Welcome, everyone, to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series. Welcome
to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series. My name is Chrisstina
Hamilton, the Series Director. Welcome back, and best wishes to each of
you for a good year this 2019. We're at the top of the
winter season, and our new calendar's available in the lobby, so pick one
up on your way out, and make sure you don't miss a thing.
Today we present the Barbara Lee Chief Curator from The Institute of Contemporary
Art/Boston, Eva Respini. Eva's presence here today is a co presentation
with the University of Michigan Museum of Art, fondly referred to as UMMA.
Today's event occurs in tandem with the exhibition Art in the Age of
the Internet, 1989 to Today, which was curated by Eva, and is on
view currently through April 7th at UMMA. So if you've not seen the
show, you must go see it. There's work in the show by past
Penny Stamps speaker Rafael Lozano Hemmer, if that's not enough of a lure.
And there is also work by an upcoming speaker we have coming in
February, Juliana Huxtable, who's with us next month.
A big thank you to the museum, who has been and continues to
be an extraordinary partner for the series.
Another thing in tandem with this exhibition I should tell you about,
this Saturday the MFA graduate students are having a symposium called Site,
Non Site, Website. Join the next generation of artists at their studio site
as they explore theory and practice in the age of the internet.
That's Saturday from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM, and that's at the Stamps
School graduate studios, which is way up far north at 1919 Green Road.
More info on both the Stamps School website and UMMA's website.
On a personal note for all of us here today, I want to
acknowledge a very significant event which has transpired since last time
we met. Many of you, I am sure, have already heard this news,
but for anyone who is a regular series patron who has not yet
heard it, it is with a heavy heart that I must inform you
of the passing of Penny Stamps. She died last month. All of us
here today, however, are very lucky, as through her generosity she has touched
each one of us, and even now she brings us here together today.
Something Penny was very good at doing was bringing people together,
and she loved this series, and even more, she loved the opportunity
that she could afford us in opening opportunities for each and every one
of us through this series. So we'll miss her presence among us very
much. I had a couple of photos I was gonna... Here's Penny here
in the theater with us.
She did come a couple of times a year,
and she loved it very much to be here with everybody.
We'll miss her, she was an incredibly practical woman with straightforward
presence, an indelible style and beauty, and had a wonderful sense of humor,
and a great sense of diplomacy. But perhaps most of all,
she had a deep sense of caring and a nurturing spirit.
She was grace defined, I like to say. And here is another...
Ah! Don't not work on me.
This was once when Penny was here at the theater, and just magically
somehow that ended up being what was on the marquee that day,
which seems very fitting. The good news for us all is that her
generosity persists, and we can all continue to enjoy the bounty of her
legacy as we gather here each week in her name.
Another program that we have to thank Penny for is the Roman Witt Artists
in Residence Program, which was named for her father, Roman Witt. And we
have just welcomed to campus the 2019 Witt resident, JuYeon Kim,
a Korean artist. She's here with us today, she is going to be
in residence at the Stamp School throughout this semester working on a multi
media installation in collaboration with the Stamp School community and
composer George Tsontakis, that explores themes around Korean comfort women,
the abducted, abused and raped female prisoners of the Japanese Army during
World War II. You can find out more about JuYeon Kim and her
project and opportunities to get involved next week, as we are gonna have
a special event next Wednesday at UMMA in the Helmut Stern Auditorium.
That'll be at 5:30 PM, a
special Penny Stamps Series talk by JuYeon Kim.
And one more thing I wanted to add. For anyone who didn't
know this news or have a chance, Penny's obituary
is on the Stamps School website, and you should... She had many,
many great works beyond the series here, and the school, and her name,
and
I suggest you take a moment and do
read about the amazing woman, Penny Stamps.
Back to today, the moment at hand, we are going to have a
regular Q&A in the screening room, as per usual. If anyone doesn't know,
go out the doors, turn left, and go down the hallway,
and you will find yourself... There is another small theater there,
the screening room, and we'll join you there directly after the talk in
here.
Please do remember to turn off your cell phones. Nicola's Books is in
the lobby, they have an amazing, big coffee table book of the exhibition,
Art in the Age of the Internet, out there for sale.
And now for a proper introduction of our guest today, we have the
woman at the helm of UMMA. Please welcome University of Michigan Museum
of Art Director, Tina
Olsen. Thank you, Chrisstina. Good evening, everyone. I'm so very pleased
to welcome Eva Respini to the stage this evening. Eva is the Barbara
Lee Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston,
and previously served as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York. I met Eva for the first time a year ago when
I visited the ICA to see the show she had curated,
Art in the Age of the Internet which, as Chrisstina mentioned,
is now on view at UMMA until April 7th. And I urge you
to go see it, all of you. So I went to Boston to
decide whether we should bring the show here. So I haven't known Eva long,
but I have a long and close connection to her exhibition's topic,
which is really all about the impact of the internet on art and
artists over the past 30 years. I lived in San Francisco from 1992
to '97 as the World Wide Web was coming into being.
It was like living through an earthquake, an amazing, disruptive, crazy
time in which everything seemed to change at once. Friends began taking
weird jobs no one understood: Content producer, content strategist, interaction
designer. We worried a lot then about how to write new kinds of
nonlinear text for CD ROMs and websites. We didn't know who would look
at these websites, so we began sending emails, we didn't know how to
do that or when to do it versus picking up the phone.
We had no mental model, no language, not the faintest idea of what
we were doing. It was the Wild West, borderless, uncharted, exciting.
Most artists I knew then had little interest in the World Wide Web,
but a few did, and they began to experiment as they wondered what
it was: A medium, a technology, a language?
So I was thrilled when I learned of Eva's ambitious show.
