Figure 1: "How to create a VR piece at Banff," a schematic representation of the Art and Virtual Environment Program as a black box.
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Uploaded May 14, 1999 |
Towards a Transformative Set-up:
A Case-Study of the Art and Virtual Environments Program
at the Banff Center for the Arts
Forthcoming in LEONARDO, 1999 and
Leonardo electronic monograph series:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/home.html
Michael Century* & Thierry Bardini**
*Center for Research on Canadian Cultural
Industries and Institutions
McGill University
3465 Peel Street
Montréal (Québec) H3A 1W7 Canada
mcentury@music.mcgill.ca
**Department of Communication, Université de Montréal
C.P. 6128 succursale center ville
Montréal (Québec) H3C 3J7 Canada
bardinit@ere.umontreal.ca
Like most communication technology innovations of the second half of the 20th century, the technological advances that made early VR possible were first developed with military uses in mind. It is only lately that new uses appeared in the civilian realm, and that the artistic community emerged as a driving force in the re-shaping of the technology and its uses.
In this paper, we describe the artistic contribution to the development of the VR as a new communication medium on the basis of a strategic analysis of several groups of artists involved in the design of virtual worlds at the Banff Center for the Arts, Alberta, Canada. We look at the artist in this specific setting as a figure of the user to come, and analyze the ongoing definition of roles in the development process and its consequences on further uses of the technology in the near future.
Towards a Transformative Set-up:
A Case-Study of the Art and Virtual Environments Program
at the Banff Center for the Arts
Michael Century & Thierry Bardini
Since the 1960s, three social models for access by artists to new technologies and expertise may be distinguished: self-financed R and D and/or partnership between freelance individuals; artist-run media centers or collectives; and the institutional laboratory. While each model can in principle -- and has in fact -- supported both the production of new works and the research and development of new systems, the more costly and complex the technology, the more likely it is that systematic research take place in the context of an institutional laboratory.
In this institutional setting, an unavoidable tension arises between, on the one hand, the ad-hoc requirements of specific works, and on the other, the development of re-usable tools and systems which support economies of scale and craft and the accrual of know-how. Where systematic artistic- or content-led research is institutionally attempted, the challenge can be expressed as follows: given the instability of the medium, how to determine the characteristics of the initial set-up and its subsquent iterations, such that it can be responsive to the widest possible range of alternative trajectories? [1]
We consider this question as embracing such dimensions as the extensibility and openness of the software and hardware systems, cultural and disciplinary diversity, and the ability of persons to move between pre-set or stereotyped roles (like artist, developer/designer, theorist, or user). To the extent that the set-up is able to economically and quickly accommodate adaptability, diversity, and mobility, we call this a "transformative set-up".
In the case of an emerging communication system such as Virtual Reality, design and use cannot be artificially separated in the networks describing the socio-technological system. Use of the system cannot be completely anticipated by its early inventors or designers. A quasi-stable state of the system occurs only as stable communities of use are structured. Low threshold adopters [2] are the leading actors in the emergence of these quasi-stable communities of use. Pre-existing actors (inventors, innovators) can only facilitate the appearance of low-threshold adopters, but hardly ever enroll them forever.
About the present stage of the development and diffusion of the virtual reality, Valente and Bardini [3] have argued that the transition between specialized niches and wider diffusion will emerge when some low-threshold adopters efficiently connect the networks of the technology development to those of its diffusion. In the present paper, we propose to look at the artist as the archetypal low-threshold adopter, and to take the example of the Banff Center's Art and Virtual Environments Project as a case study of the institutional implementation of such a program.
For the diffusion process of the set of innovations constitutive of VR, the artist is a multi-faceted kind of user, re-shaping the medium towards a second-order user, that is, spectators and audiences. This in-betweenness of the artist (between designers and audiences) creates a particular representative situation: at the interface between design and use, the artist may very well be at the strategic locus to represent each side to the other. In this perspective, our project of looking at the connection between networks of design (or development) and networks of use (or diffusion) is well-served by a look at the artistic appropriation of the medium at a time when the medium is not yet stable: it combines all the possible dimensions of mediation.
In the present paper, we describe and analyze the artistic contribution to the development and diffusion of VR as a new communication medium on the basis of the strategic analysis of four groups of artists involved in the design of virtual worlds at the Banff Center for the Arts. [4] Central to this strategic analysis is an assessment of the representative resources mobilized by the artists. By representative resources, we mean here both technological and social resources used during the negotiations: enrolled actors who accept to work for/represent the vision of artists (allies) and know-how, computing time or any other material resources available. Access to these resources should be understood as a central concept in a dynamic analysis of the political economy of the networks involved in the development and diffusion process.
