RHIZOME DIGEST: 5.07.04

discussion

Posted May 6 2004 20:00

RHIZOME DIGEST: 5.07.04

RHIZOME DIGEST: May 7, 2004 Content: +announcement+ 1. Peter Sciscioli: Digital Happy Hour @ The Kitchen +opportunity+ 2. Marisa S. Olson: Call for Entries: Improbable Monuments 3. tom holley: Artist in Residence Opportunity +work+ 4. Jo-Anne Green: Turbulence Artists' Studios: "SMS-Series 13" by David Crawford +scene report+ 5. Jonah Brucker-Cohen: Report from Ciber-Art Bilbao Conference +book review+ 6. Gloria Sutton: Getting Below the Surface [review of "Surface Tension: Problematics of Site", Edited by Ken Ehrlich and Brandon LaBelle] +thread+ 7. curt cloninger, Geert Dekkers, Michael Szpakowski, Rob Myers, Myron Turner: setting up the punch line + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 1. Date: 5.05.04 From: Peter Sciscioli (peter@thekitchen.org) Subject: Digital Happy Hour @ The Kitchen Wednesday, May 12 at 6pm, The Kitchen (512 W. 19th St) hosts Digital Happy Hour, featuring animation artist Marina Zurkow in discussion with KT Salen (Program director at Parsons MFA DT). Tickets are $8 and can be purhased on www.ticketweb.com or through The Kitchen's box office (212) 255-5793 x11. For more information, please visit www.thekitchen.org or to view Marina's work, visit <a rel="nofollow" href="http://channel.creative-capital.org/project_608.html">http://channel.creative-capital.org/project_608.html</a>. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 2. Date: 5.04.04 From: "Marisa S. Olson" (marisa@sfcamerawork.org) Subject: Call for Entries: Improbable Monuments please post/forward… SF Camerawork CALL FOR ENTRIES Receipt Deadline: July 30, 2004 [ed. note: changed from 2003] Online and Web proposals for Improbable Monuments (Part of our upcoming Fall 2004 show, Monument Recall) Monument Recall is an exhibition of work by artists who are challenging ideas of what a 'monument' can be. Through scale, material, point of view, location, subject, and concepts, work in this exhibition challenges the conventional expectations of public monuments in public spaces. As part of this exhibition, we are looking for work in proposal form only, to be exhibited online. Submissions should include: 1. a description of your Improbable Monument 2. a visual rendering of the idea, in images, animation, digital video, etc. 3. a description of its purpose and function within the context of improbable monument. 4. all current and pertinent contact information. The ideas should not be restricted by materials, funds, and subject matter or by any other practical considerations. Instead, we're looking for grand visions of what monuments can be without regard to the usual constraints. We are particularly interested in how ideas can function specifically within the cyber realm, All submissions should be available online or in Web-ready digital files on a CD-ROM. If the work is already online, please send the URL. Otherwise, send the CD-ROM to the address below. Please include an Artist Statement & Vitae, as well as a self-addressed, stamped envelope for the return of your materials. Mail the material to: SF Camerawork MONUMENT RECALL 1246 Folsom Street San Francisco, CA 94103 or email material to: Laurie Blavin <laurie@blavin.com> For more information, contact any of the exhibition curators: Paula Levine (plevine@sfsu.edu) Trena Noval (tnoval@mindspring.com) Laurie Blavin (laurie@blavin.com) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 3. Date: 5.07.04 From: tom holley (tomholley@the-media-centre.co.uk> Subject: ARTIST IN RESIDENCE OPPORTUNITY ARTIST IN RESIDENCE [AiR] 2004 OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS + + DEADLINE: FRIDAY 28 MAY 2004 + + ABOUT THE RESIDENCY Residency Period 3 months Dates July 04 - Sept 04 Location Huddersfield, England The AiR programme at The Media Centre aims to support the exploration and development of new work in digital/interactive/network media and technology based arts practice. The residency provides time and resources to artists in a supportive environment to facilitate the creation of new work; we encourage a cross disciplinary and experimental approach. This is a practice based residency designed to enable the development and completion of a new work. Benefits + Time and space to develop ideas + Accommodation in large 2 bedroom apartment + 24/7 access to technical facilities + Technical support + Contribution to travel costs to and from Huddersfield + Free internet access + Bursary of £700 [GBP] per month + Small materials fund + Opportunities to present your work + Introductions to regional and national organisations + Invitations to cultural events + Introduction to local art/cultural scene * Applicants may bring partners or families but we cannot offer financial support for them. If you would like to know more about this opportunity please visit: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.druh.co.uk">http://www.druh.co.uk</a> – Tom Holley Creative Director Media Centre Network – <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.mcnetwork.co.uk">http://www.mcnetwork.co.uk</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome is now offering organizational subscriptions, memberships purchased at the institutional level. These subscriptions allow participants of an institution to access Rhizome's services without having to purchase individual memberships. (Rhizome is also offering subsidized memberships to qualifying institutions in poor or excluded communities.) Please visit <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/info/org.php">http://rhizome.org/info/org.php</a> for more information or contact Rachel Greene at Rachel@Rhizome.org. