Title: FAIR 87.9 FM

Date: March 18, 2009.

Materials: Pirate radio station, FM transmitter, Internet, Computers, Microphones, Speakers, Automobile, Radio

Dimensions: Variable Dimensions

Location: Spectrum Project Space, Northbridge, WA, Australia

Keywords: Interactive audio installation/event, free radio, interact, collective art, transmission

Website: http://fairfm.info

Description:

FAIR FM was a nomadic community pirate radio station, initially created and exhibited during a month-long artist-residency at Spectrum Project Space, Northbridge, Western Australia in March, 2009. An operational broadcast booth was built into the gallery, which housed broadcasting equipment including a mixing console, transmitter, computer, and a large antenna.  In the adjacent gallery space, a series of portable radios, including a small automobile, aired the station live to viewers. An array of advertising materials including promotional posters, T-shirts, and other media adorned the walls. Broadcasting on 87.9FM through the use of a low-power FM transmitter, FAIR FM had a broadcast radius of approximately 1km in Northbridge[1], which technically classified it as a micro station. The station went live on air at 2:00pm on Wednesday 09 March, 2009 and broadcast daily from 2:00 pm to 9:00 pm Wednesday through Sunday until 05 April 2009. During these broadcasts, the viewers in the gallery and the public at large were invited to create, perform, and broadcast their own audio programming over the station, which resulted in an eclectic mix of pirated music, live spoken word, musical performances, and sound art. Throughout the duration of the four week residency approximately 15 individuals became involved in the station, including a street busker from Athens, Greece, a professional nightclub DJ from Sydney, the local Perth punk band - Red Triangle, and an array of other interested audiophiles, musicians, and sound artists.

The concept and motivation for creating this project was in response to my situation as an artist within the field of practice, which aestheticised an idea of social relationships, as in relational artistic practices. At the time, researching a theory of relational aesthetic in order to understand the relationship between artist and viewer as an inter-subjective relationship, I became focused on creating an environment in which the viewer could immediately transcend, or change their role as receiver in the often one-way communicative directive often experienced in a gallery setting. I was interested in challenging the boundaries of the inter-subjective experience facilitated by the work of art. This inspired the name FAIR FM, an acronym for Found Air Instant Radio, or Free and Interactive Radio, or any other acronym the users could create. Modelled after initiatives such as Radio Alice, a free broadcast radio station in Bologna, Italy in the late 1970s in which Felix Guattari was involved, I sought to create an open line of communication between the subjective spaces encountered in the gallery and the spaces that existed beyond.[2]

Specifically, I was interested in creating an artwork that moved beyond the subjective boundaries that I create when I make art as a form of self-expression. In other words, I had the urge to explore art making for others, in a way that I feel I had not previously explored in past projects. This meant pushing the boundaries of my practice into new, unseen, unknown realms.  Radio broadcast inspired me as an opportune medium to work through as it represented an invisible link through which one can communicate and connect beyond the boundaries of time and space. I have had experiences in my past working as a disc lockey at a small community radio station, WMEB 91.9 FM, in Orono, Maine, USA, inspiring another reason to use radio as my chosen medium of expression.

Through the use of radio broadcast as an expressive, artistic medium, in this project I desired to manipulate an everyday channel of media through which I could subvert the system of communication and exchange. Through subverting a communication system such as radio, I enabled an altered position in which I could experience my role as artist, or maker, in new terms, in this case in a reversal of roles, whereby the viewer or listener became the maker, or broadcaster and I as maker became the listener. In a system of radio the majority of its users are consumers, the countless throngs of listeners that complete the system as a form of mass media are at the end of the communication. Traditionally radio operates as a one-way medium of communication. Foreseen by 19^th century socialist Edward Bellamy, radio was pre-empted as the “collective telephone” in which the masses would be mobilised by the propaganda of nationalist corporations of industrial power (Mattelart & Mattelart, 1998, p. 17). It is not difficult to see radio operating in the form that Bellamy foreshadowed.  While it may be argued that radio functions as a medium of expression[3], fostering and communicating the musical expression of individuals and communities, the current state of radio is a far cry from free with the majority of publicly broadcast channels produced by national, and multi-national media corporations. I was interested in facilitating others in an attempt to challenge these boundaries, which to me represent the power relationships that exist within the field, in the creation and reception of art, or in a way of subjectivity in general.

