abstractmachine

• Biennale: Figures of Interactivity
• Symposium: Cinema, interactivity and society
• Venue: TAP, Poitiers, France
• Dates: November 19-21, 2008
• Schedule
• Speakers: Hubertus Von Amelunxen, Bertrand Augereau, Jacques Aumont, Yves Bernard, Samuel Bianchini, Jean-Louis Boissier, Victor Burgin, Jean-Claude Bustros, Jim Campbell, Luc Courchesne, Frédéric Curien, Jean-Marie Dallet, Anne-Marie Duguet, Masaki Fujihata, Thierry Guibert, Christian Laroche, Georges Legrady, Alain Liedts, Julien Maire, Denis Mellier, Stephan Natkin, Bernard Perron, Louise Poissant, Yannick Prié, Vincent Puig, Jeffrey Shaw, Douglas Edric Stanley, Bernard Stiegler, Steina Vasulka, Gwenola Wagon, Gene Youngblood

I’ll be travelling tomorrow to Poitiers for what looks like a very rich roster of speakers discussing… oh yes… the subject of interactivity. Cough.

Oh, and apparently Ségolène Royal will be giving an opening pep-talk (oui, oui, that Ségolène Royal), which probably has something to do with the fact that she is currently the president of Poitou-Charentes where the conference is being held. You might also have noticed that she is currently making a bid to for the leadership of the French Socialist Party, so I don’t know how much to bet on her appearance.

I haven’t completely finished my talk yet, but from what I have so far, it looks like I’ll be sticking with this resumé that I sent a few weeks ago to the organizers:

L’image du monstre

Il y a trois ans, lors d’un précédent colloque à l’ÉESI sur le cinéma et l’interactivité, j’ai argumenté pour une approche “hydraulique” de l’image en mouvement : une approche dynamique autour d’une image fluctuante qui prendrait en compte notamment la fluidification que les machines algorithmiques apportaient à l’image. C’était une hypothèse intéressante, mais qui n’osait pas aller jusqu’au bout. L’épine du problème était une insistance à maintenir notre relation nostalgique avec la trace photographique à l’intérieur de l’image, face à l’horizontalité des nouvelles formes de stockage comme les bases de données qui ont tendance à brouiller les figures qui s’y trouvent.

Depuis, mon optique s’est totalement transformée. L’objet n’est plus pour moi un simple jeu de re-juxtaposition permanente, il est devenu un jeu de mutation, avec des images-croissance qui poussent à partir de n’importe quelle extrémité de la « Chose ». Il se peut qu’il y ait encore des traces anciennes dans cette image, mais ces traces jouent un tout autre rôle, et nourrissent la bête tout autrement. Je vois désormais dans cette image nouvelle une forme de « monstruosité » qui pousse à l’intérieur des images, et descend jusque dans les entrailles du GPU lui-même, ne remontant à la surface de l’écran pixelisé que le temps d’un court affichage.

Accepter le monstre dans l’image, transforme notre approche de celle-ci, et transforme aussi ce qu’on entend par figure, mimesis, et enfin narration. Cela change également les champs d’exploration qui permettent de saisir plus fermement les phénomènes que je considère comme les plus pertinents pour ces transformations, à commencer par les jeux vidéo.

• Here is the symposium’s valiant attempt at an English translation, which makes absolutely no sense to me, and I wrote the damn thing. The words are right, it’s just that the meaning got lost in there somewhere. Apparently, my French is hard to translate, or perhaps just plain hard to understand:

Three years ago, during a previous conference on cine-film and interactivity at the ÉESI, I put forward the outline for a “hydraulic” approach to image in motion: a dynamic approach hinged on the fluctuating image ,which, notably, could factorise the fluidising import that algorithmic engines have brought to the image. It was an interesting hypothesis, which was just not bold enough to go all the way. The bane of the problem being insistence on maintaining our nostalgic affinity with the photographic trace within the image, at the hands of the horizontality of the new storing configurations, like those involving data bases, which tend to scramble the figures present.

