Archive of FurtherStudio Critical Forum with Rich White 26.02.04

The Panel

Rich White
FurtherStudio artist in residence

Charlie Gere
Lecturer in Digital Art History at Birkbeck College

Giles Lane
Director of Proboscis

Chaired by Marc Garrett of Furtherfield.org

Present at 18.33 GMT : rich (Rich White) neil (from Furtherfield and devoid), Charlie (Gere), Giles Lane, marc garrett, ruth (from Furtherfield), tone,

Arrivals and Introductions:

Charlie Gere : Hi Giles
rich : hi giles
marc garrett : Hello Giles :-)
Giles Lane : Hi Charlie
Giles Lane : Hi all
marc garrett : ok
marc garrett : Is everyone ready, or should i wait till exactly 4?
chris w just joined the room [16:02:18]
Charlie Gere : Let's wait
rich : exactly 4
marc garrett : fair enough :-)
marc garrett : ok
Giles Lane : whenever
marc garrett : lol
daniel delion just joined the room [16:03:48]
marc garrett : Ok - Just got a few things to say before we begin the discussion...
marc garrett : First of all I would like to thank Charlie gere & Giles Lane for sharing their time today with us out of their busy schedule.
marc garrett : this is the 2nd official critical forum on FurtherStudio...
jacob just joined the room [16:06:10]
marc garrett : I would also like to thank everyone else for popping into this live forum for FurtherStudio.
marc garrett : The transcript of this forum will be accessible for everyone in a few days on this site.
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marc garrett : Could we begin with Charlie informing the visitors briefly what he does?
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marc garrett : then giles...
Charlie Gere : I am lecturer in Digital Art History at Birkbeck College, and author of a book called Digital Culture (Reaktion Books, 2002), and some of my main interests are in the relation between art practice and technology, which is I guess why I am here
marc garrett : then Rich briefly regarding his residency on furthstudio....
Giles Lane : I run Proboscis, a non-profit creative studio where we strive to create projects and spaces in which to explore social and cultural issues through creative technologies and practices
rich : i'm an artist who uses digital media in installation and site specific work. my main concerns are value and perception of art - how art is percieved and how value is created
Charlie Gere : You know I've never done an on-line discussion before. It's kind of slow and yet weirdly too fast
rich : it is unusual
marc garrett : OK - I think that's enough of my voice...perhaps if we begin by Charlie or Rich asking any questions that they wish...
marc garrett : and giles:-)
rich : after you guys

