[-empyre-] Virtual embodiment made of meat As Time Goes By

[Wesley Goatley]

Dear Johannes & empyre,

Thank you for your thoughtful response - I think it brings to the fore a
relevant element to this discussion on the subject of the art experience in
digital realms.

I completely appreciate your point that the video itself doesn't
communicate the explicit socio-political context that I have for this work.
 This was a specific intention of mine when creating the video and the page
around it, by positioning it as just one piece of documentation around a
larger project.  As it is watched in an open browser window, the further
exploration of the context behind my highlighting of these forces can be
reached in a moment by the viewer, if they're so intrigued.  As I mentioned
before, several key points appear on the wikipedia page for each of these
corporate bodies, with much more below the surface.  Inviting the listener
to explore what is suggested through the video and the text below it
involves them using means I do not need to make explicit to them.  This
reflects a longer trend towards agency in digital works that much of what I
do reflects on, attempting again to create a lasting experience rather than
one which is as easily consumed as digital representation/delivery allows.
 I consider the other aspects of this artwork to include discussions such
as these which I have encouraged and engaged in on every digital platform
that I have presented the work in (twitter/facebook/vimeo/email).  My
physical involvement in these critical processes incorporated in the work
is very much intentional, a point I touched on at the start of my last
response.  With works that involve the body so much, it makes sense to me
that they are multi-layered, multi-document pieces where the non-physical
digital artefact does not have to resolve all elements of the work - in
fact often I explicitly work to ensure that enquiry and wonder are aspects
of these documents.  Hester Reeve has written wonderfully on her similar
process:
"Whilst I revel in making material pieces...I see these less as the
artworks of my practice and more the documentation or evidence of a larger
art labour at play. This art labour creatively brings the artist qua human
singular substance into a new becomingness."
The next stage of this continuing work is the exhibition - the main
requirement I have is that I am present in the space every hour it is open,
to be a resource for those interested in further exploring their
experiences of the work.  The installation around the device(s) shall also
reflect this approach, which I feel has been most influenced by my history
as a performance artist in both digital and analog contexts.

Both the artworks you linked to are interesting examples of art presented
digitally.  The process of revealing elements which enrich the experience
of the work seem present in both these documents (as you say in your
personal experience of CORE SAMPLE and of having to 'know the programming
to sense the work' in Data_Plex (economy)).  Aspects that stood out
immediately were the challenges of richly presenting a site-specific sound
walk in this medium, and also the influence of the type of imagery I
discussed as being part of commonly shared images of the 'virtual' in
Magruder's choice of visualisation aesthetic.  There are many such
questions/problems/solutions relating to how we represent things digitally
that I am eager to explore.

I would completely agree that the masses are not passive, though it appears
to me that history has shown technology often being deployed in an attempt
to pacify them.  Much good work in the realms of design futurism, critical
engineering, and other realms skirting the boundaries of art and thought in
post-digital contexts certainly seems to be addressing this with much
fervour.

