The second meeting in Souillac held this summer from July 6th to 17th produced a number of specific projects or project ideas following up on elements of the Souillac Charter for Art and Industry written the year before. The Charter can been seen in French and in English at the addresses listed below.
While all the projects are interrelated they are presented here as a series of detached documents corresponding to the categories established in the preliminary report and listed below. Some of the projects found form during our meeting, others have been developed further since. Still others have to be further refined. All of them demand an enormous amount of work. In some cases preliminary funding to begin that work has already been identified. For others, the search has just begun.
Artists
Rights in the New Communication Space - Survey
You are all, of course, invited to comment or expand on the conclusions, send additional information pertinent to the goals expressed, volunteer for any of the work proposed, help find funding to reach the various stages indicated or pass on any ideas that will further our joint efforts. We wish to thank everyone sincerely for their participation and energy in making Souillac II a success.
*
See Previous Souillac Article in this section: http://leonardo.info/isast/articles/
souillac/lagrana.html
http://leonardo.info/isast/articles/
souillac/foresta.html
http://leonardo.info/isast/articles/
souillac/souillac.html
http://www.cicv.fr/
CITOY/SOUILLAC/charte/char.html
Contacts
Don Foresta: foresta@wanadoo.fr
Georges-Albert Kisfaludi: gak@wanadoo.fr
Jonathan Barton: jbarton@eutelsat.fr
______________________________________________________________________________
This
regular series of workshops brings together artists and artists'
micro-enterprises with larger corporations in telecommunications, information
technologies and content, to stimulate contractual and project-based
co-operation. The proposal, based on the London prototype organised in May and
the meeting during the second week of Souillac II, is to encourage short-term
product development to long-term research, channelling the innovation flow from
artists and micro-enterprises more effectively toward large corporations and to
market.
In
Souillac, representatives from the UK, France and the Netherlands agreed to
pursue, co-ordinate and support an international programme of such meetings for
1998 - 1999, committing funds to three such meetings, one in each country, and
to a common pool to assure international participation. Representatives from
Spain, Germany and Canada expect to join during 1999. The conference
participants highly recommended such meetings at local, national and
international levels based on the following principals:
ART
IS RESEARCH
Artistic
experimentation is a form of research pushing the limits of any communications
technology and it is important for industry to be informed of the work going on
in that sphere.
ARTISTS
AND ARTISTS' MICRO-ENTERPRISES
Small
groups of innovative artists and engineers, communications and IT graduates,
have formed and continue to form quasi- or fully-commercial associations to
advance their objectives. They are essentially 'creative engineers',
refuelling their creativity through artistic experimentation.
AREAS
OF ACTIVITY
These
small and micro-enterprises are concerned with visual / auditory perception,
system architecture, interface development, algorithm development, new forms of
content and use of platforms and network to support collaborative work.
AIMS
OF THE WORKSHOPS
1.
To provide a forum for project-based, focused discussion between artists,
artists' SMEs and larger corporations in: infrastructure, equipment, software,
content creation / publishing, network services and applications.
2.
To provide access to new markets and to develop local-specific content,
applications and platforms.
3.
To generate understanding of management skills amongst creative practitioners:
SMEs in digital media, interface design, application / service developers,
small content creators / publishers, companies who develop products / uses for
networked communications.
Arts Council of England
Ministries of Culture and of Education, France
Ministry of Culture, the Netherlands
International Telecommunication Union
European Commission
European Confederation of Young Entrepreneurs
CESAM, Centre d'Expertise et de Services en Applications Multimédias, Canada
Souillac II | London | Future participants | |
Telefonica | BT | France Telecom | Nokia |
Bell Atlantic | Mitel | CNET | IBM |
CESAM | Cisco | Pearson | Philips |
Lucent | BBC | Cable & Wireless | |
Eutelsat | Nortel |
All
of the artists and institutions present during the two weeks of Souillac II
expressed the need for higher band-width possibilities and for a permanent
pipeline for artistic, educational and cultural experimentation. Many of the
institutions and individual artists are already confronting the problem of
limited band-width in their work and the need to find solutions permitting
larger scale experimentation in interactive work. It was obvious in our
discussions that the people present working in these related fields already
have existing programmes and projects capable of testing the possibilities
systems such as ATM could provide. The demand is project driven.
