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Digital Stitchings: An Interview with Rachel Beth Egenhoefer
Rachel Beth Egenhoefer considers her Commodore 64 Computer and Fischer Price Loom to be defining objects of her childhood. She creates tactile representations of cyclical data structures in candy and knitting and is currently researching the intersection of textiles, technology, and the body.
Egenhoefer received her BFA from the Fiber department with a concentration in Digital Video from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Rachel Beth was an MFA fellow at the University of California, San Diego where she also was a graduate researcher at UCSD’s Center for Research and Computing in the Arts (CRCA).
The self-proclaimed digital arts nerd formerly worked on the editorial staff of Artbyte Magazine in New York City, and continues freelance writing on art, modern society, and media culture. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Los Angeles, New York, the Netherlands, the Options 2002 Biennial in Washington DC, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) London, the 2003 Boston Cyber Arts Festival, the Banff Centre for the Arts, ISEA 2004 in Tallinn Estonia, the Curtain University of Technology in Perth Australia, and others.
Currently Rachel Beth is focusing on new projects. She was an artist in residence at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China (November & December 2007) and worked as an Artist in Residence in the UK at the University of Brighton, Lighthouse Brighton and Furtherfield in London (January-May 2008).
Jess: What are the main differences (pros and/or cons) of creating a work that is to be experienced digitally, and that which is contained within physical material borders (sweets, fabric etc…)? – this is very much a question to you as a *creator*
Rachel Beth: In some ways I feel like this is a hard question for me to answer because my work is very much about bridging these two experiences and pointing out that they aren’t that different.
There’s lots of clich’e answers like the digital being accessible anywhere on the web and that the material has the traditional sense of making and ‘aura’, but my work really sits between them and is about bringing the two together. Making the digital tactile, and the tangible coded.
Jess: What aspects of the digital would you like to be able to bring into your future work?
Rachel Beth: My most recent work, and the work I did during my residency in the UK uses motion and acceleration tracking. I’d like to continue using ideas around mapping motion and interaction. I’m not so interested in data visualization but rather how mapping actions and systems can make for new interactions or parallels. I’ve also begun to work with hacking the Nintendo Wii that has just kind of opened a whole slew of ideas. So I can see myself working more with that.
Jess: Can you tell us a bit more about how you are hacking the Wii and what drew you to the Wii as part of your artistic practice?
Rachel Beth: I’m not exactly hacking the Wii as much as I am using it as another input device or a tool. The Wii and Wii Motes come equipped with blue tooth so they are fairly easy to interface with other things that use blue tooth. I’d been thinking a lot about motion, and the motion of interaction both with knitting and with computing, as well as thinking about doing some motion tracking things in my work and around the same time the Wii came out. It uses motion, speed, angles, balance as a means of input. Some of my other work uses play and games so it just seemed natural for me to want to use it. I think it also ties in with pop culture and interacting with technology. It’s been fun!
Jess: How would you define a literate reader/experiencer of your work? (I’m thinking especially of the lovely melting sweets…how do you want your IDEAL audience to participate?)
Rachel Beth: I don’t really have an ideal audience. I strive to have multiple entry points in my work. I’ve had computer scientists view my work who know much more about code than I do but never knew that a knitting pattern looks exactly the same, or ludites who hate technology but suddenly realize there are simple, beautiful concepts in computing. Some people see my work and don’t realize it’s even a piece, some people spend hours coming back and looking at it. I’m okay with either of these extremes. It’s my hope that people find something to grab on to or relate to. Leaving a door partly open allows other people to add their own perspective as well. It’s always rewarding (well most of the time rewarding) when people discover things in your work you didn?t see before.
Jess: When is a creative piece imbued with *artistic* quality? What gives it that extra oomph? – for you as creator AND experiencer?
Rachel Beth: I don’t think it’s something you can quantify really, and perhaps it’s different for every piece. It’s a delicate balance of concept and material, clarity without being literal, and being playfully smart.
Jess: What is the role of *code* or coding (literally or metaphorically) in the creation of your work?
Rachel Beth: I often say that my work is about the relationships between textiles and technology on a historical, conceptual, physical and constructional level. On the constructional level I am interested in the similarity between knits and purl stitches, and binary zeros and ones. Knitting (and similar codes in weaving) are of course very tactile, and coding is intangible. Code also comes into my work in less literal ways. I’m interested in how people like Agnes Martin or Foucault use order in their work. I think ordering things is a lot like coding. It’s sets of instructions, or patterns for play. I often leave room for chance as well. The option that I might drop a stitch, or the program will crash.
Jess: Thinking about your work as containing, at least on some level, a set of instructions or guide for viewers/readers/interactors implies that authorial control remains with the creator. As Foucault would have it, authorial intention can be a way to limit interpretations. Also, since you mention patterns for play, I’m remembering Caillois and his framework which posits play on two axes: total creativity and more extreme ruled complexity. Where on the graph do you envision your work sitting most comfortably and does this change depending on where you are exhibiting and the kind of work itself?
Rachel Beth: I’m not entirely sure what the diagram is supposed to imply. More rules = more creativity? Or less rules = more creativity? In either case, I’m not sure I could plot my work on this chart. I have been interested in how Foucault describes order and creating order. I can see how creating too many rules would limit the interpretation. I guess this is another one of those delicate balances artists strive for – creating order, or rules, or structures that set up a context from which the viewer can engage with the work bringing their own influences and also able to depart to other connections. In some ways, when I’m making my work I’m thinking about both the order I’m creating but also conceptually talking about how others might view order, using algorithms and sets of instructions as concept. With the exception maybe of my Wii Knitting (which has explicit instructions because it’s a game) I generally use sets of instructions as concept related to computing as apposed to instructions for how people are supposed to view my work.
Jess: Have you noticed any general differences in the way your work is approached?
Rachel Beth: I often think that my work sits in this space between. Given that I work both with textiles and technology I can show work in a textile/ fiber/ sculptural context and then show the same work or give the same presentation in a digital media/ technology context and it?s approached differently just because of the different context. Context always changes how things are approached, and also which pieces I choose to show in combination with others.
Jess: How does your own perception of your work change as you create it and then when it is *complete* (if it ever really is finished). Do you have a favourite piece?
Rachel Beth: As I work on anything I’m always thinking about how my work will be perceived? asking myself questions and making changes as part of my process. Specifically I think it’s different for every piece. Some projects I’ve researched, thought out, sketched, and had every explanation for things before I ever started, and then when I made it, I hated it. But that work usually evolves into something much more organic. This is how ‘Lollipop Grid’ came about. I like to watch people view/ interact with my work. I’m not sure my perception changes per say, but I get new insight into my work? I did a show at Lighthouse in Brighton that was all work in progress. It was the first time I ever did that and I was a bit nervous about it. But it ended up being a great way to get things out of the studio and look at them in new light, then go back and keep working.
Jess: What would your perfect studio/workspace be like?
Rachel Beth: Ha, that’s good. I’m always thinking about dream houses and dream studios. I like spaces that are repurposed, old factories, warehouses, unique spaces with odd shapes. Big windows. Definitely a whole wall for all my books. Another wall to stick stuff up on, I’m always tacking up bits of paper, samples, notes, sketches, pictures, etc. Lots of floor space and tables that can be moved around and reconfigured for different projects. I guess that’s kinda what my studio is like right now only it’s a bit smaller than the dream version!
“Free software needs free reference manuals”, insists Free Software guru Richard Stallman[1]. The FLOSS Manuals project has risen to this challenge and produced a library of manuals for Free Software in a Free-Software-style collaborative manner.
The term “FLOSS” bundles the synonyms “libre” and “open source” with “free”. Free Software is software that you are free to use for whatever purpose you like; it is a matter of freedom, not price. Like freedom of speech or freedom of the press, the freedom to use software is important for a free society.
We can only exercise our freedom to use a piece of software if we understand how to use it. Even the best-designed software can be complex to operate and have a learning curve. If the instruction manuals that help people learn how to use that software are proprietary (not freely modifiable) and are expensive or inaccurate as a result, they can slow or even prevent people from understanding how to use it.
FLOSS Manuals provides manuals for a variety of Free Software. Graphics, video, audio, office, Internet, even GNU/Linux itself. An entire section is devoted to manuals for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) system. There is a selection of manuals for websites, including Wikimedia Commons, Archive.org and the FLOSS Manuals site itself. You can read these online or download PDF versions to read or print offline. Some manuals are available in different languages: English, Dutch and Farsi.
The project’s focus on the OLPC’s software is worthy of comment as one of the criticisms of the OLPC software from some adult commentators has been that the user interface and applications are so different from other systems that they are difficult to understand and use. Whether this is a fair criticism or not, they and everyone else now have a well-designed set of manuals to consult.
The website is a good example of a clean, warm 1950s television-age magazine-inspired web design and well laid out but friendly and informal. It could hardly be more user-friendly if the words “Don’t Panic” were printed in large letters. The manuals themselves are a good example of clean “default style” typography. The sections and subsections are separated and titled in a clear and unobtrusive style that provides context and guides the reader without drawing attention to itself.
The one curious feature of the manuals isn’t in their design or writing but in their licensing. They are licenced under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). This is the licence that GNU, Linux and many other Free Software projects are licenced under, but it is designed for software rather than for text. The GNU project has produced a documentation licence, the GNU Free Documentation Licence (FDL), which is used by Wikipedia, among other projects.
The FDL is a controversial licence. It allows un-modifiable and non-removable advertising statements and political statements to be added to the instruction text of manuals. In practice, there has been little or no abuse of these features. But it can be a bone of contention for projects. The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence would be a better choice, and Wikipedia may switch to it in the future, but it is still controversial with licence obsessives like the Debian Linux Legal discussion list.
FLOSS Manuals avoid these problems by using the GPL. Since the manuals are written using a Wiki, which makes getting the “source code” for them as easy as selecting a tab on the web page for each book, the fact that the GPL is designed to work with programs with source code isn’t a problem. It’s an unusual decision that is worth understanding the context of, though.
As well as versions that you can read online or download and print, FLOSS Manuals are publishing print versions of some of their manuals, including the Audacity and OLPC manuals. Print may seem environmentally unfriendly, slow and low-tech compared to online manuals. But physical books are useful if your software is in full-screen mode if you want to learn how to use your software during your commute on the way to use it, or if, like most people, you have better retention for the written word than for pixels on a screen.
Having a book to refer to alongside an OLPC laptop folded open at the right page or when the laptop is turned off is much more convenient than referring to the documentation on-screen or discovering how the system works through trial and error. The OLPC manuals are visually very appealing, maintaining the clean and child-friendly colourful symbolism of the OLPC website and user interface.
Producing books reflects FLOSS Manuals’ organization and maturity as a project, as does the diversity of the software being covered and the solid design of both the site and the manuals. Whether you are looking for a good resource to direct newbies to, looking to learn new software yourself (I’ll be trying to learn Blender again and downloading Alchemy based on their manuals here), or needing to demonstrate the existence of serious training materials when recommending Free Software for work or projects, FLOSS Manuals is an excellent resource for learning how to use free software.
Musical workshops inspiring a sense of wonder in the endless combinations of sounds and rhythms in poetry, song and nature.
Participants: 90 students between the ages of 10 and 14 from Horsenden Primary School.
Artist: Michael Szpakowski (video artist, composer and facilitator)
90 students between the ages of 10 and 14 from Horsenden Primary School engaged in an exploration of the seasons through spoken/sung words and rhymes, and collaborated to create a collection of musical pieces using a variety of musical instruments. This project supported children’s reading ability by exploring rhythm through music, as well as the creation of a permanent sound artwork for the school garden that changed with the seasons to inspire a sense of wonder in the endless combinations of sounds and rhythms in poetry, song and nature.
The artist Michael Szpakowski worked with 14 small groups of pupils doing music and sound drawing on quotes from nursery rhymes and using a range of stimulating and unusual ways of making sounds. The work was digitally recorded in order to create a “generative” piece of music and sound-scape. Generative means that the computer is programmed to play back the fragments of the sound in a semi-random order so that they would constantly unfold and combine in different ways, like a kind of musical kaleidoscope.
FILE Sao Paulo, Electronic Language International Festival, which took place in Brazil this August is subtitled Two Thousand and Eight Million Pixels. A heading that references the vast resolutions made possible by the 4K digital projection systems that were used to show cinematic work at the festival this year, and forming one of the main themes of the show. Other categories set up in an impressively produced catalogue that accompanied the show included; installations, game art, media art and performance. Works under these categories were exhibited alongside games, and the projects of commercial exhibitors to produce an energetic, rag-tag collection; that was constantly bursting out of the curatorial confines that these groupings defined.
In it’s ninth year, and continuing to expand into other cities around Brazil, FILE offers a particularly south American perspective on the global phenomena that is media art, bringing together artists from Brazil and Argentina, as well as from Japan, North America and Europe. The opportunities for debate and discussion with people of similar interests as well as the camaraderie of working together to put on a show are what made the event particularly memorable for me on a personal level, and also (I hope) helped develop my understanding of Brazilian culture.
In a country that has both 120 and 220 volt electrical circuits, and a working culture (at least in the gallery where we were exhibiting) that has a surfeit of people; each with clearly defined job roles, the ability to work collaboratively is a necessity. Working together with large groups of electricians, carpenters, AV technicians, carpet fitters, painters and decorators, and cleaners; as well as directors, architects, curators, administrators, overseers, and volunteers meant that someone, somewhere in the building would be able to help with your particular problem. While the ability to take on board the opinion of each-and-every person involved, about the merits of, for instance, a particular technique for the securing of a projector, before reaching an agreed solution, is the job of a seasoned negotiator.
The installation process of my own work Aquaplayne, required the complete construction of an installation from scratch, caused by the rather Byzantine customs situation that exists in Brazil. Shipping work extant would have meant it sitting in customs for months, multiple form filling and huge cost to the festival. As this was not then an option, I would have to recreate my work by ordering materials for purchase in Brazil as much as possible, while surreptitiously bringing the more difficult to locally source tech through customs myself. As I later discovered I was not the only artist who had to ‘smuggle’ equipment through customs.
Just as my plane was about to land, I was presented with a customs declaration form that asked if I was bringing anything into the country that cost more than $500 US. My laptop is battered to bits, and while it did originally cost more than this, I did not particularly wish to pay the Brazilian government an additional fee for the privilege, and so ticked a different box. With sweaty palms and shifty eyes, I managed to clear airport customs without any further questions. I was later amazed to hear from other artists, that they had had similar experiences, only with highly sophisticated hardware worth many times the cost of my laptop; this did at least help to put my own unease into proper perspective, but I can only imagine how they felt in the arrivals hall.
The installation process took a long time, other artists whose work was supposed to be plug-and-play took three days to get up and running, mine took a week. It often seemed, as Sheldon Brown once commented, that in the southern hemisphere, us northerners would have to ‘spin our electrons in the opposite direction’. This process was not without its advantages however, it did mean there was time to iron out physical and coding glitches and really concentrate on the presentation of the work. It also enabled me to get to know the other people working on the show, many of whom were very generous with their time in assisting in the installation of my work.
As is often the case with these types of shows, there came a moment on the day before the launch when everything seemed to fall into place. Where before there had been bare wires, trailing cables and piles of detritus, now there stood sparkling white, newly painted plinths, and gleaming bright, perfectly calibrated, projections. At the end of the day an army of red-shirted invigilators descended on the show and learnt the ropes by playing with the works.
The launch event itself was packed. While the show was open to the public, numbers were strictly limited, but this was not the case on the opening night. I have never seen so many people in a gallery and actually found it quite intimidating. What it did provide though was a good technical workout for all the exhibited pieces, all of which successfully passed this examination without a hitch.
There were many works of note exhibited, some of my own particular favourites included; Memories by Anaisa Franco, Full Body Games by Jonah Warren and Steven Sanborn, LevelHead by Julian Oliver, The Scalable City by Sheldon Brown and L.A.S.E.R Tag by Graffiti Research Lab.
Anaisa Franco, a Brazilian artist who recently graduated from IDAT Plymouth, exhibited Memories, a sculptural work consisting of two humanoid robotic heads, hung from the ceiling at head height, facing one another. Cast in clear plastic, so that we can see their inner digital workings, and with tiny LCD monitors mounted into the back of their skulls, in order that we might view the animated dreams that they exchanged with each other.
Full Body Games by Jonah Warren and Steven Sanborn requires that we jump in and physically control the game. Through shadow-mapping our image is transposed into a projection, from where we either jump over or duck under simple graphical objects that move across the screen. Selecting one of the three other options enables us to use our silhouette to touch game objects, making full use of our bodily gestures and motions in the works game-play.
Full Body Games by Jonah Warren and Steven Sanborn.
LevelHead by Julian Oliver offers an intriguing interface, consisting of a simple set of cubes placed on a plinth in front of a projection. The resulting effect of our engagement with these cubes is remarkable. Upon walking into the room, we are presented with our own mirror image and that of the plinth projected onto the far wall. Where we might however expect to see images of the cubes, we glimpse a digital world. Taking the place of the cubes in the projection is a set of three dimensional rooms, doors and stairways, populated by a single, shadowy figure. The object of the exercise quickly becomes apparent. By picking up the cubes and gently tilting them backwards, forwards and side-to-side we are able to direct our figure through the maze that is its little world, between rooms and from one cube to another in order to find the exit. A simple idea executed with sophistication, pattern recognition software is used to detect the position of the cubes within three-dimensional space, it then relays this information back to the program which then directs the character in its Kafkaesque wonderings.
LevelHead by Julian Oliver.
The Scalable City by Sheldon Brown equally pushes our perceptions of what technology is capable of, while also making use of a cube in its interface, by creating with the aid of satellite mapping, distopian versions of six different cities around the world, each situated on one face of the cube. A trackball enables our navigation between the cities, but our use of this also creates the infrastructure of each plane. Our movement through the space lays down roads as we cut through the virgin landscape, in a tornado of suburban housing, quickly creating each city in a photorealist sprawl of nondescript neighbourhoods. Using state-of-the-art hardware and software systems, we are reminded of what we are capable of doing to our planet using this technology, as we gleefully create our very own Borg cube.
