Information
Lynn Hershman Leeson >
»Time and Time again«, 1999 - 1999
Co-Workers & Funding:
Co-Worker: Dominik Petko
Technology
Hardware
Mac, Intel Based PC's.Software
Remote Vision Module: # ITU H.324 video communication protocols
# HTTP/Java based remote camera control and switching control
Interactive Compositing Module:
# Low intensity laser sensors
# Ultrasonic 3-D tracking sensors for individual participant layering
# Logic programmable controller
# MacroMedia Director (for layers)
# Serial control of Director through Xtra module
# Array of digital video mixers
# Large rear-projection video screen
# Large rear-lit blue screen
# Micro-camera hidden in rear-projection video screen
# Real time double key compositing (chroma and luma)
# Aleatory layering of sound environments
Doll Vision Module
# Robotic, telematic doll with video streaming vision
# HTTP/Java based remote control of doll's head and vision
# Remote http sound activation of dolls voice, reporting web visitors interactions
# Real time streaming (NetShow) of doll's vision.
History Database Module
# Remote triggering of video stream segment captures (based on web participants actions).
# Automatic databasing and time stamping of doll vision clips.
# Interactive remote categorizing of doll vision clips.
# Web-streaming based navigation of history database.
# Time-targeting searches based on user specified units (from current)
Web-Gate Module
# HTTP/Java based interaction with Remote Vision Module, Doll Vision Module, and Interactive Compositing Module.
# Live encoding and serving of video streams
Descriptions & Essays
Time&Time Again extends media navigation to a site-specific context with both web- and body-based interfaces. A distributed interactive installation, the piece was commissioned by the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany, as part of its Connected Cities exhibit. It explores the complex relationships between our increasingly interlinked bodies and machines, and the resulting techno-cultural identity.
The installation places museum visitors and internet viewers in a complex web of engineered interdependencies with each other and with the facilitating apparatus. At the museum, a large screen presents participants with live video images originating in train stations, coal mines, and steel mills. These locations are the nodes in a network of industrial connectivity in the Ruhr region of Germany, an infrastructure being challenged and superseded by the new network, as the industries that once defined the region become less and less cost-effective. As participants examine these projections, transfigured silhouettes of their own bodies are superimposed onto the external video signals, resulting in a composite image integrating the remote and museum elements. As each silhouette mirrors the movements of the corresponding participant, it does not reflect the details of the individual's body but instead functions as a window to a hidden scheme of technology. By moving toward or away from the screen, participants control the perspective of technology presented within their bodies. As in átwo, three, many Guevaras, a large database of media is used, though it has a fixed navigation scheme in which the probability of an image being chosen for a certain layer is uniformly distributed. At one end of the installation space, away from the screen, "macro technologies such as aerial shots of transportation, communications, or industrial structures from the Ruhr region are selected; at the opposite end, closest to the screen, images show micro perspectives such as circuits, gears, and computer boards.
A robotic, telematic doll is a synthetic witness and wired voyeur in the museum space. Simultaneously a human look-alike and a machine wannabe, its child-like form implies an alien perspective. From a corner of the installation space this "main character of the piece observes participants' interactions with the environment and speculates on the nature of the symbiosis between humans and technology. Cameras behind her eyes stream live to the world wide web where remote participants at once watch and become part of the feedback system of the piece. The doll facilitates web and museum participants' awareness of the two interconnected spaces. In addition to remote viewing, visitors to the piece's website can select which remote camera is displayed at the museum, control telematically the pan and zoom of the robotic doll's vision, and record video fragments into a navigable database history.
All of the dynamic media elements used in the environment are produced and combined on the fly and are not automatically recorded; each moment of the process is aleatory and ephemeral. The history database allows only web viewers to choose to record, store, and characterize segments of the doll's vision stream, collectively creating the piece's memory.
As suggested by Eco (1989), the piece is open: it is completed, both conceptually and experientially, by the simultaneous action of both web and museum visitors. It is only through the museum participants' electronically transformed silhouettes and their movement that the web users can view the deeper layers of technology. And it is only through web participants' actions that the images from the remote camera sites are switched and made accessible to people at the museum installation.
Literature
Exhibitions & Events