Bezoekersprogramma MIT

​Virtueel Platform welcomes multifaceted audiovisual designers Eric Gunther, Jeff Lieberman and Dan Paluska to Amsterdam. Two of them (Jeff and Dan) are two of the first beneficiaries of a Dutch government initiative to fund foreign visitors working in the field of new media arts.

Amsterdam is the final European destination for the three Americans in a visit which started out at Ars Electronica and ended at the Social RFID Hackers Camp at Picnic. On their last day in the city, Virtueel Platform’s Cathy Brickwood invited Eric, Jeff and Dan to meet over lunch with a cluster of key people based in the Netherlands. By fomenting the cross-fertilisation of ideas and networking, it was hoped that all involved could maximise the benefits of this cultural exchange.

Eric, Dan and Jeff emerge from the intense eight day creative experience which is hacker camp exhilarated and wanting to take the energy home. Organised by Mediamatic, the camp is a hotbed of interactive innovation where teams of designers, programmers, artists and engineers work to a punishing deadline to dream up social uses for the RFID tags issued to Picnic delegates. Although accustomed to the stimulating milieu of MIT, the trio praise the camp as one of the best environments imaginable in which to realise such a project. For Jeff, the space to do absolutely anything is incredibly inspiring and liberating, while Eric confesses that the breadth of collective skill sets amongst the hackers gave him a new-found courage to dive fearlessly into the unknown.

The three guys are no strangers to invincible challenges. Some of their most notable achievements include the mesmerising ‘Absolut Quartet’ (Dan Paluska and Jeff Lieberman), winner of the Award of Distinction in Interactive Art at Ars Electronica 2008, and ‘ReConstitution’, Sosolimited’s widely acclaimed live remix of the 2008 US presidential debates, (Eric Gunther). Their combined academic background at MIT spans computer science, electrical engineering, interactive design, robotics, physics and maths although they are quick to stress the importance of their work within music, sculpture, photography and the media.

Gathered cross-legged around a tray of Algerian delicacies in Amsterdam’s Rainarai restaurant, the group kicks off the conversation by each in turn articulating their primary interests, past and present. The picture drawn reveals multiple points of convergence around the themes of music, performance, objectification and issues of complexity, intuition and perception.

Interaction and collaboration
The common thread which weaves in and out of the whole discussion is interaction. Unsurprisingly so, as all of the group assembled brings experience either of working, teaching, project coordinating or, in Dick’s case, laying the groundwork in the field of interaction design. Developing new forms of social interaction through RFID tags has been the mantra of the hacker camp. Intriguingly, the interactivity hype around RFID peaked around ten years ago and yet still no mass function has been conceived for it. Kristina talks of the way a new technology often passes out of fashion to languish awhile in the technological doldrums before becoming ripe for development and, as Jeff adds, a use is found that helps humanity. The internet itself is a prime example of a technology created for warfare which has discovered an infinite number of socially beneficial uses. Clearly, it is our (re)purposing of technology that is of primordial importance.

Of all the hacker camp achievements, the hackers unanimously gained the greatest satisfaction from creating social interaction among the Picnic delegates. Any technical or artistic accomplishments were secondary to being able to offer fun and new experiences to the public. Jeff and Eric are as surprised as they are delighted by the unexpected positive feedback loop created by friendSlicer, their hacker camp installation which creates customised music videos of friends through the detection of audio samples. Each participant’s samples can be seen instantly on a screen outside the friendSlicer booth and, as the more outlandish contributions are perceived the more successful, people respond with ever crazier performances.

Following on from this, Jeff considers how people might edge away from competitive behaviour towards a model of cooperation through small shifts in a multitude of ways. Through collaboration, people are enabled to have experiences that would either be impossible to achieve alone or, even if they did have the know-how to create the experience themselves, that could take years of development. The friendSlicer project in particular triggers ideas for collaborative music creation in which individuals unite with other band members online. By writing songs and submitting their own sounds via a webcam, contributors would enjoy the customised experience of a musician playing in a band.

