The idea of writing
this essay1 has matured
over the last four years, after long years of creative activity
in the production of digitally-generated works in CDRom and Internet.
Over 15 years of work immersed in this media, I saw paradigms and
concepts be transformed practically year after year. Now my interest
is concentrated on the emergence of a new communicative environment,
imbued with a new art.
In
spite of working in a digital environment, during this period I continued
producing art in other media. Since 1985 I have dedicated myself
to literature, having published 8 printed poetry and 2 prose works.
I have also dedicated myself to producing audiovisuals, documentaries
and authorial works shown on television and copied on video tape.
My
first contact with computers was in 1987, when I started making video-poetry
programs. Personal computers were beginning to take hold and become
a reality. Soon after, at the start of the 90's, multimedia arose
with the dissemination of computers with graphic processors, CD Rom
readers and support for audio and video. That was when I started
my career as director and scriptwriter of multimedia projects.
Several
previous texts I had written followed the evolution of the ideas
that led me to writing this essay. In 1987 I wrote The
Kinetic Board, in 1994, Video-poetry
and Poetry and Technology, in 1996, it was Multimedia, Imagination and Zen Poetry, in 1998, Multi-poetry, A Temporary Name While Waiting for a New One to Show Up was published,
and, finally, in 2000, Digital
Video and Interactive Video2.
The
query that led me to write this text is related with the name multimedia3,
given that it is a new form of multi-sensorial and interactive communication
in which known media are integrated and managed by the computer,
which is transformed into a communications vehicle. I think that
the name favored the multiplicity of media in detriment to its integration.
I even came to invent the term intersense to
refer to these interactive and multi-sensorial software, but the
name multimedia continued, increasingly universal in use and more and
more non-specific.
This
media fragmentation without something that integrated media into
a new orderly system had repercussions in my personal life and in
those of the digital artists that I know. What was I: poet, writer,
director, programmer, coordinator, scriptwriter, photographer, or
musician? Until today, the artists that work in digital media are
classified in a strangely ample, non-specific manner. Artists and
works in digital media, multimedia artists, creators in new media - in
some way, the intrinsic aspects of art and communication that arose
with technological evolution have still not been done justice, and
that is what I intend to do.
There
is a concept that defines my present situation more precisely: I
am an imaginator, a proposer and maintainer of
imaginations. So why not say it and show why: That is what I propose - to
weave arguments that follow the arising of a new form of expression,
supported by digital means and more specifically a new form of art
that has taken hold in this new technological and communication matrix.
I
consider this essay to be an inaugural text. For this reason there
is ample space for the incorporation of new ideas and concepts to
this first insight, besides new developments that I still have in
mind. I consider the text incomplete and open to incorporations and
exegesis. It is turned public in order to initiate a conversation
about this subject and not to exhaust it.
II
- Precedents and the present environment
We
live in an important moment in the history of communication through
computers. If we briefly take a look at the interfaces4 of
personal computers, we find an evolution that came from the command line in text to the graphic interfaces of today, based on
the desktop5 metaphor.
This evolution, nevertheless, has come to a point where it is necessary
to adapt the new communicative functions that the computers have
come to have, especially from the 1990's onward with the onset
of multimedia and the expansion of the Internet.
From
the point of view of software, the need for change has also arisen.
The interface with operational systems that simulate the desktop has its days numbered. Today, a new generation of users utilize
iconized tools in software, whose icons no longer refer to the original
object, which is unknown to them. It is with the popularization of
the computer that people wound up substituting tradition work tools.
To exemplify, how many web designers that use design programs are
familiar with aerography? Nevertheless, in the interface of the programs
there is an icon that refers to the design of this tool, unknown
to this generation.
As
time goes on, this situation will certainly get worse. That is why
options to the desktop are being researched. A new interface of the
future is already being talked about, the immersive one, where the
user interacts with the information in a multi-dimensional environment.
Several advanced systems of virtual reality6 have already been developed and their
technologies have been incorporated into personal computers, especially
in environments for games and authoring software for multimedia.
With
the universalization of the Internet we became familiar with the
metaphor of the electronic page, composed and diagramed
with text, pictures and graphic elements, with some breaking of linearity
through connections between documents made by means of hypertexts.
Video and audio are ultimately accessed in windows that simulate
a screen. This metaphor, a representation of pages in printed media
in a computer, has great difficulty dealing with media elements that
need to have temporality, such as video, audio and animation. But
this was the first time it was demonstrated that the computer could
be used to communicate and was not just for our work.
Simultaneously,
multimedia authoring systems brought us the metaphor of the theater
and movies to computer interfaces by introducing the timeline.
Think of media objects as actors, the screen as a stage, place actors
on the stage, distributed along a timeline and
program their interactions. That is how much software works that
is used in multimedia authoring.
