OnRamp Arts is a digital arts organization based in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Since 1997, OnRamp has worked with artists, educational institutions, historians, community members and youth to create digital art projects that investigate the different identities and experiences that make up Central LA.
A list of OnRamp’s recent projects include: “Turning from the Millennium,” a multimedia investigation of LA’s historical trajectory through the eyes of area youth (1999-2000); “Inter:ReActive Space,” an interactive collection of personal and social narratives of urban experience (2001); “Tropical America,” an online game about the histories of the Americas (2001-02); “The Digital Migrant,” a video documentary about Latino immigration and labor in LA (2002-03).
“Cross-Secting LA,” OnRamp’s most current project, uses GIS technology and local knowledge to create an interactive map that can more adequately express the social, personal and economic complexities that make up LA. Cross-Secting LA is a two-year partnership project, involving Los Angeles Trade Technical College, UCLA, community organizations and their respective members. Distribution of Cross-Secting LA will be carried out locally, nationally and internationally, serving to empower local Los Angeles communities, as well as establish Cross-Secting LA as a model for other communities in their search for direction within the 21st century city.
OnRamp Arts can be found online at: www.onramparts.org
Tandem Surfing the Third Wave 4: OnRamp Arts
This is an edited transcript of a phone conversation between Ryan Griffis and OnRamp Arts co-founder Jessica Irish on OnRamp’s past, present and future, the relationship between technology and education, and her move from LA to Boston. Recorded on June 4, 2003.
RG: What’s currently going on with OnRamp and its operations?
JI: We’re in a situation where we’ve had to rethink how we’re running OnRamp, because with the funding situation, we just couldn’t continue staffing the center. So, we’ve got another organization, actually one that we’ve been partnering with, to keep the lab open, and run it out of their program. And we’re sort of shifting into a more nomadic collaborative, more project-based. We were always
project-based, but we’re going to have to continue to become more so, now that we don’t have a lab. See, that was part of the genesis of OnRamp when it first started, was that it was also a center. And at that time, in 1997, it made sense. There wasn’t a lot of interactivity here in LA, in the neighborhood.
RG: The funding situation is something that I was very interested in asking about, as everyone knows how hard non-profits “especially arts and education focused” have been hit during the last few years.
JI: Tiny orgs like us; I mean, it was always pretty hard for us, even during “the bubble.” We’re like, “Wow. Those were the good times?” But we started really, really small with OnRamp in a small storage space. Echo Park is adjacent to downtown LA. It’s a big neighborhood, fairly low income. We had a few donated computers and ten thousand bucks. Over time, we added a lot more physical capacity and started producing projects. The emphasis for me, at least, and my husband, was the projects and not just the space itself. And bringing in different artists to do projects based on a theme, and choosing themes that addressed some locally relevant issue. The projects, in the beginning…we did get some funding for projects. You know, that’s kind of what people want to fund anyway. No body wants to fund a lab, no one wants to fund galleries. They wanted to fund projects, so why not just stick with that? We did get some funding for a project called “Crossecting LA,” which is a mapping project looking at central Los Angeles, using GIS mapping as a way of empowering communities. And we didn’t really know what we wanted to do with it, because we had originally thought that this was going to be a really huge project, and had a big budget. But we only got a fraction of that funded. But this whole idea of letting go and refocusing what we really wanted to work on, I think it’s been good. Now we’re partnering with another institution, and they already have all the facilities. So, that’s great, because it allows us to focus more on projects. But it will be interesting to see how things change, once I move. OnRamp has always had a certain local subject matter, even though once the projects were made, we have gotten a lot of international attention, based on the interest of people abroad for that content. But it’s a little strange. I think it’s better that more people from LA get involved and take it in new directions rather than try to take it to Boston.
RG: So, it sounds like the projects will remain focused on the cultural and geographic locality of central Los Angeles despite your move.
JI: Steven (Metts OnRamp co-founder) and I, we wrote the “Crossecting LA” project looking at central Los Angeles, and that will shift, because we’re not the ones implementing it. So, it’s going to have a different aesthetic, or different conceptual focus. Which is fine with us. And that is going very much to be about Los Angeles. And I think we want to stay on the board and help the organization transition, and also help with the projects because we know so many people whohave done research in LA, to help with that dialogue. After that, I’m not sure that it makes sense to…I could stay on to advise, but OnRamp does have a certain locality specific to that neighborhood really responding to what’s needed and, you know, what isn’t. It’s not a national organization. The work I’m hoping to do in Boston, partnering other institutions and existing non-profits there–it’s a lot of the lessons that we’ve learned and interesting collaborative skills that we’ve learned from OnRamp and developed. I want to implement these in a more organic way, instead of coming in and imposing that business on the neighborhood, getting a better idea of what that need is. I live in Echo Park and I’ve been here since I moved to LA, so it makes sense that it didn’t just come from outer space. It came out of a very specific experience. When we started, I was up at UC Santa Barbara, and felt this huge disconnect. All the dialogue around digital media being so disconnected from, literally, where I lived. And coming back, especially from Santa Barbara, it was pretty dramatic. And Steven, who was teaching art in South Central LA, had the exact opposite experience; you know, so many hostilities, so few resources to actually do anything. So, it just made the most sense for both of us, at that point in time, based on the neighborhood. You know, with my interviews in Boston, people were like, “Are you going to come and bring OnRamp here and do the same thing?” But I think that you have to be responsive in a more integral way to your experience.
RG: So, this is a big shift for you and Steven to be changing your roles in OnRamp.
JI: I think it’s good. There’s a tendency in non-profits to just do it, to do that work until they die. They give up everything to make it happen. It’s kind of a stereotype that’s really true. And having done it, I understand the mentality of it. There’s not a lot of support structures help you not do that. Basically, it’s a way of surviving with a small non-profit. You have to be one of those people who decides to do that or not. The alternative is to be flexible, to say, ” Well, we’re gonna do it the way we think is best.” And we did it for five years: got stuff done, made a certain mark, developed a name, developed the trust of funders. Which is very hard to do when starting out fresh and nobody knows you, and you have all of these kooky ideas. I’m hoping that the people that want to get involved and take it in new directions can build on that in a way that’s interesting. But it’s kind of futile to always want to do the same thing, and antithetical to that idea of trying to apply new media in new ways. It’s always in flux, communities are always in flux. The neighborhood (Echo Park), it’s kind of the first stop for people coming in. It’s a very transitional neighborhood, and a lot of the projects we’ve looked at are about that idea of how migration, or that sort of transitional experience, changes the city and how experience changes your view of urban space or storytelling. Why not have the organization do that too.
RG: One of the things that is really important to me, in OnRamp’s projects is the presence of an unresolved tension between the specificity or locality of where you were working/who you were working with and the utopian, yet homogenizing, promise of digital media and telecommunications. This tension seems to always be there, even if it’s not always in the foreground.
JI: It’s so true. At least for me, and my own work, what I’m always thinking about is that tension between that utopia and what I think of as dystopia. LA is such a great city to work in, if you’re interested in that. We always joke that, “If you like noir, all the scandals are here.” It’s a dramatic city, literally. It’s fun if you have the right attitude. You have to have a sense of irony. You either learn to have fun with it, or you leave. But it’s been interesting to work on projects with people who have had a very different experience. Young kids, immigrant kids, who again, their experience is very different, and even though they might do the same things, they might appraise them differently. So, that was always interesting. The project we did, Turning from the Millennium, you know Norman Klein had written a book, largely around Echo Park, Chinatown, those neighborhoods, and as we were doing research, walking tours, documenting, we would have these conversations with kids and talk to them about how the neighborhood developed. The kids would often say, “Oh, we don’t call this neighborhood this, we call it that.” And he (Klein) was like, “Oh, great! I’m finally finding out what it’s really called!” he loved hearing it from people who were actually occupying the space. It became less a theoretical thing. It actually grounded it “all of his ideas”, which is hard to do, to have in terms of university faculty or artists. There was one, really cool grant that the University of California has for collaborations, either with university or community organizations, so we were able to get a few of those and pay faculty and artists to come in and be visiting artists. It completely put the dialogue on a whole other level. It was kind of a big deal, because it wasn’t about helping out, or doing something “good,” it was about research in a way, about developing a new kind of dialogue and getting it to happen. But even now, I do get frustrated with the level of distraction. For myself, I think, “How can your research be devoid of your actual experience, especially when going through the city is so difficult?” It’s literally overwhelming. Personally, I just can’t understand how you would separate that. A lot of the projects were about trying to have this relationship.
RG: I actually show OnRamp’s projects in undergraduate classes I teach as a way to introduce complexity and dealing with personal experiences; something other than the desire to uncritically reproduce special effects. And I think it usually helps, because the projects are accessible and interesting while also pretty sophisticated. The experiential component to all the projects comes through and, I think, brings people in, which is very useful to me as a teacher.
JI: That’s great to hear. That’s exactly what we wanted. That it resonates outside of here. You could take that same model and tweak it around. We were always surprised by that. With the “Turning from the Millennium” project, we put it up and we felt like nobody in LA cared at all. But the Germans were like “Wow!” Everybody in Germany was really excited, and we were like, “What is this?” It’s also something we’ve been trying to do, to adapt the methodology of the project for development in high school classes. Everywhere, arts funding is down. It’s so cut back. And all that push for everyone to just go out and buy computers …and what are they going to do with them? Of course, they’re just going to mimic what they see on TV. It’s really much more about sifting and thinking about what you’re able to do with media. Those core ideas and core possibilities. Basic ideas, like a layered thing, that you can layer things so easily. To look at things in layers. Then it becomes so much less about, “Wow! Flash MX is out. I don’t know Flash MX, I only know Flash 5,” that sort of fixation on the technological side.
RG: I’m sure it’s effecting primary education as much as higher education. The pressure to churn out people who can work for a particular industry parallels the pressure to keep up with upgrades and industry standards, often to the detriment of other aspects of education.
JI: Right. I mean, I think this applies also to working in new media, keeping the emphasis wholly on the theoretical idea without basic skills, like drawing or visually understanding how sequences work. This is an aside, but I’m teaching this intro to web class right now, and I’m supposed to be having this conversation with my students about interface design, but it always ends up being like graphic design 101. They didn’t get the color info they need, or how to layout a page, or what that means. Pretty basic ideas of the foundations. Before you can go in and make something exciting and interactive, you have to have a basic understanding of the language. And they’ve sort of lost that because they are so consumed with spitting out buzzwords and getting hooked in. I mean, a lot of it they know, just from using the technology on a basic level. It’s a weird balance. It’s an interesting time to be working in it; it’s a challenge to have that right balance of critical thinking and a real foundation of visual language together in a technological setting. The technology always comes last., even in the projects we did with OnRamp. With “Turning from the Millennium,” we spent maybe three months having participants take pictures and talking about them, then throwing them all away–we didn’t keep any of them. Then we finally got an idea of what we really wanted to do. We spent four months walking around and taking more pictures and gathering data. We didn’t actually get on the computers until six months after doing all of this and figuring out what we wanted to do, those ideas that we’d bring into the lab.With the “Tropical America” game, we took four months before turning computers on. They (youth participants) didn’t know anything about history at all. Then we spent two to three months just figuring out that idea that history interrelates, that some moments connect other moments. Again, this idea of connectedness and interrelation became central. That applies in many settings, and of course, the game setting. You don’t turn on a computer as if computers are going to help you figure that out. It was a mental thing, and it was really hard. I mean, you could make a map of all this stuff until the end of time, but at some point you have to figure out, “OK. What are we going to do?” But it wasn’t until maybe seven months after we started it that we actually started designing something that would work on a computer. And then another month went by, and we were like, “OK. We’re ready to get on the computers now.” And everything’s like that. All our interactive projects draw on our neighborhood, on our experience. Map your apartment, write a story, a mystery, re-write it. I think it’s frustrating, it’s tiring, it’s hard to build in that time, and it’s one of the luxuries we’ve had. Well, it’s not a luxury, but a thing we’ve learned is that good collaborations take time. A lot of times, in educational settings, it’s hard to squeeze something into a semester. University of California schools operate on quarters, which are only ten weeks, so it’s even worse. But that is an important part, that commitment, taking that time to flush all of that out.
