Connected Bill Seaman’s ‘Exchange Fields’ BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	"Exchange Fields" A multi-sensory interactive environment by Bill Seaman created in collaboration with Regina van Berkel. At the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University’s List Art Center, 64 College Street in Providence, through March 10.

Artists in the 15th century lured viewers into paintings by using perspective, and since then tromp l’oeil has tried to trick us there. Multimedia artist Bill Seaman, however, recruits us.

Recently tapped by RISD to head its new Digital Media Department, Seaman is introducing himself locally with "Exchange Fields," an interactive installation at Brown’s David Winton Bell Gallery.

When you walk into the darkened gallery, you encounter nine black stations, like stark sculptures, before three wide video-projection screens. Each station is labeled with the part of the body you are asked to contribute for a moment: arm, hand, knee, leg, and so on. There is a chair for using your back, and a low platform to place your entire body upon. The electronic sensor device for your knees is placed right up front, like a kneeling pad at church.

The two side screens loop, with a long time lag, the same abstract imagery of movement within darkened stillness: bare tree branches lit by street light, a blue disk of stove flames, a cigarette lighter being flicked, the amorphous flow of what looks like lava lamps shot in black and white.

Those images bracket the middle screen, which you can affect. Over Seaman’s soft electronic music, he intones his poetic but observant text ("Light becomes thought, trajectories and relays / thought becomes action, enfolded in response"). Depending on which sensors we trigger, Dutch choreographer and dancer Regina van Berkel performs various sequences of movement. In close-up or medium shot, she sometimes moves sinuously, sometimes abruptly, as a single light source in a darkened space highlights shifting body lines and musculature. In one especially fascinating and graceful sequence she simply stretches an arm across her back. Multiple gallery participants can prompt dim overlays of additional images, up to four all together.

Created in 2000 and on loan from the Museen der Stadt Dortmund, "Exchange Fields" doesn’t merely state, but demonstrates that life and actions are interconnected — and that we don’t have to be passive receivers of art.

Worthwhile art transcends the limitations that box in cognition when we make connections to find order. Seaman’s works force us to find relationships where rationality is no longer in the conversation. With his interactive opportunities, he seems to want to provide us playgrounds for meaning-making.

Seaman’s 1996 Guggenheim SoHo installation, "Passage Sets/One Pulls Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue," allows participants to select from among 150 photographs of Australia, close-ups and panoramas, linked to text fragments that recombine into random poems for each combination of images.

In his 2001 installation, "The Hybrid Invention Generator," Seaman goes further. Again with a soundtrack and non-linear text, but this time with three-dimensional graphics, he had audiences select inventions from a touch screen — a light bulb, a cell phone, a microscope — and watch them morph and mutate from one into another. As he wrote about it at the time: "Instead of approaching media combination through the metaphor of the text, I am trying to open out a new spatial, environmental understanding of meaning production."

Seaman, 47, was recruited from the Department of Design and Media Arts at the University of California in Los Angeles. His academic training began with an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, continuing with an MS from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in Interactive Arts (CaiiA) at the University of Wales. His numerous grants, fellowships and awards include the first Multimedia Prize from the Berlin Film/Video Festival; the International German Video Art Prize; and, in both 1992 and 1995, the Prix Ars Electronica in Interactive Art in Austria. His work is in collections from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to Tokyo’s Art Vivant.

In Europe for an exhibition, Seaman was tracked down by e-mail to briefly discuss some matters that "Exchange Fields" brings up.

As for the element of sound in his installations, the artist is a self-taught musician and composer. Seaman says that he started in 1978 with simple tape recorders, then progressed until he gained skills composing on the computer. What did he want this additional dimension to provide in his works? Was silence getting in the way? Seaman replies: "I have always liked ‘Silence,’ by John Cage — he found that even if you go into an anechoic chamber you still hear two sounds. Thus there is no such thing."

Our visual experience can’t be the same when we are listening to Mozart as when we are hearing traffic or a calliope. With his works, to what extent has he tried to change our perceptions through sounds? "I am interested in fields of meaning," he writes. "Thus the sound, the image, the text, all carry different fields of meaning that intermingle with our history of meaning production/thought processes, in a dynamic ongoing manner."

In full post-modernist mode, he says, "I am very much interested in meta-meaning — where one observes their thoughts as they interact."

And when the opportunity to interact with his work is resisted — does he consider that a failure? No, he responds, "Each piece has its own characteristics. Failure is in the eye of the beholder . . . For me they have all worked, but in different ways, with different intentions."