Telematic Art

Description

Week 8: March 13 – 19

Telematic is a descriptive of art projects using computer mediated telecommunications networks as their medium. Telematic art challenges the traditional relationship between active viewing subjects and passive art objects by creating interactive, behavioural contexts for remote aesthetic encounters. We will investigate the history and evolution of telematic art as an emerging artistic medium. We will have as our guest speaker, the British artist Paul Sermon, a pioneering network artist.

Assignments

Due next week: March 20

Reading

Research Critique

Each student will be assigned a work to research and critique from the following list, which correspond to artists who will be participating in the upcoming Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium:

Write a short 300 word essay about your assigned work and the artist. Incorporate the readings (see above), as relevant, into your research post, using at least one quote from each of the readings to support your own research and analysis.

The goal of the research critique is to conduct independent research by reviewing the online documentation of the work, visiting the artist’s Website, and googling any other relevant information about the artist and their work. You will give a presentation of your research in class and we will discuss how it relates to the topic of the week: Social Broadcasting

Here are instructions for the research critique:

  • Create a new post on your blog incorporating relevant hyperlinks, images, video, etc
  • Be sure to reference and quote from the reading to provide context for your critique
  • Apply the “Research” category
  • Apply appropriate tags
  • Add a featured image
  • Post a comment on at least one other research post prior to the following class
  • Be sure your post is formatted correctly, is readable, and that all media and quotes are DISCUSSED in the essay, not just used as introductory material.

Be prepared to synthesize and present your summary for class discussion in two weeks.

 

Outline

Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium

We will go over the schedule for the Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium, in which each student will attend, participate and write about two (minimally) of the three days. Next week we will have a detailed review of the Symposium Hyperessay, a more extended writing assignment based on Symposium keynotes and performances, and the concept of distributed, networked dialogue that takes place in the third space. Determine who is attending which Days in order to finalize Research Critique assignments for next week.

Everyone will attend online via Adobe Connect Webconferencing
To Login: https://connect.ntu.edu.sg/thirdspacenetwork/
Select “Guest,” type your name, “Enter Room”

Schedule @ a Glance:

Day 1: March 29 – ADM (8pm-11pm)
Keynote by Maria Chatzichristodoulou
Internet Performance by Annie Abrahams and collaborators

Day 2: March 30 – LASALLE College of the Arts (8pm-11pm)
Keynote by Matt Adams, co-founder of Blast Theory

Day 3: March 31 – School of the Art Institute of Chicago (11pm-2am)
Internet Performance by Jon Cates and collaborators

Next week we will set everyone up on Adobe Connect, be sure to bring your laptops.

Discussion of Readings

Virtual composite space, or place is what I refer to as the third space: the integration of the local and remote into a third networked space.

Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Satellite Art 1977

“A virtual space creates social situations without traditional rules or etiquette.”

Does the third space free up our inhibitions, our interactions, our engagement with others?

“If there is one word that defines Electronic Café, it is integration: integration of technology into our social fabric, integration of distinct cultures and communities, the arts, and the general public, and integration of art forms.”

Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, The Electronic Café, 1984

It is through the network that we are now able to integrate space, relationships, media, cultures, and social actions.

A definition of telematics by Roy Ascott:

Telematics is a term used to designate computer-mediated communications networking involving telephone, cable, and satellite links between geographically dispersed individuals and institutions that are interfaced to data-processing systems. It involves the technology of interaction among human beings and between the human mind and artificial systems of intelligence and perception.

Essentially, telematics is human communication mediated at a distance via digital networks.

The ubiquitous efficacy of the telematic medium is not in doubt, but the question in human terms, from the point of view of culture and creativity, is: What is the content? In essence, the question is asking: Is there love in the telematic embrace?

What is the content and what does he mean by is there love the telematic embrace? How can we use this question to analyze the telematic projects we are looking at?

The emerging new order of art is that of interactivity, of “dispersed authorship”, the canon is one of contingency and uncertainty.

What is meant by dispersed or distributed authorship? How does this idea relate to Hole in Space or Telematic Dreaming?

Thus, at the interface to telematic systems, content is created rather than received. By the same token, content is disposed of at the interface by reinserting it, transformed by the process of interaction, back into the network for storage, distribution, and eventual transformation at the interface of other users.

How does communications art differ from the traditional art object? How is information passed between the artwork and the viewer, and even between viewers?

The telematic process, like the technology that embodies it, is the product of a profound human desire for transcendence: to be out of body, out of mind, beyond language.

Is this the perception, the sensation of being present with others in the third space?

Artworks for Review

Sherry Rabinowitz & Kit Galloway, Hole in Space, 1980

Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, founders of the Electronic Café in Santa Monica, California, were among the first artists to begin exploring communications art through satellite technologies. Their seminal work, Hole-in-Space from 1980, represented one of the earliest examples of live, networked media art. They setup two large projection screens: one at Lincoln Center in New York City, the other at Century City in Los Angeles, to connect two live audiences. Conceived as a participatory event (much like the early theatrical Happenings), this unannounced project, setup for three consecutive days, enabled two groups of viewers to see the other live and in real-time across the space of the US, which literally collapsed the distance and experience of the real and the virtual, the local and the remote.