Even
more recently, in order to deal with the growing volume in video
and audio rich content, disseminated by the Internet, CD Rom's and
DVD's, the metaphor of the media console has grown in importance,
a representation of a home appliance on-screen remote control, somewhat
like the panel of a car or an airplane cockpit. It is a simplistic
metaphor where the user activates, deactivates, sequences and makes
adjustments to the videos and audio segments. The audiovisual information
is now in a window surrounded by control instruments.
To
get to the heart of the matter, one needs to emphasize the fundamental
role of the Internet in transforming the computer into a communication
vehicle. Global interconnectivity and the possibility of interaction
between myriad production and consumption information channels has
become a reality. It now advances with the speed of physical communication
media, which has allow immediate exchanges of large quantities of
data, vital to the applications with intense use of audiovisual media
and systems that use real-time interaction.
Additionally,
the Internet is fundamental in the dissemination of the concept of
hypertexts, a term coined by Vannevar Bush in 19457.
Instead of a system handling and archiving information based on
hierarchical and classifying structures in traditional data banks,
information
in hypertexts is constituted of knots, agglomerates of information - clusters,
caches, that, through associatively established connections, are
able to establish networks by diverse manners of affinities, much
in the way we establish our mental processes. A word in a text remits
to another text that remits to another..
Later
on, with the dissemination of computational support resources to
other media besides text, such as the capability of graphic processing,
photo and design exhibition, video
and audio, the term was amplified to hypermedia,
where not only texts are associated to others, but any other media
element refers to another one through these associative connections.
Information caches become documents composed with the presence of
several media elements.
As
we will see further ahead, the imagination effects
a new metaphor that abandons the metaphors used in present-day software.
This does not mean that many of the characteristics used in these
present interfaces will not be incorporated with a new meaning. It
is safe to say that the concept of hypermedia will
be incorporated, because what is intended is to give it an environment
that is more adequate for its full development.
III
- The imagination
As
time goes on, immersed in this environment of transformation, it
became clear to me that a new form of expression, a new art, a new
communication vehicle was arising. I needed to find an expression
that would help me to better understand what was happening and that
would help me in my job of creating new works expressed in this manner.
To
arrive at this concept, I embarked from a personal difficulty I had
in expressing my creative activity and from my perception of the
evolution of the communication interfaces and software in computers.
I thought that multimedia privileged diversity instead of "uni-meaning", and I was quite impressed with all-to-common incompetence
in elaborating software. A good part of software developers resorted
to the overlapping use of non-interrelated media among them, only
for the purpose of being considered as multimedia software.
I
always have been a critic of "pornographic dictatorship" imposed
on them. Do programs have to use many media to be multimedia works? A lone voice would not
be considered so, even if it were the best way to express an idea.
Indeed, it is not always that the excess of media is an adequate
way of an expression.
Everything
continued to evolve in one direction: ourselves, as we think, as
we manipulated information in the most sophisticated system ever
created for it. The term hypertext itself gives off the idea. It
is no wonder that the classic text by Vannevar Bush is called As We May Think.
Reviewing
my experience, delving deeper into is said to be the most recent
research in neuroscience, re-reading authors that deal with the evolution
of digital means, I considerably expanded by comprehension about
the latest developments in this area. I sought to rethink everything
I had learned from a kind of point zero. In fact, I went through
a "de-categorisizing/re-categorisizing" situation, where one finds
new terminology that is more useful and adequate to what was going
on in my mind and deeds.
The
word that appeared to me one day was imagination.
It could have been thought,
imaginetics, mental art, etc. In Chinese, the symbol that represents
theses concepts is the same. But I chose imagination.
Here the word is more involucrate. What is important is the definition
I will trace for this form of communication. What is important is
to delineate some of its characteristics from the first creative
experiments with this proposal and arrive at the characteristics
of the new art that is appropriated from this universe at our disposal.
The
definition of imagination as
a communication media is an evolution of the definition of multimedia. Imagination is
a multi-sensorial and interactive communication form, mediated by
computational systems, such as multimedia,
but it advances in the search for a new metaphor that abandons the
desktop metaphor, the graphic page metaphor, the geographic metaphor,
the timeline metaphor and the console metaphor, used in present-day
software. Imagination is the fruit of the incorporation of languages and media
into a new language and media and not their utilization and juxtaposition.
Imagination is based on the creation of computational environments,
here called collaborative mental
extensions that are proposed and maintained by a community. These
environments, in turn, are also interactive with other connected
communities in networks.
In
building them, I used metaphors that directly relate to the functioning
of the brain. The building blocks of these environments are called images. Also, certain mutant states of articulation among them through
connections and diagramming are called conscious and unconscious mental states. In the end we have a software
environment which as a whole resembles a live informational organism,
which I call Imagination.
