Posts Tagged ‘time’

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Thursday, April 29th, 2010

The world of Christopher Priest’s novel Inverted World is literally moving forward.

Indeed, the world is, one learns, a large mechanical sphere moving on continuously built-out tracks which are plotted by people such as the novel’s protagonist, Helward Mann.

Mann’s only job, as a “Future,” is to survey ahead of the track-work, making sure that the world’s journey towards what is referred to as “optimum” is as smooth as is reasonably possible.

The reason the world engages in this peculiar activity is the oft-mentioned fear of a centrifugal force in the natural world which, as Mann can attest to, would suck the mechanical world into a Hellish entropic spiral – a void.

(Mann saw this).

Now, this would be fine were it not for the fact that this world – in its endless march towards “optimum” – is overrun with mountains of its own feces.

One can hardly look around the world without viewing its own crumbling mechanical apparatus, its own genetic aberrations, and its own unapologetic human exploitation and warmongering – all conditions contingent upon the world’s progress in one way or another.

But, surely – as Mann would argue – there is simply no other option – one must keep going.

Indeed, Mann, as a professional surveyor into the future, would know – he has, after all, seen it:

If Man(n) stops working, Man(n) goes to(ward)s Hel(l).

(This is what Helward Mann saw.)

For Mann, one must choose the lesser of two evils and march on into the future.

The problem with all this, though – as the novel’s foil to Mann, Elizabeth Khan, demonstrates – is not that Mann is wrong per se, but rather that his question is badly stated.

It’s not that there is a binary between going forward towards the Truth and backwards towards Hell (as if time were a piece of string); but rather that there are a plethora of radically incomplete goings – never forward (as if towards “optimum”), but simply “on.”

All one can do here, then, is be reasonable and present to what is in front of one; that is to say, see things.

In the case of the world of Inverted World, the paradigm of seeing must shift or the world will drown in the endlessness of the ocean (in a sort of reversal of Mann’s own understanding of the void).

Again – it’s not that Mann is “right” or “wrong” here but that his vision is for better or for worse in ruins.

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Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Dialectics in February by Martijn Hendriks consists of two elements:

1. An inverted royal blue flag with a circular hole cut-out of the middle.

2. A piece of the flag placed on the ground directly below the hole.

As one digs deeper into the work, one understands that the flag from which the hole has been cut is, in fact, the European Union flag.

The power of the work, then, is the erasure of the flag’s power: a European Union whose only rallying cry is that the entire notion of the “European Union” is literally empty – nothing.

Self-annihilating ideas such as this have been explored by artists before, but the use of the flag is particularly effective as the flag – as a symbol of symbolism – short-circuits all meaning directly back onto itself; its impotency becomes – as a flag – to literally wave for itself.

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Friday, April 16th, 2010

Avatar in 3D by Artie Vierkant is a slowly-spinning animated 3D sphere.

On the surface of the sphere, the entire one hundred sixty-two-minute runtime of the film Avatar has been warped and stretched-out in order to cover the total surface area of the sphere.

By turning Avatar into an image object – a “thing” – the work illuminates how Avatar itself is not just a movie, but a gigantic meme, an entire world, extending well beyond the runtime of the film.

One of the most significant developments in film history is George Lucas’s recognition that Star Wars is not just a movie, but a franchise that fans can wander around in via all of the extra media and merchandise that surround it.

In a hyperreal world of endless media unreality, consumers have the desire and now the ability to amble through metaverses, consuming media franchises in ways that diverge from simply sitting in a theater and watching projected light for two hours.

The slow, painful death of movies is a testament to this as consumers now prefer the scope of entire television series or massively multiplayer game universes like Halo or World of Warcraft.

In the event that someone wants to go to the movies, it’s to see a new installment of a franchise that expands the world of the characters; in the event that someone wants to read a book, it’s to read an installment of a series like Harry Potter, Twilight, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books.

Films are still on some level stretches of time told through cinematic language, but they are now also, perhaps primarily, things, objects expanding through the Internet and culture at large.

This is what Vierkant’s work shows me.

