An Immersive Interactive Audiovisual Installation
created by: Kenneth Newby, Aleksandra Dulic, Martin Gotfrit
commissioned by the Beall Center for Art and Technology - Exhibited there 01/08/08 - 03/15/08. Recent exhibition at the Museo d'Arte Contemporane Villa Croce, Genova, Italy 06/03-05/08 as part of NIME2008.

in a thousand drops… refracted glances explores the way identity is constructed in an increasingly fragmented milieu.  Using a media diffusion technique of dynamic granular anamorphosis on multiple screens and audio channels the work presents fragments of the body of the human in hybrid relations to itself, others and a fragile environment.  Facets of a whole under construction form an audible and visible dissonance which requires a synthesis of the human embodied and aspects of the non-human environment.  Consonance is achieved in this synthesis of the subject and the body of nature.  A dynamic steady-state is maintained between an anxiety in the face of dissolution against the necessity of building identities within diversity.  Illusion is dissolved to reveal a background made of deeper perennial questions:  Who am I? What is my community? Where do its boundaries exist and how permeable might they be?

The experience of in a thousand drops… refracted glances is of a sculpture in space that becomes a single image as one interacts with the space of the exhibition.  The ongoing audiovisual image is one of the construction and deconstruction of bodies through processes of stitching, collage, multiplication, and reduction.  As a result of these processes new hybrid bodies are born that speak to the variety and complexity of the ecological balances that depend on the mutual interdependencies of the community of agents that make up its population.  The work continuously and dynamically shifts its focus providing opportunities for the participant to engage in a spectrum of modes of attention — from lateral to narrowly focused.  Interactions with the work take the form of refracted glances both rewarding and confounding in an ongoing process of making sense of a chaosmos — the balance between confusion and order — the fantastic and the logical — dream and reality.

(Version June 8, 2007)

conceptual model (version 5/6/07)

video documentation can be viewed here

In 2003 Kenneth Newby and Aleksandra Dulic and I forged  an application for the inaugural round of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council`s Fine Arts Research Creation Grant. What emerged was an enterprise titled:

Computational Poetics: Logic Machines and Creative Process

Our main concern is the use of computers in the creative process and in particular, real-time performance and immersive environments where composition is a cross-disciplinary process. Our hallmark is the interaction between the user and the work. Two principles of note:

• These emerging art practices require software capable of composition.
• The study, design and realization of these new art forms requires an exploration of their antecedents: i.e. older forms such as Indonesian shadow theatre.

Our approach is predicated upon the overarching notion that the computer is an artistic medium. We believe encoding practice: i.e., writing software that is an integral part of creation, is the essential methodology of this research and that the resulting software must facilitate and accelerate the self-examination of creative process by the artists engaged with it. To this end we've built a set of Max/MSP/Jitter software tools (Useful Abstractions) available on the CP site.

Our process encompasses practice-based and scholarly research: Specifically the design of open-ended, accessible compositional software (for music, moving images, navigable virtual worlds, installations and sound), the creation of artwork, active exchange with artists and scholars and the study of older, braided narrative forms and ethnography.

This project built upon the ongoing work an interdisciplinary team with the valued contributions of other artists and researchers: software design, scholarly research, artistic practice (music composition and performance, film and video, sound design, installation art) and world culture (Indonesian shadow theatre and music).

The issue of availability and affordability is essential to this project. Clearly current desktop/laptop systems and modest projection devices can provide a rich environment at modest cost.  When combined with the project outcomes we envision, individual artists and smaller institutions may no longer face the barriers of expensive, complex systems and dedicated software and hardware personnel.

Outcomes: (please see works & CP site)

(a) A complementary set of user-modifiable tools and templates for composition, using affordable hardware and software; 

(b) Research publications reflecting this work and our examination of braided narrative forms from a variety of cultures; including papers, ethnographies, conference presentations, our web site (which contains the tools and publications);

(c) Artworks; and

(d) Innovations in training and pedagogy...

From these rather lofty notions, or perhaps relatively simple ideas couched in grant-speak, several themes have taken hold:

• The dialectic (as expressed by Paul Klee) of chaos and cosmos - Chaosmos

• Our emergent conception of Media Ecology

- balancing practice with innovation and change

- applying soundscape principles of diffusion to image projection

• Following Duchamps and Cage we are mindful of the notion of art as attention

• Under Practice

- abide by the conviction that whenever possible perform rather than present thus -

- we continue our long standing engagement with improvisation or an `opening to the spontaneous` as well as an embodied practice in music performance and extend this approach to cinema and animation as a real-time performative art

- give consideration to the story

- embrace the unfashionably beautiful