An imagination is like a movie, a book, a
theater play, a painting.
This
environment contains images in permanent flow and connection with one
another. Such process occurs perceptibly and also imperceptively
through interactions and other actions foreseen in written software
code. Using the mental metaphor, in a certain time we will have access
only to a part of the images that we bring into focus, in a process similar to that of
our consciousness, while others remain unperceived, however in interactions
with the whole.
The
following is a description of neuroscientist Antônio Damásio about
the functioning of our mind and how this can be transported with
some limitations and adaptations to the computer environment the
I am proposing. 8
"The process
we call mind... is a continuous flow of images, many of which reveal
themselves as logically interconnected. The flow moves to the forefront
of time, slowly or quickly, in an orderly or disarrayed manner and,
sometimes, advances not only as a sequence, but in several [sequences].
At other times, the sequences compete, converge or diverge and, sometimes,
overlay themselves. Thought is an acceptable word to translate such
an image flow."
The imaginations proposed, maintained and
interacting with communities are, in fact, collaborative mental extensions
in computational environments where groups express and read their
ideas in the form of interactive images that construct/deconstruct
like a living organism. The imaginations evidently are also interactively
related to one another, exchanging images, mental states, communities,
etc.
Before
going on to develop the idea, I would like to define a little better
the term image, in the sense I use it here. To
this end, I once again refer to neuroscientist António Damásio, because
it is now very important to definitely disconnect the term from vision,
image here has a more ample sense and that will be useful later
on.
"The term image
does not only refer to a vision... By the term Image I want to denote mental patterns with a formed structure with
the currency of each one of the sensorial modes. which include several
senses: visual, hearing, smell, taste and somato-sensorial . which
includes several senses: touch, muscular, temperature, pain, visceral
and vestibular. The word image does not only refer to visual images
and does not just refer to static objects. When I use the term image, I always want to mean a mental
image. I do not utilize the word image to
refer to standard neural activities that can be found through present
methods of neuroscience in the sensorial cortices when they are active."
The
descriptions of how images are produced in the human mind, also from
António Damásio, will help us to comprehend how images can organize
themselves in the imaginative media, in a computer environment.
"Images
are constructed when we occupy ourselves with objects, from outside
the brain to inside, from people and places to toothaches; or when
we reconstruct objects from memory, from the inside to the outside.
The production of images never stops while we are awake and is maintained
even during part of our sleep, as can be demonstrated whenever we
dream."
"Images
are the currency of the mind, the words that I am using to transmit
these ideas are formed in the first place as images of phonemes and
morphemes - audio and visual images, or somato-sensorial, and it
is only later on that they were placed on this page in written form.
In the same manner, these now
printed words in front of the eyes of the reader are processed initially
in activating other non-verbal images, with which the concepts that
correspond to my words can be mentally exhibited."
"The images
can be conscious or unconscious. Nevertheless, we should note that
not all images that the brain constructs become conscious. There
is an enormous disproportion between the great number of images that
are constantly generated and that compete with one another, and the
window, which is relatively small, through which the images become
conscious - the window through which the images are accompanied by
sensation, imagetic as well, from which we are to learn from. In
other words, speaking metaphorically, there really exists an underworld
below the conscious mind, and
this underworld has several levels. One of these levels is made up
of images that attention was not paid to, another level is made up
of neural patterns that perceive all the images, whether these eventually
become conscious or not. Another level is further related to neural
machinery needed to maintain the archives of neural patterns in the
memory, the type of neural machinery that encompasses implicit dispositions,
innate and acquired."
The imagination is a possible space-time,
a present agora with certain duration of past and future, where
flows
occur and ordering of images are organized into clusters, Benjaminian9 constellations,
in re-signified languages. An imagination begins
by taking off from a proposal that aligns initial conditions of publication
of information and an interaction model of the communities correlated
to it, especially that of the sponsor community and its interactive
communities.
When
we begin we don't know where we are, what we will be. The work starts
in this manner, establishes a tempo for itself and constructs itself.
It does not lack this or that, nor is it totally published, nor totally
in preliminary form. It is it can be for the moment, and many things
are not there because a time has not yet been established for them
to be done. The time of an imagination makes up part of its syntax.
Its evolutionary patterns
are defined by active communities.
The imagination takes recourse in the concept
of version, such as with
software programs, which start up one day and are permanently under
change afterwards, to the measure that implementations arise, new
forms, possibilities, technological advances, etc. Works are never
finished after they are published, and this is a substantial change.
As
we have already seen, they acquire what I call organicity,
characteristics that share similarities with biological models, as
well as with the human brain. They are in permanent mutation, are
born, die, grow, regenerate, duplicate themselves, remember, forget,
create connections, etc.
