<html xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">
<head>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 11 (filtered medium)">
<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:"Book Antiqua";
panose-1:2 4 6 2 5 3 5 3 3 4;}
@font-face
{font-family:"Arial Black";
panose-1:2 11 10 4 2 1 2 2 2 4;}
@font-face
{font-family:Verdana;
panose-1:2 11 6 4 3 5 4 4 2 4;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Book Antiqua";}
h1
{margin-top:12.0pt;
margin-right:0in;
margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
page-break-after:avoid;
text-autospace:none;
font-size:14.0pt;
font-family:"Arial Black";}
h2
{margin-top:6.0pt;
margin-right:0in;
margin-bottom:3.0pt;
margin-left:0in;
page-break-after:avoid;
text-autospace:none;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Arial Black";
font-weight:normal;}
h3
{margin-top:6.0pt;
margin-right:0in;
margin-bottom:3.0pt;
margin-left:0in;
text-indent:.5in;
page-break-after:avoid;
text-autospace:none;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial;}
h4
{margin-top:12.0pt;
margin-right:0in;
margin-bottom:3.0pt;
margin-left:0in;
page-break-after:avoid;
text-autospace:none;
font-size:14.0pt;
font-family:Arial;}
h5
{margin-top:12.0pt;
margin-right:0in;
margin-bottom:3.0pt;
margin-left:0in;
text-autospace:none;
font-size:13.0pt;
font-family:Arial;
font-style:italic;}
h6
{margin-top:12.0pt;
margin-right:0in;
margin-bottom:3.0pt;
margin-left:0in;
text-autospace:none;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:Arial;}
p.MsoBodyText, li.MsoBodyText, div.MsoBodyText
{margin-top:0in;
margin-right:0in;
margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:0in;
text-autospace:none;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial;}
a:link, span.MsoHyperlink
{color:blue;
text-decoration:underline;}
a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed
{color:purple;
text-decoration:underline;}
p.bibliography, li.bibliography, div.bibliography
{margin-top:0in;
margin-right:0in;
margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:1.0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
text-indent:-.5in;
text-autospace:none;
font-size:9.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;}
span.EmailStyle19
{mso-style-type:personal-compose;
font-family:Arial;
color:windowtext;}
@page Section1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}
-->
</style>
</head>
<body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple>
<div class=Section1>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>Addendum to REFRESH! comments:<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><o:p> </o:p></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>In my “brief” sketch of the conference I totally forgot to
mention the concurrent exhibition held at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the
Banff Centre. I’m sure someone will have taken umbrage, but honestly, I
only saw the show at the opening, and though I meant to go back and have a
better look there wasn’t a spare minute & so a second viewing (for
some works a first viewing) didn’t happen. That’s too bad, because
it was a pretty good show; smart and self-consciously symptomatic, which was,
er, refreshing, I guess. This show, “The Art Formerly Known as New Media,”
curated by Sarah Cook and Steve Dietz, was, as Cook put it at the opening, kind
of an “alumni show,” assembling a selection of works done by
artists who have at one time or another been in residence up there. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><o:p> </o:p></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>What the curators say: <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><o:p> </o:p></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>“In the last decade we have moved from a predominately scopic to
an overwhelmingly data-based culture, in which we are interactors not just
voyeurs. Nevertheless the important questions of art revolve around meaning not
means and especially, what it means to be human. As we face the prospect of
carrying in our wallets biometrically-unique forms of identification, the
question arises – what defines us as bodies, what is bodily experience?”<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>Techno-panopticism, data saturation, cooptation, the threat of what
Marcuse would have called one-dimensionality were certainly either worked
through or acted out in several of the works I did get to see. These ranged
from the techie--large projections onto the architectural surrounds, database
projects, and a radio narrowcast of the reading of Linux code by a
computer-generated “female” voice--to the low tech—a nominally
electronic “re-do” of 19<sup>th</sup> century galvanic experiments
with dead frogs, a stereoscopic tour of Banff, a set of documents relating to
the patent of a device for falling in love, a bunch of photocopies...<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>Most effective for me, to my own surprise, were two pieces rather
romantic pieces, one by Catherine Richards and the other by Maciej Wisniewski.
The first was a performative installation of a thick glass (?) platform with a
3-D image embedded in it and, if a viewer so desired, with copper sheeting.
