Nina Sobell and Stacy Pershall
Saturday May 19, 1pm ­ 2pm
Parkbench
Parkbench is comprised of Nina Sobell and Stacy Pershall, Jody Elff and Perbiorn
www.parkbench.org

Thinking of You

When we think of each other, we usually find ourselves calling up physical characteristics to remember the other person: we recall the way they laugh, the way they walk, the touch of their skin. When we think of techology, especially medical technology, we think of sterile machinery meant to return specific data; the environment in which medical testing occurs is not often considered a warm and cozy place. And yet, the things we are measuring in hospitals and laboratories -- brainwaves, heart rate, the electricity flowing through our bodies -- are the fundamental building blocks of our humanity.

Thinking of You continues a tradition of exploring the electrochemistry of human social interaction. Prior iterations of the work, known as 'Brainwave Drawings' examined the nature of the internal dialogue made visible. In exploring the intricacies of personal communication via interpretation of brain wave energies, Thinking of You combines the EEG signals of two participants in separate physical locations, which are then expressed as one 'brain wave drawing' on the Web. The participants are able to see one another via webcam; the real-time convergence of this information creates a shared sensory environment for both performers, as well as for public participants on the Web. In the past, three preliminary models were commissioned from Parkbench. These explored local processing of EEG signals to produce real-time multimedia performances.

Thinking of You creates a deeply immersive environment encompassing sound, animation, and the sense of touch. Participants are chosen from the gallery audience in each location. The combined signal from the brainwaves of these participants is modulated by animator Stacy Pershall and musician Jody Elff in one gallery, creating a live mediascape using the data stream the participants produce. This performance is webcast using RealPlayer or Windows Media Player so that it can be viewed on the Web. In so doing, we explore how the Internet can bridge geographical distance, uniting brain- and body-states between individuals.

Thinking of You plays on our notions of non-verbal synchronicity between two people, using scientific tools to measure a decidedly unquantifiable experience. It brings the notion of time into the realm of space, creating a sort of digital teleporation; no travel is required for one person to be with the other. Rather than creating a digital artwork that requires the viewer to stare at a cold, distant, rectangular box, Thinking of You enlists the ability of technology to bring human beings into closer proximity with one another.

As we develop the piece, we are learning that it is possible to incorporate other body signals into the data stream, perhaps for the enhancement of the viewers' interaction with one another rather than additional data to be modulated by Pershall and Elff. These signals include, but are not limited to, EMG (electro-myeograph, or electrical signal from muscles), GSR (galvanic skin response, often used in psychological testing) body temperature, and heart rate.

Using touch screen monitors, for example, participants can touch one anothers' images onscreen, triggering the transmission of their "vital signs" and relaying information about their current physical state. Thinking of You moves within the realm of figurative art; the representation of the human being, psyche, identity, sexuality; concentrating on internal as well as external portraiture. It is in our quest to know one another that we begin to refine our tools.

Biography

Nina Sobell decided to go to Tyler School of Art in Philadephia because of their junior year abroad program in Rome. While there, she was commissioned by Tyler to make a sculpture in the double barrel vaulted ceiling of the foyer. Musica Electronica Viva (Curran, Teitelbaum, Rjewski) loved it and wanted it for their studio; they traveled together and were an early influence on her music. She received scholarships and prizes for her prints and sculpture from freshman through senior year, graduating with a BFA in 1969.

Since 1969, when she first used video to document participants' undirected interactions with her sculptures, Sobell has been interested in the extent to which video enables her to manipulate the relation between time and space, and to create a vortex for human experience, in which the mediated event coincides with public experience, memory, and relationships. Her Master's Thesis at Cornell University, in 1971, was the first in the country to integrate video as art, according to David Ross of SFMOMA. She received the Dean's Fellowship, Museum Purchase Prize and other awards graduating with an MFA.

She moved to a studio in Venice Beach, California where she retreated to explore the freedom of camera as audience only video performances which were shown from 1972 on at the Tenjo Sajiki (Viola) in Tokyo, The Kitchen, Berlin Film Festival, Venice Biennale, Avant Garde Festivals (Moorman) and others. Sobell now wanted to create a bridge for the parallel between the electronic medium she worked with and herself as electronic medium, and after intensive research she created a tape reflecting that concept at Dr. Barry Sterman's Neuropsychology Lab in 1973-74. She received a CAPS Grant for "Interactive Encephalographic Brain Wave Drawings". Pairs of participants sat together on a couch in a simulated living room with electrodes attached to their scalps. Their brain wave output was combined, sent through a computer, and displayed on the television set facing them. Based on the success of her six month installation of "Interactive Telemetry Environment", curated by Jim Harithas and assisted by Paul Schimmel, at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas, she received an NEA Artists' Fellowship. The work was published in Video Art, co-edited by Beryl Korot and Ira Schneider in 1975.