Neuroscientist
António Damásio tells us in his book Descartes' Mistake: 10
"... the operation of the neural circuitry depends on the pattern
of existing connections... experience models the circuitry design.
Additionally, in some systems more than in others, the synaptic potentials
can be altered over the life of an individual to reflect different
experiences of the organism and, as a result of the brain circuit
design, also continue to alter themselves. The circuits are not only
receptive to the results of the first experience, but are repeatedly
flexible and susceptible to being modified by continuous experiences.
"... Some circuits
are remodeled innumerous times over the life of an individual, in
accordance with the alterations the organism undergoes, while others
remain predominantly stable and form the 'spine' of the notions that
we construct about the internal and external world."
The
narrative here is not just predefined; the communities can mount
their sequencing, the imaginations and
focal planes, the consciences and "unconsiences". The perceptive focus of
objects placed in the time-space continuum, following their affinities,
causalities and their multi-sequencing, make up part of the work's
syntax, as is also the exchange of theses consciences and "unconsiences" between users in the communities as well.
Images
pulse, communicate with themselves through several sensorial means,
re-make themselves haphazardly, inside-out, explore new syntax combinations,
random, non-linear paths.
The videos become interactive and multi-flowing (mutlistreaming videos),
with alignments and non-alignments in relation to several simultaneous,
coordinated or random timelines. Audios configure themselves associated
to texts, phonemes, incidental sounds, articulated in musical language. Soundscapes11 are created
in a mental environment.
This new form of
expression and communication abolishes the already tenuous frontiers
between diverse language forms in a digital environment, the frontiers
between creator and his publics, the frontiers between languages,
styles, etc. Ultimately, it is no longer appropriate to say that
we have languages and multiple entries and exits in these simultaneously
acting environments. Printed text, software programming, photography,
cinema, video, bi and tri-dimensional animation, theater, painting,
etc. here become de-categorized from their original meaning as media
or language.
The
new language arises from the integration of theses languages, these
media from man's senses. What is proposed is the construction of
a new language incorporating these elements. What is proposed is
something simpler and more powerful: the construction of communication
models based on how we feel and think, on how we search, articulate,
internalize and externalize what we receive through our senses.
The imagination structures itself as a work
that communicates via multi-sensorial digital entries and exits and
is made up of a digital database with mutant syntax based on programming
languages that order the sensorial elements of the work. This new
syntax allows, among other things, the creators and the reading publics
of the work to permanently interfere in the work. These categories
also undergo profound modifications and tend to disappear, as we
shall see later on.
Time
is treated like flows. We have no single vector of linear time. The
notion of simultaneity is strongly recalled. One can expect a timeline
in the work that concludes other flows to the measure that the work
is constructed. However, each object, each moment has its own mutant,
interactive timeline with their communities and users that also mold
them to their time. Parallel flows occur in an instant of time; temporal
vectors can be inverted. These new possibilities open up doors for
us to interactive multi-flows, especially the audiovisual ones and
cause us to abandon the concept of single, unidirectional time that
rules the present languages of the cinema and video.
Nevertheless,
it is necessary to avoid the idea that, in order to conceive of imagination works, everything must interact
and nothing can be linear. In our mind many narratives exist that
demand linearity; there are images that should not be very interactive.
When the euphoria of non-linear interactive media is passed, the
time to know how to use these elements of language in a better-balanced
manner is at hand. Linearity and other sequencing forms or otherwise,
interactions or otherwise, when, how and whether or not to use them,
between which elements, etc. are decisions that make up part of the
new syntax which is delineating itself.
I
now see time as an action component of imagination. Time corresponds
to movement. And imagination is capable of dealing with
the widest range of temporal dimensions. Those that our eyes and
ears perceive and also those perceptible only by comparison made
by the memory of distinct images. There are animations that are fruit
of movements whose duration between states is greater than our capacity
to perceive their variation of light or the immediate sound propagation.
Think about a growing child in a vegetable garden. Most of the movements
have imperceptible durations to our audiovisual sensorial organs
without memory's interference. These movements, or these tempos,
that are not dealt with in present day kinetic media, such as cinema
or video, that privilege instantaneous perception, are also now capable
of being treated in imagination works.
An imagination is not there to be watched:
it is there to be in. They
are "presenced" works. The notion of stage or screen, or of page,
that remits to the concept of projection or mirroring dislocates
itself to the idea of an immersed presence of information. This is
placed as an accessible and available out-of-body option, capable
of its own relationships, established at the act of proposing or
at the interactive developments of the work during its maintenance.
I should emphasize that the movements or interactions of the imagination
work continue occurring, even in the absence of an onlooker.
