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Review
Human Nature - Ars Electronica 2009
Ars Electronica – The Festival for Art, Technology and Society held annually at Linz, Austria is the world’s leading media arts festival . HMNTSK reports on the festival .
The recently concluded Ars Electronica 2009 (3 to 8 September, 2009), the festival for art, technology and society organised annually at Linz, Austria marked it's 30th edition this time. With Linz designated as one among the two European cultural capitals for 2009, expectations were extremely high, added to the fact that the main Ars Electronica centre had been refurbished by the Vienna-based Treusch Architects for a cost of 30 million Euros to achieve a more turn of the century style using a illuminable double glass facade.
The city's name comes up often in context of the Nazis as being the place where Adolf Hitler spent his youth and wanted to be a important cultural centre of the Third Reich.
This latest installment from a three decade history where the festival has already touched upon and benchmarked the leading zones of techno-arts enquiry was daringly entitled ‘Human Nature – The Anthropocene.’ Anthropocene is a recently propounded concept which claims that the human impact on the planet is radical enough to be scientifically approached as a new geological era. It is controversial also as the agreements towards the dawn of this age varies from the start of organised farming to the invention of the steam engine and the Industrial age. The festival concept note cited the progress achieved in Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology as acceptable proof of the transition into this new era.
It was refreshing to observe a complete curatorial abstinence from any mono thought in form and medium with an extremely comprehensive range of exhibits without permitting the core focus to get dilated and I will report on some exhibits which made a strong impression on me.
The main Human Nature exhibition was located outside the seminar halls of the Brucknerhaus.
The highlight of the Brucknerhaus Human Nature exhibition was the performance ‘Shrink’ by Lawrence Malstaff, consisting three people suspended in mid air within a vacuum-sealed PVC cocoon with only a pipe intrusion for administering air. Simultaneously evoking discomfort and arousal with the contorted and lifeless looking bodies, it was a well-orchestrated simulation of viewing a clinically shrink, wrapped-alive human form.
In Malstaff's second work titled 'Nemo Observatorium’ at the OK Center, the audience was invited to sit in a sealed transparent cylindrical encasing with five ventilators at the bottom and thousands of Styrofoam beads lying limpid on the ground. On the press of a button, the ventilators start and the balls swirl in a clockwise direction and one can experience being in the centre of a whirl with very subjective patterns evolving out of the revolving texture.
‘The Animatronic Flesh Shoe’ by Adam Brandej is literally a flesh bare comment on contemporary life with it's instant gratification and consumption addiction that pretends to blind itself to the origins in sweatshops and cheap labour markets of the globalised economy. The Animatronic Flesh Shoe is a bizzare and morbid construction made from multiple pieces of latex rubber cast out moulds of the artist that which are stitched together on a shoe. The immediate disgust which the object radiates is accelerated with the shoe pulsating and twitching as if it were alive with a very ironic Nike Logo stapled on it. The laces resemble intestines and the each piece of skin is colored differently and is
delicately garnished with sparse hair.
Brandej's second work the ‘Genpets Series 01’ is a conceptual prototype of future toys. It imagines a very possible future when a series of bio-engineered pets, which mimic living creatures but carry no responsibility, are sold as toys . In his concept note he warns of a future when a generation of human children, who are desensitized to accept bio-engineering as natural, can own and manipulate life with such toys. He further writes that once Corporations create new life with patented DNA, then it can be assumed that they will have no rights, and this new life will be like any other commodity.
Carrying forth in the same thought, looped videos ‘Future Farm/Nanotopia’ by British artist Michael Burton spotlights the dark side of Genetic Engineering by considering a future society where people grow and produce clinical and pharmaceutical products alongside adipose stem cells in and on their bodies for income. It questions the influence future technologies would have on the evolution of the body in extreme situations. Advancing the characteristics of existing economic situations where humans are rewarded for selling kidneys and hair, Burton's videos connect emerging pharmaceutical
and nano-technological research in stem cell harvest with the marketability of the Human body as cultivation ground.
Other works like ‘Soil Clock’ by Marieke Staps, ‘Drink.Pee.Drink.Pee.’ by Submersible Designs and ‘The Earth Angel,’ by Caden Enterprises, a green environment friendly non-battery operated sex toy, offered artistically inclined sustainable energy design options.
