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net art Thinking Forward, Looking Back
ReadMe takes a guided tour of "Vectors," the first true "retrospective" of digital art, with some of the medium's most important voices."Artists are the antennae of the race. There is probably no use in telling this to people who can't see it without being told. Artists and poets undoubtedly get excited and 'over-excited' about things long before the general public. Before deciding whether a man is a fool or a good artist, it would be well to ask, not only: 'is he excited unduly', but: 'does he see something we don't?' Is his curious behavior due to his feeling an oncoming earthquake, or smelling a forest fire which we do not yet feel or smell?" ---Ezra Pound, 1934 When electronic music pioneer Pierre Schaeffer created symphonies of railyard hubbub and screaming steam-whistles in the '50s and called the results musique concrete, critics were miffed. Was the tape recorder a viable instrument? Could the seemingly slapdash arrangement of real-world sounds be considered music? Was "he excited unduly?" Or did "he see something we don't?" Time would tell, as the ability to record sound began to affect every aspect of music, enabling a musician to harmonize with himself, sample sounds, and even listen to a recording while walking down the street; the new tools became staples of the music world. Digital art is undergoing a similar transformation. People used to feel uncomfortable viewing art on a computer monitor. Some shied away from the invitation to grab a mouse and interact with a work. However, as digital artists stepped into the 21st century, the art establishment began to catch on; in 2001, the Whitney, SFMOMA, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art all had prominent digital art exhibits. This momentum came to a head on April 25, 2003, as digital art got its first real retrospective. Spanning the seminal compositions of electronic sound artist John Cage and the software works of the prolific digital artist John Klima, "Vectors," mounted online and at the World Financial Center by the New York Digital Salon and the School of Visual Arts, examines the brief but rich history of a fledgling medium. Pegged on the exhibition, ReadMe has put together a guided tour, conducted by five experts in the field of digital art, of some of the exhibition's most important works. The Experts: Nina Colosi, New York Digital Salon's consulting producer, provided the momentum behind "Vectors." A digital artist and electronic musician herself, she produced and curated evo1, a 2001 "exhibition of art and music created by artists responding to a world increasingly influenced by technology." Her work as a composer, performer, and producer of music for film, television, and theater has received grants and awards, including two Emmy nominations. Alex Galloway, artist and programmer, is a founding member of Radical Software Group (RSG) and the creator of "Carnivore," a software work featured in "Vectors." Formerly of Rhizome.org, Galloway now teaches in NYU's Media Ecology program. John Klima is one of the digital art world's foremost creative forces. "Vectors" includes a 1999 creation of his, a compelling musical instrument/toy called "Glasbead." His work was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and in the museum's 2001 "Bit Streams" exhibition. Mark Tribe is the founder and executive director of Rhizome.org, an online community, exhibition space, 'zine and clearinghouse for all things New Media/Net Art-related. He's also an artist and curator "whose interests lie at the intersection of emerging technologies and contemporary art." Joel Chadabe, founder and president of the Electronic Music Foundation, a non-profit organization "dedicated to increasing public understanding of the role that electronic music, in its myriad forms and technologies, plays in our world." A seasoned composer and performer, Chadabe was charged with selecting 10 electronic-sound selections for "Vectors." He also teaches electronic music at SUNY Albany, Bennington College, and the Manhattan College of Music. The Tour: Vectorial Elevation
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's "Vectorial Elevation" is the perfect place to start; it exemplifies the interactivity, scale, and democratic conversation the digital medium has allowed artists to achieve. During the piece's 1999 debut, websurfers could design their own light sculpture in a 3-D Web Applet; the user could position virtual beams of light within her browser. Once satisfied with her creation, and she clicked "Send," the virtual configuration would be uploaded, and soon, her creation was reconstructed over the Mexico City skyline by bright xenon searchlights for six seconds. Nina Colosi: "'Vectorial Elevation,' a large-scale interactive installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer [in Mexico] is, to me, one of the most important works in the exhibition. It was first presented during the millennium celebration, and people around the world participated in creating light patterns that were projected into a historic square in Mexico City by controlling robotic xenon searchlights [via] the Internet. The work has important social and cultural dimensions and is a good example of cross-cultural interactivity and the empowerment of personal creativity made possible by the convergence of technology and art process." Carnivore
