Remote exhibition

Curator's Essay by Vince Dziekan

Remote (Close up, from afar)
Vince Dziekan

This curator’s essay is preview of a more extended research paper that will concentrate on the digital aesthetics associated with the tele-image¹. This article will develop some thoughts attributable to the artworks included in the Remote exhibition with a particular focus on their distributed properties and the ‘transpositional’ characteristics associated with the featured artists’ realizations of virtual space.

What is aura, actually? A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be. Walter Benjamin²

History has it that Samuel Morse successfully transmitted his first electric-telegraph message on the 6th of January 1838. Having become increasingly obsessed with the possibility of transmitting ‘intelligence’ at a distance by electricity, the artist and part-time inventor built a telegraph machine using a variety of materials that he found readily at hand, scattered throughout his workshop. Using bits of wire, cotton thread, sundry art materials and old clockwork mechanisms, he succeeded in sending a message – coded in the graphic language he devised especially for such a purpose – a distance amounting to some ten miles. Legend has it that this experiment was realised entirely within the four walls of his New Jersey studio by coiling the total length of copper wire used to conduct the sequencing of electrical pulses – a message written literally with light – around the interior of his studio.

The paradoxical interplay between distance and proximity that is realized through the contiguous meeting of different times and places in a physical space underpins the curatorial rationale of Remote. Conceived and expressed through the medium of the exhibition, Remote is characterised by its distributed form. Its distinctive scenography (as the interrelationship between curatorial thematics, which are expressed through the communicative act of exposition involving scenic design, and the exhibition as the writing of that space) draws upon the particular characteristics of the Plimsoll Gallery and its local environment, which has been incorporated into the overall sweep of the expanded exhibition. This inclusion of other locales in the immediate proximity of the Centre for the Arts – their hyper-linking and cross-referencing to the exhibition – transforms the experience of the exhibition from its basis in installation of an enclosed, cubic space into something more likened to an itinerary. While naturally occupying gallery space and exercising its language and potential, the works by each of the five featured artists in their own ways also utilize the gallery in more ‘instrumental’ ways – using the gallery itself as a node or meeting point in a wider network – by interweaving dispersed, inter-connected and superimposed components back to that space.

These artists – Susan Collins, Pete Gomes, Derek Hart, Nancy Mauro-Flude and Martin Walch – explore certain ‘transpositional’ characteristics associated with the visualization of virtual space. Each negotiates their relation to the real world and their works demonstrate how the transaction between reality and virtuality might be constituted today when any firm sense of presence (real space) and immediacy (real time) is exacerbated by technologies that problemmatize notions of nearness and remoteness, such as the televisual, tele-communications and satellite navigational systems. While represented through a diversity of expressions that include screen and projection-based moving image work, Webcast transmissions, site-specific installation and locative media, a common point of departure for all is apparent: a confounded sense of place and proximity.

This transaction between times and places at once immediate (present, proximate, up close) and at a remove (absent, distanced, afar) is central to the modern industrialization of the production and dissemination of visual images. This feature – which in its advanced form comes to distinguish the paradoxical logic of contemporary perception from its dialectical modern counterpart³ – is clearly present in the coincidental inventions of tele-communication and photography. Both technologies were introduced in the early-mid 19th century and intersect the act of seeing with memory. Eduardo Cadava for one, in his wonderfully poetic meditation on Walter Benjamin and the intertwined relationship between words (history) and light (photography), alludes to the ‘irreducible link between thought as memory and the technical dimension of memorization, the techniques of material inscription’ that was central to Benjamin’s preoccupation with the beginnings of photography and technologies of reproduction⁴ Proceeding from the transcription of the lived event into represented memory through technological means, such as the camera apparatus, our relationship to reality is paradoxically brought up close while simultaneously remaining afar: ‘This oscillation between space and time, between distance and proximity, touches on the very nature of photographic and filmic media, whose structure consists in the simultaneous reduction and maximization of distance⁵’ More recently, the work of Paul Virilio has outlined the implications of instrumental seeing and the eradication of distance by the speed of instantaneous telecommunications – the tele-scoping of tenses or time-frames past and present. According to Virilio, the increasing dependence of perception upon technological mediation entails the ‘conveyance of sight that produce(s) a telescoping of near and far, a phenomenon of acceleration obliterating our experience of distances and dimensions⁶’

As a contributing theme of the exhibition project, Remote entertains such a telescoping; of the relationship of the perceived, immediately experienced event and its transcription (through various ways and means of writing and representation). The dynamics involved in this open dialogue can been seen to operate across all works included in the inventory, albeit manifesting itself in a variety of ways.

