The New Order Art and Technology in the Twenty-first Century is a collection at the MoMA that creates art from the disruption of technology. “The show features works made since the turn of the millennium that push and challenge the boundaries of technology: upending systems, experimenting with materials, and ultimately inventing novel techniques and substances.” (MoMA 2019 p.3)

One piece I found interesting was the 23-minute video insulation which is played on a loop. The film which is called  Eye/Machine I, II, III (2000-2003) was created by German filmmaker Harun Farocki. Farocki explores the question of how military image technologies find their way into civilian life. The images in the film were taken from missiles, real-time photographed/film of droppings and the (computer) simulated images of the Gulf War in 1991. The Gulf War is said to be the starting basis for electronic warfare.

The film is centered on the images of the Gulf War which caused a worldwide sensation in 1991. The shots taken from The loss of the ‘genuine picture’ means that the eye no longer has a role as a historical witness. It has been said that what was brought into play in the Gulf War was not new weaponry but rather a new policy on images. In this way, the basis for electronic warfare was created. All the works presented are double projections. The dual images serve as a comparison between idea and reality, a confrontation between pure war and the impurity of the actual. This confrontation is also a montage and montage is always about similarity and difference. According to Harun Farocki In a double projection, there is succession as well as simultaneity, the relation of an image to the one succeeding it as well as to the one next to it.

My favorite piece of the exhibit was Josh Kline’s Skittles, which was a commercial refrigerator filled with fifteen different smoothie flavors line the shelves of Kline’s lightbox–encased commercial refrigerator. Each bottle lists the unorthodox ingredients contained within, including latex gloves, octopus ink, Ritalin, and Google Glass eyewear. Each drink has names like Big Data, Supplements, Minimum Wage, NIghtlife, Williamsburg.

I found this piece to be a satirical commentary on today’s society, a message to the upper class who can afford these luxury $10-15 drinks that the smoothies are modeled after. Each drink is made up of a mixture of ingredients that are indicative in these places such as Kmounbca, Kale chips, and microbrew being ingredients in the Williamsburg drink. Each formula evokes the economies of goods, services, and technologies that surround us, infecting everything from our diets to our sex lives. Skittles has to be made anew each time it is shown, and it will morph and decay during the course of the exhibition. The ever-shifting solutions suggest the ways in which our bodies have been engineered, chemically altered, and transformed by technologies of consumption.

This gallery in Bushwick had an art installation with a giant painting that dragged on the floor, complete with slippers to walk onto the painting so you could get even closer. It was a Friday night and there were lots of people talking loudly. I was reading the artwork’s description when I read that she also made video art, and low and behold behind a crowd of people was a puny flat screen on the wall playing a 24 min video on loop. The video clearly had dialogue, but the poor speakers were nothing for the mass of people, so I tried to gather as much as I could from the visuals. I never grasped the story without the dialogue, which makes me consider all of the considerations for gallery video art. The imagery without dialogue or context felt like a random assortment of imagery to just be weird. There was a sterile hospital environment with workers working by themselves wearing colorful experimental or futuristic clothing. One person on a typewriter was eating candy and getting scolded for something. In another scene, it appeared to be some sort of control room where everyone still wore the same type of clothes but with old computer keyboards and a girl dancing on a pole. There was some tension that broke out, but without dialogue it was unintelligible. Overall, it was a let down because of the sound, and I would like to hear it in another context, like youtube!

The first line of the description for this video art installation is “a video game that plays itself.” It plays live like an infinite dream sequence of Talus Twenty Nine, an artificial intelligence being who oversees the terrain. Each time the program is run, something different happens, much like the spontaneity of a human life.
The ongoing nature of the algorithm shows how AI can be programmed to interact in a way like humans, but feels ultimately repetitive and limited. Although the sequence was different every time the program is run, it was still the same ingredients all senselessly interacting. It serves the gallery space well because it can be something to ponder for a moment then carry on, still mostly absorbing the piece. I felt that after 12 minutes it was starting to feel like I wanted to move on. Using AI and technology to help humans process data, numbers, and store things makes sense to me, but teaching computers to do human things like dreaming and imagining seems dangerous and, at this point, way inferior than our own imaginations. What was lacking in the work was any semblance of a narrative, and so it could never feel truly human, but should we be trying to build technology that is as human as us?

