Posts Tagged ‘virtual’

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Friday, 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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Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

No Fun by Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.org) is an approximately sixteen minute video depicting a diptych of video images.

In the video to the right of the diptych, one views a young man who has (it appears) hung himself to death.

In the video to the left of the diptych, one views a continually changing series of random computer users who are responding to the sight of this hanging man.

More specifically, the video is a documentation of the Chatroulette interface in which one of the artists (Franco Mattes) performs the role of the hanging man and leaves it up to the algorithms of Chatroulette (and the pool of Chatroulette users online at the time) to generate the bulk of the video’s subsequent content.

The first thing to note is that one’s focus through the duration of the video is nudged further away from the video of the hanging man and closer towards the video of users’ varied reactions to the sight of the hanging man.

What one takes away is the picture of a virtual public responding to the possibility of a real suicide.

In most cases, a legible pattern forms in which, first of all, a shock occurs where the user confronts the image of the suicide and exhibits a strong reaction.

The sight of a suicide online or off is obviously going to be unsettling, but, there’s something about placing a suicide in this context which is unsettling in a very particular way.

For example, the hanging man here is “live” in the sense that their virtual persona is functioning, but the user (the actual hanging man, himself) is “dead” in the sense that his biological body is no longer functioning.

So, can one really say that he’s definitely not there?

(Like a ghost, his presence in the bedroom is palpable.)

But, can one really say that he is there?

(Of course not, he’s dead.)

So, one asks one’s self:

Is a dead body the same thing as the real person?

And, then:

Is the online persona of a person representing themselves as their own dead body the same thing as the person?

Furthermore, the body here is suspended in the air – both floating, free from the laws of gravity and falling, on the precipice of physical collapse, which only adds to this confusion regarding its location.

After this initial shock effect, then, a range of reactions occur from apathy, to pondering, to sexual excitement, to denial, to the need to take a picture of the screen with a digital camera, to amusement, to vicious insulting, to hilarity, to confusion, and, in one case, to calling the police.

Some people assume it’s a joke, some people think it might be real, and most people aren’t quite sure.

Within this range of reactions, though, there is one underlying theme which remains as constant as the presence of the hanging man himself:

The question:

Is this real?

That is to say, first of all, is this really a dead body or is it rather a clever fakery perpetrated by, say, a performance artist?

And, second of all, is this real, as in is this the sort of real human situation wherein I – as a real human being – am ethically called upon to really act (whether it’s real or whether it’s fake)?

That question is by far and away the most common theme brought up by the users throughout the video’s runtime.

Is this real?

NOTE: This post might be read in conjunction with the essay “A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil Clown, a Hatian Trickster Sprit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society” by Julian Dibbel (1993)

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Friday, May 14th, 2010

“3 weeks ago” Charles Broskoski uploaded a diptych of images, each of which depicts a still-life composed in a painterly style.

One views, in the image to the left of the diptych, a vertical composition composed of an open door that itself frames an arrangement of fruit situated on a small end table and the obstructed view of a window.

These figurative elements are each carved out in chunky, geometrically-legible units of color.

In the image to the right of the diptych, one views a similar composition whose differences with the first are localized to shifts in color and re-considerations of the given shapes of objects (perhaps most notably in the cubist-inspired centerpiece of the fruit arrangement).

Now, one might say that Broskoski’s model here is not necessarily an arrangement of objects in space, but rather, a painting style – say, Fauvism.

And these particular works are apt studies of the style; they’re well-executed and have a certain aesthetic appeal.

But, that said, whereas the Fauves (“The Wild Beats”) were notorious for depicting objects in space in an un-realistic manner (or, alternatively, mutating their own definition of “realistic”), Broskoski’s paintings lack that sort of “shock effect.”

They are not wild, but tame.

The fact that these images do not catalyze the shock effects that, say, Matisse’s work catalyzed in its own time should not be surprising.

After all, Matisse’s work was once contemporary, but is now safely at home in Ikea or Pier One Imports; it’s been absorbed and neutralized into the flow of commodified signage.