Since then my assessment has been turned around. I no longer view the object as just a game of constant re-juxtaposition; it has become play on mutation, with image-growth sprouting from just about any appendage of the “Thing”. It is just possible that old traces still linger in that image, now however, they play a completely different role and feed the beast with different fodder. In this novel image, from now on, I can see a form of “monstrousness” germinating within the image, and getting right down to the entrails of the GPU itself, coming up to the pixelized surface of the screen for only a brief moment of display.

By accepting the monster in the image our approach to it becomes transformed, thus transforming that which we understand as figure, mimesis and finally narration. It also changes fields of inquiry which sanction and capture phenomena more securely and which I consider as being the most relevant for these transformations, starting with video games.

• Workshop: Livecode
• Artist: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Location: [École supérieure d’art](Livecode, Mulhouse
• Date: February 26 – March 2, 2007
• Public performance: March 1st, 2006. Time to-be-announced

When I get back from California, I’ll have a short week writing at home, and then it’s back off to yet another workshop. I had already planned this workshop quite some time ago with Jeff Guess, so I couldn’t put it off any longer. It should be fun. We are going to explore some of the ideas brandished about by the livecoding movement (?), or, uhhh, style (?), ummm, tendancy (?), errrr method (?). We’ll be using Processing, not because it’s the best environment for livecoding (although it’s possible) but because I always figure that workshops should also give its participants some tools they can walk away with. At least the students will have some basic notions, and since most of the participants will have already been working with Jeff in Flash-coding, I figured Processing would be a nice complement to their arsenal.

There will be a public performance on Thursday evening March 1st, so we will be preparing for that from day one. My current idea — although this might change — will be to tag-team livecode in competition with a film (livecode vs. film), probably something cheesy like Wargames, although I might find something better for us to battle before then because that film is just a little bit too litteral for my tastes. Maybe Scanners? Any ideas?

Here’s the announcement (en français) of the Workshop:

• Douglas Edric Stanley
• «Livecode»
• Enseignant référent : Jeff Guess
• du lundi 26 février au vendredi 2 mars 2007
• Etudiants concernés : Design graphique, semestre 6

Eloigné de l’Action Painting et du Performance Art, le Livecode réintroduit pourtant l’action, la performance et le corps dans ce que la création numérique a de plus cérébral : la programmation informatique. Lier la difficulté à programmer un ordinateur et l’exigence de produire in situ font coexister deux vecteurs opposés que nous appelons le Livecode.

Le Livecode naît dans la reconnaissance que les performances numériques sont plutôt obscures pour ceux qui doivent regarder un performeur derrière son ordinateur sur scène. Pourquoi ne pas montrer ce que fait ce personnage étrange sur sa machine ? Et puisqu’il s’agit forcément de la manipulation de programmes, pourquoi ne pas voir ce performeur fabriquer, ligne par ligne, l’ensemble de son programme devant un public ?

Ce workshop tranchera dans le débat sur la posture à adopter face à la machine. Assis ou debout, peu importe, pourvu que nous fabriquions quelque chose. Ouvrons les machines, ouvrons les environnements de programmation et regardons tout simplement ce qu’on peut produire avec. Le Livecode nous permet de se positionner avec une posture pragmatique mais décalée – une posture drôle, absurde, tout en restant engagé avec ce que la machine produit de contraignant et de libre.

Dans ce workshop, nous explorerons principalement l’environnement de programmation Processing (cf. http://www.processing.org – une plate-forme open-source et gratuite, conçue pour et par des artistes/programmeurs avec une philosophie pédagogique claire et évolutive. Les participants au workshop ne doivent pas avoir de connaissances particulières mais doivent venir avec le moins d’a priori sur la programmation et ses «utilités» artistiques.

Here are some pictures from the abstractmachine installation at the ZeroOne Festival.