The Banff Center, a publicly-financed institute of continuing professional education in the fine arts, shifted its program philosophy during the mid-1980s from medium-specific training in the visual and media arts to an interdisciplinary residency model aiming to bring art practice and theory into sustained dialogue. [5] These residencies created a temporary community of unusual disciplinary diversity, including visual artists, media producers, music composers and performers, philosophers, critics, and cultural theorists. Technical staff were employed to maintain extensive media facilities and to tutor or assist resident artists. Occasional seminars brought the entire community together, but for the most part time was left open for self-directed production and experimentation.
In 1988, the Banff Center established a media arts department, with a dual mandate to offer resident artists access to video, sound, and computer media, and to develop research partnerships in new and emerging technologies such as hypermedia and virtual reality. In 1990 the Center combined the artist residency model with a multi-year research program on "Art and Virtual Environments". The latter represented a departure from the Center's previous reliance on cultural or educational sponsorship: the new resources that were obtained to enable the establishment of a virtual reality lab came from university, corporate as well as government sources. Thus the expectations of the stakeholders were correspondingly diverse, included research into the underlying technology of VR, development of new applications suggested by content experimentation, and the creation and public exhibition of virtual art work. These expectations met around a two-stage project design, with the second multi-year R and D phase being inaugurated by a ten-week residency on the subject of the "bioapparatus," a term coined specifically for the residency.
The Banff Program as a Social Experiment
The bioapparatus "combines an understanding of particular philosophies of technology with theories about the technological apparatus, the technologized body, and the new biology". [6] A collaborative project of the Art Studio and Media Arts Programs of the Banff Center, the bioapparatus residency brought together 30 artists, theorists and technologists between October 7 and December 14, 1991, to explore technology "in the widest possible sense...a product of cultural, social and political practices that are already firmly in place. [7]" The call for submissions described virtual reality within the background and the conceptual framework for the residency: "...virtuality can be looked at as an expression of social discourses that are already in place. One of the intentions of the residency is to address the broader context of socio-cultural shifts that are both the cause and symptom of technological changes." [8]
"Some other issues related to the bioapparatus " gave a more detailed picture of the kind of developments proposed to--or expected from--the residents: "the idea of machines as essentially social assemblages; the tool as a political site for shifts in the mediascape and its definition: the military, the American "world culture" and its media, the drug cowboys, medicine; the fictions of science and the science of fiction; "man"/machine interaction, cyborgs, boundary degeneration; artists' definitions of machines: futurism, bachelor machines." In parallel with the references used by Richards and Tenhaaf in their introduction, [9] this list of issues translated a "critical project" for the residency, whose central object was "the public mythology about what virtual reality will be." For Richards and Tenhaaf indeed, "the development of this mythology is as important as the development of the technology itself," to be understood in relation to much of the "postmodernist debate on representation and the pronounced cultural shifts of the past few decades". [10]
As Michael Naimark, the only artist present at the bioapparatus residency that later took part in the Virtual Environments program, recalled, "you had two communities at the bioapparatus... the techno community... and the arts community." [11] Two communities with such a different experience of -- and access to -- to the technology, that the discussion became rapidly polarized. In Naimark's opinion, the personal (and mostly economic) situation of each individual created such a gap that the interdisciplinary exchange was limited. David Tomas, another participant of the bioapparatus residency, concluded on the same point:
While the majority of artists appear to have been theoretically and practically ill-equipped to deal with this new technology at the level of its technical organization, those involved in developing its hardware and software are equally ill-equipped to deal with its social and cultural dimensions as well as its political implications. [12]
For Tomas, this polarization could not be explained by (personal) economics only, but more by "the implicit presence of an archaic model of the social division of labor which undermined attempts to situate theoretical issues in the domain of practice and vice-versa," and by the fact that "this model's governing organizational role in the seminar was enhanced by the conflicting ideological orientations of the interest groups that were present." [13] Yet this condemnation of "archaic division of labor" can also be seen as an ideological position, one that would consider ideological differences as the "objective" basis for the conflict at hand. Needless to say, this position is ascribable to one side of the controversy, the side that defines its part by its critical practice.
What the bioapparatus seminar taught us, to summarize, was that a conversational forum was not enough to address the problem of the cultural significance of virtual reality, even when considered more as mythology than as a set of socio-technical practices, as "un fait de discours". [14] Indeed, the conditions of production of virtual environments and the theory/practice divide became a major fault-line between the two sides of the controversy. But it would be an error to identify the two sides by their access to the technology (have and have-not) or by their definition of the part they play in the technology development process (doers and critics). The first postulate should be that at the moment of the controversy, all these definitions, including the technology itself, but not restricted to it, are up in the air, uncertain and unstable.
