The Program
- Friday, October 6, 2006, 18h – 21h
- opening exhibition
- Saturday, October 7, 2006, 10h – 18h
- exhibition
Related event: Nuit Blanche 2006
The Installations
Lumen, BlockJam, and SmartSkin
The world is changing and new technologies are rapidly advancing towards us. Designers from the CSL Interaction Laboratory in Tokyo have been working on process-oriented designs for novel user interactions. Jun Rekimoto and his team have been on the forefront of new interface design for nearly two decades now and they have built up a tradition to integrate creative practices in their work. The exhibition shows three pieces: SmartSkin (Jun Rekimoto) which is a surface that is sensitive to human hand and finger gestures through capacitive sensing and a mesh-shaped antenna, BlockJam (Henri Newton-Dunn) which is a system for creating musical compositions as dynamical structures by arranging tangible blocks, and Lumen (Ivan Poupyrev) which is a device for generating slow, organic animations based on an array of movable light guides.
A Robot's Playroom
In the exhibition, an intriguing set of objects is displayed that together make up a "playroom" for the Sony AIBO. This is the result of the work of design students from ECAL, supervised by industrial designer Martino d'Esposito and CSL researcher Frédéric Kaplan. These objects offer new learning opportunities for AIBO. At Sony CSL, Frédéric Kaplan and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer have been experimenting for several years with curiosity-driven robots. They were looking for novel environments that the robots could explore. Creating such a playroom was an exciting excercise for designers who are usually accustomed to deal with human needs only. Thanks to the creativity of the ECAL student, AIBO can now draw, ride a bike, control switches, pick up everyday objects, watch itself in a mirror, and even more.
Look Into The Box
Olafur Eliasson is an artist who emphasizes process a lot in his work instead of final form. This makes his art a perfect fit with the research of Luc Steels, whose work on the origins of language has always focused on the dynamic processes from which linguistic forms originate and change.
Eliasson and Steels therefore collaborated on the "Look into the Box" installation, a continuation of previous experiments on grounded language evolution by Steels involving arts and science (e.g. the Talking Heads experiment that was shown at exhibitions in several countries and involved more than half a million people). It was first shown at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2002 and came out of discussions held at the Bridge the Gap symposium in 2001 in Kitakyushu (Japan) between Steels and Eliasson.
Linking Linke
Photographer Armin Linke has always been interested in how coherent collections could be made from his vast archive of pictures, including personal ones by the viewers themselves. Linke views his pictures as resources for navigating and browsing, but how do you choose from a collection of thousands of images? An experiment was therefore set up in which art students of the University of Venice could create their personal collections. To help them reach this goal, Melanie Aurnhammer and Peter Hanappe were brought in, two CSL researchers who are investigating similar dynamical processes on the world wide web, including tagging sites such as Flickr.
The experiment proved to be an interesting dialogue between the technologies of social tagging and emergent semantics on the one hand, and the artist Armin Linke and the highly creative students of the University of Venice on the other. At the exhibition, unique collections of Linke's photographs are presented, selected by the students with the use of systems provided by the two CSL members.
Duets with the Continuator
CSL researcher François Pachet has been working for years on the dynamical processes that underly the selection and creation of music. One of the many remarkable results of his research is the Continuator, a real-time computer based music system that supports improvisational interactions through a musical instrument like a keyboard. The Continuator was first envisioned by Pachet as an extension of his "musical brain" because he used to feel frustrated as a jazz improviser when he couldn't play all the musical ideas that he had in his mind. The system is able to pick up the playing style of an improviser and respond with musical phrases of its own so that a dialogue develops in which the musician gets the feeling of playing with herself. The final piece does not consist of a fixed score. The Continuator does not determine what the music will be. The music evolves and changes in interaction with a human player but is not solely determined by him or her either.
Pachet has engaged in several dialogues with top musicians to explore the consequences of this approach, both in the domains of "classical" contemporary music (with Gyorgy Kurtag jr. and sr.) and Jazz (with Bernard Lubat, Alain Silva, and Albert van Veenendaal). The pieces were performed at major prestigious music festivals such as the Wiener Festwoche and public radio (such as VPRO radio in the Netherlands). At the exhibition, the duets are presented between the Continuator and Albert van Veenendaal, and the movie "Double Messieurs" directed by Olivier Desagnat, featuring Georgy Kurtag Sr. and Jr.
Net_Dérive
CSL researcher Atau Tanaka has been bridging the gap between artistic practice and scientific and technological developments for many years. His original creative work and performance practice focused on music steered by body sensors. More recently he has been exploring various networked technologies in order to orchestrate dynamic music creation by social groups. The piece NetDérive produced for the present exhibition is the result of a dialogue with Sydney-based artist Petra Gemeinboeck and is another clear instance of the process-oriented view that is associated with the notion of Intensive Science. Their work sets up social interactions, supported by mobile phones and internet technologies, within a loose network of people that are exploring a city, in this particular case the urban environment around the exhibition space near the Bastille in Paris. From the paths they take and the experiences they have, a collective narrative emerges which is fed back through audiovisual means to each participant and thus shapes their evolving experience. Tanaka and Gemeinboeck thus attempt to create a new kind of space at the interstices of existing spaces, a space that is fluid and transversal. All of this is not possible without the most up-to-date technologies: wireless internet, advanced mobile phones, real-time sound synthesis, location positioning, etc., but they are hidden and not the key point of the piece.
Le Cas de Sophie K.
Jean-François Peyret, the well known French theatre maker, has already produced a series of stunning theatre plays inspired by scientific figures such as Charles Darwin and Alan Turing. He builds his pieces mainly through improvisations, where actors take scientific and philosophical texts as source material and thus approach a subject that is normally the provence of science through the medium of theatre. The result is a totally fresh and creative look at the issues and theatre rich in meaning and esthetic experience.
For the prestigious Avignon theatre festival in 2005 and the French national theatre Chaillot (Paris) during the 2006 season, Jean-Francois Peyret invited Luc Steels to collaborate on a piece inspired by the 19th century Russian mathematician Sophie Kovalevskaya, whose field of research (predictability and chaos in dynamical systems) helped to create the mathematical foundations on which Intensive Science rests. The nature and results of this unique art-science dialogue are invoked in the exhibition through live improvisation and documentary film.
