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March 5 – 31, 1993
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Perceptions
Fast Forward 1918 First Avenue Mark Bain, Seattle
1. Lightning Jar. 1993. This piece is a kinetic sculpture investigating both the fear and seduction generated by visible electricity coming into contact with water, by transgressing the taboo born from the common belief of the inherent danger of mixing the two. The sculpture consists of a five gallon glass jug half way filled with water in which a thin neon tube is placed, half way sticking out. High voltage is run through the neon connecting the outside tip to the other end inside of the jar, thus lighting up the neon and creating visible arcs of voltage on the inside surface of the glass. 2. Untitled. 1993. This project consists of an installation in which video feedback loops are altered by the intermittent interference of small kinetic sculptures. The piece incorporates a small black and white TV monitor, a surveillance camera and small kinetic sculptures are made to move back and forth between the TV screen, presenting an image of itself being recorded, and the recording video camera pointed at it. As the sculptures inter-cut the path, they become abstracted images on the screen while the signal being altered gives way to unpredictable modifications in the loop. The interaction of the elements affecting one another proceeds not only to shape what is presented on the screen but also, by being exposed, engages the viewer with the process of what is being perceived. 3. Video: Retinal Memory Induction. 3:20, 1992. Retinal Memory Induction explores the possibilities of how passive viewing of visual information can have an active effect on the physical experience of the individual. Through the use of repetitive imagery and frequency aligned presentation, the viewer’s eye becomes entranced to the material presented. After an allotted time-span of exposure to this, the piece then cuts to a still raster-graph of a biomorphic image. Although this latter image is static, the memory of the preceding stimulus in retained in the visual cortex of the viewer and thus when layered over provides an inherent sense of motion. Metaphorically this device is used to illustrate how there can be no “passive” viewing in which the audience is separated from the image. The barrage of noise presented to our gaze, in this video and in life, engages our psyche in ways that may not seem readily apparent yet might show up as artifacts to other experience. 4. Video: Texture Mapping. 10:00, 1991. Texture Mapping is a video that deals with extremes of perception and how one relates to diverse forms of visible language. Incorporating images of my own kinetic sculpture, super 8 and 16 mm film, and original video footage, which have all been processed through electronic means, the piece attempts to “hybridize” these diverse media and recombine them into a new form that is altogether different from the original parts. With the processing acting as the continuity, or “map,” the video attempts to overload the viewer with visual data that is presented in a modulated format of pulsated frequencies, rhythm, and juxtapositions. It thus acts as a hypocritical comment on the current state of the television viewing experience, which requires us to make sense of the multitude of divergent information and images that we see daily.
Battletech computer animation. 1993. Loaded on an IBM 386 with color VGA monitor, generously donated by IBM.
A Toast to Big Business. 1993. Sculpture with wood, string, fishing lures, and glass. Machines drive me around, cook my breakfast, earn my money, call my friends, trim my hair, keep me safe at night. Machines completely contain me, no matter
how hard I try to escape them. Does a machine play a part in the concept of religion and romance? Are we led to personal choices because of machines, and if so, who is in control and what do these machines look like?
1. Jacob’s Ladders. Two electric arc generators. 1993. 2. Rocket Subwoofer. 1993.
Ceremony for Universal Comprehension. Live tattoo performance. Wil gets computer icons permanently inscribed on his body, by tattooist Mark Mitchell of Tattoo you. Reading and writing giving way to visual literacy, recognizing and exchanging command icons, rendering obsolete the need for a common alphabet. Twenty-first century character communication, already ubiquitous—my devotion
Dean Johnson, Cheyenne Wyoming
The majority of current work and discussion
about virtual reality (VR) tends to focus on scientific applications
and the physical workings of reality. I wanted to make a piece that
looks at the philosophical workings of reality, the use of VR-related
techniques as an artistic medium, and the role that context plays when
presenting a virtual object.
