Arie Altena
index
Thursday afternoon, March 29, 2007. The Dutch artist
Marnix de Nijs is hard at work realizing the first public
presentation of his project EI4, Exercise in Immersion 4.
A demo version of this work will be on display in the exhibition
at DEAF07, the Dutch Electronic Art Festival. EI4 is an
art game, a technically complex project for which De Nijs
is developing software in collaboration with in V2_.
AA: What can we see during the first “user
test” of EI4?
MdN: EI4 is a game you
play in a big room. When you play you wear a crash suit
and goggles that give you a stereoscopic video feed of the
hall, which is recorded by a camera attached to your head.
When you walk onto the playing field, you see “bions” flying
around – they’re kind of intelligent blobs of mucus. You
have to collect them by walking up to them; then they stick
to you. The bions help you navigate in the higher levels
of the game. There are concrete pillars in the hall, but
you can’t always see them because of the goggles. The bions
always fly around them, though, so they’re an extension
of your self that helps you navigate. The game thread of
EI4 is “assembling” an instrument you can use to survive
in a changing world. The world changes in the game from
a video feed of the actual space to a modified and adapted
3D copy of it. The gameplay focuses on the boundary between
virtuality and reality, between real and unreal. I place
myself at that boundary and play games with it, like taking
away pillars in the game world that are there in reality,
so you run into them. It’s a physical way of showing that
boundary. It doesn’t get any more physical than that. You
smash right into the pillar, and out of the artificial world.
That’s why you’re wearing a crash suit. The dividing line
between reality and unreality, immersion and non-immersion,
also plays a part in my previous work, Run Motherfucker
Run (RMR). In that piece, the treadmill hurries you along;
you can gain control over it, but if you don’t, then you’re
literally flung off the treadmill, and thus physically thrown
out of the gameworld.
In your installations,
you often take the person who’s experiencing the
work to
a point where their senses, or at least their eyes and ears,
are
receiving different information from their body. In this
you seem
constantly to be seeking an extreme: crashing
into a pillar, getting
really nauseated...
You can see them as tools you have to learn to use within
the span of
time when you’re experiencing the installation.
I always try to program
it so that within a reasonable
span of time you can find a new balance
between all your
sensory inputs: auditory, visual as well as that of
your
organ of balance – those are the three basics in my work.
They are
the ingredients between which I create a new balance,
and you either
find it or you don’t...
You’re
building a machine that creates an imbalance – and the job
of
the person who enters the installation is to find a
new balance.
Exactly.
In
that sense it’s about the incorporation of technology. Much
of
your work has a heavily physical presence: big machines,
a big speaker
thrashing around on a six-foot arm, hovercrafts,
a chair spinning
wildly inside a projection. At first glance,
it makes it seem as if
your work is about machines, like
the machine art of the 1980s. But
when you experience it,
you find out it’s about the power of the human
being, who
triumphs over the machines by adapting.
But a lot of people aren’t able to. It’s an investigation
into that
theme. That’s how I program the balance of the
installation. It would
be very easy to make the machine
much meaner. I could set the treadmill
in RMR so that everyone
would fly off. But I don’t. I try to find and
indicate
the boundary between balance and imbalance. I’m not
pessimistic
about technology; my work is not a critique along the lines
of
“We’re weak little humans of flesh and blood, and we bleed,
and the
violence of technology is killing us.” If you’re
thrown off the
treadmill, you might think that. I’m looking
for a balance – and
sometimes I lean more to one side,
and sometimes the other – because I
don’t have a very comfortable
relationship with technology. That might
sound strange
coming from me, but I’m really not that happy about
spending
so much time sitting in front of those computers (he points
to
his desk) there on my work table. And it causes me physical
problems if
I sit there too long.
But
you are fond of technology...
I like
tinkering with cars, and here is my invention for today:
a thing
you can use to make a spirit level aim a laser
beam straight up in the
air. I made it today, because for
EI4 we had to hang sensors on the
ceiling in very precise
positions. We used this to measure out a
diagram on the
floor and then project it onto the ceiling. I make tools
for
things like that. You could buy it in a store, but I like
making
things myself. I also like fixing things. It’s a
general interest of
mine, which led me to this kind of
art. My first pieces were machines,
but they weren’t interactive.
At a certain point I wanted to make them
interactive.
Why?
Because you can
generate greater engagement. I don’t find interactivity
that
interesting in itself, certainly not as a way to offer an
infinite
number of variations for the viewer to choose
from. My installations
tell the story I want to communicate.
But I find engagement interesting.
The
balance you seek is a very precise thing. How do you find
that point? How do you set the balance?