The creation of FAIR FM enacted my response to these observations. The development of pirate radio and free radio supports an idea of opening up radio as form of mass communication, operating beyond the boundaries of control and governance of communication often encountered in modern society; FAIR FM challenges this means of control. In short, FAIR FM questioned, to what degree are my own communications controlled by the formal constructs of contemporary society and my social role as an artist?  To what degree are my own forms of communication, my own productions, or programming, formulated through a similar type of conditioning?

Beyond my desire to confront these boundaries through this project, FAIRFM allowed me to explore my practice as an open, and evolving process of creative social interactions. Somewhere between performed and lived action, by creating a public pirate radio station I could create possibilities and opportunities to move between roles, to aestheticise exchange on a communal level.

When viewers entered the gallery, I often greeted them over air, which was broadcast through the radios stationed throughout the space. Inviting these viewers to enter the booth and become active users, I had a number of individuals, prompted by their own musical and audio interests to get involved in various ways (see Figures 22, 25).  However, these experiences were very limited.  In many ways it was the lack of interaction, the limitedness of the station as my channel of communication to the public. In most instances the station acted as a platform for individuals to perform.

Modelling FAIR FM within a theory of relational aesthetics, I was examining my own “inter-human” exchanges facilitated through the pirate radio station as the “aesthetic object” that Bourriaud discusses as “producing sociability” (1998/2002, p. 33). These exchanges occurred through the communicative aspects of radio broadcast. FAIR FM functioned as a means of enabling an extension of myself in a way that challenged my boundaries of communication. Through this challenge I pushed myself to experience my role as maker of my subjective self, as artist, in an extended form, through more temporal, distanciated processes.

Because radio broadcast, as a communicative means of interaction and exchange often functions in a one-to-many context, it can be an incredibly introspective process, and in turn self-reflexive.  FAIR FM extended this representation of one-to-one communication, however the majority of the time I felt is if my communications were “one-to-none”.  Becoming lost in the self-centredness of the radio station was another instance.  Sitting, often alone in the stations broadcast booth, I became very aware of myself, listening to and monitoring myself.

Knowing that the communications I created through the process of broadcast were being transmitted beyond the space of my own perception, I was sending out signals. These signals represented attempts to define my position. One program entitled, Organised Silence, a broadcast in which I transmitted only the white noise that was created in the process of producing the broadcast itself. This gap, its space, created a divisional space, a void through which I could find another form of distance between my place and myself.

The temporality of the various transmissions I created through FAIR FM became relevant as a means of producing observable instances of myself, occasionally interrupted by the presence of another, in which, I would offer the station to that individual allowing them to gain control of the transmission.  This immediate transfer, in ways allowed me to disrupt my subjective processes, and the communication, transmission of this subjectivity.  In ways this was the first instance of exchange that occurs in the collaborative effort involved in communication. The possibility of taking over a pirate radio station, in my opinion, affords the possibility of extending ones subjectivity into inter-subjective space, yet a space that is transient and ephemeral as the radio broadcast itself. However, this transfer between viewer and user, or in this case listener and DJ, never transpired to anything more than an exchange of control.  In hopes of further extending this process of exchange into a more sustained form, FAIR FM was revised into a second installation, which was included in the exhibition, what is displace?.

[2] Guattari’s interest in free radio was in its “form and mode of social organization” (Multitudes 21, 2005, n.p.).

[3] See article Wrightson, K (2003). An Introduction to Acoustic Ecology. As Wrightson explains, “In the developed world, sound has less significance and the opportunity to experience “natural” sounds decreases with each generation due to the destruction of natural habitats. Sound becomes something that the individual tries to block, rather than to hear; the lo-fi, low information soundscape has nothing to offer. As a result, many individuals try to shut it out through the use of double glazing or with acoustic perfume–music. Music–the virtual soundscape–is, in this context, used as a means to control the sonic environment rather than as a natural expression of it. Broadcast speech and music provide the same opportunity for control, turning the sonic environment into a commodity. Networks, transmitters and satellites extend the acoustic community across the entire planet, a fact that has been utilised for fair deeds and foul. Schafer refers to the latter use of sound as “sound imperialism” (1977a, 77)” (2003, p. 3).