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 4. Date: 5.07.04 From: Jo-Anne Green (jo@turbulence.org) Subject: Turbulence Artists¹ Studios: "SMS-Series 13" by David Crawford May 7, 2004 Turbulence Artists¹ Studios: "SMS-Series 13" by David Crawford <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.turbulence.org/studios/crawford/sms13/">http://www.turbulence.org/studios/crawford/sms13/</a> "SMS-13" is a 5 minute linear remix of footage shot for previous SMS installments in London, Paris, Boston, New York, and Tokyo. The familiar SMS series' algorithmic montage that constitutes each clip's DNA remains intact, while the individual sequences are now composited within a linear framework. The speed of the transitions is based on network connection speed. BIOGRAPHY David Crawford was born in Riverside, California in 1970. He studied film, video, and new media at the Massachusetts College of Art and received a BFA in 1997. In 1999, his Here and Now project was commissioned by New Radio and Performing Arts with funds from National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000, Crawford's Light of Speed project was a finalist for the SFMOMA Webby Prize for Excellence in Online Art. In 2003, his Stop Motion Studies project received an Artport Gate Page Commission from the Whitney Museum of American Art and an Award of Distinction in the Net Vision category at the Prix Ars Electronica. For more information about Turbulence please visit <a rel="nofollow" href="http://turbulence.org">http://turbulence.org</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + For $65 annually, Rhizome members can put their sites on a Linux server, with a whopping 350MB disk storage space, 1GB data transfer per month, catch-all email forwarding, daily web traffic stats, 1 FTP account, and the capability to host your own domain name (or use <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.net/your_account_name">http://rhizome.net/your_account_name</a>). Details at: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/services/1.php">http://rhizome.org/services/1.php</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 5. Date: 5.7.04 From: Jonah Brucker-Cohen (jonah@coin-operated.com) Subject: Report from Ciber-Art Bilbao Conference Report from Ciber-Art Bilbao Conference April 25-29, 2004 Bilbao, Spain <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.ciberart-bilbao.net">http://www.ciberart-bilbao.net</a> By Jonah Brucker-Cohen (jonah_at_coin-operated.com) Set in the post-industrial city of Bilbao, Spain, the Ciber-Art Bilbao conference was a lively mix of interactive art exhibitions, performances, concerts, and a comprehensive paper session where artists and practitioners presented their work and theories on the future of digital culture. The festival's main objective was to situate Bilbao on the digital art map by creating an event with global participation from internationally known media artists. Although the art exhibition opened a week earlier, I arrived as the five day long conference sessions began. One problem with the structure of the conference was the attempt to integrate the local media art presence, since the program booklet failed to translate Spanish speaker's talks into English and vise versa. This is an account of what I was able to experience, although with concurrent panels running back to back, the breadth of the conference was impossible to completely cover. The opening presentation was by "Free Software" pioneer and grassroots hero, Richard Stallman. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Stallman, who wrote the GNU (which stands for GNU's Not Unix) operating system as an alternative to proprietary systems like Windows, outlined the four tenets of the free software movement: 1) The ability to run a software program, 2) The freedom to help yourself to the source code and change it, 3) The freedom to distribute copies of your modifications, and 4) The desire to help to build your community by publishing a modified version. His talk outlined why these freedoms are important to the premise of giving you complete "control" over your computer and your ability to use it freely. Having unrestricted access to source code and the work of like-minded programmers perpetuates the proliferation of goodwill and exchange among independent producers. He went on to demonstrate whether or not these ideas applied to hardware, as well as software by trying to deconstruct the use and misuse of a physical object: a chair. However this argument fell short because software allows for an economy of scale. When creating software it is easier for an individual to create many copies than one, whereas with hardware making many copies is more difficult and costly. The paper topics presented over the next few days ranged from examinations of online memes, location-based GPS art projects, networked accessories, and formal overviews of art and technology practice. Mirko Tobias Schafer, from the Institute of Media and Re/presentation at the University of Utrecht spoke about how the hacking and modification of existing technology has been integrated into the next versions of the hacked object. One example is the website, Aibohack.com, which profiles a hobbyist's software and hardware mods of the popular robotic dog, some of which Sony plans to integrate into their next version. Giving an overview of academic institutions in the US supporting art and technology, was Duke University's Edward A. Shanken. Shaken sees collaborations between artists and scientists as an interface for research to engage with the public. This attitude was also prevalent in Susan Kozel's keynote address where she outlined details of her wearable projects that aim to engage the public through social performative experience. Kozel, a professor at Simon Fraser University, outlined her aim to develop clothing that can connect its wearer's biometric data with others over a local network and produce vibro-haptic feedback on the surface of the garment. Thus the clothing becomes a relay of mood and emotion within social proximity. Also exploring immediacy of interaction, Eric Paulos of Intel Research Berkeley, gave the third keynote about his recent work in "Urban Atmospheres". The project is a detailed account of the proliferation of close-knit urban spaces where public passivity often upstages collective engagement. His aim is to reverse this assumption through a "carnivalization" of everyday encounters into playful interventions where everyday individuals can engage with the people or strangers occupying similar spaces. His latest project, "Jabberwocky" manifests itself as a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone application that connects to others to visualize and encourage connections between 'strangers' who frequent similar spaces. Paulos was asked if this type of community reflection could have a negative effect for people who enjoy their anonymity. Like most tracking related projects, the obvious answer is that most people give up a certain amount of freedom regardless of their desire to be tracked, simply by owning a mobile phone or using a credit card. This type of surveillance fear was debated through the conference as the promise of technology in most presentations often left out the repercussions and baggage it entails. Across town, in a large warehouse space, the art