Originally presented as the keynote lecture at STRP Festival March 2015.
Watch This
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Text Francesca
Gavin
This is an
examination about our relationship to screens. How that association is changing
our daily experience, our ways of thinking, our ways of looking. Lets start
small – with the phone. It is the most intimate example of our relationship to
technology. The screen-object we carry with us everyday.
If you search
“looking at phone” what comes up is a YouTube clip of people staring at their
phones. It is described as “an epidemic of texting while walking” and
positioned as something seriously dangerous. Illustrated by funny amateur phone
footage, this humorous news excerpt is a perfect example of our relationship
with our phones. How we fall into our focus on the screen – forgetting the
physical space around us. Forgetting our own physicality. I love the
phrase “inattention blindness”. But in fact, it is the opposite. The people
featured are consumed with attention – they are just looking down at the object
in their hands not at their ‘real’ surroundings.
Where is the screen?
Where is the
screen in contemporary life? We wake up and check our screens for messages. If
we travel to work on public transport, more than half of us are on our phones.
We stare at screens for work, communication, play and diversion throughout the
day. Travel home, and watch a screen again for entertainment. Sometimes with a
second screen on our lap. Then we go to sleep with our screens next to our
beds. We experience screens in advertising – moving alongside us on the
escalator, blown up in public space. At music gigs or exhibitions or cultural
experiences, everyone is watching things through their screens, capturing the
moment in some form. Amateur mobile screen footage is now normal on the news. As James
Bridle in his essay ‘The New Aesthetic and Its Politics” writes, “protest,
repression, revolt and schism are framed not through the lens of critique, but
the lens of iPhones and iPads held aloft.”
In recent
years, there has been a wave of literature deconstructing our relationship to
technology – often criticising it even from within. Jaron Lanier, an American
computer scientist and pioneer of virtual reality, in his book ‘You Are Not A
Gadget’ from 2010 criticised the limitations of the structure of programming
and how it restricts human expression and communication. Devices, he notes, are
“inert tools and are only useful because people have the magical ability to
communicate meaning through them… The most important thing to ask about any
technology is how it changes people.”
For me the
most influential text to sum up our experience with technology and what it
means to exist now is Jonathan Crary’s ‘24/7’ that appeared last year.
Subtitled ‘Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep’, the book is deeply critical
of the political and commercial interests that oversee our relationship to
technology. If you’re checking your emails or feeds in the middle of the night
on the tablet next to your pillow, this book will make you feel very
uncomfortable. In particular much of the focus of the book is on the speed of
consumption – the current accelerated formats of image and information
absorption. Nothing is ever really off – just resting, waiting to be activated
at a single gesture, touch or glance. Here the screen becomes a device that is limiting
not increasing our activity. To quote Crary, “Devices are introduced (and no
doubt labelled as revolutionary), they will simply be facilitating the
perpetuation of the same banal exercise of non-stop consumption, social
isolation, and political powerlessness.”
Crary points
out how the myths of open source egalitarianism and the empowerment of
technology have been cultivated. “The idea of technological change as
quasi-autonomous, driven by some process of auto-poesis or self-organisation,
allows many aspects of contemporary social reality to be accepted as necessary,
unalterable circumstances, akin to facts of nature. In the false placement of
today’s most visible products and devices within an explanatory lineage that
include the wheel, the pointed arch, movable type and so forth, there is a
concealment of the most important techniques invented in the last 150 years:
the various systems for the management and control of human beings.” To
paraphrase, we voluntarily kettle ourselves in cyberspace.
The screen as interface
My aim here is
not to join the choir of criticism. Though my feelings are ambivalent – a
midpoint between horror and fascination, admiration and addiction. Rather than
the wider discussion around technology, I want to focus on the interface – the
screen itself. Many theorists have focused on the content of the screen – the
ideas around the network and the effect of technology on our psychology,
actions and thinking. Yet there is very little discussion about the black
void-like rectangles we stare into so much. To begin with, what is a screen?
