GHz the Post-Analog Object in L.A.
In the almost ancient history of computer evolution, the Intel 8088 microprocessor, common in machines manufactured around 1980, ran at a speed of 4.77 MHz (megahertz, or millions of pulses per second). Ever since, computers have become more powerful and have catapulted digitally literate societies into the post-analog era. Clock speed, the number of pulses per second generated by an oscillator that sets the tempo of a computer's processor, has been roughly doubling every year, and in 2000 the 1 GHz (gigahertz, or billions of pulses per second) mark was surpassed. 1
For the art of fashioning objects, the implications of this revolution are only beginning to be seen. Developments in microprocessing speed are having obvious and profound effects across global society and certainly in the arena of visual culture. In fine art the advent of affordable and advanced microproccessing in the early 1990s gave rise to a second wave of art and technology initiatives by artists, following the trajectories of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) and other investigations begun during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This second wave coincided with the advent of the "post-analog era," a term referring not only to digital technologies displacing analog ones on a mass scale, but also to the shifting social and cultural dynamics that have followed as traditions of human interaction and self-knowledge succumb to these new forces of change.
Over the last decade the Williamson Gallery has embraced this new work, primarily through installations by artists who consider themselves to be "new media" practitioners. In contrast to these earlier exhibitions, GHz looks at artists who do not necessarily place themselves in the new media category. These artists come from a tradition of analog object making, yet computer technology has become a defining part of their thinking and fabrication processes.
It is clear that the current image conjured by the designation "new media art" the naked display of cables and circuitry and the deployment of monitors, projectors, and computers as sculptural elements needs to be expanded to include objects that do not bear the look of technology but that would be inconceivable without digital tools and the new visual vocabularies they make available. GHz examines this subject as it is being explored by artists in Los Angeles.
In thinking about GHz, we set out to look for artists in the Los Angeles area who were making "objects" with the input of digital technologies. We were initially motivated by what we perceived as a lack within the new media genre of a satisfying corporeal resolution of simulated digital objects. (So many of these new media "digital objects" remain within the realm of the virtual and are primarily viewed as flat images projected or displayed on a screen.) What we found was a group of artists who were extending their art-making possibilities by reaching out to the fringes of the engineering and manufacturing fields and modifying their practices by incorporating new techniques such as systems for rapid prototyping, Computer Numerical Control (CNC) milling processes, laser etching, and other rendering methods based on 3D modeling. The results of their fascination with using digital tools to push the limits of their work can be seen in GHz.
Objects, sculptural and otherwise, generally have two stages in coming to be; first, they are conceived of, and then they are physically executed. It is in the rift between the original idea and the resulting artifact that the practice specific to object making resides. How an idea has been changed by the technical means required to turn it into a physical object and how the physical transformation of raw material has modified the idea of the object (or a subsequent object) are among the criteria generally used to judge objects with regard to their nonfunctional aspects. This two-step process is still at the core of the work in GHz. The artists represented here have been producing objects, in one form or another, for some time. The significant difference from their past object making stems from the toolbox they can now draw upon; it contains an entirely new palette of options.
In the gap between an idea for an object and its realization stands a digital device that has altered the object maker's relationship to both the representation and the realization of objects. For some of these artists the new tools have fundamentally changed the way they think about object making and the way their objects look. For others, there is more continuity with their previous work, and the enhancement of their practice is more submerged and subtle. Two elements link these various artists in a common, invisible bond: their relationship to the visualization process has been changed forever, and their ability to go beyond their physical bounds has been greatly enhanced.
Representations of three-dimensional objects have traditionally consisted of a single, partial view or multiple views. In order to re-create the experience of seeing it "in the round," viewers were required to use their imagination to fill in the missing views, or they could reconstruct the spatial segments from the multiple fragments. Now, for the first time, with the illusory depth of a computer monitor screen and with a mouse to control the swaying and turning of whatever is being visualized, an artist can peruse a 3D sketch beyond the confines of the mind's eye. Just as photography changed forever the way in which painters looked at what was happening on their colored surfaces, we can expect the literally unthought-of representation of 3D to modify how object makers understand their creative process. Sketches will still exist, and lengthy descriptions will continue to draw verbal circles around things, but a nearly haptic appreciation of a three-dimensional entity has never been nearer. If new research breaches the haptic and we can actually touch these imagined volumes, it will be hard to overestimate the impact it will have on the way we imagine objects.
The speed of microprocessing has not only enabled artists to work with powerful and complex computer applications without the aid (and cost) of employing a mainframe; it has made certain manufacturing processes less costly. Machines can now fashion computer-generated objects in semipermanent and nonpermanent materials for study without high attendant production costs. The gap between representing the 3D and executing a three-dimensional object is no longer invested solely in the individualâs hands and muscles. Machines can perform tasks that hands would take years to learn and in some cases could not accomplish at all. Even if this is not often an end in itself, it allows artists to try out solutions without having to dedicate all of their resources to a project.
The big question still looms. So therese technological enhancements and digital tools to extend skills and shorten time intervals between an object's conception and its creation: in the service of what ideas are these things applied? The evidence at hand suggests that they allow artists to continue with their general line of research in an expanded field. To a certain degree, the size and, to a greater degree, the complexity have increased without the artists trading in their specific poetics for some generic digital "art" form (witness some of the already problematic trope and mode repetitions occurring in digital photography applications which homogenize the creatorsâ differences). Wendy Adest's giant morphed musical notation is a continuation of her minimal surreal studies. Sue Dorman's minute objects for the perfectly geometric housing of real gems and unspoken desires for closure carry her research beyond the physical limits of the hand. Cindy Kolodziejski's ceramic doubling of reflections within reflections of reflections elaborates upon her sly penchant for fooling the eye and generating all sorts of double meanings. Patricia Moisan has been able to create fields of a subtlety and intricacy even more refined and complex than her work has always been, the machinelike perfection echoing the perceptual complexity. Linda Nishio's exploration of the realm of marks and how they get reconfigured in art shifts her original sources from the everyday into someplace within the sidereal and ghostly. Jason Pilarski reacts to his interface with tech with a kind of retro-pop sentiment by turning ordinary stuff around him into experiments in mass and surface transformation. David Schafer's multiplication tables of physical permutations map out part of the cycles of endless repetition in which concepts come and go. An early protagonist in experiments with new technology, George Stone, presents a work in which the framing brackets around other art forms and specific artworks are playfully disarticulated and reconstructed. The work presented in GHz may simply be indicative of a tool that marks a particular moment in time and history, which will eventually be augmented or replaced by yet another tool or process, which will mark a different place in time. In the meantime, however, we are elated to be celebrating the creative range these new tools and processes have allowed these artists to attain.
Stephen Nowlin, John O'Brien, Co-curators
notes
1. "Moore's Law" accurately predicted in the mid 1960s that as microchips decrease in size, their complexity and processing speeds will roughly double every twelve months. Proposed by Gordon Moore, the cofounder of Intel, "Moore's Law" has recently been recalculated to apply every 18 months, and is expected to remain in effect for at least two more decades.
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