NOT Slow Art
By JEN ZEN (aka Jen Grey)
LA ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter Reporter
August 15, 2008
Introduction
We want it, and we want it NOW! More! Bigger! Better! Faster! "In our fast-paced society... we forget to stop, look and listen to our surroundings. What are the consequences...?" asks Lina Yamaguchi, SIGGRAPH 2008 Juried Art Chair from Stanford University.
As an integral part of SIGGRAPH 2008: Evolve, the SIGGRAPH 2008 Art Gallery featured Slow Art, a juried art exhibition representing 41 new media artists invited to re-examine the imperative/impetus for speed. The artwork highlighted recent work from the crossroads of science, art and technology, to celebrate some of the best in creativity and innovation from the past year.
A Contrary Re-Definition
"Slowness" as a popular public backlash to automation and speed was assumed. The impact of "time saving devices, fast food, voice mail, instant messaging, rapid prototyping, the Italian Cittaslow's manifesto defining new criteria for slow cities, the Slow Food Movement, and the inherent need to a return to artisanship with a renewed focus on the local as opposed to the global" were underscored in the SIGGRAPH Call for Submissions. But in the rush to identify more enduring values in a speedy automated society, the fact that "slow" also means blunt, dull, obtuse, tedious, slack, sluggish, retarded, out of fashion, and holding back progress was ignored. So the show ripped by promoting a title counterproductive to its intention... although the universal constraint that both suspension and progress are intrinsic to the paradox of time was definitely emphasized. After reviewing initial submissions, Jurors created four new categories:
- Erosion - the nature of material existence, time, temporal disintegration and entropy
- Hybrids - unique combinations of the old and familiar, with the new and unexpected
- Rhythms - patterns and play... a new examination of time and space
- Traversal - pathways that re-define the human relationship to time and place
Exhibition Highlights:
Hybrids
Chosen as the gateway into the Slow Art show, VISIONS OF THE INFINITE created by Kevin Mack dissolves boundaries between reality and illusion. The press release promised "mind-bending animations that reveal the fluid dynamic of evolving 3D math functions [...] sinuous abstract structures that dance and curl in evolving progressions like ripples in an infinite sea of twirling color." The award-winning artist delivered it all and more, richly professing "a passionate fascination for the sublime beauty of infinity, complexity, perception and consciousness."
By contrast, Dutch DJ and punster Dennis de Bel calls himself a street musician yet builds lo-tech objects to do it for him. STRATENSPELER is a robotic turntable that rotates in a perpetual circle to play the street, literally dragging the audio stylus across concrete. Dennis reconstructed his grandma's obsolete Singer sewing machine to play retro LP records. Of course it doesn't work, but then why should it? Once futuristic machines, now obsolete, are re-contextualized for nonfunctional application... recycled for "Super use", a new art direction in the Netherlands. Consumers, worried about de-humanizing aspects of machines and planned obsolescence can laugh about it, too.
Ross Racine draws freehand computer models for planned communities as aerial views of fictional suburbs that subvert effective planned communities. Intersecting street patterns are so complex that that driving anywhere would be ridiculous. Jonathan Bachrach offers a hi-tech peep system for sustaining intimate eye contact mediated by the machine interface. Inspired by Japanese Origami paper folding tradition, Joo Youn Paek presents FOLD LOUD, a hands-on electronic folding structure for generating vocal harmonics. Paul Magee programs the first passage of St. John's Gospel using the phonetic structure of text in CHORUS as a template for generating musical notes. The hybrids are as innovative, rich and complex in variety as the artists who made them.
Erosion
"At first you don't see it," say Edrex Fontanilla and Robert Goldschmidt... a curious thing to say about a grid of sandstone slabs. But it is used as a receptive base for video mapping a stream of water. S(TR)EAM initially appears to be a soothing real-time projection of primary elemental forces - earth, air, water and light. But if you linger in calm meditation, the projected imagery shifts, pausing, freezing, layering, zooming in, fading and rescaling in a Zen-like re-mapping of the space-time continuum.
Yunsil Heo and Hyunwoo Bang wanted OASIS to be totally non-nerdy and playful, despite the techno-heavy Swarm programming that drives it. Cloaked in darkness, intent visitors stir chunky black gravel with their fingers, creating trails of light for the swarming genesis of puddle critters that appear out of nowhere... like those you might expect to rise from the primordial ooze at the beginning of time. It's an instant fix on fun, generative and godlike... all as easily obliterated by a sweep of the hand.
Anab Jain and Alex S. Taylor tease us with an impractical theoretical model for retrieving energy from beautiful objects made of cast sugar. The idea is to breakdown organic material with a microbial substrate, to produce an electrical charge strong enough to drive common household appliances. Our bodies use sugar for energy, why not radios and computers? I wish it really worked, maybe someday.