Music and complexity
The group describes some of their previous work in interactive music projects such as the suit which permitted the wearer to make certain sounds which were then sampled and remixed live. Jeff and Dan reflect on the future of their Absolut Quartet, an interactive instrument involving five spinning wine glasses, ethnic percussion instruments and a 6 metre wide marimba played by rubber balls projected onto the keys. How do they get people, composers especially, to use it now that it is confined to a museum?

Dick explains that his overriding aspiration at Steim is to invite complexity in new music technology. He is adamant that the way forward is to tackle complexity head on, and through creating and learning from the instances when control is lost. Steim invites research which counters people’s fear of complexity, and offers multi-levelled support to ease the challenge of addressing really complicated instruments. The MIT guys voice a proposal for a hands-on instrument which needs full physical contact to create sound. An open invitation is extended to Jeff, Dan and Eric to pursue this, or indeed any other ideas, at Steim in what portends to be a highly beneficial relationship. The three Americans have the software expertise required to achieve the degree of complexity that Steim strives for. Furthermore, both parties share a mutual interest in sound at the structural level and in the potential of publishing structure rather than sound through the internet.

Performance and objectification
Besides music, Eric in particular works extensively with dance and vibrations. His work creates new aesthetic experiences for the body and, in a spatial sense, new experiences of movement through dance. He takes objects such as exercise machines to find ways of giving new sensory experiences. This links with Kristina’s current interests in performance, liveness and embodiment. Her focus is on finding precision, conceptualisation and validation at the moment of performance.

As someone who can only understand objects through touch, Kristina also addresses our interaction with objects and concepts. She is currently creating body-worn objects to which a function will be assigned which is related both to brain desires and to children’s appropriations of the objects during play. The resulting ‘magical’ objects are to incorporate their ascribed functionalities. In a similar vein, Brad is interested in finding a meeting point between mysticism, objectification and subjectivity in relation to technology. His practice centres around space travel and, in a recent work exploring exterior / interior bridges, he has combined meditation and zero G in Russian airspace.

Education and intuition
The group hones in on the significance of perception and intuition. While in recent years, we may have been forced to exercise our cognitive abilities more than before, our sense of intuition is waning. Neither valued nor nurtured, only in the most progressive art schools are our intuitive skills consciously exercised. We need to probe what counts as knowledge and make people comfortable with the idea that intuition is a valid objective. Even at MIT, Dan says with dismay, they still worship the hammer. But the hammer, needless to say, is merely a tool. Instead of how to use it, we need to educate the mind as to why you engage with it. There is an intricate relationship here between design, morality and ethics which is very poorly addressed.

The industrial model of education is still the dominant force which guides how we address knowledge, and from it an expansive commercial sector of knowledge management has arisen. Compare this to the nonexistent field of intuition management, and we begin to appreciate the primacy of product over process. The question is undoubtedly how to educate the public in order to increase levels of perception.

Returning to the initial remarks of this discussion on the seriousness of the (re)purposing of technology, we are witnessing how reappropriations are constantly emerging from the public sphere, particularly with the innovative uses people are finding for software. At the same time, the escalation of social media is related to the demise of social skills, and even arguably linked to the rise in autism. In this light, the intuition enrichment of our public protagonists is a highly desirable aspiration. Ultimately, the group agrees, it is the responsibility of a culture to elaborate the consciousness of the actions of the public.

Attendees
Lunch meeting between three MIT visitors, Dan Paluska, Jeff Lieberman and Eric Gunther and the Amsterdam-based Bradley Pitts, (Resident Researcher in Art/Science at the Rijksakademie, also ex-MIT space engineering), Dick Rijken and Kristina Andersen, (Steim), Martijn de Waal, (The Mobile City and ex-MIT Medialab visiting scholar), and Klaas Kuitenbrouwer and Cathy Brickwood, (Virtueel Platform - bezoekersprogramma / visitors programme).