FAIRFM is on the move once again, and this time the revolution will be streamed live! Bringing you Fidelity a la Insurgency Radio 88.8 FM; compiled from stolen sounds and captured compositions, the humdrum of today’s “lo-fidelity” society gets mixed down into five minutes of performative piracy. Transmitting across two frequencies this bootlegged broadcast masks itself, just as the pirate is a revolutionary liberator masked as a marauding low life. From lo-fi to no-fi to wi-fi to hi-fi. This is the new hi-fi.  Tune in to FAIR 88.8 FM !

Included in Low Lives 3, an international festival of live networked performances streamed worldwide, you can catch the performance in real-time, screening at a number of art spaces worldwide, including Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (USA), Utah Museum of Fine Art (USA), Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Oaxaca, (MEX), Attakalari Centre for Movement Arts (IND) and 30 other art spaces, galleries, and museums in Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Tanzania, Trinidad & Tobago, Germany, Japan and the USA.

Check it out online by tuning into our live, lo-fidelity ‘bootlegged’ broadcast aired exclusively on April 30th 2011 at 10:30am (WST-Australia) or at 10:30pm April 29th 2011 (EST-USA) at  http://www.ustream.tv/channel/low-lives-3

Viva lo-fi !

UPDATE: May 01 2011

Here is the performance as seen on http://www.ustream.tv/channel/fidelity-a-la-insurgency-radio

I know I’ve done some less-than-ethical things in my youth, but I’ve struck a new all time low…  I’ve recently been selected, alongside 49+ other artists across the globe, to get low in Low Lives 3.  Check out the release:

Low Lives is pleased to present Low Lives 3, the third installment in a series of annual international art events. Low Lives 3 will feature more than fifty live performance-based works over two days, each transmitted over the web and projected in real time at venues across the globe, with a special spotlight on contemporary choreography. The exhibition will begin on Friday, April 29 from 8-12 pm (EST) and continue on Saturday, April 30 from 3-6 pm (EST).

Founded in 2009 by artist and independent curator Jorge Rojas, Low Lives highlights works that critically investigate, challenge, and extend the potential of performative practices. The project celebrates the transmission of ideas beyond geographical and cultural borders, offering global audiences the opportunity to consider live performance in both physical and virtual space.

By featuring performances at numerous venues and broadcasting those works via multiple online networks, Low Lives provides a new model for efficiently presenting, viewing, and archiving live performance-based art. The annual exhibition embraces low-tech aesthetics, such as low pixel images and muddled sound quality, to emphasize the raw quality of the broadcast and reception of the works.

Now in its third year, Low Lives has expanded its reach to over twenty presenting partners in the United States, Mexico, Spain, Germany, India, Tanzania, Japan, and others. Presenting partners for Low Lives 3 include: Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, New Jersey; Attakalari Centre for Movement Arts, Bangalore, India; Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn, New York; Chez Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York; Co-lab, Austin, Texas; QMAD, Queens Media Art Development in partnership with Crossing Art Gallery, Queens, New York; Diaspora Vibe Gallery in partnership with AE District, Miami, Florida; DiverseWorks in partnership with Box 13, Houston, Texas; Elon University Department of Art & Art History, Elon, North Carolina; Fusebox Festival, Austin, Texas; Konic Thtr, Barcelona, Spain; La Periferia, Mérida, Yucatán, México; La Perrera in partneship with MACO, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Oaxaca, México; Living Arts, Tulsa,Oklahoma; Mascher Space Co-op, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Mindpirates, Berlin, Germany; Obsidian Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota; On the Boards, Seattle, Washington; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon; Real Art Ways, Hartford, Connecticut; Simba Theatre Art International in partnership with Village Museum, Dar es Salaam City, Tanzania; SOMArts, San Francisco, California; the temporary space, Japan; and Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, Utah.

More to come on this one…..

Title: Half Lives

Date: January 2011

Materials: Wood, found objects, sand, stone, concrete, paper, other.

Dimensions: Variable Dimensions

Location: Gallery Central, Northbridge, Western Australia

Keywords: Scale model, Bermuda, bridge, dimensional, tunnel, portal, studio

Description:

Half Lives was a project that resulted in a series of models that were shown in the exhibition what is displace?. These included a scaled model of a traditional covered wooden bridge from my home, Maine, USA entitled There ain’t no water down under…; a 2:1 scale model of the art studio worked in during the course of my doctoral research; a model of a tunnel to Bermuda; and a replica of a TransPerth public bus stop.

Inspired by readings of Michel Foucault’s (1967/1984) concept of heterotopia, Jorge Luis Borges’ Of Exactitude in Science (1946/1975), Deleuze’s (1968/1994) idea of the rhizome, and Jean Baudrillard’s (1994) conception of hyperreality, these models served to create a literal perspective-shift on my practice, creating spaces through which I could encounter my habitus as an artist and social situation/position and disposition within a field of practice. In the making of these sculptural models and installations I was attempting to create a space or spaces in which I could define, experience, and create myself spatially, which is inevitably tied to cultural and social forms. As I discuss below, each artwork functions to create a space in which I can develop and experience a form of separation and distance from as well as a form of connection to the place(s) of my practice, i.e. my home in Maine, USA, my art studio in Perth, Australia, the site of the exhibition, etc.

Model: There ain’t no water down under

There ain’t no water down under, Gallery Central, 2011.

There ain’t no water down under is a scaled model of Babb’s Bridge (Windham, Maine, USA) the oldest remaining covered wooden bridge in the state of Maine, USA. The original bridge was “burned by vandals” in 1973 and has since been rebuilt to original specifications. This model is re-constructed using Jarrah boards from a demolished wooden fence found on the side of the road in Jolimont, Western Australia. Upon peering into the entrance/exit of this model bridge, the audience would notice sections of the bridge were burned out, however the bridge continues on, seemingly into an infinite void.

In this model, the form of a bridge is important. A bridge is a structure that I identify with as connecting two places, yet delineating the separation of these spaces. This bridge was constructed in scale, however with a dimensional perspective that creates an illusion of an infinite void.

However, this particular form of bridge as a covered bridge is a form that was particular to my home in New England, a place where covered bridges were common. I was drawn to creating this particular bridge as it represented as space in my history, of growing up near the site of a covered wooden bridge.

A covered bridge forms a tunnel. The tunnel is a motif throughout my practice, as seen in the work Too Bermuda and the older work Other Side. The tunnel represents a voided space between places through which travel becomes possible. This tunnel represents a space in which I can experience an outside position in my narrative. Through the manipulation of scale in this work I transformed my embodied experience of space and place, thus creating an environment for multiple experiences to take place. Inspired in part by a reading of Deleuze’s concept of the “rhizome” which can be described as a chaotic system that connects different points in space and time. As O’ Sullivan (2005) describes, a rhizome is a structure ”[…] without centre or indeed any central organising motif. It is flat system in which the individual nodal points can, and are, connected to one another in a non-hierarchical manner… [fostering] transversal connections and communications between heterogeneous locations and events” (p. 12).

I interpret both the work and myself together as rhizomes, as the “multiplicity” manifest when I experience this work; the artwork as representation of myself as a place that is connected yet divided (as Debord (1967/1983) and Baudrillard (1994) have also discussed). It was this identification that spurred the act of burning portions of the bridge. After the structure of the bridge was constructed, I intentionally burned targeted sections of the bridge. Taken literally, the adage “to burn your bridges” means to destroy one’s social ties. This destruction of social ties became a powerful metaphor for past experiences of social structure in the creation and partial destruction of this work, which I needed to explore as a means of identifying the relational nature of subjective encounters on an abstracted scale.

Another intention involved in the creation of this sculpture was the dualism of the form as both a tunnel and a bridge. As such, this form is a form that exists in two places at once, and it is in this realisation that the work became activated in a sense that it allowed me to think about my own space as two places at once, similar to the idea of a “rhizome” that Deleuze discusses (O’ Sullivan, 2006, p. 35). However, this realisation urges the reflexive interrogation of myself: where I am from and where I am going? In this way, the There ain’t no water down under also functioned as a portal, transporting me to spaces that represented points of reference as experiences tied to places in the past and present of my self-narrative; serving as a reference point of change and transition between states of being in the making my of self. These models were referencing points in my identification of place, allowing me to explore my “multiplicity” of being, allowing me to break with my structure yet create that structure in representational terms.

