The Mercury Project is an archeological site based around a puzzle drawn from a literary classic, and the TeleGarden is a living space tended by a robot arm. Both these websites combine schematic mappings of real space, live-time video feedback, and robotic movement. The sites advance the technical possibilities of human/machine interface over the Web, while simultaneously interrogating the human dimensions of what it means to have control over via the Internet of actual motion and physical agency. In so doing, Goldberg has crafted two of the most intellectually substantial art works since the inception of the World Wide Web.
Like his work, Goldberg is himself a hybrid -- negotiating the conceptual and social divide between those two great Western cultures of science and art. Goldberg is on the faculty of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at UC Berkeley. His research centers on geometric algorithms for robotics and industrial applications. In this work, issues of reliability are paramount. Industrial robots demand simplicity of use and purpose, and must be quickly adapted to new operations and reconfigurations. While he was on the faculty of the University of Southern California, he decided to take these paradigmatic concepts of robotics and, in essence, test them in the realm of art. Working with teams of experts and artists, Goldberg established a new standard for human control of robotic motion via the Web. Both The Mercury Project (designed along with Michael Masha, Steven Gentner, Nick Rothenberg, Carl Sutter, and Jeff Wiegley) and The TeleGarden (with Joey Santarromano, George Bekey, Steven Gentner, Rosemary Morris, Carl Sutter, and Jeff Wiegley) created a community of users who entered a virtual space that was at the same time reflective of the real space of the robot arm.
Goldberg feels a responsibility to demystify technology and make it apparent that deep ideas can be explained very simply, without the smoke screen of jargon. One of the great accomplishments of both these sites is that they have a conceptual clarity and employ an intuitive operating method which users can negotiate without complex training procedures. As the user accesses the site, either blowing sand away from buried artifacts or watering and tending plants, they tend to become completely absorbed with the activity, and the interface between user and robot and camera become almost transparent after a while.
The idea of feeling directly connected to the activity and
knowing that you are actually altering a remote site is a key concept.
Goldberg talks of the difference between computer art and other forms
of art in terms of their physical component. What is problematic in
technological art is the idea of the artifact as being something
produced by the hand of the artist that we can encounter with our
bodies. With minor exceptions, the physical component has been
largely ignored in computer art; as a result computer art more closely
resembles photography than painting or sculpture.
Previously,
Goldberg developed painting machines that introduce a haptic quality
to computer generated art, and a tele-presence machine playfully
entitled the
Digital Dentata, which enabled people to hold
hands over the phone, both encouraging and defamiliarizing this
quintessentially human gesture.
While there are websites with cameras trained on coke machines and fish tanks and even a toilet, Goldberg's websites are the first to bring a true sense of physicality to projects connected to the Internet. In order to tell that The Mercury Project's archaeological site was something that the users were actually affecting, and not a series of stored images, they were forced to bring their body and senses into play. When they used a compressed air blower attached to a robotic arm to scatter sand into air, and saw it happening, they could measure the site's very physicality. Within The TeleGarden, it is obvious that plants grow or die over time, and the scale of the plants is something measurable against the body (as opposed to purely electronic images, which are scaleless and difficult to measure).
The Mercury Project was both a quest -- a virtual archeological
exploration of mythical place -- and the first stage of Goldberg's
burgeoning project. What users saw was a schematic of a large sand pit,
with arcane objects buried inside. Choosing quadrants to explore, users
would move the arm, raising and lowering it, getting a video image of where
they were, and -- by clicking on the representation of a button -- activate
a compressed air blower that would uncover miniature sea monsters, a
lantern, a ticking watch, and other mysterious objects. Users were promised
that if they excavated enough objects, they would reveal a mystery based on
a book that was left unnamed. The answer to the puzzle remained elusive
after 1,500 pages of logs in 7 months, except for a cryptic message from
someone using the name Arne Saknusssemm
who proved untraceable through
e-mail.
That Saknusssemm is the name of a character from Jules Verne's novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, was entirely appropriate, for Goldberg had used Verne's book as the basis for the site, and The Mercury Project tapped directly into the kind of enterprise that underpinned Jules Verne's writing. The depth and density within this site approached the kind of spirit with which writers like Jules Verne brought a dramatic human quality to contemporary ideas within science. The manner in which Verne brought together intellectual literary scientific and geographical thought, and concepts from mineralogy, bookbinding, runes, Icelandic history and the world's languages, is a loose kind of model for the type of enterprise that underpins Goldberg's work.
Without it being a formulaic attempt to mold the developing culture of the Internet to the way that civilization formed on earth, Goldberg has found in the aimless kind of browsing, the emphasis upon searching software, and the uncertain nutritious qualities (in intellectual terms) of what one happens across while wandering through the world wide web an analogy with the nomadic hunters and gatherers of the Paleolithic period. The TeleGarden, however, suggests that the Internet is entering a Neolithic phase, when settlement is beginning to occur and agriculture and a culture emerging. The physical site consists of a small plot of marigolds, peppers, and petunias, in a room at USC. The garden will continue to evolve over a period of months. Anyone can view it; the rights to plant and water are granted to anyone willing to make his or her email address known to other members of the co-operative. Activity are recorded in logs so that the co-operative will be self governing.
Instructive of the hybrid nature of Web based projects, probably
the most evocative comment about the site came neither from fellow
scientists nor from the discursive organs of the art world. Instead,
Garden Design magazine equated the site with a search for the soul of
gardening.
