Interview with Ralf Baecker

October 9, 2009 4:22 pm

Ralf Baecker presents  Calculating Space at Share Prize 2009.

– What role does digital art play in representing complexity and chaos?
I think that in most cases digital art deals with complexity. The moment a computer with millions of switching units is involved we have to deal with a complex system. It may behave deterministic but the encapsulated software parts running on the hardware have to interact with each other and may generate unexpected behaviour (bugs). In case these machines are connected to other machines or have sensors attached, its complexity gets manifold.
More specifically and artistically, I would think that complexity and chaos have an attracting appeal to us. It may remind us of things that we know from nature or from social and economic systems. An artist can install a very simple and obvious system that has the potential to generate an emergent behaviour. But the artist should avoid just to visualize complexity, he has got the freedom to misuse and to experiment with these technologies to create something that does not have to compete with science, engineering or the market, it just can be speculative.

– Market Forces. How do you interact with market forces in your everyday life? Would you say that the hardware and software architectures of our digital reality are market forces that stifle artists or do they open up new expressive potential?
For my artistic practice like research, word and image processing, sofware development, and hardware prototyping it feels quite natural and comfortable to work with free and open software but this is not mandatory to me. Sometimes I feel forced to use “industry standard” software that fits in certain production flows, CAD, print prepress and video codecs for example. These are somehow my interfaces to the market that I have to life with.
The enormous sucess of the open source movement and the internet had a very big impact on how digital artists work. It seems that the internet offers answers to almost every technical problem but also tends to amplify only a few.
Hardware is a whole different story because the production of semiconducting parts like transistors, CPUs and microcontrollers has developed to a complex process that involves very elaborated technology. The artists have to use off the shelf chips that already incorporate the hierarchical concepts of the market in its instruction sets. The current microchips have our cultural and physical reality imprinted in their layouts and they evolve because they are needed to build the next generation of chips. In my opinion the potential for the artists lies in translating and re-thinking the functions of the market into multiple directions and appearances.

– What idea first inspired you and what did you learn from that project?
I got interested in the historical and the cultural background of computers and calculating machines. I was searching for the link between the logical/formal and the mechanical/physical roots of these machines. I had in mind a machine that combines the tradition of the early combinatoric and philosophical instruments (ars magna) and epistemological cybernetic machines of the 1950s. My aim was to enlarge the underlying layers of the digital and offer a pataphysical view to link the calculating space (physical computation with symbols) and the result of this process, the simulation (display) into one. I did experiments with non-traditional materials to build the basic logic gates/artificial neurons AND/OR/NOT to make it tactile and give it a body. These were my building blocks for my very own hardware/programming environment to implement a simple algorithm that works parallel and generates complex patterns. It was a kind of reappropriation of the digital to me.

– You said that  “while the machine opens up everything it closes it at the same time, as if it has a secret.” can you describe this paradox of your machine?
In Calculating Space every single binary digit is build by hand (wood, strings, levers, weights et cetera). It is possible to follow a bit switching from 0 to 1 or opposite. The whole processing logic is transparent to the viewer. Nothing, except microcontroller boards that amplify/repeat signals, is hidden in a blackbox. But this total transparency does not help to conceive the process. Someone could think this would generate clarity or even be didactical but it appears to be mysterious and contemplative.