NEW
MEDIA ART SHOW
Subrealities and Distributed.Nerves
 Curated
by professors Dean Terry and Marilyn Waligore, this 3-part event
features Subrealities on the web, Distributed.Nerves
in the University Gallery (Visual Arts Building), and speakers Lev
Manovich and Natalie Bookchin. Show runs Mar 18 -
Apr 16 Visit
site
Lev Manovich
April 6, 7 p.m., Jonsson Performance Hall
One of today's most influential thinkers in the fields of media
arts and digital culture. His book, The Language of New Media, has
been described by reviewers as "the most suggestive and broad
ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan" and "the
first rigorous and far-reaching theorization of new media."
Natalie
Bookchin
April 13, 7 p.m., Jonsson Performance Hall
Natalie Bookchin is a leading Internet artist, Rockefeller Foundation
Fellow, and creator of online games such as Metapet and agoraXchange.
Reviewers place Bookchin’s work in the larger context of social
engagement, “For Bookchin...art is literally action—making
things happen, one way or the other.”
Subrealities
will be presented online at subrealities.utdinteractive.net. The
exhibition explores virtual spaces that present alternatives to
existing museum/gallery structures as well as a counterpoint to
the dominant commercial voices of corporate media. It brings together
artists David Crawford, Sharon Daniel, John Freyer, Peter Horvath,
Annette Weintraub, and Johannes Weymann to examine new methods of
generating and distributing narrative through the use of digital
media.
Distributed.Nerves
Running concurrently with subrealities, Distributed.Nerves presents
the next generation of digital art from students in the Art and
Technology Program at UTD. While relying upon computer processes
or the digital alteration of imagery, these young artists engage
in a dialogue with familiar forms such as photography, video, painting,
and installation. The U.T. Dallas students participating in the
exhibition include Kelly Brown, Will Dooley, Megan Foreman, Beverly
Grose, Don Huff, Sara Ishii, Cynthia Parry, Jeff Senita, and Amber
Wigant.
Notes
by Dean Terry:
Submission
| Submersion | Time
“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard
a revolution,” George Orwell wrote, rather “one makes
a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship”.
The waves of Internet and digital “revolutions” that
are combinations of genuine change and well financed marketing hype
offer not only possibilities for new forms of expression but also
new forms of control. Successfully negotiating the barriers demands
submerging one’s self beneath structures that define the context
of creative manifestation.
And part of this submersion includes redefining what digital time
feels like. Though measured precisely, digital time can become more
like lived time: indefinite, shifting, and variable.
The technologies that form the distributed experience mediated by
the internet, software, and hardware form a commercial matrix of
technologies that function effectively as an authoritarian regime
of method. Students, especially, are forced into particular patterns
of action and behavior. They adopt software designer’s ideas
about what “editing” and “selecting” and
“compositing” mean, and learn in the maniacally compressed
duration of computer or “Internet time.”
Hence many of the problems encountered by young artists are the
same ones that afflict content and expression of all kinds that
has become digital. Mismatched ideas about property and uniqueness
and place continue to slow the growth of our understanding of art
and digital gestures that have become relational and distributed
across multiple spaces and times. Where the “art” is
often what is in between objects, rather than the objects themselves;
a perception of passing rather than an observation of particularity.
The openings in the wired and wireless array of evolving technology
are many. Video can be further extracted from its linear bindings.
Text can become more image-like, fluid, and unstable as it exists
in our thoughts. Time can be reconstructed based on personal and
shared context, rather than the demands of commerce.
Most time spent on computers is regulated, observed, mechanical,
and highly specific. Computer mediated arts should free us from
this delineated time and place us in the unspecified duration of
lived experience. The felt time of Henri Bergson’s duree where
the oppression of mechanical time is replaced by the possibilities
of freedom and authenticity of despatialized time.
In that place/time, the clocks on our metaphorical desktop disappear,
the email is forgotten, the to-do reminders never pop up, and we
are allowed to flow uninterrupted into authored experience, rather
than fragmented among pragmatic tasks. We submerge ourselves beneath
them. And before they can rise above, these new artists must dig
down, deep, underneath assumptions about what art practice and experience
is. To “go under” as Nietzsche insists. The inherited
reality needs to be dug up, gone under, with the artist subsumed,
submerged, creating, as we have here, an matrix of subrealities.
Notes
by Marilyn Waligore:
The
artists in subrealities generate visual narratives in response
to the intensity of our contemporary lives. Meanwhile, the layered,
interactive nature of these works rely upon our ability to negotiate
increasingly complex forms of information. As guides, both John
Freyer and Sharon Daniel set parameters and await our arrival. In
Sharon Daniel’s Narrative Contingencies, the throw
of the dice introduces chance and random processes into storytelling.
Images of hand gestures and fragments of clothing, coupled with
snippets of text, prompt reflection on human relationships. Embedded
into Narrative Contingencies are excerpts, referencing
the perspectives of women, from Marguerite Dumas’ novel The
Ravishing of Lol V. Stein and Susan Rubin Suleiman’s
theoretical text Subversive Intent.1
for Daniel, the online activities of reading and writing redefine
the role of the participant in determining the meaning of a text.
In her online projects she investigates potential applications of
technology in order to foster collaboration within communities.
John Freyer’s site Allmylifeforsale generates new
stories from the sale of his personal effects via the internet.
Parallel to the drive of Fluxus artists to merge art and life, Freyer
exposes his own life to examination, and encourages others to follow.
His request of each buyer, that he/she forward an update and photograph,
extends the tale surrounding each object sold. Freyer’s creative
description is often matched by an odd, fictional story penned by
the object’s new owner, initiating an ongoing public exchange.
David Crawford, Annette Weintraub and Peter Horvath embrace the
use of multiple planes to layer images and information in their
net.art environments. In Peter Horvath’s The Presence
Of Absence the viewer encounters small virtual windows that
open and close, following what Lev Manovich describes as spatial
montage, where “time becomes spatialized, distributed over
the surface of the screen.2 The human face
functions as the interface or key for navigating these alternating
images. Exchanges of dialogue and video imagery imply travel and
separation, suggesting an emotional connection strained by physical
distance. Annette Weintraub also adopts variations of montage in
Life Support. Her line drawings describe frames for translucent
photographs while they also delineate interiors. Four animations
pan austere hospital environments, while merging past and present
through the superimposition of imagery. Weintraub’s project,
accompanied by the deep, monotone voice of the narrator, critiques
the architecture of institutional health care environments, questioning
their appropriateness as places for convalescence.
Stop Motion Studies-Series 13 reveals David Crawford’s
fascination with the urban spaces of subways. He documents parallel
realities, in particular the visual contrast between the pensive
rider and the harried commuter. Stop Motion Studies- the
title serving as a contradiction in terms-points to the visual tension
created by the difference between stasis and motion, from the barely
perceptible movement of the straphangers to the blur of textures
signifying a passing train or rush of commuters. In these videos,
windows and doors function alternately as frames and mirrors to
highlight the shared experience of everyday life that often remains
overlooked.
These artists locate new models within digital media for the fusing
of image, sound, and text to address questions of subjectivity and
human relationships, and identity within social institutions. Subrealities
points to the reality below the surface, which can be referenced
through simultaneity and the intersections that occur as media elements
overlap and collide.
1 Daniel langlois Foundation. “Sharon Daniel.” Centre
for Research and Documents Database. (2000):Online. 15 Jan. 2005.
2 Lev Manovich, The Language Of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2001) 325.
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