Take a ST/ROLL: donut fantasies Exhibition E-catalogue

The Struggle to Manipulate Data as an Art Form: Problem-solving in the creative process of the “Donut/face, the database” Reine Wong, Kongkee (Artists) & Linda Lai (Curator)

Link to Work in Progress- Donut/face trial “Donut/face”: an introduction This is a creative project deploying the notion of a database to present video footage captured by the Egg lens – a tool for 360˚ panoramic shooting – over the course of a year. There are over 50 clips stored in the “Donut/face” database. In the course of realization, we asked ourselves what possibilities lay ahead if we abandoned the step of converting the images into a VR panoramic vision, which the software that comes with the lens assumes we would do. We then started dreaming and imagining what kind of visual experiences would result by keeping the donut-shape images as they appear on a 2-D surface and present the video clips in that format. This leads to the final problem to solve: how to invent productive classification of the 50+ clips in such a way that they generate new knowledge for the active users? To turn the routine mouse-clicking navigation process into an active search and discovery process implies that inventive classification must be complemented by thoughtful interface design.

Take a ST/Roll- CD Catalogue- Donut/face, Database / Revised on 22/1/05 / p. 1 of 3 pages

Research/Creative Process à 1. Analysis à 2. Categorization The two artists have engaged with analysis and categorization imaginatively and emotively throughout the construction of the “donut/face” database.

Data is a collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn. (See: http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn?stage=1&word=data.) They possess no secondary meanings unless through interpretation. In the early phase of Take a ST/Roll, the random acts of video capture with the lens took us back and forth between playful experiments and felt impulses to make sense of what we had made.

The overall bulk of data is diverse and scattered, yet valuable for database artworks.

The classification exercise in the Donut/face project encompasses two different tropes: the Constructional Level, the Emotive/Perceptual, and Documentary/Journal Level.

“Constructional Level” in the Donut/face refers to direct analysis. Building a matrix based on qualities borrowed from established visual categories defined by a camera, such as camera positions, spatial parameters, focal length, shutter speed, moving or static camera, exposure and so on. Indeed, in the early phase of our experiments, our location shooting was organized exactly along these lines to attempt some rational organization. Part of our creative process, therefore, lay in the construction of the matrix in which our hypothesis of visual meanings was embedded.

The “Emotive mode” in the Donut/face presents the interpreted meanings resulting from our attempts to map abstractions (lines, colors, shapes and movements) onto a language of human emotions. As a result, we added personalized meanings to the data. Classifying and ranking our emotions to us is a form of creation, as such exercises involve our actively proposing how the data in our database can be read and used.

The Documentary/Journal level is a response to a few most common responses from viewers we got in the research process: what is this? Where is this place? Where is this object supposed to stand? Oh, you mean this is the Festival Walk that I visit every day? Etc. So we also take time to classify the clips according to date and place they were created, as well as the architectural features. In doing this, we give the Donut/face Database an additional treat to the visitors – a journey into the fantastic, defamiliarized city space of Hong Kong.

The two levels of analysis intersect each other, building up complexity. The database becomes interesting to be looked at as well as interpreted, as something carrying latent narrative contents. The potential of interpretation is also multiplied as each donut-picture itself is also open for interpretation. This marks the difference between “data” in the normal sense and our “donut”-data.

Artist & Audience Maker & Receiver The idea of database implies that makers and receivers are interactively tied together via “usage” and “search.” Database as artwork has a procedural feature: the step-bystep experience to find out what there is accumulates to inform the user to become a more intelligent searcher. In a sense, a database is like a huge mine to excavate, or a profound memory tank to tap. The user’s ability to find something s/he looks for allows her/him to discover the character, potentials and hidden purposes of the database.

In the direction of AI but not exactly, we look into how makers and receivers can be tied together in interaction via “usage.” We think it will be great if audience input can be at least partially captured to invoke changes to the database or to their own search path. Therefore, next to classification, we have built a hidden tracking system that

Take a ST/Roll- CD Catalogue- Donut/face, Database / Revised on 22/1/05 / p. 2 of 3 pages

detects the path (frequency, duration and selectivity) of the users’ behavior, which will then transform the users’ continuous search journey based on pre-programmed rules.

Based on the above concern, the database adopts the following classifications to represent our analysis of the video clips: I. Assembly (Accumulated Ranking) II. Affection Pentagon (Emotion) III. Property Market (Architecture) IV. Free Trip Day & Night (Location & Time) V. User Guide (Play with Me) These five modes are “pre-ranked” to signify our initial round of positive knowledge production regarding the donut/faces.

There is yet one additional mechanism built across the five categories, called Ranking. It is the “hidden track” described above, which learns the users’ input to accumulate and facilitate the mechanism to move up to higher levels of behavioral complexity. It is like a top-players’ list in a jukebox. Whenever a certain video clips has been visited for once, the Ranking function computes, based on pre-set criteria, to line up a set of clips.

We understand Ranking may be obscure at a first glance. We therefore design a special users’ interface that reads: reading<=>saving<=>data computing. The accumulation of reading times raises miniature yet crucial changes to the metadata of the clip tank.

Audience’s AutonomyàSearch Procedures and Data Interpretation - how open?

Although the search interface is set up prior to the users’ search activities, the database remains an open work that allows individual users to arrive at her/his own interpretation of the data. How a user sets out her/his journey, and the resulting route that forms, determines different impressions of the Donut/face data. A totally different view of the urban interior of Hong Kong would result, for example, depending on whether one first presses the key for clips of the Statue Square in Central with silhouettes of buildings, of the interior space of lifts, or the close-up views of some human feet.

In this project, we have proposed the “Ranking mode” as a way to broaden the interactive dynamics between the users and the data-machine. To what extend does this device allow the audience to assert control over the data? This is a question we like to invite more discussion in the course of the exhibition.