The Scalable City by Sheldon Brown.
Sheldon Brown is also very involved with the 4K cinema project that FILE is highlighting this year, and presents a narrative version of The Scalable City, one of 14 newly commissioned films, that makes use of the technology at the festival. With an extended essay by Lev Manovich in the exhibition catalogue on the subject, in which he likens the onset of the technology that has 8 million pixels of resolution, to that of Seventeenth Century Dutch painting, in terms of its clarity of representation. The experience of watching the films from the audience is certainly eye-popping. Starting the sequence of films with an homage to the Lumiere brothers, we are confronted with what appears at first to be a high-resolution stills photograph of a desert landscape. Everything is still, there is not a cloud in the sky, and then in the distance we see smoke, is this digitally generated? No, the work is actually a live action video, and it is the steam from a train, one which is bearing down on us, in crystal clarity, all of the highlight and shadow detail in the image perfectly resolved in each and every frame, then the train passes and the screen returns to its stillness and calm. What follows are a series of films, ranging from computer animations of milky-way fly-throughs, mathematical modelling routines, and ray-traces of molecular growth, to narrative and national geographic style work, all of which perfectly reveals the technical brilliance of the imaging system being used. An additional, unintentional effect of this hyper-real presentation is that it makes us ultra-sensitive to the occasional frame that gets dropped from the film sequence. As well as the single pixel line that dissects the centre of the screen in this particular setting. The clarity of detail provided by such systems of representation, conversely makes us even more aware that what they offer us are still mere shadows on the wall.
L.A.S.E.R Tag by Graffiti Research Lab an ‘open-source weapon of mass defacement’. in contrast, uses a 5000K projector, (in old money, the K here refers to the number of lumens of power the projector uses, rather than the number of lines of pixels projected, which in this case is likely to be a more traditional 1024 or so). The purpose being to open up the cities buildings to the work of it’s graffiti artists. By using a green laser pen to draw and write onto the sides of offices, the pilings of bridges, and the plinths of Sao Paulo’s monuments. The L.A.S.E.R Tag re-projects these lines in a single red, green, or blue channel, with the addition of the line weight and drip patterns that would accompany them if they were applied with a spray-can; and in so doing opening up inaccessible private space to public comment.
L.A.S.E.R Tag by Graffiti Research Lab.
The works exhibited at FILE could be categorised in terms of their models of production. Much of the work exhibited was created within the emerging European lab system, concentrating on collaboration and the use of open source software, with work from Spain in particular being well represented. In contrast to this is the highly funded US university system, which in terms of the works exhibited here was making full use of cutting-edge hardware systems in their productions. While the 4K cinema screenings takes pride of place in the catalogue, it can be described as leading edge technology, and will certainly receive widespread coverage over the coming years, other interesting patterns of production emerge. There were also contributions from commercial Brazilian producers of interactive experiences, work created using open source software. The programming languages these companies used were not chosen for political or critical reasons, but simply in order to keep down the cost of production. Perhaps FILE provides with its mixture of forms and tropes, unlikely combinations of artistic and commercial projects – a more valid appraisal of a global scene than we might first imagine.
WORLDWIDEWEGG 2 August – 13 September 2008 Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow
Eggs, toast and disco are everything you need to get the day started. From the daily activities of egg-laying in the Gorgie City Farm in Edinburgh to a mechanical toaster at the Centre of Contemporary Arts in Glasglow, the World Wide Wegg relays the biological production of the rural to the commonplace production of toast in the urban.
Through the vast communication portal known as the Internet, each egg layed in realtime at the farm triggers a toaster to produce a piece of toast for visitors at the gallery. An upbeat iTunes playlist controlled by the chickens is used to help jump start the day. With a cheeky pun referencing booty dancing Jason Forrest’s label, each peck from the chickens skips a song on a playlist from Cock Rock Disco. The sound produced is more unlistenable than dance-inducing as each song plays for no longer than a second before skipping to the next. The sound, however, is said to inspire the idea of the ‘perpetual fluttering of chickens’.
To complete the production, a lottery ticket can be purchased online resembling that of a old slot machine. With the use of simple computation, 6 random numbers are generated by the egg-laying activities of the chickens. Adding even more to the slight randomness of eggs, toast, chickens and Cock Rock Disco, the lottery completes the whole production by including a token for revenue. The lottery is a game that further engages the chickens who have no awareness of the tracking and unusual production of their actions. With a brightly coloured pixel website, and low-res web cam captures of the chickens in action, the World Wide Wegg is well packaged complete with low-fi aesthetics, pop cultural references and play-on-words.
The World Wide Wegg is a project that admires values of simplicity. Not only in with the use of simple one-way action-response communication, but also in the admiration of simple daily modern actions or processes (i.e. producing a toast or skipping a song on iTunes), as well as, the basic habitual activities of the networked chickens (i.e. egg-laying and pecking). Together these urban and rural actions and productions are linked together as symbols of the archetypal breakfast for the playful application of modern technology.
The World Wide Wegg is a quirky project that utilizes the frenetic activities chickens to create a rather unusual breakfast experience. It is a simple gesture that enlivens interactions between a world of chickens and the stark white walls of a contemporary art space.
The World Wide Wegg is brought to you by creator of audio/visual collective NewFutureNow and blog and online entertainment space, Gabba.tv.
The World Wide Wegg is presented as part of ALT-W an exhibition exploring New Directions in Scottish Digital Culture by artists supported by the Alt-W Fund on until 13 September.
Meditation for Avatars
For some, a spiritual experience is sending thoughts and feelings, prayers and even curses into the ether, hoping to receive a response or reply or perceiving some effect. However, what is received due to that projection can be difficult to assess and measure.
The project Meditation for Avatars enlists personal computers to make such spiritual projections. Participants in this project donate processing time on personal computers; the computers process mantras and send them through the Internet. A mantra is a repeated chanted sound that is used to focus one’s concentration during meditation. Personal computers are used because if there is one thing computers are good at, it’s undeviating repetition.
The goal of the project, which the creators describe as an “artistic experiment”, is to raise the spiritual consciousness of those donating processor time… “they [computers] meditate to raise our consciousness” proclaims the website. Participants can select which mantra is to be processed and see, on a screen wallpaper, the current mantra is “chanted” by the computer. According to the project developers, computers in this experiment become charged with positive energy, and this energy can be passed on to the users of the computers. By watching their computer “meditate”, participants will be encouraged to practice their own meditation.
Mantra Screen shot.
Like other forms of meditation or prayer, the consequences of devoted computing are best perceived through a filter of faith. “In order to be able to receive this energy, we need trust and faith in the positive” the website proclaims. This reviewer must lack such faith because I am compelled to wonder about assessment: how can anyone know if this works? But then, having faith eliminates the need to measure this experiment’s result. Still, many forays into the spiritual are done to realise some change on the earthly plain. The change that Meditation for Avatars seeks is “… in terms of our experiment, the greater the number of computers online, the more powerful the energy within the network. This energy can positively influence everything connected with it – the individual computers, the community network, and the Internet”. The spiritual energy in this experiment is meant to influence another non-substantial artefact – the Internet positively.
The parallel this project draws between the Internet and spirituality I find intriguing. Like many perceptions of what a spiritual realm would be like, the Internet is not wholly concrete. It has a real impact on human affairs but in ways that are not easy to gauge. As spaces, the Internet and spiritual realms both provide private and communal experiences; cyberspace is immaterial, but like a spiritual realm, it is accessed through material practices.
When we open our browser, we project ourselves into a non-corporeal space and the responses to our projections are sometimes hard to fathom. Indeed, the Internet can be downright ethereal at times. For example, those cryptic emails from an unknown source, like voices from beyond, give us the power to enlarge our body parts. Or those invitations to friends on Facebook that remain mysteriously unconfirmed; how like an unanswered prayer an unfulfilled Internet communication can be. Google acts as a Delphic oracle, an intermediary between the elusive spiritual and the actual. When we consult the Google oracle, 30,500,000 responses to the search prompt “why doesn’t anyone love me?” become available. Google performs as oracles have always done – Google will lead us to directions on how to make toast but can’t make clear the really big issues. I wonder what a Google search for “the benefits of positive spiritual energy in my computer” would turn up.
Meditation for Avatars draws a line connecting spirituality and the Internet and I ask the project to connect the material practice of computer processors chanting mantras and some measurable impact on the human condition. But perhaps the concept of the Internet as a spiritual space is where I can resolve my difficulty with the Meditation for Avatars project. If computers, as avatars, chant our behalf, perhaps the performance of our other avatars on the Internet has real consequences. Maybe the mayhem that is perpetrated in World of Warcraft corresponds to violence and intolerance in real life. Maybe Second Life is really a Second Chance, and instead of accumulating stuff and gratifying appetites, digital space is where avatars can perform differently, more nobly, than we do in Real Life.
But let’s admit it – like Real Life, our projections into cyberspace can be far from noble. The list of egregious digital ugliness people bring to the Internet is long. The violence and corruption of Real Life is mirrored in hacks and assaults on sites and in pernicious child pornography: victims of cyber crimes experience feelings of violation and helplessness that mimic the feelings of those subjected to Real Life crimes of violence. A counterbalance to the uglier side of the Internet might be the tasks we assign our computers. The steadfast churning out of mantras may work to detoxify our systems and us. And while the processors drone on, the Meditation for Avatars wallpaper provides a tally of our computer’s (and therefore our) contribution to the good, a measure of gentle sanity in the cyber-world.
As a project, Meditation for Avatars asks us to consider the ramifications of our projections into digital space to imagine that the time and energy to which we devote our computers affect users and the network community. This is another way of asking us to be responsible for what we do with the Internet. The Internet is ultimately a communal space: we need to care about how we treat each other in that space. If, in an experiment to raise spiritual consciousness, our awareness of others is heightened, then Meditation for Avatars might be on to something.
Ovu and Aphrodite at Mobilefest
Mobilefest has always had this wide-angle view for mobile and wireless technologies, but to our surprise, examples where the cellphone or a hand-held device is not obvious caught the attention and the affection of the visitors.
With a trans-disciplinary approach, we have been asking this question –
How can mobile technology contribute to democracy, culture, art, ecology, peace, education, health and the third sector? Two projects have pricked visitor interest with varied questions: Ovu and The Aphrodite Project.
Ovu
A wearable device created by Kate Bauer allows women to track their fertility easily and stylishly. Raising questions about the usability of current basal temperature thermometers that create a not-so-stimulating mood for couples, Ovu is made up of a lace armband, with a highly sensitive thermistor attached on the inside that picks up changes in the Basal Body Temperature (BBT) of a woman.
“In researching methods of tracking fertility, I came across many different products. However, many of them shared similar flaws. The basal thermometer is complicated to use. It involves a lot of tracking and documentation and begins to resemble a science experiment at some point with all the charting involved. And after all of this planning and tracking, who is in the mood to make babies anyway?
Then there is the software available, either on the web or through downloading software for the computer. These graphs are even scarier-looking than those with the basal thermometer. What’s worse is that these charts are based on a number you type in, which is not always 100% accurate in predicting the correct cycle.
Composed of an Arduino Mini, a thermistor and a Bluetooth antenna. It connects a Java application on a cellphone that sends the data when a connection is available to a MySql web server where all the history is stored and accessible. Then, if she is ovulating a web application, she can text her and her partner’s mobile phone.
The Aphrodite Project
Platforms are shoes equipped with an audio alarm, LCD screen and GPS devices attached to them in the latest models that provide a complete, up-to-date set for prostitutes.
Created by a team led by Norene Leddy, the beauty of this project is its social goals and objectives. In her own words, “Platforms is designed to question moral attitudes and value judgments, especially with this marginalized section of the population: Who gets new technology and when? What is the true value of sexual services? Using an archetypal model, is it possible to reclaim the profession for modern women? What are the ethics of surveillance and tracking? Is it possible to ensure that this information will empower and not endanger sex workers? Is it ever possible to guarantee that knowledge will stay within the hands of those who it is intended for? The shoes address creativity and art-making as well as practical issues of design and marketability. It is my hope that in addition to creating beautifully crafted objects, the project will contribute to the current international debate over the regulation, decriminalization, and legalization of prostitution.”
The possibility of having all those techno-devices embedded in a shoe got so much attention from the Brazilian audience, first because of its attention towards it being seen as pretty trendy, then knowing more about the complete scope and complexity of the project, with the audience asking questions of why and how it was developed. Of course, there was an immediate intrigue with the project’s down-to-earth and urban collaboration with sex workers. Discussions varied from talking about the incredible bridge that this project provides to more gritty subjects about sex workers, prostitution, surveillance and security.
The discussion was on the table at the end of the day, whether with a yellow, wit or shy smile! The level of attention was so high that the Aphrodite Project was featured on national television at “Programa Hebe Camargo”, a Brazilian Oprah who’s been on television since the early 50s when Brazilian television started.
Both projects show that their trans-disciplinary approaches to mobile technologies will be more available. Proposing a contemporary approach in encouraging, innovative ways to explore new ideas and discussions.
Making Sense of ISEA2008 (Without Any Decent Statistics)
ISEA2008 quick facts: held in Singapore, 25 July – 3 August 2008. ISEA has been running for two decades. It began in 1988 as the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts. It is now the International Symposium on Electronic Art. It has been a biennial event, but from next year becomes annual. A new ISEA Foundation has been developed. The coordinating role passes from Nina Czegledy to Julianne Pierce. The 2009 event will be held in Dublin (first call for papers coming this September). ISEA2010 is likely to be in Germany (Ruhr region).
Manovich, ISEA opening night, Exodus, new media, visualisation, cultural analytics.
In his weirdly scheduled ISEA2008 lecture – delivered the day after the closing night party – Lev Manovich argued that we have shifted from a state of new media to one of ‘more’ media. There is simply so much media these days (the product of new technologies and social interactive forms) that it is humanly impossible to gain an overall perspective. Our only viable option is to draw upon the quantitative methods that have driven contemporary science and business. We must data-mine culture in order to develop new methods of visualisation that have the potential to represent cultural patterns indiscernible to the naked critical eye and provide a necessary interface to the universe of specific cultural objects. Manovich dubs this new critical and expressive field, ‘cultural analytics’. While I am suspicious that significant aspects of culture are so easily amenable to discrete quantitative representation, Manovich’s lecture, delivered to a packed audience, resonated very much with my experience of ISEA2008. With its 800 delegates, five concurrent streams, juried exhibition and huge range of associated panels, seminars, workshops and exhibitions, ISEA2008 was anything but digestible. As Andreas Broeckmann suggested at the ISEA board meeting, every participant is likely to have had a substantially different experience of the event depending upon their particular path through it. A stronger and more clearly integrated keynote program may have helped, but there are clear issues of scale that no manner of organization can solve. Lacking the means to effectively data-mine the event, all I can offer here is a sample of issues that emerged for me.
Rendering Vectors I was initially a bit disappointed when I wandered down into the bowels of the National Museum of Singapore to see the juried exhibition. Very little stood out and many works seemed either poorly resolved or overblown. Alternative browsers have been a staple of net-art since the late 90s, so it felt odd to encounter a huge 3D triangle displaying images from yet another alternative browser (Metahaven’s Exodus). Similarly, Horia Cosmin Samoila and Marie Christine Driesen’s representation of alpha brain activity in terms of a swirling sphere of white points against a black background, Untitled, seemed little more than a dubious science show exhibit, indulging in standard tropes of mind as a flowing galaxy-style space (much better if they had reduced the visualization to a 32X32 grid of pixels). More conceptually interesting was Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade and Sameera Khan’s Gendered Strategies for Loitering which aimed to represent gender-based differences in urban spatial experience. Women, it seems, can move safely through public spaces in Mumbai and Singapore but they cannot loiter. Unfortunately the work itself did not really make this point sufficiently clear. It combined a multi-screen video projection with a computer game simulation when, more likely, a reduction of technological means was necessary. Linking these three works is a fundamental concern with developing new means of rendering elusive processes – whether related to data flows, physical processes or social interaction. They, and many other works in the juried show and associated exhibitions, aim less to depict stable things than to portray vectors, trajectories and movements. Despite their limitations (a bit lessened upon learning that the juried show was developed during a very short lead-up ISEA residency program), these works represent an interesting effort to render aspects of mobility (within larger spaces that are themselves conceived in mobile terms).
Untitled, Quartet, Charmed, 3D, representation of alpha brain activity, multi-screen video projection.
Positioning Play Play is a central conceit within contemporary electronic art, but how is it articulated? How does it take shape? More particularly, how does it engage with popular forms of computer-mediated play and with what the French art theorist, Nicolas Bourriaud, has termed the ‘relational’ play of contemporary art? This is a question that Australian academic, Daniel Palmer, posed in his excellent paper, “The Critical Ambivalence of Play in Media Art”. Media/electronic art, Palmer suggests, is awkwardly positioned between popular entertainment (Wii consoles and the like) and the modeling of social relations in radical art; never quite satisfying either camp – never permitting play a simple (uncritical) precedence or, on the other hand, a properly dialogic aesthetic shape. One response to this dilemma is the pursuit of ever richer and more kinaesthetically engaging interfaces. Arguably, however, it is not by effacing the technological character of interaction – by returning it to some unconvincing phenomenological state – that the fundamental issues of play are delineated and addressed. Instead it is by exploring the irregular contours of interaction – its blind spots, interstices and spaces of contradiction – that other dimensions of play become evident. The play, for example, of Tad Ermitano’s Quartet (juried show) relates ostensibly to the sense of controlling a traditional gamelan orchestra via hand gestures. The actual play, however, relates to the strange, clumsy, obviously wired and mediated character of the interaction – the sense of indirection, of curious mechanical autonomy. Similarly, Priscilla Bracks, Gavin Sade and Matt Dwyer’s Charmed (associated exhibition, Experimenta Play++) is as much about the artificiality of computer mediated spatial interaction (and worlds) as it is an appealing navigable environment. The play lies in its subversion of ordinary interface expectations – its insistence, for instance, that physically shifting a viewing pod about on a table alters the view on the world (contrary to the typical expectation that a screen serves as a stable container for an internal universe). These works have a dimension of play that runs alongside and counter to their obvious playfulness. This dimension is less about manipulation and immediate feedback than about the playful disturbance of conventional interactive paradigms.
