| Reversing the Lens System: | |||||
| The DAX Group in 1991 - Bruce Breland | |||||
| The artist picks up the message of cultural and technical challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs. He, then, builds models or Noah's arks for facing the change that is ahead. | |||||
| Marshall McLuhan | |||||
| I like to think of 'Daxonians' as sojourners embarked on a journey without end - artist travellers whom I choose to call mariners, cultural navigators moving about in a great telematic sea seeking to connect mind to mind. The analogy I prefer is that of a journey through a fluid environment that approximates the feelings we often experience in our attempts to create art in electronic space. | |||||
| Most of the members of the Digital Art Exchange Group (The DAX Group) of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, belong to the academic community. The group represents a diverse, rather informal, organization of artists, engineers, writers, musicians and researchers who have been collaborating on DAX projects for an extended period of time. Many of us have worked together for more than a decade, connecting with similar art groups located in the following cities of the United States and countries around the world: Boston, Baltimore, Bristol, Chicago, Los Angeles, Paris, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Seattle, Vancouver and Vienna. There have been other exchanges between artists in Atlanta, Campinas, Dakar, Haifa, Kassel, Linz, Lisbon, Milan, Perth, Richmond, Rio de Janeiro and Venice. The former group listed above represents the 12 most active nodes, which have been consistently involved with us since our participation in the 42nd Venice Biennale in 1986. | |||||
| Exactly why we have chosen to engage in this activity precludes a simple explanation. Therefore I will preface the description of DAX Group activity by stating in simple terms that we create artifacts that translate into idiomatic icons, which I choose to call 'thought bundles'. Thought bundles are the cultural probes used to facilitate our attempts to connect mind to mind. The analogy of the artist moving about in a fluid state, transmitting and receiving digital data, suggests mythic alchemy or transformation. The notion of inserting idiomatic bundles into a global network and thereby connecting mind to mind in order to affect the nerve receptors of similar globally dispersed art groups seems to be the stuff of utopian thinking. I will freely admit that my thoughts are utopian, and I qualify my position with a cryptic Buckminster Fuller response: do I (we) really have a choice? The dictionary tells as that utopian ideals are fanciful and considered impractical and exist only in theory. This definition under other circumstances might hold true if, indeed, we had done nothing and were proposing an unrealizable utopian dream. We make art, and the technology we use is the generic variety: telephones, FM and HAM radio, I. P. Sharp, Bitnet and EARN computer networks, fax machines, slow-scan teleconverters, video cameras and hardcopy printers. | |||||
| Our most impressive interaction to date is a slow-scan television production entitled Dakar d’ Accord: Goree Song between Dakar (Senegal) and Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania). The exchange was accomplished by telephone, using a set of direct connections between the National Television Station (O.R.T.S.) in Dakar and the DAX studios atop the Fine Arts Building located on the Carnegie-Mellon campus. This was our contribution to the Goree Almadies Memorial Celebration of 21 and 22 July 1990. Dakar d' Accord represented our 26th major telematic production since 1982. I belive it would be difficult to categorize our activity as fantasy or as the consequence of idle dreaming and unresolved theory. | |||||
| We are artists working in a global context at electronic speed, using existing technology. Our journey has been impeded only by the outmoded institutional construct inherited from our industrial pass, which insists that we formulate our work in the old industrial environment of vertical hierarchies. Our process produces no product to be distributed for consumption. | |||||
| A transformation is taking place. We live and work in a world of simultaneity and horizontality. The revolutionary platitude is that knowledge and communication are rapidly becoming independent of the institution. Structure has been eclipsed by process. This creates enormous discontinuities, with all of the obvious fallout. Network artist Robert Adrian once told me that the problem is that we are producing an art form that has no physicality, which does not depend upon the old values of handiwork and originality or upon any of the other qualities associated with art as we know it. We are standing on the threshold of the electronic age and trying to see into the new paradigm with the eyes and the tools of our industrial past. We are now in the uncomfortable (dangerous?) position of confronting ourselves as members of an exotic tribe. To Adrian's remarks I add: To those who would rely upon the old structure, it must seem as if somebody had reversed the lens system, rendering the old telescopes useless. | |||||
