On view through Nov 12-Dec 5

Reception for the artists
FRIDAY, Nov 12 2004
6-10pm FREE!

Rx is very pleased to present its next exhibition " REACTIVE: interactive video art exhibition" featuring the SF debut of 4 distint new media works by Brian Knep, Camille Utterback, Robin Guthrie, Scott Snibbe, and Stelarc. "Reactive" is sponsored by Commodore Hotel and was curated by William Linn.

Untitled 5 is the fifth interactive installation in the External Measures Series, which Utterback has been developing since 2001. The goal of these works is to create an aesthetic system which responds fluidly and intriguingly to physical movement in the exhibit space. The installations respond to their environment via input from an overhead video camera. Custom video tracking and drawing software outputs a changing wall projection in response to the activities in the space. The existence, positions, and behaviors of various parts of the projected image depend entirely on people's presence and movement in the exhibit area.

Quicktime Documentation

 The Healing Series is a set of interactive floor pieces that explore responses to the change caused by interaction. The series is currently made up of three separate but similar interactive floor pieces. They are dynamic and change in response to visitors. When a piece encounters a foreign body, such as a gallery visitor, the pattern on it pulls away, creating a wound. When the foreign body leaves, the pattern heals itself and the wound closes, but each piece heals itself in a different way.

In Healing #2 a softly glowing mat pulls away from visitors and slowly grows back after the visitors leave. VisitorsÕ movements are first distilled to their essences and eventually disappear altogether, leaving the mat once again solid and glowing softly.

This piece is part of a series exploring growth, contact, and the response to contact. Each piece in the series has a unique, dynamic pattern that responds to visitors, but each grows and heals in a different way. The first piece in the series, Healing #1, is concurrently showing in the "Art Life" show at the Exploratorium.

Brian Knep is an artist creating works that explore physical and spiritual relationships. He combines art, architecture and science to create pieces that react to visitors' behaviors and try to encourage interaction among people, even strangers.

"Deep Walls creates a projected cabinet of cinematic memories. Within each of 16 rectangles, the movements of different viewers within the space are projected, played back over-and-over, and reduced into the space of a small cupboard. Initially, when a viewer or viewers move into the larger rectangle of the entire projection, their shadows begin to be invisibly recorded, and one box within the projection (the eventual destination of the current movements) is cleared out. When all of these viewers leave the larger frame, their shadows are re-played within that smaller, single box, looping indefinitely. Thus the work presents records of the space, organized and collected into a flat cinematic projection. By collecting the viewersÕ own shadows, the piece reveals how individual objects gain in symbolic meaning, while losing literal meaning, through organization, repetition and display.

Rhythmically, the work presents a complex temporal relationship between cinematic loops. Each smaller collected shadow-film has the precise duration of its recording. A single item in the collection might anywhere from a few seconds to several hours. The temporal, musical relationship between the sixteen frames becomes extremely complex, like Brian EnoÕs tape loop experiments, always looping individual recordings, yet presenting a unique whole Ð the repetition period for the entire work can be on the order of days or even months.

Deep Walls is particularly inspired by the surrealist films of Jan Svankmajer and the Quay Brothers and the sculpture of Joseph Cornell. In their films and sculptures, small bodies and obsessive organization of objects into drawers and cabinets symbolically represent interior, psychological and spiritual states. The rational process of organization only serves to bring out an unconscious irrationality. The name of the piece is a design pattern from architect Christopher AlexanderÕs ÒPattern LanguageÓ. His admonition to architects is to build the walls of homes thick, so that cabinets, drawers and windows can perforate the interior space, providing areas to store, display, slice through and ultimately provide more meaning within the home. In the spirit of Alexander, this work gradually absorbs the contents of its environment onto its surface.   

Quicktime Documentation

The aim was to construct an automated, animated and reasonably informed artificial head that speaks to the person who interrogates it. The PROSTHETIC HEAD project is a 3D avatar head, somewhat resembling the artist, that has real time lip-synching, speech synthesis and facial expressions. Head nods, head tilts and head turns as well as changing eye gaze contribute to the personality of the agent and the non-verbal cues it can provide. It is a conversational system which can be said to be only as intelligent as the person who is interrogating it. There is an attempt to make the Prosthetic Head more creative in its responses. It has embedded algorithms that enable it to generate novel poetry and singing each time it is asked.

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are about communicative behavior. It has an ultra-sound sensor system that alerts it of the user's presence, enabling it to initiate a conversation. With a vision system, The PROSTHETIC HEAD will also be able to detect the color of the user's clothing and be able to analyze the user's behaviour. This information would then be used by the PROSTHETIC HEAD to make its conversation more interactive and convincing.

This is not an illustration of a disembodied intelligence. Rather, notions of awareness, identity, agency and embodiment become problematic. Just as a physical body has been exposed as inadequate, empty and involuntary, so simultaneously the ECA becomes seductive with its uncanny simulation of real-time recognition and response. Initially decisions would have to be made about its database and whether The PROSTHETIC HEAD is a pathological, philosophical or simply a flirting head. A problem would arise though when the PROSTHETIC HEAD increases its database, becoming more autonomous in its responses. The artist would then no longer be able to take full responsibility for what his head says.

The PROSTHETIC HEAD has been shown at New Territories, Glasgow 2003; The ICA, London 2003; InterAccess, Toronto 2003; and at TRANSFIGURE 2004.