Augmented Reality

Sarah Hart

Hart:  I'm Sarah Hart and I have been teaching at RISD in Providence in Rhode Island for about eight years.  My background is photography.  I went to grad school at Cal Arts with Monica Chau in the photo department and after that taught at the University of Washington for a couple of years and then taught at the photo department for a number of years at RISD and more and more started getting involved with new technologies.  First dealing with photographically based new technologies, but soon, working with web-based art, and started teaching a class called Virtual Art Production which was web based and looked at cyberspace and the web as a new possible place for artists to colonize--a space that's pretty generally corporate controlled and I was interested in how we as artists could produce meaning rather than just making slick corporate--more of what there was already too much of as far as I was concerned.  Over the years I kept learning and developing and continuing to take classes constantly myself, and ended up becoming very fascinated by the interface between the virtual and real, where you have the virtual arena that's programming the internet/cyberspace, and the real--the physical world we actually live in.  Where those two come together and how they interact and how often there's a denial of the problems from one to the other--this sort of erasure and whitewashing of difference of problems of economy of politics which I think fits very much into the model of the corporate think and the way we're supposed to or the way the corporations would like us to think, all of which I violently work against.  So I ended up in the last couple of years actually teaching robotics and although this may seem like quite a stretch from photography, I hope that by showing you the work I'm interested in such that they may come together more closely than I had ever possible first imagined.  As I say, I don't have any answers, I don't know where I'm going with this, but it's an interesting and so far productive journey with a huge, steep learning curve that just does not ever seem to let up.

Let me begin by talking a little bit about what I think some of the differences that are happening that are being, I don't want to say force on us, but the opportunities that are being provided for us as visual artists moving into this new realm and making new connections between things.  This is a very, wow, this is going to be a little odd because the projection system is a different ration than what I expected, so hopefully we're not going to get too cut off on the edges here, but we'll see.

You have images, which we can think of as static images on a page, whether it be photographed or drawn, painting, sculpture, whatever--something that's stable.  But with a computer you can quickly take these images and start twisting them in ways where they remain the same image in terms of volume, surface, but the array of data--the manipulation is different.  Of course we all know this through Photoshop. This is not something that's unusual idea to us, but this is still exactly the same image, it's just being manipulated differently.  Of course what this does in terms of the way it affects the real world is you can now make buildings that of course a person could have imagined and could have drawn before because we have very visual, very flexible abilities as human beings, but it couldn't have been fabricated.  To fabricate all the pieces and have them actually fit together and have them be stable enough to be earthquake proof and deal with weather and such is close to an impossibility, but with a computer doing all the work, we can imagine things and then they can be fabricated.  So this is one huge change that I think Ð it's going to be a few years before we start noticing that, but suddenly I think there's going to be a real explosion into the new possibilities and square buildings will begin to look like something from the past.

Another wonderful thing about using a computer is dynamic mapping.  These happen to be some maps of earthquakes.  This happens to be from Cal Tech in California.  These were reams and reams of data; pages and pages of data that scientists would have to look through and it would take literally days to look through.  They were monitoring, as you can see the dates going by down here, what the earthquake activity was and here we have the size of the earthquake is measured by how large the bump is and the distribution it covers by how wide it is.  So you have very quickly a take on where significant activity is happening.  Of course, this doesn't mean that you don't pay attention to the data anymore but it does give you conceptually a visualization, a way of thinking about things.

Younger:  Is this like every hour?

Hart:  Yeah, this mapping is being done every hour.

Younger:  I'm totally blown away!

Hart:  Yeah, everything you can imagine is being mapped this way.  It's incredible.  It's a whole other talk just to go on the Internet and look at real-time things.  We could watch the water moving through the sewer system in New York City.  It's being mapped this way.  There are about 50 surveillance cameras in my neighborhood constantly; I'm doing a project on that.  A dark side of all this is that the way we're all being watched and that's very problematic too.  Anyway, it's amazing, these new mapping systems.  I think for many years people who dealt with visual art, visual production, were not very well respected by the scientists who were doing the real stuff, the hard stuff, and we were just illustrating it, and I think with the new mapping systems that are being developed now, suddenly scientists and computer scientists are really realizing that being visually literate, the understand the photographic image, to understand how to display data in a meaningful way is very, very important.  I've started working with a team of computer scientists at Brown.  I'll show you some of the work we're doing, and they are--for years I think they thought that people down the hill at RISD kind of play around with stuff, and now they're actually coming and saying, ÒPlease come work with us.  We need visual metaphors, we need methods of putting information in usable form.Ó  Now, of course, when I started working with computers a lot of people felt that's not art because it's a machine making that but having come from a background of photography, I'd heard all of those arguments before.  So these were not new, and I said, ÒYeah, these arguments have been around before.Ó 

As an aside, I want to show you that when I was a kid, this is what I wanted from technology, personally, and I still do.  When I get this then I'll feel like my life has been successful.  I haven't come across it yet but I'm still hoping.

Younger:  We're going to be too old pretty soon!

Hart:  Hey, if I'm 97-years-old I'm going to get right on one of those things.  I'm ready!  Now all of this considered new technology is not really as new as the buzzwords would have us think.  This is a calculator, 1642, devised by Pascal, and a precursor to what we now think of as computers.  These ideas were very much in the air, the idea of analyzing the environment, of codifying it, of writing it down, organizing it.  Whether you take plants and animals and put them in different families, and whether you begin to think of geography, different mapping systems that quantify every name, every spot on the earth by a position rather than by local knowledge.  This way of thinking ran through everything that was around.  You also had the autonomas that were built; very complex mechanical little statuettes built usually by watchmakers who were interested in making these things Òlifelike.Ó  The most popular ones either were musicians or would draw or write.  There seemed to be a great interest in having these machines do something that was creative--crossing over that line of being, like how could a machine be creative?  Well, I'll show you in a minute how these were creative.  This is the clockwork that was inside a rider.  This is a riding machine and it was made by a watchmaker.  Again, the whole idea of delineating time and organizing time and schedules and such was a whole way of thinking that was not different from mapping the earth or beginning to separate things out into different organizational systems, often very visual.  This is actually how it worked.  This is another one, but there's a cam system in here, and by putting in a new set of cams, in fact, the model remains the same, but it can draw different pictures.  It's sort of like a program, but it's all hardware based, so there's the interchangeable cam system, which of course is not programming in the sense of what we do today electronically, but it was the beginning of the ideas that led to those possibilities. 

