Installing Reflection
in the Electronic Mirror
by Jean-Baptiste Barrière
Abstract: I discuss in this paper the status of installations, at first on a theoretical level, then through several examples of virtual reality projects to which I participated by realizing the music ("Alex" and "Messager" of Catherine Ikam and Louis Fléri ; "Worldskin" and "Le tunnel Paris-New Delhi" of Maurice Benayoun). Then I present an interactive installation for which I have both conceived the image and the sound ("Autoportrait in motion"). This installation is part of a series of projects - "Reality Checks" - on the relation between real and artificial, the question of identity at the age of virtuality, i.e. at a moment where any image or any sound can be altered in an imperceptible way for the audience, with all the consequences that this represents fruitfully from at artistic stand point, and dangerously from the point of view of potential political manipulations.
Reflection:
1. Change of direction of light or sound waves that fall on a reflecting surface.
2. Action of thinking, meditating ; thought, words that result of it.
Larousse dictionnary
1. Positions : polishing the electronic mirror
By lack of another word, and certainly by lack of imagination, all sorts of artistic propositions of extremely different forms and ambitions, are designated today under the generic and equivocal term of installation.
Without entering in a terminological debate or a stylistic exercise of a mannerist fashion, - those both would end in noticing the lack of meaning of this expression -, one has to recognize that it does not qualify very much of what it is supposed to designate or represent.
Another perspective, possibly be more constructive, would consist of attempting to give a meaning to this expression ; a less trivial meaning, and certainly an apocryph one, a deliberately creative and speculative meaning.
The object of an installation, in order to be worth its relevance in the field of art, could consist, rather than to install a more or less complex set up of devices, technical, mediatic and/or aesthetic, to install a sensible reflection on the very nature of its activity, and beyond art today.
And, a fortiori, if this installation proceeds from interactivity, it should assemble and run conditions of a reflection on the interaction between artificial and real, at the moment of the triumph of virtual.
Such an approach, both self-referential and trans-referential, should proceed in a sensible, if not sensual manner; the discourse of/on art does not imply necessarily sterility - should one recall it ?-; and the lost innocence of art, conditions this auto-reference, this auto-critique.
This is then about instillating an interrogation staged by an artistic practice through a sensible form ; and this one should be assessed also, but not only, as the enunciation of an aesthetic as well as ethic project, a statement on the state of things, of our relation with a reality more or less 'mediatised' ; without falling into the traps of making user's manuals or argumentating, caricature of a didactic art or a politically mediocre art.
In the disorder of contemporary art, which is so disturbing for some that cannot think without categories, such an enterprise, out of normality, looks particularly ambitious and even pretentious, and probably bound to failure. But it still appears valid, and could reveal itself healthy. Even more, when these installations are using new technologies, they have unfortunately too often a function of obscuring rather than clarifying, with their own self-justifying, self-installing, self-sufficient ideologies.
A part of the aesthetic challenge today, against the excesses of a certain conceptual art, in its technological variation, consists of taking the risk of "telling what one is making", while taking the responsibility of "making what one is telling". Without falling in the trap of a programmatic art form, nor getting illusioned by the effects of such a rhetoric : the audience is the only judge, and the sensible experience that he/she will have lived will be the only determining one at the moment of the artistic judgment, the only one which counts in this domain, whatever may be the convincing degree of the discourse alone.
An extreme example of such a logic can found in the piece "Osmose" (premiered in the International Symposium on Electronic Arts in September 1996 in Montreal) by Canadian artist Char Davies : the computer program used to realize the work (in plus of various quotations) is inserted in the work ; the audience being invited to navigate through it, as a constitutive part of the landscape of the piece. It seems difficult to go further in the idea to make "the spirit and the letter" to correspond.
1.2 "Alex"
Another example, on the other extreme so to say, going without justification, can be found in the piece "Alex" (premiered in Ircam in June 1996) by Catherine Ikam and Louis Fléri, for which I have e conceived and realized the sonic and musical dimension. It is a meeting between the audience and an enigmatic synthetic creature, whose face (or mask) floats in a virtual space. This "conversation" functions strictly through a process of nonverbal communication : the movements of the audience in space, determining the reactions (mimics, expressive interjections, etc.) of the creature. Nothing is explained but everything is explicit, everything is lived, without mediation, nor comment. The relations that are elaborating, described as magic, between the audience and this "person"are constructed by the experience, through the analysis of reactions, and the intuitive knowledge that emerges from it. All is suggested, nothing is said.