How does this telecommunications piece involve the audience? What is the material of the work? What does it mean to create a site-specific work of art? And in this work, the idea of the performer is completely removed, leaving only the audience as participants in the work: how does this change the relationship between the artist and viewer?

Kit Galloway (b. 1948) and Sherrie Rabinowitz (1950-2013) co-founded the Electronic Café International (ECI), a cafe, networking centre, performance and workshop space and art hub in Santa Monica, California. Until Rabinowitz’s death, they created numerous art works which could be categorized as communication aesthetics, telematic art and digital theatre.

Paul Sermon, Telematic Dreaming (1993)

Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming was originally produced as a commission for the annual summer exhibition curated by the Finnish Ministry of Culture in Kajaani, with support from Telecom Finland, in June 1992.

Within the third space, two participants lie on beds in remote locations, but together they share a bed in electronic space. Although they are not physically together, there is a strong sense of intimacy and shared presence between the participants. This piece directly questions the sense of intimacy experienced in the third space: the “telematic embrace” of individuals united via the network. When you “touch” another individual in the third space, why do you feel a connection as though you were physically present? Why is there a sense of intimacy in the third space, even though you are remote from the other person(s). Telematic Dreaming asks these questions while looking forward to how we are increasingly engaging with one another and forming relationships in the third space.

Artist Statement: Telematic Dreaming is an installation that was created within the ISDN digital telephone network. Two separate interfaces are located in separate locations, these interfaces in themselves are dynamic installations that function as customized video-conferencing systems. A double bed is located within both locations, one in a blacked out space and the other in an illuminated space. The bed in the light location has a camera situated directly above it, sending a live video image of the bed, and a person (“A”) lying on it, to a video projector located above the other bed in the blacked out location. The live video image is projected down on to the bed with another person (“B”) on it. A second camera, next to the video projector, sends a live video image of the projection of person “A” with person “B” back to a series of monitors that surround the bed and person “A” in the illuminated location. The telepresent image functions like a mirror that reflects one person within another persons reflection.

“Telematic Dreaming” deliberately plays with the ambiguous connotations of a bed as a telepresent projection surface. The psychological complexity of the object dissolves the geographical distance and technology involved in the complete ISDN installation. The ability to exist outside of the users own space and time is created by an alarmingly real sense of touch that is enhanced by the context of the bed and caused by an acute shift of senses in the telematic space. The users consciousness within the telepresent body is controlled by a voyeurism of its self. The cause and effect interactions of the body determine its own space and time, by extending this through the ISDN network, the body can travel at the speed of light and locate itself wherever it is interacting. In “Telematic Dreaming” the user exchanges their tactile senses and touch by replacing their hands with their eyes.

Guest Speaker Paul Sermon, Professor of Visual Communication in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Brighton, United Kingdom.

Empathy and Presence

This talk discusses the juncture between empathy and presence pronounced in my telematic artworks that converge space and distant audience participants in telepresent interactive video installations. The discussion will focus works that chart the kinaesthetic and proprioceptive nature of my practice, which include Telematic Dreaming first shown in 1992, Peace Talks from 2003 and Touched produced in 2017. All these works have involved networked videoconference technology, but range in contextual installation settings, from the intimacy of a bed surface to a peace negotiations table and the keyboard of an online chat conversation. Through each of these works I will present and discuss the empathetic nature of the participant’s interactions and experiences that I have encountered since the early 90s, recounted through the conversations, observations and stories I have witnessed in the production and realisation of these works. The theories and concepts I have encountered in my work are firstly experienced within them; it is not until I have publically installed and observed them that I am able to articulate them through the concepts and philosophical discourses they reflect, from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s extension of the bodily synthesis to Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic accounts of extended minds and Roy Ascott’s doubled consciousness.

Biography

Paul Sermon was born in Oxford, England, 1966. Studied BA Hon’s Fine Art degree under Professor Roy Ascott at The University of Wales, from September 1985 to June 1988. Studied a Post-graduate MFA degree at The University of Reading, England, from October 1989 to June 1991. Awarded the Prix Ars Electronica “Golden Nica”, in the category of interactive art, for the hyper media installation “Think about the People now”, in Linz, Austria, September 1991. Produced the ISDN videoconference installation “Telematic Vision” as an Artist in Residence at the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, from February to November 1993. Received the “Sparkey Award” from the Interactive Media Festival in Los Angeles, for the telepresent video installation “Telematic Dreaming”, June 1994. From 1993 to 1999 worked as Dozent for Media Art at the HGB Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Germany. During this time continued to produced further interactive telematic installations including “Telamatic Encounter” in 1996 and “The Tables Turned” in 1997 for the Ars Electronica Centre in Linz, and the ZKM Media Museum in Karlsruhe. From 2000 to 2013 employed as Professor of Creative Technology at the University of Salford, School of Arts & Media. From 1997 to 2001 Guest Professor for Performance and Environment at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria.