I thought of it as a material investigation, something physical, closely observed, a method to unravel something, for me not so much evidence, but a system of inquiry. Not an enclosure but an opening of possibilities. I did not want to think of it as a flattening out, a unity or something totalizing. I wanted to consider the forensic as being procedural.
If forensics pertained to law, I was thinking rules, algorithms, openings, lines of flight. If forensics was about things that had happened, I was interested in things yet to have happened. My sense then of a forensic cinema or forensic image is not to bring forward evidence vis a vis law under the proscription of law but to bring forward codes and rules that produce events.
The works I will show you come from and emerge out of instructions and procedures. It's the instructions that yield the work that explore a possibility space. So what you will see are instances in these envelopes of possibility. I want to show how this envelopes, these protocols and procedures, these technical instruments scale up in a networked and computational culture. I want to show how over time my interest become instructions and their various apparati.
I was trained as a filmmaker and it was not until my mid forties that I begin to exhibit work in the world of art with my initial work emerging in the context of net art, network art. The condition of the global network was bringing forward new processes, new metaphors and new arrangements that refigure our senses and at that moment various international museums including ZKM and The Walker Art Center and later the Whitney were interested in the digital and the network.
I am going to show you two works done in 1999 and 2000, The Memex Engine and Ambient Machines. In them instructions are used for interaction, for reading and playing in a certain sense.
The Memex is a rumination on the many fascinating tropes of extended self, distributed narrative, artificial life, collective intelligence and emergent systems. The Memex, set up in the context of a game, re-assembles Duchamp, Vannevar Bush, video games and many contemporary art works putting forward the notion of a engine from which works happen. The work is structured as a series of events, organized by episodes, a tool set, narrative tracks and collective networked actions.
As you can see in this image, you could build a bunny suit or other combinatory outfits. It lead me to make ambient machines, where I wanted to make ambient non-narrartive clips. It was the idea what if we had a set of film clips and we could recompose them indefinitely and order them on multiple screens. This is what video installation is. But what if we could each share a set of moving images and re-arrange them and save our arrangement.
In Ambient Machines made in 2000 I created an interface to a number of film and music clips and gave to users filters to tint the clips, slow them down, arrange them on the screen and to save them. This work as the title suggests was a machine, a software machine that could produce any number of unique works within the parameters of the software environment.
In the world of art, instructions coming out of conceptual art and avant garde music is not at all new. Think only of Sol Lewitt, Yoko Ono, Le Monte Young, Boulez onto Sophie Calle, Oulipo each working with proscribed sets of constraints. These artists worked with algorithms and instructions prior to our world of software and computation which of course amplifies and takes further instructions.
After the dot com crash, the art world turned once again to objects and we had not yet move into web 2.0 which was looking back the area I was playing with and which was picked cultural by relational aesthetics. There are always those in the arts taken by new technologies and such work can often foreground the technologies themselves. You sometimes sees these two put together, art and technology. Now Bourriaud is interested in something else he is interested in an art practice that reflects or responds to this new condition brought on by network culture. He's interested in how it changes us socially and the role and experience of the work or art.
In this idea The artwork creates a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity. Its theorist, Nicolas Bourriaud claimed "the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist."[14] Bourriaud explores this notion of relational aesthetics through examples of what he calls relational art. According to Bourriaud, relational art encompasses "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space."[13]
Bourriaud wishes to approach art in a way that ceases "to take shelter behind Sixties art history",[10] and instead seeks to offer different criteria by which to analyse the often opaque and open-ended works of art of the 1990s. To achieve this, Bourriaud imports the language of the 1990s internet boom, using terminology such as user-friendliness, interactivity and DIY (do-it-yourself).[11] In his 2002 book Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Bourriaud describes Relational Aesthetics as a book addressing works that take as their point of departure the changing mental space opened by the internet.[12]
In response to this In "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics", published in 2004 in October, Claire Bishop describes the aesthetic of Palais de Tokyo (which Bouriaud directs) as a "laboratory", the "curatorial modus operandi" of art produced in the 1990s.[17] Bishop writes, "An effect of this insistent promotion of these ideas as artists-as-designer, function over contemplation, and open-endedness over aesthetic resolution is often ultimately to enhance the status of the curator, who gains credit for stage-managing the overall laboratory experi- ence. Bishop, also asks "if relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why?"
