June 21st, 2010

In High Fives-Apple Fingerworks Multitouch Patents Sheet by Kari Altmann (a part of Altmann’s ongoing No Glove, No Love meme), one views a series of smeared, blood-colored handprints slapped to the surface of black & white printouts of x-y graphs.

Each of these x-y graphs contains a representation of seemingly arbitrary numbers and undecipherable technical language around a set of black streaks.

The direct indexical imprint of the biological body over an array of technical data creates a collision; each instance of the series suggests either a paint-crazy toddler run amok with their older sibling’s physics homework or a 1980s corporate-office slasher film in which the maniac killer slices up a victim at the copy machine.

The title of the work – High Fives-Apple Fingerworks Multitouch Patents Sheet – points out for the viewer where to go.

Each of the diagrams over which the artist places her blood-colored handprint is, it turns out, the schematic diagram of a touchscreen computer technology (a touchscreen computer technology being, for example, the touch responsive interface of the Apple iPhone).

With this information in mind, one can, then, read the “black streaks” described above as the representations of handprints which are labeled with accompanying data.

What one views here, then, is not a collision between Altmann’s blood-red handprint over any old data, but rather over virtual data representing the human hand.

It’s a “high five” – the physical trace of the artist’s handprint colliding with the copied and quantified representation of an anonymous user’s own handprint.

What’s important to reiterate here is that the immediate impression of each of the iconographic elements colliding in the space of the image doesn’t favor either the technical representation of the handprint in the background or the messy, bodily handprint in the foreground; rather each are roughly equivalent in graphic power.

This equivalency is meaningful when one considers that as touchscreen technologies become increasingly mobile and responsive to the physics and ergonomic constraints of the human body in the physical world, they simultaneously become increasingly influential in directing the control of the human body towards the ubiquitous usage of these very technologies.

It’s great that the interface of the iPhone opens up possibilities for greater bodily freedom in the use of computer technologies, but is it great that this interface also nudges human beings to spend all of their downtime hunched over, tapping and rubbing away on a little computer?

Regarding this point, Altmann writes:

In High Fives the idea is to use red finger paint to represent fake blood, and provide a handprint on this map of flesh and touch interaction being controlled by the interface. Resembling the handprints some of the earliest cave dwellers left as a mark of their civilization, this handprint in blood is a way of leaving a mark on the infrastructure being created by these systems of power and product – the virtual “cave” that technology often expects us to live in more and more, filtered from direct experience. It’s also a way of meeting every interface confrontation with an unexpected and human reaction.

*****

Altmann’s handprint, then, is a sign of the human body confronting the technology which influences its control – yes – but, through her choice of blood-red for the color of the handprints, it becomes something more intense, as well – a sign of aggressively confronting the technology which influences its control.

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June 18th, 2010

Still Available by Oliver Laric is an ongoing list of Web domain names which are still available to be taken.

Laric’s work Taken is an ongoing list of all of those domain names listed in the Still Available series which have, in fact, subsequently been taken (at present, almost seventy domains are now taken from the over three hundred listed over the course of the series’ five installments).

In the earliest iteration of Still Available – Still Available 17.10.08 – approximately one hundred thirty-five potential domain names are listed, each of which refers to keywords rich in value relevant to that particular historical time period regarding, for example, politicians, political theorists, luxury commodities, pornography, artists, art theorists, art world events, physics, pop culture, or cities.

These domain names are often funny and perceptive in the way in which they pinpoint strategies employed by “parked domain” companies who buy up domains in bulk using keyword strategies not unlike those employed by Laric himself.

So, for example, he lists domains which have no value other than a speculative one regarding the future of value-rich keywords such as elections2032.com, documenta13.com, and beverlyhillsninja3.com; or domains which combine vaguely-related value rich keywords at that particular moment in historical time such as putinpalin.com, gucciprada.com, and platinumclit.com; or else domains which just sound as thought they could be actual domains such as botoxbros.com, divorcebattle.com, or thenewsocialism.com.

Likewise, in the following four iterations of Still Available, a similar method is employed.

