September 07, 2004
Tomorrow, Perry Hoberman (installation artist extraordinaire) is in town to talk about: Recycling Post-Consumer Media Content.
Also tomorrow, Vincent Diamante (myself) is dragged into town to: facilitate discussion between students and this frighteningly interesting topic.
Being the good student I am, I googled (verb, transitive) his name a bit and found: Hey! I’ve seen this guy’s stuff!
A little more than a year ago, I ran across a Slashdot article featuring Perry’s work. And then there was the article in the Daily Trojan, of all things, talking about a man that was saving all of his spam and turning them into art. It’s all rather fascinating STUFF, making me look at my own collections of STUFF (of which I have copious amounts) and prompting me to start work on cleaning out my inbox of the 13427 spam messages I was so quickly endowed with…
It’s all very timely material.
The latest work on Perry Hoberman’s website shows off his 2003 collection, ACCEPT, that looks at some of the latest issues to hit the tech community. End User License Agreements, spam, and even the OK/Cancel dialog box do not escape his touch. (wrath?) The absurdity of it all is both laughable and scarily close to reality.
Nowadays, Perry (artist and interactive culture commentator) is working on: wormholes. Awfully cool looking stuff, but more reminiscent of a computer distribution TV commercial than previous exhibitions, with their POWER DRILLS and BAR CODE READERS and OLD COMPUTER TERMINALS.
The thing that throws me (myself) (yes, I’m forcing it. Chalk it up to pomo. I know, it’s SO 1980s…) for a loop for this lecture tomorrow is the title: Recycling Post-Consumer Media Content. Okay…Post-Consumer Media Content. Stuff that has exhausted its original consumer usage.
And now I wonder about how one should judge this exhaustion.
(Maybe Post-modernism isn’t so 1980s…)
His Faraday’s Garden takes lathes and lights and blenders and let’s the resounding din grow out of it all. Here all these instruments lie, unattached to what is needed to let them fulfill their initial consumer purposes; they’re here to make music. This was 1990.
Cathartic User Interface gets into the utterly purposeful world of computer feedback and reappropriates it with the similarly purposeful art of venting; fastballs into computer keyboards buffer the strike of those ubiquitous application errors quite nicely, I’d imagine.
I think the problem with the title is my inability to think of anything as losing its use. Old paper that I can’t write on? Crushed up aluminum cans? I can understand recycling those into newer, leaner, meaner, more useful things than what they’ve degenerated into. On the other hand, the tools of interactive media: scanners, physical interfaces, displays…I can’t think of them as losing their usefulness. Somehow, for these things that are built with the indelible mark of their own timeliness, their timeliness suspends their own obsolescence from emerging, thanks to this nearly neo-post-modernist understanding of awareness and absurdity that has emerged in the increasingly savvy world of interactive technology.
At Siggraph ’95, Hoberman is quotes as saying: “We live in an age in which technological paradigms shift about every half year. Almost every month seems to offer radically new media. Overnight, new standards are created and, suddenly, what was once exotic becomes merely commonplace (if it isn't totally forgotten).” I can’t help but disagree, that commonality breeds familiarity, not forgetfulness…or perhaps I’m so out of touch with the general consumer that you can’t help but think about how VERY WRONG I AM.
(We’ll find out!)
Here are some questions that I have, and perhaps they’ll inspire your own questions for our esteemed speaker tomorrow:
Is the art of his immediate future an art of control or one of resignation by the viewers/listeners/appreciators, etc.?
Does Wormholes fit into an art of empowerment between individuals or one of separation? Is it a play on awareness or simply a series of play?
Where is society moving to in its constantly evolving view of technology in art, and just how restrictive is installed technology in creative uses?
How are the technological paradigms shifting in this world increasingly burdened with technological restriction? Lightened with progress?
And...just for those interested in my blog... why do I have a category named: "Cheese"
Posted by diamante at September 7, 2004 06:13 PM
Comments
What instantly comes to mind is the story of 軍艦島 (= gunkanjima = Battleship Island) -- an artificial island off the coast of Japan which, until 1974, was the world's most densely-populated island. The streets and crumbling buildings of the island, I imagine, still contain the detritus of human activity -- an empty bottle here, rusty tools there, furniture and electronic equipment given over to age and disuse, and the creaking elegy of steel and wood that reaches no human ears.
That island is the largest piece of post-consumer ... something ... that I can think of. It's certainly not "art", and it's certainly not "junk". I don't quite know what it is. But it is powerful nonetheless -- on nights where the darkness is so thick that the birds struggle to cut through it in their desultory flight, I lie awake and I think of what that place must smell like, must sound like, must look like. I wonder if the winds there still carry the voices of the men and women who fled from that place long ago. And I wonder if the place could have so much impact on us here and now if not for the inscrutable sleep of forgetfulness, that crowning gift to humanity without which our lives would not -- could not -- exist.
Then I turn my attention to the eroge-turned-TV-anime "Da Capo", which ... disappointed me. I wasn't disappointed because the characters were monochromatic hacks (they were, and sometimes that's okay, if the background is sufficiently interesting -- static images with no inherent meaning overlayed on a sea of possibility become imbued with meaning that would not otherwise exist whether we like it or not sometimes), or because the story doesn't really go anywhere in either the game or the anime (Slice-of-life can be well-done! Go, go, Kokoro Library!). No, what disappointed me was the fact that the franchise allowed me -- at certain rare points -- to see a glimpse of a world where nothing exists but the prefix post-.
One of the franchise's central premises is the existence of a large cherry tree that grants the wishes of the people who live in its vicinity. It provides us with a great deal of the melodrama in the plots of both the game and the anime. But in no way is it used to full effect. The anime, in particular, begins with the main character dreaming of the tree, noting that he is a useless magician -- able to see into other peoples' dreams, but unable to affect anything that happens in those dreams. That line gave me pause -- what is the essence of "useless"? Were the "things" abandoned on Battleship Island left there to be because they were not of any "use"? What "use" is there in the ways that we choose to exist, here in this reality, here in this time?
And I thought.
What if the narrator lived completely alone in a place not unlike Battleship Island? What if that cherry tree did exist, and what if the people that he saw and the things that he did and the school that he attended were all present thanks to his unspoken wishes for companionship? Would he then be able to cast aside any of those things that make up his reality when they are no longer of any "use" to him?
Are wishes of any "use"?
And does "use" have any bearing on that thing we call reality?
Should the main character ever wake from his "dream", only to see that he is living alone in a town long-abandoned with only objects that have lost their "use" as his companions, then does reality itself have any "use" anymore?
It is as if in this world colored in the wide brush strokes of past imperfect and the indistinct scribling of future imperative, the present -- in which we sleep the sleep of forgetfulness and see not what tomorrow will bring -- has become the most difficult thing to find, even in those brief moments when we think ourselves to be awake.
Posted by: gp32 at September 7, 2004 08:10 PM
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