Take a ST/Roll- CD Catalogue- Donut/face, Database / Revised on 22/1/05 / p. 3 of 3 pages

Optical Handlers: Give Me Your Hands and I’ll Give You a Pair of Bouncing Eyes Eric Siu, Guest Artist for the Tool-making Workshop

We’ve Got a Pair of Eyes…

Most animals rely on their sense of vision to cope with everyday life. Different species have different features of their eyes – birds have sided eyes of birds that afford a 300-degree field of vision without their turning their heads; compound eyes of flies enable them to be incredibly sensitive to danger. For human beings, our vision is called binocular vision: that is, we combine two images captured by each of our two eyes to form one complete image in our brain. Binocular vision enables us to form our sense of space by recognizing depth and three-dimensional objects. This is something born with us and we take that as an ordinary part of life.

De/Re-structuring Binocular Vision The “Optical Handlers” is an optical device that asks our two eyes to see separately.

Its main idea is to work against the perceptual experience resulting from binocular vision, that is, two images becoming one on our mind-screen due to a pair of horizontally lined up eyes. The device wants to create an experience in which the human user sees two separate images at the same time without the natural process of combining them. In this way, what the left eye and right eye captures would be retained.

Two Eyes, Two Viewing Organs, Two Visual Channels The “Optical Handlers” creates a situation in which two viewing organs preserve images as two sets of visual input. A special pair of binoculars, a goggles-like device, is created as the first part of the Optical Handlers project. In place of the normal lens for each eye, two mini-screens (of two mini-LCD monitors) are installed, each attached to a mini video camera, which is the second part of the Handlers. However, the cameras are not the replacement of the human eyes. They are not fixed in position or direction. They are mobile, and can move in any direction as they will be attached to two hands (or wrists) of the user, and the hands are free to move. This means one’s left and right eyes are filled with two different video images as the hands freely explore the space around.

Dislocated Vision: side-view, back-view, top-view and more…

The main point of the device is to free the eyes from being imprisoned in their fixed positions between our two shoulders in the front part of the head. The mobility of the hands, thus the cameras, separates the vision of the two eyes. How differently one will see is precisely what we want our users to experience in person. The key is that the user has to learn to cope with two simultaneous, separate visions that separate “seeing” (what I see) from “being there” (where I am). This is a highly unique learning and discovering process, so personalized that it cannot be generalized in writing.

The “Optical Handlers” is not a device that tries to simulate the vision of other species, but to explore mobile vision enhanced by inventive apparatus that helps us to discover our “visually defined” sense of space. The “Optical Handlers” reveal and re-direct our seeing habit: a normal human being does not have the ability to dislocate our eyeballs to widen our way of seeing, nor to exteriorize or mobilize our vision freely.

In other words, our sense of space has always been dictated by our embodied vision.

Back to Lesson One: Let’s learn how to walk…

Amazingly, by means of simple tools, transformation of senses becomes possible.

Tool-driven vision enables human to see more and differently just like telescopes, magnifying lenses and so on have done. The “Optical Handlers” encourage the human hands to play a key role in manipulating what we know via what we see. It is also an experiment with the human body, as our sight and movement of hands and body are tied together. Eyes and hands are no longer used in their normal ways. They combine to guide the use of our body. The device, therefore, provide the player with the chance to understand their body and engage in space differently.

Deliberately Mistaken*: Reflexive & Imaginative Exploration of Tool & Reine Wong’s video triptych Steve Fore

[*Mistaken is the original title of the work which has three parts, now renamed as 12 Robes, 4 Couples and 1Cycle for the exhibition “Take a ST/Roll.”]

The relationship between artists and the tools they use to make their imaginative explorations tangible is complex, and this relationship has become exponentially more intricate since approximately the middle of the 19th Century. At that point in history, artists began to use, on a significantly larger scale than ever before, mechanical technologies that mediated the relationship between the artist’s mind and her subject. At that time, these technologies were especially those of still photography. Subsequently, this relationship has also taken into account the new possibilities (and constraints) associated with electronic and digital media tools.

Over this temporal trajectory, a tradition of sorts has developed in which artists working in one or more media forms embrace a creative strategy through which they selfconsciously contravene, subvert, or redirect the stated or implied default options of the tools they work with. The motivations for this activity have varied, and may be multiple in some instances. In response to the limitations of existing technologies, for example, the 19th Century photographer Henry Peach Robinson used an early form of compositing called “combination printing” that incorporated sections of several different photographs in order to create a single naturalistic image. This looked forward to the creation of composite images by Orson Welles and the cinematographer Gregg Toland in Citizen

Kane, motivated by the inability of existing camera lens technologies to generate shots with the exaggerated focal length Welles wanted. In other situations, artists have worked at least in part from a modernist impulse to deconstruct the conventional syntax of a medium—examples of this practice include Robert Rauschenberg’s canvas-based mixed media “paintings,” Nam June Paik’s use of television receivers as a sculptural motif, and Stan Brakhage’s 1963 film Mothlight, for which Brakhage dispensed with the use of a camera altogether and instead created images by gluing dead insects and other organic matter to clear film leader. There have also been numerous examples of works in which artists have been interested especially in engaging in a kind of philosophical dialogue with the technology they are using to make the work, such as Gary Hill’s video Site Recite (1989) and Hector Rodriguez’s divergent perspective animation Res Extensa (2003).