Special mention should be made of ‘Bare’ – the result of a graduate project from RCA London, a unique material resembling ink that allows users to interface with electronic devices directly through gesture, movement and touch. The documentation at view showed dancers using the surface of their skin as a musical instrument, simultaneously choreographing dance and composing music.
Chinese artist Shen Shaomin's ‘Unknown Creature No.2 Cockroach/ Unknown Creature No.18 Multiped,’ were these spectacularly imposing skeletons/fossils of seriously pretentious hybrid creatures. Fictional merging of creative sculptures and the natural sciences obtains these ‘imaginary creatures’ that are more commonly known to a B grade horror movie flick. Exponentially increasing the size of an insect and attributing various hybrid physical features to it and exhibiting it in a Natural History Museum style denotes a warning at eventualities of bio-engineering going wrong.
“Landscapes’ by Levi van Veluw aslo employs this merging of traditionally disparate mediums like landscape painting to sculpted head busts. Utilising the three dimensional contour of the artist’s face as a canvas to host a naturalistic landscape Veluw glues up plots of grass, trees etc., reversing the traditional scenario of man in ‘nature’ to a ‘nature’ on man.
2009 is also the 23rd edition The Prix Ars Electronica, unofficially called ‘The Oscar of Computer Art,’ and are awarded in a range of fields from “Computer Animation/Visual Effects,’ ‘Digital Musics,’ ‘Interactive Art,’ ‘Net Vision,’ ‘Digital Communities’ and the ‘u19’ award for ‘freestyle computing.’
This year’ prize winning entry in the Hybrid Art Section was ‘Natural History of Enigma’ by Eduardo Kac. The work, which was in appearance a plant, was a very innovative art idea, it was a new life form which does not exist in nature. The artist has used molecular biology to construct a flower that has his gene in it. The ‘Edunia’, as this flower is called, is a hybrid of the artist's DNA and a petunia. The result, which is rather angry-looking, is a pinkish flower with human blood rushing through its veins. The artist's intention was to demonstrate the contiguity of life through different species.
OK Center, Linz, hosted the Cyber Arts Show and featured the prize winning works as well as works which came under ‘Honorary Mention’ Section. I am just mentioning some of the more immediately striking works here.
‘Perpetual Story Telling Apparatus’ by Benjamin Maus, Julius Von Bismarck is a never-ending story-telling apparatus, that uses millions of patents and their references to build on a semantic web of connected drawings. Patents are the inventor’s thoughts, which reflect on the mindset of society during that period. Since all patents contain references, each reference was used as a link to connect one patent drawing to another. There are about 25 million references for the over 7.5 million patents issued and hence unforeseeable connections between completely unconnected ideas develop.
"Earth Star" by David Haines, Joyce Hinterding, deployed a hydrogen-alpha telescope to capture the solar chromo-sphere and this footage is projected on a screen. Opposite this lie two luminous refrigeration units containing virtual aroma compositions of synthesized molecules that represent states of ozone and a VLF (Very Low Frequency) antennae tuned to the radio bursts emitted by the sun, which is then fed through an amplifier to provide a real-time soundtrack. The synthesized aroma molecules emulate the smell of the ozone, which you are allowed to partake with from the exhibition on a tester.
"Bios" (bible) by Robotlab (Matthias Gommel, Martina Haitz, Jan Zappe) offered an amusing experience to watch a huge robot write with the most delicate of touches in the old Germanic font, the verses from the Bible. It was programmed to write with calligraphic precision, you almost feel a sense of apathy towards this rusty looking thing whose performance seemed close to a choreographed dance piece.
The main Ars Electronica building featured many exhibits of a significantly more extropic and educational nature.
Chief among them was the Robolab, a section within which was also sub-sections devoted to prosthetics and it’s development.
Canadian artist/architect Philip Beesley’s ‘Hylozoic Grove’ described by him as a ‘geotextile mesh’ was a installation delicately hung from the ceiling, like a transparent web and once you get closer, the structure moves as though responding to your arrival. The Hylozoic grove contains a net of close range proximity sensors, microcontrollers and actuators, and it responds with waves of motion once the visitor comes close to it. This sculptural simulation of a very often found, forest environs sort of organic and distributed interactivity achieved with technological materials like shape memory alloys pushes the envelope of the old dialogue of man vs. nature surveillance.