Since
many such networks are being discussed, and built, it was decided to propose
the kind of experimentation developed by the participants as the best possible
way to test the potential of high band-width connections. Projects in the
areas of art and education are by definition content based and the most
demanding from the cultural, social and technical points of view. They are,
therefore, ideal candidates for experimentation on the future use of such
networks.
A
specific recommendation was directed to the European Commission, DG-XIII,
DG-III and ISPO regarding the EC's plan to connect universities throughout
Europe with ATM. Since the kind of work presented, particularly artistic
production, already exists at a considerable level, since that work is already
confronted by the problems of limited band-width and since it is from several
points of view the most challenging, it is natural that such a programme of
connecting centres start with what is already happening. These existing
programmes and projects are sometimes associated with university departments,
art schools or other administrative systems, but many exist independently which
should also be included. It would be faster and more efficient to start where
there is an existing demand rather than generally connecting institutions in
hope of results.
Art
schools, universities, research centres, individual artists, industrial groups
all agreed to pursue the idea further, tracing a line from the US west coast,
through the east coast, Canada, across the Atlantic to France, Germany, the UK,
the Netherlands and Spain as the first steps in building the art and education
pipeline. The list below is far from exhaustive and represents only those who
were directly or indirectly interested in the Souillac initiative. A further
effort to identify interested people and institutions would easily double the
number on both sides of the Atlantic.
The
next step is to identify individuals who would be willing to act as country or
regional co-ordinators working to put in place their part of the pipeline and
inform everyone of what is already happening. Second, a call should be made to
other institutions, centres, schools and groups interested in participating.
Third, a list of interested industrial partners should be drawn up such as that
started here. Fourth, a technical inventory is necessary to determine what
connections already exist, how to have access to them, what projects are in the
offing, and how they could be co-ordinated. Finally, an inventory of art,
educational and cultural projects should be compiled to demonstrate more
clearly the need for this technical support.
During
the meeting between artists and representatives of industry the second week of
Souillac II the artists presented several projects either completed or in
production, demonstrating the kind of work being done and the different
directions being pursued (see Souillac Final Report - 1, Innovation Exchange
Workshops). The group also discussed several criteria for identifying the kind
of artistic, educational and cultural projects to be proposed and eventually
showcased. Ideally, work should involve one or more of the following:
1.
technical development and innovation
2.
interesting partnerships
3.
development of new "languages" in the widest sense
4.
be considered a prototype
5.
be seen in public spaces, i.e. museums, etc.
6.
be highly legible - visible
7.
be user conscious
It
is possible that a project inventory and the list of interested institutions
could be organised by using the Navihedron model developed during the Souillac
meeting (see Final Report - 3). That information could be fed in to the
various meetings being prepared between artists and industry proposed in part 1
of the Souillac II final report. The following have confirmed their interest
in the high band-width network either during Souillac II or since:
Interested Institutions & Individuals:
San
Diego Supercomputer Center, Univ. of California at San Diego, San Diego, Cal.,
USA
Contact:
Rand Steiger, Professor
University
of Southern California, Los Angeles, Cal., USA
Contact:
Vibeke Sorensen, Professor
Columbia
University, Institute for Learning Technologies, New York, NY, USA
Contact:
Robert McClintock, Director
Young
McDonald's Farm, Dover Plains, NY, USA
Contact:
Daniel P. McVeigh, Director
School
of Visual Arts, New York, NY, USA
Contact:
John Simon, Professor
Daniel
Langlois Foundation, Montreal, Canada
Contact:
Jean Gagnon, Program Director
Music
Technology Area, Music Faculty, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Contact:
Zack Settel, Chair
Laboratoire
de Museographie, Ecole de Design Industriel, University of Montreal, Montreal,
Canada
Contact:
Luc Courchesne, Professor
Societé
des Arts Technologiques, Montreal, Canada
Contact:
Monique Savoie, Director
McLuhan
