Ecological Aesthetics advance copy just arrived!
So excited that my advance copy of Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics has arrived! Out July 3!
Julian says it’s a good read.
art and tech
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Phonēy Prints
Some of my own work above… More than meets the eye, PhonÄ“y Prints are produced using ink made from ground up smart phones – complete with glittering grit in the details. More coming soon, part of The World After Us (though not yet posted on my main site!).
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Review: Jesse McLean’s When It Rains it Pours at Green Gallery
As I slowly walked towards the Green Gallery via Farwell Avenue on a snowing and icy Wednesday night, two 60-inch (or so) glowing LCD screens grew larger and larger in my vision, each presenting me with videos of how we consume… well, consumption.
Catalog (excerpt, 6 minutes total running time)
On the left, a delicate yet confident pair of hands mechanically browses a Sears catalog from the late 1800s – scouring over a landscape of hand-drawn horses, which market saddles and harnesses for us to purchase. On the right, we see a different kind of browsing and browser, our all too common doubled metaphorical “window” into Amazon.com: a scrolling grid of colorful and mostly useless objects, devoid of context, background, or sizing information (a bicycle appears smaller than a keychain).
Scroll (excerpt, 40 minutes total running time)
It’s mundane. Funny. Sad. It’s hard to look at. Hard to look away. Who buys this shit? Oh, wait, I think my daughter has that patch… Oh, that ghost pin is kind of cute. Is there a list of prices somewhere? No, not for the art… for the objects in the video…
Wait. What the fuck is wrong with me?
These videos present a very concrete frame for thinking about some of the (first print and now) digital realities around us, for reflecting on how we engage with distance shopping and online culture, visual literacy and the consumer society it encourages. That complexity can’t really be described concisely – at least not very well. But we can feel it in, and want to talk about via, the strange comparative gestures McLean dishes out. There’s just so much she implicates (positive and negative, frustrating and gleeful, embarrassing and desirous) in the continuous and varying relationships we have with money and objects, matter and concepts, looking, seeing, and being seen; buying and selling, being and becoming, hating and loving, and more.
Catalog and Scroll, image courtesy of Green Gallery
The show is, on the one hand, a wink and a nod to those critically-minded folks that are self-reflexive enough to recognize our participation in that culture, how contemporary society (and all of its predecessors) consume, and are often consumed by, things and spectacles, trends and treats. And on the other hand… It reminds us that we (“critically-minded and self-reflexive folks”), too, are no better; or at least that we can always do better. The feeling that rose in me reminded me a bit of this Jon Rafman quote, from his bizarre interview with Bad at Sports in 2010 (I’m paraphrasing here): sometimes, in Postinternet culture, we never know if we’re celebrating or ironizing what we make art about.
I hate to love to shop for the stuff I hate to love.
The Invisible World (Books), 18h x 24w in
To the right of these videos is a beautiful framed print of some Life books on various subjects: Primates and Ecology, Mathematics and The Mind, Evolution and Ships, to name a few (see above). Again, I struggle. I’d be interested to know what the books contain: both for knowledge, and to guess when they are from, as represented by the language and beliefs they present (we know so much more now, both scientifically, and about our own judgments… right?) . But then… I could as easily see this stack of books in Goodwill as I could in the Anthro or Geology department at UWM, or – oh, the irony – on a hipster’s mantelpiece.
Objects (Thumb drive), 20h x 16w in
On the other side of the video pieces discussed above, there are several framed prints of strange and funny objects; they are visually contextualized as if on instagram, with potential “like” hearts in the upper left corner (and numbers – mostly zeroes, and one 57K – that tell us their ratings); and I don’t know if that’s real (were they actually on Insta?), or even if the objects are real. Â Are they from Amazon, or 3D printed, or just rendered / virtual?… It’s amusing. And weird. And uncomfortable. I look around at other people looking, wondering what they are thinking. And I question it. And I question myself, again.
It’s so easy to get lost here, cycling around, cynical with the world and myself, and everyone around me… But then, here we are, in a crowded room despite the weather, talking and chatting and laughing and recognizing ourselves and our issues, for better or worse: making and looking at art, trying to be and do better than what came before.
Is that so wrong? In the world of alternative facts and fake news, where a reality star is president and an ex-president war criminal has become a painter, can we trust images or computers? Dogs or books? Anyone – even ourselves? And to do what, exactly? And with what power?… So, then I forgive myself… After the Greatest Generation made America Great and the Baby Boomers built on that, only so the latter could dismantle the safety nets they both created once they were through to the other side… our responses have to first be criticism with cynicism, if only to make room for the productive discussion and activism I have come to see Gen Xers and – yes – Millenials, are truly capable of. We need to look closely, then walk away – if only temporarily, to regroup – to find meaning, and purpose, and to make change.
See a Dog, Hear a Dog (McLean video still, total running time 17:40)
The center room, then, has three looping videos from 12-20 minutes each, which I admittedly came back to several times, not realizing they were separate – yet still having a hard time tearing myself away from them each time. Thankfully, McLean sent me links later, to rewatch and ponder. Let me first say that McLean’s juxtaposition of sound (or the lack thereof) – music, text, reading, effects, jarring silence – with image – realistic video, abstract digital drawings, and more – is masterful. With See a Dog, Hear a Dog, (17:40), she somehow creates a strange but familiar, almost nostalgic, empathy with and sympathy for, computers, dogs, humans, and shapes. We hear a computer telling us her feelings and reading from the bible. Dogs whimpering and wailing. A piano playing a sad melody. The affect/effect is a combination of watching CNET, Mr Rogers, and Arrival. The stories and texts are strange and implicitly political, the crying dogs terrifying and sad, the music eerily teacherly, and the “conversations” difficult to follow – despite our knowing how hard all of the subjects are trying to communicate (though what, exactly, is not always clear).
The Invisible World (video still, total running time 20:15)
The Invisible World, then, is 20 minutes of Sci-Fi snippets, scientific how-to’s, unboxing and shopping spree youtube clips, home videos, stills of “warm” and “homely” objects (think a yellow butter dish from the 70s) paired with texts about capitalism and meaning, audio narratives about vaccines (among other things)… and more, all juxtaposed in McLean’s signature style outlined above, with sound bridges and silence, embedded empathy and oddities. This was the video I couldn’t tear myself away from, watched waiting to see and hear what would happen next, trying to make sense not of the film (it’s impossible), but rather of my feelings about it, about the tactics deployed and how and why. In the end, I think I encountered precisely my feelings around trying to communicate and relate: to information and consumption overload, to others and things, to our pasts, presents, and futures (and future pasts). Communication, like consumption – I can’t help but think – always fails. But… perhaps it’s still worth trying?
Wherever You Go, There We Are (still, total running time 12:00)
And Wherever You Go, There We Are has audio of spam emails, read by an automated correspondent, juxtaposed with hand-colored historical postcards (with some hand-written and some typed texts on the underside) to create a 12-minute artificial travelogue. There are occasional videos of fingers clacking an invisible keyboard, upright; videos of natural landscapes or highways; and a feminine hand on a computer trackpad. Taken together, it wanders and has us wonder around real and virtual, affect and effect, perception and performance. Where do we go when in front of our screens? Where don’t we? Where does the value or lack thereof lie in each?
Rains (excerpt, total running time 7 minutes)
In the last room is Rains, a 7-minute video of digital rain, pouring quickly, but more slowly changing direction, ignoring gravity: up, down, left, right, in arcs and planes and more. A reference to the title of the exhibit, it does kind of sum it all up. A torrent of things and feelings and people and animals, stories and not-yets, all push and pull, potentially drowning us. We can try to bring an umbrella. Or stay inside… And sometimes we might. But sometimes, we could try asking someone else for shelter, or building some of our own – perhaps big enough for friends and family, with a fireplace, and a couch, and some whiskey. Sometimes, we might contemplate why it comes down so hard, what conditions lead to this, and if and how we might change them. And sometimes, we might run outside and play in that rain, allowing ourselves to revel in the water – and invite others to join – consequences be damned. After all, we are the ones who will be left to clean up any given mess, whether our own, or from the others who came before us.
