Art Research Communication

Space, Place, Interface by Chris Byrne

November 19, 2005 at 3:18 pm in Views No Comments

This text is based on a presentation ARC Co-director Chris Byrne made at a Hothaus seminar, organised by Vivid at the University of Central England, Birmingham. It outlines his experiences and thoughts around curating digital and networked art projects and their relationship to the locations where they were made and presented. It is soon to be published in a book, The Hothaus Papers: Paradigms and Perspectives in Media Arts edited by Joan Gibbons, a Vivid Publication in association with Article Press, Birmingham.

Space, Place, Interface
Location in new media art

In film-maker Richard Fenwick’s short RND#91: 51st State (1) an anonymous caller enquires of numerous technical support specialists where exactly the Internet is, and whether he can buy a piece. Fenwick responds to the entrepreneurial spirit of dot-com, satirising the culture of venture capitalism and 24/7 help lines. He also raises the question of the borderlessness of the Internet: the expansive, “everywhere” rhetoric of the technocrats contrasts sharply with the reality and the restricted ownership of the networks. The work questions our assumptions about the supposedly liberating potential of computer networks.

There’s a mythology of networks as ubiquitous and universal, yet in reality the Internet is still restricted to a small percentage of the world’s population. (2) Across much of the Southern hemisphere, fixed line Internet hardly exists, because fixed line telephony is scarce. To an extent, the same overblown hyperbole is applied to technological art forms. The artworks which tour the media art festival circuits are internationalist and location neutral, rather than site-specific: we’re asked to engage with the concepts and methodologies inherent to the medium, rather than to a specific geographical context.

Just as the Internet was and is largely confined to the wealthy urban elite globally, so the media art scene is concentrated in metropolitan centres: Amsterdam, New York, London, Berlin. As an artist/curator living in Scotland, it often seemed like I was practising on the periphery of the media art world. It was partly in response to this sense of the limits of the nascent digital art scene that I became involved in planning a series of commissions for artists using digital technologies based at locations around Scotland. (3)

Embarking upon such a project necessitated some thinking through of the respective roles of the artists and of the curator. Based on the model of open submissions around a theme, what I dubbed ‘open source’ curating recognised the importance of the artists independent research, and the need to broaden horizons beyond normal curatorial research in order to bring about possibly unanticipated, perhaps interesting proposals from artists. The task was to set the conditions, define parameters within which the artist would work: location, organisation, budget, equipment access. So a framework was built for artists to respond to. Within an open system another necessity is to encourage artists to apply. Therefore the pre-selection activity is more a networking exercise in itself, the curator acting as a catalyst or node which distorts the flow of information (and hence proposals) away from the purely arbitrary.

It was necessary to address the nature of a temporary transformation of a space or area. How to square the apparent contradiction between information flows in a network, and the fixity of locale? There is of course a history of artists working with the tensions and paradoxes of physical space, site, and context. The writings of artists such as Robert Smithson and Robert Irwin (4) were useful pointers towards a way forward. Irwin’s categories for art works and their relationship with place were: site determined, site dominant, pre-existing work placed on a site, site adjusted, and site specific. (4) We might adapt these categories for media art: technology determined, technology dominant, pre-existing work placed within a technological context, technology adjusted, and technology specific.

Somewhere inbetween these typologies lay the artistic approaches it seemed useful to investigate. Awareness of blurrings and fine distinctions between different types and methods of working became central to the process of selecting artists to create works in specific locales.

One example was Colin Andrews’ work Geist, designed for the specific architecture of the Pier Arts Centre, situated in Stromness, Orkney and also referenced the social and historical traditions of Scotland. The spaces of the ‘haunted’ houses interacted through the telephone network with the library of the Pier Arts Centre.

Four traditionally ‘haunted locations’ across Scotland were networked. These remote locations acted as nodes, gathering data such as changes in temperature and fluctuations in electromagnetic radiation. This information was then relayed via electronic networks to the library at the Pier Arts Centre where it was used to ‘feed’ an audio installation. The work was experienced as a four channel audio installation, with each of the channels representing one of the remote ‘haunted’ locations. The audio was derived from traces of ‘voices’ extracted from recordings made at each location at an earlier time. Andrews used so-called Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) techniques used by researchers from the late 1950s onwards to make audio recordings at the haunted sites.

