A Discomforting Quote

--discomforting anyway, to anyone who tries to make objective correlatives out of mechanical functions. But funny:

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him, and the three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose. As a general rule, any object capable of breaking down at the moment when it is most needed will do so.

--Russell Baker--

Russell Baker was an American columnist, most famous for distinguishing between being solemn and being serious.

International Herald Tribune!

All right! The International Herald Tribune covered the ISEA show. They got most of it right except for saying that the gestures were captured by photosensors and that I was "half mathematician" The online version's here. They also have a slideshow (with 3 great photos of my work) that you can access via a button on the second page or by clicking here. Appeared in the realspace paper too, with a photo of my work as well! Page 10. Woohoo!

More on ISEA

Above is a video of me and Corey Manders (who is contributing the gesture-recognition technology to the piece) fine-tuning the gesture tracking system. You can actually see the headless ghosts triggering the notes by moving their white-tipped drumsticks. The piece has since premiered at the opening but I haven't been able to digitize the footage yet. Incredible opening. I didn't know it until a couple of days ago, but this is ISEA's 20th anniversary. So it's a big festival. Over 500 delegates! Speakers include Lawrence Lessig, the inventor of the Creative Commons. The Singapore Tourism Board funded the buffet, so there was red wine that never ran out, servers with (among other things) huge trays of satay and some kind of salmon salad in those little Chinese porcelain spoons. A whole LOT of people managed to get drunk on red wine, which doesn't happen very often in Singapore, as they tax the shit out of alcohol. They opened the exhibit to the public at 9PM during the Night Festival, so there were huge crowds of ordinary people plowing through the space. Must have been 15-20 people in my room at any given time. Weird group dynamic electricity in there as people watched one guy interacting with the ghosts playing the gamelan. When the interactor would get off the platform, you could feel the twin drives of curiosity and self-consciousness building and warring in the audience until something would reach a limit and one brave soul would step up to bat. Really, really, really fantastic experience.

Chako flew in especially to catch the opening, which made it a real culmination for the three months we spent apart. (Thanks, babes). A bunch of Pinoys came and formed a kind of ambassadorial contingent. Old Mowelfund compatriot Yeye Calderon, his friends Nelle and Al Torres, (apparently the former personal chef of Kris Aquino), Lee Gibson and her husband Scott, Edsel Abesamis and his wife Sarah, plus some friends like the Malaysian photographer Nico Ong and his wife, and Ivan Thomasz, an old friend from the Singapore International Film Festival. A couple of the I2R guys who I had gotten close to were there too, their significant others in tow: Tze Jan Sim nd Chong Chieh Tseng. Varghese Paulose brought his whole family along! It was nice to be able to tell his daughters how grateful I was for his help, and it was really good to be there with everybody, there at the light at the end of the tunnel. Al and Yeye in particular took a kind of proprietary pride in the piece and became impromptu museum guides, explaining to everyone who stepped up how the piece worked. Woohoo!

Oyeah, finally got some time to surf the ISEA site again and found that the blogger JoelOng posted an interview with me here:

Couple of typos and things, but on the whole I think he really put it together well. I was afraid I'd kind of rambled during the interview.

ISEA Update: Robot Gamelan Beaters

So far the concrete (actually wooden) results of my two months in Singapore:





Above are two shots of the beaters for the Kenong (3 units from a set of 10)



Above is the Kendhang Ciblon (medium-sized drum) and one of the 2 beaters I made for it.



These weren't even the biggest gongs in the full-scale gamelan I borrowed them from.


The beater for the Saron Panerus.



Another angle.



Closeup of the solenoid mechanism. About as simple as you can get. Many thanks to Professor Jan Mrazek, the the head and teacher of the NUS gamelan group (Czechoslovakian, but an absolute Southeast Asia geek), for his very generous loan of the instruments, and to Varghese Paulose, the head of I2R's fabrication laboratory, without whose enthusiastic and welcoming support I wouldn't have been able to move a single step on this project.

Duh-Day

Made a breakthrough realization today. The solenoids were louder than the gongs, so I thought the solution was quieting the solenoids. Forgot that you could also make the gongs louder. And how do you do that? With MASS. There's a reason the traditional mallets are so heavy: it's because heavy sounds good. Moral of the story: Respect vernacular technology. If they've been doing/building it that way for a couple of hundred/thousand years, it's because there are sound physical reasons to build them that way. Jesus.

Stupid, stupid, stupid! But any day you realize how stupid you've been is a day you've gotten a little smarter, so I suppose that it's a good day in that sense.

The image shows the solenoids and the mallets. On the left is a denuded tennis ball on a stick. This was modeled on/inspired by the padded balls they traditionally use on the gongs. On the right is the new beater I kludged together after the light came on. String wrapped around a good SLAB of wood (from the wood stash of Yeye Calderon, a painter/old Mowelfund comrade now residing in SG. Salamat, Ye!). Mass made all the difference.

Another interesting detail. When the tennis ball mallet hit the gong the first time, it made a nice, loud sound. If it hit the gong again, before the gong had come to rest, sometimes it would make a loud sound, sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes it would even damp the gong. Eventually realized that it was a matter of phasing. If the mallet hit the gong out of phase, the waves it generated in the metal would cancel out the waves already there. Apparently, the solution is just to use really heavy mallets, so that they pack enough punch to damp the existing vibrations AND generate a whole bunch of new ones. Like I said, duh.

