QUANGO CREATIVE BRIDGES 2008 LECTURE SERIES
ORIGINALLY PRESENTED 5/29
DAVE ANOLIK:
Thanks for coming. This is the last of four in our spring Creative Bridges series. It’s been a great series. Tonight we have Colin Ives, who is the director of digital arts at the University of Oregon. Colin’s work is very interesting and it has to do with nature and digital technology. It has to do with things you will learn about, which I will not attempt at summarizing.
Colin and I have known each other for quite some time. We attended the same graduate program at the University of Iowa in the early 90s. I met him in the department of multimedia, but the multimedia department didn’t mean then what it means now. It meant any type of media was allowed. It didn’t specifically deal with computer programs or anything like that. So Colin showed his piece… and imagine this: there is a head of broccoli, a Volkswagen Bug, and the camera is back here. I think it was a 20-minute piece of the Volkswagen driving around Iowa. It had humor, it had an appreciation for nature, and it had a lot of amazing things that were quite wonderful.
And with that, I’ll turn it over to you.
COLIN IVES:
I was playing a video of Kit Foxes in the background earlier, and we’ll get to that point of work later eventually. It’s not where I’m going to start. As Dave said, I’m an artist who works with art and technology. The graduate program we were in, was really as David describes. A lot of colleagues of ours were doing performance work as well. So that was a huge piece of it. And there was a core of us who were moving from video to computer-based work and thinking about art and technology, which is really a core part of my practice. Both using the technology, but also trying to think deeply about the effects of technology is having on our culture.
I taught for five years in Baltimore, at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. When I was working there, I began to find that a little bit of my work began to address environmental issues. I would certainly not have called myself an environmental artist at that time at all.
Today for this talk, I’m going to retrace that thread of my work in relationship and issues of the ecology and how an immediate artist ends up working on issues of ecology while still addressing why that was related to the art. There are cultural questions that arise from working in digital media. I’m going to start with a piece that was a failure, a failure on a couple of fronts. But it’s the piece that led me to think what I was doing and indirectly affected my use of art and ecology.
I was a one of a number of artists who were selected for a DC site project. They were doing site-specific work in buildings that were empty, in downtown DC. They were plugging artists into these spaces for the summer, which was a little crazy.
So for my piece, I used a storefront. It was a piece that really dealt with the idea of presence. I took the storefront they gave me, and you can see that I made the storefront a webpage. The only things on the webpage are two web counters. So it was all about notating presence through counting. I think about it in terms of ‘hits to a website’ and why that data is important. What would that mean to make that functional on the street?
So that was the premise for the piece. I put up a webcam so I could record everything. In some ways, it was very minimal. I just put a vinyl graphic on the top to look like a web browser and I had two active counters. One counter kept count of the number of people who went to the storefront. And the other one kept track of the people who went to the website. So there was a web address involved. And if you walked up, you could pick up a little card with the web address. But there was no content. It was empty. To me it was an interesting conceptual piece that addressed the issue of presence.
What really happened in the piece was that I was given a storefront right outside a Subway. I know from looking at the webcam, was that people were taking their last smoke before they got into the Subway. I was also capturing some guy selling newspapers by the window ledge. I was getting a lot of hits, but it wasn’t from people looking at my work. So in that regard, I had the data to prove that the piece was a failure. The system allowed me to figure out that no one was getting it.
As I was coming to terms with my failure and looking at all this footage of this guy selling newspapers and people taking their last smoke, I became kind of fascinated with that footage. I’m capturing this kind of human behavior, which I didn’t even consider at all—it’s pretty interesting behavior. Do they need to care about a piece for a piece to be successful? This was my question. So the next step for me, and the next piece that came directly out of that, was a bird cam project.
I figured I’m going to make a project for birds. They’re going to care about as much as the people in the Subway did. This was about ’97. It’s funny; about six months later, a company released a bird feeder with a camera. For the life of me, I have no idea whether I should have patented it, or if they saw my site. It’s one of those things that happen.