One of the issues which arose during the production of this work was the difficulty and unreliability associated with connecting to the Internet in rural Scotland at the time. Customised modems and special software were created to make automatically dialled telephone calls to network the separate components of the installation, rather than the Internet due to the lack of dependable Internet connections in the remote locations where the haunted houses were situated.

Anne Bevan’s installations and interactive work combined sculptural processes and techniques with moving images. Her commissioned work level explored the physical effects of weightlessness, weight and buoyancy, through the movement of objects through air and water. The work existed in two forms: as an installation of video projection, sound and sculpture, and as a limited edition CD-ROM. The artist sought to present the processes and experiences of experiments with volumes of air underwater. Sculpture became process and performance.

The location for this research was Aberdeen, ideal for its connections with the oil and fishing industries. Most of the video work was undertaken with the assistance of sub aqua divers at a safety training pool for offshore oil workers. The work involved ‘experiments’ with for example, shipping floats, cast aluminium forms, balloons, weights, bubbles, oxygen and helium. The movement of these hollow forms through air or water was a central image.

Another work attempted to question notions of place entirely, whether real or virtual. Beverley Hood’s translocale explored the transitory nature of interaction and examined the potential of movement as a physical and virtual activity.The work was an intervention within the environment of online video conferencing, comprised of a vast network of users. Within this still relatively new technology, visual conventions had evolved, particularly in how users present themselves, generally staring blankly at the screen.

In stark contrast to this translocale threw into this virtual environment an inherently physical passionate and intimate activity, the Tango. The work broadcast two dancers from a live performance space into the online conferences. The dancers’ movement around the Internet was automated, connecting to a conference for a set period before disconnecting and connecting to the next. In this way the dancers lept from server to server, country to country, temporarily visible to those connected to each conference. Perceptions of place and physicality began to blur into the online realm.

A subsequent project , Remote (5) built upon the experience of commissioning work in situ. Again the impetus for the project was to respond to a particular context: in this case, an area of the Scottish Highlands around the Cairngorms range of mountains. A residency model seemed appropriate to allow artists to experience and respond to the environment they were working in. The residencies facilitated the production of online projects which were also prepared for gallery exhibition at the Iona gallery, a converted schoolhouse in Kingussie, just South of Aviemore. The artists involved were Thomson & Craighead, r a d i o q u a l i a, Simon Fildes & Katrina McPherson and Cavan Convery.

One of the issues we faced immediately was again the scarcity of Internet connectivity and bandwidth in the local area. The solutions found were prone to disruption: for the exhibition we hired in satellite broadband, however the satellite uplink that was on such a shallow incline to the earth’s surface that if someone parked their car in front of the dish, the Internet connection was cut off.

Thomson & Craighead had to change the nature of their planned work in response to the conditions. They had intended to take forward their ‘template cinema’ series with an online film using live web cams situated in the Highlands. Instead the lack of fast Internet connections meant they devised a low-bandwidth strategy for their exhibits. The Price of Freedom (6) points to four lines from John Barbour’s epic poem, ‘The Bruce’ and re-presents them as a series of domain names parked for re-sale. The poem was found in a second hand volume in a local shop, creating a link from an earlier form of storytelling to the current environment of late capitalism, where everything can be commodified. The second work entitled, Making a case for the twinning of Newtonmore and Las Vegas was an on-line open letter alluding to the Highland settlement’s history as a purpose-built Victorian resort.

Cavan Convery’s project was also transformed by the experience of working in the Highlands. The artist attempted to immerse himself in the natural landscape of one of the last wilderness areas in the UK, hiking and camping in the Cairngorms. His aim had been to experiment with GPS and other mapping technologies. However he quickly realised that the land was rapidly being colonised by signs, plaques and textual information, designed to help visitors. These phenomena were so prevalent ir began to annoy him. Convery made a work specifically in response, A History of the Interpretative Panel. (7) The artist draws attention to the increasing branding, labelling and systems management of the countryside by non-governmental organisations, some of the largest employers in rural Scotland.

r a d i o q u a l i a (8) were resident at MAKROLAB, conducting research into a number of artistic applications of remote technologies. MAKROLAB (9), the brainchild of artist Marko Peljhan, was a temporary media lab which coincidentally landed in nearby Blair Atholl the same summer as the Remote residencies took place. The r a d i o q u a l i a project, listening_stations, was the first phase of an ongoing project entitled radio astronomy. listening_stations was an interactive net.radio service consisting of three discrete channels: each channel presented live and prerecorded audio material captured from nearby objects in our solar system, including the planet Jupiter and the Sun.

