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Minna Långström The Chinese Room Finland http://www.kuva.fi/~minna/ minna@kuva.fi

The Chinese Room The Chinese Room is an interactive installation and 3D animation. The viewer steps into a space resembling a control room to follow the animated characters as if through security cameras. By pressing the monitor screens, the viewer can change the view and follow events in different places. The installation also includes a security camera which films the viewer. At times, the viewer will appear on the TV screen in the animation, watched by the virtual characters. The viewer is watching animated characters watch the viewer. A custom made software was created for the project. The software integrates live video of the viewer within the animations. It also provides for the touch screen interaction. The Chinese Room - technical interface is built using an application constructed on Apple Quicktime architecture. The application is run on a G4 Macintosh computer connected to two monitors and a DV camera. The Chinese Room application is suitable for Mac OSX. It is created using Java 1.3.1, The Quicktime for Java API provided by Apple. The Chinese Room The Chinese Room is a 3D animation that portrays a futuristic society in which video and computer surveillance is a natural part of everyday life. In the story, Ossy and Peya are a couple who live together but do not talk to each other; they would rather talk about each other with their virtual friends. They also follow each other’s movements through video surveillance. In a society in which video surveillance is becoming commonplace in people’s homes and in which security control is a normal part of the work day, the question of interpretation gains new weight. How to interpret this visual evidence and how to treat its “truth value”? “The Chinese Room” analogy comes from computer science and an argument, which questions the possibility of the intellectual consciousness of a machine. This work deals with similar questions from a human point of view and asks the often heard existential question: can we really understand each other, or do we only project different things onto each other’s words and actions? Technical requirements for “the Chinese Room” installation The installation is a 3 x 3 m room. One of the walls is a projection surface (plexi glass). The video is projected on the surface from outside the box shaped room. There is a chair, a touch screen and a cheap surveillance camera in the room. Software: 1. Mac OSX 2. Quicktime (latest version) 3. Custom made software that comes with “the Chinese Room” Hardware: 1. Dual 1 GHz G4 PowerMac computer 2. Touch screen monitor. (The museum that previously exhibited the installation used the elotouch screen found on the url below: http://www.elotouch.com/products/lcds/1725l.asp) 3. data projector 4. Surveillance video camera (+converter if necessary). 5. Audio loudspeakers (4 channels)

BIO Minna Långström is a new media artist based in Helsinki, Finland. Born 1974 she has an MFA degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Her main artistic medium is, currently, 3D computer animation. Through interdisciplinary collaborations with other artists, engineers and scientists, she makes her work interactive, audiovisual and participatory. Her participatory installations give the viewer a crucial position within the art work. Issues the installations have dealt with are watching and being watched, aspects of surveillance and the relation between the manufactured image and the real. Having studied and worked for several years in the U.S. during the “IT boom” of the late 90s, she finds it interesting to study phenomena related to techno-utopia, and how it is manifested in digital and cultural representations of social schemes and political structures. The installation “The Chinese Room” was exhibited in the Mediatheque, in the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Helsinki, Kiasma, during spring 2003. It will also be exhibited in Germany, spring 2004. The video version was selected to be premiered at the AvantoFestival for new media in Helsinki, November 21st 2003. Minna Långström also produces other artists´ work. She has initiated a platform, VIRTA, for the production of critical media art. Two major projects have been produced so far, in cooperation with the Finnish Broadcasting Company, The Finnish Film Foundation and AVEK, Center for Audiovisual Culture in Finland. In 2002 she received an artist´s grant from the Cultural Foundation of Finland that enabled her to work one year on the “Chinese Room” computer animation. Långström is a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Art in Helsinki, at the lecture series “Art & Technology”.