Centre, University of Ontario, Toronto, Canada
Contact:
Derrick de Kerckhove, Director
Laboratoire
de Langage Electronique, Paris, France
Contact:
Don Foresta, President
IRCAM,
Paris, France
Contact:
Marie-Hélène Serra, Co-Directeur de la Pédagogie et de la
Création
Cité
des Sciences et de l'Industrie, La Villette, Paris, France
Contact:
Emma Abadi, Responsable de l'action artistique
Centre
National de Création Musical (CIRM), Nice, France
Contact:
Luc Martinez, Director
Sophia
Antipolis Foundation, Sophia Antipolis, France
Contact:
Anne Chambrillon, Assistant to the Director
Centre
Interational de Création vidéo, Montbeliard, France
Contact:
Pierre Bongiovanni, Director
Society
for Old and New Media, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Contact:
Marleen Stikker, Director
V2
Organisation, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Contact:
Alex Adriaansens, Director
V2
Lab, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Contact:
Anne Nigten, Director
Museo
Internacional de Electrografia (MIDE), Cuenca, Spain
Contact:
Jose Ramon Alcala, Director
Art
House, Dublin, Ireland
Contact:
Aoibheann Gibbons, Executive Director
University
of the West of England, Digital Media Laboratory, Bristol, UK
Contact:
Tessa Elliott, Senior Research Fellow
National
Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford, UK
Contact:
Hannah Redler, Digital Media Co-ordinator
Centre
for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick,
Coventry, UK
Contact:
Norman Lewis, Co-ordinator
Visual
Institute of the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany
Contact:
Jeffrey Shaw, Director
Academy
for Art and Media, Cologne, Germany
Contact:
Bernd Kracke, Professor
Media
Arts Research Studies, Institute for Media Communication
German
National Research Center for Information Technology, Sankt Augustin, Germany
Contact:
Monika Fleishmann, Artistic Director
The
Bonn Development Workshop for Computermedia, Animax (BEC), Bonn - Bad
Godesberg, Germany
Contact:
Bodo Lensch, Director
International
Center for Art and New Technologies, Prague, Czech Rep.
Contact:
Pavel Smetana, Director
Interested
Industrial Groups:
Bell
Atlantic, New York, USA
Contact:
Steve Kohn, Director, Educational Initiatives/Strategic Alliances
CESAM,
Centre d'Expertise et de Services en Application Multimédias, Montreal,
Canada
Contact:
Louise Perras, Director
CréaNET,
CNET, Paris, France
Contact:
Pierre Musso, Director
EUTELSAT,
European Telecommunication Satellite Organisation, Paris, France
Contact:
Michael Gordon, Business Planning Manager
TELEFONICA,
Foundation for Art & Technology
Contacts
Georges-Albert Kisfaludi: gak@wanadoo.fr
Jonathan Barton: jbarton@eutelsat.fr
The
Navihedron, developed by Roy Stringer and AMAZE (Liverpool, UK), is a
non-hierarchical information architecture tool allowing intuitive navigation of
the network space. It presents the visitor with the fastest route to the most
interesting information. Further navigation around a site is helped by
arranging the selected node to link it thematically to five points - the most
relevant five next to the one chosen (www.amaze.co.uk). A model for the
interactive art and education network was developed during Souillac II allowing
the network participant or visitor to subjectively approach the information
titles presented here below for a better understanding of what one Souillac
participant called the 'digital culture landscape'.
When
completed this tool will allow participants of the 'Souillac Network' to post
information on relevant art projects, educational programmes, research, events,
pertinent information in many categories, on-line collaboration, and
partnerships. It will be an open platform for expansion to interested future
participants.
The
model has been modified since Souillac to expand its possibilities, adding
categories and enlarging others to better serve the needs described by all the
working groups during both weeks of Souillac II.
The
overall goals remain:
-
to promote artistic experimentation and collaboration in all forms of
interactive art,
-
to expand co-operation between art and industry,
-
in the field of education, to examine the network as a pedagogical subject,
-
also in the field of education,to develop its potential as an educational tool.
Any
further suggestions on how the Navihedron might be improved are appreciated.
It can be seen at http://www.amaze.co.uk/souillac/
The
necessary effort needed now is two-fold:
1.
to design and complete the graphic interface of the Navihedron,
2.
gather and install the necessary information for each of the categories.
That
work can be on-going, but should be divided among those partners interested in
one or another aspect. Any institution already working on any element or
interested in taking on an aspect of the work needed is invited to let us know.
