ㅁ

The Moment between Site and Non-site

Is What Remains Text or Context?

[1]

By

[2]

After the industrial revolution, the concept of ‘speed’ becomes one of the most important points for understanding the world we live in (as per Paul Virilio); ‘to stop’ is to ‘die’ – things must keep moving in order to exist. The stopped machine means the death of the production process. More speed makes more product. This has driven our lives to be increasingly connected to the ‘logic of capital’ with the accelerating speed of the western Capitalist system. This acceleration results in increased social inertia; this is the ‘logic of speed’.

Today, reality collapses and fragments into vertexes[3] and blobs of many different alternative realities. Reality, conceptual understanding, can no longer keep up to the speed of the image as John Berger’s Ways of Seeing comments, “seeing comes before words” (Berger, 7). Kids know through seeing before they can speak about their knowing. Seeing comes before language; it is seeing that constitutes our environment. We explain the world with language; however, the language does not deny that we are surrounded by the world. Language is a constructed understanding, a subset of the world experience. There is not ever a ‘perfect’ intersection between ‘we know’ and ‘we see’.

Introduction

Bust down the Door! (2000) is a looping 2’ 40” black and white typography animation with jazzy music by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, a Web art group consisting of C.I.O. (Chief Information Officer), Marc Voge and C.E.O. (Chief Executive Officer), Young-Hae Chang, based in Seoul, Korea. Their work consists of fast-moving text-based animation set to tightly integrated jazz sound tracks.

Unlike most other New Media art or Web art, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries shuns any interactivity or mutuality; the Artist Chang says “There is no mutuality in my work …I especially hate interactive mutuality …If there is no graphics, banners, colors, etc, what remains? It is text.”[4] Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries work features poetic texts in the Monaco font combined with jazz music or an anonymous mechanical voice. Their works are characterized by distance – in time and space; a multiplicity of temporal attachments, but deterritorialized in space, homeless – nomadic[5], and anonymous.

This paper will examine this society of accelerating speed, time and space, and deconstruct the world with the space-referential[6] art work and the language that is signified by culture and history through Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries work.

The Concept of time and space

I use the term ‘space-referential’, which includes so called ‘time-based’ media, to mean an approach to the work from the audience’s, and by extension, an environmental perspective. Except for the artist (producer), everybody constitutes the audience. Time-based art works, such as performance, film, and video, need space/materiality to be shown, to exist. They need some ‘standard’, bridges to be connected to the audience because they depend on time not on space. Medium, as an essential relationship of humans to images, demonstrates how this relationship is evidenced in both old and new media of illusion, concept, and idea. For instance, when a performance is going on, it is not only about the performance, inextricably included is where that performance is happening, how that performance is located in its context. The term, ‘time-based’ media features only the interface, the medium, and the artist, where the term ‘space-referential’ additionally emphasizes the ‘contention’ of the art. If the term, ‘time-based’ media refers to the actual art, the term ‘space-referential’ media, also includes its contextual relations.

On the other hand, I consider the concept of ‘space-based’ media, as ‘time-referential’. Sculpture exists in a space; however, its meaning changes through time. Because the time-referential work is located in space itself, it has to be perceived in time. The art object’s context is its history, and its current state. The meaning of the Sphinx of Egypt, or of any traditional art, such as painting, drawing, and sculpture, changes through time.

Since humans first made images (illusions) in a ‘mural-art culture’ – drew on the ground, on the cave, wall, and ceiling –, “a wall is no longer a tangible boundary of space but, instead, the medium of an optical idea” (Grau, 72). Through media’s seeming to extend the wall surface beyond a single plane, the medium is no longer just a physical plane; it becomes an extension of space, time, and (second) reality. The distinction between reality, and illusionary reality, is blurred. Recently, this ‘another form of second reality’ has been pulled more into art. As an illusionary reality, the ‘interior’, constituted of time and space, in conjunction with the medium itself, are not separated from the immersive, extended, exterior contextual ‘real’ space and time. Thus, the terms, ‘time/space-referential’ build more relative, inseparable relations of interfaces of medium and context.

Furthermore, in a ‘structural transformation’[7] in art practices, Hal Foster observes,

“[there] has been a shift from … a ‘vertical’ conception of art, whereby artists investigate the disciplinary depths of a given genre or medium, to a ‘horizontal’ conception, whereby art activity is conceived of as a kind of terrain on which various areas of discourse are brought together.” (Hopkins, 229)

The audience is dominated horizontally in the ‘panoramic landscape’[8]. This horizontality defines ‘presence/absence’ by ‘materiality’, and ‘pattern/randomness’ by ‘information’[9].  Space-referential media, time-based artwork, is information which needs ‘site’ (materiality) to exist, while time-referential media, space-based artwork, is materiality which requires ‘contained information’[10] (idea).

[11]

General Site of Bust down the Door!

The technology of Bust down the Door! is Flash, a (software) tool for, among other things, creating and delivering images and animations via the web.

Although there are hundreds of fonts, and millions of colors, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries does not use any fancy fonts or colors; they almost stubbornly persist in the use of monotonous fonts and color. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries refuses creating its own (personalized) identity; instead pursuing anonymity. Bust down the Door! has been reproduced in different versions: Bust down the Doors! – English, Deutsch, and Francais –, and Bust down the Door Again! – with drums, with strings, and the Gates of Hell-Victoria version[12].

