Telepresence and Kac's Rara Avis

The root "tele," comes from the Greek, meaning "distance." Telepresence is the possibility of being present in different locations at the same time. Artists have been experimenting with the notion of telepresence and telecommunication and telerobotics since the development of the technology that enables this exploration. The works often explore the possibilities and implications of presence and communication over a distance.

Kac, Rara Avis (1996)

Telepresence transports you into another environs through your eyes. And many of the artworks that utilize the concept of telepresence also comment on the act of seeing and the visual technology of our bodies.

Eduardo Kac's Rara Avis (1996) is one example of a work that playfully explores the possibilities of telepresence through combining technology, and organic and artificial life-forms. The piece is a hybrid work that consists of a site-specific installation with networked transmission. It uses video, virtual reality and internet resources.

The installation consists of a telerobotic macaw, which has video cameras as eyes. The rara avis (rare bird) is in a cage filled with 30 real birds. When the viewer walks into the gallery, they put on a virtual reality headset that transports them into the cage. The installation is designed so the viewer sees from the point of view of the telerobotic bird, witnessing the activities of the organic birds.

The head of the macaw was controlled by a servo-motor that received directional information from the headset. The video feed was also broadcasted live over the internet, and web viewers could use microphones to trigger the vocal machinery of the telerobotic bird.

The work is a sophisticated and colorful one that melds together the human and the animal, the self and the environment. It explores identity, technology and control. "Rara Avis erased boundaries between points of view, bodies, and locations at the same time as it reaffirmed them, raising issues about what constitutes identity" (Paul, Digital Art). It also explores ideas of immersion and insertion that technology provides and allows. 

Painting Away

An assemblage of the beginning of my new painting collection. After concentrating in film/video and digital art for the past few months, it's been an interesting return to the materiality and substance of paint and the process of painting. A different, but somewhat parallel, workflow and creative process.

Paintings by Minhae Shim

Schematics

I've become interested in the idea of schematics, maps and organization systems as I've reflected on my travels and begun planning my next project How does one pick the details to include in a schematic diagram? What process do we use to filter our information and choose what seems the most important and helpful (and helpful to who? Me? You? It?) There certainly is an art to creating them.

Exploded Views: Jim Campbell

During our cross country road trip this summer, Danny and I stopped in at the San Francisco MoMA. When we walked in, we were greeted with Jim Campbell's piece, Exploded Views. From below, the suspended light display seemed to shudder as black spirits moved through them. But when we went upstairs and looked at the piece head-on, we saw that the momentary black outs were in fact silhouettes of (digital) people passing by.

In this piece, Campbell remediates both film and sculpture, adding dimensions of depth, movement and light. I found it especially interesting how the piece held different meanings from different vantage points. The choreography and engineering involved in this piece are impressive. Video cannot capture the full effect of the work, as it is 3-D, but above is a small taste of the complexity of Exploded Views.

The Kuleshov Effect

Soviet Montage, a non-linear film editing style which began in the early 1900s, spliced different film shots together in unique ways to create meaning. Also deemed "intellectual montage," this editing technique forced the viewer to construct meaning from the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated images. Singular shots did not hold meaning in and of themselves, but only in comparison to other shots. The viewer was not a passive viewer, who simply marveled at the spectacle, but was an active participant in creating the meaning of the work. 

Lev Kuleshov created this experimental film, titled The Kuleshov Effect, in the early days of Soviet montage. The film demonstrates how viewers impose meaning onto the images they see. 

Shot A is a neutral actor's face. 

Shot B is soup. 

Shot C is the same actor's face. 

The audience believed that the actor's expression had changed after seeing the soup. The actor is now hungry, they believed. The hunger, it seemed, became evident in his facial expression. However, it is the exact same shot as Shot A. The audience imposed the state of hunger on the actor's face based on the juxtaposition of the actor's face with the soup. 

Kuleshov repeated the experiment several times. In the film I've posted, the other "B" shots are of a dead child and of a scantily clad woman. The audience believed that the actor's face had changed after he "saw" the child or the woman. And the audience also believed that the actor's face was distinctly different from when he saw the soup, the child and the woman. 

Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

The Kuleshov Effect demonstrates how we as viewers must be aware of how we construct meaning from raw material and impose our own values, desires, thoughts, emotions on that which we experience.

Light as an Artistic Medium

"Light is nevertheless technological energy in the making, if it is to be controlled by electric light, it is dressed up where fire is uncontrollable and naked. Light is a comprehensible representation of the human mind, whereas flame is incomprehensible and hence difficult to represent. So the decision to use neon represents the possibility of mental control." - Mario Merz

The below works interestingly all have text as content, while using light as medium. Observe the possible metaphors about the process of communication, comprehension and absorption (think: the process of illuminating words).

 Joseph Kosuth, Five Words in Blue Neon (1965)

 Mario Merz, Giap's Igloo (1969)

Bruce Nauman, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967)

Sally's Beauty Spot

Independent filmmaker Helen Lee is known for her provocative explorations of race, identity and gender in her films and writing. I recently came upon her first film, Sally's Beauty Spot (1990).

It is an eloquent exploration of sexuality, identity and the confusion that accompanies the process of self-discovery. These themes have always been of interest to me and it was inspiring to discover Helen's work. I look forward to watching her other films, which are distributed by Women Make Movies.

Walking as a Radical Art: Marina Abramović

In the chapter entitled "The Shape of a Walk" from her book Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit informs us of how walking, a seemingly utilitarian or leisurely task, has been a "act of resistance to the mainstream." Walking can be art.

