XFUNS, interview (December 2003)

Interview with XFUNS magazine issue 9 , Taiwan. Interview by Tan Ching-Chuan, XFUNS editor.

-> Magazine cover (design by me)
-> Magazine layout (PDF, 1 MB, design by Chiu Yu Hua)

FUNS Feature: CODE ART
Artist: Marius Watz
Horoscope zone: 14.january 1973, Capricorn
City/Country: Oslo / Norway
Education: Auto-didact
Specialty: Computational graphics (2D + 3D)
Interests and hobbies: Electronic music, art, design, rock climbing
Web site: www.evolutionzone.com, www.unlekker.net

1. Please introduce yourself.
I was born and raised in Oslo , capitol of Norway , where I lived until I was 30. I recently moved to Berlin , where I now live and work as an artist. Norway is a beautiful country, but too small to have a good electronic art scene. Change is good.

2. When did you start to "make friends with" computers? And when and how did you know you love design and arts?
I'm not sure why, but in primary school I developed a block that stopped me from drawing or doing things with my hands, so I didn't do much of that after age 7. I remember using rulers and compasses to make rule-based drawings already then. But when I was 11 my dad brought me a Radio Shack TRS-80 micro computer, and I knew immediately what I would be doing for the rest of my life.

I was always interested in graphics, but I never thought I'd be a visual artist. I thought maybe I would be a writer, since I loved reading. In retrospect I can see that I did rule-based visual experiments very early on, but I never took it seriously. It was only when I started doing 3D graphics that I realized the potential for working visually. I met Halvor Bodin, a designer who wanted to use my shapes for flyers and posters advertising techno raves in Oslo , and it became a golden collaboration. Halvor gave me the basic introduction to graphic design, and I decided to drop out of Computer Science, which I found boring anyway. It was pretty scary, because I never believed I was any good at visual work.

3. What computer languages and programs you use?
Most of my work is programmed in Java, then output either as 3D object files for the freeware raytracer Persistence of Vision or as Adobe Illustrator files. Lately I've been using the Java2D API, which allows me to draw vector graphics directly. Processing (by Casey Reas and Ben Fry from MIT) is an excellent tool for experimenting with programmed visual systems. I've been using it both to produce my own work as well as teach computational design at the University of Arts in Berlin, where I am associate professor at the Department for New Media.

4. Say something about your new conspicuously lekker unlekker.net !
Unlekker.net is my new site, intended to be a showcase and documentation of current work. I considered changing the format of Evolutionzone, but it seemed like blasphemy against the Amoeba name. So now Evolutionzone will remain a test-site for experimental work and sketches, and Unlekker will be the site for "finished" works. The name Unlekker refers to the word "lekker" in German and Norwegian, meaning lovely of delicious. Unlekker means, well, not.

5. Why do you call yourself 'Amoeba' living in 'Evolutionzone'?
Amoeba has been my nom-de-guerre since 1995, when I first set up Evolutionzone.com. The concept was originally about evolution, and the Amoeba is one of the most primitive lifeforms. Evolutionzone quickly became a playground where I put sketches and experiments rather than commercial work. Later the Amoeba identity became a way for me to have a separate voice, which I used to make propaganda-like statements (i.e. "You give me money. I give you beauty.") I never intended to be anonymous, even though my real name didn't appear on the web site.

6. So, playpuppy.com is.
Originally I did design and electronic art in parallel, so the Amoeba name covered both fields. Then in 2000 I set up a design studio called Products of Play (Playpuppy.com) with Erik Johan Worsoe Eriksen, and Amoeba was used only for non-commercial projects. In 2002 I decided to stop doing normal commercial work, so now I use my full name more than the Amoeba pseudonym. Erik continues to use the Product of Play name alone, under which he produces wonderful design.

7. Why did you move to Berlin ? Please describe the electronic art climate around there.
Berlin is a very dynamic city, not really beautiful, but with a very active art scene. Even though it is the capitol of Germany , the economy there is really poor, living is cheap and as a result artists converge on the town in droves. Berlin has been at the heart of techno music since the start, so it's logical that it remains at the forefront of that genre, even now that techno and house is facing a bit of a recession worldwide.

The current trend of VJ'ing caught on in Berlin very early, so the town is filled with VJ's and most clubs have setups for visuals. In spite of all this, the irony is that most of the electronic artists in Berlin tend to show their work mainly elsewhere, since there are few galleries etc. that focus on electronic art. The Transmediale festival has had its funding cut recently, but remains an important event.

