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Opening Up Public Space

 

Art Clay

 

Performing art in civic space automatically awakens curiosity and interest in the public. The audience is lifted out and away from that of the everyday by the performers presence and actions. This type of art reaches a diverse audience who, in part, generally does not make it to the modern art venues. The resulting social interaction in civic space is unique and therefore can be important for the arts, which are all to often isolate amongst a select audience. Mobile music- and art works are finding their way into civic space, but they tend to isolate the public as a possible audience due to privacy aspect of headphones and personal displays. The resulting isolation of the performer from the audience deprives both sides of one of the most important functions of public performance: social interaction.

 

 

Fig.1 GPS Wrist Conductor with Wearable Antenna

 

 

The following study of China Gates addresses the concept of audience in public space. It shows that through the use of GPS, public space can now be defined as artistic space. The starting point for this project is the want to produce a method of conducting that could be operated by anyone and could be employed in such a manner that amateurs could enjoy the possibilities of mobile art. All of what is discussed here in relation to China Gates and the Wrist-Conductor is technically based around the synchronizing possibilities using the GPS and is aesthetically rooted in having a work, that functions in an open public space without using a human conductor in any form.

 

Fig. 2. Harmolodic Movement from Chord to Melody

 

China Gates uses a series of tuned gongs whose number is determined by the number of performers participating. The tone scale depicted in Figure 2 either in its entirety or only in part, is used to give the piece a touch of the orient on the horizontal melodic side and a more western type flavor of dissonance on the vertical chord structure side. The scale, having a mix of minor thirds and both minor and major seconds, is unique in that it effortlessly produces both interesting harmonies as well as interesting melodies. The basic sonic structure in China Gates is a "harmolodic" one, or the unfolding of the vertical into the horizontal and the collapse of the horizontal back into the vertical.

Fig. 3. The Wrist Conductor in action

 

In China Gates, the GPS Time Mark is used to synch an on-board clock housed on the controller. The Time Mark arrives at the exact same moment for all of the performers and this makes it possible to synchronize events between players. To accomplish this technically and to employ it aesthetically as a compositional mechanism, a single geographic point within open public space is used as a reference point for the software. This reference point is the SynchPoint. The relationship of the SynchPoint within the Performance Area of the city is used to place a time delay of a certain amount of milliseconds between the arrival of the GPS burst and the lighting of the LED light array used to signal the performers to bang their gongs. The amount of delay at the center of the Performance Area (SynchPoint) is 0 milliseconds and at the edge of it the delay is 1000 ms.


The programmed in delay function is key to a whole principle of "harmolodic" movement inherent in the work. When the delay amount is the same between any number of players, the LED light array on all the devices are synchronized and thus are all of the gongs hits they signal to take place. This results in a single sounding chord, whose constituent tones have a common attack point and whose number is in proportion to the number of players within the same geographic coordinates. In the opposite situation in which players are not in close proximity to one another, but are scattered within the Performance Area (i.e. having diverse distances from SynchPoint), the musically opposite result takes place and a melodic line made up of the constituent tones of chord makes its way rhythmically into sonic space and is heard as melody.

Further, the delay amount is actually determined by two aspects: The distance between the player's present position and the SynchPoint AND the "Zone Range" to which the performer's present position can be assigned to. The Zone Range acts as a gear and is functioned as follows: The performance area is divided up into three Zones by the program. The Zones form concentric circles around the SynchPoint with the distance 500 meters from the center to the areas edge. The Zones divide the entire range of Performance Area evenly and follow a simple gearing rule: If the performers is in Zone 1 every GPS Clock Pulse is used to trigger the light array, if the performers is in Zone 2 every other GPS Clock Pulse is used to trigger the light array, and if the performer is in Zone 3 every third GPS Clock Pulse is used to trigger the light array. Therefore, as the players move away from SynchPoint, the banging on the gongs is reduced until it has been reduced to 1/3 of what it was at SynchPoint.

Fig. 4. Several performers in a performance of China Gates during the Hörkunst Festival in Erlangen, Germany


All players start and end at the chosen SynchPoint. In terms of movement, each of the players tries to move when the others are not moving. This brings about a type of "choreographic counterpoint" made up of independent movements that are responsible for the rhythmic coloring caused by the vertical to horizontal harmolodic unfolding mentioned previously. The performance is not limited to a discreet number of events and regardless of the number of events played, the performance ends for each performer when he or she has returned to the SynchPoint, which is inevitably at the end of each player's route.

To conclude, using wearable computing technology within global ubiquitous networks as an art tool allows interacting with society as part of a collective consciousness. This bears significance for the creator of mobile art and also for its recipient participants who likewise realize that personal space endowed with added capabilities and explored as an extension of the self and body points to a global culture of the self in which the individual is not only part of a family, a community, a nation, but is also no longer limited to what they are part of globally. The above Mobile Arts & Social Networking statement was developed over a period of years in which experiments, performances and tool development for mobile works was being done daily for mobile works at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland. We have also had the opportunity to prove its truth in the work "GoingPublik" for distributed ensemble and wearable computers and are experimenting further in "China Gates" and related works.

 

 

Sound Artist Art Clay(born in New York, lives in Basel, Switzerland) has worked in Music, Video & performance. He is aSpecialist in the performance of self created works with the use of intermedia. Appearances at international festivals, on radio and television in Europe, USA and Japan. Extensive compositions for acoustic and electronic mediums in many genre including dance, performance and theater. . Hoerspiel and Theater productions with the Swiss writer Urs Jaeggi (Selection): "Cantate and Aria for a Glass" (1993); " Broken Words" (National PEN-Meeting Heidelberg 1996); "Spinoza ist", New Media Theater (State Theater Freiburg, Germany 2000) Music theater production together with Franziska Martinsen with Text from Kurt Scwitters/Gertrude Stein and Andrej Gromyko: "Gespannte Gefaehrtin", Erratum Ensemble (CH-Tournee 2002). "Art Clay, Musik fuer Dinge", Kulturbeitrag Schweizer Fernsehen ("10 vor 10" Programm, 2000). Together with Jürg Gutknecht, he directs the 'Digital Art Weeks' Program held at the ETH in Zurich. Recently, his work has focused on large-scale performative music-theater works and public art spectacles using mobile devices.Winner sitemapping award for new media art in 2005 and 2006.

 

 

 

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