Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Screen capture using Google Earth.

When I was a child, I spent countless hours poring over a Cold War–era National Geographic photo atlas. I traced every road and river, in every country, some which no longer existed or were currently in the process of brutal disintegration (à la balkanization). Sometimes, when I was really lucky, a country would be represented by two or three photographs. Some countries earned no photographic representation. Nonetheless, these photographs helped me learn that Thai women had really long fingernails, Brazilian men wrestled anacondas naked, and Africa was an untamed land bereft civilization and modernity. This photo atlas provided a seven-year-old me with irrefutable evidence about my world, but it also left so many questions. Malawi and Kyrgyzstan had no photos; what were they like? As I grew older these questions became more nuanced: Are all Algerians really Tuaregs? Might South Americans actually wear clothes? Are Western Europe and the United States as idyllic and perfect as the amber waves of grain imply? As much of a colonial travesty as that book was, it sparked an intense interest in the world and provided me with enough information to later deconstruct its own narrative.

Jump forward a few decades. Croatia is firmly established as a tourist hotspot, Dubai is megalopolis, and Burma is now Myanmar. So much has changed. We also now have a qualitatively different kind of atlas: Google Earth. This new atlas—a seven-year-old technology that allows me access to every nook and cranny of the planet’s surface—ostensibly offers a potential antidote to the inaccuracies of older atlases. This computer software exposes the mysteries of the world; every single village, building, and street on the planet is immediately viewable to me, save those hidden beneath thick canopies.

Prior to photography, atlases were geometric abstractions, lines representing places that were theoretically real, but unconfirmed to those people who had never been to them. The dragons and mythical creatures that sometimes populated these maps speak to their susceptibility to distortion and myth making. But with the advent of photography, people believed they could see the unmediated reality of these places. Photography offered a form of documentation that then (and now) carried more authority than technical illustrations. A “higher” form of knowledge was now available. But as my childhood photo atlas shows in hindsight, nominal and highly selective representation does little to demystify those places we’ve never been, and this epistemic pitfall can be found in Google Earth as well.

On the surface, Google Earth is far from a medieval abstraction aided by a few self-fulfilling photographs. When I look at the Congo, I see it exactly as it was at a distance of 2,300 feet on Tuesday June 29, 2010. Google Earth also contains millions of geotagged photos. Provided primarily by tourists and amateur photographers, these images offer much more than a bird’s eye view of a particular locale. In many parts of the world, Street View offers an even more in-depth view. While planning a potentially hypothetical trip to Monaco, I traveled around the streets of Monte Carlo noting where restaurants and adequate parking are (note: there is a lot of one, and very little of the other). By having an on the ground look, I will know that town inside out before I even land in Nice.

Does this deluge of specific, visual information foster only an armchair interest in the world? Why even go to Monaco? I’ve seen it. So what is left of the experience? I can visit San Diego if I want warmth, visit Vegas if I want wealth, and visit Napa if I want wine. Does our easy access to so much information about the places viewed render them “known” and negate our search for a deeper understanding of a place or a visit to it?  However, my desire to visit Monaco—or Saint Helena, or Iceland, or the Mongolian steppes—is not diminished one bit. That intense yearning to learn more about these places and really see them (whatever that means) still persists. This suggests two things: that there is something more to the places we visit than what we see, and that there is something lacking in the apparent omniscience of the digital atlas.

Boulevard Princesse Charlotte, Monte Carlo, Monaco. Screen capture using Google Earth.

There is really no easy way for someone in Monte Carlo to document her experiences of taste, touch, and smell. Sight and hearing, on the other hand, are easier senses to capture; images and sounds less complicated to disseminate. It is easy then to equate places with their sights, those buildings, monuments, and natural wonders that are named for the sense that we most associate with them. And until virtual reality and holograms are perfected, the first-hand experience of a distant place is absolutely unattainable. So while I am zipping down the rues and avenues with Street View, I am missing out on the sounds of the horns and seagulls, the mild Mediterranean breeze, the coconut scent of the artificially buxom and bronzed starlets, and the taste of the latte that tops it all off. More importantly, I am missing out on the first-hand experience of all it all. I engage in no conversations with locals, no arguments with merchants, and no drinks with fellow tourists. That is, all that I enjoy about visiting a place is completely missing. Even sightseeing, the most Flickrable activity imaginable, is nothing without the phenomenological experience of feeling the mass or the emptiness of a building in the pit of your stomach.

Yet we use Google Earth as much more than a surrogate for tourism. It is a compendium of knowledge about the world—knowledge that may provide the basis of how we think about the world. Popular, specious knowledge says that to see is to believe and that a picture is worth a thousand words. By my count then, Google Earth is worth untold billions of words, constituting many, many beliefs. Given the scientific satellite imagery and seemingly exhaustive photo documentation provided, viewers may erroneous take these “beliefs” to be objective approximations of the world when sometimes they are incredible aberrations.

For example, North Korea is a starving nation. It has been reported that in 2011, authorities reduced the daily caloric intake for each individual to 700, or one Venti Double Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino from Starbucks. The average official salary for workers is $2 per month. The country is wracked by poverty and oppression, but Google Earth provides scant acknowledgement of this. To the uninformed, the geotagged photos of Pyongyang provide evidence of a wealthy nation. Magnificent architectural achievements abound, great stadiums suggest that the city may have once been host to the Olympics, and nary a starving child is to be found. Ever the skilled curators, the North Korean government finely crafts how the rest of the world sees it. They disseminate few images from their country and those few outsiders who are allowed in are taken on highly orchestrated and monitored tours that show them only what the officials want to be seen. In turn, these visitors can only rarely (and very illegally) document those starving and dying in the streets.

Disneyland, Anaheim, California. Screen capture using Google Earth.

But even outside dystopian societies, Google Earth remains a world of selective documentation. Take, for example, the city I was born in. It has a population of over 300,000. It has shopping malls and theaters, rich and poor neighborhoods, hospitals and offices. Some of this is made visible by Google Earth, but very little. The reality of this city is almost entirely obfuscated by an eighty-five acre lysergic Zion: Disneyland. To Google Earth, outside of Disneyland, Anaheim and its hundreds of thousands of residents do not even exist. This phenomenon can be found, to varying degrees, in every city in the world.

The fact is, most of us simply do not photograph liquor stores and gas stations. We photograph that which we find interesting and that which we think others will find interesting. This leaves us with a digital photo atlas of the world that is entirely unreal. The slums of Anaheim are not photo worthy, nor are the well-kept buildings of Freetown, Sierra Leone. All regions of the world are affixed with preexisting narratives, and tourists, journalists, and Google users often reinforce these narratives through the photographs they shoot and share.

But let us not forget the lesson of my childhood atlas. While it promoted a racist and NATO-centric view of the world, it nonetheless gave me knowledge for critiquing that very viewpoint. I must first know that Freetown exists before I can even imagine challenging how it is represented to the world. After witnessing countless photos of shanties and dilapidated buildings in Freetown on Google Earth, I eventually came across a photo of a sleek, Mies van der Rohe–inspired bank building—a stark contrast to the narrative of a rural and bush sub-Saharan Africa. But then again, thank God for the photos of the shanties; it would be a tragedy to forget them.

Zenith Bank, Freetown, Sierra Leone. Screen capture using Google Earth.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Social Failure and Black Signs," 2010. Pigment print 34 x 24.8 inches; edition of 3. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

Recently in the San Francisco Bay Area it has been impossible to walk down a street without running into (or trying to avoid) someone protesting something. The messages range from concise to ironic, sardonic to flat-out fed up. In the undulating sea of abridged manifestos, there is the rare message so poignant that it demands the sign-bearer’s cause receives deeper consideration. Geoff Oppenheimer’s current exhibit at Ratio 3 Gallery, Inside Us All There is a Part That Would Like to Burn Down Our Own House, presents a reductive, politically-driven narrative filled with violence, chaos, nationalism, pageantry, existentialism and self-reflection. The title may be a mouthful, but it creates an interesting opposite to Oppenheimer’s expertly edited works, and sets the tone for the show as a whole.

Installation View, Geoff Oppenheimer, "Inside us all there is a part that would like to burn down our own house," 2011. Courtesy of Ratio 3 gallery.

Depending on when you enter the gallery, your initial sensory experience will most likely be one of two things: visual or auditory. For some, a minimalist installation of sculptures and photographs will greet them. Others will not be able to ignore the deafening cacophony of marching-band instruments streaming from an invisible source. But we’ll get to that later.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Anthems," 2011. High definition video; TRT 0:04:40; Edition 1 of 3 with 2 APs. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

The two bodies of work in the main gallery, Social Failure and Black Signs and Modern Ensembles, act as examples of how conceptual art can effectively function. The images in the series Social Failure and Black Signs are almost identical—black-and-white studio scenes of a hand holding a black sign with bold, white text. At face value, each piece holds an intriguing, reductive beauty. After learning the origins of each work, a satisfying sense of quiet epiphany develops. Each sign has a different fragmented statement that Oppenheimer chose from interviews with political figures such as Regan, McNamara and Castro, in which each man discusses the failures of his ideology. Devoid of any of the expected contextual information associated with protest signage, the images transition to an interior plane—a subconscious battlefield on which each person struggles with the contradictions of his actions and beliefs.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Modern Ensembles," 2010–2011. Gunpowder, blackpowder, smoke dyes, ballistic plex, and aluminum; 20 x 23.25 x 23.25 inches. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

In dimensional and aesthetic contrast are the rectangular sculptures of Modern Ensembles. Oppenheimer made each piece by detonating various custom charges of explosive chemicals inside ballistic Plexiglas. The resulting cuboids are three-dimensional cross sections of a distinct explosion. By containing the blast, Oppenheimer makes us witnesses to a frozen moment of violence. Additionally, the time it takes to view the pieces’ six sides allows for the consideration of the relationship between space and time—an explosion takes place in an instant, yet with each ensemble, we are able to stop time and find the curious beauty in the chaos.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Social Failure and Black Signs," 2010. Pigment print 34 x 24.8 inches; Edition of 3. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

After or during your time in the main gallery, you will undoubtedly start hearing the sounds of Oppenheimer’s video piece, Anthem. Tucked into the side gallery, the projection features a marching band playing four different national anthems. Instead of hearing them in succession, Oppenheimer layers each anthem so they play simultaneously. The resulting meta-anthem and/or non-anthem is an assault on the senses. In the video, figures fade in and out of opacity, overlapping into an accumulation of tan and brass. Each anthem, recited with pride, becomes a futile attempt at nationalism—not one can be distinguished from the others. The longer you watch, the louder it gets, as if each anthem is competing to be heard. The notes crescendo to an unintelligible roar, and then, as if overwhelmed with sound and light, break into white silence.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Modern Ensembles," 2010–2011. Gunpowder, blackpowder, smoke dyes, ballistic plex, and aluminum; 20 x 23.25 x 23.25 inches. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

Oppenheimer’s work truly benefits from deeper consideration. While each piece stands on its own, the combination of the three series, plus the title, opens an investigation into a part of all of us that maybe we are not very proud of: the part that never lets us forget we did something wrong, the part that would like to burn down our own house.

Bischoff Soren Black installation image, 2011. Image courtesy of Johansson Projects

The current exhibit at Johansson Projects is how Oakland often seems; vibrant, mysterious and disorienting, with an underlying hum of recognition. The title of the show, BISCHOFF SOREN BLACK, when said aloud sounds like it could be part of a chant or spell, or the name of some mythical creature, when it is simply the last names of the three featured artists, Brice Bischoff, Tabitha Soren and Ellen Black. The works of all three artists combine to create a narrative of time, space, humanity and chaos.

Brice Bischoff, Bronson Cave VI, c-print, 2011

Upon first entering the gallery, you’re confronted with the contrast of Ellen Black’s stark, abstract geometric sculptures housing small video screens, and the dreamy cave interiors created by Brice Bischoff, that look like he was somehow able to get a whole rainbow to sit (relatively) still long enough to release the shutter of his camera. The caves filled with the unintelligible blurs use the magical capabilities of photography to illuminate and emphasize the mystical, contrasting qualities of caves and the light that fills them. The depth of each location anthropomorphizes the earth’s occupants before living creatures evolved – giving  life to the elements.

Tabitha Soren, Panic Beach 15759-3, pigment print, 2011

This quiet, pre-human interaction between earth, fire, water and air crashes into the violent un-worldliness of Tabitha Soren’s photographs. By inverting the images, Soren presents us with a tumultuous world that brings to mind the primordial soup from which we all came. With water crashing everywhere, it is sometimes hard to firmly orient oneself on the ground, causing the same kind of uneasiness one feels when stepping off a boat after being on the water for hours.

Tabitha Soren, Panic Beach 06734-20, pigment print, 2011

As soon as you feel like you’re finally getting a grasp of what is going on, Ellen Black’s video installations throw you back into the abstract. The white containers that hold her tiny video screens are more like quantum cubes than “boxes,” with edges and corners jutting out as if an unexpecting polygon was frozen while in transformation from one shape to another. The video pieces reflect their containers’ fluctuating desolation, with bleak beach scenes layered on top of other geographic scenes that break through the video’s digital deterioration, while miniature silhouetted figures wander with no apparent purpose across the landscape, some may be playing or drowning in the surf.

Ellen Black, Last Summer, single channel video, 2011

The experience of viewing the exhibition is one of quiet turmoil in contrast with the inherent beauty of the natural world. Like watching a video of a forest fire with the sound off, you know that something destructive is happening, but you know it will lead to regeneration. And of course there’s no denying how beautifully mesmerizing it is.

BISCHOFF SOREN BLACK will be on view at Johansson Projects until October 15, 2011.

CO-LAB (Chris Coleman & Laleh Mehran). Installation view of "W3FI" at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Interactive Installation.

I remember arriving at college as a bright-eyed freshman and recognizing familiar faces within moments. It was not because I went to a small school or because I had met these classmates at orientation events in my hometown, but rather that I had done my due diligence on Facebook. Today, not a week goes by that I don’t find myself googling unfamiliar names or wishing a friend Happy Birthday by e-card – or dare I admit it, text – rather than by phone or hallmark card. And yet none of this feels strange.

It is this unprecedented interconnectedness fostered by the digital world that CO-LAB founders Laleh Mehran and Chris Coleman take as a point of departure for their most recent project entitled W3FI. An unmistakable play on words, W3FI is a combination of WiFi, the word “we” and the slang use of the number 3 in place of the letter “e” as a nod to the digital parts of our lives. The W3FI project encourages people to consider their online identities – referred to as S3LF – and how we can use technology to interact with one another in positive ways. The artists explain, “[t]he W3FI project is much more than an awareness campaign, it is a movement in social activism to ask a new set of questions for each of us every time we click, text, or share a photo.”

In its manifestation at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, W3FI is an interactive installation in every sense of the word. The project’s central tenants are presented on the gallery walls as a series of moving texts and symbols alongside dynamic statistics about national and international use of the internet, cell phones and social networks. Broad statistics – usually difficult to grasp in real terms – are made more tangible through their juxtaposition with data that relate directly to the Boulder area. A topographic map of the region is overlaid by animated visualizations of internet use and signal data. Live tweets from local residents utilizing the words “I” or “we” punctuate the gallery walls as well. Museum visitors can become a part of the W3FI network by having images of their faces taken and integrated into an ever-growing forest of interconnected trees projected along the gallery walls. While many museum galleries offer limited seating – encouraging visitors to rapidly proceed through the galleries – seats are deliberately interspersed throughout the W3FI project space in order to facilitate discussion, learning, reading and quiet contemplation.

CO-LAB (Chris Coleman & Laleh Mehran). Installation view of "W3FI" at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Interactive Installation.

CO-LAB does not merely demonstrate a philosophy and data with W3FI. They bring this concept to bear by relying on Open Source software and hardware in designing the installation. Open Source encourages the sharing of knowledge and work by having contributors make all the files they have developed available online for others to copy, supplement and improve. Generating the terrain of Boulder for the map, controlling the glowing seats and the forest of faces on the “W3FI tree” were all made possible through various Open Source programs and hardware.

While the project unfortunately closes tomorrow, never fear – W3FI will live beyond this singular venue. CO-LAB’s goal is to continue promoting the W3FI presence in both real and digital space; online it will be represented by websites, pages and social networking media. And in the “real world,” Mehran and Coleman will continue to organize traveling exhibitions.

Didier Faustino, (G)host in the (S)hell, 2008. Video Still. Image courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Michel Rein.

as Donna Haraway proclaimed in her 1991 manifesto. The fusion of man and machine in popular culture, scientific exploration and artistic production in the late 20th century, was loaded with fear, alongside great aspirations, of genetic engineering, technological advances and mechanisms of control. However, the anxiety of the future that was expressed in 1990s art with the exploration of digital interfaces and the disintegration of the body, seems now to have dissipated – our reality of this is far less distressing than what was envisioned 20 years ago.

Black Dog Press’s recent publication and accompanying exhibition at WORK Gallery, See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception, takes up the post-humanist trajectory of art once again, but reframes it within one aspect that has largely been brushed over – the senses – and asks you to consider how trans-human prosthetics alter individual perception and the experience of reality – or what it might feel like to be a cyborg?

In Didier Faustino’s (G)host in the (S)hell, perception and appearance are altered by a relatively benign substance that through excess becomes deformative. Faustino’s video records a performance in which the artist painstakingly chews bubbly pink gum that when adequately softened, is applied to his face. With time, the sickly sweet substance turns the artist into a monster, his breathing becomes increasingly laboured, and we can only cringe at the sticky reality underneath it all – the host must truly be in hell.