8. Please tell us more about your Vj'ing. How do you generate real-time, dynamic art forms with music? (Please reveal more in terms of European club culture? Music trends? "Let us perspire in dark clubs while a chemical rush soothes our senses..." )
Club culture and electronic music gave me my start in working visually, so my aesthetic sensibilities are heavily influenced by that background. Club culture is about hedonism, about pleasure as a subversive element. It is anti-intellectual and populistic, promising the sublime yet always in danger of becoming pure kitsch.

I love the honesty of this approach, and use it in my visuals. If it looks good, it is good. I have no issue with minimalism, but I tend go for "more is more, too". My aim is visual hedonism, intelligent eye candy with a twist.

There is no culture like pop culture, and I still remember what it was like to be a raver in the golden days of the early 90s. Electronic music was one driving forces in European graphic design in the 90s. Hip hop aesthetics is already having the same impact in the 00s, with its background in graffiti and a blunted view of the world roughing up the superclean style that was so popular just a few years ago.

Since my work is heavily influenced by music, going into VJ'ing has been a natural move. So far have I've worked with concerts rather than club events, which is a slightly different challenge. Instead of creating an ambient atmosphere for a club you have to be part of the performance, following the tempo set by the music. Working with live performance is very rewarding because you get to work directly with the musicians and you can create visuals that are specific to the music.

Most VJ's use video as their raw material, but I'm more interested in creating dynamic systems that create interesting animated forms using the live music as input. At the moment I use a software VVVV (see vvvv.meso.net) to create visualizer software. Like Max/MSP (a favorite tool for computer music people) it is a visual programming environment where you program by connecting nodes that perform different functions. So instead of writing code as text, you are building visual network of nodes, kind of like setting up a series of sound effect boxes that each modify the sound signal. I use sound analysis to extract spectral qualities (bass, treble etc) from the sound input, and then animate abstract shapes based on that data. And since the program runs continuously without needing to recompile, I can adjust my programs live on stage and really jam with the music.

I also use a software video mixer called VDMX to mix pre-rendered video live, but this is more to give moods or introduce photographic material. Since I have to change programs in VVVV during performance I use video mostly to cover for that delay or to generate specific responses in the audience. Playing with video is fun, but I think it's easy to do bad VJ'ing this way. Your material has to be original, well-edited and you have to an eye for mixing to do it well. VJ'ing is a field that's still very fresh, so it'll be interesting to see what happens as more people experiment with it and the tools (both software and hardware) gets more advanced.

9. Then how about being a professor in computational design? Why do you choose Processing as the prime tool to teach?
Teaching is new to me, and is much harder than I thought. I'm used to doing lectures, where you can get away with just showing tons of images without any critical questions. I find that I have to slow down and also to give the initiative to my students, which is harder than it sounds.

Processing is an excellent tool for teaching computational design because it requires very little understanding of programming to get started. It is basically a simplified subset of Java with prefab libraries for 2D and 3D graphics, as well as some more exotic topics like video (for experiments with video or cameras) and serial communication (for communicating with sensors or hardware.) An important aspect is that there is a community developing around the Processing software, so that you can go online and download other people's source to extend your own knowledge.

10. While savoring your works, I've noticed that you seem to be heading for abstraction? Is that right, and why?
My basic forms have always been abstract, but over the last year I've moved even further away from classic design approaches to creating images. I've never used photos very much, but now my images use almost no typography, and I don't do so much of the cartoon characters I used to do. The end product isn't a piece of design anymore, it's more about creating an interesting process. I think I might return to using more concrete imagery in the future, though. One of the problems of computational graphics is that it can become sterile and boring, which of course I want to avoid.

11. We 're very curious about the mobile phone animations - DREIx3x2x2D.
DREIx3x2x2D was a project commissioned by Liquid_Frontiers, a duo of freelance curators in Vienna . I've been fortunate enough to work with them three times now, and they have a unique understanding not only of what design is about, but also what the designer-as-auteur is capable of.

The first project I did for them was for their Stealing Eyeballs exhibition in 2001, where I did a project on visual hedonism. Then they invited me and Erik (as Products of Play) to do a visual narrative for the Vienna offices of the 3G mobile phone company Hutchison 3G (also known in Europe as simply "3"). We ended up doing a series of wave forms that come full circle as they progress along the walls of the central corridor that runs all around the circular building.

