Projector

I would like to share some of my observations of one very important tendency in the development of visual art that became especially noticeable with the lightning fast spread of the so-called New Media or, to use a more precise term, Variable (as in changeable, impermanent) Media. Among these are the now ‘traditional’ art forms such as video art, performance and installation art, as well as the more ‘contemporary’ ones: interactive and net art, robotic-art, science art, bio art, and so forth. In short, all art that does not have a fixed from, is time-based and more processual in nature, can be said to only exist while connected to an electric socket or is in other ways ephemeral and immaterial.

But we will not focus exclusively on immaterial artistic practices but rather on the tendency that makes even the more established media lose their permanence and stability.

We will discuss the tendency of the total, inevitable and irrevocable movement of visual art towards dematerialization, dissolution, etherealization.

Art’s aspiration towards 'dematerialization’ is not just a trend that was started by the Conceptualism of the 1960s and its idea of the dematerialized Art Object, but rather a consequent and objective direction of the development of visual evolution as a whole. This is a process of gradual structural transformation of art which historically has been characterised by transitions from ‘canon’ to ‘style’, to the ‘Isms, to the ‘pluralism’. If we were to imagine visual art as a physical substance, this transformation could be described as a thermodynamic process in which its initially fundamentally solid body under certain historical circumstances and due to technological breakthroughs is transformed from one state of matter into another: A solid melts into liquid, the liquid evaporates into a gas. From the physics classes at school we know that states of matter are characterised by different degrees of freedom of its atoms, its tiniest particles.

Under the right circumstances, the atoms of a solid body, packed into an elegant, regularly ordered but very rigid crystalline structure, will be released and start moving around, thus eventually transforming a hard crystal into a free-flowing liquid. But only the bravest of these atoms will accelerate to a point where they can break the chemical bonds and burst outside the boundaries of the substance volume, and only these atoms will discover true uninhibited freedom. Our evaporating visual substance turns into a ubiquitous and all-pervading visual steam.

With every transition into a new state of matter, visual art reaches yet another level of ‘dematerialization’. A piece of art, an object will steadily and determinately lose its material qualities, replacing the more stable means of expression with more ‘unreliable’, impermanent and changeable media. From thick to thin, from solid to hollow, from indestructible stone to the flickering light and shadow on a screen.

To simplify and omit some of the details, this process of dematerialization can be sketched as follows:

Stone → wooden board → oil/canvas → photograph → ☁︎

Canon → Style → Isms → Pluralism

Solid matter → Liquid → Steam

Each such transformation, each transition from one media to another is inevitably accompanied by tectonic system changes of the entire structure of interlinks within the space of art and leads to either the change of the old or to the development of new schemes of interactions between the participants of the art process.

Let us take, for example, one such crucial stage which, in the XV century, was marked by the emergence of a new and revolutionary visual art production technique: oil painting. This stage was connected to radical transformations of visual art, the result of which was not only art’s secularisation and acquisition of new social functions but also the formation of an entirely new infrastructure of production and distribution of artistic works and the birth of the art market.

Another key advancement without which contemporary art as we know it would not exist happened at the very beginning of the XIX century when the discovery of sodium thiosulfate and its ability to dissolve silver salt brought about a major breakthrough in visual art. The development of photographic fixer – apart from stabilizing a photo image on silver plates – managed to establish chemical photography as a legitimate visual medium.

Although it was photography which started the turbulent chain reaction in the evolution of visual art, it had to wait more than 150 years before it was recognized as an art form. Thus, for example, only almost an entire century later, in 1930, did the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) first begin collecting modern photographs, and it took another ten years before the department of photography was established. But even then, another fifty years were needed before photography was finally granted its contemporary art status along with traditional painting, sculpture and graphic arts and was recognised even by the more conservative art institutions and the market. It is telling that, for example, Metropolitan Museum did not have a department of photography until as late as 1992.

By the 1960s, while photography was still fighting for its spot under the sun, the processes it brought into motion had already transformed visual art to the point where everything was ready for the new principal change, for the transition to the next state of matter for the visual substance – for it to become gas, visual steam.

By this time, Marcel Duchamp had already staged his artistic-scientific experiment featuring three one-meter-long threads falling from a height of one meter (3 Standard Stoppages), which turned accident into a standard.

John Cage had already read his lecture “Indeterminacy” and turned ambiguity into a concept.

And Wolf Vostell had already turned on his first television set in the installation German Viewfrom the Black Room cycle, and electromagnetic waves became part of the visual.

The only thing that was still missing was one last impetus.