Beta Tank, Eye Candy, Yellow, 2008. Image courtesy of the Artist.

Extending sweets into cerebrally triggered sensation, Beta Tank’s Eye Candy project creates a proposal for an object that is stimulating to both the tastebuds and the mind. Eye Candy aims to ‘transmit vivid emotive images into your mind’s eye’ in six distinct flavours through an electrode-laden lollipop – a fictional creation based on very real existing technology. A true synaesthetic world where image and colour are on the tip of your tongue.

Ann Hamilton, Face to Face • 28. Image courtesy of Ann Hamilton Studio.

Ann Hamilton’s curious series of photographs, Face to Face, appear, at first glance, to present the world through the aperture of the eyelid as faces hazily emerge from a distinctive frame. However, Hamilton is working with the same portal as Eyecode – transforming her mouth into a tiny, functional camera. Her ‘mouth seeing’ extends the senses of the mouth beyond taste – here becoming the location of vision.

Golan Levin, Eyecode. Image courtesy of the Artist and Bitforms Gallery

And turning vision back at you, Golan Levin’s Eyecode, allows you to see yourself seeing, and others seeing you as well. Levin’s high-tech programme unwarningly records your eye movement as you stand in front of the screen, and plays it back to you alongside hundreds of others who have stood there before you. An uncanny, and quite intriguing, experience indeed, founded in mechanisms of surveillance.

What sets these works apart from the previous generation of artists is a sense of humour and intimacy – an engagement with the body that is less founded in fear, and rather in intrigue and the exploration of potentials. The question has been reframed to curiously ask, ‘What does this feel like?’ – and the possibilities of reality presented are quite enticing indeed.

Desirée Holman, video still composite from Heterotopias, 2011, courtesy of the artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

Along with nine, hand-selected participants, artist Desirée Holman has spent the last two years developing a series of avatars. The resulting project, Heterotopias, 2011, a video and supporting drawings on view now at the Berkeley Art Museum, refers to corporeal reality’s relationship to virtual reality, the physical process by which the digitally rendered avatar is formed, and the ironic stasis of the body whilst the imagined self is set free.  Unfortunately, Holman only refers to these ideas.  While aesthetically engaging and fun to watch, Heterotopias fails to delve beyond the surface of her topic.

Shot as a sort of music video, the participants sit before laptops in similar, homey interiors.  They dance, are transformed into both live-action and digitally animated superhero-like characters, and engage in battle with long staffs. Considering the care taken in creating the colorful and fanciful costumes and scenery, as well as the richness of the concept, a viewer expects much more from these characters than what is delivered.

Desirée Holman, Mask of Agamemnon (Diffuse Map), 2011, courtesy of the artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

One cannot help but wonder: is sitting in front of a computer the extent of the lives of these individuals?  Even Superman’s Clark Kent has distinguishing characteristics, personal dramas and quirks.  If these avatars are an opportunity to exist in a space untethered by the bounds of the real, why do the avatars perform feats no more complex than hitting one another with sticks?

Not one of the actors or avatars has any true individuation, despite the potential offered by their appearances. The elaborately developed avatars are little more than costumes: digital exoskeletons worn by the subjects.  Holman and her participants supposedly spent a great deal of time and effort in the development of these fictions: why is the audience not granted access to this aspect of the project? We have all played video games, seen superhero fiction, or engaged in social networking sites as digitally warped versions of ourselves.  In each of these scenarios, the stories generated by fictional or semi-fantastic characters are engaging and multi-dimensional: both morally and socially complex.  We should be granted similar complexity from these characters.

Desirée Holman, Dancers Dancing in Their Own Digital Ectoplasmic Cocoons 1, 2010, courtesy of the artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

The show’s accompanying drawings are an interesting addition. Pieces such as Dancers Dancing in their Own Digital Ectoplasmic Cocoons are beautifully executed and freeze time in a manner that allows us to attempt a more in-depth connection with these individuals.  The “ectoplasmic cocoons,” incidentally, work better in the drawings than in the videos; in the latter, the pink lining on the characters as they jump between fantasy worlds seems to be a result of poor color-keying. Though not all of the works are as successful, one drawing of a costumed face alludes to information promised but never quite delivered: a man stares ahead, awkwardly, wearing a humorous headpiece.  His eyes indicate that he is unsure of the world in which he belongs, torn between his virtual self and actual self.  He is self-conscious, but nonetheless set free by his ridiculous garb.  Is this a drawing of the man, or of his digital armature?  Where in this spectrum does the drawing, and in fact, all art—itself a virtual rendition of reality—fall?

David Hockney, Untitled 26 December 2010, iPad Drawing. Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

David Hockney included himself among the iPad’s expectant lovers. Since 2008 he’s used the application Brushes to draw on his iPhone—but what he can do with the app on the oversized model, oh. He can draw with multiple fingers and recently a stylus.

His show Me Draw on iPad is exhibiting until August 28th at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. 20 iPod touches, 20 iPads and a triptych slide loop through several hundred still lifes, landscapes, portraits and self-portraits looking, I think, especially Matisse. On display the bright screens color in the dark galleries like panes of stained glass, what else. They light like the screens we hood our hands over in movie theaters. And, how weird—to come to a museum to stare into a face probably like the one stifled on your person.

Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Photo credit: Brøndum / Poul Buchard.

One iPad drawing reads,

made for

the screen

totally on

the screen

it’s not an

illusion

I am able to watch these works come into being thanks to an animation playback feature—the ghost in the machine going through the motions again, his intense lines. Someone at my shoulder remarks, “Det godt.” It’s good.

There is no saying what the implications of this new form are for making. The form is easy-to-access and convenient-to-create. Apps aren’t messy, no. Witness this playback of Hockey’s flora, watch how it blooms to life something like child’s play. Then consider the immediacy of the process. How there is no consequence because you can choose not to “Save” and take it out of the world lickety-split.