I bow in the direction of all the long-dead creators of gamelan instruments, and their acoustic/engineering/physical solutions. I follow in the footsteps of giants.

PS ISEA has its own dedicated blogger (nice idea). He's Joel Ong, whose job it is to write up and photograph the festival and process. His stuff can be found here.

ISEA Update

ISEA update. Raining like 3.67 motherfuckers here so I can blog without feeling guilty. Didn't realize I had such a protestant/confucian work ethic. This is a video of the prototype mechanism I built for Quartet- the intallation I'm building for ISEA 2008. Photosensor on the screen registers the white block on the end of the image's drumstick and activates a solenoid that strikes a lever and hits the Javanese xylophone. Hope to be building 15 more of these. But quieter! The damn solenoid must be 5 times louder than the xylophone!

Gave a talk the other day at the I2R (the research center that's facilitating my work, also known as "I squared R" and the Institute for Infocomm Research ) to a roomful of engineers and progammers, including Corey Manders, my chief collaborator for the computer vision and conducting interface, and my host Dr. Farzam Farbiz of I2R's Signal Processing group. Must have been over 20 people in there if stage fright hasn't magnified the crowd in memory. Great reception, nice feedback. Presented my work as a history of investigating/seeking non-cinematic ways to use moving images. So I mentioned Volume Control, /mutation and Spinning Jimmy. Forgot to mention Shift Register, Damn!

Dr. Farbiz asked a classic question: what is the engineering significance of the work? (I2R is an honest-to-god research center that invents stuff to sell, so every research initiative has to be justified in terms of technological significance and business model). I said that there was no engineering rationale I could currently think 0f that would justify using images to control machinery. It is much less efficient than using computer programs . Thus, I said, to a pure engineering intelligence, the work was meaningless, or at least redundant. However, I said, it means something to humans, who conceive images as powerless ghosts, to see that idea violated in physical space. (Of course, I didn't put it this succinctly during the question-and-answer period). The artwork revises, and makes visible, our preconceptions, at a visceral level. This opened up a nice little discussion among the programmers and engineers about the uses and meaning of art.

Of course, the pure engineering intelligence does not exist on this earth. A pure engineering intelligence would find it illogical to wear clothes on a hot day, and find swimming trunks and underwear indistinguishable. A human engineer, on the other hand, finds the idea of going to work naked, or of wearing underwear to the beach, unthinkable.

This capacity for finding things unthinkable is a symptom of culture, and therefore of humanity, that which is immersed and defined by cultural ideas. This is the side of us that art speaks to. Art makes the overlooked and unthought visible, thinkable, palpable.

Possible definition: Artworks are multivalent and unfinished signifiers. They invite us to speculate about their significance. Thus the viewer builds the finished work in his mind, for himself, by augmenting the signifier with his own signifieds.

PS the page describing my stuff on the ISEA website can be found here.

Conducting Ghosts in Singapore

New project! In 2007, I pitched Quartet, a project I proposed to ISEA, The International Symposium for Electronic Arts, a new media arts conference and festival in Singapore. My proposal got selected and so I am now an artist-in-residence at the National University of Singapore, and with a tenure till early August.
(http://www.isea2008singapore.org/exhibitions/air_info.html)

I will be developing Quartet in collaboration with the Institute for Infocomm Research (abbreviated in print as I2R and in speech as "I squared R") -- an honest-to-god commercial research center, where the people invent stuff for a living. I'll be working with Corey Manders, an ex- professional saxophone player who fucked off from music, became a computer engineer and is now in I2R's Signal Processing Department trying (among other things) to make computers see.

For Quartet, I will be making video images play instruments in the real world. I2R will help me make an computer vision interface so that a person will be able to conduct the four video-instrument tandems by waving his arms in the air. (Mwahahaha! It's alive! Krakaboom! )

I'll be incorporating the circuits I used to make Spinning Jimmy, the conceptual-kinetic video installation I made for Visual Pond's End Frame exhibit. To recap, Spinning Jimmy had a video loop of a man lifting a sandbag over his head. A sensor detected each lift of the sandbag and moved a little crank that caused a thread to be wound upon a spool. (So I now have in my house a spool of red thread that was wound by a ghost in a television monitor. I should make a whole bunch of these and sell them in little glass boxes or something. )

For Quartet, I'll be using the circuits to play a stripped-down 'punk gamelan' ensemble, (essentially four gamelan instruments I will rip out of a full-fledged Indonesian orchestra) and write a bunch of algorithms that will hopefully create something interesting to conduct/listen to.

So the work might also be seen as a development of Volume Control, the visual score I developed some years back and which was most recently played by Tengal's Gangan Ensemble during Teddy Co's three-screen video-music extravaganza Sinemusikalye last March 16 at the Remedios Circle.

Below are links to Sinemusikalye, but I think you have to be on Multiply to view the sites.

http://earthmedicine.multiply.com/photos/album/58/Sinemusikalye,
http://tengal.multiply.com/photos/album/49/SINEMUSIKALYE

So yeah, Quartet : Spinning Jimmy Meets Volume Control!

