Ever the kiteflying pioneer, Jackie Matisse, of Fontainbleau Forest , France , late last year collaborated on the first high-bandwidth art piece ever created by computer. Working with the Amsterdam Science and Technology Center, Matisse contributed 12 of her very long, beautifully decorated kite tails to the project. Because wind speed was added to the equation, extensive calculations were required for these real-time kinetic art pieces (kites). Computer operations, mainly at universities, around the world each took on a single one of the dozen tails. The computers were located in Chicago, Canada , Japan , Singapore , Virginia and elsewhere.

The simulation took place in Amsterdam in a three-by-three meter room known as the cave. Three-dimensional computer-generated stereo images were projected on the walls and floor. Visitors viewed the images with special glasses, allowing them to experience date in exceptional ways.

The test was dubbed “kites flying in and out of space” because the project was actually an illusion of sorts. A viewer could put his hand right through a flying, fluttering kite.

So what did the successful demonstration mean? One answer was this: the flying kites were a visual metaphor for high speed networking performance, an important harbinger of things to come globally.

Matisse takes a longer view. “The kites evolved from my use of the sky as a canvas and because they are hard to fly in all conditions, I have experimented with alternate spaces in the past, including under the water and on video. This virtual reality networking enabled me to compose and fly many more kites than I would have been able to fly in real space.

Only granddaughter of the artist Henri Matisse and stepdaughter of Marcel Duchamp, two of the four most influential artists of the 20 th century (the others are Picasso and Pollock), Matisse came to kites as her unique, chosen art form after raising a family of four in Paris. Daughter of New York art dealer Pierre Matisse, she had been reared and educated in the U.S. “Kites have helped me maintain my independence, to express what I feel about art through making ephemeral art works in the sky. Kites are a magical, never ending story and that’s why I cling to them. Whether putting kites into the air, or under the water, or into cyber space, I’ll continue to experiment with them.”

Jackie Matisse feels Duchamp helped her find kites because of his tolerant gaze. For her and for artists all over the world, he flung open the door to unheard of materials and potential directions for art. She says she took up kites after buying a 22-foot Thai snake kite, which she unfurled in the wind and soon lost. But it was a Pandora’s box for her; the image of this long kite flying in the air and creating unpredictable movement and color captured her imagination. She has been making and flying kites ever since.

Her view is that “the sky is a vast celestial canvas, offering the artist an unexploited working space. Kites sculpt the air, they play a game of freedom- they tell a mysterious story. They allow an expression of the infinitely variable interplay of movement, light and color.”

One commentator has called her kites a form of aerial painting. It has been observed they can be viewed as site- specific choreography for the sky. Another observer nicely compares them to Tibetan prayer flags inscribed with mantras, fluttering in the wind and connecting with the moving spirits of the air, thus dispensing the mantra’s benevolent power.

“Her work is inspired, comments Scott Skinner, president of the Drachen Foundation and a student of kite making and flying world wide. “Her interest seems to be with the environment as much as with kites. She provides a different way of seeing kites. She turns a kite into a functional object in which to view the environment. Her water pieces, involving mysterious movement, dappled color, implied sound, are particularly powerful. We all like the unexpected, and she provides it.”

In the 1970s, Matisse became associated with a loose association of visual artists who happened to use kites in their art—–not kite-makers turning out art kites, a significant distinction. Others in the group included the American Tal Streeter, the Swede Curt Asker, and the Hungarian Istvan Bodczky. What the group had in common was a modernist sensibility. The emphasis was on the use of simple, sometimes unorthodox material, on unpretentiousness, accident, the transitory. The collective viewed kiting as participatory, kinetic performance art.

Over the last two decades or so, Matisse’s airborne kites led her to more domesticated works—-assemblages composed of box-like wire armatures that support strings of small floating found objects and tiny sails of painted paper or spinnaker cloth. Rescued detritus is transformed into magical, elegant table pieces. Her swimming tails led her to water-filled bottles in which suspended arrangements of small, shaped tails of various materials became miniature studies for her large-scale underwater kite art.

Matisse even figured out a way to put movement into her long kite tails while hanging them indoors. She hangs them up on rollers and powers them into movement vie small electric motors. Simple, but effective. One of these hangs in the living room of her comfortable old house in the middle of a village. Complete with its own large courtyard graced by two large chestnut trees, the house has lots of paintings and sculptures. “Family and friends,” she says of the artists represented. That their names reverberate in Western art history is just the way it happens to be.