Estimated Budget, 1 year: | |
Finish Construction of Navihedron | 10 000 ECU |
Graphic Interface | 25 000 ECU |
Developing Content | 50 000 ECU |
Total | 85 000 ECU |
During
Souillac II a discussion was held on the question of artists' rights and a
presentation made by Danielle Cliche, senior researcher at ERICArt in Bonn and
Stefaan Verhulst, director of the Programme in Comparative Media Law and
Policy, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford. The discussion
included a conference call with professor Monroe Price (PCMLP - Oxford) and
Mark Stephens (Stephens Innocent-London).
The following is a summary of that presentation and a proposal for approaching the
question systematically and from the point of view of the artists.
Background:
Increasingly artists - visual artists, performance artists and others - are using new digital multi-media technologies to create and disseminate their work. Organisations in Europe and the United States, including cultural entities, have committed themselves to fostering an international community of artists via the Internet, providing for a digital era of creativity and innovation .
How the new technology will affect the content and distribution of artists' work is still unknown, but what is clear is the following: because digital media such as CD-ROM and the Internet have made copying and adapting artists' work easier and less expensive than ever before, the relationship between the economics of creation, production, and distribution maybe radically altered .
Not only artists, but authors and publishers, the music industry - all those involved in the creation and distribution of information- are concerned with this issue .
Since artists are often the most fragile aspects of the creative cycle and the most vulnerable to economic abuse, special attention must be paid to the way they fare in the world of multi-media and modern technology.
Technology firms, Internet rights groups, lawyers, and government officials have raised the discussion of how to reformulate traditional copyright law to protect the rights of large scale players in the digital era. An increasing place must be found, as well, to locate the rights of artists.In addition, artists, like all creators, are consumers as well as producers of images. The new technology providers access to an extraordinary new collection of possibilities, and the danger exists that rules that guarantee exclusivity serve to inhibit creativity.
Governments have attempted to address copyright issues in a digital age domestically, such as the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights in the US or the EU proposal attempting to harmonise aspects of rules on copyright and related rights in the Information Society. Such initiatives have addressed, for example, right holders in industry concerned about data base protection, and are built on traditional concepts of copyright law. It is now time to also address the manner in which media artists deal with the existing or new copyright regulations or issues. It would be especially important for national, regional or international bodies working on digital media and copyright law (including Commissioner Monti's new proposal) to integrate the needs of all rights holders, including artists, in their policies, if these are to survive in the future.
Against this background, the following ideas for an empirical study were
proposed and endorsed by the participants of Souillac II.
Artists' Rights Issues Raised by Digital Technologies:
A
legal system for protecting artists' rights in the digital era must
address the following issues:
Budget: | |
Researchers | 50 000 ECU |
Travel | 30 000 ECU |
Web Site/Diffusion/Communication | 15 000 ECU |
Study | 30 000 ECU |
General expenses | 10 000 ECU |
Total: | 125 000 ECU |
The discussion of interactivity and pedagogical tools began with descriptions and comparisons of the situation and initiatives in different countries; projects actually existing, in the making or non-existent and therefore needed. The discussion underlined both the strong interest and the many limitations in today's context for interactivity as a pedagogical tool as well as the means to develop it. As a first step, the working group defined the objectives of this approach to education and then followed with the recommendations and proposals for projects listed below. Summarising the results of the discussion as we have, does over-generalise. or overlook some of the important particularities of the projects presented. The group was made up of designers and operators of multimedia educational projects, representatives or consultants for governmental institutions working to develop the new multimedia technologies for education (Ministries of Education, Culture...) and industrial representatives who have supported innovative projects. It also included long-distant participants on line, Robert McClintock, Director, Institute for Learning Technologies, Columbia University, New York (USA) and Teemu Leinonen, Co-ordinator, Future Learning Environment, University of Art and Design, Media Lab, Helsinki (Finland). Those interested in more information on the various projects discussed are invited to examine the Web sites at the addresses below. That list is not closed and it is hoped that it could be the beginning of a compilation of interesting sites accessible in the future through the Navihedron (see part 5). Any additions you might wish to add should be sent to the co-ordinator listed at the end of this report.
To develop:
-educational processes re-appropriating interactive technology by reversing the approach which starts with the tool - the exterior - by starting with content - the interior;
-processes of modelling 'virtual knowledge' to fit individual cultural or professional needs by taking into account differing cultural and professional contexts;
-collaborative pedagogical programmes favouring participation, learning and experimentation modelled on the artistic process;
interactive cognitive processes permitting those who learn to participate in the development of the knowledge acquired.
