Re:Thinking:Time Exhibition Guide Peterborough Digital Arts April 9th - May 23rd 2004 To accompany the exhibition Curator Ele Carpenter interviewed six artists: Ming Wong, Ellie Harrison, Damien Robinson, Scott Martin, Alistair Gentry & Joe Magee. The interviews cover the development of the artwork, how it relates to notions of time, and the artists experience of the Lab. The full text can be found on www.pva.org.uk and a precis is included in this Exhibition Guide. Ming Wong, Monologue, 2002 DV floor projection How did the idea for your artwork germinate? Sitting on a deserted Dorset beach, staring at the horizon; flipping through ten volumes of the New Book Of Knowledge; nostalgia and horror at the realisation that that was the way I learnt to look at the world when I was a child growing up in Singapore, (through the eyes of an editor in Edinburgh in the 50's). Hence a work for surfing over waves of information - fragmented, disjointed, uncontrollable, inevitable, unreal, a dream or a nightmare - a process of un-learning for me - tossing pages of the books back into the sea... How does the work rethink notions of time? Backwards and forwards through knowledge, time traveling through memories of school, childhood, old books, old knowledge, past teachers, when England was England, before computers crept into our lives, before 'new media' was born.... Joe Magee & Alistair Gentry, Hypomart Redux, 2002 DV wall projection How did the idea for your artwork germinate? Joe: Alistair and I met at LabCulture, and shortly afterwards began exchanging ideas by email. Alistair saw some manipulated video of a school playground I had been working on and suggested we apply something similar to a shopping experience. I had been visually experimenting with how culture spreads itself in a viral nature, and Alistair introduced ideas about the effects of surveillance on public spaces. We developed the notion that there is a surveillance operator charged with the job of deciding who is 'normal', 'dangerous', etc just by studying things like body language on his monitors. We thought maybe this person might like to have some fun with manipulation: and that was the premise of a proposal we put to Channel4 and Arts Council England. Alistair: Joe and I had both been working with memetic* ideas and concepts for a long time. We both like using intelligent repetition and serial, slight alteration called isomorphism - a transformation that preserves information. I'm a huge J.G. Ballard fan, like him I'm always shocked and interested by the ways that the environments we create for ourselves, or are created for us, can make us do things we don't really want to do (or really want to do, but shouldn't). I think Ballard calls them psychopathologies. I might have made that up, but I call them psychopathologies. I'd noticed these weird gestures and mannerisms that people were doing in shopping centres - sometimes to/with each other, sometimes by themselves or for no clearly defined audience (except maybe the surveillance cameras that are all over these places and see everything). Those places stress people in ways they don't even realise, and that stress sometimes comes out in the form of literal tics, spasms and odd behaviour. I'm also fascinated, worried and completely unsurprised that the Panoptic (and totalitarian) idea of universal, indiscriminate surveillance has entered our daily lives so rapidly and with so little effective dissent or discussion. *A meme is a unit of cultural information, analogous to a gene. How does the work rethink notions of time? Joe: Hypnomart synthesizes time in exploratory ways. This is most obvious in our attempted portrayal of 'viral body language'. Very minor body movements have been amplified gigantically. In our synthetic mall behavioral looping and repetition are de rigueur. Some people are stuck in exceedingly small time loops - yet still manage to find their way around to do the shopping. Conversely, others are afforded the luxury of relatively lengthy loops yet remain anchored to a particular spot. Outside the mall, things like time are mundanely normal www.periphery.co.uk Alistair: We've snatched moments of these strangers' lives and magnified them by making loops and patterns out of what were, in reality, fleeting gestures. There must be so much surveillance footage now that it would take decades for any one to watch it all. We've saved some of those gestures that normally flicker by and disappear because we think they're interesting and worth saving. Scott Martin, Preview Projector, 2004 Wine glasses, digital