By the 1830s we had the telegraph, which was the first virtual communication where you could have communication that happened at a distance where there was either no visual or physical correspondence between the two.  You weren't flashing a mirror from one hilltop to another or waving a flag or sending someone on a horse.  You were literally, virtually, communicating across huge, vast amounts of geography.  Then there was the telephone.  Now the telephone was first devised as a hearing aid.  I'm deaf, and I have a hearing aid, and I'm totally dependent on it so I was fascinated to find out that the telephone was at first the amplification, the ability to amplify to be useful for deaf people.  It was quickly noted that there probably weren't enough deaf people to have this be a big success, so it was turned into a broadcast system, and it was meant to be a system for broadcasting.  It was a one-way stream where stuff would be broadcast to you and multiple users could listen in.  It wasn't really thought of as being a two-way stream for a while; that came later.  And, of course, that's the use that we know now.  This is completely virtual technology.  When you talk to someone on the phone, you have the illusion that you're speaking to somebody you know.  But, in fact, their voice is not traveling through the lines.  They are driving a puppet, an avatar, and they're driving it in such a way that it sounds somewhat the way they do, so you have the illusion of it being them, but in no way is it.  It's a two-way stream and it was developed before the 1900s, and that's exactly the technology that's now being developed and being worked with over the Internet and with compression schemes, but we'll get to that later.  All of this is not so new, and a lot of the ideas and a lot of the problems with it were noted and developed very early on.  By 1939 you had a huge jump in technology.  World War II interceded very quickly but I have to say that by 1939 there was a ton of stuff that was very much in place.  The most popular exhibit was America's progress.  This is a view of America put together by corporations.  It was the corporate view of what progress could be, and people would sit in these chairs and revolve around this view of America and it was vastly popular.  This was also the first public display of television in the United States that had been private--tinkering with it, developing it, but this is where it actually went public.  There was actually broadcasts in New York City from the opening day of the World's Fair onward.  And, there was a tremendous interest in robotics.  This is Electro, the robot who could answer questions.  He was, in fact, totally mechanical.  There was no autonomy or computer-based sensing of his environment whatsoever.  It was all a pre-programmed sham, but it was a delightful one.  (Laughter)  This gets to something that's closer to us in many ways.  These are students at MIT developing the first computer games in the early 60s.  There was no graphical display for computers.  Computers were oscilloscopes and eventually text based.  I don't know if you remember the old computers that were black with green or yellow text on them, but there was no such thing as RGB, there was no way of actually viewing images per se because computers were used for basically radar and number crunching, and the idea of them being used visually just hadn't occurred to anyone yet.  So the first games were a pong-type thing, basically done with oscilloscopes and taking something and bending it to other means; something that artists are very good at.  This was an interesting but complete failure.  The sensorama.  The sensorama actually was a movie that you watched, a movie clip, and it had smell and sound and movement in the chair.  This was a financial fiasco, but a number of them were made.  There's one in the Smithsonian Institute and go try it out if you're there.  It's pretty funny, actually.  It never got off the ground, but what did get off the ground and where most of us had our first virtual experiences or augmented experiences, meaning the combination of virtual and real, are in these arcades in the 70s.  I remember walking into these and instantly realizing that there's something new in the air. 

Because there was no way of visually displaying work produced on a computer, but people are always taking the technology to hand and bending it to their own means, you could use a plotter that an engineer would use, and if you were a programmer you could program it through algorithms to actually produce something that might be recognizable as a figure, if you cared to see it that way.  A lot of early work was done in Bell Labs in New Jersey, and also at Xerox Park in California, and the MIT students were developing all these pong-type games and such, and there got to be more and more interesting in thinking about how could you have these things that computers are very good at doing visually display.  But it took a while for that to happen.  And here's Ivan Sutherland who was very important in the development of computer-based graphical display, working on his sketchpad.  Here he has a wand and he sketches something and changes something here and it actually affects what's happening inside the computer.  It's a two-way stream where he could have like Photoshop filter; you pull it down and all you're doing is manipulating the data--you're taking the information and putting an algorithm on top of it that's going to arrange it a in new and different way.  He's working with those early ideas.  However, it was generally felt that when people interacted with computers that they would go into a virtual environment where they would exclude the real world you're in and the room you're in and submerge yourself into this cyberspace, into electronic space.  So there were a lot of helmets and eye scopes developed, and for a number of years this was the way the technology was going.  This is an early quick-time VR viewing, you know, back in the Middle Ages in 1989. Quick-time VR as you now know is now used all over the web, it's used a lot for real estate where you get to swirl around and look at a room.  It's become very, very common.  This is Ivan Sutherland again.  He developed several renditions of the eye phone so you'd had an Internet experience that would be directly actually stopping you from being in the space you were in.  You wouldn't be able to navigate both spaces at once--you're in one or the other. 

This is further development where you have an eye phone and a data glove.  The data glove has feedback so you can begin to manipulate things in the environment.  The closest we have to it now with the internet is the mouse, which is a very low-tech data glove, however, things are moving back in that direction and we're going to very quickly--the mouse is going to be something of history pretty soon, and I think there's going to be very haptic feedback for internet-type stuff and we'll be getting back to the data glove but with some new version.

Artists, of course, didn't have much access to this technology.  It was all very high-end.  It was all IBM, Xerox, Bell Labs, etc.  However, in Banff Canada there was a program started where they actually brought artists in and gave them the technical assistance they needed to produce artwork.  Just to play with ideas, visual ideas.  This is a piece called Topo Slide and what it is, is you're helmeted up, you can't see the real world, you're wearing this helmet and you have eye phones.  And what you're looking at are these large wave-type shapes, and you're standing on this piece of plywood that teeters and totters back and forth, and as you teeter and totter on it, it changes the display that you're seeing from your eyes.  Well you can imagine how most people felt in this.  I guess seasickness--nausea was the quick result of it.  But it was an early exploration of how do you have an interactive system where the participant does something which changes the display.  This two-way stream, this interaction, is an important thing to remember.  These are what the files that you looked at actually were like.  It was stereoscopic so your two eyes were seeing it as various things, and what part of these grids were displayed to you depended on how you were standing on the tottering box.  This is Brenda Laurel, an artist that's done water work with computers.  This was her work at Banff.  She sees the computer as a theatrical space, as a place to make theater to produce meaning--not as a space to make visually graphic displays.

This was the virtual reality set-up at Banff.  Notice that people have these helmets on with eye phones and these tethers.  These rocks were placed here, not for aesthetics, but so you'd stub your toe and not walk so far as you'd get out of your tether.  The technology was clunky, it was very expensive, and it rarely worked.  But when it did work, it was a lot of fun. 

This is a class that I taught last fall and the previous fall, which was called Interactive Spaces.  It was how do you bring the real and virtual together--half of the class was building robots and programming them where you build something in the physical world--you program a behavior and infrared download it so there's an autonomous thing that has its own behavior apart from you.  The other half of the class was to go into virtual reality where you go and you take data from the real world and you display it in a virtual world and then you manipulate it for various reasons.  So one was from the inside out and the other from the outside in. 