• Installation: abstractmachine.v87D6
• Concept & Development: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Exhibition: Transvergence
• Festival: ZeroOne: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge
• Dates: 8-13 August, 2006
• Times: 12:00-24:00 Tuesday; 12:00-22:00 Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; 12:00-17:00 Sunday
• Location: South Hall
• Project information: abstractmachine.v87D6

The abstractmachine is setup in San Jose, there is a breakcore Rubik’s Cube® kicking out the jams, a programmable video mosaic recorder is open for public abuse, and the Hypertable is unleashing a non-linear interactive documentary containing a telepathic virus. We’re setup in the main exhibition hall for the festival, South Hall.

Oh, I should also mention something after having watched a few visitors this afternoon: um, hello, people out there, yes, you can actually pick up the Rubik’s Cube® and play with it. And that interactive table, yes, you can put your hands on it. Most of you reading this are probably in the know, and would find it laughable that people would fear interacting with an installation during a festival dedicated to digital art. But hey, that’s apparently America. It’s my first show in my home country (yes, that’s right) and I guess the public is just like that. I always figured that the dopey Americans who looked confused were just like that because they were tourists lost in Europe. But who knows, maybe there are just a lot of tourists showing up today.

So with that out of the way, here’s the official statement.

Through various experiments, installations, and online software, the abstractmachine project asks the question of how we as artists and users can create, manipulate, and ultimately enact digital algorithms. If the specificity of the computer comes not only from it’s digital aspect, but even more so from it’s algorithmic aspect, how does this hyperprogrammable nature transform the media we manipulate — i.e. the images and sounds we design using these machines? Amongst the many machines available within the abstractmachine project, two creation platforms will be presented to illustrate our response to these questions: one dedicated to the creation and manipulation of algorithmic cinema, the other designed around algorithmic musical composition.

« 3 », a.k.a. « ^3 », a.k.a. « cubed » is a musical sequencer integrated into a Rubik’s Cube®. By manipulating the colors on the cube, users generate different sound algorithms within the sequencer. Using specially-designed soundfonts from Jankenpopp (cf. http://jankenpopp.com), math geeks can finally become the speedcubing breakcore supernerds they always feared were lurking underneath. With ^3 we are working against the idea that a musician has to create music with audio software where building the musical algorithm and manipulating the digital algorithm are two different processes. Often, making digital music looks a lot like someone working on their spreadsheet. In ^3, all of the notes of the musical process are visible and intrinsically intertwined. Using a universally known interface, a series of simple gestures cascade into a complex multitude of musical possibilities.

Concrescence is a platform for creating and manipulating moving images outside of the traditional linear time-code. Images grow in spatialized mosaics, allowing for infinite recomposition while avoiding purely random associations. This specialized software is then projected onto the Abstractmachine Hypertable: a multipurpose interactive table which allows multiple users to interact with the non-linear narratives by simply placing their hands on the surface. For the San Jose festival, two uses of the Concrescence platform will be presented: a fully developed algorithmic narrative entitled “The Signal”, accompanied by a simplified version of the Concrescence authoring software where the public can record their own audiovisual clips and create collective non-linear patchworks.

Concrescence was developed in France with assistance from the following institutions: ARCADI, DICREAM, SCAM, and was produced by the CIREN. All sounds for The Signal were designed by Julien Hô Kim, with a narration by Keith Evans. The Jankenpopp666 soundfont can be downloaded at http://jankenpopp.free.fr/666/

I’ve often pointed out to people that credit me for my Hypertable that in fact there have been many other attempts at interactive tabletops.

Although I’m particularly happy with my configuration (very collective, intuitive, no need for gadgets, etc) there have been many others. My little list of influences went as follows:

• Myron Kruger
• Diller+Scofidio’s Indigestion
• Ping Pong Plus
• Sommerer+Mignonneau’s A-Volve
• Michael Naimark
• Jean-Louis Boissier
• Laboratoire Esthétique de l’interactivté
• Masaki Fujihata
• Art+Com
• Knowbotic Research

Over at Pasta and Vinegar they came up with a different list of Interactive tables. Their list is a lot larger, but far from complete. There are even industrial interfaces of this sort for sale, such as the system by Hitatchi that was exhibited at the ZKM exhibit on democracy. Hypertables (interactive or not) are a common fantasme. I’m sure that we’ll be seeing more from them.