The cameras are in the bird feeder, and it was motion sensitive. These are not time-lapsed. They are motion-lapsed. So they would upload live pictures to a website every time a bird came to feed. At the end of the day I would collect them and upload them to the website as movie. This was the idea of the web cam. I was thinking of the behavior using the technology like motion capture to sense presence. I was thinking of the technological possibilities of this piece. I was also thinking about the behavior aspect.
Another thing was that I was living in inner city Baltimore and that I was capturing all this footage of pigeons and all these animals that have made an incredibly successful niche in the human environment. All the locals referred to the pigeons as flying rats, and I really came to love these birds. And this is a project that ran for about two years, and it was one of those things that would run when I wasn’t getting any work done. It was lovely.
I also redid the piece for the Delaware Museum of Art. For this one, I put the birdfeeder outside. In the gallery, there was another feeding station. This one is for people and there was a TV inside with a live feed from outside, which isn’t that interesting. It’s pretty rare to see a bird come to the birdfeeder a lot. But there was also a third station. It was a computer station. Online, I was comparing the most recent human shot with the most recent bird shot. So that there was a parallel between human behavior in the gallery—they were coming to “feed” if you will—and bird behavior at the bird feeder.
Again, I was drawing these parallels. There really kind of prefigures a lot of the work that I did later both in terms of the technology I was starting to deploy, but also in terms of the strategy as it began to get fleshed out more.
At this point, I wasn’t really thinking of the ramifications. I wasn’t trying to get people to think differently about environment. At this point, I was just thinking about behavior, both human and animal and juxtaposing them. This was really straight forward, but you can see where I ended up in my more recent work.
The next piece I did was called “Size of Life”. I was invited to do an installation at Johns Hopkins University. They have a historic house, which has collection of books. And every artist that was accepted would do a response to a particular book they have in their collection. The idea was that the viewing audience could go into special collections, view the actual book, and then walk out to the gallery and see the artist’s response to the book.
I took John James Audubon’s “Birds of America”. You’ve all seen those reproductions, right? What you don’t normally know is that this book huge. There were only a couple hundred of them printed. It’s an elephant-folio. They are printed to the size that the birds actually are. So the largest print of the largest bird determines the size of the book—because they’re life size. It’s an amazing thing to see in person. We’ve all seen them on calendars, but if you get a chance, find special collections and look at the real thing, it’ll blow your mind. There’s a hummingbird in the middle of this huge sheet, and then you turn the page and you have the bald eagle that fills the page. And the stork has to bend over and fit the page. It’s a beautiful object and an amazing thing.
So I built a case that was exactly the same size as the book. It wasn’t quite as fancy in the gold-tooling lines and everything, but I had it professionally gold-tooled. I set a monitor in the middle of it. Audubon is this fascinating guy. He has the Audubon society named after him, but he killed thousands of birds. His writing is really disturbing. He would have notes in his diary about every bird they killed that day. You would go through each page, reading about different types of species that he has killed and thinking “this guy has a naturalist society named after him?”
On the back of each one, he wrote, “size of life.” But with his broken English, he meant, “life size”. So that was my title. I used some footage of my pigeons—my Mourning Doves—mixed in with his writing describing some of the same birds. In this writing, he discusses how good they are to eat—how tasty they are. And you kind of reveal that as you walk through it.
I also used some of his actual plates that I photographed and scanned in and then I went to some of the sites in Baltimore where they’re helping endangered birds and doing educational things for these birds. I mixed in live sections of animated footage that I shot of actual birds in with his images. So you navigate his writing, and a little bit is revealed. There’s a section where your cursor becomes a weapon and suddenly you’re shooting each of these birds. Yeah, those sections are a little brutal. It was a second piece. I kind of proposed it because I’ve been working with the birds on my porch.
This piece made me read a lot about Audubon and books by him and really thinking about his description of the passenger pigeon filling the sky. But 50 years after his death, they were all gone. He had this description of being in Virginia and the entire sky go dark just with birds. And in just 50 years, none. It’s just staggering.
