THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VALUE SYSTEMS IN ART AND TRENDS IN
ART AND TECHNOLOGY
By
Abigail Stiers
B.A. Alfred University, 2001
A PROJECT
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Fine Arts
(in Intermedia)
The Graduate School
The University of Maine
May, 2011
Advisory Committee:
Owen Smith, Director of Intermedia MFA, Advisor
Justin Wolff, Assistant Professor of Art History
Jefferson Goolsby, Faculty Coordinator, Media Arts Dept., Lane College
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VALUE SYSTEMS IN ART AND TRENDS IN
ART AND TECHNOLOGY
By Abigail Stiers
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Owen Smith
An Abstract of the Project Presented
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Master of Fine Arts
(in Intermedia)
May, 2011
Although many of the artworks evolved through experimentation with physical
materials and emphasized perception, influential artists and theorists have
framed the Art and Technology movement of the late 1960's and early 1970's as
part of a transition towards dematerialization, predicting that advances in
technology would allow artworks to deal more purely with information and
become more interactive. This thesis proposes to contextualize a body of
artwork that I completed, by comparing attitudes and artworks from the Art and
Technology trend with those of contemporary technology art. Because
contemporary artists are now working with simpler, more tactile technologies and
share stated goals with Art and Technology, the comparison aims to provide
insight into the current situation. Through the examination of influences and
historical context, the motivation for my work also becomes clearer, when
discussed at the end of the thesis.
The first section of the thesis explores Art and Technology from a perspective that
does not privileged dematerialization, tracing the evolution of attitudes towards
physicality, environment, control and participation, before comparing these
attitudes to more current ones. Regarding these issues, contemporary
technology art has much in common with Art and Technology. However, older
works place more emphasis on experience and perception, while newer works
place more emphasis on modeling a correct metaphysical perspective and
presenting preconceived ideas. Current works that deal with nature and the
environment neglect to emphasize how human perception shapes these
explorations. Because some newer works are also more self-conscious about
their own historical significance and strive to be seen as relevant, they are often
formulaic, functioning as shorthand references for sanctioned ideas. Rather than
reifying and circulating the same ideas, I argue that the processes of making and
experiencing the work should bring about some kind of change in the ideas
present in the work. At the end of the thesis, I analyze and discuss my own
artwork from this perspective.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
1
2. CYBERNETIC CIRCUITRY AND PHYSIOLOGY
6
2.1 System's Esthetics
11
2.2 From Transductive to Interactive Art
16
2.3 Dematerialized Embodiment
22
2.4 Emergent Systems
25
3. DISCUSSIONS OF TIME AND SPACE
3.1 Being Relevant
34
40
4. SYMBOLIC DISCOURSE
44
5. EXPERIMENTATION
47
5.1 Works
47
5.2 Conclusion
64
6. BIBLIOGRAPHY
66
7. BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
69
iii
1. INTRODUCTION
In 1986, the artist Martha Rosier wrote the essay, "Video: Shedding the Utopian
Moment," ostensibly to anticipate and discredit attempts to create an allencompassing narrative about early video art. Rosier believed that the
dissemination of symbolic information could challenge the dominant social
discourse, while an emphasis on the physical, formal or material aspects of video
should be associated with modernism and dismissed. She writes,
The scientific modernist term 'experimentation' was to be understood in
the context of the 1960's as an angry and political response. For others,
the currency of theories of information in the art world and in cultural
criticism made the rethinking of the video apparatus as a means for the
multiple transmissions of useful, socially empowering information, rather
than the individualized reception of disempowering ideology or
subideology a vital necessity. (470-471)
According to the essay, artists who physically manipulated the hardware of the
television or computer, utilized scientific or technological concepts or were
influenced by science rather than the social sciences and art theory ought to be
linked to modernism, cold war American politics or militarization and
subsequently omitted from history. Rosier claims that "discussions of time and
space, cybernetic circuitry and physiology" belong to "a vocabulary straight out of
the old-fashioned discredited formalist modernism" by virtue of being used by
"figures as Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, who propagated a scientific vocabulary of
research and development, therapeutic pedagogy, and experimentation." Rosier
1
dismisses "Cage and company" when she links their interest in Zen Buddhism to
Kant, claiming that Zen "relied on sudden epiphany to provide instantaneous
transcendence; transport from the stubbornly mundane to the Sublime. Such an
experience could be met with meditative receptiveness, but could not be
translated into symbolic discourse." For Rosier, symbolic discourse seems to be
synonymous with verbal language. (461-473)
In his 2001 dissertation titled, Art In the Information Age: Cybernetics, Software,
Telematics and the Conceptual Contributions of Art and Technology to Art History
and Aesthetic Theory, Edward Shanken laments the fact that attitudes similar to
Rosler's apparently succeeded in diminishing the importance of certain trends in
art and technology. In the introduction to the paper he writes,
Scholarship on twentieth century art generally has ignored or disparaged
the artistic current otherwise known as Art and Technology. Art History has
failed to recognize and incorporate into its canons the rich historical and
theoretical underpinnings of this tendency. This oversight is especially
conspicuous is the literature's inability to grasp how the sciences and
technologies particular to the Information Age have shaped the formal and
conceptual development of art since 1945. (4)
We are in a period when experimentation, the manipulation of electronics and
hardware, "discussions of time and space" and an emphasis on science, systems
and processes have re-emerged. Yet many artists are not interested in studying
earlier explorations of similar ideas. Some contemporary artists claim to be
exploring issues from the perspective of other disciplines and believe art history
2
to be irrelevant, while many artists object to the fact that the earlier movements
took place exclusively in the Western world. Regardless, projects and
discussions associated with the Art and Technology trend of the late 1960's and
early 1970's resemble projects and discussions now. By studying these similar
ideas, I believe we can perceive aspects of our situation that are not obvious and
better understand where we place emphasis. Specifically, I am interested in
exploring ways in which attention to physical processes, sensory perception and
tangible experience have played an integral part in the meaning of artworks and
contributed to theoretical perspectives. Because this paper also intends to
contextualize my own work, I hope that by examining influences and expressing
generalized ideas at the beginning of the paper, the motivation for my work will
be clearer, when I discuss the work at the end of the paper.
Art and technology evolved with minimalism, conceptual art, fluxus and
environmental sculpture, involving many of the same artists. Works sought to
engage viewers on a perceptual level by responding to the environment or
surroundings, while drawing attention to experiential space and time. Rather than
focusing on these ideas, the artists and theorists who documented Art and
Technology predicted that technological advances would allow art to become
more interactive and deal more purely with information, eventually casting off the
physical trappings of rudimentary technology and mechanization. Despite these
predications or perhaps because they have already played out, artists today are
3
deliberately working with simpler, more tactile technologies to create artworks
that share stated common goals with the environmental installations of the late
sixties and early seventies. In considering Art and Technology from a point of
view that connects to earlier artistic trends and does not privilege
dematerialization, I hope to examine the role of perception, embodiment and
physicality in both historical and contemporary artworks.
At the same time, I would like to examine historical and current attitudes that
stress differences between artists now and those of the past. Regardless of
claims to be outside of the western art historical tradition, show catalogs and
theoretical texts still rely on ideas like modernism and post-modernism to
contextualize new trends. Artists still avoid concepts and terms that were vilified
under abandoned value systems and the importance of work is attributed to its
ability to question imagined assumptions.
In an effort to cast off conventions that are commonly associated with art, artists
uncritically embrace conventions in other fields. Discussions of art tend to focus
on ideas as they have been defined in other disciplines rather than exploring how
works contribute to these ideas. In order to avoid doing the same, this thesis
does not revolve around a philosophical discussion of embodiment or
phenomenology but focuses on how these ideas have been explored through
artworks.
4
For me, art has never been about convincing others of a particular idea, as much
as it is about inquiry that may lead to different realizations. It is significant that
this inquiry can take place through interactions with the physical world, outside of
and between disciplines and without divisions of body and mind. While certain
systems maintain that works will never transcend the level of discourse or that
they will ultimately end up as a commodities, there are other factors that are not
being taken into consideration and results that cannot be known in advance. The
goal of this paper is not to reject artworks that operate differently than mine or to
ban branding and messages from artworks that use them effectively, but to
evaluate the sources and efficacy of value systems in art, and understand how
they may or may not apply to the work I am doing.
5
2. CYBERNETIC CIRCUITRY AND PHYSIOLOGY
Artistic movements often define themselves in opposition to notions about the
past. In the late sixties and early seventies, many artists were reacting against
the dogmatic and rigid formalism of critics such as Michael Fried and Clement
Greenberg. Rather than rejecting or questioning arbitrary dualities that privileged
individual over collective, medium over concept, object over system and passive
contemplation over active participation, artists embraced and preserved these
constructs by enacting them in reverse. According to Shanken, this tendency
helped to diminish the importance of art and technology. He writes,
Part of the problem was that many critics associated with Conceptual
Art equated anti-modernism with anti-formalism, shifting the value sign
from plus to minus, while arguably remaining formalists at heart. As such,
art that deigned to manifest significant physical substance (much less a
physical substance that was animated) was written off as overbearingly
formal and material. (159)
Considering this situation, it is not surprising that the documentation of Art and
Technology tends to minimize the importance of physicality. Not only were its
critics dismissing Art and Technology for being too material, its proponents
ultimately emphasized the more dematerialized aspects. One such promoter was
the artists and theorist Jack Burnham, whose framing of issues has been
influential.