print on acetate, lamp. How did the idea for your artwork germinate? Interactive installation has been my thing for a while. However I have been increasingly aware of the technological impact that has been creeping into my own practice. I love what computers can do, they are fantastic tools but I don’t want to make artwork for computers, I make it for people. More so I don't want to limit where work can be displayed. Wouldn't it be great to come across interactive work in forests or on the street? I have purposely started looking at items that I could reinvent, systems that I could reuse, redundant technologies, cheep toys, self powered objects or just things found in the home. And this project is my first attempt to make a data projector in the Blue Peter style. How does the work rethink notions of time? Okay we all love exhibition openings; because there’s free wine and a chance to meet ya friends! and art! So in rethinking time this work looks at the process of making art for a preview. In fact the work will be made over the period of the private view, and look at the ritual of drinking and socialising. The audience (at the preview) will be captured in the process of drinking, and find themselves later as the subject of an animation, projected through the very vessel they had drunk from, (ie the glass). The question is … does the work exist in the drinking of the wine, the glass or the animation? And if no one turned up would there be any artwork? (Arr good old Schrödinger's cat!!) Ellie Harrison, Tic Typing Peanut Typing, 2002 Computers, max msp programme How did the idea for your artwork germinate? Six months before taking part in LabCulture I’d finished a year long project called Eat22, where I digitally photographed everything that I ate for my 22nd year. Alongside this, I had also been developing work inspired by the energy content of various foods. I wanted the work that I made on the LabCulture residency to be a development of these ideas. The difference was that I wanted the concepts for the new piece to relate specifically to its inevitable presentation through digital media. On the residency, I racked my brains about how to unite my ongoing themes with the computer as an object. The solution was found when I started to think about how a human actually physically interacts with the machine and how energy is transferred from one to the other. The most basic way this is done is through typing. The two pieces on show Peanut Typing and Tictac Typing calculate how much typing the average human could do with the energy supplied by either a peanut or a tictac. How does the work rethink notions of time? Peanut Typing and Tictac Typing confront and consider the time we spend sitting in front of a computer in our day-to-day lives, by bombarding us with facts and figures about how this time is and could be spent. The slow motion of the video clips reflects on the brief amount of time required to replenish our spent energy compared with the time it takes to use it. See www.ellieharrison.com Damien Robinson, Songbird, 2004 Director, park benches, projection, audio How did the idea for your artwork germinate? Prior to the Lab, I worked on a commission for inIVA, which sliced voice clips according to their frequency. From that work I realised that I was able to distinguish low frequency sounds by touch. Research in America has demonstrated that deaf people sense vibrations in their auditory cortex, the area of the brain active in hearing people when they listen to sounds; if you are deaf you use the auditory cortex to 'listen' to vibration. There is also an interesting contradiction to standard sensory conventions, in that the less you can hear of the mid and low frequency sounds, the more easily you 'listen' to vibrations. At the same time I read an article about declining numbers of skylarks; in their preferred farmland habitat, skylarks declined by 75% between 1972 and 1996 1. The anthropologist Paddy Ladd, has written of the Deaf community as people whose lives were not motivated by a sadness in not being able to hear birds singing2 and it seemed to me that whilst people focus on the concept of hearing 'loss', their sonic environment - particularly natural soundscapes - are disappearing. 