Report by:
Tiffany Funk, Ph.D. (ABD)
Adjunct Faculty Department of Interdisciplinary Arts, Columbia College Chicago
Presentations at Hunter College, Hunter MFA Building, 205 Hudson Street, NYC by the following NMC members:
Wenhua Shi, Steven Silberg, Sofie Elana Hodara, Paula Gaetano Adi, Patty Harris, Maura Jasper, Jim Jeffers, Jessye McDowell, Jaimes Mayhew, Ellen Mueller, Chris Coleman, Bonnie Mitchell, Atif Akin, and A. Bill Miller.
As often told in art history, following the first exhibition of Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass at the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition preparators were horrified to find that the work’s glass casing had shattered in transit. However, Duchamp seemed nonplussed, stating; “Now it is finished.” While his declaration might be apocryphal, Duchamp’s subsequent actions demonstrate his approval of this ‘happy accident’: he laboriously repaired the work by sandwiching the broken glass between new panes, carefully preserving the pieces within a new aluminum frame. [1]
No wonder so many new media artists derive inspiration from Duchamp’s proto-conceptual art practice, especially his emphasis on the interplay between performance, interactivity, and chance. And why shouldn’t they claim Duchamp as one of their own? Art historian and media theorist Dieter Daniels pointed out how many of Duchamp’s works are accompanied by meticulously detailed instructions as to their execution; Daniels interprets these carefully collected and arranged boxes and binders as a procedural proto-programming language. [2] But also like the programmer, Duchamp released his work into the world knowing its completion – or more properly that lack thereof – depended upon a chaotic system: the art world of preparators, curators, and its mutable audience, as well as the larger interconnected systems of culture, history, ecology, economy, politics, all of them at the mercy of entropy. The new media artwork, whether broadcasted video, radical sound activism, or interactive computing, is thus uniquely equipped to comment upon these fluid systems and transform them through interaction, participation, and social exchange in emerging technological forms.
The sixth annual New Media Caucus Showcase was held at Hunter College’s MFA building, attended by an eager audience of makers, theorists, and enthusiasts. Presenters were chosen by lottery, with the order of presentations designated by reverse alphabetical order; general themes nevertheless emerged as the presentations unfolded. The often experimental, exploratory investigations led by these artists cast new media as deeply performative, not simply assuming participatory or interactive gestures, but interrogating what constitutes meaningful interaction, embodiment, and radical discourse.
Singing to the Sky, 2014, Wenhua Shi, Processing, microphone, two-channel mixer, digital projector, © Wenhua Shi. (Used with permission.)
Wenhua Shi, first of the night’s presenters, set the tone with an investigation of real-time Dadaism: inspired by Raoul Hausmann’s 1946 sound poem recording bbb+fmsbw, the interactive installation Singing to the Sky (2014) focuses on digital phonetic recognition of the three universal vowels in the human voice: ee, oh, aa. As Wenhua Shi describes, “The piece invites the audience to construct their own sound poems and phonetic experiences by howling, speaking, crying, humming, singing, reading, roaring, screaming three vowels. Those sound bites create a string of three vowels projected in Chinese characters through a variety of patterns.”
Singing to the Sky, 2014, Wenhua Shi, Processing, microphone, two-channel mixer, digital projector, © Wenhua Shi. (Used with permission.)
Steven Silberg draws upon art historical models to inform interactive digital work, specifically the early photographic locomotion experiments of Eadweard Muybridge. Silberg explains, “The history of long exposure photography shows that motion can become shape – whether through the techniques of painting with light, as one sees with the images of Picasso in Life magazine, or in Nancy Breslin’s pinhole ‘Square Meals.’ [Étienne-Jules] Marey similarly chose to show the form of movement over time in a single still image.”
For Love (089-b), 2010, Steven H. Silberg, reductive video print (inkjet on uncoated Rives BFK), © Steven H. Silberg. (Used with permission.)
Silberg’s series Experiments in Reductive Video (2007-2014) captures movement using the software package Max/MSP/Jitter, visualizing only the pixels changing from one frame to the next. Using various video sources, these experiments track and visualize the shape of change over time. For example, his For Love series of prints draws from ‘user-submitted’ amateur pornographic video sharing websites for source material, reducing the images to low-resolution abstractions.
Mirror Minus, 2014, Steven H Silberg, documentation of interactive installation, © Rosewood Art Gallery / © Steven H. Silberg. (Used with permission.)
