Technoetic Arts - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2009

Drive en Mille Sons (Drifting in a Thousand Sounds) is a musical work that uses mobile media technology to artistically examine the relationship between music and the listener. Contemporary media technologies, be they at work, home or in your pocket, emphasize playback. These devices are designed to facilitate the storage and retrieval of pre-made media assets. This work leverages the processing capabilities that rest dormant within these technologies. Drawing from the writings of Guy Debord and the situationist/surrealist practice of the drive, drifting becomes a metaphor for instrumental performance in which the openness and emergence of interactivity is articulated through sound, as music.

We occupy a fascinating moment in time when the trajectory of technological development is throwing into doubt the certainty of understandings of the boundary between the human and the technological. Perhaps one of the key contributions that industrial designers have made to humankind has been the way in which they have made the extraordinary potentiality of technology seem utterly ordinary: they call it the humanisation of technology (ICSID 2008). Designers, however, seem to be in something of an intellectual spin; they have done little to mollify the projection of these times as extraordinary and without precedent in the trajectory of the human species. Rather than adding to the many who call for discontinuity, a speculative design scenario is presented taking impetus from the opportunity for designers to reconsider the essential principles that underpin their intellectual community. The scenarios explore how it will be necessary to find a means to analyse the human and the technological without seeking closure through outmoded forms of material and representational analysis. If designers can reveal borders and epistemic heterogeneity to be matters of conceptual and rhetorical convenience, then they might act upon a strategy that understands materiality to be tied to a new form of intellectual complexity in keeping with these times. In that way, it will become possible again for industrial designers to lead the discussion of humanity and technology in a single and productive conversation.

Marcel Duchamp's preoccupation with the French army can be seen in a note he included in the Box of 1914. The note is known as loignement, and with it he declares his opposition to military conscription and then speculates that the army might telephonically reconnect the limbs and organs of its soldiers that have been left scattered across the battlefield. Duchamp wrote this note before field telephones were issued to French troops but his grotesque proposition can be seen in light of his experience as an army corporal.

In 1912, before making these caustic suggestions Duchamp had taken a motor journey and written an account of it where he describes the aggressive invasion of territory by an alien force. This invasion travelled from France's liminal frontiers to its metropolitan centre. His text is known as the Jura-Paris Road and again Duchamp reveals his military concerns. He formulates territory that proceeds from topographical amplitude to the delimitation of a straight line. In spite of its sophisticated morphology, it is threatened by alien forces aimed at testing boundaries. Duchamp published his text as a facsimile of his handwritten original, which displays the amendments and uncertainties of a man of military age attempting to evade the imperatives of military service.

The essay continues with an analysis of Duchamp's influences in writing this text and suggests a link with the philosopher Edmund Husserl in the context of the profoundly anti-German atmosphere in the French military build-up to war between 1912 and 1914. The argument closes with a survey of a military thematic in Duchamp's work after he left France for America in 1915.

A visitor's experience of immersion in projection technology accumulates over time with the navigational movements that are called for through the digital artwork. The visitor travels through the artwork to gain an understanding of space and a sense of place within the visual field. An engaging display envelopes the visitor and thereby enhances their sense of immersion. An explorative movement within the virtual environment garners understanding, facilitates decision-making and intensifies navigation. Abstraction and symbolism in the visual experience offer a metaphoric journey through the visual virtual experience. This article calls for a need to subvert and exploit rational imagery to stimulate the imagination in an effort to enhance immersion through the projection screen. The article will discuss how virtual environments fusing projection technologies with artistic imagery energizes experiential circumstances, promotes navigational movements and instigates perceptual shifts. In interactive media, the joystick navigates through a virtual environment as if painting the imagery of a place coincidently with its discovery. This self-referential journey shatters the sense of the fixed picture plane with a stable point of view established in traditional aesthetic engagement. The projection wall initially appears as a boundary for vision but acts, in essence, as a psychological screen for emergent experience.

The planet is experiencing a deep metamorphosis. The pressure that is being generated nowadays on the living can be felt in a human lifetime. The extreme speed of climate change and its impact on our ecosystem can no longer be ignored. When looking at the phenomenon of ecological resilience, we notice that after a disturbance, a shock on an ecosystem, like the burning of a forest, the resilient system rebuilds itself but not exactly as it was before, surprisingly new species grow. In social systems, humans have the capacity to anticipate, adapt and invent new patterns of behaviours.

In a world where everything is uncertain, moving, shifting, we are making an artistic proposal as an open dynamic system. We are developing two versions of the same HALO project to be presented on the sea and in public places.