It felt to me like a critical story waiting to be researched and
told, and very, very long overdue. Now, Eva Respini. Over the course of
her career, she has specialized in global contemporary art and image making
practices. Most recently, she curated the show at UMMA, Art in the Age
of the Internet, 1989 to Today, which debuted at the ICA in early
2018. As I've mentioned, the exhibition examines the impact of technology
and the internet on visual art over the past three decades.
It features 60 international and intergenerational artists, with over 70
works spanning a variety of mediums. The show has been critically acclaimed,
and its impact was immediate and wide reaching. It allowed the ICA,
for example, to collaborate with more than 14
arts organizations in greater Boston during its run. Eva's passion and commitment
to contemporary art is contagious, and she has done a tremendous amount
at the ICA in her three plus years there: Expanding the permanent collection,
curating shows such as a major retrospective of Cindy Sherman's work,
and leading the opening of the ICA's Watershed, a 15,000 square foot industrial
renovated space offering a gallery, gathering spaces, and new and innovative
programming. We are so excited to have this exhibition at UMMA and in
Ann Arbor, and grateful for the opportunity to reach new audiences on campus
and in the community with Eva's remarkable project. Please join me in welcoming
her.
Hi, everyone, good evening. Thank you, Tina and Chrisstina, for those warm
welcome, thank you all for coming. I know it's a cold,
snowy night, so it's great to see a full house. I'm a little
overwhelmed;
it's a pretty big theater. So tonight I'm gonna talk about the exhibition,
Art in the Age of the Internet. I don't know how many of
you have had a chance to see it yet.
If you haven't seen it yet, please do as soon as possible.
But what I'll do tonight is give you an overview of the exhibition,
I'll walk you through the exhibition. First, I'll talk about the kind of
general ideas and parameters around the show, and then I'll focus on several
artworks that will delve into depth. I'll also talk about the process of
putting together the exhibition, why I made the choices that I made,
and at the end I'll reflect a little bit on the events and
changing attitudes that have informed the exhibition and my thinking.
So the internet is a huge subject. What do we mean when we
talk about the internet? The internet is a physical thing,
it's a set of cables, it's a set of wires, protocols that are
operated by disparate software and hardware, but it's also a social and
political construct. It's a set of social practices and exchanges that have
wide ranging and wide reaching effect. The internet has fundamentally changed
every facet of our lives, and I don't need to tell you that.
It's changed how we consume information, how we conduct research, how we
present our public and private selves, how we date, how we shop,
how we make friends, how we travel. It's transformed attitudes and mores,
it's affected how societies see themselves and others, and has challenged
our perceptions, especially recently, of reality and the truth.
So if the internet has radically changed every aspect of our lives,
I think it's safe to say that it's changed art and visual production
as well. It's changed how artists see, how they make, and how they
think.
This exhibition clearly features a lot of technology, but I would like to
stress that this is an exhibition that's not of technology, but about technology,
how technology has fundamentally changed our visual culture. And this is
what we're really exploring in the internet, the internet as a social and
political construct. In the exhibition, we see how all art, whether it's
painting, or moving images, sculpture, photography, websites, how all of
this has radically been transformed by the cultural impact of the internet.
The exploration of this cultural impact is why many of the works have
absolutely no connection to technology in their form, but they
nevertheless deal with issues that have been brought to the fore by the
development of the internet and its wide reaching effects.
Exhibitions for me are essentially a series of questions, a set of propositions,
if you will. And especially with thematic large group exhibitions such as
this, there are no pat answers, but rather I see artists as leading
us to a new way of thinking about certain questions and issues.
Of course, there are many questions being asked in this exhibition,
questions around how we understand our bodies and our sense of self in
the digital age, about the circulation of information and images today,
about the ethics of surveillance, just to name a few. But if I
were to have to think about one question that this exhibition asks,
and to kind of boil it down to that one question,
it would be how has the internet changed art?
Now, of course, that's a huge question, it's a probing question,
and the answer to that is varied and nuanced. Each artist is answering
this in their own way, through their own lens, from their own perspective.
And when I discuss the art in a minute, you'll see what I
mean. You'll see the varied positions and ideas that are represented in
this exhibition.
So the story that we're telling is a global one.
Over a dozen countries are represented in this exhibition; there's over
40 artists in the presentation here in Ann Arbor.
It's also a story of multiple generations, prescient thinkers are shown
side by side with digital natives, and here is an instance of a
kind of face off that we had in the Boston presentation of a piece
by Nam June Paik with a piece by the collective HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican?
Which I'll talk about in a minute. And just one word about these
images that I'm showing you, these are all from the Boston presentation,
so there may be some artworks that you see in here that didn't
make it here because the presentation here is a little smaller,
but every artwork that I'll talk about in detail will be...
Is on view at UMMA.
So a big goal of this work is to contextualize the work that's
being made today with art from the past, art before Google,
before social media, before smartphones, before e commerce. And while technologies
may have changed over the 30 year period that we're looking at in
this exhibition, many of the concerns have remained the same, and you'll
see that artists over several generations are investigating from their perspectives
with the tools that they had available to them. And this is really
a big part of the exhibition, that there is a kind of multi
generational look at a single topic at hand.
So the earliest work in the exhibition is
dated 1989. It's a piece by Gretchen Bender, who's an amazing artist that
worked primarily in video. She passed away; if you don't know her work,
look into it. I think she really is and was a prescient thinker.
So you might ask why 1989? That is the year that the World
Wide Web was introduced. And sometimes people confuse the World Wide Web
with the internet. So I'm gonna digress and give a really short and
simplified history of the internet. Many of you probably know this history;
the history of the internet has been mythologized now quite a bit.
