Another quick catchup post from BEAP, before it recedes into the mists of time. The Impermanence show at the John Curtin Gallery is a beautifuly-installed collection of video and interactive works. The gallery is an impressive space and curator Chris Malcolm knows how to deal with media art: HD projections onto custom painted surfaces, well-contained hi-fi sound, careful design and layout, and tons of breathing space. Daniel Lee's Origin (below)was shown as still prints and high-def video loop, and looked quite amazing; though the work in itself didn't stun me. Originally created in 1999, it's almost retro on the new media scene's manic timescale, and to me it was showing its age. For 90s Photoshop organohybrids you can't go past Australian artists Patricia Piccinini, Murray McKeich or Linda Dement - all of whom deliver lush surfaces with a lot more bite than Lee's manipulations.
"Nice, but..." just about sums up my response to this show; Lynette Wallworth's Still:Waiting2 features amazing nature-doco style video, with thousands of small parrots coming to roost in some enormous red gums in the dawn light. But it only made me want to be actually watching the birds instead of sitting in a dark box in front of a HD projector screen. Bill Viola's slowmo screen Observance is very pretty, but I just can't watch the overacting. The most interesting thing in the place was, unfortunately, an outright failure.
When I visited, we were told that Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau's Eau de Jardin (above) was broken. This work reprises their 1992 classic Interactive Plant Growing, with sensors embedded in potplants driving artificial foliage on a panoramic projection. Ordinarily the artificial plants gradually recede back into their "pond," making space for new creations. But something was wrong and the water plants weren't dying, resulting in a kind of virtual algal bloom: the screen was locked up, choked with life. By contrast the real plants were not looking good at all. The ferns were shedding fronds onto the floor; I heard someone report that the soil in the pots was dry, while gallery staff explained the lengths they were going to in trying to keep the plants alive - wheeling in big UV lamps overnight, to compensate for the dim projector-light of their daytime life. The disjunction was stark; the polarity flipped on the happy techno/bio mix that characterises much of Sommerer and Mignonneau's work. It ocurred to me that a really useful project for all these bio-artists would be to engineer a form of plant life that could live happily under the light of a data projector.
Monday, October 01, 2007
Impermanence - Life by Projector-Light at BEAP
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Peter Newman: Paperhouse
The second release on Demux is Peter Newman's Paperhouse DVD, a lush wall of fuzzy, grainy AV sensation. Like Wade Marynowsky, Newman's aesthetic could loosely be described as post-digital, overprocessed, inframedia, whatever; disintegrating media surfaces shifting between abstraction and figuration. But if Marynowsky's work has a hard, bitcrunched edge, Newman's seems to have been somehow worn smooth, or buried for years and then exhumed.
Like his compatriots Robin Fox and Andrew Gadow - and Marynowsky too - Newman works at a cross-modal alchemy, where sound and image suffuse into something approaching pure sensation. Newman comes right out with it and says "synaesthesia" on his (apparently dormant) blog. He also gives an impression of the context and formative elements here - and some stills, like the one below. But frankly none of it could prepare you for the beauty of this work. Back in the heyday of glitch I wrote about inframedia aesthetics in terms of materiality, a process rendering media technologies as embodied sensation. Newman's work seems to push materialisation as far as it can go, beyond the cool reflexivity of glitch and into sheer texture, tactile immersion and an overloaded, full-throated melancholy.
The opening track Fold - P.I.V 7 overlays what looks like distressed, burning and distintegrated film stock with a woven drone of phasing guitar overdrive, strings and piano. Between the flickering surfaces is some kind of plasma, a shifting, luminous fog that at one point coalesces into a vertical scar on the frame, like a spectral figure or a burnt-in afterimage. Finally the piece comes to rest in a hazy, burnished, slow motion loop that decomposes with almost imperceptible slowness (above); the guitars take over in a keening, reverb-soaked roar. The visual sources for the piece include time-lapse video of a painting developing (P.I.V = Painting Into Video) - a process that characterises Newman's organic interfolding of analog and digital media.