The thing no one’s saying about this show is that it’s all more or less politeness. When art is an omnipresent file on a portable showcase, do we need to get hung up on museum walls? Obviously this is not “street”; it’s something else. Hockney likes to send his flowers and sunsets to the inboxes of friends. In fact, he has, over the course of this Louisiana show, continuously emailed new drawings to the exhibition. Unless you count yourself as an intimate of Hockney’s the museum seems like your window in. But theoretically, that won’t prove true. Maybe Hockney’s “iPad period” is not a phase.

Hockney has always had a big pocket put into his tailor-made suits, ad hoc for sketchbooks—but now that pocket is reserved for his iPad. As technology advances, I wonder if maybe what is next is subscription services. Art with a capital “a,” delivered like RSS feeds or Netflix—like milk in the old days—right to you. Pay-per-view? (Holograms?) I do not know that we can only interrogate in hallowed white spaces. It was said that no one would shop online. That the Video Home System would flop because we want to be swallowed by the cavernous theater. It wasn’t the same. And no, it isn’t the same. And yet. We can get the soul of a book without the spine. And I’m looking at a Hockney drawn on an iPad.

Bruce Nauman, Going Around the Corner Piece, 1970, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian

In the self-explanatory show entitled Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010, the history and evolution of the video art genre are recounted through 50 video works and installations, drawn from the collections of both the Singapore Art Museum and Centre Pompidou. Having developed in tandem with the apparatus of television and the analogue and then digital video cameras, video art’s reconfiguration of the politics of image-making and its ability to place the spectator as an indispensable agent in a work’s existence are significant tenets on which the exhibition is established. The infinitely widening scope and scale for the production and interpretation of (moving) images, the mode of their dissemination, and the documentation of performances (technical or otherwise), pose several key but general questions around which the works are grouped.

The pertinence of such questions however, falters in the collaborative effort that has shown up more differences than similarities. Reconciling the inventory of the Singapore Art Museum with the Centre Pompidou’s reveals the tentative forays into the processes of historicisation that are only beginning to develop in Southeast Asia and the inevitable rift in the standpoints of Western art and Southeast Asian art history. The Pompidou’s international collection stretches back 4 decades to the genesis of video art; the Singapore Art Museum’s inventory spans approximately a decade that really began with the Asian Financial Crisis (1997-8) and is focused on works produced in the surrounding geographical region. The wider ramifications of this collaboration go beyond an overwhelming inventory imbalance and the expanded visual vocabulary that video technology provides; indeed the emerging ideological differences become apparent when speculative comparison – the attempt at a comparative video-art history, should it even exist – inevitably sets in.

Pipilotti Rist, A la belle étoile (Under the Sky), 2007, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian.

The seeming futile effort of historicising video art in this instance, is thus mitigated by several thematic (and loosely chronological) focuses that ground the show: television critique, the representations of self, the documentation of performance, installation in space, landscape as metaphor, video-as fiction and the deconstruction of narratives.

If early efforts by video pioneers such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman and David Hall took the definition of an art object beyond its conventional parameters as a static entity produced for visual consumption, perhaps the greatest strength of video art triumphed in this show is the unprecedented potential of experiential interactivity between artist, installation and spectator. Peter Campus’ Interface (1972) invites the viewer to superimpose their reflection onto their projected image after which they simultaneously face 2 images of themselves – one of the video image and their reflection on the glass screen. The inherent sense of ego coupled with a measure of curiosity is a potent brew, particularly when facets of the multi-layered self are revealed in art. Like the literary Doppelgänger (the ghostly and sinister double), artists’ early efforts recognised the potential of video art in exploring the loss of existential reference in which the traditionally held view of the consecrated sense of self is destabilised. In Bruce Nauman’s Going around the Corner Piece (1972), the surveillance set-up is symmetrical and simple: perched in the corners in a white square-room are closed-circuit cameras and small TV monitors that capture visitor movements going around the corner of the enclosed space. The spectator’s image disappears from view as he/she rounds a corner; speeding up in an attempt to play catch-up with one’s image results in a unsuccessful tail-chasing endeavour – which is probably the glorious core and yet most vexing part of this work.

Peter Campus, Interface, 1972.

Departing from the investigative preoccupation with the apparatus and the monolithic hold that television had, video art had, by the 1980s, begun deconstructive strategies of memory and narratives, debunking on its way, stereotypes of sexuality, ethnicity and gender perpetuated by the very same mode. Nam June Paik’s semi-documentary Guadalcanal Requiem (1979) explores the subjectivity of memory through the deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of narratives, in a film that coalesces history, time, cultural memory and mythology on the site of one of World War II’s most devastating battles in the Solomon Islands. Surrealistic images of archival footage, interviews, Charlotte Moorman’s fragmented cello performances come together like a scratchy Hitchcock–Buñuel/Dali crossover. The haunting collage is often fraught with poignant tension and a sense of the macabre: interviewees with singular (or paltry) memories picking up where some have left off; Moorman playing a cello with a long palm leaf against a thunderous horizon, and at another time, performs concealed in a body bag.

Guadalcanal Requiem, Nam June Paik, 1979, © Nam June Paik Estate video still Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EIA) New York

A deconstructive approach to the moving image seemed to be video art’s trajectory from the 1990s into the early 21^st century, incorporating new developments of photo processing, digital editing and image layering in contemporary visual culture. Swiss conceptual artist Pipilotti Rist’s A la belle étoile (2007) moves between micro- and macrocosms on horizontal and vertical surfaces. As suggested by curator Christine Van Assche, such works operate on removing depth of field, redefining in the process, the spectator’s own rapport with space.

