From the issue dated September 10, 1999

Blurring the Line Between Science and Art In an animator's collaborations with researchers, the computer is the common medium By JULIANNE BASINGER Los Angeles Inside a dim tent strewn with Moroccan rugs and cushions, several wooden boxes rest on a table. Each box is painted with a different geometric design, and ©1999 Vibeke Sorensen ©1999 Vibeke Sorensen Vibeke Sorensen's "Morocco Memory II" invites a viewer to enter a tent (above) and open boxes filled with spices. The order in which the boxes are opened determines what texts and sounds the viewer will experience. each opens to reveal a different spice. Run your fingers through the spices, their scent drifting in the air, and the lights dim further. Music begins -- drums, perhaps the call of a muezzin. Scenes of Morocco appear on the tent wall, along with fragments of text by authors who have written about the country, including Paul Bowles and Anaïs Nin. The experience is "Morocco Memory II," an interactive computer artwork created by Vibeke Sorensen, who leads the division of animation and digital arts in the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television. The piece, recently exhibited on the campus here, relies on hidden technology to work its magic. Opening each box activates a small computer chip hidden inside it, sending a signal to two concealed computers that control the mix of colored lights and sound with the text and moving images displayed on the wall. The sequence of the elements depends on the number of boxes a visitor opens, and the order in which they're opened. Ms. Sorensen conceived the work to depict her memories of traveling in Morocco as a young woman during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The work also involved several collaborators, including two computer engineers who created the customized software, James A. Snook and Philip J. Mercurio, both of the Neurosciences Institute, in San Diego. Such collaborations between artists and scientists have become more common during the past decade, as computer technology has proliferated and both groups have increasingly used it in their work. And interdisciplinary collaboration is the wave of the future, say Ms. Sorensen and other artists, scientists, and computer specialists. Although art and science have evolved as separate disciplines since the Renaissance, ALSO SEE: Film Is Produced With Virtual Sets Ms. Sorensen says artists and scientists are often faced with solving similar problems, whether their aim is creating an artifact or carrying out research. Art and science "are two areas that have a lot more in common than they often admit," she notes. "Our educational structures don't support collaboration between them as well as they could, but multimedia technology is changing that. The computer has become not only a common point for conversation, but a common medium." Top research institutions and high-technology companies have led the way in involving artists in research, not only to create innovations in multimedia technology, but also to help visualize processes in biology, chemistry, and engineering. "It certainly has become understood that design advice from artists and having them work on a scientific-visualization project are very valuable," says Judith R. Brown, manager of advanced research computing at the University of Iowa. Ms. Brown also leads the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics, or SIGGRAPH. Such collaborations have led to pivotal scientific developments, she says. For example: Daniel J. Sandin, an artist and art professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Thomas A. DeFanti, an electrical-engineering and computer-science professor there, worked together at the university's Electronic Visualization Laboratory in 1991 to conceive the CAVE, or Cave Automatic Virtual Environment -- a surround-screen, surround-sound, virtual-reality theater. Now, even the U.S. Army has seen the value of interdisciplinary collaboration. In what officials in the partnership are billing as "a joint effort of the Army, the entertainment industry, and academe," the Army last month signed a $45-million contract with U.S.C. to collaborate with researchers from the university's film, engineering, and communications schools on developing new modeling and simulation technologies. In a new Institute for Creative Technologies, the researchers will work with the Army to combine concepts of story and character with virtual-reality technologies for simulating futuristic battles and other interactive scenarios. (Ms. Sorensen says she has no plans to be involved in that work.) The National Science Foundation has encouraged collaboration between artists and scientists since the late 1980s, and Iowa's Ms. Brown notes that foundation-sponsored projects in supercomputing and networking will make interdisciplinary work easier. The projects include high-speed computer networks -- such as the very-high-performance Backbone Network Service, or vBNS, and the Internet2 project's Abilene -- and the National Technology Grid, which would interconnect 50 universities and research institutions. But most universities have not yet created formal programs for collaborative creativity in technology, say Ms. Brown and Lynn Hershman Leeson, an artist, filmmaker, and faculty member who directs the interdisciplinary electronic-arts laboratory at the University of California at Davis. "Often, institutions are reluctant to change quickly, and departments often