On April 4th at 10:30pm, Metrograph showed Minute Bodies (2016) as part of its late night series. While I was worried that I would fall asleep to a wordless, conceptual piece so late in the evening, the lively jazz music paired with an intimate peek at the microscopic and macroscopic natural world kept me in awe of the patterns, shapes, and forms that are apparent at every amplitude of nature.
With much of the time-lapse video showing the growth and movement of various organisms, such as roots, sprouts, spores, shoots, flowers, frogs, and ants, I saw the dance of nature in all its subtle, time-less glory.
I know very little about F. Percy Smith, but this homage to his work convinces me to investigate further. In the credits, I saw that his documentaries number in the dozens! This documentary was made by Stuart Staples to pay homage to the work of F. Percy Smith. This narrative, if you can call it that, was as chaotic and spontaneous as nature. But evident in the spontaneity are the rhythms that flow from it. The music of the film utilized various instruments, but always seemed to match the intuitive, improvisational style in jazz, which only emphasized the infinite patterns of nature.
The audience seemed to be awake and actively watching the film, especially because the theater was giving out all their popcorn for free since they were going to throw away at the end of the night. I heard the constant chewing of popcorn as well as the occasional gasp or giggle at the funny interactions on the screen,
The film is a short 55 minutes, but gives you enough time to really settle into it. At what would be the climax, there is an overlay of time-lapse growth scenes that replicates fireworks as foliage and mold spray and spew in networks so fast with the music that it is almost a celebration of life in the natural world. Overall, I found this film to be inspirational!

The Nari Ward Exhibit at the New Museum is a collection of sculptures and art pieces that address inequality, racism, poverty, and rights in America. Ward who a CUNY alum and longtime professor at Hunter College, created these large pieces in this two-floor exhibit that were often composed of found objects that hold dual meanings. From the forgotten trash Ward creates over thirty sculptures, videos, and paintings that span from 1992 to 2018. Through his, work Ward tells the story and shares the pain of the underrepresented and often forgotten. Many of the sculpture pieces in the exhibit also contained a technological aspect usual a sound or light, which brought these pieces to life.

For example, the title of the exhibit; We the People (2011) was displayed in right by the entrance is made up multi-colored shoelaces often used in basketball shoes or sneakers. With the use of shoelaces the words which are the famous introductory words of the US Constitution and signal of democracy, freedom, and rights now also include African Americans and minority population who are often the wears of these type of shoelaces.

One piece I especially like was “Glory” (2004) which was is an oil barrel turned into a tanning bed with fluorescent lights, the inside of the bed contains stars and stripes from the flag. Along with the exhibit is a whistling version of the US National Anthem. The tanning bed holds a dual meaning, (1) it is made of an oil barrel and its and presentation with the flag and the national anthem tie in oil with the essence of America (2) tanning beds which are often used in suburbia, allow for users to create an ideal image and for this image to be replicated to others, in other words the placement of the flag inside the tanning bed, sent the message of manufactured patriotism.

Another piece I liked was called  “Spellbound” (2015) is a piano covered with used keys, and video of footage of floorboard breathing holes that was used by escaped slaves who hid there. The keys represent freedom and release.

When looking for something to write about for the blog, I was nervous that Ward’s exhibit would not be considered experimental, but I think because many of Wards pieces hold dual meanings and use a variety of mediums that can also fall into the experimental category. Overall I really liked the Ward exhibit I am not sure I understood all of the pieces but the ones I did were especially powerful and the ones I didn’t were still interesting. The exhibit is still currently open so hopefully, I can visit us again and maybe go on a guided tour. I also think it’s really cool to see a CUNY alum who is successful in the field of art.

The Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018 exhibit at The Whitney Museum explores artwork created at the intersection of technology and art. The pieces in this exhibit examine the thin line technology can play in the distribution of “traditional” art. Each piece uses technology to highlight the effect automation and computation can have on a piece of art and the artist straddles a fine line of “traditional” art and technology.  Many of the pieces such as America’s Got No Talent actively critique the increased use of technology and how they affect and shape our society. America’s Got No Talent, a web-based art piece by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki which used the American flag as it backdrop to display and graph tweets. Each strip in the flag represents a reality TV show with the word “American” in it.  

I found this piece to be the most interesting because as Moriwaki one of the creators says, “those talent shows and contest shows really play into that, this kind of deep-seated dream that––you know, you can be nobody or anybody—in the United States and find fame and fortune. And in fact, this way in which basically, social media has created stars, created celebrities, it was something that we wanted to comment on, so the piece kind of speaks to that and speaks to the echo chamber of social media.” America’s Got No Talent explores the theme of American meritocracy and the rise of fame for the purpose of fame rather than talent.

Another piece of interested would be the main show stopper piece, the centerpiece of the exhibition was Nam June Paik’s Fin de Siecle II, which a huge, newly restored, multi-channel 1989 installation. The piece has not been displayed since its original showing at a 1989 Whitney Museum exhibition which it was created for.