With the RMR treadmill it was just trial and error.
I do user tests.
Not in an academic way – I’m not going
to invite a hundred people in
and ask them to fill out
questionnaires. If you have a good variety of
people, then
after ten tests you know exactly what’s going on. The
person
who’s made the thing is the worst tester: you know how the
sensors
react, how the motor is controlled, and, in the case of
RMR,
how all the parameters of delay, REM curve and filtering
have been set.
Even on a badly adjusted treadmill, I can
anticipate what’s going to
happen. And it’s the same with
the visuals. I originally had someone
write a script for
the RMR film, the one you see in front of you as
you’re
running on the treadmill. It was going to be an interactive
film
with all sorts of things happening in it. I was sure
it would work. But
in the user tests I found out that it
wasn’t at all believable. The
testers were just seeing
pictures, they were not experiencing it as a
world they
were running through. You find out these things by making
demos
and testing them. Since you can only shoot footage from
one point
of view, the viewer sees every event from a long
way off – after all,
on the treadmill you’re always moving
forward. Imagine that a group of
people is smashing up
a car in a pedestrian tunnel in the film. First
of all,
in the real world you probably wouldn’t run toward them;
second,
as soon as you get there in RMR you immediately pass them.
You
lack the cinematic means of making that kind of scene
interesting, such
as close-ups. Because of the treadmill,
you don’t have montage or
rhythm. Tim Echells’ script ultimately
wasn’t used. All that’s left of
it is some of the atmosphere.
With EI4, the opposite happened, didn’t
it? More and more script came
in – I’m thinking of the
different levels of the game. How did that
development
proceed?
The original description of
EI4 for the first grant application was
very general, although
I knew exactly where I wanted to go. With RMR,
the grant
providers and coproducers were disappointed that the script
wasn’t
used. I kept the initial description of IE4 very general,
so as
not to create overly high expectations. That’s why
it didn’t say
anything about game levels. I’m working on
the first user test now, and
there needs to be something
visual, so I have to build the levels.
There are five right
now, one of which might drop out if I’m unlucky.
Couldn’t you have decided to make just one level?
Each of the levels I’m using now contains a
research element. There are
a number of things I wish to
investigate, and I have distributed these
among the various
levels. That way I can better determine what works
and
what doesn’t. In level one, you collect bions and go from
a regular
video feed of the space to a half-mix, to augmented
reality. In level
two, you go from augmented reality to
a totally 3D world. In level
three, the whole space starts
to spin on its central point. Level four
is kind of a network
of corridors. That’s an experiment. The question
is whether
I can create a completely different world that has nothing
to
do with the real room – will you be swept up in that world
as you
walk through it? Will you have a filmic experience
that’s relevant? In
the last level, you come back to the
real room, which then slowly
becomes infinite, and objects
come flying out of that infinity, and you
try to beat them
off the playing field. They’re not really there in the
room;
that would be too theatrical. At the very end, I want to
end up
in a kind of desert, an empty open plain with a
Daliesque feel.
What software are you
using for the execution?
A V2_ intern
is drawing the 3D spaces in 3D Studio MAX. I give him
general
instructions, I make objects, and put in the light. Then
he
renders it into files that can go into the game engine.
I used 3D
Studio MAX for six years, but that was before
they put in all the
features we’re using now. For the past
few years I’ve only used Cinema
4D. I know what’s possible,
how it works and how to make light, but
it’s not my field
at all.
Boris Debackere is doing the
sound. How is that collaboration going?
I’ve worked with Boris before, on RMR. I like to work
with him because
he’s very good at using sound to evoke
a cinematic atmosphere. He and
his brother Brecht are also
working with spatial sound in their project
ROTOR. Spatialized
sound is a great thing to use when you’re walking
virtually
through a space. If the whole space is spinning, that’s
literally
Boris' ROTOR, at least if you put his sound sources
in.
That’s the reason he wanted to be involved. Artem Baguinski
at V2_ is
building in an audio engine that makes this possible:
it lets you hang
invisible objects in the game space and
link sound to them. For Boris,
it’s an interesting way
of composing that’s immediately very visual. It
could be
useful for him in the future, too. His role in the project
is
pretty autonomous. I indicate more or less what I want,
and he fills in
the details. But if he makes something
I don’t like, of course I tell
him so. Otherwise, the sound
is his thing.
How is the collaboration
with V2_Lab going? Does it make it more
complicated that
you’re using technology that’s still under development?
EI4 makes use of technology that isn’t yet available
to consumers and
is a long way from being fully developed,
even within the academic
research institutes. We’re working
with prototypes, so we run into
problems on every front.