Karin LaPadula, Seattle 1. Hightide. Cibachrome print of computer
painting. I’ve spent many years experimenting with different art media, such as watercolors, pencil, and pastels. I have found that the medium with which I can be most creative and abstract is the computer. In the past, I have felt trapped in representationalism, and every time I tried to escape from it, my “abstract” marks always looked the same, seemed to travel in the same direction, and seemed to say less than nothing to the viewer. The computer helped me move forward by allowing me to manipulate my imagery in ways which would be impossible using traditional media. Possibilities which didn’t work out could be undone, so there was less risk in attempting different visual approaches. Of course, it is always difficult to figure out exactly what approaches to take, so I’m always on the lookout for image concepts or forms which fascinate me. Whenever I travel, I take a sketch book, and have hundreds of drawings from my travels over the last ten years. I have wanted my computer art to show the physical mark of the artist’s hand, so I decided to try a multimedia approach to image creation, and combine computer imagery with traditional media such as paint. Mylar overlays, which I’ve used in the past, have proved to be distracting. I have just recently started using opaque black paint as an overlay over computer renderings. With a computer piece as the background, the black paint overlay seems to create a window of sorts into another world. I am working on designing “organic” window forms which can be used as overlays, since I feel my computer imagery needs something organic. I so often focus on light, transparency, and depth, that it’s easy to forget about organic forms, which I think my work needs. Metal chair with restraints and camera. The participant straps hi/herself in and takes a picture, placing the picture on the wall behind the chair.
Video document of “The Flying Dream,” a virtual sculpture based on a DaVinci flying machine.
New industrial music by Rand Cufley.
Workshop 3D Design Studio 2132 1st Avenue Workshop 3D Design Studio presents “Virtually Art,” a mixed electronic media show including “antique” personal computers, interactive virtual reality games and devices, and virtual art. In addition, for twenty-four hours on March 12 and 13, several teams of four players each will build and maintain virtual cities at Workshop 3D, using the computer program SimCity. Workshop 3D Design Studio is a Belltown architectural firm providing services to commercial and residential clients.
Wall of Sound 2237 2nd Avenue Clair Colquitt, Seattle
Clair Colquitt has lived half his forty-eight years in Seattle, having escaped Detroit Michigan with a few art degrees. He waited out a war at the local university and after getting an MFA in ceramics, spent the next ten year building custom cars and making public art. After failing in with a renegade literary arts group known as Invisible Seattle he was cajoled into starting Seattle’s first Writer’s BBS (computerized phone bulletin board system). Shortly after, he started to employ computers in his own artwork and has assisted others to puzzle themselves by the same method. Currently Mr. Colquitt is using found
objects and castoff motors combined with casted fiberglass and micro
controllers to create animated figures that blab and carry on alternately
fascinating and irritating... an example of which can be seen in the
current show.
Cyclops Cafe 2416 Western Avenue Slightly irreverent moving machines made with found and junk store parts. This show includes local artists Kurt and Debla Geissel, John Hawkley, Eric Muhs, Dave Rumley, Geof Spencer, Kevin Spitzer, Chris Lefebvre.
Living Museum of Letterpress Printing 2017 2nd Avenue
Shining Moment Productions JewelBox Theatre
Performance by The Word Band Spoo:
John Atkins, Paul Gould, Andrew Horwitz, Robert, Christopher MacRae,
and others. Word Band Spoo unites strong individual identities, orchestrating their separate parts as a jazz ensemble might, to form a whole. The cohesion of separate parts brings forth a consciousness of monologue, dialogue, cal and response, and independent logic. Here we hold two conversations simultaneously, there only the sound and motion of words, like Latin Hymns, intuits meaning. We often apply to meaning in poetry and literature the metaphor of “levels.” That is, ideas are thought to be transmitted outside, beyond, or “beneath” the linear structure of the words on the page. For example, Waiting for Godot only presents a pair of bedraggled and not apparently very bright vaudeville clowns, but in its subtext comments on the dilemmas of existence that have occupied the philosophical and the religious throughout history. Where in the words does this ineffable communication occur? In the same way that poetry and music convey meaning obliquely, the Word Band Spoo communicates indirectly through the accumulation of meanings. We live in a world without a single narrative thread, where technology allows us access to a multitude of stimuli virtually all at once. We as a culture, have not learned how to use this glut of information effectively: in fact, we fear the sheer volume. However, in a Spoo performance, where perhaps three vocalizers, several musicians, and an array of video effects all equally occupy the viewer’s attention, we hope to create another set of “levels.” The “meaning” of the spoo lies not in one element, one voice or one sound, but in all at once. In a good stage play the clearest momenets happen between the words. Similarly, Word Band Spoo’s “levels” appear in the perception of humanity in all that vast noise.