A Nohl Fellow last year, and an Assistant Professor in the department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at UWM, Jesse McLean is a talented artist, generous teacher, and interested/interesting person to chat with. When It Rains it Pours is not an easy show. But it’s a necessary one. It doesn’t provide answers, or even direct questions. Rather, it asks us to question ourselves and our relationships to contemporary digital and consumer culture; and more importantly, it then has us ask, What’s next?
When It Rains it Pours is on show at Green Gallery East at 1500 N Farwell Ave through May 12. The gallery is open Wednesday – Saturday 2-6pm or by appointment.
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Phossils
Hello world! I have a baby. And am getting married next week. So blogging has been slow…. But then, there’s this new stuff I’m excited about.
Phossils are, more or less, fossilized phones. Here I subject media devices to extreme heat and cold, artificial pressure and geological time, or other intense conditions that weather and turn these materials into… somethingelse. Through research, experimentation, and craft, I have tried to transform phones into crude oil, coal, or other fossil fuels, into synthetic archives and simulated relics for a future time. Cook, freeze, burn, smash, blend, and more… and put the results on exhibit, in beakers and tubes, on pedestals and stands, and/or as archaeological finds.
Yay, art!
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Briefiew: Art and Tech at VAR Gallery, Milwaukee
Maksym Prykhodko’s shout, an interactive installation.
Happy New Year, Everyone! I apologize for the minimal posting of late. Aside from the obvious holiday season, my son Julian was just 4 weeks old on Sunday – so I have literally had my hands full quite a bit over the last while (usually full with baby). Things will pick up again, if slowly, as we get into a routine… Here’s my first in a while: a Briefiew of the Art and Tech exhibition at VAR Gallery, Milwaukee, at which – disclaimer - Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and I have a few of our collaborative pieces.
It seems a bit dated and broad to call an exhibition, simply, “Art and Tech” in the year 2018, and yet the content and context of this show give it an edge that is both genuine and enlightening.
Artist-curators Becky Yoshikane and Cristina Ossers, in front of 3D printed works by Fred Kaems
First: context. The artist-curators, Becky Yoshikane and Cristina Ossers, are both graduates of the once-quite-large but now-defunct Interdisciplinary Arts and Technology program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and every single artist exhibiting has either taught within, guest spoken at, or graduated (or, in two cases, at least taken classes) from, that same program. And more than half of them have exhibited, and received press, internationally for that work.
Given its success (and there’s plenty of it, if you look at its graduates), what does it say that this program no longer exists? Is it because of the overly territorial environment of academia, amplified by cuts, cuts, and more cuts? Is it that creative uses of technology are now seen as more suited to design, business, or engineering programs? Could it be that technology has become so integral to all forms of art that it need not be its own major any longer? But what does that mean for the discourses of the digital, or for more advanced skillsets that require faculty and labs, like programming, electronics, and fabrication? These questions are part of the overarching background to the show.
More than anything, however, Art and Tech seems to be placing Milwaukee’s computer fine arts scene – which, on this show alone, includes some of the progenitors behind the world’s largest Maker Faire, a coder behind one of the most popular “expensive” ($30) music-making apps, highly-regarded fellowship, grant, and residency winners, and teachers from across the continent – within both a local and global context of thoughts and thinkings-with Art, Media, and Social Change. How do we interact between the digital, selfhood, consumption, data, projection, play, community, and more? Technology and Art/Culture, I constantly remind my students, are never separate. And at the present moment: all studio practices are digital studio practices; all cultural practices are digital cultural practices. And we need much broader and deeper explorations here, also asking how, why, and where we explore, together. And Milwaukee is one hub for precisely this.
