This interview takes as a starting point the VIDEO CACHE project. Mél’s research into defunct video art repositories online raises many questions about the ephemeral nature of digital culture, and the social/cultural parameters that frame the preservation of and access to such materials.
VIDEO CACHE is a research creation project emerging from Mél Hogan’s doctoral research (wayward.ca), in collaboration with Penny McCann, director of SAW Video in Ottawa, and Groupe intervention video (GIV) in Montreal.
VIDEO CACHE took place on November 24, 2010 at GIV. It was a public screening of ten works selected by McCann from the SAW Video Mediatheque collection, for which artists’ fees were paid by GIV. The Mediatheque is Canada’s first large-scale attempt to use the web as a ‘living archive’ –its server crashed in 2009 and the project has been offline since. VIDEO CACHE was also a month-long online exhibit (http://www.wayward.ca/videocache/) showcasing these ten works, carefully documented and recontextualised for the web. The documentation for VIDEO CACHE remains online, and the event catalogue is available via print-on-demand (http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/video-cache/13585058).
On the one hand, VIDEO CACHE served to document the Mediatheque project by updating the context and addressing in a practical way what it means to ‘activate’ the online archive. On the other hand, it was and remains an entity onto itself. VIDEO CACHE has become an opportunity for Hogan to bring a creative dimension to documentation and to address loss: while it is the ‘cache’ that makes the Mediatheque’s traces visible and re-visit-able, it is the ‘crash’ that signals its ongoing (archival) value.
Mél Hogan is completing her PhD in the Joint Doctorate in Communication at Concordia University, Montreal. web: www.melhogan.com email: info@melhogan.com twitter: @mel_hogan
You’ve talked about there being a paradox in the way digital culture is created and shared and the way it is preserved. How do you think preservation, creation, and use should be interrelated in the digital realm?
I don’t know that the paradox needs to be resolved so much as it needs to be acknowledged and understood within digital preservation debates. In my work what stands out is that more attention needs to be paid to digital flows, to circulation, and to the interface and database that facilitate and mask distribution online. Preservation, as an idea and as an ideal, is transformed online, though for some reason, stating this is always a bit controversial.
In archives (traditionally) the emphasis has been on long-term preservation, which more often than not has meant rendering ‘originals’ inaccessible in the present as a means to protect or safeguard them for the future. Because archival discourse and practice have come a long way in the last decade to adapt to the continually changing technoscape, I don’t want to make it sound like the tension is between the traditional, as material/offline, and the new, as digital/online. I concentrate on the digital online as a complex realm when I study the archive, but obviously the discourses and ideas are shared with, if not borrowed from, years of traditional archival theory. I think it is almost impossible not to rely on these established ideas and systems, but at the same time, I think it is important to move beyond them and beyond comparisons between material/digital, offline/online, mainly because the foundational archival concepts—the original, the authentic, and the integral—are conceived of differently in the digital realm. So there is a need for a new basis, a point of analysis that is of the web. We need to start talking about iteration, versions, repetition, and flow…
I think preservation, creation, and use are already interrelated in the digital realm—and that the archival conundrum actually lies in the fact that these elements are difficult to distinguish from each other. I think, if anything, the digital realm will keep moving in the direction of embedding the archive into technologies of creation, dissemination, and display. So maybe the question is how do we conceive of preservation, creation, and use as distinct entities in the digital online realm—rather than interrelated—and if a distinction is no longer possible, what the implications are of that interrelatedness.
You said that in your work ‘more attention needs to be paid to digital flows, to circulation itself, and to the interface and database that facilitate and mask distribution online’. Can you talk a bit more about this and how you think the interrelation between the ‘front end’ and ‘back end’ of online systems informs our perception and use of the archive?
When I say digital flows need to be addressed, I’m talking about community as much as I’m taking about trajectory. It’s an idea I’ve been stuck on for a while but also have a hard time articulating. From reading Ann Cvetkovich, Wendy HK Chun, Josephine Bosma, Anjali Arondekar, Tess Takahashi and others, I’m reminded of the underlying communities—online and offline—the people with a need and compulsion to collect, so that later, something can be made sense of, revealed. The archive ultimately makes possible connections that are sometimes dangerous or undesirable within a particular time and place. My hunch is that while the web has the potential to highlight the connections between people and their documented pasts, and with unprecedented reach, it also risks amalgamating everything into a large undifferentiated database that completely overlooks and overwrites the affective and the unarchivable.
We pay a lot of attention to digital content as objects, albeit virtual, when really an important part of what distinguishes the digital from its material counterparts is, I think, its movement, circulation, flow… the way people share the digital as a space, and travel through that space. Digital stuff is easy to copy—much of what we do on the computer is a form of duplication—and as many artists, theorists, and archivists have pointed out, these copies can be identical to ‘originals.’ Copies are also non-rival in consumption, which has forced us to seriously reconsider value and to come up with alternative economies, which so far seem most successful when thought of as network-creation itself. The mapping out of content, including links between digital nodes, constitutes digital trajectories, and this leads me to question the potential for archival theories that could emerge out of focusing on digital flows and online circulation, rather than the content-centric view imposed onto the digital. I’d like to expand my current project into theories of the web as a mobile archive, or a transient archive—something that highlights the passage of content, but also the movement of creators. And in turn, this means thinking about localization in contrast to the shifting place and space of the virtual archive…
As for the relationship between the front end and the back end, I think that we literally interact with an interface without knowing much of what generates our experiences online beyond that top layer. This isn’t new or limited to the web—this is basically our relationship to most technologies—but in the last few years, separating content from style and function (or form), has been pushed by developers. This has been mainly because browsers display content differently, and the separation made accessibility standards possible, making it easy to quickly and efficiently change the look of the interface without affecting content. Ultimately, the idea was to have form follow function, that is, to have use determine the appearance. So if we can take that kind of approach into account for the online archive, we begin to see what ideals shape the possibilities of the web for preservation.
What role do you think video artists or other digital content creators should play in the preservation of their own work?
I think this a really hard question to answer, but I’m going to respond from a personal point of view, as someone who makes video… and I am fully aware that I might make archivists and distributors shudder. I’m really for online access in principle, though I understand that in practice, it takes time, know-how, money, resources, etc. I haven’t even bothered to upload most of my videos online, so this is an ideal, a philosophical position. But it’s an ideal by which Canadian video distributors have not yet been seduced, and probably will not adopt anytime soon. And I get this—I get that making decisions about large valuable collections is something to think about carefully because once work is posted online, it simultaneously belongs to nobody and everybody.
Part of what inspires me to launch works into cyberspace is the politics of community-based activism that were about getting stuff out, sharing, exchanging ideas. There was an urgency and purpose. And as the tools became increasingly accessible, video art was about countering the mainstream in terms of both representation and means of sharing. But now it seems like the web has taken access to another level, and this is again shifting the politics of video art.
A lot of the politics that came out of video are similar to what we hear now about the web—in terms of its democratizing potential—and yet, the more video becomes common, the more precious the distinctions between art and the vernacular seem to become.
I think that there has to be some sort of middle ground—I prefer to upload videos to my own server than to YouTube for example, whose terms of use aren’t OK with me, unless I make a project with social networks in mind at the onset. But more and more artists use YouTube because it is so ubiquitous and saves on bandwidth and space. I think that online has to be thought of as many things—many contexts. So for example, if a video is shown online because someone has reviewed it, interviewed the artist, or curated an event for the work, this should make distributors and artists very eager to upload video online as part of this context. I don’t really understand the tight hold on video in these cases.
The fact that a video can be posted and embedded in numerous online contexts does not generally appeal to video distributors in Canada, who would rather see works maintained and presented in controlled environments where issues of resolution, duration, format, storage, and so on, are all carefully calculated to maintain the scarcity model on which they rest. The idea is to keep video art out of the ‘clutter’ of vernacular video—away from YouTube or on a distinct channel within it—so as to retain a curatorial sensibility.
For the archivists reading this, I have to refer to Josephine Bosma’s idea about rethinking loss as the antithesis to preservation because it gives elegance to these ideas. She writes, “We may have a lot to gain from losing control over digital objects. We should consider the ability of some artists to embrace an inherent loss of control over their work less as a challenge to conservation, and more as an inspiration to a solution. […] Both openness to a vital context and openness in terms of physical, material and technological accessibility may well be the best way forward in the strategy of conserving art in the environment of new, networked media.” [1]
My personal idea of what role artists and content creators should play in the preservation of their own work or collections is aligned with Bosma, and others who believe that setting work free allows for unpredictable modes of fan-based archiving tactics to happen. If we think of preservation as a process to keep work ‘alive,’ I can’t think of a better system—even if it is highly unpredictable—than the web. Except, as pointed out by Lucas Hilderbrand, the trend towards online distribution may mean that collection habits change, making it more difficult to keep works than with VHS or DVD, for example. [2]
So for content creators, I think that the idea of preservation has to be disentangled from marketing strategies, which isn’t easy by any means. In fact, the question of how to monetize content on the web may be the question nobody can answer; this demands an unprecedented level of innovation from video distributors whose best move may in fact be to opt out of the online realm altogether or wait for the hype train to pass… if it ever does.
The VIDEO CACHE collaboration with SAW Video activated the archive by screening some of the works from the crashed Mediatheque repository. Re-presentation through emulation or other means is a preservation strategy often undertaken with technological art of many kinds. Did you see VIDEO CACHE in this light at all, as simultaneously documenting and preserving the works?
Yes, I see VIDEO CACHE as a documentation project, but perhaps more importantly as a means of highlighting the ways in which the politics of the archive—any archive—are a reflection of the social movement(s) from which they emerge, including art movement(s). Video art history is imbued with politics and counter-movements, and these shape the discourses surrounding the video art archive on the web.
I see it less as an attempt to preserve the work within a long-term strategy where the material objects (DVDs for example) are central to the project’s history, and more in terms of preservation-as-conversation, keeping the project ‘alive’ by way of continued dialogue. Rooted in a feminist methodology, I frame VIDEO CACHE as way of bringing to the forefront the people involved in the Mediatheque—as artists or web developers or both—and their understandings of the process and labour involved, along with how their memories shape the ideals of video art and of the archive. It’s important to remember that this all started in the early 2000s, long before YouTube and broadband internet. It’s also important to mention that this project was funded as an online archive—that concept made sense very early on somehow, in that the promise of the web for preservation was something to invest in seriously, backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars of government money.
In some ways, activating the archive through a collaboratively curated event serves to document it better than written documentation would on its own; this is research-creation. The VIDEO CACHE screening and the online exhibit preserve and regenerate the Mediatheque, but very differently.
Curating a programme for a screening makes sense when you are talking about video, but it also raises a slew of questions about this assumption, given that as an online archive the Mediatheque didn’t prioritize high quality copies for screening—it was about showcasing video art online. This is a point in video art’s history that demands a look inward rather than forward. It demands a reflection on the trajectory of video art from its activist roots and from is dissident voices against mainstream representation—by women, queers, people of colour, community activists, etc.—to the current place and value of these scarce collections in an art market.
The Mediatheque is a prime case study for an archive that functioned for and through the web and privileged wide access over long-term material preservation of the files. Whether flawed or visionary as an archival approach, VIDEO CACHE preserves this idea, the Mediatheque’s aura, and the conceptual history of the project. VIDEO CACHE was about extending what I have learned from analyzing grant reports and other administrative documents made available to me by SAW Video into a case study, by highlighting preservation issues from 2003 to the present and showcasing the collection as two different modalities.
VIDEO CACHE featured only 10 works of the 486 pieces in the Mediatheque, and this sample was anything but random. So I think it’s worth noting that selection is a subjective part of this preservation process. As the current SAW Video Director, Penny McCann was the best person to make a selection based on the videos’ connections to SAW Video’s institutional history and in relation to those involved in the development of the Mediatheque from the early 2000s on. (McCann’s curatorial statement: http://www.wayward.ca/videocache/documentation/curatorial/)
Eight artists who had work in the original Mediatheque were present for the VIDEO CACHE screening at GIV, on November 24, 2010. As a result, the act of curating, on and offline, along with the discussion that followed the screening, are directly linked to the process of documentation—this event is possibly the most complete piece of documentation that exists about the Mediatheque by the people involved in the project. (http://www.wayward.ca/wayward/exhibits/video-cache/)
We also discovered quirky and confusing things in the process of organizing VIDEO CACHE, that again speak volumes about the archive’s politics. From November 24, 2010 to December 24, 2010, 9 of the 10 videos screened at GIV were showcased online at http://www.wayward.ca/videocache. Despite being remunerated $200 as part of the Mediatheque in 2003, the distributor, VTape, opted out of letting us show Gunilla Josephson’s Hello Ingmar (2000) for the month-long online exhibit of VIDEO CACHE. VTape continues its research into fees for streaming in order to develop a standard. This apparently applies to works already online and, as is the case for Josephson’s video, works for which the Mediatheque retains online showcasing rights in perpetuity. I don’t think this is VTape’s prerogative alone—the control over video art distribution, its value, and its position within art worlds and markets continues to be debated, with a prevailing Canadian bias towards the ‘web-means-dead’ credo for video art distribution.
Through the process of curating VIDEO CACHE, we unraveled many things about the Mediatheque archival method itself that feed back into the research on documenting the initiative. This is the ideal intervention for me: collaboration that emerges from research and that also uncovers and generates new threads, new concepts, and new problems. It is a highly self-reflexive approach and one that situates the archive as object and source of study.
More recently at the May 2011 Database Narrative Archive conference in Montreal (http://www.dnasymposium.com/), Adrian Miles (http://vogmae.net.au/vlog/) asked me why I thought it was necessary to activate or revive the Mediatheque project. I think that collectively we can decide whether there is value to a particular collection—after all, appraisal has always been a crucial step for archivists. Nevertheless, a digital loss or a server crash shouldn’t determine what we keep or discard. Until the Mediatheque is revived, VIDEO CACHE and the trail of documents that have come out of it (like this interview) constitute its main preservation efforts.
In your study of defunct or crashed video repositories, what issues would you highlight related to the sustainability of these types of projects? Are there any specific pitfalls you have identified?
Sustainability, by definition, is the capacity to endure. Endurance is built in to the idea of the archive, and online, as Wendy Chun argues, it’s the ephemeral itself that endures: “Memory, with its constant degeneration, does not equal storage; although artificial memory has historically combined the transitory with the permanent, the passing with the stable, digital media complicates this relationship by making the permanent into an enduring ephemeral, creating unforeseen degenerative links between humans and machines.” [3]
I think identifying pitfalls is a really important step in research that deals with emergent technology and social media. There is a lot of hype and a lot of excitement about the potential of the web to make things happen, and happen differently. That said, I think it’s important to be able to talk about failure in a generative way, even if highlighting issues related to sustainability is sometimes difficult. In this case, for instance, I am dealing with incredible, invaluable, long-established collections, but am addressing only their host organization’s relationship to the web—how they have resisted it, adapted to it, appropriated it, and so on. So I guess I want to start by saying that I recognize the value of the projects—even if they have ‘failed’—and that identifying pitfalls is in line with, rather than against, this kind of recognition.
Generally, what is most striking is that a lot of the pitfalls are relegated, and often mysteriously and suddenly, to technological failures, when in fact much of what happens to archives on and offline can be tracked back to human error and social/cultural parameters. This is what I was able to confirm in my doctoral research, and this is what makes it so complicated; it becomes impossible to make a bullet point list of pitfalls that we can all avoid and build from for future projects. I think engaging with and through technology requires a lot of knowledge on different levels (even with the democratization of media tools), including the upkeep of skills and tracking the constant developments. And this is often downplayed if not made invisible by the interface itself, which in a way becomes another pitfall.
Technology facilitates a lot of things, but ultimately it relies on human decisions and energy, and goals within a specific social, cultural, and legal context. This context also largely determines funding possibilities, the handling of copyright issues, the framing of the relationship between art and ownership, and so on, which then get coded into specific projects online. The process is iterative, and technology certainly influences choices in terms of format, access, and layout, but, as almost everyone I spoke with in this research makes clear, without (human) motivation and energy, online projects die. This probably goes without saying, but there seems to be lot more energy and money going into creating websites than into maintaining them. This is perhaps a pitfall too in the sense that the trend toward constantly creating new projects (though often duplicating entire systems) rather than centralizing or bringing content form disparate sources into one content management system might make upkeep more feasible. I believe this is something that Videographe plans to test out; there has been mention of offering up the viTheque repository as a template and/or platform for other institutions.
In my study of defunct and crashed online video art repositories in a Canadian context, I found that these philosophies of use differ greatly for each project, but most shared a common discourse about the role, place, and importance of the artist. There is a layer of each of the projects—and some more superficially than others—that reflects the history and trajectory of the artists as a category in Canada, as the first country to pay exhibition fees to artists (in the mid 70s). This is, of course, not the case in most countries, and so it explains some of the particular pitfalls that Canadian repositories fall into in terms of maintaining this professionalization of art into the digital realm, and under conditions that differ greatly from similar initiatives elsewhere. So copyright—or the way it is loosely interpreted and applied—is a major element, and I would say pitfall, in most cases of Canadian online video art repositories.
