The “non space” as an environment for artistic creation and training

The “non space” as an environment for artistic creation and training Manthos Santorinaios(1), Nefeli Dimitriadi(2),Voula Zoi(3), Konstantinos Tiligadis(4) (1)(3)(4) Multimedia-Hypermedia Laboratory of the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA) 256 Pireos Ave., 18346, Athens, Greece msantori@otenet.gr, vzoi@telecom.ntua.gr (2) Art et Technologies de l’Image, Universite Paris 8 2, rue de la Liberté 93526 - SAINT-DENIS cedex 02 nefeli@wanadoo.fr Abstract This paper presents results from an attempt to define a virtual common space for artistic creation and training, which is open and overcomes the barriers of verbal language communication. This work was carried out within the scope of the European funded Intensive Programme «ATELIE: Art and Technology for an International Language» (http://www.medialab.asfa.gr/delphous). The working team was setup by the Multimedia-Hypermedia Laboratory of the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA), the Department of Sculpture of the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), and the Department "Art and Technologies of the Image" of the University Paris 8 (Univ-Paris8). Participants (students and professors) worked throughout one academic year (2005-2006) towards defining such a virtual space. Many theoretical questions arose, such as: Is it going to be a city based on realistic models (e.g. with houses, galleries)? Should it be related to nationality/religion? Finally, after extensive discussions through the network, the working team adopted an abstract space with no rules and not a specific architectural style. Rules are defined as long as new virtual objects are incorporated, and the space exists as long as a student constructs something. Unlike other virtual environments, here, an idea, a colour, an object, or even a software component play the same role and can become parts of the virtual environment. This common space was implemented as a Macromedia Flash-based multi-user environment, developed by Pascal Ruiz, Lecturer then at Univ Paris-8, for hosting students’ creations. Database support was provided through open technologies (php/MySQL). A set of tutorials, was exchanged throughout the academic year about how to construct avatars and stages that can be immediately host by this platform. In this way, students were able to create their own projects both separately and jointly, and upload them to the common infrastructure. The working team met in Greece, at Delphi (from 3rd to 13th July 2006), where all the pieces were put together and an open, multi-user space for artistic creation and experimentation was released. The final view of the virtual space is an endless environment, where each user, as an «avatar», can wonder around and explore different parts of the world or trigger interactions with other avatars through symbolic language – each avatar may carry its own symbols or retrieve predefined from the database. The results concerning the view of this virtual world after the students’ projects were inserted are described in this paper. Three different categories of such projects came out during the training process: those that concern and/or affect the whole world and avatars (e.g. viruses, knowledge registration), those that appear as different «stages» where an avatar may be “trapped” during navigation (e.g. labyrinths), and first person projects which are directly linked into the platform. Keywords virtual space, artistic creation, non-verbal communication 1 1. Introduction Teaching Digital Arts - which is not just teaching new media - involves many issues related with aesthetics, perception and investigation. Therefore, it is not a trivial issue how to define the educational space and which tools to use. These were the basic problems that triggered Multimedia-Hypermedia Laboratory team to investigate new areas of audiovisual and digital expression for the sake of education and innovative artistic creation, since the Multimedia-Hypermedia Laboratory of the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA) was founded. One of these areas is that of games environments, which is expected to play a very important role in the domain of culture. Especially multi-user gaming platforms over the worldwide communication infrastructure (the Internet) can be very powerful tools facilitating the educational process as they highly attract young people and stimulate their imagination. Furthermore, they can be complete frameworks for artistic design and development as • they combine different kinds of digital information (such as graphics, images, video, sound) • they provide a common virtual space for exhibiting artistic creations, while the navigation facilities that they support make artworks accessible to external visitors • they bring on collaboration and team work, as participants are able to interact with each other and with the environment • the use of Internet as the basic communication infrastructure maximizes accessibility and eliminates the need for students to be present in the real classroom. However, the use of such environments in the educational process of Digital Arts students is not very obvious, as the aim is twofold: • to cultivate students’ perception of new concepts • to stimulate students’ expressiveness by defining an open environment which is capable of accepting any new creative idea, while evolving