Notes for lecture on Computer Art Practices Algorists and Algorithmic Art

In SwanQuake, igloo, the collective of Ruth Gibson & Bruno Martelli, has taken a chance in bringing together gaming structure and contemporary dance. Using game development tools they did what artists often do: they repurposed the tools, making something that the developers back at Unreal Technologies may have never envisioned. In the first version, "SwanQuake: House", presented on a March evening in London, they recreated their own living & working environment within the Game Environment, including street views and a nice step out onto the terrace. This is the first of in a series of environments to come, and the occassion for the showing was a book launch party for a collection of essays on this work and related works and histories, SwanQuake: the user manual.

Making your own environment into a game is a challenge, and takes hard work, but the knock-out artistry in this work is in the juxtaposition of the dance with the textures. These are not avatar dances floating aimlessly in space, but animated characters built from motion capture of real body movements of a human dancer.

Like texture wrapping, dance can be reduced to a series of technically competent moves. That is far from the case here. The texture wraps are rich in color and detail, and provide the right environment for dance movements which are dramatic, and forceful. The conceptual mix, however, goes beyond texture and movement.

If Games signify popular youth culture, Dance signifies established high Art culture. Putting them together challenges the non-game savey viewer, and no doubt equally confuses the gamer. But that is the point. Hybrid culture is not just about mixing East and West in a move towards "cultural diversity"'; it is also about mixing strands of culture within the same geographic location. It is about that mix representing generational differences, gender preferences (whether they come from socialization of some other root) and even differences in class and educational background which define expectations of what constitutes leisure time

So forget the goal of shooting up and winning with such speed that environment is a necessary evil to the producters. Go for the goal of fascinating spatial configurations, of unusual juxtaposition, of color against form, of sudden shifts in scale and perspective, and you get SwanQuake. And if the description of space and color sounds like it could be the formal analysis of a painting, that is the point. Good visual and spatial creative thinking does not come from nowhere, it comes from the greater cultural rules that igloo has brought into play in making SwanQuake.

House enacts a fantasy of being alone, in a place like the tube which so rarely knows solitude. More shocking than the traces of devastation is the emptiness and stillness; from the train we are jettisoned in several directions—deep into the bowels of the earth along broken tracks, or on into the labyrinth of the station.

Many of the locations connect together through sudden translocation. Teleportation of the player makes each end a new beginning. House subtly subverts the language of the computer games which share its underlying structures. It frames the world as a game, but also the worldliness of games. In depicting the destroyed train one form of mobility is lost, but then substituted with another. Shift into pulsing white light—immediate movement from one place to another. Here teleportation is like getting out of the shower; the column of warmth opens out to the cold of the room, and you are suddenly aware of yourself and your surroundings; you feel fresh but also vulnerable. Teleportation makes fresh our perception—takes us from one stylised space to another, markedly different environment; with new secrets to seek out.

When solitude has become the norm then suddenly House confronts you with its beating heart. In the darkened corridors, shifting into view is the figure of the dancer. Her movement suggests a personal enquiry; as you approach she fades from view, a sentiment that suggests the need for space. Only at a distance can we appreciate the communication taking place—bodies in space are more often than not eradicated immediately in gameplay, in House they are savoured, haunting the corridors.

The single dancers are each a premonition of the gymnasium, a large grey box all paths ultimately lead to. In here many different motion-captured movements are enacted by multiples of the same lone female figure. Are we seeing a multiplicity or single movement traced in time? The spectacle of so many simultaneous performances amount to a crying-out theme; they are collectively the voice that is absent from the tense geometry of the corridors. A high walkway gives us a privileged view of the scene. At a distance the dancers fade from view, but their shadows still swarm across the floor—each its own meditation, a train of movement with no beginning, middle and end, but rather a gentle loop. Ahead, another teleportation point.

Rain lashes the roof of House, and lightning traces the contours of a London skyline. This house is igloo’s Bethnal Green studio, connected in time and space to the rumbling underground and the conceptual space of the gymnasium. This continuity creates ambivalence about the familiarity with which we depict our own environments. Before the glim of the horizon and looming buildings, one final dancer takes a careful walk across the roof space, her body glowing against the dark. Her performance relates how movement is displaced by stillness, and that stillness is not the absence of movement. From the aerie of the roof we look down toward the road, and the story continues. A river of cars hurtles left and right. The train is not still; its movement has been displaced—people getting from A to B, point to point in a virtual geometry. House is a virtual environment created as part of igloo’s ongoing SwanQuake series. It deals in part with the experience of returning home, and continues the inquiry into technology and performance that has become characteristic of their work.

