New Media

There are 5 posts tagged New Media (this is page 1 of 1).

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.