The
space where the collaborative
mental extension is housed does not have to be bi or tri-dimensional,
nor even quadri-dimensional, when time is included. The informational
space can be abstract or realistic and can be constructed in several
forms. What is sought out is immersion. One does not attempt to increasingly
represent reality, rather, to extend our mind more and more.
The environments do not need to be rooms of
marble with 3-D reflection. The architecture of imagination works is free from representation of reality, similar
to what occurs today with Hypersurfaces12 - a new area of architecture that
studies the fusion of physical space and media, and experiences with
off-screen multi-media in robots and general appliances. An imagination space does not even require a computer screen. Its
architecture is part of its syntax.
Virtual reality, as it is proposed, adjusts itself to the expression
of some ideas, such as screenworks, reconstruction of physical environments,
etc. However, a large range of possible applications exists where
the desired results would be the de-identification with reality,
or the a-identification. And even when we think, for example, of
a remote manipulation console of a machine, certainly the environment
will have components close to the reality of a tractor operation,
but will have other components overlaid and interacting that will
facilitate, modify and adapt this operation. And this will be a new
reality that is no longer the initial one that served as a basis
for the construction of the metaphor.
There is still
the application of translation environments of sensorial entries
and exits outside of our scale of perception, such as, for example,
the translation of light and sound, e-rays and other energy spectrums.
This type of environment that will deal with the amplification translated
from somatic human perception does not need to have a realistic conception.
The conceptions will be connected to the objectives that one plans
to achieve.
IV
- Imagination and Dynamic Ideography - close concepts
The concept of dynamic ideography13 proposed
by Levi is a concept I consider very close to the one I am proposing
and, in a certain way, overlaid. According to him,
"Dynamic ideography is a way of writing that is demanded by contemporary
technical support. It functions in following the principal of figurative
and animated representation of mental models, especially by replicating
phonetic language on a visual plane, like the alphabet."
"Among so many uses of dynamic ideography for scientific research,
education, training and group communication, leisure and diversion,
who knows, maybe a still unknown art form is to be born from a new
cinema-language."
As
we can see, Levi proposes a new form of communication constructed
in computer that manipulated kinetic images, thus creating a new
kinetic-visual alphabet. He proposes an artificial imagination.
He
comes close to what I am proposing here, discussing in a brilliant
fashion several characteristics of this new language, naturally similar
to many that I propose here. Nevertheless, his concept is too restricted
to the substitution of a textual, static language by visual-kinetic
language in computer environments. This dichotomy between text and
visual, static and kinetic, permanently recalled in comparisons between
the advantages of the visual system in relation to the textual, impeded
him to deal with the question in a wider form, as I intend to do
here.
What
is sought after is a more ample, integrating plane. If we shall deal
with kinetic images, making representations of mental models, then
we have an integrated set of language and sense. More that becoming
this or that vehicle of preference for expression of all ideas, thoughts
and feelings, we can comprehend that we have all these
languages and sensorial entries-exits at our disposal to store and
communicate, similar to what occurs in our mind. We are not dealing
with one or another means. We are dealing with all forms. It is evident
that each image will demand an appropriate combination of forming
blocks, whether they come from phonetic, textual, visual, smell,
etc. And this dosage and this amalgam will become the important elements
in the development of a new imaginative language.
So,
I would say that the writing of contemporary technical support may
function according to the principal of metaphorical representation
of mental models, replicating textual, spoken or written language,
kinetic or not and a visual and audio language on an imagetic plane,
not just a visual one. On a plane where images are multi-sensorial
caches integrated into a new language.
I
cannot fail to mention in this brief exposition to include explicit
mention of constructive blocks of images temporarily outside of present-day
computer environments, such as touch, smell, self-awareness, etc.
We do not yet have computer interfaces disseminated from and for
these senses. Some of these things already exist in experimental
environments and virtual reality. Videogames have already demonstrated that it is
a question of time before we are also working with these elements
in our everyday encounters with PC's.
V
- The Imagination and Video & Cinema - What is changing?
It's funny... it's as if we have been waiting
too long for PC's to begin to support visual and sound image in
movement. They already can and we are dumbfounded by it all.
A
multimedia video application began to occupy the window, usually
set off by a button, preferentially a button with a movie icon. Only
now computers have more resources for processing and videos can be
larger, even occupying the entire screen. Additionally, it is possible
to play several videos simultaneously. It doesn't make sense to play
videos in windows, as if something apart from the rest of the screen.
Kinetic
audiovisual content in imagination is part of the interface, of a
much larger set of language elements that interact in an even larger
space than the screen. The video interacts with information in other
media and now can become the central piece of the interface, in what
I call video-anchoring. Video-anchoring refers
to the video's positioning as the central element of the interface,
a role that up till now has been assumed by text and static graphic
screens. The visual and sound image in movement, which is integrated
and interactive, has a temporality that ends up impacting the relation
of the information with people and with the software design.
