VM503 AESTHETICS AND HISTORY OF NEW MEDIA
WEEK 13 CLASS 2
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Why Art in Virtual Worlds? e-Happenings, Relational Milieux & “Second Sculpture” by Patrick Lichty (2008)
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Art in Virtual Worlds
• 2000s. • Synthetic 3-D worlds such as Second Life. • Electronic personifications called “avatars”. • Exploration of new (media) forms = contiguous with 20th century avant-garde. • Part of a historical arc of work that engages social relations: • Dada and Futurist soirees and evenings of syntesi broke the boundaries between art and theatre; • Antonin Artaud wrote of the "Theatre of Cruelty" which proclaimed the use of radical actions to reveal a reality without artifice; • Guy Debord | Situationist International engaged in critical discourse by the creation of social situations.
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Specific Precendents
• Ephemeral social/relational spaces through the “Happening” (Alan Kaprow/Al Hansen);
• Object (art/artist) as site of social exchange/ generation through “Social Sculpture” (Joseph Beuys);
• Relational space with persistent traces/art through “Relational Aesthetics” (Nicolas Bourriaud).
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Happenings
• Two principles defined by Alan Kaprow: • “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible”; • “The source of themes, materials, actions and the relationships between them are to be derived from any place or period except from the arts…”
• Art is formally freed from the object and the gallery to realm of life/action.
• Blurs the distinction between art and life to allow the Happening to be defined as any milieu of potential (which is consistent with virtual worlds, as are variability of time, indistinctness of audience, and uniqueness of moment).
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Social Sculpture • German artist Joseph Beuys’ ideas grew out of the action art of Fluxus and Happenings.
• Used this term to illustrate his idea of art's potential to transform society: "how we mold and shape the world in which we live: sculpture as an evolutionary process; everyone an artist.”
• It is expressly opposed to art that is rooted in formal and aesthetic considerations but includes human activity, in particular activity that strives to structure and shape society (i.e. he called his performances “actions.”)
• The central idea of a social sculpture is a person, who creates structures in society using language and thought. Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Social Sculpture …
• But the most important thing is to organize … the notion of collective agency, the ability of the individual to coalesce with others and take this collectivity out into the world where it can effect change.
• 7000 Oaks centers around the placement of that number of saplings and basalt plinths as a gesture of environmental awareness.
• Both the original work and the Second Life remediation of it created a discursive space formed around Beuys' original vision of environmental awareness*. It is from these Beuysian effects that works in virtual worlds can be affective event-sites rather than merely loci for material exchange.
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College 7000 Oaks, Documenta 7, 1982
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College 7000 Oaks, New York
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College 7000 Oaks and Counting (2006-2009) Tiffany Holmes
The animation changes based on the amount of electricity being consumed or dynamic carbon loads generated throughout the day. Rings of spinning oak trees represent carbon loads. If loads are low, the rings are composed fully of healthy green trees and spin slowly. As loads peak, trees are removed and replaced by electrical appliances like light bulbs or coffeepots.
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College 7000 Oaks, Second Life (2007-) Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG
The diminishing pile of virtual stones will indicate the progress of the project, which will go on until all 7000 oaks and stones have been placed.
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College “Relational Aesthetics” by Nicolas Bourriaud
• Art: Art is an activity consisting of producing relationships with the world with the help of signs, forms, actions and objects.
• Relational Art: A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.
• Relational Aesthetics: theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt.
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Relational Aesthetics …
• The supreme “separation”, the separation that affects relational channels, represents the final stage in the transformation to the “Society of the Spectacle” as described by Guy Debord.
• This is a society where human relations are no longer “directly experienced,” but start to become blurred in their “spectacular” representation.
• Herein lies the most burning issue to do with art today: is it possible to generate relationships with the world, in a practical field art-making traditionally earmarked for their “representation”?
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Relational Aesthetics …
• The role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real.
• Art is a state of encounter.
• Relational Aesthetics represents a theory of form. Form is a coherent unit, a structure which shows the typical features of a world; a lasting encounter. Form is not immutable or inevitable. It is understood differently at different times.
• What is a form when it is plunged into the dimension of dialogue*?
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Rirkrit Tiravanija
untitled (demo station no. 5), during a moment of stasis, in between moments of complete chaos.
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Rirkrit Tiravanija
His early installations involved cooking meals for gallery-goers.
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Felix Gonzalez-Torres
‘Untitled’ (Public Opinion), 1991 and ‘Untitled’ (LA), 1991
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Relational Milieu*
• This is not the utopian vision of Kaprow and Beuys -- stressing artist as libérateur -- but as artist system that leaves traces, whether material or experiential/emotional.
• Relational art then -- as opposed to the expansive definition of Kaprow (art as milieu) and Beuys' milieu- creating work -- are artist constrained, formal, collective, social systems with persistent traces.