In this way, Laric creates a portrait of the practice of domain naming as an increasingly complicated and speculative enterprise which, in turn, results in a Web consisting of as many empty, “parked” domains awaiting potential owners as it does active ones – a portrait of the Web as a space undergoing not exploration, but relentless colonization into the predicted value-rich keywords of the future.

The Taken list of domain names underlines this understanding.

On the one hand, it’s true that some of the domain names from the list are taken by “normal” people or small not-for-profits such as the artist Billy Rennekamp taking billyrennekamp.com, a modest Amon Düül fan site taking amonduul.com, the “Frankly My Darling…” blog run by a middle-aged woman taking 13dimensions.com, or the breast milk donation info hub taking breastmilkdonation.com.

However, most of the domains were taken by Web-based companies in the business of parking on domains in order to cybersquat or provide advertising space (my favorite example is steaksonaplane.com which was taken by the Godaddy.com company to advertise its own services).

With all of this in mind, what one views here, then, is the way in which this increasingly colonized landscape is different from the geographical landscape of Earth in the sense that its potential space for expansion is itself continuously expanding as world events, and memes both high and low open it up to the contingency of the moment.

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June 17th, 2010

Sand Saga by Shana Moulton, a ten-and-a-half minute video with a family resemblance to Moulton’s own Whispering Pines video series, is the story of a vision quest through a landscape involving not the traditional natural environment of the Native American vision quest, but rather a mishmash of the natural environment, new age kitsch, mirrors, vaginal Georgia O’Keefe iconography, archetypal myth, psychoactive skin creams, digital effects, time travel portals, and an extended hallucinatory state.

The narrative opens with two views of Moulton’s alter ego, Cynthia, viewing her own represented reflection in, first, a large bathroom mirror, and, second, a small personal mirror which (due to its ability to magnify facial details) morphs her face, stretching it and compressing it into bizarre forms.

Cynthia, then, returns to her reflection in the larger mirror as she applies a brown-green facial mask while, in the meantime, various objects in the bathroom – a Georgia O’Keefe “cow skull” poster as well as masks and sculptural busts depicting mythological figures – look on.

After putting on the finishing touches, she turns over an hourglass and, as the sands of time drip away, Cynthia – continuing to stare into her own reflection – watches the facial mask transform into a portal which itself leads to a lush landscape in which a shamanic figure drips sand onto a Native American sand painting (perhaps there is a Jackson Pollock reference here).

The shaman, represented to Cynthia as herself wearing an O’Keefe cow skull mask and a red jump suit, directs her to lie down on the painting as she applies consumer-quality massage gadgetry and polished black stones to Cynthia’s back.

Through the stages of this ritual, the shaman is able to extract both symbolic representations of blockages to Cynthia’s chakras as well as a contact lens from her eye – actions which, then, set off a cathartic, carnivalesque montage composed of dancing figures wearing mythological masks in the midst of a blissful void space composed of imagery from O’Keefe’s flower paintings.

This montage, accompanied by rhythmic new age music, continues for roughly three of the video’s ten-and-a-half minutes and, then, in a final scenario, Cynthia returns to her bathroom as “a new woman” and proceeds to eat her facial mask, taking what was initially a synthetic cover to her face and ingesting it, symbolically destroying it by absorbing it into herself.

Now, on the one hand, Sand Saga is a bildungsroman in which a young, seemingly dissatisfied character gains confidence through a mystical journey into the archetypal depths of herself.

On the other hand, though, the constant, knowingly jokey references to borderline quackery, “cheesy” special effects, and sham new age commodity culture casts the sincerity of this vision quest thesis into doubt – like, oh, it’s all a joke.

So which is it?

Well, at a recent artist’s talk at E.A.I., Moulton made several references to the television series Twin Peaks, citing it as an inspiration and ironically claiming that her own best video was a remake of the “Black Lodge” scenes from the final Twin Peaks episode which she made as an adolescent (unfortunately, that tape is now lost).

The appeal of Twin Peaks at the height of its meteoric rise in the 1990s was its tone of, on the one hand, absolute vulnerability and sincerity, and, on the other hand, absolute detached coolness and irony.

