Class #9 New Media Reader

Chapter 14- Four Selections by Experiments in Art and Technolgy

Intro

• Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) formed in 1966 by four guys after one of them, Billy Kluver from Bell Telephone contributed technology to a sculpture called "Homage to New York."
• The organization helped advance the possibilities of technology and art
• E.A.T. made a performance exhibition called 9 evenings, which received mixed reviews but served as an inspiration for the new media field

The Garden Party by Billy Kluver

• The sculpture "machine" he helped make destroys itself
• He calls it a spectacle
• The destruction of the machine is an ideal of good machine and a good human
• Both New York and the machine has humor and poetry

The four selections

• variations VII by John Cage- a piece of music that is created using the sounds already in the air at the performance
• vehicle by Lucinda Childs- consists of animate, inanimate and air-supported materials that make a sort of music. Inolves a doppler sonar, a refrigerator vacuum, etc.
• carriage descreteness by yvonne ranier- a dance whose choroegraphy is relayed over walkie talkie with multimedia in the background
• open score by robert rauschenberg- tennis as dance improvisation. wireless mic on a tennis racket
• a press release calls the exhibition a marriage of new technology and art that should have always developed together and that, together, open up new creative possibilities

The Pavilion by Bill Kluver

• The Pavilion is open-ended, an environment that allows for personal choice
• The artist shows how technology can be used in new environments
• It was a collaboration of artists and engineers in Japan and the US. There was some confusion and frustration when artists and engineers tried to switch roles.
• Aspects of the Pavilion: the Fog, the Mirror, the Clam Room, the Mirror Room
• There were programmers who lived inside the structure
• Pavilion was "theatre conceived of as a total instrument"
• This brought up interesting questions about the role of the artist, legally. Also talks about the relationship of the artist and industry.

Chapter 15 - Cybernated Art

• Nam June Paik is considered the first video artist
• He coined the term "information superhighway"
• There was a history of TV before it was even invented
• June wrote a manifesto, which provides a cybernetic/ Buddhist context for his work

NOTE: On the topic of technology and art, here's an interesting contribution from Brooklyn artist Adam Frank. "Performer" is currently in Times Square.

Chapter 31- Will There be Condominiums in Data Space?

Intro

Artists changed the viewer/video dynamic

Bill Viola is a video artist who has a poetic approach to the video medium

Will there be Condominiums in Data Space? by Bill Viola

• Really interesting quote: "Possibly the most startling thing about our individual existence is that it is continuous. It is an unbroken thread -- we have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives us the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods, or section of certain times or 'highlights.' Hollywood movies and the media, of course, reinforce this perception."
• "Life without editing it seems, is just not that interesting." Old video art recorded everything and didn't "forget."
• Memo-technics = artificial memory
• Data space - imagined physical space must exist in order to operate within it
• Video and holism- the idea that the art exists before it is executed
• Reality is people putting together pieces that were originally whole
• Art and structuralism, the author argues that it is important
• The marriage of video and computer: "the ultimate recording technology: total spatial storage, with the viewer wandering through some three-dimensional, possibly life-sized field of prerecorded or simulated scenes and events evolving in time." THE VIDEO GAME!
• The idea of a "Master" edit and "original" footage will disappear in the future
• "Playback speed....can be modulated, shifted up or down, superimposed, or interrupted according to the parameters of the electronic wave theory...." TIVO?
• Moving from constructing a program to carving out one....infinite points of view as opposed to one singular product
• Mapping conceptual structures of the brain into technology- the matrix, branching, idea space, etc.
• The author concludes that artists need to start paying attention to video.