Matisse’s kite making studio is elsewhere in the village. It is two stories high and nicely organized. A notable prop there is a kite reel crafted for her by the artist Jean Tinguely. Although utilitarian, it is a work of art in itself.

Amid a Henri Matisse drawing and Duchampian chess paraphernalia and two of his ready mades (the famous bottle rack and the bicycle wheel mounted atop a stool, both replicas), Jackie Matisse gathers in front of the fire with two of her sons. They discuss Duchamp, who they admired and adored. Matisse adds a small note of reality to the talk. “Yes, he was wonderful, of course but he did smoke cheap Spanish cigars. When he played chess, he was wrapped in smoke.” One of her sons adds: “We still use the boxes they came in for one thing or another. A family vignette.” Despite the cigars, he lived until he was 82.

At a time in life when some would contemplate retirement, Matisse remains busy and fulfilled. She maintains a large household, tends to her family (three sons and an daughter, grandchildren, two dogs and a cat), has a large and devoted group of friends around the world. She exhibits her own work (most recently at a one-person exhibition at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego). And, importantly, she helps represent the family in dealings with the Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp heritage—-meeting with curators and scholars, overseeing a journal devoted to the Duchampian legacy, attending the still frequent exhibitions of their work around the world.

The of course when she can make the time, there are always her kites to keep her absorbed in art creative work. Jackie Matisse has this final comment: “Why do I make flying art? To fly is soothing to the soul.”

“Art Flying In and Out of Space” is a virtual reality simulation of Jackie Matisse’s real-world physical kites, although we may be calling it an ‘interactive stereoscopic installation’ rather than VR in this case. The installation is what’s called a projection-based VR system, as apposed to the perhaps more familiar head-mounted display, where users wear a helmet with computer displays attached. Projection-based VR started with the CAVE system developed at the University of Illinois’ Electronic Visualization Laboratory.  One of the key elements of VR is to immerse the viewer in the virtual world (note that the meaning of ‘immersion’ is very loose and often up for debate). Head-mounted displays do this by attaching the display to the viewer’s head; projection-based systems do this by using very large screens that fill one’s field of view. A full CAVE is a 10 x 10 foot room with projections on multiple walls and the floor; due to space and budget restrictions, this gallery installation will only have a single 8 x 10 foot screen; when users stand up close, it will still (more or less) fill their field of view. The screen is rear-projected so that people can stand close without casting shadows on the computer imagery.

The display is stereoscopic, similar to 3D movies. The technology we use is polarized stereoscopy. Two projectors display different images, one for the left eye and one for the right eye.  The projectors have different polarizing filters, and viewers wear matching polarized glasses to see the 3D effect.

A six-degree-of-freedom tracking system is used in VR systems to allow the computer to know where things (such as the user’s head & hand) are, allowing direct physical interaction with the virtual world, rather than having interaction mediated by a button/menu/etc GUI. In our case, we won’t be tracking the head (which normally is used to draw the graphics from the tracked person’s viewpoint), since several people will be viewing the display simultaneously, so we will use a fixed viewpoint for the graphics.  We will use the trackers to allow 2 or 3 people to fly the kites – the ends of the virtual strings will be attached to the physical trackers, which the people can move around in 3D.

The sound for the piece is music by Tom Johnson. The music is dynamic – it plays in response to the motion of the kites, as manipulated by the viewers. The kites themselves involve a physics simulation known as a “mass-spring model”.  Each kite is treated as a mesh of points; the points are affected by physical forces such as wind and gravity, as well as a “spring force” that keeps the kite together as a single surface.  The earlier versions of the piece used supercomputers to perform detailed simulations of the kites, with the data being streamed back to the VR system over high-speed networks.  As

we don’t have such resources for this installation, a much simplified  version of the simulation will be running on the single Linux PC in the gallery. The motion of the simplified kites will still look very similar, just with less detail, and perhaps less realistic (although this is not likely to be apparent to most viewers).

The whole VR Installation consists  of 2 or 3 PCs (one with a high-end “gaming quality” graphics card), an electromagnetic tracking system, 2 projectors, polarizing  filters and glasses, a special polarizing-preserving screen, and speakers.  We assembled the system ourselves at UB from these parts; some companies sell similar systems pre-packaged, but for a lot more money.

Dave Pape

Assistant Professor

Media Study, University at Buffalo