6
When Burnham curated the Software exhibition in 1970, the theme of the show
specifically referenced disembodied concepts, comparing the concept of an
artwork to computer software and the physical form of an artwork to computer
hardware. In 1970, Burnham writes, "Printed proposals are make do art;
Conceptual Art's ideal medium is telepathy. Analogously, at the present time
conversational computer programs function through typewriter terminals;
eventually computer communication will be verbal or direct neural relay." (GWS
216-217) Just two years earlier, when he wrote the essay, "Systems Esthetics,"
Burnham did not consider an emphasis on physical experience or material
processes to be problematic, as long as certain formalist concepts were
challenged.
In "System's Aesthetics," many of Burnham's arguments directly refute passages
in Michael Fried's "Art and Objecthood," an essay in which Fried argues that art
should be different than theater. Fried writes, "I want to claim that it is by virtue
of their presentness and instantaneousness that modernist painting and
sculpture defeat theatre." (146) Works that emphasize experience are seen as
having theatrical qualities, because they give importance to duration and cannot
be meaningful apart from audience perception. (Fried 140-141) Additionally,
Fried rejects works that combine mediums, upholding the idea that modernist art
must be judged according to conviction, "specifically the conviction that a
particular painting or sculpture or poem or piece of music can or cannot support
7
comparison with past work within that art whose quality is not in doubt." (142)
Citing Greenberg, Fried also maintains that antitheatrical work is "radically unlike
nature." For Greenberg, modernist art is defined by the tendency to be unlike
nature and embody the same aesthetic "quality" as older work, while
progressively arriving at new solutions. Greenberg argues that while the
impressionists "invoked truth to nature," these claims were false because
"underneath all the invocations, the explanations, and the rationalizations, there
was the "simple" aspiration to quality, to aesthetic value and excellence for its
own sake, as end in itself." Greenberg continues,
For which same sake the successors in Modernism of the impressionists
were forced to forget about truth to nature. They were forced to look even
more outrageously new: Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh, and all the
Modernist painters after them ~ for the sake of aesthetic value, aesthetic
quality, nothing else.
In "System's Esthetics," Burnham correlates new automobile styles to these kinds
of "formalist inventions" in art, arguing that a paradigm shift is immanent.
Drawing on ideas from systems theory, Burham argues the importance of shifting
from a product oriented to a systems oriented perspective in order to address
crucial environmental and social problems.
These revolve around such concerns as maintaining the biological livability
of the earth, producing more accurate models of social interaction,
understanding the growing symbiosis in man-machine relationships,
establishing priorities for the usage and conservation of natural resources,
and defining alternate patterns of education, productivity, and leisure.
(GWS 16)
8
Burnham goes on to identify certain trends in art that seemed to support a shift
from product to systems based priorities. He discusses several artists, including
Allan Kaprow, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Hans Haacke, Otto Piene, Les Levine
and others. Works described in the essay respond to the environment or viewer,
involve collaborations or investigations with disciplines outside of art, are
integrated and dependent on the environment in which they exist, are modular so
that individual element did not carry value as unique objects, involve multiple
senses, give the process of making equal importance to the resulting product,
take the form of information (language?), take the form of an environment,
involve actual space and time, merge art and life, are mobile or are involved
multiple geographic locations. (GWS 15-25)
Burnham's argument, that system's esthetics manifests a new paradigm in art,
relies on Greenberg's explanation of modernist painting. Yet the first half of the
20th century is not so easily defined. Burnham writes, "As with all succeeding
formalist art, cubism followed the tradition of circumscribing art value wholly
within finite objects." (GWS16) This argument represents neither an open
system nor a complex system, but a tautology in which ail preceding art becomes
product art by virtue of leading to the current situation. The framing leads
Burnham to ultimately embrace dematerialized art as the final step in a
progression from physical object to part of a system to information.
9
While Burnham argues that the system's esthetic represents a paradigm shift
away from object oriented art, Shanken argues that much of 20th century art has
always been concerned with ideas of duration, process and movement and that
these explorations contributed to shifts in perspective that led to the development
and widespread application of interdisciplinary versions of cybernetics and
systems theory. Shanken writes,
In this regard, artists play an important role in developing new ideas that
have broad cultural ramifications, even though the processes by which
such ideas become historicized generally do not occur in the visual forms
of art (which lack cultural authority in such matters and do not "speak" a
common terminological language necessary for the construction of
historical narratives). The arts often fail to receive credit for their
conceptual innovations, even though they may predate or
occur contemporaneously with parallel developments in other disciplines.
Using formulae and words, scientific, historical, and other forms of
literature are the primary sites where a shared language serves to
concretize and historicize emergent cultural configurations in a readily
identifiable medium. As a result, scientific and philosophical
models commonly are often erroneously taken to be the precursors to
subsequent developments in the visual arts.
The following discussion sketches out the historical aesthetic context in
which cybernetics gained currency amongst artists who, like Ascott,
were experimenting with duration and interaction. This case demonstrates
how the process of cultural formation depends on an inter-related
exchange of ideas across discipline such that in many instances it may be
spurious to credit one field or another with originating any general concept.
The merging of cybernetics and art must be understood in the context of
ongoing aesthetic experiments with duration, movement, and
process. While the roots of this tendency go back further, the French
Impressionist painters first systematically explored the durational and
perceptual limits of art in novel ways that undermined the physical integrity
of matter, and emphasized the fleetingness of ocular sensation... (37)
10
In his paper, Shanken gives an overview of explorations by Cubists, Bauhaus,
Constructivist, Futurist, Dadas and others, which proceeded similar investigations
during the sixties and seventies. Although a similar outline of all 20th century art
would be beyond the scope of this paper, I agree that ideas explored in works
discussed in "Systems Esthetics" have precedents in earlier trajectories. I also
believe that attention to nature, perception and material processes helped artists
to circumvent categories, object distinctions, linear and logical structures that
were reified by verbal language.
2.1 System's Esthetics
While Burham describes certain artworks in the context of discussing a shift
away from object art, I would like to discuss works of the same time period, in
order to better understand the importance of physicality and perception in these
works, and to compare and contrast them with contemporary artworks. In
"System's Esthetics," Burnham mentions the water hammocks of the Gutai group
in Japan. In Sadamasa Montonga's Work (1965) translucent plastic sleeves
were filled with varying amounts of water and hung loosely between trees,
forming gatherings of long arcs. These arcs moved and changed in complex
ways according to wind currents. (Busch Fig. 52) The work cannot be
11
understood as a metaphor or simulation of complex natural systems, but taps into
real ones, connecting what is felt and seen, while extending the work indefinitely.
Many of Hans Haacke's early works also drew attention to complex natural
processes. Condensation Cube (1963) was a plexiglass box containing water, in
which the cycle of evaporation and condensation could be observed. (Bijoet 82)
Haacke's plexiglass boxes share concerns with minimalist art, not because of the
shape, but because the boxes interact with their surroundings. Changes in
temperature outside the boxes affect the processes inside the boxes. In Art as
Inquiry, Margot Bijoet argues that a comparison between Haacke and minimalism
is misguided.
The cubic plexiglass condensation boxes had indeed something
minimalistic. Their objective was obviously completely different. As a
matter of fact, he wanted to rid himself of the minimalist stigma that some
critics had given his neutral-looking material and forms. As he explained:
"A very important difference between the work of minimal sculptors and my
work is that they were interested in inertness, whereas I was concerned
with change. From the beginning the concept of change has been the
ideological basis of my work. All the way down there's absolutely nothing
static...nothing that does not change, or instigate real change. Most
minimal work disregards change. Things claim to be inert, static,
immovably beyond time. But the status quo is an illusion, a dangerous
illusion politically. (84)
Bijoet's objective is to demonstrate how Haacke differs from his contemporaries.
Yet Haacke chooses to create rectangle boxes, so that the form of the box
becomes a non-entity in the piece. Similarly, the geometric forms in minimalist
sculpture resulted from the rejection of attributes that create formal relationships
12
within the work. Many artists who made this work believed that the relationships
within the work allowed the work to be seen as an autonomous composition,
whereas the elimination of these relationships allowed for relationships between
the work and the world, causing the work to exist in a moment to moment
relationship with the perceiver. (Morris 6)
Haacke's argument that minimalism claims things to be immovably beyond time
is simply wrong, while Bijoet's argument, that "system esthetics" as defined by
Jack Burnham distinguishes Haacke from his contemporaries, is challenged by
the fact that Burnham uses minimalist art to define systems esthetics. Like
Burnham, Bijoet argues that system's esthetics marks a paradigm shift away
from earlier models of art making. Unlike Burnham, Bijoet believes that
minimalism falls on the other side of the paradigm shift.
While I do not subscribe to the idea that systems art represents an absolute
break from earlier art. I agree that there are differences in emphasis between
Haacke's early work and that of his contemporaries. In System's
Aesthetics, Burnham quotes Haacke, "These processes evolve without the
viewer's empathy. He becomes a witness. A system is not imagined, it is real."
(GSW 22) While many of the artists discussed by Burnham deal with real
phenomena as a way of subverting assumptions and constructs implicit in
perception, systems themselves are not considered to be discreet from the rest
of everything or "real" apart from perception. Cage's 4' 33" drew attention to real
sounds, but the emphasis is on the experience of listening.
Haacke's comments about minimalism imply that he sees the minimalist
sculpture as an idea or an example of what things are like, he does not see it as
an engagement, a transitory experience or a process of perceiving. Likewise his
systems can be read as metaphysical models or microcosms. Bijoet describes a
piece by Haacke called Grass Grows, in which a mound of rye grass, planted in
the gallery, completes its life cycle over the duration of an exhibition. While
Condensation Cube and Grass Grows are affected by temperature, they are also
somewhat self-contained and seem to be examples of discrete and recognizable
systems. In this way, these works share qualities with some systems art of today,
which seem to focus on the presentation of systems, rather than the problem of
how to affect perspective or perception of systems in life. Haacke later
disavowed his early work as overly rational.
