Proposal

As an interactive designer and educator, I work to design models for the display of information in time that can be understood and navigated by a range of audiences.

In the past two years, I have been focusing on projects that create new ways to visualize physical spaces. One year ago, the Robert Morris College Design Institute began a partnership with the Chicago Cultural Center in which the students studied ways in which an architectural monument such as the Center can be represented and studied through its representation. Besides the obvious vr walkthroughs, we discovered a number of other possibilities: historical, social, etc. Through the aid of three characters, we were able to create three different viewpoints of the same building in a CD-Rom published for the 100 year anniversary of the Center.

At the Institute, we then worked with the Chicago Transit Authority and the Museum of Contemporary Art on a project which explored the public transit system from many perspectives and models these perspectives using the web as the medium. Methods for this project ranged from CAD models based on CTA blueprints to interactive poetry to digital representations of dreams and memories of travel. One problem the project needed to solve was how to model a diverse and changing community (such as visitors to a subway station). We chose to allow visitors to the web site a chance to participate in the project.

My personal work has involved an attempt to model the thought process via time based media (see Leonardo article). Currently, I have been working on aural and visual interfaces for eye and motion tracking devices.

In summary, I would like to participate in the workshop to exchange ideas about models for dynamic information. I think that the workshop could be the seed for new ideas that I could then take with me back to Chicago and use in curriculum and application development for the college, and that I could offer the workshop a design perspective and many resources from the academic design community.

Note: The definition of virtual as used in this article is something which is simulated, which exists as image rather than physical reality. According to this definition, the mind is a virtual brain. It exists conceptually, but the actual physical matter is the brain.

Introduction

The development of my work has been focused on the relationship between physical space and the virtual space of memory and the mind. Interactive computer applications in the work metaphorically imply internalized information and physical space emphasizes the physical aspects of cognitive activity. Early work, the Appetite and Fetish series, used physical objects as the embodiment of specific memories. The work then moved conceptually to using a specific location as a container for history and memory, as in the Observatory. Current explorations place the viewer in motion or implied motion to refer to continuity or lack of continuity in conscious thought. I see motion as similar to the experience of consciousness. The moment acts as a glimpse of timelessness, an impression, that can never be examined through the linear progression of time.

Composition and Chaos

Our sense of time seems to be constructed from landmark events in the environment which act as clocks, and from which we get our temporal bearings. In this sense, the whole world can be viewed as an ensemble of clocks which we use at various times for various purposes. [1]

The mathematics of chaos fascinated me ever since James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science [2]. I was interested in the ability of the computer to discover new geometric structures by performing large amounts of calculations. In the case of chaotic systems, naturalistic forms were created through iterative formulae. As a visual artist, this was interesting to me because it created a link between abstract mathematics and naturalistic forms.

In 1989, as an MFA candidate at The Art Institute of Chicago, I was fortunate to work with George Lewis, a jazz trombonist and pioneer in human/computer musical improvisation. He counseled me in the creation of Chaotic Systems in Musical Improvisation. This project, programmed in IRCAM's Max software, was a system of improvisation for musician and computer based on the Lorenz attractor (image 1).

A lorenz system is described by the solution of three simultaneous differential equations:

The resulting improvisation, which for performer and listener felt very much like an improvisation between two human musicians in performance, was inspired by Robert R. Snyder's work on memory in musical perception. In his book, Music and Memory: A Brief Introduction [4], cognitive concepts are used to analyze musical structure. Short term memory (STM) including chunking and long term memory (LTM), including non declarative, declarative, episodic, and semantic memory are discussed at length in relationship to musical concepts such as rhythm and meter.

Snyder's analysis of musical structure based on short term memory (STM) is the basis of the design of Chaotic Systems in Musical Improvisation. Short term memory is the second stage in the memory chain; a temporary memory which holds its contents for 3-12 seconds and has a limited capacity (5-9 items). This area of memory is the location of awareness of the present. In my system, groups of notes played by the live performer were selected using duration values within the limits of STM generated by the attractor, as were durations of delays (pauses) between these groups. What was unexpected and especially interesting about the system in performance was that the live performer was able to use his/her STM to anticipate and manipulate the reactions of the system. I believe that this predictability was possible because the Lorenz attractor was used to generate values. The attractor established a waxing and waning pattern that a live musician could anticipate and respond to.

Storage/Retrieval

I raised my lips to the teaspoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through me. [17]

White Wall/Black Hole led to another installation piece dealing more directly with desire in the virtual and physical world. This piece was my first installation work to exist in both physical and virtual space. The piece was installed in the summer of 1995 at Here, in New York City. The Appetite exhibition, conceived of and curated by Michael Casselli, who had been working with the idea of the human appetite for several years, included the installation work of six artists. The overall exhibit was designed by Casselli to echo a garden, complete with garden lighting and smells.