This happened to be a program about blood vessels at Brown Medical School.  This is an early prototype.  We are right now walking through a blood vessel or a pig's artery or something like that, but they very much wanted to work with RISD students, and RISD classes, because they were having trouble visualizing.  They were realizing they had hit the end of their being able to display information in an interesting and easily readable way because they just didn't have the visual background.  In this CAVE you are wearing glasses that look like sunglasses.  Each eye--there are shutters that open and shut 60 times a second, very quickly, so you're only seeing out of one eye at any one time but it's so fast that you don't have the realization of that.  One person is wearing a special pair of glasses that--you see the tether line that goes here up to this ball and this is a tracking ball and it's tracking that persons' head movement, so wherever that person is looking and moving, the whole environment changes.  So if you're wearing that helmet, that pair of eye glasses, you have the sensation as you look around the room that you're actually scanning a vast landscape, and if you move a couple of inches, you can have the feeling of moving a huge, long way.  With virtual reality there's not a one to one correlation between the movement you make and the display you're given.  The ratio can be changed and set up in a variety of interesting ways. 

This is what the CAVE looks like when the lights are turned on.  That's the tracking ball.  These are the eye glasses.  The wand is what you paint with, and what you paint basically comes out as a bunch of numbers and algorithms on the computer.  You can make a very large painting--and it's 3D, it's sculptural and such--and you can walk around the other side of it and paint a different color or something different on the other side.  Then, if you're finished with it, you can take your hand and just squash it down to the floor and make it very small and push it over to the side and then start making another one because all it really is is a bunch of numbers.  Then at the end of the day you can decide which ones you want to save, and you just hit command ÒsÓ and which ones you want to delete and you delete them and they go out of the system and can come back another day and get it up and running and continue your visual work.  It's a very odd way of thinking about process.

Younger:  How much memory does it take?

Hart:  A huge amount. 

Younger:  Like how much?  Just a ballpark.

Hart:  When I first when in there, I thought they had really old machines because they had these things that looked like old mainframes in the back room and I thought, ÒMy God!  They're running it on old machines,Ó but they're not.  They're all brand new machines.  It's all real time visualization for the floor and three walls that are constantly moving.  It's huge. 

This is a system that was put together by NASA.  One of the problems for artists is that it's so expensive to run this per hour, that to go in there and really have a chance to experiment, it takes a lot of basically good luck.  It's like if someone didn't come when they were supposed to, you get a little bit of time between other people.  It's not a system that there's much access to because it's about $300 per hour to run it, just to have the equipment running, and then you have to have the programmers sitting in these chairs at every moment, and they get $120 an hour and there's usually a bunch of them too. 

Younger:  So it's like about $1,000 an hour.

Hart:  Yeah.  This is like National Science Foundation-type budgets.  Not the type of thing that we as artists are too used to.

This is another picture of the class.  Here you can see these shutter glasses that we're wearing.  This one student has the one that's connected to the tracking ball, and dipping into these different paint colors, they don't actually make different-color paints.  They have different types of lines that you can extrude from the brush.  So there's a real variety of types of lines that you can make.  It's still very cartoonish even though you have these incredibly expensive powerful machines all running it on four walls in real time.  This is a human artery, showing the gray web is the network is the artery, and then we have several different Ð we have pressure that's being shown by red and blue; green and yellow is the blood moving through the artery system.  As you see, it's still pretty cartoonish.  This is another.  Now we're inside that same artery.  This is where the division goes and there was some sort of problem right up in here on the artery wall, and the medical school was looking at and dealing with.  So it's got a lot way to go to be anywhere photographic. 

This is some work that Daniel Keene and Cynthia Ruben who are--he's at Brown and she's at RISD--and this is work they tried to--they got a grant to go in and use the CAVE as artists for a number of hours and this is--it's hard to display it without it being a 3D CAVE, this is the closest I could come to what it looks like.  It's called Hidden Spaces and it's the walk-through of the woods.  You can see there's the feeling of 3D-ness.  Very cartoonish, very undeveloped texture mapping; surface mapping. 

Another CAVE is in ZMK, which is in Germany.  It's a technological center.  This CAVE is run--this person is wearing the helmet, it tracks wherever this person looks, Eve looks in the same place and projects an image.  Here's Eve projecting the image.  There's not enough power in their computers to have the whole dome, so there's only a rectangle projected at any one time.  We have an incredible VR CAVE here in New York.  The new planetarium is astounding.  I think it's great to go to because it's one of the best VR projection systems in the world. 

Of course, after all was said and done, all of these fancy CAVEs and eye phones produced nausea, were very expensive, you had to have a programmer sitting next to you, there were all kinds of technological problems and not much access for the ordinary person, so by 1992 the Internet was kind of up and running and this cartoon in the New Yorker which is taken as the moment that the Internet was well enough known nationally in this country that there could be a joke about it and everyone would get it.  This cartoon is actually used as the standard of the Internet becoming popular. 

Once we have the Internet and we have the kind of communication, there's a whole new virtual possibility for artists that aren't so terribly dependent on the very high-end, rather dysfunctional scientific spaces.  Paul Sherman has done a series of projects where he has tele-distance communication between people.  You have two rooms identical; one participant is in some other location, and this participant's here, and they can have a conversation and you can imagine what the further development of that could be.

This is the set-up where he has the couch--he quickly moved from the bed to the couch, I must say.  This is the set-up.  You have blue background and you have the TV set up so the full experience only happens on the monitor.  So you have the conversations of two people together.  I ate a meal in one of these situations where I was sitting at a table and I was sitting across from another person who was in another environment, and it was very uncanny because both rooms are exactly the same.  We had the same dishes, the same silverware, we were eating the same food--everything was exactly the same.  Everything's happening in real time.  The lighting is exactly the same and the conversation is real.  The only thing is that the other person was on the other side of the country.  It's a very interesting type of displacement.  This shows you the set-up, still fairly elaborate, but nothing compared to a CAVE environment.

This is a dance that Galloway did.  These two dancers are in Chapel Hill and the woman wearing the white hat is in California, so again, this happened only in cyberspace--the full piece didn't really exist in any given place.

I found that often the first places to find interesting stuff like exploritoriums for kids.  This is in San Francisco.  This is interesting in that it is a life projection, a video-type projection, but it interacts with the viewers.  When you come in the room, the starfish starts crawling towards you, and if you move around it starts moving.  The faster you move, the faster it goes after you.  If you start making noise it starts moving more.  If multiple people come in, it gets a little confused.  It very clearly is interacting with you in the room.  Of course, it's nothing but a projection, but it seems to be a smart one.  What it is is that there's a lot of infrared sensors in the room and microphones and it's picking up your activity and responding in like ways.  He's at MIT, teaching at MIT, and I went up to his studio a month or two ago.  He's working on some really fascinating stuff where he's developing spaces so there can be a mixture of real and virtual long distance performance theater, performance pieces, that are not dependent on high-end VR, but are dependent on video projection and internet-based stuff.  It's pretty interesting.  He hopes to have it done in the fall.  He's looking around for funding right now to get it finished.  I think it's going to be pretty interesting.