Grass Grows relates to contemporaneous earthworks projects, such as Robert
Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) and Alan Sonfist's Time Landscape. Smithson
writes about the first time he visited the site of Spiral Jetty, "No ideas, no concept,
no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the
actuality of that evidence." (532) Whether or not one agrees with Smithson, there
can be no question that his emphasis lies in dissolving boundaries perceptually
as well as physically. In an essay about Spiral Jetty, the experience of blinking,
the body's response to the sun, hunger and random associations are part of the
description of the work. (533) For Smithson and many of his contemporaries
"actual" space and time refer to experiential space and time.
In contrast to Haacke's early work, Sonfist's Time Landscape injects itself into the
daily lives of the people of New York. In addition to restoring a piece of land to
it's natural environment before colonization, Sonfist also proposed many other
"memorials" to the natural state of the city, including markings to indicate paths
used by Native Americans, with explanations of why the trail once went over
certain terrain that no longer exists. In this vein, he also proposed that
newspapers should internationally report natural events, like the migration of
birds and animals, and that technology could be utilized to visualize "aspects of
nature outside of the realm of the human eye." (545-547)
In the book, Art and The Future, Douglas Davis writes about other works by
Sonfist involving mineral crystals that respond to heat and microorganisms that
"burst into iridescent colors upon contact with food."(95) These works relate to
others, which involved a conversion from one form of energy to another. In 1969,
Robert Mallory referred to this as transductive art. Regarding Ted Victoria's
contribution to the Software exhibition, Solar Audio Window Transmission,
Shanken writes,
15
Solar panels powered ten radios, which were connected to contact
sound reproducers placed on the windows of the building, turning the
Jewish Museum into a giant, faintly audible speaker that could be heard
only by placing one's ear very close to or against a window. In a 1997
interview, Victoria acknowledged that at the time he was not
especially concerned with pollution, or with advocating the use of
renewable energy sources. On the contrary, his work was based on the
idea of transforming the energy of the sun into information, making the
museum itself an active component in the piece, and engaging the
audience to interact in new ways with the physical structure of the
museum. (111)
Shanken reports that when he researched the Software show 25 years later, this
piece stood out in the minds of Carolee Shneemann, David Antin and Alan
Kaprow, "who as first-hand witnesses, recalled particular appreciation for the
work when they experienced it in the 1970 exhibition." (111-112)
2.2 From Transductive to Interactive Art
In the same way that the water hammocks visualized wind, transductive art often
translated between senses, connecting indoor and outdoor environments or
challenging priorities by affecting perception. In some pieces, it was important for
the translation of energy to be perceived by the viewer. Others did not literally
translate between types of energy through analog processes, but used input from
the environment to digitally control output. In many cases, movements or sounds
would cause changes in light, sound, movement or vibration. Because these
systems were indifferent to whether the sounds were generated by the audience
or by other things in the environment, the audience has the experience of
becoming a complex system, but did not directly control the work. Douglas
Davis describes a piece by Keith Sonnier,
In one such piece, typical of many others, the viewer entered a small room
bathed in soft red light and filled with video cameras. The images were
transmitted into a second gallery activated by amplifiers and loudspeakers,
thus linking man, image, and sound in a subtle unity. In the case of both
Sonnier and his predecessors, the work defined itself by an active
relationship between the materials employed and their surroundings. (93)
Robert Rauschenberg's Soundings (1968) consisted of a 36 foot long wall made
up of three layers of plexiglass. Sounds in the room affected the intensity of
lights positioned behind and between the layers. In 1970, the Pulsa group
created an installation in the outdoor sculpture garden of the MOMA, which
responded to light, sound, movement and heat by creating light sound movement
and heat. (Davis 92-93) Some works by the artist Takis allowed the audience to
manipulate magnetic fields by throwing bits of metal, while other works utilized
magnetism make visible the invisible communication between the metal
components of the magnetized system. In a statement from 1984, Takis reflects
on how experiments with magnets led him further and further from his original
intentions, to finally explore this communication. Takis writes, "The result was in
no way a graphic representation of a force but a force itself which had to be
handled as one would handle any other force in nature-even an animal force.
The perpetual motion aspect of it became obviously of secondary interest and I
17
put myself to treating, guiding and dominating magnetic force itself in its aspects
of real communication...the space communication of objects on this planet." (407)
Pulsa and Takis drew attention to invisible phenomena. Takis's magnetic works,
which came out of experimentation with materials, allowed the audience to
explore but not control magnetic systems. Pulsa's garden was deliberately
agnostic to the sources of input and the meaning of the output. With the
exception of the MOMA piece, most of Pulsa's work was located in public spaces
and aimed to subvert habitual priorities and constructs that affect experience,
without necessarily providing alternative ones. According to Pulsa, "Everything
that's experienced under normal conditions in an environment is seen in terms of
some context of usefulness. The work that we're doing provides experiential
alternatives to this use orientation, by making environmental phenomena
accessible on an abstract level." (Herrman 100)
Some recent wearable art projects are also intended to allow wearers to travel
through a space, with attention to particular aspects of the environment, as an
alternative to use orientation. Regarding her Dressails, Kate James writes, 'The
dresses cause the wearer's body to teeter, spin, and lean, to be engaged with a
natural and sporadic force a way that wouldn't be possible otherwise." (We Make
Money Not Art)
18
In the essay, "The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems" Burnham describes Hearts
Beats Dust by Jean Dupuy and Ralph Martel, "which consists of a palpitating pile
of lithol rubine, a very fine, brilliant red pigment. A 15-inch speaker mounted
under a rubber membrane vibrates the lithol rubine, which produces wave
patterns. In a version shown at the Brooklyn Museum's "Some More Beginnings"
exhibition, spectators could vibrate the speaker by holding a microphone next to
their hearts." (9) Burham cites this work as an example of an interactive system.
For Burnham, two way communication is important for art, because it
undermines authorship by the artist and passive contemplation by the viewer and
important for science because it moves in the direction of collaborations between
human and technological systems. (BMS 312-313) Burnham is not insensitive to
other viewpoints on responsive art, but these particular ideas seem to be quoted
more often, contributing to the assumption that more interactivity is better than
less.
For example, in a 1999 essay titled, "System's Aesthetics and Cyber Art, The
Legacy of Jack Burnham," the artist Simon Penny quotes Burnham,
It is only a step from here to suppose that in time an aesthetics of artificial
intelligence will evolve...the logical outcome of technology's influence on
art before the end of this century should be a series of art forms that
manifest true intelligence, but perhaps more meaningfully, with a capacity
for reciprocal relationships with human beings (in this case the word
viewer seems quite antiquated.)
19
Penny depicts Burnham as a visionary who predicts the importance
of information technology but quaintly cannot imagine the wonders of virtual
reality and net art. He writes,
While Duchamp remains the mystic of industrialism, and Dennis
Oppenheim's later pseudo-industrial sculptures and installations are
perhaps his clearest successors, and whereas Jean Tinguely reassured us
by lampooning the machine and Takis demonstrated the quiet
metaphysical beauty of electromagnetism; these artists and their ilk remain
within the secure confines of the tangible, machines remain material
objects after all. (Penny)
If real two-way communication is the goal and tangibility a byproduct of
sculpture's conventions, Heart Beats Dust might offer hope for the future of
interactive art, but cannot be considered a particularly successful artwork.
However, one must assume that regardless of available technology, had Dupuy
and Martel wanted to make a less physical more controllable work, they would
not have chosen the heartbeat as input of dust as output. The work can be
contrasted with later biofeedback art like Mary Lucking's Pas de Deux, from
2000, which uses sensors to monitor the breath of two participants. The breath is
visualized as a colorful pattern of concentric circles and the two users are meant
to try to make their breath overlap, so that the patterns appear as one. (Lizard
Acres) Rather visualizing the heartbeat, Dupuy and Martel choose to amplify the
actual vibrations and allow these vibrations to physically move the dust. The
patterns draw attention to real but invisible phenomena, which continues in the
absence of the artwork. Likewise, had Rauschenberg been interested in
controllability, he would not have followed up on Soundings with a Mud Muse, in
which a giant vat of mud gurgles and bubbles in response to sound. (Time)
For many artists in the sixties, and many earlier artists as well, participation and
materials provided unpredictable elements that undermined value judgments by
the artist. Contemporary artists often focus on the idea of undermining
authorship. But for Cage in the fifties as well as for Arp in the teens, undermining
value judgments opened up new possibilities, not just for composition but for
hearing, seeing, moving and thinking. This way of being in the world can be ego
negating, but not in the one to one way that many contemporary participatory
artworks claim to operate.
In contrast to responsive or indeterminate works, interactive works that tend
towards reciprocal relationships with human beings require that artists accurately
predict or limit the actions of participants and make judgments about how the
system should respond to these actions. Lucking not only made judgments about
how breath ought be visualized but gave the work an overall moral message and
the audience a goal, that of cooperation. In contrast, the technology experiments
of the 1960's were not aimed at deliberate construction of worlds or creatures
based on particular messages.
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2.3 Dematerialized Embodiment
Les Levine's contribution to the Software show was meant to show that
information about artworks is more significant than the works themselves. The
work, titled System Burn-Off X Residual Software consisted on photographs of
the Cornell University Earth Art Exhibition covered in jello and gum and scattered
on the floor. (Burnham, SOA 39) In a statement about the work, Levine writes,
All activities which have no connection with object or material mass are
the result of software. Images themselves are hardware. Information
about these images is software... In many cases an object is of much less
value than the software concerning the object. The object is the end of a
system. The software is an open continuing system. The experience of
seeing something first hand is no longer of value in a software controlled
society, as anything seen through the media carries just as much energy
as first hand experience... In the same way, most of the art that is
produced today ends up as information about art.