When I first
started thinking about this topic it was such an easy thing. It was something
that grew directly out of the construction and composition of painting –
referencing the dimensions and constructions of the canvas. The modern screen
was an extension of the cinema screen and the television, which became the
monitor, the laptop screen, the phone screen and the flatscreen. Yet, as the
academic and writer Peter Lunenfeld pointed out to me, my conception was
perhaps limited. “The newest screens really are sort of only pseudo screens.”
The screen today is no longer necessarily a black rectangle or square. It is
also an a oculus rift headset or a projected surface with moving imagery like
the blank tunnels on the London tube system which are transformed into screens
between trains. The screen has moved beyond the confines of the screen.
Scale is
something Peter also discussed with me - the emergence of the ‘phablet’. A
phone with a bigger screen space to watch things on. In the 21st
century we are seeing a move away from mid ‘human’ size towards the tiny or the
supersized. The same applies to narrative itself. “The classic Aristotelian
dramatic unity of the 90 to the 120 minute theatrical presentation, which moves
from Greek theatre into medieval passion plays, into narrative length films -
that just disappears in favour of the Vine at six seconds and Game of Thrones
at 28 hours.” There is a strong connection between how and what we watch and
the changes in our devices.
The New Intimacy
I think one of
the most interesting changes in our relationship to the screen is a new sense
of intimacy. Screens live in our pockets, our bags. We often touch them or
check them for reassurance. Sometimes numerous times per hour. The content of
the screen is life. As Baudrillard the postmodern French sociologist and
philosopher wrote in his essay ‘Screened Out’ in 1996: “Distance is abolished….
between stage and auditorium, between subject and object, between the real and
its double.” He goes on, “There is no separation any longer, no empty space, no
absence: you enter the screen and the visual image unhindered… The video image
– and the computer screen – induce a kind of immersion, a sort of umbilical
relation, of ‘tactile’ interaction as McLuhan in his day said of television…”
Here our addiction and relationship to the screen is fuelled partly by a desire
for self-immolation. As Baudrillard states, “from the desire to disappear, and
the possibility of dissolving oneself into a phantom of conviviality.”
Screens have a
bad reputation. They are blamed for eye ache, sleep damage, rewired brains, and
social isolation. A recent Norwegian study observed teens slept less when they
used computer screens more. The artificial light activated wakefulness and
suppressed melatonin. Charles Arthur, in his 2008 article in The Guardian ‘It's
the screens, not the internet, that are making us stupid’ wrote, “Low resolution
monitors (including all computer screens until now) have poor readability:
people read about 25% slower from computer screens that from printed paper.” A
study from Manchester University found reading on paper 10-30% faster than on
screens. (Interestingly the screen is always being positioned in contrast to
the book page – again a throw back to the work of Marshall McLuhan.)
In McLuhan’s
‘The Medium is the Massage’ the focus was the television, yet his ideas could
easily be applied to the modern screen. He writes, “In television there occurs
an extension of the sense of active, exploratory touch which involves all the
senses simultaneously, rather than that of sight phenomena, the visual is only
one component in a complex interplay… Television demands participation... It
will not work as background. It engages you. Perhaps this is why so many people
feel their identity has been threatened.” Its amusing to think anyone would
feel this way about TV after so much more invasive technology has been developed.
The
screen has increasingly become a space for human psychological expression or
dissolution or distrust. Andre Nusselder’s in ‘Interface Fantasy:
A Lacanian Cyborg Onotology’ argues that the computer functions in cyberspace
as a psychological space – as the screen of fantasy. At one point she mentions
the work of MIT professor Jozeph Weizenbaum, who wrote the first computer
psychotherapy program ELIZA in 1966 – which Lacan was fascinated by. She explains, “Lacan
acknowledged that ELIZA appears to produce some sort of transference relation.
