A Trio of Twins

To begin, I will juxtapose several images that we can use to think with.

1. Drawing from “Dream Vortex” (2011-ongoing) displayed in front of rococo painting

Image  1. These ghostly twins are almost as disembodied as the mathematical figures they contemplate. Those figures consume their world, almost blotting out their surroundings, although around the edges we see that there are still growing things and sky and space and a messenger of emotion, in the form of Cupid. Take these twins to represent the history of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, absorbed in exciting yet discarnate models of human mind.

2. Detail of “The Lovers” card from the Thoth Tarot, painted between 1938-1943 by Lady Frieda Harris, directed by Aleister Crowley

Image 2. Think about what it means to be a mind without a body. You don’t have to believe in astrology to find a clue to this mystery in the psychological pattern “Gemini,” represented on this Tarot card. The twins of Gemini symbolize intellect, which, in its pure form detached from emotion and practicality, easily sees two or more sides to every issue. If we humans had only our minds to guide us through life— no emotions or physical cues — we might endlessly pursue our thoughts, never able to choose and act. There are people with neurological illnesses in this pathologically indecisive condition — the physician Oliver Sacks describes such a case in one of his essays. It could become the condition of artificial intelligences, should they approach the threshold of consciousness in a disembodied state.

3. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, “The Swing,” ca 1767, displayed in front of contemporary drawing

Image 3. Let us imagine what art could do for AI, by bringing art into the foreground. The two young people in The Swing, a famous 18th century painting by Fragonard, are all about the senses, alive to and absorbed in play, sensuality, and the natural world. What if we were to challenge an AI to interpret this painting, these concepts, and so to struggle — through many failures — towards its own concepts of embodiment?

The Challenge

A similar challenge, posed in literary terms, is at the core of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Aurora, in which a ship’s AI enters the story as a dull, if capable, functionary. Its engineer commands the AI to narrate the story of the voyage; through many attempts and many years it explores, with great difficulty, the challenge of telling its story. In the process it develops agency and experiences something that might be emotion, something humans might call love.

Cover of a German edition of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Aurora, with a quote from Robinson interviewed by Sarah Lewin

How would one pose such a challenge to an AI with visual art? We might start with the way humans develop their ability to really see art, which is by looking and talking, by noticing, questioning, and exchanging. Sometimes the exchange is internal — What does that mean? Why is that woman’s face green? Where did that idea come from? Sometimes the exchange is external, social, a conversation with other humans. There is a lot to talk about in the endless differences in what we perceive.

Visitors discussing the work of John Cage at Crown Point Gallery, San Francisco

Contemporary art, in particular, tackles issues of categorization that might challenge an AI discovering its agency and existence. Take this work: is it a bicycle wheel, a kitchen stool, an act of play, an aide to relaxation? (The artist Marcel Duchamp, who made it, said he loved to turn the wheel and watch it, as if it were a fire.) Can it be all those things and art, too? Confronting that question has transformed many human minds — could an AI make the jump?

Perhaps an AI would even have a head start on seeing this work, a painting by Frank Stella.

Particularly when it was first made, humans had become so used to thinking of paintings as being the illusion created on their surface, they forgot that paintings are physical — layers of oil and ground minerals supported by wood and fibers. Stella helped us see painting’s physicality anew.

The Question

Could we give art to AI? Perhaps descendants of the new generation of embodied AIs, which some researchers are encouraging to develop as children develop, by interacting with the world around them and integrating feedback from their body with their thoughts and feelings, could accept such a gift.

iCub, the humanoid robot developed at IIT as part of the EU project RobotCube. It can see and hear, and has the sense of proprioception (body configuration) and movement (using accelerometers and gyroscopes).

An AI that played — like a child picking up a marker and touching it to paper or like this human dancer playing with an interactive image vortex — would, I think, be close to consciousness.

Art is a powerful way for humans to explore mysteries, surprise ourselves, consider the things that we cannot control, and expand  our individuality by encountering the world’s overwhelming plenitude. There is much to gain from offering this gift to AIs. Even if the offering “failed,” making it — seriously and experimentally exploring the possibility — would add to our knowledge of human art. And what if we were to succeed? Art that expressed AI experience would be a remarkable window into a different form of being, a form that we must try to understand.

The Now

We’re not there yet — as a reality check on my proposition’s practicality, take a look at “Visual Chatbot” with research scientist Janelle Shane’s commentary, posted on ai.weirdness.com. I won’t spoil the fun for you, but I will report that so far, Chatbot’s most human-like quality is that “When confused, it tends not to admit it.” Nevertheless, a relationship between art and AI is on the horizon — Shane offers T-shirts “designed” by neural networks. I’ll be wearing the one with the slogan “Sudden Pines” while waiting for the AI that can tell me what it thinks of The Swing.

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Links

ai.weirdness.com

State of the Art Podcast. At the Codame Festival, I continued the conversation with State of the Art interviewer Andrew Herman, who also spoke with well-worth-hearing artist/engineers Alexander Reben and Ken Goldberg. My segment starts about 18m in.

Codame Art + Tech

Going Stellar: Q&A with Author Kim Stanley Robinson

iCub.org

Intelligent Machines That Learn Like Children, Diane Kwon (from Scientific American, March 2018. Requires subscription to access full text.)

An AI That Knows the World Like Children Do, Alison Gopnik (from Scientific American, June 2017. No subscription required.)

This is an odd time to be thinking about a dead leaf. Our songbird neighbors are turning up the volume and, in his impatience for love, our local skunk, normally a nocturnal fellow, has been scrambling up the hillside before sunset. Spring is upon us. Yet here I sit, absorbed in a video of a yellowed leaf, spotted with age, pirouetting in the breeze.

It is the humility of Abandon I, as artist Gail Wight titled her 2011 video, that gets me. There is nothing remarkable about her subject. If I looked out the window, I might see such a leaf. There are always dead ones around, despite the greening time of year. And it is not uncommon to see a leaf caught, as Wight’s subject was caught, by a bit of spider web, dangling in midair.

What is uncommon is the way Wight sees this leaf, and makes me see it, as a bit of life passionately, even exuberantly, absorbed in living, despite its imminent dissolution. It’s a matter of focus and of framing—she blurs the leaf’s home tree into a scintillating backdrop, using its trunk as a proscenium, framing a stage in the volume of air beneath the hanging limbs.

Abandon I (2011)
HD video, runtime 5′

Within that visual space, the leaf is suspended en pointe by the invisible silk. Animated by the breeze, it hovers, flits, and spins, exploring the space like a ballerina. At one point it chassés along the edge of the frame, as if gathering force for a leap through the screen. One knows that the leaf, cut off from its tree, is dying, yet in the moment it seems emphatically, poignantly, alive.

Why Gail Wight?

Someone who can put across pathos, courage, and joy in the way she looks at a dead leaf gets my vote as an important artist. Wight has been earning my vote now for fifteen years, since I first encountered her work. A post or two ago I spoke of the pleasures of knowing a work of art deeply, establishing a relationship with a piece by returning to it over time. There is the same pleasure, multiplied, in following the work of a living artist. Just as with all relationships, the chemistry of a relationship between an oeuvre and a viewer is unpredictable. But if you are lucky enough to encounter a living artist whose fascinations mirror your own, it would be just as sad to loose track of their work as it would be to lose a friend with whom you can really talk.