So, where does this leave Broskoski?

Well, to start, this diptych – as it is displayed on his website, anyway – is situated directly below another diptych which itself is housed under a heading reading “2 weeks ago…”

In the lower-most image of this second diptych, one views iconography reading less as painterly or in reference to any other art historical style than it does digital and “new.”

One views what might be taken for a 3D “metal fence” (3D in the sense of digital “3D animation” not trompe-l’oeil) through which undulating chunks of lightly-shaded colors which might be taken for “stingrays” pass through and intermingle with small, concentric circles of color which might be taken for “eyeballs.”

And, in the upper image of the diptych, one views a similarly surrealistic arrangement of iconography; however, in this case, the icons do not read solely as “painterly” or solely as “digital,” but rather as a collision between the two.

The background and immediate foreground here are composed of graffiti-like scribbles created with a tool that automatically re-produces this “real world” effect, and the middle-ground of the image is composed of a series of “3D” representations of what one might take to be “vertebrae” extending not in a straight line (as in a spine) but in a wild swirl throughout the space of the image.

It should be said, though, that as with the images in the diptych mentioned above, these more digitally-inflected images are themselves each well-executed and sort of privately powerful, but perhaps lack the bodily shock effects which the various avant-gardes of art history are interested in.

Which would be fine – perhaps Broskoski isn’t interested in that sort of thing – were it not for the fact that, if one is up for it, there’s another way to view what’s going on here with its own unique shock:

When the artist places these paintings in conjunction with one another and in the context of an ongoing stream of paintings which a viewer might follow (as in a performance) on his website, the viewer’s lens on the work here is nudged away from each of the individual images and closer towards the legible pattern of filtration through which the individual images stream.

The shock of shifting one’s lens from such simultaneously well-executed and differently well-executed images creates a space of indeterminacy – a sort of surrealist heterotopia picturing less space than movements in time.

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Thursday, May 13th, 2010

“Nothing To Blame But Gemini” is an installation of fourteen works by Whitney Claflin now on view at Real Fine Arts in Williamsburg.

The installation is composed of one-half modestly-sized abstract paintings produced by the artist and one-half similarly-sized glossy posters printed-out by the artist which themselves each depict an abstracted detail of one of her own abstract paintings (not – it should be noted – the paintings in this particular installation, though).

The first thing to say about the installation is that one isn’t immediately sure which of the works here are the paintings and which of the works here are the posters as they’re each roughly the same size and they each depict iconography which one reads as “painterly” – drips, slashes, goopy brush strokes, etc.

(If one were to view the works through a computer screen [or a printed-out checklist], it would be effectively impossible to differentiate them via their media [rather, the “take away” message – in that case – becomes the sign of “painting,” or, alternatively, of “art.”])

However, as one spends time with “Nothing To Blame But Gemini” (as in the case [if one goes for this sort of thing, anyway] of spending time with a person born under the sign of Gemini), what at first glance appears to be singular, gradually reveals a strong duality.

The key variable of difference between these works is their materiality as objects – the paintings are sculptural, tactile; the posters are flat, glossy.

In the paintings, one views onto a surface molded by the artist – that is to say, a phenomenological space – the action occurred “here”; in the posters, one views into a surface automatically printed-out by a machine – that is to say a conceptual space – the action occurred “out there.”

Going one step deeper, the surface of the paintings calls to mind production as the location of the work (present tense), while the surface of the posters calls to mind both pre-production as well as post-production as the location of the work (past and future tenses).

And, at this point, if one is willing to go this far with the work, another layer emerges wherein each individual image harnesses these very tensions between “the hand of the artist” and “automatic effects.”

For example, in the painting works, collisions emerge between, on the one hand, the application of objects (broken ceramic, pieces of canvas, newspaper, string, glitter, etc.) which automatically produce iconographic elements and, on the other hand, the artist’s application of paint which manually produces iconographic elements.

And in the poster works, collisions emerge between, on the one hand, the data of the photograph which automatically produces iconographic elements and, on the other hand, the artist’s digital manipulation (using “painterly” effects in an image editing software) of the photograph which manually produces iconographic elements.

