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How is it that science and technology, often
considered indifferent to art, can now be found deeply entwined in
its domain?
Historically, in the west, the business of artificial worlds—of
visualizing our relations, fears, desires, and how we understand ourselves
to be—has been the almost exclusive domain of artists.
But that has changed. Now, our new information technologies are deeply
involved in the ways we re-imagine ourselves.
As humans become increasingly disconnected from nature and technologically
linked to a virtual world, our multiple senses are increasingly mediated.
Where do our psyche and physiology begin and end? What do we imagine
ourselves to be? The answers lie in the new territory where the worlds
of art, science, and technology converge.
Charged Hearts (1997) occupies this new territory. The piece
shamelessly mixes the look of an early science lab with an early 19th-century
art museum display of collectibles under glass. Upon entering, the
first impression is visually alluring and seems familiar. The
art-gallery experience appears to tell the visitor, “look, contemplate,
but don't touch.” Observe three simple brass cabinets. The two
shorter ones are identical, each displaying a bell jar with a single,
life-sized blown-glass heart. Inside each jar, an electrode emerges
from a copper spool and descends into the main artery of the heart.
Between these cabinets is a slightly taller one displaying a large,
glass sphere with a small, dark sphere inside. Glass-blown onto two
sides of the large sphere are electronic wires.
In the “don't touch” art-gallery experience, the boundaries
between the visitor and the objects are well defined. It is understood
where each begins and ends. But in Charged Hearts, the boundaries
are blurred or non-existent. The point of this work begins when the
visitor picks up the bell jar in the cabinet and turns the piece inside
out. As the heart is grasped, it
excites and begins to beat luminescently. Simultaneously the sphere,
the terrella
excites, forming a luminescent
plasma cloud of electromagnetic weather, a miniature version of
the unimaginable wireless dynamo that surrounds the earth and hides
in our household television sets. Holding hearts, plugging in, spectators
are literally and figuratively part of the electromagnetic fields,
a phenomenon they can barely see but can sense.
Plugging ourselves into the electronic world
Charged Hearts asks a question and responds aesthetically.
What is it like for us—human, flesh, blood, driven by heartbeats
of living electromagnetic charges—to plug into the electromagnetic
world that surrounds us? Our new technological environment is electromagnetic.
And so are we. Excitation is both the means and the end. Excite, say
physicists observing electron energy. Excite, we say when our hearts
are moved. Excite, say doctors watching heart tissue beat. We can
change heartbeats by a warm embrace, a cold dream, a fearful image,
or an electric charge. We are plugging one electromagnetic system
into another: ourselves into the electronic world. We can change heartbeats
and we can change minds.
This brings us to the brain. The heart is an excitable tissue. So
too is the brain. The follow-up piece to Charged Hearts is
called I was scared to death / I could have died from joy
(2000). In the piece, two stainless “clean” tables stand
in a large, dim room, one at either end. On each table is an oversized
test tube containing a blown-glass half brain, life-sized, with
spinal nerves. As the viewer approaches, the brain suddenly appears
to pulsate as the tube glows with luminescent gas in vertebrae-like
patterns. As the viewer touches the tube, an excited plasma follows
the fingers.
These particular art works set out to aesthetically investigate the
conditions of our culture's massive project: to engage our senses
in artificial worlds that are technologically simulated and aim to
surpass the natural world.
Virtual reality as an art experience
Some events can be called “found art.” Watching a human
form tethered by wires, blinded by a helmet and computer images,
gesturing with a gloved hand at the unseen,
and followed by handlers, is one of these “events.” A kind
of found performance art. These were the images of the first virtual-reality
system when it became a civilian event as NASA, the U.S. space agency,
moved technology from weapons development to a virtual environment
lab. Since the user literally wore the technology, it was an enticing
snapshot of immersion in new media environments. The technology was
all over the body, tracking, so close to the senses that it seemed
to be dealing directly with our ability to create mental images, plugging
us directly into a system.
As virtual reality has became more accessible, the popular understanding
of it has grown more confused. Many claim it as an immersion in a
realm of pure mind, seemingly abstract and bloodless, and at last
leaving behind the troublesome flesh. This commonly held opinion appeared
to reconstruct the mind/body split, which is puzzling since it was
an outdated paradigm in science and unfashionable even in conventional
medical circles.
In the late 1980s, the question of finding a way to investigate these
issues was not easily answered. The Banff Center for the Arts in Banff,
Alberta, was one of the few places in the world that could welcome
a multidisciplinary residency in virtual reality, the body, and art
practice. In 1991, this project became the BIOAPPARATUS residency
that played its part in setting the stage for the convergence of these
issues (at the same time, crucial support from the Canada Council
for the Arts meant travelling to Edmonton to work in the first Canadian
lab with immersive virtual-reality gear).
