Pete & Repeat
d.u.m.b.o. Arts Center
30 Washington Street,
Brooklyn, NY, USA
June 23-August 19, 2001
Thurs.-Mon. 12-6 pm

When I went to interview Kathleen Forde, the guest curator of "Pete &
Repeat," at the d.u.m.b.o. arts center, she was confused. The Curatorial
Associate of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was
unsure why Rhizome would be interested in running a review of a show in
which none of the work is net-based and is, in fact, hardly "new media."

The work in "Pete & Repeat," a group show claiming to "explore the
hypnotic seduction to be found within apparent monotonous or repetitive
acts," in fact uses low-tech apparatuses in a way that comments on
network culture. (Whether or not this was intended by the artists is an
entirely different issue.) It seems that even those who do know their
history are doomed to repeat it. Each of the nine installations included
in the show perform for us such repetition and allow consideration of
the role of repetition in network culture.

In 1996, Stephen Cartwright biked from his hometown of Philadelphia to
San Francisco, creating a journal of old lady sightings. Each time he
saw a woman who resembled his grandmother, he jotted down the time and
location of the find. For "Pete & Repeat," Cartwright created a lightbox
framing a hole-punched map of his journey. Imbedded speakers play
Cartwright's recording of his journal, a muffled soundtrack with no
discernible beginning or end. Cartwright became his own search engine.
Armed with minimal criteria, he gathered all possibly relevant sites for
mass distribution. Any real memories of the Platonic form, "Stephen
Cartwright's grandmother" are slowly replaced by the virtual memory of
serial spectacles, ranked according to match. (This humorously recalls
Nietzsche's example of the inaccuracy of natural language: If we begin
calling all things meeting certain criteria "leaves" we will end up
including many non-leaves and excluding real leaves.)

Graham Parker's work extends these ideas. Parker has installed dueling
slide shows: timed projections of images documenting two separate
performances consisting of reenactments of popular myths. In "Diogenes,"
Parker reenacts an account of the Greek Cynic philosopher, Diogenes,
standing in front of a statue and begging in order to "practice
disappointment," as legend goes. "Barnum" is a combined reenactment of
two myths: One about Friedrich Engels's walks amongst the slums of
Little Ireland, in the artist's home city of Manchester, England; the
second about a publicity stunt by P. T. Barnum for his American Museum,
at the intersection of Broadway and Ann Street, in New York. (In its
heyday, the long-gone museum grossed the equivalent of ten times
Disneyland, today.) Using bricks carried over from Manchester, the
artist recreated the stunt at the site of the former museum. The end
result dramatizes the semantics of search engine results. As primary web
content mutates and becomes re-circulated, multiple incarnations of the
same information is presented, often in fragments and without reference
to age, origin, or authorship.

Speaking of fragments. Les Leveque's "4 Vertigo" condensed Hitchcock's
"Vertigo" at the rate of one frame every two seconds. The film was then
duplicated four times, shifting the horizontal or vertical orientation
of the frame with each duplication. Leveque then reassembled the four
films, frame by frame, generating a rhythmic kaleidoscopic montage. Both
this piece and Jennifer DeNike's "Skipping Stones," a single channel
video combining footage of Alcatraz's flashing light with scenes of
figures skipping stones over unidentified bodies of water, cause one to
think not only of the way that data is presented, but also of how it is
interpreted.

Also questioning interpretation is Andrea Ray's audio installation in
which viewers stare at a bright blue screen while listening to
repetitive television laugh tracks. Viewers may be left disenchanted
with the myth of interactivity in this piece, which reminds us how the
monitor replaced the television. In both cases, viewers spend hours
hunched before a screen, trying to vet out useful information, or to
make information useful.

Beyond interpreting the data, there is the issue of protocol in data
dissemination. In his installation, "Ingoing and Outgoing Messages,"
Jeff Karolski presents answering machine messages and announcements
found in thrift stores. Listening to the messages, which are often side-
splittingly better than fiction, one is faced with the sheer
ordinariness of human communication. Each Detroit telephone owner
thought s/he had a unique way of saying "hello, we're not home, please
leave a message after the tone"; yet they were all the same. Whether
communicating via telephone, e-mail, ftp, telegraph, or any other
avenue, we have unspoken rules about the way that we send and receive
data. The logic of these rules, the credibility implied in their
repetition, implies as much about our character as it does the shape of
our networks.

On the other hand, an installation by the TurboTwins (Leesa and Nicole
Abahuni) comments on the wild flexibility of identity within network
culture's rigid columns of ones and zeros. The Twins' infrared-sensitive
robots, Linus and Minus, use dark markers to trace the dark lines of
blown-up thumbprints. While, in theory, their movements should be
constant, environmental factors and human intervention steers the robots
in new directions, theoretically altering the identity traced.

Standing out in the show is the work of Tristan Lowe in which an
inflated pillow gurgling with booze and tears, is presented next to a
large, inflated pink elephant, the idea being that the owner of the
pillow has a problem (a pink elephant), as unseen as this owner is to
us. Lowe's work deserves a separate show, but does manage to give Pete &
Repeat a physical center.

Finally, David Abir's steel sound sculptures present altered-variations
of classical music that merge recent technology with traditional Persian
music theory concerning "the integration of non-repetitive music and
repetitive systems." Abir is concerned with demonstrating that the same
basic forms continue to assert themselves in different creative contexts
and historical epochs. In this sense, his work may be most demonstrative
of the idea that Pete & Repeat's low tech work exemplifies high tech
culture. While media changes, our systems of representation generally
persist. The ideals, aesthetics, and everyday challenges informing old
media defined new media, so that it is no longer appropriate to speak of
"new media," but of "new genres," or simply, "media."