August 09, 2004
report from SIGGRAPH
transverging in LA
I'm at SIGGRAPH this week checking out the scene - most notably, emerging and interactive technologies. Of interest yesterday, Sunday, were Artist Round Table sessions. In the session Researching the Future the panelists discussed their work in relation to creating new models that reflect epistemological changes resulting from current scientific and technological development.
The session led off with the Planetary Collegium model as a general framework for approaching the art + science collaboration.
While all quite compelling, the resonance for this blog (and applicable to all practice) came from Marcos Novak's presentation on 'transvergence'. This excerpt from Marcos' site summarizes the changes necessitating a transvergent approach to research and practice:
In short, we conceive algorithmically (morphogenesis); we model numerically (rapid prototyping); we build robotically (new tectonics); we inhabit interactively (intelligent space); we telecommunicate instantly (pantopicon); we are informed immersively (liquid architectures); we socialise nonlocally (nonlocal public domain); we evert virtuality (transarchitectures). He has also posited a new "Soft Babylon," a theoretical stance which posits that our digitized architectural palette is causing us to create a wired Situationist city, while we struggle with some of the massive paradigm shifts that our era will and must face.
Novak explains: “transvergence, in a pedagogical and research context, refers to the study and applications of concepts and methods by which convergence of disciplines, media and technologies is seen not as a goal in itself, not as the focal point of a predictable origin for divergences but as an opportunity to speculate and propose novel transdisciplinary epistemological and creative formations. Using willful strategies of derailment, it seeks to promote the mergence of previously unattainable but presently potentially viable species of efforts: future genres, future fields of inquiry, future arts, media and sciences”.
I wonder what a practice of willful deraillment would be when applied to networked performance and who is formally investigating this.
In another session, Ars Electronica: 25 Years of the Digital Avant-Garde, Michael Naimark discussed interactive art conventions. As an Ars juror reviewing vastly differing interactive works, he notes these problematic points that need to yet be addressed:
• difference between the content and the tool
ie - when projects have vastly different use of content and tool, the criteria was to favor the work that best subverted expectations.• actual versus apparent interactivity
ie - the clarity or ambiguity of interface responsiveness - most problematic in performances in which an audience is observing a performer - how does the audience know when the performer has interacted with the work?• does the user feel in control via the interface or not?
ie - such as with obvious versus metaphoric interaction and cases when using input and interaction as a 'not directly representational' form (as in the case of interaction controlled or effected by data collected by means other than direct navigational control.)
I'd also recommend folks cruise through the Ars archives for a 25 year chronicle of digital media art presented at Ars.
Posted by michelle at August 9, 2004 10:36 PM
