Kevin Hollidge Advanced New Media Theory

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Signs and Wonders Event Writing

The current exhibition at Midway Contemporary, titled Signs and Wonders, features Berlin-based sculptor Michael Stevenson. The exhibition is entirely composed of sculptural flight simulators and simulation videos. The work is meant to touch on a past life of the artist, in which he grew up belonging to the pentecostal church. In the sculptures and projectors Stevenson attempts to connect aviation to Anthropology, 20th Century Evangelism, and education.

What is particularly striking about Stevenson’s work at first glance, is that is devoid of cliché. Popular culture and media often portrays Pentecostalism movement / evangelical / missionaries in a way that showcases their colonial, racist, destructive, and contradictory behavior (and justifiably so). On the contrary,  Stevenson’s work primarily circles around an often overlooked anecdote in the means of missionary work, which is transport. The free-standing screens project flight simulations that are based in real locations in Papua New Guinea, a country with a significant indigenous that can only be reached by small aircraft. In this sense,  the aircraft was of great significance to the Pentecostalists, as it enabled them to perform “God’s Work”. This examination of the aircraft and its significance to the local and missionary population in the Pentecostalism Church is outside of the general tropes and associations to Evangelical Christianity. There are pointed references in the work, however, to that help the audience understand that the work is identifiably about missionary work and the Pentecostal Church. The cockpit sculptures contain a variety of different Fundamentalist Christian literature, including: Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth”, Peter Wagner’s Prayer Shield, multiple Christian Bibles, and John Wimber’s “Power Evangelism”. In these Small Aircraft Cockpits the books provide the audience with direct references to Pentecostalism, as well as its history, with the some of the older books having been published in 1960s at the time of Pentecostalism conception, and other books being more contemporary.

The work pushes us to rethink our association to religion, ritual, software, and both material and immaterial objects. The Pentecostalism Missionaries rely on aircraft simulation software in order to learn and in due course fly a plane into remote areas of the world to provide indigenous populations with resources, Western Cultural Artifacts, and the teachings of a Christian Fundamentalist God. Flight simulation softwares like the one in Signs and Wonders developed in the 1970s with beginning of computer processing technologies, and are now widely used for aviation training for both Missionary and Non-Missionary purposes alike. In the softwares presented in the exhibition, it is apparent that the aircraft encounters dangerous conditions and harsh terrain, but in the software itself the aircraft continues steadily flying, pushing the viewer into the realm of the imaginary. The exclusion of danger pushes the work into more of a conceptual exercise than a thrill or excitement, but it showcases that even performing Jesus Christ’s Divine work carries an element of routine and the mundane. We are forced to situate this mundane between its relationship to those who understand as an integer in a divine solution, and thus reconsider our own personal associations to aircrafts and the other objects asserted into the cockpit. The aircraft is the vessel in which God’s messengers complete their routines, thus the aircraft gains the status of a divine enabler.

Michael Stevenson’s Signs and Wonders exhibition is peculiar, it avoids any sort of blatant critique at one of the most avid modern colonial movements of the 20th Century. However, in doing so, it provides the audience with a reflection. The work combines elements of new media and sculpture to situate the viewers in a realm that is equally Realist, based on observation of functioning aircrafts, and the theoretical, with video of a flight simulation. Stevenson’s work connects the viewer to a tradition of Missionary Work, while contextualizing an aspect that rarely becomes a discussion topic, and thus challenges our associations with objects of ritual. The work takes on a politicized nature not in its critique of Christian Missionaries, but instead through its anthropological approach and multi-media sculpture/video that suggests an atmosphere operating in between simulation and reality.  

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The Sims as Interface

In Galloway’s text, The Interface Effect, he sets out to redefine the notion of the interface. Rather than an-object oriented approach (i.e. screens and displays), Galloway broadens conceptions of an interface. Instead of a thing itself, it is the mediation that it helps achieve.

Similarly to Galloway’s description to the World of Warcraft, the Sims also functions with layers as interface. On surface level, the game functions as a life experience in which the individuals are able to construct their own virtual life and community. But the interface begins when the user in Sims experiences a simulation (”an ideological relationship to ideological conditions”). Like WOW, players in the Sims have to engage in repetitive, labour intensive form of production. In turn they create a city, a community, with distinct consumer identities and habits, architectural developments that pastiche previous forms of architecture, and an idealogical environment that depends on the user’s labour. These simulations repeat socio and political models that reflect ethics and values from the material reality in which the software and device were created. Like WOW, the Sims also has layers and a relationship to contemporary politics and information-oriented labor practices, and in terms of Galloway’s vocabulary, an interface.

Another stark similarity that Sims bears to WOW, is its repetitive labour-intensive activities for the sake of leveling up. The user’s virtual self engages in a list of redundant activities for the sake of gaining skill points or money to “buy” more impressive things. For Galloway the point in which these games becomes an interface is not its merely its ability to sit behind the screen and change images, but it is rather these laborious and social activities that mediate the users experience in the fantasy landscape.