Title: “yeah…you are all true data” (HAL2009)

Date: February 13, 2009.

Materials: Chrome tubing, copper elbows, steel wire, audio cable, speakers, microphones, computer programming / software

Dimensions: 3m H x 8m W x 20m L (Variable Dimensions)

Location: The Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery, Fremantle, WA, Australia

Keywords: Interactive audio installation, communication feedback, artificial intelligence, articulation, collectivity, speak, listen, interact

Description:

The creation and development of HAL2009 was an exercise in producing a type of artificial intelligence system through which an audience was confronted with each other by way of their conversations, utterances, and verbalisation within the exhibition space. Entering the lofty open space of the gallery, viewers are greeted by a seemingly rambling monotone voice of an automated computer system echoing long incoherent strings of words (English). Some of the words seem to fall into place, producing a half coherent sentence or pronouncement. Much of what is heard is incoherent in syntax, yet intermittently flowing in subject.

The central exhibition space houses a mess of entangled chrome pipe work, suspended from the large, wooden rafters at the height of the room. The pipes cut through the room, interrupting the space, occasionally dropping down to head height throughout the center of the space.

On opposing walls in the space the pipes neatly adjoin shiny, metal boxes mounted to the walls. Each box accommodates a small black dome, as used in closed-circuit surveillance cameras. Above the black, omniscient dome is a small plaque card which reads “HAL2009” in neatly rounded lettering.

The boxes seem as if they were appropriated from a retro 60’s science fiction movie set. They are speaking, or more appropriately, droning on. In a robotic voice, words filter through the boxes and into the gallery atmosphere. Often the voice repeats bits and parts of its previous maundering. Someone in the gallery mutters a sentence or responds to the installation with a few words. The boxes retorts in a poetic rant that seems to be recycled from not only words from generated in its own monologue, but also an arrangement of words from the audience respondents. An excerpt from “…yeah, you are all true data…” (HAL2009) reads as follows:

“…and and and and and and and and is as it is in or you don’t do this and it worked and lived a sure it’s drones on Gordon or in conjunction virtualities embracing an experienced them to their shape and in camera with and do all those individuals saw this from sculptures abjuring this new millennium absorbance refund arsenals amidst unaccelerated landscape of information about instantaneously Chinook salmon are different students in Iran since some newsreel something appears to be renewal were all raw consummately towards digital post your number one fruit on the ground of one for him nowhere somewhere else on sawhorse this nostalgic visit stir your spectrums…”

“yeah, you are all true data…(HAL2009)” is an interactive audio installation which mockingly explores the social effects of increasingly mediated communication and human’s eternal quest for true intelligence.

Transforming the gallery into a spaceship, set course: the unknown; autopiloted by the ambient collective intelligence of those in seek of the truth, or a prototype for a movie set where the actors don’t have the script, HAL2009 is premised on a paradoxical state of artificial intelligence searching for intelligent life in the outermost realms of …ummm… (art) space.

Is artificial intelligence anything more than the calculated, algorhythmic mediation of our collected knowledge; rather, not what is known, but what is asserted and at best articulated? Is this collective intelligence or artificial intelligence; mediation or interpretation? HAL2009 asks these very questions, literally! His poetic ranting responds to our ‘collective voice’ as an audience. What we say to one another in ‘his’ presence is interpreted and translated into a richly ironic monologue of bits and pieces of our own conversations. As we listen to HAL2009 we not only listen to the abstracted mediation of language, commentary, and discourse of those surrounding us within the ‘white cube’, but we are also asked, if not forced, to listen to ourselves with more critical ears. Drawing the parallel between the collective intelligence of the audience and the ‘artificial’ intelligence of the computer, HAL2009 demonstrates a communication filter that begins to operate on the verge of intelligent.

