Babel on Rosetta Stone
Babel on Rosetta Stone is an exhibition about translation and technological mediation that features the artworks of Rob Bairos, Michelle Gay, Simon Glass, Nahed Mansour, Sam Pelletier, Norman White, and Alize Zorlutuna. The multidisciplinary show explores the borderlands between media where translation is used as a vehicle to expose the constructedness and incommensurability of meaning across systems of codes, whether literal, symbolic, performative, cultural, or executable. By reframing the problem of translation technologically, the exhibition highlights the role of communication technologies in the emergence of a ‘global village.’ The artworks presented look critically at communication systems and interrogate their media–speech, writing, or code–as they are deployed to reflect broader issues of individuality, diversity, and universality.
“All of my work is a form of wishing.”
Yoko Ono [1]
Fly Piece (1963) is one of a number of Yoko Ono’s instruction works which has enjoyed a multiplicity of manifestations from text to performances situated in various contexts. It consists of a single printed word – the imperative “Fly.” Simple and yet poetic, it stimulates the imagination. Pregnant with possibility, it announces the birth of its own event in the mind of the beholder. Fly Piece calls itself into being.
Yoko Ono first wrote the instruction in 1963 as a birth announcement for her daughter Kyoko that was mailed to a select number of friends. Under the title Instructions for Poem No. 86 (Fly), it was handwritten alongside Instructions for Poem No.81 (Give birth to a child…), a child’s handprint, a photograph of Kyoko, and a photo of Yoko, Kyoko, and father Tony Cox. Written in the upper left hand corner are the words “first performed by Tony Cox Summer, 1963” thus blurring any distinction between the birth announcement and an ‘event score’ (a form that Ono was already very familiar with by this time). [2] Besides being the genesis of what would later be referred to as Fly Piece, the birth announcement is the only rendering of the instruction in the artist’s hand. It is the most personal incarnation of the work – a score written by a mother for the father to perform; an offering commemorating the birth of the living product of their creative union.
In February 1964, George Maciunas printed Instructions for Poem No. 86 (Fly) in Fluxus Newspaper No. 2 in anticipation of a collection of Ono’s scores and instructions (written in the period between 1952–1964) that he intended to publish. Maciunas became too busy with his involvement in many other Fluxus projects, so Ono eventually published the collection herself. In July 1964 this collection was released under the title Grapefruit. [3] The instruction ‘Fly’ appears in this volume under the title Fly Piece dated “1963 summer” – the same date as Instructions for Poem No. 86 (Fly) – thus drawing a connection between the two pieces despite their disparate titles.
The first public performance of Fly Piece took place at the Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo on April 25, 1964. The piece was performed by Anthony Cox, Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, Akasegawa Genpai, and Kosugi Takehisha (among others). Each performer ‘flew’ from a ladder in their own way. Ono was absent. Fly Piece was performed more than ten times in other locations in different variations. [4] At times, the audience was invited to perform the piece. Ono’s script for The Strip Tease Show (1966) outlines how this was communicated:
FLY
The word FLY is printed in the center
of a single 8 x 10 card is passed
around the audience [5]
Thus, Fly Piece can be interpreted symbolically and imaginatively, or it can be realized through embodied engagement. The key is that it begs to be performed. Its activation rests in the instruction’s negotiation by a participating agent.
In order to complete the timeline, it is worth noting that Yoko Ono produced a film titled Fly (1970) in which a fly crawls on a woman’s naked body, as well as a musical album of the same name – Fly (1971). The recurrence of this theme in Ono’s work demonstrates a certain preoccupation with the subject matter. However, this investigation will focus solely on Fly Piece as a conceptual offering. That is, Fly Piece as an instruction piece or event score – a linguistic strategy or vehicle whose function is to instantiate either a cerebral or corporeal production of the event it nominates. In 1996, Fly Piece experienced a reappearance on billboards, posters, and T-shirts produced for the Anderson Gallery in Richmond, VA. I feel that if this discussion were to include these later versions, I would need to address this work in relation to Ono’s work utilizing advertising media, which is beyond the scope of this paper. Therefore, when I refer to Fly Piece I am only referring to its incarnations as conceptual or performative gestures from 1963 to approximately 1967. [6]
Fly Piece is not the first of Yoko Ono’s instruction works, nor is it particularly unique within her larger artistic oeuvre. By the time of its inception, Yoko Ono had already displayed her instruction paintings at Maciunas’ AG Gallery in July 1961, and at the Sogetsu Art Center in Toyko in May 1962. [7] What is unique about these instruction paintings is the idea that a painting could be separated into two separate functions – the instruction for the painting, and the painting itself. For the AG Gallery show, she displayed the instructions alongside a ‘painting in progress’ signified by each instruction. By the time of the Sogetsu Art Centre Show, these instruction paintings took the form of hand-lettered sheets carefully calligraphed in Japanese by her husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi, a composer and former student of John Cage. [8] She did away with the canvas object altogether and displayed the instruction as the painting itself. This strategy of using language as medium would later be employed by many Conceptual artists.
Instruction paintings have their roots in the ‘event score’ which comes out of an expanded notion of music as well as an expanded sense of medium. An event score is an artistic form employed by New York’s interdisciplinary neo-avant-garde (George Brecht, Harry Flynt and Yoko Ono were early proponents) that can be described as a “linguistically-framed readymade.” [9] If musical notation – a precise system of symbols to signify discrete tonal values and durations – acts as the carrier of compositional instructions from the mind of the composer to the hand of the performer, then event scores serve a similar purpose except they employ common language in the form of short, instruction-like texts. Their purpose however, is less concerned with the creation of sound, and more concerned with bringing to attention the surrounding environment or a particular turn of thought:
Event scores […] were rarely read aloud – the linguistic “performativity” they propose is closer to that of the iterability of the sign than to that of an overtly oral (and more conventionally “literary”) performance poetics. Rather than pulverizing language into sonorous fragments, the scores focus on the instructions themselves as poetic material. [10]
In regards to Fly Piece and the linguistic nature of its nominating gesture, Yoko Ono does employ language as precisely this kind of ‘poetic material.’ The word itself is not her concern – experience is.
The literal composition of Fly Piece – a single word imperative in the second person – by its very nature renders the reader complicit. It requires an interpretive action (whether that action is cerebral or corporeal) on the part of the receiver. In this sense, Fly Piece is what Umberto Eco describes as an ‘open work’ where “the author offers the interpreter, the performer, the addressee, a work to be completed.” [11] Open works:
…reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities of the distribution of their elements. They appeal to the initiative of the individual performer, and hence they offer themselves not as finite works which prescribe specific repetition along given structural co-ordinates but as ‘open’ works which are brought to their conclusion by the performer at the same time as he experiences them on an aesthetic plane. [12]
This negotiation is essential to the fulfillment of the work. By allowing the viewer to engage with the artwork as a creative power, he or she becomes a co-author of the experience.