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simulation new hive

https://newhive.com/kevinch/simulation

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Matthew Zefeldt’s Paintings and the New Aesthetic

A few weeks ago our class attended Scott Nedrelow’s talk at the University of Minnesota. The artist who introduced Scott was Matthew Zefeldt, a painter and professor at the University of Minnesota. The bulk his recent work deals with imagery in reference to arcade games, traditional art practice, emojis, and other digital aesthetics. This is his website http://www.mathewzefeldt.com/. 

Zefeldt’s work relates to the new aesthetic in the sense that it is a material visualization of digital language. At 19:00 in Jame’s Bridle’s talk about the New Aesthetic, he shows an image of irrigation fields on Namibia / South Africa border, and then makes a comment about how see them as pixels before we see them as what they are, which is irrigation fields, and then he explains that this shows our understanding of the border between the physical and digital has shifted. We are now more unconsciously comfortable with the physical and digital being mixed up. I think that Zefeldt’s work expands on this concept of our understanding of the border between digital and physical shifting. In these acrylic on canvas paintings, the audience accepts the paints illusions as pixels. Instead of trying to search for the idiosyncrasies that is inherent in paint as a medium, we look at Zefeldt’s paintings as a collection of pixels. 

What Bridle is getting at is what is perhaps more important than Zefeldt’s physical work is that our way of seeing has changed. Regardless of whether we refer to Zefeldt’s painting as pixelated, or paint squares, we’ve accepted that we view Zefeldt’s work as an illusion through the  squares of color and not brushstrokes. We understand Matthew Zefeldt’s paintings with a visual language that has its origins in the digital, but has since been translated into the physical, thus the New Aesthetic. 

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Elmgreen & Dragsett’s Prada Marfa

About 25 miles outside of Marfa, Texas on Highway 90 lies a small lonely boutique storefront. Closely resembling an actual Prada Store, Prada Marfa (2005- Present) is a permanent architectural installation constructed in 2005 by artist duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. The awnings, interior design, shoes, and handbags are identical to a functional Prada boutique, closely following the lineage of Andy Warhol and Pop Art. Simultaneously, there is an embedded resemblance to Land Art practice in Prada Marfa, as the building is constructed from biodegradable, local material. These two methods of pastiche are used together to attempt to critique capitalism and gentrification, but ultimately reinforce the same structures that they critique. Ingar and Dragset's combination of branding, logos, and luxury products into their installation with elements of land art practice is a choice that engages with the culture and ideology embedded in postmodern theory around late capitalism.  

Fredric Jameson’s writing in Postmodernism and Consumer Society discusses emergences in artistic practices, and properly establishes the logic that Ingar and Dragset are working with. In the beginning of his article, Jameson establishes that there are two primary facets of postmodern logic in artistic practice, the first being that postmodernism is a reaction against modernism and its established “purity”, and the second is it intends to blur the cultural distinctions between eliteness and the masses. Jameson then examines how these facets are put into practice, in which he determines that the most prevalent method is through pastiche. Not to be confused with parody, Jameson says that pastiche is like parody but, “without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic.”  High modernism, which prioritizes the artist as an individual became denounced with the transition into late capitalism, in which it was realized during this transition that artists no longer have the ability, or perhaps never had the ability to be original. Thus, pastiche is used in this postmodern context because the only way to engage in aesthetic practice is to impersonate previous styles. Jameson concludes that we can trace a unified negative and subversive identity inside of modernist aesthetic practices, but postmodern artists working with pastiche have the ability to replicate, reproduce, or reinforce consumer capitalism. He then asks openly if artists can resist consumer capitalism through the means of pastiche.  To place Ingar and Dragset’s installation into Jameson’s “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, it is clear the artist duo is directly engaging with pastiche. The artists combine two prominent and canonical traditions in modern art, and thus demonstrate a direct application of Jameson’s thinking of how pastiche is used in postmodern art practice.

Prada Marfa’s incorporation of branding as a method to critique capitalism touches on Jameson’s question of how aesthetically practicing pastiche works inside of consumer capitalism, because the installation teeters on reinforcing the structures it critiques. In “Branded Occupation,” Dr. Nicky Ryan offers critique to the contradictory nature residing in the installation,” Prada Marfa was ostensibly a critique of capitalism and consumerism but unintentionally reinforced the capitalist values it criticized. The installation attracted more art tourists to the area, thereby intensifying the processes of gentrification and powerfully reinforcing the appeal of the commodity.”  Ryan’s critique is that Prada Marfa takes for the granted that the viewer must contribute to the gentrification of Marfa, Texas in order to engage with the installation. 