So I had a couple bird pieces. I guess I’m a bird guy. I wasn’t sure if it was my trajectory. But I took a job out here, in Eugene. I don’t know why you’re here, but it’s probably a pretty good chance because of your life style and environment was a part of those decisions. And it was a huge part of my decision to take a job here. Again, I hadn’t linked that with my creative process. I hadn’t thought about those lifestyle decisions to go hiking every weekend. It seemed separate, but in retrospect, I was already working with these issues.
The first piece I worked on here was actually not about environmental issues to show you what else I do. But it also connects.
Shows “Swimmer”
That’s a piece I did with sculptor Andy Carson in Seattle. It’s a projector that rotates slowly and projects the image of the swimmer in the space that it’s in. A lot of the issues I did on this piece in working with Andy really dealt with screen space. These were issues that I was thinking about in my other body of work. This is really a study on the ecology of screen space. We have cell phones, data projectors, televisions, plasma screens. And all of these things have a cultural aspect and how they fit into our lives and how we deal with them and what kind of space they necessitate.
I thought a lot about screen space. In this piece, the question of whether it was the technology driving the image of the swimmer? Or was it the swimmer driving the technology? There’s this ambiguity and tension that I was driving with this piece. To take advantage of space, the audio was locational. The audio moved around horizontally and the image moved vertically. So these were the spatial concerns I was working with. Nothing formal. That was the first piece Andy and I completed when I moved out here even though it wasn’t shown until earlier this year.
In our second piece, I used Andy’s sklilset but it was entirely my piece because it fits into my ecological work after living in Oregon. Andy was generous to take a backseat and just build this robot for me.
Shows “The Clearing”
It uses a very similar apparatus. It projects a slim image of a forest that pans around 360-degrees. There was a sensor in front of it, and it could detect when someone cuts the beam of the projection. And when the beam gets cut, the image becomes that of a clear-cut forest. I thought that this was too obvious. It was a little heavy handed. But in reality, it was interesting. The projector was moving around and people wouldn’t want to interrupt the image. There is a taboo against breaking the image. Inevitably, when they walk into the space, they would start moving, trying to stay behind the moving image. They would walk for almost a full circle before finally deciding to break the beam. It was really interesting.
During opening night, there would be 30–40 people jammed into this 20 by 20 foot room. They would all be trying to avoid it, but eventually, someone would break the beam. It would then go to clear-cut. At first I thought I was being a bit flat-footed, but it only confirmed what people already knew. There was this tension about disrupting an image that then played itself out. It really was a powerful moment. I was concerned, but it was actually much more subtle and rich than saying directly, “you are affecting the environment.”
This then becomes specifically about the Pacific Northwest and environmental issues. This type of work gets people thinking about environmental issues in a very experiential embodied mode.
This following piece was played in China, which is a very strange place to play it. You’ll find out why in a second. The image is actually of a sucker that I put on the ground in a little light box. In over the course of two weeks, the ants removed the entire sucker. I was taking 30-minute videos every 10 minutes for two weeks, which ended up being five hours of solid ants.
Shows “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere”
Obviously, no one is going to stand in front of an installation for five hours. Basically this video was playing in real time. But if you were standing in a certain spot where you can hear the audio, the footage would speed up. The audio is an early American spiritual song. Would you call this beautiful or gross? I think it’s somewhere in the middle where it encompasses the beautiful, disgusting space.
Showing in China was definitely a strange thing with the associated music. It just doesn’t resonate. It had to be explained. It was pretty interesting of experiment. You definitely saw generations of ants go by in the course of two weeks.
The piece I was playing in the background at the beginning was a piece with kit foxes. The kit fox project was a project I proposed for ISEA. ISEA stands for International Symposium for Electronic Arts. It was in San Jose two years ago. This year it’s in Singapore. Every other year, it’s in another place of the world.
I proposed this project on urban wildlife for ISEA, and the piece really started with me buying a house in Eugene. Really quickly, I started feeding this alley cat on the porch. I soon found little baby possums coming up to take the cat food. I did what most people would do. I called him Pit. I kind of personified him. At the same time, there was this really interesting parallel. I was moving into this neighborhood. I was trying to figure out where the good places to eat are. As much as I did with the normal human tendency to personify animals, I also thought about my behavior in animal terms. I thought about the fact that I was finding my niche, where the good food was, and my behavior could have just as easily been studied and tracked just like this guy.
