Fieldasy is a process for engaging multiple perspectives in the creation of a world, and the mapping of its virtual space. While the final outcome lies ahead, the process has already produced a series of artistic expressions that drives the overall project forward. Fieldasy refers to the methods of field working and invoking imagination by using physical objects. The objects constitute a shared ground for collaborative creativity, serves as nodes in a complex narrative and as a basis for the creation of the world. In the paper, we describe the process, methods and the artifacts developed in this project. We also show how this approach can host and facilitate artistic development in a complex production environment such as the one of digital media, supported by invited artists, researchers (computer science) and students (interaction design), enabling diverse parties to transfer their knowledge into the project in an ongoing manner.

Three aspects of the project are discussed: The Framework; the city of Abadyl, The Method; fieldasy and The Output; a series of artifacts eventually displayed in a series of exhibitions.

The Framework: Have you ever wanted to build a world of you own? In 1999 we ended an art project called “from an indefinite point in the Cartesian space” that had generated 2000 low-res and 550 high-resolution models of buildings, interiors, objects and exteriors split up in over 50 scenes. Here was a unique possibility to do just that. Therefore, we extracted all of the models from the separated scenes and placed them on top of a superimposed infrastructure of sixteen different formula one tracks. We show how we used personas, role-playing (GURPS) and conceptual mathematical formulas to be able to explore and furniture the world. We named the virtual world “the city of Abadyl”, and made it to the initial venue for the project.

 The Method: How do you go about exploring a complex digital space in a setting that suggests participation? We show how a detailed, yet open and complex world can utilize and refine the creation of scenarios, which are handed over to temporary invited co-creators of Abadyl. They then act out the scenarios in an, by themselves chosen, environment that in the end will help them to produce new artifacts. We called this method fieldasy. While the major part of research on interactive narratives has been aimed at the exploration of interactivity in experience of finished art works, fieldasy aims at exploring the perspective of collaboration in production of new media.

The Output: How do you stage involvement and ongoing development? We try to point out the specific qualities that occur when transferring artefacts and scenarios between the physical and virtual space in a series of iterations. We also show how a multi-threaded open work that consists of mixed materials is communicated amongst its participants as a series of exhibitions, and how we recreate and use a furniture like structure as a playground for the participants, as well as the main exhibition gathering the artefacts created.

Fig 1. map of the city of abadyl (work in progress)

A ”wild thinking” aiming to undermine the present and prevalent must nevertheless have a starting point, and a location in which to perform its laboratory work. Such a location was placed unintentionally on the map of the possible in the mid-seventies when Swedish Public Broadcasting, educating their listeners how to manage the new stereo technique, were establishing that:

– my voice will now be coming from the right
– my voice will now be coming from the left
– my voice will now be coming in between the loudspeakers
– my voice will now be coming from an indefinite location in the room.

This indefinite location in the room is something completely different than the outside location of the natural sciences, the point from which reality is measured and translated into objectivity. [This point too has proven itself absurd (even if strikingly efficient). Gödel, Heisenberg, Bohr etc] Then instead an indefiniteness within the room, and a voice imperatively calling forth its own elusive presence. Within the room but not clearly where, in many ways resembles the location of the potential in the prevalent, given. A floating possibility hidden in the persistently present.

Our voice is now supposed to come from an indefinite location within the room.

This location is The City of Abadyl.

The project was initiated around 1997 as an investigation of a series of locations all having in common their state of being established by recognizable senders – dictatorships, religious and political ideologies, different kinds of utopias realised, or at least regarding themselves as realised. This work under way, the idea materialised to somehow be able to destabilise these implemented utopias without destroying their utopian qualities altogether, their boldly thrown out suggestions of something else.

This experimenting-thinking within the potential can be summarized in the term “fieldasy” – a coinciding of field study and fantasy, an expedition out of the actually actual and into the actually possible.