In "Situational Aesthetics" (1969) Victor Burgin writes,
Some recent art, evolving through attention both to the conditions under
which objects are perceived and to the processes by which aesthetic
status is attributed to certain of these, has tended to take its essential form
in message rather than in materials. In its logical extremity this tendency
has resulted in a placing of art entirely within the linguistic infrastructure,
which previously served merely to support art. (Burgin)
In the essay, Burgin proposes ways to make score based works that place
emphasis on perception, kinesthetic experience and interaction with the physical
world, without using materials. Burgin was concerned about the production of
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waste and the consumption of materials, but also objected to the idea of placing
art entirely within a linguistic structure.
In "Art After Philosophy," Joseph Kosuth writes, "The "value" of particular artists
after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the
nature of art; which is another way of saying "what they added to the conception
of art" or what wasn't there before they started." (Kosuth)
In Assemblages, Environments and Happenings, Kaprow writes,
The composition of Happenings proceeds exactly as in Assemblages and
Environments, that is, it is evolved as a collage of events in certain spans
of time and certain spaces. When we think of "composition" it is important
not to think of it as a self-sufficient "form" as an arrangement as such, as
an organizing activity in which the materials are taken for granted as a
means towards an end that is greater than they are. This is too Christian
in the sense of the body being inferior to the soul. Rather, composition is
understood as an operation dependent on the materials (including people
and nature) and phenomenologically indistinct from them. Such materials
and their associations have meaning, as I have pointed out, generates the
relationships and movements of the Happening, instead of the reverse.
(241)
For Kaprow, nothing could more misguided than the idea that information about
the Happening could replace the Happening except for the idea that the
Happening would exist only to challenge art. Years ago, I read a score by Kaprow
that consisted of instructions to look out a window until a light comes on in the
apartment building across the street. I had to wait to try it, because I didn't live in
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an apartment building. But there is a world of difference between reading the
score and actually following it seriously.
In "The Un-Education of the Artist," Kaprow writes,
La Monte Young, whose performances of complex drone sounds interest
me as Art art, tells of his boyhood in the Northwest when he used to lean
his ear against the high-tension electric towers that stretched across the
fields; he would enjoy feeling the hum of the wires through his body. I did
that as a boy, too, and prefer it to the concerts of Young's music. It was
more impressive visually and less hackneyed in the vastness of its
environment than it is in a loft space or a performance hall. Dennis
Oppenheim describes another example of nonart: in Canada he ran
across a muddy lot, made plaster casts of his footprints (in the manner of
a crime investigator), and then exhibited stacks of the casts at a gallery.
The activity was great; the exhibition part of it was corny. The casts could
have been left at the local police station without identification. Or thrown
away. Those wishing to be called artists, in order to have some or all of
their acts and ideas considered art, only have to drop an artistic thought
around them, announce the fact and persuade others to believe it. That's
advertising. (Essays 102-103)
The trend towards dematerialization that put value in language, information and
concepts, also puts emphasis on the field of art. When a person takes a walk
and calls it art, the significance of the walk lies its ability to challenge art and not
in the walk itself. For some, the aura of the artwork may lend importance to the
walk but this is unacceptable to Kaprow, who associates art with its institutions.
For Kaprow, the only way to put the significance back on the walk is to keep it
away from art. But for me, following Kaprow's score felt similar to looking at a
painting. When I look at art, I am reminded to be attentive of the physical world,
not just while I am experiencing the work but also afterwards. What I am attentive
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to and how I perceive the world may be framed by the work, in such a way that
the ideas present in the work continue to be tested and explored as I move
through the world. In some sense, Kaprow's work is dematerialized, but it does
not retreat into language and the manipulation of abstract concepts, apart from
the physical world.
A shift in emphasis towards linguistics, critical theory and certain trends in
psychology, along with reactions against high modernism, resulted in a situation
in which engagement with materials could be regarded as somehow distracting.
For some, the idea that language inevitably affects thought, led to the idea that
language could be equated with thought. Others asserted that it was
more productive to deal with symbolic information. While the work could be
comprised of materials, the message took precedence . I was recently at a
conference on early experimental video art. After the lecture, an audience
member rhetorically asked, "But isn't that being led by the materials?" This was
stated in the way that one might say, "Isnt that illegal?"
2.4 Emergent Systems
The curatorial notes for the 2010 Process as Paradigm show at the Laboral
Centra de Arte y Creacion Industrial opened with the following sentence:
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With this exhibition and accompanying programme, we curators formulate
a bold thesis. We claim that process -and here we mean non-linear and
non-deterministic process- has become one of the major paradigms in
contemporary art and culture.
The curators discuss works that drain human intentionality, that incorporate
biological elements, deal with relationships within systems or to the environment.
The curators admit that artists have been researchers in the past, "in the way
they experimented with colours and their chemical composition," but are quick to
assert that this tendency ended in the 19th century. "The Renaissance and
Baroque in particular saw a close relationship between the arts and sciences. In
the 19th century the formerly mutual interest and exchange between these
disciplines massively changed and they both developed into separate and
autonomous practices as we know them now." (22-26) On her website, curator
Suzanne Jashko explains that the lack of interest in process after WWII can be
attributed to the fact that Europe experienced "a phase of recovery and
stabilization, slowly regaining confidence in predictability and continuity."
(Jashko)The statement concludes, "Depending on how momentous the
paradigmatic shift to process is, we might have already entered a new era in
art." (26)
It is interesting to contrast this statement with one made by Shanken,
Given the emphasis of post-World War II art on the concepts of process,
system, environment, and audience participation, cybernetics was able to
gain artistic currency as a theoretical model. Here it articulated the
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systematic relationships and processes among feedback loops including
the artist, artwork, audience, and environment. (78)
It is also interesting to observe how changes in attitude are reflected in the works
from the Process as Paradigm show. For example, La Huella by Adrian Cuervo
is an interactive visualization which responds to activity in a space. When nobody
is present, the image on the screen erases itself. According to the artist,
The reality the work wishes to reflect is immersed in the permanent
process of flux, of reoccurring cycles revolving around a central axis of
relationships, tensions, and influences between comprising elements more
so than a succession of consecutive actions in time. This reality forces us
to rethink the validity of accepted ideas of action and reaction, and to
increasingly accept chaos theory into our everyday lives. (46)
Roots by Roman Kirschner uses iron crystals suspended in fluid which grow and
disintegrate in relation to voltage passing through it. The voltage modifies itself
based on the growth. The voltage at each wire are put through a resonance filter
and transformed into sound. (84) In "Real Snail Mail," by Boredom Research, a
participant may type an e-mail message, to be picked up by an RFID equipped
snails when the snail passes a station inside its terrarium. The e-mail is
delivered after the snail passes another station. The accompanying text reads,
Reversing the most enduring and ubiquitous social and economic
paradigms of speed and efficiency, the Real Snail Mail messaging service
uses live snails to carry e-mails across physical space, making it possible
for the first time to communicate anywhere in the world at a snail's pace."
(48)
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Almost every work in the show illustrate the concept of collective intelligence. In
such works, the overall composition is determined the actions of multiple entities.
For example, in Red Fungus by Luna Maurer, visitors are given stickers and rules
about where to place them. Because visitors follow the rules and also react to
other visitors, emergent patterns arise. (34) In leak to lower lazy levitation
load by Peter Flemming, water is pumped from one barrel to another, allowing
slowly rise and fall. According to the artist, "This explores the idea of small things
working to eventually act upon forces larger than they are. This is how trees
work. Many small pumps act to slowly move masses of water from the ground up
to the top leaves of the tree." (52) Living Particles is an installation made up of
many small modules made from simple components, which look like small
windmills that move and make sound. According to the artist, "Delicate changes
in light and positioning influence their movement and sound." Process 18 by
C.E.C. Reas is an emergent generative artwork in which agents are lines. As
with all emergent generative works, agents follow a set of rules, governing how
they respond to each other and their digital environment. The simple interaction
of the entities results in a system that may behave in complex ways. In this piece,
one projection shows these agents, another shows the composition that they
create. (60) E-volved Cultures XXWide by Driessens and Verstappen, is another
emergent generative system. According to the artist, an evolution process
"gradually evolves a group of organisms that contain properties that collectively
generate intriguing coherent images." (62)
In Decon, by Marta de Menezes, replicas of Piet Mondrian's geometric paintings
are impregnated with bacteria that degrades the pigment over time. (72) In
Symbiosis, by Jelte Van Abbema, the word TODO, which means everything in
Spanish, is printed on a poster using micro-organisms. The word NADA,
meaning nothing is printed on the other side in negative space. As the show
progresses, microorganisms continue to grow so that both words are no longer
legible. (74)
I didn't see this show, I only read about it. I also never saw the works from sixties
and seventies. I know that many early art and technology projects had technical
problems and literally did not work and I realize that many of the project in the
Process As Paradigm show have aspects that cannot possibly be transmitted
through descriptions and pictures. Therefore I cannot make a comparison that
deals with perceptual experience or experimentation as much as a comparison
regarding attitudes about the value of perceptual experience and
experimentation.
Both Process as Paradigm and Art and Technology share an interest in feedback
loops and environment, while rejecting controllability. During the eighties and
nineties, the emphasis of discussions surrounding technology art moved away
from analog electronic systems to focus on computers. Work became more
virtual and less physical, focusing on interactivity, hypertext and the internet. The
work in this show is clearly more physical. At the same time, there are
differences in emphasis between now and in the sixties.