Explaining HAL2009: processing….

The development of HAL2009 was the result of many weeks of working through a project initially premised on my creative exploration of certain acts of communication associated with the exhibition of art. The artwork was in response to the theme of the exhibition, Ummm…The Articulate Practitioner, the show that the work would be exhibited in. The genesis of “yeah…you are all true data” was based on the simple concept of the “gallery talk”, a phenomenon inherent to art culture and the ‘art world’. It was this practice of speaking about the objects and subjects of art in the sanctified spaces of art’s exhibition that I took interest in through this project, or rather visa versa.

According to artist Jennifer Blair-Cockrum, a gallery talk can be loosely defined as “an opportunity to hear from the artist at the gallery where their work is on exhibit; perhaps see a demonstration, hear about their process and inspiration, and meet them and ask questions. Gallery talks provide the public access to the artist in a very intimate way that is casual, educational, and fun.”

I initially had the impulse to explore this concept of “access to the artist”; the engagement between the artist and the audience or the public and the boundaries of the exhibition space of art. This exploration many institutional conventions of the art world have been central themes or impetuses of large number of my works, particularly of the spatial attributes of the exhibition of art and artistic practice. Specifically concerned with the range of art and the media by which art as a communicative activity was in turn communicated, the Gallery Talk project aimed to discuss these concepts of space and articulation. Taken quite literally, what would a gallery space say if it could speak?

This work began premised on the idea of art as an advanced form of communication and how this communication is specifically affected by the cultural circumstances of the physical spaces in which it occurs. In this initial generative phase, the project can be broadly summarised as an artistic exploration of interpersonal communication impacted by the conditions/conventions of specific cultural and social spaces, i.e. the art gallery and exhibition space of art.

At the time I was reading Brian O’ Doherty’s “The White Cube” and William Mitchell’s “City of Bits”. Also, watching Stanley Kubrik’s 2001 Space Odyssey had become a monthly ritual. Considering the gallery space, a.k.a the white cube, as simultaneously confining the artwork to a very specific context and audience, yet also as a means of emplacement, locating art general and openly as art within the socio-cultural matrices of contemporary society, the project began to take on paradoxical dimension. I began to think about the space as a private-public space, where by virtue of the creation and dissemination of highly personal and individual knowledge and vision embodied and communicated via artwork, the exhibition space of art is a marginal meeting ground of a very public space with a very private nature. (writing in progress….. 05/10/09)

(20/10/09 resumed writing)

Thinking about the artist as director, or conductor within this public-private space, I was interested in the exchanges involved in this type of space, specifically the possibility on an interchange of roles and activities of the public, from audience, to viewer, to user, to director, to artist. With the transformative power of the process that art can create in mind, there is a type chain through which reactions and/or interactions can occur, similar to a chain of molecules, or a food chain.

How can a work of art operate as a communicative site or object between members of the audiences, between the artist and the audience? It was here at this juncture that the concepts of social and cultural relationships inherent in art practice and art experience began to take on some definition.

A few scenarios that might evince these public-private concepts and the communicative act of art crossed my mind. I envisioned a series of couches on the main floor of the exhibition space.  The audience might be lounging on these couches talking exchanging ideas, stories, laughter.  A convivial atmosphere might develop.  In its idyllic simplicity, this hybridised, autonomic event-performance-installation would, in its ‘normalcy’, fluidise the delineation and divisions of viewer/user/performer/artist through the movement and interchange of participants. Or would it just be a bunch of people looking at couches with the occasional snide remark on the quirky resemblance of a used furniture store?

Beyond the couches and the bodies, beyond the spatial, the visual, the physical it was perhaps the use of language that was produced in this environment, this communicative verse, the conversation that I was after, that I wished to en-art, or make art with.

Another scenario that developed from this initial kernel of an idea was a pedestal with a series of microphones connected to a series of loudspeakers placed throughout the gallery. Like a podium at a press conference, each viewer would have the opportunity to use the gallery as a space to speak to people, a place to disseminate information, communicate a thought or a feeling through spoken word or sound.  Furthermore, loudspeakers would placed outside of the gallery in public, therefore seemingly giving the gallery its own voice amidst the crowd of buildings lining Henry Street.

