October 20, 2005
Franck Ancel
From Scenography to Planetary Network
From Scenography to Planetary Network [SPN]: an entity of creations, publications, conferences, installations and performances presented by Franck Ancel, in question over contemporary time: the last creation of 2005, in real time via wireless web, via satellite, at an altitude of 30000 feet, more than 900 kilometers per hour, to Tokyo or Shanghai, in the year celebrating France in China and the exhibition of Aichi in Japan.
In the continuation of his triptych AIT in France "Architecture - Image - Technology", these communications prepare for further rendez-vous. Ancel now inhabits the planetary space of technology to fall into and under the reality of the imaginary; a World Fair or a World Tour... like the Solarimpulse plane or like the city of Shanghai between the now and 2010.
Running the planet!: Europa - Amsterdam 09.24.05; America - Banff 09.30.05; Africa - coming soon; Oceania - Sydney 12.02.05; Asia - to Tokyo or Shanghai - End of 2005.
Scenography to Planetary Network for Urban Screens
"If the modern extension of cities is being transformed into urban territory due to the impetus of science-technology, then the classic places of artistic performance remain essentially victims of these changes without really being able to incorporate them.
These new technologies are responsible for the emergence of a “City of Bits”. This “City of Bits” that was analysed as “Space, Place, and the Infobahn” only ten years ago by the researcher William J. Mitchell of MIT in his work of the same name. This was the period of the democratisation of the internet, followed by the appearance of VRML, a time in which some believed that this cyberspace was another world, a new continent, or even, for others, a utopia. Its rise was signalled by the use of a global language, the invention of HTML by a scientist from CERN in Switzerland, which allowed us to move from one computer screen to another without any knowledge of the Internet code.
Thus our project “Being = Network” makes its mark in a city by symbolically confronting the arrival of what the internet scholar Howard Rheingold calls the “smart mobs”. I will rapidly summarize this, like the arrival of the third-generation telephone in Europe. It is this journey between the present and the virtual that I am referring to here all too briefly, that determines the time and reasons for my project, at first glance a simple confrontation of art with architecture, at the moment of the emergence of digital screens in the city.
This “Being = Network” action is not an anticipatory step, but rather a phenomenon which closes without being an end in itself the installation of our AIT triptych in France during the past three years, focusing on Architecture, Image, and Technology. A multiple creation which is not linked to the types of city projection of a Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, a Krzysztof Wodiczko, or a Dan Graham.
Without being a designer, artist, or computer scientist, I do not wish to give a too highly specialized talk, in this city of Amsterdam, birthplace of Constant, founder of the Situationist Movement. However, I am convinced that the visual arts now come from places intended to show them in order to deal with life, and vice versa. This is what propels our search outside of art, architecture, and visual arts. The closest concept is a display to be found at the Scenography to Planetary Network.
Let us call to mind the definition of modern scenography given by its founder Jacques Polieri: “all the pictorial, plastic, technical, and theoretical elements that allow the creation of an image, of a bi- or tri-dimensional set piece, or the installation of an action that is spectacular.” Let us now present the context of this “Being = Network” project that is so decisive in our process. This project of the projection on a screen took place in the centre of Paris in a square, which is situated in a locality that has many cinemas, as well as a stream of people via the metro or the train punctuating the streets.
At the middle, the Montparnasse Tower, a hundred metres from the Gare Montparnasse, at the heart of the city, signals its luminous presence in Paris by night and day. Built at the beginning of the 1970s by the architect Roger Saubot, it imposes by its height of more than 200 metres. There are over fifty floors of offices, each of more than 2000 square metres, with a panoramic restaurant for tourists. This is a Montparnasse that has nothing more in common with the international artistic bohemian life of the 1930s, with its artists’ studios and bars.
(1) Van Wagner, a world-leading communications company recently installed in France, was one of the first businesses to use large advertising spaces, with still projection, in New York during the 1970s. It now owns the screen at the bottom of the Montparnasse Tower, the only one of its kind in France. But it also has the other two screens in the world, one in London and the other in Los Angeles. This LED screen has a surface area of 38 square metres. Obviously, its location in the French capital, at the crossroads of many different types of networks, is what motivated us to spend more than six months negotiating a partnership with the Van Wagner company, with the aim of completing the project free of charge with their technical support.
