Overview:
The group, "sine::apsis experiments,"
is a network of artists — Valerie Sullivan Fuchs, Kevin Heisner, Dan Miller,
Kym Olsen, Fernando Orellana, Sabrina Raaf, Lauren Was, and Amy Youngs
— that interface bodies and technologies. Steve Boyer, and Kenneth E. Rinaldo,
all contemporary media artists, have been invited by sine::apsis as special
guests for this show. "in::FORMATION" is an exhibition of art that moves
and makes artworks in the process. Often natural life processes are introduced
into artificial media. The result is immersive and responsive art experiences
generated by computer-mediated kinetic and interactive sound sculptures,
light installations, experiments with microorganisms, and performance works.
Besides the pre-programmed
activity, randomness is introduced into their works. Like scientists in
cybernetics and socio-biology, these artists agree in seeing randomness
not simply as a lacking pattern but as the creative ground from which patterns
can emerge. [1] Such systems result in
"emergence" whereby, appearing on their own, surprising and unaccounted-for
properties that arise from the complex system and develop in ways not anticipated.
The pieces form developed networks to which are imparted an upward tension
to the recursively looped programs such that, "like a spring compressed
and suddenly released, the processes break out of the pattern of circular
self-organization and leap outward into the new." [2]
They ask us to see technology and the human as contiguous, rather than
opposed, and speculate upon the advent of new mutual evolution.
The
group (formerly known as "synApse") began in 1998 when Sabrina Raaf
and Fernando Orellana invited nine other Chicago-based artists to meet
and discuss issues concerning and art and technology. [3]
Commonalities were found, mutual technical support was given, and a collective
vision formulated. For instance, the interrelationship between information
and entropy interests them — like how technologies encourage rapid restructuring
and new use of our bodies that then change experiences of our embodiment
in the world. This then impacts the metaphoric networks at play within
culture and encourages new life-choices. But also of interest to them is
how technologies are geared to accelerate a planned obsolescence that feeds
rampant consumerism. On the market, machines have short life spans. In
one of their manifestoes, the group declares both a stoic resignation to
the inevitable obsolescence and breakdown of their automata and their own
mortal bodies, even as they utopically formulate a vision of themselves
as machine-assisted artists producing artworks that are art-producing machines.
Homage to New York, remnant
(1960) Jean Tinguely
To focus on only the machine's
mortality might lead one to think that these artworks by sine::apsis and
their invited guest exhibitors are heirs of Swiss artist Jean Tinguely's
hilariously self-destroying machine-sculptures or American Richard Stankiewicz's
infernal motorized junk. However, the artists in "in::FORMATION" eschew
both the former's slapstick lampooning of, and the latter's sardonic attack
on, modernity's child — the machine. Tinguely delighted in contrasting,
as K. G. Pontus Hultén put it, "the paroxysm of junk in motion"
to the fluidity of human locomotion. Stankiewicz resurrected metallic monsters
from our glut of junk, as Hultén observed: " . . . he awakens machine
parts from their dreams and makes them come alive. Anything brought back
to life in this way is frightful and menacing. Stankiewicz is apparently
afraid of the power of machines; when they are smashed, their degraded
strength seems even more frightening than before." [4]
Hence, the true contemporary heir to the Tinguely-Stankiewicz's legacy
is not Sine::Apsis, but Mark Pauline and Matt Heckert's San Francisco-based
Survival Research Laboratories' (SRL) manic machinic black comedy performances
wherein humor and threat meet.
The Apple (1961)
Richard Stankiewicz
For modernists Tinguely and
Stankiewicz, aesthetic logic succeeds only by maintaining an antipodal
contrast: human/machine.
To them, the term intelligent-machine
would have been an oxymoron. And SRL's wacky machines only warn us of the
"dark side of the force" of technology while, paradoxically, encouraging
participants and viewers to take devilish delight in the simulation of
unleashed fury. Not so the artworks in "in::FORMATION." These artists seek
a rapprochement between art and science, between the human and technology.
Pantomime (1961)
Robert Rauschenberg
To seek an artistic precedent
concurrent with Tinguely and Stankiewicz for sine::apsis's alternative
attitude toward technology one must go back to Robert Rauschenberg's "combine-painting"
Pantomime
(1961).