The internet has been around since the 1960s, and it used to look
something like this. It was mostly accessible to universities, certain governmental
agencies, and it was not widely accessible to the general public,
it was for specialists, for computer scientists, and other specialists.
Then in 1989, the English computer scientist Tim Berners Lee proposed a
new model to access this internet while he was working at CERN in
Geneva. And the idea was to create a hyperlinked system that connected these
various sites. And as you can see in the note at the top
of his proposal, it says, "Vague but exciting," and I think that pretty
much sums it up. And this really became the World Wide Web,
and he then made the architecture of this system widely available and free,
and that's actually really key in how the internet as we understand it
today really became widely accessible. So soon, as Tina was telling us,
there was a kind of ushering in of
new web browsers that were user friendly. You didn't have to be a
specialist or a computer scientist to access the web. They looked something
like this; Netscape and Mosaic were some of the first ones to come
online. And then now I'm gonna fast forward to what the internet looks
like now, which you're all very familiar with, and this is a screenshot
of myself and Assistant Curator Jeff De Blois Skyping with Julia Scher,
one of the artists in the show, another kind of prescient thinker,
someone who's been working around issues of surveillance really since the
1970s and early '80s. And in fact, this is much of the way
in which we conducted our research and conversations with many of the artists
in the exhibition.
And this is another way that the internet looks like
now.
So certainly, this era of the web is familiar to all of us,
and especially its kind of user based guided content and social media seem
to shape every aspect of our lives, and how we understand ourselves and
each other in the world. And that's really why the exhibition starts in
1989, because with the invention of the World Wide Web,
this is the modern internet as we know it. And with the World
Wide Web arguably began the age of the internet in terms of its
larger cultural impact. But just as crucial, 1989 also marked a seismic
socio political shift, an economic shift worldwide: The fall of the Berlin
Wall, Tiananmen Square, the first satellite that comprised the GPS system
was launched into space in that year. And these cultural events arguably
marked the beginning of our globalized era, which cannot be imagined without
the internet. This socio political shift is really just as important,
or I would say even more important, than the technological developments,
and this is really why we start the exhibition in 1989,
which is when the internet really becomes larger in terms of its access
to the public and its cultural impact.
Hopefully, this quick intro of the kind of parameters and ways in which
we started to think about the exhibition gives you a sense of my
thinking. So now let's talk a little bit about the art.
As a curator, for me, it always begins and ends with the art,
and I'm so glad that most of you in the audience are artists
or art makers.
I hold what you all do in very high regard, and I have
a tremendous amount of respect for what you do, because I know it's
very difficult.
When I curate shows, I don't have an idea and then try and
shoe horn art into that idea, but rather,
in my work as a curator, I see a lot of art as
much as possible in person. And artworks that stay with me or that
sort of shift my thinking, and shift my thinking around certain issues and
ideas sometimes begin to coalesce into an exhibition, and that really
is what happened with this exhibition. This exhibition has been taking shape
in my mind for some time, but it was really my arrival in
Boston in 2015 that was the catalyst to do this show.
In many ways for me, Boston was the perfect place to launch the
project, given how important technology is in Boston and the history of
technology. But also its presentation, eventually, in Boston, which was
2018, was almost 30 years after the invention of the World Wide Web.
So that timing was also a moment to look back, there was enough
perspective, enough time to really, really look back
with maybe a little bit of authority as well.
Like the internet, this exhibition is non linear. We tell our stories over
five thematic chapters or sections. And in each section, we include work
by somewhere to six to eight artists, six to nine artists of all
generations working in all mediums, from all over the world, and they're
kind of, as you'll see in the show, they're hung cheek to cheek,
jowl to jowl, so there is this kind of sense, overwhelming sense,
of output, which I think is very much in the spirit of the
internet or how we access the internet.
And the topics are varied. They go, they really are from ideas about
threat to privacy or our sense of self and how that's been changed
by the internet and social media. Now, each of these chapters could be
exhibitions unto themselves and in fact there have been exhibitions all
over the world on one or two of these sections,
and what we did was really select the artists that we felt were
the most salient and resonant and that point to the various strategies of
artists in the internet age. The thing to keep in mind here is
that there is a porousness in these sections. We hope that the works
will speak to each other, and with each other within sections,
and across sections as well. And the way that the exhibition is installed
here at UMMA is really wonderful, because it's very porous. So if you
choose to follow the exhibition via section, which I'm gonna walk you through
now section by section, that's great, but if you choose to meander,
and take your own path, there are these wonderful relationships that are
made across the sections as well. And the installation here really accentuates
that porousness. So the opening section of the exhibition is titled Networks
of Circulation. When we think about the internet, I think one of the
first things we think about is how the internet has
ushered in an era of interconnectedness. The internet's global communications
networks and related technologies have dramatically increased our collective
output of data into a growing mass of information that we produce,
circulate and consume online at an extremely accelerated pace. The prevalence
and portability of cameras, whether they're mobile cameras or police body
cams, along with the increased presence of screens in public and private
settings have enabled and perhaps even caused us to share and be shared
with as never before. Artists working with networked images and videos,
those that are repeatedly uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, re
edited, re blogged, mobilize a range of artistic strategies and together
the works in this section
really reflect on the widespread social and political impact of our previously
unimaginable level of access and interconnectivity. And many of the works
in this section and in the exhibition at large address the kind of
reality of the dream of the internet, which was a dream of sort
of universal knowledge and universal interconnectedness and really whether
this dream has come to pass. Some of the artworks in the exhibition
tackle the reality of what the internet has wrought today. Standing from
our position now, in 2019, most often, I would say through a critical
lens, of where we stand in a post truth, fake news world of
internet echo chambers.
So I'm gonna talk about two works in each section.