As these examples suggest, the tools artists use for these reflexive explorations may be professional grade technologies, but at times artists also have retrofitted ordinary consumer market devices to their needs. The video artist Sadie Benning, for instance, has created a series of intimately autobiographical works using a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera, which was originally marketed as a children’s toy. In a marginally similar vein, filmmaker Jonathan Caouette used Apple’s iMovie software to pull together visual and sound images from multiple sources to create the recent festival and indie circuit hit Tarnation. Visual artists who deliberately go low-tech may do so out of fiscal necessity and/or because they appreciate the distinctively “nonprofessional” aesthetic generated by working with a tool that was literally made for kids. Also, though, this choice also may be a reaction to what Zoe Sofia describes as “neophilia,” a fetishistic obsession with the

latest and most high-powered technology that is characteristic of both the global militaryindustrial complex on the broadest scale and more narrowly of various forms of contemporary media production and consumption.1 Much computer graphics research and development over the past two decades, for example, has been driven by a desire to build hardware and software capable of ever more “perfect” photorealistic illusions.

Meanwhile, at the user end of the pipeline, electronics and computer manufacturers base marketing strategies around constructing an insatiable desire for the latest version or update of some gizmo or software package, regardless of whether this most recent iteration actually constitutes an improvement on the previous model.

In both professional and user environments, buzzwords and high concepts are crucial components of the ongoing endeavor to build and maintain at least a simulation of excitement over these new technologies. One of the most overworked Big Ideas in these postmodern times has been the concept of immersive experience, which has become a holy grail for high tech developers and creative types from a variety of backgrounds and in diverse settings, including military simulations, computer games, and media arts projects. And like many “new” technology concepts, immersion has a history that significantly predates the computer era. In fact, as Oliver Grau has shown, the impulse to create “virtual reality” environments can be traced back at least a couple of millennia, and that’s only in the West.2 Despite significant differences in philosophical orientation and styles of visualization, ancient Asian cultural artifacts and art objects—from Chinese

1

Zoe Sofia, “Contested Zones: Futurity and Technological Art,” in Judy Malloy (ed.), Women, Art and Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 504-505.

2 Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).

landscape painting to the temple complex at Borobudur—are lasting testaments to a parallel concern with vivid illusionism.

Reine Wong’s video triptych Mistaken is a quietly engaging participant in this ongoing dialogue concerning artists and their tools of expression. To create the work, Wong uses a technology that is generally associated with a somewhat peculiar contemporary variety of quasi-immersive experience. This is the EGG 360 camera lens, a device designed primarily for certain professional and commercial situations in which users are looking for Web-based photographs that provide viewers with a stronger sense of expansive and continuous visual space—photographs, that is, that look something like video images, but download a lot faster. If you work for an architectural firm, or if you’ve visited the Web site of a real estate company or beach resort, you may be familiar with the most conventional uses of the EGG, for building walk-throughs and for marketing different varieties of holiday spectacle (from that spacious oceanfront room to the on-site 18-hole golf course).

The EGG is capable of taking fully seamless 360 degree photographs (and video), thanks to specially designed computer software that converts the EGG’s literally circular photographic image to a fully panoramic, Java-coded scene. When viewed on a computer display, the user can then pan and tilt through the full 360 degree circle.

What we have here, then, is a moderately high end (the EGG lists for just under US$1000) consumer market imaging technology created in response to specific technical limitations of both photography and the Web. But this is also a technology created in response to a much older human desire for illusionistic immersive experience. The first working panorama was patented in the late 18th Century by the Englishman Robert

Barker; his was an enormous device, a circular building in which visitors could assume a specific vantage point on a single realistic scene (usually a landscape or a cityscape) that had been painted in sections, stitched together, and hung on the interior walls of the panorama. Originally conceived of for military applications, the panorama survived as an expensive popular culture novelty in 19th Century Europe (responding in part to the growth of middle class tourism).3 Mistaken presents a kind of playfully “anti-panoramic” encounter. Instead of striving for an immersive experience, Wong literally turns the EGG lens in on itself by basing her video on the raw, “unprocessed” representation—the circular image registered by the EGG before it is translated into a recognizably panoramic perspective by the computer software. (The resulting image was described in a PC Magazine product review as looking “like you pointed a fish-eye lens at a convex mirror.”4) But Wong does not simply use the EGG to record odd-looking images. Instead, she uses the lens’s unusual imaging properties to build a quietly elegant contemplation of the nature of time and space in an anti-realistic moving image environment. The content of the work is simple. Shooting in an amphitheater (i.e., a space defined by its circular nature) located in a Hong Kong park, Wong records herself walking the radius of a circle, with the EGG-fitted camera at the center point. She works within a strict set of compositional rules: she is dressed in austere black and white; she walks at a measured, ceremonial pace; she walks centrifugally, so that her image gradually grows smaller within the frame. In the three parts of Mistaken, Wong takes this raw material and

3 See Grau, 52-71. IMAX motion picture technology is one reasonably direct descendent of the original panoramas.

4 Les Freed, “Shoot Full Circle with the EGG,” PC Magazine, available online at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,2433,00.asp

recombines it to form a series of patterned visual movements, using multiple versions of the same images of herself, each time within the decidedly non-linear perspective of the unprocessed EGG image. The result is a kind of stately, kaleidoscopic dance that renders abstract the natural setting and movement that constitute the work’s foundation elements.

Instead of using the lens to create a three-dimensional illusion, Wong flattens the recorded natural space and human body, pushing the spectator’s attention toward more purely formal characteristics of color, shape, and movement. In a nicely ironic touch, the barely discernable soundtrack of the piece consists entirely of naturalistic sound recorded, presumably, at the same location—insects buzzing, birds chirping, the wind gently blowing.

The original title of the work, Mistaken, may have several connotations. It may be a play on words (“mis-taken”) referring to Wong’s deliberate “misuse” of the EGG lens, or it may be intended as a gentle reminder to the viewer that even more conventionally rendered EGG images that are no more or less illusions, representations of space, than are Wong’s deliberately distorted pictures. In any case, this is a work that is lovely to contemplate on its own merits, but it also represents a significant addition to the ongoing (and never-ending) discussion of the relationship between art and technology.