As (officially) stated, the research objectives of the bioapparatus residency were (1) expose artists/public to technologies, gather feedback, (2) evaluate and refine tools, (3) rapid prototyping of virtual environments for artists, (4) rapid prototyping of new editing and browsing tools, and (5) identify artists for production of selected projects. [15] Among the artists who experimented with the low-end PC-based system then available was Lawrence Paul, an aboriginal Canadian who created a VR piece entitled "Inherent Rights, Vision Rights" .Wm Leler, a former member of the computing staff at Banff who attended the bioapparatus seminars, recalls how Lawrence Paul's experience seemed important to him:
When he [Lawrence Paul] first got there, he was totally anti-technology ...he didn't even want to touch the computer. And John Harrison to a large extent, Garry Beirne and myself to a smaller extent talked to him. One of the things that he really believed in was magic....I shouldn't say magic, it's more like the trickster, sort of this aspect of magic...I don't know what he would call that in his society...he realized that he could use...we only had the Sense8 system then, which is very limited, you know, and so he realized that he could play tricks with this virtual reality, and he was the first...I liked it because he wasn't overwhelmed by the technology...he didn't care about the technology, in fact he disliked the technology intensely. [16]
In spite of its quasi-mythical nature, this episode can be read as a tale of conversion of the anti-user, who ends up translating the technology into his world (even if the whole episode is narrated through the other side of the divide, by a technologist). Lawrence Paul, as a character in this narrative, does not use the technology, he "plays tricks" with it. The important part to us, is that this "conversion" came from conversation with the technical staff of the program, and that this exchange took place in the process of using the technology, in the sense of appropriating it, translating its potential within the world of Lawrence Paul. [17]
Warren Robinett, another participant (as a "technologist") in the bioapparatus residency, also noticed the importance of this episode, and wrote about it when he was asked to produce some recommendations for the Program a year later. Robinett highlighted the social dimension of the experiment, as uncovered by the question of credits:
If someone told a composer "make a score for this film" and then later took sole credit for the film, the composer might understandably feel unhappy. A similar thing occurs when an artist who doesn't understand much about programming is supported by a talented programmer, and then is credited as the sole creator of the work...The programmer needs to get recognition when working collaboratively with an artist, just as performers get recognition when performing a composer's work, and just as actors get recognition when interpreting a playwright's script. [18]
Here resurfaces the question of the "social division of labor", but this time on the basis of a collaborative practice, the making of a VR piece. The novel nature of experiment was clearly shown by the fact that the only way to talk about it is through analogy with pre-existing media (music, theatre) and consensus reached in the social negotiations of the division of labor in these cases. The question of credits was, of course, an extreme manifestation of the social tension operating throughout the experiment. As such, it functioned as an indicator of far-reaching but deeply buried social issues, that, uncovered would add a fundamental dimension to the experimental nature of the program at Banff: technological and artistic naturally, but social too.
According to the project mentioned in our first two sections, we will now look at the artist as an early figure of the user (a low-threshold user) or, in other words, a user that would not know exactly what to expect of the device or particular technology s/he is about to use. In a technological vocabulary, such a device is known as a black box: a device in which the processes that transform inputs to outputs are hidden to the user. [19] But the kind of black box we are talking about here is even more uncertain, as the exact nature of the outputs themselves is supposed to be unpredictable, a virtuality to be discovered in the making.
The Anti-aesthetics of Virtual Worlds
As a new user of a medium still in the making, the artist appears in relation to existing actors who try to enroll him, or, in other words, to act as his representative. A representative, or a spokesperson, usually enrolls his allies by creating a discourse or any other device whose aim is to convince the candidate for enrolment that his/her interests will be taken care of. [20] Once the negotiation is completed, and if the enrolment is successful, the spokesperson will act and talk in place of the enrolled actor. In this sense, enrolment also means defining the "role" of the actor, as in giving him a place according to his interests in the division of labor.