Legend : "Alex" : a virtual reality installation premiered June 13th, 1996 at Ircam/Centre Georges Pompidou, by Louis Fléri and Catherine Ikam, music by Jean-Baptiste Barrière ; image realization: Fred Cros & Rodolphe Chabrier (Mac Guff Ligne) ; music realization: Laurent Pottier (Ircam)
View a video about Le Messager & Alex
1.2 "World Skin"
Another approach, more discursive and clearly critical, consists to exploit consciously the ideological dimension of this form, and particularly the vector of interactivity. The French artist Maurice Benayoun has explored this area through a series of virtual reality pieces (for some of which I have realized the sound and music), that reverse the modalities of the computer game against their spirit, often futile if not frankly nefast. Assuming the relation, somehow genetic, between the technologies used in these games and in virtual reality, he turns back the behaviors, induced and constitutive of this subculture that became dominant for already several generations, and use as war machine against their own potential dangers. For instance in "Worldskin" (presented in the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz in September 1997), the audience is invited to "visit the land of war", and to become for a moment a neo-tourist, going around the battle fields of Bosnia and of the second world war, in a form of interactive version of tv news, which is in the same time a parody of these games where the sole objective is to eliminate a maximum of "enemies". With a camera, he take pictures from soldiers and civilians, from ruins and corpses that he discovers. But each time he takes pictures, he takes away a part of this "reality" : the image that he literally took has effectively been taken away from the environment that he explores, the visual field embraced by the view finder, looses its colors and become completely white, vanishes from this virtual real. If the tourist seems to take pleasure in this situation, the trigger of the camera progressively transforms itself in a trigger of a pistol, then of machine gun, and this process ends in an unbearable climax consisting of an helicopter ballet and screams where all the underlying horror of this situation becomes brutally manifested.
The sound dimension somehow reveals what is hidden behind the false appearance of this situation which is at first playful. The audience, made in a ambiguous manner to become 'voyeur', is also made to think about its own attitude, as well as on the nature of these images that it consumes every day, interactivity making it lose its false distance, the all- relative but too comfortable passivity which is the one it has while considering the news, no matter how horrible they may be.
Legend : "Worldskin": a virtual reality installation premiered in September 1997 at the Ars Electronica Center of Linz, by Maurice Benayoun, music by Jean-Baptiste Barrière ; image realization : Patrick Bouchaud, Kimi Bishop (SGI Europe), David Nahon (ZA) ; music realization : Image Auditive.
1.3 "The Paris-New Delhi tunnel"
Another example, again different, may be with more serenity, is the one of the Paris-New Delhi Tunnel of Maurice Benayoun, premiered in January 1998, for which I also composed the music. This piece follows the Paris-Montréal Tunnel, premiered in September 1995, with a music composed by Martin Matalon. A person in each place, in Paris and in New Delhi, faces a circular image of approximatively two meters of diameter, which represents the section of a virtual tunnel. He is to dig and/or explore this tunnel with a joystick, in search of the other person, whom he will possibly meet in this virtual space constructed in real time from a data base of images and sounds constituted and thematically structured from the history and the culture of these two countries.
In this piece, the playful dimension is assumed totally, but this time in order to make the audience travel through image and sound, to make it explore a virtual world composed of visual and sonic materials, representations of the real world, while going to the encounter with the other. At every moment, the voice of the other person is present, spatialised around the "digger", its localization in the quadriphonic space being a cue of its direction : if one hears the other in the front, ones digs or advances in the good direction ; if one hears the other behind, it means that one is going the wrong way, but can go back on the track by just turning the joystick and orientating it in the good direction. One can talk with the other, in order to exchange information about what each one is seeing and hearing in his own present location in the tunnel : by discovering that seems to be interested by or to explore some similar themes, they finish by finding each other, the other being represented by his face filmed by a video camera and projected on a flying veil in the tunnel. The two explorers can then chat and continue together their trip in this virtual world by commenting what they discover. At all moments, music provides other cues, sometimes nearly subliminal, on their localization in this universe. In the same way that one passes from an image to another, the concrete sounds and the sonic materials are mixed and interpolated and signify in the same time in an underlying way the precise localization of each one.