Critical Forum

Charlie Gere : It brings to mind a lot of interesting questions about time and embodiment
rich : such as?
marc garrett : as in displacement of the physical from time elsewhere?
Giles Lane : the role of spontaneity, the question of originality and real time technologies
Charlie Gere : We ar both in an intimate situation and yet dispersed and absent
rich : net works are timeless (unless it is coded into them
rich : )
Charlie Gere : I find it quite uncanny
Charlie Gere : I don't think networks are timeless
rich : it feels very removed
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Charlie Gere : removed, but not timeless
rich : i meant net.artworks
marc garrett : Isn't timeless a notion of our imaginations?
rich : as in, they don't age
marc garrett : ah right...
Charlie Gere : to me they deal exactly with issues of deferral and embodiment
Giles Lane : networks are never timeless -- they are always of the moment in which they are accessed -- that is both proximate to the viewer and the context in which they are created and viewed
rich : they remain in a constant state unless programmed to change
Charlie Gere : It reminds me of one of my favourite works of art, the series of telegrams which the Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara started sending in 1970, each with the same message, "I AM STILL ALIVE".
Charlie Gere : I think Kawara beautifully captured, in a very elegant way, some of the issues arising out of the use of real-time media, such as that which we are now using, even if he was using an older medium.He brought into question all the issues about embodiment, distance, time, deferral in this ongoing work
Giles Lane : one also thinks of the long now project
rich : what was this?
Charlie Gere : Or Jem Finer's Longplayer
Charlie Gere : Both are concerned with deep time
Giles Lane : an attempt to transcend time through the creation of a work of art lasting hundreds of years
Charlie Gere : One is a clock that will last 10,000 years the other a 1000 year longf piece of music
marc garrett : Will this last that long?
Charlie Gere : They are attempts to deal with time in an age of real-time systems
Charlie Gere : Who knows?
rich : i've also heard of a piece that is a light that will flash once in a thousand years
rich : it is set to go off randomly during this period
Charlie Gere : Yes, that was in the Serpentine wasn't it recently
Giles Lane : the discussion may not, but then the archiving of its transcript may --but for whom are we acrhiving these ephemera?
rich : no one knows when it will go (or even if it has already gone) off
marc garrett : May be are archiving for our futures...
Charlie Gere : The archive is always a wager for the future
marc garrett : the potentials...
marc garrett : agreed
Charlie Gere : In that it bets on what should survive
Giles Lane : it is also the attempt to 'capture' history and make it ours...
Charlie Gere : Its a big question in our age in particular
marc garrett : and what ideas regarding our own contexts
marc garrett : mayh be we are reclaiming our own times in some kind of way...
Charlie Gere : exactly
marc garrett : making our own histories...
Charlie Gere : What I like about net.art is that it brings out questions of the archive and time in really interesting ways
rich : with the 'remove' section i was attempting to create an alternate archive
marc garrett : yes - the split between insitutional histories of time and individuals representations of their own times
Charlie Gere : Archives are always about suppression and exclusion as well as inclusion
marc garrett : yes...
rich : history can be made in an archive
Charlie Gere : Real time tech makes the question of what to archive and what not more complex and pressiing
rich : it's a form of timetravel
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Charlie Gere : Yes, but towards the future
slight just left the room
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chris w just left the room
marc garrett : but will i look at your archive rich - is your time more valuable than say someone else's?
Giles Lane : Benjamin's Angel of History?
Charlie Gere : Hooray, WB
Charlie Gere : The net is exactly like the debris the angel sees piling up behind him
rich : it's your choice marc
marc garrett : So currently we are equally claiming each other's time...
Giles Lane : The Angel is the archetypal Archivist/Librarian -- propelled into the future whilst facing the past: seeing an ever growing pile of detritus behind it
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marc garrett : information is not always abiout choice rich, although i get your drift
rich : will the transcript be edited for posting on the site?
marc garrett : i don't think so...
marc garrett : it might not need to be
Giles Lane : I want to turn to the process or apparatus of the online discussion -- what are we risking with this dis-embodied exchange?
marc garrett : ok - are there any questions that charlie & giles have regarding rich's work on here?
rich : we do have the possibility of projecting a neater, more controlled image to those who visit later though
Giles Lane : how does this discussion reflect the concern with the 'original' and questions of presence/absence?