Another pitfall, I think, is the way copyright is being interpreted and, in turn, how technologies are being used to put into measure some of these ideas that, from an archival point of view, seem to pose additional problems rather than provide viable solutions. Technological protection measures, like files that self-erase/destruct after a period of time (chronodégradable), locks based on password protection, locks that limit the number of copies a user can make, and so on, are all ‘solutions’ justified by the desire to protect works from illegal copying (and which by default block fair and legitimate copying). To impart technology with these roles—rather than engaging with these issues as a social process that accounts for fair dealing—is to misconceive of the function of copyright and to throw off its intended balance. Also, with increasingly long terms of copyright (across the globe), this kind of copyright rhetoric becomes commonplace, and access online somehow becomes in itself conceived as an assault to artists’ rights.
Copyright is a major issue, if only because it is conflated with other issues, and as a result, those underlying issues aren’t directly addressed. Copyright—and Creative Commons for that matter—are not systems of remuneration for artists, they simply inform the parameters for using other people’s stuff without asking, beyond fair dealing.
The initiative to create an online repository requires a huge amount of time, resources, knowledge, and money. This is a point I will keep repeating because being for or against copyright isn’t at the crux of the matter. And, while I think that for the most part an open and free exchange of materials circulating via the web is positive for creativity, I do think copyright and Creative Commons alternatives demand that we continue to question ownership in the face of large user-generated content sites that have at their disposal untapped media content.
So this brings me to the issue of funding and financial sustainability. In the projects I have looked at, it seems that funders (often government funding bodies) are eager to fund the creation and development of online repositories for about two years, after which it remains a bit unclear what is expected or how the project is meant to maintain itself. For the most part, these projects are not self-sustaining, and bring in very little in terms of revenues, at least in comparison to the costs incurred maintaining the site.
I try to always think of these pitfalls and failures as generative, but I also think that we have many (too many) examples of how trying to contain and control digital flows backfires in terms of preservation strategies.
Notes
1. http://www.naipublishers.nl/art/nettitudes_e.html; “The Gap between Now and Then: On the Conservation of Memory” in Nettitudes , Let’s Talk Net Art NAi Publishers (2011).
2. http://henryjenkins.org/2011/04/from_the_vcr_to_youtube_an_int.html
3. http://video.dma.ucla.edu/video/wendy-chun-the-enduring-ephemeral-or-the... Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2008) The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory In: Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn) The University of Chicago: 148.
[Woods Bagot / Icebergs NYC]
"While some programming is still necessary (there is no working prototype for a toilet or brain surgery app), labels such as 'dining room', 'conference room', 'library' and 'shop' are becoming increasingly unwieldy. The next genus will dispense of programme to an even greater degree, so deprogramme your city now." – Keiichi Matsuda, Cities for Cyborgs1
The traditional model of creating space have been intimately tied to authority: one shapes the land one owns, the monarch shapes the castle, and the municipal government shapes the plaza. Inhabitants and passersby are subject to these master plans, confined to the activities and relations scripted to occur within them. Several apogees of this brand of urban planning have yielded proposals for some of the most iconic urban spaces: the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Haussmann Plan for Paris, the Radiant City of Le Corbusier. These precisely calculated, 'hard' spaces assumed that the lives of those who filled them would slot neatly into prescribed roles that were fixed for extended periods of time and only altered by the most profound social upheavals. Today, discourses of programme are considerably more fluid and acknowledge that space is largely defined through the patterns of its users. While construction methodologies and structural engineering evolve slowly, our perception of space—at all scales—has been revolutionized by the adoption of a host of new tools and protocols. Artist and researcher Mark Shepard describes the gradual emergence of networked urbanism as anticipating near-future cities capable of reflexive self-monitoring and behaviour adjustment – the endgame of computation "leaving the desktop and spilling out onto the sidewalks."2
Within this milieu, the possibility of a 'soft' space emerges from the multiplicity of meanings now afforded to occupants, allowing them to define and refine as they see fit, without irrevocably altering a structure or location. Space can be shared, transformed, saved and re-made. The temptation is to imagine the ways that futuristic structures will allow for transformable buildings, parks, or homes, but the more immediate possibilities are much simpler: networked structures, meshes of inexpensive sensors and devices, accessible tools to mark and tag locations. Just as memories and historical narratives accumulate at a location, computation, data and networks now enable the addition of layers of meaning and possibility to our understanding of place. The reality of our data-driven culture and the networks that define the bonds and bounds of that society is that all spaces are becoming softer. Every square metre is now a granular location that can be tagged, altered, or repurposed to a degree of specificity unimaginable a generation ago.
The meaning of a location or object is never static but rather contextual. As Christopher Alexander noted "a building or town is given its character…by those events which keep on happening there most often"3 and this can be extended to spaces as well. It is worth considering that "those events" in the context that Alexander considered, villages, churches, homes, remained largely the same for decades, if not lifetimes. We consider a different range of sorts of activities which change dramatically. What is the character of a space that encompasses such change? It is either characterless or it has been softened. We propose various frames of reference for considering the 'softening of space' that can take many forms: engendered by architectural design, grafted into a space as a technological intervention, or organically shaped by the need for a space to function beyond its original programme. It is difficult to avoid thinking of intended uses of a structure or environs but the duration of even the most thorough planning is remarkably brief compared length of time that users and the surrounding environment will engage a location. Why not cultivate design strategies that acknowledge this fact? The soft, reconfigurable and re-programmable space provides stakeholders with agency within the environments they occupy.
In this essay we focus on strategies of softening, of working with pre-existing spaces and conditions to inject a softness, to create possibilities of configuration and collaboration. To focus solely on a soft architecture that is not contingent on pre-existing situations ignores one of the core challenges of making spaces and places: refactoring architecture and urbanism. The future of soft spaces will largely be comprised of strategies to integrate softness with spaces that were previously defined but are in need of updating.
[Michelle Teran / Video documentation of Parasitic Video Network]
Conflicting narratives
Disagreements about environments always come down to the narrative that transforms indeterminate space into specified place and the power to manifest that narrative. In the United States one often sees small roadside memorials consisting of flowers and small wooden crosses that mark the sites of accidents, defining place from ephemera. Likewise, the accumulation of graffiti on walls reinscribes these surfaces with layers of meaning and new narratives. When one embeds a narrative into an otherwise occupied and defined space—highway or factory wall—they generate a signal that can be heard as either harmonious with or in discord to the previous definition. This process of defining and contesting becomes a dialectic enacted by the users of a space, those who define it as a location. As each culture creates its own methods of defining place and meaning they also create ways of contesting that meaning and in a networked age, connectivity and the informatics afforded by screen-space are means of defining and contesting. Just as an architect or developer plans for rain, heat or traffic if they wish to engage the society and culture that surrounds them, they must engage the ways that the society defines and contests space. To not do so, yields not only a dead-spot but a latent opportunity, a blank canvas that will inevitably be repurposed. At the other side of the spectrum, any structure other than a prison that attempts to enforce absolute control over how it might be used is destined to perform poorly. This is how the discussion between the dweller and space becomes an exchange—a possible discourse—shaped by inhabitation and experience. The ideal technologically enabled soft space is one that opens itself to the widest range of the modes of communication – allowing for a multiplicity of places to coexist within the same bounded region.
The materiality of soft space
While new experimental electro-active polymers such as ShapeShift can fold and flex in response to the modulation of current, a softening of space does not typically entail a softening of material – softness is most often a metaphor for mutability and openness to change. Inflatables notwithstanding, the materials of contemporary construction: glass, steel, concrete and plastic are not soft to the touch but the experience of spaces and of objects is multi-sensory. Space is a function of embodiment, we perceive space as a constellation of aural, visual and tactile sensations, and conceptualize it through physicality.
The enmeshment of spaces and technology allows space to be shaped and constructed in ways that are not necessarily physical. If we can argue that technology can be immaterial then the ways that space can be defined should extend beyond materiality as well. Communication channels can define space. Memory can define space. Virtual tags can define space. The entanglement of these varying options yields softness, as a way of designing a space and a way of experiencing the world.
A vocabulary of softening
In illustrating the shift from fixed conceptions of space towards the malleable and the soft, a number of qualities have been identified: soft spaces invite participation, can be networked and allow affordance or orientations of places to be rewritable. The following vocabulary is presented as a toolkit with which designers and citizens might think about, plan, occupy and reconfigure the structures, public space, and urban fabric around them.
(Re)programme - The first type of softening has been standard operating procedure within programme-centric architectural design for thirty years now. Using programme to drive form is a means by which designers can 'tune' a proposed space to yield optimal flexibility for its intended occupants. More adventurously, we can look to now classic models such as Bernard Tschumi's "crossprogramming" or "transprogramming"4 where, respectively, a programme is inserted into an alien spatial configuration (a hospital ward is converted into a nightclub) or seemingly incongrous programmes are combined to capitalize on dissonance (a hospital ward and nightclub co-exist and thrive while sharing the same facilities).
Network - In their 2008 article "The invisible city: Design in the age of intelligent maps", Kazys Varnelis and Leah Meisterlin schematize networked urbanism as a combination of "physical texture" and data-driven representations5. The deployment of distributed sensors in everyday objects and assemblies permits systems to provide feedback and provide users—or algorithms—the ability to 'tune' and optimize the performance of space. The same logic that allows a smart grid to improve energy efficiency can be scaled down and applied to a dwelling where natural and artificial lighting, temperature and HVAC are modulated based off usage patterns and real time data. The softness or hardness of that space is a function of the allowances the network provides for users, a flexibility in the types of services, and the meaningfulness of the connections.
[Hoppala & Superimpose / Berlin Wall 3D]
Augment - The most immediate and perhaps prevalent mode of softening is augmentation, adding layers of data or imagery to a location. This creates a multiple meaning to any feature of a location, loading it with functionality and signification. A large interactive screen, for instance, performs the roles of a wall and concierge: delimiting a space, informing, observing, and providing a point for communication. One cannot walk through a screen but its characteristics as a boundary are variable. By creating indefinite boundaries, the very nature of structures become temporal, indefinite, and multiple; a classroom transforms into a lounge and then a projection room. Taken further, a data rich layer can lay atop an entire structure. Unlike the immersive environments proposed during the heyday of virtual reality in the 1990s, augmentation does not overwrite space but refocuses it. The screen is the ideal locus of an augmentation, the allowance for easy visualization and familiar data metaphors make the implementation and alteration instantaneous and simple. Augmentation is one of the oldest strategies for softening, and due to the ubiquity of the screen and data, and it is one of the most commonplace. As a softening strategy, it requires minimal infrastructure and structural alteration: a service, device and access point are all that are needed.
Reshape - As a strategy for softening reshaping requires perhaps the most infrastructural change. A reshaping action can be as sophisticated as adding a kinetic facade to a building or as simple as using chalk to demarcate alternate usage instructions for the sidewalk (drawing a hopscotch grid). From mobile architectures, ecologically enmeshed architectures, flexible strategies of construction and formation, a reshaping can take a wide range of forms that do not rely directly on the possession or occupation of space, often an important qualification in the feasibility of a softening. Reshaping can soften by making the fixed more flexible or more temporal, opening spaces for participation and possibility, allowing for a space to be remade or unmade. Temporary structures imply an emergency of sorts, after natural disasters or wars but also express an uncertainty and immediate necessity both of which are reasonable assessments of the requirements of an living or working place and urban space. Reshaping generates results similar to augmentation while requiring a distinct approach; to augment means, in many senses, to make a space more generic, to allow more layers to coexist without signal interference while reshaping creates specificity and constrains possibilities.
Hack - Not all softening is complicit with authority: some of it occurs in defiance of design intent or even the law. The oft-quoted passage from William Gibson's 1981 short story Burning Chrome reminds us that "…the street finds its own uses for things" – stakeholders can intervene and appropriate technology, space and structures to meet their needs. From accessing a cafe's wireless signal from an adjacent public space to planting a bed of flowers in a gap at the edge of the sidewalk, the overlapping fields and assemblies of spaces and structures are rife with opportunity. Hacking has an additional component of immediate necessity or illicitness, implying a lack of authority but an abundance of need. It often fulfills a simple requirement unanticipated in the original formulation, sometimes taking advantage of refuse material or unacknowledged potential. It is also the most amorphous of strategies because it is the one that does not define a particular tactic, but rather an attitude towards the preexisting circumstances of a space.
Manifestations
Rather than list off technological advances, we will examine several projects that research the application of technology to "soften" living and working situations. To put it another way, the following work is what Tom Igoe would describe as "the recently possible", enterprises that utilize commercially available technology and techniques in innovative ways. While greenfield development with limitless budgets and controlled circumstances may effectively demonstrate emerging devices or techniques, we would like focus on strategies readily available to individuals and communities.
[Graffiti Research Lab / Eyewriter]
Graffitti Research Lab (GRL) is a loose collective that works with augmentation, creating tools for other artists, hackers, and prospective taggers and spaces for tagging. The collective's regard for urban space as a screen derives from their affinity for graffitti, using public intervention—projection bombing—as a mode of simultaneously exploring the digital tag in physical and virtual space. In their more poetic projects, Eyewriter for instance, GRL extends the possibility of participation and intervention to the physically handicapped, legendary graffiti writer Tempt1. In their softening, the ability to tag is a strategy to remember and to be remembered by, to turn closed or inaccessible space into personal advertisement and gesture.
Canadian artist Michelle Teran's work explores the friction between urban environments and their digital footprints. Many of her projects appropriate the logic of commonplace media systems and leverage these technologies to transform generic urban space into ephemeral zones of voyeurism and performance. Initiated in 2008, Parasitic Video Network prototypes a kit for an immersive environment that can be temporarily installed within stock architectural typologies such as shopping malls or office buildings. A user of the project carries a device called the Parasitic Video Interceptor (aka The Spy) with access to the live feeds of 25 low-range wireless cameras that have been mounted within the environment. The participant is immersed in a reflexive media experience where their proximity to individual nodes within a surveillance mechanism determines the video output on their receiver, forcing them to become editors in their own cinematic interlude and defamiliarize the act of moving through space.
Since 2004, MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory has been exploring the potential for developing real time visualizations with data collected from mobile phones and sensors. Founded on the notion that distributed computing can be harnessed as 'smart-dust', the group develops sophisticated proof-of-concept urban informatics that reveal and clarify the intangible communicative and migratory flows that animate cities. Trash Track was produced for the 2009 exhibit Toward the Sentient City and set out to visualize the 'removal chain' of waste management in Seattle by attaching custom designed radio transmitting tags to refuse. This workflow transformed discarded consumer electronics, disposable coffee cups and bagged garbage into geolocated nodes that yielded vectors delineating the movement of waste through and out of the city. The resulting diagrams delivered a bottom-up representation of waste management with which to scrutinize speed and efficiency to compliments the traditional conception of waste management as an exercise in logistics.
[Usman Haque / Natural Fuse, diagram]
Usman Haque has long worked with his own vocabulary of architectural softness: softspace, the material of the perceived and experienced architecture, in contrast with hardspace, the physical form of the structure. This sensitivity to the variety of experienced space is evident in Natural Fuse, a project exhibited first in London in 2009, where Haque linked one of the most fundamental requirements of a modern living or working space, electrical power, to the carbon offset of a plant. The more carbon offset that is provided by a plant, the more power is allowed through a fuse connected to an outlet. If that were the extent of the project it would be a simple allegory but it extends to link devices together in a network to create a pool of available offset power, generating a network of capacity, awareness and need. As Natural Fuse runs, it generates a map which shows tags for the devices which are being used "selfishly" or "selflessly". While this network does not affect the actual structure of the building, it links the softspace and the activity of the inhabitants to a larger network that is environmentally and behaviorally defined.
The appearance of GPS enabled smartphones with built-in camera, accelerometer and magnometer (compass) functionality has positioned mobile handsets as an ideal platform for augmented reality (AR) applications. 2009 saw the launch of Layar, the first AR browser, an interface that allows users to survey space through their handset to display real time information overlays based off the location and field of view of the device. One of the most explicitly architectural 'layars' released thus far is Berlin Wall 3D, which allows users to explore how the infamous concrete barrier divided east and west Berlin from 1961-1989. A joint effort of two German developers (Hoppala and Superimpose), this application overlays a 3D model of the wall and related checkpoints along the former border line, in situ alongside nearby landmarks such as the Brandenburg gate and Potsdamer Platz. Berlin Wall 3D softens by collapsing history, erasing the distinction between past and present while allowing users access to an imposing shadow from of a bygone era.
[Theo Watson / Audio Space]
Augmentation of space is fundamentally the addition of another data layer or dimension, visual information or any other data point overlaid atop the current space. While this is often seen as mapped projections as in the mobile handset related project discussed above or the work of Pablo Valbuena, space and form are not solely registered in terms of visual phenomena but also by sound. Echoes, whispers, volumes all contribute to the definition and character of a space and the sensation of being in that space that a user takes away. In Theo Watson's 2005 installation Audio Space, a headset and microphone are used to mark a user's position and allow them to leave and receive messages at any given point in the room, combining private utterances with public space. This tagging of location and 'mark making' creates another mode of presence and communication, one of the most fundamental allowances. In a poetic sense, to 'leave' the voice behind creates a corporeal memory of a particular moment in space and time. Augmentation of space need not be a projection or visual overlay, it can be a more subtle addition.
