Art, Life and Media Merge

In this essay, we look at some of the principal issues raised by advancements in digital technology in the light of global issues today, reflecting on our engagement with these issues through a range of artworks, from the 1970s to projects in progress. The works explore the potential of art to catalyze harmonious relations between life on earth and emerging technologies, in diverse fields such as digital multimedia and animation, interactive architectural installation, networked visual-music, plant-human interaction and ecology, social media, health and well-being, and wearable transmedia technologies. In these interactions, the artworks foreground our individual and collective experiences of interconnectedness, in our associations with technology as well as in our common interests and concerns as living species. They are based on an understanding of art as an essential form of mental and physical communication, and arise out of a deep concern — for the future of human and all other forms of life, and for the future of the planet. Through these reflections, the essay argues for and stresses the need for a responsible, ethical, humanistic, compassionate, and environmentally conscious approach to art and life in the Anthropocene.

Digital media today transcend boundaries, extend and blend previously separate media, and engage an increasingly porous environment; as I started my academic career in architecture, work in this field has brought me -full circle,‖ to conceptions of an expanded architecture as an emergent and even sentient system, similar to gesamtkunstwerk, but moving beyond it, to the Anthropocene.
Recognizing our relation to phenomena that surround us, including plants and living things, enables us to reconfigure our thinking and expand the capacity of our brains, to reflect and connect with the global environment and beyond, with the universe. This is literally possible today, with the development of sensors and computing systems that can translate environmental signals into human sensory modalities.
My personal artwork and individual and collaborative research is in new media art, and integrates art and science, physical and digital media, documentary photography and experimental film/video/animation, text/poetry and music. From the beginnings of my work in new media, including film and animation, in the 1970s, I wanted to redirect technology and media to -bring us back to nature and humanity,‖ to the -real world‖ with a sense of compassion; to use technology that had traditionally been used for simulations of war to do the opposite: to catalyze creativity and positive action, to elicit humanistic engagement, reflection and compassionate behavior. I found that music, poetry, performance, and visual art are the most effective means of doing this, and so my focus has been on integrating these forms with technology, to create motion painting/visual music as dynamic poetic experiencesthat include immersive, high-resolution dome works, networked visual

Vibeke Sorensen
Lumina music performances, and multimodal interactive installations, that incorporate custom electronics and software, and also engage personal and shared memory. In recent creative work, I have focused on modes of plant-human interaction with music, animation and textiles that have applications to health and well-being, as well as on wearable computers for people in migration between cultures.
One of my early video artworks, Temple (1976), used analog computer animation and electronic music systems to create a meditative visual music work ( Fig.1) [1]. This was inspired by travels to Morocco in 1973, where I had the idea to make a -liquid architecture‖ that would allow artists and musicians to -jam‖ together globally: I imagined improvising moving images and spaces accompanying the music, where all physical surfaces could be three-dimensional screens, semi-permeable membranes passing messages between interior spaces of the mind and exterior spaces of the physical world, and between people communicating in it. With electronic cameras and imaging devices, microphones and electronic musical instruments, it had become possible for the first time in history to perform moving images with music in real time. With digital technology, it would also be possible to

