CAA Reviews "Electronic Superhighway: From Experiments in Art and Technology to Art After the Internet," Whitechapel Art Gallery London Jan 2017 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Art and the Internet 1994 - 2014. Notes and Comments
Megarave - Metarave, 2014
Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of artists with a focus on desktop-based practices decided, where possible, to leave the technologies at home when they were invited to exhibitions. Software was converted into prints, videos, installations; performative media hacks were documented and presented in set-ups inspired by the ways in which conceptual and performance art manifest themselves in physical space; and the early adopters of the “post-internet” label, whose practice mainly consisted in appropriating and reframing internet content and playing with the defaults of desktop-based tools, naturally looked at video, print and installation as media to operate in physical space. This text has been commissioned for and first published in Megarave - Metarave, exhibition catalogue, Kunsthaus Langenthal / WallRiss Friburg 2014, pp. 37 - 46. Re-published in Domenico Quaranta, AFK, Link Editions, Brescia 2016, pp. 8 - 22
Exhibiting the Analogue, Exhibiting the Digital: Afterthoughts on an exhibition
2019
Drawing from the exhibition "Fast Forward to the Analogue: vintage immersions" (Project Space, University of London Galleries, 2 July - 3 September 2019), the present edited volume investigates the symbiotic relationship between digital and analogue practices in contemporary art. With contributions from the participating artists, curators, art historians, and researchers, it addresses the complexity of this relationship and the creative ways in which it be reconfigured.
Contemporary art: 1989 to the present
Choice Reviews Online, 2013
Inhabiting the technosphere. Art and technology beyond technical invention Prepublication Manuscript "Media convergence under digitality actually increases the centrality of the body as a framer of information: as media lose their material specificity, the body takes on a more prominent function as selective processor in the creation of images." 1 The body as a framer of information: This notion, presented in the introduction to Mark Hansen's 2004 New Philosophy of New Media, could also stand as an introduction to the general condition under which art after 1989 thinks, produces and engages with technology. It marks not just a shift in thinking that concerns our general understanding of media technologies and practices-but an equally significant shift taking place within the type of artistic practice where new media and information technologies are not just deployed but are themselves also objects of thinking, investigation and imagination. The 1 Timothy Lenoir, Foreword, in Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, MIT Press, 2004, xxii task for art history is then to try to understand the newly prominent mediatic body that emerges with this shift-to discover its various manifestations in artistic practice, as well as its implications for aesthetic theory. In particular, we need to conceptualize its double relation to, on the one hand, technological media and the realm of media production and, on the other hand the notion of the artistic medium. With this shift, several influential conceptions of the relation between art, technology and media may be questioned. Firstly, the notion of the body as a framer of information challenges some of the most influential theorizations of the cultural shift that took place in the 1990's, as the Internet became a global phenomenon and digital processing emerged as a communal platform for all previously separate media and technologies of expression. One was the marginalization of art in the realm of new media. Digital media leave aesthetics behind, Friedrich Kittler claimed, with all the apocalyptic gusto of the early computer age: In distinction to the consciousness-flow of film or audio tape, the algorithmic operations that underpin information processing happen at a level that has no immediate correlate to the human perceptual system. Humans had created a non-human realm that made obsolete any idea of art based on the sense apparatus. And this turn of events was related to the way in which technologies of the information age severed any tangible connection with human existence beyond what pertains to the control practices of capitalist superpowers, notably warfare, surveillance and superficial entertainment or visual "eyewash". 2 Yet, against Kittler's bleak description of posthuman technologies it could be argued that information will still necessarily have to be processed by human bodies-even if the interaction between the human perceptual
Round table: the projected image in Contemporary Art
October, 2003