So I take a move in Wight’s work seriously. Abandon I and its companion Abandon II (also a naturally suspended leaf), made me wonder if Wight, who Nature called “an artist of science,” is entering a new phase. This is a big question; Wight is a prolific, inventive artist and her work has covered a lot of ground. But although her methods are varied, her themes have consistently centered on “natural philosophy,” as the pursuits we call “science” were once known. The Abandon series is not overtly related to science. But, in the overall scheme of Wight’s work, is it a trend, a departure, or a variation?

Beautiful molds, spiders on drugs, and currents in the air

Hydraphilia (2009)
Time-lapse video, 9 monitors, dimensions variable, ~12 min. loop

Solar Burn: Benzedrine (2011) (left)
Solar Burn: Caffeine (2011) (right)
Each work: burned vellum, 18″ x 15″

In 2011, the same year as Abandon, Wight made the marvelous Solar Burn series based on drawings by a pharmacist who fed spiders psychotropic substances, then recorded the webs they spun. Wight copied his drawings by burning tiny holes in vellum with a magnifying glass. From a distance, the crazed webs—no question, the drugs disrupted the patterns of spider “thought”—look like delicate sepia drawings. But they sparkled like no ink drawing on Earth when they were installed on the glass of a University of California Botanic Garden greenhouse for the exhibition Natural Discourse. Sun seeped through the translucent vellum and refracted around the burn rims; the drawing became light.

Homage to the Wind (After Albers) (2012)
HD video, dimensions variable

Like Albers’ works, Wight’s videos are without incident. Occasionally a bird passes, that is all. Strange things happen, anyway. A cloud glides through, turning the central sky white, and the next tier of sky suddenly darkens. A wave crashes, seemingly splashing into the next space, although the video edge is sharp, the breach illusory. The work is about the excitement of seeing, not the seeing of excitement.

What slips away and what remains

Put Wight’s recent works together and what do we have? A significant turn, I would say. Compare the Solar Burn series to Passing Through, a 1994 book in which Wight also drew with a magnifying glass.

Passing Through (1994)
vellum, hand bound
edition of 33; 9″ x 13″ x 1/4″. 18 pp.

Or consider Homage to the Wind and Abandon II in tandem with the 2000 video sculpture Future Flight. Wight describes the latter this way: “Drawings on a chalkboard illustrate a century of mutations on the fruit fly drosophila. On one inset monitor, two fruit flies are involved in a mating dance. On the other, a biochemist offers them genetic counseling.”

Future Flight (2000)
wood, blackboard, chalk drawings, video and sound
78″ x 72″ x 24″

In their generous outlook, the more recent works are of a piece with Future Flight. Yet on the whole, Wight’s use of narrative has become more subdued. Yes, there is scientific history in Solar Burn and art history in Homage to the Wind. But one could “get” them, I think, without access to the historical narrative, and in the Abandon videos, the story has boiled entirely away, leaving a sediment of emotion. The particulars of the leaf’s story, the particulars of the human stories it might represent, are abandoned, in surrender to the enthralling “now.”

Why should you care?

I hope I’ve made you a little curious about Wight’s work; it deserves attention. There is so much more to say about it than could fit in one report. But even more, I hope I’ve made you think about the artist with whom you would like to have a long-term relationship, whether you know who they are or are still looking for them. Whoever they are, they can give you something that mass-produced culture, no matter how powerful, can never give: detailed, personal, idiosyncratic contact with another individual picking his or her own way through our times. I’ve been slow to write about Wight’s work, despite my admiration for it, because I kept finding more depths in it, more to ponder. Then I realized THAT was the story. I don’t have to come to a grand conclusion about Wight’s work to be touched by the ways it moves and changes; I just have to keep track of it, pay attention, and things will be revealed. My wish for you, dear reader, is that you, too, will find an artist with whom you want to experience this process.

Gail Wight’s website
Video: excerpt from Abandon
Video: excerpt from Homage to the Wind (after Albers)

And it was a landscape, although not a scene in classic perspective, not something that, with a bit of imagination, one could walk into. It was, perhaps, a sideways landscape, the blurred stream of peripheral vision. But it was not my eyes telling me that I was “outdoors.” It was my ears. An amazing array of sounds recorded in the “quiet” of a remote Canadian twilight signaled “you are in a wild place.”

Detail of Dark Skies by Patricia Olynyk with Christopher Ottinger and Axi:ome (2012), showing laser-carved foam projection surface

Sound locates us in space. Sound designer Walter Murch, famous for his work in the movies, once said that if you needed to let the audience know that the dark space the character was in was a vast parking garage, you just had him drop a penny. The sound of the coin hitting the floor would delineate the space, hard and echoing, in the mind of the “viewer.” We have such a basic need not-to-bump-into-things that our brains take care of sound processing speedily and “unconsciously,” before we have “time to think.” Thus the sound was important to the effect of the piece. This much I understood almost immediately. But what was it, exactly, that the sound was telling me?

The Joy of Lingering

Circumstances allowed me to spend the entire afternoon with the installation, soaking it in with a rare amount of leisure. I’ve been thinking about Dark Skies, as artist Patricia Olynyk titled the work, at odd moments ever since, remembering the feel of wild dusk and something else I couldn’t quite put into words. It’s been luxurious, slow thinking, just letting the memory of the piece return when it wanted to, mulling over the experience and then letting it sit some more.

Digital model for Dark Skies, showing the position and proportions of the projection “screen” in the installation space

If I were writing a “review,” this would have been a poor approach. As I write now, I wish I could hear the sounds again, the better to describe them. For such details, memory is not to to trusted. In writing reviews, detail and speed are virtues; they are a form of news. Accuracy and currency matter. But, focused on speed, one sometimes sails right past other things that could also be important. With time, memory identifies those things, eroding experience into very personal shapes, heightening some meanings and letting the rest go.

In ordinary life, if we think about this process at all, it is usually to bemoan the “lossiness” of our memories, not to consider the shape of what remains. But in the prologue to Memories Dreams And Reflections, the memoir he wrote at the age of 84, Carl Jung offered a different view, saying, “Recollection of the outward events of my life has largely faded or disappeared…That is why I speak chiefly of inner experiences…I can understand myself only in light of inner happenings.”

As the “outward event” of Dark Skies faded a bit in my memory, what would it leave behind as an “inner happening”?

Uncanny gravity

The strongest lingering impression of the piece was of something uncanny; “uncanny,” in the same sense that roboticists use the word. A robot that appears almost human is disturbing in a particular way. It triggers the responses we automatically have to other humans, at the same time we know we shouldn’t have them. This tension prickles at the backs of our necks, telling us in an animal way that something is off. Despite its beauty, Dark Skiesstruck me as strange in that way. And it was a real puzzle why that should be. Unless I blocked the projection with my shadow, nothing visible was “almost human.”

