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DISCUSSION DYNAMICS MY OBSERVATIONS AFTER VIEWING/PARTICIPATING IN THE INSTALLATION Cell Tango exposes participants to the idea of collaborative writing/project-making via participation. While collaboration is not entered into in the traditional sense --participants do not converse with co-collaborators about the project or work together to determine the project’s goal/outcome-- the end results that Cell Tango creates very much resemble collaboration in that the ending results of participation are singular “products” or “narratives” formed out of the contributions of many. The software’s role of gathering and patterning the data allows for the outcome of the “collaboration” to be pleasantly open-ended and caused a great deal of excitement on the end of the participants as they scrambled to contribute work, anxious to observe how their contribution would interact with those of others, and what the partnering of data, and differing viewpoints of participants would create. The project is especially valuable for getting the feet wet of viewers who haven’t collaborated on work before because they aren’t responsible for coordinating the beginning stages of discussion and the bargaining towards harmony of vision that take place in collaboratory projects yet they can readily view the dense and fruitful results attempting collaboration in their own work could provide. The project also allows new and old writer’s alike to remember the value of character study by allowing them to so easily see the world through someone else’s eyes via the tags, “stories”, that other people are readily offering up which when accompanied by image truly allow the eavesdropper an enriching experience. This experience of making the stone stony again by allowing us to see objects, people, places, and ideas in a new fresh light, is always sought after by crafts-people of words, and was very inspiring to see taking place. Watching the installation’s body build (as we see happening in the second image at the right of this text), was akin to seeing the inner-workings of one’s mind as an idea is born and then deliberated over for meaning and connections. The on-screen images were similar to the old-school method of building bubbles on the page to web together connections but with the addition of many exciting possibilities due to the perspective viewer’s were enabled to experience via the use of technology. While viewing the groupings/narratives accrue one might begin by asking the seemingly simplistic though endlessly rich question: which picture was tagged with bricks? with sunlight? with grass? Take for example an image tagged "blue". After viewing what has been called blue, one might ask: what can blue mean? Blue is a feeling, a color, a political term for a particular geographic landscape, and a football team --and these are all quite literal translations. What else could it mean and how will that assigned meaning interact with the ideas it is grouped with? ARTIST INTERVIEW SS: What is your creative process like? Do you start your projects because you see a need for an exciting idea to be explored, or do you examine what a particular type of technology can be used for and go from there? At a projects inception, do the ideas or the technology tend to excite you most? Do you ask: “What can this technology be used for?”, or “Here is my idea, now what type of technology can/should be used to best communicate this idea?” GL: The short answer is “all of the above” as each project evolves out of either a potential situation, or else out of seeing a particular “coming together” of an idea with a technology. Much of the artwork I do has come out of the question “What does it mean that this or that technological medium impacts itself on the cultural content that passes through it”. I am very much interested in the syntactic, linguistic, semiotic processes that are part of technologically generated information in general, and artworks in particular. In the end, each new project is in conversation with its predecessors, thematic issues in earlier projects that somehow require a “next step” development, and meanwhile simultaneously in conversation with other projects in the field. So, from a semiotic perspective, one can say that each new project is at the intersection of both the diachronic path of my work shaped through synchronic conversations with other projects. SS: How does this relate to how Cell Tango came to be? GL: “Cell Tango” came out of the need to make “Pockets Full of Memories” (PFOM) mobile. PFOM was first planned in 1999 with the idea that the museum/gallery exhibition would function as an information collection center, and the exhibition would represent the time-based growth of the collection eventually reaching a sum total at the end with the collection representing the totality of that particular exhibition community participatory experience. PFOM had its premiere in April 2001 in Paris at the Centre Pompidou and then was exhibited at a number of exhibition venues, the most recent in Taipei in 2007. PFOM involved the use of a heavy scanning station situated in the gallery space itself, where the public would come to digitally capture an image of an object in their possession and then fill out a questionnaire to provide the necessary metadata for the collection by which it can organize itself when projected in the gallery space. Even though the technology was in place to allow image and metadata contribution over the internet, the museum lawyers got very nervous about the potential legal issues in response to problematic contributions, and so we limited online participation by allowing the public to add email text messages to each image. The data collected through the exhibitions are online and can be reviewed here. In the fall of 2003 I began to research how cell phone technology could be the ideal medium for the forwarding of images with metadata, thereby freeing the project from being locked to the physicality of a data collection unit. Soon afterwards, the conceptual issues related to a cellphone project led to it becoming an artwork in itself. Funding was requested to research multiple aspect of the concept including the potential of mobile phone picture messaging as a new form of cultural practice, redefining what, when and where photographs can be created. The database of images will be viewed and accessible on the internet, but also in a larger “spectacle” format as a mixed-realities installation for any public exhibition space such as a museum, airport, subway platform, or shopping mall where people congregate. The archive of images will be visually represented in the form of a network organism: a slowly changing cloud-like, amorphous, 3-D architectural module consisting of nodes and links where all contributed images find their relative place with others of similar value. SS: At BathHouse we often find that there is a great deal of overlap between what can be classified as creative writing and what can be classified as visual art because language can be involved in both and both generally strive to communicate/interact with an “audience” and tell a story. We enjoy this overlap because it inspires us to question definitions, which creates new spaces for us within both disciplines that allow for new approaches to projects. Where do you see these types of intersections in Cell Tango? How can what Cell Tango is doing, with narrative etc., be thought of as writing or a new method of writing? GL: Even though I am interested in the narrative structures and potential of literary narrative forms, I don’t believe that there is a direct translation and correlation to multimedia narrative, be they linear or multilinear. When a story is transported into a cinematic script, there is a lot of effort invested in that translation to make it function in a linear narrative form where