Synthetic Experience and the Continuum of the Authentic: A
Contribution, by
Andrea Ackerman, speaker and featured digital artist at the
conference Synthetic Sensations - The
Five Senses and New Technologies , June 30, 2006, organised by Niran
Bahjat-Abbas and Stephen Barber, Kingston University, London, UK http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/staff/cv.php?staffnum=302,
webcast and catalog forthcoming.
Our senses -
taste, smell, sight, hearing, touch, and how we process our perceptions to form meaning , have evolved relative to
the physical world as we ordinarily know it.. This physical world is one of
more or less solid objects in three dimensional space - Euclidean space.
relatively stable over time is what we
usually call the real world. The digital world, on the other hand the
world of information seems to our senses a clearly different sort of
world- invisible or nearly so, a world
of disembodied objects which are very
fluid or even unstable over time. This virtual
world has been thus by implication the "unreal" world.
Now I think
the boundary between these two worlds
has seemed clear cut- a linear, simple absolute boundary, but I think now we see now that is an illusion
and in fact the virtual and real world,
are part of a whole continuum of OUR world. At this point They are both the
real world. In fact there is a constant transformation happening back and forth
between the virtual and the real world.
This fluid transformation from virtual to real can be seen as different states of the same
thing like the transformation of solid
ice to liquid water to steam vapor and to gas. The virtual is just as
"real" as the physical, just a different state of the real. We are
not becoming bodiless. Bodied and bodiless are transformations in a continuous
system.*
In
characterising this system, I am very influenced in this by complexity theory
and string theory. Very simply said, I think of space time is an 11 or 12
dimensional way with all but three of these spatial dimensions being curled up,
interior small. Space time itself is
dynamic expanding and contracting. Complexity/chaos theory has shown that
living systems grow and develop based on
relatively simple algorithms, applied recursively. Both theories suggest
boundaries between events or objects are infinitely complex in a fractal sort
of way, so that the world can be thought of in much more of a sense of a
continuum and with similarity than before - between "real" and
"virtual" worlds. There is
also more of a continuum, with complex boundaries between the organic and
inorganic, alive and not alive worlds. I
use the sense of complexity inherent in these theories to connect a visual
sensory complexity in creating my art work with the sense of the complexity of
the inner psychological world and the world of meaning.
The goal in
my work has been to make digital art that is as real, as sensuously compelling,
as humanistically meaningful, as natural and physically based art. People want
the virtual to have this capacity to impart meaning, to be experienced as
authentic, desperately I think, but there are anxieties about it too. These
anxieties as a group relate to its "dehumanising" effects. We are in
a state of conflict about the direction
we are moving, but we are moving there nevertheless, inexorably. Since we
increasingly artificially creating our own environment of adaptation it
behooves to create it with as much richness, diversity and beauty as the
natural environment and to maintain the connections however complex or attenuated.
I have made a series of
landscapes, Synthetic
Landscapes which are intended to function as synthetic portable
gardens in the context of the extreme
urban environments that many of us inhabit. These landscapes have a complex
beauty and a depth of information that is mysteriously satisfying. In these
landscapes I imbued objects with qualities not ordinarily occurring in nature,
creating a synthetic nature. I take
specific aspects of 2D and 3D still and
animation software and apply them in ways they were not intended, like using
effects meant for fluids on rose petals or skin. These images have been
visually genetically engineered and animated with cross species qualities.
Finding meaningful ways to use these cross category effects is essential to the
evocation of a seamless transformation - digital to human.
The first Synthetic
Panelling which I made using a video of an abandonned slate quarry
in Vermont. I intended it to transform into a wall covering (repeating module)
suggesting the rich grain and emotionally comforting feeling of natural wood.
It also evokes such landscapes as the time when the earth was forming vast
canyons etc.
Synthetic Pond was made using video
images of a pond and waterfall from a Bronx Zoo monkey exhibit, in which the
monkeys live in an entirely synthetic world except for the other monkeys. While
making it and for a while afterwards I kept it on the floor of my studio and as
I sat by it as I would a reflecting pool in a garden and found my state of mind
would be transformed to a contempletive one
in the same way.
Weeping Hemlock is a
treed landscape, when output is about 11 feet by 22 feet it becomes
about life size.,. It was made from a video of a Weeping Hemlock in the
Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I was attracted to the complexity and interiority of
the tree space, and also the fact that the weeping characteristic comes from a
naturally occurring mutation that has been cultivated.. It was fascinating to
me that while I was making this piece, which took a few years, I found watching
the video over and over, grabbing and transforming individual frames,
recreating and transforming the landscape,
i became very intimate with it,
and it was more interesting than visiting the tree itself. The are
various sub landscapes within this vast landscapes, and make more blatant
reference to mathematical fractal forms around the edges. In other place it
transforms to underwater, intergalactic and subatomic landscapes. Although it
is a 2D digital image, it retains its video history and is experienced as 3D
and animated on the wall.
This sense leads to the last synthetic landscape which does
actually move, it's a 3D computer animation called Rose Breathing. In Rose
Breathing, a synthetic rose rhythmically opens and closes in human
like respiration, the idea being that is has cross species qualities, a plant
breathing with human respiration, the petals evoke skin or muscle, the rose has
locomotion. etc..This animation is deeply affecting. The viewer's own breathing
and their thoughts become entrained with the undulating rose. On full screen it
evokes ocean waves or streaming protoplasm, on a small screen it transforms
into a tiny beating heart. For a 3D character this is a radical new subject as
most 3D characters are action figures with essentially no emotional life. This
character has a subtle slow, deep and complex emotionality . This leads up to
the final two works which you will see in a minute. Now in the form of a synthetic virtual
woman I continue to develop the concept
of a subtle slow, deep and complex emotionality to a 3D computer animation
The two newest animations
are Yawn, and Woman Waking_Paper Dissolve a
virtual woman, as you can see is in monochrome gray. She is mysteriously
natural yet obviously artificial. She undergoes a series of ambiguously but
deeply expressive transformations, and in the process blurs the boundaries
between inner worlds and outer worlds, between the experiences of the
different senses, visual, auditory, and
kinesthetic, between the natural world and the synthetic one etc. This is
reinforced by the transformations and projections of a the sound of crinkling
paper happening in the sound composition by composer Matthew Greenbaum. At times she looks almost human, at others
she looks more canine or reptilian or like a planetary body orbiting in space.
In any event, the success to me is measured in the fact that the viewer is
induced to wonder "What is she thinking?", "What is she
feeling?" I think because she embodies the virtual in an authentic way.
With that
I'll end my talk and you can experience the three animations for yourselves.
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* The economist Edward Castronova author of Synthetic
Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games "in a recent
interview stated that "In virtual worlds-or synthetic worlds,
“virtual” having lost much of its meaning-only the icons around
which human interactions flow are nonreal (and i would argue with that). The
interactions themselves are as real as any we have outside synthetic worlds.
When six soldiers take out a machine-gun nest at Fort Bragg, the machine gun is
real and the teamwork is real. When the same six soldiers take out a dragon in
a synthetic world, the dragon is not real but the teamwork is. In synthetic
worlds, the things we trade may be fantastic, but the process and value of the
trade is real." another example, in second life players are startng to buy
and sell commodities in the virtual world for real"physical" world
currency . http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/096262in.html