audiobar presentation at Planetary Collegium, Munich, 2009
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second part of the Media Art Platform presentation at the Planetary Collegium conference in Munich, Germany,
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audiobar presentation at Planetary Collegium, Munich, 2009
- 1. MFSK Media Art Platform (MAP) Morten Søndergaard The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark Mogens Jacobsen Media artist, Denmark
- 2. Audiobar (”Hørbar” in Danish) MFSK/MAP Pilot-project www.audiobar.info
- 4. Covers First record cover. Alex Steinweiss, 1939
- 5. The Shrinking image Vinyl LP 2 pages 30x30 cm = 1800 cm 2 CD 2 pages 11x11 cm = 242 cm 2 Itunes online store 5x5 cm = 25 cm 2 * Ipod Classic player 2x2 cm = 4 cm 2 * On my 15” laptop
- 6. Social_Aktion Exhibition 2007 The Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde, Denmark
- 7. What’s so great about museums?
- 8. Navigating the museum
- 10. Not the same old thing again
- 12. Bar
- 13. Bar Table H: 100 cm Ø: 100 cm Active area: 30 cm Ø Lighting
- 14. Tangible interface Bottles Labels RFID tags
- 20. PlayList
Editor's Notes
- Now Morten has presented the over-all concept behind MAP (Media Art Platform) I would like to be very down-to-earth, and present one of the art-work produced for the projects. In - all modesty - I will present my own initial piece – the Audiobar – which became the pilot-project for MAP.
- LIBRARY When I was a young teen in the 1970s, I lived in a small and unexciting city. I spent a lot of time at the library. At that time, most Danish libraries were places of books printed on paper. Luckily, my local institution was blessed with a lot of vinyl records. As libraries in the 1970s were still sources of “high” culture, the collection focused on classic music with a bit of jazz thrown in. But there was also a section labeled “avant-garde,” which drew my attention. I spent many hours sitting on a chair, wearing grey Beyer headphones, and listening to Stockhausen, Steve Reich, Cage, Terry Reilly, and others.
- COVERS I didn’t really know much about these composers and artists. But ever since graphic designer Alex Steinweiss, convinced Columbia Records to create the first true album cover in 1939, records has been delivered in packaged with a high level of visual information. (before 1939 records were sold in generic sleeves) Often artists from the “fine arts” has been involved in producing album art, e.g., the famous banana cover art Andy Warhol designed for the 1967 album by The Velvet Underground & Nico . CLUES / STUMBLE UPON As I didn’t really know much about these composers and artists but chose the music based on the images and texts I saw on the record covers. The visual hints supplied by the covers. I navigated the collection based on visual clues. Using this strategy,I stumbled upon some wonderful treasures .
- DISAPEARING IMAGE These visual clues became less dominent, as audio went digital First of all: The need for physical packaging disappered – or rather: It became generic again. (Just like the brown record bags before 1939.) Now the brown bag looks like this (Ipod) There are still cover-images on the Ipod. But the images has been deminished to less then a ¼ % of the area of the LP cover. METADATA Instead we got digital metadata - Describtions embedded in the format:. Aside from the audiodata, the MP3 file contain information about itself. (That how your Ipod knows the title, the artist and the genre of the tracks) This type of multi-layers of digital descriptions opened up for at lot of new possibilities. One example being folksonomic recommender-systems - as used by Last.FM
- In 2006 Morten Søndergaard and co-curator Tine Seligman invited me to take part in the exhibition “Social Interaction.” The exhibition was to be shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, City of Roskilde, Denmark. And this museum has an immense collection of international audio art dating from as early as 1890. Based on my own passion for audio art, I would really like to work with this collection. -------- The collection is on CDs, LPs, cassettes, and reel-to-reel tapes. To access the collection, you would go to the museum’s library, asked for a specific item from the catalogue (or asked one of the very knowledgeable staff). -------- I wanted to “activate” the collection, making it more accessible and bringing it to the attention of the visitors.
- ROLE OF MUSEUM Getting involved with this collection, forced me think a about the roles of the museum. Of course there is all the legal stuff: Collection, preserving etc But seen from the perspective of the guest visiting the museum, there several other factors. SPACE One of them is the physical space of the museum: It might be brillian archicture. Or not. But at least you leave your everyday environment – your home and your place of work – to spend in the museum. Often a visit to a museum is recreational excursion. So the physical space is important.
