#boundary functions

Personal space (2)

Boundary Functions is realized as a set of lines projected from overhead onto the floor which divide each person in the gallery from one another. With one person in the gallery there is no response. When two are present, there is a single line drawn halfway between them segmenting the room into two regions. As each person moves, this line dynamically changes, maintaining an even distance between the two. With more than two people, the floor becomes divided into cellular regions, each with the mathematical quality that all space within the region is closer to the person inside than any other.

Week #12: But is it Art? Thinking about Scott Snibbe’s ‘Boundary Functions’ (1998) in relation to Aesthetics, Generative ‘Trans-’ness and Commercial Practice.

  ‘I think the concept of “media” is in crisis. It’s in tatters. That’s because the digital isn’t a medium, but it is what is now dominating the media field. Digital technology is an expanding network of connective and fusional potentials. You can take an input in any sense modality, and translate or transduce it into any other, say sound into image.’

Brian Massumi on New Media, ‘The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens’ (2010)

    For this blog, I took the opportunity to explore Scott Snibbe’s Boundary Functions, an interactive installation designed to express how person space is ‘defined by others and changes without our control’ (Snibbe, 2010). I felt that examining the work’s ecologies of practice/experience would be particularly relevant to my major project, in which I explore the relationship between ‘data’ and ‘the virtual’ in Snibbe’s newest apps: Motionphone and Oscilloscoop.

  I’d like to talk first about why Boundary Functions is an interesting to discuss as a ‘digital artwork’. While the installation is a fairly primitive example of interactive media and data visualization, it serves as an interesting counterpoint to current examples of digital installations—e.g. Mediatec’s LED floor (2010) or Deutsche Bank’s Generative Design Wall (2011). However, the networked relationship between ‘movement’, ‘sensation’, ‘sound’, ‘data’, ‘interaction’, ‘audience/performer’ exists in the same way across all these works and thus can be discussed with ‘relevance’ in mind.

  Thinking about Boundary Functions leads us to many questions about the future of ‘media’ and ‘communications’. Let’s first ponder Snibbe’s role as a curator of this experience. To create this work, Snibbe collaborated with graphic artists, tech designers and software coders—blending the design principles of each field’s ecologies of practice to create a new, transversal assemblage of sensation and experience. We have thought about these ‘transversal’ approaches as the future of ‘media’ and technology. But how might this transversality influence the future of ‘communications’?

  I feel the answer to this lies in thinking about Boundary Functions as piece about ‘trans-’ness. While it deals with transduction in its visual representation of spatial data, it also deals with transmateriality in its conversion of weight and movement data into ‘light’ and ‘animation’. In many ways, Boundary Functions relies on this human data—more specifically, the dynamic protocols and relationships between viewers (as captured in weight/touch data)—to enable its existence. This is a sentiment shared by Snibbe himself, who describes Boundary Functions as ‘radically interactive... a work that doesn’t even exist until two people step on to its surface’ (Snibbe, 2010).

  But there is also a transhuman element to Snibbe’s installation. Viewers don’t just communicate with each other; they also engage in a non-verbal dialogue with the work’s technical infrastructure. This is what produces Boundary Functions’ digital visualisations, which both challenge and submit to notions of human dominance and centrality. Viewers accept the work as ‘bigger’ than themselves, but recognise that it cannot have existed without them. It’s this sense of contemporation – what’s bigger, people or technology? – that I feel directs the ethico-aesthetic paradigm of Snibbe’s work.

  So let’s step back for one last time this semester. Boundary Functions presents an interesting example of how interdisciplinary team can create digital ‘art’. But how does it fit in the ‘shifting aesthetic ecologies’ (Murphie, 2012) formed by new and old media? Snibbe’s installation is outdated, relative to the generative visualisation/data relationships in the Deutsche Bank and Mediatec examples. But as this generative technology becomes more dynamic and accessible, how might media and culture industries appropriate their use for commercial practice? This is something I’m looking forward to finding out—I hope you are too.

    References:

102010xxx. (2010). Interactive LED Floor. [Online Video]. 12 November. Available from:http://youtu.be/g6N9Qid8Tqs. [Accessed: 20 May 2012].

    Inflexions. 2008. The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.senselab.ca/inflexions/htm/node/Massumi2.html. [Accessed 20 May 12].

  Murphie, A 2012, But is it Art / Is everything Art, lecture notes distributed in ARTS 3091: Advanced Media Issues at The University of New South on 21 May 2012.

   ssnibbe. (2010). Boundary Functions (1998) by Scott Snibbe. [Online Video]. 22 May. Available from:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ax4pgtHQDg. [Accessed: 20 May 2012].

  Universal Everything. (2011). Deutsche Bank / Video Art / Making Of. [Online Video]. 22 May. Available from: http://vimeo.com/23791686. [Accessed: 20 May 2012].

    Video at top:

murderer Ted Kaczynski, in The Unabomber Manifesto

Reminiscent of E.O. Wilson's On Human Nature where he says that performance of one's roles in society is like a hypertrophic outgrowth of "our" early social heritage.

Perhaps the internal logic of someone who performs many roles must be inconsistent. Whether the pressure is felt as a multiplicity of selves or an inconsistency of morals--maybe they're instantiations of the same thing.