Video
making up part of the interface also makes it become kinetic. When
I concluded my first project using video-anchoring,
in the CD Rom Discovering Brazil
200014, the idea clearly came to me the
information is no longer frozen in time, waiting for us: it is contained
in the imaginetic flows
that make up the application and in its relation with the public.
The
inclusion of interface temporality is very interesting, because the
video must play, and in this sense, it helps to breach the present
structure of the menus and tools, which are always available for
immediate access. We can accelerate routes, move
forward, backward, to the side, jump, etc., but in the interface
we are always confronted with the need to wait some time to arrive
or leave from and to some place. The information moves with the flows.
And,
as syntax and the information are not necessarily only in the video,
a space for video-illustration, audio-illustration, video-anchoring
and the crossing of several visual images and sound flows with other
elements on the screen, such as texts, photos, drawings, animation
and diagrams, menus, consoles, etc arises.
Little
has been done when dealing with non-linear video production and with
the possibility of on-line editing, such as changing cameras and
block sequencing. These videos create the need for new procedures,
both at the time of capturing and when editing scenes, as well as
when managing exhibition. We further have to think of "leafing through" videos,
like moving them backwards and forwards or to the side. And I really
think the idea is antiquated and not very practical to transform
the screen into a replica of a conventional editing station or
into a remote control like today's media consoles.
Thanks
to the possibility of programmable movements via software, we are
at a new frontier in the visual arts field. Although they deal directly
with movement, the cinema and video, by the fact that they work with
takes in seconds, chained in sequences of minutes and hours, require
the continuous presence of the spectator in the showing room. They
are not able to explore in real time some of the fundamental movements
of life, which are perceptible only through the comparison of "static" states
through memory.
Imaginations can move themselves, transforming themselves
at speeds the eye cannot follow instantaneously. They have a "life" of
their own, independently of the presence of a spectator. They are
modifying themselves and presenting themselves to whomever is connected
at a given time. Thus, we have an opportunity to explore time and
movement concepts heretofore unimaginable in terms of artistic representation:
we can explore the dominion of imperceptible movements of catastrophic
or gradual duration, infinitely small or large. Programming that
lasts for hours, days, seasons, years. It is possible to conceive
of works that have life and that, when information is erased from
the computer, may die, like landscapes that lose their leaves in
the winter. The work is in movement, whether it is perceived or not
by whom interacts with it at a given moment.
The imagination also frees us from the single
timeline of cinema and video, where a video channel and another audio
channel (further divided into 2 or 4) follow synchronized timelines.
At the same instant, in the same imagination timeline,
or in an individual timeline of some image, the elements of video and audio can be however many there
are and be aligned among themselves or not. Furthermore, these alignments
or un-alignments can be programmed in the syntax of the software.
In fact, we are dealing with audiovisual entries and exits in a new
manner. The images of our mental extension have new and interdependent autonomy that impact
in their audiovisual emanations.
Here,
the concept of sound landscape can
be extended to mental landscapes,
including visual elements also. We have to take the concept of being in seriously and no longer consider
people as spectators the see and hear what someone recorded for them.
The imagination deals with environments, universes and not with stages,
screens and audiences.
After
all, what changes in an environment where the sources of a visual
image and audio emission have autonomy and interdependence among
themselves?
Let
us think of a room in the physical real world with a TV on, a child
on the sofa watching it, a person waxing and polishing the floor
and another person reading a book. The person reading listens to
the polishing machine making noise, hears his heart beating - if
he is paying attention, listens to the child's sounds, the book is
being handled and the sound the TV is making. One may see the book
page, the TV, the child or the person waxing or close one's eyes
and see nothing.
Let
us then use this room as a metaphor in an environment we will create,
from something that can be methaphorized in our collaborative
mental extension. In an imagination the
waxing machine can be disconnected or even moved outside the environment,
we can focus on the heartbeats or not, we can show the images on
the TV, the waxing machine, the child, the book, of what the person
who is reading is about to think, simultaneously or otherwise. And
these elements are all kinetic and also interactive among each other.
This means that the TV interacts with the child who can change channels
and with this change the images it produces, the waxing machine interacts
with the person moving it, the book interacts with the person reading...
In
the cinema or in video, we watch that which is recorded in this environment,
with a reading that was done from the edition of the creators of
the work. In an imagination, we watch visual and sound
impressions resultant from interactions of the elements in the environment
and among them and you and among you, them and other members of the
community. I have no doubt that audiovisual language is about to
be transformed enormously.
