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Cybernetics in Art and the Myth of the Cyborg Artist

by tomtenney on December 29, 2010

This is the final paper written for my ‘Media Studies: Ideas’ class at The New School, Fall 2010.


Today’s artist – like Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminist – moves beyond both traditional limitations and modernist ideas about art, and enters into a hypermediated relationship with society and technology in which technological methods and mediated collaboration across networks are common.  Art has always been a carrier of cultural information.  Cybernetics as a theory of communication has been influential in the arts, as both metaphor and model for the process of artistic creation. Understanding how art and artists are influenced by Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic theory and Haraway’s cyborg theory – and in some cases how certain artists are claiming to actually “become” cyborgs – requires us to look at how Wiener and Haraway’s theories differ, as well as to delve a bit into art’s long relationship with technology and the larger artistic traditions out of which today’s artists have emerged.

In this paper, I will argue that artists calling themselves “cyborg artists” represent only a small fraction of the ways in which cybernetics has infiltrated art and ideas about art. I also hope to demonstrate that, in fact, their work often isn’t cybernetic at all, if we adhere to Norbert Wiener’s definition.  The “artist as cyborg,” I will contend, can refer not only to the materiality of the forms used to create art (i.e. machines and/or new media technology) but also to an aesthetic which is modeled on the core principles of cybernetics: negative feedback used within a system to achieve a goal.  Soraya Murray calls this “Cybernated Aesthetics,” and in her analysis of Korean artist Lee Bul, explains that “while [Bul is] calling upon an array of technologies that include (but are not limited to) media arts, [her works] are nevertheless fully engaged with cybernated life.” (Murray 47) This is a perceptual shift away from thinking of “cyborg art” exclusively as those that utilize new media technology, and towards a more holistic theory that situates art in Wiener’s more inclusive theory of cybernetics. [continue reading this post...]

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Tagged as: Art, artists, cybernetics, cyborg

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The Influence of Art and Performance on the Rise of American Independent Cinema

by tomtenney on May 20, 2010

NOTE:  Written for ‘American Independent Cinema’ class at The New School; May 5, 2010.

The Influence of Art and Performance on the Rise of Independent Cinema

“As in the other arts in America today – painting, poetry, sculpture, theater, where fresh winds have been blowing for the last few years – our rebellion against the old, official, corrupt and pretentious is primarily an ethical one.”

John Cassavetes

Cassavetes

The above statement, taken from the manifesto of the New American Cinema Group (81) written after their first meeting in 1961, is telling.  In the late 50’s and early 60’s, independent and experimental filmmakers, frustrated with the predictable commercial formulae of Hollywood cinema, began aligning themselves and what they were doing with the art and performance world, where they saw exciting changes taking place.   The original intent of this essay was to attempt to answer the question: How does what was happening in independent and experimental film in the late 50’s and 60’s compare to what was happening in art and performance at the same time? What were the common influences and how did they influence each other?   As I dug into the research, it became obvious that trying to create clean lineages and clearly drawn cause-and-effect statements would be impossible.  Attempting to define cultural influences is like trying to bottle smoke – there are simply too many artists and too many elements contributing to the cultural zeitgeist to confidently make such black and white statements.  The alternative seemed to be the much easier task of making broad generalizations like the late 50’s and 60’s were “when the American avant-garde began to define itself, in opposition to European modernism and to post-war American society,” (“Ages” 10) or that the cultural influences had to do with the ascendance of youth culture, largely due to the popularity of rock n’ roll.

Instead of relying on such generalizations, I decided instead to hone my research to focus on three representative independent filmmakers of the time – John Cassavetes, Bruce Conner, and Andy Warhol – and examine how trends in art and performance influenced their works in particular.  In this way we can hope to extrapolate a larger view by looking at a small cross-section consisting of three artists who, while working in very different ways from each other, all contributed to the changes that took place in American Independent Cinema. [continue reading this post...]

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Tagged as: Andy Warhol, Art, Bruce Conner, film, Fluxus, John Cassavetes, performance

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2001 Interview with Joey Skaggs

by tomtenney on April 4, 2010

Digging around in my virtual shoeboxes to find material for a paper I’m writing on Culture Jamming, I found this interview I did with media prankster Joey Skaggs in 2001 for a tiny little short-lived zine called VIM, published by the artist Faith Pilger.  Skaggs had just presented PRANKS: THE ART OF JOEY SKAGGS at the UCB Theatre as a part of the 9th Annual Toyota Comedy Festival.  I was interested in talking with him about the relationship of his work to comedy.  Full text is below:

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Joey Skaggs

Joey Skaggs

Joey Skaggs,  is a storyteller, performer and artist who uses mass media as his canvas to reach audiences around the world. He has duped the world’s most respected news outlets with his fictional news stories for over 35 years, and shows no signs of stopping. I spoke with Joey at a cafe downstairs from his Soho apartment, a few days after his performance in the 9th Annual Toyota Comedy Festival.

