Technology and Creativity: technology, multimedia and the

creative arts

Dr. Fionnuala Conway

Introduction

• Artist using technology

• ME – music and creative arts

• Have done work in music, theatre, wearable technologies, installation art.

• Interested in using multimedia and technology to inform how I work, what I create and how I think.

• How does it extend and inform what I do.

• As an artist, I’m on a quest to do something new and different! Multimedia and technology has a big part to play in that.

Art and Technology

• Long history in creative arts of people

using technology to:

– Make their work more efficient e.g. digital animation

– Do new things with new technologies e.g.

Video Art

– Develop new technologies to suit their artistic needs and requirements e.g. music technology, Adobe Photoshop.

Overview of talk

We are now in the age of digital technology and multimedia.

1. Describe characteristics of this new form and way to work.

2. Context: provide a brief history of how creative work has been influenced, altered and made possible because of the work of artists and engineers exploring current and new technologies plus examples to illustrate.

3. Selection of my work.

DEFINITION OF MULTIMEDIA

• Difficult to define a dominant theme behind

the emergence of this new media

• Many different forms have come from it: DVD, WWW, interactive installation,

Virtual reality.

• NO accident – qualities were the

deliberate intent on the part of

multimedia’s pioneers (technical and

artistic), who were aiming for quite

coherent goals (Packer & Jordan, 2002).

Digital versus multimedia

• Not everything digital is multimedia.

• Digital - traditional artforms have been made more efficient.

• Digital media – continuing traditional art forms – Example: Using Photoshop to enhance images.

– Example: in the case of computer animation or graphics, technology makes the work easier and does it better.

– Example: Your favourite book screened on a personal digital assistant still remains a 19th century novel

• Technology has not changed the artform. • [Add animated illustrations, hyperlinked text, an online

discussion group, or an online role-playing game that takes the place of the setting of the book, the text might become the basis for a multimedia work…

Characteristics of MULTIMEDIA

What are the characteristics of multimedia that set it apart from other media?

1. Integration – the combining of artistic forms and technology into a hybrid form of expression

2. Interactivity – the ability of the user to manipulate and affect her experience of media directly, and to communicate with others through media

Characteristics of MULTIMEDIA

3. Hypermedia (and hypertext) – the linking of separate media elements to one another to create a trail of personal association.

4. Immersion – the experience of entering into the simulation or suggestion of a 3D environment

5. Narrativity – aesthetic and formal strategies that derive from the above concepts, which result in nonlinear story forms and media presentation.

(Packer & Jordan, 2002).

Illusion and immersion.

• We’ve always had a fascination with illusion and immersion.

• Fantasy of being transported to another world, to be taken into an imaginary realm, is a primal desire.

• These spaces tend to integrate different artformsand are immersive spaces.

Using different media and immersion

• These immersive environments date from around 15000BC.

• are thought by scholars to have been theaters for the performance of rituals that integrated all forms of media and engaged all the senses.

• Computer modeling and sophisticated equipment have calculated frequencies and timbres, demonstrating that stone-built chambers, sanctuaries, and even caves were deliberately constructed to enhance ritual sounds.

Prehistoric cave paintings found at the caves of Lascaux in the South

of France.

• Imagery: painted animal images and shamanist scrawls on walls.

• Joseph Campbell – “these magical spots occur far from the natural entrances of the grottos, deep within the dark, wandering chill corridors and vast chambers, so that before reaching them one has to experience the full force of the mystery of the cave itself”.

• one has to immerse the self in an otherwordlydomain, which would heighten consciousness and trigger altered states of perception, before encountering the cave paintings.

Other examples in history of art

• Cathedrals of Europe: lot of research into how spaces influenced the music composition. Musical example

• Renaissance and Baroque illusion spaces

• Andrea Pozzo: used perspective techniques to make illusions extending architectural space into the heavens. Pozzo's work is a virtuoso application of one-point perspective, a then-new technique.

Richard Wagner | Total Artwork <1849> - Integration of Arts,

Illusion, Immersion

• Wagner – introduced the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk or Total Artwork in an essay called “The Artwork of the Future”.

• One of the first attempts in modern art to establish a practical, theoretical system for the comprehensive integration of arts.

• sought the idealized union of all the arts through the “totalizing”, or synthesizing effect of music drama – the unification of music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts, and stagecraft.

Wagner

• Gesamtkunstwerk – driven by a vision of

theater in which the audience loses itself

in the veracity of the drama, creating an

immersive experience.

• Designed space and technology to

reinvent the conventions of the opera

house

Wagner’s design

• 1876 - opened the Festspielhaus theater in Bayreuth, Germany.

• Intention – to maximize the suspension of disbelief, to draw the viewer into an illusionary work staged within the proscenium arch.

