[-empyre-] Week 4: “Convergence: expanding time-base media”

[Malcolm Levy]

Thanks Renate and Tim,

I would like to take the conversation in a bit of a different direction, as my focus over the pass number of years has been on expanding time-base media specifically through inquiry into the digital camera.    We live in a time where the image has taken on new meaning, and as the structuralists did in the 1970’s there remains a new point for investigating the image, the apparatus, and the process of how photos are produced.  There are a number of artists currently whose practices, both digital and analogue, focus on these questions, and their greater implications.  In investigating the digital camera, and its technological process, there are serious consequences with regard to the realities of how images are recorded, and what this bears for our current methods of analyzing imagery.

As with the Structuralist movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s reaction to the capitalist constructs surrounding film and the moving image, this is again happening today..  By looking at the recording process, it took into consideration within the physical structure of the camera to analyze that outside of it.  As true to the structuralist paradigm of the 70’s, a similar investigation is required today within the digital realm, and specifically the digital camera and its function.  (There are also implications here for the online world but I’m not going to get into this here to focus on the specifics of the camera its self) 
 
Digital cameras are one of the most accessible tools for recording on the planet, to the extent, that, there are more than three billion digital cameras in use globally, and an even greater number when considering cameras on mobile devices. These recording devices, and the digital chips within them, rival the population of the globe currently. Questioning the way these apparti see, compute, and process information has major ramifications for how we view our world today and the ubiquity of their presence online.  The digital chips processing this information has great bearing on how humans communicate with technology, and specifically with the image itself.
 
What constitutes photography, what constitutes an image, and furthermore what defines an image itself are in flux.  Whereas there were once clear lines of definition these have now been blurred.  Artists such as Walead Besthy  Nathaniel Stern  Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl are just a few of those looking at this today in very different yet complementary ways.  Throughout the history of the camera, the conversation concerning the usage of the camera, how these usages can alter, reshape, and change our existing understanding of the tool itself and how it can be used is not a knew one. In the digital world, the camera ‘chip’ (or sensor), based on its makeup and intended action, has only certain processes and actions that it is designed for, in terms of its use.  This process, created for the commercial industry, as a means of mass cultural production (not unlike the advent and popularization of film) is only one take on the possibilities within the apparatus itself.  

Living in a culture where cameras have become synonymous with constant daily interactions, (whether this is the news, surveillance, online, urban screens and mobile devices) recording memory is once again facing the challenges that happened during the shift from painting to photography. As Gil Blank correctly points out around our current state of events: “If ultimately there is anything to be learned from simulacra, it is that we can never in fact separate ourselves from the world or the real abstraction, whether aesthetic, mnemonic, or epistemological, is never so complete that it obviates even the least attempt at a transparent reckoning of history, nor so corrupt that its shortcoming does not in itself offer some model for understanding the human contingency of that same history.”  The camera has created a time in history where the impression of analogy has been the object of such deliberate construction, that it has been able to fundamentally question normative practices and certain techniques to the extent that such techniques become the guarantee of a capacity for analogies, the problems of which are posed by the techniques themselves. Continual techniques of the camera, in the same manner as computer software, three -dimensional rendering and other means of visual rendering, are continuing to shift, grow and emerge over time.

Though one might say that we currently live in a digital world, the reality is that it is structured very much as a hybrid state that involves numerous forms of production, and mediums. The construction of the digital-analog space, the process which is undergone in creating this, and the abstract reality that this follows, is in line with the current movements and responses to the constant debate around what can be recorded as memory, and what memory means in our current age when considering the expansion of time-base media.

