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About Liquid Spaces
Unlike the conventional gallery with it's traditional role
of viewer as passive spectator, the artworks in these Liquid
Spaces demand a more active role of the visitor as he or she
interacts with the works and becomes a protagonist in the
gallery.
Interactive art evolved from several different influences.
Incorporated in the artistic gesture is the passive language
of television viewing, the dynamic language of computer and
video games, and the typographic and verbal encoding established
by such avant garde movements as Dada, Fluxus, and the Situationists.
First appearing in the 1960s as computers began to make their
way into industry digital art drew on developing military,
medical, and entertainment technologies, collapsing the boundaries
between art and science, design and technology.
Modes of communication
Interactive art is not the first to make use of external modes
of communication or concepts of randomness. Italian Futurists
incorporated the postal system into their means of expression
by exchanging letters through the mail extolling the beauty
of war during World War I, while in 1916 Duchamp sent postcards
to his neighbors with carefully constructed, but meaningless
texts. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy used the telephone to explore the
basis of processing and assembling information in his work
Telephone Pictures, ordering three paintings from a sign factory
and exhibiting them in Berlin in 1924. This ordered coding
and decoding of images and their consequential simulated actualization
for Moholy-Nagy opened up new possibilities for the artistic
process.
Audience participation during the lively readings and performances
of Hans Arp, Tristian Tzara, and Hans Richter of the Dadaist’s
Cabaret Voltaire in the early 1900s was to have a profound
influence on the avant guard movements that followed. Dada
influences are evident in the telecommunications and multimedia
performances of the Fluxus Group in the 1960s as well as the
Performance Art, Happenings, and Video Art of the 1970s and
1980s. Robert Rauchenberg’s 1959 Broadcast invited visitors
to tune three radios into different stations in the gallery.
In 1960 the Myron Krueger project presented artworks that
were predicated on visitor disruption, thus introducing a
new interactive aesthetic. Krueger’s responsive artworks
Glowflow, Metaplay, and Videoplace were time-based performances
in which the visitor was as much an integral part of the theatrical
act as the work of art itself. Participatory elements were
also explored in the art and musical compositions of American
composer John Cage. The seminal performance of the scored
text of his Silent Composition 4’33 incorporated into
the composition both the ambient sound and the audience response,
including those who walked out of the auditorium.
Military, medical, and entertainment technologies
Interactive art is based upon technologies developed by and
for the Western military industrial complex, as it evolved
within centers for advanced research such as the Stanford
Research Institute and Xerox PARC. The medical and entertainment
industries were quick to make use of of these technological
advances, co-opting them for their own agendas.
By the 1970s centers such as the Institue of Advanced Media
Arts and Sciences in Ogaki, Japan, the Media Lab at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and the ITP at New York University,
began exploring the artistic potential of these technologies.
For the past thirty years companies such as Siggraph in the
United States and institutions such as Ars Electronic in Austria
have encouraged digital art by instituting annual competitions
and symposia on the developing discipline. These programs
and others like them around the world have stimulated the
activities and exhibitions organized by the NTT’s Intercommunication
Center in Tokyo and the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe,
Germany, which are amongst today’s key centers for this
kind of art.
The digital artists exhibited in Liquid Spaces approach their
work from very different starting points – industrial
design, literature and film, classical jazz, psychology, architecture
and photography. All Israeli born, the artists live and work
in New York and are united in their use of digital platforms
in their work.
Industrial designer Daniel Rozin’s Wooden, Trash, and
Shiny Ball Mirrors entice the observer to reflect on, and
be reflected by their transformative surfaces, as they invite
him/her to think about their own ways of seeing and notions
of cognition. Describing the intentionally fortuitous nature
of his projects, Rozin explains, “Creating a physical
object that includes computation provides serendipity or randomness.
In the physical world things happen. In computers things don’t
happen. A difficult challenge in programming a computer is
to make it behave in a non-repeatable or illogical way. You
can generate random behavior on a computer but it’s
not physical randomness – the world behaves in ways
that are much more than mathematically random. Steps wear
down where lots of people walk, things age, motors start making
weird sounds, computers overheat. One of the challenges when
trying to do art with computes is to produce the richness
of the real world.”
Tirtza Even invites the observer to navigate her liquid landscapes
through digital intervention, a transforming agency granted
by the artist and transferred to the user to produce new variations
across non-linear pathways.
Jazz musician Amit Pitaru uses computer coding to play with
animated drawings and painted images which shift and move
with the fluidity of the music. The spatial metaphors that
connect sound and motion recall the work of Russian physicist
Lev Termen, who in 1919 invented the Teremin, an instrument
played with no physical contact.
Inbar Barak and Ruth Ron are work with visualizations of information
systems and incorporate time-based interactivity in their
installations and online projects. In Liquid Spaces they entice
visitors to transgress the barriers set up between the casual
visitor and the institutional museum. Through a novel interface
and live feed video cameras visitor is allowed to glimpse
behind the scenes into the unseen workings of the museum.
Interactive art is fast becoming an integral part of the fabric
of the urban environment. From building facades to shop window
dressings, from the way we are entertained and how we entertain
ourselves and even to the way we visit museums and experience
art.
Alex Ward - Curator of Design and Architecture
Susan Hazan - Curator of New Media
Curator of New Media
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