Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Banff 4th Cyber/4Cyber Report

Text File | 1994-10-01 | 18KB | 321 lines

  4CYBERCONF

    I Get Cy With A Little Help From My Friends:

      Dispatches from the bleeding edge of Cyberspace by Kent Barrett

      4 Cyberconf and the Art and Virtual Environment Symposium.

   5/23/1994: Banff, Alta.

   The incredibly beautiful Banff Centre, nestled among the breath-taking
   mountains of Banff National Park played host to the 4th annual
   Conference on Cyberspace and Art and Virtual Environment Symposium
   this week. In attendance were the movers and shakers of the VR world,
   the theorists and analysts, and the artists who work in, around, and
   for a place that does not exist. Or does it? Or even should it? And
   should it look like a video game, or a tree? Should it be male,
   female, genderless or something else? Are there Cyber Indians? These
   and a thousand thousand related questions were probed and addressed
   and argued about over a five day period by scientists, scholars, and
   virtuality artists from around the world. This is the cutting,
   bleeding edge of Cyberspace, and these are the people who are
   designing it. They presented scores of papers representing thousands
   of hours of research, far too much material to comment on or even to
   list here, (the full book of the papers will be published by MIT Press
   this summer) but here are a few of the notes of the highlights I took
   while the conference was in progress.

   Friday May 20

   I awoke far too late to attend the first presentation: Theorizing
   Virtuality: A Prolegomenon for an Enabling Aesthetic Critique. I'm
   sorry, 9:00 A.M. is far too early for prolegomenons of any
   description, in my view. But I knew from the lineup of abstracts that
   it wasn't going to get any easier, so I loaded up on espresso and dove
   into the conference. Tore A. Nielsen likened aspects of the virtual
   experience to dream-states and the mental activity generated by REM
   sleep. Sandra Braman delivered several million words in thirty minutes
   on Alternative Approaches to Economics In and Of Cyberspace. Michael
   MacKenzie had a whack at Intellectual Property considerations. Union
   straight-arm Marc Bélanger offered to organize cyberworkers, whom he
   refers to as L'earners, who earn by learning. It went on and on, a
   constant cascade of formidable information. By the end of the day I
   had been completely overwhelmed by the breadth and scope of the
   presentations. Not that this was any surprise. Assembled here are all
   the big hats of cyberspace. At Friday evening's roundtable discussion
   First Nations representative Loretta Todd spoke of her fears that dead
   white European male thinking was going to carry all of the same
   problems of "real" reality into cyberspace. She spoke of the
   loneliness she perceives in communications technologies. And it struck
   a chord. Many present in the audience voiced similar fears, and spoke
   also of loneliness. One was practically sobbing. I couldn't stand it.
   I had to leave. It made me too lonely. I had to go back to my room and
   e-mail my friends.Which I couldn't do. There was no fiber to my room.
   No computer for that matter. Nor TV set. There was a telephone, but to
   use it you needed a PIN, and I couldn't get a PIN because I don't have
   a credit card. I could still use the phone, but the only place I could
   phone was the lobby.

   Saturday May 21,

   I awoke glum, and tired. I wasn't alone. Over coffee I chatted with a
   graphic designer from a small European country that no longer exists.
   He looked at me and said "Gee. I thought Cyberspace was supposed to be
   fun." I commiserated.We bravely finished up our espressos and waded
   back into the fray. On our plates today were issues of identity,
   native concerns, engenderment, community, disembodiment and immersion.
   This ain't no party. This ain't no disco. This ain't no video game.
   Again it was a constant barrage. By noon we were all reeling.
   Exhilarated, but reeling. [IMAGE]

   Mireille Perron (inset) uses embodied storytelling

   to illustrate her opposition to the Bachelor Machine Syndrome,

   a megalomaniacal attempt to provide the bachelor with

   perfect control over celibacy, autoeroticism, and death

   through self-procreation, in this case by making beaver soup

   on an overhead projector.

   Fortunately artist Mireille Perron was able to help us avoid the worst
   problem facing those who would build Cyberspace: Beaverism. Right,
   Beaver-ism. Well, you just had to be there I'm afraid, but it sure
   explained a lot to me. Perhaps I was just tired.What impressed me most
   about the attendees and participants at this conference was not the
   brilliance of the presentations, you expect no less when dealing with
   the best of any field, but rather the deep and genuine concern that
   the speakers seemed to feel for the opinions of others. This civilized
   behaviour appearedto stem from a gut-level sense that every one here
   shares: the certain knowledge that the flickering electronic toys we
   have managed to produce so far are merely the coctail napkin sketches
   for a machine that we are building that is going to change absolutely
   everything, in ways that we cannot anticipate; that what we are doing
   can result in the freeing of the human spirit if we build well, or the
   total enslavement of all humanity for all time if we do not.Not all
   love and roses, of course, there were squabbles. One dispute over a
   point of scholarship devolved into name-calling, and finally broke out
   into a flame war when one presenter invited another to attend a
   "flesh-ripping session". But for the most part every one was fairly
   well behaved.

