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October 30, 1997
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
Made in the Shade
n 1895, when the German physicist Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen discovered the penetrating properties of X-rays, he at first did not believe his own eyes.
"I still thought I was the victim of a mystification," Roentgen told colleagues before recounting how he conclusively confirmed the rays' power to reveal the unseen.
Ken Goldberg, the telepistemologist, can relate completely to Roentgen's sense of wonder.
Ken Goldberg
Like epistemology, the study of what we know and how we know it, telepistemology -- Goldberg's coinage -- is concerned with the nature of our knowledge over distance, especially when our perceptions are based on electronically mediated images, such as those found on the Web.
"X-rays are a perfect example of an epistemological inquiry. When they came out, all of sudden you had this new sense of imagery. The ability to see through something was unprecedented, and nobody knew quite what to make of it," Goldberg said in a recent telephone interview.
"And then you had all these questions, just as you have with all new technologies. Was it real? And what exactly were you seeing?," he continued.
Goldberg is asking visitors to his latest and most fully evolved work of Web-based "telerobotic" art, the Shadow Server, to ponder these issues anew, this time in an evocative environment that is as visually rich as it is philosophically allusive.
Created by Goldberg, an associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Bobak Farzin, one of his undergraduate students in the industrial engineering department there, the Shadow Server was officially launched this week after a beta period that began in August.
Those who enter the Shadow Server site can control, telerobotically, the switches for five halogen bulbs arrayed within a lightproof box. When any or all of the lights are on -- there are 32 possible combinations -- objects in the box cast shadows onto a scrim. A camera records each black-and-white image and transmits it "live" across the Internet.
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NEW & LINKWORTHY
The Web site for the San Francisco Taiko Dojo, a school for Japanese percussion, was relaunched last week. Go to the bottom of the main page and follow the link "Play Taiko" to see and hear demonstrations of four different drums. Before visiting Mechanical Marvels: Invention in the Age of Leonardo" at the World Financial Center, preview the exhibit on the Web. There are photos of the show's working models, as well as reproductions of the 500-year-old drawings on which they are based. Be prepared for the slow-running Italian server, which may account for the lamentable absence of onscreen animation.
The objects inside the Shadow Server are never seen directly, only as murky umbras. The transmitted images often resemble Rayographs, the pictures produced when the artist Man Ray placed items on a sheet of photographic paper and exposed them to light.
Rayographs are reminiscent of X-rays, as are the photos sent by the Shadow Server. "It's the same notion," Goldberg concurred. All three types of images show something, but how much do they truly tell?
In conceiving his new work, Goldberg actually had a different artistic antecedent than Man Ray in mind. Instead, he was inspired by Marcel Duchamp's "Ball of Twine (With Hidden Noise)," which is shown on the site's index page.
For that 1916 artifact, Duchamp asked a wealthy patron to secrete an unidentified object within a sphere of string, which was then secured with screws between two steel plates and sealed in shellac.
"Duchamp never knew what was inside," Goldberg explained. "Now, they (the artist and the patron) are both dead and nobody knows. To find out, you'd have to destroy it."
Goldberg declined to divulge the contents of the Shadow Server, and his description of the receptacle, which resides in his Berkeley lab, also was limited: a wooden container that is "a little larger than a coffin."
He would like to seal the Shadow Server and see it exhibited in a museum someday, just like a Duchamp. "There's some wires coming out of it," he mused, "but you could essentially shellac it."
Ken Goldberg's Shadow Server
When viewing the Shadow Server's images, the one recognizable object silhouetted against the scrim is a movie reel, which is consistent with Goldberg's preference for calling the setup an "apparatus."
Discussed mostly in film schools, apparatus theory contends that moviegoers are affected by how a theater is configured. Politically speaking, we are "subjected" to the mechanics of projection. All good little telepistemologists should consider that as they stare into their computer screens.
Apparatus theorists are hardly the first to identify the audience's captive status. In Plato's Republic, prisoners are chained in a cave where all they can see are shadows on the wall.
"In some sense, what we perceive is always indirect, so the idea of this allegory is very potent. What Plato is saying is that there is a deeper truth that can be gained than what our senses are telling us," Goldberg asserted.
"Technology gives us a new way to think about that question by creating a circumstance that you can see, that you can interact with, that you even can manipulate. And yet the question of whether it's real or not becomes unobvious," he continued.
The Shadow Server is more than a cleverly designed philosophical investigation, though. Previous Goldberg works, including the Tele-Garden and Legal Tender, have yielded visual results, but the output here is more carefully composed and less dependent on user-controlled variables.
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For the official launch, Goldberg and Farzin added and rearranged objects, then altered the lighting for dramatic effect. The page layout also has been cleaned up to heighten the impact of the images.
"I do want the formal aspect to be right," Goldberg confessed. "It's something I'm learning. I have an enormous respect for visual artists. One of the things that's hurt a lot engineers who get involved with art is that they have a very arrogant attitude of 'I can do that.' I fully appreciate that it takes years and years of work and practice to get to that point."
The team continues to strive to elicit more visitor feedback.
"We're trying to talk about the implications of distance, and what that means in terms of perception and belief, in terms of trust. At the same time, it doesn't require that I sit at a distance from the viewer. I want to know what the viewer's reaction is, because that's what helps me understand what's going on here," Goldberg said.
Goldberg, 36, holds a doctoral degree in robotics and his research in the field earned him a Presidential fellowship, awarded in 1995 by the National Science Foundation.
As a youth, he helped his father, a Bethlehem Steel engineer, build a robot in their basement. When Goldberg was 7, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon.
"The moon landing was such a radical concept," Goldberg recalled. "It's almost impossible for our generation to comprehend how outlandish that was. When Kennedy said we're going to put a man on the moon, people thought, 'He's crazy, that is science fiction.' As people gradually came to believe that (the moon walk happened), it led to trouble with the other technologies that followed, because people said, 'Well, anything's possible now.'"
At the time, and for decades after, there were suspicions that the lunar landing was staged in a television studio. So far, Pathfinder's arrival on Mars earlier this year has remained unchallenged, even by Goldberg.
"We've become a lot less skeptical," Goldberg said. "And there's a lot of reasons to wonder."
arts@large is published weekly, on Thursdays. Click here for a list of links to other columns in the series.
Related Sites
Following are links to the external Web sites mentioned in this article. These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability. When you have finished visiting any of these sites, you will be able to return to this page by clicking on your Web browser's "Back" button or icon until this page reappears.
- The Shadow Server
- Ken Goldberg's home page with links to his other telerobotic works
Matthew Mirapaul at mirapaul@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions.
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