I really began thinking about that, and I started shooting video down a little heat pipe of my possum friends. There were actually a couple babies around. So I begun shooting footage, but I didn’t really have a place. I didn’t have anywhere else to go with it.
I talked about my possums as my domestic partners. I always thought that that term was really strange. We had business partners, lovers, wives, and husbands. What was this term, “domestic partner”? But I thought that was a good term to describe my relationship with the possum because we shared a domestic space. I began to think about the possum in those terms. I proposed this project to ISEA and was asking the viewer to re-envision the urban landscapes in terms of animal ecology. To think about the urban environment as a habitat.
And the possum was great. It was nocturnal and we’re diurnal so we would meet at the cusp of the evening. We only interacted at the cusp of that moment. Usually where those intersections take place isn’t really good for animals. There’s a rich kind of habitat. The possum is an interesting species. It’s not local, but it doesn’t interfere with any other native species. Its niche is entirely based on us. Its range expanded because cities raised the temperature.
Begins Showing Portions of “Nocturne”
I developed this piece called “Nocturne”. It looks at animals living in a human habitat as their habitat. Obviously that’s parallel with what I said about the birds in Baltimore. But this took my thinking to another level. The core to the idea of this to me is that if you could get people to momentarily de-center themselves and rethink their perspective in animal terms, then that’s interesting.
I proposed to work with coyotes, but that’s impossible. I couldn’t stake out a coyote den without permits, and I couldn’t find any group in California that works with coyotes. There was a group in San Diego that relocated, but they did amazing work on the role of coyotes in the urban environment. Coyotes in the urban environment really help the bird population. The connection is the house cat. In urban areas where coyotes are present, there’s less of a problem with housecats getting wild birds. That’s either because people know not to let their cats out, or cats are being eaten.
So I ended up working with Kit Foxes, which turned out to be better than coyotes. They are further in the urban environment. The Kit Fox is an endangered species, but it’s actually doing better in the urban environment than in areas set aside for their preservation. So the urban environment has become a reservoir for the species.
There was a great group of biologists in an endangered species protection program down in California. I went down to work with them. They were fabulous; they set me up with a couple dens. I shot a lot of footage. I’ll show you a couple clips.
This is footage that I didn’t use that showed a Kit Fox attacking my equipment.
The third species I used for the installation were field mice. Field mice are the primary food source in the Kit Foxes’ diet. There’s a nearby baseball field where the Kit Foxes would occasionally get a hot dog. The scientists told me they won’t feed it to their pups. The adults would eat it sometimes, but no junk food for the kids.
I shot all of this footage and built an installation that used the same surveillance technology to monitor the people in the space. In the installation, everything had a monitor scaled to its size, so there was Audubon present for me. The foxes were projected onto a daylight slide of the location of where they were shot. So people would see their own shadow against the fence. It was kind of a counter-intuitive interaction. When you walked up, the foxes would run away. If you were patient, the foxes would become more confident with you. The mom would come out and get food and the pups would run out. So you had to be patient. If you started to move, they’ll run away and you’d have to wait all over again.
It was like this anti-interactivity. Again, it was using a multi-sensor trigger system that I used to capture the footage that I was now using to play back the footage. I think I’m just redeploying that technology that’s used on intersections with speed cameras for other purposes.
The mice weren’t really interactive. They just ran randomly from screen to screen. The possum was triggered by the presence of the viewer. The monitor was set in an actual pipe like the pipe they were working on. Again this was continuation of the screen space versus the real space. That was the kind of premise for the installation. I reinstalled it earlier this year, so it’s like an ongoing set of concerns.
Within that set of work that is ecology, there is now a body of work that deals with animal trajectory. Not all the work I do is exclusive to ecological issues. It has become one of the primary kinds of pieces of what I do. There are a lot of other issues that play into this. You see both the kind of references to screen space. Thinking about Audubon’s drive to put things to their real scale and what that was about. It’s a set of cross-related concerns that are coming to this work. So that’s kind of where I am now.