I call these anchor works because these are works that really
were the first works I thought about as the show became kind of coalesced
and works in each section kind of coalesced around these artworks that I'll
talk about. So the first is a video installation by the French artist
Camille Henrot, it's titled Grosse Fatigue. And this is a work that I
wanted to have in the exhibition from the very beginning. I saw it for
the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2013, where it had its
premiere, and its hypnotic score and images have really never left me.
Grosse Fatigue has been really an anchor of my thinking, not just of
the show, but of my thinking through many ideas in the exhibition.
And so with this work, the artist attempts to synthesize the origin stories
of several cultures into a single narrative, she's essentially doing a narration
of the history of the universe, which is of course no small feat and
kind of absurd in a way, but certainly the idea that the known
universe is now all at our fingertips is something that the internet has
promised with its invention.
She was an artist that was in residency at the Smithsonian
museums, it's an artist research fellowship, and so what she did to make
this work is she documented different museum collections, including natural
specimens in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Her footage plays
on a series of computer windows and folders that open and close,
often one overlapping one another, and for me this is really a kind
of image of how we live today. This is exactly how our lives
and our desktops look, it's an utterly familiar image to us all.
I mentioned the score, which is just as important as the visual imagery.
It also has a kind of collaged feeling to it. The music is
by the French electronic artist Joakim, the voices by the Ghanaian American
artist Akwetete or Akatatete. And the text is written in collaboration with
the American poet, Jacob Bromberg. So what I'm gonna do now is show
you a five minute clip of what's a 13 minute video.
We're gonna start it in the beginning.
There should be sound to this.
I don't know if
you can hear me up in the booth, but there should be sound
to this video.
Let me see if I could do something about that.
Is there any way we can turn the sound on the video,
perchance? I know it was playing earlier when we did our sound check.
No.
Alright, I'm not a tech person, but I'm gonna try. Oh,
you'll help me, thank you so much.
In the beginning, before all things, there was Ama. And he rested upon
nothing.
In the beginning, Tar, the demiurge, born from the essential ocean. In the
beginning, the... Alright, I'm gonna actually turn it back to the beginning
because I want you to really experience it.
Alright, here we go.
In the beginning, there was no earth, no water, nothing.
There was a single hill called Nunne Chaha. In beginning everything was
dead.
In the beginning there was nothing, nothing at all. No light, no life,
no movement, no breath. In the beginning, there was an immense unit of
energy.
In the beginning there was nothing but shadow and only darkness and water
in the great God, Bumba. In the beginning were quantum fluctuations.
In the beginning the universe was a black egg were heaven and earth were
mixed together. In the beginning there was an explosion.
In the beginning a dark ocean washed on the shores of nothingness and
licked the edges of the light.
In the beginning was the internal night Hern. In the beginning before all
things, there was Ama, and he rested upon nothing.
In the beginning, Tar, the demiurge, born from the essential ocean. In the
beginning, the fabric of space time unfurled and escalated. In the beginning,
the atoms were formed. In the beginning, the giant cobra floated on the
waters. In the beginning everything was still, there was no beginning,
in the beginning and in the void the oldest of old gods was
formed. The world had no time, no shape and no life,
except in the mind of the creator. In the beginning of the world already
was.
There was no world then. Only the white, yellow, blue, black,
silver, and red mists floating in the air. In the beginning was only
the sky above and water and marshland below. In the beginning was nucleo
synthesis,
and when the universe became transparent alike, then the Milky Way formed.
Then there was no need for life,
for the gods emitted a pure light from their own bodies,
then the creator was in the form of a man without bones, then
the gravity of galaxies slowed the expansion of the universe, then were
units of marrow, then Pangu died and parts of his body became parts
of the universe. Then there was a recombination, local contraction, then
the supreme God of Ometoto, being both masculine and feminine, spawned four
children. Then Ra created his wife Hathor with whom he had a son
Horus who married Isis. Then Atim took his penis in hand,
to obtain the pleasure of orgasm thereby. Then Auasis was lady of the
vulva and hand of God. Then Oru introduced disorder into the world by
committing incest with his mother earth. Then the first menstrual blood
came from this union as well as Yayba and Andubulu, the spirits of
the underworld.
And there was violent relaxation.
And God said, "Let there be light"
and there was light, and God saw the light
that it was good.
only says the word Earth, and the Earth rises like the mist from
the sea and Bumba vomited up the sun, and the sun dried up
some of the water, leaving land. And when the earth was made,
it fell down from the sky, earth, hills and stones all fell down
from the sky, and the Earth rose up like a mountain and she
used many colors of Earth which she mixed with saliva, and his spit
was the oceans and his phlegm was the Earth, and denser elements sank
to the Earth's core, and the king above the sky said,
"Punch the holes in the earth, the water will drain away."
So you'll have to see the rest at the museum.
Yeah, it's pretty great.
So for me, what this video does is speak to the avalanche of
images and overload of information that we experience today.
If the initial dream of the internet was one of universal knowledge and
interconnectedness, what we see today is something of a burden. And now
I'll quote the artist, she says,
"To take on the whole history of humanity is already a burden.
The burden of the history of the universe is absurd, by definition.
Fatigue is mentioned in a lot of creation myths, it's the loss of
energy, the entropy principle, which is the founding principle of the creation
of the universe." So Grosse Fatigue in both its form and its content
expresses the experience of image and information overload. That, of course,
is a hallmark of our times. And something that I've been thinking about
with this work, especially as I'm seeing it over and over again,
is also the way in which there's these primitivist narratives that seem
to play out here, and the ethics of those narratives is something,
I think, to further unpack and discuss.
So another work that I think speaks to the reality of the internet
today that is also an anchor of this first section,
it really speaks to how artists perceive where the promise of the internet
has landed today is work by this, which is the one on the
left, the screens on the left.