Take a ST/Roll: Donut Fantasies in the Wake of the 21st Century ONE GAME TWO TARGETS Take a ST/Roll is a playful, two-level experimentation based on a year-long research process of video-shooting HK’s city space and everyday objects with an anamorphic lens capable of a 360˚ capture.

(1) Playing with tools /subverting consumer usage: We challenge the lens package’s pre-defined usage – an obsession with panoramic VR -- to invent alternative usages. Following a widely known Modernist impulse to experiment with the apparatus , we find out how the special 360˚ lens opens up and re-defines our experience of space. We also use low-cost everyday objects and available mechanical parts to create our own optical tools to invent new visual and spatial experiences.

(2) How to tell a story? What makes something a story?

On another level, we playfully explore new narrative possibilities with the flat donut-shape (i.e. the new frame shape) moving image resulting from the use of the special lens.

A SPATIAL PLAY OF HK’S URBAN SPACE: donut fantasies Spiral staircases become forever widening rivers… Elevator boxes become fat pumpkins spitting out currents of steel meat and flashing seeds… Our donut pictures show visitors the unfamiliar of HK’s familiar urban landscape.

Our “donut pictures” are anti-realist and anti-perspectival. We turn many all too ordinary urban spots into story spaces of the fantastic, dramatizing the fluidity of movement and highlighting architectural structures and textures of surfaces.

SPACE ON DISPLAY: a four-part event Archive + Space The flamboyance of our exhaustive experiments with the lens will be presented as a computerized data space, called Donut/face: the Database.

Here, the visitor will get a glimpse of the diversity and variety of our matching exercises between camera, spatial and movement factors. Each clip will be mapped against basic shooting and camera information as well as interpretive classification including location and time, emotions, and architectural structure.

Narrative Space The “donut pictures” are also turned into the stage for drama. When a panoramic view is compressed onto a spheric view, simultaneity becomes the key interest of story-telling. The human spectator’s grasp of a full view via the free movement of the body is now replaced by a special form of omnipresence with a static viewing position. (link to “M”) This intensifies the

anticipation for inherent, limitless stories to emerge within the self-contained, framed donut space.

“12 Robes / 4 Couples / 1 Cycle” is a floor projection of a looping story that is only possible on a donut-shape surface of 360˚ capture. “Interview with the Queen” is a tale of the human bodies opening up for unusual dramatic functions.

To See and Walk Differently Two weekend workshops(link to “L”) open to the public are organized for those interested in creating optical tools with banal everyday objects that make us see and move around differently . Tools created will be integrated into the exhibition space.

(Linda Lai, curator)

Aesthetics of Partiality and its Discontents: Dissolution of the Frame IP Yuk-yiu According to the conventions of camera work in film, one of the major functions of the frame is spatial demarcation – a signifier of the camera’s viewing position via the material act of segmentation as well as concrete representation of what the camera person sees (or doesn’t see).

The active presence of the camera itself at once casts continuous space in real life into what is on camera and what is off camera. The two types of space thus created are in turn underlined by two sets of intentions. What is on screen – or framed – is central to conscious sense-making, whereas what is unframed melts into the undifferentiated mass off screen beyond our consciousness, though still potent with meanings. That is, the frame marks out a portion of the boundless world around us, places it within definite boundaries and moves it into focus of human perception. In other words, the articulation of meanings of an image is build upon the frame which is partial and tentative. Framing is no pure or accidental omission, but rather intended selectivity. If this makes sense, we may say that the conventions of camera language in filmmaking pertain to an Aesthetics of Partiality, a game that draws its power from ceaseless selection and omission.

No doubt, the above view is based on the convention of “field of vision,” that is, the scope of vision afforded by a lens. In normal cases, the breadth of field of a standard lens seldom exceeds 180 degrees, or else the space or object captured will be seen in severe distortion. On top of this, space imagined via cinematography largely imitates the result of human perception, and therefore unfolds in front of us.

Imagine that we are capable of a 360-degree spheric vision… We now see the full surroundings of the camera. The frontal axis in normal human vision dissolves. The frame’s segmentation power loses its effect. Not only does a 360-degree lens broaden of field of vision, but also the spatial definition of the framed and the unframed becomes irrelevant. In this new world of surround-vision, established conventions of film language and aesthetics of space have to loosen up. What is composition (framing)? What is (spatial) continuity (Vs spatial disruption)? What are the new possibilities of the relation between editing and camera work? What else is possible in terms of film space and its bearings on narrative? These clichéd questions become once again interesting in every sense of it.

Now my video camera is standing there wearing its 360-degree anamorphic lens. For a long while I have been resting my finger on its red button to make my call. But I still haven’t, while these thoughts roll and roll.

(Translated into English by Linda Lai)

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Transition of Cameramen-actor to Actor-cameramen

PROLOGUE Generative Experiences: art-making as procedures and classification Linda LAI (Curator) For a long time, I’ve been contemplating an installation work that is a semi-sphere like the Eskimos’ igloo, with seamless projection of moving waters on its inner walls so that when I walk in, the fantasy of being once again in my mother’s womb will be invoked. (Can someone please tell me what it’s like in a mother’s womb?)

Being enveloped is an unspeakable mysterious charm that can only be turned into an experience… I began to talk to people in the projection business about what I can do. I also came across Luc Courchesne’s panoramic video, The Visitor: Living By Numbers (

:

) viewed inside a huge hanging “bowl” with video projection viewed from bow’s centre, which he brought to the Microwave Festival 2002. From him, I learned about available consumer products for panoramic shooting that could bring me closer to my dream work.

Subsequently, with advice from others I settled on the EGG Video 360 and started to plan on involving students to engage in a series of experiments in conjunction with another colleague’s class on virtual reality. But SARS put things to a halt, and I found myself at a very different turn.

