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"Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace"
Technology Wraps Its Conceptual Arms Around You
Glen Helfand, Special to SF Gate
Thursday, March 1, 2001
©2001 SF Gate
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/technology/archive/2001/03/01/telematic.dtl
"Reach out and touch somebody" was a warm and fuzzy ad sentiment intended to increase telephone use long before the advent of cell phones. Now we're touching each other everywhere, in places we never expected to be having conversations. And telecommunications technologies seem to offer the possibility for more encompassing, even physical, experiences.
Therein lies a core premise of the multimedia exhibition, "Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace," at the San Francisco Art Institute through March 25. The show, curated by Steve Dietz, who is responsible for the groundbreaking Web projects mounted by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, comprises recent installations -- and a few now-historical works from the early 1990s -- that rely upon and acknowledge global communications networks.
While that description may evoke a sense of cool digital distance, the exhibition title reveals its human concerns of connection and embrace. The science and wiring are in service of physical and emotional needs -- to reach out and touch someone or something.
Upon entering the gallery, however, you'll probably feel more swathed in crackling electric force fields than in a hearty bear hug. The place is filled with all sorts of equipment -- computer monitors, blinking consoles, video projections, etc. I arrived as the gallery opened and caught the attendant intently opening machine cabinets and flicking a few switches, checking wires and cross-referencing them on the printout she held on a metal clipboard. The sight, along with a chorus of bleeps, electronically processed voices and other extraneous high-tech sounds, seemed more like a busy research facility than a gallery.
But then again, Dietz terms his exhibition a hybrid affair. "Part history, part speculation, partly on-site, partly online, it crosses boundaries between art, communications and popular culture," he writes in his curatorial statement (which is available, along with related Web art projects and various other related writings and resources, online at telematic.walkerart.org/ici).
Along with a dozen or so installations, the show also includes a comprehensive, museum-style time line of milestones related to telecommunications and computing (you can add your own entries on the Web site), and clips from quite a few Hollywood sci-fi films that depict computer-human interactions.
Among the movie snippets you'll see the horny mainframe that impregnates Julie Christie in "Demon Seed," teleportation in "Forbidden Planet," and virtual reality thrills in "The Matrix." The films are projected on the gallery window, as well as viewable through a pair of nifty video glasses with screens behind the lenses. You could spend hours with this compilation alone, fittingly titled "Telewood."
On the whole, the exhibition experience turns out to be an engaging, if uneven mixture of gee-whiz fun and academic chops, with sometimes problematic aspirations to artistic integrity. I was more seduced by the playful interactive electronics than the aesthetics. It's difficult not to enjoy something like Paul Sermon's "Telematic Vision," a 1993 piece that uses video technology to create the illusion that people in separate rooms are sitting on the same Ikea couch.
There are two identical sofas in separate sections of the gallery, both set against a blue screen. Inter-linked video cameras and monitors make it look as if the people on the two couches are sitting together on-monitor, if not in the flesh. The piece generates a special-effects awe that wouldn't be out of place on the Universal Studios tour. But then again, while it's fun, it is also about as thought-provoking as that family attraction.
There's something much more intriguing about Maciej Wisniewski's "Netomatheque," an "alternative browsing experience" that offers the opportunity to literally talk to the Internet over the phone while sitting in the comfort of a dimly lit approximation of a living room. You recline on a couch, pick up a phone and dial in, via an old-fashioned land line. A computerized voice answers, and asks what you'd like to talk about. Your answer is processed through voice recognition software and some ingenious programming, and the reply consists of search results related to your topic read back to you.
Wisniewski, who's responsible for the intriguing Web artwork, "Turnstile II," here uses the phone line to alter the results and generate a surprising sense of unease. Instead of visual text that can be scanned for pertinent or desirable information, you receive a linear spoken result which is difficult or impossible to utilize.
The stream of information, say the entire text of a Yahoo page as delivered by an electronic male voice, seems like babble yet it foregrounds how rudimentary the interaction really is. Does the computer understand what we're asking? Do we comprehend its responses? The experience is a bit creepy, in a prosaic way. (You can try it at home by calling 415-869-6706.)
