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Compulsion, an exhibition of new work by Alex Prager, i saw a few days ago at Michael Hoppen gallery is so impressive I'm breaking out of my habit of writing about exhibitions mere hours before they close. In Prager's part film noir, part fashion shoot work, heroines wear impeccable make-up and synthetic wigs, pose as if they were in a Hitchcock movie, breathe through an atmosphere worthy of David Lynch, and are submitted to ordeals inspired by the images of crime photographers Weegee and Enrique Metinides. The stories might take place in Hollywood-like settings but they promise to never end on a happy note. The Compulsion in the title might refer to our compulsion to gape at other people's tragedy. Underlining the voyeur theory are the dramatic close-ups of eyes that accompany some of the stills.
Along with the colour photographs, the artist is showing La Petite Mort, a short film starring French actress, Judith Godrèche. La petite mort, literally "the small death," is a French idiom for orgasm. In Prager's film, we hear the voice of Gary Oldman saying that "the act of dying, and the act of transcendent love, are two experiences cut from the same cloth." The main protagonist of the short film navigates the mystery of death through a series of experiences that involves being ran over by a steam train, being stared at by a gathering of stern-looking people, meeting a man and drowning in a river. The action unfolds very slowly but somehow all of the above takes place in a couple of minutes.
If you're in London, New York or (lucky you!) Los Angeles, go and see that show.
Alex Prager's Compulsion is showing at the Michael Hoppen Gallery, London until May 26. The work is also shown at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New york until May 19, and at M+B Gallery, LA until May 12. |
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When we first talked to each other he had just dismantled the amazing Superficial Superglow: OPENINGS, a storefront installation facilitated by UCLA Architecture & Urban Design plus UCLA Design | Media Arts, which was built into the wall of the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions gallery on Hollywood Blvd's 'Walk Of Fame'. The illuminated prototype glows in intensity according to the motion of passersby. On the street side, LCDs were displaying animated text remembering exhibitions culled from the 30-year history of LACE, while LCDs on the interior of the gallery showed text derived from artist Douglas McCulloh's '60,000 Photographs in Hollywood' describing characters encountered on Hollywood Blvd. Later on, when Justin told me about Animate Field, his MFA Thesis Project at UCLA Design | Media Arts, i thought it might be a good opportunity to interview him.
I think the first thing I would do with an expanded budget would be to expand the scale...! A project like Animate Field could really benefit from being enlarged to a more expansive field, to get closer to the infinite Ganzfeld-like spatial condition that James Turrell - for example - has in some of his work. I'd also love to continue using the digital fabrication tools that were used in Superficial Superglow: OPENINGS, technologies such as CNC milling, vacuum-forming and 3D printing; all of which don't come cheaply. Also, I've recently begun experimenting with bend sensors, so that might come into my work at some point. The opposite of a bend sensor is arguably muscle wire (shape memory alloy), which is a material I'd also like to explore. So if money were no object, I would essentially put the money towards making my work more immersive, more formally engaging, and more tactile. Animate Field from Justin Lui on Vimeo. Animate Field requires the involvement of the body far more than your other installations. Is it something you are keen to explore even further? Yeah, the direct bodily engagement of that piece was a bit of a left turn compared to my previous work, but I also see it as a continuation of earlier investigations. For example, Superficial Superglow: OPENINGS (and some prior projects) used bodily presence as a catalyst for interaction, but Animate Field added to that by incorporating the issue of direct contact with the body. This sense of touch is something I'd like to develop in future work, possibly with things like muscle wire and bend sensors. About participation with Animate Field, I noticed that audiences were evenly split: older people tended to stay outside the cloud of fibers, while younger people (say, in their 20's and younger) were much more open to wading into the fibers. The choice between observing from outside the thicket of fibers and participating inside it probably wasn't about the fear vs. embrace of technology, as the fibers themselves looked more like a natural plant-like substance than something mechanical and intimidating. Instead, I just chalk it up to the participant's sense curiosity vs. personal inhibition. What happened often was that one brave soul would enter the fiber cloud, play with the fibers, then others would follow inside - like a chain reaction. Sometimes it became a shared experience between strangers. I didn't really anticipate this sort of sociability in Animate Field, but it was gratifying to see. Another thing I observed was that the fibers would collect and stick together into branching structures after several days of having people pass through and comb them with their hands. At first I tried to 'correct' this by going in to the thicket to untangle the fibers, but I soon decided to let these forms accumulate because I realized that the installation wasn't a defined discrete form (as designers are accustomed to creating), but instead was a set of conditions for a formal structure to emerge over time. It was a 'socially generative' formal mechanism as opposed to an explicitly designed form.
