Interview with Charlie Gere, Christiane Paul, Jemima Rellie

+Commissioned by Rhizome.org+

Interview with Charlie Gere, Christiane Paul, Jemima Rellie, by Lauren
Cornell

On March 20th of this year, a vast and promising new space opened in Gijon,
Asturias: the LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre. Devoted to the
'the exhibition, research, training and production of new art and industrial
creation,' LABoral opened with four exhibitions: GAMEWORLD,
EXTENSIONS-ANCHORS, LABCYBERSPACE, and FEEDBACK–the latter of which was
organized by Charlie Gere, Christiane Paul, and Jemima Rellie. The three
curators bring a tremendous amount of experience to FEEDBACK, a show that is
ambitious in both scale and premise. Charlie Gere is Reader in New Media
Research in the Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University &
Chair of Computers and the History of Art (CHArt); Jemima Rellie is Head of
Digital Programmes at the Tate; and Christiane Paul is Adjunct Curator of
New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and director of
Intelligent Agent. All have published widely on digital art and new media.
Their exhibition breaks down established boundaries between disciplines to
present a fresh perspective on art history, one that connects new media to
artistic practices not usually seen as historical precursors. This interview
was conducted via email after the exhibition opened.

LC: Your exhibition, FEEDBACK, casts a broad historical look at art that is
responsive. It bridges categories that are often considered mutually
exclusive by showing interconnections between software-based projects, net
art, light works, early performance, and kinetic sculpture, amongst other
forms. Could you discuss the themes of the exhibition and how you arrived at
the exhibition title FEEDBACK?

CP: A main goal of the exhibition is to map out precisely the connections
you mention above, between early performance, kinetic and op art,
algorithmic software-based projects, etc. FEEDBACK focuses on two major
themes relating to 'responsive' art. One theme traces the concept of
feedback from 'algorithmic' art based on instructions (from natural
language, e.g. Sol LeWitt, to code, e.g. Casey Reas) to art that sets up
open systems (reacting to outside inputs or its own) and global connections.
The second theme explores the concept of light and the moving image from
early kinetic and Op Art to responsive notions of television and cinema.

The term 'responsive art' obviously covers a broad spectrum and, given the
various themes we are covering, we wanted the exhibition to remain as
focused as possible. The term 'feedback' goes beyond responsiveness, per se,
since it means that the system is in turn changed by the output or response
it produces. The works in the exhibition range from self-sustaining objects
that rely on a closed system of feedback to systems with varying degrees of
openness that receive input from instructions, the viewer, their
environment, or information networks.

JR: We adopted the 'feedback' theme to illustrate the connection between new
media and art history, as the term is not only descriptive of much new media
art practice but also indicates how new media art is distinct from
traditional painting, sculpture, and even photography, film, and video work.
So we needed a term that was not media-specific. There are, of course, other
terms or even qualities that we could have equally exploited to this effect,
including for instance interactivity, non-linearity, or even
participatoryness, but we felt that feedback was preferable because it is
less loaded as an art-historical term and more importantly, it is more
suggestive of the central tenet of the exhibition, that these earlier works
have influenced new media art practice today.

LC: Jemima, you discuss in your essay how technology-based art is often
marginalized or written out of art history. For this show, you construct a
powerful argument that uses the concept of feedback to chart a new course
through art history. Can you explain the art historical context you have
carved-out for the show and what, if any, historical connections do you find
most important or revealing? For instance, you discuss the relationship
between instructions in Dada to generative and software-based art, or
between Kinetic Art and cinema.

JR: A core objective of the exhibition is to demonstrate that new media art
has a much longer history than is, at times, assumed. New media art did not
emerge out of nowhere at the turn of the century, but rather its roots can
be traced back to works created decades earlier, for instance Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy's Light-Space Modulator (1930). In the exhibition we were keen
to show that the earlier artists, such as Moholy-Nagy, were often interested
in the same issues and opportunities for art that new media artists engage
with today, in order to dispel the false notion that new media art somehow
sits outside of modern art history.

CG: Art history always involves choices about what to remember and what to
forget, choices made in retrospect and designed to simplify the complexity
of art practice at any given period and to make it fit a particular
narrative. The history of art concerning the 1960s and 70s seems to involve
a massive disavowal of the importance of technology and technological
utopianism in that period, which was strongly bound up with cybernetics and
systems thinking. The recent show at Tate Modern, Open Systems c. 1970, was
exemplary of this partial amnesia, as it seemed to suggest that the art
being made in that period was mainly minimalist and conceptual, while
leaving out exactly the works most directly and explicitly concerned with
systems (which had a particular and specific meaning at the time in relation
to technological discourses such as cybernetics). FEEDBACK is, to my mind, a
directly polemical show intending to recover a forgotten heritage and in
doing so show firstly the richer and more complex sets of influences at work
then, and also the importance of technology for artists in the period,
which, in turn, looks increasingly relevant to our current circumstances.

