New Media History and Theory

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Hyperessay on Singapore New Media Artists | The Pioneering New Media Art of Urich Lau (Singapore)

The Pioneering New Media Art of Urich Lau (Singapore)

 

  1. Introduction
  2. Early New Media works and their influences 
  3. The artist as “inverting technology” in ‘life circuit’
  4. Influence of ‘indeterminant visuals’ in ‘light-space’
  5. The Artist as Orator as a form of critique
  6. The Audience as Subject Matter and Material
  7. Art as Surveillance, surveillance as art
  8. Art challenges the way we look at privacy
  9. Does technology help us to remember or forget?
  10. Conclusion 

1. Introduction

This paper explores Singapore as a city that may be small but has become a massive global tech hub in establishing itself as a highly technologised society with a labyrinthian framework of digital connectivity that connects people across the island. According to reports, the city-state comes in first for fastest connection speed and tops global connectedness indexes in terms of the distribution and outflow and inflow of goods, data, finances and even talent(s). It is this pervasiveness of technology that one assumes that this connectivity and openness to technology has infiltrated all aspects of the commercial, social and cultural aspect of Singapore. This paper discusses the work of Singapore new media artist Urich Lau as symptomatic of the conditions within the city where the artistic strategies of new media artists observe and critiques the various technological themes that face the uber-technologised ‘Smart City‘.     

Historically, the art from the regions of Southeast and East Asia has been influenced by centuries of Euramerica representational painting and the western canon of art. In Singapore’s visual narrative, the development of the Nanyang School of painting is commonly referred to as the beginnings of a modern visual language in Singapore and Malaya. Such a beginning has been subsequently fractured in the past half a century as aspects of the contemporary, the performative and the technologised art has unfolded in varying levels of influence on Singapore’s visual (and art history). The resultant effect is that technologised art sits on the periphery of the visual arts ecosystem and has not infiltrated into the city’s socio-cultural conditions much. We would assume that with technology’s ubiquity in the city, there is probably no lag in witnessing the artistic practices of artists in Singapore embracing or engaging in discourses in new media art. The reality, in fact, is far from this.

This essay will explore the works of Lau in three parts. The video performance Life-Circuit (2010, 2012), collaborative video installation Light-Space (2016) and public commission The Lapse Project (2018) by his interdisciplinary collective INTER-MISSION[1].will be cited as part of an artistic strategy that engages in media art and critiques the very medium in relation to Singapore’s supposed ‘techno-culture’. The new media practice of Lau will be examined using examples from new media art history and relevant theories ranging from the writings of Roy Ascott to Randall Packer and artwork references from John Cage to Nam June Paik.

Urich Lau, Life Circuit (2012)
Saint-Merry Church, Paris, France
Part of Singapour mon amour’s performance module INTER|action

2. Early works and their influences 

Urich Lau has presented works globally from across Asia, Europe, Central Asia Australasia and North America. The new media practice of Lau comprises of a visual aesthetics that is hypermedia[2] in form, in which he layers old technology with new media. In some of his earliest explorations, we see influences of Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, and Stelerac, where he explores the coalescence and construction of layers of still and moving images, punctuated by modulated sounds and set in various spatial contexts. For example, Life Circuit (2010,2012) and Video Car (2014) are examples of works that adopted the embedding of technology (or television monitors or computers) into bodies, objects, and situations. Nam June Paik’s TV Magnet  (1965) is an example of an early new media artwork that influenced him; where a magnet is placed on top of the television, disrupting the television signal and hence the broadcast. 

The magnetic field interferes with the television’s electronic signals, distorting the broadcast image into an abstract form that changes when the magnet is moved. Paik’s radical action undermines the seemingly inviolable power of broadcast television by transforming the TV set into a sculpture, one whose moving image is created by chance procedures and can be manipulated at will. Through his transformation of the television image, Paik challenged the notion of the art object as a self-contained entity and established a process of instant feedback, in which the viewer’s actions have a direct effect on the form and meaning of the work. The interactive quality of Magnet TV paralleled the audience involvement essential to performance art and Happenings of the early 1960s, and also anticipated the participatory nature of much contemporary art. – Whitney Museum of American Art

Video Car (2014)

Lau’s Video Car (2014) and Life Circuit (2010, 2012) have visual semblances to the Paik’s artistic oeuvre, where television screens and its latter-day incarnation of the digital projection are employed by Lau in various forms, from a performative installation that broadcasts images from tv monitors to a sculptural video piece as in the case of Video Car. The moving images created in both works as well as later works like Light-Space (2016), are not clear unmodulated digital signals but signals that are distorting forming abstract forms that change when audience moves or lighting conditions changes.

Lau’s work is challenging not just the notion of an art object but also a critique of the culture in which it is made in. For example, Lau’s Video Car is positioned in one of Singapore’s most highly attended public art event ‘Night Festival’ where the general public is treated to live performances of music, theatre and performance art. Lau has intruded into the cordoned off streets and transformed a car into a new media sculpture where a TV set plays random imagery manipulated at will by the artist or guest video-jockey. This radical gesture resulted in confused and curious on-lookers who took to documenting such a rare and dichotomous sight.    

Urich Lau Video Car (2014)
Night Festival 2014, The Substation, Singapore

Life Circuit (2010, 2012)

Life Circuit (2010, 2012) takes on a more performative and bodily form. Akin to Paik’s controversial performance pieces like Opera Sextronique (1967) and TV For Living Bra (1969), where he includes smaller television sculptures on human bodies, robotic devices and giant video walls with synthesized imagery pulsating from cathode-ray televisions, Lau has devised an electronic media performance piece that is ground-breaking in technology and new media-savvy Singapore. Lau can be said to mischievously embrace the ‘technologies of a technologised society’ in producing Life Circuit (2010, 2012) and re-performing it locally in museums, art schools, independent art spaces and abroad in biennales and expositions (in Paris, France). The work is ground-breaking in forming a connection between observer, the ‘collaborator’ and the viewing publics as well.  

In the various iterations of Lau’s video performances, he dons wearable gadgets reconstructed from industrial safety equipment like a gas mask and welding goggles in presenting a ‘hybrid-being’ in disguise. His works are akin to Ivan Sutherland’s Head-Mounted Display (1969) and Michael Naimark’s Aspen Movie Map (1978) where the artists subsumed technology as bodily art-appendages. Similar to Naimark’s Movie Map, there is ‘travel’ involved in the work, where the collaborator walks around the museum space in a “surrogate travel”, in which the artist (unlike Aspen Movie Map, where it is the viewer who is transported virtually to another place) views the spaces the collaborator is walking around in. At the same time, the projected images are also a re-creation of these visuals with pre-programmed visuals authored and sequenced by the artist in-situ. The real-time experience of the work is one that is unique to the audience witnessing the work in the projection space. Life Circuit (2010, 2012) is thus similar to Naimark’s Aspen Movie Map (1978) in integrating the movement of people around the space into a projected imagery- almost like being brought on a tour of the space.

 

3. The artist as ‘Inverting Technology’ in Life Circuit (2010, 2012)

Not just content with referencing examples from new media art histories, Lau’s video performances can be seen as inverting the capabilities of these technologies and critiquing our society’s adoption of innovations. His performances call upon the gadgets to become the extensions of the artists. These examples of technology impede him- herein blocking, instead of giving the artist the capability to navigate or visualise new spaces. The artist is now barricaded from his visual, audible and vocal capabilities and is only a vessel/machine in projecting out video and audio streamed from life-feed and playback media to the audience. 

In the artist’s interview[3], he shared that in Life Circuit (2010, 2012) and other similar works- his intention was to form a ‘circuit’ between the audience, the medium and ‘let the moving images and sounds produced from these interactions replace (his) human senses in perception and expressions’. It is in this series of ‘life-circuit’ works that Lau has deftly inverted technology by producing situations of inconvenience and its impediment in questioned our society’s embrace of technology. Further to this, he body of works questions if there’s a need to be more careful in picking the technology to adopt.

Urich Lau Life Circuit (2008-2010)

4. Investigating the artists and indeterminant visuals

With these examples, we are introduced to a Singaporean artist who has embraced technology but also mirrored the deficiencies inherent in an over-dependence on them. Next, we continue our investigation of new media history in assessing how Lau has staged events within a technologically-mediated visual framework. 

