Noplace, Installation from Above [Enlarge in New Window]

Marek Walczak, Martin Wattenberg, Jakub Segen: Noplace

In their new work, Noplace, artists Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg combine physical and virtual space in a curious shadow play—a Plato’s cave—based on contradictory visions of Paradises, Utopias, and Shangri-las as suggested by real-time feeds that arrive from the Internet. Sites promoting user-generated content that’s constantly being updated (Flickr), social networking (MySpace), and tagging, or shared user bookmarking of information (del.icio.us) are fast becoming a trademark for the so-called next generation Internet. Noplace taps into these of-the-moment tools and resources to create a live, ever-changing, and contemporary vision of Utopia. The work has two components: a website that collects and archives different descriptions and images of Utopia, and an interactive, physical installation. “We’re fascinated by the Utopian possibilities of a world of information, as well as wanting to give shape to its formlessness,” says Wattenberg.

The artists are writing original software programs that gather information, photographs, and other data uploaded by personal and commercial websites alike. The Noplace software analyzes the semantics and other aspects of the contributed and collected data. Then, the program translates linguistic elements of these texts into corresponding shadow-like renditions of virtual architectural structures aggregated. The three-dimensional silhouettes of buildings multiply as the Noplace archive grows. Yet the collective Utopia promised by Noplace remains ever elusive—by design. When asked why they present somewhat abstract shadows instead of photo-realistic digital buildings, Walczak explains: “Noplace cannot be directly experienced, even though it shares our physical space.”

For the project’s interactive installation component, the artists project actual shadows of the virtual buildings on the walls of the exhibition space. They’re developing a system of cameras and motion-detector software (designed in collaboration with scientist and programmer Jakub Segen) that allows viewers to control what they see by simply waving their hands. A finger swept through space prompts texts and images to materialize within the projection. A far cry from pointing and clicking with a mouse, the concept evokes Tom Cruise manipulating a futuristic, keyboard-less computer with sweeping arm movements in the 2002 movie Minority Report. But choosing words by moving your hands in the air is only part of the interactivity embedded in the Noplace installation. As viewers walk through the installation space, they appear to enter the shadowy silhouettes of structures, which seem to advance or recede as people amble toward them. Even viewers who do not move affect the work; projections of new data uploaded to the noplace.com site are projected around the shadows of still viewers, creating an outline or halo-like effect.

Because audiences essentially comb through information that’s available on the Web, the artists consider the installation to be a “physical browser”—a flesh-and-blood interface that substitutes for popular Web browsers such as Internet Explorer. “We want viewers to interact with the piece with gestures rather than a mouse; it’s more poetic and architectural,” explains Wattenberg.

Noplace can be seen as a logical progression from an earlier, well-known piece by Walczak and Wattenberg: an interactive new-media art installation called Apartment (2001). In Apartment, viewers typed words into a computer; a software program written by Walczak and Wattenberg analyzed the words and basic themes in each sentence and interpreted them as elements in a two-dimensional blueprint of an imaginary apartment layout. Each apartment was archived and then aggregated with other blueprints according to shared themes.

In Noplace, “the structures will be more complex than a single apartment and will move and fluidly reconfigure themselves as the viewer interacts with the piece,” says Wattenberg. No two experiences in Noplace will be the same. Instead, each experience online or in the installation depends on what particular shadow-objects, concepts, and visions viewers choose to engage. Rather than promote any single concept of paradise—even a collective one based on the gathered data—Noplace’s ultimate goal, says Walczak, is to actually “question belief systems by showing the multiplicities of desire.”

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Emerging Fields > Installation | Digital Arts / New Media | Science & Technology | New York | 2006