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. |
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Fig.1 GPS Wrist Conductor with
Wearable Antenna |
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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.
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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.
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Fig. 3. The Wrist Conductor in
action |
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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.
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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.
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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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