RG: That really comes across in OnRamp’s projects. It’s hard to imagine getting that level of complexity without that extended period of research and predesign. When you started OnRamp, did you feel like you had other models to follow or work from? There are only a few well-documented examples I know of where artists critically engaged educational efforts, Tim Rollins with KOS and Ben Caldwella’s KAOS for example.
JI: With media arts, and sort of educational artists–whatever that is–is a pretty small circle, and it didn’t take long to figure out who’s doing what. I think that it’s definitely valuable to look at what other people are doing, and I’ve definitely learned from those other organizations like Ben and KAOS and Reach LA. Actually, before OnRamp, I was doing a UC program with the Long Beach Museum of Art that was a really intense program. But it was very empowering, just learning how to do that. It was only a two and a half week program, but we worked on one project all day, everyday. And it was amazing what we got to produce. Part of OnRamp was realizing that we didn’t have to compress everything like that – we could extend it. But we didn’t have a model in mind. At least Steven and I didn’t. It was really kind of an experiment. “Let’s see if we can get this thing open. Hopefully something good will come out of it.” A lot of our projects began with something pretty nebulous. For “Turning from the Millennium,” we said, “Let’s write a grant about the past, present and future of the neighborhood.” We wrote it and thought, “This sounds good, it sounds interesting.” But I didn’t have an idea of what it was going to look like, or how much work it would be. When we finished it, I was in shock over how much content we were able to find. I had no idea. What’s really amazing is the things that the kids (working with us on the project) found. One of them had all of these audio interviews with her neighbor that grew up in these areas with all these oil wells and drilling where she describes her experiences there. And you know, we stumbled across things like this unknown part of LA’s history. We would find something and say, “Wait a minute. This is where the 101 Freeway is, but it says here that it’s a graveyard! What happened? And now it’s the site where the LA Unified School District is, so this is weird.” And then this kid found these interviews and a neighborhood woman said, “Oh, I remember when they were digging that up. There were bones everywhere.” And this was so funny and amazing. You think, “this really is a place for noir.” Even with the game, “Oh, it’d be great to make a game.” But we had no idea what it would end up being. So it’s out of that sense of dialogue and the other people involved, their perspective and what they bring to it. It’s kind of a funny position to be in, especially with funders, that sense of openness. If you’re an artist, you’re open with the process and if you’re a good artist you’re willing to change it up and experiment all the time. Applying the same model to an organization is hard because funders don’t want that. They’re like, “What are you going to do with the money?” And you’re like, “We don’t know.” In a way, you have to get them excited about the idea of discovery, rather than fearful around the idea of an unknown. I think that once they do get that idea and see that that is valuable in and of itself, but also that you have a track record of doing stuff. It’s not like we just sit around having these conversations and feeling good and that’s the project. At the end of the day, we have a record of putting things together. We’re artists, and we want to have that in the end, that’s the whole point. So, over time, I think we’ve been able to make funders a whole lot more comfortable with that.
So, how did you first hear about OnRamp?
RG: Let me think…it was through the LA Freewaves “TV or Not TV” program. There was a video production that featured you and Steven and some of the work going into the “Turning from the Millennium” project I think. After that, I remember looking up the projects online, about the time that the “Tropical Americas” game was released. While visiting a friend at UC Irvine last year I caught your presentation of the game to David Trend’s class, which was an unexpected treat.
JI: One of the things that I have wanted to do with that game, that I’m going to work more on, is developing a curriculum for using the game in class because it’s really smart and if you pay attention, you can get a lot out of it. But, I know, for a lot of people, they’re going to say, “Oh, it’s really cool and funny and sad. And I’m going to win it.” And they’ll enjoy it also, but it’s hard to gauge. There are a lot of decisions and ideas for why things were structured the way they were. The idea was to not do that kind of thing where it’s an “educational game.” Where Christopher Columbus goes, “Hi. I did this and that!” And you pay attention and then you get to play with little animations. So, at certain levels in the game you can quit out of it and then actually have a class discussion about why it was designed that way. After you play the game, you get the database. The whole idea of tying on the database later – to be able to go research the actual history then come back: you’re taking what you traditionally do in a classroom. Like a history class, with readings, writing, research, debates. At least that’s how it should be. Applying that to the game structure, you would use the game as the starting point. The kids we worked with for a year, at that level were seniors, and none of them even knew who Columbus was on the first day. There’s obviously something that they’re not getting in school. It’s like a machine; it’s so overcrowded. It’s about just showing up, like it’s a warehouse. So once they started doing all of the research and design, they really liked the storytelling aspect of looking at history. It really brought them in and they were involved in debating how to organize everything. They felt more ownership by the end of it. They also had an image. They loved symbols. They’re the ones that made up the game’s symbols. I think that’s important as a way of making things more relevant for young people in particular, because obviously it’s not working now. When I recently interviewed at another school, there was a lot of traditional approaches to many things there. It makes many people nervous looking at games, multimedia, whatever. I say to them, “At the end of the day, it’s not going away. So you might as well engage it in a way that you think is appropriate.” And they usually reply, “You’re right. It’s not going away.”
Following the honorary mention of OpenForge (an open-source development network) at the Prix Ars Electronica this year, the following question surely needs to be asked: when will art institutions look sideways at commerce and how software companies and developers have adapted to use the network as a fused combination of space for initiation, collaboration, dispersion, distribution and beyond to do likewise for art forms and disciplines such as net art. Net art having a long history of practitioners who are programmers, it seems that obstacles and technical hurdles lie in the domain of the institutions rather than the artist.
One such approach is Ars Publica, “a digital art publisher and agency established for providing and funding new media art, activities and resources in affiliation with the art server Noemata.net,” currently supported by the Council of Cultural Affairs in Norway. Yet cultural or physical borders don’t hold for this open content site.
Through a no-restrictions policy, regardless of where the content originated or what language is used, their “policy is to support collaboration, community, transparency and immediacy in the arts: net art, media art, correspondence/mail art, network art, context art, or other otherness and marginal artifactualizations.” The server space embraces art work and its byproducts in all shapes and forms, functioning and non-functioning; in fact, it revels in the successes, changes and even failures of the combinations of art and technology, documenting work as it is, in an almost dadaesque manner.
Individuals and institutions can participate in two ways: they can add, modify or remove material on the server to contribute to the work; or they can purchase shares of noemata.net…
“Shares can be browsed and purchased from the catalogue, establishing ownership in Noemata. The art will usually be delivered to you prior to your order. Digital art being freely available on the net, the audience–potential buyer–is already the owner of the art work; it is already distributed and downloaded by being browsed, much like quantum mechanics, readymades, Zen, or similar commodities. In addition, the art of Noemata is open-content licensed (meaning no fee can be charged for it); so that’s another problem–no order, no payment (if you figure out a way to pay us we’ll consider whether to accept it or not). By buying shares of Noemata in the form of art, we in Ars Publica fancy having provided a solution where you can order something you already possess and purchase something for which you may not be charged. These are problematic issues, maybe paradoxical. We’ll have a shot in the arm at it.”
While Ars Publica should be felicitated on its approach, it does seem like the attempt lacks dedication to posterity. True, art can be added in any way, but how is that art contextualized? How does it exist in relation to the piece next to it? And how will it be cataloged for users?
Lastly, because of the nature of the work that Ars Publica contains (often collaborative, contributory and variable), and the fact that it can contain many works, how do we define the border between the works and the space? Where are the indications you would have in a classic space such as a gallery, indications disposed of to free the space yet possibly to the compromise of context? How do we stop the space itself from just becoming an immense collective net-art work in itself? Is this good or bad? Do we consider galleries as collective art works?
For more information on Ars Publica and their approach see the site or [url=mailto:contact arspublica@kunst.no]contact arspublica@kunst.no[/url]
A special feature from Net Art Review. You can find more reviews and information about the NAR team at http://www.netartreview.net
January 2004
When taking part in TEK’s Trondheim Matchmaking conference in Norway at the end of 2003, I was struck by the urgent need for the positive function and action of people getting together to show what they are up to; not necessarily with the aim of declaring one’s own egoistic mission or networking alone, but to see what others are actually doing. Technology has brought about the rise of many different factions so diverse, that to pin it under a single; centralized term such as “New Media” seems almost ludicrous. One begins to realize how liberating it has been to all, in respect of the exploration of digital creativity and its widening, rule-breaking fluidity in having no static established definition.
So there we all were nearing the end of the event, late evening, worn down by all the talking, the listening, the thinking, the consuming of everyone’s ideas and contributions. The remaining die-hards, ‘ahem’, were rabidly guzzling down the expensive Norwegian beer. Washing away all that carefully attained information gathered during the conference, numbing our sore and bruised craniums. Suddenly, a techno beat cranked its potent, noisy presence into the melee, drowning out the sea of voices. A projection screen lit up and the crowds were instantly diverted from their liquid dominated haze, to witness a performance by the dynamic electro duo called “Videohometraining”. A live sound & video concert based on classic computer games.
The performance starred Marieke and Gijs, up on the screen as animated super 2d fantasy heroes, video game avatars, using high-end vector FX. The whole show was controlled live on stage via their physical selves, from their lab-tops, incorporating a funky mix of noisy sound samples with cut up animations. The epic series featuring iconic game characters such as Transformers and Lara Croft forged an immediate connection born of deep familiarity with the audience. They fought against dark forces in the form of various aliens, spaceships and dangerous clones of bikini-clad women. Their performance reminded me of the 1982 Disney movie Tron written and directed by Steven Lisberger. Like Tron caught up in virtual landscapes, these electric warriors possess heroic superhuman strength.
They have focused and finely tuned their creative talents to formulate a type of audiovisual work that refers to contemporary genre of pixel art. Incorporating a mix of sub-culture, game culture and their own identities in the work itself. A lo-tech initiative that is compatible with a wider audience and beyond art esthetics. This work is definitely more at home in a progressive club culture than the sparse white traditional walls of a white cube gallery.
In Le Catalogue, the mastermind behind www.h-arn.org has created a database of documentary images (an archive) of art projects between 1990-1996 available for public access. Every time an image is viewed, a horizontal and vertical line forming a cross are added to the archived image, which is then again stored for access by another user. The more the images are accessed, the more they are abstracted or — if one is thinking of preservation — destroyed.
Here the archive is similar to analog vinyl records losing their fidelity and being slightly deteriorated every time the needle passes through the groove. Unlike a record player, however, which is fabricated with the aim to provide the least damage possible while offering an aesthetic experience to the user, Le Catalogue actually makes the most of destruction in order to create a unique image for the present user. The image is unique in time and space because next time the same file is accessed, there will be two more lines added, and so on. In this way, Le Catalogue takes on the idea of destruction as a progressive movement, bringing on the new; and so, one can look forward to destruction as a type of online collaboration, where the archived is not preserved but rather reinterpreted as constant shifting information. History is here dependent on linear traces that expose the instability of interpretation; much like tree rings, traces are left behind by the process of development, leaving us with an allegorical database presenting destruction as an inevitable part of life.