This isn’t to say that Prada Marfa exclusively functions and fails to critique consumer capitalism and gentrification through its use of branding. Prada Marfa still relies on regional materials to construct the architecture of the site. The building was constructed using 2,000 adobe mud bricks, which are local materials to the American Southwest.  This quality of the building is a pastiche of land art through its use of biodegradable and local material, and is an element that works alongside the Pop Art pastiche to attempt to critique the structures of consumer capitalism and gentrification. As wealth started to accumulate in the United States, individuals in the Southwest moved away from building structures made out of earth materials like mud, and towards material like concrete. However, in recent times and gentrification processes, wealthy individuals have become increasingly more interested in using mud brick to build their homes. This concept is touched upon in Prada Marfa’s monograph: “At one time, buildings made of earth were looked down upon, and were ultimately made illegal to construct for several decades. Today, however, mud brick’s increasing popularity has created a demand that has turned into a status symbol in the Southwestern United States... Thus, what was once a vernacular tradition has transformed into a capitalist driven process that often leaves the traditional descendants of earth dwellers unable to afford mud, forcing them to switch to an ironically more affordable consumption of prefabricated mobile homes and concrete-block houses.”  The artist duo constructed their installation with earth materials in conjunction with the Pop Art pastiche to play on the socioeconomic associations of their materials to critique the gentrification in Marfa, Texas.

 The two forms of pastiche present in Ingar and Dragset’s installation reaffirm Jameson’s conclusion that using pastiche in the postmodern epoch is complex because it has the ability to reinforce, replicate, reproduce, the structures of consumer capitalism, but it is uncertain as to whether pastiche can resist it. In the case of Prada Marfa, the installation’s use of pastiche results in a complicated blur, in which the installation attempts to resist, but ends up reinforcing, the unjust structures of consumer capitalism.

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Douglas Rushkoff’s Program or be Programmed: 10 Commandments for the Digital Age

Douglas Rushkoff, professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at City University of New York, Queens College, and if the forefront of media-determinism, essentially meaning that democracy can be promoted and achieve through cyber-culture. He was previously involved with cyberpunk culture, and published several fiction and graphic novels. Rushkoff now primarily writes essays around contemporaries themes in digital philosophy. 

Rushkoff’s ideas are an elaboration of the themes of digital utopianism embedded in Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Similarly to Turner’s key concept that Brand’s interest as a “cultural entrepreneur” stems from the preoccupation with how technology transforms consciousness and culture, Rushkoff’s ideas are centered around the cultural implication of technocracy. Rushkoff makes an effort of elaborating and combating the ideals of Brand and his associates. Rushkoff’s ideology is that the technocracy is a longstanding product of society being one step behind innovation. Rushkoff moves from development of the alphabet, then the printing press, and then the computer. However, when these innovations happened, society was always one step behind (i.e. Israelites go to the town square to listen to the rabbi read the Torrah, and civilization develops the ability to read after the printing press but only a select few write, and after the computer and the internet we get a generation of bloggers, but few know how to program). 

In doing these categorizations Rushkoff notes that we operate on an obsolete “program” or social system that enables an elite mass to use innovation as a method of control, which is the idea where you can either program or be programmed. This notion relates to Turner’s essay in the sense the Turner in the first few chapters is noting the “programmers” the New Communalists. His references to individuals who use technology to shift cultural consciousness like Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters experimentation with LSD, performance, and Technology, Buckminster Fuller’s technological ideals, and Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Network are some examples of elite individuals who were using contemporary tools for the sake of empowerment. Inside of technological innovation, there are exciting Utopian ideals. However, Rushkoff points out that utopianism, or perhaps democracy through technological empowerment is an issue of accessibility. We as a collective society can’t empower ourselves, because we don’t make contemporary tools accessible. Until we make contemporary technological innovation (i.e. the ability to program and use open-source interfaces) available to the masses, then we can’t understand the biases in media, and therefore we are forced to consent to unjust technocracy. 

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0100101110101101.org & Tactical Media

Italian artists Franco and Eva Mattes working underneath the pseudonym 0100101110101101.org, are a New York based duo known embodying subversive tactics in their installations and performances. 

In their 2003 installation Nike Ground the duo set up an installation in a historic public square in Vienna, Austria. The fake advertisement campaign consisted of an installation in the the plaza as well as an internet campaign. The conception of the work is that nike bought the Karlsplatz and is renaming it Nikeplatz, where they will build a nike swoosh on the plaza. The installation received attention and legal action from the public, the Viennese Government, and Nike Corporation.

The notion of Nike purchasing a public plaza in Vienna to construct a monumental swoosh logo is seemingly ridiculous. However, there are many civilians that believe the claims of Nikeplatz to be true in the video released by the artist duo. In doing so, 0100101110101101.org points to how much trust and submissiveness civilians put forth to their governing structures. In campaigning that the city of Vienna was compliant in letting Nike purchase public space, it puts at question the relationship between supposedly “publicly” governed structures and corporations.

