Maja Kuzmanovic
Friday May 18, 8pm ­ 9pm
FoAM-Starlab, Belgium
www.deepfoam.org

T-Garden

T-Garden is an interdisciplinary collaboration currently being developed between FoAM in Brussels, sponge in San Francisco and four collaborating art and technology centers. It is a responsive/hybrid play-space where visitors can 'converse' with sound, dance with images and socially shape media, constructing musical and visual worlds 'on the fly'. The performance aims to dissolve the traditional lines between performer and spectator by creating a computational and media architecture which allows the visitors-players to shape their overall environment through their own movements, as well as their social encounters with each other. At the same time, T-Garden constitutes part of a larger research project investigating five fundamental questions:

1. How do we develop sustainable, international collaboration networks between cultural institutions, operators and policy makers?

2. How do we allow the project to evolve in the most open and interactive manner (a.o. looking at authorship and copyright issues)

3. How do people individually and collectively make sense of responsive, hybrid environments, articulating their knowledge in a non-verbal language?

4. Can play (in the broadest sense of the word) become an essential model for cross-cultural experience?

5. How can new forms of expression be sustained by a fusion of media, matter, motion and gesture?

T-Garden is a hybrid performance/play space conceived as an event for between two (minimum) and ten (maximum) visitors within a specified time cycle. Its ‘performers’ are the performing public who can socially construct and shape media together, based on their own bodily movement, as well as the movement and social proximity of others around them. In this way, T-Garden acts to turn away from technologies of static representation and towards technologies of creation and embodiment.

As individual visitors enter into the environment, they are escorted to individual dressing cabinets where they will find various types of clothing. The clothing itself is designed with specific physical and material constraints in order to interfere with the visitors' normal ways of physically relating to the world. The clothing is also embedded with wearable sensing and wireless transmission modules which enable the visitors' gestures to be tracked and sent to a central computer for analysis and processing.

Once the visitors have become comfortable in their "new bodies," they can then enter a central area, which is alive with other visitors, sound and image. In this space the visitors begin to discover how their new bodies, with their gestures and physical movements that they produce begin to define the matter of the garden.

For each new visitor who enters the garden, an initial period of experimentation/rehearsal should occur in order to grasp what kinds of movement influences the changes in the room. As the players-visitors move inside the room, they experience both the immediate results of their new gestures and movements (simple and graspable musical/sonic modulations, filters and transformations) as well as the perception of larger, global changes that start to occur inside the environment. The room may begin to progress towards darkness, fill with slowly transforming polymorphous computer-generated colors that gradually begin to assume life-life properties (breathing, moving in response to the rhythmic state of the environment or falling into a period of suspension and rest).

As visitors interact with each other, social relations begin to form. Locations and groupings will effect both the local and global status of the room (through dynamic tracking), varying melodic and rhythmic aspects of the sound, light and image. Memory, population density, bodily proximity affect growth and decay dynamics in the room, visitors leave traces and converse with each other in musical phrases as they move through the room. The traditional roles of spectator and actor dissolve into a field of media based on gesture and performance immanent in ordinary life, where social play emerges without explicit rules or grammar.

Problems and questions that cannot be explored entirely within the course of one production cycle will guide the research trajectory of the project. These heuristics will feed investigations in multiple fields of inquiry and technology development: social studies of technology, experimental phenomenology, topological media, wireless sensing, wearable computing, smart fabrics and responsive computer graphics.

The research facet of the project is open-ended work that is guided and seeded by T-Garden public presentations. Research is characterized by the articulation and diffusion of knowledge, that can be used in more than one context. 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 scholarly, public domain. The ideas will be realized and fed back to subsequent productions of T-Garden. In this way, the research is flexibly coupled with the performances, allowing each to follow their own calendar while at the same time resonating agendas. Through these two trajectories, T-Garden develops along both short and long term time-scales, acting as a transducer between a multiplicity of social worlds: institutionally-based knowledge creation, techno-scientific research, art and performance.

Biography

Selected by MIT as one of the Top 100 'Young Innovators', Maja Kuzmanovic holds a Master of Arts in Interactive Multimedia and her specialisation is Interactive Film and Storytelling. She is currently director of the newly formed Foundation of Affordable Mysticism (FOAM, at Starlab in Brussels), where she works with various art and technology collectives and is exploring novel modes and resources of cultural expression. She was involved in the development of the Design Technology course at the Utrecht School of the Arts, where she taught the modules 'Wearable Computing' and 'Hybrid Architecture'. She previously worked as Artist in Residence at CWI (Center for Mathematics and Computer Science) in Amsterdam, and GMD (National Center for Information Technology) in Sankt Augustin (Germany)working on projects concerning Internet innovation and Virtual Reality technologies. She has participated in high-level discussions about SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language), XML and WAP and has researched the possibilities of storytelling in immersive Virtual Reality (CAVE).