The 'e' Prefix: e-Science, e-Art & the New Creativity

The 'e' Prefix: e-Science, e-Art & the New Creativity

The division of labour that has kept the sciences and the arts apart for the past two hundred years is collapsing with the development of the 'e' prefix. As the craft practices of both areas proceed in their own directions, the 'e' component of both the sciences and the arts have created communities of interest that suspect they hold the key to the future development of the craft worlds in which they trained. Their mutual interest in exploring the possibilities of new technologies ahead of the crystalisation of e-practices provides an historic moment where the categories and values that separate science and art come under examination. The task of the early-adopters and innovators of the 'e' culture is to imbue the prefix with meaning and application whilst revelling in the opportunity to use it to transform their disciplines. This presentation will explore where the locus of creativity relocates under these conditions and how that may impact on the culture of the arts in particular.

The Networked Multi-disciplinary Performance Environment

For performance artists, the development of stable, networked performance environments has relied heavily on the importation of models of the ‘social’ inter-personal communication type. Given that such communication responds to merely an aspect of the needs of artists, in practice this proves to be an imperfect and incomplete tool. In response to the challenge of producing a more rounded environment, the authors, through their work at the Visualisation Research Unit (VRU) at BIAD, have developed Collaborative Online Digital Arts (CODA) as a platform for drawing together networked resources from different disciplines.

The benefits, drawbacks, needs and future possibilities of existing networked performance will be discussed, as well as the omissions and shortcomings of CODA and other real time applications. However, the principle of creating a virtual performance environment has been abandoned for enhancing the traditional physical performance environment.

CODA was developed specifically to facilitate inter-disciplinary communication in multi-disciplinary performances. Central to CODA is the concept of the node. A node can be a computer with a specialist function, a sensor network, a human-computer interface device or even a person. All nodes broadcast media-in-specific data to a virtual data pool from which every node has access. This allows performers to interact with the environment without the necessity of having in-depth knowledge of how the data is being generated. For example, this allows the output from a video analysis node to be easily mapped onto a sound synthesis parameter on another node.

CODA could be thought of as a single ‘super instrument’ with which all performers can interact simultaneously. The technological infrastructure of the instrument is hidden, but the interface is not. Performers do not need to learn how it works, instead only what interactions it understands and what the results of those interactions may be. This methodology improves performer spontaneity considerably and lends itself particularly well to improvisation incorporating different disciplines where ad hoc exploration and experimentation are important.

This suggests that the network is itself the instrument, and leads to a further interesting phenomena. The data produced can be automatically archived and endlessly reformulated after real time presentation.

The paper will be presented with a short demonstration of CODA.

The New Passive: Opportunities for Spectators in Interactive Performance

Distributed digital media has produced a new space for performance that has much in common with old spaces: opportunities for spectator anonymity and passivity in particular. The shady interactions of the lurker are difficult to identify and often lead to misapprehensions about the success or failure of online performance. The web statistics rarely count how quickly the back button was pressed. This is partly because of an assumption on the part of developers of performance for the web: that they are virtualising a real-world style experience related to either performance or broadcasting or a mixture of both.

The Web, however, presents more difficulties than this as a push-pull medium. The dynamics of the relationships between people who surf in and people who create frameworks are not dichotomised in the same way as in a performance. In Web 2.0 technologies, it is often the visitor who creates or contributes to the content. Extrapolating this idea to the realm of performance, this presentation will discuss how spectating can be redefined and realigned as contributing. Working beyond the computer hardware and into the realms of the flesh and blood, spectators are now accessible as contributors. The potential for using these new 'input devices' to develop performance work suggests a different relationship in creative practice.