Turning the machine inside out - Creating Worlds as Interface by Eric Kluitenberg: It is always a good thing for artists who work with technology and technological media to study the inner life of the machines. Break open the box and look what is inside. This helps to foreclose an overly naive relationship to the medium. Obviously, it also seems a good thing for artists to simply know their material, understand their medium. This is hardly any different today for media-artists than it was, for instance, for Fresco painters in the grand hall of Sienna’s Palazzo Publico in the thirteenth century. Still there might be more at stake in the case of digital machines, something that moves beyond the usual questions about the artist’s material.

That something might be the creation of Worlds as Interface. This speculative idea was suggested in the proposal for a new physics by the physicist Otto E. Rossler. An approach he named Endophysics. The main problem for Rossler was the apparently insolvable question of how to define an explicit model of the world in its entirety, in which the implicit role of the observer was accounted for, given that the observer is always inextricably implicated in what can be observed of the world in the first place. It would require an explicit model that includes the observer. Such a model would, however only be possible to construct from an ‘exophysical’ location, a position outside of the world (in its entirety), which is by definition impossible.

The world according to Rossler is defined by that what transfers between the observer and the ‘real’ world at the interface. It is the interface to the world that defines what can be observed about the ‘real’ world. This interface constitutes a ‘cut’ across the ‘real’ which remains in itself inaccessible, as it is the very implication of the observer in the observed. The riddle of the necessary but impossible inclusion of the observer and the interface in the picture of the world would appear as a problem without solution. But Rossler suggest there might just be a little escape hatch from this unresolvable implication. He describes it as the construction of model worlds that include the model-observer and their interface with that model world, which allows us, by deferral, from our meta-position outside the model world, to study explicitly the implicit implication of the observer into the microscopic phenomena that transpire in the model world, and their influence on macroscopic phenomena in that model world.

Through this deferral it is possible to make explicit the relationships between the observer, the interface, and the ‘real’ world. While the true nature of the ‘real’ world remains as such unknowable, since all knowledge is a product of an interface whose structure and effect cannot be determined as there is no external position to the ‘real’ world from where this could be judged, this deferred study suggests next steps to bring the analysis closer to our own world. First of all Endophysics recognises the necessity to include the study of the human brain, the biological material substructure that structures the interface to the ‘real’ world. It attempts to bridge the gap between physics, neurophysiology and the subjective, the object of psychological study and psycho-analysis. Endophysics understands the world as something specific to each observer, defined and constituted by the specific structure of the observers’ brain and experience, but still attempts through this deferred study and return to the original observer to come closer to an explicit understanding of the interface that defines the world this observer inhabits and escape ‘mere subjectivism’, even if the interface itself remains ultimately inaccessible for external scrutiny.

It cannot be a coincidence that Rossler chooses his terminology of the interface as a ‘cut’ across the ‘real’ that we know so well from Lacanian psycho-analytical theory. In a Lacanian understanding it is the symbolic order that ‘cuts’ across the ‘real’, which is always in its place but is itself unknowable. The symbolic order, language par excellence, but also the wider objects of semiotic study, open the real as in a cut, without a sense of where or how this cut is applied. The subject is thus stumbling in the dark of that what cannot be known - the ‘real’ itself.

What the interface creates, both in Rossler’s conception as well as in Lacan’s, is not an access to the world, but the world itself. As such we can never study the world in its entirety as it s structured by the interface that exists prior to this world, but escapes its own detection by the observer - us as human subjects - being nothing more than the effect of an unknown interface that links us to a an equally unknown ‘real’. We continue to stumble in the dark, playing around whit the effects of the interface and delimited by its structural limitations, the structuring principles of which are unknown to us. When we try to observe them at their microscopic (fundamental) level they change as a result of our action. When we want to see place we cannot see time, when we want to see moment we cannot see space. The state of the fundamental building blocks of ‘reality’ is unknown to us until we look inside Shrodinger’s box, but when we look inside we produce the reality we observe. Outside the box the state of that reality remains undecidable, it can be one or zero, we just cannot know. Rossler also refers to Kurt Godel’s undecidability theorem that shows the limits of formal (explicit) reasoning in a thus far undisputed mathematical expos?.

