On Monday 6th October I attended a talk titled Perverting Technologies: A science. It was organized by the DANA Centre (part of the Science Museum) a cluster of spaces, inviting debate and thought about science in relation to culture. The speakers on the panel were artist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Blast Theory producer Julianne Pierce and Andrew Shoeben, founder and lead artist in the collective Greyworld. The audience were in the larger space downstairs. The speakers and compeer were on a small stage not much higher off the ground than the audience they were addressing. The space is rectangular with two plasma screens at each end with the bar running across the longer side, opposite the stage. Each speaker was allocated 10mins to introduce their respective practices:
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer:
Lozano-Hemmer spoke articulately about a range of ideas and influences. Notably a forthcoming project in November in Trafalgar square called, Under Scan… “a large-scale video art installation for public space. In the piece, passers-by are detected by a computer tracking system that activates video-portraits projected within their shadow on the ground. The piece is intended as a public takeover of their city, linking high technology with strategies of self-representation, connective engagement and urban entitlement. Over one thousand video portraits were shot in Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Northampton and Nottingham by a team of local film-makers. Participants were free to represent themselves in the video portraits in whatever way they desired and a wide range of emotions and attitudes were recorded.” (Under Scan website). The projected image is scaled to fit the outline of your shadow. The projectors are extraordinarily powerful among the strongest in the world, 10 000 lumens. He spoke excitedly of one’s own shadow becoming a mobile interface, something we intuitively have learnt how to deal with and manipulate. Every seven minutes, in what he called a 'Brechtian moment', the intricate Orwellian surveillance system reveals itself: luminous green tracking grids are made visible, the scanning systems and spot lights disclose themselves - like red-laser dot gun targets. Observing people’s reaction to his work Lozano-Hammer found himself surprised by ‘what makes people uncomfortable’. In conception he thought this moment of displaying the hidden mechanism would be horrifying - the sudden foregrounding of the technology that increasingly surrounds us - on the contrary, he has discovered the public often like this moment and break into smiles - ’because it looks like a disco’, he says. On the otherhand he finds more were unsettled engaging with the projected portraits. (Filmed in such a way as to stare up at you from the ground.) Such is the number of portraits, and the randomisation of their projection Lozano-Hemmer with an unintentional poetry said: “Participants come back to find themselves, it is very hard to find yourself.”
The artist felt it key that the public activate the work, that the work does not slide into a solely technological spectacle. He sited his work within the Western Classical Painting tradition of portraiture, showing examples of inspirations which included Velasquez’s Las Meninas and work by Van Eyck. The examples portrayed the sitters aware they are being looked at, rather than simply objectified obliviously.
Lorenzo-Hemmer also sited contemporary artists such as Gary Hill (b.1951, “for his earliest video installation, Hole in the Wall (1974), he broke a hole through a wall of the Woodstock Artists' Association, placing on the other side a monitor that replayed his destructive action” (Slought Foundation)). Paul Sermon (b.1966, http://www.paulsermon.org/) and Daniel Conogar (b.1964, Madrid, www.danielcanogar.com). These artists engage with telematic systems, live relay and projection.
He also expressed an interest in exploring the ephemerality of public art. The temporary nature of his installations, the fleeting apparitions of the portraits themselves are means of achieving this. He also referenced ‘the anti-monument’ and in particular the work of Jochen Gerz:
[ “Since the 1960s, forms of monuments were invented that not only explored new types of expression but challenged the very tradition of marking historical events with monuments in order to commemorate the past in the present. Crucial to this development were the works of American and German artists, Edward Kienholz and Jochen Gerz. Kienholz’s ‘anti-monument’, The Portable War Memorial of 1968, comprises a blackboard and chalk with which spectators are invited to record the names and victims of future wars, while Gerz’s much debated ‘counter-monument’ of the 1980s and 1990s is based on the principle that monuments which renounce symbolism draw spectators into an active questioning of their relation to the past and its representations. The inscription on the plaque marking the site of Gerz‘s invisible ‘Monument against Fascism’ in Harburg near Hamburg reads, "For nothing can with duration rise against fascism in our place"
Peter Carrier, Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989]
Despite his positive and utopian rhetoric my unease about Under Scan and other works that employ or re-work surveillance technology was not dispelled. In making such technologies ‘fun’ and ‘playful’ it is often argued they have been ‘hijacked’ in the name of progressive socially engaged interactivity, as opposed to being utilized as policing aides. On the other hand I fear such works can unwittingly become PR-exercises for a surveillance state, accustomizing us to their presence, to the point we lose all critically of them or attach undeservedly positive connotations to mention and thought of surveillance systems. John McGrath, the former artistic director of Contact Theatre and now inaugural artistic director of the National Theatre of Wales, author of "Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space" , talked earlier this year at the LIFT festival in Stratford, during which he called for a more open recognition of an innate human pleasure from watching and surveying, that oft’ forewarned ‘surveillance society’ is already upon us and our emphasis should be engagement, subversion or creative play with these technologies.
