What Franklin Furnace Learned from Presenting and Producing Live Art
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GUEST EDITOR’S OVERVIEW What Franklin Furnace Learned from Presenting and Producing ON THE INTERNET Live Art on the Internet, LIVE ART AND SCIENCE from 1996 to Now Martha Wilson ABSTRACT The year 1996 saw the dra- matic transformation of the artists’ organization Franklin Furnace from a site-based entity to a conveyor of live on-line art. founded Franklin Furnace in 1976 to champion Franklin Furnace has had an in- From early experiments in “live” I Internet video to public art ephemeral forms neglected by mainstream arts institutions. delible impact upon art by launch- Franklin Furnace has developed a place in art history for ing the careers of artists whose work drawing on wireless technology, the author traces the develop- artists’ books, temporary installation art and performance art, has influenced art and cultural dis- ment of a nascent art practice and has researched the history of the contemporary artists’ course. Franklin Furnace’s niche through its both groundbreaking book through such exhibitions as Cubist Prints/Cubist Books, remains the bottom of the food and idiosyncratic formative The Avant-Garde Book: 1900–1945 and Fluxus: A Conceptual chain, premiering artists in New years. Country, as well as thematic shows such as Artists’ Books: York who later emerge as art world Japan, Multiples by Latin American Artists, Contemporary stars: Ida Applebroog, Eric Bo- Russian Samizdat, and Eastern European Artists’ Books. The gosian, David Cale, Patty Chang, organization set upon a course of substantial change in 1993, Willie Cole, Nicole Eisenmann, Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gomez- when its collection of artists’ books published internationally Peña, Ann Hamilton, Murray Hill, Jenny Holzer, Barbara after 1960, the largest in the United States, was acquired by Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Liza Lou, Robbie McCauley, William the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During its 20th an- Pope.L, Theodora Skipitares, Michael Smith, Annie Sprinkle, niversary season, Franklin Furnace reinvented itself as a “vir- Krzysztof Wodiczko, Paul Zaloom and hundreds of others. tual institution,” not identified with its real estate but rather Franklin Furnace’s web site, which we are building as a research with its resources, made accessible by electronic and other resource documenting ephemeral practice, receives more than means, in order to provide a freedom of expression to the three million hits per year, reaching an international audience artists it presents equivalent to that which was possible in its of every stripe, including artists, arts professionals, scholars loft at 112 Franklin Street in TriBeCa in the 1970s. and the general public. FRANKLIN FURNACE’S Fig. 1. Emily Hartzell and Nina Sobell, Web Séance, 1994. (© Emily 20TH ANNIVERSARY SEASON Hartzell and Nina Sobell) This first live Web performance via In 1996, not too long after the decision to “go virtual” was taken remotely controlled webcam consisted of “brainwave drawings,” live heartbeats and a question-and-answer interface of e-mail and video by Franklin Furnace, I was approached by performance artist conferencing. Digital photograph by Hartzell/Sobell/ParkBench Nina Sobell and artist Emily Hartzell to perform on Park- taken at Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada. Bench’s ArtisTheater. ParkBench was originally conceived by Sobell as a network of kiosks, which through videoconferenc- ing, Internet access and a collaborative drawing space would enable people in diverse neighborhoods to access the Inter- net, talk to and see one another, and communicate collabo- ratively. This project became part of NYU’s Center for Advanced Technology before the Web’s emergence, so the artists used Director to design the ParkBench interface, and later after the graphical Mosaic browser was introduced, they adapted ParkBench again. It was Sobell and Hartzell who, in 1994, performed and archived what C. Carr of the Village Voice believes was the first live web performance in the history of the World Wide Web via a remotely controlled webcam. Their Martha Wilson (Founding Director of Franklin Furnace and Guest Editor of Leonardo sec- tions on Live Art and Science on the Internet, 2004 to 2007), Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc., 80 Arts—The James E. Davis Arts Building, 80 Hanson Place #301, Brooklyn, NY 11217-1506, U.S.A. E-mail: <[email protected]>. ©2005 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 193–200, 2005 193 the camera, then deep into the loft . for 50 minutes, from 5 to 5:50 p.m., EST. Fig. 2. Alexander Komlosi, Upon reflection, this deceptively sim- aka Walter T. Komslowli, 1996. ple performance raised some sophisti- (© Alexander Komlosi. Video ON THE INTERNET still from footage © Emily cated issues: Exactly when is the “live” Hartzell and Nina Sobell.) performance of the pre-recorded video LIVE ART AND SCIENCE Performance component presentation? What space