Barbara Sansone web design & multimedia

CALLED TO EXPERIMENT :

Art, experimentation, aesthetic balance, clearness of sound, user participation, exploration in the era of technology: these are the ingredients of web work by Carla Diana

In the wide panorama of artists and designers using Flash to express their creativity on the Web, a very interesting woman stands out. Her work already attained international acknowledgments. Her name is Carla Diana, she's from New York but has Italian roots. When you visit her work, on her web site www.carladiana.com, suddenly you dive into a peculiar dimension. Her   environments are consistently abstract and not crowded, and the objects that exist there are actual sound-toys that can be manipulated by the user, thanks to the complex programming behind the scenes. And Carla, loving mechanical objects and music, able to catch details of daily life that you often don't notice, reflecting over the relation between animals (including humans) and machines, listening to the feedback coming from colleagues and users, always eager for explorations, supported by her deep technical skills and by her willing to discuss herself and to learn form others' work, demonstrates how a popular software like Flash can be used for personal and coherent research.

Her work, marked by an unmistakable style, enriches the zone on the Web that nowadays is dedicated to art, experimentation and entertainment. Carla also works for professional clients and produces educational tools based on the latest technologies or various web sites - by herself or working in teams - such as the site of the independent filmmaker Atom Egoyan (www.egofilmarts.com), the site for the multimedia company theFurios, inc., which is now Sarkissian-Mason (www.sarkissianmason.com), a section on the site about the Armenian genocide (www.theforgotten.org).

Her work is always suitable, usable and communicative, but also strongly original and pleasant.

STORY OF AN EXPERIMENTER

Carla Diana's biography shows how the elements of daily life, together with one's character, can build a creative personality. Carla always loved mechanisms and the way the daily objects work. Starting from there, she's now living a charming adventure that turned her into a world famous designer.

A child with a screwdriver

Even as a child, she always loved machines. She feels that machines are the perfect combination of motion and solid object, and she tries to bring some of this joy into her interactive design. When she was young, she was always taking things apart - taking the parts off her bicycle, examining the locks, and taking apart the telephone. Nowadays, in her interactive design, she likes to let her users enjoy some of the fun of taking things apart in her interface.

An eloquent example is her recent work repercussion.org (www.repercussion.org), where the small parts that an instrument consist of and that produce sounds can be manipulated, one by one or en masse, changing the virtual machine behavior.

Music to dismantle

Carla studied a great deal of music as a child. She went to piano lessons and music theory, and because she was the kind of child who loved mathematical games, she saw a fun link between that and the music theory. She loved to play Bach's inventions, for example, because they are full of clear patterns blending together. Later in life, she began to appreciate the way musical instruments behave as machines, and she purchased a gorgeous metal flute about ten years ago and studied the flute for a little while, just because she enjoyed it as an object.

What followed grew out of her fascination with machines and her appreciation for musical instruments as objects for a predictable creation of sound. She's often enjoyed the ideas expressed by musicians such as Brian Eno or John Cage who explore sounds from the environment and create non-conventional compositions. Often she hears a rhythm created by some object in the background, like a moving fan or a washing machine, and she finds it soothing to escape in this beat and imagine the kinds of melodies that might accompany it.

Although she did not use music in her professional life before becoming a designer, she always yearned for a way to bring the joy of it back into her life. Interactive design, because it involves many different kinds of media, was a natural way to bring sound into her work, and she found that she also enjoyed the feeling of performance when showing her work in front of an audience.

She started working with sounds and interfaces, and she has made several interactive pieces that she called "visual mixing boards". These involved several sound loops playing simultaneously with individual volumes that could be dynamically changed by manipulating the graphics on the screen. As these works evolved, Carla reached a point where she wanted something more than simply a mixing board of volumes that go up and down; she wanted to be able to actually manipulate things like pitch and rhythm in addition to volume, and link these properties to the graphics on the screen.

In her work, music also is an object to dismantle. The user is invited to recompose it, recombinig its parts. WideOpen Interactive (www.carladiana.com/wideopen) clearly shows this attempt . In this project, Carla deconstructed the music of Laurie Makela and Skooby Laposky in order to create the piece, where the user can recombine its parts interacting with the interface graphic objects.

Organic engineering

Originally from New York City, she has an MFA in Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a Bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering from the Cooper Union. Those studies fulfilled her need to understand how the components of mechanical objects can coexist and take life, and deeply influenced her thinking and the way she express it in her digital art. Her objects usually behave as small independent   mechanisms that influence each other and determine how the organism in which they are contained works. Moreover, Carla didn't want them to be graphically flat and anonymous, but prefers that they exist together, creating a system and telling a story. That's why she houses them in special environments where user can manipulate them.

