Fine Art is delighted to present a public weekly programme of research lectures and seminars from some of the most interesting and original artists, critics, curators, historians and Art professionals working today.
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Wednesday 30 April 2008
Jamie Allen : Killing Lena
What is the relationship between the human and the digital component in Jamie Allens Work......Does this have implications for digital technologies of the future......?
As our interactions with digital technology become increasingly intimate, flexible and malleable, it is interesting to see how artists are responding to this new environment. Recent developments have allowed artists working with technology to further define their practice beyond the connotations of film, television and the internet. New and innovative software, platforms and modes of exhibition are now readily created by artists themselves.
Jamie Allen started with an assertion by Heidegger, that the essence of technology (‘the technological understanding of being’) is art . By that, I take him to mean that the idea (and so the desire for adventure – or what Heidegger called 'openness to mystery' – and the drive of imagination) precedes the process of exploring the means of realising the idea.
As an aside, I found a quote from Heidegger, the meaning of which might help to answer some of Nick's challenge: ‘Releasement towards things and openness to the mystery give us a vision of a new rootedness which someday might even be fit to recapture the old and now rapidly disappearing rootedness in a changed form. (DOT 55, G 26)’
Heidegger goes further: ‘If releasement toward things and openness to the mystery awaken within us, then we should arrive at a path that will lead to a new ground and foundation.’ (DOT 56, G 28)
Perhaps this is the field in which Jamie Allen is exploring.
However, it came apart for me if I suspected that digital technology was being used as a substitute for physical processes, rather than as a medium in its own right. Therefore, the first examples of his work/performances that he gave were slightly amusing and entertaining, but I felt strangely cold about them; they did not seem to go any further than an average slightly-quirky street performance. (ie boom box). The performance piece of him building circuits and being filmed from different angles, with the images projected on the walls around him could have been about anything, especially since the live-editing was presumably done (as in the boom box piece) by someone else. Use of human-powered generators to run digital equipment reminded me of years’ ago in the Green Fields of Glastonbury. His use of the physical environment, whether that be Central Park or the locations used for the filming of Ghost Busters, was also only slightly interesting (but I guess that's because NY street culture is something in which I have little interest). It seemed a rather forced form of communication/ music-making, having someone with a program to join in a jam session using mobile phones (Jam Requested) around some park benches, although the idea of ‘low-res communication’ is in itself quite appealing. Even more low-res would be drumming on a tin can and making melodies on combs and paper.
However, I enjoyed the irony of creating a spoof office to accommodate a spoof ‘information technology company’, where the only things communicated were about confusion and obfuscation. And his final piece ‘Killing Lena’ was certainly the most compelling, and quite mesmerising. These were examples to me of where digital technology has moved beyond the physical world, and where the physical and virtual world can collide and provide us with a new shared meaning. Somewhere along the lines that Heidegger predicted, perhaps?
2 comments:
As our interactions with digital technology become increasingly intimate, flexible and malleable, it is interesting to see how artists are responding to this new environment. Recent developments have allowed artists working with technology to further define their practice beyond the connotations of film, television and the internet. New and innovative software, platforms and modes of exhibition are now readily created by artists themselves.
Jamie Allen started with an assertion by Heidegger, that the essence of technology (‘the technological understanding of being’) is art . By that, I take him to mean that the idea (and so the desire for adventure – or what Heidegger called 'openness to mystery' – and the drive of imagination) precedes the process of exploring the means of realising the idea.
As an aside, I found a quote from Heidegger, the meaning of which might help to answer some of Nick's challenge:
‘Releasement towards things and openness to the mystery give us a vision of a new rootedness which someday might even be fit to recapture the old and now rapidly disappearing rootedness in a changed form. (DOT 55, G 26)’
Heidegger goes further:
‘If releasement toward things and openness to the mystery awaken within us, then we should arrive at a path that will lead to a new ground and foundation.’ (DOT 56, G 28)
Perhaps this is the field in which Jamie Allen is exploring.
However, it came apart for me if I suspected that digital technology was being used as a substitute for physical processes, rather than as a medium in its own right. Therefore, the first examples of his work/performances that he gave were slightly amusing and entertaining, but I felt strangely cold about them; they did not seem to go any further than an average slightly-quirky street performance. (ie boom box). The performance piece of him building circuits and being filmed from different angles, with the images projected on the walls around him could have been about anything, especially since the live-editing was presumably done (as in the boom box piece) by someone else. Use of human-powered generators to run digital equipment reminded me of years’ ago in the Green Fields of Glastonbury. His use of the physical environment, whether that be Central Park or the locations used for the filming of Ghost Busters, was also only slightly interesting (but I guess that's because NY street culture is something in which I have little interest). It seemed a rather forced form of communication/ music-making, having someone with a program to join in a jam session using mobile phones (Jam Requested) around some park benches, although the idea of ‘low-res communication’ is in itself quite appealing. Even more low-res would be drumming on a tin can and making melodies on combs and paper.
However, I enjoyed the irony of creating a spoof office to accommodate a spoof ‘information technology company’, where the only things communicated were about confusion and obfuscation. And his final piece ‘Killing Lena’ was certainly the most compelling, and quite mesmerising. These were examples to me of where digital technology has moved beyond the physical world, and where the physical and virtual world can collide and provide us with a new shared meaning. Somewhere along the lines that Heidegger predicted, perhaps?
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