Hi crumb
another forward from Judith Rodenbeck regarding the Refresh conference.
This message, as with her first report, was originally posted on the 
iDC mailing list run by Trebor Scholz and hosted at the Thing. Trebor 
has asked me to suggest to you that if you'd like to respond about it, 
you do so on that list (perhaps as well as this one?), so that Judith 
can reply too.
-Sarah


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Judith Rodenbeck <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 7 October 2005 03:28:36 BST
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [iDC] The Art Formerly Known as New Media
>
> Addendum to REFRESH! comments:
>  
> In my “brief” sketch of the conference I totally forgot to mention the 
> concurrent exhibition held at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff 
> Centre. I’m sure someone will have taken umbrage, but honestly, I only 
> saw the show at the opening, and though I meant to go back and have a 
> better look there wasn’t a spare minute & so a second viewing (for 
> some works a first viewing) didn’t happen. That’s too bad, because it 
> was a pretty good show; smart and self-consciously symptomatic, which 
> was, er, refreshing, I guess. This show, “The Art Formerly Known as 
> New Media,” curated by Sarah Cook and Steve Dietz, was, as Cook put it 
> at the opening, kind of an “alumni show,” assembling a selection of 
> works done by artists who have at one time or another been in 
> residence up there.
>  
> What the curators say:
>  
> “In the last decade we have moved from a predominately scopic to an 
> overwhelmingly data-based culture, in which we are interactors not 
> just voyeurs. Nevertheless the important questions of art revolve 
> around meaning not means and especially, what it means to be human. As 
> we face the prospect of carrying in our wallets biometrically-unique 
> forms of identification, the question arises – what defines us as 
> bodies, what is bodily experience?”
>  
> Techno-panopticism, data saturation, cooptation, the threat of what 
> Marcuse would have called one-dimensionality were certainly either 
> worked through or acted out in several of the works I did get to see. 
> These ranged from the techie--large projections onto the architectural 
> surrounds, database projects, and a radio narrowcast of the reading of 
> Linux code by a computer-generated “female” voice--to the low tech—a 
> nominally electronic “re-do” of 19th century galvanic experiments with 
> dead frogs, a stereoscopic tour of Banff, a set of documents relating 
> to the patent of a device for falling in love, a bunch of 
> photocopies...
>  
> Most effective for me, to my own surprise, were two pieces rather 
> romantic pieces, one by Catherine Richards and the other by Maciej 
> Wisniewski. The first was a performative installation of a thick glass 
> (?) platform with a 3-D image embedded in it and, if a viewer so 
> desired, with copper sheeting. This a viewer could volunteer to be 
> wrapped in, and it was Richards’s claim that shrouded thus in copper 
> the viewer would, probably for the first time ever, be shielded from 
> ambient electromagnetic radiation. When the heavy transparent 
> plinth-like platform on which this shrouding was to take place was 
> unoccupied it showed a 3-d (with glasses) image of a ghostly copper 
> shroud. In its inert form the piece was less effective, but just 
> before I left the opening I went back for a second look and there was 
> a form wrapped in copper on the bed wiggling its toes: spooky! And I 
> was very taken with a large projection by Maciej Wisniewski, 3 Seconds 
> in the Life of the Internet. What was particularly lovely about this 
> moving image was that it was projected onto the opening into the 
> second large gallery space, i.e. wasn’t totally flat on one wall but 
> rather ran around the opening, over it, and onto the wall beyond; 
> also, the piece scrolls text and colors that initially seem random but 
> gradually demonstrate a kind of poetic coherence that I didn’t have 
> enough time to completely decode. Although we’re not allowed to say 
> such things these days, I found this work very beautiful, and I would 
> have liked to watch it for a much longer time than the few glimpses I 
> stole during the opening speeches.
