From the issue dated February 23, 2007
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i25/25a02701.htm
Where High Tech Meets High Concept
A digital-arts center at the U. of Washington explores the aesthetics of technology
By PETER MONAGHAN
Seattle
Shawn Brixey's "Altimira" is a decidedly strange work of art — so strange that he has not, to date, put it on public display. He turns on a device, housed in a basketball-size glass chamber, and it converts rapidly pulsating radio signals emanating from pulsars — collapsed stars that spin violently, sweeping their poles like lighthouses through space — and directs them via goggles into the retina of a viewer, activating intensely the phenomena known as "phosphenes" that one sees when rubbing one's eyes.
Those high-tech qualities are typical of the art that Mr. Brixey and his colleagues produce, teach, and study here at the University of Washington's Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media.
The central themes of the striking creations of Mr. Brixey, who helped establish the center in 2002 and who has just become its director, include the aesthetics of often-obscure or little-considered technology, and the nature of human encounters with it.
With the advent of new technologies — ones based on computers and the Internet, and many others that draw from fields of scientific discovery and insight — new dimensions are opening up that lend themselves to representation beyond two- or even three-dimensional art, says Mr. Brixey.
He says he is attempting a synthesis of novel art and science that "begins to stake out new artistic and poetic territory about being human," to produce "not weird science making bad art, not hip techno-art posing as pseudoscience, but the gestalt of wonder in both."
Serious Training
The center he leads, which goes by the abbreviation DXArts, is arguably the most innovative workshop of its kind. It engages in experimental arts that include digital media, computer animation, computer music, and sound art, and many novel combinations of those already esoteric fields. It also deals in the artistic uses and implications of "telematics" — the blending of communications devices — and "mechatronics" — the intersections of mechanical, electronic, and software engineering, applied to the design of automatons and other hybrid systems.
In such artistic practices, the center's personnel deal in the dimensions of artmaking that are commonly recognized, such as form, tone, and resonance, but also less-often-recognized ones, such as neuroscience.
The center is the only one in the country that offers a doctoral program in digital and experimental art. It also offers a challenging, five-year undergraduate major with prerequisites in such subjects as art and music history, physics, algebra, and computer programming. Having completed those, each year about 125 undergraduates proceed to the center's own pre-major classes in the history of digital and other experimental arts.
By that point, students are able to qualify for 18 majors, including engineering, mathematics, and the comparative history of ideas. Those who are still determined to opt for the digital-arts major — about 35 each year — go on to the second of the center's own prerequisite courses, a "digital-arts boot camp" that teaches hands-on lessons in how to use a wide range of equipment and computer programs.
Having survived all that, says Richard S. Karpen, until recently the center's founding director, and now divisional dean of research and infrastructure in the College of Arts & Sciences, students who opt to take a major in digital and experimental arts "won't be surprised that they're not allowed to do just video games for their projects."
A True Arts School
The program's demands are intense, says Noel Paul, one of the center's 14 graduate students, who assist in teaching courses. An experimental filmmaker, he says: "This is not a film school, it's an arts school." So students at the center who are interested in film do not steep themselves in 120 years of filmmaking practice and history, but rather combine a study of experimental filmmaking with the practice of making it.
He says that that often entails pulling apart the conventions of filmmaking, and improvising with its standard equipment. So, he says, if the latest, fanciest digital video cameras do not serve the goals students have in mind, they are by all means encouraged to tinker instead with, say, a Fisher-Price toy camera, or to write new image-processing software, or to string together an array of commercial cameras, all in a quest for new forms of visual expression.
Stephanie Andrews, an assistant professor at the center, says that rather than encourage students to specialize in, say, video production, as would happen at a film school, she and her colleagues urge them to collaborate with colleagues in the array of disciplines represented on the campus. The center regularly invites scientists, technologists, lawyers, writers, and a variety of researchers to work with and advise its artists and students.
In Ms. Andrews's work, the results are often as playful as they are technologically sophisticated. Formerly a lighting director in such Pixar Animation Studios productions as A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2, she now concentrates on more unusual forms of expression that, for example, use recognized media, such as digital, video imaging, and neon, in strikingly novel arrays.
In her sculptural installation "Lifeblood" she uses computer-controlled pneumatic systems to release orchestrated streams of bubbles — which suggest, among other things, the flow of digital signals — from 64 valves at the bottom of a tank of water. Microphones transmit to viewer-listeners the sound of the bubbles breaking the surface of the water, creating a cinematic experience in which viewers' own reflections play a part.
The work is, she says, "a meditation on the essential importance" of air and water, and also a way of expressing the nature of digital signals.
