notes from the field
Another Currents has come and gone with all the attendant celebration and excitement. I had a small hand in installing and dismantling parts of of the exhibition so I'm not an impartial observer.
Modesty prevents me from mentioning that my Stanley -- Feeling Abandoned -- was, by many reports, one of the show's darlings. However modesty does not prevent me from admitting that my other two works Fear Producer and Agon Box were heavily outclassed in scale and scope. Anyway, I thank the Parallel Studios producers for giving them all a chance.
I spent time with many of the Interactive Installation works, viewed a few of the Single Channel videos, attended one performance evening, and missed just about everything else. I twice looked at the array of waiting Pads and PCs containing what I thought should be enticing games and websites, but never actually figured out what I was supposed to do in order to get them to pay attention to me. As it does for any cross-cutting festival, work varied from embarrassing to enthralling and I'm sure other folks have selected different exemplars of both.
addenda Jul28:
Funnily enough, I was searching for other reviews of the show and found this:
Reflections on the Public Space of CURRENTS New Media Festival
which has only one work in common with my favorites listed below, and quite a few from my least list...
Most of the plain-old-video work was displayed in groups on monitors throughout the space. I rotated through a number of times in order to catch one particular video but always managed to return at the halfway point. I get the idea that I should be exposed to the variety of selections, but it would be nice to have a playbill with times and images or even a now-playing ticker to let you know what you are watching and how long you will have to wait for it to end.
I was struck by the number of projections onto semi-transparent media giving a sense of three dimensional space. Just as painters used film and video to expand into time, videographers, waiting impatiently for true 3D projection and virtual reality, seem to be using translucency to expand into the third spacial dimension. There was one VR goggle piece but it was always in use when I passed by. Reports were that it was a combination of fabulous and dizzy making.
In the world of Installation the Interactive part was advisory, unless one considers walking around in a space to be such. Some of the pieces were Responsive, or should have been when working correctly, but very few (close to zero not counting my un-mentionable robot) allowed for the back-and-forth communication that I consider necessary to interaction.
As a standin for interaction we can thank the Gesamtkunstwerk of Richard Wagner for mutating from theater into film, architecture, and installation. And we can thank Duchamp, Cage, and Cunningham for making seemingly aleatoric and arbitrary combinations of light, sound, and backdrop deceptively easy to implement. But they were all innovators and masters of their media, whereas more recent followers often miss a step or two, ending up with experiential environments full of bemused, slightly stunned, viewers. Some of it is very pretty and could easily be installed in a Hipster Hotel Lobby -- someplace other than Fanta Se of course.
However, advancing the case for Art is a different fettle of kish, and here, for me, some of the work stood out.
Alejandro Borsani's The Origin of Clouds was a large lovely projection of the inner workings of a cloud chamber. It showed the beauty and mystery of what would normally be considered a science demo in an simple and elegant manner.
Gillian Brown's Shape of the Universe was a small kiosk with suspended wire-frame screens onto which a sleeping figure and a starry night were projected to enchanting effect. Again simple and elegant.
Robert Campbell's Dissolution of Order, a triptych of very high resolution screens with related slowly morphing imagery made gorgeous use of subtle color pallets. I give special points for the mists in the distances.
Susanna Carlisle and Bruce Hamilton's Iron Curtain projection of Berlin Wall graffiti onto fallen bits of an iron curtain made a Phoenix of industrial waste.
Heidi Kumao's Egress (inspired by the book Reading Lolita in Tehran) was a compelling use of video projection -- onto a wall with the small addition of a stack of physical books -- to tell an abstract story of the plight of middle-eastern women. Some of my confidants found it a bit too didactic but I really liked the foley sounds of scissors being snipped and butterflies being crunched.
Stefan Prosky's Partisan, the other robotic entry in the show, was an amusing performance pitting the White House against the Capitol Building in a Sumo match. A bitingly funny re-conceptualization of a standard school robotics contest perennial, with added raconteur.
Jane Tingley and Michal Seta's Re-Collect took up a good portion of the space with an abstract model of neurons firing while making sound. The piece collects ambient sounds from everywhere it has been installed, plays them back, and modifies them, just as our brains treat memories. It was nearly a no show as a part broke the day before the opening and was heroically repaired. Further ministrations from the magic fingers of one of the festival staff were required to keep it, sometimes, running to the end. It took 3-4 days to install and 3-4 hours to dismantle and I can say after assisting the lovely and talented staff member in the dismantling phase, it is way more complicated than necessary. But a great idea.
Short videos by Annie Berman, Kate Rhoades, and Emilio Vavarela repurposed material purloined from YouTube and Google Street View to good effect. As the voice over from the beginning of the Berman piece said, "I used to walk around and take photographs. Now I walk around IN photographs". Here I can see the dawning of the importance of the internet as a medium in its own right.
We are still at the beginning of life in many of these media. Artists need to develop both techniques and metaphors simultaneously, so my oft-heard compliant of Content-Free-Work is overly harsh. Once we better understand them we can make larger strides in using them wisely. The work I mentioned here points the way.
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