Terre Di Nessuno

Probably the biggest challenge involved in organising the technological structure that encompasses the Terre di nessuno installation was that of moving within the intercontextual territory found between the different languages used.

It is a navigable environment. However, unlike the Internet, an installation of this kind allows the interconnection of devices that can exchange a large quantity of data. Thus, this sort of multimedia intranet serves to enable all lighting, sound and video equipment to respond to the actions of visitors, so that each moment is unique and essentially unrepeatable, given the immense number of possible combinations among the different sensors distributed throughout the installation and the different devices connected to them.

With this end in view, research and development tasks were performed to achieve navigation control by means of ultrasound sensors that respond to proximity, along with other types of sensors capable of stimulating a relay (buttons, switches, beams of light, etc.). All this makes the installation a sensitive tissue, which uses a sophisticated system of translators to transform the initiatives taken by participants into bits of information that can be read by the various machines.

Multiple languages come together in the control systems especially designed for this installation. Ultrasound signals cut through the air to convert the language of moving hands into MIDI messages, thanks to a microcontroller programmed in assembly language.

Other sensors also enter the world of MIDI musical notes by means of electronic microprocessors and CPLDs (complex logic device programmed in the ABEL hardware design language).

MIDI messages can be used here not in their customary musical form, but rather to carry information from the sensors to a laptop that executes a C++ program written specifically for the installation.

This laptop (in yet another change of language) can conduct a dialogue via USB (Universal Serial Bus) with any other computer, managing to emulate the movement of a mouse which, rather than non-existent, is omniexistent (since it is distributed through the sensor space) thanks to the program, which allows the specification of the desired action by each sensor (movement and mouse click).

From the territory of analogue data in which our activity takes place, the different sensors perform measurements which, one the first conversion has been effected, become numbers that can be used within the digital environment of computers.

This initial digitalisation is translated to MIDI by a piece of custom hardware. Once translated, is it relayed to a computer running a program that permits a new translation into mouse events. The program, written especially for this project, ends the process by converting hand movements and other gestures into movements and actions of the mouse on the screen of a second computer.

This is a very important step in bringing a wide range of gestures nearer to the environment in which the selections are produced and other types of instructions normally used by computer equipment and which have been limited by the needs of most people to be able to communicate with the machines via the such devices as the keyboard and mouse. Only for computer games has it been regarded as necessary to develop specific instruments (e.g. the joystick) to allow interactivity that is more in accord with their own needs. Even so, such needs tend to be quite specific, and do not lend themselves to a use such as this, in which the sensorial capacity of the system have been expanded to perceive other type of actions, which may be less precise than, for instance, disarming an enemy in a game.

These are actions which we might define as exploratory, and that have no purpose beyond satisfying a certain curiosity that may be sparked by the fact of extending a hand or pushing a button or stepping on something or interfering with a beam of light just to see what happens.

A second machine contains a program in which all the mouse events produced by a visitor’s movements set off different actions which make changes on the screen –changes of scene or of state. These changes, in turn, may provoke variations in the lighting, cause videos or sounds to be played, or transform the very multimedia structure of the computer one is using to navigate.
But in this no-man’s land, the result of this interaction is not specific. It is not a simple Pavlovian mechanism that furnishes concrete responses. What the environment returns is the result that specific interaction causes in combination with other initiatives: the response received refers to the overall index of activity registered in combination with the drift of events that are characteristic of the state of the installation at the moment of interaction.

Accordingly, this technological edifice is characterised by polycentrism in the heart of an a-centric society, and is more like a labyrinth than a motorway with a happy ending.
With help from interactive experiences, undefined complexity becomes a complexity with a certain margin of tolerance of the establishment of differences, as a condition for the possibility of obtaining and processing information.

However, this information obviously does not allow us to draw any kind of conclusions, or even provide is with the slightest orientation. The experience in itself returns only snippets, fragments. Perhaps it poses in this way, among other things, the possibility of obtaining self-references in the dialogue with systems whose data-processing capacity notably surpasses our own. It is possible that we will not always need to write a word to choose a specific actions. It may be that we find ourselves, as indeed occurs in other spheres, with the need to explore in order to discover what our next step will be.

Indeed, machines today are able to provide us with the illusion of a highly organised world, but we should not be so gullible as to imagine that this us all they can really offer. By extending our capacities so spectacularly, a new dilemma is posed.

We must be able to conduct a dialogue –using the same evolutionary mechanisms that have brought us to our present condition– with entities that may enable us to extend our capacity to perceive semi-organised structures or structures that are organised at the frontiers of what we customarily understand as organisation. But what languages shall we use for this dialogue? The language of the instructions through which machines serve our most immediate purposes, or a language in which the machine can take on our exploratory needs and furnish us with different possibilities, allowing us to discover different possible paths? Choosing a different path from those that are normally supplied by developments of artificial intelligence, we understand that technology is nothing more than an extraordinary prosthetic through which humans may proceed with their peculiar evolution, and it is this symbiotic meeting that operates as a single unity. This vision poses the needs that have obliged us to develop different relational mechanisms that can lead to a different encounter.

This initiative obliged is to physically disassemble some apparatus, given the non-existence of systems that the job required, and throughout such a process the question inevitably arises of whether its is really our needs that determine the construction of devices, or whether, contrariwise, it is the devices that determine the creation of needs. For example, are our needs are television viewers what determine the creation of the television set, or, if a television set is offered us as a means of dialogue, will our needs as viewers arise from that?

If we accept the second hypothesis, then similar reasoning will confer an unusual responsibility on the development of technological systems like those directly responsible for the production of contexts of characteristic behaviour. For instance, the type of context spawned by technological computer developments will be what determines the needs –and hence the behaviour– of computer users.

And those who decide what these devices will be like are establishing, in a certain way, the rules of play for all participants. If this is the case, then who decides what kind of devices are suitable for use, and the kinds of games we should be playing?

The question will remain unanswered because, on the one hand, the technological pyramid at its base is seen as an undeniable reality, and, on the other, we can’t allow ourselves to ascribe the responsibility to individual as thoughtless as Bill Gates or organisations like Microsoft or Apple, because we cannot accept that our destiny is being marked out only by business greed.

But the fact is that in order the engender an interactive environment such as that posed by Terre di nessuno, we have found ourselves obliged to work exhaustively on the development of translation systems that allow the different devices to communicate amongst themselves.

Taken together, a tower (a network?) of languages co-operating to merge the real and virtual exhibition spaces, which may thus interact and communicate, is fused into a unique mutant entity.

Just another no-man’s land.

.	Terre Di Nessuno
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