Johannes Birringer, Klaus Behringer, Uschi Schmidt-Lenhard (edtors)
Interaktionslabor proudly announces the publication on July 1, 2004, of its
first book-catalogue, Wechselwirkung: Internationales Interaktionslabor (in
german/english), the first in a series of research catalogues with illustrations
of the lab process.
To give the readers an introduction to the contents of the book and the issue
it will treat, we publish below the report on the first international lab held
at the former coalmine.
Interaktionslabor Goettelborn initiates new research venture at former coal
mine in the Saarland
A Report
An international laboratory on interactive media convened at the former Coal
Mine Goettelborn in the Saarland, Germany, from July 1 to 14, 2003.
On the concluding weekend, the work of 20 artists and technologists was exhibited
during late night performance-installations in four different buildings in the
pit; during the day, guided tours through the laboratory were offered to the
public.
German-American choreographer Johannes Birringer had designed the interdisciplinary
fabric and philosophy of the Lab for the Industriekultur Saar (IKS), a regional
commission which oversees the infrastructural redevelopment of the Mine. The
Waag Society (Amsterdam) joined as a partner, and other regional high tech firms
provided equipment and technical assistance. Choreographers, musicians, composers,
architects, media and network artists from four different continents arrived
to set up shop in the Schwarz-Weisskaue, one of the largest and most unusual
buildings on site, formerly used as dressing-washing room (first and second
floor) and central office (third floor) of the Mining Company and the 5000 coal
miners who worked here for many decades.
The Site:
Mining in the area of Goettelborn is documented since 1446, but the actual systematic
development of coal mining, the building of the technical facilities, occurred
during the height of the industrial revolution, circa 1887, under the Prussian
government. During that time the miners' dwellings, in the village of Goettelborn,
were also built. The whole area has the look of countryside, with luscious trees,
pastures, interspersed with the mining area and slack heaps, and a new power
plant built there in the 60s, its smoking chimney widely visible. In 1995 the
Mine added the new white tower (Shaft IV), with its colossal pyramidal framework
considered the tallest mining tower in Europe. Paradoxically, the mine closed
a few years later when coal was no longer considered profitable. In 1995, there
were still about 4200 workers on location. IKS director Karl Kleineberg administers
the "future" of the site and the research into the sustainability
of regional industrial culture; he sees the vacant site as a 'town' with an
urban topography.
The Laboratory
The Laboratory was designed to help initiate the re-utilization and conversion
of the abandoned site which now anticipates economic and architectural development.
The role of new media/technology is considered vital in this changing landscape
of industrial culture. The Lab sees itself as an innovative platform for integrated
research projects in media arts and technologies, with a special focus on interactive
interfaces and telecommunications. On the one hand, the Lab team knew that it
had gathered under non-familiar circumstances, on a site filled with heavy machinery
and still guarded by the Mining Company which is responsible for security and
the decontamination and dismantling of the engines and extraction equipment.
The team used the first days to familiarize itself with the environment, the
Mine's engineering history, and its own task of setting up laboratory conditions
under which it could establish Goettelborn as a test-site for several networked
performance, sound recording, and film projects, and as a "shop" for
building interactive wireless sensor applications to be presented to the public
during the visitors' days. On the other hand, the simultaneous presence of the
Schichtwechsel Festival, a regional organization which had programmed a theatre
touring production to take place at the Mine, raised interesting questions about
the role of artists using the industrial ambience as backdrop for spectacle-entertainment.
The Lab defined its role mainly as research-oriented, while also seeking to
establish connections with the community to find out how software and media
applications could be used to motivate and inspire new ideas for creative infrastructure-development.
The work phases:
1. Workshops During the first 10 days, the group held daily workshops during
which members shared their diverse practices, methodologies and current project-ideas
for collaboration. Jim Ruxton and Jeff Mann, for example, offered workshops
on sensor technology and micropocessors. Arri Keesmaat demonstrated the Keyworx
real-time multiuser platform after installing a local server. Kelli Dipple introduced
her work in network technologies and telepresence performance, and Paulo C.
Chagas suggested creating an interactive soundwork based on texts and recorded
voices from the group. Orm Finnendahl demonstrated the PD patch on his Linux
system which he had prepared for real-time processing of recorded sound on the
site. Alan Smith showed films from his previous work in the lead mines in Northumberland
and emphasized the need for poetic encounters with historical residue.
