I went to the “Interactive Futures 09: Stereo” performances to understand what is the digital interactive art is, and what is art in the present is. I watched some performances, and one of them is “Creating DIVA and a personal Three-Dimensional Display” directed by Sidney Fels. Sidney is the director of the media and Graphic interdisciplinary center, and he combines art (fashion, music, etc.) and technology all together and then puts it into his art pieces. Now a days, we cannot live without art because art is the most powerful influence in the present; therefore, the art exists everywhere even in technology. At the end of the presentation, Sidney mentions that technology is fashion, which means, technology is developing fast like fashion. In the modern day, artists have started to combine their art with technology, and that comes out as creating a D.I.V.A, which is digital interactive visual art. I choose him for a critical review because I want to let everyone know about how the technology and art can compound together.
Sidney Fels who is the presenter of “Creating DIVA and a personal Three-Dimensional Display” is the most interesting presenter because of the title. I like three-dimension work than two dimensions because it is more active. Also I always interested and curious about DIVA because my concentration is DIVA. Before I choose my concentration, I had lots of questions about DIVA because I ever heard of DIVA before. Therefore, when I saw the title of the presentation, I thought I could get some answers for my questions. The presentation’s thesis was “DIVA: Digital Ventriloquized Actor”, Sidney Fels combines digital gesture, wearable machine, and expression all together; it comes out as a “talking glove”. Before he showed an example he explained about HCT and MAGIC. HCT focuses on human experience, which means Higher Colleges of Technology, and MAGIC is media technology and graphics. Sidney used HCT to create the ‘talking glove’. After that he shows a demon for ‘talking glove’, the person wears a glove and makes an alphabet sound with gesture. The glove can speak English and also Japanese, so they had a first performance in Japan in January 24th 09. The sound is made by a person’s hand gesture, accordingly, the person need lots of training to make a proper sound of the alphabet. Also the person can speak with her own voice, Sidney attaches a speaker on the person’s neck so we also can hear the person’s sound from their throat. Sidney wants to make the machine lighter because the person has to carry a laptop on their back and other machines all over their body. Sidney’s goal is, to make the machine easy to wear. In his presentation, I like the word wearable because I like fashion design, so I really want to attach my major with fashion and art. For that reason, after the presentation I feel some connection between technology, art and fashion. Before I saw his performances might be I made a boundary between technology and art, and Sidney’s presentation break that. For example, I thought the artists are using CS4 or robots to create a new artistic piece, the artist are not the person who creates the CS4 or robots. After performances I feel that artist also can build technology like CS4 or robot as art piece. (Robot can be the part of sculpture) Actually Sidney is successful with that. One thing that is inconvenient is I cannot see the performance live. After Sidney finished the presentation of “talking glove”, he showed P-cubee, which is three Dimension display cube and it made by MAGIC: media technologies and graphic. P-cubee is a little square box, so the person can hold it in their hand and move it around and it will shows the different perspectives of a drawing. I did not like this one. It is different with other three dimension works because it has only one perspective view, so not many people can see at one time. Therefore, I felt like capturing in the box.
Consequently, the technology is the part of art in our life. The art is getting attached to all other subjects. The artists have to develop their own artistic skills, and use many different materials to create an art piece. Therefore artist should always open their mind and get interested and learn other subjects. Sidney’s presentation and other performance were really great and these let me know, there are many ways to create art. All the performance especially Sidney’s helped me to get some ideas about digital interactive art and I realize again that art is so extensive; however, it is all connecting to each other and there are many possibilities. Over all I really enjoyed seeing all the performances and it was great.