Building a world

Even if the intention was not the establishment of a so called great narrative, inspiration has been retrieved from the art of novel writing and its practice in constructing worlds. In “Postscript to the Name of the Rose”, Umberto Eco writes on the generative logic he has adopted, a logic both limiting and expanding creativity. The fundamental parameters guide what can and what cannot be included in a fictional but historically plausible universe. A detective story in mediaeval settings requires shrewd index-construing and an advanced enough semiotics, this being developed by Roger Bacon and the Ockhamists – thus it must be no earlier than the 12th century. To work out the reference to the blood at the second trumpet blow of the Apocalypse, a pig must be slain – pigs were only slaughtered during winter, but since Michele of Cesena already in December is in Avignon, the story must occur in November etc. In The City of Abadyl we have chosen to focus more on the generative itself in this logic; that is to say, it is not about parameters resulting in a watertight consistent universe, but the main interest is in what can be generated from a large number of predetermined parameters.(Söderberg, 2003)

 Abadyl is a kind of utopia. It attempts as Michael Sorkins Local Code “to imagine a city via a code, a regulatory prescription for an urban fantasy. Such theories lodge in a space between nature, culture, technology, politics and economics on the one hand, and a set of physical visions, on the other. All cities are formed by this relationship, whether simple or complex, acknowledged or unconscious.” (Sorkin, 1993) But where he ends in theory we actually started in the creations of a mixed reality space –the city of Abadyl.

“As a space of “unthinkable complexity,” the matrix is simply too vast, too dense, too complex to be comprehended in its entirety, There is, moreover, no external perspective from which it could be grasped as a whole; the matrix can only be viewed from within. Thus, there can be no map that would chart its overall space, no schematic diagram that would trace its complete circuitry. Any attempt to take in the matrix globally, as a whole world, can only yield a vague sense of it as a mutated, techno­logical space (a cyberspace) beyond representation, a sense that is very much like the experience that Kant described as “the sublime?’ Yet, given the technological status of the matrix, a status that would have excluded it from Kant’s notion of the sublime, it is perhaps more appropriate to speak of the matrix as the space of, to use Fredric Jameson’s provocative phrase, a “technological sublime.” (Rutsky, 1999)

In 1997 we got a grant from the art council in Sweden for making a project called “from an indefinite point in the Cartesian space”. Here we went around the world and visited different places and locations that have had very specific ideologies, that been abandoned but have left some traces in forms of monuments and buildings behind. The focus was to see how people on the different locations delft with the very present past in forms for example abandoned buildings and monuments. How their everyday life was influenced. Based on that we tried to developed new stories and expressions in relation to the actual place itself, this was later overlaid back onto the site itself in forms of video drive-b-bbby video projections. The bad thing with this approach was that is was very hard to document the final outcome of the project. The project was shown both as a gallery exhibition and on Internet in 1999-2000.

Fig 2. A sketch of the drive by video projections

My computer is 36 m2.

 At a certain point after visiting over 20 locations, we concluded that now was the time to finish collecting new material. The material had been mostly directly digitized into a single computer, which at that time had become quite extensive according to its database. One day my colleague at that time said to me:

– I do not know what is inside of that computer anymore, let’s print everything out.

So we did. It covered a 4 to 9 meters big wall and it occupied us for four days going through every image, sound, 3dmodel, video sequences and animation: But in the end we didn’t create the overview of the project that looked so promising in the beginning. The overall structure there on the wall was very inviting for the people that came and went in the studio. They Stopped for a while, started to look at the material, reading the text and by moving in parallel they created their own stories and navigation through our unordered references.

Fig 3. The 36m2 wall (computer printed out)

The framework: Creating a world of their own are many peoples wet dream but it seldom leads to any action. The task is much too complex, to demanding and the risk of being disappointed on what you could achieve is evident. But since we already had generated 2000 low-res and 550 high-resolution models of buildings, interiors, objects and exteriors, we saw a unique possibility to get a good start at least. The basic idea was to establish a space where we practice a critique of art, culture and society, through an in­vestigation of philosophy and criticism in a dynamic material in a mixed reality space.