This 7-foot by 5-foot canvas sports two operating electrical fans that
face each other from either side of the piece so that, as Hultén
describes it, "The play of the two fans . . . is one of the subtlest uses
of mechanical means in a work of art. The two currents of air move over
the painting behind them [the fans], keeping it fresh and in constant relation
to the atmosphere of the room. The display of electric cords connects the
work of art to the current of life." [5]
One also notices wide splashes of black paint that appear to have moved
from the left toward the center and white pigment that seem to have flowed
from the right toward the center, clues suggesting they've been spread
in part by the force of the air from each fan, hastening the pigments'
drying. This distinctly implies the cooperative agency of man and machine
the production of pigmental patterns whereby human and machinic constraints
coupled with random events result in an artwork. Here the machine, as in
"in::FORMATION," is treated as an apprentice, that appears to learn and
come to function independently of its master, rather than an object of
sport or menace.
Sketch for The Unstoppable
Hum (1999) Sabrina Raaf
The artists represented in
this show desire creative machines rather than foist on us destructive
ones. They produce a more complex systems architecture where networks,
reflexivity, and the interplay of randomness and pattern are used to initiate
a profound engagement with informatics, [6]
commenting on a society fraught with information glut, genetic engineering,
robotics, AIDS, and environmental destruction. They observe that sensorial
experience is increasingly mediated through technological extensions of
ourselves. Where humans and machines are viewed as sharing patterns of
organization, there can emerge the "posthuman," the splicing of human
with the machine. These artists view such innovations as fertile implements,
as tools to be used for heuristically creating new experiential frameworks
that question the nature of creativity, manipulate staid cultural messages,
and restructure old meanings.
"The Big Arm," in Illusions
of Shameless Abundance:
Degenerating into an
Uninterrupted Sequence of Hostile Encounters
(1989) Survival Research
Laboratories, Mark Pauline and Matt Heckert
As in SRL performances, technology
can be construed dystopically, but one must also recall Martin Heidegger's
claim that where technology's danger lies, so does its saving power, a
saving power not merely secondary to its danger. Underscoring the ambiguous
nature of technology — Heidegger reminds us that in ancient Greece "the
poiésis of the fine arts was also called techné"
— he says any decisive confrontation with technology "must happen in a
realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and,
on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art." [7]
Such a confrontation underlies sine::apsis's interfacing of technology
and the human.
Installation view of Drawing
Machine (1999) Fernando Orellana
These installations and the
accompanying opening night performances (all produced specifically for
this exhibition) function as witty metacommentaries on artistic production
itself while challenging Marshall McLuhan's claim that new technologies
can only induce "self-amputations" of our own organs to protect them from
over stimulation. [8] Their works evoke a more positive
outlook toward interfacing with machines than evidenced in Arthur Kroker's
recent comment that we are living in the "flesh-eating 90s." [9]
Becoming posthuman need not result in a wasting away of our humanity. Here
information is not conceived as a thing separate from the medium instantiating
it, but as literally, physically in formation. Embodiment — realized
in the human complicity in the systems on exhibition here, as well as their
various material products—is not a to-be-purged supplement to information.
[10]
The works here are articulations that escape from the dualism of anti/pro-humanism
by offering models of "post-human existence where 'technology' and the
'human' are understood in continuous rather than in oppositional terms."
[11]
As a group, these artists strive toward what Katherine Hayles has called
"reverse reductionism": the synthesis of elements which produce something
mysterious and excessive.
[12]
Sketch for Winter Bloom
(1999) Amy Youngs
Thus, these artists stress
human agency — employing both artist and audience — and modes generating
random events as catalysts for their non-determinate, intelligent, independently
functioning mechanisms. The machines become autonomous; by themselves they
produce/transform certain materials during the span of the exhibit. The
exhibitors intend such transformations to make an impact on the audience
visually, but often on the exhibition space as well via sound, smell, and
taste. In some works, the very presence of a viewer in the exhibition
space functions reflexively as feedback. Looped through the observers,
this reflexivity unwittingly makes them part of the system being observed.
So how then will the viewers perceive these products — as art or, having
not been immediately produced by human hand, something less?
The Flock
(1994) Kenneth Rinaldo and Mark Grossman (strobe
shot capturing
multiple positions of the three arms interacting )
For many people artistic
creation is mysterious, even magical. Most theories of creativity are too
vague to be modeled and computers are deterministic, but they can simulate
arbitrary choices. The idea is to start with a few simple rules or constraints
and then, through highly recursive structures, allow complexity to emerge
spontaneously.
[13]
Enhancing this effect, the artworks in this exhibition intermix computational
devices with human agency and random generation either at the initial stage
or during the computational event itself. The artist or random generator
produces ideas, making use of at least some initial constraints. The outcome,
however, calls for revision or elaboration by both machine and audience
intervention, and the process may be governed by constraints that cannot
be used in the generative stage. In other words, the intelligent-machines
in this exhibition are designed to evolve spontaneously in directions the
artist-programmer may not have anticipated; their intent is to produce
systems that evolve the capacity to evolve. They are in formation.