CP: One of the art-historical lineages we are tracing in the show is a move
from instruction-based, generative, and conceptual art to telematics and
networks. FEEDBACK reflects on various models of open systems and their
inherent characteristics. Instructions and rules as a basis for creating art
were an important element of art movements such as Dada, Fluxus, and
conceptual art, which all incorporated variations of formal instructions as
well as a focus on concept, event, and audience participation as opposed to
art as a unified object. This emphasis on instructions connects to the
algorithms that form the basis of any software and computer operation.
Instruction-based practice is closely related to contemporary generative art
in which a process, such as software, a machine, or a procedural invention,
is set into motion to create a work of art. FEEDBACK explores generative art
in two related threads that connect 'machine-driven drawing,' from Roman
Verostko to 5voltcore, with biological systems and artificial life and
intelligence (for example, Harold Cohen's Aaron or Sommerer & Mignonneau's
LifeWriter).

Another art-historical lineage we are sketching is the one between kinetic
and op art works that employ motion, light, optics, and interaction for the
creation of abstract moving images; video pieces based on input from the
audience or the environment; and contemporary cinematic pieces that react to
the viewer or construct a movie in real time on the basis of software or
data from the internet. Mapping out this territory was important to us for
two reasons: first of all, as Charlie says, these connections are often
neglected or forgotten in the process of writing art history; secondly, the
connections are frequently made within the new media field, at conferences,
in writings, in discourse on mailing lists but, at the same time, nobody has
actually seen the works physically together in the same exhibition space. At
the opening, many people came to us saying that it was great for them to
actually see Moholy-Nagy and the Sinas next to Herwig Weiser and Amorphic
Robotworks, next to a Tinguely sculpture, etc.

LC: How do you distinguish interactivity from feedback, in this case?

JR: The two terms overlap, but interactivity suggests to me that a high
level of active audience participation is involved, whereas in fact much of
the work in FEEDBACK is actually responding to the environment, or the
system itself, and does not demand human intervention for full effect.
Furthermore, whereas the term 'interactivity' focuses closely on an
object-level process under consideration, I would suggest that feedback can
connote a relationship that extends beyond the work in question to the
practice as a whole.

CP: I would agree with Jemima that interactivity is usually understood in
relation to human interaction, although people occasionally use the term
'system interaction' to refer to works that interact with themselves.
Feedback is a broader term referring to the process by which a system is
modulated, controlled, or changed by the output or response it produces. Of
course feedback also is a commonly used term for an evaluative response and
the return of information about the result of an activity, and we wanted to
include this meaning. On a more metaphorical level, the projects assembled
in the exhibition function as a response to each other, returning
information about their context to the viewer.

LC: In 2007, there is still so much debate about terms like 'new media art'
and 'digital art' in regards to whether they are still relevant or useful.
As a goal of this show is to contextualize what we call new media art in a
broader trajectory, I wonder what you make of these classifications.

JR: I think we all agree that both of these classifications are
fundamentally problematic, and I don't think it is necessary to rehearse all
the reasons why to the Rhizome community. But even though they are clunky
terms that are difficult to define precisely, they do, I believe, still hold
value in that they allow us to point to and discuss a broad and diverse
practice that has traditionally been excluded from mainstream art history.

The argument that says that these terms are now defunct and that all
contemporary art is now new media art, as it inevitably all now involves new
technologies in its production and/or dissemination, is spurious I believe.
What this ignores is that there remains something quite distinct about new
media art, which fundamentally challenges the established art world
infrastructure in both concept and production. This challenge does not
simply stem from the media employed in the works, but more importantly from
the issues and values they raise.

CP: I very much agree with Jemima. Digital or new media art are certainly
problematic terms, and there have been discussions–on the lists, at
conferences, and in other contexts–about their shortcomings for years. Art
that uses digital technologies as a tool for producing a photograph, video,
or even painting, which is the case for a lot of contemporary art, tends to
be better understood than art that uses these technologies as a medium,
making use of its inherent characteristics–its participatory, networked,
non-linear, modular, generative nature. As long as we do not understand the
language of new media as we understand the language of painting and video,
this art form will not be integrated in the traditional art world. By
contextualizing new media art within a broader trajectory FEEDBACK tries to
explore at least some of the aspects of the aesthetic language of the
digital medium as it relates to more traditional art.

LC: FEEDBACK is the inaugural exhibition of LABoral. When you organized the
show, how did you take into consideration the institution's premier and its
local context?