Managing ‘More’ Media The German media arts historian, Oliver Grau, spoke about the need to develop a large archival project that would map and conserve the heritage of media arts practice. He argued that there have been a number of efforts to develop such a resource, but that they have all foundered under the weight of technological and financial demands. He provided an overview of a new on-line archive, The Database of Virtual Art, which has been developed at Danube University Krems and has an impressive advisory panel drawn from around the world. While developing effective and sustainable means for managing the heritage of media arts is clearly a worthwhile objective, I am uncomfortable with the thought of a centralised database project – particularly if alongside conservation the archive also aims to assume an editorial/curatorial role, tracing out main threads of development and a canon of key works. There is a risk, despite the advisory panel, that the archive will ignore, or treat as secondary, all manner of local contexts and practices that may or may not be in step with whatever dominant (probably North American and European) paradigm of development is identified. It may better to facilitate the creation of a range of local (distributed) archives. In my view, any universal system should have the more restricted role of enabling communication between the archival nodes, rather than serving as an uber-perspective on the field.
Despite my reservations, I found ISEA2008 an interesting and useful event, if only to confront all sorts of views and practices alien to my own and to have the opportunity to speak to a variety of artists and theorists directly. No possibility of adequately taking in the whole event, but is that really so essential? Is a map of everything better than a set of specific, limited encounters? Actually, if I wanted to say anything more, it would be to mention further specific details: Alex Monteith’s wonderfully playful (but non-interactive) video installation, Composition for Farmer, in the associated NZ exhibition, Cloudland; Paul Brown’s insightful effort to trace the roots of the split between contemporary art and media/electronic arts to a division between sensualism and intellectualism within modernism; and Daniel Peltz’s, Beepez-le, a small poetic piece reflecting upon mobile phone practices in Cameroon. Which leaves me with one last question, how am I going to get to Dublin?
Jeremy Bailey (CA)
Jeremy Bailey will be working as Artist in Residence at HTTP, Furtherfield’s Gallery and lab space, in Summer 2008. As part of the residency HTTP Gallery has commissioned a new satirical performance called Warmail which is the central piece in Bailey’s upcoming HTTP exhibition, The Jeremy Bailey Show in Autumn 2008.
The Jeremy Bailey Show, Bailey’s first solo exhibition in the UK, will present many of Bailey’s most recent works including VideoPaint 3.0 and SOS, alongside the new commission, Warmail, produced during his adjunct residency. This brand new performance work pokes fun at the value placed on “collaboration” in today’s art practice and policy-making. The performance will be staged live at the exhibition opening (Friday 19 September 2008, 7:30pm) and documented for viewing throughout the exhibition. Bailey plans to co-demonstrate, with his audience, new collaborative software that will allow participants to perform office related tasks such as email, word processing, or spreadsheets together while simultaneously composing a visual/musical score with matching choreography.
Jeremy Bailey received his MFA in Video Art from Syracuse University and an undergraduate degree in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. He is co-founder of award winning artist video collective 640 480. His work has been described by Filmmaker Magazine as “a one man revolution on the way we use video, computers and our bodies to create art”. Bailey lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
Calling Home
As 080808, the second UpStage Festival of live online performances, draws closer, one of the 14 selected performances has already begun: “Calling Home: Part 1” by activelayers was presented on Tuesday 1 July.
The show revolves around four elusive characters, who are perhaps lost or searching or need to be called home, and who may or may not be connected to each other. Rather than providing a linear narrative, “Calling Home: Part 1” introduced these characters and threw down some of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of their lives, for the audience to ponder. Beyond the performance, further clues are provided on the activelayers web site (part two of the whole), where each character has a profile and links to their blogs and email addresses. The characters also appear in other online environments and email lists as they wander cyberspace, looking for a way home. We are invited to engage with the characters via all these means, to discover more about their personal pilgrimages.
activelayers are Cherry Truluck (UK), Suzon Fuks (Belgium/Australia), James Cunningham (Australia) and Liz Bryce (Aotearoa/NZ); the group collaborated on “The Old Hotel” which was performed at the 070707 UpStage Festival and formed activelayers early in 2008 to continue their collaborative work. As some of the more experienced users of the cyberformance platform UpStage, their performances have pushed the software to new limits. In “The Old Hotel” they found ways to add audio to UpStage before that was available as a feature, and in “Calling Home” they are experimenting with the use of multiple stages – active layers in action!
An UpStage “stage” is a web page which delivers visual, audio and textual material to an online audience in real time. Using more than one stage simultaneously creates a sense of multiple co-existing worlds that can criss-cross and overlap – avatars travel between stages, news items are echoed and transformed, and the sound from all stages is heard at once. It’s definitely a new challenge for the cyberformance audience: it took me some minutes to get over my anxiety of missing out on something – I was switching rapidly from one window to the other until finally I understood that there was no fast-paced narrative to try to keep up with, rather the gradual unfolding of character and situation. It’s always possible to scroll back in the text chat to catch up on anything missed, but in fact I didn’t have to do this. Once I found the rhythm of the piece, I moved more slowly between the stages and lingered where my interest took me.
Grand Uncle’s Hendrix-obsessed radio show and dreadful smoker’s cough provided a background score for the show, while specific sounds were used to call us back to particular stages, such as the mobile phone ringing on Finch’s stage, and dogs barking on Esme’s stage. Heather’s stage is quiet but magical – a talking diary and an old outside dunny that turns Tardis-like to provide Heather with a secret route to Esme’s stage. Postcards, emails, radio, television, mobile phones, blogs – for all the communication networks these characters have access to, they are isolated in their own little bubbles until Heather appears in Esme’s stage. Grand Uncle never makes a visual appearance but his gravely voice – disembodied yet clearly attached to a complaining body – drives the performance along and holds it all together.
The same networks of communication are also available to the audience: you can call Finch’s mobile phone (a UK number), send Grand Uncle a story and even be interviewed by him, and leave posts on Heather and Esme’s blogs (see http://www.activelayers.net/ for links). This performance continues beyond the confines of the stages and the time of the performance, and the audience is encouraged to engage with the characters. activelayers want to provoke the audience out of their passivity – whether we are stage-hopping, interacting with the characters, or simply pondering over what it might all mean, this is definitely a show to get you out of that comfortable seat in the dark auditorium.
Part 3 will be performed at the 080808 UpStage Festival, taking place online in UpStage on 8-9 August 2008, one of 14 performances created and performed by artists in 14 different time zones. See www.upstage.org.nz for further information about 080808 and the schedule of performances and watch online from anywhere, no log-in required.
The Salt Satyagraha
Feurbach’s “The Essence of Christianity” (1843) discusses the importance we make of images and illusions, and that we prefer “the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being”. Second Life, the 3-D online ecosystem that is created and maintained by those who virtually inhabit it, is arguably a testament to our culture’s embrace of this level of fantasy and denial of the Real, which Ludwig Feuerbach had presciently observed shortly after the invention of the camera.
However, bringing to light this realization isn’t to suggest that Second Life doesn’t have its appeal to those of us who don’t barter, exchange, purchase, and develop friendships within its virtual walls. Life on the outside might still be a preferred existence to most. Still, it can be alluring for all to discover the blurred boundaries between virtual and real, avatar and human, representation and being, illuminating possibilities within a world that very closely parallels ours. Joseph DeLappe’s recent project, aptly a social experiment encased in a shell of net art, creates a space of in-betweenness that invites us to experience elements of both worlds without committing either.
Realized in several stages, DeLappe’s virtual re-creation of The Salt Satyagraha, Mahatma Ghandi’s Salt March to Dandi, a journey 240 miles long, is part installation and part performance art. His historical re-enactment reveals more about how virtual space is navigated from real space than it explains the politics of Mahatma Ghandi’s protest against the British salt tax in 1930, utilizing travel in real space, a blog, and images from the journey housed on Flickr.
DeLappe’s re-creation relies on Second Life to provide a virtual landscape of India and an avatar that sports the likeness of Ghandi. DeLappe’s role in this excursion is to propel the avatar through this space utilizing his physical movement in reality, creating a visceral connection to the march and providing a personality to an otherwise soulless avatar. As part of DeLappe’s mission, he welcomed strange participants along his path to join him in his peace march by offering a walking staff. These participants met him on Second Life while real-life participants also served as spectators of his journey at Eyebeam’s Chelsea gallery.
A custom-designed treadmill in Real Life provides movement through Second Life. DeLappe, the avatar’s human counterpart, takes the journey seriously, wearing comfortable shoes, a T-shirt, and gym pants for the stretch of the march, which he achieves over 26 days. The treadmill has a wooden desk for his laptop, a bottle of water, and a coffee mug; a leather cushion at abdomen height provides ample comfort for his journey through cyberspace. His activity through cyberspace is projected onto a wall.
The relationship between two sometimes disparate and sometimes mirroring worlds is in constant negotiation. When Second Life crashes, DeLappe and his avatar are kicked out of the system. A simple reboot will bring them back, though the interruption results in a system error that forces his avatar to return to the location he had at the beginning of the day, purging the data it had collected since that point. DeLappe, by now familiar with this setback, wanders away from his treadmill station to grab a nutrition bar. After another day of cyber navigation, he calmly resumes his initial position and dives back in.
To think that there isn’t tension in virtual space is a misunderstanding of how closely we connect ourselves to our virtual counterparts in the social context of Second Life. It is a utopian space, on the one hand, as it enables users to, in some way, materialize personas that are otherwise only possible in one’s imagination. However, conflicts abound in relationship to those personas – reactions to where they lie politically, socially, and economically – and to the limited nature of communication through text. DeLappe’s Ghandi was no exception when he encountered Storm36Thor, a long-haired thug with a beefy build, a machine gun, and a T-shirt with the acronym FBI written across it. Their encounter was initiated by gunfire, as Storm36 Thor shot in the air to announce his authority.
Disinterested in and perhaps unaware of who Mahatma Gandhi was, Storm36 Thor was unimpressed by DeLappe’s introduction and by the idea of joining him on his journey. A self-described ‘trigger happy’ avatar, the human behind Storm36Thor could have been anyone from a reckless teenager to a bored executive. There is no way of knowing the age, gender, political leaning, or social or economic status of the person behind the avatar. Yet the encounter gave DeLappe and his audience a window into virtual violence (unnecessary gunfire), social interactivity (introducing oneself to another) and theatre (heightened persona).
The exploration of how these two environments engage with one another creates a third environment that is neither fully virtual nor fully real but instead rests between the two in a space informed by each of them. This third space relies on both for inspiration, historical context, and creativity. How we socially interact with each other in real life is the basis for how we socially interact in virtual space, but the two interactions greatly differ. While an avatar represents a human being, it is not wholly or truthfully reflective of the human who created it. And for those of us in DeLappe’s audience in physical space, our interaction with all is distanced and removed.
With respect to his interaction with Storm36Thor, DeLappe was comfortable with the level of tension they generated in cyberspace, perhaps more than he might be in real life, and playfully antagonized him by questioning his use of a machine gun in declared virtual a safe zone, the plaza of a mall. Their displayed interaction became an entertainment vehicle, bringing his physical spectators into the realm of his theatre. In this case, the virtual confrontation had no consequences as each eventually wandered away from the other in boredom.
The second stage of this Second Life project is a 17-foot cardboard papercraft sculpture of Mahatma Gandhi’s avatar currently on display at Eyebeam. This representation of a real person is the same size as Michelangelo’s David, produced using a 3-D rapid prototype printing technology from the 8-inch avatar.
The mixed layers of real and fantasy, history and re-enactment, and human and representation between every phase of DeLappe’s project become more difficult to distinguish, mirroring our postmodern sensibility and the mediated extensions that history and human life produce. One can only think of how we might further add to these dimensions of possibility, and create worlds of existence that don?t rely on the relationship between space and time.
How to Talk to Images
New Online Work and Film Retrospective by Richard Wright
No one is sure how many images there are on the Internet. Google has nearly a billion. Some say it is hundreds of times more than that. People say you can find a picture of anything on the Internet, as though the entire visual world is reflected there.
For How to Talk to Images, Richard Wright has compiled a database of 50,000 random Internet images as the raw content for two artworks. The Internet Speaks and The Mimeticon both explore new conceptions of the image, called for by the sheer quantity of visual information now available via the Internet. Related events at HTTP www.mimeticon.net www.internetspeaks.net
A limited edition poster and an artist’s monograph have also been published to coincide with this show. For more information, click here.
Photo of the screen image of the Mimeticon interface/platform.Mimeticon. Lady looking at the Mimeticon artwork on a screen.
In this era, finding our way through the world of images is so overwhelming that the dominant mode is to “search” rather than to “see”. An image is an answer to a question, a search query. The Internet Speaks gives us one of the simplest imaginable ways of searching this set of images, stepping through them, one by one, in random order, without context. In contrast, The Mimeticon is a wilfully complex and ‘baroque’ search engine that allows us to search for images by visual similarity rather than by typing in keywords. These ‘search images’ are ‘drawn’ using letters from the history of the alphabet.
THE INTERNET SPEAKS 2006
As part of How to Talk to Images, Richard Wright’s first solo exhibition in London, a selection of Wright’s animated films demonstrates the development of his current interest in the Baroque. The exhibition is also the occasion of the publication of a limited-edition poster featuring an essay by the artist illustrated by the entire visual history of the Western alphabet – from its pictorial Egyptian origins 5,000 years ago to its perfected form under the Romans, as well as a new book documenting the artists twenty-year long practice.
Cupid Barrow
Richard Wright has been making digital animation and interactive pieces since the eighties. Heliocentrum, an animation about Louis XIV, was described by writer Hari Kunzru as “…an amazingly effective way of showing how a sovereign manipulated power”, and The Bank of Time was nominated for a BAFTA in 2001. Richard was most recently a member of the artist group Mongrel and is currently working on an urban media project called “decorative surveillance”. Since the summer of 2007, he has been Artist in Residence at Furtherfield.org.
Events at HTTP Gallery Opening Reception Your chance to meet Richard Wright to enjoy a few drinks and conversations about the exhibition.
HTTP Gallery Unit A2, Arena Design Centre 71 Ashfield Road London N4 1LD Further info: www.futurenatural.net
Big Buck Bunny
Big Buck Bunny is the second short 3D computer animated cartoon from the Blender Foundation. The Blender Foundation produces these films to stimulate development of and promote use of their popular eponymous free software 3D modelling and rendering package.
The Foundation’s first film, codenamed Orange, was “Elephants Dream”. This was in the European experimental stop-frame animation tradition, a dark Gilliamesque fantasy with two men trying to escape a threatening clockwork labyrinth that may or may not really exist. The character and scenery designs were excellent, and the film as a whole was very atmospheric. The quality of the facial animation and the comprehensibility of the plot were criticised, though. And the full release of the soundtrack for the film was not Free due to being limited to noncommercial use. These minor criticisms aside, Elephants Dream was a very successful production.
Big Buck Bunny, by contrast, is firmly in the Dreamworks mould of cartoon animal comedies. This is quite a change from the steampunk magical realism of Elephants Dream. I am of course reviewing it for Furtherfield because it is an example of producing high-quality animation using an alternative funding model and giving the results to society in a copyable, study-able, reworkable, remixable form that advances participatory culture rather than because cartoon animals trying to kill each other is funny.
As the film begins we encounter the titular oversized rabbit living in a bucolic paradise of rolling fields, fruit trees, birds and butterflies. Destruction and cruelty intrude into this green and pleasant land in the form of a trio of vindictive smaller mammals. Big of heart as well as of frame the rabbit is quickly driven over the edge by the intruders’ spite and sets out to teach them a lesson in a superbly crafted series of cartoon violence vignettes.
The plot and characterisations suffer briefly from an unfocused start but quickly rally to an amusing and often laugh-out-loud funny climax. There are a couple of cuts that don’t quite scan, but you’ll miss them if you blink. The modelling, animation and rendering are superior to Dreamworks fare such as “Over The Hedge”. Big Buck Bunny‘s animators have a much better dramatic and artistic grasp of what made old Warner Brothers cartoons funny than Dreamworks seem to have, or at least they have not been prevented from using that knowledge. Visual comedy is about timing and the timing of Big Buck Bunny has the musical quality of the best old slapstick film and animation.
Despite being the products of very different genres and therefore difficult to compare objectively, the character animation of Big Buck Bunny is a definite advance on that of “Elephants Dream”. The sets and character designs are softer than those for Elephants Dream but this is a natural outcome of the genre and the characters are animated more fluidly and expressively. On a technical level this is due in no small part to the improvements that the Peach project requested from Blender’s modelling and rendering capabilities. On an artistic level, the small but tight-knit group of animators have clearly played to their strengths and interests on a project free of corporate organisational restraints. Both of these dynamics provide useful lessons for other projects.
The two-DVD set of the film includes the model, texture, animation and rendering files used to make the film as well as various quality renders and the PAL and NTSC versions of the finished film. The Free Culture licence for these materials makes them easy to watch, study, modify and use just about any way you can think of. If only Hollywood cartoons or Japanese anime came with such extras in a usable format.
Big Buck Bunny, like Elephant’s Dream, was paid for in part by DVD pre-orders and it is Free Culture licenced under Creative Commons’s Attribution licence (CC-BY). That the Blender Foundation are using this funding model again (essentially the “Street Performer Protocol”) presumably shows that it has worked well for them. They are even talking about making enough money this time to start funding the next project. The success of this approach should encourage people looking for ways to fund Free Culture projects.
You can download the files for free but buying the DVDs funds future projects and provides you with a handy physical archive. The CC-BY licence means that if you own a physical or electronic copy of Big Buck Bunny you effectively own the work, Copyright is unable to stop you from sharing and using it as you wish. Big Buck Bunny is therefore on the side of those who wish to keep mass culture free and open rather than locked away behind onerous contracts or technological protection measures.
