michael naimark
 

 

 

INTERVAL TRIP REPORT

Art School en Provence, Aix

Michael Naimark

11/30/98

Douglas is waiting for me at the train station in Marseilles when I arrive Wednesday afternoon. We'd never met but he's easy to spot: black clothes, leather jacket, and dyed hair. Douglas, who grew up in Los Altos Hills, had recently moved from seven years in Paris to Aix to teach at l'Ecole d'Art here.

The art school is a gated compound a few blocks from la Centre Ville of Aix. This town of flowers and Cezanne is still beautiful with its narrow streets and outdoor markets, but is equally dominated by Benneton, Gap, and Mephisto stores. It's cold and rainy and off-season, so things are quiet. Once through the school gate, things are abuzz with activity. The complex is a modern one, buildings with large windows overlooking courtyards in the middle. The school has 100-200 students and appears to be evenly balanced between traditional and electronic arts. They are well-equipped with video, photography, and Macs (and one SGI), but are just getting wired into the Internet - they currently have only one connected computer, which is used for lurking and downloading software.

Douglas takes me on a tour. The first studio we enter is dominated by a structure resembling a large scale model of a space station: a 20 foot long piece of unistrut on a mechanized pedestal, with a large vertical rectangular frame at one end and heavy old junk as counterweight at the other. The artist is a portly moustached man with a smile and a beret - which Douglas says he never takes off and hence, everyone calls him the Official Frenchman. He's excited and wants to give us a demo. The structure is to hold a large projection screen in the rectangle and a video projector at the other end. He powers it up and the unistrut arm starts to rotate around and bob up and down, both controlled by motors. It rotates and bobs at a disturbingly fast rate, and we duck. Then faster. We duck again. Then crash! - it bobs too high and hits the ceiling and the arm first bends at a right angle, then flies off. We get up from the floor. The Official Frenchman is still smiling and says he really wants it to move fast, but since it's for public display he needs to demonstrate it's safe. Not today.

Next we visit the administration office to get the paperwork out of the way. Paperwork never seems simple at art schools, and never is simple in France, and Douglas reminds me that this is a French art school. We meet Madame Jouve, a good natured older woman, who handles such things. I fill out several forms and we xerox several pages of my passport. She says getting my honorarium may take some time, since the mayor has to sign the forms and I'm a foreigner without a bank account here. "Pourquoi cette beaucoup beaurocracy?" I ask in my bad French. She throws up here hands and declares "Napoleon."

+++++

 

Why should an applied commercial research lab like Interval care at all about art schools? There are several reasons for sure - interns and recruits, creativity for our own projects, a lean resourcefulness, and good public relations. But there may be another more important one: If you want to learn about the future and trends in popular culture, you'll see it first in an art school.

Art students have their ears closer to the ground than other students, than advertising agencies, and than market researchers. OK, maybe it's not better, but the trend-spotting is of a different nature. It has nothing to do with surveys or anything quantitative. (If you sent clipboard-carrying surveyors to any art school worth its salt, the students would have a very creative time fucking them up as much as possible.)

Art schools can be "seeded" in collaboration with larger institutions, often providing a good deal for both sides. Interval has done an unrivalled job so far. Bill Buxton likes to point out: Ever wonder why the two most successful computer graphics software companies are Canadian? About 15 years ago, he says, the Canadian government took heed after looking at trends in television, Hollywood, and Siggraph and decided to invest heavily in university-level arts funding in computer graphics. The result is verifiably true when you ask around Alias and SoftImage.

+++++

 

The next morning (Thanksgiving Thursday, not even a blip over here), I give a presentation to the student community, showing short videos of past and current work going back to the late 1970s. Douglas tells me it'd be great if I could spend the next day and a half working directly with students, putting together some little project. We both agree it could be about the line between the actual and the virtual.

After lunch we meet with several interested students, and have a video camcorder and a decent LCD projector. The first thing we do is find a colorful poster, tear it in half, put one half in front of the camera out in the well-lit hallway, and the other half in front of the projector in a dark room. The exercise is to register the projected image with the actual object to "reconstruct" the whole poster. It's amazing how successful this illusion this can be, and the students particularly enjoy when passers-by in the hallway "walk" through only half the poster, or when someone turns on the light in the dark projection space revealing only the other half poster. It also provides a very clear view of everything wrong with video.