Now, if we look at the Arts and Virtual Environments program as a black box, it is as a device that allows the enrolment of the artists that participated in the program. By participating, the artists gain access to the virtual reality technology that allows their visions to be implemented in a virtual "piece." But in participating, the artists also negotiate their enrolment, the extent to which their discourse will be translated into someone else's discourse, then filtered, transformed, adapted. The device that makes this transformation possible is the program itself. In a paper appended to the program proposal that secured funding for the program by the Canadian government in 1991, Wm Leler proposed the following equivalencies:
The occupant of a virtual world should be treated as an integral part of the environment. One way to do this is to think of a virtual environment as a set of transfer functions between the user's actions and the computer's reactions. Using engineering terminology, such a function (whose output is a function of its input) is called a filter. [21]
Based on this engineering analogy, we can look at a virtual environment as a set of filters. Among these filters, Leler distinguishes different levels of behavior:
The filters in a virtual environment need not be simple functions between the inputs and outputs. Instead, a filter can contain state information. This state is not static (as in current virtual environments), it is affected by the filter input (from the user or the output of another filter). When individual filters in a virtual environment are dependent on their own internal state, in addition to user input, these filters appear to possess behavior. In this case, we usually call these filters objects, or actors. [22]
The enrolment device that we were talking about is a set of filters, among which some appear to "possess behavior." What we get at the end, is a heterogeneous network of human agents and machines that filters the artist's vision to produce a virtual piece. According to our interviews with four groups of artists participating in the Program and with all of the technical staff (computer and sound associates, programmers), we schematized the Arts and Virtual Environments Program as represented in Figure 1.
Figure 1: "How to create a VR piece at Banff," a schematic representation of the Art and Virtual Environment Program as a black box.
In this schematic representation the process of creating a VR piece in the Arts and Virtual Environments Program is represented regardless of the action of the artist. In other words, this representation considers the program as a service facility that allows the creation of a VR piece in 3 major phases, independently of the artist's ability to participate in each of this phases ("Vision," "Model," and "Implementation"). Figure 1 also shows the position of all the technical staff members (represented as white circles with their initials), as well as the hardware (blue rectangles) and software (yellow ellipses) that they use. Between each phase of the process, a specific "filter" (a cyborg-like association of some staff members and the hardware and software they use) translates the output of the previous phase into a new input.
In this "ideal" set-up, the artist's action can be limited to providing his "vision" in natural language, and then to a "passive" editorial control of the operation without ever touching a computer. But this is only a possibility, and the process represented as such presents 5 points (A, B, C, D, E) where the artist can anchor his/her activity. Figure 2 schematizes these 5 anchor points.
Figure 2: A schematic representation of the socio-technical set-up showing the 5 anchor points.
The points B, C, and D are especially important. B represents an action on the model, the result of the first filtering: from the artist's input on point A (vision), the associates create a three-dimensional computerized representation of the virtual world using Alias, a computer-aided design (CAD) application. This first phase is crucial in the process, and to set the program up accordingly was a major decision. The CAD-created model represented a static world, where the potential interactions between the user and the environment were "bolted on" after the designer created the world. [23] The interactivity of the piece in VR was then implemented between C and E, and/or various iterations back to the 3-D model This implementation had two separate aspects: the addition of motion - "behavior" - to 3D objects, and the programming of music and sound effects to simulate 3-dimensionality.
These multiple iterations between the model and its implementation in VR created a bottleneck both in terms of access to the necessary computing time and the programmer or associate time. Between these two phases occurred a major translation, as the model entered a medium whose characteristics are not only different but also unpredictable to the other side. Ron Kuivila, one of the artists who developed a virtual environment, attested that the tools that would have enabled the artist to do this translation were crucially lacking:
The tools in the simulation for interactively adjusting the model were never developed. So what happened is, little... you know...nips and tucks, that you might want to do, have to either be done by going back into the Alias modeling program or by directly intervening in the VR program itself. Because there is no conduit for the kind of scripting or editing to take place based on the model...OK...using the program is something that the artist would do, that means that either the artist has to be doing a bunch of modeling himself or the person doing the modeling has to go back and redo it; or that the programmers have to sit here and tweak the values. [24]
In this set-up then, the model was imported in VR through the generic program developed at the Center on the basis of routine codes from the MR toolkit (Minimal Reality toolkit) created at the University of Alberta, and later by using the Silicon Graphics Performer library. This generic program was the program's code, created by the three programmers and used for all the eight projects developed at the Center. The result of this import was uncertain as there was no way (except trial and error) to predict the rendering in VR of a specific model created in Alias. It could either work as planned (rare), or require adjustment at the model stage, or in the VR implementation. Yet it was precisely at this stage of implementation that each piece obtained its specificity, through the assignment of particular behaviors and sound effects programmed on demand (D). The final anchor point E of Figure 2 represents the output of the process -- the finished VR piece.
The participation of the artist in the process therefore presented various modalities according to the resources (s)he was able to mobilize at a given point of the development of his/her piece. We can distinguish two variables determining the artist's participation:
- Computing skills, conditioning the artist's participation at each phase of the process, from CAD modeling skills to C programming skills.
