MFA thesis project documentation
G. Craig Hobbs
interACTIVATE – digital art :: social impact The Digital Arts and New Media MFA program at UC Santa Cruz presented the work of ten graduate students in a two-part exhibition at The Museum of Art & History in downtown Santa Cruz. Entitled interACTIVATE, the UCSC DANM MFA presentation was the culmination of two years of research and artistic exploration into digital media art and its social impact. The show included new media works that explore performativity, interactivity, participation and politics. These works probe the interplay of private and public space as they interrogate the borderlands, edges, and contested territories of contemporary new media art practice. My thesis installation - In Situ ∆ ~ the embodied search - was featured during the second part of the exhibition |
A moon suspended at eye level generates a low frequency oscillation tone that I can hear and feel in my body. The full orb floats in space for a time. Then suddenly the camera zooms, forcing it back into the blackness of night. Like a UFO sliding across the horizon. Only to reappear later as a small dot expanding out from the center of the screen. Brought forth, fully illuminated. And then the cycle repeats itself. A moon loop.
This moon is composited upon a scene of moss encrusted roots and rocks supporting a tall tree balancing precariously on the edge of a mountain stream. The roots reveal seasonal strife, warped and twisted tendrils wrapped tightly around a lichen encrusted boulder. A dead leaf twirls from the remains of a spider’s web. Time does not stand still in this image. It never will.
As I begin to move, these scenes move around me. The moon/ tree image fades into another world - an exposed coral reef at low tide. Crustacean life teeming in its site of origin, a lifeworld on the edge of land and sea. This self-generating milieu of form and flow, morphological processes underway in a lush, saline landscape. What is seen here shares the time and space of the natural environment until it repeats again five minutes later, this transition invisible to me. There is no obviously fixed location of the image and its accompanying sounds, it appears from a circle of movement, as I walk around the room.
I entered into the room from the center of the long side of a rectangle. Each side encompassing a 10’ x 10’ square area. At the center of each square is located a round glass table containing four objects. I am drawn to the table as much by its shape as by the objects placed upon it. Yet I am also drawn to the images on the walls. These images and objects lead me to pass through, to walk around. To navigate the centers and the squares as I pass from one side of the room to the other in a play of symmetrical forces. I am drawn through this space - from subject to object, object to image, image to body - in cyclical acts of movement, change, and transition.
And as circulate, the images I see and the sounds I hear change in correlation to my position in space. The relationship is subtle, yet simple in form. Four natural milieus interleave in a play of landscape and soundscape, movement and form. These eight worlds composited together as I transit the space, the movement of my body linked to its fluctuations, its frequencies, it insects, its birds, its waterfalls, deserts, mountains, glaciers, skys, and trees. Representations of the earth, illuminated by the sun and the moon.
In Situ ∆ ~ Images, Objects, Interactions
What I have read can not be what I have seen, what I have heard, and what I have felt. But it can describe it. A description sets out towards the real, toward memories of time which has passed. I begin with a description of the installation as it is known to myself, as a viewer and the artist. This process of description enriches my knowledge of the elements I’ve placed, offering a more intimate knowing of that which was formed in the making, the crafting and collecting, of images and objects and their deployment in the work.
I start with an image because it is form. Form which can be described by language. The language of image I use in these descriptions aims to simplify understanding, not complicate it. Yet the processes by which these image take form are complex ones, situated somewhere between the technological, the cultural, and the natural. Suspended in a state of creation and reception, ideas and forms, the work of art invites this description into the world.
In Situ ∆ - the embodied search consists of images, objects, and interactions. Images provide a basis for representation, and a field of influence which propels the work forward. By images, I refer to video and sound, the digital mediums which are the perceptual substrate and process of my work. By objects, I refer to the icons and structures situated within the work. I consider their meaning, influence, placement, and function. And by interactions, I refer to relationships of interactivity forming a circuit of meaning between the technologies deployed in the installation and the viewer who navigates its space. Interactions refer to these relations, their origins and outcomes.
Images
Visually, In Situ ∆ consists of eight natural milieus in transition, flow, movement, or flux. These milieus exclude mammalian presence, opting for simpler living forms, insects and sea creatures, birds and trees. They illustrate structural forms - mountains and boulders, water and ice. Places under the influence of time - a waterfall cascading from a cliff face, a desert landscape at dusk, morphing clouds at dawn. Each milieu is imbued with a transitional affect, rendered through extended time-based video studies of nature in transformation. Field recordings were captured during explorations of environments where my attention is focused on sites of imminent change. These sites reveal a broad range of temporality, from the immediate (water), to the cyclical (ice), to the imperceptible (rock), and the vaporous (clouds).
Accompanying these visual milieus are natural sounds - singing birds, cacophonous insects, flowing water, an owl, and wind. Captured at their source to reflect relationships of site and sound, the recordings are juxtaposed in the museum space with low-frequency oscillations.
The resulting synesthesia a hybrid of natural and subsonic form. Site and sound blending into space and place, rendered through the movement of a circumambulating viewer. Sounds establish the being in the work, immersing the viewer in sonic signification and opening up a circuit between nature and synthesis at play within the work itself.