Anna Ursyn celebrates water as a form of exploration, transformation, metaphor, annotation history and myth... an intriguing vehicle for cultural evolution and value. A history of her work reveals a sophisticated fascination with data mining and programming linked to visual meditations on color, pattern, regularity and balance. WATER PLANET is loaded with visual connotation and spatial nuance, comprised of dense shortcuts and visual fragments that read like collapsing sentences to create deeper levels of meaning.
Kirk Woolford and Carlos Guedes began the ECHO LOCATIONS project in NYC seven years ago, and sustained the collaboration inter-continentally from Amsterdam, Majorca, Portugal and the UK as their respective base of operations changed. The result: a life-scale interactive installation that enhances an awareness of location as a time-based experience. The backdrop is a midsummer night's evening at St. Patrick's Chapel, built on the Viking ruins of a 6th c burial site in the Scottish Lake District. The audio mix harmonizes real world sound bites of the natural environment with fragments of melody and harp song, giving the night an edgy corporality, weight and volume. As visitors approach, streams of particles streak across the site, like a time traveling dancer caught in a song line of fast forward motion. As visitors still, the particle flows coalesce, never quite settling as a singular human silhouette. If visitors chase the flow, or make too much noise, the apparition dodges off, hissing and scratching like a haunting electronic cat in wet tide. In this complex soundscape, the artists explore the edge between the human and the abstract, teasing recognition through action and interaction rather than appearance. The artists eloquently point out that, "Chasing after technology, like the devilishly elusive will of the wisp of legend, you will find yourself lost in space and time."
Rhythms
SKORPIANS designed by Joanna Berzowska and Di Mainstone are kinetic electronic garments constructed as metaphors for parasites and organisms that feed on your body. The metaphoric clothing is a perverse, ultra-soft cocoon of camouflage with an independent history of living, breathing memory. Revealing and hiding alien intentions, pleasure and pain, the garments are out of your control. Engineered with soft electronic circuits, electronic thread and programming boards, embedded sensors activated by magnets trigger the shape memory alloy Nitinal. Felt leaves furl and unfurl like intelligent little tongues licking and testing the air. A cowl neck creeps up to engulf the head. Fully dressed, the model is transformed as an alien creature, beautifully organic yet creepy, like a warrior dressed for protective battle while being eaten alive.
Trained as musicians with a background in gaming, The Sancho Plan artists merge new genres to create an interactive system that can be applied as an interface for gaming and futuristic club music, or as a new form of edutainment and home play. Beat the drums to activate a filmic backdrop in which streams of delightful underwater creatures dance to your rhythms. What kid wouldn't want to play? SPACEQUATICA out-bests Karaoke as an immersive, real-time audio/visual experience.
Armella Leung and Oliver Oswald created THE DREAMING PILLOW as an ordinary object that transforms simple visions into wondrous waking dreams. Takahiro Matsuo draws you into another fantasy dreamscape in PHANTASM, where clouds of white butterflies are lured to a hand-held orb of light, transient illusions, interactive yet insubstantial. Even more ephemeral, Mark Stock strips a deforming blob of fluid to its essential nature, revealing the elemental force of SMOKE WATER FIRE as an animated computational structure in slow motion.
Ryoko Ueoka and Hiroki Kobayashi present the marvelous WEARABLE FOREST: FEELING OF BELONG TO NATURE, interactive bio-acoustic clothing with embedded speakers, LEDs and a CPU system with a wireless connection to process and play acoustic data received from the forest. The concept is brilliant. Although the user can broadcast pre-recorded sounds back to the forest installation, however, the potential for real-time conversation with the biosphere has not yet been fully explored.
The work in Rhythms seemed united in its yearning, nostalgic and magical sense of nature, immersed yet paradoxically displaced and disconnected from human experience in phantasms of dream. Is this an expression of our often-mysterious connections with nature, or is it a reflection of technology displacing nature in our lives?
Traversal
Hye Yeon Nam asserts, "Technology is like a brush. It is not my priority but the best way to show my work. I am not a drama queen." Raised by an extremely conservative Korean family, she confronted her fear of nonconformity by walking backwards through Times Square with square planks attached to her feet. Surprised that it attracted little attention from the fast moving crush of pedestrians, she flipped the film backwards, transforming the low profile scene HERE AND NOT HERE, as an eerie displacement of the familiar - as if a time traveler had become lost, engulfed yet disconnected and nearly invisible to society.