Machines “Word begets image
Cal Speaks Elliot Meacham
In fact, he would have sworn it was just the chunka-chink of the toaster, sprouting bread, hot and crusty, crumbs ashower and yeasted veins stiffened. He reached to his remote control and punched the button that raised the volume on his stereo. Dave Crosby, his voice somewhere above the smog, lingering in the coils of heat knit lovingly into that pale blue below the clouds where planes only flew when they landed or took off and where birds wishing to soar found the current especially accommodating, flowed form the speakers, Model 1001 Pioneers, with a bass port, two fifteen inch woofers, a liquid-cooled tweeter and a five inch midrange. Baby Cal, his thoughts as random as scattered dirt, squirmed with excitement at hearing himself speak the abrupt toaster dialect. How long he had sat in his mother’s arms, the crooks of her elbows the fragrance of butter, the dark nook under her chin warm and sweet, like pastries smelled from around the corner, as she put cold wheat bread into the toaster slots. She rocked him slowly, humming a tune made up of whatever notes her inhalations could snatch from the air. Then, the machine: Chunka-chink! He felt his mother's heart pump a little faster, her thumping chest wall pressing against the thin, hot skin on his temple. The primal reflexes overtook him then. The ones that ignited his pleasure, the ones that brought warmth to his belly, a tingle to his palms and a blissful glaze to his eyes. Mother, her body, her blood. The chunka-chink made it all one spiral. Her heart raced upon the union. She was suddenly excited, anxious, when she heard that her toast was now ready. If Cal could speak, if he even could make the random thoughts (which clung to his brain like burrs as he raced through this fascinating field called the world) understood with gargles and wails, he would. He would tell her he understood her feeling. And, furthermore, he would tell her that it made him ecstatic, jittery, to feel her body react, her nerves all fuse, then fire simultaneously. Now, much later, in his crib, at the base of the bed, with his father providing shade for a thick pad of yellow paper, his face intent like he was staring into a dark bag, his stereo machine making that thring-schling noise that tickled your ears and that thump-ump noise that moved the floor, Cal finally could speak. And, would you know it, his father hardly noticed. So, he spoke again. Chunka-chink! His father looked up. Cal was sitting up, starting at him, his round face glowing like a 200 watt bulb. "Cal?" Wayne said. "Chunka-chink!" said Cal. His father lowered the stereo and stood over his son. He watched Cal's small mouth open ina pink smile. He saw Cal's eyes flash like a new penny in a spotlight. And, he heard the baby say it again. "Chunka-chink!" His son was talking and, damned if it didn't sound just like the toaster. Exactly like the freakin' toaster. Wayne, an incredulous look on his face, picked up his son, slung him over his sloping shoulder and pat his back. Cal gurgled. He felt his father's neck swell and sink. He sensed the heat flowing from behind his father's ear. He smelled the moistened pores of his father's scalp. His father was all fused and firing now. Everything—heart, blood, skin, all working together. Nothing slept. Wayne walked to the kitchen and pressed the lever on the toaster. He waited. He got impatient. He popped up the level himself. Chunka-chink, the toaster said. "Oh my God," Wayne said. He put Cal onto the new leather sofa they bought from Grieve's Furniture, which had now gone out of business. The guy who sold it to them had a cut curving from his nose which looked like a thin, dried bit of mucus that had snuck from the safe, moist confines of his nasal cavity and had died a most inglorious death in the very air it wished to escape into. Mil could not help but stare at the thing. Finally, the salesman, named Albert, said, "I cut myself with my electric mustache trimmer. A new thing I bought. Quite vicious. You were wondering, weren't you?" Wayne found his cordless phone and picked it up. He was going to call Mil in her office at the Human Services department. He had to tell her what Cal was saying, to tell her that their son's first words were "chunka-chink." But, he thought as the dial tone spun in his ear, were those really words? How could he explain it to Mil? Was there anything to explain? Cal sounds like the toaster, he'd say. What?, she'd say, probably wrinkling only one side of her nose, like she always does when she thinks she's