Reading 1 – “Telepresence Art”
The Summery
Interactive art is almost strictly about behaviour over composition. Viewers become active in shaping the art piece and shaping their own experience with the piece.
“Media” relates to the transmission of information from one point to another single point, whereas “mass media” relates to the transmission of data from one point to a large amount of other points.
Cyberspace is synthetic space. Man and machine are often seen as one. “Memory” on a computer is obviously a biological thing. If a human is properly equipped it can interact with others in a digital environment through transmission of images and sound.
Virtual reality relates to the images computers show that represent computer data. In optics, virtual relates to objects within, for example, a mirror. The objects are not actually real. Real stands for whatever shares spacetime. To witness virtual reality, one must be enclosed within cyberspace.
Teleprescence is the remote controlling of a real object while the user is inside cyberspace. A good example not written here might be doctors being able to preform surgery from kilometers away with the use of robotics and networking. Participants are able to experience events from perspectives and scales that are not common to us.
Telepresence is bidirectional. It differs from a phone line and the unidirectional reception of television broadcasts. Mass media is not communication: it is a one way show. Home viewers cannot often interact with what is being broadcast on screen from the studio. Telepresence is a fusion of mediums. From far away, someone, through digital space, is able to change and modify something in the real world. “Getting in touch” relates to phoning someone. People are getting into relationships via the internet. Soon we may be able to touch someone without actually doing it in the same space. It is up to new media artists to generate new aesthetic experiences that incorporate the bidirectional and multidirectional communication forms.
How will the increasing irrelevancy of distance and real space change society? Paul Virilio suggests the transmission of video has become a new “place”. Video has become very popular. Virilio says that the role of the image “is to be everywhere, to be reality.” Practically everything in society today involves images in some way. Our images did not duplicate reality, they gave it shape. The shortest distance between two points is no longer a straight line, it is real time. The only separation now are time zones.
Equipment normally used in science for data collection (robots, phones, etc) is used differently in art. It lets us address “the complexity of our perception in the age of media.” We see due to pre-laid networks that allow us to recognize illuminated objects as important. The screen does not fully separate us from reality, however it acts as a door between two spaces.
“Ornitorrinco” is an art piece where the distance between the installation and the art shoe is three miles. Users press keys on a telephone which controls a robot, named Ornitorrinco. The keypad offers specific instructions (1 is go left, 2 is move forward, etc). Pressing 5 makes the robot send an image back. Due to distance and infrastructure limits, there is a 6 second delay between pressing a button and the robot hearing the new instruction. The user can only see the space after requesting an image. Therefore the space is not actually experience by humans: we must rely on the robot to do the seeing for us.
The Response
This article helped clear up the confusion between cyberspace, virtual reality, and telepresence. I liked how Kac concluded by talking about his own piece in relation to what he was saying in the previous parts of the essay which made everything tie together. I kept thinking back to the stories heard on the news regularity of technology that will allow doctors to perform surgery from their own studio to, say, the international space station, will with the aid of robotics and networks. Seeing people on a Skype video-to-video chat is certainly better than a phone chat (since images tend to do better than audio), however it is still missing the “in person” feel that many of us still wish we had more of. Of course, as mentioned in the article, there may be a time when it is somehow possible to touch someone else without even being in the same room as them. As someone practicing new media it will be interesting to take this relatively new phenomenon, play with it, and help define what it is.