If the spaces that we create could speak to us, could verbalise, what might they say?  Or are they already speaking through us in an indirect manner by virtue of the succession of our own interactions enveloped in the spaces and the relational proximities that develop as a result of our habitation of these places and the situations of our sites?

This work slowly evolved from a pedestal and a rack of loud speakers to a stage with a curtain and P.A. The curtain which was originally a prop, icing on the cake of the installation, took on a prominence in the development of the project. Whether it was people sitting or standing around couches in conversation, or someone speaking from a podium, there was still an immediacy between the audience members and the users that needed to be subverted. The division between viewer and user needed to remain connected yet pronounced.  The stage and curtain facilitated this division, and it was this line of flight form the initial gallery talk conception that took the work into its next developmental iteration and transformation.

I began to consider the purpose of the curtain and stage, thinking about concepts of the “4th wall” and performance. The site of a stage signified this performative role that the viewer adopted as a user, or an actor within the site of the project.

To recap, at this point I was working with a number of ideas: the gallery talk as a voice of the site; the divisions and flux between viewers, user, audiences, actors, and artists; and communicative interaction through the site and exhibition space of art.

From here the work took a thematic turn, adopting the Wizard of Oz as a source of conceptual and formal inspiration. From Gallery talk to Wizard of Oz.  I had been keen to work with some of the forms of the The Wizard of Oz, as the story had a particular resonance with my new home here in Australia (Oz).  The conceptual figure of the Great Wizard of Oz, the meager man behind the curtain that portrayed the Great and Magnificent, a god-like figure that inspired through his mystifying awesomeness. The possibility that each viewer might have the opportunity through a work of art to adopt the role of the ‘Wizard’, a powerless commoner, who through the smoke and mirrors, through a performative act, might give hope, guidance, or purpose to our interaction with the strange world we awaken in.

Perhaps, this is a quality that, as artists, we indulge in within our own practices, aesthetic revelations and presentations and representations of truth, beauty, and passion.

However, it soon became apparent that it would not be one singular viewer would be the Wizard, but rather the collective whole of the viewers, as espoused through their communication and interaction with one another that would transfigure the great ‘Wizard’. Behind the curtain on the stage, would not be a singular person, but a conglomeration of all of the occupants of the space represented through the amalgamation of their collective conversations. The Wizard would be the whole of verbal, spoken communication that occurred in the exhibition space.

The installation took on the form of a small stage in the round surrounded be a 3 m tall, satin curtain which housed a machine, much like the Wizard’s contraption from the original movie, that would record, remix and broadcast the speech within the exhibition space.  This machine however could be overridden when an individual entered the curtained pillar and spoke directly into a microphone, thus announcing, dictating or narrating there own singular impressions, thoughts or feelings on anything that came to mind. (writing in progress…21/10/09)

(resumed writing…26/10/09)

In developing this system three central components were necessary; audio input, speech recognition processing, and audio output. Within the stage-in-the-round was an audio processing apparatus constructed from a series of microphones, loudspeakers, and a CPU. A series of high-sensitivity condenser microphones capable of picking up the most subtle voices from all areas of the space were used to gather the speech audio. This audio was then input into a custom-built audio program which processed the speech using the speech recognition software Macspeech Dictate implemented through a custom AppleScript program. The resulting assemblage of speech was then broadcast throughout the gallery on a series of loudspeakers (also hidden behind the curtain).

Essentially, the apparatus (eventually known as HAL2009) would record all of the speech from within the gallery space, process this speech, combining all separate dialogues, conversations, and speech, into a continuous aggregation of all that was said, and regurgitate this monologue back into the space.  At any point in time you could hear all of what was said in the gallery, however with all context stripped away. One conversation might be garbled with another. A string of words confused with similar sounding words. All that was spoken in the gallery became a singular collective monologue, simultaneously interpreted and misinterpreted.

