Stefan Arisona and Steve Gibson, since 2006

Introduction

EPI Redux is re-imagining of the psychedelic classic The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, created by Andy Warhol with the Velvet Underground in the late 1960s. Rather than literally interpreting the original Warhol event, EPI Redux seeks to update psychedelia for the new millennium. Using an excess of technology the project immerses viewers in an overload of the senses and in a Gesamtkunstwerk where sound, vision, space and time coincide.

The core concept behind EPI Redux resides in both its communal nature and in its long-form. The piece has been performed by as few as two performers and as many as eleven. As all the performers are expert in their mediums this reconfiguration allows for considerable amount of spontaneity, while at the same time calling on them to apply their analytical skills in real-time. The modularity of the piece similarly allows it to take several forms and keeps the content both loose and ever-evolving. In this way the Redux is similar to the Warhol original, even as it veers dramatically from the sound and visual world of the late 60s.

Synopsis of Work (by Luc Meier, Swissnex San Francisco)

Switzerland’s Stefan Arisona and Victoria, BC’s Steve Gibson are media artists who have established a strong footing in academia while keeping their fingers on the throbbing pulse of the club scene, DJ-ing and VJ-ing underground. Grounded in the history of audiovisual tinkering, they take creative hints from illustrious forebearers to push multimedia environments into the next realm.

Arisona and Gibson joined forces in 2006 to create a digital-age reenactment of The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the boundary-breaking multimedia show conceived in the 1960’s by Andy Warhol with the complicity of Lou Reed and his cult rock act The Velvet Underground.

A full-blown sensorium featuring giant projections of Warhol’s films, The Velvet Underground at their most dazzlingly abrasive, and dancers let loose from Warhol’s New-Yorker Factory, the original Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966-1967) was, while it lasted, the most unique and effective discotheque environment prior to the advent of venues such as the Fillmore in San Francisco. In many ways, it remains a benchmark for all subsequent immersive multimedia shows.

Originated under the auspices of ETH Zurich’s “Digital Art Weeks” and Victoria’s “Interactive Futures”, Arisona and Gibson’s take on Warhol’s circus makes full use of digital technology and the free-flowing, associative thinking of the techno age. Armed with multiple projectors, a barrage of laptop computers and additional data-churning devices, the pair have already performed in Zurich, Victoria, Chicago, Vancouver and Shanghai.

Using custom software, live vocals, keyboards and live video processing risona and Gibson create an immersive audio-visual experience which mimics the psychedelic atmosphere of the original EPI event, while at the same time updating the audio-visual language to the 21st Century.

Resources

Photos, videos and sounds at the Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable site: https://www.telebody.ws/Exploding/

Initiators and main artists: Stefan Arisona & Steve Gibson
Guest artists: Jackson 2bears, Randy Adams, Agitpop, babel, Dyz, I send data live, Tom Kuo, Love&Olson, Marcellus, Nuthre, Scheinwerfer, Sho-b, Adam Tindale

Event History

• Oct 20 2016 - Rolex Center, EPFL, Switzerland
• Mar 17 2012 - Velvet Underground, Zouk Club, Singapore
• Nov 12 2011 - NeOn Festival Closing Party, The Reading Rooms, Dundee, UK
• Sep 5-8 2010 - DRHA 2010, Brunel University, London, UK
• Jul 3, 2010 - Digital Art Weeks 2010, Xian, China
• Nov 17 and 19, 2009 - Phoenix Square Film & Digital Media Centre, Launch Events, Leicester, UK
• Oct 17 2009 - The Institute for Converging Arts and Sciences, Launch Event, Greenwich University, London, UK
• May 29 2009 - Computational Aesthetics at the Delta Ocean Pointe Hotel, Victoria, Canada
• May 12 2009 - Cantos Society, Calgary, Canada
• Sep 18 2008 - Santa Barbara Nights Closing Party, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
• Aug 21, 2008 - Transdisciplinary Digital Art Canadian Book Launch, Open Space, Victoria, Canada
• Aug 1, 2008 - Swissnex San Francisco, Swiss National Day Celebrations, San Francisco, CA, USA
• May 31 2008 - ELO Visionary Landscapes Conference, Northbank Artists Gallery, Vancouver, WA, USA
• May 22 2008 - Digital Art Weeks +, Shelter Club Shanghai, Shanghai, China
• Apr 24 2008 - Conaway Centre, Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
• Nov 17 2007 - Interactive Futures, Open Space, Victoria, Canada.
• Jul 14 2007 - Digital Art Weeks, Zurich, Switzerland
• Oct 21 2006 - Open Space, Victoria, Canada

The interactive installation Digital Marionette impressively shows the audience the look and feel of a puppet in the multimedia era: The nicely dressed wooden marionette is replaced by a Lara Croft - like character; the traditional strings attached to puppet control handles emerge into a network of computer cables. The installation is currently exhibited at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz.