One of the stranger things I noticed talking to people using my installation back at the Pompidou Center last year, was that they did not in fact think of the image as projected from above: they often described it as a table lumineuse, in other words the image was emanating from the table itself. Obviously the image was still for them an image, that it acted like objects without being objects was part of the charm. But the familiar nature of the Hypertable surface (perhaps its Unheimlich nature if I got lucky) and its horizontal configuration evoked centuries of table-top culture and just couldn’t be shaken. People like to touch things in front of them, as opposed to the cinematic apparatus which is a pretty frightening apparatus when you get down to it. A lot of my algorithmic cinema work has actually tried to deal with these issues, and I’ve even just finished an article (a few days ago) that will explain some of my positions on these issues. I’ll post more when it is published.

• Concrescence
• Douglas Edric Stanley
• Generative Cinema Installation

Concrescence is a software program for the creation of interactive and generative cinema, coupled with an interactive Hypertable where users can intuitively interact with the film with the use of their hands.

As a software program, Concrescence is organised around database of small, moving image fragments, a kind of infinite potential for non-linear narratives. As the program runs, images accrete — hence the term “concrescence” — forming a mosaic of images that are subsequently projected onto the hypertable.

The hypertable is a simple wooden table 160cm x 85 cm x 88 cm, onto which images are projected. Above the table, a surveillance system using various near-infrared filters and optics connected to a circuit board allow the system to “see” human hands as they move upon the tabletop. When a hand is placed on the table, the surveillance system distinguishes it from the table itself, and instructs the Concrescence software to grow images around it.

The images projected onto the table come directly from the database, but are filtered through a unique, but simple, semantic processor that limits “anything goes” accretion by allowing images to bond with another image only if there are conceptual relations between them. These conceptual relations are created by an author, using the integrated authoring interface. Images are placed visually with other images, and the system is told to “remember” their relationships (proximity, number, etc). The author can therefore design a narrative coherence for the subsequent interactors, while allowing the interactors to investigate various tangents and follow the narrative soup in their own time and manner. The entire process has been designed as both a cinematic narrative device and a more subtle interactive putty out of which non-linear narratives can be designed and caressed.

The questions explored by Concrescence revolve around the future of traditional cinema in relation to the possibilities emerging in algorithmic art.

One of the major contributions of Concrescence, lies in its ability to resolve the endless use of choice in interactivity. Interactivity is a rich medium, and should not be reduced simply to the offering of choices (YES, NO, LEFT, RIGHT) to a potential user. In fact, in the case of interactive cinema, offering choices is in many cases counterproductive to the construction of a narrative. By refusing the reduction of interactivity to choices, and instead opting for a more dynamic, plastic, playful articulation of the elements, Concrescence reintroduces the pleasure of editing to the viewer’s experience of cinema.

As an artistic project, Concrescence has been designed for a specific author, namely myself. It is my soundstage, editing suite, and projection theatre all rolled into one, and I am currently using it to explore variations on cinematic narrative form.

Algorithmic cinema

While video software has introduced a new workflow, the result nevertheless remains, for the most part, tied to more traditional linear media such as video, television and film. And while the Internet has introduced new means of presenting, contextualizing, and even producing work, the idea of an emergent generative cinema has not been sufficiently explored. Beginning as a speculative software project, Concrescence began with an interrogation on what a non-linear cinematic authoring tool might look like from an experimental artist’s perspective. Several variations on this opening question resulted — one of the more interesting being a dynamic VJ-ing program entitled The Object Machine — but all of the variations come back to the same visual form: a mosaic of semi-autonomous video objects in which one moving image triggers action in the next image-object in a visual cascade of looping waves. This method allows for any image to potentially aggregate with any other autonomously — allowing the computer dynamic associations — and for the cinematic action-reaction editing of temporal composition to take place within the frame, rather than between frames. As the ensemble is no longer tied to any temporal necessity, the whole can move and evolve at varying rhythms, both according to the will of the interactor, and according the necessities of the generator. The cinema form becomes both generative and interactive, there is no contradiction between the two.

