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22 May 2018 by nathaniel

Review: Jessica Meuninck-Ganger’s Inbound East at The Alice Wilds

Inbound East: Coastline

Inbound East: Coastline

I have known Jessica Meuninck-Ganger for about ten years: as friend, colleague, someone I have written about (in my first book), and collaborator. She is smart, generous, detail-oriented, interesting, funny, sensitive, and… a bit manic (such is contemporary life). The work I am most familiar with is either deeply personal – presenting memory and dementia as they relate to facial expressions and materiality – and/or exploring a combination of form, space, and technique – installations, hybrid print-video projections and screens, and/or other mixed media projects that create potent story-based objects.

And so it was a pleasant surprise to read about Jessica’s latest approach to art-attunement: walking. According to her statement for The Alice Wilds, her Inbound East exhibition charts “the Milwaukee cityscape by departing east from 71st street and proceeding inbound toward Lake Michigan.” The artist walks, encounters, and takes photos, thinks, draws, and draws out, “overlooked aspects of the built environment,” chronicling:

matter, marks, indentations, and scratches. Hand-rendered textures of the metropolitan area include stacks of lumber, skillfully arranged patterns of cream city brick, fieldstone walls, composite fiberboard lap siding, rooftops, and cedar shake. She re-imagines, cuts, rearranges, constructs, and transforms her drawings into screen printed paper maps, buildings, landscapes, and waterways – providing distinctive views of a city.

Meuninck-Ganger pointing out the kind of building she'd choose to re-present

Meuninck-Ganger pointing out the kind of building she’d choose to re-present

Jessica tactfully, tactilely, and tactically… walks. And the tacit agreement between her and her landscape is that their story will continue, forever and together, even when they are not face-to-face (as it were). The city might at many points be invisible even while we roam it, but it is always felt. Its landscape is always moving – both itself, and the people within and around it.

Jessica represents that city with her work. But not in the standard sense of the word “represent.” According to French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, the “re” in “represent” is not repetitive; it is intensive. In other words, to “re-present” is not to present again, but to present more of what is. It is a presence presented. Meuninck-Ganger has us remember, facilitate, enhance, refine, re-image, reimagine, and reintroduce our selves and our relationships to and with the vibrant city around us.

Several of Mueninck-Ganger's building portraits

Several of Mueninck-Ganger’s building portraits

Unlike the busyness of her day as mother, teacher, administrator, world-saver, community engagement actor, and more, Jessica must slow down and… look. She might spend an hour or more simply drawing a building while in front of it, like the one she is pictured with (two images up). Short and warm, giving character to everything around it, that building (she often names them after friends they remind her of) stands out as different, but belonging. … And after she makes an archetypal drawing of such a Milwaukee building – from a very real and specific Milwaukee building – she shows these “portraits” (above) of the buildings she “knows” – as in, she has admired or been inside that space, felt herself change because of it. No building is ever completely “known,” of course (nothing ever is), but Jessica has an intimate knowledge of what these do, what they think, how they feel. And we see and feel this in the ways we experience her crafted representations.

Inbound East: Confluence

Inbound East: Confluence

Or, Jessica might swish through a quick, one-minute sketch of an interesting tidbit – whether it be another building, a brick, or dripping water below a bridge… She might then revisit that drawing several days later, and re-present/re-draw that several times over, before turning it into a silk screen – representing the representation of a representation (etc) into one of her larger works.

More and more and more presences presented.

…

And you see, the East in Inbound East is not only about the direction of Meuninck-Ganger’s walks. It is also a reference to the influence of Eastern culture on her practice (as well as to Italo Calvino’s beautiful 1974 book, Invisible Cities, an inspiration for her). She uses Korean and/or Japanese-styled hand-made paper, inks, and cut-ups towards, for example, the production of pathway installations we are invited to traverse carefully, much like the artist traverses her city – looking for tactile details rather than a gridded whole. Above and below, Inbound East: Confluence is a two-wall installation of silk-screened and pasted-together prints that play between 2-, 3-, and 4-dimensions: flat, erected, and across time/space.