is the artist oc- of Blast V at Sandra Gering cupying, the loft or the circulatory system Gallery, NYC, in conjunction with Franklin Furnace’s 20th of the Internet itself? Live “chat” was be- anniversary exhibition, In ing received by the Pseudo chat jockey the Flow: Alternate Author- from viewers around the world. After the ing Strategies, curated by “live” show was performed, the stream- Daniel O. Georges. ing video image was saved on Pseudo’s server for 6 months. The event could sub- sequently be viewed “on demand” from any point on the globe with a live Inter- net connection for as little or as long a Fig. 3. Halona Hilbertz, Pseudo time as the viewer chose, adding yet an- Studio Walk, video still from other dimension to time and space as em- footage by Galinsky, 1998. bodied by art on the Internet. (© Halona Hilbertz) This deceptively simple netcast The level of discourse during this first showing the artist walking up on-line event was disappointing; instead to the camera and then deep of commentary about the shifting pa- into the loft raises sophisti- rameters of space and time created by cated issues. works of live art on the Internet, several viewers commented, “Nice ass.” Franklin Furnace understood that it would need to “prime the pump” to get discussion of “liveness” going, and henceforth invited its museum interns and Franklin Furnace members to chime in with their views. Web Séance (Fig. 1) was composed of live—abandoning its role as a conven- The artists selected by annual peer “brainwave drawings,” live heartbeats and tional publication and instead position- panel review to be part of Franklin Fur- a question-and-answer interface of e-mail ing itself within the globalized sphere of nace’s program lost no time in exploit- and video-conferencing kiosks [1]. These communications. Artist/curator Adri- ing the artistic properties of the digital artists saw the potential of the Internet anne Wortzel, who was involved in the realm. Nora York paid $750 of her $1,000 as a live art medium, with its new textual preparation of Blast 5, asked Sobell and honorarium to Pseudo animation tech- and visual vocabulary as well as its po- Hartzell to recommend work; they, in nicians (our agreement with Pseudo pro- tential to draw artists and audiences into turn, invited me to select Franklin Fur- vided only 6 hours of technical staff time interactive art discourse. nace performers to be a part of the cy- for each artist’s netcast) to animate a For my October performance on ber/physical space/time installation at Sheela-na-gig, an image by Nancy Spero ParkBench, I decided to impersonate Sandra Gering Gallery. I selected six of a Celtic fertility figure. Then York (Fig. Tipper Gore singing “The Star-Spangled artists/collaborators: Alexander Komlosi 4) situated her mouth inside its vagina to Banner.” I thought the well-known lyrics (Fig. 2); Tanya Barfield and Clarinda sing, producing the image of a “vagina and my pantomime of them would best MacLow; Anita Chao and Rumiza Koya; dentata”! accommodate the one-frame-per-second Prema Murthy and Diane Ludin; Debo- speed, and the silence, of the netcast. The rah Edmeades; and Murray Hill and performance was a collaboration: The Penelope Tuesdae. Their performance 1998–1999: ParkBench crew hung a red velvet curtain works are still archivally available at DIGITAL ORIGINALITY behind me and was inspired to superim- <www.parkbench.org>. Franklin Furnace presented 10 live net- pose the lyrics of the U.S. national an- casts during its first season in spring 1998, them, in blue, upon my body as I sang. I and 22 during its second full season of came away satisfied with my first virtual SPRING 1998: TIME AND SPACE collaboration with Pseudo, whose goal performance, although I now admit I was The first netcasting season presented was to emulate television with the added in a fog as to the potential of the Inter- by Franklin Furnace was produced in feature of chat interaction. During this net as an art medium. collaboration with a for-profit dot.com full season, renamed The Future of the That December, Jordan Crandall, di- company, Pseudo Programs, Inc., located Present at the suggestion of Franklin rector of the X-Art Foundation, invited in a loft on the corner of Broadway and Furnace’s producer at Pseudo, Robert artists to curate works for Blast 5. From Houston Street in New York. On 6 Feb- Galinsky (known universally as Galinsky), its beginning in 1990, Blast set out to ex- ruary 1998, artist Halona Hilbertz (Fig. Franklin Furnace learned that trying to plore contemporary texts and images 3) performed Pseudo Studio Walk, con- produce a work of live art on the Inter- and their accompanying practices of sisting of video documentation of her fig- net every other week from September reading, viewing and authoring by em- ure walking up to the camera, obscuring to July (infrequent by live perform- bracing content that is material and dig- the lens with her bushy hair, then reced- ance standards) was difficult to do in cy- ital, on-line and off-line, recorded and ing deep into Pseudo’s loft, then up to berspace.