homologies

the STEVE DANIELS interview
by Lester Alfonso

Steve Daniels is an electronic artist and professor at Ryerson University (Toronto) where he teaches courses in Physical Computing, Telepresence and Networked Objects.  I recently spoke to Steve Daniels at the opening of his new exhibition at Artspace.  The exhibition is called "homologies" and it consists of around fifty electronic devices mounted on the walls of the gallery.  The devices are nicknamed "living particles" and each has three arms.  The devices react to differences in the surrounding light.  As the viewer approaches and casts shadows over them, the arms of the devices are triggered and move like living organisms reacting to the presence of others.

October 16, 2008 - PETERBOROUGH, ONTARIO

LESTER: Can you describe how this came about or does everybody ask you that question?

STEVE: ...it's one of those questions with such an elaborate answer... 

Where did it come from?  I wish there was a single thread I could offer you.  It came from a whole collection of really interesting failures that guided me to what I think is a really exciting solution. 

It evolved and emerged out of this struggle with completely different technologies and similar intention which was to create objects that could occupy space differently through time.  So change their volume and change their relationship to space and people.  And I had started initially wanting to produce something that was almost materially absent: really thin wires and thin paper-like surfaces that folded.  I just rustled with it for months and couldn't come to terms with how to do it with the technology I was playing with at the time.  And deadlines were looming.  And I found a motor working in one of the buckets of parts in my studio and realized it moved in really fantastic ways too.  That spun off in a completely tangential but somehow similar kind of direction.  And led me to the final form of these objects. 

It's a big weird arc. But the thing that really captured me with these motors, unlike most motors, instead of turning in circles, they move linearly.  They lengthen and shorten - rather than roll.  And the lengthening and shortening sort of echoed the intention around the folding of paper that I was initially working with as the prototypical plan.

So I took the motor and started with it and built the architecture around it that would allow this sort of bending and folding to occur in the context of this new device.

LESTER: [I heard that] there's certain personalities that you then programmed to each one?

STEVE:  Each of the devices has it's own little computer attached to it called a "micro-controller."  And the micro-controller can be programmed using words - typical computer code that allows you to represent not just visual information but also behavioral and social information so the kind of information it might begin to develop with an audience or develop with each other.  This particular generation doesn't yet have it but they will have the ability to speak to one another.  And kind of share their experiences with one another.

But in terms of the personalities - there are very distinct personalities and they emerge from two different properties.  One is there's actually two different bodies of code.  Two different programs have been installed in different devices.  So they're not identical in terms of that aspect of them.

One group is what I would call Calm.  And another group has had this Anxiety function built into them.  And the Anxiety function is this mechanism that allows them.  To respond to the different kinds of stimulus differently through time.  So, instead of becoming predictable, they become erratic.  It just gives a different kind of feel to how the devices work.

And the second aspect that influences how they react to people is just subtle differences in the actual manufacture of the limbs and subtle differences in the electrical components themselves lead to them both seeing and responding to their world in ways that are slightly different.  Some of them tremble when they move and some of them move very gracefully and smoothly and some kind of flutter.  And that's not so much gross...difference but rather those sort of surface imperfections or details that arise as you take the part off the machine and sand the bumps you don't like off by hand and lead to these unexpected variations that also give out a great deal of character to the objects.

LESTER: How much time went into the mounting - the look of grouping them...has that always been part of the idea is having them on a wall?

STEVE:  They were always intended to be perceived as social devices.  Exactly how they were going to look on the wall has gone through several generations and changes.  As the pieces developed and as I was able to see as I get further and further on.  You could begin to see how they did respond to people; or how they responded to different variations in light.  You could then begin to sense how they might work in relation to each other.  So in some levels that came very late in the game but is really critical to the experience. 

In terms of the effort of bringing it all together though has been absolutely enormous.  I've been extraordinarily grateful over the last three and a half weeks to have been supported by nearly fifty different volunteers who have helped with soldering of parts and drilling of holes and assembling countless little objects. 

There's fifty circuit boards in the piece and each circuit board has nearly four hundred holes.  There's nearly 20,000 holes that had to be first drilled be able to solder.  So it begins to get really foolish at some point when your working on something like this alone.  And it wouldn't have been achievable without the just exceptional support that I've had from people here in Peterborough and friends in Toronto who have lent untold hours to helping me get this ready for today.  I feel truly grateful and lucky to have had that much support.

Boisterous kids have started to run around inside the gallery while we talk.

STEVE:  I really hope it's my kid that knocks a piece off the wall first.  [laughter]  It really won't matter but I know the parents are gonna be just traumatized.

LESTER: How are they mounted on the wall? Are they pretty safe?

STEVE: The circuit boards are really safe; the objects are entirely precarious.  They're basically tacked by three little stumps to their circuit boards with hot glue.  And that was both tactical and out of necessity. 

The structures of their legs don't provide a lot of opportunities for attaching.  And if you get their feet too strapped down, they don't move very well.  So they needed to have a joint rather than a connection; they couldn't just be bolted onto a surface.  And if you watch them, it's very subtle but it turns out mechanically it's really important when they open and close you can see their body parts kind of torque around each other.  I tried screwing them down which made them much more stable but their movements were just - they shuddered - probably a reflection of my horrid mechanical skills.  It became really sad.  They're kind of liberated by being only gently tacked to the wall.