Kim Fi, he's done a lot of work with music, but a lot of visual work too.  This is a piano, which has been exhibited several times in the States.  You sit with a little roller-ball here and you write music depending on how you move the bar.  You write notes on this piece of material, which is constantly moving and it moves them up to the piano and when they get to the piano they actually play the piano, and then once played, the notes turn into streaks of colored light and move upwards.  This is another view of the same piece, with the roller-ball, and by tracking it you lay down the music, and then it is played by a very real piano.  It's fun because there's such an immediate reaction between what you do, what you see, and what you hear.  It's a very engaging piece.  This is a diagram of how it's set up.  It's actually very simple, very elegant, as many things that work the best do have that sort of directness to them and are not so complicated.

Jeffrey Shaw is another artist who was lucky enough to work in Banff early on, and he did an augmented reality piece being a combination of virtual and real.  You sit on the bicycle and you pedal, and the faster you pedal the faster you go, and you can turn the bike right and left and you go right and left, and you move through this town that he's developed.  He has several of these developed.  They have streets and alleys and back alleys and they're populated by words.  This is legible city, another version of it.  It's funny because you go--I think these things are about 2-3 kilometers large, and you can actually bike around and then come back to the same place.  They're environments that are fairly stable. 

This is something that I have seen anyone use yet for art production, but I think it's going to come.  This is a space that's being proposed, there's a company in Seattle, Washington, that is actively selling these now, where you have an office and then you have a special screen material in one corner and on part of the table and these projection systems, and it appears as though the room moves back into that space.  It's all in real time.  It's pretty descent looking, actually.  It's not too cartoonish.  It's high-end video projection, but these people are in another location, so you have what seems to be, with certainly real time visual and voice communication, and if you set up the architecture there is the illusion of it being one continuous space.  The early version of it looked like this.  This is very early, as you can see.  It's still pretty primitive, but the possibilities are being developed as we speak.

An artist, Adam Frank, has taken some of these ideas and he is an artist who has taken these ideas off the shelf.  Well, not quite off the shelf but they've been developed and uses them in his own work.  He gets grants from the companies that developed the technology.  This is a piece called The Audience, and what this is is you walk into a darkened room and expect to see a video projection very much like in a museum setting, and sure enough, there's a video of people milling around and such, but as you walk in, they notice you.  All the people in the video turn around and they notice you, and as you move they follow you around, and if you do something or talk to someone they'll start clapping or they'll yell ÒYeah!Ó and if somebody else comes in the room, they split into two groups and they can track several people.  So what you have is what appears to be a video.  You think you're going to be looking at a video, but in fact, the characters get up and start reacting to you and what happens is you become the performer and they're the audience and what you do makes them react in quite an articulated variety of ways.  I was really surprised how well he has it worked out.  What he does is these are all fully modeled figures based on photographs that are taken, I think it's about 16 photographs per person on a turntable, and then models them.  So he ends up with these models that have pretty good movement.  He's really smart at 3D stuff.  Then this is the space that would be rear-projected, and there would be a series of sensors monitoring what was happening in the viewing space which is actually where you, rather than being the audience, the viewer, you are the performer and the audience Ð I think the really interesting ironic twist and it takes a while when you walk in to figure out what's going on.  I've only seen the prototype of it which is mostly wire frame, it was just very primitive, truncated surface mapping done because he's still raising money, he's getting money from corporations to help do this piece and put it together.  But I think we're going to see more and more pieces that are interactive that way.  Well, not this way, but interactive where there's a two-way stream where the audience is no longer the passive viewer.

As the computer begins to be able to look at us and react to us, we're going to have a password to get into a system, it's going to recognize who you are and not only that, it's going to recognize the mood you're in, this is the mapping that goes on where it looks at the subtle differences in your face muscles and such, and of course surveillance comes to mind.  There's a dark side to all of this, it's not all happy art projects.

So I started getting really interested in what are these computers looking at?  If we're going to have these computers looking at us, these interactive pieces, what are they sensing?  How intelligent and how articulated are their sensors?  I looked at a bunch of people who did art pieces, though they were primarily computer scientists because those are the people who had figured out how to do this type of thing.  This is Simon Penny who is a robotist at Carnegie Mellon and he has Petit Mall, which is a highly interactive cute little robot on bicycle wheels that really does interact with you in a way that you think someone's radio-controlling it from somewhere because it's interactions are just a little too keen for it to be just the computer, but in fact it is.  Here's Petit Mall on his Parisian tour.  He had a European tour.

Audience:  He's actually at Irvine.

Hart:  Yeah, but he was at Carnegie Mellon when he did this.  So this is the kind of training that the visual system goes through for this particular series of bots.  This is the kind of mapping of looking for edges to see where the edges of whatever it's looking at, and then having sensors that pick up the movement and mapping not the space where you are, but the movement you might be mapping.  So this is the map that is actually looked at, the data that is looked at by the computer inside the bot so it can map the type and the speed and the direction and all that. 

Rodney Brooks is doing a lot of work at MIT with computers, has Cog, a computer he's developed which is very visually smart, can actually learn from what it sees and stores what it learns in its database.  This is just a funny picture.  Back here we can see what Cog is seeing.  These are all the readouts.  These systems that are looking at us are pretty articulated. 

This is another tangent of this new technology thing.  This is instead of interacting with a computer as a robot, the interface between the virtual and the real.  It makes yourself into like a cyborg where you take the new technology and you plant it into your own body.  This is Australian.  This is a third arm.  He has this attached in a way that he can control the third arm through his muscles in his thigh.  He's learned how to move it in such ways that he has pretty good control of that third arm.  Here he is writing with all three arms at once--this arm being controlled by the thigh muscles.  This is another one of his extravaganzas.  If you ever get a chance to go to one of his performances, do.  They're pretty amazing. 

Kevin Warwick is another.  He's in England and he is at the University of Leeds.  He is having chips embedded into himself so he can download his state of being to the internet, so he basically has an internet chip in himself, he would like to have so he can download his state of being and then later when he wants to feel that way again, he can upload it back into himself.  He's bumped against a wall, he can't find medical people in England who will help him with some of his experiments because he wants to dig way deep into the nervous system and the possibilities of major neurological damage are there.  He's not some sort of nutcase.  This guy is a very well respected computer scientist, but not a neurologist. 

