Week 6: On Talking Heads, Hearts, Machines, etc.

Anne Pasternak, the curator of "Playing the Building"  shares some thoughts in regards to David Byrne's piece that quite eloquently sum up what the installation is all about: "'Playing the Building' seems to be layered with rich meaning relating to human nature, our contemporary  relationship to place and sound, and considerations of shifts in culture at large". That we are able to relate our experiences in installations or interactive pieces with a contemporary understanding of the relationships in human nature seems to speak leaps and bounds about what such interactions and installations are capable of imparting on an audience. Byrne agrees that the piece was "socially" successful because there was an overwhelming sense that a shared communal experience was taking place, and that it was not in fact just merely an exhibition. It engages the audience in the act of "careful listening", which can be related to careful observing or careful thinking in regards to visual imagery. But instead of observing closely and carefully with the eyes, the ears are employed and engaged. The ears are to be the observer. It's an interesting and powerful notion, using our ears as the main sensory participant, when as a culture we're so visually conditioned and fixated on imagery.

Although we all love and appreciate music, there's something uncanny or simply unexpected about going to an art installation that focuses more on the audible parts and less so on the visual aspect (although there is still a refined visual quality to the work). In a sense, Byrne's turning consummation on its head: there's "less separation between cultural producers (the artists, writers, musicians, dancers, singers) and cultural consumers." Instead of simply just taking in what's being produced by someone else, you have to produce it yourself. And you have to do this while simultaneously and carefully observing with your ears. Anne Pasternak says that the piece is "highlighting the nuance and quirks of space" through transparency and simplicity; everyone can see how it's done and how it works in a physical sense, yet the sounds are still fascinating and intriguing. Although the sounds were seriously creepy, I found the inner workings of the whole thing to be quite impressive. There were strings (well, they looked like strings, anyway) hanging from every which way and other little peculiar contraptions fastened to the sides of walls and other places, with the organ being the "heart" of the whole operation. The position of the organ in the building also gave the installation a sense of simplicity and, at the same time, a sense of intrigue. Why is the organ standing alone, in the middle of a run down building? Why aren't there other instruments? Why is the organ significant? Is there some kind of religious connotation (as alluded to in the interview)? These were are the questions I found myself asking.

With this whole idea of the spiritual, there exists a slightly more psychological/emotional level to the piece. Byrne believes that "we have an innate longing for the spiritual and ecstatic. If we're not getting it in church, synagogue, or temple then eventually we'll locate it elsewhere: at a concert, a rave, Burning Man, or through sports or drugs, or even through some kinds of art." And it seems that these ecstatic experiences are made accessible many times over through popular cultural. But why do these ecstatic or spiritual experiences resonate with us? Do we indeed have an innate longing for the things more unseen, the unexplainable, the uncanny? I think we definitely do. I found the video of "Playing the Building" to be seriously eerie. It was like the soundtrack to a freakishly scary zombie or psycho-killer movie. I am going to have nightmares about the sounds. I felt this innate sense of the uncanny. Something didn't seem quite right about the whole installation, like someone was watching the building, like the building itself had a heart and the sounds were actually tortured squeals from the depths of the building's soul. I don't know. It was like I felt what the building was feeling. The building was speaking to me. And yet now, looking back on it, the person actually speaking to me was the person controlling the organ. So maybe the building is the medium, and we are connecting to the building and the artist and the person playing the organ, we are hearing all of the nuances of the building, the empty spaces, dark crevices, the soul, the heart, we're hearing and feeling everything. I don't know, it's tripping me out just thinking about it.

For Byrne, making and participating in art serves some kind of therapeutic value, therefore it is also able to have some social value attached with it. He sees art as becoming more and more of a status symbol/item, and yet simultaneously becoming more widely popular. Of this, he says "It's a weird moment. I often find that I am excited, inspired, and cynical all at the same time." And I think that this notion is ultimately what makes Byrne's art making and music making successful: his willingness to delve into different realms of creativity while his pieces simultaneously converge with all of his feelings and emotions surrounding the creative process. There's not just one sentiment, feeling, or emotion felt with Byrne, and likewise, there's not just one theme, ideology, or purpose behind his pieces. They are all accessible; there are no boundaries between the artist and the audience, because in certain moments the artists can be the audience, or the audience can be the artist, and there are no boundaries between the artist and the performance, because the artist is the performance, and the performance is the artist. I know that sounds like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, and it probably is, but what I'm trying to encapsulate here is that the boundaries in Byrne's work are few and far between, and that in place of boundaries, what we get through his work is a sense of accessibility and the sense of communal experience. And what we also get is a talking head- our own.