Yoko Ono’s absence from the first public performance of Fly Piece at Naiqua Gallery (Tokyo, 1964) reinforces its reception as an ‘open’ work. Speaking about her absence, she asserts:
not only that it made the piece more conceptual, but it did make a point that I [Ono] did not have to be there physically. The piece had its own life, and the participation of others, in fact made the piece. [13]
In a letter to John Cage written in 1966, Ono provides him with 13 concert pieces including Fly Piece. She writes:
My music is performed only to induce a situation in which people can listen to their own mind music. […] Also, every performance should be considered a rehearsal and unfinished. [14]
For Ono, Fly Piece is presented not as a finality, but as a continuously evolving interpretive event. The performance space occupies the mind of the addressee allowing them to envision the proposed perceptual event. The role of the author is not privileged. It is art that anyone can make.
The instruction “fly” is not prescriptive because the action it proposes is implausible. Rather, it stimulates the imagination. It is the “‘idea’ [that] the artist gives, like a stone thrown into the water for ripples to be made.” [15] The intuitive and experiential nature of the instruction conveys an Eastern aesthetic where paradox and anti-sense are employed to provoke an epiphany:
Her instructions create “events” as analogs for passing from one experiential sphere to another, from one conceptual plane to another. In them, she sought aesthetic melding as a process and means for perceptually transcending the boundaries of material phenomena in order to gain an epiphany, thereby transforming conditions of Being. [16]
Fly Piece is one among a number of Ono’s instruction works which distilled the essence of the proposed perceptual event into the simplicity of a single verb. Imagine (1966), Promise (1966), Question (1962), Breathe (1966), and Fly (1963) all reveal the poignancy and hope inherent in her work. Unlike many of her contemporaries working in favour of vanishing of the art object, Ono’s work reveals her optimism for the potential of this dematerialization. [17] These works are expansive rather than reductive – they are unbound by material instantiation.
Yoko Ono’s instructions were years ahead of the discourse on the “dematerialization of the art object” framed by Lucy Lippard, yet they established a primacy of idea, language and participation that became central to Conceptual Art. Fly Piece (1963) is one such instruction piece by Ms. Ono to use language to instantiate either a cerebral or corporeal production of the event it nominates. Beyond using language as a signifier, Fly Piece is imbued with creative potential. It evokes a subjective, aesthetic negotiation in the mind of the addressee. More than poetics, Fly Piece is the notation for a composition to be played in the receiver’s head. Fly is the music of freedom, joy, and potential.
=Farah Yusuf
2. Kristine Stiles, “Being Undyed: The Mind and Matter in Yoko Ono’s Events,” in Yes Yoko Ono, eds. Alexandra Munroe, Jon Hendricks (New York: Japan Society, 2000),154.
3. Jon Hendricks, “Yoko Ono and Fluxus,” in Yes Yoko Ono, eds. Alexandra Munroe, Jon Hendricks (New York: Japan Society, 2000), 42.
4. Stiles, 154.
5. Yoko Ono, “The Strip Tease Show,” in Yes Yoko Ono, eds. Alexandra Munroe, Jon Hendricks (New York: Japan Society, 2000), 277.
6. The catalogue for Yes Yoko Ono (2000) is comprehensive in its compilation of source materials and chronology of Ono’s oeuvre. The majority of references to Fly Piece occur within this timeframe.
7. Alexandra Munroe, “Spirit of YES: The Art and Life of Yoko Ono,” in Yes Yoko Ono, eds. Alexandra Munroe, Jon Hendricks (New York: Japan Society, 2000), 21.
8. Liz Kotz, “Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the “Event” Score.“ October, vol. 95 (Winter, 2001): 57.
9. Ibid, 81.
10. Ibid, 61.
11. Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work, 1962,” in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (London: Whitechapel, 2006), 36.
12. Ibid, 21.
13. Quoted in Stiles, 154.
14. Yoko Ono, “9 Concert Pieces for John Cage, December 15, 1966,” in Yes Yoko Ono, eds. Alexandra Munroe, Jon Hendricks (New York: Japan Society, 2000), 279.
15. Ono quoted in Munroe, 22.
16. Stiles, 147.
17. Tomii, 42-43.
Future Forward (Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2011 @OCADU)
Poised to nurture creative thinkers with a forward-thinking outlook, OCAD U commemorates that visionary spirit by reflecting on what was and what could be. The installations in Future Forward reclaim an imaginative realm once reserved for fantasy as they negotiate technology’s integration into the fabric of society. These sci-fi and cinematic propositions of an imagined future investigate the permeable boundaries between nature and technology, myth and tool, history and potential. What will tomorrow bring: techno lust or future shock? Future Forward provides a timely contemplation in keeping with OCAD University’s 135th anniversary. What might the future be in the year 2146?
Coup de Tech: Tuning Technologies for Revolution
Coup de Tech: Tuning Technologies for Revolution
“The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat […] The revolution will be live.”
– Gil Scott Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
When Gil Scott Heron released the song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised in 1971, he understood then the hegemony of broadcast mass media – a single system serving the political and economic forces already in control. CNN may relay media events from the world stage to the comfort of your living room, but the revolution will be live, as it happens, by the people. The late twentieth century brought communications technologies that give voices to the voiceless – fax, email, SMS (Short Message Service), and Twitter. These ‘small media’ bypass the controls of mass media replacing the one-to-many broadcasting hierarchy with the many-to-many paradigm of networked communications.
Recent revolutionary activities have incorporated new possibilities for these networked media into their projects of transformation. Consider the 1989 Tiananmen Square student revolt and 2001 EDSA People Power II Revolution in the Philippines, popularly dubbed the ‘fax revolution’ and ‘coup de text’ respectively. Both enabled an innovative transformation of a technology toward a specific goal. In these contexts, “media politics (understood in both senses of the phrase: the politics of media, but also the inescapable mediation of the political)” requires close scrutiny.[1] How were these technologies used to undermine authoritative measures in place? What were the stressors, and what characteristics of each media lent itself to the retrieval of older forms of revolutionary communication? What transformations occurred in the retrieval and how does that illuminate the technological transformation of the social body? Using media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s tetrad, I will explore these questions and analyze the creative tuning of technologies in the revolutionary activities of Tiananmen Square and EDSA II.
McLuhan’s Tetrad
For McLuhan, the study of media is a science. As such, he developed a tetradic law of media as an exploratory probe based on empirical observation.[2] Rather than relying on theory, the tetrad consists of four testable questions regarding the historical, social, and technological knowledge of the subject:
- What does any artifact enlarge or enhance?
- What does it erode or obsolesce?
- What does it retrieve that has been earlier obsolesced?
- What does it reverse or flip into when pushed to the limits of its potential (chiasmus)?[3]
These questions are not causal. Instead, they are usually graphed as points on a continuum and require a balance of both left and right brain thinking in the analysis. The left-brain favors visual space, which privileges structure and sequentially, whereas the right brain favors acoustic space which privileges simultaneity. The questions form a double figure-ground relationship with enhancement and retrieval in the foreground, and with reversal and obsolescence as the ground. Taken as a whole, the four questions form a “resonating interval” and each part exists in a complementary relationship with the others. “Retrieval is to obsolescence as enhancement is to reversal–and–Retrieval is to enhancement as obsolescence is to reversal.”[4] Visualizing both figure and ground in this simultaneous relationship illuminates the latent possibilities of any artifact. Here, the tetrad encourages a comprehensive awareness not only of the artifact but the environment that incorporates it.
