MotionPhone was released last week as an app for the iPad. The app lets people create abstract animations together over a network, choosing colors, shapes, and forms that follow their fingers’ most subtle movements. By moving again-and-again in the same animated canvas, people can create layers and rhythms of abstract form and color, much like musicians layer track after track of audio in the studio sessions.

With MotionPhone, people can connect to each other using their iPads for a visual “conversation” using Apple’s Game Center social gaming network. Ordinarily used for leaderboards and multiplayer games, we’ve used Apple’s gaming network for a social form of creativity that updates parlor games like Consequences and Exquisite Corpse into the era of digital animation. And MotionPhone’s iPad canvas is not merely a window, but an infinite two-dimensional world, where people can move about and have different visual conversations at different locations and scales as they pinch in or zoom out.

MotionPhone for the iPad

The original Motion Phone was one of the first networked works of art, and the first interactive networked animation system. Motion Phone began more than 23 years ago, when I was exploring how to make animation directly with my body. In film school at the Rhode Island School of Design, I was inspired by two experimental animation pioneers. The first, Oskar Fischinger, pioneered a cinema of pure abstraction. His earliest films are simple black and white forms, drawn frame-by-frame in charcoal. Yet the resulting movements, such as in Study Number 8 (1931), have incredible emotional power. The second pioneer, Len Lye, pioneered “direct cinema,” created by marking directly on the film surface with pens, inks, or by scratching emulsion off of black leader, as in his masterpiece Free Radicals (1957). These and other film artists’ work are sometimes referred to as Visual Music.

Oskar Fischinger’s Study Number 8, 1931. Courtesy Center For Visual Music. (c) Fischinger Trust 2012

Len Lye’s Free Radicals, 1958

In my enthusiasm for abstract animation, and for interactive computer graphics, I was searching for a way to improvise hard-edged abstraction like Fischinger’s by using my body directly the way Lye did, but with a computer rather than film. In an epiphany one evening staring at the computer, I realized that the cursor was the most interesting object on the screen. Here was the only place that my body, through the mouse, came into the machine. Based on this understanding, I created Motion Sketch, originally written for a Sun SPARCstation, which attaches the movements of one’s hand to the movements of abstract forms. These forms are laid down into a short one-second graphics loop whose temporal complexity results from the continuous layering of forms, creating a rich motion painting.

Motion Phone (1995) was a networked version of Motion Sketch, written for Silicon Graphics workstations. With this software, multiple computers, networked via the Internet, communicate together simultaneously through a shared animated canvas.

As an experiment in abstract visual communication, Motion Phone created new social rules. Instead of a fixed size canvas, Motion Phone provided an infinitely zoomable plane. Multiple “conversations” take place at any position or scale within this virtual world. However, each performer cannot be certain what the other is looking at.

Similarly, performers have independent control of frame rate. If one person sets their frame rate low, they can seem to run circles around the other, creating at miraculous speed and with incredible temporal precision.

Each performer can only erase his own work, and one can also choose to not display anyone else’s work if privacy is desired. However, the background color is set to the last person’s choice so that there is at least one thing to fight over: changes to background color are instantaneous and startling.

By working with a loop, the problem of communication latency becomes irrelevant. As the one-second loop continues over-and-over for each viewer, new material from other viewers appears whenever it arrives. As long as the strokes are revealed within a few seconds of their creation, all the creators have the sense of the lively progress within a shared dynamic canvas.

Motion Phone was first exhibited in 1995 at SIGGRAPH Los Angeles, in a fairly amateur presentation to see how people would respond (see the video above). At the show, I met many contemporaries in abstract animation and interactivity. Computer animation pioneer Larry Cuba spent hours at the SIGGRAPH installation, and introduced me to Elfriede Fischinger, Oskar Fischinger’s widow, whom I had a wonderful afternoon with together, listening to her reminisce about Oskar, and viewing her library, paintings, and notes. Larry also introduced me to Bill Moritz, the foremost scholar of abstract animation, who  had me over his house for a long discussion and tour of his archive, where he gave me some rare Fischinger publications.

Motion Phone won a Prix Ars Electronica prize in 1996, a prize often referred to as the ‘Academy Awards’ of interactive art, and was invited to many international shows afterwards.

Several contemporary digital artists were inspired by Motion Phone, including Golan Levin, whom I showed the program to in 1996 while working together at Interval Research. The experience convinced him that he should learn how to program and make similar works, and we can all be grateful that he did, as he has become one of the foremost interactive artists and educators. When Golan later went to MIT he showed Motion Phone to Casey Reas and others in John Maeda’s legendary Aesthetics and Computation Group, where the beginner’s graphical language Processing was born. My colleague Lukas Girling whom I also met at Interval Research, was also excited by Motion Phone (as was I by his work in interactive music), and we began a collaboration that continues to this day with projects like OscilloScoop.

My hope is that MotionPhone and programs like it can serve as an alternative to ordinary communication like email, text, and video chat—a form of communication where people work together in a meditative, creative process to make something together, and where they experience the kind of concentrated attention that is familiar to artists, musicians, and meditators. This type of attention is different from the neurotic attention of video games, or the sedative concentration of television. Might it even be possible for this social form of networked animation art to become a mass medium?

Read More

Visit MotionPhone at Scott Snibbe Studio for news about the app, and the technical paper Interactive Dynamic Abstraction from the Proceedings of the Symposium on Nonphotorealistic Animation and Rendering, June 2000, describes technical and creative details.