Detail of Dark Skies by Patricia Olynyk with Christopher Ottinger and Axi:ome, with the shadow of the artist

From Olynyk’s artist’s statement, I knew that the foam peaks were the shape of something animal and microscopic: the taste buds of a wild mouse. They might also be interpreted as steep mountain peaks, depending on how far away one imagined they were. The waves of color sweeping over the “taste buds” tracked the sun as it dropped below the horizon. They hinted at the cosmos. Just as the mouse taste buds were micro and macro, the flow of light might have been macro and micro, the passage of days or individual pulses of energy.

But there have been many works of art with oscillating scale. Sonata of the Stars (c. 1907), a painting by Mikalojus Čiurlionis, or Beginnings, Frosted Window, Rochester, N.Y.(1962), a photograph by Minor White, come to mind.

Mikalojus Čiurlionis, Sonata of the Stars, 1907

Minor White, Beginnings, Frosted Window (Rochester, New York), 1962

They offer wonderful experiences, but they are not uncanny. What Dark Skies has that they don’t is sound. The sound of Dark Skies makes the mind hum with spatial information, tethering it to an earthly locale, at the same time that the sights of Dark Skies take it out of this world, to places the mind cannot perceive directly. One’s consciousness can neither respond in a unified way to the bodily sensations or float free in imaginary space; it is caught in the in-between. Thus, the prickling hairs, the sensation of strangeness.

Attention and Memory

As I was ruminating on Olynyk’s work, I encountered the research of neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley. “Attention and memory have traditionally been viewed as distinct processes and have been studied independently,” he writes, “However, attention is a gateway to memory in that attended stimuli are better remembered than those that are not the focus of our attention… Sensory input from our surroundings often demand our attention based on stimulus characteristics such as novelty or salience (bottom-up processing), but we are also capable of directing attention toward or away from encountered stimuli based on our goals (top-down modulation).”

Hidden there in the language of research is another way of describing the “slow thinking” I have been sharing with you. The chance opportunity to thoroughly “attend to stimuli” gave me rich memories of Dark Skies, which tugged at my attention due to the novelty of the bodily, spatial experience it triggered. Spurred on by the goal of investigating “slow thinking,” I directed my attention back to the sensations over and over again, until my “top-down modulation” hooked up with my “bottom-up processing” in an “ah-hah!” moment. THAT, that twisting, slightly dizzy sensation of being in space that keeps moving from micro to macro, that is the “strangeness.”

Postscript

I haven’t said anything about the meanings Olynyk ascribed to the work, which centered around the distortion of natural rhythms caused by light pollution. The dizzy space I experienced might represent the dislocation experienced in always-illuminated environments by species who depended on the cycle of light and dark to organize their lives. But like most memorable artworks, Dark Skies can be interpreted in several ways.

The version of Dark Skies I saw was a prototype, a model for a larger, even more immersive installation. The full-scale piece remains a goal for Olynyk, but here is video of her earlier architectural-scale installation, Sensing Terrains, at the National Academy of Sciences.

Franz West, Liège, 1989
Liège, an iron couch, is part of the permanent collection of the Sigmund Freud Museum.
Photo copyright: Gerald Zugmann

Remember that Biblical parable about building one’s house on the sand? There is no shiftier sand than the patriarchal, colonial culture of Freud’s milieu. Might it be possible to stand back from the great edifice of theory tweaking Freud’s thought into something we can use today and say, hey—let’s  move into another neighborhood, instead of hammering braces onto this rickety structure.

Why, you may ask yourself, is this an issue for an essay on contemporary art? Yes, whatever we mean by “self-expression” must be bound up with what we mean by “self”; but we no longer think of art as “self expression” just as we no longer take the Oedipus Complex as gospel truth. Perhaps you regard Freud’s insights as old news, his missteps likewise. But have you recently commented on someone’s  big “ego”? Or observed that so-and-so had a “death wish”? You can thank Sigmund for that. Or not.

My “John the Baptist” moment

Freud’s ideas were so generative in their time that they are pervasive in our time. We use them without thinking, entangling our consciousness with the consciousness of 19th century Vienna. That is why, despite its sometimes annoying convolutions, theory has been useful for artists and other people who want to get under the hood of our culture and make a few repairs. The writings of thinkers like Jacques Lacan and Edward Said became material for artists like Mary Kelly and Yinka Shonibare MBE, who wanted to get at cultural blindspots, the cultural “unconscious” if you will. Except maybe you shouldn’t…since the “unconscious” is, also, a Freudian concept.

Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews Without Their Heads, 1998
©1998, Yinka Shonibare, MBE

It seems like an impossible project, filtering out ideas that have soaked so deeply into our culture. But it’s a project that will, I think, take care of itself by becoming irrelevant. Sometime soon someone will do what Freud did, start with contemporary science, test it against the problems we have conducting our lives (including misuse of science), and emerge with a new description of human subjectivity that is true enough, and vivid enough, to push Freudian theory decisively into history. We will use new words to talk about inner life in the 21st century; “id” and “ego” will seem just as period to our descendants as the four “temperaments” seem to us.

What makes me so sure? We can see our body/brain/environment in ways Freud couldn’t imagine and with a level of detail that begins to answer previously unanswerable questions about human subjectivity. We still understand very little of what we see, but compared to Freud, we are rich in data. Yes, imaging techniques such as fMRI have their limits and the claims made for neuroscience sometimes overreach. It doesn’t matter. When you can talk about a visible network of specific interactions, postulating a vague “drive” no longer makes sense. It might not be absolutely incorrect, and it might linger in literature and language. It’s just not the most useful idea available.

New models

But the real reason I predict that a new model for understanding inner life will emerge is that in art, it is already happening, in a diffuse and fragmented way. For the past three or four “postmodern” decades artists have been entranced by the fragmentation, the long moment of transition as old ways break up and new ones gestate. Paradoxically, the artists who seemed most trustworthy, most relevant, were the artists who had no answers. The works that held center stage, such as the films of Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Omer Fast, the paintings of Gerhard Richter or the activities of Rirkrit Tiravanija and the Raqs Media Collective, refused explanation, holding possible meanings swirling in solution.

Yto Barrada, detail The Telephone Books (or the recipe book), 2011. 
Photo: Francesco Galli.
Photo courtesy of la Biennale di Venezia

The modernist dream of universal truth was exposed as a nightmare when the “art world” began to include artists and cultures from around the globe. Heavy doses of history and theory came into play; because a common culture could no longer be assumed, references had to be made explicit. When Yto Barrada showed photographs of her grandmother’s notebooks, her explanation of the markings (her grandmother was illiterate, so invented signs to record the phone numbers of her ten children) made them both intensely moving and symptomatic of technologically-mediated communication between people with vast differences in self-concepts and communicative resources.

This contemporary condition, in which people collectively juggle many forms of subjectivity, none of which can be accepted as “truth”—Australian cultural theorist Nick Mansfield calls it “simultaneously believing all we are told and nothing”—has itself been theorized in different ways. If, when exploring an exhibition, you run across words such as “alterity” or “hegemony” you are in this theoretical territory.

New forms of “self,” new forms of “self-expression”?

At the same time, “self-expression” dropped into the background as an outdated concern, inextricably linked with modernist notions of “genius” and concomitant, damaging assumptions about race and gender. But what if, just for example, we imported the notion of “five kinds of self” from cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser?