Earlier in his career, McLuhan proposed the idea that we come to understand the present only through the past:
Because the present is always a period of painful change, every generation views the world in the past – Medusa is viewed through the polished shield: the rearview mirror.[5]
Recognizing that the rearview mirror no longer holds in the technological acceleration of modern society, he devised the tetrad as a means of taking the pulse of present to anticipate the future. This shift in temporal focus allows the staging of “experimental alternatives” to “various futures.”[6] Understanding the laws of media creates the opportunity take a proactive approach to socio-technological conditions. By exploring the two media revolutions of Tiananmen Square and EDSA II through the lens of McLuhan’s tetrad, I will be analyzing them technologically more so than scrutinizing their political milieu. This is not to say that technology drives the social structure. Rather, technology is a medium for registering experience; technological and socio-political forces unfold in tandem, informing each other in a continual process of decentering and recentering.
Tiananmen Square, 1989
The drama of the 1989 student-led pro-democracy movement unfolded in both the physical space of Tiananmen Square and the ‘metatopical’ space of international informational flow. Located in the heart of Beijing and proximal to important government buildings, Tiananmen Square is the symbolic center of the People’s Republic of China. The location signifies the founding of the communist regime and throughout its history it has served as the site of numerous political events and demonstrations. The events of spring 1989 transformed Tiananmen Square from a state-orientated ceremonial space to a setting for popular discourse resembling Habermas’ ‘public sphere.’[7] Although the press focused their attention on the Square, the movement itself reached every major Chinese city inciting sympathetic protests throughout the country:
The movement encompassed all media and reached to almost every major Chinese city; to virtually all institutions of higher learning; to nearly half of the professional and technical high schools; to many mines, factories, and offices; and into some rural areas. Altogether, nearly a hundred million people participated in one form or another. The movement was autonomous, spontaneous and disorderly – in some ways a pressure valve for popular dissatisfaction and anger with the government.[8]
International media extended the space of the public sphere by broadcasting the physical movements in Beijing throughout the world. While television, radio, and news reports were used to publicize the uprising to other nations, hi-tech communications technologies such as fax and e-mail were used to mobilize students within China. Outside the scrutiny of the Party, these technologies permitted a relatively free flow of information between Chinese students, as well as correspondence with Chinese students studying abroad.[9]
The protests in Tiananmen Square escalated over a six-week period culminating in the blood of thousands of students spilled on June Fourth 1989. However, the script was written long before crisis broke out. China has a long history of student protests. The most recent played out without incident mere months before. Some believe the events of 1989 arose in part from the residual discontent of earlier protests combined with renewed revolutionary anticipation for the upcoming commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement.[10] It was, however, the sudden death on April 15 of popular reformist leader Hu Yaobang that ultimately destabilized the tenuous political situation. “For the Party leadership, Hu was a ‘loyal Communist fighter’ and ‘great proletarian revolutionary,’ but for the students he was a symbol of liberal reform and clean government.”[11] The students seized the opportunity of Yaobang’s death to launch spontaneous mourning activities. Initially, “they marched to mourn rather than protest […] but a minority raised more dangerous issues, such as democracy and press freedoms.”[12] The protests waxed and waned over the next few weeks but several key incidents related to propaganda and press freedom established renewed vigor in student demonstrations and demands and served as topical pivot points for international press support and pressure.[13]
News reports of the movement left the country but were severely propagandized within China.[14] Underground networks of fax transmissions between Chinese students and their peers in Hong Kong and America exposed the discrepancy in reportage. The student movement increased pressure on the Chinese media by refusing to speak to domestic reporters, only granting interviews to international reporters. National news officials and reporters were acutely aware of this problem, themselves demanding press reform:
The big forces of change in society are forcing reforms in the news. […] News reports have to tell the truth; we absolutely mustn’t put out fake news, and we can’t be off the mark in what we say.[15]
This statement was made during a meeting called between several Chinese news agencies at the time of the crisis, and culminated in a petition signed by 1,013 Chinese reporters presented to the government on May 9th with an audience of nearly a thousand college students in support[16] The petition lobbied for the freedom of publication the Chinese had enjoyed before 1949. Prior to the petition, these resistant sentiments were ineffectually curtailed. The Leading Group for Discipline of the Shanghai Party Committee seized control of The World Economic Herald when it was determined that the Herald had contacted foreign reporters to enlist international support for its cause.[17] Meanwhile, people overseas had been paying close attention to the unfolding situation. Government officials from various countries approached Chinese embassies expressing their concern and hope against the deployment of extreme measures.[18] Eager to disperse the situation before the May Fourth anniversary, the deputy chief of propaganda suggested that Zeng Jianhui compose an editorial in the April 26th edition of the People’s Daily. Titled “The Necessity for a Clear Stand Against Turmoil,” it ran as follows:
This is a well planned plot […] to confuse the people and throw the country into turmoil […] Its real aim is to reject the Chinese Communist Party and the Socialist System at the most fundamental level […] This is a most serious political struggle that concerns the whole Party and the nation.[19]
Before the editorial, support for the demonstration began to wane. Contrary to its goal, the editorial’s blatant propaganda only served to revitalize the movement and present a clear target for free press demands.
Mid-way through the crisis, a visit by Gorbachev brought renewed global press attention. The demonstrators, eager to take advantage of this, began a hunger strike, and detailed reports of the situation spread throughout the world inciting sympathetic hunger strikes in other countries.[20] Acutely aware of the potential dangers of the news media, the government instituted a media blackout on Beijing.[21] Once the blackout descended, the fax machine became the prime tool for combating censorship. Faxes were used to transmit foreign press reports inside China’s border. Later that year, overseas newspapers and magazines participated in a ‘fax-in’:
[M]agazines in sixteen countries, led by Actuel in France, published a six-page supplement entirely in Chinese. Copying the format of the official Party organ People’s Daily, the supplement contained articles and information concerning the Democracy Movement in China: news of arrests and executions, accounts of the Tiananmen Square massacre, satires, cartoons, and statements by student leaders. These were accompanied by 6,500 fax numbers in the People’s Republic.[22]
Readers were encouraged to fax the supplement to any number at random. The effects of which are akin to the old propaganda technique of dropping leaflets from an airplane. Here, an outmoded convention of dissemination finds a re-vitalized expression in the global village.
The Democracy Movement in China encompassed all media and garnered the attention of the entire world. Although email and bulletin board messages were also widespread, the fax machine underwent the most significant ‘tuning’ of its intended purpose during this particular crisis. The uprising pushed the fax machine to its extreme potential. Analyzing this case study with McLuhan’s tetrad illuminates a technological transformation of the social body.