missing something in the conversation. Oh, nothing, he'd say, and fell very stupid. Kids make noises all the time, she'd say. She loved to try to make him think rationally, as if he never had a foot on reality since he could walk. Yeah, I know, he'd say. Well, she'd say, don't worry, his first words will probably be "mama" followed by "hungry" and, sometime later, "daddy." She always liked to inject her egoism in most everything she said that was meant to be funny. Cal sat on the sofa and watched his father, tall and strong, a tree with soft branches. He watched as his father shifted on his feet, scratched his head. A wind was blowing through his branches. Cal raised his arms toward his father and gurgled. His father only stood, his hand on his head. Cal wanted him near, to feel his father's anxious blood pumping. Wayne made a face at him. Then, he looked back at the phone. No. He wasn't going to call Mil. What was the use? Just a baby noise. That's what it was. Just a baby noise… Squaak-kisss! Squaak-kisss! Wayne quickly glanced at his espresso machine. Even though that noise came from the sofa, if sounded an awful lot like the espresso machine. It, in fact, sounded exactly like the espresso machine. He looked over to Cal. "Squaak-kisss! Squaaak-kisss!" said Cal. He saw the surprise, the sheer shock in his father's gaze and it amused him greatly. So, he kept on jabbering. "Whirrrrrr! Whirrrrrr! Raaaaaakkkkk!" said Cal. "Holy shit, now he's doing the juicer," said Wayne. As he shakily dialed the phone, he still wondered what to tell Mil, but, that was okay because he also wondered what to tell himself. It's just a phase, he thought frantically, he'll grow out of it. But, as Wayne looked at the garbage disposal, the blender, the dishwasher, the phone for God's sake, the alarm clock, the microwave, the television, he felt a twinge deep in his stomach. It was a twinge, said the switchboard operator in his head, that he'd better make good friends with.
Notes Toward and Essay on Language and Machine Culture Compiled by John Atkins and Paul Gould [1]
Only human perception creates a "lifetime." Everything else lives without time. We regulate the action of ourselves with clocks, thus our machines run on clocks. The perception of time constructs our consciousness, it gives us the capacity to give symbolic form to experience: to reflect, imagine, and project ourselves in a passage through time. And though machines record and act within time, we have yet to build one that perceives it. Everything we have accomplished, positive or negative, has stemmed from our ability to construct from our dreams what we can imagine but have not seen. All understanding, to that end, only matters as it related=s to human existence. The liberation of a fantasy—whether we conceive of transcendence through our bodies or via an external power—roots itself deeply in perception. Our ability to perceive ourselves separated us from the world When we see ourselves as different from that which surrounds us, we have moved into the realm of fantasy. We see the harm that has done all around us, just as we sense the freedom it provides. All human culture—ritual, speech, costume, and social organization—remakes the human being and the expression of our personalities. Whatever the method of abstraction, signs or symbols, notes or numbers, meaning builds upon meaning, relation upon relations, all with an aim to control the energy in our unconscious. With the statement, We are not natural, language transports us away from nature. Language orders, controls. Only human being have the power to create, through symbolic expression, a negation; nature has none. Perhaps we are natural, but if we conceive ourselves, we remove ourselves from nature and live in our imagined landscape. A paradox. *** A man wants to smash you over the head with a two-by-four. If you aren't conceiving yourself about to be hit with a two-by-four, you duck. If you are occupied with abstraction, you get whacked. In the instant that you act out of sheer self-preservation, you stop conceiving of yourself. *** Language enables us to investigate our consciousness, as many forms of abstraction do: music, dance, mathematics. But language, as a form of symbolic expression, comes form the same source within us that produced the first machine—time, the clock: the primeval repetitive order of ritual. Our unruly subconscious makes of itself a regular pattern. All machines, like the first machine, produce order. We have only made one machine that can produce irrationality like the human mind: the