Water Clouds of Light looks like a remarkably simple installation. Some water jugs, a few light bulbs. Is the work really as straight-forward as i just made it sound? Yes, I wanted it to have a clear and direct reading. It's an unfussy installation; simple, serene, but not static as the lights 'breathe' in and out in a way that is life-like. Compared to my other work, I think Water Clouds of Light stands apart in a couple of ways: it has a stated allusion to the natural world, and it runs autonomously as opposed to being specifically interactive (which some people found refreshing considering the contemporary disposition for interactivity and responsiveness).
Many of the works in your portfolio have been devised for safe, closed exhibition spaces. Superficial Superglow: OPENINGS, however, was built into the exterior wall of an art gallery right on the famous Hollywood Blvd. Are you more comfortable in closed exhibition spaces or do you rather welcome the challenge of installing your work in contexts where you have less control over its surrounding (light, public, weather, etc)? I see the value in both situations. A lot of my installations are dependent on the control of environment-related factors like light levels and physical access, so I like the degree of control in a gallery. But I also find that public spaces present an opportunity to engage a larger audience; one that isn't pre-disposed to look for art, which means there's a greater potential to surprise people (provided the piece has the conceptual clarity required to connect them in a meaningful way). Since it was a double-sided installation, OPENINGS actually addressed audiences in both types of situations; gallery visitors inside Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE gallery), and passersby on Hollywood Blvd. The materials and construction were almost identical on both sides of the glass wall, but the experience on either side was different because the LCD data content was different for each side, and the sensors of the lighting-interaction system were exclusively aimed at the street to capture the movement of pedestrians. There were some serious physical challenges on the exterior side, as you hinted at. With the security gate that rolled down every night, it was a tight and narrow space to build in to. Also, that area of Hollywood is a little bit seedy, so vandalism was always a concern. We actually had one of our ultra-sonic sensors stolen - twice!
What have you learnt from the Superficial Superglow: OPENINGS experience? That project was a great experience for me and my partners: Andrea Boeck and Jihyun Kim. The three of us formed a well-balanced and even-tempered team. I learned several things, including the value of maintaining that balance and good temper, and the importance of visual and conceptual clarity in a publicly-sited interactive piece. That was probably the most important thing, that interactive installations generally need to be designed and calibrated to express clearly to the participants what the interaction is; what they are being prompted to do, what the rewards or results are, etc. Clear communication, essentially. Since the project was in a public space with a constant supply of test subjects, we were able to do some on-site testing and observe passersby triggering and relating to the interaction system. Consequently, we were able to tune the sensing, lighting and display systems to try to maximize the project's ability to communicate and interact. I also gained some valuable experience with managing and executing a fairly large interactive installation involving multiple technical systems and multiple outside parties (various UCLA departments, the gallery, suppliers, and so on). Who are the artists or architects who inspire you today? Creators of otherworldly atmospheres like Olafur Eliasson, James Turrell... Tara Donovan for the accumulative formal quality in her work... United Visual Artists, whose work represents to me an ideal marriage between behavioral electronics, physical space and people... realities:united, who also do great work combining electronic interaction and animation with physical architecture... Toyo Ito's dynamic installations and structures from the late 1980's and 1990's, which pioneered a lot of the qualities I see in dynamic and interactive architecture today... Toshio Iwai, Tokujin Yoshioka, Scott Snibbe, and more. You are also part of DEFECTIKONS::, a collective creating works that blend the architecture, design, visual art and sound disciplines. Can you tell me a few words about your role in DEFECTIKONS? The Defectikons are a group of three partners; Chris McCullough and Shaheen Seth. I was one of two DJs, and I also shared the work on installation design and assembly, graphic design and music production. What happened fairly often was that I would work iteratively, refining things towards an end while the other two partners often created great beginnings. Our media-installation projects were really fun and great to learn from. For us, they were a happy combination of architecture with DJing and video, like humble precursors to the Daft Punk pyramid. At this point our creative energy has been refocused into a musical band, with the addition of two other members.
What have you been doing since I met you last Spring in Los Angeles? I graduated from UCLA Design | Media Arts a few months ago, and have been working on various endeavors: teaching graphic design, web design, and physical computing; making project submissions with my OPENINGS partners; and showing Water Clouds of Light at a couple of light-art exhibitions. Next I'll be working with Variate Labs and Miles Kemp (who co-wrote the book Interactive Architecture) to develop next-generation interfaces and interactive spatial architecture projects. Thanks Justin! |
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Untitled Fragile Machine, seen last week at Arthur Ganson's very charming Long Now seminar titled Machines and the Breath of Time. As Stewart Brand says about Ganson's work: "As long as the idea is nonphysical, it is permanent; it becomes temporary as a physical device; and then it becomes permanent again in the mind of the viewer."
