Computer Graphics World

April 2009 36 n n n n Art•Augmented Reality with the result, overlaying text in various sizes on a map of the globe based on the number of hits. en, he began creating terrain maps based on the number of hits for a particular word. One city's 630 hits on the word "nervous" would produce a little bump in the map; another city might build a mountain with 15,700 hits. "I'm not trying to do something scien tific," Benayoun says, walking to a wide fil ing cabinet with narrow drawers. "I'm just trying to see if I get a significant response. en I create frozen feelings that are sculp tures." He pulls open a drawer, and a tray with platters of emotions slide out from the cabinet. e platters look like thick clay plates with bumps. "ese are dead emo tions, of course," the artist says, "because they can't move." For his first exhibition with the "dead" emotions, Benayoun pro jected the relief map for "fear" onto large, transparent spheres hanging from the ceil ing of a church in Italy, and below the sphere, presented platters of frozen feelings like religious relics. In December, Benayoun gave the frozen emotions a little life with "Still Moving," an interactive installation at the Grand Pal ais that he plans to install in other cities, as well. For this, he created a giant sculpture with three emotions in layers—nervous, anxious, excited—using blue, yellow, and red to represent each emotion. To create the thick, multilevel, flattened sphere, Benay oun and CITU used Stratoconception, an innovative rapidprototyping method for creating large parts from layers of materi als, developed by CIRTES, the European Center for Rapid Prototyping. When people approach the sculpture, which is three and a half meters in diam eter, they can feel a vibration that increases when they touch it. "ey can feel mu sic—which is also made with the level of emotions—with their bodies," Benayoun says. "ey cannot hear it." City names ap pear on areas they touch. "Still Moving" is one of 14 "Mechanics of Emotions" projects Benayoun has imag ined, only some of which he's already imple mented. "I have many new projects relating to emotions," he says. "Some are close to completion. But, it's always difficult to say too much until they are completed." The Dump It is not difficult at all, though, for Benay oun to talk about an ongoing project that he calls, "e Dump." It is a blog (www.the dump.net), a collection of his ideas. Hun dreds of ideas. "Everyone can come and take them and do them if they want," he says. One concept, for example, is that people might live rentfree in apartments wall papered with catalog pages. Each month, the catalog company would replace the wallpaper with new pages of products ap propriate for each room. Another idea would help critics define contemporary art. "I tried to understand what it is that makes people say something is art," Benayoun explains with characteris tic sardonic humor. "I think it has nothing to do with content, so I thought, maybe it's the smell. And, I found the smell. It's the smell of the white paint used for the wall because the galleries are newly painted for each exhibition. So I propose to cre ate a new paint perfume that artists could dab onto their works. en, the critics and journalists and curators would say, 'is is contemporary art.' " Benayoun submitted "e Dump" as his PhD thesis and became, arguably, the first artist to use a blog to qualify for a doc torate degree. "I think 'e Dump' is one of the most exciting things I'm doing," he says. "It's a way to go deeper and deeper in side to what art could be, what innovation could be, and what any action should be. You know, I can't think about art without thinking about the world. It's not about political correctness. So why should I de cide to do something? Very often you only know what artists like to do because you see the results. You never know what they decided not to do, or couldn't do, or didn't know how to do. So, 'e Dump' is also about that. It's about artistic intention." Of all his work, "e Dump" is the sim plest form of digital art, but also the most accessible and most interactive. It is neither virtual nor augmented reality, or perhaps it's both, but with it, Benayoun might have created the newest of all new media. At least, for now. n Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. Benayoun created a tag cloud of hits on the Internet for the word "fear" to create an emotional world map that he projected onto a helium balloon. He titled the exhibition "Sfear."

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