Then there are a lot of hybrids being done.  There's a tremendous amount of work being done with hybrids.  You see all kinds of connections between insects and electronics now.  A lot of that's being driven by the government, they found that certain types of insects are very sensitive to certain chemicals and can pick up a very, very small amount of the chemical.  They can send hundreds of these things out and let them loose, they will send back signals of what they're finding.  A lot of stuff is being done with plants.  These truly are hybrids, the combination of the real and the virtual. 

The art world quickly got very fascinated by technology and the idea or robots and computers and there was an exhibition in 1965 and this is one of the pieces.  This robot would--I think this was the fortune-telling robot and it was completely mechanical, pre-set.  There was absolutely nothing--this was not robotic in any way whatsoever but it was a popular interest in robotics. 

Here again at KMZ in Germany there is an ongoing program for artists to come and do work and if you have ideas you want to explore, they get technicians to work with you so you don't have to have the technical knowledge, you just have to have a playful mind and a willingness to explore a lot.  This happens to be a bot that writes.  Obviously it's all pre-programmed or else its spelling would be bad, or if I programmed it its spelling would be bad. 

A lot of people are using the computer and robots, which are basically autonomous little computers as a theatrical space and doing theatrical work.  This was a performance in California and here we have seeing for autonomy, something that robots are very concerned with.

This is a Japanese bot that dances.  He's more interesting looking when he dances, and when he dances it's actually--to have that kind of movement and have bounce and not fall over is not such an easy thing.  This is actually a fairly advanced robot.  Although, I consider it a synthesizer.  Synthesizers have become so common that we don't really think of them as virtual anymore.  They've become integrated into our experience of the world, and I think music more quickly than visual art has taken and incorporated new technologies. 

This was the class that I taught at RISD for the last couple of years with Eva Sutton.  It's a class where we were building robots.  We used the LEGO Mindstorm system that they used in the engineering school at TOPS.  There are several varieties of it.  Building robots and teaching programming, for many of the students, it was their first programming experience and really thinking about what sensors can do and even though what we could do in one semester was slight, we tried to really open up the doors to think about larger issues and further explorations.  This was a painting and it's a collaboration between two bots.  The one in the middle is making marks.  This is a light sensor.  When this bot senses a mark made by the first one, it lowers its brush and it makes these red marks with a brush and when it bumps into the first one, it has a special brush that sprays paint.  So by the end of it, there's red paint all around the outside, and the inside is pretty marked up. Sometimes the batteries run down before it gets there.  These were the types of things that the students built, and they had a number of actuators and a number of sensors on them, so even though they don't--they're small, but they were fairly complex and they could collaborate together--speak to each other through infrared transmission, detect edges.  This was a painting.  As a sense of irony we developed these art bots because, of course, being machines they had nothing to do with art and there were a number of people who didn't feel they should be in an art school, so we completely as an ironic move had one of the projects be mark-making that maybe could be interpreted as art if one cared to do so.

This bot is sending a signal to these two bots to whip around with these sponges, and although you can't see it, there's this very beautiful lacey blue paint on this and when it got out of range, too far for the infrared communication to go, which was about 17 feet, then that would be the end of the painting.  This one would be too far away to send a signal for these to continue to churn the paper down and whip the little sponges around.

This is basically how the RCX system works, the Mindstorm system.  You have three motors for three contacts for motors, so you can send three different sets of information program for three different motors, and then you have three sensors and they can be visual or touch sensors or touch sensors or temperature sensors or auditory sensors; whatever type of sensor you choose to attach to that.  Then you write a program so that the bot knows what--you give it a set of directives with instructions, but you don't know exactly what it's going to do because depending on what it finds and how it interacts with other ones, you get fairly complex.

This is a picture that was in the Circus issue of the New York Times last week.  Eve and I were invited to go to an exhibition in Brooklyn two weekends ago and we took one of these bots.  We actually made a series of bots, a number of them that did different types of Sumi paintings with Sumi brushes.  This doesn't look too great here, but this is off the Internet from the New York Times article about it.  We chose to put a head on it that was like an innocent head of something, that knows nothing, that's just starting, that's fresh, that isn't too knowledgeable or too many pre-conclusions about the world.  Done with a sense of irony. 

So rather than having the visual environment that we go into be something where we blank off the physical environment we're in, and through the virtual environment through earphones and headphones and head-mounted gear, what's happened is the virtual environment has become embedded into our physical environment.  You have the Internet with a computer, but you're still very much in contact with the world around you.  You have smart houses, smart cars, and all kinds of traffic lights that change depending on what the sensors see.  You have all these toys that are computerized, have sensors, interact, and apparently--I have a friend who does work with young children, and she says that these are very confusing to kids under the age of two. That some of the sensors are well enough along now that kids under the age of two aren't always really sure what's alive and what's a robot.  And as these robots become more sophisticated, that's going to get to be more of a problem.  As artists, making things that occupy the real physical world rather than to have to go to these really expensive and remote environments, I think there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of things are going to get developed in the next couple of years. 

This is my last picture and this is a bot that is very reactive to sound and placement of people, and it moves around, and I think it's just interesting, this kid's just sort of looking at it and not knowing quite what to make of it for sure. 

Okay, that's about it. 

(Applause) 

How I got from photography to that, I can't tell you.  I'm still interested in the visual aspects of it.  I find myself--I'm not a programmer, I've had to learn to program through learning this stuff, but I am not a programmer.  I don't enjoy spending the whole weekend looking at the laptop programming, although I've been doing it the last few weekends to get the Sumi bot working, but I'm really interested in developing the visual aspects of this.  People like Adam Frank who are making visual pieces that are completely robotic, or in his case, being a projected image rather than an object but it's still autonomous, it has its set of behaviors built into it. 

Audience:  I have a question. 

Hart:  One thing.  I don't see too well in the dark because I'm deaf.

Audience:  I'm right here.  There's been a lot of talk regarding ethics in regard to this line that's starting to blur between autonomous machines, the rights of autonomous machines, and that comes up in several popular films such as Spielberg's A.I. and Bicentennial Man, however, is there a discussion that's going in reverse in regards to this artificial intelligence, if it can at this point be called that, in regards--you mentioned that children have this difficult time navigating what these things are and the reality of this toy dog not being a real dog and telling the difference.  Has there been any discussion in a larger arena about those issues?

Hart:  I think not enough. I think that the corporations aren't going to be discussing this and they're the people who develop the technology, and they're interested in selling us the technology, not discussing these issues.  One thing I hope is that artists will address these and point out the malevolent or the dark side of these technologies, which is a very big issue.  The more I learn about this stuff, the creepier it gets.  (End of tape)  Artists can actually point these things out and bring up these questions because we know the corporations are never going to--not that they aren't aware of them but there's never going to be an open discussion.  It's just not the nature of how these things are developed.

Audience:  So what are some of the darker shades of this technology that you've uncovered or discovered or that you're concerned about?

