Reality under Construction
The Norwegian dance/media performance company Kreutzerkompani is operating with two levels of reality that is being augmented into each other. In the beginning of the new millennium they created a number of media performances that all had one main interest: To make use of live performance and real-time recordings as creative material on the same level – so that the performing and creative processes are melting together into one practice. One example is Sync #2, where a dancer is performing live in front of a public and being recorded real-time on video at the same time. The recordings are sometimes synchronous, sometimes stopped or repeated in patterns on a big screen behind the dancer. The camera is not only recording the live-performance but is recording the recording as well the earlier recordings being played back. The result is a mirror effect, where the image is repeated indefinitely into seemingly parallel worlds – but with the added element of recorded material being projected onto the live performance.
The sounds are prerecorded material combined with real-time recordings from the dancing, the audience and the “ambient” sounds of the entire space played back onto them.
In Sync #2, reality is under construction. Furthermore, reality is not being constructed from the “outside”, or through physical phenomena only;it is as much constructed by conceptual integration of ideas, actions and technology.
Working from the notion that augmented reality in contemporary art is a reality und construction, I will attempt to investigate augmented reality in contemporary art with examples from the practices from the Scandinavian art scene. Moreover, I will investigate augmented reality as part of a transdisciplinary field of art production that is taking place in the expanding field of new media.
However, my focus on augmented reality will not only be as a new media issue, but as part of a new paradigm of artistic production in public and social spaces, combining physical experience with technological interface. Hence, the augmentation of reality in contemporary art is not about aesthetic transformations alone – it is not a matter of form or style; instead, it is part of a cultural change involving the relations of art practice, art institutions, humanistic research and the public space which is brought on by the refining and expansion of technology into every aspect of our lives.
Above all, augmented reality is about how experience interacts with knowledge; and how that interaction, in turn, creates interfaces between public spaces, social spheres, and art. In computer science the term Human-Computer Interaction, HCI, is used when studying this from the practical side. In the 1980s and 1990s, the notion of the embodied mind and conceptual integration as a structuring principle of knowledge was formulated by Mark Johnson (The Body in the Mind, Chicago 1986) and Mark Turner (The Literary Mind, 1999). In the last decade, the idea of the embodied mind, bodily based rationality, cognition based upon physical and bodily active relations with the surrounding world, has entered the stage of artistic as well as aesthetic research. Paul Dourish, in Where the Action is – the Foundation of Embodied Interaction wants to nourish the perspective that sees “the embodied practical action in the world as the foundation of our conscious experience” in this kind of research. Augmented reality in contemporary art is a reality as well as a social aesthetic under construction; it is an artistic research into the question of Human-Computer Interaction, the function of conceptual integration, and the embodied practical action of art and art experience. It is a structural combination of circuits that traditionally has been divided: The fusion of the performing mind and a technologicalbody, of conceptual sensing and media consciousness, and last but not least a public is ever more active in the creation of (that which we understand as) art.
The Scandinavian scene is very innovative and active, experimenting extensively across old genres, art forms and disciplines. This experimental focus on production that artists are conducting qualifies, I would claim, as scientific and research and philosophical inquiries into a field of production that this article wishes to investigate as an intensely rich and complex – and extremely important – source of knowledge about the culture we are living in. In fact, I will attempt to examine this field of production, in a sense, anthropologically – which means that I will attempt to look at it as a field of cultural production which is semiotic coherent and structured around the artist as a functionary or indeed mediatorbetween art and technology.
Instead of discussing art and media as something separate that collide suddenly in new media, I would like approach an analysis of the mediator from a different angle – focusing on the research done by the Danish media performance group, Boxiganga. I will attempt to analyze their “Augmented Reality Project, part 1-3” (1998-2008) and their research into a relations technology –art as a network of open systems:
We intend to develop relations-orientated multimedia works, which function in the social realm, in which we as people continually recreate and reinvent our existence — in relations between people. This is “relations technology” as opposed to functional or manifested technology; Open systems in which content and relevance are directly dependant on involvement.
I will then move on to discuss augmented reality within the framework of that which Boris Groys call “die zeitalter des medien”. Groys claims that the situation of art in a media culture is indeed not only that of emergence of new aesthetic paradigms, but the infusion of a new "logic" and "epistemology" into our concept of reality and cultural patterns. Thus, there is an "amplification" of reality from media taking place in aesthetics as well as in the broader cultural context.
