Next Memory City from Border Crossings

Next Memory City from Border Crossings

TITLE:	NEXT MEMORY CITY
SOURCE:	Border Crossings 21 no4 36-40 N 2002

The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.

    "Next Memory City" is a collaborative project involving architect and curator MICHAEL AWAD, pianist and sound artist EVE EGOYAN and multimedia artist DAVID ROKEBY. Their project was chosen to represent Canada at the 2002 Venice Biennale in Architecture and was on exhibition at the Canadian Pavilion from September 8 to November 3.
    The following forum is a collage of separate responses by the artists to questions that have been removed. It is an exercise in interstitial reduction.
    MICHAEL AWAD: The project was based not only on urban space, but on the lack of architecture. Even though David and I had never met, we were working on exactly the same projects, except that I was working in an analog form and he was working in a digital form. My piece is specific to Toronto: one image of Chinatown, four minutes of activity recorded in the heart of the most densely populated part of the city. But it records without any architecture in the background; it only registers things that happen or change--people, automobiles and movement.
    DAVID ROKEBY: There's a fundamental link between what Michael is after in his photographs and what I've been interested in since the early '80s in tracking, monitoring and translating movement through my video systems. I find the more I look at Chinatown, the richer it gets. What was interesting in retrospect was trying to figure out how to balance a live, moving image and a still image from the perspective of the viewer. And it has something to do with time: Michael's piece requires time to view successfully.
    AWAD: What we really tried to create in our pavilion was a pause. Amongst all these other pavilions with high-powered architecture and an overwhelming focus on buildings, our space was a bit of a quiet, dark oasis where people could actually stop for a while. On many levels we counter-programmed by presenting an installation that focussed attention on urban space devoid of buildings. But I can't imagine the installation without the sound. As soon as the sound came up, it engaged the images so directly. It became integral.
    EVE EGOYAN: The sound definitely seemed to draw the images off the wall and into the space with the people. My work was on the ground and on the ceiling. On the ground I placed the same stones that were used on the Giardini walkways, and that made the floor both visual and auditory. We wanted to create an atmosphere where people, when they were looking at other people, would have a sense of themselves in the space. There were also moments of silence where the images went back to the walls and everyone was left just with themselves. We had eight channels along the ceiling and we had sounds that were really intense--a vaporetto and a streetcar. There were sounds from Venice and Toronto, and I had to work with the combination of them as if they were orchestral. For me, it was a question of thinking about the two cities and what their sounds represent. Toronto sounds are upbeat, they have vivacity, largeness and multi-ethnicity. Venice is slow, quiet, extremely transparent and really lovely to record. If there is such a word, it was autogenic. Collecting sounds was almost like creating a palette, which we then took to the pavilion to see if all the colours were appropriate.
    ROKEBY: Venice is an extraordinary city because there is such a depth-of-field of sound that you're always hearing people around the next corner. We really got into that and made a lot of recordings of a densely populated space like San Marco, and then individual footsteps going down isolated passageways, and everything in between. When we came back to Toronto, it was frustrating because the depth-of-field that was so seductive was gone. Mostly because of the fan noise from the office tower ventilators that are like sound blankets.
    EGOYAN: In Venice people didn't have to raise their voices above the general blur of sound, which is constant in Toronto. On our streets you can have an intimate conversation and some degree of privacy because there is so much sound around. In Venice, because you can hear everything, you can't do that. It can be irritating. We were in an apartment and you could hear everything the neighbours did. And where were the musicians? It would be quite an adjustment to practise there. I couldn't imagine it. But the way the sounds captured the two environments we were dealing with could be quite beautiful. Both of us were using intuition in the editing process about what sounds to use where. It was also a lot of fun because when you put the sound into a computer, it became so malleable, so manoeuvrable.
    AWAD: The pavilion is quite quirky. It's the only structure on the Biennale grounds that doesn't have a 90-degree angle and dealing with it can be a love-hate thing. From what we heard, this may be the first time that the space has been used in a highly sympathetic way. Architecturally speaking, I kept referring to it as a half-doughnut. What we did was fit all 120 feet of "Chinatown" on the outside wall of the pavilion, and then we built two walls in a v-shape on the inside, on which David could project the images he had gathered on San Marco. The sound piece, which was called "Channel," brought the two images together. It worked both spatially and metaphorically. The actual editing was a digital technology that spatialized the sound and moved it back and forth across the channel. We've been calling this place the Inter-city, primarily because it's between both cities while it exists as neither one. At the same time, it focusses attention on the interior of the city, which is something very deliberate. "Interstitial" is a great word for it; something in between that represents both but is neither.
    ROKEBY: When I was thinking about the flow through public space, there was always, in my mind, the notion of water, hence "Channel." And as Eve pointed out when we were standing in the pavilion after the stones were laid down, you did imagine you were in a drained canal. But the rawly expressed Inter-city was not as important to me as the basic notion of public space. What makes public space unique but also universal is that it's formed by people. It's still a socialized space and its very basic human needs, desires, likes and dislikes define how the space works and what happens there.
    AWAD: We're not trying to represent or recreate an urban environment; we're actually showing you things that you couldn't see otherwise, but they are things that are happening in front of you at every moment. It's as if our eyes were programmed differently, or if we were able to remember things differently. We were trying, in a very distilled way, to present qualities of the city that may be allusive.
    EGOYAN: I'm not a composer. I'm more of an interpreter but I think people associate me with being a composer because I play, almost exclusively, the music of my time. And I improvise, too. So it's in the nature of the things I do to find a way to invite people into hearing things without any fear. I work with new music and a lot of people who are familiar with classical music have real problems going to hear stuff they've never really heard before. I try to open people up to the pure act of listening.
    ROKEBY: In my work and in Michael's--in different ways--there is a perceptual displacement. This is a strategy that I've pursued for a long time; looking at the way a banal, familiar or completely readable image is radically renovated by putting it through some fairly straightforward filters. In a lot of my work I'm trying to remove the familiarity of things. This process of perceptual destabilization, especially in relation to very familiar stuff, is connected to my notion of language. It's a very expanded idea of language as any codification, where you stop dealing with raw experience and start replacing it with concepts, ideas and words. We have a tendency to get trapped in the terms and symbols we choose to apply to things. My hope is that destabilization will shake off those symbols, momentarily, and give us a way of re-reading and rejuvenating what is very conventional experience.