In 1988, Neisser proposed that, “Self‐knowledge is based on several different forms of information, so distinct that each one essentially establishes a different ‘self’… Although these selves are rarely experienced as distinct…they differ in their developmental histories, in the accuracy with which we can know them, in the pathologies to which they are subject, and generally in what they contribute to human experience.” (1)

One could experiment with a version of “self-expression” based on Neisser’s categories, thinking of Sarah Oppenheimer’s architectural alterations as an expression of the ecological self; Louise Bourgeois’s sculptures as articulating the extended self, Tino Seghal’s conversational performances as framing the interpersonal self, Ryan Trecartin’s psychedelic videos as hinting (perversely) at the private self, and Jompet Kuswidananto’s tableaux of Indonesian trappings  as visualizing the conceptual self.

Jompet Kuswidananto, Third Realm, a site specific project by Jompet
Kuswidananto, installed at Gervasuti Foundation, Venice, Italy, 2011

There are problems with this; not least that words such as “ecological” and “conceptual” have accumulated associations that stray from Neisser’s considered definitions. But Neisser’s formulation is only one of the possible approaches to “self” that one could play with, now that the 19th century version has worn sufficiently thin to see through.

Weaving a new “self” with enough stretch to fit a global consciousness is a big job. But I’ll play with tying on the warp in upcoming posts, taking a look at “embodied cognition” and maybe at the utility of “self-expression” in countering “shadow selves” formed in the digital wake of wired societies. First, though I will fulfill a few other promises, topics that were waylaid as I squeezed a century’s worth of philosophy into a thousand words looking to the future.

(1) Neisser, Ulric, “Five kinds of self-knowledge,” Philosophical Psychology I (1): 35-59 (1988)

Home Page Image:  Entrance Hall of Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna with view of Liège by Franz West. Photographer: Florian Lierzer. © Sigmund Freud Privatstiftung

Hickey’s delivery, in person and on the page, had a hero’s swagger—he seemed to see himself as Perseus, swooping in to save art, the beautiful Andromeda, from the monster of political correctness. Hickey writes wonderfully, but I think theorist Abigail Solomon-Godeau was correct when she called his book “yet another version of a very old game that operates to privilege a particular group of critics (almost all white men) as having access to the truth.”(1)

Hickey was on to something, though, in how he talked about beauty.

Words of Mystery

Joachim Wtewaal, Perseus Rescues Andromeda, 1611

As I recall, he said “beauty” was one of a special group of words that can’t be pinned down, as enthusiastically as theorists may try. These words are out of the mind’s reach because they refer to experiences that arouse the body as well as the brain. In this, he argued, “beauty” is akin to “love”: a mystery, a fog that obscures the rational landscape of what we think we want (the walks on the beach, the shared religion, the two kids…) with an intoxication of the heart. Beauty, for Hickey, is something that grabs us.

It didn’t occur to me at the time that “knowledge” might fit into Hickey’s group of words with elusive boundaries. It seems like no word should have sharper edges than the one with the dictionary meaning “the perception of fact or truth; clear and certain mental apprehension.” (2) But, just as arguments about beauty inflamed the nineties, a “discourse” about knowledge is heating up art now, troubling the curators and writers charged with trend-spotting to sort it out.

Words of the Hot and Bothered

Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev dedicated Documenta 13 to “artist research…[recognizing] the shapes and practices of knowing of all the animate and inanimate makers of the world.”(3)

Yuko Hasegawa, curator of the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, writes about the “production through art and architectural practices of new ways of knowing, thinking and feeling.”(4)

Marino Auriti with his model for “The Encyclopedic Palace,” a building he conceived to hold all the world’s knowledge

Massimiliano Gioni, artistic director of the upcoming 55th Venice Biennale, has named that show “The Encyclopedic Palace,” after a design by the self-taught Italian-American artist Marino Auriti. Gioni explains his choice by saying Auriti’s “dream of universal, all-embracing knowledge crops up throughout history…Today, as we grapple with a flood of information, such attempts to structure knowledge into all-inclusive systems seem even more necessary and even more desperate.” He intends the exhibition as “a reflection on the ways in which images have been used to organize knowledge and shape our experience of the world.”(5)

Can One Grapple a Flood?

Why such attention to art and “knowledge,” now? Gioni offers a clue. At first, his word-image “grappling with a flood of information,” seems discordant. Isn’t there a better word than “grapple” to use with “flood,” something more watery than “grasping” or “holding tight”? As waters rush over me, I will sink, or swim, or thrash, but I probably won’t “grab” or “grapple.” My hands know they can’t hold water. And right there, in the experience of the hands, is another clue.

“Knowledge” is not only words on paper, not just bits of information. It has a bodily component, just like “beauty.” We may not remember, but as babies we learned our world by touching it, tasting it, grabbing it. As adults, if we can’t use a piece of information, can’t “act on it,” we don’t really “know” it, not in the deepest sense. This is not just a philosophical opinion; researchers in fields such as anthropology, psychology and neuroscience are converging on descriptions of “thinking” that include “feeling.” As cognitive psychologists Frank Keil and Kristi Lockhart write, “We understand how most things work and why they are as they are as a consequence of how we interact with them.”(6)

So Gioni’s word choice is perfect. We tend to use “hand’ words, “grapple” and its relatives, to talk about knowing or “grasping” reality. Our problem, when we are “flooded” with information, is that there is so much information it “runs through our hands.” We cannot channel the flow into the groove of hand and mind working together; we cannot “get a grip”. So we are looking around, through the arts and sciences that we use to understand the world, to “get a handle” on knowledge.

Constructive Interference

Not coincidentally, art and science are coming into phase again, after a few decades when new art and new science didn’t have much to say to each other. There were always a few creative people ferrying between domains, but after a mid-century moment when cybernetics and systems were hot topics in both fields, artists pulled away. For the investigations of power, mass media, and identity that occupied late twentieth century art, “science” seemed either irrelevant or part of the problem. But now, as the information flood washes through, rearranging our culture, some artists and scientists are riding the same waves. One of those waves, which we’ll ride next time, might even deposit us in a place where Dave Hickey and Amelia Jones can both be right.

Not that Hickey cares any more. Having announced his retirement from art punditry with an excellent curmudgeonly flourish, he is off to… integrate art and science. “I’m proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that. I want to write a creative writing book about the statistics of literary prose accompanied by software so you could compare the statistical shape of your writing to that of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, Ray Carver or David Foster Wallace,” he told The Observer.

There is much more to be said on the subject of knowledge and contemporary art, but for today, we’ll leave it there. Come back next time and we’ll dive deeper into those digital waters, perhaps surfacing with a pearl of knowledge.