The works of Lau largely depends on the interaction between audience- with indeterminant visuals created on TV and projection screens in real time and pre-programmed. The images are at times abstract, fractured and moving-image representation with moments of intermittent flash (caused by camera lens flare). These images are sometimes a result of live feeds and embody an element of ‘glitch art’. The glitchy nature of the images are mainly due to the technical glitches brought about by interference from various sound, visual and computation equipment. We can observe that the various iterations of Life Circuit (2010, 2012) highlights the fallacy of such interactivity and places the artists’ body as an altered being that forms the ‘somewhat forced’ connection with technology and the audience.

“What is projected into the physical space are what the cables in and out of the body of this part-machine and part-man has achieved- a performance sequence that is a result of the presence of the audience, where capturing people in the images has distorted the sound due to the video/sound mixer interfering with the visuals.”

Urich Lau

Urich Lau, Life Circuit (2010) Focal Point – December 2012, The Arts House at the Parliament, Singapore

As can be seen in the earlier works, Lau’s work very much depends on the reaction or presence of the audience and touches on ideas of indeterminacy. He has been influenced by cinema, music and as a result his work deals with the inherent indeterminate relationship between music, images and the audience. A characteristic of hypermedia artwork is ‘the shift away from the traditional art audience passively observing’, critiquing and historicising the artwork. Here is a hypermedia artwork that is mediated through multiple media(s) and produces limitless possible associations between previously unrelated mediums.

4. Influence of ‘indeterminant visuals’ in ‘Light-Space’

In Lau’s work as well as other new media pioneers like John Cage, Nam June Paik and Rauschenberg- “the structures of ideas are not sequential” because the audience takes on a participatory role instead of one of passivity and is required to create meaning together with the artists and the medium (in this case technology). The unpredictability of the images formed from the live-feed is akin to John Cage’s Variations V (1964) and Rauschenberg’s Soundings (1968) where motion and sound are used as triggers to control imagery, performance and the experience in and of the space.

John Cage is perhaps one of the most influential avant-garde composers and artists of the 20th century, and with Variations V (1964)  has used chance techniques to create an unpredictable, indeterminate relationship between music, dance, and image. Where a sensor tracks the motion of dancers and this movement is then used as a control source for the sound input. This together with Soundings (1968), where it is an interactive media work that draws vocal sounds of the audience to activate lights from within the sculpture; which will then light up the chairs, presents an entirely new role for the viewer. Rather than being a passive observer or receiver of the artwork, the viewer is now empowered to actively shape and affect the imagery and their experience of the work with their input or voices.  

Therefore in Lau’s work, as in the case of the experiences of Life Circuit as well as Light-Space, the audience becomes an activator of images and experiences for the space. For example in Life Circuit, the imposing pre-programmed text and images, as well as the electronically filtered elements found within the audience and the exhibition space, created a poetic experience of interactivity between the artists, the audience’s physical presence, and the dull lull of the electronic gadgets. As is the case in Light-Space, the visitor’s movement results in changes in the images projected in the exact space that the audience walks, talks and resides in. This embodied experience projected and articulated by Lau is an example of his artistic strategy of engaging in the discourses of new media art. Unlike other local artistic practices- he not only engages in new media art, he is also producing a form of art that is apart from other art practices experienced in Singapore- where he deftly critiques at the same time ‘aestheticises’ the experience.

5. Artist as Orator as a form of critique

So far we have touched on how Life Circuit attempts to form a ‘circuit’ between audience, art medium and moving images. As a form of social critique, the work also touches on issues pertaining to the state of contemporary art and heritage in Singapore’s context. For example, in an iteration of the work abroad like Malaysia, Taiwan and in the Pyeongchang Biennale, Lau included ‘statements as noise’ and programmed computer voices to read out the National Art Council (NAC)’s mission statement. With this radical gesture, he has presented himself as an ‘orator’ talking about the conditions of Singapore Art to the foreign and unsuspecting audience. In Lau’s work, there are elements of ‘entropy’ being forewarned to the audience. As the avoidance of entropy is seen as a response(s) to feedback, the interactive nature of Life Circuit calls on the audience to exchange or communicate information between the user and the machine (in this case the artist-hybrid-being) through action, gestures or sound.

The artist as orator and presence in these performative video works can be seen/read as reading out set ideals from the nation body/institution for the arts in Singapore. I see the inclusion of the text as a gesture by Lau to push his audience to reflect upon the mandated aims set out like a manifesto for the arts in Singapore. In essence, the performance-video piece Life Circuit (2010, 2012) can be read as an entropic treatise on the possible development of Singapore into a mega-corporation, where the quote below from Cherian George’s controversial book can be a basis for Lau’s investigation into the fabrics of our society.

Singapore’s tragedy is not the absence of idealism, but that it systematically rewards the individualistic majority and discourages the socially-conscious minority…. the overwhelming ethos is to mind your own business. Singapore’s embrace of the market forces … has provided rich incentives for Singaporeans to work hard, and to create wealth. But its exercise of illiberal controls to maintain ownership of the public sphere adds up to a heavy tax on thinking socially and acting politically. The public has been privatised.

 Cherian George, P.202 (Singapore The Air-conditioned Nation: Essays on the politics of comfort and control 1990 – 2000)

Urich Lau, Life Circuit (2010)

As reference in Cherian George’s critical anthology of writings about Singapore, Lau’s work can be read as highlighting the symbiotic relationship between the artists and the purveyor and guardian of the arts in Singapore- the NAC, just as the orator speaks in a mechanical voice, sequences of glitches inevitably disrupts and interrupts the reading of these lofty messages. So who is the audience here, are there mere participants or are they the purveyors of this greater chance?

6. Audience as Subject Matter and Material

Speculations aside, on top of calling on the audience to exchange and communicate with his art, Lau extends the ideas manifested in iterations of Life-Circuit to the collaborative site-specific work Light-Space (2016). On multiple levels, this work requires close examination as it contains a layering of ideas that Lau has constantly engaged in his artistic oeuvre, wherein this work issues of surveillance, viewer-participation (or non-participation in Singapore’s art scene) and fetishism of the moving image are explored.  

Light-Space (2016)

Light-Space (2016) is a multi-media installation between two unlikely collaborators- a painter of the traditional medium and a new media artist-technocrat. How do the practices of these two artists who engage in mediums separated by years of technology and discourses come together to enact a site-specific artwork?

The unique collaboration birthed an artwork that placed the audience as subject matter (and material), for without the audience the artwork ‘will just be lights in space’. Space itself is the vessel to allow the content to flow in, out and around. When people entered the space, the place becomes activated, and images/sound is formed. With this activation of the space, much like other immersive new media works like Variation V (1964) and Soundings (1968); materiality is birthed from the coalescing of matter (moving audience) and light (camera lens flare and moving imagery). The interaction of captured images (formed from movement by visitors to the space) and electronic pulses animates the colour, forms fragmented moving shades of light and create an aural soundtrack for the space. The sound in this case is formed by the feedback created by moving bodily forms and is akin to John Cage’s Variation V (1964) where the movement becomes a trigger and controller for ambient sounds.

Similar to Life-Circuit, the absence of images is echoed in the work, where images can only be formed if there is an audience. This “content-less” nature of the art can only be formed when the live feed from surveillance cameras in the space picks up movement and feeds them to the projectors which will then project onto the walls made of silver panels and form imagery that appeal painterly and ephemeral. This radical gesture is almost a reference to the hollowness felt by the spectator/artist and society in the experience of the arts in the city-state. In not reading too much into the visual void, I asked Lau in the interview: So what does the audience see? He answers:

The feedback of lights when they walk in, then the audience reacts to the work and sees fragments of themselves, their reflections. And when no one is in the room, the lights swing and captures reflections.

Urich Lau

Urich Lau, Light-Space (2016)

Author’s reflection on the work

Those reflections in the empty spaces were beautiful moments in the work, I almost wish that the audience never appears as the abstract images formed by wedges of colours set against stark bright sparks (due to camera lens flare) envelops the space in a contemplative echo. There is beauty in that void. More poignantly, the gallery sitter is viewing the empty room, from a space behind. 