The seminar is available for download as audio and there's a video to watch too. |
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In case you forgot that something like 5 months ago i posted the first part of this story, here's a link to it: A visit to UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts, part 1. The department is located inside the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center on the UCLA campus, right next to T.E.U.C.L.A., Richard Serra's 42.5-ton ellipse sculpture. And that's where you should go next week. On May 14, D|MA graduate students are showing some of their work at the MFA Exhibition. I wrote about the projects of David Elliott, Michael Kontopoulos, Nova Jiang, and Justin Lui last time. Here's a few words about two of the other students i met while i was in Los Angeles:
Gil Kuno is doing mostly, but not only, sound-based projects. He recently collaborated with GX Jupitter-Larsen (The Haters) to develop an application and performance that amplify and treat the sound of an aerosol can to create a live soundscape. The image of the can discharging is projected behind the performers to deliver the audiovisual articulations of erosion and entropy. The performance ends when the can is empty. A year ago, the artist exhibited the most frightening musical instrument i've ever seen: Christo Allegra's work intersects information design, dynamic media and performance. Among the works he showed me, the one i like the best is Phi Two, a series that uses an algorithm to construct a form based on phyllotaxis, the arrangement of the leaves on the stem of a plant. Phyllotaxis was described mathematically as morphogenesis by Alan Turing as part of his final work. Morphogenesis attempts to account for biological pattern formation as documented by phyllotaxis.
In the Phi Two series, the application was rewritten for tracing the nodes of the phyllotaxis as they were generated. For each drawing, 200+ nodes/lines were traced in silver ink on black paper, and 100 drawings were generated. All of the resulting drawings were given away at their showing in return for an explanation from attendees as to why they had chosen the particular drawing. Marks generated in the drawing process were then fed back into the system for redraw. |
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While i was in Los Angeles ealier this month, i had the opportunity to visit the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts and chat with some of the students. The department educates responsible designers and artists for the information age by teaching the fundamentals of Design, Media, and the Arts, and encouraging experimentation and innovation. Providing an extensive education in Design and Media Arts practice, history and criticism, the department fosters a critical and creative exploration of emerging forms of visual communication, typographies, interaction and interface design, ubiquitous computing, virtual environments, information spaces, networked agents and all other pertinent areas of research.
I was impressed beyond words by the mix of lightness, playfulness, critical minds, audacious ideas, social relevance and a great attention to details and aesthetics. Because I met only 5 students from the course, i will focus on their work while inviting you to check out the project gallery on the DMA website.
I'll start with Nova Jiang whom i left a few days ago in cold Milan where she was participating with the project Alternate Endings to the Milan Public Design Festival. Standing in a little pink open house in the street, she invited passersby to leave one piece of garment with her. Using a different coloured fabric each day, she and her team of costume designers and makers replicated exactly the cut and style of the garment and later gave it as a present to the person. Another of her pieces, the Figurative Drawing Device invites two people to get in close and sometimes disturbingly intimate contact with each other. One of them uses the device to 'scan' and draw the outlines of the other person. The imperfect lines preserve not only the presence of the model but also the idiosyncratic movement of the tracer.
Each drawing can be read as a graph which records the subtle interactions between the two. The drawings can also be multiplied and become a flip book. The process of creating a flip book this way is a performance in endurance for both the subject and the tracer where new psychological patterns emerge.
Hull Loss --which she just exhibited in The Netherlands-- invites participants to make paper airplanes and launch them through a series of mechanically animated scissors.
The Objects for Enhancing the Experience of Being Lost, in collaboration with Michael Kontopoulos, address ideas of disorientation in a foreign city, in their case, Singapore. A traveler may tote the objects around in a briefcase, using them to enhance the experience of being lost. One of these objects is a pair of blinders that simulate the experience of tunnel vision at any given location.
Which brings me to the work of Michael Kontopoulos. Watching his Machines that Almost Fall Over is akin to being in the same room as someone whose favourite hobby is to scratch their fingernails on a blackboard. His wooden sculptures are constantly on the brink of collapse. They swing dangerously, slowly and endlessly but never crash.
Justin Lui (together with Andrea Boeck and Jihyun Kim) created an amazing installation on the facade of the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) gallery in Hollywood. OPENINGS is made of system of modular vacuum-formed panels, LCD displays, and LED lights built into both the interior and exterior sides of the storefront wall. White LEDs glow in intensity according to the motion and proximity of pedestrians on Hollywood Blvd's 'Walk Of Fame'. LCDs on the exterior side of the wall show animated text describing art exhibits culled from the archives of LACE, while LCDs on the interior show text derived from artist Douglas McCulloh's project '60,000 Photographs in Hollywood' describing and quoting various characters encountered on Hollywood Blvd.