Research into the concept of the appetite led me to consider my personal appetite for possessions. It became clear that I along with many others have multiple layers of possessions. We have possessions in physical space, and we have possessions in virtual space: images, sounds, and texts in analog and digital media. My work specifically consisted of 32 porcelain dinner plates suspended on the walls of a small space containing actual materials symbolic of my personal desires. (image 5) A cellular phone, for example, referred to protection, i.e. the idea of being untouchable; keys referred to power and control . Each material on the plates was photographed in its "ideal" state, lit like a commercial product. (image 6) Objects of desire in the virtual world exist in a visually heightened state to compensate for the lack of physical touch. Remote visitors could access the desires in the virtual world through the world wide web.

Another manifestation of this work was created for the Nylistafnid Museum in Reykjavik, Iceland as a part of the Altitudes/Attitudes exchange show sponsored by Nylistafnid and Artemisia Gallery. In this version, I selected only twelve plates of clear glass rather than porcelain. The materials on the plates were the more ephemeral: air, sound, magnetic energy, etc. One of the plates, filled with wine, was placed above a large speaker which emitted the sound of a heart beat. With each beat, the surface of the wine would distort to a series of circular ripples. Light, bounced of that plate and on to the wall, created a pattern of motion that was reproduced on the wall. (image 7) This work dealt with longing and loss, using ephemeral material as a direct reference to an emotional state. The wine and heartbeat referred to the physical body's experience of emotion.

One explanation is that throughout one's lifetime, experiences with common objects are stored in permanent memory--not as singular instances, but as items organized around a central theme...We recognize and classify a variety of disparate objects (cups and saucers) as members of a class by rapidly comparing them with an "idealized" image of the class...It is the idealized image, or prototype, of an object, person, feeling, or idea that is stored in our long-term memory. [18]

the human mind..operates by association...in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain [19]

The idea of possessions in virtual space explored in Appetite led me to the conscious realization that virtual possessions are actually an integral part of non-digital life. Every human being has a storage bank of virtual possessions, memories. In fact, the computer storage bank is understood in human terms only through the metaphor of the memory.

Fetish, a part of Command-Shift-Ctrl in May of 1996 at NAME Gallery in Chicago explored the issue of memory in virtual and physical space. The installation consisted of twelve objects suspended over the heads of the viewers on a glass drop ceiling. A computer in the space provided a virtual replication of the objects. In positioning the objects, I was attempting to create a body metaphor for the action of remembering. There are physical correlates to many emotional states. For example: joy is experienced as a physical buoyance, and in contrast, grief is experienced as physical weight. When trying to remember, often humans will move their eyes up and to the side. (image 8)

Each object was lit with a dramatic spotlight which created an exaggerated shadow of each object on the walls of the space. Like in Appetite, lighting served to give the objects a "larger than life" presence in the space. I wanted to create a physical space that might refer to the virtual space in the mind when remembering events and objects. Certain events have prominence in the mind, and the physical metaphor of size/importance is referred to in the space using oversized shadows, which are foggy reproductions of the actual event/object.

The objects were selected as signifiers of personal experiences related to relationships I have experienced. Viewers could access the computer using an interface sensitive to touch. A visitor could select each object to obtain a personal story related to the memory of the object and a sound which was used as a signifier of the emotional quality of the story. The stories were selected for their prominence in my personal database of memories, and described in a way that left the reference to the object somewhat ambiguous, and/or cross-referenced to more than one object. (image 9) This structure referred to the fluid nature of the experience of a memory. One memory leads to another in unpredictable ways.

The sounds on the system, like smells created by Casselli in Appetite, were an effective means to evoke memories in the viewers. They were chosen for their familiarity: a door knock, a car door slamming, birds calling, ice clinking in a glass, etc.

Like Appetite, this work was also re-worked for other spaces. At the University of Indianapolis in November of 1996, Fetish was created by using 100 2X2 cardboard boxes. The boxes were stacked to the 40 ceiling of the gallery. The boxes were used to create an environment of a warehouse or storage space, and at the same time creating an atmosphere of mystery as the contents of the boxes were not revealed. On the surface of one of the boxes, a video was projected of the series of idealized objects.

Since beginning this project, there has been a fluid exchange of objects in each work. Objects gain and lose importance in my personal memory, and that is reflected in the objects evident in each work. I suppose I am trying to re-create my state of mind at a given moment in time.