Behavior becomes art, and the simplicity of the idea creates an experience that is the confluence of painterly aesthetics and technological inquisition.

Urich Lau, Light-Space (2016) Exhibition: Objectifs – Centre for Photography and Film 2 to 22 Dec 2016

7. Art as Surveillance, surveillance as art

In charting the artistic oeuvre of Lau, surveillance of oneself and the surveillance of one’s society as one of the strong themes in his works. In ‘Light-Space’, the audience is given the (false) possibility of being given freedom to roam, but the surveillance camera is always there. Unsuspecting to the audience, another person sits behind the wooden frames and is observing them. Lau has cleverly constructed the space to bring up contentious ideas of surveillance, freedom and the ubiquity of technology controlling or ‘data-fying’ our lives.

In this work, Lau once again presents an immersive video-installation that calls upon technologies from sound-devices, video-splicing software and surveillance cameras to critique our contemporary world- or specifically contemporary Singapore. Lau specifically mentioned:

And in some sense when people enter the space it’s going to be disorienting with the images, the tunnel and the sound coming in. So, I’m wondering, this whole concept of disorienting the audience coming into the space, subverting their expectation of what an exhibition is supposed to be, what a space, an exhibition space is to be…

Urich Lau

This sense of disorientation is achieved with the dangling of multiple surveillance cameras that uses live feed to produce an immediate projection of the figures in the space.

At the same time, Lau is making a statement about what an exhibition space can be and is supposed to be- a white cube to experience an artwork passively. On a socio-cultural level, Lau is questioning the abundance of data and technology around us- just as his visitors are encouraged to take photos of the space, the people and the reflections or all of their experiences.

Urich Lau, Light-Space (2016)

8. Art challenges the way we look at privacy

He sets up this scenario to challenge the way we look at privacy, especially poignant due to the currencies of our contemporary world. He shared that he encouraged audience participation and pushing the interaction to a post-digital domain, where the photographs were taken and posted on Instagram- where they may then circulate back to become a data or content on the internet. In Singapore, we are a city besieged by technology, to a level that is overwhelming. This large-scale video installation cleverly (and somewhat subtly) brings up questions of our culture- where we are asked:

  • Why do we produce images?
  • Why do we photograph or film life events? What do we do with them?
  • Will it (the images) come back to haunt us?

Who’s watching and who is being watched?

Camera in Light-Space (2016)

Light-Space (2016) thus operates as a thought-provoking artwork on various levels and through the deft use of technology has constructed a scenario that brings to mind Roy Ascott, who wrote on the historical roots of new media:

meaning is not something created by the artist, distributed through the network, and received by the observer. Meaning is the product of interaction between the observer and the system, the content of which is in a state of flux, of endless change and transformation.

Roy Ascott

Lau through the examples of these rarely seen new media artworks have played with the language of video art, installation, sound art and broken them down and re-assimilated them in the space all at once, almost creating an endless change and transformation. The employment of disruptive and ‘content-less’ images coupled with the restructured space produced a somewhat disorientating but poetic work that looks at the condition of the site and presents a self-reflective space to contemplate on Singapore’s condition of the arts.

9. Does technology help us to remember or forget?

In ending off this essay, we will look at an artwork to be shown in April/May (26th April to 12 May 2018) by INTER-MISSION- a collaborative art of Urich’s creative mind. The Lapse Project (2018) is a collaborative new media artwork that presents experiences for the visitor who will toggle between the physical and the imaginary through the use of VR headsets, viewing of ‘panorama-lapses’ on large-scale projection videos and particle lapses (through live sound feeds) while walking through The Artshouse[4]. All of these experiences are set in The Artshouse, a national monument in itself where the visitors will develop new visions and modes of interaction with Singapore the city, and question one’s relationship to these monuments, and what constitutes one’s collective reality’.

In interviewing Lau, he shared that he was pleasantly surprised when NAC and the organisers selected their proposed work for the Singapore International Festival of Arts (2018). INTER-MISSION had proposed a radical idea of an interface that enables places of artistic and cultural importance to be editable and more contentiously switched on or off- almost like removing them from our memory. He highlighted that he was certain that the state-sanctioned council will not see too kindly to removing one’s cultural sites, let alone remove four of Singapore’s oldest buildings that now serve as spaces for the arts around Singapore’s Civic District.

INTER-MISSION The Lapse Project (2018)   
      Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) held at The Artshouse, Singapore

The project was accepted and Lapse Project (2018) will be created. The work takes on a multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary approach to art-making which is a reference to the artistic strategies of Lau. The Lapse Project seeks to question the use of space in Singapore, the lapses in memory in Singaporeans and the possible effects of these physical lapses on national history and national culture.

10. Conclusion

We conclude that with The Lapse Project (2018), it has come to embody the ideas in Life-Circuit and Light-Space and more. The piece picks up from Lau’s artistic strategies in positing visitors as active participants, where in this case they contemplate on the presence and absence of the arts in Singapore (through the physical removal of these art institutions). Similar to the two works presented earlier, the yet to be experienced work employs Lau’s vision of inverting technology to question one’s own being and place in time and space. Looking beyond the artist and at the system of art viewership and reception in Singapore, The impending materialisation of The Lapse Project can be considered an indication of an increased acceptance or appreciation of new media art in Singapore. Lau and his collaborative outfit INTER-MISSION is an example of a collaborative artistic endeavour that adeptly use(s) new media to bring to fruition their aesthetic visions and thematic concerns. As a result, the work can open up further debates and dialogues about national identity and uses of our city-space. It is also through this lengthy and timely survey of Lau’s artistic strategies that we are able to glean the strong messages about our society that resonate in Lau’s poignant new media artworks. Here is a new media artist who addresses technological themes in a manner unlike any other in the cityscape, and it is my intent in writing this essay that Ulrich Lau is situated as an important critic and pioneer in Singapore’s early new media art history. 

 

Bibliography

  • Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, 2001
  • George, Cherian, Singapore The Air-Conditioned Nation: Essays on the politics of comfort and control 1990 – 2000, 2000,

Websites

[1] INTER–MISSION is an art collective focusing on interdisciplinary and collaborative works in video art, audiovisual, performance, installation and interactive art, and discourses of technology in art.

[2] Hypermedia is defined (by Parker and Jordan 2001) as the connections between different discrete media elements that provide a personal trail of association among them

[3] Interview with Urich Lau conducted on 12 April 2018, NAFA Gallery

[4] Occupying the almost 200-year-old building that was home to Singapore’s first parliament, The Arts House plays a key role in the country’s arts and creative scene. The Arts House is an interdisciplinary art spacer that promotes and presents multidisciplinary programmes and festivals within its space.

Hyperessay Research | Urich Lau’s Video Conference: Exposition 4.0 (2016)

Not lagging, just interactivity in the art.

“Traditional narratives are being restructured. As a result, people feel a greater need to personally participate in the discovery of values that affect and order their lives, to dissolve the division that separates them from control, freedom… ” – Lynn Hershman

Using Hershman’s prescient quote to delve into the multimedia artwork by Urich Lau Video Conference: Exposition 4.0 (2016), we are introduced to a multi-media work that transcends spaces in restructuring traditional narratives. One’s foray into an art exhibition brings forth a personal journey of viewing an artwork in-situ, where the narratives are played out exclusively in the gallery space. The existence of surveillance cameras persists as fixtures ever-present and immovable in the formal spaces of a gallery. Unknowing to the visitor, Lau’s work plays on this notion of surveillance via these ubiquitous devices to present an artwork that prompts interactivity.

Video Conference: Exposition 4.0 (2016). Urich Lau

Interactivity
For this particular work, Lau’s video installation experiments, rather poetically, with ideas of interactivity, surveillance and somewhat subversively sharing of data (or privacy). The work operates on two distinct spaces- that of the internet (cyber-space) and the physical (gallery-space). During the period of the art exhibition, the work invites viewers to access via the Ustream app an opportunity to watch or simply gaze at live feeds of the exhibiting space. The app consequently also allows for viewers to provide live feeds of other art spaces they are visiting or even their selfies. Simultaneously this feed is projected in the physical-space of the art gallery, conflating a sense of space with an image of the present space and interspersed with images of another space.

