Editorial
“…Technology provides tools usually designed for a specific purpose responding to a specific demand. The artist finds other uses for those same tools by making them do things beyond what they were constructed to do, and in doing so, advances the humanistic application of the technology. Those uses can be as simple as Man Ray’s filming with an up-side-down camera in the 20’s - a good example of that pushing beyond “normal� use, or as complex as Woody Vasulka building a digital video synthesizer. Artists socialize machines and technology by discovering an esthetic use for them, sometimes creating new demands for machines to which engineers must respond. This fact has been demonstrated over and over again in the field of electronics. Artists first entered there in a spirit of play, the safest and surest way of overcoming our natural intimidation toward a complex technology. The second step has been the mastery of the technology through longer term experimentation and production. Finally we find the artist actually inventing, or collaborating on the invention of new systems in order to respond to his or her creative needs. Every artist mentioned in this book has passed through those stages, and that will continue to be the case for each new technological system invented.
Each of those stages has its concrete results which clearly identify the different levels of evolution of this form of creativity. In the first phase both the artist and the public are surprised by the results, both amazed by the nearly accidental discoveries of the artist, images and forms never before seen. The second phase demands more sophistication on the part of artist and spectator where the technology is mastered and consciously used by the artist to achieve what he has set out to create. Here he or she generally begins to understand the limitations of the technology and starts the move to stage three, developing extensions of the technology to satisfy personal creative demands. At this point, the artist and the work become meaningful to the technological evolution of society, since the real integration of the technological system into the human environment has begun. It is no longer a passive tool serving predetermined human needs, but an active system evolving as man evolves. It is an integral part of human culture.
This interaction between the creativity of the artist, the evolution of a technological process and the reaction of the public represents a new form of relationship between these entities, providing new experimental potential for exploring the future of these new systems as we attempt to define them, all in keeping with a very dynamic definition of cultural evolution. This is the role of the artist as educator of perception, as defined by McLuhan, dealing with the technologies that are changing the way we perceive our world and therefore understand it. The world-view expressed in the totality of artistic production, while ahead of the general public, participates in the education of that public and at the same time expresses something that the public understands as being important and part of the partially understood change taking place today.(Don Foresta �Mondes Multiples")
Executive Summary
In general, all the projects in ALTERNE operate in a complex technical environment which limits their use in other areas and over other support structures. The experimentation and production was on a very high level but confined to two virtual spaces, that of the SAS Cube, which required the set-up existing only in Laval and that of the high bandwidth network, at this point historically, limited to the academic networks of member countries. This will undoubtedly change in the future and the work done will be more accessible to a wider and wider public as bandwidth grows and the various teams move into other potential presentation spaces.
The situation under the ALTERNE project was very much a laboratory situation in which work was realized for its research and exploratory benefit above all. That is not to say that the work done was not complete. The artistic production was in every case completed to the satisfaction of the artists involved and can be shown to any public on the condition that the technical set-up be available. More importantly the experimentation helped artists anticipate coming possibilities in the creative realm that will lead to future work, not necessarily with the exact same tools, but certainly with the same artistic and communicative possibilities.
In every case the artists felt that the experience opened new possibilities and new avenues of production and research. Most had not worked with Unreal Tournament or the SAS Cube. On the other hand, Mathias Fuchs had had a long experience with UT and had already worked extensively with the high bandwidth network. His experience with that tool allowed him to move immediately into the major technical propos of his work, the combining of the virtual space of UT with the networking possibilities of Access Grid and the high bandwidth academic network. Louis Bec and the team from Cypres have worked for many years in artificial life forms. Their work with the SAS Cube and UT gave them a major step up in their work by allowing them to create artificial life forms in a controlled environment to test their various propositions. All artistic teams have had long experience with IT tools and that experience permitted a rather rapid movement to new and more demanding technologies.
The project is not a closed book, and only this first chapter was completed. It was obvious that while work was finished, other aspects were suggested through the thorough exploration of the possibilities at hand. Most of the artistic teams considered their work to be a piece of a larger whole. Some discovered a new set of tools, others a new environment to be explored. There is still much to invent including other means of presentation in order to reach larger audiences.