Additionally, Concrescence attempts to bring the body back into the interactive cinema experience. Rejecting complex physical electronic interfaces, I propose instead a simple corporeal experience in which the human hand shapes and explores an interactive audiovisual narrative through intuitive gestures. This simplicity is essential. The power of classical theatre-based cinema resides in its usage of basic body functions: sight, hearing, immobility. However diverse the semiotics of its contents (classical Hollywood narrative, French nouvelle vague, Asian kung-fu action-adventure), cinema always comes back to the platform of an immobile body before a audiovisually mobile projection. If interactive cinema is to “compete” with this model, it will need a similarly powerful simplicity in its use of the human body.

The first step was to detach the cinema screen from its pedestal, and reposition it at hand’s reach. This liberates the spectator from immobility, and allows her to “move around” the diegesis, passively observing or actively exploring, without having to leave the visual world to think about choosing the next scene. The frame remains mobile, but now it is both the interactor and the image that move, suggesting almost naturally the ability to “act” upon the image. Also, allowing interaction at any position on table, means that this user-mobility is free-form, and not tied to any predefined gesture.

The second step was the usage of a common evocative object: the table. In the past, I have used the floor, and/or all four walls, which instinctively evokes a theatre experience rather than a cinematographic one. By using a table, I can tap into the dual public-private nature of the table, its passive-active status. The Concrescence hypertable is at once an operating table, a writing desk, a work bench, a kitchen table, a café table and a screen. This familiarity makes the interaction very comfortable, reminds us of familiar gestures, and immediately places us into an evocative context. But whatever its evocations, the hypertable always implicitly suggests that something will be constructed.

The third step was the simplification of the gestures required to manipulate the dynamic cinema. To render evident a user’s interactions, immediate visual cues are given as to the location of their hands on the table’s surface: by mirroring the user’s presence, they know that their body is integrated into the space. This interaction, however, is purely superficial, and does not lead to the creation of new narrative material. In order to truly shape the experience, the user must slow down their movements, further implicate their body into the experience, only then will the interface truly respond. By using body presence, rather than symbolic gesture (point and click), interactors are subtly forced to – much like the cinemagoer as she eases into her chair – enter into a lightly modified environment. In fact, one can move in and out of this gestural slowness quite easily, back and forth from spectator to interactor, unlike the cinemagoer that must radically shift environments when leaving the chair.

The exhibit at the Centre Pompidou is over.

The Signal was a very popular installation. I’ve had some interesting reactions. Before it was too late, I made a little document of the installation which you can watch in mp4 format.

The Signal (mp4 video)

Model: Vincent Voisin

Here are some pictures Julien Hô Kim took during the opening:

Here’s a little visitor I saw on one of the last days :

• Installation: The Signal
• Concept+Design: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Sound Design: Julien Hô Kim
• Exhibition: Écoute
• Location: Centre Georges Pompidou
• Reception: September 21, 2004. 17h00
• Dates: September 22, 2004 to January 17, 2005. 11h – 19h. Closed on Tuesdays
• Curator: Boris Tissot
• Video: The Signal

“The Signal” is a unique audiovisual narrative, designed specifically for the Abstract Machine Hypertable. It maps the mysterious chain of infections that led to a poorly documented telepathic virus that spread throughout the United States of America in a historical period not so far removed from our own. Traces of this virus have been found in the strangest of milieu : in communications technologies, via teenager rituals, in mass media and advertising, through irrigation systems, in sound recordings, in political propaganda and urban myth paranoia, in sociological experiments, etc. “The Signal” charts the virus’ growth across the map of the United States, allowing the Hypertable to transform itself into a sort of war map, overlooking the spread of the contagion.