through it. Our approach towards the use of computer games technologies does not concern the creation of new computer games, or a critical view against them. It has stemmed from the need to find a suitable environment for education and artistic creation, based on digital technologies which are easily accessible and exploitable by the academic community. Since 2003, the ASFA Multimedia-Hypermedia Laboratory has been developing an activity, on an international level, in collaboration with the department Art and Technology of the Image of the University of Paris 8 and the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), who had similar cogitations. After meetings in a real space, seminars and collaborations on the Internet, the principal ideas were thus formed: we decided to utilise the technology and the culture of the games on the internet, forming a space of artistic expression, collaboration and education. We have concluded that there were big possibilities to define and construct a space different than the “real” world; therefore there was no reason to subsume it in urban or institutional limitations. This space was constructed mainly with ideas as raw material. The ideas that are being transformed into a new language: the “language of programming”. This space can be situated everywhere, as long as someone can look it up, as long as he has the technology to visit it, the knowledge to understand and communicate with it, the curiosity to explore it and the disposition to change it. The rule that was valid in this space was that there were no rules, so it would be formed according to the rules that the participants would lay down. In the rest of this paper we present work carried out within the scope of the European funded Intensive Programme «ATELIE: Art and Technology for an International Language» [1]. 2. Theoretical Framework: Towards a Non-Verbal Communication in the Internet 2.1 Internet Utopias: an open space for experimentation John Potts, in his essay “Nowhereseville. Utopia is No-Place” clearly formulates this very question: “And now, in the postindustrial, postmodern era, where is utopia? Removed as we are from the futurist faith in the machine and in progress, sceptical and more inclined to look backwards than forwards, is there room for utopia? The answer is that utopian desire is stronger now than ever, because postindustrial topology has opened up a new dreaming space. Utopia thrives in the contemporary immaterial sphere, the electronic no-place: cyberspace.” [7] 2 Internet is by itself a non spatial space: no localisation can be assinged to it. It is an alternative space promising a virgin territory where humanity is invited once more to re-think and “redesign” a system that will shape a new social environment. In this sense Internet promised new utopias: in the Net, human beings were supposed to surpass the physical constraints (virtual vs physical space, immateriality vs materiality, transcending of geographical barriers etc.) and the social ones (planetary impact, freedom of expression, democratisation of the media, transcending of the cultural barriers etc.) According to John Potts “The utopian dream of a universal language haunts a wired world based on computer language.” [7] This “universality” offered by the digital culture became suddenly the “natural environment” of the Net generations and Pierre Levy’s visions of “a new stage in the evolution of man” or of the forming of a “collective intelligence” reflect the same problematics of the network era. The question of virtual space as a “living space”, a space of exchange and communication, is treated by many net projects that have chosen as their subject the “virtual city”, the “concrete/abstract” product of the new digital urbanism of the Net. These virtual cities exist in the Internet in an artistic or non-artistic form, such as Matt Mullican’s City project in 1989, concerning a “psycho-geographic” promenade in a fiction city, Carl Eugen Loeffler’s “Virtual City” composed by habitation tours containing individual spaces and others. During the 90s when the technology allowed the creation of virtual worlds in which whoever could be connected via Internet, the pioneers of what later became the MMORGGs and the simulation games, have begun to examine the possibilities of these spaces. In 1994 Pauk Liip Sulizer, the creator of the “Second World” (Deuxieme Monde, Canal+, Cryo, 1995) questioned the democracy in the parallel virtual universes: and what if we could create a virtual city that “will only exist in the screens of the computers connected to the Internet?” A city with its own roads, its habitations, its public spaces, where the people would “be connected from all over the world to take a walk, make conversations with each other, exchange digital pictures etc.”