CHArt Conference Proceedings, volume eight
2005

Abstracts

Mapping Outside the Frame: Interactive and Locative¹ Art Environments
Elizabeth Coulter-Smith and Graham Coulter-Smith

The locative project is in a condition of emergence, an embryonic state in which everything is still up for grabs, a zone of consistency yet to emerge. As an emergent practice locative art, like locative media generally, it is simultaneously opening up new ways of engaging in the world and mapping its own domain. (Drew Hemment, 2004)

Artists and scientists have always used whatever emerging technologies existed at their particular time throughout history to push the boundaries of their fields of practice. The use of new technologies or the notion of 'new' media is neither particularly new nor novel. Humans are adaptive, evolving and will continue to invent and explore technological innovation.

This paper asks the following questions: what role does adaptive and/or intelligent art play in the future of public spaces, and how does this intervention alter the relationship between theory and practice? Does locative or installation-based art reach more people, and does 'intelligent' or 'smart' art have a larger role to play in the beginning of this century?

The speakers will discuss their current collaborative prototype and within the presentation demonstrate how software art has the potential to activate public spaces, and therefore contribute to a change in spatial or locative awareness. It is argued that the role and perhaps even the representation of the audience/viewer is left altered through this intervention.

1. An experiential form of art which engages the viewer both from within a specific location and in response to their intentional or unintentional input.

Les Cyclistes
David Furnham

Les Cyclistes is an innovative touring arts event which creates lively amusing and insights into French and UK culture and attitudes to cycling - past and present. To this end, live performance mixes with archive film and artefacts and contemporary video in intimate settings so the visitor enters a virtual world, which is entertaining, knowledgeable and fun - a popular experience for all. The tour will be launched in Brighton in 2006 and further publicised at York Cycle Rally, before proceeding to locations in France, and the UK.

Les Cyclistes the event… is an entertaining and humorous portrayal of the passions of cycling. The design and realisation of the project echoes the ethos of cycling. This is achieved through the use of an historic Citroen van and accompanying Marquee to present a short original silent film with live bonimenteur/sound effects and a mixed media performance installation respectively. The event also records cyclists’ stories onto video as its own archive.

Les Cyclistes the film… is an original, gently comic silent film with recorded piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne (resident pianist at the National Film Theatre, London). The film is presented in an historic Citroen van. The professional actors have been cast for their wide experience of comic performance, physical theatre and mask work. The film will be made during 1-20 July 2005.

Les Cyclistes the installation... Is the portrayal of the hyperreal world of the complete cycling enthusiast - an absurd world where archive and contemporary footage, memories and live performance, mix and collide. The object of desire - the bicycle, gives the opportunity to explore time and space and social moments about age and gender in a humorous way. The set (based in the cyclist's kitchen) is an upturned bicycle on the kitchen table with a video screen in the cycle mirror. The room has a buffet littered with old magazines and cycling memorabilia. There is a workshop table, a map of France on the wall onto which there is a video projection, and a birdcage with no birds but with a mirror which reflects projected images onto a nearby window and acts as a screen. In the foreground is a practice cycle with an original interactive device, which creates rear view images in two cycle mirrors according to the speed of the bicycle. My colleague, Magnus Moar, from the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, Middlesex University, is developing this piece. In the background and 'outside' is a small set comprising a typical cyclist competition podium with an original cut-out figure of the winner and the commentator, complete with desk and video monitor (LCD screen). The videotapes play continuously enabling the visitor to explore freely but at times the cycling enthusiast (the actor) appears and invites the visitor to sit down in 'his kitchen' and then performs, moving about the set as if in conversation with his guests.

The actor's monologue refers to what is happening on the screen without looking at it so creating a 'magical' relationship with the material. The innovative use of surround sound enables the placement of sound in relation to both the screens and the actor. The actor involves the audience through song, story, video, archive artefacts, and the interactive cycle.

Observing 'Systems-Art' from a Systems-Theoretical Perspective
Francis Halsall

This paper takes the forthcoming exhibition, 'Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970,' at Tate Modern (1.) as a starting point for a discussion on how to theorise 'systems-art.' Systems-art emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a new paradigm in artistic practice. Such art is characterised by the following: artistic responses to new technologies, the use of so-called New Media (including computer art), the emergence of digital and network art, and an interest in a systems-aesthetic. I argue that such artistic practice presents particular problems to established art-historical methods, and that the emergence of these problems is two-fold.