Vibeke Sorensen
Lumina create and transform 3-D spaces in real-time, and share memory and intelligence of organized information contained within them. With telecommunications technology, it was possible to connect people all over the world with each other, and through these images, spaces and sounds, they would be able to play together. This technology would be an instrument, not just a tool, affirming life rather than destroying it.
All this was possible, but it would take many years to realize, considering the cost of technology and the poverty of so many around the world; in addition, the limitations of early computer graphics systems in the 1970s made them too problematic to use in real-time performance. I worked on various related projects in the ‗70s and early ‗80s: Solstice was a series of multi-media works which explored an ancient pagan summer solstice ritual in contemporary Scandinavia; Concurrents, and NLoops were respectively a multi-monitor computer-video installation, and a performance in collaboration with composers Gaylord Mowrey and Rand Steiger, exploring visual relationships to polyrhythmic musical structures. During 1989During -1993 I collaborated with computer scientist Phil Mercurio at the San Diego Supercomputer Center to create a real-time stereoscopic animation system; this was the basis of Maya, a stereoscopic work inspired by the Hindu term for the conflict between illusion and reality, and structured musically in collaboration with Steiger.
The Global Visual Music Project(GVM), which I developed with support from the Intel Research Council and in collaboration with Puckette and Steiger,was based on developing technologies: Puckette had created -Max‖ software, which was in wide use in the computer music community, and was developing it into a new data processing package called -Pure Data‖(PD);and his Ph.D. student Mark Danks was making GEM (Graphics Environment for Multimedia), that would bring the full capabilities of Open GL graphics into the PD environment. Thiswas the first combination of computer graphics, animation, and digital video with computer music and physical computing;and we put the software, -PureData/GEM‖, into the public domain, as part of our commitment to enriching present and future telecommunications systems with the tools necessary to make long-distance artistic collaboration possible.
The GVM project developed in two phases, Lemma I and Lemma 2.Lemma 1 comprised two simultaneous performances in September 1997 that were to be linked by ISDN networking, one at the International Computer Music Conference in Thessaloniki, Greece (Fig. 2) and the other, with different performers, at the University of California, San Diego. These featured improvisation by four performers, with two at each of the local sites on either side of a large video projection screen. In Greece, Steven Schick performed on drums, while George Lewis, on trombone, had a small video cameras mounted on his hand; microphones were attached to both performers' instruments. I was personally in Thessaloniki, where my collaborators and I operated the computers and associated video and audio devices, and the audio program was amplified through a quadraphonic speaker system.

Lumina
During each stage of the two-site performance, the scores were based on approximate timings, flexibly determined by the performers so each section would create a natural trajectory towards the next, as graphics and animations were displayed on the screen between them. It was a form of structured improvisation, where the performers could interact with the animation, responding to it and the audience dynamically. Audio and gestural signals detected by the system were to be transmitted to the remote location; and there was a time offset due to the period it took these signals to traverse the Earth and arrive at the remote location in California: we used this time offset for rhythm timing.
While the two-site networked rehearsals were very successful, the final performance in Greece did not include the remote site, because of network problems there; and as a result, the local performance became the main event for the Greek audience. Nevertheless, it was extremely successful as a real-time, interactive visual music performance, as the cheering crowds confirmed. Real-time computer animation and video were projected at both sites; they responded in various ways to musical gestures at either location. The intention behind this work was to explore the transformations made possible by geographical connections as well as the relations between gestures, sounds, and moving images.
Often during rehearsals, the musicians became so excited with the extension of their instruments into the visual domain that their music became not only fortissimo (very loud), but prestissimo (very fast); however, the system allowed for great nuance at all speeds and in the fine details of the visual elements, and over time, the performers learned to explore the various ways their instruments were traversing the visual domain. This included not only abstract and representational images, such as doors, ladders, and furniture, but words as texts: I had requested that the performers write down their dreams, and these were used as references for the 2and 3-D computer models, and also as graphical textual elements in the animation.
The goal was to create a -lucid dream‖ that employed logic and mathematics in service of the imagination-in its potential to extend beyond the limitations of logical thinking through mathematics and computing. I see computer graphics as Platonic, in that pure computer graphics is ideal, perfect, and even includes a -World of Forms‖ as a library of perfect models, while the -real world‖ is full of chaos, what Plato considered -imperfect.‖ Yet this very -imperfection‖ is the variation and cornucopia which we see as the diversity and unpredictability of life; which is present in thought and feeling, and shapes our human values, including feelings of compassion. It is the combination of the natural, chaotic and physical -real world‖ and the ideal -Platonic‖ world of computer graphics that comes together or clashes in physical computing, art, technology and culture [3].