Julianne Pierce, spoke about Blast Theory’s recent and ongoing project, Rider Spoke:
“The audience can take part either on their own bike or borrow one supplied by Blast Theory. Following a short introduction and a safety briefing you head out into the streets with a handheld computer (Nokia N800) mounted on the handlebars. You are given a question and invited to look for an appropriate hiding place where you will record your answer. The screen of the device acts primarily as a positioning system, showing where you are and whether there are any hiding places nearby. The interface employs imagery drawn from Mexican votive painting, sailor tattoos and heraldry: swallows flutter across the screen to show available hiding places, prefab houses indicate places where others have hidden. Once you find a hiding place - a spot previously undiscovered by any other player – the device flashes an alert and the question. The question is one of a selection authored by Blast Theory that asks you – alone, in an out of the way spot – to reflect on your life. You then record your answer onto the device. Each hiding place combines two properties: the physical location and the electronic location as reported by the device and, for this reason, position itself is slippery and changeable.”
Julianne played samples of various participants confessions in recording devices, (notably one in which a 40 year old woman, talks of all pervading fear which affects her. “I’m constantly in fear, of what might be fear of what might not, fear of myself”). An interesting idea was put forward that people generally found it easier to interact with machines in a public-performative situation than a person, ‘it’s a lot less intimidating‘, one attendant said, ‘to engage with an answer machine device than to be invited on stage and interact with a human performer‘. I think this is a valuable point to consider and disrupts the binary oppositions that come into discussions around this theme, which will often site technology on one hand and intimacy on the other.
I was more excited by mention of an earlier Blast Theory project with which they achieved their first wave of critical acclaim and mention in the press. It was a project titled Kidnap:
“In 1998 Blast Theory launched a lottery in which the winners had the chance to be kidnapped. Ten finalists around England and Wales were chosen at random and put under surveillance. Two winners were then snatched in broad daylight and taken to a secret location where they were held for 48 hours. The two winners were Debra Burgess, a 27 year old Australian working as a temp and Russell Ward, a 19 year old from Southend working in a 24 hour convenience store. The whole process was broadcast live onto the internet. Online visitors were able to control the video camera inside the safehouse and communicate live with the kidnappers. During the run up to Kidnap, a 45 second video - the Kidnap Blipvert - was shown at cinemas around the UK. The Blipvert carried a freephone number, allowing people to register their interest.” (Blast Theory, website)
I am curious as to how this project would be received now in 2008, when footage of captives held by terrorists is such a mainstay of our tele-visual media. The idea of 'lottery winners' and the project’s initial advertisement in cinemas, switches an extreme, aggressive, torturous, (often politicised) act , into an artwork and perverse leisure activity - both for the hostage and those who become part of the project online through the manipulation of cameras tracking the hostages. How many of the negative aspects of kidnapping remain in the game version of it? Is kidnapping trivialised? and is their anything necessarily wrong with such trivialisation?). Have the primary connotations of ‘kidnapping’ itself shifted in the last decade in this country? In 1998 I suspect kidnapping would have evoked more personal acts of abuse: a lone dysfunctional sadist, a desperate individual trying to raise money, cinematically depicted as ploy in the criminal underworld, an act that takes place within our cities , or at least a domestic place - now one is more likely to think of aid workers, or soldiers in Iraq, frenzied political rants, recitations of religious commentary - we possibly think of kidnapping as an act by ‘a community of the other’ visited upon someone we recognize - a social event and political act. In that respect Blast Theory can be said to have been curiously prescient about the mediarization of anti-social activity and the complicity of the voyeurs.
