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…..

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.

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…

Title: Other Side
Date: June 01 2008.
Materials: Scavenged wood, paint, fake lawn, wheel barrow, earth, grass, time capsule
Dimensions: 4500 H mm x 4000 mm W x 2000 mm D
Location: Gomboc Galleries and Sculpture Park, Middle Swan, WA, Australia

Keywords: Sculptural, site-specific, time capsule, upside-down, emergence, displacement, memory, rhizome.

Description:

A sculptural installation consisting of a 4.5m x 4m x 2m shipping crate build from scavenged materials, constructed on-site at Gomboc Galleries and Sculpture Park in the Swan Valley, Western Australia.  Having been dropped by an airmail cargo shipment from the adjacent airport, the crate has crash-landed upside-down in (ironically) a sculpture park.

Within the crate, on what is now the ceiling is a small patch of fake lawn 4m by 2m bisected by a white picket fence.  The fence appears to have been damaged in the crash, broken open and hanging.

On one side of the fence is a wheel barrow, neatly cut by the inner wall of the crate, as if it the space had been sliced out of a movie set. Before the wheel-barrow are a series of small holes dug in the lawn, exposing the soil below (above), and a few odd mounds of dirt from the digging of the holes. A shovel hangs, stuck into one of the piles.

On the other side of the fence, is what appears to be a a volume of sod with soil intact, hanging open in the manner of a trap door, opening up into a large empty space above (below) the fake lawn. On the floor of the crate, directly beneath the sod trap door is a very large mound of actual soil that appears to have fallen through the hole in the lawn above.

Within the large pile of soil inside the crate, partially visible, is small, red metal container of some sort, which appears to have been buried in the earth (above), thus exposed accidentally as the soil came crashing through the sod trap door.

Unpacking this crate: processes of Other Side

This was the first project of a recent series of experimental and generative works focused on developing my praxis as an emerging contemporary artist engaged in the initial stages of my doctoral studies, researching my practice within the context of developing  a concept of sociality in contemporary art and media. This project, in particular, will prove to be substantial in the genesis of a relational perspective of self and my method of praxis and reflexivity.

At the time of this project’s conception, early March 2008, I had recently relocated to Australia to begin my doctoral studies and develop my practice as a contemporary visual artist. I was living in a share house, where my room was in the center of the house.

Behind the house was a sand pit covered in fake lawn Astro-turf with a large metal skeleton of a cage in it. While at the time I wasn’t cognisant of it,  these initial forms and spaces in my settlement down under seemed to have greatly influenced the development of this project.

Reflecting upon the premise of the project, constructing a very large shipping crate in a field amidst sculptural works, the initial idea was in response to this specific environment, a sculpture park full of monumental abstract formalism. I was attracted to the tongue-in-cheek allure of installing a monumental sculptural work, however not unpacking the work from its shipping container, thus the shipping container which houses the work itself becomes the sculpture.

The Other Side developed from here. While the satirical minimalism of the mismanaged shipment of art was amusing enough, I felt that the vast empty space inside of the crate was crying out for some creative invention.  Like a Trojan horse, the crate could take on an internal layer and silently infiltrate, or infil-‘crate’, this formalist theme-park with a more sophisticated conceptual intervention. It was from this point that “the crate” (as it came to be known by) began to grow and change, evolving through its various stages until it reached its current and final manifestation.

Infil-‘crate’-ion

What would this parcel to contain?  What would I ship to myself? Why was I shipping it?  My initial thoughts were of disruption and displacement.  As this was an aesthetic that I have been exploring in many of my past works, particularly in many of my video installations, ie. It happened just like that (2007).

Thinking on the site of the Other Side, a large green, grassy field, I immediately considered the possibility of extracting a portion of that field and encasing it within the crate. I also considered how the grass underneath the crate might grow up between the boards. The use of grass within the work was not only influenced by the site, but also had a strong parallel influence by the work of American installation/video artist Jeroen Nelemans.  I had the fortune of attending a residency with Jeroen the previous year at Vermont Studio Center and was inspired by his dynamic, living installations using grass or mold.

