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…..

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…

Thinking about four recent projects (Other Side, HAL2009, FAIR FM, and Splendid),  I reflect back upon my past works and consider how they functioned, how they were purposeful for me, what they did for me and/or allowed me to do?  Recently, in examining my artistic practice, how it functions and what it does, and more importantly why this is valuable, I have come to some conclusions on the my process of reflection and the value of reflexivity in artistic practice, which I will discuss here.

I have adopted a new framework, or a thought structure, for thinking reflexively about my artworks and looking at my overall artistic practice (and other’s artistic practices for that matter). Setting up a binary structure of opposition, I try to think about each artwork on a descriptive level and on an analytical level.  This can be further reduced to what the work is being, thus framing the work within descriptive questions of how it is and what it is; and what the work is doing, thus considering, or analysing what the work does, how it does it, and why it does it.  The distinction lies within the separation of what something, a form, an action, an object, or a subject does as opposed to what it is.

Scaling out to a macrocosmic level of my overall practice as an artist, I can then consider the gestalt of my art as a relationship amongst a series of individual, microcosmic artworks, how they are, how they be (holistically) in relation to what my practice does, or what each artwork might do in relation to how my practice is and exists. These comparisons can quickly become complex as multiple works, and even multiple practices enter into the equation. This structure becomes necessary as a means of contrasting my processes and methods as an artist, as my works develop intuitively and much so through a felt and visceral knowledge of the world.  This thought structure’s oppostional form, provides me with a very simple way of approaching each work and outlining its conceptual foundations, thus allowing me to create connections between multiple artworks, and thus begin to visualise an overall aesthetic or dynamic to my practice as an artist.

As I read through past descriptions of my practice, or of singular works of art I have produced, I would generalise how each artwork explored concepts of boundaries, disruption, and separation.  These are the conceptual characteristics of the works that I identified with. By describing the work I would arrive at an analysis of how these characteristic functioned within the work, but for some reason I would stop just shy of considering what the purpose of this function of the work was doing for me. I was describing the art and what it might do for others within various cultural contexts, but not what it was doing for me, in a personal context. This prevented me from experiencing my practice on a macro scale, and rather kept me focused on the internal mechanism of the art that I produced. Perhaps, as the artist, as my self making the artwork, as it is felt, and intuited, there was no need to see the work on this scale, no need to think about the work.  From this understanding, the work was for me.

What has changed?  Why do I now feel it is important to think about the work, as it is felt and experienced?  Thinking vs. feeling?

I am at a point of change within my practice as an artist. I have developed a large enough body of work, with multiple bodies within that some contrast begins to emerge, and thus there are immediate aesthetic divergencies and congruencies. It is here that the descriptions of these differences begin to develop into more fully realised analyses. As I begin to analyse my past work in contrast to my recent work, I find the communicative importance, the agency, the power of the artworks, in their abilities to communicate and span the margins within my self and between others. It is here that my practice congeals.

REFRACTORY ANALYSIS

As I begin to look at the work from another angle, or refract upon my work, I begin to see what the work was doing for me (as opposed to how I was doing it, or what the work was being).  As I step out away from the processes involved, I can catch a glimpse different effects the work may have produced.  Moreover, I another step out I could see my relationship to the work, beyond my attachment to it through the processes of conception, development, and creation. What was I actually doing in the process of making the work? This is a separation of being and doing, this is part of praxis and reflexivity. Moving to a place where I can understand this is empowering, as it gives me a broader vision of the multiple plains that this work exists upon.  Taking this step back to look at myself making the work, going through the various processes and actions of collecting, transforming, distributing, disruption, displacement, and facilitating allows me to start to understand and decide how this is important to my self, outside my identity as an artist, how this as an extension of my self can be influential and important in relation to others.

This was a complexity inherent in my practice, as my artistic activities were strongly reflexive in their content.  My work on one level is about looking at oneself suspended through the media that we extend through. I increasingly became the subject of my own practice.  I was researching myself in a way, ever work was very personal, yet starkly impersonal and detached. In these works, mainly video installations, I simultaneously objectified and subjectified my self via media channels.  Works such as PiP (2005), Beware! (2006), It happened like that (2007) all represented this displacement of self, this video objectification/subjectification. It is here that could communicate my self to myself in a way that is very unique, I could channel in on my self.

