Good morning Mr. Orwell Communication as a Theme in Art

Transcription

1 Good morning Mr. Orwell Communication as a Theme in Art The character, devices and habits of communication have diversified and changed radically in recent years, yet the basic everyday challenges of communication remain the same. The laws of human communication devised by the late communications professor, Osmo A. Wiio, seem topical even today. The fundamental tenet of the laws is that Communication usually fails, except by accident. 1 A long-entrenched idea posits communication as an interactive process that involves a sender and a receiver of a message 2. Simply put, the essence of communication is that its parties the sender and the recipient share meanings. 3 Social media, channels that have become increasingly important in recent years, offer an entirely new way of viewing communication. Communication Researcher Esko Kilpi has termed such media the third logic of communication, as opposed to the earlier logics of both mass and private personal communication. More or less passive recipients have become proactive agents who make personal decisions about which themes they wish to follow at any given moment, and whose messages they want to receive 4. For many, an online presence and participation in social media are much more than just instrumental facilitators of interaction; for an increasing number of people, an online reality is an extension of their identity, a natural way of being simultaneously in touch with many people and receiving information about topics they find personally relevant, and also of sharing experiences and personally important things with acquaintances as well as strangers in real time. Communication as subject in art Interaction is an essential aspect of contemporary art as well. Here, however, it is not just an interactive technological interface, it denotes the reception of art as an active and interpretative event. According to phenomenological theory, a work of art only acquires meaning in the encounter between the viewer and the work. Joint interpretation, communication with other viewers, may be much more meaningful than ideas born solely from a personal observation. The experience of art can be shared, a discussion between individuals. The audience encounters a work, but begins instead to communicate amongst its members. What and how artists communicate through their works, and whether art is in fact a form of communication, these are eternal questions, of course. In this essay, my focus is on communication as a theme in contemporary art, how artists themselves 1 english/ 2 Communication is defined as the activity of conveying information, producing meanings and building common understanding. The very etymology of the word (communis, Lat. common, shared) refers to collective endeavour. 3 Davis Fougler, Models of the Communication Process, 2004, second cornerstone of social business pullcommunication/

2 explore different modes of communication. They examine the relationship of language to meaning and the impacts of technology on communication and culture in general, and highlight through their works the challenges and potential of interaction. In this article, I use as examples art works that all feature in the Kiasma Hits collection exhibition. Many of them are about the basic need to be understood, to encounter another person, to make contact, while others focus on language itself or violate the systems of spoken language in order to discover an interesting level of communication somewhere along their edges. Language as Non-Communication "I think the point where language starts to break down as a useful tool for communication is the edge where poetry or art occurs." 5 - Bruce Nauman In his works, Bruce Nauman investigates language in many ways, divesting it of linguistic structure or meaning. He is interested in the peripheral aspects of language, the moments when we no longer focus on the meaning in spoken language, when our attention shifts to the manner of speech, to pronunciation the oral presentation 6. This is the case also in Nauman s early video performance, Lip Sync (1969), in which Nauman, wearing headphones, tries to enunciate the word he hears at the exact moment he hears it, which is of course impossible. The two words used in the piece are lip and sync, in direct reference to the conceptual level of the work. The video is shot with a static camera, turned upside down and framed to show only Nauman s mouth. The situation is absurd: the sound and the image are out of synchrony, and it is surprisingly difficult to hear what the word combination is. One begins instead to observe the artist s lips and their hypnotic movement. Linguistic communication gives way to performativity, to mime 7. Messages do not necessarily cross the gap between two persons, even if they speak the same language. Conversely, successful communication does not necessarily require a known language. Tone of voice and emphasis, context and the will to understand are much more important. Made a few years later than Nauman s Lip Sync, Vito Acconci s video performance Open Book (1974) is also a close-up of the artist s mouth. Acconci keeps telling us that he is completely open, that he will not exclude anyone. He is in fact so open that he speaks with his mouth wide open all the time, which makes it difficult to 5 Christopher Cordes: Talking with Bruce Nauman, in Pay attention please Bruce Nauman's words, writings and interviews. Ed. by Janet Kraynak, First MIT Press paperback edition, 2005, Janet Kraynak: Bruce Nauman s Words, in Pay attention please Bruce Nauman's words, writings and interviews. Ed. by Janet Kraynak, First MIT Press paperback edition, 2005, Kimberley Woodard: Art, language and the abject Through an enquiry into performance art, does a prior knowledge gained from the social situations and experiences around us affect the way in which we understand linguistics within artistic practice? Dissertation, University of Lincoln, 2011, 11.