People find something (of themselves) in the machine; they unconsciously
transfer (fantasmically) the object of their desire onto it. Computers may
appear as fellow “humans”: you can talk to them, they can ask you questions,
you can play and cooperate with them.” We see our screens as sentient.
Psychologist
Sherry Turkle has been strongly critical of the changing emotional fallout from
technological developments. In ‘Life on Screen’ (1995) she writes, “We have
learned to take things at interface value. We are moving towards a culture of
simulation in which people are increasingly uncomfortable with substituting
representations of reality for the real”. More recently in her 2012 Ted Talk
‘Connected, but alone?’ she laments the opportunity for self-editing and
distance that technology allows us. “Texting, emailing, posting lets us
present the self as we want it to be. We get to retouch. Human relationships
are messy. We clean them up with technology. We sacrifice conversation for
connection.” She notes that the phone presents the fantasy that we are never
alone, will always be heard. “Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be
solved. I share therefore I am.”
Future Fantasies
The future
looks even crazier. The TV series ‘Wild Palms’ is a great metaphor for the
possibilities of what the screen can be. This mini series was released in 1990
– following the avant-garde approach of Twin Peaks. It was based on a comic
strip by Bruce Wagner. It was partly created and produced by Oliver Stone with
episodes directed by Kathryn Bigelow among others. The series focused on a
future Hollywood in a fictionalised 2007 where an underground movement, the
Friends, were in resistance to the right wing Fathers who owned the media and
had political and religious control. The way the populace were manipulated and
controlled was through a virtual reality holographic technique ‘Mimecom’. The
protagonist’s son is set to star in a Channel 3 series “Church Windows” using
this new media, which would project a holographic character into your domestic
space. Here the screen literally broke out of the fourth wall and touched you.
This was an exploration of the possibilities of virtual reality (sometimes
exaggerated by an addictive drug mimezine).
Steven
Spielberg’s ‘Minority Report’ provides another metaphor of the transformed
screen – in the context of marketing, advertising and consumerism. You could
literally feel capitalists get turned on the minute that film was released.
Both of these examples highlight something central to what a lot of artists and
writers are highlighting – the ownership and possible exploitation of
technology. (Something Lunenfeld explores very well in his book ‘The Secret War
Between Uploading and Downloading’).
There are
rumours of Facebook’s messenger app recording people’s conversations and
ruffled feathers over Samsung's amended Terms and Conditions warning users of
their Smart TVs that [records?] conversations within earshot of their products.
The screen is watching us as much as we are watching the screen. Television
today is often a two-screen interaction – with phones and tablet interaction
encouraged to revive traditional passive media. Sony have just patented
methods, systems, and computer programs for converting television commercials
into interactive network video games. In one method, a broadcast or streamed
commercial is accompanied by an interactive segment. A media player would
present users with an enhanced and interactive mini-game commercial that could
be played with other ‘viewers’. It could be inserted within the television
program, overlaid on frames or last the duration of a commercial spot.
Interactive adverts already exist on services like Hulu.
Ageing Technology
Getting back
to the present, it is also important to define what the modern screen’s
appearance is. It has its own texture, colour and illumination. Many artists
that are making work today reflect this – like Rafaël Rozendaal, who will be
talking later today, the digital animations of Daniel Swan, the projections and
print work by Travess Smalley. The way images disintegrate on the modern screen
is also very important. Laura Marks writes in ‘Touch: Sensuous theory and
multisensory media’: “The noise of a failed Internet connection Soundbite? is a
declaration of electronic independence. It grabs us back from the virtual space
and reminds us of the physicality of our machines.” She emphasises that digital
media are in fact analogue. They are unpredictable, make errors, breakdown,
connections cut out – these are all things that remind us of technology’s
physicality rather than its transcendence. Failure is inbuilt into technology
design. As Marks puts it “technologies age and die just as people do.” It is
just manufacturers and techno evangelists with vested interest that make us
want to dream it is superhuman.
