Telepresent visitors operate a telerobot that leaves behind a digital “bread crumb” trail that mathematically mutates over time as they attempt to navigate the massive maze made from a human thumbprint.
Chimera Obscura
Commissioned for The Henry Art Gallery and the Berkeley Art Museum 2001-2003 world premiere of the touring exhibition, Genesis | Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics. Chimera Obscura examines the historical anxieties and eugenic fantasies of genomic research through the creation and evolution of a rapidly evolving online, massive multi-user data organism..
Crossing the boundary between gallery installation and telepresent artwork, Chimera Obscura centers on the remote operation of a precision tele-robot that Internet visitors pilot by navigating an elaborate real-world maze created from a giant human thumbprint. As online visitors teleport themselves into each museums maze, they use the robotic video camera as their eyes, and its mobility as their legs to navigate and move their agency through uncharted maze space. As they wander, discover and explore the maze remotely, they leave behind dense archeological layers of virtual information genes (media files of any type, i.e. video, audio, text, graphics) for others to read, duplicate or delete in the search for the unique sequence that will decode the maze.
Loosely following a mutative game style structure, the activity and data patterns visitors leave behind form an electronic "bread crumb trail" that evolves over time into information nodes. As the maze space becomes populated with the memory of its many visitors, the information they have left behind becomes the landscape of the maze with directions and landmarks where the activity inherent in the information architecture of each exploration accumulates, grows and naturally mutates over time. The more activity that occurs within the organism, the more robustly the data evolves and the maze space changes to become both the history of the process and the social organism that evolves directly from the activity that creates the project.
Four severs running proprietary software comprise the computational backbone of the Chimera. The online interface integrates all aspects of a visitor's exploration (camera, robotic control, location, history, database, etc.) into a unified user experience. The interface provides elegant control of the tele-robot located in the gallery, and the ability to simultaneously excavate any previous visitors journey or create a new detailed digital memory and map of their own journey using text, sound, video and graphics.
Each new visitor that logs on is placed at the last physical location the robot had been abandoned by the previous explorer. The interface provides cardinal directions for moving the robot, and real-time video feedback so one can instantly see and travel where they wish. The interface allows visitors to linger, at each point in the maze and to excavate the library of millions of information gene's left behind by others, or possibly even mutated data left by themselves on previous expeditions. The videos, poems and sounds that made up the experience of the visitors provided clues of where you and others have been, and act as a dialogue on being telematically lost and found.
The process of navigation and sequencing feels both wonderfully alien and poetically intuitive as one charts wholly unfamiliar topology, looking for and leaving clues. Repeat visitors to Chimera began to break through by assuming a hybrid form of telematic cyborg - simultaneously operating in real space (the museum) and virtual space (the Internet), while existing physically in a third space, (their actual space anywhere in the world with a networked computer).
The ghost of the minotaur also roams the maze in the form of random mutative forces (mathematical algorithms), subtly modifying the original data left behind, frustrating any attempt at easy linear resolution.
The continually evolving structure of the maze, its dynamic range and mutability of input requires that visitors work together to align in loose confederations much like social organisms generating maps of navigation and understanding of this new kind of hybrid space, space that is fully co-mingled and woven from equal parts real and virtual.