'Songbird' unwraps the structures of a natural sound source and presents them in a number of different ways. How does the work rethink notions of time? Although human hearing is thought to be sensitive to the same frequency range as birds, theirs has finer resolution in time. So a single 3 second verse of bird song might be perceived by birds as we would follow a 20 second piece of music. Each of the original sounds in the work is dropped by pitch (two and four octaves) and by pitch and speed. Pitch and speed are inter-related - if you drop a sound's pitch its duration expands (like playing a 45rpm vinyl record at 33rpm). A five second clip becomes 40 seconds. Although the work loops, the random elements mean it never repeats itself exactly (so you think 'Oh I've heard this bit', then you realise you haven't) but the work still constitutes a sound memory, not a 'live' experience. 'Of all the farmland birds that have declined over the last 25 years, none is missed more than the skylark. Although this species has declined less in percentage terms than some others, its abundance means that the number we have lost (more than two million) is greater than for any other species.' RSPB Understanding Deaf Culture, Paddy Ladd 2003 RE:THIN:KING: THEMES:GUIDE Experiments in digital media produced during LabCulture residencies 2000-2004 Simon Aeppli / Carolyn Black / Veronique Chance / Ed Cookson / Michael Cousin & Steve Brown / Ross Dalgleish & Spencer Nicholls / Michael Fairfax / Sabine Gla§er / Lucy Harris / Sophie Horton / Ralph Hoyte / Ulrike Kubatta / Claire Mason / Fabrizio Manco & Nathan Hughes / Benedict Phillips / Kirsty Stansfield / Phillip Walker / Una Walker / Karen Wallis / Geni Wate / Louise K Wilson Rethinking Time Peterborough Digital Arts April 9th - May 23rd 2004 RE:THIN:KING:TIME * PVA MediaLab DVD, Colour, Sound. English. LabCulture Experiments in Digital Media 2000 - 2004 Curated by Ele Carpenter Design: Paul Khera DVD Construction: Simon Poulter and Steve Crabtree LabCulture Artist Facilitators: Simon Poulter, Dane Watkins, Gareth Jones, Duncan Speakman. Produced by LabCulture Ltd trading as PVA MediaLab PVA MediaLab, 1 Kings Square, Bridport, Dorset DT6 3QE, UK, +44 www.pva.org.uk Supported by Arts Council of England. Programme Notes (Alphabetical Order) Simon Aeppli, No Man's Land, 0'30" One of a series of compressed flash videos Aeppli has designed for the web. This No Man's Land is situated above Salvington Hill (Brighton Street AtoZ Atlas, page 4, grid ref. C 5). From Brighton Bus Station to Worthington, change to a number 2 for Findon Valley. Get off at Vale Drive and walk through the Gallops. In the middle of No Man's Land is Site 96, a Vodaphone mobile transmitter. The sound and image in this Quicktime Movie are intrinsic to each other. The electrostatic interference of the transmission masts is their detected if not always audible presence. LabCulture, Brighton, 2002 Carolyn Black, Semblance, 2'12" Carolyn Black worked with an audio file and a mixture of evocative found and pre-recorded source tapes. The resulting meld is a 'semblance' of something, not a representation but an idea or feeling of things other than their truth: the ambiguity of sound and the subtlety of vision. Ominous plumes are propelled upwards taking on a sculptural form. A white surface distorts our vision: waking, blinking in the light. LabCulture, Vivid, Birmingham 2002 Veronique Chance, WorkOut, 3'40" In the Gym the body becomes mechanised, in turn the equipment mimics human movement, forming a hybrid of human and machine. This symmetrical fusion creates a new body, trapped in a never-ending loop. The slowing of the sound and image heightens the ambiguity and other worldliness of these strange creatures. LabCulture, Bridport, 2002 Ed Cookson, Play Movie, 0'40" Play Movie earnestly searches the New Forest heath land. The camera mimics both the vision of a hunter and the hunted; adrenalin poised for fight or flight. Cookson uses a cinematic strategy of suspense - where the threat or fear lies outside the frame. A primitive animal loiters at the periphery of our vision. The forest then becomes animated with representations of animals from cave painting, to Van Gogh's ‘Crows above a wheat field' and ultimately Ed Cookson's 'Play Movie'. LabCulture, Artsway 2002 Michael Cousin & Steve Brown, Fight, 3" Employing all the camera angles of action-cinema, Cousin and Brown stage a perfect punch. The self-conscious choreography and the fact that the victim puts up no defence, would suggest that this is perhaps a re-enactment of a scripted or screen-fight. The style of the black and white film noir further romanticises the scene. The location is reminiscent of a school hall, adding to the nostalgia of this classic moment. LabCulture, Brighton, 2001 Ross Dalgleish & Spencer Nicholls, X-factor, 2'47" X-factor is an interpretation of the testimony of a life (so