- External resources, crucial in case of competition with other artists over the access to the Program's resources (computing, programmer time).
Overall, the artist's control over the production process of his/her piece depended on those two kinds of resources, and work therefore entailed a specific configuration of skills and access to remote resources. Figures 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 present the network configuration for the 4 groups we studied. They show in each case the artist's access to the various phases of the project according to the variables previously introduced (artists are represented as black circles in each network configuration).
This first network configuration (Fig. 3) represents the case of Perry Hoberman's project, "Barcode Hotel." In this case, Hoberman's lack of computing skills and access to external resources prevented him from getting a direct control on the piece's fate, though this changed over the course of his work with the technical staff of the Center:
It's definitely all give and take...I mean the roles are not clearly defined...in the sense that I know a certain amount about the technology, I've worked with computers a lot so to some extent, some of the stuff that I need to figure out I can just figure out by myself, you know, with help from people. So it's surely not like the sort of a model of an artist coming in and working with engineers and designers to sort of realize their vision...I came up here first a year ago in November so it's almost a year and half, which is for me a long time to work on something with other people. It does seem like the piece has kind of...when I think about what it's become it has sort of like taken the shape over this period of time, it's something I probably didn't anticipate, I mean it wasn't exactly what I was thinking and there're have been times when it has been very frustrating, and I just felt like what we are getting done is not what I wanted in the first place, and then usually after a certain period of time of getting back into it, it has been exciting, because you realize that it's something that you wouldn't have done by yourself. [25]
Figure 3: A schematic representation of the network configuration for Perry Hoberman's, "Barcode Hotel." Hoberman indicated by initials PH.
In "Bar Code Hotel" there was no attempt to use the stereoscopic HMD, nor to provide the user with a first person navigational point of view. Instead, Hoberman populated the virtual world with hundreds of whimsical objects, each programmed discretely with its own self-standing behavior, but which would be modified when others were invoked. The objects were called up by swiping on a bar code displayed on tables and walls throughout the gallery space. Hoberman saw his use of bar code technology as "a caricature" of conventional VR. While the visitors don polarizing glasses to see the projection in 3D, all were free to move about and call on as many of the object-guests of the Bar Code Hotel as they wished: "like a game without rules, or a musical ensemble". [26]
Our second example is also the case of a single artist, Ron Kuivila in his work "Virtual Reality on 5 Dollars a Day "project (fig. 4). But in this case, Ron Kuivila's ability to program in C gave a very different configuration to the network representing his relation to the Program. In such a configuration, Ron's self perception of his work at the Center was as much as a programmer as an artist. In fact, speaking of "programming style" Ron defined his effort as "individual," meaning by this that his programming work focused on adding features specifically for his own "individual" piece. In these conditions, the artist somehow crossed the mirror and became a programmer himself, and his participation in the Program could be seen as technological development as well as artistic production.
An interesting problem here is distinguishing between in a sense, the piece and the technological innovation. One of the problems is that to some extent pieces end up being identified with their technological innovation, and so then there is some kind of a power struggle. [27]
Figure 4: A schematic representation of the network configuration for Ron Kuivila's, "Virtual Reality on 5 Dollars a Day." Kuivila indicated by initials RK.
Like Hoberman, Kuivila's approach was ironic, intending to deflate the myths of transcendence and disembodied consciousness then (and still) circulating around VR. Kuivila did make use of the HMD, but the single immersant shared the virtual space with the installation visitors, whose motions were tracked and represented in the world as a "constellation of points in the (virtual) sky". A flock of shape-changing autonomous agents were attracted to the people spied by the system. The immersant was "periodically interrupted by fictional advertisements. After several of the ads, the installation temporarily adapts a new form that demonstrates the product". [28]
These two first cases showed us the difference in roles that the programming skills of the artist create in the program. The two next examples, dealing with groups of artists, will show us how this allocation of roles changes in the case of a collaborative effort, as well as the importance of access to external resources.