There were two kinds of proposals made during the discussions: recommendations coming from the shared experiences of the group, and proposals for projects coming from stated needs. The projects proposed in this final report are a call to those interested to jointly pursue the development of those actions deemed necessary by the group. In some cases that means support for and participation in programmes already existing in certain countries. For others, it will be necessary to form working groups to put into action those recommendations.
Build educational projects clearly proposing:
-pedagogical forms specific to each intellectual discipline in its proper context,
examples: Ocean of Know, where through telecommunications and robotics, junior high-school students studying the sea can see and act at a distance with sea creatures their actual environment; or, long-distant medical training such as tele-surgery taking place in real operating rooms;
-a return-path of information to industry, permitting it to participate in
interdisciplinary exchanges, in support committees and to use curricula and
information for its own educative needs;
-a method of effective evaluation throughout the development of the project.
Organise an International Interactive Technological Observatory in the context of
art/education/research/industry:
-
as a response to the needs of specific pedagogical concepts for each discipline
rather than forcing those concepts into existing technological or market
solutions;
-adapting its 'virtual' nature - the network model - as the most appropriate
structure for accelerating technological progress;
-to develop a view based on transdisciplinarity of the potential of the
technologies in art, education and culture.
Organise
a network of pedagogical innovation to better adapt form to content:
-
to introduce an
innovation-based dynamic - where necessary through the use of outside experts
until proper skill levels are reached - in the relationship between
designers/architects and content creators;
-
to make available production specialists serving as intermediaries between
content creators and end-users;
-
to make the benefits from local initiatives available to all;
-
to adapt its 'virtual' nature - the network model - as the most appropriate
structure for accelerating technological progress;
-
to assure the pr
esence
of catalytic elements, e.g. institutions, with political, financial or others
means to influence pedagogical development in an innovative way.
Teach teachers by:
-bringing teachers and students to operate within the same learning dynamic and in the same environments permitting both to better understand contemporary
society and the others' explicit and implicit sources of information;
- training teachers to use technology and, above all, to understand its potential through unorthodox applications or approaches, especially concerning interactive technologies and the new symbolic languages that accompany them.
Develop pedagogical resources :
-that encourage learning processes closer to actual experience (e.g. how
video-conferencing processes add to understanding network interactivity). In
other terms, to make comprehensible the difference between providing or
creating information and making it felt through interactive experimentation,
example:
the long-distance interactive experience of Young
MacDonald's Farm where the student choose, through captors, cameras, microphones and robots built by the students themselves, to replace
the manual practices of agriculture and aquaculture with networked operations
during the time they are not physically present on the farm. This example
demonstrates the importance of the complimentarity between the real-time
communication tool and on-site experience, as well as dealing with data in virtual space, navigating the Internet, and shows the importance of the students' mastering the tools themselves and not relying on engineers.
-to understand the nature of the content of digital media so that the
information and the person-to-person interactivity are not replaced by the tool
and its man-machine interface. It is, therefore, important to encourage
students to master the tools and understand the influence of form on content, in particular, to understand that "images" teach very little in themselves when divorced from the process of human interactivity.
Normalise on-line translation :
-developing it from existing experiences and technologies;
-developing symbolic multimedia representations specific to each discipline,
ideally, representations generally accepted and intuitively understood in each
discipline.
Modify educational working methods:
-through total immersion into the interactive tools in the classroom and other
learning programmes (see Teach teachers);
-through expanding the time spent on interactive projects rather than textbook
based exercises;
-through evaluating students by what they can do, rather than what they know, to evolve toward pedagogical systems adapted to revealing the creative potential of each person and to develop the faculty of adapting and appropriating the technology.
