The Vectors online journal is a magazine that discusses world and domestic events that have contemporary resonance with issues of art and technology. The journal's title does an excellent job in explaining the format for the arguments. Though strait-forward texts preface each of the articles with an Editor's Introduction and an Artist's Statement, each of the essays is in a relatively interactive multimedia format that best illustrates and delineates the points and the material. "Blue Velvet" directs the user through a series of arguments that are separated by an interlude of falling words, however, the user has no control of the order in which these arguments are read. "Killer Entertainments", however, presents a series of videos that are presented in three screens and though each screen has videos in succession, the user may watch any of the screens in any order as well as cycling through the videos at her/his leisure; each video has text that, by a vector, is suggested reading.
New Orleans was, prior to Katrina, a predominantly Black city; women also outnumbered the men. It was seen as a quintessentially American city, a bohemian one: a city that produced jazz, birthed the Delta Blues, and made much of America cringe. However, the Contemporary New Orleans, our New Orleans, is home to a majorities of Caucasians and Men, unlikely to produce any new art, unlikely to embarrass the rest of the country. The essay, designed by Erik Loyer, is set-up with a floating, swaying, drifting city/seascape that has words, words like delimitation or covenants, cascading upon it. Some words can be clicked, these are the titles of each of the twenty-four chapters. As the chapter title is clicked, the user is plunged beneath the the surface of the city/seascape into the depths of the argument, of the problem; alongside, the audio that is paired with the image is shifted from an uneasy water world into a roiling drum loop. The prose, written by David Theo Goldberg and Stefka Hristova, has the feel of a playful lamentation, like David Foster Wallace on a cheerful day. They use complicated phrasing ripe with adjectives as nouns and switch their adjectives and nouns to change the meaning of the phrase and deepen the meaning the chosen words. They reference Salmon Rushdie, Lucinda Williams, and Albert King among those cited. They use blues phrasing and rhyming, they begin with a breif portrait of the city and 24 chapters along end by re-dressing it. The city's Blue Velvet, "too soft to touch," is replaced by a Homogenous, prescribed whiteness, blankness. The words themselves are not always printed in uniform size and format: they sometimes jump across lines or break off at phrases or schew into one another or drift toward the top of the screen, partially obscured. Though the delivery is playful, the subject is grave. Racism, Goldberg and Hristova argue, is at fault for the Catastrophe that cast Katrina, a hurricane, as the enemy. The Catastrophe is not just a natural disaster or a social crisis but a complication of both by timing. Racism, though not as public as the days of Jim Crow, is a product of corporate redlining that uses business statistics to racially profile and discriminate inidividuals as investment risks. The essay is about racism and Neo-Liberalism, the writers's word for Bush-ite privitization, but uses the city's former disposition to the artistic as a vehicle for this essay, which in itself is a sort of Blues.
"Killer Entertainments" on the other hand is directly about a technology, its wartime uses and the technology spawned from those uses. The user is directed through a series of videos shot by soldiers in Iraq, each video is linked to texts that describe the geographical area shown in the movie and describe a concern that is depicted or raised by the movie. The user is control, though. S/he may watch the movies in any order and read the texts with the suggested video or at any interval. The videos are taken from weapon-, helmet-, vehicle-, and hand-held cameras; some are taken from terrorist websites, some are used as models for video games. Words are flown over the video players and the user can click on them to be expanded or just wait until they fly off again, the wrds are fleeting. Sometimes these words are breif excerpts of dialogue from the video, "fuck these bitches up," sometimes an explanation of how the video was edited to look less haldheld and boringly linear, "B-Roll." The final argument here is much more complex and than that of "Blue Velvet," the user is not directed toward a specific conclusion but is given an information set about a technology using various technologies, sources, and media. A conclusion maybe drawn during the reading of one text but over turned by the issues raised by the next video. Perhaps the inclusion of an anecdote about a 60 Minutes interview will shape the user's opinion of the use of video and media in War, perhaps it won't. The goal seems less about persauding than about informing, the user is left with an impression of the uses for these videos, but the opinion about whether it is ultimately good or bad is entirely up to her/him.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
On ACT/REACT or Why I don't Chew Gum (Normally)
Milwaukee Art Museum's ACT/REACT exhibit offers a glimpse of the art that may be on a quickly approaching horizon, interactive installations. These pieces all engage with technology and question the roles of the artist and observer, as per John McKinnon's point. Where Marcel Duchamp's work, and many of the pieces by other artists in the Sensory Overload exhibit, deal with these questions by creating art that was ordered and assembled in a shop, or asks the observer to bring their own experiences of life and art museums to a piece. Like those pieces, the ACT/REACT exhibit demands the same of visitors, only in a more physical manner; Camille Utterback's Untitled series and Janet Cardiff's To Touch especially engage these specific questions.
