Final Writing Assignment: Nova Jiang and Rob Seward, interactive and participatory systems

Rob Seward and Nova Jiang are two media artists with similar backgrounds, yet each with very different approaches and intentions to their work. They use similar tools and technologies to develop distinctive, interactive, and highly conceptual pieces. Nova Jiang’s piece, Ideogenetic Machine, is an interactive installation whereas Rob Seward’s piece, Four Letter Words, is a kinetic sculpture. This analysis will focus on examination of each piece from these two artists.

Ideogenetic Machine video:

Ideogenetic Machine from Nova Jiang on Vimeo.

Four Letter Words video:

Four Letter Words from Rob Seward on Vimeo.

Nova Jiang’s, Ideogenetic Machine, an interactive installation she created during her fellowship at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York City in October 2011.¹ Jiang has created an algorithmically generated comic book. The comic book is produced by custom-built software, developed in the language of Processing, which automates the creation of the narrative by pulling from a database of drawings and combining them with photos taken by a camera and displayed via projector in real time. Participants are invited to contribute by acting out scenes and taking these photographs with props as they are captured on camera. The drawings in which the program pulls from are created by the artist and inspired by current events that populate part of the comic book, juxtaposed with the images taken with the camera. The customized computer program has randomness built in, so that the layout and combinations of illustrations and camera-captured images will not repeat. Because of this randomness, the program always fabricates unique combinations and thus creates original narratives and comic books for each participant. The program also generates blank speech bubbles within the arrangement of the narrative so that participants can fill them in and develop the storyline further through their own invented dialogue. Each contributor becomes the leading role and designer of these one of a kind comic books, even receiving a personal copy of the comic.

At first glance, Jiang’s piece is whimsical and fun, inviting people to partake and collectively play along, as they contribute to the larger piece. Watching video of these collaborators, one can’t help but feel camaraderie that seems to emerge as they act out various scenes together, wearing props, and committing to the story they have become part of. Of this piece, Jiang states, “I’m interested in chance-inspired creativity, not to mention the ways human beings can read meaning into mechanical acts performed by the computer. There’s a long tradition of chance-generated narratives such as the cut-up technique or Dada poetry. It also makes participants the chance to be protagonists of their own comic book. It also gives them plenty of room to be creative: they still have to fill out the empty speech bubbles the comic generates with dialog.”²

Jiang keeps to black and white for both the drawings and the photos captured for the piece. The photos appear to have a filter applied in some part of the process before they materialize in the story, as they look similar to pencil drawings to some extent; the values and line of both the photos and drawings are alike when brought together in the piece. Overall, the format of the narrative is a familiar one, in which it mimics the traditional format of a comic book or storyboard, again, supporting the whimsical and playful feel of the work.

Jiang takes her participants and viewers on a journey that asks them to suspend belief if only for a moment and become someone else, to enter another world. She encourages these collaborators to be creative and engage in play, yet she does set the stage in doing so. In an email to the author on December 11, 2011, Jiang states, “I try to be there as much as possible to observe audience response.”³

In Lev Manovich’s book, The Language of New Media, he states that, “Interactive media ask us to identify with someone else’s mental structure…the computer user is asked to follow the mental trajectory of the new media designer.”⁴ In Jiang’s piece, this is also true. She has constructed a world in which participants are asked to join her and follow the constructs that she has set up. Though participants may feel imaginative in contributing to the tale, they are in a way “pre-programmed” to follow down a path that Jiang has already conceived. Though the nature and likely intention of the piece is playful and fanciful, there is another darker side of this piece that emerges, where viewers and participants adopt the artist’s associations as their own, possibly without realizing it.

Jiang’s process is fascinating and this piece is layered with contrasts as in the combination of: handmade and computer generated, preformed stories and spontaneity of individual participation, and innocent play against a darker subtext. In asking Jiang about her process she says, “It's really about being able to recognize what ideas are interesting and has [sic] value and then editing it done [sic] to a final form through prototyping.”⁵ Though the darker undertones are there, the artist seems less aware of them and perhaps did not intend for them to occur in this work.

Rob Seward’s piece, Four Letter Words, is part kinetic sculpture, part installation, and part video art; this piece was created in 2010 and has been showcased in galleries, in video festivals and online, including the website, Rhizome.⁶ Seward has created an algorithmically generated arrangement of words made of fluorescent lights and various custom-made machine parts. While not available to comment, there are many details available on the artist's project blog as to the construction and development of this unique piece. Made up of four units, each unit within the piece, through automated motion, can present the twenty-six letters of the alphabet in a variety of combinations that show words four letters or less in length. The work is 4’ x 20” with a black backdrop upon which the fluorescent bars that work together to create each of the four letters is set upon. These words are derived from a database of words gathered and selected from word association studies done by the University of South Florida between 1976 and 1998. The display is produced by custom-built software, developed in the languages of Processing, Java and php, which automates the choice and subsequent display by pulling from this database of words. The computer algorithm built by Seward not only pulls from the database of words but programmed into the algorithm is: word meaning, rhyme, letter sequencing, and association.⁷

The movement generated by the fluorescent lights, as they produce the letters, is mesmerizing and has a pattern as well. Set against the dark backdrop, the fluorescent lights shine brightly yet overall, the tone is dark and perhaps even ominous in nature; this piece has a very different feel in its presentation than Jiang’s piece. The words displayed typically have a dark subtext and the aesthetic of the piece is futuristic, perhaps post-apocalyptic. It appears the viewer is watching a machine eerily at work, creating these words in combination, churning them out in a fairly regular rhythm, where a context between words occurs. While in Jiang’s piece a narrative develops from the association between the images, this piece is less narrative yet because of the word associations; themes and specific subject matter develop.

