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Class Blog
- Dr Simone Paterson
- Teaches New Media Art and Theory, Cyber Arts and Digital Video and Special Effects in the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Polytechnic and State University (Virginia Tech). She has been invited to teach Contemporary Arts Practices at Hollins University in the MFA program in Dance. Fall 2009.
I'm thinking about Gary Hill's "Tall Ships" video installation (with the projections that walk toward the viewer, stop, and look at her/him).
ReplyDeleteThis is sort of simple, but I think, first of all, within this assumption of audience passivity is the idea that they sit in chairs and look at something without having to move at all themselves. Any installation or performance work that requires the audience to literally mobilize automatically challenges this notion of passivity in that they are participating in a physical way.
On page 645 of the reading Hershman says: "Interactive systems require viewers to react. Their choices are facilitated by means of a keyboard, mouse, or touch-sensitive screen." When I think of "active" viewing, it's easy for me to think of work like Hershman's first because they so obviously require some sort of activity by the audience since they require the use of the audience's hands to touch/choose/direct the work.
I refer to "Tall Ships" specifically though because of the subtlety of participation. It's different from Hershman's "Lorna" or "Deep Contact" in that touch is not required for the action/interaction to occur. I'm fascinated by the fact that the audience doesn't need to "do" or "choose" anything in order to activate the work; they only need to stand in a place. Still, the action of the piece cannot occur unless the audience members put themselves in that place, so to me, even this challenges the assumption of viewing art as passive.
I get excited when I think about, talk about, see interactive art. I am writing my theory paper about interactive performance and I enjoy thinking about who has agency in an interactive performance: choreographer? performer? audience member? I am also aware how much more interactive possibility now exists with the internet, which was not yet widely available when this article was written. But, I am also aware that it's a false assumption to equate "online" with "access," since many many people still could not not access it just because it's online. More people than can access the 14 remaining copies of Lorna, yes, but still many could not. And where do we place value? It is with the number of people interaction or in the depth of an individual's connectivity?
ReplyDeleteWhen I think of interactive New Media art, I immediately think of Susan Kozel. Looking back through my notes on Closer, I associate this article's discussion of interactivity with her concept of "reversibility" in Closer. I think of media that "does not look back" (ex: Ghostcatching/Bill T. Jones and Biped/Cunningham), and media that does "look back," like Kozel in the bed piece she discusses. This pice provides more reversibility of gaze -- it is still not equal, but viewer and performer can both see and interact have have real-time interactions, decided by humans on both end of the communication, and mediated by the pieces' technology and design structure.
In the article, I noticed how many times "nostalgia" was mentioned -- yearning for a past time when we had real connections with people, perhaps. And I kept thinking about why one would use new media to fill this nostalgic void, as opposed to generating human-to-human interactions. Why would a mediated response to this feeling be better than a live one? Again, I think of Kozel, and her discussion about what these mediated relationships can reveal phenomenologically. What they can reveal to us about experience adn relationg to other and to dance and the ephemeral. I keep coming back to the benefits of "real" interaction, person to person. I don't want to rule out that media can't do this: we know it can. Gary Hill's "Tall Ships" video installation also comes to mind for me. Based on how it was described to us, a genuine feeling of connectivity and humanity was communicated despite that it was not a live performer on the other end of the technology. But there is something I love about the room for live human input on both sides, as opposed to human/already programmed by a human in the past interaction (as in Lorna).
“The dominant presumption is that making art is active and viewing it is passive.”
ReplyDeleteYes, I guess I have no doubt to agree that “making art is active”, because it is a process of decision making, once you have to make a decision, which is active. However, I’m not quite sure about “viewing it is passive”. I think in certain degree that the role of viewer is passive, at least audience is not the one who initiate the “art sharing process”. But if the audience have to make decision during they perceive the artwork, I think it is the “active” moment of audience.
I remembered I had that “active” moment as an viewer/participant when I visited the installation in PS1 last year. It was Leandro Erlich's Swimming Pool (http://ps1.org/exhibitions/view/207/). The swimming pool was built in between two levels of the building. The people on both levels could see each other through the pool. In this case, I was not only the viewer and also being seen. Moreover, I could change other people’s participate experience by moving myself around the pool. At this point, I think I was in a interactive state, rather than a totally passive viewer.
