nam june paik

Under normal circumstances, technology does not age gracefuly. With Nam June Paik's death we'll see a wave of retrospectives featuring his work and hear of his many predictions about the future of technology and communication practices. We'll also see a few momentary but brilliant instances of how an artist can intervene and change how we think about the inanimate technological objects on which we now depend. On one level Paik's work reads like that of a dendrochronologist distracted by television, carefully measuring its impact on modern culture. But his most illuminating moments come when he does the equivalent of carving into a tree instead of examining and measuring it.

TV magnet makes the message the medium, or the medium the message, or the distortion of the medium the message of distortion. The simple but utterly imaginative act of placing a magnet on a cathode ray tv set overturns the traditional broadcast model of one-way communication. The piece alludes to the principles behind Duchamp's assisted readymades but while Duchamp rejected what he called "retinal art," Paik, I can only imagine, is mesmerized by the look of the reconfigured TV signal and wants to mesmerize his viewers, too. However, by making the piece interactive (originally viewers could move the magnet around on to change the signal themselves) Paik was also able to make his critical point about media's one-way nature at that point in time.


The critical aspect of his work was even more evident in another landmark piece, TV Buddha. Here Paik demonstrates how TV mediates experiences, even mediates an individual's perception of him or her self. This mediation via technology simultaneously enables a viewer to participate in a remote experience and, in a certain way, commodifies the remote experience itself. The mediated image is seductive, sometimes even more so than the original event it portrays. Television can frame experiences in a way that magnifies their significance. But it can also devalue its significance. With this power Paik predicts an age in which nothing remains sacred and nothing unexploitable. The advant and success of reality TV has only reinforced this.

Much of Paik's later work became bogged down with a stifling aesthetic as he continued to reflect on the effects of communication technology. Despite his early success with visually streamlined conceptually based pieces he came to rely on recycling a strange AbEx/primitive/pop hybrid aesthetic that was literal in a lazy way. Perhaps all this was the result of some outsourcing problems.

Char Davies and VR

In "Osmoses" Char Davies attempted to create a virtual environment that 'immersants' could navigate with their breath and balance. The unique and groundbreaking aspect of this work was the interface that allowed the immersant to navigate the VR space via natural body activities. In class we discussed some of the aesthetic problems with the piece like the naturalistic imagery and how limited the visual scope of the virtual environment was. I also had a problem with how directed the experience was for an immersant given that Davies intended for the experience to "evoke rather than illustrate." This phrase seems to suggest that an immersant may come away from the event with an unpredictable response evoked by the experience in relation to the person's state of mind. The reactions to this piece seemed very predictable though, consistently 'evoking' something similar to a meditative state. While this may not be illustrative, the piece certainly seems designed to 'evoke' a very particular type of reflection and state of mind.

But to move beyond this specific criticism, one of the interesting things about VR environments like this is how, when done well, they transform space from a physical property to a mental construct. It raises issues about how we experience space in the first place: is it an inherently physical space? is it more of a mental experience? is one type of space more 'real' than another? and if not, is there anything 'virtual' about virtual reality?

In conjunction with telepresence, virtual reality may as well be reality if you believe that our experience of space is primarily mental. There are of course restrictions to this view like the fact that virtual nutrients can't sustain a living organism....yet. To what extent can mere belief in the reality of something determine one's physical experience? Can one be satisfied sitting in a virtual chair when it doesn't exist in real space? Are there points at which either mental or physical 'reality' would exert itself to the exclusion of the other? And can someone begin to defy or manipulate the laws governing how space is navigated in either environtment based on experiences in both? The premise of VR leads to this type of basic metaphysical inquiry. I'd like to see Davies and other artists working with VR make work that addresses these questions unique to the medium rather than 'evoking' particular feelings that could be had in one's living room.

On "Telepresence Art" by Kac

Telepresence art is based on the "the integration of telecommunications, robotics, new kinds of human-machine interface, and computers" and is specifically designed to enable new forms of communication or interactivity between people (or people and machines) using technological media. The essay opens with a series of Kosuth quotes stressing the importance of artistic innovation in terms of maintaining cultural relevance. Kosuth believes that in the post-Duchamp age the conception of art must be expanded by questioning its nature and not just accepting the conventional language set by precedents. Today value in art can only be measured in terms of innovation.

As for definitions: "cyberspace" is an artificial space where a properly equipped human can interact in a digital environment with other people or the environment itself. "Virtual reality" is a more encompassing space where virtual and real space converge and affect each other. "Telepresence" involves a person remotely controlling a machine or robot. While there are a number of practical applications of this set of technologies labeled telepresence, Koc is interested in using it in an art context to create "the integration of telecommunications, robotics, new kinds of human-machine interface, and computers." He wants to subvert the traditional unidirectional mode of communication while enabling people to experience the world differently by designing a new interface through which we can confront it.

Baudillard claims that mass media does not provide an environment for communication because it does not provide a "reciprocal space" for the person being communicated to; in other words, that person can't talk back or participate in any sort of significant or meaningful way. This deficency can only be overcome by abandoning the reigning communications paradigm and generating new modes of interactivity that enables two-way responses (or true responsibility). Telepresence provides an individual with the power of true tele-vision, the "ability to decide what and when he or she wants to see."

Another aspect of telepresence aside from space is time. Technology affords us the capability of real-time interactions through remote connections. In some ways this is a more direct experience than time in our traditional physical space because we have to overcome the boundaries of space in order to interact. With communications technology, space can be overcome with the touch of a button. Space is overcome to a greater extent based on what Virillo considers the displacement of space by speed, particularly the speed by which images are communicated now. The images we recieve, he argues, provide us with the material to construct a version of reality that is in many ways more influential than our everyday experience in real space.

Telepresence in art functions differently than it would in industry, or as a practical means in our everyday life. Koc believes that its use as an art medium addresses the complexity of our modes of precieving in our technological world: our dependence on video and digital cameras, their images, and the fiber optic cables or satellites required to transmit their information. Telepresence art should reflect the promise and problems of this new technology as it's being incorporated into our lives at a more and more rapid rate. Koc refers to Merleau-Ponty saying that our eyes are more than receptors, and we develop vision by exercising them. Koc seems to believe that this represents the mission of telepresence art: to serve as a means for improving our vision using the predominant media that mediates our perception of the world.

first post while watching leno

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