TT: You began your presentation by saying “I’m not a comedian”, but in a sense, you are. You’re a satirist.

JS: (laughs) Well, but I don’t do ‘stand-up’

TT: Well, sure… but I thought it was an interesting idea to include you in the festival.  It’s like the producers are finally starting to realize that comedy means more than standup.

JS: I thought it was a brave and radical departure…. and I’m glad there was a turnout.  I was really impressed with the range of artists that were there [in the audience] because I think it shows the audience are all kinds of possibilities.  And there were all kinds of possibilities there… that were presented.  It was totally cool.

TT: For people who don’t know your work…what do you do?  How do you sum it up?

JS: It depends on what I think about the person who’s asking me (laughs). What I do is what I’ve always done and that is… I’m an artist, and I felt restricted by the way that the art scene, or the art world, is run, and I didn’t want to be limited to the censoring… and the acceptance, the timing… you know you have a show, or maybe a group show or maybe it’s going to be a theme show where you have to produce a work of art that goes along with that.  It’s all bullshit, so I didn’t want to be limited to that.  And there were so many social issues when I was growing up that I thought were really important and I felt that as a creative person, I could express what I thought about those issues creatively.  I didn’t want to just throw rocks through windows or do destructive things like that, because I didn’t think that was effective.  So, as an artist, I used the media as a medium, and I use deception, a lie, as a means of communicating.  And if you think about what art is… art is a lie.  Art is an illusion, art is a creation that is meant to deceive.
[continue reading this post...]

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Tagged as: Art, interviews, Mass Media, performance, pranks

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Sweatshoppe Tonight at ISE Cultural Foundation

by tomtenney on March 18, 2010

Admittedly, I don’t know much about the ISE Cultural Foundation, nor even about their current exhibit: OUROBORUS: The History of the Universe which is having their opening party tonight from 6-8 PM.  What I do know is that the exhibit  created by video artist Ali  Hossaini in collaboration with  Sweatshoppe – aka multimedia artists Blake Shaw and Bruno Levy – a couple of geniuses who will, I guarantee, blow you away with what they are doing with video and sound.  According to the ISE’s site, the exhibition “tells the history of cosmic evolution by animating more than 30,000 found images in custom software that generates a holographic 3D environment. Compiling and processing the images requires hundreds of hours of effort and attention to detail on every frame of video.”

I had the pleasure of getting a live demo of their video art in Sweatshoppe’s Chelsea studio about a month ago, and I can promise you that whatever they do tonight will blow your mind – and at my age, that’s not something I get to say very often anymore.   Incidentally, Sweatshoppe will be also be performing in the RE/Mixed Media Festival on May 30th at Galapagos, so if you miss them tonight, you should definitely do so then.

In the meantime, here’s a vid to whet your appetite – a demo of “video wheat paste” – just one of the cool things they do:

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Tagged as: Art, NYC Events, performance, Video

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MLS: Response to Kumi Yamashita Documentation

by tomtenney on February 13, 2010

I’m still trying to figure out my whole blog strategy, now that I have one personal one, and one academic. According to Shannon Mattern, we needn’t separate these two completely, nor should we, as each informs the other.  However until I find a way to merge them in a way so that my academic work isn’t infected by stories of debauchery and drunkenness (and vice versa) – I will maintain the two as discrete entities.  I’m also going to use this one to document all my academic writing, and will be posting work from all my classes, using tags to differentiate them (MLS = “Media Language & Society,” etc.)  The following is a recent response to a YouTube video documenting Dialogue, a work at the New Museum by Kumi Yamashita.