Yes, on the left. It's by a collective, founded in 2013,
HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? They're also just known as the Yams Collective.
It's a collective of over 40 artists, musicians, poets, writers, performers
and activists, mostly black and mostly queer by their own definition.
They all live all over the world. And they collaborate together to make
projects across many platforms and mediums, and the project that
they made that we're showing in the exhibition is titled Thewayblackmachinedotnet,
and it's an installation that's comprised of 30 monitors. They initially
made it in 2014, but every time it gets shown
the piece is updated. And it takes as it's point of departure the
shooting death of African American teenager Michael Brown by the white Ferguson
Police Officer Darren Wilson. And they construct an archive of activism
around black embodiment. The title is a riff on the Way Back Machine,
which is a digital archive of the World Wide Web, and the work
is composed of algorithmically generated, electronically processed images
and materials that are mostly collected from social media platforms, and
they're drawing on various hashtags, including #blacklivesmatter, #ferguson,
among others. And they then include press and amateur footage as well as
statistical data on police brutality and violence against African Americans.
So let's take a look at how this work functions in the gallery.
I'm gonna show you a very short clip of the piece. But before
I do, I wanna let you know that there are depictions of racial
violence that may be disturbing. The work brings up issues of the ethics
of picturing violence against black bodies, and how those images then circulate
online. And it's a discussion I had with the artists and I look
forward to unpacking that more as well.
So there's a little bit of sound with this piece, but I'm not
gonna play it now. The sound really is
the sound that emanates from these various clips that are kind of flashing
on the 30 screens. And there's a kind of 20 minute loop that
this piece takes. At the end of the 20 minutes, all of the
screens kind of fade
to a gray static and then that static has a pretty loud sound
and actually kind of overtakes the galleries at some point.
So for me, this work is again what we were talking about,
the reality of the internet as opposed to the dream of it.
And for me, I think about... And this piece really, I think,
forces us to think about the fact that despite the proliferation of information
about the systemic murder of African Americans at the hands of white law
enforcement, despite the searing images that circulate widely on the internet,
on the media and on the news, despite this great visibility and access
to these images and information, the needle on this issue hasn't changed.
And thewayblackmachinedotnet, the promise of the internet as a space of
emancipation, is challenged by its more nefarious operations, and in the
words of the artists, "Examine the ways that means and hashtags collapse
and make legible such threats to personhood."
Now, this piece, although it's in the section about Networks of Circulation,
is a nice segue to the next section, which is titled Hybrid Bodies,
because very much the kind of... The ethics of the representation of the
body at hand in this piece is also something that moves forward in
this next section. And this next section really asks the age old question,
"What does it mean to be human?" And this really remains critically important
in the age of the internet and takes on, I would say,
new urgency in today's technologically mediated sphere. The works in this
section address the lasting effects of human activities on the health of
the planet on both human and non human life, the accelerated development
of bio technologies, robotics and automation, and the human being as a basic
unit of measurement and a structure of shared identity. In this section,
the body itself is presented in multiple ways. It's an avatar in some
cases, it's a digital representation, and most often it's a fragment comprising
of both organic and synthetic materials. There's a lot of hybrids in this
section. And really in this section we're confronting questions related
to race, gender and labor among other questions. And these artworks together
consider how our bodies are sites for politics in the digital age.
So, an anchor in this section is this monumental video sculpture by the
American artist, Judith Barry. The piece is titled Imagination, Dead Imagine.
It's from 1991. And Judith is what I've been calling an impression thinker,
someone who's been making work, dealing with a lot of these ideas that
are explored in the exhibition that are so resonant now, but she's been
doing it since the '80s and '90s, and this is one such work.
Imagination, Dead Imagine pictures the body as a hybrid; it's not quite
human, but not machine either. What you see is a large head,
and this sculpture is,
it's about 12 feet tall, just to give you a sense of scale.
So we see a head, from all sides, encased in a large cube;
the head is projected on all four and five sides, on the top
as well. And it's almost like a human head is trapped in an
old computer monitor or an old TV.
The work was created during the height of the AIDS crisis in the
United States, but to me, feels utterly contemporary today, and at home
in today's era of omnipresent screens and swipes.
There's a soundtrack to this work, which is kind of heavy breathing.
And what happens in the piece, and I'll just play you a video
and talk over it, is that there's ambiguous substances that appear to be
bodily fluids that are repeatedly poured over the head, only to be wiped
away. And the wipe, to me, from our vantage point, reads like a
swipe, even though this piece was made long before tablets and smartphones.
And so here you can see one of these substances which appears to
look like blood, appears to be blood.
And then at the top there, you can see the wipe coming.
So what's interesting to me is the... One can think about this work
in the context in which it was made, which is against the backdrop
of the AIDS crisis, and we see the body is being inundated with
substances. The idea of being infected by a virus is of course very
present in this work. But today, the virus,
the idea of a virus or going viral has a whole another resonance.
And Barry has said of this work, and now I'm quoting the artist,
"These images are electronically produced, defaced, and finally delivered
clean, only to be sullied again. It leaves no uncertainty for the viewer
that this head, while perhaps at first seemingly human,
is in fact, technologically generated." So for me, ultimately, this piece
is a reckoning of what it means, here's another substance, of what it
means to be human in the digital age, and feels like it could
have been made yesterday, even though it was made almost 30 years ago.
So this work of Judith Barry is juxtaposed with the work of an
artist of a younger generation, Josh Kline. The work is titled Saving Money
With Subcontractors, and this demonstrates the wide ranging effects of new
technologies on our everyday lives. So to make this work,
the artist scanned, modeled and 3D printed a FedEx worker's body;
this was his local FedEx delivery person that he developed a close relationship
with. And of course, this piece has formal similarities with the Judith
Barry; they're both cubes, just to put it simply, and it's nice to
kind of see them together even though the scales are quite different.