The wide variety of 'systems-art,' or that which explores the systems-aesthetic, includes the following characteristics: an interest in the aesthetics of networks, the exploitation of new technology and New Media, unstable or de-materialised physicality, the prioritising of non-visual aspects, and an engagement (often politicised) with the institutional systems of support (such as the gallery, discourse, or the market) within which it occurs. These characteristics often manifest themselves in the challenge which such art presents to Modernist paradigms of art-making and identity.

Art History as it is commonly practiced, remains largely structurally unaltered since its Modernist foundations as an autonomous discipline in the nineteenth century. It therefore focuses its attentions primarily upon singular objects, and provides accounts of these objects in predominantly visual terms. I argue that it is therefore insufficient to deal with the ambiguities and complexities of 'systems-art.'

Having introduced, via specific examples, some key concepts of 'systems-art'. I then argue that systems-theory, exemplified by that of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, provides an effective theoretical model to account for such art. This is because it shifts its attention from singular objects to the systems from which art emerges. These include systems of display, exchange, discursive systems and artworks themselves which display systemic qualities.

In particular I will introduce the systems-theoretical vocabularies of Emergence, Complexity and (systems-contingent) Observation as they are discussed by Luhmann and demonstrate their application to the complexity of 'systems-art'.

1. ‘Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970,’ is at Tate Modern from 1 June to 18 September 2005 and is curated by Donna De Salvo. Participants include: Bas Jan Ader, Carl Andre, John Baldessari, Mel Bochner, Alighiero e Boetti, Marcel Broodthaers, Lygia Clark, Braco Dimitrijevic, Valie Export, Robert Filliou, Gilbert & George, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Eva Hesse, Sanja Ivekovic, Joan Jonas, Donald Judd, Ilya Kabakov, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Mangelos, Gordon Matta-Clark, Cildo Meireles, Bruce Nauman, Hélio Oiticica, Adrian Piper, Charles Ray, Gerhard Richter, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson and Andy Warhol.

Digital Archiving as an Art Practice
Dew Harrison

Archiving is a cultural activity involving the creation of vast electronic databases, which document and preserve art past and present for our education and heritage. However, this activity does not belong solely in the domain of information specialists, museum curators and librarians. Archiving can also be accepted as a form of art practice, and the 'digital' archive - as a curatorial project, an art-based collaboration, or a piece of Conceptual art. These new media art databases are being approached from a different direction and with a different intent than those of the major art galleries and national institutions. They are not constructed by trained archivists, but constitute 'archive' none-the-less.

Within my own practice I have directed web collaborations into one artwork, which is a form of curation but remains as practice. I have created a large database of online exhibitions, which live on dedicated servers and constitute an archive of online work produced at that time under an overarching theme. I am in the process of archiving the work of 400 or so artists produced in the same week-long media lab conditions over a period of 8 years into an electronic database, which could be understood as a curatorial project. I have created an artwork which could be seen as an archive of Duchamp's work, but isn't. It could be said that an artist's website is an archive of their work, but not their practice, not a piece in its own right. When does the database archive exist as an artwork in itself then?

In this paper I intend to trace the idea of the archive as a form of art practice, from Duchamp to Art & Language, in that it situates investments in text and wordplay, indexing and database, archiving and curation as both content and a medium for a Conceptual practice.

The Digital Image and the Pleasure Principle: The Consumption of Realism in the Age of Simulation
Hamid van Koten , University of Dundee, Scotland

Digital technology has rapidly become the dominant provider of mass entertainment. Digital animation, CGI feature film, digital gaming.. the photorealistic, all immersive environment lies just ahead of us.

This paper will seek to examine the social and philosophical implications of the digital environment with reference to Marshall McLuhan's notions of 'hot and cold' media, and drawing upon the works of Baudrillard, Lacan and Gerbner.

Rather than adopting an 'effects theory', this paper will bring together these highly diverse approaches to understanding the digital environment, and explore the complex interrelationship between the producers, distributors and the consumers of the digital media product. What are the forces at work in the production and consumption of these digital environments? What makes these products so popular? What are the narratives and representational issues involved and what can these tell us about our culture?

Specifically, the paper will seek to uncover two themes: pre-modern narrative and realism as the dominant form of digital representations in terms of production, and the Lacanian notion of the Imaginary as the dominant drive towards the consumption of these representations.