Model: Too Bermuda…

Another sculptural model in the Half Lives series was the work, Too Bermuda…, a model of a subterranean tunnel through the core of the Earth to the remote North Atlantic island of Bermuda. From Perth, Australia (one of the most isolated capital cities in the world) a hole dug straight down would reach Hamilton, Bermuda (another extremely isolated location), strangely enough making these two places antipodes. This model tunnel, which is constructed within a scale model of my art studio is based on a scale replica of the Kalgoorlie Superpit (the largest open pit mine in Australia) transposed into an area of the city known as the “Perth Cultural Centre”, the location of Gallery Central, the art gallery in which this work was shown. Here, the form of a tunnel was further explored and developed into a site for self-exploration. The black hole at the mouth of this tunnel represents a point of the unknown, another void through which space could be created in an attempt to disembed myself; as a point of entry into the transition between here and there in a process of exploration. This tunnel provoked an abstracted sense of place and space, allowing for me to explore these relationships purely from my experience and understanding of the environments that shape my identity.

Developed out of a different project, A Third Life, the installation Too Bermuda…began as a 1:1 scale model of my art studio at Edith Cowan University, in which I was constructing an artist studio as a means of both creating an experience of making art and observing it. Through this project I sought to develop a simultaneous first and third person perspective on my practice as an artist. By making my studio as a model, I was attempting to create a site of a reflexive break with my practice. In order to do so, I would have to create a space that displaced the space in which I was creating it, thus the 1:1 scale model developed. In order to reflex to my practice, the work needed to present my practice in this process. Just as writer Jorge Borges’ famous allegory of simulation, Of Exactitude in Science (1946/1975), describes the Empire’s cartographers creating a map so detailed, comprehensive, and exact that it subsumed its own territory, in this artwork I seek to substitute a representation for reality in an attempt to know myself as an artist on such a scale. In my own way, through the process of constructing my practice as replicated model I give form to a phenomenon that French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1994) defines as the “precession of simulacra” (p. 1). In this theory, Baudrillard (1994) claims that contemporary modern society has substituted reality with its own simulation and that any human experience within this perceptual construct is simulated. Thus, reality as we know it, according to Baudrillard (1994), becomes hyperbolic or “hyperreal”. In reference to Borges’ fable Baudrillard (1994) suggests,

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. (p.1)

Rather than creating a solely representational space, like a model in conventional terms, in my practice, through this work of art, I constructed a reflexive space in which I was making both the spaces that defined and identified myself as artist in such a way that I became abstracted to a degree of virtual dimensions. I interpret this to extend into, “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” as Baudrillard suggests (p.1). By doing so I was both creating a space that was simultaneously representational and relational; a space was both here and there, that represented my internalisations and my external environment(s)- thus exposing a working model of my habitus as an artist. By being in control and out of control of being here and there, I am able to confuse the normative structural boundaries involved in creating art and being an artist, which are informing my habitus. In doing so, I create a temporary rupture in the structure and process of my identity formation. This is a representation of a simulation of representation, thus my own model of self-simulacra. As a process of inverted deconstruction of the structures that I create in which I am an artist, my practice as a process of simulacra that precedes my reality as an artist.

The artwork, at this point, created a break between reality and imagination by replacing itself, by simulating itself. However, the shift from the image of myself as an artist creating my situation as an artist is only observable in the differenciation that occurs between states of being. As an external structure that could then become internalised through representational means, in order
Figure 38. Artist, Nathan Stevens, constructing Other Side, 2008.

for the work to continue in this disrupted state of structural continuity, I created another space for the project to evolve. To further explore this break, I modeled the studio within virtual terms by creating a three-dimensional rendering of this project using the computer program Sketch Up. It was here in this alternative mapping, this third space of creation, that I was able to define my practice and create enough of a perspective shift that the artwork (as my practice) could reclaim the imaginary that Baudrillard (1994) suggests dissolves in the process of simulation.

In this instance, the work again functions as hyperreal, which I interpret as an associative break with the doxa of reality. In Simulacra and Simulation (1994), Baudrillard describes a society, more or less an ethos, in which reality is superceded by its symbolism. The result of this formation of society is the disappearance of abstraction and separation of the real and imaginary. For Baudrillard, the “imaginary of representation disappears” in the simulation of reality that occurs in today’s society (p. 1). He writes, “A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences” (p. 2). However, does this work challenge a concept of hyperreality by recreating it? By creating a hyperreality of my own practice as an artist I am able to change it by reinvesting the imaginary as a construct within a certain version, or structure of reality.

At a point during its construction the studio the model became reduced in scale by one half, in order to continue working on it in my studio, both conceptually and physically. It was this point in shifting between full-scale to half-scale that afforded a reflexive opportunity to experience my place of creativity in two ways. Using remnants of the sculptural installation Other Side, I boxed up the studio model, containing it, capturing it within its own parcel.

However, I believe reflexivity quickly relapses into recursion making it necessary to continuously develop and explore new (reflexive) possibilities. At this point, the form of a tunnel to Bermuda entered into the project. Since my arrival to Perth, I had desired to create a tunnel, one which connected me to the opposite side of the Earth; a tunnel that could connect me to the other side, where I had come from. As within the project Other Side, in which I had created a model in which holes were dug into a section of earth, the artwork Too Bermuda… was an extension of this process of digging, and searching, however, with much more calculation and coordination. The accidental spilling of the earth and its contents within Other Side, took on a planned and organised excavation in the site of Too Bermuda… .

Creating the tunnel in the work Too Bermuda… represented a means of locating myself and developed as a way of making a connection, a direct physical and forced connection between a place of my past, Maine and a place of my present, Perth. While Perth and Maine are not antipodes, they are worlds apart, and I imagined that as locations in my life they were at opposite points on the Earth. Interestingly enough, after some geographical research, a tunnel originating in Perth dug straight through the Earth would reach the remote island of Bermuda, making Hamilton, Bermuda and Perth, Australia antipodes. In fact, it was only by a variation of 8 km that these two, strangely remote places, were not exact antipodes.

At this point, the idea of antipodes became conceptually poignant in my work; two places that could exist as the same point in space at different points in time. This notion seemed compelling and for this reason I chose to develop the work Too Bermuda… into an actual model. By constructing a model of this tunnel
Figure 41. Detail of tunnel opening in Too Bermuda…, 2011.

that would lead to an antipode, I was leading the way towards an understanding of a connection that I would make with myself.

The practice of map making or model making becomes a reflexive act in which I try to bend back upon myself through the abstraction created in these dimensional correspondences, articulated through the model, Too Bermuda…. In this way a multi-dimensionality exists for me as the maker at the intersection of self, time and space. It is here at this juncture in an abstract system of relations that I am able to almost step outside of the construct of one dimensionality and into another, much in the same way that I might be able to step into the model and change my relationship to myself on a physical scale. Passing through the threshold of the model, I enter into a not only a space, but a system of relations both subjective and objective, and it is here that I can experience myself from another perspective, in both image-form and…in both actual and virtual terms, in both representational and relational.

Model: LOSE WAY NOW

LOSE WAY NOW installed on the corner of Aberdeen and Beaufort, Northbridge, Western Australia, 2011.

LOSE WAY NOW is another scale model exhibited as part of Half Lives. Constructed from found materials, such as wood and concrete, this 1:1 scale model is a replica of a Transperth bus stop. Representative of the type of movement encountered in a process of self-modeling, this work references the disappearing reference points that Giddens (1990), Beck (2002), Virilio (1991), and Baudrillard (1994) all describe as occurring within a concept of reflexive modernity and global society. As the bus stop signifies both a point of departure and arrival it became a fitting symbol of the reflexive processes involved in my practice.

By modeling these spaces I am able to expose or externalise a structure that serve as markers within my travels. As points within a system of public transit, these bus stops serve to provide a network of connections, yet dislocated connections, becoming rhizomatic. As a system of dislocated connections, this suggests a circuit of movement and represent an abstraction of a structure that can govern our collective movement as individuals.