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? …Thus, at the interface to telematics systems, content is created rather than received. – Randall Packer

In Lau’s work, a sense of uncertainty and contingency is exacerbated via a viewing of the video images, interspersed with glitch, error and intentionally ‘lo-fi’ in the darkened space. The visitors not only emerge as forming the visuals in the work (visually) but also have the power/propensity to take on part of the “dispersed authorship” generously provided or facilitated by the artist. In Video Conference: Exposition 4.0 (2016) the interface provided by the artist is one of a “poetic embrace of noise and error” as exemplified by the writings and artworks of John Cates. Referencing Cates, we embrace the idea of ‘sharing and tagging one’s activities and whereabouts’ as an interfacing with the work and the gallery space. No doubt, in this techno-social culture, we see an artist like Lau enabling art that is socially performed and poetically embracing ‘random or chance’ performative moments.

Video Conference: Exposition 4.0 (2016). Urich Lau

Immersion

“The human mind… operates by association,”
Vannevar Bush

At the same time, this work opens up questions and issues related to information sharing and online/internet privacy. As aptly put by Bush, when one sees an interior of a gallery, the immediate reaction would be to relate and associate it with the space they are in. By enabling visitors during and after viewing the exhibit to provide input and co-author the viewing of spaces by others, the immersive space becomes operated by many and not just the author (or artist). With this interactivity, questions of online surveillance and the phenomenon of “checking-in” and “checking-out” of locations using geo-tagging methods are put forth to the visitor and one is left with an artwork that is an open-system in exploring these possibilities and constraints. The immersed visitor can author images while viewing the work in the physical-space or proceed to doing so off-site or at a later time and space, causing an interruption to the installation set-up.

Interruption

Alternating between spaces interrupts one’s viewing of the work and the live-feeds of images and happenings from other art-spaces or for that matter private spaces highlights how we are in a modulated world where our windows are constantly stacked, closed and duplicated.

“It is my belief that computer and media technology will continue to have an increasingly profound effect on everyone on the planet… and if artists don’t jump in and proactively help shape these powerful new tools, it will be left by default to advertisers, the military, organized religion, and sex peddlers.” – Michael Naimark

With Naimark’s quote, we are reminded of the recent development in the invasion of privacy (by major technology corporations) and proliferation of fake news. On many levels, the piece by Lau is an example, albeit a small one of the potential technology (via web-based apps) where a conflation of space can control, manipulate and have a profound impact of peoples experience of art and the world at large. Will we one day ask: The video images lag but is it just interactivity in art? 

 

Video Conference: Exposition 4.0 (2016) Urich Lau. Exhibition: Survey: Space, Sharing, Haunting Curated by Post-Museum The Substation 1 – 30 September 2016

 

 

 

 

Hyperessay Research 1 | Introduction to Urich Lau (Singapore)

Urich Lau Wai-Yuen was born in Singapore in 1975. He works with video art, photography, printmaking, and installation art. Aside from his practice, he is an independent curator and organiser for video art and lectures at LASALLE College of the Arts. Lau is also co-founder of the art collective INTER–MISSION which focuses on technology in art. He is also part of The Artist Village and a resident-artist at the Goodman Arts Centre in Singapore.

Lau has exhibited in Singapore and other countries including Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, China, Japan, Australia, Germany, Serbia, Uzbekistan and the USA, with recent exhibitions including the Singapore Biennale 2013 and VII Tashkent International Biennale of Contemporary Art.

LIGHT-SPACE

A collaboration between Warren Khong and Urich Lau. LIGHT–SPACE brings the two artists together whose practices deal with the materiality and elemental concepts of light and space. The result is an artwork that plays on the relationships of colours and light in and around spaces with methods in the interaction of physical objects and electronic pulses.

Looking at the conditions in the physical space, interactions with the audience and unseen electrical/magnetic forces, the work also attempts to show the presence of the body as external influences. With the concept and issues surrounding the use of surveillance capabilities, the work is created with the materiality element of light and space, and interaction of physical objects (bodies) and frequency interference.

LIGHT-SPACE #103 Document: Interference, held at Objectifs – Centre for Photography and Film from 2 to 22 Dec 2016

Urich Lau has the following artist’s statement on his online portfolio/webpage:

I work with the medium of video and photography in various technological methodologies to explore forms of images in space and time, perceptions and perspectives. The intent of my work touches on contemporary issues in arts and culture, and the conceptual negotiations between images and the viewer. The subject matters are interpreted in contextual irony with interactions, interventions or interruptions.

 

Above statement was extracted from: https://sites.google.com/site/urichlauwy/home/artist-statement

Network Art Symposium: A Review

ART OF THE NETWORKED PRACTICE SOCIAL BROADCASTING: AN UNFINISHED COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION

This essay takes Matt Adam’s keynote titled “The Here, the Now, the Audience and the Spectator” as an entry point to analysing and critiquing the online third space experience of igaies (intimate glitches across internet error) a live networked performance directed by Jon Cates who performed with his collaborators.

Screenshot of Matt Adam’s Keynote Address

1. The Internet as a starting point

A revolution that was not to be, the internet. Matt Adams had lamented in his keynote narrative that the internet was compelling and gripping for him (when he first encountered it) during its early emergence in the 1990s. Matt Adams and his collective Blast Theory then went on to leave an indelible mark on art of the networked practice with the controversial work Kidnap in the late 1990s. In Kidnap, spectators paid to enter a lottery to be kidnapped, where they will indeterminably give up control and suffer the (possible) trauma of losing control over their lives to artists who will (1) interface with their real lives, (2) attempt new action and (3) create new articulations of what will/can go on in their lives. From Matt Adam’s articulation of how “the internet failed him”, the impact that the internet has made on society, culture and interpersonal relationships is startling but in the words of Adam:

 have not been able to match up to utopian believers’ hope that new social relationships can be made possible by the new interface- internet.

Will the symposium be able to tap into the internet as a virtual/online environment to bring about a communication revolution?

2. The Symposium as a construct- was the network connection real or fictional?

His words will resonate throughout the symposium as ideas of the artists/performers played out in the respective physical spaces, juxtaposed with the online happenings as conversations, opinions, and sharing of references/readings and theoretical conditions are played out. Sequentially, the process of art-making is poetically mapped in the foreground of the continuous theoretical discourses by the audience. Using Blast Theory’s Kidnap as an example of an interdisciplinary artwork that poetically played out exactly what the internet was made for, the symposium seeks to re-enact the devices of allowing/enabling intimacy and closeness to permeate through the experience of the work. The symposium can then be like Kidnap in establishing new forms of articulations of real-life activities where the actions of others feel like its close and intimate. The experience of the work, where real-time footage of the activities of the kidnapped persons was beamed over the internet was a new articulation of what went on in other people’s lives, persons who relinquished control over their lives and let the other (the artist in this case) take control. This was felt in some parts in the symposium but often times the experience of the performances were similarly theatrical and distant in its one-way mode of communication, where the remote viewer is a passive spectator viewing the process from a distant locale.

3. Who controls our imagination? Who speaks, who performs and who pays attention?[1]

The roles of the artists, the audience, and the spectator were melted in an unfinished communication revolution that was the symposium- where interdisciplinary was the constant- where media, art form and roles were mixed and mashed into a 1072 x 768 screen. The night (Day Three of the Symposium- 10:00 am in Chicago and 11:00 pm in Singapore) entered its moment of sound checking, equipment verification and upside down imagery/framing of the performative space. “Art of the Networked Practice Social Broadcasting: An Unfinished Communications Revolution”, an unerring follow-up to the 2015 event of the same name minus the “unfinished communications revolution” disclaimer. 

4. Symposium Objective

The symposium is a collaboration between the School of Art, Design & Media at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore); LASALLE College of the Arts (Singapore) and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Performance (USA) and is framed as an international gathering that unites local and remote speakers, artists and audiences through the use of Adobe Connect. Such an endeavour aims to create a dynamic peer-to-peer form of academic and artistic investigation through creative art-making and two-way dialogue. The instrumental aspect of the symposium is that it is an interdisciplinary event that mixes geography, media, art forms and human expression in the articulation of a new experience. The symposium was this online third space environment that constructed an “alternative social world” for live performative arts, presentations and a creative dialogue (global roundtable discussion) all rolled into one!

