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	Jan Robert Leegte A Real Perspective on Virtual Reality By Silvia Baumgart (Published in Varoom Magazine) Jan Robert Leegte, like the MIT media lab guru John Maeda, user computer code to create his art. Leegte's work appears deeply familiar - so familiar we hardly notice it. But it is also deeply skewed and off-kilter. He mixes the drab aestethics of on-screen interfaces with a warped functionality that makes him an image-maker for the 21st century. "The world behind the computer screen has always fascinated me," announces the artist Jan Robert Leegte. Leegte creates animated studies using code from Windows interfaces and software programmes such as Photoshop. He has recently shifted his interest from computer-based interactivity to installations in 'real' space. Leegte studied Architecture at the Technical University in Delft, followed by Fine Arts at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. He now lives and works in Amsterdam. His works are playful experiments that explore the possibilities of new media by drawing on ideas and paradigms of modern art such as abstraction, the moving image, interactivity, and ready-made objects. He subverts the mundane appearance of computer interfaces to create recognisable but oddly mysterious aesthetic experiences - both online and as gallery-based installations. He not only subverts the look of computer interfaces, but also the functionality. In Leegte's twisted world, nothing quite works as you expect it to. The online work Untitled [Wood and Button] (2003) shows two identical rectangles laid side by side on a grey background. One rectangle resembles a piece of wood, the other is a typical Windows button, coloured with the same grey as the background. White and black lines outline both forms and give the illusion of dimensionality. Anyone familiar with Windows interfaces will automatically try to click on both shapes to trigger a reaction. Nothing happens when the cursor is moved onto the wooden object, but the cursor changes from an arrow to a hand when it is moved over the grey button. Click on the grey button and it changes from an embossed button to a de-bossed button. Nothing else happens. The artwork is complete. Leegte uses code that is common in Windows systems and rearranges it to create an interface that shows familiar details but has been reduced to forms and basic functions that are essentially useless. His deconstruction is similar to the reductions that led to abstract art in the beginning of the 20th Century, when, for example, Piet Mondrian reduced a tree to a pattern of lines and coloured forms on canvas. Windows is a virtual environment that doesn't imitate naturalistic spaces, but provides frames and navigation systems that resemble modern abstract compositions. Yet still it is furnished with objects and patterns that have been taken from the real world - on/off switches, directional arrows, waste bins and illustrations of document pages, envelopes and printers. It is an alternative desktop constructed to mimic our familiar 'real' working environment. The thought-processes behind Leegte's work have their origins in abstract, and even surreal art, but are best compared to postmodernist assemblages by artists such as John Armleder. In the 80s, Armleder combined abstract painting and old-style furniture for his so-called 'furniture sculptures'. By bringing together objects of art and design in the same context - in this case the gallery space - he looked to influence the perception of both and thereby challenge the beholder's value system. In this context, the reduction to lines and colour on the canvas may be interpreted as an ornamental pattern while an old vintage chair is seen as sculpture. Armleder's work can easily be perceived in the capabilities of the computer, where everything can be translated into algorithms to create a multi-media platform that can - at least in theory - generate endless combinations of reference systems and is open to new and surprising meanings. Yet the ability of the user of multi-media applications, as well as the viewer of post-modern assemblages or installations to create new interpretations, relies heavily on previous knowledge and experiences. No such previous knowledge is required when watching Selections (2006), where Leegte has used Photoshop to create a digital film of a live drawing session. Using the Select function, the cursor of the programme marks rectangular forms that are outlined with short lines that move around and highlight the selected area. The more areas the cursor selects the more complex the drawing becomes. Overlapping lines leads to the underlying lines disappearing until finally the whole drawing is erased. The cursor, in the form of a cross, stands alone against a grey, grainy background. Leegte filmed the process from a computer screen with a digital camera. The visible pixels from the computer's screen intentionally awake the aesthetics of early abstract animations. Although the composition of lines appear to resemble the grid system of a city, the drawing is simply self-referential -- it reveals nothing other than the movement of the user and