Finally, the painterly gestures in the works themselves (be they conducted with paint or pixels) point one in the direction of these dialectical tensions as they reveal an indeterminacy – a hesitation to settle anywhere for certain.

One views wiggling lines and almost haphazard juxtapositions of iconography and media; things never quite coalesce.

However, if one is willing to think of the work occurring here as located less in the individual objects, and more in the dialectical tension pictured by the installation as a whole, then suddenly a strong, singular point of view reveals itself.

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Friday, May 7th, 2010

The most recent post on “Schumacher,” a Tumblr of Ben and Louie Schumacher’s sculptural work from mid-2009 to the present moment, displays a series of views on an assemblage sculpture entitled Champfleury in which a (most likely faux) marble plinth supports the following three elements:

1. A framed line drawing (in the style of, say, Matisse) depicting a nude woman paired next to a vase of flowers.

2. A series of approximately twelve small, white rectangular objects which one assumes to be the “12 rapid prototypes of iphones found on google 3d warehouse” listed in the work’s media.

3. An unfinished maquette depicting a figure roughly rendered in plaster.

Additionally, outside of this plinth, one views an un-adorned wire dress-form which is hung on the wall in the background.

Now, a place to begin to understand the interaction of these elements is the work’s title:

Champfleury.

“Champfleury” is the pen name of the 19th century French art critic Jules Fleury-Husson who notably defended the “realistic” paintings of Courbet depicting beggars and other previously un-represented (or un-representable) subject matter.

His defense of Courbet rested not on politics, but rather on Courbet’s unique ability to paint what he sees in front of him in the world.

Now, if one views these particular sculptures through the lens of an art critic associated with “realism,” a paradox occurs as the sculptures assembled here each work through and around ideas of mediation between real models and virtual simulations, not “reality” itself or at least not reality as Courbet taught Champfleury (for one) to view it.

Models of ipods, models of sculptures, models of garments, models of drawings of nude models and vases; in each of these cases, one is presented a synthetic portal in-between a “real” thing in the world and the creative representation of that thing.

This paradox is only worked through if one is willing to think through the idea that reality may have mutated from Courbet’s day (which could be a terrifying idea to think through).

The work – here – involved in a new type of “realism” – a realism premised not on distinctions between real and virtual, but on the mixed reality thresholds between the two.

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Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

I like to walk around in a particular park.

This park isn’t huge, but it’s not small either (about a mile around) and it has some tennis courts, as well as a series of hills.

On the largest of these hills is a large vertical monument to a military exploit around which a lot of fit, physically attractive people hang out.

And on one of the smaller of these hills are a couple of small, dying trees around which a group of sickly, goth teenagers hang out and role play vampire fantasy scenarios.

Writing about Internet art makes me compare everything I see to the Internet, so, after seeing this group of kids on a regular basis for long enough, I began to think about the relationship between vampires themes and what it’s like to be online.

Here are some thoughts:

1. Vampires are unable to exist in the light of day:

The teenagers don’t seem to fit into the world of daylight.

Multiplayer online gaming in a dark, musty basement is better for them and they would appear more at home there.

2. Vampires are able to exist in an endless duration:

The Internet is a vampire world in the sense that online time is premised less on the rhythms of day and night (the seasons changing through the “real” world) and more on those of the endless twenty-four hour data stream (the endless “now” of the virtual world).

The endless time of the virtual world seems more appropriate for these teenagers than natural time.

In the synthetic, role-playing milieu of virtual worlds, it is the vampire kids who seem relevant and cool, not the physically-fit people who hang out near the military statue.

It should be said, though, that the recent popularity of vampire mythology is not fundamentally bound up with sickly teenagers hanging out near dying trees.

For example, I walked into a large, chain bookstore yesterday and was frustrated to find myself shuffling through hundreds of yuppies, suburban “moms,” and other assorted mainstream people who were packed standing room only to hear Charlaine Harris, the author of a series of elaborately-realized vampire mystery novels, speak.