5. igaies – intimate glitches across internet error

The glitches at the beginning of the Live Network Performances at Chicago highlighted the realism/real-time nature of such an occurrence, where loose cables and sound checks were visible and audible to the expectant audience- but it is precisely this glitching that added to the intimacy, authenticity and spirit of dynamism/chance. The spectatorship of such a scene differed from an experience of a performance art piece in a museum or a theater piece in its system of openness and leaving things to spectatorial behavioural responses and dynamism of the performers. The three performances had varying content, Jon Cates directed the performances but seemingly left the interpretation open to the performers and spectators. Akin to what the visionary artist, pedagogue, and writer Roy Ascott had written in his 1967 manifesto “Behaviourables and Futuribles”:

“When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. The process replaces the product in importance, just as system supersedes structure. The act of changing becomes a vital part of the total aesthetic experience of the participant.”        

This quote poetically describes the night’s performances, where the Live Network Performances were seemingly loosely scripted and allowed for a high margin of free play by the artists. For example, XXXtraPrincess began the night’s interdisciplinary experiences with a textual display of bodily performance layered with their engagement in hashtagging on social media streams. As their mobile phones cover half their faces, their phone screens display images of selfies, memes and live-tweet postings that are an embodiment of their hybridised existence, mediated by their online selves and their real-time selves. The here– as portrayed by the two “young girls” remixing the materials that represent them produces a hypnotic performance for the audience and spectator as fiction is overlaid with the real in a beautiful embrace of technology. This layering continued almost seamlessly as Roberto Sifuentes occupied another side of the open space, where audiences mingled and freely moved between performer and spaces.

Screenshot of XXXtraPrincess’s Performance at Chicago, Day 3 of the Symposium

6. The Here, the Now, the Audience and the Spectator

Screenshot of Roberto Sifuente’s Performance, Day 2 of the Symposium

Together with his collaborators who assisted in the somewhat ritualistic process of placing leeches on the body of Sifuentes, there was a continuous flow of activity, abide slow but mesmerising in a process akin to mourning- where leeches were applied to the body like an act of cleansing. Gradually blood trickled down his body, onto his white singlet but the performance #exsanguination continued unabated and enabled audiences in the physical space to be part of the making of the work. This is a profound experience for the spectator, where the once passive consumer of artwork is now present in the art- whose behaviour makes up the work. Without the audience, the performer is but a figure of ‘potential’ or self-mutilation. But with the omnipresence of the audience, they enter the space occupied by the body of the performer, fill up space(s) on and around the body and serendipitously makes the remote viewer (on the 1024×768 screen in a different topology) a voyeur of this spectacle.  

Screenshot of Roberto Sifuente’s Performance, Day 2 of the Symposium

The voyeur is locked in viewership with amazement, freely responding with words in the online chatter, involving themselves in the layer of theoretical discourses surrounding the process of art making currently on-going. Recalling Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s essay, “Welcome to Electronic Café International”, this is an example of a performance set within a collaborative networked performance space with no geographical boundaries, almost. What could have elevated or pushed the work to a higher level of transcendence would be a possible interaction by the remote viewer, how then could that be elicited? Will that remove the theoretical discourses that are also such valuable inputs in the possible impending written discourses about these artistic acts?

7. Behavioural Context & Feedback Loop

The collaborative performance space was separate from the remote online chatter space- different but similar at the same time. Taking reference from the iconic new media collective Ant Farm in the writing of their iconic artwork ‘Media Burn’:

 . . . The artist, the artifact, and the spectator are all involved in a more behavioural context. . . . [T]hese factors . . . draw the spectator into active participation in the act of creation; to extend him, via the artifact, the opportunity to become involved in creative behaviour on all levels of experience—physical, emotional, and conceptual. A feedback loop is established so that the evolution of the artwork/experience is governed by the intimate involvement of the spectator.

In this regard, I posit that the feedback loop is established by having the second layering of spectators, where the remote viewer is able to dissect, discuss and hold conversations about the works as the processes evolve and experiences change. The spectator, because of this community of discursive nature is intimately involved in the work, but in a more cerebral manner. As observed by Paul Hertz in the post-performance round-table discussing, what we have witnessed- be it in the physical space or remotely is a complex topology of many delayed elements from bacteria to leeches and technological interventions. The value of such multi-sensorial, multi-layered strata of work is that it makes the viewer highly aware of their own senses, their own presence. Hertz comments that everything that makes one aware is a good performance and I cannot agree more, as I felt seduced into this totalised interconnected space where beings floated around in the spaces and the experience was multi-dimensional.

8. An Unfinished Communication Revolution is All We Need

Therefore, in analysing what was discussed in the roundtable discussion that wrapped up the three-day symposium- I posit that the audience in the real space or in virtual space is in no way compromised. The beauty and sublimity of such a multi-layered presentation and reception is in its diverse reception of the process of artmaking. The lens of the live viewer as compared with the lens of the juxtaposed viewer with online commentary and privy to the vibrant, continuous and free flow conversation is different and varies. The mediated experience is a unique experience as compared to the spectator up close and both experiences are valuable. Referring to Matt Adam’s keynote “The Here, the Now, the Audience and the Spectator”, the symposium is fruitful and admittedly an unfinished communication revolution but it is precisely this incomplete comprehension of such an open pedagogue, application of technology that makes it compelling as an artistic event and experience for viewers, performers and theorists alike. This unfinished communication is all we need, going forward.

[1] We are in a post-Marxist period where the notions of “we-the-people” have absolute control over our lives, our intake of knowledge, our levels of consumption and even our imagination.

Research Critique | Kidnap (1998) and it’s impact.

NETWORK CULTURE

Since the mid 1990s, the group followed the trajectory of the development of the media, with their acute and in-depth psychological analyses. I would call them the most contemporary media-poet of this age.

  • Soh Yeong Roh, Head of the Selection Committee for the 2016 Nam June Paik Art Center Award

Blast Theory is a pioneering and multi-faceted artists group that creates interactive, thought-provoking and complex artworks that traverse media, form, and modes of communication systems. The artists come from diverse backgrounds grounded in art theory, theatre and new media art forms like gaming and broadcast media. As a result of this hybrid of characteristics and peculiarities, there is a collective rootedness to placing the audience at the centre of their work. In so doing, numerous projects constructed and situated by Blast Theory blurs the boundary between art and life and the mechanisms of control. This essay will investigate how Kidnap (1998) has brought forth a particular/peculiar oeuvre of interactive artworks that deftly challenges the fluid boundary between fact and fiction and uses technology to alter the viewer experience. The artwork itself will not be covered in depth, for there is much to be read about on the internet.

Kidnap as more than an artwork

Kidnap required extensive consultations with a legal firm about the legal and ethical aspects of making the artwork, all this before it eventually took place in West London. In mid-1990s UK, the fear of being kidnapped off the streets was genuine and mounting. Coupled with an increasing rate of kidnap cases and concerns over the country’s economic situation, Blast Theory’s work brought with it far-reaching social and political commentary. In an interview with Blast Theory’s Matt Adams, he elaborates that:

This is a piece about kidnapping, an incredibly powerful political and pop-cultural social force. During the 1970s, some of the most important political discussions in Western urban culture were happening via the medium of kidnapping, if you look at the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, for example.

Blast Theory, Kidnap (1998) courtesy of Blast Theory

From here, we see that Blast Theory has instrumentally created a multi-layered artwork that is not only acutely psychological in its intent, it poignantly engages with the participant (and the audience), and on a more socio-cultural level asked particular questions about the culture in which we live in- it is inherently attaching itself to making a political comment. In the same interview, Matt Adams commented on how Blast Theory interfaces the digital with the physical, where the real collides with the virtual.

Blast Theory as collaborators

The latter sophisticated use of technology, savvy collaborations with art institutions (like Institute of Contemporary Art, London) and tie-ins with art colleges (like the University of Nottingham), opened up vast opportunities for the group to bring their interactive art to interface with the larger public and receive huge media coverage globally. All this started with the dramaturgy that is Kidnap (1998), where the audience actually does it themselves– they become the art. It is with the radicality and open-ness that was Kidnap that enabled the media, art historians and media theorists to engage in conversation, collaborations and commissions for future projects.