A special feature from Net Art Review.
You can find more reviews and information about the NAR team
———————
WarProductWar is in a constant state of flux with much deep linking. Every now and then some links break due to change of URLS, images and then other new links arrive. A perpetual multi-collage that shifts its contextual shape as time goes by.
When you have jumped into the site, you are inflicted by an influx of images, text, sounds and moving visuals. An intense barrage of all things related to America’s crusade and war against terrorism: the cost, financial dealings or news pictures, reporting images of the world’s civilians slaughtered in the name of War Against Terror. A sobering net journey. When exploring the many thumbnail links, with pop-up windows declaring news information about corporations such as Exxon gaining record-breaking profits of $7bn during the start of the three-month period of the war in Iraq.
The piece’s pace is heightened with the constant changing of large images in the main browser, the work’s backdrop, whilst clicking on smaller windows at the front. Many of these images feature men in safety helmets (all white) on oil rigs. Because there is so much in this site, you can be sure that you are not likely to come across everything with only one visit. You have a visual countdown and voice repeatedly counting down “5,4,3,2,1”. Then you hear inserted sounds of a synthetic trumpet, war music and chants along with various other snippets of audio: explosions, lift music, advertisement music and birds singing before the rattle of atomic bombs.
It convinces the user or viewer that war is most definitely tied up with product. One observes the cataloguing of all those maimed and dead civilians in contrast to the figures for corporate profits rising. Things begin to get even darker as you continue to click through the various avenues of the site. A feeling of helplessness begins to take over as one is overloaded with the intensity and seemingly unstoppable hunger of America’s corporations, complicit in the process of killing people for profit, backed by governmental greed for global power. And then you slump into a void, inertia.
The American people are constantly trapped in a conduit of intense fear and paranoia compared to the rest of the western world regarding war coverage. The use of such words such as “collateral damage” instead of “dead civilians”, and misleading reports, such as that about the attack on the Afghan wedding party was first presented as “Coalition bomb goes astray” when it was not a coalition bombing, it was American led. Even though the UK has its own issues with propaganda and the elimination of truth, actual events and the history surrounding mass graves and killings of civilians are remixed, spliced and blatantly re-invented. News corporations continue to get away with quite literally promoting murder via misinformation.
The whole piece comes across like a massive, perpetually shifting billboard. Everything is very bold and direct, yet there are also subtle layers of information and smaller windows that one does not notice until a page is closed. Much like Joy Garnet’s The Bomb Project and Ruth Catlow’s One among 400,000, this work by Mark Cooley is an art piece, consisting of Internet-based networked information. This is net art as information offering a political subjectivity. For declaring subjectivity is to declare context, if that is eliminated, cut up and pared down by the corporate media via divisive means such as propaganda, then the real substance, spirit and essence of humanity is much easier to deny.
WarProductWar shows (and often quotes from) the pornographic nature of tactical news and its overbearing broadcasting of the spectacle, its bombardment of the mind via sensationalist means. Social intimacies are abstracted to a point of nonsensical confusion.
Information in the Expanded Field: a Case Study
Information-Society, -Technology, -Arts, -Overload.
The supposed shift into the “Information Age” is a shift that’s hard to think outside of. It’s something that we’re told occurred quite a while ago now, sometime between WWII and the first successful packet sent over the Darpanet, yet it remains a promise for the future. The term “Information Age” suggests that the most important thing being produced now is information in the form of knowledge, data and formulas as opposed to things made of bronze or steel. Likewise, the economy is said to be one trafficking in services, like data processing and telemarketing, rather than the manufacturing of cars and kitchen appliances. Of course, as some (if not enough) have pointed out, the complimentary myths of the “Service Economy” and “Information Age” are dependent on a highly selective field of vision that excludes the simultaneous existence of “older” economies. The “Information Age” is the surface of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, where the machines of production are working well beneath the surface.
Tonight (7 November 2003), I happened to be flipping through the nightly news programs on the major US television networks, changing the stations as commercials came on. Not so surprisingly, the main stories covered by each network were exactly the same in subject and perspective; they were even chronologically presented in similar order by the white, male lead anchors. Tonight, it was U.S. casualties in the ongoing war in Iraq and new bombing activities, a South Carolina high school’s militant drug raid on students, rising rates of employment, and high beef prices. Another not-so-surprising observation: the commercials were the same across the networks as well-cell phones and car insurance being the most consistent. Without going into yet another discussion of the homogenization and consolidation of media resulting from corporate mergers (Bill Moyers’ NOW show is a good starting place for that discussion), viewing this sameness of information within what is considered to be a highly competitive industry presents some interesting problems in terms of our evolving relationship to mediated knowledge and what to do with it.
“The system had become closed, had become a massive machine for reproducing its own assumptions, had reached in the orbital model a condition of stasis.“[1]
Peter Halley, in On Line, meditates on what he sees as the completion of the modernist project to subjugate Nature. Using the visual metaphor of the line, Halley textually illustrates the completeness of the archive, of the ordering of information into linear constructs that are as insulated from Nature as the copper wire used to upload this text to the Web. For Halley, the reproduction and distribution of information “through endless systems of linear technology”? Represents the closing of the circuit, the final process where Culture looks at Nature and sees itself. The semiconductor is the atomization of the same Cartesian logic that produced the National Highways linking horizontally expanding housing developments and mini-malls, now freed from the constraints of urban necessities.
It’s interesting rereading essays like On Line that were conceived before the Internet hype became mainstream, before non-linearity became pedestrian. The notion of a linear logic dominating technological discourse runs so counter to most of what has been written about new information technologies since the Web that it is almost hard to even consider seriously. Recent events have shown that systems are far from closed and secure, be it the spectacular terrorist attacks of 9/11 or the more mundane ubiquity of PC viruses and worms that keep managing to find holes in Microsoft’s security. Such events also make apparent the major fallacy of Halley’s dystopic vision of the present: namely, it continues the euro- and US-centric belief in superior centrality within its critique of Reason. An assertion that Culture has become completely self-referential does not even make attempts to engage interests that have not profited from Western centrality, and most likely have a stake in de-stabilizing it.
Halley’s conception of the linear is based upon formal, visual phenomena, rather than the use, function and cultural significance of technology and communication. There may be an overwhelming power directing how IT is developed, but I would argue that it’s not to be found in the visual logic of the line, but in the ideological forces of social relations and the aesthetics of control. From the vantage point of 2003, it’s much more obvious that economic power need not appear linear, or in any particular fashion for that matter.
This is not to say that Halley’s critique, on loan from Baudrillard and Virilio, is not useful. The acknowledgement of history and ideology is completely needed in dialogues about technology and Nature. But, I would argue, there are more productive forms of critiquing our relationship with information, ways that consider the gaps in the circuits and what can be let in through them. There are many directions that such a discussion could go, many things that could be built upon, but here I would like to consider some of the recent artworks by Ricardo Miranda Zuniga in the context of information and linearity.
Miranda Zuniga’s works are appropriate for such a discussion, I believe, because, for one, information distribution and representation are such obvious parts of their production. Secondly, these works utilize the technology Halley saw as the ultimate expression of the “closure of the system”: the personal computer. Miranda Zuniga’s use of the computer represents the state of globalized information as overdetermined by a complex set of beliefs and structures, yet a system that, because of its complexity, remains open to modification and disruption. Using various representational tactics, from digital games to interactive sculpture and video, the subjects addressed range from illegal immigration and labor to the ecological impact of global development. There is a meta-text that runs through all the works however. Zuniga does not seem to be concerned with the authenticity of data, but with the very processes that determine what is considered data to begin with. What information should be considered relevant and significant regarding decisions, including those both personal and organizational, appears to be an politically charged question in Zuniga’s works.
For Public Broadcast Cart, a work completed for the Wireless Lab Park Days in New York City (September, 2003), Zuniga constructed a mobile radio transmitting station on a common grocery cart. The transmissions occupied three spaces: the audible space of the cart itself (via speakers mounted to the cart); an FM radio frequency; and an Internet-based audio broadcast (via the thing.net). Visitors to City Hall Park were invited to create their own broadcast for the three potential audiences.
Due to the ongoing policy struggles over the relaxation of media consolidation regulations by the Federal Communication Commission, as well as older attempts to expand the use of low power FM stations, the Public Broadcast Cart takes on specifically political meanings. But it is the intersection of the explicitly political with the potential for increased subjectivity that creates a subtle tension. Such tension is exacerbated further by the actual device used as the point of interaction- the shopping cart – highlighting the utopianism of the project as indeed transient and literally “homeless.” Much like the earlier Homeless Cart project of Krzysztof Wodiczko, the Public Broadcast Cart is a utopian gesture that simultaneously points at the absurdity of the situation.
This situational absurdity, the overwhelming layers of contradictions that engulf social relations, are everywhere in our information environment. The decisions we make, and the ones that others make for us, are based on data sets that are abstractions of other data, like charts, graphs and satellite images. It is these types of pictorial data that are considered “real” information now, not the front-page photographs that are easily misleading through cropping or outright manipulation. We are now more comfortable learning about the “human condition” through programmatically generated data and models based on algorithms. Miranda Zuniga’s Daily Headline Deaths (2002) reported instances of deaths by the New York Times are compressed into simplified visual icons. A Virtual Landscape (2001) reveals the loss of emotional autonomy in the face of basic economics and the desire for identification with work. Information about our surroundings can be delivered in ever more efficient bits, in mobile and easily digestible formats. But it seems it can always be more efficient; an icon, for example, can more easily sum up a headline since there are only so many kinds of stories to begin with, right?
It may be easy to say that the solution to every problem is the individual’s, but the redundancy in the archive of problems, along with the mediated nature of the data used to assess those problems, makes it a bit more complicated. As Victor Burgin once wrote:”A Response to the radical heterogeneity of the possible has always been the homogeneity of the permissible, offering us the images of the roles we may adopt, those subjects we may become, if we are ourselves to become socially meaningful.”
(from “Work and Commentary,” 1973)
Nexum ATM another recent project, takes as it’s overt subject matter the historical military presence of the U.S. around the world within the context of actions by the current Bush Administration. The Nexum ATM website is only part of a larger work that includes an interactive, sculptural ATM machine (installed at the Bronx Museum during the Summer of 2003). The form of both the website and interactive sculpture utilize what could be called a tactic of “parodic appropriation”, developed since the 1980s by aesthetic-activists like Gran Fury and Hans Haacke, and now groups like subRosa, Critical Art Ensemble, and The Yes Men. Here the formal aesthetics of commerce, line graphs and “functionality,” are conflated with the details of past and current US military interventions to make the obvious connection between commercial and military motives.
It would be easy to shrug off this representation of information that anyone who’s ever heard of Chomsky has heard before. But to take such a flippant view would be to accept the information at face value and not engage the representation. Nexum ATM is playing with what Alex Galloway has called “phrasing”- the “collapsing of conceptual distance” that creates a situation of content-evacuation and the simplification of complex social relationships.” [2] Parodic appropriation reverse engineers this process of phrasing, seeking to make the social relationship more complex rather than simplified. Even the connection made between U.S. economic and military investments in Nexum are complicated through the use of a competitive sports metaphor. A lone (patriotically outfitted) Greco-Roman wrestler performs moves on invisible competitors while visitors read about various U.S. invasions. The image of the wrestler seems to be part of the phrasing, referencing the corporate appropriation of the competitive signifiers of “American masculinity”, but it becomes overly exaggerated and disrupts the comfort of easily consumed information.