My reaction to the video documentation of Kumi Yamashita’s piece may not be the expected one.  On the surface, I suspect we were to relate the “talking” heads aspect of the piece to the idea of dialogue explored in the previous assignment, but  I’d like to approach it from another angle.  This video was clearly a *documentation* of a piece of art that was meant to live in a live space.  While I’m not entirely sure how it worked,  it appeared as though there was one piece (the white one) living in 3-D space on a pedestal, and casting a shadow on the wall behind it, so that the shadow appeared to be “talking” to the live art.   This is an intriguing concept, and I would have loved to have seen it when it was installed at the New Museum, but the video documentation left me cold.   With any live art, or art that is meant to be experienced communally, there is an “energy” that defies translation from the real world to another medium.   Walter Benjamin called the energy of an original work of art its “aura” – it’s something that exists not only for visual art work, but dance, theatre, performance art, and even film.  Live art is meant to activate a space and the people around it, creating a unique relationship between the art and its viewers and the viewers with each other.  This relationship is the kind of ‘dialogue’ that I find valuable in art, and that almost inevitably disappears in its documentation.  I come from a background in performance (actor, director, producer) and the day after a particularly electric performance, I’d always be excited to watch the video – and was almost always disappointed at how the video failed to capture the electricity.  In the last minute of the Yamashita video (which was inexplicably 9-minutes long,) the camera tries to simulate the experience of the viewer walking around the piece, viewing it from different angles.  However, doesn’t this take much of the agency away from the viewer, and leave it up to the camera to tell her/him *how* to see it?  If art is a dialogue, then by definition it takes both parties (art/artist and viewer) to contribute to the conversation. By allowing a camera to do my seeing, I feel as though I am being deprived the right to express myself as a viewer.

This complaint is one that I have not only of this type of video documentation, but the way in which much of the new art – being created by new artists using new technology – is experienced.  Whereas experimental filmmakers in the 50s and 60s had cafes and venues (like Cinema 16) in which to present their work  before a live audience, today’s artists often have no place but YouTube – which takes the live social aspect of art out of the equation altogether. I think it’s a mistake to assume that because something is “video art,” that all we need to experience it is a screen.  Like all art, we need others as well.
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Tagged as: Art, MLS, Video

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Light, Sound & Time

by tomtenney on December 29, 2009

I wrote the following essay for my class on ‘Art of the 60′s & 70′s’ at The New School.  The assignment was to create my ‘dream exhibition’ using 3 artists of the period. This was the most fun I’ve had writing a paper in a long time….my choices were Robert Wilson, John Cage, and Dan Flavin in a 24-hour/7-day multimedia production called ‘Light, Sound, and Time.’

Dan Flavin, John Cage and Robert Wilson in Light, Sound, and Time

The three artists I have chosen for my fantasy exhibition are Robert Wilson, Dan Flavin and John Cage – in a show entitled Light, Sound, and Time.  Each of these artists represent one of each of the three elements comprising the title: Dan Flavin’s represents light with his playful, minimalist sculptures shaped from fluorescent tubing; John Cage, of course revolutionized the way we listen to music, if not the way we hear altogether, and Robert Wilson’s experiments with time – juxtaposing extreme slowness with a visual brilliance and emotion, has been challenging the boundaries of contemporary theatre from the 60’s to the present.  The goal of this exhibition is to place each of these artists’ works in relation to the others, so that the experience for the visitor should not be one in which they are merely exposed to three artists with disparate styles who happen to be working in roughly the same time period, but one of cohesion and wholeness, a single “performance” where the qualities of each artist both challenge and enhance the others.  To that end, I have chosen works from each of them that I feel will bring the necessary elements to the gestalt of this theatrical experience.

The Venue

The setting for my dream exhibit is the location formerly known as the Brooklyn Anchorage – a vast and cavernous space that exists inside the foundational pillars of the Brooklyn Bridge.  The Anchorage served as a performance and art exhibition space from 1983 until 2001, when it was shut down for security reasons following the attacks of September 11th.    When the bridge was completed in 1883, the space was planned as a commercial arcade, but served as a farmer’s market and playground until the 1930’s when it was walled off and used for municipal storage.

The Brooklyn Anchorage

The first thing one notices when entering this space is a sense of majesty.  The ceilings are 150 feet high, grand archways invite visitors into the various areas of the seemingly endless space, and the walls are of old, exposed brick – all qualities evoking comparisons to a medieval castle.   Tunnels and corridors go off in many directions, and many are lined with rooms and cubbies of various sizes.  While exploring its spaces, it’s hard to believe that this enormous sprawling catacomb is the same structure that looks so austere and narrow from the outside.  It’s almost as if one’s sense of space has been magically altered.  Time is shifted as well – with no windows or allowance for natural light whatever, it is always dark inside the space, allowing one to forget the time of day or night, and instead focus entirely on the art existing in this enveloping environment.  Vertical structures throughout the space resemble indoor turrets of a tower, and feature stairways and ramps that lead to the tops of the structures, and are lined with various rooms of different sizes.   Many of the anchorage’s paths and passageways crisscross each other so that there are even bridges, several feet in the air, that cross over many of the ground-floor corridors.   The photo here, the only one I could find of the interior of the Anchorage hardly does justice to its grandeur, but hopefully gives at least an inkling of what this space looks (or looked) like. [continue reading this post...]

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Tagged as: Art, Dan Flavin, John Cage, Music, Robert Wilson

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