An Arts Council England Individual Grant in 2004 brought modest funding for

critically address the form of the mass-media industry. A spontaneous, non-tactile

interaction was to be based on the biological principles of interaction among cells, and a

game-based software architecture would operate within the set of a 3D London Tube

map. Dr Peter Bentley, a UCL-based expert on computational models of the human

immune system, joined the project, along with Anthony Ruto, an expert on 3D

modelling also from UCL, and my long-term collaborator Rainer Linz […]

We decided that our focus in Fugue would be on understanding and applying the

principles of biological processes, rather than creating photo-realistic 'beautiful

imagery', or merely re-representing scientific findings as visualisations or sonifications.

My friend, the immunologist Dr Nada Pejnović, a research fellow at St. Mary’s

Hospital, gave me a detailed introduction to the field, and I was able to discuss with her

my artistic interpretations of scientific subjects, my sketches inspired by medical

sources, and the concept for the eventual piece. Real-time generated images originating

in computational processes would set the framework for the visuals, with a major

practical requirement being to reduce the typically heavy computation to a minimum.

To meet this condition, and to achieve an abstract, symbolic representation of the actors

in the immune system drama, I looked back to the cell-like egg-shaped and spherical

structures that had appeared in my paintings from the 1990s and I suggested making

some clay models, as I had done for my early paintings. Anthony scanned the clay

models in 3D as the starting point for the final look of the inhabitants of our virtual

immune system. To emphasise the focus on processes, and the distinction from the

aesthetics of the gaming industry and commercial computer graphics, I suggested a

black-and-white approach. Both scientists found this idea problematic, because, in their

own words, they ‘could think of the immune system only in red’. As a compromise, our

first prototype was indeed monochromatic, but in red.

The combination of Anthony’s expertise in creating 3D wire-frame models of the

human body, his taste for abstract visual art, and my experience as a trained painter of

using techniques of perspective, colour and sfumato to suggest depth, and to upgrade

the crudeness of the computer generated image with the attributes of traditional visual

aesthetics, gave rise to an enjoyable creative process. We replaced the red with a

greyscale approach, which was now accepted as being congruent with the overall

conceptual framework. To complete the basic system, Rainer designed the sound

software around a series of customised audio players that he called Fugue Players,

which responded in real time to changes within the artificial immune system.

The first outcome of the team's collaboration was a paper [2] presented at a scientific

conference. However, our concept received little attention, as most of the scientists

categorised it as ‘non-scientific’, although a small number praised its fresh approach. It

is only now as this text is going to press that we have noticed some interest from those

dealing with scientific representations, but it is too early to know where this might lead.

VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF INTERACTIVITY

After this encounter with scientists, we concentrated on developing the artwork. At

the time, I wrote: ‘The title Fugue is a metaphor for the transdisciplinary nature of the

work, and for the method applied: inter-weaving the different perspectives of artists and

scientists. The emergent, evolving nature of the artificial immune system algorithm, the

use of repetition in the form of a succession of variations of immune system ‘events’,

and the complex structural and functional interrelationships between the individual

elements and processes are strongly related to the musical form of counterpoint, which

formed one of the inspirations for the artistic concept for Fugue. The Artificial Immune

System software creates the dynamics of the virtual immune system drama

From http://www.janeprophet.com/cell/html/about.html

Cell is a collaborative projectm that investigates stem cell research. The research has been in progress for over two years and this installation is one of several outcomes.
The collaboration explores how current research into adult stem cells is having to re-address the complexity of human biology. Human cells have been traditionally thought of as behaving in predictable ways. Stem cells can be described as the ‘master’ cells whose off-spring are the more specialised, but limited, cells that make up most of the human body. But current research suggests that at a cellular level the human body behaves in less obvious ways than has been imagined and that adult stem cell activity, which has recently become the focus of widespread attention, may be harder to define, and observe, than previously expected.

As part of the collaboration, medical scientist Dr Neil Theise, a world leader into adult stem cell research, based in New York, has been working together with Jane Prophet, mathematician Mark d’Inverno, computer scientist Rob Saunders and curator Peter Ride, who instigated the project, from the University of Westminster. One aim has been to find new ways of visualising the new and contentious theories of stem cell behaviour, and to find ways to feed the visualisation back into the scientific research so that it can be a conceptual tool in the laboratory practice. Another has been to generate a range of artistic outcomes that are under-pinned by the emerging understanding of cellular activity.

The project is developed in partnership with Peter Ride, Artistic Director, DA2 Digital Arts Development Agency, and is being developed at the Centre of Arts Research, Technology and Education (CARTE) at the University of Westminster.

Aims:

# We will create a dialogue and develop joint research involving exchanges of skills, knowledge and expertise

The project will explore:

* new approaches to cell behaviour

* new ways that human biology can be represented

* how digital technologies enable us to understand complex ideas and enable us to visualise information

* ways that we conceptualise aesthetics at a micro or cellular level

* the act of discovery: how scientific discovery and ideas are communicated and how the impact of paradigm shifts in knowledge is felt.