First, it is necessary to understand the trend of ‘networking’ or chuanlian that was prevalent in large-scale student led activity across China. Students left the city to meet with students in other provinces resulting in an influx of people from the provinces to join the demonstration:
The term chuanlian, also translated as “linking up,” arose during the Cultural Revolution to describe the movement of young people into factories, offices, schools, farms, and elsewhere, eventually reaching all corners of the country and especially Beijing, to organize and to spread and to absorb the revolutionary word. The usage invokes, either positively or negatively, the image of Cultural Revolution-style activism or chaos.[23]
This type of lo-tech distributed dissemination had its roots in prior revolutionary activity and prefigured the advent of distributed communication technologies that would later emerge as transformative tools.
New technologies like the fax and email transmissions extended the grassroots propensity for chuanlian to an international scale:
After the turmoil in Beijing began, an International Scholarly Center in Newton, Massachusetts, opened four international telephone lines that Chinese students in the Boston area could use free of charge […] Chinese students from universities such as MIT and Harvard have been in continuous contact with students in Beijing, Western Europe, and Japan […] they use the fax machine […] to send messages to universities in more than twenty big cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing.[24]
Prior to the uprising, students had already been in correspondence with each other forging networks through telecommunications.[25] Where, in previous incidents mail and telephone communications risked interception, email and fax provided a more secure forum for the exchange of revolutionary ideas.[26] None of these communications technologies were new to China and the preceding decade saw significant growth. Fax units increased by 5875% between 1978 and 1988, but they still numbered in the low thousands.[27] How they were deployed and the extent to which already existing networks were used during the uprising, however, was astonishing. The crisis amplified the forging of disparate connections and rapid network expansion.
In 1989 the fax machine achieved its reversal potential and essentially became the modern equivalent to the underground printing press. A fax is the best way to copy a document remotely, thus it enhances reproduction and transmission. Its capacity to transmit remotely obsolesces the need to conduct chuanlian in person. Because of the ability to transfer information unchecked across borders, it retrieves, or circumvents, the imposed absence of free press. According to McLuhan, what is obsolesced creates opportunity for reversal; thus, the printing press was resurrected in a globally networked environment, and the fax machine became a networked small press. The face-to-face communication of chuanlian evolved into mediated communication with the rest of the world. This thrust China into an accelerated and immediate reflection of itself as it appeared to the media. China could not only view itself from the rearview mirror of its historical past anymore. The speed of communication and support from abroad exploded the scope of the movement. The Party carefully managed and monitored global opinion in order to save face with their trading partners, while the demonstrators exploited the media attention to galvanize the movement. However, while outgoing information reached the world stage, incoming transmissions were delivered to merely a fraction of the people. Unlike a national media, the dissemination of incoming faxes was fractured and incomplete across the population.
The curtain was lifted and this transnational awareness allowed pluralist thoughts to propagate among the populace. The revolution was not the “well planned plot” that the authorities had charged in the June 26th editorial.[28] To suggest that either side were unified in their goals is to grossly simplify the situation. A volume published in 2001 called The Tiananmen Papers compiles official Party reports and transcripts of meetings with top officials as the crisis unfolded. The documents evince the lack of unity in response at the highest levels of Party leadership, as well as political divisions among the demonstrators and their lack of tight organization or programme. In reviewing these records, the crisis appears as a system thrust into complete entropy, striving to stabilize itself while pulled in fractured and diverging directions. Through foreign media, the entire system became reflexive and the social body struggled to cope with the information overload of this newfound reflexivity. Spontaneous, chaotic, and conflicted in their organization, they were however united in the purpose of staging a theatrical event for the media. For a country entrenched in hierarchical order and controlled organization, this conflicted social body was little more than a reactionary spasm. Ultimately, the Tiananmen Square incident was a resounding failure for both sides.
EDSA People Power II, 2001
The curious incident of EDSA People Power II began with an SMS, “Go 2EDSA, Wear blk” and peacefully resulted in the impeachment of Filipino President Joseph Estrada four days later.[29] He was the first leader to lose power to a smart mob, and although over a million people congregated on EDSA – Epifano de los Santos Avenue – the legitimacy of his removal is nebulous. Here, the rule of law was overturned by the power of the mobile masses wielding their cell phones as subversive weapons.
Estrada became president by a landslide victory in 1998.[30] However, allegations of corruption and mishandling of public funds plagued his presidency. On December 7, 2000 formal proceedings into these allegations began and continued until January 16, 2001 when senators believed to be under Estrada’s control abruptly halted the trial.[31] Filipino citizens were enraged at the turn of events. Within an hour of the decision, 20,000 people converged at EDSA, directed by instructions sent to their mobile phones, to demand Estrada’s immediate removal.[32] The demonstration lasted for four days and swelled to a critical mass of over a million people. On January 20, the military removed their support and the Estrada government collapsed.
In order to understand the viral spread of the EDSA II text messages, it is first important to look at the suppression of media under the Marcos regime, and the power of rumour that emerged among the populace as a primary means for exercising dissent.[33] The martial law imposed on the Philippines under the regime of Marcos brought with it tight controls on print and broadcasting media. Open protest or political dissent of any kind was outlawed:
In the restricted environment, political gossip and rumours flourished. Enemies of the regime used rumours of Marcos’ hidden wealth and ailing health as weapons to combat the legitimacy of the dictatorship.
The rumours that circulated […] so alarmed the regime that rumour-mongering was criminalized and those caught spreading then charged with subversion.[34]
Rumours had the ability to travel virally, circulating across social and geographical divisions. Despite the relaxed press controls after Marcos’ exile, rumours would continue to enjoy prevalence at a public expression of dissatisfaction in the government. During Estrada’s presidency, instead of traveling orally, rumours migrated to the medium of text messaging. For Filipinos, the power of the texting is quite subversive. “The power of texting [is] to legitimize a text’s meaning; […] such a power is felt precisely in the multiple transmissions of the same text.”[35] Although many realize the questionable truth to many of the jokes and rumours forwarded, they respond to a text by forwarding the message to others who are expected to do the same, and so on ad infinitum.
The crowd self-organized through the rapid dissemination of instant messages instructing the receiver to go to EDSA and pass the message on. In the span of the four days, a total of 1.16 billion text messages were sent as the public mobilized.[36] Here, the medium of text messaging enhances the speed of communication and the distillation of a complex thought; it obsolesces oral communication because it favours the textual; it retrieves the memetic power of rumour; and, under the pressure of revolutionary sentiment, it reverses communication into action:
Texting seems to reduce all speech to writing and all writing to a kind of mechanical percussion, a drumming that responds to external constraints rather than an internal source. […] Mimicking the mobility of their phone, texters move about, bound to nothing but the technological forms and the limits of the medium.[37]
On one level, texting reverses communication into the rhythmic action of tapping the keypad, but on another level the mobility afforded by cell phones, combined with the call to action, elicited a similar automatic physical response in the formation of the crowd.
