Schreuder, Catrien, Noud Heerkens, Jorinde Seijdel, and Jane Bemont. Pixels and Places: Video Art in Public Space. Rotterdam: Nai, 2010. Print.
"Van Warmerdam steers clear of such associations and of the atmosphere of the exceptional. The film shows an ordinary action with out making it more interesting, without adding anything to it. - K. Michel
"the ideal video work offers the passer-by a new language, and offers a different or more discerning way of looking at the world. - Kate Taylor
As my work tends toward installation and video, this book has proved to be an interesting jumping off of point. One of the difficulties i encounter is my limited technical knowledge, and the fact that I'm drawn to things/other artworks that are hi-tech, as video installations/interactive installations often are. I simply can't generate hi-tech pieces within the timeframe of grad school, so it's extremely valuable to read about simple, and clean pieces that are powerful and incorporate elements of things i'm interested in. A simple video loop that is arresting and poignant can be so much more effective than a hi-tech interaction piece, which may be glitchy, require more resources and specific circumstances.
The breadth of this book is fantastic in that it also showcases good examples of the powerful, arresting, and effective hi-tech interactive pieces as well. My only negative comment is that as with all books that cover Turing-land artworks, they don't age well as contemporary catalogues and quickly read closer to historical overviews. (still important though)
Burnham, Jack. "Systems Esthetics." Artforum Sept. 1968. Print.
"The systems approach goes beyond the concerns of staged environments and happenings: it deals in a revolutionary fashion with the larger problem of boundary concepts. In systems perspective, there are no contrived confines such as the theatre proscenium or picture frame. Conceptual focus rather than material limits define the system. […] Inasmuch as a system may contain people, ideas, messages, atmospheric conditions, power sources and so on…, a system is, to quote systems biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a "complex of components in interaction" comprised of material, energy and information in various degrees of organization. In evaluating systems the artist is a perspectivist considering goals, boundaries, input, output, and related activity inside and outside the system. Where the object almost always has a fixed shape and boundaries, the consistency of a system may be altered in time and space, its behavior determined both by external conditions and its mechanisms of control.
-jack burnham
We are now in transition M from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done. -jack burnham
A "sculpture" that physically reacts to its environment is no longer to be regarded as on object. The range of outside factors affecting it, as well as its own radius of action, reach beyond the space it materially occupies. It thus merges wit the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a "system" of interdependent processes. The processes evolve without the viewer's empathy. He becomes a witness. A system is not imagined, it is real.
-hans Haacke
article can be found online here
This article significantly changed my understanding of my work, my approach, and perhaps my larger interest. I'm not making sculptures, or objects. I'm making systems. Shifting my perspective to that of systems analysis, and reading my historical context as a perspectivist, I'm able to more clearly dissect the objects that I do utilize, and critique the elements of the system, their functions in the system, and the system as a whole as an ecosystem of work.
Referring to the electro-bike as an interactive sculpture is not addressing its main strengths. It is a system, the object of the bike, the electrical current, the people, the space around the bike and the flow of foot-traffic, the dialogue generated by the viewers and riders: all of these are what make the piece- all of these should be considered and refined/understood.
I see quickly my desire to fetishize the idea of systems. Irresponsibly, I could tend toward Rube Goldberg devices. Aware of this, I need to hold myself to the critique of the system.
Crary, Jonathan, Russell Ferguson, and Holly Myers. Uta Barth the Long Now. New York (N.Y.): Gregory R. Miller &, 2010. Print.
"Equally, one might think of John Cage, who understood that for us to hear silence, it first needs to be bracketed out from the rest of the world that surrounds it." - Russell Ferguson
"If the subject of the work is perception and not what the camera is pointed at, then there is no point in "going out to photograph... But you still have to point the lens someplace. So let it follow your gaze..." - Uta Barth
Uta Barth is one of my favorite photographers. She lives in that center overlapping bit of the Venn Diagram of Sugimoto, Meyerowitz, Turrell. Her ability to be painterly, narrative, reveal/conceal all at once- I find it so wonderful, so dare I say- magical? For sure it is refined, elegant and sensitive. I hope my works can touch on elements like these and be considered as such. An issue for my work- it tends to be read as unrefined, half-executed (or slap-dash). How is it that a blurry, out-of-focus photograph isn't considered unrefined? I need to understand what moves these works beyond being read as poor craft.
Canogar, Daniel. Incorpóreo : Septiembre-octubre 1995, Salas De Exposiciones Temporales Fundación Arte Y Tecnología, Madrid. [Madrid]: Fundación Arte Y Tecnología, 1995. Print.
It is an increasingly self-evident truth that the search for an explanation of life is producing an excessively vast technology, that studies on energy and the new communication media surpass the possibilities of the human body, and that computer and technological aids have before inescapable for modern mankind. But it is just as obvious that the contents of all these networks are still under the influence of that twilight zone in which the soul was located. Electrical currents may be the plasma of modern society, but its strength can never be compared with the power of blood coursing through veins, the other essential plasma that drives the human machine.
"Small wonder, then, that scientists of all times have been obsessed with experimentation relating to the body, with posing similarities between the body's organism and other mechanical organisms that have emerged throughout the history of progress. And it can hardly surprise us that artists revolve around the body and its representation, continually and obsessively working on all that concerns the human being. In this whole discourse the concept of pairs seems inevitable: reason and intuition, body and soul, science and art, knowledge and imagination, concrete and abstract."
- Rosa Olivares
Daniel Canogar uses electronics, light and shadow to create delicate pieces that people read with such poetic, organic descriptors, it makes me wonder if they've seen his work or not. The reverence in these pieces is real and deliberate. That these collections of plastic, glass, copper wire should be read with such spirituality or corporealness provides a clear example for my work that's feeling unintentionally cold, confused-mess-of-wire, just a tech- Turingland gimmick.
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