An avatar for Avatar.

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Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

At Light Industry in Brooklyn, the artist Paul Slocum recently exhibited a re-constructed 1966 Dr. Who episode which long-time fans of the series feared was “lost in time” following a spat of sweeping reductions from the BBC’s entire television archive during the 1960s and 70s.

The BBC’s discarding of this particular Dr. Who episode was not personal, but economic – they were looking for a way to save money on media storage.

In the current epoch of media storage technology, though, the data cloud affords ample room to archive and database this or any other Dr. Who episode.

And, indeed, in response to this hunger, fans of the show and, eventually, the BBC itself have subsequently played the role of the “time-lord,” travelling back in time and re-constructing several of these lost episodes.

As one views-through this particular episode re-construction, which was conducted by the BBC, one listens to an original audio track and views two key visual elements:

1. The first is the rough-hewn re-construction of the episode itself which consists of explanatory text as well as black-and-white production stills and video footage scraps depicting low-budget sci-fi sets and costumes intermingling with actors frozen in time.

There’s a surrealistic, dreamy quality to the visual rhythm here and the lack of clear connection between the images on the screen to the soundtrack reminds one of, say, the Chris Marker film La Jetée which is, likewise, a time-travel story told through an audio track and a series of black-and-white still frames.

2. The second key visual element in the re-construction, though, is the shifting background of solid colors intermingling with random number and letter strings under which this episode re-construction plays-through.

This shifting background imagery reads as “tech” or “sci-fi future” or “futurity”; however, it does so in a notably different way than those same words would find their meaning in the imagery of the episode re-construction – (they read here – not as better or worse – but simply as if from a different era – perhaps the mid-1990s [there’s something Gattaca about the background’s look] – in any event, equally historically dated – dead).

At the end of the episode’s narrative, the Doctor (one vision of the future) “dies” and is – then – re-generated into an entirely new Doctor (another vision of the future) with an entirely new take on the role of the “time lord” who will, nevertheless – play-out an old story:

Like the Doctor before him – this new Doctor will die and be re-generated and, then, that Doctor will die and be re-generated and so on and so on and so on and so on.

Slocum’s further re-contextualization of the episode re-construction itself provides an even deeper layer of re-generation:

One views here neither the obsolete imagery of the episode re-construction nor the obsolete imagery of the background of the re-construction nor the collision of the re-construction and its background, but rather an endless chain of dead re-generations of the future extending forever.

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Friday, April 9th, 2010

6312414236 by Damon Zucconi is in dialogue with his Continuous Line Drawings as the same technologically-mediated drawing technique is employed and the resulting work projects the sense that one is viewing both a drawing as well as the continuous creation of a drawing.

As it turns out, the numbers are, in fact, Zucconi’s own mobile phone number – (631) 241-4236 – as it is displayed on his artist’s website.

The body in the network is there and not there – one has an idea that one knows where it is, but if one is asked to grasp it, the body in the network changes its context (and keeps changing – always just out of reach).

In Zucconi’s own words:

[…] it’s a method of extending a line in space that connects to my mobile body. Connecting to where I am now; a present-tense…

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Thursday, April 8th, 2010

The Continuous Line Drawings series by Damon Zucconi consists of (what is displayed to date, anyway) fifty-four short loops (at the most a couple of seconds per loop) – each of which consists of a single action – a jagged line being drawn.

These line drawings, though, are not representations of the artist’s hand painting in a studio or over a pane of glass (as in the films on Picasso and Pollock).

Rather, they are representations solely of the line itself being drawn over a field of black as if they were a screen-capture from a digital painting program (which they’re not – on the contrary, they were created with a tablet and a piece of custom software which captures, plots, and plays-back the drawing gesture).

The lines in each loop begin to fade away as soon as they are drawn, resulting in a “ghosting” effect (in this sense, they look like hyper-complicated representations of the heart beating as it rises and falls in a classic EKG monitor).