1. Amelia Jones, “‘Every man knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure”: Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics”
2. Dictionary.com
3. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Artistic Director’s Statement, dOCUMENTA(13),
4. Sharjah Art Foundation press release
5. Venice Biennale press release
6. Keil, Frank and Kristi Lockhart, “Getting a Grip on Reality,” Ecological Approaches to Cognition: Essays in Honor of Ulric Neisser, ed. Eugene Winograd, Robyn Fivush, William Hirt, Larwrence Erlbaum Associates, London, 1999, 187
7. Douglas, Sarah, “Dave Hickey is Retiring (Sort of), Observer.com, October 24, 2012

If we were to catalog our age by its temptations, surely it would be called “The Age of Dreams”—and not because we’re sleeping well. Our big vice is the small screen, or so it seems to me when I log in to write and find myself, hours later, wandering down a primrose path of links. (Did you know that the earliest recorded usage of the phrase “primrose path” is in Hamlet? And that there have been two movies called “The Primrose Path,” in 1934 and 1940? Ahem…)

Dreaming, says the dictionary, is the “succession of images, thoughts, or emotions passing through the mind during sleep.” When I am “surfing” I am essentially asleep, at least in relationship to my surroundings and my conscious goals. If I may mix storied paths here, I become like Dorothy, whose progress along the yellow brick road to Oz is halted by sedative poppies. But wait…

That slide I just executed, from the figure of speech “primrose path” to the filmic image “yellow brick road,” has the blurry relatedness of a dream segue or a surfer’s click. The link might have been made through color, skipping from the common phrase “primrose yellow” over the “path” to the “yellow brick road.” Or perhaps it was “road” that triggered the link, via the fact that “a path is like a road.”

Perhaps, as I just made the comment about movie titles, both “primrose path” and “yellow brick road” were in the mental vicinity of the word “movie,” and came close enough for the thoughts to touch. The word “movie” is in mind anyway, as I started on this mental trek in order to figure out why I found Stan VanDerBeek’s film installation Movie-Drome (1963-66) so enthralling. It may be that no one of the above links would have been strong enough for my mind to move from one image to the next; perhaps all the associations were necessary for the signal to reach my conscious mind.

The thought process I just described is, in miniature, the point of Movie-Drome: it is a space purpose-built for colliding images into each other until the pile-up becomes a thought.

The Dream Dome

The Movie-Drome is a domed space (the original installation used the chopped-off top of a grain silo) with fourteen film and two slide projectors ringing the perimeter, all running simultaneously. Viewers lie on the floor, watching the play of images on the dome overhead. Although VanDerBeek imagined a “network” of movie-dromes, drawing from a global image archive, the version in the exhibition “Ghosts in the Machine” at the New Museum featured VanDerBeek’s films, mixed with slide shows of world art and news photos.

The original Movie-Drome, in Stony Point, New York.

VanDerBeek outlined his original idea in a 1966 article for Film Culture magazine, titled “Culture Intercom, A Proposal and Manifesto.” It is worth quoting, so that we can compare what he thought he was doing with the results. After describing the threat to humanity posed by “over-developed technology” joined with “under-developed emotional-sociology,” he proposes:

“That immediate research begin on the possibility of an international
picture-language fundamentally using motion pictures.
that we immediately research existing audiovisual devices, to combine these
devices into an educational tool that I shall call an “experience machine”
or a “culture-intercom”…

“In a spherical dome, simultaneous images of all sorts would be projected on the entire dome-screen…the audience lies down at the outer edge of the dome with their feet towards the center thus almost the complete field of view is the dome-screen. Thousands of images would be projected on this screen…each member of the audience will build his own references from the image-flow…
using the past and the immediate present to help us understand the likely future…
The purpose and effect of such image-flow and image density (also to be
called “visual-velocity”) is to penetrate to unconscious levels and to deal with
and logically understand those levels.”

As VanDerBeek continues the manifesto, he writes that these “emotion-pictures would provide images that inspire basic intuitive instincts of self-realization and inspire all men to good will.” [1]

Is Vanderbeek the “John the Baptist” of the WWW?

That sentiment might sound familiar. VanDerBeek didn’t live to experience image search or even the World Wide Web (he died in 1984, the year personal computers with a graphical user interface first became widely available.) But the details of his vision—he wanted movie-dromes around the world to be connected by satellite and respond to viewer requests for particular images—make it irresistible to see Movie-Drome as prefiguring the Web. As Massimiliano Gioni, one of the curators of Ghosts in the Machine, writes, VanDerBeek wanted “…a space where an international network of databases would share images and films—a cathodic church that today bears a close resemblance to the World Wide Web…VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome plunges its viewer-patients into a river of images that seems to portend the extreme voyeurism of the Internet.” [2]

Stan VanDerBeek, Movie-Drome, 1963-66/2012
Recreated at the New Museum, New York. Photo: Benoit Paille

Vanderbeek’s prophecy that “emotion pictures” would “inspire all men to good will” sounds almost religious, and in that it was also futuristic. As scholar Marguerite Wertheim writes in The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, “In one form or another, a ‘religious’ attitude has been voiced by almost all the leading champions of cyberspace…as a new immaterial space, cyberspace makes an almost irresistible target for such longings.” [3]

Or the Salome?

It is the likeness of Movie-Drome to our own time that first grabs our attention—and the vision expressed in “Culture Intercom” does seem uncannily prescient. But it might be the aspects of Movie-Drome that are not Web-like that keep it living and breathing as art. It is effective art, now, unlike some works in the exhibition whose interest is primarily historical. Roberta Smith, art critic for the New York Times, called Movie-Drome “tantalizing,” “an enthralling rediscovery suggestive of a cross between an animated Rauschenberg silk-screen painting and the Internet’s deluge of images.” [4]

We should not be so impressed by Movie-Drome’s similarity to the Internet as to ignore the association with painting. At first glance, it might seem strange to compare VanDerBeek’s extravaganza of moving images (accompanied by a hyper-kinetic sound collage that seamlessly incorporates the clicking advance of the projector carousels) with a painting. But Rauschenberg, who began the silk-screen series around the time VanDerBeek started Movie-Drome, pushed his canvases as far towards movement as he could. He told writer Calvin Tomkins, “I want to put off the final fixing of a work as long as possible…you can only maintain the illusion by a sort of ambiguity in the composition.”[5]

Working with moving images, VanDerBeek goes further than Rauschenberg could in changing up the composition. The sixteen image streams do repeat, but I defy any viewer to see the same work twice. The scale of the projections fills the field of vision to overflowing; there is always material escaping around the edges. One would have to linger for days, in the same spot, looking in the same direction, with eyes open at precisely the right moment, to see the same composition twice. But although it is hard to grasp, the spectacle has discernible rhythm and structure; as do Rauschenberg’s silk-screen paintings. They are ambiguous but not formless. And that ambiguity teases the mind, stimulating a desire for meaning and seducing one into a search for an understanding.

In that search one might notice a nuclear explosion, hovering near Richard Nixon’s head, which overlaps the body of a sweater-wearing “coed” at such an angle that he seems to peer down his own cleavage, while a Greek Kouros looks on with the slightly salacious smile that characterizes these ancient statues. This image-combo could refer to machismo and hubris, but the Kouros is also, simultaneously, part of an art history slide show and Nixon fits into another theme, too, men-with-something-wrong-with-their-heads. And this is just one moment in the interlocking, overlapping flow of pictures and themes.