The question “What is to be done?” has been going around again, asking for ideas of social action and collective problem solving. Collaborative blogs, diversified mailing lists, creative campaigns, and more have been created, dispersed, uploaded and downloaded by relatively large groups of people working to create and promote other ways of communicating, organizing and living in opposition to dominant broadcast models. At the center of all of this seems to be Information, and the latest index of its importance is the World Summit on the Information Society to be held in Geneva this December.
For Halley in 1987, information seemed to be irrelevant for those isolated individuals who “may live a few feet apart in adjacent apartments, in adjacent buildings, on the same floor, without ever meeting or considering each other’s existence.” Now, we may not know our neighbor, but the lucky might have an expansive, virtual social network. The expanded field of information should not be taken at face value, however. It is a field divided by many fences, not unlike those that the Latino immigrant protagonist in Miranda Zuniga’s online game Vagamundo crossed only to experience what Mike Davis and Alessandra Moctezuma have referred to as the “Third Border.” [3]
The surface of this expanded field is covered with bright green Bermuda grass, hiding the network of subterranean tunnels that keep it irrigated. Maybe the circle that Halley viewed as a closed line was actually the outline of a hole yet to be dug. Hopefully we’re preparing ourselves for what’s below the surface.
Ricardo Miranda Zuniga’s works can be found at http://www.ambriente.com
[1] Halley, Peter, “On Line,” Blasted Allegories, The New Museum of Contemporary Art & MIT Press, 1987
[2] Galloway, Alex, “Fonts and Phasing,” Digital Delirium, St. Martin’s Press, 1997
[3] Narratives of Power and the Power of Narratives: Transformation along the U.S.-Mexico BorderÂ
The Finnish duo Pink Twins, the brothers Vesa and Jusu Vehvilainen, started to work together in 1997. Since then they have been exploring visual and sonic noise combined in a most physical experience. Sampling the everyday images and tearing them apart to pixels then putting them together again to a chaotic and blasting unity.
In their works, in such as Slow and Fast (2001), Let it Beep (2002) and Purple Drain (2002), they have transferred the reality to a abstract flow of flickering colourful images and scratchy and noisy sounds. Using their own developed program Framestein, programmed by Jusu, the images is real-time transferred to an own aesthetic of digital ever-changing visions reminding of powerful paintings and where the original input is hardly recognisable. The fact that they use common images as a input seems not very important since the output seems to have very little to do with normal perception.
Scratches, fuzz, noises and weird and warped rhythms are combined with images to a mosaic flow that which you perceive not only with your seeing but with all your senses. The result spellbinds you and surrounds you with a complexity. What they achieve puts you inside the a digital dynamic weave of crumbles of the reality.
L’art pour l’art can be descriptive for Pink Twins works but maybe there is more a direct and physical experience of the art than an experience through theory and intellectuality. And this gives Pink Twins the advantage.
RG: A lot of your work utilizes sculptural and spatially interactive elements as well as virtual/networked components. How do you see your work functioning in these different arenas?
RMZ: The majority of the work I do draws from current sociopolitical issues that I feel must be publicized and protested. In so far as creating art that attempts to approach activism, I question the relevance and potential of on-screen virtual/networked art. I believe that in order to create work that embraces activism the work presents greater potential when embodied in the physical space, more importantly the public space to create dialogue between diverse individuals. Of course, I can’t negate the web’s power as a communication and dissemination vehicle, therefore, nearly all the projects that I do have a web component in which information, creative visualization and related links are presented to support the sculptural elements of a given project. Although, today I give greater weight to the embodied space, both arenas, the physical and virtual, present modes of interaction, discussion and contestation that I seek to embrace.
RG: I’ve also noticed that some of your work seems to be a response to specifically curated events, like the Wireless Lab Park Days. Besides the obvious advantages of producing things for venues that already have an audience, what have you found to be pros and cons to this way of working?
RMZ: Although, the Public Broadcast Cart has only been presented at the Wireless Lab Park Days, this is a project that I started working toward before the event was conceived and it is a project that would have been executed regardless of any particular venue albeit perhaps in a different format.
I live in a neighborhood in Brooklyn with a growing Mexican population. Most of these people have arrived here illegally and are eager to work, but many have had to create their own means of sustenance. Amongst the economic means that they have established are mobile flower stores, by taking shopping carts and outfitting them with beautiful arrays of roses. I was struck by the carts themselves as well as how these floral carts establish a strong public presence for the individuals as they push the carts along the sidewalks and streets.
The flower vendors and their carts inspired me to begin building tiny FM transmitters that would be installed within paper crafted flowers that would populate a shopping cart and transform the cart into a radio transmitting tool. The flowers would then be freely given to anyone seeking to inhabit the radio waves. Due to so much radio activity in the area, I had a rough time catching the mini transmitters on the airwaves, so I began to rethink the project. At this time, the Wireless Lab Park Days began to take form. The event helped me to arrive at the final format of the radio cart. I tossed out the miniFM transmitting flowers for a combination of broadcasting via speakers, online radio and a larger 5 watt transmitter and designing the speakers in a way that would visually evoke the flower vendors. So the pros of the event was that it helped me realize the project in an effective manner, that successfully invited interaction, even by people unaware of the wireless event. In general, I would say that realizing a project for a given event may prescribe certain elements to the project and may make the project valuable only to that event. However as wireless nodes continue to spring up, not just here in the states, but throughout Europe and parts of Asia, I do seek to present the project again and continue that old Marxist ideal of freeing the media.
‘Confrontation’ is a collage of 3 elements, variously constructed and channelled by Annie Abrahams/Clement Charmet. They have worked with PHP (the source code is available on request) and Flash, to pull in images from the web, to allow viewers to interject their texts, and to stream an audio recording to the theatre of the webpage.
This work is a cycling, multilingual, taxonomy of human intention at war. Visual and textual language, harvested from the web and input by visitors to the site are fodder for an algorithm which intertwines corporate, promotional and news content with the interior world of the viewer/contributor.
The piece displays web-searched “war” images, (searched in 6 languages) and feeds those images to the page. In front of these are streaming texts, elicited from visitors and meshed with others from “project hope”, an earlier work made in collaboration with Reiner Strasser and Alan Sondheim.
I typed in my own truly earnest response and watched with discomfort as its intended meaning was mutated by association with the texts and images that surrounded it.
CONSECUTIVE TEXTS
“i hope in death there will be no pain
i hope on a rope
i hope a big smack
i do not hope anymore, it is over
i hope that the Prince of Darkness doesn’t exist”
CONSECUTIVE IMAGES
Osama bin Laden
Chewbacca
Sadam Hussein in khakis, caught in a moment of unselfconscious contemplation.
AUDIO
Spoken in short alternating phrases by the wistful, crackled voice of a woman and the deeper, more certain voice of a young man, both in a language that I don’t recognise. At first I assume that they are a grandmother and a grandson- something in the way that they are not listening or responding to each other, just gently, tolerantly speaking in turn. Although the tone suggests emotional engagement it turns out that they are speaking in made up languages.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – -Confrontation, resonates with an element of another recent networked event/art piece called “where r u?” by Here nor There, in which visitors were invited to send via the internet or sms, their answers to the questions:-
“where r u?”
“where would u like 2 b?”
Contributions were cycled randomly within a web page as well as being attached to helium balloons and released to the skies.
‘where r u’ invites a clarification and invocation of one’s dreams. Through a similar application of the technology, Abrahams and Charmet address the subject of conflict in the global community. With a baffling array of associations a new rhetorical form for a collective voice is suggested: a faltering beginners script for the language of the multitude.
confrontation– Abrahams/Charmet
project hope – Reiner Strasser, Annie Abrahams, Alan Sondheim
where r u?- Here nor There (an international artists collective)
November 2003
5 Operas launched at Epping Hall, Essex, UK in June this year. We couldn’t make it to the launch but logged on, watched, and listened in stunned delight. I did post some of my thoughts to art lists at the time but wanted to draw attention to the operas again as they explore the contributory and collaborative possibilities of the Internet in such a fresh and direct way.
The operas are the result of an internet call for opera libretti, exactly 100 words in length, selected and set to music by Michael Szpakowski, sung by students from Epping Forest College and year 5 students from Chipping Ongar Primary School and finally visualised for the web by Michael.
‘Far from being a tokenistic “outreach” project, this work made serious demands on all the participants, which they passed with flying colours.’- Lewis Lacook
In the Operas, we hear kids being allowed to sing new songs that relate in unlikely but very tangible ways to everyday life: songs without sentiment. Songs laughing about the guy who gets drunk on cranberries or pondering perspectives on telepathic communication with aliens; the girls who try to forget their lives by shopping for shoes, while the tabloids talk down to everyone they know, and no one seems that bothered. A fox and a hen miraculously spend an un-murderous evening together while George Washington, oblivious, cogitates on being and nothingness. Lewis Lacook’s exquisite love poem between cup and water.
I was reminded of a double CD that I took out of Walthamstow Library (North East London) a couple of years ago, recordings of old folk tunes, songs and stories from across England and Scotland made by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. These stories and songs were born in contained geographic regions into a slower pace of life and a slower rate of cultural consumption. Stories of the particular, passing through archetype, dream, and myth for protest, human solidarity, survival, and pleasure.
Similarly to the 5 Operas, these recordings expressed, in precise and familiar detail, what it is like to be alive and responsive in the world and what it means to share this experience. Epic theatre’s Bertolt Brecht wrote, ‘There are times when you have to choose between being a human and having good taste..’ I suspect that these works will never be described as tasteful. They pay far too much attention to the details of what it is to be human.
Nov 2003
Since 1998 Beeoff, an artists group, has been working with, what they term as, a new art-scene, a real-time-creation-studio involving the development of new technologies and software. They also have built a physical space/splintermind-studio, infrastructure, live-scene, museum network, residency-program and nonTVTVstation. The group now works with installation and sculptures involving “high-tech, way beyond all the buzz about new media” says Bjorn Norberg, curator for nonTVTVstation.
The latest work brought to us online in real-time from nonTVTVstation is ‘Sperm phase detector’ by the artist Nils Edvardsson. Every other day he frequents the station’s studio to deposit his fresh seed for the online audience to listen to. We do not only hear, we can also actually view the machine as it processes, translates the potentially ‘life-giving’ liquid into audio. It feels like a performance but without the artist literally being there, except in spirit and essence that is.
When observing the static machine and listening to the fuzzy noise of the piece, one’s first impression is that there is not much happening, yet it is live and it is occuring before your very ears and eyes. A white noise dominates, the sound of the semen planted by the artist. One’s associative and relative mind kicks into gear and all the sound references start sliding into place; such as distant waterfalls, television fuzz and whatever else you feel fits into that ‘sonic-art’ category. Visually, it is very still and one finds it hard to believe that it is real-time and that the sound is actually semen, but I have been informed by the curator that it is absolutely live and not a hoax.
So, we are listening to the sound of sperm being transferred as data. A trans materialization of bodily fluid into data for the Internet; abstracted, processed into the networked void. Such inactive creative humour from Nils Edvardsson’s piece is reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s ‘Empire’.
John: Why is nothing happening? I don’t understand.