The messages distilled symbolic information into a simple instructional package becoming viral instantly. Because text messages are limited to 140 characters, economy of communication is an important factor of this medium. “Instant messaging […] requires only highly abbreviated narrative constructions with little semantic deferral or delay.”[38]
Located in Manila, the shrine at EDSA was the site of the 1986 People Power demonstration that overthrew the Marcos regime. The four letters EDSA symbolically encode the Marcos exemplar as behavioural instruction and goal. However, during EDSA–I, elite actors in the opposition parties and the Roman Catholic Church organized and mobilized the public; at EDSA II, the spontaneous crowd mobilized the politicians and military:
In the first hour of EDSA 2, previously unfamiliar networks found themselves standing opposite each other at the foot of the shrine. Leaderless and inexperienced in the craft of organizing protest, they sang the national anthem instead. Slowly, naturally, a programme evolved until organized groups came to provide a semblance of organization and purpose to the unfolding scene.[39]
The crowd was conscious of itself congregating as a spectacle, but unsure of the specifics of its assembly. “The power of texting has less to do with the capacity to elicit interpretation and stir public debate than it does with compelling others to keep the message in circulation.”[40] The crowd at EDSA attracted networks of individuals from diverse social backgrounds and political tendencies, connected only by shared address book entries in their mobile phones.[41] It was the sheer number of people present that swayed the military to remove Estrada from office.
Comparisons and Further Analysis
The two revolutions discussed here exhibit quite different characteristics, as do the technologies symbolic to each. The Tiananmen Square revolt was a complex ‘perfect storm’ of events, protracted over many weeks and involving various players – influences from outside the country as well as sympathetic movements across the nation. What started as a call for reform of the existing socialist regime escalated into pro-democracy demands. However, the crowd was not completely united in a common goal. Different factions of student groups rallied behind a diverse spectrum of political goals leading to confusion and ultimate failure. In the Philippines, EDSA II lasted for only four days. The goal was clear, go to EDSA and demonstrate for Estrada’s impeachment, which summarily proved effective. Despite their social and political diversity, the crowd united to oust the sitting president, but did not have the foresight or unity to negotiate beyond that goal. If Tiananmen Square is analogous to a pressure valve, then EDSA II is analogous to a well-aimed arrow. The informational capacities of their technologies reflect this discrepancy. A fax is capable of sending a great deal of information (which arrived in China in the form of newspaper articles), whereas a text transmits 140 characters or less. This implies that, as technology speeds up movement and informational flow, the social body responds more effectively to condensed information.
Another discrepancy is the prevalence of each media. New technologies were not that widespread in 1989 China, whereas, by 2001, texting was a ubiquitous part of Filipino culture. Like many Third World countries, the Philippines is awash in deteriorating and expensive infrastructure while having access to the latest communication technologies.[42] The advent of prepaid mobile phone cards in the late 1990’s made cell phones a cheaper alternative to telephone land lines and computers. If Filipinos enjoyed a comfortable relationship with mobile media, the Chinese were still trying to contend with the impact of new communication technology. They were still in the ideological space of the printing-press era and moving at the speed of older media. Tiananmen Square was a trial by fire as the social body registered the increased pace of networked communication.
The political actions themselves were indistinguishable from time-honoured modes of rebellion in that they both involved large crowds staging protests around a site of symbolic value, thus performing a theatre of public dissent. The accelerated effects of technology’s role in the mobilization and self-awareness of the crowd, however, compels a technological analysis of the crowd:
[T]he crowd is a sort of medium, if by that word one means a way of gathering and transforming elements, objects, people, and things. As such, the crowd is also a site for the articulation of fantasies and the circulation of messages. It is in this sense that we might think of a crowd not as merely an effect of technological devices, but as a kind of technology itself. [...] As a technology, the crowd represents more than a potential instrument of production or an exploitable surplus for formation of social order. It also delineates the form and content of a technic of engaging the world.[43]
The crowd of EDSA II, and to an extent those at Tiananmen Square exhibit a spontaneous, autonomous, and chaotic form of assembly. By bypassing centralized organization and dissemination in favour of a distributed self-organizing principle, the question becomes one of architecture rather than cause and effect. Both crowds demonstrate principles of reflexivity and autopoiesis in their ‘entropic organization’ and must be viewed as emergent autonomous systems. Katherine Hayles defines reflexivity as “the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates.”[44] Media devices channeled information about the crowds back into the crowd in such a way as to influence their movements, thus becoming embedded and entangled with the actors in the crowd. This feedback loop is in essence autopoietic in that the system and environment are informationally closed.[45] As such, the crowd creates itself through mutually constitutive interactions between the components of its ecology – the people in the crowd, their enabling devices, and the mass media’s dissemination of the event.
Again, I am not suggesting that technology contributed to a radical shift in the fundamental characteristics of revolutionary activity. As we have seen, the technologies of both events innovated established modes of public dissent in response to the accelerated media space – the fax tuned chuanlian with a transnational underground press, and texting transformed rumor into viral mobilization. The actions of chuanlian and rumours both prefigure virtual networked communications. The revolutionary milieu provided the stressor to amplify and ‘tune’ technology and map its use onto conventional practice in a process of technoèsis – a term used by Roy Ascott to describe technology’s capacity to inform reality and shape culture. [46] Technoèsis is the active registration of meaning through technological mediation. It does not imply a complete break, or ‘media revolution’ per se, but rather a means to contend with the cognitive disjunction accompanied by new technology through metonymic measures. Thus, technological and socio-political forces unfold in tandem in a continual process of decentering and recentering.
The two revolutions of Tiananmen Square 1989 and EDSA II trace an evolution from one-to-many to many-to-many forms of communication. Neither of these contributed to a radical break change the structure of a revolution or its goals, nor did they engender a real revolution in the social body and across all media, as technological determinists would contend. Instead of viewing these events as ‘media revolutions’, I have instead focused on their ‘media politics’ in an effort to register the subtle transformation of the social body through a technological lens. Returning to Mcluhan’s media laws, I find it more useful to view these events along as points within a continuum – the ebb and flow of figure and ground to intimate the latent possibilities of the technologically transformed social body. As virtual mobile networks increase in speed and scope, their users as carriers of information form new types of community and alter the character of public space. Meaning is negotiated incrementally and registers as an epiphenomenon of the networked crowd. As communication accelerates, crossing social and ideological boundaries and incorporating these pluralist voices into a networked democratized body, it is not the content, but the amount of content should be proportional to the speed of communication for the spontaneous crowd to be effective. The language of small media as a revolutionary tool is the soundbyte. But again, this too can reverse.
[1] Vincente L. Rafael, “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines,” Public Culture 15.3 (2003): 400.
[7] Craig Calhoun, “Tiananmen, Television and the Public Sphere: Internationalization of Culture and the Beijing Spring of 1989,” Public Culture 2.1 (1989), 55.
[8] Liang Zhang, Andrew J. Nathan, and E. Perry Link. The Tiananmen Papers (New York: Public Affairs, 2001) xi.