The challenges of a new media culture and the artist as the functionary/mediator of this culture, also brings up the question of how media consciousness is augmenting the modern public/political space. Jürgen Habermas, writing in 1962, believed that the modern public space was founded in a literary consciousness as a kind of a common/ shared ground – in the general public as well as in politics and art. How, then, does the notion of public space, I am very tempted to ask, change if this common ground is founded in a media consciousness (which it already is)?
The competences of traditional institutions and genres, indeed the epistemology of those competences, are changing. Instead, we get new domains and new competences – and an inversion of institutions and the public space. Reality, art and art institutions are under construction.
Boxiganga: Augmented Reality Project
The fusion of performing mind and technological body is clearly visible in the practice and artistic strategy of the Danish media Performance group, Boxiganga - Karin Søndergaard and Kjeld Pedersen. In 1998, theyformulated the principles of an Augmented Reality Project which should create an environment for artistic research into the use of human-computer interaction in artistic/ performative installations. Building from a tradition of Nô Theatre and “classic” performance art practice in the 1980s, the Augmented Reality Project was to be realized in three parts: “Relational Mechanisms” (1998-2000), “Constructed Interactive Spatiality” (2000-2005), and “A Sensing Sculpture in Public Space” (2005-2008). The result of the first part of the project, relational mechanisms, was shown at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde in january-march 2000. Working with a network of Apple G3-computers, the basic principle was to place the computer and data-processing in the background; this is preconditional for achieving the illusion of reality in the human-computer interaction. Augmented reality is a construction of physical conditions that should be present in order tobe able to experience a realistic physical relation in space:
In our multimedia set-ups, the computer is relegated to a place where data is recorded, processed and transmitted. We can then be concerned with multimedia in a context of Augmented Reality, with creating spatio - sensory, perceptive and reactive constructs.
An interactive multimedia set-up is a world construct, in which everything consists of second hand impressions of different forms of processed transmissions — projections, sounds and reactions as interpretations and translations in a constructed reality. One is never in direct realization, but in search of meanings with one´s own physical presence, in which one´s own senses and actions can conquer, interpret and recognize.
The Augmented Reality Project part 1 is organized in four complex, spatial constructions: “Smiles in Motion”, “Mirrechophone” (Mirror+Echo+Phone), “I think You — You think Me”, and “The Different Stories of a Bride and Groom”. Each spatial construction (or perhaps: augmented installation) play with the notion of constructing the preconditions for how we are experiencing actual phenomena and relations in physical space, through hidden data processing. Boxiganga works withspecific strategies which uses the audience’s actions and reaction as a framework for the creation of an augmentation of reality. It is a pretext for making it possible to experience the construction of reality and by the same token enables the audience to reflect upon their interpretation of this experience:
In this way, the visitor also becomes involved in an augmenting of what is able to be sensed and is likewise brought to an augmented state of interpreting that experience.
In fact, the basic function of the installations often requires that two visitors enter into a relationship and investigate an interpretation of the contents of that relationship. These installations then are situations for augmented relationships.
It is through the body´s organs that we sense and act. In this way our being interprets the presence of people and things and brings a certain reality to that presence. Augmented Reality involves the body through the installations presented here, and in doing so, proposes “conversations” at the edge of our normal means of sensing and communicating.
In this project, visitors will come into contact with a series of staged and coreographed, high technology installations that can sense their presence. These “sensitive” sculptures are likened to pieces of furniture in a room.
But the installations, each in its own way, don´t only sense, they also react. Thus they promote relationships through experiences that may take place at the edge of the senses.
The first, Smilets bevægelse / Smiles in Motion, was a
“Spejlekkofon” — Mirrechophone
Institutional redistribution of competences
Historical developments in the 60s and 70s have reshaped art. Some artists have stressed mass consumption. Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol are among the most important artists. In their art the single object is lost and their works becomes multiple objects themselves. Other artists have chosen to create art without creating objects and new forms of art have showed up: performance, conceptual art, processual art, environmental art, digital art, mail art and more. Interesting is that many of those art forms have the real-time as an important ingredient.