The system would undoubtedly begin to input parts of its output, and with no outside input from animate actors in the exhibition space might eventually lead to a closed feedback loop, a monotonous thundering repetition of a singular phrase, word or sound. It was here that the thematic facade of the project made a dramatic jump cut…from Wizard of Oz to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

From the Emerald City to the Discovery Space Shuttle…HAL2009 is conceived.

Upon the successful build and beta tests of the audio processing program, somewhat of a minor epiphany occurred. I realised that this system was more or less the very rudimentary groundwork for somewhat of an artificial intelligence system.  Moreover, ‘Alex’ the stock voice on the Macbook Pro laptop I was using for the programming, uncannily resembled the voice of the infamous artificial intelligence computer ‘HAL 9000’ of Stanley Kubrik’s 1968 epic “2001: A Space Odyssey (based on the story written by himself and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark).  After watching the film a number of times, considering the concept of artificial intelligence, and more importantly its ironic role in Kubrik’s film, artificial intelligence used to search for intelligent life in the depths of space, I decided to abandon the stage, curtain, and Wizard of Oz theme entirely. It was the phenomenon embued within the communication that unfolded within the exhibition space, and within an art experience that became central in the project, rather than the correlation between the audience and the an ambivalent collective meta-narrative that rested on the engaged interaction with the space between performance and behaviour.

Working intuitively, the formal qualities of the installation were revamped.  The formal elements of the installation would now be premised on the design of HAL 9000.  I envisioned the gallery as more or less a space ship, a vessel in which we (the audience) could move through space, a space made up of cultural galaxies, social worlds, political asteroid belts, and other bodies in the art space. Auto-piloted by the communicative activity within the space, the space ship would take the audience through parallel dimensions where the forms (the sentences and phrases) within language became abstracted and reformulated.

Working out from the concepts of confused communication, artificial intelligence and collective conversation, the project’s form and architecture developed as a function of these arguments. Using the film as my primary reference, or model, the resulting installation would consist of a series of interfaces where the audience would be monitored.  These interfaces took on the form of a home-made HAL 9000 all seeing eye.  A microphone and a stereo speaker housed within a small metal box fixed to the wall of the exhibition space simultaneously recorded the raw speech and broadcast the automated speech within the installation.

I constructed a prototype using a stainless steel IKEA brand storage box, internally mounting a small electret condenser microphone capsule on a custom rubber mount made from a chair foot. A 3-inch, 8-watt stereo speaker was also mounted within the box.  On the exterior of the box I face mounted a small black dummy dome used for CCTV monitors. This is what I imagined a HAL 9000 original prototype interface to resemble, possibly as the HAL computer-user interface existed in its trial phases of development in the early 1990’s.

According to a Wikipedia description of HAL 9000:

The many boxes of HAL were networked throughout the gallery’s multiple rooms by a reticulation of metal tubing suspended from the ceiling, representing the entanglement of lines of communication that ensued as the installation’s performance evolved. These lines not only served a symbolic role, but also a functional role as a means of concealing the 350+ meters of audio cabling on which the system relied for operation.

With the exhibition drawing near and the final form of the original project kernel (Gallery Talk) still in a conceptual phase it was time to begin constructing HAL2009. Due to the sheer scale of the final installation, anticipated at 172 linear metres of tubing throughout five rooms at the Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery, it was only feasible to build a small portion of the installation for testing.  This meant that I would essentially be constructing the installation for the first time at the gallery for the exhibition.

With the program nearly complete, the hardware hooked up and testing about to begin, tie came for the final act of voice training HAL2009.  As the HAL2009 system was based entirely on the ability of speech recognition software to recognise people speaking, and to transcribe this speech into its memory, the need to train the system to recognise not only a range of voices, but also to recognise itself. For those of you familiar with speech recognition software, you’ll understand the capricious nature of this media, as it is normally tuned to the voice of only a single user (which even still causes complications). Initially, a bit apprehensive of the quality and capacity of SR software in general, I was pleased to discover that Macspeech Dictate was very well suited for this project, due to its inaccuracy (which can be manually adjusted with the program’s preference pane!).  Training HAL involved a series of sessions teaching the SR software to hear the voice of HAL (Apple’s Alex) as well as not solely recognise this voice, and to hear others as well. In essence I was reverse engineering SR software by training the program to not distinguish between a computer speaking and any other speaking entity, not to recognise the variance in voices, which the speech recognition is premised on. I can’t help but applaud the irony of this. This was the key to the project, that the computer could at once not distinguish between itself and the audience or user, between its output and its input. This is an entry point into the evolution of the system as exhibiting an artificial intelligence.