Carla's work tries to ride the line between reality and virtuality, organic and mechanic, because the crucial idea in her work is the contact between these two dimensions. The objects' appearance continues to search for this balance, as shown in her artificial flowers showcase (www.carladiana.com/flowers).

Carla worked for the famous designer Karim Rashid for a while in New York, and she learned a tremendous amount about aesthetics and process.

Some of her early object design work can be seen at www.carladiana.com/objects. Eventually, Carla moved from object design to interactive because she didn't like having to create "fake" non-working models that didn't do anything - designing for the screen gave her the power to harness her programming skills to make things really come alive. She hopes to be able to bring more experiments with interactive objects, such as this recent jack-in-the-box piece (www.carladiana.com/jack).

Transferring data...

Carla teaches Interactive Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. Here she has also created a new course called "Interactive Sound for the Web", where she's using some of her experience to help students.

In her lessons, she teaches how to use machines and software, but also how to express your personal goals and narratives.

The media are no more than toolboxes that you have to know deeply and are not to be used as an end in themselves, but as instruments to communicate your own original message, in a clear and coherent way.

There are two ideas that Carla tries to stress the most with her students. First, avoid the temptation to be competitive about using Flash tricks. It can take two weeks to built an effect of something zipping across the screen and in the end it may not even really work well in your interface. Be sure to have a well thought out concept that drives the rest of the project. Second, pick two or three things that are your strongest points and keep working on those rather than trying to master everything at once. Interactive designers are often overwhelmed by their attempts to do every single aspect of the project from start to finish. Pick what you do best and do it well. For example, say to yourself, "I will be good at design, typography and programmed transitions", or "...3D, programming and sound".

A world-wide team

Carla is surrounded by people helping her when she conceives and realizes her work. The way that others are involved is mostly through offering feedback and support. Carla also has a number of friends who are designers and programmers; they are professional colleagues and former classmates now scattered all over the world and it's exciting to email them with a new piece to ask for advice.

There are also other projects that were collaborations, such as the WideOpen Interactive site. Finally, there is also the generosity of the online Flash community. It's so useful when you are stuck with a tough problem to go to one of the forums, such as were-here.com or ultrashock.com to look for help from others.

A woman on the dais

Carla received several awards and aknowledgments for the quality of her work. In 2001 she was featured as one of the Art Director's Club "Young Guns", an exibition hosted by the Art Director's Club of New York (www.futureflair.com/pages/ff_projects/ff_projects_youngguns.html).   Her latest piece, repercussion.org, was the Experimental category winner in the 2003 San Francisco Flash Forward Film Festival. On this occasion, Carla lived a professional and human great experience. Everybody knows that Internet is global, shared by different people coming form all over the world. But it becomes especially impressive when you can speak to some of those people who know the work and connect with it in some way. A fun thing for Carla about the festival was to see how many people approached her to say kind things, and there were people from all over the world, Brazil, Finland, Spain, etc.

Perhaps her best moment at the Film Festival was one evening when walking in the street in San Francisco, she was approached by two women who had been at the Festival. They said that there are very few women in the Interactive Design world and they felt especially inspired to see a woman winning an award. This made Carla feel very touched and encourages her to keep going. There is a sense in which the web design world is a bit of a "boy's club" and so can feel intimidating. When she met other web designers who were men and saw that they appreciated her work, she felt very embraced by the community.

Additionally, it was great for her to be approached by musicians and listen to them talk about some of the specifics of her pieces in the way that showed that they appreciated all the nuances and concepts that were being explored.

Back to the analog

Carla is an artist that can start a profitable dialogue with machines and mostly with her computer. But, even if this relationship is crucial in her work, Carla never stops bringing it into question and sometimes she needs to stop. Recently she's dabbled in woodworking because she felt the need to work in "real" space for a while, and she wanted to take advantage of the fact that the school at which she teaches has a fantastic wood shop. She took a refresher course in wood techniques, and was it tough! She forgot how impatient working on the computer can may her, and so she hopes to do more "offline" work, particularly drawing, so that she can lean to slow down a bit. She's become used to drawing lots of quick conceptual sketches that are the basis for her work, but she would like to spend more time on slow, detailed drawings.