The economic meltdown had global repercussions on commercial real estate markets throughout the world. Noting the numerous construction projects across Manhattan that had ground to halt, in 2010 the New York based architecture firm Woods Bagot proposed an ingenious solution for making use of the vacant, 'stalled' construction sites that were scattered across the island. Icebergs NYC is system for reshaping the (non)use of these sites as a venue for temporary, inflatable structures that generate revenue while the financing for the project originally slotted for the location floats in limbo. These structures are 100% recyclable – composed of simple steel frames wrapped in EFTE pillows, and they employ modular HVAC elements that do not require permanent infrastructure. EFTE is a flexible enough material that it can be inflated to give an Iceberg a dynamic, faceted roof that doubles as a dramatic projection surface. When the constructed project planned for the site is re-initiated, the Iceberg can be quickly dissembled, packed into a single shipping container and transported to a new site.
Conclusion
Softening as a strategy enables users to participate, creating a dynamic sense of place and a flexible approach to space that allows varied activity by users and encourages participation and reshaping. To design such a space requires not only an understanding of an activity but an understanding of the tools related to those activities: spaces must integrate with action. The usage and meaning of any given space are contingent on how it serves the needs, tools and capabilities of its users. Following Doreen Massey "for the future to be open, space must be open too"6 – we posit that for place to be truly functional, it must be open as well.
References:
1. Keiichi Matsuda. "Cities for Cyborgs," Quiet Babylon, September 23, 2010, http://quietbabylon.com/2010/cities-for-cyborgs-10-rules
2. Mark Shepard, "Toward the Sentient City," in Toward the Sentient City (exhibition catalogue) (New York City: The Architectural League of New York, 2009), 10.
3. Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979)
4. Bernard Tschumi, "Abstract Mediation and Strategy," in Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 205.
5. Kazys Varnelis and Leah Meisterlin, "The invisible city: Design in the age of intelligent maps," Adobe Think Tank, July 15, 2008, accessed December 5, 2010. http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/thinktank/tt_varnelis.html
6. Doreen Massey, For Space, (London: SAGE, 2005)
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Our eleventh VT Audio Edition is live! Contributed by the Toronto-based Andrew Zealley (whose work bridges composition and audio art) who has served up an impressive, highly conceptual soundscape. Andrew describes the structure of his submission below:
'Sonnet 56 is a composition in 5 parts, without pause. Each part lasts 5 minutes, bringing the total duration to 25 minutes and establishing a splendid sense of symmetry. Based on and around the text to "Sonnet 56" by William Shakespeare (1564-1616), this audio is a meditation on love. The subject is expressed from four personal memory locations and also the present, in non-chronological fashion just as memories and recollections may shift, temporally, backwards and forwards in our thoughts.'
Jump through to the release page for more info and a download link.
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We recently received a note from our friend Adam Young (of Direwires fame – note his Audio Edition release here) about a festival he is involved in organizing that will take place in Sarnia in August.
"CURRENT is an experimental art and music festival, showcasing creative minds who explore the tension between natural and unnatural in their work and performance, reflecting the very essence of the city it takes place in: Sarnia, a city where beautiful parks and beaches are found on one side, a valley of chemical industry on the other and everyone that lives there in between."
Visit currentfestival.com/program for event and workshop details – the festival takes place in approximately two weeks.
[ecoarttech / Indeterminate hikes]
The Eighteenth International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA2012 Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness is a symposium and series of events exploring the discourse of global proportions on the subject of art, technology and nature. The ISEA symposium is held every year in a different location around the world, and has a 30-year history of significant acclaim. Albuquerque is the first host city in the U.S. in six years.
The ISEA2012 symposium will consist of a conference September 19 – 24, 2012 based in Albuquerque with outreach days along the state’s “Cultural Corridor” in Santa Fe and Taos, and an expansive, regional collaboration throughout the fall of 2012, including art exhibitions, public events, performances and educational activities. This project will bring together a wealth of leading creative minds from around the globe, and engage the local community through in-depth partnerships.
Machine Wilderness references the New Mexico region as an area of rapid growth and technology alongside wide expanses of open land, and aims to present artists' and technologists' ideas for a more humane interaction between technology and wilderness in which "machines" can take many forms to support life on Earth. Machine Wilderness focuses on creative solutions for how technology and the natural world can sustainably co-exist.
The program will include: a bilingual focus, an indigenous thread, and a focus on land and skyscape. Because of our vast resource of land in New Mexico, proposals from artists are being sought that will take ISEA participants out into the landscape. The Albuquerque Balloon Museum offers a unique opportunity for artworks to extend into the sky as well.
Related calls:
The following is an interview I conducted with video and performance artist Dayna McLeod. McLeod's work is ripe with humour and socially charged situations and she has received funding for video projects from the Canada Council and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Over the course of the last month, we have been exchanging emails about her video editing process, drawing particular attention to self-imposed rules and the politics of remixing popular television shows. The following transcript contains the highlights from this conversation.
Mél Hogan: Describe your process for working on videos like Nothing Compares to You. How much time did that video take to make – from finding scripts to editing, etc. What are the steps in making a video like that: Watching shows, finding scripts, mapping out content. Tell me everything in detail, unless, of course, it’s a secret.
Dayna McLeod: Nothing Compares to You took 6 months to make. I downloaded the first season from a bittorent site, and found the first season of scripts transcribed by fans at tvtdb.com. These transcripts were saved as pdfs, making them easy to search. At first, I had made some fairly insane rules for myself that I later broke: originally, I searched the transcripts for each word in the song in order; so if I took “It’s” -the first word of Nothing Compares 2 U- from episode 1 and found it, then I would search for “been” from the next episode, in order, until I found it. So if I didn’t find “been” until episode 5, then I would start my search for “seven” in episode 6, and the search would continue numerically and loop back to episode 1 once I reached the last episode of season 1. These rules proved to be insanely tedious, and I threw them out after working on the piece for two months, when I had only gotten through the first verse. It was really important for me to have House perform the entire song—a rule I only broke twice, ie: Foreman says “yard” because not only does House never say “yard” (for the line, “in the backyard”), I could not make him say it by splicing together words, as I did with other words that I couldn’t find him saying, intact. I also wanted to ensure that House was on camera when he said each word, which also proved to be impossible.
[Nothing Compares to You]
MH: Tell me more about these rules. How do you decide which rules to set for yourself? Why have rules in the first place?
DMC: For found footage/quick-cut projects like this, I need to have rules. Otherwise, it’s too easy to get lost in all of the possibilities, especially when I’m looking for such small sound bites. The rules seem to write themselves at first and are a bit of a rush: can I meet my own challenge? It’s like I’m competing against myself. Sometimes setting rules is the best way to jumpstart my brain to a better solution, and throw the rules out completely. That’s extremely satisfying; setting rigid rules and finding a better process that makes these rules seem ridiculous.
MH: Why do you do what you do? What time of day do you work? Is the process meditative? How many hours in a row can you work at this?
DMC: I’m not sure if this video making process was particularly meditative; it was more of an endurance challenge. I usually work at night, or all day, depending on the project and my other time commitments. A project like this is both addictive and repulsive; addictive because it’s a challenge to see if I can do it, and repulsive, because after about 5 hours in a row of working on it, I start to force words to work, and they don’t, and it’s frustrating. Also watching the same show over and over again, especially in 1-second sound bites, becomes annoying and irritating, especially when you aren’t having success, or you only make it through one line in an editing session. That’s how I know when to stop, when I can’t stand the show or the searching anymore, and I start to force things that I end up undoing when I come back to the edit.
MH: You show your work online, at festivals, in performances. Can you tell me a bit about how these work for you? What each context provides?
DMC: Obviously, there is a huge difference between watching work in a festival and watching it on a computer or portable device. I house almost all of my videos on my website at daynarama.com. This is a portfolio site, and given the digital reality of media, is a way to show work to anyone with a relatively good internet connection, anywhere in the world. But festival play is my favorite way to show work; sitting in a theatre watching videos with likeminded festival goers is fantastic, and similar to a Cabaret audience, you know if your video is funny, not funny, boring, or entertaining because everyone reacts naturally. I also use video in my performance work, often playing with the false reality of projection, characterization, improv and karaoke.
MH: How do you choose your themes? Why popular TV shows?
DMC: I love tv: I love bad tv, I love good tv, and I will pretty much watch anything. I think it’s fair to say that I’m a critical viewer, but I also enjoy watching. I don’t see myself as a passive viewer, and these videos are essentially my interactive participation in existing mainstream culture.
In television, there are repeating patterns of storylines that we can see in different series. For example, shows often have Christmas, Hanukah or holiday themed, birthday, or “issue” oriented episodes. For me, these “issue” shows become a fairly significant marker of our media culture, a snapshot of where we are socially: Natalie almost gets raped in The Facts of Life (1) (1981) during a mugging and empowers herself by taking a self-defense class. Dana Plato wears blackface to confront a racist boyfriend in Diff’rent Strokes (2) (1980). After 4 seasons, Ellen DeGeneres comes out on her show, Ellen (3) (1997). These were all significant tv moments for me as an evolving viewer, having grown up with tv, and seeing the power of it. These examples were also considered to be ground-breaking, but in contemporary television, these themes are as commonplace as a Christmas special within a series. “Racism”, “gay”, “abuse”, “eating disorder”, “molestation”, “rape” are commonplace themes, and the reason I put these in quotes is that they are often heavy-handed, especially in sitcoms and dramedies. Lately, I’ve become distracted by when these agendas overwhelm the show itself: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Gay, Gay, Gay, is an example of me short-cutting an episode of Boston Legal by cutting it down to the essence of what the maker’s agenda is, ie: the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy of the US military.
[Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Gay, Gay, Gay]
MH: This kind of collage work is really your signature style. How would you describe your work aesthetically, politically and artistically?
DMC: YouTube and online attention spans have demonstrated to me that you have about 15 seconds to capture someone’s attention, and maybe 1 minute to keep it, if you’re lucky, so I like to get to the point quickly, and this is why I love the short video format.
Aesthetically and artistically, the collage videos are about the content and cutting to the chase. Recently, I’ve been working with both an additive and reductive process: Nothing Compares to You is additive- I’m searching for specific content and putting it together to make something new from the source material. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Gay, Gay, Gay and the Secret Messages series are reductive because I’m taking the episode or film, and cutting out the irrelevant content (to my rules). After the challenge is met, I then have to make decisions about the final cut- adding the sweeping melodramatic chords from the song for Nothing Compares to You, the timing of the music, do I cover up the cuts for words I’ve spliced together, how do I end the piece, what happens in the 20 second bridge in the middle of the video? These are all choices that get resolved in the edit, but are obviously integral to the final version.
Politically, most of my work is pretty fucking GAY. It doesn’t apologize or assume the victim position, the quiet queer, the polite lesbian, the normative gay. And critics, audiences and programmers tell me that that in itself, is political: I’m here, I’m queer, get used to watching my videos.
[Ultimate SUB Ultimate DOM]
MH: Your work is, I think, a commentary on television culture itself, and so the projects demand that TV be your pool of sources. Who do you imagine as your audience? Does it matter if they are well versed in television culture or pop culture? How important are those common reference points?
DMC: This is a good question, because it keeps coming up. I think the best way to address this is to look at 2 pieces that I’ve made for essentially the same (queer) audience. Ultimate SUB Ultimate DOM: Maria Von Trapp & Mary Poppins imagines Maria Von Trapp from The Sound of Music as a submissive to the Mother Superior, begging for mercy and looking for a spanking, and Mary Poppins as the Mother Superior, wielding a dildo-sheathed umbrella and a ball-gag. Cut to a monologue about this fantasy scenario, I used footage from both films to illustrate this fictitious relationship, assuming that most viewers, queer or straight would be familiar with these characters. However, if you don’t know who these character are or aren’t familiar with their embodiment by Julie Andrews, does this matter? Are the signifiers of Nun and British Nanny clear enough for you within the video to enjoy the subversion of putting them in an S&M scenario? And, contrarily, if you are intimately familiar with these characters, then you will hopefully enjoy references to their actions that I make outside of the video that might not be clear to others, like Maria being punished for dressing children in drapery, or Mary Poppins’ umbrella fetish. That’s Right Diana Barry, You Needed Me, is a very Canadian piece and I don’t think it will play much outside of Canada. Originally commissioned as a performance for Anne Made Me Gay curated by Moynan King and Rosemary Rowe at Buddies in Bad Times in Toronto, this video uses Anne Murray and Anne of Green Gables in a karaoke mash-up. I cut the 1984, made-for-CBC television version of Anne of Green Gables staring Megan Follows, to Anne Murray’s, You Needed Me. Now, if you’re already asking who the hell Anne Murray, Megan Follows or Anne of Green Gables are, or what the hell the CBC is, well, I feel we have our answer.
I also see this work as related to 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon; whenever I watch tv or film and see actors appear in something else as a different character, does this add to your viewing experience or take away from it? Do the antics and drama that actors get up to off camera (hello Mel Gibson and Charlie Sheen) impact how we watch media? Does it affect the story? Try it: the next time you watch something with an actor you’ve seen before, think of everything you know about that actor, and every show you’ve seen them in – how does it affect the story you’re watching right now?
[That's Right Diana Barry, You Needed Me]
MH: You distribute your works internationally and nationally. Has there ever been a copyright issue? Do you worry about copyright at all? Are distributors reluctant to distribute your stuff b/c you don’t clear rights? (Clearing rights would be impossible in your case.)
DMC: I use artist-run distribution centres in Canada to distribute my work, but festivals and broadcasters with copyright infringement policies won’t play these kinds of work, for fear of legal action because the copyright infringement becomes their (financial) responsibility.
MH: Tell me how you see copyright as a political issue.
DMC: Invariably, when I show work that contains copyright material, someone will ask how can I make it- how do I “get around” copyright. These are good questions, and ones that I take very seriously. In 2000, I won an online contest for Best Comedy and Audience Choice Award for How to Fake an Orgasm as part of the PlanetOut Queer Short Movie Awards. This video is a one-shot monologue with PJ Harvey’s album, Rid of Me playing in the background. I used it because she moans and screams rather dramatically throughout the album, and I wanted to time my talk about faking orgasms with these outbursts. PlanetOut wanted to distribute all of the winners (there were 5 categories) on dvd, but insisted that I clear the rights to this music. I couldn’t, and did not end up on the dvd. This was an important lesson for me, because it made me aware of the implications and consequences of using copyright material in my work right at the beginning of my video art career, and I made a choice to continue, because my work is about pop culture- it needs the original property in order to critique it. Without Julie Andrews as Maria Von Trapp and Mary Poppins, Ultimate SUB Ultimate DOM is meaningless. Without Dr. House, Prince or Sinéad O'Connor, I could not make Nothing Compares to You.
More and more mashup artists are citing Fair Use (in the US) (4) as a means to legally use copyright material, a pre-emptive strike against legal action because Fair Use allows for parody, and as long as there is no damage to the original property in the marketplace, then it is A-OK to use. (5) However, one is supposed to ask for permission from the property holder to claim Fair Use if we haven’t afforded to purchase the rights, so we are essentially asking permission for legal approval to subvert the very thing we are using. Another concern I have with even talking about Fair Use in relation to my work is that by doing so, I am acknowledging that I’ve done something wrong and that someone else, an authority [read: “The Man”] needs to approve it.
And sure, there is the argument that these corporations, (who have put a stronghold on media culture) are the ones making the property in the first place- it’s theirs, they own it. But what about us as consumption junkies? I was brought up with Mickey Mouse™, Coca-Cola™ and Nike™. We went to Disneyland, I had the watch, the bedspread, the t-shirt, the videos- I drank the Kool-Aid™. Don’t I “own” part of this culture? Don’t I have “rights”? When I repeat a Family Guy joke, do a James Bond impression, say “just do it” or sing a song in the shower from a Disney musical, aren’t I enforcing the brand? Isn’t it mine, too? Aren’t I… helping? Or do I owe someone money for my soapy rendition of, When You Wish Upon A Star? And perhaps this is an example of my watching too much Law & Order, but who evaluates whether or not my use of the material is damaging to the original property? Paranoid projections on my part assume that making two wholesome, family-friendly characters like Maria Von Trapp and Mary Poppins lesbian lovers with a taste for S&M, might be considered harmful to the Disney Corporation™ by the Disney Corporation™. Much like my queerness, I don’t see my art practice as illegal.
Notes:
(1) “Fear Strikes Back”, Season 3, Episode 2, original air date: 11/4/1981: CBS Entertainment. "The Facts of Life Season 3 Episode Guide." tv.com. CBS Interactive Inc, 2011. Web. 23 Jul 2011.
(2) “Skin Deep or True Blue (a.k.a.) Guess Who?”, Season 2, Episode 22, original air date: 2/20/1980: CBS Entertainment. "Diff'rent Strokes Season 2 Episode Guide." tv.com. CBS Interactive Inc, 2011. Web. 23 Jul 2011. .