– used Greek amphitheatrical seating,

– surround-sound acoustics,

– darkening of the house,

– placement of musicians in the orchestra pit,

– focused audience’s attention on the dramatic action.

Gesamtkunstwerk - influence

Any suggestions for other technologies

that could immerse viewers, create illusion

and integrate art forms?

Futurists

• 1916 manifesto – F.T. Marinetti and others

- declared film to be the supreme art

because it embraced all other art forms

through the use of (then) new media

technology.

• Only Cinema, they claimed had

the ‘totalising’ effect on human

consciousness.

Artistic History -

INTEGRATION AND

INTERACTIVITY

John Cage

• John Cage, with Merce Cunningham and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns – devised theatrical experiments to dissolve boundaries between art forms.

• Particularly attracted to aesthetic methods that opened the door to greater participation of the audience, especially if these methods encouraged a heightened awareness of subjective experience.

• Use of chance-related technique shifted responsibility for the outcome of the work away from the artist .

Cage - Influence on others

• 1950s – Allan Kaprow, Richard Higgins,

Nam June Paik

• lead to emergence of genres such as Happenings, electronic theater,

performance art, and interactive

installations.

ALAN KAPROW – ‘Happening’

• Kaprow – particularly interested in blurring distinction between artwork and audience.

• The ultimate integrated art would be without an audience, because every participant would be an integral part of the work.

• 1966 primer “Untitled Guidelines for happenings”, “the line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible”.

ALAN KAPROW – ‘Happening’

• Approach led to a performance style that pioneered deliberate, aesthetically conceived group interactivity in a composed environment.

• Happenings artists devised formal elements that allowed participants the freedom to make personal choices and collective decisions that would affect the performance.

Modern reenactments:

Allan Kaprow – POSE Reinvented -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hzNKLx9jio

INTEGRATION OF

TECHNOLOGY

BILLY KLUVER

• artists became increasingly interested in

using technology in their work.

• not until Billy Kluver, Bell Labs scientist, placed the potential of advanced

engineering in the hands of artists in New

York that integrated works of art and

technology began to flourish.

Robert Rauschenberg + Billy Kluver - ORACLE 1963-65

Now at Beaubourg in Paris.

Audience participation, technology, different art forms.

• Oracle is a sound environment made up of five AM radios, where the sounds from each radio emanates from one of the five sculptures. The viewer can play the sculpture as an orchestra from the controls on one of the pieces, by varying the volume and the rate of scanning through the frequency band. But they can not stop the scanning at any given station.

• The impression was that of walking down the Lower East Side on a summer evening and hearing the radios from open windows of the apartment buildings.

• All of the material for the sculptures Rauschenberg had found on the streets of New York.

Kluver and Andy Warhol: Silver Clouds <1965>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCWrc9ZUTC8

“In his 47th Street studio, Andy Warhol asked me one day if we could make him a floating light bulb. We made some calculations and discovered that it was not possible with existing battery technology. While working on the idea, my colleague at Bell Labs found a material called Scotchpak which was relatively impermeable to helium and could be heat sealed. The U.S. Army used it to vacuum pack sandwiches. I brought some of the material to Andy and then he decided to use it to make clouds. While we were experimenting with how to heat seal curves and balance the clouds so they wouldn't fall over, Andy took the material, folded it over, and made his own version of Silver Clouds.”

Virtual Reality and Immersion

MYRON KRUEGER – interactive installation

• Work going on at the same time (Ivan Sutherland - “The ultimate display would…be a room within which the computer can control existence of matter”. Launched an entire field of scientific inquiry and fuelled the imagination of a generation of artists…VR…

• One of first artists to consider the possibilities of digitally constructed virtual experiences.

• Krueger originally trained as computer scientist and was heavily influenced by John Cage and Allan Kaprowexperiments in indeterminacy and audience participation.

• Early 70’s, created the pioneering works GLOWFLOW, Metaplay and Videoplace to explore the potential of computer-mediated interactivity.

MYRON KRUEGER – interactive installation

• Artificial Reality – phrase coined by Krueger

• wanted to create an artificial reality that would perceive human actions in a simulated world of sight, sounds, and other sensations and would make the experience of this illusion convincing.

• to create artificial realities where people could participate with their entire body without wearing any special instruments (be they sensors or displays) in an synthetic experience created by the computer.

• In the VIDEOPLACE installation, the

participant faced a video-projection screen

while the screen behind him was backlit to

produce high contrast images for the

camera (in front of the projection screen) and allow the computer to distinguish the

participant from the background.

Videoplace

VIDEOPLACE

• the computer had control over the relationship between the participant's image and the objects in the graphic scene.

• It could coordinate the movement of a graphic object with the actions of the participant.