far). A person's life story was recorded on mini disk and broken into a sequence of scenes. Key words from each scene were selected and put together with colours relating to the time, place or event. The music was composed specially for each frame in the final sequence. The resulting work plays with the narrative relationships between memory, music, colour and text. LabCulture Watershed, 2002 Michael Fairfax, Reflections, 1'10" This work synthesizes a unique and harmonious recording of a live opera singer with the hard industrial noises of the city. Like an audio - responsive digital painting the visual elements evolve and re-invent themselves in relationship to the sound. Light plays across a reflective surface, picking up the reverberations of heavy drilling. And in turn, the audio seems to shift between reflecting and pushing the animation. LabCulture, Vivid, 2002 Sabine Gla§er, I'll be in your mind! 1'30" This playful animation follows a stereotype of a female blonde-haired beauty as she dives into the ear of a head. However, we are not party to her experience inside the seemingly empty space of the mind. The identical heads are endless, and the super woman continues to emerge with as much bounce in her step as before. The work visually explores the linguistic pun often used in popular music 'I can't get you out of my head'. As the animation loops, the repetition of the music starts to get stuck in your head. Achieving the aim of the artist to have a memorable impact on her audience. LabCulture, Artsway, 2002 Lucy Harris, Greensplat, 1'32" Nature is a constructed concept, one that encompasses the extremes of the rural idyll and the environment as a raw material for industry. The Eden project, an attempt to preserve nature, has been constructed in a vast open cast mine. These exquisite clear views of similar mines in the area reveal layers of geography that enrich our understanding of place, and expose our industrial and romantic relationship to the environment. LabCulture, Eden, 2003 Sophie Horton, Crochet Architecture, 1'20" Crochet Architecture overlays two production processes: concrete modern architecture and domestic handmade crochet. The pattern code, like computer code, is incomprehensible to the novice. The crochet uses the same process of modular construction as the modern buildings it covers. This soft and colourful handmade intervention is surprisingly radical in the hard grey monotony of the urban environment. LabCulture, Watershed, 2002 And The Youth Pricked Forth, Ralph Hoyte, 0'50" In this poem Ralph Hoyte tells a tale of a young man set in the time of King Arthur. The poem uses old English language to construct a Romantic Arthurian landscape for the youth who is entirely defined by his technology. First performed live on the beach at West Bay, the presence of a medieval young man with “a versatile four-way scroll to cause text messages to flow swifter than the fall of the dewdrop from the spur of the multi-band mast upon the earth when the dew of June is at the heaviest" was almost as believable as the legend itself. LabCulture, Vivid, Birmingham, 2002 Ulrike Kubatta, M13, Sample, 7'45" The 'Mercury 13' were the first women astronauts secretly trained for space travel in the early 1960s. In spite of their outstanding test results, the group was disbanded and never fulfilled its dream of exploring the new frontier of space. The story is a metaphorical springboard for investigating ideas of mental and aspirational journeys. A Majorette conducts a “homecoming ceremony" for the team's never completed journey. Charting a constellation of the women's names flag marked in the sand. LabCulture, Artsway, 2002 Fabrizio Manco & Nathan Hughes, Corrodoi, 6' 30" The minds and moods of the matador and the bull shift and intermingle in this beautifully crafted short film. The restricted animal suffocates in an artificial environment without vision, space or natural light. The matador is a natural performer. The rhythmic energy of the Bhuto dance beat and the 'crackle of a vinyl record', form the structure of this tightly choreographed and edited performance. LabCulture, Vivid, Birmingham, 2002. Claire Mason, It's Not My Fault, This concrete poem uses the means and process of its production as its subject. It uses a Windows format and appropriates typography to convey a thoughtful but urgent message in a Flash movie. The resulting stop-frame animation reflects the struggling relationship between artist and software, a potentially creative but often technologically frustrating experience. Playing with language and