Hart:  I think there's a seduction in it, so people are willing to give up a lot of their own choices, or they may make choices based on the seduction of the technology rather than what's best for them.  Especially young kids.  But I'm a young kid, too, when it comes to some of that stuff.  I think surveillance is a huge problem.  I think we're entering an era where surveillance is, because of 9/11 we're willing to accept more of it than we used to be able to and I think it's very, very important to think about what we're accepting and what it means down the road and have some sort of discussion about this rather than these knee-jerk reactions.  The surveillance systems in New York City are probably going to be developed a lot further in the next few years, but it's already pretty amazing when you start looking at them to see where they are now.  There's more watching that I had realized.  That doesn't mean that they're watching affectively or efficiently or they know what to do with it, but somebody's out there trying to develop systems that, just in terms of using a credit card, using a phone, going over a bridge, going through a tollbooth, in a subway, you're just mapping.  You have an electronic image of yourself that is very closely aligned to what you're doing on a day to day level, and what does this mean in the long run?

Younger:  This thing that I read, every person is photographed at least six times a day. 

Hart:  I'm sure we're all photographed coming in here today.  I got on the subway.  I was photographed when I got on.  I know I was photographed twice walking down the block from my house.  And while all of this is going on, it's like in and of itself you can say well it's not good or bad but it can be used later.  All of this information is stored in databases and can be used.  Narratives can be constructed after the fact.  Also, I think with a lot of this technology, the seduction of it erases some of the issues that we really need to be coping with and facing as a society, as a culture.  It's like, oh, we have this happy little toy that does these cute things.  Well, we have to dig a little deeper than that.  So that's what I think we as artists can do because we have traditionally played the role of the thorn in the side of society and I think that's a valuable thing--to raise questions. 

Audience:  I had a question about--well it's sort of an observation.  You showed some work of Stelarc and I know one of his projects actually turned the informing of the movement around so that the people in the extended audience, virtually there or actually in the room, using internet ports, controlled the movement of his body through the automated part of his body.  That to me both comments on what's going on but also points in another direction, just as people like I think it's Eugene Thacker who we were talking about bio-infomatics and how the human genome is not really being questioned as basically saying that the body is, in fact, information and that the issues that come up if you start with the basic of what the genome is is that it's a database and therefore there's this one to one contact suggested between this database and the human body.

Hart:  Exactly.  It's a way of thinking.  Like when I went to grade school I learned about the human body being this mechanical devise and they showed levers and pulleys and the heart was like a pump, and I learned about it as a mechanical devise.  Now I noticed that kids who are quite young and in grade school learn about it in terms of genetics.  That's the way it's presented to them.  It's a database.  It's a different metaphor that's being produced.  I think looking at the metaphors that are in the air and the social constructions around them and how that helps push the technology and the technology helps push the metaphors is an interesting thing to do.  That's why I started this stuff way back in 1642 because these things aren't new.  They have long histories.  They come out of a past and because they do come out of a past, I think they're easier to accept, but also we accept them unquestioningly and I think we need to question them.  We need to think about what the meaning down the road is for all of this.

Audience:  I wonder if you might be able to say a few more words about that, because I don't think, for example, it's one thing to talk about photography as being not necessarily being a photograph of a person being truly that person.  It's another thing to take information from a database and start to inject it into a human body and say this is going to solve your problems of illness, when that database only has, just like a photograph, a certain interpretation of what that reality is.  Yet there's all these assumptions about it being complete.  The human genome is just you.

Hart:  As I say, I think all these things will be used b corporations to sell us more and more stuff. I think that the understanding through advertising--I don't know much about the genome.  I know very little about it.  Mostly what I know is what I learned through mass media.  Well, who controls that?  What kind of information am I getting?  So my way of thinking about it and the possibilities of it and what I'm going to let myself into and what pill I might need next week and I wish I'd had last week, all this stuff is pushed at me by a corporate gentility, not by any reality.  Our reality is just so negotiable that you always have to be thinking about where it's coming from.  I think that as we move into these robotic systems, because they appear to be autonomous, because they appear to be slightly seductive, it's really important to think about this stuff.

Audience:  I'm always fascinated when I see these things because I don't know a lot about them and it's great to hear you talk about them in such specific detail because it gets me on a visual and a conceptual level thinking about how this relates to me and who I am and I how I move through the universe, so whether it's robotics or genetics and how it works, I always take it to think about who I am and how I'm constructed and what I'm about, but also, very quickly, when looking at this, go to abject terror that we are going to screw this up and we have a rich and long history of not being able to do very simple things, so I'm wondering if you could just talk about--I think a central problem in the universe is a lack of community and it's terrifying to me that a group of individuals who have no sense of community are creating virtual ones and then making these robots that are going to interface and become a part of it.  I wonder if you could talk a little about . . .

Hart:  Well, one thing that worries me, it's one of my current neurotic concerns is that some people are so intrigued with developing these robotic systems that they really feel that we are going to leave our bodies, that we are going to download our consciousness into these highly developed computer systems and we're no longer going to need the real world.  This is sort of a seductive fantasy at play.  What this means is we don't have to deal with issues of pollution, issues of healthcare, issues of poverty, because all of that is all that old stuff.  We can think about this wonderful new shiny reality that's going to be so glorious.  So for me, I think we need to pay more attention to what's actually going on and not get seduced by all that stuff.  And again, I think as artists we're the people who can question things and make work that is the thorn, the irritant in an interesting way.

Audience:  First of all, let me say thank you for picking me. You have very good taste.  Secondly, my day job involves working with individuals who are disabled, and I'm very excited about this type of technology in the way it allows people to interact.  The way it enables individuals.  I think that as a computer person I'm extremely illiterate.  I can turn it on; I can turn it off.  That's as far as I can go.  But I had the opportunity to see individuals who are disabled use adaptive technology to interact in classroom settings and to participate.  Part of what I do is career advisement, and we always talk about ability potential for individuals who are disabled.  You know, the idea that somebody, if you're blind, the idea that you're going to be a surgeon is sort of not going to happen.  And that comes up a lot because people want to be all they can be in spite of their limitations.  What I've seen here today I think is exciting.  I don't mind people downloading and uploading their emotions.  It would give me more free time at work, quite honestly, and I don't believe it will replace people in my profession because they told me years ago that the computer was going to get rid of paper and oddly enough, I have more paper in my pocket today than I had in 1981.  Receipts get bigger and bigger everyday.  So I'm not really frightened about it.  Do you see the possibility or rather, do you think this technology, from a creative point of view, is addressing the integration of disabled individuals into . . .

