Writing for Rhizome.org: Act/React at the Milwaukee Art Museum

A review I penned of the Act/React Milwaukee Art Musem exhibition is on the front page of Rhizome today, and will be in their DIGEST this weekend.

Teaser:

Action, Reaction, and Phenomenon

Image: Daniel Rozin, Snow Mirror, 2006. Computer, custom software,
video camera, projector, silk. Dimensions variable. Edition of 6. (Courtesy
of bitforms gallery, New York, and ITP, Tisch School of the Arts, New York.)

In his book, Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi calls for “movement, sensation, and qualities of experience” to be put back into our understandings of embodiment. He says that contemporary society comprehends bodies, and by extension the world, almost exclusively through linguistic and visual apprehension. They are defined by their images, their symbols, what they look like and how we write and talk about them. Massumi wants to instead “engage with continuity,” to encourage a processual and active approach to embodied experience. In essence, Massumi proposes that our theories “feel” again. “Act/React,” curator George Fifield’s “dream exhibition” that opened at the Milwaukee Art Museum on October 4th, picks up on these phenomenologist principles. He and his selected artists invite viewer-participants to physically explore their embodied and continuous relationships to each other, the screen, space, biology, art history and perhaps more.

Fifield is quick to point out that all the works on show are unhindered by traditional interface objects such as the mouse and keyboard. Most of them instead employ computer vision technologies, more commonly known as interactive video. Here, the combined use of digital video cameras and custom computer software allows each artwork to “see,” and respond to, bodies, colors and/or motion in the space of the museum. The few works not using cameras in this fashion employ similar technologies towards the same end. While this homogeneity means that the works might at first seem too similar in their interactions, their one-to-one responsiveness, and their lack of other new media-specific explorations — such as networked art or dynamic appropriation and re-mixing systems — it also accomplishes something most museum-based “state of the digital art” shows don’t. It uses just one avenue of interest by contemporary media artists in order to dig much deeper into what their practice means, and why it’s important. “Act/React” encourages an extremely varied and nuanced investigation of our embodied experiences in our own surroundings. As the curator himself notes in the Museum’s press release, “If in the last century the crisis of representation was resolved by new ways of seeing, then in the twenty-first century the challenge is for artists to suggest new ways of experiencing…This is contemporary art about contemporary existence.” This exhibition, in other words, implores us to look at action and reaction, at our embodied relationships, as critical experience. It is a contemporary investigation of phenomenology.

Near the entrance of the show, Scott Snibbe’s Boundary Functions (1998) begins by literalizing the fine line between publicly constructed and personally constituted space, between “you (plural)” and “me.”…. Continue reading