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Sunday, December 16, 2001
ART &
ARCHITECTURE
A Human Dimension to
New Media
Feeling that
show-and-tell is the way to present such art, Rhizome.LA
offers a salon for artist and viewer to meet.
By SCARLET CHENG
Some
say that new technology sounds the death knell for
face-to-face human interactions--that we'll all be riveted to
our Aeron chairs, staring at the tube. However, it's the
experience of Mark Tribe, founder of Rhizome.org, a New
York-based Web site for exploring the intersections of art and
technology, that people do like to meet in the flesh.
In Manhattan, Rhizome
sponsors popular monthly showings of new media art, called
"OpenMouse," usually at a bar where tech-art fans can schmooze
afterward.
"We wanted to
take it out of the academic or institutional setting, these
works were so dynamic," says Tribe. "People like to meet each
other, to talk, to hang out."
Now the concept, in a
slightly different package, is coming to L.A. Beverly Tang, a
lamp designer, technophile and, like Tribe, a graduate of art
school at UC San Diego, is the producer of Rhizome.LA, a new
media art salon that will take over the newly opened Whose
Cafe on Santa Monica Boulevard one night a month. On
Wednesday, six artists, mostly of the computer-wielding
variety, will present and discuss their work to kick off the
series. Rhizome will provide, among other support, a Web
presence at www.rhizome.org and an electronic mailing list.
"I've been following new
media art and knew that there are a lot of projects out there
that aren't seen very much," Tang says. "Galleries don't
really show a lot of new media--it's hard for them to present
it. It's not like a painting that they know how to hang."
Another problem is
commercial: Many pieces aren't meant to be sold, and in any
case, the market for such works is small. Part of that is due
to newness; part is due to what Tang calls "problems of the
future--like, is there tech support for the art when things
break down?"
All of which
makes show-and-tell a better way to go, she says.
Tang asked Tribe to connect
the new series to Rhizome. "We have similar ideas of
community," Tang says, "and it was obvious we could easily
collaborate on this."
"What's happening in L.A. is
the paradigm for how we want to do things in the future,"
Tribe says. "We're here to help Beverly, provide some
infrastructure to make it possible. And we want to replicate
that in cities around the world."
Rhizome.LA, as Tang points
out, won't be pushing a new media style or movement. There
isn't one, she says. But there are some commonalities.
First, Tang says, the
artists are often using materials and processes created for
industrial applications, not for the making of art, so artists
have to be inventive in turning them to their own ends.
Secondly, the element of
unpredictability or randomness is often part of the process.
"You could say the artists have less control over their
product and allow everything to interact," she says. "They
play more with chance, as opposed to traditional art, where
they have more control."
The
salon's kickoff artists, recruited by Tang, are Steve
Appleton, Joyce Campbell and Mark Pesce, all of Los Angeles,
Scott Draves and Nick Thompson of San Francisco, and Ryan
Wartena of Atlanta.
They
have vastly different projects and portfolios. Some are
technically trained, with degrees and day jobs in computer
science; some have fine-arts backgrounds.
And for some, working in new
media doesn't involve using a computer. Campbell, for
instance, uses morphogenesis--chemical and biological
structural development--as her subject, and photography as her
medium. She has a background in sculpture, and she has been
commissioned by the Southern California Institute of
Architecture to chart L.A. in her own particular way. She'll
introduce Rhizome.LA attendees to "Bloom," which is in the
beginning stages, and is similar to work she did in Australia
and New Zealand, before moving to L.A. two years ago.
For "Bloom," which will be
part of a mapping exhibition when it is finished, Campbell has
begun collecting water and soil samples from 50 sections of
Los Angeles County. "I'm trying to be relatively empirical
about it," she says. "It's absolutely pseudoscience, but I
have to maintain quite a strict protocol to make it meaningful
in any way at all."