| We are now living and working in a shared electronic space, and we have compressed time and space such that we must deal with our resulting altered consciousness. We have broken through the boundary of 'thingness'. The environment in which we now probe feels more like water because every thought is like an immersion. We are traversing a complex system, accummulating layers of information at electronic speed discovering internal landfalls to aid us in our search for the critical path. | |||||
| Telematic artists are engaged in the network by their actions, reactions, interactions, accumulations, collections, integrations-layering and folding as our accumulated thought bundles become the integrated remnants of all previous collective actions. Every action modifies what we already know. In this dynamic context, idiomatic icons, stored on audio and video tape or in computer memory, form psychic maps - acoustic images resonating on our brain pans from video monitors or as a response to hardcopy printouts. | |||||
| Marshall McLuhan told us in 1964 that the history of human culture provides no examples of a conscious adjustment in the affairs of humankind to its new extensions or technologies except in the puny and peripheral efforts of artists. He is suggesting that the artist serves in the role of the social navigator, and in that context McLuhan adds that "in the electronic age there is no point in saying that the artist is ahead of his time. Our technology is ahead of its time if we reckon by our ability to recognize it for what it is" [1]. The risk is enormous that we may become isolated on some distant mind island outpost. If this happens, some future anthropologist, sifting through our ideographic icons, will identify our thought bundles as a tiny side issue from an unseen culture. When this happens our utopian ideals do indeed become fantasy and our theories unresolved, and indeed our effort will be viewed as puny and peripheral. | |||||
| The topic of this essay is brought into sharp focus by the timing and consequence of our most recent scheduled event. In late 1990, Hank Bull of the Canadian art center Western Front in Vancouver put into motion an idea that began with: | |||||
| ]anuary - 17 - art's birthday
HOW OLD IS ART? In 1963, French artist Robert Filliou proposed the idea of celebrating art's birthday, and the German city of Aachen took him up on it. Art was declared to be 1,000,000 years old. Kids were let out of school, bands played and everyone had a good time. Filliou had actually suggested that we start with a one-day (paid) holiday |
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| Plans were made for establishing a telephone bridge for videophone, slow-scan television and fax connecting Amman (Jordan), Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Phoenix, Oakland, Quebec, Tokyo, Toronto and Vancouver. The original proposal was first conceived as an opportunity to throw a party, have a parade or mount a protest. As it turned out, the 'party' very quickly turned into an alternative personal netyork created to offer art as a response to war. On 16 January the plan's for celebrating the 'birthing of art' were immediately overshadowed by the beginning of the war in the Middle East. Cable News Network (CNN), with electronic speed, delivered Operation Desert Shield - now Operation Desert Storm - by television into the American home as it appeared to be happening, with a simultaneous appearance on TV screens in Baghdad, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Amman - prime time all at once over the surface of the earth. Time and distance melted into a sanitized sensory real-time image-mix of death and destruction, complete with mind bundles of anxiety, yellow ribbon icons, surgical bombing, Scud missiles, real-time military television briefings, tank attacks, penetration bombs, carpet bombing, collateral damage, political restraint, military intelligence, military constraint, newsgathering pools, Patriot anti-missile missiles, information screening, electronic twilight infrared raids, Iraqi TV screening, air-raid sirens, smart bombs, ecological oilspill terrorism, programmed long-range artillery, peace marches, over 25,000 air sorties, body counts, protesters, frightful rumors, air-raid shelters, all of the great wars revisited, and on and on and on information structured, produced, managed, carefully orchestrated, sanitized and inserted into the global psyche. |
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| During the birthday party, DAX received videophone images, by way of Vancouver, transmitted from Amman. These were from artists - a group that calls itself Van Gogh Television - who live in Hamburg, Germany, and were taping in Amman. In that instant their transmitted video stills became seed crystals in my mind, ideographic icons delivering instant clarification external to the closed international control structure. Their information had been inserted in to the network from an alternate landfall located on the island of the Middle East. The message was that artists of destruction had taken over in the telematic sea, and all of humanity in that moment of crystallization was at risk. The cognitive switch was placed in the ON position, and it was the beginning of a perilous journey for all of mankind. | |||||
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