3 understand anything he says. The viewer s attention is once again transferred to the performance itself, away from the meaning conveyed by language. The work is related to Bruce Nauman's Lip Sync both in terms of its playful attitude and its form. Both works were made with video, which was new at the time: the innovative technology that had just appeared on the market allowed performance to be expanded into video, and also gave artists a critical tool for creating alternative content to that transmitted via the unilateral mode of television communication. A Speaking Work of Art Ken Feingold too investigates our relationship to language and speech, but he has a different strategy. He is interested in the communicative capacity of art, as in the work Head (1999). The work is an interactive sculpture that looks like a human head. With built-in speech recognition and artificial intelligence, the work understands spoken English to some extent. It blinks its eyes, reacts to the viewer s presence and speech (albeit slowly), and makes replies, which give at least an impression of the head conversing with the audience. Head has the ability to change its speech and answers, and it can also ask questions. It also uses rhymes and alliteration, and combines words in surprising ways, sometimes resulting in absurd or comic sentences. 8 Feingold calls his talking and moving works cinematic sculptures. The metaphor is based on the idea that when we watch a movie, we are often carried away by the events on the screen, and project our mind into them. Feingold believes his works function in the same way. The viewer is not separate from the work, but part of it 9. Head even though it is only a dummy has sufficiently human, familiar elements. You try to understand Head just as if it were an ordinary person. Although you know that it is just a dummy and a simple computer program, you still try to have a conversation. The bizarre personality of Head is fascinating and uncanny, it pulls you in. The illusion of having a real conversation is quite soon banished, of course. There is no shared understanding, the utterances of Head stray down ever stranger paths, and the illusion is shattered. Head demonstrates that successful communication arises from interaction, a shared process of meaning production, which involves a continuous and reciprocal process of recognising and rectifying errors and misunderstandings. Lucy Suchman, who has studied human-machine communication, considers this the key difference between inter-human and human-machine communication. A machine may construct meanings on the basis of a given body of material in very complex ways, but it is unable to react continuously to a constantly changing and evolving communication situation and to rectify a shared message, a necessary component of genuine interaction Ken Feingold: Head, in Outoäly, Museum of Contemporary Art Publications , Matthew Gambr: A Conversation with Ken Feingold, in Big, Red & Shiny, Lucy Suchman: 'Human/Machine Reconsidered', Department of Sociology, Lancaster University,

4 The idea of communicating with a machine has fascinated people for a long time. According to Ken Feingold, we build artificial intelligence in order to understand the fundamentals of intelligence and consciousness. It is a means for us to understand, not only others, but also ourselves 11. Violin and Cello Music plays a role in a lot of my work, even when there is no music. - Bruce Nauman In the video performance Violin Tuned D.E.A.D. (1969), Bruce Nauman stands with his back to the camera, and the picture is rotated on its side. As the title suggests, the artist has tuned his violin in an unorthodox way. Instead of the normal free strings G-D-A-E, Nauman s performance features the notes D-E-A and D. The performance itself is monotonous: Nauman plays the same chord over and over again. The style is marcato: Nauman emphasises every stroke of the bow, which adds to the fateful mood of the performance. According to Seth Kim-Cohen, Nauman s work represents a baffling blend of the Western system of notation and the English alphabet. The violin is not tuned after the logic of music, but after that of language 12. The work can also be seen as humorous and ironic, a punk-like comment on the performance conventions of classical music. The artist plays with his back to the audience, the picture is on its side, and the violin has been tuned in an ominous way to communicate a hidden message of death. Nauman himself comments on the work quite matter of factly: "What I did was to play as fast as I could on all four strings with the violin tuned D.E.A.D. I thought it would just be a lot of noise, but it turned out to be musically very interesting. It is a very tense piece." 13 Where Nauman uses the violin, Nam June Paik takes the cello onto a new level with his piece TV Cello. Finnish Dream (1991). The work is a re-imagined version of his earlier TV Cello that featured black-and-white monitors, made now in colour for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. Each of the three monitors in the cello broadcasts a flow of images manipulated in different ways. In one sequence, cellist Charlotte Moorman plays a standard cello, in another she plays Paik s TV cello. In one brief glimpse, Moorman wears a TV monitor bra while playing Paik himself, who rests in Moorman's lap instead of a cello. 11 Matthew Gambr: A Conversation with Ken Feingold, in Big, Red & Shiny, Seth Kim-Cohen, In the blink of an ear toward the non-cochlear sonic art. Continuum, International Publishing Group, 2009, Willoughby Sharp: Interview with Bruce Nauman, (May, 1970), in Pay attention please Bruce Nauman's words, writings and interviews. Ed. by Janet Kraynak, First MIT Press paperback edition, 2005, 147.