And now, in 1967, riding the Fluxus wave and thanks to the Japanese economic miracle, electronic technology in the form of a Porta-Pak CV-2400 Video Rover burst into visual art and gave birth to video art.

Porta-Pak CV-2400 — a brainchild of Sony — was the first «portable» video system which could be carried by one person. (Sony would later play an integral role in the formation of video art. But this is a separate topic about the role major technology corporations play in the development of visual art.)

Regardless, the birth of video art became a gamechanger that gave visual art what it had long been striving towards but could not obtain until this moment – the context of time.

Instead of the traditional three dimensions the artist could now operate with four. Visual art now became what our friends the physicists call ‘spacetime’. As the term suggests, there is no longer an ‘and’ between space and time, now they are as inseparable as they are spelled. Then our physicist friends termed all physical things that occur in spacetime – everything that makes up spacetime, that is – ‘events’. Thus, if visual art became a spacetime continuum, the works that comprise it became events. Specifically, events which no longer separate time and space.

This radical transformation of a work of visual art from an object into an event requires no less radical changes in the entire system of interactions between the participants of the artistic process.

With the development of electronic technologies, the emergence of personal computers and the birth of internet, the new four-dimensional visual art was given a virtually unlimited number of instruments.

New Media came to supplant video art and with them came powerful institutional support. Media art has its own extensive network of educational institutions, research and academic programs, foundations, residencies, festivals, and exhibition platforms.

But even though media art was wholeheartedly recognized and admitted into the art practices and discourse, the mainstream market for contemporary art was not particularly enthusiastic in its reception of this cardinal transformation of visual art.

Instead of adapting to the new conditions, the contemporary art market has mostly been ignoring and avoiding difficulties connected to media art, often only imitating their involvement in the process. Thus, even third-rate galleries rarely miss a chance to include a performance in an exhibition opening or to have a video monitor as part of the exposition. But the reason for these inclusions is often the simple wish to mark the exhibition as topical as well as to entertain and amuse the audience.

The galleries and art dealers who really do try to work with media art tend to rely on the same outdated strategies as while selling, say, traditional art prints or photographs. They exploit the very questionable – especially in relation to electronic media – notion of an original work of art and will artificially limit its distribution, number the editions, and inflate the price imitating the ‘uniqueness’ of the copy being sold. Essentially, they are simply trying turn an intangible four-dimensional work into something resembling an object. But this does not work with every piece of media art, and what this system does is force artists to adjust, to hold back, and to produce something ‘backward compatible’. For example, it has become extremely popular to turn everything into documentations, photographs or at the very least one-channel video that is easily compatible with existing household technology and is closer to the familiar format of traditional cinema. Thus, it is films that are often being sold under the umbrella of new media. But as the art market lacks its own structure of communication with the cinema viewer, it is forced to utilize a foreign market infrastructure that is both well developed and advanced but ill-suited for art sales.

It is understandable that having to deal with ‘events’ instead of static ‘objects’ and having to promote ‘experiences’ instead of ‘artefacts’ will break the accepted and polished schemes that have been structuring the art industry or make them ineffective.

A well-known art dealer said that art that requires an electric socket makes collectors nervous. And occasional exceptions aside this is the actual state of things. But the main problem does not lie with the collectors or their weak nerves or their extreme dislike of new media; it is the act of approaching new art with old standard that is fraught with problems, the main of which being the fact that a traditional archiver/curator/collector will find variable media to be too fragile, vulnerable, and impermanent. It is obvious that only big museums or the few collectors who are true heroic media art enthusiasts can afford to buy ephemeral art in the hopes that they will find a way to preserve their purchase.

To solve the problem of media art storage, museums, foundations, private initiatives start research programs, networks dedicated to the conservation of electronic cultural heritage, organize symposia, develop methods and strategies of storage and restoration but so far, the overall problem remains.

There are multiple known standard methods of storing media art. These are:

1. Stockpiling. Simple storage of the original format of a given work.
2. Migration. Renewal, switching from an old format and equipment to the new. For example, transferring the contents of an outdated VHS cassette onto a newer (but now also outdated) DVD disk. 
3. Emulation. Using a new device to re-create the working conditions of the original equipment in order to use the original recording or software as necessary for the piece of media art in question.

But none of these methods offer a storage solution for the ‘live’, or performative elements of a work. In addition, all these methods are very labour-intensive and demand constant care and attention from qualified professionals. Thus, for example, storing data entails regularly copying it from one disk onto another as well as making constant backups or relying on cloud-based storage services to avoid data loss due to a defective carrier. (This is regarding the ‘uniqueness’ and ‘originality’ of digital media. Its storage alone will involve making multiple dozens if not hundreds of backups.) Not to mention such a complicated method as emulation, which requires serious input of many high-class programmers and engineers.

