MONDAY, 29 January 2001
Breakout: Creativity
Art in the Age of Digital Production & Distribution
Barbara London, moderator
My curatorial work at MoMA began in 1973 and back then artists were inventing new art forms that I found more shocking than the late-breaking news. At the beginning, artists were handling simple tools like the portapack themselves, which wasn't so easy. It actually was kind
| "We talk about globalization now, but I think we really saw it take shape in the 80's." BARBARA LONDON |
of clunky. Artists like Lillian Schwartz and Bob Brashenberg were going across the river to New Jersey to work with engineers at Bell Labs. And it was a moment when many engineers were becoming artists. By the 1980s, we started to see a lot of video in contemporary art shows and media festivals all over the world. These were the early days of the globalization of contemporary art. We talk about globalization now, but I think we really saw it take shape in the 80's.
Brad deGraf, Protozoa
I've been immersed in digital animation for about fifteen years and I really love it. It really does open up a lot of freedoms that you never had before. The main thing is the combination of live action puppetry and animation so you have the best features of both. You have the immediacy, interactivity, live action and puppetry. Its very flexible and very mobile. It's perfect for the transmedia world that's emerging today where you can data-broadcast objects and update characters in real time. Finally, we're focusing on how the Internet enables the marriage of business and creativity so that we can do what we want to do without being hampered by the business limitations that have inhibited creative expression in the past.
Digital technology is the big enabler for animation, allowing us to do things faster, cheaper and on a larger scale that we could do with traditional animation techniques. As the Internet came available, it made the big enabler even bigger - not only doing things faster and cheaper, but also providing direct access to an audience. That access is really powerful because one doesn't have to give up ownership and participation in the profits, and one bypasses the choke point of broadcast television. One of the main innovations for us is data broadcasting – as distinguished from video streaming. We don't do video. In effect, we ship the recipe not the cake. Users download a very small representation of the character that can then be animated by simply streaming the motion into it.
One of our biggest successes was "Duke 2000." I don't know if you saw it, but about fifteen months ago we were talking to Gary Trudeau about doing a project with him. Gary wrote a comic strip about the cartoon characters that are running for president, like Donald Trump and Warren Beatty. I proposed to Gary that we actually run Duke and, after he agreed, we spent about twelve months running a website that is incredibly deep. It included a photo archive which we'd update every week. Gary had the candidate profile, an FBI file from 30 years of comic strips and other things, and each could be hyperlinked to all his comic strips. We did one video episode a week and went on TV using Gary as the entrée.
Tommy Pallotta, F
lat Black
My background is not in animation nor in film nor in computers. So my work in animation over the last three years has been an experiment – doing everything the wrong way and, I think, doing a pretty good job of it. We are trying to break the tradition of the set character design common to animation, which isn't dependent on technology at all. This has been done for years in traditional cell animation. Also, we were playing around with the notion of the documentary and what reality is. We've been really influenced by Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker who caused a lot of controversy when he first started making films incorporating rotoscoping techniques. We brought the technique to software that my partner Bob Sabiston wrote. When we started working, we invited different artists to work with us, most of whom don't have much of a background in animation or computers.
We started doing this for a series of interstitials on MTV that came out a couple years ago. Then we started making short, independent films like "Roadhead" and "Snack and Drink" that played at festivals. Then we did a project for ITVS. After that we started thinking about doing a narrative that could empower individual artists to express themselves fully. We worked with Richard Linklater who had made the indie film "Slackers", which had a sort of vignette-type storyline. We thought more about a non-narrative vignette storyline, and the result was "Waking Life". Our approach allowed us to assign different scenes to different artists. We assign and cast each scene with a single artist; that way we can maintain the same artistic vision throughout the scene.
Our animation process is actually very labor intensive. It takes well over two hundred man-hours to do one minute of animation. Fortunately we can do it on Apple G4s, which aren't that expensive, although the cost does add up when you want to do a feature. With "Waking Life" we worked with the Independent Film Channel and Thousand Word, a New York independent production company, who co-financed the production. You've got to understand, we didn't have a script. We were very vague as far as telling them what we were going to do and they took a risk based essentially on Richard's reputation. They were also interested in getting into animation.
Natalie Jeremijenko, NYU
I wanted to say that digital transformation does not equal social transformation and digital distribution models do not equal funding models. I am an engineer experimenting with how we can create new forms of computer and video art. Let me give you an example.
| "I wanted to say that digital transformation does not equal social transformation and digital distribution models do not equal funding models." NATALIE JEREMIJENKO |
Something that's "appropriate" to present in San Francisco is the suicide box. This involves an automated video system installed in the vicinity of the Golden Gate Bridge. It watches the bridge constantly and when there is vertical motion, it captures this motion on a permanent video record and thus builds an archive of the event, the "vertical" event of any suicide jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge. We did some interesting things with this footage, including linking the suicide rate off the Golden Gate Bridge to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, to create the despondency index, which is an economic indicator that demonstrates the correlation between the Golden Gate Bridge events and the Dow Jones. This juxtaposition, in my own humble opinion, challenges what gets to count as information in the information age.
Another example is a network of automated video cameras - micro, low-power video cameras - set to be "triggered" when gunfire or explosive sounds occur in such places as East Timor, Kosovo, LA, New York, South Africa or other sites of political strife. They monitor what the public feels constantly. When there is an explosive event, it captures it and transmits it for approximately four seconds. It's actually related to the amplitude. These little events occurring at these various sites are stored in a database archive. They're all just a few seconds long, and so this is really just dumb counting, but the set-up also captures a little bit of video as well as other background phenomena such as a radioactivity reading.
So why is this interesting? First, these are interesting ways to play with how you see these particular events. But there is also something more than the dumb logic of the technologies involved and the stories recorded: you come to realize how critically important local conditions are to the technological system. You discover new ways of thinking about common, anonymous events.
Ben Benjamin, Superbad
I'm an artist who works as a graphic designer, and since I live in San Francisco I started working on websites pretty early on. I had to learn HTML and learn how to put websites together. What if you code this wrong? What if you use multiple body tags? At the same time, I was involved doing corporate work where interface rules are being established really quickly for the web. I thought it was important to question those rules and break them and see how you could do a successful website that didn't follow the conventions being established for the medium.
As I was working on the web, I got a URL mostly for email and then just threw all these experiments that I'd been doing up on the website, told a few friends and family, mentioned it at job interviews and I was surprised when it started getting hits and visitors. Since then, it has simply grown and grown. Then a couple of interesting things happened. The Cool Site of the Day picked Superbad. I then got thousands of visitors -- and I got a lot of angry email from people who thought that I was trying to trick them or something. About six months after Superbad started making the rounds of the net art lists, I got responses from people on those lists and they were cool and positive: they said, nice work, interesting concepts or whatever. That was really great, but it was really more interesting to me that if you're planning to experience art, it's really hard to be surprised, whereas if you don't know what you're going to experience, it's easier to be surprised and that, to me, is a more interesting response.