the smallest drop in the ocean. The best value of such a project would be in creating ways for people all over the world to both DEPOSIT and ACCESS accounts of artwork experiences. I’m sure that researchers and curators everywhere are recording audience experiences, maybe in informal ways. But there is no way to make these recordings accessible to others.

So right now I’m working on the question: How viable is the idea of a globally accessible Oral History project for New Media Art?

I gave a paper on the audience-centred process of making Cardiomorphologies at the InfoVis conference at SOAS in July. The ref. for the publication is at the bottom.

In his introduction to the conference the Chair of the committee suggested that the best way to experience an event as diverse and multi-disciplinary as Information Visualisation was to think of it as an experimental buffet and to take a selection of offerings. He recommended that the participants should not stick rigidly to what they thought of as their own area of expertise, but to dip into others with an open mind and take some chances.

I was happy to take his advice. Whilst I was keen to see all the papers in my particular strand (digital art), I was also loathe to view it as a mini-conference within a conference. I was interested to find connections with other papers, disciplines and points of view.

The most interesting of these experimental dips from my point of view was a key note paper on biomedical imaging. The paper had very interesting parallels to my own. Both were dealing with imagery of the body – particularly of things not visible to the eye without complex technology. His work looked at the creation of real-time 3d imagery of tumors used to guide radiotherapy treatment. He described the amazing increases in accuracy and effectiveness resulting from his research – life and death stuff. Our work visualises heart and breath data from the body to make art. Though the immediate stakes in our work are lower, for me the relationship between the two was interesting. Both sets of research deal with how we conceive of the human body, and how we relate to it. My paper argued for the need for ambiguity and richness of imagery to develop people’s affective engagement with the work. For him richness was a very low priority, ambiguity a liability. I was glad to have a chance to contemplate different needs of image making, their different rationales and consequences.

The Digital Art sessions were very interesting. The papers were split into two themes – New Trends (my session) which was very diverse, and Art and Architecture, which – interestingly - must reflect a strong and focused area of interest in the submissions received.

The sessions were very crowded, each speaker had between 10-15 minutes. My paper was well received; I particularly appreciated a question on the importance of sound –an aspect neglected by all speakers - which reminded us that whatever the title of the conference, perceiving information is a rich and embodied experience that is compromised by too much exclusive attention to the visual sense.

The highlight was a very strong paper on “Curating Digital Media – Next Generation of Japanese Media Art and Exhibition” by Tomoe Moriyama; a grand tour of the inspirational venues and artists that have made Japan such a renowned centre for art and technology. Tomoe reflected on the different requirements of cultural organisations and how these affected their collection policies and display strategies. She reported on research by the Japanese Media Arts Research Committee which looked at a range of museums’ programming and staffing in regard to Media Art. It looked like an exemplary piece of research, which cultural and governmental agencies in other countries could learn from. She also reflected on how the educational policies in high schools and higher education has developed a generation of highly digitally literate students, who have gone on to be ground breaking artists. She herself has played a key part, as a curator, in the development of Japanese digital art (which you might never have known from her modest delivery).

Publication Details:

Muller, L., Turner, G., Khut, G. and Edmonds, E. “Creating Affective Visualisations for a Physiologically Interactive Artwork”, Proceedings of the 10th International Conference of Information Visualisation, London, 5-7 July 2006, pp 651-658, IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, California.

In London I was hunting for artist run spaces and independent initiatives that are spicing up the new media art scene. My favorite was the HTTP Gallery (House of Technology Termed Praxis), a very difficult gallery to google. It’s a small space in an industrial estate in Manor House run by the ever-interesting Furtherfield.

When I visited they were showing the exhibition Game/Play (a dual-sited show with the other half at QArts in Derby), a collection of interactive artworks that play with our expectations of play. The focus at HTTP, nearly filling the entire gallery, was Mary Flanagan’s [giantJoystick], which was specially commissioned for the show. It’s a lovely thing that joystick - big enough to bear hug it takes at least two people to operate - one on the button, one maneuvering the tree-trunk stick. Ruth and Marc from Furtherfield teamed up with me to play some old Atari classics.

Amongst other networked pieces (including the mythically beautiful Tale of Tales) was Furtherfield’s own VisitorsStudio a collaborative mash-up space, where you can upload and mix media files and chat simultaneously. Ruth and Marc asked me to interview them within the online space for a video they were making. It’s so easy to use that within a few minutes I was happily chatting away to them in there and mixing up the backdrop.

Janis Jefferies, Professor at Goldsmith’s Centre for Cognition, Computation and Culture, invited me to give a talk at the Thursday Club - a regular seminar on cross-disciplinary creative and cultural research. I gave a talk on the “Gallery as Laboratory” an idea I have been developing through my work with beta_space. I have published a short paper on the concept at Siggraph 06 in Boston (delivered by Ernest earlier this month), and a longer one is forthcoming (watch this space).
A great bunch of people turned up including Craig Smith, who brought (as he has before) a fresh dimension to my rather techno-centric version of interactivity, and Kelli Dipple, currently web-casting curator at the Tate Modern, who got to the heart of the essential question of traditional galleries’ unfamiliarity with the production methodologies of new media art.

