Still from Art21 Telethon, May 2012

There's performance: immediate, rehearsed and present; then there's television: distant, canned, and broadcast. One offspring of their coupling is the telethon. 'Telethon' became a recognized portmanteau of 'television' and 'marathon' with Jerry Lewis' aid in the 1950s. His telethons for the Muscular Dystrophy Association ran and ran: there'd be a song, a celebrity, a mail carrier, a joke, banter and filler. The marathon viewing sessions kept attention on the cause at hand by providing various entertainment in service of one goal: to raise awareness and funds for the organization. The camera was always on: in order to look away, the viewer had to hit the clicker to change the view (or turn off the box). Inside, the telethon continued.

Recently, Art21 held their own artist-led telethon. Hosted by Ronnie Bass, who had explored the format in 2007 in order to raise funds for his Performa TV piece, the event came to be after the NEA cut funding to the PBS art documentary program. Artists replaced entertainers to create some nine hours of durational broadcast performance streaming from Algus Greenspon Gallery to the Art21 site. It was telethon to its core, making up what it lacked in big-production finesse with performative sincerity, intimacy, and palpable camaraderie.

The telethon as a fundraiser makes less viable sense today: crowd-funding options are less time-consuming and presentation-intensive. What remains is its value as a style: the telethon as an experience that fills time with performance, and an endurance event in service of an objective.

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Shu Lea Cheang, Brandon, Bigdoll interface, 1998

In 1998, the Guggenheim Museum launched its first web-based art commission, Shu Lea Cheang's Brandon. Over the course of a year, the collaborative, dynamic piece would look at the complexity of gender, sexuality, and identity through the life and death of Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon, a Nebraska youth who was raped and murdered after his biological sex as a woman came to light in 1993.

Oft-cited in new media art history as one of the first widely recognized pieces of net art, the Brandon site has been offline for the last year or so; the Guggenheim plans to restore the work in the very near future.

I spoke to the artist about Brandon, 14 years after its launch: 

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YH: How did you first come to conceptualize Brandon? What were the circumstances for its commission?

SLC: Brandon was conceived at a time that I moved from actual space to cyber/virtual, claiming myself a cyber-nomad. It was around the mid-90s, and there was high hope for a super-highway, for a virtual world where race/gender does not matter any more. (I think it was the ad copy of MCI communications?). Meanwhile, two articles came out at Village Voice, one about Brandon Teena's rape/murder case by Donna Minkowitz and the other Julian Dibbell's A Rape in Cyberspace. I had been experimenting with boundary crossing between the actual (state/nation) and virtual (anonymous/avatars), which needed to take up a durational performative format.

By 1995, I wrote out a proposal which was to be a one-year web narrative project following my feature film Fresh Kill (1994). At the time, I guess it was unusual to conceive a durational web work, to be unfolded by episodes, by staged virtual performance 'events' supported by actual space installation. At the time, David Ross was the director of the Whitney Museum. He had the vision to expand the museum into cyberspace. Curator John Hanhardt (who has exhibited three of my major works: color schemes (a solo show in 1990), Those Fluttering Objects of Desire (1993, Whitney Biennial), and Fresh Kill (1995, Whitney Biennial)) took up the curation of Brandon. By 1998, Hanhardt had moved to the Guggenheim Museum and took Brandon with him. At the Guggenheim, Matthew Drutt, Associate Curator for Research, helped realize the curatorial admist the Guggenheim's venture into the virtual museum with Asymptote Architects...

Mat (Clodagh Emoe, 2008-ongoing) via

On a recent episode of Fringe, a mad scientist arch-villain primes two parallel worlds for destruction by re-tuning the frequency of each planet to resonate at the same pitch. A semi-literal bridge that connects the worlds makes this simultaneous ruination possible. The uniting functionality is familiar: an open line enables communication, and much like the telephone and its network offspring, a bridge makes connection possible. That open line has served as a hopeful means of connection to magic, the fuzzily understood, and the otherworldy.  