The cosmic and internationalist nature of this project fitted well with MAKROLAB’s situation. An admirable undertaking in many ways, MAKROLAB’s sojourn in Scotland alas took little account of the social or historical context of the landscape within which it was located.

Sited in the Atholl sporting estates, the wilderness where artists and scientists experimented with technology was entirely man-made. Within sight of the futuristic sleeping pods lay the ruins of settlements whose residents had been cleared from the land by the Duke of Atholl a century before. It was unfortunate that the significance of their location was largely lost on the many creative people who visited the area because of MAKROLAB’s presence. This seems indicative of the disconnect which sometimes occurs between international media art practitioners and the places where they carry out their research.

My collaborators on this project, artists Simon Fildes and Katrina McPherson, lived in the area. Their work for the project was thus informed by an in-depth knowledge of the social context. Their project was based around the winding road from Dalwhinnie to Laggan, ‘the most dangerous road in Britain’. The web-based work If I follow you, do we make a path? (10) comprised a slow motion composite journey in which the road takes centre screen and all other obvious traces of human activity have been edited out or altered, recreating a kind of false wilderness. The artists’ conscious appreciation of the ways in which visitors or tourists idealise the rural lanscape stood in contrast to the romanticism of the MAKROLAB premise.

In parallel with these activities at disparate physical locations, I initiated and curated the online project space Host (11). In computer jargon, the host is a computer system that is accessed by a user working at a remote location. The system that contains the data is the host, while the computer at which the user sits is the remote terminal. Following the advent of the world wide web, the term host is commonly used to describe a web server, or the act of providing such a server. In wider language, apart from religious connotations, the host is the person who welcomes guests to the home.

Host began partly as a response to the nomadic, distributed nature in which new media artists operate. There was a feeling that artists needed space for experimentation. This was particularly acutely felt in Scotland, as compared to other countries there had been a relatively low profile for new media art practice. The sense of a ‘place’ dedicated to artists projects on the web site seemed important: it had its own identity, separate from other, often geographically dispersed activities and was promoted accordingly.

Artists’ activities often come about through building partnerships with others, who provide physical spaces, equipment or resources. With Host, the ‘place’ was constructed through a different set of conventions and limits – those of HTTP protocols, data storage, domain names, scripting languages and browser technologies. When artists focussed on these issues in the building of a ’space’ some interesting work was the result. The idea of the ‘project’ from visual arts or performance traditions was important too. It felt freer than ‘exhibition’, ’show’, or ‘gallery’: lending the possibility to try something new.

Several of the projects presented in some way explored notions of space, and attempted to articulate the position of the viewer in relation to the space constructed by the artist. But dealing with these issues was not a prerequisite. Host projects explored a variety of different concerns, notably popular culture, artist’s software, politics, and cultural identity.

My original intention with Host was to present projects only temporarily. But it soon transpired that artists were keen to keep their work in view for as long as possible. So the emphasis moved from temporary to semi-permanent artworks in public space. This shift influenced the presentation of web-specific works, which did not proscribe time-based or performative elements to Host projects, but meant the artist had to consider what would remain after a specific event or timespan ended.

One of the early commissions for Host was by Claude Closky, who uses a variety of media – drawing, photography, sound, video and the Internet to create subtle distortions of mass media. In Going for the high score he took the computer game Tetris as his starting point.

He positioned the screen as a space for play, but also voyeurism. The viewer’s expectations were subverted as the work allowed no user interaction, only the observation of Closky’s gamesmanship as he pursued the ultimate high score. Closky made a wry comment on the nature of interactive media, whilst examining the tensions between the artifacts of popular culture and the contemplative realm of art.

Artist Jorn Ebner’s work is concerned with situations such as migration, settling down, creating environments. In his performances and drawings, he uses objects as playful tools to create visual narratives. In Life Measure Constructions, the viewer was invited to create their own worlds on the web. An interactive electronic drawing, Life Measure Constructions allowed the user to make decisions as to how the online environment would develop. The project attempted to adopt a very personal symbolic order of objects from Ebner’s performance works, in order to create an interface for a virtual three dimensional space. This was realised through a graphic style which derived from Ebner’s delicate line drawings, giving a visual quality which was quite unlike those commonly associated with online 3-D worlds.

