Site-specific Media

Sayles Talk [Danielle Eley, Joe Gammello, Elizabeth Tan]

 

Sayles Hill Great Space
May 15 2008

The laptop is unique in its mobility and its access to the Internet. Along with the laptop screen as the new cinematic screen, this portable stage opens up many possibilities for interpersonal communication in site-specific performance.

In this project we utilized the Internet phone software Skype to create a live video conference that linked a classroom in Scoville to the Great Space. Being an interactive performance, Sayles Talk involved two sites: the laptop, and the environment of the Great Space. The function of Skype as a piece of mobile space-shrinking technology was an essential feature of the project. This was further exemplified during the course of the project when the laptop was carried to another part of Sayles to allow our Skype actor, Andrew Tatge, to watch the next site-specific performance.

As seen in Fred Wilson's site-specific project Mining the Museum (1992), an idea was transported from site to site, each time making use of the materials at the site thus making a single idea site-specific at multiple locations. Likewise, the idea of Sayles Talk has the capacity to be carried out in many locations. However, the fact that the actor performed the piece using gestures and actions commonly seen in Sayles conveyed the site-specificity of the project. For example, if this same project were performed in the Library, the actor's gestures would involve reading, studying, and other library-related behavior.

Sayles Talk brings to the locale of Great Space a blend of common and foreign elements. On one hand, a laptop on a table or a face looking back at you from behind a table is not an uncommon sight. On the other hand, the close-up of a face on a computer screen interacting with you  is not  quite an everyday occurrence. The interactive computer screen created an artificial, alien space within the familiar environment of the Great Space. Furthermore, it is apparent from the image on the screen that the actor is in a different location. As such, via the laptop, this second location is virtually brought into the first.

Finally, while we had planned for Sayles Talk to be non-invasive performance, technological setbacks transformed the piece into an attention-drawing performance.  One of the setbacks was the lack of clarity in the audio leading to flawed communication. Besides physically drawing the audience closer to the performance,  the actor resorted to writing signs on pieces of paper at times to enhance dialogue. Due to this improvisation, the project resulted in a more engaged audience than we had originally anticipated. The actor even became an active audience member of the subsequent site-specific project in Great Space. Sayles Talk shone a light on the negative and positive aspects of the laptop beyond its typical audio and visual functions through the utilization of its Internet connectivity  (i.e. it was tight).

 

Bird Sanctuary [Sarah Nienaber and Tricia England]

On Saturday, May 17th, 2008, in the Lower Cowling Arboretum, we (Carleton College seniors Tricia England and Sarah Nienaber) installed a digital bird sanctuary, affectionately nicknamed “Zoo Arb.”

This sanctuary featured digital photographic and audio representations of birds from the Rice County area whom we had captured on film and caged within the confines of our laptop screens. These high-tech cages were placed on “bird” swings we had constructed of plywood and twine, which then were carefully hung on the most perch-worthy trees. Creating a sense of finite space in this open, outdoor environment was the sanctuary cage, which we constructed of chicken wire that we made to conform to a small thicket of trees, creating a space of enclosure like one might see at a zoo.

As students of site-specific media, we are interested in the emphatically anti-place quality of the increasingly prevalent media plinth and repository, the laptop. This piece of technology displays and stores a substantial amount of the media people enjoy, and its defining factor lies in its portability, its eschewal of chords or roots. In approaching this project, we asked ourselves whether such a piece of technology does or can have an organic relationship with site. Examining the natural world, we were struck by the example of birds, beings who, through their migratory habits, reject a static relationship with place, yet who, particularly through the media of song, define and enhance the aesthetics of the places they alight.

In addition to creating a pleasing aesthetic experience, “Zoo Arb” seeks to heighten its audience’s awareness of the role that the perceived personal sanctuary, the laptop, plays in both rejecting and enhancing place. By turning to an example from the natural world, the bird, we can sense both the confining and liberating aspects of place and placelessness, as well as the boons and the losses involved in physical and artistic enclosure.

Meet the birds:

www.flickr.com

Spectra: A Color Light Orchestra

At 9:20 pm on Thursday, May 15 2008, a group of students gathered on the Carleton College Bald Spot to put on an improvisatory sound and light performance. Their instruments? Laptops. Using a Power Point program that contained seven slides, each with a different color and tone, they used their computers to create a soundscape that softly drifted away from the group. The music produced was atonal and calming, while the solid-colored slides of the power point presentation turned the performers’ faces different colors as they switched notes. The overall feel was one of community and reflection.

