The Multi-dimensional Transliteracy of Martin Rieser

I recently stumbled on the work of Martin Rieser when researching the Songlines of the Australian Aborigines. I had intended to blog about songlines, but for now that is deferred as I explore Rieser's site, YouTube talks and works.

Rieser was an early pioneer of interactive electronic and digital art:

Martin Rieser's Electronic Forest

In 1988, he exhibited at the First International Society of Electronic Artists (FISEA) conference held in Utrecht. In 1990, he created an interactive exhibition utilizing giant digital panels and interactive sound installations with an accompanying multimedia program on the theme of the Electronic Forest.

This collaboration with Electronic Musician Edward Williams featured 12 panels of Rainforest scenes created in Adobe Photoshop and Freehand and initially printed out in 120 A4 sections per panel.

Interactive sound devices based on "Soundbeam" were ceiling mounted and as an audience passed among the panels they triggered stored recordings of Rainforest sounds. Because the device was based on ultra sound detection, variations in visitor height would change the pitch and duration of emmitted sounds.

Fast-forward through many unique and fascinating projects to Rieser's artistic exploitation of mobile locational technologies.

A site-specific proposal for Manchester, Riverains is a multi-user mobile story game, which collaboratively maps an imaginary world onto a cityscape. Riverains are souls tied to watery energies, running under our cities in rivers, cables, sewers and tunnels. They travel unseen by these invisible routes and cluster around sites of past experience. Participants can use their mobile phone like a douser to discover this hidden world, which will correspond to real underground locations aligned with the sites of notable events, and, then use the Riverain’s overheard tales to map those sites and find clues and directions to others.

One can play as a team and eventually add one’s own stories and avatars. Manchester has a rich underground world of hidden or “lost” rivers, nuclear fallout facilities and command centres and Second World War bunkers, in addition to Victorian sewers and underground railway system. It also has an archeology going back through medieval to Roman times. The Riverains will be drawn from this rich history and from the City’s annals of poverty, industrial revolution, political protest, commerce and innovation, gang warfare, gun crime and uncanny happenings. The project will map video sprites and stories across a large area of central Manchester. 

The reason I consider Rieser's work to be  "multi-dimensionally transliterate" is because it melds digital technologies, including communications technologies, into real-time-and-space (3-D) installations, and many of his projects such as Riverains are mapped along a timeline  (now we're up to 4-D). But Riverains and other installations in his CV "fold time up" by using modern media and living human input to tour ancient times and mythologies, adding superimposed commentary from the present onto the record of and even infrastructure from the past.

How many dimensions do we count, then, now that we're talking about messing around with linear time, and incorporating dynamic unpredictable input arising from human interaction with his work?

CMC11