2. Site Work
On any given day, members went on excursions into the mine to gather materials,
record sounds and shoot film, to extract information and to examine the architecture
and topography of the mine as a resource and inspiration for new ideas. Alan
Smith and Kelli Dipple shot and edited several short films on location, and
both Marija Stamenkovic and Koala Yip created dance performances that were filmed
on the roof of one of massive concrete buildings (the sinking pond). Webcams
were set up, and a digital archive and website developed and updated every day
(http://www.iks-saar.net). Affiliations
were made with several cultural locations in the region, including the Stadtgalerie,
the children's museum (Saarlandmuseum), and the K4 Forum in Saarbrücken,
the regional capital. Klaus Friedrich, a graphic artist from the region who
joined the lab, volunteered to create an "outpost" in the K4 Forum,
installing videos and photographic collages from the lab process as well as
setting up a network connection. The Lab also communicated with the Schichtwechsel
Festival, the non-profit organization which produces theatre, dance and music
concerts in former industrial plants.
3. Team-work and Programming
The creative energy of the Lab resided to a large degree in the fortuitous combination of transdisciplinary knowledge and expertise brought together for the common good by participants who came from very different backgrounds and brought their artistic techniques, cultural and linguistic sensibilities, and many suitcases full of tools. Very soon smaller teams found themselves and worked together on specific investigations; there was space for individual ideas and pursuits but the full group always adhered to a common ethos of collaboration. During the daily meetings it was decided to develop three or four interactive media scenarios on the basis of architectural sketches, design plans and programming carried out on site. Convergences between the various interface scenarios were examined, and locations sought out for the public installation of these scenarios.
4. Outreach
The Lab did not seek to operate in isolation or as a private enterprise nor
rely on the media and press to broadcast its presence. As a new venture it lacked
staff support, organizational and other logistical infrastructure (there were
no phones, and no water or electricity in some of the buildings), but it tried
to define a public function for its operation, and to communicate its open-source
work to the community. We had cell phones and network access. Camille Turner
led the effort to establish connections to the local population, to invite citizens
to visit, and to start a dialogue. She used the performance of a character ("Miss
Canadiana") as a tactic to participate in a local village festival, bringing
gifts to the children and inviting the villagers to be photographed and interviewed
with the fictitious beauty queen. The interviews focussed on the local peopleÕs
ideas and hopes for the future of their community. The large contingent of Canadians
in the Lab team was due to the fact that Birringer had presented a short preview
feature on the Mine project at Subtle Technologies (Toronto), the unique arts
and science conference organized annually by Jim Ruxton. The Interaktionslabor
followed the integrative principle of Subtle Technologies but provided a small
transdisciplinary factory for interactive tools in art and everyday life. The
guided tours on the final weekend were held to demonstrate to the visitors how
the lab team had tested new media applications (data archives, wireless sensors,
mobile computers, telepresence, interactive real-time processing systems involving
sensors and motion tracking, etc) and the relations between new media and everyday
life. The team asked itself how such applications can be made accessible to
users in sensual and attractive ways, and how interactive media can become exciting,
creative learning tools in education. A class of 14-year-olds from a high school
nearby was invited to visit the lab and get a first-hand look at the tools.
The Results
The Interaktionslabor proceeded to explore three areas of research: communication
technologies, interactive media, virtual environments. The urban architecture
of the Mine became the material source for interactions defining Gsıttelborn
as a transitory space: the location was treated <ETH> with regard to sustainability
research - neither as something to be preserved (museum of industrial culture),
nor as a theatrical setting for festival entertainment, but rather as an open
place of transformation processes. A laboratory mediates knowledge processes
that can be used in other areas of training. This transferability is particularly
meaningful in view of new communications strategies that involve internet, video
and cellular conferencing technologies and wearable computing. They have an
impact on new concepts of urbanity, life styles and mobility, and they offer
a perspective for the younger generations growing up in the region.. A study
of networked environments takes up questions implicitly raised by the IKS and
its search for investments into new infrastructures. In a basic sense, the lab
provided a workshop for skilled labor and artisanship, it converted existing
spaces, generated stories, images, sound(radio broadcast), hardware and software
design and network solutions. The team moved around a lot, dancing, making music,
scavenging, constructing.
Canadian artist Jeff Mann, for example, constructed a special antenna that enabled
wireless access from the top of the Tower, Shaft IV. From that towering vantage
point he was able to send a video stream to Sher Doruff (Waag Society, Amsterdam)
who created a Keyworx configuration that displayed the images from Jeff's camera
mixed with an audio visualization of their conversation on walkie-talkies. Queries
from the audience, communicated via text messaging from Blackberry PDA's set-up
by Renn Scott and chalk drawings made by visitors on the pavement were further
displayed in the image mix in the Winding Engine Building. The Interaktionslabor
thus challenges the restructuring plans of the IKS. Investment or the creation
of new jobs can not only mean the importation of artistic product into the abandoned
industrial facility or the leasing of real estate. Interactivity means setting
in motion, programming a sensitive interface and an active space that requires
agency to generate new realities. Interactive media art here implies above all
performative processes that involve communicative action with different resonances
in public and social environments, in the sense of that interaction is social
process requiring feedback, and design is the invention of new cultural interfaces.
