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Bill Seaman: Exchange Fields An interactive video-sound installation about the body
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1. The combination of dance
and technology has generated interesting artworks in which
dancers incorporate technology as an extension or mirror of
their action. Thus, in "Vodka Konkav", a performance of
Wenedikt Jerafejew's poem "The Journey to Petuschki"
directed by Helena Waldmann, the dancers act behind a
milk-glas wall and can be seen by the audience only via five
big, transparent mirrors, which multiply, fragment, and
distort the dancers. Here technology has stepped between the
dancers and the audience not to make the presentation chic
and modern, as in many other cases, but to render the
surreal-hallucinatory journey of a drunkard through real and
virtual worlds. In other cases the marriage
starts from the other side: technology incorporates dance as
its subject. An example are the Macromedia Director pieces
2. The interface may be
considered the most important part of an interactive
installation. Its role is "to visualize the meanings inside
the system and to be transparent." Interfaces can be
manipulated "and must also explain to the user how to use
them." (1)
Fujihata speaks of the grammar of the interface,
which the user has to understand in order to "interact with
something that lies behind, with certain meaning." Once the
grammar has been grasped, the reader can as easily read as
she can write for in an interactive environment reading is
just the other side of writing. To put it this way: The user
can read her writing. To make the process easy one
can apply interfaces that are simple to understand such as
the bicycle in Jeffrey Shaws "Legible City" (1990/91) which
invites the user to bicycle through a city whose street
consist of letters. The city is projected onto the screen in
front of the cyclist who can navigate through by moving the
wheel. Such an interface is based on 'practical literacy'.
It does not threaten the volunteering user to find herself
in an embarrassing situation watched by the other viewers
who do not interact with the system. Other interfaces
deliberately deny the user such control over the system
driven by philosophical concern and pedagogical intention.
"For the most part, sense of control is a dangerous
illusion," as David Rokeby states whose "Very Nervous
System"-Installations are "systems of inexact control" that
negate the fetishization of control. According to Rokeby in
a good interaction system "each action on the part of the
user is as much a question as a statement," which proclaims
interface-illiteracy appears as a useful experience. (See
the What concerns Seaman's
installation, it kind of merges both extremes with respect
to both subjects discussed above. It presents the dance of a
real person but only projected as video and as a response to
the audience's action. The audience interacts with an easy
to read and to control interface, but only to learn that it
is absolutely controlled by the required actions. How does
"Exchange Fields" work? In "Exchange Fields" the
viewer can interact with 13 furniture-like objects made of
pressed wood displayed on the gallery floor in front of
three video projections. Each object - Seaman calls it
"furniture/sculpture" - is designed and labeled in
relationship to a particular part of the body. If the viewer
puts her leg into the appropriate box she will trigger the
projection of a dance sequence - choreographed and danced by
Regina van Berkel - focusing on the leg. If the user puts
her hand in the appropriate box, a moving hand will appear
on the screen. The installation is able to project four
overlapping dance sequences thus allowing four viewers to
interact with four furniture/sculpture at the same
time. sketch and drawing
for arm sculpture video sequence for
arm object In addition to the video
sequences , which are almost the only source of light in the
gallery, one hears "meditative sound playing in the
background, blending with the chanting of Seaman's lyrics
reflecting on human-machine relations." As Bill Seaman
states, the central question of "Exchange Fields" deals with
the generation of a new kind of interface: "how might an
embodied experience of interface be layered into the content
of an interactive media/dance comprised of video, text, a
sculptural installation and
music?"(2)
There are at least three ways to experience this piece.
Freshmen in the field of new
media art will be taken by the hypnotic composition of
visuals, sound, and material environment. They will
subscribe to the attached buzzword "interaction," test the
action-reaction-circle and enjoy the piece as cool and fun.
Sophomores have seen things
like this before and may ask with a weary shrug: So what!
The pure fact of being involved in the presentation of the
work excites them as little as the fact that there is a
theory and a history behind the concept of interaction and
that the voice-over-text includes clandestine quotes from
it. They may test the action-reaction-circle and enjoy that
they could tricks the system which triggers a food-focussed
video sequence while a hand was moved into the food
box. Juniors finally have grown
beyond both the naïve enthusiasm and the
been-there-done-that ennui. They will consider what actually
happens in this interaction. They will take into account
that the interface partly looks like x-ray-boxes in which
one has to immobilize one's limbs to have 'them' appearing
and moving on the screen. This is what they may
think: The fact that I have to wait
before my immobilized leg triggers the video clip of its
alter ego first seems to be a flaw in the program. However,
soon I understand that it goes well with the demand for
immobilization. By the same logic, if I move my body again
its alter ego on the screen disappears. It is as if I trade
my body for hers, leg for leg, arm for arm, and head for
head. The reality of my body, which I haven't been very
content with lately since - because of all the assignments -
I don't find time to work out anymore, the reality of this
very body of mine is traded for the projection of a foreign
body on the screen, that appears in dramatic lighting and
camera moves and is imbued with implicit eroticism. The
corporal (thick, fleshy, old, exhausted) body is exchanged
for the ideal body. To an extent - our juniors'
mind may proceed - one can see this installation as a way to
convert the viewer into the sculpture. This sculpture is not
still as those great sculptures of the ancient time, however
it idealizes, transcendences the body as much as those do.
One change in the setting would make this clear. Imagine the
immobilization of your body would trigger the appearance of
an old, wrinkled, washed-out body. Would you still want to
interact within this installation? How would this change
your reception? Seaman's voice-over text
ends with the words: "Motion becomes you, emergent of
flows." This line is ambiguous enough to be read in
different ways. One surely would be right to understand it
as an emphasis on the substitution of bodies. The other
body, whose motion is triggered by my immobilization,
becomes me, becomes my ideal. I project myself onto the
screen. This screen represents more than itself - the
juniors would move on entering a new hermeneutic level - it
embodies TV, cinema, and advertisement on billboards: places
that confront us with the beautiful body, inform our own
body ideal. But only here, in this interactive setting of
exchanged bodies are we really urged to discover this
ongoing substitution and our contribution to it. Here we
think about it; and half the thinking is feeling (the end of
my actual body) while conducting this interaction (putting
my body out of action). This perspective does not
stop with the notion that the interface is designed to bring
out movement of the viewer's body. It is true the
furniture-objects cause the viewer walking through the room
to reach them. However, this movement is actually part of
any installation or even classical sculpture requiring the
viewers to walk around it. The point is that after reaching
the object one is expected to move certain parts of the
body, to put them in or at the furniture/sculptures. As we
have seen, this is only half the grammar this interface
requires us to grasp. Part of the "physical engagement of
the participant", which Seaman announces for his
installation, is the demand to stop moving in order to carry
out the interaction. The juniors above have shown how this
'writing' can be read. Tilman Baumgärtl, who
obviously does not like "Exchange Fields" very much, reports
that maleficent viewers try to make the system
crash.(3)
Baumgärtl considers this as the revenge of friends of
art who dislike to be made into interactive guinea pig. We
now know what is really behind it. Such intention is either
the unintended result of freshmen enthusiasm or the blind
reaction of bored sophomores - or it is the defense of those
who have seen through the system of substitution.
published on dichtung-digital 2/2004 |
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