The third case that we studied is the "Dancing with the Virtual Dervish" project, which comprised two virtual worlds created by an initial trio of artists, Diane Gromala (graphic designer and art director), Yacov Sharir (choreographer and dancer) and Marcos Novak (architect). Central to the "Dancing with the Virtual Dervish" project was the metaphor of "worldmaking," new opportunities to create, see, understand and participate in art offered by the emergent technologies of virtual reality. [29] According to the authors' description, the piece:
...may be conceptualized in terms of notions of presence, and understood as five intertwined worlds: the Physical performance space, where a dancer and a performer in VR gear interact with projections of a virtual reality and with the audience; an immersive computer simulation, the Virtual World, accessible through head-mounted display and video projections; the Cyberworld, existing as a kind of 'nature' to the Virtual World; the Teleworld of remote, interconnected performances spaces (in Austin, Paris, Banff, and Los Angeles); and the Inner and Outer Body. The creative and experiential aspects become manifest when all five worlds are connected and continuously altered by the participation of the performers and the audience. [30]
Given the multivariate concept, it is not surprising that after one preliminary combined presentation in March 1994, the Virtual Dervish project split into two separate works, though retaining certain common elements.
Novak's work, subtitled "Virtual Worlds", grows out of his previous theorization of liquid architecture [31], in which both architectural and musical structures are algorithmically generated and shaped by the spatial navigation of a single immersant. "Combining music, plasticity, number and space into a new medium I call ArchiMusic, [Virtual Worlds] seeks to speak the first utterance of what will be a new multimode of expression".[32] The network configuration shown in figure 5 shows Novak's enrolment of supplementary resources to create the "navigable music" -- Rick Bidlack, a member of Banff's technical staff at the time, but also a composer and expert in interactive systems programming. In Novak's Virtual Worlds interactive music became a driving modality, as the world successively evolved towards a synaesthetic meta-instrument. Novak's own contribution of "algorithmics" at point D is matched by Bidlack's navigable music programming.
Figure 5: A schematic representation of the network configuration for Marcos Novak’s "Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Worlds". Marcos Novak, Rick Bidlack, Yakov Sharir, Diana Gromala indicated by their initials.
In contrast, Gromala and Sharir's work, subtitled "Virtual Bodies", placed the solo immersant inside a vast anatomical representation of Gromala's own medical imaging data, as a way of re-inhabiting her own bodily experience (fig. 6). [33]
Figure 6: A schematic representation of the network configuration for Diana Gromala and Yakov Sharir, "Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Bodies." Marcos Novak, Yakov Sharir, Diana Gromala indicated by their initials.
Our last case, Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland's "Placeholder" project, shows us the importance of access to external resources in the enrolment process.
Placeholder was an installation which explored narrative action in virtual environments. The geography of Placeholder took inspiration from three actual locations in the Banff National Park - a cave, a waterfall, and a formation of weathered earthen spires overlooking a river. Three-dimensional videographic scene elements, spatialized sounds and voices, and embodiment as petroglyphic spirit animals were employed to construct a composite landscape that could be visited concurrently by two physically remote participants wearing head-mounted displays, who were guided by a disembodied "Voice of the Goddess" as they walked about, conversed, used both hands to touch and move virtual objects, and recorded fragments of their own narratives in the three worlds." [34]
Here again, we deal with a group of artists, as Laurel and Strickland worked with Rob Tow and Michael Naimark, their colleagues at Interval Research Corporation. Naimark's panoramic Field Recording Study 2 served as a basis for one of the three virtual worlds of "Placeholder." Tow took charge of large parts of the complex integration of the 11 computer installation, notably developing the code for managing the multichannel audio generation and spatialization. Other members of Interval's technical staff designed new haptic controllers. Finally, Precipice Theatre, an improvisational theatre troupe, was engaged by the team to help generate archetypal narrative materials on which to guide the two users "narrative play". [35]
Figure 7
We can see that the network configuration appears more complex in this case, as the 4 actors of the artists' group have access to another set of machines and do not only rely on the Program's facilities. In this sense, we can say that as a figure of the user the artist could be seen here as "an integral part of the environment," as his/her behavior dynamically changes the set-up itself. In the case of the Placeholder project indeed, the worldmaking activity cannot be seen as the production of "virtual art" in a service facility offered to the artist. From the start of the project in fact, it was clear that Placeholder would be a co-production of the Arts and Media Environments at Banff and Interval Research Corporation.
We shall not detail further here the consequences of these specific network configurations for each project. What we want to stress, instead, are the consequences of this overall situation in terms of the lessons learned by this social experiment.
The four cases that we have studied, in spite of their huge differences, all have one common feature: the core of the set-up, the generic program developed in house at the Center, appears definitely as a black-box to the artists whether or not they are able to program in C. As a development tool for virtual environment design, the technological set-up excludes the artist from the actual implementation of the interactivity of the piece, not by design, but by default: the successive iterations from model to VR implementation were hard-wired in the set-up, since one implementation of the vision in one phase was not directly translatable in the next. The absence of tools that would allow this direct translation, or, at least, possible adjustment of the piece in VR, was the absolute bottleneck of the project set-up.