INGREDIENTS OF A CREATIVE MIND

Carla's work is the result of a big technical skill, but in her case also of her studies, her work experiences and mostly of the message she bases her work on. The idea has to be organized and made convincing by a careful direction, transmitted using visual and audio communication strategies, and sometimes needs to involve the users by asking for participation and contributions. Finally, it has to find a place where it can be offered to an audience.

The idea

All Carla's work is based on a unique idea: a reflection over humanity and machines and an attempt to create a relation between them, drawing its inspiration from daily life but exploiting the possibilities given by the digital world.

We're at an interesting point in history because we have become sophisticated enough in our machinery that we are creating devices that are animal-like in behavior. We have, for example, robots that can "learn", artificial life algorithms, nanotechnology, and the ability to create prosthetics that give us "superhuman" powers. In this way, the lines between animal and machine are being blurred to the point where we are actually becoming one with the machines. At the same time, all our knowledge comes from an observation of the world around us, and in particular we learn about creating new "organisms" by studying those that already exist. We learn about how to create robots that walk efficiently by studying insects, we learn about machine clusters from looking at flocking behaviors, and we learn about artificial intelligence by studying animal (including human, of course) intelligence.

Essentially, we learn about what it means to be human by studying animals, and in turn we use this knowledge as inspiration to make new creations in the form of machines. In a way the process forms a full circle.

The direction Carla loves cinema that is very visual and also very aware of the use of time. Particularly engaging to her are those very beautiful films that have a gentle pace - not necessarily slow, but very calm. Some recent films that come to mind are "Lost in Translation" and "Love Liza". An old favorite of hers is "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control", by famed documentarian Errol Morris. There is a moment when the camera is focusing on the topiary gardener while he sculpts a large animal shape. The lighting is gorgeous and the music is swelling, turning this otherwise ordinary scene into something very moving and passionate. Carla's also a huge fan of all of Woody Allen's early films, but more because of the sharpness of the scriptwriting (and because she's a New Yorker at heart).

Also great websites definite need great direction. Even though the user has choices in where to go in a website, the designer is still taking him by the hand, so to speak, and saying to him "now look at this, what do you think?". With her students, Carla describes the planning of a piece of interactive design in terms of a "conversation", where the designer presents the user with an opening explanation of some story details and tries to be flexible in responding to the user's particular interests when building the story for them.

Carla learned to do creative direction for interactive pieces in a number of ways. Particularly, she has always been influenced by others. For one thing, she originally began studying product design when she was in graduate school. Thus, she often thinks of interfaces as objects, and not just flat screens. Next she studied graphic design at Cranbrook Academy of Art under Laurie Makela and the late Scott Makela, where she learned to think of everything in terms of the overall story being told through text and imagery. Finally, she worked for a dynamic creative director, Kevin Slavin, at DDB, a huge ad agency in New York. He had a real passion for embracing the core concept and exploring it as thoroughly as possible, and Carla always strives to look for those kinds of overriding ideas.

The color

Carla carefully uses colors, as they definitely have a symbolic function for her. She usually put together a few collections of colors and gives herself a few days to consider them; colors are very difficult and sometimes it requires trying something and then walking away from it for a while to look at it again later with a fresh mind. She also tries to remember the adjectives she came up with for the piece ("sad, "calm", "slow") and make sure her colors fit in. Ultimately she's a big fan of whitespace, so lately she has been tempted to use a lot of white.

The sound

Lately, Carla has taken a "digital purist" approach to sound creation and has been trying to use sounds that are generated from simple waveforms or midi sounds. In the past, she has used community servers. Her favorite one has always been Ontology Sounds (see www.ontology.com), free site dedicated to connecting original sounds and music made by electronic musicians worldwide.

If the creator of a piece wants to immerse the viewer in the mood of the piece, sound is an essential element. Depending on the application, it may not be necessary to control all sounds (for example, a simple menu system or utilitarian piece of software), but at the very least offering sounds for clicks and other interactive "gestures" will provide important feedback to the user.

As always, Carla thinks of three adjectives that she wants to get across (for example, "sophisticated, serious, high-tech" or "casual, funny, friendly"). Designing the sound along with everything else is a great way to reinforce those concepts.

The software

The interactive toys by Carla are made using Flash. She uses this tool because of its ability to combine graphics, sound and scripting, but most importantly because it is the most common browser plugin in the world today. She accepts the limitations of working online because the ability to touch an audience all over the planet is an extremely powerful feeling and keeps her very motivated.

