surveillance art

very interesting question. i am less interested in the question of our right to privacy, since i read a pretty convincing argument by michael warner that nothing actually is private, that the "private sphere" has always been mediated by public dialog. i am interested in the way that surveillance art can cause us to think more carefully about how we view ourselves and how we view art. surveillance adds another frame to reality. an extra frame can lead us to think about the way in which we think of things in more traditional frames. perhaps surveillance art lead us to be less satisfied with television drama and ushered in reality tv shows.

there was a video piece fox last year, footage from an ATM camera. as the footage shows the ATM users withdrawing money, checking over their shoulders, fixing their hair, a very dramatic classical score plays. it viewed like a movie with non-actors. the musical score was so moving that it lead me to think about money, personal money problems, isolation in contemporary society, the individual against the world.

at the dan graham show in the whitney this autumn there were a few pieces of art that incorporated surveillance. they seemed to be stating that the way we act in the present is always influenced by our memory of the immediate past and our expectations of the immediate future, so that the present gets muddled and cannot be said to clearly exist at all.

i like these two projects.

RIP

the host of RIP is very handsome, very boy-next-door. at first i found him a little pedantic, but i was surprised when he brought the copyright law discussion to bear on cancer and aids research. it is a very intelligent move and i'm sure one advanced before by other people.

at the same time i was annoyed to be lead by the hand through an argument by someone so square. i was also annoyed that he introduced me to "girl talk's girl". doesn't she have a name? and anyway, why should i give a damn whether he has a girl friend? is that to make him seem more human? is that just in case i think he's hot and wonder if he's gay?

i have since recommended that documentary to several people, with the qualification that it can be at times pedantic but that overall it relates a lot of interesting ideas.

i recently attended a lecture by michael hardt on his new book *commonwealth*. he talked a lot about immaterial products (things like information and art) and advanced the argument that current copyright laws are relics of the industrial air when products were material, when ownership was by necessity private on account of the physically limited dimensions of the product. now that products are immaterial, can exist simulatneously in many places at once, copyright law should be revamped. he argues that the outdated copyright laws are actually detrimental to the capitalist, since they impede progress.

history of hacking

i couldn't believe that story about how apple computers got started. it's so strange to me that apple computers, which are the pinnical of design and technology, were once being built from spare parts in a garage, by a couple of computer geeks. apple computers seems to dominate so absolutely now that they have dicated the way we expect technology to work, i.e. they have dictated the way our desires work in relation to media.

i wonder what hacking could look like today in a time when technology so quickly follows the the user's desires, or when the user's desires and the technology have such a strong and tightly intertwined relationship.

perhaps a contemporary form of hacking would involve a move away from technology, using compters and web information and web tools to support real-time performance or material art works. in that way the user's output is not province of the web, is not available to those who control the technology and those responsible for upgrading it to meet consumers' desires.

i am thinking in particular of sam shea's youtube plays at the copycat, wherein several groups of artists adapted popular youtube videos and performed them live for an audience.

survival research laboratories seem pretty impressive, though they definitely have that macho metal sculptor thing going on, which seems a little outdated to me. to me that shtick includes an ambition to create massive works out of metal, using mechanical knowledge and dangerous power tools. some celluloid figures who partly embody this attitude are indiana jones, dennis the mennis, macguiver. it's not totally all about men, either, because women can participate in it also. it's a certain stance taken on art and creation and it seems to rely on a community or brotherhood of artists that share the same values.

the head guy seemed really cocky. he talked about teaching amsterdam a lesson. he just seemed like he thought he had all the answers and that his art is the perfect antidote to the world's problem and if they don't get it then they're dumb. plus it seemed like their art had a lot to do with laughing at people's reactions to it, which is fine. i accept that there are artists whose role is to provoke in certain ways, but they're just so bro about it and it gets old after a while.

that said i would have totally loved to attend one of their shows, the performances seemed amazing and one-of-a-kind. i think it would rank up their with my most impressive memories. i would talk about it for years.

john cage

i am not sure how to conceive of sound as sculpture. well, now that i'm thinking about it, if sculpture is a reckoning of space, or a work that attempts to account for and comment on space, sound pieces that take into account the physical space in which the sound is heard, or sound pieces that take into account the phenomenological experience of sound (a phenomenological approach being one that examines the physiological reception of sound as well as the cultural and social landscape of the reception of sound)– such work can indeed be considered sculptural.

but we expect sculpture to have three-dimensional qualities. sound could be conceived of as three-dimensional, since it travels in 3D space, fills that 3D space. also, it might be argued that sound in a specific site can make the audience more aware of the site itself, so that the sound turns the site (the auditorium, the public space [the street], the private space [the bedroom or the car]) into a sculpture, and the audience is also part of the sculpture.

in this sense john cage's work opperates as sculpture. his work 4'33" draws the audience's attention not only to the ambient noises of the environment but also makes the audience consider the context of a performance and the attendent conventions of a performance. the sculpture is a room of people, gathered together, all their expectations, their reactions to the piece (bafflement, confusion, anger, ammusement), and finally the chance noises that occur to fill the space.

fluxus

virginia adams taught a new course here at mica last semester: art since the 1960s. it included extensive readings whose density eclipsed most of my other time commitments. to me, it was worth it, to be taken through the debate about objects and into the era of conceptual art where writing and philosophy joined with the visual arts to form hybrid work that was intellectually compelling and materially minimal.

this semester for thesis i am working with two ideas that seem sympathetic to some fluxus artists' strategies. the material for this work is text messages and song lyrics. although it still needs to be focused, the work consists so far in the appropriation of popular song lyrics and transmitting them via text message to a friend or a love object as a means of expression. i understand the lyrics as readymade sentiments that stand in for an original expression.

i am having trouble with the presentation of the work. the activity of texting is decidedly quotidian and the means of representation i've used so far to document it (digital photography) is not providing additional dimension to the work. i would like to be able to hone the idea more so that if the presentation is indeed minimal (like yoko ono's instruction paintings) the stark presentation is better accounted for in the content.



now that i'm looking again at her work, it seems ono's work is appropriately minimal since the poems themselves are proposals for potential work. perhaps the minimal quality of a digital photo of a text message would cause me to think about the ineffectuality of a text message. it is small, received remotely. . .

stay tuned--

pipilotti

pipilotti uses video and appropriated popular songs to enfranchise the music consumer. videos like "sexy sad i", "i'm not the girl who misses much" and "i'm a victim of this song" seem to treat the pop song as a readymade object and foreground the listener's consumption of that song. i can't understand exactly the choices that she makes. beyond this concept the videos' content seems to be intuitively generated. i say this because they appeal to me and they are humorous, but it's hard for me to say why exactly she has made the choices she has.

"sexy sad i", for example, is footage of a naked scraggly man flailing around in the woods. the camera is trained most often on his dick. he seems to be fighting the camera, kicking at it, swinging his arms at it defensively or maybe playfully. his face is never really visible. there is a humor here that derives from such crazy imagery juxtaposed with a beatles song, whose sound i've always thought to be sweet and naive. apparently the song itself is about the maharishi, the spiritual guru under whom celebrities such as the beatles and mia farrow practiced transcendental meditation. apparently john lennon wrote the song about his guru after the guru purportedly made sexual advances to mia farrow.

the naked body in "sexy sad i" is absurd, not beautiful, awkward. the video makes me think about mocking the preciousness of propriety and sexual morality.



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