WOOHOO!

A Comforting Quote

The frame of mind in which interesting things germinate is often more confused and desperate than organized and confident.

--Randy Thom

Noise and Causes

Some thoughts occasioned by the last NMAM gig (Minus Ten Decibels--- happened at the screening room on the 2nd floor of Mogwai at Cubao X last April 30. NMAM = New Media Arts Manila). Successful and not. Successful because most of the stuff was half decent to experience, and not successful because we couldn't play as softly as I'd hoped. Minus Ten Decibels was supposed to be an evening of quiet noise. Blums and I had actually hoped people would have to lean forward, searching for the sounds, but that was not to be. Aside from most of the performers apparently having difficulty wrapping their heads around that idea, the hubbub from the bar below was just too loud. Minimum volume was determined as the minimum volume level required to drown out the bar. Ah well. Maybe next time it can be held in a library or something.

Performers

Me, Autoceremony (Jing Garcia), Caliph8, Malek Lopez, Nun Radar (Pow Martinez) and Tengal performed sound, Jason Tan and Blums Borres performed video, which included insectoid footage created by the Lord of Mogwai, hizzoner Lyle Sacris.


Noise for a Cause?

A member of the audience, Atty Adrian Sison, asked if NMAM had ever thought of linking the shows to some kind of social theme, which made me bark a bit. I should have gone up and apologized, but I have to give it to him. He knew it was a legitimate question and he didn't back down. I eventually calmed down and gave him my 2 cents on the idea, which might be worth posting here.

I am against associating sound art with social/environmental/topical causes. And two reasons are that:

1) Doing so destroys the ambiguity of the work. The easiest way to "tame" new or unfamiliar forms is to link them to themes like poverty or hunger or imperialism. Then anything discordant in the work becomes the emblem of social iniquity, injustice, rage, or whatever. The work becomes a vessel for a set of prefabricated meanings. I prefer that the sounds and images in these works stay as sounds and images, or at least, that they remain available as signs/emblems for other meanings. Who knows. Keep social justice out of the picture long enough and maybe some of Lirio's robot cat solos might start to sound like love songs, heh heh.

2) The easiest way to convince people that you or the work are "serious," is to link the work to things which people agree are serious: things like poverty, rice shortages, tsunamis, etc. I don't like it when artists do this because it's an easy thing to do. Also, it's an easy way to pass off bad art, because the seriousness of the theme camouflages the formal flaws, making the flaws harder to see.

Pugad Baboy

I used to love the strip because Pol Medina used to be funny, creative, clever. His characters used to go into the future, parody batman, make surreal puns, etc. Lately he's run out of ideas or passion but he's been masking it with political commentary. Polgas and Mang Dagul drinking beer and talking about corruption in the Philippines. Topical, maybe slightly satirical, but most of the time, not really funny or even clever. Most of the time, it's kind of boring. I'd have to call this turn of events as artistic failure. Good causes are easy masks for bad art to wear.

Fine, what about good art? Say you put together a bunch of noises that actually have a beginning, middle and end, that have interesting dynamics, etc etc. Is there anything to be lost by associating it with, say, the Jonas Burgos kidnapping? Mingus did that a couple of times I think. He titled one composition I really liked as "Free Cellblock F, 'Tis Nazi USA" or something. Just tacked an incendiary title on the thing. He said he did it to make people think. Well, I dunno. When I listen to that piece, I just basically forget about the title and soak in the jazz. And another way of expressing that fact would be to say that I need to forget about the Nazi USA shit to be able to hear the damn horns, which would be another way of saying that linking sounds to sociopolitical themes make the sounds harder to hear.


Enough said. I want to thank everybody who came and soaked it in, and also our sponsors Intel, Globe and Sony Ericsson for feeding the performers and making the gig happen. Several people came up to me later and said they really liked the Q & A, so let that be a hint to anybody who reads this and shows up at the next gig: Speak up. People like it. ;-)

Cheers!

Klaus Schultze on Stockhausen

Several people have mentioned the death of Stockhausen, I think, because lot of people (including me) are/were under the impression that Stockhausen was a seminal figure in the history of electronic music. Klaus Schultze (one of the old members of the German 70's synth group Tangerine Dream. He eventually left the group and produced a number of solo albums) thinks different: he acknowledges that Stockhausen was certainly among the first to use an oscillator in a composition, but that this act was a minor experiment that Stockhausen abandoned almost immediately in a career dedicated to exploring NON-electronic music.

Below is an excerpt from an interview given by Klaus Schultze. The rest of the interview can be found here.

KS: Everytime a journalist cannot cope (pun intended) with a certain music, he mentions "Stockhausen" as a kind of synonym. Have you ever checked Stockhausen's output? About 5 (five) compositions that could be called "electronic", and they were done 30 to 40 years ago, made with an oscillator or something like this. He did over hundred of other compositions that have no relation whatsoever to electronic music. Besides, what I heard meanwhile, sounds awful to my ears and to most other people's ears and hearts. Stockhausen is maybe a good theorist. Who's listening voluntarily to his actual music, who "enjoys" it? I also had and I have nothing to do with Cage or Riley. Neither with their music nor with their theories and philosophies (if they have any...). I have nothing against it, but this is simply not my world. When I started to do my music, and before, I was listening to Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd, before it was the Spotnicks and the Ventures, but not to the names you mention. Nobody in my surrounding and in my age did. This was a kind of "culture" that just did not exist among us. Only many years after, and because every second journalist asked me about "Stockhausen", I finally bought his theoretic books and I read them. Interesting stuff, I must admit, but the musical results are still not my cup of tea.

