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Experiment and performance concerning networked social interaction using the Nuna machine, a kind of teleprompter with specific software and a robotic camera. The Nuna allows users to authentically experience eye contact in the virtual world, transforming online meetings into personal connections. Nuna provides unique control over eye contact and time delay, factors that are central in the human awareness for being together in a moment.

Press release: 

The performance will see artists experiment with new forms of networked social interaction. At the heart of the installation will be the Nuna machine itself, a kind of teleprompter with specific software and a robotic camera. The Nuna allows users to authentically experience eye contact in the virtual world. It is designed to identify new opportunities for transforming detached online meetings into “real” personal connections. Major ventures within the same realm have recently been launched by Google (Project Starline) and Apple (Vision Pro). What makes the Nuna stand out (except that it works, right now) is the immediate control over eye contact and time delay, factors that are central in the human system for being together in a moment, and in its extension gives clearer understanding of what’s missing in normal online interactions. Combining the Nuna technology with an artistic investigation of the phenomena of interpresence, this project breakes new ground within multiple fields.

Working across design, art, AI, psychology, neuroscience, and mathematics, the Interpresence Intstitute are using all available methods for putting focus on that special feeling of being present, together. The team: Christoffel Kuenen, Umeå Institute of Design; Gabriel Bohm Calles, Academy of Fine Art ;Niclas Kaiser, Dept of Psychology; David Risberg, Umeå Institute of Design; Performers: Amalia Wänman, Peter Andersson (friday & saturday), Lollo Aurell (friday), Sef Aurell (saturday).

Summary of the performance/exeperiment: 

When the sound stops working in the middle of a concert. When a speaker is interrupted by a member of the audience and chooses to listen and respond. The show we expected stops and another kind of contact becomes possible. When the form is broken, we become visible, or rather, our capacity for contact comes to the fore and becomes apparent to us. Niclas Kaiser's and Emily Butler's theory of social breathing focuses on this ability which, like hearing, is something we cannot turn off and which shapes our entire world without us noticing.

During the 70s, the artist Dan Graham worked with mirrors, video cameras and monitors to create shifts in our perception of time, the present, and ourselves. In Time Delay Room, he shifted the viewer's experience away from the work to their experience of themself as a viewer. On a wall, two monitors show the room they are mounted in but from two different angles. When the visitor enters, they expect to see themselves on the screens but the room remains empty. Only after an eight-second delay do they see themselves stepping into the left monitor while the right keeps showing an empty room. Only after another eight seconds do they appear on the right one as well. Eight seconds is the limit of what we can hold in our immediate memory and perceive as the present. The result is that the visitor can never fully identify with what they see on the screens, but instead gets stuck in a constant observation of themselves.

The artist Janet Cardiff has worked with hearing and sound as a starting point for over 30 years. In installations and audiowalks (voice-guided walks), she has explored both the associative power of sound and hearing as one of our primary senses. In the work The 40 part motet we encounter the sound recording of a choral piece, but Cardiff has recorded each of the singers alone and presents the work with a loudspeaker for each voice. 40 speakers in a ring together manifest the striking discrepancy between the embodied voice and our expected experience of a sound recording.

What is happening here and how is it related to our work? The philosopher and dancer Susan Kozel has for many years worked on formulating phenomenological experiences of a technologically expanded corporeality. In her book Closer, she describes what phenomenologists call the 'pre-reflective' state. A state that allows us to step around preconceived notions and meet and experience something new. We can visit this state (never dwell) in several ways. Partly by simply arresting our assessing and categorizing the situation, but also through, for example, improvisation. As a performing artist, Kozel easily draws parallels to music and dance when she describes the role of improvisation in her work and that of others. By changing, among other things, rhythm and tempo, an experience can go from slow and contemplative to fast and changing. She further says that improvisation can be used to break up the everyday and thus make the invisible visible. There is a strong relation between improvisation and play.

Graham and Cardiff both manage to engage their viewers bodily. The works are open in such a way that any meaning is subordinate to the fact that in a pre-reflective stage we know how to deal with them and simply start to play. In documentation of Graham's Time Delay Room, we see visitors bewilderedly waving to themselves with no response. Once they realize what is going on, many laugh and get caught up in a kind of strange game of contact with themselves.

Visitors to The 40 Part Motet  immediately begin to interact with the work. They walk along the rows of speakers, approach them from behind, try to create their own sections and find the nearest voices. Some experiment with walking past the speakers at different speeds. Others are left standing with a big smile on their face.

Nuna provides the possibility of eye contact in a screen conversation. Here, Nuna breaks the expected, normal experience and potentially enables a contact previously reserved for the direct meeting between people in the same room. This is a technique that until now only existed in science fiction. In Star Trek where Captain Picard addresses alien captains directly through the 'main viewer'. But also in 1984 where the training instructor suddenly addresses Smith personally and scolds him for not performing the movements correctly. The fact that the technology is new creates a window for spontaneous play. The same isolation of a particular experience of what it means to be human occurs here as in Graham's and Cardiff's work. By further handing over the ability to manipulate both the degree of eye contact and the delay of sound and image to the visitors, we hope to create a similar environment of play. By shaking up the form, our natural ability for making and keeping contact comes to the fore. When is it there? When does it break? How do we maintain it and what tests can it withstand?

This is our first experiment with Nuna, which will form the basis for developing artistic investigations based in clinical psychology of the natural and automatic processes that enable all human contact.