The whole show is worth your time, to be sure, but here are a few of my favorite highlights…
Scott Kildall, two pieces from Strewn Fields
Scott Kildall’s Strewn Fields mine (pun intended) impact data from Earth-bound meteorites, and transduces these numbers into mappings for a high-pressure waterjet / cutting machine, which then carves into rock, producing new forms. Kildall calls the pieces from this series “data-visualizations” on his web site, but they are so much more than that. From stone to stone, marring to marring, I ask, what is lost or gained? How does Earth re-member (that is, embody again), violence, impact, or change? At what scale can we see, touch, and feel, the Earth, its climate, and the wonder that (and how) it simply is? Where do meaning and matter coincide, disperse, reconfigure, and relate/transform? I see all of these questions, and more, in each small tablet. I have been a fan of Kildall’s work for some time – why I chose to collaborate with him on several occasions – and yet I believe these understated sculptures are some of the strongest work I’ve seen from him to date.
Alycia Griesl’s Malfunctions
Alycia Griesl’s portraits that likely employ either desktop scanners or some form of slit scan imaging are probably the simplest of works on exhibit, yet it is precisely this thinking that shows how far we’ve come in the last decade or two. Whereas prints such as these would be considered high-tech and highly “filtered” in years gone by, we now see them only as emotive, and even recognize the procedure, the lines as moments of time, the colors as relics of the that process.
Adam Wertel
And Adam Wertel’s kinetic sculpture (I missed the title, but it’s probably something like Drawing Machine, given his other work), sees an occasionally and slowly rotating block of charcoal drawing, building up, and sometimes dripping lines on paper and graphite on the floor… If you sneak behind, you can see the mechanical arm, guess at his use of magnets. Like in Kildall’s case, there’s a kind of deployment of authorship coupled with a purposeful amplification of the agency of mark-making, in both senses of the phrase.
Fred Kaems displays photographs of people interacting with the large 3D printed sculptures he places in public spaces, changing all of people, places, and things, at once. Pete Prodoehl shows his funny and quirky interactive sculptures that make noise and emphasize maker culture itself, “when pushed.” Morehshin Allahyari, who I recently wrote about, displays her Dark Matter (above, video courtesy of the artist and Upfor Gallery), a video of binary-yet-mixed worldwide icons – barbies with guns for arms, playboy bunny scissors, and more. Most interestingly, this video is meant to travel, with NASA, to an international space station.
some of Pete Prodoehl’s sculptures
Works by David Witzling, Kevin Schlei, and Bryan Cera (another recently covered artist), (and, as mentioned, Jessica and me) are also on show, and there will be various other workshops and screenings. Overall, it’s a microcosm of some of the most current explorations in and with digital media, what it is and does and might be, how it thinks and asks us to think.
Art and Tech is on view through February 3rd at Var Gallery.
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Tops of 2017: a different kind of year in review
This was a short-lived tradition I started almost a decade ago, and I’m stoked to reboot it. Here, I put forward four Top 5 lists of my own: The Top 5 people I newly met in 2017, The Top 5 people I’d like to meet because of what they did (or the work I saw from them) in 2017, The Top 5 exhibitions for me (what I found most enjoyable), and The Top 5 shows I wish I had seen, but didn’t. Hope you like it! Feel free to comment, leaving any things/people I missed but might (or should have) enjoy(ed)!
The Top 5 people I newly met in 2017
- Julian James Lafayette Stern. My newborn son. Obvs. Also his mom is AMAZING.
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De Angela Duff
De Angela Duff co-runs the Integrated Digital Media program, a creative technology degree (er, set of degrees – undergraduate, masters, and PhD) in the engineering college at New York University. She restructured it to be more creative – to cover design and arts thinking along with utilitarian engineering skills – and grew it to more than double its size in a few short years. All this and she is a proud woman of color to boot. She hosted me in New York, along with Luke (below) for a talk I gave at their program last Spring.