(From another interview, two years earlier:)

I'm really tired of hearing this name: "Stockhausen". Have you ever checked how many "electronic" compositions he did? For the last 20 years not one. This friendly religious man does not even own a mixing desk (Which is no crime, of course. But it shows some things), not to mention that he never searched seriously for synthetic sounds. What he did before, in the fifties and sixties, was not at all "electronic", in the sense we understand it since Robert Moog and Walter Carlos' profound works. I have nothing against Stockhausen and his theories, but his music was and is of no big interest to me, not to mention: influence. ...There is no "myth" behind Stockhausen. It's just that one inept writer copies from the other this magical word: "Stockhausen". An Italian friend recently told me: There are many journalists who don't know much about a certain music. If those writers try to give a name to a kind of music which is beyond their understanding, they call it "Stockhausen". There are many of these writers.

Fuck Lomography

The question is not so much what the hell lomo is or what the hell
lomography is, as how the hell is lomography different from nikonography,minoltagraphy, leicagraphy, etc.

Lomo is not the name of a new technology and lomography is not the name of a new discipline/practice/art. They are marketing words cooked up by fuckbrain marketers.

The lomo is an instamatic camera made by the lomo corporation. Period. The answer to the question. "What the Hell is Lomography" is therefore "The art of taking pictures with an instamatic camera made by the Lomo corporation. "

If there is such a word as lomography, then the following words also exist:

kodakography the art of taking pictures with Kodak film
fuijigraphy the art of taking pictures with Fuji film
vivitagraphy the art of taking pictures with Vivitar lenses

etc. , ie: repeat for every corporation in the world.

Further, EVERY POSSIBLE COMBINATION OF THESE WORDS WOULD EXIST, so that, for example, there would be such a word as:

nikonokodakovivitalevisairjordanography, which would be the art of taking pictures with a Nikon camera using a Vivitar zoom loaded with Kodak film while wearing 501s and Nike cross-trainers.

So fuck "lomography"

Stupid Question

I despise it. It is, in my opinion, an act of speech whose vapidness is comparable to asking an earthquake victim, "How do you feel?" when a 30 story building has fallen on said victim's house and family. I hate it because it is undefined, pointless and wasteful and because of the fake respectability that cloaks its emptiness, pointlessness and wastefulness. It makes the asker of the question APPEAR serious and thoughtful, when he is not being anything of the kind. I refer to question whose general form consists of the formula:

"Is the Philippines Ready for X?"


UNDEFINED
"The Philippines"
"ready for"
"X" (Not because "X" stands for the unknown, but because the terms usually inserted here refer to new/emerging/poorly understood art forms.)


POINTLESS
To ask people about their opinion about the likelihood of X happening in the world is to accumulate information about people's opinions, not about X or the likelihood of X.

Parable: Someone asks 5 lovers of alligator sausage, "Do you think there is a Philippine market for alligator sausage?" One guy says yes because a, b, c, d. Another guys says no, because e, f, g, h. At the end of the discussion, there are 5 opinions and 20 reasons, none of which have been verified as accurately describing anything in the real world. For the question to even begin to have the shadow of a point, it would have to be reframed, critically and specifically, as a statistical question. However, a statistical question can only properly answered by a statistical survey.


WASTEFUL
It is a waste of time and spit to ask this question of an enthusiast/artist/maker, because you are in effect asking him what he thinks OTHER people think, or worse, what he thinks other people WILL think. Listen: He doesn't know, and his opinion is an enthusiast's opinion, meaning that a positive answer is probably colored by his enthusiasm anyway. An enthusiast or artist might have some expert knowledge about X. He has no expert knowledge at all about what other people think about X.

On the other hand, there are endless SPECIFIC questions that an enthusiast with his store of personal experience could USEFULLY answer. Questions which actually are questions of fact, or useful guides to personal experiment/investigation like: What are the different kinds of sausage? What are the different ways you can prepare alligator sausage? Are alligators farmed, or are they just hunted in the wild? How is alligator sausage different from pork sausage? from beef? Does the alligator's diet affect the taste of the sausage, and so on and so on and so on.

Can we just put a stake through this question's heart? I propose that we should all publicly recognize this question for the piece of emptyheaded fluff that it is and herefter suspect all framers of it to be emptyheaded and fluffy by association and therefore to be just and proper targets for our concerted hilarity and disdain. Kh!

Then again...

Was thinking about what everybody including me were saying at the Daily Disclosures forum re video art necessarily excluding narrative, mtv, documentary (etc). Just realized that my work Eisenstein's Monster (still showing at the Lopez Museum until March of 2008) is roughly narrative (as it can fairly be described to be the account of Frankenstein's Monster's creation as told from the viewpoint of the monster) and, as the sound track contains the entirety of Tony Bennett's "Stranger in Paradise", can also be classed as a kind of MTV. Yet it doesn't seem to NOT be video art...