the reaction of the programme to these movements. Leegte was asked in a 2004 interview with Peter Luining why, after working online, he returned to installations in real space? "It took me some time," he notes, "but at a point I started noticing aspects of interactivity and net-behavior which I hadn't focused on until then. My main field was exploring this space in which I could build these 'new' sculptural experiences and place them on the net. I had been adding interactive experiments now and then, but they were sidetracks. When I began noticing how people react to browser-based work, and the way the net is used, I decided my research would have to find a different medium." Leegte continued: "The sculptural feel of the Internet studies is fragile and demands the viewer to look mainly as if observing a phenomenon in nature. The net is a highly impatient, click-based environment. Visitors would sometimes interpret my work as an intentional aggravation for the user, a form of crash-art, or even subversive. I decided that it was the effect of the medium of the Internet that created these unintended connotations. Shifting back to 'real' space was a very effective way of dispensing with this problem." Leegte's installations are a direct result of his previous net studies. He uses elements of Windows to create abstract structures; mimicking the functions and visual signifiers to create real life computer environments. Scrollbar Composition (2005) consists of a linear wooden structure standing in a gallery space and a projected image. Leegte has meticulously adjusted the projector so that it overlaps the image with the architectural structure which acts as a screen. The result is a physical experience of a room and installation that would not be possible through the computer screen. The web creates virtual spaces with which the body can connect directly through the movement of the hand and the input these movements have on the vision. But as long as the primary sense involved in perception is the eye, the experience is still likely to be that of a two-dimensional screen. In a three-dimensional space this is different. The whole body moves and constantly alters the perspective of vision; resulting in a different, multi-sensory interpretation of the piece. Rather than creating new structures, Cassette Ceiling and Selections, use existing architectural structures as projection areas. In the former, a computer-generated image presenting several lines of buttons is projected onto the ceiling of a gallery space. All individual frames are programmed to slowly open or close maximising or minimising the black area they enclose. Although the composition creates an illusion of solid architectural elements, the movements of those elements contradict the very notion of architecture. Additionally, the projector lights produce a glow that is similar to natural light, and emphasise the illusion of transparency. The gleam and slow movements of the projected image allow the visitor to experience the space differently, creating a feeling of unfamiliarity and perhaps even unease. In Selections, Leegte has chosen the walls and pillars of the exhibition space to project 'selected' areas against them. Inspired by the 'select' function of Photoshop, 'running' lines that mark rectangular areas are projected onto architectural elements of the gallery. The moving lines encase the marked fields and divide the plain walls into sections, adding ornamental rhythm to the construction. Although the line drawings have more in common with a rather modernist architectural sketch, the size of the marked areas awakens the memory of huge building stones that show the strength of the supporting walls, while at the same time dividing up the wall with a powerful graphic pattern. There is one small area next to one of the large rectangles that breaks this pattern and thus the simplicity of the symmetric construction. This, together with the moving glowing lines draws the visitor's attention to the origin of the drawings - the computer software. Similar to the installation Scrollbar Composition, the visitor can choose the perspective of somebody wandering around in cyberspace while an invisible user can change the environment with the click of a mouse. The merging of real and virtual space may create uncertainty but it also opens up a chance to view the world from a virtual perspective, both physically and intellectually Leegte's visual language draws on experiences widely explored by artists in the beginning of the 20th Century, yet, despite developments of New Media, which allow human imagination to soar and to create images that were never seen before - the majority of software developers and image makers still draw on a reference system that is deeply rooted in a metaphysical view of nature and experience. Thus, as we saw in The Matrix Trilogy (1999), in Leegte's realisations of a computer-generated world, what is unnerving is not the vegetative state of the body that is connected to a Virtual Reality, but the fact that this alternative reality looks exactly as our own. www.leegte.org www.maedastudio.com At the Edge of Art, Joline Blais & Jon Ippolito. Thames & Hudson, 2006