The representation of artistic practice in digital visual culture
Ann-Sophie Lehmann

Traditionally, artists have always reflected on their practice, technical achievements and representational skills. The genres of the self-portrait in front of the easel and the atelier-scene serve this self-reflective element of artistic practice. New media art it seems, has not yet generated a genre reflecting on its practical and technical procedures and skills.

Although process and technology are prominent features in many art works, the initial procedures of construction seem to be too 'technical' to generate interesting visual material. Although many artists use their own image as working material, and viewers might become active practitioners in interactive artworks, the ‘artist at work’ is seldom represented as ‘work of art’. As the creative space of the media artist is currently more often described as a laboratory than an atelier, practice even tends to disappear inside a black box: the laboratory traditionally evokes experiment and invention kept from the public view.

While new media art seems to exclude the representation of practice, other more applied domains of digital practice, like web design and computer animation, have created self-reflective genres in which practice is represented. Like their traditional precursors, the self-portrait at work and the atelier-scene serve to represent, celebrate and mystify professional skills of creation.

This paper investigates the representational status of artistic practice in new media art, and using examples from different genres of new media art, will address the following questions: When does practice become representational? How do artists conceive and describe their creative spaces? Have digital production modes rendered creation invisible by transferring practice to the virtual realm?

ARTstor, a digital library for the history of art and the humanities
Max Marmor

ARTstor (www.artstor.org) is a non-profit initiative, founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2001, with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the history of art and associated fields. The roots of ARTstor, as well as its name, can be traced to the Foundation's earlier creation of JSTOR (www.jstor.org). JSTOR's goal is to serve libraries and the scholarly community by building, making available, and preserving a reliable and comprehensive archive of important scholarly journal literature. The JSTOR archive now includes many key journals in the history of art and architecture, such as the Art Bulletin, Burlington Magazine and the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes.

In March 1999, the Foundation began to explore ways in which it might help address community-wide needs for accessing and using images for non-commercial, educational and scholarly purposes. What digital resources do curators, educators, scholars, students, and others need to do their work more effectively and in new ways? How can the adoption of evolving standards and best practices in this domain be fostered? Where do the interests of various parts of the arts community overlap and how can different interests be addressed regarding the development and use of digital collections? Above all, how can work in this arena be developed, sustained and funded?

ARTstor's primary goals as an organization are: to assemble image collections from across many time periods and cultures that will, in the aggregate, have sufficient depth, breadth, and coherence to support a wide range of educational and scholarly activities; to create an organized, central, and reliable digital resource that supports the non-commercial use of images for research, teaching and learning.

As an expanding digital library offering (even at this early date) hundreds of thousands of digital images and related data, ARTstor seeks to provide scholars, teachers, and students with the kinds of image collections and software tools they need to make the pivotal transition from slides to digital images.

As an online resource available only to non-profit institutions, ARTstor seeks to create a secure, trustworthy space on the Internet for the educational, non-commercial use of digital images. This space is defined by a licensing framework that embraces - and seeks to accommodate the concerns and interests of - content owners, participating institutions and end users.

As a non-profit organization with roots in both higher education and the museum community, ARTstor strives to bring the international community of archives, libraries, and museums together around a set of shared values and common goals focused on teaching and learning. Essential to this effort is a commitment to identifying, understanding, and balancing the concerns and interests of content and rights owners with those of end users and those who represent them in a variety of institutional settings.

ARTstor became an independent non-profit organization in January 2004, and began offering a service in July of that year. In its first year of serving the educational and cultural communities nearly 400 colleges, universities, art schools, and museums in the United States have chosen to participate. In April 2005, ARTstor announced its availability in Canada, the beginning of an international outreach program.

This presentation will offer an overview of ARTstor's mission and genesis to date, a demonstration of ARTstor's collections, software and services, and a look ahead at the future, including prospects for availability in the UK.

From UNCAGED to Cyber-Spatialism
Ralf Nuhn

The starting point for this paper is my recent project UNCAGED, which is a series of six 'telesymbiotic' installations, exploring interrelationships and transitions between screen-based digital environments and their physical surroundings. The presentation will include a commentated video documentation featuring the first exhibition of UNCAGED at the V&A (National Museum of Childhood) during May and June 2004.

