| More and more, artists are employing multimedia and interactive techniques in their art pieces, regardless of what materials they have used before or are experienced in using. These artworks have changed the way people consume art. Moreover, like the emergence of Minimal and Conceptual art, they have helped the art world overcome yet another crisis. After the 80s, the new scientific revolution based on information technology livened up urban culture and fundamentally changed people’s lifestyles and attitudes. |  |
Remote/Control Interactive and Multimedia Art – Ella Liao
More and more, artists are employing multimedia and interactive techniques in their art pieces, regardless of what materials they have used before or are experienced in using. These artworks have changed the way people consume art. Moreover, like the emergence of Minimal and Conceptual art, they have helped the art world overcome yet another crisis. After the 80s, the new scientific revolution based on information technology livened up urban culture and fundamentally changed people’s lifestyles and attitudes. Traditional easel painting and sculpture both have very long histories and extremely diverse styles. It has become increasingly hard for the artists to create something new within the frame, and traditional media-users are therefore facing a difficult dilemma. After Duchamp, art not only existed on the visual level, but also on the conceptual level. When conceptual art pieces are exhibited in museums, what we see is not the expected consensus but an unpleasant disagreement between the audience and the artists. With the development of science and technology, interactive and multimedia art was born at a most appropriate time. This has changed the way people perceive art, rendering the museum a completely new space for experiencing it, raising, once again, essential questions such as “What is art?” and “What is the boundary between art and science?”. Art and science, two sides of the same coin, have once again spun into a dazzling light.
Traditional art pieces are always alienated from their viewers at museums, with a distance that is holy and inviolable. What museums provide is pure visual experience. The viewers are treated either as voyeurs or as criminals constantly under surveillance. They are not allowed to speak too loudly or get too close, let alone touch the art pieces. Museums have become a field of behaviorism. The artworks are in a dominant position, whereas the viewers become the passive receivers of opinions and exterior stimulations, their power of re-creation completely ignored. Multimedia and interactive artists, on the other hand, utilize various machines and programmes to set up scenes within the museum space. As soon as the viewers step inside, they fall into a pre-planned environment. No matter what kind of actions they take, these are always within the artists’ expectation. The artists force the viewers into the contexts they create, allowing them to obtain different sensual experiences. From the outside, it seems that the viewers are controlling the buttons, the switches and the sensors, creating random audio, visual and sensual reactions, but all these reactions are in fact within the artists’ control. They have predicted all possibilities and the viewers have become a part of their works that is essential to their completion. The viewers are absent during the creating process, whilst the artists are absent during the completing process—the distant relationship between the artists and the viewers is an important characteristic of interactive art.
Art history is not only the history of art, but also the history of human beings, reflected in artworks. “Remote Control” is the theme of the exhibition. It touches upon the nature of multimedia and interactive art, and indicates at the same time the complicated relationships between individuals within a contemporary society. To control is to be controlled, to imprison is to be imprisoned and to enslave is to be enslaved. Various machines and computer programmes are installed in our daily life: mobiles, e-mails, instant messengers, burglar alarms and even monitors, enabling some to control others. We indulge in the success of the post-industrial revolution characterized by the computer revolution, happily playing both the master and the slave. Norbert Wiener compared human brains and computers in his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, emphasizing that it is not about who is in control, but about mutual influence and improvement. Weiner’s control theory has changed the definition of computers. Computers not only process data and information, but also carry out deduction under instructions. They are calculators of sentences, as well as numbers. As Weiner says, they are in fact “thinking machines.”
“Remote/Control” is an investigation into the presence of technology in contemporary art today. It gives us an opportunity to re-examine the machines with which we are familiar and reminds us to maintain dignity and humanity in a world of technology, so as not to walk too far away down the path of cold indifference.
Hu Jieming’s interactive installation, Altitude Zero, consists of 15 monitors camouflaged as cabin windows. On the screen, the top half above sea level shows the city in the distance and the bottom half shows the sea water below. What the work captures is the scene at altitude zero, as if the ship is sinking into the bottom of the ocean. As soon as the infrared sensor detects the approach of the viewer, the calm ocean on the screens starts to change. One sees abandoned materials from daily life, either clashing against the cabin windows or drifting away. These abandoned materials come from the bottom of urban life. They used to be inseparable from us, but are now being destroyed, losing their value and their dignity. Also gone with these materials are the traditions and cultures that we used to value. Such is the price we pay for urbanization and civilization. The artists are looking for a compromise between these dead abandoned materials and eternity. If art represents eternity, then these abandoned materials are exactly where reality bleeds into it. In the cabin, one feels the anxiety of being inside of a sinking ship and the pressure of the ocean waves. The work, correspondingly, instills in us a desperate, sinking feeling.
Created when the artist was living in Paris, Gong Yan’s video installation, Twin Cities, radiates feminine warmth and sensitivity. On a white wall, the artist ink painted the interior structure and decoration of her room in Paris. Through the little holes drilled in the wall, the viewers can see images on the hidden computer screens. These images form the views that Gong Yan sees from her home in Shanghai. The double frequency video creates a simple three-dimensional visual effect, shortening, on purpose, the distance between the two cities, making them as if they overlap in space. The little holes are windows into the heart of the artist who lives far away from home. Outside, the windows are extremely realistic images of an imagined homeland. As we walk into the installation space, we enter the personal life and the inner world of the artist, and thus can empathize with the artist’s alienated feelings as she travels, spiritually, between the two cities.
Du Zhenjun’s interactive piece, Disturbance, requires the participation of the viewers and their mobile phones. On the screen in front of them, people are doing all kinds of things: reading, smoking and strolling, and a board in front of the screen informs the audience that they can dial a free number to harass the people on the screen. As a viewer dials the number, the phone starts to ring and the people on the screen start to look for their mobiles all over the place. A chaos then ensues—random objects fall down, roofs of houses collapse, a cow starts running, the chicken flies away and the dog jumps around. This highly entertaining piece satisfies the viewers’ mischievous psychology. Mobile phones may well become weapons that cause chaos. They can control people’s mood and provoke conflicts between individuals. Like a new organ developed during human evolution, this groundbreaking invention has extended our senses and abilities. The artist has fully explored this ability, allowing the viewers in the real world to control the individuals in a virtual space. We are therefore very surprised to find out that the remote control has been inside our pocket all along. Accompanying this invention, our view of the world has undergone many subtle changes, and so has our understanding of morality, spirituality and memories.
Du Zhenjun’s other piece, Fountain is a tribute to Marcel Duchamp, the father of contemporary art. The monitor is placed on its back, presenting to the audience a toilet bowl. When a viewer approaches, a spurt of water flows into the bowl. When the viewer withdraws, the toilet flushes all by itself. By using the computer and the sensor, the piece has imitated the scene of a male going to the toilet, creating in the public an embarrassment and a sexual disorientation for the female audience. With his usual playful spirit and sense of humour, the artist is challenging the audience’s daily habits and attitudes.
Developments in the history of science have been influencing the development of art history. Anatomy and scenography, for example, gave birth to traditional painting and sculpture, whereas photography started a whole new era of images. But what kind of inspiration will computer and communication technologies bring to the art world today? “Remote/Control” interactive and multimedia art exhibition has posed a challenge to the old aesthetic experiences by redefining the traditional museum space and exploring new artistic languages and narrative structures. In a sense, the show is a benign readjustment of the audience’s viewing habits. Art and science, the two sides of the same coin, defines each other rhetorically. Each possessing a range of distinct characteristics, they attract one another and bear witness to our effort in understanding and exceeding ourselves. Together they contribute to the irreversible development of the human history.