What to do then, if we cannot extricate ourselves from the world to study the interface that produces our world as an ‘effect’? Should we give up trying to understand hat world, our world, our relationship to that world, as we are entangled in a senseless circulatory motion that will never get us closer to the ‘real”, closer to understanding, to ‘enlightenment’? Or is this all just a formal game, a puzzle, a fancy at best? Surely there are still ‘real’ passions, joys, pains, beauty and sublime suffering to engage with?

Rossler suggests one possible trajectory: the construction of model worlds. He sees them embodied in our times in virtual worlds, in simulations that can run on digital brains, in finite schemes of explicit description.

Well…, perhaps. But over the years (as a personal note on this) I have become increasingly disaffected with the sterile aesthetics and anaemic experience of virtual worlds. They simply do not capture my soul, or haunt my dreams. They do not stir my passions, as the dramatic foreshorthenings in a grand Caravaggio painting do. So I am wondering, can there be another way in which we can build a deferred reality that includes the observer and the implicit interface, suitable for explicit study? Such an undertaking would not simply be the construction of formal model worlds in finite schemes of explicit description, but much rather a more visceral experimental practice. Its object would have to be the construction and simultaneous deconstruction of the interface; the conscious explication of an interface with the aim to study the interfaces that implicitly structure our world - not just our experience of the world, but notably the world itself.

The reason why I am going into all this is that some of these thoughts were triggered by one work in particular I had the privilege of seeing ‘under construction’ (always the most exciting phase of a technologically invested art work, in preparation for the Piet Zwart Institute’s Media Design MA graduation show of 2008. An installation work by Danja Vassiliev. The monstrous machine he created felt like a psychoanalytically ambiguous tunnel that allowed a view into the very belly of the beast, as if we are looking at the inner life of the machines themselves. It looked a bit like the wonderfully kitschy culmination scene of the Matrix trilogy, where the story’s protagonist Neo visits the heart of the machine empire to negotiate a truce between men and machines.

Vassiliev constructed a patently absurd machine, called m/e/m/e/2.0[1], and finds himself (inadvertently or not) in the best company of a long tradition of ‘avant-garde’ artists who created various sorts of absurd, ironic, impossible, sadistic, insane or ridiculous machines. His likes are the creators of ominous bachelor machines (Duchamp, Lautreamont, Picabia, Roussel, Kafka), self-destructing machines of the Tinguely type, right down to the magically autistic robotic anti-sculptures of Allan Rath.

In his comments Vassiliev showed himself sceptical of the current infatuation with disembodied information, especially the world-wide web with its inapt page metaphors that suggest a stability where only flux and impermanence are the rule. To counter the loss of materiality in the info- interface, Vassiliev constructed an elaborate machine that allows us to look, through the tunnel in the installation an via a web cam on the web (yes the object of criticism is part of the work) at a stunningly analogue ‘interface’. The information is printed or drawn on half transparent sheets of circuit board material and becomes visible by a light that shines through the sheet from behind, like an electrical viewing box. To make the whole thing ‘interactive’, Vassiliev constructed a tunnel of surgically removed and reinserted cd/dvd computer drives, mounted at 45 degrees angle relative to each other, and hollowed out their sliders. The sheets are now covering the slide and the drive places a different sheet in front of the light - at the click of a mouse!

“My main problem was to get the camera to focus automatically”, said Vassiliev, as the slides of the drives necessarily had to be placed at different distances from both the source of light as well as the relative position of the observer/camera. So here some complex algorithmic manipulation had to be put in place to give us a readable ‘in-focus’ web cam image on the website - what would the point of the whole web-interface otherwise be if the image be systematically out of focus…?!

The interesting point of Vassiliev’s machine is that we can witness it in two forms at once, as a physical interface to a limited universe, five or eight half translucent sheets (depending on the number of drives mounted in the machine) containing some printed information, or maybe one or two hand- drawn images, whatever might be stored on those few lowly sheets, illuminated by the artists’ light from behind. Captured for us lower mortals by a cheap mass-consumption web cam and made visible again in an indirect exposure emanating from the computer screen in the from of a web page containing the webcam feed.