Despite the influence of the commercial mainstream, video art has nevertheless, retained its earlier forms: the performance documentary, mixed-media texts, or even the visual portrait. Such forms seem conceivably better suited to the preoccupation with art’s social purpose and its context of production that remain dominant traits in Asian-produced videos; perhaps most similar to the historical Western notions where art was produced within corresponding socio-political backgrounds. Just as Gustav Courbet’s post-romanticism was a rejection of academic and bourgeois juste milieu, much of Southeast Asian works are filled with the rhetoric of social change in which media artists show no desire to be unbound from their local cultural matrices. By continuing to invoke ties to tradition, incredibly varied configurations (or even fragments) of history that appear in Asian works at best, seem to read as disjointed narratives to the viewer unschooled in the intricacies of China’s tumultuous last few decades.

Yang Fudong, Backyard - Hey! Sun is rising, 2001.

Yang Fudong’s Backyard – Hey! Sun is Rising (2001) follows the Keatonesque slapstick antics of four young men enacting military rituals and traipsing around with swords, questioning the meaning of rituals in the wake of social changes. A richer meaning however, could be gleaned from Yang’s work if considered in the light of the communism’s wane, as well as in the historical traditions of Zen, martial arts and the aesthetic disciplines of poetry, painting and calligraphy – all of which are mirrored in aesthetic form and content in his videos. Like Yang’s disoriented characters who seem to seek penance in an environment marked by repression, The Propeller Group’s Uh… (2007) confronts Vietnam’s youth culture’s adaptations to the changing socio-cultural and political landscape through the symbolic use of graffiti, and the disorder and spontaneity it represents – the antithesis of Vietnam’s ordered socialist state.

Uh..., The Propeller Group, 2007, Singapore Art Museum Collection

Manet's Luncheon on the Grass and the Thai farmers, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Two Planets series, 2008, Singapore Art Museum collection

While Western artists like Pierre Huyghe and Issac Julien integrated mixed media installations with the spectacular and immersive experience of cinema, Asian filmmakers also tended to persist with the use of narrative (and at times, the meta-narrative) as a didactic strategy. In Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s The Two Planets Series (2008), Thai farmers – groups of people blithely oblivious to the cultural or economic baggage associated with canonical works of Western art history – talk about several cornerstones of modern European painting. Their discussions of Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (1863), van Gogh’s The Siesta (1889-90) and Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) are artlessly literal, context-less and extremely humourous, with the constant comical tendency to drift towards off-topic situations. Straddling the diverse worlds of rural farming and art history, Rasdjarmrearnsook raises questions of socio-cultural context, the parameters of interpretation and appreciation, but stops short of suggesting that our efforts in basting together a coherent narrative and interpretation of art are vain but significant detractors from the lost pleasure of looking.

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Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010 is presented by the Singapore Art Museum and the Centre Pompidou, and runs through 18 September 2011.

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 10 (1973). Black-and-white photograph and letterpress text panel. Image courtesy Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, scholar Elaine Scarry describes the inability of language to interpret and express physical pain: “By its very nature, pain resists, even destroys the language that grapples with it.” But what of the capacity of visual art to interpret and translate this bodily experience? “For a Long Time”, on view now at Roberts & Tilton in Culver City, attempts to answer this question by showcasing visual work that grapples with physical endurance and its effects. The result, though ambitious in scope, is a little too conventional.

For A Long Time, installation view. Image courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

“For A Long Time” takes its cues from a long lineage: in 1974, an assistant nailed Chris Burden to a Volkswagen Beetle for his performance piece Trans-fixed; in 1989, Matthew Barney jumped for hours on a small trampoline in Drawing Restraint 6; and, in 1997, Francis Alÿs pushed a solid block of ice through the streets of Mexico City for seven hours until it melted in The Paradox of Praxis I. Several among the show’s artists—Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, and Hamish Fulton—have made a lifelong practice of using their own bodies as raw material. Abramović’s Rhythm 10 (1973), for example, depicts the artist kneeling piously before a series of neatly arranged knives; in a smaller, neighboring frame, a descriptive text written by Abramović reveals that her performance will consist of cutting herself with each knife. In A Machine For Living (1981),Vito Acconci, the self-described “godfather of transgression and pioneer of performance art,” pairs charcoal drawings and photo-documentation of himself swinging his body around a hulking, nonfunctional sculpture. The work is strong but predictable, and the show benefits from the presence of a few younger artists, such as Whitney Hubbs and Erica Love, who diversify the group.

Erica Love, Remote Control (2009). Video still. Image courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

“For A Long Time” is at its best not when it considers pain and physical endurance at large, but rather when its artists seize upon the moment of breakdown, the threshold between having control and becoming unhinged. In their respective video pieces, Smile (2001) and Remote Control (2009), Kehinde Wiley and Erica Love achieve this unnerving quality. Wiley, famous for his heroic, realist paintings of Titian-esque, young African-American men, has made a multi-channel video picturing four African-American men, each attempting to hold a smile while facing the camera. As time wears on, their smiles turn to strange grimaces, their cheek muscles twitching in discomfort. In her single channel video, Love holds Barbara Kruger’s book, Remote Control (1993), her hand in the same pinched position as the appropriated image on the cover.  Love holds this positions until she can no longer bear it, and, after thirty-seven minutes and twenty-six seconds, drops her unsteady hand.

Kehinde Wiley, Smile (2001). Installation view of video. Image courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

The show’s intentions are worthy, but the work and its curation is too tidy, failing to push into new territory or offer anything unexpected. The human body is still as enduring and even dangerous an agent as it was forty years ago. Yet after an era of art practices that bravely tested its limits and terms, we need new propositions.

Hajnal Németh: CRASH - Passive Interview, installation view, 2011.

Memory is deeply connected to the senses, far beyond the linear nature of storytelling. Words are often the farthest from the real “truth” of a scenario, leaving space for memory and imagination to take place. Sight and sound, smell and touch fill in the gaps that words cannot describe, and it is at this brink that Hajnal Németh’s installation CRASH – Passive Interview rests. Exhibited in the Hungarian Pavilion this year at the 54th Venice Biennale, Németh’s installation molds perception and memory through a simple event, adding layers of sensory experience to narrative.