This page and facing page: Canadian Pavilion, 8th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, 2002, presented by Alphabet City and InterAccess. Photographs countesy Alphabet City and InterAccess.

Source: Border Crossings, November 2002, Vol. 21 Issue 4, p36, 5p
Item: 505021941

Copied from UMaine Folger Library Database on 03.07.17

Chicago Style Citation

2002. "Next Memory City." Border Crossings 21, no. 4: 36-40. Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost (accessed March 07, 2017).

Invisible Venue(s): Alternatives to the Institution, Christian L. Frock

Invisible Venue collaborates with artists to present art in unexpected settings. It is a one-person organization that supports artist’s ideas and explores alternative locations for the presentation of contemporary art, outside of conventional gallery and institutional settings. Often in speaking about Invisible Venue my language switches back and forth between “I” and “we.” Though Invisible Venue encompasses my independent curatorial practice and research, the work itself is collaborative and has been dependent upon a number of generous collaborators, including the artist Aaron Stienstra who should be recognized here for his extensive support. Additionally, I would like to recognize all of the artists who have collaborated with Invisible Venue and who have brought tremendous brio to the task of making something from nothing—complete documentation of each project and details about all of the artists are available on www.invisiblevenue.com.

I created Invisible Venue in 2005 in response to these questions: Is it possible to show something (artwork) that is also nothing (conceptual, digital, ephemeral), everywhere (public spaces) and nowhere (online)? As a curator and cultural producer, I wanted to collaborate with artists to explore their ideas and through this collaboration interrogate the relationship between contemporary art and daily life. Intrinsic to my objectives was finding a way to work both independently and publicly—to what extent could I interject the work of artists into the public realm through the force of personal autonomy? What kinds of opportunities exist in between the margins of regulations and special permissions? What, in short, are the alternatives to the institution?

Invisible Venue originated as a website to present new media projects in the widely accessible public forum of the world wide web, an unregulated public space that allowed for complete creative freedom1. The first project, titled You Don’t Know San Francisco (2005), featured eleven videos by Bay Area artists2. The website launched a week prior to Frieze Art Fair, an international showcase for contemporary art that takes place annually in London. I distributed cards with the web address throughout the fair and in public spaces around London and arranged a public screening by borrowing a flat, a laptop, and a projector to project directly from the website3. More than 100 people attended the all-night event. It was my first realization that I could independently create the circumstances to present art publicly in alternative locations. In 2008 Invisible Venue won an Alternative Exposure Grant, awarded by San Francisco nonprofit Southern Exposure in conjunction with The Andy Warhol Foundation, to support independent initiatives in contemporary art. In addition to a vote of confidence, this grant provided small budgets for 11 projects last year; otherwise Invisible Venue operates as a do-it-yourself venture, with all of the self-directed autonomy and limited financial means implied therein. Since the inception of Invisible Venue, I have collaborated with more than 30 artists to present projects in a variety of unconventional spaces4. Projects have included digital media online and on the telephone, guerilla billboard interventions, ephemeral performance, site-specific temporary installations, public events, happenings, and accidental encounters.

Public art agencies ArtAngel, Creative Time, Dia Foundation, and Public Art Fund have been valuable educational resources in the development of Invisible Venue. My work is significantly influenced by their work. Most frequently I am interested in the temporary, site-specific, and conceptual artworks that exist for a limited time before being absorbed into public memory or not. Key also to my interests is artwork with the power to engage accidental and art-initiated audiences alike. One important example that I discovered through research is Michael Bramwell’s Building Sweeps (1995-6), a yearlong site-specific art action sponsored by Creative Time that involved the artist’s mopping, sweeping and cleaning the public areas of a city-owned Harlem tenement building, unannounced and uninvited. Though the community response to this work was contentious and its success, even by the standards of its sponsors, is unclear, it is the DIY spirit of this project, absent of permits, which gives me permission to trespass into private and public spaces. As does Chris Doyle’s Commutable (1996), a temporarily gilded staircase on an otherwise unremarkable Manhattan pedestrian walkway produced by Public Art Fund. Finally, Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Voice (1999) an audio walk that navigated the neighborhood surrounding London’s Whitechapel Public Library taught me that the work does not have to have a material presence to continue to appear in your mind’s eye5. Further I am captivated by art that is surreptitiously integrated into the fabric of everyday life, such as Walter De Maria’s Earthroom (1977), situated in a discreet location and yet right in the middle of Soho in Manhattan.

Inspired by public artworks that engage domestic spaces, I decided to curate and produce artist projects in and around a four bedroom flat in July 2007. Over the next two years Invisible Venue commissioned eleven projects for this location, or rather project space, in West Oakland. The neighborhood was both central and remote; it was a two-minute walk from the first train stop outside of San Francisco, in a partially industrial neighborhood in a forgotten part of town. The space of the main entry, the stairwell and landing, and the two front rooms—literally half of the 101-year-old Victorian era flat—was dedicated to Invisible Venue. I lived with my family in the back half of the building, separate from the project space, with our own entrance and living areas. Artists were invited to use the project space however they wanted and consequently projects spilled into our living areas, the yard, the billboard on the side of the building, and the empty lot across the street. It is important to stipulate this was not a gallery for commercial endeavors or for showing pre-existing two-dimensional work. All the work that I commissioned investigated the inherent politics of the location as a public platform—in every instance, the space itself was intrinsic to the ideas. Investigations included the physical building and its architecture, but also macro-level considerations of the past and present politics of the neighborhood, the historical and social concerns of Oakland, the location in the vicinity of an important industrial port, and the micro-level considerations of the space as both public and domestic, interior and exterior.

For one of the first projects in this space, Invisible Venue collaborated with Jonn Herschend to present The Man Who Disappeared into His Own Clothes Pile (2007). A self-navigable installation representative of The Man’s living quarters prior to his disappearance was installed in the project space. A deadpan documentary in which Herschend interviewed those who knew The Man simultaneously played in my living room, as if the television had been left on. Visitors were brought in the street entrance and directed to go through The Man’s personal affects in the project space, including a journal and drawings. Visitors were told to take as much time as they needed, then make their way to the living room to watch the documentary for more information. The documentary was filmed on site and featured various neighbors from the building. As visitors moved through the house, I continued to work in the kitchen, doing dishes or something equally banal, further blurring the lines between the artwork and quotidian domestic life. The work combined the voyeuristic experience of reality television with the live action of eavesdropping or peeping, placing the viewer in an uncomfortable position to fully explore the dynamic tensions of a public project in a private space.

