ART/FIST 240 Bringing Technology to the People

First, and most important it was necessary for computers to have a language beyond mathematics. The vision of Grace Hopper made it possible to communicate with computers using English. At Remington Rand her idea was not accepted for 3 years. In the meantime, she published her first paper on the subject, compilers, in 1952. "I decided data processors ought to be able to write their programs in English, and the computers would translate them into machine code. That was the beginning of COBOL, a computer language for data processors."

Queen of Code doc; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNvS0V7Tr4o

 

Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013), whose vision of collaboration using computer technology to help solve the urgent and complex problems of all of humanity, died on July 2, 2013. His comrades believed that his ideas were never fully realized due to his ideals and generosity of spirit. For example, he resisted patenting the "mouse" he'd invented and it eventually fell into the public domain. The robotic rigidity of institutions is also to blame -- most powerful technology companies in American relegated him to R&D. Ted Nelson, professor and inventor of the first hypertext project, delivered Engelbart's eulogy on December 9, 2013. In his tearful delivery, he said the "...real ashes to be mourned are the ashes of Doug’s great dreams and vision, that we dance around in the costume party of fonts that swept aside his ideas of structure and collaboration...Perhaps his notion of accelerating collaboration and cooperation was a pipe dream in this dirty world of organizational politics, jockeying and backstabbing and euphemizing evil." Engelbart articulated his ideas for collaboration publicly in what is known as The Mother of all Demos delivered on December 9, 1968, over a half a century ago. Some of what he described is still in the process of being realized in commercial forms such as Skype, Google Docs, and more.

 

Ted Nelson inserts a bit of attitude into this history. He detests the evils of limitations and compromise. He questions corporate control. His technical ideas may have not have had as widespread impact as others here, but his spirit, and that of his ilk, is what helped made computing a tool available to most rather than a select few.

 

Steve Wozniak believed that computers could be beautiful machines. Not just utilitarian devices with some industrial design on the outside, but beautiful from the inside out. Art objects. The idea was radical, and has changed our lives. We are now willfully living with computing technology all of the time.

ART/FIST 340/540 New Media; Carved in Stone (?)

 COUNTERFEIT;

The Parthenon in Nashville's Centennial Park is a full-scale copy of the original Parthenon in Athens. It was originally stucco and was later rebuilt in concrete.


PRODUCTION;

Erik Sommer’s sculpture/installation “Volvo 240”: a real Volvo, coated completely in concrete.

SIMULATION; 

 The Stucco Angel 

 The Wisconsin Concrete Park is an outdoor museum with 237 embellished concrete and mixed media sculptures built between 1948 and 1964 by Fred Smith.

 

ART/FIST 340/540 New Media; Lance Loud

 An American Family was a groundbreaking documentary and is considered the first "reality" series on American television. Lance Loud, the eldest son of the family, emerged as the star of the show and was the first openly gay person to appear on television. You can watch episode excerpts here;
https://www.thirteen.org/american-family/
Years later, when Lance Loud was diagnosed with AIDS and Hepatitis C, he asked An American Family filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond to make a follow-up film that would take him through sickness and death. Lance Loud! A Death In An American Family becomes the final episode. Here is the absolutely heart-wrenching last scene;

"SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW" sung by Rufus Wainright.

Rufus is accompanied by his mother, Kate McGarrigle. 

From the documentary "Lance Loud! A Death In An American Family." 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F33MUnKpt9M&t=227s 

ART/FIST 340/540 New Media; Fordism and Art, the Hysteria of Production

Fordism is a term widely used to describe the system of standardized mass production that was pioneered in the early 20th century by the Ford Motor Company, and a term used to describe the basis of modern economic and social systems in industrialized mass production and mass consumption.

This video tells how Henry Ford made affordable automobiles possible. Others look at the darker side of his vision.

Jeff Koons' artwork is the the most expensive in the marketplace for a living artist. Although critics are divided on the merits of his work, its presence in commerce is substantial.

Nostalgia, Sickness or Salvation?

 There wasn't space in Modernism for nostalgia...as culture sprang forward any form of sentimentality needed to be cast aside. Post-modernists and post-structuralists had to deal with nostalgia anew, without much consensus on where it fit into the picture.

(nostalgia) by Hollis Frampton (1936-1984)

DVD program notes:

“What does it mean? I am uncertain but perfectly willing to offer a plausible explanation,” intones the narrator in (nostalgia) by Hollis Frampton (1936-1984). Film images, while capturing moments in time, also create illusions that outlast what they record. Frampton explores the disjuncture of image and memory in (nostalgia), deadpan retelling of his transformation from New York art photographer to filmmaker.

A voracious reader, the Ohio-born Frampton won a scholarship to the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he studied extensively, but he did not bother to graduate. He followed the same path at Western Reserve University before moving to Washington, D.C., to visit poet Ezra Pound, then institutionalized at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Poetry, Frampton decided, was not his vocation, and he went to New York and took up photography. Rooming briefly with his Andover classmates, artists Carl Andre and Frank Stella, he produced the wry photographic series The Secret World of Frank Stella (1958-1962) and photographed the art world, supporting himself by doing odd jobs. Experiments with filmmaking led to “Zorns Lemma” (1970), the first avant-garde feature screened at the New York Film Festival.

Made the next year, (nostalgia) lays old memories to rest with a new twist. The film is structured around a sequence of 13 photographs from Frampton’s days documenting the art scene. Each photo is presented and burned to ash as the narrator describes a different image. As the film unfolds, we realize that the narration anticipates what will appear in the next photo. The distance between word and image is jarring, as is the camera’s painstaking, almost loving, documentation of the immolation of the photographer’s work. One by one, still images of Stella, Larry Poons, James Rosenquist, and Frampton himself meet the moving flame.