Audience interacts and becomes the art

 Do what?

Blast Theory, Kidnap (1998) courtesy of Blast Theory

Be the artwork, be in the centre of the piece, be fifty percent of the artwork, quoting Adam’s once again.

More importantly, the work questions the kidnapped (and at times the kidnapper as well) on how they make sense of the world, whereas one lives in an age of increasing ‘technologisation’ are overwhelmed with different sources of information. Kidnap is an example of a Tabula Rasa for which as discussed by Slavoj Zizek in The Desert of the Real, a whole new reality (for the kidnapped and the kidnapper) is created and at the same time the viewer (for example the writer who only encountered the work 20 years later) and various visitors to websites, articles, and journals about the work and the various documentation on YouTube, Instagram, and Vimeo is torn between being caught in this mixed reality. This so-called ‘game’ co-constructed by participant and artists stems from the idea that an interface to a virtual world could be thought of as a permeable, bi-directional, and potentially traversable “mixed reality boundary” between the physical and virtual.

The complexity of the work allows participants on either side to see – and ultimately to cross over into – the other. The value and longevity of the work reside in how the idea and contestations within the work outlive the performance itself. On one level, the performative environment resided in 1998, where several things competed simultaneously with the audience’s attention, but in watching and re-watching the sequence of events unfolding, within an uncomfortable context, the poignancy of the work is further exacerbated by the nature of it being an archive of an event 20 years ago, we are quick to ask- so what happened to the participants? What was the impact of the work on the kidnapped (The kidnapped was ‘chosen’ through a very British social past-time- The Lottery)? 

In the Politics of New Media Theatre, Gabriella Giannachi presented Blast Theory’s work as political. Not because of the spaces created by the artists’ group that is socially transformative and at times aesthetically appealing, but more importantly because the artworks (or can we still call them art?) problematizes the way in which technology is used as a lens/language to experience everydayness. She says:

Here, technology does impact directly on whom we choose to be, in our relationships with others and in our engagement with locality as materiality, and in the ways these inform each other. So, as Adams suggests, Kidnap is about ‘giving up control’, but also being controlled. about looking and being looked at. It is about trust and endurance.    

With this, we are able to see the artists group as a collective looking to poke at the fabrics of society and our culture at large. Through the lens of art, where not only art objects, installations or interactive situations are created- a strong political message is sent out to the public(s), the new(s) media and government(s) as well. Blast Theory plays with the communication systems and produces work that can potentially be socially and politically transformative. Through their terrain of ideas, Blast Theory has explored humanity and what it means to exists in this city, this day and this age of post-modernity. Kidnap and the many artworks that Blast Theory has conjured up in the last twenty years have managed to make art that can not only poetically resonate but also seek viewers (and participants) to reflect upon. Such is the reach and multi-faceted approach of using art as language, that at times the ‘contemporary media-poets of this age’ seems to exert the same level of control as the work Kidnap did its viewers.

Research Critique | Telematic Dreaming, 1992

In surveying Paul Sermon’s artwork Telematics Dreaming (1992), we delve into how telematic art has come into being not simply as a result of technological advancements in computer-mediated telecommunications networks but also its value in contesting similar formal concerns of conceptual art formulated under the rhetoric of “dematerialization” of the art object.

As an art form, telematic art (similar to notions of conceptual art) challenged the traditional relationships between the art object and the viewer. No longer is the viewer an observer of passive art objects, telematic art creates interactive, behavioural contexts for an active viewing and at times a more direct experience of an aesthetic encounter. The encounter sets up an unconventional artistic experience, where the artistic experience takes place in a computer-mediated space in which the art object has been “dematerialised”. Furthering from this, as expressed in Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s essay, “Welcome to Electronic Café International,” 1992,

There must be a quality of “tension” that defines the “communication”. if you don’t create tension in the work, you are not really looking at the qualities of the medium, or of the art…

This quality of “tension” is present in Paul Sermon’s artwork Telematics Dreaming (1992) without respite. Sermon’s installation is a unique installation that exists within ISDN digital telephone networks, thus allowing two locations to communicate with one another. This early example of teleconferencing is created by constructing two separate interfaces located in separate locations anywhere in the world. The idea is to create a mirror scenario where one person’s image is reflected in another person’s reality. This image (or place/location in another part of the world) is created using a camera situated above the queen-size bed (in both instances). The image (or place) where the bed resides has a person lying on it and this is projected onto the bed with someone lying on it as well, more often times in a geographically distant location.

                                     Paul Sermon Telematics Dreaming (1992)

As mentioned in Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s essay, “Welcome to Electronic Café International”, this is an example of a “tele-performance” set within a collaborative networked performance space with no geographical boundaries, almost. Tension is also formed as a result of the uncertainty surrounding the nature and eventuality of the work. Unlike art objects or artistic situations (like performative artworks), telematic artworks exist as a technological extension of the body. The collaborators’ bodies, which if unmoving (as has happened in the many iterations of Telematics Dreaming) creates a quality of tension that communicates an inherent awkwardness in actual human interaction. This tension is a quality of the telematic medium that extends the study of human consciousness, interactivity, and reticence as well. No doubt, the artwork raises and addresses many questions pertaining to the technology it embodies, and also touches on more profound concepts of human’s desire for transcendence- to create an experience out of the body, beyond language.

The computer has (almost) managed to bring together this telematic embrace that is not just a glimpse of the ‘unseeable’ but in it, the observer (or user) exchanges his/her sense of touch, smell and overall tactily with a contentious dependence on their eyes to experience the art. What this creates is a scenario or a “collaborative networked performance” space where the observer (or user) is central to the installation. Without them(her/him) the bed is an empty space of ‘potential’ or disappointment. But with the omnipresence of the user, they enter the bed space, fill up the space and serendipitously become the voyeur of their own spectacle. This is a profound experience for the art viewer or in this case art-user, where the once passive consumer of artwork is now present in the art- whose behaviour makes up the work. In this process of “dematerialisation” of the art object, the accentuation of one’s behaviour takes over the validity of an art object and manifests itself as the subject of the artistic process and experience.

The visionary artist, pedagogue, and writer Roy Ascott had written in his 1967 manifesto “Behaviourables and Futuribles”:

“When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. Process replaces the product in importance, just as system supersedes structure. The act of changing becomes a vital part of the total aesthetic experience of the participant.”        

Ascott’s work as an artist and writer has contributed to the vital tendencies of telematic art and twentieth-century experimental art. He has also greatly influenced a generation of musicians (having taught Brian Eno), visual artists (having taught Paul Sermon), and art writers/theorists with his progressive art pedagogies. In many ways, Ascott has illuminated how the ethereal and somewhat marginalised medium of electronic (or computer-mediated) telecommunication could produce or facilitate interactive art exchanges.

in summary, some of the key concepts that Ascott ascribes to are:

  • His focus on temporality
  • Utilisation of the concept of the feedback loop in the learning and making of art as opposed to an art object/product
  • The accentuation of the third space as opposed to a conventional subject matter or stylistic approach to art making.

These tendencies bring across his idea of art as a system based on a field of objects to the field of behaviour as astutely written in “Is there love in the telematic embrace?”:

 . . . The artist, the artifact, and the spectator are all involved in a more behavioural context. . . . [T]hese factors . . . draw the spectator into active participation in the act of creation; to extend him, via the artifact, the opportunity to become involved in creative behaviour on all levels of experience—physical, emotional, and conceptual. A feedback loop is established so that the evolution of the artwork/experience is governed by the intimate involvement of the spectator.

 

Research Critique | Ant Farm’s Media Burn, 1975

Ant Farm
(An Interview with Chip Lord, from the NMC Media Lounge at the College Art Association conference, February 23, 2018).)