Concurrent with this project, Helena Keeffe collaborated with Invisible Venue to present Talking to Neighbors: Jim in West Oakland (2007). This social sculpture, to use the artist’s term, and audio piece consisted of a recorded and edited interview between the West Oakland-based artist and Jim Edgar, a local resident of nearly 70 years. The interview was transferred to an answering machine hooked up to a landline and installed on the landing, as if it was the house telephone. A disused telephone booth, located at the other end of the block, was cleaned and painted for the application of a vinyl sign that advertized the telephone number to access the interview. Additionally the information was distributed on www.invisiblevenue.com, over email and in blanket text messages. As a freely accessible recurring experience this work challenged the assumed materiality of public art.

In December 2008, Michael Damm projected a series of videos onto windows in the project space, as well as the living area because they offered the best vantage points from the street and the passing trains. The videos ran for 10 consecutive nights, during the darkest time of the year, from about 5pm to 9pm, overlapping with the heaviest commute hours. Consisting of images from various locations in Oakland, the work reflected the visually rich experience of navigating the city, when one is only half aware of their environment and is en route to somewhere else. incidental films for an accidental audience (2008) played upon the visibility of the building and its windows from a distance; the videos were visible to passing trains, from the train platform itself, to passing cars and neighborhood pedestrians. This accessibility reflected on the nomadic features of contemporary communities as the work was visible to West Oakland residents and to everyone in transit. It also interrogated the public and private aspects of the space by co-opting the windows for use as an alternative venue, projecting outward when windows are typically covered for privacy and inviting attention to the building from every direction.

Christine Lee furthered this exploration between interior and exterior space with Order and Ornamentation (2009), a site-specific installation and concurrent intervention that existed both in the project space and in an undeveloped publicly accessible lot across the street from the building. In the project space, Lee installed living sod, cut in lengths and arranged to mimic the pattern of the original century-old hardwood floors. In the lot, Lee installed a collection of reclaimed carpet remnants, cut and assembled in a historic floral pattern that evoked the original interiors of the surrounding Victorian neighborhood. This unconventionally "woven" rug bisected a pre-existing "desire path" worn into the lot by pedestrian footfall. The term desire path was coined by Gaston Bachelard in his 1958 book The Poetics of Space, an analysis that privileges a lived experience of architecture over the abstract rhetoric of theory. Both the installation and the intervention explored the lived experience of West Oakland and its complicated history as an old family neighborhood with once beautiful architecture in contrast with its present state.

Though we regarded the project space as a public site, there were of course concerns about safety due to the fact that we lived in the building. Whenever we projected videos out of the windows to the street, we wondered if we would invite vandalism, but we never experienced a single incident. Projects are and have always been listed on numerous public event listings online, as well as postings on Facebook and Twitter. Press releases are sent to all of the most prominent local critics, newspapers and publications, and the announcement list includes hundreds of strangers. Anyone who emails about being added to our list is added. Anyone who asks to see projects by appointment is scheduled an appointment. Sometimes the doorbell would ring from the Invisible Venue entrance because someone on the street wanted to know more about the flickering projections. Other times I would walk up to a person outside puzzling over an intervention and chat with them about the work. We did not attempt to prescript encounters with the work—like much public art, it was left to the viewer to wonder at its existence. We continue in this same vain. Though every project has information online and there are project descriptions available upon request, by and large, we leave the accidental audience members alone to interpret or ignore the work as they choose.

Attendance is difficult to quantify for the projects that have taken place in public spaces because the works are left unattended. Projects that took place in the West Oakland project space had varied attendance at launch events—with some events seeing attendance of more than 100 people in a single day. Despite operating slightly under the mainstream radar and being a unusual organizational model, Invisible Venue projects have received a fair amount of critical attention in a variety of publications including SFGate.com, Examiner.com, International Arts Magazine, ArtSlant, San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, Artillery Magazine, and SF Camerawork Journal, in addition to numerous blogs.

Since relinquishing the West Oakland space in August of 2009, Invisible Venue has transformed again to produce projects in exclusively public environments. (Meant to be) Lost and Found (2009) recently featured work by Charles Gute, Anthony Discenza, Jonn Herschend and Jamie Hilder. Predicated on the private/public nature of displaced personal correspondence, the participating artists created artworks that resembled official letters, business memos and handwritten notes. 100 inkjet prints of the “letters” were printed on the reverse with “This is public art. www.invisiblevenue.com.” The letters were left in public spaces throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn over four days in October 20096. Locations included restaurants, cabs, elevators, lobbies, the subway, baskets on bicycles, stores, and front porches, among many other places—all locations were chosen at random to mediate chance encounters with an unquantifiable public audience. Here printed correspondence provided a metaphor to ask questions about public art, as both printed correspondence and permanent public art appear to be diminishing products of a bygone era in favor of increasing digitization, the passive call and no- response of social networking and temporary spectacle. The range of audience engagement was anticipated to mimic that of formally recognized "public art" and likely also incited any number of positive and negative responses: indifference, derision, contemplation, or enjoyment. The production of this project challenged the market-driven budgets and architectural scale of much recent contemporary public art and deployed the recessionary conventions of revolutionist movements—including interventionist tactics, low-budget production methods and portability.

Site-specificity is still at the core of Invisible Venue investigations, except now the site is once again transient with projects taking place in all manner of public spaces rather than limited to a specific location. Based on these experiences, I have discovered it is possible to present something that is also nothing, everywhere and nowhere when one considers every possible site an invisible venue.

Invisible Venue(s): Alternatives to the Institution by Christian L. Frock. Originally presented in "Site Variations: The Shifting Grounds of Public Art," College Art Association 98th Annual Conference, Chicago 2010; also edited and republished in Art Practical, Issue 9

Above copied from: http://artandeducation.net/papers/view/23

Artsound, Germano Celant

From SOUNDINGS, Neuberger Museum, State University of New York, College at Purchase, 1981 (ISBN 0-934032-X), Translated by Carla Sanguineti Weinberg

It is the opinion commonly accepted by authentic libertines that the sensations communicated by the organs of hearing are the most exciting and that their impressions are the most vivid.