ORIGINALLY PRESENTED 5/29
DAVE ANOLIK:
Thanks for coming. This is the last of four in our spring Creative Bridges series. It’s been a great series. Tonight we have Colin Ives, who is the director of digital arts at the University of Oregon. Colin’s work is very interesting and it has to do with nature and digital technology. It has to do with things you will learn about, which I will not attempt at summarizing.
Colin and I have known each other for quite some time. We attended the same graduate program at the University of Iowa in the early 90s. I met him in the department of multimedia, but the multimedia department didn’t mean then what it means now. It meant any type of media was allowed. It didn’t specifically deal with computer programs or anything like that. So Colin showed his piece… and imagine this: there is a head of broccoli, a Volkswagen Bug, and the camera is back here. I think it was a 20-minute piece of the Volkswagen driving around Iowa. It had humor, it had an appreciation for nature, and it had a lot of amazing things that were quite wonderful.
And with that, I’ll turn it over to you.
COLIN IVES:
I was playing a video of Kit Foxes in the background earlier, and we’ll get to that point of work later eventually. It’s not where I’m going to start. As Dave said, I’m an artist who works with art and technology. The graduate program we were in, was really as David describes. A lot of colleagues of ours were doing performance work as well. So that was a huge piece of it. And there was a core of us who were moving from video to computer-based work and thinking about art and technology, which is really a core part of my practice. Both using the technology, but also trying to think deeply about the effects of technology is having on our culture.
I taught for five years in Baltimore, at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. When I was working there, I began to find that a little bit of my work began to address environmental issues. I would certainly not have called myself an environmental artist at that time at all.
Today for this talk, I’m going to retrace that thread of my work in relationship and issues of the ecology and how an immediate artist ends up working on issues of ecology while still addressing why that was related to the art. There are cultural questions that arise from working in digital media. I’m going to start with a piece that was a failure, a failure on a couple of fronts. But it’s the piece that led me to think what I was doing and indirectly affected my use of art and ecology.
I was a one of a number of artists who were selected for a DC site project. They were doing site-specific work in buildings that were empty, in downtown DC. They were plugging artists into these spaces for the summer, which was a little crazy.
So for my piece, I used a storefront. It was a piece that really dealt with the idea of presence. I took the storefront they gave me, and you can see that I made the storefront a webpage. The only things on the webpage are two web counters. So it was all about notating presence through counting. I think about it in terms of ‘hits to a website’ and why that data is important. What would that mean to make that functional on the street?
So that was the premise for the piece. I put up a webcam so I could record everything. In some ways, it was very minimal. I just put a vinyl graphic on the top to look like a web browser and I had two active counters. One counter kept count of the number of people who went to the storefront. And the other one kept track of the people who went to the website. So there was a web address involved. And if you walked up, you could pick up a little card with the web address. But there was no content. It was empty. To me it was an interesting conceptual piece that addressed the issue of presence.
What really happened in the piece was that I was given a storefront right outside a Subway. I know from looking at the webcam, was that people were taking their last smoke before they got into the Subway. I was also capturing some guy selling newspapers by the window ledge. I was getting a lot of hits, but it wasn’t from people looking at my work. So in that regard, I had the data to prove that the piece was a failure. The system allowed me to figure out that no one was getting it.
As I was coming to terms with my failure and looking at all this footage of this guy selling newspapers and people taking their last smoke, I became kind of fascinated with that footage. I’m capturing this kind of human behavior, which I didn’t even consider at all—it’s pretty interesting behavior. Do they need to care about a piece for a piece to be successful? This was my question. So the next step for me, and the next piece that came directly out of that, was a bird cam project.
I figured I’m going to make a project for birds. They’re going to care about as much as the people in the Subway did. This was about ’97. It’s funny; about six months later, a company released a bird feeder with a camera. For the life of me, I have no idea whether I should have patented it, or if they saw my site. It’s one of those things that happen.