Then we do a simple motion study. We place an "X" made of black tape on the wall in front of the projector and place something stationary in front of the camera (we use someone's hand on the wall). One student stands behind the camera and slowly pans and tilts it randomly, while another student stands behind the projector and pans and tilts it to try to keep the image of the thumb exactly on the X. It's possible, and when it happens, the projected frame strongly resembles a moving window.

Just around now Julie, one of the students, walks in carrying a white cast of a human face and a videotape. It turns out she's been working on projecting images of human faces onto her white mask (like the Disney Haunted Mansion woman, my old work at MIT,  and recent work of art star Tony Oursler). Par chance, she's just at the point of trying it out. She intends to have an image of a long-haired woman projected on the mask which will sit on a pillow on an empty bed. We all play with registering and mis-registering the image. It's a lovely project.

It's now the end of the day, and after these little exercises, we huddle to make a plan for tomorrow. The students think relief projection is cooler than moving projection, and want to make a little still life, then mess with the image in PhotoShop and Director, and project it back (after painting the little scene white). Douglas likes the idea because it's like texture mapping, and he intends to promote more 3D computer modeling here. They agree on a modern breakfast still life a la Cezanne, and determine who brings what for the scene. We break for the day.

+++++

 

At the risk of being trashed from several directions, I've observed that American art students have a couple of hang-ups, or immaturities, not shared by the rest of the world, particularly by the French. One deals with self-expression, the other with politics.

There seems to be a loud "look-at-me!" narcissism which has increased in American art schools, of young artists making sure to be blatantly in your face. To be sure, there are many examples in both art history and in contemporary art where this is brilliant and evocative. But it seems to have gotten out of control, and after seeing much of this, one is only left with an equally loud: "nobody-cares!"  French philosopher Michel Foucalt made a famous admonition, "le souci de toi," the care for the self, where he argued that such care is not a selfish gesture, but a true social act. As interpreted once by a Canadian artist friend: "get your own house in order before trying to save the world." This sort of attention to self is very different from narcissism.

The other hang-up deals with a false dichotomy between politics and aesthetics. One of the woman faculty members at Aix expressed her utter boredom with American feminist art, for example. A wonderful counter-example is currently on exhibit in Paris, the Millet/Van Gogh show at the Musée d'Orsay. Ostensibly, this show is about comparing Millet's paintings of workers and everyday life which he made in the 1850-60s with Van Gogh's paintings made from journal reproductions of the Millets'. Even though these images were politically charged - of peasants and farm workers at the dawn of the Industrial Age - to Millet and, particularly to Van Gogh, they were (from the catalog) "expressions of the presence of God" and "the high point of all art." The politics were part of the aesthetics.

+++++

 

The next day, Friday morning, the students start filtering in (mostly late, "on French Time") with their props for the little still life: a box of cereal, a jar of juice, a bowl, a round box of cheese, a loaf of bread, etc., and begin a formal composition. After an hour of aesthetic haggling, they all agree "c'est beau." Since we only need a still image, we opt for using a high-resolution digital still camera, and snap several images with different lighting configurations. Then a couple students start painting everything in the scene white (for projection), another couple students work on mounting the video projector at the steep angle down to mimic the camera, and others go off with Douglas and the digitized frames to the "2D Lab."

I wander down the hallway which looks down on the studio of the Official Frenchman, who smiles and waves at me. Everything is back together and his contraption is spinning around. Mme Jouve finds me and says she's found a solution: she will open a local French bank account in my name to make the honorarium deposit, then can easily wire the money from there to my normal account in the U.S. (Do they have to do this every time an American visits?) The greatest irony is that, as per Interval policy, I'll use the honorarium to reimburse the trip expenses, but only because to give it back as a donation would clearly be more difficult and confusing than getting it in the first place.

+++++

 

So, what's hot at this French art school? First, the Internet, the hottest thing in most art schools, isn't very hot right here now but probably only because of access issues (which they say will change next month). It's tempting to say moving and relief projection is hot, but I think such projects are coincidences with my past work. (Hell, maybe that's why they invited me.)

At the top of the list of what's hot here are robotics and mechatronics. Everyone seems interested in making things move. Several studios are full of scavenged junk with a computer sitting off to the side for simulation or control. There is a project with little insect-like robotic creatures that communicate with each other (like Mitch Resnick's work at the Media Lab); another project with a moving contraption built around a basketball, which acts like an upside-down motorized trackball; and another project using 3D modeling to simulate a to-be-built dancing robot. These are all in addition to the rotating projection sculpture.