Their complexity, high price point, and the need for constant professional support makes these methods ineffective or even barely realisable for a small private collection or even an artist trying to preserve their own work. This means that if a work of art does not become part of a collection of a large museum or an art institute within its lifetime, it is most likely destined to disappear.

However, the work of art might not even be save in large institutions, as none of the above methods can guarantee its preservation. A media work that has been recorded onto a video cassette, computer hard drive or a CD cannot be conserved, placed under a glass hood, or hidden in a dark room. Because the next time you might decide to take it out, there is a good chance you will not find equipment that will play it. Moreover, information carrier and their reading devices also age and deteriorate, and, even worse, they become morally outdated. Sooner or later, the moment will come when it is no longer possible to replace the burnt graphics card or to repair the broken cathode ray tube television set which was released in 1963 by a factory that has long been closed.

But there is more…

What becomes of the data itself? Apart from the fact that data is stored as magnetically charged particles 10 nanometres is size, which can crumble or demagnetize, it is also bound to a specific file format and to software that is needed to decode and play it, both of which are regularly updated and outdated.

JPG, TIF, PNG, MP3, MP4, AEP, MOV, PDF, AVI, WAV – the list is endless.

Different formats require different programs, and some formats can no longer be read or decoded.

And now we are beginning to empathize with the collector who starts to nervously sweat at the sight of a plugged-in work.

We are obviously at an impasse. Any attempts to approach the preservation of the new four-dimensional work using traditional methodology and strategies are doomed to fail. So how can a media art work survive?

First radical ideas on the topic were raised in the end of the 1990s when Joh Ippolite, publicist and curator of the Guggenheim Art Museum, started developing the concept of variable media, and Richard Rinehart, the director and curator of the Samek Art Museum of the Bucknell University, introduced his system for formal recoding of ‘scores’ of media art, Media Art Notation System. Both systems are based on a completely new for visual art idea of the possibility of a re-interpretation of a work of art. Basically, instead of senselessly trying to preserve the artefact in its ‘original’ form, one should focus on the preservation of the main idea behind the work of art and lay down the rules of its future recreation taking into the account the changing external circumstances and technology. Thus, to show Nam June Paik’s installation TV Garden– which used live plants and television sets – today, one need not hope to revive those same palm trees Paik used when he first presented his work or to find those exact tube TV sets. It is enough to determine the key, most important conceptual, aesthetic, functional elements with which the author had endowed his work and to realize them using the means available to us today.

Of course, this is not an easy task. There are many questions that need answers. How do we know what the artist was trying to say and what was important to them? It is necessary to establish a clear line of communication between the artist and those responsible for the re-interpretation of their work.

Richard Rinehart suggested building a system of communication based on the example of musical notation, drawing a parallel between new media art and music and musical notation.

Indeed, the invisible connection between music and new media had long been noticed and even outlined by the term ‘time-based art’. The nature of the new visual art is similar to that of music. Firstly, they share the time aspect that is at the base of their physical existence; then there is their ephemerality, their performative nature, their variability. This closeness allows us to view the problems connected to new visual art through the musical prism. We can study the survival strategies of music, which due to its qualities was initially destined to transience and ephemeral existence. Perhaps, we can turn to these strategies in the fight for the survival of the new visual art.

Music is a virus!.. Its main survival strategy is maximum proliferation by the way of conquering an increasing number of organisms. The more hosts a musical piece will find, the better its chances for survival. The more listeners it has – listeners who caught it, becoming its hosts, its performers – the more likely it is that the piece, melody, song can survive more than one generation of its carriers, even in the case of a complete absence of any recording media or means to store acoustic information. This aspect of music is especially evident with folk or pop music. But regardless of the genre, style, or elitism of music, this is the foundational strategy of all and any practical survival methods of a musical piece.

Method one:

Independence from media, flexibility, plasticity, and mutability. Although each musical piece might traditionally be bound to a specific instrument or a way it is performed, it still allows for experimentation when it comes to its orchestration. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 will remain Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 regardless of whether it is being played by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra or hummed in the shower.

Method two, logically inferred from the first:

Distinction between the Author and the Interpreter. Because interpretation is the only natural expressive medium of music, the interpreter/performer is elevated to the level of creator. A musical piece requires no conservation or mummification to survive. It is reborn with each new performance. Indisputably, this is a winning strategy, as it allows a musical work to be adapted and, therefore, to be adequately received in various historical or cultural settings.

