Inspiration :
:::::::
Nam June Paik (Cybernated Art)
“Opera Sextronique” (1967)
In the 1960s, Nam June Paik embraced the medium of television, and became
the founding father of video art. His long and prolific relationship with
electronic media began notably with the cellist Charlotte Moorman, in
controversial performance works such as Opera Sextronique from 1967. Paik's
oeuvre later included television sculpture, satellite art, robotic devices,
and giant video walls with synthesized imagery pulsating from stacks of
cathode-ray tubes
Paik suggests that art should embrace the technologies of the information
society. Paik presents himself as artist-shaman, synthesizing art and
technology in an effort to exorcise the demons of a mass-consumer, technology
obsessed society. Paik uses rejected media artifacts in his work, such
as vintage television sets.
Wolf Vostell
“TV Dé-coll/age for Millions” (1959 1963)
3 minutes of blurred TV program. Because the broadcasting station has
deliberately blurred the transmission quality of the film, millions of
viewers take three minutes to notice that their TV set is not defective.
(Presumably millions of people will fumble with their TV sets and try
to adjust the picture.)
Peter Weibel pursued a similar idea in 'The Endless Sandwich.’
“TV for Millions” (1959 1967)
Planned for a TV broadcast in which the TV audience participates and acts.
The events; images; words; recommendations or commands are aimed to rouse
in the viewers active participation, involvement, and thoughts and actions
running parallel to the broadcast.
Bill Viola
“Room for St. John of the Cross” (1983)
Since he began producing video art in the early 1970s, Bill Viola has
explored ways to manipulate and restructure our perception of time and
space through electronic media. In such video installations as Room for
St. John of the Cross (1983), Viola has demonstrated the narrative potential
of "dataspace," a territory of information in which all data
exists in a continual present, outside the traditional definitions of
time and space, available for use in endless juxtapositions.
Viola arrives at the notion of dataspace by considering the spaces that
have been constructed over the ages to record cultural history in architectural
form, from Greek temples to Gothic cathedrals. He compares these "memory
palaces" to the personal computer, with its capacity for storage,
instant access and information retrieval. The computer has introduced
the "next evolutionary step," Viola claims, in which ancient
models of memory and artistic expression are reborn through the fluid
processes of information technologies.
Jeffrey Shaw
“The Golden Calf” (1994)
This work is constituted by a white pedestal on which there stands an
LCD color monitor connected to computing machinery by a cable running
through the pedestal. The viewer of this work picks up and holds this
monitor in his hands. The screen shows a representation of the pedestal
with a computer-generated image of a golden calf on top. By moving the
monitor around the actual pedestal the viewer can examine this golden
calf from above and below and all sides. Thus the monitor functions like
a window that reveals a virtual body apparently located physically in
the real space.
The golden calf has a shiny mirror-like surface in which the viewer sees
reflections of the actual venue of the installation. These are previously
digitized photographs of the room that are 'reflection-mapped' onto the
calf's skin. While the viewer himself is not included in this digitized
reflection of the environment, he does see himself reflected on the glass
surface of the LCD screen. The immateriality of this golden calf is further
emphasized by the fact that only its outer surfaces are modeled, so that
if the viewer moves the monitor screen into the calf's body none of its
interior surfaces are visible.
In The Golden Calf the body is no longer a corporeal object but instead
the immaterial subject of a specifically physical process of disclosure.
When moving the monitor screen up, down and round the pedestal, the viewer
performs what looks like a ceremonial dance around a technological pilaster
construing an almost tangible phantasm.
"The Legible City" (1989)
In The Legible City the visitor is able to ride a stationary bicycle through
a simulated representation of a city that is constituted by computer-generated
three-dimensional letters that form words and sentences along the sides
of the streets. Using the ground plans of actual cities - Manhattan, Amsterdam
and Karlsruhe - the existing architecture of these cities is completely
replaced by textual formations. Traveling through these cities of words
is consequently a journey of reading; choosing the path one takes is a
choice of texts as well as their spontaneous juxtapositions and conjunctions
of meaning.
"The Legible City" (1989) is a three dimensional digital image
whose virtual size was approximately six square kilometers. The viewer
can interactively travel in this space by riding a bicycle which is standing
in front of a large video projection screen. The 'real time' interaction
of the bicycle and the computer generated image allows the bicyclist complete
freedom to move anywhere in this virtual image space. In "The Legible
City" the space of visualization is virtually located beyond the
surface of the projection screen and thus outside the actual room where
the bicyclist are situated. In "Alice's Room" and "The
Virtual Museum" the virtual imagery is located inside the actual
room where the viewers are standing. Such a digital conjunction of virtual
and actual space evokes a Mannerist ambiguity - different orders of simulation
are located in a meta-dimensional structure that mirrors a confluence
of the real and the fictional. This location of the virtual space in a
contiguous relationship with the real space establishes a discourse in
that fine zone between the virtual and the actual. It is here that I believe
the most interesting and challenging opportunities for artistic formulations
exist.
"The Narrative Landscape" (1985)
In this installation images are projected onto a large screen lying flat
on the floor of the exhibition space. The spectators stand on a surrounding
balcony where a joystick enables any one of them to interactively operate
the work by panning in any lateral direction over the surface of its images
and zooming in or out of a chosen part of an image. At the zoom extremes
the joystick generates a digital transition from one image layer to another.
The Narrative Landscape is constituted by twenty-eight images that are
interrelated by a specific spatial and conceptual architecture. The primary
image - a satellite picture of earth inscribed with a Hebraic astrological
chart) is divided by a grid of red lines into nine areas that define access
to nine groups of three images. The three images in each group are arranged
one below the other and the viewer can move up or down through these three
layers.
The interactive structure of "The Narrative Landscape" (1985)
shows that the spatial boundary of the digital image does not have to
be defined by the traditional perimeter of a 'picture frame'. Instead,
a virtual image space of any dimension may be created, which the viewer
explores by moving his 'viewing window'.
Summaries from Research
Extract from a lecture at XXVIII. International Conference on Art History,
Berlin, July 1992; published in: Artistic Exchange, Ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens,
Berlin, 1993, pp. 295-300.
While the capacities of technology are clearly phenomenal, at the same
time its most advanced exercise is its greatest abuse. The technology
is beyond his understanding or control. It becomes another of the alienated
consumer spectacles. Humbled by the complexity and scale of this resource,
we begin to feel that the developments of its forms (car, bomb, electric
toothbrush, etc.) are determined virtually by force of nature. The system
is thus able to recruit technology to its market principles with impunity.
What are needed now are more and more demonstrations of technological
application outside the dictates of the institutionalized program. Such
an open-ended exploitation of technological resources becomes the evidence
for all people that it is there as an extension of their individual wills
and freedom. Nam June Paik has been able to do this with television.
Published in: Art and Artists, No. 10, January 1969, pp. 47-49.
..