exhibition featured several large-scale interactive installations, and hundreds of screen-based terminals behind giant car-wash plastic flaps. "Evident Traces", a mini-show at the festival, curated by Christiane Paul, featured several works that attempted to engage the user on a physical level. One of these projects was NYC-based artist, John Klima's long awaited "Terrain Machine", a real-time depth display with hundred of motorized potentiometers with stretched spandex connecting each point. The result is a moving "terrain" with a projected image of a woman floating on the surface, allowing users to manipuate the depths of the pots as they cast a shadow. Also in Paul¹s selection was Susan Kozel's "Between Bodies", the second phase of the wearable sensing project, "whisper",but featuring a series of skirts that send signals amongst each other via PocketPCs to effect physical stimuli such as electric fans and motors. Also present were Sibylle Hauert and Daniel Reichmuth's "Instant City", a tangible sound installation that allows people to create sound mixes by placing translucent plastic blocks on a light table. Depending on the amount of light that passes through the stacked blocks, different sound samples would play. Other notable additions were NYC based artist Daniel Shiffman's "Reactive", a particle-based video parser, and MEART - The Semi Living Artist¹s ³Symbotica², which used artificial life simulations coupled with a pneumatic robotic drawing machine. Leaving the conference early, I missed out on the Planetary Collegium events scheduled for later in the week. Regardless, it seemed as if the prevailing attitudes expressed outlined how the promise of technology as a social leveler becomes more evident with re-appropriation and disruption of existing contexts of interaction, place, and social engagement. Is creativity the ultimate social equalizer? When does technology lose relevance to the idea trying to be conveyed? From the numerous installations that challenged how forms of media can displace their traditional modes of representation, to papers that explored how the proliferation and mutation of ideas is causing a rift in popular culture, the Ciber-Art Bilbao provided an interesting perspective on the role of the digital instigator. - Jonah Brucker-Cohen (jonah_at_coin-operated.com) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 6. Date: 5.7.04 From: Gloria Sutton (suttong@humnet.ucla.edu) Subject: Getting Below the Surface Getting Below the Surface Surface Tension: Problematics of Site Edited by Ken Ehrlich and Brandon LaBelle CD selection by Stephen Vitiello Published by Errant Bodies Press with Ground Fault Recordings (2003) ISBN: 0-9655570-4-9 $25.00 www.errantbodies.org Often times when we are describing the types of interactions that take place via email and postings on websites we end up attaching social descriptors to humanize these data infrastructures. The Internet becomes a communication ³space,² a public ³sphere,² and a ³site² for dialogue. And when we strain a little further to describe the social conditions on the net, it pretty much looks like the artworld a fairly anglo-centric and male-dominated space. While the social structures that have come to define and determine our notions of online space are sometimes lost under a cloud of political rhetoric, the cultural construction of ³space² (on or offline) has been the subject of intense scrutiny by artists, architects and historians under the rubric of ³site-specificity.² One of the most engaging and creative contributions to the ongoing conversation on site-specific art practices is found in the critical essays, artist projects and sound pieces collected in the anthology, Surface Tension: Problematics of Site edited by Ken Ehrlich and Brandon LaBelle, two Los Angeles-based writers and artists and recently published by Errant Bodies Press. Highly nuanced essays such as Juli Carson¹s performative reading of the public hearings and related ³documents² prompted by Richard Serra¹s Tilted Arc (1989) provide an object lesson for current debates surrounding the production and exhibition of new media art. Carson is adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at UCLA where she teaches critical theory and contemporary art. In ³Two Walls: 1989,² she deftly breaks down the subtle dialectic in a work of art that ³transcends any physical union with its site² while ³transcending any physical contradiction with its site.² Carson¹s argument emphasizes the moment when a work of art becomes ³discursively bound (and for many, first-received) off-site²: public hearings, books, news articles and other written sources. Carson¹s astute reading of ³discursive site² complicates issues of publicity, public record, and public space key to many new media art projects such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer¹s ³Body Movies² and ³Vectorial Elevations.² Lozano-Hemmer, who is a Madrid-based artist, discusses these projects in Surface Tension and bills them as ³relational architecture installations.² He maintains his projects are relationship-specific rather than site-specific, yet they still have to negotiate the same terrain between a live event enacted in a public square, soliciting participants via his website and then posting photographic documentation of the results. The interplay between sites of production and sites of reception are taken up throughout a variety of the essays in Surface Tension including an interview with Dutch artist Paul Panhuysen, director of the influential Het Apollohuis, an experimental music and sound venue in Eindhoven from 19801997, who discusses using site-specific properties of a given location in relation to musical performance and tonality. In particular, many of the essays and projects grabble with the tensions that arise when global phenomena such as the rise of digital computer networks and overdevelopment run into what can be thought of as ³the site-specifics of everyday life.² This is the basis for Brandon LaBelle¹s analysis of the current shift from the material city toward the immaterial flow of information in his essay, ³Split Space: Practices of Transurban Life.² Los Angeles-based artist and curator Lize Mogel¹s bus shelter maps showing the accessible green space in Los Angeles make what she calls the ³symbiotic relationship between the development of parkland and the growth of the city² very clear. The editors themselves have cleared a little conceptual room in the book¹s layout for both production and reception by contributing ten blank pages as ³public space.