Communication between human/nature/technologies is provoking artists, scientists, educational professionals, as well as technicians and business people with a lot of issues. In our contemporary scenario, we have increasingly special events, journals, magazines, newspapers, TVs, Internet spaces discussing fascinating possibilities to generate new forms of life using interactive technologies. Just the same, during the Banff Centre Summit in June 2000, "Growing Things: The Cultures of Nano Tech, Bio Tech, and Eco Tech Meat Art" , some important investigations in medicine, philosophy, architecture, genetic engineering, communication, art among other scientific realms have presented transdisciplinary approaches concerning biological, technological and artistic creativity researches. At the panel: "Dreaming Bodies, Animal and Human", I presented "Growing up dreams: animal and human", which is related to recent works of the Artecno Group at exploring human and animal life extended by dialogues with interactive artificial systems that generate hybrid forms of life. My intention as an artist and researcher totally engaged in the Cyberculture social environment is to highlight human practices related to computers and interfaces, their hardware and software which provide us some behaviors in biological and emotional aspects. There are technologies linked to the development of microinformation and interfaces that generate events where we come across the unknown, the magic and its spell power, on the border of deliriums or nightmares of a bad night's sleep.
Artifacts, tools, machines and devices always have enhanced our capacity to understand the physical world. Concerning computer and interfaces, which are more than tools, because they are systems that work related to the environment’s behavior, we have now in the art scenario the notion of complexity. Thus, interactive art goes into the field of complexity sciences and ecosystem’s issues are important to understand what is implied in the sensitive experiences. Among these technologies are artificial intelligence and multiagent systems, neural networks, telepresence and telerobotics, avatars, virtual reality immersive environments, artificial life and other kinds of interactive environments. So, what radically modifies the art scenario is undoubtedly the possibility to be immersed in a new hybrid world where our body communicates with interactive technologies and their notions of complexity, emergence, feedback and self-organization receiving responses in real time and processing new sensorial syntheses. Consequently, what alters the art scenario is the possibility that computers and interfaces offer to couple the body to the technologies. In the contemporary philosophy, the Chilean School postulates the surpassing of representation’s ideas and the unification of the self. Those researches provide straight relation to the Interactive Art. Varela’s cognition as "concrete, incarnated, in-corporated, embodied" actions implies cognition inside the experience of the body’s performance. To be connected is to think and feel coupled to high performance technologies. The interfaces offer the cognition as a guided action what means virtual environment perception and possession as a living experience. So, to be connected to technologies is to accept to be involved in a situation or process where the expressiveness of the "I" or the "interior self" is technologically coupled, which means to have a complex existence. That condition enhances our levels of intelligence and imagination. In the same way, Edmond Couchot puts in the interactive art context the concept of "sujet interfacé". This condition is totally related to theories about body, experience and cognition and coincides with Varela's theories about the body’s capability to lead perception through actions. Couchot emphasizes the hybridization of the viewer’s body where the "sujet interfacé", connected to computer technologies is immersed in a new communication process. He calls this dialogue the commutation process, highlighting that the human communication has changed with interactive technologies. The "sujet interfacé" has a post-biological feeling in which human’s actions engage the technologies in the process of understanding, generating and regenerating the world.
Interactive art acts in a complex way, because it does not represent worlds, but simulates other kinds of worlds, it generates new forms of life. The paradigm of representation, the idea of the beautiful, the contemplation of an image or an object are changed by fields of relation between bodies and computers, among networks, between the body and the machines, among several bodies connected, amplified, in planetary dimensions, between minds and softwares. The interaction validates the principle of connectivity and the emergence of interactive technologies. So, we are immersed in constructive process. It is not only the case of generating knowledge and fixes it on a memory as the given result, but of evolving in mental processes of a technical nature and a human nature. How can we act in images of a painting, in the texture of an sculpture and exchange with them different states? The art which uses support and materials has dimensions, weight, defined and unchangeable. In this kind of art exterior and interior are definitely marked. We are not allowed to exchange information as it happens with memory units we share with the cyberspace and that put the artistic object in situations of mutation. Interactive art offers ephemeral connections through man's relationship with technologies. It explores the behaviour of human bodies and the behaviour of the systems. It demands a total implication with what is being experimented and it presupposes a state of "attentiveness". Interactive art interrogates the existence as a possibility of constantly reinventing life. Vigilance, receptivity, choice, collaboration, control, diversions, Reframed consciousness' states of predictability, unpredictability, chances, disorders, adaptability among others are required conditions for those who foresee an interactive system and for those who experience it. The principle of this art is no longer to show how an "interior I" has generated something in a particular way, as it is not to determine artistic manifestations from the "isms" succeeding in history. According to Roy Ascott, the only legitimate "ism" is based on connection, on production and regeneration of knowledge, what denominates connectivism, that is, a creating shared with the power of machines which expand our capacities of thinking and acting.
Artists work in collaboration with scientists and technicians and explore the behavior of systems. They attempt to face the challenges of hardware and software to create beyond the mouse, the keyboard and the screen. They see the computer as a complex system and no longer as a tool or a simple machine. The principle ruling creation is the one of mutability, of ephemeral, of come-into-being in process demanding reciprocity, collaboration, sharing for the one who is the old viewer of previous artistic manifestations.
The human/technologies’ relationship provokes an anthropological revolution and offers a new social environment where we reach a reframed consciousness through technologies’effects. The ways of feeling of the virtual technologic are part of a new aesthetics, the cyberaesthetics, and they put us right in the middle of the postbiological feeling where the body acts, thinks and feel coupled to computer’synthetic bodies whose access to the devices allow us to enter information. The foundation that begins to be necessary for a theory of the artistic production and creativity matters is expanded on the basies of an implication of the biologic that does not depend on the aesthetic judgment only. Within the Cyberculture’s technological scenario, the human being experiences communication phenomena by interacting and receiving artificial systems’ responses in real time. Interactive technologies are providing us with dialogues between the body and artificial systems, which allow the acquisition and communication of biological signals with machines signals. Interfaces and computers capture, manage and give back signals emitted by the body. We have dialogues between the biologic and the artificial in biofeedbacks and technofeedbacks processing sensorial syntheses. In Interactive Art, artist needs to generate intimate zones with scientific discoveries searching for their synaesthetic conditions. I call those zones "elliptical zones". They are interval zones between the real and the virtual where we experience something that can happen only because we are connected to technologies. By interacting with artists’ works, biofeedbacks and technofeedbacks flows displace the sensibility of phenomena and of scientific laws which manage the symbolic meaning from the interactive experience during ravishing machine/human dialogues.
Artists deal with scientific issues looking for exceeding technoscientific limits of the artificial systems and offering new ways to experiment artists’ ideas about the world. In the digital era, by using computers and interfaces, we can experience other worlds through the magic and unexpected effects of technologies. When interacting, we penetrate the field of phenomena and acquire an ultrahuman condition (Teillard Chardin), through artificial systems that allow us to go beyond the limits of the nontechnologized real. Interactive technologies modify art environment not only in a technical way but because they are intelligent systems which act in epistemological levels surpassing the machines capabilities and acting more like consciousness process related to complex systems and their softwares. Bodies connected to computers experience flows from electronic databases and their logic-digital circuits. Simulations are possible through systems based on high performance software which operate mathematical language algorithms, make complex calculations, hybridize images, sounds, texts, offer connections and associative thoughts in hypermedia structures, interpret cellular microworlds, codify particles’ signals of the universe, ask agents to incorporate us and act in our place, incarnate avatars as identities experienced on the net or to perform other tasks in virtual environments. To transform invisible powers by giving them visibility, to check organic laws, the immersion in virtual worlds, to teletransport us to other virtual worlds, to act in remote spaces are among other situations provided by computer technologies that offer consciousness propagations in a symbiosis of organic and inorganic life.
Just the same, the recent interactive artistic works of Artecno Research Group, University of Caxias do Sul, in Brazil, offer interfaces to be used on the body, which permit to reach to simulated worlds and to enhance our human condition. Poetically, we explore some Brazilian cultural issues concerning shamans and native’s life. I emphasize that in Brazilian tribes there are always the shamans or "pagés" that are responsible to manage the health of people, deal with natural phenomena to provoke rain or other communication with the cosmos, because the shamans have special powers regarding the ecosystem. Interactive art also enables artists to manage invisible forces during interactive rituals, where body is coupled to technologies receiving special powers. External memories transform us into potential beings able to exist and to think coupled to machines. However, when we are connected the implication of body is a hybrid expression of our subjectivities. We are at a passage, in transit from one to another strange thing. We are on a crossroads or on an intersection of the real and the technological virtual. That is the concept and the content of our interactive event INSN(H)AK(R)E S. The robot /snake lives together with real snakes in a mixture of biological and robotic body, sharing the lfe of serpents. In the title of the work, IN + SNAKES + the letters (H) and (R) in brackets allow us to read also the world shares or the shares we can experience with the robot and the environment, the snake body and the images. This means the condition for mixing real and virtual, organic and inorganic, carbon and silicon, animal, human and artificial.
I N S N (H) A K (R) E S
Living among snakes is put us at the level of dream and imagination. Serpents have always incited human’s thought.
"Have you ever been a snake? Have you ever shared someone's body in a remote environment?". This invitation may be fulfilled if you take part in the robotics event:
INSN(H)AK(R)ES
http://artecno.ucs.br/insnakes
Thinking about enhancing the sensorial-perceptive field with the interactive technologies and using robotics, sensoring and telematic communication networks, this event proposes to share the body of a robot/snake that lives in a serpentarium of the Museum of Natural Sciences in the Caxias do Sul University, Brazil. Remote participants, connected to the site, can move in the same physical space that living snakes when they incorporate the snake/robot’s body called Angela. In robot’s body a coupled webcamera which transmits images of the environment. Using the arrow keys of the keyboard, we can transmit movement orders to the robot, which interpret them and the result is a trajectory in the serpentarium. The life of the environment results from the mixture of biologic signals and artificial signals. The natural world revitalizes itself through the interactive technologies that generate new forms of life.