Making art is definitely active. I'm not sure if i agree with "viewing it is passive." I've been rereading Randy Martin's "Critical Moves" and I keep thinking about audience(s) having agency. I know for me when I'm viewing art the audience or people around me definitely affect how i see what is being presented. Whether someone is cheering, covering their ears, looking at their program, snoring, there is always an energy stirring in the air that does not make my experience feel passive. The audience is there viewing (except for the guy snoring), contemplating, and forming their own perception of what the heck they're seeing. That experience feels very alive; the audience has a lot of power.
ReplyDeleteThinking of other work pushing this notion of interaction and viewing as not passive (although i did not see it and only read about it): Susan Kozel's bed piece for example was highly interactive. The "viewers" could fully participate in her piece if they wanted to. Through the technology of having live video feed, there was an immediate response from the performer who was in a separate room when the viewer/participant touched her projected image on the bed. This brings the idea of audience having agency to a new level. The work seems to need audience participation to be fully realized.
Thoughts on the article: In Hershman’s "Deep Contact," when you're playing with the technology and touching the person's body on the screen and then through the surveillance camera you're image is now on the screen. Aaaaahhh! That creeps me out..... yet is wonderful and hilarious.
By the vantage of the technology, is true that the new media artist is able to invite audience to take action on their work, such as using remote control in Hershman’s Lorna that can control Lorna’s action, or by walking in to certain area in Hill’s Tall Ship ,then the character in the projection will come toward the audience. It does create a whole new possibility to artist to create their work. Moreover, sometime, interaction may create in this process.
ReplyDeleteI also think that, this will trigger audience’s curiosity. I think people would like to know if they make other decision for Lorna, would the ending be different. I suppose this is what “inverse labyrinth of themselves” refer to in the reading. Viewer has actually placed in a labyrinth that Hershman made.
It also reminds me of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, the concept of this work is really challenging the tradition, and it was way back to 1964. Audience has to line up and cut a piece of her cloth off until she was naked. This is such a simple concept without involving any new technology, but the impact is so strong. The spot light shift from Yoko Ono to the audience (who holding the scissors) alternately. She actually made the audience become part of the performance.
While, technology is most recognized for its utility and immediacy i.e. speed of delivery, I think interactive new media art is asking us to reflect on what would happen if we were more attentive to our relationships with technology?
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of Susan Kozel's interest in "ethical relationships with digital data, whether a human ethics can be developed from human-digital interactions?"
Maybe the current artistic zeitgeist is a debate about whether human-digital interaction or human-human interaction provides more of a reflective, meaning-making space for today's relating?
Both human-digital and human-human interactive art, seem invested in asserting that all experiences are extensions of our thinking, moving, and touching. Through dance I'm asking what would happen if we were more attentive to our relationships with bodies, and new media interactivity likely extends this question mediated through today's technologies.
I'm curious whether new media interactivity can better contrast how no human experience is passive or without accountability by combining two things that could be perceived as passive - technology and art viewing. Does this help media artists to skirt or reveal historical hegemonies?
On a local scale I am not convinced. I think human-human interaction drives home an immediacy of insight that digital-human interaction may only theorize. But I could see it the other way too.
Like on a global scale, I think digital-human interaction may be the most concrete way to provide reflection, as it is otherwise difficult to feel our impact across currencies, time zones, and cultures.
If we are all eventually to be interacting cyborgs, new media interactivity helps us practice integrating the intellectual and sensory possibilities. If the inevitability of cyborg culture seems too far fetched, I argue that new media interactivity wakes our virtual powers.
For example, I felt so telepathically charged interacting at Virginia Tech's Experiential Gallery. To walk into a unknown space, and encounter my movement's shadows as impetus for animating MMUVA's Pollock inspired traces, or feel my hands warm and charge with interactive play and compassion for the Dome Garden's glo-bot creatures, or posture myself as a haunting laugh and then retreat from the creepy arms of Always Uncoupled, or sense my potential to be moving in two environments at once - a bare room and in the "waters" of Elemental!
