One of the artists mentioned in the book The Art of Projection, which I have discussed previously is Diana Thater, an artist I found intriguing not just for her ingenious use of the projected frame to merge the real and the computer generated space, but also for her political stand point. She uses new media as a way of defending her own practice and the practice of others, undermined by their critics. Again an example of how the installation can be at once the medium and the defence strategy. Her work is a hybrid of video, sculpture and architecture yet defies categorisation itself. Her installations are not illusion – they do not hide the apparatus, but then perhaps technical apparatus has in fact become invisible to us anyway. Our brains are so conditioned to filter simultaneous images, to select and pull our own relevancies from every moment, perhaps to hide the apparatus would be a way of highlighting it. Beatriz Colominia wrote in The Art of Projection that, “the idea of the single image commanding our attention has faded away. It seems as if we need to be distracted in order to concentrate.” Memory itself has become an act of performance and, as Colominia said, time is memory’s toy, “time is the place where subjectivity is produced.”

So… back to Thater. Where is the memory, the performativity in her installation? With the lack of material disguise the audience morphs into the work itself creating bodily screens and shadows. They are at once the audience and the unknowing performer within her space. Her series entitled, ‘The Best Animals are the Flat Animals’ 1998 were influenced by Alice in Wonderland. Alice encounters 3D animals that morph into 2D playing cards. It is representative perhaps of how people experience nature, or rather, that they think they are experiencing it at all. A changing landscape for the viewer to move through where nothing is stationary, nothing is tangible. More of a comment on our ability to push out the technical details, the price we pay for the lure of absorption.

“Video installation offers a space where intention and judgement of beauty finally separate.” Instead it is up to the viewer to play the part.

www.thaterstudio.com

Tadek Kantor’s Objects – Cricot² Theatre with introduction by Marek Rostworowski (an information guide written in 1986)

Kantor is likened to a Renaissance alchemist; lost in thought, working passionately yet methodically towards knowledge.

“Materials, which Kantor takes from reality in order to throw them into the forge of his performances, are subjected to a transformation of their functions and specific qualities. They are not simply elements illustrating a wider project, (already defined in the initial phase), but reagents which reveal their invisible side, their unexpected parallelisms and contrasts in the process of transformation.”

The audience becomes yet another one of his materials within the performance. Machines are used consistently within his work – both funny and threatening, they become metaphors for a world built on a tension between contrasting, co-existing poles; chaos and geometry, catastrophe and order, chance and constructive necessity. They are described as Kantor’s, ‘traps set for conventional aspects of reality.’ Space is not treated as an empty vessel to fill compositionally – as Matisse called, ‘a comfortable sofa’ (by which I think he meant the lazy use of space, not necessarily traditional, but easy to fall into). Space is not absolute; it exists as a result of contrasts and conflicts.

“Every gesture, even the most banal one, may unsettle the invisible balance, may set the trap in motion. A whole life may depend on the position of a suitcase.” Space is one of the most valuable commodities; we invest in it on every single level, financially, temporally, physically, emotionally… Yet within the theatre it is consistently used as a blank canvas, built on top of with various carefully positioned components. Any space however has a multitude of codes and sign to decipher, within the structure itself and this is I believe what Kantor worked with, rather than working over.

Collecting into the Future

Book: New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art edited by Christiane Paul 2008

This book analyses the reconfiguration of the institution. Participation in or with the artworks today counteracts the idea of the museum as shrine to sacred objects. New media has broken free, evaded definition and escaped categorisation. It is constantly evolving and reinventing itself, the enemy of history, new media has developed out of confinement. In the 1960s the then editor of Artforum asked the question, “Are computers, consumer electronics and communication theory transforming art production or simple obscuring it?”

If the museum functions, among other things, as an archive and ‘cultural memory’, how is this memory influenced by the acceleration of real time processing? What might the archive of the future be?

These questions posed in this book were also some of the questions offered to us as a group when asked to present our opinions on collections and our hypotheses for the future. The discussions took place within the Raeburn Rooms of Edinburgh University between three groups of student from the fine art course, art, space and nature course and curatorial course. The discussions were instigated and mediated by Clementine Deliss – founder of the Future Academy ongoing project.

