Coactive Art

WORDS ON WORKS Words on Works are short statements about new artworks in which art and technology coexist or merge. Words on Works are published regularly on the ISAST online database F.A.S. T (Fine Art Science and Technology) and in the ISAST online newsletterF.A.S. T News. In the spirit of Leonardo, the information they contain is what the artists themselves have chosen to say about their own work. TRANSACTION Martin Cox, 1489 Avon Park Ter., Los Angeles, CA 90026, U.S.A. Transaction (1989) was a processoriented , site-specific installation. It consisted of 160 black-and-white photographs . I began by photographing four individuals in a series of staged events involving daily activities of contemporary Western life-walking up a staircase, shaking hands, getting out of a car, turning a key. Through this process of documentation, I amassed a large amount of detailed photographic evidence that formed the raw material for my work. Using photographic printing techniques , I inverted, fractured and repeated the images. I then edited this material to produce sequences and groups of images to retell the events. The subsequent installation at Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, was formed with these groups of images and with additional images produced when I photographed the inside gallery space. This meant that the walls, floor and ceiling of the gallery not only displayed the work but also became part of the imagery, providing a link between the viewer and the history of the events. The exhibition was designed to be read as a single narrative, with the viewer detecting connections and incongruities from one sequence of images to the next by the juxtaposition of these images. In this way, Transaction explored the visual mystery and the apparent truth created by connecting isolated incidental evidence into a single narrative. COACTIVE ART David Gaw and Ed Koch, 82 Webster St., San Francisco, CA 94117, U.S.A. E-mail: Since 1988, we have been exploring a form of interactive art that we call coactive art. We use the term 'coactive', rather than 'interactive', to ernphasize an aesthetic of the viewer-object interaction rather than an aesthetic of the object itself. Our goal is to produce objects that permit viewers to perceive their influence on the objects without precisely knowing the nature of that influence . This implies that the objects must have a certain level of autonomy ; their behavior must not be totally determined by environmental and/or sensory inputs. We achieve this coupling of viewer and object through the use of computers , sensors and computer-controlled actuation devices such as motors, lights and video images. One such device, The Sock, is a 6-ft-tall monolithic form covered with a highly elastic material. Thirteen electric motors cause the shape to change and deform in various ways. Speed and direction of the motors, and thus the shape of the object, are controlled by input from a 1O-x-12-ftgrid of switches, hidden under a carpet, that determines the positions of viewers in the room. The sculpture is dynamic and changes its shape based on the presence of viewers. Emotion Pictures, another project we are developing, is the next step in interactive video. Over the last few years psychophysiologists have developed techniques that allow one to crudely determine a person's emotional state or 'emotion estimate' based on basic physiological signs (skin temperature, pulse rate, skin conductance). The Emotion Pictures system captures and processes these signals, using the emotion estimate to control the sequence of images shown according to rules defined by the artist. For example, a rule might instruct, "if fear is increasing then show image-sequence y, otherwise show image-sequence z ". NEZUMI (RAT) Reiko Goto, 1446 San Bruno Ave., San Francisco, CA 94110, U.S.A. Nezumi (1989) is a result of my interest in spaces that are created by animal movement. My ideas often come from my work experiences as a volunteer at the Marin Wildlife Center. The Center takes care of injured wild animals and raises rats to feed captured predators. One of my jobs is feeding the rats and cleaning out their cages. In summer 1989, there were about 50 rats at...