WEB sites referred to:
http://www.amaze.co.uk/souillac (Navihedron)
http://www.mlab.uiah.fi/fle (Future Learning Environment -project, University of Helsinki)
http://www.mlab.uiah.fi/~teemul/kopis/slide1.html (idem, but specific info for Souillac II)
http://www.educnet.education.fr (French Ministry of Culture)
http://www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/
(McLuhan Program in Culture & Technology)
http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~mcentury/souillac-links.html
(proposed by Michael Century)
http://www.univ-paris1.fr/
UFR04/benayoun (example of a university site built by an artist)
http://www.t0.or.at
(Public Netbase t0 Media~Space)
http://www.zkm.de
(from this homepage, ZKM, Institute for Visual Media)
http://www.newmediacenters.org
(New Media Centers, technological observatory, USA)
http://www.oceanofk.org/YMFSite/html
(Young MacDonald's Farm)
http://www.oceanofk.org/
(Ocean of Know)
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/
(Institute for Learning Technologies, Columbia University, USA)
http://services.worldnet.net/ote/
(Observatoire des technologies pour l'éducation en Europe)
Contact:
Georges-Albert Kisfaludi: gak@wanadoo.fr
Recipe
for a Virtual Faculty of Art and Science
Take
the 24 most articulate, open-minded and brave scientists from all disciplines
and all continents and the same for 24 artists of the same level and create a
Virtual Faculty of outstanding intellectuals that dare see their work in a
wider context, dare speak out clearly and yet have an outstanding status
amongst their peers.
Invite
them to join a Virtual Faculty where each will give one lecture every year on
themes connecting their own work with a wider science/art perspective. The
lectures are given via teleconferencing and are available to interested
institutions and individuals all over the planet.
For
instance, one day a week, say every Thursday, for the 24 weeks of the academic
year, a tag team probing the same subject from two different angles will be
available to the audience:
Example:
10
- 11: Scientist lecture (on-line)
11
- 12: On-line chat (text only) with scientist, open to everyone.
14
- 15: Artist lecture (on-line)
15
- 16: On-line chat (text only) with artist, open to everyone.
One
benefit of this activity will be the educational and research-relevant material
delivered to all interested institutions, be they in the realm of art or
science or any other curiosity-driven human activity. Another benefit will be
the resurrection of the intellectual, previously so apparent in the European
tradition: the independent, free thinker with a wide audience of interested
individuals; a highly skilled and hard-working person with a deep insight into
his or her own field with a deep feeling for other intellectual walks of life.
At
a manageable cost, a truly international circle of curiosity-driven minds can
be established to the benefit of the many.
A
Background to Virtual Faculty of Art and Science
There
is general agreement that we have been living through and continue to live
through a period of profound change manifest everywhere in western
civilisation, socially, politically, culturally, intellectually,
philosophically and psychologically. This transformation has been most
apparent in the arts and the sciences of our century and it is there we must
look to discover the meaning of that change and its consequences for our
society. These tandem sources of knowledge have, consciously and
unconsciously, been giving us clues throughout most of century as to where we
are headed.
Given
the great dispersion of knowledge today, the lack of links between the various
kinds of information available through different approaches to understanding, a
point of focus is essential to bring unity to such a program. Such a point can
be the idea of a new organisational space for western society, a space that has
been the subject and object of much artistic and scientific invention since the
end of the 19th century. Every society has at its core an image, an image of
itself, of how it operates, of how it relates to other things around, an image
which contains a schema describing the way that society functions.
It
is obvious that during the course of the 20th century that schema, for western
and probably world civilisation, has changed in profound and fundamental ways
from the mechanical schema of the clockwork universe to something not yet fully
defined. That schema is the organisational space referred to above. It is, as
well, a visual space, a communication space, an imaginary space, an intuitional
space, the way in which we see things operating.
By
exploring art and science, separately and as an ensemble, it is perhaps
possible to begin to understand that space and how it works and thereby find
directions for the future evolution of our society. This is the principal
objective of the faculty. Since few people are looking at this change in how
reality is defined, the number of teachers and guides that can help through
this exploration is limited. Many of the people are themselves unaware of the
part their work plays in the overall transformation confronting us. No one is
certain about the direction in which this is leading which means that by
attempting to teach it, we are participating actively in the discovery of what
we are looking for.
By
making the most efficient use of the communications tools now available, we can
bring together people from different disciplines to add their part to the
overall construction of the new space and to work with students and teachers
from several different academic disciplines to actually build it together.
Target:
Art
schools or faculties, engineering schools, science faculties, research centres
in both the arts and sciences, and many others.
Tools:
On-line
video-conferencing, minimally one ISDN connection bridging interested sites
with the transmitting institute, for direct presentation and discussion,
Internet for chat sessions, preparation and follow-up.
Affiliated
Institutions:
Mindship
Copenhagen, Denmark
Mindship
Intl., University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA
Leonardo,
ISAST
Laboratoire
de Langage Electronique, Paris, France
Project
Budget:
Funding
would be in two steps, the first, an initial grant to permit the preparation of
a detail project and the first year's program. The second step would be to
fund and execute that first year with both public and private support.