Within all of these artworks in the Half Lives series, opened and closed forms are present. Like windows into the private, symbolic spaces of the places in which I develop my sense of self-identity, responding to the internalisations that take place. These models in themselves become windows and doors into my habitus.

These models became the means to experience aspects of my identity through objective means, including allowing me to open closed off spaces in different ways. They functioned as objectifications of the world around me, which in turn manifest as subjective, internalisations, allowing me a space to move through into a position in which I might see myself differently, from another place and perspective; a place where I can control my change through creative means.

Within a theory of a relational aesthetic, Half Lives didn’t so much function within the classical definition as a relational artwork, but operated within what I interpret as a ‘self-relational’ aesthetic, or in other words a ‘reflexive aesthetic’. As direct extensions of self-reflexive objects or situations, they created what I interpret as a democracy of perspective shifts through which I could observe my situation as a multiplicity. These works became shifting reference point within my practice, as both an enacted process of becoming an artist and an instance of observation. As both a thing and an action these works cut between the space that exists in being and doing, and therefore function within a concept of habitus. In this way, these works can be interpreted as self-portraits, not in the traditional sense in the way I see myself, but in an abstracted sense in the way see the habitus through which I become myself. In this way they are re-presentations or what I define as self-models. As a self-model this work operates similarly to the form of a mirror, as an expression of self-analysis in a romanticisation of the individual post-Enlightenment. Drawing from Foucault’s concept of a heterotopia as a place that exists between places, he likens the mirror as the liminal space between utopian and heterotopian sites. Here my focus is caught between sites and sights. As self-portraits, or self-models, these works do not function to solely represent an image of myself, but rather function to present images of myself, and in turn re-present myself in a recursive reflection, or a reflexion of images that I draw out from the subjective spaces and relational matrices of my practical experiences. From a psychoanalytical perspective these works can be interpreted, much in the same way a dream might be objectivised. In this way, these works function within a context of reflexivity, attempting the both break a separation and create a connection.

In ways these works imagine a break with myself, by modelling spaces that create an objective space to experience my artistic practice. In a way, my entire practice can be interpreted as a heterotopia within my identity, a location expressing reflexive perspectives on my practice of art. It is a place/non place of the environment(s) of my reflexive, fragmented self-identity as an artist, or another artist, i.e. Nath Allan, or a traveler, a research student, a husband, a son, a man, a person, etc. As a way of separating my sense of self from the place in which I develop this experience, these spaces served to allow me an opportunity to rethink myself, the reflex as an individual to the environments and circumstances within which I exist.

Within Giddens (1990, 1991) theoretical model of reflexivity terms, these works are interrogations of myself through location, and as I have discussed become reference points in space and time, within my self-narrative. As interrogations it is necessary they are formal and physical as a means of existing on a scale that is relational to my body. They are present as physical manifestations and interpretations of myself as both a body in space and time, yet also a subjective being. All focus on my relationship to a specific place or location, these artworks as self-models enable the necessary break with the world, both literally and figuratively, thus allowing for the apprehension of the habitual nature of my relationship to the environments or objects these models extract and abstract. Each model abstracts my relationship to the object or environment in a different means.

As a model, LOSE WAY NOW abstracts by replicating as a false image of an object that imagines a route of travel, thus extending this route into the unknown possibilities of the future. This artwork represents the ultimate reflexive model as this model as a replica can be reinserted into the world of social relations on a number of levels, within the field of artistic practice as an art object or within ‘real life’, as an actual, functioning bus stop.

Conversely, as models they also serve to reinforce my relationship to the places they model as representations. They locate me in space-time and serve as markers in the history of my self-identity.

It’s on now.  I’m three days into my debut solo exhibition (in actual terms).  Now I’m beginning to feel like an artist! The gallery is a comfortable space near down-town Perth, Western Australia, called Gallery Central. The show will be up for the next two weeks. Check it out at http://displace.me.

Here is the gist the exhibition:

“Transforming the gallery into his own deserted island, North American nomad Nathan Stevens leaves you stranded in this landscape of found and lost discoveries.  Influenced by ideas of cartography and communication breakdown, surveying and self-surveillance, this moving series of installations unpacks processes of personal displacement and dislocation through interactive broadcasts from a shipwrecked radio station; endless conversations with an auto-poetic artificial intelligence; a model for multi-dimensional travel to the Bermuda Triangle; and a body of unidentifiable glass objects.”

As you might notice, most of the work involves wood.  This is for a number of reasons, the most important being that the work is created from recycled/discarded shipping pallets (which are free ‘round these parts….). Another reason being that much of the work is ‘about’ travel, relocation, and placement. However, the most significant reason for the use of shipping pallets to create this body of work relates back to the first project I created (or better yet ‘craeted’) here in my journey ‘down under’, Other Side. In essence, these works are reconstructed from the ruins of that work.

Well, I’m currently somewhere in a place called the Third Space. To recap, Third Space is an international artist exchange-based collaborative initiative established between eight Australian artists and eight Chinese artists. We work in pairs towards creating a collaborative artwork that then exists within this third space, a space that exists at the margins of cultures when they (we) interact. The project impetus is drawn from cultural theorist Homi Bhabha’s notion that cultures share incommensurable differences, or share no commonality by which to measure, and therefore become hybridisations of the differences of identifying cultural traits. This of course creates tensions and incompatibility is eminent. We increasingly experience this in our daily lives, intensified especially in extremely urban and extremely rural settings. Even my self as a temporary American-Australian, experience this cultural difference, yet in a bizarre way, almost like living in a parallel dimension.

As Bhabha explains, “the incommesurable elements are the basis of cultural identities” [1]. Thus identity is informed by misunderstandings and miscommunications. When alien cultural and social systems make contact, identities are formed, yet not in a systematic way that can be attributed to solely either system. Identity becomes reactivated with every interaction, and eventually this hybridised marginal zone develops at the edges of each system, of each culture. This is a third space.

Coming back to the third space that we are presently floating through, above is an image, a snapshot of our exchange. Chinese artist Liu Qingqing and I have been exchanging virtually using video clips in order to create our own visual language system, in essence a third language consisting of time-based glyphs/pictographs, (maybe these can be called filmographs or videgraphs). Eventually we will produce our own ideo-cultural translations…

References:

[1] Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

I’ve recently been invited to exhibit in the International Festival of Contemporary Art in Ptuj, Slovenia.  The work that I am showing is a video piece created especially for this exhibition, premised on concepts of fluid identity, dispersed selves, and the despatialisation of subjectivity. Here it is, hear the lion roar:

About the festival:

According to the festival’s website, “ART STAYS, International Festival of Contemporary Art, is with ART PTUJ the main annual visual art event in the region of Ptuj. It started in 2003 as a visual art workshop for young European artists. This year’s programme includes 10-day residency working sessions and several four-week-long exhibitions.

The 8th edition of ART STAYS 2010 will host over 50 artists from 15 different countries: Italy, Slovenia, Germany, Spain, Slovakia, Hungary, Switzerland, USA, Bulgary, Great Britain, Austria, Singapore, Australia, Finland and Ireland and 4 continents:  Europe, Asia, North America and Australia.

Jernej Forbici, art director of ART STAYS said: “This year’s ART STAYS will be the richest ever. It will host artists of great artistic quality and what is especially important for us, also great projects designed specifically for the city of Ptuj. For ten days we will be witnessing an outstanding development of different art projects and then for an entire month admiring the results at the exhibitions, taking place in more than ten exhibition spaces all over the city and elsewhere. The music festival Arsana that will take place in Ptuj at the same time is an outstanding music event that together with ART STAYS creates a big “festival happening” that we named ART PTUJ.”

The forthcoming edition will feature a total of 40 artists including painters, video artists, performers, graphic designers, sculptors, media and sound artists that will be present in 5 European national pavilions: Italy, Germany, Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia and in 5 additional international projects: Video art, New media exchange Main USA, Performing art, Site specific projects, Art Factory.”

The festival runs from July 20 - August 31.

Title: FAIR 87.9 FM

Date: March 18, 2009.