The Morocco Memory Project
These  In addition, the remote receivers tracked the states of the boxes through radio signals from the chips in them, and these were transmitted and reflected on computers outside the tent; participants could, as a result, dynamically alter the layers of images, texts, movies and sounds while walking around inside the tent, holding, touching and smelling the boxes and their contents. By engaging with the layered and constantly shifting memory fragments, they explored the interplay of the senses, memory, and imagination; and while the context was within historical, cultural and geographical frames of North Africa, the focus was not only on the perceptions and memories of western expatriates, many of whom were attracted to this geography and for various reasons resided there, but also on the fragmentary memories and perceptions of exiles from other countries, such as Muslims and Jews expelled from Spain during the Inquisition. The interactive experience reflected the way memory functions: not as a static collection of recorded experiences, but as a recycling, iterative and dynamic process that is constantly being updated and connected with other, new or recorded, related experiences and memories.
The effect of this -ubiquitous computing‖ environment-where most of the technology was concealed from view and inside objects made of natural materials, and where users freely associated and connected personal and cultural memory fragments triggered by various kinds of sensory input, including smell and touchwas to create a total sensory experience that engaged the entire body on an individual level. The working metaphor was -the mixing of smells is like the mixing of memories‖-which I knew would allow visitors/interactors to -fill in‖ the gaps between media fragments with their own memories and actions. In practice, it worked so well that people stayed for hours, experiencing the piece uniquely as an emergent system:since there are so many related though distinct elements, their possible combinations were unrepeatable. And because the experience was activated by openings or closings of boxes, each participant could create a unique association of memories that only came alive when they interacted with them; at the same time, however, this engagement also constituted a collective experience, as up to six people could interact with the boxes and alter the layered memories at the same time.

Illuminations
The relations between individual and collective experience have become increasingly complex today, in the interrelated contexts of global social and environmental concerns and emerging technologies. Spontaneously drawing from our unconscious or conscious mind is especially relevant to any investigation of a changing environment; our technology must be increasingly adaptable, so that we can extend our bodies, minds, actions and thoughts, and allow for unpredictable  includes live plants with sensors that measure their CO2 output (Fig. 6). All these are interfaced to the real-time system, and alter the animation and music.

Lumina
Art, Life and Media Merge  (Fig. 7) was also installed the same year at ZKM in Germany, where the screens were suspended from the ceiling and appeared to be weightless; in this way, they also reflected Plato's world of Forms and related ideas of perfection, stasis and chaos.
This -illuminated folding screen‖ seeks to transcend traditional -East-West‖, -Ancient-Modern‖, -Nature-Technology‖ relationships by translating data across species and modalities, producing a luminous environment for reflection, contemplation, and meditation, in which the audience is implicitly asked to reconsider relationships between material and digital cultures and organic systems, and discover new connections among them.     . 11). This is a piece of wearable art, which is esthetic-through its design, it serves as a medium of cross-cultural communication-and also functional: it enables wearers to select music and animations (these are influenced by Indian mandalas and traditional instruments) reflecting biofeedback from their own bodies or a network, or to respond to environmental conditions.  and -textile‖ share a common root and a common history through etymology. There is a literal and metaphorical weaving of the two, through connections that are, one might say, reflexively intertextual.

Art, Life and Media Merge
In wearable art, the primary medium and agent is the entire human body, including the brain, and its extensions that span oral and written languages, ideas and texts, and emerging forms of multimodal communication. A variety of -prosthetics‖ and -interfaces‖ encompass not only all of the senses and their modes of engagement with the environment, including the protective and the playful, but also recorded human history-since wearable art reaches back thousands, if not millions of years, through clothing and textiles.
Garments and clothing can be regarded as a synthesis of the arts, humanities, sciences, and engineering developments through the ages, since textiles, or tech-styles and text-iles, are a product of our bodies, brains, ingenuity and environment. As our hands freed our mouths to speak and write, they also allowed us to change our appearance and the world we inhabited. We tilled soil and wove the fibres into fabric, for protection and for the expression of culture. As a result, we have many metaphors related to thread: sewing, fabric, many types of garments. There are also social and industrial considerations, as for generations sewing and fashion were considered -women's work,‖ and clothing denoted gender. Today, fashion is androgenous, and identity is expressed through the clothes that are worn. In the theater, actors change clothes-and cosmetics (a word derived from the Greek for -cosmos‖) or makeup-to communicate changes in mood, time, context, story, and of course, to create some continuity or larger connection to the plot or meta-narrative, and environment. necessitate an active concern for the human condition, but also an ecological approach.