Soon after her early video performances opened LAICA's first show in Century City, she was introduced to the Kipper Kids. In 1975 she married Brian Routh alias Harry Kipper as part of a Sobell/Kipper performance climaxing in Las Vegas. She moved to London with Harry Kipper where she lectured at many universities and art schools, participated in shows, did installations, and performances , collaborated with Joseph Beuys at Documenta VI, who was very interested in her interactive video window installation, " Videophone Voyeur," (London, Manchester 77), and invited her to talk about it there. She received an Arts Council of Great Britain Bursary for this work. Sobell also worked on huge paintings on paper with powdered pigment, and a series of self portraits in her studio on the Thames known as Butler's Wharf where artist Dieter Roth saw them and collected many that are now a part of his estate. Nina made plans before leaving Basel to join Beuys and Reindeer Werk, in Graz, but had to leave Europe unexpectedly because of her father's precarious health, and after his passing returned to Los Angeles.

She taught Electronic Imagery integrated with traditional media at UCLA, and Digital Design. She coordinated a project with Goodyear for her students to design signs and symbols to be displayed on the blimp during earthquake emergencies. Sobell pursued her video window installations about our response to mediated communication. and continued her Baby Chicky performance series culminating at LACE in 1981 having received funding from the Foundation for Art Resources. Around this time, she installed the Six Moving Cameras, Three Converging Views window installation at a show curated by Susan Hiller and Suzanne Lacy at Franklin Furnace including works by LA and London artists, in which the World Trade Center Towers played a major part. Versions of this work were later installed at LACE and at the Otis Art Institute.

Biography

In 1985 I was fourteen years old and in the ninth grade at Prarie Grove Junior High in Prairie Grove, Arkansas. I was really into B.F. Skinner and operant conditioning, and I had a hamster, so one day I bought a plastic hamster exercise ball and a set of kiddie bowling pins and started teaching him to bowl. I inadvertently won the school science fair and had to go to state to compete against a kid who built his own robot.

Because I had expressed an interest in science and medicine, my biology teacher suggested I spend the following summer volunteering at the local hospital, thirty minutes away. While there, I befriended the only other girl who wanted to work in the radiology lab, Shannon Chenault, who went to a different school. One day Shannon invited me over to her house after our shift to listen to music because I said I'd never heard of Prefab Sprout. When we got there, she put on the record "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson. I listened to it five times in a row, and my brain split open. I knew there was hope for weird radiology girls who had been forced to take music lessons all their lives. Shortly thereafter, I cut off all my hair. I decided my career goal was to become a mad scientist and I worked hard on achieving the Einstein look in my bedroom with dull scissors.

Almost a decade later, I received a B.A. in theatre from the University of Arkansas. I followed that with a year as an intern at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati. During that internship, I learned that I not only wanted to perform, I wanted to write the script and design the set, sound, and lights as well. This led me to art school - specifically, the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Art, and Architecture, from which I graduated in 1997 with an emphasis in electronic art. I figured it was as close to a major in mad science as I could get.

That summer, I was accepted as Artist in Residence at Do While Studio in Boston, an electronic art studio founded by graduates of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. There I created a 7-station installation entitled Timeline, based on the Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo. My interests in neurology and robotics as performance media merged at Do While. These interests began to take visual form in two pieces: a robot which enacted an important childhood memory (a piece which involved one ton of black marbles) and a performance which took place inside an MRI machine, the documentation of which consists of scans of my brain in the act of remembering. The robot was moved to Boston's Mobius Gallery for the 1999 Boston CyberArts Festival. Another station from Timeline, one which involved 60 scents from my memory custom-designed with the help of the Olfactory Research Foundation in New York, traveled to Cincinnati for my first solo exhibition, which was funded by an Individual Artist's Grant from the Ohio Arts Council.

After a year in Boston, I moved to New York, where I have now lived for two years. My work in New York has changed greatly due to the fact that my studio space now consists of one small bedroom in my apartment in Brooklyn. In the fall of 1999, I began to explore webcams as portals for a constant, ongoing performance piece. In February 2000, I launched www.atomcam.com, performance art webcam. Atomcam has now been uploading at least four images every thirty seconds for over a year.

My goal now is to continue pushing toward a continuous, streaming mobile audio and video broadcast, with cameras attached to my body at all times. Obviously, this technology is far from a reality at this time, but I am determined to be among those who bring it to pass.

I am now working with Nina Sobell and sound artist Jody Elff, as the current incarnation of parkbench.org, on a piece called "Brainwave Drawings." My function in this particular work is to create an animation whose movement, and therefore narrative, is changed by the brainwaves of those viewing the piece. These brainwaves are measured via EEG signal taken from two participants at a time and streamed over the web while they are being seen in the gallery. I view this piece as a non-linear interpretation of narrative; two people telling their stories to one another and the online viewer using language other than words. It is this kind of use of the internet as a communication medium that really interests me.

I also want to move atomcam into a more non-linear format in both the digital and analog realm, with a focus on stories of life in New York. I am obsessed right now with shortwave radio numbers stations, where spies can receive messages in code from their governments. This has led to a great desire to set up a shortwave radio broadcast that can be listened to in New York City, in the gallery, and possibly online. The visual, digital accompaniment to this will be a revamping of the original atomcam site, so that its navigational structure is that of a house with ever-multiplying rooms - rooms that are added as stories and experiences are collected.