Esther Leslie
in her Slade Contemporary Lecture of 2010 questioned “Is there a liquid crystalaesthetic?” For Leslie, HD screens are the new contemporary media in
themselves. The ability of LCD and plasma screens to be flicker free, still at
any moment and negate the time progression of narrative is influencing creative
content. Here art’s progress is bound up with the imitation of nature – depth,
perspective etc. The definition of mimesis. Today’s photorealistic 3D animation
attempts to do the same thing – to make fiction invisible. Yet at the same time
digitization is a simulation. A computer transforms an image into pixels, code,
a language – the result is a version of something.
We can
conclude that the screen is complex. It is becoming the focus for all kinds of
issues of modern life. Physical, psychological, cultural, political. We have
never been more obsessed with looking at the moving or still image in screen
space. Nathan Jeurgenson notes in ‘The IRL Fetish’ “the plain fact that our
lived reality is the result of the constant interpenetration of the online and
offline.”
Between the Passive and the Active
So how are
artists addressing this relationship? I think this can be positioned between
the idea of the passive and active screen. The passive screen is one observed,
a screen as object. In its most simple form, this is a screen we watch. CamilleHenrot ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013) is a beautiful example of a film, which
documents our computer screen relationship. The piece examines the way we look
and accumulate information. There is a strong sense of rhythm and editing in
the work, which was developed during a residency fellowship at the Smithsonian.
She discussed
the project with me in 2013. “I was doing a lot of Internet research on the
Smithsonian database. I often had a lot of windows open on my desktop. When you
look at a cluster of windows on a desktop and try to find reason, it results in
a kind of primitive thinking – a sort of ultra rationality. You see the images
together and then your mind makes these connections, not because there is a
connection but because your brain needs to resolve the images.”
Here the
screen becomes the subject of work itself. Shown as a projection, nonetheless
our engagement is one of observer watching the film from the point of a
relatively passive audience. Another contemporary example of this passive,
observant screen relationship is Dis’ #Artselfie project, which was recently
released as a book.
Part art
project, part viral meme, the artselfie revealed the audience’s desire to
capture themselves alongside the artwork, even inside the artwork. The subjects
become temporary collectors who are able to have their experience intertwined
with a digital ownership of the work in some form – even if only within the
screenscape. The results feel like a prosaic take on performance documentation.
In this way the art object becomes something communal, sharable and conceptual
rather than physical.
Samara Scott
is an artist better known for her work in 2D space – sculptures, paintings and
installation pieces. However, she created a fascinating web project for Legion
TV that I think is of note as an example of an artist drawing on ideas of the
passive screen interaction. Scott is interested in how the screen perverts gaze
– “shifts and melts and inverts natural legibility”. Her work was an attempt to
make a narrative film but this emerged as a diary of snapchats and scenes she
had casually collected placed together on the screen, which popped up over
whatever was on the viewer’s desktop. Playing with the logic of collage, this
moving image was largely footage of textures, soft things, hard things, woven
objects. “Textual encounters” as she puts it. The result was a very visceral
experience to watch – a digital creation of sensation. She is currently making
a body of work photographing and filming sanitising hand gel on an iPad.
The Screen as Object
The next stage
of the passive screen is one where the screen is embedded in the work – often
within the sculptural or painting field. Ken Okiishi does this by making the
screen into a canvas for paintings. Nate Boyce does this by making sculptural
plinth part of a work holding a screen. The work of British based artist Adham Faramawy is a great example, placing screens within complex sculptural objects. Based in the UK, originally from Egypt and
is a graduate of the RA schools. He was originally influenced by the arrival of
flat screen TVs and how they were replacing cathode ray monitors and the way
this changed how we receive and perceive an image.
His use of the embedded screen emerged after
he began working with animators to produce sculptural computer programs and
later particle animation. “I started to get familiar with the logics and the
languages of the interfaces to the programs producing these moving images.