² While the term ³public space² is deployed over and over, the subject is never presented as fixed or residing on stable ground. In fact, interesting temporal complications are forced by the inclusion of historical material such as a 1976 interview with artist Gordon Matta-Clark (19431978) and contemporary artist Simon Leung¹s compelling account of his project ³Waren Piece (In the ?70s)² and its subsequent retellings at conferences in New York and Los Angeles. Moreover, In a new essay by legendary critic Lucy Lippard, ³Land Art in the Rearview Mirror,² Lippard self-reflexively implicates her earlier writing of the 1960s as the ³macro-pronouncements about paradigms² that she is currently arguing against by promoting ³micro-view that relies on grassroots connections.² Advertised by word-of-mouth and distributed by a micro press itself, Surface Tension may be one of those books that you only hear about (especially its irreverent accompanying CD that includes ³Lunar Rambles² by Bay-area performance pioneer Terry Fox, ³Rhythmic Stamping² by Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono coughing and more), but never get the chance to pick up because it might not be front in center in your local Barnes and Noble or even in the new super glam set up of architecture bookshop Hennessy and Ingalls in Santa Monica. But isn¹t that what grass roots networks like Rhizome are for? Gloria Sutton + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 7. Date: 4.29.04 - 5.07.04 From: curt cloninger (curt@lab404.com), Geert Dekkers (geert@nznl.com)>, Michael Szpakowski (szpako@yahoo.com), Rob Myers (robmyers@mac.com), Myron Turner (myron_turner@shaw.ca) Subject: setting up the punch line [Editor¹s note: this discussion has been trimmed and includes excerpts from the stream of opnions generated over the week in response to Curt¹s original post (which is here in it¹s entirety). For the complete correspondence (and more copy+paste notation detailing/directing references between posts), check fresh texts at rhizome.org] curt cloninger (curt@lab404.com) posted: Setting Up the Punch Line: Some Thoughts on Para-Art Media I've been thinking a lot lately about media that accompanies an artwork, and the kind of artwork that relies on such accompanying media. Accompanying media can include the artist statement, but it can also include instructions on how to use the work, as well as an explanation of what the work is actually doing. Let's deal with each type of accompanying media in turn, citing specific examples. 1. Artist Statement: Think of Sherry Levine's "After Walker Evans," where she takes pictures of Walker Evans' pictures. Without the explanatory artist statement, we think we're looking at pictures of Alabama sharecroppers taken by Walker Evans. We wonder what these pictures from the turn of the century are doing in a contemporary art gallery. It's only after we read the artist statement that we understand we are looking at pictures of pictures, and we get it. I've dissed conceptual work like this before, and it's not my intention to kick that dead horse again. I just want to point out that, although the "art" of this piece is in its concept, the punch line of that concept is revealed in the actual accompanying media of the artist statement. The artist statement is like the "Da-dum-bum!" that cues us to the joke. So although Levine's meta-media conceptual artplay is supposed to be heady and subtle, the gag is actually revealed with all the subtlety of a vaudeville clown. Understated, Steven Wright-type humor this ain't. When Steven Wright pauses for a very long time, then mumbles "I stole all the erasers to all the miniature golf pencils in the world," the joke is as much in the subtlety of his delivery as it is in the content of his punch line. We get no such subtlety from artwork that relies entirely on accompanying media to convey its concept. 2. Instructions on How To Use the Work: This is just one example of many, but check "Free Radio Linux": <a rel="nofollow" href="http://gallery9.walkerart.org/bookmark.html?id=10672&type=object&bookmark=1">http://gallery9.walkerart.org/bookmark.html?id=10672&type=object&bookmark=1</a> There is an introductory text blurb at the gallery9 site itself. Then after you link to the URL of the actual piece, there is even more accompanying media before you get to the piece itself, telling you how to get to the piece, what software you need for the piece, etc. These instructions are necessary for the use of the piece. To his credit, the artists tries to tie-in the tone of the instructions with the overall concept of the piece. The piece deals with sourcecode, and the instructions are written in a "readme" type of voice. Still, all of these how-to interruptions place barriers between the user and the piece itself. If this were Amazon and the piece itself was a book being sold, few people would ever get around to clicking on the "buy now" button. Which may be just as well in this case, since the piece is just an audio stream of translated software code with little aesthetic appeal. The instructions of how to access the piece may be as interesting as the actual piece itself. To return to our stand-up comedy analogy, this piece is like a comedian who spends his entire routine testing the sound system and the acoustics of the room, and then he tells a fart joke and walks off stage. My critique is that the accompanying explanatory media distracts from the impact of the art. It's not setting the user up in any intentional way to experience the art. It's not leading her into the art. It doesn't help contextualize the art. If anything, it decontextualizes the art. Just like labeling every tree in the wilderness with a placard describing its uses and phylum and genus detracts from my hiking experience rather than adding to it. (This critique admittedly presumes that art is meant to have some sort of overall experience on a person besides just explaining something to her intellect.) 