Inbound East: Confluence

Inbound East: Confluence

Michel de Certeau’s highly influential paper, “Walking in the City,” defines a tactic as an agile, material, and detail-oriented (tactile) approach to making change. It is opposed to a strategy, which takes a more institutional (structured) and less flexible approach, towards specific ends. Google Maps and city ordinances, strategic plans and road works: these strategically make futures without consideration for the everyday encounters we have with our own mappings within the city, their roads and where they take us. Whereas Jessica’s tactic for engagement is to walk and draw. And she represents the forces of what she finds in different modes. We continue to feel them in and around her show, even in their absence, and even after we’ve left the gallery.

Inbound East: Confluence

Inbound East: Confluence

Or with Inbound East: Coastline (very first image), the artist plays between the city as seen from above, the drawings she makes in town, and the space of the gallery itself. She paints the walls and backdrops the same water/sky blue to make it larger than us, but gives us a floor-based installation… and then reminds us just what an illusion these strategic views are, with the plastic plug holes in the gallery wall left overtly white, the blue-painted foam leaking onto the wood paneling of the floor from the dry wall. Here the plays between 2- and 3-D feel more tenuous, are disconcerting even while they are satisfying.

spotted on my walk with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger

spotted on my walk with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger

On Saturday May 19th, I joined the artist and about 20 others on a walk from the gallery, in and around Walker’s Point. She told us about her process of choosing buildings to draw, walking and forcing herself to pay attention to what is present, rather than what needs to be done. She even gave us artwork clipboards to “work” with. I got to know and see beauty in the sometimes invisible cities before me, in both large and small, known and unknown – with my three kids, some strangers, and some acquaintances I hadn’t spoken to much before.

Meuninck-Ganger's gifted clipboards

Meuninck-Ganger’s gifted clipboards

It was… nice. It made me want to walk and think, play and draw… more. To spend more time concerning myself with the city and its inhabitants, concerning myself with… well, myself, and my relationships and environments.

And isn’t that what all art should do?

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger’s Inbound East is on view at The Alice Wilds in Walker’s Point, Milwaukee until June 16, 2018.

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09 January 2018 by nathaniel

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

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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07 November 2017 by nathaniel

Briefiew of Thor: Ragnarok (with the kids)

There are no plot spoilers in this review! Only a sprinkling of lines/character development appreciations…

The whole family went to see Thor:  Ragnarok on Sunday morning, and it was super fun! Jack and Nonie and I were all always excited for this one, but Kitty mostly only wanted to go because Idris Elba was in it (with a decent sized role, for a change; oh, and Cate Blanchett, too!); and she was very pleasantly surprised (even going so far as to say she now, finally, wants to see the other ensemble cast Marvel films, like The Avengers, with me). It was laugh out loud funny, and there were many “YES! KICK BUTT!” moments to boot.

What was so great about it? Let’s ask our team…

Nonie (11 year old geek girl) says she really appreciated Hulk’s character development. “He was his own character this time, with his own thoughts and feelings, separate from Bruce Banner’s.” Ruffalo’s Hulk, especially when bantering (possibly via improv) with Hemsworth’s Thor, really got a lot across, with minimal words. I always thought that the Banner/Hulk storyline was the best part of the first Avengers film, and this film continues that story, along with others, showing how Banner and Hulk begin to appreciate each other’s complementary parts. And that Wisconsin-born Ruffalo is a fine actor.

Jack (9-year-old boy wolf) says his favorite part is when Blanchett’s character, Hela, challenges Thor to the core (“What are you the god of again?”), and the latter thinks back on his upbringing, his father, his goals and aspirations, what make him Thor (hint: it’s actually not his hammer), and calls up thunder so the good guys (god guys?) win. It’s a nice story, and done well.

From my side (middle-aged art nerd), it was the easy sense of the relationships, the improv, the further development of a lot of already fairly developed characters (22 films or something like that now?). Thor: Ragnarok’s stories and jokes refer to earlier in the film itself (classic improv), but also to the comics, to previous films, to pop culture… but you don’t need to know all the references (or any of them) to enjoy it.