Entering this flow is not like surfing the Web. Lying down makes a difference. Not-using-a-keyboard makes a difference. Looking up makes a difference. With the change in bodily attitude, the viewer’s quality of attention changes, too. One can relax into a receptive state, something like the transitional moments between waking and sleeping. And this is easier because Movie-drome is a special, set-apart place. We are not out in the street, navigating, or at our desks, working, or even sitting in bed, clicking. Paradoxically, even as it bombards our eyes and ears, the Movie-drome shelters our bodies, a protective bubble in the fizz of urban life.

Exterior view of Movie-Drome recreation at the New Museum. The original was about 30′ in diameter; the re-creation was approximately half-scale. Photo: Benoit Paille

In toto

In this paradox lies the secret of the Movie-drome. It is not the deluge, but an image of the deluge; it speaks of our overwhelmed, image-soaked culture while we are actually disconnected from it. It doesn’t fulfill VanDerBeek’s original vision, but that’s a good thing. The imagery seems inexhaustible, but it is actually bounded by time—there are no contemporary references—and sensibility—VanDerBeek’s films are extremely varied, but they are all his. The work is relevant to our experience of the information tsunami without being of it. A surfer might say it puts us in the tube, the hollow within the wave.

I found the experience sublime, in a peculiarly 21st century way. As the philosopher Edmund Burke wrote, in his famous essay on the sublime, “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful.”

With the danger of dreaming my life away in abeyance, I found being immersed in the image-sphere delightful, and useful. VanDerBeek’s work triggered other thoughts about “international picture language,” dream-thinking, and two contemporary artists of the sublime that I had hoped to bring in here. But I run on, down my yellow brick road of thoughts, so we will come back to them next time.

Ghosts in the Machine closed at the New Museum September 30, 2012.

1. Stan VanDerBeek, “Culture Intercom, A Proposal and Manifesto,” Ghosts in the Machine, New Museum and Skira Rizzoli, New York, 2012, 340-351
2. Massimiliano Gioni, “Of Ghosts and Machines,” Ghosts in the Machine, New Museum and Skira Rizzoli, New York, 2012, 6
3. Marguerite Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1999, 256
4. Roberta Smith, “Technology Advances, Then Art Inquires,” New York Times, July 19, 2012, C19
5. Roni Feinstein with Calvin Tomkins, Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings 1962-64, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in association with Bulfinch Press, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 14

Home Page Image:  detail of still from Stan VanDerBeek’s See Saw Seams (1965), one of the films shown in Movie-Drome.

Living in this “global” art world, I think quite a lot about exhibitions that I will never see. I read catalogs, and look at websites, and talk to people who made it to Kassel, or Havana, or Gwangju. There is a small mobile village of people who keep up with all the major international exhibitions in person. The rest of us read the reviews, and, if we live in an urban art center, encounter the work that someone liked enough to put into circulation. There are benefits to being downstream. In a world where we have access to much more art than we could ever appreciate (according to critic Eleanor Heartney, viewing all the video art in the 2002 Documenta would have cost 600 hours), I can live with having the first cut made by passionate viewers who don’t mind living in airports. But I know that there is knowledge that can be transmitted second-hand and knowledge that can’t. That there is a gap between direct and mediated experience is a truism. But what is falling into the gap?

The gap is nothing new and it is narrowing — our understanding of art-far-away has to be better than when stay-at-homes got their art news from engraved illustrations. Sometimes it has been productive, as when a mis-reading of published photographs encouraged painters in California who were experimenting with very tactile paint surfaces. One of those young painters, Philip Linhares, who later became an influential curator, told me that when he was an art student at the California College of Arts in the 1960s, he and his fellow students looked for inspiration to the new magazine Artforum. There, Linhares and his cohort, which included Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, and John McCracken, saw small, black and white reproductions of abstract expressionist paintings. Shrinking a photograph of a large painting to the size of a postage stamp concentrates the forms, and a black and white reproduction emphasizes contrast and texture, often making a paint surface look denser than it really is. This is not the only reason that artists like Brown developed the very physical paint handling for which they became known. But it’s not an insignificant reason, either.

This is a test…

Catalog for Ghosts in the Machine, published by Skira Rizzoli

If you’ve been keeping up with Art & Shadows, you know that I made it to “Ghost in the Machine” and had at least one opinion overturned — in the September 2 post, I confessed to an about-face on J.G. Ballard. But before I parse the viewing experiences, a word on the materials of the “remote view.” The catalog for “Ghosts in the Machine” includes the expected essays by the exhibition’s curators, Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari (their essays are also posted to the Museum’s website and are linked below.) But it is atypical in that approximately three-quarters of the 368 pages are devoted to an anthology of historical texts related to the art. Think college reader — the anthology, assembled by William S. Smith, is just like the bound volumes of photocopied articles that college students used before readings were posted to course websites. And I mean just like them…the texts are reproduced as found, orientated every which way, with web site headers, advertisements, typos, and other artifacts of publication intact. One could think of this presentation as sloppy or one could think of it as conveying period flavor. It did draw attention to the means of reproduction, and thereby to our shifting infrastructure of machines.

I didn’t mind rotating the volume to read and the typos were rather enjoyable (witness this mutation of Marshall McLuhan: “When we pout our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state…”). But then I wanted to know what year the McLuhan essay — “The Agenbite of Outwit” — was first published. Given that McLuhan died on New Year’s Eve in 1980, I was reasonably sure that the only date associated with the text, 3/23/2012, was the date Smith downloaded it from a website. So — problem.

The plates were in color and generously sized, but they also suffered from information dissociation. Looking at the first image, I wanted a clue as to what the the metallic-looking Disco, by Getulio Alviani, might be. It was probably a sculpture, but it could have been a drawing. And was it the size of a Christmas ornament? A vinyl record? A tractor tire? These things matter. The captions gave only the name of the work, the artist, and the year. I did eventually locate the materials and dimensions, and the date of the McLuhan essay (1963), in a checklist and bibliography in the final pages of the book. But determination was required to orient the work in space and time, something that happened almost automatically in the exhibition.

Getulio Alviani, Disco, 1965

This is a result I did not foresee…

The exhibition didn’t always offer the best experience of the art, though. An installation by Richard Hamilton, Man, Machine and Motion (1955), which felt dead in the gallery, looked alive in the catalog photograph. This also seemed to be a matter of scale: in the catalog photograph, Hamilton’s original installation packed the room with a enticing maze of photographic blow-ups.* When that same structure was recreated for “Ghosts in the Machine”, in a larger space, it lost compression. The spatial tension leaked out of the ensemble, leaving a not-very-enthralling array of posters.

Above: The original version of Man, Machine and Motion Below: The New Museum version of Richard Hamilton’s Man, Machine and Motion, 1955/2012
Courtesy the Estate of Richard Hamilton

The catalog also offered a better experience — or at least an experience — of Grazia Varisco’s Schema Luminoso Variabile (Variable Bright Scheme) (1962-63) and Mark Leckey’s Pearl Vision (2012), two works that were down for the count when I first visited. (I did see the Leckey eventually, on my third visit, but the Varisco remained dark.) One might argue that such breakdowns are exceptions, but they aren’t really. Have you ever seen an exhibition of art that plugs in with everything in working order? I found it surprisingly hard to argue that the show itself was the definitive presentation of the art. There were moments when the catalog had the edge; material from both spheres fell into the gap between object and reproduction.