One small exception occurred in Placeholder: there the group managed to do a "small piece of world layout from inside the virtual environment." As recounted by Rob Tow, "Laurel donned a helmet (HMD) and moved the voiceholders to where she wanted the various critters [spirit animals] to be... This was a small presage of what it might be like to fluidly design from within an immersive virtual environment, as opposed to painfully and explicitly calculating the coordinates at a desk." [36]
TopConclusions
In this paper, we have proposed an analysis of the social and technological set-up of the Arts and Virtual Environments Program at the Banff Center for the Arts. With the help of a framework and methodology developed for our research program on the social construction of the user [37], we have tried to uncover the significance of the artistic production of virtual environments as a social and technical interface between the technology development and its civilian uses.
We have seen that the technological decision to use a CAD based approach, importing a static model of the environment and then assigning behavior to it in VR, was paralleled by an analogous process on the social side: The artist first had to behave as a designer or, if and when possible as a programmer, then (and only then) as a figure of the user, a performer. In this it can be said that the socio-technological set-up was successful in its attempt to enrol the artists, as it somehow changed or translated their social identity in the process. But this flexibility did not extend to the point of permitting the artist to move easily between the roles of user and designer (and in some cases as well, programmer).
The Banff Project thus pointed the way toward defining the requirements of a transformative set-up for the development and diffusion of virtual reality as an artistic medium: in the ideal scenario, artistic input should be emblematic of future communication uses, and programmers, designers and artists should be able to cooperate to transform and shape the medium in a harmonious way. After all, if we reclaimed Wm. Leler’s engineering metaphor to consider the project set-up as a set of filters, we can also reclaim what could appear to be his conclusion:
The behavior of the entire system is then determined by how the actors communicate with each other. Because of the interaction between actors, a wide range of interesting results can be obtained based on (even slightly) different inputs. [38]
Afterword
Since the completion of the Banff program in 1994 the diffusion of VR took a surprising turn with the proposal of an industry-wide standard for creating online virtual worlds (VRML) and animating them (VRML 2) with characters (avatars). The widespread popularity of some of these worlds has given hundreds of thousands of users the experience of "authoring" aspects of a 3D virtual environment, such as the layout of simple objects in a shared space, and customizing virtual costumes and gestures. Yet, based on what we have observed in the Banff Project, it is not surprising to see how these worlds typically work: objects are placed in the world, then behaviors assigned to them from among a set of pre-defined actions.
The Computing Science staff of the University of Alberta went on to develop new tools for their MR Toolkit, to make it simpler to program environments with many interacting entities. [39] This work took place in a university research context, without artists.
Meanwhile, John Harrison and several other members of Center's technical and design staff continued to work together on VR, but this time in the context of an art research lab directed by Charlotte Davies and sponsored by SoftImage, Inc. [40] It is beyond the scope of this paper to trace in any detail the effect of the prior experience of this Banff team on their work with Davies. This was not a setting requiring the regular enrolment of different artists, as at Banff; yet it is hardly surprising that a configuration which had already negotiated a variety of projects from vision through implementation would be effective in extending both the technology and the communicational uses of VR.
TopENDNOTES
[1] In her ethnographic study of computer music research at the IRCAM, Georgina Born describes a case in which ideological factors shaping the research agenda severely limited the range of technologies and musical practices which could be pursued. See herRationalizing culture : IRCAM, Boulez, and the institutionalization of the musical avant-garde (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995)
[2] Network thresholds are the proportion of adopters in an individual's network necessary for him/her to adopt an innovation. Individuals with low thresholds require few networks partners to have adopted before they adopt, Thomas W. Valente, Thresholds and the Critical Mass in Network Models of the Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Hampton Press, 1996).
[3] Thomas W. Valente and Thierry Bardini, "Virtual Diffusion or an Uncertain Reality: Networks, Policy and Models for the Diffusion of Virtual Reality," Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, edited by F. Biocca and M. Levy (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995).
[4] The present paper is based on 16 personal interviews carried out at the Banff Centre for the Arts and in the San Francisco Bay area between March and April 1994. We thank once again here the people that we interviewed for their invaluable cooperation.
[5] The initiator and coordinator of these residencies was critic and curator Lorne Falk. Themes included nomadology, feminism, mythology, post-nationalism.
[6] Catherine Richards and Nell Tenhaaf, "Introduction to the Bioapparatus," in Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus, edited by Mary Anne Moser (Banff Centre for the Arts, 1991), p. 5.
[7] Ibid, p. 7.
[8] Call for submissions to the bioapparatus residency, in Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus, op. cit. note 6, p. 10-11.