First
step: (estimated budget, 85 000 ECU for one year preparation):
-
Prepare the objectives
-
Identify the topics
-
Identify the faculty
-
Identify the participating schools
-
Identify support institutions
-
Work out a technical audit
-
Identify public, private and industrial partners
-
Identify funding
-
Prepare a detailed budget for year one
The
critical problems here are:
1.
Choosing the 48 people
2.
Persuading them to participate
3.
Deciding on working languages and solutions to on-line translation
4.
Finding moderators for public debates
5.
Counselling Faculty members about to lecture.
6.
Creating a manual on delivering lectures
7.
Creating a manual for institutions on how to use the VF in their activities
8.
Locating physical homes for the VF
9.
Finding fully compatible and transparent communication systems
Second
step: (estimated annual budget, 350 000 ECU):
Operational
costs for year one:
-
Pedagogical Organisation
-
Communications
-
Equipment
-
Administration
-
Faculty salaries
-
Administrative salaries
Contacts:
Tor Norretranders: tornor@post5.tele.dk
Roger Malina: rmalina@astrsp-mrs.fr
Don Foresta: foresta@wanadoo
One
of the most enthusiastically discussed ideas during the two weeks of the
Souillac meeting was the organisation of an art exhibit demonstrating the
little known artists' role in the evolution of the tools of the new
technologies and the impact it has had on the innovation of those technologies
and on society itself.
Preliminary
Project
"Instrument
Makers" was proposed as an important international art exhibition, both
historical and contemporary, with one of the objectives being to trace the
topography of artistic activity engaged in using, developing, reappropriating
and reinventing the technologies of a given period. It would attempt to show
the impact of artistic practice and exploration throughout the century on the
development and innovation of technique and technology and illustrate the
on-going dialogue between art, science and technology. It would be a
fundamental re-examination of art history, as well as the history of science,
during the last one hundred years with, as background, the reinvention of the
space of the imagination of western society. It would highlight the parallels
existing between art and the development of different mathematical and
scientific models which have radically transformed the way we conceive space
and time.
The
project is based on the idea of instruments, either of artists or engineers, or
both, which have had the singular effect of transforming or opening up the
artistic process between one discipline and another and of promoting
transdisciplinarity between art and science, creativity and technique. The
exhibition will put the accent on work more transitory than fixed, defined by
the process of its generation - both artistic and technical, rather than as
something solid and immutable. It will underline the passage from a universe
of fixed categories to a universe of moving references.
Instrument
Makers: Relating Art & Technology
The
exhibition should show how artists - by assimilating and mastering, then
rerouting technologies - have contributed and continue to contribute to
technical progress and the evolution of the tools and expand their potential.
This aspect should be of particular concern to industry but is often unknown to
it. One of the fundamental objectives of the exhibition is to present this
artistic demarche, becoming more and more evident today but whose roots run
throughout the 20th century.
In
its historical dimension the exhibition should take into account the
aspirations of cinema and the electromechanical recording of sound and voice.
Furthermore, electricity - the domestication of the electron - seems to be at
the heart of a paradigm change in constructing art history for the last one
hundred years. The application of electrical, electronic and digital
technologies to artistic ends has grown with the advancement of the 20th
century, and the passage from analogue to digital points to one of the key
ideas of McLuhan. He saw that passage, starting from the predominance of
vision in the perception and conception of the universe - first in the
invention of the phonetic alphabet, then the movable type of the Gutenburg
press, up to electricity and the media growing from it - as a new synthesis in
relationships, favouring a mix of disciplines and the meshing of technologies
by the artist.
Instrument
Makers: Relating Art to Art
The
exhibition should show how, with the arrival of digital technologies in the
service of all forms of creativity, artists have overcome the barriers existing
between different forms of artistic expression and fuse them in the process of
making a work. The appearance of the notion of space-time in our civilisation
has provoked and acceleration the synthesis between the arts, plastic arts and
performing arts. The new technologies have encouraged that synthesis in a more
direct manner, freeing art from older forms.
Just
as there exists in music an obvious relation between the instrument and the
sound produced, a new relation has developed at the end of this century in the
visual field in the production and creation of images. Just as new tools allow
composers and musicians to model sound objects the way clay was modelled in
making sculpture, in visual creation they permit the artist to conceive an
image as something not fixed but as part of a process which converges toward
the development of new visual languages.
