Art
Moving Pictures
At this year's FotoFest in Houston, digital art— once notable for its novelty—was actually done well, and the still picture seemed like an anachronism.
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But the two-dimensional, with-sound moving picture may itself be a dated concept. To make Dusted, shown at the Museum of Fine Arts' Glassell School, New Mexico-based filmmaker Peter Sarkisian originally placed a nude couple inside a Plexiglas cube and shot them with five video cameras, one positioned at the top of the cube and one on each side. The actual installation consisted of five video projectors, set in the same position as the cameras, surrounding a roughly three-foot white plywood cube. Projected onto this three-dimensional screen, accompanied by the sound of a woman's darkly erotic, cryptic whispering, the five separate yet perfectly synchronized images eerily merge into the startling illusion that the couple is trapped inside a transparent cube. Struggling to orient themselves, reaching plaintively out of what appears to be a small circular opening at the top, the figures seem to float in a sort of amniotic fluid, like fetuses that reached sexual maturity without ever having been born.
The ambiguous status of Sarkisian's claustrophobic nudes touches on the identity issues that ran rampant throughout FotoFest. Just ten years ago many artists were stridently categorizing themselves by gender, sexual orientation, race, or ethnicity and demanding to be taken at face value: Here's who I am; deal with it. Today that kind of self-assertion seems almost as passé as an anti-war rally, replaced by a pervasive anxiety: Am I real or am I virtual? Not surprisingly, the question is most explicitly examined at Internet sites like Heath Bunting and Russian artist Olia Lialina's Identity Swap Database, which invites visitors to match their photos and physical descriptions with similarly endowed, potential identity-barter partners—a playful slap at the interchangeable, commodity status of personal information on the Web. The insidious nature of Internet information gathering—and the efforts of corporate marketeers to pigeonhole us with it—are lampooned in Jenny Marketou's SmellBytes. Greek artist Marketou unleashes a "knowbot," an intelligent software program capable of autonomously roaming the Web, to swipe personal Webcam images from CUseeMe chat rooms (the Internet equivalent of the videophone) and analyze each subject's facial structure, pseudoscientifically arriving at a digital algorithm that corresponds to the hapless identity-theft victim's "personal smell."
The corollary to the digital identity crisis is that in a world of bits and bytes, you can be anyone you want—or don't want—to be. The kind of identity-sampling Cindy Sherman pioneered 25 years ago, photographing herself in roles ranging from hooker to harried housewife, no longer requires sets, costumes, and props. Swedish-born Sara Rytekke, who received her master of fine arts degree from the University of Houston and now teaches in Miami (a paradigmatic résumé in today's art world), uses basic desktop-publishing technology to design dozens of fictitious women's-magazine covers and digitally insert herself as the cover girl on each. The titles (Dazzle, Best Ever Housekeeping, Pucker Up, Smash) and featured articles ("Hollywood's Secrets to a Great Party," "Sex 911," "Mr. Right Radar," "Why Younger Women Have Children") are just close enough to reality to be really frightening, skewering the vapid "ideal" images insistently marketed to young women.
Like our personal histories, our collective past can just as easily be shoveled into the digital information processor and come out as something else. Self-taught Los Angeles artist Scott Griesbach revisits cultural history in a series of large black and white digital images, inventing fictitious scenes like Marcel Duchamp purchasing his revolutionary 1917 Dadaist work, the urinal he signed and exhibited as Fountain, in a well-stocked period hardware store. Another artist based in L.A., Ken Gonzalez-Day, showed a series of digital prints documenting a digitally created facsimile of an artifact that never actually existed, the ostensible only known copy of a florid nineteenth-century frontier novel titled The Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River. Set during the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War, filled with galloping prose and surrealistic border mayhem, Gonzalez-Day's digital mock-up limns its nineteenth-century models in all but an essential particular: The hero and heroine are, for a change, Mexicans. The paradox is that it takes Gonzalez-Day's fake to illuminate Western history's Anglo-skewed emphasis, but an ominous subtext in both Griesbach's and Gonzalez-Day's work is the potential of this technology in the hands of people—Holocaust deniers come to mind—who simply want to get history wrong.
The digital age's infinitely mutable past flows into a decidedly ambiguous future. Looking over the horizon, a noticeable number of artists registered their concern with the clash between nature and technology. MANUAL's Protracted Image cautions that simply because we can't see changes in the natural environment from moment to moment doesn't mean that potentially disastrous transformations aren't inexorably under way. Both Anna Ullrich and Oliver Wasow hybridize nature and technology to create exotic landscapes that appear neither utopian nor dystopian—or are sometimes both at once. In a fascinating series of digital stills that accompanied his DVD pieces, Wasow envisions vast cities that scarcely intrude on their surreally magnificent natural settings, while another metropolis, surrounded by an ocean of sludge, is enveloped in a fiery climatological apocalypse that makes nuclear war seem tepid.
The uncertainty extends even to the technology itself. A year ago the buzz was about "immersive media," the sense that the ultimate work of art might be a virtual-reality suit wrapping the spectator in a totally enveloping, interactive sensory experience. Yet FotoFest 2002 made a strong argument that increasingly less obtrusive new media that superficially resemble old media can behave in surprising ways. As the thin-screen revolution continues and digital paper becomes a reality, we may see living room walls turn into virtual museums and art magazines that play videos. There's even hope that digital art and digital entertainment might find some common ground, a meaningful alternative to the juvenile inanities of computer games and action-movie special effects.
At the outset of the twenty-first century, we don't know what to call it yet: Is it the Digital Age, the Information Age, the Post-human Era, or more philosophically, the Age of Uncertainty? Whatever we end up calling it, the message from FotoFest 2002 is that this new age is capable of spawning a digital culture that transcends the fantasies of twelve-year-old boys, that this century's new media may even be as transforming as the Modernists' new media—collage, assemblage, "found" objects, industrial materials and the machine aesthetic, the very notion of mixing media—which were so instrumental in changing the look and the outlook of the twentieth century. It's uncertain where we're going, but the ground is unmistakably moving beneath our feet.
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