All best,

Malcolm


Malcolm Levy
Director - New Forms Festival
#200-252 East 1st Avenue. Vancouver, B.C. V5T-1A6
www.newformsfestival.com

Sept 12-15th 2013

malcolm at newformsfestival.com



On Oct 25, 2013, at 1:20 PM, Renate Ferro <rtf9 at cornell.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 
> 
> Thanks to Tim for taking over during week three as I have been in the middle of mid=term critiques with our senior thesis students.  Also thanks to Dale Hudson and Gabriel Menotti for being our featured guests this week.  
> 
> 
> 
> For the last week of October we welcome Isak Berbic, Lisa Patti and Ken Feingold, and Malcolm Levy. We will keep this discussion open until Thursday the 31st and are hoping that those of our former guests in previous weeks will feel free to make final closing posts.  
> 
> 
> 
> We met Isak in Hungary just about two years ago and are happy that he has moved to the States after spending time in the UAE.  Lisa is a former Cornellian who lives to the North of us and teaches at Hobart College.  We do miss seeing you around campus Lisa. We also welcome our other two guests Ken and Malcolm with the anticipation of learning more about their own work especially as it interests with this month's theme of Convergence.  Bios are below.  Thanks.  Renate Ferro
> 
> 
> 
> Isak Berbic (b.1983) is a photography, moving image and performance artist from Sarajevo. As Yugoslavia dissolved and Bosnia was under attack, he and his family became refugees, moving through Croatia, a refugee camp in Denmark, eventually receiving asylum in the United States. Isak Berbic studied Photography at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In Chicago, he practiced art, worked in theater, and art directed a political community magazine. From 2007-2012 he was based in the Middle East, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, where he taught at the University of Sharjah. In 2012 he joined the faculty at Stony Brook University (SUNY), Art Department. His research deals with social histories, politics, tragedy, memory, humor, exile, and the limits of representation. His recent artworks investigate the overlaps of documentary and fiction in relation to the visualization of contested politics and contested histories. Isak Berbic is now living and working in New York. http://www.isakberbic.com/
> 
>  
> 
> Lisa Patti teaches in the Media and Society Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Film and Video from Cornell University.  Her current research explores the global distribution of cinema and television through new media platforms, focusing on the circulation of multilingual cinema.
> 
>  
> Ken Feingold (USA, 1952) received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees in
> 
> “Post-Studio Art” from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA.  He
> 
> has been recognized as an innovator in the field of interactive art after
> 
> fifteen prior years of making films, video art, objects, and installations. His early interactive works include The Surprising Spiral (1991), JCJ Junkman (1992), Childhood/Hot & Cold Wars (1993), and where I can see my house from here so we are (1993-95) among others.  His work Interior (1997) was commissioned for the first ICC Biennale '97, Tokyo; Séance Box No.1 was developed while in residence at the ZKM Karlsruhe during 1998-99, and Head (1999-2000) was commissioned by the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki for the exhibition "Alien Intelligence" (Feb-May 2000). Since 2000 he has developed a body of “cinematic sculptures” - objects and installations which include artificially intelligent animatronics and, frequently, moving images. He has taught moving image art at Princeton University and Cooper Union, among others, and he is also a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice. His works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kiasma, Helsinki; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, and others.
> 
>  
> Malcolm Levy is an artist and curator based in Vancouver, Canada.  He is the co-founder and current Artistic Director of the New Forms Festival (1999--present), and was the curator of CODE Live at the 2010 Winter Olympics,  where he oversaw the installation of  over 40 interactive media artworks and 8 performances across the city.  He is the Artistic Director of ISEA 2015 with Kate Armstrong.  His work was recently shown at Supermarkt (Berlin, 2013) Audain Gallery (When we stop and they begin', Vancouver, 2012), in the “Occupy Wall Street” exhibition (New York, 2011), Grimmuseum (Framework, Berlin, 2011),  Nuit Blanche (A Place to Reflect (Nuit Blanche Toronto 2011) and Transmission (Victoria, 2011).  Malcolm is currently completely his MA in Media Studies at the New School and teaches at SFU in Vancouver.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Renate Ferro
> Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, 
> (contracted since 2004)
> Cornell University
> Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office:  306
> Ithaca, NY  14853
> Email:   <rferro at cornell.edu>
> URL:  http://www.renateferro.net
>       http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net       
> Lab:  http://www.tinkerfactory.net
> 
> Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
> 
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