I began to think of the crate as a space where something dynamic could occur.  I envisioned, as the crate was upside-down, whatever was shipped within the crate might now begin to interact with the new contents of grass as it grew up through the crate into its shipment. A parcel containing a parcel (of land). The possibility of me shipping a patch of lawn and earth from an old site in my past to this new site in my present become a reality of the project.  Trans-planting an environment of my past into an environment of my present. In this way, this act was a metaphor of my relocation to Australia.  I began to consider what I was bringing with me, and within me to my new place of being.  The upside-downess of the crate I could now perceive as a convenient metaphor for my movement to the Southern Hemisphere, and a wry spatial consideration of my possible crash-landing down under.

As I thought through the concept of shipping something or place of my past to my present, I began to view the crate as a time capsule. A space were the memory and the presence collide and intersect. Where the artifacts of past are suspended until they are unearthed by the present. Where the past is sent to the future in a static state. The concept of time encapsulation developed.  Shipping my past into my future, when it arrives it collides with the present.  The Other Side is a variation of this process.

The crate was developing into a container, a capsule, for two diametric spaces, or two sites to meet. The intersection of these sites was a marginal space of the fake and the real, the virtual and the actual, the past and the present. This was a metonymically rhizomatic space. As I worked through the formality of these concepts, using the grass on the site as a means to begin to think about these diametric spaces, and how each space was to influence the other, I considered ways of focalising this intermediary margin between the two. As I envisioned rich and vibrant grass growing up from the floor of the crate into the dense, fake lawn hanging from the ceiling I became concerned with separating this space.

The fake grass on the ceiling was not simply a memory of a patch of grass, but perhaps could serve to demonstrate a process within a site that it represented. The crate could capture, like a photograph, or a snapshot, a memory of doing something, performing some task that could represent something meaningful from my history.  This spatial snapshot, this model could then be juxtaposed into a new space, and the event of this meeting, this crash landing could suspend them in a state of intermixing, thus this work is a snapshot of this collision or spaces, times, and activities.

An entry in the project logbook notes:

“May 01, 2008: I knew I would be shipping an environment, thinking about how the items in that environment formed as a condition of that environment, which was really what I was shipping, my experience of those conditions. After moving here [Australia] and realizing that I didn’t need to bring anything at all, I have begun to view environments a little differently.  I have always have attachment to objects and clothes, and these facades that we adorn our selves with or in in order to feel a certain way. Whether it is for pleasure, comfort, acceptance, etc. Things all provide certain levels of this.  Things are the vehicles that bring these feelings to us, rather than just instrinsically being that feeling, it is the experience of a thing in a context that allows us to find a certain feeling or idea within ourselves, as we relate to that relationship and the phenomenology of the world around us. SO I didnt even need to send anything, as it would become “lost in translation” so to speak.  Just needed to send the context for that experience, the environment, including all surroundings and conditions, including people…”

What was the task?

Somehow the idea of a lawnmower crept into the crate. Looking back to my logbook for the project it was unclear at the time.  The logbook reads:

“March 24th, 2008: Not sure where the [lawnmower] idea came from.  I thought of grass.  I thought of mowing it. Maintaining it and managing its appearance… Control.  So there was also this binary of control and out of control in the missing parcel property of the work.”

Perhaps the lawnmower was the representation of this control over the environment that I was encapsulating within the crate.  It was my attachment to the environment and the crates new destination, in the field of that sculpture park would provide a new environment for this ‘control’ to negotiate.  Yet, as I noted in the logbook, there was a certain lack of control that is explored through the haphazardly ‘dropping’ of the crate. It is this juxtapositioning of these contexts that I find motivating in the work.

Still not sold on the mower for its lack of personality, I opt for something more…well…me.  I recall a piece of advice given by a past mentor, “Your art should be personal, it should come from inside you.” From this point I began to think about the core concepts in the work and how they related to me.  The idea of a time capsule, the idea of shipping and moving, relocation, the ideas of memory and presence.

