Wafaa Bilal's 2007 interactive installation Domestic Tension has been described as “one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time”[1[and if Camus’ criteria for a successful political creation is anything to go by, I would tend to agree. For one month Bilal lived in the Chicago gallery space, surviving on donations and communicated only to visitors to the gallery and those who engaged through the internet via live webcam footage of the gallery space and chatroom access. These virtual participants also had the option of shooting Bilal with a paintball gun. This element transforms their virtual experience into a frighteningly physical one, and plays on ideas of virtually and stereotyping which exist in first person shooter gaming. The original idea for the work however stems from experiences significantly more raw and real than virtual gaming. Inspired by the death of his brother from shrapnel in Najaf and learning of U.S Soldiers remotely firing missiles on Iraq from a base in Colorado, Bilal installation explores the very real situation for many Iraqi’s. He uses the work to raise awareness of the home confinement they face due to the both the violent and the virtual war they face on a daily basis, while also speaking to the desensitisation of violence in American culture through virtualizing conflict. This sensational approach to the war attempted to draw people into a political dialogue that may not be willing to engage through conventional means. In this sense Bilal subverts the mass medium of cyber-interaction and gaming, reinforcing the very real consequences of virtual actions.
Online participants in the piece grew into the thousands, resulting in periods of rapid bombardment, and the intervention of hackers programming the gun to fire on its own. The work also inspired acts of solidarity, with some visitors to the gallery acting as human shields, protecting the artist from the deluge. The overwhelming success of this new media piece, as opposed to other new media works can perhaps be best explained by Lovink:
“In today's society of the spectacle there is no place for halfway art, no matter how many policy documents praise new media arts for its experimental attitude and Will to innovate.”[2]
Bilal’s work is certainly anything but half-way, in sacrificing himself for his creation, he can truly be called a creative rebel
[2]Lovink, Geert. 2005. New Media, Art and Science: Explorations beyond the Official Discourse. In Empires, Ruins + Networks, ed. Scott McQuire/ Nikos Papastergiadis, Melbourne, University of Melbourne Press.
In 1999, New Zealand born, Melbourne based media artist Daniel Crooks began to explore alternative models of spatio-temporal representation in the moving image through a technique he terms ‘time slice’. This involves the extraction of thin slices from a moving image stream and then recombining them using temporal and spatial displacement. He applies this technique to both still and moving images and, while conceptually similar, the visual outcomes are quite distinct. Described by critic Gail Priest as, “photographs that progress through time and videos of frozen moments that move.” His investigation is based around converting the spatial dimension of time into a tangible and malleable material. In his video piece On Perspective and Motion (Part 2), commissioned for the biennial Anne Landa award, Crooks distributes a continuous series of seven 180 degree pans across seven screens. The disrupted time line transforms the busy pedestrian location of Sydney’s Martin Place into a “city folding, reversing, expanding and contracting on itself with perfect fluidity; a city in which pedestrians slip, slide and undulate in a sensuous dance of the everyday.” His treatment of time over the 23 minute piece sees four major sequences emerge, in which different qualities of movement and space are explored. In these sequences we observe an environment of infinite curiosity and urban poetry, through the manipulation of time Crooks reveals choreographed relationships within the crowds. Multiplying individuals, split, meet, erase themselves, simultaneously playing out past, present and futures.Through the Time Slice method Crooks’ creatively rebels against established notions of time and space, engaging with time-based visual technology in a new way. The intricacy of his work ensures there is never a uniform ‘apply all’ approach. This gives feeling of consideration and manipulation of each figure, offering us the opportunity to see ourselves from not just a different perspective, but from another dimension.
Camus saw creativity as an intense form of rebellion, acknowledging the very struggle to create in this world as sufficient rebellion. A creative person who fights the inevitable with all their power, taking responsibility for their own life, through their own subjective choices is able to make life meaningful and therefore one worth living. It is always refreshing in our world of cultural hegemony, to see more artists putting value back into creation and sacrifice, shifting the paradigm of commodification.