Andrew Shoeben, the director of Greyworld, talked of his primary audience being the passer-by and how this affected how he presented his work. His challenge becomes getting people’s attention in an instant, this is not an audience who have come to see the work, but who in the act of passing through the space, activate it and on discovery imay then spend time with it. He saw many of his projects as antidotal to the reduction of public space to nothing more than traffic lanes, from which to get to and from work - or shop. A notable work simply titled 'Railings', involved the tuning of the bars which made up a stretch of railing: running a stick along the railings created a melody. Shoeben felt this was especially representative of what he strived to achieve because a cyclist could still chain their bike to the railing a though it was a purely functional object. Equally exciting was a work called World Bench: “Each installation is situated in a school and consists of a bench placed next to a wall onto which is projected the mirror image of the bench. However, whilst one side of the bench may be in the grey playground of a primary school in Newcastle the other is in the sun-baked play - ground of a school in Cape Town. The people sitting on the bench can have an idle conversation, discussing their lunch or perhaps indulging in a little light flirtation, which they would have were they sitting on the same bench and not separated by thousands of miles.”
Other projects included carpeting a bridge: when walking over the bridge sensors are triggered which create various soundscapes such as crunching snow, or dry leaves. Shoeben talked about it being ironic that Greyworld’s most recognised work to date was the least accessible by the general public: The Source, an installation at the London Stock Exchange…
“The Source is formed from a grid of cables arranged in a square, 162 cables in all, reaching eight stories to the glass roof. Nine spheres are mounted on each cable and are free to move independently up and down its length. In essence the spheres act like animated pixels, able to model any shape in three dimensions a fluid, dynamic, three dimensional television. Visitors to the atrium are greeted by this motion: its particles rising and falling, generating an infinite range of figurative and abstract shapes that rise, dissolve and reform at different heights in the atrium. The shape of the sun rising on a new day of trade, the names and positions of currently traded stocks, the DNA helix at the centre of life formed by the work, and floating in the 32m void of the atrium. This complex and sophisticated installation is a microcosm of activity, a living reflection of market forces.”
He went on to joke it exists for the public in the televised world. It can be glimpsed most mornings on news features and seen on the internet. This is interesting territory: a notion of public space within broadcast systems, non-physical public space, what is the potential for public art which only exists in transmitted mediarized, representational space?
I find this work exciting for its treatment of the stock-market as a ‘real-time system’ much the same way the likes of Hans Haacke did so in the late 60s. This spotlight on the stock market is a particularly relevant one in the current economic climate, works which try and depict such data in a visual way is especially illuminating and necessary at this time.
Shoeben’s repeated insistence that the work should communicate itself without extraneous contextualization in the form of a press release or wall panel, definitely alters the dialogue between audience and artwork. He really valued the immediacy of contact between the two. To achieve this it appears the works need a level of directness which operates in a very similar way to a lot of advertising campaigns which continually seek ways of ‘grabbing your attention’, is there a danger of work which uses the same strategies designed to sell you something? Desptie the twist being nothing is bought? That you can be given something, all be it an experience without having to hand over cash, or sign up to something… that isn’t a marketing plug for a personal commodity, unfortunately, is an ever-decreasing occurrence in our public spaces.
After the introductory talks the audience of about 60 were separated into three groups in three separate spaces. Each group included one of the invited talkers. These discussions were designed to encourage a more intimate dialogue about the themes which had emerged. The artist/producer with each group chaired and orchestrated the discussion. Questions judged particularly relevant were noted and shared with everyone in the last ten minutes - when the three groups reassembled. Two points that especially struck me were 1) the politics of access to the technology: the highly technical projects that Blast Theory and Under Scan engage with demand huge financial resources and specialist equipment, how do the artists avoid replicating the dynamic of the privileged few with high access (like military, secret services, big business and police) making subjects of those without this access? do the audience ever become more than glorified end-users? 2) Do artists using such state-of-the-art technologies presume with too much certainty the continuous presence of hi-tech systems in their work? could we not be facing a future where we are reduced to very little, can technology prepare us for its own potential absence?
When the group had re-assembled there was talk about the primacy of the technology, with general consensus among the panel that the application of technology was not an end-point in itself, in various ways they claimed to avoid showcasing in the work itself, this led to the compeer wrapping up with what was for me, perhaps the most revelatory statement of the evening: “Technology is most visible when it fails.”
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