Henry: What would you like to happen?
John: I don’t know.
Henry: I have a feeling that all we’re filming is the red light.
Andy: Oh, Henry!!!
Henry: Andy?! Now Is THE TIME TO PAN.
John: Definitely not!
Henry: The film is a whole new bag when the lights go off.
John: Look at all that action going on. Those flashes. Tourists taking photos.
Andy: Henry, what is the meaning of action?
Henry: Action is the absence of inaction.
Andy: Let’s say things intelligent.
Gerard: Listen! We don’t want to deceive the public, dear.
John: We’re hitting a new milestone.
Andy: Henry, say Nietzsche.
http://www.splintermind.com/start.html – view work.
Conversation Notated Verbatim by Gerard Malanga During the Filming of Empire. With John Palmer/Henry Romney/Andy Warhol
Gerard Malanga/Marie Desert/Jonas Mekas.
http://www.warholstars.org/warhol/warhol1/warhol1f/links/conv.html
October 2003
I have been following the continuing, fluid declarations of Joseph and Donna McElroy of ElectricHands for about three years now. Their performances explore their imaginative reasonings, engaging with informed, multi-behavioural understanding to promote the idea that we (humanity) are the medium. They consciously refuse to stick to the traditional art protocols or to use materials or tools to justify the act of creating art itself. Most art attention is directed towards the object as art. They advocate that their embodied experience is art. What they create is a ‘gift economy’, not a product. Their recent collaboration is a collection of short streaming videos ranging in size from 274k to 1,185k.
In this recent assortment of work, various themes and ideas crop up that seem to be dealing with presence and non-presence. For instance, in ‘Ghosthands’, a video is presented of Joseph talking to the viewer, but you cannot hear his voice, whilst words are automatically typed out onto the web page saying, “as I type these words I’m typing them for you. These are my Ghost hands”. And then we shift an extra level in ‘I am not Donna’. Joseph is talking, but once more, you do not hear his voice. Instead, you hear Donna’s voice saying, “Hi, this is not Donna McElroy…This is my Shadow”. Yet the text appearing before your eyes read, “Hi, this is not Joseph McElroy…This is my Shadow”.
There are other works to see here, so the above does not define all the work, although I would like to mention that I also feel that there are traces and resonances of post-fluxus in many of the pieces, such as ‘Gum Joseph’. This new collection of work by Joseph and Donna McElroy features a successful exploration of defining unconsciousness as experience. It is a type of social psychology mixed with an intuitive way of using new media and the Internet.
Going back to the two pieces Ghosthands and I am not Donna, such play on out-of-sync, communicative language functions suggests a dysfunction that many people experience in their everyday lives. Unearthing an existential realisation that our languages, gestures and actions are not necessarily of our own. They are shared, whether we like it or not. We are subconsciously entwined, at many levels, with non-fixed narratives, and we might not even be aware of such shifts. These socially informed performed observations are a poetic subjectivity, trying to break away from a singular ‘themed’ (one-liner) narrative. These works somehow manage to touch and reach inside the psyche. Leaving one in a state of confusion yet simultaneously accepting that what we see and hear is true but also immeasurable.
An example to ponder on is the lucid image and moment in Milan Kundera’s novel ‘Immortality’. Goethe is in heaven, describing a dream to Hemingway. It involves a puppet theatre production of his Faust-
‘And then I suddenly glanced at the seats and saw that the theatre was empty. That puzzled me. Where was the audience? … I expected them out front, and instead, they were at the back of the stage, gazing at me with wide-open, inquisitive eyes. As soon as my glance met theirs, they began to applaud. And I realized that my Faust didn’t interest them at all and that the show they wished to see was not the puppets I was leading round the stage, but me myself! Not Faust but Goethe!’ (p. 93)
So, Joseph and Donna are the audience, and they have taken hold of the reigns, blurring the boundaries between art and life. Art is experience. It breathes.
Oct 2003
Much of Lo_y’s work is poetic and dynamic in its conception rather than in its functionality. The deliberate assembling of text & character symbols in earlier works has referred to the formal possibilities of the code behind digital content, making it its subject. These are abstract works, stripped of narrative, subjectivity or political slant.
030807 marks a new direction for L_oy, as previous work has consisted of high-colour, static HTML code texts on strongly contrasting backgrounds. I have enjoyed the austere Greenburgian qualities of these earlier works, where the only interaction required to view them is to scroll down or across on your browser. This piece, in some ways, is more ambiguous in its pursuit of bare-bone aesthetics. With this work (unusually, made in Flash), the formal essence and non-representational focus are revealed by the user’s exploration of the page. As one clicks and moves one’s mouse over the organic silhouette forms, ranged in a grid across the page, they morph to reveal sigils.
In a recent message on August Highland’s site, I noticed a statement from Lo_y. It went, “well, there’s not much to say. Lo_y is only what Lo_y writes. No history, no stories, no explanations…“
So I better shut my mouth.
Featured image: Monochromatic and dichromatic grids, stitched together via javascript
if (jimpunk=3D=3Dprozac)…
You can’t escape jimpunk. I tried, believe me: it was easy to be disillusioned with net.art, with so many new works showing up on the list-servs plunging so far into the morass of conceptualism that both the “net” and “network” properties that have always distinguished the medium seem to have submerged somewhere deep below the surface of the current aesthetic set as to be almost imperceptible. I definitely don’t want to write this essay, much less look at jimpunk. I think this net depression began for me around the time I encountered a piece by Eryk Salvaggio in Whalelane that was, if I remember, purporting to be an “mpeg haiku.”http://www.whalelane.com/esalvaggio_mpeghaiku_house.html . What I got when clicking here was a few linear, non-interactive films of jets in the sky and other objects visually reminiscent of straight lines. As a conceptual gesture, the work was genius: an extended pun on the form of haiku, the video being “linear,” the jet trails being “linear” (ah, but look, look at the tension in that: it’s a linearity we see melt away before our eyes): each video also being a line. Yes, beautiful when I thought about it. But for some reason I craved spectacle, the sensual: I had been poisoned by Horace, searching art to give me “pleasure.”
So Marc said, well, write something about jimpunk. Take this link. The red pill, the blue pill. Marc sent me to http://www.jimpunk.com/_____________1_____________/, which I, attempting to exonerate myself from my recent deep-fried badness, tried. I was suspicious at first: wasn’t jimpunk illegal in the States? What if my mother walked in as I was looking at one of jimpunk’s sites; what would she think? So I chose the dead of night to schedule my visit, and prepared myself by insuring that everyone in the city was asleep. I was able to do this by paranoiacally peeping out all windows and doors in my apartment, and making sure I smiled extra wide at any old ladies I ran across in the city during the day. No base sensualist would smile so brightly!
jimpunk snaps on your screen with all the verve and whimsy of Stuart Davis . Remember Stuart Davis? Situated somewhere between dada and early abstract expressionism, Davis dipped a paintbrush in the conflagration and cacophony of emerging urban life, then wrung it across every canvas he touched. He inherited from Braque and Picasso a feverish urge toward college, and a love for the detritus of modern life. Just as Picasso’s daily newspaper nudged its way into certain compositions, the new neon signs and electric boulevards of cities bubbled out of the confusion of color that Davis felt.
But there’s something, well, much more primal, almost tribal, in this here site of jimpunk’s. He has a fondness, in ______________1_______________, for the visual impact of early video games—pixelization, my friend: monochromatic and dichromatic grids. The site seems to be a collection of animated DHTML pages, stitched together via javascript, to reload and refresh randomly into each other. One fullscreen composition melts into another; images, functioning here (WARNING: CONCEPTUALIST INTERPRETATION AHEAD!!) as tropes, collide both metaphorically and literally across your screen, sketching thin strands of association. Is that a young Don Knotts I see there, Marc? Is that Pac-Man?
These grids and boxy robots that slither and flit across the screen remind me of Native American textiles . Can you see it? Does not the cheesy robot, black and white and square all over, evoke for you earlier representations of man, lost (or fully in control?) of a halo mosaic of phenomena, of WORLD? Not to imply that jimpunk is working in a digital primitivistic style here; the work seems innocent, yes, but not naive: this resemblance to earlier textile artforms is intentional, and there seems to be some irony involved as well: you, as audience for this work, are invited to make the connection between the past and the present, between navajo textiles and early ’80s Pac-Man, not simply on the visual level, not simply in similarity of pattern, but also ideologically. With the lingering war in Iraq on everyone’s minds, and the United States in particular sliding backwards into a fascistic mode of government post 9/11, jimpunk seems to be laughing at us–not harshly, mind you; it’s a gentle, chiding laughter. jimpunk is no cynic.
It’s that lack of cybicism and gentle criticism that helped me past my net depression. After a few nights of clandestine visits to jimpunk’s project, I feel much better about net.art, even hopeful in my own way. I have, however, noticed certain sexual side effects; the toaster has been looking mighty attractive these days, and I get a strange fluttering thrill now whenever I plug data cables in…
Featured image: Photograph of a room being built upon
Dion Laurent’s website of The House that George Built contains three galleries of photographs which document a remarkable, satirical project in the grand tradition of doing exactly as you are told, to reveal and subvert the idiocy of national government.
The shelter that Laurent built in his home takes as its starting point instructions issued by the US Department of Homeland Security in their ‘Campaign for Citizen Preparedness’ . This revamp of the 1950’s ‘Duck and Cover’ campaign, (in which a hawkish US Government terrorized the population with lunatic, useless and blatantly alarmist civic defence schemes), takes the form of a duct- tape and plastic-covers initiative; another assalt on the psychological security of the American people.
Laurent playfully extrapolates the government blueprint for a home shelter against terrorist attacks. With an inventive reworking of utilities such as the Air Phone and the Air Pump, enthusiastically constructed from found objects and household materials that look like they’ve already had a lot of everyday use, he develops and explores the campaign’s appeal to a sweat-of-the-brow, do-it-yourself ethic. We intuit a certain Thoreau-like pride in his shelter and supplies, that sense of pioneering spirit, self-sufficiency, a capacity to home-make for one.
In the ongoing series of paintings and reliefs, the project becomes less lighthearted and less abstract, and the true horror of what is being proposed by the government unfolds. Descriptive titles like DaisyClusterFuck, YellowBlueExplosion, PeacefulMuslim and GulfFighters reveal a darker aspect of the artist as he takes on the persona of the “survivor”. The paintings indicate possible states of mind and obsessions for the isolated, sole inhabitant. They reflect his evolving values, religious beliefs and aspirations. In the paintings, land and nature merge with weaponry, perhaps to keep the thieving, murderous strangers out. So much for Flower Power.
This project exudes a fascination and exploration of a certain, very relevant masculine dysfunction with serious humour, commitment, care and craft.
*See the White House website http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030219-11.html
For further instructions on how to survive terrorist attacks of a biological and chemical nature or a nuclear blast and radiation.
http://www.ready.gov/
20 August 2003
Featured image: Screenshot from an online magazine that advertises sex with others
Ivan Pope’s latest work and project ‘Couples’ crawls into one’s psyche as he manages to unearth a seemingly timeless activity that, in the contemporary world, functions as a networking activity between millions of people worldwide. We are all now probably accustomed to the idea that it occurs on the Internet and that there are swingers regularly contacting each other and arranging liaisons through it. Instead of concentrating on such subterranean mutuality and its pursuits on a digital medium like the Internet, Ivan has collected his information from a magazine such as ‘Matchmaker’.