From a purely technological point of view, The Signal is a unique algorithmic cinema experiment. Over 10,000 video shots were culled from public archives, treated and injected into the [Concrescence](http://www.abstractmachine.net/blog/?p=21) development software. A narration was added to each image, giving its context in relation to the story. Each image contains its own diegetic sound track, but is accompagnied by narration whenever possible (the program avoids cacaphony by singling out only related narrative information, and tries to give pause between each utterance). One all this data had been entered into the database, the software was then used to literally “teach” the computer the non-linear narrative relationships between the images. This allows the computer to make intelligent choices within the narrative material, in such a way that it can smoothly acompany the unpredictable movements of the public. As each image knows its relationship with other images in the database, it can easily modulate the arrival of new images to match narrative paths coherent with its own. This “concrescence” process is what gave the software platform its name, by the way. “The Signal” was created, therefore, to be one of the first proofs-of-concept of the feasability of the [Concrescence](http://www.abstractmachine.net/blog/?p=21) platform.

I will be showing The Signal at the Pompidou Center, as part of the exhibition Ecoute on sound as an artistic material. I wrote the story and designed the images starting from material from the Internet Archive. Sound design by Julien Hô Kim. Keith Evans of Silt fame (yes, that’s his back) spoke the narration.

For those that already saw the hypertable prototype at the Festival Némo or H2TPM03, you might be pleasantly suprised by the changes.

The Signal was co-produced by the CIREN, with the assistance of Arcadi, the DICREAM, and the SCAM.

“Le Signal” est une installation interactive de Douglas Edric Stanley présentée lors de l’exposition “Ecoute” au Centre Pompidou en Sptembre 2004. A partir d’un logiciel-auteur, une base de données d’images sonorisées en mouvement est proposé comme potentiel non-linéaire de lecture. L’ensemble est projeté sur l’hypertable où l’utilisateur re-compose le récit avec ses mains. A l’image frontale du cinéma ou de la télévision se substitue une image horizontale et manipulable. Réflexion sur les limites du cinéma traditionnel face aux possibilités offertes par l’art algorithmique.

• Conference: Cinéma Algorithmique
• Speaker: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Location: Forum des Images, Paris
• Time: 18:00, Wednesday, 10 March, 2004

I will be giving a conference in conjunction with my installation at the Festival Némo.

I will be showing my algorithmic cinema authoring system Concrescence during the conference, as well as workshops and research that led me to it. I will also try to speak about the Hypertable, and some of its multiple influences: Myron Kruger, Diller+Scofidio, Ping Pong Plus, Sommerer+Mignonneau, Michael Naimark, Jean-Louis Boissier + Laboratoire Esthétique de l’interactivté, Masaki Fujihata, Art+Com, etc.

• Installation: Concrescence
• Concept+Design: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Exhibition: Féstival Némo
• Location: Paris, Forum des Halles
• Dates: March 9 – March 14, 2004
• Video: Concrescence Video Documentation (mp4)

If you are in Paris this week, I will be re-presenting last September’s prototype at the exhibition Némo while awaiting the first work to use the system at the Pompidou Center which won’t be ready until October.

The opening is monday night.

I don’t know how good the festival is going to be, but at least there is going to be some Bokanowski, and an evening of “Trash Nights at Némo” with Portugese trash-art films. Whatever that’s worth. I’m also excited to see Pat O’Neil’s The Decay of Fiction. I’ve always been a huge fan, ever since I saw his Water and Power at the Pacific Film Archive way back when I was studying cinema (and other subjects) in 1989.

In today’s edition of the French newspaper Libération, Marie Lechner published a review of our exhibition. She had nice things to say about my installation.

