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FEATURE
/ February 24, 1997
Omnipresent in CyberspaceBy Dominic Gates A visitor to the Huntington Art Gallery at the University of Texas in Austin is drawn to a large aviary, within which some 30 small gray birds flit around. Perched among them is a huge robotic bird, painted in vivid hues of red, yellow, and blue. The robot resembles a macaw, except that its eyes are on the front of its face, owl-like. This is Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac's art installation "Rara Avis." Behind those "macowl" eyes, miniature video cameras observe the world and feed images to two Power Macintosh® computers. Those cameras become the eyes not only of visitors to the real space, but of visitors from cyberspace. "Rara Avis" was created to take different forms in different parts of the Internet, from the plain old World Wide Web to a highly restricted experimental network called the MBone. In Kac's phrase, it is "omnipresent in cyberspace." His fractured presentation is intended to highlight the hierarchies of access that exist on the Internet, while hinting at the possibilityÑand desirabilityÑof full interactivity for all. "We are moving into a digital world, lots of things on the horizon are changing," says Kac. "My work reflects that change . . . and tries to make statements that help change it." The Installation in Austin In the gallery in Houston, the pair of Power Macs are fed data from the two macowl eyes independently. One digitizes the left eye image in color, the other digitizes the right eye image in black and white. When a visitor to the physical exhibit dons a CyberMaxx virtual reality headset, those cameras become the wearer's eyes. Ed Bennett, facilities manager in the Art and Technology Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, who built the electronics, and designed the video system to Kac's specifications, explains that the macowl's eyes are placed in front to create stereoscopic 3-D vision. The left and right eye images are fed into the headset, synchronized in phase, and multiplexed together. In addition, the right/left head movements of the robot bird are wired to mirror those of the visitor, who virtually inhabits the body of the macowl. CU-SeeMe from Afar This identity-shifting experience transfers to cyberspace, with at least four levels of accessibility. In the closet behind the aviary a Silicon Graphics Indy desktop computer runs a CU-SeeMe reflector, allowing multiple computer users with CU-SeeMe video-conferencing software to see the aviary on their computer screens, and to send sound into the aviary via their computer microphones. The basic software is available for free in black and white; an enhanced version, offering color, is sold by White Pine Software. Only those who have purchased the latter will see both the black-and-white and color images. The images appear in separate windows, so there is no 3-D effect; although, as Bennett points out, all the information necessary for 3-D is provided. "Stereoscopy is there in a metaphorical way," he remarks. In any case, the cyber-visitor to the installation experiences the sights and sounds in the aviary, and can speak directly into the cage. Several voices at once, flowing from around the world, can emanate from the robot's mouth. Multicasting on the MBone The Silicon Graphics Indy also cybercasts a 24-hour live feed of the left-eye color image onto the MBone. The MBone is an elite corner of the Internet used to "multicast" audio and video, sending out an audiovisual signal not just to a single computer user, as when a Web page is downloaded (a "unicast"), but to a large number of users at once. In some ways it is like television, although TV sends out a signal everywhere (broadcast), a paradigm that would choke the Internet. Though a glance at the MBone schedule reveals a glut of college math lectures, scientific meetings, and cyberspace seminarsÑimagine a TV Guide designed for nerdy computer engineering graduate studentsÑBennett calls the MBone "one of the last wild and woolly places on the Net." Access to this new frontier is currently restricted to those with powerful Unix workstations. Use of bandwidth in this elite cyberhood is governed by an "informal gentlemanly sharing," reminiscent of the early days of the Internet, says Bill Morgan, a systems analyst at the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas, who did the computer networking for the installation. To avoid gobbling up too much bandwidth on the MBone, Rara Avis was set up to run at 60 or 70 kilobits per second, creating a video image speed of four frames per second. "That's too jerky to call full-motion video," he says, "but it shows a nice clear motion; you can see birds flying, a perch swinging." Morgan recalls a time when there were six users logged on to a Rara Avis multicast simultaneously, accessing from both coasts of the United States, and from Iceland, Italy, and Korea. The Democratic Web Placing the better of the two images on the MBone is a deliberate artistic allusion, says Kac. "I take the color image, already one step removed from popular availability, and that goes to the MBone, a rarefied space very few have access to," he explains, "I am taking what is less available and making it even less so, drawing attention to the disparities." In contrast, the free, popularly accessible black-and-white image from the right eye is posted on the Rara Avis World Wide Web site, through a third Power Macintosh, which uploads a fresh still image once a minute. Kac foresees that the Web will one day offer all that is now available only through the restricted alternatives. Part artist, part cyber-prophet, Kac declares: "Only full interactivity will transform the Web into a more democratic, open medium." Dominic Gates is a writer for PreText, a multimedia content and design company in Seattle.
© 1997 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Terms of use.
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