However, the rigorous looping combined with the very short run-times of each loop results in the continuous retracing of each line’s path so that just as a point in the trajectory of a given line drawing is about to completely fade away, the drawing of the line from the following loop picks up the slack, breathing new life into the line and sustaining an afterimage of a full shape drawn by the line.

When one views these elements as a whole, then, one views both:

1. An un-changing object (one does see a static shape outlined through the looping drawing of the line).

2. As well as flux (the continuously executed temporal event of the line being drawn).

Each work in the series thus plays with this tension between the work as a spatial object and the work as a temporal object (or alternatively, an understanding of an artwork as a creation and an understanding of an artwork as creating).

To that end, Zucconi alters the frame-rate at which he records the drawing of each of his lines.

So, in drawings with relatively high frame-rate recordings (say, sixty frames-per-second), the action appears “fast” and, thus, the “object-ness” of the shape drawn by the drawing-action is rendered more legible and vice-versa.

When one views through each work of the series, then, one begins to picture the differences between each drawing and between each drawing-time.

Additionally, when the artist projects these works in physical space, his objective as an artist, then, becomes to create a harmony (or dis-harmony as the case may be) between the physical architecture and the frame-rate of the drawing.

The work becomes site-specific.

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Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

Kevin Bewersdorf was doing okay for himself.

1. He was a co-founder of the Internet surf club Spirit Surfers.

2. He was developing a prolific and popular collection of photography, texts, performance pieces, and music on his website maximumsorrow.com.

3. He had (amongst other exhibitions of his physical work) a solo show at the V&A Gallery in New York, and a two-person show with Guthrie Lonergan at the well-known And/Or Gallery in Dallas.

In short, Bewersdorf was building an impressively dense archive of work with a strongly growing reputation both on and off the Internet.

(He had good “stats.”)

What, then, to make of his decision in early 2009 to take this archive of work off of the Internet, destroying it as well as whatever traces he could find of it left, and replacing it with a single work – an in-progress performance piece he calls PUREKev?

PUREKev is a highly-focused, three-year long performance in which Bewersdorf very gradually diminishes the size of his artistic avatar – a looping clip of over-exposed home video footage depicting a firecracker flickering – against an (International Klein?) blue field over which it flickers.

There’s something poetic about this idea which draws one to its premises and, then, carries one beyond the auto-destructive act which preceded it.

Still, though, what justifies the relatively extreme length of three years?

Would one, after a year, of watching Bewersdorf’s little light growing smaller and smaller, still care?

And, indeed, that’s the gambit of the work:

Bewersdorf made a wager that there is something to his gesture which – despite its simplicity – is intriguing enough for one to follow and keep following, each return a new wave of illumination into the work’s significance.

In my own experience of the work, this is – so far – true.

I can’t say that I look at purekev.com everyday or even every month, but I do return to it every now and again on a somewhat regular basis (as in a pilgrimage) and, when I do so, I never leave satisfied or dis-satisfied, but, rather, pleasantly held in suspension – not sure where to put my finger, but interested in fingering it nonetheless.

When I go to the site today (April 6th, 2010), I – at first – don’t view the flickering light at all.

Rather, I view a blue void through which I scroll to – then – find the little, flickering light at the bottom of the page, surrounded by blue.

As I’ve followed Bewersdorf’s performance, its value to me has begun to reside less in the tracking of his flickering light and more in its tracking of the field upon which it flickers.

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Monday, April 5th, 2010

Some of the key differences between magnetized (that is, pre-digital) videotape and celluloid film are the quantitative shifts in the following three categories:

1. Memory storage capacity.

Videotape, as a media storage device, holds more temporal information and affords un-interrupted recording.

2. Affordability.

Videotape is less expensive then celluloid film.

3. And mobility.

Video cameras are lighter than film cameras and videotape is more robust in more light conditions then celluloid film.

That is to say, automatic moving image reproductions were – with the onset of magnetized videotape in the 1960s – no longer quite as precious.

Just shoot – shoot a lot; shoot at your house; shoot at the park; shoot down time, not just up time – just shoot.

This change in the relationship of moving image technology to the representation of time became a point of interest to many artists.

