The history of art can be recounted from a plurality of methods and perspectives. One such possibility is the artist's development of new techniques for emergent technologies particularly with regard to how the 'artifacts' of the technology influence the content of the art produced. Since the beginning of the 20th century, together with the iconography and period history an essential characteristic of the history of art has been the artist's purposeful alteration and extension of the 'artifacts' of technology. This line of development and defining characteristic has become central to art produced in an electronic-digital environment.
Artists working with emerging digital technologies are exploring new territory and establishing new genres in a cultural context, where the 'techniques' of innovative art practice are increasingly overlapped and exchanged with the 'techniques' of contemporary mass media. Jonathan Crary eloquently argues that the meaning in an artwork is constituted between the viewer and the work, and that the 'techniques of the observer' are as important as the techniques of the artist. This is particularly relevant with regard to the time-based technologies of film (cinema), video (television), and audio recordings (music) where prior experience and saturated exposure in a popular-mass media context affects the way a viewer reads an 'artwork' that uses these same technologies. This very often results in a crisis of meaning between the viewer and the 'artwork', because the viewer is attempting to read and understand the 'work' in another language--the language of mass media.
The implication of this observation requires that the artist working with mass media encoded technologies develop a 'mechanism' that provides for a means of translation of these codes into a 'recombinant' language. This allows the viewer to engage the 'artwork', and provide for an understanding of these new forms of media usage, by incorporating associations to previously employed 'techniques' of the observer.
One such 'strategy' is the examination of 'theoretical techniques' of inter-authorship as intelligent feedback 'mechanisms' that explores the complexity of the contemporary media context and its interaction with works of art.
This methodology as applied to my own work has been to appropriate and participate in the dominant ideology, and introduce new versions and alternatives that open the receiver’s participation in the discourse. The effective design of the work acts as a 'trajectory of discovery', a path of exploration through the work by using visual and interactive cues in an attempt to build a 'live residue' in the mind of the viewer. This strategy is the performance of critique and mythology at the same time, bringing into relationship experiences with three levels of discourse: personal (autobiographical), popular (community stories, oral history, and popular culture), and expert (technological disciplines of knowledge).
I believe an exemplary work of art offers intellectual substance to a wide range of visitors. Laypersons and specialists in the field should be able to engage the work and gather something of value.
OVERVIEW
My artworks are hybrid constructions of overlapping scenarios composed using the convergent technologies of film, video, photography, and audio processed with a range of digital tools. A body or palette of work is then performed-exhibited in multiple formats-DIGITAL VIDEO, ONLINE, and INTERMEDIA PERFORMANCE. The selected performance venues engage the question: What form of ‘cultural practice’ will digital art practice engender? The term ‘cultural practice’ is employed to indicate that an artwork that evolves with digital technologies may take a different exhibition form from traditional art media by exploring various non-standard exhibition possibilities, as well as, conventional art world exhibition sites of museums and galleries.
CONTEXT
I The conscience of these projects lay not in the production of specific artifacts but rather in the potential for the making of meaning constructed from a translation of the media elements and processes into a 'recombinant' language. The interaction of the artifacts of the media format and the ‘techniques of the observer’ in a specific venue characterize the performance and exhibition of the project (work). The structure or situation(s) presented function(s) as a 'container' for the authored system of content exploration. The artwork does not attempt to transmit something pure in itself, as a news story or a report; but something from within the very life of the narrator and from that life latter borrows it back--imprinting the narrator’s and then the viewer(s) sign in the story. The realities that form themselves are tangible as a heuristic manner of organization, which regards the irregularities of the environment as a set of opportunities around which the work takes shape and adjusts its own identity. Discoveries made in this 'framework' provide a mechanism for the work to continue to develop by engaging the 'techniques of the observer'.
II An examination of ‘testimony’ as subject and medium of transmission informs the conceptual possibilities and experiential specificity of many of my works. ‘Testimony' as subject is here considered as a vow to tell or promise, as an act composed of bits and pieces of memory, as occurrences not settled into any complete understanding or remembrance of past events. ‘Testimony’ as medium of transmission is performed as a reminiscent series of snapshots taken at specific intersections of material, place, and time. The events are retroactively rediscovered or understood by visible marks or indications and assembled as a “testimony of sorts” addressed to others from the stance of the witness. The ‘testimonial artwork’ functions in the capacity of witness to something cognitively dissonant without offering a completed statement or account of events performing a form of theoria.
In its Greek meaning, theoria referred to a group of individuals (theoros), who had the function to “see and tell,” attest to the occurrence of some event, to witness its happenstance. If we follow a trajectory from (Greek) tragedy, (Roman) epistle, (Renaissance) sonnet, we find that the contemporary era has '(re)-invented' testimony as its new literature. For example, in classical tragedy the spectators came to the theater worried about everyday problems. Through the medium of the chorus, the spectators could feel the required emotions. In contemporary culture, the daily most familiar notion of testimony is its usage by the mass media. In modern television, we can find the 'talk show' employing testimony as a privileged mode of communication-transmission and as bearing witness to a crisis or trauma functioning in this capacity as a counter part to classical chorus-the ‘other’ as now embodied in the television set.
III The work(s) treat digital technology as the prosthesis of contemporary memory in our time. ‘Digital
Memory’ is used as a tool of evocation of 'place'. By evoking a ‘place’, one may recall various bits of information. This concept is interesting and relevant from our computerized society's point of view in that memory storage and retrieval is its functionality linking the conceptual configuration of ‘architecture’ as a mnemonic device. 'Architecture' is the technical term for the way information is routed in digital systems and the ‘architectural design’ of a 'CPU' is what gives its particular qualities and capabilities. The basic function of memory systems is storage and the categorization of incoming sensations for the integration of new stimuli. The 'location of memory' is the language of digital media.
RESEARCH
I. Audio-Visual media as transformed by the hard drive focusing on practices and artifacts unique to digital media rethinking techniques developed using the primary devices of film, video, and audio in this new context. Previous audio-visual technologies are examined from a historical perspective to reveal the ways in which a meta-medium has its own recognizable traits and languages.
II. The exhibition of intermedia work that explore various non-standard possibilities outside traditional art world venues, such as broadcast television and radio, site-specific architectural installation-projection, and alternative performative venues.