Artist Statement
In The Legible City the visitor is able to ride a stationary bicycle through a simulated representation of a city that is constituted by computer-generated three-dimensional letters that form words and sentences along the sides of the streets. Using the ground plans of actual cities - Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe - the existing architecture of these cities is completely replaced by textual formations written and compiled by Dirk Groeneveld. Travelling through these cities of words is consequently a journey of reading; choosing the path one takes is a choice of texts as well as their spontaneous juxtapositions and conjunctions of meaning.
Source of Artist Statement]]> Description from Media Art Net, website for media artwork]]> Excerpt from IAMAS, the Institute of Advance Media Arts and Science]]> Artist Statement
The installation has a large cylindrical projection screen with a round motorised platform in its centre, a computer and three video projectors that project onto a 120-degree portion of the screen. Continuous rotation of this viewing window around the screen reveals the full 360-degree computer-generated scene. While the work is controlled and generally viewed from within the circumference of the screen, the projected image can also be seen on its outside surface. The user interface in this work is a modified video camera. By rotating this camera and using its zoom and play buttons, the viewer controls his forward, backward and rotational movements through the virtual scene as well as the rotation of the platform and of the projected image around the circular screen.
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ConFIGURING the CAVE is a computer based interactive video installation that assumes a set of technical and pictorial procedures to identify various paradigmatic conjunctions of body and space. The work utilises the CAVE technology stereographic virtual reality environment with contiguous projections on three walls and the floor. The user interface is a near life-size wooden puppet that is formed like the prosaic artists' mannequin; this figure can be handled by the viewers to control real time transformations of the computer generated imagery and the sound composition.
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In this installation a rotating platform allows the viewer to interactively rotate a projected image within a large circular projection screen and explore a three dimensional virtual environment constituted by an emblematic constellation of panoramic locations and cinematic events. The work presents a virtual landscape containing eleven cylinders that show particular sites in the Ruhr area. The viewer can navigate this 3D space and enter these panoramic cylinders, inside each of which a surrounding cinematic sequence fills the projection screen and presents a 360 degree pre-recorded situation and acted event[...]A microphone on top of this interface camera picks up any sound that the viewer makes, and this causes the release of continuously moving three dimensional words and sentences within the projected scene.
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In this installation images are projected onto a large screen lying flat on the floor of the exhibition space. The spectators stand on a surrounding balcony where a joystick enables any one of them to interactively operate the work by panning in any lateral direction over the surface of its images and zooming in or out of a chosen part of an image. At the zoom extremes the joystick generates a digital transition from one image layer to another.
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During Imagina '93 computer graphics installations in Monte Carlo and in Karlsruhe were connected by modem through a conventional telephone line. Facing large video screens, the two distant players each shared the same virtual image space. While manipulating their own graphic elements each person was at the same time seeing on the screen in front of them the result of their distant partner's actions [...] Sharing a televirtual space of alphabetic forms, the formal interaction of the two players was both a sculptural interplay of the letters as well as a tentative communication with words. Up to eight letters could be placed by each player on the board at one time, and each player's letters had a distinctive colour (magenta and cyan). These letters could be individually resized in width, height and depth, becoming more transparent as their size increased. Each letter could also be moved anywhere over and above the surface of the game board. After some time, letters that were not being manipulated in one way or another would disappear from the game board area. Another function allowed each player to independently control their angle of view over the whole scene, and a voice phone connection between the two sites also allowed the players to speak to each other while manipulating these letters in the shared virtual space.
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Large LED alphanumeric units are mounted in a 13 x 9 grid on the stage tower of this theatre. Like a conventional news sign textual information is scrolled through these elements, but because the alphanumeric units are spaced far apart, the projected information becomes abstracted into a more complex image - it generates a patterning of fragments of words and sentences that appear to weave in and out of the wall of the building. The theatre users interactively program this sign, taking titles and texts from performances that are being presented in the theatre.
Thus the sculpture radiates fragments of texts from the current stage production to the viewers outside, and from a great distance draws attention and makes the building porous to a transfer of information from inside out.
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In this installation at the International Art & Science Exhibition a large, back projected high-resolution monitor was mounted on a motorised turntable. An infra-red joystick controlled the 360-degree rotation of this screen and the synchronous rotation of the viewer's point of view in the computer-generated scene. This joystick also allowed the viewer to move his point of view forwards and backwards in the scene. The computer-generated imagery showed a room that reproduced the appearance and proportions of the real room accommodating the installation. The virtual space (the image on the the screen) and the real space (the room) were optically aligned so that the viewer facing a door or a window in the real room would also be facing the same features in the simulated room.
In this way Alice's Room set up a conjunction of virtual and actual spaces enabling reality and fiction be physically interpolated. Four computer-generated objects were added in this simulated environment - red, green, yellow and blue rectangular boxes in the corners of the room. When entered, each box became a room interior which looked exactly like the outer room while at the same time possessing unique characteristics.