The museum as an idea is old and the origin can be found in the cabinet lockers of the 17th century. The cabinets were filled with different kinds of artefacts that could represent the known world. The owner of the cabinet could then literary hold the world in his hands. The object was not just an object, it represented something more, a part of the world. Many of the central museums were founded on the 19th century and has preserved the idea of the object as a key to the history. The museums use the artefacts in the same way as they did in the 17th century. By collecting artefacts we could get an image of the past and by collecting and preserving them it is possible to preserve our history to future generations.
Today when objects in general lose the function as holders of status and history it is natural that the antiquarians at the museums are confused. How to preserve our contemporary time to coming generations if there are no relevant artefacts? Museums are going through a gigantic identity crises at the moment. The distance between the past and the contemporary time is growing all the time. What are real i.e. old artefacts made unique and by hand craft becomes rarer. They represent something not artificial and will gain more and more interest. How can we look at these objects? In our post modern time, or perhaps post-post modern, we know that the object is no key to the past, objects are not time machines and they cannot give us an image of the past. At their best they can give us a number of possible explanations filtered by the present time.
At the art museums the identity crises is very clear. They have a mission to collect, preserve and communicate art works that represent our current time. But, how is it possible to preserve or collect art works that are built on real-time strategies and are made for the moment, art where no object can be found and where the concept is what matters?
According to the French Philosopher Jacques Derrida, the Public Museum is founded by two ideas: First of all the revolutionary and institutionalizing, since the museum creates the framework and connecting cultural phenomena into (new) identities; Secondly, they are traditional and conservative since the museum at the same time are preserving, not only the institutions and (new) identities, but also the cultural patterns inherent in the society into which they are institutionalizing themselves:
Museums are … Revolutionary and traditional. An eco-nomic archive in this double sense: it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion, that is to say in making the law (nomos) or in making people respect the law.[1]
Using the notion from Peter Weibel (above), I would like to move Derrida’s ideas into the field of ’competences’ that are in play in the game of the cultural epistemology. The competences of a museum are encompassing both the revolutionary and the conservative, and this, in turn, becomes very much the case when institutions are being formed around the possibilities and new public spaces that the technology behind the term New Media – or, as I prefer to call it: Digitally distributed environments - create.
However, it is very common to see only the conservative and un-connected side of museums – which in large part is the fault of the museum’s themselves. The last 50 years or so, after the Second World War, focus has been on conserving culture and art, to a point where it has almost hidden the other competence of the museum. Perhaps it is even political incorrect to speak it… but, nonetheless, the distributed environments have created an unprecedented and (for some) unexpected break with the ‘traditional’ museum.
Museums are an augmentation of a reality, and ways of organize knowledge, that has been constructed by a democratic society. In that sense, we primarily think of a museum as a ‘church for objects’ because, as Boris Groys is pointing out, the museum is the place where the modern subjectivity is manifested in its most immediate form. The museum gives us a moment of pure insight, and is the place where the line between art and non-art is drawn. That is why museums are interesting to investigate further when the question of new constructions of reality arises. What happens to the “old” competences that Groys explains would be the definition of a space for free expression as well as a place where the limits between art and nonart are drawn?:
Die freie Subjektivität kann sich also nur als frei zeigen, weil sie durch das Museum verliehen, indem wir das Funktionieren des Readymade-Verfahrens im Museum kennengelernt haben. Die freie Subjektivität kann sich also nur frei zeigen, weil sie durch das Museum von der Arbeit der Kunstproduktion entlastet wird, indem das Museum diese Arbeit übernimmt… Das Museum ist der Ort, an dem der Unterschied zwischen Kunst und Nicht-Kunst hergestellt wird.[2]
In fact, institutions like museums produce a free subjectivity, according to Groys. We may add that the museums are augmenting the idea of free subjectivity into society. This idea of a free subjectivity is part of the creation of the museum as a free space where the framework for a social community is being formulated through artistic/cultural manifestations and artefacts.
In the age of media the function of the modern museum has become central to the effort of maintaining an illusion of an inner free space, and one construction of reality as the only true construction:
Es ist also die primäre Funktion des Museums, die illusion eines Freiraumes ausserhalb seiner Wände zu erzeugen, der als Wirkungsfeld der freien Subjektivität fungieren kann. s.12
The modern museum traditionally creates a free inner public space which has consequences for the outer social space. But the free inner public space as a construced reality is in a crisis. There are many reasons for this crisis, which has lurked for a long time, but the main reason is to be found in the very core of the discussion of augmented reality in art – that of the paradigmatic change of the traditional public spaces by a media consciousness.