Over the last three weeks of building the crate in the studio the contents of the crate changed radically.  Everyday it was something different.  At some point a fence worked its way into the crate, triggering a memory of one of my many back yards growing up as a child who tended to move every two years or so.  It just so happened that in this back yard, as 11 year old, I buried a time capsule as 11 year olds do.  Eureka!  All this diggin and I’ve finally struck gold!

This was it.  It was this memory of this site where I buried a time capsule that I would extract from its virtual site, pack in the crate, and ship from my childhood as an archaeological pioneer of Cedar Forks subdivision circa 1992 to my present site as an arts researcher standing in a sculpture park in Western Australia, 2008.

I’m workin’ on a buildin’

Constructing the crate was no simple feat.  It required a great deal of initial thought and planning, not that dissimilar from planning the construction of a house.  In fact, most of the time while constructing the crate, I felt as if I were building a house, and in a strange way I was.  The crate turns out would house a space where realities meet.

In order to build the crate, I would need timber, and a lot of it.  The initial dimensions of the crate measured 4 metres cubed (as shown in Fig. 1 above). This equated to approximately…too many board feet.  Not only would the acquisition of these materials be expensive, structurally the 4 metre cube began to seem out of reach. I scaled the dimensions back to a more manageable 4 m H x 2 m W x 4 m D.

After being rejecting by all of my hopeful material sponsors, I decided the most appropriate source of timber would be from discarded shipping pallets.

I was collecting my material for the project from used shipping pallets scavenged from various building sites and businesses throughout the greater Perth area.  The pallets were then systematically stripped, de-nailed, counted, stacked, measured sawn, and restacked. The total number of pallets collected and prepared for use in the project: 101.  This equates to over 1100 boards, each containing a minimum of 6 nails to be pounded and pryed out.  In the industry, we call this ‘art work’.

After all of the material was collected from various nooks and corners of the city and prepped for construction,  the task of making 4.5 metre structural timber supports was no easy thing.  These had to be scabbed together with nail plates at alternating lengths.

The crate was constructed in bays with facade paneling, all entirely prefabricated in the studio and assembled on-site. Twenty-eight 1 x 2 metre panels were constructed.

The crate was designed to be modular, in that each panel would be interchangeable with any other panel in the crate, thus making assembly fast and simple.  Due to variability of the materials and other factors beyond control, this was not the case.  In fact each panel ended up in being colour coded to aid in the correct placement in the crates assembly.

Fieldwork

With a the shell of the ‘crate’ constructed and fairly stablised vision of the interior of the crate, the ‘fieldwork’ commenced 61 days after the initial conception of the project. The location was chosen after a few visits to the site.

May, 04, 2008: Install Day 1- Impact crater.

After the site was prepped with an instant impact crater and four corner supports anchored in the earth, the sod was left for ten days to re-root before the crate was to be constructed.

May 15, 2008- Install Day 2- Framing

With the help of my construction team, Graeme and Stu,  we transported the crate sections (4 stud-bays, 28 panels, and foundation) to the site and framed up the skeleton of the structure.

May 20, 2008- Install Day 7- Finalising construction

The framing and paneling of the crate was nearly finished after 5 days of building. The interior ‘roof’ of suspended fake lawn was installed, nearly ready for the contents of the crate to be installed.

May 21, 2008- Install Day 8- Interior Design

The interior of the crate was then ‘in’-fitted with various sized holes, white picket fence, large pile of real earth, custom wheel barrow, and other components of the ‘shipment’.

May 23, 2008- Install Day 9- Stenciling

The crate was nearly complete, just needed a paint job.

June 1, 2008- Install Day 11- Open to the public

Working Analysis

• Snail Mail?: The Rhizomatic Act of Sending and Receiving.

• Relocating memories and the act of re-membering.

• Crash-landing past into present in the future.

• Trojan Horse of Self: The emplacement of self into an other self.

• Other Spaces: Heterotopian memories of simulation, representation, and location

Keywords: Heterotopia, opposition, disruption, displacement, memory, rhizomatic, virtual, emplacement

(19/09/09 in progress…)

The project developed as an exploration of virtual and actual spaces of me, and the relationships between the two; the virtuality of a remembered history, the actuality of a presence. Looking at the boundaries between where these spaces exist. the relationships that become exposed through a circumstantial, unintentional act of uncovering.  Turf became a poignant metaphorical medium, where the grass of the project grew.