We need this double perspective to understand the nature of the interface, as a principle. We can witness it simultaneously from within the model world constructed by the artist (the feed on the web page), and from the outside as a materialised structure (in the installation). Obviously here the ‘content’ is not the point of the work. Neither is the medium the thing under scrutiny. Much more it is the interface: The way in which our relationship to whatever it is that is mediated is structured by this interface. By extension we can understand our relationship to the ‘real’ world as a question of interface and mediation through this deferred but still visceral model world.

One word of caution, though: The analogy of the biological brain to the electronic machine should not be taken too literally. We have witnessed over many century’s of scientific and engineering discourse a recurrent recourse to mechanistic models of the mind. Most recently within Hard A.I. research. According to this latter doctrine a symbol processing machine such as an electronic digital computer, should, if it is able to perform ‘typically’ human tasks (of symbolic processing) offer us a possibility, by analogy, to understand the mechanisms of the human mind and the workings of the human brain as a biological symbol processor. However, leaving the obvious contestations of scale and complexity aside (the complexity of the human brain outranks that of current computers by an enormous magnitude), these models offer very little insight, quite likely none whatsoever, into the workings of the human mind and brain. For the simple reason that human minds do not only process symbols, but also many other sensations. The brain itself is not independent of the rest of the body, most notably the nervous system. The biological brain is not silicon-based, and therefore essentially (physically, quantum-mechanically) different from electronic digital machines. And finally, humans are part of living cultures that transform with and through them, while the electronic digital machines are little more than a mere product of the same, without any significant immanent transcendent potential[2].

So the central issue in these experimental practices is not to create a literal analogy to the biological brain as such, but much rather to explore the question of the interface in a visceral manner. In fact virtually all works represented in the Media Design graduation show exemplify and embody this central point. They investigate, externalise, and manifest the interface to the domain of information, which lies at the heart of the digital machine.

In the case of Michael van Schaik’s Archus Browser[3] project he investigates simultaneously the (so far) never delivered promised of the semantic web, an information structure based on ordering by association of meaning and semantic properties, rather than syntactical and physical (and therefore often arbitrary) links, and the emerging practice of social tagging. Van Schaik’s project is the most purely informational of the group, but through its emphasis on extra-medial structuring and social praxis it clearly explores the interface as problem and suggests alternative approaches to the information interface.

Maria Karagianni’s project “Notations under Provisions” creates a linkage between the informational and embodied realm by creating a system in which Laban dance notations can be interactively performed with the help of a digital machine. But the linkage then exceeds the relationship of notation and performance by capturing this instant performance and putting it under copyright, utilising legal provisions that enable the copyrighting of a first-time performance of a dance score. The interface between the informational and embodied realm is thus extended into the social, institutional and legal realm. Copyright itself, of course, is a purely informational construct, and deeply contested one for that matter. The interesting transformation is the movement from the informational (a digital rendition of Laban notation) through the corporeal (the performance) back to the informational domain (the legal regime). Here again we can be both inside and outside the system to witness how the interface between these domains produces new realities as an ‘effect’.

In Gordan Savcic’s project “PlaySureVeillance”, similarly the interface between a physical game console, a game, and a hidden profiling system creates a play of entertainment and security politics. Player’s of hacked version of Nintendo’s Terror Toad are recorded, profiled and automatically presented and tracked on Facebook. In the course of the game more and more information is gathered of the participant and stored in a public record. The sinister politics of social coercion in the revered social web are revealed as a problem of unwarranted interfacing.

During my studio visit Ivan Monroy Lopez showed me a version of his algorithmic typography generator, where the typeface could be dynamically generated using a midi controller to influence seed parameters for the system. While the final version should be implemented in a web interface, this haptic interface seemed all the more prescient to the interrogation of the interface-problem, so it seemed to me.