Creativity: generative series and morphological transformation

I never actually returned to the igloo-womb work since then, for I was very much drawn to a creative process in which a concept, an idea, an image, an object or a tool is turned into a node with multiple sprouting possibilities. The short piece that Reine, Kongkee and I wrote for the “Artist Statements” section of this catalogue, “The Struggle to Manipulate Data as an Art Form,” has captured the various phases of the experiment I walked through with them. The move from trial shooting to factual and interpretive classification to narrativity to conceptual engagement with framing and (anti-)perspectivism, which then took us all the way through to drifting (or city roaming), an activity grounded in critical/urban studies, questions of panorama and the varying forms of surveillance implicit in it (Reine’s obsession in particular), until we decided to put a tentative closure to the game on tool-based experimentation turned into subversive activities to re-define visually driven spatial experience (see all the exhibits, the weekend workshop content, and Guest Artist Eric Siu’s critical essay)…

The joy of creation evolved around Take a ST/Roll should be further reviewed on a different terrain that belongs to media and art histories. In the course of our experiments, ceaseless

processes of divergent transformation become the work itself. Adopting the language in generative art, the EGG Solution as a tool and the bagel-shape pictures are turned into generators. To generate is to produce, to bring into existence, to push forward something into the next possible steps. To conceive anything as a generator, one immediately turns that something into a unit that is capable of producing more units based on defined principles.

Anything can become a generator under two conditions: when it is turned into a principle for more productive activities; and when it is studied for its capability to push forward the production of the next possible members. A generator can be a word, a fragment of a story, a bundle of lines, a name, an object, a dramatic structure and the list will never end. Generators can be aural, visual, linguistic, structural and material. Generative Art performs the idea as process. In a nutshell, Generative Arts price rules and procedures.1

Another way to qualify creative activities that highlight process and its serial potentials would be to appeal to the notion of morphology. Morphology seeks to break down a thing into smaller units to look at the generative potentials of each of them, as in the case of a morpheme, a part of a word that carries meanings as long as it isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t further broken down. Morphology in zoology and botany also concerns about classification. In a sense, generative arts all exemplify some morphological characteristics, that is, to think of a unit for its potentials. In Take a ST/Roll, we have followed through our tools and pictures as both external and internal generators. External generators cross over space for outward growing evolvement: the overall process of how this event evolves from a private obsession with the motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s womb can be described as a series of generative transformation. Internal generators invite us to think and look analytically the obvious and hidden potentials of something. All the exhibits, activities, and conceptual issues mapped out are products of the EGG solution 360 and the bagel-face pictures are internal generators.

Key ideas The divergent design of Take a ST/Roll may not always convenience a casual viewer to grasp

its multiple intentions. Below is the final capture of all the conceptual impulses and critical objectives embedded in our event. They are conceptual generators as well as products of our generative series:

*anti-perspectival vision: The moment of our recognition of the bagel-face pictures as a species of its own rather than the raw version of an unprocessed image occurred when we abandoned perspectival space.

For moving images, as in paintings as well, space is imagined as if they can be experienced and measured in a rectangular cube. This is the basis for the employment of terms like depth of view and vanishing point, which form what we understand as 3-D perspective. This convention also assumes that space pre-exists the object conceptually and visually, although the object in space is the actual focus of discussion. These two principles are both proved to be unproductive or invalid in the bagel-shape pictures because parallel lines do not really run parallel each other and they do not meet. Reine has aptly used the term “vanishing horizon” to substitute for the term “vanishing point” to highlight literally where the image ends. The slightly convergent tendencies of identifiable objects speak of liberation from the pyramid section that normally dictates our angle of viewing. Minute changes in camera angles or optic components (depth of field, shutter speed and exposure etc.) would transform a picture’s meaning – far more radically than the way such changes function in normal film-video-making.

*Framing: Instead of commanding absence and presence, the frame, now in the form of two concentric circles, endows upon the images and the captured space a quality that is at once dispersive, divergent and digressive -- full enclosure. The flat “bagel” surface is not only a canvas of a different shape, but a shape that challenges assumptions for the function of a frame when it’s in the normal rectangular 4:3 ratio. The new round frame works between two extremes: the circular parameters (edges) open up, inviting continuous imagination beyond the frame, or they systematically close up a picture, replacing (or equating) the horizon line and the vanishing point with the “complete frame” and “the vanishing line” respectively. *Unseen and possible spaces: The penetrating video camera with the EGG lens culminates in a performative act of urban morphology. On the one hand, it stares at architectural constructions as if they are structures that can be broken down into smaller units, like an English word can be broken up into morphemes, or a Chinese character can be broken down into parts (radicals). On the other hand, the moving, penetrating video of the city roamer keeps re-defining the morphological function of each unit: for the unfamiliar spatial journey keeps changing the shape of the units and their compositional relation to other units. The urban space as we see it is only one state of many seeable spaces: what is seen is part of a series of conjugational moves (of morphological units). When seen as geometric lines, shapes and movements, we can start talking about what possible structures there are before and after the ones that we see. Seeing and ways to see become inseparable from the motion of the city roamer’s body. *Epistemologies: We have playfully encouraged a number of ways to see and to know. We propose “classification” as creative activity itself that generates positive knowledge production. We collapse the boundaries between “archive” and “display,” ”research and creation,” “analysis” and “signification,” and “presentation” and “representation.” We also break down the

three-in-one process of seeing-knowing-moving into distinct procedures. While the 18th- and 19th-century panorama invites us to stroll around the continuous curved paintings, the 360-degree captures of the bagel-shape pictures assign us a unique kind of stillness: immobile body, static position and single viewing position offer an omni-vision yet of images dissipating towards the vanishing horizons.

