Abstract
For centuries, artists have captured and generated information they have gotten from everything around them into art forms, from their daily lives, to landscapes to religious beliefs to inner self-explorations. In the same manner, the new generation of interactive artists explore beyond the real world into the Internet and computer world because the Internet and the virtual world have more effect on the modern lifestyle. They use information as a form of new paint. They capture information, and then transform it into artworks to communicate their ideas with the audience. This style of making artworks from online or dynamic data can be called ‘DIGIA – Dynamic Information Generated Interactive Art.’
DIGIA is an interactive art style that utilizes dynamic information to create an artwork that tries to achieve the artist’s purpose whether to make a social statement, to present the information, or to provide an aesthetic experience. This research paper explores many examples of DIGIAs that try to achieve one or more of the objectives mentioned above, and then analyzes how the other DIGIA artists combine, transform, and utilize dynamic information in their DIGIA works.
This project also constructs a series of DIGIA installations called Pirate Music Box. Pirate Music Box makes a statement about the transition of the music industry from a major label monopolistic model to an online free sharing model by capturing information from the Bittorrent file sharing network, and then visualizes it into a series of symbols and mosaics.
Pirate Music Box achieves DIGIA by using symbolized real-time Bittorrent network information into a mosaic that changes its colors and tiles every time there is a user downloads music illegally. In other words, Pirate Music Box works as a DIGIA by making a neutral social statement that illustrates the evolution of the music industry, showing the current situation about Bittorrent network, and providing on aesthetic experience from art elements, using visual and culture puns.
When Art and Science Dissolve:
The new relationship art world and the science world
Art and science affect and sustain each other (Eskridge). They influence and inspire each other all the time. The science world usually improves art tools that provide artists with more ways to create arts. However, in the 21st century, technological advancement is creating a new relationship between art and science. Computer and technology had become important tools for artists who create new media arts. New technology provides more possibility of creation for artists to explore and experiment with artworks. For computer artists, they are not only artists but also scientists. Many computer artists are also computer programmers. When they need specific tools to create the artworks, they create their own tools. Sometimes they have new tools that inspire them to create new art forms using the new tools they just invented. From this new relationship between art and science worlds, DIGIA was born.
DIGIA: The 21st century virtual landscape
DIGIA– Dynamic Information Generated Interactive Art is a new form of art but serves the same antistatic purpose as traditional arts, to communicate the artist’s ideas to the audience.
It is common for an artist to capture and reform everything in the world around him into an artwork. DIGIA, as well, catches any available dynamic information online to artistically present the information to world. However, this core idea of DIGIA is not totally new. One can see the transition from the past when artists generate art from everything around them. Vincent van Gogh frequently used himself as a subject for his paintings. Monet found and captured beautiful landscape into impressionistic paintings. Jackson Pollock expressed his inner thoughts on canvases in the form of abstract paintings.
Today, the blurring line between art and science influence interactive artists to look into the more subjects and contents to transform them into art works. The Internet world is becoming another world that can be explored, and contains new subjects for new form of art. For instance, Internet users have alternate identities and communities online besides their daily life. There are more than 61 million Myspace users register to contact and get to know each other virtually (Peschel). Many independent music bands have earned their fans and business from MySpace (Baker). This activity on the new world such as, MySpace.com, Facebook, and Second Life, is becoming so relevant to the real world, that is becoming worth mentioning in today’s art.
Figure 1 – MySpace users chart compared to other networking websites
Interactive artists use information as a new landscape and computer as a new paint. As the old adage put “Art reflects life.” Interactive artists show the reflections of modern life using modern information. They capture information as an art element and transform it into artworks to communicate with the audience. Moreover, if the sources of information are reliable, the reflections of life in DIGIA works are more truthful than ever. For example, an interactive project called We Feel Fine captures emotional words from blogs that have a phase “I feel…” and visualizes them into color particles. Each color defines a category of emotions. In other words, the interactive applet is a moving picture of how people feel in the Internet world feeling. The piece gradually changes dynamically according to the entries on blogs in almost real time. As a result, the visual of this interactive piece changes and develops itself rather than displaying a still image like in traditional information visualization. This style of making artworks from online or dynamic data can be called ‘DIGIA–Dynamic Information Generated Interactive Art.’ Some examples of DIGIA works are mentioned in the following chapter.