We’re actually beta-beta testers. We’ll just
keep testing
all the way up to the opening. I’m using 25 Hexamite
ultrasound
receivers for IE4 right now; they’re location sensors. The
system
is theoretically more or less indefinitely loopable. In
the room
where you play EI4, there’s a grid of receivers
hanging from the
ceiling that receive sound pulses. On
the player’s head is a sensor
that sends out pulses, and
you can use triangulation to determine the
person’s position
in the space. It works pretty well. I track a
seven-by-twelve-meter
space, but in principle I’d like to be able to
track a
bigger one. I need a lot of sensors since ultrasound doesn’t
carry
very far. GPS isn’t precise enough by a long shot, and neither
is
the military band – I track to an accuracy of four centimeters.
The
triangulation gives an xyz position in the room. Those
data are
combined in a filter with data from gyroscope
sensors and a compass
sensor that measure the turning of
the player’s head. This is used to
steer the virtual camera
in the game engine.
When you know what kind of system
you need, first you do some research
to see whether one
exists. V2_ started doing that a year ago. Not full
time,
of course. A lot of research has been done on sensor systems
–
everyone’s doing it, actually. You find systems with
specifications
that look promising, but then you find out
no one’s done anything with
them for two years. It finally
turns out that no one has a system that
really works. There’s
just one outdoor system, which we might have been
able
to get hold of from one of the partners of MultimediaN (one
of the
main sponsors), but it wasn’t transportable. It
only works outdoors,
and also it would have been much too
expensive, it wasn’t a realistic
option; they build this
thing into sports stadiums. So we started
working with
a number of alternatives that were not optimal. We tried
to
improve some of them, but that didn’t lead to a satisfactory
solution,
either. Finally, we decided to use the Hexamite ultrasound
sensor
system with the software provided; it turned out not to
be so
bad after all, we thought. In terms of hardware,
the system is almost
infinitely expandable. You can put
up as many sensors as you want.
Except that now, a week
and a half before the first user test, it turns
out that
the software hasn’t been adapted for that at all. It’s never
been
tested for a setup of more than six sensors. A programmer
at V2_
is writing the code full time right now.
Fortunately,
we’ve stated clearly that the presentation at DEAF is
going
to be a demo, but it’s in my interest to make sure there’s
as
much as possible to see. I have to get support at DEAF07
to make the
follow-up version. That’s why I almost always
do a complex project like
this in two steps. First there’s
a demo phase. At the end of the demo
phase, I establish
the terms under which I want to continue working. By
then
I also have enough visual material to show the art people,
and I
can ask the film foundations for money. At the same
time, a demo is a
very speculative thing. Will I be able
to deliver on it? This is a big,
somewhat pretentious project.
It uses theatrical lighting; we’ve made
crash suits; we’re
making visuals. But right now it’s all just loose
ends;
there’s no integration yet. There does have to be a balance
between
what you’re presenting and what you’ve announced. I have
possibly
the biggest room at the DEAF festival; there’s fancy
theatrical
lighting. If there are bugs at another level of the
production,
I’ll fall on my face.
On V2_’s server
I ran across a document about the software
development
for RMR. It mentioned similar problems: Macs that weren’t
fast
enough to read all the data in real time; an overview of
the
various solutions that were developed; which ones worked
and which ones
didn’t.
That’s right.
With RMR, the problem was that the laser scanner we were
using
– the same kind as the one on the Pathfinder (I had access
to it
thanks to ZKM) – was sending the Mac way too much
data – more than the
computer could handle. One thing we
did was to make something in
MAX/MSP. Of course, MAX is
a handy tool for building things, but if you
really want
something good you’re better off writing it in C.
Because then you have fewer problems with reading data,
less overkill?
Yes, with MAX/MSP you
make a shell within a shell, and that causes delays and
can make strange things happen.
Are you
a programmer yourself?
No, but I can
build things in MAX. I can’t read a scanner. I understand
what’s
going on at the architectural level. I did talk to Stock,
one of
the programmers at V2_, about how to read the laser
scanner. But I
can’t do it myself. I need the V2_ Lab for
those things. For me, the
most difficult thing about the
EI4 collaboration is that in this phase
it’s solely about
developing the technology, the hard- and software. I
could
actually write down the specifications on a piece of paper
right
now. They haven’t changed in the past year. But I
really want to move
on now, and I need to. There has to
be something to see. The art
foundations that are giving
me grants won’t be happy if all I do is
develop technology,
of course. And I wouldn’t want that either.