This installation is an artistic visualisation of the concept of cell characterisation (irreversible gene restriction) in stem cells. Neil Theise’s theory of a 'Paradigm Shift' in cell behaviour in the human body challenges the notion of irreversibility. The model of the paradigm shift has been simplified for exhibition in dialogue between Theise and Jane Prophet.

The model is a real-time 2D graphic interpretation using a complex system of multiple moving 'agents' generated through artificial life (A-life) programming.

The 'old' paradigm of stem cell behaviour was that stem cell development/replication was irreversible and progressive and that after a certain number of replications cells were therefore no longer plastic (functionality was irretrievably switched off). This irreversible gene restriction is indicated by shifts in the colour of 'cells'.

In this graphic simulation cells in the human body are represented as coloured discs (with four chromosomes) emanating (being 'produced') from a set location in the centre of a 2D window. Cells start at the centre of screen and move towards the periphery, by the time they reach the periphery they die. When stem cells are first 'born' they are white in colour indicating their high level of plasticity (many genes are switched on)and a hue is generated for each cell that mutates when it differentiates. The brightness and saturation of the colours displayed are based on each cell's hue; the brightness of the colour decreases with each generation, to a minimum brightness of 50% at death; and the saturation depends upon how differentiated the cell is.

To prevent runaway population explosions the population of cells is cleared and begins again when the number of cells reaches 500.

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The technological sublime

A further interest of Jane Prophet is the ’sublime’: how our understanding of the sublime is increasingly about being scientific, minute or virtual. In the study of aesthetics, the human body was traditionally used as a field of reference from which we derived notions of scale in the sublime–and the sublime experience was one that combined a sense of beauty with a sense of fear.

In the 20th century ideas of nature as ’classically’ sublime, represented through the magnificent and awesome landscapes, have been eroded and obscured. At the same time we have developed complexity theory and its offshoots, artificial life and A-life systems are installed in computer space, a locus without horizon. In recent years, across disciplines ranging from physics to biology to mathematics there has been a re-emphasis on scale, but this time the focus is on the very small. This is epitomised in stem cell research, where the operation at a cellular level becomes central. Again the human body is a field of reference for scale, but this time to contemplate the very small.

The microscopic scale of things challenges us, just as vast expanses of nature once challenged philosophers of aesthetics like Shaftesbury who wrote prolifically in the eighteenth century on the sensibilities of his contemporaries. While Shaftesbury’s sublime was too big for us to grasp comfortably, Hawking’s is perhaps too small.

The sublime of the small contains the mixture of beauty and fear–medical images from hitherto invisible realms of the inner landscape of the body are often beautiful (witness the frequent use of Theise’s images on the covers of scientific magazines) and at the same time they prompt fearful feelings of an unfathomable wilderness, an inner landscape out of our control and untameable. The A-life ’organism’ is not just small, but invisible–virtual. The ’body’ of the artificial creature and the ’landscape’ it inhabits become pure data. It is as if we have almost come full circle, once again nature is untameable and out of control.

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Jane Prophet

tuesday 24 march 2009, 19:36

tags: janeprophet, art, netart, alife, AdaLovelaceDay09

Written as part of Ada Lovelace Day 2009.

Jane Prophet is a UK-based artist whose practice explores contemporary technological processes while retaining distinctly classical referents. Loosely speaking, she could be described as a sculptor, though one whose investigative drive and spectrum of interests leads her through radically fresh terrain with each new project. Working with cutting-edge materials and practices — from CD-ROM and early net art in the 90s, through to recent explorations of fractal-based machine fabrication and stem cell dynamics — the process through which her work is produced is often equally as rich as the end product.

More recently, she has been working with a research group here at Goldsmiths, University of London on the ongoing Net Work (2005-), which takes simple models of stem cell behaviour and translates them into cellular automata: grid-like structures which portray the interactions of discrete cells. These behaviours are translated into a 100m² web of illumated fishing buoys and floated in a river or lake to create a simple but compelling public artwork, whose intention is to accessibly highlight processes of self-organisation to a wider audience.

In a 1998 interview, she discusses her ambivalent relationships with technology.

I'm really drawn to the technology because of the debates that it threw me into, I think, and the questions that I had to ask about what it meant in terms of authenticity of images, what it meant in terms of the physicality or the reality of an image or of a body of work.

But primarily, when I think about the work I make with new media technology I see very little difference between it (other than hopefully it's more mature) and the work I made when I worked in installation and performance when I was a student and the reason for that is that for me at the center of any piece is the idea, is the concept.