The Pastoralism of New Media: A Rant About Contemporary Art

We live in a world where the implosion of meaning and the end of history Baudrillaud wrote about so dramatically in Simulacra and Simulation (and which accelerated in the internet era) have now been around for a while. Philosophy, art, literature, in fact, all of the humanities were sucked into a theoretical black hole (which we can blame largely on Wittgenstein and the way that media operates to render information meaningless): meta to the nth.

But here we still are, getting up and going to work (if you're lucky enough to have a job), people in a meaningless, ahistorical world.

But Science, as post-structuralism dismantled feminism, humanism, and all metanarratives, held its ground, upholding it's empirical reductionism like a politician upholding family values.

And in the debris of postmodernism, it remains. Science.

Science, and Science alone retains the subject and the object, the signifier and the signified, the Future and the noble goals of mankind. Science, and not philosophy, will tell us the Truth about ourselves, the world, and through fossils and conjecture about early humans, the Nature of Man.

...Oh, and artists remain, bewildered by the absolute meaninglessness of their art history educations.

And two major trends have emerged: relational art, which represents, produces, or prompts inter-human relations (check out Gabriel Orozco and Miranda July); and art that imitates or employs as its medium science and technology, creating abstracted data visualizations, substituting scientific approaches for aesthetic approaches, using the forms of science to imbue work with meaning. (Check out Gail Wight and the sound-memory neural networks of Debora Aschheim).

As these trends expand there seems to be a sentiment that a given project which is sort-of about science or is sort-of interactive is automatically art, even if it can't satisfy the questions "What does it mean?" or "Why should I care?"

But, back to Science. While some art that borrows from science and technology does so critically or works with the concepts creatively, some are just aesthetic objects inspired by science. And I love beautiful things, I do. I just don't want art discourse to be lost to the pastoralism of abstract, uncritical new media work.

Grad Programs

As I get closer and closer to my Studio Art degree, I think about what to do after graduating. What are worthwhile goals? How do I intend to participate in our complex culture and economy? In parallel to my art-focused goals I've been thinking about grad school, and post some token research last fall, I am looking into a lot more programs.

While my focus on the intersection of art and technology from an art perspective is intriguing and satisfying, I want more technical skills. Digital applications have so much potential for changing society. In a world where there is practically infinite information and computation there is so much room for innovation in applications and usability/accessibility. While I'm interested in computer science, I want to use it for data visualization, interaction design, and/or information systems design. I'm excited by the work of companies like Gesture Tek, Obscura Digital, and Snibbe Interactive.

Here's a list of programs I think look cool:

The Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, with a self-designed emphasis on computer science and information systems.

The Media Lab at MIT definitely has some incredible-looking research groups: Affective Computing, Camera Culture, Computing Culture, Fluid Interfaces, Tangible Media...

Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford, which apparently combines artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and symbolic logic. The Stanford graduate Design program there also looks interesting.

Human-Computer Interaction at Georgia Tech is an interdisciplinary program which allows an emphasis in digital media.

U.C. Santa Barbara Media Arts and Technology: emergent media, computer science, engineering, and electronic music and digital art research, practice, production, and theory. (Emergent media, I like that) Option of MS in Multimedia Engineering or MA in Visual and Spatial Arts.

I'm also pretty intrigued by the U.C. Berkeley School of Information, which goes with my most recent art theory flirtation, Database Aesthetics.

My approach for figuring out what I want to study has largely been through looking at companies that are producing the applications for the sort of things I dream about with my art, and looking at the sort of qualifications their staff has and/or that they are seeking.

I definitely intend to take a year or two off and see how I can evolve what I do outside academia before going to grad school. I'd appreciate your thoughts and advice.

Projects for 2010

Saturday "Everyone Intimate Alone Visibly," my collaboration with Levydance, premiered at Dance Place in Washington DC to a favorable review in the Washington Post. With that I finished my major work of 2009. Inspired to apply my new skills to new projects, I'm planning a number of new projects for 2010.

Project 1: Collaborate with Bad Unkl Sista

Bad Unkl Sista is a San Francisco Butoh-inspired performance group. Their incredibly striking white costumes should work as interesting surfaces on which to project video. I'll use computer vision to track the dancers, applying some of the systems I developed so recently.

Project 2: A story of a dream: typewriter/language-based video installation

This does not yet have a name, but will derive a lot of its function from language and algorithms (I'll be reading some Chomsky). Basically I'll modify a mechanical typewriter with an Arduino to output ASCII. I'll make a program to parse words and mix video accordingly. There will be a lot of system design, video editing, and building the "vocabulary" of the project. Limiting it to one of my dreams will make it more expressive and personal, more aesthetically coherent (visually), and make it a smaller, more achievable project that I can expand on later.

