Norman White, The Helpless Robot, 1987-2002, interactive installation. Purchased with matching funds from the Chancellor Richardson Memorial Fund and the Canada Council Acquisition Assistance Fund, 2003 (46-003). Credit: www.bernardclarkphoto.com
Exhibitions
Machine Life
Contemporary Feature, The Davies Foundation and Samuel J. Zacks Galleries
6 February - 18 April 2004
Skip To: Works in the Exhibition
Machine Life explored artists' use of robotics through the work of Norman White and the circle of artists he has taught and influenced through the past quarter century. The show examined the aesthetics of interactivity and traced the strategies of the current generation of electronic artists by highlighting the remarkably fruitful set of working methods, attitudes and ethical positions that constitute the core of Norman White's legacy and influence. Works by White, Lois Andison, Doug Back, Peter Flemming, Simone Jones and Lance Winn, Jeff Mann, and David Rokeby staged the interface between human and machine-based systems. By scrutinizing the somatic, narrative and psychological aspects of technology, these artists exposed the mutually formative relationship between human experience and machine behaviour.
Machine Life addressed a world increasingly mediated and managed by electronic tools and devices. Replete with deadpan humour and unexpected turns, the works addressed technologically-prompted tendencies in human behaviour, patterns of communication, the generative potential of surveillance, questions of agency and the integrity of the body, the incursions of science in the natural world, and changing conceptions of labour.
An illustrated 60-page publication (with CD) accompanying the show traces the history of and current tendencies in robotic and interactive art through examination of the motivations and means of White et al. Jan Allen identifies themes arising from shared devices and influences among the works in Machine Life. Ihor Holubizky addresses Norman White's early innovations and the artist's continuing contributions to the field. Caroline Langill discusses the role of emergence in technology-based art. The Agnes Etherington Art Centre co-published this catalogue with the Koffler Gallery, Toronto, in conjunction with the exhibition Norm's Robots, presented at the Koffler 13 May to 27 June. The catalogue is available at the Gallery Shop ($20).
The Art Centre acknowledges the assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Rita Friendly Kaufman Fund, Apple, the Chancellor Richardson Memorial Fund and the City of Kingston's Healthy Community Fund.
WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
Lois Andison's camouflage 2 comprises ordered rows of mechanically driven wild grasses programmed to sway back and forth in unison. This "field" is a charmingly awkward machine simulation of the natural environment. Her maid of the mist is a bronze manikin bust that, when approached by the viewer, emits a halo of mist. The maid is a mechanical surrogate hyperbolically enacting emotional response.
Doug Back's Frantic makes reference to the increasing use of technologies to ensure security. Mimicking child-safety devices, the piece emits an alarm when the visitor carries it more than 30 feet from a receiver embedded in the presentation plinth. Back's Wasp # addresses the relationship between technology and nature and, in an unexpected twist, our appetite for surveillance. A microscope over a motorized platform brings into view a series of dead wasps, each bearing a tiny text label excerpted from the warnings on household products. A computerized voice whispers information snippets about the bizarrely anthropomorphized life of each wasp.
Peter Flemming's Manual deposits a spiral of dust heaps on the floor and then sweeps them up in an endless cycle. The methodical repetition of tasks and the mesmerizing elegance of their steady execution is a meditation on the nature of work. Manual offers a metaphoric enactment of human deployment of electronic devices and servant robots.
Simone Jones and Lance Winn's Truncated presents a motorized tripod that raises and lowers a projector. The projected image reproduces the path of a camera that has recorded a human torso so the projector seems to create and erase the image as it loops up and down, making explicit the way, as Jones puts it, "the lens is forced to cut in order to capture." Truncated suggests that the figure is brought into being by the machine and thus proposes a symbiosis of consciousness between human life and proliferating devices of recording and surveillance.
Jeff Mann's Adult Contemporary explores the live-ness qualities of machines through tactile video. A 30-second clip of a performance by adult contemporary genre singer Celine Dion is affected by viewer interaction with a tambourine. Both sound and image respond to the shaking tambourine, speeding up and looping frenetically in a way that suggests empathetic engagement.
David Rokeby's n-Cha(n)t presents a "community" of verbal processors linked by a network that speaks in unison, chanting a shared stream of verbal association. In a mimesis of social interaction, the speech of gallery visitors disrupts the system and the chant breaks into a party-like chaos of voices. The system muses, then resumes speaking, using the new stimuli as dominant themes until communication among the units draws them back to the chant. Computer monitors suspended in the gallery space show the changing receptivity of each processor.
Norman White's The Helpless Robot uses a synthesized voice to encourage gallery visitors to reposition it on a swivel mount. The piece responds to viewer actions; for example, greater levels of assistance prompt more petulant demands. While the Robot's behaviour is unpredictable, it conforms to tendencies such that the piece simulates temperament. Reflecting the artist's unrelenting sense of the absurd, Bellevue is an automaton disguised as an ordinary abstract painting.
Jan Allen