The CC-BY licence does not, unlike the GPL licence for software, require that you provide the sources used to make the finished work. Big Buck Bunny shows how useful and empowering providing source material for cultural works is. The fact that you have the source material and production files for the film means that you possess the means to not just remix the finished work but to re-produce it and make derivatives of it at the same level of detail and quality as the original. You can produce works that are peers to it, creatively and economically.
The Blender Foundation are building the creative, technical and economic resources needed to create a very different relationship between producers and consumers of mass culture. Big Buck Bunny quickly finds its feet to provide excellent entertainment that rewards repeated viewing. Opening up the artistry of making the film as a usable resource is therefore a treat as well as a valuable contribution to free culture. Now if only the full soundtrack had been released under a free licence this time…
“Hacktivism” is a cool-sounding portmanteau word combining “hacking” and “activism”. Activism means political organisation and activity directed toward particular issues. Hacking can mean either “creative mastery and reworking” or “breaking and entering” of various systems, usually computer systems. The latter is more properly called “cracking”. Hacktivism tends to mean cracking rather than creative hacking. This means that hacktivism usually identifies, at most, a negativist posture of technological resistance to socioeconomic ills.
Otto von Busch and Karl Palmas have spun this ideological straw into critical gold. Their book Abstract Hacktivism is a collection of essays that reconsider the possibilities of activism and hacking, wrapped in an introduction and a postscript that draws these ideas together. It’s available as a very readable PDF or as a print version, which is an excellent example of how to make something that is available for free worth paying for.
The introduction introduces various ideas that will be found in both essays, notably hacktivism and the historical concept of society as various kinds of machines, and provides some context for each.
The first essay, “Hacking and Heresy” by von Busch, compares hacking to religious heresy, notably the socially inspired and socially flavoured Liberation Theology of South America. Hacking as heresy is a theologically and historically interesting metaphor. The history of liberation theology is of interest outside of immediate religious or socialist thought as a real-world case study in emergent alternative social and political organisation.
Hacking is immanent critique; it is in its practice and its products critique of an existing system, and it does bear comparison to critique of systems of thought expressed theologically or economically as well as technologically.
In my opinion, the mode of critique that hacking best bears comparison to is philosophy rather than heresy, the cargo cult of “killer apps”, and the convert’s zeal of a hacker with a new programming language or framework notwithstanding.
That said, von Bush’s specific comparison of hacking to the simultaneously theological and economic heresy of Liberation Theology is very instructive. Not for the first time the irrational (the unrepresentable or unrepresented) and the creative produced a space of resistance to the flattening effects of totalising forms of knowing or rationalising, be they economic, theological or technological. Liberation Theology is a socioeconomic-theological hack, modifying old forms to produce new forms that include previously excluded and denied possibilities.
To borrow another term from computer culture, Liberation Theology is also an “exploit”. It is a script for cracking the systems of society as expressed economically, politically and theologically for the benefit of the cracker(s). Exploits become known to the maintainer’s system they are against in time, and the system will be “patched” to withstand them. This has been the case for Liberation Theology, as von Busch shows.
“After Counterculture” by Palmas provides a context for these kinds of system and network-based considerations of social phenomena. Palmas describes how both culture and counterculture have moved from a 19th-century self-image based on machines and flows between reservoirs and motors to a 21st-century self-image based on hierarchy-free rhizomatic networks and how these models have been adopted both by corporate culture and those who seek to critique it.
In considering the symmetry between 1968 revolutionaries’ and corporate MBAs’ views of the world as a post-industrial hierarchy-free flatland, Palmas treads a similar path to Christine Harold’s more recent book “OurSpace”. Palmas shares Harold’s critique of AdBuster’s style 1990s anticorporatism. But where OurSpace catalogues, contextualizes and reinvigorates the strategies that both political activism and advertising have taken from Situationism, “After Counterculture” details the cultural context in which these strategies currently play out and how what is unique to network and free software thinking can supplant older strategies.
The socioeconomic hacks or exploits that Palmas considers include microeconomics, a success story that neither global capital nor negativist critique could produce. Microeconomics is definitely not an exploit. It does not compromise an existing system. Rather, it is a hack, creating a new possibility that extends both the system of global finances and the options available to those formerly excluded from it. This is precisely the kind of creative reworking of a system that earns the title of “hack” and is a form of political activism. The difference between microeconomics and trying to crash a corporation’s website could not be more marked.
The postscript draws together examples of both hacking and activism to caution against techno-determinism or believing that these ideas are somehow unknown to the existing economic or political order and to call for these ideas to be applied practically rather than simply as cool metaphors.
Abstract Hacktivism abstracts the concepts of computer hacking and political activism away from tired existing ideas of hacktivism, contextualises them, finds concrete examples of historical parallels, and recasts hacktivism as a positive extension and recreation of social and economic systems to realise progressive political aims within society. This move away from the literal cracking of existing computer systems in the service of negativist gesture politics is a powerful hack on the very concept of hacktivism. Hopefully, this will be embraced as an enlightening new philosophy rather than shunned as a political heresy.
This exhibition explores the connections between the collaborative characteristics of needlework, craft and Open Source software. This project has brought together embroiderers, patchworkers, knitters, artists and computer programmers to share their practice and make new work.
The centre-piece of the exhibition at HTTP Gallery is the HTML Patchwork developed in response to the popularity of quilting in Sheffield, the result of a participatory project initiated by Ele Carpenter in partnership with Access Space. The patchwork is built on open principles of collective production and skill-share, where each person contributes a part to the whole. The final work is a collectively stitched patchwork quilt of HTML web-safe colours with embroidered codes and a wiki website, where the makers of each patch identify themselves and write about their sewing process. Each patch is personalised by the sewer, often including embroidered web addresses.
Telinit Ø: time for bed, Lisa Wallbank, 2007.Knitted Blog (detail), Suzanne Hardy, 2006.Open Source Embroidery Gallery Opening, From left to Right: HTML Patchwork Suzanne Hardy, Knit-a-Blog.
In an interview with Jess Lacetti, Ele Carpenter said about the project: “The same arguments about Open Source vs Free Software can be applied to embroidery. The needlework crafts also have to negotiate the principles of ‘freedom’ to create, modify and distribute within capitalism’s cultural and economic constraints. The Open Source Embroidery project simply attempts to provide a social and practical way of discussing the issues and trying out the practice. Free Software, Open Source, amateur and professional embroiderers and programmers are welcome to contribute to the project.”
Hexart GDlib Script Error, digital print on canvas, James Wallbank, 2007. Weaving network cable in progress, Paul Grimmer, 2007.Open Source Embroidery Gallery Opening. Eli Carpenter points to collaborative artwork in the middle of the image, and Furthefield Co-curator Ruth Catlow (far right) looks on as visitors discuss the various works.
Ele Carpenter developed the project while working as an artist in residence at Access Space in Sheffield and Isis Arts in Newcastle upon Tyne. Access Space is an open-access media lab using recycled computers and open-source software. Anyone can drop in and use the lab to develop their creative projects.
The exhibition at HTTP Gallery in Harringay, North London, includes works by 11 artists and makers alongside the collectively made HTML Patchwork quilt and wiki. Other works in the exhibition include Susanne Hardy’s Knit-a-Blog, a collective knitting project made by contributors from across the UK and USA, Iain Clarke’s PHP Embroidery, which explores the open source PHP programming language as a form of self-generating weaving, as well as artworks by Paul Grimmer, Tricia Grindrod, Jake Harries & Keith o’Faoláin, John Keenan, Trevor Pitt, Clare Ruddock, James Wallbank, and Lisa Wallbank.
People at Access Space have created the HTML Patchwork. Art through Textiles, The Patchwork Garden, The Fat Quarters, Stocksbridge Knit n Chat, Totley Quilters, Isis Arts, and the Banff New Media Institute at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada.
Events at HTTP
Preview Your chance to meet Ele Carpenter, the curator and some other exhibiting artists to enjoy a few drinks and conversations about the exhibition.
Open Knitting and Embroidery evenings Dates and times TBC
Bring your knits, your embroidery and your friends for tea, biscuits and conversation amongst the artworks.
These events are open to the public and have free entrance; however, advanced booking is necessary.
HTTP Gallery Unit A2, Arena Design Centre 71 Ashfield Road London N4 1LD
Trash Talk: A Review of The Appearance Machine by Willy Le Maitre and Eric Rosenzveig.
For nearly ten years, trash has been the focus of a massive project, an audiovisual work called The Appearance Machine, by artists Willy Le Maitre & Eric Rosenzveig. This project deals firsthand with an overabundance of material that won’t go away and with seeing the beautiful possibilities of trash, giving recycling a new context. The result is conflicting, producing a sense of alienation and comfort, disbelief and wonder in the viewer.
The once aimless material waste becomes the nexus of a unique art project that celebrates waste and the odd notion of an enjoyable wasteland through complex processing and image-making. The Appearance Machine’s permanent residence is in New York City, the unofficial centre of the detritus crisis, as the home to the largest landfill in the world. The machine is housed in a warehouse space that doubles as a factory or lab for audiovisual ‘performances’ set to an orchestra of digitally produced sound.
The Appearance Machine is a production mill that generates non-narrative audiovisual by-products, relying on a steady stream of incoming refuge to sustain itself. Trash enters a conveyor belt-like system where objects are photographed in a manner unlike how a photographer might capture the image of a fashion model. Artificial wind, mechanical impulses, and vibration work in concert to animate the objects to provide them with context, dimension and, to some degree, personality. Multiple camera angles ensure the same quality of perspective and dimension to produce audiovisual works of art in increments that last about ten or fifteen minutes.
The final video output is best understood as the combined results of data responding to other data. Captured images react to machine activity, where objects are analytically sorted by type and compatibility. Sound is formed in real-time through data analysis of the video imagery. In other words, the accompanying sound is produced by a computer program that reacts to object movement. Through this data mining and analysis, the trash objects construct music that appropriately complements the objects’ movement and character. Sound and image are then joined, transmitted through computer translation, and made available online for the general public.
Going green, a now popular concept that has surfaced with widespread assuredness convinces the average person that through simple shifts in practice, we can transform our homes, schools, and environment. While useful tips for change promote awareness of this global cause through energy conservation, reducing material waste, and recycling matter, there are also mediated ways of addressing our environment, which can activate a different attitude toward the overwhelming trash problem. By channelling waste through digital form, detritus becomes raw material for art.
Trash and found objects have been the subjects of art since Marcel Duchamp decided to wow his gallery audience with found objects, placing them in unexpected contexts and giving them a weight they hadn’t had but ultimately deserved. Le Maitre and Rosenzweig’s Appearance Machine provides audiences with new ways of experiencing once-banal objects and repurposing refuse in a manner that is in keeping with the crux of environmentalism.
Though immaterial, this project allows trash to embody a new form. Refuse is recycled into representations of matter that have character and produce visually stunning, energetic movements and sounds that stimulate the senses and demonstrate recognisable patterns that allude to narrative and metaphor. Some sounds resemble the theremin-produced soundtracks of 1950s science fiction films, while the visual imagery produces non-descript shapes and colours. Both are what one might expect to encounter on another planet.
The Appearance Machine works on many levels. It draws attention to an environmental concern over an overabundance of material waste and deals with it by providing an outlet through technology. In doing so, audiences are confronted with trash in a manner that is pleasantly accessible, mediated through the representation of imagery and sound. This is a form we collectively understand.
While this project does not aim to resolve environmental problems, it moves toward alleviating concerns by creating a purpose or function for refuse, making the most of its extended afterlife through its reuse while placing it back into the public realm in its new form. This cinematic performance does more than shed the look and feel of its raw form. It engages the viewer/listener in an enjoyably complex fusion of image and sound.
The Internet Speaks
We’re used to creating sense from image sequences, it’s what we do when we watch a film. We piece the sequences together and form a narrative so that we can travel along a trajectory that takes us from one place to the other. Either an emotional starting point or an intellectual one that ends at some other place. We hope to have changed in some way even if it’s just questioning what we’ve seen. So we should be fully trained by our culture to view the image sequences in The Internet Speaks by Richard Wright create stories from them.
Yet viewing the images and putting them into context doesn’t necessarily come easily to the viewer. It could be because there is no context in which to relate the continual change of images that come at us, no obvious linear process that would give us the chance to be lazy and just view the images without thought. We have to actually think and add something of our own imaginations to make the piece work for us.
There are two versions to this project. The gallery based piece that automatically selects random images and displays them on the gallery wall, and the Internet version that offers the viewer a next and back button with which to scroll through and reverse the sequence so that they can return and reconsider the images. The second, Internet-based work allows the viewer to cheat a little bit, giving them the opportunity to think through the sequence and rework the narrative as it unfurls. It also tempts the viewer to play around with how much they are able to remember the previous image: go back, was it that, what does it mean now?
The ease of use belies the complexity of the questions that the work asks of the Internet. If it is truly the Internet speaking to us, surely we should be granted the right to see the words that it uses as well as the images? Perhaps so, but the words are pushed back here and asked to take second place. We need them to become invisible and not interfere with the pleasure of the work. Given that the text and indeed hypertext, is the basis of the web, and sits as some kind of post-Derrida response to the importance of the text over all else, The Internet Speaks is a reminder that we are dealing with thousands of images everyday and not always taking on board the text surrounding them. We may feel as though we have access to a huge library resource and as much text online as any half decent library could offer, but really, most of us are only viewing the videos and images anyway.
Drawing the images from the Internet also brings another interesting issue when trying to make sense of the work (and you will find yourself trying to do so, as Wright himself has remarked: we all try to find faces in the flames of a fire, so why wouldn’t we search for narrative in something like this?). This pulling together of the images means that multiple cultures, reference points and ideologies are going to be shown. There may be a technical graph from a PowerPoint presentation, then an image of a mother nursing a child. The mother looks as though she might be from Iraq, the graph looks decidedly American, because after all, Microsoft and the world of computers are inherently US-centric aren’t they? How do we read this? Can we trust that we aren’t just reading these images in the context of our own culture? The Internet is supposed to break down these cultural barriers and open our minds to a whole world of differences and allow us to experience multiple worlds, but it doesn’t. Quite often we behave like the old turn of the 19th century explorers making our way around the globe and always looking with Western eyes at the strange sights before us: viewing things as odd, uncivilized and even worse, not particularly Christian (god-ahem-forbid!). So we have to try to play with the images and piece them together without any kind of prejudice. Which is hard because there isn’t even a reference point to avoid.
But that’s why a project like The Internet Speaks is so relevant to our contemporary web culture. We have no reference points beyond ourselves, and we don’t know if we can trust the images and our own reading, because they might be flawed in some way. If the Internet is speaking to us, it is saying that we should be cautious and not judge too quickly what we see. We should ensure that the narratives aren’t just created from our own pre-conceptions, but take into account the cultural references of others.
The Internet Speaks in many voices, despite the attempts at global homogeneity some would try to impose on us.
Why Some Dolls Are Bad
Dolls behaving truly madly, but not really badly…
French Absurdist artists Antonin Artaud and Eugene Ionesco would be proud of some of the cruel and absurd organized nonsense that is flaming through the Internet art world right now. Accidental-on-purpose artistic endeavors in today’s developing Net.Art world are dizzying enough to make one want to just sit down and read a book. Anticipating this archaic return to exercising the imagination instead of typing the brain into pap, prescient Net Artist Kate Armstrong has contrived a book that infiltrates a decidedly non-literary universe. Billed as a graphic novel the piece is created to be experienced within the Facebook platform. Why Some Dolls are Bad invites the user to a collection of streamed images culled from the Internet, which take on random editorial positions in the frame of an original text written by Armstrong. The result- a bespoke book for the users of Facebook is an infinite precipitation of stirred structure a ribald evolving commentary on our world of Good and Bad dolls. Bold and occasionally wry, nonlinear storytelling has become high art. In the cinema, for example director Quentin Tarantino has made banal, albeit shocking and grisly tales buzz by cleverly rearranging their story lines. In his wild musical chair structures the story remains the same while the viewers’ experience of it is shuffled. In Armstrong’s work the images shift perpetually and this re-invents the meaning of the narrative.
Capturing precious Doll moments
The idea of this work more than its execution is the compelling element. Anyone who has clipped articles out of a newspaper, saved snippets of poetry or edited together their own home videos has experienced the process that is re-created in Dolls. But Armstrong cleverly nurtures a circumstance of wry tension that illustrates the fraying tether between traditional literary and neo-digital expression. The same page never appears twice but the user can capture and save a favorite page. This is an intriguing re-enactment of the experience of reading a narrative book where particular passages haunt the imagination and are saved to our cognitive hard drive. The impact of these literary moments etched in our psyches sometimes leads us to rave and recommend books to friends. Sending off custom tailored pages of Dolls however is rather like sending postcards from a literary journey. “Can personal moments sent to a friend – ever be re-captured” by said friend?
At the very least, Dolls explores a fabulous range of themes including but not limited to everything from ethics to fashion. These themes are explored through an absurd collection of systems and materials, from Mohair, through contagion to Venus Fly-traps. Absurdity is perhaps the resuscitated and re-fertilized Venus Fly-Trap of today’s digital art world not to mention the now myriad ‘send to a friend’ online communities. Everything old in the recent history of culture is new again online. Repetition begets re-examination.
In the Valley of the Dolls ad-infinitum
In 2002 Armstrong published a book CRISIS & REPETITION: ESSAYS ON ART AND CULTURE (Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, Michigan, USA). The Dolls experiment neatly addresses the phrase by essentially erasing the possibility of repetition. In this respect, Armstrong’s work is reminiscent of Chris Borkowski’s aleatory video piece CODEX (2007, HD & SD video/ Jitter/ Mac mini/ 24inch Flat Screen) wherein a program culls images into a film that is ceaselessly being extended and re-edited. Unlike more Classical storytelling mediums (books and movies) neither Armstrong nor Borkowski’s re-inventions really implicate the user. It is curious to consider these eternal electronic works calculating incessantly, while somewhere on some rickety caf’e seat someone may actually be reading a book. The engagement of imagination involved in reading a book, be it graphic or pure text, is less important in these new works where the reader is more passive observer.