Yet this is not the only magazine out there being rabidly collected by these flesh swappers (may be you are interested). Many of them possess curious titles such as ‘Women in Jail’, ‘Adult Fun Times’, Liberated Women’, ‘Fads and Fantasies’, ‘Subs and Doms’ and of course ‘Couples’. They are usually bi-monthly issues containing contact catalogues showing explicit photographs of people exhibiting themselves.
The works that you see here are a small selection of a much larger growing collection. In actuality they are presented in the form of larger Inkjet prints, measuring up to two meters high. Thus reflecting upon our selves the viewer when observed (in the flesh) a human scale experience. This consciously aware figurative art declares a social context showing text with the images of people’s measurements, eyes and hair colours, height, false and alias names, desired requirements and contact details.
James Hillman the Archetypal psychologist said that ‘The sexual fascination is the soul trying to get out and get into something other than itself’. Which kind of explains not just the functionally of this habitual occurrence to a small degree but it also casts light upon the emotional side of it and why there are so many people out there in the world trying to meet each other this way, even when it seems that they are content with being with another singular loving entity. A subculture that swaps flesh not only goes through the process of swapping their physical selves, their bodies but also they share consciousnesses. There is a sense that many people feel an intense urgency to fulfill their desires (not need) by immersing their physical frames with others. Exploring their anonymity, letting go of the everyday nonsense that we all have to deal with, such as politics, paying bills, family struggles, wars and even love.
‘I was carried by the conviction that I rejoiced in extraordinary freedom. To fuck above and beyond any sense of disgust was not just a way of lowering oneself, it was to raise your self above all prejudice. There are those who break taboos as powerful as incest. I settled for not having to choose my partners.’ Catherine Millet. The Observer, Sunday May 19, 2002.
As I look at ‘Couples’ I am subjected to the unnerving realization that what I am seeing is also a kind of cattle market, flesh being sold on to those who long to possess them. They are also actually photographic images of real people rather than illustrations, cartoons, paintings; adding weight to the pieces with an undeniable raw intensity. Yes, it is dark. Yet it is also a barometer, a brutal signifier carrying with it an honest realism that we are more complicated, more connected to our visceral and feral identities than supposed civilized society acknowledges and lets on and informs us all to be.
Featured image: August Highland collaborates with William Shakespeare with the start of an going series of sonnets.
AUGUST HIGHLAND/WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
By now most net artists, curators, net art viewers & related academics are aware of the perpetual antics of August Highland and his networked literary identities. They would also be aware of the non-stop emails that are poured into various lists, like liquidized data streams. Highland’s textural multi-presences bewilder some and subject others in peer positions to envy such fluid dedication.
It’s as though August is a machine, a ghost on automatic drive, asserting an existential punk spirit whilst going through the motions of spewing out into the void the essence of language as a pure medium, exploiting the Internet as a conduit, a space that needs filling. A quantum-digital type of universality or inclusiveness occurs, suggesting that our minds are part of a greater sum. We easily connect to the Internet now and do quite comfortably become part of the matrix.
Broadcast me, scrambled clean
Or free me from this flesh
Let the armchair cannibals take their fill
In every cell across wilderness
We’ll trip such a strangled tango
We’ll waltz a wonderland affair
Let’s run to meet the tide tomorrow
Leave all emotion dying there
In the star cold beyond all of your dreams
(I want to be a machine, Ultravox 1977)
We are psychologically and emotionally entwined, wrapped in a never-ending abyss of The Body Electric. For the virtual electronic waves, networks that August is currently filling are not far from the patterns of our own physical brains. As time goes by, we might begin injecting his work into our craniums, stimulating our neurons much like smart drugs or medication, as we become a multitude of consciousnesses connected via digital intersections.
One of August’s more recent explorative and playful manoeuvres is a sideways step from his usual all-out Internet infiltrations. This time he collaborates with William Shakespeare. Sonnets by the Superheroes of Humanities is a net-based, single-page object featuring the voice of the late Sir John Gielgud, which is the beginning of an ongoing project to do all of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
When entering the page, you are faced with a presentation of cut-up texts in five sections from the sonnet. In the centre lies the original text, unfettered by the artist for viewers to see before it is garbled. The rest of the four sections are various differentiations, digressing into visual text data. Java scripted words cut up, each possessing its own mannerism, function and movement. One section retypes, another shakes. Also, one can interact by mixing poems or words into sections or palettes.
It is worth venturing to see some of the other identities of August Highland to understand where he is coming from:
“Highland’s work here may on one level be a parody of the entire concept of the “art movement;” inasmuch as the postmodern has been characterized as “the end of movements” and an art era beyond manifestos; Highland, in a bold conceptual move, has birthed an art movement, complete with varied practitioners, from just himself.” -Lewis Look. Multiplicity: Notes for/on August Highland. October 15, 2002. Suite101.com.
The following is an interview with Joy Garnett creator of The Bomb Project, conducted via email – September 2003:
Ryan: What was the beginning of “the bomb project” for you? Where/when did you say, “This is going to be a project.”?
Joy: In 1997 I began doing image research for an exhibition of paintings, my first solo show at Debs + Co. in New York, which consisted of U.S. nuclear test landscapes. I didn’t realize at the time how much the project would continue to progress and morph, nor how much my working methods would be influenced by this particular subject and the realms of information and secrecy and policy it would lead me to. But one thing did lead to another.
Research for the painting project eventually led to the idea for the web project; that is, my focused search for imagery fanned out and became a more generalized quest for information and context. There was only so much used-book documentation on The Bomb to be found from the era of The Bomb, so I set out to extract images and footage from more primary sources. It was around 1997 that I also got my first laptop and my first email account and I started to poke around online. After spending a few years reacclimating to the Web and amassing online resources, I realized that certain ideals and models would best be served by recontextualizing my sources in a public portal.
In the spring of 2000 I registered the domain thebombproject.org and launched a preliminary version of the site. At that stage it served as little more than a storage solution. I redesigned and relaunched it definitively in August 2002 and I’ve been continuously adding links and making improvements ever since.
RG: There is a critical engagement with science with this project, and with your other projects, like First Pulse Projects. The histories of Western science and technology are synonymous with histories of oppression and social catastrophe, one story of which is told within “the bomb project,” yet science also holds out utopian possibilities for change and liberation. Do you see aesthetic/archival projects being able to contribute to the emancipatory potentials of scientific practice?
JG: Science and art are subject to abuse. They have no built-in immunity. But oppression and social catastrophe not withstanding, the histories of Western science and technology are also synonymous with certain realized states of autonomy, which though circumscribed politically and economically, amount to much more than mere utopian fantasy. For instance, while science may be ultimately instrumental in the weaponizing of smallpox, it is also responsible for its total eradication in the wild. And while there persists a Luddite tendency in our culture to equate science and technology with oppression, images themselves–art itself–can embody a kind of oppression as well. Art has its own tradition of leading the way to war, as has been pointed out by Susan Sontag, Thomas Keenan and others. Imagine the Third Reich without Albert Speer, without Leni Riefenstahl. Imagine the Gulf War without CNN. In the case of the Cold War era where we find the primacy of the classified image to be unparalleled, we have a historical case whose global ramifications are relevant to us all.
So to me, one of the most interesting things is the intersection of visual media, science and politics. Each of these elements is transformed by intersecting with the other. The phenomenon bears study, and to conduct such study–artistic or otherwise–it is paramount to first establish a context where art, science and government are presented as interlocking and overlapping areas. This is the mandate of The Bomb Project.
Finally, the challenge of setting up an archive must draw on an appreciation of the material at hand. However ephemeral in nature, or obtuse, or diffuse, the challenge is in letting the information speak for itself, of presenting cultural artifacts while disturbing them as little as possible. The archivists project thus becomes the anthropologist’s dilemma, and unlike the artist whose job is more or less to transform, the mission here is not to meddle too much.
RG: Has anything you’ve come across in your compiling and researching caught you off guard or given you an angle on something you didn’t have before?
JG: I am repeatedly stunned by the degree of fetishization of The Bomb, and by the sheer amount of information, especially visual, which has been recorded and preserved. I’ve become interested in the phenomenon of classification and declassification; for instance, how a prior state of secrecy might affect the impact or meaning of certain images even long after they have been released.
Also, despite government secrecy from the Cold War era through to the present-day, so much material has been declassified and made available to the general public. The Bomb Project just manages to scratch the surface.
It makes me wonder how we can effectively challenge government secrecy when we’ve barely absorbed the information that is available to us.
RG: What do you think is the importance in communicating about “The Bomb” today, especially in the form that “The Bomb Project” takes?
JG: Ours is a global nuclear culture, but we have yet to fully accept that. We have aesthetisized danger and death and corruption and violence and the apocalyptic morbid side of technology. We have rendered it as fantasy and entertainment, or else as historical and therefore remote.
By specifically emphasizing the image-fetish aspect of nuclear culture, I want to show how violence and militarism are invariably tied to aesthetics and therefore to media and pop culture; military culture permeates popular culture and the arts and vice versa, and has done so for quite some time.
By contextualizing a broad spectrum of nuclear material in light of the arts I hope to provide a platform for work and study. Above all, I hope to foster awareness that these issues and responsibilities are no fantasy, but real problems that will be with us for a long time to come.
Featured image: Two web cam installations by Ivan Pope – Lost Magic Kingdoms and Tabletop
Web Cam Theatre – two web cam installations, Lost Magic Kingdoms and Tabletop by Ivan Pope
Objects are cast in a performative context displaying motion and time using Internet technology. By using very basic equipment, cheap web cams, cheap software, cheap objects Ivan has created a twilight world. We witness a psychogeographically influenced environment that engages a fluent mix of conceptual and poetic crossovers with performance/live action. The installation is minimal, with light settings, the quality of the image and time based changes largely uncontrollable.
When you click onto the page of ‘Lost Magic Kingdoms’, images slowly cascade before your eyes down the browser page. You discover its history, with different times and moments of the day recored by two cameras on either side of a small table, enclosed by a screen. The cameras take it in turn to transmit the scene. Inspired by an installation made in 1987 by Eduardo Paolozzi, called Lost Magic Kingdoms and Six Paper Moons, revealing how art could be constructed by rearranging existing objects. With ‘Tabletop’, a single camera is mounted on a tripod. The lights go on and off. The camera pans the tabletop, looking for action and a new world is created.
These two web cam installations will be live until September 20 2003. The format will remain the same, but the objects and arrangement will vary. The rate of image change will also vary.
Both works show the relational nature of objects, a kind of magical realism falls into place like an Angela Carter’s ‘Nights at the Circus (1984), half human and half mythical; between actuality, the physical and the virtual, reality and non-reality. Changing every six minutes, you know that something is going to happen but the timeline is relative to your own modem, your own situation, and your own desires.
“The Space Between Analog and Digital”: Alan Sondheim’s Recent Executables
I’ve developed, over the last few years, certain assumptions about software art. Just browse through the many entries available at runme.org (http://runme.org/), and you, too will likely come away with some of these assumptions: that software art is, at its heart, utilitarian; it functions, it does something; it’s tool-like; it’s often more software than art.
Over the last month or so, July and August 2003, the writer Alan Sondheim has been happily chipping away at those assumptions. Alan is well known to netizens for his writing, which operates at the hinge of language and machine code; what isn’t so well known about him is that he’s spent some time programming–indeed, has been programming since at least the 1970s. A careful visitor to his monumental text work Philosophy and Psychology of the Internet (also known as the Internet Text)(http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt/), will see that Alan has, embedded in the text, some brilliant source code for Quick BASIC, the revival of the old BASIC language once shipped with all Windows PCs. He has written in Perl as well–see his Julu at runme.org (http://runme.org/project/+sondheimjulu/).