The interactive installation Mirror Minus (2014) allows the viewer to witness what Silberg calls “the constructive/deconstructive process inherent in imaging technologies, whether by emerging as the noise within the system – engaging in the process of degradation – or by witnessing and manipulating the visual matrix as it fills in a rigid and organized fashion – engaging in the process of construction.”
Black Friday, 2013, Sofie Hodara, digital video, 45 sec., © Sofie Elana Hodara. (Used with permission.)
Sofie Elana Hodara began her presentation by leading the audience through the Apple product landscape re-imagined as a science-fiction thriller. She sets the scene:
It’s a late afternoon in the fall of 2013. Apple has just released IOS7 and Boston’s Boylston Street Apple store is crowded with customers. Suddenly, the store’s overhead soundtrack stops. Unbeknownst to the shoppers and salespeople, they are about to become victims of an act of artistic intervention. A single clear note – the Apple alert Sherwood Forest – pierces the store. Everyone pauses as it repeats three times before the sound system’s regularly scheduled Coldplay song resumes. This was the first documented intervention, or Sounding, by anonymous artist and hacker UBIQ: The Robin Hood of Sound.
UBIQ, his name the same as the dystopian Philip K. Dick sci-fi novel, is known for radical interventions in which he usurps control of sound infrastructures to broadcast iconic ringtones and alerts from familiar digital interfaces. His practice radicalizes once-familiar user-experience sound to disrupt our complacency toward global corporate culture. He’s also fictitious: despite having his own website, Vimeo channel, news reports, and a 150-page gallery catalogue for his solo show at a Brooklyn gallery, UBIQ exists as an internet construct perpetrated by Hodara to question how digital media contorts our knowledge of reality.
iHear, 2014, Sofie Elana Hodara, interactive installation, ©Sofie Elana Hodara. (Used with permission.)
To further the illusion of UBIQ’s existence, Hodara created an interactive audio gallery installation, iHear (2014). Exhibition visitors trigger a photocell within a shiny black box instrument, playing it like a Theremin, manipulating the frequency of four ringtones by moving their hands. The resulting noise renders the seemingly familiar strange, prompting reflection on the nature of this seemingly intimate relationships we have with our technological devices.
TZ’IJK, 2013, Autonomous Robotic Agent, Paula Gaetano Adi & Gustavo Crembil, mud/clay and electronics, © Gaetano Adi/Crembil. (Used with permission.)
Paula Gaetano Adi called upon anthropological and folkloric modes of understanding human history in describing the collaborative work TZ’ICK (2013), a mud egg referencing creationist mythology and sci-fi fantasy. TZ’ICK (Mayan Ch’orti’ for mud or clay) is a ‘mestizo robotic artwork’ inspired by the creationist mythology of the Popol Vuh. As a blind, deaf, speechless, and autonomous mud robot, it embodies the spirit of Latin American hybridity through high and low technologies.
TZ’IJK, 2013, Autonomous Robotic Agent, Paula Gaetano Adi & Gustavo Crembil, mud/clay and electronics, © Gaetano Adi/Crembil. (Used with permission.)
Adi calls this approach Mestizo Robotics, as it provides tactics to understand technology’s embodiment and assimilation in Latin America, and encouraging the creation of a community to envision a new social order through artificial life. TZ’IJK is an open call for the creation of new mestizo robots, encouraging the process of mestizaje in the performance of techno-science.
The Farnsworth House Flood, 2008, Patty Harris, animation created in Maya, © Patty Harris. (Used with permission.)
Vimeo link: https://vimeo.com/17607946
Patty Harris’ Maya-rendered landscapes literally flow through the dream-nightmare realm, situating familiar architectural renderings in surreal, flooding landscapes. Her Modern Disasters series places famous examples of modern architecture, such as Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, in the midst of fictitious natural disasters that question the untouchable status of cultural icons.
Fallingwater, 2009, Patty Harris, animation created in Maya, © Patty Harris. (Used with permission.)
Vimeo link: https://vimeo.com/17608876
The mock documentary The Farnsworth House Flood (2008) draws inspiration from the actual flooding of the site during its construction. The video juxtaposes the clarity of Mies’ vision with the chaos of floodwaters rising into its aquarium-like structure. In Fallingwater (2009), Wright’s building is broken in an earth¬quake, and crystals grow off its broken structure. Reflecting how Wright’s prairie style attempted to mimic a building’s landscape, the crystals multiply like the surrounding tree branches. In similar fashion, Harris’ Ronchamp (2010) features Le Corbusier’s titular biomorphic cathedral swallowed whole by a mudslide.
Ronchamp, 2010, Patty Harris, animation created in Maya, © Patty Harris. (Used with permission.)
