Subtract the sky: discussing the scientific aesthetics and the philosophical aspects of the interdisciplinary development of a collaborative system and its interactive interfaces
Mark Barthett, Sharon Daniel, Puragra Guhathakurta

The Subtract the Sky project was designed for the Internet. It is a collaborative system that estabilishes a new interactive public art. Through it, users will be able to access a huge file of maps, cartography, sounds, and other tools on-line, through which they will be able to create their own maps. They can also be linked to other users' creations and exchange information.
The site is still under construction, but it will soon enter its experimental phase. There are also plans to make telescopes with remote control, which will be manipulated by users available, so that they will be able to observe whatever it is they want.
The concept behind subtract the sky is to eliminate all interference, so that we can concetrate only on our specific subject. The human eye finds it difficult to see light that's faint, especially against some bright light. If we eliminate the sky, the interference, then all that'll be left will be the subject that we will then be able to see clearly.
The telescope can be used as a time machine. Because the light we see was emitted in the past and took a long time to reach us. When we look at a star, what we see is what it was four years ago, because that's the time it takes its light to reach us. By contemplating a galaxy we travel twenty, thirty million years through time!
"Thinking the artist's space"
Maria Luiza Fragoso

With the advent of electronic media the artist must adapt his/her way of working. The artistic background is still bound to the old traditions of atelier, museums, and studio. But there's this immediate urge to abandon these places which have become infeasible. It's no longer possible to produce inside an atelier because it is very difficult to take all necessary technology to it.
Museums and galleries used to exhibit and deal in artworks, but technological art has no big rotation. Its display ends up taking place in institutions, centers for culture, or special exhibits. Another question to be posed is the fact that that is an art of the elite. Not everybody can appreciate it.
Contemporary art's aim is not to represent, it just happens. And the public just "happens along," it participates.
There are two types of technological art: material and immaterial. In the first one, there is a physical body that interacts with people, leading to sensations. In the second, on the other hand, sensations are mediated by machines, it's the machines that interact with the public.
The body is fundamental. And in the postbiological era the body is glorified. We need to have the notion of the body and never forget that it is that body which is sitting right in front of the computer.
Fragoso believes that not all kinds of art can be fulfilled by means of the computer. She mediated a performance on the web, in which two artists should interact from two different cities, but several problems rendered the connection impossible. When it finally got through, the frustration from the artistic standpoint was really big. The interface was ugly, the time wasn't real, and there was no emotion. In fact what really counts is the contact between people, the desire to be with somebody.
Would-be worlds: the science and the surprise of artificial worlds
John Casti

One of the inconsistencies of life is that man knows more about scientific systems than he does about the systems connected to his everyday life, such as bank, traffic, health, or medical systems. Science progressed a lot because it is possible to make repetitive experiments that help us understand how things work, how they can be modified and improved. But these systems have nothing to do with the problems we have to solve everyday. And the daily systems can't be experimented. It isn't possible to devastate a forest, for example, to investigate the consequences of that act. Complex systems are made up of individual agents, the components of the system. They are intelligent, adjustable, and they follow rules. Information is local. It means that the agents don't know everything that happens everywhere, they only know that which happens around them. The essence of these systems is the interaction between all parts and up to then it was no use splitting them into single parts to understand how they work separately.
Now with so many new technologies, we can think of building replicas of daily systems in our computers, which would be equivalent to real research laboratories, and thus we could study them as a whole.
That would be very useful, for instance, in the building of a bridge, aiming at traffic improvement. A simulation could show if the bridge would really solve the problem before a great amount of money would be uselessly wasted.

texts and photos: Fabia Fuzeti
english version proofreading : Regina Stocklen