Normally the ear just hangs there; it is waiting on a wire above a fountain with black water and the reflected characters from the alphabet. A couple of times a day a man appears. The thin man wears a long white dress and in his long hair he wears a crown of leafs.
He speaks with strange sounds: Yells, stuttered words, rapid repetition of sound which nobody can understand. Nobody, except for the mirror text on the floor. It translates the sounds of the man to words and sentences, which seem to have a relation: "In Italy the landowner and only Anna hovers."
"Do I have to battle against Sparta? Can I send my son on a dangerous trip to Egypt?" If the old Greek had to make a very important decision, they often went to the oracle for advice, for example like the woman in Delphi at the well of Pythia. She gave advise by translating the bubbling of the water into sounds, a priest would then translate these sounds into good advise, for instance: "Stay home because the anger of Poseidon is not jet over."
The installation of the English artist Aaron Williamson is a contemporary version of such an oracle. Every sound visitors make will be translated into language with the help of a language recognition computer program. But the equipment is off its rattle. Not one word comes out correctly, the program translates not only spoken words, but it translates every sound into written language. "More moles living and little and India landowner look."
A couple of times a day Williamson puts on the oracle dress and with a lot of physical movement he translates the harvest of words of that day to authentic oracle language. This is an experience you will not forget very soon, all the more because of the strong contrast with the surroundings. A little bit further the visitors bend over computers screens in silence.
The theme of the Dutch Electronic Festival (DEAF) is "The Art of the Accident". DEAF is a bi-annual festival, which is organized by V2, an organization in Rotterdam, which plays an important role in exploring new media. What kind of advantages can we have when accidents, misunderstandings and instability occur? The installation of Williamson is the perfect example. First of all because his work exists of a lot of misunderstandings: Of man - to machine - to oracle - to men. That"s how the information is transformed further and further, but still the result is not without meaning.
Hearing Things (The Oracle) is the name of the installation. The owekel, says the artist himself with a contorted face, because he is since ten years deaf and just as a lot of deaf people he has trouble with pronouncing the r. For him his deafness is actually brought on creativity. Without his handicap Williamson wouldn"t have had to learn how to read lips and he wouldn"t have gotten obsessed with the misunderstandings that occur with the interpretation of his lip reading. Today misunderstanding is the essence of his work.
The presentation of the Englishman is an unexpected phenomenon on a festival that is dedicated to modern media. He is the most explicit example of a general desire: away with the cold hardware, back to the fun of touching, feeling, and understanding what is happening.
Sometimes the pleasure comes from the form which artists give to their installation. The installation of Cãlin Dan "Happy Doomsday" shows the consequences of the territorial impulse of mankind. By giving his research the form of a state of the art computer game which can be played not with a keyboard or regular joystick, but with a fitness machine. This makes his installation accessible for every benevolent visitor.
Other projects give the visitors confidence because they refer to the prehistoric history of electronics. The Austrian Gebhard Sengmüller developed a technique to store video images on a vinyl record, with the help of a needle and a normal turntable you can watch the video on a black and white television. The result: A jumpy film with a low resolution about the tragic faith of a few Guinean pigs. The combination of the old vinyl and the low quality of the images give the visitors a sense of trust. You can ask yourself: What is the use of a blurry vinyl video in a time where the images on the screen are most of the time more clear than the images around you? This question about the use is not in its place because DEAF98 is about electronic art. This has it"s own standards and criteria, even if the art finds itself on the borderline of the technological development.
The Japanese Seiko Mikami wears a jolly little hat. With a smile on her face she stands next to a shiny silver room that is covered with isolation material. She is pointing to a screen on which you can see a landscape of green highs and red lows in a graphic representation, it is moving very fast. "Look, not very stable. Lot of tension in there."
She is pointing to a door of the isolated silver room. In the room you can connect yourself to a machine, which increase the sounds of the pumping of your organs, and translate these sounds to a digital mountain landscape. When the lights go of you will experience your body as an ear. If you can harmonize with your own intern sounds can make the highs and lows less extreme and maybe he can even turn it to a polder landscape.
Five years ago you could still keep yourself ignorant of the digital world. Internet was a toy for a small group of innovators. But this attitude doesn"t work anymore. The computer is penetrated in every corner of our society. Those who are not yet prepared to see the mouse and cursor as a part of your life, will loose a piece of mobility, just as those who were afraid of the steam locomotives.