Interaktionslabor, Inc.,could function as a company. It could develop the already
emerging partnerships within the team (between the WAAG Society for Old and
New Media, Amsterdam, REM in Toronto, the blueLab in Dresden, Nottingham Trent
University's Live Art program, etc) as well as with partners found in the region
and the Goettelborn community. Such a network creates practical alliances between
art, science, technology and the life world, not satisfied with the short-term
magic of theatre in abandoned factories, but dedicated to long term research
in active media applications.
The Performance
How are we to view the late night performance, then? It might be best to call
it a "virtual environment," a hybrid installation displaying the potential
of creative media design through demonstrations and performances, through play
and chat, through participation. The demonstration would not have been possible
without the chemistry that existed between the artists who had come here from
many different backgrounds and countries (Germany, the Netherlands, Austria,
England, Spain, Canada, the US, Latin America and China). What connected everyone
was a shared interest in creativity and critical thinking, interface development
and tinkering, and a passion for discovering resonant dimensions in the social
interface arising from real-time virtual environments that connect bodies and
sensory technologies. Finally: some examples from the late night performance
which aroused the positive reactions of the public: some audience members returned
the next day to take a closer look at the interface design and express their
interest in the continuance of the Lab.
Architect-performer Marion Tränkle had reshaped the 10 "cells"
of the Schwarzkaue (the 70 meter long south dressing room) into different "apartments",
available for different purposes and to be used by the audience in their encounter
with cameras, sensors, monitors and objects (found or newly constructed). Most
of these objects invited the audience to rely on trusted perceptional mechanisms,
involving various aspects of story-telling, photographs and videos functioning
as an archive of the physical interfaces between lab team and local population.
TrSınkle had also designed a Òdiscussion tableÓ, with interactive
apples, which solicited questions, when touched, about the future of Goettelborn,
and Julia Baur had built a memory game-table out of her photographs from the
site, hinting at the imaginative and playful use (for leisure time activities,
inline skating, etc) of the large open areas on the south side of the pit.
Jim Ruxton had helped TrSınkle and others to construct the different sensors
and microprocessors which were used in the building, including those for the
"glowing soap" in the dark washrooms, which ÒspokeÓ
to the visitors if someone stepped through the ultrasonic beam. In this building
we used all the sensing devices commonly used for interactive design: haptic
sensors (pressure, touch, flex, and proximity), non-haptic sensors (distance
sensors such as ultrasound), and microphones. In the Weisskaue (the north dressing
room), composer Orm Finnendahl used the entire space as a gigantic "sound
production room", suggesting to the visitors that they could generate the
sounds (recorded via microphones) themselves which were then processed by the
computer in real-time and spatially distributed via an 8-channel speaker system.
Two dancers, Koala Yip and Marlon Barrios Solano, then performed a movement
improvisation with sensors that demonstrated how sound textures could be dynamically
developed in new and surprising manifestations.
During discussions with the audience, Yip referred to the physical interactive
experience and how movement feels in such a resonant and responsive space when
each gesture can instantly alter the tonalities of sound and make moving clusters
of music (in the psychoacoustic perception of space) seemingly appear in different
parts of the building. She also pointed out that she did not rely on a choreography
but explored the nature of such processual interactivity, which is its instability,
emergence, and mutability in the present moment. Interactive dance, in this
sense, is never merely a stimulus-and-response behavior, but a psychophysical
and emotional experience which engages the entire body sensing system in motion,
and in continuity, which creates layers upon layers of affect that of course
cannot be measured by the sensors. For the audience, the intensity of these
affects is experienceable as sensation, there is a synaesthetic and energetic
exchange, and the emotional intensity of Koala's and Marlon's dance was of course
heightened by the extraordinary setting, the thousands and thousands of steel
baskets that hung empty and suspended in the air of the Kaue. The coal miners
had used these baskets to store their clothes before going down to the shafts.