Bust down the Doors! starts with the countdown: “TEN 9 EIGHT 7 SIX 5 FOUR 3 …” The work tells the narrative of a midnight attack at a home by unidentified armed aggressors:

“We/bust/down/the door/while/you sleep,/rush into/your home,/enter/your bedroom,/drag you/out of bed,/push you/in your/under-wear/out into/the street,/while the/neighbors,/now awakened,/peek from/behind curtains/to catch/a glimpse/of your/humili-ation,/some of/them nodding/in agreement/with us, your/captors,/others smiling,/still others/opening/their windows/to cry out/“kill the/traitor,”/while you,/in bare feet,/hands tied/behind your/back,/advance to/the pokes/of our gun/muzzles/in your back/and sides/and our spit/that drips/from your/face,/and all/the while/how strange/that as/you walk/in the/cool night,/as you move/closer/and closer/to the/isolated spot/where we/will force/you to/your knees/and put/a bullet/in/your head,/how/strange/and how/important,/how/life-saving/that/you must,/you/utterly must,/recall/the dream/you were/dreaming/when we/pulled you/out of bed,/the dream/of the/cool summer/sea/breeze,/that/caressed you/and/your lover/as you/sat on/the terrace/over-looking/the sea/and drank/to the/strains/of an/unbearably/sweet/bossa nova[13].”

The entire sequence of images is black text on white background. The font style of Bust down the door! is simple, aggressive, big and heavy like their iconic title ‘Heavy Industries’. The font is very generic, but not so generic at the same time. The Monaco font is one of the basic fonts in the Mac computer, but also has a noticeable characteristic of slashed 0s ()[14]. The text is endlessly repeated with the background music which has a very regular fast-paced rhythm. On the other hand, it also has unpredictable flashes and visual “stop – and go” rhythms, and these tend to hold the viewer in a state of tension throughout the entire piece. This is achieved by the careful modulation of image sequence. For instance, in the phrase, “We/bust/down/the door/while/you sleep,/rush into/your home,/enter/your bedroom[15],” each individual word on the screen, ‘we’, ‘bust’, ‘down’ …, creates its own image within us. Furthermore, it creates its meaning through the modulation of image-segments, such as ‘we bust down’, ‘the door’, ‘while you sleep’ …, the entire sequence of images forming in the mind into a single disturbing “over-image”. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries plays with the multiplicity of narrative possibilities of animated text accompanied by jazzy music.

Is What Remains the text or the image?

Bust down the Door! features strategically assembled text and music; it is magnetic, inseparable, inescapable. The work integrates aspects of easy access, anatomy, music, art, and literature; it blurs the boundaries of them. Their attempt plays with the traditional separation of art, text, literature, and music; the work resembles many traditional art forms. It is like poetry, or experimental film. The work crosses many different disciplinary boundaries.

The tone of the work is bold and strong, at the same time it is sweet, or sometimes so dry. It is dynamic, and emotionally powerful. We become thoroughly intrigued with the work through variable and rhythmic changes of image and music.

Bust down the Door! depicts the world between the real and imaginary through a surreal poem of the beautiful vision of a victim that confronts death delivered by people that he (or she) does not know, who busted down his door and dragged him out of bed. This reminds us of individuals trampled by majorities in our society while it simultaneously depicts fantasies between dream and reality with the startling image of the memory of one beautiful moment from the past, prior to death. This places us in a mixed state of ‘critical nostalgia’ where fear is blended with hope. The image that remains reverberates within us perhaps like more traditional dramatic theatrical formats, such as Romeo’s and Juliet’s moment of realization prior to their tragic end, or paintings and sculptures of the poignant moment of Apollo’s loss of Daphne[16].

The accelerated pace of the text approaches a threshold of human cognition, demanding a state of heightened concentration. The subliminal speed of the image comes to us first then the contents of the image. The arrangement and formation of word-images,

“while the

neighbors,

now awakened,

peek from

behind curtains

to catch

a glimpse

of your

humili-ation,

some of

them nodding

in agreement

with us, your

captors,

others smiling,

still others

opening

their windows

to cry out

“kill the

traitor,”[17].”

reminds us of poetry narrative. The image that this work delivers through the variation of the text, and sound is very strong. Due to the speed of delivery, the screen is first perceived as individual black and white images, and only then is it read as text. The primary effect of the image “is really in their form and not in their content” (McLuhan, “Myth and Mass Media,” 10). Since human history arrived at “print culture”, “we are surrounded by forms for transmitting information” (McLuhan, “Printing and Social Change,” 3). The text is information, the information is image. Text is the text of an image. Image is the image of the text. When we see Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Bust down the Door!, we cannot deny that there is a first image that comes to our perception before we recognize the text of the work. For instance, when we see the text ‘door’, we simultaneously perceive the image of ‘door’. Similarly, when we see the intro screen “Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries presents, Bust down the Door! [18]” with the flashing screen, we are automatically reminded of the image of busting down a door. Text is being more than text itself, when it transmits message or information, when it transmits image.

What is art? Art is what one chooses to call art. Art is not the things (pictures, music, narratives, performances, etc) that it may from time to time contain, but instead can be conferred upon absolutely anything. Art is not a matter of form (text), profundity or craftsmanship, but of context. We analyze, de-contextualize and re-contextualize to make maps of relations with other art, to our culture, society, and history.