   Sunday May 22

   Back at it. Eight more straight hours of fascinating gibberish. Brenda
   Laurel and Rachel Strickland explained their piece "Placeholders".
   This excellent virtual experience used a stone-glyph-like series of
   icons to represent the "smart costumes" that cybernaughts can put on,
   and in effect become: Fish; Snake; Crow; and Spider. There were
   interactive dance interfaces, interactive music interfaces, and
   interfaces that I plain did not understand.By Sunday night every one
   was in a state of paralytic information overload shock. It was decided
   that what we needed was a Rave. I attended, dancing until three with
   the women from SoftImage. That's what I like about Cyberconf as
   opposed to computer industry gatherings—there's women at Cyberconf.
   Also the people you meet are absolutely fascinating, intelligent and
   eloquent. I can remember looking around in amazement at who was up
   howling and dancing with me at three A.M. Great god, I thought, if a
   bomb were to go off in this bar right now the collective IQ of
   Cyberspace would drop 80 points.

   Monday May 23

   Day four. Just one more to survive after tonight. The presentations
   just keep on coming. I am in the Bit Rot Café. It is ten o'clock at
   night. Virtual Environment machines are all around me, unplugged and
   dark . I am grumpy. I am not alone. After four days of cyberspeak,
   extreme synaptic stress, and trying on dozens of VR helmets, everybody
   is having a bad hair day. I want to finish this up. I want to go back
   to my room and phone the lobby, just to cause trouble. But I won't.
   I'm going to finish up this dispatch, have myself a sauna, and then
   wander off into the night, for a walk in the cold clear air of the
   magic Banff. In real reality. I love VR, you know, but there's no
   place like...home.

  BUT IS IT ART?:

    The Art and Virtual Environments Symposium

      and the Fourth International Conference on Cyberspace

      Kent Barrett:06/05/94

   ELK WARNING!!!

   4Cyberconf, the fourth international conference on cyberspace was held
   in Canada for the first time late in May of this year, in conjunction
   with the Art and Virtual Environments Symposium. Banff, Alberta is at
   once an exhilarating and a frustrating setting for an examination of
   the state of the virtual arts. Nestled among the mountains of Banff
   National Park, Banff Centre researchers and conference attendees
   shared this placid postcard village with all manor of wildlife,
   including calving elk who are known to aggressively protect their
   young. Signs in all buildings reminded everyone to be aware of the
   warning signs of elk aggression (staring, stamping, whites of eyes
   showing...) and to stay at least 100 meters away from them, which is
   difficult if they happen to be feeding on the shrubbery outside the
   front door of your lab. It is sobering, after several hours in a
   darkened room with your head clamped into a virtual reality helmet, to
   step outside into the blazing panorama of a Rocky mountain landscape
   and be confronted by a herd of wild animals that might suddenly decide
   that you are a threat to their young. It is a shocking reminder that
   even Silicon Graphics cannot produce computers that can give even the
   palest of reflections of the reality we take for granted every day.

   Of course, that's no excuse not to try. The symposium showcased work
   from the art and virtual environments project in the Banff Centre's
   Media Arts program. This three year research program, which began in
   1991, has provided artists in a variety of disciplines with the access
   to the computer technologies required for them to explore the
   implications of VR. Dancers, native artists, architects, painters,
   musicians, all with little or no computer experience were brought
   together with teams of technicians, programmers and high-speed
   machinery (including an SGI Onyx Reality Rack) in an attempt to
   stretch the limits of their own creativity, and push the envelope of
   what VR is considered to be. The results are fascinating. Here are a
   few of the many highlights.

   Bar Code Hotel

   by Perry Hoberman

   Most VR installations adhere to the popular model of dataglove and
   head-mounted-display. One cyberspace-suited traveler explores a
   (usually) lonely world and navigates, bodiless, through a constructed
   landscape of flickering polygons and unearthly music. Not here. At the
   Bar Code Hotel you can check in with your friends. In this space
   visitors wear simple polarizing eyeglasses, and a pair of video
   projectors beam the virtual environment into the gallery,
   superimposing it on the 'real' environment of the otherwise empty
   room. Entering the gallery guests find themselves on the observation
   deck. Beyond this platform the gallery space is covered with bar codes
   (the familiar striped Universal Product Codes printed on most
   products' packaging these days). Five light weight laser pens are
   provided to scan these codes and experiment with the effects they have
   on the environment. The effects are startling. Scanning a code will
   suddenly cause a common (though uncommonly large) object such as a
   giant paper clip, camera, or hat to appear in three dimensional space
   where it immediately begins to move around and exhibit its own
   "personality". Scanning other codes will evoke changes in the
   "behavior" of the floating objects, causing them to become "shy"
   (avoid other objects) or "aggressive" (chase other objects) or show a
   variety of other personality traits, and of course emit different
   sounds. The objects also have a life span. After a period of a few
   minutes they become sluggish and respond less vigorously to new codes,
   and eventually they flicker out and die (though they are still
   partially visible for awhile as thin "ghosts".Guests can be as
   interactive as they please with the objects, scanning in a constant
   stream of new codes, or simply letting an object go where it likes and
   only occasionally "correcting" its behavior. It's a lot of fun, but
   the best part is that since the room itself is the interface, guests
   can interact with each other. Bar Code Hotel can be played freeform,
   like a game without rules, or directed precisely like a stage
   performance. This piece drew a lot of oohs and ahhs. It's not quite
   the holodeck, but it's a step in that direction.See Banff! Kinetoscope

