Art attack

About Technology -

Art is a problem.

Not in the sense that it is a waste of money, often unfathomable and occasionally obscene. It is a problem because of all the things people do it is the activity that cannot be easily explained by consulting their biological urges.

It stands out as a uniquely human activity. No other animal goes to such lengths to produce it, consume it and react to it in the way that people do. That’s why it is a problem. And a tricky one at that.

Patrick Tresset and Frederic Fol Leymarie are trying to shed light on it using a system called Aikon that aims to unpick and then copy how an artist works. The artist is Mr Tresset who has almost a decade of practice as a portrait artist to call on.

"We’re trying to understand what goes on in the mind of the person performing the act of drawing," said Prof Leymarie.

That understanding, gleaned from watching Mr Tresset at work and drawing on his own insights of how he works, has produced a system that uses a robot arm to sketch faces.

The robot arm is crude but can produce works of art

At no point, said Prof Leymarie, was the idea to create photo-realistic reproductions of faces. Instead the roughness of the finished sketches is key.

"It’s a cheap robot arm because we are trying to get away from something that’s a performance and very well engineered," he said "In part that’s because we are trying to capture the different elements and uncertainties that are expected from a human."

One key insight that developing the system has revealed is the difference in the amount of time that artists and non-artists spend looking at a subject when they are drawing.

Non-artists, said Prof Leymarie, spend their time looking at the paper. By contrast, he said, artists look at the subject and trust their hand to do the reproduction.

The collaboration between Mr Tresset and technology has been such that now the robot arm can produce sketches in its own distinctive style.

And, said Prof Leymarie, the collaboration does not end there.

"He can not only use it as a way to explore and understand what he is doing or what other artists are doing," he said. "He can use it as something more powerful.

"It can be used by artists to explore why they end up doing a certain type of art a certain way," he said.

Novel art

Mr Tresset and Prof Leymarie are not alone in using technology to tickle the creativity of artists and others.

At a Digital Expo to show off Goldsmiths College’s digital studio, Dan Jones created an installation that helped visitors explore interactive creativity.

It bonded motion capture to a virtual landscape. As a participant moved around the enclosed space, clapped their hands or spoke, the landscape was changed in response.

Mr Jones said the installation was related to the work he is doing to help scientists and artists explore all facets of their creativity.

Dan Jones’ installation lets people interact with a virtual landscape

In a similar way, he said, the creative journey that artists embark on when producing a work is really only one path through the larger landscape of all the things they could create.

"Through a lifetime of practice artists acquire habits and tropes," said Mr Jones. "One way out of that is adopting computational models that supplement their own creative process that can re-shape and re-direct that impulse."

Simulations based around small, smart software programs known as agents can help artists reach those areas of that creative landscape that they would otherwise never visit.

One product of this work is a system that can improvise and jam with musicians.

"What’s particularly interesting about it is that it’s inherently unpredictable and chaotic," he said. Often it takes musicians to places they have never been before and stretches their ability to improvise, to create.

Mr Jones work is also being applied to the sciences to help a group of researchers tackling leukaemia to understand how stem cells react to the disease. The interaction of visualisation and their deep knowledge of the biology could give them a far greater insight into how that system works.

Dr Mick Grierson, who oversees the work going on at Goldsmiths, said the projects go to the heart of what it means to be a maker, hacker, scientist or artist. And arguably a human. It is all about curiosity, creativity and innovation.

"That’s what makes science great, and technology great and art great," he said "It’s about playing with ideas.

"You try a few things out and see what happens, then try more and more and you come up with something that is genius," he said.

Only by building it, seeing and shaping it, can they truly understand. Something any and every maker can identify with.

About Technology - Art attack

About Technology -

Art can help us get to grips with the digital world

Novel ways of thinking about the digital world are needed, says Bill Thompson, and perhaps the arts can help.

One of the more interesting shifts in the technology world over the last quarter century has been the way that cultural organisations have gone from being the late adopters, inheriting office-oriented computer systems from business and making do with them, to being those leading the digital revolution in many areas.

When I worked with the Community Computing Network in the late 80s it was hard work persuading charities and voluntary organisations that having a computer to handle their member databases and print letters was worthwhile.