In approaching and researching into the artistic oeuvre of Ant Farm (1968 – 1978), one stumbles upon numerous documents and retrospective shows about/from the visionary collective. The body of works all stack up as being ‘sublimely relevant more than three decades later’ as quoted by Constance M. Lewallaen in her essay Still Subversive After All These Years, a testament to how Chip Lord, Doug Michel later joined by Curtis Schreier have left behind a body of not just artworks but research that is not just relevant but still considered radical and groundbreaking. As described in Michael Sorkin’s essay Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, Cars, Dolphins, and Architecture:

Looking back at the amazingly fertile oeuvre of the Ants—produced in a ten-year sprint that would have left lesser artists burned out for life— one is overwhelmed by their vision and their generosity, their interventions in the range of practices and issues that set the contemporary agenda for architecture. Performance, video, public sculpture, architecture, and polemic were all wielded with huge skill and massive aplomb.

Ant Farm was established within the counter-cultural milieu of 1968 San Francisco by architects who dealt with the intersection of architecture (the built form), design and media arts (the projected form) and produced works in numerous formats ranging from agitprop events to videos, live-action performances, and installations.  Referencing Michael Sorkin’s essay again, he continues that:

The times, after all, were not purely about rupture but also about rupture, about submitting the cultural and physical landscape to the revaluing of altered vision. That vision was diverse.’

Ant Farm was an art collective like no other as they produced a diverse body of artworks that cuts across visual arts, architecture, graphic design, new media art and socially engaged art. Such a diverse vision was achieved by Ant Farm as they existed as an ‘autonomous reality community’, a term by respected scholar and theorist of media arts and politics, Gene Youngblood (and referenced by Randall Packer as an ideal description of Ant Farm, in a recent interview with Chip Lord from the NMC Media Lounge at the College Art Association conference, February 23, 2018).

Autonomous, in how they developed their practice outside of the privileged institutional context of universities and were able to produce art that is still relevant today in debates about the impact of mass media on our lives, discussions on sustainable architecture and issues surrounding building technologies, public art and essentially questioning the ‘realities’ of  architecture. The group crafted artworks that were altered visions like “Media Burn” that was always somewhat utopian, but also ironic and tongue-in-cheek in the appropriation of elements from popular culture. As a collaborative entity, their work was a result of the creative energies swilling around at the conceptual activities of the late sixties and seventies, a seminal period of creative gestation for art.

In “Media Burn”, it is a multimedia artwork on many levels. As a live event, the artists have created an opening ‘mockumentary’ where the artists have appropriated documentary-style staging to create a simulacrum of an actual event. Doug Hall plays John F. Kennedy, appropriating the iconic president whose live television shooting shocked a generation of Americans and their experience of mass media, as an artist-president. This tongue-in-cheek gesture by Ant Farm is exacerbated by the speech that he delivers where the artist-president regally pronounces “Who can deny that we are a nation addicted to television and the constant flow of media? Haven’t you ever wanted to put your foot through your television?”

 

With this radical gesture, the reconstructed Cadillac that has been crudely modified (as Ant Farm were greatly influenced by the Do-It-Yourself culture at that time) to resemble an idealised/dream vehicular object, plows into a wall of televisions. The video brings forth a performative gesture that sets up an explosive collision between two of North America’s biggest and most potent cultural symbols of the 1970s: the vehicle (a car that has come to symbolise the ability to traverse land, a dream of many Americans) and the television (a mass media device that has shaped the way people in America live and perceive one another and how they have come to envision the outside world). The invited media representatives that formed the spectators made the spectacle into a ‘media circus’ and footage of the event, which were shot from the video camera mounted inside the car, were further juxtaposed with news coverage from television stations. Such was the complexity of the work that in surveying the work, we categorise it as a media event, a series of site structures (installation), performance (also in real-time) and video-art (closed-circuit cameras and pre-edited ‘mockumentary’.

The event itself manages to merge all these into an artwork that is humorous with cultural and political critique, where they critiqued North American’s ideals of technological superiority and questioned the role of mass media and consumerism on the North American culture. The invited guests who were members of the national media, a gesture that up to this day is very much spoken about. Ant Farm had:

engaged the most powerful aspect of the joke: the possibility of splicing things that in conventional atmospheres would be considered impossible to join.

Ant Farm, Media Burn, 1975-2003.
 San Francisco. Videotape. 16 mins. Color.

With “Media Burn”, Ant Farm has produced one of the most exquisite artworks of the 20th century that is still relevant and spoken about up until today. In fact, the work has definitely become more ‘sublimely relevant more than three decades later’ due to the increased intertwining of mass media and one’s social and physical reality. The altered vision set up by Ant Farm still resonate, as our experience of the every day becomes blurred by imagery displayed on the television, internet and social media.

 

Research Critique | Char Davies’s Osmose, 1995

IMMERSION

While Virtual Reality is no doubt commonplace in our present-day experience of the world, supplanted by the ubiquitous rise of screen-based gaming, the medium has a rich history in New Media artistic experimentations, non-more so that in the artwork by Char Davies- Osmose (1995). Osmose is an intriguing immersive environment that uses virtual-reality 3D graphics computer technology and interactive sound and real-time motion tracking of one’s breathing and balance to enable the immersant (as the artist calls his participants) to navigate various worlds using Virtual Reality headsets. In Osmose, Davies has very deftly produced (with the use of technology and her painterly aesthetics) an immersive experience that challenges the conventional approaches to virtual reality.

Virtual Reality is an experience of a scenario that mimics the real, oftentimes the immersive environment is a recreated scene that one steps into where the experiences vary in magnitudes of realism. In the harsh and somewhat hard-edged experience of screen-based 3D-computer graphics gaming, the experience of realism is stark and highly defined- strategic and goal-oriented. Conversely, the experiences that the immersant takes away from Osmose is one of transcendental beauty and moments of serenity, where some immersants have described their experience as ‘falling into a meditative state’. Quite different from the non-stop action and opacity of a gaming experience, immersants are placed in a sublime abstract environment that blends translucent naturalistic forms with technologically driven semi-abstract representation. In Scott Fisher’s Virtual Environments (1989), taken from Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, he writes about:

The possibilities of virtual realities, it appears, are as limitless as the possibilities of reality. It provides a human interface that disappears – a doorway to other worlds.

Indeed, this doorway to other worlds was achieved in the seminal artwork Osmoses, where the visual aesthetics are subliminal, semi-abstract and essentially translucent in various levels. The beauty (aesthetics) of the piece comes from Davies’s background/understanding of painterly aesthetics, where her painterly objective of immersing the viewer in the representation of nature was realised using cutting edge technology. It is Davies’s sensitivity to the layering of imagery, understanding of semi-transparent textures adapted from the language of paintings that enabled her to cogently recreate scenes in her mind into this immersive 3D experience. As the immersant lingers and navigates through the semi-abstract and translucent spaces (in his/her own time and space), they observe the lush textures juxtaposed with flowing particles that sometimes enabled the immersant to forget that the experience is in fact computer generated.

The human interface is unlike that of a screen-based gaming experience, in Osmose the immersant dons/wears a head-mounted display and motion-tracking vest and not a mouse or trackpad/joystick. The immersant has control over how they wish to navigate the space(s), inhaling to rise, exhaling to sink and leaning from side to side to navigate. This is a radically different form of human interfacing and relationship to space compared to screen-based technology. No longer is the immersant constrained by the figure/ground relationship so prevalent in screen-based gaming, but his/her relationship to the ground is now ambiguous and hence results in a somewhat floaty and transcendental experience. Furthermore, as one navigates through the various spaces, the transition between worlds (there are numerous worlds ranging from cloudscapes, seascapes to forest landscapes) are seamless and non-transitory.

This brings to mind the concluding paragraph to Ivan Sutherland’s famous essay that became the seed-bomb for emergent technologies, “Augmented Reality: The Ultimate Display” that says:

 The ultimate display would, of course, be in a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal. With appropriate programming such a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked.