   by Michael Naimark

   This piece is a leap both forward and backward at the same time.
   Looking decidedly out of place beside the Macintosh computers and 3D
   sound generators in the Bit Rot Café is a tall wooden box with a crank
   on one side, and a single-viewer eyepiece on top. The device resembles
   that famous 19th century VR machine, the kinetoscope. And indeed it is
   a kinetoscope, of sorts. Turning the handle on the side allows viewers
   to navigate and browse back and forth through a variety of silent
   stereoscopic "views" of the Banff area and rural Alberta. I found the
   concept interesting, but couldn't see the work properly, as the view
   piece was not designed to accommodate people who wear glasses. Naimark
   sheepishly admits this and will change the design for his next piece.

   Inherent Rights, Vision Rights

   by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

   I first noticed this work as a young girl sitting at the eyepiece
   cried out "A bee just went by!" Inherent Rights, Vision Rights is
   noted for being the first piece created at Banff that integrated 3D
   sound and visuals. The work is housed in a dishwasher-sized plexiglas
   enclosure that reveals its inner machinery and cabling. An eyepiece
   (yes it works with eyeglasses) is presented at eye level when a viewer
   is seated before it. Navigation buttons mounted on columns replace the
   dataglove for maneuvering through the environment. Stereo headphones
   complete the ensemble.Starting the device you find yourself on an
   eerie, featureless plane. It is night. Strange animal sounds fill the
   air and music can be heard in the distance. Far away a low building is
   visible, and this seems to be the source of the music. As you navigate
   toward the building the music increases in volume and tempo. Flies
   buzz around your head. ("A bee just went by!") The music reaches a
   crescendo as you enter the long house. Ceremonial fires burn within,
   their smoke rising up through holes in the ceiling. Arranged around
   the room are large reproductions of Lawrence's paintings as on
   dividers in an art gallery. Leaving the gallery you are free to roam
   around outside, where animal and spirit images float in the sky.

   [IMAGE] Topological Slide

   by Stewart Dickson and Michael Scroggins.

   In this work, viewers wear the HMD and stand on a low platform about
   three feet in diameter. Sensors under the platform sense the weight of
   the viewer and navigation is controlled by shifting your weight
   forward and backward and from side to side to direct your virtual self
   around 3D representations of mathematical equations. Very cool. The
   inventors called it a topological slide, but every one else called it
   what it is: a surfboard. The first time I tried it out I was very
   impressed, but slightly disoriented: the controls were working
   backwards. To move forward I had to lean backwards, to go right I had
   to lean left. I mentioned this to one of the technicians. "That's
   weird," he said, "it was working perfectly last night..." You hear a
   lot of that around VR installations.

   Placeholder

   by Brenda Laurel and Rachael Strickland

   This work attempted to use actual physical locations in Banff National
   Park as virtual locations to be navigated by players in this
   two-person interactive piece. It was only partly successful in that
   regard. Digitized video frames of footage shot at the three different
   locations were mapped onto computer- modeled geometry to produce
   natural virtual spaces that participants could explore and interact
   in, or at least that was what was hoped for. Optical limitations
   prevented the scenes from matching as well as had been hoped, and the
   final work had to make some concessions to topology, but it was still
   a valuable experiment. In this piece two cybernauts wearing HMD's can
   enter the environment at once. Upon entering the space you can look
   around all you want, but in order to interact, it is necessary to "put
   on" a body. This is accomplished by sticking your head into the icon
   of a fish, crow, snake or a spider. These icons are referred to by
   Laurel and Strickland as "smart costumes", the idea being that by
   becoming one of these creatures, you assume different powers. Fish can
   swim, of course, Snake can see in the infrared, and naturally Crow can
   fly. The players can see and hear each other in the environment, and
   how you are seen and how your voice is heard depends upon which smart
   costume you are currently wearing. Fish sounds like many bubbling
   voices at once, for example and Crow sounds like, well, a crow.This
   piece stands out in my mind for one other innovation it introduced: as
   you wander about the world you can leave graffiti. Not the spray-paint
   kind (a limitation RAM, processing, and programming constraints) but
   an audio equivalent. "Voice Holders", beautiful stone glyph-like
   markers located at various points may be filled with messages,
   observations, or songs to be played back by the next person who
   wanders by.

   There was more, lots more, but there isn't the space here to describe
   it all. Some of the exhibits were entirely visual, some entirely
   aural, some both, some had physical feedback. Some were serious and
   thought provoking, others "merely" entertaining or fun. The Banff
   Centre will be a place to watch over the next few years as
   technician/artists and artist/technicians continue to put their heads
   together to build that holodeck we've all been waiting for. One day,
   not too soon, but not too far away, I completely expect to be able to
   walk into an empty room, feel the sun on my face and the wind in my
   hair and find calving elk... staring, stamping, whites of eyes
   showing...

   -30-Surf on back to Generality.