It was this space and this dynamic of becoming that I’m interested in. In the early designs of the project, fake grass ‘growing’ towards real grass was the key form. There is a dualism that occurs in this investigation, yet the work begins to open up towards multiplicity, which is rhizomatic in its essence.

There is a relationship to philosphers Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guttari’s concept of rhizome, the “theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation”. [1] Other Side is a model of certain relationships between my present and my past, this I suppose becomes the data within the Deleuzean/Guttarian rhizomatic model.  The memory, in its remembered form, in manner, is virtual.  My manifestation of this memory, in present, or in action, creative activity of producing the Other Side, takes on an actual form or quality.  The imitative quality of the forms used within the crate exhibit this virtual nature of the memory as a meme.

Coming back to the circumstances of the conception and development of the Other Side, it is important to consider my physical, spatial, cultural, and personal situation as me, Nathan that has recently relocated to Australia alone, living in room in the centre of a share house, planning his research as an artist, etc. In a lot of ways all I had was memories. Without much stuff, the only comforts I had were inside me.  Memories are directly influenced by the environment at the time of reflection and vision.  There is a connection that is made.  In some ways the Other Side embodies these connections in one instance, one imitation of the relationship as occured in my situation.

What did/does the work do for me?

It asks me to consider these relationships within myself.  How does my past relate to my future?  How am I present, presented, or represented through the processes I engage with as an artist? Specifically within this project, I focused on the relocation of my self, and how through time my self becomes continuously relocational from one perspective.  However, when this perspective is inverted through memory, or activity, or another process of engaging with my existence, or presence in the world, my self becomes static or suspended.

Relating the project back to myself,  thinking about the process, the act of collecting and sourcing the materials to build the crate, I had to rely on myself to resource the material to build the crate. The project became more about building this crate, designing the project.  At times during the building process, I felt as if I where building a home in the sculpture park, and actually home here in Australia.  Building a structure of my past self that was relocated to a new location, a new site for development and growth.  This new site would inevitably slowly overgrow the past, which in its suspended, remembered, virtual state would change and become enveloped by the grass of the present.

Unpacking this idea, it wasn’t my past self as a collection of experiences at a recent point in time, but rather based on a memory of something I had done as a child, 16 years prior to my relocation to Australia. The externalisation of this memory, focused the processual nature of the act the memory was based upon.  The memory that I was re-membering through the installation was that of the creation and burying of a time capsule in a childhood backyard.  I do not recall what was in the time capsule, but more so the feeling I had, awe, wonderment, and excitement of the act of burying things that I held as valuable, personal, and attributable to who I was at the time and how I understood the world.

(05/10/09)

Not only is the installation based upon a memory of this feeling, but also moves one step further in a symbolic act of virtue in a suspended state of attempting to recover, locate, or re-discover this ‘time capsule’. It is a multiplicity of the time capsule, relational to self, to others, to the environment.

It is in some ways a simulation of a memory, of a processual activity, a representational space that is at once many spaces.  In essence, the project formalises a “heteropology” via a heterotopian model of the mulitple spaces and encounters of memory and site. Michel Foucault discusses these concepts in his text Des Espace Autres (1967). Presenting the concept of a heterotopia, Foucault describes this “heteropolgy”, or the “simultaneous mythic and real contestation of the space in which one lives”, of the juxtaposing of relations to ourselves and the spaces that are occupied in one’s memory, culture, personality, knowledge, and being:

It is here, that the heterotopia exists.  The Other Side (the crate) exposes and comes to rest at this culmination of sites. The crate is a site that encounters the set of relations amongst the multiple sites of memory, presence, and process. Within this heterotopia of the Other Side, a sort of erosion, or a rupturing of the boundaries of these spaces occurs. It is here through this erosion that the unearthing of a new site, one that is at once a simulation and a real site is created.  This site is the collision of historical sites of memories, contemporary sites of artistic practice, personal sites of experience and enactment all within the field of my knowledge, expression, and being of self through intersecting spaces and times, presented, performed, and represented.