Linda Hoffling’s “Remote Control / Democracy Player” fits in a series of projects that have attempted to deregulate the tight editorial control of mass-media channels - the ultimate tool for social normalisation. Here she proposes a series of participatory tools to influence the content and programming of a local Copenhagen TV station, subverting the logic of tight top-down control of the mass-brainwash-medium TV - it should include the on/off switch, which might have a devastatingly stroboscopic effect on the TCV transmission…

Salvador d’Souza’s Traditional Ritual Information System (TRIS)[4] explores the abyss of post-colonial transcultural misunderstanding. Investigating how to build web-based tools to support the study of symbolic and visual anthropology. In this case d’Souza is looking at the representation of Ghanaian Chieftaincy rituals and their relationship to world cultures. While these rituals are regularly and often erroneously framed as exotic and authentic (in the sense of untainted by external cultures), d’Souza reflects on the complex interrelations between Colonial history, migration and translocal linkages, as for instance in the Libation Pouring ritual, which as a local Ghanaian phenomenon is entirely dependent on De Kuyper’s Schnapps from Schiedam, another local but distinctively not Ghanaian product. The question is how the essential translocal and borderless nature of the world wide web relates to such local/translocal practices and linkages.

That in virtually all these projects the information interface and the inner life of the machine are at the heart of the works produced here is certainly no coincidence. Under the leadership of the Media design MFA, first by Matthew Fuller and now Florian Cramer, there has been a deliberate attempt to question the structure of the machine and the construction of the interface from its inception. Both Fuller and Cramer understand this necessity to dive into the machine, to turn its bowels inside out, to make explicit the implicit interface, to deconstruct and reconstruct it in visceral examinations. Some of the projects presented this year take this objective quite literally, while others imply the interface as a border and as a problem; a locus of activity even if the interface is ultimately a non- locality (because of its essential inaccessibility).

We could maybe even call this approach a ’style’, though both Fuller and Cramer would probably abhor such a notion. It is certainly significant, however, that the machine is turned inside out here to reveal that the interface is a permeable border which can be reconfigured through such visceral, sometimes haptic acts.

Eric Kluitenberg,
Amsterdam, June 2008.

[1] http://k0a1a.net/meme20/
[2] Granting some transcendent potential to self-programming machines - but only very little and limited…
[3] http://archusproject.org/
[4] http://tris.ofamfa.org/

[This essay was commissioned for the graduation catalogue of the Media Design M.A. of the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam, and will appear in the graduation catalogue designed by Open Source Publishing, Brussels. For more information on the graduation show YOU ARE PWNED at WORM Rotterdam, 4-6 July.]

With more than 73 million participants in online games and social networking sites such as EverQuest, Legend of Zelda, Second Life and World of Warcraft (to name but a few), and the recent introduction of motion-sensitive controllers such as the Wiimote, an opportunity exists to develop an innovative artwork engaging embodied users in a highly networked environment.

Applications will only be accepted from teams who fulfill all the grant requirements, including having the necessary artform experience. Artists who have professional experience in more than one artform can include this as part of their submission.

“_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ explores concepts that shape and are shaped by an extensive range of online / synthetic encounters. These concepts are formed through principles generated internally within specific online environments. These environments include - among others - Massively Multiplayer Online Environments [World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Second Life], Social Networking Platforms [Twitter, Facebook, OpenSocial], Social Gaming [Passively Multiplayer Online Game, Parallel Kingdom] and Alternative Reality Games [I Love Bees, Perplex_City, Year Zero]. Entries will dissect post-geophysically defined notions of reality through a mixture of:

* Platform-specific case studies.
* Analysis of contextual behaviour sets.
* Construction of theoretical projections derived via synthetic, mixed and augmented formats.”

Mez is a Futurist who has had a sustained presence in synthetic realities for over two decades. She is also an established net artist and game theorist who practices _Poetic Game Interventions_ [the creative manipulation of MMO parameters in order to disrupt or comment on various aspects of augmented states]. She is a widely exhibited, award winning artist and we are extremely fortunate to be able to present her work here and enjoy her company as a member of our guild.

Ars Virtua is a New Media Center and Gallery located in the synthetic world of Second Life, World of Warcraft and the World Wide Web. It is a new type of space that leverages the tension between 3-D rendered game space and terrestrial reality, between simulated and simulation. The Ars Virtua Foundation is a locus of research around the issues of reality within simulated environments.

Ars Virtua is sponsored by the CADRE Laboratory for New Media.

Anything that can be made, can be made black.