DREIx3x2x2D is my contribution to their project "First flush", which is a program of animations to be shown on the Hutchison 3G mobile network. The animations will be displayed on mobile phones in a special exhibition, as well as made available for download over the network. DREIx3x2x2D is a series of 6 animations, 3x3x3=27 seconds each. They are exercises in abstract animation, simple systems of 2D forms that animate and change behavior over time. They are completely computational rather than rendered and edited, so each is really a piece of software written in Processing. Each time the software runs it spits out a series of frames making up an animation, so effectively they are a series of animation machines...

12. We've heard that the Norwegian government is on to you too. What happened?
In Norway there is a fund for art in public buildings, and they commissioned me to come up with a concept that would work for the digital equivalent of a public space. I chose the web site Odin.dep.no, the electronic publishing service for the Norwegian Government and Ministries of State. All new laws and statements from Parliament etc. get published here. It's a huge web site with over 50000 documents.

My idea was "Drawing machine 1-12", a series of systems that draw images over the time. I call them drawing machines because that's what they are, virtual machines for drawing on a virtual canvas. They are 12 separate systems based on different principles, which was hard to come up without repeating myself. Also, they have a micro/macro aspect because you can see just the area where the machine is drawing at the moment (micro), or you can see the whole image (macro). This added a new challenge for me, because the composition has to look good from both perspectives.

For me it was a perfect project to get such a commission, because I have long thought that web sites can be treated as public space. So this was a chance to develop a project that was specifically for such a space, and which is designed to last for a longer period of time. Each machine draws for two months, then a new one takes over. So you have 12 images in all, the first of which began to be drawn in June 2003 and the last one will be finished in June 2005.

13. Definitely tell us more about "AmoebaAbstracts 1-3" for the "Abstraction Now" exhibition. They look gorgeous.
The "AmoebaAbstracts 1-3" were a fun project. They were created for the "Abstraction Now" show in Vienna , which was curated based on the concept of artists working with abstraction rather which media they used. I did three self-contained systems that are interactive in a subtle way, but which mostly focus on graphic abstraction. It was a fast project, which sometimes means I get good work simply because I don't think too much about what I want to do.

14. We've tracked you down to Oslo and Stockholm and. You seem to travel a lot with Wibutee.
Wibutee is a Norwegian electrojazz quartet, with all members being excellent instrumentalists as well as wizards of electronic music. Even the drummer has a laptop on stage, and their approach is based on improvisation around certain themes. They take the attitudes of jazz into the electronic sphere, sampling improvised riffs live and then playing along with the samples to create a truly live experience.

I was approached by Hakon Kornstad, who is a virtuoso saxophone player as well as an excellent graphic designer. Just look at Wibutee's home page www.wibutee.net or his album covers for the internationally renowned Jazzland Records label for proof of his skill. Hakon and I knew each other by reputation and he wondered if I wanted to join up to do live visuals for the band. We decided from the start that we wanted to create something with the potential to "jam" with the live music rather than static video playback.

Hakon and I collaborated to create a series of pre-rendered video clips that I mix live, which I alternate with a series of "visualizers" that I've developed in VVVV. The visualizers work like improvisational visual instruments responding to the live sound, which ties in very well with the way that the group works. I now go with Wibutee to nearly every concert they do, so I have a good opportunity to develop the material and the performance instead of just doing one-off performances. Because they are all classically trained as well as being immersed in popular electronic music their perspective is very fresh and inspiring. I've learnt a lot from them.

15. How was Ars 2003? Did you have fun this time? Like to be our 5-min tour guide? Come on, flash backs!
Ars Electronica 2003 was a good experience. Since the theme of the festival was "CODE", they focused on artists creating their own software or working with programming in their work. That meant that a lot of people I consider friends ended up being involved, so I got to hang out with them and talk about how stuff has worked out. The irony for me is that I've been working computationally from the beginning 10 years ago, but it's now suddenly very popular because of projects like Processing.

There is a convergence on the idea of software literacy, which means that if you are a artist or designer working with electronic media you must be able to "read" (use and understand) as well as "write" (create your own) software. That doesn't mean you need to be able to create your own Photoshop program. But if you want to take full advantage of the unprecedented flexibility of electronic media, you need to be able to use computation as a tool. Your work becomes a piece of software as opposed to a static image or an object. I'm teaching a course in Computational Design at the University of Arts in Berlin , which is great for developing a more theoretical background to my work.