The viewer of Twin Peaks is invested in following the case of “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” not because they intrinsically care about Laura Palmer nor because they care about the show’s detached hipster humor, but rather because of the satisfactory collision between these two elements in which it’s impossible to tell which one is the true Twin Peaks.

Similarly, Moulton’s videos are perhaps best considered as operating in the cracks of a collision between sincerity and irony and a lot of that has to do with Moulton’s skills as a performer.

Like Kyle MacLachlan in the role of Special Agent Dale Cooper before her, if one views Moulton’s character enough, it doesn’t matter if she’s serious or goofing or if the truth will ever be revealed; the pleasure is in following her figure it all out for herself.

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June 14th, 2010

Plato with biometric overlay by Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas of Aids-3D is a work of inkjet print and acrylic on canvas depicting two elements:

1. The photo of a Greek sculptural bust.

2. A formal pattern of intersecting pink lines and “stars” at each of the intersection points that together map out the facial features of the figure depicted in the Greek sculptural bust.

At first glance, one views the contrast of the relatively smooth lines and monochromatic color palette depicted in the photo of the sculpture (which read as “ancient” – the photo comes across as signifying the era of Ancient Greece more than a particular artist or subject), with the rigidness and dayglo color-scheme of the lines and stars (which themselves each read as “artificial” – they create a pattern reminiscent of graphic iconography from the Transformers cartoon show and film series).

So, there’s an immediate collision between two starkly differentiated iconographic elements – each of which pull one in an opposed direction.

The title – Plato with biometric overlay – points out for the viewer where to go from there.

In the context of the philosophy of art, Plato is perhaps best known for his “mimetic theory” of art in which art is an imitation of an imitation of a real thing; there is – here – a higher level of idealized, capital-F “Form” (an abstracted, immaterial idea of a bed), an imitation of this ideal (an actual material bed based on the idea of a bed) and an imitation of an imitation (a drawing of an actual bed based on the idea of a bed).

Biometric overlay, on the other hand, is a surveillance strategy employed by security professionals in order to create an abstracted, immaterial representation of a person’s facial features which can be digitally stored and cross-referenced in a computer network in order to, for example, quickly see if the subject’s facial features match those of anyone on a terrorist watchlist.

When the biometric overlay is placed over the face of Plato, a collision occurs in the work between one vision of idealized Form and another – one vision of Form as the transcendental space outside of the “cave” of “normal” consciousness and another vision of Form as the nightmarish acceleration of Biopower in the wake of the military industrial complex (or some such).

In their own commentary on this work, the artists lay out a similar reading.

They write:

The form has become the Form – There is no longer a need for a distinction between the particular and the universal. Plato’s ‘faceness’ has been quantified and digitized and his biography, stress levels, horoscope, download queue, credit history and criminal record have all been cross-checked for potential threat-patternage. Are the laser lines a symbol of magic and wonder or of cold totalitarianism?

*****

With this in mind and as one continues to view through the work, the biometrics overlay, with its diamond-like rigidity, becomes aggressive, confronting Plato’s face like a muzzle or the “facehugger” alien from the Alien films.

However, against this pressure, the eyes of the philosopher – emptied out of content in the classical style – are able to momentarily resist, extending beyond the biometrics, pointing towards (without naming) something seemingly outside of any representation.

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June 11th, 2010

Parker Ito’s recent solo show at the Adobe Books Backroom Gallery in San Francisco, entitled “RGB Forever,” featured eleven unframed paintings and one video.

Of the eleven paintings exhibited, one of them was The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet (which is discussed in the previous post) and the remaining ten comprise a series of digital prints on canvas which (1.) each depict a wide range of subject matter and (2.) over all of which the artist applies an acrylic texturing gel in order to give the surface a more tactile, painterly feeling.

At first glance, it’s difficult to see how the varying images in the series converse with one another.

