Six frantic men and a handful of visitors zigzagged their way through the lobby last Wednesday, preparing for the next day’s Arts and Technology Symposium. In the center sat a static box of half-empty Munchkins on a bench, the only thing not toyed with or repositioned, and a lonely reminder that some things don’t change. Maybe technology is upending our perception of art, of narrative, of beauty, of communication, but a house-shaped cardboard pink and orange container will always contain what we expect it to: chocolate glazed. Powdered sugar. Coconut. Jelly. The basic breakfast pleasure for a working crew.
The installations, performances, panels and lectures all seemed to focus on these questions: how much do we control technology, how much does it function independently, and how much does it control us? University of Wisconsin professor Dean Balladez explained in his talk “Embodiment and Mass Communication” that the Internet has created a global social commons. On social networking sites we construct new disembodied identities, or avatars, that represent us albeit disassociated with the physical space we embody. Is it possible to uphold these identities in cyberspace, textville, and real life? Is copresence between virtual and physical spheres weakening or strengthening our abilities? He concluded by asking yet another unanswerable question: whether and when the two will merge. “Will online avatars make it into our offline world?” Will there come a time when we can morph our identities in real space and real time?”
On Friday night, David Bithell and Ali Momenti performed “Paraguay,” an interactive table-top performance loosely controlled by the artists and amplified by technology. Visually, they use lights and a video camera to project the miniaturized stage behind them. Audibly, they wired the stage’s props, crude wooden and iron cutouts of trees, people, and shapes, with digital sensors to give them “pseudohuman” intelligence to produce their own arrhythmic beats. They manipulate this set in their performances to explore what Bithell called the “cognitive dissonance caused by the human relationship to technology”
The work evokes but doesn’t direct a narrative. It plays with how much the audience acknowledges the artists as puppetmasters versus how much it forgets them in preference to the puppets. Momenti called it “analog madness” – experimenting with physical technology – amplifying sounds, gadgets that can play controlled, sophisticated things on their own.
In the lobby, Zack Settel and Mike Wozniewski sat surrounded by laptops and headphones to explain “Audio Graffiti”, a virtual space installation that explored the role of sound in a three dimensional space. They virtually overtook the south wall of the Cummings lobby as their “sound wall” for the weekend, on which viewers could use a microphone-headphone set to stick sounds. Their project, much less abstract, works like this: a viewer puts on headphones, and the closer he stands to the wall, the more prominently he intersects with an individual sound. As he walks back, he can hear the big picture, a muddle of different tags that are locked into a consistent rhythm. Through the course of the weekend, the sounds consisted of everything from a student whispering, “I’m behind the wall” to ringing bells to clapping drumsticks.
The artists ideally want to bring this idea into an urban landscape, allowing people to tag their city using an iPhone application. Walls, tourist attractions and street signs could be tagged with any sound, from spoken reviews to guitar riffs. Settel and Wozniewski are in effect playing with the human response to the intangible sphere of pure audio, of hearing what you can’t see. This work felt most obviously progressive and useful.
Jamie Jewett, Luke Dubois, and Tim Cryan created a multimedia piece called Persistence of Vision, a three-way collaboration between light, media and dance aimed to invert the idea of blinking. The piece encouraged viewers to perceive the blink not as moment you lose, but instead as a moment that provokes action. Every momentary action in the piece was based on the blink of a videotaped woman projected above the audience. Within these blinks, dancers moved under infrared motion tracking devices that followed their shapes on that same screen, the eyeball itself projected onto the floor and occasionally angled up to the audience on a giant circular screen. The whole piece moves based on the arrhythmic structure of this human action, a paradoxically more organic rhythm than any steady beat. It’s meant to alter our perception of routine and structure by erratically exerting energy in movement, lighting, sound and projections to shock us out of passively watching.
Overall, my impression was this: a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The time, grant money and meticulous concentration these artists spend on the minutiae of their work seem, at best, self-indulgent. In conversations with students, artists overcomplicated their sentences to explain straightforward ideas, the work constantly “evoking” and not portraying, and their main point purposefully ambiguous.
But those small deliberations are working toward something bigger, potentially game changing ideas that could advance the global use of both art and technology. These artists are consciously progressing how we relate to our surroundings and how media literate generations will bring together fields of thought.
It was interdisciplinary work for an increasingly interdisciplinary world.