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Luke DuBois
Luke DuBois co-hosted me on my aforementioned New York visit. He and his work are fun, smart, political, and engaging on so many levels. He is most known for his “human portraits made from data” (this is Dubois’s TED talk) and for his work on Cycling74’s artful Software Development App, Max. He’s also a great teacher and composer, and a generous seeker of funds for his students; and one can get a real pulse on liberal news simply by watching his Twitter or Facebook feed fly by…
- All my new studio assistants: Mary Widener, Jenna Marti, Alex Gugg, Josh Passon, Reid Finley, and Olivia Overturf (actually, I met Olivia in 2016, but it’s a fit). These folks have been working feverishly on new sculptures, new experiments, my new card game, and more. They do so with passion, creativity, and professionalism, all while having to put up with a very strange boss.
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Maggie Sasso
Maggie Sasso was a Nohl Fellow (a big deal in Milwaukee) a few years back, and we were thrown together for side-by-side solo shows coming up in Madison’s Watrous Gallery in Fall 2018. We decided to meet up to discuss the space… and eventually agreed to collaborate! I’ve had a blast getting to know her, her work, and her family. She is very generous, very smart, very fun, and both creatively thoughtful and thoughtfully creative. If you don’t know her or her art… do yourself a favor! It’s humorous and tragic, with both implied and explicit narratives from the sites and lives she touches.
The Top 5 people I’d like to meet because of what they did (or the work I saw from them) in 2017
- Amanda Boetzkes is someone whose work I only briefly encountered while doing research for my new manuscript, and who then wound up giving amazing and insightful feedback on an earlier draft of that text, pushing me towards the book it eventually became. The book is, without any doubt, much stronger because of her constructive criticism. Boetzkes has some wonderful texts out there already, and I am eagerly awaiting her new book project, Ecologicity: Vision and Art for A World to Come, which “analyzes the aesthetic and perceptual dimensions of imagining the ecological condition.” More on Amanda Boetzkes via her website, or check out some of her writing via Amazon.
N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics was hugely influential on my dissertation and thinking, and I still cite her regularly in my classes and texts. Almost 20 years later, her 2017 Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious differentiates between a thinking that describes “thoughts and capabilities associated with higher consciousness such as rationality, the ability to formulate and manipulate abstract concepts, linguistic competencies, and so on,†and “cognition†(2), which is the nonconscious capacity for processing information, the latter gained through biological sensation or perception, or technological sensors, mechanical feedback, or data received from external sources, among other things. Cognition, in other words, is a “much broader faculty†extant on some level “in all biological life-forms and many technical systems†(14). Hayles wants to have the humanities engage with and better understand “the specificities of human-technical cognitive assemblages and their power to transform life on the planet†through a more coherent “ethical inquiry†(3-4). She wants us to look more closely at what and how those systems act, cognize, and think, what we do with and as them, and why. Hers is an important premise and fascinating study of the “supporting environments†humans are “embedded and immersed in,†which “function as distributed cognitive systems†(2). As I said in an earlier briefiew of the book, I found myself alternatively nodding with approval ,and shaking my head in disagreement, while reading, but that is precisely because this is such an interesting field with too much to debate. And Hayles’s bringing these ideas into the humanities is unmistakably important, and may prove to be another game-changer.-
Kathy High
Kathy High is the super cool bio artist behind Blood Wars, where participants contribute their white blood cells toward battle against each other in a petri dish, until only one winner in this (literally) bloody tournament remains. We’ve shot a few emails back and forth around the section I wrote about her work in my upcoming book, but I’d love to meet her in person.