CP: We started discussions about the show with the LABoral art centre, its
director Rosina Gomez-Baeza, and people from the local government
approximately a year before the show opened. Inaugural shows obviously make
a statement regarding the mission of an institution, and the exhibition was
meant to capture an intersection of art and technology. We all agreed that
it would be important to communicate that the LABoral art centre is not
simply devoted to the latest technological trends but acknowledges the
histories of the intersections between art, technology, and industry. From
its inception, LABoral very much tried to bring in and involve local artists
and there were several inaugural events doing so, among them the one
organized by Eyebeam. From the beginning, FEEDBACK was meant to be a more
internationally- than locally-focused show, establishing a broader context.

JR: LABoral sits on a university campus, in an industrial part of Northern
Spain. This context–which is reflected in the center's focus on 'Art and
Industrial Creation'–allowed us, I would suggest, to present our arguments
more forcefully, or straightforwardly perhaps, than if we were for instance
exhibiting in a regular regional fine art museum. The focus of the center
meant that we could assume that visitors to FEEDBACK would expect to find
art works employing new technologies. Indeed, if anything, I think the
challenge was to present these works as we would any other artworks, in any
other art museum–i.e. to ensure the same quality of experience, of
presentation, of interpretation etc as you would find for instance at Tate.

Of course we were particularly keen to include some Spanish artists in the
exhibition (Antoni Muntadas and Boj & Diaz), but we were not required to
edit our selection in order to promote local artists. These local artists
were targeted in an accompanying inaugural program called
Extensions-Anchors.

LC: As you mention, LABoral is a space devoted to art, technology, and
industry. You took a very diverse, interdisciplinary approach to art and
technology. What do you think the challenges and advantages are to opening
up a space that focuses on a particular area of contemporary art?

CP: In terms of the exhibition, it was important to us to show the long
history of intersections between art and technology. Art has always
reflected the conditions of its time; as societies became increasingly
technologized during the 20th century (although connections between art,
technology, and science are obviously much older), art also more and more
incorporated and/or commented on the effects of technologies. Both from an
art-historical and aesthetic point of view, these developments remain
underexamined, so that a space devoted to art, technology, and industry
makes sense and is very much needed. The challenges are to avoid a focus on
technology, per se, driven by the interests of the industry, and to ensure
that so-called new media art does not remain marginalized with regard to the
art world at large.

JR: The danger is that the work in focus is somehow ghettoized and perceived
to be outside of mainstream art practice. The advantage is that sustained
attention is given to what it is that makes this work distinct from
mainstream practice, or special. The challenge is to encourage visitors to
the space to value this difference within the broader context of
contemporary art.


LC: The works in this show are very diverse and, as you eloquently put it
Christiane, the notion of feedback is 'the tissue' that binds them. I really
enjoy seeing Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Jean Tinguely,
and Casey Reas all blended together. How did you determine the selection?
And, how did you handle the installation at LABoral, which has such a large
exhibition space?

JR: We all put forward the names of artists and individual works that we
felt resonated particularly strongly with the central feedback theme, and
grouped these according to a series of sub-themes, before making our final
selection. Of course there are hundreds of additional works that we would
have liked to include, but could not due to logistical reasons - and even
space! In order to balance the budget and space available to us, we did
deliberately select several large-scale works, such as Marie Sester's
Threatbox.us <http://threatbox.us/>, (2007) and David Rokeby's n-Cha(n)t
(2001), but these were complemented by smaller-scale works of equal impact
including Hans Haacke's Condensation Cube (1963) or Alejandro & Moira Sina's
Spinning Shaft (1983). The folded map set devised by the architects, Leeser
Architecture, ensured that all these works of varying scale and media are
held together and that a coherent experience is sustained when navigating
the huge halls.

CP: As Jemima says, it was clear to us that we wouldn't be able to do an
inclusive historical survey featuring hundreds of works. Surveys of themes
surfacing in this show, such as telematics or algorithmic art, have already
been shown at other institutions (Algorithmic Revolution at ZKM, in 2004, or
Telematic Connections-The Virtual Embrace, 2001, a traveling exhibition
curated by Steve Dietz). We decided to create a fairly tight narrative by
bringing together international works representing key aspects of the
aforementioned themes throughout time. Our goal was to create a network of
connections that critically explores the role of responsiveness in relation
to technologies and how the latter have changed cultural life and the social
fabric. The works in the exhibition are not presented in chronological order
but form certain thematic nodes that branch or connect to other sub-themes.
Projects are often presented as pairs, highlighting the realization of a
similar idea at different points in time.