Figure 2 – We feel fine. interactive applet. < http://www.wefeelfine.org/>
So Called DIGIA:
Looking through DIGIA works
DIGIA can be grouped depending on how a DIGIA work utilizes dynamic information. There are three main purposes of using dynamic information to create artworks: to make an artist statement, to present the information, or to provide aesthetic experience.
The first DIGIA’s objective refers to postmodern philosophy. Postmodernism inspires the 20th century artists to not only use art elements but also concepts to shape aesthetic quality in artworks (Aylesworth). After the birth of Post-modernism in mid 1990s, artworks work more than just decorations; they communicate. DIGIA artists, as post-modern artists, express their thoughts, ideas, and opinions through information.
Google is a good source of information that DIGIA artists can utilize to communicate their staments. Google is known as a major source for online information. Almost every online user uses Google as a main gate connecting to every website. Information on the early results of Google searches can influence people’s attention on any kind of information. Therefore, this Google phenomenon brings up a question that ‘Does Google have bias that leads people to a certain type of information?’ This idea about gives birth to an interactive essay called News Map.
News Map is an application that tracks news headlines from Google News and visualizes them according to the category of news as an information landscape (Weskamp). The piece updates every ten minutes to keep the information almost real time. Through country choices, typography sizes, and display colors, News Map uses online news to make a statement about the world bias towards information filtered by Google’s information windows.
Figure 3 – News Map, 2007. An interactive applet visualizing news headlines from Google.com
Even though the overall News Map project is not an involving interactive DIGIA project, the users can interact with the piece by choosing the news display result by countries. This way, the users can notice that each country Google news headlines are found differently. News Map utilizes interactivity to let the users experience that through Google, each country has a different information priority. Google’s information filters how the viewers perceive information by country bias. For example, news headlines in the United States on February 26, 2008 are different in both topic and category from news in India on the same day, same time (Figure 3-4). For the news content, the viewer can see Google’s sponsors appear in a certain amount of portion too. News about a product like Comcast can be found easily on the US. headlines but not from the UK.
Figure 4 – News Map displays news headlines found from Google.com in India
News Map’s visualization also shows how each country prioritizes news topics by using typography sizes. The bigger the headline, the more related articles are shown in Google’s search results. News Map shows how the world conceives each news topic through Google bias. Since the typography size variation shows the amount of each news headline, the viewer can see the difference in levels of importance about social issues reflected by Google. In Australia, world news occupies more than half of the screen space while it takes only one third of the screen in the United States related article results. In other words, Google.com in America does not as much priority to international news. On the other hand, the technology portion of the news in the UK is the smallest area compared to the size about the world news.
Colors are also an important element for News Map to achieve DIGIA. The piece uses color to indicate news category. Each category displayed on the visualization capture the area of interest of each country. Therefore, the viewer can observe how hard or easy Internet users keep tracking on a certain areas of interest. The US may find domestic news easier to find than Austrian readers. News Map also uses color brightness to indicate how new a headline is added to Google search result. The darker the headline, the older it is. In Canada search result, almost every news headline is refreshed and developed equally. In contrast, search results in Italy do not active much but they still show in a larger portion.
News Map snatches news headlines from Google to encourage the viewers to reconsider about information found on before they believe it. News Map, a DIGIA work that expresses the artist statement, is a moving landscape of the society that an interactive artist captures and shows it to the audience.