3. Explanations of What the Work is Actually Doing (when you can already tell): A lot of times, these explanations of what a piece of work is actually doing are gratuitous, because it's quite obvious what the work is doing. Yoshi Sodeoka recently had a piece at Turbulence where he was asked to come up with some sort of introductory statement as part of the commission [ <a rel="nofollow" href="http://turbulence.org/Works/sodeoka/">http://turbulence.org/Works/sodeoka/</a> ]. The piece doesn't need an introductory statement, and Sodeoka solved this problem by giving a sort of non-introductory statement in the form of a FAQ – Q: Why do you believe that this will be entertaining? A: This is a question that you will have to answer for yourself. Sodeoka's evasiveness was pegged (derided?) by Eduardo Navas as enforcing a kind of structuralism. And in a sense, he's right. Sodeoka, as a graphic designer, is used to being able in maintaining contextual control of the user's experience of his work. His work is meant to be visceral and somewhat disorienting. So accompanying textual media that orients his users actually runs counter to the experience he is trying to create. But I don't think it's any kind of intentional structuralism as much as it is a desire to sneak up on the punch line, to keep the audience guessing. It's mostly an issue of timing. Back to the stand-up comedy analogy – Sodeoka is a Gallagher-like comedian who likes to run out on stage and begin throwing rubber chickens into the unexpecting audience. In this instance, he's hired to play a comedy club (Turbulence) where the house rules dictate that every comedian must have a proper biographical introduction. This requirement undermines his comedic surprise attack, so as he's being introduced, Sodeoka sits in the wings and throws rubber chickens at the MC. 3b. Explanations of What the Work is Actually Doing (when you can't tell otherwise): Now here is a problem I'm encountering in my own work. One of the fun things about the web is that you're not obliged to contextualize your art as art. You needn't have any accompanying explanatory media whatsoever, and you can simply throw your user straight into your piece. You can even create faux accompanying explanatory media that actually sets-up your user for your punch-line (cf: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/rebranding/">http://www.computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/rebranding/</a> ). Mouchette is the classic example. But there is a problem with new media that foregoes an accompanying explanation – if your technology is not *apparently* doing what it's *actually* doing, nobody will know what it's doing. A case in point is this piece: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/bubblegum/">http://www.computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/bubblegum/</a> There are user instructions, but they are cryptic ("wait for a magic transformation"). The underlying technology is calling in discrete images and autogeneratively collaging them according to a semi-random code. You can watch each card and see sometimes thousands of different combinations. But you may have to keep watching before you realize that these collages are being generated in real-time. Otherwise, you might watch 4 or 5 different collages, and think that each one is a static, pre-fab single image. In which case, it seems like you are watching a slide show of a few discrete collages, when in actuality you are watching a collage-generating machine. My honest questions are: 1. Would adding an accompanying explanation of the underlying technology make this piece more enjoyable and meaningful? Would it increase the value of the user's experience? 2. Would adding such an explanation detract from the whimsical, disorienting context of the piece in a way that hurts the piece? 3. If a new media piece needs accompanying text to explain how it works, if its underlying workings are conceptually important but not experientially apparent, then does that piece fail as an autogenerative/reactive piece? If I'm looking at one of Lev Manovich's autogenerative database cinema pieces, and it just looks like a linear movie to me, then has he achieved his artistic purpose? +++++++++++++++++ Personally, I suspect that the most successful pieces evince their underlying workings and concepts without the need for a bunch of accompanying explanatory text. Without the accompanying text, the artist is allowed to hijack more of the user's context. This gives the artist the ability to dialogue with a more holistic/gritty area of the user's mindspace; it makes the work less antiseptic and quarantined. Granted, the artist who is comfortable relying on accompanying explanatory text may object, "But what if the user doesn't get it?" My knee-jerk response is, "Then it's probably not that good." But things are probably more complicated than that. I'm coming to believe that a piece of work may well be enhanced by accompanying explanatory text, *provided that*: 1. it's absolutely necessary 2. the tenor of its copy is in dialogue with the approach of the piece. 3. it serves to contextualize the piece rather than de-contextualize it. [cf: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.memexengine.com">http://www.memexengine.com</a> ] 4. it isn't full of a bunch of blah blah Adorno-quoting art school bullshit [cf: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.playdamage.org/market-o-matic">http://www.playdamage.org/market-o-matic</a> ]. Oftentimes the accompanying explanatory text is used like overabundant A1 sauce to mask the rank taste of an underlying cut of bad beef. If your piece sucks, alluding to John Cage isn't going to make it any less sucky. + + + Geert Dekkers (geert@nznl.com) replied: [?] I don't think I really understand your question here – do you mean that it's not overly clear what's happening in the piece. Or perhaps you realise that you're testing the viewers' patience – asking the viewer to stay for longer than a few seconds to appreciate the piece. In this context, one of the things I hate about net.art (or, for that matter, all art that is supposed to compete with mass media – like video works broadcasted on primetime) is the ease with which the viewer/user can click away from the work – considering the trouble it takes to go to an art gallery or museum. The very ease of the medium is a downfall for (some of) it;'s content. [?] As always, an explanatory text is just one of the many aspects of art waiting to be freed from it's functional shackles. (In there with resumes, documentation, book-keeping, paying bills, debts, bubble-gum stuck to the undersides of the studio tables [seriously!].) Pieces will suck less if the artist realises this. + + + Curt Cloninger replied: [?] Such attention to contextual detail I would expect to find in contemporary art (particularly in contemporary conceptual art interested in questioning context and playing with viewer expectation), and yet there is an almost tacky sloppiness about the