Rhizome News
By
Brian Droitcour
on
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at
3:00 pm
Image: 386DX performance at Hellenic American Union, Athens, 2000. (Photo by Jenny Marketou)
Alexei Shulgin's pioneering works in internet art are collected on his site easylife.org, but many of the links there are empty or obsolete; one called Insanity Notification sends visitors to a site indicating that Shulgin went insane at an unidentified point in the past. It has been more than five years since Shulgin left the online environment to focus on the production of tangible, marketable objects. His collaboration with Aristarkh Chernyshev began in 2003, and two years later the artists founded Electroboutique a gallery-slash-gadget shop selling distorting screens and other high-tech toys. Shulgin and Chernyshev called it "Media Art 2.0," and wrote a manifesto saying the plug-and-play nature of their new work liberated them from a "media art ghetto," adding that their manipulation of familiar screen-based interfaces contained a nugget of criticality. Their work was recently featured in "Criti Pop", an exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (along with interactive installations that Chernyshev made in collaboration with Vladislav Efimov). - Brian Droitcour
Your recent exhibition was called "CritiPop." Could you explain where this label came from, and what it means?
We spent a long time thinking about what to call the exhibition. Media Art 2.0 no longer fit. We had moved away from media art and no longer wanted to be associated with it. Eventually, we singled out the most important feature uniting the works: critical communication contained in a popular form, with shiny plastic, bright colors, primitive interactivity, a resemblance to consumer goods, glowing LED screens and so on. Thus, "CritiPop" was born. Its effect is akin to that of advertising or propaganda: vivid, universally recognizable images that conceal a subliminal message.
There is a striking amount of texts and manifestos accompanying "CritiPop." Are you concerned that the critical component of your work won't be read without them?
Almost all these texts were written in the years preceding "CritiPop," for exhibitions in our gallery. So, it was natural to include them. But basically you're right. We had to introduce the viewer to the context, because our works are easy to read on the superficial level of real-time, eye-candy effects, brightly polished plastic and impressive animation.
Image: Installation view at Moscow Museum of Modern Art. (Photo by Anton Akimov)
Moscow critics often frame the history of Russian art after perestroika around artists like Oleg Kulik and Anatoly Osmolovsky, who worked with actions and other ephemeral forms of art during the chaotic 1990s and turned to object-based practice during the relative stability of the Putin administration. Your career follows a similar trajectory. Do you think this is a fairly accurate description of what happened? Why did you abandon net.art and begin to produce objects in collaboration with Aristarkh Chernyshev?
I think there are similarities here, but also significant differences. Unlike Kulik or Osmolovsky, who always worked on the territory of institutionalized contemporary art, I was working on the internet, which in the 1990s was an open zone for experimentation. I had become disgusted with the world of museums and galleries, where I spent quite some time in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, thanks to perestroika and the boom for Soviet art. I even decided to stop being an artist for a while.
The term net.art came later. In the mid-1990s you could make art on the internet without getting stuck in a particular context. The internet itself was the context. Eventually even net.art was institutionalized. But it did not create its own economy; only JODI could survive as internet artists, thanks to the generous grant system in the Netherlands. But net.art disappeared simply because the internet developed. As soon as a large number of people obtained access to the internet, net.art became meaningless. It dissolved in the mass of blogs and platforms. You could say that net.art invented and investigated methods and technologies used in Web 2.0.
Image: Alexei Shulgin, Natalie Bookchin, Blank+Jeron, Introduction to Net Art, 1994-1999
In the early 2000s I saw some creative potential in software art, which could be called the heir to net.art, and organized with Olga Goriunova four Read.me festivals, as well as the repository Runme.org (along with Amy Alexander and Alex McLean), which is active to this day. While working on Read.me, I noticed that software art was following the same path to demise as net.art -- it was gradually becoming absorbed by media culture and new IT products, by digital banality. That was when I began to work with Aristarkh Chernyshev. Our first project, in 2003, was Super-i Real Virtuality Goggles . But that wasn't my first material project after net.art. In 1998 I made 386 DX, the singing computer, and I've given 100 concerts around the world with it.
Web 2.0 marked the end of net.art, as it had to compete with the glut of ideas published on Livejournal and other sites like it, and thus introduced a crisis of originality. Moreover, the inability of political activism to affect policy -- the main shock here was the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq -- cast doubts on its reasons for existence. That brings us to the mid-2000s. With the strategies of the 1990s facing a crisis, we created Electroboutique as a laboratory for studying new strategies in art. We wanted to create media works that were plug-and-play and zero-maintenance. Furthermore, we wanted to distance ourselves from media activism, which had hit a dead end. Since art equals consumption in the conditions of the unipolar capitalist world, we decided to make a commercial object. We put protest and critique in its body. That's how we arrived at our style, which we called commercial protest. Then we added exciting shapes and sound. And that's how we got CritiPop.