While it may not be the priority of the artists to illustrate specific concepts, the
works in Process as Paradigm would not have been accepted into the show, if
there wasn't something clear and seemingly significant to fall back on. In most of
these works, the idea of collective intelligence provides that clear, easy and
defensible message, which shortcuts other processes that could take place. In
this way, the works unfold over time, but the viewer might grasp the meaningful
aspects instantaneously and the processes being utilized do not challenge the
artist's values or intention. For example, La Huella is a simulated complex
system, that is specifically authored to reflect a view of complexity in order to help
us introduce chaos theory into our everyday lives. But the world is clearly more
complex than this artwork, and we interact with it all the time. So the question of
how the work helps us to introduce chaos theory into our lives is not addressed.
This criticism does not just apply to systems or process art, but to many overtly
political artworks as well. When it becomes more important to reference popular
ideas than to functionally perform the stated goals of the work, the works are
preaching to choir.
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Additionally, the outright denial of the last 100 years in art also allows a work to
be significant because of "what it adds to the conception of art" and allows the
curators to make simplistic correlations between what artists are doing now and
ways in which this particular time period is viewed. For example, the curators of
Process As Paradigm write, "This art does no longer hold on to the safe
properties of the final object, the ultimate manifestation of the creative process.
In production, it responds to a major shift from an industrial culture based on the
concept of the final product to a post-industrial networked culture." (24)
This is not to say that the works in the show are not good. I would like very much
to hear and see Living Particles and Roots. But as an artist, I am frustrated by
the expectation that I should be referencing or depicting certain issues in an overt
and obvious way, when I think that other approaches would be more
effective. The problem with Burnham's framing of the situation in the 1960's, is
that we cant see the entire complex system in which we operate. We can look
for correlations and construct temporary systems which reflect these correlations,
but cannot simultaneously comprehend everything. Any system's perspective is
necessarily based on upon priorities. A system's view may cut across some
categories and priorities, but necessarily creates others.
Regardless, Burnham wasn't asking artists to illustrate system's aesthetics, or
the correlations that he was making between products and objects. He was
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observing a trend away from adherence to certain categorical distinctions like
disciplines, mediums and senses. The issue of agency is far stranger. There is a
self consciousness about the idea that we live in a networked culture in which
hierarchical systems are challenged. Because individualism is associated with
capitalism and the forces that destroy the environment, individual concerns, such
as perception, are not good to emphasize. The presentation of an emergent
systems as a model of a metaphysical viewpoint references the idea of each
person as a product of their economic, social and physical environment.
In addition to illustrating collective intelligence, artists also claim to be negating
their own individual agency through responsive, participatory, interactive, crowd
sourced or emergent artworks. The idea that any artwork can be less authored
by an artist or multiple artists usually requires a narrow definition of artwork. An
interactive artwork that draws lines in response to the movements of audience
members can only be co-authored by the audience member if the artwork is not
considered to be the resulting drawing. The same goes for the microorganisms
in Symbiosis. If an artist counts words on twitter, and would like to consider all of
the twitter users to be collaborators, they must embrace a very unequal
relationship with these collaborators, considering that the artist is framing the
exploration. Collaborative artworks may be democratic for the collaborators, but
should not be considered democratic by default, because this relationship
requires a lot of care, honesty and watchfulness on the part of all those involved.
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We are all affected by an infinite number of factors at any given moment,
therefore nobody is the supreme author of any work. Some works may be more
accessible or inclusive than others, but there is no objective criteria to determine
which ones. There are many works that engage ideas of participation and
authorship in interesting and nuanced ways. But if these works don't have the
recognizable outward appearance of engaging these ideas, they are not
recognized for engaging these ideas.
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3. DISCUSSIONS OF TIME AND SPACE
At the 2010 Transmediale festival entitled "Futurity Now!" artists and others
tackled the ideas and attitudes towards the future, which included discussions of
developing a longer view regarding the environment, political and social issues.
There was a panel discussion which included a presentation by Alexander Rose,
a representative from the "Long Now Foundation" explaining the foundation's
plan to create a clock that will be larger than Stonehenge and will run for the next
10000 years, a presentation by the media theorist Siegfried Zielinski and a
presentation by the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. These presentations
were followed by a question and answer session with the presenters.
In his presentation, Zielinski declared that "the Long Now project contains
the perverse or scandalous attempt to stretch the now into eternity...a very
special attack of the present against the rest of time" Later he stated that "the
Ancient Greeks understood too well the dilemma we would get ourselves into
with a Chronocracy as the dominant time mode." He went onto explain that in
addition to Chronos, "that kind of time which disposes of life by using it up," the
Greeks conceived of two other modes of understanding time. Aeon is infinite
limitless time which goes beyond the span of the universe and Kairos relates to
"doing the right thing at the right moment." Projecting an image of Kairos on an
overhead projector, Zielinski pointed out how Kairos's hair is long in the front and
bald in the back, so that once he is gone he cannot be grasped. After discussing
other ways in which technology and the media may overrule own perceptions of
time with their specific agendas, Zeilinski suggested that "the intelligent and
sensitive interplay of all three conceptions of time" could prevent us from falling
into a variety traps and miseries that had been discussed earlier in the talk.
("Siegfried Zielinski (de) in Atemporality - A Cultural Speed Control?")
In reference to dynamic technical, machine, or human and machine processes he
stated, "As intellectuals or as artists, the very least we can do is ensure that the
conversion that takes place mid-process makes a sharp and qualitative
distinction between the variables that are present at the beginning and those
present at the end. We fail with this we fail at everything."
In his 20 minute presentation, Sterling characterized the present moment as
drastically different from other periods of time. His assertion that there is "a loss
of a canon and a record, there is no single authoritative voice of history"
understated his perception of the situation. "What we are facing is a decade of
emergency rescue, attempts at sustainability rather than some kind of clear
march towards advanced heights of civilization. We are into an era of decay and
repurposing of broken structures, of new social inventions within networks, a
world of gothic high tech and favela chic, a crooked network bizarre of futurity
and history rather than a cathedral of history and a Utopia of futurity. I don't want
to belabor this point. I don't want to go on and on about the fact that this is a new
historical situation. If you don't get it by now you will be forced to get it. You will
have no other choice."
After outlining the situation, Sterling described what the creative artist might do
during this moment. The Transmediale art exhibition contained a few works,
which imagined that technology had gone in a-different directions, including an
electronic camera obscura by Gebhard Sengmuller. Sengmuller is also known
for inventing vinyl video players. Sterling suggested that instead of re-imagining
technology, artist should re-imagine history. Other ideas included generative art,
"new types of collaborative art that has no single author, open source arts,
multiplayer arts, multimedia collaboration, online world building is of great
interest," narratives which utilize information gleaned from garbage, pollen
counts, or corpses and information visualization. He also stated that, "We don't
really have a coherent outlook or interest that can enslave us. This means that
we are closer to a potentially objective history than anybody has ever
been." ("Keynote: Bruce Sterling on Atemporality")
Rose began his presentation on the Long Now Project by comparing the time
scales of nature, culture, governance, infrastructure, commerce and culture and
art, discussing problems caused by the discrepancies. For example, lumber from
redwoods are sold much faster than the redwoods can grow. He then discussed
other examples of long term engineering problems including the pyramids, Taj
Mahal, Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repocitory, Spalbard international seed
vault and the Mormon Geneological Vaults. The rest of the presentation was
devoted to a discussion of the building process, outlining the design principals,
site choice and technological innovations involved. ("Alexander Rose in
Atemporality - A Cultural Speed Control?")
In the question and answer period that followed, Zelinski reiterated the idea that
the clock project is obscene, in the sense that it is arrogant to impose the present
moment on the rest of time. Sterling responded by pointing out that often in the
arts ideas are not just characterized as wrong, but somehow unthinkable
because they challenge the status quo. Voltaire was considered obscene as well.
The conversation moved away from the subject of the clock only to return to it
later. Zelinski argued that using resources, money and engineering knowledge to
build something big and permanent, countered ideas of long term thinking. He
suggested that the project should incorporate ideas from other attempts to build
lasting clocks, like sundials and the Arabic Islamic tradition of building water
clocks. This time, Sterling argued that worse things exist, such as the nuclear
waste sites. Rose argued that the clock pushed people's temporal horizons. "If
people say those crazy people in California are building that 10,000 year clock so
we are only going to think 100 years ahead, I think we still have pushed people's
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temporal horizons." ("Panel discussion in Atemporality - A Cultural Speed
Control")
On the surface, I can understand Sterling's position. Artists are often criticized
for making large or extravagant work and this criticism alone should not
immediately dismiss the value of the work. The clock project was started by the
computer scientist Danny Hiller who worked on supercomputers and wanted to
somehow reverse the goals of technology industries, which are focused on new
innovations rather than long term thinking. I can appreciate the fact that the clock
is being built with no ulterior motive and no practical or economic goal. Yet, I fail
to understand how the creation of the clock actually pushes temporal horizons.
The project only references the idea of long term thinking as it already exists in
our minds. It does not consider, make tangible or evolve our perception of the
idea. It does not force or enable us to change our lifestyles or thought processes
on the subject. At best, people may apply some of the foundation's engineering
innovations, but this will only result in the construction of other permanent
structures, not changes in environmental practices. The reference to the idea of
long term thinking can be understood immediately and the meaning of the initial
idea is not affected by its realization. As with Real Snail Mail, the full impact of
the work can be comprehended in a very short time span.
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The Long Now Projects treats time as absolute and does not consider the
perceptual assumptions of the project, or how the project could actually affect
audience perception of time. The project makes the assumption that the time
scale of nature is long, but others have maintained that nature is in constant flux.