... Do dance "viewers" get this kind of waking of their virtual powers?
Another thought, or question...
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking about the difference between active and passive interactivity...
I value the space in which we can unselfconciously let things pass through to see what's left. This is likely passive interactivity, and active interactivity has more of an emphasis on exercising influence/agency. Perhaps???
PPS - ... food for thought ... this question reminds me of Tommy's discussion of the sublime vs. the beautiful in theory class at ADF ...
ReplyDeleteit definitely went over my head... but I do recall him musing that the sublime was active in that it gets folks dynamically charged, and that the beautiful was more passive in its docile familiarity... jus thinking...
For me, art does not exist without an audience.
ReplyDeleteFrom this viewpoint, the audience is always an active part of creating the work, as the work gets created in the interaction of the art-piece (whatever it is) and the audience.
To try and say it really simply: When i read the book, the story is created in my mind as the text and i meet. When i read the same book for the second time, i notice different things in the text and the story has a different flavour. When you read that same book, your reaction is different from mine. We are not passively eating what is being fed, we are co-creating the piece as it is happening.
For an artist to assume the audience to be passive, it feels like there is a need to hold on to the illusion that the artist could keep the right to solely define what it is that they are doing.
But at the moment that the piece of art is first exposed to the world, the artist loses the authorship in some sense. The people will always experience it through their own viewpoint and add meaning from their own previous life experience. The audience, no matter what they do, even just sitting, become co-authors of the piece. The artist cannot stop this from happening.
I imagine what would be a truly passive audience - maybe an audience who does not know they are participating in a work (until the moment they realise what is happening and become active). An example of this kind of passive audience would be Pippilotti Rist's Closet Circuit. It is positioned in the museum, but in a place where people are not expecting to encounter interactive art: the toilet stall. The audience/participant remains passive in mind, until they see their own bare rearside projected on the little screen next to the toilet bowl, and realise they have been active participants in the installation before even knowing it was there (at which point they become fully active participants). So, I would argue that we can be physically active in a piece of art without being knowingly engaged, and that would be the one kind of passivity i see in the audience. Knowingly viewing a piece of art is already participation, whether the viewer is physically active or not.
One of the most delightful interactive art experiences has been Jenny Holzer's Projections at MASS MoCA 2008. A gigantic dark space with projected text running through the walls, the ceiling, the floor, layers of text alternating, impossible for the reader to read everything. Looking at the text in the space, i noticed there were big black lumps of something on the floor of the space. I gingerly entered the space and walked on the text running on the floor, venturing to see what the lumps were. They turned out to be massive beanbags, so i lay down on one and watched the play of light and darkness, and the people who had decided it was ok to enter the space after i had first entered. When i finally thought i should get up and move on, i was surprised that there was a white mark on the beanbag under my hand. Under my arm. Under my whole body. The fabric was heat sensitive and changed colour from black to white when my warm body lay on it. And when i got up i left a visible trace in the space - and saw the traces that other people had left there.
I think the reason that this delighted me so much was that there was no instruction, and no explanation, the space interacted with me when i decided to go in, and lie down: it was a journey of discovery rather than me as a spectator "controlling" the space.
So, i did not answer your question in my first post - seems like i needed to make a point that i don't believe the assumption to be true in any kind of art. Cheeky student. But i will try to answer the question briefly now.
ReplyDeleteIn my understanding new media art has changed people's perception of how to relate to an image on the screen, or to sound in the space. New media art has shifted the audience from the place of a consumer to the place of an active arts audience, not only by being interactive but by posing questions about the relationship between the art (object/subject) and the audience (subject/object).
John Haber writes about this in a review of the Guggenheim museum video art retrospective in 1996: "Just when the living-room sofa started to feel comfortable, the TV all but leaps up on it like a ill-trained pet. The monitor and viewer become subjects in an ever-evolving, shared space. Quick, head for the rest room while it is safe."
But alas, thanks to Pippilotti Rist, not even the restroom is safe anymore.
(I have another example i would like to share, but forgot the name of... been trying to find the piece online for hours now, maybe if i explain it to you Simone you will be able to tell me who and what it was.)