Tina Gonsalves, Chameleon Project, Prototype 08 – Lighthouse Residency August 2009

its 1.30 pm, and all is quiet in the basement of Lighthouse. Ofcourse, Micheal Roy from experentia Electricia hasn’t slept – he spent the night here working away. I am not sure how many nights he hasn’t slept for. He tells me not to worry about it.

We saw the first bits of light to go through the second display – still no video yet. Jeff Mann sent another patch so we can run the two screens from the one display. I still haven’t tested it yet as I am waiting for the second display. I can’t wait to see it as the first time we saw it – it looked fantastic – brighter and more tones. Interestingly, it hung more as a curtain, which sort of soften it – I feel for Pixy to have worked with Chameleon we would have needed some diffusion – it felt to ‘pixel’ which is what natacha loves – but for Chameleon, it didn’t quite work. Looking back, we needed much more time to come to a better solution for how the projects met/integrated. We got the software integration, but that was about it. Its been interesting to collaborate – but the problem was that the collaboration came in from two projects at different stages with different needs. Maybe we just never got that meeting point right for those reasons.

Phillip Carr from Fabrica came in today to interview me for a small film to run on the TV at Fabrica. Its hard to contain something into 3 minutes. We tried.

Harry Witchell and Carina Westling came over last night for a bit of a chat. Harry Witchel is research the science of the body and its language. I am hoping Harry might come to the talk today so I can get him into a discussion about body language and mimicry. Carina does some interesting work in performance

When I was last in Brighton the HCI group interviewed Carina and her response to one of the protraits. “I was just feeling the shape of that person and how they are to be near, and whether is a soft or hard surface. Whether its one way or two way, whether they are coming out towards me, or whether there is an interface or give and take. And that’s kinda the empathy bit. And I think with the ‘actory two’ its sort of a shiny sort of surface. It doesn’t allow any sort of pushing in. With the other one (susan) there is more a sense of a soft/open ended territory between the two people, me being one of them. It feels like there a sort of tentative listening. Which I guess is the empathy”.

JANE MCGRATH MA DIGITAL MEDIA ARTS

I am participating in the Chameleon project as part of larger research for my MA dissertation. I can see so much potential material in the project, when you explore it on a micro level it’s so deep – such a rich area of knowledge embedded in one place. As I am typing away I’m thinking more and more of just how much learning will come out of the project for me. I am becoming more and more convinced that using just this one project as a basis for my dissertation question will be enough to write a PHD let alone an MA. I wasnt expecting that.

Firstly there is the excitement of a live Arts / Science Collaboration – just quickly running through the people whose work I have seen, whom I have personally met or simply heard talk on the project – Tina, MIT, UCL, Gordon from Solent Rapid Prototyping Lab, neuroscientists, Carl a sociologist, Helen Soane, Experientae Electricae not forgetting Lighthouse, Fabrica and Incubator. No wonder Im so excited – its like a term of study crammed into two weeks.

Also in view of my personal research I have been involved and so can be subjective as well as objective which is a great. But I need to keep asking my self – how does it relate to me question about using new technology to construct liminal spaces? And where does my question of powerlessness/emowerment come in, in fact I keep asking my self – does it?

After a really helpful chat with Carl on the train home, I need to define for me what exactly a liminal space is –I need to (re)read Victor Turner and Van Gennep, I do love the Betwixt and Between notion and the notion of pure potentiality. I find that betwixt and between situated in Tinas work – in human emotion, in technology. The potentiality is an area of further research and Natasha from EE was explaining to me the Deleuzian concept of potentiality. Very valuable and helpful.

Carl had a very important question when he asked me how constructing an experience where I wanted to control the outcome of an experience – ie powerlessness – to empowerment could create a liminal space because there was no option for pure potentiality because the outcome was predefined.

Thinking aout loud I had said that althouh the destination would be set – ie point A – B each person would have a different potential subjective experience, a different journey where emotionally and intellectually anything could happen. That the emotional end point could be a very different experience for the user.

Carl has some excellent advice that was that it would be beneficial to take the meaning of liminality back to its original meaning (Turner, Van Gennep) and use this as the structure on which to base the ‘liminal’ . So much could be seen as liminal and the question would always be are they ‘truly liminal’ spaces or just thresholds.

JANE MCGRATH MA DIGITAL MEDIA ARTS

My experience has been very exciting, there is something wonderful about the meeting of many creative minds in one space, the ability to move from room to room and engage in or simply listen in on very exciting convestations.

At moments these are practcal, relating to producing screens, sizes, cameras and tracking onto deeper matters of engagement and interaction ….then back to the process of rapid prototyping – in its self something that sends my mind into a spin!

Move on and Micahel is sitting in the corner working dilligently on his pixy boards as a scientist who is visiting the work is discussing his theory on how the electrronics are working with his friend .. Carl is discussing the context of the engagement process to The Shyness Project..Tina is introducing new arrivals to the work.