In fact, this group was almost identical in appearance and demography to the one I (again accidentally) found myself swimming through who were on hand to hear Candace Bushnell, the creator of Sex and the City, speak at the same bookstore – a population less Hot Topic than Gap.

This is not to pass a value judgment either way, just to say that there is something about the thematics and atmospherics of the vampire myth which speaks to an audience of “indoor kids” beyond the goth teenagers in the park.

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Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

“Hydrate and Perform,” one part of a two-part solo exhibition of the work of Tobias Madison at the Swiss Institute, features sculptures and prints which function as synthetic visions of the natural world.

The sculptures in the exhibition are divided into a pair of categories:

1. Translucent horizontal cubes which are filled with a variety of colors of Vitamin Water.

In approximately half of these tanks the artist has placed artificial bamboo shoots which poke out of the tops of the tanks.

The effect of these bamboo shoots is to both frustrate the strict cubic linearity of the sculpture and compound the sense of artificiality introduced into the work through the use of the Vitamin Water.

2. Translucent vertical cubes which are filled top-to-bottom with claustrophobically-confined, paint-splattered artificial plant arrangements.

These cubes are supported upon minimal vertical bases – the surfaces of which are combinations of various faux wood patterns.

The prints in the exhibition, likewise, are divided into a pair of categories:

1. A series of large, framed scans of compact discs which have been digitally-manipulated to appear as though they have melted and spilled down the page like paint spilling down a canvas.

2. Several un-framed prints of similarly digitally-manipulated imagery which is no longer legible as the representation of any particular object – it reads not as a melting CD, but rather as the melting effect itself.

In combination, these sculptures and prints frame not just the artificiality of natural elements and phenomena, but – through their aestheticized / fetishized presentation – frame the desire for artificiality itself wherein artificial water is more desirable than actual water and the effect of “liquification” overruns the effect’s functional representational application.

However, there is another (perhaps unanticipated) formal element occurring here which is worth mentioning.

In the tanks of Vitamin Water, one views blocks of colorful, über-artificial water – yes; however, one also views the accumulation of dust and debris which has gathered in the corners and walls of the tank, disrupting the vision of total, almost evil, artificial cleanliness.

This trace of naturally-occurring entropic process is, like the dust “breeding” on Duchamp’s Large Glass as photographed by Man Ray or Smithson’s vision of crumbling cinematic apparatus, a death mask – a reminder that even the hyper-virtualized quality of contemporary experience is always already a ruin.

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Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Rumble (1993) is a work created in 2009 by Kari Altmann.

She plays a YouTube clip depicting hand-held, date-stamped camcorder footage of a rumbling Malaysian landslide dating from 1993 through the yooouuutuuube.com video mosaic effect generator.

(Yooouuutuuube.com is a tool wherein one enters a YouTube url and a “size” for the video referenced in the url which results in – first – the creation of a domino [or rumble] effect of multiple “screens” – each of which plays the video just a hair off of the time of the one preceding it – and – second – the eventual filling-in of the entire screen with these streaming, out-of-sync video ripples – each of which contains several to dozens to hundreds of the original videos in an ongoing mosaic flicker through the run-time of the video.)

A point to note is that the artist included the date of the original landslide video, 1993, in her title.

This isn’t something that artists typically do.

So, what makes the date 1993 worth including in the title?

Well, what happened in 1993?

For one thing, CERN (the same Swiss organization behind the Large Hadron Collider) announced that the World Wide Web would be free to enter for anyone with an Internet connection.

In much of Altmann’s work, she equates the Web database with an archaeological site or a landscape that one can sift through.

In 1993, this landscape came into being with a rumble.

That’s what the work shows me.

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Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Dreams from google 3d warehouse by Guthrie Lonergan is:

1. The artist’s re-contextualization of seventeen “3D” models – each of which are based on an individual dream of the Google 3D Warehouse user who initially created the model.

2. An accompanying commentary on the process of translating the memory of a dream to a 3D model provided by the dreamers/3D model-makers themselves (in conversation with Lonergan).