The Stroll will continue…

Our creative “serial” could have gone on but we decided to stop where you find us now in the month-long Take a ST/Roll. From here, each of us will continue to diverge into our own generative practices. Reine will continue to work on the donut pictures by digitally mapping the contours of the image sequences to turn them into abstract procedural animation. Kongkee will continue to pursue his signature narratives of playful deconstruction and semiotic minimalism.

For me, I see two possible next stops: (1) further creative and technical research on the building of a database and theoretical/historical research on theories of an archival space; and (2) to go back to the igloo-womb video projection project with generative sound works.

We are all human. So many different kinds of intellectual language have been mobilized to exhaust the serious meanings of Take a ST/Roll. For me the most memorable moments are about the following: I have learned how to walk to my School’s front door safely and how to re-coordinate my arms and legs with Eric’s Optical Handler; Eric and Coco have finally found the way to show us how each of our two eyes sees differently; Reine now is an expert interpreter who can look at a donut face and tell you right away what the scenario exactly is when seen with our naked eyes and where the camera is placed; and thanks to Kongkee, the director of Snow White’s Queen, Reine can now twist her arms, legs and neck like they are climbing tendrils.

1

For a full description, see Alain Robbe-Grillet, Bruce Morrissette, Diane Kirkpatrick, Karlis Racevskiks,

and David Leach, Generative Literature and Generative Art: New Essays (York Press, 1983). See also the following links:

http://www.generative.net/ http://www.generativedesign.com/ http://www.generativeart.com

12 Robes / 4 Couples / 1 Cycle: micro-narratives Reine Wong, Artist of 12 Robes/4 Couples/1Cycle

The overall story is about Saints. The location is particularly chosen to be in a circular piazza. Harmony is denoted by the presence/absence of frame edges by placing a circular architectural shape within a round picture frame.

The 12 Robes are the blessed saints. They appear one by one, strolling through a flat, circular space.

A person in skirt meets with another in pants-and-suit. Four of the set makes 4 Couples. This piece is the interplay of time and space. The pants-and-suit signifies devilâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s luring the saints into leisure activities such as hide-and-seek. The situation gets increasingly awkward. They find each other but get lost in space. Finally, the saints overcome the lure and regain their own spiritual unity by forming into a strong circle that looks like caterpillars queuing up. The circle of long-robe saints makes their solemn offerings in a parade of 1 Cycle. They march behind the temple-like screen, making offerings and worshipping. After cleansing their minds, they emerge from behind the screen and show their faces. Calm and peace is finally restored to the circular space,

and the saints pass away silently and gracefully to attain nirvana.

This work is inspired by my research on the panorama. In a 19th-century panorama, to get the full view, you normally take 2 seconds to turn around through 360-degree. Or you take time to stroll along the given path of a rotunda until you come back to the where you begin. In a different direction, my work involves an experiment to signify a flat circular space which allows the interplay of actress and camera. The displacement of actress and camera creates changes minute changes. The act of walking through is also the act of exploring the total space of the moving image by exhausting all reachable, walkable space in front of the camera. The shooting location, dramatic actions and shooting angle are meant to convey harmony.

The installation setting involves circular projections on the floor and a TV set with 5.1 surround sounds. The projection of the image on the floor is to take advantage of the visitorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s viewing position, allowing her/him a full view of the 360-degree tracking from one God-like perspective, like Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s encompassing vision over the 12 robesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; acts. Such a device also invites audience to walk around the image, like around a pond. The audience can read and hear the space differently while they drift their standing position in the projection space.

As for the TV set, the donut-shape image within the rectangular frame of the TV monitor turns the image back into a viewing object. It also provides convenient comparison for visitors so they can experience how viewing positions alter perceptual meanings.

The Conception of Take a ST/Roll: beyond panorama Reine Wong

IN THE BEGINNING… EGG Lens & its Use I had a mental stroke caused by an urge to marry moving images and software technology…What is a tool? What is software? How are they different from each other?

And one day, I was introduced to the EGG Solution with a challenge to turn it into a playful game. And in a playful spirit, a rule was set to produce a 360degree vision without falling back onto the Virtual 3D-tour format, assumed in the purpose of that product. The raw images produced by the lens are in like a flattened donut shape. A new definition of "framing" dawned on me as a result.

> A new definition of “Framing” emerges...

I have started making such unusual videos since one year ago – actually not long after I acquainted myself with video-making. Few people dare to change the shape of the frame of moving images, but here I am with my fantasy of roundness. I drifted in the city and I searched for new ways to see. With a basic background in perspective drawings, I was especially drawn to the possibility of a new approach to spatial representation here. Playful exploration and narration are refreshing. I became less and less drawn to conventional modes of visual representation. I began to discover the hidden visual pleasure of images in distortion due to use of the EGG lens.

Among the first things I have discovered was that the vanishing point in a normal perspectival painting does not apply to the donut-shape images

created but instead, I can only talk about “vanishing lines.” Put in another way, the images produced are kept between the boundaries of two concentric circles whereas the inner circle is a black hole (i.e. the irremovable blind spot that conceals the camera). We can consider the two circles two sets of “vanishing horizons,” which are also the only two frame lines on the donut picture. The conversion software that comes with the product works on forming a cylindrical image via adjusting the parameters of the two circles, thus a horizontal-running picture in the form of a panoramic tour trapped in a rectangular frame. By abandoning the preset procedures, I find infinite imaging possibilities.

Along the same principle, instead of treating the black hole in the centre of the round images as a defect, I look for its narrative possibilities. One direction is to treat the black hole as a new type of stage for performance. (See Kongkee’s short piece, “Why Do We Have to Hide behind the Camera?” on video fiction Interview with the Queen.)

The impulse of alterity has sustained my year-long research. 360-degree imaging is definitely a spatial wonder to me. At times I feel claustrophobic.

Other times, I wonder what to do with my eyes for there is too much to see at one time.