The piece work consists of 207 televisions, all of which are older, cathode-ray tube models from the time of the work’s creation is accompanied by a booming electronic base and a montage of images pulled from tv shows, music videos, and advertisements. Images of David Bowie, a man and woman dancing, piano keys, naked women walking against a fleshy backdrop,  and a number of other images that move too fast for the brain to process. The sculpture serves s commentary on how digital content saturates our lives, and in the age of Youtube, Memes, iPhones, and Influencers, the restoration of this piece is particularly needed.

Fin de Siecle II also helps to decide the exhibit into two, the first displays pieces from artists like Josef Albers, Donald Judd, and other mid-century artists the use algorithms to create paintings, sculpture, print work, and simple projections. The second display pieces that focus on “the use of instructions and algorithms to manipulate” to create digital art pieces using television programs, sets, and signals, or image sequences and like Paik’s piece, Brucker-Cohen and Moriwaki piece many of the works serve as a critique on society.

The Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018 exhibit at the Whitney’s collection, looks back at predecessors of computational art and shows how the ideas addressed in those earlier works hold up and have evolved in contemporary artistic practices.

One piece I was able to see at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bruer location on 76th street and Madison Avenue was, “Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk 1968) by Bruce Nauman. A fixed camera records Nauman as he repeats the same sequence of gestures: after kicking one leg up at a right angle, he pivots 45 degrees, letting his leg drop with a thump while extending his back leg at a right angle. According to the description on the wall next to this film, “These absurd motions take inspiration from the writings of Irish author Samuel Beckett, who described his characters’ awkward movements in excruciating detail.”

 

At certain moments, Bruce Nauman moves totally out of shot and only the noise of his footsteps indicate his presence. This way of treating his body with detachment through fragmentation and moving out of shot is reinforced by the perceptive confusion and the impression of weightlessness produced by the inverted space. In Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), the spectators are confronted by a feeling of alienation which they experience while watching the artist in the doubly enclosed space of the screen and his studio.

 

Nauman abandoned painting for a wide ranging investigation of his own body as subject and object of his work, from latex and wax casting of body parts to a series of twenty-five films and videos.

In these latter works, the artist executed mundane activities in his studio – from walking and jumping to bouncing balls – where he explored “the kinds of tension that arise when you try and balance and can’t.” Nauman knew this kind of stripped-down, non-narrative movement from his association with Ann Halprin’s Dance Theatre Workshop in San Francisco which he was a part of for a while.

Two things that stuck to me about this film was the dullness and the creative use of the body to make sounds.

When I first came up to this film, I thought it would pick up or change at some point, but after about 6 minutes of the same action, I finally decided to read the description where it said that he did multiple hour long videos of these types of videos, and practiced for many hours at a time until it was perfect.  The intent wasn’t for the videos to be watching in its entirety, but rather something you could come back to throughout your visit to the museum.

The creativity in this piece, to me, was very unique because people walk every day, yet I’ve never thought steps could be seen as an artsy part of the human body. Nauman was able to recognize that and use it to his advantage to explore this new avenue in the art world and create something different.

What I was able to take away from this film was sometimes you just have to think outside the box and let your imagination take over, especially if you’re an artist or something of the sort. Also, it goes to shows how art can be expressed in many different ways and doesn’t really have a definition or look.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The MOMA’s current exhibition New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century is a collection of pieces which blur the lines between the two categories: Art and Technology. The exhibition consisted of various forms of media, sometimes even within just one piece. The artists included in this exhibition are all working to explore technology as something which is physical and tangible, not merely unseen codes and waves. It was very interesting to see the various ways artists are working within, and expanding upon, the place of technology in the future of art.

Of the works on display, I think my favorite, by far, was Made in ‘Eaven by Mark Leckey. The piece was a combined work of film and an accompanying sculptural component. The sculptural component was an EIKI 16mm projector which was positioned to project the film onto the wall in front of it. It is clear that the projector was meant to be seen as a feature of the piece, being that it was placed in a highly visible area and the film was not projected from a ceiling mounted projector. The inclusion of the projector in the piece led to the initial mischaracterization of the projected image as having been captured on film. After further inspection, it was clear that the image was a digital rendering of the artist’s studio and had merely been transferred from its digital form to 16mm.

What interested me so much about this piece was its backwardness. Today, it is so normal to transfer images from their analog form to a more easily handled digital form, but I have never seen this process take place in the opposite direction.