[9] These references came from the works of the following authors: Kroker, Baudry, Metz, Mulvey, Virilio, Penley, Copjec, Randolph, Deleuze, Parnet, and Haraway.
[10] op. cit. note 6, p. 8.
[11] Michael Naimark, personal interview with the authors, Interval Research Corporation, Palo Alto, April 20, 1994.
[12] David Tomas, "The Bioapparatus: Reflections Beyond the Interface of Theory and Practice," in Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus, op. cit. note 13, p. 117.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Tomas concludes an expanded assessment of the Bioappartus residency along similar lines: "conventional language as we know it...can no longer provide a legitimate site for conceptualizing possible futures [of new technologies]" which he considers are "already being written elsewhere in other codes". "An Identity in Crisis: Artists and New Technologies", in Art Rules, Edited by J. Berland, D. Tomas, and W. Straw. (Toronto: YYZ, 1996.) This paper, however, does not address any of the VR works created in the residency or research project.
[15] Michael Century, editor, Art and Virtual Environments. A Research and Development Project (Banff Centre for the Arts, April 1991), p. 22.
[16] Wm. Leler, personal interview with the author, Ithaca Software, Oakland, April 21, 1994.
[17] "Inherent Rights, Vision Rights is a virtual reality project...[which] I approach from the aspect of the fear others have of native people. Not understanding our spirit world. In it the longhouse is a given space in time which I use to show a religious concept, to physically bring people into contact with a native worshipping aspect of life, praying Indians -- a way to bring others close to my heart so they can understand my belief system". Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, in Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, Eds. M. A. Moser, D. MacLeod (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 316
[18] Warren Robinett, "Recommendations for the Art and Virtual Environments Program at the Banff Centre" (October 17, 1992).
[19] The use of the cybernetic notion of "black box" is very common in relativist social studies of science and technology, as exemplified by Bruno Latour's Science in Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
[20] For a detailed and comprehensive exposé of the concept of enrolment and its use in the social study of scientific or technological controversies, see Michel Callon "Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay," In J. Law (Ed.), Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 196-233.
[21] Wm. Leler, "Actor-Based Simulation + Linda = Virtual Environments" in M. Century, editor, Art and Virtual Environment. A Research and Development Project, op. cit. n. 15: 47
[22] Ibid p. 48.
[23] Ibid p. 45.
[24] Ron Kuivila, personal interview with the authors, Banff Centre for the Arts, March 15, 1994.
[25] Perry Hoberman, personal interview with the authors, Banff Centre for the Arts, March 11, 1994.
[26] Perry Hoberman, "Bar Code Hotel", Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, op. cit. n.17 289-290
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ron Kuivila, Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, op. cit. n. 17, p. 290-94.
[29] Diane Gromala, Marcos Novak, and Yacov Sharir, "Dancing with the Virtual Dervish," (University of Texas at Austin, 1993), p. 1.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Marcos Novak, "Liquid Architecture in Cyberspace", in Michael Benedikt (Ed.) Cyberspace: First Steps, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
[32] Novak, in Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, op. cit. n. 17, p. 305
[33] Diana Gromala, "Pain and Subjectivity in Virtual Reality", in Clicking In: Hot Links to Digital Culture, (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996), 236-237
[34] Online documentation, at Interval Research Corporation, http://www.interval.com
[35] Brenda Laurel, Rachel Strickland, Rob Tow, "Placeholder: Landscape and Narrative in Virtual Environments", Computer Graphics, (28( 2) May 1994).
[36] Tow, ibid, 124.
[37] See Bardini & Horvath, "The Social Construction of the Personal Computer User: The Rise and Fall of the Reflexive User, (Journal of Communication, 45(3): 40-65, Summer 1995) and Bardini, The Personal Interface. Douglas Engelbart, the Framework for the Augmentation of Human Intellect and the Birth of Personal Computing, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, forthcoming).
[38] Wm. Leler, op. cit. n.21: 49-50.
[39] Diane Gromala, Chris Shaw, "VR Art: Artists and Scientists in Collaboration", unpublished mss.. Qunjie Wang, Mark Green and Chris Shaw, "EM - An Environment Manager for Building Networked Virtual Environments." IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (VRAIS 95). pp 11-18, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, March 11-15, 1995, IEEE.
[40] Davies' immersive environment Osmose was premiered at the International Symposium on Electronic Arts at Montréal in 1995, and has since been exhibited widely and engendered extensive critical comment; see Michael Heim, Virtual Realism (Oxford University Press, 1998). For online details for Osmose and its closely related successor VR work, Éphémère see http://www.immersence.com
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