Since media began to engage interactively with its audience the art \u00adcommunity has witnessed an attendant diversification of sources for both production of interactive art and its conceptual \u00adscaffolding. The inter-disciplinary nature of the work, with its genesis in the \u00admilitary-industrial complex draws from science, art and technological practices and histories. Interactive media art pays homage to much of the early research into cybernetic systems relying on feedback loops that \u00adperpetuate unpredictable events creating surprising outcomes for the audience\/inter-actor. The tendency to mimic real-life systems, to re-create our relationship to organic forms has led to work that often parallels our experience of our everyday environment. Norman White, David Rokeby, Diana Burgoyne, Catherine Richards, Marc Fournel, and Luc Courchesne are just a few of the artists engaged in these practices in this country. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this brief discussion I will look at Marc Fournel\u2019s work in \u00adparticular, noting the evolution of interactive systems in his work and the way \u00adbiological systems, and even theories, are implicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2004 Marc Fournel mounted his complex interactive work Tontauben<\/em> at Oboro, a centre devoted to, among other things, the \u00adproduction and presentation of new media. Tontauben<\/em> incorporated a 3D positioning system to create what Ricardo Dal Farra has called a \u201cproposed sound universe.\u201d On entering the space the audience found, situated on the floor, a group of small spheres, each about half the size of a bowling ball. By picking up a ball the inter-actor could manipulate, or perhaps \u00adstimulate, the local positioning system (LPS) that transformed the ball\u2019s movement into sound. With three possible categories to elicit\u2014\u00adorganic-non-human (waves, wind, rocks, seagulls), organic-human (laughter, \u00adfootsteps, kids on a swing), mechanical (gears, rolling trains, paper \u00adfolding)\u2014there was little prediction in what sounds one might hear. However, the acoustic space could be played like an instrument once a familiarity with various modes was achieved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reciprocal and dialogical nature of this work can be considered typical of interactive art. Marc Fournel achieves this in Tontauben<\/em> through the work\u2019s ability to provide reassuring feedback for the inter-actor. What this allows for is intuitive interaction that lessens the burden of conscious thought. Consequently, the audience is able to be more spontaneous in their response. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Le Puits<\/em> (1999-2000), Fournel\u2019s first interactive installation, revolved around a sculptural component, a deep well-like structure in the middle of the space. By approaching the well the audience could activate \u00adalternate sounds, interfering with the soundtrack of a video projected onto the ceiling and into the well. The possibility for collective action as layers of sound created by individuals began to form a new sonic environment for the work inspired Fournel to strip down the components and focus solely on sound and audience-machine interaction. Tontauben <\/em>takes this \u00adsensibility and collapses it with a positioning system, enabling interaction that generates the work. The title of the work translates from German into \u201csound pigeon.\u201d Fournel recognized that the nature of the sound mimicked pigeons flying around the space. The individual sounds are the \u201cpigeons\u201d that orient to and around each other. Introducing a microphone, enabling additions of sound objects enables the audience to affect the environment and \u201cperform\u201d the work. For Tontauben<\/em> Fournel created a meta-\u00adinstrument using the X, Y, Z axes as direct variables of custom-made sound \u00adalgorithms and virtual synthesizers that were integrated in meta-instrument \u00adprogramming. The artist\u2019s desire to have a more integrated influence on the movement of the user in the system led Fournel to the boids software program for his next work FLOCK<\/em> (2007), where the inter-actor influences the behaviour of the sound objects, but doesn\u2019t directly control them. The boids program was designed by Craig Reynolds in 1986. An A-Life program simulating coordinated animal motion, it creates flock-like behaviours in the objects it is controlling. The \u201cboids\u201d have three-dimensional access to the space, but are dependent for their \u201cseparation, alignment and \u00adcohesion\u201d on their neighbours.^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - See http:\/\/www.red3d.com\/cwr\/boids\/ for an in-depth description of Craig Reynolds\u2019 boids program.<\/span> In Tontauben<\/em> audience members may have been distracted by the type of sounds they were hearing and did not \u00adassociate them with birds. In fact, the cryptic nature of Fournel\u2019s title \u00adsuggests that even he was reluctant to make the biological dimension in this work explicit and instead left it within the realm of \u00adenvironmental sound-scape art. Also, Fournel\u2019s collaboration with the new-media \u00adartist and programmer Thomas Ouellet Fredericks was new and untested. Although Tontauben<\/em> can be considered a fully resolved work, in light of its successor, FLOCK<\/em>, it feels much like a prototype, a necessary step, but one that researches how an artist might incorporate 3D positioning systems in order to transcend their ontology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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