? These are the questions evoked when a person or a group of persons launch themselves into the great adventure of re-conceiving the world in a neutral and unconstrained environment and begin to design a new kind of system in which “virtual social life” could be accommodated. This new ground could be called a “city” as much as it could be called anything else, as a simple convention, since in the virtual universe the very properties of what the word “city” means should be re-defined. Pauk Liip Sulizer when he begun his endeavour had to find answers to the following questions: should we impose laws and rules in a virtual city? Should we have the right to go wherever we please? Will we permit the citizens to grow old and eventually to die? Will our city have frontiers? Shall we permit the creation of other cities as well? And how shall we protect the liberty of our initial city in this case? Shall we have virtual money? What will “property” mean in the virtual world? Could a couple formed in the Internet have virtual kids? The “Second World” is one of the first efforts to give a concrete answer to these questions and it constitutes one of the first “spatialised” virtual communities (what later took the form of MMORPGs). The success of MMORPGs (not to mention the role-playing influence on player and all the psychosociological aspects analysed by many game-culture theorists), is also due to their capacity to provide a solid communication platform for “ludic” collaboration so that the players are endowed with the means to re-invent and re-define their ones worlds and their own worlds’ rules. The question then becomes, how could human beings function via their virtual self, in a space “neutral” and “free”, such as Internet auto-regulated, multi-user platforms? What would then these beings do with this “utopian possibility” so unexpectedly offered to them? The same questions were addressed in the ATELIE project where three teams from University of Paris 8, Athens School of Fine, Arts and Polytechnic University of Valencia attempted to create a “neutral”, “empty” space where the collaborative creation of a “new world” could take place. In the ATELIE project for a collaborative creation in an “empty” space, the questions of the re-appropriation of virtual space via utopian approach have been treated by a trans-university team, open to experimentation, research and art. 2.2 “Digital culture: research for an international non-verbal language” A preparatory work on the main idea of the ATELIE project was done by the participating Universities, in June 2004, as an initiative of the ASFA Multimedia-Hypermedia Laboratory (www.withoutwordproject.asfa.gr). A multicultural approach on the subject of language through art and technology, aiming at the creation of a tool for on-line research and education was adopted. 3 A software, some aesthetic rules, are a language of common use that every one integrates in his own personality, his own culture, his own particularities, while the common language constitutes the culture itself. The language of common use is a "new territory" that will eventually create "new housemates", and so will then create a common language. Today more than ever, the subject of language, along with the subjects of identity and culture, becomes of a great importance. However, a very close relationship exists between these subjects: ΄Without being confused, culture and language maintain very close relationships.... To assimilate a culture, means first and foremost to assimilate its language. The multiplication of the exchanges at the global scale opens an arena where the languages are in a relation of disjunction and of translation one with the other... A multicultural team experimented and explored the question of language in the site of Internet as well as in the site that once, at the time when the world was a smaller place, was named ‘the centre of the earth: Delphi’. An International Trans-University Seminar was organized by the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA) on the subject of “Digital culture: research for an international non-verbal language” from 1st to 6th of June 2004 at Delphi, with the collaboration of the Department of Sculpture of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, the Department Art and Technologies of the Image of the University Paris 8 and the School of Fine Arts of the University of Shanghai, aiming at the development of a collective work of art in the form of a web-site, on the subject of language, with the minimum use of the ordinary verbal language. In order to substitute the verbal language, in this project, an effort was made to use the artistic language, the technological language and the language of improvisation. This website was created within five days thanks to the collaborative work of the participant professors and students, using material that was produced in situ through exercises, improvisations and workshops. 2.4 ATELIE project “Art and Technology for an International LanguagE: a European Approach” As the needs of transcending the local barriers and collaborating at a European and, moreover, international level, become more and more intense, one of the fundamental issues posed by Culture is the problem of language. The domains of Art and Technology, domains with intense activity on communication and “language” with its wide meaning, provide different possibilities and solutions in the use of language for international communication. In these frames, a multicultural team worked together, exchanging knowledge, ideas and experiences in both practical and theoretical level, on the subject of language: image, sound, programming, corporal expression, are some of the fields that formed the base of an educational program between three European Universities. In a constantly evolving context that is characterized by a powerful web that contains almost all the information, a constant evolution of the tools for artistic expression, and an internationalization of most of the activities, the question arises: where can we locate