John J Park was wonderfully brilliant and he advocated for power of the human hand and mind amongst all of the machines. The most striking thing about Park was his attitude toward technology and his reservations about it. His view on technological advances and using them to our advantage is the perfect balance between letting technology enhance our lives and also using it as a communicative means of expression, without completely succumbing to the power that such technology holds. The danger of technology, according to Park, seems to be that many in our generation rely on it too much, so much so, in fact, that we begin to lose ourselves in it. Park showed a short video on the beneficial uses of technology with the street artist who had Lou Gehrig's disease and the subsequent use of a play-station headset to create some kind of crazy contraption that allowed him to draw/make art using his eyes. I thought this video was an awesome example of the use of technology being beneficial and powerful in a profound way, as opposed to the manner in which most of us use technology in a more superficial and indulgent way. I also thoroughly enjoyed his work that he's currently doing in collaboration with the dance department. His use of technology to enhance a performance piece strikes a beautiful balance between the art of the human hand and the creative and responsible use of technology. His interactive light show/installation really reiterates what Byrne's "Playing the Building" is all about: engaging with the audience, while simultaneously erasing the boundary between artist and performance, and artist and audience.

David Byrne and his "idea that the artist's hand must be evident and visible isn't as crucial anymore" is interesting because it relates with what John Park spoke about. This whole idea about machines and technology taking over, people becoming so engrossed and aroused by visual imagery and technological devices that the evidence of the human hand is diminishing, and in fact, less crucial in our society. But, for Byrne and Park, it seems that they're advocating for a harmonious and respectful relationship between the hand and the machine. That we should use such machines and technologies as tools, and nothing more. That the human hand is in fact as crucial as ever.

According to Art 21, Paul Pfeiffer "dissect(s) the role that mass media plays in shaping consciousness" and I couldn't agree more. Many of his pieces are centered around photos taken at sporting events, something very socially and culturally accessible. In these pieces, where he seemingly "erases" the main figure of the image, we must project our own doubts/thoughts/narratives of the possibility. There's also a spiritual dimension and religious ties in some of his work, such as "Poltergeist", similar to the work "Playing the Building" by David Byrne. Both Byrne and Pfeiffer examine the history of the human consciousness and the relationship between popular culture and its audience.

In Pfeiffer's work, the process of manipulating the images isn't really about erasure, but instead it's about camouflage, taking pieces and applying them over the image to cover up a figure, and in the end it's all just one big illusion. How brilliant, adding more to an image while it's seemingly diminishing. In "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" Pfeiffer describes his work with images of legendary sports players and how he manipulates them, removing all contextual detail, "so that what remains is not an absent figure but an intensified figure by virtue of the fact that you are lacking some aspects of a context to place it in." For example, he explains that in the Wilt Chamberlin image, he manipulates it so that Wilt is more or less invisible, leaving a figure in the background that puts a whole new spin on the purpose of the image. Instead of Wilt in all his star studded glory, there remains a figure less prominent, causing the context to change- in this case, the figure looks completely out of context. The photo was obviously not taken of the figure in the background, but when Wilt is removed (or camouflaged) the image . He also speaks about the editing process and how, much like John Park, he believes that computers/technology are useful, yet the human eye and human hand ultimately should have the final say. In other words, technology should be used as a tool, and nothing more. Human innovation and human interaction with technology is a great thing, but we shouldn't solely rely on it for creative processes. We must remember to use our hands and our eyes and our minds. Above all, these things- these physical, tangible, sensory, human things- are far more valuable, and far more advanced than any piece of computer equipment, in my opinion.

