Receiver article now online
January 17th, 2004 § Leave a Comment
The essay I recently posted on text messaging, poetry and touch is now online at Vodafone’s RECEIVER on-line journal. There’s some other interesting texts by far better writers, including Timothy Druckrey, David Toop and Matt Adams from Blast Theory. Best of all is Tom Charity’s essay on how mobile phones have been represented in films, from Wall Street to Minority Report. He makes a good point about sci-fi’s wrong futurism at the start:
“We didn’t see it coming. In all the many tens of hundreds of science fiction movies which unspooled over the twentieth century – from “Metropolis” to “Star Wars”, “Blade Runner” to “The Time Machine” – you won’t find one which envisages a general populace babbling to itself, as if in the throes of some giant collective nervous breakdown. Who could have imagined even 15 years ago, that public space – the bus, the train, the street – would be overrun? That the social sphere, which for centuries dictated certain civil proprieties (decorum, discretion and deferment), should fold in on itself almost overnight, leaving only solipsism rampant?”
RIP Billy Kluver
January 15th, 2004 § 1 Comment
Billy Kluver, pioneering artist/engineer at Bell Labs and founder of Experiments in Art & Technology, died last Sunday at his home in New Jersey. Billy could rightly be called the godfather of contemporary media art. After training as an electrical engineer in Sweden, started working with artists, initially with Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, before becoming staff scientist at Bell Labs in 1958.
It was at Bell Labs that he combined his interests in Art, Film and Technology, fostering collaborations between the engineers at Bell and artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, John Cage and Frank Stella. These collaborations led to Kluver staging ‘Nine Evenings’, a series of interactive performances held in New York in 1966. Nine Evenings presented artists and engineers as equal partners, an attitude that characterised the work of EAT for the next 40 years.
Billy Kluver was invited over to Leeds in 2002 for the Evolution festival, and I had the great pleasure of chairing some of his sessions and spending a few days escorting him around the city. He was already quite frail, but his informal presentation of his projects – peppered with anecdotes about working with Warhol, Johns, Cage and other art-world luminaries – enraptured a packed audience, most of whom wouldn’t have been born when he was starting his pioneering career in New York.
In conversation over those few days, he seemed quite pessimistic about the historical significance of the work he’d done, and for the future of media art. He was quite critical of contemporary computer technology, feeling that it divorced artists from a real understanding of what technology actually contributes to an artwork. His collaborations were always informed by a real sense of the material logic of technology – how the bits and atoms worked together to create something sublime. I think he despaired of artists using off-the-shelf packages that emulate some of the ground-breaking combinations of media that he pioneered in the 60′s, without giving the artist an insight into what those combinations actually mean.
His pessimism about his historical significance was misplaced, however. He was received rapturously at the Evolution festival in Leeds, and introduced recently remastered documentary films of the ‘Nine Evenings’ performances, as well as a touring exhibition on the history of EAT. Hopefully this documentation will now be distributed more widely, and a new generation of media artists can learn from his work.
Most of all, I remember Billy for having a very European dry wit. He scarcastically cut through some of the more florid praise heaped upon him at the festival, and spent the evenings entertaining us over dinner with gossip and anecdotes about the famous artists he had worked with. As I walked him back to his hotel one night, he observed the traditional northern english female dress code (very short skirts, barely-there tops, even in the bitter cold and driving rain), and demanded “Take me where those girls are going!” The idea of taking Billy to one of Leeds’ less salubrious night clubs was very appealing, but his wife Julie managed to convince him otherwise. He probably would have spent the evening investigating the lighting rigs in any case, saying that he did far more spectacular stuff in the 60′s…
As media art grows up and enters the mainstream, and the technical innovations of previous generations become hidden under slick interfaces, it becomes more and more important that we recognise and learn from the pioneering work of people like Billy Kluver. Technological culture suffers from a fetishisation of the new, erasing recent history as its welcomes new innovation.
But the history of the last 30-40 years that Billy represented gives us a new way of looking at contemporary practise, a perspective that helps us realise that the new isn’t so new, and that people were asking the same questions about culture in the 60′s as we are now. It was this perspective that Billy urged the audience in Leeds to maintain, and his legacy of cultural innovation will now stand as a milestone in art and technology history, as well as an endless mine of inspiration for future artists.