Every artwork tries to achieve the same goal, aesthetic. DIGIA is an art form that articulates aesthetic experience to the viewer as well. Visual Poetry 2006 by Boris Müller is dynamic data visualization online Java Application used as a visual theme for an annual international German literature festival 2006. Andrew Vande Moere, a data visualization expert, describes
The beauty of information aesthetics: Visual Poetry 06 by Boris Müller. "Boris Müller's newest 'visual theme' for a annual international German literature festival. 2006 the theme consisted of beautiful visualizations of the poetry texts themselves. Each word corresponded to a numerical code by adding the alphabetical values of its letters together. This number was mapped onto the position on a circle, and marked by a red dot. Gray lines connect the dots in the sequence the words appear in the poem. The diameter of the circle on which the dots are placed is decided by the length of the poem (Moere)
Figure 5 – Müller, Visual Poetry 06, 2006. DIGIA for aesthetic
Visual Poetry 06 renders input text into a picture procedurally. Müller uses Processing, an interactive programming application, not to create an alternate version of the literature but to enhance the way a poem communicates, so the audience can experience beyond the sense of literal language to visual senses.
Visual Poetry 06 successfully combines curve lines and red circles into a complicated but clean abstract composition. The program translates words and lays them out in a spiral pattern. Gray lines unite the whole visual, and imply depth that leads the viewer to follow each red circle. This layout creates a tunnel like graphical spiral that pulls the audience to the focal point in the middle.
As a visual theme for a literature festival, a program, and an artwork, Müller’s Visual Poetry achieves many objectives: representing the festival, inventing new technology, and the most important, creating beauty from the other kinds of information.
To communicate and to provide aesthetic are not only main objectives for DIGIA. In exploring DIGIA it is hard not to mention DIGIA’s most original form, data visualization. Data visualization serves as a graphical representation of statistic, scientific, and social information. The main goal of data visualization is to simplify information visually to make it easier to communicate.
Three Views is an application that visualizes the world’s money spending and earning on military sorted by countries. The sizes of the circles shown in figure 6 indicate a strong concentration of military activity; Colors indicate the earning amount. Like many data visualization projects, Three Views simplifies significant amounts of information into a streamlined visual representation that the audience can slowly observe and digest information without being overwhelmed by a big chunk of numbers from raw data.
Figure 6 – Andrew Cooke, Three View, 2005, displays how much each country spends budget on military.
As mentioned before, the Internet is a new big field of information waiting for interactive artists to harvest. Data visualization is a new art form that challenges modern computer artists to utilize their design skills in order to present complex information to common people.
From these examples of DIGIA works, one should have a basic understanding about how DIGIAs communicate artist statements, create aesthetic experiences, and deliver information. The next chapter will explain how the visual component, Pirate Music Box interactive installation series, is inspired and contracted from the influences of earlier DIGIA works.
Pirate Music Box:
Creating art forms from stolen art forms
Pirate Music Box originally is constructed to be a common DIGIA with one step further. The installation tried to achieve two of the main DIGIA’s objectives, which are to communicate artist’s statements and to create aesthesis. Moreover, the core of the installation extends from other DIGIAs by embedding the concept of reversing activities of people who steal artworks online, Bittorrent network, into artworks.
Bittorrent users are pirates. The Bittorrent network is known as an international network that illegally shares almost every kind of information or creative content such as music, movies, TV shows, books, software, pictures, and games. There are more than 1.5 millions active users uploading and downloading everyday (ISO Hunt). People in the network have their own culture. Most of them believe that they should not pay for content that they might not like. They fell like they should have a chance to purchase the product only if they like it. Some believe that Bittorrent networking rebels against capitalism. In other words, Bittorrent culture is a 21st century Hippy movement that believes in free trades and sharing of everything.
Major content providers are having a hard time stopping this file sharing movement because there is not actual content on any Bittorrent websites. There are just torrent files that are running a Bittorrent client application on the users computer that connects and shares files with other online users. Furthermore, all the users and trackers do not use their real identities. It is almost impossible for the content providers to track and stop them from sharing files.
Whether right or wrong, Bittorrent network provides significant amount of dynamic information, and the network activity affects the society in many ways. In short, dynamic information on Bittorrent network provides a good resource for a DIGIA project to utilize.
This research project utilizes inspirations from previous DIGIA work, dynamic information from Bittorrent network, and social contexts about content piracy to create a series of DIGIA called Pirate Music Box.
Figure 7- Umyot Boonmarlart , “Let It Be,” Pirate Music Box Series– DIGIA work using music label logos (black and white) and Bittorrent client logos (colored) to assemble a mosaic of the Beatles last album “Let it be.”