CRASH – Passive Interview is loosely based on a recounted story of a car accident, slowed down to every minute detail. Entering the space, I was instantly filled with sensations of drama and pain erupting from the lifesize crushed car in the center of a large gallery. Sounds of an experimental opera encapsulate the room, while an extreme red light blankets not only the destroyed car but everyone in the space. Here, narrative relies solely on the emotive power of music and light, leaving the story to unfold as the space continues. The car rests as a relic of the story unfolding through the various sensory effects — transitioned from its objecthood by the light and sound into an almost uncanny filmic space.  The speed at which the narrative becomes clear mimics the sensation of experiencing a traumatic event, each detail is slowly understood.

Hajnal Németh: CRASH - Passive Interview, installation view, 2011.

In the center of the pavilion lies a space filled with stands for sheet music, providing visual access to the sensation of opera performances. The extreme, aggressive light from the destroyed car transitions into stage light, changing the sensory encounter from a largely cinematic experience into a performative relationship between the narrative and the event. Each stand holds the libretto, allowing one to follow the story through text. This text provides the first direct, although still disjointed, connection between sensory experience and narrative — unfolding the details of the crash that are simultaneously filling the space through audio and visual means.

Hajnal Németh: CRASH - Passive Interview, video still, 2011, camera: István Imreh.

In the last room, all parts of the narrative are brought together through a video of two singers performing the opera.  Although there is never a climax or revelation of the actual event, the elements of story, time, and sensory experience come together through the video. Here, CRASH – Passive Interview returns to the cinematic space of the room with the car, but removes the drama provided through the visual overload. This is the first time that Hajnal Németh provides the viewer with a picture of the event, even though it is through the image of the performers themselves.

In each gallery space, CRASH – Passive Interview turns the relationship between narrative and the senses on its head, leaving one with a disjointed story filled with perceptive and visceral sensations without concrete pictures. For an event as grandiose and dramatically visual as the Biennale, Hajnal Németh’s project for the Hungarian Pavilion offers a reminder that memory and consciousness go far beyond the pictorial field.

Ranu Mukherjee, Auspicious Picture, Multiple Sources of Power (2011). Hybrid film, 2 minutes 51 seconds. Edition of 5. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

What happens at the moment when energy becomes material, and how can we even dream of documenting it? The question has wide-ranging implications, from the memories stored in everyday objects to the effects of prayer. Ranu Mukherjee’s solo exhibition at Frey Norris Contemporary and Modern, Absorption Into the Nomadic and Luminous, takes up these issues. A former painter who now works mostly with photography and animation, the question has particular potency for Mukherjee, as it references the creation cycle of a painting (from pigment to paint to image), the balance between the intangible and tangible found in digital video, and perhaps the link between.

Ranu Mukherjee, Rajasthani Gypsy Shoes, Dr. Gabrielle Francis (2011). Ink on colored paper. 19 5/8 x 19 5/8 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

Nomadic and Luminous consists of a series of square paintings and a suite of hybrid films (so-called due to their combination of animation, photography, and video). In the first film, Auspicious Picture, Multiple Sources of Power (2011), an animated emanation, or halo, glows above a live action shot of ocean waves at night.  As the emanation fades and disappears, different articles of clothing and tapestry appear and disappear in the foreground, almost dancing, and we are left to contemplate each object—ocean, emanation, and clothing—as a source of power in its own right.

Ranu Mukherjee, Between the no longer and the not yet (2011). Ink on colored paper. 19 5/8 x 19 5/8 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

The second film, Abundance Picture, As Told By the Element Itself (2011), opens with the image of a checkered-cloth bundle making its way across a crocodile-filled river, with children’s silhouettes in the background. After a while the silhouettes fade, and the next image features bright clothing hung from tree roots, juxtaposed against a hand-painted landscape as yet another shadowy silhouette moves in and out of the frame, eventually revealing itself to be pile of gold.  The final film, Ecstatic Picture, Spilled Milk (2011), shows the infiltration and spread of a pitcher of spilled milk amongst a constant rain of flowers, Indian clothing and jewelry, and other objects. The empty silhouette of what could be a deity, or perhaps a mother and child, occupies the center of the screen. Eventually, a mass of cell phones appear and pour forth the rainbow equivalent of spilled milk, which mingles with rest of the animations and references the boon that cell phone technology has brought to India.

Ranu Mukherjee, Ecstatic Picture, Spilled Milk (2011). Hybrid Film, 5 minutes 4 seconds. Edition of 5. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

Taken together, the films provide a meditation on tangibility and intangibility; landscape, negative space, and sacred space; void, object, memory, and isolation.  And while Mukherjee describes the accompanying paintings as merely “note taking,” they should not be undervalued—particularly because they provide us with Mukherjee’s lexicon. The same pair of gold Rajasthani gypsy shoes, with their curled toes and red interiors, for instance, appears in both Rajasthani Gypsy Shoes, Dr. Gabrielle Francis (2011), and Auspicious Picture (2011). Similarly, landscape fragments based on lithographs of Indian deities, with the deities cut out, show up in multiple paintings, as well as both Auspicious and Ecstatic Pictures.

Ranu Mukherjee, Abundance picture, as told by the element itself (2011). Hybrid Film. 3 minutes 32 seconds. Edition of 5. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

To Mukherjee’s credit, the work never becomes ponderous, but remains uniquely well-thought out and mesmerizing. On a more personal note, the objects in the paintings also reference Mukherjee’s Indian heritage—just one more way long-stored energy materializes or becomes current.

Absorption Into the Nomadic and Luminous is on view at Frey Norris in San Francisco through July 30, 2011.

Miki (Reading Electrical Meters), 2009. Courtesy the artist.

Looking through artist Dave Beck‘s portfolio, one sees a variety of projects, which on the surface don’t necessarily mesh.  A closer look, however, reveals a consistent focus on abstract concepts, personal experiences and research.  More specifically, each of Beck’s ‘sculptural visualizations’ aims to offer insight into the complexities of the human experience.