The installation consists of a projection of a digital face, which can be controlled by the visitors. The puppet can be made talking via speech input, and the classical puppet controls serve as controllers for head direction and face emotions, such as joy, anger, or sadness. The whole artistic concept was designed and realised in an interdisciplinary manner, incorporating art historical facts about marionettes, the architectural space, interaction design, and state of the art research results from computer graphics and speech recognition.

Concept

The translation from old to new, from analogue to digital, takes place via the most popular computer input device: the mouse. The puppet control handles are attached to sliding strips of mousepads and eight computer mice track movements of the individual strings. This approach is at the same time efficient, low-cost and easily understandable by the non-expert visitor. Speech input is realised via speech recognition, where the recognised phonemes are mapped to a set of facial expressions and visemes.

Exhibition at Museum Bellerive, Zurich, Switzerland, 2004

The first exhibition of the Marionette was realised in 2004 by the Corebounce Art Collective in cooperation with Christian Iten (interface realisation), Swisscom Innovations (Swiss-German voice recognition), and ETH Zürich (real-time face animation), and Eva Afuhs and Sergio Cavero (Curators, Museum Bellerive, Zürich).

Exhibition at Ars Electronica Centre, Linz, Austria, 2006 - 2008

An augmented permanent version of the installation was presented in the entrace hall of the world-famous Ars Electronica Center in Linz. It was realised by the Corebounce Art Collective with technical support from Gerhard Grafinger of the Ars Electronica Center. Furthermore we thank Ellen Fethke, Gerold Hofstadler and Nicoletta Blacher of Ars Electronica; and Jürg Gutknecht and Luc Van Gool of ETH Zürich.

Bellerive Installation Video

https://youtu.be/RDblsvIg5xk

3D Concept Video

https://youtu.be/6rAy1iRgQAI

Additional Information

Exhibition: Museum Bellerive
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
Period: Jun 11 - Sep 12 2004

Exhibition: Ars Electronic Centre
Location: Linz, Austria
Period: Sep 2006 - Sep 2008

Concept and realisation: Corebounce Art Collective (Pascal Mueller, Stefan Arisona, Simon Schubiger, Matthias Specht)

Corebounce, in collaboration with Heinrich Lüber and Art Clay, 2006

“Almost Lost” was a performative audio-visual installation of Corebounce in collaboration with artists Art Clay and Heinrich Lüber: Streams of spoken words are deformed by interactive technology.

In der Performance spreche ich über zwei Stunden endlose Wortketten und projiziere diese gewissermassen von Innen an eine meinen Kopf umgebende Sphère. Die sich selbst dekonstruierende Sprache wird durch eine interaktive Technologie umgeformt und in Lichtform auf die Sphère und den Umgebungsraum zurückgeworfen. Die Projektionen zeigt eine Virtualität im Sinne einer “plastischen” Verformung in Möglichkeitsräume hinein. Das die Figur umgebende Halbrund bildet eine Andeutung einer zweiten Schicht dieses dynamischen Raumsystems, die begehbar ist und worin der Zuschauer sich als formender/aktiver Mitspieler in diesem System erleben kann. (Heinrich Lüber)

During the two hours of performance, I speak ceaseless streams of words and virtually project them from the inside onto the sphere surrounding my head. The self-deconstructing language is deformed by interactive technology and reflected in terms of lights and shapes onto the sphere and the ambiance. The projections show a virtuality in terms of “malleable” deformations into alternative spaces. The semicircle surrounding the character constitutes an adumbration of a secondary layer of that dynamic space. It is accessible to the spectator, who can experience herself / himself as a forming and active participant in this space system. (Heinrich Lüber)

The project was officially supported by Kultur Basel-Stadt and Kulturelles Basel-Land. Heinrich Lüber’s Homepage: https://www.heinrichlueber.ch/

https://youtu.be/frTtp-L80p8

Event: Digital Art Weeks 2006
Location: ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Date: Jul 12 2006
Concept: Art Clay and Stefan Arisona
Programming: Stefan Arisona
Performance: Heinrich Lüber and Corebounce Art Collective

I recently (2012) stepped across this submission again, and was surprised and also feeling a bit depressed that we never fully realised this piece at that time - this was before facebook & co took off, see “the next hype” box in the picture below. Anyway, the concept is still here, and I believe the assertion is still valid.

