The Presence Project

The first part of Andrea Zapp's current current work, Eye 2 Eye will open on 16 June.

Eye 2 Eye – Networked Installation is developed for the Okno Gallery in Cheljabinsk, Russia. her partners onsite are Dmitry Lathukin and Svetlana Shlyapnikova from the Okno Gallery. The gallery's website is at http://www.oknogallery.ru/en/index.html

Andrea will be showing the work locally via a LAN connection at the summer festival at the GI in Moscow on the 16th of June and then travel on to the Urals, to set up the work as a networked link between theUral State University (Ekaterinburg) [http://www.usu.ru/] and South Ural State University (Chelyabinsk)

Andrea describes the piece:

Two remote identical black wooden boxes are connected via the Internet using I Sight cameras and an I Chat video interface.

Visitors glimpse through a small peephole into the box. An invisible camera inside on the opposite wall captures their eyes and transfers it to the other box, where it is displayed underneath the camera on a small round-shaped projection screen and vice versa. Both participants exchange their views in real-time, looking into each other’s eyes.

This surveillance interface inside the box is embedded into a stage like miniature set of an earth globe below and amidst a starry sky with little colourful planets dotted around that seem to float in the space. It recalls a satellite perspective, which is underlined by the surveillance interface above; but the view onto this small universe glowing in the dark, reminiscent of toys even, implicates ironic commentaries in itself – resulting in thoughts about who controls and who observes whom in a more globally networked sense

Image courtesy Andrea Zapp.

Andrea Zapp's website is at: http://www.azapp.de/

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Paul Sermon is creating a new, site-specific telepresence work in Taipei, Taiwan. To enable this commission, Paul will be working in the studios at Taipei Artist's Village (TAV) until 6 May.

Gabriella Giannachi has begun a dialogue with Paul, published on the Presence Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/500, following the process of making the piece.

Paul writes:

Some images attached of the locations I have visited. The Chinese housing complex I spoke about is called Treasure Hill, this was a really inspiring space and several of the houses have been purchased by the city government and turned into artist studios/galleries.

The artists are working with a lot of found objects and using the space as living/working/studio/exhibition environments, turning one of the spaces into a bar also.

But in general I don't think it is possible to use the space for a media art installation, it's just not secure enough, it's also very damp and electrical supplies are not reliable.

But anyway - very inspiring. I'm also attaching a photo from The Huashan Culture Park I visited Wednesday to give you some idea of the scale of the space.

They also have some small studio/bedroom spaces here at Taipei Artists Village which I could use to produce an installation work which could draw some of the thoughts gathered from Treasure Hill. I will talk more about the concept emerging here in my next email.

I'm intrigued by your [Gabriella's] notion absentness in the telepresent space. In my work/notion nothing is absent but rather becoming redefined - the absence of touch is embodied in the expanded sense of sight. The same could be said for blind person - the absence of sight is embodied in the expanded sense of touch or sound. Can we expand this to cultural experience?

Over the next three months we will be following and documenting Paul's process.

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Early in the New Year we will begin documenting Paul Sermon’s development of a new commission for the opening of THEpUBLIC museum in West Bromwich, UK http://www.thepublic.com/.

Telematic Embrace will be a permanent installation in place from August 2006.

These images from Paul’s prospectus for the project are from Telematic Vision (1992), which inspires this new work.

Paul’s site-specific installations employ telematics to explore mutual interaction and user-determined narrative between remote participants.

Participants interact with others in physically dispersed sites by observing their own ‘human avatar’ representations in a telepresent space.

Paul describes how this is enabled:

Through the use of live chroma-keying and videoconferencing technology these divided audience participants enter a video installation and initially suppose they entering a passive space - sitting, standing or sometimes lying within it. Their presence within the space is recorded live on video camera and mapped in real-time, via a chroma-key video mixer, with an identical camera view of another participant in an identical installation space – combining two shots of live action by replacing a blue or green back drop in one image with the image of the other. The two spaces which can be any geographical distance apart are linked via a videoconference connection, making it possible to link and combine these telematic installations and their performing audiences between almost any location in the world.

These installations provoke an uncanny sense of presence in conflations between proximity and distance, intimacy and removal.

Paul argues that:

All technology is a development of language - a means of construction and interpretation of an environment. The definition of the virtual and real are all part of the same linguistic construct. Technology/language is not an apparatus or attachment of the body, but rather an extension of it.

For the user, remote participants come closer in a sense of presence divided between sites, actions and interactions.

Paul’s website is at http://www.paulsermon.org/

A context for this documentation of Paul’s work is already being developed on the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/PaulSermon/Home

Images courtesy Paul Sermon.

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Human Avatars is a networked media art installation by Andrea Zapp, with a soundtrack by Vini Reilly of Manchester’s Durutti Column.

The installation was launched in Manchester, UK, in October 2005 as part of the exhibition ‘Storyrooms,’ curated by Andrea at the Museum of Science and Industry.

‘Storyrooms’ explores interactive networks, media art and installation through work by Susan Collins, UK; Paul DeMarinis, Stanford, USA; Ken Goldberg, USA; Paul Sermon, UK; Cornelia Sollfrank, D; Tan Teck Weng, Malaysia; and Andrea, D/UK.

In early November, Gabriella (Giannachi) and I will meet Andrea and Paul Sermon to discuss extended documentations of their work beginning in year 1 or 2 of the Presence Project.

We plan to document and respond to ‘Storyrooms’ as a context for this work, focussing on the performance of presence through interactive and performative installations exploring telepresence and communications systems.

In Andrea’s work, the occupation of places and interaction with others becomes complex and dispersed.

For Human Avatars, visitors becomes subject to a series of live, interactive mediations, in which their presence becomes the object of attention for other remote visitors, whose watching is fed back and amplified through the installation.

Andrea describes the piece:

Human Avatars creates a visual dialogue between real and virtual participants on two networked stages:

Visitors in the exhibition space discover a small wooden hut, which they are invited to enter. A live image of their body inside is projected into a remote model version of the hut, complete with model furniture, where other visitors can make contact with the tiny moving figures by peeping through a small window. Yet unaware that a second camera inside displays their peering faces back on the window of the big shed, with their eyes now overshadowing the participants inside.

The architecture and the scenario appear very playful, but the immediate interactive experience is controversial, once the voyeuristic strategy behind the idyllic backdrop becomes evident - indirectly hinting at rather ambivalent and melancholic side effects of surveillance and visual control as an intrinsic part of media and entertainment.

Andrea’s work engages with the complexities of presence formed in an interleaving of real and virtual action, meeting and place.

We will begin developing this work on the Collaboratory more fully shortly.

Andrea’s website is at http://www.azapp.de/

The ‘Storyrooms’ exhibition is at http://www.storyrooms.net/

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