Experimenta Prototype
BlackBox, Victorian Arts Centre
5-12 September 2002
It is not hard to see morse code as a technology that profoundly changed the world. This binary system of dots and dashes abstracted and simplified the complexities of writing, and allowed communication over distance on a scale and speed previously inconceivable. Both conceptually simple in its design and powerfully human in its resonance, it is no surprise that morse code was invented by an artist. Samuel Morse had established a successful painting career well before his experiments with electro-magnetics allowed his in 1844 to send the first coded message: 'What hath God wrought?'
It is a question at the very heart of our equivocal relationship with the extraordinary change that technology has forced upon the modern age. Technology is central to the history of modernity, not as a linear series of discrete inventions, but as a history of progressive and interdependent prototypes.
This complex network of technical relationships and creative influences is also clearly seen in the histories of art and film, with the figure of the artist often imagined as a kind of scientist, their practice characterised by qualities of innovation and discovery. But save anecodotal examples like Morse, while artists have applied technologies to their work, they have rarely invented them.
Increasingly, this comparison between artist and scientist is becoming less rhetorical. The lines of delineation converge to a greater and greater extent. Not only are the artists in this exhibition using technology as their materials, they are inventing new technologies themselves, and hybridising existing technologies to create new materials specific to their practice. They are, in other words, creating prototypes.
These artists have moved beyond treating science and technology simply as their medium. They are pushing into a new realm, creating works that emphasise the human resonances of technology, proving that it need not be alienating. The works chosen for this exhibition engage the audience with profoundly human interfaces that create a relationship that is experiential, tactile and intimate.
Several of the works in Prototype use interactivity in a way that evokes a sense of wonder that transcends everyday experience. The voice-activated interface in Stephen Barrass' Op Shop encourages an unbridled physicality in one's interaction, so enchanting that the user can forget that they are singing in a public place. Also voice-activated, Elizabeth Vander Zaag's Nice Talk uses technology to establish a less tangible level of interaction by interpreting the emotionally inflections of the users conversation.
The sense of wonder possible through tecchnology is especially evident in the seductive illusion of Richard Brown's Mimetic Starfish. The work takes hold of the imagination, so that users become progressively attached to the convincingly organic lifeform. The intersection between organism and machine, and their increasing ability for technological systems to interface with hybridised biological and genetic systems is evoked in a number of works. Beauty Kit and Itsu: Plaid by Pleix both predict an appalling future where science and medicine are unbridled by ethics. Chris Mether's Chicken in a Box and Isobel Knowles and Haima Marriott'sPet Sounds both suggest that their animal surrogates are part of some bizarre genetic experiment, the very type that Amy Young's Rearming the Spineless Opuntia attempts to reverse. These prototypes suggest that to aspire to become greater than nature will allow, is a desire more contested than ever.
At its most basic, all technology is interactive. Many of the works in Prototype, however, push interactivity to a point where it is compellingly human and irregular as, for example, a conversation with a friend. Source material for artists seeking interactive technology charged with this sort of emotion is everywhere. Ben Morieson's Burnout 2001 - Part 2: The Game finds it in the crowded gaming arcade. Allowing users of his Daytona-style game to print out their burnt rubber 'drawings', Morieson gives the passionate gamer a souvenir of their virtual experience. Again inspired by popular culture is Simon Norton's Testimony: A Story Machine that invents a different type of storytelling steered by the reader, rather than the author.
The human capacity to creative narrative is produced in an all together different way in Jane Crappsley's Untitled Drawing in Space. By capturing the user on an intimate and bodily level, her work creates an evocative and open-ended landscape that encourages viewers to create their own psychological narrative. David McDowell'sSee Saw also produces this kind of poetic interactivity through the viewers oscillation between seeing and imagining.
In Prototype, creative applications of technology show our world afresh. The way we depict our environment is examined in Martin Walsh's Over Written, Under Written, using stereoscopic photography to capture landscape in a way that transcends the map. Another reimagining of landscape occurs in Chris Henschke's Tonal Field Navigator, visualising the digital realm as an interactive space to be explored, and giving presence to the invisible grain of our world.
While we often privilege sight in our experience of the environment, works in Prototype unearth the central role that sound plays in the way we understand place. Bruce Mowson's Flesh Antenna mimics the complex sediments of noise deposited by technology, like an audio microcosm of the modern world, reminding us of the complexity of our aural surroundings. Sound is used to reinterpret the way that we understand geography in Iain Mott's Sound Mapping. As well as allowing the audience to radically blur the lines between sound installation and live performance,Sound Mapping gives audio presence to the latent textures of our occupation of the environment.
The works in this exhibition demonstrate how interactivity can engage the human resonances of technology. The engage with the emotional fibres of everyday life: communication, storytelling, place and tradition. Works also mine the very nature of invention, exploring how creativity and innovation go hand in hand. In the absence of a defined history or tradition, new media art borrows from the histories of those disciplines that influence it, resulting in the range of diverse and personal references in this exhibition. Prototype shows that although technology revolutionises our lives, it is memory, myth and magic that frame the way we relate to, and interact with, those inventions that change our world.