Charlie Gere : Rich has written about questions of originality with the digital, which I think this experience embodies. Do you see this forum as part of your art work or as a supplement?
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rich : i was contemplating doing a live session that consisted of just the chat room
Charlie Gere : Rather than the forum?
rich : as apposed to the desktop screen shots of working
rich : just in the normal chat room
Giles Lane : but to what degree is the frisson of embodied engagement and discussion affected by the distancing of the forum?
rich : so, in order to watch me working you just had to log in to the chat room
Charlie Gere : I find it quite frustrating not to be in full presence
Charlie Gere : Sorry, that sounds a bit weird
marc garrett : emotional presence
marc garrett : possibly
rich : i was going to attemp a kind of performance with text
Giles Lane : tangible relatons that emerge through simple person to person communication
Charlie Gere : Actual embodiment is interesting to think about when it is absence
rich : being in the chat room visitors would be able to add their own things to it
Charlie Gere : This may relate to questions about the digital art work and its relation to the embodiment of the artist
marc garrett : So, absence is quite linked to rich's work - relational even in the context of chatting on here...
rich : i never quite figured out how it would work though - something for later
Giles Lane : I also find it strange being cast in the rrole of a 'critic' yet contributing to a critical 'discussion' from my own studio -- surrounded by the tools and outcomes of my own work, yet intending to reflect upon someone else's...
rich : the chat room would 'exist' for as long as it went on
Charlie Gere : Absence is always an issue with any work that uses telecoms
Giles Lane : kind of an interesting paradox?
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marc garrett : A paradox that needs exploring may maybe...
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Charlie Gere : Its a question to some extent of enframing
rich : the two halves of the project were an attempt to explore the realtion between presence and absence, i suppose
rich : there were parallels between the two
Giles Lane : and between the virtual and physical?
Charlie Gere : Out of interest in relation to this discussion do you physically occupy a space for your residency?
marc garrett : what is interesting, is that being here is much to do with less of a dichotomy, like presence and absence - it actually creates a grey area, an inbetwenn exprience
rich : because of what it entails to ensure a digital file remains unique
rich : i have always occupied the same physical space for the residency (whilst online)
Giles Lane : but inbetween what? between two dichotmoies perhaps?
marc garrett : possibly giles...
rich : the point between creating and removing
marc garrett : you mentioned that you are in view of your own work yet online here discussing some one else's
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Charlie Gere : I believe that digital data is always fundamentally physical and embodied, albeit in ways that may be hard to apprehend
Giles Lane : yes, in that this is a sort of virtual studio visit, yet I am in my own.
Charlie Gere : I think that the supposed dichotomy between virtual and physical is not true
marc garrett : I'm going stay quite & let you continue - if you want me back in, just ask:-)
Giles Lane : All data resides somewhere, in some data warehouse, on some server, consuming electricity generated by combusting some form of matter
Charlie Gere : exactly, its a question of scale
rich : i was also trying to draw a comparison to human memory with some of the create works
rich : works that allowed the viewer to imagine a work
Charlie Gere : Could you explain more?
rich : making a virtual work in the mind as apposed to online
rich : one of the ways i was trying to make something unique was to prompt the viewer to imagine their own version - unique to them
Charlie Gere : By blacking out images?
rich : in anothr way yes - this was for the create half of the project
Giles Lane : this is very close to the way conceptual artists of the 1970s described their work and how it operated in the minds of the viewers
Charlie Gere : Yes, that's right
Charlie Gere : Its quite transcendental, even theological, or at least romantic
rich : censoring produces its own viewer created information - when filling in the blanks, or remembering what a work looked like (often incorrectly - creating a psychologically existing new version)
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Charlie Gere : Misremembering, which is a crucial aspect of engagement with art
rich : it creates unique versions of art
Giles Lane : Charlie -- this idea of the theological, do you see a relation between spiritual experience and the 'ephemerality' of digital art?
rich : even if they are by some one else
Charlie Gere : I think that there is definitely a connection
Charlie Gere : Rich, would you say that you are interested in the more spiritual aspects of art, not necessarily in a religious sense?
rich : sorry, that last line was an addition to the sentence i wrote before it!
