Post-media art - The Humour
of Patrick Martinez.
By now, the media arts are surrounded by so many people with English-sounding
titles like engineer, programmer, operator and, if lucky, sponsor
with the latest equipment they manipulate, that the artist himself
becomes hard to find in the crowd, making for a drastic situation.
The cooperation of so many people makes it possible to overcome one's
modernist ego and rid oneself of complacency, giving us creations
in the new mode and much virtual hope of anticipating the future.
They seem to shine as if saying that the media and the technology
that supports it is everything.
But in reality it is not the people but the binary equipment that
controls everything and the people involved only play out the roles
assigned to them. Their existence can't even be found in memory. They
are merely tools of the contents and they have no rulebook for a strategy
for recovering their own selves.
Self-expression may be too old-fashioned, but what is there for us
if ars - whether it be technology or art is not for human beings ?
If we adore equipment and rely on it too much, the artist will be
busy doing errands for the electrons and expression will become impossible.
There is too much media art that has progressed too far and is using
equipment that they cannot manage so that they are left in a straitjacket.
And so very often we feel a strange sort of joy, a fresh surprise
at works like those of MARTINEZ which take common, well-known equipment
that will fit anyone's ruler and masters it for purposes it was never
intended for.
A slide projector shows us a hand-drawn image of a flame endlessly
in regular cycles. Thus far, all is commonplace, but each time the
picture changes we hear a tremendous noise. In this is hidden a great
technological and artistic device. A projector usually makes a mechanical
noise each time the slide changes. The artist picked up this sound,
distorted it with an effecter, amplified it and presents us with the
result.
A rhythm of destruction is etched at a slow, dull pace.
Some of today's top quality slide projectors are extremely high tech,
with automatic projection, auto focus and dissolve, controlled by
micro computer; they are hardly to be despised.
Yet he pays no attention to all this, but makes us breathe a sigh
of relief at his witty use of this meaningless noise.
We may perhaps call this a sound installation which uses ready-made
technology or bricolage (do-it-yourself) media art.
I might add that the title "Feu" (flame or fire) is hard
for us to distinguish in sound from fou (crazy) and it is hard to
pronounce [fé…˘ and [fu] differently. In fact MARTINEZ flame reduces
the spell of meaning to ashes and releases us in humour.
Let us also at this time slowly steep ourselves in the nonsense of
video works, which are being presented in the same show.
NAKAMURA Keiji (Deputy Director / Chief Curator,
NTT InterCommunication Center)
The Genealogy - About new possibilities.
There are not just a few young artists out there who aim for artistic
expression in media technology. There are fine arts colleges and technical
schools where they can get specialized education and learn what they
need to know about the latest technology. It is a fact that computers
and other equipment, which were at one time too expensive for students
and young people, can now be had relatively cheaply.
However, the reality is that it is hard to find new talent.
There are probably several reasons for this, but the biggest one may
be summed up, I feel, in that these people don't have the opportunity
to show their work to the public. No matter how good the idea may
be, or how wonderful a work they may create, as long as they can't
show the works to an audience, it is as if they did not exist.
This lack of opportunity to show at the same time ensures that they
lack the opportunity to improve in content. This is because the lack
of exposure to suitable criticism may lead to over-reliance on technique
and failure to notice, due to smugness, a lack of content. Isn't it
true that in such an environment even a powerful work of art will
soon lose its force and the newly sprouted possibility will be taken
away? One of the reasons for planning the present exhibit was a desire
to change this environment, if only by a little.
Now, the work of SHIMOGAWA Kei that is being shown at the ICC at this
time is no doubt of the category that had no opportunity to be viewed.
It was exhibited last fall in Tokyo at the ai gallery, but I believe
that even people who are especially interested in media art will not
know much about his work.
Black geometric patterns are printed on twelve centimeter square panels
with blank frames and these panels are lined up regularly on the wall
of a room. Each of these panels, which at first glance seem to be
abstract prints, have designs each giving its own coded information
and this information can be read with a gun-type bar code reader.
In this case the accumulated information is the sound of so many metronomes
with different cycles. The bar code reader is spotlighted and the
sounds of the metronome fill the room. At the same time the wave patterns
of the sounds appear on a crystal television monitor placed in the
center of the room. The viewer repeats this experience inside the
room.
The best thing about this work, I believe, is its systematic idea
for a very simple creation: the interaction through which information
is reduced to a bar code which is then read. This scene has become
an everyday occurrence at supermarkets and convenience stores. And
yet, just because it is so commonplace, we are not aware of the many
problems of phases, such as the manner of communication and changes
in the relationships between individuals, which can arise, hidden
by the progress of technology. However, SHIMOGAWA's work, because
of this simple structure, seems to give us the opportunity to raise
to the level of awareness that which we have forgotten in our everyday
lives. This system has strength just because it is so simple. The
present exhibit should become the first step toward exhibiting his
work in earnest.
If possible we hope that he will preserve this simple structure and
attempt many different concepts, giving us new developments into the
future.
KOMATSUZAKI Takuo (Senior Curator, NTT InterCommunication
Center)
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