[1] Rhizome (philosophy). (2009, August 15). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 03:12, October 5, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rhizome_(philosophy)&oldid=308191501

[2] Foucault, M. (1984). “Des Espace Autres”. Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité.

The artist wears multiple hats, each shaped by the practices, processes, and aesthetics of the work they are engaged with. The role of artist changes when their practice changes.  Their practice changes because of a “problem” as Deleuze might describe it; a multiplicity of highly different factors prompting the creation of a response”.   This problem, not in a negative sense, in this context is a great change in the tools materials and venues of the artist as afforded by new media on the early 1990’s. How does the role of artist change with an increased presence of new media, and in turn an increased opportunity for the actualization of the virtual?

As new media generates the response of new virtual art forms and processes, the Internet gives birth to new social roles and aesthetics, new audiences, and new ways of being an artist.

Artists took on a new meaning with the virtualisation that accompanied the new media of the 1990’s. (Green 2001). New media such as the Internet gave birth to an entirely new culture of artists and creative practitioners, one being the aptly defined as Internet artist. The Internet artist, in some ways consecrates the social freedom of the artist, who is constantly bound by the institutionalization of practice and aesthetic. In her text Internet Art (2001), Rachel Greene describes the Internet artist as one who is:

[…]actively reclaiming public space and circumnavigating boundaries that seem entrenched in the world of galleries and museums. Internet art has redefined some of the materials of current art-making, distribution and consumption, expanding operations from the white cube gallery out to the most remote networked computer (p. 11-12).

With the aid of the digital computer and the WWW artists can create art using virtual material and tools in the form of digital code, hyperlinks, etc. Early Internet art such as the work of Heath Bunting (King’s Cross Phone In, 1994) exemplify the transitivity of artistic practice between the virtual and the actual, but also the democratic interactivity and immersion that new media perpetuates (Greene 2001, Rush 1999).

Furthermore, in extension to the expansion of practices and forms of art-making, Greene and Rush describe the roles and responsibility of artists as changing. If an artist designs and programs a website, which functions as art internal and external to the institution of the white cube, is the artist still an artist, or is the artist a (web)designer, or is the artist an “artist-as-designer” as Bishop (2004) describes. According to Manovich, design and art are distiguished by the content-interface dichotomy; “in contrast to design, in art the connection between content and form (or in the case of new media, content and interface)… merge into one entity and no longer can be taken apart.” (Manovich 2001, p. 67). It would appear that the artist, in the face of new media, becomes variable and modular, transcoded by the very principles of the new media they interface.

While the artist can variably and simultaneously adorn so many hats, they can easily become buried under the pile.  In this situation, has the ‘artist’ lost meaning or transcended meaning?  When the artist casually performs all creative roles in a society, do they disappear without the possibility of a differential?  Joseph Beuys might say they do, in the shamanistic sense of disappearance.  Perhaps this was the ground for his proclamation that “every human being is an artist”. If it is not the particular act that the artist performs, if it is not their mastery, their talent, then what makes them an actual artist? Perhaps all artists became virtual with the onset of these new media.

Fortunately, for the museums, collectors, and institutions, it appears that the artist evolves, rather than disappears. Changing forms and processes of artistic practice direct its players, artist and audience, towards change as well. This is demonstrated in a changing sociality of the artist, the role of the artist as something other than a “master of craft”, which the artist has been considered as for centuries (Bolt 2004, Greene 2001). When the artist transforms into something other than the “master of craft”, the social dimensions and response to art change as well.

There is often a cultural resistance to the artist becoming something other than that which they have been conditioned as for centuries. This is particularly evident of the Internet artist, as Greene (2001) notes:

“A related criticism is sometimes aimed at the works’ creators: that Internet and software artists often self identified as programmers, are not ‘real’ artists. This critique can be taken as a symptom of the changing modes of art and the evolving expectations of what artist should be, what skills or trades they should possess, and what their critical concerns should be.  The objections can be sustained only if the role of the artist as producer is imagined in limited ways, and exist, perhaps anachronistically, outside the tune and reach of the web” (Greene 2001, p.13).

