Introduction
Berkeley, CA, 01/05/08: My artwork is in new media, that is to say the elements I work with are electricity, people and code. I started out as a photographer, and switched my practice to new media while I was in the MFA program at Stanford University. My colleague Prof. Anne Walsh described the type of work I do now by saying, "Greg's art tends to increase the desire for exchange." Other people say all projects examine breathing in some way. But many of them are just games which seek to support cultural change. Below are some recent highlights, and I write about such games on my Free Change blog, too.
- Oxygen Flute: A flute-playing greenhouse
- Balance Game: Improve your balance while playing this videogame
- Tomato Quintet It's better to hear tomatoes ripen than to watch the grass grow
For the more chronologically minded, here is a narrative account of my projects so far:
Projects in Chronological Order
My first new media project was Flash Language Cards, 1997. It was a set of language memorization cards, for students of Mandarin, featuring difficult words such as "Underground Resistance", together with an obliquely related illustration, such as, an image of a tree's root system. With the tension between image and text I meant to illustrate how teaching a language can help establish value systems and behavior modifications. The images were executed in 3D modeling software. The cards were available for sale, and I actually sold some sets to language card collectors and unsuspecting Mandarin students. The cards were exhibited at the Xerox Parc Gallery in Palo Alto.
The following project was a collaboration with Dr. Chris Beaulieu, a Colonoscopy expert, and with Seny Lee, a composer. Together, we made a movie about a virtual colonoscopy, very slow, and available online here. The project was called Voyage through the Human Body, and we made it for the Stanford Art Museum, in Palo Alto. Subsequently, the movie was screened in many venues. What I liked about it is that it showed an intimate interior space as a large dataset, since the colonoscopy was based on a large spreadsheet of water densities in one man's guts.
Ping
Ping was a collaboration between Chris Chafe and me, which Benjamin Weil commissioned for the SFMOMA 010101 show. Intel's Dana Plautz supported the installation, and Richard Mortimer Humphrey built the custom electronics for the project. The metals were fabricated by a local motorcycle shop.
Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes wrote this review:
Created by composer and researcher Chris Chafe and digital artist Greg Niemeyer, Ping is a site-specific sound installation that is an outgrowth of audio networking research at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics and interactive and graphic design experiments originating from the Stanford University Digital Art Center. Ping is a sonic adaptation of a network tool commonly used for timing data transmission over the Internet. As installed in the outdoor atrium of SFMOMA, Ping functions as a sonar-like detector whose echoes sound out the paths traversed by data flowing on the Internet. At any given moment, several sites are concurrently active, and the tones that are heard in Ping make audible the time lag that occurs while moving information from one site to another between networked computers.
Within the Ping environment, one can navigate through the network soundscape while overlooking San Francisco, a cityscape itself linked by the same networks that constitute the medium. Visitors to the installation can expand or change the list of available sites as well as influence the types of sound produced, choosing different projections of the instruments, musical scales, and speaker configurations in the surround-sound environment.
Current explorations pertaining to sound synthesis and Internet engineering are the foundation of the Ping installation. The research that led to this installation is, however, just one part of a larger effort to investigate the usefulness of audio for internetworking and, reciprocally, ways in which the Internet can abet audio. It is precisely this dialectic surrounding Ping that illustrates the increasingly common intersection of art and technical advancements, an interdisciplinary breeding ground where computer-based technology functions both as a stunning artistic medium and as a research tool.
Oxygen Flute (Chafe, Niemeyer)
Oxygen Flute (2002) allowed players to experience their impact on a chamber full of bamboo plants in terms of their breathing. Inside the chamber, a Carbon Dioxide monitor tracked the changes in air quality due to the players consumption of Oxygen and the plants' consumption of Carbon Dioxide. Some players achieved a sense of balance with the plants, while others tended towards hyperventilation, consuming as much Oxygen as possible and then leaving, lightheaded.
The air quality was presented to players as flute music. As the Berkeleyan reported in 2002:
Organum
Organum consists of both an experimental movie and a game. In the movie, animated creatures are amalgamated with animated machines in a struggle for survival. Chris Chafe calculated the sounds all moving characters in the animation would make if they'd exist, and thereby generated the soundtrack for the movie, which was most recently presented at the Flaherty Film Seminar.Autocell
Autocell is a a research visualization project Prof. Terence Deacon and I initiated and completed with our students Gautam Rangan, Jason Gatt and Ian Cheng. The aim of the project is to model processes of self-assembly, which, according to Deacon, were instrumental in forming the basic chemical and biological elements of life. Here is a link to an mpg4 movie of the autocell model in action.