VI
- Imagination and Interactivity - the end of response stimulation
What has interactivity been in most Internet
and CD Rom software? By clicking a button, giving the user immediate
access to the information he desires and allow him to customize
the software by a resource called "skin". This notion of interactivity,
which in fact makes the user increasingly passive, is not dissimilar
to a simplified model of a reproduction of interactivity in the fashion
of Skinner's stimulus-response model. And what is worse, it is
imbedded with the false impression of interactivity, since the
connection
between information contained in the software and the user have
already been previously defined.
One
of the first measures in the design of interactivity of an imagination is to throw out the idea that the click of a mouse, following
by navigation or execution of a task, is the preponderant interaction
of a digital work. We need to liberate ourselves from the curse of
the button, a materializer of
a compulsive and instantaneous desire.
In
an imagination, the design of interactivity
is fundamental. It is necessary to define how it occurs among images,
itself and the communities, and the relations that we can create
among the communities. It is time to seek out new forms of interaction,
in navigation and in the relationship between the users of software
and the information. It is necessary to include interaction with
time - create maturity cycles, catastrophic movements, gradual movements.
Interaction with random events. Interaction with negatives - reality
molded around negatives. Associative interaction, crossed
interactions or those based on potential.
And nothing is
better that to seek ideas of mental metaphors. After all, the neurons
guard connections with even hundreds of thousands of other neurons
simultaneously, forming groups in the shape of networks, exchanging
information, dealing with potential changes, creating circuits to
generate short term information, undergoing modifications to deal
with long term information, carrying sensorial information and translating
and connecting feelings and thoughts.
As simple as they
may be, the new interactivity models developed from these new premises
will be infinitely richer that what is available today.
VII
- The Author/Creator and the Reader/Spectator/Public - Categories in
disuse
Because of everything
said previously, it no longer make sense to speak of author and spectator
when dealing with imagination works.
They are open works by their intrinsic nature. On the other hand,
it wouldn't make sense to de-categorize people without re-categorizing
them when interacting with this re-contoured work.
So,
let's talk about them. An imagination needs minimal conditions
to begin to exist and, later on, to continue expanding. To begin
with,
it is necessary that someone propose the work.
The proposer,
person or group, is the one that starts of the process of creation
of the basic initial conditions of the imagination work. An already proposed work will be signed up in a computer system's bits where
it is accessed by the communities.
The
public, reader or spectator, I call communities because
this word synthesizes the new position of the public, which, besides
receiving information, interacts with the works, where its influences
and participates in its configuration, in feeding it data and in
its development. Each community interacts
with the others and among themselves and with the work. It is important
to note that the same person can take part in distinct communities
and that these communities do not have rigid limits.
A
specific community basic for the existence of a
work is the maintaining community.
A work with maintainers continues
existing. Like any living organism, an imagination needs
financial resources to remain filed in databanks and maintain connectivity.
Like any organism, the work tends towards entropy and chaos if it
does not periodically receive content maintenance, software, etc.
The maintaining community is also fundamental
for the maintenance of the work. And finally, because of its mutant,
kinetic and interactive nature, an imagination needs
constant implementation to make sense of its existence. An imagination without maintainers tends
to die due to unfeasibility, making it chaotic and inoperative.
The
other communities have varying levels of access
and capability of changing the work, defined over the development
of the work. In function of their interests and characteristics,
these are the communities that read and edit the work; without
them, it would also "die", this time, because it would be forgotten.
In the case of not making sense, an imagination becomes one more of the billions
of uninteresting documents today available on the net.
What
have been called open or interactive works are works where the author
abdicates his control over content of the work in favor of the reader,
which also does not have a defined form, since it is a mutant work
in progress. That is how imagination works are. Nevertheless, the
distinction between authors and readers does not matter - nor
does the loss of control over the work by the community of maintainers and proposers.
The imagination organizes itself like a network,
where the system in some way needs to validate its users. After this
validation, the user qualifies oneself to frequent the work, obtaining
permissions that go from one possibility of interference in some
sections to some people and communities to interference in all sections,
affecting all groups. What one desires is to create premises of relationship
that allow for shared creativity, without leaving the work drift
into a completely chaotic state.
Using
our mental metaphor, it is desirable to have much change and
interrelation in parts of the work, but that other parts have a slower
pace and
more restricted access. To the contrary, it would tend to be
completely disfigured. A work that succumbs entirely to the control
of whomever
uses its does not communicate. If there is some type of "id" place
there, talking with users, the work will go away.
On
the other hand, it also does not make sense to create works with
rigid controls in an environment resistant to mutation, change of
state, etc. The relation among possibilities of access, edition,
additions and deletions of images and environments make up part of
the new syntax that arises. Each imagination presupposes its optimum
level interactively, also mutant, of levels of access to the communities.