By going to the discovery of the other, by digging and exploring these visual and sonic representations, the spectator/interactor takes a pure and real pleasure in this trip through representations, that announces may be a future situation that would consist of a trip through knowledge representations.
Legend : "The Paris-New Delhi Tunnel": a tele-virtuality installation premiered in January 1998 at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris and in the Virtual Gallery at New Delhi, by Maurice Benayoun, music by Jean-Baptiste Barrière ; image realization: David Nahon & Tristan Lorach (ZA) ; music realization : Image Auditive.
View a video about the Tunnel Paris-New Delhi
Genesis and spirit of the "Reality Checks"project
The "Reality Checks" project is born and nourishes itself from these reflections and from the various experiences of virtual reality that interested me or to which I participated as a composer.
Even if, strictu sensu, it is not virtual reality (there is sensorial immersion with an helmet or with tridimensional glasses, nor gestural devices for navigation and control), it is inspired directly by the "virtual reality emerging form", and takes from it principles and what could be called "genre features", to put them in perspective and question them. The matter is definitively not about technical "tour de force" or even a simple technological demo. It is rather about staging technical procedures to the service a sensible situation carrying an interrogation on the nature of these, and on the way they change our perception, our relation to the world.
By choosing deliberately more simple technologies (and by ways of consequence more affordable and hopefully masterable), than the ones possible today with the best virtual reality systems (that allow a quasi-perfection in simulation and image synthesis), this project shows a lack of interest for pure technological performance, to insist on the use of technology to serve an expression, whose purpose proceeds from the staging of the potential dangers of virtuality, specially of the usage/manipulation of someone's image and voice, and consequently of some attributes of his identity.
The aesthetic form chosen aims clearly at provoking, I hope without making confusion, on the contrary, by provoking a personal reflection, which elaborates on the troubling experience of encountering altered reflections of one's own image and voice.
To be very clear : in this project there is for me no fascination for the occult, in which our civilization, today desperately in search of values and spirituality, is looking for comfort.
Much the contrary, it is about reversing these sick pulsional devices, these contemporary clichés and, while doing so, to nourish our work from these, as opera as a form, as nourished itself from archetypes to better transcend them, in order to propose a true aesthetic interrogation.
Without loosing track of what I consider the priority of sensitive exigency.
Because works of art that use new technologies too often have a trend to dissolve in a new avatar of conceptual art, as I underlined earlier : the programme being self- sufficient, and devaluating even the necessity of the realization.
Also, for me, the interest of interactivity is not in whatever demagogic illusion, that would make the audience the creator, by whichever procuration, and at no artistic and personal cost.
It is more about realizing a form of electronic palimpsest : where each one contributes by inscribing his own comment on a collective work in perpetually becoming, by exploring/ interrogating his own image, unfolding/revealing the "frightening foreignness" of its possible electronic becomings.
And by installing the interactive work in its function of mirror : giving to reflect.
2. Propositions : the "Reality Checks" installations series
2.1. Checking reality : confronting virtual and real worlds
Electronic devices for sound and video capture are not simple recorders, they modify reality. Not only do they send back to us, literally and metaphorically, images, but they allow us, and force us, to take a distance to them, and therefore also allow us possibly to take position in relation to them.
In this distance everything becomes possible, introspection or fear, auto satisfaction, amusement or painful questioning.
An extreme case is the one where we are confronted to our own image and to our own voice. These devices become objective and subjective analyzers at the same time.
'Reality checks' is a series of integral (mixing images and sounds) interactive pieces, where the spectator is confronted with his own image - precisely to representations of his own image and voice -, and has to interpret it.
He is exposed to situations where this image of himself is subject to progressive gliding that he can control, but only partly, since these have their own life, inexorable, that reminds him of the powers of a hidden order, one beyond appearance, and therefore establishes that all image demands interpretation.