I looked it up, and apparently Hemsworth felt like Thor 2: Dark World tried too hard to be serious, and lost sight of some of what he wanted from the character. He spoke it over with the director, with Marvel, and others, and… they totally went for his ideas, scrapping and re-booting on some level. We used to think of Thor as this long-haired, cape-wearing, hammer-wielding hero, who takes himself pretty seriously. Now? We think of Hemsworth. So… Hemsworth had at him! He tore his cape and tossed it, cut his hair off (hilarious scene, with Stan Lee), lost his hammer, and very often took the piss out of himself. The chemistry between him and Hulk (and separately, Banner), him and Tom Hiddleston’s AMAZINGLY AWESOME (as always) and even more developed Loki, him and Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie, etc, etc. … It’s just obvious they had so much FUN making this film. And I admit: I was even surprised at the end!

Kitty (most beautiful woman in the universe – inside and out) really appreciated… Loki. We love to hate him, hate to love him. He often does good, but we can never trust him.  Also? Idris Elba. Also? Now she likes Chris Hemsworth (I am going to watch the new Ghostbusters with her). Also? We don’t want to give any (more) of the jokes away, but… after you see it, say to yourself…. “we’re not doing get help.” Overall what Kitty really liked was that in addition to this fun and funny super hero film, she was able to engage with her own childhood passions surrounding Norse mythology, which is so rich and complex. Also? The sound track. So eighties!

Thor: Ragnarok’s plot is fun and interesting, there are a lot of awesome tangents and cool-but-throwaway “catch up with the Marvel story” lines – and it all holds together, both from beginning to end, and in relation to MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe).

All four of us recommend this film!

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24 September 2017 by nathaniel

Briefiew of General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm

I define an ecological approach as one that takes account of agents, processes, thoughts, and relations. Humans and non-humans, matter and concepts, things and not-yet things, politics, economics, and industry, for example, are all actively shaped in, and as, their interrelation. And there is, according to Erich Hörl in his great collection edited along with James Burton, General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (2017), “hardly any area that cannot be considered the object of an ecology and thus open to ecological reformulation.” These range in the thousands, he asserts, including “ecologies of sensation, perception, cognition, desire, attention, power, values, information, participation, media, the mind, relations, practices, behavior, belonging, the social, [and] the political” to name a fraction of those already called into action (1).

The book brings together some of the most important thinkers of our time, across media and philosophy, feminism and communication, geology and literature, to have us reevaluate, in the words of Brian Massumi in his chapter on “Virtual ecology and the question of value,” our “orientational qualities of existence.” What do we value, and why? Can we shift our appetites and propensities, our stylistic approaches, so as to aim, together, with our environments, towards better futures?

Like most collections, this book is best digested slowly, rather than read all at once. I started with the introduction, jumped to Massumi’s chapter (among the authors, I am most familiar with his work), then back around to Stiegler, Parikka, Fuller and Goriunova, and more, and I’m still middling through several others. I’ll admit it is also surprising, and reassuring, to see so many media theorists and digital culture scholars asking us to think-with our everyday materials, what they do and are, and might become – and what we should do as part of our engagements, and life.

Simply, I love the framing of this book as a whole. It gives these wonderful thinkers the opportunity take different and new directions with their research, to push the boundaries of their own specificities, in order to show us how to approach ecology more generally. And, it’s under $30 (yes, I paid for mine; this is not a freeview). Recommended.

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19 September 2017 by nathaniel

Brefiew: Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious by N Katherine Hayles

Welcome to another briefiew (brief review)!

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. Here her ironically titled book re-members (that is, embodies again) how humans (and data) both “lost their materiality” in our minds, and then she shows us that this is dead wrong, and that there are major stakes in that misperception. 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).

I found myself alternatively nodding and shaking my head while reading. I agree that we must pay more attention to the things that think and cognize, and the ethical questions at play; though I also believe the distinctions more blurred and subtle (and sometimes non-existent) than laid out by those Hayles cites (book forthcoming – though mine is entirely about art!). Still, this is precisely because it is such an interesting topic, with too much to debate. And Hayles’ bringing these ideas into the humanities is unmistakably important, and her modes of storytelling around them are as funny and smart as ever. If you haven’t yet read  How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, I would start there – not because you need it to understand Unthought, but because the first is her strongest manuscript, by far.  If you enjoyed that, or have more interest in the later/recent book, I do recommend it. It’s not as easy of a read, but it is more than worthwhile, and may yet prove to be the game-changer the first was.