(3) The Puppy Episode (part 1 and 2) Season 4, Episode 22, original air date: 4/30/1997: : CBS Entertainment. "Ellen Season 4 Episode Guide." tv.com. CBS Interactive Inc, 2011. Web. 23 Jul 2011.
(4) Nolo. "What Is Fair Use?." fairuse.stanford.edu. Nolo, 2010. Web. 1 Aug 2011. .
(5) I reference this American approach to copyright here and not Canada’s Fair Dealing policy because of the murkiness of international copyright policies/laws and because of American global domination in the realm of familiarity and media culture, similar to my reasons for using American generated material in the first place: media culture identity trumps Canadian identity.
Because London could clearly use a little noise and disorder right now, we bring to you an announcement about an upcoming show by VT blogger Marco Donnarumma that seems quite promising…
[Ryan Jordan / Channeling Interface]
Noise=Noise "Bio signal noise, music for flesh, psychosis attacks, the body is integrated".
Featuring performances by:
Show info:
Monday August 15th
8-11pm
£5 suggested donation
rough bar
nnnnn Unit 73a, Regent Studios, 8 Andrew's Road, E8 4QN
(get in the lift and go to the 7th floor, turn right and its the second unit)
Editor's note: In this post Vague Terrain and Artengine's critical blogging resident Jaenine Parkinson continues her reflections on Ottawa / Gatineau Area media art. This year long series of posts is dedicated to providing a space where our resident can exploring bloggging as a "creative space for critical discourse around the media arts and creative technological expression."
[Philomène Longpré Xia, courtesy Gallery 101, photographer David Barbour]
Xia, a video installation by Montreal based artist Philomène Longpré, caught my eye recently at the Gallery 101 show Body Tracks | Traces de corps (10 June - 9 July) in Ottawa*. It was given prominence, taking over the entire back half of the exhibition space with the rest of the, mainly video, works all reduced to monitor size. It certainly needed and warranted the space.
Xia looms as a cool projection of a woman cast onto a backdrop of pink canvas. The canvas rolls off the wall and along the floor into the space and the woman appears pinned to it, like a butterfly in a shadow box, trapped and on display as an allegory of beauty and mortality. Twisting, tossing, turning, resting and stretching, often with glitching, frantic movements, she gives off a nervous desperation. It is as if she is caught in a nightmare, running but getting nowhere. Her frantically flailing limbs spread heavy charcoal marks across the rich rosy-pink backdrop. The drama of the piece is heightened by the lighting—an extreme chiaroscuro, which could easily be described as Caravaggesque tenebrism. The strong shadows and highlights sculpt the rumpled fabric loosely wrapped around her figure, exaggerating the contours of her face and body to haunting effect.
With Xia Longpré has formed a virtual, pocket of time and space that is annexed onto our own. The space is shallow with no foreground or background; the depth is more like a relief. The camera’s point of view does not move, forming a seal between this pocket of virtual space and our own. Dark footprints lead along the pink canvas lying on the floor, like traces of someone having left this reality and leapt into the alternate sanguine atmosphere. There is a doubling of real charcoal handprints beneath their projected counterparts, in a way that produces a hint of depth. Gravity behaves differently in this other realm. The woman is suspended in space, floating as if she is in a liquid environment. Sounds of cicadas, beating insect wings, pouring water and metallic scratching reinforce the feeling that we have opened up a gate to a parallel existence.
[Xia (detail), courtesy Gallery 101, photographer David Barbour]
The work apparently reacts to visitors’ movements through motion sensors but I missed its responsiveness entirely. This sometimes happens with subtly interactive work that has no obvious interface. Regardless, I don’t think this detracted from my experience. I did, however, notice two subtly different phases in the piece. At some point the woman appears to be wearing a grotesque mask and the color projected onto the background turns it more coral than rose. Whether I was triggering video sequences and not noticing it, or not, the work seemed to address me more like a painting; something that would carry on being despite whether I was there or not.
Like a moving painting Longpré’s work is similar to that of video artist Bill Viola’s (interestingly Viola just received an award for painting). Beyond opening up another virtual, illusionistic space on the surface of the pink canvas Longpre, like Viola, references the painting tradition, with its lighting, static frame, and figure placed at the centre of the composition, at a scale proportional to our own. Both artists also treat time as material, slowing down and speeding up movements in a way that renders them surreal and supernatural. While it is often hard to know whether the loop of a video installation is merely conventional or intentionally meaningful, repetition seems inherent to the reverberating space Longpré has constructed. The woman in Xia is trapped in a prison of a collapsed present, sliding down a spiral of infinite regress. This is artificial, digital time. Time that slips out from under standard linear perceptions and progressions. Like Viola, Longpré’s work is highly crafted, lyrical and poetic and makes the most of advances in ever affordable and accessible digital technologies.
[Ana Mendieta, Untitled aka Body Tracks (Blood Sign #2) 1974]
The publicity draw-card of the show is Ana Mendieta and the mystique surrounding her (and her untimely death). The curator (and author of a graphic novel based on Mendieta’s life, also featured in the show) has selected Mendieta’s Untitled aka Body Tracks (Blood sign #2), 1974 as the headlining work of the show. In this performance Mendieta drags her blood soaked arms down a wall with a simple, sweeping, singular gesture. The mark she creates is elemental, iconic and can be read in any number of ways: tree, uterus, pictograph… Unfortunately, the video was not well presented in the show, positioned too close to the entrance on a rather rough translucent screen.
The ties between Mendieta’s work and Longpré’s are easy to thread: the body as paintbrush, the critical feminist undercurrent, the power of a single expressive gesture. The female body as a site of expression and resistance, crystalised in video, is a theme that runs across the whole show. Video works by Jude Norris and Anna Peak similarly hinge around a singular expressive gesture enacted by a strong female individual. They lend a context for Longpré’s work to be read within. In exchange Xia adds nuance into the exhibition narrative; the feminine character depicted here is in turn determined and trapped, beautiful and frightening.
Body Tracks is awash with screens, a symptom of an art world swamped by moving images. This trend is so pervasive critic Dominique Païni even went so far as to pen an article for the journal October entitled “Should we put an end to projection?” This sentiment is a far cry from a pre-90s era where video struggled to gain recognition in the art world. Now everything else lives in its shadow. With a quick lick of paint the white cube has become a black box. Phrases like new media or multi media installation still resound as metonyms for video installation. Nine times out of ten when you read or hear the phrase “new media work” you can bet it means “there’s a projection.”
In his article Païni charts a parallel art history of projected light; one of images dematarialized and made more spectacular transforming the viewer into a contemporary flaneur, who browses and flits between video installations like a window shopper. Art historian Kate Mondloch asks “by creating media installations that support or even require visitors to determine the length of their experience with the work, might artists unintentionally provide for a spectatorship characterized by short attention spans?”
It would be easy for us to see the art world’s insatiable desire for ever larger audio visual installations as a way to draw in crowds with quickly digestible spectacles and just as easy to see the desire for video as simply manifesting a desire for the new. Though to indiscriminately rebuke artists’ continuing interest in video as merely trend following or crowd pleasing fails to see that, as Mondloch puts, it we are living in a “society of the screen.” We are subsumed by the moving image in its many forms: projections, monitors, computer screens, smartphones; cinemas, electronic billboards, youtube… to the point where it is hard to get critical distance. The screen has replaced the painted or printed image as the foundation for contemporary visual communication. As it continues to become more pervasive and more universal, blending illusionistic and information spaces, Mondloch suggests we will need to continue to “think through our thinking through media screens.”
*Xia will be shown again, within a modified exhibition, at FOFA Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal from 6 September to 10 October 2011.
Notes:
You may need: Adobe Flash Player.
Today marks a year of releases from the VT Audio Edition project and to celebrate that milestone, series curator Neil Wiernik has contributed a dispatch from his longstanding naw project. Neil describes his work as exploring the friction between natural and artificial environments – "the space where nature meets steel and concrete." To this end, Neil has contributed a 25 minute live mix that effortlessly blends minimal techno, dubstep and some more experimental percussive fare. Jump through to the release page for more info and a download link.
[Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Fibre Mantra – Microbit Records (2011)]
In a recent lecture given at Coventry University, entitled "Zombie Media: Media Archaelogy As Circuit Bending," media theorist Jussi Parikka provides us with a colorful new metaphor for outmoded and subsequently re-purposed technologies: like the titular horror / sci-fi characters of his essay, these devices have "come back from the dead" or been re-animated courtesy of simple contingency-driven ingenuity, and also thanks to an all-hands-on-deck fear of pending ecological catastrophe. The latter point cannot be overstated enough: Parikka reminds us that "in the United States alone, about 400,000,000 units of consumer electronics [are] discarded each year" and, more interestingly, E.P.A. research has revealed that "…two thirds of all discarded consumer electronics still work."1 The number of capable re-animators is on the rise, and not just because of a need for melioration of looming disasters, but also because of the considerable fun factor involved in such activities. One specific example of "zombification" cited by Parikka – the "circuit-bent" electronic toys and educational aids that have provided DIY musicians with a new source of aleatory sound output – is still gaining increasing currency as knowledge of bending techniques becomes more widespread. When not reconfiguring would-be obsolete hardware into a mutant form that surpasses its factory preset limitations, some types of otherwise obsolete software are also salvaged to meet this same end: artists such as The User and the duo of Pablo Reche / Anla Courtis have both found that the old 5" floppy disc housing makes a handsome jacket for a compact disc of similar size.
Then there are the digital net-labels 4m@ and Floppyswop (the former is claimed by its founders as the "conservative aspect" of the Proc Records netlabel.) Both require that their artists follow one simple criterion: the pieces they release must be no larger than the 1.44-megabyte storage space of the 3.5" floppy disk (the latter label's home pages also host an archive of mercilessly bit-compressed, floppy-ready video projects, by the way.) Album artwork, to be submitted at a suggested resolution of 198 x 153 pixels, is also tailored to fit the floppy's on-disk label space. When faced with this kind of challenging limitation, the artist has only a couple of choices: maintain the "CD quality" standard of audio fidelty and release an audio work of disappointing brevity, or drastically downgrade the fidelity in order to buy oneself more minutes' worth of playback time. The fidelity downgrade is the choice of most participants in these projects, and an entire subculture of "lo-bit" artists now exists with works available for free download (whether you have the ability to house their work on a floppy disk or not.)
The MP3 audio codec, conceived in 1987 at the Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen [Fraunhofer Institute For Integrated Circuits] and code-named "EUREKA Project EU147," has already had quite a storied existence: where it was once a radical and risky move for a record label to offer digital sales of their product in MP3 form, now - according to journalist Evgeny Morozov - even the website of the Chinese Defense Ministry boasts an MP3 download section2 (I haven't been able to personally corroborate this, although the same august body now has its own iPhone app, so this isn't much of a stretch.) As with other technologies that mature to this point of market saturation, it has become ripe for use in a number of meta-music projects that subject it to a series of "stress tests," questioning its fallibility and longevity in the process- "lo-bit" releasing seems to be one of the most extreme tests now taking place. The audio file boom, as initialized by MP3 and sustained by more luxurious formats (e.g.. OGG Vorbis, uncompressed .aiff and .wav files) has gone on long enough now that its own subculture of self-critical artists, generally overlapping with self-releasing culture, has sprung up to test these formats' technical and aesthetic limitations. As exemplified by the 4m@ and Floppyswop projects, the "low-bitrate" MP3 album can be harnessed to Parikka's concept of "zombie media" while also contributing to the expansion of the so-called "freeconomy," of which much of the MP3-releasing culture is a subset.
[HertzCanary, whµ_do_birds_sing_so_gaµ – 20kbps Records 2011]
So what kind of audio finds its way onto a lo-bit release? The answer may be surprising to those who expect all such products to be an undifferentiated and unremarkable mess of noise, with the already murky signals being drowned in a secondary wave of noise, i.e. the tinny artifacts that result from heavy file compression. The Swiss label 20kbps (which releases recordings in other bitrates, contrary to what the moniker suggests) has laid claim to being the first label with "lo-bit" as its modus operandi, and features disassembled dance music courtesy of artists like HertzCanary. The Russian net-label Microbit Records, formed in 2008, provides another one of the more well rounded catalogs, specializing in releases "devoted to low-bit music of all genres", with "releases […] available as free download in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format," and "…encoded in low bitrate (from 1 kbps to 64 kbps)."3 Some of the releases also up the ante by being available in monaural sound. Despite the apparent limitations of this concept, the label's roster boasts nearly 70 artists at the time of writing. As could be expected, much of this is post-industrial electronica, but there are surprises in store as well: the Microbit group Hobo (the only group listed without a presence on networking sites like MySpace or LastFM) play a punk-inflected Russian-language blues, and the enigmatic Evgenij Kharitonov offers up a distressed form of concrete poetry made more unsettling by the unique sonic artifacts unique to low bitrate recording. Neizvestnost, a competent and fluid trance-rock unit, also turns in a rewarding release capable of overcoming the challenges provided by the label's modus operandi, perhaps even benefiting from the unnatural thinness of that particular sound (the group also features on the Extreme Russia From Music omnibus on the intensely selective Susan Lawly label.)
These netlabels' countries of origin are not at all irrelevant to this discussion, and may indeed help to make a case for their being more than "cute" novelties or knowing statements about the transience of technology (e.g. today's cutting-edge hardware is tomorrow's punch line.) The name of one Bangkok-based netlabel, Top Of The Flops, broadcasts this comical self-effacement, upping the comedy factor by inviting artists to submit material "if you think you are good enough for Top Of The Flops."4 However, it is useful to not be overwhelmed by patent quirkiness and to find other approaches to this aesthetic: both Microbit and labels from former Soviet territories, like the Ukraine and Latvia, have added significant support to this project (see the 8 Ravens and Dex And The City labels, respectively), and with motives that stray outside the bounds of ironic humor. Elsehwere, the Russian e-zine / LiveJournal community lobit.ru—an offshoot of Microbit Records—remains one of the most reliable sources for aggregating the output of the various other lo-bit netlabels.
In light of all this, Foreign Policy magazine's recent comprehensive survey of Internet trends poses the question of what nation is currently the most fertile ground for future online innovations. The polling results award the U.S. a whopping 74% share in response to this question (survey results such as "everywhere" and "nowhere" are included as write-in responses in lieu of naming a particular geographic region), and includes some curious omissions as well- nowhere in South America or Australia is cited as having a single percentage point in this poll. Microbit's Russia is also absent from the winner's circle here, unless you count the dubious consolation prize of coming in 3rd place for the poll question "which country has the most powerful offensive cyberwarfare capacity?"5 So, is it possible that some of the lo-bit releases from this region are the result of a technological assymetry with other nations?
[Neizvestnost, Pauki-Zloumishlenniki – Microbit Records (2008)]
To be sure, the standards of speed and reliability for Internet connectivity are still hardly uniform throughout the globe: in Microbit's Russia, the percentage of computer users in the total population hovers around a maximum value of 50% (one source suggests 59,700,000 Russian Internet users out of a potential 140,000,000)6 which is also the lowest estimated percentage of users for much of Western Europe and Scandinavia. Naturally, these numbers take into account a sizable rural population, although urban Russia does not boast total connectivity either: among users in the cities, household Internet access is not a given, and the chosen environment for Web surfing may be an Internet café. Given the hourly prices charged at these cafes, and the fact that "in some cities […] the highest speed people can count on is 256 kbps"7 the ability to download music fairly quickly makes a little more sense. Put another way, urban Russia "might have passed the digital divide, but still live[s] in the 'pre-broadband world with little or no access to YouTube and other traffic-sensitive online services."8 Given such factors, it is a little more difficult to dismiss low bitrate releasing as a purely contrarian exercise meant to alienate audiophiles and 'scene' jumpers. Doing so puts the critic at risk of seeming chauvinistically unaware of other nations' infrastructural problems, and also of state restrictions on media. Even if one has the broadband capability to enjoy, say, the Russian YouTube equivalent RuTube, there is still the matter of its ownership by state-controlled energy titan Gazprom, and the possibility that not just any content will pass through its ideological filter.
Digital dystopians like Andrew Keen and Cass Sunstein have made a name for themselves by bemoaning the "monkeys" running the asylum of Web 2.0 and the so-called "Daily Me" method of online group polarization (i.e. ideological reinforcement coming about by customizing information feeds to match only one's particular interests.) The novelty aspect of the lo-bit releasing method has been an irresistible low-hanging fruit for a battalion of pranksters and "griefers," and has emboldened many who are inclined towards mocking the sanctity of music making, or just societal mores in general. So, while Sunstein and Keen are likely unaware of the activities of these ironic anti-artists, both pundits would heartily claim them as further proof of the Internet's infantilizing tendencies (and in this instance I have to actually agree with my sparring partners.) A sort of trans-national clique of juvenile suburbantites has taken up residence in the lo-bit scene since its inception, merrily grinding out releases whose staggering number is disproportionate to their negligible cultural influence. These releases are larded with all-too-predictable approximations of "ghetto" attitude, failed attempts at generating "lulz" with pop culture detritus, and the geeky concupiscence of 12 year olds who have just discovered hardcore porn and need to share this triumphal discovery with anyone and everyone.