Part I: April 14, 2008; 7:00 pm :: MoMA, Titus 2 Theater, 11 West 53 Street, New York, NY - with Fan Di’an, Alex Adriannsens, Caroline Jones, Arthur Kroker, Erkki Huhtamo and Jordan Crandall (Moderated by Mike Stubbs)

Part II: April 15, 2008; 9:30 am - :: Tishman Auditorium, Parsons The New School for Design (The New School), 66 West 12th St. New York, NY (1) Beyond Body with Miao Xiaochun and Sissel Tolaas (Moderated by Caroline Jones) (2) Emotive Digital with Erkki Huhtamo, Kurt Hentschlager, Chirco Macmurtrie, Mariana Rondon (Moderated by Erkki Huhtamo) (3) Recombinant Reality with Jordan Crandall, Luc Courchesne, Marek Walczak, Friedrich Kirschner (Moderated by Jordan Crandall) (4) Here, There and Everywhere with Arthur Kroker, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Kim Machan, Bengt Sjölén, Li Zhenhua (Moderated by Arthur Kroker).

Part III: 8 pm :: Eyebeam, Center for Art and Technology, 540 W. 21st Street, (between 10th and 11th Avenues)
New York - Greetings by Amanda Crowley and Performances by Eyebeam resident artists.

Think virtually. Buy locally. Invisible Threads - a virtual sweatshop - will be operating live from Second Life and Eyebeam as part of the Synthetic Times Beijing Media Arts Symposium closing reception. The mixed reality performance explores the politics of virtual labor through the creation of a designer jeans sweatshop in the online, 3-dimensional world of Second Life. Simulating a real life manufacturing facility that includes hiring Second Life workers to produce real world jeans sold for profit, the project provides an insiders view into current modes of global, telematic production.

During the evening visitors will be able to order a pair of Double Happiness Jeans through the factory’s just-in-time telematic manufacturing process. Customers in the real world place their jean orders to the workers in the virtual factory via streaming audio and video. The workers, avatars controlled by humans sitting at computers around the globe, operate textile machines on an assembly line that produce the jeans. Styles include “MyPants”, “No Pants Left Behind” and the “LowRider”. Video.

Moving a mouse with your hand can be one of the most powerful actions a man can do in the beginning 21 century. Its one of the most common actions of modern everyday life work. The proletarian of the 21 century has not to deal with big machines, he transfers billions of dollars over the world - with one mouseclick. Huge amounts of data are generated, saved, copied and moved with this pretty unimpressive action. I can sit still for hours although moving me and the world. - Florian Kuhlmann (03/2008)

[1] space merged out of our thinking and virtual reality.

Based in Rennes, artist Laurent Duthion is a confirmed experimenter with sensations, objects and environments. Intensely curious about scientific research, he works with soil and crop researchers and has spent time in the Antarctic collecting samples of odours and discovering new vegetable and animal species. For Duthion the question is not one of blindly applying scientific experiments to the sphere of art, nor of claiming to revolutionise science with an artistic vision. He roams the fields of art and scientific research in order to upset our certitudes and put our perception of the body and space to the test. Art and science come up with new possibilities for human freedom, especially via their capacity to put together critical visions of our individual and collective relationships with the world.

At his exhibition at la criée centre for contemporary art, Laurent Duthion will be presenting ten experimental creations including:
– events at the private view: an underwater tasting using a sculpture-object (Aquarhine) and a buffet based on recipes invented by the artist
– installations that disturb our retinal and olfactory perceptions: fragrant synthetic fat, a reflective microbead wall, and Porte de Fresnel , a magnifying door
– a sculpture-object and a film testing the capacity of bodily energy to produce images: the Bolex-Mobile bicycle and Sunfest, an experiment filmed on the Arctic ice pack
– a topography of words and images covering the entire floor area and making palpable the experimental processes used by the artist (Paysage des négociations)
– the presence of an animal, a vulturine guineafowl, representing both an aspect of living systems and a visual logo.

The idea of a separate set of needs for ones Second Life is both absurd and fundamental. Abraham Maslow provides an interesting hierarchy for us that other than a few differences lays over the synthetic world very nicely, however avatars are not the people they represent and as such do not have the same needs. The Virtual Environments class at UCSD takes a look at the difference and similarity in this space, this borderland between avatar and human and reflects on different aspects of need for both.

The exhibit runs the gamut from a reflection on need in classic video games to views on identity and a left handed look at our surveillance society. Projects also tackle loftier more abstract subjects such as the positioning of governance and faith in the synthetic realm.

