Gen.R.8ing Art
Adrienne Day
that explores the concept of generative art via video, painting, technology,
biotechnology, music, and photography, is less than a means to an end than a
peek through the lens of creative process and perpetual, conceptual fusion. The
"DNA" of the work shown here has been in many cases modified or
distorted – as in the work of David Lee Myers, Lee Ranaldo, Ibrahim Quraishi
and Carol Warner – or, in the case of
name="OLE_LINK8">Natalie Jeremijenko’s One
Tree
style=’mso-bookmark:OLE_LINK7′>
style=’font-family:Verdana’>project, stripped of identity and thereby rendered
almost completely irrelevant.
Ken Mongomery’s Ritus
Laminandum (or Lamination
Ritual) clearly illustrates one of
Gen.R.8’s unifying concepts: It engages the viewer in a listening experience
that is completely of-the-moment, yet provides a transformed and unique
personal item that he claims "will last almost
style=’font-family:Verdana’> forever." The end result is a tangible
object, frozen in time, yet the process by which the "object" – in
this case, a General Mills’ Bugle – is laminated is, in and of itself, a
fleeting, disposable experience. Every factory-processed, machine-cut Bugle has
been genetically modified to ensure a smooth and congruous snacking experience,
yet by undergoing Ritus, each
Bugle is granted identity by virtue of its unique sonic map. Andrea Polli’s The
Fly’s Eye works on a similar level
while deconstructing the complex processes of vision, as multiple
style=’color:black’> images are projected in the gallery space based on the
movement of viewers in the space. Each time the viewer changes position, the
live video feed moves and a visible trail is left in the gallery space. While
each image is recorded as a passage, an animated document of space and time,
the viewer is imbued with the power of creation and control.
Taking the idea of
ownership one step further, as evinced by Eric Singer’s GUITARbot
style=’font-family:Verdana’>, Jeff Feddersen’s FORESTbot
style=’font-family:Verdana’>, Jeremijenko’s Sniffer
style=’font-family:Verdana’>, and DJ Olive’s Composition 11
style=’font-family:Verdana’>, the actualization process becomes one of self
style=’font-family:Verdana’>-generation; the work continues to evolve and
change even after the artist’s job can be considered, in a traditional sense,
complete. While the bots use
self-generative software so they can "play themselves," Sniffer
style=’font-family:Verdana’>, a commercially available robotic toy dog, has
been modified so that it acts as if it were hunting for environmental toxins.
In addition, visitors are also encouraged to create their own Sniffers
style=’font-family:Verdana’> at home, instructions readily available for
download on the Internet. This act of sharing information effectively reduces
the artist’s role to one of mere instruction, and removes the creative process
from the hands of the "owner" entirely. Olive’s Composition 11
style=’font-family:Verdana’> similarly invites the
user to participate in the creative process, as visitors are asked to mix from
a pre-existing palette in order to generate their own music.
On the flip side of the
so-called generative process is Bill Morrison’s Decasia,
style=’font-family:Verdana’>which uses decaying film stock as raw material; a
subdued tension is created between the fragility of the medium and the
fragility of its subject matter. But instead of purposefully distressing the
footage—much like contemporaries Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow—Morrsion works
with material that has decayed naturally, a genesis that favors a
self-perpetuating entropic process over a tidy, finite conclusion.
The mutation of
pre-existing material is a theme that not only informs the work of Kurgan,
Ranaldo, Quraishi, and Warner, but also the music of DJ Olive and Steve Reich.
In Warner’s case, Inside Out
demonstrates how the media shapes cultural experiences and how information is
incorporated and assimilated into everyday life, blurring the lines between
reality and fiction and calling into question what we absorb from our
environments and what we conceive of "on our own." Similarly, the
simulacrum inherent in Ranaldo’s Madonna Generation
style=’font-family:Verdana’>, Reich’s Early Works
style=’font-family:Verdana’>, and
the calculus of Greg DeoCampo’s Big Bang Hum Vs
Type-III Solar Explosion, also questions what can be considered an
"original" idea and what has been created via the brainpower of
someone else–a music or video loop as a synthesized glomming of discrete and
autonomic units.
But how does one lay claim
to the ownership of an idea? Or, how much (and to what degree) does one have to
alter something in order to fully possess it? To paraphrase Sir Francis Bacon,
as things are passed around the cultural marketplace, are they changed for
better or for worse? In a world where it has been said time and time again that
no man is an island, perhaps it is a moot point to challenge traditional ideas
of ownership, of process, of generation, of control. But as the modern world
quickly shrinks around us, as nearly any piece of information is as close as a
mouse-click away, Gen.R.8 provides a pretty convincing argument as to why we
need to question such mores – and why we need art in the first place.
