Artist Category Week 4: Ding an sich

Ding an sich (The Canon Series), Piotr Szyhalski, 1997

Piotr Szyhalski created a series of 12 canons as the first commission for Walker's online gallery, Gallery 9. The title literally translates to "the thing itself" and the project serves as Szyhalski's interpretation of the ideas of 19th-century theologian Immanuel Kant's philosophy through the medium of new media. Kant describes the existance of things outside of a human's sensory perceptions. This existance is unknowable, but certainly existing. Szyhalski argues that this idea is manifest through art - it testifies to the existance of things themselves, though this constant is described in different terms by different people.

The site itself features links to 12 different windows, or canons, that will open up in a new browser and are activated through the actions of the visitor. Different actions will produce different results, and the progess of the webpage is entirely dependent on what the visitor does. Joseph Beuys describes the process of Szyhalski's website as exformation, a term meaning "explicitly discarded information" or "everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when, or before, we say anything at all". Szyhalski explains the idea as contained in experience. The arist's descisions in building the work play an inherent role in this, but within the context of new media art the viewer's decisions are just as important because they define how the artwork will be executed. In traditional mediums, art neccistates the presence of a viewer in order to have any meaning as a communicative device. In the forms of new media art that are emerging, the artwork itself would literally not exist without the viewer and is an entirely seperate work for each viewer due to the interactions they have with the work.

Szyhalski's work is not interested so much in providing answers for his viewers or conveying one specific meaning. Their purpose is more to provide an experience and a journey for the audience that is unique to each person who engages with the piece. This interactive aspect of new media art is possible in other artforms, but is not so very essential to the existence of the work as it is in the digital works emerging today.

Artist Category Week 3: e-poltergeist

e-poltergeist, Thompson and Craighead, 2001

e-poltergeist is a website designed to create an unstoppable series of pop up windows that render it virtually impossible to continue using a browser window. Among the noise and chaos of advertisements, the site is designed to generate messages that appear to be addressing the viewer such as, "Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me? Please help me. Nobody cares..."

The link above only links to a demonstrative version of the project that can be easily stopped. The full program can be accessed at http://www.thomson-craighead.net, but due to its disruptive nature it is not advised to casually view the site. The e-poltergeist project is intriguing to me because it takes a concept, Internet spam, that is generally acknowledged to be only a hindrance to an Internet user and attempts to give it a personal dimension that makes it worth engaging in. The program itself is a virus, it is destructive, and it begs the question of whether this site is actually viewable as a work or art or if it functions better as merely a conceptual idea. No one would willingly submit to having their computer overrun by pop up ads, but e-poltergeist asks if there is something in those messages that is important to see and is most often missed due to the massive quantity of spam.

Thompson and Craighead are able to take advantage of nature of the Internet as a functional medium, an aesthetic expressionist venue, and a corrupting system and combined them into a project that begins with the most negative of these assumptions. It asks the viewer to question what Internet spam really is, and whether we are actually being observed and communicated with by actual beings when we surf the web or whether the advertisements we are bombarded with are simply the product of programs. It also highlights the endless and inescapable loop of pop up advertisements in a time before browsers had effective means of preventing them from activating and asks what would happen if we became stuck in this loop.

Artist Category Week 2: Double-Taker (Snout)

Double-Taker (Snout) Golan Levin with Lawrence Hayhurst, Steven Benders and Fannie White, 2008

Double-Taker (Snout) is an interactive installation conceived of by Glan Levin and collaborators and situated above a museum entrance of Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. The mechanical arm, designed to resemble an elephant's trunk with a cartoon eye at the end of it, responds to the presence and movements of humans within its vicinity. The autonomous interaction of the object plays with notions of the salience of machines and their increasingly accurate replication of human, or at least animal, action. Withing cities, and around public and private buildings humans are generally being observed on surveillance equipment of some sort, but the direct responses of this creation make present the act of being observed. Not only does it alter our awareness of being constantly watched, even while we believe we are anonymous pedestrians, but the responsive actions of Double-Taker are so lifelike that they alter how we percieve the machine itself - as a concious, receptive animal.

The example video on the site features a group of children interacting with Double-Taker, which allows the machine to become a playful element is an otherwise lifeless environment (the outside of a building). However, the main element of the project that stood out to me was it's ability to make humans aware of their presence in otherwise empty environments through the addition of an animated machine. It is not just that the machine knows that humans are in its presence, but it responds to each one in a unique manner, reminding us all of our own individual impacts on the environments we inhabit. Many of Golan Levin's other projects, specifically Opto-Isolator, also play with a similar theme - what happens when the art we observe begins to observe us? The addition of New Media techniques allows Levin and other artists to make this concept a physical reality.