Home > News > "The Bush Soul," Interactive Art by Rebecca Allen, to be Presented at SIGGRAPH 98 in Orlando, Florida

"The Bush Soul," Interactive Art by Rebecca Allen, to be Presented at SIGGRAPH 98 in Orlando, Florida

Carolyn Campbell (ccampbel@arts.ucla.edu) (310) 825-6540
For Immediate Use Sunday, July 19, 1998.

"The Bush Soul," an interactive art installation created by UCLA's Rebecca Allen, will be presented at SIGGRAPH 98, the 25th international conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques. The event will be held in Orlando, Florida, July 19-24. The SIGGRAPH conference, which began in 1974 and is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world's premier forum for computer graphics researchers.

Allen, chair of the Department of Design in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, is an internationally recognized media artist. For this new work, she created an abstract world that focuses on the "life" of a virtual environment and encourages exploration and participation. "The Bush Soul" explores the role of avatars and human presence in a world of artificial life. Avatars are virtual representations of ourselves in the form of computer-generated characters. The avatar becomes our other body, but what part of us is in our avatar? Is part of our soul in this computer-generated character?

In West Africa, there is a belief that a person has more than one soul and that there is a typeof soul -- called the "bush soul" -- that dwells within a wild animal of the bush. The avatar could serve as a place for the "bush soul" to dwell. This idea is carried into Allen's work, where every object is instilled with some form of artificial life.

Through the avatar, a person enters a world that is "alive" and responsive. Each of the characters in the virtual world is endowed with "feelings" toward other objects in the world. These feelings drive the character's movements and affect its reactions. Communication and interaction among characters occur through gestures, sound and the emission of energy in the form of light particles. As in real life, feelings and resulting behaviors can change based on certain interactions or due to time-based events. Complex social environments can emerge from the interaction of simple behaviors.

"One of the exciting aspects of this project is that it has brought computer science students to the arts," Allen said. "We have achieved much more than expected, thanks to the dedication and collaboration of these students and those in our design department." Allen also credits the crucial support of Intel Corp., which funded her research, and the UCLA Center for the Digital Arts.

Allen received a B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design, and an M.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Founding co-director of UCLA's Center for the Digital Arts, she is the recipient of an Emmy award for "Outstanding Individual Achievement" and Japan's Nicograph award for "Artistic and Technical Excellence." Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

The sound design for "The Bush Soul" was created by Mark Mothersbaugh and his production company, Mutato Muzika. Mothersbaugh is the lead singer/songwriter of the rock group Devo. "The Bush Soul" was created using Emergence, a PC-based software system designed for the creation of interactive art. In this system, three dimensional, computer-generated environments and autonomous, animated characters are displayed in real-time. Emergence provides the opportunity to develop artistic works that include the interactive experience.

In order to create virtual environments, a fast and flexible real-time 3-D graphics engine needed to be built, capable of rendering texture-mapped, animated polygonal models and supporting synchronized audio data. In addition, a sophisticated physics-based behavior system was developed that enables complex behaviors and interactions between all objects in the environment. A high-level behavior scripting language was developed to allow for the specification of behaviors and relationships among characters. Sounds -- such as voice, music or ambient effects -- are linked to objects and characters to enhance the sense of life and space.

The NT version of Softimage, donated by the leading software company, was utilized as the 3-D modeling and animation software, and a production pathway was built that converts 3-D models, including texture, material and hierarchical animation data from the Softimage format to one read by Emergence.

The development of the software was partially funded by a grant from Intel. "Intel's Research Council grants for higher education reinforce Intel's commitment to supporting innovation and the advancement of technology in the industry," said Dana Plautz, Manager, Research Communications, Intel Corp. "We are especially happy to have this working relationship with a public university such as UCLA. Rebecca Allen's research…is certainly a testimony to this endeavor. Intel is very pleased that Rebecca's work has been selected to be showcased at SIGGRAPH."

"The Bush Soul" will be on display in Art Gallery: Touchware, Hall C, of the Orlando Convention Center. Allen will be a speaker at a special session, The History of the Future, which will use the occasion of the 25th anniversary of SIGGRAPH to reflect on past ideas of what computer graphics and interactivity would become vs. what has actually happened. She will participate with a group of pioneering visionaries who will reflect on past predictions of the future and draw some conclusions, based on wisdom and hindsight, about future developments. The group includes Don Greenberg, Alan Kay, and Turner Whitted. The session will take place on Wednesday, July 22, from 12:45 to 1:45 pm. On Thursday, July 23, at noon, Allen will participate on a panel in a gallery talk entitled Interactive Installation Art, Part 2.

The first installation of "The Bush Soul" was presented last October at Art Futura in Madrid, Spain. The piece "continues to grow and evolve," said Allen. Further information about the project is available on the Emergence web site at http://emergence.design.ucla.edu.

Editorial note: There are several images appropriate for press use which can be downloaded from the site. Image credit should read "By Rebecca Allen and the Emergence Team."



REBECCA ALLEN

Media Artist
Chair and Professor, Department of Design
School of the Arts and Architecture
University of California, Los Angeles

Rebecca Allen is an internationally recognized media artist and pioneer of projects involving computer animation, interactive art installations, video games, and live multimedia performances. She is known for her work with human motion and techniques involving artificial life software. Clients include CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS/Nova, TVE (Spain), Warner, Mattel, Philips, Taejon World Expo '93, Seville World Expo '92, Apple's Vivarium Project, Island Records, and Rebo High Definition Studios.

Television credits include an Emmy-award winning title sequence for Walter Cronkite's Universe on CBS; and UBAR, a PBS/Nova program for which she created computer simulation of the ancient city. She created all the visual material for the album, Electric Café by the German group Kraftwerk (Warner), including the classic music video, Musique Non Stop, for which she received Japan's Nicograph award for "Artistic and Technical Excellence." She designed and directed Adventures in Success and SMILE, two award-winning music videos with music by Will Powers, Robert Palmer and Sting (Island). She created a dancing, computer-generated character who plays the role of St. Catherine to the music of David Byrne in The Catherine Wheel, a film by choreographer Twyla Tharp. The Seville World Expo 1992 featured her two award-winning opening animation sequences, plus a three-screen panoramic film with music by John Paul Jones and Peter Gabriel. All were commissioned by the Spanish government.

She was a member of the Architecture Machine Group at MIT (now known as the Media Lab) followed by six years at the Computer Graphics Lab at NYIT, a world renowned computer animation research center. From 1986 to 1993 she was a professor of new media at UCLA while producing commissioned art work in Europe and the United States, followed by two years as creative director and executive producer at Virgin Interactive Entertainment.

In 1996, Allen joined the faculty at UCLA as professor in the newly formed Department of Design, and was appointed department chair in 1997. Her work has been published, televised, performed, and exhibited internationally, and is part of the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. She received her B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design and her M.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


Contact: Carolyn Campbell
Phone: (310) 825-6540
Email: ccampbel@arts.ucla.edu