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Subject: [CTHEORY] Article 155 - Slipstreaming the Cyborg
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 28, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
Article 155 11/05/2005 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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1000 DAYS OF THEORY
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Slipstreaming the Cyborg
CTHEORY Interview with Christina McPhee
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~Christina McPhee in conversation with Francesca De Nicolo~
Christina McPhee (Los Angeles) engages the sense of place within
an art that extends the semiotics of new media into layers of
time, memory and sublimity. Her installations, often at
architectural scale, instantiate artifacts of memory within the
landscape of their own echoes. She develops technologically
nuanced topographies in net art, sound, video, performance,
painting and photography. christinamcphee.net, naxsmash.net, and
carrizoparkfielddiaries.net.
Francesca De Nicolo (Rome) is an art historian, independent
curator and art critic. She studied contemporary art with
Jolanda Nigro Covre and Silvia Bordini at the University of
Rome; and is finishing research with Enrico Crispolti and Luca
Quattrocchi of the University of Siena, on postorganic
aesthetics and its connection with the net. She has been
assistant at the GCAMC of Rome and assistant curator at the
British School of Rome Contemporary Arts programme; she
currently reviews art for Random, Exiwebart, Arte e Critica,
Netartreview, Crudelia and Merzbau.
CTHEORY: You have often described your new media work with the
evocative term, 'slipstream,' In the parlance of internet service
providers, 'slipstream' is an adjective, a verb and a noun, which
refers to a fix or enhancement made to software without creating a
new version number to identify the changes, for example, "a
slipstream fix". When I look at your work online, I wonder about
whether your presence, as the artist, is like this kind of
enhancement, as if, maybe, you imagine or are the fix that alters the
software within the software. Does this implicate how you identify a
psychic space or transactional relationship between your body, 'the
machine' and new media? Can we imagine a relative space, or
transitive condition? Does this condition admit a conscious or
visible place for the identity of the artist, or is that identity
sublimated in the machine?
Christina McPhee: Thinking about the poetics implied by "between your
body and 'the machine'": -- one wonders if 'machines' could be
imagined as distributive trace presences within a psychic
architecture, even a voice-space, built from a breath inside the
screen. Let's visualize a model of this breathing architecture; how
can we imagine it as neither machine body nor human body, or maybe
both, so that the space is as much a transitive verb as a nameable
location. Here's where the visualization of 'slipstream' becomes
especially useful: apart from programming slang, the word also has an
older meaning in aerodynamics. Slipstream denotes the area of
negative pressure or suction that follows a very fast moving object,
like an airplane propeller. Or, when you're in a small sports car on
the freeway, you can 'slipstream' behind a large truck, which allows
your small vehicle to be sucked into the slipstream of the larger
vehicle -- at risk to your life. "Slipstream" can be a metonym,
standing in for a complex set of associations, including machine
repair, hallucination ( as in, a 'fix' ), sublimation of identity
(forward suction into something ahead of you), minimal resistance,
and air, wind or breath (intake, inhalation, suction).
CTHEORY: So does software 'slipstream' the artist?
McPhee: Sure, so you could say, as a metaphor, my body, my lungs, my
voice are sucked into the slipstream of this air tunnel 'behind' the
swiftly moving, apparently autonomous vehicle, of software. My
presence is subsumed or minimized, but a new version of me is not
released. Slipstream only works as a negative pressure area, or x.
Like the poet Emily Dickinson, I ask the machine, or maybe, it asks
me, "I'm nobody, are you nobody too?" Between the two of us is this
moving space or breathing architecture. Then there's a meta level of
metonymy: 'slipstreaming' as a verb describes a dynamic relationship
between two co-variants, presence (consciousness of information,
stored as human/machine memory) and aphasia (inability to speak or
articulate memory). It's not that memory is lost, or recovered, off/
on; instead, the stored memory is inarticulate within the suction of
the stream -- it's there, but its voice is lost in the rush of air. I
find, and I am speaking of my own human, physical memory, that the
psychic space implied by 'slipstream' is both self-reflexive and not
about the self -- somehow the self (artist) disappears in the flux,
leaving only the traces of her presence in fleeting gestures and in
fast-moving spaces that extend beyond the browser, as if there is a
screen so vast it becomes a night city.
Naxsmash is a work, or series of net based projects, scenarios that
try to disclose this kind of psychic topology, so that the
'slipstream' relationship between body and machine generates this
uncanny place, as if I am trying to describe what it is like inside
the area of negative pressure, inside the stream/screen. Everything I
have done as a painter and musician within new media has arisen from
the process of trying to recover and release traumatic memory: the
act of trying led to an act of generative fiction. Naxmash comes from
NAX, a performance video (2001). NAX involved a video shoot of an
onsite ritualized action, in which very little happened apart from my
selection of the site, my lying down in the dirt, and breathing. The
place was someplace I had forgotten and then accidentally
rediscovered. There had been childhood violence there. I remembered
it; I thought to conquer it, by going to the place and confronting
its mean space and narrow darkness. I thought that by breathing there
in a gesture learned from photographs of Ana Mendieta that I should
be able to remake the place or release its violent memory. The
physical performance was a ritual theatre without audience. The video
documents an act of breathing as if to contain and release traumatic
memory from the site.