Interactivy becomes the vector of interpretation : by exploring space, one constructs his own interpretation of this reality to which one is exposed.
Autoportrait can then become a revelation process, serious or playful, according to the perspective that each person chooses to give it.
'Reality check' attempts to be both a philosophical and artistic experience using the new interactive computer technologies of image and sound processing to revisit and question the canonic forms, like here the auto portrait, by interrogating the status of reality and representation, as well as the question of virtuality.
The "reality check series" is a collection of virtual reality pieces about the increasingly mutually dependent status of reality and virtuality, how they interact, how they eventually conflicts with each other.
They are meant to be intimate experiences, living parabolas about our changing relations with objects, as well as with ourselves, questioning our present and future in a world where the border between them may tend to vanish, letting us with even more interrogations about our identities.
2.2 "Autoportrait in Motion"
"Autoportrait in motion", first piece realized to date of this series, was premiered January 30th, 1998, in the Contemporary Art Museum of Zurich and presented until March 2nd.
The visitor enter a close space. He/she is immediately confronted to his own image projected on a wall of the room. This image lives, is transforming itself according to one's own behavior into space. Some transformations are predictable, some other not. His/her voice is also transformed and projected on the space all around. Little by little, all a world at first hidden, is revealing itself. This is fact an analysis of the visitor's behavior. Following his/her movements in space, fast or slow, concentrated or large, he/she defines the nature of the auto portrait, of images and sounds that 'come back' to reality.
Legend : "Autoportrait in motion": an interactive installation premiered January 30th 1998 at the Contemporary Art Museum of Zurich, image and music by Jean-Baptiste Barrière ; music and image realization (Image Auditive) : Frédéric Voisin (computer music), Pierre-Jean Bouyer (computer graphics), Isabelle Barrière (video camera).
View a vidéo about Autoportrait en mouvement
2.3 Technical description of "Autoportrait in Motion"
A video camera is fixed on the side of the mirror and transmits to a first Macintosh computer the movements of the audience in front of the mirror. These images and the movements they contain are analyzed by the Big Eye program, developed at Steim (Amsterdam). This software allows to specify for regions in an image, as well as objects (colored surfaces of variable size) whose movements are detected in these regions.
Depending on these informations, one then determines actions to realize, specified in MIDI (Musical instrument Digital Interface : a standard for communication between all sorts of devices for sound production, but also audiovisual resources, for instance projectors, etc.).
These actions (triggers, continuos variations) are transmitted to a second Macintosh computer, on which runs the Max program, (Max was developed at Ircam and distributed by Opcode), which analyzes them structurally, interprets them and realizes them in different ways according to a time-varying predefined scenario.
Max then controls the triggering of prerecorded sound processes (various materials), as well as variations of other real time processes : synthesis, processing, mixing, spatialization of various materials (including the voice of visitors captured by a microphone). The sound signal processing tasks in real time are realized with MSP : a specialized library for Max, developed by David Zicarelli, from the experience of the Ircam Signal Processing Workstation.
Max finally controls a third Macintosh computer, on which runs Image/ine, another program from Steim for image processing in real time. The camera placed in the axis of the mirror, transmits the visitor's images to Image/ine. Max, according to the scenario and to the detected movements, specify the tasks of image processing to realize. The real time transformed images are mixed with prepared sequences (as for the sound), realized with the After Effects program.
The image produced is then projected on the screen in the middle of the room. This is in fact both a mirror and a screen, two meters high and one meter large : it reflects the image of persons in front of it, and receives the transformed images retro-projected. The sounds are diffused in a quadrophonic space, speakers being positioned at the four corners of the room.
In general, the image and sound processing develops ideas of interpolation and hybridization, with different techniques (cross-synthesis, convolution, filtering, etc.), realized similarly on various musical and visual materials, produced in advance or in real time.
2.4 To "dis-install": "Cellitude Fragments", a performance starting from this installation.
The same technical and dramaturgic set-up was used for a performance, staging a cellist, in front of the electronic mirror. In "Cellitude fragments", premiered March 2nd at the Contemporary Art Museum of Zurich by Anssi Karttunen, the visual and sonic materials of the installation were mixed with other materials coming from the cello and its interpreter, here also both were processed in advance or in real time.