Marquis de Sade: Les 120 Journêes de Sodome


Once there was an avant-garde, and it represented oppositionally it is so totally accepted and established that it has become a common and quotidian matter. One can no longer speak about it because the violation of the rules is rhetorical, and intellectual discourse no longer evolves within the dialectic between avant-garde and tradition, but rather between avant-garde and avant-garde or, say, between tradition and tradition. The permutability of the terms carries within itself a challenge to the progression of tendencies and movements as much as it does to the interchange between progress and retrogression, revolution and reaction, development and involution, quality and quantity. At this stage, the sign is not susceptible to criticism and secures for itself a place in history without causing its antecedent to lose its place. The themes of discussion and struggle that used to condition inquiry crumble, and an all-encompassing course is adopted in which convention embraces experimentation. All values become comparable but Subtly subordinate to the well-being of the art establishment which, with the fall of the prohibition against non- involvement, is no longer differentiated from the industrial establishment. In fact, with the end of the political discords that characterized the art establishment during the sixties, some compromises are announced in which artists exclude the representation of disorder and the defeat of the imaginary.

What is produced now is no longer an agitation but an assent, the excess value of which resides in its maneuverability and reproducibility. Such a transformation could be explained as much by current consumer demands as by the withdrawal of artistic involvement that has realized the rise on the social scene of a creativity of the masses. The effect of homogenization, from which current inquiries suffer, is, furthermore, both the consequence of an overall conformity in accordance with which the area reserved for personal choice has been reduced and the realm of production has been extended and of an indoctrination characteristic of a society which, in the leveling association among products, tends to abolish disassociation and discussion. Art as well is associated with this process and so confounds its art-objects with decoration for the eye and ear that it disintegrates every sign of change and vitality. Furthermore, in order not to run the risk of becoming disassociated, art often aims at a passive imitation of the past, which, recycled by quotation, becomes contemporary in order to satisfy the demands of the consumer. In this sense, a part of "the new'' is presented as a copy of the modern and fulfills, in the post- modern, the double role of an object which is "experimental" art based on the security of the historical model. The subject of the sale is then secure; it moves between the tradition of the avant-garde and the avant-garde of the tradition.

In the U.S., too, the acceleration of the contemporary, brought about by the consumption of art as well as by the demographic explosion of gallery owners, dealers, curators, and museum directors, has so enlarged the base of power and cultural exchange that the illusion of a democratization of art has arisen. This mirage, sustained by the National Endowment for the Arts and by corporations, has taken on the appearance of an overall conformity to such an extent that individual sensibility has made itself subservient to a surrendering of taste and inquiry to the masses that has no equal in history. Exhibits multiply, new museums spring up, and private galleries flood the field, but the call to debate the procedures as well as the process of making art is extinguished, and the face of culture shows the terrified expression of one who waits behind the counter for the real and true command, the request of what to serve.

Along with its apolitical content, a linguistic debasement is the consequence to such an extent that, if one were to think about pattern-painting and the neo-Fauves, one would find a rise in the value of decoration and eclecticism as escapes from every problem other than business affairs and the multiplication in quantity of the "artistic gadget" that is to be collected on the walls of the petty bourgeoisie. In this process of despoliation that confounds the nightshade, the carpet, the couch, the fresco, and the painting, the aim of art is to he at the level of all the consumer signs. In respect to art's exit from the margin and its entrance into a decoration that satisfies the common taste, one may adopt various positions. One may enact an ideological amorality, as for years Warhol has done, and in a cynical way dry up the very concept of margin in order to render it anti-heroic and commercial, that is to say, to enact the total and definitive annulment of the concept "avant-garde" in order to turn it into a subculture for the rich. Or, one may move within art with the humanistic - and therefore idealistic - hope that art will bring something good to the world. The latter hypothesis, we know, is a suicidal one because it continues to believe in the separate womb of culture where the petty-bourgeois rarities are formed. At the same time, the former hypothesis, riskier but lucid and indifferent, seems open because in letting itself be maneuvered by the stars of finance, film, fashion, and musical stage, it can reach out for the definitive leveling between industry and art in which both reproduce inexpressive and cold objects and images that are the only experiences common to millions of persons. To redouble industry in order to devour it in a system of its own may seem utopian and unreal, but it also means that the passive becomes active and the artist attempts to put himself in the place of the object.

The artist's identification with an undistinguished and easily recognizable entity (it could he a hook, record, film, photograph, advertisement, etc.) may he considered the norm of the mass-society in which the factitiousness of mass-consumption ion and of the fetishism of the signals dues not-mean losing oneself not- negating oneself, but keeping up with the times. And because the cadence is accelerated, one has to make the signals denser rather than rarer. The repetition carries with it a disturbance of the unique, but it increases its identity with the mass. Now, it is not surprising that contemporary artists identify themselves with everything that the artist of yesterday "lacks," in particular, the circulation of his wares and his signals. Here they are, then, taking into consideration the possibility of a teal diffusion through mechanical and electronic repeaters. with which they might lose themselves in the fields of television and radio. The goal for the artist is to divest himself of whatever is predestined and humiliating in his creativity, and to make of this predestination and humiliation, not a praxis of ruin, but of success.

The first step consists in discovering the threshold for crossing from one establishment to another so as to he able to circulate freely in the diversified fields of both the star establishment and the art establishment. The first breakthrough seems to have occurred in music and in the production of scores and records. Many artists today seem to address themselves to passing from an artisan to a machinelike function in order to translate their "dexterity" into consumption and money and their imagination into a warehouse from which business emerges. Now, there is no richer nor more fashionable field than music - a territory in which the "signed" sign Produces an economic and mythical acme. The idea of taking music-recording technology as a model for our own alteration dates from the beginning of this century when the Futurists and the Dadaists, renouncing using themselves as a unit of measurement, trusted! themselves to radio and the cinema like ecstatic lovers. The process continued up to the seventies* but always within the ambit of the experimental.