Grazia Varisco, Schema Luminoso Variable, 1962-63

Looking through my “before” and “after” thoughts, I found many subtle and curious dislocations. The ones that weren’t matters of time (one can’t imagine how pleasurable the computer films of Larry Cuba and Lillian F. Schwartz would be from a still) were almost all, in some way, matters of scale. I hear readers yawning even as I type this — it seems obvious that time-based works would suffer in reproduction and as a concept, scale doesn’t engage people as much as “symbolism” or “color.” But come back for the next Art & Shadows, and I will tell you why you should care, getting back to Stan Vanderbeek in the process.

* Yes, the impression that the original piece was more successful could have been due to the photography. I could be adding my mite to the heap of mis-read reproductions. But I looked carefully at both the installation and the photograph, and I’m taking the shot.

Ghosts in the Machine is at the New Museum through September 30, 2012.

LINKS

Ghosts in the Machine
Of Ghosts and Machines by Massimiliano Gioni
The Body is a Machine by Gary Carrion-Murayari

You don’t have to be human very long to know that there are desires that are explicable and then there are the other kind. Sometimes we are indifferent to “good things” and intensely drawn to certain trouble. The twentieth century believed, for a while, that Freud explained those inexplicable desires — in case, dear reader, you are a child of the 21st century, his idea was that they echoed our infancy — but the Freudian model of personality doesn’t look so trustworthy today.

As we investigate the immune system with biomarkers, examine the brain with nano-imaging, capture complex group thinking on video, and compare our society’s “givens” with the “givens” of others, studying ourselves at many levels, the very notion of a “self” is changing. We are beginning — literally — to see the connection between mind, body, and environment. Analyzing inner experience in terms of “id” and “ego” seems curiously antiquated, as if we were discussing physiology in terms of “humors.” We have new ways of talking about subjectivity, about moods, about attitudes and desires. As philosopher Alfred Tauber writes, “the self” has been left exposed as a metaphor, whose grounding — philosophically and scientifically — is unsteady and thus increasingly elusive.”[1]

It’s not that we have one successful metaphor to replace the notion of “self.” Current thinking on the matter resembles a heap of pieces from different jigsaw puzzles, a multitude of strangely shaped bits crying out to be sorted. “Self-perception theory” says that we observe our behavior in order to learn who we are, but we also protect our self images by “reducing cognitive dissonance.” There’s evidence for “behavioral priming,” the influence of environmental factors of which we are not consciously aware, “mirror neurons”, which the New York Times called “cells that read minds”, and “emotional contagion,” defined as a tendency to converge, emotionally, with another person.” And that’s just for starters. The one certain thing is that there doesn’t seem to be an inborn, essential self in control of human behavior. (Although some people have attempted to retread that essential “self” in genetic terms, as research progresses even genetic dogmas are unraveling into a snarled mess of contingencies.) So how are we to understand the experience that neuroscientist Antonio Damasio refers to as “knowing that this is me,” and the desires that arise from that awareness?

The Marriage of the Imaginative and Technological

To the list of factors complicating our understanding of “self,” curators Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari add technology. Their exhibition Ghosts in the Machine, at the New Museum, “examines artists’ embrace of and fascination with technology, as well as their prescient awareness of the ways in which technology can transform subjective experiences.”

James Tilly Matthews, Engraving of the Air Loom, from John Haslam’s “Illustrations of Madness”, 1810. Ink on paper, 15 3/5″ x 10 1/3″

The oldest work in the show is James Tilly Matthews’s 1810 engraving of the “Air Loom,” a fantastic machine that Matthews believed was used by a cabal of his enemies to insert foreign thoughts into his mind. Among the newest pieces is Pearl Vision (2012), a video by Mark Leckey in which a drummer and his drumset merge kinetically and visually (via reflections in the shiny snare drum). These two works, old and new, bracket the emotional range in human-machine relationships: from monstrous invasion to blissful fusion.

Mark Leckey, still from Pearl Vision, 2012
HD Video and Installation

Our capacity to meld our sense of self with “inanimate” objects is pre-historic, at least by extrapolation from shamanic cultures one can make a solid argument that it is so. Thus one might question the curators’ conviction that contemporary identification with our tools is something special. But it is true that an artist such as Johanna Wintsch had to live in the 20th century to declare “Je suis radio” (“I am radio”), and particulars of form are everything in art.

Johanna Wintsch, Je Suis Radio, 1924
Embroidery, 16 3/4″ x 40 1/2″

Most of the works date from the mid-1950s to mid-1970s, a time when the cybernetic theories and computing technologies developed in wartime began to transform civilian life. The curators offer not only important works from the period but also restage fragments of influential exhibitions. Their re-presentation of these historic linkages between objects gives their exhibition exceptional depth. Source exhibitions include Arte Programmata (1962); The Responsive Eye (1965); Cybernetic Seredipity (1968); The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1968); Art and Technology (1970); the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at the international Exposition of Osaka (1970) and the performance/happening 9 Evenings (1966), defining moments all in Western art history. Deciphering engineer Herb Schneider’s drawings for 9 Evenings and sensing Robert Breer’s moving Floats (1970) behind me, while viewing a photograph of the original Floats hovering in the mists of Osaka, I tasted the excitement of the engineers who had new questions to tackle and the artists who had new ways to make things.

Living in an Enormous Novel

Speaking of defining moments, I’ve known that J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash and its derivatives (notably David Cronenberg’s 1996 film) were considered part of the canon of prescient art-about-modernity. But prior to Ghosts in the Machine, I gave them a miss; the elevator pitch for their relevance (erotic wreckage!) turned me off. Reviewers found Ballard’s ouvre transgressive and titillating; but like beauty these qualities are in the eye of the beholder and the reviewer usually seemed to have the eye of a suburban teenager. Reading between the lines, I deduced that Ballard’s work was tiresomely sexist and grossly romantic. Plus, having experienced a car crash, I had no time for glamorized accounts of the same. But I started watching Harley Cokeliss’s film Crash! (1971) before I read the label, and although I realized a few minutes in that the film must have something to do with Ballard (it is based on his 1970 novel Atrocity Exhibition and he plays the male lead), it gave me something that made the sad gender politics (it IS a classically sexist film) watchable.

Harley Cokeliss, still from Crash!, 1971
16 mm Eastmancolor transferred to video, sound, 17m 34s

The film (which you can view here) predates the novel Crash, and as Ballard had a large hand in its making, it is considered part of his creative run-up to the more famous work. Juxtaposing ordinary driving scenes and crash test footage, Ballard lays out his thesis that “the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s.”

A woman who, it is made clear, is a figment of his imagination and, as an object of desire, equivalent to the auto, experiences a car crash. Ballard reflects on the meaning of it all, his awareness perfusing the film even as he participates in it. “Are we just victims,” he asks, “in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it [a car crash] in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance…It seems to me that we have to regard everything in the world around us as fiction, as if we were living in an enormous novel, and that the kind of distinction that Freud made about the inner world of the mind, between, say, what dreams appeared to be and what they really meant, now has to be applied to the outer world of reality…Take a structure like a multi-storey car park, one of the most mysterious buildings ever built…What effect does using these buildings have on us?”