• This brings art back to the gallery, which was a site anathema to Kaprow, and one that was transcended by Beuys.
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Relational Milieu …
• Negotiating issues of "ownership" defines power relations that shape milieux in which art may operate.
• Within virtual worlds that have fundamental systems of exchange* -- commercial, social and otherwise -- relationalism redefines social art as complex affective systems, with larger effects in that environment spreading into the larger culture surrounding the given virtual world.
• In virtual worlds, "objects" create social relations and then build into oeuvres and communities.
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College “One Hour Sim” by Eshi Otawara
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College One Hour Sim …
• A set of at eleven daily installations using the entire space of a SL server, or 256 virtual square meters in which she creates a regional installation in one hour.
• Flower Tower is a multi-tiered, recursive, meditative space framed by shell upon shell of flowers.
• A structure for inhabitation, congregation, assembly, and singular contemplation.
• Purchased and relocated by the owner* = a sculpture and social space, fulfilling Bourriaud's principles of experience and exchange.
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Brooklyn Is Watching
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Brooklyn is Watching
• An area on an SL region, a portal at Brooklyn's Jack the Pelican gallery, a blog, and a podcast.
• A nexus where contemporary and virtual artists share art and critical dialogues between virtual and physical cultures.
• Loosely based on Kaprow's idea of “art as life”; a space where “art happens”, with no preconception as to who might be the participants, (chance, indeterminacy).
• Interest in avatar-as-object = agent-objects which are then generators of objects.
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Gazira Barbeli: Code Performer
Locusolus Island: “Gazira becomes a sculptor because she has a space to live in, just as she becomes a performer because she has an audience to astound. These two things are not separate, because in her world sculptures are events, and events have a presence in space.” - Domenico Quaranta,
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Gazira Barbeli …
• Claims to be an independent agent with no human intervention.
• A virtually embodied artwork/"Body of Work"/"Corpus" who/that is a creator of virtual situations, including a pizza delivery attack upon a virtual art gallery, or provocative artworks like the Warholian "Second Soup".
• She/It further recurses from Otawara and Van Buren, (BiW) embodying a series of the previous social functions, but integrates further functions: • through her Locusonus region, she moves into community building; has multiple studios for other artists and archives.
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Gazira Barbeli …
Second Soup. You love Pop Art - Pop Art hates you (2006)
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Gazira Barbeli …
Second Soup LSL code Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Gazira Barbeli …
Don't Say stupid ("Offensive words? Nevermore!", performances)
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Cao Fei (aka China Tracy): New Citizen | Architect
RMB City Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Cao Fei (aka China Tracy)
iMirror
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Performative Interventions
• Artists create ad hoc sites through actions, focusing on experiential work.
• Paradise Ahead (2006-07) by Scott Kildall: • a print and performance series that blurs the line between document and event in Second Life; • each scene captures the anticipation and familiarity of this simulated environment by restaging iconic art installations, films and photographs; • using only primitive graphics of Second Life, the documentation of these performances -- large-scale prints -- serves as a historical record of the initial launch point into simulated worlds.
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Paradise Ahead
Recreation of “Cut-Piece” (1965) by Yoko Ono
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College The Impossible Happening: Second Front
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Second Front • An international performance group of seven members, located across ten time zones.
• Create original or "impossible" performance works in the spirit of Dada, Fluxus.
• Adoption of elements from Kaprow's Happening format: interpretation and non-repeatability, using disparate elements from cascades of barricades to rains of Super Marios. Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Second Front: ‘Theatre of the Improbable’ • Car Bibbe #2 was performed in Chicago, and Parvu, Estonia on Oct. 18, 2008.
• Hansen's 1958 "Car Bibbe” (or "car symphony”) has been performed a number of times; Car Bibbe #2 was written years after and was never feasible due to the use of large amounts of explosives.
• Second Front member Bibbe Hansen revealed a scan of her father's original sketch, and asked whether the piece could finally be realized in the virtual.
• The Car Bibbe #2 score involved cycles of systematic detonations of a Cadillac automobile using dynamite, ballerinas performing barre exercises, and maintenance engineers raking parts in, where the cycle repeats until the vehicle's destruction.
• Random virtual passers-by are invited to participate by raking or performing pirouettes while the detonations progress. Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Car Bibbe by Al Hansen
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Car Bibbe # 2 by Second Front
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Car Bibbe #2 by Second Front
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College Why Art in Virtual Worlds?
• This begs consideration of the differences between performativity and objecthood in relational art, as well as objective, site specific, and unsituated works.
• We are led to the questions of the extant, immediacy, and identification in the work that creates levels of compelling engagement.
• Possible answers may have to do with physiology / psychology: • mirror or “Dalai Lama” neurons (Ramachandran); role in empathy; • avatar = “second self” • humans are hard-wired to identify with virtual spaces and virtual art.
Jo-Anne Green, Emerson College