Pirate Music Box is a series of interactive installation art that gathers dynamic information about the Bittorrent network to convey the artist opinion about how the creative content industry has been changed. There are four installations in the series. Each piece in the series is an interactive mosaic that has two sides. The fist side is black and white mosaic of well-known logos from music labels visual, book publisher logos, and film studio logos. The second side is a colored mosaic of popular Bittorrent clients. When every torrent user downloads contents from Bittorent network, a black and white logo randomly flips into a colored Bittorrent client logo. Each piece of Pirate Music Box has an interface with a play button and a play head. When the user press play button, the play head on the interface starts to play. The play head triggers a sound every time it hits a torrent client logo. Once the play head reaches the right end of mosaic, the mosaic refreshes all the tiles. Therefore, Pirate Music Box dynamically changes its appearance every time it plays. Although each installation shares the same technique, every piece covers a different category of pirated contents.
Combining four different contexts but using the same style, Pirate Music Box constructs a big picture of the current piracy situation in creative content industry to makes a statement. The first and second pieces, “Let it be” and “I Shot The Sheriff” display the effect of Bittorent networking on music industry; the third piece is “The Boy Who Lives” articulating the piracy in book and publishing industry; the last piece is titled “The Sinking Boat” implying illegal movie download. Through paradoxical concepts, conflicted symbols, and puns, Pirate Music Box series shows that while music, books, and movies are the same, the traditional ways of content distribution is being replaced by digital file sharing.
The most important element in Pirate Music Box series is the paradoxical concept, which is how the piece generates its visual and sound. Pirate Music Box captures information from people who are stealing arts to make artworks. For example, whenever a Bittorrent user starts to download any the Beatles’ album, Let It Be will flip one tile from a black and white music label logo into a Bittorrent client logo. When the user presses the play button, and the playhead runs over a Bittorrent logo, a sound will be triggered. This interactivity mimics Bittorrent logos as pins in a music box. Information about people who are stealing music and other contents is ironically creating another piece of music. In addition, each installation’s Bittorrent logo tiles use sampling of sound related to the visual representation. “Let It Be” uses samplings from the Beatles music; “I Shot The Sheriff” uses Bob Marley Music sampling; “The Boy Who Lives” uses Harry Potter audio book sound; “The Sinking Boat” samples Titanic movie soundtrack. In other words, while stealing creative contents, Bittorrent users re-construct a new version of the contents in Pirate Music Box. Thus, the series creates paradoxical concept by playfully doing touché to the information pirates by taking their stealing activity to create the other creative contents.
Besides this ironic concept, mosaics in Pirate Music Box series use specific symbols to convey the message. The conflict between grayscale traditional media logos and colored Bittorrent logos are used and synchronized with file downloading activity to show that Bittorrent network is replacing traditional media. Traditional media logos appear in black and white while Bittrrent logos have color because grayscale represents past and color implies present. Symbol colors in Pirate Music Box implies that Bittorent network is become today’s industry standard.
The small symbolic tiles show conflict, but the big picture the tiles create remain the same. For example, “I Shot The Sheriff” uses black and white music label logos to assemble a dead music legend Bob Marley (Figure 8). Both kinds of logos, black and white or colored, are assembling the same picture. This implies the artist’s statement that the music industry is still about music; it is just changing in details. Pirate Music Box uses the contrast of symbols to illustrate the conflict issue in the industry about Bittrront networking.
Figure 8-9 – I Shot The Sheriff, Comparison of grayscale version, using music label tiles, and colored version, using Bittorrent logo tiles.
While the paradox of concept and symbols imply the artist’s message, puns playfully conclude the artist’s opinion. Each mosaic in the series is carefully picked to create culture puns and verbal puns. For the first piece, “Let It Be” uses Let It Be album cover as a mosaic and title of a piece. Let It Be is the last album from the Beatles, the most famous band that started pre-digital music business model. The culture pun in this piece implies the end of traditional music business that music labels dominate all the benefits from both consumers and artist. The verbal pun itself communicates the hint from the artist to the people who try to stop the digital movement to “let it be.”
