Bathuns Gully

Here are some more pictures from my adventure to Bathuns' Gully.

Blogging

Does the digital make other art forms obsolete?

What are the concerns of professional photographers and media makers in terms of how the Net may indeed threaten the integrity of their art forms. If I digest the issues discussed correctly, the primary concerns are with the quality and copyrights to media productions distributed on the Net. Methinks the longstanding tension between blogging and journalism since the emergence of blogosphere plays up similar issues albeit in slightly different light. Here we are talking about the rice bowls of professional journalists and news corporations being threatened by blogging upstarts. Is blogging a reflection of a popular demand among the traditionally passive consumers who are now demanding a voice in the production of materials that they would consume? In many ways, the Net has only intensifed this shift towards prosuming. I’ll say the growing popularity of Reality TV shows such as Big Brother, the Idol series which sprang off ‘copies’

As individuals and producers of creative content, be it in visual or textual formats, we can choose to be either hapless victims or active participants shaping this inevitable tide of events. -

relationship between blogging and journalism, the big question now is not as much as how blogging has threatened journalism, but how journalists can tap on the opportunities now made visible and available by bloggers.

Jack Burnham

Han Haake

-Software as "an attempt to produce aesthetic sensations without the intervening 'object;' in fact, to exacerbate the conflict or sense of aesthetic tension by placing works in mundane, non-art formats.

-The computer's most profound aesthetic implication is that we are being forced to dismiss the classical view of art and reality which insists that man stand outside of reality in order to observe it, and, in art, requires the presence of the picture frame and the sculpture pedestal.

-The notion that art can be separated from its everyday environment is a cultural fixation [in other words, a mythic structure] as is the ideal of objectivity in science. It may be that the computer will negate the need for such an illusion by fusing both observer and observed, "inside" and "outside." It has already been observed that the everyday world is rapidly assuming identity with the condition of art.

- The metaphorical premise of Software permitted Burnham to explore convergences between his notion of the mythic structure of art, emerging information technology, and the increasing conceptualism characteristic of much experimental art in the late 1960's.

-Components were conjoined in works that emulated the sort of two-way communication he experienced with computer programs and which he advocated in art. The catalog emphasized the importance of creating a context in which "the public can personally respond to programmatic situations structured by artists," and explicitly stated that the show "makes no distinctions between art and non-art."

-Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group (precursor to the MIT Media Lab, which Negroponte now directs) submitted "Seek," a computer-controlled robotic environment that, at least in theory, cybernetically reconfigured itself in response to the behavior of the gerbils that inhabited it. I interpret Seek as an early example of "intelligent architecture," a growing concern of the design community internationally. By synthesizing cybernetics, aesthetics, phenomenology, and semiotics, Software emphasized the process of audience interaction with "control and communication techniques," encouraging the "public" to "personally respond" and ascribe meaning to experience. In so doing, Software questioned the intrinsic significance of objects and implied that meaning emerges from perception in what Burnham (quoting Barthes) later identified as "syntagmatic" and "systematic" contexts.

Myron Krueger

Videoplace is an early example of augmented reality art, done by an artist whose interests lay mostly in VR. The installation features computer projection that interacts with the viewer's physical shadow.

Myron Krueger is one of the original pioneers of virtual reality and interactive art. Beginning in 1969, Krueger developed the prototypes for what would eventually be called Virtual Reality. These "responsive environments" responded to the movement and gesture of the viewer through an elaborate system of sensing floors, graphic tables, and video cameras. Audience members could directly interact with the video projections of others interacted with a shared environment. Krueger also pioneered the development of unencumbered, full-body participation in computer-created telecommunication experiences and coined the term "Artificial Reality" in 1973 to describe the ultimate expression of this concept. [Jeremy Turner of CTheory]

After several other experiments, VIDEOPLACE was created where the computer had control over the relationship between the participant's image and the objects in the graphic scene. It could coordinate the movement of a graphic object with the actions of the participant. While gravity affects the physical body, it may not control or confine the image which could float, if needed. A series of simulations could be programmed based on any action and Videoplace offered over 50 compositions and interactions (including Critter, Individual Medley, Fractal, Finger Painting, Digital Drawing, Body Surfacing, Replay, among others). To illustrate, when the participant's silhouette pushed a graphic object-the computer could choose to move the object or the silhouette. Or, as in Finger Painting where each finger created flowing paint without the distraction of the silhouette.