Today, instead, the Process seems to flood throughout the music industry itself, where the image of creativity is subservient to the work done by Ralph Records or RCA. In a kingdom of sounds, there once artists occupied a small reservation, art seems to have carved out for itself a domain. This is a proof of power, and for this reason art's intolerableness is today considered to be it uniqueness which can, however, be multiplied into millions of copies of either records or tapes. This attitude, by now common among artists and persons interested in art, is disquieting to those who have a horror of multiplication and reproduction, but it excites instead all those who are interested in the perfect ion of the "transmissions" because the absence of error typical of reproduction in a review or book serves to obliterate the difference between direct experience and indirect information. This coincidence occurs in records and concerts. For a generation educated via cable and satellite, which provide at home all the data and all the patterns, both narrative and cinematic, what counts is reception - because expression transformed into image and sound must result in perfection - since it is perfection that determines attention even more than content. The passion, in fact, turns on the quality of the recording and of the reprinting, and it is on these that the eye and ear express their judgment. All hits of information, insofar as they are expressed, recommend themselves for their reproductive and receptive qualities. What is consumed, sitting in front of 'a television and a movie screen, or walking or roller skating with the earphones of a cassette- recorder, is ever less a statement or a story and ever more an inexpressive and uniform image and sound. One might even say that the real stereotype travels in photographic and musical disguises. Those are the ones that are trustworthy as being objective-because they are controlled technically - more than the accounts of the human eye and ear.

The exasperating minutiae that these new realities form offers great interest today. Compared to the silence and opaqueness of painting and sculpture, music seems sensational-owing to a certain fashionable dazzle which fascinates-because it corresponds to quotidian reality. Each sound is an absolute entity, born out of fixed points, but it renders the world something unheard of. The unusual, which the frame or the pedestal used to send forth, today originates from loudspeakers and the projector. For this reason the greatest measure of the contemporary artist is that of self-expression in order to be a painter, a photographer, a filmmaker, and a musician like Robert Longo and Mayo Thompson, Alan Vega and Laurie Anderson, Jack Goldstein and The Residents. Their needs are relegated, in fact, in accordance with the imprint left on the paper, the film, and the record, on which one is able to incise a perfect sign. In addition, the original matrices shape the world itself, because from them thousands of copies-consequently millions of images and sounds-are derived which circulate everywhere in the eye and ear of all. Now, since artists have always been interested in shaping reality, or at least in influencing it, what better process is there than to reproduce their own ideas in limitless quantities? As may well he seen, after the opening up of the media that has taken plate in the last twenty years, all the artists are now armed with cameras and recorders. To them, to click a shutter or record a tape is a normal process; it serves to tranquilize them, since they are able to take away with them any image or sound whatsoever, on the instant, without designing or composing it. The identification between trace and real world renders the world a box of sounds; therein lies its own existence, the rest does not count. And so it is perfectly logical that artists today react to their own restricted existence, and they start to roam like vagabonds in the space of electronic and filmic images. On this ground, the location is not fixed, as it is in painting and sculpture, but spread out, since the panoply of figures and noises pours out through gigantic sources of emission. It is not surprising, then, that following the historic example of the Velvet Underground, the artists working at the beginning of this decade have broken away from the margination of art and have passed from the "personal show" to the "music show" in nightclubs and on television.

The list of artists or persons coming from the art world who have formed groups is today very long; it goes from Red Crayola (dubbed Art & Language) to the Disband of Martha Wilson, from Cabaret Voltaire to Alan Suicide, front Brian Eno to Glenn Branca, from Rhys Chatham to David Byrne. For these, imagination or the process of conceptualization has made everything useable, to the point where they urge the creation of an indiscriminate catalogue of products. This attitude is premonitory of a change in the artistic establishment as well as in the musical establishment, as if it were aiming at a spectacular tune-up of the avant-garde. It is not by chance that the Talking Heads have put into MUSIC poems by Hugo Ball and that Cabaret Voltaire has used the Sonorous poems of Marinetti, or that Phil Glass "translated" himself in Polyrock.

Besides, music is an industrial sector; it permits expansion toward the audience and the direct verification of its reactions. In contrast to the sepulchral silence of exhibition spaces, the actions induced by music are explosive, almost like an exorcism of a dead painted or sculpted object. Each sound eradicates, in fact, the knowledge of the body, to the point of revitalizing the blind and spent pupil as well as the atrophied arms of the spectator of the show.

Might the mechanism which was formed in these years of musical wandering now be called "inversion,'' which is to say, substitution of one establishment for another? One might say, no; one might, rather, speak of equivalence, due to the fact that industry entered into art, and art, instead of being passively present at its own despoliation, has entered into industry. In addition, if the musician allows himself the luxury of artistry, he does it because art "acts" on the audience, and it (an then be put on the stage. The musical rite is, therefore, complimentary to the artistic sacrifice, except that the artist hides behind the object, does not transcribe himself, and remains separate from the senses of the audience, while the singer and the musician do not. In some way, if artists form bands, from Peter Gordon to Arto Lindsay arid Pere Ubu, it means that art aspires to the destruction of the limits that condition its systems of traditional reception. It attempts to sacrifice itself, sweats and howls, in order to he accepted and adored by thousands of spectators, to whom the ''diversity" of the rite gives pleasure. All forget, in fact, that the aspiration of every artist is to penetrate the castle of society and to be recognized; now, from 1968 to 1977, with the feeling of shame caused by political involvement, this chance was just missed unless they had recourse to the ''tragedy" of "decoration." And yet if it is moralistic to declare oneself rich, as well as poor, today no one wants to oust himself from the world, and artists least of all.