As anyone who currently visits galleries and museums knows, image/sound installations employing projection technologies or monitorswhat we are referring to here, for the sake of shorthand, as "projected image" installations-are ubiquitous in contemporary art. George Baker and I have organized this round table in order to address this phenomenon: its causes; its significance, both aesthetic and social, for the artist, for the viewer, for the traditional mediums and institutions of film, painting, and sculpture; its economic rationale; and, we hope, much more. We have invited the following here because of their expertise with this form or "medium": Matthew Buckingham is a young artist who works with film; Chrissie Iles, who as curator of film and video at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is intimately and perhaps uniquely familiar with projected image work in both the art world and the avant-garde film and video world; and Anthony McCall is the creator of seminal projected image works in the 1970s such as Line Describing a Cone [1973]. We are wondering what insights you can give us and our readers into this phenomenon. Hal Foster: Perhaps we should start, if we can, with a genealogical sketch of artists' interest in the projected image, and within that genealogy a typology, because there are all kinds of projected images-image installations, cinema, video, digital, etc.-and it's important to keep in mind the differences between them. Chrissie Iles: Mechanical reproduction, of course, has been important to artists since it first emerged in the nineteenth century. In fact, we should go further back to the eighteenth century, when artists were dealing with the camera obscura on the one hand, and the panorama on the other. Both can be cited as the precursors of the twentieth-century artistic concern with both the projection of an image in space, and the three-dimensionality of experiencing an image in space. In the nineteenth century, painters such as Degas, Munch, and Eakins used photography very much in the way painters in the previous century used the camera obscura to aid their painting. In the 1920s, Duchamp is interested in the temporal experiments of Muybridge and Marey. His film and OCTOBER 104, Spring 2003, pp. 71-96. ? 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. OCTOBER his rotating discs, along with Man Ray and Leger's films, constitute a brief moment in France when film and motion were explored by artists working in other media. Richter, Eggeling, and Ruttmann introduced abstraction into film, and parallels between film and painting began to emerge-abstract painting and abstract film emerge at the same moment, both in reaction to pictorialist conventions. In America during the 1930s and 1940s, filmmakers such as Feininger, John and James Whitney, and others experimented with abstract film, and searched for a Kandinsky-like fusion between art, film, and music, trying to create a synthesis between image, sound, and color. The end of World War II marked a new phase in experimental film, as filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas, Oscar Peterson, Ken Jacobs, and Stan Brakhage took up the newly available 16mm film camera from a background in the novel and poetry. Their cinema was derived from a poetic or literary idea of personal expression, and an interest in language. The importance of literature and language was also strongly evident in Beat films of the 1950s, including the cut-up films involving William Burroughs, and in films such as Pull My Daisy [1958] and Shirley Clarke's films, such as The Cool World [1963]. In the 1960s, Warhol was the key figure in the reconnection between film and painting. His shift from painting toward film was influenced directly by the filmmakerJack Smith and the painter and filmmaker Marie Menken, who appeared in films such as Chelsea Girls [1966]. Mechanical reproduction, derived from film and photography, was applied to painting in Pop art. Meanwhile, in films such as Empire [1964], Warhol slowed film down to stasis, at the same time as Minimalism was introducing a phenomenological, syncretic viewing experience into sculpture. It was at this point, in the mid-1960s, that artists, mainly sculptors, began to use film. Some employed it simply as documentation of performance and happenings. Others incorporated it into their conceptual practice, such as Mel Bochner and Robert Moskowitz's New York Windows [1966], or, like Richard Serra, used it as part of a broader, process-based approach to sculptural issues. At the same time, Structural filmmakers such as Anthony, Paul Sharits, Michael Snow, Ernie Gehr, and Hollis Frampton were exploring many of the same concerns, although Sharits' films remained very connected with painting, especially multiple screen pieces like Shutter Interface [1975], which demonstrates a recurrence of the attempt to fuse color and sound. In the late 1970s and 1980s, narrative began to reassert itself in the work of both experimental filmmakers and artists. In both experimental film and video, and among artists working with film, a shift occurred toward increasingly complex narratives and away from structural ideas, or processbased explorations of space. Filmmakers such as Ken Jacobs and Ernie Gehr were the exception to the rule, however, as were filmmakers such as Peter Hutton, who created, and still create, filmic tableaux that evoke the still 72 The Projected Image in Contemporary Art photographic image. There are no clear-cut breaks, and each successive decade contains both the residue of the last, and the seeds of the next. The 1990s, I think, saw the fulfillment of Marshall McLuhan's predictions of the 1960s. McLuhan described the nineteenth century as being obsessed with privacy, and the twentieth century as being obsessed with communication. Craigie Horsfield pointed out recently