Materials: Pirate radio station, FM transmitter, Internet, Computers, Microphones, Speakers, Automobile, Radio

Dimensions: Variable Dimensions

Location: Spectrum Project Space, Northbridge, WA, Australia

Keywords: Interactive audio installation/event, free radio, interact, collective art, transmission

Website: http://fairfm.info

Description:

FAIR FM was a nomadic community pirate radio station, initially created and exhibited during a month-long artist-residency at Spectrum Project Space, Northbridge, Western Australia in March, 2009. An operational broadcast booth was built into the gallery, which housed broadcasting equipment including a mixing console, transmitter, computer, and a large antenna.  In the adjacent gallery space, a series of portable radios, including a small automobile, aired the station live to viewers. An array of advertising materials including promotional posters, T-shirts, and other media adorned the walls. Broadcasting on 87.9FM through the use of a low-power FM transmitter, FAIR FM had a broadcast radius of approximately 1km in Northbridge[1], which technically classified it as a micro station. The station went live on air at 2:00pm on Wednesday 09 March, 2009 and broadcast daily from 2:00 pm to 9:00 pm Wednesday through Sunday until 05 April 2009. During these broadcasts, the viewers in the gallery and the public at large were invited to create, perform, and broadcast their own audio programming over the station, which resulted in an eclectic mix of pirated music, live spoken word, musical performances, and sound art. Throughout the duration of the four week residency approximately 15 individuals became involved in the station, including a street busker from Athens, Greece, a professional nightclub DJ from Sydney, the local Perth punk band - Red Triangle, and an array of other interested audiophiles, musicians, and sound artists.

The concept and motivation for creating this project was in response to my situation as an artist within the field of practice, which aestheticised an idea of social relationships, as in relational artistic practices. At the time, researching a theory of relational aesthetic in order to understand the relationship between artist and viewer as an inter-subjective relationship, I became focused on creating an environment in which the viewer could immediately transcend, or change their role as receiver in the often one-way communicative directive often experienced in a gallery setting. I was interested in challenging the boundaries of the inter-subjective experience facilitated by the work of art. This inspired the name FAIR FM, an acronym for Found Air Instant Radio, or Free and Interactive Radio, or any other acronym the users could create. Modelled after initiatives such as Radio Alice, a free broadcast radio station in Bologna, Italy in the late 1970s in which Felix Guattari was involved, I sought to create an open line of communication between the subjective spaces encountered in the gallery and the spaces that existed beyond.[2]

Specifically, I was interested in creating an artwork that moved beyond the subjective boundaries that I create when I make art as a form of self-expression. In other words, I had the urge to explore art making for others, in a way that I feel I had not previously explored in past projects. This meant pushing the boundaries of my practice into new, unseen, unknown realms.  Radio broadcast inspired me as an opportune medium to work through as it represented an invisible link through which one can communicate and connect beyond the boundaries of time and space. I have had experiences in my past working as a disc lockey at a small community radio station, WMEB 91.9 FM, in Orono, Maine, USA, inspiring another reason to use radio as my chosen medium of expression.

Through the use of radio broadcast as an expressive, artistic medium, in this project I desired to manipulate an everyday channel of media through which I could subvert the system of communication and exchange. Through subverting a communication system such as radio, I enabled an altered position in which I could experience my role as artist, or maker, in new terms, in this case in a reversal of roles, whereby the viewer or listener became the maker, or broadcaster and I as maker became the listener. In a system of radio the majority of its users are consumers, the countless throngs of listeners that complete the system as a form of mass media are at the end of the communication. Traditionally radio operates as a one-way medium of communication. Foreseen by 19^th century socialist Edward Bellamy, radio was pre-empted as the “collective telephone” in which the masses would be mobilised by the propaganda of nationalist corporations of industrial power (Mattelart & Mattelart, 1998, p. 17). It is not difficult to see radio operating in the form that Bellamy foreshadowed.  While it may be argued that radio functions as a medium of expression[3], fostering and communicating the musical expression of individuals and communities, the current state of radio is a far cry from free with the majority of publicly broadcast channels produced by national, and multi-national media corporations. I was interested in facilitating others in an attempt to challenge these boundaries, which to me represent the power relationships that exist within the field, in the creation and reception of art, or in a way of subjectivity in general.

The creation of FAIR FM enacted my response to these observations. The development of pirate radio and free radio supports an idea of opening up radio as form of mass communication, operating beyond the boundaries of control and governance of communication often encountered in modern society; FAIR FM challenges this means of control. In short, FAIR FM questioned, to what degree are my own communications controlled by the formal constructs of contemporary society and my social role as an artist?  To what degree are my own forms of communication, my own productions, or programming, formulated through a similar type of conditioning?

Beyond my desire to confront these boundaries through this project, FAIRFM allowed me to explore my practice as an open, and evolving process of creative social interactions. Somewhere between performed and lived action, by creating a public pirate radio station I could create possibilities and opportunities to move between roles, to aestheticise exchange on a communal level.

When viewers entered the gallery, I often greeted them over air, which was broadcast through the radios stationed throughout the space. Inviting these viewers to enter the booth and become active users, I had a number of individuals, prompted by their own musical and audio interests to get involved in various ways (see Figures 22, 25).  However, these experiences were very limited.  In many ways it was the lack of interaction, the limitedness of the station as my channel of communication to the public. In most instances the station acted as a platform for individuals to perform.

Modelling FAIR FM within a theory of relational aesthetics, I was examining my own “inter-human” exchanges facilitated through the pirate radio station as the “aesthetic object” that Bourriaud discusses as “producing sociability” (1998/2002, p. 33). These exchanges occurred through the communicative aspects of radio broadcast. FAIR FM functioned as a means of enabling an extension of myself in a way that challenged my boundaries of communication. Through this challenge I pushed myself to experience my role as maker of my subjective self, as artist, in an extended form, through more temporal, distanciated processes.

Because radio broadcast, as a communicative means of interaction and exchange often functions in a one-to-many context, it can be an incredibly introspective process, and in turn self-reflexive.  FAIR FM extended this representation of one-to-one communication, however the majority of the time I felt is if my communications were “one-to-none”.  Becoming lost in the self-centredness of the radio station was another instance.  Sitting, often alone in the stations broadcast booth, I became very aware of myself, listening to and monitoring myself.

Knowing that the communications I created through the process of broadcast were being transmitted beyond the space of my own perception, I was sending out signals. These signals represented attempts to define my position. One program entitled, Organised Silence, a broadcast in which I transmitted only the white noise that was created in the process of producing the broadcast itself. This gap, its space, created a divisional space, a void through which I could find another form of distance between my place and myself.

The temporality of the various transmissions I created through FAIR FM became relevant as a means of producing observable instances of myself, occasionally interrupted by the presence of another, in which, I would offer the station to that individual allowing them to gain control of the transmission.  This immediate transfer, in ways allowed me to disrupt my subjective processes, and the communication, transmission of this subjectivity.  In ways this was the first instance of exchange that occurs in the collaborative effort involved in communication. The possibility of taking over a pirate radio station, in my opinion, affords the possibility of extending ones subjectivity into inter-subjective space, yet a space that is transient and ephemeral as the radio broadcast itself. However, this transfer between viewer and user, or in this case listener and DJ, never transpired to anything more than an exchange of control.  In hopes of further extending this process of exchange into a more sustained form, FAIR FM was revised into a second installation, which was included in the exhibition, what is displace?.

[2] Guattari’s interest in free radio was in its “form and mode of social organization” (Multitudes 21, 2005, n.p.).