CTHEORY: This seems like some kind of private ritual action. But you
recorded it, and you digitized it. So you're now not following the
practice of Ana Mendieta. It seems to me, that her photographs of
herself, lying in the dirt, in the sand, makes a kind of memoir. An
attempt at a meaningful record. Maybe even like a monument to memory,
or a momento mori. And yet I feel, this isn't happening in NAX, since
you are interested in disappearance and loss of memory. Does Nax
really tell a story, or imply that there is a story to tell?
McPhee: I don't think NAX was about storytelling at all. Memory is
the recognition or storage of events; memoir is narration of memory.
All I did was, practically nothing: an act almost negligent-- just
breathing. Breath itself: breathing new life into something. New life
-- birth -- where the performance happened, the place was beside a
lake named for the Nativity. NAX is shorthand for Lake Nacimiento,
California. Later, in the digital studio, in the edit, to name the
movie file, I typed "nacimiento," then "nascent," then "nax". That
stopped me. "X" marked the place, but where was it? Inside the edit,
the performance had disappeared into pixels: oxygenated gesture was a
digital object. No longer a place, NAX became nowhere else than
inside the digital video edits, via erasure and inscription. Smashing
the violence inside the digital edit performed memory in a realm that
has no site: x is negative. Then, too, "x," factor spliced the sign
of female inside the media space. I noticed a shift: what had
happened to the feminine x, the spot where I was or am, the location
of the subject? I was gone. The site was gone.
I felt that I had disappeared into the architecture of a place x,
from whence, no longer visible, I could move freely, in terms of
artistic and conceptual practice. (from (A)Nascent Memoire: The
Naxsmash Project)
naxsmash.net/public_html/texts/McPheeNaxsmash_files.htm
CTHEORY: So it seems that you are imagining an electronic topology as
a negative pressure zone, an x zone that extends in infinite strands
or skeins? I get the impression that the online screen provides you
with a time-based medium that delivers a certain kind of feeling, or
atmosphere, of an indeterminate, maybe even infinite space, or an
architectural topology that goes on and on in long time based
strings. All that black background in Naxsmash makes me think of the
black behind the scenes in paintings from the school of Caravaggio.
Actions and events slip in and out of darkness, flickering in and out
of the light. I sense drawings across a dynamic, breathing black
field, a nightscape. But what I don't understand is how this night
field connects with the breathing, slipstreaming metaphor you've been
describing. Can you speak a bit about this breathing quality as,
perhaps, a condition of immanence within a dark topology? Do you
think that it is possible to speak about the concept of immanent body
in your work?
McPhee: Well, in some ways, the incidents, such as quicktime movies,
interactive links, texts, sounds emerge in Naxsmash naxsmash.net are
drawing elements or traces across the dark topology, or maybe you
could even call it a dark body, of the space of the work. The space
'behind' the screen in Naxsmash, as you say, has an atmosphere or
quality of infinite extension, or of an architectural topology that
might be going on and on indefinitely. It was because of this kind of
state of unconditional extension, that I could imagine a
slipstreaming state of being: the old subjective "I" of myself, the
artist, disappears into the pixels, leaving traces like drawings or
residue or debris. The traces are the visual and auditory incidents
that, sort of, coalesce into narrative fragments in the various
sections of Naxsmash -- Sonic Persephone, No Flight Zone, Slipstream
Andromeda, Blood Ellipse, 47 Reds, and Avatarotica. By working in
hypertext and animation for online work, work that could only exist
in the oxygen of pixels could escape being covered over or
suffocated. Inside the slipstream, the code, not authored by me, only
slipstreamed by me, always worked the same way, each time,
automatically, autonomically, a mechanism of disclosure and
disappearance, of strange threads of sound, moving image fragments
and text. Sometimes I call the naxsmash site "vox cyborg." Perhaps I
am not really answering your question, but I guess what I am trying
to describe, is an aesthetic of immanence. Immanence, in that I was
able to suggest my body presence while hiding it. The subjective
memory disappears, leaving a trace in these partial, or fragmentary
identities and voices, Persephone and Andromeda. Just being able to
create these immanent personae kept me from suicide.
CTHEORY: I guess you could say then that you kept your body and mind
alive through net-based media.
McPhee: True enough. Before access to multimedia authoring tools,
during the nineties, I would carry out large performative drawings,
layering precisely drawn fragments of doorways, stairways, and
choreographic movements of dancers in archaeological ruins from sites
in the American southwest. I left large areas blank, as if the viewer
could fill it in, or in a way, because the openness of the empty
space was a place of refuge. The drawings were both precise in
execution and ambiguous as representations -- they gestured at
something immanent and undisclosed. Pushing towards greater and
greater articulation, I was trying to see something that I could not
see. I would add more and more detail until a breaking point would
happen. I could not bear too much information. I would smother the
delicate drawings and clear traces with dark slashes of paint, like
cuts of a machete. Painting's immediacy and fluency led me to a wall.