One views, for example, the stock image of a bowl-of-fruit still life, a photorealistic portrait of a woman photoshopped to blur at the lower edge like a tableau vivant, broad squiggly lines which read as “digital” over a background of paint blobs which themselves read as “painterly,” a cliché image of messy abstract brushwork, a wheel of gradiating digital color, an “animal portrait” foregrounded by LOLCATS – style text graphics, a collage of varying pictorial strategies from the history of art placed in a grid, nude models covered in paint, a digitally drawn rendering of a Hudson River school style landscape, and, finally, a rigid formal pattern composed of a tactile material (in fact, it’s a close angle on the texture of the same canvas material Ito used to print the images in the series on).

So, as mentioned, there is a heterogeneity in subject matter here which is initially disorienting.

However, as one continues to view through this wide variety of imagery, taking the show in as a whole, one theme begins to emerge as a constant variable:

A collision between the physical act of painting and the simulation of the physical act of painting.

In each instance, a pictorial strategy or “effect” drawn from the history of painting is input into a computer, simulated through digital tools (where it gains its own currency as part of digital culture) and, then, re-output as paintings which were automatically “painted” by a digital printer.

On Ry David Bradley’s Painted, Etc. blog, Ito is quoted as calling the works in this series not paintings, but “painting objects.”

He writes:

[…] these “painting objects” were simulating hand made things, but also referencing modes which have been typically associated with the reproductions of paintings. The whole premise of the body of work was approaching painting as “found”, so I selected jpegs that referenced genres/history of painting (sorta based on wikipedia). The work is very involved in painting history and an awareness of that history, but I also believe the jpegs I selected reflect on other issues that are not so specific to this history, and are more specific to Internet culture.

*****

With that mind, the kick of the paintings is similar whether one views them in person or on the Web.

In both cases, what one views is a painting straddling each of those two worlds.

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June 10th, 2010

Parker Ito asked orderartwork.com, a Chinese company which makes oil paintings on-demand, to create a series of paintings based on a single image which would be broadly familiar to Internet users – a stock photo depicting a smiling, blonde female wearing a backpack which (amongst its other usages) a “parked domain” company called Demand Media employs to catch the eye of Web surfers who accidentally click to the sites it owns.

The resulting work – The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet – exists as both these made-to-order paintings as well as a heavily re-blogged Web meme.

In regard to the paintings, they might be considered in relation to Warhol’s Marilyn series of silkscreened paintings.

Both Marilyn Monroe and “the parked domain girl” are icons of emptiness.

Monroe was a blank slate for sexual desire, the parked domain girl is a symbol of sites without content.

Furthermore, both painting series automate the painting process which, then, further amplifies the sense of an emptying-out of content.

And, finally, in both cases the artists are each interested in depicting the process of their own making as much as they’re interested in depicting the icon being processed.

For example, one views Warhol’s rough usage of the silkscreen technology as much as a legible image of Monroe, and one views the hands of the different painters Ito employs to create the painted images as much as a single painting of the parked domain girl.

However, at this level – the level of a process being depicted – Ito’s series takes a departure from Warhol’s own that allows it to exist as an intriguing version of pop art rather than an imitation of it.

What fascinated Warhol was the way that “real life” stars like Monroe developed a life of their own in the sphere of reproducible images.

Ito, though, picks up on the fact that an icon like the “parked domain girl” is not even based on a “real life” star – she’s an icon who short-circuits the previous paradigm of stardom.

In the wake of the Internet, pop culture is something consumed and lived amongst; there is no need for pop to reference a real world as the real world is to a great extent pop.

A model posed for the photograph, yes, but that model is anonymous; the parked domain girl’s identity is entirely native to the sphere of pop representation on the Web.

By hiring a company to create hand-made oil paintings of the parked domain girl, Ito brings her into the realm of “real life” for the first time.

His work is thus meaningful not for depicting the automated painting of a “real” icon, but for depicting the outsourced hand-painting of a “fake” icon and, in so doing, bringing Warhol’s joke full circle.

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June 9th, 2010

In The Society of the Spectacle (Now in 3D) by Pascual Sisto, one views a version of Guy Debord’s 1974 film La Société du Spectacle in which the film’s original black and white images appropriated by Debord from pre-existing mass media are, then, themselves re-appropriated by Sisto.

