Artist Statement
Crossworlds presents sampled images and audio in an interactive computer installation that continually varies its content and compositional parameters with materials acquired through a web-based database portal and on-site performance and media acquisition. The installation uses a circular table as a projection surface to display a computer monitor image. The table is equipped with twelve photo sensors. Visitors wave variable-density filters attached to wands over the sensors to control the installation.In the installation, images and sounds of nature mix with images and sounds of human cities and technology. Reduced to patterns, natural and man made imagery merge in a hypnotic kaleidoscope; however, when visitors begin to interact with the display, topical images from communications media erupt. The images come from a continually updated database open for contributions from the public throughout the year. The artist will also collect new materials in Nagoya in performances with a laptop computer.
Crossworlds is an intermedia work, where sounds and image events are controlled by the same underlying parameters, and an interactive work, where each visitor creates a new configuration. The publically accessible database and the performance element further emphasize the role of the artist as a mediator of social processes, as opposed to an isolated creator of objects. Crossworlds attempts to examine how the “comings and goings” of communications technologies are mixing geographical locations and persons together into new constellations. It is easy to be hypnotized by the speed and momentum of these changes, by the transformation of the world into patterns of information. Fortunately, our state of technological distraction is continually interrupted by events, large and small. Will our dearest desire be to return to distraction, or will we waken to the construction of a more just world?
The interactive multimedia installation Orai/Kalos was first presented at the International Symposium on Electronic Art, October 2002, in Nagoya, Japan. The Center for Art and Technology at Northwestern University provided material support for the project; BOXMedia provided some useful audio. A revised version (using magnetic sensors) was presented at SIGGRAPH 2004 in Los Angeles, USA, with some valuable assistance from Apple Computer. In 2005, a further revision was presented at the International Computer Music Conference in Barcelona, Spain, where the artist also spoke on a panel on table interfaces. A useful online resource on tangible interfaces grew out of that panel. In August 2006, documentation on Orai/Kalos was presented in the New York Digital Salon, as part of an ongoing video series on Abstract Visual Music. Two of the curators, Jack Ox and Cindy Keefer, kindly mention my work and ideas in their essay On Curating Recent Digital Abstract Visual Music.
Orai/Kalos was developed in the now obsolete application MacroMedia Director and in MaxMSP. I provided most of the audio and images, and wrote the code. Images were projected down onto a table with embedded sensors. Interaction was through wands that drove three “agents” over a graph of directional “nodes” that triggered audio/visual events. Spatialized audio and granular synthesis were handled by MaxMSP, triggered from Director. The table was a little too big for one person to manage—the idea was that two or three people would be necessary to reveal all the potential events. In particular, if the three agents (one for each wand) all met at one node, the kaleidoscopic mix of images would clear, revealing a background image expressive of social relationships and concerns.
- Paul Hertz. In the Canary Islands, Paul Hertz once lived in a volcanic cave. He spent many years in Spain producing graphic, musical, and intermedia performance works with traditional media. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago he began to develop digital intermedia works. Hertz is a founding member of Chicago’s IgnoStudio artists collective. He teaches and develops interactive multimedia applications at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, USA. A grant from Northwestern’s Center for lnterdisciplinary Research in the Arts is helping him to develop VR performance works in an electronic CAVE. https://paulhertz.net/