So we have relational aesthetics, art by instructions, code instructions and objects that bring about interaction.
Where much of this comes together is in performance art, in the body, as social creatures embodied and socially situated in the discourse of art in the event of art.
What I want to share with you then is how instructions and interactions and the event of art, its material, audiences and cultural practices come together in an exhibition I had at the Minsheng Art Museum called Eternal Sunshine. This will give us the direction where we are going.
It will also allow me to spend some time to show you how this comes together by various non-linear and parallel investigations in my own practice of art which includes films, photographs, objects and installations.
Let's return again to instructions and interactions but this time embodied and on the go.
A series of performance works called En Garde. En Garde as you may know is a term used in fencing to warn your opponent to be on guard and to assume the position preparatory to a fencing match about to ensue. To humor my small child, I do many of these small moments of En Garde.
And this.
In doing this we would put on the moment creating another relation to our environment and ourselves. We would create an event of art.
Below two clips from an installation and film project where I gave actors and artists cameras asking them to record themselves alone in a room.
These smaller films were part of a narrative film about a group of artists who formed a collective to see as a group if they could, in quotes, change the world. Here is the trailer. I had come to the point in my films where I realized to really have actors and artists reveal themselves it would be best to give them a camera and ask them to film themselves alone. I would give them minimal instructions, an HD flip camera and days later they would come back with their recordings.
Below is a small film one of many with instructions, in this case instructions of code.
We live within instructions, coming to us all the time over networks and codes, within the software protocols that overlay our environment, let alone all the legal and civil codes, restraints and instructions which order the everyday. Such things tend to go into the background until of course something goes wrong, like planes disappearing in the skies, or cops killing too many people or diseases crossing borders, or when networks are compromised and we learn we've been listening in on the phone calls of the german prime minister.
I always intensely feel such protocols when I travel and I have to go through security when my person is subject to search. At that moment what's in the background but ever present in civil society is made clear. We are bodies in a social order within which protocols manage and control us. Those of you who are New Yorkers know this in that the last 10 years, anyone riding the subway is subject to being search without warrant or reason. But let's not get ahead of ourselves because I want to show you that seeing instructions is the beginning to better see the complexity of various ordering and emerging systems that make us who we are. Such instructions both constraint our possibilities and enable them. And that space is a very interesting one.
Below is a picture from a class I taught at the San Francisco Art Institute where I asked students to make three works from the pages of the class syllabus; a performance, an installation and object. In the first picture a student cut out various texts from the readings and placed them on the floor as a kind of very minimal sculpture.
Another student taped down pages of one of the essays into a square on the floor, sat down and shaved his head.
When at first I told the students that I wanted them to work with these restraints they were sort of annoyed or indifferent but as time went on they realized how much with the same underlying materials, simply the paper of the 8 readings, they could do and found it liberating.
Now think of the breakthrough question of Facebook. 'What is your status?' With that simple question they started the biggest recorded conversation in the world. This is the result of network effects, a good or service becoming more and more valuable as people use. Think of an artwork, its entire value is premised on its scarcity. The fewer works there are the more exclusive it becomes. So the one, the many. Perception Management. Public Relations. Almost all space on this planet has been sercuritized and monetized and all manage publics, their perceptions, their wants and their desires. I think it is far to say that the art world is that one laboratory where such procedures can come into some undoing.
Here is a work of art of the many and most ordinary.
You might know this artist Ed Ruscha. On the left is his book, Every Building on Sunset Strip. Now think of Google Street Views. Google has photographed almost every building on every street on every continent on this planet.
Maybe you know this work by Christian Boltanski.
I show it to you to give a sense of a number of things; how the information is sensual, tactile, physical. How it carries with it biography, history, how it overwhelms us in its scale. It's not an image or projected light. It's spatial and distributed. Notice how I called it information. Because in the image there are not artifacts, there are resemblances to things that are familiar. That's why artists who make photographs want to make them big so they are things, objects, experiences - they want to be part of the experience economy but in the business of art.