Vimeo link: https://vimeo.com/17609847
Maura Jasper also calls upon icons of the cultural familiar – in this case, the technological paraphernalia of weather reports and daily news broadcasts – but situates her videos in the context of anecdote and family. These uproariously funny investigations feature her mother, a self-professed technophobe, using various technologies to deliver her own annotated daily weather report.
In Like A Lion: Summer 2012, 2014, Maura Jasper, production still, © Maura Jasper. (Used with permission.)
Inspired by her mother’s frequent voicemail weather updates, the ongoing video collaboration In Like a Lion explores the intersections and foibles of observation, documentation, and technology. Jasper turned her mother’s kitchen into an ad-hoc television studio for a month, asking her to document evidence of seasonal change through photographs and video of her day-to-day experiences. Her mother displays selected material, keyed to a picture board for the viewer, as she tells stories to accompany the weather reports. These daily observations reveal intimate and humorous personal narratives coloring the sometimes troubling (and often dry) data produced by weather tracking.
In Like A Lion: Summer 2012, 2014, Maura Jasper, digital video, © Maura Jasper. (Used with permission.)
Humor can be effective in interrogating our relationship with technology, but it can also encourage discourse about deeply uncomfortable subjects. Jim Jeffers’ interactive performances reference the fundamental societal changes in security procedures that have taken place since the events of September 11, 2001.
…And Awe (Superhero Intercourse), 2007, Jim Jeffers with Adam Norton & Julia Pelosi, performance, University of Massachusetts Lowell, © Jim Jeffers. (Used with permission.)
His 2006 performance Salutation Increasing Collective Kindness (Superhero Intercourse) (or S.I.C.K.) invited participants to get frisked and have an item from their person “tagged and bagged” in exchange. Another iteration, his 2007 …And Awe (Superhero Intercourse), asked frisked participants to submit to having a Polaroid photograph taken of their open mouth, which was then sealed in a bag as payment for their interaction. Strategic Admission Procedure (Superhero Intercourse), (or STR.A.P) (2008), extended this performance to unsuspecting faculty, staff, and administration at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. With the help of a trained crew, Jeffers invited everyone entering a university security symposium to have their bags inspected; some were additionally ‘tagged’ with a silver helium balloon tied to their wrists.
Frisk, Hug or Abstain, 2013, Jim Jeffers with Dioni Cruz, Brittany Ghaderi, Nick Poles, Madison Schneider, Esteban Servin, and Brianna Stowe, performance, the College of the Holy Cross, © Jim Jeffers. (Used with permission.)
His latest iteration, Frisk, Hug or Abstain (2013), evolved into a portable, spontaneous performance where participants are asked, “Frisk, Hug, or Abstain?” Depending on their response they are frisked, hugged, or left alone, and given a card referencing their choice.
Cards distributed for Frisk, Hug, and Abstain, 2013, Jim Jeffers, digital image offset print, © Jim Jeffers. (Used with permission.)
Jessye McDowell’s photo-realistic prints also use humor, but in the context of the sublime. The series Make it Real (2014) derives its title from the 1987 pop ballad by The Jets, fitting the synthetic, pop-inspired landscapes McDowell constructs with the open-source 3D modeling program Blender 3D.
The Sugar Camp, 2014, Jessye McDowell, digital print of 3D modeled image and collage, © Jessye McDowell. (Used with permission.)
These scenes combine natural landforms and climates with synthetic textures commenting upon the notion of the romantic sublime and its relationship to landscape. Scenes such as The Sugar Camp (2014) and Twist Tree (2014) question what constitutes ‘nature.’ McDowell explains, “There is a nostalgia for an idealized, simpler, more real way of life we imagine we’ve left behind, and a distrust of the technology we see as to pushing that life ever further out of reach. This conflicting set of impulses results in what I see as simultaneous pleasure in the excesses of today, longing for an intangible authenticity of yesterday, and hope for a future perfected by technology.”
Twist Tree, 2014, Jessye McDowell, digital print of 3D modeled image, © Jessye McDowell. (Used with permission.)
Jaimes Mayhew engages in performative radical discourse by queering landscapes. His work attempts to deconstruct the habit of assigning identities to both bodies and landscapes, while also imagining ways to create space, both literally and metaphorically, for queer bodies.
The Autonomous Energy Mobile Research Lab (Iceland), 2012, Jaimes Mayhew, mobile sculpture, © Jaimes Mayhew, photo by Jessica Harvey. (Used with permission.)