But what I would say what's really most interesting about this work is
that it also deals with how technology has changed how we see our
bodies and thinking about digital technologies' effects on labor in the
era of Amazon, FedEx and other automated labor
of big retailers. So there's an accompanying video to this piece where
the same FedEx worker talks about his experience, and he's actually a subcontractor
of FedEx, which means as a third party contractor, he was regularly denied
the full benefits of a salaried employee. So he doesn't have vacation days,
he doesn't have health benefits, health insurance. And so really, it's about
the effects of what it means to his work, his labor and the
effects on his body. He even talks about how he has to buy
his own uniform, special kind of shoes he has to wear so that
he doesn't get back pain, etcetera, etcetera. So really it becomes the physical
scanning of the body. But this piece is also about how digital technologies
have fundamentally changed portraiture and the idea of imaging the self
and others. And so the artist sort of recalls the process of making
this piece, and I'm quoting him now, he says,
"In 2014, I started doing 3D scans, which opened up a whole new
world of photography for me. The way that they're created by compositing
together scores of photos of a subject taken from different perspectives
becomes a metaphor for how information about us is collected by companies
and government agencies, fractured aspects of our lives accumulating in
different databases, creating subtly different portraits." And so here you
see the portrait of one man decapitated, printed in three ways;
one, life like, and then 3D printed on
using the FedEx slip, and then 3D printed the head in the back
is using the uniform, the blue of the FedEx uniform, and that's presented
on peanuts that are also the likeness of the FedEx worker,
and of course, presented in a FedEx box.
The next section is something we call Virtual Worlds, which is all about
how artists see cyberspace as a vital space of invention. Even before the
invention of the World Wide Web, cyberspace was something we imagined as
expansive, immaterial, an environment that was flexible enough to accommodate
a multitude of virtual worlds. Artists in this section engage in complicated
relationships between the virtual and the real in a variety of different
ways, exploring the possibilities of computer generated spaces as sites
of production, of inquiry, even as they mark the increasingly indistinguishable
difference between the virtual and the real in everyday life.
And for me, a kind of huge anchor, not just of this section,
but of the show, is a collaborative project that was made by
two French artists, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, in 1999, and the
piece was titled, No Ghost Just A Shell. It's a big project.
The title is a reference to the Japanese manga film, Ghost in a
Shell, which you may recall recently in the last couple of years,
was remade as a Hollywood film. So in 1999, the artists purchased a
Japanese manga character that was named Annlee, and Huyghe and Parreno used
the original Annlee computer file as a starting point for an extended project.
They invited several artists to appropriate the character and to bring her
to life. Some of the artists that they invited to make projects with
Annlee include Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.
Huyghe and Parreno suggested to the participating artists, "Work with her
in a real story. Translate her capabilities into psychological traits. Lend
her a character, a text, a denunciation, an address to the court,
a trial in her defense. Do all that you can do so this
character lives different stories and experiences, so that she can act as
a sign, as a live logo."
The artists have filled Annlee's empty shell with these ideas, manifested
in the form of animations, paintings, posters, books, neon works and sculptures.
So in the exhibition we have two of these projects; there were 14
total. The first, what you see here is the video which was made
by Huyghe titled One Million Kingdoms, and then that video is projected
on a series of posters by the French design firm M/M Paris that
portrays Annlee in a kind of collaged Huyghe paper poster
set of images. And so I'm gonna show you a video of Huyghe's One Million
Kingdoms. It's just a short clip, and you'll see that he portrayed Annlee
in a barren, computer generated lunar landscape, and the accompanying soundtrack
is a recording of Neil Armstrong's first moon landing.
So this is the still. And I'll play you the video,
just a few minutes of that.
It's. It's there at the foot of a volcano.
That's the moon landing test for
film. Before anyone walked on the moon, these pictures foreshadowed us
what we would discover
later on.
They prepared us for the spectacle of desolation
on the moon. There's nothing besides
dust. The conquest of space, which
was a dream until now,
had become an illusion. We want to enter
the unknown,
when the greatest mysteries
are right here,
here under our footsteps.
So we are on the threshold of another world.
Just one small step...
So I think you probably know what comes after that one small step.
But it's pretty interesting to hear that audio and
think about it in terms, actually, of the internet, this idea of a
kind of unknown, launch into an unknown world.
What's interesting about this project is its conclusion. In 2002, Huyghe
and Parreno created a corporation in Annlee's name. They sold her copyright
to that corporation so that she might own her own rights to representation.
This gesture, which was a culmination of their project, to quote in their
words, "Free a sign from the realm of representation,"
and really provokes questions about legal personhood, agency and the
politics of representation.
And for me, what's pretty incredible is that they did this in 1999.
It was an incredibly important sign post for things to come,
and even looking at what at that time was really
sophisticated looking visuals and now, of course, to us looks extremely
simple, the ideas and the kind of conceptual framework of this to me
still seems very much ahead of its time, actually.
So, as I've been saying all along, the show's not just a show
of video and digital technologies; a variety of mediums have been touched
by the internet, including the oldest medium of all, which is painting.
This is an untitled painting by the Bronx based artist Avery Singer,
and to make this work, she uses 3D technology, she uses SketchUp, and
she renders the composition on her computer before she then executes the
painting by hand. She describes her process like this: "I utilized computer
modeling as a means to set up a kind of digital still life.
I take the basic information that a selected still from each model gives
me as a point of departure." So in this painting, you see a
geometric figure, likely a female figure, that studies a film strip,
with the two frames isolated and magnified showing instances of movement
paused in the space of a static painting. She tests the representational
capabilities of the software while also expanding the possibilities of painting
in the digital age.