The painting surface was like a wall behind which were insupportable
memoires of sexual violence. I could not go there and yet if I did
not I could not become coherent as a subject. I could only allow
limited glimpses of color and drawing to survive. Some of these are
at http://www.naxsmash.net/inscapes/ in the archive section (in
Flash). Lost drawings, ten years of work, turned into dead zones
where the animated trace -- the cognitive, the aware -- disappeared
under suffocating materials. A drive to survive kept me alive, but
killed painting until I could figure out a way to paint inside
electronic media, where I could disappear into the pixels and live
behind the wall of paint, now a screen.
CTHEORY: Still, in terms of electronic media, are you actually
talking about the net, or electronic interactive installation? Does
it matter which?
McPhee: Really both were useful, in the sense that taking NAX video
performance and turning it, itself, into an online performative
interactive work, made it an impersonal, or subpersonal, open work,
in the sense of Umberto Eco, I could actually continue to survive as
a body. Immanently, you could say: "The machine has an organic back."
(Fernandez Galiano) Thus the = 'cyborg' body arose naturally out of
my suicidal dilemma: an 'I/not I' appears as a transference -- a
projection into and out of the screen world, while remaining in a
sense, trapped behind or inside the screen. By being able to
'breathe' through the multimedia authoring tools, I started to make
still transparent works for Naxsmash, but I did not want to fix them
to the wall, because they might revert to being read as obscuring
veils. So I printed them in transparent scrims and made performance
installations of them. I performed inside a 'forest' of scrims, by
shooting video of my own performance through the scrims, and then
drawing on the scrims from the back sides, so that the projection of
my drawing gestures would cut through the performance space, and onto
the audience and onto the walls of the club or gallery. I performed
first at Moonbase Gallery, Vancouver in 2001 with the show Digitalis
1, then at California Museum of Photography UC Riverside
www.cmp.ucr.edu/photography/impromptu/mcphee.html in 2002, and later
to the San Francisco Performance Cinema Symposium and to RMIT
Melbourne DAC : Streaming Worlds in 2003. At Selectmedia 03, Chicago,
I was surrounded by an indifferent and occasionally hostile club
crowd. People came up and tried to make me break concentration. The
performance www.christinamcphee.net/performanceinstallation/
selectmediaperformance.htm) became an act of resistance.
CTHEORY: Resistance, that's interesting, your personae in Naxsmash
always seems to elude definitive identification. In the Naxsmash
digital print suite, there appear fragments of a woman's body -- most
of the shots, are they shots of you? You look like you're tied up, in
a sadomasochistic way, with red ropes. Are you showing your body as a
cyborg condition?
McPhee: Maybe. It did seem like the act of publishing the redropes
images, ironically, opened up the problematic of suicide and erasure
into a public realm, by creating a digital performance online,
thereby exposing that obsession to the public space of the net. And
of course that leads quickly, in my imagination at any rate, to a
consideration of obsessional topologies. Places of slippage, where
things are about to happen, or haven't just happened yet: where you
are waiting for something: a Piranesian 'Carcieri'-like space.
CTHEORY: A prison, but you talk about things breaking open, or
breaking apart. How does this relate to the cyborg? Is her body
continuously falling apart?
McPhee: Yes, I think that the slipstreaming implies a constant
fragmenting into strands or skeins. And then you ask yourself, how
can I trace or map these? Is there a correlation to a topology
outside the self, outside the psychic architecture?
CTHEORY: So you move into landscape.
McPhee: Yes. Certainly with the cyborg, there's no-one there, only a
set of instructions or a data-body. In fact, experiencing a
significant earthquake (6.5) (the San Simeon quake of December 23,
2003) suggested a new direction. I shot images of the destruction and
began a suite of images that dealt with the presence/absence of
memory, again trying to embody memory through the bitmap. I also
integrated these as stills within video footage shot at the media
circus surrounding the disaster, and contrasted them to the silence
and emptiness (the 'open' phenomenology) of Soda Lake, a sheer white
dry lakebed near the San Andreas Fault. This became the digital
short, SALT. In Salt,
www.christinamcphee.net/slipcity/texts/salt.html, a cyborg like
antagonist, a dark silhouette against the white lake, seems to
tantalize and retreat. SALT explored the problem of memory, how it is
not encoded perfectly into the body, but is subject to slippage. And
inside a deserted landscape.
CTHEORY: How does your new work, Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries, explore
memory differently than Naxsmash? Are we still in the realm of the
cyborg body? What is being remembered here? I understand you are
working with near real time, live data streams from a USGS site. Is
data an objective entity, that's being somehow transformed into a
subjective presence? Does the truth of the data, or relative truth,
matter to you?
McPhee: The Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries interpolate live and archived
seismic and geomorphologic data through digital photographic, video
and sonic installation; large scale digital photographic prints,
digital video, locative and electronic audio; and online time based
interactive art. I made very large digital chromogenic prints from
documentary medium format and digital photography, digital video, and
drawings made on-site at seismically active zones in central
California -- Carrizo Plains, where the San Andreas Fault is most
visible, and Parkfield, a continuously active seismic landscape,
where a recent 6.0 quake yields a rich archive of geologic data. I
incorporate layers of field observation within a dream-like sequence
of abstract images, where passages of linear structures and shadowed
mass allude to ruins and debris in the wake of recent tremors. By
means of architectural scale, at 72 to 92 inches, each print is like
a page torn from a cinematic notebook -- film stills from an
event-scene that has almost materialized, laced with traces from
geomorphologic maps. At carrizoparkfielddiaries.net, Flash animations
trigger from a selective crashing of online live data against
archived data from the recent 6.0 quake at Parkfield.
christinamcphee.net/cpdstrikeslip.html.
