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Exterior view, “Sauna 2” at The
Lab
Project Title: Sauna
02
Recipient Organization: The LAB/The Art Re
Grup, Inc.
Lead Artist: Chris Salter and Sponge
Genre and Date Awarded: Media Arts, June
2001
Presented: June 2002
The
artists’ group Sponge collaborated with The LAB to produce
an edition of the evolving Sauna project, which features “contemplative
hybrid media spaces embedded into a public environment.” Members
of Sponge are Chris Salter (lead artist for this project), Sha
Xin-Wei and Laura Farabaugh.
Additional Sauna02 artistic collaborators were Erik Adigard, Amy
Hoffman, Brad Niven, and David Robert.
Their partnership resulted in simultaneous
outdoor and indoor installations
at The LAB in San Francisco’s Mission District. A large-scale responsive
media installation was installed outside of the Redstone Building on
16th Street,
where the LAB is located. This work consisted of three large cylinders,
mounted on the facade of the building, that were illuminated from within
by computer-controlled
strobe lights. Visitors standing beneath the tubes were washed by waves
of light and sound. The installation adapted itself to and was influenced
by
its changing surroundings, and was meant to be a source of respite and
solace for
passersby through the chaotic Mission District environment. Inside of
The LAB’s
gallery, a behind-the-scenes exhibition showcased the project’s
development and design process by way of notebooks, texts, video, sound,
drawings,
sketches and interactive media. The project opened on Friday, May 31,
2002 and the
exhibition was on view through Saturday, June 29. A Wednesday evening
series of salons
was presented in conjunction with these artworks.
The contemporary public
is bombarded by the hour by banner ads, radio jingles, logos, and other
intrusions, and all of these media icons and
images are stamped
in our imaginations. The Sauna project seeks to explore and
examine our media immersion in public space by creating alternative
experiences
in the form of experimental non-invasive environments. In the artists’ words, “The
Sauna is a space which immerses you in sound and image to steam such
toxic icons out of your body.”
The finished Sauna02 project
differed somewhat from the original plan primarily in the realization
of the outdoor public artwork. Several
possible “saunas” had
been proposed, including one that would deliver a soft blast of cool
air when a passing visitor placed his or her head inside of a hair
dryer-like object.
After the anthrax scare of 2001, such a piece was inappropriate.
Further, various public sites—such as public transit stations—were
considered, but by installing the work on the exterior of the Redstone
Building, the
artists
and The LAB were able to monitor the pieces and public response more
closely and easily. This proved to be a wise choice as unseasonably
high winds
required close observation (and ultimately a one-week early removal)
of the outdoor
cylinders.
The collaboration engaged the public in many ways. The
artists and organization brought together a team of some 30 people
to assist
with the installation
process and Sauna 02 was well-attended with more than 250
people at the opening and many more at the public salons and as
gallery visitors
during the course
of the exhibit. Thousands of other people passed under the sculpture
on 16th Street,
experiencing its subtle and lovely emission of light and sound.
Sponge
was “born” in San Francisco in 1997 as an association
of professional artists and researchers who share a commitment
to creating public experiments
as artifacts of cultural engineering. All of the Sponge members
have prior careers in their respective disciplines, which include
performance theater,
new media, computer-generated music and sound design, differential
geometry, economics, information architecture, interaction design,
multimedia production,
philosophy of techno-science, scientific visualization, and simulations
and human-computer systems architecture. Sponge’s purpose
is to be a production network realizing hybrid media spaces, performances,
and environments,
and to be a think tank distributed around the world, conducting
a multidisciplinary conversation. Prior activities include projects
in Atlanta, Georgia; Vienna,
Austria; San Francisco, California; and New Orleans, Louisiana.
In conjunction with foam-Brussels, at the same time that Sauna02 was
being created, Sponge was developing T-Garden, a project
created in association with four leading international arts and
technology
organizations.
The LAB is an interdisciplinary artists’ organization
that supports the development and presentation of new visual, performing,
literary, and media
art. It assists artists in the creation of new work and presents
work of high quality by emerging and experimental professional
artists. Its interest is
in work that crosses boundaries—material, cultural, or presentational—and
it encourages new artistic and social exchanges between artists
and audiences. The LAB was founded in 1983 by a group of students
and former students
of the Inter-Arts Program at San Francisco State University.
Chris Salter was trained in economics,
philosophy, theater directing/dramaturgy,
and computer-generated
sound at Emory and
Stanford Universities. Since 1990,
he has been engaged in intensive work in digital sound processing, acoustics,
multimedia production, and interactive performance systems, attempting to integrate
these areas in the realm of live performance. He received a Ph.D. in theater/computer-generated
sound from Stanford University in 1997. His dissertation, “Unstable Events:
Theater on the Verge of Complexity,” details the processes by which electronic
media will change the perceptual and spiritual understandings of performance
in the 21st century. He was awarded the Fulbright and Alexander
von Humboldt Chancellor fellowships for work in Germany between 1993-1995.