I am not interested in arguing for one particular understanding of time, only that
we cannot simply disregard the question. In the long now project, Zeliniski's
examples act as foil to this oversight. In current systems art, older environmental
art may act as a foil. Discussions of time and space are irrelevant when it is
agreed that cultural constructs are useful and necessary and inescapable, that is
more productive to agree to use language than to question it. But those values
cannot possibly be held by the Long Now project. It is not possible to
meaningfully engage with non-human processes and simultaneously ignore one's
own framing of those explorations.
I feel that this particular panel discussion indicates much about the problems of
making and contextualizing work at this time. In politics, a 124 character tweet
about death panels was instrumental in derailing a proposed health care system.
It seems that short simplistic dramatic statements carry more weight than
thoughtful nuanced arguments, even when the short statements could be
debunked with minimal effort. In the panel discussion, Zeliniski gave a thoughtful
and nuanced argument, which Sterling dismissed on the grounds that the word
obscene was also leveled at Voltaire.
3.1 Being Relevant
More typical of 124 word attention spans is Sterling's list of interesting things that
artists should engage. Suddenly, there is nothing absurd about the idea of
someone listing ways to make relevant work, artists making this work and people
appreciating it because it is relevant. Work about interesting things is not
necessarily interesting. I learned this when I drove eight hours to see a Matthew
Ritchie show at Mass MOCA, after reading about it online. While Ritchie
included ideas from string theory, game structures and drawing processes, he
seemed to do so for the purpose of making an interesting work of art. In spite of
Ritchie's process related rhetoric, neither the work, nor the process of making the
work, nor the process which led to the making of the work, nor the process of
viewing the work makes "a sharp and qualitative distinction between the
variables present at the beginning and those present at the end."
More to the point, works that are made according to simplistic correlations
regarding relevant and important issues of our particular era give up the ability to
shape what is important. In the catalog for the 2009 Tate Triennial, Altermodern,
Nicolas Bourriaud writes,
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Postmodernism, thanks to the post-colonial criticism of Western
pretensions to determine the world's direction and the speed of it's
development, has allowed the historical counters to be reset to zero;
today, temporalities intersect and weave a complex network stripped of a
centre. Numerous contemporary artistic practices indicate however, that
we are on the verge of a leap, out of the postmodern period and the
(essentialist) multicultural model from which it is indivisible, a leap that
would give rise to a synthesis between modernism and post-colonialism.
Let us then call the synthesis 'altermodernism.'
Regarding 'altermodernism,' Bourriaud later writes, "It is neither a petrified kind of
time advancing in loops (postmodernism) nor a linear version of history
(modernism), but a positive experience of disorientation through an art form
exploring all dimensions of the present, tracing lines in all directions of time and
space."
Suspiciously, the catalog includes a linear narrative explaining how we arrived at
'altermoderism.' In this narrative, modernism is symbolized by the image of an
explosion, think of the Futurists, Viennese Actionists, Tinguely, "not to mention
the fragmented forms of dada," or the "blown-up" imagery of pop art. Five
geniuses managed to dodge this trend, Duchamp, Filliou, On Kawara, Gordon
Matta-Clark and most of all Smithson, making them "precursors to our
heterochronic time." Bourriaud of course invokes Fried when he writes about the
modern idea of progress and of course the works and intentions of these artists
don't fit that view. But most any artist, examined closely will not fit that view.
Specifically Bourriaud writes that "oriental philosophy" allowed Filliou and On
Kawara to superimpose movement towards the past on movement towards the
future. The same case could easily be made for the work of many other
modernist artists.
In Bourriaud's words,
'Altermodernist1 works convey, "signs that are both heterogenous
(belonging to different registers and or cultural traditions) and
heterochronic (borrowed from different periods.) ...What is cutting-edge in
these frolics is not the summoning up of the past to express the present, it
is the visual language with which the business is transacted - that of
traveling and nomadism...Frank Ackerman invents the age of painting with
GPS. Joachim Koester follows the route of the Hashishins in Iran after
retracing Kant's daily walks in Konisberg or - as related in DraculaJonathon Harker's trek in the Carpathians. Rachel Harrison's inspiration
to invent a kind of formal anthropology comes from Charles Darwin's
voyages on the Beagle. Walead Beshty passes exposed film stocks
through airports x-ray scanners, or captures the cracks occurring in
Perspex sculptures as they travel to exhibitions in fed-ex boxes.
Bourriaud's ideas must represent some kind of strange conflation of history and
life. The idea of 'altermoderism' as the next new paradigm that challenges linear
concepts of time, is clearly a paradox. For Bourriaud the abstract concept of
modernism can be expressed as a line, postmodernism can be expressed as
loops and 'altermoderist' artworks literally incorporate atemporal elements and
the "visual language" of journeys.
I perceive similarities between Bourriaud's conflation of history and life and the
attempts of artists to negate their own agency or represent collective intelligence.
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Both tendencies reflect literal reversals of simplified views of historical
modernism and both tendencies are predicated on ideas of progress, of applying
new systems or non-linear approaches to artworks. But artworks have never
been linear by default. In Art After Philosophy, Kosuth writes,
The twentieth century brought in a time that could be called "the end of
philosophy and the beginning of art." I do not mean that, of course, strictly
speaking, but rather as the "tendency" of the situation. Certainly linguistic
philosophy can be considered the heir to empiricism, but it's a philosophy
in one gear. (Kosuth)
I think that we are currently dealing with art after philosophy after art, in which art
tries to differentiate itself from art after philosophy by manifesting certain
recognizable qualities in order to prove that the system's perspective does not
come out of an art perspective, but from a deliberate application of philosophical
or rationally deduced concepts.
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4. SYMBOLIC DISCOURSE
Bourriaud claims to be noticing a new paradigm, but he is also creating a brand.
To his credit, Bourriaud is arguing for 'altermodernism' to replace other brands in
the art world, not inventing the concept. Regardless, there is something very
particular about Bourriaud's language that lends well to perpetuation in
discourse. Bourriaud's very particular terms, metaphors, pet artists and versions
of history echo loudly in technology art blogs, shows and festivals, in Europe and
in the academic and non-profit worlds where technology art mostly lives. In the
spring of 2009, October magazine distributed a questionnaire on "The
Contemporary" to 70 critics and curators and then published the responses.
Bourriaud's language figured prominently in several of these responses as well.
In contrast to these essays, which purport to already know about the
contemporary era, the art historian Joshua Shannon writes, "If contemporary art
history has anything to offer the humanities, it is because the weirdness of its
objects might yield subtler understandings of the effects and character of the
present." (17)
While it is true that verbal language affects thought and that information about a
work of art lasts longer than the work itself, these are not good reasons to
capitulate to an art system that relies entirely on key terms and brand recognition.
While I disagree with the Long Now Foundation's approach, I think that we do
need longer discussions, longer engagements and longer thought processes. At
Transmediale, the Long Now Foundation held the "Long Conversation" in which
two invited speakers would talk for fifteen minutes, then one would sit down and
another speaker would talk to the first speaker. The conversation, which lasted
nine hours, could not have been worse. Each person promoted his or her own
work and ideas for fifteen minutes while the other person listened. Then, the first
person listened while the next person did the same. (Transmediale)
In an interview in 1987, regarding mediation, Jean Baudrillard said that the artist
should "go further in this direction and really play the commodity, but at the power
of two or the power of ten. To play the media, but in a sense with an almost
ironic strategy." The other day, I heard a story on the radio about Democrats who
want Democrats to send out daily talking points memos to commentators, like the
Republicans do. They say the Republicans are organized, while the Democrats
sound like white noise.
(This American Life)
If people cannot concentrate on highly politicized discussions that dont use the
exact same words, it might useful to reconsider an alternatives to competing with
the media. While many problems are blamed on individuality, it could be argued
that placing absolute importance on social and external processes may have led
to a perspective in which there can be no alternative to messages. I am not
convinced that we should eliminate the idea that art may help us to listen to white
noise. By avoiding the temptation to illustrate recognizable concepts, formally
model the correct metaphysical system or to adhere to a particular visual
language or recognizable brand, artworks may at least allow for the possibility of
longer engagements.
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5. EXPERIMENTATION
To know something intellectually is not the same as to realize it experientially.
The work I like best is different than my own. The simplest explanation is that
this work comes out of a thought process or perspective that is not mine. My
colleague Bethany Engstrom consistently makes work like this. When says that
she is going to put zombie noises inside of a football helmet, I can't imagine why
this would work, but it does. In her piece titled, Dreams of Z Defense, (2009) the
weight of the helmet and the closeness of the sound operate tactilely and
kinesthetically. Her piece, The Bodies Brush Together With a Rustle of Dry
Leaves, (2009) consists of a narrow corridor framed by two by fours. Inside the
corridor, dark blue fabric serves as walls and white spray painted leaves covers
the floor. The piece, which functions like the shell of a situation, sometimes
comes to mind when I walk at dusk in autumn night and destabilizes everything
that makes the scene appear whole. What part of this makes it this?
5.1 Works
Obviously, I cannot make work that doesn't think like me and cannot know how
my work will function for other people. I can only set up experiments and see
where they lead. When I began graduate school, I was interested in better
understanding how participation in physical processes affect thought processes.
Before graduate school, I had been doing dry stone masonry. All day, for four
47
years, I concentrated selecting and positioning rocks to contact each other at the
highest possible point on both rocks. This very particular goal began to affect my
thought processes about other things, sometimes in conflicting ways.
For example, I would be making a pancake and notice myself lamenting the fact
that the pancake did not have straight edges. As an undergraduate, I had also
been interested in the ways that shooting and mixing video affected my thought
processes.