The Autonomous Energy Research Lab (2012) began while on a Fulbright grant in Iceland, where Mayhew researched the country’s production of hydroelectric and geothermal power. Mayhew built a mobile research lab to generate electricity using a bicycle, thereby engaging visitors in conversation about electricity usage.
Post Landscape: Hoover Dam #3, 2014, Jaimes Mayhew and The Autonomous Energy Research Lab, digital C-Print, © Jaimes Mayhew. (Used with permission.)
The series Post-Landscapes (2014) extends these projects, through research on assigning identity, investigating how queer theorists describe identity assignment for human bodies in regards to gender, use-value, and production. These images describe what it means to be differently-bodied, or as Mayhew describes, “stitched together in a way that suits progress, taking territory anywhere it’s possible to take it, without regard to reality.”
Samesies Island, 2014, Cartographer: Jaimes Mayhew, Surveyors: Bones, Mickey Dehn, Asa Keiswetter and Jack Pinder, colored pencil, marker, and pen on paper, © Jaimes Mayhew. (Used with permission.)
Samesies Island (2014) exists as a collaborative map of an imaginary place, where transmen who date other transmen live in a separatist community, enjoying access to amenities that are so often denied them. He explains, “While none of us have any intention of building this community, we designed this map as an exercise to re-imagine a world built for us, by us.”
Cluster of Filing Cabinets, 2015, Ellen Mueller, 3D printed in matte bronze steel, © Ellen Mueller. (Used with permission.)
Ellen Mueller’s Synergism series (2015) demonstrates how subversive, radical discourse can take the form of small-scale interventions. The series consists of 3D modeled bronze-steel sculptures, ranging from three to eight inches, of office paraphernalia installed in a variety of institutional spaces, including office buildings, city halls, DMVs, post offices, and schools.
Cluster of Clipboards, 2015, Ellen Mueller, 3D printed in matte bronze steel, © Ellen Mueller. (Used with permission.)
Though Synergism takes its inspiration from street art, it disrupts institutional architecture through corporate camouflage; by mimicking the bronze, classical sculptures often gracing entrances and lobbies, while drastically reducing their scale, these absurd interventions signify larger issues of the effects of workplace monetization, namely the objectification of individuals.
METRO Re/De-construction, 2013, Chris Coleman, HD animation, © Chris Coleman. (Used with permission.)
Chris Coleman’s experiments with 3D scanning constitute another kind of intervention, but his visualizations fracture the concepts of time and space as captured by scanning technologies. Using a portable 3D scanning device and laptop, he visualizes journeys as static models interrogating our concepts of time, perspective, and perception in turn.
METRO Re/De-construction, 2013, Chris Coleman, HD animation and VR experience, © Chris Coleman. (Used with permission.)
Originally commissioned as a ‘subHD’ animation for a large digital billboard in downtown Denver, METRO Re/De-construction (2013) documents Coleman’s commute on the Denver Light Rail: as he traverses train cars and urban pathways, his scanner logs data to generate the geometric abstractions he can later visualize. The kinds of abstraction thus generated are defined both by the nature of the scanning device, but also the artist’s route, speed, and his physical jostling of the device. In this way, each journey renders an entirely different virtual immersive environment, unique in its rendering of the symbiotic technological and biological experience.
Encounter(s), 2007, Bonnie Mitchell & Elainie Lillios, immersive installation, © Bonnie Mitchell, Elainie Lillios. (Used with permission.)
Bonny Mitchell and collaborator Elainie Lillios also experiment with immersive environments, having collaborated in developing interactive immersive installation art and visual music animations since 2000. Exploring the intersections of perception, experience, audio spatialization, and particle systems, the duo use time-based media to induce alternating states of tension and release to provoke an emotive response. The interactive immersion environment Encounter(s) (2007) promotes introspection, tranquility and transformation through confrontation. Once participants enter the installation, an ethereal animated figure approaches and asks an introspective question. After providing a moment for contemplation, it retreats and transforms into a tree-like form, representing self-actualization and growth.
Emergent Submergence, 2015, Bonnie Mitchell & Elainie Lillios, immersive installation, © Bonnie Mitchell, Elainie Lillios. (Used with permission.)
Their most recent installation, Emergent Submergence (2015), immerses the participant in the particle world, meditating on climate change and water shortage. Mitchell explains, “This piece provokes a sense of connectedness to water, the unifying element essential to life. Water is sacred to many indigenous peoples including the Maori of New Zealand. Their saying for who are you, Ko wai au literally means ‘of whose water are you from?’ As humans, we are made up of water and depend on it for life, yet we take it for granted.”