Originally trained as a computer scientist, Myron Krueger, under the influence of John Cage's experiments in indeterminacy and audience participation, pioneered human-computer interaction in the context of physical environments. Beginning in 1969, he collaborated with artist and engineer colleagues to create artworks that responded to the movement and gesture of the viewer through an elaborate system of sensing floors, graphic tables, and video cameras... At the heart of Krueger's contribution to interactive computer art was the notion of the artist as a "composer" of intelligent, real-time computer-mediated spaces, or "responsive environments," as he called them. Krueger "composed" environments, such as Videoplace from 1970, in which the computer responded to the gestures of the audience by interpreting, and even anticipating, their actions. Audience members could "touch" each other's video-generated silhouettes, as well as manipulate the odd, playful assortment of graphical objects and animated organisms that appeared on the screen, imbued with the presence of artificial life. [from ArtMuseum.net]

Aesthetic Paradigms of Media Art

Claudia Giannetti

Art beyond art

The definition of ‹art beyond art› amounts to a negation of an understanding of art that is based on accumulative and historically linear findings. Interest focuses no longer on the autonomy of a work of art, a subject much discussed during modernism (and already wholly assimilated into contemporary art), but on art’s emancipation from art itself. This shift implies that the modernist tendency to take issue with the arguments of a discourse within the discourse itself has been overcome. It also signifies the demand for a ‹reconstruction of the area› on new foundations which place in question several of its basic theoretical generalizations and many of its methods.

The argument of the essays can be summarized as follows: explanations delivered by art are constitutively neither reductionist nor transcendental; the function of art consists in expanding realities, knowledge and experiences; this process can take its course dialogically or consensually (through seduction), or by means of canonization (through control or coercion). Further paradigm shifts specifically relevant to media art will be examined below.

Interdisciplinarity

Media art—in its diverse forms ranging from audiovisual installations to interactive systems, from hypermedia to artificial reality, from the net to cyberspace—reinforces the idea of ‹interdisciplinarity,› which reaches much further than the aforementioned considerations about the relationship of art and technology. In the context of interdisciplinarity, the intermeshing of art, technologies, and science refers to the process that brings about convergence, interference, appropriation, overlapping and interpenetration; a process successively leading to the generation of referential networks and reciprocal— non-hierarchic—influences.

Ubiquity and dematerialization

After the exodus of art from conventional presentation spaces such as museums or galleries and the conquest of public places, streets, towns, landscapes (e.g. Land Art, Performance, Happening), the fact that spatiotemporal expansion and the wider use of
materials arrived at a deeper significance of ubiquity (the possibility of being present at all place at once or simultaneously), dematerialization (independence of the physical-material existence of the object) and participation (the use of interactive network resources) is without doubt brought about by the deployment of so-called new media—such as the telecommunications system.

All of the telecommunications projects developed from the 1970s onward, such as those of satellite art, were basically attempts to transform the medium into a meta-medium permitting art spatial and temporal ubiquity. That was what gave Nam June Paik, for example, the idea that a work could be created in several different places at once, as outlined in the score in 1961. Paik’s efforts to accomplish meta-communication led to his most important contributions to satellite art, such as in 1977 «Nine Minutes Live,» his direct satellite telecast of performances in Europe and the USA for the opening of the Documenta 6 in Kassel, and in 1984 «Good Morning Mr. Orwell,» organized jointly by the Centre Pompidou and the broadcaster WNET-TV, with whichPaik succeeded in realizing a live satellite program that was participative as well as simultaneous. According to Paik, satellite art was destined to become the most important non-material work in post-industrial society.

The formation of international projects in the 1970s was a crucial stimulus for art in conjunction with telecommunication as well as for the notion of ubiquity. The Brazilian Waldemar Cordeiro,a pioneer of Computer Art, in 1971 identified the inadequacy of communications media as a form of information transmission and the inefficiency of information as language, thought, and action as being the causes of the crisis of contemporary art. Cordeiro asserted in his Manifest Arteônica that art whose main emphasis lies on the material object restricts audience access to the work and therefore meets the cultural standards of modern society neither qualitatively nor quantitatively. Cordeiro’s deliberations in regard to global networking and free, telecommunication-enabled audience access to a work of art anticipated the notion of ubiquity, participation, and net art.

Jim Campbell

Light, 1988-91
Custom electronics.

-Interaction through both digital and analogue means
-Undermines the notion of the 'live' image.
-What are the aesthetic implications of the live image?