There are new opportunities for the artist.  The job market has inverted. With the virtual embodiment of the connectedness of humanity in the Net the artists and the audiences become empowered through the democratisation of creative practice afforded by the network, not only through the virtuality of form and material, but through the social architecture of the network.  This becomes a pivotal time for the relationships between artist and art and audience.  The audience becomes a necessary component of artistic practice, now even more necessary than the traditional tools and materials, venues of the past.

Claire Bishop (2004) relates the changing role of the artist directly to the idea of project-based art works promoted by the gallery-as-laboratory paradigm. The last decade of the millennium saw a “visible tendency” to “reconceptualize the ‘white cube’” in more of a “laboratory” setting for contemporary art (Bishop 2004, P.51). Art produced in the 1990’s was “open-ended, interactive, and resistant to closure”. Bishop sees this idea as being derivative of a “creative misreading of post structuralist theory: rather than the interpretations of a work of art being open to continual reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual flux.” (Bishop 2004, p. 53). The role of artist was also symptomatic of this flux, taking on many forms, in part driven by institutional agendas of transforming the white cube of the exhibition space into something new and experimental (and experiential). The gallery or museum became “marketable as a space of leisure and entertainment” in which the artist [was] invited to “design or trouble-shoot amenities [within the museum]” which then were presented as works of art. (Jorge Pardo at K21, Dusseldorf) (Bishop 2004, p. 52). In effect, the role of the artist became “artist-as-designer”.

The “artist-as-designer” embodies architect or interior designer, or possibly marriage counsellor and [art] therapist?  It seems as though, any terminology even remotely concerned with creative activity/facility takes on a variability in an information age.  Artist, designer, mediator, facilitator, producer all become a placeholder for the actual aestheticised practice of an entity (individual or collective). These non-conventional roles are becoming more commonly conflated with the “artist”, as the artist becomes more virtual.  The word artist now implies much more than it used to.  It has taken on a variability, a discursive multiplicity in which artist can mean nearly anything.  As Deleuze and Guttari (1972) might suggest, it has become “rhizomatic”.  This variabililty seems to accompany the widening array of practices and processes afforded by new media, specifically the Internet, as artist began working with new tools/materials and exhibiting in new venues; all afforded by the actualization of cyberspace.

None the less, these altered roles lead directly onto the pulpit of relational aesthetics, where social bonds and relationships are emphasised in response to the representationalism and individualism residuals of modernism. As Bourriaud describes,

“Relational art is seen as a direct response to the shift from a goods to a service-based economy.  It is also seen as a response to the virtual relationships of the Internet and globalisation, which on one hand have prompted a desire for more physical and face-to-face interaction between people, while on the other have inspired artists to adopt a “do-it-yourself” (DIY) approach and model their own “possible universes” (cited by Bishop, 2004, p. 51).

References:

Bishop, C. (2004). Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. October 110, Fall 2004.

Colebrook,
 C. 
(2002).
Understanding
 Deleuze. 
Crows
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 NSW:
 Allen
 &
 Unwin.

Greene, Rachel. Internet Art. New
 York:
 Thames 
& 
Hudson.

Manovich, L. (2000). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, 
Mass.: 
The 
MIT 
Press.

Rush,
 M.
 (1999).
 New 
Media 
in
 Art:
 second
edition.
 New
York:
 Thames 
& 
Hudson.