In this piece, the character of the cellist, in front of the mirror, was bringing out, by his playing, images and sounds hidden behind the mirror, including a voice of a Japanese woman, reciting an ancient japanese poem on impossibility to separate dream from reality.
Legend : "Cellitude fragments": premiered March 2nd at the Contemporary Art Museum of Zurich, image and music by Jean-Baptiste Barrière ; cello : Anssi Karttunen ; music and image realization (Image Auditive) : Frédéric Voisin (computer music), Pierre-Jean Bouyer (computer graphics) , Isabelle Barrière (video camera).
View a one minute remixed clip: Cellitude Aphorism
3.0 Other projects in the "Reality Checks"series
In the rest of this paper, I describe the other projects of the "Reality Checks" series.
3.1 Meeting with an angel
You enter alone a rather dark and small room whose one side/wall is covered by a mirror. The room is empty but for this mirror. Your image is reflected in it. Your eyes wander around what's to be seen, until you suddenly realize that there is nothing else in the room but your image in the mirror.
Then something happens : the shade of a blurred creature appears next to you in the mirror, slowly evolving/flying around you. It soon becomes clearer, as if only because your eyes are getting accustomed with it. It is an angel. It smiles to you. It follows you if you move. A soft breathless eternal voice starts to whisper to you indecipherable messages.
After a few seconds, almost without you noticing that it happened, it has changed. It is now a ghost, then a devilish figure, that suddenly screams at you.
You have no other choice that to run away.
3.2. Self-Portrait
You enter a photomaton. You sit down after having locked the door behind you. You prepare yourself by looking at your face in the mirror, by adjusting the height of the rotating chair in order to match your eyes with the markers disposed in this intention.
Then you press the ready button. A flash makes you blind. Low vibrations start. When your eyes quickly recover, you realize that your image has changed. Not only you cannot recognize yourself anymore, but your altered reflection is like frozen. You are not yourself anymore, or you do not recognize yourself. Who is this in the mirror?
If, under shock by what happened, you do nothing else than look at this alien in the mirror, which somehow still bears something of yourself, you suddenly realize that the image is in fact not frozen. It changes slowly and becomes more and more foreign to you.
The vibrations are more intense, oppressing. If you press the ready button again, another image, even more altered of yourself will appear.
Again and again, more and more distant to you, until you suddenly decide to leave this place at once, deeply perturbed
3.3. Remote-control
You enter alone a room in which there is only a closed TV set, an armchair in front of it, and a small table in between, with a remote-controller on it. You sit down in the armchair, take the remote, search for the on button, quickly find it, and press it.
The image comes, together with a heavy noise. What appears is first 'snow', the white noise typical of the lack of tuning on a signal of a network.
But it is quickly becomes your own image sitting in the armchair. You immediately realize something strange is going on. It is not quite right. This is frozen. No, it is not. In fact, it is progressively changing, becoming something else, somebody else. If you try to switch with the remote control, the changes are more brutal. Now it becomes a woman. Then a man. Then an older person. Then somebody even older. Then a ghost. Then the chair is left alone. Silence.
You may go.
In fact, you are already gone.
3.4. Make-up
You enter alone a badly lit room in which there is nothing else than a make-up mirror on a table covered with just a make-up color palette, and an armchair in front of it. A switched-off neon light is on the top of mirror.
The mirror seems empty, not reflecting any image. You sit down and suddenly the mirror somehow starts working, showing your image, in the same time that the neon light switches on with an unpleasant, exaggerated noise.
You realize immediately that something is wrong : your image is like frozen. If you touch and pick colors on the palette in order to make up yourself, the mirror makes sudden changes, altering your image with colorful deformations linked to the color you have chosen. But besides that, the image slowly transforms itself, becoming more and more alien to you.
After a short while, in a climax of foreignness to you, where the neon noise became unbearable, it suddenly stops, the mirror becoming dark, the neon switching off together with its painful noise.
You may leave.