the artist’s laboratory and mainly the education space? Three Universities, each one with a different experience, form a proposal for a virtual space that can be situated everywhere, developing in this way artistic experimentations towards an international collaboration. It is a “non-space” that is created gradually through the participation of artists-students. The experiment has already completed the second stage (first stage: the creation of the space, second stage: the creation of projects through courses and experimentations) and moves on to the third stage (distance learning and artistic collaboration between the Universities). The trans-university project ATELIE “Art and Technology for an International LanguagE: a European Approach”, by University Paris 8, Athens School of Fine Arts, and Polytechnic University of Valencia, is developed in the framework of SOCRATES-ERASMUS Intensive Programme and concerns the use of digital gaming in art creation, education and collaboration. The fundamental aims and objectives of this project are in a first place the promotion of the collaboration between different European Universities especially in the Mediterranean area, the encouragement of the use of the new technologies in the domain of art and culture, the creation of a common ground where a new “language” of the digital age could be developed and the promotion of new ways of communication in the Internet. The central seminar of the Intensive Programme took place at the annex of the ASFA at Delphi for 10 days (3rd - 14th of July 2006). The proposed activities were related to three axes: 4 a. Theoretical seminars on communication and language b. Practical exercises on the artistic language (multimedia, hypermedia, visual arts) c. Original research on the ”machine language” (programming, software languages development, communication protocols, algorithms) 3 “Delphous” platform: an environment for artistic creation and training 3.1 No-space-No-rule game The first decision which was adopted towards defining a common virtual working space was that the students would work on the network and its culture. This decision pushed the educational program into new directions and advanced students’ skills. Then, the matter of language appeared as a natural consequence of cooperation with people of different nationality and temperament. The problem of communication in such a way that language doesn’t restrict students’ expressiveness pushed our investigation one step further, as we had to distinguish between human languages and the tools that programming languages provide for communication. Therefore, we decided to adopt a non verbal communication, which could be based on audiovisual components (e.g. symbols) and software components over the Web. The methodology was initially based on the experience gained from the International Trans-university seminar: “Digital Culture, Research for an International Non-Verbal language” (see Section 2.2). This attempt to define a common virtual space for training and artistic creation was quite successful, but not sufficient, as single-user Web technologies do not cultivate collaboration and team work. A multi-user virtual environment seemed an option that we wanted to examine. Therefore, the next experiment was that the students would create a virtual city, in common, each one constructing a part of it. The architectural design and construction would be based on 3D technologies, and the different parts of the city would then be transferred to a multi-user platform [3]. This experiment was not very successful because each student created an architectural behemoth of his/her own, based on the civilization that he/she knows, and therefore a common space enabling collaboration was not defined properly. The above project was abandoned and new efforts began through the “ATELIE project. The working team was set up by the Athens school of Fine Arts, the Department of Sculpture of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, and the Department "Art and Technologies of the Image" of the University Paris 8, coordinated by Professor Marie-Helene Tramus from Univ-Paris8. The main task of this team was to define a virtual common space for artistic creation and training, which would be open and would overcome the barriers of verbal language communication. Many questions arose while trying to define – at a theoretical level - the identity of this environment. Would this be a city? Would this city be based on realistic city models (e.g. with houses, Town Halls, galleries)? Would it be related to nationality/religion? Finally, the working team proposed an abstract space with no rules and not a specific architectural style. In this endless space, every student would be able to design and put his/her own artwork. Therefore, rules are defined as long as new virtual objects are incorporated, and the space exists as long as a student constructs something. Unlike other virtual environments, in this “no-space-no-rule” concept, an idea, a colour, an object, or even a software component play the same role – they can become parts of the virtual environment. 