Remote became routinely possible with the telephone. Electronically transmitted speech enabled nearly immediate, if once-removed, conversation. The device, as described by philosopher Avital Ronell, both amplified a voice across distance and marked the physical absence of the other. A call's origin, the voice on the other side, could be logically anywhere, or from beyond. One story goes: Alexander Graham Bell, influenced by Thomas Watson's interest in phatasmic communication and seeking a means to communicate with his much-loved departed brother, ended up inventing the telephone.

Could transmission and recording instruments reveal the unknown? Ethereal forces were felt and unseen — what was imperceptible to the naked eye might be seen by a technologically augmented one:

The Medium Eva C. with a Materialization on Her Head and a Luminous Apparition Between Her Hands (Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, 1912) via

The mind-consciousness interface is direct and hopefully unburdened by interpretative infrastructure. Fringe's FBI agent heroine possesses slight telepathic and telekinetic abilities that lubricate her passage between worlds. She requires no intervening interface; her mind is the bridge, her thoughts go unmediated from input to considered output. (For more on brain interfaces and interaction, go here for the Near Future Laboratories SXSW talk; slideshow here).

Direct communication from mind to the external results in ...

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Hannah Sawtell, Swap Meet (Ijen Mix) Optic, 2012

The images that you show most often have digital origins, whether combined and assembled into one image, transformed into the surface of a physical object, or edited into sequence as moving image. What is the importance of using digital images (and sound, in the case of your films) as opposed to their analog predecessors? Are your sources always culled from the Internet? If so, do you gather them systematically? How do you refine the selection?

The images, textures and surfaces I reconstruct or redeploy are sourced from the ‘contemporary global arcade’. When my work considers the internet, it is to think of it as at once a tool that presents access to a commons, and also a globalised shop, the ‘autocracy of choice machine’... images/sites are bought by multinations, searches made first fall on what the engines have as priority, the majors are all linked, many of the interesting images disappear as websites go down, and there's matters of copyright and how the virtual is policed, etc… with all this in mind and the fact that as I say this, it's outdated, I follow streams to find the right tone for the work. Talking formally, the different pixel or image qualities give a porous or dense cadence to the video or collage. It’s the same with the sound in the videos. It is edited, leaving the glitches at the edge to force the screen to represent the materiality of digital production or cut and paste editing. I use what I have access to...ideas of access are obviously a moot point with regard to global social economics and therefore the possible agency of the collaborator, actor or author.

The industry and economy of objects seem to figure into ...

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12:12 Welcome!  Seven on Seven begins shortly — watch this space for conference liveblogging.  

12:17 A video welcome from Mayor Bloomberg: technology and art are vital to the city's fabric and "best of luck to all of the contributors."

12:19 HTC's Scott Croyle speaks: it's the journey that drives him; the construct of artists and technologists coming up w/ an idea and presenting them today exemplifies that journey. He introduces Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome. She presents Rhizome's context as "all contemporary art that engages technology," and a broad conversation between art and tech that has grown since the mid-90s. She juxtaposes that context with a summary of E.A.T.'s 9 evenings in 1966 (performances and music by Rauschenberg, Rainer, Cage), a time when engineers and artists seemed much farther apart.

She recounts a conversation w/ a technologist this year who was excited about not creating a product and an artist who wanted "to create a hot start-up."  Presentations to follow on what these teams came up w/in a day.  Lauren ends by thanking the people, corporations, and organizations involved in making Seven on Seven happen, and introducing Douglas Rushkoff, the keynote speaker.  

12:27 Douglas: an artsier Apple = an Apple less open for artistic intervention. Anyway, he's happy to play around w/ the HTC phone he received. He recalls joining the geeks (those who tended to turn sharp corners while walking in straight lines) in 1976 as an artsy theater guy to try programming, but "using computer science to solve mathematical problems" wasn't enough of a motivation to really get him hooked or to understand programming's scope. Being in California in the late 70s introduced him to the artier, psychedelic, hard-core math/computer science folks in ...

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