John Haber (haberarts.com) wrote recently to me about "the tendency
to forget that the metaphoric connection between the finished image
and the original data does not flow naturally, not because the work
itself isn't an adequate model or metaphor of phenomena (art as
landscape, art as commerce), but because the original data themselves
did not have a phenomenological relationship to such things, but only
arose in the context of a methodology, model or metaphor." To me this
point seems particularly salient -- that the data is 'real' only
insofar as it is known to be conditionally related to something
outside data, nature itself. Similarly, the cyborg landscape and the
cyborg identity are conditional. They relate as an indication of real
things and real subjects outside the slipstream, but inside the
vortex of the negative x space of media and information arts, they
can only exist in strange self referential loops.
CTHEORY: This sounds like a contradiction: on the one hand, you're
saying that there is no objectivity to the data scape, and on the
other hand, you're claiming some kind of metaphoric truth be
inscribed between geologic and human traumatic memory.
McPhee: No, it's not that kind of direct linking. Again, think of the
conditional situation: it's really more a matter of allusion, and
ellipse, and syntax. To speak of the immanent body in my practice, is
to allude to the problem of physical memory, how trauma and suffering
is imprinted or inscribed in the brain and the body of real people,
in real places, like the debris or archaeology of violence, buried in
the 'code' of the body itself.
CTHEORY: To give the body space in which to be able to breathe...
McPhee: Right, I am slipstreaming, moving in and out of an immanent
body through the live data of the net, through installation, through
performance, and even through still composite images like the large C
prints, whose dark depths have such a shiny mirrored surface that
they reflect on each other in an endless Piranesian array. Just to
make this work as installation in still form brings me back to the
problem of layered drawings: but now I have not erased them.
www.christinamcphee.net/carrizoparkfielddiaries/
transportinstallation1/84x40in.htm.
CTHEORY: I suspect that you must be fascinated by the condition of
border and border space, then, particularly in relationship to your
physical memory and your body. Do you, yourself, feel like a border?
McPhee: Thinking about this question raises another, what is border?
or border space? My current landscape based work conflates human
traumatic and geologic memory as a single 'seismic' memory. The
border is fluid, or semipermeable. In poetic terms, aftershock is
inevitable. Our minds are tuned to anticipate the next disaster.
Destabilized, continuously, we look to data, delivered by our
instrumentations, to surveille the geologic conditions, in hopes of
saving ourselves from the next violent destruction of our city. Our
city becomes our body, and is already a cyborg border space itself.
In naxsmash.net/47reds/47redshift.html, I imagine myself both
watching a woman running through the streets of the city and being
that woman myself, and that woman is the city -- an 'illumination' of
one of Italo Calvino's texts from Invisible Cities (cities+desire5).
One may have a vision of a city stretching between Los Angeles and
San Francisco that cannot sustain itself except in the margins. Thus,
a border space/ crossroads. The Carrizo Diaries start to touch on
this... in their generative 'echoes' of an uncertain future; I tried
to imagine structures of debris containing habitations -- thinking
all the while of Constant's Babylon models (which I saw at the
Documenta XII, Kassel, in 2002).
www.christinamcphee.net/carrizoparkfielddiaries/album/pages/
debris.htm.
The generative fictions that both distress and enchant my imagination
are ones that, despite linguistic filtering through the machine
language (large photoshop files, Final Cut Pro Video, Flash, PhP,
java, in my practices) still assert some strange material presence
that seems to beg to be recognized as human. I work at the image
building until a strangeness of the images refuses the obvious
gestures that these programs are designed to deliver.
Maybe a matrixial strategy is in the set of all possible interactions
here: x = (christina)(photoshop) / documentary images.
CTHEORY: Do you mean that software has consciousness, on a really
simple linguistic process level?
McPhee: I don't know about consciousness. Nonetheless, because I
remediate the pages of my diary, my raw experience with the
landscape, by forcing it into a syntax of a linguistically narrow
architecture (the commercial tools), on the other side of the tunnel,
the work 'comes out' as a kind of difference. Like, as if it's a
queer condition -- refusing accommodation and disappearance, it
asserts itself as Uncanny -- unheimlich.
CTHEORY: Does the commercial software dominate the content?
McPhee: Well, it is a moot point, that the software design -- the
layers metaphor in Photoshop, for example -- influences, perhaps even
co-authors the photographic image data. More interesting to me than
the idea of domination, is the idea of occlusion and looking through
-- partially inside -- the data landscape. In the Diaries, I pushed
the images to the point that they became abstract vertical
constructs, or abstract architectural arrays that suggest looking
through, rather than over, the surface, yet the layers cover and
converge on one another, so that it's challenging to the viewer, to
figure out what the diaries want to record. You are forced to rely on
studying the internal contextual relations between different images
and traces within the installation, to decode them into a narrative
or subnarrative. In Carrizo-Parkfield I enjoy playing with the
syntactical relationships between several very divergent kinds of
visual representation. On one extreme margin of this project, is the
raw experience of drawing, of making performance work in the dry lake
bed, shooting film at dirt level, remembering Ana Mendieta, as in the
'carrizoclip' here www.christinamcphee.net/cpdstrikedipslip.html.