I’ve developed software art with Alan’s inspiration in mind myself–the application sondheim.exe (http://runme.org/project/+sondheim/) is a text editor written in Visual Basic designed to transform user input based on a configurable timer. The idea for this piece was wholly Alan’s; in electronic conversation, Alan mentioned that he had once, in the 1970s, written a similar application.
It was shortly after I wrote sondheim.exe that I mailed Alan a copy of Visual Basic, the object-oriented application development environment, developed by Microsoft, based on the old BASIC language. Visual Basic is about as close to English as one can get in the higher-level programming languages; it eschews the funky syntax most other languages have inherited from C, and which is often one of the more apparent stumbling blocks for new coders. And yet, despite its seeming simplicity, it succeeds as one of the most powerful Rapid Application Development (RAD) packages for Windows programming; one can do with Visual Basic almost anything that can be done in C and C++; indeed, if it weren’t for the fact that VB is exclusively a Windows programming tool, it might even approach that paragon of portability and power, Java.
Alan took the tool and ran with it. His characteristically unique vision, combined with his agile sense of mathematics, has produced a series of standalone executables in Visual Basic that are challenging the very core of what I had always assumed software art was about–creating strange and wondrous tools, creating functional pieces that interacted with unsuspecting users.
Alan’s recent Visual Basic works are nothing like that at all. These are not tools in any sense of the word. They’re only minimally interactive; usually, all one of these works require to get started is one simple mouse click from the user. Instead of crafting a functional artistic tool, Alan Sondheim has, in these works, highlighted the very processes one’s computer uses. These are narrative works, in the skin of software.
Anyone who has downloaded these is doubtlessly scratching their head right now, thinking, “Narrative? What’s narrative about watching an image dissolve or be defaced in some pre-programmed way?” Well, I understand your consternation. I’m not the most stable of people. Children run away from me when I smile.
Be that as it may, I’m sticking to my thesis: these executables are narrative; what we’re watching, when we download and run this software, is, as Alan himself states, “mathesis transform(ing) semantics…” And here’s how:
The Archaea Series
This is where I first began to notice the gist of Alan’s work in Visual Basic. The Archaea series consists of ten executables; they are all predicated on the dissolving and warping of images based on mathematical processes. The most vivid in the series is archaea3, downloadable here: http://www.asondheim.org/portal/archaea3.exe .
“The programs are operating in the space between analog and digital, although totally grounded in the digital,” Alan writes. “What are they deconstructing? Language, meaning, symbols, the symbolic. Through erasure and the growth of form.”
We’re confronted with a very red image of breasts pressed up against some glass when we first open archaea3. The glass is beaded with moisture; either the light or the filter makes the water gleam a sinister red. When we click on the image, what looks like static begins to eat away at the scene from left to right, very slowly; the static looks like it’s wiping away the image, as if it were cleansing the screen of this suggestively bloody site. It’s almost like watching a linear animation–except here the story, the plot, the interest, hinges on the horizontal erasure sweeping through the image. It’s a purgative myth we’re witnessing; like the big fish vomiting Jonah up out of the sea.
What clinches process works like these as narrative is the fact that Alan uses evocative images in this software. “…these images are interpreted in terms of the underlying photographs – a lichen-like growth upon them, empathetic and cohering. In turn, they modify, deconstruct….” Alan muses. The images serve as a reference point. The story’s there, not just in the images but in the process itself–a process the user stands outside of. Like cinema, like literature, it’s a closed system until it’s in front of us, in our heads, and when we perform the magic of watching.
The other works in the series follow the same principles. In archaea9 (http://www.asondheim.org/portal/archaea9.exe), a woman (Alan’s wife and long-time collaborator, Azure Carter, whose influence on Alan’s work is ever pervasive) paddling in a swimming pool that gets “erased.” But what kind of erasure is this? The paradox of this process that Alan is using is precisely in its “lichen-like” growth. In number 9, it’s quite evident that this image isn’t being erased so much as it is being penetrated by an emptiness. Ripples from the image linger as the process spreads throughout the surface of the picture. The emptiness left behind is an entity unto itself–may, indeed, be the protagonist in these stories.
Or is the image the protagonist? archaea4’s image is basically that of a rocky hole. Found at https://alansondheim.org/, the erasure in this piece resonates strangely with this hole. Which is the emptiness? Is this a zen koan, a linear animation, or software?
This Program is not Responding
One aspect of these pieces may actually come across as a design flaw; clicking on the close button in the upper right hand corner doesn’t close them. Indeed, just trying to move the piece from one area of the screen to the other causes a major hang on CPU resources; the image blanks out completely, along with its erasure.
“The immobility of some of the pieces, as well as the inability to resize is deliberate,” Alan maintains. “I thought of these as ‘sticky objects,’ insistent on their own processes. One of the earlier ones, of course, _does_ kind of stick to the desktop…”
I can see how this would enhance the work. When running one of these strange programs, I often feel as if to do anything at all on the computer while the process is playing itself out would be to violate the principle of the whole thing. I get the sense that what is happening in these pieces is both intense and enormous; and yet, fragile as far as the machine is concerned. This process will not tolerate any other process spinning off in the same space.
I like to leave the works running on my screen. Like a good movie, or a good novel, I’m fascinated enough by the interaction between the characters to sit still for a moment, absorb rather than react.
Featured image: printed out photographs of the streets, pasted them back onto the surfaces where they were taken, and then rephotographed them
When we visited New York this spring, we met in Willamsburg, Brooklyn with Christina Ray, founder of Glowlab, multimedia arts lab for experimental psychogeography. According to the article ‘Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation’, in Situationniste Internationale No. 1 (1958), psychogeography studies ‘the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’.
We wandered the streets, chatting and observed the effects of the emotions and behaviour of the local communities on the streets of Brooklyn. Christina described for us the significance of various tags, stickers and stencils and told us about the brewing turf wars between the recent influx of middle class artists and disgruntled locals whose families have lived in the area for generations, but who were facing the consequences of creeping gentrification and the threat of fast-rising rents. The diverse concerns of the local community were spelt out in frenetically pasted, posted, taped and painted signs, tags, images and messages of all sorts. Every wall, every piece of street furniture shares its surface with an accretion of eye-catching stickers, advertising local bands, spray painted decorations, tags and statements of protest, like ‘more yuppie bullshit’.
The Graffoto project divides into three distinct parts. Graffoto 01 documents the richly textured expressivity of the Brooklyn communities. The social commentary mixes with exuberant, colourful and stunningly executed murals and sometimes inexplicable expressions of appreciation for the absurdity of life, such as ‘saving to buy air conditioner- saving to buy a bike (written and illustrated on 2 strips of masking tape stuck to a wall heavy with graffiti). These images draw you to spin out narratives. Sometimes further clues to the complete story lie in the details of the surroundings, whilst other accounts are completely opaque to the outsider but suggest a connection of great significance to individuals, groups or events in the locality.
In Graffoto02, MOTC (man of the crowd) has printed out photographs of the streets, pasted them back onto the surfaces where they were taken, and then rephotographed them in situ. I guess that in the streets these images act as a mirror of sorts for the street artists of Brooklyn. Also as a sign that the guttural and wonderfully articulated expressions of protest, humour, threat and joie de vivre can be both appreciated and participated in but also consumed by the world of mediation. These second stage images do evoke a strange threat of surveillance.
The final layer of the Graffoto project invites us to participate by sending in images of our streets for others to print out and post in their own public localities. Alternatively we can download and print an image from the collection and paste it onto the lamp-post outside our own doors.
We can only imagine these images so rich with local texture and information will start to appear in all the lands of the world; turning up like tourists, marked out by their strange dress, stranger cultural values and the blind spots afforded them by their communities. Or perhaps more like illegal immigrants, their language will be foreign, their deepest and most obvious narratives veiled, their protests displaced and irrelevant to the communities amongst which they find themselves.
MOTC offers a strategy for border crossing. OK, we loose much of the texture, the information and with these, many pieces of the narrative but something equally important is facilitated here. The photographs and printouts of the graffiti are a sign of something foreign, mediated, stuck and mingling in a community that isn’t sure why it’s there, whether it’s any of their business and whether they like it.
August 2003
Featured image: abstract animated visual models working from the audio samples of couples engaging in sexual activities.
Frequency Love is a net art piece, not in the networked sense but conceptually filled to the brim with a net consciousness, a net object. This visual deviation playfully captures the dark side of the Internet and its globally collective and obsessive mannerist activities. It reveals a psychological nuance of the everyday Internet sexual experience.
The source material were originally sound files – mp3’s, consisting of couples copulating. Amateurs submitting and declaring their intimately entwined, feral and visceral exertions for other interested parties to hear and enjoy online. Chris Webb abstracted the audio, the data and transformed them into what now are animated gif images of couples having sex.
There is a contradiction at play built by circumstance, that such esoteric interests of sharing intimate, sexual sound files in virtual private clubs do tend to exude. The inevitable occurs. If the multitude of surfers, search hard enough on the net, they collect hidden information by hook or crook somehow; which is part of the nature of using the Internet medium.
When viewing these works it is as though they are breathing, as if they are real souls, real people, even though you know that they are invented visuals, data into sound. Then you remember that they were real people, but mutated into visual form. The ‘Plexus’, culmination of networked, linked individuals expressing proclivity and what seems an uncontrollable hunger to communicate in a way other than by words, via the motion of sexual intercourse in audio format. There has been a global shift of people exploring new territories regarding their own relational selves. The term virtual is essence of the Internet medium and we used to think that this word stood for the unreal, untouchable but now we know that this is no longer applicable. It is now part of our everyday experience, therefore real.
This strangely emotional work weaves finely tuned aesthetic formalism with polemic. Unusually for Internet-based media works (though not for much of the generative Shockwave work made by collaborators Kate Southworth and Patrick Simons of GloriusNinth), after an initial cascade of data, the piece unfolds at an intensely slow pace, inducing a mesmeric state in the viewer and winding down the desire to click, for the next feature.
To the left of the screen, the word [R]evolution builds layer on layer, becoming bolder but more disrupted, threatening to blot itself out through reiteration. In the right-hand column, smaller texts emerge and fade imperceptibly in falling fields of high colour, visual interference like every bit of news information ever displayed on any screen through history, atomised, appropriated and reworked by a new mechanical order. The tenor of these texts is that of disrupted and upset internal dialogues sparked by bewildering, morally fractured world affairs. These act in combination with the full title of the work World#—saved 10.10.01 to suggest a reference to another historical date- 9/11/01. What was saved on this date? The work or the world?
Over time, the work unfolds quiet, crafted layers to the riddle with a deliberate subtlety that suggests a kind of inspired fanaticism in its creators, a refusal to draw conclusions. This work’s intangible (or non-existent- I can’t be sure) interactivity challenges and proliferates notions of individual agency within social [r]evolution.
Link to GloriousNinth
Featured image: PANSE (Public Access Network Sound Engine) – an open platform for developing audio-visual net art.
PANSE is the latest in a series of generative audio-visual pieces created by Reykjavik-based artist Pall Thayer. PANSE or ‘Public Access Network Sound Engine’ is a server based program which creates a live audio stream based on (multi) user interaction. Alongside the continuous live mp3 stream, visitors can interact with the piece, modifying and mutating the audio created in real-time through a series of interfaces that also respond visually to the live audio data generated by PANSE and other concurrent visitors.