So, now that they no longer seem to have anything to do with politicians, they have been infiltrating the shows, first in performances and in the theater,-now in concerts. Since the show is made to he seen, the jump from visual art does not prove unnatural; in addition, the event occurs for everyone, in a way that replaces the loneliness of art with a mass-participation that is further augmented by the circulation of records. Welcome, then, he the exchanges and collaborations between artists and filmmakers, musicians and photographers, who tiled together at the Mudd Club or the Rocky Lunch in New York in order to set tip gigs with Blondie and Lydia Lunch, Steve Pollack, the Bush Tetras, and DNA. Naturally, debarking in the terra incognita of music is not easy. We understand, then, the trust in chance and improvisation that characterizes the musical products oft he "new wave." The vagabondage of persons educated within the avant-garde of Futurism and Dadaism, of metaphysics and Surrealism, cannot be predirected, but must be found, like a readymade. Many musicians neither know music nor know how to use traditional musical instruments; they often trust themselves to toys and gadgets, which, along with gestures, lights, and filmed hits, become resounding instruments on a par with percussion instruments and the guitar. The horizontal convergence of "diverse' sonorous apparatuses, even if bound together by their "immateriality," does not alter the status of the artist, who, operating in the Minimal and the Conceptual, is accustomed to carry to the extreme any "material" whatsoever that results in the sensitive or the insensitive, expressive or inexpressive, so as to satisfy the spectator and the audience, who today scent more and more interested in sustaining the opinion of de Sade.

NOTE *Germano Celant, The Record As Artwork: From Futurism to Conceptual Art (Fort Worth, TX: The Fort Worth Art Museum, 1977).

reproduced from: http://www.ubu.com/papers/celant_artsound.html

Conceptual Art as a Neurobiologic Praxis and The Neuro-aesthetic Reading Room, Warren Neidich

Introduction

"Conceptual Art as a Neurobiologic Praxis" and the The Neuro-aesthetic Reading room are two projects that were originally separate but now have been joined together. "Conceptual Art as a Neurobiologic Praxis" was an exhibition I curated at the Thread Waxing Space, New York City, in 1999 which attempted to make explicit certain trends and ideas that I considered important parts of the history of Conceptual Art but which had not, up to that moment, been adequately explored. The Neuro-aesthetic Reading Room is still an imaginary project proposal which in many ways builds on the concepts of Conceptual Art as a Neurobiological Praxis. In fact the latter is now incorporated as part of the project. Because both operate somewhere in between art works and curatorial projects they are presented here as one project in the gallery section of the website. The accompanying details of artworks included in the Thread Waxing Exhibition act I hope to highlight the type of strategies and models some artists today are using either consciously or unconsciously to approach ideas of mind and brain. Conceptual Art as a Neurobiologic Praxis

The history of Conceptual Art like all art historical movements is continually under a state of siege as the changing cultural milieu in which it lives mutates the facts of its origins, development and relevance. Conceptual Art like Situationism which preceded it and Minimalism, Pop Art and Op Art which was contemporaneous with it had its own founding artists who in their desire to create an identifiable character or brand unconsciously tried to define and limit the parameters of its meaning, economy and distribution.. This of course is always hopeless, at best creating a discourse at worst creating a dogmatic regime that becomes deterministic and exclusive, and in the end results in its own demise. Such is the history of Conceptual Art which in its "pure" form, according to Lucy Lippard,, lasts only seven years running from 1965-1972. However Conceptual Art is not and was not, in spite of itself, a linear practice and emerges in the context of many streams of art practice, including Letterism and Situationsim, philosophy including Structuralism and Phenomenology, Infomatics like Cybernetics, psychosocial discourses like Psychoanalysis and Marxism and the political activism of the late 1960's. The degree to which each of these contributes to the active image of conceptualism is the result of different networks of relationships that form between them at different moments and create nodal intensities in an open, not closed, autopoetic system of multiple feed forward, feedback, reentrant systems, and temporal synchronicities which are formed as systems of porous information modules linked together by dynamic intermittent temporal synchronicities. I am not here trying to analyze this system of relations into some finite set of determinations but instead to give the reader some idea of the massive complexity of this system and the degree to which organizations of art breathe and live in a system of multiple meanings, realities and definitions which in the end give them very complicated and folded structures which almost defies interpretation and analysis. For it is within this complexity which other forms and other meanings hibernate laying latent, remaining in a state of hypothermia and very slow metabolism, awaiting the proper set of conditions in which to emerge and once again become. We see examples of this all the time as certain artists' work all of a sudden becomes once again important or in the way certain bodies of works, which had gained notoriety in there day, begin to be appreciated and recuperated. This is certainly true of the many careers of Marcel Duchamp but recently we have also witnessed this phenomena in a renewed interest in the work of Robert Smithson, Anthony McCall and Gordon Matta Clark.

Some would argue that an explanation of this phenomena can be found in the way that the social, political, historical, psychological, economic conditions of the late nineties and early 21st century share important qualities with those that defined the late sixties and early seventies such that this recovered work expresses key incites common to both eras. For instance the work of Sol Lewitt very much influenced by infomatics of the sixties develops renewed intensity in the context new media art today. His now famous quote from Artforum Magazine (5:10 Summer 1967) attests to this. "When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art" sounds very much like a quote from Cybernetics by Norbert Weiner.

Others would argue that in fact that these works and the other works that carry for instance, a minimalist codon, were never understood completely and their reappraisal concerns a kind of historicity in which the works that followed have given their primary sources new meanings not originally appreciated, at that time but which emerge within the newly configured cultural context. For instance ideas of time and space have been radically altered since the invention of the Internet and with this new understanding primary works of art that forewarned of this new condition for instance Robert Smithsons "Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space", Arts Magazine (New York) 41, no.1 and John Baldessari, "Painting for Kubler", 1969 have added significance. Time and space is now generally understood as intensive and folded and complex and these mutated conditions lend new levels of understanding to what these artists intuitively were trying to say. Another permutation of this explanation concerns the way a work of art or a movement is never really understood at all and that other meanings emerge that lay sleeping in the interstices of its being. That is to say the emerging contexts reconfigure the artworks themselves so that their determining factors are not what they were understood to be. In fact the founding artists were responding to conditions that would become and had not yet formed and that these artists, as they are simply observers, spectators, are a product of newly formed culturally derived subjectivities, stumbled through their creations without understanding what they were doing but doing so with extreme elegance. Finally another possibility for emerging interest in art of the past is the condition of the observer who interfaces with it. Such is the condition of the mutated observer whose reconfigured neural networks, reset as they have been by mutating temporal and spatial conditions resulting from the cultural incorporation of new media practice at the end of the twentieth century, view and experience the work in quite new and radical ways. Space does not allow me to go to deeply into this explanation and for those interested in a more in depth analysis please see my chapter entitled, "Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain" in the book of the same title.