Language in History & Language in Pluralism

Language is a “human artifact,” it is “collective products of human skill and need” (McLuhan, “Myth and Mass Media,” 6). Language is the essence of our culture. To write, read, and speak a language means to think in that language. Language can be generous or exclusive to culture. For instance, using one language can give access to certain histories which cannot be approached from another linguistic stand point.

You can click on any site on the web, but you will not be able to navigate unless you know the language of the website. Digital culture is characteristically global in its geographical access, however, the exclusive characteristic of language does not allow for globalization unless you know the dominant language, for instance, English. Language can be “itself a mass medium” (McLuhan, “Myth and Mass Media,” 5). You can surf the web ‘in English’ – only, ‘in French and English’ (in France), ‘in German and English’ (in Germany), and ‘in English and Chinese’ (in China), but you would not likely see ‘in German and Korean’ unless there is a cultural relationship being promoted between those countries. Therefore, language can be exclusive for certain cultures like some politics, histories, arts, etc; language is the most dominant exclusivity.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries chooses to serve as a bridge between many different cultures through their art. The work of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is written in different languages; English, Korean, and French. They collaborate with others when the work comes to other languages.

[19]

Variability of Bust down the Door!

The showing of Bust down the Door! at the Rodin Gallery (2004) was Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ first installation in a real space. Like their works on the web, the installation has no interactivity; however, its much larger presence gives the audience a very different experience than the work on a screen (often computer monitor). The repetition by flashing on a singular screen is extended into another repetition over multiple sequential screens. The size and speed of the work creates ‘fragmented visuals’ rather than a localized narrative. Narrative, which is often considered as immaterial media, changes its structure and meaning into heavy materiality.

This giant full-screen, full-wall projection puts us in a different space. Because of the immersive massive attack of image and sound, we are blown with virtual hurricane force into the world of Alice in Wonderland; lost without direction. Installation, as a medium, is “defined by spatial location rather than by the materials that constitute it” (Hopkins, 229). The space (site) that the installation is placed in is “scattered information”[20] while the idea, concept of the work is “contained information”[21]. When Bust down the Door! was on the web, its position remained in time but not in any physical space (non-site); it was space-referential media. However, the work becomes an extended ‘reality’ in a spatial site, as an installation. Installation is

“a kind of art making which rejects concentration on one object in favour of a consideration of the relationships between a number of elements or of the interaction between things and their contexts.” (Archer, “Foreword,” 8)

The texts on the wall are no longer ‘physical texts’, they create another extended space beyond the gallery space; it creates another instance of time and space.

Conclusion

It is obvious that New Media art, especially web based art, is more emotionally distant and difficult to ‘locate’ than traditional art formats. Many international art galleries and Biennales devote a vast exhibition hall to what is called “New Media art,” but it does not include much Web art. What it usually includes is mostly computer animation, video and sound installation, or interactivity (more recently).

Tate Online[22], one of the largest art networks in the world, has only 12 entries of Net art work including Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ The Art of Sleep[23]. It seems cursory, more like a half-hearted attempt to give their website a cutting-edge façade as one of the largest art networks of the world. Furthermore, MOMA[24], the Museum of Modern Art (New York), barely has any archive of Media art, and certainly not much Web art. This illustrates that “the ordinary museum and its representatives simply present one form of the truth” (Archer, 125). Relative lack of interest in Web art as a new, alternative, and unique medium of expression may stem from its inherently modest demeanor. Human kind is a very sociable creature, yet interactivity on the web is, ironically, a solitary, lonely activity.

Web space is a new medium of action and information. It is another territory of our extended society. “All of man’s artifacts, of language, of laws, of ideas and hypotheses, of tools, of clothing and computers ㅡ all of these are extensions of the physical human body” (McLuhan, “Laws of the Media,” 5). Ironically, our new territory enhances the loss of diversity and access. It contrasts with the concept of print which enabled one man to speak to many. Media is counter to the progress of human history which has moved from local to global, from individualism to pluralism. Media is counter to the nature of our progress in time and space.

Art behaves like business in a Capitalist society. The artist thinks and acts like a businessman calculating how to get one’s capital worth. Things happen and disappear quickly; this is the nature of systematic-conformist society. Long-term and time-referential[25] projects mean death; thinking, exploration, and discussion are for the loser. Money results only in tangible things (or monumental); money is pure virtuality.

However, Bust down the Door!, as a Web art, is against this Capitalist illusion. It is fast-produced, fast-distributed, but in a different speed (time and space) than Capitalism. In contrast to the regulated speed of Capitalism with its horizontal and vertical directions, the malleable speed of Web art is in its shifting multiplicity of approaches. Web art is not tangible at all; it is invisible, immaterial. It is solitary, revolutionary, and activist.

Bust down the Door! has a wide-ranging aspect as space-referential media; it tries to break down the limitation that comes through nationalism. It is beyond (popular) consciousness, beyond (strategic) control, and beyond (modernist) reality. Virtual reality is considered as not only ‘another reality’, but also “a realer reality” (Davis). It is mind-time, memory[26]. It “enhance[s]” the real, not “betray[s]” (Davis). What remains is the context of the work not the ‘form’ of the work. The flashing pixels dissolve.

There’s a banging on my door.

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Citation

Archer, Michael. “Foreword”. Installation Art. Ed. Nicolas de Oliveira,     Nicola Oxley, and Michael Petry. USA: Smithsonian Institute Press ⓒ Thames & Hudson. 1994. (8).