But now that there really is a computer on every desk and word processing, spreadsheets and databases are standard, arts organisations seem to be far more willing to engage and experiment with the latest tools, especially online.

We have few stories that talk about technology and few workable metaphors or analogies that let us convey complex technological issues in ways that people really grasp Bill Thompson

Many are making expert use of social media, moving from MySpace and Bebo to Facebook to follow the audiences, but also finding out how Twitter and other services can be used to help them engage and interact with people who may be interested in their art.

The much-loved Pilot Theatre brought in virtual worlds expert Caron Lyon to built them a stage set in Second Life. The team at Hoi Polloi used video diaries, Facebook and Twitter to establish an online following that has supported them as they tour from their Cambridge base as far afield as Australia, offering new audiences a chance to discover their work in all its strangeness while also ensuring that fans - including me - know what they are up to while they are away.

When it comes crossover organisations like Hide&Seek, who recently ran a social gaming festival in London, it is impossible to separate the art from the technology, and their work offers a real inspiration to those who wonder what the arts will look like in a digitised world.

This cross-fertilisation is important in several ways. It obviously makes sense for those committed to experiment and exploration in the arts to embrace new technologies as a way of exploring the creative potential of a new domain of human activity, just as painters explored the radical new technology of oils for for many decades, or sculptors turned from marble and limestone to work with welded iron or novel materials like frozen blood.

But there is something else going on, something deeper and potentially more important, because in working through the creative potential of new technologies artists of all types are helping us to find new ways to think about these tools and working out how to integrate them into our wider cultural and commercial practice.

They are helping us to explore the latest chapter in the ongoing conversation between human psychology and the capabilities of modern technology, something which will matter more and more as the network becomes pervasive and digital devices penetrate every area of our lives.

The point was made clear to me at Shift Happens, a conference on the ways arts organisations are using new technologies that took place this week at York Theatre Royal.

Over a day and a half the audience, mostly made up of practitioners, was treated to a fascinating selection of arts-based technology, or technology-based arts, from the interactive animations of the always-engaging Sancho Plan through calls to ensure that tech-based arts are environmentally sustainable from Envirodigital and a demonstration of how to subtitle your online video from Internet Subtitling.

A modern reading of The Tempest could explain the digital world

It quickly became clear that the network revolution is already happening in the arts even if its success on the political stage is sometimes sadly limited, as we saw this week in Iran.

One problem in talking about this is that relatively few people understand the underlying technology sufficiently well to be comfortable with it. We have few stories that talk about technology and few workable metaphors or analogies that let us convey complex technological issues in ways that people really grasp.

I wonder, however, if we can take some old stories and use them to explore the new world. Take The Tempest, for example, Shakespeare’s last play and one of his finest. Set on a remote island where Prospero, exiled Duke of Milan, lives with his daughter Miranda and a strange creature called Caliban, the Tempest explores issues of redemption and forgiveness and the use and abuse of power.

Prospero rules his island thanks the the spells in the books he has studied in his exile, commanding the spirit Ariel to torment and manipulate his former enemies, who have been shipwrecked on the island by a tempest created at Prospero’s command.

A modern reading this tale would see Ariel as a representative of the digital realm, created from bits but able to have a real effect on the physical world. We discover during the play that Ariel was locked into a forked tree until released by Prospero, a good analogy for the effort needed to liberate the power of the digital revolution, represented by Prospero’s books of spells.

We can take this further. The witch’s child Caliban believes himself the true inheritor of the island as his mother was banished there before Prospero arrived and fails to realise that Prospero’s books have given him power over the unseen world that far outstrip Caliban’s physical prowess, just as the rulers of analogue distribution fear the world we have conjured from our code.

And when Caliban, wandering the island with shipwrecked sailors Trinculo and Stephano, hears an invisible Ariel playing on a pipe he tells them:

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

Today the thousand twangling instruments that Ariel and his sprites conjure up are replaced by millions of tweets, status updates, but they still fill the world with sweet sounds, and offer us a vision of a digital world that can be as rich and full of delight as we choose to make it. It’s reassuring to see that some of our best artists are working hard to make that happen.