The above discussion is especially relevant for the history of Conceptual Art. Recently a number of exhibitions have attempted to throw new light on the history of Conceptual Art. Most notably are L'Art Conceptual, une perspective,( Musee de Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris,1990) Reconsidering the object of art, (MOCA LA,1998) and finally Global Conceptualism: Points of Origins, (Queens Museum, New York, 1999). Conceptual Art as a Neuro-biologic Praxis, 1999 is another recent example of this historical reappraisal by also attempting a rereading or expansion of the roots, causes and concerns of conceptualism while at the same time linking it to the history of artistic and technologic apparatuses and processes as they float between the investigation of perception and cognition on the one hand and artistic production on the other.

Jonathan Crary would link the parallel history of technologies of observation in the nineteenth century to the emergence of a new kind of observer. The same could be said of course about the late 20th century. New media according to the likes of Manuel Delanda moves us away from an extensive culture to an intensive one. Sequential, linear, heirarchial forms of information are substituted for by folded, non-linear, multiplicities of meaning. This new intensive culture is expressed in an intensive subjectivity. One only has to glance at a Frank Gehry's Bilboa or the graphics used in Wired Magazine to know how this subjectivity is expressed.. This is another important subtext of Conceptual Art as a Neurobiologic Praxis.

Neuro-aesthetic Reading Room
(Conceptual Art as a Neurobiologic Praxis is reinvigorated in its newer instantiation as part of "Moments of Unease: Conjunctions of Neuro-science and Art in the Twentieth Century.") Before progressing to describe the Neuro-aesthetic reading room a concise definition is in order. Neuro-aesthetics is the study of the development of three streams of knowledge, which are progressing in parallel, but which at times interact together to create new forms of information and images which can be used by the imagination and understanding to create new kinds of thought. These three discourses are the history of techniques as they relate to photography, film and new media, Neuro-science and art. Neuro-aesthetics describes the dance between these three very different methods of investigation that at times exchange partners. It is my contention that research and understanding of the nervous system as it is disseminated through kinds of media forms the basis of new optical and acoustic technologies which extend its abilities, and as a result of the new conditions of visual and auditory culture they produce, artists are affected in ways that stimulate them to make new kinds of images and artworks. In essence, the art works reflect in themselves directly and indirectly the current condition of Neuro-science at a specific moment as it affects ideas of perception and cognition.

1. The Neuro-aesthetic Reading Room is a "trans-disciplinary space" that has three main objectives:

a. To create a transportable library and social space for the creation, production and dissemination of a new kind of trans-disciplinary information based on Neuro-science and art interactions of form and processes. Artist and Neuro-scientist are interested in similar questions like memory, object perception, colour theory, the imagination, creativity and consciousness and the reading room will highlight these interests and how they become connected.

b. To create an exhibition entitled "Moments of Unease: Conjunctions of Neuro-science and Art in the Twentieth Century" that will give the reading room a context. This exhibition traces artists' work beginning with Cezanne, Serault and Duchamp continuing through Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley and Robert Morris and recently manifesting in the work of artists like Carsten Holler, Douglas Gordon and Olifur Eliason.

c. To create a space where random social interactions between artistic and Neuro-scientific professionals can accidentally meet and as a result develop ideas for interdisciplinary interactions in the form of hybridized projects.

The Neuro-aesthetic Reading Room borrows on a long history of artists using transportable artworks sometimes called Parasitic Architecture. Following the example of mobile architectures built by architects like Richard Buckminster Fuller and Archigram contemporary artists have used these kinds of structures to radicalize the work of art by moving out of the picture frame into real space. Rirkrit Tiravanija, Rosemarie Trockel and Jorge Pardo are just some of the artists working in this manner.

In my particular case the art crate becomes an armature through which a telescopic space is reconfigured. The term telescopic space delineates two main considerations of the reading room. First: many walls built into the body of the crate spring out. Secondly, telescopic refers to the relationship between the development of optical apparatti as extensions of the body that define the history of visual technologies and their special relationship to the visual system and the brain. Physically and mechanically this configuration allows for the crate to transform itself into a travelling reading room and social interactive space. Library walls spring out horizontally, a projection screen made of cloth springs out vertically, a sitting room/lounge is built into the inside front wall which is opened on the crates arrival. The library contains book titles concerned with Neuro-aesthetics. The Reading Room will travel globally after its tour of England, and will also be featured on-line at a new web site where web cam transmission will detail day-by-day occurrences of such things as symposia and social interactions as well as accessing a compilation of on-line websites that are related to Neuro-aeshetics that will be listed and made available.

2. Accompanying the reading room and surrounding it will be an exhibition entitled, "Moments of Unease: Conjunctions of Neuro-science and Art in the Twentieth Century." This exhibition traces the affect of knowledge coming out of physiologic psychology, neuro-biology and cognitive neuroscience that implicitly or explicitly affected artist in their art production. This exhibition would not feature real work but instead simply photocopies tacked to the wall. First there was the work of Marcel Duchamp characterized as it was by an interest in the apparatti of photography and cinema on one hand and that of the neurophysiology of the eye and brain on the other. Duchamp's work such as the "Rotoreliefs", "The Stereoptican Cards", "Tu m" and "Temoins oculists" plus his statements concerning anti-retinal art attest to this. The second phase took place around the nineteen sixties. The advent of information technology in relation to feedback and feed forward mechanisms of neural loops as described in Norbert Weiner's book Cybernetics, an interest in the "phenomena-logically" based work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an reawakened interest in the work of Marcel Duchamp and the use of psychotropic drugs led artists like Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, Donald Judd, and Joyce Koslov to make work that explored the intersection of art and mind.