Parallèlement au très pointu colloque scientifique H2ptm (un jargon barbare pour hypertextes, hypermédias, produits, techniques et méthodes) qui s’achève aujourd’hui à l’université Paris-VIII, le département hypermédia propose au grand public une extension artistique et pédagogique, avec ateliers, performances (lire agenda ci-contre) et exposition d’installations interactives. Projets aboutis ou prototypes, nombre d’entre eux flirtent avec le cinéma et la notion de spectateur. Comme le prometteur Concrescence , de Douglas Edric Stanley, un dispositif de «cinéma algorithmique». En déplaçant ses mains au-dessus d’une table, le visiteur fait apparaître des mosaïques d’images animées (ici de très courts extraits de Psychose ) qu’il peut manipuler. L’ordinateur analyse ses mouvements et lui propose de nouvelles images à partir de celles dévoilées. A l’opposé d’un scénario interactif où l’utilisateur choisit le destin de l’histoire, Concrescence repose sur un subtil pas de deux entre l’humain qui influence l’histoire et la machine qui improvise des suites cohérentes. Pour une narration elliptique, fragmentée, ni totalement maîtrisée, ni vraiment automatique.

The rest of the article can be found here on the Libération Website: Scénarios pour un hypercinéma

• Installation: Concrescence
• Concept+Design: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Exhibition: Créer du sens à l’ère numérique
• Location: H2PTM, Saint-Denis, Paris
• Dates: 24, 25, 26 September, 2003
• Assistant: Pierre-Erick Lefebvre
• Co-producer: CIREN, MSH Paris-Nord
• Video: Concrescence Video Documentation (mp4)

I will be presenting a prototype for an interactive and algorithmic cinema platform, entitled Concrescence. The Concrescence project aims to build a non-linear cinema platform that allows for exploring moving images dynamically. It is both an authoring system, an editing suite, and a projection space. A specific form, the Hypertable, was built for it, allowing users to interact with the complex narrative suites in a simple and intuitive manner.

This prototype was funded by a grant from the DICREAM, Centre National Cinématographique, Ministère de la Culture.

Here are some screenshots from the program:

All images are cut out of the Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho. The film has been sliced, shot-by-shot, into morsels, each being injected into the Concrescence database. The “narrative” was then reconstructed by manipulating images associatively from within the Concrescence software. These connections and threads make up what the user then will explore from the film, through the non-linear process of concrescence. In this way, images are not mixed randomly (a common misconception: oh so it’s random), but rather through non-linear association, which is a very different process indeed. Hence the images are not programmed through some linear narrative, nor are they randomly thrown about the surface of the Hypertable. It’s a middle ground, where the user explores different possibilities, and the computer offers up related imagery and narrative elements in relation to manipulated images..

Described in a different light, we might say that the “body” of the film itself has been cut into pieces and placed into a trunk lowered into the swamps. By warming the surface of the table with one’s hand, images rise to the surface out of the swampy mass, and mix with other images also floating on the surface that are similar to it.

As such, it is the film itself that has been placed on the operating table. This explains the choice of the form itself of the table: we were trying to build something that would evoke the operating room, although something a little more ancient, almost like the operating room tables of Charcot and his hysterics.

• Installation: Object vA7D2
• Concept+Development: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Exhibition: Fête de la science
• Location: Saint-Denis, Paris
• Date: 17, 18, 19 October 2002
• Video: Abstract Machine : Object

I just had an interresting meeting with Mme le Ministre de la science, Claudie Haigneré (the first French woman in space!). She came to see the installations at the “Fête de la science” where I’ve been showing the Object Machine in conjunction with the Paris 8 research lab Laboratoire Esthétique de l’Interactivité. Since my installation was pretty popular — especially with the teenagers that had been dragged there with their school — Mme Haigneré’s assistants wanted me to give her a demo. So I recorded her into the Object Machine saying a highly original phrase “Que l’on fête la science” (oh la la!) then played her back mixed in with a bunch of “banlieusard” rascals that had been playing with the machine a few minutes earlier.