Archer, Michael. “Museum”. Installation Art. Ed. Nicolas de Oliveira,     Nicola Oxley, and Michael Petry. USA: Smithsonian Institute Press ⓒ Thames & Hudson. 1994. (125).

Archer, Michael. “Site”. Installation Art. Ed. Nicolas de Oliveira,     Nicola Oxley, and Michael Petry. USA: Smithsonian Institute Press ⓒ Thames & Hudson. 1994. (33).

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger. Penguin. 1972. (7).

Davis, Douglas. “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction – an Evolving Thesis/1991-1995.” Retrieved from http://cristine.org/borders/Davis_Essay.html. 2008.

Deleuze and Guattari, Gilles, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1983. (30).

Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Trans. Gloria Custance. USA: The MIT Press ⓒ 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (72).

Hayles. N. Katherine. How WE Became PostHuman. USA: The University of Chicago Press © by The University of Chicago. 1999. (248-249).

Hopkins, David. After Modern Art 1945-2000. UK: Oxford History of Art. 2000. (229).

Kellner, Douglas, editor. Review of Baudrillard: A Critical Reader. Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. 1994. (8).

McLuhan, Marshall. “Laws of Media.” Marshall McLuhan Unbound. Ed. Eric McLuhan and W. Terrence Gordon. USA: Gingko Press, Inc. 2005. (5).

McLuhan, Marshall. “Myth and Mass Media.” Marshall McLuhan Unbound. Ed. Eric McLuhan and W. Terrence Gordon. USA: Gingko Press, Inc. 2005. (5-10).

McLuhan, Marshall. “Printing and Social Change.” Marshall McLuhan Unbound. Ed. Eric McLuhan and W. Terrence Gordon. USA: Gingko Press, Inc. 2005. (3).

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. Bust Down The Door! (2000)

with drums: http://www.yhchang.com/BUST_DOWN_THE_DOOR!_Rodin.html.

with strings:

http://www.yhchang.com/BUST_DOWN_THE_DOOR!_B.html.

Gates of Hell-Victoria version: http://www.yhchang.com/GATES_OF_HELL.html

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Bibliography

Archer, Michael. “Foreword”. Installation Art. Ed. Nicolas de Oliveira,     Nicola Oxley, and Michael Petry. USA: Smithsonian Institute Press ⓒ Thames & Hudson. 1994.

Archer, Michael. “Museum”. Installation Art. Ed. Nicolas de Oliveira,     Nicola Oxley, and Michael Petry. USA: Smithsonian Institute Press ⓒ Thames & Hudson. 1994.

Archer, Michael. “Site”. Installation Art. Ed. Nicolas de Oliveira,     Nicola Oxley, and Michael Petry. USA: Smithsonian Institute Press ⓒ Thames & Hudson. 1994.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin. 1990.

Davis, Douglas. “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction – an Evolving Thesis/1991-1995.” Retrieved from http://cristine.org/borders/Davis_Essay.html. 2008.

Deleuze and Guattari, Gilles, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1983.

Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Trans. Gloria Custance. USA: The MIT Press ⓒ Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2003.

Hayles. N. Katherine. How WE Became PostHuman. USA: The University of Chicago Press © by The University of Chicago. 1999.

Hopkins, David. After Modern Art 1945-2000. UK: Oxford History of Art. 2000.

Kellner, Douglas, editor. Review of Baudrillard: A Critical Reader. Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. 1994.

McLuhan, Marshall. “Laws of Media.” Marshall McLuhan Unbound. Ed. Eric McLuhan and W. Terrence Gordon. USA: Gingko Press, Inc. 2005.

McLuhan, Marshall. “Myth and Mass Media.” Marshall McLuhan Unbound. Ed. Eric McLuhan and W. Terrence Gordon. USA: Gingko Press, Inc. 2005.

McLuhan, Marshall. “Printing and Social Change.” Marshall McLuhan Unbound. Ed. Eric McLuhan and W. Terrence Gordon. USA: Gingko Press, Inc. 2005.

McLuhan, Marshall. “The Effect of the Printed Book on Language in the 16^th Centry.” Marshall McLuhan Unbound. Ed. Eric McLuhan and W. Terrence Gordon. USA: Gingko Press, Inc. 2005.

Mitchell, William J. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. USA: MIT Press Paperback edition ⓒ 1995 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fourth printing. 1997.

Virilio, Paul. Art and Fear. Trans. Julie Rose. New York: Continuum. 2003.

Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. New York: Semiotext(e). 1986.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. Bust Down The Door! (2000)

with drums: http://www.yhchang.com/BUST_DOWN_THE_DOOR!_Rodin.html.

with strings:

http://www.yhchang.com/BUST_DOWN_THE_DOOR!_B.html.

Gates of Hell-Victoria version: http://www.yhchang.com/GATES_OF_HELL.html

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[1] Image from Bust Down the Door! (2000) by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.

[2] Image from Bust Down the Door! (2000) by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.

Retrieved from http://www.yhchang.com/BUST_DOWN_THE_DOOR!_Rodin.html. 2008.

[3] The boundaries of reality have broken down into discrete elements which organically reform and rearrange into many vague and shifting cultures.