Billy Kluver was a hero to a lot of people I knew, especially William Rose and Dennis Hopkins, whose visits to New York to meet Billy prior to inviting him to Leeds were almost an act of pilgrimage. I’m incredibly indebited to Dennis and William for the chance to meet a personal hero, and hope that their work will continue to celebrate Billy’s work, and give many other people the chance to be inspired by him.
Three Things
January 8th, 2004 § Leave a Comment
I’m in the middle of writing an essay that I should have finished months ago, so updates on this site are going to be rare for a while. In the interim, here’s three things that have caught my eye lately:
02 ESCAPE PODS
02 have a service enabling people to set up their own text services over SMS. You can create a POD online with info, announcement or voting functionality, and then invite people to join. It seems to have been running for a while, as one of the listed pods is about who will win last summer’s Big Brother. Very interesting service, and amusing to see the pods already created – jokes, gossip and organising beer nights seem to the be the most popular uses, but its impossible to tell if these have been set up by users or planted by 02. It would be very handy if you were organising a football club or other regular social gathering, though. Swiss ‘e-fashion’ company SKIM used to provide a similar service, and I used their version for the first SMS project I curated in 2000. Blimey – I’ve just been to the SKIM site, and was amazed to find they still exist, although they seem to be less interested in clothes and more in networking/communications.
4LUV
4Luv is a project by Siobhan Hapaska and Fiddian Warman (from SODA). Taking a cue from lovers carving their names in trees, 4Luv consists of SMS pagers built into boxes and mounted on trees in Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park. You can text messages to the trees and see them displayed there, although the screen looks a bit small in the photo. Its a bit like the public caches idea that I wrote about a while ago, but much better realised for basing itself on an already existing vernacular writing (or carving) activity. No info about when the work was installed, or if its currently working, though. Anybody see the work in action?
SOCIAL CIRCLES
Finally, Marcos Weskamp has just launched Social Circles, a flash app that maps in real time the activity on a number of mailing lists, including Rhizome and Nettime. He says it’s an attempt to help new members of the list identify the social factors – who posts the most, and who gets the most responses to the posts they send to the list. It seems to be pretty early stages at the moment, as some of the visualisations are pretty simple for a well established and complex list like Nettime.
A nice experiment, though, which will no doubt get hijacked by the those people who periodically infest lists like Rhizome as some kind of email performance art-work, spamming loads of rubbish in the name of art. I’m not on most of these lists these days, but it was interesting to look at the social circles diagrams and recognise some names that were active when I was on the lists a few years ago. I also checked the web archives of the EMPYRE list recently, as they are having a very interesting discussion with Noah Wardrup-Fruin and Nick Montfort about historicizing new media art. There were a number of familiar names from Rhizome and other media art lists, like Brett Staulbaum, Patrick Lichty and Simon Biggs. I wonder where they find the time to participate in so many communities…
Sports star goes interweb!
January 5th, 2004 § 11 Comments
For reasons that are far too boring to go into here, I am a huge baseball fan despite being born in the UK, and follow the Boston Red Sox, the natural US partner to my similarly tragically underperforming football team, Spurs. So inevitably, this article in MIT’s Technology Review caught my eye.
It seems that Curt Schilling, the Sox’s new starting pitcher, is a great fan of chatrooms and forums, regularly contributing to discussions on boards like Sons of Sam Horn. The RedSox owners have also been posting news and opinion on the boards, leaving ESPN and other news outlets in the dark. This enlightened approach to connecting with their audiences has pissed off the broadcasters, as Schilling found out:
Schilling was involved in a chat session when he heard that the hosts of “The Big O“ sports talk show on WEEI were bad mouthing him for privileging the internet over broadcast media. He picked up the phone and called in to fire back. Beginning by saying that he felt that he could get his message out to his supporters most effectively through two channels — the internet and radio — he proceeded to discuss the gatekeeping function of traditional media and the ways they selectively filtered out what he was trying to say. He talked about the power of digital media to cut across hierarchies and to include the public more fully in the process. He talked about the challenges of identity theft online and the steps he’s taken to make sure his fans know it’s really him when he posts things. And he told the reporters that it was their job to track down the news, not his job to hand it to them. “Maybe this is a medium you’re going to have to start following if you want to get the story,“ he said.
Its fantastic that a sport star – not normally respected for their intelligence – should be clued-in to the radical nature of digital media, let along passionate enough to defend it in public and *also* raise some cogent points about idendity theft in the bargain. All we need is a Howard Dean style campaign, and we can make him MVP before the new season even kicks off. Go Schilling! Go Sox! Go Interweb!