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08 September 2017 by nathaniel

Urban Fantasy geek out: the Kate Daniels Series by Ilona Andrews

Urban Fantasy is one of my guilty pleasures. (I’m lying; part of me thinks that as a doctor/professor/artist type, I’m not supposed to love it. But I have no guilt, really. Only pleasure.) That’s fantasy – vampires and werewolves, fairies and elves, things along these lines – but in the present moment. Rather than taking place on a different world (Middle Earth! Narnia!), or at some point in history (Outlander! Leviathan! – tho the latter is more YAF, Young Adult Fiction and steampunk), it’s now, or in the near future. Like, if we’re talking movies and television, True Blood or Lost, which are decidedly part of the genre, or Buffy or Teen Wolf, which were (obvs) way ahead of their time.  

My favorite is the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews. (It’s also pretty cute that the authors are a couple, Ilona and Andrew.) The whole background of the world puts the fantasy genre on its head, in so many ways; and the tech and culture geek in me gets a real thrill around it.

Whereas in traditional Tolkien-like fantasy, “magic is leaving the world,” as science, technology, and contemporary know-how take hold, in Kate Daniels‘ world, magic is coming back, and technology is leaving – the latter eaten away by the powers of magic.

Myth and religion, magic and fae, werewolves, gods, vampires, and witches, from every part of the world, and every part of history, are real – and they gain their power from stories and belief.

Fascinating as part of the series, which now has 9 books and some short stories appearing elsewhere (some for free online!) is its own mythology. Like in many other fictional worlds (another favorite being Jim Butcher’s Dresden series), magic and technology do not get along. But rather than technology chasing magic away, or tech consistently breaking in the face of wizards, magic and tech simply do not exist at the same time. So with Kate, either the “magic is up” or the “tech is up.” And you never know when one might fail, the other dominate.

All the stories of old are real. Merlin. Golems. Vampires. Werewolves. Berserkers. Babel. The Morrigan. Dragons. All of it. But humans got arrogant. We used too much magic, grew our power until finally, it toppled over and destroyed itself; magic mostly left the world… for a time.

In the near future, our arrogance catches up with us again – this time technology toppling down from its overuse. Planes fall out of the sky, hospital equipment fails, buildings crumble, and, all at once, the monsters and heroes exist again.

Think of technology and magic as a pendulum swing. When one is up, the other is not. When that gets too powerful, it comes crashing down, the other rising. Interesting, in post-tech/post-apocolyptic Atlanta (er, all over the Daniels world, actually, but I had to slip in where she lives), the pendulum is more or less in the middle. This does not mean, however, that magic and tech are each at half mast; rather, every now and again, maybe after a few hours, maybe after a few days, all the gods disappear, the banshees stop shouting, my magic stops working, and the lights come on (etc). And, at the same random interval, the inverse, again.

One of my favorite things in all this chaos is the role belief in magic (or tech) plays. For example, praying to a lesser-known deity may again grant him or her power, new abilities, and more. Or, on the flip, and this is super clever, since we all know the basics of a car – filling it with petrol, changing the oil, that it goes via combustion – it would never run when the magic is up. But… how many of us really understand how a mobile phone works? For many of us, it may as well be magic. And so… sometimes (if the magic is not in flare), and for some people (if they are not too, too magical), phones will work when the tech is down/magic is up. Magic and belief, technology and its understanding, all can and do play off of each other in such interesting ways.

It makes for great stories. And the science and fantasy nerd in me loves every aspect of this.

Shape-shifters are infected with magic, DNA-swapping viruses. Vampires are actually empty, blood-sucking vessels, where Masters of the Dead can “ride” them like avatars. And Kate? She’s not really a hero. She’s deeply flawed, sometimes mean, only rarely kind, a complete bad-ass, who begrudgingly really does care about her world and those around her (especially kids!), and is thus immanently relatable and likable as a first-person author. And the romance, which takes quite a few books to build up, is mostly rom-com relief, with the occasional twist of the heartfelt.

Alright, I just convinced myself to start from the beginning of the series, and read once again. (Maybe I’ll write an academic paper about it, so it’s “work.”) You should, too. The paperbacks are super affordable at the moment.

This should get you started.

late addition: Ah, and they just announced book 10 yesterday! Timely!