We all pursue a multitude of lives in the electronic realm. A schizophrenia, that splinters out identity across communities, blogs, and portals. In every on-line community we cultivate our alter ego with a biography, network, reputation and fame. The writer Joseph Campbell once said we were all potential heroes. Now, with the help of a webcam or blog, we are all potential celebrities. When he got tired of his original quote, Andy Warhol gave with his adapted variant of the “15 minutes of fame” hope to the insignificant, but was at the same time laughing at the famous. But how does this relate to the on-line world? How do we compare to other on-liners? Is there a reward for all the time and enthusiasm we sacrifice to screen and keyboard? Is our on-line existence sufficiently important to be a celebrity? Will we be famous to only fifteen people, as Warhol’s original quote has been adapted once more in the context of emerging on-line phenomena?

Find it out with “In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.” Attracted by curiosity and self(over)estimation on-liners are drawn to our system. They are asked to present as many artefacts (mobile phone, credit cards, usernames, passwords, etc.) as possible to the system. The system will automatically discover their online trails with the information drawn from the artefacts. A variant of Google’s page rank algorithm (our people rank algorithm) calculates individual on-line celebrity values based on social networks and on-line behaviour. The result is a single value that sums up ones entire on-line existence. There are obvious ways to improve an on-line existence. Come back - with the right network everybody can be famous in 15 minutes.

Conceived: July 2006, submitted to Prix Ars in March 2007
Concept and implementation: Corebounce Art Collective

Project Details (Excerpt from the Submission)

Objectives

The forefront goal of this project is to sum up your online existence in one single numeric value and thus render your existence comparable to others. But how much information are you willing to hand out for this single number? Loosing privacy for fame is a creeping process in real life – here it is rendered explicit. What are you ready to reveal? Your e-mail address? Your MySpace credentials? Your contacts on your mobile phone? Your credit card? The more you offer the more likely the system gets the big picture across communities and metaverses. And what about elevating your celebrity value by faking an online presence? What about stealing credentials? Without being asked directly, the user is forced to think about these questions on his way to fame and reflect on his motivations. In the process one will not only learn how much or little one matters in the electronic universe but also possibly rediscover long forgotten traces left throughout electronic systems.

Language and context

The interaction is realized with simple, universally understood iconic dialogs and thus language independent. There are no inherent geographical or cultural restrictions whatsoever. However, due to the selection of supported online communities the implementation is currently biased towards the western hemisphere.

Project History

This project roots in various scientific, technical and artistic ancestors. It borrows the human cognition inspired approach to information discovery form the thesis “Automatic Software Configuration” (https://diuf.unifr.ch/pai/publications/2002/paper/Schubiger-PhD02.pdf). Ubiquitous access to mobile phone data is realized with a variant of SICAP’s POS module (https://www.sicap.com/). Close contacts to the masterminds of cocomment (https://www.cocomment.com/) help understanding the technical and social challenges in today’s on-line communities. Corebounce’s long track of public appearances and expertise in interactive installations heavily influenced the interaction design. Especially the experience gained through RipMyDisk motivated the implementation of this project.

People

The driving people behind this project are the founding members of Corebounce Association, which were also deeply involved in the forerunners: Pascal Müller, Stefan Arisona, Simon Schubiger-Banz, and Matthias Specht. The original concept, as well as the software development was carried out by them. The project is intended to be instantiated either as an installation or as an online platform. The forerunner RipMyDisk was open to the public during Interactive Futures 2006. The software is entirely based on Soundium / Decklight which is partially open source.

Lessons learned

From a technical perspective, RipMyDisk demonstrated the feasibility but also the limits of access to physical artefacts linked to the online world. While we continuously improve on artefact support, we also integrated additional input devices such as card readers and a keyboard. Whereas RipMyDisk was a specialized system tailored for a specific event, the new system is greatly modular to accommodate a wide range of community software and web interfaces to have a maximum reach into the online world. From a social viewpoint two remarkable observations were made: First, technical limitations were circumvented by ad-hoc social networks that emerged around “gateway” artefacts. We call a “gateway artefact” a device that can be used to feed information into the system without being itself a representation of real life identity. Second, privacy is at least in an installation setting of little or no concern. The urge to participate, here enforced by the urge to become famous temporally blinds the user in respect to privacy and security.

