The Passage of Mirage — Illusory Virtual Objects
featuring works by Jim Campbell, Vuk Cosic, John Gerrard, W.
Bradford Paley, Eric Paulos, Wolfgang Staehle, Thomson & Craighead,
and Carlo Zanni
September 14 - October 16
Opening reception: Tues, September
14, 6-8 PM
Artist Talk:
Thurs., September 30, 7 - 9 PM
Symposium:
"Negotiating Realities: New Media Art and the
Post-Object"
Sun, Oct. 10, 4-9 PM, Tishman Auditorium, New School University
Exhibition and symposium organized by agent.netart
(joint public programs by Intelligent Agent and the Netart Initiative
of the Parsons School of Design)
Curators and symposium co-ordinators:
Christiane Paul (Director, Intelligent Agent; Adjunct Curator of
New Media Arts, Whitney Museum)
Zhang Ga (Director, Netart Initiative; Professor, MFA Design and
Technology program, Parsons School of Design)
The exhibition and symposium are made possible by funding from THE
ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION
The exhibition The Passage of Mirage explores concepts surrounding
the "virtual object" and the issues of representation that
have been raised by it. While the coalition of virtual and object
seems contradictory at first glance, it dialectically illuminates
the complex relationships between the virtual and the real that unfold
in new media art. In classical optical theories of the 18th century,
the word "virtual" was used to describe the reflected image
of an object. Today's digital image does not require a physical object
to represent a physical reality; rather than reproducing reality,
it encodes data and therefore alludes to an expanded concept of objecthood.
New media art both connects to and expands the dematerialization
of the art object that occurred in earlier art movements. The new
media object is a process in flux that is potentially interactive,
dynamic, participatory and customizable and often oscillates between
its inherent ephemeral nature and its material components or people’s
desire to objectify it.
The Passage of Mirage features nine projects that address these issues
by portraying the virtual object as a process, a data structure (or
carrier thereof), or as an encoded reality. The artworks expand notions
of the traditional art object, sometimes quite specifically with
regard to more established art forms such as photography, film, or
painting.
The works of Jim Campbell and Thomson & Craighead, for example,
offer different approaches to processing the medium of film. Campbell's
Illuminated Average #1 creates an average of all the frames of Htchock's
Psycho and collapses the film into one single image; by contrast,
the artist's Night Light visualizes Psycho's sound level and the
brightness of the image throughout the film. Thomson & Craighead's
Short Films about Flying is an edition of unique cinematic works
that were generated in real-from existing data found on the World
Wide Web: each "movie" (replete with opening titles and
end credits) combines a video feed from Logan Airport in Boston with
randomly loaded net radio sourced from elsewhere in the world.
John Gerrard's Watchful Portrait and Carlo Zanni's Altarboy both
transform a portrait into a "living" process that is networked
or responds to haptic sensation; and Wolfgang Staehle's and Vuk Cosic's
works present a "live" version of a photograph or painting.
In very different ways, the idea of the object as data carrier unfolds
both in W. Bradford Paley's Code Profiles and Eric Paulos' Limelight,
a sculptural object that doubles as automated threat detection and
indication system.
While still informed by the aesthetics of more traditional media,
the artworks in the exhibition are media objects that are process-oriented,
reactive, or open to (real-time) data processing and intervention.
The Passage of Mirage — Illusory Virtual Objects
Exhibition Projects
Jim Campbell
Accumulating Psycho, 2004
DVD
Night Light, 1995/1998
Custom electronics, light bulbs, glass
website
Jim Campbell's Accumulating Psycho and
Night Light each represent a different view of the Alfred Hitchcock
classic Psycho. Accumulating
Psycho continually collapses the frames of the entire 1 hour, 50
minutes film (while the sound remains intact). By contrast, Night
Light (from Campbell's Memory Series) visualizes two different
aspects or "memories" of Psycho: the film's sound level
and the brightness of the image throughout the film. The two memories
are synchronized and used to change the brightness of two light
bulbs. Loud scenes are bright on the left-hand bulb and dark scenes
are dark on the right-hand bulb.
This way, an electronic record of the collective memory of the
film is used to transform an every-day object mounted on the wall.
Night Light points to the "hidden" quality of memories,
which have to be transformed in order to be represented.
John Gerrard,
Watchful Portrait (Caroline), 2004
Medium : 3D model, gaming engine, software
Equipment : PC x 2, LCD screen x 2, custom corian plastic housing, tracking
device
Collaborators : Erwin Reitboeck, Werner Poetzelberger, Robert Praxmarer, Ars
Electronica Futurelab.
This work was realised with the support of the 2004 Siemens Artist in
Residence Project at the Ars Electronica Futurelab, Austria.
website
The work consists of two virtual portraits that are tracking the position of
the sun and the moon at all times. The precise scientific information as to the
movement of these elements is constantly monitored live and the portraits are
designed to follow these co-ordinates with their eyes at all times. The portrait
(Caroline) opens her eyes at dawn and tracks the sun. At dusk she closes her
eyes. At this point, the opposite portrait opens her eyes and tracks the moon
all night. The diptych is shown on a shelf with the public being able to turn
each panel on a central pivot point. The virtual portrait, however, remains static,
allowing the public to look around and behind it, evenually leaving the screens
in any way desired.