Another hot area is sound, driven mainly by ProTools and Max software. The audio lab appears to be one of the most popular places. Among the more interesting projects is a simulation of the guttural, two-toned chants of Tibetan monks.

Another popular project, by one of the computer-whiz students, is an artificial life project, with on-screen artsy little creatures and emergent behavior. The user can tweak the parameters and watch as generations evolve. This student appears thoroughly familiar with the current literature and keeps up with activities at the Santa Fe Institute.

Finally, the video class is currently beginning a group assault on the town of Aix. They are designing posters which vaguely resemble Office of Tourism material but with a drawing of a stylized, grotesque, baby face and the single word "Bonjour." They plan to use this as a premise for videotaping and intend to be ready by tourist season.

+++++

 

Near the middle of the afternoon I'm getting concerned we won't finish by the end of the day when I leave. I'd been conscientious of this little project's scale, of the aesthetic and cultural potential muddles, and of the clock, and now it's fate is unclear.

The paint is dry, the projector is roughly aimed (we won't be able to fine-tune until we project the image back), but Douglas is having trouble getting video out of the Mac which costs us a couple hours. Finally, with the help of a couple students, they get it working and start playing with the image. Douglas is a Director hacker, and wants to flex some muscle with his animation skills. The students huddle around as Douglas makes the drawing of the little boy on the cereal box smile and frown, the empty bowl fill up with cornflakes and milk, and the loaf of bread be eaten piece by piece.

By 5pm we move the Mac into the dark studio and begin the tedious process of aligning the projector in six dimensions (plus zoom) to match the angle and position of the camera. Yesterday I tried suggesting they keep the camera horizontal and that, though it wouldn't have the same coverage of the top of things, it would be much easier to align the projector in the end. I couldn't and gave up. Too much science. So now they are learning for themselves.

After about an hour, they have a pretty decent alignment. All the white-painting things look passably normal, at least at first glance. The animation turns out to be funny and revealing. The animated face looks great. The empty bowl filling up looks pretty good, but one student suggests placing a white top on the bowl for better projection. The bread disappearing fails, mainly because the white-painted bread still looks like, well, white-painted bread. Another student suggests that spackling in all the cracks on the loaf would make the projector work better.

It's now almost 7pm when the gates will close, and we feel like we completed a far-from-perfect work but a not-bad study, just in time.

Art School en Provence, Aix

Michael Naimark

11/30/98

Douglas is waiting for me at the train station in Marseilles when I arrive Wednesday afternoon. We'd never met but he's easy to spot: black clothes, leather jacket, and dyed hair. Douglas, who grew up in Los Altos Hills, had recently moved from seven years in Paris to Aix to teach at l'Ecole d'Art here.

The art school is a gated compound a few blocks from la Centre Ville of Aix. This town of flowers and Cezanne is still beautiful with its narrow streets and outdoor markets, but is equally dominated by Benneton, Gap, and Mephisto stores. It's cold and rainy and off-season, so things are quiet. Once through the school gate, things are abuzz with activity. The complex is a modern one, buildings with large windows overlooking courtyards in the middle. The school has 100-200 students and appears to be evenly balanced between traditional and electronic arts. They are well-equipped with video, photography, and Macs (and one SGI), but are just getting wired into the Internet - they currently have only one connected computer, which is used for lurking and downloading software.

Douglas takes me on a tour. The first studio we enter is dominated by a structure resembling a large scale model of a space station: a 20 foot long piece of unistrut on a mechanized pedestal, with a large vertical rectangular frame at one end and heavy old junk as counterweight at the other. The artist is a portly moustached man with a smile and a beret - which Douglas says he never takes off and hence, everyone calls him the Official Frenchman. He's excited and wants to give us a demo. The structure is to hold a large projection screen in the rectangle and a video projector at the other end. He powers it up and the unistrut arm starts to rotate around and bob up and down, both controlled by motors. It rotates and bobs at a disturbingly fast rate, and we duck. Then faster. We duck again. Then crash! - it bobs too high and hits the ceiling and the arm first bends at a right angle, then flies off. We get up from the floor. The Official Frenchman is still smiling and says he really wants it to move fast, but since it's for public display he needs to demonstrate it's safe. Not today.

Next we visit the administration office to get the paperwork out of the way. Paperwork never seems simple at art schools, and never is simple in France, and Douglas reminds me that this is a French art school. We meet Madame Jouve, a good natured older woman, who handles such things. I fill out several forms and we xerox several pages of my passport. She says getting my honorarium may take some time, since the mayor has to sign the forms and I'm a foreigner without a bank account here. "Pourquoi cette beaucoup beaurocracy?" I ask in my bad French. She throws up here hands and declares "Napoleon."