At the end of the south corridor, a small, intimate bathroom that had been used
by the mining engineers was transformed into a silent installation by Marija
Stamenkovic Herranz. Reflected on two sides by mirrors, a small video monitor
sat on a rusty chair and showed the ghost-like appearance and disappearance
of a woman walking a circular path around the "eye" or vortex of the
sinking pond <ETH> the lowest point of the circular building where the
water used for cleaning the coal dropped down into a pipeline. Marija's video,
"Do U C Me You," was a quiet but disorienting poem; shot with a webcam
in grainy black and white, it had the look of overexposed film. The figure-ground
relationship changed constantly insofar as we could never be sure how many Marijas
we would see: doppelgänger images appeared suddenly and then faded away
as the women in black silently enacted their ritual perambulations, like monks
in some long-forgotten cloister.
A similar transformation, here in the sense of an ebbing and flowing momentum,
was heard in the "Verlesesaal" (the reading room where miners received
their daily task sheets). Brazilian composer Paulo C. Chagas had installed a
layered composition of voices (4 channels) designed to change interactively
when the audience would step into a specific area. Simultaneously, this portion
of the ground came alive with projected text in an interactive design by Arjen
Keesmaat. Words appeared on the surface, as if from nowhere (projected from
above), and then faded away, and these words only became visible and grew larger
depending on the velocity of movement by an audience member stepping into the
purview of the infrared camera. This room displayed, in its quiet and even magical
way (lit only in blue light) a kind of lunar cycle, a whispering night, mental
maps and superpositions of possible communicative meanings, women's voices in
several languages telling stories.
Before Chagas started the loopular program, a ritual poem performed by Camille
Turner and addressed to Santa Barbara (patron saint of the Mine, Yoruba deity)
in memory of her parents introduced a spiritual dimension which was altogether
unexpected, by the lab team as well as the audience. Camille took everyone by
surprise, except her special guests, a local men's choir she had befriended
and invited to join her that night. The choir, steeped in local and European
song tradition, responded to her poem by offering several songs in German, Russian,
and Ukrainian, and interaction here gained cultural and social meanings that
point beyond the technological interface design, perhaps to the sense of "transduction"
as a collective process. As a "communication design", the song and
the ritual repetition of Camille's rhythmic intonation of her poem functioned
clearly as a collective cultural infrastructure, like a prayer for survival,
a reminder of our mortality. The song also reminded us that even the newest
electronica and digital sound are only an instrument like other cultural technologies.
The Verlesesaal became the poetic core of the evening, with saxophonist Hartmut
Dorschner entering the space later on to play his acoustic instrument, after
he had processed some digital samples of the sound of a creaking door earlier
on, while Alan Smith projected a sequence of six short films he had composed
of his personal interactions with the landscape and the found signage of the
Mine (e.g. "Safety begins in the Head"; "Order is Safety",
"Eve loves Professionals", etc). His films were full of poignancy
and humor. Near midnight the audience was guided further north along a quiet
avenue to the winding engine building for the Tower (Shaft IV) where the final
performance-installations took place. Renn Scott, who works as user experience
architect for REM (Research in Motion) Company in Toronto, had brought several
new Blackberrys (cellular computer telephones) to hand out to the audience,
and the walk to the engine room turned into a navigational game and audience
intercourse with the "Control Tower," where Jeff Mann sent SMS instructions
to the users, inviting them to send messages back and carry out some activities
at a particular location where the camera on the tower could capture them. The
camera pics were then sent (via Apple airport) to the laptops, and by the time
the audience entered the engine room the pictures from the game of the participants
were ready to be processed...
The gigantic dark engine room received the public with an experimental arrangement
that almost literally took their breath away, and I mean this in a visceral
and vicarious sense. Upon entering a door leading to a staircase, the audience
would glance down 30 or 40 feet to an empty space where one of the two winding
engines of 10000 horsepower had stood, the remaining one now facing our "opera"
auditorium, a deep resonance body, with the western wall serving as film screen.
The collaborations between Lynn Lukkas/Mark Henrickson (Minneapolis)/Paul Smith(Bristol)/Marija
Stamenkovic (Barcelona), Kelli Dipple (Australia) and Yip/Birringer/Barrios
Solano pointed to other possibilities of the sensation-technology, emphasizing
the interactivity between visual media and performance, corporeality, amplified
sound and resonant space.
In the first interface environment, programmed by Lukkas, Smith, and Henrickson,
the body's actions are measured not only as sound (via microphone), but rather
as the most subtle variations in the biomechanics: the pulse, breath, and heart
rhythm in the body itself (by means of a Bioradio attached with electrodes).