BlackBox, Victorian Arts Centre
5-12 September 2002
It is not hard to see morse code as a technology that profoundly changed the world. This binary system of dots and dashes abstracted and simplified the complexities of writing, and allowed communication over distance on a scale and speed previously inconceivable. Both conceptually simple in its design and powerfully human in its resonance, it is no surprise that morse code was invented by an artist. Samuel Morse had established a successful painting career well before his experiments with electro-magnetics allowed his in 1844 to send the first coded message: 'What hath God wrought?'
It is a question at the very heart of our equivocal relationship with the extraordinary change that technology has forced upon the modern age. Technology is central to the history of modernity, not as a linear series of discrete inventions, but as a history of progressive and interdependent prototypes.
This complex network of technical relationships and creative influences is also clearly seen in the histories of art and film, with the figure of the artist often imagined as a kind of scientist, their practice characterised by qualities of innovation and discovery. But save anecodotal examples like Morse, while artists have applied technologies to their work, they have rarely invented them.
Increasingly, this comparison between artist and scientist is becoming less rhetorical. The lines of delineation converge to a greater and greater extent. Not only are the artists in this exhibition using technology as their materials, they are inventing new technologies themselves, and hybridising existing technologies to create new materials specific to their practice. They are, in other words, creating prototypes.
These artists have moved beyond treating science and technology simply as their medium. They are pushing into a new realm, creating works that emphasise the human resonances of technology, proving that it need not be alienating. The works chosen for this exhibition engage the audience with profoundly human interfaces that create a relationship that is experiential, tactile and intimate.
Several of the works in Prototype use interactivity in a way that evokes a sense of wonder that transcends everyday experience. The voice-activated interface in Stephen Barrass' Op Shop encourages an unbridled physicality in one's interaction, so enchanting that the user can forget that they are singing in a public place. Also voice-activated, Elizabeth Vander Zaag's Nice Talk uses technology to establish a less tangible level of interaction by interpreting the emotionally inflections of the users conversation.
The sense of wonder possible through tecchnology is especially evident in the seductive illusion of Richard Brown's Mimetic Starfish. The work takes hold of the imagination, so that users become progressively attached to the convincingly organic lifeform. The intersection between organism and machine, and their increasing ability for technological systems to interface with hybridised biological and genetic systems is evoked in a number of works. Beauty Kit and Itsu: Plaid by Pleix both predict an appalling future where science and medicine are unbridled by ethics. Chris Mether's Chicken in a Box and Isobel Knowles and Haima Marriott'sPet Sounds both suggest that their animal surrogates are part of some bizarre genetic experiment, the very type that Amy Young's Rearming the Spineless Opuntia attempts to reverse. These prototypes suggest that to aspire to become greater than nature will allow, is a desire more contested than ever.
At its most basic, all technology is interactive. Many of the works in Prototype, however, push interactivity to a point where it is compellingly human and irregular as, for example, a conversation with a friend. Source material for artists seeking interactive technology charged with this sort of emotion is everywhere. Ben Morieson's Burnout 2001 - Part 2: The Game finds it in the crowded gaming arcade. Allowing users of his Daytona-style game to print out their burnt rubber 'drawings', Morieson gives the passionate gamer a souvenir of their virtual experience. Again inspired by popular culture is Simon Norton's Testimony: A Story Machine that invents a different type of storytelling steered by the reader, rather than the author.
The human capacity to creative narrative is produced in an all together different way in Jane Crappsley's Untitled Drawing in Space. By capturing the user on an intimate and bodily level, her work creates an evocative and open-ended landscape that encourages viewers to create their own psychological narrative. David McDowell'sSee Saw also produces this kind of poetic interactivity through the viewers oscillation between seeing and imagining.
In Prototype, creative applications of technology show our world afresh. The way we depict our environment is examined in Martin Walsh's Over Written, Under Written, using stereoscopic photography to capture landscape in a way that transcends the map. Another reimagining of landscape occurs in Chris Henschke's Tonal Field Navigator, visualising the digital realm as an interactive space to be explored, and giving presence to the invisible grain of our world.
While we often privilege sight in our experience of the environment, works in Prototype unearth the central role that sound plays in the way we understand place. Bruce Mowson's Flesh Antenna mimics the complex sediments of noise deposited by technology, like an audio microcosm of the modern world, reminding us of the complexity of our aural surroundings. Sound is used to reinterpret the way that we understand geography in Iain Mott's Sound Mapping. As well as allowing the audience to radically blur the lines between sound installation and live performance,Sound Mapping gives audio presence to the latent textures of our occupation of the environment.
The works in this exhibition demonstrate how interactivity can engage the human resonances of technology. The engage with the emotional fibres of everyday life: communication, storytelling, place and tradition. Works also mine the very nature of invention, exploring how creativity and innovation go hand in hand. In the absence of a defined history or tradition, new media art borrows from the histories of those disciplines that influence it, resulting in the range of diverse and personal references in this exhibition. Prototype shows that although technology revolutionises our lives, it is memory, myth and magic that frame the way we relate to, and interact with, those inventions that change our world.