Another of the pieces I really enjoyed was Augmented Objects by Camille Henrot. This piece was made of various domestic objects covered in layers of tar. The artist purchased these objects from various places, including eBay, and then covered them in tar, making them effectively unusable. The statement for the piece described this act as “thwart[ing] the normal flow of objects, commodities, and digital networks of exchange.”

I was intrigued by the objects which were still recognizable, such as the old hair dryer and the TV antennas, but were obviously stunted by their transformation. It made me think about the way technology so quickly becomes obsolete, replaced by something faster, smaller, more functional. These objects also become useless, much in the same way that Henrot has stripped the usefulness from her objects. I also felt as if there was a gender component to be read in the work, being that many of the objects chosen were “domestic” in nature. Do these objects become relics of the domesticized woman of the past? Or does woman’s escape from isolation in the private sphere have an effect on the flow of these objects?

I have seen Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain back in high school and remember really enjoying it, along with his other film, El Topo. I recently saw a the IFC center where it still plays as a midnight movie.

The story is full of surreal and absurd imagery that tells a loose story of a christ like figure wandering around a land that resembles a hellish landscape that resembles the American southwest and Mexico. The figure meets an alchemist who takes him on as an apprentice and introduces him to seven other students who represent the seven planets of the solar system. Vignettes provide the backgrounds of each student, with all of them being despicable in their own ways, consisting of: a politician, an arms dealer, a to manufacturer, an architect, an art dealer, a police chief, and a cosmetics maker. The group then burns their money and their own images and goes on  a journey to find enlightenment.

Almost every shot of the film is beautiful and has imagery that relates to many religions, spirituality, and esoteric beliefs, as well as just plain surreal and often comically absurd. The first part of the film, which follows the Christlike figure, has a lot of references to the history and politics of Mexico. The commodification of Christianity, poverty, and features a scene of a reenactment of the Spanish conquest using lizards dressed as the indigenous people and toads dressed as conquistadors. The later part of the movie also has scenes which bring about the ideas of the exploitation of workers in factories, the cult-like fraternity of the police force and its suppression of protestors, as well as the desire for beauty through cosmetic enhancements.

Something that struck out to me that I didn’t think about when I first saw it was the use of animals in this film, especially their carcasses. The scene with the reenactment of the Spanish conquest features exploding pyramids where you can see the toads flying in the air. There are also shots of dead chickens being strapped to trees, skinned and crucified sheep. I don’t think I agree with the death of animals for the sake of art, especially in the amounts that the film shows. The part that bothered me the most was a dog fight that, if it was faked, would be very convincing. I understand the concept behind it but I don’t think any work of art is worth the direct suffering of animals to make.

The installation that I found very interesting is called “Made in ‘Eaven,” and it was created by artist named Mark Leckey.  It is a short piece of video, the length of it is around three or four minutes. It starts very abruptly and later on becomes very slow and smooth. In the beginning camera shakes a little and it creates a feeling that it was shot handheld. After that it starts moving and it is very stable as if the camera is on the dolly or on a very good stabilizer. Viewer of this piece sees just a white room with two doors, one window and one very suspicious looking sculpture of what it seems like a bunny. The camera gets closer and closer to the bunny but the interesting thing is that the bunny is made of completely reflective surface and still we don’t see the camera coming closer. The camera starts revolving around this bunny and there is a moment when it comes closer to the presumable head of a bunny and it feels strange and bizarre. The wicked feeling occurs because we are looking straight into the bunny’s head but we don’t see eyes or nose or any other features. As the camera comes closer we see the reflection or a part of a room that is always behind the camera. And, it continues revolving in a close up for a minute and as it dollies out we see a window and what is outside of the room. As the camera gets further from the bunny we see two doors and the body of the bunny. In the middle of the video, the camera gets back to its first position where it started and bizarre feeling happens again because the head of a bunny reflects two red pillar looking parts of a room and they are reflected exactly on the part of bunny’s head where eyes are supposed to be.

However, the most interesting thing about the art piece is that the video  looks as CGI rendering and it probably is because the camera is two fluid and there is no other way how the artist could get rid of the reflections on a bunny’s surface. Although, the way this art piece is shown is very not contemporary or binary. It was transferred on 16mm film and it is projected to a wall from an old projector that loops the video. In the beginning, I personally did not realize that it was a computer generated video because it was projected from a film. My initial thought was a wonder of how they made the camera flow so smoothly. Also, watching it from a distance helped to seal the illusion that it was real. However then the bunny’s head moment came in on a screen and it was too smooth and with no reflection of the camera. Around that time the realization came that it was created on a computer. In close inspection though it was still hard to distinguish because the room itself looks very natural and the lighting is very real.