3.2 Results All the above participants of the ATELIE project (students and professors) worked throughout one academic year towards the direction of the “no-space-no-rule” virtual environment. The basic graphics design technology was decided to be Macromedia Flash, as it is quite popular, suitable for Web applications, and easily accessible by the academic community. A basic infrastructure comprising a multi-user Macromedia Flash-based platform was developed by Pascal Ruiz, Lecturer at Univ Paris-8, for hosting students’ creations. Database support was provided through open technologies (php/MySQL). Many tutorials were released throughout the academic year about how to construct avatars and stages that can immediately be host by this platform. In this way, students have managed to create their own projects separately and put them all together under the common infrastructure. 5 The working team met in Greece, at Delphi (from 3rd to 13th July 2006), in an International Transuniversity seminar, were all the pieces were put together and an open, multi-user space for artistic creation and experimentation was released. 3.3 The virtual space The final view of the virtual space is an endless environment, where each user in the form of an «avatar», is able to wonder around and explore different parts of the world or trigger several inter actions with the virtual space or the other avatars. Communication between avatars is achieved through symbolic language – each of them may carry its own symbols or retrieve some predefined from the database (Figure 1). Fig.1. Avatar gesture selection Space borders, as well as rules of navigation are defined only by students’ artworks which can be of two kinds: 1. Those that concern and/or affect the whole virtual environment and avatars (e.g. viruses, areas that change color at avatar movement) 2. Those that have a limited effect and appear as different “stages” 3. First person projects which are directly linked into the platform Some examples of the first category are the following: The Library It is an abstract construction of a library, which is used to gather the whole knowledge of the virtual space (Figure 2). Fig.2. The Library 6 Once a new artwork is registered into the platform, a new book entry is created on-the-fly containing information about the artist, which is then stored into the database. By clicking on each book the avatar may be transferred to the artwork that it represents. Mailboxes It is a virtual post structure that simulates the idea of asynchronous communication. The mail boxes can be found all around the virtual environment, and can be accessed by any avatar (Figure 3, left picture). Fig.3. Mailboxes Once an avatar wishes to send an email to another avatar it can trigger a mailbox and enter the authoring area (Figure 3, right picture), where it can draw the message and send it. The use of non verbal communication is again obvious here. Graffiti A similar authoring area is used by the graffiti project in order to create graffiti drawings and put them anywhere inside the virtual space (Figure 4). Fig. 4. Graffiti Dots A visualization of the traffic inside the platform (Figure 5). 7 Fig. 5 – Dots Other more specific projects that fall into the second category mentioned above (those that do not affect the whole environment, but form different stages where avatars are trapped) are illustrated in Figure 6. Figure 6 - Autonomous projects (Left: The Labyrinth, Right: The game of life) Finally, some first person projects which are directly linked to the platform are illustrated in figure 7. 8 Fig. 7. First person projects (Left: The world of dreams, Right: The satellite) 3.4 The future The next step is to integrate the project in the programme of studies of the participant Universities. A common e-course is already established between ASFA and University Paris 8, for the development of exercises on “non-verbal” artistic experimentation in the platform “Delphous”. A new project named “Neighborhoods of the World” is under development and will be customized for the Delphous platform. The dissemination of the results of the first phase in relative exhibitions and conferences will continue, aiming to get feedback from other academic institutions as well. The venture of defining a virtual space for artistic creation, collaboration and learning will continue with the aim to evolve it into a more powerful tool, which will be open to academic community for research and educational purposes. Also, several research issues that have stemmed from this attempt, such as non verbal communication, will be further investigated. References [1] ATELIE project - http://www.medialab.asfa.gr/delphous/` [2] Castells, Manuel, La Société en réseaux, éditions Fayard, 1998 [3] Mitchell, William J., E-Topia. Urban life, Jim – But not as we know it, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1999 [4] Rheingold, Howard, The Virtual Community, HarperPerennial Paperback, USA, 1993 [5] Santorinaios, Manthos, Zoi, Stavroula, Tiligadis, Konstadinos, and Konstantinou, Yiannis, “Exploiting digital game technologies for the new needs of artistic training and creation”, in BCI nd Conference Proceedings, 2 Balkan Conference in Informatics (BCI 2005), November 17-19 2005, Ohrid [6] Santorinaios, Manthos, “Experiences of a Greek Artist in the field of technologies. From the Artist’s Laboratory in 1987 to Virtual Centre in 2003”, paper from the meeting Digital Culture and Artistic Creation: Greek creators, Foundation of the Hellinic World Art Nouveau Programme, March 2003 [7] Tofts, Darren, Jonson, Annemarie, Cavallaro, Alessio, Prefiguring Cyberculture. An intellectual History. MIT, London, 2003 [8] Without Words Project - http://www.withoutwords-project.asfa.gr 9