For a sense of how the practice of art is changing at the dawn of the 21st century, you need look no further than Jim Campbell. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics, Campbell has virtually no formal training as an artist. His art apprenticeship, if you can call it that, consisted of repairing video equipment and, later, designing integrated circuits for video here in Silicon Valley. The non-intuitive notion of Heisenberg's principle is that the universe is probabilistic. This means that not only are you unable to measure the position of the electron accurately, but that it does not exist accurately. That, I agree, is totally counter-intuitive. But at a time when many artists who want to create technologically based art seek a partner who knows the electronics and will leave the creativity to them, Campbell is a whole different thing -- a technocrat who discovered early on that he has an artist's soul. At the moment, Campbell's non-art-school vision of art is on exhibit on both coasts. In addition to having a solo show that just opened at the Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco, he is one of a relative handful of artists from the Bay Area with work in the prestigious Whitney Biennial 2002 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. ''Up until about six years ago, I didn't even call myself an artist,'' says Campbell, 46, who still puts in one day a week at his job for Sage Inc., a company in Silicon Valley, designing integrated circuits. ''I always knew I wanted to do something with art. In the beginning it had to do with balance, the need to do something that was more poetic and less mathematical. I don't like to categorize myself.''

Shadow (For Heisenberg), 1993-94
Custom electronics, video camera, glass cube with LCD material, statue

Shadow (for Heisenberg) is an interactive installation that involves the viewer's desire to see an object contained within a glass cube. If the viewer moves towards the object the image of the object fades from view and is replaced by the shadow of the object. This work incorporates a new technology that allows a piece of glass to go from transparent to translucent. The work also incorporates a video camera on the ceiling. The image from the camera on the ceiling is manipulated and displayed on the wall behind the pedestal to make apparent the relationship between position and perception. This work is loosely based on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle from Quantum Physics which states that one can never observe an object in its purest form because the process of observation has an impact on the object. The more accurately one trys to observe or measure an object, the more that object will be affected by the observation.

Memory/Recollection, 1990
Black and white video camera, five CRT's, 286 computer, custom electronics

Memory/Recollection is an interactive video installation in which a series of captured live frozen images are displayed on a series of monitors. The images fade from the first monitor to the last monitor so that the last monitor has the oldest image on it. The piece stores images for up to 2 years and at times displays these older images from 10 minutes, a week or six months ago. i.e. The piece keeps track of and is defined by its own history.

Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman's photography had a strong impact on me when I first started taking photography seriously; her work along with others (Man Ray, Duane Michel’s, Ralph Meatyard, Moholy-nagy, Jerry Uelsmann, and Dali) definitely inspired me to experiment with movement, blurring, and manipulation within the medium. Woodman blurs fantasy with reality in a way which has always inspired me to find the unusual in everyday life. I want to create scenes for the audience to be a part of; something which the viewer knows must exist but has the same unusual eerie feel of standing in a dark room looking at an installation piece.
Woodman constructs her scenes by superimposing various levels of the real rather than breaking down reality to study the image's constructive mechanisms. In a similar way, at the end of the 70s Cindy Sherman appeared on the scene with a series of photographic "Film Stills" that manifest the influences of the film culture and a linear approach to the image. Each picture was a "slice of life," walking the line between fiction and reality. Each picture provided the viewer with a precise image of a woman acting out our clichés concerning traditional female roles. But in spite of the common ground shared by these two photographers, Woodman never seemed interested in the cultural model of today's woman: there is no objective investigation in her work, only a personal kind of research. Basically, while Cindy Sherman offered — in image after image — a fragmentary vision of women, Francesca Woodman gave us a cumulative one, images that take on the woman's different models. Woodman was photographer and model, subject and object, at the same time. She utilized the female body to develop her own self-knowledge and not some representative but generic model of the world. The images of the body that this young American was experimenting with suggest a diffuse intimacy while tending to dissuade a voyeuristic approach. Unlike most of the images we are faced with on a daily basis, where the body is treated like a commodity to be used and consumed, or an icon to adore at safe distance, Francesca Woodman employs her body to initiate a dialog with herself. She places her body in familiar settings, though at the limits of our experience, presenting it as a symbol of receptivity, a meeting place between herself and the rest of the world, a communicative model in which information about her experience is presented and reflected upon. She uses her own body as a model to investigate her own vision and not another's vision of her body. Woodman projects images and symbols, hopes and fears onto the female body. She uses it like a gesticulative vector not fully known to her, communicating to the viewer the novelty of her encounter.