On the other extreme margin, is the super slick dark pools of the
installation prints, mirror like, apparently impassive, reflecting,
in their surfaces, back to you, the observer, the witness, standing
there. www.christinamcphee.net/
carrizoparkfielddiaries/transportinstallation1/pages/
aftershocaccelsubt1_jpg.htm. There, where you stand, you absorb the
distant place, Carrizo Plain, into the reflected image of your body
in the mirrored wall. The Carrizo becomes abstracted to the point of
disappearance.
CTHEORY: Where, then, is the cyborg landscape? Where is the border?
McPhee: You find it in the cat's cradle of impulses between the
'remembering' of the performance and documentation work and the
'forgetting' of the pseudo perfect mask of Photoshopped image. It
seems to me that this condition, of being only able to remember part
of the time, partially, 'through a glass darkly', is 'completely
human centered.' I desire a strange (unheimlich) use of the mode of
production (the commercial software) in service of a generative human
space (fictional, fluid, resistant to categorization, escaping being
tagged and identified). Using the radar to stay under the radar (a
coyote trick).
CTHEORY: Does this mean that there is a political dimension to the
project itself, insofar as it is born of resistance to being
sublimated to forgetfulness, to amnesia and to totalizing technology?
That it still insists on being some kind of 'diary', which suggests
person -- subject -- aliveness outside the prison? Is this
frightening?
McPhee: I've been thinking about this, a kind of witness to something
we don't want to see or know. At Documenta XI, in 2002 the Italian
artists group Multiplicity showed a harrowing installation of
interviews and videos related to the deaths by drowning of immigrants
from Asia to Italy on a Christmas night. "We say that it did not
happen, we say that we did not know (Multiplicity, Solid Sea,)
resonates at naxsmash.net/noflightzone/texthtml/peregrine.html) In
the case of the Carrizo Parkfield Diaries, the fact that California's
urban space stretches over completely unpredictable seismic terrain,
over which we do not have control, and with which we must develop
some kind of rapprochement and negotiation? In the fact that a
totalizing media landscape is not possible, because life always
(already) exists outside of whatever we might imagine as 'landscape'?
CTHEORY: Could you say that you are definitively, a cyborg? Or are
you a witness to the cyborg?
McPhee: I feel my body is like a border; but, no, it is not itself a
cyborg, because it (I) exist in some kind of condition of alterity
outside technology even though I experience its operational
architecture from the inside, as if from the inside of my body, heart
and brain. It's a strange condition, liberating and uncomfortable:
but better than the old psychotropic condition of enslavement, when
in former times (before I entered the media labyrinth) my mind was
hostage to the repetitive, unpredictable onslaught of triggered
memories of violence to my body. Now I may be lost in the borders of
the labyrinth, but I have no longer lost my psychic self. I remember
who and what I am while I move through the operational constructs of
media. Thus I escape media. Perhaps (I) is simply this: the
consciousness of a space beyond any formulation of 'landscape' or
technology', that paradoxically resides inside my body. And anyway, I
will die, and cyborgs don't. They are a conditional, or subjunctive
tense within a larger grammar.
CTHEORY: If we are not cyborgs, then, let's go back to slipstreaming
as the idea of 'fix'. Sounds a bit like a drug habit. Is new media
like that, an insatiable addiction? Deliriously, do we hallucinate
some 'interaction' with new media, as if this interaction is
technopoetics outside of as well as inscribed on our own bodies? Is
that an assumption, that 'new media' launches a trace or line towards
some construction or Cartesian coordinate outside itself?
McPhee: I tend not to think of new media or operations with it as
being something that exists a priori, with some kind of transcendent
value as a super-tool or super-techne. Towards phase-like and
phrase-like instantiations of artifice or artificial life, such as
the code-driven visualities and sonorities of digital media, one
feels the advance and retreat of some kind of metadata that works
above a condition that we cannot see and cannot access (a sublime
condition, such as, 'nature'). This semiotic movement of information
poetically, metaphorically, across barrier, border or transgressive
zone, is a constant obsession in my imaginative experience. The
obsession seems to express itself in a lyrical and complex
materialist poetics, such that the new media digital environment
becomes a series of semiotic gestures, or linguistic moves, towards
and away from seeing and knowing.
CTHEORY: Or towards and away from memory and remembering.
McPhee: The digitally marked moves are only partially legible: they
only spell a partial sentence. Or, you could say, that the new media
art environment is one of continuous decay and rebuilding, like an
architectural topology or language-topology. Sometimes this flux
seems to be instigated algorithmically, like Fluxus sentences. In
some ways, this is how the online diaries,
carrizoparkfielddiairies.net, work. Here, compiled hourly, live
microseismic strong motion data from a southern California remote
site, crash archived seismic data from a recent quake in Parkfield,
California.
