In the fall of 1999 students created a performative interactive installation, In.TIME.ation, that examined the interdependence of reality, knowledge, and value. In.TIME.ations involved seven interactive videos that represented different concepts of reality and time. The class decided how to present the videos as hyperlinks and worked together to create the virtual space in which to place the videos. When viewers entered the gallery, students wearing "scrubs" sterilized them with a cotton ball dipped in alcohol and connected gallery participants to wires connected to computers. As viewers moved in the space they affected the images that filled the four walls. One wall was filled with an on-going dialogue between gallery visitors and artificial intelligence (i.e., a computer chatterbot). Not only was personal made public but the recorded dialogue generated another layer of simulacra.

Four visitors to this class provided provocative insights about the installation. Electronic media theorist, Katherine Hayles, and an installation artist team, Harald Fuchs and Helga Haug viewed the students' video rough cuts, heard their ideas on conveying reality/time, and responded with ideas and thought-provoking questions. Web artist, Beth Stryker entered the event of the installation and her feedback enlivened our sensitivities to what we had created.

At one point in the performative-site a group of people sat together to interpret their shared experience of the space. I looked up from the group to the large projection of words filling, yet constantly changing, on the wall. The text read, "No I don't like to talk to humans either." The author sat alone at one of the computers in the room typing responses to a machine. He looked content and unconcerned about the humans in the room. I imagined a future of AIs and humans dialoguing together and wondered if the AIs would bond exclusively together or would they prefer to interact with humans. I also wondered what children raised by AIs would be like. Scary.

In the fall of 2000, students created a performative interaction using Reese Center's Virtual Reality Theatre, their videos, dry ice and other props. Students encouraged audience members to enter and move in the virtual images while wearing 3D stereo glasses. The poster's (created by Kok Chow Yeoh) text asls: "Consider how you know what is truly real. Is reality shaped by sense perceptions of experiences (physical), from cognitive perceptions (virtual), or from cultural transmission in both physical and virtuals spaces? Experience altered and multiple realities through stereo glasses at the Reese Center's Virtual Reality Theatre to transform individual and shared realities."

"Interactivity offers important new avenues to cognition to take place, where works can begin to flow with the more psychological internal associations of the individual viewer's make-up and identity in mind" (Lovejoy, PM Currents, p. 167).

 

House Symbol: "Our structures are extensions of our world order and are viewed as living beings with life and death cycles" (Text by Tesse Naranjo, Santa Clara Pueblo in the Here, Now, & Always Exhibit at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in Santa Fe, July, 2001).

 

House Allegory: Household in Spanish cinema is an allegory of the nation's politics. In the words of filmmaker Manuel Gutiérrez Aragon) "a microscopic state . . . a summary of the tensions and structures' of the nation" (quoted by Hopewell, J. (1986). Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema After Franco, London, BFI, p. 194). John Hopewell perceives the Spaniard's home as "an arena in which spectacles of gender, nationality and sexuality are represented, in which both fully social and unconscious drives are played out." (Quoted in Smith, P. L. (1996). Vision machines: Cinema, literature and secuality in Spain and Cuba, 1983-1993, p. 33. New York: Verso.


House Analogy: "In the context of feminist research methodology, "ecology" suggests that feminist research is housed in various contexts. Most feminist researchers acknowledge that they are housed in particular academic disciplines and theories, and in criticism of the disciplines" (Reinharz, 1992, p. 241). Part of the house includes connections to feminist scholarship, the women's movement, their body, and personal relationships. "I came to see that what I had thought previously was separate items, was actually an ecological system of people, institutions, and ideas, connected to each other in complex ways" (Reinharz, S., 1992, Feminist methods in social research, p. 241. New York: Oxford).

In this semester (fall 2001) collaborative art venture you scan objects no smaller than a "James Watkins' vessel" to place into our interactive Web virtual house created by TTU Architecture Professor, Glenn Hill who will help us move ideas into the virtual house that will be added to and accessed globally with user directed views. The focus of the house will be to revisit questions raised by Judy Chicago's 1972 Womanhouse. Key questions are: (1) How are individuals inscripted in spaces? (2) What are their embodied experiences? Feminist research methodologies inform the house's rooms. Critical inquiry into the interdependence of the nature of reality (metaphysics), the nature of knowledge (epistemology) and the nature of value (axiology) will also inform the collaboratively created interactive Web house.

Three guests to the fall 2001 course (i.e., Glenn Hill, Oliver Herring, & Esther Parada) will provide inspiration and guidance. For inspiration on the video and performative aspect, German-born artist Oliver Herring (with exhibitions at NYC's Guggenheim Museum SoHo in 1997 and at Biennale di Firenze in Florence) will present about his video and performance art in class on Sept. 26, 2001 following a performance the weekend prior. Each student will create a 1-minute video to explore different concepts of time & reality and place this in their "room" in the house. Esther Parada will visit November 2, 2001. She is an artist whose work explores historical and contemporary relationships between visual representation and power, and the complexities of cultural hybridity. She has exhibited extensively in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Through digital interweaving of photographs and text, she creates images which challenge traditional landscape icons to re-vision an environment of cultural/horticultural diversity. A field trip to the Reese Virtual Reality theater with Esther Parada and Glenn Hill will enhance our exploration of illusion and multi-dimensionality. Esther Parada will inspire you to create meaningful landscapes with image and text that animate and uncover surface layers. Bring words, phrases and visual images which may express the multi-dimensionality of a personal landscape. Parada will demonstrate and discuss a number of strategies for digitally blending, juxtaposing, or sequencing these elements. These landscapes can become a part of your "room" in the virtual house. Additionally your self-sculpture may become part of your "room" in the virtual house. Besides accessible on the Internet, each student will burn their own CD-ROM containing the finished project.

Technology involved: camcorder, digital cameras, scanners, PhotoShop, AVID Cinema, 3D Studio, DreamWeaver, & CD-ROM creation. (Some students may also want to use MacroMedia Director, Adobe Premiere, & Graphic Converter or other software.)

Pedagogical approach: a postmodern multicultural orientation involving intertextuality, intervisuality, and intersubjectivity.

Basic nonlinear/interface design criteria:

1. Continuity between visuals, sound, and concept.
2. Users feel free to create their own interpretation.
3. User can easily navigate through the piece.
4. The project is visually and conceptually engaging.