[4] Review of Young-Hae Chng Heavy Industries’ exhibition at Rodin Gallery, Seoul (Samsung Foundation), by Jo, Sun Ryung (Curator, Pusan Metropolitan). 2004. Retrieved from http://www.foruma.co.kr/faReview/View.asp?fNum=42&page=1&writerCode=%EC%A1%B0%EC%84%A0%EB%A0%B9. Translated by Suk Kyoung Choi. 2008.

[5] French philosopher, Gilles Deuleuze mentions ‘nomadism’ as a philosophical term in his 1968 book, Difference and Repetition, developed from his concept of ‘deterritorialization’. Meanwhile, the Canadian communication theorist Herbert Marshall McLuhan, famous for the book, Understanding Media, foresaw the appearance of the ‘digital nomad’ in the 1970s, though he did not name it as such.

[6] Space-referential media (software: knowledge, information, and idea generated) is immaterial, so that it may spread wider, however, it does not exist physically; virtual images or data on CDs, DVDs or the internet are more fragile than time-referential traditional art works such as painting and sculpture, or the Sphinx of Egypt.

[7] See Hopkins (2000), p. 229.

[8] See Grau (2003), p.32.

[9] Figure 2 – The semiotics of virtuality. Hayles (1999), p. 248-249.

[10] From Robert Smithson’s ‘nonsite’. Archer (1994), p. 33.

[11] Image retrieved from http://www.yhchang.com/BUST_DOWN_THE_DOOR!_B.html.

[12] Cited http://www.yhchang.com/.

[13] Retrieved from http://www.yhchang.com/BUST_DOWN_THE_DOOR!_Rodin.html. Transcribed by Suk Kyoung Choi. 2008. Slashes (/) indicates screen (image) changes.

[14] Monaco. From Apple. Retrieved from http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/apple/monaco/. 2008.

[15] Retrieved from http://www.yhchang.com/BUST_DOWN_THE_DOOR!_Rodin.html. Transcribed by Suk Kyoung Choi. 2008. Slashes (/) indicates screen (image) changes.

[16] See the works by Bernini or Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

[17] Retrieved from http://www.yhchang.com/BUST_DOWN_THE_DOOR!_Rodin.html. Transcribed by Suk Kyoung Choi. 2008.

[18] Retrieved from http://www.yhchang.com/BUST_DOWN_THE_DOOR!_Rodin.html. Transcribed by Suk Kyoung Choi. 2008.

[19] Still shots of the installation of Bust down the Door! at the Rodin Gallery, in Seoul. September 3 to October 31, 2004. Retrieved from http://news.naver.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LSD&mid=sec&sid1=103&oid=028&aid=0000078731.

[20] From Robert Smithson’s “site”. Archer (1994), p. 33.

[21] From Robert Smithson’s “nonsite”. Archer (1994), p. 33.

[22] Tate is the United Kingdom’s national museum of British and Modern Art, and is a network of four art galleries in England: Tate Britain (opened in 1897 as the National Gallery of British Art, and renamed in 2000), Tate Liverpool (1988), Tate St. Ives (1993), and Tate Modern (2000), with a complementary website, Tate Online (1998) http://www.tate.org.uk/.

[23] Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. The Art of Sleep. Net Art (2006). The work is commissioned by the Tate. Employing their usual mix of animated black and white typography, jazzy music and humor, the work explores the international contemporary art market from the artists’ perspective. http://www.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/the_art_of_sleep.shtm.

[24] http://moma.org/

[25] Time-referential media (hardware; traditional object-based media) is therefore material, so that it can last longer physically; however, it has to be attached to a point in space..

[26] See also, “Artist Manifesto II” on http://popopanda.wordpress.com/.

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The interactivity of New Media art is inherently tied up with the technology that is used in its mediation. The New Media art that crosses the boundary between art and technology is interactive art not only in its content and ideas but also its form; media used as medium. In New Media Art, the concepts and practices of collaboration, sharing, interaction, free interchange, and open-mindedness appear frequently. The Golden Nica award of Prix Ars Electronica 2004 acknowledges these initiatives.

In a new category of the 2004 Prix Ars Electronica, “Digital Communities”, the Golden Nica was awarded to “Wikipedia” (USA, www.wikipedia.org) – an online “copyleft” encyclopedia – and “The World Starts With Me” (Uganda, Netherlands, and Kenya, http://www.theworldstarts.org) – a digital learning environment about sexual health education, AIDS prevention and creative Information Communication Technology (ICT) skills for young Ugandans. Both “Wikipedia” and “The World Starts With me” are about networks, networking, collaboration, and the possibility of community based work. The Golden Nica was also awarded in the “Net Vision” category (2004) to the “Creative Commons” (http://creativecommons.org), an organization that promotes collaboration and sharing through author-defined copyright management. “The goal of the Creative Commons project is to allow creators to share their works with others; to build a large pool of creative content that others can use and re-use in their own works, and restore some sanity to the intellectual property debate” (Ars Electronica)[1].

The wide-ranging social and creative impact of the internet as well as latest developments in the fields of social software, ubiquitous computing, mobile communications and wireless networking, and collaboration between diverse areas creates new participant social communities, in turn giving rise to new forms of interlinked Media art; the self-empowerment enabled by these developments allows more people to feel free to share, and to be connected in community, community that is not bound by biological-physical barriers.