There will be a scheduled “end of life” performance at 7:30, and musical accompaniment throughout the night. We have a limited amount of “Free Parking” available on a first come first served basis and the unusual snackbar included.

Ars Virtua is sponsored by the CADRE Laboratory for New Media.

Computational Aesthetics bridges the analytic and synthetic and integrates aspects of computer science, philosophy, psychology, and the fine & performing arts. In particular it focuses on the mathematical and information theoretic aspects of both connectionist and symbol processing methods by humans and computers. Computational Aesthetics seeks to facilitate both the analysis and the augmentation of creative behaviour. It investigates the creation of tools that can enhance the expressive power of the fine and applied arts and furthers our understanding of aesthetic evaluation, perception and meaning. Invited talks will be given by individuals involved in the technical, artistic and theoretical aspects of this young field to help participants to better understand what aesthetics is, what computer technology is currently capable of delivering, and to appreciate what is involved in the creative process.

Call for Artworks, Performances and Artist’s Presentations: Members of the fine and performing arts community are invited to submit work and presentations about their work for consideration for the final program. Please note that full papers must be received by the earlier deadline of 15 March 2008 (see website for the cfp). The program organisers can provide some basic computer systems and data-projectors to support artist’s contributions however installations and performances that require additional support (or special technology) must include details of how the submitter will provide, install and support the work.

Submissions will be reviewed by the Arts Program international committee and accepted works will be included in a catalogue section of the conference proceedings which will be published by Eurographics and also appear in the Eurographics and ACM Digital Libraries.

Please send proposals including: descriptive overview (proposed catalogue entry) half page A4; images; sound samples; video; time-based works; technical specification; artist’s resume/biography and artist’s statement to the online portal below by the deadline of 15 April. Any work that requires a non-standard facility (codec, plug-in, etc…) must detail this and give a location where this may be sourced. Submissions should compose a pdf file as the descriptive overview (proposed catalogue entry) and be accompanied by a single zip archive containing all other files -or- the pdf should have links to these.

Important dates:

15 April 2008: Submission deadline - Arts Program
29 April 2008: Notification and catalogue draft - to you
2 May 2008: Approval of catalogue draft - from you
18-20 June 2008: Conference

Conference Chairs: Joaquim Jorge, INESC-ID, Portugal / Bruce Gooch, Univ. Victoria, Canada

Program Chairs: Technical Program: Douglas Cunningham, Univ. of T|bingen, Germany; Victoria Interrante, Univ. of Minnesota, USA
Arts Program: Paul Brown, Univ. Sussex, UK; Jon McCormack, Monash Univ., Australia Curator Local Arts Program; Adirito Marcos, Univ Minho, Portugal.

Further information: Paul Brown - paul@paul-brown.com - Arts Program only please!

The exhibition draws on SLAC’s continued interest in developing an awareness of the interconnectedness of space and material, with a goal of extending established notions of volume and scale. The gallery is fitted with sensors that draw real-time data from the installation and the people within the exhibition, which is then synchronized with streamed real-time data of solar activity and nuclear processes provided by SLAC and NASA. This information is then fed back into the object through layers of LED strands, re-visualizing the space in order to create an dynamic spatial experience.

Quasar Exhibition from Aaron Bocanegra on Vimeo.

The word “quasar” is a contraction of the term quasi-stellar-radio-source, used historically by astronomers to describe entirely unknown cosmological objects. Today, it is believed that quasars are the most distant, and yet still detectable, objects in the universe. Giving off enormous amounts of energy produced from massive black holes in the center of their own galaxies, quasars are intensely bright; their emitted light drowning out all other stars in the same galaxy.

“Quasar is an artificial counterpart hovering in response to the currents and activities of the visitors, and in doing so, stretches and collapses the horizons of the known. The possibilities of interrelated synthetic and natural processes begin to define new emergent ecologies. quasar questions the boundaries of scale and the psyche, offering immersion into a vastly expanded space which renders perception permeable, and in the end, disperses identity.”

Quaser will be exhibited at SCI-Arc until 9th March 2008 [posted by Ruairi Glynn on Interactive Architecture dot org]