Sometimes I
really feel a discordance in these collaborations. They’re
about
developing technology – as an artist, what do I want with
that?
While the technological development
is going on, don’t all kinds of
adjustments get made under
the influence of that process that have an
effect on the
project’s artistic aspects – how the piece needs to
function
and look?
I play a part in the technological
development, of course. But in fact
I always want just
a little bit more. All the time, I’m on the edge of
my
chair, ready to start working on the visual details – and
I can’t
yet.
That’s the delaying effect
of technological development. One always wishes to be two
steps further.
Yes – please, let me
do a user test, so I can move ahead! There’s no
point in
developing 25 levels for EI4 yet, even though I’d like to,
because
I don’t know yet which game threads work well and which
don’t.
I won’t know that until after the first test; but
before that can
happen, the technology has to at least
work. In practice, EI4’s
artistic and technological development
are intertwined right now.
That’s not ideal. And you can
see it in the way we work. The V2_ Lab,
of course, works
everything out very precisely. A rapid prototype would
actually
be more helpful to me right now, but there is no
rapid-prototyping
tool for sensor systems. It’s no accident that all
the
technical universities are tinkering with it, and there’s
no good
solution yet. I do sometimes wonder: Should I bother
with a long
developmental process like this?
Don’t things move faster in the commercial game world?
There, they work much more within established
frameworks. When you
start from scratch, you get the chance
to make something really new.
That never happens in the
game world, or almost never. I like the story
of how EI4
started. I’ve been working with V2_ for quite a while, and
I
know the people there. Now and then I email them with
a technological
question. For instance, there’s a technique
for interpreting
stereoscopic video footage and generating
3D material. My initial idea
was to have someone walk through
a room wearing stereoscopic goggles; I
wanted to record
the footage in 3D and manipulate it. They use this
technique
for making moving images from Mars. But you can only make
one
frame per second, or even 25 seconds, that way. I had
a question about
this, and I exchanged some emails with
the V2_ programmers; we were
thinking about solutions and
soon we hit on another idea. How exactly
it reached management,
I have no idea. I think Artem Baguinski told
Anne Nigten
about it. It turned out that it fit perfectly within a
research
project of MultimediaN’s. I came by to talk about it, and
we
were able to start work immediately, and pay the programmers.
There’s
normally a six-month period of getting funding
first. EI4 is a project
that suddenly took off in a big
way after some brainstorming and a
little sparring with
one of the programmers. That’s why I’d rather not
continue
the development right now; I’d rather see a user test first.
I
want to go back and reflect a little bit before rushing
on with the
technological development.
You
usually show your work at media festivals. Are you also
getting
opportunities to show your work in museums and
in a visual-art context?
That’s slowly
been happening more. The Shanghai Biennale, which I
participated
in, was really a visual art show. People from the art
world
go to see it; you meet art-museum curators there, and critics
who
write for art magazines. But in general, there’s usually
not a lot of
interest from that side. I did try once to
interest the Museum Boijmans
Van Beuningen – and it wasn’t
that they weren’t interested, but it
wasn’t a priority.
I ask partly because it strikes me that
there seem to be different
views or interpretations of
your work. A visual-art curator sees
something different
than someone from the new-media world. For example,
in
articles about the revolving speaker arm (Spatial Sounds,
which you
made with Edwin van der Heide) I’ve come across
references to
“surveillance” and “enclosure.” To my mind,
the installation doesn’t
have much to do with that. Those
ideas seem to be triggered by the
fence that surrounds
the installation. I’m inclined to see the fence
merely
as a necessity and not as part of the installation. But
visual-art
people see it differently, perhaps rightly so. What do you
think?
In Spatial Sounds I was never interested in
surveillance; that’s not
what it’s about. Surveillance
is Big Brother spying on you from a
distance; this is a
machine that explores the space and interacts with
the
viewers. At a certain point it can go crazy, but it doesn’t
have
anything to do with surveillance. But when they mention
the theme of
demarcation of space, they do have a point.
For my graduation project,
I made small, sculpturally designed
architectural spaces that alluded
to the contrast between
private and public. There were speakers in
there; one was
full of kebab broilers – that kind of thing. That piece
was
about defining place, and so is Spatial Sounds. So that
interpretation
is on the right track. And EI4 is also about two ways of
experiencing
space, although other layers also come into it. Whereas
before
it was about physical boundaries – a kind of shower-stall
installation
as a representation of your own private space – now it’s
about
boundaries in a media-dominated society: the boundaries
between
virtual and “real.”
Are there
perhaps also differences in the way people experience these
installations?