This piece started with an assignment to think critically about laptops, and to discover a new and compelling way to use them. Spectra: A Color Light Orchestra was an attempt to challenge the purposes and uses of laptops, as well as an attempt to bring a community together to create an instantaneous, improvised performance. The simplicity of the PowerPoint file, as well as the ubiquitous nature of Microsoft, meant that everyone, regardless of their operating system, computer age, or laptop choice, could participate in the project and enjoy themselves.

We chose to perform our piece on the Bald Spot because of its centrality. We created Spectra to encompass as many people as wanted to participate, and the large open space emphasized this and allowed us to be seen from many points on campus. While the specific location was not essential—we could have performed the piece at night in many other public spaces—the social presence and physical “space” of the laptops themselves were essential. Also, because of the ephemeral nature of an improvised performance, even with documentation the exact piece will never be performed again. New people may take the idea and implement it again and again, but the social community and the music and light patterns produced will always be slightly different.

With all that in mind, Spectra is easily implemented, thanks to a few easy steps. Download the PowerPoint file here, assemble a group with laptops at night, perform the piece, and enjoy!  Visit spectra2008.blogspot.com for more details.

3x3 [Elizabeth Evizon, Jeremy Sairsingh, Kristen Miller, Mateo Trujillo, Paul Caine, Terin Mayer]

The formal component of "3x3" is an experiment in home-made media facades. By assembling nine lap-top computers in an array, we turned the north face of McKinley Gould Library into a three story screen after dark.

"3x3" was also a performance, displaying four distinct works specially formatted to the array. Three of these were abstract color sequences, using each of the laptops in the three by three grid as a pixel. One was a segment of the film by Alejandro Jodorowsky, "Holy Mountain", which we parsed into nine segments. Each laptop was then programmed to run at the same time, so the nine pieces moved in a synchronized fashion.

The piece displays an irony. While the array is meant to act as one unit, the idiosyncrasies of each lap-top in the performance continued to assert themselves. Even when time-synchronized and programmed, each piece of technology had its own timing in displaying the videos. The array works more as an unruly chorus than a lock-step machine.

"3x3" capitalized on the pre-existing window-grid of the Library, but it also demanded a re-appraisal of the North side of the library building, which is not widely visited. Locating a media performance in this space gave us a reason to view the architecture at a novel time and angle. In this way the performance gestures beyond the artistic content displayed toward the activity of students. One begins to look through the windows with eyes primed for viewing art.

There's both a complementarity and a tension between the focus we've drawn to the lap-tops and the Library. Libraries provide resources in long aisles and quiet places to study; laptop computers store information and allow users to efficiently manipulate data. On the one hand, the screens display the results of series of computational tasks and, in a sense, mirror the productive efforts of students who are also transforming data. On the other hand, introducing these glitchy digital components into a space that has been paradigmatically analogue recalls the justifiable ambivalence we might feel at the progress of the information age.

Lights and Beats

Doing a site-specific piece using only the laptop as a medium is similar to eating finger food. It simplifies the meal, makes it more accessible, and even though it may at times be messy it creates a distinct bond between the consumer and the consumed. This relationship between the screen and viewer was something we didn’t want to lose yet we did desire to push the boundary of it just a little. Thus, we established our viewing distance for our piece and some parameters for media that might fit into it. Digging further it should be acknowledged that the laptop is an object that is constant in what it provides; entertainment, assistance, connections, and freedom. Within this frame we were set free to work with it, fight it, or do our best and forget about it.

Conceptually our project is no revolutionary, we break no major rules, nor did we intend to. Yet, our beat still speaks to many areas. In essence it speaks to the speed at which life is lived today. It also addresses the area of entertainment, yet that was only a side thought that we had as more importantly we were working with an idea themed by explaining or toying with the many connections a computer can give you. Our idea spawned of Henry’s light and sound symphony pitch, but after discussing within the three of us we thought we could develop what he had come up with more to make a piece in which the tools within a laptop exploited a little more. We wanted the viewer to be closer, as almost to put them on a line during which sometimes it feels like they are playing the drum set, and other times just viewing it. We understood that in this decision we might lose an interaction quality of our piece but thought that we wanted to explore a connection them between multiple laptops, instead of multiple people.