that film is essentially a socializing medium. We constantly ask each other, "What film have you seen? Did you like the new so-and-so?" Everybody wants to share their experiences of seeing a narrative film. Film creates a kind of connective tissue, socially and culturally, much more than anything else-novels or TV, for instance. I think that artists' use of film in the 1990s, particularly popular Hollywood film, is partly to do with wanting to engage with, and perhaps influence, the connective tissue that film creates, and participate in a common language of communication. George Baker: How useful, though, is this genealogy of continuity-the long entanglement of art and mechanical reproduction-for understanding contemporary developments around the projected image? Are there, in fact, new situations or new conditions now that a narrative of continuity, in a sense, does not acknowledge? Shouldn't we pay attention to the historical differences between the periods of film's insurgency into the art world? If we lookjust to the 1960s and '70s, and the present moment-with the lacuna of the '80s being in fact significant for a genealogy looking more for ruptures, discontinuities-I don't so much see a shared dialogue between painting and film as I do moments of intense technological transformation that have the effect of revivifying work on film. In the '60s and '70s, you have the rise of new electronic media such as TV and video, which have a freeing effect on artistic explorations and uses of film. And since the '90s, we see that new digital media have had a similar effect. But the junctures-technological, historical-are radically different. Foster: The use of such media in both periods is often very funky, as if they were already secondhand, almost outmoded. There are usually two dynamics at these new technological moments. There are artists who want to push the futuristic freedoms of new media, and others who want to look at what this apparent leap forward opens up in the past, the obsolete. Iles: The emergence of digital technology has, paradoxically, led to an increased activity in film. Baker: That's my point exactly. lies: A lot of artists today are making life very difficult for themselves, technically speaking, using obscure film stocks and film loopers. Not everyone wants to work with the electronic digital medium. Matthew Buckingham: I think this is true. I think much of the contemporary interest in cinema within the art world is due to the rich familiarity with its history, which can be mined for its resonance with viewers. The contrast cinema provides to newer media is also very rich, in many ways. Returning to older
WALKING TOWARDS THE LIGHT. ART IN THE MID-EIGHTIES TO THE MID-NINETIES
Da compreensão da arte ao estudo da história da arte, hoje.
We have noted the importance of the exhibition Les Immatériaux-Modernes, et après? (at the Georges Pompidou Center) which would ultimately prove a watershed, stating clear intentions as to the change of values-the key ingredient in the genesis of Postmodernity. In the words of its main curator, Jean-François Lyotard, the exhibition did not intend to be more than "(…) une expo pédagogique-expliquer par exemple les nouvelles technologies (...), mais une expo qui soit une oeuvre d'art. De viser donc non pas la capacité d'acquisition d'un public mais plutôt sa sensibilité, c'est-à-dire un sentiment esthétique." Les Immatériaux took on the role of artistic form based on science, presenting itself for enjoyment. Not just the creator's enjoyment, at least not first and foremost; instead, it offered itself to a wide audience. Thus began a praxis that would send ripples across the history of art over the following decade: the curator as artist, as creator. At the core, Les Immatériaux had global claims on the avowal of complexity, and even though mass computerization was not yet a reality, it was intended that the mass audience should get to grips with a host of "…dispositifs technologiques en passe de constituer notre environnement et une nouvelle écologie de l'esprit". The exhibition is underpinned by philosophy , concept, science and aesthetic, committed to the "recherche de la recherche", accepting the uncertainty of concepts. It is the acme of all exhibitions of super-modernity, to some, or a second stage in postmodernity to others: a place of passage, a wandering through realities and eras, where borders, not tightly upheld, come to fade naturally-bereft of the support of ideology, theory and even matter. The airtight compartments that seal off fields of research make no sense on the virtual plane. In Les Immatériaux, different sites embody different contexts. The same now happens when we browse the internet, looking at site after site. Favoring what can be sensed rather than what can merely be seen (this is a fundamental operation), the goal is to achieve total involvement, engagement with the multiple senses of the human. Les Immatériaux is above all a course in reflection in perception. As Martine Moinot would have it: "(...) la mise en espace, repose sur l'idée de 'parcours' réflexifs / perceptifs, qui se déplacent de questions en questions, et non pas d'objets en objets proposés comme des références. La perception dans le parcours de l'expo ne doit pas fonctionner uniquement sur le visible, mais plus largement sur le sensible."
