C94 Article  |
| image by John Gerrard, adapted for website |
As MediaLabEurope takes up residence in Dublin's Guinness Hop Store, John Gerrard and Gemma Tipton look at the commercial and cultural crossovers of art and technology which it may represent.
MediaLabEurope was formally launched in Dublin on July 24 by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in the Guinness Hop Store. Backed by IR£28 million (from the National Development Plan budgets) and the provision of a permanent premises (the Hop Store) from the Irish Government, "MediaLabEurope's mission will be to prepare future generations of young researchers, inventors and artists - primarily from Ireland, but also from elsewhere in Europe - to become international entrepreneurs and leaders in communications, multimedia and the learning arts and sciences." At its most basic level, MediaLabEurope is an independent, university-level research and education centre, designed "to re-invent the future" and to "replicate the innovative and entrepreneurial environment" of MIT Media Lab 1 .
Ireland wasn't the first choice of the Media Lab. From U.S. Government-driven flirtations with Japan in the early nineties, to advanced discussions with Germany, Ireland ultimately became Media Lab's first 'off-shore' home because, as Director Nicholas Negroponte puts it "Ireland provides the kind of intellectual, economic and governmental environment ideally suited for this ambitious international effort to transform ways of thinking and creating." 2 During the first ten years of its life, MLE will be able to benefit from an "inflow of intellectual know-how" from Media Lab in the U.S., and part of the IR£28 million from the Irish Government is an IR£8.4 million payment to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for this assistance.
This structure of payment for knowledge points to a factor which can be forgotten in the exciting rhetoric of MLE: that even though it is under the umbrella of MIT, Media Lab is a company, not a university, and so is MLE. While there is an excellent teaching remit and an exciting research programme, there is also an underlying sense of knowledge needing to have a financial value. It is probable that this is also due to an Americanised view of the operation of a university (in the U.S. all the top universities are private), a view which is starting to permeate Irish universities too - that education must pay for itself. Viewed in this context, the ambition to "transform ways of thinking and creating" carries a slightly different edge - imagine the phrase coming from Eircom or even Microsoft.
The positioning of MLE at the Hop Store seems to signal a key moment in the transition from Ireland's primary attraction being its reputation for Guinness to our being the wired technocrats of Europe. Consider also that a crucial stage of the Hop Store's metamorphosis from brewing joint to epicentre of this technology was as one of Dublin's best art spaces (specifically home of ROSC in the Eighties). It seems timely to use the moment to investigate the relationship and influence artists can hope to enjoy with the kind of technology that is going to be developed at MLE.
The scale of the reputation and endeavour of Media Lab brings exciting possibilities to their Dublin enterprise. It is early days for MediaLabEurope; they have yet to put in place the structures that will dictate their operations here. Given that the balance of the estimated 10-year running costs of IR£130 million is to be raised from research contracts, sponsorships and private contributions, this delay in announcing a programme is not necessarily surprising. The Irish Times referred to Media Lab as "The Holy Grail of Multimedia" 3 and, while that may be overstating the case somewhat (the likes of Apple Computers, Adobe, Macromedia and the denizens of Silicon Valley being not insignificant players themselves), the best clues to how MLE will function can be gleaned from looking at the operations of Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Founding Director of Media Lab, Negroponte had two models in mind when he was sourcing the $50 million required to build and equip it. One model came from the likes of Bell Labs and Xerox, but the second came from the Bauhaus. In his book, Being Digital he also likens it in its early days to the Salon des Refusés of the Impressionists. 4 The words 'Art', 'the Arts' and 'Artists' appear throughout Being Digital and in the web and press material of both Media Lab and MLE, while the working practices at Media Lab are compared to the Atelier system of the Renaissance. In the first instance, this self-conscious juxtaposition of technology and the arts comes from Negroponte's own architectural training. "There is a perceived polarity (however artificial) between technology and the humanities, between science and art, between right brain and left. The burgeoning field of multimedia is likely to be one of those disciplines, like architecture, that bridges the gap." 5
Another reason for the insertion of art into technological or business endeavours is the conferred cultural value which accrues when artistic alibis are applied to commercial projects. Digital artist Feargal Fitzpatrick puts it this way: "art has always been the cultural wing of the dominant ideology." A palliative, a cosmetic. Applying the notion of the artistic to something confers a particular set of values. As Fitzpatrick points out, for example, Trinity College's multimedia MSc exhibits its end-of-year projects in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, endowing the work, by inference, with the creative and specific cultural values of the fine arts.
But Media Lab has always promoted the artistic element in its operations, for highly practical and straightforward reasons. According to MLE faculty member Tod Machover, "One of the reasons we have such a focus on the arts is that Nicholas Negroponte...had the intuition that we'd come up with a completely different response to questions about technology because of that." He continues, "The arts, which started out as the farthest, wackiest fringe, have become a central part and touch nearly everyone at the Media Lab." And this centrality has now come to be described as a fusion: "you can't say that this person is an artist or a technologist. Many of these students think of these issues together." 6
In practical application, this has enormous benefits for artists at Media Lab developing new projects. Irish artist Aisling Kelliher came to Media Lab by way of the Trinity College MSc in multimedia systems. She describes the lab as a
unique place in that you have a very diverse mixture of people from different countries, cultures and backgrounds working together in imagining how things could be. The idea is not to just to create functional, utilitarian computational systems and devices, but also to give consideration to the aesthetics of how these inventions will look, feel, sound, taste, etc.