Four Letter Words is a rather dark piece, where viewers in person, online, or through video observe this machine that forms letters in these unsettling combinations. It raises interesting commentary on computers and machinery and their potential to seem human and have thoughts.

In the text, Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media, the authors state, “Autonomy”…“In terms of participative art systems, this characteristic tends to mean simply that computers, in addition to their human input do things automatically by themselves over time.”⁸ However, while Jiang’s piece is inviting and warm, by comparison, Seward seems to want viewers to feel uncomfortable. He seems to want observers of this piece to perceive it as disconcerting, precisely because it seems so divorced from anything human, except the words and word associations it displays; that autonomous in this case is actually invoking fear of the machine. Jiang’s piece evokes more of a human rather than machine feel; play replaces any sense of fear.

Both pieces are interactive by the descriptions put forward by Manovich as well as Graham and Cook.⁹ Interacting as described by Manovich, is described in two ways: internally and externally. Interacting internally includes thoughts, ideas, memories, and imagery in an individual’s mind. This is much like experiencing a more traditional medium of art such as a painting. Whereas interacting externally includes thoughts or ideas which then are made more public and in some cases manipulated, objectified, and/or pre-programmed. This is much like experience of new media art such as an interactive installation where a participant might be asked to contribute but in a way that is pre-programmed by a set construction the artist has set.¹⁰

Though both Jiang and Seward work with a similar set of tools including: customized hardware, computer programming in Processing, and content derived from a database, their projects each have a very different outcome and viewers are meant to respond very differently to each piece.

The viewer is much more a viewer in Four Letter Words, than in Ideogenetic Machine, as there is no physical input or participation for the observer. However, one could argue there are interactions at work, as people view the piece and possibly conjure thoughts and images in response to the words being shown. As in Jaing’s Ideogenetic Machine, viewers of Four Letter Words are being asked to “identify with someone else’s mental structure …”¹¹ and follow down the path that Seward has laid out for them. As observers are being given a selection of words gathered by Seward and programmed in a particular way, this piece is pre-programmed to an extent where the audience is influenced by, reacts, and responds in a predetermined way that is crafted by the artist. The difference between Jiang’s Ideogenetic Machine and Seward’s Four Letter Words is mainly that Jiang is asking participants to play and partake in a whimsical fashion through performance, while Seward is showing viewers this machine that generates words that lead the viewer to perhaps imagine in their own minds these dark topics that come through as the words display. Overall, Seward has a more sinister piece and possibly intention of interacting with his viewers while Jiang’s piece is more participative, lighthearted, and intended to inspire creativity in the individuals that join her.

Though each artists’ have different intentions in each of the pieces, Manovich discusses a concept from Louis Althusser, called “interpellation,” in which, “we are asked to mistake the structure of somebody else’s mind for our own.”¹² Both Four Letter Words and Ideogenetic Machine leave the viewer to follow each artist on a pre-programmed journey. Through each artist’s work, individuals invent thoughts, images, and ideas, yet none of these are their own; in experiencing these pieces, the viewer has in fact adopted the mind-set of each artist and perhaps even mistaken these thoughts as their own as they interact with Four Letter Words and Ideogenetic Machine.

Bibliography

1. “Ideogenetic Machine,” retrieved online on December 4, 2011: http://eyebeam.org/projects/ideogenetic-machine.
2. DiPierro, Katherine “Eye to Eyebeam: A Conversation with Nova Jiang”, retrieved December 5, 2011: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/katherinedipierro/eye-to-eyebeam-a-conversation-with-nova-jiang.
3. Nova Jiang, email message to the author, December 11, 2011.
4. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 61.
5. Ibid.
6. “Four Letter Words,” retrieved online on December 1, 2011: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2010/mar/29/four-letter-words-2010-rob-seward/.
7. “Four Letter Words,” retrieved online December 1, 2011: http://robseward.com/documentation/four_letter_words/.
8. Graham, Beryl and Sarah Cook. Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 123.
9. Ibid.
10.  Ibid.
11.  Ibid.
12.  Ibid.

Additional Resources:

1. “Nova Jiang”, retrieved online on December 1, 2011: http://www.novajiang.com/.
2. Rob Seward’s Project blog, retrieved online on December 1, 2011: http://robslog.tumblr.com/.
3. "Eye Candy: Fluorescent Type-Design Experiment Veers Toward Darkness", retrieved online on December 1, 2011:  http://www.fastcompany.com/1601695/eye-candy-an-amazing-type-design-experirment.