Fig 4 A schematic for the framework based on the numbers 16, 7 and 100

So to be able to create such an infrastructure,that could host the already developed models we came up with the idea to set up a closed but yet complex space, an area with blurred boarders to the surrounded unknown. So to support this we looked for metaphors that could host this delimited space. The analogy to racing tracks was obvious; with roads that just looped themselves through their environment; We had to find, write and draw a set of characteristics for every part of the city to be able to see which of our former material that could be transferred to the different parts of the city. A sort of simplified pattern language (Alexander, Ishikawa, Silverstein, 1977) had to be developed.

Fig 5. The sixteen formula one tracks put on top of each other

The numbers 16, 7 and 100

16 formula one tracks became our point of departure, they where put on top of each other shaping an interesting ornamentation of roads just waiting for be driven on. The city then divides in sixteen parts with their own separate ideology, architecture, fashion, lifestyles etc.

Fig 6. Schematic number 16

7 scale system that we introduced to handle the event space of the city it described the different levels on which objects and events can occur.

1. Environment

2. Building

3. Room:

4. Furniture

5. Tools

6. Interfaces

7. Ideas

Fig 7. Schematic number 7

These objects will help us shape the differences on a broader range of levels in every part of the city and serves as a series of obstacles. The purpose is to interfere with both the already built objects and the activities that are going to occur here later on.

Fig 8. Schematic number 100

The detail makes the difference, so to start the process of deciding on what level of representation that would constitute the city we decided to go with the scale 1 to 2 in the first round. We also made an architectural profile to each of the sixteen parts of the city. The first one was on a conceptual level shaped like a mathematical formula. We used the different programming proposal by Bernhard Tschumi (Tschumi, -94) that was implemented on a conceptual level for the 3d modellers. It described a series of Boolean operations with a different design formula for each part of the city. We also included a chart with profiles or silhouette of each part, which supported both the modelling and the distribution of the architectural models in the city. The main architectural expression was then combined with the textures from other location than its

origin, to create a both familiar and strange atmosphere in the different parts of the city.

Fig 9. Street view the city of abadyl 1999

We also started a parallel much more long-term project together with the computer science department at LTH. We called it Procedural cities. Here we are looking at a more mathematical way of modelling and creating a city like structure from scratch. We was able to get them interested by showing our more conceptual and time-consuming approach. This helped them to get a very clear vision on what we had done so far and on what level we could cooperate.

This framework will help us establish a tension between story and objects. As in animation we tried to work with every object based on these notions stated by Victor Navone, Pixar Studios that flaws, desire, contrast and motion, are important qualities when designing characters.

This framework is like Sol Lewitts sentences on conceptual art. It provides us with a backbone with enough gravity attached to it, so it easily can support the involvement of co-creators in the city. A space where we can be in a constant dialogue with the material that is interlinked here regardless of its incompatibilities through the architecture of the city. Here we can stage both immediate and long-term projects.

Method

To start to explore different methods of handling the future events in the project we looked at The GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System). Together with four interaction design students at Malmo University the department of art and communication we developed a system for handling the design of objects in both the physical and virtual world. By constructing a board game where had the possibility to explore and set up rules on different levels in the city of Abadyl. The case that we then choose to test our approach on was an interface and a database for the creation of characters in abadyl, a system that provided an integrated set of tools for the “minds” and “bodies” of the future citizens. They suggested that the under laying character generation should be based on one super character for each part of the city.

Fig 10. The xml based character generator that the interaction design students built

Together with the interaction design students we also tried to make use of personas (Cooper, 1999) but did not find it useful for actual creating our first sixteen characters. It is design to drive and control the process by creating hypothetical archetypes that plays vital parts in the design process by articulate the persona with singular detail and precision. So instead of connecting personas to future objects and processes, we went the other way around and try to connect artefacts to the future characters of Abadyl by getting to know them by their artefacts – in some kind of reverse archaeology.