Good Morning Flowers a.k.a. Away from the New
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In preparation for an exciting show in Cairo, Egypt, I developed a two-person game, and previewed it at the San Francisco Intl. Film Festival, 2006, together with Dan Perkel and Ryan Shaw. The game allows two players to control a sailboat on the Nile using their voices. At SFIFF players used their cellphones to call the game. In the Cairo presentation, I first spent a week playtesting and refining the game in a youth center called Fustat, where children spend time after work. After vigurous playtesting, the childern renamed the game to "Good Morning Flowers", requested new rules, and Arabic Numerals. |
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As they saw how I struggled to implement their changes, they learned some programming basics. In the game, players are navigating the Nile with a small Faluka boat. They blow "wind" in to microphones, which changes the speed and direction of the boat. The boat's mission is to collect flowers and to avoid crocodiles. Players win the game, once they collected 12 flowers. Various game levels correspond to different periods in the history of Egypt. I was grateful to conduct unlimited playtests at Fustat and improve the game a bit every day. At the end of the week, I brought the game back to Townhouse Gallery, in downtown Cairo, and presented it there to a more adult audience. Here below is an excerpt from a review on the Cairo show. |
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Excerpt from a review by Serene Assir, Al-Ahram Weekly, Cairo, Issue 796, May 23, 2006: (...)Greg Niemeyer, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley's New Media Centre, transformed parts of his videogame-cum-art installation at the request of children in Fustat, who were the first in Egypt to try out this unique game, based on vocally controlled manoeuvres, in which two players share decision-making on the movements of a single canoe floating through a river filled with sweet-looking but no less menacing crocodiles.
"They didn't like the original name of the game, so I changed it to 'Good Morning Flowers'," Niemeyer explains. "They were very pleased." A videogame designed to encourage people to work together, Neimeyer's piece proved immensely effective among Cairo's adult audience; many shed the daily angst of their hard lives in favour of harmony, childish excitement and instant friendship with co-players, which though short-lived was nonetheless a powerful experience that broke with the moulds of normality.
Bounce, A Common Experience Game
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Much experience of older generations seems lost on the youth, perhaps because there so few games designed to be played by members of different generations. Ken Goldberg, Irene Chien, Jane McGonigal, and I developed Bounce // San Jose for ISEA 2006. Our game is a tool to engage people of different ages in conversation. During a web-supported phone conversation, the game prepares questions that one young person and an older person answer together. This way, they discover a number of things that they have in common, and perhaps some things that set them apart. A link to the game site is here. |
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OK Donuts aka The Return of Balance aka Balance Game
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A team project by Joe McKay and Greg Niemeyer with Nik Hanselmann, and funded in part by the Humanities Research Institute, OK Donuts is a video game which requires subtle intuitive movements, as it tracks the players’ shifts in weight. You play the game by standing on a 18 inch square platform and shifting one's weight to tilt a virtual platform on the screen. You win by bouncing falling balls off the platform into colored hoops. Of course, you succeed, the task becomes more difficult. The targets change location and even begin to circle the platform. To be truly proficient on the higher levels, the player must "get in the zone, be the ball" and "lose him/herself" in gameplay. While the game engages you in solving a dexterity puzzle, the actual learning effect is to allow you to focus on improving your sense of balance. Early results show that people who train their sense of balance master the game much sooner than those who don’t, and that people who completed the game demonstrate a better sense of balance outside of the game. The game is coded in processing and OpenGL, and was exhibited at the Falaki Gallery in Cairo, Egypt. The Cairo Daily Star wrote this review of the show. |
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The Tomato Quintet at Machine Project, Los Angeles, involved five pods filled with Tomatoes. The pods were sealed from the outside world and contained sophisiticated sensors which logged CO2, light and temperature changes inside the pods. The sensors recorded the ripening of the tomatoes over ten days. We compressed these data recordings in time to produce a 44 minute sonification of the entire ripening process. In the gallery, we played the music while serving pasta with tomato sauce made from the very tomatoes we recorded. |
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