archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Prompted by curiousity, and a desire to see if interactive art really is irritating, I took in several exhibits for the 2005 Boston CyberArts Festival, at the Decordova Museum this weekend.
Sarah Boxer’s review of Trains – a landscape made of tiny model railroad buildings and figures, adorned with movie images from famous movie scenes, and populated by passengers that appear only on the video screen of a Gameboy – offers several stellar insights about the emotionally unhealthy states of mind brought on by attempting to interact with computerized interfaces. Boxer says:

Alas, some cyberworks combine all the annoyances of interactive art (prurience, ritual, ungraciousness and moral superiority) to produce a mega-annoyance: total frustration. Case in point: John Klima’s “Trains,” at the DeCordova Museum School Gallery, in the Boston suburb Lincoln, which is a model train set guided by cellphone.

It’s clear from this that the emotional or other content of the art installation itself was obscured by the user experience Boxer had to negotiate in order to engage with the piece. Boxer’s expectations for user experience quality might have been lower if she were trying out a new spreadsheet, or Lotus Notes, but that’s just an example of how the software industry has trained customers to expect abusively bad experiences. See photos of Trains here.
One of the more usable – if that judgement applies – is Nam June Paik’s “Requiem for the 20th Century“. Requiem – photo here – according to Boxer is less annoying “…a relief to just stand there and watch the apocalyptic montage! No interaction. No instruction. No insults.”
Once past the interface, I found Requiem elegiac as expected, but unsatisfying for two reasons: first by virtue of concerning mostly Paik’s work in video art, and second by being strangely empty at heart (or was that the point?). The svelte physicality of the Chrysler Airstream art-deco automobile contrasted sharply with the ephemeral nature of the video images showing on it’s windows, in a clear example of concepts that were well-thought-through, but in the end, this is another example of art (post modern and/or otherwise) that is clever, yet incapable of engaging and establishing emotional resonance. “Requiem” is not even effectively psychological, which would broaden it’s potential modes of address. To ameliorate this weakness, I recommend obtaining the audiobook version of J.G. Ballard’s “Crash“, and listening to it’s auto-erotic on headphones while taking in the silvered spectacle.
From the description: “Requiem sums up the twentieth century as a period of transformative socio-cultural change from an industrial based society to an electronic information based society. The automobile and the television figure as both the most significant inventions of the century as well as the most prominent signifiers of Western consumerism.”

The most interesting installation was a wiki based soundscape, the first example I know of in which information architecture becomes both medium and art.
From the official description of the festival:

The creative connection between two of Boston’s most vital forces – the arts community and the high-tech industry – is once again in the spotlight, with more than 70 exhibitions and events in and around the Boston area from April 22 through May 8. It’s the first and largest collaboration of artists working in new technologies in all media in North America, encompassing visual art, dance, music, electronic literature, web art, and public art.

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For those who would rather plant trees than cell phone towers:

The Canadian Film Centre’s Habitat New Media Lab in collaboration with the SEED Collective will unveil an innovative interactive art installation, SEED, during the scopeNew York Art Fair, March 11th to 14th at Flatotel, 135 West 52nd in New York City. This public interactive art installation invites participants to use their cell phones to plant “seeds” to grow a virtual forest.
SEED explores the convergence of rich media and wireless technology in the creation of a collaborative and evolving work of art. Through sound and imagery users create and populate a forest together. By dialing a particular number, each audience member will be given a “seed” to grow using the keypads of their cell phones. With each punch of the keypad, audiences have the ability to grow their seeds, choose the type of trees they want to plant, and change their texture and colour. After the three days at the scopeNew York Air Fair, the end effect is that all trees created by audience members will reveal a virtual forest.

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Traces of Fire is an art exhibit and social exper­i­ment that used wildlife-tracking teleme­try to trace the move­ments of ten cig­a­rette lighters ‘lost’ in famous pubs in Lim­er­ick. The lighters were car­ried around Lim­er­ick by unknown peo­ple, as trans­mit­ters relayed loca­tion and motion data to observ­ing artists for nearly two weeks. From the cumu­la­tive data, the artists built a series of exhi­bi­tions show­ing pat­terns in the loca­tions and move­ments of the lighters around the city.

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C404 — an art/media group — brings you music icons includ­ing The Sex Pis­tols, Hen­drix, AC/DC, and Van Halen per­form­ing live in videos ren­dered in Wachowski-style cas­cades of glow­ing ASCII text.

I cre­ate cat­e­gories pro­fes­sion­ally, which means it’s almost inevitable that I’m inter­ested in things that chal­lenge and escape cat­e­gories (the “mind forg’d man­a­cles” Blake labelled so well) by their nature.

Though I’m sure this will appear in an over-miked com­mer­cial for tooth­paste or pick-up trucks soon, at the moment it’s a new way of look­ing at sev­eral very famil­iar cul­tural prop­er­ties that ques­tions the thresh­olds of recog­ni­tion, per­cpetion, and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion we rely on every day.