Several contacts were naturally made with other businesses linked to the networks, such as RATP, the company that manages the Parisian metro system. This was in the hope of using live images from their CCTV cameras for our screen display. Also, with mobile phone companies, because I propose the appearance of cyber-traceability of mobile telephone chips thanks to software monitoring all movement within the city through cartographic superimposition.
This leads to the possibility for everyone to send live photographic and video captures from a mobile phone using MMS onto each window of the screen display. But none of this contact with these companies led to any results, either positive or negative, though the dialogue remains open for other projects. For the moment, I am not directly dealing with questions about the danger of the mobile phone waves for humans, nor about civil liberties’ with regard to CCTV.
Finally Van Wagner did not allow us to use the screen in real time. We did not therefore have access to the MP4 server broadcasting to the screen and potentially via the network to the two other screens, as I would have liked, to produce a live triptych between Paris-London-Los Angeles. In the end, the entire financing of the project came from a private source, as cultural institutions did not help this scheme.
Unlike the first two parts of the triptych, we were not consequently able to use the software in real time; we use MAX/MSP and JITTER. I came up with a global slogan which would be relevant for this specific context. A proposition of a highly prized poetic “hot spot” within the city which only contained the three words “Mobile Wireless Digital” invoked more than interactivity. The monumental projection at the bottom of the tower lasted for thirty seconds, inserted between other advertising clips, several times a minute for several weeks, until the end of December of last year.
Some video captures were selected from the first triptych projects, three for the Convent project built by Le Courbusier and Xenakis, and three from the Franco-Spanish border. These form windows whose size also has meaning. Each window of these short videos is similar to the typical holiday video captured by a mobile phone. The projection is thus made up of a video-wall corresponding to the windows of the front face of the tower. The video clips are thirty seconds in length, corresponding to the length of the advertising clips; but this is also the maximum time for sending this same video via a mobile phone file format, such as the 3GP, via MMS from one phone to another phone.
Here, whether it is appearing on my own mobile phone as a small image, or on the tower as a large one, there is a fictional connection. Without an audience, since no sign, other than newspapers and radio reporting this action, tells us that we are in front of a work and not of prospective products and/or services. If we were in Asia, the formats would be different but our comments would stay the same.
There are different technical supports depending on the continents. The history of media arts has a more universal history, founded on a re-reading and not only a French philosophical reading, with Deleuze, Virilio, or Baudrillard about the arrival of technology. Moreover, I will speak about these issues next week in Canada in a paper entitled “from Scenography to Planetary Network for refresh 01”, which is also the name of the gathering.
There is also a historical filiation for “Being = Network” with a scenography by Jacques Polieri. From the end of the Second World War, Polieri carried out research on historical avant-garde moments in the visual arts, namely those of exactly eighty years ago this year: the Bauhaus with Schlemmer, Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Molnar, Weininger, the Paris international exhibition with Kiesler and Prampolini, etc. Polieri never stopped from going into and then beyond projects that were too limited by available resources.
Let us think, for example, of his synopsis using exterior screens at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Polieri tries to interconnect between them on a micro-scale: “Electronic images were installed from one end to the other of a “Leisure Street”, in the form of either colour VDUs (all along the street) of projections onto large screens permitting the public to dialogue or to participate in the various games. The five main screens were at the end of the street, together with the video control room situated inside a geodesic dome. Preparatory show.” The electronic gave it telepresence dimensions.
(2) In the meetings that I propose such as “Being = Network”, there can not be an area and a centre which will gain the upper hand, and the same goes for a discipline over a technique. Nor does the image in action simply constitute a performance. It embodies data which can be sound, gestures, an archive, a camera, infinite sources, thanks to digitization: a visualization whose screen is momentarily a performing technical support.
