Rhizomes » Issue 13 (Fall 2006) » Kristin Powers and Matt Roberts

Transfers: Portrait of a City

Kristin Powers and Matt Roberts

Abstract

"Transfers" by Matt Roberts, Assistant Professor of Art and Program Director of Digital Arts at Stetson University, an interactive car ride of abstract visualization and John Cage-like musical performance, creates individualized portraits of a city. The rider/reader, sitting in the back seat facing an LCD screen with speakers, controls the direction of the driver and thus the sights and sounds of the art presentation. Matt Roberts sits next to a laptop and a tangle of wires connecting a camera under the rear-view mirror, taking in the scene in front of the car, the microphones on the truck outside, and a GPS unit to the laptop and its software program. As the driver, Roberts, relegates the position of creator to the passengers in the seats, he emphasizes how moving through the urban environments directly creates the experience (which is delivered to the riders as a video on CD after their ride). The project calls upon the viewer to direct the driver; "where do I go now?" The directions run through a program that modifies the experience of the passenger. The urban landscape, designed to accommodate automobiles, undergoes a detournment, it becomes like art and life—constantly shifting. Each time the art is created it is unique; the project almost thrives on the unexpected. Getting lost becomes the destination. In a very modernist way, the process is more important than the end result. However, it calls into question the satisfaction of an interactive art piece and the necessity of the material object. Combining high technology with the ubiquity of automobile travel, Matt Roberts' mobile project moves the audience literally through their own city reinterpreted, reformatted, and reconfigured.

[1] I am sitting in the parking lot of the Altamonte Mall; outside the car, the sun is setting slowly behind a mirage of fashion shops, computer stores, and cinemas. I am trying to decide where to go. Not where to go in a functionality sense; I have nothing to pick up, drop off, or purchase. Rather, I am being asked by the driver of the car I am in where I want to go so we can simply drive around and see things—in-car wandering. The experience is the reason I am here, to interact with Matt Roberts' mobile art presentation "Transfers." Described by Roberts as "a project exploring real-time generation of art and user participation in a mobile environment," Transfers is taking car culture to a new level (Transfers).

[2] I am seated in the back seat of an art project. LCD screens are mounted in front of me. Microphones are attached to the trunk outside, feeding to the speakers the electric din of mall street-life. A camera is mounted underneath the rearview mirror, facing the urban sprawl of concrete and flashy shops. Next to Roberts is a laptop getting receiving information input from a GPS. The laptop has custom-built software that translates all this input into a visual and auditory show for the passenger in the back seat.

[3] "Let's just drive around," I say, knowing artistic consequences are at stake—my directions creating the piece and being hesitant about the level of control offered to me as a passenger. The rules of this interaction are unclear; I do not know the equivalent reactions for each possible decision made. As an artist myself, I want the knowledge of each choice I am making—to know the round thick mark of paint is made by a round camel hair brush by applying specific pressure. I give myself over to the chance aspect of this creation. The passenger must accept that thought s/he makes the decisions, there is no chart in the car that detailings the direction and or the effect.

[4] On the screen before me, I watch red lava erupt up and fall back into a pixelated landscape. I take in the abstract colors slathered on the monitor like Gerhard Richter paintings. Roberts explains the workings of the project, including small unnoticed details; the software has a memory to recall visual input from the camera of places that have already passed and intermix it with current camera input. The sounds coming from the speakers are a blend of car engines, motorcycles, people, chimes, and wind. It sounds like the ocean breathing over a Wal-Mart soundtrack. The GPS calculates the latitude and longitude of our path; when these change more than five degrees a specific chime sound is made.

[5] "In Florida, you drive a car all the time," Matt Roberts explains; he wanted to find a way to make it more interesting. The unexpected plays an important role in making this interaction unique. "As the user tells the driver where to go the passenger becomes both performer and viewer as they experience a unique piece of art generated by their decisions," the "Transfers" website states. This stress on chance, as well as the creation of art by folding/merging daily life with entertainment technology, creates a useful synergy with the Situationists International group. The Situationists International came together in 1957 to experiment, by way of aesthetic intervention into contemporary culture, with the goal of erasing the false barriers between art and life (Drifting). Roberts' "Transfers" adopts a similar strategy and goal for to bring art into the urban everydayness. Even his use of the car, a popular symbol of American life since the 1950's car culture boom, relates to one of Guy Debord's main criticisms of modern culture. "Today urbanism's main problem is ensuring the smooth circulation of a rapidly increasing quantity of motor vehicles. We might be justified in thinking that a future urbanism will also apply itself to no less utilitarian projects that will give the greatest consideration to psychogeographical possibilities" (Introduction). Is this future urbanism an aesthetic ride with no destination?

[6] One of the main dialectical tools of the Situationists is detournement—the effect of taking something culturally banal and making it oppositional, through the use of art—a "turning around." Detournement opposes recuperation, commodification, and the repossession of that which dulls us into inaction. "Transfers" uses this tool to dissolve boundaries between inside and outside space, private and public, and most importantly, art and life. Many of these artificial divisions are held in place by the idea of the tacky spectacle. "In the spectacle, the lower the use value of modern survival-time, the more highly it is exalted. The reality of time has been replaced by the advertisement of time" Guy Debord states (Spectacle). Driving a car is one of the most obscene use of advertised luxuries, because every American citizen believes it to be a natural right—an accepted marker in the passage from child to adult—a partition of private and public space—a reason to rearrange city planning and urban centers.

[7] Mobile art, in general, attempts to bring aspects of the spectacle into the mundane and to make routine acts into art. Space is another form of the spectacle—the lived environment of urbanism—that is evident in the dichotomy between "inside the car" and "outside the car." The Situationists International made an effort to expose the spectacle that stultifies us by creating small ruptures within nonspectacular things. These ruptures make art out of life and reveal the possibilities of everyday life. Matt Roberts' project seems to be working in this same direction. However, he may not yet fully grasp the potential for de-materializing art, since he gives a CD to each rider after their experience.