Luci Eyers participates in art projects focused on independent mediation and distribution systems. She is a member of the low-fi collective (12), an artist / curatorial practice working with net art.

Her web site cyberskiving was a collection of favourite non-work related sites visited by employees during work hours. cyberskiving was searchable either by topic or occupation. The project was an open, generative system which developed as cyberskivers submitted information on this covert activity. The artist addressed the context within which many people experience the Internet, and how that influences perceptions of what the network is for and people’s choices of sites to visit. Eyers looks slightly askance at the Internet as a place to while away spare moments through small acts of defiance.

To conclude, my involvement has been with artworks which interrogate our interactions with space and place. This has led naturally to an interest in so-called ‘locative’ practices and in current forms of collaborative authorship. There is not the room here to explore these in detail, but some final observations may point to some of the principle issues for these emerging practices (13).

The problematic interrelationships between technology and site referred to at the start of this text come into play in new and interesting ways. ‘Location aware’ projects can share characteristics with site-specific work, but in many instances invert the nature of specific sites by mediating our experience of real space. Locative media tend to be more concerned with process than specific locales. The systematisation and mediatisation of urban or rural space becomes the primary focus in creating and disseminating the artwork.

The contrast is between making an artifact for a locale, with making one from/within a locale. The audience experience is different, in that a ‘location aware’ work is a hybrid of performance and artifact: the viewers/users are very often participants in a networked relationship with each other, annotating or tagging electronic and physical space.

What is the role of curating in this new environment? Perhaps not so different from other site-specific artworks or the networked practices. The curator is involved in setting parameters for the creation of the work and the audience experience, and the relationship to the site where it occurs.

References

(1) www.richardfenwick.com

(2) A breakdown of the global population of Internet users by nation state is provided here: www.clickz.com/stats/web_worldwide

(3) The digital art commissions were organised between 1999 and 2001, comprising projects by artists at sites across Scotland. Artists were Colin Andrews, Trevor Avery, Anne Bevan, Jorn Ebner, Alistair Gentry, Catriona Grant, Beverley Hood, Roshini Kempadoo, Nigel Mullan, Chris Rowland, Euan Sutherland. Hosting organisations were Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen; Visual Research Centre, Dundee; Stills, Edinburgh; CCA, Glasgow; Collins Gallery, Glasgow; National Review of Live Art, Glasgow; Streetlevel Gallery, Glasgow; art.tm, Inverness; Changing Room, Stirling; Pier Arts Centre, Stromness.

(4) Irwin, Robert. ‘Being and Circumstance: Notes toward a Conditional Art’. Larkspur Landing, California, 1985.

(5) Remote took place during the Summer and Autumn of 2002 in Newtonmore, Kingussie, Dalwhinnie, Blair Atholl, and the area of the Cairngorms national park.

(6) www.thomson-craighead.net/freedom/

(7) The artwork can be downloaded in PDF format: www.a-r-c.org.uk/remote/convery

(8) r a d i o q u a l i a are Honor Harger and Adam Hyde. They have experimented with net.radio since the mid-1990s. www.radioqualia.net

(9) MAKROLAB was a global project which landed in Scotland during the Summer of 2002. Artist Marko Peljhan started the project in 1994. http://makrolab.ljudmila.org

(10) Detailed documentation of this project and the work itself: www.left-luggage.co.uk/a889.html

(11) The Host online project space was active from 2000 – 2004, featuring 18 artists’ works over that period. At the time of writing, the works are still online at www.mediascot.org/host

(12) www.low-fi.org.uk

(13) Some recent locative projects are discussed in my essay ‘Mobile realism?’ published in ‘Reclaiming cultural territory in new media’ (Ed. Mare Tralla), Tallinn, Estonia 2005; and also online at www.a-r-c.org.uk/weblog/?p=17

Image credits: Richard Fenwick, RND#91: 51st State; Chris Byrne, Stromness Harbour; Colin Andrews, Geist; Chris Byrne, Anne Bevan’s level; Beverley Hood, translocale; Simon Fildes, near Dalwhinnie, the Scottish Highlands; Fraser Macdonald, MAKROLAB on the Atholl Estates; Claude Closky, Going for the high score; Jorn Ebner, Life Measure Constructions; Luci Eyers, cyberskiving.