Coming back to the idea of stepping outside of my practice and witnessing myself in action, making art, it is here that I actually come to know these parts of my self in a ‘knew’ way.  This is through a creative act of reflecting upon myself, through a reflexivity of reflection. As described above, I found mass and new forms of media to be highly versatile and practical medium for these creative communicative acts. The screen, in particular, affords a dimensionality to this form of reflexivity that supports its dynamism, and the ‘degrees of separation’ that a reflexive process and practice espouse.

This is the nature of my self as artist and my practice as me simultaneous being and doing me.  This is me becoming or creating (doing/making) myself through the process of being myself.  This is a form of self-reliance, self-exploration, self-consciousness.  For me, this self-becoming is done intuitively, and it is through the conscious act of thinking, reflexively, that this can then be communicated, a communicative act.  Therefore by describing this to you, I’m at once being and doing, and thus I am conflated once again, ready for the emancipatory process of reflexivity via artistic process.

This is the concept of ‘Dasein’, the concept of ‘presence’ that Heidegger theorizes on our experience of one self in the world.  I, my self, am quite interested in Dasein as impacted by my concept of ‘uniplicity’ (a singleness exhibited amongst multiple subjects), particularly as it is influenced by forms of media, especially new media. Expressed through many past works, I have employed various forms of new media, i.e digital video, physical computing, Internet, etc. into this process of reflexive introspection, as well as traditional media forms, such as radio and printed text.  These are the tools (objects) and processes by which I can transform parts of my self into forms that function within the reflexive situation of my practice.

Thinking about how these works subjectified my self as at once the object and subject of my observation, it becomes apparent that the art that I was concerned with was in my relationship to these works.  I was at once objectified and subjectified through the mediafication of my self within my practice as an artist. From this perspective, the works were activated in my presence, and in effect, types of models waiting to be put into use in my absence.

I believe that all that is art, at times, demonstrates these qualities or a relationship to these reflexive qualities.  This is the surplus value of art as described by Diederichsen (2008), or the interstice value contemplated by Marx via Bourriaud (1998), it is valuable in infinite contexts beyond itself.  These artworks that I describe are not solely one thing.  They do not only represent some thing in the world, they are some thing in the world at once.  Just as we are at once a subject and an object, being and doing (making) our selves as individuals.  This is the parallel dimensions of self, the mulitplicity of self and identity.  So it is not a question of what does it mean, or what is it, or what anything… it is a question of why is it where and when it is and how is it to me, you, or us?

Meaning is meaningful. It’s what we all search for, often relentlessly in all that we do.  Are we looking for value in a valueless world?  Do we want assurance of a purpose as conscious beings?  Do we merely need to experience ourselves as part something, part of a greater significance or symbolism than the economic, political, and social systems that we manufacture and perpetuate in this search?

I was cleaning out my art studio the other day. As I was pulling off sticky-note after sticky-note of unrealised projects and halfed-up ideas, when it dawned on me that all of the sketches and scribblings had something in common.  In all that ‘data’ there was some kind of meaning that could be attached to it. There was meaning in the message, a pattern emerged. (PAUSE). I realised that all of these projects seemed to be centered around or tangent to some form of singularity. Black holes, the ‘ice man’, amoebas, time capsules, chameleons…the list goes on.  These were all images that popped into my head at some point of time while hanging out in the studio brainstorming new installations and art projects.  As I restacked this pile of sticky-notes, it became  increasingly evident.  All of these projects were about something that was  inspiring in its singularity.  These forms, the ice man, a black hole are essentially anomalies, the differences that provide enough contrast or distance from subjective being to offer a glimpse of something sublime and perfect, something truly meaningful.  Additionally, there is also something nearly magical about the these things, at least for me personally.  Something non-descript, something that might be called beauty?

So how do these projects relate to me.  This is the ad-infinitum question of the hour.  Are they metonyms of my conscious existence? Do they signal a quest for absolute greatness, not dissimilar to a Holy Grail of consciousness?

Thinking about reasons for why I have this creative urge that assumes these singular anomalies, I began to think about myself as something singularly unique in my individuality.  Not only in my form as matter, but also in my identity, my conscious being. So what exactly makes these other forms of singularities, and beyond that what gives them reason to be attractive?  Why would I even care about this idea of a black hole?  Well, I suppose behind the facade of its imagery, it reminds me of something, something personal, something inside me that I know.  Perhaps something that I am, something that we all are.