Each
sample will then be cultivated in much the way science labs
grow viruses or bacteria. A bit of it will be placed on agar
spread across a sheet of plexiglass; agar is that gelatin-like
stuff in the bottom of your high school petri dish. After
letting the samples stew for several days, Campbell will
create a photogram of the results--directly transferring their
images onto positive photographic paper.
It will be intriguing to see
how the samples differ from area to area, she says.
"I'm interested in how
habitation registers itself on space, in self-generating form,
and the idea that meaning can be projected onto form," she
explains.
Another of the
locally created projects seems on the face of it more like old
media than new. Mark Pesce and photographer Steven Piesecki
are finishing an hourlong video of this year's Burning Man
Festival, which took place in August in the Nevada desert
about 130 miles northeast of Reno.
But Pesce and Piesecki are
using a digital process, which makes their work startlingly
cheap to produce--about $3,000, which includes digital camera
equipment and tape stock, and editing and special effects can
be done through the friendly home computer.
The filmmakers will screen
an excerpt from "This Strange Eventful History" that focuses
on one construction at the festival, whose overall theme this
year was the Seven Ages of Man. "The Temple of Tears," an
ethereally lacey building made of press board, addressed the
subject of death and was burned at the end of the event, which
is dedicated to radical self-expression.
"The idea is not to
document," Pesce says. "I wanted to make an artistic piece
about this one piece and the festival."
As a result, the video skips
narration and interviews, and communicates strictly through
imagery and music (which is by Todd Barton). Pesce hopes to
screen the film at Burning Man next year and at film
festivals, and he is also planning a DVD with optional
commentary.
The works of
Appleton and Draves may be closer to what you would expect
from the intersection of technology and art. Both require
computers, and both make use of that element of chance that
often marks new media art.
Appleton's "About Face,"
which he'll demonstrate Wednesday, uses a surveillance-type
camera and form-recognition software. The program captures
images of people's faces and eventually reduces them to
components of a larger face.
There are two levels of
randomness in his work, he points out. "One is the randomness
that happens that you simply don't expect, which can be
disconcerting or surprising and interesting"--such as when the
computer reads an eye as a whole face.
"Then there's another that
you deliberately put into the program." He points to one of
his printouts of a grid of faces and explains how the computer
randomly changed the background colors each time the screen
was regenerated.
Draves, a
programmer from San Francisco, has devised a screen saver that
links computers to create ever-changing animated images that
he calls "Electric Sheep" (from Philip K. Dick's story "Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," the inspiration for the
film "Blade Runner"). Sample "sheep" (which may be seen on
www.electricsheep.org) can look like crystalline structures,
colored wisps of smoke or nebulae spinning in
space--programmed, but not predetermined, by Draves.
Thompson's work is also a
program: "Glambient" explores families of "tilings," allowing
the user to change the shapes and relationships among the
pieces.
Finally, Wartena is
interested in updating old science with new. He is working on
using laser technology on vinyl to create improved analog (as
opposed to digital) audio records, perhaps even adding a
visual component.
The
Rhizome.LA series is designed to be ongoing. Tang already has
January and February planned.
The second salon will
feature a disc-scratching robot deejay, which is the creation
of MIT Professor Chris Csikszentmihalyi. At Whose Cafe, "DJ I,
Robot" will collaborate with local sound artists. In February,
more robotics are planned--robots used in art, entertainment
and maybe even medicine.
And
somewhere down the line, there will be new media in
fashion--built-in gadgetry, new fibers, new designs.
From Tang's perspective, new
technology isn't necessarily being invented for the sake of
aesthetics. But, she says, "with all these breakthroughs, it's
a waste not to use them for artistic purposes."
* *
* "RHIZOME.LA," Whose
Cafe, 6320 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Dates: Wednesday,
7:30-10 p.m. Price: Free. Phone: (323) 462-8500.
* * * Scarlet
Cheng is a regular contributor to Calendar.
Copyright 2002 Los Angeles
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