Each week my group dutifully met up to discuss the possibilities for collecting into the future and each week we found ourselves talking round and round this impossibly large subject full of abstract concepts. Each week we recorded our long, rambling, convoluted and more often than not, non-sensicle conversations on the topic. Finally we decided that the only way to present these ideas, without them becoming merely another collectable, was through a slightly edited script written from our discussion recordings. The script was given to a group of actors one hour before the presentation who made a far better job of reading it than we did constructing it. I shall follow this entry with some extracts...

http://www.metasenta.com.au/projects/projects-completed/53-clementine-deliss.html

http://www.eca.ac.uk/389/

We were recently visited by our external examiner, given a fifteen minute slot and instructed to have an ‘informal chat’ with him about our work. As always, and more for fear of rambling than running out of words, I made a sort of check list of what I felt was important for him to know about my work. Again, as always I veered horribly off the runway and promptly lost track of the list. I have just rediscovered it and decided that it is worth putting into non-scribble, as a reminder that, at one point at least in this mad final countdown, I seemed to have a reasonably clear grasp of where I was headed.

The power of the performance lecture lies in its permission to borrow indiscriminately from multiple disciplines. Fact, fiction and opinion can co-exist in the same space, even in the same sentence. My history of art course has been heavily factually bias, dry, for want of a better word. Within fine art there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ – there is little in history either for that matter, however the defence strategies are very different. The performance lecture has the duel capacity to act as both the medium and the defence. Last year I became increasingly interested in the changing function of the brain in line with technological advancements. Our notions of time, space, and indeed memory itself are now all in flux. I took a class last year called ‘The spaces of Contemporary Art’ which lead me onto an investigation into what other experiences in life we take for granted yet have been manipulated and mediated by a growing technological framework. Peter Weibel’s book CTRL: Space proved most enlightening, introducing me to Foucault’s use of Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptic Principle and investigating the ways in which many artists are tackling the subject of a mass surveillance culture.

The performance lecture (or as I have now renamed it, the demonstration) has a real scope for awareness bringing, for raising consciousness. In line with my discovery of Kantor I felt that there was too, a space within this where my objects could also participate, as something akin to, but also more than, a prop. The frame as both an object and an idea proved fascinating subject matter for debate and investigation. It became more than an object, more than an idea but also a metaphor for this abstract notion of surveillance culture with the assumptions it places on what it contains. Recently I have ventured outside the studio frame towards a more obviously terrifying container – the source of where the brain meets the machine, Edinburgh’s Clinical Research Laboratory. It is often difficult to find a source for your investigation. We read round and round subjects and look at the work of others but for me the challenge is always locating that trigger image, space or sometimes person that I can then hang my argument onto, or rather, my defence.

I have recently discovered the joy of the blog! My flat mate thinks it is hilarious, the hours I will spend happily tapping away at a computer under the pretence of putting together a final assessment research document. There is a little more to my new obsession however, something deeper and a bit darker, something that I thought could prove potential fodder for another demonstration. The blog is a self indulgent record of my thoughts and movements. I can be utterly opinionated and cutting (usual unsubstantiated with any actual fact) and yet it is mediated. No one need know who this person is; I can write the things I would never vocalise. It is the most impersonal of mediums wrapped up under the guise of a secret diary. More importantly than this however, it is a track and a trace of where I have been, what I have done. It is a collection of words for a generation that no longer trusts the ability of their own memory. We don’t have to, we can blog! So, the flatmate and I came up with the proposal, a way of putting all these thoughts out there with a few mediators; the computer, the projector, the screen. As if these few mediators suddenly stop the words coming from you; they are from the computer, from cyber-space, not me. I could sit there, happily tapping away, projecting my words out to other people and printing as I tap. This could continue hypothetically until the print out began to form piles and piles around me, perhaps taking on the space and the weight of my own body. They would take over, take my place. The fear of forgetting could become so huge that it may indeed take over a physical space. More important than any singular sheet of paper it would represent the futility of trying to collect everything, retain everything, just in case. At the point where any of these colossal ramblings might ‘come in handy’ the irony would be that for all the attempts to retain information, it has merely been lost in a mass paper flood.

http://framingcontrol.blogspot.com