Digital Futures
Midori Yoshimoto
The term "new media art" has been around for some time. Starting with video art in the 1970s, it has come to encompass all sorts of technological art, including sound art and, most recently, internet art. "LivePictures: The Digital World Animates Contemporary Art," at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning in Queens, New York, presents a mixture of a kinetic sculpture, digital prints, video art, animation, video games, and computer art. Here, "new media art" also encompasses audience interaction: bypassing stagnant forms, many of these works come alive with the viewer’s presence.
Three digital prints by Daniel Rozin behave rather like holograms; their appearance shifts depending on where you stand. But the effect is more radical than an old-fashioned hologram: one print appears to be the New York subway map from one viewpoint, but morphs into a portrait of a young boy from a different angle. This innovation, named Proxxi Composite, was developed by Rozin himself, who is the Director of Research and adjunct professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program of New York University. He is best known for more intricate works incorporating mirrors, motors, computers, and video cameras. The Proxxi prints may seem far simpler than those works at a glance, but they contain the complex shape-shifting potential of interactive art.
Next to Rozin’s digital prints is Bill Viola’s Six Heads. Set against Viola’s signature dramatic, dark atmospherics, theatrical spotlights shine on a series of six faces with shifting expressions. It’s the face of the same man, who recalls a pensive philosopher or a penitent saint. The joy, sorrow, anger, fear, awe, and dreaminess in the man’s expressions echoes Rembrandt’s studies of his own face, and also the studio studies of faces that Renaissance artisans were encouraged to practice.
Contrasting with the classical Viola is a Pop animation, Bestial Delights, by Eunjung Hwang. Her flat cartoon characters, created by Flash software, act out a fairytale narrative on a backdrop of still photographs of snow-capped Austrian Alps. In one scene, a strange bird monster emerges from behind a mountain, like Godzilla. In another scene, a dog with its belly slit open is sat upon, rather suggestively, by a creepy man with a long tail. Nonsensical and disturbing, these monsters seem not too far from the Protean types of human beings seen in antique literature and art.
In the back of the gallery, a jelly fish-type sculpture by Shiih-Chieh Huang hangs from the ceiling. Whenever a viewer enters the area beneath it, the sculpture lights up and rotates three hundred and sixty degrees, extending its long transparent plastic legs in all directions. The jelly fish/octopus’s body is made of a plastic water bottle cut in half, which contains miscellaneous objects such as a motor, walkman, and a pair of slip-on roller-skates. Entitled I Love You Today, Too, this work may be offering a glimpse into the future where humans are greeted by mechanical, genetically modified, and even totally virtual pets at home.
After enjoying the physical interaction with Huang’s piece, the spectator is offered opportunities for cerebral interaction through Marcin Ramocki’s living computer software, The History. The viewer types a word on a keyboard on a pedestal in the middle of the gallery. Inside the pedestal is a computer that inserts the newly-typed word into a pre-existing sequence of words randomly chosen from a 150-word poem. In the wall projection, black squares containing white letters emerge from the bottom and rapidly accumulate at the top. As the magma-like flow of words changes direction and leaves traces behind, an abstract digital landscape forms. The electronic scribing sound that accompanies this movement changes pitch whenever the first word hits the margin of the screen. The new words added by the viewers eventually replace the original set of words as well as the pattern that evolves from them. By moving a mouse, a viewer can also erase or stop words. As a whole, the work alludes to the way history is cumulatively, and somewhat arbitrarily, created and erased. The growth of digital words does not cease just as the real history has a life of its own.
Upon leaving Ramocki’s contemplative environment, the spectator encounters a video game made by Ricardo Miranda Zuniga about the human destruction of nature. The viewer plays the role of Jack, who moves across a map of the Americas. Each area he passes displays data on deforestation, biodiversity, and urbanism in the chosen country. Then Jack is swallowed up by a monster. Playing the role of the monster in the next game, you earn points by catching flying red blobs with your long tongue. The more blobs caught, the further the civilization develops to the right of the screen. The player wins when they score 24.
Patricia McLaughlin’s Home Rolled is a 3D animation showing a girl who inhabits a cylinder-shaped housing unit. The actual sculpture model of this housing unit is displayed in front of the monitor. The housing unit consists of a bed, a bathtub, a kitchen, and a combined kitchen with an office–everything one needs in the imagined future and, interestingly, the stagnant present for the career-driven, isolated woman. The digital future in "LivePictures" is a brave new world we may already be inhabiting.