Society’s desire for increasing speed causes a correspondent reliance on technology, a technology that creates both more complex obstacles through secured and limited access – the attempt to protect perceived ownership of data – as well as many continuously evolving, often unforeseen, benefits related to open communication. The speed of communication has reached a point where communities form and reform intentionally; this postmodern reflected and mediated environment leads to new tribalisms, perhaps a return to humanities first method of social organization. These new forms of intentional community allow us the possibility of freedom from the enslavement of secured information; networking, sharing, collaboration, bonding together, and transparency are fundamental principles of this new tribalism.

New Media art positions itself as a connection or bridge (interface) between these community-based networks. This paper will examine why humanity has to move in a direction of a more community based global environment in this world of accelerating speed, how New Media art influences and is implicit in the rise of new distributed tribalism, and theorize about where it might end up.

In social life, there have been changes of values. What is valuable? Value is processed in every dominant network at every time in every space. Value derives from human livelihood, resources, and power, and through the connectivity of their main activities. In the new tribalism, information and communication become the imperative – information and knowledge as the source of power, wealth, and meaning – with their attendant technological change, while the older tribalism was primarily a material hunter-gatherer existence.

Networks in old tribalism describe linear threads/paths, however, networks in new tribalism shift to planes; a movement from one-directional flows (linear time) to multi-directional/dimensional flows of information and resources. In the old tribalism, beyond a certain threshold of size, complexity, and volume of change, the flows became less efficient as hierarchical organized command and control structures under the conditions of pre-electronic communication technology. Networks become more efficient organizational forms with the new technological environment; they can be reconfigured, they can expand or shrink in free flows, because they have no center, and nodes can operate in a wide range of configurations. They are temporally organic, not spatially crystallized.

The construction of new tribal networks is socially differentiated from traditional structures by multiple and scattered spaces, and fragmented, disconnected, temporary, and individual/non-linear time; allowing for the manipulation of traditional biological space and clock time.

A network is a technological extension of the human biological organism, a new physicality and virtuality: physical hyperlink. Hyperlinks are understood as new “linked geographies” which pursue “nongeographical, real-time and mutable data, links and thick description, and interactivity” (Turow and Tsui ed. pg. 196-198). Sensual proximity densifies in high speed networks; this allows for enhanced communication, and facilitates shared understanding. Networks form richer cultural artifacts by integrating social activity as the infrastructure of power, and these networks -powered by information and communication- create a networked society. By this social structure, the organizational arrangements of human relationships of production, consumption, reproduction, experience, and expression are encoded into culture; the networks exist, re-present and re-produce themselves as recombinant sets of interconnecting nodes.

Nodes are points intersected organically, discrete spontaneous relationships in the space-time cultural data set. Networks have no fixed center, but are inseparable from their distributed and variant nodal points. Nodes increase their influence in the network, organically attracting further connections by absorbing more locally relevant information from other nodes. “Communication networks are the patterns of contact that are created by the flow of messages among communicators through time and space” (Monge and Contractor, p.3). ‘Flows’ are streams of information between nodes, or connections between nodes. Flows are the process of networks. The network exists as pure potentiality until there is information flow. Flows have self-expanding processing power because of their recurrent-recombinant and interactive-communicative aspects.

New information and communication networks are characterized by constant intersection and flexibility that allows for distribution in various contexts and applications, and this causes multiplicities of (multilevel) communication. The distributed nodes included in a new communication network gain density, not only through flexibility but from their ubiquitous spatial structure; new information networks are not limited/confined to traditional ‘places-space’, rather the spatial structure is associated with but not codified into the communication flow – everybody’s easier access to information through wireless connections and portable access devices, etc. – in a kind of ‘time-space[2]’. In this sense, alternative nodes which were minorities in the traditional and inherent power structure become dynamic and highly malleable responses to that power structure, to society, and to culture; they result in a more multidimensional social structure. A society that has more alternative subcultures allows for more self-programmable/reprogrammable ability, not just acceptance of an enforced given-society[3].

Media, art, and technology encourage the notion of an information networked society: a society founded on communication networks of interacting cultures, multi-dominant global networks of power, and a common belief in the positive use-value of sharing, rather than on localized fixed ‘seats’ of power. Appropriate combination between information/idea and distributive technology, open development of potential technologies, and organizational restructuring based on free access networking become the keys to ensuring productivity, innovation, creativity, and power sharing in the new tribal networked community.

“Collective action[4]” by social networks with their various forms of salient multiplicity tends to encourage and be motivated by a positive-developed society: a transdisciplinary, intercultural, and conversational interface, a common-ground of appreciated difference – the new distributed tribalism. Collective action works in coordination of observer and participant perspectives, resulting in consequently richer “’social capital’: networks of interaction that allow collective action, democratic participation and community” (Chambers, pg. 94). Johnny Lee, a human-computer interaction researcher currently (2008) working at Microsoft[5], built a good example of the positive use-value of sharing in a collective community. Lee built sophisticated educational tools out of cheap and easily available parts: a digital whiteboard assembled from a Nintendo wii remote, touch screen, and a head-mounted 3-D viewer[6]. Lee shares not only the information about his projects, but also the schematics and software so that anybody can share his knowledge and use it for further creative work. This attitude creates further discussion online around his “wiimote project” at http://www.wiimoteproject.com/, and engages people in the input and output cycle of the network. Networks powered by information and communication enlarge across time-before-space as recombinant sets of interconnecting nodes layering upon kinetic, potential, and archived narrative, a (re)making in history(s) diametrically re-mixed in contrast to the old tribal site-primal ‘history in the making’.