image, sound, story plot development, and narrative build-up occur. What may be common to literary narrative and visual representation is that there is the process of encoding and interpretation. Images require decoding of their content in the way one decodes literary structure. SS: A lot of your projects are a collaboration of sorts with a production team of members who deal with different aspects of project management and technology. How has collaboration or working with a team changed you as an artist or expanded your abilities? GL: Collaboration has forced me to acquire skills in project management and interpersonal communication – things that I had not anticipated prior to engaging with colleagues or expert students who have been my collaborators. I come out of a tradition of the individual artist creating a particular vision out of cultural content one handles, and processed in a particular medium – in my case, it being photography, and then interactive multimedia. Also, context determines a lot. Cinematographers, musicians are part of a long standing tradition of collaborative work where specialized experts such as photographers, lighting experts, etc bring their expertise to the project. Visual artists exist in a tradition of individual production, unless demand forces them to develop a studio or “shop”, for instance Rubens, Rembrandt, and recently Jeff Koons, etc. SS: Placing text in visual art can easily go awry if it is not integrated with skill or it is abused by being used in places where it does not better a piece. Cell Tango makes use of text both to create patterns and to display results of investigation; how has text been a part of your past projects? GL: I first used text in an artwork titled “Everyday Stories” in response to an exhibition in San Francisco I chose not to participate in titled “Photography & Language” in 1976. This was a radical exhibition because it proposed that the photographic image was to be subjucated to textual anchorage rather then be pictorially meaningful. “Everyday Stories” was realized 3 years later and I wanted to create a permutation of relationships between the image and text. So I had 4 groupings of images, one where the text and the image where meaningful, one where neither the text, nor the image conveyed meaning, and then two sequences where one or the other conveyed meaning… Roland Barthes described text captions in relation to an image as a form of anchorage, where the text dictated the meaning of the image, grounding it into an ideological reading, focusing the viewer’s attention to an interpretation determined in advanced. As a photographer who belief in the power of the image, I had considered this issue in depth for many years prior to actually bringing text into my work. Once I began to work with the text, it then became obvious to then actualize it as a visual element: font, size, scale, and color where all connotative elements that shaped the relative importance and meaning of the text in relation to the image it was placed against. SS: In writer’s circles the question of when to stop working on a text is often summed up by the sentiment that a book is never done, just abandoned. Because so many of your projects are technology based, do you ever go back and update them or push them to evolve when new technology is created or updated technology becomes available? Have two projects ever morphed into one? GL: I usually move on to the next project based on some unresolved problematic in the just completed work. SS: When we create projects which are conducting social experiments a lot of the fun is often in the patterns we see develop which provide a deeper understanding of the world we live in. Has any of the content or patterns generated by Cell Tango surprised you? Have you found that the same patterns and narratives develop no matter what geographic location the project takes place in? GL: Cell Tango is a collection of images specific to its geographical and cultural location. Cell Tango is a virtual version of the previous data collection project titled “Pockets Full of Memories”…Each exhibition becomes the occasion to create a mini-archive of collected data representative of that particular event and location. For Cell Tango one can see that the images collected in Poitiers, France are quite different from those collected Ypsilanti, Michigan and different as well from those currently being collected in Irvine, California, so the content does change and is specific to the location and also to the event during which the data is collected. SS: As Professor of Interactive Media at UC Santa Barbara, you have joint appointment in the Media Arts & Technology program and the department of Art: at BathHouse we find there is an even split between submitters who identify primarily as artists and those that identify primarily as writers; at the university level do you see a trend towards placing value on interdisciplinary work? What struggles have you faced working with material which draws from multiple disciplines, in academia and beyond? GL: This is a very large question, so I can only answer briefly. Each discipline brings its own bias, prejudice, mode of evaluating the world to the discussion. I teach in a program that has Computer Science, electrical Computing Engineering, Electronic Music composition, and art colleagues from architecture, technology performance, and data visualization. Every time we get together, we spend some time clarifying what we mean by the terms we use. For instance the term “feedback” means something different to each of the disciplines I have mentioned who are part of my program at UCSB. In the end, what is amazing, is that after 8 years, we are still sitting at the table together pushing forwards towards realizing our desire for creating a new discipline that will emerge out of the sum of our older disciplines. The biggest challenge is to define the evaluation metrics that our engineer colleagues continuously ask from our arts colleagues in terms of how to evaluate the quality of our varying performances. SS: Why do you create projects which are interactive for viewers? What do you want Cell Tango participants to experience? GL: Cell Tango is an opportunity for the arts/museum goer to leave a trace, a contribution in a public institution. This is a very fulfilling gesture for the visitor. As an artist who is interested in creating an artwork that functions as a means of interaction with the public, the project becomes an occasion for sampling a particular culture group at a particular location and at a particular time. Conventional exhibitions are terminal experiences. They represent a culminating experience for the artist where the institutional presentation of their work is a terminal action. Such exhibitions signal “Here is an artist’s particular exploration of a theme”. For my projects, I want the museum exhibition to function as a data collection process, and the end of the exhibition represents the end of the collecting phase – but this then becomes only half of the process to be followed by the analysis of the sum of the collected information contributed throughout the event of the exhibition. ROOM FOR CONTEMPLATION I am excited by the points where my descriptions of and experiences with Cell Tango may differ from George's descriptions and even intent because they can provide us with space to question what writing may or may not consist of, and while there is no absolute boundary defined for us by dictionary or by popular thought, this questioning causes the definitions and boundaries we individually call upon to answer the questions, to come to light, in turn enabling us to examine the boxes we have placed our own projects and ideas in. Where do you perceive these inconsistencies to exist in the conversation, if at all, and what can they mean for your work? Read more about George and his work at: georgelegrady.com |