atom bomb. The unruly subconscious unleashed. Through our mechanistic reduction of imagination, we allow the machine to become a paradigm for how we understand ourselves. Right now, our models for our bodily functions, our brains, our ability to fall in love, mimic the order we love in machines. Freud distilled the self-consciousness of the soul into an industrial, rational model. Everything that is useful in us can be explained with rationality, with precision. The paradigm of the machine limits our creativity. It limits us: the irrationality of our fantasy, of myth, of our ability to make the world new in our minds. In only one sense has human existence become godlike: we have fabricated a symbolic universe of meaning which reveals our separation from nature; and up to a point this enables us t transcend in thought our temporal limitations. The process of thought abstracts from life, invents life, but only approximates life itself. We only become human through this process. Dreams nourish the human mind: we dream ad we bring into being ourselves. [1] Lifted, complied, and condensed from: Ideogram, The History of a Poetic Method by Laszlo Gefin, Austin, 1982; The Myth of the Machine by Lewis Mumford, 1967; The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction by James E. Miller, Jr., University of Chicago, 1979; The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry by E. Fenollosa, edited by Ezra Pound; Guide to Kulchur by Ezra Pound; The ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound; The Poetry of Ezra Pound by Hugh Kenner, New Directions.
DMC Steven Hodas
The desire to apprehend complexity, to encompass it in a more immediately accessible form, gives us the long, albeit limited, history of mechanical and neo-mechanical metaphor. The shift from one metaphor to another generally lags the technology itself by a generation or so, and each drastically affects the way cultures view the natural and human worlds. Until the fourteenth century there were no such metaphors. Indeed, the rope of nearly all metaphor, metonymy, and analogy was tied to the natural or supernatural world, simply because there were no complex machines as we understand them today. The invention o the astrolabe, and its close and quick descendant, the clock, provided the first tangible human creation whose complexity was sufficient to embody the observed complexity of the natural world. It's at this time that we start seeing reference to the intricate 'workings' of things and of their proper 'regulation', usually of the cosmos and nature, although occasionally of human systems as well. The clock, with its numerous intricate, precise, and interlocking components, and able to embody the abstraction of temporality, shaped Western perceptions of the world by serving as its chief systemic metaphor for the next five hundred years. In the early nineteenth century, the metaphor of the clock came to be gradually replace by that of the engine, and somewhat more generally, by the notion of the machine as a phylum unto itself. The figures shift from those of intricacy and precision to those of 'drive and power', from regulation to motivation. IN the early twentieth century, as technology became more sophisticated, the concepts of motivation and regulation were to some extent merged in the future of the self-regulating machine. This is essentially the dominate metaphor with which we've grown up, the notion of a 'system' which contains the means of both its perpetuity and its governance, and it has been applied to everything from political science, to nature, to the human body, to the human mind. The engine 'drive' of the Freudian unconscious, Darwinian evolution, and the Marxian proletariat give way to 'family systems', ecosystems, and political equilibria as the Industrial Revolution lurches to a close. I speak here of dominant metaphors: certainly there are others that have been employed in more limited (and more transient) contexts. For a mechanical metaphor to dominate, however, it must be linked to a fundamental technology, one which enables others, as the engine enables the truck, the refrigerator, the factory, and the merry-go-round. Any one of these may make for an apt analogy, but none of them reverberate widely or deeply enough to become a dominant metaphor. A significant liability of mechanical metaphors is there inability to encompass values other than, well, mechanical ones. The only appropriate measure of a machine or a system is its efficiency, the conversion of inputs into outputs with as little waste energy as