Animation as an extension of life
Art today-if understood as -expression‖ and -reflection‖-can be considered as the exploration of phenomena, the encoding of complex information, or the transfer of knowledge into media that are refined through skill, experiment, critical thinking, and visionary imagination. In design, the goal is to improve life and -make the world a better place‖, which means having an active concern-among other concepts, issues and activities-for sustainability, diversity, inclusion of global ethnic cultures, and the Anthropocene [6].
In this context, I consider animation to be not simply an illusion of life, given advances in technologies that -animate‖, but an extension of life. What is fundamental is that the living trace of an artist, user, or living thing being engaged is transferred, through a system, to a medium which allows us to perceive and engage it in a fluid and transparent way, so that the output becomes an extension of life, reflecting and responding to the life in a sensitive and ethical way (Fig. 12). -the uncanny valley‖; and even today, using the most sophisticated computers, the hand of the artist is still needed to translate data from the unseeable to the seeable, and to refine digital animation aesthetically to make it -believable‖. The artist is also needed because it is in part his or her life trace that -gives life‖ to animation, especially when the data is derived from sensors detecting phenomena across great scales and distances, from molecules and DNA to galaxies and distant planets. The process of producing animation is further complicated by the fact that animation which achieves the highest quality normally requires conscious awareness of unconscious or instinctive movements and perception, for it to be transferred to a medium in such a way that it seems to be just as alive as the living thing that produced or originated it.
In real-time systems, similarly to what occurs with musical instruments, the potential to articulate nuance and virtuosity through dynamics of graphical and multimodal elements is further potentialized and extended. There are now even greater possibilities for animation than ever before, given innovations in sensing  be centered in empathy and ethics (Fig. 14). The title (vishwa means -universe‖; roop means -form‖) is from Hindu philosophy, and means the appearance of God or Brahma in forms that incorporate the creation of worlds and the universe within them. The five main elements of the Universe in Hindu philosophy are fire, earth, air, water and ether (space):this animation is produced using Pure Data/GEM, and the process is a real-time emergent system that continuously generates new forms, including these elements as sources of data. Animation and programming by Vibeke Sorensen, with technical assistance from Nagaraju Thummanapalli. Live music performed by sitar virtuoso Kartik Seshadri, accompanied by tabla virtuoso Arup Chattopadhyay. Thanks to Biju Dhanapalan, Miller S. Puckette, Ben Shedd, Joseph Waters, and John Young.
Source: photographs by Vibeke Sorensen.
The goal today is to save humanity, life, and the planet. Ultimately, art is for thinking and prototyping solutions to problems. When I started in the 1970s, I wanted to know if virtual reality technology could be used to help soldiers returning from war to recover from PTSD, since they had prepared for war using the same technology, in the form of -war games.‖ Since then, I have continued my work as an artist and educator; and I continue to believe that it is the human heart, and not only the head, that can change the world for the better.
It is urgent that we work to solve the problems of the survival of the planet.
I sometimes wonder why people all over the world do not stop everything they are doing and work together to reverse global warming, and stop the human-induced mass extinction of species, as evidenced by the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment [8].
There is a wonderful documentary entitled -Earth on Edge‖ [9] that was produced in 2001 for WGBH Boston, with Bill Moyers. The scientists interviewed explained that within a hundred years, 50% of the biodiversity then in existence would be extinct due to human activity. Since then, the extinctions have been re-evaluated every few years; and today the rate of extinction has increased dramatically. We are at what some have called a -tipping point,‖ as the Earth is dramatically affected by our stewardship of it, and each step we take has enormous consequences. As artists, scholars, and educators, each of us can contribute to solving the problems of survival, from the smallest decisions we make in our everyday lives to the larger works we undertake. It is a privilege to have been born human, to be healthy, receive a good education, and have the possibility of pursuing ourinterests during the short time we inhabit this beautiful Earth; and because of this,we have a responsibility, through our collective work, to do this with intelligence and compassion for all living things. Art directed in this way is bio-art and eco-art;its medium and message is the life on the planet and of the planet.