Thinking Through Photography with Maria Antelman
Carlin Brown interviews Maria Antelman on the occasion of her solo exhibition My Touch, Your Command, Your Touch, My Command.
Maria Antelman makes videos, photographs, sound installations, and sculptures using both new and traditional technologies. Conceptually, her art practice points to our interaction with machines and the complicated systems they weave around us. Her themes come from disparate sources like space exploration, crash test facilities, artificial intelligence experiences, and utopian possibilities. Recent shows include On the Exactitude of Rain at Ryan Lee Gallery (NY), A Nonexistent Event at Melanie Flood Projects (Portland, OR), Notes from the Field at the University of Melbourne, Soft Machines at Impakt Festival (Utrecht), Private Matters at Apexart (NY), Stigmergy at 247365 (Brooklyn), The Amateurs at the Agency (London), …But the Clouds… at Room East (NY), and Capsule Spaces at the Eugenides Foundation (Athens). Antelman received her MFA from Columbia University.
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CB: There are a few repeating motifs in your work; a hand collaged over footage, explicit references to science and science-fiction, and of course the machine. The title of your exhibition at Melanie Flood Projects, My Touch, Your Command, Your Touch, My Command suggests back to some of that same imagery. I think of voice command systems, tactile technologies, and Artificial Intelligence — the difference between the “touch” (whether physical or psychological) of a human hand or that of a machine becomes blurred. Technology and the machine is an extension of us. This is something you’ve addressed before, like in the sound piece The World of Blocks (2015). Can you speak to that?
MA: We used to handle machines. Now we command technology with a sound, a voice, a touch, a gesture, a motion. There is a relationship of power and a feeling of control attached to how we use it, and it’s intelligent. With the machines, the master and slave component was clear. Digital technologies are kind of sneaky. We create tools and then these tools transform us. We become extensions of the technologies we use. Objects are turning into information technologies and are entering our personal territories. An example is prosthetics: your bionic hearing aid is smart, and thus accessible by a third party (hackable). There is a vulnerability inside its intelligence. Also, on a larger scale, we become dependent to smart technologies serving us. We are losing the ability of doing certain things by our selves. There is always the underlying question: who is in control?
CB: There are also intimate and sexual connotations behind the title. What is the correlation between human intimacy and our computers? If machines are not an extension of us, how might you otherwise describe human-technology relationships?
MA: “We are gathered around the altar of high technology, transforming our loneliness into some kind of community”, a quote from a forgotten source.
CB: You grew up in Greece and studied history in Spain, but relocated to Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, bust, and rebound of hi-tech. Starting from a place so rich in its own history and moving to a hub of fast-paced technology, your artistic practice seems to act as a bridge between these two worlds. How does the parallel of past and future exist in your work?
MA: Rich history can become a burden, while the hub of fast-paced technology can feel extremely empty. The poet says that thinking about the past connects us to our mortality and thinking about the future connects us to the idea of utopia. What conjures past and future is our imagination. My father was a political cartoonist, and I grew up looking at all these sophisticated comments on politics, economics, society. I loved how they were sad and intense but always made you laugh. Their effect lasted for a second, but that second was amazing. I really admire this quality: being comic and tragic at the same time. Maybe the past is tragedy and the future is a comedy, or vice versa.
CB: You’ve often made work that sits somewhere between video and still image by animating sequences to an audio track. The Repeater (2016) superposes slides of side-by-side photographs with the soft, echoing voiceover of a hired actor. How did you come to this process? Given that your new exhibition is a part of the series Thinking Through Photography, can you describe your relationship with photo as medium?
MA: “Death is a photograph, life is a movie”, wrote Susan Sontag. A photograph makes you wonder what happened, while a movie is an anticipating experience. The viewer is expecting to see what is going to happen next. So, I make movies with photographs, because I am interested in the contrasting feeling of these two reading responses. I started taking pictures very young and later as a cinephile, I felt great admiration for filmmakers. Years later, I came across a video editing program in a box with a user manual, and I started making videos using my photographs. I make these compositions, or rather juxtapositions of different elements (images, sounds, voices, texts, motion, etc), which question the sanity of our society.
CB: “If there is a copy of you, while you are still alive, then the real you ceases to exist at that moment. You can never know if you are the very same person, for fear of an unknown double running around somewhere else.” There is a really powerful message here — it makes me think about the way our virtual presences can succeed our “real lives” and in a way have a separate existence. Can you elaborate on this quote from The Repeater?
MA: This is part of a philosophical argument, also known as the duplication objection. It has been used in the film Total Recall with Schwarzenegger, a technophobic film from 1990. Arnold, the man-machine has had his memories duplicated in multiples. He ends up losing his sense of who he is. The best moment in the film is when Arnold watches a video recording of his original self talking to him, his physical duplicate. It is very nicely confusing. It makes me think of the way we are dealing with our multiple digital personas, which we curate and update constantly. These copies or representations inhabit multiple platforms and data banks. In the Repeater, the images transport us to a natural setting, on an island, with a bunch of amateur radio operators, far away from a dark machinist urbanscape. The radio operation is low key, a couple of stations set on the sand, surrounded by stray dogs, antennas facing the sea and a few careless tourists taking selfies. It feels harmless, and innocent, but the slight possibility of such duplication absurdity creates an intense feeling.
CB: In 2015 you showed in Portland for the first time with your exhibition A Non-Existent Event at Melanie Flood Projects. There are some clear aesthetic differences between the work you presented at that time to the work in MTYC, YTMC. How would you say your practice has shifted since your last exhibition?
MA: Then, I presented a photomontage series inspired by the J.G. Ballard’s novel The Drowned World. The novel takes place in a post-apocalyptic tropical London with high-saturated color descriptions. I loved the feel of the story, the characters and the landscapes. I had shot these black and white negatives inside a metal shop at a NASA center, there where satellites and rockets are built. Again, I was thinking about the interrelation of the mechanical with the digital world. My photographs were shot with a mechanical camera and were about mechanical tools, but I was using digital tools to manipulate them. The result was an amalgam of these two technologies, dipped into the color palette of the Ballards descriptions. Then, I played a sound piece about one of the first inspiring AI intelligent program created at MIT. Two voices were reenacting the human machine interaction, highlighting tensions of knowledge and nonknowledge. Now, that I think about it, I could have used the same title for that show as well.
CB: The work produced for A Non-Existent Event includes photographs you captured during your visit to NASA centers in Mountain View, California and Hampton, Virginia. Can you describe your experiences visiting the NASA centers and how else those visits informed your practice?
MA: I have visited three NASA centers, Ames, Langton and Glenn. All of them were initially Aeronautical Centers, and have wind tunnels built in the first stage of space exploration. Walking inside these humongous architectural monuments, was an incredible experience. The feeling was very archeo-futuristic. The most fascinating part was how they stood there, immense and empty, as proofs to ideas that don’t exist anymore. After the space exploration funding ended, all the space technology was applied to global networks and economies. Satellites now orbit earth, support the communications systems and mirror back to us all our posts, selfies, locations, data, etc. Digital culture technically flourished, using the technological infrastructure of the cold war. During those years people’s vision was directed outwards; now we are looking at each other. It is strange how the culture we are experiencing is a byproduct of another process.