Beck’s Nebraska City Portraits (2009) give dimensional presence to otherwise abstract data.  The series, created during a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, NE, features the results of the artist shadowing different community members for a day using a GPS tracking device.  These GPS plots became, in the artist’s words ‘unconventional portraits’ translated into 3D digital models on his computer.  The GPS portraits were then printed using a stereolithography machine to realize the tracks in laser-cured resin.  The final result was mounted in plexiglass shadow box – becoming a tangible visualization of contemporary technology and mobility on an individual level.

Logjam Installation View, Courtesy of the Artist.

Beck’s 3D animation, Logjam (2010), illustrates another facet of Beck’s practice: the moving image.  For Beck, the moving image is an extension of his sculpture and a means of presenting such elements in a dynamic way.  Logjam was created as a result of his 2010 residency at the St. Croix Watershed Research Station at the Science Museum of Minnesota when he spent a month living and working on the St. Croix River.  As a product of this experience, Logjam features sounds and imagery pulled from research and scuba diving excursions conducted with local park rangers.  The work is a treatise on the status of water as both a life-giving and a destructive force that evokes the ‘cyclical process of death and rebirth’.  More concretely, Beck references the logging industry.  As the logs pile up and wash away, the viewer is asked to question the affect of man versus nature.

In 2012, look for Beck’s Nebraska City Portraits on display for the first time in Nebraska City in a solo show at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.  Beck tells DailyServing that he is also currently working on a new project centered on the historic Lewis and Clark Expedition.  The multi-channel video and animation work will feature ‘… their route, the objects they used, and the chance encounters they had that determined their eventual success’.

Dave Beck currently teaches at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY where he directs the Digital Arts and Sciences Program.

The Keys, 2010, 150 x 370 cm

Stitching together digital, sculptural and natural ephemera, Israeli artist Ilit Azoulay makes photographs that hover between the miniature and the gigantic. She gathers small abstract accretions of wire, plastic, shells or stone that have been cast aside, left in the shadowed hollows of street corners and alleyways. These finds are organized along with old pictures into groupings that follow the loose grids of shelves, boxes and files. At this stage, the work resembles a mad Cartesian impulse to make order out of disorder, creating an archive of objects endowed with an aura, despite their seeming inconsequence.

Tree for too one, 2010 (detail)

As Azoulay painstakingly photographs each image and its ground, this archaeology of knowledge is fueled by an archive fever that goes beyond the mere physicality of order. Each object, each scrap of torn weathered paper, and each discrete portion of the ground on which they sit is documented, resized and pieced together to create a new landscape in which scale and perspective are modified into an aggregate of visual information.

Tree for too one, 2010, 150 x 500 cm

Like other contemporary artists such as Daniel Lefcourt, Leslie Hewitt, and Ruth Van Beek, Azoulay’s predilection is toward using photography as a method to unpack the performative qualities of an archive. In this sense, the photograph foregrounds its potential to act as both a document and as a picture of the structure through which these documents are understood. We are lulled into a belief of fact while constantly jolted awake, reminding ourselves that these facts are constructed pieces of a larger story.

Telegram 24, 2010, 100 x 160 cm

Azoulay, who recently received her MFA from the Bezalel Academy in Tel Aviv, at once affirms and denies any easily essentialized connections between the archiving impulse and her national identity. Israel is a country that recognizes the deep relationship between archaeology and national memory, as a result there is a modernist shrine in Jerusalem that houses the dead sea scrolls. Archive fever also drives the volumes of holocaust survivor testimonies at Yad Vashem. But because of the everyday materials that seem to have no overt historical value or political symbology, Azloulay leans more on the transnational impulse to picture an archive of the everyday. Her work is a picture of a picture, an image of an idea that resists framing, because it is a frame itself.

Azoulay’s upcoming exhibition at Andrea Meislin Gallery in New York City opens June 23, 2011.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

This show reminds me of the time I danced for hours at a club in Cologne, caught part of an arthouse film next door, and then somehow ended up at a bar where a bunch of people I didn’t know were drinking like it was the end of the earth. Ok, so that never happened. But I feel like Cosima von Bonin’s current show, The Juxtaposition of Nothings at Friedrich Petzel is a close approximation of that experience.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

Von Bonin has always balanced her killer soft sculptures and fabric wall pieces with a deep investment in context and place-making. At Petzel, in collaboration with musician Moritz von Oswald, the focus is less on individual works and more on a sort of behind the stage/back alley voyeuristic adventure where the spectators are exhausted and drunk with cultural consumption. A puppy lies limp, arms laid out flat, staring at a video on loop. A floppy eared pimp-like bunny character with an eye patch appears to have found a friend in a bright red dog.  Even the light post is out for a smoke, as this show is at once chuckle-worthy and noir.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

Viewers accustomed to the almost clinical reimagining of minimalist form in Von Bonin’s previous work might be put off by the glut of audio and video equipment on display here. But the sound is sharp and deployed with precision.  Each tightly contained audio zone adds a different layer to the show as pulsating dance beats blend into more spaced out jams. Moving around the gallery, you become part of the orchestration, as most of the animal sculptures are either on a sound stage, absorbing a video, or emitting a sound track of their own.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

The back room seems to unwind from the activity of the main gallery like a club that lets out into the street at the end of the night. Sophisticated cardboard sculptures of a mailbox, café signage and a street lamp hang on the wall. A slumped over bloodied bird sits alone on a bleacher—here, the alienation of today’s technological self-absorption sets in.  While this theme isn’t terribly new (think Kraftwerk, Radiohead, or Kanye), von Bonin and von Oswald play the space between the handmade and the machined perfectly. While a lot of technological collaborations seem to blast off with an über-corny futuristic vision, the artists here spare us the space travel allusions.  The characters in this little drama are too busy livin’ to know that they don’t have a future anyway.