Instrument
Makers: Relating Art & Science
The
exhibition will attempt to show how certain artistic experimentation posed the
same questions as parallel developments in 20th century science.
During
the period covered by the exhibition, artists and scientists in parallel have
participated in the invention of a new space of the imagination whose
characteristics are very different from the mechanical space inherited from the
first Renaissance: a space still not fully defined, but clearly interactive,
which proposes relations of a different order, at once conceptual as well as
practical, between individuals and between people and their environment, both
natural and artificial. The view of the artist as researcher, similar to the
scientist - a researcher into the sense of things, expands the role of the
artist - art as research.
Instrument
Makers: Relating Art/Science/Technology - Society
The
exhibition will attempt to show that certain values implicit in the work of
artists, with parallels in science, for example interactivity and
transdisciplinarity, can generate new organisational structures, both social
and intellectual.
Through
the work of artists in our era, as with a majority of scientific propositions,
we are confronted by new metaphors, new relationships. The concept of the
interactive network and the new space of communication is becoming the metaphor
for our civilisation and its geometry the geometry of our imagination. These
changes correspond to an epistemological shift in the concept of space and
time, and among the repercussions is the emerging technological infrastructure
of telecommunications which pushes us more and more into a universe where time
and space have become mutable entities. These technologies have today, and
will undoubtedly have even more so in the future, a profound impact on the
functioning of our society, and because they are technologies of communication,
they are the means by which we manifest our culture. The electronic media have
intervened in the structure of the human senses and the function of art and
artists is to give witness to the resulting disruption.
Given
that, and in particular the extreme newness of the information society - the
world of new media and telecommunications - artistic and in general human
awareness must rise to the occasion and start drawing the first road maps of
that new territory. Marshall McLuhan wrote already in 1964 that the role of
the "artist is indispensable to the orientation, analysis and comprehension of
the form and structure created by the technology of electricity."*
The
exhibition will call on those artists who have both modified our vision of the
world as well
reconstructed
the tools of artistic expression: as reference, the chain of inventors from
Marcel Duchamp to Nam June Paik, with Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy, Takis, Woody and
Steina Vasulka, Norman White, etc.; in the field of music, innovators such as
Scriabine, Varèse, Cage, Moog; and in the reinvention of the space of
dance, Wigman, Graham, Nicolais, Cunningham... Other art forms have also
worked in the same perspective and newer generations of artists, through their
mastering of science and technology, are accelerating this process of
transformation and innovation.
The
exhibition, planned for 2002, will be above all an exhibit of artistic work and
performance and will include an important section of historical and
contemporary documentation.
The
preparation will take one year completing the following stages:
-
Production of the exhibition concept with an historical text and bibliography
-
Selecting the teams, (scientific and artistic committees), deliberations and
mandates
-
Selection of participating museums
-
Selection of historical work (preparing requests for loans)
-
Selection of contemporary artists (commissions of work)
-
Selection of artistic events (productions)
-
Develop the budget, financial structuring, negotiation with funders and
potential partners
The
Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology and the Sophia
Antipolis Foundation have expressed their willingness to support the
preparation of the exhibition by financing the preliminary stages necessary for
its organisation. Jean Gagnon of the Daniel Langlois Foundation and Don
Foresta are responsible for the first preliminary phase.
Leonardo/The
International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology has expressed its
interest in contributing to the exhibition, in organising workshops, meetings
and conferences exploring the central themes, also in providing publication
venues through Leonardo magazine, the Leonardo Book Series at MIT Press and
their web sites in Europe and MIT Press. The Association is presently
developing a documentation project on those artists pioneering in technological
innovation.
The
Smithsonian Institute in Washington and the Visual Institute of the ZKM in
Karlsruhe have also expressed an interest in the exhibition.
The
exhibition will be aimed at industry as well as the general public. A
suggestion was made that it could be inaugurated during the ITU Telecom
Interactive in Geneva and then travel throughout the world to reach larger
audiences.
*
Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964, "Pour comprendre les
médias", 1968, pages 84-85.
Contacts:
Jean Gagnon: fondlang@total.net
Don Foresta: foresta@wanadoo.fr
copyright 1998 ISAST