Alex Galloway and RSG's "Carnivore," described by Rachel Greene of Artforum as "kicking ass and literally taking names," is a good example of the new ways in which digital art can comment on technology, data interpretation, and information dissemination. It's a reverse-engineered copy of the FBI's own "Carnivore" software, which was designed as an Internet surveillance tool. Galloway's version was created with a sense of irony: rather than report what it finds, it translates the data packets "sniffed out" by the software into a myriad of colors, sounds, and words that flash across the screen. Here's where "Carnivore" truly distinguishes itself from other information-interpreting digital artworks: Galloway made the program's code available to those who cared to download it, allowing other digital artists to create their own "Carnivore clients"---programs that convert Carnivore's data into new shapes, sounds, and structures. One Carnivore client, "PoliceState,", by Jonah Brucker-Cohen, translates Carnivore's datastream into directional coordinates for a fleet of remote-controlled toy police cars. In addition to acting as a foil for the veil of secrecy around the original FBI "Carnivore," "Carnivore," which makes use of what is known as the "open source" paradigm (the idea that software's is made available by its creator so that anyone can download and toy with it for free), also represents one of the ways that digital technology allows artists to explore the unexplored. Mark Tribe: "There's two sides to the 'open source' approach to intellectual property: 'I've made something and want to make it available to other people,' which is what Alex has done, or the perspective of people that are making 'clients.' This essentially goes back to 'collage,' a widely used technique by the dadaists, pop art, and [the aptly named] appropriation art movement in the '80s. The [new digital] tools really lend themselves to that." Alex Galloway: "Our goal is to invent a new use for data surveillance that breaks out of the hero/terrorist dilemma and instead dreams about a future use for networked data. The decision to make 'Carnivore' open source is absolutely central to the piece. The FBI software that inspired us is a closed technology. The public cannot use the software themselves; they can't inspect the code to see how it works. So it was interesting for us to turn the FBI software inside out and show how easy it was to make. It can be reverse-engineered using preexisting tools and with almost no budget--all you need is a Linux computer. Now people can use the RSG software to assist the FBI in their wiretapping activities...or to make art. It doesn't matter." Nina Colosi: "Grahame Weinbren, artist and scholar, pointed out that in engaging with interactive work we want to be responded to in human ways. And if, as Ezra Pound wrote, 'artists are the antennae of the race,' are these interactive works preliminary steps in fulfilling our subconscious desire for machines that have human attributes?" Every Icon
John Simon Jr.'s "Every Icon" will take several hundred trillion years to reach its programmed objective: to have represented every possible combination of black and white squares on a 32 by 32 grid. By that time, like so many monkeys on so many typewriters, it will have generated (or so the theory goes) every familiar icon ever, including black-and-white renderings of Alfred E. Newman and the Izod crocodile. It will have generated more images than it's possible to see and recognize in a lifetime. In essence, the computer has allowed Simon to create a work that encompasses every image ever. John Klima: "Jorge Luis Borges presaged many of the concerns of new media artists in his fiction, more than 50 years ago. John Simon's 'Every Icon' is a direct descendant of a Borges story. The best art, regardless of medium, recognizes, comments, questions, and plays with its predecessors." Joel Chadabi: "Digital art is, in its materials and structures, getting so close to life that one could think of art as 'extraordinary life,' offering looks at life that can educate, inspire, influence. In dealing with interesting art, I don't find the interactions strange, but I do find them special and extraordinary. But then, the point of art is to 'leave the ordinary.'" Nina Colosi: "Joel Chadabe says 'Art is getting closer to life.' Roger Malina stated in the 'Vectors' Leonardo issue and at the symposium, that we are in the 'stone age of the digital arts,' and laying the foundation for cultural transformation, in quest of humanism." Glasbead
"Glasbead," as well as other works by John Klima, such as "The Great Game" or "Jack and Jill," seem inspired by, or at least related to, video games. "Glasbead" is a software program in which the user manipulates a 3-D glass orb filled with numerous "stems" and "hammers," virtual switches connected to sound files. The "viewer" (player?) sets these hammers in motion, and when they come into contact with a stem, it plays the corresponding sound file. The user manipulates the soundscape, controlling its volume, speed of playback, and complexity by controlling these hammers. The resulting cacaphony assumes natural rhythms based on the chain reactions of contact that the "viewer" has set in motion. Looked at one way, "Glasbead" is a new musical instrument. From another angle, however, it's a whimsical, intuitive, and interactive video game. In digital art, the line between "art" and "game" frequently blurs.