STEP BY STEP… Panorama: from architecture to digital media application in arts The year-long research on the EGG SOLUTION lens was paralleled by a historical research in the Panorama in the early phase. My feeling was that the two should be closely tied together. After my undergraduate training in Environmental Design, I switched to video and media arts in my graduate studies. This makes me think of how the panorama also went through similar “switches,” i.e. from a concern with built environment to electronic/digital media-base representation. What kind of transition took me through the trajectory from architectural studies to media/video art which is about the imaginary? Similarly, what do we learn from the trajectories that the panorama has travelled through ever since Robert Barker created it and obtained patency in 1787, to the contemporary times when it becomes a prominent topic in contemporary arts?

In the early phases of the panorama, paintings and the environment could not be separated. In order to provide an effective setting for a 360degree horizontal vision, a new form of building had to be designed. The rotunda, a special kind of architecture, was created to ensure the paintings were viewed as a panorama. Contemporary artists like Jeffrey Shaw also built to help us see, and in his case the painting canvases become the projection screens. Interactivity is an important consideration for the modern rotunda: while controlling what the viewers see, it also invites them to move and think.

(For a trace of the history of the panorama, please see sections A and B in essay “The Many Lives of Panoramic Vision” under the “work in progress” section in this digital catalogue.)

Through research studies in different fields, I found a perfect match between panorama and the activity of drifting. Panorama was born in the pre-

technological age. Drifting was a concept raised in the modern times in the 1950s by the Lettrist International, further developed by the Situationist International (SI), a critical/creative activity to re-discover the urban space via free walking. What I want to do is to creatively bind together the two via a new optical device. In the following, I shall detail such a process.

Seeing and Drifting

A Topological Change in Horizon and Perspective “Horizon” to me is a constructive concept rather an objective fact.

It has been used to explore previously unknown territories. It contributes significantly to the need of precise navigation. In a psychological sense, it refers to the discovery of new realities, just like the New Continents to those the sail the sea. Stephan Oettermann writes, “…if what lies beyond the horizon is unknown and frightening, then by implication everything enclosed by it is familiar and not threatening.” This is true that horizons vary and yet there is something constant: the horizon give sailors a sense of “home behind the horizon”; and to them, the horizon is always there with them, giving them the assurance to continue with their discovery. The lands beneath the horizontal border of view are the ground for activities, signifying the safe zones of certainty. Towers are built to experience the horizon.

Alpinists climb the mountains to fulfill their feverish urge to see.

In the panoramic vision of the donut pictures, the “horizon” has become two constant circular borders as described in the first section.

As a result, the image is seen in distortion. It obtains a topological change from a rectangular frame to a panoramic circular disc. Rather than taking these images as incorrect or distorted, I suggest we may imagine these images as what might have been experienced through the eyes of a frog or other animals. (Please refer to section C, “a zoological view: monocular Vs binocular vision” in essay “The Many Lives of Panoramic Vision.”)

A New Tool for Walking in the City Drifting and Flânerie Drifting and Flanerie are city-walking concepts which enable us to experience a place differently, and possibly invite us to re-map a place, an active intervention “to discover significant relationships that have so far escaped us”i. The impulses embodied in the two concepts allow me to extend the notion of mapping to photographic methods: from the singular view of a photograph that represents perspectival space to panoramic view on a round surface.

In Drifting, according to the SI, one puts aside the normal routines and usual motives to let go oneself in the surrounding for new encounters. It is a decentering experience, through which one discovers rather than reinforces certain interpretation of the city.

“A flâneur,” after Walter Benjamin, “is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic.”ii A camera capped with the EGG lens could be a useful tool to accompany walking as it transforms normal perception to create a new (visual) city-walking experience. This draws a close comparison with the city people in 18th- and 19th-century Europe who would walk into a rotunda to just experience the fascination of a panoramic view that was also about an unusual way to see.

The Free Drifter Vs the Single-minded Flâneur To me, the single frame photographic representation of perspectival space is compared to the attentive, self-oriented flâneur, just as 360-degree panoramic video shooting is compared to drifting which is distracted in vision and decentred in subjectivity.

The relatively “wandering” (for there is no obvious focus) and “excessive” (for there is always more to see than one can afford) vision took me to roam through familiar urban spots in Hong Kong to remap the physical landmarks visually with new artificial boundaries. A new terrain is obtained through 360 degrees that seems to communicate a different sense of totality.

Camera and Human Bodies Before considering any innovative narrative possibilities, the most immediate experience in drifting is that of visual pleasure. The following is a short inventory list result from my pleasurable drifting and seeing exercises, which is crucial for further scene development and design for performative approach to narrative images.

Surveilled space

Unsurveilled space

Public Streets / squares / market places / pedestrian areas Most parks / jungles of skyscrapers

Semi-public Shopping malls / department stores / terminals / vehicles of public transportation / banks / hospitals / libraries / schools / churches Some small shops / some schools / churches / most restaurants

The classification base on surveillance here is important to my discussion of the relation between panoramic and the technology of power, which I discussed in section D of the essay “The Many Lives of Panoramic Vision.”

Reference: Artists (1) Jeremy Bentham - http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/bentham.htm (2)

Luc Courches - http://www.din.umontreal.ca/courchesne/

(3)

Lev Manovich - http://www.manovich.net/

(4)

Michael Naimark - http://www.naimark.net/projects.html

(5)

Jeffery Shaw - http://www.jeffrey-shaw.net

Theoretical & Historical Comment, Bernard, 1999: The panorama. Reaktion Books, New York Foucault, Michel, 1977: Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison; trans.