The idea is to let the co-creator deal with problems of another scale than it’s normally works in. In Art and Design, Art meets Science and Spirituality where a series of interviews conducted with different authorities in the field; The Dalai Lama, Fritjof Capra, Robert Rauschenberg, H J Witteveen, David Boom, (Art and Design, Art meets Science and Spirituality, 1990) The beginning question is always on a very interesting but pretentious level:

– What is your vision of the world in which we live?

But by placing these type of “hard-to-answer questions” in a scenario where the co-creator isn’t fully in control or responsible for his or her actions, they can actually take responsibility for those kind of questions and find ways and means to act out the given problem in a given material.

While collaboration and interaction has been the topic of a huge amount of research on artistic use of digital media in the last years, the focus have been mainly on the meeting between viewer and art pieces that are either fixed or evolving. Methods for asynchronous collaborative creativity have yet to be thoroughly explored. Another aspect of conducted research has been on how digital technologies can support collaboration and interaction in physical space. Fieldasy reverses the question and asks how real life collaboration and physical art objects can support the creation of real-time virtual characters and worlds. Using representations of real objects and movements for creating 3D worlds is not new, but has not been used as much for representing psychological features of characters.

Fig 11. Fieldasy01 exhibition view

The role of scenarios in design has been that of writing up narrative descriptions of use. Other cultural domains have generated more speculative methods for collaboration. Originating from the idea of autonomous writing the surrealists borrowed methods from academic disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and psychology to elaborate methods in the form of games for exploring the mechanism of imagination and intensifying collaborative experience. They subverted academic modes of inquiry to undermine rationality and invented playful procedures to release collaborative creativity (Gooding, 1991). The role of procedures and systematic strategies, while still being playful makes a creative constraint. Research on creativity points to processes, which not stems from a vacuum in the individual mind, but that they are a result of serious and known strategies. This applies to many aspects of artistic work. Changing a constraint might be at the core of creative thinking (Boden, 1997). Other researchers stress the process of association, how one item by acts of creative association creates a new item (Brown, 1989). The scenarios acted very much as constraints, but also as a first generator in a chain of associative artistic work that produced the artefacts.

An interview with one of the participators revealed that; “Imagination was tickled by the knowledge of being part of a networked mapping I didn’t know in detail. The scenario got me going, but I felt no repressing obligation towards it and also felt more liberated that in the situations of my own work where I’m the responsible and potential object for critique”

Fig 12. Annika Urbansdotter, co-creator paper shredding all of her teenage literature in one of the scenarios

The Fieldasy method of using scenarios as probing for imaginative efforts of the co-creators aimed at creating a platform for collaboration which didn’t depend on control of the communication channels. Rather the idea was to have an open-ended way of working where the original scenarios originated, at beforehand unknown artefacts, that would be assimilated into Abadyl. The open-ended nature and unknown results are important. Representing the complexity of a city is perhaps not suited for work by individuals or homogenous teams.

“for there is a powerful analogy between the mind and the city. Is it not true that the city is also a collection of specialized homun­culi, each conjoined in fluctuating strategies and hierarchies, each with a past that can be

traced, both geographically and biologically? Society is about a type of human connectedness: The complexity of the city or a global system is massive: consider the charting of our human module’s simple geo­graphical location and interaction with the fabric of the city, let alone that of its infinitely more complex neural (perceptual) counterpart.” (Spiller, 1998)

In the novel The Invisible cities by Italo Calvino Marco Polo answers Kublai Khan “Even I have elaborated a model of a city that could be legible for every city. It is a city made up only of exceptions, obstacles, constraints, incongruence and non-existency” (Calvino, 1972). This model relies on negatives that can hardly be foreseen by a single creator.

The co-creator imports qualities into the world, which do not and cannot stem from the world itself.

Fig 13. Jonas Larsen, co-creator in his glass workshop working with a first price in one of the scenarios.