Bruce Nauman, for example – in a particular series of videos from the late 1960s – pictures the artist not as one who represents an act of creation, but rather as one who (through the technology’s ability to depict greatly extended units of un-interrupted time) represents creating.

One views Nauman stomp on the ground of his bare artist studio in a rigorous rhythm for approximately 60 minutes.

Or one views him adjust a piece of wood, never quite getting it right, for the same amount of time.

These projects can be read as allegories about creation.

The artist never gets it quite right; every stomp or every movement of the wood is a failure.

What is more important is the evolving process of creation.

In the wake of videotape technology, though, a further series of media storage mutations have come and gone.

The result is the end of material storage devices such as videos or hard drives and the birth of the virtual data cloud – the immaterial field of code transformed into information signage – both private as well as public – hovering in, out, and around one’s physical locations in space.

Each one of these generational mutations, then, has necessitated subsequent mutations in the pictures artists draw of their own body performing actions through time.

Kari Altmann, for example, considers her work to be located not in individual works (as meaningful as they may be), but rather in her avatar inside the data cloud wherein one views her perform the excavation and molding of her own artistic archive in mutable cloud-space, cloud-time.

Sometimes she’ll just add an image for research or edit an older project; sometimes she’ll list, but not show new projects she’s working on; sometimes she’ll add a new video; sometimes she’ll take a video away; and so on and so on and so on and so on in a plethora of permutations one follows the artist play with her own cloud data:

Change, evolve – not to “better” data, just different data – data occurring in an ecological network of additional data networks which are – as a whole – growing and becoming self-reflexive, becoming visible to themselves.

The performative focus here, then, is not on the physical body repeating an action, but rather on the virtual body mutating its own archival network.

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Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Right now, on the main page of Charles Broskoski’s personal website, one views paintings created with digital tools as well as clocks which read-out the amount of time passed since each artwork was initially uploaded to the site (in this case, for the more recently uploaded painting “2 days ago…” and, for the less recently uploaded painting “3 weeks ago…”).

One, thus, views both the paintings and the paintings’ built-in obsolescence.

The most recently uploaded painting, Avocado, is a token of a traditional painting genre – the still life with fruit; on the other hand – with its ghostly, blurred brush work which fights to keep from dripping down (to the past of the artist’s painting) and up (to the future of the artist’s painting) – the work is an allegory of painting on the computer:

Not present in space, but streaming through time, fighting for its life to be there in the room (on the screen) despite the inevitability of its passing.

That is to say:

1. A picture of avocados (they are there).

2. A picture of avocados blurring through time from future (an ideal) to past (a memory) (they’re gone – ghosts).

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Friday, March 26th, 2010

Since April 28, 2008, Joel Holmberg has posted one hundred and seven (and counting) questions to Yahoo! Answers.

If one skips back to the first of the chronologically-organized questions posed by the artist in early 2008, one views three general, relatively straightforward questions regarding the subject of coffee in a category termed:

“Non-Alcoholic Drinks.”

However, in his following (often funny, koan-like) questions posed throughout the course of his performance, Holmberg branches-out his performed investigation into multiple question categories such as, for example, “Other – Society and Culture,” “Laptops and Notebooks,” and “Other – General Health Care,” which each catalyze a different set of responses to the act of “answering” a question.

The “Philosophy” category, for example, is more logically precise than the “Religion and Spirituality” category which is more emotionally-charged than the “Etiquette” category which is more polite than the “Other – Internet” category which is more nerdy than the “Other – Visual Arts” category which is more artsy than the “Men’s Health” category and so on and so on and so on and so on.

Throughout his performance, Holmberg explicitly explores these categorical-discrepancies by asking the same question in multiple categories.

For example, he asks the question “How do you occupy space?” in the “Physics,” “Other-Environment,” “Other-Internet,” “Military,” and “Wrestling” categories.

In each category, one views a unique approach to language and the act of “answering” a question.

The work, in the end, may be less about showing one answers and more about showing one the different answer categories we constantly shift in and out of through our lives.

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