The initial trials took sometime to fine tune the voice (mis)recognition.  However, within days the system seemed to take on a life of its own. Strangely, HAL2009 exhibited almost a cyber-clairvoyance, which can only be attributed to the program’s use of an associative database of the English language from which it places corresponding words in a hierarchy of their probability of registering with the system as incoming speech is processed. For instance, ‘misunderstood’ words might lead to other words that strangely coincided with underlying concepts or topics within the project. I would start with a sentence and HAL would feedback the sentence until it came up with a wholly new monologue of different content. For instance, I spoke the phrase ” What is the meaning of life?”. The following is the response of the HAL2009 system from this speech trial:

“Meaning of life meaning is what is this where you where you live many producers are you and everyone else in your life meaning is what is her anywhere in my many producers are you in her house meaning of life he is going to remind many producers are you and everyone else in your life meaning is we are and weren’t on any producers are you proud meaning of life meaning is what is he wearing my many producers are you and everyone else in your life meaning if we are on any show…and live meeting is what is he wearing why many producers are you and everyone else in your life meaning is leaner and more finding producers argue NASA is home to my many producers are you and everyone else in your life meaning isn’t there were many producers are proud meaning of life meaning is what is he wearing my many producers are you and everyone else in your life meaning is not a shudder has to live his homes by many producers are and everyone else in your life and he’s American of Jerry meaning of life meaning is what is this freeware”

(And I was expecting something simple, like 42!)

So, with the system in place and the testing commenced, HAL2009 was born, on the 12 of January 2009.

Constructing HAL2009 at MBCAG:

Construction of HAL was a three day event that involved many long hours of troubleshooting the complexities of the installation process as they arose. Coupled with the mad rush to get this installation up and running in such a short period of time, documentation of this process was limited.  Working with the invaluable help of my assistant, Anja, we were able to ‘hang’ the work and get HAL ‘trained’ in situ.

After the interface boxes and pipework was in place.  All systems were go and HAL2009 was introduced to his new (temporary) home.

Working Analysis

Concepts of power, control, and communication.

Collective intelligence vs. artificial intelligence

Staging Science Fiction: HAL9000, the Wizard and 21st Century interactive installation art

Humbug- Pretenses of the roles we occupy on the grounds of our cultural site of art.

Our own False Idol:

Feedback in the Chinese Room

The Dreaming Astronaut: Complexity and Emergence in the Models of Film and Life

Other worlds: selves and other bodies in space

Input, Output, Indifference: Misrecognition in communication as evolution

Language is a pipeline

It Lives! The narrative of the work

The primary concepts addressed through this project:

What does the site say? If a site is not the spatial factors of place, but also the cultural (social, political, technological, philosophical) what might this voice say?  How do sites speak? Is what is experienced at a particular site communicative in essence?  How is this ‘situational language’ translated through the participants and characters of the site?

From this broad approach to these concepts of (meta)communication, there are certain specificities that arise necessitating this dialogue.  Considering the roles of participants as cultural actors within the social, political, and technological framework of the art experience, and the creation of this experience and interaction with art as a process, this project affords a form of emancipatory alienation through its automation.