[3] See article Wrightson, K (2003). An Introduction to Acoustic Ecology. As Wrightson explains, “In the developed world, sound has less significance and the opportunity to experience “natural” sounds decreases with each generation due to the destruction of natural habitats. Sound becomes something that the individual tries to block, rather than to hear; the lo-fi, low information soundscape has nothing to offer. As a result, many individuals try to shut it out through the use of double glazing or with acoustic perfume–music. Music–the virtual soundscape–is, in this context, used as a means to control the sonic environment rather than as a natural expression of it. Broadcast speech and music provide the same opportunity for control, turning the sonic environment into a commodity. Networks, transmitters and satellites extend the acoustic community across the entire planet, a fact that has been utilised for fair deeds and foul. Schafer refers to the latter use of sound as “sound imperialism” (1977a, 77)” (2003, p. 3).

so you think you can make art?

nathan stevens: splendid arts lab 2009

AS THE SAYING GOES, “TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE”, SO 10 HEADS MUST BE SPLENDID. FROM A UNIQUE INITIATIVE BETWEEN LISMORE REGIONAL GALLERY AND THE MUSIC FESTIVAL SPLENDOUR IN THE GRASS, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL, NORTHERN RIVERS PERFORMING ARTS (NORPA) AND ARTS NORTHERN RIVERS, COMES SPLENDID, A NEW EXPERIMENTAL ARTS PROGRAM AIMED AT PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN ART AND AUDIENCE, PUTTING THEORY TO THE TEST………..

Click here to read the rest of the article at realtimearts.net

Essentially, this is a defining article, a brief essay that sets out to reify some definition to my art, and its relationship to my self; and some definition of this self as espoused through the ensuing relationships.  This is essential in coming to any consequential understanding or meaningful perspective and experience of my existence as an artist, or at least current discourse on the topic might have us consider.

As I consider my artistic practice as a means of generating, developing, and exploring my self, it quickly becomes clear to me that this is a process that could stand to be mapped out and reconsidered within this context.

Thinking back through my past practice of art, I begin to see the patterns emerge from these works. Many of the projects involved producing a representation of myself, a part of myself, an image of myself within a specific context, which I became at once subjectified/objectified.  These works seem to place myself in such a manner that I could actually watch myself perform some strange activity within an equally bizarre context, i.e. pretending to bark like a Döberman pinscher on a television chained to a small doghouse in the basement of a popular contemporary art gallery.  This is diametrically opposed to, say, a version of this situation in a virtual dream state.

At the time of creation of such projects, I was simply using myself as an actor, or model, or participant, as I was really the only volunteer that I knew that was available 24/7, and for free (how much better can it get?). I suppose in some small, yet unrealised manner, I was very much aware that this was a possibility of the events that were unfolding.  As the work evolved intuitively from feeling, as opposed to a calculated and constructed action through thought and from concept, I might have known in the back of my mind that what I was doing was, in some context, very much introspective as it was an externalisation and expression of certain feelings towards situational circumstances of the (cultural) time, in this instance perhaps it was an expression of feelings of subordination to the media constrcuts through which we can be limited in our abilities to effectively communicate.

In other words, I knew that this was an exploration of the self, the concerns, attitudes, feelings, thoughts and beliefs I held at that point in time. Looking back upon this practice as a whole practice comprised a series of similar works, I see that in my volunteerism I was in another sense exploring myself as a subject, or an individual subject to cultural conditions, ideologies, and environmental circumstances.  Considering the ontology of my existence, within the microcosm of the sculpture studio, I was an adept supernummery, a qualified extra available for free.  However, within the macrocosm of my cultural circumstance (Western contemporary art culture in the early 21st century), I was an individual installation and media artist.

From this scaled perspective, at once being very different within in varied contexts; from a physical, animate body/entity to act on the camera, to an independent individual amidst a cultural field and all the levels in between, this practice which I regularly engaged with was a phenomenon of my being, my self, how I felt, what I thought, and the agency of this being to produce an expression of this consciousness.  Art was a means of both advancing and developing of my self as well as moving away from this self in order to generate an understand and gain knowledge of this (my) self. In fact, this specific body of work embodied this duality of 1st and 3rd person, the subject-object situation. As a means of objectifying myself within a video object, I was able to examine my self from an alter perspective.  Simultaneously acting as the subject and object of scrutiny, when in the presence of these works, I had the experience of being in the work and outside of the work at once. A personal impersonality. Similar to watch home movies of ourselves, or looking at photographs of ourselves, these types of observation are necessary for objectification of our life-world and our relationships to these phenomena.

These specific projects were more like real-time snapshots of dream sequences in their ethereal, outré characteristics. The gave me multiple perspectives as they traverse the void between the actual, the virtual, and the real.  Moreover, they operated as almost a form of metacommunication, or portals into an introspection of the role that my self plays through the cultural consctructs that afford this self the possibility to become, to develop language, meaning, and communicative practices; artistic practices.

Here is a good place to contextualise my current ontological stance in regards to the orientation and situation of existence. These writings are presupposed by a philosophy that the ‘world’, its being, knowledge and experience of this existence are existent as multiplicities, all co-habiting a simultaneous existence. In short, everything conceived exists, right now! This is sort of a phenomenological theory of relativity of self reification. It is the movement of perception and of the phenomena of these states of existence that, in part, determine the emplacement of its being and our epistemological, ontological, and phenomenological relationship to this phase/form/version of being.  Furthermore, existence is existent in terms of an experience or lack of experience of the possibility that a thing may or may not exist within any context, state, or representation of its existence.

Art allows one to experiment with one’s position within the fields in which they awaken. We awaken in different fields continuously, throughout our being. The activity involved with the creation and realisation of art, the processes of art, is our means or technique of engaging with our self within these fields.

This is a technique of self, or a technical knowledge of the self which is adjacent to a relational model of work (technical) knowledge, practical knowledge, and emancipatory knowledge as suggested by Jürgen Habermas (Foucault, 1993).  Foucault (1993) describes this concept of the technology of self as an additional technique of the individual within society:
“…in all societies whatever they are, another type of techniques [exist]: techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on. Let’s call this kind of techniques a techniques or technology of the self? “

Art, in this context, is an agency of self, or a method of this technology of self, made possible by the cultural conditions that foster the possibility of an individual within a society.  The concept of society is founded on the basis of the existence of selves, or individuals acting (working) independently and democratically within a structure that incurs interaction and counteraction,  interdependence and counterdependence.  This is evidenced in the relationship between self and other, as demonstrated through society.

My practice as an artist has allowed my to come to an understanding of my existence, the existence of my practice as an artist, and the relationship between my self and this practice through the emplacement of my self and this practice within various frameworks, one being my practice as an artist amongst other artists within a field of art, another being my practice as an individual amongst others within a social framework or field, such as art or the academy.

Furthermore, as this practice, and the reflection of this practice are not separate but co-exist in an evolving relationship my practice is reflexively shaped by my exploration of it, and extensions that develop through presentation and representation of this practice, .ie. media.  This is a type of emancipatory knowledge production that exists (Habermas).

Because the concept of self is a reality within a broader social reality, or at least conferred by this social state, and art too is a specific form or field within this broader field of social reality, art can exist as a means of constructing the self in relation to the social reality that constitutes and contextualises the existence of the other (in this case me and the things that I do and make within this context).

Because I exist in relation to others, I perceive and experience my self as a self amongst other  selves, and ‘theirfore’ constituted by this relationship.  I often think that if no other existed, or was experienced in any possibility of the definition, would I exist (in the epistemological and phenomenological sense of the concept)?  If the only entity in existence was my self, I would have no frame, no point of reference, no horizon to measure up against, I would correspond to nothing, relational to only a singular dimension of my self (perhaps not even ‘my’ could exist, but rather a self, which would yield to the oblivion of being or the creation of an other).  I envision this as the point where either a singularity (white hole) or a black hole becomes.

Coming back down to Earth, where I exist with my practice, my peers, and all my art surrounding me in boxes it is here within these relationships that my self develops. Self projects acquire meaning through their situation in relation to other self projects within an approximate cultural correspondence.

Unpacking these boxes in a specific place, with specific conditions (physical, cultural, environmental, etc.) avails certain relations. If I unpack the art in one time and place, I might see it as valuable to a specific project, at another time and place it may remain undiscovered, unrelated and too distanced to promote capital; dependent on the strength and value of the relationships that are produced through a relational presence. However, art as capital seems to operate under different circumstances than other types of capital.