Project 3: Anomaly

I'm expanding on Anomaly with some new collaborators. Besides improving the current sculpture and electronics, I'll be working with Yosh!, Aaron McLeran, Moldover, and Pehr Hovey to have Anomaly control generative sound algorithms which use sound files uploaded by contributors online. As this becomes more developed I'll be inviting sound artists to contribute sound.

Project 4: Events etc.

This year I am co-producing Alchemy, a False Profit interactive art event with Stephanie Tholand, which will take place April 24th.

February 1st I'll be moving into Million Fishes, the artist collective and gallery in the Mission. My goals are to curate art shows in the gallery, hold workshops, work to improve Million Fishes' branding and visibility, and collaborate with my talented cohorts.

I'll also continue presenting and showing my work and probably organize another workshop on using Max for interactivity programming and computer vision.

Basically this year is going to be about collaborating to make a lot of cool work, building on my skills from past projects more than acquiring new technical skills.

New Museum: Urs Fischer

Thursday I visited the New Museum in New York with a friend I had just made at my interview at ITP. The Urs Fischer exhibit was "a series of immersive installations and hallucinatory environments. " True to the description, I found it to be entirely sensually pleasing. Exceptionally experiential in its use of space and tactile in its material, I thought it also managed to tie into the "real world" of marketing, the experience of products, design and manufacturing.

The second floor installation of mirrored boxes with giant prints of objects on their surface captured the sense of desire and illusion generated by the ads they seemed to imitate. Larger and more vivid than life, I wanted to touch them. Wandering among them as in a strange garden was certainly "hallucinatory" and open to an array of meanings.

The third floor gooey melting purple piano continued this tactility of medium. It looked like purple taffy, askew and distorted but perfectly detailed. The room had richly colored but subdued wall paper going all the way up, mostly a desaturated burnt umber-mars violet but which shifted at the top to different colors in the light, huge. As a background it made everything else in the room pop and put me inside the installation. It made me feel like everyone else was part of the installation, too: the blonde girl carefully photographing the suspended croissant and her hipster friend watching her, like they'd been arranged there as well. I anticipated something from them, and myself.

The fourth floor had what looked at first like metallic clouds, like nebulous silver Vaseline, but which were in fact giant sculptures of cast aluminum. They were beautiful in themselves, but I thought they were all about how they were made: some American artist simply squeezed some wet clay in his hand, scanned it, and sent it off to China for people there to manufacture, then had it shipped back to the U.S.

Eyes to Fly With: Gaciela Iturbide

I normally don't pay much attention to photography, but I came across the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide's work, and it is so incredibly striking and poetic. I think that this is when image is most powerful: when it captures a vivid moment's story and all the myths within it. There's more, and it is hauntingly beautiful.

A conversation with Michi

Last night I was introduced to Michael Zeltner, a new media artists from Vienna who currently resides in London. He works with Graffiti Research Lab and is best known for his Ear Cinema project. We had a long conversation about his work, new media art, my work and general tips on how to make it as a new media artist.

Most of my art network is composed of people who consider themselves secondarily as artists and/or approach their work from tech or design perspectives. So it was refreshing and stimulating to engage with someone who is passionately involved in the new media and makes complex, conceptually driven work, working only as an artist.

When Audrey Penven introduced us, Michael was working on Shifts, his current project. Shifts is an installation centered on a photo of the back of Michael's legs, which have symmetrical waveform tattoos. A horizontal thread will scroll over the photo as the sound of the waveforms plays, referencing an audio player, while his blood spurts from a hole in the photo. Comfortably hanging out at Noisebridge, he was debugging his beagleboard (a Linux system with audio and video out, a little larger than an Arduino) to playback the sound and control the motors.

As for making it as an artist, he encouraged me to submit my work widely, answer as many calls for art as possible, network with artists, and collaborate with people who are more well known than I am. "It's like social engineering." He recommended not showing for free: "Be arrogant." He also emphasized the importance of including patrons in the process and keeping them abreast of one's work. He seemed to like my work, but pointed out that my projects don't all come through clearly and vividly on my website.

He ranted a little about new media art in the US, criticizing the all-too-common technical emphasis at the expense of articulated conceptual discourse. Certainly, there is a distinction to be made between artists and technologists. Borrowing largely from Bourriaud, I consider that distinction to be the creation of meaning, a goal I strive for in my own work. I, too, am sometimes annoyed by what I perceive to be an over emphasis of what is novel at the expense of what is poignant.

Michael is certainly making work that is both technically cutting edge and visceral.

IR Webcam 2

I modified a second webcam to receive only infrared using an exacto, tweezers, film negative, vice grips, plastic wrap and this recipe.

IR eye from Mary Franck on Vimeo.

The plastic wrap was a stroke of genius: I didn't have any glue. The focus on this one is much better than the last, I think I should take that one apart again and adjust it. IR allows you to see people without annoying video feedback. Does nothing for their looks, though.