In INSN(H)NAK(R)ES, in the serpentarium natural environment, the remotely controlled robot performs tasks which human beings might be doing with their body. The robot is an agent that dwells and acts in the physical world. Consequently, connecting the website http://artecno.ucs.br/insnakes, allows the robot/snake to be commanded by remote participants in an enhancement of the body in a planetary scale and with decisions that are made in the cyberspace without any physical or geographic boundary. By acting collaboratively, each participant contributes to life of the site and to the natural life of the ecological environment. A cross-disciplinary team of Artecno Research Group - University of Caxias do Sul - that includes artists, biologists, information technology and automation people is responsible for this work. Poetically, we offer the possibility to live with snakes, which provokes a strong aesthetic dimension. Snakes are part of a huge arsenal of terrifying stories and according to the biologist e herpetologist that collaborates in the project who is responsible for the serpentarium, these frightening ideas about snakes have been keeping people away from the scientific knowledge of their lives that could put down the myth about these matters. Being able to live through telepresence in the environment and penetrate, crawling into the natural life of the snakes, thus learning about snakes' habits and behaviors makes INSN(H)AK(R)ES to be a very important very important for environmental education.
Another version of I N S N ( H ) A K (R) E S is the interactive installation in a dark room with a transparent glass box and projection of images on the floor over a layer of white marble powder. The interface to interact is a snake’s body and people must touch the snake’s body to receive images and sounds. Simultaneously, the snake’s website allows us to incorporate the body of the artificial snake and to act in a remote space living with natural snakes. So, the installation offers two kinds of interfaces with the same poetic and aesthetic approach: telematic interface and on site interface. Technically, in the first environment, the telematic system allows the remote action and enables people to live in real time in the snake’s serpentarium. We visualize the environment with a videocamera CCD, and we can move using a robot’s body through the applet in Java and a special software to video capture developed in C++ for Win32 environment with API Video for Windows, platform UNIX. The software for displacements is in C for DOS environment and there is also an API ROBIX. The second installation environment offers interactivity on site and provokes an adaptive behavior in the snakes’s projections using a neural network capability to receive the haptic signals when people are connected to the interface. Every touch sends signals to the computer and the software "Xamã 32" that consists of a neural network system is the responsible for the environment changes. The body of the snake’s interface is in a specially lighted place, exploring scenographic effects. It is quite impressive the participants's reactions when interacting, mixing states of fear, happiness and surprise because the environment changes. Images born from the powder on the floor and the irregular surface of grains create other topographies to the virtual environment and modify the shapes and textures of the snakes. Sounds of native rituals and natural noises remind us of primitive ceremonies in which the human desire is to embody animals. All this situation is related to native rituals which are used to painting the body with snakes’ patterns when perform the rituals. It is the ritual of the snakes. The installation intends to offer this kind of aesthetic appeal: to incorporate the animal’ body and to become a snake by receiving all symbolic meaning.
Finally, with my words, I just wish to propose a few of ideas about cyberart and complexity by incorporating issues of computer and interfaces used in art. The central issues are the complex existence in the art process, the structural copulae between the biological and the artificial, the most intensified possibilities to signals processing by capture and translation, virtual meetings and remote actions. Without any doubt, interactivity enhances the subjective dimension of artistic intentions and technologies have the expressive capacity to feed the human sensitive field. I believe that the artist's presence is extremely relevant for the research field that addresses interfaces between humans and machines. The artists, with their creative mind, their imagination are important because they are experts in discovering the sensitive qualities of technologies. In this way, in interactive art, artists work in collaboration with scientists and technicians and explore systems' behavior by thinking their sensitive qualities. In this way, in interactive art, artists work in collaboration with scientists and technicians and explore systems' behavior by thinking their sensitive qualities. Through the artist’s works the scientists see their theories in the sensitive praxis. In a stimulating way, artists bring scientists closer to the spirituality of their theories. This is why we must work together, in co-authorship with science people. First of all, because artists understand what is beyond technologies and work with metaphors. The system's logic feeds the artist's creativity and the collaborative action of artists and scientists is extremely important to propose new forms of life and to enhance our human condition. In the crossroads art and science, using interfaces as prosthesis to the body we collaborate with the future of our species. Certainly, computers will be increasingly more biological and interfaces more humans. Technologies will be naturalized and the body technologized. That condition enhances the challenges to create more and more interactive systems mixing animal, human, plants, cosmos signals with the technological-virtual.
With the present exhibition, I would like to highlight the subjective dimension of my artistic intentions and the expressive capacity of interactive systems to feed the human sensitive. Artists provoke poetic and psychological levels of technologies, throwing the body into rituals by performances to be accomplished in couplings with machines. In structural copulae, in a biologic and technological context, the body’s behavior and the system behavior give responses and regenerate themselves. Art enters into relationship with cosmic forces. Interactive art faces us with the concept of ecosystem and gives us shamanic powers. All this is fantastic!!
Profª Drª. Diana Domingues
Artecno Research Group
University of Caxias do Sul - Brazil