Artists Martin Walch and Pete Gomes share an interest in mapping the experiential, first hand encounters with physical places. Both use global positioning system (GPS) derived data sets that are subsequently translated into visualized notation. This processing literally transcribes the traces of recorded passage through spaces both drawn from actual tracking in the natural environment (from Walch’s earlier forays into the Mount Lyall wilderness on Tasmania’s remote and rugged west coast, or, more recently, his excursions in the relatively accessible wilderness area of Tasman Peninsula) and imaginatively filtered by the imposition of distance (London-based artist Gomes’ pre-visualization of a tract of Madagascar coastline that the artist will subsequently inhabit as part of his involvement in a community aid project there). Gomes has volunteered to spend time working in and around the last remaining stands of littoral forest in southeast Madagascar with the charity organization Azafady. The staging of this particular iteration of this multi-dimensional work, which he has also ‘performed’ in London, is a response to the destruction of this distinctive feature of the local ecology where the rainforest grows to the edge of the sea. In particular, the artist intends to draw the viewer’s attention to the impact that the mining of titanium dioxide is having on the local ecosystem there. Representative of his performative utilization of locative media, Gomes’ artistic process of mark-making raises to a level of visuality the invisible streams of information that pervade, course through and envelope any geographical (which also underpins Walch’s Losing the Plot – XYZ/T v15-220206) or geopolitical sense of the interconnection of local and global spaces. This transient act of leaving behind traces as indicative of meaningful intervention contrasts with the way we normally take photographs of (and subsequent transport them from) a particular locale and transpose them into another place. Instead, such location-sensitive and aware artworks imbue the space in which these traces are left with a superimposed record or ‘meta-tagged’ meaning derived from another register of perception of that space. Recalling the classical mnemonic technique known as the Method of Loci, the works of both Walch and Gomes, memory and imaginative projection, technology and topography become fused⁷. The ordering of space and time through the sequential interconnection of locations is applied for the purpose of performing the reactivation of intangible histories, remembered stories or rites.

Derek Hart shares with these artists a practice that is characterised by active, participatory involvement, accumulative documentation and performative re-enactment. For his part, Hart presents a distributed artwork that has adapted itself flexibly to the expanded environmental conditions of the exhibition’s distinctive scenography. Maravilha do Rio de Janeiro is based on the televisual representation of six of the most scenic attributes of Rio de Janeiro, including Guanabara Bay, Maracanã football stadium, Sugarloaf Mountain and the Christ the Redeemer statue. Inspired by a populist survey that ranked these prominent, iconic locations, the artist directed the shooting of source footage, executed as an instructional relay between the English artist and the Brazilian pilot of a TV Globo news helicopter. Image making in this example is reduced to that purest act of ‘sighting’ and ‘targeting’. Creative visual subjectivity of the photographic medium is submitted to the production of ambient technical effect.