Being that many of the culprits often work in the "chiptune" style – the remixing of classic videogame soundtracks, or the attempt at emulating the timbral qualities of the same – we're also never too far from a fresh round of jokes on that most stale of punchlines; the awkward English grammar deployed in translations of Japanese console games. All in all, it seems like the more puerile members of the lo-bit community are obsessed with demonstrating that ethics and aesthetics (or the lack thereof) have to proceed in lockstep: ergo poor sonic quality must be caught up in an ever-intensifying, reciprocal dialogue with junk subject matter. While I realize it's not good journalistic form, I refuse to mention any of these individuals by name or to link to them- discerning readers will know what I'm talking about when encountering these acts on the netlabels' rosters, otherwise I am content to leave them comfortably alone in the confines of their echo chamber.
[Hobo, Working Man's Blues – Microbit Records (2010)]
The low-bitrate MP3's multiple uses, if nothing else, do set it apart from many other cultural products that have appeared in the post-digital flood of tools for "authenticity enhancement": so far we've seen that it is both (for better or worse) the carrier of an aesthetic, and a practical means of delivering new creative expressions to areas where the available computer hardware has less than optimum processor performance, online connectivity, and storage capabilites. More interestingly, though, is that no clever scripting, hacking, bending, or esoteric software was required to kickstart this audio micro-revolution: the ability to encode an MP3 at sub-'CD quality' bitrates is a feature built into the iTunes application (customizing import settings allows one to lower the fidelity to 16kbps), while the open-source audio editor Audacity allows for audio projects to be exported as 8kbps MP3 files. Though the floppy disk-related campaigns of 4m@ and Floppyswop steer them into the realm of "zombie media," the majority of lo-bit releases are merely experiments with media features that, though not "dead," exist at least in a suspended animation of un-use.
The lo-fi recording aesthetic was once one where "take me as I am" authenticity was concomitant with jarring intimacy: the poster children for such an aesthetic were singer-songwriters like Low Barlow, whose heartbroken confessional style practically necessitated "one take" recording done at home, with no discernible editing, and with the technical flaws (e.g. vocals being placed way too high in the mix) also being its signature elements. What the releases from Microbit and 4m@ point to, though, is nothing less than a kind of "neo lo-fi" for the digital age, a recognition of the fact that much of the vaunted "analog" lifestyle is well out of the price range of the average citizen: vintage analog keyboards, tube amplifiers and other workhorses of pre-digital studio recording cost in the thousands of dollars, while the bill for their upkeep and repair can itself become a burdensome expense. Given such expenses, it is something of a conceit when a completely analog-driven "indie" recording act uses this equipment as a proof of its frugality and rootsy authenticity (rather than because it sounds better, which itself is only true some of the time.) So, digital outfits like Microbit are reresentative of a new tactical shift in the "authenticity wars," whose objective has been to show how positive public recognition can be attained irrespective of technical mastery. Their radically bit-reduced sound arrives at the ears like a lost transmission from some parallel reality, something that would normally be quite alienating and disorienting. However, this sense of distancing paradoxically works to provide the listener with a more authentic experience: the limited frequency range and watery audio quality of low bitrate MP3s may wholeheartedly trade out sonic presence for distance, but doesn't this really provide the most honest portrait of the releasing artists? They largely inhabit a cultural milieu where physical distance from kindred spirits is the rule rather than the exception, and where the expressive vocabulary has evolved as a result of taking technology beyond its intended uses (most digital audio software recommends that the low bitrates be used only for transmission of "human speech.")
As long as authenticity remains a mandatory selling point for culture consumers, it has to be noted that "lo-bit" is now closer to manifesting that elusive quality than what earlier qualified as "lo-fi" music. A bored Ann Arbor teen who has spent the majority of his free time consuming 4chan postings and console video games will naturally gravitate towards deliberately downgraded chiptune tracks, while a struggling blues band in an ex-Soviet company town may embrace software features reflecting their less-than-symmetrical relationship to the technological advancement of the affluent West. Like other 21st century aesthetic imperfections – e.g. the shaky camera movements in the nascent "mumblecore" film genre – the technique's communicative substance varies from one user to the next, being used out of necessity as much as it is used as an optional, voluntary attempt to mark stylistic boundaries. The common goal here is still recognition for one's work, and the desire for this remains one of the most indisputably "authentic" (even biologically driven) human traits. Some would consider lo-bit recording a desperate way to go about it, but it's hardly an illegitimate addition to a modern aesthetic lexicon already brimful of glitches, oversaturation, and "zombification" techniques.
Notes:
(1) Jussi Parikka quoted at "Zombie Media: Media Archaelogy As Circuit Bending" lecture, Coventry University, February 14 2011. Available online at http://coventryuniversity.podbean.com/2011/02/14/zombie-media-media-arch...
(2) See Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side Of Internet Freedom, p. 138. Public Affairs Books, New York, 2011.
(3) http://www.discogs.com/label/Microbit+Records. Retrieved March 22, 2011.
(4) http://topoftheflopsrecords.blogspot.com. Retrieved August 24, 2011.
(5) "The FP Survey: The Internet," author uncredited. Foreign Policy Sept.-Oct. 2011, p. 91.
(6) http://www.internetworldstats.com/euro/ru.htm. Retrieved March 24, 2011.
(7) http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/03/14/russia-mapping-broadband-intern.... Retrieved March 24, 2011.
(8) Ibid
Ben Bogart is a Canadian artist whose works encompass science, machine creativity and open source ethics. His innovative and fascinating investigations on artificial imagination and machine learning are effectively demonstrated through his body of work, which is neatly underpinned and strongly characterized by a critical analysis of the paradigm of creativity.
[Output from Dreaming Machine #1]
Marco Donnarumma: Ben, to what extent can creativity be investigated through algorithmic means and which of your works best embodies such a practice? In which ways can the development of creative machines foster a better understanding of individuals as makers?
Ben Bogart: My research group (MAMAS), directed by Philippe Pasquier, my Ph.D. supervisor) is a group of students and faculty many of whom are working on "metacreation", where we attempt to design systems that exhibit creative behaviour. Personally, I came to academia not to explore creativity directly (creative machines that is), but origination: how something (idea, form, life, universe) could come to be. The early genesis of this thinking is apparent in my 2005 paper "untitled iterations" in Vague Terrain. I started my M.Sc. degree with the idea of making a site-specific artwork that could "find its own relationship to its context". Eventually this lead to research on creativity and creative machines. Memory Association Machine (MAM) (2007) was an answer to this investigation of a machine forming its own relationship to context.
MAM implements a simplified conception of creativity proposed by Liane Gabora that emphasizes origination over evaluation. According to this theory, all the experiences of an agent are broken down into micro-features and encoded in memory. The 'world-view' is the whole collection of memories of a person, and they are organized in a structure that is unique to their life experience. Creativity is an association through this field of memories, where components of previous experiences are combined and new juxtapositions are formed. Rational and creative thought are two extremes of a single process. Rational associations involve activations of few memories in very focused directions, while creative associations involve the activation of many memories in many different directions. For more information on this see my M.Sc. Thesis. In order to continue my interest in origination, I'm moving away from creativity and looking at mental processes that may not involve any agency. My Ph.D. project is the development of a 'Dreaming Machine' that explicitly implements cognitively oriented models of concept generation, perception, memory and dreaming.
Creative machines are a way to test out theories of creativity, and could be used to validate certain models of cognitive processing. I'm not interested in using art to validate science, but interested in some mutual overlap between these areas. I believe that science is just another cultural practise. The use of scientific models is more about a better understanding of science than it is about a better understanding of 'makers'. To simply accept these models without critique is to accept the doctrine that only science can construct new knowledge, which I don't think is the case.
There are features regarding the study of creativity that are really interesting, and others than I find tiresome. It becomes very clear when looking at 'creativity' that one of the most imperative aspects is that of evaluation. Boden explicitly defines creativity as the construction of something (idea or artifact) that is new, surprising and valuable. This thinking permeates much work in metacreation, where some mechanism randomly creates variation, which is then edited down by a secondary process. Almost any process can create massive amounts of random variation and, according to this mindset, the process of evaluation becomes paramount. In computational systems much effort is put into the "fitness" and evaluation functions that allow a machine to decide what is worth keeping, and what is not. In order to design such algorithms one must build in a criteria for what is important in an idea or artifact. This cuts against my interest in origination because the problem moves from "lets build a machine that originates" to "lets determine a measure of creativity". I don't really care what relationship MAM will form with its context, what is important is the formation itself (or at least the effort in that direction) not the qualities of the relationship. I find the idea of formally encoding evaluation criteria quite unpleasant.
Perhaps it comes down to the AI debate between 'symbolic' and 'interactionist' poles. One side is 'top-down', where intelligence is considered a rational process that can be reduced to symbolic logic. For this side, evaluation is natural as it's a top-down process. On the other side we have a 'bottom-up' approach, where methods are often inspired by biological systems, for example artificial neural networks. Intelligence is an emergent property that arises from the interaction between an agent and its environment. In this case, evaluation does not explicitly exist, it too is emergent. The bottom line is that for something to be created it must first originate before it can be evaluated.
Creativity, for me, is really an exploration of the big project of AI: building machines that do things that we normally attribute to people. In looking at creativity I'm interested in rejecting the notion of rational intelligence and interested in mental processes that go beyond rationality. This also explains my interest in origination, which could be considered irrational, due to a potential lack of evaluation. Choices may not be made for an explicit reason, they could be random, they could be unintelligible, they could be insane. Evaluation, on the other hand, is extremely rational. In Boden's terms, it involves knowing what has happened before (to judge newness), what is normal (to judge surprise), and what is needed (to judge value).
[Self-Organized Landscape #32, University of Limerick: Study from Video]
MD: That's indeed a good point; but now I wonder: would you also attempt at mimicking or reconstituting human forgetfulness and fallacy in machines? I'm pointing at that obscure mental process which makes human beings forget or hide their memories, or even rebuild them, patch them together by deploying pretentious ambitions or delusional feelings. I believe such processes greatly affect human creativity by simultaneously creating grounds and expectations.
BB: Just today on the radio I heard a reference to a link between creative genius, irrationality and destructive behaviour. There has been a line of argument that creativity and insanity are related, but, as far as I understand, this argument depends on an extremely simplistic notion of creativity. Through the process of working on MAM, many interesting issues came up, the subtitle of my first publication on MAM (before it was even titled as such), "seizures, blindness and short-term memory", highlights the nature of the machine's disability. Early implementations of the free-associative system were very temperamental and often became over-activated, causing CPU spikes and lockups. It was Dr. Steven Barnes that made the connection between this behaviour and epilepsy. Blindness and short-term memory are fairly obvious limitations of the system. Forgetfulness seems fairly clear in a system with finite memory, humans and machines alike. In regards to fallacy, it seems to me that even the notion of human fallibility depends on the consideration of humans as rational creatures. A mistake requires some goal-oriented task. What if the machine does not have such a task, does it's fallibility have any significance?
In my background research for the current dreaming machine I came across this paper, "Toward Daydreaming Machines", which describes architectures that could give machines the ability to resolve cognitive tension by relegating facts and memories to their subconscious. I'm not so interested in these high level models of human cognition, but the aspect of illness and disability is interesting in the context of a cultural reflection: what is normal. Deaf and autistic cultures being examples of 'differences of ability' rather than disability. I think that creative ability likely brings to bare all aspects of cognition, including illness, inability and so on. Creativity is a function of the whole of the mind, as informed by the whole of a person's bodily experience in the world. Perhaps for a machine to be creative in a truly significant way, it would need to have an emotional base that drives an irrational process. Now we're back to the problem of origination. One theory of human emotion is that it is rooted in biological needs, as a machine is not biologically alive, its not clear what these needs would be. Machines are not designed to survive, certainly not on the scale that living things, at the level of species, do.
[Self-Organized Landscapes, Pixelache 2010]
MD: How would an 'intelligent' or 'creative' machine benefit from such intrinsic human traits? Would a machine benefit from it at all?
BB: It depends on the purpose of the machine. If it is meant to be a tool, a system that (creatively or through reasoned deduction) generates new artifacts/ideas, then those cognitive (dis)abilities related to managing cognitive dissonance would likely just get in the way. On the other hand, a machine with these traits could be a mirror through which we could reflect on ourselves. In general, the question of whether such traits would be a benefit depends on what function those traits have in living systems. It's possible they only have functions for survival.
MD: A machine as a techno-cultural mirror of our intellectual and emotional drifts. Sounds intriguing. Talking about science as a cultural practise, I seem to identify a convergent force which is moving all digital arts toward more scientific approaches; increasingly, the digital arts community appear to question the nature of humanity and society by means of hybridized methodologies involving scientific methods or theories.
BB: There is this issue of methodology. I don't think that it is appropriate to apply a hard-lined quantitative methodology to an artistic practise, simply because the purpose, the direction of the production in artistic practise, is always being reconsidered. It's not appropriate to give up on a scientific experiment before getting the results, but an artist's reflective practise means that they are constantly reconsidering the whole of the work, not just executing an idea or finding the truth value of a hypothesis, but questioning whether the artistic idea is worth following and what its implications may be. That is not to say that quantitative methods don't have a place. I certainly believe they should be integrated into an artistic practise in cases cases of computational art. The difference is that in this case these methods are used to solve sub-problems, not prove the validity of the whole project.
MD: Aside from the (seemingly) wider distribution of more complex technologies, which could be an obvious trigger of such scientific hybridization of arts, how is this phenomena is taking place? Has art always been following the pace of science? If a growing interest in science is really informing artists' creativity, how will the knowledge that art produces be different than it was 50 years ago?
BB: I believe it was once thought that philosophy (the original science) was concerned with ideas, while art was concerned with forms. I think we now know that forms are a special kinds of ideas and that this dichotomy does not hold true. Artists who construct forms certainly have ideas that extend past the forms themselves. I think the processes of thinking/reasoning/hypothesizing and the construction of forms have always been complimentary. I don't think the argument for constructing form without thought holds a lot of water, as the effort to make form without thought is in itself an artistic idea. In order for thought to be communicated, it has to be manifest in some form, verbal, textual and so on. I believe both art and science are centrally concerned with constructing representations that enrich our understanding through a discourse. In the case of science these representations are texts, equations and figures that communicate models, in the case of art they are a multitude of media constructed in an artistic framework in a tradition of ideas. Science is highly rigorous and pointed in its depth first search of a space of enquiry. Art is free-associative, relational, subjective and centrally reflexive. I'm not sure art knowledge is really different than it was 50 years ago. It reflects our time now, but I don't think that nature has changed. It is interesting you choose 50 years, bringing us right back to the start of art/science/engineering integrations of the "Experiments in Art and Technology" (EAT) group.
MD: Presently, the theme of innovation and innovators seems to be a topic of interest in the artistic and hacktivist communities; while some of the latest corporations' technological devices have been creatively hacked and re-distributed (PS3 Eye, Kinect), several anti-(capitalist)social networks projects were developed (Seppukoo, Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, and the more recent Thimbl) in an attempt to claim back the primal peer2peer character of the Internet. As comprehensively outlined in FLOSS+Art, and, more recently, in the Telekommunist Manifesto, there exists a multi-stranded relation between capitalism and innovation, and innovation and open creativity. What are the modalities by which Open Source ethics can encourage innovative practices? Could we argue that innovation is intrinsic to the Open Source ethos?
BB: If we consider science (and therefore technology) a cultural practise, then it is clear that no idea forms in isolation, but is given life thanks to a context of other ideas. In Gabora's theory of creativity the 'world-view' contains all the components of all the things we have seen and remember. It is only from this pool that a new idea can be constructed from existing components. For this very reason I can't believe in intellectual property (IP). Ideas cannot be owned because they cannot be attributed to an isolated person. Everything we have is not thanks to individuals, but to a culture that enables collaboration. This is why I endeavour to use only free and open-source software.
Innovation is about refinement, and it requires a large and varied pool of cultural components (ideas and technologies). As corporations sequester more and more knowledge in their IP vaults, there is less for others to work with. It's insane to think this would do anything but stifle innovation, where the components needed for innovation are increasingly controlled. Patents were thought up to encourage innovation by trading the explicit documentation of a design for a monopoly on the production of that design for a limited amount of time. The reason why a patent claim must contain so much detail is so that when the patent expires the design can be quickly reimplemented and transformed by culture at large. If a maker does not file a patent, then they can simply choose not disclose the design, and would never be obliged to share it. With this in mind we can think of FLOSS as an extreme version of this. By publishing the source, the maker is releasing a design to the cultural world, where it can be refined and used right away. It has an additional feature: since the copyright notice must follow source through its life, it includes a record of the contributions of those who were involved. Imagine a remix culture where this credit is automatically managed, you download a movie clip and your mashup automatically contains a reference to the original, a history of the production beyond a single maker. Imagine generational art or software projects that are passed down, like an oral history, from parent to child. With each generation the history and the work itself is being continuously enriched. FLOSS is about sharing, and innovation is at its best when ideas and methods are shared widely and openly.