While
in Europe, he worked as a directing assistant with, among others, Peter Sellars
(Saltzburg Festival, Bobigny-Paris and Berlin Royal Opera House-Covent
Garden, London), Peter Stein (Saltzburg Festival) and Frank Castorf (Volksbuhne-Berlin).
He also worked with Robert Woodruff (American Conservatory Theatre San Francisco,
1992). Since 1995, he has been a musical/conceptual collaborator with the
choreographer William Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballet on Eidos:
Telos and Sleepers
Guts in Frankfurt, Paris, and Genoa. He also has been collaborating with
composers/sound artists Sam Auinger and Bruce Odland (Could Chamber, The
Kitchen, New York, 1998), Berliner Theorie-Berlin (1998), and performed in
Auinger’s work
box for the European Cultural Month in Linz, Austria as well as in the
1998 Ars Electronica music program SuperCOLLIDER.
Most recently, Salter has
been working in the field of interaction design, collaborating with Bruce
Odland’s 30/70 productions in designing the
interaction and media direction for the Plante Earth gallery at the Earth
Center, a British
government millennium-commissioned environment theme park in Northern England
(1999), and with Sha Xin-Wei served as interface developer for the Field
Museum of Natural History’s (Chicago) recent millennial exhibit, “Sounds
from the Vaults” (1999). In addition to his work with Sponge, he is
currently working on several projects in Europe, including a media performance/installation/research
work with Sam Auinger dealing with the rise and fall of the industrial
age and an interactive performance-exhibit dealing with the origins of
violence
in language for an upcoming Exhibit at the European Museum for Peace and
War
in Austria. He, along with Laura Farabaugh and Sha Xin-Wei, is on the advisory
board for ZeroOne: The Art and Technology Network, located in Silicon Valley.
Laura Farabaugh was co-founder/artistic
director of Beggars Theater, which evolved into Snake Theater.
Snake grew too big too fast and instead
of
swallowing its own tail, bit itself in two. She then founded Nightfire.
Influenced by
sources as diverse as Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, and Captain Beefheart,
she is one of the pioneers in the genre of site specific performance
and in the
merge between video and performance. She was commissioned by the 1984
Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles to develop a site-specific work,
which resulted
in the large-scale swimming pool spectacle, “Liquid Distance/Timed
Approach.” Her
work, which has toured in the United States, Europe, and Japan, was fully
underwritten from 1976-1991 by private and community philanthropy, including
ten years of
continuous awards from the California Arts Council and National Endowment
for the Arts. In addition, she has received such fellowships as the Japan/United
States Friendship Commission Fellowship (1987), and was a Fulbright Senior
Scholar Lecture/Research Fellow in Cairo, Egypt in 1994. Laura’s
company Nightfire faced the problem of shrinking support and closed in
the mid-1990s.
Farabaugh then entered the Ph.D. program in drama at Stanford University.
She formed Sponge with Chris Salter and Sha Xin-Wei in 1997 in order
to realize
another model of making creative work. She currently is writing her dissertation
on Sponge’s working methods.
Sha Xin-Wei
Sha Xin-Wei was trained in mathematics at Harvard
and Stanford Universities, specializing in differential geometry.
He taught
mathematics in both
traditional and innovative curricula at Stanford for five years (1979-1984).
In the
subsequent decade he worked in the fields of scientific computation,
mathematical modeling,
and the visualization of scientific data and of topological and geometric
structures. Since 1993, he has extended his work to distributed media
authoring systems,
such as Media Weaver, and to a theoretical study of computational media.
Sha has served as Human-Computer Systems Architect for the University
Information Resources, specializing in Mathematics and Scientific Computation;
and
he is
appointed as a visiting scholar at the Zprogram in History and Philosophy
of Science. He is the coordinator of the Stanford Humanities Center’s Interactive
Media Group, a research workshop designed to draw participants from literature,
art, performance, science, and philosophy together in an interdisciplinary
study of interaction and media. In 1996, Sha co-founded Pliant Research, a
group of computer scientists, philosophers, and anthropologists dedicated to
the design of socio-technical systems that are more supple, flexible, and malleable
according to the evolution of social desire. He also has worked as a consultant
at Interval Research, a leading Silicon Valley technology research firm, in
the arenas of unsupervised learning and vision. More recently, Sha has joined
the Knexus research initiative on the study of the evolution of knowledge in
networks, in exchange and in use. His current research interests include gesture
and performance, hyletic media, differential geometry, and critical studies
of technologies of sketching and writing. Sha completed his doctorate in the
Mathematics Department with a dissertation on the phenomenology of mathematics: “Differential
Geometric Performance and the Technologies of Writing.” He is
currently an assistant professor in science studies and media studies
at the School
for Literature, Communication, and culture at Georgia Tech in Atlanta,
Georgia.
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