In acknowledging our fleeting existence how do we then justify making art without the ‘other’ in mind? Camus would argue that with the freedom to create comes the responsibility to consider both the art and the artifice. The idea of acknowledging of our inevitable obsolescence is imperative to new media; even the term suggests an ‘old’ media, a cycle of life and death. It can be said that every art medium has had its ‘new media’ stage, by labelling it as such are we investing hope in some kind of existence beyond ourselves? This seems absurd when considering the significant challenge of obsolescence to the new media world, not only in terms of the technical, but also in social, cultural and political respects.
There is a certain seduction in ‘new’ technology and since the rise of capitalism and mass production we have been consuming and discarding at an ever increasing rate. In Sampling Tradition: The Old in New Media, an essay published in last years Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader, Janine Randerson describes this consideration, “The commercial history of new media should be recognised; built in obsolescence and entanglement in an endless cycle of up-grades helps sustain the capitalist economy.”[1]
Taking responsibility for our on consumption is a significant step toward creative rebellion, what is equally important however is considering the wider systems and structures which shape the life cycles of our technologies and indeed humanity.Artworks employing non-traditional materials and technology complicate the issue of obsolescence.Preservation is a key issue, particularly significant for the media art scene in New Zealand. Lissa Mitchell discusses the challenges facing New Zealand galleries in her essay New Data. She asks “how do we ensure long term access to digital information?” Mitchell suggests “Galleries now have to try and adapt to video and sound works, policies for documenting and preserving this works need to be developed to go beyond the existing systems for ‘physical artworks’.”[2]
However these new standards seem far from being employed. Despite New Zealand’s significant contribution to the history of new media art, there is still no government allocated funding for its preservation and many early film and video works are already damaged beyond recognition. The New Zealand Film Archive (Est. 1982) is a charitable trust, and our only major body with policies in place for preserving and maintaining our moving image heritage.
It is this inherent obsolescence in much new media work which denotes conjecture underlying the practice of cultural preservation. In this sense we should question the true permanence of any object, not just those which are media based. The supposed ‘newness’ of media art pushes the public to examine how they participate in the care, storage, display, and interpretation of works, making it a valuable vehicle and voice for change.
[1]Randerson, Janine. 2008. Sampling Tradition: The Old in New Media. In The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader, ed Su Ballard/ Stella Brennan,Auckland, Aotearoa Digital Arts and Clouds.
[2] Mitchell, Lissa. 2008. New Data. In The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader, ed Su Ballard/ Stella Brennan,Auckland, Aotearoa Digital Arts and Clouds.
Palimpsest –noun a parchment or the like from which writing has been partially or completely erased to make room for another text. Origin: 1655–65; <>
1. A manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible. 2. An object, place, or area that reflects its history: "Spaniards in the sixteenth century . . . saw an ocean moving south . . . through a palimpsest of bayous and distributary streams in forested paludal basins" (John McPhee).
My studio practice this semester has been largely based around the idea of creating a 'video palimpsest'. I have under-taken a variety of experiements to do this.
First I tested the idea on still images, using a fully manual Holga camera I took a 120 colour film with multiple exposures and various coloured flashes.
I have also been making a few short video works (approx 1:30). In these I have experiemented with in camera editing, filming a shot for the full duration of the video first, then rewinding back and re-recording over the top. This has had some interesting results. The sound seemed to layer up and become distorted and some of the transitions have bright red flashes in between. This technique was most successful in my short video 'Bowl-a-rama''.
Another technique I have incorparated is layering up the imagery in Adobe After effects to create moving multiple exposures. The aesthetic of this however was not particularly successful, and will not be something I explore further next semester.
Inspired by the success of the layered sound, my latest video work ' Motivation and Moral are at an all time Low' shot in a unused industrial woolshed, is a single channel video with score created from multi-layered sounds recorded on location. The dominant noise being a train slowly approaching and finally passing, fading into the distance. This is designed to build and distort in the middle, and fad on either side inorder to create a seamless loop.