- NAVIGATE And when you get there, you navigate through the museum. When I visit a museum, I don’t always plan which art works to see. More often I plan to see the exhibition, the “compilation” of works on display. Not all the pieces will be hits, but I am always quite sure I will find some unknown and new – or forgotten - during my visit. And even unexciting works might grow on me in the future. So I explore the exhibition – and most often stumble upon interressting works. The Audiobar should try to introduce this “stumble upon” experience into the field of audio-based art. SOCIAL And a visit to the museum is often a social event: we go with friends or family or meet new people there. Similarly, the Audiobar is a multiuser environment, where visitors are encouraged – almost forced - to interact, not with computers or technology, but with other visitors.
- Bringing new / digital technology into the museum, tends to follow one of 2 strategies: You bring the computer into the museums Or You bring the museum into the computer
- One problem of both strategies is the “build-in” symbolic graphical user-interface. It IS based on a Desktop metaphor – an Office metaphor (desktop, file folder, trashcan) I wanted the experience should be different than balancing you budget in MS Excell or using an ATM
- So I ended up with some ideas. The 4 central were these: Great works by great artists makes up the collection. From the beginning I chose not to cut or “remix” it. The integrity of the individual works was respected and they were presented as original art works, not as raw material for my personal expression Use the real space of the museum. And not force guests to work with ”computers” = use contemporary interface technology (GUI) Support and encourage exploration and the ”stumbling upon” experience Not a ”single user” experience – but enforce social interaction between visitors (another reason NOT to base the work on common interface technology)
- So I made a bar. An reactive environment. I chose the metaphor of the bar, because bars are archetypical social playgrounds for adults.
- The central element is a custom-build table. The table contains a sensor (RFID reader), some lighting and a lot of IT-technology.
- But of course a bar also need some bottles. The Audiobar has 260 of them. (Sadly they are apparently empty). But they all have very colorful labels on them
- The colorful labels has bi-polar scales printed on them. (IRMA: Cheap wine – scale between dry and sweet). There are 13 different types of labels – 13 different colors. 12 of them are very ambigiuos decriptive scale – using a mix of very understandable terms and some very strange (Green on slide: Noisy/Quit) (Pink: More blue than red) (Not shown: Few vs Many) - The are also some black labels: They show a certain 5-year period. For example the years between 1960 -65.
- The Audiobar does not rely on factual information about the tracks (even though we keep these data in the database). Instead, it is based on very ambigious subjective descriptions. I chose 12 parameters and developed a system through which the digitized audio could be described according to twelve bipolar emotional descriptors. This subjective indexing was done by a student - Jesper Steen Andersen - who spent the last six months of 2006 listening to all the tracks and trying to fit them into my descriptive system. As I expected, the deliberate vagueness and ambiguity of the terms left open a great deal of interpretation to Jesper . We had many excellent discussions during the period, but the final judgment was left to Jesper, even in cases where I would have described the audio differently. ------ To achieve the goal of this task, a special indexing software tool was developed. This software allowed Jesper to listen to tracks while adjusting twelve “weights” within the database.
- Interacting with the Bar A tangible interface is used: Guests are invited to take bottles shelves along the walls and place them onto the table. The act of placing bottles on the table issues a digital request to a database. The RFID reader in the table reads the virtual “content” of the bottle. The request is based on fuzzy logic that insures all audio tracks close to the requested values are returned to the software in the bar. From these possible choices, the software selects one and plays the track.
- Placing several bottles at the same time issues a combined request. This narrows down the list of possible tracks. Think of the process as similar to typing several related words into the Google search engine; the more words in the string, the more precise the search. A fuzzy logic algorithm ensures that at least one track will be found at all times, no matter how narrow or restricting the search values are.
- Noisy Addng human Removing noise constraining to a certain periode of time Adding ”non-narrative”
- No facts shown in the bar (exploration only) But in a different room: looking up a playlist shown the last 10 tracks. Here users can listen to the whole track (wearing headphone) – jump back and forth Link to other tracks by the same artist Read material about the track/artist (from the database of the museum)
- Focus on interaction between humans (not man/machine interaction) The Audiobar is a playful environment. It invites to exploration. One of my biggest concerns during development was the toy element: Would the novel interface attract guests to the bar but distract them from the audio? I have spent a lot of time watching people in the Audiobar . At first, visitors are fascinated by their interaction with the table. Bottles are lifted up and put down immediately, lights blink, and audio is played. Then combinations of bottles are investigated. But sooner than I’d hoped for or expected – often within the first minute – the focus moves towards the audio and away from the technology. Visitors explore the bottles on the shelves, looking for specific combinations. Guests discuss music and negotiate with strangers for real estate on the table top. And some even begin to discuss the concept of describing audio in words. Different groups of users: People playing …. “the experts” – with a knowledge of the audio-material = inventing games