We don't usually look down on pages. Imagine these pages bound. Or these images unbound.
Below is a scrapbook page from a project called art box. A project about how our sight and senses, our knowledge and memories, our spaces are organized. In our mind, in perspective, in architecture, on the video phone and the theatre.
Here is a picture of the very room you are sitting in right now at Parsons.
I was teaching a class at Stanford in a very similar room and I asked the students to rearrange the classroom each time before class.
Such much of what I have told you are actions that are repeatable, scalable and they produce social relations.
With the above examples you begin to get a sense of the exponential power of instructions and with that variability. Different but not the same. Difference and repetition, seemingly contradictory. What gives?1 I looked this up on google and came to an article by a very-very good friend of mine, Daniel Coffeen, Some of My Favorite Concepts: Repetition via Deleuze And I just have to read it to you.
When I first read "Difference and Repetition," — I dunno, 17 years ago — I was so thoroughly confused I could not speak, read, or write for a year. But once I enjoyed a glimpse of comprehension, everything — and I mean everything — changed. Repetition is the defining concept of my adult intellectual life to date. Which is what Kierkegaard claims repetition is: to be born again and anew — an impossible, yet actual, undertaking.
For Deleuze, repetition allows us to think the relationship between sameness and difference without making one the derivative or disruptor of the other. That is, on the one hand we can say that I am a fixed self and all the different moments of me are accidental. Or I can say that all these moments are each a different me and hence there is no me per se: I am shattered and therefore there is no I.
Well, ok. But what if there is neither a fixed me nor a shattered me? What if there is no I but there is still a this? What if we deploy a different logic, one that is not premised on the existence, or lack of existence, of a fixed identity? That logic is repetition.
Repetition allows us to think limits, forms, and continuity without identity. That is, repetition allows us to think a certain kind of sameness that is not opposed to difference. So rather than being stuck in an either/or — either I am a fixed self or I'm a series of disconnected moments — I am one who repeats. I am the act of repeating this, then this again and anew, then again and anew.
Each moment of me is me; each moment of this is this. None is privileged. But nor are they isolated: they are repetitions of each other, a taking up and reconfiguring of elements to make something new. I am this network of moments, this limit that is always becoming. When there's another me that doesn't seem to fit — well, it does fit: it recasts the network, redraws the limit (a limit that is a process, anyway, not a stable line).
Repetition displaces any call to an original me. It's not that it undoes the original (as Derrida's iteration does); it's that there never was an original: we are always already a repetition. (Coffeen)
Here is an excerpt of a computational film made of some twenty images.
The film is made by a set of instructions that both generate new sounds and new shot durations. It's made in a program designed in MAX MSP Jitter. The films and hundreds of them I've made can play for hours and days and years never repeating themselves. It is endlessly emerging. As my friend would say, 'There is no original, only versions to infinity and it is beautiful.'
Here is another short film but where the first one is made of instructions this one is fixed. The film was made at a period when I was very interested in micro sounds. It's made with one photograph. I made a number of 1 image films.
But note the difference, where the first film can play infinitely, the second is finite. Around 2002 I wanted to rewrite the film projector in software as a variable instrument. Film as most of us know it comes to us as a single channel or one screen, fixed temporal event. And as its one screen we have an mise-en-scene of one shot following another. But it does not need to be that way.
Let me step back for a moment. In my book, Everyday Cinema, in the introduction I tell the story of working in Hollywood as a conceptualist, screenwriter and occasional director. At the UCLA film school one is taught to make film as a product for the studio system. Of course as in every liberal arts academic program there is the murmur of film contributing to political consciousness and there was 1 class on avant garde cinema but the large Hollywood sign casting its shadow over the hills of the Los Angeles basin let's you know that the star system, weekend box office grosses, producers and accountants run the factory and control the industrial product of cinema.
Some would Hollywood films, they're all different but they're the same. And that's the point.
When I left Los Angeles to go to San Francisco I had a chance to make a film I long wanted to make and we shot the film in 35mm. There was in 1997 when there was still no video camera like the red camera nor consumer software to edit films. You can see in the clip, the protagonist of the story wants to smash the mirror of himself, the narrative of himself but making a movie. Film here is still working under the regime of representation. It is thought of a story making machine. And that's a fantastic thing. But this sense of the cinema alone would miss that cinema, film and television are technical apparatuses constrained and employed for very specific ends. Remember I have also said that constraints can create great things.