Technical Information

The Soundium research platform served as the technological basis for the realization of the project. As indicated earlier Soundium has roots in various computer science research domains ranging from software engineering, human-computer interaction techniques to real-time multimedia processing and computer graphics. The development of platform was initiated by Corebounce in 1999 and has since then been supported by various Swiss universities and companies. One of the principal design goals of Soundium was to provide a highly modular software architecture for the rapid realisation of scientific experiments as well as artistic ideas. Besides of this project and its basis, RipMyDisk, Soundium has been intensely been applied for live visuals and VJ performances, as well as interactive media art installations (for example the Digital Marionette, currently exhibited at the Ars Electronica Center). Soundium runs on Linux and is freely available.

Selected References (Related to the Soundium Platform)

P. Müller, S. Arisona, K. A. Huff and B. Lintermann. 2007. Digital Art Techniques. ACM SIGGRAPH 2007, San Diego, CA, USA. To appear in: Course Notes of the ACM SIGGRAPH 2007, ACM Press.

P. Müller, S. Arisona, S. Schubiger and M. Specht. 2007. Interactive Editing of Live Visuals. To appear in: J. Braz, A. Ranchordas, H. Araújo and J. Jorge (eds). Computer Graphics and Computer Vision: Theory and Applications I, Springer Verlag.

P. Müller, S. Arisona, S. Schubiger, and M. Specht (Corebounce Art Collective). 2006. Digital Marionette. In: Simplicity - The Art of Complexity. Ars Electronica 2006: 348 - 349.

S. Arisona, S. Schubiger, and M. Specht. 2006. A Real-Time Multimedia Composition Layer. Proceedings of AMCMM, Workshop on Audio and Music Computing for Multimedia. ACM Multimedia 2006, Santa Barbara, October 23-27.

S. Schubiger and S. Arisona. 2003. Soundium2: An Interactive Multimedia Playground. In: Proceedings of the 2003 International Computer Music Conference, ICMA, San Francisco.

Solutions

The system draws it vigour from three key elements:

• Ubiquitous access to personal artefacts. Through various interfaces to the physical world (card reader, infrared port, Bluetooth, keyboard) artefacts can be transferred to the system in an ubiquitous way.
• Modular integration of existing and emerging community services. A unique automatic site crawling technique enables the integration of arbitrary on-line communities, portals, blogs, newsgroups, etc. in a modular way. The crawler isolates individuals, relates them, and extracts their social networks.
• Social ranking is largely based on Google’s page rank algorithm that is adapted in our system to rank people. Page rank basically measures the importance of a page by the links pointing to that page and the rank of the origins of these links. “People rank” is measured by the number of people that refer to an individual in combination with the rank of the referrers. Additionally, on-line activity over time is integrated into the people rank to take into consideration the volatile character of fame.

Implementation

The research instance of the project is currently running at ETH Zurich’s Computer Systems Institute. This is where the software further evolves. Several partners are using parts of the code for rapid-prototyping of their own research projects. Corebounce will be showing artistic applications of the software at this year’s TweakFest (Zurich, https://www.tweakfest.ch) and Digital Art Weeks (Zurich, https://www.digitalartweeks.ethz.ch).

Users

The project addresses everyone with an Internet identity, and/or those that are actively involved in social or technological aspects of digital communities.

License

Some parts of the software are already open-source, or will be released as open-source within a short timeframe. Some parts are currently closed-source, but available for free. Current licensees are mainly research institutions involved in computer systems, network technology, as well as multimedia and digital art.

Statement of Reasons

The main contribution of our project is the novel way to look at communities and to explore the interconnections between our physical identity and our various net identities. The project reveals many important social and technical issues. In particular, it highlights the widening gap between the need for privacy versus the desire for publicity. With its scientific orientation, it serves as a solid foundation for future projects in the domain. It is our goal to contribute to social, sociological, and technical research related to digital communities, as well as to artistically oriented projects.

Corebounce Art Collective, 2006

The project “Rip my Disk”, presented at Interactive Futures 2006, brought mobile art to the dancefloor. It compromised privacy by displaying personal content to the big screen.

In an augmented VJ performance, visitors entered into a dare by letting the Corebounce team “rip” multimedia contents off their personal mobile phones with the Soundium program to get exposed (“virtually naked”) on the dance floor. Others, not so akin to risk taking, simply enjoyed to employ their mobile phones for interactive painting as well as sending media sources such as live video and image material. The sent media were used as personal artifacts, and were continuously adapted and integrated into the live visuals performance. The result was the personal enhancement of the space around the media owner’s location. The project also demonstrated how mobile communication technologies can easily be made accessible to artists or performers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut3D5Z4PoWg

Performance & Installation: Interactive Futures 06
Location: Open Space, Victoria, BC, Canada
Date: Jan 27 2006

Installation: Digital Art Weeks 07
Location: ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Date: Jul 10 - 14 2007

Concept, programming and realisation: Corebounce Art Collective