• A series of simulations could be programmed based on any action and Videoplace offered over 50 compositions and interactions (including Critter, Individual Medley, Fractal, Finger Painting, Digital Drawing, Body Surfacing, Replay, among others).

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmmxVA5xhuo

Scott Fisher –engage the entire nervous system

• 70s and 80s, several engineering projects pursued virtual environment display systems that could represent such an artificial reality.

• Most significant of these (mid-80s), led by Scott Fisher at the NASA-Ames Research Center.

• F’s intent was to engage the entire nervous system in a multi-sensory presentation of virtual space – extending multimedia beyond the screen.

VIEW (Virtual Interface Environmental Workstation)

• included a headset with 2 small liquid crystal display screens, a microphone for speech recognition, earphones for surround-sound effects, a head-tracking device, and a datagloveto recognise the user’s gestures and place them in the virtual environment.

• 1989 article “Virtual Interface Environments” -“with full body tracking capability, it would be possible for users to be represented in this [virtual] space by life-size virtual representations of themselves in whatever form they choose. ”

Char Davies – Osmose 1995 – use of VIEW

• immersive interactive virtual-reality environment installation with 3D computer graphics and interactive 3D sound, a head-mounted display and real-time motion tracking based on breathing and balance.

• The immersant travels to Clearing, Forest, Tree, Leaf, Cloud, Pond, Subterranean Earth, and Abyss.

CAVE

• most research in Virtual Reality aims to project viewer into a digital environment by means of a head-mounted display.

• Early 90s, Daniel Sandin and Thomas DeFanticonceived a Virtual Reality system that places the human body directly inside a computer-generated environment.

• http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=8&type=1&indi=2 – vid of CAVE

Summary: History – 2 timelines

1. Technical - since WW2, scientists have pursued personal computing and human-computer interactivity as vehicles for

transforming consciousness, extending memory, increasing knowledge, amplifying the intellect, and enhancing creativity.

2. Artistic – long history of using current technologies to facilitate and enhance creative expression.

Examples of my work

• Urban Chameleon (2003) – wearable

technology

• Reactive Performance dress (2004)

• Art of Decision (2005)

• Urban Chameleon looks at the ability of reactive garments to influence and change perceptions of one's surroundings. Part of ongoing work which looks at how environmental stimuli displayed on the body can affect urban behavior and communication.

Reactive Performance Dress

Reactive Performance Dress -video

http://www.vimeo.com/2796979

Art of Decision

• The Art of Decision is a large-scale immersive interactive multimedia exhibition that consists of a series of rooms that immerse visitors in situations that invite them to reconstruct their perception of political structures and political involvement. The exhibition offers visitors an opportunity to travel through 9 interactive rooms that present opinions and ideas about power and decision-making from a variety of research participants in an engaging, theatrical way. Contributors’ ideas are presented alongside statistical information in a meaningful and innovative fashion using sound, film and interactive installations. The technology also facilitates visitors to contribute their ideas to Art of Decision as it evolves in the space and in future research.

Art of Decision

• There were over 3000 visitors to the Art of Decision exhibition in the 2-week period of its presentation.

• The exhibition presents 9 interactive installations created from 2003-2005 that include DATAmap, Decisions³, The VIP room, Rite of Passage, Powerhouse, Finding Your Voice – Mamo’sstory, Finding Your Voice – Siobhan’s story, Rantroom, Art of Decision Daily Post.

• Documentary online at http://www.vimeo.com/2771258

• Exhibits vary in how they use:

– Space,

– Lighting

– Interaction

– Technology

– Media

– Exploration of the space is very important.

DATAmap

• DATAMAP is a large-scale immersive multimedia installation that presents factual information on the levels of representation in Irish State bodies, with a focus on gender balance. It is a large interactive map of Ireland designed to present information in a novel way on 6 surrounding projector screens. As they walk across the map, visitors trigger animations that present statistical data on the gender balance on Irish State bodies in over 70 locations around the country.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMol-vf5V0w

Art of Decision DailyPost

• Visitors to this exhibit are immersed in a giant newspaper where the front page of the Art of Decision Daily Post is projected. Visitors can relax here and use their mobile phones to text or email their opinion and comment on the current affairs headline of the day.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIwhXQtSwRc

Rite of Passage

• The Rite of Passage gathers images of visitors’faces and superimposes them on members of the Dáil. In doing this, it challenges visitors to

think of themselves in positions of power, while also gathering contributions in a creative and alternative way. Visitors leave a mark of their identity on the dynamically-changing Rite of Passage.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wewhv2I8SiI

Some of my artistic concerns for public art creation

• Meaningful interaction

• Technology is not just there for

technology’s sake

• Important that work is accessible and

intuitive

• Technology can put people off so attempt

to hide it.