Bill Seaman
Interactive and/or Virtual Environments
Bill Seaman has explored text, image and sound relationships through diverse technological means since 1979. Seaman is self-taught as a composer and Musician. He studied video, performance, and installation at the San Francisco Art Institute, BFA 1979. He holds a Master of Science in Visual Studies degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1985. At MIT he first began exploring the potentials of computer-based. His Ph.D. is from CAiiA, the Centre For Advanced Inquiry into the Interactive Arts, 1999.
Certain early works stand out as precursors to his interactive oeuvre. One simple yet interesting early work was entitled Device for Architectural Inversion (1979). The work was facilitated by the simple technology of a pair of glasses that had two mirrors affixed to the front at 45 degree angles. When a participant wore the glasses, it appeared that they were walking on the ceiling. Thus a strange conflation of actual space with a displacement of actual space was facilitated. The participant experienced an uncanny sense of architectural displacement.
The work .apt.alt. (1981) [read online text] explored the creation of a generative text system. For each element in the periodic table of elements three words were designated [read online text]. The notion was that any compound could be used as a kind of algorithm to derive new poems, repeating relevant lines in relation to the chemical formula. Thus the system created a form of compound poetry exploring the periodic table of elements in a literal and metaphorical manner.
A second early work entitled Architectural Hearing Aids, a collaboration with the now deceased artist Carlos Hernandez, explored the relationship of actual architecture to sound, text, sculptural and performative elements. One might call this an early example of "Augmented Reality." A series of sound systems were installed in a Cherokee Chief wagon including a speaker on the roof of the vehicle. A one hour and fourty minute tour of San Francisco and the Marin headlands was driven on 21 evenings. Three participants per evening were driven on the tour. Seaman had composed music to qualify the meaning of the architecture. Many architectural landmarks and vicinities in San Francisco were included in the tour including tunnerls, the swerving Lombard st., the Golden Gate Bridge and the Pallace of fine arts were just of few of the building observed. Seaman described the work as an "Inverted Film." The music qualified the viewing of the environment which was being treated as a massive Duchampian readymade. Seaman provided a live mix from a series of tape recorders in the front seat.
The next period in Seaman's oeuvre employed video as a poetic technological vehicle, exploring sound, image and text relations within a slow pulsing hypnotic video space. Both linear tapes and video installations were produced. The tapes S.He (1983) [read online text], Telling Motions (1986) [read online text] The Water Catalogue (1984) (commissioned by the Contemporary Art Television Fund) [read online text], Shear (1986), Boxer's Puzzle (1986) with Ellen Sebring were produced in this period. Central in all of these works was the artist's voice, delivering the text in either spoken or sung form. Two significant installations were produced - Water Wheel (1985), a seven channel installation presented through a circle of monitors, incorporating material from The Water Catalogue, and The Design of the Grip (1989) [read online text], a nine channel video/sound installation with written related text. Significant in this installation was the concept of the "sound pun" - where one sound was used as "folie" for 9 different simultaneous images. In these early works film was shot and transferred to video exploring particular qualities of light, as well as choreographed landscape and architecture. Often texts in the work explored puns, word plays and poly-valent language. The material qualities of both film and video were manipulated for these works exploring both slow motion and pulsing stop motion techniques.
The first major interactive work was entitled The Watch Detail (1990) [read online text]. Video images, sound and text that addressed the subject of time were explored interactively. This work employed Macintosh Hypercard media, that was used to control an interactive laserdisc. Thus the work became a meta-media time piece. A large database of time-oriented images, and texts could be navigated, juxtaposed and/or re-oriented in time. The media-time of the image could also be explored where a participant could move forward, backward, stay still, as well as move fast forward and fast backward. An elaborate poetic text made of short individual observations about time was made available to the user of the system. The participant could juxtapose any of the video and still material, move from chapter to chapter, edit segments, trigger sequences of encoded database material in relation to chosen selected textual criteria, view a set of still images with text superimpositions, or view material in a linear mode. A linear video also exists with this title.
The second major interactive installation was entitled The Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers (1993). It should be noted that many of Seaman's works were shown in different states and /or alternate contexts. Each version of the work informs other versions in varying ways i.e. this work appears as an interactive installation with a single projection, a 10 screen video wall version, a Japanese/English Version - Ex.Mech (1994), 30 minute linear video as well as a CD Rom version that was published in Artintact 1 (1994). The work explores the construction of an audio/visual sentence with 10 segments. Each segment has a related piece of music, a specific spoken piece of text and time-based section of video. The template of the work has 33 variables for each modular section of the audio/visual sentence - thus the linear work is comprised of 33 sentences. Interactive versions of the work enable the user of the system to substitute different modular variables and generate new audio visual "sentences". These substitutions always facilitate the generation of a grammatically correct sentence. Because each of these modules is poly-valent in terms of their meaning, the work is always emergent. One can also use automated chance methods to derive new audio/visual sentences. A linear video also exists with this title and date.
Abstraction Machine / Erotic – The Voyeur of Light (1994) [read online text] was a site specific installation in a hotel room, Room 33 Gallery, Regent's Court Hotel, Sydney, Australia. The security viewer was inverted so that visitors could view into the room. A generative text was visible through the eyepiece presented via computer.
Picture GalleryPassage
Sets / One Pulls Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue (1995) [read online text] is an interactive
installation that functions as an elaborate navigable audio/visual poem. Seaman
worked with Chris Ziegler as the programmer for this work. Three projections
comprise the installation, where one video and two data projections are presented
as a triptych. The central projection enables the participant to navigate through
a 150-image panorama with text superimposed over the image. The participant
can navigate spatially by moving over the surface of the images - move
left, right, up and down through an image grid presented on the central screen.
