A Lecture delivered at NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, September 13, 1996, 14:00-16:00

I am a war child; I was born just before the European conflict began in 1937. At the end of the war I was about eight years old. Europe looked like a pile of junk, it was completely destroyed and on that landscape there laid all these dead war machines. I lived across a large airfield full of dead airplanes. So all we did, me and my gang, was to go and forage these airplanes. We would perform autopsy on them, we would even find that the machines had secrets. There were certain compartments, dedicated to the survival of the pilot, and stashed there was food and blankets, also a gun, a loaded gun. So we knew all about these details and this was basically my obsession from the age of eight to about the age of ten. I believe that this interest in machines was imprinted on me from that early time. I continue to do the same as I did then. I drive around in the southwest of the United States and stop at the graveyards of airplanes and look at what's in them, this vast, vast area of dead airplanes, each with its own secrets.

After the war, we all grew up in a utopian streak. We all believed that the world was not perfect, that in fact it was deeply unjust because the war and its consequences showed us that this was not a good world and we better change it. This coincides with a certain belief in the Left, so as a generation we migrated towards definition of a certain change. But before we grew into adults, the idea of social change had been transformed into the dreadful and oppressive system called socialism or communism. At that time my generation moderated the view that in life one always lives by two opposite ideas: One, that social change is necessary and underlies one's activity, the other that continuously criticizes that belief. We seem to be constantly suspended in this dichotomy of a reform movement and a contemplative criticism of reform -- each being destroyed by the other.

The only way to escape from an assigned job in the socialist system was to seek higher education. So, my idea of going to film school was motivated basically by survival, because to stay in the factory meant a certain intellectual death. I was lucky to escape into film school, and it was there that I got my education in art. Soon I understood that film has certain rules, like specific ideas of dramatic structure, which did not sit well with me. I find it very difficult to create a dramatic structure, like a conflict between two entities. For that reason, I never bonded with film. The only part of film I truly liked was editing. Editing evokes autonomous, self-generating structures. Instead of building dramatic structures, one can build independent units which relate to dramatic narratives, but which are more versatile and fluid. This is comparable to ‘automatic text’ in literature, which in its time discovered all the abilities of generating text without preconceived or pre-structured, syntactic sets. The automatic text was generated by drawing certain words from a hat and then placing them onto a particular page as for example the Futurists did. It was also in this subconscious mode that you could produce work by simply doing it and not really thinking about it.

These two autonomous processes are very much like music, because music usually comes from a different source. It is not a premeditated state, it is assembled by intuitive processes, and the building of melodies and harmonies eventually becomes a very abstract - architectural. I had understood this very early on in film, but found that I had nothing to add. Film became a closed discipline and when I moved to the United States, I tried very briefly to work in film and in fact worked as an editor, but I was never tempted by the dramatic films of Hollywood. So, I stayed in fact on the other side, as an independent image-maker--- first as a filmmaker, then videomaker.

The medium of video was a coincidence for me, one that set me free from the confinement of film and gave me the opportunity to look into a field that was completely undeveloped. It was unmarked, and free, without criticism, without tradition and without strategy. This was very much a continuation of my knowledge of sound work, and in no time I understood that electronic sound and electronic image come from the same source, and are in fact made of the same material. So, this was my first introduction to electronic material. Now, if I refer to electronic material, it is a paradox because electronics or electronic codes are immaterial. They do not possess the physicality of film, where the film actually moves and where is the action of an apparatus. There is also a certain action of light, making the system truly physical. In the electronic world, we construct every single component of all the frames and their changes by using time and energy and by containing energy in time. In this sense, we can describe images as ‘wave forms’ -- a term which we inherited from electronic sound making, because wave forms manifest as sounds. The basic wave forms are sine, triangle, and square -- but in video they are very complex, and they represent images.

*** Stills from The Matter

*** Stills from Grazing

Grazing:

This is a television frame, and this television frame is suspended in electro-magnetic fields. Normally the frame is drawn line by line from top to bottom, with what we call a television ‘raster’. However, if you use other wave forms, which are in this case sine waves, that interfere with the existing wave form, you can bend the television frame, and you can alter the normal display of television into a cylindrical shape, for example. These two sheep in Iceland are grazing on the seaweed during a low tide.