In the process, these machine-human systems create products and byproducts
for our wonderment.
These artists seem to have
anticipated an observation by Katherine Hayles: "The best possible time
to contest for what the posthuman means is now, before the trains of thought
it embodies have been laid down so firmly that it would take dynamite to
change them. Although some current versions of the posthuman point toward
the anti-human and the apocalyptic, we can craft others that will be conducive
to the long-range survival of humans and of the other life-forms, biological
and artificial, with whom we share the planet and ourselves." [14]
The Opening
Night Performances:
"Wanderings"
by Stephen W. Boyer: clad in a network of microprocessors wired to produce
sound, the artist moves about the gallery. When he likes the musical patterns,
he downloads the algorithm to a sculptural object that he is wired
to. This object, which remains active throughout the exhibition, contains
dozens of small light sources interwoven into a network representing relationships
among the twelve tones of the chromatic scale. Disconnected from the artist,
the sound-sculpture continues to modify the original sound pattern as sensors
embedded in the gallery unobtrusively and randomly feed back new data to
the system, increasing musical complexity.
Stephen Boyer, "Wanderings",
1999, glass, soap, electronics, variable
dimensions (approx. 36"
x 36" x 12"). Photograph courtesy of the artist.
From the exhibition "in::FORMATION,"
January 14 - March 1, 2000 at the School
of the Art Institute of
Chicago's Betty Rymer Gallery.
"Gesundheit"
by Kym Olsen and
Trevor Martin: the turn of a millenium
gives us an artificial frame from which to reflect on the successes and
failures of our methods of making meaning. How have these methods affected
our perceptions of ourselves externally and internally is the general question
from which "Gesundheit" began. It is a distillation of one of many explorations
the performers have made with the body as the site for pathology, pleasure,
hysteria, pain, and transformation. In this case they have focused on the
center of the body, the belly. The performers are located behind an artifical
wall which has peepholes from which to view them. One performer is suspended
on the wall, while the other "tortures" the suspended performer's belly
as she attempts to tell a story. Their exposed skin is covered in organic
material such as flour, egg and food coloring. Here the belly is used to
investigate the dynamics between public/private and pleasure/pain. Formally,
the use of a frustrated narrative, absurdity, and fragmentation are used
to "paint" an incomplete picture for the viewer. The viewer is unable to
see the whole gestural sequence and the artificiality of the external appearances
of the performers work to inhabit the postmodern idea that all history
is fabricated.
Kym Olsen and Trevor Martin,
"Gesundheit", 1999. performance, running time:
2 hours. Photograph courtesy
of the artist. From the exhibition
"in::FORMATION," January
14 - March 1, 2000 at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago's Betty
Rymer Gallery.
The Installations:
"The
In Finite Earth" by Valerie Sullivan Fuchs: symbolizes earth, air,
fire, and water using four hollow ceramic spheres whose surfaces are encrusted
with suggestions of ruins; inside, they contain objects specific to the
elements they symbolize (e.g., a heating element in the fire sphere). Different
video projections beam down upon each sphere. Elizabeth Fisher in Women's
Creation, 1975 speculates that the "first cultural device was probably
a recipient. . . . Many theorists feel that the earliest cultural inventions
must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of
sling or net carrier," and here ancient clay and carrier bag technology
meets hi-tech in an ecological comment on how we are misusing our natural
resources.
Valerie Sullivan Fuchs,
detail from "The In Finite Earth (Fire, Water, Air,
Earth)", 1999, video projection,
unfired clay, heating element, electrical
box, fountain pump, wire
mesh, plastic tubing, metal water container,
motion detector, water,
atomizer, dimmer switch and wood, dimensions
variable. Photograph courtesy
of the artist. From the exhibition
"in::FORMATION," January
14 - March 1, 2000 at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago's Betty
Rymer Gallery.
"Database
PØØ: mutating informatic tools" by Kevin Heisner:
Mutating Informatic Tools" by Kevin Heisner: in this work a database is
generated over the duration of the exhibition. The viewers/participants
interact with the piece by leaving a telephone response at 888-803-8735.
The message is then forwarded to a voice pager installed inside a wooden
animal transport cage, which is the shell of the sculpture. This message
is then emitted in delayed real-time from within the cage. There is a door
at one end of the wooden box with an expanded metal opening through which
the viewer can see inside and view a projected video. The messages end
up recorded into a database on a web site. The site displays a short animation
of the video, the phone number, and the text sorted into a randomly ordered
data structure. This artwork explores presence/absence in communication,
pattern/ randomness in information, and the evolution of artificial senses
and its biological ramifications.