Most directly, the movement of time – as distinct from its ‘arresting’ in still photography – and how this might be constituted in the photomedia image is most thoroughly addressed in the transmission-based pieces of Nancy Mauro-Flude and Susan Collins. For her part, Mauro-Flude reprises her Webcast Tradestream, which relays a live video feed from her window overlooking a canal in Amsterdam. Like the perpetual ebb and flow of the canal, it seems arbitrary to think of the work as having either beginning or end. Recast as Take Me There: Bring Me Back, the Webcam image is refreshed at 6-second intervals, not unlike the intermittent traffic along the watercourse; the open channel transmission of the image’s feed via the Internet likened to the steady passing of the ordinary time of life. The artist’s thorough immersion in the contemporary networked culture of the datasphere is exemplified in the work’s continuous performative exchange – which is indicated by the insertion of an intimate, personal aphorism updated daily (‘Better call all the ships they’ve been caught sailing’, ‘Is starlight a wireless signal?’, ‘The unruly has been censored’) and the interjection of different visual tableaux that interrupt the otherwise steady image ‘flow’. Acting like thoughts for the day, these phrases juxtapose with the textual insertion recording the transmission’s time and date stamping. Superimposed upon whatever incidental image ‘happens’ to be within the camera’s field of view at the time (an ordered pair of seabirds frozen in centre frame, a dispersing flock amongst bare tree branches, a blue cargo ship whose name – truncated to read C – - MAX – by the partial obliteration resulting from the fortuitous placement of a tree limb in the foreground, one can’t help interpreted as ‘CLIMAX’), the artist’s fleeting thoughts and impressions provide a tone that colours these ‘slices of life’, existing somewhere in between ritual or routine, the happenstance of waking-reality or nocturnal dream episodes.

British artist Susan Collins’ work also entertains the possibility that the online world supersedes the dichotomy that separates notions of the real and virtual, and instead offers the means to be ‘elsewhere’. One way that this concern manifests itself in her practice involves the exploration of technologically mediated exchange between geographically remote locations. Her work Transporting Skies from 2002 introduced a number of the concerns that continue to resonate in her more recent Webcam tele-artworks, including the ‘attempt to make visible what it means to send information across time and place, and to expose the material that we use to do that with⁸’

Transporting Skies involved the transmission of images linking exhibition spaces 300 miles apart in Yorkshire and Cornwall (the choice of this particular location took its inspiration from the fact that Marconi transmitted the first transatlantic Morse code message from there). As with Morse’s studio-centric transmission over 10 miles of coiled cabling, the actual distances involved become something of an irrelevance; the artist has commented how the work was initially conceived for a significantly larger scale involving different time zones. However, once attuned, the relative proximity of these two sites revealed unexpected perceptible differences and subtleties between the urban Sheffield landscape and the Penzance seascape (differences such as the onset of dusk and the colour qualities of the night-time sky). In this work a video image of sky was captured in real time from each location and sent as streaming video to the opposite gallery location. Sky relayed from Cornwall was presented as a large-scale projection on the wall of Site Gallery in Sheffield, while the counterpart image from Sheffield was integrated into the lantern ceiling of Newlyn Art Gallery. An additional level of viewer interaction was incorporated into this part of the work by having the viewer’s own attentive image captured and combined using chroma-key techniques with the live image of Yorkshire sky transferred to the ceiling projection in Penzance.

More recently, Collins’ work has concentrated on producing (in actual fact ‘propagating’ might be a better word) artworks that elude temporal closure or the fixing of pictorial space in an image. One such ‘pixelscape’, Glenlandia, is exhibited as part of Remote. Constructed in a similar way to its ‘sister’ piece, Fenlandia, these art projects involve observing the relationship between landscape and technology over greatly extended time spans; in the case of Glenlandia the work is ‘active’ over the course of a full year. Fenlandia was situated in an area of East Anglia known as the ‘Silicon Fen’, after the proliferation of new technology companies located there. In noting how technology had become literally embedded in the flat horizons of this reclaimed landscape, the artist has commented: ‘It seemed the perfect opportunity not only to marry the horizontality of my pixel landscapes to their subject, but also to develop the work further, distributing it live online as well as archiving (harvesting) images from the work over the course of a full year⁹’. Comparatively, in the case of Glenlandia, Collins has set up a Webcam in Pitlochry to take in the view of what appears to be a quintessentially ‘natural’ Scottish scene. However, Loch Faskally is actually a man made loch and its water levels fluctuate according to demand on power generated from a nearby hydro dam.