[9] David B. Conklin, “The Internet, Email, and Political Activism: The Case of Tiananmen Square.” Lecture. Changing Media and Civil Society, Edinburgh. 30 Mar. 2003. European Consortium for Political Research. University of Essex. Web. 23 Oct. 2010. www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/events/jointsessions/paperarchive/edinburgh/ws20/David%20Conklin.pdf 6.
[10] Zhang, Nathan, and Link, 29.
[11] Ibid., 19.
[12] Ibid., 19.
[13] There were many galvanizing incidents during the movement not mentioned here. I have constrained my inquiry to events that speak to the repression and flow of communication.
[14] Ibid., 56-100. The chapter details correspondences between news agencies and government bodies, and student activities in reaction to government press releases.
[15] Rui Xingwen, qtd. in Zhang, Nathan, and Link, 82.
[16] Zhang, Nathan, and Link, 130.
[17] Ibid., 93-94.
[18] Ibid., 89
[19] Ibid., 76.
[20] Zhang, Nathan, and Link, 266.
[21] Conklin, 5.
[22] Eliot Weinberger, “China Is Here,” Outside Stories, 1987-1991 (New York: New Directions, 1992) 126.
[23] Zhang, Nathan, and Link, 69.
[24] Ibid., 345.
[25] Ibid., 6.
[26] The Party was not yet successful in monitoring these transmissions.
[27] Conklin, 8.
[28] Zhang, Nathan, and Link, 93-94.
[29] Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs:Tthe Next Social Revolution. (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Pub., 2002) 158.
[30] Manuel Castells, “The Mobile Civil Society: Social Movements, Political Power, and Communication Networks.” Mobile Communication and Society a Global Perspective. (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007) 187.
[31] Castells, 186-187.
[32] Rheingold, 160.
[33] David Celdran, “The Philippines: SMS and Citizenship” Development Dialogue 1 (2002): 92.
[34] Ibid., 92.
[35] Raphael, 409.
[36] Celdran, 100.
[37] Raphael, 407.
[38] Ibid., 405.
[39] Celdran, 101.
[40] Raphael, 409.
[41] Celdran, 100.
[42] Raphael, 402.
Vision Quest: Interview with Luke Painter and Philippe Blanchard
[I conducted this interview when I worked as a curatorial intern for the (now defunct) exhibition space 47 during the summer of 2010. The original publication appeared on the 47 blog: Dear Art]
What happens when art embarks on a technologically aided vision quest to inquire into its roots and future possibilities? Well, you get Ancestral Vision – an animated, psychedelic exhibition on display at 47 throughout the month of May. Here, artists Luke Painter and Philippe Blanchard have re-mixed old and new media in their refreshing, lighthearted take on memory and perception.
An oversized Victorian dollhouse projects an animated fantasy of modern industrial silos through stained glass eyes in Luke Painter’s piece From Victorian to Modernist to What?! (2010). With the help of his father, Painter has recreated a 1/5th scale model of a neighborhood house from his childhood. Too big to be a dollhouse, but too small to be a real house, I’m reminded of the forced perspective set of Psycho at Universal Studios.
A stark contrast to the subdued and surreal effect of Painter’s installation is the bombastic LED lightshow of Philippe Blanchard’s Quest for Fire, (2010). A triptych of screen-printed Simpson-esque characters is animated, not in the traditional projected image sense, but through a trick of the eye (and colour theory). Simply ingenious!
Although the two artists’ paths have meandered through similar artistic avenues and investigations, taking them from printmaking to animation to installation, through Montréal and Toronto, and from Concordia to OCAD, their practices do not coincide, but rather complement each other. I sat down with Luke and Philippe to talk about these intersections and divergences in their work. With so much in common, I was surprised to find out that the two have only known each other for a couple of years. They may have known of each other before, but a Craig’s List ad for a silk-screen exposure unit brought the two in contact. The connection was reinforced when Philippe requested Luke as a thesis advisor for his MFA at OCAD. And the rest is history, or, Ancestral Vision…
LUKE PAINTER: I got to know Philippe’s work over the last two years being on Philippe’s master’s committee. I received a Canada Council grant to do this project, and I had been offered to this show…. And I thought ‘Oh! Philippe should do this show with me too’. I knew there would be some connections. We didn’t know how those connections would work out, but I just thought it would be interesting.
PHILIPPE BLANCHARD: Yes. Luke brought this up, and I thought it would be a great opportunity. Also, I had been researching this idea of expanding animation into installation components. That’s the kind of work I’m interested in doing in my practice, but it’s also what Luke is doing in his work. Where animation and sculpture and installation combine to create these hybrid forms. That’s something that I’ve been interested in over the past few years.
DEAR ART: Can you talk about your interests in print media and animation and how that manifests in your work?
PB: Actually all the imagery in my work is screen-printed.
LP: I think print does come into the work. It comes into Philippe’s work physically, and it’s always present in my work in a lot of ways. I’m interested in the multiple, and things that are ornamented, things that look like their woodcuts. A lot of my drawings look like they’re woodcuts or engraving but are actually drawings. And, so, the house is all about repetition and the multiple which is a broader idea that actually has to do with printmaking. So, I never really get away from that.
When I started animation, I just arbitrarily picked it because when I was doing my MFA, I was doing paintings and they were successful because they were getting sold. My teachers thought that I should try something else because I was doing fine with that, so I thought, “I’ll try animation.”
Animation is really interesting because it’s this problem solving that can go any way. I never storyboard anything. I just start making it and then see where it travels, unlike drawing, where I usually have a good idea of where it is going.
But Philippe has worked commercially with animation, so maybe there’s a different relationship.
PB: I guess my path has been really meandering. I studied film, but I always drew a lot. After that, I got into web design, and that got me into compositing work. After that I got into digital media a lot more. Digital media allows you to translate work from one form to another, and it’s pretty open in a way. I moved to Toronto and started working for a company called Headgear Animation, and started to move away from the digital toward stop-motion, prop building, and directing.
The show is part of my Master’s thesis. I wanted to get back into printmaking. I missed the immediacy of working with materials. It’s really physically demanding. And, there’s something about the smell of it too and the tactile quality of the material you’re working with. Also, you end up working on something for a while, building it in your head, and it only actually happens when you pull the ink off the paper. It’s like a huge build-up for one moment of surprise.
It’s the opposite of what Luke was talking about with his animation process.
DA: I guess the artistic process is more open to exploration and experimentation more so than the rigidity of commercial work.
LP: I like to use the word “hunch.” You get a hunch about something and then you dive off from there. I think that’s important. It’s kind of insane to think about that in our culture now, where everything’s planned out – to take a hunch on some little thing and then work on it. The process that Philippe has is interesting. I don’t think that anybody has done this particularly. But that came from a hunch in the first place. I’ve heard it described as ‘studio based research.’
