Database Narrative, Spatial Montage, and the Cultural Transmission of Memory

This chapter discusses ways in which the database narrative techniques of virtual media can be used to explore the relationship between real-world oral storytelling and embodied performance in the cultural transmission of memory. It is based on an ongoing collaboration between the author and the historical anthropologist, Wendy James, to develop a multilayered associative narrative, which considers relationships between experience, event, and memory among a displaced community. The work is based on a substantial living archive of photographs, audio, cine, and video recordings collected by Wendy James in the Sudan/Ethiopian borderlands from the mid-1960s to the present day. Its critical context relates to the ’sensory turn’ in anthropology and to ’beyond text’ debates within the arts and humanities regarding ways in which we can capture and represent the sensory experiences of the past.

Behind the Sonic Veil

Drawing firstly on animation, this chapter will consider how applications of sound may demand new conceptual frameworks for animated work to develop. Making reference to audio-visual sound theory, the acousmatic and cinematic histories, the discussion surveys aspects of animation sound, and suggests the potential for exposing the sonic elements of the form to evaluation using means beyond current film-sound concepts. The application of recorded sound and the role it performs in the re-creation of synthetic life in new animated situations brings unconsidered possibilities for sound-image concepts. How sound functions and how it combines with an image on screen, in order to create a listening involvement in animation, is central to this consideration. Nevertheless, as the form transgresses, it is evolving from the structured sound space of the traditional screen; new spaces may present different challenges that motivate different sound to picture equations.

Mobility, Liminality, and Digital Materiality

This chapter will examine and critically align a number of pioneering projects from around the world, using mobile and pervasive technologies, which have challenged the design and delivery of mobile artworks, as documented on the author’s weblog and book The Mobile Audience (Rodopi, 2011). These will be presented together with examples from the artist’s own research and practice, which have been concerned with the liminal nature of digital media and the intersection of the real and virtual, the physicality of place, and the immateriality of the imaginary in artistic spaces. Two projects in process are also referenced: The Prisoner—a motion-captured, emotionally responsive avatar in the round—and Secret Garden—a virtual reality digital opera. Lastly, this chapter considers the nature of digital materiality in the exhibition of miniature Internet transmitted sculptures: Inside Out: Sculpture in the Digital Age.

LPDT2 La Plissure du Texte 2

This chapter will discuss the artistic processes involved in the creation of the three dimensional, virtual art installation La Plissure du Texte 2, which is the sequel to Roy Ascott’s ground breaking telematically networked art work La Plissure du Texte, created in 1983 and shown in Paris at the Musée de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris during that same year. While the underlying concepts of the original art work, as well as its capability of regenerating itself as an entirely novel manifestation based upon the concepts of distributed authorship, textual mobility, emergent semiosis, multiple identity, and participatory poesis will be underlined, the main focus of the text will be upon the creative strategies as well as the technological means through which the architecture was brought about in the contemporary creative environment of the metaverse. A further topic that will be covered is the challenge of exhibiting what is after all an art work that requires full virtual immersion to bring about a deep level experience and understanding of it, in the physical world, i.e. ‘Real Life’4—in a gallery or museum space in which such a virtual immersion cannot be readily obtained.

Data-Objects

This chapter discusses a current shift away from thinking about ideas of virtual reality, towards a conversation around hybrid digital/physical constructs and the notions of mixed or augmented reality. In particular the chapter explores how physical artifacts that are based on data extracted from computer generated virtual spaces are being created as a way of challenging how we read, interpret, and respond to digital information. This emerging trend for the realization of data sets into three-dimensional (3D) physical objects is discussed from the perspective of creative practice and digital information visualization. In these new constructs, digital data sets are concretized into a physical form, remediated from information sources, such as mobile phone coverage records, crime statistics, and temperature patterns. Through a series of examples, the chapter will investigate how these tangible translations can change our relationship to screen-based digital content, in particular statistical data, and seeks to reveal how by encoding digital information into a physical object we can establish a way of reading this data through spatial, temporal, and material variations that sit outside of the computer-monitor and the digital environment. Rapid prototyping making techniques are discussed as a trigger for a conversation around the ontological and epistemological readings of these liminal physical/data objects.

Virtual Communitas, “Digital Place-Making,” and the Process of “Becoming”

In Aristotelian philosophy, the process of change from a lower level of “potentiality” to the higher level of “actuality” is known as “becoming,” or to become more and more of what one is, or capable of “becoming.” For this process to take place, the dissolution of the normative values or understanding of one’s self and context is necessary (Turner, 1968). Such dissolution, although initially destabilising, can create an environment conducive to the values and normal modes of behaviour being reflected upon and transformed. The chapter considers how selected context-responsive projects that use the Internet, develop and harness “communitas” (Turner, 1967) and function as “liminoid” (Turner, 1974) space, facilitating new understandings of place. The virtual manifestations of place highlighted are then reflected upon for their potential in the process of “place-making” to enable the process of “becoming,” for people and the specific location.

The Metaplastic Cyber Opencode Art

This chapter explores the continuum between old and new media and presents the research area of Metaplastic Art and Design. The description of the Metaplastic Metaspace and its own methodology create interactive virtual spaces for Cyber Art between reality and virtual realities, from living code to software and vice versa through the Metaplastic Opencode Platform.

The Earth Sciences and Creative Practice

Artists who engage with the earth sciences have been able to explore all kinds of information about the natural environment, including information about the atmosphere, extremes of physical formations across immense dimensions of time and space, and increasingly ‘invisible’ realms of materials at the nanoscale. This is a rich area for identifying the relationship between digital and material cultures as many artists working with this subject are crossing boundaries and testing out the liminal spaces between the virtual and the real. After an overview of theoretical links between visualisation and geology, mineralogy and crystallography, this chapter explores four themes: (1) environment and experience, (2) code and pattern, (3) co-creation and participation, and (4) mining heritage.

The Mirror between Two Worlds

The information society manufactures, manipulates, and commodifies information. Heritage is one such area that is undergoing digital transformation. Heritage is increasingly being transmuted through digitisation devices such as laser and structured light scans into multiple representations of information. The rich information of a heritage object or an environment can be restructured, transmitted, and recomposed into a mediated form both textual and non-textual. Once digitised, it becomes free from its physical predecessor; it enters another world that defies the physical laws of nature where the imagination of the maker is a limit. Such worlds accompanied by their objects are accessible in new yet intuitive ways via surface computers. The horizontal nature of the multitouch-multiuser surface computer then becomes the mirror that links both worlds, allowing access into a virtual space via the touch-table computing paradigm. This chapter explores 3D surface computing, its technology, capabilities, and limits with developments of two multitouch applications incorporating heritage objects and environments, and the observation of the reactions of initial users. It addresses new issues and challenges surrounding the use of surface computing and how the access and transmission of heritage information via multitouch-multiuser tables are able to contribute to the accessibility, teaching, and learning of heritage.

Exploring Liminality from an Anthropological Perspective

The transition from the real to the digital requires a shift of consciousness that can be theorised with recourse to the concept of liminality, which has multidisciplinary currency in psychology and other disciplines in the social sciences, cultural, and literary theory. In anthropology the notion of liminality was introduced by the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in the context of the development of the rite of passage. Since van Gennep’s discussion of the concept, the term has been used in a variety of contexts and disciplines that range from psychology, religion, sociology, and latterly in new media, where it has a renewed emphasis because of the transition from the real to the virtual space of the digital interface.