Susanne Ackers

Quartet - Evaluation in the context of New Media and Electronic Arts Susanne Ackers, Executive Director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund, Germany.

Quartet has been in development since 2003 and is based on an earlier work by Margie Medlin ?Miss World? (2001-2003), which can be discussed in the context of virtual and augmented reality. While the notion of virtual reality in the 1990s included the understanding of creating cyberspace as a parallel world to physical space (as in Miss World?s Virtual Dancer and her placement on one of the three single screens), a new approach to this notion is developed in Quartet; the augmented space of the stage in front of an audience. The term augmented reality, as virtual reality, was coined in the late 1980s/early 1990s and is based on the understanding of the physical world, which is augmented with digital data and technology. Our daily life today is more and more based on mobile technology that provides us with information transmitted through the air in a digital form that is not perceivable with the human sensory organs. This development is changing our perception of the world. Through Quartet Margie Medlin took an artistic approach in creating complex new tools that can be used by humans/artists living in this augmented reality. The resulting 60-minute performance presented to the audience in real time a highly aesthetical rendering of Margie Medlin?s interpretation of our world as an augmented space.

While ?Miss World? already described the two different spaces of virtual and augmented and their links as a three projection installation, Quartet enfolds a complex web of different connections in real-time between the place of the performance, the human actors on the stage (dancer and musician), the robot on the stage and the world of the virtual dancer. Thus bringing the virtual dancer into communication with the outside, the physical world, respecting the existence of this figure as a given fact, as an invention from the 1990s, and as an individual and equal partner during the performance. In a similar way, the robot on the stage is presented as a character in its own right.

The virtual and the real are represented in Quartet through different elements. The physical stage opens up through two screens to the virtual dancers? world, which at some point during the performance is flooded with the moving image material of the physical stage and the theatre hall with the audience captured by the robot camera of the robot. In this way a visual bridge is set up, inviting the audience from the physical space into the virtual dancers? cyberspace.

Next to the locative aspect and the mapping of the two spaces, through a number of complex relations, the two spaces are connected through the movements of the virtual dancer and its visible analogies in the movement to the musician, the dancer and the robot on stage.

The physical space is limited by natural laws, as the real dancer, the musician and the robot show on stage during the performance ? each player with its own temporary spatial limits. The cyberspace, and in it the virtual dancer, underlies other laws, those of software and hardware limits. This is not an exciting insight. The new aspect that is covered and put on stage by Quartet lies in the visualization of a common language that the cyber-creature, the virtual dancer, the robot with its camera eye, the dancer and the musician establish and learn over the process of the performance. To my knowledge no other performance in this area has reached such a precise research and presentation of interactions between technology and human.

The title ?Quartet? points towards the use of technology in various combinations, as does the line up of the different sections on the programme. The four instruments: the dancer, the robot, the musician and the virtual dancer play in different combinations together. The duet between the dancer and the robot is visually easily perceivable and rewarding for the audience as it is clear most of the time that the robot follows the dancer in its movements. An interesting connection between spatial analogies is evident when the camera eye of the robot is projected onto the screen, seemingly having a conscious will to recognize the dancer. On the other hand, the wish of the dancer to understand its own existence is perceptible through its play with the machine.

The duet between the musician and the virtual dancer is more complex and perceivable only partly on a visual level. The audiovisual connection becomes visible only during certain sections of the performance. This is partly due to the fact that there is a double layer of data creation in the dancer; audio and spatial.

Quartet can also be seen in the context of the discussion of immersion. Again, while immersion usually describes a human?s immersion into technology, here the focus lies on immersion in several ways, not only in terms of the audiences? immersion into the performance of the interaction, but also through the theme of immersion evident in the interaction itself. On the one hand through the immersion of the virtual dancer into the physical stage space through the fact that ?they? dance together, and on the other hand, the musician and real dancer are immersed into the virtual dancer?s space through the fact that she copies movements that are given to her remotely. In relation to the augmented space, Quartet immerses the virtual dancer and the programmed robot into the physical space of the audience. Technically speaking, in Movement 3: Personal Space Duet dance with robot camera the dancer controls the movements of the robot, metaphorically, the dancer is respecting the robots restrictive moving possibilities and like this integrates the robot into human physical space.

Although Translation Duet dance and violin improvisation is an interaction between the musician and the dancer without the use of technology, the language that is used, both body and musical, relate to the other sections of the performance.

As a summary of the whole set up of the performance, broken down in three movements, it can be said that a language between the four players is established over time. Starting by introducing the dancer and the robot with its camera eye and continuing with a first meeting between the musician and the dancer with the virtual dancer in Movement 1: Phasing, in Movement 2: Breath Song different player present themselves in their spaces and in their languages with their own characteristics. The virtual dancer is shown in a sort of ?awakening? when it first appears; a memory towards the human dream of creating a mechanical human is touched in the audience ? a avatar with its own history, its own character, maybe even with its own form of consciousness.

The development of a common body language based on visual figures and musical themes is the result of the artistic competence of Margie Medlin, who?s skills as a highly knowledgeable visual artist, programmer and manager of a team of specialists, are evident in the staging of this complex performance of virtual and augmented space onto a stage in real time. The tools developed ? the figure of the virtual dancer, the robot with its camera, the electronically enhanced violin ? serve as part of the artistic work, as they were developed to enable the final real time performance. Thus, Margie Medlin is not only to be seen as a visual artist, but also as a stage director and producer, bringing together specialists in the field of robot construction and programming, music, dance, creation of a virtual body and its movements and an overall programming of all different inputs in real time. The artistic achievement of this performance lies in the complex staging of technologically based live interaction between live and virtual dancers providing an interpretation of the augmented space.

In terms of classical genres of art, Quartet combines dance, music and visual art. Dance as a spatial art, measures movement in space by creating three-dimensional data through motion tracking technology.

Music, as one of the arts liberals, is based on relations between pitches. In Quartet, new possibilities of creating useful data have been developed; loudness and spatial movements connected to playing the violin.

Visual art, through the invention of central perspective in the Renaissance, is also based on numbers: there are two levels of visualization: programming the virtual dancer and the camera imagery. Quartet combines all of these genres and is based on the real time event of the digital quadriga which in itself is based on numbers ? on the material of the augmented space. The mapping of cyberspace and real space frees the Virtual Dancer out of the cyberspace of the 1990s and offers her an entrance into our physical world of augmented reality in the 21st century ? an artistic masterpiece perceivable for a public that is interested in understanding the world we are living in within 60 minutes of highly artistic employment of technology in a context based on the history of art.