Hart:  Yeah, that's very interesting that you bring that up.  One of my kids is disabled.  Fairly severely disabled, in a wheelchair.  And he uses the computer a lot.  For him, it has opened a whole world.  He's been able to finish school because he can't write but he can type on a computer.  He has access through email to all kinds of situations and people that he wouldn't physically--for him to get his clothes on in the morning, take a shower and get his clothes on in the morning is more work than I do in a week.  He starts every single day with a momentous task before him, which is to get ready to live your life, whatever it is.  And yes, this technology has been incredible for him.  He's playing around with some of the things like PhotoShop and Flash.  Even that kind of stuff, he can do something and make something because he can no longer make it in the physical world.  There are now people in Seattle, they've inserted chips into people, speaking of cyborgian desires, who are blind and it's allowing them--of course they don't have retinal vision the way we do--but they have robotic vision, like I showed you how the mapping of movement, where they have the awareness of movement and edge detection.  So yes, it's doing amazing things for disabled people, and that's one of the real positive things.  This technology in and of itself isn't good or bad.  It's just how it's used.  As I say, the huge, huge wonderful possibilities opening up for people, but the other side is we have to beware of how possibilities will be shutting down because of corporate control, too.  So it's two sided.

Audience:  I'm going to ask--I have a sort of slightly unreasonable request.  The way the new media work that's been developed that incorporates this interactivity and the collaborative process as well and the prosthetic, to refer to an earlier lecture by Thomas Zummer who was here what feels like years ago now, the work in the larger field overall around high tech and bio tech and everything, is kind of propelling us towards a new way of perceiving and a new way of producing.  I'm just wondering, given my--you don't know my personal history but I've tried really hard to look at electronic arts and I've gone to arts electronica and I was actually in Banff in 1993 when they were doing that stuff and I couldn't get access because a total of two dozen people got in. 

Hart:  Yeah, I know.  Access is a big issue.

Audience:  And I've always had this problem of appreciating the work because I look at it from the point of view of a visual artists.  It's a very different history, and I'm interested in how you perceive it because you come out of that tradition and you've moved in, as opposed to from a computer science or engineering kind of perspective or background.  There seems to be still this gap of the ability to appreciate beyond a theoretical or technical interest and I'm wondering if you're seeing the gaps being closed or perhaps talk about that gap, articulate it for me, because I would like to begin to feel less frustrated at my own inability to come to terms with the intentions and desires around electronic arts.

Hart:  Well, I think you're right in that I have become, in the last few years, more aware of it.  I've started working with these computer scientists and with the medical school at Brown University that has this CAVE and they are becoming aware of the fact that they are very clumsy at visual work.  And they are beginning to value that.  The stuff being done is very cartoonish. I don't think it looks very good, because I love a photograph.  There's a photographic quality about a photograph that is so beautiful, and it's not happening in these other arenas yet and it probably never will.  Probably a new aesthetic will be developed that isn't there yet, something new will grow out of it that really comes out of the possibilities those machines provide.  It's going to be different. Things are changing so quickly right now, in the last three months I've seen huge development of new medical imaging technologies.  The program I work in at RISD is a combination of RISD and Fraunhofer, which is a German company that does computer visualization mostly for medical stuff at this point.  So I'm working with these scientists every day and I am seeing that huge gap, but also that they're beginning to recognize that there's a gap, too.  Where this is going to go in the future?  I don't know.  I would like to think that something will develop that's rich and meaningful and interesting to us as artists to work with.  Maybe that won't happen, but maybe it will.  I don't know.  But there's definitely a gap.

Younger:  There are some things that I've been thinking about is that obviously change is the only constant in the world and you're not going to stop it.  But I do think that we need to think about it and maybe we can bend it to a better or different use, and I think there are a lot of Ð And I think when we talk about these kinds of computer-generated things and this huge new technology, we really need to take it in a greater context, just like I'm hoping that we do with these other kinds of things that we talk about here, because we need to take it in the context of a world that is a more global world; one where more corporations really do own a whole lot of things, where when we get into these issues that we're going to talk about, like the way  the war on terror was presented in the media, we're living in a system now where there was no dissent on television, and that our individual free voice--we aren't even really aware that kind of thing has disappeared.  Surveillance is really important and they've been able to track these guys down.  Like look at all the places they found where they went to the bathroom, you know what I mean?  Sure, it's afterwards, but it doesn't mean that in time that can't be developed to be a future thing so that if you're the person who's complaining, it may be a way of making us like, do whatever we want to do as long as we're quiet, we're fine.  And I think that's really against the nature of artists.  I think that we really are the oppositional people.  I always think of us as the visionaries of the world and the ones who can lead us. I think we need to think about ethical, moral, and spiritual kinds of issues.  I know you're addressing that but I want to see it go like 5,000 feet further than you are right now with that because I think these issues are really critical to how we're going to live, not only in America, but in the whole world.  And I don't think that we're going to stop it.  I don't really necessarily want to stop it, but I certainly do want us to think about it and to make sure that there's always some kind of space for us in there.  That they won't be taking something away from us when they do this.

Audience:  So, Henry was talking about the Banff exposition and the fact that there's this limited access. What's the reason for limiting the access?  Why is there a limited access to experiencing or viewing these technologies?  Is it because they're so expensive, like you were talking about the CAVE machine, to operate?  Or, what's the reason for that?

Hart:  I'm not sure that I've completely figured that out.  One is the expense.  Because you have these very expensive machines, and you have to have programmers sitting there, so there's a whole entourage.  You work in a team.  It's not like going to your studio with an idea and struggling your idea and developing something and showing it to a few people and realizing that your intentions aren't coming through and going back and redoing it.  It's very much team work.  And everyone on the team's being paid a lot of money, except the artist, some things never change, and so in some ways it's work by committee, and there are limited hours. You're usually working on somebody else's project that's got funding through the National Science Foundation or some medical grant.  A very small amount of time can be given and as I say, it's only the interstitial times that you can grab here and there to experiment, and what artists are really good at doing is experimenting and coming up with interesting things because of that.  Heidi's going to talk later today and show you some great, interesting experiments that are wonderful.  But I think a lot of it is that, and some of it is just the mindset.  Giving artists access to new technology that they might not have the ability to buy and own in their own studio is not the way the world thinks.  Although, with more and more corporations through various art funded groups, you can apply for artists in residence type things and get some of the technological help.  If you have an idea, develop it and shop it around to the corporations.  Sometimes you can get them, even when they don't have a program like that you can get them to.  I think it would be a good PR thing, so it's worth pursuing, but it's not easy. 

Audience:  I'm thinking about some of the criticisms that have gone on with pre-virtual technology like cinema, television, and video games, with generating a kind of passive spectator.  I was in the discussion the other day about our access to computers here and the way in the last few years our reliance on computers have affected the way we spell and the way we write and basically the way we think, and it seems that the passive spectator is changing.  I'm just wondering if you could comment on the switch, and maybe also, if you could talk about some works that deal explicitly with the dark side.  And also, I'm thinking about the audience and it seems so celebratory, but also about surveillance.