This tele-image endures as a continually refreshing image feed. Each pixel records a different second in time throughout the duration of the exhibition period, cascading from top left to bottom right corners of the continuously ‘overwritten’ single image frame. Time becomes the ‘dynamic fabric of the work’ as the total number of pixels captured by this 320×240 resolution image translates effectively into a single day (76800 seconds, or 21.33 hours)[10]. While digitally-updating the techniques of the cinematic time-lapse or photographic long exposure, this method of image production also entails a conceptual shift in focus: ‘The image loses its characteristics of instantaneousness to become a stratification of the passing of time. It’s an elaboration which involves a remarkable conceptual leap compared to the creative use of the shutter speed in classical photography and which contains one of the peculiar characteristics of digital technologies (the accumulation of information), applying it to the domain of time and of visual effects¹¹’.

Both Mauro-Flude and Collins (and also Hart to a degree) utilize the instrumental operability of vision in their work. In their cases, the Web camera records what it sees, absolutely, resulting in an ‘ambient’ machine vision (‘visionics’) of the kind that Virilio identifies with computer-aided or surveillance imaging. Any valorisation of the aesthetisized instant proves irrelevant as the image’s decisive moment shifts constantly: from when it was instrumentally captured, digitally archived or, as when viewing successive single pixels refresh, moving the image inexorably forward into the future. Yet, as both artists have acutely observed, it is through the pulse, the continuous disturbance of this ‘time shift’ that the image finds itself delicately poised between banality and epiphany. As Collins summarizes, found in the midst of the tele-image are surprising revelations: ‘for instance the occasions that a full moon is captured passing through the night sky, gives a real sense of planet/earth movement which serves to really consider nature in time and space¹²’. In the midst of day passing into night and light turns to darkness, ‘stray’ pixels capture presence in all its fleetingness – as cloud pass and birds fly, human life intrudes, stops awhile before dissolving back into flux.

These works reintroduce the ‘durational’ character of photography, first revealed in the fluctuating luminosity and the blurs and wipes of vague amorphous form that characterise many early photographs due to the technical limitations that resulted in prolonged exposure. In a strange way, the long exposure times characteristic of such representative photographs of the era produced a coherence of illumination and atmosphere that resulted in a ‘correspondence’ between subject and technique. This short-lived period of ‘congruence’ would soon become ‘incongruent’ when, according to Benjamin, ‘advances in optics made instruments available that put darkness entirely to flight and recorded appearances as faithfully as any mirror¹³’.

To capture fleeting images has long been the objective of representational art; sought after since at least the technical invention of the camera obscura. It is worth remembering, particularly in relation to Remote, that the first ‘camera’ was actually a room that the artist was required to erect in situ. Before the advent of the substantially more miniaturized, table-top camera lucida, the ‘black box’ had to be constructed in the selected location, placed to best frame the desired vantage upon the view to be transcribed by the artist – from within the camera’s sealed walls.

Corresponding to the way that the camera might thus be seen to operate in relation to the image, techno-social networks have come to now operate as the site for contemporary art and media practices. The highly individualized ‘aesthetics’ of the artists that have been brought together – framed by the curatorial and architectural parameters of the exhibition – are indicative of the burgeoning of what has been termed ‘distributed aesthetics¹⁴’. A number of positions currently developing within this genre are encompassed by terms such as ‘net art’, ‘locative media’ or ‘networked narrative environments’. In terms of digital aesthetics, one commentator has observed: ‘The exploratory movements of locative media lead to a convergence of geographical and data space, reversing the trend towards digital content being viewed as placeless, only encountered in the amorphous and other space of the internet¹⁵’. By connecting digital media to the real spaces (in which they are encountered) or environments (to which they are inter-connected), it is the network that ‘provides the technical backdrop that enables a remote and open-ended dialog between these spaces¹⁶’. The technologized interface between physical and virtual spaces has consequence upon how communication and meaning is culturally negotiated and the act of involvement or participation is socially organized. How might the relationship between perceptual experience and its aesthetic re-presentation find material, media or mediated expression through visualization, digital imaging and communications technologies?