Though she uses the drawing tools in Flash, there are sometimes complex vector shapes that can be built more easily in illustrator.

Carla also uses Melody Assistant - this is a great general purpose composing software; it allows users to select instruments, create midi sounds, and edit music using traditional music notation on the screen - and Amadeus, her favorite sound editor. It is simple, cheap and easy to use. It also uses VST plugins to filter sounds.

The interactivity

The impressions of users the visit Carla's work deal often some way with the brain and its workings. Someone mentions psychology, someone else hallucinations and drugs. It sounds like there's an oscillation between the two brain hemispheres and their specializations, that reflects the fact that in Flash an artist has the ability to have dialogues with the machine - when you train it in order to let it do what you want, programming it in a precise and very rational language - and the creativity at full gallop, the idea and the strength of content are based on, live together.

Carla has similar sensations when considering creative work. At times she feels that all art and design is simply the human being's attempt to feel some control over an environment even though he is really at the mercy of the universe. In other words, we create to give us the illusion of control. In this sense she thinks it is the rational part of the brain that takes over for the user as well as the maker. On the other hand, once something is created, it has a life of its own with unique behaviors and offers the user a sense of play and creativity. Carla likes to make pieces that offer the sense of control, but then turn into something new when the user gets involved in playing with it, and allows for a freedom of "jamming" with it.

The user is a basic element in Carla's work. In her environments, the user has to enter and play with gears in order to obtain an unique result. The user necessarily has to participate actively in Carla's work because in her opinion one of the most interesting aspects of the digital medium is its non-linearity, so that you can customize your pace and your path.

Because of these goals, in Carla's work the user is at once a witness upon whom attention is lavished and the protagonist of an evolving adventure.

The Web The Web is the medium Carla chooses for presenting her work. For an artist who needs to both express herself and make the users the central point of her projects, the possibility of addressing a world-wide audience that can decide how much or when they want to experience certain things is really great.

Moreover, unlike the places previously dedicated to the art, the Web users are a wide range of different people.

The experimentation, when showed in a place as frequented as the Internet, is also available to an audience not used to non-conventional messages or to the form in which they are transmitted, sometimes disturbing ears or emotions by breaking down traditional boundaries. When Carla gets feedback from the kind of user who is not used to viewing experimental work of this kind, it is often the most rewarding feeling. A friend of hers worked for years as a professional musician playing piano, violin and accordian; he's nearly 80 and he doesn't necessarily look for unique interactive experiences; when Carla hears that he loves her work and thinks it's unique, it makes her feel like she's really touched someone in a new way.

Carla has worked on several non-Web-based projects.

She programmed such as kiosks for companies such as Ford for American automobile shows. It was particularly interesting to watch users interacting with her interface on a touch-screen or watching something that responds to sensors, because they don't have as much experience with these kinds of interfaces.

The Fi-do piece (www.carladiana.com/show) was originally intended to be viewed in a gallery space, as it was created for a show at the Cranbrook Museum of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Carla was very excited to see it projected on a wall, as it has much more presence than it does when viewed close-up on a small screen.

Carla has also done stand-alone applications, such as a project in which she created a visual version of the computer's CD player (www.carladiana.com/insert_music_cd.sit). This wound up being particularly frustrating for a few reasons: for example, you have to ask users to make the commitment to download your file and even then you can't anticipate changes in hardware (this piece was created for Mac OS 9, but nowadays most users have switched over to OS X, making her piece unusable).

FACTORIES OF EMOTIONS

Combining these ingredients, Carla evokes and influences the audience's emotions, but thanks to the interactivity she gives them back the control of her work. In her projects the work controls the user and, simultaneously, the user controls the work.

Creating an environment

Carla's works are environments in which the user dives in and forget where he actually is. This is the result of a careful and precise planning. When she's doing her initial brainstorming, Carla actually like to think of objects, gadgets, or machines, drawing out the structure of the information at hand, and determining which parts will move and which will allow the user to manipulate. At some point after that, she usually tries to envision the environment, or the overall metaphor that works best to tie it together as a story.

  What's really important to Carla is to always keep the idea of some narrative in mind. Some designers think that abstraction has nothing to do with story, but she really thinks it is important to try to project an idea of what kind of environment you are creating and what kinds of "creatures' or characters live there, what the world sounds like, and what kind of emotions it offers. For example, she tries to avoid doing isolated experiments, and rather makes work where the action fits into an overriding theme.