+++++

 

Why should an applied commercial research lab like Interval care at all about art schools? There are several reasons for sure - interns and recruits, creativity for our own projects, a lean resourcefulness, and good public relations. But there may be another more important one: If you want to learn about the future and trends in popular culture, you'll see it first in an art school.

Art students have their ears closer to the ground than other students, than advertising agencies, and than market researchers. OK, maybe it's not better, but the trend-spotting is of a different nature. It has nothing to do with surveys or anything quantitative. (If you sent clipboard-carrying surveyors to any art school worth its salt, the students would have a very creative time fucking them up as much as possible.)

Art schools can be "seeded" in collaboration with larger institutions, often providing a good deal for both sides. Interval has done an unrivalled job so far. Bill Buxton likes to point out: Ever wonder why the two most successful computer graphics software companies are Canadian? About 15 years ago, he says, the Canadian government took heed after looking at trends in television, Hollywood, and Siggraph and decided to invest heavily in university-level arts funding in computer graphics. The result is verifiably true when you ask around Alias and SoftImage.

+++++

 

The next morning (Thanksgiving Thursday, not even a blip over here), I give a presentation to the student community, showing short videos of past and current work going back to the late 1970s. Douglas tells me it'd be great if I could spend the next day and a half working directly with students, putting together some little project. We both agree it could be about the line between the actual and the virtual.

After lunch we meet with several interested students, and have a video camcorder and a decent LCD projector. The first thing we do is find a colorful poster, tear it in half, put one half in front of the camera out in the well-lit hallway, and the other half in front of the projector in a dark room. The exercise is to register the projected image with the actual object to "reconstruct" the whole poster. It's amazing how successful this illusion this can be, and the students particularly enjoy when passers-by in the hallway "walk" through only half the poster, or when someone turns on the light in the dark projection space revealing only the other half poster. It also provides a very clear view of everything wrong with video.

Then we do a simple motion study. We place an "X" made of black tape on the wall in front of the projector and place something stationary in front of the camera (we use someone's hand on the wall). One student stands behind the camera and slowly pans and tilts it randomly, while another student stands behind the projector and pans and tilts it to try to keep the image of the thumb exactly on the X. It's possible, and when it happens, the projected frame strongly resembles a moving window.

Just around now Julie, one of the students, walks in carrying a white cast of a human face and a videotape. It turns out she's been working on projecting images of human faces onto her white mask (like the Disney Haunted Mansion woman, my old work at MIT,  and recent work of art star Tony Oursler). Par chance, she's just at the point of trying it out. She intends to have an image of a long-haired woman projected on the mask which will sit on a pillow on an empty bed. We all play with registering and mis-registering the image. It's a lovely project.

It's now the end of the day, and after these little exercises, we huddle to make a plan for tomorrow. The students think relief projection is cooler than moving projection, and want to make a little still life, then mess with the image in PhotoShop and Director, and project it back (after painting the little scene white). Douglas likes the idea because it's like texture mapping, and he intends to promote more 3D computer modeling here. They agree on a modern breakfast still life a la Cezanne, and determine who brings what for the scene. We break for the day.

+++++

 

At the risk of being trashed from several directions, I've observed that American art students have a couple of hang-ups, or immaturities, not shared by the rest of the world, particularly by the French. One deals with self-expression, the other with politics.

There seems to be a loud "look-at-me!" narcissism which has increased in American art schools, of young artists making sure to be blatantly in your face. To be sure, there are many examples in both art history and in contemporary art where this is brilliant and evocative. But it seems to have gotten out of control, and after seeing much of this, one is only left with an equally loud: "nobody-cares!"  French philosopher Michel Foucalt made a famous admonition, "le souci de toi," the care for the self, where he argued that such care is not a selfish gesture, but a true social act. As interpreted once by a Canadian artist friend: "get your own house in order before trying to save the world." This sort of attention to self is very different from narcissism.

The other hang-up deals with a false dichotomy between politics and aesthetics. One of the woman faculty members at Aix expressed her utter boredom with American feminist art, for example. A wonderful counter-example is currently on exhibit in Paris, the Millet/Van Gogh show at the Musée d'Orsay. Ostensibly, this show is about comparing Millet's paintings of workers and everyday life which he made in the 1850-60s with Van Gogh's paintings made from journal reproductions of the Millets'. Even though these images were politically charged - of peasants and farm workers at the dawn of the Industrial Age - to Millet and, particularly to Van Gogh, they were (from the catalog) "expressions of the presence of God" and "the high point of all art." The politics were part of the aesthetics.