Virtuality is perhaps one of the most buoyant and phenomenal topics frothily surfacing to the whirlpool of social knowledge in recent times. Nearing the intellectual equivalent of the Valley Girl modifier “like”, “virtual” has virtually become the buzzword of the past decade, denoting some advanced quality of reality or some new and improved way to experience life.   This being said, virtuality is like “really” nothing new.  Actually, tracing back through the history books, or rather prehistory books, it appears that, “…[a] tension existing between the material and the virtual has existed for the last 40 millennia”.  That’s about as long as any other [modern] human related idea.  Although this may seem a rather extreme statement, it is widely acknowledged and supported throughout the academic anthropological and sociological community, (Lommel, Gosden, etc.) that the notion of virtuality is in fact “as old as dirt”. Looking back through out the ages, the virtual and its various phenomena can be found in a variety of cultural practices, on many individual and social levels. However, while as old as virtuality may seem, it never ceases to insight and inspire new interpretations, agencies, and channels for its (pseudo)existence. Looking to the burgeoning plethora of vehicles that technology, namely information technologies, and new media are manifesting today, we see new, amended forms and functions of the virtual; new ways to experience the world afforded by the state of virtuality. Delocalization and disembodiment Virtual reality and telematics open up the opportunity for…( Incomplete). New cybercultures are popping up on every virtual corner of cybersociety. With an ever-increasing role of virtual experience and virtual being in cyberspace, there is also an increasingly resonant impact on the constructs and the composition of social reality within this continuum.  From virtual death to telegardens, the virtual is transforming the way we live and exist in “somewhere-nowhere”. Part of the reason virtuality seems to be such an widely used anthropological concept is because of its paradoxical and pluralistic nature. Depending one who you ask in what context, the term ‘virtual’ can allude to potentiality or possibility or it can contrast and oppose the actuality and/or reality.  While there is no steadfast absolute, it becomes critical to understand the idea of virtuality on its various phenomenological, ontological, and epistemological terms.  For the context of this research I will use virtual in the context of Gilles Deleuze. Clair Colebrook offers a concise summary of the basis for Deleuze’s virtuality: Deleuze, like many writers of the twentieth century, regarded western thought in general as being dominated by the dogmas of common sense and representation (Deleuze 1994).  The very concept of thought as representation assumes that there is some objective, present, real and external world that is then re-presented by thought, as though there were a passive picture or copy of the world.  There would be an actual world (the real), and then there is a virtual and secondary copy.  Both the actual and the virtual are real, and the virtual is not subordinate to the real. On the contrary, the virtual is the univocal plane of past, present, and future; the totality of all that is, was and will be.  It is therefore an open totality or whole, never fully given or completed.  The virtual can then be actualised in specific forms (Colebrook 2002, p. 1). From this perspective, the virtual is not opposed to the real, but a possibility within the real. The virtual can encompass imagination, dreams, myth, and story.  Also the virtual can become a potential state or plane.  In this way virtuality can encompass digital media and other coded structures of information or knowledge that exist in abstract form. It is important to emphasis that virtuality is not a representative code in itself, as its manifestation in virtual reality systems or interfaces may preclude.  Rather, it is the space-state that allows for the fruition and development of these ideas (codes, symbolisms, languages, structures, etc. ). For the purpose of this research I will focalise around virtuality as it is exhibited or actualised by new media. In particular I will look more towards the affect of virtuality via new media, rather than the specific instances such as the Internet and virtual reality, to define how virtuality implicates contemporary aesthetics.  However, it is still important to understand how specific media such as the Internet operates in the transcodification of aesthetics via virtuality.

References:

Colebrook, C. (2002). Understanding Deleuze. Crows Nest, Australia: Allen & Unwin.

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press.

My pre-proposal for admission to ECU for PhD research. This outlines my research interests in roughly 1000 words.

Date:     30 July, 2007
From:    Nathan Allan Stevens
To:    Graduate Research School; SCCA,ECU
Re:    Graduate Research Proposal
____________________________________________________________________________________

The following research proposal outlines the nature, intent, and scope of the proposed graduate research to be conducted at Edith Cowan University.

Nature & Intent of Research:

-I propose to conduct innovative research in the combined fields of New Media, Installation Art, and Contemporary Art Theory within the School of Communications and Contemporary Arts at Edith Cowan University. The proposed research approaches art and media from a platform on which both fields inter-exist as a dynamic coupling of contemporary philosophies and practices.