The idea of trust in the telematic interaction is a recurrent theme in this exhibition, and it makes sense, as all of the pieces require some sort of interactive relationship. You have to give something to get something. Steve Mann's "Seatsale," for example, requires you to swipe a credit card or any other form of identification with a magnetic strip to experience the project. I felt extremely reluctant to dig into my wallet for a piece of plastic, an oddly hypocritical response based on the ease in which I'll trustingly insert my ATM card into all manner of potentially bank-account draining slots.
But after the gallery attendant bravely activated the piece with her Visa card, I followed suit. This enabled me to sit in an elaborately rigged chair and witness a paranoia-infused video documenting a trip to Sears in which the man behind the camera asks various salespeople about the surveillance cameras. Some of the clerks are more forthcoming than others about the fact that security cameras are there to catch shoplifters. After a while, a shrill alarm buzzer rings a warning that if you don't get up, something like those tire puncturing grates in parking lots will rise out of the seat and jab you in the heinie.
The latter elements just seemed silly and superfluous compared to the real cultural challenge posed by the uneasy knowledge that you swiped your card and it took your personal info -- to add your identity to a database perhaps? One doesn't know.
Even though it emits a roaring amplified rumble, there's more subtlety to "Mori," a collaborative piece by Ken Goldberg, Randall Packer, Gregory Kuhn and Wojciech Matusik. Described as an "Internet-based earthwork," the installation digitally translates, via the Internet, a live seismic monitor of minute movements along the Hayward fault into bone-shaking surround sound inside a darkened circular room with a pulse-taking video monitor set into the floor. There's drama here to be sure, and sometimes it hints at being fiction -- is the piece really doing what it says it does? Is that fault really that active? Again, we'll never quite know.
"Mori" also points out the aesthetic shortcomings of a type of tech art. The piece, like many others in this show, doesn't really look or feel like artwork. It lacks a certain grace and aesthetic nuance -- the complexities sometimes get lost in the elaborate wiring. Mind you, the piece has its strengths, but it's part of a genre that doesn't cross as many aesthetic boundaries as it might intend.
The works in this show generally require a time commitment to be rewarding, yet sometimes they exude an off-putting air of scientific research that makes you question the investment. Pieces here by the much-lauded Bureau of Inverse Technology or Eduardo Kac (famous for breeding a glow-in-the dark bunny by adding some radiant jellyfish genes to a rabbit's code), are visually uninteresting works that are backed up with reams of impenetrable explanatory text. The concepts may be strong, but their physical manifestations are not convincing.
As fits the stereotype of such exhibitions, one of the main pieces had technical difficulties during my visit. "Community of People With No Time (Notime)," by a collaborative team of artists -- Victoria Vesna, Gerald de Jong and David Beaudry -- is an installation housed in a circular room defined by walls of stretched fabric. I read the wall label to get a sense of what it's intended to do -- explore "ways in which perception of group identity shifts from the common ideas of avatars represented as corporeal bodies to that of characteristic/information/notime bodies."
To be fair, I wasn't able to experience the piece fully, (I merely heard its amplified electronic heartbeat and saw elements of video-projected geometries), but the rhetoric of that label points to an insularity of a particular brand of tech art. The ideas sound interesting, but the explanation generated a sense of resistance, that the material was out of my realm. But then again, I suppose this interaction did elaborate on a theme of the show: For some reason I really did want to connect with the thing.
Through March 25: "Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace"; San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut St., SF; free to public, For more information: (415) 749-4507. (The show then tours to Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, Austin Museum of Art, and Atlanta College of Art.)
Lectures and dialogs accompanying the show: March 10, 1 p.m. "Women, the City and Technology"; March 17, 1 p.m.: "Digital Dialogues: Curating Byte-Based Art," Lectures/events are $6.00 general admission, $4.00 for members, alumni, seniors; free for SFAI students. Contact the gallery for more information.
Glen Helfand is a freelance writer, critic, and curator. His writing on art, culture and technology has appeared in The Bay Guardian, Wired, Limn, Salon, Travel and Leisure and nest. glen_h@sirius.com |