Whereas someone from the visual art world would mainly
be
concerned with the installation’s visual presence and would
look
closely at that, I sometimes think I’m practically
blind to it. In
Spatial Sounds, I immediately notice the
sound and how the speaker
reacts to me; I pay much less
attention to how it looks.
That’s how
I designed it. There’s nothing superfluous about it. I could
give
it a design, but right now it looks like a machine that
does what
it does. That’s precisely in order to solely
emphasize the speed,
movement and sound – if it wasn’t
for the fact that it’s already a very
sculptural object.
And it’s no coincidence that I put the
interpretation of
someone like Olga Majcen – she’s a Croatian curator
who
emphasizes the visual, and to whose interpretation you’re
referring
– on my website. It’s an interpretation that’s
easily missed. I really
love the kind of exhibitions she
organizes. In really hardcore
new-media exhibitions, a
lot of the time everything still tends to look
the same.
I always think, pay some attention to the visual – I’ve
seen
interactivity before. That was one of the things I
investigated in RMR,
too: seeing if it was possible to
create a genuinely cinematographic
experience. I’m trying
to do the same thing in EI4. I want to create a
filmic
quality. That’s why I’m working with people from the film
world.
Lack of visual quality is often a reason why art
people aren’t that
interested in new media exhibitions.
The new media world is sometimes
also difficult to pin
down. Some exhibitions place science and art side
by side
without distinguishing between them. One installation might
give
you a physics-related experience, and the next might give
you a
carefully thought-out artistic experience. Those
are two different
things. And unfortunately, it sometimes
happens that technologically
innovative works of art get
exhibited that are not at all strong in
terms of artistic
content.
What is the defining factor
in artistic content? Is it a balance
between the subject
that’s being investigated and the way it’s
presented visually?
To me, a work of art – regardless of what it’s
made of – is successful
when there’s a harmony, an agreement,
a balance, between the way you
present it and what you’re
trying to say. It could be conceptual art,
where you hang
a few sheets of paper on the wall, or it could be a
sculpture,
and the artist starts stammering whenever someone asks him
a
question about it. The thing the work of art is trying
to accomplish
has to correspond with what it’s communicating.
But that’s so general –
that rule leaves you a lot of leeway.
It also applies to technical
gadgets that don’t make any
claims. I’m definitely interested in social
and political
connotations. I comment on the world around me in a very
basic
way. I have my impressions, and I incorporate them. I started
working
with computers because they were around; that has an effect
on
me. You can look at RMR as a metaphor for how I feel
in the city. I’m
definitely interested in image content.
That’s why I remade the
Accelerator. In that piece, the
images had to meet a number of
requirements, since in the
installation, to avoid getting sick, the
viewer has to
synchronize the images while he’s spinning. I could have
gone
into the city and filmed in the middle of an intersection,
but I
thought that would be too literal. A forest would
have worked, too,
since they look the same everywhere.
For the first version, I ended up
quickly shooting some
footage at Hoek van Holland. Those images
accidentally
turned out to be very usable. I was there on a pretty
windy
day, after the end of the beach season; the umbrellas were
still
out, and while I was filming dark clouds started
to gather. It was all
by chance. In the first version of
Accelerator every level got darker.
It worked. To be honest,
I was much more concerned with interfaces and
machines
in those days, and that’s partly why I thought the footage
was
good enough. In Beijing Accelerator, the remake I was
asked to do, the
images are much more meaningful, and the
visual interface, which Brecht
Debackere designed, is much
better. There are shots of Beijing with
high-rise buildings
that they knocked over entire old neighborhoods
for. In
this version I avoid the romantic shots, the kind where
you’re
standing on a corner in the beautiful Hutong district
looking over at
the advancing skyscrapers. But that theme
is in there. Because of the
mix of interest in technology
and concern for the visual, programmers
and curators don’t
always analyze media art deeply enough. I think
people
should pay much more attention to this; it will lead to
better
exhibitions. Then the discrepancy between visual
art and media art will
stop being relevant.
Is it easier to make art about the modern world
using current technology?
To me, yes.
To me, it’s always about creating situations –
installations
that are real. They aren’t representations; they do
something.
An artist has to engage with contemporary discourse. For
me,
life in the technological society of today is the only
source of
inspiration. Sometimes when I travel, I don’t
see a single reason to
make art. Away from the contemporary
technological world, I don’t find
a reason to create work.
Published on V2_Archive, 2007
http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/text/default.xslt/nodenr-164384
Translation by Laura Martz
See also http://www.marnixdenijs.nl
some rights reserved
Arie Altena & Marnix de Nijs
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