The cameras are in the bird feeder, and it was motion sensitive. These are not time-lapsed. They are motion-lapsed. So they would upload live pictures to a website every time a bird came to feed. At the end of the day I would collect them and upload them to the website as movie. This was the idea of the web cam. I was thinking of the behavior using the technology like motion capture to sense presence. I was thinking of the technological possibilities of this piece. I was also thinking about the behavior aspect.
Another thing was that I was living in inner city Baltimore and that I was capturing all this footage of pigeons and all these animals that have made an incredibly successful niche in the human environment. All the locals referred to the pigeons as flying rats, and I really came to love these birds. And this is a project that ran for about two years, and it was one of those things that would run when I wasn’t getting any work done. It was lovely.
I also redid the piece for the Delaware Museum of Art. For this one, I put the birdfeeder outside. In the gallery, there was another feeding station. This one is for people and there was a TV inside with a live feed from outside, which isn’t that interesting. It’s pretty rare to see a bird come to the birdfeeder a lot. But there was also a third station. It was a computer station. Online, I was comparing the most recent human shot with the most recent bird shot. So that there was a parallel between human behavior in the gallery—they were coming to “feed” if you will—and bird behavior at the bird feeder.
Again, I was drawing these parallels. There really kind of prefigures a lot of the work that I did later both in terms of the technology I was starting to deploy, but also in terms of the strategy as it began to get fleshed out more.
At this point, I wasn’t really thinking of the ramifications. I wasn’t trying to get people to think differently about environment. At this point, I was just thinking about behavior, both human and animal and juxtaposing them. This was really straight forward, but you can see where I ended up in my more recent work.
The next piece I did was called “Size of Life”. I was invited to do an installation at Johns Hopkins University. They have a historic house, which has collection of books. And every artist that was accepted would do a response to a particular book they have in their collection. The idea was that the viewing audience could go into special collections, view the actual book, and then walk out to the gallery and see the artist’s response to the book.
I took John James Audubon’s “Birds of America”. You’ve all seen those reproductions, right? What you don’t normally know is that this book huge. There were only a couple hundred of them printed. It’s an elephant-folio. They are printed to the size that the birds actually are. So the largest print of the largest bird determines the size of the book—because they’re life size. It’s an amazing thing to see in person. We’ve all seen them on calendars, but if you get a chance, find special collections and look at the real thing, it’ll blow your mind. There’s a hummingbird in the middle of this huge sheet, and then you turn the page and you have the bald eagle that fills the page. And the stork has to bend over and fit the page. It’s a beautiful object and an amazing thing.
So I built a case that was exactly the same size as the book. It wasn’t quite as fancy in the gold-tooling lines and everything, but I had it professionally gold-tooled. I set a monitor in the middle of it. Audubon is this fascinating guy. He has the Audubon society named after him, but he killed thousands of birds. His writing is really disturbing. He would have notes in his diary about every bird they killed that day. You would go through each page, reading about different types of species that he has killed and thinking “this guy has a naturalist society named after him?”
On the back of each one, he wrote, “size of life.” But with his broken English, he meant, “life size”. So that was my title. I used some footage of my pigeons—my Mourning Doves—mixed in with his writing describing some of the same birds. In this writing, he discusses how good they are to eat—how tasty they are. And you kind of reveal that as you walk through it.
I also used some of his actual plates that I photographed and scanned in and then I went to some of the sites in Baltimore where they’re helping endangered birds and doing educational things for these birds. I mixed in live sections of animated footage that I shot of actual birds in with his images. So you navigate his writing, and a little bit is revealed. There’s a section where your cursor becomes a weapon and suddenly you’re shooting each of these birds. Yeah, those sections are a little brutal. It was a second piece. I kind of proposed it because I’ve been working with the birds on my porch.
This piece made me read a lot about Audubon and books by him and really thinking about his description of the passenger pigeon filling the sky. But 50 years after his death, they were all gone. He had this description of being in Virginia and the entire sky go dark just with birds. And in just 50 years, none. It’s just staggering.