One possible moral of the story is that if the limits of any genre are pushed far enough, the specimen becomes extreme/outside/weird/puzzling/engaging enough to persuade us to call it art.

Another possiblity is that I was/am mistaken, and that Eisenstein's Monster is not, in fact video art. Or that it is, in fact an MTV. (This could eventually be judged to be the case. Some artworks start out in one category and wind up in another, according to the flow of history. Some of Nam June Paik's looped pieces (eg "Button Happening") used to be called films.)

Another possibility is that the "No MTVs, Narrative etc" rule is equivalent to insisting that a work must somehow transcend/exceed conventional boundaries for it to be considered "art". Perhaps our search for "art" is a search for the strange, the uncontained, the transcendent, the new, or maybe even just the unfamiliar.

At any rate, for this idea to have completely slipped by me for a couple of months illustrates how creation and criticism/analysis/philosophy can SOMETIMES proceed apparently independently of each other. I prefer to make stuff naively, following the trail of fun or whatever, but everything made, (however it was made) should be fair game for analysis, after it's made. Just because it was made in the absence of rational analysis doesn't mean that it should be immune from rational analysis. Evaluation doesn't have to parallel the creative process.

Spinning Jimmy

This is a video of the work I contributed to the Daily Disclosures show. The title is "Spinning Jimmy", which is a play on James Hargreave's "Spinning Jenny," an iconic invention in the history of automation. A lot of artists sort of play on the difference between the virtual and the real, by putting props next to a TV. I wanted to make a virtual image definitively enter the real world by making it perform work. So I made this photosensor-activated crank thing that wound thread around an old VHS spool. Every time Jimmy lifts the sandbag over his head, he winds a little thread on the spool. Heh heh.

Visual Pond, the curators of the show, maintain a blog at http://visualpond.blogspot.com/2010/04/end-frame-video-art-project-ii-daily.html

They have more documentation there. Check it out. ;-)

2 Faces of Video Art Part 2

Another sign how conceptual art has somehow co-opted (or seems to be in the process of co-opting) video art: Ringo Bunoan, a curator and conceptual artist identified with the group surrounding Roberto Chabet, was complaining that the one-minute limit was improper, because video art unfolded over a long period of time. Now, from the standpoint of an experimental filmmaker or experimental video maker, it is completely reasonable to make one-minute works, or even works that unfold in a matter of seconds. Hell, commercials run for 30 seconds. Ringo has apparently equated the scale and motifs associated with conceptual video art (prolonged duration, looping, relative static frame, repetition, incremental change, minimalism) with all art made with video.

I have to say I don’t like the co-optation of the term, but let’s lay that aside for a moment. I’m thinking: that the field/technology of the moving image appears to present two main problematics, or areas of exploration. On the one hand there is the problem of alternative sequential meaning: how can you sequence images if you leave out narrative, documentary,mtv? Then there is the problem that the kind of conceptual video art Ringo is familiar with seems to tackle. As it doesn’t seem to be concerned with the problem of shot sequence, I’m thinking that it’s concerned with the shot itself. Using film terminology, perhaps we can say that its problem is the problem of alternative shot meaning. What else/how else can the shot mean? This seems a likely way of putting it, as it appears to be one of the major problems the conceptualists address, ie: what/how else could a painting (ie a single image) mean?

In short, I'm thinking that although the one-minute video pieces and the video installations are both art and although they both use video, they are two different kinds of video art, in the sense that they require different kinds of viewing attention, address different problems, and that you need to use different sets of conceptual/critical tools to talk about what they are doing.

Notes on the Daily Disclosures Show

Dammit, really falling behind. Although it's pretty clear in my mind that it's the artist's job to infect the culture with his ideas and that he should therefore put some effort in documenting ie publicizing his works in order to spread said infection, it's really quite difficult to make stuff and publicize it at the same time, especially if, (as in my case) the making part primarily consists of ironing out mechanical/logical/electronic/physical glitches in the damn things. After a long day of bughunting, the LAST thing I want to do is stare at a computer screen. Anyway. This show ran from 2007 Oct 12 to Oct 16 in a corridor of the 5th floor of the EDSA Shangrila Mall. It was produced by Visual Pond, a group of very young, very intelligent curators who have decided to dedicate a major portion of their activities to curating video art. As even Time magazine knows, and most of the art writers and critics here still apparently do not, video art is very nearly the new mainstream in all the big art biennales, accounting for over half of all submissions. As usual, it's taking a while to catch on in the archipelago, but hopefully the increased speed of gossip/communications in the 21st century (blogging, text, etc) and the cheap video equipment made in China or smuggled in at the pier will shorten the process of culturo-psychological penetration.

For those of you on multiply, you can check out the documentation that the Visual Pond girls uploaded there here: http://visualpond.multiply.com. There are photos, and mp3s of two talks. One was a primer on copyright law by Atty Louie Calvario of the Intellectual Property Rights Office, and the other an open forum in which I, Jun Sabayton and Teddy Co were speakers.

Anyway: The show featured works that basically fell into two categories: a bunch of one-minute video works for the One-Minutes Foundation, and a bunch of video art not bound by that limit. Those video works that were not part of the one-minute video series included both "pure" (simple?) video pieces that existed primarily as DVDs that could be displayed on any video monitor, and video installations, which incorporated physical hardware aside from the video monitors and DVD players.

