Benjamin Gaulon -Recyclism

The Works of Benjamin Gaulon
by Arie Altena
Playing Pong on the facade of big buildings, a paintball gun shooting pictures and messages, a musical instrument using game controllers to make music collectively, digital photos corrupted by software: Benjamin Gaulon’s artworks make clear statements that engage the public in a meaningful and playful way. Often, his works make the audience aware of issues of concerning the role of technology in culture and society. They have a quality of being immediately accessible, bringing a smile on your face, making you want to play, do it yourself. And while enjoying, the works make you aware that you could do so many more meaningful, interesting, creative ‘things’ with the old and new technologies around. The way in which Gaulon works with both hard- and software shows that technology is a toolbox to create works, to engage in making culture, to express oneself, to react to the existing culture. As Jonah Brucker-Cohen remarked very aptly in his interview with Benjamin Gaulon that "Gaulon’s projects attempt to challenge popular conceptions of how electronic objects and software should and could function in our daily lives."

Benjamin Gaulon belongs to the young generation of artists in the field of technological and new media art, that, adhering to a DIY-ideology, loves to make physical pieces. He builds software (in Processing and Max/Msp), he is very much part of the internet generation, the laptop is his home probably – being French and living in Ireland – but developing his work he isn’t content with being ‘virtual’. His works mostly involves the design of tangible interfaces, custom hardware, and aims at performances where the audience plays an active part. His attitude towards technology is that we now have so many tools and electronic parts available – partly to be found in the rubbish bins – that one can built custom devices to one’s own taste. They might not work perfectly always (in the way commercial technology should), they might just be built for one task, but they do what the maker wants it to do – and that might be something that no other piece of software or hardware does.

Recycling is a theme that informs a lot of Benjamin Gaulon’s projects. This is as an environmental issue, for instance when he points to all the e-waste that the West ships to Africa and China. But it is primarily by engaging us with old games and obsolete technology, by making new works from obsolete equipment, discarded electronic parts, and stuff found on flea markets or even amongst the rubbish, that he makes us aware of how much we just throw away, how much we discard and forget about when buying the new iPhone, the new iPod.

Gaulon likes to open up the electronic parts, tinker with it, and build something that works. Often the creative potential of the old parts is larger than that of the new gadgets with their shiny look. He shows that with the toolkit we have now (laptop, software like Max/Msp and Processing, Arduino-boards and Atmel-chips, hardware tools), we can build our own tools, robots, strange gadgets, instruments, et cetera. To emphasize this point Benjamin Gaulon has for instance led e-Waste workshops with DePonk (Gaulon with Geraud de Bizien and Karl Klomp).

In his own works Gaulon communicate this ‘message’, by packaging it skillfully, to first capture the public, that subsequently, through engaging or playing with the work, will later begin to ponder these issues. I experienced this myself, by playing his RES – the Recycling Entertainment System a custom made electronic instrument, to be played collaboratively by six people. It consists of six Nintendo game-controllers (the early NES-ones), with which the player plays and chooses sounds from a library. Every controller is connected to the main chip in a black box – which is programmed in basic to read and convert the signals from the controller to midi. This output goes to a computer that runs the Resware, built with MAX/msp. One controller plays bass sounds, another the drums, two for percussion, one for synthesiser sounds and one for various samples (voices, scratching sounds etc.) Playing together one hears a joyfully bleeping band with a hip-hop flavour coming to life. Note that for every sound (every hit on a snare drum, every bass-note, every percussion sound), the player has to push a button, the sounds do not loop: playing the RES is very much like playing a (simple) musical instrument. The RES is addictive to play, because on the one hand it gives immediate gratification (it sounds great almost from the start), but it takes hour to get to know it intimately. The real joy lies in playing it together. If it is a game, it is a game that one does not play against each other to win, but a game to play together in order to make it sound good. That is what making collectively improvised music is about, but it is also a road not often taken in commercial game development. Gaming might be is a social activity, still gamers get together to play against each other, or play together against others. The RES is a truly interactive ’system’ where several players create something together in realtime. In 2005 the RES was one of the highlights on the Sonic Acts Festival in Amsterdam, where it was installed in the basement of Paradiso, with some players spending hours playing the RES, and missing out on the performances of the electronic music acts that they’d come to see and hear.

