Reportage from the Aesthetic Edge

To live in the space of the inexplicable

By Randall Packer On 06/16/2013 at 12:00 pm · 3rd Space, Alchemical Transformation, I am the Movie, Intoxicating Embrace, The Post Reality

What happens when the media space begins to bleed through your consciousness? What happens when the arbitrary boundary between electronic space and your physical being begins to coalesce? That is an aspect of media research that seems to be brazen new territory for investigation. Of course, such luminaries as Marshall McLuhan, Paul Virilio, Umberto Eco, et al, have written about the effects of media and our feeble ability to immunize ourselves to the unpredictability of its effects. But what do we really know conclusively about this? Maybe its better to keep it all a bit mysterious (I’m sure the high-tech companies would prefer it that way), I say, maybe the undefinable and slippery notion of the effects of media can be material for creative speculation. Well, William Gibson has made a career of this, and even defined the territory (cyberspace) itself where the media lives and breathes.

So as an artist who doesn’t hesitate to venture into these mysterious and sometimes even forbidden places, places we don’t really understand, or for that matter, actually fear. I have dipped my toe (if not my whole body) in the spectacle of effects for the sheer pleasure of wonder and a (perhaps) naive understanding of the inexplicable.

If only life could presents itself such that one could really inhabit that space… or just maybe, we already do.

The flow of things

By Randall Packer On 06/13/2013 at 7:21 pm · Open Source Studio, Speed of Life

I no longer see myself as an artist who makes “things…”

… rather I am concerned with the process of making: my studio is now open source. Everything I do, think, imagine, feel, finds its way into the daily flow of creating, something, here and now. In the age of social media, we live in the ever-present, present… which means we are concerned with the flow of things: the dialogue, the conversation, the act of doing + communication + sharing and responding. Where does that leave one as an artist in this open source environment where information is always just-passing-through?

Under the Watchful eye of Big Data

By Randall Packer On 06/12/2013 at 9:02 am · Future is Here, Life in America

Recent revelations about the government’s spy program Prism have been leaking out of a posh hotel in Hong Kong. Edward Snowden has become America’s favorite loose cannon, a former IT specialist at the NSA branch in Hawaii, who has dramatically spilled the beans, much to everyone’s chagrin or delight, depending on where you stand. However, it seems as though almost everyone is implicated in this mess: tech companies, the CIA, NSA, Congress, all the way up to President Obama. And even the media is queasy about the discussion, no one can really take a side without undermining their own position!

The Republicans created this spy operation in the first place with their post 9/11 paranoia that led to the Patriot Act, Homeland Security and its the kooky alert system, and of course Cheney’s mad dog efforts to fight terror with terror. So they can hardly complain. Facebook has made an art of mining our data, thus selling our likes and tastes and friends and rants to the highest bidder. So they are hardly innocent. Fox News is gleefully playing the Senator Obama tapes when he was a staunch anti-Big-Data kind of guy, but hey, they were right behind Bush and Cheney when things got scary. And of course the NSA doesn’t give a shred about their image: they have absolutely nothing to apologize for.

So with everyone scrambling to reposition themselves in the ever-growing and evolving Prism scandal, it turns out that just maybe, Edward Snowden is some kind of national hero. In the grand tradition of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, Snowden has managed to instigate a worldwide discussion that has everyone talking and running for cover. While polls say that most Americans don’t really care about all the cyber talk – most are too busy texting and Tweeting and status updating to pay too much attention – you can feel the groundswell rumbling around an issue ready to explode for some time: this is a scandalous eruption that was waiting to happen.

Yes, there are ramifications to these revelations and I look forward to following the continuing saga with my own ever-present, watchful eye. Perhaps we can reverse the panopticon and use the media to collectively keep our eyes fixed on Big Data: and thus take command of the cyber powers that be.

Art as creative dialogue

By Randall Packer On 06/10/2013 at 10:13 pm · Future is Here, Open Source Studio

Open Source Studio class at the California Institute of the Arts, Fall 2012

What exactly is creative dialogue? In the hallowed histories of conceptual and information forms, it seems to fit right in: human discourse as artistic action. How does creative dialogue serve as action at all? And what is it about dialogue that substitutes for the materiality of traditional media?

Dialogue is a catalyst. Purely. A driving force. In many ways it is the end result of the artistic process: after the work comes into existence there are ideas resonating in the air to be absorbed and shared and dissected. So what if you simply eliminate the “work” and cut right to the chase: the discourse of ideas as the point of origin – which just might – crystallize into something that resembles art. Why not?!

Dialogue as the substance of art is a mediational force, which joins people together, while dissolving differences of discipline, culture, perspective, and experience. As the substance of art (rather than a substitute), dialogue is a source of creative energy and reason and understanding between people who engage in the action of words.

In the 3rd space network of virtual possibilities, dialogue becomes a distributed *medium* that dissolves distance. The medium of dialogue is a catalyst for a dynamic that creates links across social and political barriers that might have been impossible to connect. The insertion of dialogue into the 3rd space defies the physical limitations of geography and time and opens up the possibilities for change, transformation, knowledge and instantaneous inter-cultural collaboration in ways that were formerly unthinkable.