‘Geminoid HI – 1’ by the ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories was the most well advertised exhibit of the exhibition. Hiroshi Ishiguro served as the first model for the geminoid, a robot created as a clone of an actual human being, himself. It is linked by a unique network and sensor technology, where it not only resembles the person but also acts like him as well . As you get close to the geminoid, it speaks to you and invites you to have a dialogue with him, he doesn’t actually speak, but someone monitors this from another interface but you are inclined to locate the robot as the actual
speaker.
The main gallery had different labs dealing with diverse design aspects such as the rapid
prototyping at the Fablab and workshops dealing with extraction and study of one's own DNA using the cutting edge equipment at the Biolab. The Brainlab had an educational project featured called the ‘Visucam,’ the visitor’s retina is photographed and it is explained how the retina is the main portal from which the brain receives information. The image of a retina as a receptorial factory and a potential unit to operate the interface of future consumer machines was demonstrated very well at the various research desks.
The glass façade of the Ars Electronica building was also utilised every night as a space for experimental exploit, different artists were invited to use the 40,000 LEDs creatively. Façade music was another inventive way to invite artists to explore light / sound on the main deck.
On one evening, as part of the cultural capital of Europe extravaganza, Linz saw a parade of animals, both imaginary and real walking amidst the townsfolk, in what appeared to be part of a prophecy, which unfolded at night. There were fireworks, drama, visuals on the Danube and almost a foreboding of some sort of an impeding doom which would come upon the city. The letters SOS were set on fire aided by a big boat and let to drift upstream on the Danube, which on reaching a certain distance erupted, and moments later the river was lit with hundreds of little floating candles.
Ryoji Ikeda, Japanese sound artist and winner of the prix Ars Electronica 2001 performed his audio visual composition ‘Datamatics [ver.2.0]’ at Brucknerhaus around the last evening. ‘Datamatics’ is an art project that reflects upon sound-based visualisations of various non perceivable dimensions of data within the Cartesian co-ordinates of various human mappings of the world. Using pure data as a tool to generate sound and visuals with extremely fast frames and variable bit depths the technical dynamics of the composition challenges the thresholds of our perception. To quote the description offered on his site – “From 2D sequences of patterns derived from hard drive errors and studies of software code, the imagery transforms into dramatic, rotating views of the universe in 3D, whilst the final scenes add a further dimension as four-dimensional mathematical processing opens up spectacular and seemingly infinite vistas.”
There were many other ambitious concerts, visualisation projects, proof of concepts, seminars, animation film screenings and other spectacular events I haven’t been able to touch upon in the scope of this review. I would strongly recommend the festival website to read up further on these.
I would like to make a closing special mention of the remarkable exhibition at the Lentos Museum curated by Cosima Rainer titled ‘See this sound,’ citing the whole inception of sound and art, with many videos and classical experimental art from the 20s onwards. But it was not part of the main Human Nature programme but nevertheless, a very informative exhibition.
The exhibition throws up a lot more questions than it offers solutions to, like any empirical aesthetic enquiry should.
Will our clones have any rights? Will they be equal to us? Would they have Human Rights ?
What would be the new class system in an age of bio-engineering and genome patenting?
Will the ‘natural’ ecology be the ‘oil’ of this century?
What would be the role of art in a new age of synthesised immortality?
Will artists be the new future ‘bio-aesthetic engineers’ and prostheticians of a new species ?
Will we consider war, murder, suicide and greed as types of human nature which we can fix like buggy code?
What does it mean to be Human once the species can filter itself into pure information?
Will we be ‘natural’ ever again or just keep iterating into a ‘virtual.’
What will be the popular business model and definition of labour in the context of a technocratic transhumanist society?
To cease this report on a more conclusive note I will quote Jean Baudrillard's thought on Human Nature – “If we discover that not everything can be cloned, simulated, programmed, genetically and neurologically managed, then whatever survives could truly be called ‘human’: some inalienable and indestructible human quality could finally be identified.”
Let's see.
(HMNTSK indulges in art criticism sometimes and enjoys thinking about the semiotic aspects of media art. Email – hmntsk@gmail.com.)