[7]

[Image 1] “3-D Screen” [Image 2] “3-D Screen”

 

Our world is wired and we cannot avoid being connected. With increasing frequency, different disciplines have collaborated building networks in a variety of ways in order to achieve their aims, but also to introduce the perspective of ‘the other’.

An artist, W. Bradford Paley, and a scientist, Jefferson Han, work on interesting ideas in their own fields. Paley, an artist and interaction designer whose focus in both worlds is the visual interpretation of patterns hidden in information, creates visual filters which let different subjects address the expression of their differences and reveals complexity in a way that is matched to human perceptual abilities[8]. Han is a research scientist who is one of the main developers of an “interface-free” touch-driven computer screen[9]. He has created a simple, multi-touch, multi-user screen interface that just might herald the end of the point-and-click era[10].

[Image 3] “Perspective Pixel” [11]

Both Paley and Han work on collaboration with people from many other disciplines in various ways according to their interdisciplinary areas of interest. Recently they worked together on a project, “TraceEncounters” (2004). “TraceEncounters” was a social network visualization, installed at Ars Electronica, 2004. It required participants to attach a small ‘chip on a pin’ (image 6) to their clothes. This enabled the position of the participant to be tracked at any time during the next few days. This live information was interpreted to provide an on-screen representation of the chip positions within a plan of the conference buildings of Ars Electronica, and this was always on display at one of the central meeting spaces. As discussions occurred and delegates gathered around particular individuals, the screen showed the changing flows of a complex pattern of social relationships centered now in one place and then another.

[12]

[Image 4] Left [Image 5] Top right

[Image 6] Bottom right

[Image 4] “TraceEncounters”, a crowd at the installation

[Image 5] “TraceEncounters”, the screen

[Image 6] “TraceEncounters”, the TraceEncounters Pin

The “GNOM Project” is another example of a networked collaborative project by a group of artists including Santiago Ortiz, Luis Rico, and Alfonso Valencia; a project co-produced by MedialabMadrid and the Protein Design Group from the Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid[13]. It is a research project in digital and physical interfaces for visualization, navigation, and experimentation with genetic networks.

[14]

[Image 7 (left), and Image 8 (right)] Visualization of “GNOM Project” and detail

The Project uses different forms of visualizations to explore genetic networks. For instance, the genetic interaction network in the bacteria Escherichia Coli[15] is represented in data-forms of an ‘oracle’ and a ‘landscape’ interface. The oracle interface represents “a circular interface of high control level over the node selection, where the entire network of relations can be visualized” while the landscape interface represents “a three-dimensional interface for spatial navigation, based on the metaphor of a journey over a flat and infinite landscape, where the navigation takes place between interrelated nodes” (“GNOM Project”).

12

[Image 9] Left: “GNOM Project” – Oracle interface

[Image 10] Right: “GNOM Project” – Landscape interface

 

This kind of collaboration between different disciplines not only explores relations between disciplines, but also addresses broad issues of perception, provides alternate perspective on complex questions, and solves problems beyond the scope of any one discipline. Klein introduces interdisciplinary discourse as

“new divisions of intellectual labor, collaborative research, team teaching, hybrid fields, comparative studies, increased borrowing across disciplines, and a variety of “unified,” “holistic” perspectives have created pressures upon traditional divisions of knowledge. There is talk of a growing “permeability of boundaries,” a blurring and mixing of genres, a postmodern return to grand theory and cosmology, even a “profound epistemological crisis”.” (Klein, pg. 11)

 

Interdisciplinary collaboration in this newly mediated world exponentially amplifies the scope and frequency of social contact and thus provides a fertile platform for mass participation and the development of new cultural forms: I have called this meta-form the new (distributed) tribalism. It creates “on a meta-level, a networked digital world provides an intellectual and social environment that is radically interdisciplinary” (Hughes and Lafortune, pg. 20). The tribe is the idea of the tribe.

Individuals are nodes of potential flows like “a steady bridge in the “between”” (Heidegger, pg.344). Martin Heidegger refers to man “as the stranger in the executed free-throw, who no longer returns from the ab-ground[16] and who in this foreign land keeps the remote neighboring to be-ing” (Heidegger, pg 346), and this “be-ing is nothing “in itself” and nothing “for” a “subject”” (Heidegger, pg. 341). Gilles Deleuze comments “an individual always belongs to a clan or a community” (Deleuze, pg. 38), and in the opinion of Deleuze, Hume views “relations as the effects of the principles of human nature … relations are the effect of the principles of human nature” (Deleuze, pg. 6-7). For Martin Buber, “I is the beginning of dialogue in community, but it is not sufficient. The We of communicative exchange must emerge” (Arnett, pg. 158), and he emphasizes “participation with others is the key to a meaningful existence” (Arnett, pg. 127-128). Humans are social animals, and tribalism is the very first social system that human beings ever lived in, and it has lasted until today. For all our social existence, a network has been a pattern that is common to our life. An individual being is a given collection of separate ideas and impressions. Impressions are defined by their vividness, and ideas, as reproductions of impressions. When an individual communicates to another (transmits the idea), that exchange creates resonance and produces something new; reception, response, transmission of re-contextualized idea, then cycle-link.