" Conceptual Art as a Neurobiologic Praxis" is a restaging of the original exhibition at the Thread Waxing Space, New York City, 1999, will make up the final historical period of this exhibition. The exhibition included twenty-five artists that would form the basis of works by contemporary artists who have been affected by the advent of the internet, artificial intelligence, network theory, binding, neural networks, and intelligent media. Participating artists include: Ricci Albenda, Uta Barth, Sam Durant, Eric Duyckaerts, Spencer Finch, Carl Fudge, Rainer Ganahl, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Grennan and Sperandio, Jonathan Horowitz, Beom Kim, Anne Kugler, Ann Lislegaard, T. Kelly Mason, Jack Pierson, Jason Rhoades, Mathew Ritchie, Andrea Robbins, Thomas Ruff and Charlene Von Heyl

The exhibition was divided into three parts of which artists' work illustrated. The Retinal-Cortical Axis, as the name implies, looked at the kind of visual processing occurring in the initial phases of perception where the image of the world is transformed into electric signals. The retinal-cortical axis concerns the transfer of these electrical signals from the initial events occurring in the retina at the level of the photoreceptors to those taking place at the optic chiasm, lateral geniculate nucleus, optic radiation and finally the visual cortex. Artists in this part of the show explored through their artistic practices the various aesthetic possibilities created by the anatomical and physiological conditions present in these structures like stereopsis (Grennan and Sperandio ,Ruff), gaze (Barth), visual field (Finch, Kim), and anatomy( Albenda,Von Heyl). The second part titled The Word-Image Dialectic explored the relation between text and image. Neurobiologically this work looked at the relation between the visual cortex and those areas of the brain involved in the reception and production of language like the Arcuate Nucleus, Temporal Lobe, Wernicke's and Brocas area were explored. Works dealing with images and text were an important component of conceptualist practice in the 1960's and artists are still involved in issues surrounding language today except that its referents have expanded beyond an analysis of sign and signifier into issues of mapping and cultural discourse. Artists work in this domain looked at such things as language acquisition (Robbins ,Ganahl, Horowitz), neologisms (Pierson), dyslexia( Albenda, Durant) and symbolic meaning ( Durant ,Robbins). Finally Global Chaosmosis explored how the whole brain operated. This term was derived from two sources. First Gilles Deluze's notion of chaosmosis and the rhizome and secondly from global mapping as it is referred to by Gerald Edelman and Pierre Changeux in their descriptions of the developing brain sculpted by experience. Global Mapping defines the way the disparate parts of the brain, which are working in parallel on certain cognitive tasks, are synchronized together in order that all their outputs can be shared as a unity. The underlying thematic construct here concerned the way that our cultural conditions had recently undergone a radical shift in which hierarchial, sequential, analogue, arborealike had become instead intensive, folded, complex, digital and rhizomatic and as a consequence reconfigured the neural networks of our brains into what I was referring to as an Intensive Brain. Artist here explored the nature of brain waves (Finch), cerebral lateralization (Duyckaerts) mapping (T. Kelly Mason and Ritchie), hypnosis (Lislegaard), dreaming and myth, (Rhoades and Kugler) thinking, (Gillick), artificial intelligence (Fudge) and consciousness ( Gillick, Rhoades, Ritchie and Duyckaerts, Gordon) in relation to the above mentioned changing cultural conditions.

One question that comes up quite frequently is whether or not the artists chosen for this show were intentionally making work about the brain or were intentionally utilizing neuro cognitive strategies to make their work. The answer to this question is complex. In certain situations like Ricci Albenda, Charlene Von Heyl, Mathew Ritchie, Douglas Gordon, Eric Duyckaerts and Spencer Finch the answer is definitely yes. In other cases the similarities of what is being explored by neuroscience and that of art were so close that an investigation of one automatically involves the other. In other words the synchronicity between the two fields contextualized the work of art with out the artists awareness or intent. That is true for Uta Barth, Grennan and Sperandio, Rainer Ganahl, Carl Fudge and Thomas Ruff. In the case of the others it came down to a curatorial perogative based on a my special knowledge of the field of neuroscience and cultural studies. As a result I was able to make connections and draw links between what I saw as essential components of the works and the kinds of issues that in my mind they referred to. The intentionality of the artist is not always a determining factor because in some cases the works are so ripe with meaning and causality that any one reading would be simple minded. The work of art also mutates in the sea of relations that enfold it and as those conditions change so does it. Liam Gillickís work is a case in point. Yes it has to do with thinking but in this show I was more interested in its concerns with social relations and the way that these relations became recontextualized in the context of discussions of the brain and consciousness.

3. The third component of the reading room is its "inter-activation quality". This is a term to describe a kind of plug-in that helps the user/participant navigate the space in a creative and amusing way. When the user enters the space he or she signs in on a computer interface set up in the middle of the room and is assigned a number that relates to a tiny homing device that the individual is asked to attach to himself or herself. This homing device will help the computer record that individuals route through the reading room and will also collate that route in relation to other routes by other individuals doing the same thing. In the reading room their exists a compartment outlined in red, called the "red zone", that contains one book from each of the ten subjects of neuro-aesthetics for instance philosophy of mind, visual culture, neuroscience. Each of these books was chosen by the artist as key references of neuro-aesthetics and is electronically connected to other volumes of like subject matter distributed locally by topic and diffusely throughout the reading room. So for instance Neurophiloshy by Patricia Churchland would obviously connect to books in the section on philosophy but might also be connected to books in the neuroscience or psychology section. Each book therefore has a multiplicity of connections that were formulated by the artist and in a way represents the workings of his mind. When the viewer or user takes one of the books from the red zone, this by the way is optional as the reading room can be freely accessed, it sends out a radio signal to a set of prescribed books with which it has an allegiance and causes a red light to flash above its placement in the shelf. One book may cause many such signals simultaneously and the user then chooses which related book to choose from. It creates another meta-category of how books are related to each other beyond subject matter. This book is hooked to the same referential network so that when it is chosen it to sends out a radio signal to related books one of which is always contained in the red zone. Consequently the user is led around the reading room according to his or her choices and selections. When finished the user receives a printout of their individual journey and the books they chose. It is like a poster and on the bottom sheet is written, Neuro-aesthetic Reading Room, the date and time. The purpose of this is to increase the desire of each user to participate with the piece. Over the course of the exhibition the computer will record many such journeys and an algorhythm will combine these separate trips to see if any patterns emerge. As the reading room travels worldwide it might be interesting to view cross cultural differences as they emerge.

Future considerations:
I am currently settled down in London where I am embarking on a new project that has its roots in my project at Thread Waxing Space called The Department of Neuro-aesthetics. An application to first create a masters in neuro-aesthetics is already been filed and students finishing the program will receive a masters in visual arts through the department of visual arts. The top floor of 43 Lewisham across from the college has already been designated as the site for the Department of Neuro-aesthetics.

above copied from: http://www.artbrain.org/gallery3/c_text.html