[] low-fi update 27

[] low-fi update 27
[] http://www.low-fi.org.uk

[] guest selection: Rebecca Cannon on Six answers to the question -
'are games art?'
Cornelia Sollfrank on GOOGLE ART

[] low-fi selection: Duration, Absence.

[] http://www.thing.net/~cocofusco/dolores.html [Coco Fusco, Ricardo
Dominguez]
[] http://longplayer.org/ [Jem Finer]
[] http://www.thing.net/empire.html [Wolfgang Staehle]
[] http://www.susan-collins.net/fenlandia [Susan Collins]
[] http://www.kenotaphion.org/ [Jonty Semper]
[] http://www.radio-astronomy.net [radioqualia]
[] http://www.brainwavedrawings.com/webseance/index.html [Nina Sobell]
[] http://www.amodal.net/intro.html [Rafael Loano Hemmer]

This latest Low-Fi list isn't for the lazy or the time-strapped. The
shortest piece clocks in at 12 hours, the longest at 1000 years. Some,
like Radioqualia's Radio Astronomy, are unquantifiably long,
practically inexhaustible. And this raises a question (although no more
than does a 12 hour piece) about the relationship between time,
viewership, and the work of art. No one will ever hear all 1000 years
of Jem Finer's Longplayer, possibly not even the artist himself, and if
someone did, one might argue that their incredible attendance was
itself a work of art. So, time becomes a question precisely because the
artworks assembled here invalidate time as a measure of art or the
experience of art.

But the eight works in "Duration, Absence" speak less about time than
they do about durations, those special spans of time that aren't
themselves time so much as what occurs or could possibly occur in time.
They play for a specific period, or they play indefinitely, or they
occur during a specific event. In other words, they conceive of time as
the net does: diversely.

Net art frequently concerns itself with time and durations. Possibly
this is because one of the things that net art accomplishes is to give
time over to the audience, who might have the chance to watch on their
own time, in their own home…to escape the control of the gallery.

But there's something missing in this account. For most people, to
accept the idea that Coco Fusco's and Ricardo Dominguez's work consists
in the full 12 hours is to accept the idea that absences, certain
experiential gaps or lacunae, are an essential part of the art. This is
the consequence of a simple fact: few people will experience the entire
12 hours. And even if there are exceptions to this, there will be far
fewer exceptions in the case of the 1000-year Longplayer. It's
interesting (because unexpected) that the theme of absence should be
thematically located within a discussion of durations; unexpected
because durations point strongly to the presence of things that happen
in those durations. Whence comes absence, then?

Some of the works collected here incorporate absence into themselves
(the idea that the full duration will not be experienced by all people)
while others deal thematically with absence itself, and still others
treat absence as a tool or method.

Jonty Semper's Kenotaphion archives recordings of the one-minute public
silences that commemorate high-profile deaths, like that of Princess
Diana. These minutes of silence, Semper's recordings of the absence of
sound, are nevertheless made material in various symbolic registers,
e.g. the nation, commemoration, the representation of death.

Susan Collins leads us to a similar idea through her impossibly slow
photographic processes. For much of the duration of the piece, as
pixels are added one by one, the landscape that is in a certain sense
the subject and object of the piece simply isn't there. Here again,
absences highlight the work of making: making landscapes, making
representations, making nations, making landscapes claimed as the face
of a nation. Gaps point to the work that occurred in that gap or to the
work of making the gap disappear. Wolfgang Staehler's Empire 24/7, in
its plenitude, its inexhaustability, points out the absence in its
predecessor: the relative brevity of Warhol's otherwise exhaustive and
exhausting video of the same skyscraper.

Why should duration leads us, conceptually, to absence? Nina Sobell's
Web Seance gives us one answer. By stretching the metaphor of
"connectedness," Sobell points to the role of (if not society, then at
least) a collection of other people in durational art work. In net art,
and over the span of durational work, people are both titillatingly
present and conspicuously absent. We know ourselves as part of an
audience, yet we may experience the piece alone. And it's not that this
is more true of the internet; the internet, rather, shows us the wider
relevance of the claim.

With similarly forceful tactics, Rafael Loano Hemmer's Amodal
Suspension points to the role of the audience in the nexus of durations
and absence. Amodal Suspension writes text messages as light in the sky
and suspends them there until they are received, at which point they
are replaced by messages-yet-to-be-received. The durations within his
piece, expressed by flashes of light representing text messages, are
controlled by the practical sociality of a network. People must receive
the texts for the piece to work. No sociality, no art.

Radioqualia's live cosmic soundtracks in Radio Astronomy make a
different observation about the relationship between duration and
absence. In the very act of producing these sounds, Radioqualia
emphasise the simple fact that presence isn't simply given, but
requires an act of materialisation. Coco Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez
make the same point powerfully and affectively by reenacting an event
whose historical absence has been very carefully maintained. In this,
Radioqualia and Fusco and Dominguez, along with the other pieces in the
list, make the more elusive point that absence might only be an absence
of hearing or seeing. We learn this in the duration.

These 8 works are described in more detail below.

"Dolores from 10h to 22h" was a reenactment in 2001 by Fusco and
Dominguez of the full 12 hour intimidation of a Mexican factory worker
in the US who was shut in a room, coerced and abused when she
questioned the company's position on union rights. The invisibility of
this ordeal was suggested by the audience only being able to watch the
performance through surveillance cameras streaming the reenactment.
Invisibility was central to the story because when 'Dolores' pursued
her complaint against her employer they claimed that it hadn't happened
and that no one had seen her shut up.

Jem Finer's "Longplayer" is a 1000 year long piece of music which
started to play on the 1st January 2000 and will continue to play,
without repetition, until the 31st December 2999, when it will come
back to the point at which it began - and begin again. Currently,
Longplayer exists in its original form as a computer program and has
been playing since it began in the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf in
London's Docklands. It can also be heard via a live stream on-line and
at various listening posts around the world.
Longplayer was developed and composed between October 1995 and December
1999 by Jem Finer with the support of Artangel.

"Empire 24/7" ups the ante on Warhol's durational video work, giving
netizens a 24 hour, 7 day a week view of the Empire State Building in
New York City, as seen from Thing's office window. The title refers in
part to 24/7 consumer culture, which is one site where distinctions
between on and offline experiences make very little sense (for example,
the window of Thing's offices becomes like the windows of the computer
monitors which give onto the same view).
This piece originally appeared as a projected environment in the 1999
exhibit