Then I made a film Confessions of an Image. It's a meditation on cinema and what happens when the projected light of cinema becomes the electronic pulses of the digital.
By the late to mid-nineties it was clear that all media would be absorbed into the world wide web. The once bounded media would become unbound. Marshal McLuhan had sensed this at time when there were only mainframe computers and written about this as a global village with the instantaneous transfer of information which of course started with the telegraph. But more than that the world wide web would bring us two communication between sender and receiver.
I wrote about this in my book Hyper Hyper the Unbounded Wor(ld).
But of course the book is bounded, a bounded infinity but bounded.
Here an entry in the book is entered into a wiki created for a project at Cal Arts. The book above fixed in order is navigated in an entirely new way.
Interestingly the project at Cal Arts lost funding and the wiki has gone off into the ether. But never-the-less the wiki is very much the way we read today, laterally and associatively. I have always loved books but from this time on saw and made them as objects.
'Long before the Internet, books were the miracle that carried information far and wide. Some scribbles printed on a page conveyed worlds. But as Marshal McLuhan and Quentin Fiore so deftly showed in The Medium is the Massage, a book is a material technology. It is a thing with limits that inflects information to fit its needs and desires (most notably, perhaps, books tend to be linear).
Books —from codec to clay table, from papyrus to scroll, from hard back to paper back to e-book — are bound by their material form. Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book from a number of folded or unfolded sheets of paper or other material. In The Unbounded Wor(l)d, I wanted to reconsider the book and re-figure it as a new site of possibility, as a geography, as a territory with new ways of knowing, seeing, and enjoying.' 2
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Below is a screen shot of an interface we designed for artandculture.com a company I founded in the late nineties. It was infinitely extensible and there were a number or algorithms designed to make correlations and connections between the artists by virtue of sharing attributes. The idea was not to hard wire the relations but to let them emerge and surprise.
You can a film clip of the first artandculture here.
If montage is fixed in most cinema, in a computational cinema it can be variable.
What if we could read or visualize the cinema not in terms of dramaturgy but in terms of lines of flight, as forces coming up against each other, but abstract forces.
In this project done for the Whitney and Tate Modern, I wanted to re-present the logic of the contestants in the Battle for Algiers as presented in the dramaturgy as algorithmic instructions. What was seen in the film as an enacted drama is seen in the app as lines of force trying to control and occupy space.
With what I have shown you so far I want to suggest that writing an instrument of inscription, an instrument or rule set that gives forth photographs, films, installations, paintings, sound works, sculpture, narratives, software environments, is at the heart of most contemporary art practices. Though we often read these works as surfaces, especially in painting and photographs, and of course they are, I like to think of them in terms of procedures or engines that give forth events, relations and assemblages. Not images, not moving pictures, not narratives, not environments or installations per se but instruction sets that set forth material events. If there is then a forensics here, it turns not on evidence but processes and probabilities that produce events.
Of course some systems or instructions are more prodigious and generative than others and some keep my interest more than others. Some are out of my reach in terms of computational power or needed material resources and some don't compel me to return to them. Many others I see realized much further by other practitioners and I enjoy this to see the richness of these instruction sets and there possibility spaces more fully actualized than I had imagined or could.
Instruments of Inscription. Take for example this blogging platform I am writing into right now. From which I am presenting this talk to you. It has a number of rules and constraints, a number of dependencies. It has limits. What were once fixed machines like still cameras, film and video recorders, word and data processors, musical instruments, environments are now programmable instruments.
Simply the age of mechanical reproduction is now an age of programmability. And all programs open up possibility spaces. They also give us pause as to what we might have thought a medium to be. Take the case of the cinema. With the emergence of electronic and digital media we can no longer take for granted what cinema as on object as medium is.