[Dreaming Machine #2 in Sao Paulo]
MD: Another topic which is being critically discussed at the moment is pervasive computing, or the Internet of Things. Although I personally believe such paradigm to be nothing more than a regenerated definition of a founding concept underlying the historical development of today's information society, it seems that a novel, mainstream awareness of the nature of ubiquitous computing is coming to life. Do you believe that a pervasive digital art could ever exist in the future? In which ways will the ubiquitous presence of computational devices shape digital creativity and electronic arts?
BB: I don't own a cell phone, and I'm still using a Sony Clie, made in 2005, I bought used for $60. The first computer I bought was a used Amiga 3000, that one ended up in a museum when I bought my first PC, a Duron 800 around ~2000. That machine only died a month ago, after three drives, two ram upgrades, two graphics cards, and two PSUs. For 10 years it was my primary machine, running Linux of course. I don't use Facebook, though I do use IRC on occasion. I have always had an extremely critical eye for the technologies that I use. I do not support the ubiquitous computing platforms largely for one reason: eWaste. Our needs for faster and faster smart phones is already creating a horrible waste problem. A device designed to be manufactured by the millions, and kept for only a few years, or months, is a ecological nightmare. They can't be designed be to be recyclable, because that would increase production costs too much. They can't be built to last, because then the manufacturer would not be able to sell the latest and greatest. If all our current 'dumb' devices became 'smart' then our ability to reclaim those materials would drop significantly. I've already come to the realization that in the future people will have to develop methods to mine the landfills to reclaim that which we have discarded. I'm all for the acceptance of digital and electronic media art projects as broadly into the public as possible, but there is an ethical issue with the platforms that may enable that kind of penetration.
I'm not sure that creativity will be transformed in a world of increasing ubiquitous computing. Creativity always operated against constraints, and within a tradition. How would the introduction of ubiquitous computing devices be any different than the introduction of any other "new" technology? The greatest value of ubiquitous computing is the aspect of embodiment. How we deal with information would no longer be in the top-down realms of our minds, but we may be able to feel it in our bones and on our skin. If we were able to solve the eWaste problems of technology then there is potential for public art to take on a new meaning, being integrated in social structure and architectural space. Maybe this would make art more relevant to the public, we just have to be aware of the ethical consequences.
MD: 'Ethical consequences', yes, many of us probably wish there would be a better awareness of ethical consequences about several matters. It seems to me that still in 2011 the majority of the world population is not aware of the real power, impact and utility (or abuse) of technology; a good part of our population is perhaps 'technology-aware': they recognize technological products and means surrounding them and they understand some of the social implications that today's eInfrastructures are based on. However, only a small number of us consciously realizes where technologies come from, on which principles they are based on, and the embedded logical and moral fallacy they cherish; lastly, an incredibly tiny amount of people is actively involved in the production of technology, for commercial, creative or hacktivist purposes.
BB: I agree, and I think your observation applies the same for science, a general lack of understanding and an unwillingness to criticize technological and scientific knowledge. The popularity of "making" and a new coolness for craft and nerds perhaps indicates that things are changing. "The big bang theory" TV show certainly has references in it that require a pretty good foundational understanding of science. I wish and dream we could end up with a population that is as media and technologically literate as they are textually literate. Part of why I'm interested in public art and public space is to engage with a broad public on these matters.
MD: Don't you think that the acceleration of technological advance, coupled with the ubiquity of tech end-products, could possibly weaken our awareness by not giving us the room and time to realize, in depth, what we are dealing with?
BB: I think that it is inevitable that technologies are developed and marketed before we even have a chance to understand the previous incarnation. It's possible that we will never understand the ramifications of a technology, it being forgotten and obsolete before we can really see it. This is a frightening thought, that a technology could come and go, changing us in some way we cannot, and will never, know. Our ability to habituate, to integrate our minds and tools such that we are not aware of them, is that which makes us special, but perhaps also that which makes us victims of our own power structures.
MD: Finally, do you have any new projects in the pipeline? Would you like to share something with us?
I'm working on a few things at the same time, and blogging the process in the "production" section of my website. I'm continuing to work on my Self-Organized Landscapes, which are a spinoff of MAM and Dreaming Machine #2. My Ph.D. Project "Dreaming Machine #3" (DM3) is the next step. Where MAM and Dreaming Machine #1 and #2 all make use of Gabora's model of creativity and a self-organizing map, DM3 will make explicit use of cognitive models of perception, memory and perhaps most importantly concept formation. DM3 will learn patterns in the world (not whole images) that will form into concepts. Concepts will then allow the reconstruction of these patterns into new images. These images will be imagined by the machine, and constructed of components that the machine has seen. This project would be perhaps less a creative machine and more like a young child attempting to make sense of the world, and that sense being reflected in its dreams. Just as we explore and understand ourselves through cultural representations, the artwork will attempt to make sense of us and our world by constructing itself (or lack of self).
The 2011 edition of Alpha-ville Festival provides an online and live platform to explore, test and disseminate new ideas, emerging trends, collaborations and groundbreaking works. Running from 22-25 September in London, the programme presents social media and interactive art, open labs, meet-ups, talks, workshops and screenings alongside with live music, visual performances and parties.
Gathering artists, creative coders, new media technologists, designers, architects, professionals, musicians, researchers and academics, some of the key names are: Tom Uglow (Google Creative Labs), Marius Watz, Filip Visnjic (CreativeApplications.Net), Man Bartlett, Daito Manabe, Moritz Stefaner, Keiichi Matsuda, James Alliban, Pantha Du Prince, Jon Hopkins, Jacaszek and Kangding Ray.
"This year’s programme addresses the transition from a digital to a post-digital culture, that looks beneath technology at how human behaviours such as collaboration, participation and interaction have redefined the creative practice and society itself, and at how the physical boundaries between reality and online are being blurred."
View the full programme here.
Congrats to our peers at CONT3XT.NET (guest cur-editors of VT 11) on their forthcoming book – note the details below.
Content | Form | Im-material – Five Years of CONT3XT.NET
Authors: Josephine Bosma, Mary-Anne Breeze – aka netwurker, Sarah Cook, Thomas Dreher, Constant Dullaart, Mark E. Grimm, Jeremy Hight, Sabine Hochrieser, Michael Kargl, Jan Robert Leegte, Mia Makela, Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, Stefan Nowotny, Les Liens Invisibles, Birgit Rinagl, Franz Thalmair, Pall Thayer, Marius Watz
Artists: Maria Anwander, Anna Artaker, Ruben Aubrecht, Miriam Bajtala, Ryan Barone, Mary-Anne Breeze – aka netwurker, Charles Broskoski, Codemanipulator®, Arend deGryuter-Helfer and Aylor Brown, Gerhard Dirmoser, Aleksandra Domanovic, Reynald Drouhin, Nikolaus Gansterer, Christina Goestl, Jochen Höller, Karl Heinz Jeron und Valie Djordjevic, Michael Kargl, Annja Krautgasser, Miriam Laussegger and Eva Beierheimer, Jan Robert Leegte, Ralo Mayer, Michail Michailov, MTAA – M. River and T. Whid Art Associates, Barbara Musil and Karo Szmit, Jörg Piringer, Lisa Rastl, Arnold Reinthaler, Veronika Schubert, Johanna Tinzl and Stefan Flunger, UBERMORGEN.COM, Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak
Bibliographic information: CONT3XT.NET – Sabine Hochrieser, Michael Kargl, Birgit Rinagl, Franz Thalmair (eds.): “Content | Form | Im-material”, Verlag fuer moderne Kunst Nuernberg, 2011, 21 x 14,8 cm, approx. 100 coloured images, 264 pages, ISBN 978-3-86984-187-8, with an introductory essay by Steve Dietz
Editor's Note: We are thrilled to announce that we are co-presenting a show as part of The Music Gallery's annual X AVANT Festival – undoubtedly one of the most adventurous and dynamic festivals in North America. This event will showcase abstract electronic music and feature performances by Tim Hecker, Markus Popp and The Global Cities Ensemble – please join us in Toronto on October 21st.
Friday October 21
Location: The Music Gallery
Doors 7pm, concert 8pm
Tickets $25 advance at Rotate This, Soundscapes & Ticketweb.ca – BUY NOW!
At the door: $30 regular, $15 member
Admission included in $85 All-Access Festival Pass
Music Gallery event info page
8:00PM – GLOBAL CITIES ENSEMBLE
Global Cities Ensemble was formed in 2010 by four respected musicians on the Toronto scene: Andrew Timar (suling - Indonesian flute), Araz Salek (tar – Persian lute), Abdominal (emcee) and Professor Fingers (turntables). GCE makes music with an inter-cultural flavour, at once international and local. Asian world music added to a bubbling cauldron of local hip-hop – this is new territory yet little explored. This new musical hybrid language and aesthetic is driven by instruments, intonation, tonal and rhythmic modes from Iran, Indonesia, India and Western classical music. GCE merges that with popular music, urban poetry and contemporary live electronic performance soundscapes.
9:00PM – OVAL
Oval is the musical alias of Berlin artist Markus Popp, creator of some of the most original electronic music of the last 20 years – termed “glitch” music. Emerging in the mid-1990s, glitch was the sound of embracing failure. Scratched and skipping CDs, hardware noise and computer crashes were all used as sound sources in this emerging movement, at which Oval – originally a trio including Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzger – were at the forefront. Seminal recordings like Systemisch and 94 Diskont showed a playful sense of melody shine through amongst the clicky chaos; a sensible which continue through to later collaborations such as Gastr del Sol’s Camoufleur (with Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs) in 1998 and SO (with Japanese vocalist Eriko Toyada) in 2003. Popp then went silent for seven years, before returning at full strength in 2010 with an EP, “Oh,” and an epic, 70-track double album, O. For these latest recordings, Popp has left his past in the realm of glitch and custom software platforms behind, instead challenging himself to create music using a commercial PC outfitted with stock sounds and plug-ins. The result, though still distinctly Oval in its slippery shape-shifting, is also something distinctly more musical and mellifluous than anything we’ve heard from him before. We are very pleased to present Oval live at X Avant, as one his first appearances in Canada in more than 15 years.
10:00pm – TIM HECKER
A Music Gallery (and Vague Terrain!) favourite, tonight’s concert marks the third appearance by Vancouver-bred, Montréal based sound artist Tim Hecker in the last five years. But it also marks a special occasion, as Hecker will play a rarely-performed set utilizing St. George the Martyr Church’s pipe organ. This hybrid performance relies on a feedback system between pipe organ and computer, as organ tones are fed into a Max/MSP patch, run through guitar distortion pedals and out through bass amplifiers and the PA system. Sounds slowly stack, overlap, interweave and eventually dissolve into the air. This approach was developed while recording Hecker’s latest release, Ravedeath, 1972 in Reykjavik, Iceland with producer Ben Frost. Long-listed for the 2011 Polaris Music Prize, Ravedeath, 1972 approaches a form of secular musical transcendentalism from within the battered temple of spirituality. Recorded in a church and using a pipe organ as the primary sound source, the album is essentially a live recording. In reality, it exists in a nether world between captured live performance and meticulous studio work, melding the two approaches to sonic artifice as a unity. It is in parts a document of air circulating within a wooden room, and also a pagan work of physical resonance within a space once reserved for the hallowed breath of the divine.
Earlier this summer Vague Terrain contributor Thomas Bey William Bailey undertook a research residency at the SONM (Sound Archive of Experimental Music and Sound Art) in Murcia, Spain. The SONM has posted a PDF of Bailey's essay "State of the Union: The Synesthetic Experience in Experimental Music and Sound Art", which begins as follows:
The type of perception we normally have in mind when discussing the mirroring of sensory information is synesthesia- from the Greek "syn" [union] and aesthesis [sensation]. While being diagnosed with this condition as a parament state is extremely rare and likely to be inherited (something we'll look at into shortly), the number of artistic practices dealing with synesthesia as an adventitious or acquired state are growing steadily. For the latter, maybe "cross-modal translation" should be used in place of "synesthesia" to differentiate adventitious and inherited forms of experience, yet the "sexiness" of the term synesthesisa is difficult to shake off…"
Yes, Thomas has tackled (and catalogued) synesthesia in sound art and experimental music production and the results are quite compelling. Cruise over to a related SONM page to download his essay – it is well worth your time.
Note:The SONM site seems to time out frequently – if you try to click through to the site several times, you will eventually get to the linked page and the essay.
Editor's note: In this post Vague Terrain and Artengine's critical blogging resident Jaenine Parkinson continues her reflections on Ottawa / Gatineau Area media art. This year long series of posts is dedicated to providing a space where our resident can exploring bloggging as a "creative space for critical discourse around the media arts and creative technological expression."
"In a world where everyone can air their views to everyone, we are faced, I think, not with mass empowerment but with an endless stream of banal egos.” – Claire Bishop"
Claire Bishop is on a mission to re-scribe readings of participatory/collaborative/socially engaged/relational/dialogic art beyond moral interpretations. Her agenda hasn’t changed since her 2004 October article where she challenged Nicolas Bourriaud’s aggrandizing claims for relational aesthetics. From this polarizing start she has been unrelenting in her push for a more sober take on the participatory art forms currently trending. So, you can imagine my interest in the launch of her new book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. Supposedly released in spring this year, I can’t find a copy anywhere, and there is no mention of it yet on the publisher’s (Verso) website. Nevertheless, no book is an island, therefore, a lot of Bishop’s material is already floating around. What follows is a cursory guess at the types of things I think—and hope—she will address in her book. I will be glancing over the wealth of historical research that Bishop draws upon to contextualize and evidence her argument. Suffice to say, she has brought an overlooked history of participation in twentieth century art into the light. More than simply proving her thesis is no knee-jerk reaction this history serves as ample reason to read her book(s) for yourself. In the end, all this may become a preamble, in need of revisiting once I get my hands on a copy of her new book.
The title Bishop has chosen, Artificial Hells, doesn’t shy away from giving us a sense of where she stands on the subject. She sides with Sartre: hell is other people. Or, more specifically, hell is working as an unpaid performer in a participatory art project with other people, while enacting a predictable exchange that comes nowhere close to inducing the promised new and emancipatory forms of social collaboration and relation. Her title also situates her argument within historical linage of socially engaged art—artificial hells is the term coined by André Breton to describe Dada events of the 1920s. Bishop sees these events as an example of one of two trends evident in the history of twentieth century participatory art. Many Dada events were oblique, chaotic situations—artificial hells—intended to shake up participants and critique societal alienation; in what Bishop terms a ‘negation of negation’. The storming of the Winter Palace in 1920 is an example of a parallel trend that attempts to provoke collective creativity, oppose injustices and propose alternatives, in a type of ‘utopian realization’.
At the root of both of these, still prevalent, strategies is the belief in the automatic political efficacy of physical participation; something that Bishop and her philosophical inspiration Jacques Rancière refute. They argue that there is no direct correlation between an artistic form and political meaning. Artistic forms, participation among them, can be equally co-opted by competing ideologies. Bishop has spent a great deal of time and effort opposing the narrative behind participatory art that claims audiences are activated, awakened and empowered when artists give over control to participants. But she also goes further, asking: what criteria should we use, then, to evaluate participatory works critically and develop a frame of reference for discussing them?
[Mel Chin / Fundred Dollar Bill Project (2010-present) / Image: Jeffrey Bussmann]
If we evaluate these works by their ability to bring about social change, they fall short. Most artists do not wield the power, resources and time to bring about substantial long term change to the issues they highlight. As an example, Bishop cites Mel Chin’s Fundred Dollar Bill Project which aims to leverage $300 million from the U.S. Congress for lead pollution cleanup, by exchanging the same amount in ‘Fundred’ one hundred dollar bills, drawn by participants (mostly school children). Who, she asks, will be responsible for guaranteeing lead removal once the hand-drawn notes are presented to government? At some point responsibility needs to be handed over to social and political organizations. But exactly when and how this will occur is often beyond the scope of artistic projects.
Furthermore, artists who create socially engaged, participatory projects reject questions of aesthetics and often disregard the life of their projects beyond communication with their primary audience. Instead, they position their practices as working outside or beyond artistic concerns, in new interstitial zones. Such claims, Bishop argues, are disingenuous, as most of these projects are endorsed, funded, hosted and invested with meaning by art institutions, and engage art audiences. These projects are also seen as peripheral by socio-political organizations. By eschewing artistic interpretation or ultimate social responsibility, Bishop argues “a great swath of participatory art ends up floating in a comfortable non-zone where neither social or artistic criteria are being achieved/can be used as a basis for judgement.”
Bishop is often asked questions like “but surely it’s better for one art project to improve one person’s life, or draw attention to an issue, than for it not to happen at all?” But such questions are still founded on valuing a project’s role as a social agent, where it is good simply because it is intention is good, not because it produces anything good. We could, for instance, see Chin’s Fundred Dollar Bill Project as a petition. But if we value it only because it draws attention to an important issue, we are effectively saying that art is valuable only as propaganda. Art becomes reduced to a feel-good gesture aimed to relieve feelings of responsibility or guilt. A bandage over the cracks in society. It also places undue investment in the power of revelation. Believing that simply exposing an issue will bring about change. Bishop is adamant that her criticism is not aimed at convincing artists to become more politically active or responsible, but about articulating and appreciating art’s value beyond propaganda, beyond serving as a petition or publicity strategy. Art’s value, she contests, lies not in it’s ability to tote the ethical slogans of the day, but precisely because it exists outside of this. Because it can present contentions that cannot be read as morally exemplary.