The first room showed the four coloured boxes in a continuous circulating process of splitting into thirty-two smaller boxes and then reassembling themselves. The second room showed two rows of large moving Japanese characters - a haiku written specially by Shuntaro Tanikawa. The third room contained a slowly rotating wire-frame hypercube. At the centre of the fourth room was a continuously turning replica of the actual video monitor. While this simulated monitor had a blank white screen, moving coloured reflections on the walls of the room conveyed the impression that it was being illuminated by images on this empty screen.
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For the exhibition Kunst Over de Vloer artists were invited to create works in the rooms of a private apartment building. Anamorphoses of Memory was located in a sparse and untidy student's bedroom. A monitor was placed on a mattress on the floor with its screen facing upwards. On the monitor screen moving rows of text were anamorphically reflected onto a mirrored cylinder standing upright in the centre of the screen. These texts moved outwards from the centre of the screen in concentric circles. Reflected on the cylinder, they became vertically scrolling sentences which could be read by the viewers. The texts were written specially by Dirk Groeneveld and evoked certain erotic contingencies performed in this bedroom.
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Points of View was a 'theatre of signs' with both stage and protagonists being provided by a three-dimensional computer graphics simulation that was video projected onto a large screen in front of a seated audience...The representation of the actors on the stage was derived from the ancient Egyptian alphabet - each figure was a hieroglyphic character. This constellation of signs was used to articulate a world model with an underlying set of physical and conceptual relationships. Sixteen sound tracks - mostly spoken texts - were interactively linked to the image via the same joystick that controlled the visual movements.
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Points of View II - Babel addressed issues relating to the Falklands War. It implemented functional and iconographic structures that were similar to Points of View I. Egyptian hieroglyphs were used to articulate both a visual and psychological architecture - a hierarchical edifice that set out to identify the essential pathology of power and its inevitable predisposition to oppression and warfare.
Source of Artist Statement]]> Excerpt from Australian Sound Design Project]]> Excerpt from the online database Australian Sound Design Project]]> Artist Statement
The egg, the cart, the horse, the chicken was written by Hazel Smith (text) and Roger Dean (sound). The hypertext and animations, written in Flash by Hazel Smith, are designed for a split screen. The texts in both the upper and lower frame are grouped into short linear 'scenes' which form an overall 'movie'. But the sequence in the upper frame can be disrupted by clicking on hyperlinks (marked in capital letters), which allow the reader to jump to texts other than the ones which follow each other in sequence. Consequently the juxtaposition of the texts on the two different screens is also variable. The piece engages with the way in which linear systems are constantly disrupted by non-linearity. This is written into the piece at a formal level by the use of the hyperlinks, animation and split screen, which tend to disrupt normal reading processes. Thematically the piece also addresses the ways in which a simple cause and effect relationship rarely operates, even within scientific systems. At the same time the hypertextual network interconnects many different ideas including the cultural significance of illness, the process of writing, the commodification of women's bodies, and the atemporal nature of memory.
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The multimedia work, soundAFFECTs, employs the text of 'AFFECTions' as its base, but converts it into a piece which combines text as moving image and transforming sound. For the multimedia work Roger Dean programmed a performing interface using the real-time image processing program Jitter; he also programmed a performing interface in MAX/MSP to enable algorithmic generation of the sound. This multimedia work has been shown in performance on many occasions projected on a large screen with live music; the text and sound are processed in real time and each performance is different.
Excerpt from the article "soundAFFECTs: transcoding, writing, new media, affect"]]> Excerpt from How2, electronic Journal for experimental women's poetry. Vol.3 no.2]]> Excerpt from PennSound, Center For Programs In Contemporary Writing]]> Artist Statement
ProseThetic Memories is a collaborative, fictocritical and cross-genre text which combines prose, poetry, cultural theory and philosophy. It challenges traditional ideas about memory as a process of storage and subsequent retrieval. Instead memory is seen as a dynamic process, in which the present constantly transforms our impression of the past and vice versa. In this way the very division of time into discrete past and present components is called into question. Important to the genesis of the piece was Freud's notion of Nachtraglichkeit, "afterwardsness", the idea that what is continually rewrites what has been. The concept of prosthesis is also central to the piece because collaboration is itself a prosthetic process, involving the adoption of others' memories and preoccupations, and because memory is always collective as well as individual.
Source of Artist Statement]]> Excerpt from Drunken Boat, an online journal of art and literature. Issue No.12]]> Artist Statement
Clay conversations arose out of collaborative conversations I had with British ceramicist Joanna Still. After several meetings and exchanges, Joanna created some ceramics which evoked various forms of communication, for example a clay book, a calendar, and an abacus, but which also had an abstracted connection with the objects to which they refer. I wrote several short poems in response to Joanna's ceramics, conversations we had, and textual material she sent me (such as a newspaper cutting about Haitians eating clay plates because they could not afford food). My poetry also drew on experiences I had independently, which seemed to connect with the project, such as a visit I made to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.
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