implicit art

Both on my implicit art and “now on youtube” kick, my ‘04 Brett Kebble-winning work is up. With voiceover, or just documentation, as below.

Implicit Art, or as I more often call it, Implicit Body Art, is art that asks us to move in ways we normally wouldn’t, pushing the boundaries of performativity and affect. A different mode of thinking about interactive art - whether for critique or production or both - the Implicit Manifesto does not look to measure simulation or immersion, but instead explores stimulation and relationality.

Artists such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, David Rokeby, Char Davies, Scott Snibbe and myself have long been interested in embodiment as engaged (perhaps even initiated) through activity. For my PhD research, I’ve begun coupling our work, and that of similar artists, with the art of choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown, and the research of Performance Studies scholars like Richard Schechner and Phillip Zarrilli. The results are simple-but-awkward interfaces that ask us to chase and stutter with our arms, smell and breathe with our legs, or see and hear with our hands. Always performative, usually interactive, and mostly digital, Implicit Art asks us to accent, and examine, the feedback loop that is embodiment. It looks at couplings between flesh and world through the lens of clumsy maneuverings.

enter:hektor, by nathaniel sternBelow is a recent abstract (full presentation and info further down the post) based on my dissertation research. More Implicit Art readings and writings will be forthcoming over the next 10 months…
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The Implicit Body as Performance

Brian Massumi, in his Parables for the Virtual, asks us to put “movement, sensation, and qualities of experience” back into our understandings of embodiment without “contradicting the very real insights of poststructuralist cultural theory.” Mark Hansen’s ‘body-in-code’ echoes this call, reading the sensorimotor body as an “activity” and a “being-with,” which is “distributed beyond the skin in the context of contemporary technics.” They want to explore “a semiotics willing to engage with continuity” (Massumi), and examine our agency in the “scope of body-environment coupling” (Hansen). As a producing artist, my parallel question is, “How might the body’s continuity, and its potential disruption, be attendant, provoked and contextualized in contemporary art?”

My research contends that the body is performed. A body in space can “act” as a site of emergence, a boundary project, and an incipience. While Rebecca Schneider’s “explicit body” in feminist performance art performatively unfolds (Latin: explicare) and explicates, the implicit body concordantly enfolds (Latin: implicare) and implies. Inter-action is both constitutive of, and always already involved in, the flesh. Like an animated moebius strip, the body feeds back between affection and reflection: the implicit body.

This paper attempts to think through digital art as a proscenium for, and framer of, the implicit body. Interactive art has the power to “put in quotes” continuous, relational bodies and their immediate environments; it accents our dispersion and interference across borders, putting into crisis both our conscious and non-conscious perceptions and actions. I’m interested in work or environments that ask us to move in ways we normally wouldn’t, pushing the boundaries of performativity and affect. By setting the stage, interactive artists-as-directors create productive tensions between the per-formed and the pre-formed, shifting our experiences of “body”. At stake, are potential strategies for intervention in our understandings of enfleshment, art that contextualizes embodiment towards specific ends.

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A PDF version of the academic presentation: The Implicit Body as Performance

Versions of this presentation have been given at Perspectives on the Body and Embodiment at the University College of Dublin and the Second International Conference on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK; I also presented some of its initial ideas at the Ars Virtua ‘Body in Quotes’ panel in Second Life.

Howdy all. If you remember, early last year I developed a new WordPress theme as part of the launch of SAartsEmerging.org - promoting and critiquing emerging South African artists. That site is now maintained by Bronwyn Lace and Rat Western, and you should keep an eye out for upcoming changes.

Given the popularity of this theme, I’ve decided to release a new, widget-compatible version, and you can expect all future releases to be maintained from this site. I believe the most beneficial aspect of this 2-column design is its easy customization. The zip file includes:

• new design, with different sidebars for posts, pages and single posts - these are now customizable using WordPress’ built-in widgets
• header and footer images using a detail of Nathaniel Stern’s Compressionist work
• layered Photoshop file to put in your own image; includes gradient, curved edges and “pre-cut” slices (and instructions)

Download the zip file. (open source CC/GPL)

As you can see, this blog now also uses the new artsemerging theme (with a “widgetized” sidebar - note that all changes happened in the WP interface - I needed no code in any of the php files to customize this), and this coincides with the announcement of some upcoming changes around here — as I concentrate on my PhD research and writing over the next year, blogging will again pick up pace, mostly concentrating on thoughts and works related to my dissertation topic. You’ll see texts (rants?) that intersect between performance studies, art, embodiment and technology, and eventually a re-design of this whole site to match my thesis (this, over the next 4-5 months). In the meanwhile, note that “nathaniel and the non-aggressive” is no more, and this blog is henceforth to be known as “implicit art.” Enjoy the theme, and the blog, and please let me know if you encounter any problems, in the comments section.