The technologies used were also not an end in themselves. They suggested avenues of exploration to which the creative teams committed themselves for the duration of this project. Some of the teams will undoubtedly stay with the technological set-up developed; others will go further in one direction or another. In the cases of WSA and Cypres, the platforms built will be used in an ongoing fashion, either to complete and perfect a platform for online presentations or use the environment built to continue experimenting with the original idea. Both beg the question of accessibility to the tools developed.
Since the SAS Cube is essentially a one-of-a-kind installation, it is difficult to imagine an ongoing access to that structure for further artistic exploration or production, nor an easily available means for the public to view the work already done. However, having access to that technological set-up was very useful and provocative and changed the way artists saw their work. In doing so, the change in perspective parallels that discussed by Marcel Duchamp one century ago, who, when talking about artistic debates at the beginning of the century recounted, "at the time, we argued intensely about the 4th dimension and non-Euclidean geometry. Most people thought about these questions in a passionate but non-professional way. And in spite of our misunderstandings, these new ideas helped us break away from conventional ways of thinking."
Likewise, working in a new virtual space can break down unconscious conditioning and set in motion other approaches and other ways of looking at the world. The work in virtual space acquainted the artists with new dimensions and a further, still developing stage, for their work. In moving that work from the virtual space of the SAS Cube to the virtual space of the network, another mind set is created as new questions are posed. This will be part of the on-going experimentation resulting from the ALTERNE project.
Another small limitation indicated by the artists was the fact that the Unreal engine is copyright protected which could create problems for future development and distribution. The existing rights situation with UT more than allows for the kind of limited distribution necessary at this level. If, in the future, the artists wish to continue in this direction, changing to an open-source gaming engine would easily solve that problem.
A challenge will be to find other ways of showing the work done and adapting it to other support systems reaching other audiences. Work already operating over the network will have little trouble continuing in the same direction, particularly as bandwidth availability increases. The wide range of work done for the SAS Cube is another question and making that work in other technical spaces will take further development with the work presented. CIANT has already started on a network presentation of their work and is talking to Cypres about doing the same. Marc Palmer has expressed an interest in completing his work and moving it to the network space.
In the opinion of this writer and others in the project, Qualitative Physics has always been part of the artistic toolbox. It is nothing more than a scientific explanation of the surrealists’ dream – liquid watches hanging from trees, mountains suspended over oceans. The provocative transformation of physical laws has always been the domain of the artist. The revelation of reality coming from the transformations of artificial life in a virtual universe, which Cypres has pursued, is another way of saying the same thing. This has been one of the implicit forces in art for well over a century.
“By insinuating into his canvases mountains that lose mass and apples that do not fall, Cezanne undermined the classical concepts of mass and space. And he did so a full generation before the scientific community discovered that the paradigm of mass, space and gravity had to be revised.
Cezanne can be credited with changing the way the artist envisioned the relationship of space and mass. His accumulated insights departed radically from the precepts of the academic tradition. Space, no longer an empty stage upon which an artist merely presents objects, which were in turn altered by the space in their vicinity. Many of Cezanne’s works do not sharply delineate a boundary between space and mass because the boundary is an interactive tensile interface.
To understand better the subversive images of Manet, Monet and Cezanne regarding gravity, it is necessary to jump ahead in time to the revolution that occurred in physics in the beginning of the twentieth century. These artists had initiated an inquiry in the late nineteenth century about the relationship of space and mass.�1
The fact that Qualitative Physics now exists has given us a tool for transforming those same approaches into virtual space in order to experiment more fully with the meaning behind those transformations. By translating those artistic ideas into scientific concepts, the technological world has the means to create the technological tools for exploring the artistic ideas, reflecting back, in both artistic and scientific terms, on the representation of reality. It is part of the chain of artist from science to scientist from art to artist and scientist working together.
"The spirit of a time is probably a fact as objective as any fact in natural science, and this spirit brings out certain features of the world which are even independent of time, are in this sense eternal. The artist tries by his work to make these features understandable... The two processes, that of science and that of art, are not very different. Both science and art form in the course of the centuries a human language by which we can speak about the more remote parts of reality."2