It is at this point, in which dialogue functions as a thread for weaving global trajectories of human exchange, that we understand technology as a great enabler, a source of empowerment, and a force of artistic thinking. Inter-cultural dialogue signifies hope where none might have existed, it signifies a broader understanding of the world where ignorance might have prevailed, and it is a means for the artist (or any individual) to resist and overcome hierarchical and even tyrannical forces. Dialogue and its empowerment functions as resistance on a new scale. Dialogue is a call to action.

Creative dialogue as an artistic medium means giving primacy to the voice of the artist. Simply stated: let words be the new media.

Giving up your data to the repository

By Randall Packer On 06/08/2013 at 9:08 am · Future is Here, Inhabit Facebook

With recent revelations concerning the complicity of technology companies to join forces with the government’s spy agencies, the ramifications of giving up our data takes on new significance. We already knew that Facebook, for instance, was crunching our profiles, our likes, our group affiliations, and our online purchases for mega-profit. We already knew that Facebook, Google, Yahoo, et al earn the vast majority of their revenue by auctioning off our personal tastes and casual social interactions. But what we didn’t realize is the fine line between our social media interactions and government-military intelligence gathering. In the vast corridors and secret hallways of Silicon Valley, there are secret, virtual surveillance repositories, cyber-mailboxes so to speak, stuffed with our most intimate data, electronically transmitted by clandestine personnel from major tech companies that only government spy agencies are privy to.

Under the benevolent eye of Barack Obama, one would assume, or perhaps hope, that this covert operation is conducted carefully and honestly for our own protection against whatever evils lie out there in the world. But let’s not forget this program began under the evil eye of Dick Cheney: Obama essentially inherited a vast NSA-conceived spy operation that would boggle the imagination if we actually knew the real details. But what happens if the wrong finger is pressing the ‘return’ key on this ocean of information. What happens when those at the top no longer have the conscience of law and the constitution and whatever founding ideals we still cling to in America. It would make Orwell’s television-networked Big Brother surveillance operation look like reality TV. Imagine: as you innocently saunter through your Facebook page chatting away: every keystroke, every mouse press, every status update is monitored and collected in those underground server factories that could well be converted into cyber-gulags holding us hostage.

As far-fetched and futuristic as this may sound, recent news is a wake-up call to the potential of dangerous encroachment on our civil liberties. The power of the network is the power to connect us all, which is an extraordinarily utopian idea. But the network also has its dark, dystopic, Gibsonian side: cyber-spies quietly jacking into the system and tracking our every move.

What to do? Do we abandon our laptops in despair? I don’t think so. But remember: every time you give up your data, every time you share you that special moment, that sentimental photo of your cat or your three-year old, just remember, it’s all being archived and stored in some fluorescent-lit, air-conditioned repository for purposes we can only imagine. Let’s just hope they ‘like’ what they see…

Situating the studio in the open source of no constraints

By Randall Packer On 06/02/2013 at 2:31 pm · 3rd Space, Open Source Studio

The Open Source Studio concept has evolved considerably since its inception during the fall of 2012 in the hallowed, Disneyfied virtual hallways of the California institute of the Arts. OSS was originally intended to be a course, then a project, then it became a group identity: well by the end of the semester it had become something akin to a religious cause. Not to become too grandiose, OSS felt like something new, and like all things new, it had a sense of purpose – maybe destination is a better word - for everyone who came into contact with it. OSS felt the way art should and could be when it really matters: even to a group of graduate students who are generally pretty jaded.

The “movement” continued, when I took OSS to Singapore, where undergraduates from the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University took a spin around the virtual block. Open Source Studio proved contagious and relevant once again, as my little group of five ferociously smart and funny students created new work that expanded the possibilities of the online medium.

Now (while sitting in a little Cape Cod café on a hot summer day) I am taking stock of OSS. I have come to realize it is all or none of the above, rather, the project has returned (at least conceptually) home to its roots, to the scene of the crime, the bunker, where I began to experiment with designing a set and a broadcast studio for my Internet performance work: The Post Reality Show. Yes, Open Source Studio is a studio space that situates itself neatly across the digital divide between the real and the virtual (post-real), the local and the remote: that is, the Third Space. OSS is a Third Space studio, a new kind of studio, a studio without boundaries, a studio without limits, a studio that doesn’t confine itself to a physical space. OSS is a studio that moves at the speed of light.

Open Source Studio is, quite frankly, anything I want it to be, because it flies under the radar of physicality. It defies the laws of gravity, in fact it subverts everything we associate with the “known world.” My OSS studio takes its form from flights of imagination, away from the knowable and the predictable and towards the unknowable, the impossible, and the uncategorizable. OSS is a place where things are fashioned that could be, rather than simply “are.” OSS precedes what is real, it exists in the virtual (that which has the potential of coming into being) and luxuriates in the freedom of letting go of constraints that might inhibit the artist (or anyone) of dreaming things that don’t yet exist, even if they never will.