Alan Sheridan. Penguin Books, London Grau, Oliver, 2003: Virtual Art. Oliver Grau. The MIT Press Cambrige, London Helfand, Jessica, 2001: Screen: essays on graphic design, new media, and visual culture. Princeton Architectural Press, New York Levin, Thomas Y., Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel (eds.), 2002: Ctrl [space] : rhetorics of surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. MIT Press, Germany.

Moretti, Franco, ????: Altas of the European Novel 1800-1900.

Naimark, Michael, 2001: VR Today; Leonardo Electronic Almanac, v. 9:5. The MIT Press, London.

Oettermann, Stephan, 1997: The panorama: history of a mass medium; translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider. Zone Books, New York Rush, Michael, 1999: New Media in Late 20th-century Art. Thames & Hudson, London Staples, William G., 1997: The culture of surveillance: discipline and social control in the United States. St. Martin's Press, New York Tufte, Edward R., 1990: Envisioning information. Graphics Press, Cheshire, Conn.

Weibel, Peter, and Timothy Druckrey (eds.), 2001: Net_condition : art and global media. MIT Press, Cambridge.

White, Edmund, 2001: The Flaneur; Bloomsbury.

Technical Reference (1) Egg Solution 360-degree lens: http://www.eggsolution.com/ (2)

Sony 150 Camera User Guide

Franco Moretti, Altas of the European Novel 1800-1900.

Edmund White, â&#x20AC;&#x153;City and the Walker,â&#x20AC;? The Flaneur; (Bloomsbury:, March 2001). i

ii

You Have Seen Too Much, You Haven’t Seen Enough Wesley Tang This may seem like an odd question but I will ask it anyway: what are the five senses? Most often the answers are quite unified: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body. Or else, they follow, rather unconsciously though, the definition of “senses” distinguished by Aristotle, namely, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Coincidentally, Buddhists also believe that when we die, we lose these five senses. Philosophical issues aside, the way in which we usually sequence our five senses seems to echo with John Berger’s famous observation of the privilege of Sight: Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.1 When a funny shape shows up, the child laughs; sometimes it panics when the things it sees are too unfamiliar. Seeing is like an instinctive means of cognition, a most “primitive” communication experience. Sight is with us way before language is.

Berger furthers his argument, saying that the way we see is limited by what we know and what we believe. As we grow up, cognition tempers sight and vision. In other words, our visual perception is subject to knowledge. When we cannot make sense of an image at the sight of it, we tend to lose patience. This is sad but quite true that our visual experience is necessarily informed vision. The ways we see speak of the learned habits we have acquired.

Although we learned how to look at certain things, there seems to be an indiscernible desire for new images, for new perspectives as well as for new knowledge. Swelled in the realm of the bizarre, we often turn this straying experience into a pleasure of discovery.

1

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972), 7.

There are thousands of ways to produce new images. Those who keep up with the latest technology can now effortlessly produce stunning images â&#x20AC;&#x201C; swift conjuring of colours, lines, shapes and textures to yield new, unthinkable images. TV screens are crammed with landscapes from the farthest end of the world, and the super effects of computer animations rewrite the most familiar physical law, and the list goes on. What is it that we have not seen?

Let us consider the Optical Handlers produced by Eric Siu. His optical tool displaces our eyes to our two wrists as two fixated miniature video cameras. The images captured by the cameras are then transmitted to two small LCD colour screens that cover our eyes like a pair of spectacles. With the Optical Handlers, we produce images not by moving our head but by stretching our limbs and moving freely in all directions. In this work of a heavy Modernist intent, Siu relocates the position of our eyes to produce a vision that is divided, multiplied and somewhat charmingly chaotic. The resulting mobile and decentred vision also produces an unfamiliar perception that in turn begs us to (re-)examine our very usual sense of position, distance and space.

But the most important implication of Siuâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work lies not in the visual and spatial

disorientation the tool produces. His work concerns more about the process and method of image-making activities: the de-emphasis of Sight has paved way for the liberalization of other senses like hearing, smell and touch. What is actually (re-)discovered is a sense of body awareness that allows us to “see” our body, if to see means to understand and become aware of. Besides the remarkable perceptual frustrations, we seem to take off from the safeguarded territory of the visual language we know well of and start to communicate freely – perhaps also insecurely – in some other sensual languages that have been too under-developed.

Creating new optical tools is certainly the most direct way to produce new visual experience but there are other ways to challenge our visual habits as well. Sometimes, the “old” tools that are available in the marketplace are fun to play with, too. Kongkee and Reine Wong have, for example, appropriated the EGG 360 camera lens and altered the set usage which is primarily to capture 360-degree panoramic images for the creation of virtual 3D tours.

Instead of following the industrial practice to perfect and convert circular images to 360-degree panoramas, they work with the donut-shape of the raw images like it is a canvas – to (re-)tell the tale of Snow White. Visual distortion is one of the obvious features of the unprocessed donut image but what troubles us most is the apparent limitation of the EGG lens. Since the lens is made to create virtual 3D tours, the manufacturer leaves a blind spot so that the camera itself will not be captured in the image. As a result, a “black hole” remains at the centre of the unprocessed circular image.

While some might simply ignore the presence of the black hole and go on with exploring the magical distortion effect, Kong and Wong have turned the black hole into the body of the cameraperson and narrator to further problematicize our tendency to look at the centre of the frame. Snow White, the heroine of the original story, would never appear at the centre of the image. Actions are literally “sidetracked” because they always take place elsewhere across the donut area. Making use of the radioactive perspective, Kong and Wong deliberately places the Queen and the cameraperson around the centre to register a shift of character identification. Consequently, we need to either move our eyeballs very rapidly or to develop a mode of reception that is less about attention than distraction.

The world is much more than it seems in our habitual reception. So, while pushing your way through this boring essay, have you already started fancying about what’s out there? Step out, worlds of insanity are just around the corner but they probably make much more sense now.

[image here] Link to Work in Progress-Donut/face Trial à

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