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By
Greg J. Smith
on
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at
2:45 pm
Image: Mitchell Whitelaw, 05.02_540_radial - Watching the Sky, 2008
Mitchell Whitelaw is an artist and writer with interests in digital ontology and generative systems. His work and theory are invested in a close reading of the networks and tools we engage on a daily basis and questioning modes of representation. Whitelaw is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Creative Communication at the University of Canberra and he also authors (the teeming void), a blog on generative and data aesthetics. In this interview conducted by Greg J. Smith, Whitelaw discusses his recent work and contextualizes several of his writing projects.
Greg J. Smith: A central focus in your recent writing is the notion of transmateriality. Instead of reading information and mediated experience as virtual or "disembodied" this investigation focuses on the tangible, idiosyncratic nature of the digital. Can you identify and contextualize a few new media projects that explicitly explore or invoke the materiality of data?
Mitchell Whitelaw: There's been a huge wave of them. Self.detach, by Tim Horntrich and Jens Wunderling "decomposes" Flickr self-portraits into grains of colored sand, literally materializing the pixels; Caleb Larsen's Monument (If it Bleeds it Leads) takes a similar approach, analyzing news feeds for reports of war casualties and presenting each death as a tiny yellow BB, dropped into a hopper. So, tangible data is one aspect of this idea, but it also relates to the current explosion of hardware tinkering and custom devices, which create local, specific, and material instances of digital systems. A beautiful example of this is H C Gilje's wind-up birds, a group of mechanical woodpeckers - microcontroller-driven solenoids that tap on hand-made wooden slit drums - installed in a forest also inhabited by real woodpeckers. Materializing digital systems also embeds them more deeply in their surrounding environment, of course. A final example fascinates me because it's a kind of non-digital transmateriality: Thomas Traxler's The Idea of a Tree is a solar-powered mechanical system that turns a spindle to fabricate objects from epoxy and string. Variations in solar energy change the speed of the spindle, which changes the amount of dye on the string, so that the resulting object manifests that variation.
Image: Thomas Traxler, The Idea of a Tree (machine & generated artefacts), 2008
The Idea of a Tree is quite compelling. How would you read the output from that device? Is it explicitly about the indeterminacy of the output? I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the relationship that apparatus has with the "natural processes" it measures and emulates.
As I understand it, the artifacts can be read as records of solar energy over the span of a day. The length of the object depends on the total amount of sunlight (more sunlight, more length); the bands of color reveal variations in energy throughout the day. The slower the string moves through the dye, the more the dye penetrates, giving a darker color - this mechanism is ingenious. So, I don't think it's about indeterminacy. I also don't think it's particularly about natural processes, despite the analogy of the title. I would distinguish "material" from "natural"; this is a material system that manifests structures in its specific, local environment. There's nothing inherently "natural" about the data it gathers: those variations in solar energy could relate to shadows from nearby buildings, or atmospheric pollution, as much as clouds and seasons. In a way, I think the tree analogy works best in reverse, here; tree as (local, material) machine seems more interesting than machine as tree-like.
Would you frame your photo-based Watching the Sky project in the same way? That is, sky as (local material) machine?
Yes, exactly. Watching the Sky is a very simple work. Long series of time-lapse images, shot every three minutes, are compressed or "revisualised" to reveal patterns within and between days and weeks (perhaps eventually years). It's essentially a digital slit-scan process, where narrow slices of each image are extracted and recompiled. As Golan Levin has shown this is a well-worn technique; this work tries to recast it as a form of data visualization - as well as slowing it down. Digital images are an interesting data source because they are so obviously indiscriminate; they show whatever is in the field of view, regardless of what is ostensibly being "measured" (the Google Street View controversy illustrates this nicely). So, like the solar energy in Thomas Traxler's work, the image can cut across domains and scales like a kind of core sample; and yes, in this work the image is a trace of a changing material field. Initially the work was focused on the sky as a visual data source; but the initial sketches used images scraped from a webcam that included trees, power lines and other foreground clutter. To my surprise, some of the most interesting structures emerged from this extraneous stuff; from trees shifting in the breeze, shadows moving, and so on. I later realized these were all traces of the material field's interactions with itself; when the images show the foliage shifting as the wind changes, the landscape is acting as both object and instrument, it's a kind of self-revelation. The images also show human or social patterns; like cars being parked on the grass, outside my office window. I like the idea of all these scales, from the distant clouds to the local shadows, and domains from the weather to the parking, being compressed into a single field, but still readable.
Image: Mitchell Whitelaw, Stacked Histogram - The Visible Archive, 2008
You are currently working on The Visible Archive, a project to visualize the holdings of the National Archives of Australia. Could you briefly describe the scope of this project and how this "data practice" extends out of or informs your broader research?
The project is funded by the National Archives, simply exploring interactive visualizations of their collection. In many ways it's a fairly straight-ahead data visualization project, based on the premise that visualization is a useful way to reveal structure in large datasets, and can give a sense of context or orientation to users navigating that data. I'm working with two main datasets; one describes the entire collection in around 35,000 groups, or series; the other is a single series with some 20,000 individual items. The exciting part here is what that data is: primary materials from the history of modern Australia. The very first visualization I made of the series data was a simple histogram, counting how many series commenced in a given year. The histogram had three big spikes: at 1901, 1914 and 1939. So three big historical moments - Federation and the two Wars - popped out of the visualization as a simple statistical property of the data. I'm most interested in revealing these kind of emergent structures within the datasets.