The arts and expression group is a newly formed effort in the lab... we want to push and explore the boundaries of expression, using the technology at our disposal as a tool, as content and as a way for creating new contexts for the delivery and reception of cr eative works.
Kelliher uses her installation Stations as a working example of the interaction between art and technology at Media Lab.
I wanted to do more adventurous things with the different elements [of the project] and it was really just a case of pottering around the lab and finding people with the necessary experience and know how... that's the beauty of working here - the gaps in your knowledge can be filled and extended by others in the lab who are all creative, talented people who can take your vision/proposal and really push it and help make it something special. Without this symbiotic, dynamic relationship between students and staff we probably wouldn't achieve such a richness and depth in our work.
This attempted fusion of art and technology is not without its problems. As Negroponte puts it,
computers and art can bring out the worst in each other when they first meet. One reason is that the signature of the machine can be too strong. It can overpower the intended expression, as occurs so often in holographic art and 3-D movies. Technology can be like a jalapeño pepper in a French sauce. The flavour of the computer can drown the subtler signals of the art. 7
The terms 'art' and 'technology' are used somewhat loosely here, as Mick Wilson points out: "it seems to me that oil paint is a technology. It seems to me that perspective is a technology..." 8 Nonetheless, technology, as Media Lab would have it, is a medium worth exploring. As a medium for expression, it is important that artists are involved with the development of its evolution. Negroponte puts it thus:
Technological imperatives - and only those imperatives - drove the development of television. Then it was handed off to a body of creative talent, with different values, from a different intellectual subculture. Photography on the other hand, was invented by photographers. The people who perfected photographic technology did it for expressive purposes, fine tuning their techniques to meet the needs of their art. 9
This involvement is especially crucial as one of MediaLabEurope's missions in Dublin is the creation of a "new art form." Glorianna Davenport, head of the Interactive Cinema Department at Media Lab, now also working at MLE says, "I think we've got to the point with the technology that it gives us enormous opportunity to reinvent or newly invent form." Machover adds, "we need to figure out what comes after cinema...we're hoping to develop a large part of it in Ireland." 10
As with Machover's Brain Opera (brainop.media.mit.edu), it is not inevitable that this will be a totally new form (in the manner of photography), but possibly a synthesis of existing forms, or a re-presentation of forms over a new interface, but in terms of access to the development of technologies, and usage of these technologies, artists are at a unique point in the crossover between their artistic and commercial applications. In addition to the integration of artists in structures like those of Media Lab, artists are also being taught to use computer tools on fine-art degree courses, and while fields such as advertising have traditionally plundered the art schools for creative staff, they are now opening up to an entire raft of diversely digital cultural concerns. The radical new look of Apple computers was designed by a graduate of London's Royal College of Art, for example, and the exposure that multimedia technology offers is massive. Negroponte believes that "artists will come to see the Internet as the world's largest gallery for their expressions." 11 But, to take levels of exposure as a measure of achievement, consider, as Feargal Fitzpatrick points out, that "the people who designed the Windows interface have had more pairs of eyes looking at their work than any artist or designer for the past 100 years."
The title of this article, The Bleeding Edge , refers to the first release period of newly developed software, during which a beta version is put out so that bugs and glitches can be ironed out with usage. It is then that the conditions of the laboratory are exposed as not having been sufficient to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the new program. The establishment of MLE seems to come at a bleeding-edge point for artists working at the commercial and cultural crossover of new technologies. We await developments. 12
1 Quotations from web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/1999/mle.html . The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the parent organisation of the Media Lab, is one of the leading research universities in the world with approximately 2,568 researchers and employing 2,401 research assistants and 706 teaching assistants (1998-99 figures). MIT routinely leads all U.S. universities in patents granted (details from web.mit.edu/facts/research.shtml). MIT has been responsible for technological breakthroughs in the development of various artforms. North America's first School of Architecture was at MIT, MIT students developed the hand-held super-8 camera and, of course, the facility is at the pioneering heart of digital video and multimedia.
2 Frames , the monthly publication for sponsors of The Media Laboratory (MIT), May 2000, Number 96.
3 The Irish Times , May 16, 2000.
4 Negroponte, Nicholas, Being Digital , Vintage, New York 1995, p. 225.
5 ibid, p. 81.
6 Tod Machover, quoted by Karlin Lillington in The Irish Times , July 28, 2000.
7 Negroponte, Nicholas, op cit , p. 223.
8 CIRCA 93, p. 43.
9 Negroponte, Nicholas, op cit , p. 82.
10 quoted by Karlin Lillington in The Irish Times , July 28, 2000.
11 Negroponte, Nicholas, op cit , p. 224.
12 Dor a totally different perspective on MLE, try meejalab.tripod.com .. .
John Gerrard is an artist based in Dublin.
Gemma Tipton is a writer based in Dublin.
Article reproduced from CIRCA 94, Winter 2000, pp. 15-17.