Out of Hand: Materializing the Digital (exhibition review)
Journal of Modern Craft, 2017
Digital tools deployed in art, science, fashion, design, and architecture are the primary focus of Out of Hand. The exhibition’s Australian version brings together in excess of 90 objects with content from the American exhibition shown alongside new material inspired by Australia’s Pacific Rim location. The MAAS exhibition uses an adapted exhibition title, dropping “postdigital” in favor of “digital” and instead adding a seventh theme: Analog to Postdigital. The change is more than antipodean semantics. Instead, it indicates the curious tension around the ubiquity of digital strategies felt in developed economies worldwide.
A Portrait of the Computer as a Young Artist
IAFOR Journal of Cultural Studies
From Emojis to Manga, from western adverts to "foreign" brand consciousness, visual products are continuing their near instantaneous circulation around the globe. Especially their apparent "naturalness" and freedom from translation is appealing. But here also lies the problem: many of the consumers of these images are oblivious to the fact that these materials have been constructed by social actors with specific backgrounds and specific agendas in mind; thus, especially their "foreign" receptions create challenges, including ethical ones. In order to properly study these fairly new phenomena, a different kind of terminology is needed, not one that relies on older media concepts, but one that does them justice in terms of their contextual and technological complexity, multivalence and mobility. I will propose the term "VisionBytes" for these phenomena. These denote complex visual arrays, oftentimes of foreign cultural origin and consisting of still or moving images. They circulate within a system of non-photography as sketched by François Laruelle (2013) and are akin to the "objects" described in Quentin Meillassoux' Beyond Finitude (2010). Invariably, they touch on issues of belonging, identity, exclusion, globalisation, human and AI rights, all points featuring strongly in this text. Already today, these images have begun participating in the preparations for the gaze of the (technological) Other, of a possible singularity which for the first time will allow humans to review themselves and thus be seen by non-human intelligent others, a trajectory already taking its course. As so often, art is at the forefront of these mediated upheavals. In the final part of the article, I will examine a number of recent art pieces/installations from a 2016 Art Fair in Shanghai, from the 2017 Dokumenta 14 in Kassel, and from an ongoing internet project. These select pieces all point to an ever more life-permeating media future where wanting to merely live with media will never do.
Evental Aesthetics, 2021
Frankfurt School thinkers were among the first to reflect upon mass culture under capitalism as an aesthetic-political force, proposing that mass cultural forms may either iterate or subvert the normative perspective of an audience. In our present attempts to grasp the aesthetic-political consequences of contemporary mass culture, it seems wise not only to retrace the history of this inquiry, but also to mine it. Drawing upon Siegfried Kracauer's 1925 essay "The Mass Ornament," I consider the aesthetic-political force of digital graphics interchange formatting or, the GIF. I suggest GIFs are a hyperbolic expression of the phenomenon Kracauer diagnosed as the "mass ornament": an aesthetic that both informed and exposed the connection between material reality and a way of seeing. On Kracauer's account, the mass ornament was iterative of a normative perspective, but it also invited the possibility of critical self-encounter among its audience. Retracing his diagnosis of the mass ornament, I submit Kracauer offered a heuristic that is illuminating for us today as we theorize the aesthetic-political impact of the GIF.