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.

About Technology - Art attack

About Technology -

Dancing avatars is a step on from the days of Pans People

Digital technologies challenge the cultural industries, says Bill Thompson.

I had one of the strangest experiences of my online life last Friday evening in the bar of the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, and while I’m still not sure what it means I enjoyed it, in a odd sort of way.

It came at the end of a conference on the future of cinemas and other artistic venues in a digital world, while we were enjoying a DJ set from Captain Buck Rogers. The music we were listening to was being streamed live into the virtual world of Second Life, and being played out in replica of the renowned Baltic Mill gallery, situated on a newly-opened virtual Tyneside island developed by a local company, Vector 76.

Avatars from around the world were dancing to the music we could hear, while we watched them projected onto the wall of the cinema bar, so I got out my laptop, logged in to Second Life and made my way to the virtual Baltic, where I joined in the dancing.

I could see my avatar moving around on the screen of my computer, but I was also clearly visible among the crowd projected onto the wall, dancing like every teenager’s embarrassing dad in cyberspace while drinking a deliciously cold beer in the real world.

It was profoundly disquieting to find myself in three places at once, but it helped me reflect on how new technologies are shifting the boundaries of the arts and culture, and it was a very appropriate end to a day which had been spent considering how arts venues are being challenged by digital technologies.

Offline galleries

The network could be about to unleash a wave of creative cultural destruction as great in its impact on all cultural activism as the rise of modernism was in the last century. Bill Thompson

The conference was called ‘Clicks or Mortar?’ in reference to the question facing many retailers who are struggling to decide whether to put effort into online or shop-based sales and marketing, and was part of a programme of debate and discussion I’ve been helping to lead at Tyneside since it reopened last year after extensive - and expensive - rebuilding work.

As you might expect, it was a day with many more questions than answers, although by the time we headed to the bar there were lots of plans for exploration and innovation being hatched between the theatre directors, curators, cinema managers and social media experts who had spent the day together.

There might even have been a sense of optimism about the future, since nobody had tried to argue that everyone would abandon their desire to share space and art with other people even if high speed networks, home cinema systems and social tools meant the quality of the home experience continued to improve.

Immersive environments

But there was also great concern that venues such as cinemas and theatres may not survive in their current form.

Of course it is far too easy to frame any debate about the future development of the arts in terms of a ‘crisis’, and theatre, opera, cinema, the novel and even the very idea of the author have all been through more crises than most of us care to recall.

Can art galleries survive in the digital age?

Yet there is a strong case to be made that the combined effect of the collapse of the current iteration of globalised capitalism and the social changes wrought by digital technologies really do merit the use of the term this time around, and that it might sensibly be applied to the whole cultural scene rather than just one aspect of it.

New technologies offer new ways to create and experience art of all types, but they also offer new conceptual frameworks within which art can be created, from the immersive environments of video games like Grand Theft Auto IV to the complex mathematical modelling that underpinned My Secret Heart, one of the works shown at the conference as an example of current practice, and this could have significant consequences for current cultural practice.

Anyone who has heard me talk about the impact of technology will know that I am a great admirer of Joseph Schumpeter, the twentieth century economist whose described the way that new production methods often destroy successful companies when they leave it too late to adopt innovations because they are wedded to currently profitable practices.

He named the process ‘creative destruction’, and his work still provides a useful framework for understanding how Microsoft challenged IBM, Amazon challenged the booksellers and Google destroyed Yahoo!

It can also be applied to cultural production, but whereas in the past it has largely been driven by artistic innovations such as the invention of the first person narrative or atonal music, with technology secondary, the rapid rate of technological change may mean that those artists, artforms and venues that make the best use of the capabilities of the new technologies will sweep away those who fail to innovate.

The network could be about to unleash a wave of creative cultural destruction as great in its impact on all cultural activism as the rise of modernism was in the last century.

In the new digital world I suspect that artforms, artists and cultural organisations will succeed by occupying the subliminal space between offline and online, building a compelling presence in both that allows something unexpected to emerge where they meet and blur together.

Rather like dancing in Second Life while drinking a beer in the the first one.

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.