Wesley


On Sun, Jul 27, 2014 at 3:27 PM, Johannes Birringer <
Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> dear all
>
> Ilsa: Play it once, Sam. For old times' sake.
> Sam: I don't know what you mean, Miss Ilsa.
> Ilsa: Play it, Sam. Play "As Time Goes By."
> Sam: Oh, I can't remember it, Miss Ilsa. I'm a little rusty on it.
> Ilsa: I'll hum it for you. Da-dy-da-dy-da-dum, da-dy-da-dee-da-dum..
>     [Casablanca]
>
>
> The difference between once and again might be of interest; our
> discussions are reaching a point where I'm not sure what to return to
> (virtual embodiment as oxymoron?) or what to turn to - thanks Simon Taylor
> for your
> wonderful response, difficult to read, fully, but I am taken by your
> reference to bodily crisis, and the critical, in the figural in art
> <embodiment of slapstick, or, more directly, its incarnation, because,
> after all, the meat feels as it falls off the  chair-lift. The virtual is
> here too?>, and if I may mention this, the other week during the Metabody
> workshop in Madrid, on a free day, I spend a few hours in the Prado and
> looked at the current exhibition "El Greco y la pintura moderna", stunned
> by the representations of the crucifixion, the crucified limp hollowed-out
> unsavory body, in El Greco's often steep vertical canvases that loom over
> the viewer, there was also a striking 'Laocoonte' of convulsed bodies
> fallen, a slithering snake coiled around limbs ...(see
> https://www.museodelprado.es/en/exhibitions/exhibitions/at-the-museum/el-greco-y-la-pintura-moderna/).
> The pairing of the El Grecos with the moderns was limp (a not so striking
> Bacon hung there too, forlorn, a blob of pink fleshiness smudged near the
> center of the picture, weak compared to Bacon's frightening Crucifixion
> triptych and meat carcasses). A few rooms further on, I encountered Goya's
> so-called dark paintings, and the horrific anthropophagic 'Saturn devouring
> his Son', a prolepsis if there ever was one.
>
> The 'différend' that you mention seems to hint at the relative
> incompatibilities (of such meat bleeding through?) with our current
> <technological facade, or digital interface, or sexy face>>, if I
> understand you correctly, and that would to some extent then seem
> convergent with my earlier questions to Wesley (and Sally Jane, and Kirk),
> and picking up on Sally Jane's response, I don't think my concern was
> merely a question of sensibilities though of course I don't know what sound
> or song was playing in your head/headset, how it affected you..
>
> Wesley, thanks for your further elaboration on your work, and no doubt
> there is conceptual strength and thoughtfulness in what you are working on,
> also the political intent seems clearer to me, yes, and what you propose
> "Wireless-Fidelity" to become – "a tool with lasting use by inviting the
> listener to an explicit awareness of the density and presence of corporate
> bodies, opening the door to further exploration and discussion with this
> knowledge..."    But how can the sound of the soundwalk  (and I am basing
> this on your explication of the sonifications,
>
> >BT   30.5 %  Market Share -  Low Bass drones
>   Sky   22% Market Share - Granular Pianos
>   Virgin   20.1 Market Share - Female Vocal Samples
> >
>
> and the vimeo documentation of the person strolling the streets of
> Brighton hearing sound) be construed, by a listener, to make a connection
> between low bass drones and corporate ideologies or "reflecting BTs
> long-standing market share"?
>
> I am reminded of two other conceptual media works that some of you may
> have encountered, one aural one visual.
>
> -  CORE SAMPLE by Teri Rueb  [2009]   (
> http://www.terirueb.net/core_sample/)
>
> The conceptual explication is very rich, if you perhaps want to take a
> glance at it on the website, but when I enacted the soundwalk in Boston
> Harbor, none of the sedimented layers underneath "the picturesque surface
> that
> conceals Spectacle Island's complex past, present and future," were
> "exposed" to me it through layers of sound Rueb had composed. I would have
> had no idea what I am listening to, had I not read the artists statement,
> and even after reading, the sounds did not reveal.
>
>
> -  Data_Plex (economy), by Michael Takeo Magruder (2009)
> http://www.takeo.org/nspace/ns031/
>
> , an online work that utilises live data feeds from real-life scenarios
> (global financial markets)  to generate three-dimensional geometry and
> textures in real-time, creating virtual realms that refract ever-changing,
> volatile forces in and upon the real world......A Java and VRML (Virtual
> Reality Modelling Language) framework translates this stream of fluctuating
> information into a metaphorical cityscape based on modernist aesthetics of
> skyscrapers and urban grids. Each company is represented in the virtual
> environment by a series of cubic greyscale forms that are proportioned
> according to factors such as its stock price, market capitalisation and
> percentage of the DJI index. <
> Michael's work is also conceptually powerful; looking at the citiscape,
> you'd have to know the programming to sense the work.
>
> Perhaps, in the spirit of (the political despair in Lyotard's) différend,
>  and thinking of Wesley's statement about out-sourcing (extraction; and
> non-knowledge of algorithmic machines working somewhere in the 'occult'?)
> and pop culture delusion –  < a portrayal of 'the network' and the many
> forms it takes in these fictions as something beyond understanding or
> access to any but a mystical 'expert', sphinx-like in their guardianship of
> occult knowledge, beyond the ken of the passive masses [Wesley] >  –  I
> would propose that we have plenty of incidents in recent history that show
> the "masses" are not passive, just think, e.g.,  of the sustained protests
> in Taksim  and Gesi Park in Istanbul, where some striking embodied
> theatrical languages were at play that excited me physically; I supposed
> the excited body is also what Simon had in mind?
>
> But did not Susan Kozel, in the first week of our empyre discussion, raise
> the issue of encryption?  Could you come back to this, Susan?
>
> >I have now become a little obsessed by encryption and what this might
> mean on an affective and bodily level as we continue to expand and
> transform our movement by networked, sensed and virtual technologies.
> Affect, I believe, is already encrypted [Susan]>
>
>
> respectfully
> Johannes Birringer
>
> (and here an epitaph borrowed from a writer who has returned from Taksim
> where a play he had written to be staged in a theatre was cancelled due to
> public unrest)
>
>      Lang ist
>      Die Zeit, es ereignet sich aber
>      Das Wahre
>            (Hölderlin)
>
> .....................................................................
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>



-- 
-----------------------------------
www.wesleygoatley.com
lumbers.bandcamp.com/ <http://soundcloud.com/lumbers>
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