So I had a couple bird pieces. I guess I’m a bird guy. I wasn’t sure if it was my trajectory. But I took a job out here, in Eugene. I don’t know why you’re here, but it’s probably a pretty good chance because of your life style and environment was a part of those decisions. And it was a huge part of my decision to take a job here. Again, I hadn’t linked that with my creative process. I hadn’t thought about those lifestyle decisions to go hiking every weekend. It seemed separate, but in retrospect, I was already working with these issues.
The first piece I worked on here was actually not about environmental issues to show you what else I do. But it also connects.
Shows “Swimmer”
That’s a piece I did with sculptor Andy Carson in Seattle. It’s a projector that rotates slowly and projects the image of the swimmer in the space that it’s in. A lot of the issues I did on this piece in working with Andy really dealt with screen space. These were issues that I was thinking about in my other body of work. This is really a study on the ecology of screen space. We have cell phones, data projectors, televisions, plasma screens. And all of these things have a cultural aspect and how they fit into our lives and how we deal with them and what kind of space they necessitate.
I thought a lot about screen space. In this piece, the question of whether it was the technology driving the image of the swimmer? Or was it the swimmer driving the technology? There’s this ambiguity and tension that I was driving with this piece. To take advantage of space, the audio was locational. The audio moved around horizontally and the image moved vertically. So these were the spatial concerns I was working with. Nothing formal. That was the first piece Andy and I completed when I moved out here even though it wasn’t shown until earlier this year.
In our second piece, I used Andy’s sklilset but it was entirely my piece because it fits into my ecological work after living in Oregon. Andy was generous to take a backseat and just build this robot for me.
Shows “The Clearing”
It uses a very similar apparatus. It projects a slim image of a forest that pans around 360-degrees. There was a sensor in front of it, and it could detect when someone cuts the beam of the projection. And when the beam gets cut, the image becomes that of a clear-cut forest. I thought that this was too obvious. It was a little heavy handed. But in reality, it was interesting. The projector was moving around and people wouldn’t want to interrupt the image. There is a taboo against breaking the image. Inevitably, when they walk into the space, they would start moving, trying to stay behind the moving image. They would walk for almost a full circle before finally deciding to break the beam. It was really interesting.
During opening night, there would be 30–40 people jammed into this 20 by 20 foot room. They would all be trying to avoid it, but eventually, someone would break the beam. It would then go to clear-cut. At first I thought I was being a bit flat-footed, but it only confirmed what people already knew. There was this tension about disrupting an image that then played itself out. It really was a powerful moment. I was concerned, but it was actually much more subtle and rich than saying directly, “you are affecting the environment.”
This then becomes specifically about the Pacific Northwest and environmental issues. This type of work gets people thinking about environmental issues in a very experiential embodied mode.
This following piece was played in China, which is a very strange place to play it. You’ll find out why in a second. The image is actually of a sucker that I put on the ground in a little light box. In over the course of two weeks, the ants removed the entire sucker. I was taking 30-minute videos every 10 minutes for two weeks, which ended up being five hours of solid ants.
Shows “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere”
Obviously, no one is going to stand in front of an installation for five hours. Basically this video was playing in real time. But if you were standing in a certain spot where you can hear the audio, the footage would speed up. The audio is an early American spiritual song. Would you call this beautiful or gross? I think it’s somewhere in the middle where it encompasses the beautiful, disgusting space.
Showing in China was definitely a strange thing with the associated music. It just doesn’t resonate. It had to be explained. It was pretty interesting of experiment. You definitely saw generations of ants go by in the course of two weeks.
The piece I was playing in the background at the beginning was a piece with kit foxes. The kit fox project was a project I proposed for ISEA. ISEA stands for International Symposium for Electronic Arts. It was in San Jose two years ago. This year it’s in Singapore. Every other year, it’s in another place of the world.
I proposed this project on urban wildlife for ISEA, and the piece really started with me buying a house in Eugene. Really quickly, I started feeding this alley cat on the porch. I soon found little baby possums coming up to take the cat food. I did what most people would do. I called him Pit. I kind of personified him. At the same time, there was this really interesting parallel. I was moving into this neighborhood. I was trying to figure out where the good places to eat are. As much as I did with the normal human tendency to personify animals, I also thought about my behavior in animal terms. I thought about the fact that I was finding my niche, where the good food was, and my behavior could have just as easily been studied and tracked just like this guy.