The second piece uses a rebellion icon, Bob Marley, as a visual representation. For this piece, Pirate Music Box symbolizes Bittorrent networking as a rebel act like Bob Marley’s movement to promote freedom. The wordplay is also in the title, “I Shot The Sheriff.” The tile shows a dare from the content pirates to fight with the capitalism.
The third piece, “The Boy Who Lives,” captures the last book from the most famous novels Harry Potter into a mosaic. Harry Potter novels represent revolution in novel industry. They are some of the best-selling fictions of this generation. The story is about a young and restless boy who survives the most powerful wizard from an ancient world. The mosaic of “The Last” Harry Potter book cover analogizes Bittorrent pirates as the boys who are strong enough to defeat the old power. The title “The Boy Who Lives” also supports same message.
The last piece, “The Sinking Boat,” plays with movie for culture pun. “The Sinking Boat” assembles the mosaic of the movie Titanic poster because Titanic is highest grossing film of this generation. Therefore, Titanic represents a peak of a movie industry. The changes between movie studio logos and Bittorrent logos suggest a new elements that construct the movie industry. In addition, Titanic was called “an unsinkable boat,” but Titanic sank during the first journey. The piece’s title reverse this idea by using the name “The Sinking Boat” to portray the paradigm of the old movie industry changing with the birth of the file sharing network. The combination of the four installations covers overall frequently downloaded content ranged from music, books, to movies. Pirate Music Box uses culture and verbal puns to suggest that the rise of content sharing culture is bringing down the “Big Guy,” and balancing the benefits for everyone.
With paradoxical concepts, symbol conflicts, and puns, Pirate Music Box demonstrates two main categories of DIGIA, which are communicating artist’s statement and providing aesthetic to the audience. The message of Pirate Music Box is reflected clearly through the use of each element in the piece. The dynamic animation of the tiles shows the activity in the Bittorrent. The traditional tiles such as music labels are very easy to recognize. Many Bittorrent client logos are included, so if the viewers have experienced Bittorrent issues, they should understand the conflict between grayscale and colored tiles. However, if the audience does not understand the message from visual, culture and verbal puns re-state the main idea of the piece linguistically to make sure the point is pushed across. From the installations element, Pirate Music Box articulates the artist’s statement about the creative content piracy situation.
Pirate Music Box not only carries an artist’s statement but also create aesthetic quality. The most important quality of this series is the concept. The irony of reversing piracy to create an artwork is very obvious but layered enough for the audience to consider and discuss about. The sound samples provide the audience to rediscover the famous content in the new way. In other words, Pirate Music Box, for the first time, lets the audience experience “the sound of pirates.” The audience can also enjoy the endless changes of visuals that synchronize with real time dynamic information. Every time the installations refreshes the tiles, they will look and sound different, so the series shows the moving landscape and soundscape of Bittorrent community.
Conclusion: The Post Mortem
Pirate Music Box series was shown in an exhibition for the first time at Le Blu Gallery, Montgomery Hall, Savannah, GA. The exhibition stood from April 8 – 16, 2008. There only three out of four pieces were selected to show in the exhibition due to the limitation of the space and equipments. The shown pieces “Pirate Music Box 1: Let It Be,” “Pirate Music Box 3: The Sinking Boat,” and “Pirate Music Box 4: The Boy Who Lives.” “Pirate Music Box 2: I Shot the Sheriff” was taken out because it covers the same content area as number1.
In the opening reception on April 9th and during the exhibition peirod, the artist gathered the feedback from the audience from both direct conversations with the participants and observation. There are many comments and feedback about the series both positive and negative.
Feedbacks that were considered positive mean the feedbacks that the artist expected because that meant Pirate Music Box series was able to push the artist statement across. During the exhibition, most of the audience understood Pirate Music Box series after they had read the exhibition statement, as cited below.
For centuries, artists have captured and generated information they got from everything around them into art forms, from their daily lives to landscapes to religious beliefs to inner self-explorations. In the same manner, the new generation of interactive artists explore beyond the real world into the Internet and computer world because the Internet and virtual world have more effects on the modern lifestyle. They use information as a new landscape and computer as a new paint. They capture information, and then transform it into artworks to communicate their ideas with the audience. This style of making artworks from online or dynamic data can be called ‘DIGIA – Dynamic Information Generated Interactive Art.’
