sponge, foAM
Imagine, if you will, a room that changes its media and mood as you move and dance within it. No prior experience required. You aren't weighted down by cumbersome and unfashionable gear on your head, hands and other appendages. Instead, you can wear fabulous designer costumes made of the wildest textiles imaginable. In fact, the textiles are live fabrics, sensing how your body moves and flexes. Furthermore, imagine that this room is being played not just by you alone but by you and others around you. You have come upon TGarden, a responsive environment built by an interdisciplinary, international collaboration between by two cultural organizations: Sponge, in SF, USA, and FoAM in Europe. Both Sponge and FoAM build and study deep, embodied experiences and how technology increasingly shapes such experience. Sponge and FoAM are committed to the idea that both art and its conceptualization must be immanent in everyday economy. This applies not only to aesthetic practice but to new media, matter, symbols and social capital. The TGarden project explores economic, ethical, social and architectural questions that are critical to the construction of advanced technologies (and by technology we don´t just mean computers, although they do play a significant role). These questions include:
1. How do people make meaning in complex, dynamic environments without benefit of language?
2. Can play in the richest senses of the word become an essential model for cross-cultural experience?
3. How can new forms of expression be sustained by a fusion of matter, media, motion and gesture?
4. How do we develop a sustainable, international long-term collaborative research platform among artists, researchers, cultural institutions, for profit/non-profit institutions and policy makers?
5. How do we allow a project to evolve in the most open and interactive manner possible, when authorship, IP and copyright issues are at stake?
So TGarden is both a particular responsive environment and a way to conceive and build such environments.
Room
TGarden is, first and foremost, a built space you can inhabit. The costumes you get to wear act as a second skin, helping you and others to shape the media and environment. Sophisticated and simple technologies such as cameras, wireless sensors and wearable computers track and analyze your motion and gestures - but that shouldn't stop you from having fun. TGarden'sTM nervous system is a computer network which interprets what you do and choreographs a series of complex, evolving responses.. The nature of the activity is up to you, although the clothing you wear, the other players you encounter, and whether the room is in a good or bad mood might have a lot to do with your fun factor. The room's behavior can be perturbed by you, but is also the result of autonomous processes. You are not a user and the TGarden doesn't have tasks for you to solve. You don't have to deal with a GUI. The space is not there to be navigated or searched but rather to hang out and dance in, to show off, people-watch or just chill out. A new kind of game space? Club? These are possible trajectories for TGarden in the future. What you may see at Ars Electronica 2001 is one micro-manifestation of the project. If you come to Rotterdam in October 2001, you will experience something different. Over the next several years, the project will take on different manifestations and scalings depending on the setting, country and audience. Like its name, TGarden will be growing and decaying; constantly evolving. Things will be added and things will decay, die and fall away.
Performance
In the TGarden, you can oscillate between being both performer and spectator. The only spectators in the room are your fellow players. Like you, they have not been trained how to interact with the room. There are no signs or instructions telling you what to do or what not to do. TGarden realizes a new model of on-the-fly´s "performance" -- something that exists in the club and fashion world.
Experience
TGarden is not a pre-fabricated experience like a theme park ride - rather, we are interested in building layers of technology allowing you to engage in experiences that we don't dictate. There is serious method underneath the fun. Let's just say that we are building a responsive, dynamic field which registers your play in the room. Sometimes it's loosely coupled to what you do, sometimes more closely. Moving from the rat psych stimulus and response that we've come to expect from "interactive media." TGarden responds to you, in the way that a gravity field responds when you fall (cf Gravitation: Misner, Thorn and Wheeler,1973).
Play
TGarden is also serious when it comes to play - a topic that is of increasing interest to industry in our new "experience economies." Sponge and FoAM are toying with what play means in a broader sense: how does play build new modes of meaning-making, particularly in a fluid environment? How long and how intensely can people play with one another and the room when they can improvise everything: their voice, gesture and body? How do social conventions of play drive experience? Just look at the skatepark, the club, the street, the concert hall, the stage, the stadium and the bedroom. TGarden challenges those who believe that play comes purely from disembodied, cybernetic experience. The project focuses on play in a body-based environment - wet with computational possibilities.