16. Please reveal more of your contribution to "Principles of Indeterminism"? (We did a report of Ars Electronica in XFUNS No.8.)
"Principles of Indeterminism" was an evening of music inspired by the work of the composer Iannis Xenakis. The music ranged from classic big orchestra pieces to experimental noise music. VJ's like myself, Lia, Justin Manor, Sue Costabile etc. were given two pieces each to create visuals to. We had very different approaches, from computational systems to live video.

My visuals had to work on a giant screen made up of three projections, 18x4 meters in all. I was given two pieces for solo piano, and it turned out to be harder work than I imagined. "Traiettoria Deviata" by Marco Stroppa is an asymmetrical piece with lots of silence and very little in terms of melody. I ended up scrapping my original idea just 2 hours before the performance and adapting a non-responsive piece (AmoebaAbstract #2) instead. It just draws circular arcs that gradually fill the screen completely, drawing at a speed that matched the pace of the piece. I ran it on all the three screens with some minor interactive tweaks and it worked out fine. For once it was a case where doing visuals that didn't respond to the music was a better solution.

The other piece was more forgiving. Rupert Huber (who with Richard Dorfmeister is the excellent Tosca duo) played a sad but melodic improvised piano piece - barefeet, in a black tux - to which I did some minimalist sound-responsive graphics. VVVV has an excellent feature called boygrouping, which I used to treat the three projects as one image, rendering parts of the image on three separate computers. It worked out very well, particularly since his piece came at the very end of the programme, after some intense noise music by Ryoji Ikeda and Otomo Yoshihide.

17. Let's talk about your various, absolutely STUNNING 3D arts. (For example, how did you get inspirations? How to achieve those amazing shapes, lights, and textures?)
I started doing 3D very early, long before modern software like 3d Max or Maya ever existed. Since 1993 I've been using a freeware raytracer called Persistence of Vision, which has a simple object description language instead of a visual modeler. All my 3D forms are created by writing my own software to create shapes and animations. I don't use any textures, the organic feeling is created when I use a multitude of spheres to describe complex effects. I respect the real 3D artists who create whole scenarios, but I usually just do single objects since I am most interested in pure form.

The biggest source of inspiration for me is the natural world, particularly plants, flowers and invertebrate sea animals. They have such fantastic forms. I don't attempt to create naturalistic forms, I just love making these abstract organic shapes. They tend to end up being super-fat, somewhat erotic I guess.

18. Please introduce some of your favorite Amoeba's hard works.
Hard question. I like the Stealing Eyeballs poster, my AmoebaAbstracts, my old 3D stuff, the cover I made for this magazine, and the drawing machines I did. I'm lucky because I'm not one of those people who hate their work when they're done with it, but I would still rather a make a new piece than show an old one...

19. How do you balance yourself over all the stuff, like Vj'ing and teaching, commercial projects and software art.?
I've just followed my intuitions and followed where they take me. One of the good things about being self-taught is that you get to try out anything you want to do. You also learn a lot about yourself, how to focus on your strong sides and minimize weaknesses. Design has always been a great interest, but I guess ultimately I've always wanted to work without the restriction of a commercial client. Besides, I think I'm ultimately better at "free" work than I am at realizing someone else's vision.

20. As an experienced traveler, recommendations?!
Well, even in these days of "war on terror" I love America . As much as I hate the politics of Bush etc., I still love the paradoxes of that huge country. From New York to Los Angeles , the mountains of Yosemite to the insanity of Las Vegas , it remains fantastic. One of my crimes is that I've never been to Asia , a big oversight for sure. I'd love to visit Tokyo , Kuala Lumpur and of course Taipei ! I hear you have the biggest building in the world now, way to go...

Being Scandinavian means that you're on the edge of Europe , a continent that offers plenty of diversity in its own right. I've had great times discovering the complexities of Vienna , Amsterdam and Barcelona . I'd like to travel in Eastern Europe, but also to visit extreme places like Iceland or Svalbard, a place north of Norway where you can't leave the city limits without a gun because of polar bears.

21. Recommend your favorite artists, music, books or mags, movies, or whatever you like!
I know it's a cliche, but I love Warhol and the Pop artists because of their mix of pop culture and art. Music is all-important to me, whether it's techno, hiphop, drum'n'bass or experimental noise music. Some favorites would be DJ Vadim, Peaches, Talib Kweli, Front242, Covenant (the Swedish synth band), Beastie Boys and of course Wibutee. I don't read magazines so much these days, guess I like more experimental mags like Soda and Übersee. Oh, and I read tons of rock climbing magazines, since I seem to reading about climbing mountains than doing it...

Tusen takk!!! The End

Copyright 2003, Marius Watz