The Gate (or Hole in Space, Reloaded) is an installation created for the opening exhibition of iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology in Brussels (4th – 10th October 2007).

Ideated by Yves Bernhard , iMAL's director, the installation was meant to deal with a just seemingly simple question: how to create a connection between real space and virtual worlds, so as to let people use them (and interact with their inhabitants) in real space without the mediation of a graphic interface. The problem has already been raised some times but the solution – the projection of a video streaming from the virtual world onto the real space – has never worked. The Gate did not solve the problem and the solution that has been found after a very hard searching can be considered everything but definitive. Nevertheless, a step has been taken forward and some people, from both sides, have tried to cross the threshold.

In the latest issue of the magazine we reported the first part of that experience. In this issue we are going to finish the story...

The Gate: first day

The opening show, in the evening of 4th October, was successful, at least as far as the audience was concerned .The real space is full up, as well as the corner of Odyssey, which was chosen for the performance. Second Front ‘s performance is visually fascinating, Rodin's decadence and Second Life's synthetic kitsch seemed to have found an excellent link. But.. there is a problem. Some avatars think the performance is a bit boring: it is not easy to explain them that the performers have to consider the audience of the aliens too, who may think it is crazy what seems obvious to the others. Yet, the alien audience cannot understand totally what is going on, though it is intrigued. They cannot either understand they are watching a performance, or send signals to the performers, trying to interact with them.

In other words, people in the audience do not understand they are in a screen. They do not understand because they cannot see themselves . Having focused on the symmetry of the two installations, we have not realized that, once again, the performance does not show as a live event, but as a video on the screen. And, considering Hole in Space , we haven't realized that, if that one connected two similar realities, we are creating a bridge between two completely different worlds. The real space is familiar both to persons and avatars while the other is well known by avatars but not necessarily to people. The two realities we meant to connect keep separated and do not interact. Why?

Personally,I am sure our mistake has been to think that it would have been enough to connect the two spaces, hoping each would have acted aware of been watched from the other side. With that assumption, things could work (and they actually do, as we will see soon), provided there is a sharing element, on which to build the interaction. Once Second Front's performance ended, Gazira Babeli installed her latest work: a huge tap that vomited every kind of objects on the black carpet of the Gate , thus choking up the performance space. The sculpture, called Ursonate , is accompanied by the famous Ursonate by dada artist Kurt Schwitters . As soon as they heard it, two persons from the “real” audience started dancing in the middle of the installation, offering Second Life's audience “their” show. The music coming from Second Life is the starting point of the interaction.

First the dancing and then Gazira who, squashing her naked body against the screen, projected the real audience into Second Life, made me think. We kept the two world separated, while we should have created a “third place” instead, where to let the two world live together.

And that space is inside the screen. We quoted Hole in Space , but we should have thought about Satellite Arts Project '77, another Galloway & Rabinowitz's project instead . There, a group of dancers coexist, thanks to satellite transmission, on a single virtual stage which is projected in front of them: by controlling their movements on the screen, they can dance together, though in geogrphically separated places.

We've done it. The third place already exists, it's inside Second Life. All we have to do is moving the camera so that it films both the black carpet and the screen which streams from iMAL. Late in the evening I asked Yannick to try. It worked.

The Gate: “interacting with aliens”

Luckily, I was not the only one to have that idea. The day after, when I went back to iMAL, I found the installation had slightly changed. With Yannick's help, Gazira included our screen within Rodin's door, which majestically framed it. The two spaces had blended. Gaz started playing with the exhibition's audience and just before I left for Italy, she sent me some gorgeous images. She called them Interacting with Aliens . She was naked and upside down as a bat, aiming at one of the artists' head with a gun (the artist was Erland Jacobsen Lòpez , who, like Gazira, loves guitars: (http://eil.net/ejL/). The interaction developed spontaneously, through shouts, parodies, messages scribbled with a pencil (“I don't have a computer”, someone said) and, on the other side, flying objects, events and more motions.

During the following days, The Gate had been what it was meant to be: a sort of two-direction peep-show, a place for spontaneous performances and interactions. Some danced and some said hello; there was who arrived with a cello to play Bach, who repeated Kafka and whohad grown their hair to the point they created an alien, with its own life. A primordial man came too, speaking an unknown language. Many documentation was gathered, many stories were told. I have still to hear some of them.

There is still much to do, of course: yet the direction seems right. The audio streaming should be two-direction, as the video is, even though that would probablycreate confusion. If we coped with Babel, we will certainly sort that out too. The two stages should have tiny tools for the performance and the interaction: something that could help less skilled avatars to do more than just dancing, greeting and taking pictures as well as helping real visitors to communicate and perform. Very simple performances, happening in both places at the same time, could be organized, such as Galloway and Rabinowitz's synchronized dance. The Gate is a project worth a follow-up: if it is not us, I hope it will be someone else .

www.imal.org/

http://odysseyart.ning.com/

www.gazirababeli.com/

www.artificialia.com/peam2006/

www.0100101110101101.org/home/performances/index.html

http://slfront.blogspot.com/

www.ecafe.com/getty/table.html