way many contemporary artists allow galleries (online and off) to present their para-art information and to contextualize their pieces. It's as if the artist assumes "the art starts here," and then whatever happens outside of that "art" area is subject to the (often aesthetically boring) rules of the academy and gallery culture. + + + Geert Dekkers replied: Right. But sometimes there is more to a piece than can be taken in on face value. The process can be equally important (of course you know I'm not speaking specifically of the piece you mentioned above, which I have not experienced personally) and sometimes more so. Interactivity in a piece implies in principal a radical depart from the traditional relationship between de artist, the work and the audience – of course this implication must be made explicit for the piece to work. All depends on the way in which the artist/initiator crafts the interactivity. Which just goes to show that – what? That bad art sucks? Back to your initial question here: what if the technology isn't "apparently" doing what it is "actually" doing – what does that mean, actually? In your piece, the randomness subtly changes what could be thought of as a series of static images. So that we don't and can't figure out when the series loops, because it doesn't. Imagine a piece where the viewer/user is confronted with a piece that does loop, but loops for one session only. So that only in communicating with other viewers/users could ever be deduced that the piece is in fact not a series of static images but is in reality randomised. Would this be a good example of a piece that is "apparently" doing something else than it is "actually" doing? And now – why does this matter? Isn't it true that the code itself presents and represents the true colours of the piece? That the fact that we humans are experiencing the current instance of the presentation of the code as a series of static images is irrelevant for the importance of the piece? There's an anology with written music that might be interesting – in Bach, we see musical notation that literally depicts the two beautiful brown eyes of some lady – but of course, the viewer/user/consumer of that music experiences nothing of the sort. Just two G's. Or are they no more than that, just two G's? + + + Geert Dekkers added: [?] Again. you could turn this around if you like. In the work of Joseph Beuys, his text, the flow of his language (because he was first and foremost a teacher), was his life's work, and the pieces he made in the process could be called "examples". But not only that. Beuys would have never been such a well-known artist had he stayed silent and just produced pieces. (Of course not! we all realise) And, in effect, his art would never have been as GOOD as it is (or "is considered", take your pick) had he stayed silent. It all depends on what kind of artist you're trying te be. If you make (good) pieces and then go around saying: "Duh, it just came to me" you become an "expressive beast" artist, relying and depending entirely upon your more linguistically affluent bretheren (users/viewers, critics) to put the pieces together. This is one end of the spectrum. On the other side, there would be an artist unfathomably more hermetic than Beuys, succeeding in piecing together his works on his very own. (No-one would be allowed to breathe a word about his work other than he.) Of course, in the everyday practise of things we oscillate between the two. And let the two influence each other. (Work on pieces, talk about them, show them, talk about them more, work on more pieces.) So – is it cheating to give that didactic bit of para-art instruction? I'd say that silence is a sentence too. + + + Rob Myers (robmyers@mac.com) replied: [?] Absolutely. Titling a work "Untitled" speaks volumes. And if anybody can point out an artwork that functions without context, explanation or external reference I'd be very interested to see it. Assuming anybody could. :-) + + + Rob Meyers added: "Art, for Jackson Pollock, Was inner neccessity But it was surplus value Got his place in history." - The Red Crayola with Art & Language (Kangaroo?) A Portrait of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock (Part I) Also see "re:evolution", Terence McKenna, The Shamen (Boss Drum) : <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php">http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php</a>? s=fb5610e4914136c23af8a126e45e7d40&p=194053&postcount=1 - Rob. + + + Michael Szpakowski (szpako@yahoo.com) replied: [?] something slightly tangential intrigued me, which bears on the arts/crafts question: <It's often so that the difference between great art and mediocre art is in the finishing and polishing.> [ed. Note: Geert Dekkers said this] Now is this true ?.. I accept the qualifier "often so" but what interests me is how quite often figures in the fine arts tradition are relatively *uninterested* in finish, in polish ..and I'm thinking specifically here of a great Degas piece in the National Gallery London swathes of which are manifestly unfinished. ( and this is by no means a unique example) Now of course the commodification of such pieces means that work that was not finished ( and not felt to be finished by the artist) can now find itself displayed but it seems to me part of the practice of many interesting artists (especially but not exclusively in drawing) to focus on something beyond surface finish. There's also many centuries of tradition in Japan of an aesthetic that actually prioritizes sketchiness, impermanence, lack of finish. [?] To speculate as to why -the craftsperson is always embedded in some sort of economic relationship -producing for the market, or the feudal lord, or the church or whatever. The artist (although her products, once made, move into the world of commerce) not primarliy so. Milton wrote "Paradise Lost", said Marx, not for money but because it was *in his nature*. I think here we see the shamanistic roots of art very clearly - the fact that the finest work arises out of some very deep need in the depths of the human psyche. + + + Geert Dekkers replied: [?] I never meant to say that "polish and finish" was ever exclusively about a literal surface. It could just as much be about a conceptual surface. In the case of Japanese line-drawings, there is this saga that I suppose everyone knows: – a draughtsman was commissioned to do drawings of a bird – he went off for months on end, came back at the designed time but without drawings. The drawings he made