Computer and Art

Advances in computer technology and the spread of personal computers have made new tools available to artists. Technological means have made it possible to re-implement ideas of the sixties and seventies, enabling the viewer to take part in works of art.

Interactive media art

In 1967 Nam June Paik presented his Participation TV, in which viewers could manipulate an abstract television picture by means of a microphone and an audio amplifier. In the same year, the Prague film-maker Radúz Çinçera unveiled his "Kinoautomat" (a movie-vending machine) at the Montréal Expo '67, probably the first interactive film experience:

"The branching structure wasn't tree-like, doubling the number of scenes needed at each choice, but rather always remained only two. They did this by carefully crafting a story such that no matter which of the two options were chosen, it would end up back at the same next choice. The vote was executed by the projectionist switching one lens cap between the two synchronized projectors. The artfulness, ultimately, was not in the interaction but in the illusion of interaction. The film's director, Radúz Çinçera, made it as a satire of democracy, where everyone votes but it doesn't make any difference." (Michael Naimark, Interactive Art - Maybe It's a Bad Idea, 1997)

In her book Pioniere Interaktiver Kunst von 1970 bis heute, Söke Dinkla has described the beginnings of this genre in West Germany. One of the earliest German interactive videos, Videolabyrinth by Ilka Lauchstädt, Rike Anders, Mari Cantu and Martin Potthoff, was shown at the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück in 1988. Shortly thereafter its makers soberly noted "that the recipient of an interactive work makes his own subjective selection from the given material, but does not have the opportunity to depart from the pre-defined structure, much less to change it".

Although interactive media art works range over an almost infinitely various spectrum, this verdict applies to nearly all. Another example is the interactive installation The Deviewer (Der Zerseher, 1991), developed by Joachim Sauter and Dirk Lüsebrink for the firm Art + Com, in which a Renaissance painting undergoes a series of transformations into ever more abstract forms through the use of an eyetracker.

Virtual environments and interfaces

The group Knowbotic Research (Christian Hübler, Yvonne Wilhelm, Alexander Tuchacek and varying co-workers), which came together at the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne, generate data environments in which visitors can explore visual and audio material, such as Simulationsraum – Mosaik mobiler Datenräume (i.e., Simulation Space – Mosaic of Mobile Data Spaces, 1993) and Dialogue with the Knowbotic South (1994). The artists Jeffrey Shaw and Agnes Hegedüs worked at the ZKM in the nineties. In The Legible City (1988-91), Shaw designed a visualisation of the cities Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe in which he replaced blocks of houses with blocks of text that the visitor could cruise or steer through on a bicycle. In The Fruit Machine (1991), Hegedüs created a virtual environment in which she assumed the function of a slot machine and gave players the opportunity of putting together a virtual fruit picture.

Before joining the ZKM, Hegedüs studied at the Institute for New Media in Frankfurt, like Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, who in their Interactive Plant Growing (1992) linked biological and technological processes, enabling the viewer to play the role of a technologically interactive gardener. The artist couple carried forward this approach in Life Spacies (1997), in Life Spacies 2 (1999) and other projects. These projects come under the rubric of "BioArt": an art form which treats the relation of nature, technology and art, and which has been increasingly represented in recent years at media art festivals and exhibitions.

Since the nineties, many video artists have turned to the new media – for example, Rotraut Pape and Gérard Couty, who in their interactive Real Virtuality installations have pursued subjects such as the body, transcendence and reality.

Space-time and virtual reality

Other artists have taken up the relation between space and time: in Invisible Shape of Things Past (1995/2001), Joachim Sauter & Dirk Lüsebrink of Art & Com created the possibility of transforming film time lapses and movements into a sculptural object.

In Wegzeit (The Geometry of Relative Distance, 2000-2002) and 5 Minute Places (2003), the Austrian artist Dietmar Offenhuber used the software Virtools to navigate video images in a virtual 3D space. In Field Work@Alsace (1999), made for the ZKM, Masaki Fujuhata pinpointed his encounters in the French region in an interactive stereoscopic installation by means of a GPS system and video.

The Finnish media scholar and curator Erkki Huhtamo assumes that in future there will be an increasing linkage of interactive cinema and stereoscopic and 3D images. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard has spoken of the "mythe du vertige consommé", of second-hand experiences and simulations that threaten someday to supplant reality. Is this a horror scenario, like the Wachowski brothers' Hollywood trilogy Matrix, or a desirable expansion of consciousness, a technological form of transcendence? In his Summa Technologiae of 1964, the science fiction author Stanislav Lem already sought to set up criteria for distinguishing virtual reality (which he called "phantomatics") from real experience.

One of the most advanced means of interactive media art to make virtual space experienceable is CAVE – Computer Aided Virtual Environment. It is mainly used at research centres round the world, at the ZKM and at the Future Centre of Ars Electronica in Linz. The Australian media artist and former director of the Institute for Visual Media at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Jeffrey Shaw, was one of the first to pioneer CAVE technology in his work Configuring the CAVE (1997), which used a wooden puppet for the user interface. For several years now a more advanced technology, Deep Space, has replaced Cave at the Future Center in Linz. Deep Space enables a spatial projection in high-definition 3D.

A far more common interface is the mobile telephone. It therefore seems to be the obvious choice for use as the control element in interactive installations. Up to now the biggest installation in which it has been employed is Blinkenlights by the Chaos Computer Club, which to celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2001 used steerable light rays to transform the windows façade of the "Teachers' House" on Alexanderplatz in Berlin into a gigantic display for greetings and Pong playing.

Use of CD-ROMs and DVDs

In addition to interactive installations, which tend to be rather complicated technically, CD-ROMs and later DVDs are inexpensive interactive media that have found wide use. They represent a new terrain for experimentation for many film-makers and video artists and serve at the same time as archives, as for the experimental film-maker Michael Brynntrup (CD-Rom: Netz etc., 1999).

Because of their interactive potential, CD-ROMs and DVDs have been increasingly used in the field of education. A good example of the symbiosis between art and education is the CD-ROM Improvisation Technologies (1996), developed by the dancer and choreographer William Forsythe at the ZKM, in which he lucidly demonstrates his improvisation techniques. The project Hamburg-Ersatz (i.e., Hamburg Substitute, 1998/99) of the artist couple Dellbrügge & DeMoll also uses this medium to convey knowledge. In their CD-ROM and Internet project, they playfully visualise utopian models for the improvement of urban living space.

Non-linear narrative, symbiosis of music and image

Mut der Ahnungslosen (i.e., Courage of the Clueless, 1997), developed by Lotio F. and Rigoletti M., treats the dramaturgy of non-linear narrative, but also interface technology in ordinary use. In a seemingly unending horror window, more than 1,500 windows can be combined by being clicked onto, producing all kinds of nonsense.

A relative novelty, works appeared in the nineties that pursued an interactive symbiosis of music and image. Experimental and electronic music has always played an important pioneering role in media art. For example, the works of the avant garde musician John Cage influenced the experiments of a whole generation of media artists. The CD-ROM Small Fish (1997), also developed at the ZKM by Kiyoshi Furukawa, Masaki Fujihata and Wolfgang Münch, provides the user with various graphic surfaces by means of whose objects he can generate music in accordance with pre-defined criteria such as timbre.