No ball game is a participative performance where the artist and the public are playing a interactive and musical football game. The piece is not really about interactivity but about the relation between the gallery, the artist and the public trough art. Performance generally is about having the public focusing on the artist and his actions. I wanted to merge the performer, the public and the prop.

Mainly, I wanted to bring back the joy of playing/experimenting in the gallery.

It was not about creating a proper musical tool but a catalyst or extrapolation of the action, energy and gallery’s atmosphere.

I kept the interactive and sound layers simple. There were 3 steps accessed by how hard you kick the ball. As for the sounds I wanted to created a ruff, blunt, dramatic, romantic and emotional soundscape. I wanted it to be proper piece of music as well as sound poetry.

What kind of software/hardware have you been using for this piece?

I programmed a wiimote in a soft ball to trigger musical elements and structures. I used processing with two libraries, proMidi and the wrj4P5 from Classiclll. Processing was triggering midi notes and controllers by using the wiimote movement and accelerations. The program was really basic and not that accurate because my point was more on working on the “ménage à trois” that are the public, the gallery and the artist.

As I couldn’t be there and people didn’t manage to run the softwares, Jankenpopp kindly redid a version using director. I like the idea that NO BALL GAME is more than a piece of code, and that the “how it’s made” is not the main goal.

Does Computer Arts mean to you, or do you consider yourself has a computer artist?

I don’t consider myself as a computer artist. I am interested in how technologies can influence or be used for social purposes. I am more a telematic artist, I am interested in how the human can project itself in various spaces and time at the same time. I am interested in that strange mix of collective consciousnes, culture and personnal experience. I also think that artists working in interactivity often take it for granded that interactive art makes explicite what is implicite in art: the need of a third party, the viewer, to make the piece exist. We need more focus on the user’s experience and the space then on the actual interactive object, and stop to treat people as triggers only for an interactive piece.

For now, my main focus is in the prescence of the person in an interactive piece. How to make analogies of this presence and make a real exchange between actions and feedback.

“Thomas Michalak creates sound architectures and layers extrapolated from physical architectures and environmental sounds. In his telematic work, he does not seek to erase the distance but to consider the network as integrated space. In general his work is about contextualized sound, the presence of the body and mind in a physical and virtual space (virtual as mental), and interactivity in public space.”

protocole :
rencontre/analyse/décomposition/recomposition/diffusion

Dans mon travail télématique, je ne cherche pas à effacer la distance, pour une relation quasi-direct entre les sujets, mais au contraire à intégrer le réseau, au travers de la conscience de la distance, comme espace à part entière. Au travers de chaque projection/construction faisant appel à notre propre conception d’un lieu, notre mémoire et notre conscience collective, le minimun d’informations sur un lieu permet de rendre l’expérience unique et à la fois similaire.

Si je travail avec le réseau je dois prendre conscience de ce qu’il est et de ce qu’il implique : Le contrôle, l’échange, la destruction de l’information et la duplication de celle-ci. je travail à présent sur des espaces virtuels appréciables qu’à travers le réseau, où je traite l’information et l’échange de celle-ci comme un medium. Ainsi je ne suis pas là pour démontrer des faits techniques mais pour questionner ce medium et, à travers celui-ci, notre relation esprit/corps/environnement\temps\réalité.