5 From Information Superhighway to Super Age of Communication For Paik, the new television and video technology were both a threat and an opportunity. As early as 1965, Paik formulated his frequently quoted slogan Television has been attacking us all our lives. Now we can attack it back. Just as for Bruce Nauman and many other early video artists, for Paik too video offered a tool for a critical counter-attack against the way information was communicated by the mass media. However, Paik also believed in the capacity of technology to bring people together from different parts of the world. In the 1980s, he organised art events via satellite, such as Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, an event and a concert in which WNET TV from New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, as well as German and South Korean broadcasters, were all hooked up live via satellite. In the year of Orwellian dystopia, 1984, the purpose of the global installation was to demonstrate the positive potential of TV culture. The event was followed by another satellite installation, Bye Bye Kipling (1986), which united New York, Seoul and Tokyo. The title of the piece was a reference to Rudyard Kipling s famous adage, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. 14 Nam June Paik envisioned fast communication links between faraway places, and launched the famous term information superhighway as far back as Paik also anticipated many other technological innovations and future forms of interaction. He was not only the father of video art, but he can also be considered as the grandfather of YouTube, by predicting that one day all people would have their own TV channel where they would feed their own footage and through which they would communicate with each other 15. Today many of Paik s visions have become reality. Communication no longer recognises any boundaries, and most communication today takes place on the web, the speed of which is now taken for granted. The transformation of consumers into authors and their participation in cultural production is one of the megatrends of our time and part of the great revolution in communication practices. Nam June Paik had a premonition of the kind of huge changes mass communications and television would bring to culture in the future. What remains interesting in his art to this day is how he pushed the boundaries of new technologies, doing things with technology that it was not meant to do. For instance, television was for him both an art object and a medium of art. The rise of media culture in the 1960s spawned all kinds of artistic reactions which are still going strong. Artists interest in coding, cybernetics, gaming and interactive technologies remain responses to a phenomenon that got its start back then. We are currently undergoing the next great transformation in media culture, 14 See also Tillman Baumgaertel: "I am a communication artist" Interview with Nam June Paik, at 15 Mark Hudson: Nam June Paik: The man who inspired 'Gangnam Style. The Telegraph, 15 Oct

6 the age of the social media, or, more broadly, the age of network technologies that support the community. Jacob Wang has put this cultural change elegantly in a nutshell: We are moving from analogue to digital, from broadcast to interaction, from product to platform. 16 Considering the potential of all this for interactivity, we seem to be heading towards a super age of communication. But how will the genres and practices of art change in the future? Maybe works that utilise online media will become more common, or online co-creation of works of art more prevalent. Of course, some contemporary artists have for a long time been using teamwork and process-oriented strategies in their work, bringing other people s experiences into the artwork and working with a limited or broader community 17. The possibility for instant interaction with a wide audience, facilitated by social media, provides new and efficient tools for such practices. The richness of artistic communication is in that it accommodates multiple languages and interpretations and discovers surprising perspectives. Art takes its own distinctive perspective on communication. A work of art may be about the need to establish contact or the deconstruction of language; but there is always much more to it than that. Such an intuitive experience may be pointless to even try to verbalise. Arja Miller 16 Jacob Wang: The Digital Museum as platform. Lecture at Museum Next conference in Amsterdam 13 May For instance, many works by Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, such as Complaint Choir, I love my job or Olisinpa oppinut tämän koulussa (collaboration with Maija Hirvanen) have used people s personal experiences and were created in collaboration with the participants.