[-empyre-] fabric | ch .txt

[patrick keller <patrick@fabric.ch>]

hello all,
i try to follow the discussion but i must admit i'm having hard time trying 
to do so! we have several deadlines just behind and in front of us, so i 
don't think i'll be able to make it, even if there are some highly 
interesting themes about space being debated here. and as we are architects 
trying to work on what we call contemporary space, this, of course, is of 
much interests for us!

just some general impressions about web3d, digital arts and some words on 
fabric | ch 's specific works. some of those works are included in the 
web3d art gallery or are digital gallery by themselves, some have been 
exhibited in museums or other networked places, some are made for clients 
and allow us to be much or less our own sponsors for research & 
experimental works, some still doesn't exists! ) ...

but before, general considerations regarding exhibiting digit art:
i'm just back from an expo in Basel/Switzerland [for the Swiss Art Awards, 
i'm a bit annoyed about it and that's probably the reason why i speak about 
this here...], where i experienced one more time the difficulty to exhibit 
any digital piece. at least still here in switzerland, i don't know really 
if it is better elsewhere and what is the experience of the people on the 
list about this.
i'm a bit bored with this... one more time, somebody tells you "no problem, 
there will be an internet connection" and one more time when you arrive 
with your stuff and computers: no connection. one more time: "somebody will 
take care of the piece, watch that the computers are not crashed when 
you're not there or reboot them", and again, one more time, nobody and 
nobody as well from the "museum side" that is really able to understand the 
technical needs of the piece. then you begin to have troubles with the 
connection again, and so on.

i also begin to have the feeling that most of the pieces are too complex to 
be displayed in museums: too long to understand, too long to see in full or 
even in part. it would be like if you were exhibiting 10 films in a museum: 
nobody would stay 15 hours to see it in full and they wouldn't get involved 
in it if they stayed 2 hours. i consider a lot of contemporary art as big 
*old* frontal art for the moment: it gives itselt in full in one glance. 
you rarely stay more than 5 minutes around or in a piece [well, i know i'm 
a bit caricaturing here]. most of the curators are now functioning in this 
context and i feel this is inappropriate for most of new media pieces yet. 
i must also stress that this wasn't the case at all in Manchester @ the 
Cornerhouse where everything looked and worked fine.

so, i think it is definitively hard to exhibit online/digital/whatever 
pieces in lots of physical areas for the moment. we even experienced it in 
the MAMCO/Geneva [that is a quite considered contemporary museum in french 
speaking part of Europe] last year where there is just no IT responsible at 
all in the museum... amazing... we nearly had to go ourselves reboot the 
machine in Geneva when it crashed!
so to say, i think "some efforts" still needs to be done in lots of 
places/museums before exhibiting *New Media* works in a good way. at least 
interactive ones. or maybe new *places* should be found/defined to become 
new type of museums. i wonder if all this situation will generate some new 
artefacts for art presentation to the public. this is a question that 
interests us for sure and that has driven some of our works.

that's also why we are more and more considering the *demo* like mode of 
intervention for our works at the moment. closer to performances in fact 
where they are some traces left after it and where the piece exists in its 
own state, own material, being still accessible or not -i.e. online-. btw 
could the *demo* that is really something coming directly from the digital 
culture become a performing art genre?
we also look at new places to display the work, like clubs, national 
telecom *hot spots*, equiped offices, big public billboards, etc... so to 
say, we experiment the process of exhibiting in itself trying to find new 
and maybe more appropriate contexts to display the works. i must admit we 
haven't find the perfect one for the moment...
___
we have worked around this theme on some of our pieces. couples of years 
ago, we have suggested to canal+ to set up a "museum" into their public 3d 
chat [called "Le deuxième monde"]. the idea was both to try to implant 
"museums" in new spaces contexts and try to experiment specific ways of 
producing the content [distant collaboration, extensive use of email, 
collaborative works]. of course, canal+ gave us a lot of constraints. as 
the "deuxième monde" was a "realistic world" [paris], we had to keep 
gravity on, collision detection and so on. but in the end, the process 
revealed to be very interesting with an online opening, realvideo artists 
interviews that could be follow online, etc. they had big plans at this 
time for this type of museum, like having big parties in amazing places for 
the openings, make them move from opening to opening, etc... we had  two 
openings and then everything went down... the "museum", La_Fabrique can 
still be seen there: http://www.fabric.ch/La_Fabrique [with three processes 
done until now, we use it now as a playground during workshops as well 
-some texts and images are also online- La_Fabrique10 is teh latest one]
___
another recent try we've made was in the extension and hybridation of a 
real contemporary museum, the MAMCO/Geneva [the one i spoke about 
before...]. project's name is electroscape 002: 
http://www.electroscape.org/002 [here again, lots of texts/images online]. 
in this case,  the idea is more to extend the space or multiply it! and 
that both structures [the digital as well as the physical one] could work 
together or in parallel. this hybrid space can then be exploited by both 
the commissionner of the museum, the curators and the artists. this project 
should continue next year to maybe become a real hybrid museum, will see. 
it will both exists with local access in the specific museum and online 
with distributed content but the main idea was really to keep it linked 
with a physical location and morphology and to extend the modes of 
appropriation of the structure.
___
if you also check http://www.electroscape.org/001 you will see what we've 
presented in the Siggraph Art gallery last year. We were in the "performing 
artists" session so this is the result of a one week work session between 
different locations/teams. fabric | ch in Europe and US and lab-au in 
Brussels and Berlin. It was an intersting collaborative investigation about 
"screenscapes" and "screenspaces" even if the work was much more intersting 
than the results...

so to say, we have lots of projects we want to test around 
galleries/museums and as we've just been accepted in the xbox content 
developer's program, we plan to work on a fully hybrid structure, both 
multi localised [several institutions], multi-users and distributed [game 
based and www based and if possible gprs based as well].
well... i'm beginning to be very long here and i just spoke about the 
"museums" works...

best regards to all, Patrick

:::::fabric | ch::::::::electronic_architecture:::::