Art carries a surplus value, as Diederichsen (2008) puts it. The surplus value of art is the added bonus that releases art from the subordination to any globally dominant law, such as economic value, or meaning.  Art is an interstice, a space that can exist outside of normal relations (Bourriaud, 1998).  Artistic Mehrwert, according to Diederichsen,  “...refers to the fact that art is ‘good for something’ and therefore has a use; it is legitimate and must exist, despite the fact that its meaning lies precisely in not being useful. “(1)

It is precisely here, that art as a field, yet a field with no edges, it is a desert of a field, slowly expanding and consuming its periphery as it gains relational ground through the multiple practices occurring within its margins.

References

Bourriaud, N. (1998). Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les presses du réel.

Diederichsen, D. (2008). On (Surplus) Value in Art. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Witte de With Publishers.

Foucault, M. “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth”. Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 2 (May, 1993, 198-227.)

Habermas, J. (1981). The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press.

Title: “yeah…you are all true data” (HAL2009)

Date: February 13, 2009.

Materials: Chrome tubing, copper elbows, steel wire, audio cable, speakers, microphones, computer programming / software

Dimensions: 3m H x 8m W x 20m L (Variable Dimensions)

Location: The Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery, Fremantle, WA, Australia

Keywords: Interactive audio installation, communication feedback, artificial intelligence, articulation, collectivity, speak, listen, interact

Description:

The creation and development of HAL2009 was an exercise in producing a type of artificial intelligence system through which an audience was confronted with each other by way of their conversations, utterances, and verbalisation within the exhibition space. Entering the lofty open space of the gallery, viewers are greeted by a seemingly rambling monotone voice of an automated computer system echoing long incoherent strings of words (English). Some of the words seem to fall into place, producing a half coherent sentence or pronouncement. Much of what is heard is incoherent in syntax, yet intermittently flowing in subject.

The central exhibition space houses a mess of entangled chrome pipe work, suspended from the large, wooden rafters at the height of the room. The pipes cut through the room, interrupting the space, occasionally dropping down to head height throughout the center of the space.

On opposing walls in the space the pipes neatly adjoin shiny, metal boxes mounted to the walls. Each box accommodates a small black dome, as used in closed-circuit surveillance cameras. Above the black, omniscient dome is a small plaque card which reads “HAL2009” in neatly rounded lettering.

The boxes seem as if they were appropriated from a retro 60’s science fiction movie set. They are speaking, or more appropriately, droning on. In a robotic voice, words filter through the boxes and into the gallery atmosphere. Often the voice repeats bits and parts of its previous maundering. Someone in the gallery mutters a sentence or responds to the installation with a few words. The boxes retorts in a poetic rant that seems to be recycled from not only words from generated in its own monologue, but also an arrangement of words from the audience respondents. An excerpt from “…yeah, you are all true data…” (HAL2009) reads as follows:

“…and and and and and and and and is as it is in or you don’t do this and it worked and lived a sure it’s drones on Gordon or in conjunction virtualities embracing an experienced them to their shape and in camera with and do all those individuals saw this from sculptures abjuring this new millennium absorbance refund arsenals amidst unaccelerated landscape of information about instantaneously Chinook salmon are different students in Iran since some newsreel something appears to be renewal were all raw consummately towards digital post your number one fruit on the ground of one for him nowhere somewhere else on sawhorse this nostalgic visit stir your spectrums…”

“yeah, you are all true data…(HAL2009)” is an interactive audio installation which mockingly explores the social effects of increasingly mediated communication and human’s eternal quest for true intelligence.

Transforming the gallery into a spaceship, set course: the unknown; autopiloted by the ambient collective intelligence of those in seek of the truth, or a prototype for a movie set where the actors don’t have the script, HAL2009 is premised on a paradoxical state of artificial intelligence searching for intelligent life in the outermost realms of …ummm… (art) space.

Is artificial intelligence anything more than the calculated, algorhythmic mediation of our collected knowledge; rather, not what is known, but what is asserted and at best articulated? Is this collective intelligence or artificial intelligence; mediation or interpretation? HAL2009 asks these very questions, literally! His poetic ranting responds to our ‘collective voice’ as an audience. What we say to one another in ‘his’ presence is interpreted and translated into a richly ironic monologue of bits and pieces of our own conversations. As we listen to HAL2009 we not only listen to the abstracted mediation of language, commentary, and discourse of those surrounding us within the ‘white cube’, but we are also asked, if not forced, to listen to ourselves with more critical ears. Drawing the parallel between the collective intelligence of the audience and the ‘artificial’ intelligence of the computer, HAL2009 demonstrates a communication filter that begins to operate on the verge of intelligent.

Explaining HAL2009: processing….

The development of HAL2009 was the result of many weeks of working through a project initially premised on my creative exploration of certain acts of communication associated with the exhibition of art. The artwork was in response to the theme of the exhibition, Ummm…The Articulate Practitioner, the show that the work would be exhibited in. The genesis of “yeah…you are all true data” was based on the simple concept of the “gallery talk”, a phenomenon inherent to art culture and the ‘art world’. It was this practice of speaking about the objects and subjects of art in the sanctified spaces of art’s exhibition that I took interest in through this project, or rather visa versa.

According to artist Jennifer Blair-Cockrum, a gallery talk can be loosely defined as “an opportunity to hear from the artist at the gallery where their work is on exhibit; perhaps see a demonstration, hear about their process and inspiration, and meet them and ask questions. Gallery talks provide the public access to the artist in a very intimate way that is casual, educational, and fun.”

I initially had the impulse to explore this concept of “access to the artist”; the engagement between the artist and the audience or the public and the boundaries of the exhibition space of art. This exploration many institutional conventions of the art world have been central themes or impetuses of large number of my works, particularly of the spatial attributes of the exhibition of art and artistic practice. Specifically concerned with the range of art and the media by which art as a communicative activity was in turn communicated, the Gallery Talk project aimed to discuss these concepts of space and articulation. Taken quite literally, what would a gallery space say if it could speak?

This work began premised on the idea of art as an advanced form of communication and how this communication is specifically affected by the cultural circumstances of the physical spaces in which it occurs. In this initial generative phase, the project can be broadly summarised as an artistic exploration of interpersonal communication impacted by the conditions/conventions of specific cultural and social spaces, i.e. the art gallery and exhibition space of art.

At the time I was reading Brian O’ Doherty’s “The White Cube” and William Mitchell’s “City of Bits”. Also, watching Stanley Kubrik’s 2001 Space Odyssey had become a monthly ritual. Considering the gallery space, a.k.a the white cube, as simultaneously confining the artwork to a very specific context and audience, yet also as a means of emplacement, locating art general and openly as art within the socio-cultural matrices of contemporary society, the project began to take on paradoxical dimension. I began to think about the space as a private-public space, where by virtue of the creation and dissemination of highly personal and individual knowledge and vision embodied and communicated via artwork, the exhibition space of art is a marginal meeting ground of a very public space with a very private nature. (writing in progress….. 05/10/09)

(20/10/09 resumed writing)

Thinking about the artist as director, or conductor within this public-private space, I was interested in the exchanges involved in this type of space, specifically the possibility on an interchange of roles and activities of the public, from audience, to viewer, to user, to director, to artist. With the transformative power of the process that art can create in mind, there is a type chain through which reactions and/or interactions can occur, similar to a chain of molecules, or a food chain.

How can a work of art operate as a communicative site or object between members of the audiences, between the artist and the audience? It was here at this juncture that the concepts of social and cultural relationships inherent in art practice and art experience began to take on some definition.

A few scenarios that might evince these public-private concepts and the communicative act of art crossed my mind. I envisioned a series of couches on the main floor of the exhibition space.  The audience might be lounging on these couches talking exchanging ideas, stories, laughter.  A convivial atmosphere might develop.  In its idyllic simplicity, this hybridised, autonomic event-performance-installation would, in its ‘normalcy’, fluidise the delineation and divisions of viewer/user/performer/artist through the movement and interchange of participants. Or would it just be a bunch of people looking at couches with the occasional snide remark on the quirky resemblance of a used furniture store?

Beyond the couches and the bodies, beyond the spatial, the visual, the physical it was perhaps the use of language that was produced in this environment, this communicative verse, the conversation that I was after, that I wished to en-art, or make art with.