The OSS “project” has come a long way. Its mercurial existence has established a place to work freely, where geographical distance no longer matters, where anyone can be connected to anyone else, where even time is suspect as a logical, linear continuum. This is the hallucinatory cyber-realm that William Gibson imagined; it is the expanded-cinema / synaesthetic realm that Gene Youngblood described, it is the ever-present present time / out-of-time for moving through the hyperreality. It is all those things brought into the studio context. It is not just some starry-eyed, drug-induced place to be, but rather it is a place to work, make things, collaborate, and engage. It is an active space, where things happen, and best of all, where things change and become new and indescribable.

So it’s no wonder OSS took on a quasi-religious quality in its recent manifestations. We all know that art is much more than auctions and glamor and star-studded international glitz-festivals: art is just a simple (and elusive) thing to be made and experienced in a wondrous place where anything is possible and where the limitations of life itself don’t get in the way.

Drinking from the source

By Randall Packer On 05/30/2013 at 8:53 am · Alchemical Transformation, Catalysts of Multimedia, Performance is Reality

Pat Muschinski and Claes Oldenburg in Claes Oldenburg’s Snapshots from the City, performed during Ray Gun Spex at Judson Church, February 29, March 1–2, 1960.

Here at MoMA, some of the dirt and grime from the Lower East Side has leaked in. In Claes Oldenburg’s “The Street,” the collages and assemblages he created at the dawn of the 1960s were made from the filth and clutter you might encounter when you leave the austere white walls of the Museum and saunter downtown to the gritty neighborhoods surrounding the Bowery. Of course, 50 years + later, the grime-laden collage pieces are now artifacts of one of the most remarkable periods in American art history.

Oldenburg’s “The Street” was the result of the artist’s need in the late 1950s and early 60s to erase the line between art and life, to make art as funky and brutal and funny as life itself. He appropriated the squalor of downtown NYC into his work, then blew it all wide open when the tattered sculptural pieces became set pieces for his first performance: Snapshots from the City. As we have noted more than once: when art spills out over the edges of what is art and moves in impossible new directions, theater is a natural destination for these revolutionary forms that defy categorization. The Happenings of the early 1960s were exactly that: a kind of artistic seizure that shook up the rules and foundations of the acceptable.

In “The Street,” Oldenburg created the proto-sculptural work that would become his trademark: “ray guns” (his comic / ironic motif) of every size and shape; scaled up found objects made of soaked newspaper and formed in wireframe; fantastically stylized streetsigns consisting of chewed up cardboard, etc. Somehow these seemingly discarded objects, which you might find sticking out of a trash can in the streets of New York, take on a mythic quality when inserted into the mercurial constructions of the Happening. Not exactly illusion, or the age-old suspension of disbelief, but something more akin to alchemical transformation, a metamorphosis of material and its origins when inserted into the totalizing effects of live theater.

Standing in the pristine gallery at MoMA, where these magnificently-charged objects have been brought together again (with Vanderbeek’s rare film footage of Snapshots from the City flickering overhead), you can still smell the fire, smoldering after all these years from its initial combustion: the shock waves continue to resonate today.

Moon traveling through hyperreality

By Randall Packer On 05/28/2013 at 7:22 pm · Catalysts of Multimedia, Future is Here, Speed of Life, The Post Reality

July 20, 1969: the first interplanetary television event. It was at this moment when McLuhan’s visionary prediction of the global village was diminished. For the first time, the inhabitants of planet Earth were united in a televised broadcast of the surface of a celestial body 238,900 miles away. This was the greatest media event of all time. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon for everyone to see on their TV screen, it altered our understanding of how transformative television really had become. We were looking at the moon live and in real-time. It wasn’t Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, it was the real deal. A million years of moon mythology, moon dreams, and moon madness had been compressed into a single televised image on our still primitive black & white television screens.

The effects of that moment permeated the final days of the 1960s and spilled out into the 70s. This was the height of the psychedelic era, Woodstock would take place only a month later. We had been seduced by our travels into the hyperreality of the moon via live television. It was as though it had all been delivered to our screens by some electronic force that was beyond comprehension. We would never be the same.

The trip to the moon triggered all sorts of mystical-response trip-mechanisms, such as David Bowie’s Space Oddity: released a few months later on November 4, 1969.

“Major Tom to ground control, I’m stepping through the door, and I’m floating in a most peculiar way, and the stars look very different today…”

Bowie’s moon-induced, acid-laced song took us to some otherworldly, far-away, distant place in the mind’s own moon imagination.

Moon-traveling through new forms of post-reality: perhaps that’s when the schism occurred. Perhaps that was the point at which our thoughts, ideas and dreams were no longer Earthbound, triggered by the magical instantaneity of electronic media, where distance is simply no longer relevant. And just to throw out one more possible moon-influenced historical moment into the historical mix: the first Internet message was sent on October 29th, 1969 between UCLA and Stanford, just three months after the first man set foot on the moon. As Samuel Morse said in 1844 with the invention of the telegraph: What Hath God Wrought!

So as we now look at the wide angled reflection in Buzz Aldrin’s space helmet, we can only imagine the staggering impact of the moment, in which we saw ourselves outside of ourselves traveling through space and time into a new dimension. We have never been the same since. Or perhaps we never came back…