The second to last section is titled States of Surveillance, and really,
we can't think about the internet today without thinking about the threat
to privacy and surveillance. And this is really a very central theme that
runs through the show, not just in this section, as you've seen many
of the other works that we talked about have this kind of undertone
of sort of thinking about surveillance today. So there are really two kind
of events in a way that we thought a lot about in forming this
section. One was the revelations of Edward Snowden in 2013 of the mass
surveillance program of the National Security, the NSA, National Security
Agency, and really thinking about debates around governmental transparency,
mass surveillance and information privacy. But two years before Snowden's
disclosures, the Arab world experienced democratic revolutions in the spring
of 2011, known as the Arab Springs, and that for us was also
really important in thinking about this, because the use of social media
platforms, along with other digital technologies, offered a means of collective
activism to subvert state operated media channels. These two episodes are
unique and complex examples among many others that reflect on the dualistic
nature of the internet,
and especially thinking about its utopian ideals and perhaps its dystopian
realities. So the artworks in this section employ a variety of strategies
to examine the wide reaching effects of surveillance,
ideas about information and control, while also pointing to paths of resistance.
So a kind of anchor in this piece is by Rafael Lozano Hemmer, who
I understood has been a lecturer in this series, a Mexican artist based
in Montreal. This is a piece that he made in 1992 titled Surface
Tension, and he made it at that time as a response to the
rise of smart bomb technologies which use camera technologies, infrared
camera technologies to aid them in
their mission, and this was during the first Gulf War. And here what
he's done is use this infrared technology as an interactive part of the
installation in which a human eye is programmed to follow viewers throughout
the space. So, it's quite literally Big Brother watching you, and here's
a video of how it works.
So there's someone now walking across the gallery, we can't see them because
the person filming this didn't film the person walking across, and that
eye tracks you in the gallery wherever you go. So,
quite literally, it's Big Brother. And this is a
work that people immediately get, and works symbolically in many ways.
He actually tweaked the piece in 2004. So he initially made it in
1992, tweaked it in 2004, because, as the artist said, he wanted
"the work to coincide with George W. Bush's new war in the Gulf, and
the increased surveillance of his own people." So Surface Tension really
implicates the viewer in a real time system of watching and being watched,
pointing to the often unseen role of surveillance in everyday life.
And one of the things that I really like about this piece is
when there's no one in the gallery, the eye closes and goes to
sleep, but it's always there, ever ready, just like Alexa.
So one of the issues we confront in this exhibition and in this
section in particular, is that access to the internet is not equal for
everyone. I think here in the US and in the West,
we kind of take that for granted. But in fact, many people across
the world don't have access to the internet. Actually, more people than
not don't have access to the internet. And there are many areas of
the world where the internet is restricted by regimes and governments.
And in this case, the internet could also lead to a path of
resistance, and we were interested in teasing that out, and that's especially
teased out with this work. So what we saw, for example,
in the Arab Spring is a sense of... Is the liberation that was
afforded through social media and
citizen journalism. And so, this piece which is titled The Fall Of A
Hair: Blow Ups, is made by a Lebanese artist, Rabih Mroue, and it
was made during the first year of the Syrian civil war.
And it's a series of seven photographs and what they portray,
they're enlarged blurry images of snipers that are pointing a gun towards
the photographer and thus the viewer. These images were captured by Syrian
protesters on mobile phone cameras and they were uploaded online. Some of
these people who made the pictures were reportedly killed moments after
photographing the gunman. These cell phone pictures were uploaded freely,
available freely
and these kind of images have played a pivotal role in documenting on
the ground reality of the Syrian civil war and other Arab Spring uprisings.
And the artist has said of this work, quote, "What distinguishes the revolution
in Syria more than any other Arab country, is that in Syria journalists,
whether professionals or freelancers, whether they belong to an institution
or not, are entirely absent from the scene of the event.
This makes it almost impossible to know what is happening during the demonstrations.
There are only two ways for us to know what is going on
there, one being Syria's official news channels and the other being the
protester images which are uploaded on to the internet.
I chose the second source, the internet, since my aim is to look
for the protesters' points of view." Now, of course, this was set during
the first year of the Syrian civil war, a lot has happened since,
including a kind of clamping down and a complete destruction of a society
and any kind of social fabric.
Of course, today we can't think about the internet without thinking about
social media and the ways in which those technologies have influenced how
we think about our many selves. And in fact, I would say the
rise of social media has underscored the malleability of the self, which
of course was always there. So, the final section in this exhibition is
titled Performing The Self, it looks at how the internet has affected how
we understand ourselves, how we perform our identities
online and offline, and increasingly
how that has affected how we think of ourselves as a society.
Many online platforms offer unique means with which to explore and articulate
aspects of our personal and cultural identities that may not otherwise be
easily expressed. So while we may think a lot about the drawbacks of
social media, online platforms and technologies can also offer new modes
of representation, a sense of community and increased visibility for historically
marginalized groups. So, the artworks in this section kind of explore both,
the sort of surface of the performativity of
the online social media presence, as well as perhaps other
ways in which representation and thinking about the self and the malleability
of the self has had far reaching effects, both online and offline.
So, in this section, there is a really interesting conversation between
two artworks and you can see two of them here sort of in
conversation with each other and those are sort of the anchors of this
section from the very beginning, and those are photographs by the artist
Juliana Huxtable and a sculpture of Huxtable by the artist Frank Benson
and I'm really excited that you'll be able to hear from Juliana herself
when she comes here next month.