Now, by applying the wave forms we could also arrange this particular screen in a spherical way. This was the first time I experienced that a third-dimension is possible in the electronic world. Once you introduce the codes for the image, it is easy to alter it. In film you would have to use animation to reprogram the whole space, but in the electronic world you simply alter the energy and time, and that is how you alter the shape of your images. You can also take the energy of the image and whatever is bright in the image translates it into a magnetic pull or push. This process of recoding the signal from one state to another became the leitmotif in my video exploration for the next few years. Since then I have stayed with video a long time and created a large body of work dealing with the basic electronic phenomenology.

After this particular experience of the analog period, as I call it, it was clear that the next successive period would involve the computer, because my way of looking at the electronic image was in fact to follow the suggestion of the tool itself. In my case, the tool became the dominant and driving force in my work. I was not really concerned with what it meant in the art world, because, at that time, video was not considered an art form anyway. We still see this misunderstanding when the critics come to the gallery and see electronically generated material, whether they relate to it as a work from the video archive or ‘look down at it’ from the standpoint of Art. But that early period was extraordinarily free of these judgments, and those of us working with these materials, were very much at ease. At the same time, it was clear that the computer world would suggest new ways.

It was also clear that certain types of technology existed in certain places, like on Canal Street in New York. I began collecting certain military technological equipment related to a particular strategy of the war machine. At that time I was still preoccupied with the concepts of time and energy, which did not initially seem to apply to these objects. But they were an interesting type of hardware, so I collected them anyway. I collected many machines which I did not use until a few years ago. Even now I am asking myself why I collected these things. At that time, I had no answer, it was an intuitive process; it was the continuation of my adolescent interest that had become my own private collection. Then the computer brought an interesting paradox into my experience.

It wasn't by presenting a new image that the computer became important to me, but rather it was the new suggested space. I understood that there was a certain modality that extended the language and the syntactic possibilities of film, but in a way that summarized film and added several important elements to it. For example, feedback was significant to all these processes, and the computer added a few new elements, like morphing, or various processes in which you could modulate one image by another. This was a kind of new vocabulary. But the most important part in my encounter with the computer was to discover a new space that you could create in this empty computer, a notion of distance, of perspective, of sound, of echo. Suddenly the whole process within the computer referred to all media. All the components of sound, image, motion, color, could be generated and controlled by code. The materiality of the operating process became a binary code translated to a numerical form, and through this code, it represented all media ---sound and image as such could be represented by the unified structure, namely the Code, or the Software, or the Program. This was for me very radical. This is a very special case, because everything until then had been dependent on physical conditions. Everything in front of the camera obscura, or photographic apparatus, and video camera originated from the world of light. But through the code we could assemble independent structures, which no longer related to the outside world becoming internalized and totally independent through internal operations of the computer.

Also, there are extraordinary opportunities for using particular sensorial or detecting inputs devices, which can be translated into data, changing the internal world of the computer by conditions around it. This is what we call interactivity: when one component interacts with another and is embedded in the code processing. Code is very interesting, since it has the ability to absorb all other codes to create increasingly more complex code. This malleability of configuration along with the sensorial environment asks for a new set of spatial syntax. Now I would like to show you my own personal laboratory.

Illustrations

Every artist who works in this medium has to experiment, so I have built my personal laboratory home. All of what you see is basically based on protocols between a human and a machine, or between machine and machine. These things are based on what we call serial protocol and every new type of machine, has a little microprocessor, in which the ability to receive outside information is embedded through various remote control devices, in this case a MIDI-interface of musical instruments. But MIDI-code is not just a musical code, it already contains certain elements of culturalization; it is a culturally initiated code. That means it has a tonal assignment, and as most of us have some musical education, we know that music is an intellectual endeavor. Engaging MIDI-code with its crescendo, decrescendo, ‘piano’ or ‘forte’ makes it easy to interface to other cultural modalities.

That's why it was very important to accept these already prepared codes and apply them. Especially in robotics where it is very difficult to organize codes, the whole operation of MIDI devices became extraordinarily fluid. This was my way of dealing with the world of machines, and in fact I have incorporated all of these conditions into my installations.

