I make Interactive Installation Art!

Together with a handful of friends (Rob Myers, Robin Schaufler, Eva Manolis, Bruce Karsh, Ron Fisher, Lieven Leroy, Becky Fuson and Delle Maxwell) I have been trying to push the limits of what this new technology can do since 1985.

Way back then computers were barely networkable, and it certainly wasn't common practice. Our piece that year was a synthetic fishbowl, together with a real world environment to put it in, you know, a nice sofa, a coffee table, some magazines...

Among other novel attributes of Plasm: A Fish Sample were the underlying behaviors that were coded into the fish. They had minds of their own and if left alone would eat each other, reproduce, and otherwise entertain any viewers with unexpected behavior.

A few years later we did a piece that started to use the network. Plasm: A Nano Sample established a portal into a synthetic world. You explored this alternate world by looking through two wheeled monitors that you could roll freely around a 20 by 20 foot room (6 by 6 meters). The entities on the inside of the monitors were simple triangular shapes, but they moved in groups and could do things that were impossible in this world, like swoop down through the floor under your feet. We used a small network in this piece to let the three machines all keep track of each other.

In 1991 we again used a network to let the machines coordinate their activities. This piece, Plasm Above the Drome, allowed viewers to use their whole body to interact with the work and each other. You stepped onto a small surfboard and off you went, crashing through virtual waves or, again exploiting the lack of physical contraints, you could dive down to surf with the underwater fish, or up into the sky with your companions. Three people could be on different surfboards at the same time, each one leaving their mark on the virtual waterscape.

This year we are working on a piece that will mirror your facial expressions, exploiting the non-physical nature of the machine to render entertaining caricatures. Although we might use the net again to coordinate between multiple machines (a sort of caricature-tele-conference) the real way the net has influenced this piece is in providing access to cutting edge research done at various institutions around the world. We wanted some face feature extraction software that would run in real time. We asked a few Web indexer sites for help and found just what we needed. We haven't named the piece yet (probably another in the Plasm: ... series however) but we have a mockup of what it might sort of be like.

So, how as an artist has the net affected me/my work? Well it makes an interesting technical challege to use it effectivly, but as critical mass of information has accreted on it I am finding it easier/more productive to use for everything from simple coordination of machines, coordination with my collaborators, and most recently research connections that would have taken years to uncover using more traditional means. I Love it!