Obake - Essay

Global Goblins

Obake endeavoured to create an interactive space for non-verbal communication through objects, gestures and sound. The shadow of the participants’ hand serves as a human-computer interface. A machine-vision system detects the hands of the participants. The program analyses the hand’s movements and gestures. According to the movement of the hand’s shadow, virtual puppets were generated in real-time and displayed as if attached to the shadow. These virtual objects respond to the movement of the shadow to create the impression as if the user is controlling a virtual puppet. The computer-generated creatures follow the movements of the participant’s hand and both behaviour and appearance of the virtual puppets changes continuously. Information related to both movements of puppets and the overall state of the installation is used for the generation of sound through a MIDI sound synthesiser, based on the sound-action design defined by composer Kiyoshi Furukawa. 

Obake was a project undertaken during a six-month artist-in-residency at IAMAS Institute for Advanced Studies in Media Arts and Science in Ogaki, Japan. The title Obake originates from the Japanese word for goblin, or little ghost, a mythological creature commonly associated with friendly behaviour and attitudes towards human beings. The project was first exhibited in 2003 at Softopia Centre in Gifu, Japan, in a beta-version that did not incorporate all intended functionality, although it was operational enough to provide users with an entertaining interactive encounter with the slightly unpredictable behaviour of little goblins. 

The unfinished part of Obake was concerned with the rather complex endeavour of implementing artificial life algorithms that would govern the behaviour of the virtual objects. The careful analysis of the participants’ hand movements and gestures would result in the possibility of synthesising such information into descriptors of the object’s ‘attitudes’, or attributes that reference human behaviour such as ‘shy’, ‘aggressive’, or ‘playful’. The proximity of different virtual puppets would start a process of communication between these objects that would mutually affect their particular behaviour, thus establishing a process of ‘learning’ from each other. It was further intended to enable an online communication between applications running at different international venues, by exchanging information that describes the objects’ attributes through text-based network protocols.  

It was certainly demanding, albeit not impossible in technical and conceptual terms, to realise such features. However, expanding the interaction and communication model from a localised area, in which participants share a common cultural context, into a global approach to interconnecting participants from diverse cultural backgrounds, posed a serious challenge to the notion of communication in interactive systems that relied on non-verbal communication and interaction. It required the consideration whether a mathematical-logical algorithm can capture the cultural essence of a gesture, and translate it into a meaningful expression in a different culture. Without such proper cultural translation into the semantic context of different cultures, the perception of these non-verbal communication cues in a different cultural context would likely be inaccurate, misleading, or indistinguishable from random processes.  

After spending a significant part of the previous three years in Asia, and with the immediate prospect of relocating to South-East Asia, I was sufficiently aware of the importance of non-verbal communication for the establishment of meaningful communication and the manifold opportunities for its misinterpretation. However, as with most media artists at that time I did not occupy myself with aspects of cultural contextualisation of concepts for human-computer interactivity. I was working with a language of new media that assumed global comprehensibility and validity across cultures as a given. At the same time, I experienced countless difficulties in embarking on an appropriate verbal and non-verbal communication with people from different countries that hosted the exhibitions of the ‘global’ artworks. The hypothesis that the cultural contextualisation of the user could have an impact on the generation of meaning in interactive, process-oriented media artworks seemed not too far-fetched, and eventually led to the formulation of research questions concerned with the interdependence between artist, audience, and technology in interactive artworks.

© Wolfgang Muench . This essay forms part of the Author's PhD Thesis (Muench, 2017) , with minor edits to adjust to the online environment. 

Illustration Credits

1. Obake (2003). Photo of the artwork taken at Institute for Advanced Media Arts and Science, Ogaki, Japan, 2003. © Wolfgang Muench.

2. Obake v2 (2003). Photo of the artwork taken at the exhibition In Media Sockets: Realities brimming over media sockets, YCAM Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Yamaguchi, Japan, 2003. © YCAM.