communication, graphic designer Claire Mason, shifts responsibility from computer to user, before avoiding the problem altogether and then submitting to the inevitable blame. LabCulture, Isis 2003 Benedict Phillips, Benedictionary, 3'36" Benedict has written a dictionary based on his own phonetic language. In this video, an un-dyslexic person reads the 'Agenda of the Aggressive Dyslexic' written in Benedictionary. The agenda describes the empowerment of dyslexia as a unique way of describing language and the world. Offering personal insights into understanding the written word. The reader struggles with the translation of the text into his own phonetic understanding: “Do not accept the translation for this is the road to banality, for once you accept the translator is necessary you deny the freedom of your own volition." LabCulture, Artsway, 2001 Kirsty Stansfield, Treble Bare Witness, 1'57" Kirsty Stansfield is concerned with the materiality of sound, the grain of the voice and the idea that the voice can be navigated and conceived as an object, like any other, in space. She recorded the sounds for the audio work in her hotel room during LabCulture: the drag of a chair across the carpet, the static of nylon sheets, the drip of the tap in the bathroom and the flicking pages of the bible. These sounds were then shaped and conceived as disparate yet dynamic objects in post-production. The 'objects' were then spatially positioned in an imaginary room, where a woman sits in a chair throwing sounds from her mouth, giving the ones that fall near her feet a gentle kick. LabCulture Vivid, Birmingham, 2002 Karen Wallis, Tits, 0'46" Karen Wallis exposes herself to the camera, in the traditions of video performance and life drawing. This voyeuristic film references a feminist critique of the notion of female identity, and how women are portrayed when they are no longer perceived as sexually attractive objects. It is a humorous critique of a male dominated art genre. The intimacy quickly shifts from sexual murmurings to sinister laughter, shifting the power from viewer to sitter. LabCulture, Artsway, 2001 Phillip Walker, Stool, 0'46" Time moves forwards and backwards as Phillip Walker plays his bar stool trick in the studio and in the edit suite. But even technology, the balancing act and editing process can't prevent the inevitable. LabCulture, Bridport, 2002 Una Walker, Memory, 3'12" In this short film objects, and sequences are physically and digitally edited and replayed, creating interrupted time sequences to explain different kinds of memory. All memories consist of millions of neurons firing in specific patterns. Each memory is encoded in its own pattern, and the more often an event or fact is recalled the more pronounced the pattern becomes. Current research indicates that these patterns of neurones are 'cloned' and versions are stored in different parts of the brain so that separate clues can activate the memory. LabCulture, Artsway, 2001 Louise K Wilson, Dust, 3'20" An IMAX projectionist explains the intricacies of air and dust movement around the projection booth. If dust gets on the film it looks as if there is sand all over the picture. The quality of the IMAX projection system has been compared to the fact that there is no dust in space. The projected film, Space Station 3D, shows cosmonauts waving before they leave Earth. The speed at which technology is developing seems out of synch with the time it takes people to gain the knowledge required to fully understand the equipment of our time. LabCulture, Watershed, 2002 Geni Wate, Recode Me, 2'55" How are our identities defined and created by the language of computers and the public space of the internet? Recode Me acknowledges the power of the computer programmer to create and recode relationships and environments as they wish. "I am just your ghost it seems manipulating memory, while your information store remains completely hidden." Ownership of programming code is a political issue. Open source software enables everyone to have access to the programming code, so that it can be freely shared and upgraded. This democratic approach not only frees software from the global corporations, it ultimately leads to more reliable programmes. LabCulture, Bridport, 2002 Ele Carpenter Independent Curator M: + 44 (0)7989 - 502 191 T: + 44 (0)191 - 240 1453 Doctoral Researcher www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/crumb/ www.balticmill.com Associate Curator (Visual Arts) www.cca-glasgow.com Associate Curator www.pva.org.uk Aside film & video www.sidecinema.com