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Marshall University Marshall Digital Scholar Art & Design Faculty Research School of Art & Design 2016 Materiality in Site Responsive Media Art Daniel Dean Marshall University, [email protected] John W. Kim Macalester College Follow this and additional works at: http://mds.marshall.edu/artdesign_faculty Part of the Art and Design Commons, and the Digital Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Kim, John W. “Materiality in Site Responsive Media Art.” In Rupture of the Virtual, 94-119. Saint Paul: DeWitt alW lace Library, Macalester College, 2016. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/books/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Art & Design at Marshall Digital Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Art & Design Faculty Research by an authorized administrator of Marshall Digital Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. 1 5 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Arco de la Victoria, Madrid, 1991. © Krzysztof Materiality in Wodiczko. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York Site Responsive Media Art 2 Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981. Image: © G. Lutz. 94 Rupture of the Virtual Krzysztof Wodiczko’s projection work estab- multiplicity of ways, we can extend the utility lished an early and influential approach of a concept of the material in the examina- to site-specific public media art. Since tion of media that frames a relationship to the 1980s, there has been a rapid expan- one’s physical surroundings. sion in the number, variety and technical sophistication of outdoor media art. Today there are a number of artists who engage JANET CARDIFF AND GEORGE in projection-type work but operate with BURES MILLER: different models for site specificity. This AUDIO AND chapter investigates three groups of media VIDEO WALKS artists and collectives who create work that make use of site in innovative ways, but in We are all searching for the real, for the authentic experience... configurations differing from the examples that we are actually on this earth … We are building a simulated previously examined. In contrast to the experience in the attempt to make people feel more connected previous chapter’s focus on site specificity to real life.139 in media art, I employ the term site respon- sive to characterize the works discussed in Cardiff and Miller have been creating this chapter. Site responsive is intended as artwork since the early 1990s, and their a more inclusive notion of how media art projects span a wide variety of forms, from responds to location. While site-specific art gallery installations and sonic environments exhibits the characteristics that were dis- to outdoor media pieces. I focus on a body cussed in Chapter 4,138 site responsive media of work they refer to as audio and video art, by contrast, may exhibit some (but not walks, because, in light of the site-specific all) of these characteristics. Site responsive, work discussed in the last chapter, they in other words, is used here as a more open- make use of comparable sensory and media ended category for media art that includes elements. The manner in which they have both site-specific art and work that is agnos- spoken about their intentions for the work, tic about site specificity. furthermore, resonates with the discussion An investigation of the variety of site of the material found in Wodiczko’s projec- responsive models for media art will sup- tions. As suggested in the quotation above, port the discussion of the material and the Cardiff and Miller characterize their own media’s role in constituting knowledge about work as an effort to “make people feel more it. The works examined here include ones connected to real life” or inspire a “renewal ones that critically investigate the material to of a sense of place.”140 In an examination of those that blur or hybridize viewers’ percep- a selection of their audio and video walks, tion of their physical surroundings in such I argue they can also produce an opposite a way as to extend the virtual out into site. effect: the extension of mediated experi- By examining projects that engage site in a ence out into the material, which blurs the 96 Rupture of the Virtual 97 Materiality in Site Responsive Media Art boundary between the real and the invented. soundtrack of an audience around you. The While Wodiczko’s site-specific projections third is a… sound environment of scenes foreground the sociocultural conditions of that unfold around you in the darkness.”141 site and its materiality, Cardiff and Miller’s The audience strains to distinguish extend the virtual out into the participant’s between the movie’s soundtrack and exter- interactions with site. I begin with an exam- nal noises, real and fake audience noises, ination of one of Cardiff and Miller’s gallery between sounds occurring inside or outside based projects, which illustrates a preoccu- the structure. The piece unsettles conven- pation with the virtual and its relation to the tions surrounding spectatorship in theatri- material that is central to their audio and cal settings, which makes the experience video walks. discomforting. The audience’s attention Originally created for the Canadian jitters between the film’s soundtrack and Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, the recorded audience noises. This shuffling Paradise Institute (2001) consists of a ply- of attention thwarts one’s ability to settle wood structure 17 x 36 x 10 feet with two into the immersiveness of a cinematic expe- doors that grant access to viewers (see rience. Paradise Institute is less about the Figure 1). When viewers enter, they find narrative content of the film being screened themselves on a theater’s balcony with 16 than this struggle to comprehend the mul- seats. It is a model of an old-fashioned movie tiple soundtracks. In other words, the piece theater in extreme forced perspective and examines the audience’s positionality as crafted in miniature to give the illusion that spectators in the constructed environment one is in a full-sized movie theater despite of the theater by unsettling the expectations the sturcture’s actual scale (see Figure 2). A that normally govern it. movie is screened and participants listen In Jonathan Crary’s analysis of modern to the soundtrack on headphones provided spectatorship, he charts how our capac- at each seat. Cardiff and Miller constructed ity for attention is the outcome of over a the soundtrack in such a way as to confuse century and a half of construction.142 That viewers about which sounds are part of the we can sit in fixed attention for the dura- movie’s storyline and which are recorded tion of a Hollywood movie hardly seems a ambient sounds that are outside the movie’s feat of disciplined self-control, but when narrative, such as the sounds of coughing, understood alongside myriad ways in chit-chat and rustling, a ringing cell phone, which focused attentiveness is demanded and a woman who whispers intimately into in contemporary forms of consumption one’s ear. In interviews, Cardiff and Miller and labor, such as full-time computer work have said that there are, in fact, three and assembly line manufacturing, the discrete soundtracks to the piece. “One importance of the construction of attentive level gives you the experience of the film subjects becomes clear.143 As part of his soundtrack. The second level is... a 3D analysis of the modern attention economy, 98 Rupture of the Virtual 99 Materiality in Site Responsive Media Art Crary also notes the rise of psychological are created for these precise locations, yet disorders associated with an inability to unlike walking tours, Cardiff and Miller’s properly embody attentiveness, including pieces tell a story about the place that is forms of schizophrenia and Attention frequently fictional, but at times contain Deficit Disorder.144 Symptoms associated fragments of factual details. with these disorders can include hyperac- To date, Cardiff and Miller have made tivity, disorientation, confusion, inability to over 25 audio and video walks and have concentrate or focus, and others. These are developed a number of techniques to precisely the kinds of effects that Cardiff deepen a listener’s involvement in the nar- and Miller produce in Paradise Institute. The rative. Given the large number of walks, it disruptions to the narrative make it impos- is difficult to generalize the techniques that sible to focus on the plotline, creating a they employ. I focus on a particular example, disorientation akin to the disorders asso- Her Long Black Hair (2004), an audio walk ciated with inattentiveness. What an inter- commissioned by the Public Art Fund for loper whispers into your ear, for example, Central Park in New York City, to exemplify becomes part of the unfolding sequence some of these techniques. The piece has the of events occurring on the screen. The sensibility of a detective story, because lis- screen does not define the entirety of the teners are given a packet of photographs at audience’s experience of the piece, for the the start of the tour, which includes images outside breaks in as a constitutive element. of a mysterious woman with long black hair This preoccupation with the inside (see Figure 3). Cardiff’s narratorial voice and the outside, the constructed and the also has a conspiratorial tone to it, making real, sets up a discussion of Cardiff and it seem like we are in pursuit of someone or Miller’s audio and video walks, which cul- something. There is no discernible narrative tivate similar tactics. In contrast to their structure to Her Long Black Hair, which gallery-based work, the walks draw on a consists mainly of the narrator’s recollec- tradition of recorded driving and walking tions and thoughts about various locations.

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