Sound and image move tangentially at times, aligned in monolithic slabs whose edges coincide - as in Fold; elsewhere, especially in the run-outs, Newman lets the sound hang over, as if to emphasise the independence of sound and image, the loss of a connection that only moments ago seemed all-consuming. Some tracks stitch that connection tighter still; in Rosebud (below) the flickering haze and the burnt-in scar return, but accelerated by a crackling soundtrack of granulated static and projector sprockets. Sound and image fuse in an incandescent, a ten-minute-long build, as if something is being very slowly destroyed, revealing its disintegrating inner layers. 
One reviewer aptly compared Newman's work with Stan Brakhage's legendary abstract film; they share a sense of visceral texture, morphogenesis and disintegration. But as Newman pointed out to me, Brakhage's work is silent - visually self-sufficient. Interestingly Brakhage seems to have experienced something like image-to-sound synaesthesia; he heard "shifting chords of sound that corresponded in a meaningful interplay with what I was seeing"* while standing in a quiet Kansas cornfield, at midnight. So what Newman describes as his own "primary challenge" - fusing audio and vision - is in one sense realising Brakhage's inner synaesthesia.
This disc is a frankly staggering body of work. It's an extreme example of what might be called immaterial materialism; as a product, it rides the digital media infrastructure, the n copies economy, yet its aesthetic is profoundly embodied, processual and affective; its process lies in between, working both sides. Highly recommended.
* quoted in Kerry Brougher, "Visual-Music Culture," in Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music since 1900, 121-122.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Wade Marynowsky: Interpretive Dance
Wade Marynowsky's Interpretive Dance has just been released on the artist's Demux DVD label. I'm currently gathering material for a DVD compilation of Australian audiovisual work - more about that later - so Wade sent me this disc, along with another new release, Peter Newman's Paperhouse (review coming soon). Interpretive Dance documents Marynowsky's installation and performance work since 2004 - almost all live audiovisuals, made using Max/MSP and hybrid sound/image processing. Long story short, it's great - essential viewing for anyone connected with the Australian experimental/improv scene (you might be in it) or anyone sick of new media performance that takes itself too seriously. 
On the cover of this disc is a familiar image: artist-at-laptop, gazing at the screen, immobile; behind, the "visuals" are projected large. The image instantly identifies a whole genre of AV where the body, conventionally at the core the performance, has been immobilised by the computer. The projected image, hovering over and behind the artist, forms an abstract, animated surrogate. Movement and gesture have been rationalised and externalised, the body's been reconstituted at PAL resolution. Taken with the disc's title, the cover image is a reflexive half-joke; because rather than replicate the new orthodoxy of man-machine AV, Marynowsky playfully shreds it. He puts the body - whatever that is - at the centre of post-laptop AV performance.
In the Autonomous Mutations installation he focuses on the performing bodies of the Australian experimental improv scene. The video, shot in studio conditions, extracts the performers from their native cultural environment - the utopian/bohemian niche of artist-run-space, cheap beer, all your friends in one room. Instead they have been archived, framed, some - the laptoppers and twiddlers - look vulnerable; some (like Marynowsky) use dress-up-box burlesque as a form of counterattack. Out of context, the body is forced to bear more of the weight of conviction. What do you think you're doing, at that laptop? What is that noise you're making? The performances hold their own, even as Marynowsky subjects them to an algorithmic cutup process, folding them into an automated improv-of-improvs apparently controlled by a runaway pianola. Embodied performance is guaranteed by our expectation of an audiovisual link; hearing and seeing, both at once, is fundamental. Here Marynowsky breaks that link, staggering sound and image edits to continually construct, recombine and deconstruct the performing body, and in the process casually generate moments of intense audiovisual counterpoint and (in)coherence.