Mark Tribe: "Well, artists have been experimenting with games for some time. There's certainly been a lot of interest on the part of artists in games as both inspiration as well as a format. Games are fun." Alex Galloway: "I predict that 2003 for games [will end up being] like the 1930s were for film. We are n the cusp of what will be the most creative and exciting period of gamemaking. The great classics of gaming have yet to be made, but we will see them very soon. I think we will also see the emergence of more auteur gamemakers, as someone like [Nintendo's] Shigeru Miyamoto has already become. In this way I think mainstream games will start to be thought of as art, just as today certain films are considered art. Many mainstream games have already been lauded for their artistic qualities---games like Ico, or Myst. But our thoughts on what counts as art will also evolve, and what is today considered lowbrow (GTA3, Tony Hawk Pro Skater) will probably be thought of more highly, in a historical context." Birdcage
John Cage's "Birdcage," the composer once said, was to be played back in a space where "people were free to move and birds to fly." The piece, an arrangement of bird-chirpings, Cage's own voice, and other random sounds, was composed in 1972, and is one of the retrospective's oldest works (Cage's "Imaginary Landscape," the retrospective's oldest offering, dates back to 1939). Cage's work occupies a unique place in a retrospective in which most of the work is from the '90s. It grounds the show, suggesting that the fledgeling medium actually has a rich heritage. Our virtual guides use this piece as an opportunity to discuss why it's important for a new medium to look back. John Klima: "To deny that the past exists is very dangerous. Many new media artists create work they think is 'new' when the concepts and even the technologies existed for many years prior." Nina Colosi: "In general, we all need to see how [digital art] directly relates to our lives, and to understand the social and cultural implications of digital art and sound art. Education will help accelerate the process. Dedicated young talent can find some secrets to the future in the artworks, essays and symposium online presented by the participating artists and curators that can be used to spark their new ideas." Joel Chadabi: "John Cage's approach to sound composition was to define a territory, record all of the sounds within that territory, and then randomize the juxtapositions of the sounds to create an anarchistic world in which everything simply happens simultaneously in a cheerful, symbiotic whole. His 'Birdcage' is a complex, exuberant, and joyful fabric of juxtapositions centered around birds recorded in aviaries, with Cage's voice and the sounds of the birds creating an atmosphere that is both good-humored and ridiculous." Things to Come If artists are indeed "the antennae of the race," then the future of digital art looks bright. "Vectors" shows us that the digital medium's comparatively brief history is simultaneously rich with ideas of what is to come, and incorporations of artistic notions of the past. What comes next is open-ended: software has no boundaries. If artists can dream it, then they can likely implement it with code. Then, their creations take on a life of their own, each viewer's experience unique and separate from anything else that's existed before or will exist after. With digital art, the viewer becomes part of the piece, but not in the way they do with Christo's static, grandiose works, for instance. The new medium, by nature, forces viewers to become an integral part of the work and forge an intimate relationship with it. ("Vectors: Digital Art of Our Time," and related events, talks, and tours will run from April 22 to May 25th, 2003 at the World Financial Center's Winter Garden, as well as virtually, at http://www.nydigitalsalon.org) RELATED LINKS: Vectors Homepage The Whitney's online exhibition space, Artport Nina Colosi's evo1 The EMF's definitive timeline of the history of electronic music "Renderings of Digital Art," "Vectors" curator Christiane Paul's essay on the genre Dan Reiss is a freelance writer and a junior at New York University, majoring in print journalism. |
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