Although the visual artist and curator Ringo Bunoan grumbled that an exhibit in a mall corridor did not do justice to the works, there is something to be said for the virtue of sheer mainstream accessibility. Shoppers with probably no previous acquaintance with video art stopping to furrow their brows even for just a few minutes, without having to commit to the act of entering a gallery's front door...I dunno. I like it. That aside, the show had a bright, contemporary feel overall, incorporating pop furniture from Cubao X and huge flatscreen monitors on grey pillars, all cables neatly tucked away inside.


The show reflected the dimly-lit and groping nature of cultural digestion, not only in the presentation and content, but also in the curatorial process: judges from divergent fields, (film, academia, visual art) struggling to find common criteria by which to judge the works, submissions that were NOT video art (documentaries and MTVs among them), artists themselves wondering whether they had actually made a piece of video art, and all looking for some kind of positive definition of what the hell video art is to light the way. Even Ringo demanded a definition, but tellingly stood at a loss for an answer when I asked her how she knew HER stuff was video art: what was her definition?

For a practitioner of her history and stature to have no definition should be enough to make one suspect that such a definition will NOT be forthcoming. Nor will it. As was eventually thrashed out in the highly vocal, SRO open forum held on the 16th, video art (and very possibly all emerging art forms) has to be defined NEGATIVELY, ie by what it is NOT: It's not animation, it's not MTV, it's not documentary, it's not narrative. The apparent unavoidability of a negative definition seems to be a logical consequence of the fact that "video art" is the current name for the project of finding alternatives to known ways of sequencing images. In other words: we currently know how to sequence images in order to make narratives, MTVs, documentaries and animation. Video art (and it's previous incarnation of experimental film) asks: HOW ELSE can we sequence images? To ask "how else" is to begin by knowing what you DON'T want to do, ie to explore by knowing the negative of the answer. In short: we have a negative definition BECAUSE we explore in a negative space.

(An interesting logical consequence of this idea is the possibility that we will ONLY be able to arrive at a positive definition once video art ceases to be an exploration in negative space, ie when it has died. ;-))

I am a bit disturbed however, with the current identification of the entirety of video art with the motifs and concerns of conceptual art. When did the two terms become synonymous? Although I am attracted to the conceptualist approach myself, surely there must be video art that is NOT conceptual? There was a work there that was essentially a big pink particle animation explosion. Ringo insisted that it was not video art, that it was only "a special effect." I was watching it myself thinking "this is very pretty, but yes there is no concept behind it..." when it occurred to me that there are a lot of pretty, ie decorative paintings, paintings that have no concept behind them, but we don't refuse to call them paintings. For a moment there, I thought I saw a possible turn the future could take: a new, defiant rejection of the conceptualist valorization of ideas. The rebels would call their stuff New Eye Candy and insist that revelation proceeded from sensuous and preverbal intuition. Heh heh. Will this future arrive?

Later.

Nietzche on simplicity

“Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.”

--Nietzche

The Two Faces of Video Art in the Philippines

Below is an essay I wrote in 2005 for Digital Paradise, a new media exhibit and held at the Daejeon Museum of Art and associated galleries in Korea. It was subsequently edited and republished by Lisa Chikiamco for the first End Frame Video Art exhibition held in Rockwell in 2006. I figured I'd park it here for ready access. It should be noted however, that recent exhibitions of videoart have tended to exclude the maximalist works in favor of the minimalist/conceptualist works, a narrowing of curatorial focus which Lisa Chikiamco herself has played some part in bringing about. Perhaps this is the way transitions take place in the Philippines. New stuff is made by friends of the old guard, which the old guard happily and uncritically show alongside of their stuff, unmindful of the visual disjunction. As the new stuff proliferates, so do its supporters. Finally, the old scene "buds" another scene, which focuses primarily on the new stuff.


WORLDS APART
The Two Faces of Video Art in the Philippines

As of the present, video art in the Philippines has roots in two traditions. One is the tradition of experimental film, which mainly radiate from the Mowelfund Film Institute (MFI), and the tradition of conceptual art which radiate from the teachings of the conceptualist Roberto Chabet. This essay attempts to sketch and describe the work and motifs of the two camps. For this purpose, I will delineate the motifs of the MFI/experimental film camp through a discussion of certain works by filmmakers Lyle Sacris, Elvert Banares and Ryan Vergara and the motifs of the conceptual camp by discussing works of Ronald Anading and Gary Pastrana.

The Face from MFI/Experimental Film

MFI director Nick DeOcampo (himself a filmmaker and film historian), asserts that filmmakers with a (non-Conceptual-Art) Fine Arts background simply saw the camera as something else to paint with. He further asserts that the sheer technical and economic difficulties of making a synchronized sound narrative on film or video in a third world country in the 80's (before the advent and proliferation of desktop editing) forced young filmmakers to create alternatives to a structure that made such impossible demands. However, it is also impossible to discount the influence of the Goethe Institut, which not only screened whole programs of experimental film, but also sponsored hands-on experimental film workshops at the MFI by filmmakers like Helmut Berger and Christoph Janetzko in the 80’s. Janetzko in particular, is famous as a teacher and advocate of experimental film all over Asia. It is primarily through Janetzko, and the Goethe Institut’s sponsorship of Janetzko’s workshops, that the memes of experimental film have spread throughout this continent.