So, you probably know Juliana best as a performer and a DJ,
she's also a visual artist, she makes... As a poet,
she works really across a range of platforms to push against and stabilize
the restrictive boundaries traditionally assigned to categories such as
gender and ethnicity. Juliana is a trans woman. For many years
she operated a really influential Tumblr account where she uploaded many
self portraits and she explains, quote, "My adulthood was liberated by social
media, it became as integral to my sense of self and psychological reality
as my flesh. At this point I feel like I'm always living a
hybrid of my online presence and my IRL presence. I used to feel
a bit powerless and it was actually through playing with my body as
an image file that could be manipulated, distorted, rendered, decorated
and placed in new contexts that I came to accept and feel at
home in my body as it currently is, but also to imagine how
it might move into the future." So here you see a self portrait
entitled In The Rage and she portrays herself as a self described in
her words, quote, "Cyborg, cunt, priestess, witch and Nubian princess."
And, in the second photograph that's included in the exhibition, she creates
a provocative visual poem that comprises a variety of references to various
places, people and cultural signifiers that relate to African American identity.
So, throughout much of her work, the internet is a tool for the
writing and re writing of various histories and thus a tool for constructing
and deconstructing identity.
So Frank Benson's sculpture, Juliana, is a life size bronze sculpture that
was made with the aid of 3D printing technology and captures Huxtable in
exquisite detail. He first actually came to know Huxtable through her Tumblr
account, which really was an inspiration for the pose and the way that
this piece looks, the finishing of the piece, the color of the paint.
Eventually, the two of them were introduced by a mutual friend and they
made... Collaborated really closely to make this work. So to make this work
he scanned Juliana in 3D, he had her 3D printed. Then those 3D
prints were used to make casts that eventually were made into a bronze.
And as you know, bronze is a very traditional material for sculpture.
So starting in the very present as a way to look back at
the history of sculpture. This piece is incredibly life like. It's hyper
real, I would say. And to be in its presence, physically,
is really quite a powerful thing. So, I encourage all of you to
really spend some time with it in person. The work was influenced by
Huxtable's own self portraits and desire on how to be portrayed.
For example, Benson finished the sculpture with a metallic green paint,
it's an auto body paint, that was inspired by the self portrait that's
in the show. It's right next to the sculpture, so it gives this
kind of conversation between the two. But that paint gives the classic bronze
sculpture a digital... A really machine like finish.
It's kind of a hyper realism and the detail of Juliana,
the way in which it's rendered, is really... Presents Juliana
as an ideal. Her pose, this pose here
makes reference to classical representations of the female body throughout
the history of art and history of sculpture. And for Benson the 3D
modeling technology and its existence in the digital space is on par with
the physically rendered sculpture. He explains, and I quote him now,
"I want the sculpture to exist as a completely finished entity inside the
computer. The 3D model is its ultimate version and the print in the
real world is a manifestation of it." So he holds the kind of
digital file in the same sort of regard or level as the bronze.
This work was first shown in 2015 at the New Museum in New
York and the sculptor became a social media phenomenon and an icon for
some in the trans community. It became a
kind of trend on social media and to this date if you do
a search of #JulianaHuxtable this sculpture comes up alongside obviously
images of her performing.
And so, this is what I love about this work, that it really
comes full circle. It began as a digital image, a 3D scan. It
was translated into bronze, a kind of heaviest, most kind of fraught material
of all and then it went back into the digital realm via social
media. And this is emblematic of how circulated images can have immense
power.
So, before we end, I wanna just take a moment to look back
at the exhibition as I've had a little bit of a moment
to get some perspective, to have some distance.
I would like to express that this exhibition is not the final word.
As in the case of many exhibitions, especially thematic exhibitions,
Art in the Age of the Internet is an incomplete account.
It's dated as soon as it's put on view.
So, the project aspires to being neither the first or the last word.
I really just consider this as a kind of sign post,
a bookmark, a link to ongoing conversations that have preceded and
will follow this endeavor. The book, which
is its own major endeavor, is the scholarly output of this project and
one that I hope will live on beyond the ephemerality of the exhibition.
And with the book, we invited authors to write beyond the parameters of
the exhibition, to look back at the 1960s, and we also included conversations
with artists of many different generations so that their voices would be
present as well. If the internet has taught us anything is that the
pace by which information, knowledge and how we understand our world is
always changing, it's never fixed, it's ever variable. And so, from the
outset of this research project in 2015 to its presentation in 2018,
technologies, conditions and visual cultures have changed seismically, but
also the world has changed. Since I started on this project we witnessed
Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the rise of hashtags and movements
such as Me Too and Black Lives Matter, the rise of fake news,
post truth, and, of course, the increased threat to net neutrality.
And I have to say, many of of these events sharpened the arguments
of the exhibition. I was writing my catalog essay in 2016 when post
truth was announced as the word of the year by the Oxford English
Dictionary. It was also the year of Brexit or the referendum on Brexit
and the election of Donald Trump. And with those events, along with others,
I took a more pointed and critical look at where the internet has
brought us.
For me the exhibition is a way to mark our moment,
to step back and understand the complex moment in which we live,
but I think these concepts will look very different to us in three
years, five years and 10 years from now, and I'm sure that artists
are, as we speak, making work that are shifting some of these ideas.
So in this ever present, ever changing present where everything seems to
be shifting with incredible speed, I think visual culture does more than
hold a mirror to reality. It actually has a role in creating it.
If there's anything that I hope you can take away from this exhibition
is that art and artists play a key role in shedding light on
being critical of and asking probing questions about our moment, the age
of the internet.
I would like to remind you that there's a Q and A in
the screening room
just down the hallway, but before you go, I wanna take a picture
of all of you for my Instagram.
I wonder if the house lights can be pulled out. Thank you.
Wave, smile.
Thank you so much for coming, have a good night.