In regards to Pfeifer's "Poltergeist" piece, what I found most intriguing was the use of computer programs and technological machines to make the sculptural piece from start to finish, employing barely any human contact with the object itself. I also found his fixation on horror stories in popular american culture to be intriguing. Pfeiffer not only draws from celebrity images in pop culture, he also draws creative inspiration from sources such as horror classics "Poltergeist" and "The Exorcist", reverting back to these movies in his adulthood after he spent his childhood submersed in their images. In "Dutch Interior" he says he drew from the doll houses he used to create as a child. He also mentions that, in his youth, after the completion of the doll houses he would then burn them, creating a "moving" or fluid image from something that was initially pretty static. All of these pieces seem to be created from, or surrounded by, influences of not only popular american culture, but also by his youth, protestant upbringing, notions of the spiritual, and most crucial, the sense of the uncanny. That is to say, through out all of Pfeieffer's pieces the foundation of his creativity seems to lie in the ability to produce, camouflage, or construct images that are based in a supernatural, or inexplicable context, as we see in his erasure of figures in legendary images or his construction of a pile of chairs in "Poltergeist."

On visual imagery, Pfeiffer explains that "there’s something really seductive at the same time about the comfort of pre-digested images that are available. It makes me wonder if ultimately what we are talking about is not just the proliferation of images or a more distracted viewer or freedom of choice in terms of the consumption of images, but really a shrinking of the imagination." I wonder how this "shrinking of the imagination" plays into the development of technology: is imagination really shrinking because we have computers and tools and programs to do all the hard work for us? Or is our imagination really expanding because we have to create and implement new ways to work with such technologies without losing the creativity of the human hand? I don't know the right answer to this, as I'm more or less technologically illiterate, but it seems artists, such as Pfeiffer and Byrne, have expanded on their imagination and creative process tenfold when they think about ways to work around and work with these machines. Our minds are battling back and forth with this machines, and in a sense creating some kind of dialogue, although it's all just talking in our heads.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller As if the events were taking place live, in real time.
It's a "bizarrely intense sensation of psychological immersion" into a place that's not really there. It's real and alive in your mind, you feel it, you think it's real, and maybe it is for the duration of the audio walks, and then in the flip of a switch you're back to reality and the world you were just immersed in for 20 minutes no longer exists. These narratives really get into your mind, they're hypnotic-like and establish this strange sense of intimacy. It's strange because we can't see the person talking in our ears, and yet throughout the talk we develop this intimate relationship with them. For me, the visual aspect of all of these walks takes a back seat. The true art is in the narrative, it's in the literal, intrusive, yet simultaneously comforting voice talking in your head. In "The Telephone Call" the audience response at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco in March oh 2001, as described in the excerpt below the piece, was overwhelming, in the best way possible. It's essentially a glimpse into the inner-workings of another person, intimately detailed, imparting a sense of closeness both psychologically and physiologically.  Of her audio walks, Cardiff says that "the virtual recorded soundscape has to mimic the real physical one in order to create a new world as a seamless combination of the two" which is an absolutely brilliant concept. When we experience the audio walks, we hear a person speaking to us intimately, we feel connected to this person that's literally inside our heads. And at the same time of this feeling intense closeness, there's also this sense of ambiguity and disconnectedness about it.

For all of these works, I found myself asking: How do we place ourselves in the context that the talking voice is putting us in? Do we submerse ourselves completely? Or are we a bit wary and uncertain of what the voice in our own head is telling us? I found myself completely and unconsciously captivated and connected when I listened to the audio walk, or watched the "Playing the Building" video, or viewing one of Pfeiffer's pieces. Yet through all of these I was consciously trying to keep my distance. There was this beautiful juxtaposition going on in my head. How do I reconcile this artificial talking that's going on in my head with the talking that's unconsciously going on in my head? How do I differentiate between the two? What if I can't? Suffice to say that I found the works engaged both my unconscious and conscious at the same time, creating this swirling and ambiguous and controlled and limitless and overwhelming and intimate world. I think my head was literally talking.
 

The Stage as a Musical Instrument: Nine Inch Nails