Artists like Ms. Andrews not only look to a wide array of research fields, such as engineering, computer science, and optics, for inspiration and a means of creating their visions; they also try to foster at the center a high-tech-era equivalent of past arts institutions — the long mentorship of composers under maestros, or of artists in master painters' ateliers.
Setting up such a practice at DXArts gives concrete form to the reasons artists are on campuses to begin with. "Why are the arts there, at a research university, if not to be part of the research endeavor?" asks Mr. Karpen, one of the country's most celebrated composers of computer and electronic music.
"My view is, serious and important art has always been research" — whether through investigation of materials, the science and mathematics of their art form, or other avenues. So much so, he suggests, that "if you're not doing research, then you're probably not doing art."
What's more, says Mr. Brixey, "we're trying to overcome a common phenomenon where artists live in a slum next to the scientists, who bring them in to visualize complex problems, and then they're allowed to make art in their spare time." Here, he says, the faculty artists have the making and study of art as their whole workload, and the center's graduate students are all on full scholarships.
One challenge of imposing a research-university model on the center's approach to art is to describe projects in ways that capture their achievements. That often means finding new terms to augment the established terminology of art criticism.
Consider "The Search for Luminosity," a project by Allison Kudla, a graduate student. In it, a plant's broad leaves trigger colored lights — their own, marshaled "sun" — to go down as soon as they fully open, and to come up as soon as they close.
Ms. Kudla's artistic statement expresses her intention, and makes clear how difficult it is to express some of its dimensions: "I was able to develop an artwork that was in a structurally similar reality system to our own, rather than a representational depiction of a potentially nonexistent reverie, thereby allowing the artwork the ability to become an actual existing reverie, in this case a plant in regulative dialogue with its sun."
Where is the work heading? "I can't wait to find out," she says. Along the way, she has learned skills in three-dimensional scanning and other technologies. Still, she says, at the core of the work, and of all her art, is an emotional theme, "imbedding beauty that I imagine into nature, using technology."
That, she says, is "more and more of a liberating process."
Fingerprints and Bubbles
Among the eight artists on the core faculty here (another eight researchers, from fields such as architecture, physics, electrical and computer engineering, music, and cinema studies, are affiliated faculty members), Mr. Brixey produces as esoteric a collection of art as any.
His "Chimera Obscura," mounted in collaboration with Richard Rinehart, a colleague at the University of California at Berkeley, is a table-size work in which a robotic pointer, directed remotely by Internet users, navigates through a complex maze. The maze is a projection of an enlarged human thumbprint. Observers operate the pointer, and leave "memes" — text, audio, video, and graphics — for those who follow.
When members of the public interacted with the work, which Mr. Brixey and Mr. Rinehart mounted in a museum in a collaboration with scientists involved in the Human Genome Project, "you could feel peoples' agency," says Mr. Brixey. "You could recognize when someone was telematically lost or found. It produced behaviors that humans recognize."
The project served, he says, to provide insight into how he could build artificial-intelligence elements of ciphering, sequencing, and applying logic and chance into subsequent works. He says it also reflected historical anxieties and eugenic fantasies about genetic manipulation.
His work "Eon," which received a 2003 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship Award and the University of California's prestigious Hellman Award for distinction in research, made use of sonoluminescence, a mysterious phenomenon, first recognized 80 years ago, but still little understood, in which sound triggers gaseous bubbles in water to convert to bursts of light.
Museum visitors, and users who were "telepresent" via the Internet, could send snippets of text to the device. There, a text-to-speech processor and voice synthesizer converted those to ultrasound. That sound modulated a small vessel of ultrapure water. That created pressure nodes that sparked sonoluminescent light at the center of a glass cylinder. Finally, the light struck photodetectors that decoded data from it, and rendered it in a computerlike voice that repeated the phrases originally sent to it. Users heard words, but in essence "they were listening to light," says Mr. Brixey.
Not surprisingly, the Internet, with its range of communication technologies, has emerged as a popular medium for making or interacting with new works. And when observers of his works become participants via the Internet, says Mr. Brixey, that prompts him to think theoretically about such concepts of "telepresence," the ability of humans now to be essentially present via communications technologies in more places than one, and the study of how that affects what and how humans can know — "telepistemology."
For all the seemingly arcane nature of the art that they and their colleagues create, Mr. Brixey and Mr. Karpen agree on a tenet of art and art making that is as old as beating logs with mammoth bones: the centrality of the body to the experience of art.
They have formed partnerships with the department of dance to explore ways to reassert, or reinsert, that more fundamentally human element into experimental art.
"Going somewhere where the body is not the instrument is a flawed strategy," says Mr. Brixey.
http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Volume 53, Issue 25, Page A27