- Ben Davis is the author of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class and an all-around great writer on the arts, aesthetics, pop culture, and how they all relate to both everyday and overarching politics. He is smart, and funny, and manages to wrap up a lot of difficult-to-understand aesthetic and cultural philosophy and theory into easier to understand texts, when it is called for. Part activist, part writer, part arts and culture critic, whenever I stumble onto his writings I always read and enjoy them, and imagine a coffee or beer with Ben would be fun and enlightening.
- Lin-Manuel Miranda. This is a no-brainer. If you don’t know who he is, I can’t help you. Hell, I feel like I’m pretty late to his fan club myself…
The Top 5 exhibitions for me (what I found most enjoyable)
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Bill Viola
Electronic Renaissance, Bill Viola at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. I find Viola’s slow motion and high definition video installations of the last decade to be mesmerizing; where he began as an experimental video artist, playing with time and image, he has now mastered that material and discipline. He has long been re-staging historical (mostly religious) paintings, with a few moments before and after in his detailed slo-mo imagery, and this exhibition curated his updates alongside the originals. It was a wonder to take my time with the show, an affective and curious ride…
- The Venice Biennale. I finally made it out! What an amazing few days of jumping around contemporary art and ideas, and a beautiful city. I’d never been (though some of my work has been part of the periphery), and I feel like this was a very strong year. Candice Breitz has always been a favorite (since my time in South Africa, 2001-2006), and I was very pleased to be introduced to the work of Michel Blazy.
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Rashid Johnson
Hail Now we Sing Joy, Rashid Johnson at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Locals: if you missed this, you missed out. Johnson is a master of mixed media and installation, using materials that allude to race and gender, identity and escape, while pushing us to explore how we think-with ourselves and our surroundings, histories and presents, materials and how and why they matter. Not only are there explicit ties to politics and its knowns and unknowns, but implications of ecology and more long-term accountability, and where these coincide with issues of race and class, interpersonal relationships and how they function.
- Stacey Williams-Ng, tour of Black Cat Alley. Wlliams-Ng has amplified how Milwaukee murals are acts of politics, dialog, community, and commercialism, all in one. Black Cat Alley has launched a lot of debate and new business, a shining light on a number of locally featured artists. Yes, there was some controversy around Adam Stoner’s mural (and again when it was painted over) – but in my opinion the outcomes of the conversations it spurred have had a net positive effect, mostly because of the generosity of everyone involved. It was great to get a group tour with other generous folks in the Fall of 2017.
- Shane Walsh at The Alice Wilds. I did not review this show because it was before my blog was rebooted, but I did follow up with this post about Shane’s work a few months later.
The Top 5 shows I wish I had seen, but didn’t.
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Nicole Eisenman in Munster
Skulptur Projekte Münster. Only every ten years, this citywide exhibition sees new permanent commissions, several exhibitions and ephemeral projects, and a whole history of work of years gone by. I went a decade ago and … wow, it was like a treasure hunt! I hope I make it again some day.
- Sara Cwynar’s Rose Gold at Foxy Production. I’m just gonna pull from the text on this one, because it totally nails it: “Apple’s Rose Gold iPhone [tracks] how the phone acts as a talisman of desire for objects, people, power, and money. The film considers how individuals — the artist is one of its protagonists – negotiate complicated feelings of love and hate for commercial objects and how features such as touch and 3D resonate directly with the user’s emotions and imagination.”
- Sean Slemon’s Confluence Tree. I LOVE Sean’s work, and wrote the catalog essay for this one – but sadly had to miss it. More on his work and this show via this post.
- “Merce Cunningham: Common Time†at the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Mostly known for his cutting-edge and revolutionary choreography from mid-last century until his death in 2009, Cunningham also collaborated across genres and disciplines from installations to theatre, costumes to printmaking, painting, music, and more. I’ve loved and appreciated much of the work by his contemporary William Forsythe, and I imagine this show was stunning…
WanÃ¥s Konst. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure I understand what is going on here, but it looks RAD. I love it.
Comment with your lists!!!