'the drift between' at the Substation Gallery, Wits
by James Sey
Here are two convenient starting places to embark on a reading of 'interactive media' installations. The first is with one of the spiritual fathers of 'new media', Nam June Paik, who once asked what was new about 'new media'. Since television has been around since 1910, he reasoned, why do we still think it's 'new'?
The second is with a more recent thinker about contemporary media and culture. Economist Jacques Attali's famous book Noise contains, in its new edition, an expanded section on what Attali calls 'compositional culture': the ability the internet and other digital technologies afford every one of us to cut, paste, collage, bricolage, create and share across a (multi)medium.
So technology in art is neither new nor inaccessible, and this is forcefully demonstrated in 'the drift between', a group exhibition of four installations by young artists completing their Master's degrees in part at the new Digital Multimedia programme in the Wits School of the Arts, which was shown during February.
Each installation is a tightly conceived and elegantly rendered meditation on the liminal state of (un)consciousness between the biological and the technological. The four artists - Colleen Alborough, Elmi Dixon, Richard Kilpert and Sue van Zyl - all assisted by tech whiz Nicholas Nesbitt, each approach the question of technological 'interface' from a unique perspective, but each work acts as a meditation on the same question: what one might call the psychodynamics of technology.
The aesthetic fascination with technology derives in part from the promise of perfection that technology holds out. The ability of machines to perfectly reiterate and reproduce, for example, is a key part of the shift in our era from a quasi-romantic notion of sublime creative originality to one of a creative use of the copy or the duplicate, the 'already-referred'.
Our culture is built on the idea that the quintessentially human characteristic is our ability to choose - in other words, to be contingent. The ability of machines to infallibly repeat runs exactly counter to this and thus technology acts as a kind of mirror image of the human psyche. Embracing that obverse force in contemporary culture has propelled the creative evolution into so-called 'new media' over the last few decades. The organisation of the exhibition around the concept of a twilight zone between the psyche and technology is therefore very compelling.
The installations make the best of a frankly wretched exhibition space. The Substation on Wits campus is, well, a converted substation. The incredibly awkward volumes of the space are used to great advantage by each of the installations in different ways.
A cordoned-off area in the main exhibition space is accessed through filmy curtaining, through which a designated route leads the viewer to Alborough's installation, Night Journey. This work implicates the viewer in a technologically-mediated act of voyeurism in someone else's dreams. A digital camera captures the viewer's motion, triggering projections onto the dreamer's screen above a bed in which a figure lies swathed in blankets. The viewer becomes a ghost in a dream machine and the waking dreamer who revises the dream through the technology.
On the other side of the curtains stands Dixon's work Roep. In her words, 'Upon entering the space, viewers encounter an illuminated Perspex table, with two children's windmills on opposite sides. The installation invites participants to come nearer to, and blow on, these windmills, activating a video that shoots lines of poetry from each of the windmills' mouths. If two physically opposed participants engage in this exchange, their words involve themselves in a cycle of creation, disruption, and comprehension'.
This simple yet startling work uses soundwaves and amplitudes as triggers for the projection of flash video containing the snatches of text. The 'reduction' of poetic meaning to absolute instrumentality in the blowing of the windmills is a profound representational gesture, and of course viewers at the opening all failed to realise that the projection could be triggered by any sound into the contact microphones of the windmills; preferring to issue the breath of life and meaning.
Van Zyl's work Ripple Floor suspended small spheres from a vent in the ceiling of the exhibition space so that they touched the surface of a pool of water in a tank beneath. Stationed at a point around the tank were engraved touchpads, activated by the same sensitive recording technology which measures physiological changes in the skin in polygraph tests. Touching these activated a shuddering in the spheres, and thus ripples across the water.
Van Zyl's elegant construction brought together machinic and somatic systems of circulation in a way reminiscent for me of the voigt-kampf machine detecting the presence of the truly human in the classic film Blade Runner.
In a separate, elevated space at the rear of the exhibition venue was Kilpert's work in-camera. Setting up a web-cam through a pinhole in the side of the exhibition building, Kilpert built three layers of visual perception of the same image: the camera's projection, an inverted image, and a slide projection of a sequence of stills of the same imagestream.
The work comments on the physiology and psychology of perception itself, utilizing Walter Benjamin's famous dictum that 'the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses'. The staging of the piece as a camera obscura in a darkened faux-cinematic space added considerably to its insight and experiential quality.
The show as a whole showed a coherence and a maturity of conception which puts many professional shows to shame, and is to be doubly commended as a putative 'student show'. It's a stake in the ground and a benchmark for work emerging from the Wits School of the Arts. One looks forward to the day these emerging artists can exhibit freely in the rebuilt Wits Gallery in the adjacent Old Convent building, and not also have to overcome the limitations of an accidentally liminal exhibition space.
Closed: February 11
The Substation
Opposite Wits Theatre, cor. Station and Jorissen Streets, Braamfontein, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 717 4682 or 073 272 4400
Email: dohertyc@artworks.wits.ac.za
www.wits.ac.za/artworks - click on the 'drift exhibition' button, or www.digitalarts.wits.ac.za/exhibit/index.html
Hours: Sun - Fri 10am - 4pm
James Sey is a writer, curator, critic and multimedia artist based in Johannesburg.