My final experiment which has not yet been fully resolved is the incorporation of a data projector into the layering process. The idea was to project some recorded footage of the location back on to the location, using two cameras and tapes I would continually film the projection and it's surrounds, then feed that back through the projector. Repeating the process over an over, aiming to degrade the moving imagery into abstracted light forms. I have not yet mastered this process, but I hope to have a work created this way resolved in the following month.
‘FEATURE CREEPS’ (Data projection of live footage, OHP and Projection onto self-standing screen, HDV Camera feeding into Data Projector, Wind-up Toys various dimensions, March 2009)
My two most recent media installations have been investigations into the obsolescence of the object and the systems which serve the rapid accumulation of waste. ‘Feature Creeps’ is a mix media work originally installed as part of the E.Arts Department, Systems ’09 exhibition. This involved two projections installed in the corner of the gallery. A warm nostalgic glow emitting from an over-head projector is directed onto a self standing screen of the same era, on the adjacent wall shines a high definition colour image of the incandescent surface of the OHP. A small plinth displaying a variety of recycled wind-up toys is placed between the projection devices, inviting viewers to engage with the familiar action of the toy, and place it on the surface of the overhead, resulting in an inter-active system, which descends into obsolescence without human participation. The use of the dual projections was designed to bring the participant closer the consequence of their inter-action. The abstracted silhouettes of the over-head speak about our simplification of complex issues in order to justify the status-quo. In contrast the sharp imagery produced by the high definition camera and data projector ponder the complexity of our technological world, we can see in clear detail and large scale the toys first frantic movements and deceleration to stillness, and gain a sense of the fraction of control we have in the system. The projections are linked by the simultaneous movement of the toys, suggesting that simplification does not necessarily give a better understanding of the issue at hand, while acknowledging our sense of insignificance in a system dominated by technology.
‘INSTRUCTIONAL MODELS’ (Collaborative Single Channel Video Projection with Max Bellamy, Pete Gorman and Nikos Pantazis- HDV Format, April 2009)
As part of the ‘Instructional Models’ project exhibited at the Blue Oyster Gallery in April/May of this year, I participated in a collaborative single channel video work with Dunedin based media artists Max Bellamy and Pete Gorman, the original instructions for which were provided by Melbourne based artist Nikos Pantazis. As instructed by Pantazis, this work was based primarily in an artist studio space. To reflect the collaborative nature of the project we choose the neutral shared creative space of None Gallery’s basement. This provided the perfect location to look at issues of obsolescence. Depending on perspective it is goldmine or wasteland of mix-media artefacts, a literal ode to the obsolescence of the art object. Tasks given to us by Pantazis were carried out incorporating the years of discarded creations and obsolete technical equipment. Coloured bulbs flash on a rocket shaped sculpture, mannequin heads and masked humans move amongst piles of debris, and to it we bring something else to eventually be added to the heap; the projection of our own image. Framing the projection of live footage filmed from inside the space amongst the inside environment references the inevitable future of its very existence. The interaction between characters inside the projected image and ‘real’ environment suggests a vision of a world in which we simultaneously consider the past present and future of creation. Raising the questions of why creations loss their usefulness? When is preservation no longer necessary? And who is responsible for assigning this system of value?
A possible way forward can be seen in the ideas of media art preservation pioneer John Ippolito, creator of the ‘Media Art Notation system- a documentation tool for writing metadata for artworks. He states: ‘It is going to take more than manila folders and telecine machines to preserve anything more of our cultural moment than the lifeless carcasses of forsaken mediums. We need artists- their information, their support, and above all their creativity- to outwit oblivion and obsolescence.’[1]
[1] Mitchell, Lissa. 2008. New Data. In The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader, ed Su Ballard/ Stella Brennan,Auckland, Aotearoa Digital Arts and Clouds.