Ultimately, this is a clash of value systems. A clash that Bishop has demonstrated as nothing new. At its bare bones lies a series of binary oppositions: active participation vs passive spectatorship, open text vs closed work, equality of access vs quality of result, real life vs spectacle, political morality vs artistic freedom, collective vs individual, process vs product, collaborator vs author, etc. My guess is that a fair chunk of Bishop’s book will lay out an artistic history that shows how these dichotomies have flared up and taken many different shapes over the course of the twentieth century.
Drawing on the work of sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Bishop has shown that these values have a deeper root in reactions to contemporary capitalism. Boltanski and Chiapello have noted that throughout history four critiques of capitalism continuously reappear: (i) a demand for liberation from oppression; (ii) a rejection of inauthenticity and disenchantment; (iii) a refusal of egoism and private interests; (iv) a response to suffering and poverty. Of these, the first pair are often expressed as an ‘artistic critique’ that deplores the loss of meaning and loss of a sense of what is beautiful and valuable within a society that standardizes and commodifies things, people and art. The second pair form a ‘social critique’ that rejects moral neutrality and individualism of artists and a separation of art from life.
These critiques Bishop equates with the two separate narratives that have arisen, in opposition, around socially engaged art work. For those who place value on the social and ethical side of the divide, a work is significant and successful when it models better behaviors or offers solutions, however short-term, to social problems. Alternatively, those who read these projects as art first and foremost base their judgements upon sensory responses to the material presented. Bishop explains “In this schema ethics are nugatory because art is understood to continually throw established systems of value into question, including questions of morality. It is more important to devise new languages with which to represent and question social contradiction.”
In etching out a critical framework for understanding the value systems behind evaluations of participatory work Bishop has been criticized for policing the boundaries of artistic practice and polarizing discussions into camps pitching “aesthetes” against “activists”. (Kester, 2006) But to those resistant to assessing and theorizing the value of art, Bishop describes the history of the post 1968 community arts movement as a warning:
"Emphasizing process rather than end results and basing their judgements on ethical criteria about how and with whom they work, rather than the character of their artistic outcomes, they found themselves subject to manipulation and eventually instrumentalization by right wing governments. From being an agitational force in the 1970s campaigning for social justice, it became, by the 1980s, a harmless branch of the welfare state. The kindly folk who could be relied upon to mop-up whenever the government wished to absolve itself of responsibility."
For practitioners who operate within artistic spheres, receiving funding and institutional support for their work, it is important to be able to articulate the value of the arts to avoid being put to use in the service of neo-liberal agendas as community builders, perception adjusters, social minders etc.
Bishop has noticed that many artists have internalized the pressure to find solutions to social problems. But, she argues, this is a task that artists are often not best equipped to undertake and the job is much larger than they can tackle on their own. Bishop sees this pressure to make art politically ‘relevant’ to the real world as having welled up from a lack of faith in the value of art as a de-alienating human endeavor, a lack of faith in democratic political processes and the absence of a viable, global, left alternative. Bishop argues “We need to recognize art as an experimental activity overlapping with the world, [that] may lend support towards a political project, without bearing the sole responsibility for devising and implementing this.”
So, if the value in art is not imagining and instigating solutions to social problems, where does its value lie? Now, we get to the interesting part. Bishop has spent a lot of effort in cutting down interpretations of art based solely on political and ethical judgments. I hope she spends a greater chunk of her book fleshing out an alternative critical schema. From what she has demonstrated in the past, I think this schema will target a position that rests between the social and artistic narratives and will revolve around the concept of sustaining tension between the various binaries listed above.
The tension Bishop highlights is often palpable as uneasiness. Works that demonstrate this quality don’t fit easily into any moral code. They also deal with participation as a form that comes with baggage: celebrated by museums and curators, demanded by state funders, utilized by schools and businesses and pervasive in mass media (think user generated content and reality TV). The ideals of dialogue and collaboration are often not lost, they are just complicated by discomfort, frustration or absurdity, eccentricity, doubt, even sheer pleasure. This blend, Bishop argues, gives the work aesthetic impact and opens the space for new perspectives on our condition. For the artists Bishop champions participation is not an end in itself, instead it delivers a messy knot of concerns including asking questions about who can be involved, in what ways, under which circumstances, and at who’s expense. Bishop has enacted numerous readings of works that blur, not collapse, some of the binaries of participatory discourse; embracing paradox, contradiction and ambiguity.
[Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument (2002) / Photo: Emile Estelli]
With comments like I am “an artist and not an animator, teacher or social worker” Thomas Hirschhorn is one such artist who calls for the type of reading Bishop can bring. Bishop has written at length about his work Bataille Monument (2002), which was presented in a remote Turkish suburb of Kassel as a part of Documenta XI. In the middle of this working class, immigrant community Hirschhorn set up makeshift structures to house a library, TV studio and bar in hommage to the surrealist writer Georges Bataille. Documenta audience members were ferried out to the site by scarce Turkish taxis.
The only thing visitors were required to do at the site was to think about the material offered. Hirschhorn doesn’t give control to the audience, or recruit them to fulfill a role in completing the work. Rather, Bishop suggests, there is a mutual power play in operation, where the artist relies on the “participants creative exploitation of the situation he or she offers, just as participants require the artist’s cue and direction.” Rather than trying to enable complete audience control, what results, Bishop argues, is a tension “of recognition and dependency more akin to the collectively negotiated dynamics of stand up comedy or BDSM sex than to a ladder of progressively more virtuous political forms.”
By bringing two different communities together Hirschhorn was not trying to model social cohesion through shared collaborative experience. Actually, in complete contrast to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s curry lunches, there was an uneasy clash. This riled ethically versed critics like Maria Lind who criticized Hirschhorn for “exhibiting and making exotic marginalized groups and thereby contributing to a form of social pornography.” But Bishop points out that the “zoo effect went both ways” and that it was important that these two communities were not pedantically reconciled; that the gap between them in society was reflected in the work. Even more so, Hirschhorn exposed contemporary art’s self-delusion as an all-embracive domain.
Bishop explains that while there is no audience empowerment or simulated utopia in works such as Hirschhorn’s, these works do enact a crucial principle of democracy: antagonism. Sustained conflict, not resolution, between between ideals and practicalities (while resisting totalitarianism) is a symptom of a functioning democracy. Without antagonism there is only imposed consensus and suppression of debate. Acknowledging that conflict is not only unavoidable, but crucial, is not to give in to political deadlock, but to suggest that antagonism allows for new political frontiers to be continuously imagined and debated.
Bishop’s argument is that evaluation of art should be based upon the way artists and artworks reflect the irreducible tension between aesthetic autonomy and social intervention. The alternative she sees to palliative, prototype art is work that stirs unease, inviting affective responses and the possibility “to confront darker, more painfully complicated considerations of our predicament.” With this comes the need to value art’s ability to ignite imagination to and stir emotions, while also acknowledging the limitations of what is possible as art. Ultimately, it is art’s ability to embody contradiction that holds the most promise for Bishop. What she values the most is work, and criticism, that does not sacrifice the aesthetic in favor of social change, but to see the contradictions in art as inherently productive.
This is where I hope Bishop focuses for her book, because I think there are still a lot of unpacking to do and questions that need addressing. Questions such as: can participatory art open up new ways of thinking whilst relying on the historical language of art and only speaking to those who understand this language? Can participatory art cross the boundary between the social and aesthetic, whilst still claiming a distinct critical space for itself in the aesthetic realm? Isn’t Bishop, in her criticism of ‘banal’ participatory art, herself making a ethical argument about not wasting the disruptive potential of the aesthetic?
I don’t see Artificial Hells bringing an end to the conversation; I see a new wave of dispute on the horizon. Critics, such as Grant Kester, will surely continue to protest Bishop’s contraining of art to an indirect engagement with politics. They will continue to point out her apparent acceptance of the economic privilege and social prestige of art and their belief that Bishop calls for obtuse artworks specifically to legitimize her role as interpreter. But, no matter where you stand on the issue, a rowdy battle is better than quiet acquiescence.
Source texts/Further reading:
Bishop, Claire ‘Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now’ presented at Creative Time’s Living as Form lecture series http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2011/livingasform/talks.htm
Bishop, Claire Participation 2006, London: Whitechapel and MIT Press http://www.anti-thesis.net/contents/texts/references/bishop-participation.pdf
Bishop, Claire ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’, Artforum, February 2006 http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=200602&id=10274
Bishop, Claire ‘Rate of Return: Claire Bishop on the Artist Placement Group’ Artforum, October 2010 http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201008&id=26419&pagenum=0
Bishop, Claire ‘Something for Everyone: The Art of Pawel Althamer’, Artforum, February 2011, p.175-181
Bishop, Claire ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, no. 110, Autumn 2004 p. 51-79 http://www.marginalutility.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Claire-Bishop_Antagonism-and-Relational-Aesthetics.pdf
Charnley, Kim ‘Dissensus and the politics of collaborative practice’ Art & the Public Sphere
Volume 1, Number 1, 2011 p. 37–53 http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/File:download,aid=10623/aps.1.1.37.pdf
Kester, Grant ‘Another Turn: A Response to Claire Bishop’ Artforum, May 2006 http://www.couldyoubemorespecific.com/research/grant-kester-response-to-claire-bishop-‘another-turn’/
Rancière, Jacques The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, 2004, Translation and introduction Gabriel Rockhill, London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd http://books.google.com/books?id=hzdyW_an6gUC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Rancière, Jacques ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ ArtForum, March 2007 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_7_45/ai_n24354915/
Rancière, Jacques Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 2009 Translation Steven Corcoran, Polity http://www.aaronvandyke.net/summer_readings/Ranciere-Problems%20and%20Transformations%20of%20Critical%20Art.pdf
Roche, Jennifer ‘Socially Engaged Art, Critics and Discontents: An Interview with Claire Bishop’ Community Arts Networkhttp://www.scribd.com/doc/45545670/an-Interview-With-Claire-Bishop
Editor's note: We just received a tip from Joseph Nechvatal about his new book project which looks quite promising. Note the details of the summary below and—best of all—the text is open-access.
The noise factor is the ratio of signal to noise of an input signal to that of the output signal. Noise can block or interfere with the meaning of a message in both human and electronic communication. But in Information Theory, noise is still considered to be information.
By refining the definition of noise as that which addresses us outside of our preferred comfort zone, Joseph Nechvatal's Immersion Into Noise investigates multiple aspects of cultural noise by applying the audio understanding of noise to the visual, architectural and cognitive domains. Nechvatal expands and extends our understanding of the function of cultural noise by taking the reader through the immersive and phenomenal aspects of noise into algorithmic and network contexts, beginning with his experience in the Abside of the Grotte de Lascaux.
Immersion Into Noise is intended as a conceptual handbook useful for the development of a personal-political-visionary art of noise. On a planet that is increasingly technologically linked and globally mediated, how might noises break and re-connect in distinctive and productive ways within practices located in the world of art and thought? That is the question Joseph Nechvatal explores in Immersion Into Noise.
[Little Oak Animal / video sketch screen capture]
In recent years there has been increased discourse surrounding ‘ambient’ technologies and awareness. The latter half of the 20th century has seen the public and private spheres become increasingly mediated and our notions of environment, awareness and presence have been irrevocably altered. ‘Ambience’ is also a term connected to musical composition – from Erik Satie’s passive “Furniture Music” to Brian Eno’s late 1970s experiments in process-based work this creative milieu has formed the foundation for entire genres and working methodologies. Vague Terrain 20: Ambient aspires to peel back the veneer of contemporary environments and art practices to explore place, atmosphere and performance.
David Kristian is a landmark figure in the history of Canadian electronic and ambient music. His work In your sleep is music intended to breath and evolve on its own, it simultaneously occupies lived space while making space more livable. Little Oak Animal presents a series of audiovisual works that can perhaps be best described as digital naturalism: where digital audio meets an organic photographic process. ScottM2, better known as one half of the ambient duo DreamState and organizer of the world renowned Ambient Ping music series presents an audiovisual work titled Cloud Painting which draws heavily on Eno-inspired image and sound paintings. Andrea-Jane Cornell is a sound artist who explores the phenomenological dimensions of sound in an intuitive and iterative way; her piece Basin / Bassin is representative of this working methodology and documents the process through which the piece was created.
To round out this issue of Vague Terrain we’ve commissioned a series of texts that explore ambience in relation to various disciplines and creative practices. Game designer Michel Mcbride–Charpentier carefully considers the intersection of soundscape studies and level design in ‘City 17’ within Valve’s classic first-person shooter Half-Life 2. Veteran music and sound art writer Marc Weidenbaum has penned a sprawling meditation on ‘non-musical’ sound and the practice of criticism as noted during his annual vacation from recorded music. Jim Bizzocchi discusses his artistic practice of ambient video and explores connections between cinema, video art, music, generative art and painting. Leonardo Rosado, founder of the experimental music label FeedbackLoop, discusses what it is like to curate within the ambiguous and amorphous ‘genre’ of ambient music. Interaction designer Andrew Lovett-Baron weighs in with survey of recent developments in interface and sensor design in order to demonstrate how our expectations of objects and environments are about to be radically transformed. Finally, media and performance artist Michelle Teran sits down with Vague Terrain’s Greg J. Smith to discuss how her work playfully problematizes our everyday experience and perception of the city.
We present this work to you as a survey of approaches for considering time, space and duration.
Corina MacDonald, Neil Wiernik and Greg J. Smith, Montreal & Toronto
October 2011
Vague Terrain & Artengine's critical blogging resident Jaenine Parkinson talks to Andrew Pelling about two collaborative art works that bridge art and science, which he was involved in presenting at the Open Ottawa Libra conference held at Arts Court on Wednesday September 28, 2011. Andrew Pelling is Canada Research Chair and Assistant Professor in the Departments of Physics and Biology at University of Ottawa. He heads up Pelling Lab, a laboratory for Biophysical Manipulation, housed in the University’s new Center for Interdisciplinary Nano-physics.
[Andrew Pelling and Daniel Modulevsky Organ Re-Purposing Bioreactors / 2011]
Jaenine Parkinson: Could you explain to me exactly what was going on in the two pieces you had at Open Ottawa Libre? Maybe we can start with the tissue culture piece, that you made with your student Dan Modulevsky? From what I gathered, it looked like, there were two bits of steak? And you were, someone said, sucking the cells out of them?
Andrew Pelling: Yes, we were extracting the cells out to leave behind what we call an extra-cellular matrix. It’s like a scaffold that cells grow on, it’s made out of collagen—a protein. There are cells in tissue that make the collagen and then there are other cells that make muscle and nerves, and things like that. We have been developing this process to remove all the cells and just leave behind the matrix. Which is great because, one, for a practical reason, to make the matrix in a lab is unbelievably expensive.
[Andrew Pelling and Daniel Modulevsky Organ Re-Purposing Bioreactors, detail]
JP: Oh, it seems like a highly detailed process; so you can actually synthesize it?
AP: You can, absolutely, but it is incredibly expensive. I’m not sure why. It’s not actually very hard. I don’t know what it is that makes it so costly. There are a lot of proprietary products out there you can just buy to synthesize it from pure collagen. But, for what ever reason it is very expensive; to make a large piece.
[Decellularized steak]
JP: So it’s use is primarily for recreating new tissue, with different cells in it?
AP: It is part of a huge push called regenerative medicine. Because you can take stem cells and coax them into being anything, like heart cells. But then you’ve just got a blob of heart cells and you need a structure. One way to build that would be to make it artificially, to create these collagen scaffolds in the shape of a heart, and put your cells onto it. That’s one approach and it is expensive. But it is very controlled. So, a few years ago a group took some hearts and got rid of the cells (decellularization) and there you have this scaffold of a heart. Of course, now you have to kill one animal to make a heart to put into another animal, so I’m not sure if it really makes much sense. It is also not very interesting to me personally, it’s kind of a standard thing that can do with this technology.
What we got interested in started with the little bit of animal work that’s going on here. In many cases you will study one part, in our case we were studying the aorta and heart disease, but the rest of the animal gets tossed, and it is quite wasteful I think. So I started thinking, well what else can we do to get more value out of this life that we have just ended? I just felt very guilty about that whole thing. And we started thinking about what about hacking the organs that are in there. Sort of bio-hacking.
JP: When you use the term bio-hacking what do you mean?
AP: Very much like you would in technology where you hack a piece of technology to repurpose it, use it for unintended purposes. So like Protype D with their printers. So, I thought, why can’t we do that with these organs? Can we take muscle and get rid of the cells and create an new structure that doesn’t currently exist in nature? Can we create little pumps that join to little arms and start putting them together to make monstrosities or tools and devices that would be bio-compatible? It is just something nobody is doing, so it just really attracts me. It’s so weird, but we have the technology. It is so, easy to get rid of cells and put whatever cell we want in. So, we can take a heart and put kidney cells into it; so it’s this heart-kidney. You just need a couple of electrodes to make it pump. You could exploit some of the biology of these kidney cells, to, say, pump and filter at the same time, or who knows. We do a lot of work with micro-fluidics and micro, miniaturized technologies. We spend a lot of times making these things synthetically, well could we make them organically? Then if it is all biological it will be easier to put into something as a device, rather than a new organ.