Interactive Art’s Entrepreneurial Urge

In 1935 Marcel Duchamp nervously awaited the public in Alley F, Booth Number 147 of Paris’ 33rd Concours Lepin. This exhibition offered inventors a chance to showcase a new product before the public and financial backers. Over the years many notable inventions debuted at the Concours including the ballpoint pen, the steam iron, and the contact lens. However, on this day Duchamp offered a series of abstract interactive artworks called Rotoreliefs, which he had just patented.

Marcel Duchamp's Rotorelief, 1935

Duchamp’s invention was a series of circular disks printed with abstract patterns. When placed upon a spinning record player, the discs created optical illusions of depth, color, and movement. Duchamp won an honorable mention in the Industrial Art category for his invention, which he also mischievously referred to as silent music. Unfortunately, Duchamp’s investment was a failure. He received few orders and was ignored in favor of more practical inventions like those of his neighbors: a pre-Cuisinart food processor and an early trash compactor. Most of his first run of 500 units were lost or destroyed.

Rarely have painters and sculptors attempted to mass-market their works of art the way musicians and filmmakers do. What is it about the genre of interactive and time-based media that brings out the entrepreneurial urge? I believe it is the inherently personal nature of interactivity. An experience like Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs is best encountered privately in an intimate space. Over the course of weeks and years the viewer becomes increasingly familiar with its time-varying and reactive properties, getting to know it like a favorite song. More fundamentally, we recognize that artistic interactivity is modeled on intimate face-to-face interactions with other human beings, in constrast with the less intimate “broadcast” experiences of a gallery, performance, or exhibition.

Duchamp was not alone in his dream of reaching out directly to his “customers.” Now nearly forgotten, but groundbreaking in his time, Thomas Wilfred pioneered light performances decades before their rise in the 1960s. His performances, called Lumia, were created with his Clavilux, a color organ of his own invention. These performances, which took place mostly in the 1920s, were infrequent, expensive, and ephemeral. Seeking to broaden his audience, in 1930 Wilfred premiered sixteen Home Clavilux devices, also known as Clavilux Juniors.

Thomas Wilfred's Home Clavilux, 1930

These devices imagined a world where families would sit down after dinner, open a handsome hinged oak cabinet, and enjoy an evening of time-varying abstract light. The “visual music” inside the box was created by lights modulated by colored disks that reflected and refracted across miniature mirrors onto a translucent screen. In a gesture anticipating John Cage, Wilfred named each Home Clavilux numerically, based on the amount of time before the performance began to repeat: one device was subtitled 8 Hours, 15 Minutes, 42 Seconds. Each Clavilux also included interactive controls to modify the tempo, shutter, and color of the pre-programmed performance. Unfortunately, these devices, like Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, proved commercial failures, and none were constructed after the initial run. Wilfred almost got it right—people did want to watch a cabinet of light—but preferred the greyscale forms of Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball to waves of color. Most of the original Home Claviluxes have been lost or destroyed.

Oskar Fischinger's Lumigraph, 1950s

Oskar Fischinger, the master of abstraction animation, also flirted with distributing interactive abstraction. While living in Los Angeles during the latter years of his life, Fischinger invented a “real-time” method to produce abstract imagery. His device, which he named the Lumigraph, consisted of a flexible white screen that he pressed into with his hands, intersecting sheets of colored light controlled via interactive dials and pulleys. Fischinger made several performances over the years with the Lumigraph, and a patent issued in 1955 attests to his hopes to commercialize and distribute the device. However, his dreams were never realized. The broadest distribution the Lumigraph achieved was via Hollywood in the role of a futuristic erotic stimulator in the 1965 film Time Travelers.

Lumigraph Patent, 1955

Today we have more hope. With the introduction of the iPad and its smaller mobile cousins, the problem of a device and distribution is solved: interactive artists can now focus on the software “scores” for our intimate, interactive performances. These highly useful devices can be exploited for useless purposes. I feared for several years that my career would go the way of the ignored precursors I revered like Wilfred and Fischinger. In 2002 I stopped creating abstract screen-based interactivity after a dozen years of showing in galleries and museums without sales or wider distribution. Now, after two months in the app store, I have an audience of hundreds of thousands that grows daily. Gravilux, Bubble Harp, and Antograph are enjoyed by people all over the world, bringing the unique joys of abstract interaction to anyone with a mobile device, and taking their minds away momentarily from more neurotic activities. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing modern masters of interactive abstraction like John Simon Jr. and Camille Utterback turn their efforts to this small screen and delight viewers worldwide. Could abstract interactive art become as widespread, and easily “consumed” as music and movies? Stay tuned.

REFERENCES

H.P. Roché, “Souvenirs of Marcel Duchamp,” in Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 79 and 86. Originally published in the Nouvelle Revue Française, June 1953, 79-87

Thomas Wilfred: A Retrospective. Concoran Gallery Exhibition Catalog. Washington, 1972.

Fischinger, Elfriede, “Writing Light,” reprinted in First Light, Robert A. Haller, ed. New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1998: 30-34. http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/WritingLight.htm

Personal conversations with Elfriede Fischinger and William Moritz, August, 1995.

Thanks to Cindy Keefer of the Center for Visual Music (http://centerforvisualmusic.org) for up-to-date references on Fischinger’s Lumigraph.