CTHEORY: You've written that the live diaries' reach into the past
changes the archive from a static resource into an unpredictable
future array. How does that work? Is this a delirious use of new
media -- where interaction isn't any more between viewer or user and
the digital work, but rather, an interaction with data coming off the
landscape? Interaction with the landscape through a series of strange
mediations?
McPhee: Sindee Nakatani and I thought it would be interesting to
crash databases of live and archived strong motion data from the
geologic field stations at Parkfield, California, because, as our
collaborative writer, Jeremy Hight, pointed out, it would be an
intriguing model of the way our short term memory and immediate
experiences in the present, crash into our memory and alter the data
inside our heads, so that, in the end, memory, and memoir, generate
themselves -- they are fictions. The the diaries consist of
semi-random animations based on locative sound, electronic keyboard,
textual memoir, and documentary video / photographic stills from the
fault at Carrizo, while, subliminally, Parkfield 'appears' invisibly
as the data feed. Hourly compilations of the latest seismic data are
performed via a CRON job, which executes a retrieval script. This
semi-real time data is parsed into an array which is then used to
crash numerical strings into an array of archived data from the
September 28, 2004 Parkfield quake. These crashes occur via action
scripts written into each one of a series of Flash animation movies,
which do simultaneous retrievals of data of the live and archived
arrays.
CTHEORY: What are the numbers that seem to log in, in between Flash
presentations?
McPhee: Those number strings form from the crashing of the two
databases -- near live versus archived -- and these strings, in turn,
make random selections of Flash movies from our project folder; each
movie presents in a randomized way, so that no sequence is ever the
same, while the sequences as a formal looping resemble the obsessive
return, or metanoia, of traumatic memory. Every once in a while, the
browser gets stuck and you have to reset, and then the project
continues; but meanwhile, as always, live data is being captured and
compiled from the remote site, which I found on a US Geological
Survey public folder on a server. In essence, there is interactivity
within a new media context, or semiotics: but not with the human
'user' in the classic sense (point and click). The interactivity is
with the datastream coming from instrumentation on the remote site,
recording micro increments of ground motion changes, in velocity,
acceleration, and other perameters.
CTHEORY: Even so, there is no interactivity with nature itself,
rather with the 'material' of data compilations coming off the desert
site.
McPhee: It's exciting to me to think that the piece is driven by a
sublime source outside new media, and thus outside ourselves, and
that this source remains and endures as an emitter of seismic
information, that then records as the earth's own diary, or memoir.
Thus the idea of nature as being in completely co-subjective status
with ourselves is suggested. To me the beauty of new media techne
relates to its usefulness as a tool for gesturing towards sublimity,
i e. what can only be know in part, if at all.
CTHEORY: Are the Diaries a closed book, or are you thinking of their
implications outside the installation, and, perhaps, outside the
world of seismic data? Are they extensive, like the slipstream? Are
they pulling you into new lines of research?
McPhee: One of the most interesting things about installing the
Carrizo Parkfield Diaries in LA, was to realize that it would be
great to deconstruct the installation and reassemble it in different
ways, depending on the architectural conditions of the next space.
This is a transitional strategy while I begin a close study of
another series of urban and rural sites in southern California.
Currently, I am pulling out fragments of the prints as stills and
then inserting the stills into video footage that I have shot while
walking through dense urban spaces in London, Berlin and Los Angeles.
I am recycling the fragments as if they are memory fragments that
carry the data of the seismic trauma into a displaced, dream like
context. The new context is the nomadic journey through the city.
Carrizo Parkfield Diaries flows out of a slightly earlier project ,
generally called Merz_city, in honor of Kurt Schwitters. In
Merz_city, there continues to be an aesthetic of breakdown and
waiting within a flux, so that there's an edgy anticipation,
exaggerating the quality of the numinous and fleeting presence of
persons unknown. One is moving through the city, lost in one's own
thoughts, and the mind flickers between the inner obsessive realm of
fragments of aftershock (the Carrizo stills), patches of darkness or
confusion, and intense, near chaotic activity that one perceives in
the ephemeral fleeting intensity of the street. Schwitters was
concerned with the idea of sublation, or the continuous negation and
simultaneous preservation of image. Like a continuously augmented and
expiring drawing, merz_city both exposes and erases an imaginary
heterogeneous city that draws you in and leaves you out, on the edge
of falling; a city preoccupied with its own obliteration and
simultaneous performance.
CTHEORY: Tell me about your relationship with sound and music and
about the movement or artists that you think of in your works?
McPhee: My musical education was through private lessons, never in
formal professional training. Restricted from watching television or
going to movies when I was very young, my desires for art practice
were poured into music, landscape, and books. What I couldn't see
seemed to be the important thing. Visual art, like film, could
somehow bring the invisible into the visible, even if randomly, or in
glimpses. I am sure that the exile from California had something to
do with this thirst for things not immediately at hand, but that I
could make, somehow, by improvisation on the keyboard, or by drawing
out on the prairie. I dreamed of connecting dots into great complexes
of sound and visual incident, like film, but not really with
narrative. Music, especially of Bach, made me visualize synaesthetic
structures, like great strange castles in the air.