Installation view and screenshots of Evacuate Istanbul!, 2009, Atif Akin, public screen-based installation, © Atif Akin. (Used with permission.)
Atif Akin approaches art as an act of research, design, production and presentation.
His work engages social-political issues, traversing artistic genres in order to effectively visualize the interplay between natural and man-made catastrophes.
Mutant Space: Horizontal Section, 2015, Atif Akin, digital image, © Atif Akin. (Used with permission.)
Evacuate Istanbul! (2009) resulted from a collaborative project between Akin, Gokce Taskan, Ali M. Demirel for the Marmara Pera Screen, Yama, Istanbul. The real-time data, complying with conventional data aesthetics of urban visualizations, is parsed from Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute web site, translated for a low-resolution, 240 x 180 pixel display. As Istanbul sits near the North Anatolian fault line, the nearby collision of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates has disrupted the city with deadly earthquakes throughout its history. Akin compares this collision with the social, cultural and political tug-of-war that has likewise wracked the region of Turkey: “This dead-locked stalemate inevitably reminds us of the dichotomies experienced by the Turkish Republic . . . the prospective earthquake is an earthly activity which can be coped with in human terms like all the others, rather than being a natural disaster.”
Mutant Space, Metsamor, 2014, Atif Akin, digital image, © Atif Akin. (Used with permission.)
Mutant Space, with both online and installation components, contemplates nuclear power and the ravages of radioactivity. The visualizations and ongoing research consist of surveys around nuclear sites and the effects of radioactive mobility. Akin explores the idea of nuclear material as a ‘hyperobject,’ an object that, while massively distributed in time and space, is nevertheless largely invisible.
UW Whitewater Motion Capture Studio, 2014, © A. Bill Miller. (Used with permission.)
A. Bill Miller, described his experiences developing a motion capture (MOCAP) studio with The Department of Art and Design and the Media Arts and Game Development program at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. Because the studio system requires no special setup or skillset, all students can participate as both actors and technicians. Miller thus describes UW Whitewater’s MOCAP studio as predominantly pedagogical while also experimental, encouraging creative motion capture in art, design, theater, and game development by both faculty and students.
Omniopticon (screenshot, work-in-progress), 2015, A. Bill Miller, custom software with motion capture data, © A. Bill Miller. (Used with permission.)
Miller is currently experimenting with animated videos mapping MOCAP data onto non-figurative elements. In Omniopticon, Miller attaches 3D typographic characters to random parts of the MOCAP skeleton, allowing the type to operate like puppets. However, because of the smoothness of the MOCAP data, the type takes on more human-like attributes in the smoothness of its actions and gestures.
The Rake’s Progress, 2012, Peter DiPietro, HD projection set design for University of Cincinnati production, © Peter DiPietro. (Used with permission.)
Peter DiPietro’s set design for Igor Stravinsky’s 1951 opera The Rake’s Progress also emphasized the importance of integrating new media with the performing arts. This University of Cincinnati production re-interpreted the opera as taking place in 1974 New York City, taking on the psychedelic aesthetics popularized by artists such as Andy Warhol and Peter Max. The addition of quickly morphing video projections of high-definition landscapes not only created a dynamic backdrop to the musical performances, but also described urbanity in the midst of ecstatic, as well as destructive, metamorphosis.
The Rake’s Progress, 2012, Peter DiPietro, HD projection set design for University of Cincinnati production, © Peter DiPietro. (Used with permission.)
The Rake’s Progress, 2012, Peter DiPietro, production documentation of HD projection set design for University of Cincinnati production, © Peter DiPietro. (Used with permission.)
References
- “Marcel Duchamp, The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme), 1915-1923,” Philadelphia Museum of Art, accessed May 28, 2015,
http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/54149.html. - Dieter Daniels, “Duchamp: Interface: Turing,” in MediaArtHistories, ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
Bio
Tiffany Funk (Ph.D. ABD) is an artist and art historian living in Chicago, Illinois. She develops work that explores technological intervention in biology though traditional and digital practices, alternately taking the form of critical and conceptual writing, drawing, software, video, and installation. Funk’s current work explores our present and historical relationship with software in order to make visible the disruptions and distortions inherent in our technologically-mediated ‘human’ interactions and critically analyze our preconceived notions of autonomy. She received her MFA in 2012 from the University of Illinois at Chicago in New Media Arts, and she has shown in galleries and media festivals in the U.S. and abroad. Currently she is researching and writing her dissertation focusing on John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s HPSCHD (1967-1969) and its legacy in generative software art.