He adds a layer of images tinted blue and a layer of images tinted red – each positioned slightly off of the original image – so that they resemble a 3D image requiring cheap 3D glasses.

(In fact, it doesn’t work as actual 3D imagery.)

This is ironic because it was Debord himself who was one of the great theorists of image appropriation and re-contextualization – he called his own strategy détournement.

Détournement is “to divert,” “to distract,” or “to re-direct” – the artist appropriates a media image and re-contextualizes it in order to negate its value as a fetishized commodity.

Debord saw the world increasingly mediating all of its social interaction through media imagery, e.g. quality time between lovers is spent flipping through magazines, watching television or going to the movies; and, as a reaction to this, he sought to create a form of auto-destructive artwork in which media images are appropriated and re-contextualized in order to unveil their operations as the increasingly universal mediator of human interaction.

The Society of the Spectacle (Now in 3D) is a textbook example of détournement:

An artist appropriates a piece of media and re-contextualizes it in order to negate it and refute its claim.

Sisto’s version both breaks apart the original imagery as well as points out its own spectacular tendencies by making his version 3D, the contemporary sign of spectacle in the wake of Avatar and other recent 3D blockbusters.

But, there’s a paradox here as the original film is executing the exact same operation.

Can one detourn a détournement?

Before getting tangled up here, though, it should be said that Debord himself provides an answer in his text “A User’s Guide to Détournement.”

He writes:

The literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda purposes. It is, of course, necessary to go beyond any idea of mere scandal. Since opposition to the bourgeois notion of art and artistic genius has become pretty much old hat, [Marcel Duchamp’s] drawing of a mustache on the Mona Lisa is no more interesting than the original version of that painting. We must now push this process to the point of negating the negation […] It is in fact necessary to eliminate all remnants of the notion of personal property in this area. The appearance of new necessities outmodes previous “inspired” works. They become obstacles, dangerous habits. The point is not whether we like them or not. We have to go beyond them.

*****

What Debord is saying here is that the history of the avant-garde is not so precious for it to be above contemporary critique.

Duchamp was once radical, but is now safely absorbed into the fables of academic art history – the point is not to fight against this unfortunate reality, but to carry on the fight into the future, responding to one’s own time.

Looking back at Debord’s career and his careful framing of his own work reveals him to be a great showman – his polemical texts and romantic tilting at the windmills of post World War II media culture is today as easily sentimentalized as Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. was in Debord’s day.

That doesn’t mean, though, that his ideas are suddenly irrelevant.

On the contrary, while Sisto negates Debord’s claims, he carries them forward.

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June 8th, 2010

From Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980) by Frederik Pohl:

Of course, even Albert did not use all sixty billion gigabits all the time. For one thing, they were not all shared. Even the shared stores were occupied by tens of thousands of programs as subtle and complicated as Albert, and by tens of millions of duller ones. The program called “Albert Einstein” slipped through and among the thousands and the millions without interference. Traffic signals warned him away from occupied circuits. Guideposts led him to subroutines and libraries needed to fulfill his functions. His path was never a straight line. It was a tree of branching decision points, a lightning-stroke of zigzag turns and reverses. It was not truly a “path,” either; Albert never moved. He was never in a specific place to move from. It is at least arguable whether Albert “was” anything at all. He had no continuous existence. When Robin Broadhead was through with him and turned him off he ceased to be, and his subroutines picked up other tasks. When he was turned on again he recreated himself from whatever circuits were idle, according to the program S. Ya. had written. He was no more real than an equation, and no less so than God.

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June 3rd, 2010

Internet surfing clubs are blogs authored by multiple users in which short, visually immediate posts, each of which often involve re-mixed or readymade material appropriated from elsewhere on the Internet, are shared in on-going conversation.

The pace of posting on, for example, the clubs Double Happiness, Loshadka, Nasty Nets, Spirit Surfers, and Supercentral was, several years ago, much more active than it is now, but, generally speaking, the pace currently ranges from several times a day to several times a month (in some cases less than that or simply not at all).