Comprised of various artistic, cultural, and technological investigations into the shifting contemporary paradigm of Self and the phenomenology of individual identity as impacted by postmodernism and the digital age, (i.e. technology, virtuality, new media), this research, entitled “Dissecting Tomorrow’s Phenomenological Self: An Interactive Model of the Post-historical Individual, confronts the evolving nature of self-experience and personal identity.  With a critical focus on the post-historical practice of the individual within a “digital Pangaea”, my research will examine and dissect our experience of Self in the context of identity creation/formation/expression, contemporary ideology, mediated communication, and a future global community.

Proposing questions such as, “How has humanity’s progression into a post-historical, digital age altered the phenomena of personal identity construction and self-experience?”, “How has this impact influenced the processes of expression and communication of the individual?”, and “How are the phenomena of contemporary self-experience and artistic ideology paralleled in our interactions as individuals of a virtual global community?”, this research responds to the contemporary scenario of individuality enveloped by a complex, digital society and the evolutionary socio-technological conditions within that community. Additionally, this project seeks the future ramifications of an evolving actual vs. virtual construct embedded in our post-historical understanding of self-existence, and how this paradigm affects contemporary ideologies of individual practice and creative process.

The intent of this research is to investigate and engage in an internal dialogue of personal identity within the individual as we respond to the advent of new, virtual means of existence in our contemporary social spheres. Moreover, the proposed research will assist in further developing an experiential knowledge base on the effects of technology on identity formation and the phenomena of self-experience in a post-historical context.

As postmodernism advances into a post-historical age, overwhelmingly adapted to a mandatory integration of new technology, it becomes increasingly necessary to examine and critique the roles these shifts play in our individual identities; and how this change impacts our social functions, intercommunications, and expression as the individuals in an expanding digital environment. In order to promote future understanding and innovation in a contemporary society, we must introspectively examine how the information of today transcodes into the individual of tomorrow.

Scope & Methodology of Research:

The methodology of this research embraces study in a variety of disciplines, subjects, and themes that play vital roles in the formation and augmentation of identity and the resulting experience of one’s Self as impacted by contemporary society and new technology. These include: contemporary artistic practice/theory, new media, popular cultural, counter-culture, cultural aesthetics, communications, phenomenology, self psychology, sociology, philosophy of technology, among more specific topics such as Internet technologies that foster individual, communal, cultural identity, (i.e. virtual forums and communities, friend & business networks; P2P networks; etc.), mass media, intellectual property and ownership, virtuality, and digitization.

Various social experiments, interactive models, and post-autonomous events will be conducted to gather information on contemporary artistic practice and social phenomena of the individual in a post-historical context. Interviews with artists, critics, and audiences will be performed to gain necessary external observations. Additionally, this research will be augmented by the study of texts by influential authors such as Arthur Danto, G.W.F Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Dominic Strinati, Lev Manovich, Nicolas Negroponte, Theodor Nelson, Andrew Feenberg, Marshal McLuhan,  and Joseph Margolis. Contemporary and postmodern art icons such as Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci,  John Campbell, Nam June Paik, Maurizio Cattelan, Marcel DuChamp, Simon Starling, and Andy Warhol, among others, will also be of importance in examining the position of the artist in the context of this research.

The facilities and equipment required to conduct this research include: access to a media lab (e.g. preferably Apple platform with large scale printing facilities), a studio space with high-speed wireless Internet, public exhibition space, sculpture facilities (e.g. metal & wood fabrication), access to audio/ video equipment (e.g. digital video cameras, audio recording equipment, LCD video projectors, etc.).

Acting as the content of my work, the resulting conclusions will be illustrated to an audience via a formal exhibition(s) of a series of between 6-10 large scale artworks, (i.e. installations, interactive models, post-autonomous events, performances, etc.) incorporating various video, audio, Internet technologies, and physical computing components, coupled with strong performative aspects. Addressing the chosen sub-themes, e.g., identity creation/formation/expression, interpersonal communication, popular virtual culture, autonomy, and community, these artworks will demonstrate the innate phenomenological nature of contemporary technology and it’s interface with personal identity in the post-historical present.  Furthermore, these works will raise additional inquiry on the existence and experience of the constructs and processes of the individual as affected by tomorrow’s impending virtual future.