The_Geek_from_Swampy_Creek further embodies Marynowsky's laptop pisstake. Sporting goggle glasses, nerd tie and megacephalic exo-brain, the Geek sways calmly at his Powerbook, generating an audiovisual meditation on the Creek from whence he came. Again Marynowsky puts his own body on the line with a persona that uses parody as a kind of side-door through which landscape, identity and narrative quietly enter. Like all the best parodies it works because it's true: the Geek is our embodied guarantee, he really is weaving organic image/sound textures together, on the fly. The shattered, glitchy processes feed the parody and the narrative, as the Geek's manipulations seem to take him ever further from home, abstracting his swamp into a haze of pixels.
Uranium Country and Apocalypse Later also deal with lost and abstracted landscapes, overprocessing image and sound into dense, evocative textures. In the audio track of Uranium Country cicadas and birdsong merge imperceptibly with the buzz-saw hum of digital timestretching. Apocalypse Later closes the disc in devastating style, drawing on images of Tasmania's Styx Valley, Kakadu, Old Sydney Town and Australia's Wonderland to develop a nightmare collage of trash culture, disintegrating landscapes and implied violence. Just when the abstract textures begin to lull you into a comfortable stupor, the body returns: a lash across the back, a flash of light and a wet snap; it's the crystalline moment of the disc, a visceral sync point that's also a parodic nucleus of history and fake history, national kitsch and real violence. It also jumps the representational gap that the whole disc explores - between the live, performing body and its image. Using processes that operate across audio and video, Marnowsky occasionally extracts abstract audiovisual gestures - gut blows or head-jarring abrasions - that pull your own body into the circuit, too.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Jonathan McCabe - Nervous States
Canberra artist Jonathan McCabe is currently showing some digital prints at the Front gallery in Lyneham - the show is called Nervous States, ostensibly referring to the neural net behind the generative process... but it seems to have much wider implications just at the moment, too. I wrote about McCabe's Butterfly Origami Method on generator.x a while ago, and was impressed by the elegance of the generative mechanism and the visual richness of the results. Nervous States is just as elegant, and visually psychedelic, but uses a completely different generative approach.
Like the Butterfly Origami images, there's a sense of materiality here... which is paradoxical, considering the abstraction of the generative techniques. Each image is essentially a visualisation of the output state of a small neural network. The X and Y coordinates correspond to two variables in the connections of the network; the colour of the pixel at that point is a representation of the network's behaviour for those parameters. So the image is a map of system states; coherent colours show areas of relative stability or gradual change; edges show sharp jumps in the output; marbled swirls show complex oscillations.
Technically, this work is pushing the edges in several ways. To select images from the vast range that the system can produce, McCabe first uses an automated analysis based on variation in the image at three levels of scale: the software varies the weighting of the inter-neuron connections, and selects images (maps) with the most variation. However this automated process still generated 6000 candidate images, which McCabe then whittled down to nine for this exhibition.
Generating these images at very high resolutions is a hefty computational task. The solution for McCabe was to make use of the parallel-processing grunt available on the video card. Using the Brook language from the Stanford Graphics Lab, the images are rendered using the parallel pixel processors on an nVidia graphics card.
This work also makes me wonder about communication, meaning and generative art. As McCabe explains them, and in the context of the "nervous" metaphor, the generative system is poetic in itself; the images can be read in that context, as mysterious maps of complex dynamics - or they can function on a more "retinal" level, as sheer visual stimulus - or perhaps both. But how comprehensible is the generative system for a wide audience? Does it matter? Understanding the images as state maps, rather than physical (or even simulated physical) traces and gestures, is a considerable leap of abstraction. And at a time when open-source tools are drawing more and more artists and designers to generative techniques, McCabe's work issues a similar challenge: underneath the initial challenge of learning to code is the conceptual process of understanding, designing and visualising generative systems, and it's those systems that (I'd say) are at the core of the work.