In the heyday of the Internet surfing club phenomenon, one of the contested theoretical topics hashed out on the message boards of new media art sites like rhizome.org, was the question of what separates material found on an Internet surfing club from very similar material found on a vernacular imageboard site like 4chan.

People seem to generally agree that something is different, but that something is difficult to account for (if it’s not itself an illusion).

For example, if one is to view two images whose iconography is exactly the same – one of which appears on 4chan and one of which appears on Nasty Nets – in one sense, each would look identical to the other and, yet, in another sense, each would look very different from the other.

One account for this difference is premised on the distinction between the world of the vernacular web in which material on 4chan is arguably framed and the world of art in which material on Nasty Nets is arguably framed.

A given image – let’s say that it’s a funny picture of a cat – would, on 4chan, be viewed against its relationship to other funny cat memes and judged as such, while, on Nasty Nets, it would be viewed against its relationship to an alternative category – the artworld discourse of, for example, the Readymade or Appropriation art (or some such) – and judged as such.

These modes of viewing are, of course, not dogmatically valid – obviously viewers of 4chan say “this is art” and viewers of Nasty Nets say “this is funny” in regard to the material on each respective site – but, nevertheless, one would seem to nudge one in the direction of the vernacular Web world and one would seem to nudge one in the direction of the artworld.

(Some works, such as Cory Arcangel’s Drei Klavierstücke op. 11, are intriguing because they straddle both worlds.)

This discrepancy is related to what Arthur Danto refers to as art’s “transfiguration of the commonplace” in which the simple re-contextualization of a commonplace object into art transforms the way one views it.

For Danto, viewing contemporary art doesn’t involve what the eye sees, but rather what the eye sees plus the theory and history of art surrounding what the eye sees.

His famous example is Warhol’s Brillo Box which, he claims, “ended” the history of art by shifting the burden of the work’s working from the visible (a Brillo Box) to the invisible (a Brillo Box plus the theory and history of the readymade and pop art which together allow the Brillo Box to be legitimately viewed as art).

Danto writes in his essay, “The Artworld”:

To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.

*****

As such, the difference between material on an imageboard and an Internet surfing club is – through this lens, anyway – a question of what is made formally visible to the eye – yes – but what is made conceptually visible to the mind, as well.

The fact that there is art theory and the positing of art historical connections in relation to Internet surfing clubs is itself the mechanism which makes a funny cat picture function as a work of art on an Internet surfing club and not on an imageboard site in which different theories and histories are in play.

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June 2nd, 2010

Apples and Enamel by Lance Wakeling is a series of fifty-five process sculptures – each of which consist of a rotting apple covered in gesso and, then, glossy white (and in two instances, glossy yellow) lead-based enamel paint.

They are process sculptures in the sense that one views each of the apples as an individual art object – yes – but one also views the processes of gravity, entropy, and decay.

These processes are pictured through the artist’s use of the gesso and enamel over the apple’s surface which allows it to flexibly compress without cracking as the apple itself rots away from the inside (one might think of the look of certain Claes Oldenburg “soft” sculptures from the mid-1960s – Soft Toilet, for example).

Thus, the form of the sculpture is in a continual state of transformation.

Eventually, the surface of the apple will compress to the point that it has nowhere else to go, but, at that point, the form of the apple reads as a sign of decay as much as it does a solid form and, as such, one is nudged towards continuing to think of the sculpture in terms of the time of its decay which continues unabated from the inside.

What significance, though, does the apple as the locus of this decay afford the work?

What does an apple do here that, say, a peach or roast beef wouldn’t do?

Well, one could think of the apple as bound up with the Apple corporation – a sort of The Picture of Dorian Gray meets the iPad.

That’s one possibility. Another would be that on art historical / iconographic level, the apple is perhaps best known to be “forbidden fruit” – desire incarnate as described in the story of Adam and Eve.

And if one is to view the works in the context of the white cube art space on either a pedestal or in a vitrine (which would each mark the work as capital-A-Art), then this reading makes a certain amount of sense.

One could say, then, that the work pictures the glossy white sheen of desire incarnate as much as it pictures this desire’s ongoing decay.

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