I would never claim that I make computer art, but in this particular case, I make a specific point in calling them ‘studies’. I really like the computer as a device with which to make variations, to make studies, but for me it does not really come to its own art form. I am using the same principle as in the previous image sequence with the sheep. I use the brightness of the image to elevate the surface from the two-dimensional into a three-dimensional image by a process of displacement. That means I assigned intensity of each point of the image and displaced it on the Z axis. In this case I keep increasing their number until the image disintegrates. This idea still interests me very much, and a lot of my studies are basically based on translation of the energy from one image form to another.

I also like to find some artifacts which are not normally seen, because, if you create those animations for a purpose, to indicate say, an industrial logo, you will bypass those strange pictures, because you are only interested in those that are meaningful.

Illustrations

Here I am using different processes in which one image influences the other image and even dislocates or disturbs the other image. Anyway this was the undefined space that was offered to me by the computer, strange space that interested me and also influenced my future work. And I started working with two basic spaces, one virtual and one actual, and this also had a very direct influence on the installations.

What I learned is that it is not easy to translate your mind from a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional space, especially as a film educated and film-dependent person, because I still recognize film as a very influential element in my life. I grew up with the notion of film as a dominant input into our way of thinking socially and aesthetically. But then of course film went into its own crisis, and film now is basically an industrial endeavor. When I grew up it was an art form that criticized other art forms. It was advanced, it actually was ahead of literature in the 1940s, but then film started to lose its edge, maybe mostly because of the strange explosion of popular culture and by the cost of film production. So, when film became the dominant medium of the popular culture there was no way for our kind to continue with film, we all had to move away to the shelter of art, which was initially not very receptive to moving images.

Galleries and museums usually present static images. Only lately, in the last few years has this idea of the electronic image and installation in its continuous dynamic state become acceptable. I wonder how and why moving images, rather than the single frame, have become the contemporary common expression. Virtually nobody I know works now with a single image. We have all moved to multiple images or images in dynamic state, or installations in which the image is only part of the whole composition. And again the object is moving towards the gallery because of the space, and the gallery or museum has become again an asylum for unusual ways of thinking. The popular culture has other interests, and its basic interest is to entertain the masses. So, coming from the 1960s when we thought the gallery world was dead and we would make our own world, suddenly, this world of galleries and museums is becoming a kind of an intellectual refuge, which is a very difficult thing to accept. The old dream of the modern movement at the beginning of the century was proclaiming: “let's abandon, let's eliminate the museums, let's burn them.” As Luis Bunuel, the film maker-surrealist said, “We wanted to change the world, but instead we changed art." And of course in our utopian way, because after the war it was clear that the world was not as it should be and we had a program--we had an interest in changing the world--but as you see now we are finding refuge in institutions. The whole idea of radical change of the world has become less and less possible, and this allegiance to the world of corporations is more and more probable.

I could use human elements in my installations but am as of yet unable to integrate any dramatic function of a human being into my environment. There is not much experience in sensing a kind of presence. I don't yet have an evolutionary place for people in my machine world. I am still struggling with machine to machine communication with interest in what the machines can teach me. This is my interest, has always been my interest. But when I am careless, people sneak into my art and eventually a face appears, but a face is too complex, even a hand is too complex to deal with. To introduce into the machine world human psychology is a problem, because all my life I have been trying to avoid human psychology in my work. I am sure there will be others who use people, because people use people in almost 100 percent of their art.

The question of a machine I take purely as an ethical issue, because the machine is basically indifferent to our needs and wishes, especially those machines that are not yet written about. Of course they deliver some kind of message, but new media, as in the case of television when it was new, was something extraordinarily pure, undefined, and innocent. So, when McLuhan said "the medium is the message" certainly for us this was a credo of an ethical purification. As soon as you take the pure machine and use it, you violate its state of innocence, and then you bend it toward human psychological needs. And then you see the beautiful, pristine medium suddenly polluted by hundreds of human concerns about love, procreation, relationships - the human condition. These things don't belong to the pristine ideas of the machine, which exposes its own qualities, its own non-human contribution to our thinking. It is basically like looking up into the universe. Up there, there are no questions about the human condition. That space and that machinery, is way outside ourselves, very pure, very beautiful, with no human interference. In some strange way, this is what has always interested me-- the state of innocence of these devices, machines, and concepts. And, even if I have to deal with the basis of my images or my certain reality, yes somewhere there is a camera image. The camera image, like the camera obscura image, is a product of the light condition, which outside on the landscape is god. It is god's property, god makes these pictures, and god makes these landscapes and it belongs to god. Fortunately, we humans started to populate the interiors. We would take the space from god and turn it into buildings. This is what is stolen from god, and we encapsulate that into our own interest, we install light bulbs to challenge god's light - at least there is some escape. The basis of the ethical conviction is that we should become completely separate from the reality of god and go to the reality of the machine, because the reality of god is the traditional one, the one that contains all the injustice and all the wars and cruelty we have inflicted on each other. Our reality should be the one that we can dream about, be utopian about. This is all a paradox, because I don't know why I serve these machines, and certainly don't want them to serve me. But I do willingly submit myself to this process of working with them, letting them speak, letting them live.