LESTER: So how do you feel about someone saying that they start to feel that these things are alive (ie. organic) and therefore it elicits a love...a kind of love.  What do you say to that?

STEVE: I think it's a beautiful interpretation of them.  I think the question is "are they alive?" - that's fundamental to me.  Humans have this extraordinary capacity for empathy and will project...  We project onto all kinds of things - we project onto our favourite toasters and our dearest coffee mugs and you know all kinds of things.  So when you take something that's essentially a plumbing pipe and re-form it and animate it and give it the impression that it's responding to you, it catapults this piece of technology into an completely different space.

You know I used the word earlier - anxiety  - literally in my code, I have a variable now called Anxiety because I see them as...well they're nicknamed living particles and I want to explore what is this question?  What is this convergence between the kinds of technologies that we play with especially when we step back and we kind of realize the dual histories of our technologies - one coming out of design fields which lead to these totally utilitarian relationships through technology.  And the other, very militaristic, which is almost completely destructive.  If it wasn't for killing people and looking good we probably wouldn't have most of the technologies that we do and so I wanted to play on these edges, you know.

Is this thing alive?  What does it come from?  What is it's history?  And in a way that's why I wanted the show named "homologies" because these devices on the walls share those two histories.  They share that history of design and they share in their own way through the fact that the devices themselves were cut by computerized cutting devices they have miniature computers that are born ultimately of militaristic concern not hopefully being deployed in a militaristic...I would be tragicaly hurt if people looked at these and saw them as weapons because I don't think they don't look or respond or feel like weapons in any way.  I sort of see them as sort of as really helpless fish long before I would see them as weapons but they still share that history.

The possibility of these devices is borne on that and so I think it brings me a great deal of joy that you go to love when you look at them because I think a lot of people look at technology and go for the cold and the mechanical and the replicated and it suggests to me that the personalities I hope to instill in them might - the kernel of them - might already be present.  That's an exciting response.

LESTER: Perfect.  I think part of the reason is because they seem so frail. If it was something as mechanical but looked over-bearing, I don't know, it probably would instill fear instead of love.

STEVE: I did want them to feel, this where the second name [comes in].  The piece itself is called Sessile.

LESTER: How do you spell that?

STEVE: S - E - S - S - I - L - E which is, like homologies, a biological term.  Sessile is a biological term for animals, more often even plants, but organisms that are alive but can't get out of the way.  So, whatever they can do, they're in some degree terribly helpless.  They're subject to their environment in a way that things that are mobile are not. 

So "sessile" is a technical description of a life form a living and motile organism that can't get around.  So it can move; it can flex; it can bend. But at the end of its day, its feet or roots or body are one way or another fused to the substrate upon which it survives.  That was also a driving concern. 

So I didn't want them to look like big heavy hunks of technology.  I wanted you to be able to look through them as you could look at them.  That was a real driving element in their design and hopefully in the kinds of movement that they're able to manifest.

LESTER: So, like, I know it's a large question but what is art to you?

STEVE: [chuckles]

LESTER: Is this art?  Are you an artist?  Is that primarily what drives it too?  Is an artist curious about something,  wants to discover [something] and then just plows through..?  Is that what it is?

STEVE: I think people have a difficult time kind of positioning technologically based art forms because, again, the technology gets in the way.  And this is where the design history is so interesting.  Because a relationship to design tells us that technology should serve us.  It's made to be in service of us.  The interfaces are designed to our benefit, to our ease of use, to facilitating a task that we probably don't want to be engaged in.  And to me that's what's profoundly interesting.  And so one of the driving questions for me in creating this work was:  if technology could shape itself, what shape might it pick?  Right?  What would it look like if it wasn't constrained to be in service of us.  What if it was simply in service of self.  What if it's selfish?  What if isn't just a wrench.  That was another those layers I was playing with as I sat down and figured out what they might be. 

But I think technology like this is really exciting and really significantly positioned in terms of art because we live in an era right now where conversation and behaviour are really fundamental parts of our daily lives.  We're living in a time where there's a significant shift away from art being experienced purely as representational to art being experienced also as behavioural.  And part of this is being largely shift by Web. 2.0 technologies and social technologies online that allow people to organize themselves and construct community and relationships in ways that are truly unprecedented.  It a general pattern.  They're age old.  But in terms of the scale we can now achieve with these technologies is completely revolutionary.  And I'm very interested in that and as an artist I'm very interested in where the intersection of beheaviour stands in relation to what most people perceive as art. 

People think of art as often pictorial, although people also understand it as sculptural or formal and having relationships... To me this is the, representation isn't the word - but if you can represent a behaviour, if you can represent a social engagement.  That's what I'm striving to do here.  And I see technology or the technologies I am employing as vital to realizing that vision of exploring that notion of relationship.

When you stand in the gallery here, there's countless little kids who run and put their noses up to the devices the same way they might their pet dog and there's adults who are more suspicious so they kind of stare at them at 45 degrees but still trying to peer in to see what might be going on or if there's a secret to be revealed.  It's gratifying to see people that willing to stand that close to a technology that until that moment had no relationship with.