0100101110101101.org’s Nikeplatz embody some of the ideals of Tiqqun’s Cybernetic Hypothesis by proposing surreal relationships between government and corporations, but in doing so, help us actualize the dominance that these governing structures of cybernetic capitalism really do have. In a sense, Nikeplatz is actualizing the ideas put forth in the Cybernetic Hypothesis in material form. A surreal campaign is imposed on a public square, in which a private corporation purchased public to promote themselves, and civilians have no ability to refute or reject this from happening. In demonstrating methods in which cybernetics exercise control over individuals through the medium of a surreal campaign, the artist duo create realize the Tiqqun’s ideas of interference. In Tiqqun’s writing, it is revealed that in the struggle against the dominance of cybernetic capitalism, small guerilla interferences with the system is more effective large scale attacks. 0100101110101101.org’s interference showcases the requirements and expectations of information imposed by the cybernetic system, and embodies Tiqquns’ manifesto for autonomy

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Anthony Antonellis  putitonapedestal.com

This is a screenshot I took after curating various gifs and pedestals in Anthony Antonellis’ putitonapedestal.com (2011). Antonellis’ work takes place in an open gallery space, in which you are required to curate an arrangement of gifs on different pedestals. putitonapedestal.com’s visual composition is unconventional in form, often playing with visual tension between a two dimensional photograph and three dimensional animated GIFs. This unnerving and humorous interactive work is as subversive as it is playful. The composition confronts the user and their perceptions of digital media and its representation, as well as proposing a general critique of the art culture’s tendency to symbolically put things on pedestals.

The most obvious layer of Antonellis’ work is the critique of art culture. The vodka and watermelon, the coin on top of a pyramid, industrial minimalist sculpture, are a few of the GIFs that make the most obvious reference to modern and contemporary art. There are also several references to stereotypical Net culture, like the flying Windows, Beachball, and the circular blue ring. The idea of putting these GIFs on a pedestal serves as a metaphor to the Western tradition of Canonizing art and artistic movements. While the user is ironically required to place these GIFs on pedestals to create visual sense of the given composition, the objects juxtaposed with pedestals form a critique of our canonical traditions. While placing the objects on top of the pedestals, we ask ourselves why we our participating in doing so both literally and metaphorically. 

The next layer that arises out of putitonapedestal.com, is its conceptual justifications for its humorous, visually frustrating, composition. While arranging the objects in the gallery space, I found myself consistently trying and failing to make visual sense in the gallery plane. In “Media Theory and Technologies of Mediation: An Introduction”, Martin Irvine uses Lev Manovich’s book, “The Language of New Media” to ground his definition of Digital or “New” Media, in which Irvine defines pulls out five essential elements of New Media from Manovich’s book (numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding.) Irvine writes that the fifth essential element is,

“Transcoding. New media reveal a composite form from a deep “cultural layer” in the cultural use of media and a “computer layer” from the logic of computer systems and programs. Any HCI (human-computer interface) reveals this new conceptual representation, which is not simply transferring older analog media to digital form.”

Perhaps this is what’s at stake in Antonellis’ choice in using a photograph and animated gifs, instead of creating a 3d model that simulates navigating a gallery in physical reality. Antonellis intentionally creates a visual space where we struggle, but ultimately fail in believing the illusion of the gallery space. The medium confronts the user by forcing the user to openly acknowledge the gallery as a photograph, and the pedestals and objects as GIFs. As important as the GIFs’ representations and metaphors are, the GIF as a medium is equally important in putitonapedestal.com, because it points to what the user often takes for granted. Antonellis’ methodology functions in a similar way to the Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists, who use used their respective medium in a confrontational format to have the audience recognize the medium as the medium, rather than an illusion. putitonapedestal.com’s gifs and photographs function together to force the user to recognize the gifs and photographs as their form rather than their representation. As individuals constantly subsumed by the “metamedium,” we often forget the transcoding element and the unique conceptual representation that digital environments entail. We understand the vodka-watermelon as an illusion of vodka being poured into watermelon, but in fact it is an animated GIF that uniquely operates in a digital plane. Although we are presented with a photo of a “white cube” gallery space, the confrontation we have with the composition asserts that in fact, the work is not operating in a gallery space, but in a digital network. Antonellis’ is using the relationships and juxtapositions between GIFs and photographs as a method to confront users perceptions and expectations of digital space.

Antonellis’ putitonapedestal.com uses humorous, lo-fi, visual nonsense to make conceptual sense. In understanding the treatment of the composition, the user is forced confront their own ideas and perceptions of digital media and perhaps that they take certain aspects of digital media for granted. While meanwhile the representations embedded poke fun at the peculiar cultures of Net Art, High Art, and Western canonical traditions.