STATEMENT preforming my live "komputartoon" in 2000 I like to study brains, what they do and how they got to working. So I study neurology, cog sci, child development, extremely exciting stuff, like that. My studies have lead to things like shamanism, musicology, and sociology. Behavioral Art Over the years, I have made art/experiments I call "behavioral art". This differs from say "visual art" or being a "recording artist" in that the sensory aspect really only plays a supporting role. These aren't things or objects to detect from a removed distance, but non-linear systems and phenomena to engage in. The primary focus is to look at the way people (usually audiences) behave. The object (and whatever properties, we detect of it) is a merely a tool in this ongoing process. I have observed, people in galleries generally are restricted in their movements (probably for a good enough reason, so they don't spill wine on a Rembrandt.) But my art, which could look like anything, is intended to create some novel context in which these gallery visitors are encouraged to jump up and down. Now imagine setting a trampoline in that gallery. What would happen? Most likely no one would actually touch it. In fact, for all practical purposes, there would be very little internal debate as to how to react (or, in this case, not to react physically) to the trampoline. So behavioral art has to be a little more clever in coercing folks. Actually, there is, as has long been noted, a lot of inertia to overcome from a lifetime of previous art (both in galleries and in theaters). But more importantly, there is inertia from Western philosophy that distinguishes between external things and internal processes. With this in mind, it's great if audiences do indeed jump around, but exciting their mental model of the world is really the end goal. Wanting to jump and preventing it is also an active behavior. To do so, we have to provide a context where jumping solves some problem. Art == learning That problem solving is what we call learning. As any salesman will tell you, saying "jump!" isn't going to be nearly as effective as if the person comes up with it on their own. I actually don't really even care specifically if a person jumps or shakes their butt or flaps their arms. What is interesting though, is the very personalized ways in which each individual problem solves. Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences is a good way to think about this. Gardner shows how children may learn better by seeing a colorful example or may learn better by singing a song in a group, but the child will in general, tend to choose their own "style of learning" in play. An example we all see a lot, babies put things they find in their mouths. This is not done with the intention of eating them, as many parents assume. Babies first learn about their environment most effectively with their mouths. Only later we use locomotion and our hands. Still later our eyes. As we grow, we are encouraged - even forced - to solve problems intellectually rather than physically. Gown up play is extremely restricted. Art is adult's chance to play, particularly at the neurological learning level. Art may have other roles we project as individuals. Nonetheless, art is necessarily and primarily an impulsive strategy that the mind has concocted, in order to continually fine-tune our learning ability, to keep tabs on our ever-shifting environment. The notion of internal and external experiences is a mental construct for convenience, but there really is no difference. Thus behavioral art provides novel processes that demand our active (not passive) understanding - in whichever way we (often subconsciously) deem most useful to us personally as audience members. Computers and Art To accomplish this, by far the most efficient tool for this job, to create a piece that symbiotically reacts to input and monitor audiences in a flexibly enormous number of ways, I program computers. There really is nothing about any "media", a tangental topic that people tend to focus on, but has no relevance here. All media are arbitrarily interchangeable, especially in programming, and can be substituted without the audience even knowing (or caring). There is no limit to the idea that all noun-like things are just variables. To me, the distinction between gallery, stage and web is also entirely arbitrary. What can be confusing to a casual observer though, is that the computer certainly must generate something (noise or animation) for audiences to react to. Ultimately though, this output is just as arbitrary when considering the larger system. The system (and phenomenon it exploits within the human brain) is really where it's at. > like Cage or Schoenberg? John Cage: yes. but there's a subtle difference between his idea of chance/unexpected and uncontrolled results and 12 tone or "algorithmic" compositions. Granted, many computer/music programmers do make that kind and love it. Works great with percussive noises but not so well with tuned pitches, likened to a cat walking across a piano. With randomness the source (be it math or fish in an aquarium), the result is kinda arbitrary. If you closed your eyes, you'd never really know which is which. But for this kind of composition, the source is really as important to appreciate as the sounds. Others combine traditionally composed samples, clips, etc in more or less arbitrary ways. This gets into what modern DJs (and VJs) do. But this is where we diverge from a relationship to the input. As the piece becomes more composed by the artist, the piece is listening to the world less and less. If you imagine we are at a conceptual crossroads here, this is pretty much the opposite of what I am interested in working on. I have no interest in organizing music, noise, colors or shapes, only looking at how the brain decides what is music and what is just noise. Likewise, what is a meaningful image and what's just TV hash? Or what is a communicative sentence and what are thoughts we humans impulsively project onto things, that look (to us) potentially communicative. Think horoscopes. The actual output (music, etc) isn't as important as the system (music) we imagine we hear.