Marina Abramović, self-described as "the grandmother of performance art," certainly reminds us that walking can be a radical art. Abramović and her former partner, Ulay, were interesting in using their bodies to test "both their own and their audience's physical and psychic boundaries with performances that threatened danger, pain, transgression, boredom" (Solnit, 273). Abramović and Ulay used walking as a medium that, without words or description, communicated messages about relationships, space, decisions, intimacy.

I think the beauty of performance art is that the work is grounded in ideology, and there is little if no exposition in the work itself. Performance art is concentrated on the gesture of the work, which lends itself to an air of purity. Of course, this does not mean that other media are less pure or heavily expository, but I think performance art is unique in the lack of the necessity to explain to the audience what is being done. The audience is left to interpret and react to the work in their own way.

Abramović and Ulay explored the physicality of walking and its implications in many works, including Relation to Space, Imponderabilia, and Rest Energy. However, the most dramatic and radical of their work devoted to walking was The Great Wall Walk, in which the artists planned to walk towards each other from opposite ends of the wall, meet and then marry. There were a series of bureaucratic headaches that accompanied the planning of this trip. This, combined with the significant amount of time that it took to organize the performance, and the introspective nature of the walk, led to a different outcome than the artists had envisioned. In 1988, the couple "spent three months walking towards each other from 2,400 miles away, embraced at the center, and went their separate ways" (274). This walk was the end of their romantic and creative relationship.

It's interesting that this epic walk led to Abramović and Ulay's relationship. Walking is a way of connecting to the earth and the world. Walking carries with it, "the primeval purity of bodily encounter with the earth" (275). I wonder if it was this intimacy that the artists developed with the earth during the thousands of miles they walked on the Great Wall that ultimately drew the couple apart. Perhaps the pull they felt with the earth, enhanced by the gestural study of walking, that changed how the individuals related to the rest of the world. Deliberate walking is a harbinger of truth. It forces one to reflect and be honest with the way in which one understand herself in relation to the earth and to others.

Debris Puzzle & The Masonic Hall Walk

I found this green corner of a wrapper
when I walked to the Masonic Hall
in Dorchester.
It lay in a corner, by a raised platform.
Invisible.
And so I took it, and made it into a puzzle.

One thing I noticed when I walked to the Masonic Hall was the shutting off of my vision, and the amplification of my other senses. Let me explain: My eyes are engaged every day and every moment of my waking life, the times in which I am engaged in a task. I am reading. I am drawing. I am memorizing. I am talking and making eye contact. When my brain is engaged in an actively intellectual way, so are my eyes.

But when I am walking, or doing something more physical and repetitive, my eyes shut off. I see, but don't remember. I am not actively seeing. What I do recall is that I can hear and smell and feel the vibrations of the wind and earth. My other senses become amplified. I remember the heat and the sounds of traffic and the clanking of a metal key against a belt buckle. Walking re-calibrates my senses and therefore my memory, especially when I am exploring a new place. 

Capsule Hotels in Japan: Place & Art

Japan offers many quirky products to tourists and inhabitants alike, but the most recent one I've discovered is a "capsule hotel." Capsule hotels, once deemed "dog kennel hotels"by the American media in the 70s, are aptly named because the space in which one stays for the night is only 3 ft x 3 ft x 7 ft, just enough space to sleep in.

While certainly an object to shudder at for claustrophobics, capsule hotels certainly hold an economic appeal--only $30/night. But the fact of their existence brings up some questions about human needs, psychogeography, privacy and the possibility of surveillance. The Art Collective, Fakeshop, responded to this "utilitarian absurdity of society" (Christiane Paul, Digital Art, 163) in their project, entitled Capsule Hotel, which ran from 1995-2009. 

Fakeshop's installation created a link between the actual existing capsule hotels of Tokyo with a gallery installation that had similar structures. In the gallery capsules, the compartments were enhanced with internet, videoconferencing and other networked communications. The project allowed visitors to be part of a collective piece of performance art and narrative that lasted for 14 years.

Ken Feingold's Talking Heads

An intersection of art and science, Feingold's If/Then is a remarkable piece that combines robotics, philosophy and sculpture. Two robotics heads are immersed in styrofoam as if they are still sitting at the factory, waiting to be packed up. The two engage in an existential dialogue with each other that "probes the philosophical issues of their likeness as well as their separateness and likeness" (Christiane Paul, Digital Art, 148).

The installation holds many layers of meanings, especially if one thinks about the development and execution process the artist underwent to create the piece. Feingold conceived the idea of creating two robotic heads that contemplate their existence, and then had to create the algorithm to create the dialogue they engage in, and then create the physical sculpture, and so on. The entire project, from conception to installation, is a commentary, or reflection on, creation.

And here is another Feingold project, entitled Box of Men (2007) that raises similar questions, and is equally as fascinating.

7 d.a.y.s, a Conceptual Film Project

My partner, Danny Roth, and I engaged in a 7-day experimental film project, entitled 7 d.a.y.s, that we created for ourselves last year. The conceptual work combines poetry, prose, and images. We created one film per day, developing, shooting and editing every day, for a week.

One of the intentions of the project was to explore the ephemerality of creativity, and comment on how rapidly ideas enter and leave our consciousness. The result was a series of videos that portrayed notions and experiences that had enveloped us throughout the period of seven days. The project can be seen as a preservation and exploration of particular ideas at particular points in time.

Films by Daniel Roth and Minhae Shim

Visit Roshi Productions to watch the films. 

The Family Box, an original sculpture

Sculpture and paintings by Minhae Shim

Thank you to Karen Polin for photographing my work. 

Crazy Horse, a documentary film by Frederick Wiseman

Fred Wiseman's Crazy Horse will be screened at UMass Boston on Wednesday, September 26. The screening is free and a Q&A with the renowned director will follow.

For more information on the series: http://www.umb.edu/filmseries