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Ecomedia
How the Natural World is Transforming the Nature of Media.
This weblog is not the usual blog of daily events. It contains a series of notes/thoughts designed to make connections between science and media art.
Sometimes these ideas are tied in with current events, but most of the time this blog is not in any particular order. It serves as a central area for a detailed examination of ideas first published in a 1999 Leonardo Journal article entitled 'Active Vision' that I hope to develop into a book that will discuss some of the current developments in science, ecology, media and society and how they inform and are informed by new technologies. The book will be written for artists working with digital media and anyone who is interested in future directions of the medium.
http://www.andreapolli.com
last modified Sep 7, 2006 at 13:00
A few weeks ago I attended a Leonardo/OLATS symposium on space art at the Maisson D'Alleurs in Yverdon Les Bains, Switzerland. A wonderful group of artists and scientists, including scientists from ESA, the European Space Agency, and JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, were in attendance. The day I arrived, a series of hot air balloons had drifted over Yverdon in the early moring, each balloon playing a different part of an electroacoustic sound composition designed to influence the dreams of sleeping city dwellers. This was a work called the Celestial (or 'Sky') Orchestra by Luke Jerram, also a participant in the symposium.
I also was able to see the work of the great Pierre Compte, a pioneer in space art, who has created sculpture for zero gravity environments, a large scale land sculpture on Earth designed to be viewed from space called Signature Terre, and proposals for inflatable sculptures that float in space and are placed on the surface of the moon.
All these optimistic visions of art and culture in space contrast in my mind to an article I read just days before the symposium about the US plan to weaponize space. I spoke to an ESA scientist about the issue, and he made me realize that this should come as no surprise. Although ESA and NASA's purpose is to explore space for peaceful purposes, the US and various EU countries all have separate space programs within their militaries. Although there are currently global treaties that do not allow space to be owned, we spoke about the 'value' of space, now that satellites provide any number of lucrative services, from entertainment to communication to surveillance, and that as the value of space increases, it's not surprising that governments would want to take some ownership.
It's a puzzling issue. I spoke with an artist who was involved in various types of radio transmission work. She told me she has started working with a group of private citizens in the US who have put together funds to launch their own satellite. Another artist was planning a private parabolic flight (a flight in which zero gravity can be experienced for a short time, used in training astronauts), and of course the goal of that project is to eventually go into space with various artists (right now she's working with Stelarc and a few others).
Aside from the technical requirements of launching into space, what will be the issues with regard to laws and safety? Will going into space be similar to going to the wild west or to disputed territory? Perhaps some international standards and regulations need to be developed for space. It's an interesting opportunity from a policy standpoint, what would be the models and ideals for community in space? Is it possible to maintain space as a place without ownership? If so, perhaps looking to the way Native American, Aboriginal and other tribes co-existed for so many years would be useful as models.
The Acoustic Space Research Lab
<http://acoustic.space.re-lab.net>
is an international group of artists and scientists that "aim to re-approach collaborative audio communication tools, to broaden the meaning of 'net.radio' ... and to set up new context for research on 'data-ecology' and co-experiments in the field of networked media, radio and satellite technologies."
The work of this group is particularly interesting to me because it combines the two main focuses of my own work right now: acoustic ecology and data translation. The Acoustic Space Research Lab tries to examine the full spectrum of signals, not just visible and audible signals, but signals outside of the perceivable spectrum. They examine signals received by anyting from high level radio telescopes to home made receivers.
The Acoustic Space Research Lab has put out three journals and operates a discussion list for creative online broadcasters. They are in particular interested in 'acoustic cyberspace' or what Rheingold called 'the great conversation.'
A group of artists who also are engaged in space and sound is a group in New Zealand called radioqualia
<http://www.radioqualia.net>
They broadcast sounds from space on the internet gathered by a radio telescope (the same sort of thing that SETI uses to listen for life in outer space). Their work is focused on listening to the soundscape of space, a place that most people think is silent but is actually filled with sound. According to radioqualia, most of the information we have about the universe has come from the soundscape and not imagery.
They just set up an exhibtion of radio astronomy at the ICC in Tokyo in an exhibition called 'Open Nature.'
Another Kriesche quote from his artist's statement of 1996:
"The information based society defines itself by breaking down the hence given world into its smallest entities. The result is a segmentation in 'bits' and 'particles', that seem to have nothing to do with each other. the result is the socially isolated, seggregated, egocentred individual. But the information based society defines itself also by homogenizing all the 'bits' and 'particles' into a whole. In cultural terms, the society will become interconnected, interwoven, it will become a communication society. The result, however, is an unidentifiable, amorphous society, people can't identify with it.
Both tendencies are based on the given technological, economic and strategic status of information- and communications technology. This technology is still the result of a research and scientific approach in which hardly any emphasis is given on the cultural implications. worse, what can be seen right now is, that the cultural implications are only seen in its outcome toward communications media, but have no impact for the development and the innovative aspect of technology and the media themselves. This is where art and creativity comes into play. scientific and technological research, - because of its interconnectedness with the whole of society and its construction -, must be embedded in the multitudes of cultural awareness of all its members. the reason for this is to finally understand how and by what means the global society can and must be built. Then science and research will become, as it has already been highlighted by some of the researchers and scientists, not only the common ground of our culture, but furthermore a particular kind of art.
This science-art connectedness has been basic in our evolution. According to the potentials of our information technology this connectedness can and must now be regarded as basic again for our daily lifeprocesses. Then art, in its most advanced format, both participatorial, communicative, interactive and sublime, will become the general awareness of going beyond the technological, political, sociological, etc. constraints, to imagine the not yet given culture. In regard to the information- and communication technology and the technological interconnectedness of the 'global whole society' to come, at its best, information-based art in a new spiritual awareness has become the interface between the techno-based info-society and its lost metaphysical traditions." (quotation: information machines, Richard Kriesche, Biennale Venice, Venice 1995.)
Soon I'll be participating in a Space Art Symposium in Yverdon, Switzerland hosted by Leonardo/OLATS. Through an interview with Roger Malina, the founder of Leonardo, I learned of the work of Richard Kriesche. Kriesche is an artist who has worked with networks, television and internet and telepresence and has created works that transmit to and interface with satellite transmissions.
I found some of his writing online, and here are some excerpts of interest to this blog:
"Information-based technology has already gone far beyond our consciousness. We are at a revolutionary stage in humankind. We do not know what it means and we are far away from predicting anything at all. We are too close to the beginning of the immaterial construction of our Digital Cathedral to visualize its gestalt.
A Quadpuck is a device, named by its inventor Jerry Cromer, that allows a totally paralyzed person to communicate by his/her breath. The breath creates the environment, the breath is the first and last medium and, indeed, the only one medium of communication and creation. Breath is bio-sphere and info-spere in one. (Donna Coco, Input Device Turns Air Into Electric Signals, Computer Graphics World, Nov. 1993)
Newsweek Magazine, April 22, 1996, stated the question: "Who's Internet is it?" The answer? -- A metaphor for the ominpresence of the medium on our planet. "Internet is like air" says Esther Dyson, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, "a user in germany who wants to read the Neo-Nazi Zuendel will dial up a computer in Amsterdam or Paris."
We are beginning to enter the spiritual/metaphysical world where we have come back to our book of books, where God's breath created Adam. However, this time, the Adam will create the Digital Cathedral with a digital breath -- a breath that is communication at its best. The question of this new form of communication as a creative process is not a question of our technological ability, but of our spirituality, our ability to ground a moral balance in our own human thinking. "
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