Another thing that is really important to Carla is to try to get away from plain mouse clicks, and start introducing virtual "gestures" that involve the user in a way that reminds him of the physical world. For example, taking something on the screen and dragging it, throwing it, turning it, etc. creates another dimension to a piece of interactive design beyond the flat world of the screen.

Suggesting an emotion

It's definitely Carla's intention to influence the user's sensations, and create an experience that is at least somewhat immersive. Also essential is the link between the audio and the visual. When the two are mapped to one another in a seamless and meaningful way, it allows the user a greater sense of escape, but when the sound is arbitrary, the viewer can lose the connection with the work. In a successful piece of work, all elements (graphics, sound, motion) are tightly synchronized, live together as organs in a same body or gears in a same machine. In this way, she creates an environment and a coherent atmosphere with a clear personality, that the user clearly receives   and that drives him through a deeply emotional experience. In order to obtain the harmony of the elements, it is necessary to take care of each detail and to keep the user's sensations in mind. For example, the use of transitions can help move the user from one point to another, rather than jumping abruptly to a new section after something is clicked.

The user as a creator

Carla's work brings the user into an atmosphere that enraptures him and determines his emotions, but he's anything but passive.

First, he moves in the virtual world following a personal path at his own pace and to Carla this is the beauty of non-linear media.

Aside from a sophisticated control of timing and the synchronization of all elements, an increase in the number of user possibilities will offer a sensation of user freedom. That is, when the environment can be continuously re-created, perhaps through an algorithm, it can offer a sense of true exploration. Additionally, when technology gets good enough to allow full 3D on the web, it will allow for a lot more user freedom. There is a new piece of software called Anark Studio that looks like it may allow for greater 3-dimensionality in interactive environments, but it hasn't really been accepted by the public yet.

  In many cases the key lies in timing. There is an aspect to interactive media that allows the user to explore at his own pace, but really the creator has to be very deliberate about what elements are revealed, and when. The user should only be presented with new choices when he is ready for it. And he is only ready for it after he has absorbed what has come before it. The best example of this that Carla can think of is not online, but a CD-ROM game from 1995 called Eve, put together by Peter Gabriel's company, Real World Multimedia. Not only was it visually stunning (he had artists like Neils Udo, Helen Chadwick and Yayoi Kusama working on it), but each element was only revealed after the user had enough knowledge of what came before it. This knowledge could only come from exploring the environment, and so you had to really understand the environment before you could move on. You can see some imagery from the project at www.realworldmultimedia.com/. (Click on the link on the lower right for "eve".)

Cartla has tried to bring some of this idea into her work, particularly with pieces like Terranium (www.carladiana.com/terranium) and Fi-do (www.carladiana.com/show), where user immersion in the abstracted environment is important.

THE ART AND THE INTERNET

Art, especially when it deals with new media, opens interesting questions about how to define it, how to measure it and what are the principles it is based on. Carla Diana developed her personal point of view.

The art in a digital artist's opinion

Trying to define art to Carla is not a banal question but a very provocative (and difficult) one. Carla uses a very suggestive image.

Imagine that there exists a giant gem that floats in front of us, something like a 3-meter high diamond. We all can see this gem and we have all seen certain aspects of it that we appreciate, but the artist is the one who attempts to turn that diamond in a peculiar way, at an angle that others may have never seen before, and gets it to reflect a certain facet of the world (light, beauty, wonder, or some other fascination) in a new way. She is the one who cries "look at this fascinating thing I've discovered" and feels compelled to share this discovery with others.         

Artist or designer?

Carla considers herself an artist when it comes to her non-commercial work (repercussion.org, terranium, wideopen interactive, etc.). When she's doing more specific client work she would consider herself more of a designer.

She spends a great deal of time on her personal work development, but it is hard for her to put a number on it. As an artist, she feels that her mind is often working on concepts even when she doesn't really appear to be working. In other words, she likes to plant the seed of an idea, and then hope that it grows over time, as she explores different aspects to it. She does try to spend at least a couple of hours a day working on her ideas, whether it's by learning new software tools, researching other artists, or drawing in her sketchbook, but sometimes the best inspiration comes all of a sudden when you least expect.

She thinks that what's needed to be a good designer is essentially a passion for design, and a sense of that "gut" feeling about things. It takes a real passion to work with something for hours moving a line one pixel here or there, trying new colors and shapes a hundred times - many people just don't care enough about it. Then it takes courage to ultimately go with your "gut" because there is no way to know what is right or wrong until you put it in front of your audience. A designer has to care a lot about non-verbal communication and in the end, has to be at least a little bit of a showoff.