Image and circularity link the viewer to the interface in In Situ ∆. This link can be understood in terms of the image and its relationship to the body. Here the body moves in relationship to a center (that of the table) which can not be occupied. In this circularity of movement, the image is in relationship to a viewer who circumnavigates a form: a glass table. Its shape - round -encouraging circularity in viewer movement. Its material - glass - implying a certain fragility and impermanence. These glass sheets supported by metal shapes, circles bisected by triangles, forming what appears to be a large transport icon6 The tables are lit from above, illuminated with museum grade quartz light. Visually present so as not to be tripped upon, laying low so as to defer its importance away from the hands, and towards the feet.
In this work, images are linked to objects, as objects are linked to movement. Object placement defines image placement and relationships of interactivity. In the material formation of In Situ ∆, subject/ object/ image relationships correlate with my theoretical and philosophical research into the nature of space, time, and being. These ideas are opened up in the process of creation and deployment of their myriad forms.
Objects
Two tables, 8 auspicious symbols. A translation of Buddhist iconography into material form. The objects used in the creation of In Situ ∆ emerge from the process of its maker. The images of nature I discovered in a search for spaces of temporal flux revealed a nexus to buddhist iconography, philosophy, and form. My understanding of these forms is activated in my artistic praxis through relationships of space to time, image to object, object to self, self to other, and other to none.
I translate 8 auspicious objects as the buddha, a stupa, a lotus flower, moss, rocks, sea shells, crystals, and a tree. Each symbol imbued with an affect, selected for the image(s) near which it appears. Each area of appearance being measured as π/4 (90˚). That circle mapped to a body in space. Its radian measured from the center of the circle as theta, Θ. Theta being the eighth letter and the ninth number of the Greek alphabet. Within In Situ ∆ theta functions as the device for measuring viewer presence in the interactivity of the work. A viewer circumambulates theta as a means to observe the four objects on each side of a room. Two circumambulations complete the form of a loop, a figure eight, or infinity (∞). The body generates circularity in the course of viewing eight objects of imminent change.
Thereby, the viewer encircles the objects. And while doing so, their bodies emit a field of influence, what I call affect. But quite literally a field of affective influence measured in the work as presence. The presence of viewers as subjects of the work, and objects of its iterations, opens up the possibility of a more direct perceptual engagement with the viewer as a seer, a listener, and a body of movement, change, flux and flow. Bodies generate movement through their presence and form, and bodies in movement gain perceptual correlation with proprioceptive sense. The sensation of extensivity and affect occurring at the nexus of image and movement. In exploring these matters, I engage the philosophical language and emergent mediums of digital culture as a way to explore interactive ontologies and spaces of being encompassed by the artwork.
Interactions (In Situ ∆ Max/MSP/ Jitter custom software)
The software that runs In Situ ∆ was created using Max/MSP/Jitter, an interactive graphical programming environment for music, audio, and media. In Situ ∆ is a 4-channel XGA video mixer utilizing openGL slabs for efficeint video performance. The software leverages top-down infrared viewer tracking and a unique, fuzzy logic angle panner developed in the course of my work Peter Elsea to create an original approach to the problem of video cross-fading. That is, the use of circularity rather than linearity in the construction of fade parameters.
The unique contribution of the In SItu ∆ software is the conversion of cartesian coordinate data to polar coordinate data as a means to determine viewer location from a central point, and transitional movement around a central axis of influence. This resulting algorithm solves practical problems in the implementation of In Situ ∆, but also addresses theoretical ambitions of the project including affective influence of bodies in space, and subject-object relations.
The introduction of circular panning in the video realm provides an alternate model for considering video playback outside traditional polygonal implementations of transitions, and leads toward the possibility of transiting that influence to bodies themselves as discreet fields of influence moving throughout the interactive installation space.
Video Walkthrough ~ MAH installation
Herein, the body searches through nature by way of its proximity to a given milieu. Instead of the disembodied intellect being the agent of the search, the body is the agent of the search. By transposing the body into the place of the intellect, I offer the locus of embodiment back to the viewer. I believe our search for liberation through technology is recursive to the fact that it enslaves us both physically and temporally, isolating us from our bodies and from nature. I am interested in cosmological forces as generators of art and affect, particularly as a by-product of fin de siècle technological societies. In this context, In Situ ∆ establishes an ontological polymorphism through which to address intensities of bodies, space, time, and materiality.
In Situ ∆ creates an ontological space of becoming, and a space of knowing originating from the idea that we must construct these spaces ourselves instead of relying on others to construct them for us. Humans - as self-organizing, affective influences - search for domains of influence. Through this search, domain control and reification becomes the primary modulations of technology and of suffering. Yet by the same means - belief, mobility, and intensification - creativity may be wielded as a foil to death, as a bifurcation of the liminal space of life, of liminal beings and their sounds, visions, colors, interactions, spaces, times, and places.
Through art making I seek to extract intensity from temporality, to use technology against itself as art, as cultural becoming. I seek aesthetic equilibrium between content and form, subject and object, nature and culture, to engage the viewer in a physical exploration of space and time as a way to create openings, multiplicities, and spaces of becoming. I seek to be aware of the nature of being in a body. Of knowing which can not be extracted from its being. Of stranded epistemologies in a technological age which seek return to bodies of knowing and being.
Thesis Paper
Click here to view the completed MFA thesis paper in PDF format