Who plays with captured Dolls?
Whether or not her project will successfully infiltrate the ‘send to a friend’, realm and restore art to the masses remains to be seen. In an informal survey of Facebook users the most common observation was that this was not what they went on Facebook for. But Googling Dolls confirms that Net.Art aficionados who are also Facebook members are game to participate. In a way Armstrong has leveled the playing field with her choice of platform. Her story becomes everybody?s story so Facebook groups like ‘If all men looked like Johnny Depp I’d be such a Whore’ could potentially join book clubs that are born of Net Art bastions like Rhizome.org or, um, Furtherfield.org. In fact Facebook groups like ‘I like Cupcakes and making out’ (mostly girls) ‘and Beer…it’ll get ya drunk’ (mostly guys) may actually be the perfect audience- in spite of their apparent disinterest. Aesthetically inclined Avatars in the Net art community who interlope on such sites might also discover that a crisis like Facebook could actually beget innovation.
Rachel Beth Egenhoefer considers her Commodore 64 Computer and Fischer Price Loom to be defining objects of her childhood. She creates tactile representations of cyclical data structures in candy and knitting and is currently researching the intersection of textiles, technology, and the body.
Rachel Beth will be working as an Artist in Residence at HTTP, Furtherfield’s Gallery and lab space in April 2008. She has been brought to UK from San Francisco as part of the Distributed South initiative, which is a network intended to raise awareness of the considerable activity in media arts in South of UK. Through residencies and collaborative events co-curated by SCAN and Space Media, Distributed South seeks to develop and build collaborations and networks in media arts and all are welcome to take part. Egenhoefer’s residency consists of several key parts – experimental studio time to create new work at the University of Brighton, presenting workshops and lectures across the south of England, a commissioned exhibition at Lighthouse Brighton, all culminating with time spent in residence at Furtherfield.
Work in Progress: knitting machine knitting zoetrope strip of knittingWork in Progress: knitting machine knitting zoetrope strip of knitting
Currently Rachel Beth is working in the studio on ideas comparing tactile knitting to intangible computer code and how the body interacts and moves with both. In addition to building a knit zoetrope, casting the space between body and machine in candy, she has also been tracking the motion of knitting needles in both physical and virtual space and knitting with the Nintendo Wii. Her time at Furtherfield will be used to continue exploring these ideas while interacting with the larger community and audiences Furtherfield brings.
Ideas in progress: trying to draw while knitting
Events at HTTP
Higher Education Student Day Wednesday April 15, 1:00-4:00pm
Rachel Beth will present her work and professional practice from the residency to higher education students
This event is free however advanced booking is necessary.
Networking Event and Residency Closing Party Configurations: Technology and Textiles Networking Afternoon 25 April, 3.30 – 6pm, HTTP Gallery (Booking essential)
You are invited to share ideas, discuss and develop future working around art work that investigates the relationship between new technology, traditional making techniques and transformative political actions. Anna Dumitriu, Ele Carpenter, Nicola Naismith and Rachel Beth Egenhoefer will present their work using diverse approaches to the making of work using new technology alongside textiles, followed by a “Long Table Discussion”.
The “Long Table Discussion” is an experimental public forum developed by performance artist Lois Weaver. It is a hybrid performance, installation and roundtable discussion designed to facilitate informal conversations on serious topics encouraging everyone to contribute. Previous “Long Table Discussions” include conversations on Women and Prisons, Human Rights and Performance and Manufacturing Bodies.
This event is free however advanced booking is necessary. To book places please email Aaron, visibilityATfurtherfieldDOTorg.
Closing Party for Rachel Beth Egenhoefer 6pm – 9pm (all welcome): Party to celebrate the close of Rachel Beth Egenhoefer’s residency at Furtherfield/HTTP Gallery and providing an opportunity to discuss her work and experiences during the residency.
Rachel Beth Egenhoefer’s residency and Configurations is part of Distributed South an initiative co-curated by SCAN and Space Media. The residency and event is funded by the Arts Council England, University of Wales, University of Brighton, Lighthouse Brighton with support from Furtherfield.org, Textile Futures Research Group (TFRG) and University of the Arts London.
Candy & Code Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) London _Textile Futures Research Group Monday March 17, 2008, 6:30-8:30pm Presentations from Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, Barbara Rauch & Nicola Naismith Following by a panel discussion with the artists and Dr Jane Harris, Director of TFRG, Helen Sloan, Director of SCAN.
Exhibition of New Work Lighthouse Brighton March 20- April 5, 2008 Opening Reception: Thursday March 20, 6:00-9:00pm Talk on Residency and Distributed South (with Rachel Beth Egenhoefer and Helen Sloan) with an opportunity to view the exhibition: Thursday March 27, 7:30pm, doors open at 7
Rachel Beth’s residency for Distributed South is funded by the Arts Council England, University of Wales, University of Brighton, Lighthouse Brighton and supported by SCAN, Space Media, Furtherfield.org, Textile Futures Research Group (TFRG) and University of the Arts London.
Grove Park Special School Claim the Borough of Brent
Inclusive filmmaking workshops to create a documentary challenging community perceptions of Grove Park Special School.
Participants: 20 students between the ages of 10 and 14 from Grove Park Special School in Brent
Artist: Michael Szpakowski (video artist, composer and facilitator)
20 students between the ages of 10 and 14 from Grove Park Special School in Brent explored and challenged community perceptions of the school in a series of visits and interviews with leading figures in the local community. The students, teachers, learning support assistants and Michael Szpakowski worked collaboratively in small groups to make a documentary film about the Borough of Brent, and the people who live and work there. Visits were made to 3 locations over 10 weeks: Brent Town Hall, Fryent Country Park and the nearby IKEA superstore. They were chosen because of their significance as providers of essential local community services. During these visits and interviews the students were encouraged to look outward and find their voices in the local community and throughout this process students and staff had the opportunity to learn valuable filmmaking and editing skills. The project has culminated in a DVD film, for distribution to all participants.
DIWO (Do It With Others) is a distributed campaign for emancipatory, networked art practices instigated by Furtherfield in 2006.
It’s DIWO if it…
Enlarges artistic freedoms.
Uses the metaphors, tools, cultures and processes of digital & physical networks.
Is led by experimental artistic processes rather than utilitarian or theoretical concerns.
Disrupts traditional hierarchies and concepts of ownership working with decentralized peer 2 peer practices.
Involves diverse participants (unwitting and active collaborators), ideas and social ecologies.
Generates unruly and provocative relationships between symbolic meanings and material effects.
Co-creates a new, freer, art context for more and more diverse people.
About DIWO – Do It With Others
The term DIWO – Do It With Others was first defined in 2006 on Rosalind – Upstart New Media Art Lexicon1 It extended the DIY Do-It-Yourself ethos of early net art, punk & Situationism, towards a more collaborative approach, using the Internet as an experimental artistic medium and distribution system to foment grass-roots creativity. Even before it was defined it underpinned everything Furtherfield has ever done.
The first DIWO Email Art project started with an open call to the email list Netbehaviour, February 1st 2007. The call drew on the Mail Art tradition proposing to bypass curatorial restrictions to promote imaginative exchange between artists and audiences on their own terms.
“Peers connect, communicate and collaborate, creating controversies, structures and a shared grass roots culture, through both digital online networks and physical environments.”2
Participants worked ‘across time zones and geographic and cultural distances with digital images, audio, text, code and software. They created streams of art-data, art-surveillance, instructions and proposals in relay, producing multiple threads and mash-ups.’3. Co-curated using VOIP and webcams the exhibition at HTTP Gallery displayed every contribution an email inbox, alongside an installation of prints of every image, and a running copy of every video and audio file submitted.4 Every post to the list, until April 1st, was considered an artwork – or part of a larger, collective artwork – for the DIWO project. DIWO at the Dark Mountain was the second DIWO email art exhibition instigated by Furtherfield and the Dark Mountain Project in 2010. It took ecological collapse as its subject and the need for new stories, systems and infrastructures as its premise. This project generated intense controversies among participants. Again, considered part of the artwork, the details of debates were re-enacted for gallery visitors in a live performance at the opening event. In addition to the networked, live-streamed co-curation event, and the performance, this exhibition closed with a disassembly event in which gallery visitors demounted all physical works and redistributed them via snail mail to anyone they knew.5
In recent years other individuals and groups have taken DIWO as the inspiration for their own projects. Some changed its meaning. For instance Cory Janssen’s definition of DIWO for Technopedia, does away with the art, and collaboration across difference. We think that what he describes is just plain and simple Crowdsourcing.6 Others maintain the adventurous and emancipatory spirit. For instance, in 2012 Pixelache the Helsinki-based transdisciplinary platform for experimental art, design, research and activism took DIWO as the theme for its annual festival.7 Whatever the starting point we always welcome invitations to DIWO!
Do It With Others (DIWO): contributory media in the Furtherfield Neighbourhood by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, Furtherfield. From Coding Cultures, 2007. Editor: Francesca Da Rimini. Published by d/lux, Lilyfield NSW Australia. Available at Foam (pdf) here.
Do It With Others (DIWO)– E-Mail Art in Context by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, 2008. Curediting, Vague Terrain. Available here.
DIWO (Do-It-With-Others): Artistic co-creation as a decentralized method of peer empowerment in today’s multitude by Marc Garrett, 2013, published by SEAD: White Papers. Available here.
DIWO: Do It With Others – No Ecology without Social Ecology, by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett. From Remediating the Social, 2012. Editor: Simon Biggs University of Edinburgh. Published by Electronic Literature as a Model for Creativity and Innovation in Practice, University of Bergen, Norway. Available here.
Addressable Memory Touring exhibition by Michael Takeo Magruder
TheSpace4, Peterborough, 22nd September – 18th November 2007
Andy Warhol’s audio cassette tape recorder was his constant companion and confidant. He used to call it his wife. Many of Warhol’s tapes were of nothing other than white noise and the occasional sudden background sound. Warhol also carried a Polaroid camera, shooting tens of thousands of photographs over the last decades of his life. His obsessive recording of the minutiae of his existence must have appeared eccentric in the second half of the Twentieth Century.
Traditionally the technology of mechanical recording and reproduction of sound and image has been the resource of mass media, of news media. News is the first draft of history. It is the sensorium of shared memory, dominated by a few powerful centralized voices. A lone artist such as Warhol could not reproduce the workings of the mass media no matter how hard he tried. He could however allegorize and represent it.
The analogue technology that Warhol used has given way to digital audio and video. High-definition, high dynamic contrast range chips are now included on even relatively cheap mobile phones. Warhol’s two devices have become one. Anyone can record dozens of images and many minutes of sound or video each day if they want to. With broadcast distribution giving way to the more decentralized distribution system of the Internet they can share their personal media with friends around the world instantly or even with the entire on-line world via sharing sites. In the twenty-first century Warhol would just be a mid-volume user of Blogger and Flickr.
Personal digital technology and the publishing medium of the Internet blur any line between personal and shared memory, and between experience and representation. This may be experienced as empowered citizen journalism, the future embarrassments of youthful digital exhibitionism, or the spectre of a participatory surveillance society.
Michael Takeo Magruder is portraying this landscape of digital memory with its own tools, producing portraits of its inhabitants with its own palettes. In Addressable Memory the first draft of history is allegorized as a process of combining and quantizing disparate experience and telemetry. Of mashing-up and composing. The technology and aesthetics of mobile phones, Internet news feeds, video screens, computer image processing and virtual reality are all turned on themselves. At TheSpace4 in Peterborough this show takes up all three rooms. It will be touring the UK throughout 2008.
The first room contains large scale prints and projections of pixellated camera phone images and video along with smaller images on camera phone screens. Even the placards next to each work are small video screens, emphasizing the feeling of the pervasiveness of digital media.
Pixels are an established enough visual form now that they have a certain cultural resonance and are a part of everyday experience. They are ephemeral and functional grids of colour, quite the opposite of the carefully considered coloured grids of abstract high art.
The large-scale prints and projections abstract and compose the pixellated images to the point where this opposition collapses. Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie performed a similar but more celebratory synthesis of media overload and contemplative reflection combining urban architecture and mass mediatized music with the modernist abstracting grid in the analogue age of mass media.
Phone images and video clips are fragmentary records of life in a visually saturated corporate information culture. Recasting them in the visual language of high art’s slow contemplation affords the viewer a different, less commodified and commodifying way of looking at the representations of this culture. The critical aesthetic engagement of the work is one that the viewer can share and take with them when they leave the gallery if they wish.
The middle room has generative art prints on its walls created by software that produces compositions from reprocessed digital imagery. Strangely this seems the most visually and technically traditional work in the show. Surrounded by this, on the central platform a hardware based piece presents the hardware and software of handheld sound and image as a microcosm both of the social and media networks of digital media. In a wirelessly networked age the wiring under the board is in the air between devices, the analogue video artist’s shtick of taking the casing off of televisions wouldn’t show how this system works. This is a transition from the personal imagery of the first room to the mediatized imagery of the third room.
The third room is dark but lit by the projections, screens and monitor banks of works that remix the visual, audio and textual representations of reality created by the mass media. The loud, bright, pervasive, confident voice of the mass-media is reimposed on itself. Letters become pixels that images are rendered into, web sites are projected onto virtual reality geometry, striking news imagery is broken down across grids of monitors or at different speeds.
This is a redoubling of the experience of broadcast media. The media selectively quantizes, re-maps and filters reality before presenting its representations as added value. Here this process is applied back to the representations produced by the media and thereby to the media itself. This is a mapping of media’s hyperspace back onto itself.
Such recursion is the stuff not just of memory but of awareness, the start of a strange loop (pace Douglas Hofstadter) that comes to know itself through repeated introspection. The machinery and techniques of mediatization turn unique experience into fungible data. The works in the third room of “Addressable Memory” reverse this process by continuing and intensifying it.
Addressable Memory as a whole steps back from a world pervaded by the representational machinery of digital media that reduces both personal and shared experience to economically leveragable ephemeral information in order to pause and reflect on it. It re-presents the representations of the personal and institutional products of this machinery in a more contemplative and more contextualising way, intensifying the use of technology to the point where the presence of that pervasive technology is again visible but the content and operation of that technology is defamiliarised and contemplatable. This is a coherent and mature body of art that works with the viewer to produce a revealing portrait of their visual environment.
I came across the Net Artwork Norwayweb whilst receiving my usual mass of e-mails. Even though I usually use filters, far too much spam still gets through. So, like so many other’s around the world, I have the arduous process of picking out what is deemed worth keeping. Lost in despair, numerous individuals choose to delete everything rather than cyphering through an ever expansive junk mail infestation. In 2004 yahoo found in their research “that the average British PC has nine ‘sick days’ per year, two more than the average for workers. Six of these are wasted battling with spam and three more days are lost due to viruses. Nearly half of British computer users find dealing with junk e-mails more stressful than traffic jams…”[1]
As we all adapt and mutate in response to a more technologically determined world, we become something else. New generations join the mass shift to be digitally dependent via games, the Internet and other post-analogue activities. As we use the Internet or fill in a form to the tax office our information is stored digitally somewhere, yet many do not think how safe the submitted information really is. In the UK, “The government was forced to admit the most fundamental breach of faith between the state and citizen yesterday when it disclosed that the personal records of 25 million individuals, including their dates of birth, addresses, bank accounts and national insurance numbers had been lost in the post, opening up the threat of mass identity fraud and theft from personal bank accounts. MPs gasped when the chancellor, Alistair Darling, told the Commons that discs containing personal details from 7.25 million families claiming child benefit had been lost. They went missing in the internal post after a junior official at HM Revenue & Customs in Washington, Tyne and Wear, breached all government security rules by sending them by courier to the National Audit Office in London..” [2]
As I went through the (programmed) mannerism of switching between looking at e-mails on my Thunderbird client and clicking back to the Firefox browser to view how Norwayweb was doing; and visiting Facebook to see the various messages that had been left there for me by those who I wish to know and those who I do not wish to know. At first, when visiting the project it all seems simplistic in layout and then one begins to feel the deeper workings behind the page, the cogs and wheels digitally chugging away. The profundity of it all brings about a tip of the ice burg metaphor to mind. A frozen moment, like when everyone sees what is at the end of every fork. As William Burroughs’ discovered in the writing of Naked Lunch. To me, the fork is a simple trigger, example of a realisation that something big is happening and what one sees in front of them may be micro but also intrinsically connected to a macro, set of happenings and situations that are overwhelming.
Bjorn Magnhildoen is known for his various net art works, incororating databases and networks. He’s the author of more than fourty books, many of them collaborative and generative works, and has also published books concerned with net art and net writing. Recent projects deal with net art books, writing machines and software implemented on the net, live or performative writing and programming, codework, hypertext, and e-poetry.
Norwayweb was originally part of a series called “Protocol Performance” realised in 2007 with the support of the Norwegian Cultural Council, section for art and new technology. This work uses specific data collected from a source or sources originating from the national system’s database. The information is scraped from about 4 million Norwegian tax payer’s databases. As soon as you visit the web page, you automatically trigger off the action of collecting the data. On the left side of the interface figures cascade down the page before your very eyes, which gradually evolves into what Magnhildoen calls a carpet. The term carpet is a reference to the textile based craft of weaving
When opening the web page the viewer becomes a participant in the collection of the data, each number represents one singular individual which is added as you watch it in real-time. It stops when you close the browser and starts all over again if you return. Once the total of the numbers reach 3943077 the carpet is completed. If you leave the browser open on the page of the Norwayweb artwork for I minute, you will have triggered off and received information equivalent to 60 people. The whole work itself is complete once there has been 555 hours of viewing of it. By taking part in the process of web-scraping we become affiliated as peer scrapers in the accumulation other people’s personal tax details based in Norway.