The assimilation of objects into Abadyl is not done by simply rendering the artefacts into virtual shapes, but to let them form basis of rendering of characters that inhabits Abadyl. This creates a multi-levelled structure of meaning of the objects. While they are at one hand part of constituting virtual characters, they are also art objects in their own right. Thus the method for collaboration also creates a platform for co-operative expressions.

For example was one scenario about inner voices. Here the co-creator was put in the situation of being a man waking up on a hospital and finds out that his been part of an accident (Damasio, -99) where his skull had been injured and a metallic implant has replaced part of his scull bone. (Hooper,1986). After a couple of weeks he starts to hear a voice inside of his head. He tries to consult different kind of physicians to get rid of the problem but no one finds anything wrong with

him. He goes through a series of test one after the other. He finally finds himself in conflict with everyone in his surroundings. The outside worlds lack of trust in his experience makes him isolated. The voice however gets more and more present and he decides to eventually construct a recording machine that will be able to record the voice and finally communicate it back to his real world again.

The transference from physical to virtual is different from that of the Situationist movement’s use of psycho-geographical maps, while still having a resemblance. While they were using the maps to render tangibility to the psychological experience of a city, fieldasy goes the other way around. Designers Gaver & Dunne was influenced by the Situationist’s maps when designing a kit of cultural probes to be used within the Presence project. Instead of the traditional scientific survey, they sent out disposable cameras, postcards with provocative questions, maps to be filled in etc. for exploring a specific context of relevance to the project. One of their experience was that the probes should be carefully designed (Gaver et. al, 1999).

Fig 14. Recording device for inner voices, Pia Skoglund (industrial designer)

The fieldasy scenarios was designed with respect to stage a conflict that has a mind triggering influence on the co-creator with a set of problems that only can be captured in an artefact. In fieldasy01 (the first exhibition of the project) we worked with the theme of language as a process of contamination and strategies on a personal level to handle that. All of the first twelve scenarios delft with issues of that kind.

Fig 15. Scenario sheet example

The role of technology in art not only has that of the tool. Electronic media has also raised consciousness of an incidental flux in our culture where cultural production combines fragments, dislocates them and re-combines again. The cut-up of Burroughs or the game of Exquisite corps by the surrealists are no longer weird for ordinary people. The concept of sampling takes it’s older relative the montage some giant steps further. While collage or montage is a kind of juxtaposition where you disrupt elements to put them in new combinations, the sampling technique works on a more genetic level. Since all media objects share the same foundation (Manovich, 2001) the can establish a other kind of interpolation. Here the virtual object can challenge the physical with qualities that is very hard to achieve in the physical world, and in that conflict new expressions can fruitfully be developed. Hybrid creations have become a method for working with cultural production not only with different elements of form, but as blending identities of the creators as well. Musician and sampling artist Dj.Spooky writes about the flux in his notes on a digital agora; “It’s kind of like moving in a strange organic, neurochemical soup composed of thousands of distinct kinds of macromolecules with open bonding sites” (Miller, 2000). So the role of the artist/designer is not only about creating art/design objects, but also one of setting up processes that creates platforms for collaborative forms of creativity. Fieldasy as method benefits from the notion of the flux and works a bit like the game of Exquisite corps, providing a fragment that generates new artefacts that eventually combine. In this sense the scenarios works as prototypes. This is also a special view on art, that it builds on common

data that suggests new experiments (Francastel, 2000).

Output

As mentioned before there is a demand for a deeper challenge between the virtual and the physical objects, a will to explore their incompatibilities rather than merging them together into one. And by letting them evolve in different media and materials the final hybrid will host an interesting comprehension of the two perspectives. This kind of work actually incorporates surprising visual and technical proposals that are unusual, enriching and engaging.

