WoRD(&i)MaGeSouNDS in associative flux - a review of
Com <=> Space
– The Architecture of Association, by Bill Seaman & Daniel C. Howe
by Marcus Bastos
Com <=> Space
– The Architecture of Association, by Bill Seaman and Daniel Howe, explores
generative arrangements of text, image and sound using recombinant databases. The
piece employs artificial intelligence algorithms to organize groups of
multimedia information on six sets of twin monitors. Controlled by six
computers, the system periodically reconfigures these arrangements transforming
the installation into a meta-text in which the meaning that emerges not as it
is written but by constant rewriting.
The functioning of
this mechanism depends on the relations between clusters organized by metadata.
They emerge for a certain period of time and then dissolve. In Com <=>
Space..., this emergent and temporary meaning points to the
ephemeral nature of current language – both in terms of language that runs or
flows, and language that form chains of meaning, as implied on the Portuguese
word for “current” (“corrente”, that may also means
“chain”). Seaman sees it as stimulating “thinking and reflection on key
concepts poetically related with 'communication'.” It is therefore a concept-tbase that generates articulated series (as they slide
from one monitor to another).
The practice of
producing meaning by randomizing discrete elements goes back through the
history of literature and the visual arts. One might add to classic examples
such as Oedipus Aegyptiacus, by Athanasius Kircher, or the
algorithms of Ramon Llull's Ars
Combinatoria, Eisenstein’s intellectual montage,
or the potential images of Brian Eno's 77 Million
Paintings. This article does not aim to propose an extensive discussion of
the topic, that has been thoroughly presented in Florian
Cramer's Words Made Flesh [1]; Haroldo de Campos'
“A Poética do Aleatório”[2];
Arlindo Machado's “O Sonho
de Mallarmé”[3],
or in Seaman's Recombinant Poetics[4].
In the context of dialog between languages in which Seaman operates, Eno's and Eisenstein's proposals are particularly relevant,
as will be explained below.
Through a
generative software program, the “painting” created by Eno
makes textures and shades oscillate to create an almost infinite number of
variations. A painter creating five works a day would take 42,000 years
to finish 77 million paintings. Com <=> Space... is based on a
similar procedure, with an important difference: instead of dealing with
relatively open sensory variations, it moves towards the construction of a
generative semantics. In addition, it operates on fluxes and interstices
between chains of meaning in which boundaries between one arrangement and
another cannot be specified.
Eisenstein always
advocated montage as a means of generating audiovisual concepts. He saw cinema
as a process of formulating thoughts with image and sound rather than just
organizing a succession of scenes that duplicated (real or invented) worlds
captured by a camera. Com <=> Space – The Architecture of Association poses this aspiration anew, in a different
context. Seaman's project produces a conceptual machine, that is, a device
which is capable of generating abstract configurations as it orders and
re-orders the words, images and sounds gathered in its database.
Examining Seaman's
Poetics, this procedure goes back to, at least, Exquisite Mechanism of
Shivers (1994). The work is constructed from a 28-minute video segmented in
33 audiovisual fragments based on ten-word phrases, that
results on the “poetic menu” of an application that produces 330
sentences. Dieter Daniels describes ex.Mech as
“multimedia artwork in the fullest sense of the term,” since all its components
were created by the artist himself.
Daniels sees the interactive version of the
project as an attempt to examine “the mutual influences (of language, image and
sound) on our perception and our construction of associations”[5];
he notes that ex.Mech works with the superimposition
of technology and content as a means to explore the ambivalence of meaning with
the goal of building a kind of paradox generator. In Seaman's own words, it is
a machine in which “words are to
images as thoughts to the receiver / browser.”
This pursuit of
ambivalence is an important ingredient in Seaman's works, since the greater
multiplicity of meanings indicates greater complexity of the devices he
develops. This becomes clear as his poetics evolves. In Passage Sets,
1995, Seaman implements one of his generative devices in physical space. The
interactive installation, with programming developed by Chris Ziegler, is a
triptych on which a video projector and two data projectors produce a panorama
of layered images and texts that may be navigated by the interactor.
As described on the
artist's website, “participants may navigate spatially over the surface of the
images - left, right, up or down, on a grid shown center screen.” In this
project, “the user can explore meaning in its relationship with interchangeable
contexts; therefore both emergent meaning and experiential observation of
shifting meaning are observed in the work “[6].
In The World
Generator / The Engine of Desire (initiated in
1996 and still in development) Seaman worked with programmer Gideon May to
create a system that “explores emergent meaning”, a topic that subsequently
became central on his reflections in Recombinant
Poetics. From this perspective, The World Generator is at the same
time a first halt and a point of departure for future developments of Seaman's
investigation on generative systems, of which Com <=> Space... is
the latest Architecture of Association, the subtitle of the work, points to the artists’ attempts to build
mechanisms capable of combining data by triggering semantic procedures. In this
project, software algorithms use words (metadata), rather than sets of numbers
(data) as parameters to join their parts in temporary wholes.
By producing a
prototype of a conceptual machine (which poses the question: could a conceptual
machines not be anything other a prototype?), Seaman produces texts
whose ephemeral nature and mutability ?seems? to be based on the hability to
layer meaning and speech about meaning - if we can understand in those terms
the relationship between data and metadata which sets its clusters in motion.
Despite the apparent passivity reserved for observers of its infinite
progression of intellectual montages, Com<=> Space... depends on
the viewer-user taking some action, even if only mentally. This is an exercise
in which, beyond the reader plots described by Roger Chartier
as capable of dismantling any supposedly static meaning, the artifices of
intelligence simulated through increasingly complex algorithms seem to multiply
the fluidity of language in innumerable directions. Although created at the
frenetic pace of numbers in seamless movement.
Marcus
Bastos holds a Ph.D. in communication and semiotics
from PUC-SP, where he is a professor. He directed More Radicals (short film, 2008), Free Radicals (short film, 2007) and Shapeless Interface (interactive video, 2006). Bastos
authored the artist’s book Cultura da Reciclagem (Noema, 2007) and
articles such as Digital and Wild: Beyond
“Generative / Emergent” and “Performative / Locative”
(with Ryan Griffis, Leonardo Electronic Almanac) and O Grande Vídeo
(Trópico).
5. Daniel,
Dieter. Bill Seaman:Ex.Mech,
in ArtIntAct2.Karlruhe: ZKM:1995.
6. http://digitalmedia.risd.edu/billseaman/workSpcPassage01.php
[1] Words Made Flesh, by Florian Cramer, may be downloaded at http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh/.
[2] “A
Poética do Aleatório”, in: A Arte no Horizonte do Provável, by Haroldo
de Campos. Sao Paulo: Perspectiva, 1969.
[3] “O
Sonho de Mallarmé”, in: Máquina e Imaginário, by Arlindo Machado.
[4] Recombinant Poetics, by Bill Seamanis available for downloading at http://digitalmedia.risd.edu/billseaman/workRecombDis.php.
[5] Daniels, Dieter. Bill Seaman: ex.Mech, inArtIntAct 2.
[6] http://digitalmedia.risd.edu/billseaman/workSpcPassage01.php.