DA: Both works mix the digital with the physical in truly unique ways. Was it a natural evolution, an easy connection? Philippe, in your piece the animated and static components are reversed. Usually it’s the image that moves and the light is static, but instead the lights are animated and that in turn animates the static imagery, where each part of the cycle are ever-present and encoded in a single image. I get the feeling that you are both investigating or researching your media in order to come up with new possibilities.
PB: I’ve never really verbalized it, but yes, that’s an interesting way to approach the show.
LP: I think it’s about trying to find the appropriate connection sometimes. I think it’s a really good question too, because in the end were trying to marry those two worlds – not necessarily humanizing the digital. What happens with new media work is that the focus is on the new interactive qualities, and sometimes it’s really cheesy. But sometimes you really want to go with something that’s more evocative.
We talked about the “re-mix” and how remixing this new media with some old media could be interesting.
PB: It’s funny; I never used to think about new media in relation to my work. I guess I thought about it more in the last couple of years. As soon as I started using lights instead of a projector, technically I was in new media territory.
DA: Philippe, how did you make the leap from projector to lights?
PB: I used to use a video projector with a DVD, but the DVD only had red, green and blue looping on it.
LP: It was hilarious!
PB: …a really boring movie. But, I was never happy with it… so I went on a hunch, and I looked into DJ lighting. The colours were way more saturated, and the light just filled up my studio. It was a more embodied spatial experience. So I don’t think this piece does that as much as it did in my studio, which is a much smaller space. There, it feels like a club – with the lights pumping. It’s really intense.
But, it just felt like a different way of working. It opened up different possibilities. That’s the part of the process that’s kind of interesting. I made the jump to a new direction by changing a tool. And we’ll see where that goes.
DA: Programming the lights?
PB: Yeah, I learned Max MSP to program the lights, but it’s really simple looping. It was fun to learn and figure out.
LP: It’s interesting with work like that. There’s all this knowledge that you have, like animation, or the moving image, or whatever it is, and some of these technical things. And then there are these shallow dives into these areas, just as you need them, like programming, right? These shallow dives become a sort of composite toolkit. Some tools are better than others.
PB: And there’s deciding when you can actually take a shallow dive, or when you need help and call in an expert. Luke, you actually took a deep dive into stained glass.
LP: Yes. It’s a hunch thing as well. I don’t why I took it. I just wanted to take a class, and then I made these stained glass sunglasses because, well, that’s just ridiculous. And when I started making them in the class, the lady turned to me and said, “What are you doing? You know that’s not going to work, right? They won’t be UV protected.” And I said, “I know”.
The stained glass just sort of fit with this project. But I was also interested in stained glass because it’s a material that integrated media artist don’t tend to use. You know, it’s decorative, but also, it’s been described as illuminated tapestry. I’m interested in all the metaphorical properties, and anthropomorphic qualities of stained glass – the Rose Window is supposed to be the eye of God; how it can be used as allegory – it’s an illuminated surface and that has a connection to the screen, of course. Maybe I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, but I see all these connections with this traditional material.
DA: Is that the ‘ancestral’ part of Ancestral Visions, then, this revisiting of traditional materials and older technologies?
LP: Yeah, there’s that trend of looking back at certain early technologies that Philippe has been really interested in. There’s that connection with stained glass in my work, that looking back – making things that are newish, but then also harkening back to the medium, or in terms of content. There’s an aspect in my work that I guess I can overtly describe as ‘fan fiction,’ taking a pop cultural image that people recognize and then turning it into an artwork. It comes across in Philippe’s work too, with the knock-off Simpson characters.
FY: Luke, in your animation pieces you use recognizable industrial Toronto architecture, and then there’s the house from your childhood…
LP: Well both pieces of architecture were from my childhood. One’s projecting the other. The house is a large projector.
DA: I get the impression that the house is dreaming the animation of the malting silos.
LP: Yes, well there’s something anthropomorphic about this house with eyes, right? It’s like personalizing this house. And where my piece is probably more literal in terms of the ‘vision’ part of the Ancestral Vision title of the show, Philippe’s is more visceral. It can actually affect you if you’re there for quite a while.
PB: Yeah, I had to turn it off during my thesis defense because it was overly visceral. I thought that was kind of successful – in a sort of sadistic way. I just find it funny because it’s too intense for people to watch for any length of time.
Jocelyn and Natalyn Tremblay: Pre-Ovum #8: Cyborg Single
Two radiant bodies formlessly entwine and lock in an aggressive embrace. Perfect, androgynous mirrors upheld by the simplest gesture – the weight of each body exerting force on the other. As each twin fortifies their individuality, they paradoxically enact the statement “my body is not yours”.[1] Thus, the identical queer bodies of Jocelyn and Natalyn Tremblay perform difference as they struggle to unite in Cyborg Single (2010).
The piece was presented on the opening night of 7a*11d 8th International Festival of Performance Art at the Mercer Union in Toronto. It is the latest installment in Pre-Ovum Split (2000-2010), a series of collaborative performances exploring the Tremblay sisters’ ‘twinness’. Cyborg Single unfolds in a number of acts, and through media, gesture, camp, and the poetry of worms, the pair interrogate notions of normativity.
At the front of the room are adjacent projections of two video cameras facing opposite walls. The performance begins with a Tremblay sister’s hand projected live on each screen, palms together. Their hands separate and face outward. Between them flash pop-culture images of queerness. The sisters then move toward each other in front of the screen. Their palms meet as they brace against each other for support. Their breathing grows laboured and their strain palpable as they tangle, embrace, and hoist each other in protracted movements.
Watching the two contort in this the most poetic movement of the performance the phrase “the unbearable lightness of being” comes to mind.[2] In the novel Immortality, Milan Kundera recalls these words (also the title of an earlier book) in the description of a woman’s gesture to her swimming instructor. The gesture becomes an obsession in the author’s mind, and the woman his subject of longing and fascination. The Tremblay twins instill the same indescribable allure; their gesture sexually charged and innocent. Like children wrestling, oblivious to the intimacy of their proximity, they evoke the naïveté of a youthful time before the cultural imprinting of sexual or gendered behaviours. The pain and love exhibited in the collision of their ambiguous bodies lays bare this alienation from a natural state.[3]
The performance then shifts to split screen projections of the Tremblay sisters’ alter egos Nasty Nat and Cybaubergine. Their humorous theoretical musings and autobiographical sound bytes describe a mongrel gypsy upbringing in rural Ontario. Although they sometimes contradict each other, the message is clear; they were both marked by difference at the outset. From their mixed Romanian and French Canadian heritage to their queerness, neither conforms to any essential notion of identity.[4] And, despite their biological sameness, there is a marked difference to their personalities.