Hart:  Well I think that the two-way stream that you're talking about, rather than broadcast, which comes to you and you're the passive receiver, yes, you may switch the channel but you don't control what's happening on the channel, but that is changing.  I think we're going to find the Internet--I think the Internet is going to become a two-way stream, which it sort of is.  Like you can buy things on line.  Pretty soon you're going to be able to do a lot more interactive type stuff and I think it's going to become a 3D world.  I think there's going to be haptic feedback.  I saw an Internet display a while ago and instead of a mouse you reached in a box and you could actually move things around that you saw on the monitor.  There was nothing there, it was all virtual but the illusion was that you were actually moving things around.  You could feel things.  It was like dealing with a physical space. You could interact with them.  I don't know how many of you have played games like Microsoft's Asheron's Call, these 3D worlds, these virtual 3D worlds, where you can go and your avatar goes in, and you really do identify with your avatar very quickly, and it's completely 3D and you have objects and you can put them down, and the objects stay there when you come back later or somebody else can come and pick them up.  It's not a flat 2D world.  It's a highly interactive 3D universe, and I think that's what the Internet is going to become.  There's a lot of money being made by developing new compression schemes right now.  That's one of the very high-paid things, and a lot of people are sitting in front of a lot of computers right now trying to write those compressions schemes.

Audience:  I guess I'm also thinking about ultra-violent video games and the way, the argument that these promote violence and what it's really doing is promoting in an inactive person sitting in front of the TV who's not engaging in anything outside of that.  When you were talking about the CAVE at Brown, I was really interested and I can't believe this has never dawned on me, it's such a logical step, but the creation of art in those artificial environments and then saving them and then potentially where those could go from there.

Hart:  It's hard because the CAVE at Brown is unique.  It doesn't have--I don't think you could take work you did there and take it to another CAVE.  I think it's specific to that environment, so it's a very rarified environment.  It's not something we have much access to using.  The bit about these violent computer games, when you think about it, those are very highly short loops, you know, you go around a corner and you shoot somebody.  Boom, then you go around another corner and shoot somebody again.  It's not very interesting. 

Audience:  My question is more mundane than sophisticated.  It has to do with your rule as a juror and picking up our work.  Can you talk to us a little bit about how you get to choose our work, was there a team or something you find much more interesting from this group than all the other candidates that were chosen?

Hart:  There was a lot of good work submitted.  The problem was not finding good people; there was a ton of work.  There were a bunch of us and we each had our own personal perspectives, which is what's interesting about a jury is that you don't agree.  A good jury doesn't agree openly and fights for what they want.  Cheryl had it very well organized.  It was incredibly well organized.  In fact, one of the best organized ones--in fact, everything just went.  It was great!  For me, my personal interest is in the social meaning of work.  How does it relate to the way the world plays out, how can it change the way or disrupt or ask questions about things, but that's my personal take.  So I'm always interested in work that does those things, whether it's ancient painting or virtual work, and of course, most work doesn't.  Most work is more about soothing you on your way to the cash register and slickness and looking good and I love things that are wonderful looking, it's not that I'm against that, but I want something else to be happening, too.  So that's just my take.  I take that with me wherever I go, and I'll fight for that in a jury and people can disagree with me and sometimes they can get me to change my mind, sometimes I can get them to change their mind.  It was a good jury I felt because there was great discussion and lots of disagreement. 

Younger:  That's always the best jury. 

Hart:  People would say, ÒHow did you come up with that?Ó  (Laughter)  That's good.

Audience:  You talked a lot about the corporation and development of these technologies.  What's in the back of my mind is our military.  In the past, where the military basically were the ones that developed all of these technologies and then the consumers, you know, made it more consumer-oriented.  Now it's almost like our government contracting these corporations to develop these technologies for  . . .

Hart:  Well, it's a military corporate power base.  These things aren't developed for artists to ask interesting questions.  Ever. 

Audience:  I just have a quick question.  Have you given any thought at all to, in the last five years, this growing consensus in the media that reality is a novelty?  For example, with reality television.  It's reality in quotes, clearly . . .

Hart:  Yeah, but it doesn't have anything to do with any reality as I know it.  It might be somebody's reality but it's definitely not my reality.

Audience:  I wonder how that connects up with this growing interest in out of body experiences, you know?  Like sitting at home watching people get arrested, or who's going to hook up with who on this island that they wouldn't have been on if . . .

Hart:  . . .if the corporations hadn't sent them there so you could watch their advertising.  Yeah, you have to be very--one could become extremely cynical very quickly.  I think it's important to keep some sort of vision about what do you want to do, and not get so cynical that you get eaten alive by all this stuff.

Audience:  You mentioned earlier in the beginning of your talk about artists colonizing the space of the internet and that type of work, and I'm interested in knowing in terms of countries that don't necessarily have this technological power and the importance that it's taking in the world, do you know of anything being done to create a level playing ground in this new frontier?

Hart:  Not enough.  There are a few organizations and groups that are trying, but given the huge problem, they're really being able to implement much change is small, but I still applaud that change.  One of the things that is interesting is that countries that haven't developed the infrastructure that now is beginning to look old, instead of getting repaired it's being thrown out because we're moving to this electronic era, is they can make the jump immediately to the electronic.  They don't have all this old infrastructure to have to get rid of.  Do they have the money to do that, and do they have the money to educate the people who are going to install and repair?  These are all huge problems.  I think that at this point in time, the gap is enormous, and not just between countries, but even within the United States.  We talk as though everyone has a computer sitting on their desk at home, and there are a lot of people who don't.  This is a part of the issue that needs to be addressed and raised.  Believe me, the corporations, again, are not going to provide much of any answer in those ways.  I think it takes dedication from groups and people.

Audience:  I was wondering, since 9/11 have you seen the militarization of stuff? Because at UB we have this supercomputer thing, I think it's a CAVE or something like that, I guess they do it for flight simulation and geographic and outer space stuff.  Before 9/11 they seemed interested in having people from different disciplines come in.  And I remember walking in and everybody wondering, okay, who are you?  You're in art?  There was this resistance and after 9/11 you couldn't even get access to the area.  So I'm wondering in terms of art or things that are not necessarily in the hierarchy of importance anymore, has there been some cut back to that?

Hart:  I always assumed that any government will do exactly what it wants until it's stopped by people, and that it will use any of that to put its own agenda forward, and I think a lot of what's happened, as Cheryl was saying, was that there was no dissent on TV.  Whenever they start interviewing people for months about 9/11 and people started questioning the surveillance-type stuff that was going on or whatever, immediately they would show a picture of the planes hitting the towers again, and they would cut to something else!  It was amazing!  It was like this we have to give up our power to the almighty government to protect us from these horrible things.  I don't buy it on any level whatsoever.  I have huge questions there.