Kevin Heisner, "Database
Pøø: Mutating Informatic Tools", 1999, found
wooden animal crate, video
projection, electonics, steel, voice pager and
Internet, 60" x 20" x 36".
Photograph courtesy of the artist. From the
exhibition "in::FORMATION,"
January 14 - March 1, 2000 at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago's
Betty Rymer Gallery.
"Colony"
by Dan Miller: three robot loader mechanisms, following unique patterns,
struggle to co-create a surface. Sensors in the gallery decide which loader
deposits its material on the tabletop. The pattern for each loader is randomly
sequenced to create new patterns. One loader places biodegradable foam
squares on the table, another drizzles wax, and the third drops pebbles
and water. Once deposited, the materials interact, wear on each other,
creating patterned deposits. It makes us think about earthmovers, despoiled
land, and systems run amuck.
Daniel Wayne Miller, "Colony",
1999, steel, aluminum, plastics,
electronics, programmable
controllers, biodegradable packing, earth
mixture, 102" x 120" x 120".
Photograph courtesy of the artist. From the
exhibition "in::FORMATION,"
January 14 - March 1, 2000 at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago's
Betty Rymer Gallery.
"The
Hive" by Fernando Orellana: nine drawing machines simultaneously
drawing while communicating to each other via a network. The server of
this network will mediate commands to each individual machine, allowing
for "The Hive's" behavior to change while time passes. Connected in parallel
with piece's network is a malfunctioning pager unit that turns on chaotically
through out work's "ON" time. This random event is used as a seed
to generate behavioral patterns unattainable in "The Hive's" closed
network. In addition to the pager's random injection of information, the
pager will also allow for incoming pages. The number of the pager will
be available for viewers to call, thus allowing "The Hive" yet another
means of achieving independent behavioral patterns. These undetermined
patterns will be reflected in the motion of each individual machine and
in the drawings that the installation will produce. Periodically, through
out the exhibition's duration, the drawings will be removed and new drawings
will begin.
Fernando Orellana, "The
Hive", 1999, aluminum, steel, wood, glass, paper,
ink, motor, electronics,
Basic Stamp 1 and 2, 200" x 20" x 15". Photograph
courtesy of the artist.
From the exhibition "in::FORMATION," January 14 -
March 1, 2000 at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago's Betty Rymer Gallery.
"The
Unstoppable Hum" by Sabrina Raaf: we perceive the hum of our industrial
environment as inanimate background noise, while our life sounds animate
space. This piece reverses these roles, showing us how a building environment
perceives us. Contact microphones monitor inherent sounds from pipes and
machinery, etc. in the gallery; a geophone listens to visitors' footsteps
while a video camera track's their motion through the space. A microprocessor
translates these inputs into digital signals that activate a biomorphic
kinetic sculpture that blows air over water-filled bottles of various sizes
secreted therein, creating sensually dissonant tones. The environment's
hums activate the most animated tones, while the humans' activity is translated
into sounds of wheezing water bags and droning bass noises.
Sabrina Raaf, "The Unstoppable
Hum", 1999, steel, rubber, aluminum, glass,
custom electronics, 84"
x 70" x 12". Photograph courtesy of the artist.
From the exhibition "in::FORMATION,"
January 14 - March 1, 2000 at the
School of
the Art Institute of Chicago's Betty Rymer Gallery.
"Standby
Deliver" by Kenneth Rinaldo: consists of aluminum plates facing
each other and moving back and forth attached to activating motors. Underneath
is a lit glass sugar molecule. Visitors have access to chewing gum, which
they chew and stick to the plates, which will stretch out, creating long
colorful strings of the sticky substance. After many cycles of the plates
back and forth motion, the glass sugar molecule rises up to catch the colorful
goo. These molecules are periodically collected, becoming colorful illuminated
sculptures displayed on the gallery wall. This computer-human activated
system uses sugar, gum and machine as metaphor for human consumption and
waist cycle while offering mouth and eye candy to help the participant
question the impact of their addictive consumerist behavior and the sugar
tweaked cognition that results.
Kenneth Rinaldo, "Standby
Deliver", 1999-2000, aluminum, steel, chewing
gum, sugar, human circulatory
system, glass, electronics, motors, lights,
and microcontroller, 120"
x 120" x 36", 3D modeling by George Faeber.
Photograph courtesy of the
artist. From the exhibition "in::FORMATION,"
January 14 - March 1, 2000
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's
Betty Rymer Gallery.