The electrically measurable signals are transmitted wirelessly as data to the
computer. There they change not only the sound processes in real time, but affect
the rhythm of the image movement of the projected film sequences stored in the
computer (via Macromedia Director and Max/Msp). Marija Stamenkovic Herranz performed
this dance of breath, first improvising softly with extended vocal techniques
as she descended the staircase in midst of the audience, then purely with heavily
amplified breathing as she moved onto the flat plain of the engine room, and
finally with her whole body and staccato voice as she propelled herself into
a wild trance-like flurry of movement. Her voice crept under our skins, the
resonating sound in the huge room entering through our pores and stomachs, and
as we listened we realized how her breath controlled the image movement and
thus the dramaturgy of the story. If Marija stops her breath, the film's motion
freezes. When she breathes, we see her (on film) walk across the slack heap
of the Mine, descending into a hollow path. Lynn had also filmed her movement
outside differently in each section, the third one using a hyperactive zoom.
In conjunction with Marija's accelerated breathing, this final segment materialized
as pure hyperkinetic sensation, transforming the entire space into a irregular
pulsating bodymachine of continuously unfolding exhaustive (libidinal?) intensities.
A performance of this kind is hard to describe, but the spectrum of the evening
demonstrated the variety of interactive interfaces (sound, image projection,
body, voice, writing, acoustic space, wireless communication, etc) at the threshold
between pure sensation and theatrical expression, where a performance dramaturgy
and a poetics become anticipatable if one were to develop and structure a full
work for presentation rather than an interactive installation for the audience-user.
In the case of Marija's performance, her interaction of course was also with
her own image (on film), and thus with a remembered movement-trajectory she
had enacted outside.
Kelli Dipple, on the other hand, showed a short interactive improvisation (on
the theme of "absence") with a triptych of Quicktime movies she had
shot of herself in the Mine, and then invited the audience to join her and do
the same, leaving something of themselves (as trace) in the space. In her films,
she focused on the Mine as a space of disappearing bodies, and her treatment
of the interface itself seemed to comment on the disappearing effect of programming
that allows for randomness and certain kinds of recognition, not others. Her
interface was set up with a video camera as input device for the interactive
system (BigEye): it could see space and track motion and color. Her parameter
defined dark colors as a "present body," and the dynamics of the movement
decided which film of her disappearances we would see (and in which direction,
forward or backward). Kelli's "game," which simultaneously involves
spoken passages activated by certain gestures or movements, implicates the audience
and thus potentially motivates and integrates its movement and the interpretation
of the collective moment (someone is being disappeared from our midst). Perhaps
it is possible to argue that such an interactive design animates the audience
user to negotiate a game of relationship to the image, and to take responsibility.
Like Kelli, Birringer had also filmed in the Mine and created a 6-minute movement
study of a dance by Koala Yip on the roof of the colossal sinking pond rotunda.
Entitled "Oracle," the film was not shown in its edited form. Rather,
Johannes asked Koala to question the Göttelborn oracle again in her native
language. Her voice (via wireless microphone) then animated sections of the
film in real time, processed in a Max/Msp/Jitter patch programmed by Marlon
Barrios Solano. The algorithmic process translates Koala's voice into new digital
objects -- distorted, pulsating, curved, exploding and shrinking picture-animations
that bear little relation to the original dancefilm, even though one can still
recognize Koala standing above her mirror reflection in the dark watery vortex
of the sinking pond. The film became a virtual film; no predictions of the future
were provided except the echoes of Koala's vocal intonations pulling, stretching,
and scratching the digital emulsion of the filmstrip.
The Interaktionslabor of course pointed its finger at the future and asked what
kind of influence virtual environments might have on our imagination, and what
intuitive associations people make with such technically mediated interactions.
How can architectures of virtual image-sound-spaces emerge to form meaningful
sensual experiences for social interaction, allowing us to recognize our bodily
activity? How is the virtual felt? What relationships are forged between portable/mobile
media and the persons who use them? How do relations between body and media
develop into symbolic actions or interactive games which we understand as meaningful
collective cultural behavior? What balances can we achieve between nature, industry,
digital culture? Digital nature? With these questions in mind, the laboratory
plans to continue its work and regroup next year, while strengthening the partnership
with the IKS that has been initiated now. In order to develop continuity for
the research in Göttelborn, Birringer and project coordinator Uschi Schmidt-Lenhard
(Saarbrücken) have devised a long-term R&D plan that examines further
convergences between media technologies and art education, learning systems
and cognitive processes, design and ecology, science, sustainability studies
and everyday life. The Interaktionslabor, Inc. will be available as a dialogue
partner for firms and cultural organizations in the region; it will also serve
as a network partner to interested parties elsewhere.