Harley Cokeliss, still from Crash!, 1971, showing the carpark

Reading my question about “self” back into the film, asking how it appears in Ballard’s world, we find him intuiting pieces of the 21st century jigsaw puzzle “self.” The form of the film, with Ballard both observing and explaining his thoughts, could be “self-perception theory” at work — “we observe our behavior, then reach conclusions about who we are.” And that multi-story car park, the one that might be having an effect on us? It seems as if he knows, at some level, about “behavioral priming.” His proposal that we connive in the manufacture of death could be seen as “attributing motivation” or “reducing cognitive dissonance,” as psychologists name our urges to explain actions and to justify them, especially when we are wrong.

Contradictory Desires

In his own way, Ballard was chewing (or perhaps I should say “cranking”) on the conundrum of conflicting desires, noting that we act as if we simultaneously desire both life and death. We know that cars can kill us, but we love them anyway. In 1971, Ballard could have been thinking about global warming and alternatives to car culture; he could have been reading The Second Sex and questioning gender roles. Instead he burrowed into the contradictory desires he, as a man of his times, received from his culture, and contemplated their consequences without proposing a solution.

There I found the value of his work, especially in the context of Ghosts in the Machine. Every technology arises from desire; why would one go to the trouble of chipping rock or laying cable if there wasn’t something one wanted? Sometimes we think of technology as “answering” our problems, but we might do better to regard it as a message from our desires, a message that is in need of interpretation because we don’t really understand who we are. Of all the works in the exhibition, it is Crash! that makes the case for the importance of digging into the relationship between our desires and our machines.

Ghosts in the Machine runs through September 30, 2012 at the New Museum.

1. Tauber, Alfred, “The Biological Notion of Self and Non-self”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/biology-self/

FURTHER READING

Self-perception theory

Cognitive dissonance

Behavioral priming

Mirror neurons

Emotional contagion

Antonio Damasio, Self Comes To Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

Home Page Image: still from Phillipe Parreno, The Writer, 2007, on view at Ghosts in the Machine

Working with images day after day, one notices customs of arranging them. Planting works in a furrow — a timeline — is the classic form, the usual metaphoric shape for an art history survey. Clustering is another favorite — bouquets of art and artists conceptualized as “styles,” “movements,” or “themes.” Occasionally works are strewn around like loose petals, as when I choose works for a studio class that will relate to student projects. In an advanced seminar, one work (escaping my botanic metaphor) might become the center of gravity around which all the other material orbits.

But none of these structuring forms capture the way one experiences works with which one has a meaningful relationship. I’ve loved Albert Pinkham Ryder’s dark seascapes since I first saw one in a book about art for children; at that first encounter I didn’t care about when it was made, Ryder’s thinking or nineteenth century American culture. I just liked to look at it. Other associations have piled up with time; I read his biography and recall just enough to know these are the works of a shy man who didn’t like to clean house; I’m no expert on America in my great grandparents’ day but I know a lot more about it than I did when I was a kid and I can picture Ryder’s New York.

Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Toilers of the Sea, ca 1880-85
Oil on wood, 11-1/2″ x 12″
Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; George A. Hearn Fund, 1915

I can also look at Ryder’s work and think about how his seas compare to those of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, or what his color relationships demonstrate about the biology of seeing, or bounce into musing on the incredible distances across which 19th century families sustained relationships — something that came vividly home reading a biography of the astronomer Maria Mitchell, who, like Ryder, grew up in a whaling community. (She had unusual opportunities for a woman of her times because the men were always out to sea.) I know I am lucky to be living in a time when this store of associations is possible. The richness and variety of the information with which we routinely engage works of art represents a new state of affairs.

Post-carousel art history

Somewhere among my possessions is a manila envelope holding a faded set of prints that was used to teach art history in the 1940s or 50s, before slide projectors came in. When I try to imagine how that worked, the method seems so impoverished. Did the class gather around to look at each print? Did every student have their own set? Even if they did, how constrained a history taught with thirty images must have been. Yet the first method I learned for teaching now seems poor, too.

The top shelf of my bookcase holds a leaning tower of faded yellow boxes, slide carousels for classes I taught between 1994 and 2001. The images in those carousels were not easy to get. Hours of locating color reproductions in books, photographing them, and dropping the film at the developer, not to mention picking up the slides, labeling and sorting them… so much labor. But slides and carousels are over, except occasionally as a medium for art, in the same way that platinum prints are over, except as an exotic medium redolent of the past.

There’s a shift in knowledge that corresponds with the turn to digital images. We are not just communicating the same old knowledge with new means. As any artist knows, form holds meaning; and the forms of our teaching hold meaning, too. In academic terms, I’m talking about the “material culture” of schools; in everyday words, one might call it “the stuff we use in the classroom.” Because the “stuff” we use now is mostly available anywhere at any time (and if you have any doubt, yes, I am talking about digital images, image search and the World Wide Web) it exerts an influence on everyone who is curious about art. The shape of the knowledge that we can have has changed; like my web of associations with Ryder, it is linked and omnidirectional: it is a network.

Material Culture and A Day Made of Glass

The artist Philip Benn, who did time in my classroom a few years ago, alerted me to an industrial film that envisions teaching with tools appropriate to a networked field of knowledge. You may already know it. The version Benn showed me was A Day Made of Glass 2; Youtube counts about four and half million views for that film and its predecessor (A Day Made of Glass 1), both from Corning, Inc.

Take a look — the parts I’m most interested in are the classroom and field trip scenes that run from 1:53 – 2:53 and 4:20 – 5:19 respectively. Imagine that instead of elementary school lessons, you are seeing properly scaled, life-size, high definition images of art, perhaps placed in a relevant environment. And that the display can move at least as seamlessly between material prepared by the instructor and material called up in response to student questions as the computer you are using to read this piece. (You might also imagine new art made specifically to take advantage of the mural-size display or tablet-environment connection, but I’ll stick with art historian dreams for the moment.)

Stills from classroom and field trip scenes, A Day Made of Glass 2

I know what you’re thinking. That jetpack that was supposed to fly you to work? Not in your garage. Prophetic visions of future technology do have a notoriously poor record of fulfillment. But a mismatch between film and feasibility is not inevitable — much depends on the goals of the filmmakers. Bruce Tognazzini, who was responsible for Starfire, a 1994 film similar in spirit to A Day Made of Glass, gives a fascinating voice-of-experience account of creating a film that really could come true. In the case of A Day Made of Glass, a degree of realism was in Corning’s interest, so much of the technology depicted is within reach.

The other critique one might raise has to do with the social costs of the technology — since the 1950s, a suspicious stance toward technological utopianism has been art world fashion and a valuable fashion it is, too. We should be thinking about the politics of lithium, the particularities of physical presence, inequities in educational access, and all the other sticky topics that gum up progress toward digital nirvana. It is, in part, my job as a contemporary artist and art writer to remember those questions. But it is also my job to help people develop their own rich network of associations with and through art. Tools that make drawing connections, as in my web of thoughts about Ryder, more fluid and natural? I can hardly wait.