For my first graduate school project titled, Conversations, (2007) I had one hour
long conversations with six different people. In these conversations, I asked
each person about the way his or her thought processes look and feel and what
outside processes might have contributed to particular mental constructs. These
interviews were cut into short statements and organized spatially and according
to relationships between the clips. The relationships took into consideration
shapes or movements described by the language as well more specific
references to places, situations or objects. I also built an interface that allowed
audience members to navigate the clips by drawing on a tablet. The statements
were paired with videos, but matched in such a way that clips would pair with
different neighboring videos at different times. Pairing different statements with
the same video emphasized relationships between the statements, while pairing
different videos with the same statement, emphasized relationships between the
videos. Most of the videos were culled from my old tapes or from collective
commons. It was important to me that the statements were not being perfectly
illustrated, but related to something visual.
This work is still interesting to me, because I am interested in these ideas, but the
project itself is sort of arbitrary. At the time, I remember feeling discouraged from
engaging my own thought processes, because of a vague and looming societal
preferring of social over introspective processes. There are too many ideas at
work in this project, or the same idea, working in contradictory ways. The idea of
interdependency between actions and thought processes is stated on multiple
levels, rather than being explored. One problem with this work is the interaction.
I had the idea that I could overlay the process of drawing onto the information, in
the same way that the masonry affected my daily life. But because drawing was
used as a tool for navigating through clips and videos, it never functioned as a
separate process.
While I don't have any documentation of my next work titled, The Space Inside
My Mouth, (2007) it is useful towards understanding the context of my work. One
summer, I attended a class on the Upanishads, at a local meditation center. The
class had been going on for many years. Each week, the group read one line of
the ancient Hindu text and discussed several lengthy interpretations of that one
line. During the entire summer, we read about eight lines, all of which focused on
49
the space inside the mouth, called Dur. It makes less sense to try to describe the
concept of Dur, than to describe the way that I understood it at the time. Dur is
the only thing not subject to Karma, because is space, it is not speech or action.
The process of focusing intensely on this concept for eight weeks planted the
idea in my mouth, so that when I spoke and listened, I was aware of the space.
This was a constant awareness of speech as action, which asserted itself in the
negative.
In, Inner Landscape of the Body, the Chinese artist Chen Zhen constructed
sculptures, depicting his personal perception of the space of his internal organs.
Having been diagnosed with a terminal blood disease at age 25, and having
doctors as parents, the sculptor began to study Chinese medicine after his
diagnosis. The small sculptures, made from melted crayons, reflect how Zhen
imagines his organs, not their actual shapes or sizes. (ICA) When I made, The
Space Inside My Mouth, I had seen this work at the ICA in Boston and had been
influenced by it. For me, the concept of Dur had very literally become the space
in my mouth. I wanted to evoke the texture and materiality of a mouth and the
open emptiness of space. I began by making molds of my mouth, by chewing
gum and spitting the gum into snow. From these molds, I produced small plastic
molds of the inside of my mouth and then built a larger fiberglass one. Finally, I
formed a mouth large enough stand inside of, by suspending layers of plastic in
the shape of the molds.
The layers of plastic were covered with all manner of strange paints and solvents
in an effort to create some sort new material that would seem like the feeling of a
mouth. I had to cover my living room in plastic and work there, because I didn't
have a studio. The work also had to be installed in the gallery on the same day
as the critique, so I was not able to hang the mouth directly in the space. I had to
build a frame from PVC and canvas, which was distracting to the piece.
Like Burgin in 1969, issues of consumption, waste and practical considerations
caused me to focus on more dematerialized ways of working, but I still wanted to
deal with physicality. After many experiments, I arrived at my next interactive
piece titled, Mirrors. (2007) A projector was positioned upside-down in the
ceiling of a room. Audience members would capture the light of the projector on
mirrors and shine this light back at the ceiling, where a camera would pick up the
light, allowing the system to determine the position of all the mirrors and
continuously send different videos to each mirror. The videos could be viewed in
the mirror or reflected onto the walls and ceiling of the room. When a mirror was
held steadily or moved carefully, the same video would play. More frenetic
movements would cause new videos to constantly start playing. I was interested
in making tangible the idea of honing, or of stillness as it relates concentration.
Therefore, holding the mirror steadily resulted in the continuation of one clip or
one train of thought. Sweeping movements related to scattered attention and
contributed to the overall rhythm of all of voices and sounds that were
simultaneously playing back for different users. I was also interested in the idea
of sending each viewer a separate, private video to watch and in the fact that the
interaction operated as a feedback loop in which the light of the projector was
reflected back at the system.
One day, while I was working on Mirrors, I awoke from a dream that I had been
flying a plane and wrote down the dream. When I record my dreams, bizarre
events seem less important than mundane details, like the color of a plate on a
table or the fact that a bird flies by the window. Later in the day, I saw a sign
advertising plane rides as a fundraiser and went to take a ten minute plane ride.
Because it was the last trip of the day, the pilot asked my friend and I where we
wanted to go. We flew for two hours, stopping an airport.
The day itself was dreamlike and my dream had seemed prophetic. I was also
constantly conscious of the need to be making art, and carried a video camera,
although I was only able to charge and use the battery for minutes at a time. At
the end of the day, I wrote down the events of the day as if the day as if it had
been a dream, describing details like the color of the tickets, the plant in the office
inside the airport and the way the shape of a bridge made me feel. In dreams,
these aspects seem especially significant because they do not contribute to the
plot of the dream. Carrying the camera and later writing down the events of the
day resulted in a different kind of consciousness of the world. For the next few
days, I continued to pretend that I was in a dream.
In The Un-education of the Artist, Kaprow promotes the idea of play as an
alternative to art. (106) The project left me with the problem of presenting the
narrative about the day, the short video clips and objects that I had collected.
Like Kaprow, I often feel that the presentation of work can be counterproductive.
When the presentation of the work becomes an afterthought to the work, I
wonder why it is necessary to tell anybody else what was done.
Initially, this piece took the form of a performance. I captured the video, exported
the clips to a tiny still camera and put the objects in a box. It was important to me
that the each video clip seemed like an object, like evidence and that the clips did
not come together to form a narrative. It was also important that the story was
heard before the objects were seen. After reading the narrative, I passed around
the box.
Later, I had the opportunity to site the work in an old science building on
campus. In the second version of the piece, Souvenirs From Dreams (2008), the
objects were affixed to RFID tags. When the objects were placed on a scale, a
clip would play on an old television. Because equipment, half finished
experiments, notes and labels had been left throughout the building. I used
similar notes and labels to guide the audience to listen to a recording of the story,
unlock a laboratory door and then place the objects on the scale. By drilling a
hole into a table and running wires into a scale, I was able to lock the computer
and other equipment in a drawer. While I find this installation to be somewhat
heavy handed, I enjoy the fact that it could be left in unguarded in the building
and possibly discovered accidently. The installation ran for 24 hours a day, for
several weeks.
During the span of about a year, I worked on several site specific pieces. In one
piece, titled Maps (2008), I left boxes and signs in public places, asking people to
draw maps to their favorite places in Bangor, Maine. The project, which was
done for a public art event, aimed to compare how people imagine, represent and
interact with space. As with Souvenirs From Dreams, the work explores what is
noticed. The maps were layered to create a compilation map which emphasizes
differences in priorities and mark making.
Designing interactive installations which attempted to track users accurately
provided the opportunity to begin experimenting with sensors, which led to works
that embraced a lack of control. My interest in sensors also relates to priorities.
Just as I focused on mundane details when I thought about the world in terms of
dreams, and focused on square edges when I did masonry, sensors are always
focused on only one parameter. Headlights (2009), which used light levels to
54
choose words from narrative texts, was located in a storefront during a night time
Art Walk. As cars drove by space, the headlights would gradually become
brighter, naturally filling the room with light. At the same time, changes in light
levels caused words to be chosen from a linear text and projected in the space.
When no cars were present, light levels remained low, so the first few words of
the text would be repeated in varying sequences. When cars drove by, a torrent
of language accompanied the reflections, shadows and sound from the cars.
Wind Spinners (ongoing) operates on a similar principal, except the words are
chosen according to wind speed and appear on a spinning aluminum turbine.
The turbine, which hangs from a tree outside, performs persistence of vision with
LED lights. Once I learn how to use wind to charge the batteries, wind will be
powering the piece, choosing the words and allowing the persistence of vision to
occur. As with Souvenirs from Dreams, I am attracted to the idea of leaving the
work to be discovered accidently. Because I invested time into solving the
technical problems of the project, I became attached to the project and wanted to
design fancy permanent turbines and install the work as officially sanctioned
public art. Defaulting to ideas of permanence would have undermined the
meaning of the piece. Now that I have had time away from the project, I prefer
the simplicity of the aluminum cylinders, the idea of installing the work in remote
or unexpected places and the fact that the turbines only spin fast enough on
55
windy days. This makes the sudden appearance of language in trees more rare
and strange.
Skin Response aka Minor Rhythms Within (2009) is the third iteration of this idea,
in which words are chosen based on skin conductivity. Changes in conductivity
caused by to the filling of sweat ducts, relates to nervousness and excitement as
well as a number of biological factors. The original text for the piece is a found
poem compiled from 1930's writings about mind and body. As with all of my text
pieces, the message becomes less important than accidental rhythms,
repetitions and slippages of meaning. In Minor Rhythms Within and Wind
Spinners, the simplicity of the technology is significant. Neither requires a
computer or complex sensors, so the physics of the system can be understood
directly. Rather than simply applying commercial technology towards a towards a
preconceived use, the ideas for these systems came from experimenting with
electronics.