I really began thinking about that, and I started shooting video down a little heat pipe of my possum friends. There were actually a couple babies around. So I begun shooting footage, but I didn’t really have a place. I didn’t have anywhere else to go with it.
I talked about my possums as my domestic partners. I always thought that that term was really strange. We had business partners, lovers, wives, and husbands. What was this term, “domestic partner”? But I thought that was a good term to describe my relationship with the possum because we shared a domestic space. I began to think about the possum in those terms. I proposed this project to ISEA and was asking the viewer to re-envision the urban landscapes in terms of animal ecology. To think about the urban environment as a habitat.
And the possum was great. It was nocturnal and we’re diurnal so we would meet at the cusp of the evening. We only interacted at the cusp of that moment. Usually where those intersections take place isn’t really good for animals. There’s a rich kind of habitat. The possum is an interesting species. It’s not local, but it doesn’t interfere with any other native species. Its niche is entirely based on us. Its range expanded because cities raised the temperature.
Begins Showing Portions of “Nocturne”
I developed this piece called “Nocturne”. It looks at animals living in a human habitat as their habitat. Obviously that’s parallel with what I said about the birds in Baltimore. But this took my thinking to another level. The core to the idea of this to me is that if you could get people to momentarily de-center themselves and rethink their perspective in animal terms, then that’s interesting.
I proposed to work with coyotes, but that’s impossible. I couldn’t stake out a coyote den without permits, and I couldn’t find any group in California that works with coyotes. There was a group in San Diego that relocated, but they did amazing work on the role of coyotes in the urban environment. Coyotes in the urban environment really help the bird population. The connection is the house cat. In urban areas where coyotes are present, there’s less of a problem with housecats getting wild birds. That’s either because people know not to let their cats out, or cats are being eaten.
So I ended up working with Kit Foxes, which turned out to be better than coyotes. They are further in the urban environment. The Kit Fox is an endangered species, but it’s actually doing better in the urban environment than in areas set aside for their preservation. So the urban environment has become a reservoir for the species.
There was a great group of biologists in an endangered species protection program down in California. I went down to work with them. They were fabulous; they set me up with a couple dens. I shot a lot of footage. I’ll show you a couple clips.
This is footage that I didn’t use that showed a Kit Fox attacking my equipment.
The third species I used for the installation were field mice. Field mice are the primary food source in the Kit Foxes’ diet. There’s a nearby baseball field where the Kit Foxes would occasionally get a hot dog. The scientists told me they won’t feed it to their pups. The adults would eat it sometimes, but no junk food for the kids.
I shot all of this footage and built an installation that used the same surveillance technology to monitor the people in the space. In the installation, everything had a monitor scaled to its size, so there was Audubon present for me. The foxes were projected onto a daylight slide of the location of where they were shot. So people would see their own shadow against the fence. It was kind of a counter-intuitive interaction. When you walked up, the foxes would run away. If you were patient, the foxes would become more confident with you. The mom would come out and get food and the pups would run out. So you had to be patient. If you started to move, they’ll run away and you’d have to wait all over again.
It was like this anti-interactivity. Again, it was using a multi-sensor trigger system that I used to capture the footage that I was now using to play back the footage. I think I’m just redeploying that technology that’s used on intersections with speed cameras for other purposes.
The mice weren’t really interactive. They just ran randomly from screen to screen. The possum was triggered by the presence of the viewer. The monitor was set in an actual pipe like the pipe they were working on. Again this was continuation of the screen space versus the real space. That was the kind of premise for the installation. I reinstalled it earlier this year, so it’s like an ongoing set of concerns.
Within that set of work that is ecology, there is now a body of work that deals with animal trajectory. Not all the work I do is exclusive to ecological issues. It has become one of the primary kinds of pieces of what I do. There are a lot of other issues that play into this. You see both the kind of references to screen space. Thinking about Audubon’s drive to put things to their real scale and what that was about. It’s a set of cross-related concerns that are coming to this work. So that’s kind of where I am now.
