Five windows light the cavern’d
man…
Europe - A Prophecy
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In many of Blake's writings on religion and philosophy, he argues that the five senses are our only true connection to God. His existentialist philosophy focused on all the pleasures life had to offer an individual; pleasures we can only perceive through our senses. I wonder if Blake were alive today, would he create his art through computers or at least argue that computers can truly interconnect each other’s experiences with time, space, and whatever deity you call your own, because computers can tap into our senses and create new meanings. 
The use of sensory devices ranges from aiding the disabled, making animated films, military support, to the touch happy bank kiosks. Once sensory devices were made available to the consumer, digital artists began exploring all the ways in which to connect. Vibeke Sorensen, artist and professor at the Division of Animation and Digital Arts School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California, writes that artists working in this medium are re-inventors, re-inventing the tools for their own device, connecting on a global level, ultimately creating a new language. Her installations explore personal and cultural identity in real time.I wanted to explore liquid architecture, performing and interacting with spaces in real-time the way a musician performs a musical instrument.” In an installation at the Fisher Gallery at USC, Morocco Memory II, Sorensen creates a liquid architecture filled with individual memories stimulated by touch and smells.
Visual and aural senses are the most widely exploited by digital media artists, while smell and taste have been left out of the computer equation. Smell is the most primitive sense, the one sense most closely linked with memory.In Morocco Memory II, a person enters a tent with a table in the middle surrounded by a rear projection screen, speakers, and a Moroccan decor. There are six boxes on the table, filled with herbs and scents associated with Morocco. The boxes can be held and the participant can walk around the tent freely, smelling, touching, and maybe even tasting the contents of each box. A microchip is placed in each box sending radio waves to a MIDI input device while triggering specific visual and aural events from a database of artist’s memories of Morocco in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Using various software including custom neural net software by Phillip Mercurio of the Neurosciences Institute, La Jolla, California and DNA musical note recognition software designed by Rand Steiger of the U. C. San Diego Department of Music, Sorensen was able to create a new labyrinth of memories for each person participating. The neural net software, designed by Phillip Mercurio is dna2abc - an application for turning DNA sequences into musical sequences. It is basically a list of rules for each DNA scan. I contacted Ms. Sorensen for more technical information and reactions to the installation. Here is her response: "I used 2 PCs and some custom hardware and software. I used Pure Data and GEM (look on the visualmusic.org website to get a download) and Midi interfaces to control it. The way I worked with smell was direct. I put specific spices into wooden boxes, and when the boxes opened, 2 things happened. The smells mixed in the air, but also signals were sent from chips inside the boxes to a remote receiver that sensed the number of the box that was opened or closed (there were 6 and numbered 1-6) and so the state of the 6 boxes were known to a host computer. Open or closed, box number, and the number of boxes open at any given moment in time. So the smells themselves weren't sensed directly. But the receptacles were sensed and correlated the boxes (and their numbers) with the data being navigated by them. The receiver made the data into MIDI signals that then affected a Pure Data/GEM program running live, making graphics and audio output sent to a data projector and speakers in the installation. it also controlled lights using a MIDI lighting controller. With 6 boxes, one person could interact with one or more. Sometimes 2 or more people could interact as well. I didn't worry about the number of people. I only worried about the number of boxes. I like the idea that people could collaborate and interfere with each other. It made the problem of navigating data one of cooperation rather than competition. It really did have that effect since the narrative of the texts and other media materials brought people together. The reactions to the installation were mostly positive. I had a surprise when 3 women from India sat in beautiful saris (traditional Indian women's formal dress) rubbing their hand in the spices in the boxes for over an hour. They were completely comfortable in the installation and having a great time navigating the materials because of the familiarityof the spices. They did what they do in India, they rub their hands in the spices and then hold their hand to their noses to smell the mixed aroma. I was delighted that I could invite people completely outside the world of "high tech art" into the installation without any problem thisway. The only negative comment came from an art historian who said to me "don’t you know that working with memory is nostalgic?" and I answered that there is nothing more central to real-time and live experience than memory. This piece is about freeing experience from fixed memory by making it dynamic rather than static. It is about updating memory by allowing it's context to change. All we know, all we sense, is based on comparison between sense impressions and stored memory. It's not nostalgic, rather it is a form of updating memory and being honest about the past rather than thinking we invent everything, which we don't. We build on memory." After that, he seemed more at ease. I had lots ofpositive feedback from people from all fields and cultures, including Moroccans. I didn't present the piece as any kind of authority onMorocco. The Moroccans and Africans were happy to be part of the dialog. And they felt respected, and that is what is most important. it is important to be a humanist, and to honor others and welcome them. I was so happy that they felt this way. It used technology, but back grounded it and prioritized humanism. My new work , Sanctuary, not only prioritizes humanism, but also environmentalism." References: |