Second Nature's Revenge
Three decades ago, a new term--information--appeared in art discussion
when the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted a show by that name.
This innovative event presented and coalesced numerous trends in Sixties
art, especially pop, conceptual, minimal, and structural directions.
Significantly, with "Information" we moved decisively away from an
aesthetics of imitation or representation in which art was always
considered in relation to an external world or a self-referential
modernism in which art was about itself, its own processes, its own
unique nature.
Instead, "Information" pointed to actively reflecting on the interaction
between the viewer and the work and the technological processes framing
the art event. In that sense the artists in this show are part of the
Information Revolution and operating subversively within it. A global
industrial economy requires the rapid exchange of information, and yet
at the same time people within that system have a need and desire to
operate within technology to interrupt and modify the isolation and
privatization of the system. The alienated office cubicle with its separate
workstation also inspires Web cruising, chat groups, email, and listserv
discussions. The human plays with and against the corporate.
This show works on that transformative terrain with a wide range of
digitally created/referenced/produced work. Two extremes: Paul Catanese
paradoxically works with completely digital forms (the body-like figures
in his piece are generated from computer models, not digitally photographed,
and are then presented in a form which underlines the decay and idiosyncratic
nature of printers). The image is further distorted by being cut into
smaller pieces and mounted on a shell of hand created paper. The craft
disrupts the precision and invariability of the digital. On the other
hand, exhibit curator Paul Hertz's recent prints, based on his long
standing fascination with tiles, culturally indebted to the Moorish
influence in Spain and by extension the Islamic prohibition on representational
art, emerges in a very different cyber framework. Using extremely sophisticated
printing of his digitally generated material, Hertz employs mathematical
precision to break with the expectation of mechanical sameness while
standing against a simple mimesis-obsession characteristic of computer
"painting" programs.
In a cyberculture which few experience directly as chips and algorithms,
artists have observed how humans are being decisively transformed in
their cultural habits, in their range and quality of perception and
cognition, by this computer world framing human life. Kenneth Rinaldo
pushes the possibility of machine/living being interface even further by
stating that his piece allows a Siamese Fighting Fish to determine its
own position along an axis. The claim is both intriguing and droll
at the same time. Certainly the environment exists so the fish could do
it, but does it have the mental capacity to learn the environment, to
change its behavior in movement to change its relative position and
thereby its actual position? Or are we seeing a set of random
events--change without will? And if this is so, then is the joke on us?
Are we too the masters of technology, or have we already, unknowingly,
changed our perceptual and cognitive skills in relation to a digitally
mediated environment?
More directly challenging our cybersubjectivity, Silvia Malagrino's
installation calls into question our very understanding of virtual experience.
She challenges the very nature of information processing, with images,
symbols, text, the texture of editing and the figural changing and distorting
the dominant system's goal of "invisible" communication.
Other artists provide new challenges to understanding digital culture
by offering new pleasures. Stephen Boyer's piece with LEDs allows us
to sense a ghost in the machine that seems to indicate life, or some
kind of a relationship with us viewers. Simple and playful, Boyer's
work encourages a playful response to this mystery. Margaret Dolinsky's
virtual environment works provide an imaginative playground for self
performance. The experience seduces: enter this space, have new adventures.
Being a participatory event, arranged in a nonlinear frame, exploring
these virtual worlds engages new imaginations. This, of course, is the
great anticipation in our historical moment--that this new technology
will liberate us into new experiences, expand our senses, provide new
adventures. Digital games have already achieved a youth marketing triumph
in this area--especially violent video games. Extending the spectator
involvement of games, Jim Ferolo provides a mystery and puzzle-solving
environment in which the pleasures of discovery evolve. Employing our
need for a story, our desire for narration, Ferolo gives us a new adventure.
Shawn Decker's sound performance installation gives us an experience
with direct sound "conducted" by a computer and software which interrogate
our understanding of performance. Just as a chorus of crickets or cicadas
swells and declines with some structure (temperature, for example),
his piece works on changes which produce unpredictable differences,
like Hertz's scattered patterns--defying the common assumption that
mechanical regularity limits machine-based art.
A pioneer and master of digital art, Miroslaw Rogala, best known for
his environments in which the viewer enters and becomes a creator of
further changes, becoming part of the biological/mechanical event, is
represented here by wall pieces recycling parts of previous exhibits.
Our current fascination with the machine/human interface as evidenced
in the proliferation of robots, cyborgs, and cyberpunk adventurers ranging
from Blade Runner to The Matrix, continues an earlier cultural response
to the grotesque. The grotesque, dramatizing the interface between life
and death, was inherent in the Romantic movement which responded to
the epochal change from feudalism to capitalism and industrial production.
Frankenstein's monster embodies cultural anxieties that re-emerge today
with the mystery of power and control in society. Today the boundary
is not between organic life and death but between the human and the
(life-like but lifeless) machine.Distopic science fiction in commercial
popular culture rehearses common fears of information and its systems
controlling, surveilling, and changing us. When information is alienated
from its human context in order to be exchanged--to flow within the
overall global socioeconomic system--it must be changed and adapted
to be humanly useful again. Against anxiety about tomorrow, the artists
in this show offer other possibilities for the cyberfuture.
Chuck Kleinhans
Chicago, April 1999
Chuck Kleinhans, Associate Professor in the Department
of Radio, Television and Film at Northwestern University, is co-editor
of Jump Cut, a journal of contemporary media.
