Screenshot from
Touch Me project presented at Sonic Self festival in Chelsea Art
Museum, New York, 2008
The
striking multitude of images that
have come into existence during the last 30 years can falsely engender
the sense that they have brought about great breakthroughs in
multimedia art. Critical discourse has barely touched on the radically
different dimensions in creativity made possible by recent
technological advances, especially when compared to the rampant
discussions of the alterations in social paradigms that they have
brought on. This is especially true in more traditional, computer-based
art. Despite significant advances in software, most artists, because of
their lack of technological and programming expertise, still do not
utilize it to its full creative potential. The progress of art making
depends upon the artists’ thorough understanding of how new, more
technologically advanced sets of tools can be utilized for creating
stronger visual effects.
The
TouchMe™ project, conceived by Anna
Frants in 2002, is one of the first examples of a distributed creative
potential realized in the unconstrained collaboration between mediums.
The project is a prototype of a virtual studio where individual
artists’ works interact with one another other in a manner which is
both structured and non-deterministic. The result is a work of art that
is open-ended and continuously evolving in time. Each new contributing
artist actively changes the overall creation and the visual landscape
of the project. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
In
Frants’ work, artists from around the
world contribute elements of their individual visual vocabularies. The
elements of such vocabularies are video and sound streams that express
artists’ associations with specific colors. The TouchMe™ framework
dynamically blends multiple images; it then picks sound tracks, based
on the color choice made by the participating viewer. The resulting
video stream, while related to the chosen color, is not predictable.
The randomly selected, blended images, and corresponding soundtracks
create a unique sensation that cannot be achieved by a small number of
works contributed by any single artist. In early 2004, internationally
known video artist Alina Bliumis was the first artist to contribute her
videos to the project. These were used for the initial prototype. Seven
more video artists contributed their work for the exhibition at the
Broadway Gallery — Vladimir Gruzdev, Elena Gubanova, Asia Nemchenok,
Maria Shirofutdinova, Mihail Skorodumov, Leo Stepanov and Aliona
Yurtsevich.
In the
final inception of the project,
contributing artists will be storing libraries of their video works on
web servers in geographically distributed locations. These works will
not be limited to any particular style. The TouchMe™ framework, running
on a web server will load and play such distributed videos.
Typically,
the Internet serves as network
that hosts many individual, fully encapsulated, unconnected artistic
efforts. These artistic islands, despite occasionally referencing each
other, do not form an internet-based aesthetic whole. Nor has the
internet been used as means of building works of art that require a
high degree of artistic collaboration, one not possible in the physical
world. We only now find ourselves at the onset of an age where artists
are presented with the opportunity to evolve in this nearly untapped
resource and venue. With TouchMe™, Ana Frants is at the forefront of
visual artists embracing the greatest communication medium that has
ever existed — the Internet.