These objects, forms, things are not solely attractive or of interest to me alone.  For this reason alone I can only assume that due to the fact that others hold stock in the idea of a black hole, enough to construct the world’s largest particle accelerator in order to study it, the idea must hold some meaning; it must be important and of special consequence.  So why I am I attracted to them?

Are they symbolic?  I suppose another factor is that many of these singularities I have never actually seen, or witnessed with any acute sensibility.  Therefore I am only aware of the black hole through representation of it in images, words, and stories. The other quality about the black hole is “Despite its invisible interior, a black hole can reveal its presence through interaction with other matter.”

It is here that we can observe something.

How does the concept of a black hole relate to me?  I started to think about myself, if I were a black hole how would I feel? Black holes can never look in the mirror, so reflecting upon ones self isn’t possible.  Black holes become ones self continuously. Black holes are because they are absorbing everything else, and only know to exist through their “interaction with other matter”.

(REWIND)… the amoeba is similar but in an opposite kind of way.

Back to meaning. From these perspectives…Can there be meaning in any one singular thing, if the singular thing is always becoming through everything surrounding it?

Perhaps meaning cannot exist within the singularity.  There is no meaning in one single thing alone, as is matter in a black hole, but rather meaning is constructed by proximities and relationships. Furthermore, it is not simple a spatial or relational matter, but also a matter of agreement, communicated agreement.  As artists we are continuously explore new and changing ways of communicating agreements.

Moving these ideas to the concept of value, this concept suggest that we are not valuable in our selves. As humans, as people, as artists. In fact art may as well have no value. According to Bourriaud (1998), contemporary art and its delivery can operate in many arenas as a “social interstice…a space in human relations which fits more or less harmoniously and openly in to the overall system, but suggests other trading possibilities other than those in effect within this system” (p.16). As Bourriaud describes, “It has been said of art, and Marx was the first, that it represents the ‘absolute merchandise’, because it is the actual image of the value” (p. 42). Art is immediately devoted to, and often created solely, for the worlds of exchange, communication, and commerce.

Just as art acquires an exchange value, people too can embody this value. We, as some-one, are nothing without someone else, or are we?  We are conferred and confirmed through the awareness of another, through our differences and deviations.  It is the through the connections between ‘some-ones’ that anything meaningful can even be considered, yet communicated.

Much of my past work as an artist has been near these ideas.  In many ways I’ve been concerned with singularity. I’ve been concerned with examining myself in relation. Through the use of media as a vehicular mechanism of communication to communicate myself to myself at a singular point in time-space.  In this way, I bend back upon myself.  Like making a media-instant clone of myself that somehow got caught in a feedback loop before I could communicate something to myself.

I think of watching myself watch myself in a hall of mirrors.  I am my audience.

One question that is begging an answer.  Do I have anything meaningful to communicate to myself?

The following is a working reading/listening list for Bourriaud/Relational Aesthetic-related articles, interviews, and other texts. Updated 07/2009. (in no particular order)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourriaud - wiki on Bourriaud, links to various info/text.

http://a.aaaarg.org/text/3044/altermodern - Bourriaud’s catalogue essay for Altermodern: the Tate Triennial 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqHMILrKpDY - Bourriaud on the “Altermodern” and “Global from Scratch”

http://classifiedad.wordpress.com/ - a blog with a great reading list relating to Relational Aesthetics.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_8_39/ai_75830815 - an interview with Bourriaud.

http://www.gairspace.org.uk/htm/bourr.htm - the glossary from ‘Relational Aesthetics’.

http://www.artlink.com.au/articles.cfm?id=2020 - you can order a copy of artlink magazine here with an article entitled “Gleaning Relational Aesthetics”.

http://a.aaaarg.org/nicolas-bourriaud-postproduction - Culture as a Screenplay, How Art Reprograms the World

http://recycledcinema.blogspot.com/2009/02/nicolas-bourriaud.html - appropriation, remix culture, and inventive design of creative culture discussed through a review of Bourriaud

http://books.google.com.au/books?as_auth=Nicolas+Bourriaud - Bourriaud booklist.

http://www.stretcher.org/archives/i1_a/2003_02_25_i1_archive.php - interview with Bourriaud on ‘newness’ and a relational aesthetic.

http://transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/1196340894 - Radical Culture Research Institute review of ‘Relational Aesthetics’.

http://www.artreview.com/forum/topic/show?id=1474022%3ATopic%3A125816 - book review of Claire Bishops ‘Participation’

more to come…….