+++++

 

The next day, Friday morning, the students start filtering in (mostly late, "on French Time") with their props for the little still life: a box of cereal, a jar of juice, a bowl, a round box of cheese, a loaf of bread, etc., and begin a formal composition. After an hour of aesthetic haggling, they all agree "c'est beau." Since we only need a still image, we opt for using a high-resolution digital still camera, and snap several images with different lighting configurations. Then a couple students start painting everything in the scene white (for projection), another couple students work on mounting the video projector at the steep angle down to mimic the camera, and others go off with Douglas and the digitized frames to the "2D Lab."

I wander down the hallway which looks down on the studio of the Official Frenchman, who smiles and waves at me. Everything is back together and his contraption is spinning around. Mme Jouve finds me and says she's found a solution: she will open a local French bank account in my name to make the honorarium deposit, then can easily wire the money from there to my normal account in the U.S. (Do they have to do this every time an American visits?) The greatest irony is that, as per Interval policy, I'll use the honorarium to reimburse the trip expenses, but only because to give it back as a donation would clearly be more difficult and confusing than getting it in the first place.

+++++

 

So, what's hot at this French art school? First, the Internet, the hottest thing in most art schools, isn't very hot right here now but probably only because of access issues (which they say will change next month). It's tempting to say moving and relief projection is hot, but I think such projects are coincidences with my past work. (Hell, maybe that's why they invited me.)

At the top of the list of what's hot here are robotics and mechatronics. Everyone seems interested in making things move. Several studios are full of scavenged junk with a computer sitting off to the side for simulation or control. There is a project with little insect-like robotic creatures that communicate with each other (like Mitch Resnick's work at the Media Lab); another project with a moving contraption built around a basketball, which acts like an upside-down motorized trackball; and another project using 3D modeling to simulate a to-be-built dancing robot. These are all in addition to the rotating projection sculpture.

Another hot area is sound, driven mainly by ProTools and Max software. The audio lab appears to be one of the most popular places. Among the more interesting projects is a simulation of the guttural, two-toned chants of Tibetan monks.

Another popular project, by one of the computer-whiz students, is an artificial life project, with on-screen artsy little creatures and emergent behavior. The user can tweak the parameters and watch as generations evolve. This student appears thoroughly familiar with the current literature and keeps up with activities at the Santa Fe Institute.

Finally, the video class is currently beginning a group assault on the town of Aix. They are designing posters which vaguely resemble Office of Tourism material but with a drawing of a stylized, grotesque, baby face and the single word "Bonjour." They plan to use this as a premise for videotaping and intend to be ready by tourist season.

+++++

 

Near the middle of the afternoon I'm getting concerned we won't finish by the end of the day when I leave. I'd been conscientious of this little project's scale, of the aesthetic and cultural potential muddles, and of the clock, and now it's fate is unclear.

The paint is dry, the projector is roughly aimed (we won't be able to fine-tune until we project the image back), but Douglas is having trouble getting video out of the Mac which costs us a couple hours. Finally, with the help of a couple students, they get it working and start playing with the image. Douglas is a Director hacker, and wants to flex some muscle with his animation skills. The students huddle around as Douglas makes the drawing of the little boy on the cereal box smile and frown, the empty bowl fill up with cornflakes and milk, and the loaf of bread be eaten piece by piece.

By 5pm we move the Mac into the dark studio and begin the tedious process of aligning the projector in six dimensions (plus zoom) to match the angle and position of the camera. Yesterday I tried suggesting they keep the camera horizontal and that, though it wouldn't have the same coverage of the top of things, it would be much easier to align the projector in the end. I couldn't and gave up. Too much science. So now they are learning for themselves.

After about an hour, they have a pretty decent alignment. All the white-painting things look passably normal, at least at first glance. The animation turns out to be funny and revealing. The animated face looks great. The empty bowl filling up looks pretty good, but one student suggests placing a white top on the bowl for better projection. The bread disappearing fails, mainly because the white-painted bread still looks like, well, white-painted bread. Another student suggests that spackling in all the cracks on the loaf would make the projector work better.

It's now almost 7pm when the gates will close, and we feel like we completed a far-from-perfect work but a not-bad study, just in time.