on the spot, in a matter of seconds. When questioned, he told the commissioner that he had spent the time away comtemplating the subject so that he may capture its essence in a single line. So I wouldn't say "sketchiness", "impermanence", "lack of finish" because they are negative qualifications. There is no "lack" – the way the subject is rendered is the best way possible given the intentions of the artist. + + + Michael Szpakowski replied: < if anybody can point out an artwork that functions without context, explanation or external reference> Three different things! (1)Context isn't decided or given by anyone -context exists -historical, political, social, psychological, artistic. Of course emphases may differ radically in the explication or interpretation of context. (2)External reference - OK many artworks clearly have external reference -how it operates for a particular artwok is a much more complex question. Even for artworks that have no obvious external reference it is often readable, surmisable by an appeal to the context discussed above -an example would be the work of the abstract expressionists. (3)Explanation -now this is something else again and we can divide it into two kinds -explanation by the artist and explanation by others: critics, casual viewers, journalists, sociologists of art, whatever. Here explanation by the artist is at issue. Technical explanations I personally have no problem with -its a practical matter -sometimes you maybe need to give people a clue, especially in interactive work ( but with generative type stuff personally I've gritted my teeth and thought 'well if they want to find it they will') but I guess if you do it you would want to try and do it elegantly and in an integrated way. My big bugbear is the artist statement, the artist's explanation of what their piece is about. I've never read one that I've found anything but massively irritating - I think that artists are usually the last people who should explicate their work, unless it is so dully one dimensional and tedious ( and God knows there's enough of that about) that it is susceptible to a linear straightforward and unambiguous statement of its meaning and intentions. + + + Rob Myers replied: [?] With avant-garde work, the culture does not teach viewers the iconography and technique from kindergarten, so it may need explaining. It takes an incredible amount of knowledge to "see" a post-renaissance oil painting, but people have been taught it before they come to one. + + + Michael Szpakowski replied: [?] I *was* addressing simply the question of literal finish -I do think Curt's original point vis a vis craftspeople and artists has force in this entirely literal sense. I often feel that commercial graphic design, films &care in some sense denser , more finished , more carefully constructed than many artworks appear to be.Does this make them "better" -well I think not. Can we learn from them -absolutely. Is there a difference between lack of surface finish where the value of the artwork is undamaged and indeed enhanced by the artist's focus on particular details at the expense of others, and sloppiness/laziness/ contempt for the audience - of course. Both exist and we have to argue about which is which! + + + Curt Cloninger replied: I still think surface polish is just one aspect of rigor/thoroughness/purposefulness – the most initially obvious aspect but not necessarily the most important. Think of Matthew Barney's films. They are very polished visually in terms of a high-budget production sheen, and he's taken some crap from the art world for that. But his narrative is far from closed. I think it can fairly be argued that the films reward multiple viewings. It's like comparing the White Stripes to Stereolab. The former is one-off and raw-edged; the latter is intricate, layered, thoroughly arranged, with an ultra-glossy lounge production sheen. But both reward repeat listenings (and stereolab even moreso). There is a contemporary cliche that says gorgeous production value = commerce = not art, while low-budget technical shoddiness = legitimacy = art. I don't think it divides so neatly along those lines. But then I think "Summer Breeze" by Seals & Crofts is a work of sublime genius, so there you are. + + + Michael Szpakowski replied: Hi Curt I claim it as no more than a tendency or perhaps better, one possibility amongst others… but I do think its there and there are material reasons for it. By the way, in my opinion you're entirely right to seperate the critical and artistic spheres in the way that you do. >From the artist's point of view rather than reams of explanation I wonder if there isn't some milage to be had from the idea that we make stuff not for an ideal viewer but for a "competent" one. So in the case of generative stuff they would perhaps have experienced similar work enough to know what to look for. When I watch something like Tarkovsky's "Mirror" in the cinema -I can enjoy it initially in a purely visceral, affective way -its a beautiful and hearbreaking film. But if I do a little work- say on Russian history and come back to it a second or third time my enjoyment and what I get from the piece is much enhanced thereby. ( of course the fact that I watch it with subtitles is I suppose a kind of 'explanation' -although even here my extremely poor Russian occasionally allows me to get closer to the heart of a scene -if I acutually did some serious work on it I'm sure it would be work repayed) Despite the fact that I grew up with and continue to love pop culture with a fair bit of passion I do think one of the negative outcomes of its hegemony has been the idea that cultural experience should be available immediately , without effort on the part of the viewer. ( and this is not an argument for elitism but for more opportunity for more people to learn about and participate in artistic activity). An interesting discussion! + + + Myron Turner (myron_turner@shaw.ca) added: […] Recently, Ryan Griffiths contributed an excellent post on 'The Social Construction of Blogspace'. What his piece communicates most of all is his sense of the net as a space–both personal and public. Such a space is ripe with opportunities for art. The art of the punch line takes its queues from video and cinema, and there's no doubt that there are analogies to be made with both of these forms, just as there is with the book. But the art which explores the intersection of public and private space is architecture, and it's here where I believe that the art of the