Structurally, we built our digital drum set (or light and beats project) in a series of steps. First, we filmed each instrument—snare, tom, high hat, crash, bass drum, guitar, and clapping hands—multiple times to find one loud and separate hit of it being played. Next, we split up these clips in Final Cut Pro and built a beat by repeating them at different intervals. This, what we liked to call stop action took the largest part of our preparation. Then, we developed a script on the computer that would run a video player program at a certain time due to the local time on the laptop as shown by the clock. This was maybe the most troublesome part that we would encounter, as none of the laptops we used were exactly in sync and it was difficult to get there precisely equal. Then, we separated the movie into 6 separate videos, and shared them to 6 computers. We set up our computers in the cave, and just waited for the time to count down.

Computer Crash

     While many groups strove to highlight the capabilities of computers through sound and visual means, our group attempted to represent through physical objects the ways in which our personal and academic lives are tied to computers.  This literal representation culminated in an equally literal “crash” in which the computer was destroyed during lunch hour at Sayles-Hill, leaving the contents strewn about and lost to the user.
    Construction of our project began with a trip to a computer recycling plant in Eagan, MN.  There we acquired an old CRT monitor shell, which we soon began to fill with items that had symbolic importance to the common uses of computers in academic and personal contexts.  We lined the inside of the monitor with CDs and DVDs, as well as littered the bottom of the computer with personal items, such as disposed AIM conversations, a Facebook profile, bank account statements, video game websites, a new media art Blog, personal photos, and an online newspaper article.  Suspended in the computer, as the objects are in their elevated position in society, are celebrities, political figures, as well as a couple pornographic images.
    The computer also contained acade mic content, which is a highly important aspect of the computer on a college campus.   Items included old term papers, class readings, personal musings, class notes, poetry, an old e-mail, and a transcript from the Hub. 
    The desktop was a printed image of a Macintosh desktop whose background was the Art Walk’s poster.  One of the rectangular regions of the poster was cut out in order to allow a view of the computer’s interior.  The interior was also lit by a small flashlight, which reflected off of the CDs and DVDs.
    The performance section of our project featured a student whose computer unexpectedly crashed.  His work and personal items were scattered on the floor.  Most of them were irretrievable, but a couple of papers were salvageable. 
    The main goal of our project was to emphasize the integral nature of computers to student’s personal and academic lives in a college environment.  Sayles was the perfect environment for us to display our project in both because of the density of students during common time and because Sayles is a place where the academic and personal parts, of student’s lives converge.  Students both eat and socialize as well as study into the night in Sayles.  Furthermore, Sayles contains the bookstore, a place of academic supplies as well as personal goods.
We encountered some difficulty in transferring these entirely digital concepts into physical realities.

A Precious Second [Danielle Eley]

A Precious Second is a piece specific to the Gould Library.  Based on information from some other students, it seems reasonable to estimate that Carleton students spend an average of three hours studying and working in the library a day.  I have always viewed the library as a slightly suffocating space that actually impedes my productivity - especially as I often find myself distracted by the thought of what is happening outside - and rarely use the space for study. 

The video was made of images of the library shot over a 3-hour time period.  It was created using a digital camera and iMovie, which was burned onto DVDs and placed on various screens in the library.  Every eleventh photo is a shot of an American war-era propaganda poster encouraging hard work, maximum production, and sacrifice, all of which are elements of Carleton's academic program on which it seems that there is a tremendous amount of focus.  The slogans range from a simple "More Production!" to "Get hot! Keep Moving! Don't waste a precious minute."

The video was shown on two screens of the media-viewing stations on the uppermost floor of the library, a computer in the 3rd floor Mac Lab, and on a Mac that sits at the entrance to the library.  I chose the media stations, because they are rarely used, but the idea of someone stumbling upon the looped imagery and turning it off so that they can do work furthers my idea that people are putting study before anything happening in the world around them.  The same applies for the Macs, however those are in much more heavily-trafficked areas, so the idea was that the video might actually force someone to stop and think about the work before shutting it off.  I also chose these spaces because I liked the idea of presenting the outside world on-screen, as if it were something foreign or disconnected from our own lives.