By creating a collective monologue that is continuously eliminating individual ownership by scrambling dialogues and essentially detaching conversations from their specific sites within the exhibition summoning a collective voice of the space. This activity highlights the accumulation of the social sites that are produced within the gallery, encouraging their production in order to harvest them for the greater production of the site of HAL2009.

language and communication in collective form-

the emergence of understanding

decontextualised communication-

reticulated articulation

Within this white-cube exists a complex web of communications. Language and systems for the transmission and communication of these languages become an important aspect of the project. There are multiple layers of communication that are occurring in the art gallery, that “yeah…you are all true data” takes into consideration. On a gross level is the broader communication between the artist and the field of art, which is facilitated through the institution of the gallery, museum, or in this case exhibition space. The interaction and relationship between the place and space of exhibiting artwork and the creator, maker, or doer of art as an artist is

Important in any analysis of a project is not only how the project sits in relation to its field and its peers (so to speak), but also how the project sits in other scales, such as the projects history and development. This can be thought of in terms of axis of the project. Every project can be thought of as multi-dimensional. A model of this might have the historical development of the project on a Y axis.  For instance, in “yeah…you are all true data” the project transformed over time through a succession states, each with varied formal elements.  These formal elements were thematic in nature, i.e. a gallery talk, a film, an artificial intelligence computer, etc. , with each theme acquiring different forms that articulate specific concepts inherent with the theme. For example, characters, settings, props or other cinematic constructs within the Wizard of Oz can be thought of as specific forms of this theme which convey certain concepts based on their relation and correspondence to other constructs within the narrative. The Wizard, Dorthy, Toto, the Emerald City, Kansas, the ruby slippers all represent core concepts in their relationships within the story. While these themes morphed and shifted, the core concepts underlying these formal qualities, remained in less fluxus states. It was the concepts at the core of these filmic relationships that became paramount as the project drew parallels between states as embodiments of the different themes it endorsed in its evolution as a work of art.

Within both contexts, the Wizard of Oz and 2001 A Space Odyssey the interaction remains similar in affect.  The audience is confronted with a space that cumulates their communications, stripping away context and meaning, by converting, processing, and representing the speech as raw information, which is then arbitrarily fedback into the system. The forms within the space shift leading to the formulation of different sites for this interaction to occur. The Wizard of Oz is a stage where a singular person becomes emphasized as they enter the stage as the sole actor within the installation.  2001 affords a heightened state of anonymity to individuals within the system, thus taking the emphasis away from the sole individual at the center of the work, i.e a viewer/user on the stage in the middle of the gallery, and allows the system increased authority over the commencing audio artifact. This is evinced in the actual spatiality of the installation where performing audience viewers/users are relocated to the periphery of the exhibition space as the 2001 model networked the spaces of the gallery across a series of rooms as opposed to the singular central stage within the middle of the gallery as modeled in the Wizard of Oz semblance. This highlights the varying levels of

Becoming a User: From Artist to Audience

This project is grounded amidst a point in my practice where I am questioning my role as an artist, and in turn the roles of those whom I am connected to through this role.  Within the framework of the greater system of art, a cultural system for the creation, expression, and communication of value; as a means and method of experiencing relationships and correspondences within multiple worlds of selves and others

By creating a type of artificial intelligence, and relinquishing control of the art to a sort of autopoietic system that in essence determined its own development, I was removing myself from the role of artist, in an abstracted conceptual sense, whereas I could become literally de-contextualised as just another voice in the gallery.  In the face of the computer, in the simplified binary language of the machine, the hierarchy of the artist-viewer relationship is changed. By creating a system that is scripted as an abstract model, a mathematic model, my context was reduced to a stream of 1’s and 0’s.

As a method of de-contextualisation, the automation of a system that converts and simplifies sender and receiver as a fluid role

Randomising communication.

The act of creating systems of chance or the act of randomising as a means of surrendering ones control over the various cultural, social, political, and economic systems and structures at work has its roots in the process art of artists such as John Cage, movements such as Dadaism, Fluxism, and the Theatre of the Absurd. The concept of randomness implies a lack of predictability and method of deterministic pattern.

My language as communication became irrelevant and purposeless.  As an artist within the space I had created, my voice was as equal to all other voices in the eye of HAL2009.  In making an interactive work, my interactions were no different than those of the other users and viewers. This brings into view the idea that as an artist, once art is created and released into the world, the only control that remains with the artist are abstract cultural notions of ownership and authority.

Coming back to the theme of the exhibition, Ummm…The Articulate Practitioner…