Here for example is a rule set for sound in multi-window or multi-screen films. With this simple instruction set we have the possibility of a radically different kind of mise-en-scene and new modes of narration. (1)
These rules for sound for a software film projector I wrote with a programmer in MAX MSP for a project called Permutations and you can find some of the films at cinema-engine.Until recently the film projector was a hard coded machine, pulling down one film-frame at a time through the gate of a projector. As a result we've grown accustomed to viewing scenes in a film sequentially but what if we could view the shots that make up the scenes of a film all-at-once as a simultaneous tableau.
What if films could read other films as in this clip of Irma Vep next to the Man who fell to Earth.
What if we are making films with each other all the time.
In these pictures from chat roulette we can continually go from one scene to another and unlike Facebook and other mainstream networks and unlike porn who you meet and the terms you meet them on are always open.
In Guest 10497, I worked with actor/artist Raimonda Skereyte, who spend 6 months joining the web service free cams.
Think today of your iPhone camera, or the filters in Instagram and right away you can see there is no one to one relation to the picture you take when you click the shutter and what the picture can be. Almost instantaneously your picture can be realized in numerous variants of color, sepia, monochrome, b&w and so forth. The 'picture' is code and can be translated and interpolated into any number of file formats with any number of attributes. This variability comes from instructions from the software.
This is a still from Godard's 1996 film Forever Mozart. I changed the color of the image of this one moving shot. Not only do we have 'Glorious Signs Bathing in The Light of Their Absent Explanation' we have signs that are inherently variable. Not only are they variable but as Godard says in his statement they can be presented in 'the light of their absent explanation' or with any all kinds of explanations and reconfiguration. In fact I would argue that this is how signs are presented all the time and why we so much want to insist that they are presented methodologically or even scientifically or objectively, that is signs bathing in explanation when in fact said explanations just don't add up.
Take W.G. Sebald's, Rings of Saturn where in he uses found photographs to construct his novels, to contract meaning and narratives from found photographs. The photograph is an opportunity to construct an explanation, a narrative. There is no photograph, only a narrative about a photograph.
Below is an image, from a series of works for a show, #IMAGE in which I want to use the suggested format of an archive, or the blog archive to present varied suggestive images. Like recording media archives, databases are continuously variable, re-writable.
If conceptual art was about the instantiation of art as object or over and above the object by its great reduction it made all things possible in the realm of art. Here instructions are foregrounded and the ever variable and redoubling the experience we have online.
So I started to make works that physicalized the interaction demanded of instructions in social media. In this work, Art as Instructions, 3 blackboards were installed at the Shanghai World Financial Center. Each had a separate title; Utopia, Reality, Pleasure and each had specific questions inviting passerbys to answer.
I took this idea further in Eternal Sunshine.
In Eternal Sunshine at the Minsheng Museum of Art, Shanghai, Marc Lafia in his solo show presents a series of works that reflect network culture’s restructuring of the subject in contemporary society. In network culture mankind’s relationship to media has changed from one of representation to presentation; and from contemplation to embodiment. In the main space of the exhibition, the artist has transformed the virtual domain of online social networks, e.g. facebook, twitter, weibo, etc. into a large scale, interactive installation. This vivacious work involving video, sculptures, and audience participation brings together a number of techno-social concerns that have been central to Lafia’s career as artist, filmmaker and information architect. In particular his interest in how we are all part of an elaborate program that is as real as it is virtual.
Presented along with this installation, specially designed for the Minsheng Art Museum, are Lafia’s print and video works that investigate how subjectivities, once constructed through nation states and cinematic representation have changed over time to become a global condition in which the individual now represents him/herself through social media in the network.
All of the works in Eternal Sunshine are active metaphors of a technocratic society enmeshed in online media. They critique this new cultural order as an ecstatic artifice. In this order, mediated by personal computer networks, normative values are reproduced as consumable objects and the individual’s identity is played like a pawn. On the one side we see the community, empathy and transcendence that the global network inspires. On the other side we see how yesterday’s dystopic world looks utopic today and how concepts such as open, transparent, non-hierarchical, and participatory are mere pretenses to empowerment and inclusion.