Finally there is this industrial society or priesthood of the technicians, which have the same assignment. So I am kind of puzzled as to which part I play. At least they have a reason, they want to make money and they want to prey on you, because they have this gift of understanding the machine. And I question what my position here is. Am I a servant to this purpose or am I trying to not have a specific purpose, or am I perhaps on a mission just trying to preserve innocence somehow? As soon as I see what it's written by any one hand, I will move to another image, to another system, to another state. So, this is the continuous movement away from what is written. Finding this unwritten page is also a bit sinister. It's really like violating the continuous innocence of the world, but I can't help it. This is what I am looking back and seeing of my life, and I am wondering what happened or particularly what role did I play in this particular world.

I see very clearly that there is a process in which art as such can no longer prescribe a way of life. Nineteenth century literature did really tell us how to live, how to feel about our self-deceptions, like say Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, all these great novels instructed us in certain behaviors and life styles. This is all breaking down, suddenly the author, the artist, or the speaker can no longer have this truth, cannot instruct anybody. Nobody would actually believe in any of these as prescriptions to ones life. They are no longer meaningful, and not that deep or not that emotional and they are not that true. And there is no claim of that any more because the hierarchy of meaning in art has broken down.

All we do now as artists and authors is lead the audience to find their own ways to the art. Take Virtual Reality, there is no longer a single viewpoint of an author, not like in film where there was someone, who chose the cinematic language for us and created shot by shot a cinematic space. Now if you are in Virtual Reality you as the audience find your own viewpoint, because all viewpoints are there. This idea of giving the space, the art, the narrativity, the storytelling away from your own personal position as author to the audience is a very radical step. And we see that it is not only the wish of the creators of the games, but that it is inevitable. This industry called Virtual Reality is driven by the game industry, because that is where you become the client and you have all the choices. And as you see there is no intellectual challenge, there is no one that would say "Here I come with my work, which is in this new space" or "Here I give you all my possessions, all these unique viewpoints, my space." But then I have to prepare something for the audience to be interested in, another type of clue, another mystery. These are unknown elements, and we don't yet know how to prepare them. But it's inevitable that the hierarchy of values of both the author and audience are changing.

Starting from the French Symbolists at the middle of the 19th century, as Baudelaire, Verlaine, up until the social revolutionaries, these early generations always had Nature as a poetic source. That's where they got the 'stuff’, because the Greeks were always lurking there somewhere, as is the myth of the Greeks in poetry, which is of course completely outdated. But Nature was a very legitimate source until Rimbaud started to twist it a little. He would evoke certain images and call them sounds or he would call colors sounds. Remember this is shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century. So there was a certain media translation of this interpretation of Nature, and it eventually extended to the idea of colors playing on a musical instrument. In other words, this idea of "synasthesia" might have come from hashish, the whole French generation stricken by this craze. But anyway this encoded process was then passed on to the 20th century as translations of codes. Now in media for me personally, the translation between technological structure and the creative process has virtually the same dimensions as it used to have to poets, who would seek their source in Nature. I am completely satisfied looking at the technological structure as a poetic system, we still have that upper stratosphere for us, and there is a territory that is beyond Nature. So, I think that what used to be the source of the poetic material in the past is now technological systems. They are more and more populated by demons as they behave more and more like humans and the more of what we call intelligence is assigned to them, the more demonological systems will arise, more mystery and more stories of the future imagination will be found there. This was predicted by science fiction, and if we believe in that, we will have regained a poetic system in its glory.