They're inherited from analogue, physical traditions like film editing, clay
modelling and masonry, but unlike the given conditions of these traditions,
with computer modelling you can't make assumptions, you have to assign physical
conditions and physics to an object.” contained within highly textured cases
and plinth structures. Often the screen is upturned in his work. He explains,
“Shifting the angles at which a viewer receives an image was, for me, intended
to point at the physicality of the image, thinking about the substrata carrying
that image as a sculptural body, a form within a composition.”
Another
passive example of screen use is deconstructed and taken apart but still
functions in some way as a screen. One example would be the work of Yuri Pattison, an artist who is currently in residence at the Chisenhale Gallery and
was part of the collective Lucky PDF. He has used digital signage monitors,
which present self shot iPhone footage – commenting on our consumption of
screen based information. His current interest is in e-ink panels. Pattison often
takes apart screens and displays their inner workings, revealing the mechanisms
of display. As a result, we can see a small number of manufacturers are making
these parts – Samsung panels are being used by numerous brands for example. He
removes the façade of slick design and marketing. “The stripping of the screens
cosmetic body and branding also highlights the mechanisms that support the
display of the image – these mechanisms are normally invisible, deliberately
hidden by the manufacturer to present a seamless experience.” Pattison notes.
“We view screens as a window on to something, so in the way we don't think of
the glass in the window we don't think of the processes behind the
representation on the screen. There are numerous layers we don't perceive, or
barely perceive, in the act of viewing something on a screen.”
Berlin-based
artist Simon Denny who is representing New Zealand in the next Venice Biennale
is very interested in a deconstructed screen. His work has examined TV hacking,
the thinning of monitor, how we receive information, the design, packaging and
structure of the companies behind the consumption of technology, and
conferences that promote and position devices in society. Here the screen is
printed on panels. Analogue materials replicate the structure and format of the
screen. The screen is ripped apart, reimagined and revealed.
Another way
the passive screen is explored in artworks is when it is translated into
something outside of the screen – the screen space in real space so to speak.
Dutch artist Constant Dullaart does this well. “The screen is our contemporary
landscape. We spend more time daydreaming and staring at screens then we look
out of windows. The screen is a personal experience more and more, which brand,
design or lifestyle you subscribe to. This fetishisation of the private
experience seems to be a response to knowing most networked screen based
communication is not private at all,” he points out. “How private can a screen
get, can it get more private then the Oculus Rift, Microsoft Hololens, or
Google Glass? If we have these private views, are we leaving our shared
experiences to be mediated by commercial companies?”
The active screen
The next level
artists are engaged with the screen as what I’m going to call the active
screen. This is where artists are exploring ideas around interaction and space.
I curated a show called ‘Responsive Eyes’ a couple of years ago that I want to
bring up at this point. It was inspired by documentation of the opening of ‘The
Responsive Eye’ an exhibition held at MOMA in New York in 1965. It brought
together artworks by so-called ‘Op’ and minimalist artists such as Bridget
Riley, Josef Albers and Viktor Vasarely. The curator William Seitz described
the show an “exhibition that would indicate an activity, not a kind of art”. He
argued in the exhibition’s catalogue this was “non-objective perceptual art”,
art that “exists primarily for its impact on reception rather than for
conceptual examination… Ideological focus has moved from the outside world,
passed through the work as object, and entered the incompletely explored region
area between the cornea and the brain.”
The reason I
wanted to highlight this moment in art is because I think our interaction with
the screen has decades of legacy of technological advancements that have played
with human perception and physicality. I want to connect these ‘retinal’ works
with gifs, digital paintings and 3D animation. How we relate and view the
constant influx of movement, imagery, sound and informational content in modern
screen life.
The exploration
of screen interaction can be lo fi. Aram Bartholl’s show which closed earlier
this month at Baby Castles in New York questioned the screen perspective. “Most
of our reality today is taking place in that phone rectangle. The screen
constantly moved closer to our eyes over the past decades (from cinema to
phones). The screen will be attached to our eyes soon (glasses or lenses).”