Naturally, the death of film (especially the Super-8 and 16-mm gauges—the traditional, low-budget film gauges of alternative cinema) has made it inevitable that experimental filmmakers would turn to video. This transition/connection between film and video is the most obvious characteristic of Elvert Bañares' work "Gemini," in which he digitally reprocessed footage he originally created with the Mowelfund J&K optical printer. The film footage lovingly reprises familiar motifs from experimental film: found footage, the physical assault on the celluloid, (scratched emulsions, celluloid soaked in various chemicals, burnt, buried in the ground, and so on) and so on, producing a strange nostalgia in the viewer. Inside the computer, the work becomes further manipulated by digital processes. Bañares composites pieces of the original footage, multiplies it, changes the color and so on. That he has transformed his single channel work into a 2 channel installation is also indicative of the way experimental film in the Philippines slides between film and installation.

The filmic pedigree of Banares, Sacris and Vergara, is also immediately visible in the conventions they use to frame the “content” of their works. They include a title card, a list of credits, and, in the case of Banares, even a dedication. They show the filmmakers’ faith that all material on the screen outside the opening and closing shot can be experienced by the viewer as something apart from the actual content of the work. They are perhaps also more used to thinking of the work as pure information, and consequently also as something very likely to spawn copies with illegible, damaged, or nonexistent labels. In contrast, those artists from the Fine Arts/Conceptualist camp often avoid shooting credits, preferring that no text interrupt the video. They tend to see the physical monitor as the frame, and trust that a suitable label will accompany the work wherever it is exhibited.

The works from the experimental film tradition are often somewhat “maximalist,” with a kind of Rauschenbergian inclusivity. They are marked by a kind of hyperkineticism, filled with movement, noise, and jarring transitions. The artists generally view their art in the light of ideas elucidated by the Romantics in the 19th century: that works of art are highly personal expressions of the artist, the unruly manifestations of unruly spirits that are impatient with rules and tradition. This strain is particularly evident in Videotron. Vergara, a flamboyant and androgynous figure, shows himself using spray paint, focusing cameras and editing on a computer, amid a welter of images from the city and from television. The video presents a quixotic figure, dizzied by the modern city, cataloging it, manipulating images of it, turning it, by the magic of digital manipulation, into something part of him. The camera is the means by which he comes to grips with the city.

Of the three, Sacris has the slickest images, not surprising for a man who used to direct music videos for a living. Sacris, has previously asserted that although his images are representations of personal sentiments, these sentiments themselves are not for public consumption, and that the viewer is absolutely free to make what he will of the images. As a result, his previous work has suffered from a kind of hermetic quality. In contrast, Reincarnation’s dual structure of video and poem provides the viewer with a more limited space for interpretation, which turns out to allow the viewer to find more, not less meaning in the work. The mind, shuttling between the two structures, weaves a deepening tapestry of meditation, circling the issues of life and limits that have been staked out as the work’s subject-matter. His eight-channel work is designed to work with the structure of a ceiling and a floor, thus weaving the architecture of the exhibit space into the digital content of the work. Dancers run upward, flowing across the eight monitors, only to be turned back by the ceiling. The monitors flicker with extreme closeups that quote the lighting of the eerie animated shorts of the Quay brothers, the London-based directors of the live-action feature Institute Benjamenta, famed for eerie, atmospheric shorts like Street of Crocodiles, and The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer. Sacris paints the world as a jumble of abandoned relics. Humanity seems to wade through a junkyard of mementos, striving upwards, constantly turned back by an impenetrable ceiling.

The Face from Conceptual Art

Opposed to the maximalist-romantic orientation of the artists who come from an experimental film background is the minimalist-self-effacing aesthetic of the artists with a Fine Arts background associated with the circle surrounding the grand old man of Philippine conceptual art, Roberto Chabet. These artists see themselves primarily as visual artists who sometimes also use video. Ronald Anading and Gary Pastrana, both paint and build objects aside from creating video installations. Ronald Anading (Or “Poklong” as he is called by his friends) is also responsible for curating Interruption at the Big Sky Mind Gallery in 2001, the first all-video art show in the Philippines.

The works of this tradition are governed by a kind of “anti-prettiness,” inherited from the Dadaists by way of Fluxus. They reduce rather than accumulate. They substitute repetition for variety. They avoid micromanaged cinematography in favor of video shot in available spaces with available light. Their whole aesthetic is drenched in a kind of visual monasticism, a Calvinist preference for plain, unadorned appearances. This overt plainness overlies a covert aspect that is the true “content” of the work. Quite a number of artworks use video to illuminate an object as an indexical sign. The philosopher Charles Pierce defined the indexical sign, or index, as the sign which is causally related to its referent, like a footprint is an indexical sign of human presence. Typically, an ordinary object is juxtaposed with video that reveals something covert about the object. This covert aspect need not be something large or grandiose. It is often simply some fact about the how object was created: the point is the relationship between the video and the object. Gary Pastrana’s work Gravity Builds A Poem is especially elegant in the way each half of the work is so ordinary apart from the other half. In this work, a shelf at eye-level is messily piled with toy alphabet blocks. On the floor below the shelf, a video monitor displays the image of the artist lying on the floor throwing blocks upward, out of frame . The video, in short, simply documents the process by which the blocks arrived on the shelf. The work rejects the expressionist idea of the role that the artist’s personal labor and emotion play in the making of something recognized as a “work of art”. The arrangement of the blocks are arbitrary, but at the same time absolutely sacred: it is impossible to move anything on the shelf without destroying the nature of its relationship with the video. And while it is also impossible to prove that this relationship has not been disturbed, one also senses that the site has somehow been imprinted, or sanctified, by this idiosyncratic, arbitrary process.