OPENINGS functions as the active membrane between two seemingly at odds zones on either side of the storefront wall, pulling Hollywood Blvd. into LACE gallery and LACE gallery onto the street.
Water Clouds of Light. Discarded water jugs are re-contextualized into a light installation. Objects that used to be cheap and very mundane has been ennobled and seem to float and 'breathe' with light. What i like best about the installation is that it is NOT interactive. Why should everything techy be interactive? Video.
Human Powered Chatbot was a workshop headed by David Elliott and FutureFarmers in Baltimore. 17 people who were given simple rules for processing text and working together. This system created a writing machine that was connected to the internet. Source material was programatically mined from the Twitter and New York Times APIs based on feedback from the participant's input. The result was a chatbot running on twitter that could interact and respond to conversations online under the guise of a "computer simulating intelligence".
Reduced to mere automata in the system, the participants could nevertheless chose to be either Computational Processors (whose job is to extract keywords) or Subjective Processors (who make a text using the keywords). After a message has been passed through the Computational and Subjective Processors, it gets uploaded to the internet where keywords are used as search terms on the New York Times and Twitter websites. The results of the search are returned along with any replies from people trying to talk to the Human Powered Chatbot and everything is copied down onto pieces of paper... and then redistributed to the Computational Processor to complete the loop. Inspired by A Mathematical Theory of Communication, an article written in 1948 by mathematician Claude E. Shannon.
To be continued... |
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After Postopolis, a talk at ENSAD in Paris, a few days at the STRP festival in Eindhoven, a couple of days washing dirty clothes, queuing all over the city and catching up with work at home, i'm back on the road again and will probably disappear for half a week unless i manage to extract myself from the 'evening entertainment' that -rumour has it- will be forced upon me these coming days.
The plan was to write a long and well-documented post about a remarkable exhibition i saw at LACMA in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago: Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, i promised myself i'd do it before i get on the plane to Linz but guess what? The plan failed miserably. So here, dear reader, for your eyes only comes a sloppy version of what this post should have been. It is not exhaustive, it is not very informative but it might give you an idea of a couple of works i found particularly striking. Sometimes i might even explain why:
Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures: For East and West Germany during the Cold War, the creation of art and its reception and theorization were closely linked to their respective political systems: the Western liberal democracy of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the Eastern communist dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Reacting against the legacy of Nazism, both Germanys revived pre-World War II national artistic traditions. Yet they developed distinctive versions of modern and postmodern art--at times in accord with their political cultures, at other times in opposition to them. By tracing the political, cultural, and theoretical discourses during the Cold War in the East and West German art worlds, Art of Two Germanys reveals the complex and richly varied roles that conventional art, new media, new art forms, popular culture, and contemporary art exhibitions played in the establishment of their art in the postwar era.
I knew i would get a powerful lesson of history but i was not expecting the show to be so overwhelmingly good.
Artworks are choreographed in chronological order. First comes WWII's immediate aftermath, 1945-1949, a dark period that would not be brightened by the division of the country into two separate states--East Germany and West Germany--along the lines of Allied occupation. Richard Peter Sr.'s B&W photographs that document the bombing of Dresden translate the mood better than any word could:
The second section, covering the 1950s, reveals the influence of Soviet and communist imagery on East Germany.
I particularly liked Konrad Klapheck's strict and flat paintings of various instruments and devices that have often been interpreted as a reflection of the stern and strong Nazi regime.
The Zero Group explored the relationship between science, technology and art. Strangely (to me) the movement was illustrated by an installation of it founder, Heinz Mack, that covered a wall with slowly spinning silver panels and disks. Section three, dedicated to the 1960s and '70s brings familiar faces: Joseph Beuys (right from my arrival at the exhibition, i was pacing the rooms wondering "so which Beuys will be here? Which one?), Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter.
Uncle Rudi is a 1965 painting of a family snapshot of a SS officer, he was Richter's uncle, "the Nazi in the family". A smiling and proud young man who, years after the picture had been taken, evokes war and violence.
The final section brings us to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The most arresting piece in the section refers to the country's darkest hours again. For the installation "Hand and Foot" (1980), Raffael Rheinsberg carefully ordered on the floor 400 shoes and gloves painted dark brown. The shoes belonged to forced laborers during World War II, they were found in an abandoned train station in Berlin.
Sibylle Bergemann's photos of sculptures of Marx and Lenin have become symbols of the dismantling of the Soviet power in Eastern Germany, when in fact the images documented the monument's birth, not its destruction.
Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures is on view until April 19, 2009 at LACMA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. All images courtesy LACMA. |