Bjorn has mentioned that he is aware that collecting such data could be ethically questionable and is not clear himself how real it is that a law is actually being broken. As a kind of opt out clause or fail-safe he suggests that, visitors to the artwork could also be peer criminals due to the fact that they are (or we are) going through the systematic process of collecting this information and are not necessarily just passive observers. The complexity of acting out a simple thing as clicking onto a web page and becoming a co-conspirator without the intention of criminal intent, poses some confusing questions. Not only regarding our liberties in respect of are we really to blame for someone’s work of art by just viewing it? But it also begs the question that if Magnhildoen unintentionally (or intentionally) broke the law and involved other people visitors to the work, surely he is the main culprit. Like a drug dealer who peddles drugs, perhaps he is peddling illegal information, by actively setting up a system in sourcing it and then distributing it to others to potentially use. My guess is that all is fine if the Norwegian Cultural Council funded and supported the project.
For me, the Norwayweb project deals with one of the most contentious issues that we all face today. Recently, the British Parliament discussed ‘Function Creep’, which is about digital surveillance in all its forms taking over our everyday lives. Consuming, following and data-basing our movements outside as well as our activities on the Internet and public databases. At the Select Committee on Home Affairs Fourth Report, July 2004, the then Home Secretary said in respect of the introduction of ID Cards to the UK “The identity cards scheme is intended primarily as a United Kingdom wide measure to help deter and control illegal immigration by helping to establish the nationality and immigration status of UK residents.”[3]
Critical Art Ensemble way back in 1995 said “Each one of us has files that rest at the state’s fingertips. Education files, medical files, employment files, financial files, communication files, travel files, and for some, criminal files. Each strand in the trajectory of each person~s life is recorded and maintained. The total collection of records on an individual is his or her data body~a state-and-corporate-controlled doppelg~nger. What is most unfortunate about this development is that the data body not only claims to have ontological privilege, but actually has it. What your data body says about you is more real than what you say about yourself. The data body is the body by which you are judged in society, and the body which dictates your status in the world. What we are witnessing at this point in time is the triumph of representation over being. The electronic file has conquered self-aware consciousness.”[4]
This is a fascinating artwork. I am interested in discovering more of Bjorn Magnhildoen’s future explorations, as well as his other works. Norwayweb is poetic, intelligent and thorough in its conception and understanding, of the cultural context on the subject of our civil liberties. It is refreshing to experience a net art project that is able to incorporate a clear argument with the very medium that he uses in challenging its uses by others.
Online Video Portal Streams Artists into community and exhibition.
[PAM] Live and in Person Participation lies at the heart of the online video portal [PAM]. In fact the site has generated such response that the best way to communicate with the PAM founders is to find them in person. They are a visible, engaged group on the New York Art scene; Lee Wells, a curator and Artist in his own right, was introduced to Christopher Borkowski, a digital artist and IT specialist at the Guggenheim by Raphaele Shirley, whose credentials include working for Nam June Paik. Artist Aaron Miller had already been collaborating with Borkowski following on their with Scope Art fair on the horizon, [PAM] was born in December 2005 two months after an impromptu brainstorming session at Shirley’s studio.
‘With [PAM] we sought an interactive and inclusive means of bringing artists and their audience into the curatorial process. Says Wells, ‘We figured out a simple way to present it in a non-hierarchal fashion. [PAM] is more of an educational tool than anything else.’ Arguably [PAM] is more than just instructional. [PAM] is an online smorgasbord of video creation and a real time installation that is reviving the sense of community in an art world where dollars seem to be overtaking sensibility. Like the commercial behemoth, Youtube, [PAM] was created with open source software but its start up cost was less than $500.00. The [PAM] founders essentially hacked a system that would have necessitated hundreds of thousands of dollars for a commercial venture. The result is a dizzying array of one thousand video artworks by artists in over eighty countries.
In [PAM] we trust Trust and collaboration ensure [PAM] evolves smoothly. ‘Alexis Hubshman and the Scope Art Fair made us realize that [PAM] wasn’t a one time gig.’ Says Wells ‘Alexis is our partner and one of our most trusted advisors.’ Wells and his partners are quick to acknowledge other influences: ‘I have been lucky enough to learn from a lot of great people. Kerry James Marshall, Phyllis Bramson, Julia Fish, I-igo Manglano-Ovalle, Steve Campbell, Stewart Home, God and the Stars, Hannah Higgins, Critical Art Ensemble and Miroslaw Rogala to name a few.’ Wells also cites a wide range of co-operative inspiration; art portals such as Rhizome.org, Furtherfield.org and organizations like the Coyote Arts Festival in Chicago as well as The United Nations. Raphaele Shirley references her experience assisting Nam June Paik at the Guggenheim as groundwork for the sort of interpersonal and technical work that [PAM] has required. ‘On a conceptual level we are walking in his footsteps so it is a great joy to be able to reference him and review what he originally predicted for the age of technology.’
[PAM] comes to life TELECULTURE a show curated by Wells at PACE University Gallery in New York in December, showcased a selection of [PAM] artists. At the opening photographer Eric Payson paid tribute to both PAM and PACE as vital new elements of the video art scene. His haunting transparencies (Ghostplay, 2007), rich in sociological observation, (the NFL as a metaphor for slavery) were as dynamic as the moving pictures in the show. Of these, the four-channel video (SisterCity, 2007) by newcomer Jennifer Jones was technologically ambitious and psychologically challenging. Jillian McDonald, Co-Director of the Gallery and practicing new media artist singled out Taras Hrabowsky’s Amalgamide Tide (2006) as a highlight. A projection careening down a wall overlooking the main staircase, the CGI video was a year in the making, the work depicts thousands of human figures; tossing, floating and whirling in patterns of weather systems that Hrabowsky has mapped them into. Mesmerizing and disturbing, it is uncanny in its decorative and political balance.
Making [PAM] pay Now that [PAM] is established and thriving, the founders must face the inevitable- a reconciliation with the Art Market. Alongside plans for the site to become a vehicle for art sales, developments include shifting the focus of the website to engage artists in commentary as well as providing exhibition information. Says, Chris Borkowski ‘We would like to find a way to sustain the organization and put money into the hands of the artists involved. At the end of the day artists have to make a living.’
[PAM]’s Progeny Interpersonal and professional alliances that [PAM] has already fostered bode well for its future. In two short years the project has gone from studio imaginings to real-time exhibits, generating new work and opportunities for established as well emerging video artists Bethany Fancher, a [PAM] member and sculptor, new to the video world was included in the TELECULTURE show and is already at work on new video pieces. She is also planning a work that will incorporate a horseback trip across the United States. Mew Media Pioneer G.H. Hovagimyan whose work spans decades of the New York Alternative scene, has played an active role in supporting the project. His piece, New Orleans Rant2, a wry punk commentary on the tragedy in that city, also challenges the worldwide membership of [PAM] to keep moving forward. His rant You can’t stay here is a call to perpetual action. Lee Wells has great hopes for the creature he and his collaborators have brought into being, ‘[PAM] is designed to be adapting to technology as it changes. She is two years old in December. We are hoping she will have children one day.’
What Would It Mean To Win? was filmed on the blockades at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany in June 2007. In their first collaborative film Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler focus on the current state of the counter-globalisation movement in a project which grows out of both artists’ preoccupation with globalisation and its discontents. The film, which combines documentary footage, interviews, and animation sequences, is structured around three questions pertinent to the movement: Who are we? What is our power? What would it mean to win?
Almost ten years after ‘Seattle this film explores the impact this movement has had on contemporary politics. Seattle has been described as the birthplace for the ‘movement of movements’ and marked a time when resistance to capitalist globalisation emerged in industrialised nations. In many senses it has been regarded as the time when a new social subject ‘the multitude’ entered the political landscape. Recently the counter-globalisation movement has gone through a certain malaise accentuated by the shifts in global politics in the post 911 context.
The protests in Heiligendamm seemed to re-assert the confidence, inventiveness and creativity of the counter-globalisation movement. In particular the five finger tactic where protesters spread out across the fields of Rostock slipping around police lines proved successful in establishing blockades in all roads into Heiligendamm. Staff working for the G8 summit were forced to enter and leave the meeting by helicopter or boat thus providing a symbolic victory to the movement.
‘What Would It Mean To Win?’, as the title implies, addresses this central question for the movement. During the Seattle demonstrations ‘we are winning’ was a popular graffiti slogan that captured the sense of euphoria that came with the birth of a new movement. Since that time however this slogan has been regarded in a much more speculative manner. This film aims to move beyond the question of whether we are ‘winning’ or not by addressing what would it actually mean to win.
When addressing the question ‘what would it mean to win?’ John Holloway quotes Subcomandante Marcos who once described ‘winning’ as the ability to live an ‘infinite film program’ where participants could re-invent themselves each day, each hour, each minute. The animated sequences take this as their starting point to explore how ideas of social agency, struggle and winning are incorporated into our imagination of politics.
The film was recorded in English and German and exists also in a French subtitled version. ‘What Would It Mean To Win?’ will be presented in screenings in a variety of contexts and will also be part of the upcoming installation ‘Jumps and Surprises’ by Begg and Ressler, which will present a broader perspective of different approaches to the counter-globalisation movement.
Concept, Interviews, Film Editing, Production: Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler
Interviewees: Emma Dowling, John Holloway, Adam Idrissou, Tadzio Mueller, Michal Osterweil, Sarah Tolba
Camera: Oliver Ressler
Animation: Zanny Begg
Sound: Kate Carr
Image Editing: Markus Koessl
Sound Editing: Rudi Gottsberger, Oliver Ressler
Special thanks to Turbulence, Holy Damn It, Conrad Barrett
Grants: Bundesministerium fr Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur
College of Fine Art Research Grants Scheme, Sydney
THE THIRD MIND
A review of THE THIRD MIND at Le Palais de Tokyo
Curated by Ugo Rondinone
THE THIRD MIND
Le Palais de Tokyo
13, avenue du president Wilson 75116 Paris
September 7th – January 8th
I first want to congratulate the guest curator Ugo Rondinone and the new director of Le Palais de Tokyo, Marc-Olivier Wahler, for mounting a really high-quality group show (*) that criss-crosses an assortment of generational frontiers and stylistic barriers. Ugo Rondinone is an artist known for his talent for building systems of connections and given the visual results of this exhibit; he has, in large part, very good taste in art. I particularly enjoyed his assembling excellent works of Brion Gysin – William S. Burroughs, Ronald Bladen, Lee Bontecou, Andy Warhol, Nancy Grossman, Cady Noland, Martin Boyce, Paul Thek and Emma Kunz.
I think what might be interesting about this disquieting show, is to look at how this group show differs in its conjoining (or not) from other group shows by pinning it to the collaborative work of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs from the early 1960s known as The Third Mind. Also we can place THE THIRD MIND in the context of wider connections and ponder at what point does homage turn into exploitation?
First some background. Beat writer Burroughs and the artist Brion Gysin, known predominantly for his rediscovery of the Dada master Tristan Tzara’s cut-up technique and for co-inventing the flickering Dreamachine device, worked together in the early 1960s on a publishing project that used a chance based cut-up method. A cut-up method consists of cutting up and randomly reassembling various fragments of something to give them a completely new and unexpected meaning. 1+1=3 (**) In the recent biography of Allen Ginsburg, Celebrate Myself, Ginsburg’s archivist, Bill Morgan, excellently recounts some of the genesis of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs forays into radical Dada cut-up technique and collaboration based on Ginsburg’s diary entries.
Gysin in the mid 1950’s pointed out to Burroughs that collage technique has been a regular tool in painting and graphics since half a century. This came as late news to the young Beat writers of that time, so it is perhaps not surprising that Ginsburg’s first exposure to Burroughs’s use of the cut-up was met with distain – Ginsburg considered it something along the lines of a parlor trick. (p. 318) Even more, Ginsburg speculated from NYC that Burroughs had lost his mind through lack of sex (note: Burroughs lusted after Ginsburg in vain). As a joke, Ginsburg and Peter Orlovsky cut up some of their own poems and rearranged them and sent them to Burroughs with the note ‘Just having a little fun mother’. (pp. 318 – 319). However Burroughs was so dedicated to the random cut-up method that he often defended his use of the technique. When Ginsburg and Orlovsky arrived in Tangiers in 1961, Burroughs was working on an even more advanced use of the cut-up; he and Ian Sommerville were cutting and splicing audiotapes and Burroughs was making collages from newspapers and photographs while proclaiming that poetry and words were dead. (pp.331-332)
Burroughs however soon began work on a cut-up novel, the Soft Machine – drawing material from his The Word Hoard. (**) This manuscript was soon being ‘assembled’ and edited by Ian Sommerville and Michael Portman; Burroughs’s companions. Sommerville was regularly speaking of building electrical cut-up machines.
Burroughs would soon begin collaborating on a book project with Brion Gysin using the cut-up method; cutting up and reassembling various fragments of sentences and images to give them a new and unexpected meaning. The Third Mind is the title of the book they devised together following this method – and they were so overwhelmed by the results that they felt it had been composed by a third person; a third author (mind) made of a synthesis of their two personalities.
Ginsburg remained highly skeptical for some time, but following his travels in India came to appreciate the cut-up technique; even while never employing it.
Now for THE THIRD MIND show itself. Two major works (themselves multitudinal) advance well Rondinone’s thesis of the third mind. Of course, foremost is the Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs collaboration The Third Mind. An entire gallery is devoted to the maquettes for this unpublished book from the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – and it does not disillusion the 4th mind: that of the viewer/reader. It is a golden hodgepodge
feast and serves as the underpinnings of the exhibit.
Then there is the glamorous video installation/accumulation of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests from 1964-1966: a group of silent b&w three-minute films in which visitors to the Warhol factory try to sit still. Here we see an interlaced presentation that visually connect the youthful faces of Edi Sedgwick, Susan Sontag, Nico, John Giorno, Jonas Mekas, Gerald Melanga, Jack Smith, Paul Thek, Lou Reed and the distinguished Marcel Duchamp. The presentation is structurally connectivist given its 4 directional presentation as a low laying sculpture. It is incredibly enjoyable. Plus the room is ringed with black haunting photograms called Angels by the fascinating Bruce Conner from 1973-75.
In terms of a more traditional synthetic associational curatorial fission, the strongest effect was achieved for me in the Ronald Bladen, Nancy Grossman, Cady Noland gallery. Everything here is screaming in harmony of power, sex and violence. The entire space felt hard as nails ? most all of it a macho silver and black. Bracketing the huge gallery were long rows of Nancy Grossman’s famous black-leathered heads, aggressively sprouting phallic shapes like picks and horns. Ronald Bladen’s 1969 minimal masterwork The Cathedral Evening aggressively dominates the interior space with a mammoth triangle breach. This is backed up by his famous Three Elements from 1965. Then, giving the gallery a sense of an almost palpably Oedipal contest, is a large group of superb black on silver Cady Noland anthropological silkscreens on metal from the early 1990s.
The other room that really collectively worked for me held Paul Thek and Emma Kunz. Three wonderful Paul Thek Meat Piece are there; weird post-minimal sculptures that sickly encase flayed body sections in wax in long yellow transparent plexiglas shrines that literally shine. This meat-machine mix is counter-pointed with the healing magnetic-field ephemerality of Emma Kunz’s geometric drawings, done with lead and colored pencils or chalk on graph paper. It was easy to envision some fierce spiritual forces zapping each other throughout that area.
Other rooms bring the connectivest bent to a jolting halt. I simply admired Martin Boyce’s huge neon sculpture (Boyce channeling Dan Flavin), but it produced no associative effects with what else was in the room. Worse of all was a room entirely devoted to the work of Joe Brainard. What was that doing there? One strains to see (or imagine) even a 2nd mind in that space. So the unavoidable thought arises, well, Rondinone must like this stuff – so that is at least two minds in synch. But does Rondinone think there is anything still interesting in a Gober sink? His The Split-up Conflicted Sink from 1985 also played a huge flat note for me in this supposed visual symphony, as did the overly unembellished black crosses of Valentin Carron, the stupid car bashed installation by Sarah Lucas, and the cloying faux-naive canvases of Karen Kilimnik. How to connect this boring, stupid and naive work to the third mind connectivity theme?
OK. I will. On thinking about the show on my way home, I concluded that the show’s relationship to connectivity is gravely naive and passe (if pleasant in a quaint, charming way) in lieu of the multi-networked world in which we now reside. By now various theories of complexity have established an undeniable influence within cultural theory by emphasizing open systems and collaborative adaptability. One ponders if Rondinone has ever even heard of the theories of Tiziana Terranova, Eugene Thacker or other cultural workers involved in the issues of human-machine symbiosis as interface within our inter-network media ecology. So yes, part of the pleasure for me was bathing in this old fashioned naivety, having just spent some serious time reading and writing on the topics of conspiratorial shadow activities (****) and viral software logic based on complex inter-connectionism (*****). Placed against issues of avant-garde cybernetics, the coupling of nature and biology via code, media ecologies, distributed management teams, internet mash-up music, artificial life swarms, the political herd mind, and Negri/Hardt’s multitudes; THE THIRD MIND played in my mind like a romp through a kindergarten playpen. Nice. It felt good to forget about that pervasive nagging political/cultural feeling of stalemate created by the resilience of our current reality in that it assimilates everything.
But no, Ugo Rondinone did not randomly cut and reassemble art to create a new third meaning. He did not cut-up anything. He did, like every music dj, fashion designer, and group show curator, remix contemporary expression from recent decades to permit new meanings to emerge from the mix. The ideas in the collaborative work of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs were not needed to achieve this end – and perhaps they were poorly intellectually served here (even though it was great to see the work). There was no use of chance or randomness evident here (even the re-shuffled catalogue pages I heard was rather suspiciously non-random) that is necessary for a really unexpected – and perhaps disastrous – result. This show did not go that far. There was no randomly reassembling of various fragments of something to give them a completely new and unexpected meaning (like I saw in the show Rolywholyover: A Composition for Museum by John Cage at the Guggenheim Museum in Soho NYC in 1994). THE THIRD MIND is just a standard, but good, heterogeneous art show where the whole is greater than its parts. Which is as it must be.