This a viewer could volunteer to be wrapped in, and it was Richards’s
claim that shrouded thus in copper the viewer would, probably for the first
time ever, be shielded from ambient electromagnetic radiation. When the heavy
transparent plinth-like platform on which this shrouding was to take place was
unoccupied it showed a 3-d (with glasses) image of a ghostly copper shroud. In
its inert form the piece was less effective, but just before I left the opening
I went back for a second look and there was a form wrapped in copper on the bed
wiggling its toes: spooky! And I was very taken with a large projection by
Maciej Wisniewski, 3 Seconds in the Life of the Internet. What was particularly
lovely about this moving image was that it was projected onto the opening into
the second large gallery space, i.e. wasn’t totally flat on one wall but
rather ran around the opening, over it, and onto the wall beyond; also, the
piece scrolls text and colors that initially seem random but gradually
demonstrate a kind of poetic coherence that I didn’t have enough time to
completely decode. Although we’re not allowed to say such things these
days, I found this work very beautiful, and I would have liked to watch it for
a much longer time than the few glimpses I stole during the opening speeches.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>Oother pieces I thought were interesting, but in qualified ways. The
technical solution to the audio of the Linux reading (by radioqualia?), for
instance. The piece itself was less interesting to me, but the big plastic
parabola hanging from the ceiling and the way it provided for a relative sonic
cocoon was cool and a very nice (curatorial?) visual touch. A crazy table of
xeroxes and a blackboard on the wall were the contribution of irrational.org,
and though I didn’t have time to really look at the “piece”
(was it only one work?) I liked that the curators had inserted it into their “new
media” category and I wanted to know more. And in the very back of the
gallery an array of microphones promised some kind of interactive thingie where
users’ voices would control something on a screen, but it wasn’t
going when I was there—too bad, because it looked intriguing.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>Less successful, at least for my taste, were those pieces that failed
to get out of the box. This problem is one video artists have struggled with in
various ways at least since Joan Jonas made Vertical Roll; it seems to be a real
problem, too, for certain kinds of database works. This was the case with Shu Lea
Cheang’s work based on the Brandon Teena story, and the piece by Francesca
da Rimini. I only looked at the first—or tried to look, rather, because my
navigations failed to really get it to go anywhere. The piece itself may have
been pure genius, I don’t know. But to view it you have to mouse around
ye olde single-user Mac screen, which at my advanced age I find tedious, given
that I seem to spend half my working life doing that. I’m sure the curators
deal with what they get. But it would be nice to see artists work with curators
to get off the damn screen, out of that kind of privatized single-user,
single-face-screen time, and think about some more adventurous display
alternatives, e.g. projecting the work on the wall or reconceiving mousing—even
if the content of the piece remains the same. In a way it was important to have
these works in the show in this format, as a nod to the box, but I got bored
fiddling with the piece and moved on. The other work that really didn’t
happen for me was the galvanic frog. This piece involves a dead and wired-up frog
in a tank (formaldehyde?) and, at the other end of the room, a computer set-up
that displays a live image of said dead frog captured by overhead camera. The
user is given the onscreen option of stimulating either the right or the left
leg via mouse click. Click, and the frog kicks left or right because, ta da! the
computer is wired to said frog. Ick! What made this piece fail for me was the
wiring of the frog. All you’re doing is opening and closing an electric
circuit via mouse click. In fact, technically you could have the mouse not
attached to the computer at all but merely rewired with a battery, no? Much
cooler, or ghouler, would be to have the frog stimulated wirelessly via, say,
your technerd RIM device or, if you were a serious REFRESH! old guard, your disco-playing
Treo. Now THAT would have been something!<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>I’m just pulling out a couple of things that I found thought
provoking (and the wall projection was just plain nice). To do the show justice
would have required a much longer visit, without crowds. What I can say is that
the surrounding discussion of the show seemed very smart and healthily
skeptical about new media discourse, and that this was evident in the array of
works, from the quasi-romantic patent piece (in the same space as the New Linux
Eve) to the database work (symbolically deconstructed in the next room by the lovely
irrational.org photocopied mess). And while I found certain projects were
compromised by their delivery mechanisms what was encouraging to see also was
that very little of the work done at BNMI and presented here was tucked tidily in
the box. Dietz made a point of noting the title of the show as a critique of
the bagginess of “new media” as a designation. (He’s posted
his remarks on a blog somewhere.) And I think this was nicely addressed in the
variety of works in the show, from paper to code, and in the ways in which at
least some of those works addressed themselves to the body, to a kind of
frontier romanticism about embodiment, and to myths and realities of “networking.”<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>In any event I look forward to reading other impressions of the show,
and of the conference.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>Judith Rodenbeck</span><o:p></o:p></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
</div>
</body>
</html>