Fetish, May I Help You was a collaborative version of Fetish created in January of 1997 with students of Alfred University. (image 10) The students collected their personal fetish objects: some found and some made and wrote short stories related to the objects and desires. These objects were then photographed and placed with the stories on an interactive CD-Rom. The objects were displayed in glass cases on the first floor of a storefront space in the town of Alfred. On the second floor, a dark 'cabaret' atmosphere was created with a projection of the interactive application and live performance. Visitors were invited to enter a tiny 'confessional' and record their private fetishes on video tape which was then broadcast onto the street of the town.

In November of 1996, I further explored this idea in a collaborative performance with artists Jan Erik Andersson, Louise McKissick, and Jeff Callen. We met as a group and discussed our work and interests. Andersson, who was on a residency from his home in Finland, discussed the discomfort he felt as a child in his father's absence. This sparked a group discussion of each group member's father and led to a performance, P-P-Pa-Pa, which used a fractured narrative of stories, past and present, and video projection into a pool of water in which viewers could direct a small remote-controlled boat. The performance was a metaphor for the process of trying to remember that which one could not understand.

Interior/Exterior

Here, everything is a "predicate of existence": no dialectic but the terrible simultaneity of "white walls/black holes"; a matter of "synthetic apperception" taking the materialist form of the three syntheses of Anti-Oedipus: the "connective synthesis of production" (understanding), the "disjunctive synthesis of recording" (imagination), and the "conjunctive synthesis of consumption-consummation (reason). [5]

White Wall/Black Hole, shown in January of 1993 at Artemisia Gallery, was one of the first pieces created to address communications media in gallery installation rather than performance. The piece consisted of a flour-coated gallery wall shaken by live sound from the area outside the gallery using a police radio scanner. The flour on the wall slowly fell to the floor of the space due to the vibrations of the sound. The flour-coated wall visually referred to a topographical map, changing slightly with each new bit of audio information. (image 4) In the creation of this work, I wanted to address information accessible to individuals through technology. Like the Stein/Doorika piece, this work addressed desires awakened by access to technology. The desire for power and the acquisition of power through information was contrasted with the content of the messages, live police radio dispatches.

Police radio in the piece acted on two forms of the listener's memory. On the one hand, the comprehension of speech is the basis of acoustic memory. Comprehension of the text depended on the listener's short term phonological memory which serves as an 'articulatory loop' which helps preserve order and allows the listener time to process continuous streams of speech. The listener's long term semantic memory was also engaged, that part of the mind which contains schemas, or generalizations about world order.

The title of the work was a reference to 1,000 Plateaus, by Gilles Deleuze [14]. BlackHole/White Wall is a reference to the Baroque and nature. It refers structurally to the union of opposites.

The monad is the autonomy of the inside, and inside without an outside. It has as its correlative the independence of the facade, and outside without an inside. [15]

The Baroque is inseparable from a new regime of light and color. To begin, we can consider light and shadows as 1 and 0, as the two levels of the world separated by a thin line of waters.[16]

The paradox of Deleuzian theory being addressed in this piece has to do with the concept of opposition, the idea of two halves, an inside and an outside, and, as a sculpture, space and non-space.

...their past, their culture, their native places, their families and friends; an attachment which they carry with them all their lives, regardless of where destiny may fling them. Andrey Tarkovsky [20]

A particular place can be seen as an energy, a presence, the essence of a locale, a force which evokes an emotional response. I have moved from working positioning objects in space to exploration of the space itself: geographic and architectural position.

The Observatory, organized by the artist's group SEL, Super-on ExLibris: Tomas Geciaskas, Sigitas Lukauskas, Rasa Staniuniene, and Sigitas Staniunas, was an international site specific project which took place in the last weeks of April, 1997 in Vilnius, Lithuania. It included installation, performance, and theatre created by individual artists and in collaboration. [21] Seven Chicago artists participated: Donald McGhee, David Brown, Matthew Wilson, Steve Barsotti, Louise McKissick, Jeff Callen, and myself.

The observatory, established in the center of Vilnius by Tomas Zebrauskas in 1753, is one of the oldest observatories in Europe. In 1876, the western tower of the observatory burned, and in 1883 the observatory was closed, inaccessible, and almost forgotten until 1997. The Observatory is metaphoric, an interface created as a means to understand the world on a global scale. Through international collaboration: dialogue, interaction, and contextualization the participants in this project engaged in a similar process of global understanding.

My interest in The Observatory project is related to the metaphor of the historical function of the observatory related to the present explosion of information in the digital age. In trying to understand the implications of this drastic social and cultural upheaval, I looked to the time of the Enlightenment, when the operation of the observatory was at its height. During the 18th century, the observatory was an international center of scientific research with significant discoveries in the orbit of Mercury and the nature of light itself. In the present day, technology (this time information technology via email and web correspondence between artists and organizers) has made the observatory once again internationally significant.