Internet will ultimately find its most profound analogies. It is no coincidence that we speak of computer architectures when referring to operating systems and systems of code–the net is founded upon these "architectures"–these technologies which organize and enable the public and private spaces of the Internet. Mathematicians speak of the beauty of mathematics, software developers speak of the elegance of code. In the very notion of computer architecture there is buried an aesthetic recognition. The question for net artists is how to understand and organize public and private spaces and their intersections so that these spaces become aesthetic and then, while doing this, to create just what is meant in such instances by "aesthetic". I don't deny aesthetic value to the art of the one-liner and the usual web project, of which I have myself been guilty. But it's not enough to treat the screen like a wall in a gallery–to hang a work there on its glassy surface. The computer is a trans-prosthetic device–the monitor a virtual extension of what the phenomenologists call our "intentionality"–of the means by which we explore and know the phenomenal world, an extension of our mental space. In other words, it's not an object to "behold" but an object which extends our ability to behold. And it's here, where the computer has been internalized and where public and private meet that we can possibly create an art which like the art of galleries and architectural space takes us beyond the short attention span of the punch line. + + + Curt Cloninger replied: [?] I find the architecture analogy more desirable than the gallery analogy, unless you mean some expansive installation piece that takes over the context of the entire gallery. Otherwise, the gallery is *not* what net art wants to be – discrete piece after discrete piece, neatly labeled and formally contextualized as art. I'm guessing that artists are more free to work/exploit the network and new media when they aren't always having to fit their work into some contexted "art" box (as alexei shulgin could have told us in 1995). For example, only one of these pieces is self-aware "art" (florian kramer's "permutations"), yet the rest of the pieces are interesting along the same lines: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://deepyoung.org/permanent/autodidactic/">http://deepyoung.org/permanent/autodidactic/</a> Some other possible examples of un-art net.art: In the physical offices of Google, there is a digital screen displaying ongoing, real-time text feeds of live google search phrases as they are being typed in by users all over the world (cf: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://metaspy.com">http://metaspy.com</a> ). T. Whid (disparagingly or astutely) observed that this is the coolest piece of net art anybody's ever made [i'm paraphrasing]. In a similar vein, Auriea Harvey once commented that NN would eventually be remembered more for her funky bulletin board rhetoric than for her Nato55 software [again, i'm paraphrasing]. So maybe visiting <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.kartoo.com">http://www.kartoo.com</a> and searching for "curt cloninger" presents a better example of my "net.art" than <a rel="nofollow" href="http://lab404.com/art/">http://lab404.com/art/</a> But then, maybe not. I'm not opposed to what some dismissively call web art or screen art. To me, heavy conceptual use of the network is not a pre-requisite for valid online work, nor does it de facto guarantee interesting online work. I'm just opposed to cheezy one-liner art (whether online, offline, in a boat, with a goat, etc.). I don't just want to "get it." I want to be engaged by it. + + + Myron Turner replied: [?] As to your qualificaton about "expansive installations" pieces–I agree: I think of architecture as a metaphor for virtual space, not as an actual space where installations could be mounted. I like the metaphor because architecture, despite its potentially massive physicality, or perhaps when it is most massive and cannnot be taken in all at once, requires an internalized imaginative grasp of space. And it's an internalized imaginative beholding of space that, I feel, is the defining characteristic of networks as aesthetic constructions. I hope that this doesn't sound like too much of a stretch–but it helps me to view the net in the idealistic terms that have always appealed to me. + + + Curt Cloninger replied: I think I understand what you are saying. You're not comparing architecture to the net in terms of a William Gibson cyberspace VR type connection (an awkward/unnatural imposition onto a network that wants to be more about code [programmatic, semantic, even iconic] than 3D space). It seems like you're saying architecture is cool becauese you can't out-meta it. You're not going to put somebody's architecture into a gallery. Architecture defines its own context (or its context is simply worldspace). And the network can be that way too. It's not just a "place" to show your art; it is itself an artistic medium, with its own kind of implicit unboundedness (Eric Raymond likens it to the noosphere – realtime mindspace). Heady stuff, but I don't think it's entirely unfounded. + + + Rob Myers added: What about architectural-scale art? Or architectural models? Or designs. Exhibitions of architecture are very common (Archigram are on at the moment: Conceptual Architecture from the 1960s…). Art on the scale of architecture is also common. You can always paint a picture of architecture. It's harder to make a building of a painting. The desire to control space and behaviour that architecture seems to offer to satiate can be achieved through art as well, although it's hard to get a new kitchen fitted in a Picasso. + + + Curt Cloniger replied: Per this thread, it's less architecture's control of space and behavior that's being admired as it is architecture's ability to achieve a kind of most-meta-ness. I agree that "art" can also achieve this (without necessarily being big or even physical). But (by definition) it can't achieve most-meta-ness while hanging on a gallery wall with a label under it. + + + Rob Myers replied: But what is architecture most-meta to? It's real-space (unless it's a mall…). In terms of abstraction, generality, referentiality (etc.), art wins hands-down. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome.org is a 501©(3) nonprofit organization and an affiliate of the New Museum of Contemporary Art. 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