Networks always work in binary logic: inclusion/exclusion. Indeed, networks have their strength in their flexibility and adaptability, yet there is in their fundamental logic, a potentially negative aspect of collective action by the intentional community and this results from group control by nodes seeking dominance not so much of exclusivity or inclusivity, but through the manipulation of the idea of the gate itself; the right to decide. This overlay of old media on the new, of old tribalist site-centered protectionism on the openness of indecision, on the trust inherent in no-centre, on free creative interplay, has led to such interruptions in the flow as corporate legislation around copyright and sociopathic tribal scapegoating through collective flow blocking actions.

Thankfully, new tribalism also includes characteristics which distinguish it from older models of networking: a self-expanding processing and communicating capacity in terms of volume, complexity, and speed; a recombinant potentiality with digitization and recurrent flows; and, a distributed flexibility through interactive and mutual networking. Networks in new tribalism can sublimate towards these optimistic elements with a positive common belief in dynamic social networks. Interlinked, lateral, cross-boundary communication networks and newly emergent networks give expression to horizontal complexity and multiplicity, and the essential pluralism of new tribalism gives vertical depth to that shifting plane of possibility. Thus, the tribal networked society develops in a multiplicity of cultural contexts, trading in ones and zeros, nomadic but persistent, traveling at will across this new landscape in ubiquitous time and space.

 

 

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Works cited

Arnett, Ronard C. Communication and Community: Implications of Martin Buber’s Dialogue. Foreword by Friedman, Maurice. USA: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. (127-128, 158).

Chambers, Deborah. New Social Ties: Contemporary Connections in a Fragmented Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. (94).

Deleuze, Gilles. Empiricism and Subjectivity: an Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. Trans. Boundas, Constantin V. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. (6-7, 38).

“GNOM Project.” http://www.moebio.com/santiago/gnom/english.html. Retrieved on December 1, 2008.

Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Trans. Emand, Parvis and Maly, Kenneth. USA: Indiana University Press, 1999. (341, 344, 346)

Hughes, Lynn and Lafortune, Marie-Josée (eds.). “Creative Con/Fusions.” Coursepack for HUMN 320. Calgary: ACAD, 2008. (20).

Klen, Julie Thompson. Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. (11).

Monge, Peter R. and Contractor, Noshir. Theories of Communication Networks. USA: Oxford University Press, 2003. (3).

Turow, Joseph and Tsui, Lokman, ed. The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age. USA: The University of Michigan Press, 2008. (196-198).

 

 

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References

Book References

Arnett, Ronard C. Communication and Community: Implications of Martin Buber’s Dialogue. Foreword by Friedman, Maurice. USA: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986.

Chambers, Deborah. New Social Ties: Contemporary Connections in a Fragmented Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Deleuze, Gilles. Empiricism and Subjectivity: an Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. Trans. Boundas, Constantin V. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Hassan, Robert. Media, Politics and the Network Society. Open University Press, 2004.

Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Trans. Emand, Parvis and Maly, Kenneth. USA: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Klen, Julie Thompson. Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Alterity & Transcendence. Trans. Smith, Michael B. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Monge, Peter R. and Contractor, Noshir. Theories of Communication Networks. USA: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Turow, Joseph and Tsui, Lokman, ed. The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age. USA: The University of Michigan Press, 2008.

 

Web References

Ars Electronica. http://www.aec.at/en/.

“bestiario”. http://www.bestiario.org/.

MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art. “Desighn and the Elastic Mind”. http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/.

Ortiz, Santiago. “moebio.com”. http://www.moebio.com/santiago/.

Ortiz, Santiago. “visualcomplexity”. http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/index.cfm?author=Santiago%20Ortiz

Rhizome. http://rhizome.org/.

TED. http://www.ted.com/index.php/.

“theyrule”. http://www.theyrule.net/2004/tr2.php.

 

 

 

 

 

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Footnotes:

[1] http://www.aec.at/en/archives/prix_archive/prix_projekt.asp?iProjectID=12866&iCategoryID=12418

[2] I mean by this that the visualization of communication flow tends to map time-span rather than physical position-space.

[3] Passive, pre-determined society

[4] “Collective action is a term that has been broadly applied to a wide range of phenomena in the social sciences, including organizational communication. It main focus is on “mutual interests and the possibility of benefits from coordinated action” rather than on individual self-interests” (Monge and Contractor, pg. 159).

[5] Johnny Lee (computer scientist). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lee_(computer_scientist).

[6] See Johnny Lee’s talk at TED: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remote_hacks.html, and his projects at his website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/.

[7] Image 1 & 2: Still images of Johnny Lee’s “3-D Screen: Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays” project from his TED Talk. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remote_hacks.html.

[8] See W. Bradford Paley’s website: http://didi.com/brad/index.html.

[9] Jefferson Han. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Han.

[10] See the official website of the multi-touch screen, “Perspective Pixel”: http://www.perceptivepixel.com/. See also Jefferson Han’s talk at TED: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html.

[11] Still image of the “Perspective Pixel” from http://www.perceptivepixel.com/.

[12] See http://www.traceencounters.org/.

[13] Santiago Ortiz: moebio.com

Luis Rico: MediaLabMadrid http://www.medialabmadrid.org/medialab/, banquete.org

Alfonso Valencia: Protein Design Group

[14] Still images from http://www.moebio.com/santiago/gnom/english.html.

[15] Escherichia coli is “a gram negative bacterium that is commonly found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded animals.” Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli.

[16] “Ab-ground is the originary essential swaying of ground. Ground is what is ownmost to truth” (Heidegger, pg. 264).