Interview with Bottin and Meneghini

October 15, 2009 9:52 am

William Bottin and Francesco Meneghini present  Sciame 1 at Share Prize 2009.

– What role does digital art play in representing complexity and chaos?
WB: I don’t think digital art offers a privileged key for interpreting aspects of complexity. Compared to other representational media, perhaps what it does is render certain elementary mechanisms underpinning complex phenomena more visible, or help randomly generate output that can help ferment a rather elementary idea of chaos.
FM: Digital art is tied to mathematics and code. Digital art works reveal characteristics that are extremely chaotic and complex.
This is why digital art lays bare the complexity of the world and the intrinsic relationship between complexity and nature for all to see.

– Market forces. How do you interact with market forces in your everyday life? Would you say that the hardware and software architectures of our digital reality are market forces that stifle artists or do they open up new expressive potential?
WB: I believe that digital artists are completely stifled by the technology they adopt. In the best of cases, they might try to free themselves by altering the hardware of the technology through unorthodox (though widespread) practices such as circuit bending or feedback techniques.
As for market forces, I think they have always been an ineluctable force, like the force of gravity. Market forces influence life itself – and not just the lives of human beings.
All our relationships with and representations of the world are mediated, if not dictated, by these forces.
FM: I think all forms of art are stifled by the market. Despite this, artists should try and act as freely as possible. It doesn’t matter if what they produce ends up falling within the dictates of the art market, and is catalogued, judged and appraised. As far as the infrastructure and tools available to the artist are concerned, Bruce Mau says in his manifesto: “Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.”
From this point of view, digital artists don’t use tools that are the same for everyone. They build their own tools every time they write a new line of code.

– What idea first inspired you and what did you learn from that project?
WB: There was no one particular thing. It was more about our identification with a world and with a perception that for us seemed immediately interesting to invent or represent.
I think that apart from the purely technical aspects we had to look into so as to complete the installation, you never really stop learning from a project like this, because by nature it is intrinsically changeable and susceptible to influences, which compels it to keep moving and seeking a finely-balanced equilibrium.
FM: I have always been attracted by nature and by light. All of my previous works represented a bridge between nature and technology.
Sciame (Swarm) shows communication between physical elements in chaotic movement, and their translation into music. It’s nature interpreted and amplified in a way.
Creating a digital art work always drives the artist a bit to search and discover something new. Not even we knew, when we started the work, what sound our ‘bees’ would make.

– Generative music usually emerges and develops within a completely digital environment, taking numbers as its random input. In this case though, randomness is triggered by the chaotic movement of pieces of cotton, which is deciphered and translated into music through an analogue procedure, using Theremin magnetic waves. Where did you get the idea of building this sort of system for visualising random input into a system?
WB: I don’t think in this case that what we have is really generative music.
All the chaotic movement does is influence the continuous flow of vocal syntax, which is completely digital, even though the technology of the toy that we use might seem simpler than computer software. The complex movement of the confetti-insects captured by the antenna, joined to a sort of wise-talking voice synthesizer, doesn’t actually produce music (if by music we mean the organisation of sound). What it does produce is a sort of indecipherable speech in which every attempt at verbalising sound is cut off by the movement of the insects. The sound patterns produced by the synthesizer are constantly mixed and instead of producing phonemes and then words, all we are left with is a language rendered completely aphasic and ineffective by the complexity/chaos of the entire system.
FM: An important part of the project consisted of giving sound to the chaotic complexity of nature, which in this case is represented by physical elements moved by a stream of air. The theremin was the perfect interface for us as it is able to capture movement and translate it into MIDI signals.
The synthesizer and speaker gives sound to the impulses received from the theremin, producing syllables and word fragments – the voices of our flying insects.