Playing on the exchange and selling of imagery though the screen, Bartholl’s
exhibition was very much made for interaction and dispersion through social
media. He created giant photo picture cut outs so people could pose as if
within the phone screenspace for Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. The main aim
was to get visitors to interact with each other.
Selfie sticks,
head mounted cameras like GoPro or Google Glass played with the idea of the POV
image (what is this?). He created head mounted phones during a workshop at the
Atlantic Center of the Arts, experimenting with filming POV techniques. “In the
end it appeared to me that the picture of someone wearing his/her phone on the
forehead obviously filming is even more interesting than the actual clip shot
with that head mounted phone.” He explains, “The whole thing is a bit cyborg
but in a silly, lite [light?] way.”
The active or
living screen can be seen in the work of Antoine Catala. In his video
projection works and sculptural installations the screen appears to literally
come to life. He uses membranes that appear to be breathing, moving in a techno
organic way. He has streamed television into fluid blobs shapes – ‘alive’ in
some form. He uses display technology and reflection to create screen-like
space. Many of these pieces are a step beyond a mere passive screen as it is
one alive, in flux – closer to the conceptual approach of someone like Bruce
Nauman and his real time video experiments. Our engagement may still be as
observers but the screen itself comes to life in some way.
The Human Touch
The next level
of active screen is one that is activated by human touch or a click – such as
in the online installation pieces by Brenna Murphy or the websites by Rafaël
Rozendaal. Murphy makes immersive installation pieces in real space, often with
sound elements and performance, but her interactive pieces are largely based
online. The intimacy of the screen relationship is key. “I make art that is
meant to be viewed on the Internet by people privately browsing from their own
device. I think this is an intimate and powerful way of transmitting and
experiencing media.” Here viewers click on audio files so they overlap with
rhythmic gifs, video montage and scrolling images she makes from her own video
footage. The results are very psychedelic. Clicking on images takes us through
a maze of digital collage imagery. The aim of her web ‘Labyrinths’ is to make us conscious
of the role of the screen.
Her work is so
successful because it relates to how we are used to using our screens for input
and interaction. The simple click and arrow (or in some examples touch). Other
artists also create active screen works that replicate the interactive pathways
and experience of exploring the Internet, such as the online questionnaires and
page-to-page pathways of Cecile B Evans’ online project for Serpentine Gallery
AGNES. A spambot that generates experiences beyond the virtual, and created a
sense of connection and emotion query. Here the screen touches on those
sensations of Lacanian transference
The active
screen relationship is very clear in artworks that draw on gaming –
increasingly a source of inspiration for a generation of artists including
Lawrence Lek, Tabor Robak and the Dutch artist Rosa Menkman of whom we will
also see work in the Vertical Cinema program tonight. Games give the illusion
of interactive but in fact the audience is still largely controlled by the
artist, the developer, the structure of the screen – something that
metaphorical reflects our relationship to technology and screens as a whole.
Devices that, for the majority of users, force us into a passive position.
There are also
structural and aesthetic aspects of screen game interactivity that emerge. Jon
Rafman and Rosa Aiello’s online film work “Beyond Carthage” was conceived of
spaces from “Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception” and “Second Life” to look at ideas
around history and self through largely architectural spaces. As Aiello notes,
“The decay and historical movement of a digital object occurs laterally,
through pixellation and a loss of image quality, rather than by rusting or
crumbling or scars.”
Ben Washington
is an incredible British artist using the interactive screen in his
exhibitions. He creates sculptural installations in galleries and then
recreates these spaces, though often with strange failure and pathways, digital
as an interactive game he places within the exhibition space. The viewer
(standing behind the controls of an arcade machine) will, for example, find
themselves in a virtual version of the exact same physical gallery space in
which they are standing.
The result is
an experience that contrasts seeing the real and the virtual version of
something at the same time. They both become fused and influenced by each
other. Washington explained to me, “the interest between screen space and real
space arises at the point at which they converge and diverge. The focus in my
work has been on these uncanny moments.”
