To find the pieces for this show I did not have to search far. The artists are all members of a group that shares a long history. They have been friends, lovers, mentors, acolytes, and collaborators for a period spanning, in some cases, two decades.
The works chosen for this exhibition are representative of this history and of the direction we are headed in as individuals and as a group. Despite a shared history, these artists represent a diversity of viewpoints and approaches from the raw metal and visceral harmonics of Victoria Scott’s “Coil Room” to the subtle responses of David Rokeby’s “Very Nervous System”.
One of the challenges faced when creating and exhibiting these types of works is a reluctance of the main stream art media to deal with them. Artists working in the field of new media often get the feeling of working in a vacuum. The only thing worse than a bad review is no review at all.
It seems to me this lack of coverage is due mainly to two factors. The first is perhaps a perceived ignorance of the technology and issues being dealt with. Art critics are reluctant to comment on works they feel they don’t fully understand.
I believe these works should be judged by the same standards as are all works of art. What makes something a piece of “art” is that, in addition to having craft and content, it provides context — a new way of looking at the world.
Of course an understanding of the crafting of a piece can allow the viewer a deeper appreciation of it. However, if one does not understand the techniques involved in the construction of a work, then one must attempt to look beyond this to the other aspects of the piece. Just as photography could not be accepted as an art form until the novelty of the medium wore off, so too these new media must lose their “Gee Whiz” appeal and be judged for their ability to convey a deeper meaning.
I am optimistic that, as the new technologies permeate our everyday lives, an acceptance for this kind of work will grow. Conversely, I also believe that an appreciation for the non-conventional uses of these technologies will help prevent us from becoming slaves to the machine.
These pieces are not “avante-garde” in the same sense as the revolutionary art of the turn of the century. That tradition exposed us to the irrational impulses underlying a staid and rigid society. The Dadaists, for example, perhaps as a reaction to the industrial revolution, applied mechanical processes to images and words. Their works revealed the often frightening under current of the subconscious mind. Quite the contrary, I think the pieces in this show apply organic, human methods to machines and by so doing attempt to make some sense of and give hope to an increasingly irrational world.
Another explanation for the reticence of the mainstream media to deal positively with technology-based art is that the dissemination of communications technology to the people marks the end of the media’s long standing monopoly on the mediation of information. The invention of movable type threatened the powerful hold of church and crown over the spread of ideas, allowing pamphleteers to publish the last words of radical thinkers from the steps of the gallows. The industrialization of the press and the development of broadcast technologies eventually put that power in the hands of the industrialists. They would rather divert us with pretty images designed to stimulate consumption and distract us from the fact that there are actually some things very wrong with our society. The catalytic power of the modem, the fax machine and the PC have already proven themselves in Czechoslovakia, the former USSR, and China. The powers of the West are misleading themselves if they think it can’t happen here.
These technologies were originally created as just another bunch of consumer goods, but I see them as a Pandora’s box. No matter how much the media warns us of the dangers of playing with the Promethean fire of unregulated, uncensored communication, the misfortunes cannot be contained. As in the myth, hope remains behind even though the gods are always angered when humans become more free.
Another positive aspect to this change is the fact that it is an evolutionary process. It reinforces my faith in human nature that at this time when the planet is no longer able to sustain the rabid material consumption that we have been raised to expect, society is spontaneously moving toward an economy based on information consumption.
As I mentioned earlier I feel that the pieces in this exhibition attempt to put a human face on the new technology. Each artist comes to terms with their chosen medium on a personal level. To best give specific examples it is convenient to divide the exhibition into three parts along the lines of similarities in style, theme and medium.
Net@Works
(A Show of Interactive Computer Installations)
Interactive works require the participation of the viewer to be complete. It can be argued that, like the tree that falls unheard in the forest, they are not fully art until they are seen and heard. The demands of the works in this show range from the mere presence of spectators to actual aerobic exertion.
Perhaps it is the nature of this interaction that fascinates these artists, because the pieces in this part of the show are also about the interconnection between individuals and crowds, their physical surroundings and their cultures.
We came up with “Net@Works” as a name for a show that was at the same time about our own community and about expanding and connecting with other communities. The word “network” is both a noun, meaning a system of interconnected people or computer systems and a verb, which means the act of creating or connecting networks . The process of building networks produces a series of nested self referential systems not unlike iterative nature of fractals. As such, it is a good metaphor for a type of work that looks both inward and outward of it’s inspiration and it’s expression.
Three of the pieces deal with the dynamics of individuals and communities. Mary Alton’s CD ROM “Critical Mass” takes the viewer on a journey from within the self and looks at the crowd as an organism unto itself, greater than the sum of it’s parts and superseding even the will of the individual. “The Gathering Space” by Tom Leonhardt and myself invokes the common denominator of humanity which unites all people at all times.
Graham Smith’s “Welcome to the Electric Skin” involves the actual creation of a new virtual community. “Cyberspace” has been described as “the place where a telephone conversation takes place”. If that is true then Graham’s piece is an attempt to colonize that space in the classic pioneering tradition.
