Ritual Union: An Analytical Essay on Topics and Concepts
Below you will find a short essay on the themes presented in
Ritual Union constructed by myself and my contemporaries at school.
I hope you enjoy the read:
Rohan Likhite et al.
FACS 3936
David Han
Tuesday Oct 16th, 2012
An Analytical Essay on Ritual Union
Humans’ most dominant sense is that of sight, our species depends on it for everything from basic motor control to communication as well as a means of experiencing the world around us. It has only been in the last few centuries or so that studies on human perception via eyesight have come to light. Additionally, with the world being one of constant emerging new media forms, the topic of a computer’s ability to “look at” and “perceive” the world via external hardware is one in which experts have recently delved into. Within Ritual Union there is a challenging questions being presented in that, can there be an inversion of spectatorship between an interactive art installation and its audience? Subsequently, can the installation participant be made to feel that they are apart of the installation as a result of this inverted recursion of seeing one another?
The notion that computers and humans can interact solely based on visual communication requires a lot of primitive conceptual framework. For example, with Ritual Union, the software is required to detect human like shapes and interpret them accordingly. According to Sven J. Dickinson et al, “The human visual system harbors both raw (pixel-like) representations and a great variety of complex and structured ones, whereas a pedestrian detection system may only need the former; this is why a human is much better not only at seeing the visual world as a profusion of objects, but also as ‘just seing’…” (Dickinson, Sven J. 76). A complex human-like way of seeing can only be accomplished by programming cases and values into a computer’s systems. This is problematic as a computer that is programmed to visually understand certain objects may reject foreign, unknown objects thus rendering the software useless. It is because of this that Ritual Union utilizes library’s that have been developed for one specific task, which is to detect an adult human. Dickinson brings up the problem of “seeing” vs. “seeing as” and a main point within Ritual Union is upon “seeing” the pixels it is really “seeing them as” a human and acting accordingly based on pre-programmed behaviors.
This behavior, stemming from Ritual Union’s ability to follow users with its eyes relates to author David Benyon and his text on interactive systems. He outlines brief details on the ergonomics of these systems stating, “Ergonomics. This is primarily concerned with fitting the machine to the person. It draws upon psychology, anatomy, anthropometrics and lots of environmental sciences,” he then moves further to say, “The design of interactive system which recognizes the role and importance of the body – which includes the discipline of ergonomics – may be described as embodied interaction” (Benyon, David 185). Ritual Union is a form of this “interaction” that Benyon describes as it provides the user with feedback at they test and experiment with it. Similarly by recognizing the user’s entire body as a means of evoking an action out of Ritual Union there is a general concept of embodying the user.
The aforementioned concepts of “seeing vs. seeing as” and “embodied interaction” both lead up to the final notion of Ritual Union being an interactive installation, one in which is able to convince the user that it watching him/her. In this Ritual Union tries to go beyond the traditional experience of viewing a composition in a gallery setting where everything is static and the composition is solely being viewed by the audience member. This is best described by Aviva Dove- Viebahn from the University of Rochester, who in the article “Looking for Pleasure: Art, Spectatorship, and Desire in a Televisual Age” states:
Mechanical reproduction allows the viewer to encounter an object or performance under variable and numerous circumstances, distorting and dispersing the ‘authentic’ apsects of the object’s physical presence in a specific space and time (i.e. the controlled environment of the museum, the acoustic resonance of a music hall, or the sobering sanctity of a cathedral’s grounds). (Dove-Viebahn, Aviva Chantal Tamu).
This one sided experience is what Ritual Union tries to avoid, uniting both the viewer as well as the composition by creating an recursion of spectatorship involving both parties. One artists who exemplifies this is Lygia Clark who explains in her essay “We Refuse…”,
What’s happening around me? A whole group of people clearly sees that modern art doesn’t communicate, is increasingly becoming an elitist issue. So they turn to popular art, hoping to fill the gulf that separates them from the majority… For myself, I belong to a third group that tries to elicit the public’s participation. This totally changes the meaning of art as one has understood it up to now. (Clark, Lygia)
Other artists that exemplify this kind of work are Golan Levin and Eric Corriel. Both artists deal in part with active user interaction as well as the inversion of sight between the user and composition.
In conclusion Ritual Union is an art installation set out to reverse the roles of observer vs. observed. It will do this between itself and a user who interacts with it. Therefore, it may redefine the relationship between itself and a user, strengthening it by creating a symbiosis instead of a removed environment between itself and a user.
Works Cited:
Dickinson, Sven J. Object Categorization: Computer and Human Vision Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.
Benyon, David. Designing Interactive Systems: Peoples, Activities, Contexts, Technologies. Harlow: Pearson Educated Limited, 2005. Print.
Dove-Viebahn, Aviva Chantal Tamu. "Looking for Pleasure: Art, Spectatorship, and Desire in a Televisual Age." Looking for Pleasure : Art, Spectatorship, and Desire in a Televisual Age. University of Rochester, 11th June 2010. Web. 14th Oct. 2012.
Clark, Lygia. "We Refuse..." O Mundo de Lygia Clark. Associação Cultural, 1966. Web. 14th Oct. 2012.