Imagination has an editorial trait to the measure that the
communities and individuals may modify aspects of content, diagramming,
syntax, etc. in the work. This characteristic brings to light an
important interaction that had been lost with the appearance of the
press and later on of mass communication media. With these media,
a condition that limited the works was created as of the process
of publication.
Imagination works can be reproduced
in large quantities without ceasing to be plastic, enough for them
to be modified by whoever uses them. It is important to emphasize
that this retrieval brings with it novelty allowed by technology:
the computer can register the versions of the work while it is being
modified. The registry of the mutation can be preserved.
VIII
- Poesis - An ongoing experiment
Having
made clear that what is in course is the development of a new art
form with its own language, which incorporates and modifies others,
but which is still incipient, it is necessary to experiment and create
new amalgams of language elements that will become consolidated later
on as elements of imaginative language. To help cement the structure
of the new language, I looked at the existing ones for that which
had more affinity with the new one, with the unmapped one, to supply
syntactical operational models to be used as the backbone of an imagination language.
I
opted for poetic language. I proposed to myself that I use the
term in its widest meaning, not only that restricted to literary
art.
It is because that, in spite of the consensus that poetry is
an art of writing, I observe the term frequently being used in connection
with other arts. Such a poetic image... the poetry of a musical
phrase....
of a character... The term is also used in many everyday situations
without a direct connection with text where the term is used
with
a connotation that makes us believe it is more of a "mental state." It
is this amplified meaning connected to a sensitive, creative "mental
state" and its syntactical operations, including not only those
of text, but others as well - imaginetic ones - to
which it adapts itself.
Over
the last few years I have sought to give poetic language the status
of a language that is an articulator of languages in the creation
of a new imagination language. I tried this path because I consider
that poetry is an extremely suggestive language form. It is inaugural
in the sense that it recombines language codes with extreme ease.
This faculty of rupture and divergence, this initiating strength,
always makes the poetic text reach the imagination with great intensity
to whoever has access to it. This has resulted in the use of poetry
in almost all the sacred processes of the past and in the processes
of rebellion and contemporary social advances.
I
do not say that poetry cannot be reproductive and conformist; it
is like that, too, when the author or reader wishes it to be. However,
I sustain that poetry indisputably has a very large potential for
innovation imbedded in its formal construction characteristics. The
facility that it has to incorporate visual and audio elements of
language, the facility for recombination, translation and re-codifying
languages and fusion of images diverse origins is part of its essence.
As
a language form, poetry easily invokes mental images, leading to
rearrangements and internal re-creations, giving life to the imaginary
element, bringing it new codes and freedom of composition. The opening
up of possible language combinations, the silence between the images,
the formation of semantic sets, all of this contributes in a decisive
way for this characteristic to be the base for the creation of a
new language.
Why not use this
potential to vigorously articulate the integration of existing languages
into a new creative art form and circulation of imaginations?
IX
- The Imagination Site - A mental extension that constitutes itself
The Ciclope Imagination Site is a work that was inspired
as a laboratory for the development of the concepts laid forth
here. It would not make sense to be elaborating these rationalizations
if there were no environments to be practiced in, creating a
desirable
exchange between thought and action. The Site is
a collaborative mental extension that has
existed in my mind since May, 2000, after years of experiments
in the construction of sites dealing with digital art. Afterwards
it
was launched in June 2002 on the Internet at www.ciclope.art.br with
versions in CD Rom and intranet. Since then, a digital environment
has been under construction with permanently mutating organic
characteristics.
The
site experiments with the concepts of adapted imaginations to the
limits of present day networks, especially on the Internet and to
the present state of hardware and software of home computers. However,
taking into consideration that the work is alive and is under ongoing
development and is also evolving with the media where it manifests
itself, it will be easy to understand it in its present state and
see its potential in the near future. As a matter of comfort, the
site is fictitious. It is through fiction that I can realize the
task of scrutinizing reality with greater levity. In a world where
the mind is still confined, controlled and many times untouchable,
fiction frees us from the dilemmas of truth and lies and projects
us into other spheres of wider, more fluid understanding.
The
site is of an indefinite duration and is updated monthly to facilitate
the visiting routine of the communities it is forming. Its functioning
is intuitive and its interface contemplates several new tools to
deal with the imagination in digital media, taking into consideration
prevailing restrictions. The objects on the screen are draggable
and drag themselves, are amplifiable, rotate, become transparent,
duplicate themselves, disappear, can be manipulated and edited. These
objects are called images and form amalgams of audiovisual, textual
and graphic elements indistinguishably among themselves, as I discussed
in this essay.
Video
and audio illustrations, multi-linear sequencing, multi-flows,
language fusion, mental states, focus, consciousness and unconsciousness,
worlds in movement - there, these concepts that we have gotten
to
know are articulated in a series of experiments of interactivity
and graphic organization in constant evolution.
Notes