The show contains work from: Ronald Bladen, Lee Bontecou, Martin, Boyce, Joe Brainard, Valentin Carron, Vija Celmins, Bruce Conner, Verne Dawson, Jay Defeo, Trisha Donnelly, Urs Fischer, Bruno Gironcoli, Robert Gober, Nancy Grossman, Hans Josephsohn, Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, Toba Khedoori, Karen Kilimnik, Emma Kunz, Andrew Lord, Sarah Lucas, Hugo Markl, Cady Noland, Laurie Parsons, Jean-Frederic Schnyder, Josh Smith, Paul Thek, Andy Warhol, Rebecca Warren, and Sue Williams. Also applause to Marc-Olivier Wahler for cutting Le Palais de Tokyo into large but manageable discrete spaces. What a relief from the prior cavernous chaos.
(**) Recently I heard Martin Scorsese speak about how any editing together of two shots in a film creates a third subjective image effect in the mind of the viewer.
(***) The Word Hoard is a collection of Burroughs’s manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, and London that all together created the super mother-load manuscript that served as the basis for much of Burroughs’s cut-up writings: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, (together referred to as The Nova Trilogy or Nova Epic). Even Naked Lunch was taken from sections of The Word Hoard. There was also produced a text called Dead Fingers Talk in 1963 which contains excerpts from Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded – combined together to create a new narrative. Also, via Burroughs’s artistic collaborations with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, the cut-up technique was combined with images, Gysin’s paintings, and sound, via Somerville’s tape recorders. Some of these recordings can be heard here.
There were also a number of cut-up films that were produced which can
be seen here:
http://www.ubu.com/film/burroughs.html
William Buys a Parrot (1963)
Bill and Tony (1972)
Towers Open Fire (1963)
Ghost at n?9 (Paris) (1963-72)
The Cut-Ups (1966)
{loop:file = get-random-executable-file;
if first-line-of-file = then goto loop;
prepend virus to file;}
-Fred Cohen, Computer Viruses: Theory and Experiments
We cannot be done with viruses as long as the ontology of network culture is viral-like.
-Jussi Parikka, The Universal Viral Machine
One could be forgiven for assuming that a book with the title ‘Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses’ would be of sole interest to those sniggering hornrimmed programmers who harbor an erudite loathing of Bill Gates and an affection for the Viennese witch-doctor. Actually, it is a rather game and enthralling look, via a media-ecological approach, into the acutely frightening, yet hysterically glittering, networked world in which we now reside. A world where the distinct individual is pitted against – and thoroughly processed by – post-human semi-autonomous software programs which often ferment anomalous feelings of being eaten alive by some great indifferent artificiality that apparently functions semi-independently as a natural being.
Though no J. G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs, Jussi Parikka nevertheless sucks us into a fantastic black tour-de-force narrative of virulence and the cultural history of computer viruses (*), followed by innumerable inquisitive innuendoes concerning the ramifications for a creative and aesthetic, if post-human, future. Digital Contagions is impregnated with fear and suspicion, but we almost immediately sense that it also contains an undeniable affirmative nobility of purpose; which is to save the media cultural condition -and the brimful push of technological modernization in general – from catastrophically killing itself off.
This admirable embryonic redemption is achieved by a vaccination-like turning of tables, as Parikka convincingly demonstrates that computer viruses (semi-autonomous machinic/vampiric pieces of code) are not antithetical to contemporary digital culture, but rather essential traits of the techno-cultural logic itself. According to Parikka, digital viruses in effect define the media ecology logic that characterizes our networked computerized culture in recent decades.
We may wish to recall here that for Deleuze and Guattari, media ecologies are machinic operations (the term machinic here refers to the production of consistencies between heterogeneous elements) based in particular technological and humane strings that have attained virtual consistency. Our current inter-network ecology is a comparable combination of top-down host arrangements wedded to bottom-up self-organization where invariable linear configurations and states of entanglement co-evolve in active process. Placing the significant role of the virus in this mix in no uncertain terms, Parikka writes that, ‘the virus truly seems to be a central cultural trope of the digital world’. (p. 136) Indeed digital viruses are recognized by Parikka as the crowning culmination of current postmodern cultural trends – as viruses, by definition, are merger machines based on parasitism and acculturation. So it is not only their symbolic/metaphoric power that places them firmly in a wider perspective of cultural infection; it is their formal structure, in that they procure their actuality from the encircling environment to which they are receptively coupled.
Moreover, with the love of an aficionado, Parikka lucidly demonstrates that computer viruses are indeed a variable index of the rudimentary underpinning on which contemporary techno culture rests. He astutely anoints the indexical function of the virus by establishing not only its symbolic melancholy power in relation to the human body and sex, but by folding the viral life/nonlife model (**) into key cultural areas underlying the digital ecology; such as bottom-up self-organization, hidden distributed activity and ethereal meshwork. In that sense Parikka describes network ecology as both actual and virtual, what I have elsewhere identified as the viractual. (Briefly, the viractual is the stratum of activity where distinct actualizations/individuations are materialized out of the flow of virtuality.) But some viruses do not simply yield copies of themselves, they also engage in a process of self-reproducing autopoiesis: they are copying themselves over and over again but they can also mutate and change, and by doing so, Parikka maintains, reveal distinguishing aspects of network culture at large.
I would add that they mimic the manneristic aspects of late post-modernism in general, particularly if one sees modernism as the great petri dish aggregate in which we still are afloat. So computer viruses are recognized here as an indexical symptom also of a bigger cultural tendency that characterizes our post-modern media culture as being inserted within a modern (purist) digital ecology. This aspect provides the book with a discerning, yet heterogeneous, comprehension of the connectionist technologies of contemporaneous techno culture. But beyond the techno-cultural relevance, the significance of the viral issues in Parikka’s book to ALL cultural production is evident to anyone who has already recognized that digitalization has become the universal technical platform for networked capitalism. As Parikka himself points out, digitalization has secured its place as the master formal archive for sounds, images and texts. (p. 5) Digitalization is the double, the gangrel, that accompanies each of us in what we do – and which accounts for our cultural feelings of vacillating between anxiety and enthusiasm over being invaded by something invisible – and the sneaky suspicion that we have been taken control of from within.
To begin this caliginous expedition, Digital Contagions plunges us into a haunting, shifting and dislocating array of source material that thrills. Parikka launches his degenerate seduction by drawing from, and intertwining in a non-linear fashion, the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (for whom my unending love is verging on obsession), Friedrich Kittler, Eugene Thacker, Tiziana Terranova, N. Katherine Hayles, Lynn Margulis, Manuel DeLanda, Brian Massumi, Bruno Latour, Charlie Gere, Sherry Turkle, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Deborah Lupton, and Paul Virilio. These thinkers are then linked with ripe examples from prankster net art, stealth biopolitics, immunological incubations, the disassembly significance of noise, ribald sexual allegories, antibody a-life projects, various infected prosthesis, polymorphic encryptions, ticklish security issues, numerous medical plagues, the coupling of nature and biology via code, incisive sabotage attempts, anti-debugging trickery, genome sequencing, parasitic spyware, killer T cell epidemics, rebellious database deletions, trojan horse latency, viral marketing, inflammatory political resistance, biological weaponry, pornographic clones, depraved destructive turpitudes, rotten jokes, human-machine symbiosis as interface, and a history of cracker catastrophes. All are conjoined with excellent taste. The shock effect is one of discovering a poignant nervous virality that has been secretly penetrating us everywhere.
Digital Contagions’s genealogical account is proportionately impressive, as it devotes satisfactory space to the discussion of historical precedent; including Turing machines, Fred Cohen’s pioneering work with computer viruses, John von Neumann’s cellular automata theory (i.e. any system that processes information as part of a self-regulating mechanism), avant-garde cybernetics, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the Creeper virus in the Arpanet network, the coupling machines of John Conway, the nastily waggish Morris worm, Richard Dawkins’s meme (contagious idea) theory; and even the under known artistic hacks of Tommaso Tozzi. Furthermore, the viral spectral as fantasized in science fiction is adequately fleshed out, paying deserved attention to the obscure but much loved (by me, anyway) 1975 book The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner and the celebrated cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash; among other speculative books and hallucinatory films.
But the pinnacle of interest, for me, of this engaging and educative read is its conclusion where Parikka sketches out an alternative radical media-ecological perspective hinged on the viral characteristics of self-reproduction and a coupling of the outside with the inside typical of artificial life (a-life). He correctly maintains that viral autopoiesis undertakings, like Thomas S. Ray’s Tierra virtual ecology art project, provides quintessential clues to interpreting the software logic that has produced, and will continue to produce, the ontological basis for much of the economic, political and cultural transactions of our current globalizing world.
Here he has rendered problematic the safe vision of virus as malicious software (virus as infection machine) and replaced it with a far more curious, aesthetic and even benevolent one; as whimsical artificial life (a-life). Using viral a-life’s tenants of semi-automation, self-reproduction, and host quest; Parikka proposes a living machinic autopoiesis that might provide a moebius strip like ontological process for culture.
Though suppositional, he bases his procedure in formal viral attributes – not unlike those of primitive artificial life with its capability to self-reproduce and spread semi-autonomously (as viruses do) while keeping in mind that Maturana/Varela’s autopoiesis contends that living systems are an integral component of their surroundings and work towards supporting that ecology. Parikka here picks up that thread by pointing out that recent polymorphic viruses are now able to evolve in response to anti-virus behaviors. Various viruses, known as retroviruses, (***) explicitly target anti-virus programs. Viruses with adaptive behavior, self-reproductive and evolutionary programs can be seen, at least in part, as something alive, even if not artificial life in the strongest sense of the word. Here we might recall John Von Neumann’s conviction that the ideal design of a computer should be based on the design of certain human organs – or other live organisms. The artistic compositional benefit of his autopoiesic virality theory, for me, is in allowing thought and vision to rupture habit and bypass object-subject dichotomies.
I wish to point out here that although biological viruses were originally discovered and characterized on the basis of the diseases they caused, most viruses that infect bacteria, plants and animals (including humans) do not cause disease. In fact, viruses may be helpful to life in that they rapidly transfer genetic information from one bacterium to another, and viruses of plants and animals may convey genetic information among similar species, helping their hosts survive in hostile environments.
Already various theories of complexity have established an influence within philosophy and cultural theory by emphasizing open systems and adaptability, but Parikka here supplies a further step in thinking about ongoing feedback loops between an organism and its environment, what I am tempted to call viralosophy. Viralosophy would be the study of viral philosophical and theoretical points of reference concerning malignant transformations useful in understanding the viral paradigm essential to digital culture and media theory that focuses on environmental complexity and interconnectionism in relationship to the particular artist. Within viralosophy, viral comprehension might become the eventual – yet chimerical – reference point for culture at large in terms of a modification of parameters, as it promotes parasite-host dynamic interfacings of the technologically inert with the biologically animate, probabilistically.
So the decisive, if dormant, payload that is triggered by reading this book, for me, is an enhanced understands of pagan and animist sentiment which recognizes non-malicious looping-mutating energy feedback and self-recreational dynamism that informs new aesthetic becomings which may alter artistic output. Possibly heuristic becomings (****) that transgress the established boundaries of nature/technology/culture and extend the time-bomb cognitive nihilism of Henry Flynt. This affirmative viral payload forces open-ended multiplicities onto art that favor new-sprung conceptualizations and rebooted realizations. Here the artist comes back to life as spurred a-life, and not as a sole articulation of the pirated environment of currency. So the so-called art virus is not to be judged in terms of its occasional monetary payload, but by the metabolistic characteristics that make art reasonable to discuss as a form of extravagant artificial life: triggered emergence, resilience and back door evolution.
(*) A computer virus is a self-replicating computer program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents. A computer virus behaves in a way similar to a biological virus, which spreads by inserting itself into living cells. Extending the analogy, the insertion of a virus into the program is termed as an “infection”, and the infected file, or executable code that is not part of a file, is called a “host”.
(**) Scientists have argued about whether viruses are living organisms or just a package of colossal molecules. A virus has to hijack another organism’s biological machinery to replicate, which it does by inserting its DNA into a host.
(***) Retroviruses are sometimes known as anti-anti-viruses. The basic principle is that the virus must somehow hinder the operation of an anti-virus program in such a way that the virus itself benefits from it. Anti-anti-viruses should not be confused with anti-virus-viruses, which are viruses that will disable or disinfect other viruses.
(****) A heuristic virus cleaner works by loading an infected file up to memory and emulating the program code. It uses a combination of disassembly, emulation and sometimes execution to trace the flow of the virus and to emulate what the virus is normally doing. The risk in heuristic cleaning is that if the cleaner tries to emulate everything, the virus might get control inside the emulated environment and escape, after which it can propagate further or trigger a destructive retaliation reflex.
Joseph Nechvatal
Mid-September 2007, Marrakech
Zero Gamer – Sometimes we just like to watch
The exhibition was curated by critical game theorist Corrado Morgana in partnership with Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow Furtherfield’s HTTP Gallery. It included works by Axel Stockburger, TheGhost, Corrado Morgana, Ziga Hajdukovic, Progress Quest and JODI. The exhibition was accompanied by a short publication with a keynote text by Axel Stockburger.
Zero Gamer positions itself as a meaningful interruption of the playing process in order to facilitate a platform for reflection. The works addressed different aspects of digital gameplay, although they did not take the form of playable games themselves. Rather, their purpose was to allow the audience to engage with different crucial issues arising from the hugely complex field of games and gaming but without actually playing. The artists employed different strategies to enable this, ranging from intervening with mechanics such as artificial intelligence and in-game physics to removing game tokens and hazards enabling discussions about the meaning of player engagement. Zero Gamer does not stand for a return to more traditional forms of aesthetic production. On the contrary, it points in the opposite direction, placing itself as the necessary interstice between gaming cycles.
Zero Gamer was first presented by HTTP Gallery at the London Games Festival Fringe in 2007. The remixed exhibition, Zero Gamer (GOLD) was on show at HTTP Gallery between 2-18 November 2007.
Zero Gamer text by Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett (HTTP/Furtherfield.org) and Corrado Morgana 2007. On Archive.org – Wayback machine – https://bit.ly/3ya6nqe
List of artworks
Mario Trilogy: Mario battle no.1 (2000), Mario is drowning (2004) and Mario is doing time (2004). by Myfanwy Ashmore
Max Payne Cheats Only (2004). By JODI
Boys in the Hood (2006). By Axel Stockburger
CarnageHug (2007). By Corrado Morgana
Progress Quest (2004). By Eric Fredricksen
1d Tetris (2002). By Ziga Hajdukovic
Youtube Showreel Breen and Alyx by Wo0Yay Launch Line by TheGhost Real Action Tetris by Mega64 Hamster Video Game uploaded by Jason the Vid Guy Tetris The Absolute The Grandmaster2 Plus Death Mode uploaded by madeofwin Space Invaders in Real Life uploaded by ChugaTheMonkey Self-playing Mario by Diagram TAS video – Megaman 3,4,5 and 6 by Angerfist and Baxter
Exhibition Images
From Entropy8Zuper! to Tale of Tales: Games and The Endless Forest Part 2.
2nd part of Auriea Harvey’s and Michael Samyn’s retrospective on Furtherfield. In the 1st interview they discussed about the history of their previous incarnation as net art collaborators, Entropy8Zuper! This time Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria X), talks with them about their mutation into Tale of Tales and why and how this change came about…
Click here to read the 1st interview
‘Who are you?’ I ask. I am a bit confused: although I know them as Entropy8Zuper!, their most recent piece, The Endless Forest, is created by Tale of Tales. Auriea explains that E8Z! was very personal, as it was the merging of entropy8 (herself) and zuper! (Michael). ‘E8Z! is just the two of us’ says Michael.
It has always been like that, our little personal corner of the web… But with Tale of Tales, we took a step towards an audience in the sense that we wanted to make things the wider audience could enjoy actively.
In 2002 E8Z! Found the for-profit company Tale of Tales. Tale of Tales’s brief is to produce alternative commercial video games for a niche market that does not enjoy the violence and blood-shedding of most mainstream games. According to their website, their aim is to design and develop immersive websites and multimedia environments with a strong emphasis on narration, play, emotion and sensuality.
It seems to me that the current work of ToT is very different from E8Z!’s early work. Do they feel that they have lost something? Yes, they have, says Michael, but that was something they wanted to lose. The shift from E8Z! to Tale of Tales was a natural evolution for them. The main differences between the two have to do with their maturity as artists and as a couple, and the technological developments that took place from 1999 to 2003: E8Z! Produced work for each other, while ToT’s main aim is to reach audiences; E8Z! was operating on the crossover between art and design, while ToT looks at the cross-pollination of art and video games; E8Z! Produced work for the web while ToT’s pieces are downloadable.
ToT’s most well-known work? In fact, the only developed work they have released? Is The Endless Forest (2005-). This is a hybrid, multi-layered piece that operates on several levels: it is an online multiplayer game, it is also a social screensaver, a live performance environment, a virtual world, and a collective fairytale: In The Forest, you are a deer. You live deep in the idyllic, peaceful forest. You spend your time roaming around the forest with other deer. You eat, sleep under the shadow of the trees, drink water from the lake, rest by the ancient ruins, play with other deer and collect flowers. There are also things you cannot do in the forest: you cannot speak, for example. This is not just any forest… In The Endless Forest, magical things can happen: beasts can fly, all the flowers can bloom at once, stones can fall from the sky, and the rain can be gold. Nobody knows what the Twin Gods will come up with to entertain themselves… While in the Forest, there are no goals to achieve or rules to follow. Being there is what this experience is about.