I will introduce the initial motivation behind the project, which is based on the idea to 'uncage' computer-based realities from the confines of their digital existence and to bring the remote computer world closer to our human experience. In addition, I will explore how my critical engagement with the work has nourished the impression that despite the perceptual fusion between the digital and the physical world, UNCAGED actually seems to highlight the distance between the two domains. In my view, all six exhibits bear an underlying absurdity, which arises from the very fusion between their physical and digital components. For me, this absurdity ultimately hints at the fallacy of the initial motivation behind UNCAGED and, in a wider context, questions the idea to seek in virtual worlds a place for meaningful human exchange and experiences.

In the second part of this presentation, I will discuss how these new insights have informed my new artistic approach, which is essentially concerned with exploring further the socio-philosophical issues implied in UNCAGED. In particular, I will refer to my project Cyber-Spatialism, which is a series of canvasses in which common computer connectors are inserted. The project makes specific references to Luigi Fontana's slashed canvases and his concept of Spatialism (which is usually regarded as an attempt to overcome the illusionistic representation of space in painting by introducing real physical space). By substituting Fontana's slashes with computer connectors, Cyber-Spatialism implies an extension of the canvas into cyberspace, and thus attempts to address the notion, that in today's (globalized) culture, real space is increasingly being replaced by virtual space.

For further information about UNCAGED, including photos and videos, please visit the project website at: http://www.telesymbiosis.com

Convergence; uniting, or merging tendencies that were originally opposed or very different
Stephen Partridge

Continual and changing, convergence places us (artists and audience) in a post-film and -video era, where digital forms (mostly) replace, substitute, or simulate the previous media. This process of substitution and simulation explains the current lack of perceived distinctions between forms or media. For instance, it is common for us to say that we are going to watch a film on video or a DVD when what we actually mean is that we intend to watch a recording of a film or movie (without recourse to celluloid). It is possible that this lack of distinction is likely to erode even further with the advent of high definition television (HDTV) for broadcast and DVD with the improvement in picture quality and adoption of movie-theatre aspect ratios. It may be worth asking whether this matters and why in the process of convergence, video has been substituted, while film has been simulated by digital technologies. To answer this question, there is a need to re-examine the development of video as a medium and its incorporation into digital form, while making some comparisons with film, and in turn, its simulation within the digital domain.

The convergence or incorporation of video with digital forms could be considered as almost complete. In any case, video as a term has had many definitions and uses, both culturally and technologically, and has become a generic word for a number of different things. As a specific term it refers originally to an electrical analogue waveform produced by scanning the light (the latent image) focused onto a photosensitive plate in the video camera, which is then re-created into the pattern (or raster) of horizontal scanning lines made by an electron beam onto the photosensitive surface of a cathode-ray-tube, which in turn creates the image that appears on a television. This waveform in the digital domain is now essentially bit-mapped or sampled to appear on a contemporary television, computer screen or flat display panel. This converged analogue/digital use of the word can be referred to as the video-plane and as such was (and remains) incorporeal like its cousin, the audio waveform or sound sample, with which it is usually incorporated. This distinguishes it from the photographic and material-based medium of film, even though both film and video strive to produce one similar effect - a moving image as perceived by the human brain.

The Problematics of Making Ambiguity Explicit in Virtual Reconstructions: A Case Study of the Mausoleum of Augustus
John Pollini

The representation of antiquity using virtual reconstructions creates a highly ambiguous relationship between data, interpretation, and presentation. Virtual 3-D reconstructions have considerable value as visualization tools, bringing an immediacy of spatial perception and experience to researchers and students alike. Whether in the context of university teaching and research or the setting of web-based sites on the Internet, virtual reconstructions are problematic intellectual productions. They can be seductive if they lack critique and citation. The relationship between data and reconstruction should be able to be interrogated and clarified on demand, thus allowing consumers of research products (as is already the case with books or site reports) to see the link between evidence and interpretation. When authorship or the evidentiary basis is not transparent, the virtual reconstruction plays a dubious role in education. In other words, while maintaining the immediacy and interactivity of the virtual experience, the equivalent of footnotes should be accessible within the virtual world. This paper presents as a case study a virtual 3-D Mausoleum of Augustus, in which the relationship between written and archaeological evidence and a restored virtual world is made transparent using interactive, intuitive, and visual tools. This paper presents an explanation of theoretical and pedagogical concerns and a demonstration of solutions developed during three years of experimentation with archaeological reconstructions created by students in university courses.

 

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