Another scenario that developed from this initial kernel of an idea was a pedestal with a series of microphones connected to a series of loudspeakers placed throughout the gallery. Like a podium at a press conference, each viewer would have the opportunity to use the gallery as a space to speak to people, a place to disseminate information, communicate a thought or a feeling through spoken word or sound.  Furthermore, loudspeakers would placed outside of the gallery in public, therefore seemingly giving the gallery its own voice amidst the crowd of buildings lining Henry Street.

If the spaces that we create could speak to us, could verbalise, what might they say?  Or are they already speaking through us in an indirect manner by virtue of the succession of our own interactions enveloped in the spaces and the relational proximities that develop as a result of our habitation of these places and the situations of our sites?

This work slowly evolved from a pedestal and a rack of loud speakers to a stage with a curtain and P.A. The curtain which was originally a prop, icing on the cake of the installation, took on a prominence in the development of the project. Whether it was people sitting or standing around couches in conversation, or someone speaking from a podium, there was still an immediacy between the audience members and the users that needed to be subverted. The division between viewer and user needed to remain connected yet pronounced.  The stage and curtain facilitated this division, and it was this line of flight form the initial gallery talk conception that took the work into its next developmental iteration and transformation.

I began to consider the purpose of the curtain and stage, thinking about concepts of the “4th wall” and performance. The site of a stage signified this performative role that the viewer adopted as a user, or an actor within the site of the project.

To recap, at this point I was working with a number of ideas: the gallery talk as a voice of the site; the divisions and flux between viewers, user, audiences, actors, and artists; and communicative interaction through the site and exhibition space of art.

From here the work took a thematic turn, adopting the Wizard of Oz as a source of conceptual and formal inspiration. From Gallery talk to Wizard of Oz.  I had been keen to work with some of the forms of the The Wizard of Oz, as the story had a particular resonance with my new home here in Australia (Oz).  The conceptual figure of the Great Wizard of Oz, the meager man behind the curtain that portrayed the Great and Magnificent, a god-like figure that inspired through his mystifying awesomeness. The possibility that each viewer might have the opportunity through a work of art to adopt the role of the ‘Wizard’, a powerless commoner, who through the smoke and mirrors, through a performative act, might give hope, guidance, or purpose to our interaction with the strange world we awaken in.

Perhaps, this is a quality that, as artists, we indulge in within our own practices, aesthetic revelations and presentations and representations of truth, beauty, and passion.

However, it soon became apparent that it would not be one singular viewer would be the Wizard, but rather the collective whole of the viewers, as espoused through their communication and interaction with one another that would transfigure the great ‘Wizard’. Behind the curtain on the stage, would not be a singular person, but a conglomeration of all of the occupants of the space represented through the amalgamation of their collective conversations. The Wizard would be the whole of verbal, spoken communication that occurred in the exhibition space.

The installation took on the form of a small stage in the round surrounded be a 3 m tall, satin curtain which housed a machine, much like the Wizard’s contraption from the original movie, that would record, remix and broadcast the speech within the exhibition space.  This machine however could be overridden when an individual entered the curtained pillar and spoke directly into a microphone, thus announcing, dictating or narrating there own singular impressions, thoughts or feelings on anything that came to mind. (writing in progress…21/10/09)

(resumed writing…26/10/09)

In developing this system three central components were necessary; audio input, speech recognition processing, and audio output. Within the stage-in-the-round was an audio processing apparatus constructed from a series of microphones, loudspeakers, and a CPU. A series of high-sensitivity condenser microphones capable of picking up the most subtle voices from all areas of the space were used to gather the speech audio. This audio was then input into a custom-built audio program which processed the speech using the speech recognition software Macspeech Dictate implemented through a custom AppleScript program. The resulting assemblage of speech was then broadcast throughout the gallery on a series of loudspeakers (also hidden behind the curtain).

Essentially, the apparatus (eventually known as HAL2009) would record all of the speech from within the gallery space, process this speech, combining all separate dialogues, conversations, and speech, into a continuous aggregation of all that was said, and regurgitate this monologue back into the space.  At any point in time you could hear all of what was said in the gallery, however with all context stripped away. One conversation might be garbled with another. A string of words confused with similar sounding words. All that was spoken in the gallery became a singular collective monologue, simultaneously interpreted and misinterpreted.

The system would undoubtedly begin to input parts of its output, and with no outside input from animate actors in the exhibition space might eventually lead to a closed feedback loop, a monotonous thundering repetition of a singular phrase, word or sound. It was here that the thematic facade of the project made a dramatic jump cut…from Wizard of Oz to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

From the Emerald City to the Discovery Space Shuttle…HAL2009 is conceived.

Upon the successful build and beta tests of the audio processing program, somewhat of a minor epiphany occurred. I realised that this system was more or less the very rudimentary groundwork for somewhat of an artificial intelligence system.  Moreover, ‘Alex’ the stock voice on the Macbook Pro laptop I was using for the programming, uncannily resembled the voice of the infamous artificial intelligence computer ‘HAL 9000’ of Stanley Kubrik’s 1968 epic “2001: A Space Odyssey (based on the story written by himself and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark).  After watching the film a number of times, considering the concept of artificial intelligence, and more importantly its ironic role in Kubrik’s film, artificial intelligence used to search for intelligent life in the depths of space, I decided to abandon the stage, curtain, and Wizard of Oz theme entirely. It was the phenomenon embued within the communication that unfolded within the exhibition space, and within an art experience that became central in the project, rather than the correlation between the audience and the an ambivalent collective meta-narrative that rested on the engaged interaction with the space between performance and behaviour.

Working intuitively, the formal qualities of the installation were revamped.  The formal elements of the installation would now be premised on the design of HAL 9000.  I envisioned the gallery as more or less a space ship, a vessel in which we (the audience) could move through space, a space made up of cultural galaxies, social worlds, political asteroid belts, and other bodies in the art space. Auto-piloted by the communicative activity within the space, the space ship would take the audience through parallel dimensions where the forms (the sentences and phrases) within language became abstracted and reformulated.

Working out from the concepts of confused communication, artificial intelligence and collective conversation, the project’s form and architecture developed as a function of these arguments. Using the film as my primary reference, or model, the resulting installation would consist of a series of interfaces where the audience would be monitored.  These interfaces took on the form of a home-made HAL 9000 all seeing eye.  A microphone and a stereo speaker housed within a small metal box fixed to the wall of the exhibition space simultaneously recorded the raw speech and broadcast the automated speech within the installation.

I constructed a prototype using a stainless steel IKEA brand storage box, internally mounting a small electret condenser microphone capsule on a custom rubber mount made from a chair foot. A 3-inch, 8-watt stereo speaker was also mounted within the box.  On the exterior of the box I face mounted a small black dummy dome used for CCTV monitors. This is what I imagined a HAL 9000 original prototype interface to resemble, possibly as the HAL computer-user interface existed in its trial phases of development in the early 1990’s.

According to a Wikipedia description of HAL 9000:

The many boxes of HAL were networked throughout the gallery’s multiple rooms by a reticulation of metal tubing suspended from the ceiling, representing the entanglement of lines of communication that ensued as the installation’s performance evolved. These lines not only served a symbolic role, but also a functional role as a means of concealing the 350+ meters of audio cabling on which the system relied for operation.

With the exhibition drawing near and the final form of the original project kernel (Gallery Talk) still in a conceptual phase it was time to begin constructing HAL2009. Due to the sheer scale of the final installation, anticipated at 172 linear metres of tubing throughout five rooms at the Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery, it was only feasible to build a small portion of the installation for testing.  This meant that I would essentially be constructing the installation for the first time at the gallery for the exhibition.

With the program nearly complete, the hardware hooked up and testing about to begin, tie came for the final act of voice training HAL2009.  As the HAL2009 system was based entirely on the ability of speech recognition software to recognise people speaking, and to transcribe this speech into its memory, the need to train the system to recognise not only a range of voices, but also to recognise itself. For those of you familiar with speech recognition software, you’ll understand the capricious nature of this media, as it is normally tuned to the voice of only a single user (which even still causes complications). Initially, a bit apprehensive of the quality and capacity of SR software in general, I was pleased to discover that Macspeech Dictate was very well suited for this project, due to its inaccuracy (which can be manually adjusted with the program’s preference pane!).  Training HAL involved a series of sessions teaching the SR software to hear the voice of HAL (Apple’s Alex) as well as not solely recognise this voice, and to hear others as well. In essence I was reverse engineering SR software by training the program to not distinguish between a computer speaking and any other speaking entity, not to recognise the variance in voices, which the speech recognition is premised on. I can’t help but applaud the irony of this. This was the key to the project, that the computer could at once not distinguish between itself and the audience or user, between its output and its input. This is an entry point into the evolution of the system as exhibiting an artificial intelligence.