So how did The Endless Forest start?, I ask. I actually know that the prototype was commissioned by the Musee d’Art Moderne Grad-Duc Jean (last visit 27/04/2007) (Museum of Modern Art of Luxemburg) in September 2003. (Now that I think about it, this is rather strange given Auriea and Michael’s comments about net artists selling their work to Museums!) “At that time ToT were working on 8, a research project which they tried to turn into a commercial game. This was the first time that they were trying to produce a commercial video game, and it was hard to find a balance between the mainstream publishers’ requirements and their wish to produce an alternative, non-violent and non-sexist title. 8 was still quite traditional in that it was based on action, had a clear-cut narrative and the player had to perform certain tasks in order to achieve his/her aim. So The Forest came up as a reaction against these very specific sets of rules about how a game should function. ToT came up with the idea on a train-ride back from Luxembourg: the train was driving through a forest (Ardennes) and they could see deer roaming in it… It was a bit of a joke to start with,” They giggle.
[M:] So next to that (8) was The Endless Forest, which was sort of an anti-game. It was like ‘you play a deer, in a forest, and you can’t talk, and you can’t level up’, ha ha! And there’s lots of things you can’t do, and that’s, like, cool! ? Once ToT created a forest it took a long time for the project to fully emerge. Originally they were not at all clear about what this forest would be or how it would evolve. There was not a single deer in the prototype forest that was presented, for example.
One of the reasons E8Z! had decided to stop Wirefire was that they found its ‘liveness’ both limited and limiting. Wirefire could only be live once per week, while Auriea and Michael were performing in it:
M: It only lived an hour per week, while there were still people who were very valid and active participants there. They could probably do a performance themselves or whatever. So that’s where the idea of a persistent world came from. Everybody could be present in the environment, and there’s no division between the artist and the audience.
So the idea was to create The Forest as a persistent world depending for its aliveness on its inhabitants rather than its creators. It took a while to get it started as they were busy working on 8. They only went back to work on The Forest in 2005 once it was clear that 8 was too weird and different a game for it to get commercial funding. By then, they had also realised how difficult and expensive these games are to produce, and what building the full design of The Endless Forest would mean in terms of money and time… Eventually, they came up with the idea of chopping the Forest’s complex design into pieces, seeking arts funding to produce each piece and release these sequentially.
From the very beginning of their career, first as E8Z! and then ToT, Auriea and Michael have explored ways for their work to be financially self-sustainable: as E8Z! they did a great many commercial projects, for example projects like Museum of Sex (2002), Making Waves and Next Wave Festival (2002-3), Oblomow (2006); and never sought arts funding. Instead, they sustained their art through the income generated by their web design. They even tried to raise money through the art itself: skinonskinonskin was presented as a pay-per-view project, whereas the Godlove Museum has recently been rebuilt in flash and is available to download for a fee of 20 euros. And, although as ToT they have been dependent on arts funding for the development of The Endless Forest and have not generated any income as yet, their brief is to produce commercial games people will want to pay for.
The Endless Forest is available to download and play for free. This is because it was released piece by piece, and so ToT felt that they couldn’t charge for the first very basic version of the game. Auriea explains that another reason they don’t charge is that this is their first game environment, and they wanted to have as many people/deer in the forest as possible in order to test how the environment works and receive feedback from players. This is a way for them to demonstrate their abilities as game developers and become known in the gaming world. They think that this approach worked as there are more than 13,000 deer currently roaming in the forest (!), and they can see that there is an audience out there interested in their work. This is unlike most net art practices, which are normally accessible online and open to all. Why do Auriea and Michael think that it is OK to ask people to pay to view their work?
It all started because they only wanted a ‘serious’ audience to be able to access their work, explains Auriea. To them, skinonskinonskin was a very personal project, and they wanted to ensure that it would only be accessed by people who would make an informed and conscious decision to visit it. This was more of a symbolic gesture than a real attempt to generate income, claims Auriea. People had to pay minimal fees, and the money generated was shared. Charging people to view the project was just a way of protecting the piece ? and themselves? by anyone who wasn’t interested enough in it.
Charging for downloads of the Godlove Museum is not the same: this time, they really felt that, since re-building the project on a more sustainable technical platform to make it fully accessible was really hard work, it is only fair to ask people who want to download this new version of the project to pay a fee. They did not know whether this would work, and they saw it as an experiment in e-commerce. They both find it difficult to understand why paying for net art is so taboo: people pay for books, magazines, movies, music and games… They pay for a night out with friends. They often pay exuberant prices to collect art objects shown in galleries. Why is it taboo to charge people to view and/or download a net art piece? E8Z! ask. People even pay for the technology to view the piece, like their hardware, software, and Internet connection, says Michael, rather baffled. The only thing they refuse to pay for is the art itself…
I have to admit that I am the culprit of this attitude myself. When I realised I could download a new version of the Godlove Museum for 20 euros, I thought, ‘Well, that’s only fair; that’s not more than I would pay for a book’, but for some reason, I was still resistant to the idea… In the end, I didn’t buy it. I can’t even explain why I didn’t buy it! Why this resistance to pay for art on the Internet? I ask E8Z!:
A: I think it’s the arts community and the way they’re used to relating to what people produce. ‘Art should be free’ someone said to us, you know. We’re like, well, you pay for movies and music… But the sad thing is that most people wouldn’t look at it seriously, even if it were free and online. And I think that this is what happened with net art: people stopped looking at it seriously, stopped examining it. With games, it is completely different. People seriously look at it. They’ll play a game that lasts twenty hours, you know? They’ll play it all the way through, and then they’ll play it repeatedly and again so they can do a speed run and then do it in two hours. And then they’ll record it and put it on YouTube. So it’s a different audience, and that’s the audience that we decided we like better. Not only will they look at, dissect and criticise what you’re working on, but they’ll also pay for it.
Michael thinks that the privacy of a net art experience is another factor that deters people from paying for it: it lacks social status. Visiting a gallery, going to the cinema, and going out with friends are all social activities that may help define one’s identity as a popular, well-educated, cultivated, intelligent person. On the other hand, viewing art online in the privacy of one’s house is something that no one will even know… Why on earth would one want to pay for such a ‘pervert’ experience? Laughs Michael. Whatever the reasons this doesn’t work, it doesn’t: hardly anyone has paid to download the Godlove Museum…
Tale of Tales considers it extremely important that they eventually produce projects people will want to pay for. Whether this is called art or entertainment is, for them, irrelevant. They have never wanted to work within a pure art context, says Auriea, as art means nothing to the culture. Absolutely nothing. They have always worked on the borderline between art and something else, like crafts or entertainment, that is more relevant or accessible to popular culture. They think that games are much more successful in involving their users in two-way communication than many ‘interactive’ art projects have been.
It emerges that they have both been keen game-players themselves. Auriea gets very excited talking about the first games she played. Tomb Raider, for example, was a huge inspiration, she laughs. There has been a very strong community element about many MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) games, and ToT greatly like this. It reminds them of the early Internet. It is about communication, exchange, and limited hierarchy.
M: For many game-players, playing becomes interwoven within the fabric of their lives, and this is another element that Auriea and Michael like about games: this blurring of the boundaries between reality and fiction, when the fairytale becomes part of one’s everyday life. This is how they experienced Wirefire while it was still active, as another space, always available, where they could withdraw together once per week. They hope that this is how The Forest experience will be for its players:
A: So you go in the forest and play for five minutes and then you go off and do whatever you want. Or you come back to your machine, you notice that it’s playing, you ran around for a little while and then you stop. And so it becomes a part of your life, you know… Something that you play for a few minutes, but then it stays with you for the rest of the day. Or something you think about every now and then… Or you want to go back and visit a certain place, you know… For us that’s what Wirefire was too, like this place we visited for an hour every week.
Do they think that The Endless Forest is similar to other popular virtual environments like Second Life? Yes, they both think that it is, because, like Second Life, the main aim of the environment is for people to socialize, hang out together, have fun and possibly collaborate, while it lacks the central attributes of other MMO games such as specific rules, tasks, targets, violence and competition. On the other hand it differs from Second Life in that is is an authored environment. Whereas SL duplicates elements of RL within a virtual context, The Forest is a fairytale world and places its users straight within a specific narrative. Auriea and Michael’s work has always been about story-telling: they might not produce linear stories with plots, but they like to create narrative environments that transport audiences/users from their everyday lives into the context of open-ended, multi-layered fictional worlds.
ToT are currently developing a new project called The Path. This is a single-player PC game they hope will become a commercial project that people will be willing to pay for. The Endless Forest experience makes them think that there is an audience out there that appreciates their work, and this is an audience that they would like to approach. Incidentally, although there are no official studies or statistics, ToT have evidence from the players that participate in the Forum. that the majority of their players are female, which is unlike most other MMORPGs. ToT hope that, eventually, they will become independent of public arts funding by being able to generate commercial income.
[M:] There is an audience there, so we think that maybe we should work together with the audience rather than the funders. Maybe that’s a deal we can do with them, like ‘you pay, we make, OK?’ ha ha! We’ll see, it’ll be an experiment…
I think that by now it wouldn’t come as a surprise to say that, when asked about their influences (other than games!) Auriea and Michael refer to paintings: they talk about Baroque and Gothic art; Michael also talks about old Flemish painters. They talk about their love of craftmanship and they attempt to shock me by stating that ?cathedrals are the best 3D narrative environments?. They consider themselves ‘conservative’ (this is a word they repeat quite often) because they insist on story-telling, figuration, and content. They are against cynicism. They believe in hope and beauty. Through their art they want to affect communities and give people joy. And they talk about their work with such affection, as if they speak of a child: Auriea describes how she feels physically ill when their server is down…
Do they come from another time?
Well, whatever era they come from, I wish the best of luck to these two pragmatic-dreamers-in-love…
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Edward Picot, originally from Hertfordshire in the UK, now lives in Kent with his wife and daughter. He completed his Ph.D in English Literature in 1997 and then published his thesis in book-form ‘Outcasts from Eden: Ideas of Landscape in British Poetry since 1945’. It deals with modern landscape poetry in the context of the environmental crisis, and includes substantial essays on five postwar British poets Philip Larkin, R S Thomas, Charles Tomlinson, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. It also examines the recurring myths of Eden and the Fall, which have been used to assert and explain the superiority of the countryside or natural world (seen as Eden) to the urban environment (seen as the result of the Fall).
His day job is with the health service but he makes time in his schedule for self-publishing online, where you will find various types of work. He publishes something new every month; usually a piece of criticism for one month, then followed by a visual work the next. In 2003 he set up another web site called The Hyperliterature Exchange[1], a review and directory of Hyperliterature works for sale on the Web, with links to the places where it can be bought. Featuring works by artists and poets such as Mac Dunlop, Peter McCarey, Martha Deed and many others this is well worth investigation.
Edward Picot’s visually playful, web art interpretation of Wallace Stevens’s poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird[2] is a curious artwork for many reasons. Once you have visited the work it lingers in the mind and on each return it maintains a strong freshness. So what is it in this work that compels me to re-experience its particularly strange and magical reasoning?
Most of Picot’s web artwork communicates to a younger generation as well as for adults. For instance the Flash piece created in 2006 called Frog-o-Mighty[3], was a collaboration between himself and his daughter Rachel. In this piece they used as the main props for the story ornaments from their living-room window-sill, and also the window-sill as the setting, the scenery. On his web site Edward says “Many of my recent creative pieces have been either entirely or partially inspired by the games I play with my daughter Rachel. They therefore feature a lot of jokes and toys.” Frog-o-Mighty first appeared online in Autumn 2006 as part of the Art of the Animal Net Art Exhibition, curated and designed by poet and net artist Jason Nelson.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird is an altogether more complex affair, even though it is as equally as approachable as Frog-o-Mighty when first experienced. The poem was originally written by the American poet Wallace Stevens[4], who was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on October 2, 1879, and died at the age of seventy-six in Hartford, Connecticut on August 2, 1955. Stevens main focus and interest was to write on ideas that “revolved around the interplay between imagination and reality and the relation between consciousness and the world.”
Unlike Frog-o-Mighty, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird has a little more interaction, but not much. The only two sections where you can interact (as in clicking) are either at the beginning where you can find some interesting information about the work or at the first page, the main interface for the actual piece itself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not desperately asking for interaction here. In fact, there are many out there who dispute interaction and the process of just habitually clicking away. Interaction itself, can become more of a means to an end. Sometimes it is nice to just let a work appear and happen in front of you.
Picot says “the idea for this version of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird came to me a couple of years ago, when I was working on my own one Saturday and there was a heavy fall of snow. In the middle of the afternoon, whilst waiting for the kettle to boil for my umpteenth cup of coffee, I happened to glance out of the window. In the carpark outside grows a crab-apple tree, which bears very bright red fruit in winter, and because of the snow the apples were looking particularly vivid. On one branch of the tree perched a blackbird – a startling contrast with both the white snow and the red fruit. Pretentious soul that I am, I was immediately reminded of Wallace Stevens’ poem, and almost as immediately it occurred to me that the crab-apple tree would make an excellent interface for a new media version, with the bright red apples acting as buttons to call up the different sections.”[5]
On first entering, you immediately come across a silhouette of a crab-apple tree. There are few plants that create greater intrigue or visual impact during all four seasons than the flowering of a crab-apple tree. Colours can range from dark-reddish purples through the reds and oranges to golden yellow and even some green. On this occasion they are deep red and the tree itself bares no leaves so we must assume that it is winter. Crab-apples are usually no larger than 2 inches in diameter, a perfect fruity, nature-nurtured confectionary for a blackbird to peck into. The Celtic year has 13 months and each month is associated with a particular tree and its contribution to mankind, together with its forms of healing and associating for the month they represent. “The crab-apple is the ancient mother of all orchard trees and Britain’s only indigenous apple tree. The flowers are valuable to insects and the fruit is important to birds.”[6]
Before we even touch upon the role of the blackbird or delve into specific areas of the work’s inner content, there are some interesting elements of symbolism at play. Whether this is deliberate or not, it is of course the artists’ prerogative to leave different measures of ambiguity hanging loose according to their process and decision making, which of course can add an extra nuance to the whole mix. In the Garden of Eden story in the Biblical book of Genesis God charges both Adam and Eve to tend the garden in which they live, commanding Adam not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – we know the rest. Picot’s decision to use the archetypal image of a tree as the interface, offers some interesting parallels that may be not as binary, absolute or as literal as the Biblical book of Genesis. Yet it introduces us to elements that symbolically touch upon religion and metaphysics, which weave in and out through the whole piece.
Much of the religious flavour does echo from Wallace Stevens himself, although not with obvious traditional or orthodox values. He believed that God was a human creation. Yet he was interested in something as equivalent which ruled the universe, our hearts and minds. Through his poetic reasoning he found that complete contact with reality was a closer conduit towards discovering the truth of what we really are. Proposing that, ‘with the right idea, we may again find the same sort of solace that we once found in divinity.’ He felt that humanity could find truth and our own heaven(s) through sensuous apprehension of the world. “This supreme fiction will be something equally central to our being, but contemporary to our lives, in a way that god can never again be.” [7] Whether he felt that god was ever a reality is not clear, yet it is interesting that he believed that humanity could replace whatever void with something equally significant and relevant. He also thought that reality was and is a product of our imagination, this shapes the world.
The various contexts created throughout the “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” might be considered from the romantic point of view as haphazard attempts at defining or identifying the writing subject’s relation to an object that is already ambiguous in itself and is a symbol rich in potential for producing hopes and fears. On ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. Helen Vendler.
This mixture of existential realism, metaphysical and spiritual reflection through the process and practice of poetic discourse settles neatly with Picot’s own contemporary version of, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. As you explore the various audio/visual presentations within each section, which feature stanzas from the poem. Each of the Stanzas introduces or guides you into a specific theme or micro-journey that unfolds before your eyes. The first one begins quite simply, with the visitor being taken to a cartoon image of a mountainous vista then the blackbird, then a zooming into its eye. From then on as you move through the different sections you are taken into different worlds and situations.
It consciously acknowledges the original spirit of the text, whilst introducing a response that at the same time attempts to deal with what these words may mean today. This interpretation of the poem not only gives us the opportunity to appreciate how special the original work is by following the text, whether in order, or haphazardly, but it also creates a moment in time that opens up a rare experience of two creative minds as a kind of collaboration.
There are various other clues within the whole work which can enlighten you of the different influences to Picot’s work. If you click on the eighth crab-apple you are taken to a bookshelf. One of the books on the shelf is called ‘Seeing Things’ which is Oliver Postgate’s autobiography. In the UK, Oliver Postgate [8] was responsible right from the late 1950’s to this day for, the most imaginative and magical children’s television. “He is the creator and writer of some of the most popular children’s television programmes ever seen in Britain. Pingwings, Pogles’ Wood, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and Bagpuss, were all made by Smallfilms, the company he set up with Peter Firmin, and were shown on the BBC between the 1950s and the 1980s, and on ITV from 1959 to the present day. In a 1999 poll, Bagpuss was voted most popular children’s programme of all time.” My personal favourites are Noggin the Nog, Bagpuss and The Clangers.
Moving away from the mystical and magical elements that reside in the piece, there are a few darker moments to experience. One of them is the portrayal of the real-life disaster such as the Hurricane Katrina disaster on Louisiana and connected regions. Images of newspaper reportage, snippets of the carnage and the hurricane are shown, as well as the blackbird flying across the scenery.
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
The role of the blackbird seems to me a kind of spectre, a shadow of ours, Stevens’s and Picot’s consciousness. It takes us through the scenes, introducing with each stanza various points of reference, like a guide. It sees what we see, but opens our eyes to re-imagine or remember certain things, letting us come to terms with our own conclusions alongside the poetry, an important trigger and voice of the work.
I am hesitant in continuing with unearthing more of this work. What I will conclude with is that, what I find personally interesting in Picot’s version of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Is that, it is connected to so many different things that exist outside of the work itself. There are jokes, puns, and some darker moments but all presented in a playful light. The world is a backdrop yet at the same time it still manages to maintain a fresh and simple narrative that can be understood at many levels. It revels in its small bites of aspects of human nature; simple yet profound. On the whole, it is a delightful and beautiful experience that can move you and have you thinking about metaphysical matters as well as real situations. It breaths life into our grey and seriously battered worlds, shining a kind of light which asks us to slow down a little and let go of our socially engineered sensibilities and open ourselves up to a snippet of richness that is not trying to impress how clever it is but how imagination can also be about play.
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