The RES is also an example of another strand in Gaulon’s work: that of modifying existing hardware. In RES this is done with obsolete technology (at least for the visible part: the controllers), in a later project PrintBall a contemporary paintball gun is modified into a software-driven semi-automatic painting-canon that can shoot messages and images. The PrintBall is like an inktjet printer using a paintball gun as printhead. The gun is mounted on a custom made pan and tilt unit which is connected to software (built with Max/Msp). The software allow the users to load an image, that the paintball gun will shoot in a pixellated form. Every bullet is one pixel. The resolution of the image and the space between the points can be adjusted. Gaulon shows this this work in performances, that have a powerful impact, simply because the paintball gun is, indeed a gun that shoots bullets – bullets filled with paint, but still bullets. In fact Gaulon’s first idea was to build a graffiti robot that could spray messages on walls out of reach, inspired by similar projects, mostly from the scene of political activists and culture jammers. Using a gun for that is a reference to the force with which advertising, commercial media and also the political propaganda are shooting their images at us with force.

Pong, an earlier project that Gaulon developed while studying in Groningen, is a recycling of the old computer game Pong, and again a reference to the culture of retro-gaming. It is an augmented reality game played in public space. Pong is projected on a building, and the limits of that building become the limits of the playing field. The projected ball bounces against against the walls, but also against windowsills and other ‘obstacles’ on the building, while two players on the ground play against each other. The software was developed in cooperation with Arjan Westerdiep, and the set-up is portable, so that it can be played in any square without to much ado. Success is ensured as the public, expecting that the game is simply projected, finds out that the virtual ‘ball’ bounces on the real architecture.

Thanks to his background in visual design, Benjamin Gaulon knows how to make his works attractive and communicate to an audience in an exhibition or festival context. One engages there with his works, without ever asking the question if it’s art or not. (In my experience, that question pops up mostly when the work itself is not strong enough and one begins to wonder what it’s place is a a certain venue). Gaulon uses his designing skills also to make the works come across on the web. This is important since in our digital age, more often than not, we will often first encounter new artworks not while visiting a festival of exhibition, but from browsing around on the net.

Benjamin Gaulon uses the internet also in practice to engage his audience. For an earlier work on e-waste, he for instance asked people to to upload the contents of their computer trash to his site, for further recycling. His work Corrupt is a piece of software that corrupts imagefile, by reading code and changing a few lines (in practice, the software, built with Processing, opens the image-file in a text-editor and changes the binary code before saving the image again as an image). He encourages his visitors to use the software themselves and upload the results. Often people – and also Benjamin Gaulon – will choose political images: to corrupt portraits of Bush, Blair, or Sarkozy, and thereby show their corruption. In those cases the work Corrupt is a piece of cultural activism, that can be compared to painting over billboards and the skillful detournement of advertising used by the culture jammers. Corrupt is also a work in the lineage of the Situationists. Gaulon indeed prefers to regard it that way – as can be inferred from the fact that on his site he republishes, as his ‘statement’ one of the seminal texts from that avant-garde movement: A User’s Guide to Detournement, by Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman from 1956. On the other hand, Gaulon is also fascinated by the purely aesthetic results of the glitches: sometimes through pure luck, the corruption procedure results in beautiful effects. The very first exhibition of the project, featured a corrupted filmclip, in which content and form rhymed: a second, showing a rider on a motorbike almost losing control of his machine, which might be too powerful for human beings, on a fast turn. I don’t think that image was illustrative of Benjamin Gaulon’s work in general, but it is significant as an example of his love for clear and powerful statements.