But most of the new developments take the form of a keyboard, command"s and incomprehensible instructions. How do you translate new media to a main public in a way that they find it interesting and understandable? This question plays a very important role on DEAF98. Not only with an inventive web site and an online connection with avatars in Karlsruhe, but also with well known ways, like an exhibition, a symposium, a festival café and a book.
Even the theme of the festival the art of the accident is an invitation for a discussion about art and new media. Because every time an accident happens you will be forced to think of the question: Why does it work in other situations? "We should fight again for the right of risk in this heavily secured and ensured society" writes composer and drop-expert Dick Raaijmakers in the festival book. People search for risks; the disaster movies and reality television programs, bungee jumping and tours over the polar ice are very popular.
The festival tries to create a dialog, but the origin of new media makes it very difficult. This shows very clearly in the festival book, a colorful illustrated bundle of interviews and opinions printed on printed on glossy paper. But the language in which the book is written, makes it almost impossible to judge the meaning of their statements. It is as if the prehistoric time of the communism must be redone, when the new time was also announced in not understandable language, stumbling over a lifeless space.
The developed theories, still in the footsteps of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze en Paul Virilio, often inspired by young writers like Jorge Luis Borges or Adolfo Bioy Casares, show the origin of the new media. It is the language of technicalmanuals and university readers. This is the reason why you still need to have courage to enter the world of new media.
The exhibition transArchitectures 02+03 is the worst example of this. The second floor of the Dutch Architecture Institute shows the work of architects who design buildings with the help of computers, which serve the purpose of mental experiments. The design of the exposition suggests that it should be better to never realize these projects. Between small concrete walls plastic panels are hanging like parking lot for the small monitors. The screens show the work of the architects, without information or an attempt to make it comprehensible. It feels like a small group tried to keep the main public out.
But this is an exception. Most of the artists really tried to search for ways to make the visitors part of their art works. Not everyone chose the very accessible way of the fitness machine or the heart chamber. The Dutch Belgium duo Jodi (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans), aimed for a confrontation between human and computer. Their CD-ROM OSS/**** shows an overdose of hundred icons.
Jodi carefully explains what it is about. They think that de CD-ROM speaks for itself, telling about it the effect diminishes. "The old computer viruses would always show a warning on you screen. Than there would appear a text I AM ALREADY INSIDE YOU, or your screen would turn a different color very fast. We are fascinated by the unofficial history of computer by the hackers and the virus spreaders."
Their CD-ROM has simular cyberpunky aesthetics. Peasmans shows: rough stripes shuffling very fast on the screen and each time the electricity discharges itself with a crackled noise, he grins.
Jodi makes a real mess of things. It looks as if the CD-ROM results in irreparable damage. "People don"t know their computer", explains Paesmans. "They have a computer and they don"t know what it does."
But, does Jodi know?
They grin and point to the bottom of the screen. "Five minutes ago we found this symbol over here. If you click on it your CD-ROM will come out so it will not jam the computer. Really, we are no computer freaks."
Most artists who work with new media, are visual art oriented. But also theatres show growing interest in new media. For years the choreographers William Forsythe and Merce Cunningham use the computer in their pieces. In the Netherlands one of the pioneers is Bianca van Dillen. In the performance Lara of Krisztina de Châtel, she used a computergame about an animated computer game character Lara Croft"s life. The performance shows how dance and technology can be combined.
The most convincing example is the American performance Jet Lag of the Builders Association. Artistic leader of the group is Marianne Weems, who worked for The Wooster Group from New York for a couple of years. The precision, the inventively and the coolness of the group return in a new form: Jet Lag is the Woosters in space age.
The performance exists of two parts, each one is dedicated to a historical person placed in a very extreme way outside time and space. One of them is Sara Krassnoff, in 1970 she and her grandson flew over the Atlantic Ocean 167 time within six months, to escape the father of the child. She died of jetlag. The media philosopher Virilio called her the "contemporary heroin, who lived in a delayed time".
The second story is about the inexperienced sailor Donald Crowhurst, who entered a race around the world in 1969. For months he kept the homefront in the illusion that he was making progress while in reality he had soon given up and was sailing in circles before the coast of South-America and finally he would jump overboard.
The Builders Association adds a new element to the festival, which was still missing: you can laugh in their cyberspace. Because of the sadness of the lonely sailor, surfing before his swinging screen which shows the waves of the ocean. And of the determined old lady who searched her shelter in the clouds.
Humor and subtlety - it would be great if these would set out the new course of the next phase of new media.