CTHEORY: You mentioned Fluxus earlier with regard to setting up data
interpolations as a set of randomized instructions. I would imagine
you are influenced by the work of John Cage.
McPhee: Certainly, Cage has inspired strategies in the sound project,
Slipstreamkonza (www.christinamcphee.net/slipkonza/autochamber.html),
with some insights from Henry Warwick (2004). Intuitive, almost
randomized recirculation and improvisation of long-remembered bits
and pieces, motifs, credenzas, mini-arpeggios, descending minor
fifths, little blues riffs, move best through my hands, and short
circuit the visual brain while playing.
CTHEORY: How does sound function in your works? You speak of the
cyborg as a neural topology in some of your writings. Is sound a part
of this experience?
McPhee: In my own brain it seems that the fear-centers of the mind
(the amygdalas) are overridden with something like an endorphin or
tension release through the formal figuration that seems to attend
improvisational performance, and, later, transmutes and transforms
multimedia formal conditions -- like a subterranean stream below the
level of the visual in my multimedia works. Perhaps the music
structures, as complex as they are, carry out a kind of mathematical
coherence or temporal architecture, or armature, over which the
visual absences and presences with which one can develop narrative
and formal sequences, can be suspended. I also have noticed, that
when reacting to traumatic memory, the first thing that shuts down is
my voice (words), the second, visual thinking, and the third, or very
last, is music and sound. The sound patterns remain a powerful
neurological pathway for remaining conscious and integrated
emotionally and cognitively even when I cannot understand what is
happening around me, or when experiencing paralyzing fear and mental
shutdown, in other modes of thought. Perhaps there is a deep
impression in my hands and heart, arising from childhood hours at the
piano, that there is an integrative principle in the cosmos that
leaks out via music to the human level.
CTHEORY: How did you become involved with electronic composition?
McPhee: The pathways into sound for me came totally through the
medium of digital transformation of analog material and memories of
sounds in childhood at the piano. I was messing around a lot with an
old (circa 1995) Yamaha Clavinova and finding that the musical ideas
of my childhood experience came flooding back into consciousness. It
was as if a lost part of my mind and soul had come back to me. As
soon as I realized there were no digital rules, no performance
agenda, no audience, I started to play improvisations that flowed out
of a thousand memory fragments of Bartok, Ravel, Stravinsky, and
Shostakovich, the doric mode, perhaps, set to move up and through
lines of Kansas City blues. The acoustic pleasures of improvisation
led directly into digital files that became fodder for editing and
montaging into stranger and shorter passages until there were only
intense distillations of electronic electroacoustical distortions
left like ruins touched here and there by lines of architectural
melody. So for me this work is like mining the gold of the intense
sense of the present cached within the past I remember from childhood
at the piano. Sound art is a mode of super awareness as if one is
singing in the interstitial spaces between one present moment and the
next present moment: a hyper now.
CTHEORY: You've written, on the soundtoys site,
www.soundtoys.net/a/index.php about how you find that transpositions
of image and sound delivery on the net create thresholds between
what's behind the screen and what is physically live, between virtual
and so called real. Why does this happen, in your view? What's so
special about sound?
McPhee: For reasons I do not understand, it seems that sound reaches
past the barriers of memory and, like Orpheus, hears the material of
dreams of the underground and reports the sound in an awakened, live
state.
CTHEORY: Is this too a kind of slipstreaming, in which you are
slipstreaming behind the 'bid data' fields of seismic activity? Are
the media effects reports from the underground, or reports from a
subliminal source?
McPhee: Off and on since 2001, I've been working on Slipstreamkonza,
a sonic topology in net and physical installation. Slipstreamkonza
makes a space in which near live compilations of carbon
photosynthesis from microclimatologic instrumentation at the remote
site, in a dynamic database, generate a series of slipped,
discontinuous flows of data into animation via capture and
transformation of compressed diurnal/nocturnal and seasonal cycles of
the tall grass prairie. Slipstreamkonza's design flows photosynthetic
data from microclimate measurements on the tall grass prairie via the
net, into compilations, that in turn trigger sound from micro ambient
conditions at the prairie site, literally at grass roots level. The
installation could express the breathing of the prairie in the middle
of urban life, so that the live landscape 'voices' itself
telematically. North of Konza, as a kid I rambled through fields and
scrubby creekbeds -- a Turnerian landscape delivering absence and
presence, there and not there, like the flow of invisible breathing.
I am interested in the way net-based data-driven environments can
emulate a remote presence, much like the ephemera of childhood. The
sonic topology performs through play on and through the carbon data,
so that data and the net sound are in a musical self-reflexive loop,
remediating, through a flexible action-scripted Flash interface,
photosynthesis. The sound becomes a performance field, whose shapes
and dynamics flow from coupling to numeric expressions arising from
landscape itself.