Fig 16. Iteration sequence of a character c.e.s.k (cryo emergency spy kit) 1999-2003

The continuous flux has also been the model for the archetypical narrative form of digital media. Networked non-linear narratives have many predecessors from the Chinese oracle text I-Ching to Joyce’s Finnegans wake. The most recognized metaphor is perhaps the rhizome conceptualised by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari; “The rhizome itself can take all sorts of different forms, from branching out in all directions on the surface to the compression into knots […] Any point of the rhizome can and must be connected to any other point” (Deleuze and Guattari,1977). Likewise much referred to, by the same authors, is the concept of desiring machines. “Desiring machines are binary machines obeying a binary rule or set of laws, governing associations, one machine is always coupled with another” (Deleuze and Guattari,1983). The associative chain is at the heart of the concept.

There is a blurring between product and producing, they are inevitably coupled. The product generates producing and the different identities melt into an enormous undifferentiated object.

Fig 17. Pre-visualisation of the furniture like object for the exhibition fieldasy01

The term ‘machine’ does not refer to industrial apparatus or computers, but are still not just a metaphor. The machine can be defined as a series of interruptions. The interruptions does not oppose the continuous flow, they condition it. Incorporating meaning to put together within a body is the act of organizing the objects in the different shelves of the furniture like object The objects all run at the same time, but going from shelf to shelf they can never be conceived as a whole.

Fig 18. Fieldasy01 exhibition view

Like in the case of the 36 m2 computer, the viewer side-steps from shelf to shelf arranging their own stories of the objects, the shelves and body movements create disruptions like rhythms. Jaleh Mansoor refers how Kurt Schwitters in the first meeting with Hans Richter walked up to him and introduced himself as “I’m a painter and I nail my pictures together” (Mansoor, 2002). Painting and nailing seems to belong to different domains, but was integrated in his Merzbau, a gigantic project giving physical form to an assemblage of objects and spatial configurations. While side-stepping the furniture in the fieldasy01 exhibition, the body framed the viewing in an a laborious way – nailing, and at the same time performed an act of imaging, in combining the objects into visual stories – painting.

Fig 19. Fieldasy01 exhibition view

Digital art has come to focus, and rightly so, on the interactive meeting point between viewer and the art object, the way the viewer becomes an agent of change and participator by using interactive technologies. This is of course necessary to explore one of the intrinsic characteristics of new media. But in doing so there’s also a focus on singular moments extracted from time. Other definitions might give way to how the metaphors and models

could integrate how art can evolve over very large temporal spans. There’s slowness on the border of inertia in the way the city of Abadyl develops. Involving many actors in the process develops nodes of expressions that may have meaning for the actors themselves in their work. That meaning gears into other levels and speed, when put together with other nodes from other actors. The exhibition situation is one such moment, when the speed of the artefacts implodes. They enter into a realm where they can be contemplated and juxtaposed into new stories for the viewers. The term ‘floating work of art’, with references to Eco maybe better depicts this openness, not only in directions of the narrative but also the character of work-in-progress (Dinkla, 2002). Fieldasy01, the exhibition, does not increase speed going from object to signs and representations. It stops time to put forth material objects that are generative rather that produced. Generative in the sense that they have nor original nor final form. They are sprung out of a chain of association that generates new forms, which in it’s turn re-combines into new stories by the side-stepping act of the viewer.

Fig 20. One of the sixteen parts of the city, presented as a map

Conclusion

Fieldasy attempts to understand and redefine our world in a situation where information is lacking. This lack of information is used as a resource. By providing ambiguous fragments as a starting point, the scenarios put no constraints on imagination.

Fieldasy serves as a vital part in the creation of a space where we can be in a constant dialogue with, a large database of material that is interlinked through the architecture of a city, regardless of its incompatibilities. That space is a continuously evolving platform for staging both immediate and long-term projects. The method establish a multidisciplinary common ground for a art practice, interaction design and technology development, through an in­vestigation of philosophy and criticism in a dynamic material.

Per Linde PHD

K3 Malmo university

Beijerskajen 8

205 06 malmo,

Sweden

Per.linde@k3.mah.se