"screenlife"
Curated by Magdalena Sawon
with artists Jenny Althoff/Alexander Vaindorf and Kiki Sekor
at Apex Art as part of the "222"–two curators, two artists, two
projects–series.

It seems that there have been a lot of well-intended but ultimately
disappointing attempts made to bring the computer and internet into the
gallery space. For many of us, the technological constraints of the
keyboard and monitor have proved a difficult aesthetic barrier to
overcome. But is this resistance endemic to the technology itself or the
curator's willingness to creatively engage it? Taking the example of the
recent Whitney Biennial–not to ignore its more obvious shortcomings–
the use of computers in the exhibition space can be both an aesthetic
and engineering disaster. In addition, the work of certain artists, such
as jody.org and Heath Bunting, continues to resist the physical and
temporal framework of the gallery. Caught between real and virtual
worlds, is it possible to imagine a kind of artwork which could
successfully straddle the computer interface and the gallery wall?

Magdalena Sawon and Tamas Banovich of Postmasters Gallery have long been
proponents of bringing the computer into the gallery, beginning with
"Can You Digit?" in 1996, followed by the cleverly conceived "Mac
Classics" exhibition in 1997 in which artists were invited to rework
their obsolescent Mac Classics as art projects. They have also shown the
work of new media artists Perry Hoberman, G. H. Hovagimyan, and most
recently, etoy. In the first part of Apex Art's summer series "222 two
curators, two artists, two projects" Sawon has assembled a show which
renders the question of whether or not the internet belongs in the
gallery effectively moot.

"Active Worlds" is a 3-D multi-user space on the Internet in which
Active World denizens can construct virtual worlds and interact with
visitors using chat room software. Tanya Murphy is an Active World
homesteader who has built a virtual model of her house on the Internet.
Murphy's site can be visited using a simple navigation tool provided
free of charge. The artists Jenny Althoff and Alexander Vaindorf were
interested in Murphy's site because it simulates her actual home–
nothing has been added or taken away. In their installation at Apex Art,
Althoff and Vaindorf reconstructed Murphy's virtual living room in the
gallery. The objects in the room–couches, curtains, pictures, coffee
table, bookshelf, TV and TV cabinet–have been rendered in the same way
that a video game like Quake or Unreal renders virtual space, as a 3-D
polygon with surface texture. Like their virtual counterparts, the
objects in this room are only as deep as their digital skin. The books
cannot be taken off the bookshelf and read, the couch cannot be sat on,
the curtains cannot be closed. They occupy actual space, but are only
digital facimiles, like projections from a digital world, and as such
hesitate between real and virtual, caught in the gravitational pull of
parallel worlds.

The artists' aesthetic is one of digital degradation in which fabric and
wood are rendered as they are in the virtual space of Murphy's digital
living room. The couch and curtains become a patchwork of enlarged
pixels; the overall effect is of entering an Alice-in-Wonderland
netherworld seen through the looking glass of a computer monitor. It is
a pixelated, fragmented approximation of Murphy's artificial living
room, which is, in turn, a rough approximation of the "real" living room
in her house. By bringing Murphy's virtual space back into the physical
space of the gallery, the artists have effected a clever double-
displacement, from actual to artificial to some kind of hybrid of the
virtual and the real.

Kiki Sekor's light boxes and virtual reality glasses, by contrast, are
sleekly fabricated in steel greys, electric blues, and neon reds, and
thus firmly rooted in the "real" space of the gallery. Sekor trawls the
porn sites of the internet, entering hard-core chat rooms, engaging in
virtual sex with other users, and recording her encounters. Her sexual
encounters are more banal than erotic, and seem intended to desensitize
rather than arouse the viewer:

Galatea: Your cock slides in all the way deep in my wet mouth
Cyaneye: I begin to pump your mouth
Galatea: you feel the back of my throat its tight and moist
Cyaneye: I pump your mouth harder

The central part of the installation is a round table wired with three
sets of virtual reality glasses. Donning the VR glasses, the viewer is
led through a Tron-like virtual space in which the same words appear as
looming blocks of 3-D text. It is an intelligent and effective way to
present the video, forcing the viewer to immerse themselves completely
in the virtual world, and at the same time echoing the anonymity of the
online chat room. No one else in the gallery can see what you are
seeing; there is no one looking over your shoulder as you descend into
Sekor's hard-core yet strangely antiseptic virtual world.