Urban Jungle

Today’s suburban kids are not exposed to the natural world. “Environment” for people such as these imply McDonalds, Walmart, and parking garages. For my project, I took on an effort to bring nature back into our “environment”. An outdoor classroom served as the environment to view nature scenes, taken from BBC’s Planet Earth.
My project evolved from trying to bring natural images to places where nature no longer is present. The outdoor classroom served as a good location due to its unnatural benches and cement ground. Here we can “reclaim” the space with natural imagery to bring nature back to the outdoors. I tried to project the scene through the benches to show some idea of a “caged nature”, but the benches did not lend themselves to working with the concept. Thus, projector remains unobstructed.
I think my project had limited success in looking at site specificity using imagery. The contrast of natural images against the Center for Mathematics and Computing speaks somewhat to the decline of “nature” in our “environment”. As people stopped by to investigate, comments of "I didn't know birds could do that" and "So that's how that works..." could be heard.

Download P5050035.AVI

Paper Glass

This project involved using tissue paper and tape to attempt to emulate stained glass.  Placed inside of the student union, Sayles-Hill, Paper Glass attempts to present something traditionally perceived as spiritual in a secular space.  Furthermore, it hopes to open up students' minds into rethinking what Sayles is, though it is difficult to say whether it was successful or not.

An initial problem I faced with this project was the materials with which I would be working.  Colored transparencies, while probably the most effective material for this project, were outside of the budget.  The class brainstormed ideas and tissue paper was agreed upon as my material.  Unfortunately the only colored tissue paper I found was a bit too bright to truly look like traditional stained glass.  Also, tissue paper, being the weak material it is, was easily pulled apart, creating holes through which sunshine could poke.  If I recreated this project, I would be more inclined to use different materials that would emulate the glass in a more effective manner.

I came away from this project a bit disappointed, for my conception was to truly create something spiritual-like and less arts-and-craftsy like.  Though people have told me that they understand it is supposed to be stained glass, the reaction of rethinking the space was most likely loss due to the clear falsehood of the project.  I did, however, rethink the space as well as push the relationship between art and space.  So in someways it was successful, perhaps more selfishly than planned.  And if nothing, perhaps it was just a semi-interesting thing for someone to look at while they were enjoying their burger from the snack bar.

Grind Cubes [Caitlin Magnusson]

For some time, I've been working on a video piece that combines squares of flashing color to form kaleidoscope patterns. I've combined this with carefully constructed audio. The overall conceptual hope is to create a video that draws the viewer in without relying on recognizable images or narrative structure, but still has a satisfying conclusion. With the audio, I connected them such that it becomes hard to tell if the audio is affecting the visual or vice versa, so that they hopefully meld together into one audio-visual element.

The 4 minute film I created without thinking of location, instead of finding a location and picking media that will fit. I have always felt that this video is extremely effective when blown up and the only center of attention, however, and so I realized that some places would be better than others.  I tampered with the idea of projecting in the long hallway that connects the Sayles student center from the Burton dorm and dining hall.  It is relatively dark and serves only as a thoroughfare, with decent traffic throughout the day and night. I also started looking differently at surfaces, trying to gauge which walls would catch the eye, and how audio would work in the enclosed space.

I finally decided to project on the ceiling of a stairwell directly to the side of the main hallway. The idea was that audio would alert passerby, and that their eyes would then eventually land on the cubes changing on the ceiling.

The project had moderate success. I projected for a few hours during dinner, when traffic was moderately high. Unfortunately, i couldn't get the main stairwell lights turned off because of safety regulations, and I feel this detracted from the potential full effect. While I have no doubt everyone heard the audio, some people walked straight through without looking up, and others, who came in large groups, were too busy laughing or socializing to actually give their full attention to the video. Others stood still to watch for a short time, but none watched the full four minutes,  either because it failed to hold their attention, their necks hurt, or they felt uncomfortable standing in a thoroughfare.

I feel this piece did catch people by surprise and perhaps enriched a place they walk through on a daily basis, but it wasn't the perfect combination of place and media. In the future, I'd like to place the video in a dark location with few other aural or visual distractions.

Special thanks to Wain Yee for the documentation.