>  
> Oother pieces I thought were interesting, but in qualified ways. The 
> technical solution to the audio of the Linux reading (by 
> radioqualia?), for instance. The piece itself was less interesting to 
> me, but the big plastic parabola hanging from the ceiling and the way 
> it provided for a relative sonic cocoon was cool and a very nice 
> (curatorial?) visual touch. A crazy table of xeroxes and a blackboard 
> on the wall were the contribution of irrational.org, and though I 
> didn’t have time to really look at the “piece” (was it only one work?) 
> I liked that the curators had inserted it into their “new media” 
> category and I wanted to know more. And in the very back of the 
> gallery an array of microphones promised some kind of interactive 
> thingie where users’ voices would control something on a screen, but 
> it wasn’t going when I was there—too bad, because it looked 
> intriguing.
>  
> Less successful, at least for my taste, were those pieces that failed 
> to get out of the box. This problem is one video artists have 
> struggled with in various ways at least since Joan Jonas made Vertical 
> Roll; it seems to be a real problem, too, for certain kinds of 
> database works. This was the case with Shu Lea Cheang’s work based on 
> the Brandon Teena story, and the piece by Francesca da Rimini. I only 
> looked at the first—or tried to look, rather, because my navigations 
> failed to really get it to go anywhere. The piece itself may have been 
> pure genius, I don’t know. But to view it you have to mouse around ye 
> olde single-user Mac screen, which at my advanced age I find tedious, 
> given that I seem to spend half my working life doing that. I’m sure 
> the curators deal with what they get. But it would be nice to see 
> artists work with curators to get off the damn screen, out of that 
> kind of privatized single-user, single-face-screen time, and think 
> about some more adventurous display alternatives, e.g. projecting the 
> work on the wall or reconceiving mousing—even if the content of the 
> piece remains the same. In a way it was important to have these works 
> in the show in this format, as a nod to the box, but I got bored 
> fiddling with the piece and moved on. The other work that really 
> didn’t happen for me was the galvanic frog. This piece involves a dead 
> and wired-up frog in a tank (formaldehyde?) and, at the other end of 
> the room, a computer set-up that displays a live image of said dead 
> frog captured by overhead camera. The user is given the onscreen 
> option of stimulating either the right or the left leg via mouse 
> click. Click, and the frog kicks left or right because, ta da! the 
> computer is wired to said frog. Ick! What made this piece fail for me 
> was the wiring of the frog. All you’re doing is opening and closing an 
> electric circuit via mouse click. In fact, technically you could have 
> the mouse not attached to the computer at all but merely rewired with 
> a battery, no? Much cooler, or ghouler, would be to have the frog 
> stimulated wirelessly via, say, your technerd RIM device or, if you 
> were a serious REFRESH! old guard, your disco-playing Treo. Now THAT 
> would have been something!
>  
> I’m just pulling out a couple of things that I found thought provoking 
> (and the wall projection was just plain nice). To do the show justice 
> would have required a much longer visit, without crowds. What I can 
> say is that the surrounding discussion of the show seemed very smart 
> and healthily skeptical about new media discourse, and that this was 
> evident in the array of works, from the quasi-romantic patent piece 
> (in the same space as the New Linux Eve) to the database work 
> (symbolically deconstructed in the next room by the lovely 
> irrational.org photocopied mess). And while I found certain projects 
> were compromised by their delivery mechanisms what was encouraging to 
> see also was that very little of the work done at BNMI and presented 
> here was tucked tidily in the box. Dietz made a point of noting the 
> title of the show as a critique of the bagginess of “new media” as a 
> designation. (He’s posted his remarks on a blog somewhere.) And I 
> think this was nicely addressed in the variety of works in the show, 
> from paper to code, and in the ways in which at least some of those 
> works addressed themselves to the body, to a kind of frontier 
> romanticism about embodiment, and to myths and realities of 
> “networking.”
>  
> In any event I look forward to reading other impressions of the show, 
> and of the conference.
>  
> Judith Rodenbeck
>  
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