The journey into Osmose is one where the computer yields control in almost recreating the experience of lush textured, subtlety translucent and subliminal spaces that shift from one percept to another. The visitor is ‘evolved’ rather than illustrated into almost floating between realms, and almost slipping into a trance-like state. Space and time in this artwork become warped, where the translucent forms are revealed in a non-sequential form and individualised to each participant. These experiences are thus made possible by the use of VR technology and Davies’s background in painting. In concluding, the public installation of Osmose goes full circle in that the individualised experience is shared with viewers as the navigation taken by each immersant is projected real-time from the point-of-view of the immersant. This projection enables the audience to share the moments of discovery, hesitation, and slowness with the immersant. The journey is on one hand immersive and private, much like the Wonderland into which Alice walked into, but the projection enables the audience to share the experience and observe the body gestures of the immersant in a poetic shadow-silhouette. As a result, the environment created connects the private to the public, rounding up the artist’s goal to not only connect the immersant to others but also to the depths of him or herself, thereby mirroring a beautiful idea about changing one’s experience of spaces from Gaston Bachelard in “The Poetics of Space” that Davies refers to in Osmose and her later works as well: 

“By changing space, by leaving the space of one’s usual sensibilities, one enters into communication with a space that is psychically innovating. … For we do not change place, we change our nature.”

Gaston Bachelard
The Poetics of Space, 1964
 
 

Research Critique | Mark Amerika’s Grammatron, 1997

INTERACTIVITY

“As We May Think” is a visionary text and predicted (to a certain extent) our present-day dependency on personal computers, the internet and its many tools like the online encyclopedias and the ubiquitous use of hypertext. Indeed, in his text, Vannevar Bush highlighted his concerns on how information needed to be managed and ‘controlled’ in order for scientists (and more importantly the everyday man on the street) to benefit from being introduced to the information hyperspace. Bush envisioned much of the present-day use of technology like retrieving several articles, pictures of moving images on a single screen more than seven decades ago. His belief that people will one day create ‘links’ between related writings, to enable a fascinating mapping of thoughts and narrative paths for each user, has in some ways come true. In the year 2018, people are experiencing a new form of information enhanced by technology- that of the hypermedia. As highlighted in Kay and Goldberg’s seminal text “Personal Dynamic Media” in 1977, the idea of creating a personal computer will be a large step forward in sharing information and a new and improved medium of communication between persons. Kay believed that:

When normal people start creating and sending each other simulations as a way to exchange ideas, a new revolution will happen, similar to the one which the printing press eventually led to. People will be able to exchange more interesting ideas and will be able to have deeper conversations than they could before.     

The experience of sending each other ‘simulations’ is very much an element (amongst many elements) of Mark Amerika’s artwork Grammatron that seeks to have deeper conversation(s) with readers (or visitors). The interactivity of the written (or narrative) form is experienced in Grammatron, an early example of a hypermedia artwork. The 1997 artwork was groundbreaking in many ways and exploded onto the new media art scene as a form of ‘Internet Art’ or ‘Net Art’. Grammatron is inspired by Derrida’s Of Grammatology, an examination of the relation between speech and writing, more importantly, it is an investigation of how speech and writing development as forms of language. Mark Amerika utilises the early incarnations of hypertext links to devise a fusion of text, images and moving images in a networked environment that is immersive, beguiling and set against a ‘re-mixed’ soundtrack- multisensorial.

The hypertext pages invites the visitor to immerse oneself in the narrative by clicking on highlighted texts while viewing the sequence of static images, animated images and text-based images that populate the sequential pages. We (the visitors) is brought along playful codes of interactivity that leads Golam (The character alludes to the Medieval Jewish legend of the Golem, a servant made of clay and brought to life- a prototype for man-machine myths from Frankenstein to the Terminator) through a hybridised world made up of metafiction, hypertext, cyberpunk; and most importantly a personification of Amerika the artist. The project is made up of many layers of meaning, where the visitor is sucked into the networked environment that is, on one hand, an experiment by the artist and a meta-critique of the ‘web culture’ of the early 20th century. Amerika has produced an iconic (and somewhat troubling) artwork that experiments with the evolving technology that is the World Wide Web. More importantly, the work is a prophecy on the coming control that the internet will wield over our lives.

In going back to Bush’s “As We May Think”, the visionary and prophetic nature of this text is eerily accurate in how he sees that:

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers.

Bush’s paper aptly pre-empts concerns of generations to come, a society that has become fed on the open knowledge spaces arising from the proliferation of the internet. The 21st Century has become a mine-field of information, where the ‘information explosion’ that rose from the demands of war(stemming from the warfare needs of the Second World War) gradually developed into an unprecedented demand on scientific production. The rapidity of scientific development resulted in investigators (or the everyday person) swiftly becoming bogged down by the excesses of information. In many ways, the Grammatron non-linear narrative satirises the way computer networked environments become breeding grounds for unethical practices, particularly the penetration of our creative and research spaces with the mindless info-spam of an invasive techno capitalism vision gone wrong. Similar to how Abe Golam searches for his “second-half” in the web of interactivity that is Grammatron, where both Golam and the visitor (or reader) is brought through a labyrinth of multi-layered textscapes where they search for “the missing link”, the internet has become for us a hyperspace filled with fake news, viruses and mindless info-spam.

 

Research Critique | Robert Rauschenberg’s Soundings, 1968

INTEGRATION

RAUSCHENBERG/ 1976.151 002

When the observer enters the space in which “Soundings” is installed, he enters a darkened space. Looking around, the observer sees his own reflection in the silvered panels. Sounds made by the viewer will trigger light points to illuminate parts of the silvered panel revealing coloured lithographs. The work is intriguing, alternately bewildering or for some- infuriating.

 

Intriguing because Rauschenberg (the individual and artist) has created a space (and not the “perfect object”) in such a way that the observer is required to shift his/her mode of interaction with the work to one of an active participant. No longer can the viewer simply retain his/her passivity in consuming the artwork(Rauschenberg has sought to expand the notions of art in his art practice), but the observer is now part of a two-way exchange between the artwork and its audience. This measure of interactivity is bewildering for many and has its semblance to what Roy Ascott wrote in his 1966 essay “Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision” that:

The vision of art has shifted from the field of objects to the field of behaviour, and its function has become less descriptive and more purposive.

No doubt “soundings” is an example of ‘the behavioural tendency in modern art’, as the interactivity between the artwork and the audience is no longer constrained by aesthetic canons or political directives, where an artwork can be a non-object and not solely determined by the artists/creator. The interactive artwork is now less prescriptive/descriptive and serves a purpose of getting the viewer to participate and with the interactivity- think and question his/her role in the experience of the artwork.

As quoted from the pivotal Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) Press Release for “Soundings”, he (Rauschenberg) insists that the viewer become his collaborator; without him/her the work does not exists. This forms a general characteristic of the modern artwork according to Ascott- that the dominant feature of art is one based on “interactivity”. As prophetically written by Norbert Wiener in “Cybernetics In History”:

messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing role.

This concept is clearly anticipated in “Soundings” as the darkened space forces a communication between the artwork and the spectator. Art is no longer about transmitting a presupposed or intended message of the artists, but is is now more about the mechanisms of “feedback” and mutual control. When we look at our state of affairs in the 21st century, it is astounding how Wiener has foreseen future developments of message and communication facilities to go ‘out of control’ or beyond a state of entropy. in a clever use of technology, Rauschenberg has highlighted Wiener’s writing on how Cybernetics could and will play an increasing role in communication.

This vision of a changing world influenced by machines is thus cleverly played out in the experience of Rauschenberg’s “Soundings”. In this respect, this exhibition at MOMA sheds light on Rauschenberg’s legacy as a founding member of E.A.T.―which was initiated to allow the public interaction with lab-based computer engineering and technology and his importance in the history of cybernetics and art. In particular, this exhibition has focused on Rauschenberg’s responsive environment, in which a new mode of ‘spectatorship’ or a new relationship among spectator, the environment and technology was achieved. Further taken from the “Soundings” Press Release, Rauschenberg is said to:

merge art and technology … to confront the public with the present. Soundings continues to use the vocabulary of commonplace objects and to dissolve what he considers the needless separateness between man and technology.

It is with this that we see the multimedia and multi-modal artwork “Soundings” as an example of Rauschenberg’s incorporation of technology and machine aesthetics (in having the work be electronically activated and what the viewer sees dependent on his/her voice and sounds made) in Modern Art as prophetic of the future to come and is an artist way ahead of his time. Together with his oeuvre of other iconic artworks, Rauschenberg has profoundly influenced artists in future generations who increasingly incorporate more complex media and technology in their works. Where contemporary art sits on a cusp of uncertainty where the art system is constantly driven by entropy and market forces, Rauschenberg was one to see it happening- 50 years earlier.