In The Twins, through the use of robotics, light, interactive computer technology, and human interaction, I designed a system in which a structured set of rules created a complex and unpredictable event. (image 11) Complex patterns in black chalk were created by two performers controlling line-tracker robots. The cylindrical tower space served symbolically as interior mind space; and in this performance, the chalk marks left as a record of an event could be seen as a map of the mind.

In collaboration, performances were created in the space. Steve Barsotti used his skills as an instrument maker and musician to fashion instruments out of material he found in the observatory. The music of these instruments was then performed within the space itself. A remnant of Spinduline Spinae, a collaborative performance work by McKissick and myself, was hung out of the tower in which housed The Twins. (image 12) Spinduline Spyna (Radiation Lock in Lithuanian) consisted of one blindfolded performer in the tower reciting a series of significant dates in Lithuanian history, one for each of a long line of scarves as she let the scarves out the window of the space.

Motion and Perception

What we call reality--"this is it"; "I am here"; "this is happening to me" --is a certain relationship between memories and sensations that surround us at the same time. That is the only true relationship that marks the distinction between self and not-self. 'I' am the bridge between past and present, and also between present and future. This linkage demands something more than memory [22]

The experience of timelessness is similar to what George P. Landow calls the Borgesian Aleph.[23] That is, a point that contains all other points. Landow is referring to digital experience on the internet rather than physical experience: the idea that you can seemingly reach any point on the web from any other point. Is there an analogous position in the physical world? We consider time as linear, each point in time leading to another in succession. Yet, many claim to have experienced moments in time that seem to have a position outside that linear progression.

In the Siggraph '97 panel discussion moderated by Eric Paulos of the University of California, Berkeley entitled "Interfacing Reality: Emerging Trends Between Humans and Machines," performance artist Stelarc discussed the relationship between body motion and memory. She stated that when a person walking wants to recall something, the walking pace slows down. When someone wants to forget something, they naturally speed up their pace. Theoretical physics also expresses a relationship between time and motion, for example: the slowing down of time in travel at the speed of light. [24]

My current exploration is the expansion of location to motion. New work deals with the perception of continuity in conscious thought. I am attempting to change viewers' physical body perception and alter their expectations of control through inconsistencies in control and response in interactive installation.

Tight, shown in June at Artemisia Gallery, was a collaborative work between myself, McKissick, and Barbara Droth. (image 13) An interactive computer application [25] was displayed through an antique stereoscope. Sound, stories, and images could be accessed through a standard mouse interface, but the way the images were seen created a false sense of perspective. The application used stereoscopic 3D modeled objects as well as 2D graphics and video. The text was from an actual conversation with a stranger, a moment stored in my personal memory.

The performance aspect of the exhibition consisted of two performers in black wetsuits suspended from the ceiling of the gallery in climbing harnesses. Visitors to the gallery were then invited to suspend themselves as well. This process was my first experimentation in combining altered physical sensation with interactive media, this has recently been expanded to performance events controlled by subtle eye movements.

My most recent project, Gape, was created using a simple eye tracking device designed by An Reich. The device, which determines the position of dark or light pixels, uses input through a video capture card to control an interactive application. Gape was shown at Columbia College Chicago in Cache, an exhibition of digital work shown in conjunction with ISEA98 curated by Niki Nolin. In this piece, which was also performed at Artemisia Gallery, a live performer uses the eye tracking device as a mode of communication. A grid of nine regions on a 640X480 screen output the sound of eight words from the text used in Tight (one of the nine regions was inactive and used to create the effect of a pause or breath in the spoken words). The performer worked with the device and several sound processors to create a sound composition. At first, the viewer believed that the performer was trying to speak a complete sentence but was unable to control her eye movements enough to tame the sensitive technological device, but then the viewer began to listen to the soundscape created by the overlapping words and to appreciate the complexity of the combination and repetition. The eight words: I (You) (don't) want to be young (old), in combination created conflicting statements about the human body while the viewer watched a performer locked into an unmoving position, limited by the same technology she was controlling.

Conclusion

Art can be viewed as parallel to memory. Many of the same terms are used to describe the two. For example: art and memory both employ and integrate the senses, both are representations, and both refer to a sense of timelessness. Art can evoke memory and vice versa.

There are a number of metaphors in use today to help us understand how memory functions. I have concentrated on three major schemas in my work and used these schemas in the organization of this article: the spatial metaphor, the computer database metaphor, and the temporal metaphor. None of these schemas completely define memory with all its complex and inexplicable behavior. I have come to believe in the course of this research that at the present time that there are many aspects of memory that, like art, are not quantifiable.