fear new territories and view them as threats, rather than enhancements," Ms. Hershman Leeson says. But change is "inevitable," given technology's ubiquity, notes Ms. Hershman Leeson, who created the recent feature film, Conceiving Ada. Ms. Brown notes that collaboration between disciplines and institutions was the focus this summer of a SIGGRAPH conference on creating curricula for computer-graphics students in both computer-science and art departments. The idea, in part, is to teach students enough about ways of thinking in other disciplines that the students don't end up trying to reinvent what people in another field already know. Ms. Sorensen was one of the earliest artists to work on scientific projects. In 1989, she helped scientists at the San Diego Supercomputer Center design an interactive stereoscopic-animation system. With a crystallographer, Lynn Ten Eyck, and Mr. Mercurio, who then worked at the center, she helped develop the system, which allows scientists to interact with complex molecular models in a three-dimensional format. She then used the system to create an abstract, seven-minute film called Maya. In the film, which must be viewed with 3-D liquid-crystal ©1999 Vibeke Sorensen In Ms. Sorensen's three-dimensional film Maya, abstract shapes surround the viewer. glasses, moving shapes seem to lift off the screen and surround the viewer with color and music. The system is still used by scientists, and Ms. Sorensen says the project gave her a better understanding of stereoscopy, which remains a continuing element in her art. That interest, along with her work with computers, began when she was an architecture student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where the curriculum emphasized visual communication, she says. "I knew that computers would be a way that spatial images were constructed," she says. "I saw that as a means of connecting an interior world with the exterior world. Moving images and sounds are becoming the dominant mode of communication. This is very natural, since we exist in a world of the senses. It's the way we think and remember and experience things." Her pursuit of an art form that would allow her to realize that vision led to her subsequent work in film and animation, as well as to artworks using the World-Wide Web and installations such as "Morocco Memory II." She also has collaborated in experimental projects that combine animation with music. Those include a 1997 work with the Austrian composer Karlheinz Essl called "MindShipMind" (http://www.essl.at/works/mindshipmind.html). In addition to the animation and music, the site uses found images from the Web and links to other sites. It also uses algorithms and probabilities to recombine its elements and create different results each time the site is visited. Technology, Ms. Sorensen says, "has created a dynamic continuum for John Durant "People learn what they have to in order to realize their visions," says Ms. Sorensen. creating, sharing, and transferring complex ideas in real time. It has changed the way we communicate." While she often uses technological collaborators in her work, she also does some of her own programming. She wrote a software program called Drawstereo in order to draw and paint in three dimensions. "People learn what they have to in order to realize their visions," she says. She currently is working with a graphics engineer to develop a computerized, stereoscopic rotoscope that will register animation to live action. Images are displayed on a computer and then traced or transformed there so that new frames can be reanimated in three dimensions. She also has joined a U.S.C. chemistry professor, Mark Thompson, on the development of new display technology. Technical innovations are altering how scholars define art as well as science, says Joel Slayton, professor of digital-media art at San Jose State University. "The kind of work that comes out of such collaborations is different from what has been done before," he says. "It raises the question of whether this is art or science, because it's different." He and a few other postmodern scholars even go so far as to say that a data base can be art. "Why not, if it can be configured or conceptualized in a way that makes it interesting?" he says. Technology also is changing artists' relationships with the works they create, since interactive artworks that use computers require a participant in order to be art, Mr. Slayton says. "It's not something the artist can be in complete control over." And the rise of digital art means artworks increasingly are becoming consumer products, he notes. Many high-tech companies support digital artists' work with that aim in mind. Intel, for example, has sponsored Ms. Sorensen's recent work, including the Morocco piece. "Intel wants to develop new markets, and new forms of art create new markets," she says. Yet her work, like that of some other computer artists, sometimes aims to subvert the technology it uses, or at least change the way that technology has traditionally been used. Ms. Sorensen notes that computers and virtual reality so far have focused on visual experience. She instead wants to make art that is multisensory and experiential -- as in "Morocco Memory II," where participants can touch and smell spices, hear music, and be surrounded by a work of art. "I want to bring the whole body back into the technology," she says. http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Page: A34 Easy-to-print version E-mail this article