CTHEORY: In the end you are in love with the cyborg landscape, the
technological landscape. You seem to want to remediate a sense of
place through performance of the data. Global media is often said to
obliterate the local. Yet, here you describe a situation in which the
specificity and ephemerality of algorithmic triggers from the
landscape itself brings the remote location into intimate presence.
christinamcphee.net/slipkonza/SlipstreamKonzaSemiotics.htm
McPhee: The prairie is, in my physical memory, a place of aftershock
(the site of sexual trauma and emotional violence), and, at the same
time, extremely beautiful in its spatial austerity, abundant
absences, and proliferant grasses reaching to heaven. My hope is that
somehow by creating a negotiation with that landscape through sound
will permit a cognitive reformulation of that landscape: landscape
becomes art through the winnowing of the grasses of trauma, not to
bury the human under ground alive, in a temporary seasonal death like
Persephone, but to release the data of the prairie into an aesthetic
of sound that reflects a larger semiotic structure that can support
and release a metaphor of life.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
About the artist:
Born in Los Angeles, Christina fell in love with the extreme
contrasts of terrain and city in southern California. A childhood
move to rural Nebraska was an exile where, in the absence of the
visual complexity of California, she trained her eye towards the
subtleties of landscape in apparently empty space, read voraciously
and studied piano and drawing. A world of imaginary layered
landscapes propelled a desire to create physical manifestations of
the same, and, upon earning a scholarship to Scripps College,
Clarement, she began interdisciplinary studies in literature, art
history and philosophy. Painting and printmaking followed, at Kansas
City Art Institute (BFA), and as a student of Philip Guston in
painting at Boston University (MFA). Since 2000, her digitally
transformed landscapes are both performative and architectural, and
extend a baroque complexity into a collusion of still and time based
media. A study of the space of the net as a live subject, or
cyborg-topology, www.naxsmash.net has been included in festivals and
electronic media archives around the world, including Cornell
University Libraries, National Library of Australia, Soundtoys.net,
and the Rhizome Artbase New York. Since 2001, her time based
interactive performances and installations have traveled and shown in
many international venues, among them , in London and also in western
European venues; FILE in Sao Paulo (2002); R-R-F at National Museum
of Contemporary Art, Bucharest (2003), and New Media Art Festival
Bangkok (2004); Lounge|lab, an installation at the Back_up Festival
for New Media and Film, at Bauhaus-University-Weimar (2003); San
Francisco Performance Cinema Symposium (2003), Victoria Film
Festival, British Columbia (2004), and California Museum of
Photography UC-Riverside (2002). She showed with "Page_Space" at
Machine Gallery in Los Angeles in 2004, and Carrizo Parkfield Diaries
www.christinamcphee.net/cpdstrikedipslip.html showed at Transport
Gallery, Los Angeles and RX Gallery, San Francisco in spring 2005.
Her short film SALT will show in Hic et Nunc, a Veneto regional
festival during the Venice Biennale 2005, from June 10 to July 17,
2005. She has presented her work on seismic memory landscapes for
Jihui, the Digital Salon at Parsons/New School University, New York
City in spring 2005 netart-init.org/jihuisalon/view.php?jihui_id=69
She will be at the Humlab University of Umea, Sweden, for a data
mining research residency in October 2005. McPhee was a resident
artist at the Banff Centre in 1999, where she was inspired to work in
new media by Teri Rueb and the artists of parkbench (New York). She
is a noted writer on new media, most recently published in Life in
the Wires: A CTheory Reader (2004) www.lifeinthewires.net and
co-moderates an international list digital media arts, -- empyre --
(www.subtle.net/empyre). Her collaborative live seismic data project,
www.carrizoparkfielddiaries.net, is in the net art archive collection
of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Current/future projects from McPhee include online mpeg releases on
Chicago-based microsound label Stasisfield (www.stasisfield.com) in
summer 2005, including a release of selected sound art from
Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries and from Slipstreamkonza. In 2003, digital
prints from Slipstreamkonza won the James Phelan Award for
Printmaking, San Francisco Foundation, showing at Kala Art Institute
in Berkeley (2003) and RX Gallery, San Francisco, in 2004. Christina
formed naxsmash group productions, for intermedia art and design
installation, with Terry Hargrave, MIT-trained architect, teacher and
video artist, in 2002. Her net art works, noflightzone and 47Reds are
archived at CTHEORY Multimedia in two issues online, WIRED RUINS
(2002) and NETNOISE (2003), at ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu,
Sonicpersephone and Piranesia are published in London by
www.soundtoys.net, together with 47Reds on www.chairetmetal.com in
Montreal, curated by Ollivier Dyens. Writing on net architecture and
the poetics of virtual space is found at arch.virose.pt. Her net art
work on traumatic memory and violence is at
www.a-virtual-memorial.org and is part of the >wartime< project at
offline.area3.net/wartime/. Her exhibition on volcanic landscapes,
Ring of Fire, was supported by the State Foundation for Culture and
the Arts, Hawaii in 1999, for the University of Hawaii. Her
paintings, drawings and prints are the Kemper Museum of Contemporary
Art, Colorado Springs Fine Art Center/Taylor Museum, Spencer Museum
of Artand the Sheldon Museum of Art and Sculpture Garden, University
of Nebraska; private collections of her landscape-based drawings,
photography, and digital prints are in London, New York, Paris,
Chicago, Kansas City and Los Angeles.
_____________________________________________________________________
*
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