The narrative game keeps viewers on their toes and divides attention between sight and sound, past and present. The voice often expresses regret or longing. “I despised this photograph for several years. But I could never bring myself to destroy a negative so incriminating,” confesses Frampton’s narrator, Canadian filmmaker and multimedia artist Michael Snow. Snow’s flat delivery fuels the understated wit but also intensifies the distancing and adds another layer of complication, especially when he describes a portrait of his studio taken by Frampton.

Nostalgia, derived from the Greek, was defined by Frampton as “the wounds of returning.” As the narrator talks about each image, his stories bring to light the inadequacies of the filmmaker’s former self and the electric burner consumes the evidence of the previously described photograph. But like a phoenix, a new beginning emerges from the ashes. As Frampton said to Scott MacDonald about the images: “You see, that are not destroyed; they can be resurrected by rewinding the film.”

More information:
Rachel Moore’s book-length essay (nostalgia) (Afterall Books, 2006) features an illustrated transcription of the narration. Frampton is interviewed in A Critical Cinema, by Scott MacDonald (University of California Press, 1988), and his writings are compiled in Circles of Confusion (Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983). Prints of Frampton’s films are available from the Museum of Modern Art.

https://www.hipandtrippy.com/2012/11/hollis-framptons-nostalgia-1971-a-riddle-in-temporality/

And also, an interesting response to Baudrillard's take on nostalgia:

https://uclpimedia.com/online/nostalgia-as-disease-can-we-take-any-hope-from-our-sentimentality

Phases of the Image

 

It might be interesting to think about images in more straightforward terms:

-Suggesting reality (reflecting everyday)

-Distorting reality (idealizing)

-Only hinting at a possible reality (iconicism, mythical)

-Transforming our sense of reality by not relating to anything we consider real.

Or, relating to a reality that is understood as fantasy.

ART/FIST 340/540 Introduction to Baudrillard's Simulations

The idea of the replica can be seen in our earliest cultural artifacts. But when did the simulation become our only reality, when did the real cease to exist? When did we begin to live entirely in simulation? Some see the fictions of Borges an important cultural moment.

 This short piece was written in 1946, but the theme emerged in Borges writings in the 1930s. Then in 1955 we have Disneyland, an actual place based on fiction. (hyperreality)

Baudrillard references quite a bit of then-recent phenomena, including Disneyland, the Louds, and Watergate, but Disneyland may be the most profound example in the book. I've never been there, but have had many friends with children try to explain how you are completely overwhelmed with stimulus there, but still the place feels "empty" "soul-less" "surreal" etc. 

For a theorist to be able to unwrap how hollow nostalgia can culturally exist as our new hyperreal normal is a monumental act.

Even though this book was translated to English in 1983, the ideas contained in it are still being sorted through to this day. This year's Whitney Biennial—"the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States" has the title "Even Better Than the Real Thing, acknowledg(ing) that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is complicating our understanding of what is real."

Three Parameters of Installation Art

 Anne Ring Petersen, Installation Art, pg. 41-45 

 

Activating Space and Context

•       Elements in interplay with space, creating a heightened sense of the space

•       Context: Institutional or makeshift; confrontational, neutral, or unifying

 

 

 

 

 

Stretching the work in time

•       Instantaneous viewing vs. moving through

 

 

Phenomenological Focus

•       No separation of space

•       Viewer’s body is within the art

•       Experience may be familiar, but altered to a subtle or profound degree

 

 

Beyond space

•       The installation as set, activating activity

•       Time and movement become cinematic, dreamlike in character

 

Awareness is altered, collaborative participation happens intuitively

 

. 41-45

Claire Bishop's Book 'Installation Art' Can Provide Us with Strategies for Installation Making

 In the book Installation Art by Claire Bishop, the work featured therein is divided into four categories. As makers of installations these can become specific strategies to help us understand how our viewer may interact with the work and help us to craft an installation that effectively conveys meaning. The text that follows is based on my interpretation the book.

Dreamscapes

The dream may be psychological, in the Freudian sense, using metaphors and symbolism to evoke elusive content. 

George Segal Couple in Open Doorway 1977

 

Mystic spirituality can function in a similar manner. A bit of both may be found in the work of Paul Thek, highly influenced by his Catholic upbringing;

 

 

 

 

Heightened Perception

Minimalism escaped from expressionist dogma with pure formalism. It only asks...'what am I seeing?'

Robert Morris, installation in the Green Gallery, New York, 1964

 

A counter 'anti-minimalist' movement added content to the language of minimalism;

Here a simple gesture is accompanied by a message, often disruptive.

Mimetic Engulfment

Here you are absorbed, or reflected into, the environment. In Larry Bell's works viewer's reflections can be absorbed into the piece.

Larry Bell. Photo: World Red Eye.

Or in the case of Yayoi Kusama's chamber rooms the viewer's multiple reflections combine with the illusion of infinite space.

 

Activated Spectatorship

 These works provoke actions from the viewer. They usually have political leanings, sometimes governmental and sometimes personal. Joseph Beuys is a seminal example.

Not only was Beuys an artist but also active in government as a founder or co-founder of the German Student Party (1967), Organization for Direct Democracy Through Referendum (1971), Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (1974), and German Green Party Die Grünen (1980).  

Rirkrit Tiravanija's installations often have had political content, but he wants you to be physically nurished as well.

This exhibition at the Hirshhorn includes a communal dining space in which visitors were served curry and invited to share a meal together. The installation included a large-scale mural, drawn on the walls over the course of the exhibition, which referenced protests against Thai government policies.