Each image is tied to a related section of video, music and text that can be
triggered (presented on the right hand screen). This video presents a spoken
version of the same text that is scattered over the surface of the image. The
user of the system can also select words and/or phrases from the image which
lead them to a poem generator. All of the language from the work is included
in four scrolling lists that enable the participant to build new poems or generate
random selections. Each of these selections can be used to navigate back to
the context of the panorama that they are drawn from. The user can explore meaning
in relation to a shifting contexts, thus both emergent meaning as well as the
experiential observation of meaning alteration is observed in the work. A third
screen shows the computer constantly generating new poems lines, drawing from
a related poem generator list to the one presented center screen. A German Version
of the work has been authored entitled Passagen Kombinationen / Man
Manövriert
Drehungen auf der Zungenspitze (1996). The work is in the permanent
collection of the Medien Museum, ZKM, Karlesruhe, Germany.
Picture GalleryThe World
Generator / The Engine of Desire (1996-present) [read online text] marks an expansion
of Seaman's work into the realm of virtual environments. Seaman collaborating
with the programmer Gideon May
authored a complex virtual world generator that enables users of the system
to construct and navigate virtual worlds by making choices from a spinning virtual
interface of container wheels, from a physical interface table. These container
wheels house a series of different media-elements and processes including 3D
objects, 2D images and poetic texts, musical loops, and digital movies as well
as processes relevant to the entire world. The user of the system can also explore
a set of built-in chance processes to construct worlds. Participants can also
do what Erkki Huhtamo calls "World Processing," enabling them to edit
and alter the virtual world. One can also attach behaviors to the media-elements,
apply still and movie texture maps, as well as make the media-elements transparent.
When the participant navigates through the virtual world, a new sound mix is
made for each user - Seaman calls this Recombinant Music. The work explores
emergent meaning and is different for each participant. A networked version
of the work has been shown internationally which enables people in two parts
of the world to inhabit and operate within simultaneous copies of the same environment,
communicate via video phone, and view the alternate participant as a video avatar.
This avatar shows the relative position of the alternate participant within
the virtual space. A Japanese Version of the work has also been authored. A
third large scale version has been authored for the Visualisation Portal at
UCLA which is visible on a 160 degree screen, with literally hundreds of objects/images
in the environment. Seaman's Ph.D. Recombinant Poetics: Emergent Meaning
as Examined and Explored Within a Specific Generative Virtual Environment (1999),
discusses the work at great length, and is available on-line through the Langlois
Foundation.
Picture GalleryRed Dice / Des Chiffré (2000) [read online text] was commissioned
by the Canadian National Gallery and is now in their permanent collection. Seaman
again worked
with Chris Ziegler on the programming of the work. The work presents a text
by the Poet Stéphane Mallarmé - Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira
le hasard, Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance, and an interactive audio/visual
meta-text by Seaman. Large scale projections of both the interface and the visual
portion of Seaman's audio/visual work are presented. The piece enables the user
to view and listen to Mallarmé's text through the use of a Pen/Wacom
tablet interface. When the pen touches on words, they are subsequently spoken.
Small video icons are called up that register the potential to trigger related
segments of an audio/visual text by Seaman. The work also incorporates a "Recombinant" section
enabling the user to re-order Seaman's video, generate a new soundtrack by choosing
from 144 different musical sections - layering up to seven at a time,
as well as recombine Seaman's texts via this pen interface. The work functions
as a companion work to Passage Sets / One Pulls Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue
which was also influenced by the Mallarmé text.
Picture GalleryExchange Fields (2000) [read online text],
commissioned by the Vision Ruhr Exhibition in Dortmund Germany, incorporates
the recorded dance and choreography of Regina van Berkel. The programmer Gideon
May also became involved in this project. The central question dealt with the
generation of a new kind of interface - how might an embodied experience of
interface be layered into the content of an interactive media/dance comprised
of video, text, a sculptural installation and music? Exchange Fields sought
to develop a novel interface strategy by eliciting culturally determined environmental
'behavior in relation to objects' as a grammar of gesture that could be used
as input to the reacting system. The work sought to tap into pre-linguistic
environmental knowledge related to the use of particular varieties of objects.
A series of furniture/sculptures were developed. Each furniture/sculpture was
designed with a unique implied "suggestion" of how the body might
be positioned in relation to that object. This suggestion was non-logo-centric.
It was embodied in the form of the physical interface itself and reinforced
through linguistic captioning affixed near the work.
A dynamic relation is experienced by the participant that is brought about through their embodied physical positioning. This "gesture" functions as an input into a computerized system that dynamically links output consisting of pre-recorded performance/dance images (video) and sound. These have been choreographed in relation to the particularity of that embodied position. For each unique furniture/sculpture a set of related dances was recorded. A linear text and musical composition become layered with the sound and image that is triggered by users. It is the physical engagement of the participant relative to the visual and audible output that gives the work its artistic experiential content and power.
Picture GalleryThe Hybrid Invention Generator (2001) [read online text] is a work that explores
a "machinic
genetics." Users of the system can scroll through a series of inventions,
choose two different inventions and generate the visualization of a hybrid invention.
An underlying logic defines a functional connection between the differing inventions.
Picture GalleryInversion (2001) [read online text] is a new dance/installation, a collaboration with the Dancer/Choreographer
Regina van Berkel that explores the topic of Nanotechnology through a poetic
text, a musical score, the A Hybrid Invention Generator like system functioning
in an auto-generative mode, two linear videotapes, a set of sculptural elements,
and variable lighting.