Thanks to Maria X for organising it, and for a great intro to what’s what (or what’s not) in new media art in London at the moment.

Green and pleasant

I’ve just got back to Australia - via a typhoon in Hong Kong - from a two month trip to London. As I flew into heathrow at the end of May England seemed ludicrously green, by the time I left at the end of July it was a patchwork of yellow and brown, following a heatwave and drought (already historicised on wikipedia). As well as the remarkable weather, so much happened that i’ve decided to post it in a few installments.

Future episodes include notes from a day of brainstorming for Node London (an exuberant experiment in “open” cultural organisation), thoughts on one or two exhibitions and performances - including Game/Play at the http gallery, a review of the digital art strand of the InfoVis conference at SOAS in July, and impressions of the Hong Kong new media art scene.

On Thursday I did my neck in - and I couldn’t look left or right, or nod my head all weekend (maybe another time i’ll share some insights on the world that I gained from looking straight ahead for 3 days). When i could finally return to work I read an article on Somaesthetics by Richard Shusterman, as part of research for a catalogue essay on George Khut. I couldn’t help but take it personally when I came to this paragraph:

“If, as Beauvoir argues, the body “is the instrument of our grasp upon the world” (1989, 34), then we can learn more of the world by improving the conditions and use of this instrument. A person unable to turn her head to look behind her because of a stiff neck (typically caused by bad habits of clenching the upper body, which hinders the shoulders and ribs from swiveling) will see less and perceive less reliably.”

(Ref. for the geeks: SHUSTERMAN, R. “Somaesthetics and The Second Sex: A Pragmatist Reading of a Feminist Classic” Hypatia vol. 18, no. 4 (Fall 2003)).

Bad habits - me? Maybe i’ll uncurl myself from in front of this computer and have a walk.

My first trip to New Zealand/Aotearoa was to take part in the Cultural Futures Symposium, an extraordinary get together of artists, critics, curators and academics to think about the themes of place, ground and practice in Asia Pacific New Media Art.

The symposium included 3 days and 2 nights at the Hoani Waititi Marae, an urban marae in West Auckland, with a vibrant political and cultural past and present; home to full Maori language immersion primary and high schools, and soon a university.

Most of the symposium took place in the wharenui (main house), where we sprawled on mattresses that became our beds at night, wrapped in blankets. The artists gave detailed, even intimate expositions of their work, encouraged I think by the dual atmosphere of ritual and informality. We all listened with great intensity to one another during those days. A wireless network turned the house into a globally porous place - strangely inkeeping with its traditional structure. At night glowing apples were our nightlights, and the faces of the ancestors looked on from the walls.

We heard many stories in that house, and many tales of ancestors. My own cultural inheritance, the child of a jewish south african father and a humanist, english mother, brought up in a north london suburb and trained at a left wing university, is a suspicion of inheritance, birth rites and ancestry. I floundered, wanting to defend my lack of “indigenous” place and ground. For the second time in my life, i was saved by the eloquence of Shuddha Sengupta, from Raqs Media Collective, one of the few people I have met who can help you think your way out of mingled intellectual and emotional confusion. The best way, he said, to honour your ancestors, is to to dispute with them. To free them and ourselves both from the automatic innocence of the marginalised and colonised, or the automatic guilt of the descendants of perpetrators.

It was one of those trips, like a school summer camp, where you feel strangely soppy about everyone who was there. I have this big sense of gratitude to all the people I met, but particularly to Deborah Lawler-Dormer who put me up in Auckland, Jane Davidson who shared her knowledge of Aotearoa history and art with me - as well as extra bedding when i was cold - and the organisers Danny Butt, Nova Paul and Jon Bywater.

In an straight forward and lovely few days we have installed the latest interactive art work in Beta_space.

Sonic Tai Chi is a gorgeous piece made by Joanne Jakovich which, in the words of the daily telegraph (sorry), reveal your aura in colour and sound.

The piece will be up till Jan 05. More details on the slightly unpolished but soon to be renovated Beta_space website: www.betaspace.net.au

George Khut and I presented a paper at the Vital Signs Conference at ACMI in Melbourne. It was called (beware long title approaching) “Evolving creative practice: a reflection on working with audience experience in Cardiomorphologies”

In it there was a lot of very heart-felt thinking (which is what you would expect from two people working on an artwork called Cardiomorphologies) about the impact of working so closely with audiences and with each other, as artist and curator. Somehow delivering the paper I felt like a bit of a hippy, as though talking earnestly about audience experience was kind of embarrassing - possibly inappropriate. The tone of the rest of the conference - which was meant to give a picture of where new media practice is in Australia today - was largely pithy position statements. Maybe a result of most speakers having only 10 mintues to talk. You can see a review of the conference by Keith Gallasch in RealTime (which is nice about our paper) here