The twins then don sparkly berets and Buddy Holly glasses in a campy pseudo-scientific exposé about earthworms:
Did you know that the earthworm is asexual? That to mate it simply sidles up to another earthworm, exchanges DNA, and both can procreate? Did you know that if you cut an earthworm in half it doesn’t die? Does it then become two earthworms, or is each one a clone of the other?[5]
Through the metonymy of earthworms – their animal kingdom brethren – they cut deep into the nature/nurture question of queerness, twindom, and identity. These concepts are entangled in the Tremblay sisters’ biology as well as their performative actions; tough to tease apart due to the twins’ exploitation of their sameness – the biological fact of their identical DNA – to provoke anomalous anti-normative issues. Through title and zoological kinship, the performance invokes Donna Haraway’s cyborg. The cyborg is a theoretical hybrid being that straddles a multitude of domains, deriving strength not from an essentialist notion of feminism, but through affinities between inappropriate/d others.[6][7] For Haraway, social reality is an optical illusion that distracts from the responsibility of empowered self-construction.
To drive this point home, the Tremblay sisters continue with a manifesto against normativities (hetero and otherwise). They speak of the fetishization of their twinness and enumerate the countless binaries imposed on them: “the smart one, the pretty one,” etc.[8] They rage against these comparisons of difference and advocate a fluidity of sexuality and the constant construction and reconstruction of identity. Their fierce political rhetoric, however, is executed with a curious blend of poignancy, cheek, and charm unique to Jocelyn and Natalyn Tremblay. Their charismatic delivery renders this otherwise heavy-handed didactic both forgivable and rousing.
Speech delivered, their final movement is cheerful and uplifting. While harmonizing a smooth beat box groove, they shuffle apart as each approaches a video camera on either side of the room. The performance closes with Jocelyn and Natalyn’s composite face on abutted screens. The twins strike and hold a final note. Two halves become whole – Les Tremblay are united in their single mediated cyborg self.
[3] Vergine, Lea. “The Body as Language.” Art in Theory, 1900-2000: an Anthology of Changing Ideas. Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2003. 906-7.
[4] Homi K. Bhabha, “On ‘Hybridity’ and ‘Moving Beyond’” Art in Theory, 1900-2000: an Anthology of Changing Ideas. Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2003) 1111.
[5] Jocelyn and Natalyn Tremblay, perf., Pre-Ovum #8: Cyborg Single. Mercer Union, Toronto. 21 October 2010.
[6] Donna Haraway. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Stanford University. Web. 02 Oct. 2010. <http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html>.
“r u part of the art” is a site-specific new media installation conceived for Nuit Blanche 2008. This piece attempts to actively blur the boundaries in the perception of and participation in art. It is instructional art for the cell phone age. Participants are invited to subscribe to mobile text alerts that are then sent to their cell phones at regular intervals over the course of the night. The text messages are instructions that participants are asked to perform creating the framework for a large-scale social experiment.
The boundaries of the art space can be described along three vectors – temporal, spatial, and physicality. Of these three only one – the temporal space – is clearly defined. That is, the project exists solely for the duration of time that is Nuit Blanche. Spatially, the site of the project will exist as a series of “nodes”, where each node is any person who has subscribed to the “r u part of the art” texts alerts. The number of nodes is variable and dynamic as well as their individual locations and population densities in space. Likewise, because of the nature of the instructions – some will require acts that are social or demonstrative in nature, while other instructions are vague and introspective – the physicality of the piece is called into question. It is at once both public spectacle and private contemplation.
Inspired by the event scores of John Cage and the Fluxus movement, and the instruction works of Yoko Ono and Sol LeWitt, “r u part of the art” uses instruction as its central artistic principle. However, where this tradition highlighted the primacy of the idea as art, “r u part of the art” investigates the social dimension of participation in this highly networked culture.
The use of the cell phone and text messaging as the delivery medium provides an immediacy of execution that transcends spatial boundaries (consider the use of text messages in the Philippines in 2001 to direct 700,000 demonstrators in the Estrada coup d’text). This opens up a new dynamic in social participation as performance. What does it mean to be ‘the other’ vs. a member of a ‘tribe’? What is the critical mass of participants needed to cross the boundary from one experience to the other? What if the next instruction is not carried out?
Participation is a key element to the piece. Whether that participation is physical or symbolic, the goal is to blur the line between performer and audience. Although ‘instruction’ implies that the artist has some sort of control over the viewer, this is not the case. In fact, the artist has ceded control of the artwork by allowing the collaborative unpredictability of the user experience. Whether this culminates as acts of acquiescence or rebellion, the interpretation of the work is entirely in their domain.
Archive:
http://archive.scotiabanknuitblanche.ca/2008/exhibition.aspx?zone=B&mapID=12
http://www.ccca.ca/nuitblanche/nuitblanche2008/artists/b12.html
Press:
http://vagueterrain.net/content/2008/10/nuit-blanche-recommendations-zone-b
http://www.xtra.ca/public/Toronto/Nuit_Blanche_yours_to_discover-5555.aspx
My Comfort Remains (2008)
Farah Yusuf, My Comfort Remains (2008)
Materials: Glass vials, metal and plastic clips, paper with printed text
Scale: 10” x 2” per unit, approx 60 units in total
Description: Each unit consists of a strip of text placed inside a glass vial and hung vertically by a metal and plastic clip affixed to the wall. There are approximately 60 units in total. They are all evenly spaced at the same height with a distance of 6” separating them.
Statement: This piece is an investigation of ritual and rhythm.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder tends to manifest itself in ritualized behaviour. This same kind of behaviour is prevalent in many religions. It is here that the dichotomy between religion and science becomes blurred. With ritual, we have an act that is accepted within certain systems, yet outside of those systems it is classified as a symptom of a psychological disorder.
In her book Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas describes the function of ritual as a means to purify dirt – according to Douglas, dirt is matter out of place. That is to say, every thing, place or person can be ordered and classified; anything that exists outside of the boundaries of those classifications – exceptions and crossing thresholds – is profane. The ritual serves to protect the individual from these spaces where the boundaries are broken down.
That protection/purification is merely imagined. It is only symbolic. Crossing oneself upon entering a church and an OCD behaviour of spinning around three times before opening a door both accomplish nothing more than to provide an internal comfort – a force of habit; an act of comfort that the body remembers through rhythm and repetition.
The lines of text contained in the vials come from the Gospel of John. Any overtly religious content was avoided. Many of the lines began with the word ‘and’ like the way a child would relay a story. Likewise, the lines are cut midway through the sentences according to a loose meter. I didn’t want the content to overshadow the rhythm and repetition. I had in mind that as people would read the lines, the meter would carry them forward and thus would not try to comprehend any meaning from the text itself. I wanted the flow of the user experience to be a meditative one. My Comfort Remains is a found poem presented in sculptural form.
The Text (excerpt):
10 And there are seven kings: five
5 And to them it was given
13 And in the midst of the seven
24 And in her was found
9 And there came unto me
2 And she being with child
8 And there followed another
8 And to her it was granted
3 And there appeared another
2 And I saw as it were
4 And there went out another
2 And I saw, and behold
3 And when he had opened
8 And I looked, and behold
5 And when he had opened
6 And I beheld, and, lo
16 And the number of
19 And the temple of
18 And the nations were
15 And the kings of the earth
18 And the building of the wall
21 And the twelve gates were twelve
19 And the foundations of the wall
16 And the four and twenty elders…