"Little
Graffiti" by Lauren Was: a hi-tech bulbous sculpture: driven by
Basic Stamp II and programmed to generate random behavior—rolls determinedly
back and forth on a track and up and down on a cord along the wall; it
scrawls playfully with lo-tech large crayons — at times the scrawl may
be elegant, at others, manic; either way, one flashes on those delightful,
naughty wall-defacing enterprises of childhood.
Lauren Was, "Little Graffiti",
1999, rubber gaskets, silicon rubber,
canvas, stretch nylon, steel,
bronze, pens,pencils,crayons,rubber cords,
motors, and the Basic Stamp
II, variable dimensions. Photograph courtesy of
the artist. From the exhibition
"in::FORMATION," January 14 - March 1, 2000
at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago's Betty Rymer Gallery.
"Alchemical
Bloom" by Amy Youngs: outside temperature becomes information via
a sensor that controls the voltage to an electroplating tank wherein "grows"
an organic-looking copper object; thus, the weather directly affects the
size, texture, and shape of the copper deposits on the armature dipped
into the copper sulfate. As each copper bloom is completed, it is displayed
hanging on a wire, still dripping, beside the tank in chronological order
of production. The bloom quickly develops a patina, while the excess copper
sulfate drips create crystalline designs on an aluminum canvas underneath.
Process, product and byproduct all become "the art" in this transmutation
of weather, electricity and chemistry.
Amy Youngs, "Alchemical
Bloom", 1999, digital thermometer, microprocessor,
voltage rectifier, copper,
electrolyte, plexiglas, glass, aluminum, and
wood, variable dimensions
(approx. 180" x 72" x 48"). Photograph courtesy
of the artist. From the
exhibition "in::FORMATION," January 14 - March 1,
2000 at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago's Betty Rymer Gallery.
Endnotes
1.
Concerning
randomness and creativity, some see chaos as accelerating the evolution
of biological and artificial life (Chris Langton and Stuart Kauffman),
while others (Francisco Varela) see randomness as the froth of noise from
which coherent microstates evolve and to which living systems owe their
capacity for fast, flexible response. See Francisco J. Varela, "Making
It Concrete: Before, During, and After Breakdowns," Revisioning Philosophy,
James
Ogilvy, ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press): 97-109.
2. N.
Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago, IL: The University
of Chicago Press, 1999): 222.
3.
In engaging with the machine, these artists collaborate much less with
industrial technicians than did Tinguely and the artists involved in Experiments
in Art and Technology's (E.A.T.) 1960s idealistic and internationalist
attempt to heal the breach between art/science and emotion/reason, by pairing
artists and technicians.
4.
K. G. Pontus Hultén, The Machine as seen at the end of the mechanical
age (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968): 172, 176.
5. Ibid.,
188.
6. "Informatics"
refers to the material, technological, economic, and social structures
that make our "information age" possible.
7. Martin
Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New
York: Harper Colophon Books, 1977): 28, 35. Heidegger claims the essence
of technology is nothing technological; the real threat is not from "potentially
lethal machines and apparatus of technology," but resides in the attendant
informational processes of regulating and securing, an "Enframing" of our
world into a dead stock pile for potential use. This "standing-reserve"
may be embodied as objects or encoded as information, and it occludes a
more truthful revealing of the poetic coming forth of things and a more
poetical way of dwelling in the world.
8. Marshall
McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: Signet Books, 1964): 52-53.
9.
See Arthur Kroker, Hacking the Future for the Flesh-Eating 90s (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).
10.
On this point these artists agree with N. Katherine Hayles who, in How
We Became Posthuman (1999): 5, argues against the mind/body dualism
in cybernetics that favors disembodiment; her anti-Platonic stance claims
"an opportunity to put back into the picture the flesh that continues to
be erased in contemporary discussions about cybernetic subjects."
11.
Anne Balsamo, "Feminism for the Incurably Informed," South Atlantic
Quarterly 92 (1993): 684.
12.
Hayles, "Narratives of Artificial Life," Jon Birds, Barry Curtis, et al.
(eds.), FutureNatural (London: Routledge, 1996): 153.
13.
Philip N. Johnson-Laird's The Computer and the Mind (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1988): 258, sketches out a "multi-stage"
computational architecture with which a computer might come to be seen
as creative: "It uses constraints to generate ideas and some to select
viable ones from amongst them. Because creativity is not deterministic,
there may at some point be more than one possibility — even after the use
of some constraints — and, if so, an arbitrary choice is made from amongst
them. The constraints may be spread over many stages, or products may be
fed back for modification to the generative stage. Multi-stage creativity
uses constraints both generatively and selectively."
14.
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press, 1999): 291.
(C) Copyright 1999 James
R. Hugunin
The School of the Art Institute
of Chicago