JP: And always the ethics comes up…
AP: Absolutely.
JP: What is it like working within the University framework? What sort of controls do they have in place around this type of work?
AP: Yes the University has good ethical guidelines, especially in terms of how you handle an animal, or bio-hazardous stuff. But, a lot of our work doesn’t actually involve animals. There are things called cell-lines which are immortalized cells. That just grow, and grow and grow and grow and don’t need a lot.
JP: I was reading your blog, plasticbiology.net there is one from a cervical cancer victim who died in 1951.
AP: That’s a really famous one: HeLa.
JP: It seems bizarre to me that this woman, Henrietta Lacks, died from a horrible disease, in 1951, and a part of her is still living. It is kind of amazing and horrifying at the same time…
AP: It is completely crazy when you sit down and really think about it. There is more of her biomass now then there ever was. Every lab in the world has HeLa cells. I’m sure this has been thought about by other people, but it is such a bizarre phenomenon. What’s even more strange is that it is so easy to genetically modify these things. To create new cells that would have never have existed. It’s bizarre how much power we have.
JP: Then there is this sort of fear/fascination blend to it, and many people just don’t want to go there because we don’t have the ethics yet to deal with it.
AP: Well, there are a tremendous amount of ethical guidelines. You have to get certified to do animal work and there are rules and regulations to minimize suffering. Although, it is interesting, because Canada does things a lot differently from the UK, where I used to work. I think maybe North Americans are a bit more squeamish. Some of the rules that are in place aren’t actually better for the animal, I think, but they just don’t look as horrific.
JP: But do ethics come into it when you are thinking about these projects?
AP: I’m not an ethicist, I think there are big issues there and sometimes I purposefully say stuff just to provoke ethical questions.
JP: I suppose half the attraction is to play with that boundary line?
AP: Absolutely, that is definitely part of what interests me, is that pushing, always. But, at the same time I would have a really hard time growing mice for the sole purpose of bio-hacking. We have these mice already and what we are working on already is a collaboration with a medic who has discovered a protein that minimizes, and maybe, perhaps could cure heart disease. So, there is real reason to do this work and there is real merit behind it. And what really bothered me at the end, is this ethical thing, we have this entire mouse, minus a heart, that’s just getting incinerated. There must be something we can do with this.
JP: Is this where the science stops and the art kicks in? Because, you don’t have an artistic background, do you?
AP: Well I did go to an art school when I was younger, and that’s where I learnt to love math. Some people get confused by me sometimes, some people call me an artist, some people call me a scientist. I like to think of it more as just being a creative person. And I don’t think there actually is much of a difference. I think it is more a medium you work in.
JP: Except with science there is more of a focus on purpose, where as exploration is more the purpose in art.
AP: In science there is more of a push for technologies, applications and profit. I like to keep my lab more in the field of pure exploration, curiosity driven. But it is getting harder. Although there are still grants for that – my main operating grant is called the Discovery Grant – its mainly for that fundamental research. It’s a federal grant, most science Professors have access to it. Although, I like to push those boundaries a little further than most. The Discovery Grant is much more open ended, but pot of money is much smaller than with industrial grants.
JP: So where are you going to next with this tissue culture project?
AP: The work we are doing with decellularization is a slightly different twist on regenerative medicine, where it’s not so much about making transplant products, but about making devices and things you can use. Integrating them with micro-fluidics or biosensors, or who knows. We can either spend years and years developing our own mechanical or micro-mechanical device that pumps or we can use something that already there. These aren’t trivial issues, but this is another way of thinking. Specifically, it’s not a way not many people are looking at right now, and that is why it is interesting. It’s more just stepping into the dark and seeing what happens.
[Andrew Pelling and Donna LegaultDarkfields / 2011]
JP: So the work that you did with artist Donna Legault, that is completely different.
AP: Yeah, that was interesting, because we just got shoved in a room and we didn’t even know each other.
JP: Oh, how did that happen?
AP: Julie DuPont, who is the Cultural Planner for the City of Ottawa, was organizing Open Ottawa Libra and she arranged a meeting between a few of us at PrototypeD. We were just going to see their space. We ended up talking about Open Ottawa and some themes for it and all of a sudden we were planning a whole bunch of stuff for this event. Donna and I met there I guess because one of my previous art-sci things was this cell sounds project and we were just introducing ourselves and I talked about that. Then it turns out she is a sound artist, so there was this connection. We came up with some crazy ideas about using sound to manipulate cells. I don’t know if any of that will ever turn into something. But she came to the lab one weekend and we tried a few things out. She has these base shakers, and she has been working with infra-sound, low frequency sound, feeling and visualizing sound. We put some beakers on top of these base shakers, which vibrate to create little standing waves. It became about visualizing sound with water. The other consideration was capturing the waves, you actually have to have the lights at a certain angle, to scatter up into the camera. We were making sound visible, but also making these waves visible.
[Andrew Pelling and Donna Legault Darkfields, detail]
JP: So could you explain a little about the cell-sound work you had done previously?
AP: That was called Dark Side of the Cell (2004) www.darksideofcell.info and that was with an artist I have been working with for years Anne Niemetz She and I met in UCLA, we were both graduates. Our advisors were organizing this huge art-sci exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) which was this year long, 10,000 square foot exhibition about the interface between nanoscience and art. Since I was working on these cell sounds and she is a sound artist, our advisors kind of pushed us together and asked us to do the sound design for the whole exhibit. Again, we started talking, and she was doing an MFA so we developed this piece called Dark Side of the Cell. I was using this device called an atomic force microscope. It is sort of like a record player needle on the end of an arm, you can use it to image atoms and image cells. So I was using it to feel how cells move. Which was, at the time, completely bizarre stuff to do in the field. And I discovered in particular yeast cells these small low amplitude oscillations in the cell wall; high frequency, about a thousand kilohertz. They were very transient, they would come and go. The digital data looks like sound waves, like a .wav file. That inspired my advisor and I to convert this to sound, so we could listen to these cells. So I had that going, then I met Anne and we developed this Dark Side of the Cell installation. Which is a concert of pure cell audio, untouched, unaltered, just the volume has been changed, and we organised it into themes, for this immersive sound environment. We had big cell sculptures and projected onto them images of the cells you are actually listening to. The show got a surprising amount of press, and Anne and I have been working ever since on different things. It’s a little harder now that she is in New Zealand.
[Andrew Pelling and Anne Niemetz Dark Side of the Cell (2004) installation detail]
JP: Didn’t you met up with her recently in Perth?
AP: Yes, she and I went to SymbioticA, which is this bio art center in Western Australia. I’ve known Oran Catts and Ionat Zurr from the Tissue Culture and Art Project for a while now. That trip inspired my Lego project. I did it in preparation for going out there. Again it was triggered by a feeling of guilt. When you work in a lab as a student you don’t really think about where a lot of the things come from, or are wasted. But when you are the guy running the lab and buying these materials you see that there is a tremendous amount of waste – and plastic – bio materials and animals. We have a culture of mass production and we have a huge mechanism in our society for it. And none of it its recycled, it’s all incinerated, because you are worried about biohazards. And these are legitimate concerns. But there is a huge amount of waste, and it doesn’t really get talked about. So I thought, why don’t I think of a way to push a debate. Not necessarily to answer any questions, but just to bring it to the front. And that was the Lego project. It is this idea that even living things are plastic in our lab. We can totally manipulate them; get them to do whatever we want.
[Andrew Pelling Semi-Living LEGO Minifigs / 2011]
JP: And cells are like these little Lego building blocks anyway.
AP: Exactly, so I took these HeLa cells and inserted a jellyfish gene – again, because I could – to make it glow. So you have this human-jellyfish organism now. It’s just this Frankenstein. But again, you just buy the products off the shelf, it’s all plastic, you don’t have to do anything special, I could teach anybody to do it in an hour. It is kind of scary. We do it every day. It is just this tool we use. And then I thought, how can I represent it – and Lego figures were the answer.
JP: It also brings it a bit closer to home, turning this jelly-like blob into a skin, and referencing the fact that there are human cells being used. Because that is the scariest thing, for many, because not only can you change our food and animals, but you can change us as well.
AP: Of course, in reality, could we do it to a human? Probably. It would be a lot harder, probably. But conceptually it is all there.
JP: And then there is the whole ‘slippery slope’ argument. If you take one step, why not take the second and third.
AP: And it is all commercially available. If you have enough money you can do it. Anyone can do it. Especially with that whole DIY bio thing right now.
[Andrew Pelling Semi-Living LEGO Minifigs, detail]
JP: So did you present your Lego work at SymboticA?
AP: I showed some pictures and just discussed it. Of course, at SymboticA these are issues they have discussed at length, because that is what they think about all the time.
JP: Did you see anything interesting while you were there? What other problems were people considering?
AP: Well the other aspect of our work is that we try and build mechanical devices to manipulate cells. Stretch them and pull them and poke them, to see what happens. And what shocked me was when I showed up at SymboticA one of there students was building exactly what we were in the middle of building and he had done it ten times better than us actually. It was amazing, here are a bunch of artists building the same device for the same purposes. It was so strange. Our project came from our work with the heart. If you think about the aorta it is constantly expanding when your heart pumps, there is a pressure on the veins and arteries, and they expand. So the cells in those walls are being stretched and compressed and undergo different types of stress and strain.
JP: And you just wanted to see what the upper threshold is?
AP: I just really wanted to image, video record, how they respond. It is amazing, these are just such simple perturbations but when we look at the data carefully the responses are unbelievably complex. We are sort of at a stage where we don’t even have enough physics to describe what is going on there. We don’t have the models. We have some models that sort of work, but what we are finding again and again is that when biology does these things, these physical things, it doesn’t behave the way we expect it to. And you would never have discovered that if you weren’t really looking. For many years people weren’t looking and they derived a lot of physical equations that are very elegant. But they have no basis in describing a real cell. That is why we just look.
For eons science has just been about understanding how cells work in normal environments and circumstances. There are still a lot of questions to be answered, and a lot of knowledge there. But what has been interesting me much more now is what happens when we put them in very extreme conditions that have nothing to do with normality or make completely new types of cells and new types of ‘organs’. Let’s attach a lung to, I don’t know, a piece of steak, and see what happens.
JP: Yeah, I remember Stelarc grew an ear on the back of a mouse and it was really controversial.
AP: That is really part of the inspiration. Along with Steve Mann in Toronto with his electronic surveillance and integration between bodies and electronics. So could we start pushing our science away from just try to understand how things normally behave. What I am more interested in now is how they behave under really extreme, artificial conditions. Which is really interesting, especially if the future is this integration between technology and biology. I bet there are a lot of responses, the potential of cells, that we don’t even know exist.
JP: Do you think you would be doing this type of work if you didn’t have access to all your equipment?
AP: Well that is what is so cool about the DIY bio movement. In a lab a company could sell us a piece of equipment for say, $12000-15000 dollars, but it is really a couple of hundred dollars worth of parts. We have built our own equipment out of garbage and some of it is even more accurate than what we have bought. So you could do it. The general public can do it. For instance, our centrifuge, would cost $10,000, and I just read an article the other day of someone constructing one from a salad spinner and a drill.
JP: What about opening up these labs for other artists to come and work in? Does that happen?
AP: It does, Anne Niemetz has worked here, twice now. And I am hoping Oran Catts and Ionat Zurr will come over sometime as a residency. There is no formal mechanism but everything we are doing is so in the middle of art and science anyway, it all fits. So really all you need is some safety training.
What we are working on in the lab at the moment is miniaturization, to create micro-fluidic devices. We have developed one to stretch cells using vacuum. When we apply a vacuum to one of the chambers they shrink, and that allows us to pull on the cells. And each is individually controlled. We are experimenting a lot with this type of silicone technology, because we can integrate electrodes.
The other project we are working on uses two lasers, that we point at each other. Then we have a fluidic channel that a cell floats down. And when it hits these two lasers, the lasers can hold it. So very Star-trec, tractor beam. Then by manipulating the power of the laser we can start stretching the cell. I don’t know exactly what we are going to do with this. But it is amazing to see that it is possible. The idea that we are toying with is that if you manipulate these cells, is to find out if you stretch a lot of cells and collect them afterwards, and grow them will they grow differently? If we do that with stem cells, do we get a different response? We will see, I guess.
We are also working with micro tumors that will grow in chambers of these micro-fluidic devices, so we can study how they behave under different mechanical situations. Because, when cancer is spread the first thing that forms is these micro-tumors, a tiny collection cells. And they are very sensitive to the mechanics of their environment. But exactly how, and what is going on and why, we don’t know. This is one way we can study them.
Usually how I develop a new project is that I just have some image in my head of a cell in a particular environment. I have no idea why it is there, or how it got there. But, let’s make this! Let’s just figure out how to do this. It doesn’t ever start with a particular question or scientific hypothesis.
JP: There seems to be dove-tailing end-goals here. What you are doing could have some application to medical science or it could be…
AP: Complete madness. Well I’m not a medic and I don’t like to say my research is about advancing medicine, because I have no business talking about medicine. A lot of scientists do this because it helps them get funding. But really have no business talking about medicine.
JP: But a lot of medicine is just an elaborate, educated guessing game.
AP: Absolutely, I have always said, we will develop the concepts and it is up to the medics to develop the applications. And actually decide if my findings do have applications or not.
JP: So do you have any presentations of your work coming up?
AP: I’m giving a bio-hacking talk at Concordia, Montreal on 1 November, which is open to the public. I don’t know if you know Tagny Duff, she is an artist and she had a residency at SimbioticA and I think she has almost got her own tissue culture lab set up there. Called, Fluxmedia, I think. It is a centre for bio-art and bio-ethics. Show some videos, of how cells move, which is quite incredible.
We use a silicone mould stamps, and the cells grow around it. When we pull it out we are left with a shape. We are studying how they fill that space back in. These angle of the mould has such huge effect on the rate, and which cells start moving and when and how they are communicating. It is called wound healing. The traditional paradigm for this is you make a line, a scratch, and you’d time how long it takes for the cells to heal. I thought, well what happens if you make two scratches? What happens if you start changing the angle here? What we see is there is a collective behavior going on here. The cells at the edges move as a unit. Depending on how steep we make the angle, we get different dynamics. If we make a really steep cut some cells don’t move and others do all the work. How that is happening and how they are communicating isn’t really clear.
JP: It is amazing, because this would happen in your body too?
AP: Yes, especially if you got cut. For fifty years people would just make a straight line, it was just never questioned. But there is anecdotal evidence of surgeons making jagged, zigzag cuts and them healing better. I came up with this idea because I was talking with two of my students suggesting that they try it. And just even convincing them to do it was so hard. Because, why would you want to do it? It is always done with a line, so we have to do it with a line. Why would we do it any other way?
JP: To see what happens.
AP: Just shift your mindset.
In 2012, Subtle Technologies celebrates our 15th anniversary with our annual Festival. For 15 years Subtle Technologies has been bringing people together to promote wonder, incite creativity and spark innovation across disciplines. Our symposium, performances, workshops, screenings, exhibitions and networking sessions provide a forum to explore ideas and pose questions at the intersection of art, science and technology. Subtle Technologies is known internationally for presenting work by artists and scientists at the leading edge of their respective disciplines.
Our 2012 festival takes place from May 24 to May 27 2012 at various venues throughout Toronto. Our annual open call accepts submissions that bridge art, science and technology. This year we are also accepting submissions for a themed session which explores work inspired by biology, as outlined below. For both streams we are soliciting proposals from all disciplines and also welcome topics that explore ways of knowing that are outside of the western framework.
We are interested in receiving submissions from individuals as well as interdisciplinary teams and collaborative projects. We would like to present successful stories from artists and scientists working together. We are equally interested in hearing about the issues that inhibit disciplines from collaborating. What approaches can we take to foster inter-cultural exchanges when it comes to science or technology based work? How do we make scientific systems more accessible to artists as tools for creating new work?
Possible areas to be explored in this year’s Festival from either an artistic or scientific approach include: Acoustics, alternative energy, artificial intelligence, astronomy, bioengineering, bioethics, chemistry, complexity, computer science, consciousness, environmental science, ethnobotany, funding strategies for interdisciplinary collaboration, hacking and DIY culture, imaging techniques and systems, interactive systems, indigenous science, mathematics, nanotechnology, network theory, neuroscience, pharmacology, psychology, physics, robotics, science and society, systems theory, virtual worlds.
In 2012 Subtle Technologies is also presenting a special session at our symposium that focuses on work inspired by, utilizing or hacking biological systems. This special session will include work by artists who are using live tissues, bacteria and other biological process in their work. We are also interested in submissions exploring enhancements or modifications to the human body through transhumanism. Projects which use concepts of biomimicry, genetic engineering and synthetic biology will also be considered for this special session. We are interested in both technical and ethical issues surrounding this work.
The above topics are only suggested ones for inclusion in the Festival. Other relevant topics within the realm of art, science and technology will be considered.