The massive scale of the exhibition spaces at LABoral was indeed a challenge
for us; artworks can easily get lost in the vast galleries. We worked with
Leeser architecture to both 'reduce' the space and develop a design that
would connect all the various strands of the exhibition. They came up with
the idea of a Situationist map that is dropped into the exhibition spaces
and folds to create walls and pedestals for the placement of work. The
exhibition design becomes both a backdrop and a work in itself and seemed to
be particularly appropriate in that it connects to Situationist notions of
constructing situations (in public space). It adds another layer of
art-historical connections since Situationist concepts have been an
important influence on practices of mapping in new media–and locative,
mobile media, in particular.


LC: Participatory culture, sociable media, and Web 2.0 are hotly debated
ways to describe the shape of contemporary web- and mobile-based media and
the social formations they engender. In this context, artists are emerging
less as creators of individual works but more, as Trebor Scholz has put it,
as "cultural context producers." How do you think this notion of feedback
can be connected to these emerging forms of artistic practice?

CG: There is an absolutely clear historical connection between current
conceptions of participatory media and earlier forms of art involving
feedback, interactivity, and other cybernetic ideas as well as with cognate
concerns about systems, ecology, and so on. In a sense, those using the
capabilities of Web 2.0 are involved in practices whose roots can be traced
back to John Cage, Fluxus, Alan Kaprow, Telematics, work involving slow-scan
and closed-circuit TV, and practices that fed into the thinking that enabled
the shift in digital technology from being concerned with batch processing
to being about real-time symbol manipulation. Trebor's concept of artists
less as creators of individual works and more as 'cultural context
providers' is very close to the reconception of the role of art in relation
to cybernetics undertaken by Jack Burnham in the late 60s and early 70s.
Without the influence of cybernetics on the artistic culture of the late 60s
and that culture's influence on how computers might be understood and used,
there would be no Web 2.0, at least as it is presently constituted. That
said there are important differences between the work of artists in that
period and what is being done with participatory media. One of the most
important differences, to my mind, is that in the earlier period artists
rushed to embrace the technological possibilities of the technology, whereas
now they are more concerned with making critiques of the technological
claims made for these networks.

JR: The importance of collaboration in the creation of new media art has
been regularly debated and endorsed since the launch of Rhizome, but I think
this concept is being pushed still further in recent works like Boj & Diaz's
Free Network, Visible Network (2004)–included in the exhibition–or, for
instance, Furtherfield's VisitorsStudio (2003), or Simon Pope's Charade
(2006), all of which, I assume, are the sorts of work to which you refer in
your question. In these works the collaboration is less tightly-controlled
or directed by the artist/instigator, and the success of the project rests
more firmly with the level of engagement… or participation… or feedback
that the work attracts from the wider public. So I think the notion of
feedback is particularly strong in relation to these works, which
essentially fail, or remain empty, in a practical if not conceptual sense,
when little feedback is generated.

CP: I very much agree, and I think the shift from artists as content
providers (a dubious dot-com buzzword) to context providers is one of the
main characteristics of the digital medium. Together with Margot Lovejoy and
Victoria Vesna, I have been editing a book titled "Context
Providers–Context and Meaning in Media Arts" that explores these issues. I
believe that the commercial construct of Web 2.0, with its social networking
tools, has created a new, contemporary version of users as 'content
providers' who fill 'corporate' contextual interfaces with data and sign off
the rights for them. It's interesting to see this new iteration of the
content provider, which takes the notion of the artist as content provider
for commercial tools and applications in the 90s to another level.


LC: As we've discussed, FEEDBACK illuminates a broader history for new media
art, or art that engages technology. What are the current directions you see
the field moving towards?

JR: Technology is involved at some stage in the production of most art
today, so it is possible to argue that new media art is becoming synonymous
with contemporary art. Artists, curators, and the public in general are all
increasingly techno-literate and comfortable, I would argue, with using
technology not simply as a tool, but also as a medium for art. But art that
engages technology is a very imprecise and broad discipline, and some
technology-based art is inevitably more innovative, challenging, and
engaging than the rest. The work that I personally find most interesting,
now, is work that somehow addresses, or incorporates recent technology
developments classified under the banner of Web 2.0. By this I am referring
to work which is either actively reliant on massive audience participation,
or on the manipulation of large quantities of data. I am particularly
intrigued by the potential copyright and pro-am implications of this
practice on established, mainstream art structures.

CP: New media art is such a hybrid field that it is impossible to identify
*a* direction in which it is moving. By nature, it develops in multiple
directions. But, as Jemima indicates, there certainly is an increased
interest in and focus on social networking and mobile locative media at this
time. It will be interesting to see if the corporate construct of Web
2.0will be balanced by more user-driven, open source alternatives of
'social
softwares.'

+ http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org/feedback/index_001.html

+ Lauren Cornell is Executive Director of Rhizome.