Interdisciplinarity
In order to make TGarden work, it draws on an extensive range of disciplines. The TGarden team comes from six countries and includes collaborators with expertise in philosophy, computer science, fashion, textile, media and interaction design, mathematics, physics, computer-generated music and sound, electrical and mechanical engineering, information architecture, human-computer interaction and project management. TGarden'sTM realization is built essentially on the fusion of all this expertise.
Collaboration
How to realize a complex, discipline-defying project in times of cultural and economic instability? This is one of the motivating questions of the entire project. With the stakes in economy, intellectual ambition and presentation/distribution being so high, TGarden is forming a consortium to explore the project´s strategic themes. The members of the consortium are like-minded technology/media arts centers such as Banff Center, V2, Ars Electronica, STEIM and C3. There are, however, other supporters engaged as well: the Daniel Langlois Foundation, Creative Disturbance in San Francisco, Georgia Institute of Technology, Ground Zero in Silicon Valley and lurkers who haven't revealed themselves. The consortium will eventually include industry partners as well as larger non-profit foundations, because cultural institutions alone can no longer bear the costs of such a project. For artists and researchers in the times of takeover, what is critical is rewarding human expertise, labor and time: investments of knowledge and social capital.
Research
The consortium will use the TGarden as a laboratory for a spectrum of research ranging from models of responsive, real time computation, new authoring languages for designers and heuristics for measuring audience experience in novel location-based entertainment. Research is characterized by the articulation and diffusion of knowledge that can be used in more than one context. The research facet of the project is open-ended work which is guided and seeded by TGarden public presentations. Results from the research will be generated in appropriate forms of reports, symposia or experimental technologies and should have the same status as other academic or scientific work published in the public scholarly domain. The ideas will be materialized and fed back to subsequent productions of TGarden. In this way, the research is flexibly coupled with public presentation, allowing each to follow its own development path.
Economies
TGarden is attempting against high odds to use other models of exchange beside the conventional market model. The economies of aura, play and gift may in the long run prove to have much more globally sustainable power. These economies played a crucial role in the incubation of the project. With its partners, TGarden is building from and extending open source principals into the industries of media, experience and knowledge. We like to think of TGarden as a living garden - we and our partners seed it with our time, and capital. People who pass through the TGarden - the room and the project - come out of it transformed. This may be the real takeover.
Collaborating artists/designers/researchers:
Project Initiators: Sha Xin Wei, sponge + Georgia Institute of Technology; Maja Kuzmanovic, FoAM; Chris Salter, sponge; Laura Farabough, sponge
Project Management: Chris Salter, sponge; Maja Kuzmanovic, FoAM
Clothing/Textile Design: Evelina Kusaite, FoAM; Maja Kuzmanovic, FoAM;Cynthia Bohner-Vloet; Cocky Eek; Peggy Jacobs; Marchel van Doorn
Sensors + Wireless LAN: Ozan Cakmakci, Starlab; Mark Scheeff,Stock, V2
Vision Tracking: Yifan Shi, Georgia Institute of Technology; Aaron Bobick, Georgia Institute of Technology
Room Logic: Sha Xin Wei, sponge + Georgia Institute of Technology; Nik Gaffney, FoAM; Steven Pickles
Sound Composition and System: Joel Ryan, STEIM; Chris Salter, sponge
Graphics and Particle System: Dave Tonessen, FoAM + Starlab
Systems Administration: Nik Gaffney, FoAM
The research, development and production of TGarden is supported with the financial assistance of: Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology;B anff Center for the Arts, Media and Visual Arts; Ars Electronica 2001; V2-Institute for the Unstable Media; Georgia Institute of Technology; STEIM; Starlab, NV
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