Nancy Paterson’s “Bicycle TV” seems to warn us that too much fascination for this Brave New (Virtual) World can lead us to neglect the real physical world that our bodies must still inhabit. Though no substitute for the real thing, one can still enjoy the illusion of a bicycle trip through rural Ontario. This type of interface must surely be more natural than the usual computer mouse.
“Very Nervous System” by David Rokeby springs directly from his frustration tools the industry has given us it interact with our computers. Keyboards are a very unlike the voices they replace and the mouse is good for pointing and not much more. When all one can do is point ones expression is necessarily objective. David has spent many years perfecting an interface which is capable of responding to the subtlest and the broadest of physical gestures.
Northern Lights
(A Show of Holography)
Toronto has one of the largest and most active communities of art holographers in North America and perhaps the world. This is due largely to courses taught at the Ontario College of Art and facilities maintained by collectives and artist run centers such as The Photon League of Holographers and Fringe Research. This show consists of pieces from four artists, all of whom work in other media as well. In these pieces they have used holography as part of multimedia works and thus taken the medium beyond the mere representation of three dimensional objects.
I have often heard holographers criticized for not producing art but merely making interesting 3D pictures of sculptural maquettes–holography for holography’s sake. This is due partially to the aforementioned “Gee Whiz” phenomenon and it is true that sometimes even the artists themselves fall under it’s spell. All of these works are exceptions to that generalization. They integrate traditional media and use holograms to utilize properties that cannot be reproduced in any other way.
A common theme which seems to link all these works is “life”–its beginnings, its tenaciousness, its transience, and our resistance to let it pass.
Catherine Orfald’s work, invokes creation myths and goddesses to pay tribute to the beginnings of life.
“The Mother of Songs,
the mother of our whole seed,
bore us in the beginning.”
Fused in light the bodies of Father and Mother, Mother and Child bear witness to the duality and the unity of the family and of life.
Bruce Evans’ “Puddle” juxtaposes nature and civilization using objects, sounds, and images. Our entry into the space provokes a play of light that transforms a pot hole into a living pond.
“The Sappho Project” interplays light, music, and representations of the ancient poetess with translations of her words. Mary Alton has chosen poems which capture the elusive passage of time and the impermanence of temporal existence.
Tonight I’ve watched the moon and then
the Pleiades go down;
the night is now half gone; youth goes
I am alone in bed
The urge to write and create images is, in itself, a reaction against that ceaseless change.
To expose a holographic plate takes a very brief time, measured in millionths of a second. In that time the image is recorded over its entirety in such a way that it can be broken into pieces and each piece still holds the entire image. In this sense the hologram is sometimes used as a metaphor for how the brain stores memories. In “The Eternal Nanosecond” Laura Kikauka preserves a sentimental memory of herself, taking that brief moment and making it last forever.
“I Sing the Body Electric”
(A Show of Kinetic And Robotic Sculpture)
Ever since the first primitive tools were invented the machine has been an extension of the human body. Conversely the state of the art of any age has given its contemporaries a new mirror in which to view themselves and their surroundings. Take for example the model of steam technology which parallels Freud’s imagery of the mind as made up of compartments building up pressures and venting into and displacing one another.
This era dominated by telecommunications, computers, and robotics is no different. The artists in this show have all spent plenty of time bending and welding metal, designing and soldering circuits, and programming computers. One can clearly see in the humor, ingenuity, and beauty of these works that the artists share a fascination for, even a love of things electronic and mechanical. They give us works which speak about some of the important issues of concern to our age. Do machines have too much influence over our lives? Do they intermediate our interaction to the point of threatening the family and the human relationship as we know it? Are machines destroying and replacing nature as our habitat?
Doug Back’s “Small Artist Pushing Technology” is a simple, clear analogy for the plight of the new media artist or for anyone who has to work with technology. A little bit like a modern day Sisyphus, the tiny figure pushes the medium and at the same time pushes his whole world.
Simone Jones reconciles the organic and the mechanical in her piece “Transformation #1” By distilling forms and movement from natural phenomenon and translating them into motor driven sculptures she pays homage to nature and points toward a beauty hidden in unexpected places (like a field of oil derricks or the concerted movements of a factory assembly line or automated tortillaria).
Victoria Scott’s “Coil Room” redefines the female principal not in the traditional sense of passive as opposed to active, but as a cyclic as opposed to vector based energy. If the gun or the rocket can be seen as technologies representative of maleness, Scott sees the A/C motor, the oscillator, and the ones and zeros of the digital world as paralleling the rhythmic nature of female energy.
Norman White’s “Helpless Robot” turns the tables on us, reversing the traditional roles of man and machine. This robot has the ability to learn but rather than “artificial intelligence” it might more accurately be described as “artificial stupidity”. It can learn but it cannot do for itself. The more help it gets, the more it demands. It cannot escape its dependence on humans to get what it wants. Could this be a metaphor for our growing dependence on technology?
Steev Morgan, July 22, 1995, Toronto