Exploded_Views
2.0
by Marnix de Nijs is a masterpiece. No doubt about it. It is the most
beautiful work of interactive media art I have ever seen. But its
most peculiar aspect is that neither its beauty nor its meaning
reside in the interactivity of the piece. The visitor or user needs
to engage only in ordinary actions. You walk towards a wall on which
the imagery of the work is projected and navigate the continuous
image space by stepping a bit to the right or left. That's about it.
There’s no fancy interface to enter, no sophisticated movements or
gestures to learn or explore. You stroll in a natural way, except
that the space you cover is a few yards at most.
This
simplicity of interactivity is a new element in De Nijs' oeuvre. Most
of his works, including Run
Motherfucker Run
(2001/2004) and Spatial
Sounds (100dB at 100 km/h)
(2000/2001), have become interactive media art classics precisely
because of the surprising behavior these installations compel the
visitor to engage in. The imagery in Run
Motherfucker Run
may be full of suspense and surprises, yet for the audience the
work’s interest resides mostly in the way you have to walk on the
treadmill that functions as the physical interface between you and
the imagery. If you don’t understand how to interact properly with
the piece, the conveyer belt starts to run faster and faster, until
finally you’re ejected off the back of the treadmill. Once you’ve
found the right walking speed, you have to learn to move left and
right on the conveyor belt in order to navigate the empty streets and
lots projected on the huge screen in front of you. It requires
considerable effort, as the title of the piece suggests.
Spatial
Sounds
evokes wonderful, amusing behavior in its interactors. They run
around the piece, pursued by a heavy machine arm that, if they manage
to find the right speed of movement and gestures, will increase its
speed to100 km/h, growling and whining at 100dB through speakers
affixed to its end. When the arm finally comes to a stop, as if to
catch its breath like the visitors, quite a few of them will give the
speaker a knock, as if to say, "Are you OK?" or even, "That
was better than sex." The machine as an object is imposing when
at rest and seductive in action. It lets its visitors know that it is
willing to interact with them and encourages them with a graceful
wave or an aggressive rush towards them.
This
behavioral interest is all but lacking in Exploded
Views 2.0.
In fact, one could call the interactivity in the piece modest, if not
clumsy, since the work functions best when only one interactor at a
time approaches the huge projections on the wall. This compels the
other viewers into the passive role of an audience, even though
you’ll often hear them say things like "Go over to the right a
little – there's something reddish over there." The peculiar
thing is, as I suggested above, that this passivity is the best way
to look at and experience the unique qualities of the work. Although
an interactor is needed to activate the work and make the images
move, it is the audience as a whole that gets immersed in its beauty
without hesitation or shyness. And as the interactor moves, the
beauty of that imagery is staggering.
Exploded_Views
2.0
heralds the coming of a new age in interactive media art, in which
images not only make sense but are far more interesting and layered –
in function, meaning and beauty – than any found in contemporary
museum art. The images in Exploded_Views
2.0 consist
of point clouds generated from huge Web 2.0 photo collections like
Flickr. The work is basically a database of 350 reconstructions of
the most famous buildings on five continents, derived from 100,000
web images, rendered in real time as a person moves through the
interface.
When
the work is navigated by an interactor (who functions as a deputy for
the onlookers), you recognize these archetypal temples, cathedrals,
museums, city gates, palaces, facades and whatnot as the sort of
places you visit in your sleep at night. It is a dark, nocturnal
world that is evoked. The buildings seem to be made of whirling
stardust, of the unstable, glowing, ever-transforming stuff dreams
are made of. It is a realistic world, yet an utterly artificial one
because of the absence of real-life distances between the floating,
bubbling, sometimes exploding buildings.
The
imagery is deeply moving because you rediscover the specious,
amorphous, vague, fluttering material your mind is made of, brought
together in an arrangement that both is consistent and dances
gracefully to the music of time. It is a world of soft buildings and
squares, tender walls and windows, gentle colors and suffering hues,
fully recognizable yet far beyond words. This is what the world looks
like when we navigate the virtual space of our inner life, before the
material of our subconscious memories crystallizes into solid forms
or discursive meaning.
In
Exploded_Views
2.0,
Marnix
de Nijs has made an interactive media art installation that combines
100,000 mediocre photos from a public database into a mass of imagery
of staggering, singular, public yet private beauty. This is the sort
of affirmative imagery we need to keep our souls alive and sane,
healthy, indeed happy. It goes far beyond a critique of the poverty
and shallowness of most contemporary museum art and sets a new
21st-century standard for what art can do.
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