Jing Zhou is more interested in the traversal of the mind and spirit, finding beauty in the balance of the moment. In the Ch'an Mind, Zen Mind Series INFINITY AND PURITY, the artist describes "infinite and constant change performing against a background of perfect tranquility," on the one hand "symbolized by harmonic elements from the natural landscape mediated by lines and circles inspired by the ancient Chinese numeric system," and on the other by the more "sensuous and emotionally abstracted images of the lotus."
Jorn Ebner explores circuitous forms of navigation in an invented world re-contextualized by animating children's drawings and digital photographs. He wants to guide the viewer in choosing unexpected pathways, while Dylan Moore aggregates data from commuter bike and pedestrian pathways to form digital line drawings that remap familiar urban spaces in his familiar New York City neighborhood. Aaron Oldenburg investigates the nonsequitur nature of narrative while playing with new ideas about game design based on two years as a development worker in Mali.
Whether searching for ways to investigate the familiar from new perspectives, or suspend disbelief in time or state of mind in an open-ended experience, the artists seem committed to understanding a non-linear interpretation of human existence.
Conclusions
The subcategories - Hybrids, Erosion, Rhythms, and Traversal - provided a dialectical framework far more interesting than the initial concept of "slowness". Luckily, the artists included in the show were themselves more intent on creating work of rich and stunning complexity than in providing a re-definition of speed. The Jurors made fascinating choices in selecting work for Slow Art, filtered by their checklist for concept, novelty, interest, quality, craft and completeness. Sue Gollifer, a member of the Art Exhibition Committee, was pleased the show "looks good, was not too big, and proved quite international."
Slow Art is not slow. It is techno-smart-art, timely, up to date, generative and responsive to the state of the world today. Certainly, all of the work was enriched by patient contemplation, incubation, meditation, scrutiny and examination intrinsic to invention. But this is a quick witted rather than a slow process. Some of the more intriguing work in the show is real-time interactive, redefining the traditionally inverse nature of 'still life' as a primary art genre for illusion, but most of the art in the show does not move at all. None of it is dull, tedious, stupid or obtuse. And none of it takes longer than expected... with the outrageously wry exception of the REALSNAILMAIL (RSM) developed by researchers Vicky Isley and Paul Smith at bordomresearchl.com.
Modeled on a Standard Webmail Service Contract, RSM Users sign up to send e-mail via real snails cultivated in a real aquarium. Theoretically, the snails carry embedded RDIF (Radio Frequency Identification) chips to pick up messages from one side of the tank, and deliver them to the other... IF, that is, they pass by the collecting points at all. Even given the British sense of folly and farce, researchers did not expect that the snails might NEVER pick up, much less ever deliver a message. Observing that the snails are apparently more interested in vertical foraging and rampant sex, researchers now expect that dead snails in a box could work just as well. 7,000 e-mails have stacked up in the queue, which could take 70 years to deliver, more than the herd of snails can ever send in a lifetime. Researchers worry whether they owe it to their Users to intervene or not, having assistants spray mist the tank to encourage faster snail traffic. One of the Users planned to send a letter of resignation... another, a letter to his unborn children. Luckily there are enough escape clauses in the Terms of Agreement to protect Researchers from romantic Users who expected the tongue in cheek system to work. RSM epitomizes Slow Art, subverting a priori expectations for natural systems to conform to human networks, foiling expectations set by instant messaging, and epitomizing 'wisdumb' at its best.
Slow Art is fast-tracked. It represents innovative art that mediates consciousness, awakens curiosity and encourages continued innovation. Whether the art is still or kinetic, our minds react with the speed of light filtered by our senses, a lifetime of experience and expectation triggered in a piquant instant. This remains a universal aspect of great art, which serves constraints of the past, present and future simultaneously. Nandhini Giri, Student Volunteer at the International Chapters Booth, brilliantly summed it up more simply, "Fun is more knowledge! Come back for more next year at New Orleans SIGGRAPH 2009!"
For complete details on SIGGRAPH 2008 "Slow Art", click here.
To contribute commentary, visit "Slow Art"
Anab Jain and Alex S. Taylor
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Kirk Woolford and Carlos Guedes
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Paul Magee
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Yunsil Heo and Hyunwoo Bang
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Dennis de Bel
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Jonathan Bachrach
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Joanna Berzowska and Di Mainstone
Anna Ursyn |
Vicky Isley and Paul Smith
Jorn Ebner
Armella Leung and Oliver Oswald
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Joo Youn Paek
Aaron Oldenburg
Takahiro Matsuo |
Ryoko Ueoka and Hiroki Kobayashi
Jing Zhou |
Ross Racine
Edrex Fontanilla and Robert Goldschmidt |
Mark Stock
Dylan Moore
Hye Yeon Nam
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Kevin Mack |
Ed Cookson |