The
interactive nature of the screen is of particular note to Washington from a
more social perspective. He points out, “How much we are going to let the
screen encroach into real space and into our social norms? Already it is
evident that socially it is now almost totally acceptable to wander around with
your face in a smart phone. And you would expect newer technologies such as
Google glass, and interactions such as augmented reality, but interestingly it
feels that both these developments have stalled. I’m as interested as much by
that which we decide to discard along the way as that which we finally decide
to assimilate with.”
Washington was
particularly excited by development kits being produced for Oculus Rift and the
other contenders in the Virtual Reality market – Sony's ‘Morpheus’, ‘Steam VR’
and the ‘Sulon Cortex’. William Gibson’s version of cyberspace made flesh.
Director David Mullett, who is currently working on a VR project and has been
writing on the subject, describes the attraction of the VR screen. “VR has a
frame in the sense that it is a screen tied to your face – but with a software
coding sleight of hand and optics advancements alongside the accelerometers and
gyroscopes built into smart phones, it appears as if there is no frame
whatsoever. And our relationship to screens is so addictive and obsessive
that we need to ramp up our stimulation to tug the emotions or get that
dopamine hit we are so hungry for.”
Artists are
beginning to experiment with VR itself in a more conceptual way rather than
gaming context. The Sundance film festival had a whole VR exhibition project.
Oscar Raby’s ‘Assent’ documented the artist’ cathartic exploration of his
father’s traumatic memory of a mass execution in Chile in the seventies. Part
interactive, part cinematic a physical and poetic journey into trauma. A hybrid
between first person gaming and the protagonist in a film narrative.
Perspective’ by Morris May and Rose Troche reveals an extremity of first-person
filmmaking where the audience is put in the shoes of a teenage girl being date
raped at a house party, then in the shoes of the guy doing to raping.
Max Rheiner’s
‘Birdly’ is a flying-simulation installation where your entire body is used to
fly like in a dream. As Mullet notes, “With VR immersion, your unconscious
brain actually thinks that it is doing these things, indicating that the
technology will rewire our brains in critical ways with extent of use and
intensity of experience.” He imagines flipping through immersive channels like
TV surfing.
As the
boundaries of the screen transform the future is looking pretty crazy – though
I admit the excitement and fantasy of tech literature over the past twenty or
so years always sees wild changes on the near horizon. Writer, curator and artist
Sam Hart sees the post screen future for art as something more to do with the
structure of the internet itself. In fact a new decentralised Internet. Artwork
coming out of the blockchain space.
As Hart
explains, “the blockchain is nothing more than a publicly visible, distributed
database whose entries are immutable once instantiated. The “blocks,” or
records, comprising the database are uniquely addressed and have a
cryptographic key which entails ownership.” Hart suggests this space could
become a novel medium for digital art by encoding line and colour values,
sequences and relationships. The yet to be launched platform for decentralized
applications Ethereum (www.ethereum.org), for example, embeds an
entire programming language for design. As Hart explains, “I think it
represents a significant progression in digital artistry: a uniquely relational
medium that circulates through body and network by way of the screen.” The
results are unknowable at this time but these new languages point to new screen
based structures to create work within and upon. As Lanier points out, the structure
of programming has a huge influence on the results we experience. Rethink our
entire approach to that and you have a different future in formation.
So where does
this leave us and our little black screens? Sam Hart sees the screen as “a
hopeful object, representing possibility better than most anything.” Despite
the anxiety around them, they are the site of a lot of creativity. It is
impossible to be comprehensive in the many ways artists are using the screen in
their work – what is so interesting is how varied approaches are. Interactive,
passive, three dimensional, flattened, virtual, literal – the screen has a lot
more conceptual depth than a void. In fact the void-like nature of the screen
can be seen as what makes it so exciting. It is waiting to be filled with
imagery, information
and ideas.
(c) Francesca Gavin 2015