She didn’t really notice my play, and was oddly speechless. I too was puzzled, and asked her why so silent. Finally she muttered, “Je ne sais pas quoi dire. C’est génial. Je ne savais pas que des choses comme ça existe!” (“I don’t know what to say. It’s brilliant. I didn’t know things like this existed!”). I was suprised by this reaction. She’s the minister of research, for god’s sake. Multimedia’s not really all that new after all. The last time I met the the Minister of Research (Socialist that time), it was in 1999: he’d just come back from the MIT Media Lab and was trying to find things of a like nature in France. Ah, the endless musical chairs of politicians.

• Installation: Object v87D2
• Concept+Development: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Exhibition: Digit@rts, Villette Numérique
• Location: Cité des science et de l’industrie, Parc de la Villette, Paris
• Date: 24-29 September, 2002
• Video: Abstract Machine : Object

Object is at once a game, a puzzle, a universal programming environment, and a video editing suite. The key to “Object” resides in its algorithmic nature: video grows laterally, in mosaics of visual concrescence in which narrative passes from one image to the next within a network of independant and autonomous events. Any type of image can be added to the mosaic, and visitors are invited, via a webcam, to add their own images to the collective database.

• Machine: From A to G
• Concept+Development: Douglas Edric Stanley

This is a complement designed to work with the Abstract Machine Trane module. It takes all the images from Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and creates a boxcar editing-system out of it. For each note played by Trane, a sequence from the film is brought out of the database and placed on screen in a left-to-right order. When the series hits the right edge of the frame, it “pushes” all its images to the left like a train of boxcars, making room for the next image to appear.

Each image contains its own diegetic soundtrack. This creates a musical dynamic as the images are called quickly one after the other by the Trane module. Very quickly, another narrative builds out of the original film.

• Installation: 12:00
• Concept + Development: Douglas Edric Stanley

This is an installation that I built at the Villa Arson in 2001. Unfortunately, the Villa Arson’s huge (and very expensive) digital arts facility imploded due to some internal contemporary art fascists who were terrified of digital art. I think my residency was all they needed to push them over the edge ;-)

This installation was designed around the Fred Zinneman film “High Noon”. Using an algorithmic cinema software program, I “taught” the computer the film, and gave it pointers on where it could stretch the film out, compact it, make cuts, etc.

For the installation, a chair was set up in the middle of a room with a projected image of high noon on the wall facing it. On the chair, a small calculator-type interface allowed users to choose a new duration for the time. Times could range anywhere from 30 seconds to 24 hours. Once the time entered into the keypad, the film readapted itself to the remaining time.

• Installation/Projection: Cube–
• Workshop: Le cinéma et son programme
• Location: Villa Arson, Nice
• Date: 23-27 April, 2001

I have basically been researching two distinct areas during my residency at the Villa Arson : virtual machines and algorithmic cinema. In this workshop we explored various possibilities for “elastic cinema”, and I showed the participants my experiments in stretching Wile E. Coyote films to make adaptable time lengths and variable gags.

We decided to work off these experiments, only in an installation context. We also wanted to choose a film that would create a sense of confinement, and through our manipulations would provoke a negative impulse away from interactivity, a desire to do anything but interact with it. Interactivity would be a disrupting force for cinema and narrative.

After some debate we finally decided on using Vincenzo Natali’s film Cube. Originally, I proposed using Jaques Becker’s Le trou, but everyone else wanted something more “contemporary”. Oh, today’s youth…

After digitizing the film, we built a simple system using a reed switch mounted on a door and connected to a small I/O interface. The switch was strategically placed on the door leading into the projection of the film Cube. The program, too, was archi-simple : every time the switch was opened, the film would rewind back to frame 1. If no one opens the door, of course the film advances, until… eventually… someone has to leave. Thus opening the switch, and back to frame 1…