They continued: Sowing a single, unseen and untouched seed
thousands of miles away might seem mechanical, but it engenders a Zen-like
appreciation for the fundamental act of growing. Though drained of sensory
cues, planting that distant seed still stirs anticipation, protectiveness,
and nurturing. The unmistakable vibration of the garden pulses and pulls,
even through a modem.
This is not to say that The TeleGarden is not appreciated in
other communities as well. It was shown as a part of SIGGRAPH's
Interactive Communities program this year, and won the Kobe Prize at
the Interactive Media Festival in Los Angeles. Also, since The Mercury
Project and the TeleGarden have been online, a number of other
tele-robotic sites have appeared on the Web. Following Goldberg's
lead, these sites are innovative not only in the mechanisms and
metaphors they employ, but also in the in the range of new ideas that
they represent and the speed at which they have adapted new
techniques. There is now a robotic arm in Western Australia that can
be remotely operated to move blocksand there is also a URL at which
users can access a camera trained upon a park bench, from which
performance art is broadcast. The TeleGarden links to these other
sites, enabling users to surf to them from a
Telerobotics Links
page. I believe the combination of tele-robotics and the web can
stretch installation as an art form,
he says.
In their pragmatic aestheticism, however, the Mercury Project and
the TeleGarden connect up with the very difficulties of absorbing the
knowledge and culture of previous eras and moving it onto the Internet.
Goldberg's sites both acknowledge and fight the ways in which advances in
software and hardware erase what has gone before in time and in practice.
So often in the development of what we label new media
(for want of a
better term), incompatible formats and proliferating platforms do not last
long enough to develop artifacts that reflect a mature culture and language
of their own before disappearing. The science fiction author Bruce
Sterling has recently pointed out the difficulties of creating in such an
environment: Our riches of information are in some deep and perverse sense
a terrible burden to us. They're like a cognitive load. Every time a
platform vanishes, it's like a little cultural apocalypse.
In this turbulent context, Goldberg engages us in questioning how we make sense of our world when our senses are unreliable guides and what we trust as real complies with no fixed measure of reality. Viewer's doubts about the veracity of his online sites led Goldberg to focus on what he has labelled ``telepistemology'': the study of how distance influences belief, truth, and perception.
"Technologies for viewing continue to evolve, from the camera obscura to the telescope to the atomic force microscope; each new technology raises questions about what is real versus what is an artifact of the viewing process. For example, how does the framed vision of a microscope differ from the framing induced by the World Wide Web?"
In a 1996 project, Invisible Cantilever, Goldberg teamed with Karl Bohringer to construct a microscopic version of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. The 1/1 millionth scale model of this icon of 20th Century architecture is etched into a corner of a silicon chip and invisible to the naked eye. This microscopic sculpture has been exhibited in galleries in San Francisco and Chicago. The installation includes a dark wooden desk and chair with the squared, solid proportions of antiquity, a vintage microscope, and a worn edition of Descartes' _Meditations_. Invisible Cantilever evokes a romantic period when art and science occupied much closer orbits.
Goldberg's most recent web project addresses the issue of telepistemology from a different perspective. The Shadowserver, (1997), co-directed by Bob Farzin, is an online site linked to an apparatus housed in a lightproof box that contains physical objects, some of which move of their own accord. Viewers can interact with these objects via buttons. Viewers can select any combination of five buttons and then Cast a Shadow, which activates a combination of lighting devices and returns a digital snapshot of the resulting shadow. Each combinations of buttons produce different lighting conditions. Certain random combinations will provide clues which lead to a mysterious Sixth button. The Sixth button illuminates hidden secrets in an alcove of the apparatus.
In addition to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the Shadowserver conjures the sinister aspects of noir and the industrial technologies of the electric light and motion picture. All digital images are shadows. In contrast to the physical world, shadows in the online world do not measure time and lack the physical referent of the human body. Our challenge is to navigate through this landscape without landmarks.
With the development of the computer, twentieth century science has created its own apocalypse machine -- the shock of the new comes with every upgrade, with every download of shareware. The linking together of computers to share scientific data and to consolidate computing power, which was the early purpose of the Internet, has become our new central nervous system -- and a very nervous system it is, at that. The various forms of data that are interlinked and intermingled through the Internet have created a new terrain that is constantly reconfiguring itself. The degree to which the shape and density of the data, the locations of specific information and the very nature of this new kind of space itself are great unknowns aligns us with previous periods of great discovery in our history. After a short period in which it seemed that the land masses had been mapped, the seas circumnavigated, and the planet reduced to a Big Blue Marble, we return to state of exploring the unknown. Now, it is our virtual spaces that seem vast and unmappable, our electronic polities that appear lawless and anarchic.
Theoretician Peter Lunenfeld has noted
that Goldberg's Web sites engage with this very state of anxiety.
Furthermore, he notes, we are still in an era in which the promise of
digital aesthetics elicits a greater response than most actual projects do,
and one of the pleasures of Goldberg's Web sites is that they actually
work.
The Mercury Project and the TeleGarden are remarkable because of
their rigor on all fronts: technical, conceptual, and aesthetic. With the
nomadic and early cultivation periods covered, we await Goldberg's
inevitable move into the realm of architecture and urban planning -- for
where is this hybrid of virtual and physical to go if not through the gates
of the city?
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