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This weekend, the Ammerman Center at Connecticut College hosted its twelfth Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology. The Symposium consists of both lectures and performances on topics regarding the nexus between art and technology. The presentations and installations are all a bit nebulous-sounding: a performance featured an “interactive audio table-top” instrument and a talk titled “A Ubiquitous Computing Framework for Authoring Interactive Environments in the Arts.” Even though it’s a bit too abstruse for me, every presentation displays a unique way in which artists are using technology, or programmers are using art in order to explore incredibly diverse methods of artistic expression.
This year, they received around eighty submissions, of which about thirty were selected by a panel of Connecticut College faculty that included Arthur Kreiger, David Dorfman and Andrea Wollensak. They received submissions from multiple countries (such as Portugal, Canada and Israel), which they selected the winning entries based on artistic or educational merit, as well as creativity.
The Symposium is a showcase for a cutting-edge art movement, one in which the boundaries of art are stretched in a seemingly infinite number of directions. I do not know if there is a word for this movement simply because it has such a variance in style and form, so I’ll stick with a metaphor. This artistic movement is like the old American frontier; vast, mostly unexplored and perilous; that is, subject to failure. This weekend, Connecticut College & Co. traveled down something akin to the Oregon Trail of artistic expression. It was a path that negotiated between experimental brilliance and meandering disappointments.
I analyzed the performances at the Symposium as a combination of concept and composition. The artistic concepts explored were captivating: invented instruments, live coding of sound (a live-operated computer program that created sound and images projected on a screen for the audience to watch) and many more novel combinations of media. In piece after piece, the audience witnessed artistic creation in a brand new form. Almost every piece and installation begged the same question out of the audience: “How the hell did they do that?”
However, in some pieces, the concept was not supported by the composition, the overall structure and effect of the piece. The shortcomings that stood out to me were primarily issues of compositional quality. Sure, it’s interesting to watch a performance of the aforementioned live coding, where the performer generates sounds and images from a computer on stage… it’s even theatrical in a way. But then, ten minutes later, you’re still watching the pressing of buttons and a random collection of sounds and concentric colorful circles emanating from a MacBook. It doesn’t go anywhere, and then it ends. Keeping with the Oregon Trail metaphor, we get lost in the Sierra Nevadas, wander aimlessly for a while, Jenny gets bitten by a snake (but lives) and then the curtains close. Many pieces I saw were devoid of any emotional response in that they possessed no conflict or direction. The piece just wallowed in the mud of experimental improvisations and overdone sonic textures.
Talking to other students after the performances, I would consistently hear “I don’t get it,” and “What was the point?”
The point, I think, is to display a new way of creating and performing art, but sometimes the audience is left out of the loop, causing a loss of interest. Even though I’ve been looking forward to the Arts and Tech Symposium for two years, I found myself losing interest in many of the pieces. This is hugely disappointing to me, because I think the biggest source of potential in this type of art is its ability to engage the audience on many more levels than previously possible. As I said, the Symposium is a showcase of art movement in progress. It hasn’t reached its compositional maturity yet.
I don’t believe that every piece was devoid of compositional merit, and I “got something” out of almost every piece. There were definitely highlights this weekend, among them “Bloomy Girls,” a video of emotive colors and forms with a soundtrack that complemented the images in a meaningful way. “Persistence of Vision,” a dance and multimedia piece, incorporated dancers captured and projected in various ways by an infrared camera. The dancers were combined with computer-generated musical and choreographed gestures and a short film that created a composition of unique texture and stimulation. However, it seemed that the weakly choreographed dance was justified and covered up by all the fancy gadgetry.
KinoDance’s piece is perhaps representative of the tension between the traditional and modern forms of artistic expression found throughout the Symposium. The performance combined a prepared piano set off to the side, reminiscent of a theatre for silent film. The piano was prepared in a way that altered the sounds of certain keys, implying a modern take on the classic piano. The progression of the dance seemed to convey a conflict between dancers dressed in traditional clothing—a red satin dress and trousers with suspenders—and dancers dressed in futuristic costumes that represented modernity. The future dancers seemed to be on the offensive, grabbing and manipulating the traditionally costumed dancers, which invokes a sense of modernity’s increasing, inexorable influence on traditional forms of art. We saw this same theme expressed in many of the other works, such as a traditional flute, piano or entire orchestral composition distorted and shaped by electronics.
In this new field of art, where the synthesis of traditional and digital artistic methods can create pretty much anything imaginable, the results we have seen so far have been hit or miss.
Still, the Symposium offers Connecticut College an opportunity to experience first-hand a budding artistic and technological movement.