Carlo Zanni, Oriana, 2004
Sculpture, aluminum case with LCD screen
website
The Oriana sculpture (part of Carlo Zanni's series Altarboy) consists of a
customized, portable aluminum case. The bottom shell sheet of the case contains
a little transparent glass box with fresh rose petals, pointing to the ephemeral
nature of the object. The sheet itself is also covered by fresh rose petals.
Embedded in the top shell is a 17" LCD screen showing a portrait of writer
and journalist Oriana Fallaci. The pupils of her eyes consist of images gathered
through live search engine queries; the images returned by the query are resized
as 1x1 pixels and linked to a thumbnail of the same image (images are being
refreshed every 90 seconds). Users remotely interact with the piece and launch
the images in the pupils at the website www.oriana.us. The right pupil of the
portrait is filled with images that users gather through queries at the webiste.
The left pupil of the portrait is filled with images that are the result of
a query for the words "Cu Chi" on the Google search engine. The Cu
Chi tunnels were one of the most famous battlegrounds of the Vietnam War and
are one of the country's prime tourist attractions today. Fallaci wrote about
the Vietnam war, most notably in her Vietnam journal Nothing, and So Be It
.Oriana constructs a physical object and portrait as a "living process" that
contains a multitude of other possible portraits and takes its shape through
the choices of users in a real-time networked process.
Thompson & Craighead,
Short Films about Flying, 2003
Installation / projection
website 1 website 2
(beta)
Short
Films about Flying is a networked installation and open edition of unique
cinematic works which were generated in real-time from existing data found
on
the World Wide Web. Each "movie" (replete with opening titles and end
credits) combines a video feed from Logan Airport in Boston with randomly loaded
net radio sourced from elsewhere in the world. As this relatively good quality
video stream was taken from an existing commercial website where its visitors
are able to remotely control the camera, each "movie" is "shot" and "paced" by
its own (albeit unsuspecting) camera person. Additionally, text grabbed from
a variety of on-line message boards is periodically inserted, appearing like
cinematic inter-titles when viewed in combination with all the other components.
The result is a coherent yet evocative combination of elements that produce
an endlessly mutating edition of low-tech mini-movies that the artists call
Template
Cinema.
Courtesy of Mobile Home, London
Wolfgang Staehle, Fernsehturm (TV Tower),2004
Live webcam feed, flat panel screen, dimensions variable Fernsehturm
continues Wolfgang Staehle's exploration of the aesthetic implications
of the "live" image. The screen displays a live feed of a view monitoring
the TV tower in Berlin -- a painting in motion. Fernsehturm suggests a constantly
evolving photographic image that becomes a continuous record of minute changes
in light and every aspect of the environment. It is a highly ephemeral, time-based
document that cannot and won’t ever be repeated (except as an archived
version). Encountering this type of image on the wall of a gallery or museum,
constitutes a radical change of context that poses essential questions about
representation and the nature of the art object itself. Does the "live" image
supersede previous art forms such as photography? What role do the aesthetics
of processing and mediation play in our perception of an artwork?
Vuk Cosic,
History of Art for the Intelligence Community (Cezanne), 2002
Networked software, projection
website
History
of Art for the Intelligence Community is a front-end / client for Carnivore,
a project by the Radical Software Group (RSG) that mimics the FBI's net surveillance
software of the same name. The Carnivore project consists of the packet-sniffing
software created by RSG that monitors network traffic on a local area network;
and the clients that numerous artists have created to visualize the data exchange
on the network. In History of Art for the Intelligence Community, Cosic displays
the Web-usage data of the network via well-known masterpieces by Cezanne, Van
Gogh, and others. Paul Cezanne's Still Life with Plate of Cherries (1885-87)
appears as a digital reproduction of the original painting, except for the fact
that the numbers of cherries and peaches on the plates in the painting are constantly
changing. Cherries indicate the number of incoming mails on the network, and
peaches the number of outgoing mails. The project seeks to encourage "old
media"-oriented audiences to consider the aesthetic possibilities of networked
digital media.
W. Bradford Paley, Code Profiles, 2002
Touchscreen; software commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art
website
Code Profiles is a software that displays its underlying code and comments on itself.
The code reads in its own source and displays it in a tiny font. As users
move their finger over the touch screen, each line of the code becomes legible.
The software moves three points in "code space": the white line traces
the code in the order it was written by the artist; the amber line traces the
code word by word as someone might read it; the green line shows a sample of
how the computer reads the code. The code lines themselves gradually get brighter
as they execute more. In a self-reflexive way, Code Profiles unveils a "virtual
object" as the algorithms constructing this very object.
Eric Paulos & Chris Myers, Limelight, 2003
website
Limelight is a sculptural
object designed to provide the user with an awareness of the current condition
of actual threats that should be of concern. It is an
automated, electronic, personal, tactical, threat detection and indication system
that identifies, monitors, and interprets the numerous local and global indicators
that might signal a threat. Limelight is designed to provide the necessary balance
of local measurements and global monitoring to provide an accurate awareness
of threats. However, the privilege of obtaining this information and easing the
mind of the user is not without its price: the relinquishing of privacy and personal
biometric data as well as the profiling of the individual's usage patterns, location,
and activities. Standing at around 40 cm and weighing less than 4 kg, Limelight
has a variety of local sensing equipment onboard that samples the local environment
thousands of times every second. The measurements are carefully compared to "normal
parameters" as well as globally changing indicators to watch for any sign
signaling a potential threat. The rules used to determine a current threat are
also in flux, constantly being updated and reconfigured via the wireless remote
network connection to Limelight from the EIU server.
|