possible. Whether that conversion is desirable or undesirable is not a consideration for judging the worth or quality of the machine, which abides completely in the realm of means. An additional problem with all non-quantum mechanical metaphors is that they poorly express relationships that lack clear cause-and-effect, or those that depend upon probability. While twentieth century physics is largely an attempt to deal with the precisely this limitation, most college graduate do not intuitively apprehend even Newtonian mechanics, and so it's unlikely that this will become a popular mode of structuring our perceptions for several hundred years. The edges of a new metaphor for complex systems can be seen emerging, however, one which is able to embrace the relativity and immanence which stresses mechanical metaphors to the point of fatigue: that of the computer and its data networks. We see, and will see more, shifts away from the concepts of drive and regulation to those of processing and transmission. The raw material upon which processes act will be regarded not as objects and forces but as data, which is not a thing but rather an arbitrary arrangement given virtual form. The action itself will be seen as a program, or set of instructions, allowing for more or fewer degrees of freedom. The interrelationships of things will be embodied in paths, arrangements, and pointers rather than linkages (creakingly mechanical) through which objects transmit force. The significance of this shift is that data is an abstraction rather than a concrete entity, and that both its form and its interpretation are malleable. Distinctions will be made between hardware, that which is fixed/infrastructure, and software, that which determines use and function. This has tremendous consequences for our notions of property, or originality and authorship, of privacy and relationship. It may, perhaps, be less limiting than the mechanical metaphors it will largely displace. Since the rate of technological change is now accelerating exponentially, I imagine that the rate of language change will also accelerate, although never as rapidly. Give it five to ten years before the data/processing metaphor dominates social science jargon, fifteen year for it to become common in daily speech.
Thank you to those who have made this possible, including: Mark Selleck, IBM Harry Green, Heather Wilde, Jason Harler Allyson Riley, Ray Freeman Mike Phelps, Eric Larson, Lisa Harrison John Hawkley, Gina Koakola Geronimo Squier, Kay Rhinehart Mark Sullo John Atkins Edward Galore Linley Storm
All work is © 1993 the authors
and may not be reproduced
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(Just)
Before the Scream. 1993. Machine installation inspired by the Anita
Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, as well as a recent conversation with
a borderline manic depressive.
Seeing
the Virtual Light: Do You Believe? An installation with lamp, monitor,
LCD shutter glasses and guilt frames.
“Suits,”
a coin-operated window installation. Moving figures interact.
The
Living Museum of Letterpress Printing is an organization dedicated to
the collection, preservation, exhibition and utilization of equipment
and methods involved in the art and craft of letterpress printing. Through
demonstration we are striving to educate the general public as to the
role letterpress printing has played in the spread of knowledge throughout
the literate world—and beyond. It is our goal to continue the processes
which gave birth to the dissemination of information on a much broader
scale than was possible prior to movable type’s invention in the
middle 15th century. For more than 500 years letterpress printing has
championed freedom of thought and provided a practical method by which
ideas could be shared by the masses. With the establishment of the museum,
we seek to promote education and a better understanding of the viability
of letterpress printing in these modern times. Though technology has
changed, the fact remains that printing translated thought into tangible
form—no matter the speed of production. By supporting the Living
Museum of Letterpress Printing, you are not only helping to preserve
an extremely valuable period of history, but also doing your part in
assuring that future generations will have the opportunity to better
understand this concept we have come to call mass communication.
March
19: "WAX or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees,"
an independent electronic science fiction cinema. 85 minutes of surreal
video by David Blair from New York.