Giles Lane : perhaps in the tension between presence and absence that artists like Gordon Matta Clark explored?
Charlie Gere : Or Smithson
rich : i am definately interested in a more psychological approach to art understanding
Charlie Gere : but you are also concerned with questions of immateriality both in mind and media
Giles Lane : I'm also thinking here of the 'carnevalesque' -- how artists have long been involved in communal parctices which use excess to transcend order
Charlie Gere : Its gnostic, transcending the material
Giles Lane : a process of creation and destruction... liberating themselves from history and tradition
Charlie Gere : back to the archive
rich : one of my major influences earlier in my artistic development was joseph beuys - that might explain a few things
Giles Lane : Rich's 'remove' works seem to fall into some such category
Charlie Gere : He is very spiritual if not religious
Charlie Gere : Beuys I mean
rich : shamanistic
Charlie Gere : How does shamanism connect with psychology?
rich : it was his use of heat and energy that interested me
Giles Lane : and censorship acts as an erasure...
Charlie Gere : I think it does
rich : this heat and energy being produced by thought
Charlie Gere : Is there room for a kind of shamanistic practice on the web?
rich : i think the web is already quite shamanistic
Giles Lane : i think it depends how we define the role of the shaman in our dispersed and distributed communities
Charlie Gere : That's interesting
rich : you go to it when you want to find something out
rich : you search it
rich : you cast questions into it and get replies from places you don't even have to physically go to
Giles Lane : are you suggesting that we have hived off the shaman's role to a distributed network of computers?
rich : in some cases
Giles Lane : is this what people refer to as the 'network effect'?
Charlie Gere : William Gibson got all this with his images of cyberspace as a vodoun space, with various voodoo gods
marc garrett : and architypal psychology connects with say a polytheistic outlook...moving into Hakim Bey territory possibly, even James Hillman...
rich : communication comfort
Giles Lane : Another interesting SF writer, Kathleen Ann Goonan, has also explored this -- especially in relation to nanotechnology and pheromonal communication...
Charlie Gere : wow
Charlie Gere : Thats such a Giles reference
Giles Lane : She creates world where elelctronics are rendered useless by an electro-magnetic pulse from space, and humanity has to develop new modes of sommunication based on smell -- phermones
marc garrett : ok - you've gone 5 minutes over time, how much time do you wish me to give you before we move into the other chat room with everyone else?
rich : last orders?
Charlie Gere : whenever you want
Giles Lane : ring the bell
marc garrett : 10 minutes
rich : ok
rich : where were we?
rich : pheromones
Charlie Gere : Smell, which is beyond discursive structuring
Charlie Gere : How can we articulate with smell
Charlie Gere : Beyond the crudest statements
rich : smell is good for stimulating memory
Giles Lane : Smell is also interesting in its ontological problem -- at what point is the smell outside of us once we have smelt it?
Charlie Gere : If a tree farts in the forest do we smell it?
Giles Lane : of course, we have already absorbed it -- become it in a sense - and the original smell is actually something else
rich : who said something about crude statements?
marc garrett : are odours socially constructed?
Giles Lane : yes
Giles Lane : they are often part of a learned behaviour
marc garrett : thought so :-)
Charlie Gere : Smells are presumably unique in one sense, absolutely irreproducible but also incredibly evocative, which relates to Rich's project
rich : who here wears deodourant, perfume, aftershave?
rich : all of us?
marc garrett : no way
Charlie Gere : OK, but just deodorant
Giles Lane : Actually, smells are reproducible (there's a major centre in Scotland which has developed a system for synthesising any smell from its chemical composition
rich : this stuff was only invented in the last few hundred years or so
rich : were we all ok with smelling before then?
Charlie Gere : this reminds me of work done in the 1920s and beyond to stimulate memory directly in the brain
Giles Lane : perfume has been part of human experience for thousdands of years -- the Egytians are known to have used it
rich : ..ok
Giles Lane : often as part of religious experience -- smell is a powerful stimulus for inducing certain states (such as ecstacy)
rich : but still, my point being, some smell is social construct
Charlie Gere : Moot point
marc garrett : Ok - I would like give warm thanx to Charlie & Giles for giving us a great experience in the critical discussion section, and thank you also Rich...
Giles Lane : pleasure
rich : we smell bad because we're living in a society that says it is bad to smell like this
Charlie Gere : Thanks
marc garrett : so if you have time we can move into the other chat room now with everyone else...
Charlie Gere : I mean thanks to Mark
rich : ok, be there soon
marc garrett : cool :-)
neil just left the room
rich : with my virtual smell

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