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Conversions
by Alex Galloway
pdf (16 Kb)
[This article first appeared on Rhizome.org]
"BitStreams" and "Data Dynamics"
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York)
March 22 - June 10, 2001
"010101--Art in Technological Times"
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
January 1 - July 8, 2001
Net art is about *conversions*. Why conversions? Perhaps because
net art needs data like paintings need pigment, and converting
data from one form to another gives net artists the basic materials
they need for artmaking. The conversions stem also from our fascination
with transformation, a type of digital alchemy where the use of
an intermediary substrate (ones and zeros) lets artists convert
IP addresses to colors, video to ASCII text, HTML to animation,
and so on. In recent months net art has become more and more focused
on this "phase shift" process whereby one data mode
is translated into another. Let's have a look.
A member of the ASCII Art Ensemble, Vuk Cosic has focused on
converting various media formats into the dots and slashes of
the ASCII character set (http://mail.ljudmila.org/~vuk/).
His "ASCII History of Moving Images" is a video-to-ASCII
converter which transforms clips from films such as Hitchcock's
"Psycho" and Antonioni's "Blow Up" into full
motion green-tinted text. In "Instant ASCII Camera,"
which premiered at the Dutch "Next 5 Minutes 3" festival
in 1999, the ASCII Art Ensemble created a small machine to take
passport-style photographs of passers- by. But instead of printing
a photo, the machine returned a small scrap of paper imprinted
with the user's ASCII portrait. In a more absurd piece titled
"ASCII Art For the Blind," Cosic uses a text-to-speech
converter to read aloud the text characters in ASCII images, with
the ostensible goal of making ASCII images audible to blind art-goers.
The result is a monotone recitation of garbled punctuation marks
as a computerized voice phonetically reads ASCII images left to
right, as if the images were words. The focus here is precisely
the concept of conversion itself--there is little narrative, form,
or other traditionally aesthetic qualities.
A variety of current projects also rely on data conversion. The
new Rhizome logo, designed by Markus Weisbeck and Frank Hausschild
(http://www.surface.de),
is a conversion piece that translates IP addresses into a dynamic
visual icon. A very literal conversion happens in "Time As
Color," an elegant net art piece from Christopher Otto (http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2144)
that converts seconds, minutes and hours into RGB color values.
Andy Deck's "Bardcode" (http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2230)
does something similar. It translates works of literature into
visual symbols. Vinyl Video (http://www.vinylvideo.com/)
makes art out of the conversion between the video format and vinyl
record format.
The art of conversion figures also in the curatorial philosophy
behind the Whitney museum's new exhibition "BitStreams"
(http://www.whitney.org/bitstreams).
For, the story goes, since much new art practice hinges on the
intervention of digital technologies at crucial steps in the production
process (such as when a photograph is touched-up using Photoshop),
the digital world as a whole has infected artmaking through a
forced conversion to ones and zeros, at some basic if invisible
level.
"BitStreams" is not strictly a new media art show.
There is video, there is photography, there is sculpture and painting
and installation. A few computers are tolerated here-and-there
for variety's sake. In particular work from Leah Gilliam, John
Klima and John Simon stands out. The Whitney should be applauded
for showcasing digital art, but this exhibition proves once and
for all that Photoshop does not new media art make. "BitStreams"
falls short in that respect. It's too hesitant, too technophobic.
Consider for example Warren Neidich's banal photograph "Remapping
2" (where's the bit stream?), Sally Elesby's silly doodles
(where's the bit stream?), or Robert Lazzarini's sculptures of
skulls (where's the bit stream?).
To be sure, several "old" media artworks stand out
in this show. Jason Salavon's "The Top Grossing Film of All
Time, 1 x 1" is captivating. The piece takes the entire film
reel from the top grossing film of all time (whatever that may
be) and resamples it such that each frame from the film becomes
a single pixel on the canvass. Stripes of color appear left to
right as the film's scenes play themselves out in miniature.
Another sleeper is Jim Campbell. In two fascinating artworks,
Campbell uses low resolution LED screens to explore the thresholds
of our sensory perception. Instead of trying to make technology
invisible (which ultimately may be "BitStreams"'s biggest
crime), Campbell looks to the liminal point between clarity and
confusion--that point of "flicker fusion" where our
eyes grab legible images out of pure static. Writer Marina Grzinic
has identified this phenomenon in a recent essay where she notes
that "delays in transmission-time, busy signals from service
providers, [and] crashing web browsers" are not simply the
undesirable side-effects of technology, but are in fact the very
aesthetic of that technology. Campbell understands this, while
many others in the exhibition do not.
Running in parallel at the Whitney is a much smaller exhibition
called "Data Dynamics" (http://www.whitney.org/datadynamics).
While not all the pieces in this show require the web to function,
this is essentially a net art show, and an exciting one indeed.
Curator Christiane Paul (formerly of the pioneering but now defunct
tech art magazine "Intelligent Agent") met an interesting
challenge: how to stage a net art show using Americans when net
art has historically been very *non* American. Thus, the art stars
of Europe are decidedly not in this show -- people like Jodi,
Knowbotic Research or Etoy -- such is the personality of the Whitney.
Instead Paul picked from the New York net art scene, hanging recent
work from Mark Napier, Maciej Wisniewski and others.
Perhaps the most successful piece in "Data Dynamics"
is "The Apartment" (http://www.turbulence.org/Works/apartment/),
an artwork by Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg that hinges
on a conversion between words and spaces. First, the user types
sentences on the keyboard. Next, each word is converted into a
room in an imaginary apartment building. An invisible dictionary
performs the translations. Words like "you" and "love"
become the bedroom, while "book," or "sentence,"
become the library. The semantic connections between words and
spaces was arrived at by the artists themselves, who created a
mini-dictionary of the couple hundred most common terms they were
likely to encounter. Finally, the artwork renders the imaginary
apartment in 3D, creating a warped domestic space wallpapered
with a collage of images.
3000 miles away, in the SFMoMA's exhibition "010101"
(http://010101.sfmoma.org),
a new work from Entropy8zuper! titled "Eden.Garden 1.0"
(http://eden.garden1.0.projects.sfmoma.org/)
is also based on a fundamental conversion. In this piece, a three-dimensional
landscape appears on the screen. At the same moment an HTML page
is fetched and parsed word by word for its component mark-up tags.
Using a special reference chart created by the artists the HTML
tags are converted into animals, plants and other objects within
the virtual landscape. For example, line and paragraph breaks
appear as bushes and flowers, while images become butterflies,
and fonts become small bunnies. Using the Eden.Garden, the user
can quite literally "visit" a webpage -- walk around
inside of it and seeing what it might *look* like converted into
a virtual space.
Mark Napier's "Feed" (http://feed.projects.sfmoma.org/)
does something similar. Webpages are fetched via the Internet
and converted into various charts and graphs. As the artist writes,
"FEED reads HTML and images, reducing web pages to a stream
of text and pixels. That stream is fed to nine displays that chart,
graph, and plot the data." Where Entropy8zuper's conversion
is lush and organic, Napier's is statistical and analytic. The
qualities of pure data are brought to the fore, unbuffered and
indifferent in this cold interface.
http://010101.sfmoma.org/
http://www.whitney.org/bitstreams
http://www.whitney.org/datadynamics
http://mail.ljudmila.org/~vuk
http://www.surface.de
http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2144
http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2230
http://www.vinylvideo.com
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/apartment
http://eden.garden1.0.projects.sfmoma.org
http://feed.projects.sfmoma.org
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