Also, the very existence of this screen in the Parisian space can not be the only grounds for our use of it. It is the context which is virtually projected. It would have been much simpler in a more formal dimension to project somewhere else with total freedom. But I do not want to move the white cube from the gallery, to open a new programme to an audience of contemporary artists, like at the crossroads of Time Square in New York at the beginning of the 1990s.
I am thinking more of an incarnation which, from now on, must no longer just remain within the context reserved for a projection, for it’s not just a projection, but rather of digital data, of finding future areas, like space that is now temporal, for the live broadcasting and recording of our lives. In this way, architecture is no longer the interface for a surface image for our projects, but is valid within a context of watching over emerging issues.
Like the support screens, the urban economy is not the framework of our practice. I am simply looking to determine and be part of the changes that are happening. Using an art without artistic limits, I am not engaging in experimentation but rather in a new way forward, one of widespread interconnection in daily life. So, for each of my designs, a desire to exchange with the professional best is a necessity.
This starts with choosing the site according to the project’s needs as much the same way as its technological items, which is not directly linked to the design or programming. Similarly, the media are no longer mailboxes with images to be re-conceived and re-designed, but are prostheses that are now integrated into our activity and lives.
For example, in our “Global Poetic System” project, which was part of a marathon, we diverted the sporting use of technology towards a digital visual and sound dimension, reconstructable using physical data. I will bring up this necessary conception of new interfaces for these emerging practices in the beginning of December, in a lecture entitled “from Scenography to Network Planetary for e-performance and plug-ins” at the School of Media, Film & Theatre, University of New South Wales, Australia.
To close this “Being = Network”, I would like to share the following anecdote from Bruce Sterling and Richard Kadrey, which is taken from “Dead Media Manifesto”, and which may be found on the Amsterdam internet site “De Balie”. They report the words of Jacqueline Goddarda, a surrealist bohemian figure of 1930s Paris:
“After a day of work, the artists wanted to get away from their studios, and get away from what they were creating. They all met in cafes to argue about this and that, to discuss their work, politics and philosophy… We went to the bar of La Coupole. Bob, the barman, was a terribly nice chap… As there was no telephone in those days everybody used to leave him messages. At the Dome we also had a little place behind the door for messages. The telephone was the death of Montparnasse.”
Our project for third-generation telephones is not necessarily the rebirth of Montparnasse. “You are not the network!” if the projection on the urban screen is your only interrogation. “I am the network!” if you redefine everything with new technology - not only as an urban accessory, but also in the universality of human beings in their future mobile interconnection with the world. While I wait, I am seeking new sensitive places like the Montparnasse Tower in Paris in order to transcribe a new temporality which is now becoming a planetary one." Franck Ancel
(1) Illustration no. 1 “Being = Network”, Paris Montparnasse Tower, photo by Simon Procter, 2004.
(2) Illustration no. 2 “Leisure Street”, Munich Olympic Games, 1972, pp. 42/44/45 “Polieri creator of modern scenography”, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, 2002.
"SPN for urbanscreens05" in Europa and "SPN for refresh!01" in America, these english presentations are now online pdf.
Biography: Born in 1970, France, Franck Ancel works in Paris. He has been probing technology for more than fifteen years. He has traced the development from the avant-gardes artists of the last century to the recent mutations of creation on a planetary scale.He has thus organized and coordinated symposiums, expositions, and performances in cooperation with associations and institutions. The last one was a retrospective on Jacques Polieri, the creator of ”modern scenography,” at the BnF. Since the attacks of 9/11, Franck Ancel has set up an interactive triptych probing “architecture – image – technology” on 20th century heritage sites. In 2002, he put it in the Le Corbusier/Xenakis convent; in 2003 in a classified theater in Catalogne; and in 2004 on the screen of Montparnasse Tower in Paris. Franck Ancel challenges the viewer outside traditional frontiers, by projecting a setting of a network of information on screens. At the same time, he analyzes this technique on a more theoretical level in texts and talk.
Posted by jo at October 20, 2005 12:19 PM