On the scientific research agenda was the question of simulating presence
in virtual worlds. But if we were attempting to simulate presence
in virtual bodies, we first had to ask a question: How did we know
if we were present in our material bodies? This question led to scientitic
expertise in the sense of proprioception, that is, the sense of inhabiting
our bodies (how we know we are). Remarkably, the research demonstrated
that this habitation of our material bodies turns out to be quite
unstable. Household technology used on a blindfolded subject could
illicit illusions of displaced bodies: an arm can be felt to be somewhere
other than where it is, even inside the body. Artists at Banff became
the willing victims of my inquiry. Fundamentally, the question became
this: What might happen if we displaced this bodily presence and found
a way to map it into virtual bodies?
The art pieces I have attempted to bring to life here result from
years of research and collaboration with scientists who were tuned
to complementary intuitions: neuroscientists, perceptual psychologists,
physicists, electrical engineers, medical researchers, computer scientists,
and mathematicians. Since the technology is an integral part of each
piece's intention, much of it is specifically developed including:
programming, evacuating glass tubes and filling them with gases, and
constructing high-voltage supplies (not to mention the installation
of a prototype at 4 a.m. the day of the exhibition opening that is
intended to run continuously for months of tactile accessibility to
the public).
Simulating our senses through technology
Canada has a history of artistic expression that perceives information
technology as a cultural artefact and artist terrain. The 1960s and
1970s were an explosive period of art happenings, multimedia art events,
performance art, video art, the first portopaks, satellite live art,
art installations, and Telidon (the first consumer graphic work station
and used by artists). Artists took Marshall McLuhan’s lament
perversely to heart. On one hand, McLuhan described media technologies
as wreaking drastic shifts in society. On the other hand, he singled
out the artist’s role: "In the history of human culture
there is no example of a conscious adjustment…to new extensions
(technologies) except in the puny and peripheral efforts of artists."
McLuhan was preceded by such Canadian thinkers as Harold Innis and
George Grant who were part of a general climate that included institutions
like the National Research Council, the National Film Board, the Department
of Communications, the Canada Council for the Arts; research labs
like the Structured Sound Synthesis Project at the University of Toronto;
and companies such as Alias Research and Softimage. It was a climate
that recognized the convergence of media technologies, science, art,
and culture. The artworks described here extend this historical thread
of awareness. It is an awareness that understood that, by technically
simulating our senses, we appropriate that power over our imaginations.
In contemporary terms, these early threads have spun further and further
into the social matrix. New information technology has became more
than computer image making, user interface developments, and displays.
There are now new visualization methods such as evolutionary algorithms
and visualization of complex data and data mining. The technology
has deeply implicated the viewer by imaging the formerly inaccessible,
such as the interior of the human body and its processes. It is also
profoundly implicated in the myriad of surveillance and tracking techniques
that can read minute physiological body changes, as well as feed into
complex models of dynamic systems. And it is becoming deeply enmeshed
in day-to-day life be it smart houses, smart agents, smart fabrics,
or smart toys.
While creating Charged Hearts in 1995 and reflecting on the
slippery language of physics and emotion, we were considering which
areas would be the next subject for simulation and mediation. Consequently,
our first project on emotion and intimacy was a Web site linked to
the glass hearts in Charged Hearts. The Web site was an ironical
look at an intimacy simulation: a real time, interactive, emergent
game of hearts where one’s heartbeat could become dangerously
over excited, have a heart attack, or become comatose. Its life depended
on the relationship with other users’ hearts, which could be
called in, dragging in their malcontent friends’ heartbeats with
them. With our slim resources, we cheerfully called it the slowest
game. However, it anticipated a move in information technologies to
model emotion, now among a trend of related ways to “make alive’’
new technological representations.
The moment when representations are “alive” may be seen
in the well-known first cinematic public event, when the audience
fled a film projection of an oncoming train. Looking back further
to the mid-1700s, it was also revealed when French philosopher Denis
Diderot recounted his experience of entering a painting and being
flooded with “sensations délicieuses.” Currently,
the same kind of moment may be seen when virtual reality users declare
they leave their bodies behind, or evolutionary algorithms are said
to be alive and evolving.
By 2000, the project of emotions, intimate interactions, and mediation
evolved into Method
and Apparatus for Finding Love (1 MB Acrobat PDF file), a
work of art that takes the form of a patent. The form was chosen as
a way to implicate both the world of art and the world of invention
in the construction of desire. As such, it critiques how technology
is developed and rationalized in North American culture. The patent
is a description of an art piece and a device: a wireless, embedded,
handheld, information technology device that will simultaneously act
as a new kind of personal information technology, and an instrument
that will collect data on its and the user's behaviour. In its first
exhibition, a young woman sat at a desk placed next to a locked room.
To enter the room, viewers were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement
promising not to reveal the contents of the artwork.
As the research progresses, it will present an opportunity to investigate
a speculative issue on the relationship of humans and intelligent
systems. There is continuing discussion that we are becoming “post
human” and mixed with intelligent machines that take on human
attributes. These works of art raise further questions. Is the initial
pleasure, the enticement of the mind and senses in both art and media
related to the obsession to “make alive” a world of representation?
Is this an extension of aesthetics? If so, then the aesthetic project
has been taken up by media and now information technologies. If this
seems to be the case, then the aesthetic project appears to go to
exceeding lengths to re-invent that moment of disbelief, with the
consequences played out in the human landscape.
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