DIGIA is an interactive art style that utilizes dynamic information to create an artwork that try to achieve the artist’s purpose whether to make a social statement, to present the information, or to provide aesthetic experience.
The collection in this show makes a social statement about content piracy. It doesn't support but illustrates the evolution of the creative content industry by showing the current situation of piracy through the Bittorrent network. DIGIA provides aesthetic experience from art elements, visual and culture puns.
Although the exhibition statement only covered the concept of DIGIA and Bittorrent elements that the artist uses to construct Pirate Music Box series, the audience was able to interpret each piece’s meaning. Furthermore, once the audience saw all the three pieces, they were able to connect every message together and got the whole idea that the exhibition represented the piracy of creative content from movie, music, and books. The positive feedback that made Pirate Music Box series a successful installation was that the exhibition triggered critical conversations between the audiences. They defined the meaning from their own perspectives, and exchanged opinion about the puns and symbols that each audience was familiar with. For example, the audience who are familiar with music would understand “Pirate Music Box 1: Let It Be” very quickly because he could distinguish music label logos very easily. The audience found “Pirate Music Box 4: The Boy Who Lives” the most difficult to interpret because not many people were familiar with book publisher logos. However, once one of the pieces’ puns was decoded, the audience would try to decode the rest two pieces. Some of the audiences also brought in more people to see the exhibition and told the new participants their interpretation. The positive feedbacks gathered from the reception and regular exhibition time showed that audience had a process of peeling layers of meaning to understand the core of the artworks.
In contrast, the exhibition didn’t deliver many elements successfully. First of all, the exhibition still needed exhibition statement especially the description that Pirate Music Box series pulls information from Bittorrent to create artworks. Therefore, if the audience didn’t notice the fact about Bittorrent, they didn't have surprising impression that would lead to the aesthetic of interpreting the layered of meaning and critical opinion towards the pieces. Second, since the exhibition space was limited and near classroom, each piece’s sound cannot turn the volume on high enough to present each installation soundscape. Each installation was also too close to each other that was hard to recognize which soundscape came from which. Actually the exhibition designers were trying to install headphones to avoid these problems, but they could not find the right solution to install the headphones. For the next exhibition, using headphones is mandatory for the installation. In addition, Pirate Music Box series can develop into many contexts according to the variation of the mosaic. Each piece in the series might use a mosaic of software or a person to show the effects of Bittorrent network to a certain subject.
Both positive and negative show that Pirate Music Box series is successful as a DIGIA because the artwork captures dynamic information on the Internet, and transforms it into a statement and aesthetic experience for the audience although the series needs some support from other media such as exhibition statement. If one takes a look at the core of Pirate Music Box series, one will find that the essence of the series derives from classic art that provides aesthetic experience and convey messages. Only media used are different. Today’s technological improvement allows Pirate Music Box series to uses more scientific tools and approaches to construct the artwork. Some might consider Pirate Music Box series and DIGIA toward the offspring of the science world not the art world, but the actually the two separate worlds have grown from the same root.
Ancient Greek once defined the word ‘techné’, the root of the word ‘technology,’ art. More than 20,000 years ago, Egyptian artists used ancient dyes and pigments invented by ancient scientist to create artworks that made the viewers felt the way the artists wanted to because they had better control of their tools (Semanick). Later generations of scientists, technicians, and industrialists have improved paints as well as art equipments to be efficient and marketable. Industrial revolution in 18th century, Europe released more than 20 intense pigment palettes that gave birth the Impressionism because color mixing became more predictable and portable (NC Art Museum). In the middle of 19th century, invention in optics birth to the art of photography. The history shows that the art world was sometimes defined by technological limitation from the science world. People in the world of art and science are considered different groups with different skill sets. As a result, for a long time, the art and science worlds are considered totally different worlds. Today, DIGIA, other kinds of new media arts, and the interactive artists, are hybrid between artists and scientists. They have brought the meaning of art home where art and science are in the same world and can inspire a new generation of art.