As far as clients asking for what they want, she's worked in both situations: those where the client has been clear about what they want, and others where it's been left up to her. Sometime ago she worked for the kids' software division of Scholastic, Inc., and they gave her a great deal of freedom in the creative direction; Carla thinks it worked out well for both parties.

  With commercial work, it really is essential that the client be happy. Sometimes this may involve a struggle to get the client to appreciate a particular creative vision, but it's fair for the client to ask to be convinced.

Two really big rules for building a successful commercial site have to do with communicating with the user:

- In particular, figure out the users needs/desires, and make sure those are easy to find on the screen;

- Additionally, it is a good idea to let the user know where he is in the overall flow. In other words, if the "structure" of the site can be as clear as possible, it will ultimately help your audience.

Binary art Nowadays, digital tools allow even people who don't know anything about music to play, and allows people who can't draw to draw. For some time now, the medium and the technologies have become almost more of a focus than the content, and people have been so taken aback by digital special effects that they tend to forget the importance of content. Now that multimedia is a part of our daily life, the message and the content consistency are finally being valued again.

Carla definitely thinks that digital tools offer new means of expression because they help the artist to quickly visualize an idea that only exists in her mind. This can sometimes be a bad thing if it is abused and people use the tool without any real thought behind it. Ultimately, however, a talented artist with a real sense of her vision can quickly experiment with a few different manifestations of an idea in order to determine the best expression.

At the same time, a lot of what is important in art is the relationship between the work itself and its audience. Digital tools and the internet have allowed many new audiences to connect with work that they otherwise would never have seen.

Carla thinks the difference is in being able to connect with a work on more than one level. A piece can draw you in because of something simple, but perhaps the more time you spend with it the more meanings you see. Carla is a big fan of the work of futurefarmers (www.futurefarmers.com) and she feels a few things when she interacts with their work: at first it just feels like great graphic design and cute characters; then she sees the characters with respect to their relationship to the environment they are in and she begins to see meaning behind the abstractions; then she also begins to enjoy the interactions when she sees that there is a sophistication to the motion; finally there are pieces which also have an underlying agenda, be it moral or political.

A work that offers simple pleasures when you first experience it, but then reveals deeper meanings or intricacies upon further inspection, is the most valuable in her opinion. Digital work should also uphold the same kinds of standards of "craft" that other work has - sloppiness still shows even if you use digital tools, and the eye can see when there is no attention to detail.

The Web as an art gallery

The internet has definitely changed the size of the audience that is exposed to art from around the world. You now have access to images from Japan, Australia, Russia, etc., and people in those areas have direct access to imagery that comes from my part of the world. In Carla's opinion, it is making art much more global and allowing people to really engage their aesthetic obsessions by finding others who share them.

On the other hand, there is a way in which new media and the internet "cheapens" part of our experience of art, because we are becoming spoiled by having access to so much imagery. Many of us are also becoming very speedy in the way that we look at things, because we are used to having the power to click around the screen very quickly and discard things without really considering them.

Carla is very frustrated by certain aspects of working via the internet: for example, the varying speeds of data transmission means that she has to relinquish some control over the overall pacing of her work; and the differences in hardware mean that she can't anticipate what her work will look or sound like. Particularly with the sound work, she has to remember that most people have very small and weak speaker systems attached to their computers, and often the computer will not produce the full range of sounds as intended.

In the end, however, the benefit of being able to reach a global audience of practically unlimited size (some days 3 people might look at some of her work and other days it might be thousands) outweighs any of the frustrations, and Carla is very willing to stick with it.

CARLA DIANA'S AUDIO-VISUAL WORK            

Carla Diana's personal work deals very heavily with humans as the link between animal and machine. She finds this particular juncture in history to be a perplexing haze of discovery that makes us increasingly aware of how little we truly know about what it means to be alive. It is this complexity, its mystery and its energy and the emotive implications it produces, that she seeks to highlight in her interactive experiments. She makes work that harmoniously is part image, part sound, part math and part language, and where, starting from a structure created following precise rules, unexpected   diversions are possible, thanks to the open possibilities for interaction.

Fido: On Being Feline (www.carladiana.com/show)

This work has been created in March 2000 and originally was an interactive projection for the Summer Show featured at the Cranbrook Museum of Art (Figura 6).

Fido: On Being Feline arose during a period of time when Carla was doing a lot of research into human's ability to emphathize with animals. One of the stories she read was about a lion who was betrayed by his owner (the zookeeper) when he was shipped to another zoo.