The project is an open platform for the development of audio-visual net art, with an invitation to anyone who wishes to create an interface to the engine. Further information on this is included in the site with examples and a gallery of interfaces created by Pall and contributions from french artist Joachim Lapotre.
Medrano says she doesn’t know what kind of chemical she splashed on her face, nor was she warned about the product or its potential danger — and such perilous oversights are all too common in the industry. Injuries related to chemical exposures such as Medrano’s range from skin irritation and burns to allergic reactions in the lungs or on the skin. Other hazards include lacerations from material such as broken glass left in trash cans, lung problems from removing mold, and nasty falls on slippery floors. “If the elevator is broken, I have to drag heavy bags to the basement using the stairs,” says a Salvadoran janitor who cleans dot-com offices.
– Michele Holcenberg, “Janitors and Custodians,”
http://www.buildingbetterhealth.com/topic/janitors
“If you become aware of an unusual and suspicious release of an unknown substance nearby, it doesn’t hurt to protect yourself. Quickly get away.”
-the US Dept. of Homeland Security’s http://www.ready.gov
A couple of years ago, I attended a presentation by an artist who had worked with the web-based group RTMark), among other politically-motivated arts groups, that was about political art after September 11. During the question and answer session, another attendee expressed her dislike for the work of RTMark and questioned the political commitment of such work in general. The problem was the seeming lack of risk for the artists, which was translated as a lack of genuine commitment. In other words, if the artists really meant what they said, they would be on the front lines of demonstrations risking injury, fines and jail. Or at least they’d be politicians. I left wondering what it means to consider art, or even political action, in terms of heroic risk taking.
This anecdote has stuck with me, and I often come across other situations and debates where similar terms arise. On a recent trip to Germany, I was fortunate enough to catch At Your Own Risk, an exhibition at the Shirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, and further consider the concept of risk. Curated by Markus Heinzelmann and Martina Weinhart, works were included by Christoph Buchel, Critical Art Ensemble (with Beatriz da Costa and Shyh-shiun Shyu), Camilla Dahl, gelatin, Jeppe Hein, Carsten Holler, Ann Veronica Janssens, Sven Pahlsson, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Julia Scher and Ann Maria Tavares. The particular relationship to risk varied from work to work, as was the aesthetic and conceptual strategies used by each artist.
One possible way of reading conceptual differences among the works is in how each creates a different sense of time for the viewer. Simply put, there seem to be differences in how each work positions the relationship between risk and the exhibition’s visitors. Some work, for example, creates the experience of an aftermath, a risk in the past tense. This is more significant than a simple difference in narrative approach however. How we are positioned/position ourselves in relation to our understanding of risk says a lot about how we perceive our ability to enact change in our own lives. Or as Neils Werber discusses in the catalogue, whether we are taking risks (making decisions about our own future) or experiencing danger (living with the choices of others).
The environmental/architectural installation by Christph Buchel creates such an experience of a past, a past where the outcome of taking a risk is now known. Upon entering Buchel’s work, one finds herself within a decomposing, yet not completely destroyed, apartment. A radio and electric lights still function amid the vacant rooms that include a collapsed kitchen filling with dirt and a completely flooded, and eerily still, bathroom. As a visitor, walking through with other visitors, the feeling is voyeuristic, as if you are part of a scientific team exploring an urban ecosystem post catastrophe. It’s this feeling of being an observer that provided me with the feeling of temporal distance, along with the nostalgia provided by my experiences with dated, post-apocalyptic films like Mad Max and The Omega Man. Relating to present trauma through the past is one way of making sense of new experiences, as well as a way of using traumatic experience in order to harness emotional power, for good or bad.
Many of the works dealt with an abstract sense of the present, offering the chance to make theatrical choices within the confines of the work. Camilla Dahl’s Champaign Bar dares viewers to suck champaign from rubber nipples (on their knees, of course) as it’s poured over a seductive, faux-porcelain appliance. If you like taking blank pills for fun, Carsten Huller’s Placebo Tablet Tank, a lotto-like machine that spits placebo pills out of a large aquarium, may help you out. Stepping into Ann Veronica Janssens’s fog filled room (if you don’t have asthma), it takes about five seconds before you have no idea how you got in, as you wander through a mist that changes colors from one spot to the next.
Only a couple of the works in the show dealt specifically with technological risks/dangers, and while not completely focused on an uncertain future, there certainly is a sense of looking at risks that are not, nor can be, completely decided upon in the moment. As Paul Virilio’s Unknown Quantity suggests there is the feeling (largely supported by contemporary experience) of dangers/risks increasing exponentially as the complexity and interconnectivity of technology expands.
Julia Scher’s Embedded uses closed circuit surveillance video within a seductive sculptural installation of beds to relate an ongoing story that makes each visitor a new character (Goldilocks perhaps). The story involves a simultaneous past, present and future, as visitors will see video images of those that preceded them, making them aware of a delay in the broadcast, while also aware that some unknown future visitors will be looking at images of them. While video surveillance is already ubiquitous in contemporary public life, and anyone familiar with the Web has probably seen private web cams of some sort, the future direction of surveillance technology and our understanding of “public” are not necessarily certain. Scher provides an opportunity to question both the social and personal aspects of voyeurism and control, and points to some of the epistemological problems with the public/private dichotomy in the first place.
Biotechnology has become an increasingly contentious, global topic, affecting philosophical, economic and religious ideologies. With growing evidence of the mobility of genetically modified (GM) material (GM “polluted” crops like soy, corn and canola), there is also growing resistance to the acceptance of this unregulated genetic drift. Legal cases like Monsanto vs. Percy Schmeiser, the battle for labeling standards, the Mexican governments attempts to preserve the integrity of its corn stock, and now the EU’s effort to ban the importation of GM foods from the US are some of the manifestations of this resistance. Critical Art Ensemble (with Beatriz da Costa and Shyh-shiun Shyu) project, Free Range Grain, takes the methods of risk analysis to the audience, giving EU citizens an opportunity to see if such a ban is proving successful in keeping GMOs out of the food supply. For the exhibit, a portable lab was set up in the Schirn where visitors could bring in food products and test them for evidence of GM material, demystifying both the subject of GMOs and the science behind genetic research.
In the exhibition catalogue, Neils Werber makes the argument that the dichotomy of risk/danger is unavoidable, that “no round table discussion, however broadly representative its participants, changes anything about the fact that, time and again, decisions involving high risks and lasting consequences are imposed on others as dangers.” The attempt to democratize decisions then, merely “shifts their focus.” It is this concept that I’d like to consider in conclusion and take us back to the opening quotations that I’ve yet to mention.
One of the curatorial strategies employed in making a cohesive, graphic statement with the exhibition was the approach to labeling. Instead of the standard wall tags, information was printed on those bright yellow floor signs often used to warn of slippery floors (the catalogues also had bright yellow covers with singular, black symbols familiar as hazard warnings, like those for fire or electric shock). Usually, the institutional/curatorial hand is less visible and therefore more difficult to consciously consider, so this instance of institutional visualization provides plenty for contemplation.
If as Werber suggests, risk (agency) comes at the expense of danger (passivity), where does the transfer of control occur here? We are told that we, as viewers transformed into participants, are taking risks; that the artists are taking risks by making participatory work; that the curators are taking risks by organizing such a show; and finally that the institution is taking risks by hosting the exhibit. I certainly do not mean to minimize these risks or the significance of the acts involved, rather quite the opposite. But, if these are risks, taken knowingly and with active involvement, where is the site of danger? Well, this is a complex question, for sure, but one worth considering.
It’s possible that the signage, as insignificant as it may seem, reveals something of a subconscious here, almost like an institutional Freudian slip. The little yellow sandwich boards, warning of a just mopped floor, are institutional indicators themselves. They are standardized, isotype bearing markers of a seemingly benevolent power looking out for our wellbeing, saying, “Be careful! Don’t slip.” We see them in malls, shops, schools, hospitals, and museums: those public spaces where you may visit, work, or just pass through. So we slow down and move more carefully, aware of the risk if we don’t. But behind this institutional display of paternal caring are those like Medrano and the Salvadoran worker quoted above. Institutional risk creates personal danger for those in service or considered expendable, whether it’s one’s health or retirement savings. Of course, I don’t mean to simplify the issue to one of worker safety: institutions depend on many forms of power transference in order to sustain the illusion of control and the appearance of benevolence, whether local or global in scope. And while the problem of inequality in the risk/danger dichotomy may remain problematic, shifting the focus might not be such a bad idea. Maybe it’s who’s doing the shifting that matters.
At Your Own Risk June 27- September 7, 2003 at the Shirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
Catalogue published by Revolver, Frankfurt am Main, 2003
image: installation view, Critical Art Ensemble, Beatriz da Costa and Shyh-shiun Shyu “Free Range Grain,” with fog from Ann Veronica Janssens’s “Schirn.”
photo by Ryan Griffis
Using data from a 1966 behavioural experiment testing the influence of the perception of time categories on individual behaviour, The Relation Papers presents a fictional vision of two characters – The Simulating Subject and The Hypnotized Subject – as they undergo questioning at the hands of The Experimenter, his Confederate, and an Outside Observer.
The work is meant to explore the combination of an existing structure with fiction so that the arrangement of fragments would retain the internal direction and logic of the information yet be deliberate and subjective, with the quality of a fever dream.
Taken from the album Airstream by John Blanchard, a selection of meditative pieces for cello, piano, sitar, and orchestra. A smooth interface that reflects the feeling of the music, drawing the user into an environment that is unusually calming and relaxing for a computer interface. It also features photography created by the composer inspired by the work of Andy Goldsworthy.
A personal interactive document of the protest in London, UK, on September 28th 2002, to stop the war against Iraq. I am an artist, but on this day, I was one among 400,000 (or thereabouts) protesters. It seems more relevant these days for me as an artist to jump in with both feet, to be in the middle of a crowd of human beings when so much of our experience of the world is so passive and mediated by TV and film’. This piece uses JavaScript and is accompanied by a flash soundtrack made in collaboration with ‘Ouch Those Monkeys.
http://www.furtherfield.org/rcatlow/stop/index.html
A collaborative effort of Taped Rugs Artists, conceived and executed during spring and summer, 2002. It is credited not to any specific artist, but to “Taped Rugs Productions”. Collaborators C.Goff III, Buzzsaw, Josh Duringer, Killr “Mark” Kaswan, Eric Matchett, Mikadams, and the ‘Tapegerm Collective’ worked with Mp3s and tapes that were created using materials which were improvised live, transmitted via email, and/or sent through the post. These materials were edited and glued together in various ways to create the 28 pieces which appear on the final recording. 5 tracks featured on Furtherfield.
https://archive.org/details/Machinations
These archived visual diary accounts exude an intuitve and playful intimacy. As you journey through the collection of pages, static images, moving images, dates, times and moments; you get the sense that images are a platform for communicating what cannot be said by words alone. The user experiences a methodology, an ‘in tune’ optical awareness. The emotion and poetic mind behind these works explores life by seeing, shining light on other people’s lives as well as her own. Viewing the external world as part of her own inner world, relational identification. The use of Flash, sound and other techniques are subtle and do not distract you from the subject at hand.
Other work by Jess Loseby on Furtherfield in Archive.org
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayartist.php?artist_id=38
Furtherfield content is published