In Minor Rhythms Within, the user's expectations play a role in the meaning of
the work. The language may be heard differently because of the awareness that
the body is constantly affecting it. In the piece, marks are also drawn according
to variables that determine the speed of the scrolling paper and the movements
of a pen. Because the shape of the marks are determined by multiple arbitrary
factors, they do not show correlations. While a scientific apparatus might show
spikes related to excitement, these marks are much stranger and cannot be
interpreted, except that they draw attention to changes in the body in order to
draw attention to subjective or experiential awareness of those changes. They
also draw attention to differences between users. While the marks may evolve
and change for one user, they are dramatically different from one user to the
next.
In more precise applications of similar technology, such as lie detection, baseline
skin conductivity is established, breathing, heart rate and temperature are also
monitored and the subject is perfectly still, in order to isolate specific kinds of
mental responses. In Minor Rhythms Within there is no attempt to separate
physical and mental experience. Just as Pulsa's garden environment is agnostic
to the difference between human and nonhuman factors, Minor Rhythms Within
is agnostic to differences between what is considered to be physical and mental
phenomena.
Before I making Minor Rhythms Within, I made, Who is Making Art? (2009) In
this piece, I wore a heart rate monitor in my daily life. The monitor wirelessly sent
data to a small camera that was sewn into a vest. When my heart was within a
certain range, a picture was taken. At the end of the day, I would look at all of the
pictures from that day. At the end of a certain period of time, all of the images
were displayed. In Souvenirs From Dreams, carrying a camera and writing
about the day caused me to be aware of different things in the environment.
Wearing a camera that could be taking pictures at any time and then looking at
the pictures each day was meant to affect what affects me, in a kind of feedback
loop.
At the time, I was interested in the experience of feeling vulnerable or honest, of
wearing my heart on my sleeve, in the sense that the pictures would reveal my
unconscious reactions. Like Wind Spinners, this project turned out to be more
technically difficult than I expected. Rather than wearing the vest for one
extended block of time, I was constantly fixing the electronics and testing and
trying different algorithms. Regardless, the process of testing made me more
aware of my heart rate, and this awareness became more significant than the
vulnerability that I expected to feel. For example, one algorithm caused a picture
to be taken whenever I had been still and concentrating for an extended period of
time, but then broke off this concentration. For this piece, I finally decided to
simply make the system take pictures when my heart rate was over a certain
value. But other aspects of the experience carried over to Minor Rhythms Within.
I bought my first computer in 2005. When I began graduate school, I had worked
with analog video but knew little about computers and nothing about
programming or electronics. Early on, I began to realize that if I refused to put
58
technical limitations on a project, I would eventually solve the technical problems
and learn a lot in the process.
One major difference between 1960's Art and Technology and current technology
art project relates to amount of information and tools that are currently available.
Open source platforms make programming and electronics easier, as do online
communities that share tutorials, and forums in which anyone can ask and
answer questions. Therefore artists, hobbyists and others are able to help each
other realize projects that would have required more money and expertise in the
past. Because the technical aspects of the projects are not handed over to
experts, or handled through commercial software and hardware, the process of
building informs the work.
The early Art and Technology artists also wanted to use technology in
experimental ways, but had to coordinate collaborations between engineers and
artists, which required significantly more effort, organization and money. Often
these efforts were funded through objectionable sources, resulting in situations
where the meaning of the work was compromised by the source of funding or the
funding was short lived. Therefore, the internet and open source culture strongly
contribute to the possibility of making more tactile and experimental technology
art.
59
By participating in these communities, I remain aware of what others are doing
and am usually able to realize my projects. However, I have also had to accept
the fact that I cannot predict how long my projects will take. Regarding Art and
Technology, Shanken writes,
When experimental art utilizes technology, it often also pushes
the boundaries of what is known to work technologically. For those who
admire the courage of artists to attempt the unknown, the failure of an
experiment to actually work, or to work consistently, is not necessarily a
failed experiment, and the excitement of the effort to try something new is
sufficient to sustain disappointments in the pursuit of discovery. Such
remains the case with contemporary Art and Technology. (128)
In other words, conventional ideas of professionalism can be counterproductive
to inquiry and it is often necessary to choose one over another. In most cases, it
is possible to apply for shows using finished projects. But given a certain amount
of time to work, I will always choose the more productive use of time over the
safer one.
My final project, titled For
(2010), was meant to identify a viewer and
match the viewer with a particular video. In an earlier project titled,
Loupehole (2009), I collaborated with Elizabeth Ainslie, who produced hundreds
of drawings. Each drawing was assigned three variables, depending on
continuums related to lines and shapes in the drawings. I embedded a small LCD
screen, electronics and a color sensor into a magnifying loupe and programmed
60
the device to select a drawing based on the color of a surface. As viewers
carried the loupe around the gallery, they could place it on top of objects to see
different drawings. The same surface was always supposed to cause the same
drawing to appear.
In this piece, the drawings might function like the marks in Minor Rhythms
Within. One can not make a correlation between the object and the drawing, the
correlation is accepted. For an unknown reason, this specific surface equals this
specific drawing. Therefore the meaning of the object and the meaning of the
drawing are both changed by the relationship. Once again, the work has an
alternative logic, which Ainslie and I determined to be important in both her
paintings and my work. However, I am not entirely satisfied that the work
engages, rather than just referencing these ideas in my mind and the minds of
the viewers. As always, Ainslie's drawing are amazing to me, but I don't think the
interaction works except as a novelty. Unfortunately, For
may end up
having many of the same problems as Loupehole.
For
, arbitrarily assigns videos to viewers. When a viewer looks through
a peephole into a box, a video plays inside the box. Each time the same viewer
returns, the same video is supposed to play. The videos result from considered
choices, which aim to capture anonymous, intriguing or unappreciated spaces
and evoke the experience of being in a particular place at a certain moment.
Each video loops in such a way that there should be no beginning and end, just
an extended moment. At the top of the screen, a timer keeps track of the total
amount of time that the viewer has watched. As with Minor Rhythms Within, the
viewer's expectations play a part in the work. Knowing that nobody else will ever
see the video, the viewer may pay particularly close attention. I am also
interested in the idea that the video never literally changes, but changes as the
viewer spends more time watching, or each time she returns to the piece, coming
from a different situation.
This project differs from my other work, because the technology requires
absolute one to one precision to identify viewers and utilizes commercial
technology. The process of working on the piece is more detached from the
ideas in the piece, resulting in the feeling of making compromises between the
concept and the materials, which is problematic for me. The processes of
recording and watching the videos may be more important. The best solution
might be to continue taking videos and see where that leads or to collaborate
with others to design a better iris identification system.
Also, it would seem that this project is different because other works draw
attention to the environment or body, while these videos are contained inside of a
box in a gallery. Yet the question of whether the work is located in the gallery or
62
outside is less significant than the question of how the work affects awareness in
life, for the viewer and myself.
For the show catalog, I was asked how my work merges art and life, as "the
integration of art and life has been suggested to be key to intermedia." In an
effort to be concise, I probably made little sense, jumping from the idea of social
networks, twitter and reality television to Kaprow's Rules for Happenings. I was
trying to make the point that art does not mean the same thing that it did in the
1960's and neither does life, when viewed from the perspective of the question.
I brought up Kaprow, because I was thinking about Kaprow when I made the
piece. I was interested in idea that the viewer would repeatedly return to the
piece, that the work might function like a pause that comes in and out of the
viewer's life, interrupting whatever other processes were happening. Kaprow
went to the trouble of writing rules for Happenings when he thought that people
were missing the point of Happenings. The point was not to discard the
conventions of art, only to default to the values and priorities of commercial
industry, entertainment or rationality. It may be necessary to sometimes discard
the look or conventions that have grown up around art that merges with life, in
order for the artworks to function according to Kaprow's ideals. To this end, the
aura of the artwork may not always be bad and participation may not always be
good.
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5.2 Conclusion
By comparing and contrasting views on the past, this thesis aims to explore the
transitory and sometimes conflicting nature of value systems in art. The first
section draws attention to different ways that Art and Technology has been
framed in relation to its past and with regard to physicality, before exploring the
evolution of attitudes towards perception, tangibility, participation, process and
environment. Regarding these issues, contemporary technology art shares
similar attitudes to Art and Technology. However older works placed more
emphasis on experience, while newer works place more emphasis on ideas.
Despite contrary claims, I believe more that newer works are also more selfconscious about their own historical significance.
This self-consciousness manifests itself on various levels, resulting in the
tendency of artists and curators to look for predetermined signs of relevance.
However, artworks that do not aspire to make references to preconceived ideas
may allow the present to be understood in different ways, rather than circulating
and reifying the same ideas. In regard to my concern about the way artworks
function, the following statement by the media theorist Siegfried Zeilinski takes
on additional significance. "As intellectuals or as artists, the very least we can do
is ensure that the conversion that takes place mid-process makes a sharp and
64
qualitative distinction between the variables that are present at the beginning and
those present at the end." When I discuss my own work at the end of the paper, I
try to avoid defaulting to a set of conventional values. However, I continue to
apply the idea that the processes of making and experiencing the work should
bring about some kind of change in the ideas that are present in the individual
works and also in the overall trajectory of the work.
65
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7. BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
Abigail Stiers was born in Washington D.C. on October 30,1979. She grew up in
Silver Spring, Maryland and Rockville, Maryland and graduated from Rockville
High School in 1997. She graduated from Alfred University in Alfred, New York in
2001, with a Bachelors degree in Fine Arts. After living in Ithaca, New York she
moved to Maine to work for the Maine Conservation Corps and Acadia National
Park, before entering the Intermedia MFA program at the University of Maine in
2007. Abigail will be the first student graduate from the Intermedia MFA. She
plans to continue to make and exhibit artwork. Abigail is a candidate for the
Master of Fine Arts degree in Intermedia from the University of Maine in May
2011.
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