Utterback's work uses a computer program and sensor matrix to project a "painting" based on the broad and subtle movements of an observer. The images are abstract and shifting, allowing an observer to engage with the visual contributions of the previous one. This is entertaining and novel, especially in an art gallery. Where interactive art is common place within the popular culture in the form of the video game, Art Museums have been slow on the uptake. ACT/REACT replaces a Wii-mote with cameras and sensor matrixes, creating complicated computer programs that interpret an observer's image or movements. These installations creatively engage a viewer for a short-time, but unlike a story-based video-game or many of the pieces in Sensory Overload, they fail to engage the viewer for a lengthy period of time. Unlike video games, Utterback's work is to let the observer actually create an image; however, the actual work of art is the computing program and installation, the projection is a sort of by-product of the craftsmanship to engage an audience. Though more complicated than the programs of Snow Mirror or Healing #1, Utterback's work is similar to the paintings of Jacques Louis David, impressive in the technical realm, but not very interesting. Also like David's work, Utterback's work is most profound within the context of art history as a step to an interactive art that is ultimately more engaging and satisfying.
The one exception to this is Cardiff's To Touch. This piece connects two artistic elements through the observer's touch: a weathered wooden table and audio. The table, alone in a room, stands alone as sculpture, the observer reaches across normal boundaries of acceptability when viewing sculpture and touches it. That act then transforms the piece by introducing the audio element. Intimate voices, swelling music and other soundbites become tied to portions of the table through the visitor. The pocked and cracked surface of the table pairs a specific feel (a sense very often neglected by the fine arts) with these sounds; it feels as if the visitor is brushing these sounds out of the textured wood. Had this piece been just the table, it would have engaged the observer with many of the same questions of appropriation and technology that Duchamp did. The audio alone as an installation would have questioned the need for an image and quotidian nature of hearing. And an audio collage that is based on movements of an observer would have been uninterestingly similar to David Rokeby's Very Nervous System (most of the ACT/REACT exhibit seem to be banal, visual variations of Rokeby's work, Utterback's the most so). But, when these elements are paired through the physical act, the Visitor creates connections between sensory experience of touching, the visual impact of the table, and the shifting soundscapes they are eliciting. The subtlety and complexity of To Touch engage art history and the arguments of McKinnon in a much more meaningful way than the rest of the exhibit.
The other pieces, like Healing #1, Deep Walls, and Echo Evolution, engage the visitor and the questions of art and interactivity in relation to art in much less interesting or memorable ways. The greatest strength of these and the other pieces in the show is novelty. Viewers' certainly enjoy themselves when walking through, past and over the various exhibits, but the experience is quickly lost as s/he moves onto the next piece of technological wizardry. Like a paint by numbers kit that is in the style of Van Gogh or the tasted pleasure of chewing gum, there is little lasting effect of ACT/REACT, aside from To Touch.
Utterback's work uses a computer program and sensor matrix to project a "painting" based on the broad and subtle movements of an observer. The images are abstract and shifting, allowing an observer to engage with the visual contributions of the previous one. This is entertaining and novel, especially in an art gallery. Where interactive art is common place within the popular culture in the form of the video game, Art Museums have been slow on the uptake. ACT/REACT replaces a Wii-mote with cameras and sensor matrixes, creating complicated computer programs that interpret an observer's image or movements. These installations creatively engage a viewer for a short-time, but unlike a story-based video-game or many of the pieces in Sensory Overload, they fail to engage the viewer for a lengthy period of time. Unlike video games, Utterback's work is to let the observer actually create an image; however, the actual work of art is the computing program and installation, the projection is a sort of by-product of the craftsmanship to engage an audience. Though more complicated than the programs of Snow Mirror or Healing #1, Utterback's work is similar to the paintings of Jacques Louis David, impressive in the technical realm, but not very interesting. Also like David's work, Utterback's work is most profound within the context of art history as a step to an interactive art that is ultimately more engaging and satisfying.
The one exception to this is Cardiff's To Touch. This piece connects two artistic elements through the observer's touch: a weathered wooden table and audio. The table, alone in a room, stands alone as sculpture, the observer reaches across normal boundaries of acceptability when viewing sculpture and touches it. That act then transforms the piece by introducing the audio element. Intimate voices, swelling music and other soundbites become tied to portions of the table through the visitor. The pocked and cracked surface of the table pairs a specific feel (a sense very often neglected by the fine arts) with these sounds; it feels as if the visitor is brushing these sounds out of the textured wood. Had this piece been just the table, it would have engaged the observer with many of the same questions of appropriation and technology that Duchamp did. The audio alone as an installation would have questioned the need for an image and quotidian nature of hearing. And an audio collage that is based on movements of an observer would have been uninterestingly similar to David Rokeby's Very Nervous System (most of the ACT/REACT exhibit seem to be banal, visual variations of Rokeby's work, Utterback's the most so). But, when these elements are paired through the physical act, the Visitor creates connections between sensory experience of touching, the visual impact of the table, and the shifting soundscapes they are eliciting. The subtlety and complexity of To Touch engage art history and the arguments of McKinnon in a much more meaningful way than the rest of the exhibit.