This piece is about being inside the mind of an animal, exploring the development of trust and a programmed response to be suspicious of the outside. On the screen, a network of brain impulses and reflexes represented graphically in a circuit of lines and nodes which connect and disconnect based on user input. As graphic elements emerge the visual mood and musical theme shifts. Virtual synapses connect, and the animal's mind "opens" to allow a relationship between the being behind the eyes and the world in front of it.

Even if the process is determined by the user and the piece is structured in a way that several combinations are possible, the user's choices are cleverly conditioned in a specific direction, leading to the result that Carla wants to reveal. From a gloomier environment where it looks like there's no exit (the image of the wall makes a small movement giving the impression of being surrounded and jailed), the atmosphere slowly changes, becomes brighter and far-reaching (the sky appears, fills up the scene and then raises), where the image of hands receiving and calling with a reassuring movements adds to friendly and persuasive voices.

The user so becomes the creator of a synapse that opens the animal mind and allows a relation between the being behind the sight and the world in front of him.

Terranium (www.carladiana.com/terranium)

Terranium is a work created by Carla in 2000, but still is very charming. When she made this piece, she'd been trying to give more complexity to her "visual mixing boards", that involved several sound loops playing simultaneously with individual volumes that could be dynamically changed by manipulating the graphics on the screen: she wanted to be able to actually manipulate things like pitch and rhythm in addition to volume, and link these properties to the graphics on the screen.

In any section of Terranium, graphic objects hide programmed behaviors that operate on sound. Rhythms and compositions are algorithmic and can be manipulated by the user.

In order to make the objects more than just simple interactive shapes on the screen, Carla created a narrative virtual environment that can be explored by the user moving into the three levels: sub-terranian, ground-level and stellar. You can explore just one level at time, but the three environments are a continuum. When the user goes to the upper or the lower level, the screens slides so that he feels like he's moving in just one environment. Some graphical elements also unify the three environments: the green lines that in the sub-terranian level are a kind of box turn into the floor in the ground-level. Here, on this interactive lawn, a blue sky proceeds until the stellar level, where it turns into a frame containing the darker background.

Objects living in each screen are alive and again organic. The protagonist in   the sub-terranian level looks like a creeping creature, almost primitive, it moves like a worm, even if it looks like a spinal column. In the stellar level, the star sequences look like they are being spied through a microscope, the throbbing reminiscent of breathing despite the fact that they are motionless, the eternal sleep where the simplest creatures look jailed even if they're necessary in the ecosystem. On the ground-level, metal flowers bounce and collide because they're not tied on the ground.

All these beings have a necessary and independent movement, but the user can disturb it, which will automatically change the environmental sound. The sound in the sub-terranian level is made with low frequencies that remind the ground movement (the earthquake, for example) and with cracklings that remind one of creatures swarming, digging, and transforming the ground. In the ground level, the music background lets you imagine what you can't see - the human presence: machanical movements, cars, cities crawded with people working and travelling. In the stellar level low sounds are back, to suggest the deepness and the infinite, something mysterious and still not explored, wandering particles, liquids, gases.

The possibility of interaction, of entering these worlds by operating them and not simply watching, makes this work more beautiful. If the user doesn't touch the mouse, it is still fascinating.

Repercussion.org (www.repercussion.org)

Repercussion.org is the work that Carla Diana created in 2003 using Macromedia Flash and that was Experimental category winner in the 2003 San Francisco Forward Film Festival.

It's a collection of virtual instruments designed for live performance and online user exploration. Rhythms and musical phrases can be dynamically composed and altered based on the arrangement of objects on the screen.

This work, still in progress, grew out of some of the desires Carla had when she built the Terranium piece: to be able to dynamically change things like pitch and rhythm in addition to volume, and link these properties to the graphics on the screen.

In particular, Carla found that she enjoyed showing her work to others because it felt like a performance, and she decided to start making her own tailor-made virtual instruments that she could use for creating musical compositions.

Unlike the other pieces, however, she wanted to treat this as a collection of mechanical devices that would not be tied to a particular narrative, but rather could be manipulated to create a variety of sound arrangements. Finally, she didn't want these interfaces to be flat graphics, but instead she wanted to think of them as little pieces of architecture that together could make a little city or building complex.