In re-writing our instruments of inscription we rethink the very thing they configure. In seeing our apparatuses as programmable we see assemblages configured by abstract machines by programs. A way to think about this is this quote from Deleuze and Guattari from A Thousand Plateaus “writing has nothing to do with signifying, it has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come”. (2)
Now that we have discussed how the once machined or hard coded instrument is re-writable and programmable I want to turn our attention on how the writing of instruments leads to a desire to see the visioning of visioning itself. When an instrument becomes abstract you see seeing as instrumentation. I suppose I have wanted to take a picture of the instrument seeing. I want to make a film of the film making sense. The picture coming into formation. The apparatus that pictures.
This we will look at in part 2 in the following post.
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-I am always asking myself is my work about instructions or does it simply use instructions.
*rather than an exact picture made of precise composition with
all the elements selected and known in advance, this is a method, a program set
up to make pictures, that is procedural.
*procedural meaning there are rules, limits, instructions and
within those, play.
so the first thing is to set up a navigation system, a creative
algorithm made up of a system of contingencies, an envelope of possibilities.
random events, neither necessary nor impossible come together on the
basis of diminished causality. the procedure is to set up a possibility
space and the work is to probe that space. this is the program that
makes the pictures. that creates events, that creates the unforeseen
encounter.
imagine a traffic accident, a street, a rail road, a
traffic light malfunctions, two vehicles collide. it did not have to happen.
there is no sharp, firm causality. contingency in latin means
collide .
let's understand this for a moment philosophically in terms of
our class discussion on the turn from the geo-centric universe to the
heliocentric universe. in the pre-copernican universe this accident, this
maze of earthly life could be surveyed and understood by a divine eye in all
its consequences an inevitability.
but here the survey and the map are missing. we can make a local
map to see some of the probabilities, but we can't see the larger picture,
what happens is contingent and characterized by an inner endlessness.
so again this is the program and later on when i talk about my
book, image photograph, i will talk about it as a search for the program of
picturing in photography.
It's not just instructions that produce the pictures, sounds, drawings, moving images and installations you'll see but in fact a picturing of their procedures.
Such procedures give forth events. That's the work that I want to discuss with you tonight. I want to look at select works and show you the procedures that make the work and I want to ask ourselves wherein then is the work.
I would like at times to have a calamity physics, a kind of catastrophe happen to these systems, something whereby small changes in the system over turn or collapse the whole system entirely changing the behavior of the system. Certain of the systems have come about by errors or accidents or limits and maybe that can be thought of as kind of catastrophe or calamity itself. For the most part over time these systems are abandoned or returned to without me initially seeing them as a variant of an early project.
Notes
1.
2.Rhizomatic Writing Steven Craig Hickman
we can begin to see that the abstract machine, as a ‘movement of deterritorialization’ that allows for the possibility of stable systems and hence for the logic, syntax, and semantics that formalizes these systems, is not to be confused with the stable forms of meaning, the established relationships between content and expression, form and substance. As a dynamic system at the edge of chaos, a statement is meaningful not because of an established relationship it has to an already identified object, but it is meaningful to the extent that these established relationships become deterritorialized, become other, and in doing so allow for the emergence of new forms of established meaning. One of the frequent mistakes one finds among Deleuze commentators is the assumption that because Deleuze was critical of representational language – such as philosophy being the expressive representation of identifiable thoughts – he was offering instead an anti-representational, abstract philosophy with nothing in common with representational uses of language. Such a characterization presupposes the type of either/or thinking the notion of the abstract machine was precisely an effort to avoid. In A Thousand Plateaus, for example, they reject just this type of thinking as it was applied to the relationship between tonal and atonal music:
“…the important thing is certainly not to establish a pseudobreak between the tonal system and atonal music… The essential thing is almost the opposite movement: the ferment in the tonal system itself (during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) that dissolved temperament and widened chromaticism while preserving relative tonality, which reinvented new modalities, brought a new amalgamation of major and minor, and in each instance conquered realms of continous variation for this variable or that.”
The key, then, is not to break with the tonal system, nor is it to break with representational or established forms of meaning, but instead to inject a ferment into the tonal and representational systems themselves, a ferment that can allow for ‘new modalities.’ This is why, in a much later essay, Deleuze is quite forthright in saying that ‘the novelty of a statement is its meaning.’
3. Keywords
Variability, Permutations, Programs, Abstract Machines, Marc Lafia,
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