The initial trials took sometime to fine tune the voice (mis)recognition.  However, within days the system seemed to take on a life of its own. Strangely, HAL2009 exhibited almost a cyber-clairvoyance, which can only be attributed to the program’s use of an associative database of the English language from which it places corresponding words in a hierarchy of their probability of registering with the system as incoming speech is processed. For instance, ‘misunderstood’ words might lead to other words that strangely coincided with underlying concepts or topics within the project. I would start with a sentence and HAL would feedback the sentence until it came up with a wholly new monologue of different content. For instance, I spoke the phrase ” What is the meaning of life?”. The following is the response of the HAL2009 system from this speech trial:

“Meaning of life meaning is what is this where you where you live many producers are you and everyone else in your life meaning is what is her anywhere in my many producers are you in her house meaning of life he is going to remind many producers are you and everyone else in your life meaning is we are and weren’t on any producers are you proud meaning of life meaning is what is he wearing my many producers are you and everyone else in your life meaning if we are on any show…and live meeting is what is he wearing why many producers are you and everyone else in your life meaning is leaner and more finding producers argue NASA is home to my many producers are you and everyone else in your life meaning isn’t there were many producers are proud meaning of life meaning is what is he wearing my many producers are you and everyone else in your life meaning is not a shudder has to live his homes by many producers are and everyone else in your life and he’s American of Jerry meaning of life meaning is what is this freeware”

(And I was expecting something simple, like 42!)

So, with the system in place and the testing commenced, HAL2009 was born, on the 12 of January 2009.

Constructing HAL2009 at MBCAG:

Construction of HAL was a three day event that involved many long hours of troubleshooting the complexities of the installation process as they arose. Coupled with the mad rush to get this installation up and running in such a short period of time, documentation of this process was limited.  Working with the invaluable help of my assistant, Anja, we were able to ‘hang’ the work and get HAL ‘trained’ in situ.

After the interface boxes and pipework was in place.  All systems were go and HAL2009 was introduced to his new (temporary) home.

Working Analysis

Concepts of power, control, and communication.

Collective intelligence vs. artificial intelligence

Staging Science Fiction: HAL9000, the Wizard and 21st Century interactive installation art

Humbug- Pretenses of the roles we occupy on the grounds of our cultural site of art.

Our own False Idol:

Feedback in the Chinese Room

The Dreaming Astronaut: Complexity and Emergence in the Models of Film and Life

Other worlds: selves and other bodies in space

Input, Output, Indifference: Misrecognition in communication as evolution

Language is a pipeline

It Lives! The narrative of the work

The primary concepts addressed through this project:

What does the site say? If a site is not the spatial factors of place, but also the cultural (social, political, technological, philosophical) what might this voice say?  How do sites speak? Is what is experienced at a particular site communicative in essence?  How is this ‘situational language’ translated through the participants and characters of the site?

From this broad approach to these concepts of (meta)communication, there are certain specificities that arise necessitating this dialogue.  Considering the roles of participants as cultural actors within the social, political, and technological framework of the art experience, and the creation of this experience and interaction with art as a process, this project affords a form of emancipatory alienation through its automation.

By creating a collective monologue that is continuously eliminating individual ownership by scrambling dialogues and essentially detaching conversations from their specific sites within the exhibition summoning a collective voice of the space. This activity highlights the accumulation of the social sites that are produced within the gallery, encouraging their production in order to harvest them for the greater production of the site of HAL2009.

language and communication in collective form-

the emergence of understanding

decontextualised communication-

reticulated articulation

Within this white-cube exists a complex web of communications. Language and systems for the transmission and communication of these languages become an important aspect of the project. There are multiple layers of communication that are occurring in the art gallery, that “yeah…you are all true data” takes into consideration. On a gross level is the broader communication between the artist and the field of art, which is facilitated through the institution of the gallery, museum, or in this case exhibition space. The interaction and relationship between the place and space of exhibiting artwork and the creator, maker, or doer of art as an artist is

Important in any analysis of a project is not only how the project sits in relation to its field and its peers (so to speak), but also how the project sits in other scales, such as the projects history and development. This can be thought of in terms of axis of the project. Every project can be thought of as multi-dimensional. A model of this might have the historical development of the project on a Y axis.  For instance, in “yeah…you are all true data” the project transformed over time through a succession states, each with varied formal elements.  These formal elements were thematic in nature, i.e. a gallery talk, a film, an artificial intelligence computer, etc. , with each theme acquiring different forms that articulate specific concepts inherent with the theme. For example, characters, settings, props or other cinematic constructs within the Wizard of Oz can be thought of as specific forms of this theme which convey certain concepts based on their relation and correspondence to other constructs within the narrative. The Wizard, Dorthy, Toto, the Emerald City, Kansas, the ruby slippers all represent core concepts in their relationships within the story. While these themes morphed and shifted, the core concepts underlying these formal qualities, remained in less fluxus states. It was the concepts at the core of these filmic relationships that became paramount as the project drew parallels between states as embodiments of the different themes it endorsed in its evolution as a work of art.

Within both contexts, the Wizard of Oz and 2001 A Space Odyssey the interaction remains similar in affect.  The audience is confronted with a space that cumulates their communications, stripping away context and meaning, by converting, processing, and representing the speech as raw information, which is then arbitrarily fedback into the system. The forms within the space shift leading to the formulation of different sites for this interaction to occur. The Wizard of Oz is a stage where a singular person becomes emphasized as they enter the stage as the sole actor within the installation.  2001 affords a heightened state of anonymity to individuals within the system, thus taking the emphasis away from the sole individual at the center of the work, i.e a viewer/user on the stage in the middle of the gallery, and allows the system increased authority over the commencing audio artifact. This is evinced in the actual spatiality of the installation where performing audience viewers/users are relocated to the periphery of the exhibition space as the 2001 model networked the spaces of the gallery across a series of rooms as opposed to the singular central stage within the middle of the gallery as modeled in the Wizard of Oz semblance. This highlights the varying levels of

Becoming a User: From Artist to Audience

This project is grounded amidst a point in my practice where I am questioning my role as an artist, and in turn the roles of those whom I am connected to through this role.  Within the framework of the greater system of art, a cultural system for the creation, expression, and communication of value; as a means and method of experiencing relationships and correspondences within multiple worlds of selves and others

By creating a type of artificial intelligence, and relinquishing control of the art to a sort of autopoietic system that in essence determined its own development, I was removing myself from the role of artist, in an abstracted conceptual sense, whereas I could become literally de-contextualised as just another voice in the gallery.  In the face of the computer, in the simplified binary language of the machine, the hierarchy of the artist-viewer relationship is changed. By creating a system that is scripted as an abstract model, a mathematic model, my context was reduced to a stream of 1’s and 0’s.

As a method of de-contextualisation, the automation of a system that converts and simplifies sender and receiver as a fluid role

Randomising communication.

The act of creating systems of chance or the act of randomising as a means of surrendering ones control over the various cultural, social, political, and economic systems and structures at work has its roots in the process art of artists such as John Cage, movements such as Dadaism, Fluxism, and the Theatre of the Absurd. The concept of randomness implies a lack of predictability and method of deterministic pattern.

My language as communication became irrelevant and purposeless.  As an artist within the space I had created, my voice was as equal to all other voices in the eye of HAL2009.  In making an interactive work, my interactions were no different than those of the other users and viewers. This brings into view the idea that as an artist, once art is created and released into the world, the only control that remains with the artist are abstract cultural notions of ownership and authority.

Coming back to the theme of the exhibition, Ummm…The Articulate Practitioner…