People are engaging both with the work and with each other. There is a dynamic contagious energy that circulates within the space … just like the movement across the Pixy… or the movement of emotions between screen, software and the viewer -it bursts forward and retracts depending on who is where …you can almost touch it and feel it… this residency seems to me to be a constant process of becomming – of pushing forward, of change. Not only is the work it self pushing forward but it is pushing outwards and affecting the visitors.. all of this played out to a sound track of the works pre recorded emotions…laughter and whooping, crying and long bitter accusations. Its a very emotive space.

So for me the ‘experience’ starts as soon as you reach the bottom of the stairs and will not end until you close the main door on the way out. The emotions are so strong that they can not fail to affect you, your mood can not fail to be changed.

There is definately a move from emotion A to emotion B – I feel that there is a very hoilistic kind of contagion going on. Whether this comes from interaction with the work or interaction with the people or the process seems somehow irrelevant.

I believe that if you stand back and take a longer perspective on the residency at Lighthouse as a live installation, a piece of work in it self – it has the fingerprints of real time emotional contagion all over it.

A case of process immitating art?

And the now we are nearing the end of a residency. I feel sad that this is the end of something, but also aware that I need a lot of time to reflect about it all.

Now how to go ahead with Fabrica. We are either talking about a two screen option or six screens. Micheal and Matthew from Fabrica are heading toward the six screen and Helen is heading toward a two screen version. We are all aware that it opens in six weeks.

For a six to eight screen version to work I need a lot of projectors. I need to work on the interaction. I need to finish the screens with Gordon. Its a major install. I can see Michael is apprehensive of the hang. I am worried that Fabrica is so big it would completely over shadow the work.

Helen believes the use of the two larger screens rather than several smaller screens will facilitate a more sustained immersive experience for the viewer for several reasons:

The aim will be to have two large screens/projections facing each other across the gallery with the visitor driving the emotional dialogue between the two. During the residency at Lighthouse we have discovered that the camera and other technology necessary for operating ‘mind reader’ have frequently been a source of distraction for visitors, thus preventing a prolonged and immersive experience with Chameleon. The use of two larger screens will demand more sustained attention, and will lead to visitors focusing upon the two screens/film projections for a longer period of time, and therefore enabling a more qualitatively rich experience of emotional contagion. Importantly allowing visitors greater opportunity to register their own affects upon the exhibit and the overall affective quality of the gallery space. This latter point is of key significance as the exhibit sets out to foreground emotional contagion for the visitor not only through their interactions with Chameleon, but also through the overall production of a profoundly affective gallery space. The size of the screens/projections and their capacity to display film at such a scale will be another of way of producing and communicating the affective intensity of the exhibit –the sheer volume of their presence will be emotionally ‘demanding’ and hopefully overwhelming to the extent that in this context the technology itself takes second stage.

I came to a conclusion yesterday that we shouldn’t progress with Pixy with the Chameleon Project. It wasn’t a light decision, I hardly slept at all. Primarily, I think I was anxious about the nature of the collaboration, and about how much we could adapt Pixy to work with Chameleon. I was anxious about delivering the project on time. I was anxious about having very limited video to work with, I was concerned about too much complication, and how Pixy brings a very different reading of the work. If we hung Pixy as a display for Chameleon, I would have wanted it to investigate emotional contagion, and Natacha told me that she didn’t think it was about emotional contagion anymore. I guess alarm bells went off, and I started to retreat away from the development of Pixy and Chameleon. I wanted it to be the meeting of two great projects, and I wonder if it ended up competing more than anything else? Pixy bought a very different reading of Chameleon, and maybe one that I felt might have been to confusing. I was also aware that both Pixy and Chameleon are quite innovative in their nature, and wondered if audiences would ever see past this. My work, although I use technology is about humanity, about visceral responses, about relationships, trust and intimacy. I don’t want it to concentrate on Technology. I realised part of the reason that I wanted to explore Pixy was also so Pixy could be seen more by people. Bringing Pixy to Fabrica would have been a great opportunity for Experientiae Electricae. Anyway, I am sure they will get other opportunities in the UK after the Lighthouse residency. Pixy is beautiful.

I talked the decision through with Fabrica, whose main concern is really about what I want to show, as well as what works in the space. The opening at Fabrica is October 2nd, and I always had told Fabrica I would give them a decision by the 12th of August. I sit here now, still feeling confused. Fabrica is a big space with a personality of it own.

I talked it through with Natacha and Michael and they understood. They could see the disconnects that were never truly resolved. We discussed the type of imagery that Natacha might explore with Pixy. Interestingly she wants to explore video’s of ‘atom bombs’. How very different to my own approach to Pixy.

I feel sad about the potentials that were developing between Pixy and Chameleon – that were never truly resolved. When I thought about Pixy coming into Chameleon, it took effort – we needed to find somewhere to host a residency, I needed to discuss it with the collaborators, I needed to work out timings, we wrote 3 grants applications and were successful with one Arts council England application. 100’s of emails and discussions later. Both Natacha’s and my own family up-routed to Brighton… Sleepless nights and hardwork from everyone.