For its own part, the curatorial design of Remote aims to engage the viewer with different ways and means through which the network, broadly understood, functions in determining the increasingly dispersed contours of art and aesthetics. The exhibition form is called upon to provide the infrastructure that locates the viewer simultaneously at the juncture and disjunction of here and there, of the socially instituted and individually experienced. In recognition of the virtualization of the art complex that involves the increasingly fluid interrelation between museum, exhibition and artwork, the scenography of Remote structures the experience of being dispersed between informatic and physical space. The range of spatial practices available to art practice and curatorial design far exceed purely architectural factors of gallery space and have come increasingly to include the design of an extended typology of spaces (which today involves digitally-mediated communication spaces, a variety of multimedia modes and the Internet). The exhibition form brings together these features into a distributive, aggregative complex of relations. By inducing the exploration of art across this broader ‘ecology’ of spaces, the artworks that have been assembled through the connective tissue of the exhibition collectively propose how artistic and curatorial practice might negotiate the tension between virtuality and site-specificity.

End notes

¹ tele– (Before a vowel properly tel-, but more often in the full form), afar, far off; used in numerous (chiefly recent) scientific and technical terms, mostly denoting or connected with special appliances or methods for operating over long distances; also in several terms connected with psychical research, denoting actions or impressions produced at a distance from the exciting cause, independently of the normal means of communication. Definition from the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 2003 [http://www.oed.com/]

² Benjamin, Walter (1979), ‘A Small History of Photography’, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, transl. Jephcott, Edmund and Shorter, Kingsley, Verso: London and New York; p.250

³ Paul Virilio distinguishes between three logics or ‘logistics of perception’ involving technologies of visual representation; see Virilio, Paul (1994), The Vision Machine, BFI and Indiana University Press: London and Bloomington, Indiana.

In summary, the age of what he refers to as the image’s ‘formal’ logic was the era of pictorial painting, print media and architecture. This era culminated with the advent of the ‘photogram’, which introduced the reproductive technologies of photography and the cinema during the 19th century. This period is characterised by a ‘dialectical’ logic of public representation. The close of the 20th century marks the end of modernism with the inventions of video recording, holography and computer graphics – these infographic and digital technologies herald the latest phase, which Virilio terms ‘paradoxical’: ‘Paradoxical logic emerges when the real-time image dominates the thing represented, real time subsequently prevailing over real space, virtuality dominating actuality and turning the very concept of reality on its head. Whence the crisis in traditional forms of public representation (graphics, photography, cinema…), to the great advantage of presentation, of a paradoxical presence, the long distance telepresence of the object or being which provides their very existence, here and now.’ p.63

⁴ Cadava, Eduardo (1997), Words of Light – Theses on the Photography of History, Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey; p.xviii

⁵ Cadava; p.xxv

⁶ Virilio; P.4

⁷ Ibid; p.3

⁸ Collins, Susan (transcript; from an unpublished interview with Carlo Zanni)

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Collins, Susan (2004), ‘The Actual and the Imagined’, in Networked Narrative Environments As Imaginary Spaces of Being, ed. Zapp, Andrea, MIRIAD: Manchester; p.55

¹¹ Ludovico, Alessandro, ‘Fenlandia, Slow Pixels’, Neural.it, 09/07/2004 [Accessed at: http://www.neural.it/nnews/fenlandiae.htm]

¹² Collins, Susan (transcript; from an unpublished interview with Carlo Zanni)

¹³ Benjamin; p. 248

¹⁴ The reader is directed to the most recent issue of Fibreculture Journal which was dedicated to this field of enquiry; See FibreCulture Journal, Issue 7 – Distributed Aesthetics, 2005 ISSN 1449-1443. Editorially, this issue proposes that techno-social networks are crucially constitutive of the distributed aesthesia of contemporary networked encounters. The issue was edited by Lisa Gye, Anna Munster and Ingrid Richardson, and included contributions from Darren Tofts, Anna Munster & Geert Lovink, Greg Turner-Rahman, Mark Amerika, Simon Biggs, Edwina Bartlem, Susan Ballard, Keith Armstrong and Vince Dziekan. [Accessed at: http://www.fibreculture.org.au]

¹⁵ Hemment, Drew, ‘Locative Arts’ [Accessed at: http://www.loca.org.uk]

¹⁶ Zapp, Andrea (2004), ‘Introduction’, in Networked Narrative Environments As Imaginary Spaces of Being, ed. Zapp, Andrea, MIRIAD: Manchester; p.12