More soon!

(PS Technorati Wordpress and Theme)

Not to again mention Winkleman’s appearance on the US telly about the big Warhol sale a few weeks ago, but there are quite a few good reads about the art market on the web as of late. Not gonna list all the ones I’ve seen (one reason being that it’s not really a focus of mine), but I enjoyed quite a few, if for no other reason than their critical eyes on how “the market” effects production, what it means for art now and in the near future. A few:

The Reality of the Collector-Driven Art World (blog post, Ed Winkleman);
Bursting art’s bubble (The Times, South Africa);
The problem with a collector driven market (The Art Newspaper, NYC-based writer);
and shorter, and more outside (and contrary to a few of the points above), Is That a Hirst?, by newcomer Irish gallerist, Haydn Shaughnessy. I thought this last piece also went well with Haydn’s Irish Times article on Digital Art a few weeks ago: Beyond Art and Design.

Some nice further discussion in the comments section of Tom Moody’s post about my Wireframe Series, and I’m glad for the crit - some positive, some negative, all useful for when I implement the next iteration (hopefully in Joburg in September). I’m even more grateful for his second post, a point by point comparison to Stephen Hendee (image: The Eye, New Britain Museum, New Britain, CT, USA, 2005):

-specifically evokes “wireframe” computer model (or “invokes” in the case of Stern, who uses the word in his title)
-reproduces wireframe outlines as an actual object
-”problematizes” computer drawing with surrealist invention, deformation
-use of materials such as tape and foamcor (Hendee) and rope (Stern) suggests folk-like or cargo-cult-like reification or fetishization of high technology
-inverts the idea of a computer as effortless and airy through the conspicuous employment of hand labor

I think that these, coupled with his point of it being “activated through its contact with people” (both the performers/volunteers, and the public) are where I should re-double my efforts.

Tom Moody defends Sentimental Construction #1 after Paddy Johnson’s initial slate. Although I tend to take criticism well, and Paddy and I are “still friends” (we met through professional channels, and now I like to think of us as such), I was very pleased to see my name on Tom’s channel in my RSS reader, and I’m a little less mopey about the initial bad review - what with Tom’s taking her to task. (Intellectual Property Spokesperson Tom Chance also had good things to say on the iCommons site, but it means more to me coming from an artist, and on an arts blog I read / like.) Above are better pics of the installation view than Tom (Moody) managed to find (he was just looking in the wrong place - it was on my camera, rather than online anywhere…), and there are direct links to the video and images on the lower right, here.

(Here are another set of parentheses, just to drive home the point that I think in little node-like bubbles.)

Of money, meaning and artists in residence is a lovely response to our artist talk and work by Tom Chance, while Paddy’s insightful review is slightly more critical (especially of my own work). It inspired a great conversation, actually, and I’m excited about where I might go with the next Wireframe, as I think through what happened, and what didn’t (with or without Paddy’s approval :).

And more from Joy. And, oh well, go here. That’s what technorati is for - I’m off to a planning meeting for next year’s Summit!

updated links (and again):

http://www.robmyers.org/weblog/2007/06/14/the-art-happens-here/#comment-39071
http://www.parthsuthar.com/derive/2007/06/15/the-art-happens-here/
http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/06/by_prokofy_neva.html#more
Why don’t artists use open source software?
Second Summit
http://www.ugotrade.com/2007/06/18/second-life-a-global-creative-context-of-the-future/
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/004417.html
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2007/06/icommons_keynot.html

Go/diva of the Icommons is an extension of Patrick Lichty’s (re)constructing Cicciolina project in which he, recontextualized as real-life avatar Cicciolina, questions the translations of mythology, culture, normative sociology, gender and IP issues. Here, Lichty stood in the iCommons art gallery for 30 minutes, then rode through the iCommons performance area before exiting. While the double play of Cicciolina asks questions of identity and image in cultural terms, Cicciolina as Go/diva is far more symbolic, asking what cultures we are creating in online communities. Attached is a properly sized texture for a primitive. Thanks for the opportunity, and it’s been an honor.

Opening went really well last night in Dubrovnik (still open for 2 days if you missed it)! There are a constant stream of pictures on flickr from the iCommons Air stream, as well as write-ups (more coming) on the iCommons site (we love you Paddy). Great turn out and response, and several net stars made the artists giddy (Jimmy Wales, for example, writing “edit this art” in chalk on Joy’s mural).

While this was going on, Sitearm Madonna and Cory (Linden) were finishing up the SL build for that iteration of the exhibition (mostly live now), and M.River, the other half of our AiR team MTAA, is in NYC re-mixing the photo stream, live (check out his copyright story on that here).