This work is a result of the type of work that is uniquely Carla's way of describing and elaborating her environments. In preparing for it, she often observed simple everyday objects, like a light switch, and wished to embrace the magic of   experiencing even those simple interactions, Her work is an attempt to translate those gestures and experiences into the virtual world. She listens to music in an attempt to imagine the seeds from which a composition might grow, or the brick that might make up its stucture.

Recently, Carla created a special version of this work, where the user can interact using his body instead of the mouse (www.carladiana.com/repercussion/events/). A projection offers immediate visual feedback in which specific musical elements are mapped to simple objects on the wall. Four sensors suspended from the ceiling read users' heights, which then correspond to the tone in a chord. Eight sensors along the wall match the beats in a rhythm. Essentially, the work is a human-powered musical instrument. Human presence and collaboration are required to compose a song.

This installation has been presented in Savannah Gallery, Atlanta (USA) from February 9 to March 19, 2005 as part of the DIGITAL COTTON show.

GUIDE TO AWARE SURFING

Carla thinks that watching other artists' work is an important inspiration source that drives to improvements. Here you are a list of sites that Carla suggests:

James Tindall (www.atomless.com/sqrt-1) He created a site called thesquarerootof-1.com, which was one of the most inspirational pieces I'd ever seen at the time. It contains simple graphics with highly complex programmed behaviors. It's highly interactive, responsive to both the user and the music, but above all the complexity that he creates on the screen in mesmerizing.

Audiorom (www.audiorom.com) This group has been around for a while, but their work is still interesting today. They are one of the few artists who combine looped sounds with event-based rhythms and patterns.

Stanza (www.stanza.co.uk - www.soundtoys.net) This British-based interactive artist has been committed to the pursuit of interactive audio visual work for several years. His work is rich and multi-layered; also it is often generative so that over time new environments evolve. In addition to his own work, he has been an extremely positive force in supporting the work of other artists working with online audio-visual art. His soundtoys.net online gallery has received international attention and is a true asset to the online artistic community.

Amit Pitaru (www.pitaru.com) Multimedia artist Amit Pitaru creates work that is very sophisticated and engaging. Some of his recent experiments with a digitizer tablet have been particularly amazing.

Futurefarmers.com (www.futurefarmers.com) As mentioned above, Carla feels that the work of this San Francisco based group shows a strong sense of graphic design, with an overall playful aesthetic and sophisticated interactivity. Anove everything else, she thinks she has always been impressed by how strong their identity is: they've taken super simple 3D shapes made up of mostly balls and boxes and used the simplicity of part of their own aesthetic.

Theremediproject.com (www.theremediproject.com) This is an extremely well curated project featuring online artwork by a number of artists. The work was always fresh, beautiful and highly innovative. It began in 1997 and a new issue was revealed every quarter of a year. The project was ended some years ago, but all of the work is online for viewing.

Orisinal (www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/) This collection of online Flash games is created by an artist whom I really respect; he took something that is often given little value - simple online games - and did it with such poetry and sophistication that he's elevated it to an art form. Every one of his Orisinal pieces shows a sense of refinement and an attention to detail in the graphics, the programming and the overall narrative that is implied.

Strane cose (www.nostatic.it/selected/strane/index.html) This collection of mathematics-inspired interactive experiments is a favorite of Carla's because she always found it very inspirational. Though many artist/programmers have collections of experiments, this one stands out to me because of its unique aesthetic and because it links into a central theme: a celebration of natural phenomena. It was created by Italian multimedia artist Luigi D'Aloisio.

habbohotel.com   (www.habbohotel.com) This avatar-based chat room is one of the most intriguing projects that exists on the web. It's not the most practical chat application, but it is a really interesting example of a visual representation of a human's presence in a virtual environment.

firstbornmultimedia.com (www.firstbornmultimedia.com) This design firm has managed to take bold, simple design and infuse it with graceful motion in their portfolio site. Even though it is very minimal, an attention to graphic design details - size, placement, grouping, spacing - makes it very effective. The way that the word glide around the screen as they grow or shrink further emphasizes what's going on in the overall design.

uncontrol.com (www.uncontrol.com) This experimental website of designer/programmer Manny Tan showcases minimal Flash pieces that are highly interactive and reveal very specific programmed behaviors. It showcases one of those qualities of computer-based work that Carla loves the most: the sensation that the thing on the screen is somehow "alive".

FREE TUTORIAL

A free tutorial by Barbara Sansone www.headroom.ws/slice0 based on a "Terranium" file, a multimedia work for the Web originally designed and produced by Carla Diana, can be found at www.headroom.ws/slice0/download.