Anading’s Found Object is strangely hypnotic in spite of the high speed of the images (produced by time lapse, a visual device usually associated with the maximalists) and the crashing noise of a concrete drainage pipe being demolished with sledge hammers. Again, the overt aspect is one of pure ordinariness. Lighting is utilitarian and camera movement nonexistent. However, the sped-up humans lose their separate identities even as we watch, and become part of a clanging, flickering, slowly changing landscape. In this case, the covert and overt elements are presented sequentially, unlike in Pastrana’s work, wherein they are presented simultaneously. The covert element, the noisy and destructive party organized by Anading is presented onscreen. But because Anading has reversed the video in addition to speeding it up, the destruction becomes an act of slow creation, wresting a kind of industrial poetry from the drainage pipe. At the end of the work, the overt object (the drainage pipe) stands whole like a witness to all we have seen before: a mute, impenetrable, yet deeply pregnant icon, reminiscent of the monolith from Kubrick’s film 2001.

Really Two Faces?

Film and Conceptual Art: From what I little I know, read, and been told, a similar duality exists in other countries’ art traditions, but that the stylistic/aesthetic divide between the two traditions corresponds to social and curatorial divisions: the two camps often do not mingle, and see the art of the other camp as a hostile tradition with which they have nothing in common. The young turks of the Videoart Center in Tokyo view the old guard of the Image Forum with suspicion and it seems that the attitude is reciprocated. No such divisions inform the Philippine scene. Makers of hyperkinetic experimental films exhibit their works alongside minimalist, conceptual video installations and toast the makers of these installations as fellow “filmmakers.” For their part, the loop-minimalists do not contest the label, and seem content with the curating of the shows. All seem united in the view that they till a common field.

It would be easy to claim that the Filipino artists don’t really get it, or that they’ve got it all wrong; to claim that their easy inclusivity indicates that Filipino video artists misunderstand that conceptual, loop-based video works are as much a rejection of assumptions and values of “traditional” experimental film as they are an exploration of areas this tradition does not explore. This would be the easy conclusion, and so we refuse to make it, and instead choose, at this time, to indicate that we are looking for another conclusion, and that we haven’t found one yet.

Mothra song in Tagalog

Bit of Pinoy Trivia: This is an extract from Mothra versus Godzilla (1964). You can hear the tiny islander girls played by twin sisters Emi and Yumi Ito (the singing duo called The Peanuts) singing in Tagalog:

Naiintindihan mo ba?
Mayroon ba doon?
Pumunta ka lang dito.
Halika't maupo.

(Do you understand? Is there something over there? Come over here. Sit down.)

The phrase "Halika't maupo" is kind of an old-fashioned, or literary way of speaking. Makes me wonder if this isn't a straight rip from some old kundiman. Would appreciate it if anyone could say for sure. The composer is Akira Ifukabe, who composed the eerie music of the Mothra movies.

Media Art Histories

I'm currently reading MediaArtHistories a brilliant compilation of essays that link current computer/sensor/VR etc art to various phenomena/movements etc in the past. Needless to say, I adore the book. Haven't read anything like it. It's something that ought to be bought (especially by libraries) and read (especially by teachers, critics and writers). Not just because it would make my life easier when I tell people that I make media art, but because the world is not about to become LESS technological, which means that media art is a coming juggernaut. But, as the writers point out, a lot of historical threads are present in media art's themes. (For instance, Peter Weibel traces Mediaart motifs like virtuality, programmability, haptic interactivity and algorithmic process to Kinetic and Op art!)

For an overview of the kind of writing that the book contains, you can check out this site:

http://www.mediaarthistories.org/

It's the archive some of of the papers (in pdf) that were presented at the conference that eventually spawned the book.

About 40 u$ and not locally available as far as I know. (No whining please!) You wanna get it, go to Amazon here or MIT Press here.

Note: I've exchanged a few emails with the editor Oliver Grau, and yeah, he does have a vested interest in getting the word out, but I don't get anything for doing this. I'm just glad for some perspective on what otherwise seems like a forest of alienware (even if I make some of that alienware myself ;-)). I've also checked out Grau's own book Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion on Googlebooks (see here ). The bit where he says that Virtual Reality is an expression of the desire to "enter the picture" and then uncovers that drive expressing itself in a whole-room fresco in Pompeii painted in 60BC (!!!) is almost like criticism porn. Will have to get that one soon. Haven't been this excited about a book since I found a pirate pdf of Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media on the net. Mwahahah!