The other pieces, like Healing #1, Deep Walls, and Echo Evolution, engage the visitor and the questions of art and interactivity in relation to art in much less interesting or memorable ways. The greatest strength of these and the other pieces in the show is novelty. Viewers' certainly enjoy themselves when walking through, past and over the various exhibits, but the experience is quickly lost as s/he moves onto the next piece of technological wizardry. Like a paint by numbers kit that is in the style of Van Gogh or the tasted pleasure of chewing gum, there is little lasting effect of ACT/REACT, aside from To Touch.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
On Everson's The Golden Age of Fish, the soundtrack inparticular
"Fragmented" is, perhaps, the best descriptor for The Golden Age of Fish. Images of a protagonist speaking of cleaning products, catching footballs, and falling, presumably of murder, are the major visual refrains of Kevin Jerome Everson's The Age of Fish. Voice-overs tell viewers of the hazards of the cleaning products, the history of Cleveland shale, and a murder suicide case. The soundtrack is similarly fragmented: it clicks and hisses with technical failure, it hums and pulses with angst and tension, it swells and falls with sadness. In his introduction to the film Everson called the piece the experience of viewing a landscape from a distance.
Unlike the goals of most soundtracks, Everson's purposely draws the viewers attention to its own artifice, not allowing viewers into the world of the fragmented narrative. Everson seems to assume that the repetition of images, multiple film stocks, and other experimental strategies are not enough to keep the viewer from becoming immersed in the story, the place. The keep the distance of the viewer as his own childhood viewing Cleveland from a small, safe, town, he uses a musical score that eschews any song structures and utilizes little tonality. Just when a a recognizeable chord would make itself whole, full of longing, a sharp electronic pop of an amp cable being pulled would break it up and a new set of creaks and whistles would begin to build.
Other sequences would just use synchronous sound as the protagonist walks down a street. The recording device was tinny and harsh, so the city symphony of passing cars and construction work became an unbearable din of urban pollution and consumption.
Everson mentioned that wanted to shoot the Cleveland landscape as if it was, in and of itself, a suspect in the crimes the film's outline. His grainy rendering of billboards, storefronts, and alleyways certainly put the viewer into a place of suspicion toward the landscape. However, it is this tuneless, grating sound that invokes a certain righteous anger toward the content of these images.
Some sequences contain little or no soundtrack outside of a voiceover speaking about shale. This sterile, facutal reading over certain images fails to create any sense of peace with in the viewer (this viewer, specifically). Instead, geology becomes a bone of contention. Science itself is a suspect in a cosmic conspiracy against a Woman and her maniacal lover. When the soundtrack kicks back in with the disquieting noises the viewers are even more likely to suspect the city and its geology.
Unlike the goals of most soundtracks, Everson's purposely draws the viewers attention to its own artifice, not allowing viewers into the world of the fragmented narrative. Everson seems to assume that the repetition of images, multiple film stocks, and other experimental strategies are not enough to keep the viewer from becoming immersed in the story, the place. The keep the distance of the viewer as his own childhood viewing Cleveland from a small, safe, town, he uses a musical score that eschews any song structures and utilizes little tonality. Just when a a recognizeable chord would make itself whole, full of longing, a sharp electronic pop of an amp cable being pulled would break it up and a new set of creaks and whistles would begin to build.
Other sequences would just use synchronous sound as the protagonist walks down a street. The recording device was tinny and harsh, so the city symphony of passing cars and construction work became an unbearable din of urban pollution and consumption.
Everson mentioned that wanted to shoot the Cleveland landscape as if it was, in and of itself, a suspect in the crimes the film's outline. His grainy rendering of billboards, storefronts, and alleyways certainly put the viewer into a place of suspicion toward the landscape. However, it is this tuneless, grating sound that invokes a certain righteous anger toward the content of these images.
Some sequences contain little or no soundtrack outside of a voiceover speaking about shale. This sterile, facutal reading over certain images fails to create any sense of peace with in the viewer (this viewer, specifically). Instead, geology becomes a bone of contention. Science itself is a suspect in a cosmic conspiracy against a Woman and her maniacal lover. When the soundtrack kicks back in with the disquieting noises the viewers are even more likely to suspect the city and its geology.
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