My interests in "data practice" started out as critical and theoretical; I've been observing the rise of a kind of data aesthetics in sound, music and the media arts over the past decade, and it's a fascinating moment, as culture and practice come to grips with a material that is so central to contemporary society. "Art Against Information", a paper on data art published earlier this year, develops a critical response. My own experiments in sonification and visualization are partly ways for me to test out theoretical hunches, but largely (and increasingly) rewarding in themselves. You can view data as a kind of generative strategy for the arts in one sense - it's just another way of making stuff - but also, and this interests me a lot, it's broader than art; it's about epistemology, ways of understanding the world, whatever that is. It can be art if it wants to, but frankly I'm more interested in what else it can do.
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By
Ceci Moss
on
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at
3:03 pm
Image: Machine Project storefront (Photo: Michele Yu)
Machine Project, since its inception in 2003, has grown to become one of those mythic, playful and gloriously idiosyncratic spaces -- on the map alongside destinations such as the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the City Reliquary, or the Pirate Store at 826 Valencia. An interdisciplinary non-profit art space run out of a storefront in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Machine Project host events and exhibitions, which span lectures on the aesthetic cultivation of bacteria to a 3 day banjo performance in their front window. I interviewed founder Mark Allen about his involvement with the space and some of their upcoming projects. - Ceci Moss
How did you get started with Machine Project? Were you involved with other arts organization like this in the past?
I did two temporary, summer long 3 month art spaces in Houston. One called Revolution Summer in 1997 and one called LAX in 1998. I went to Cal Arts in 1997-99, then afterwards was a part of C-level. C-level was a collective art/new media space that was started by Eddo Stern in Chinatown Los Angeles. C-level dissolved in 2004 or 2005, but the space is still used by a spin off group called Betalevel lead by Jason Brown, who was part of C-level and is also on the board of Machine Project. I started Machine Project in 2003 after seeing the storefront that is our current location for rent while looking for an apartment.
Education is an important part of your mission -- Machine Project often sponsors workshops and classes. How did this emphasis in your programming come about?
While I was at Cal Arts, I became interested in electronics for a sculpture I was making. The experience of teaching myself electronics was pretty challenging. Afterwards, I started helping other people with their electronics projects and after a while I had enough people that I was helping as individuals that I decided to try offering a class, which I did at C-level. Also, while at graduate school, I worked as a TA for Hilary Kapan who taught me computer programming. The process of helping other people with their programming assignments was something I enjoyed and that I would like to think I was good at. So, I have a personal history in helping people learn technology.
The second part is that I often think of Machine Project as a pedagogical project disguised as an art project. Most/much of what we do can be viewed as various forms of education - lectures, peer-to-peer learning, informal learning, and workshops. I'm very interested in setting up ways that learning and education can be a large part of one's cultural life after one is done with formal education.
Finally, I have a certain stake in believing that it's important to provide people access to the tools which our reality is constructed by, that is systems of thought as well as technical frameworks.
Image: Machine Project Electronics Workshop at Art LA 07 (Photo: Scott Mayoral)
I think your educational initiatives really speak to Machine Project's larger community focus- you often collaborate with local arts groups like Fallen Fruit, Sumi Ink Club, etc. to stage projects. Could you talk a bit about the arts community within which you work and how that feeds into your activities as a space?
I think this is one of the most exciting things about contemporary art practice in general and Los Angeles specifically is that a significant portion of artists are engaged in creating their own contexts for their cultural production. LA has a nice combination of relatively affordable commercial real estate (compared to NYC, for example) and a huge number of young artists because of all the art schools. We are currently experiencing a real explosion in artist-run initiatives. Within walking distance of Machine Project there are a number of great spaces - Tiny Creatures, 1830, Echo Curio, to name three. There is a network of sorts between lots of these projects - people are involved in multiple spots as participants, board members, audience, supporters, and collaborators.
Image: Jon Rubin, "A Practical Demonstration" (Part One), 2008
Do you think Machine Project serves a particular niche within this community?
I think we are fairly unique in the degree to which our programming covers a very wide range of cultural practices from poetry to music to art to science to technology to oddball games and recreational activities. We are also in an interesting position in terms of infrastructure in that we have more structure than most artist-run spaces but less than the more formal non-profits such as LACE or the museums. One curatorial idea I have, which I think is very important, is we value sensibility over ideology and I think we've been successful at articulating our sensibility. In that, our audience may not be able to define what a Machine Project event is, but they recognize that thing when they see it. And we are enthusiasts! We serve the enthusiast niche!
Whether those enthusiasts include giant joystick enthusiasts, sea slugs enthusiasts, or cable untangling enthusiasts...That's a lot of ground to cover!
Yes, and they're often the same enthusiasts.
I've been thinking lately how much our programming is influenced by the way in which the internet has changed how people use information...That many people use the internet, wikipedia, etc. as a site of a dérive (in the sense used by the situationalists) to wander around different categories of knowledge and information as a form of entertainment. We like to take that way of experiencing knowledge and have it take place in a socially embodied community space.
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