The work is viewed on two Web pages – each of which are hosted on Caitlin Denny and Parker Ito’s jstchillin.org website.

On the first page, one views three lines of black sans-serif text extending the horizontal-length of the page.

This text reads:

This is a Piano I dreamed that I was playing, but its actually a tattoo that I want to do somewhere on my body… You can’t really comment about it because i dreamed it and you didn’t see it… Oh well…

*****

Positioned below this text is the 2D representation of a 3D model depicting a black piano keyboard which – when clicked – opens a Web browser tab displaying the 3D model’s original Web page on the Google 3D Warehouse Web site.

On the second page of the work, one views a block of sixteen additional dream-text-and-3D-model pairings which are positioned above a block of seventeen lines of text which each (a.) list the 3D models’ file names and creator/user names, as well as (b.) link to the models’ original Web pages on the Google 3D Warehouse Web site.

The first of the dream memories-into-3D models displayed at the top of this page is prefaced by the following text:

i had the wierdest dream last night. i was walking downtown when a space ship landed in the street, naturely i dove for cover behind a bush. thank you to dj orion for the road

*****

Below this text is an initial view of the 3D model described above in which one views a low medium-wide framing on:

1. A grey figure running away from a large white craft emanating blue flames, which is labeled “space ship,” and

2. A second grey figure labeled “me” lying on the ground behind a rectangular box with a green marbleized texture, which one takes to be the bush mentioned in the dream.

Below this view of the model, then, are three lines of grey text in which a question regarding the model-maker’s memory of certain details is posed.

It reads:

i’m curious if the blue flames from the jets on the spaceship were in the dream? also, there seems to be some sort of steering column inside of the spaceship, is this something that you remembered?

*****

And a reply, reading:

to answer your questions, yes there was blue flames from the spaceship, and yes, i do remember the steering column was something i remembered. i remember the aliens coming out and there was that steering column

*****

As one scrolls down the page, one encounters two more views of the 3D model – one into the cockpit of the space ship in which the steering column mentioned above is visible, the other a high wide-angle in which the steering column is – again – made visible.

Below these views are another question-and-response regarding the translation of dream memory into 3D model.

The question reads:

do you remember anything else about the steering column, like how it functioned, or anything else about it?

*****

And the model-maker responds:

i just remember the steering stick was like a big joystick, controlling the ship here and there

*****

One more view of the steering column is, then, displayed and the next dream model and commentary begins.

The remaining fifteen of these dreams involve similar science-fiction scenarios as well as relatively banal scenarios involving the architecture of, for example, factories and shopping malls.

Throughout the project, though, one theme remains constant:

As one begins to picture a dream, one begins to mutate the dream to fit the picture (until one can’t say for sure if they remember the dream at all).

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Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Same Shit Different Island, a sculpture by Joel Holmberg, is a thin, haphazardly bent-up metal beam supporting a rough chunk of concrete in the shape of, say, a long piece of petrified grey shit, which itself is held to the beam by a thin piece of fishing wire.

Also attached to this bent-up metal beam-armature are a small piece of wood and a second, relatively smaller metal beam element, which, in turn, each support a vertical leg of the larger metal beam-armature.

Before the sculpture is an object, it is – for the artist – a process which is designed to be replicated and reproduced through a broad spectrum of scales.

The work consists of the following 5 process-steps:

1. A beam is bent in three points, forming an armature.

2. Two wires span the uprights of this armature and a third, longer (and, thus, more deeply hanging) wire is suspended down the middle of the first two wires.

3. A tarp is stretched over the three wires, resulting in a hanging “hammock” form.

4. A cement mixture is poured into this hammock form.

5. After the cement dries, both the tarp and the outer two wires of the armature-form are removed so that a curved concrete shape (the piece of shit) is left suspended in air by the “third wire” which still spans the upright points of the beam.

One is, thus, provided with a blueprint for the creation of the “same shit” on “different island(s).”

As one evaluates the sculpture in terms of form, one evaluates it as a set of instructions as well.

It’s virtual art.

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