Method three:

Special system of notation which ensures the efficacy of the first two methods – musical notation is a universal system of communication between the author and the musician. A series of important qualities which make it an effective asset in the fight for survival of a musical piece are:

1. its ability to accurately document the author’s vision and its subtleties;
2. its flexibility, which grants the interpreter a fair share of creative freedom;
3. its resilience against the changing external circumstances and independence from recording media and instruments

So, medial independence, distinction between the author and the interpreter, and musical notation. These methods are natural and effective when it comes to music, but how can they be applied to new visual art?

When it comes to the artistic process, it is the changing nature of art which dictates its new rules and organisational methods. Artists, curators, collectors have long (perhaps intuitively rather than voluntarily, and not very articulately) been relying on these same ‘musical’ methods when it comes to solving the problems connected with the exhibition, storing and communications of the new visual art.

Medial independence

Artists working with new media are used to the fact that the format of their works may change, as do its dimensions and even ‘technique’ depending on the conditions of its presentation, lack or availability of equipment, levels of light available and size of the exhibition space, neighbouring works of art and so forth. For example, a video installation could be shown using screens and a video projector on one occasion and using video monitors on another. One could build a ‘black box’ or darken the entire room, but if the equipment allows it, one can simply forgo the dark room. One might use speakers and sound boosters or sound cancelling headphones. The size of the screen can vary, as can the resolution of the image, the distance at which the projectors are installed and the method of their installation, and so on, and so on…

This type of medial independence is still mostly perceived as a necessary evil one needs to either accept or try to fight. But I am beginning to think that medial independence must become the new logical and natural standard in visual art, a powerful instrument and a new expressive medium in the hands of an artist as well as an indispensable and necessary element in the survival strategy of the new visual art.

Notation

Working with new media most often means having to combine in one work multiple components, technologies, and materials, which in return means having to involve at least a few people in the production and the installation of the work: author, curator, fundraiser, programmer, operator, technician. For such an operation to succeed, a well-established and clear communication system between all the participants is necessary. Without a standard methodology to describe works of media art, this problem is placed on the shoulders of the artist, who will need to find how to communicate their ideas, describe the work and write an instruction manual. There is an abundance of different writings, blueprints, essentially ‘scores’ of media works that were produced by the artists themselves. These singular and unique notes can be culturally and historically valuable on their own and can even serve to illuminate the creative process of their author. However, the lack of a universal notation system will in most cases lead to misunderstandings, wrongful interpretations and, sometimes, to undesirable results that have few things in common with the artist’s original idea. And when it comes to the preservation of a media work, the situation can be even more grave. Imprecise or incomplete description can, in the worst-case scenario, lead to a complete and irreversible loss of the work.

The creation of a truly universal notation system for visual works of art is, of course, an extraordinarily difficult task that cannot be accomplished in a day. But at the same time, I do not think that it needs to take centuries, as it was the case with the evolution of musical notation. Thus, only a few decades were needed for the first and primitive programming languages of the 1950s to become advanced and complex, structured, and object-oriented. And modern computer languages are developed within only a couple of years. The aforementioned Media Art Notation System of Richard Rinehart is based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML) which is an established standard and is universally used to develop and describe computer programs. And the special survey Variable Media Questionnaire (http://variablemediaquestionnaire.net/), created by the Variable Media initiative, systematizes and classifies information necessary for a comprehensive description of a media work.

However, for such pioneering initiatives to become a universally accepted standard, it is necessary for curators, archivers, collectors and, most importantly, artists to fully grasp the problem and the necessity of solving it.

Distinction between the Author and the Interpreter

This method, which is strategically important and absolutely indispensable for the survival of a musical piece, can at first glance seem controversial and perhaps almost inapplicable to the field of visual art. Unlike musicians, who divide themselves into composers and performers but still manage to coexist, egocentric artists-creators will find the very idea of a stranger intruding into the Holiest of Holies – a master’s creation – blasphemous. The cult of singularity and inimitability of a work of art and the originality and recognisability of a master’s ‘handwriting’ is at least partially justified when it comes to traditional art practices. But when it comes to variable media, performances, multicomponent multimedia installations and digital technologies, such an approach becomes, at the very least, counterproductive.

To support the life cycle of a work of media art, to adapt it to the new exhibition conditions, to maintain and to restore it, one must make decisions that go beyond mere technicalities and can cardinally change the author’s original intent and affect the work in general.

Of course, it would be nice to have the original author perform or directly supervise these tasks to avoid unwanted conceptual and aesthetic distortions and to prevent potential corruption of the works’ meanings. However, this is not possible. An author cannot remain bound to their works forever, and whenever they are, for whatever reason, unavailable, the only authority we can turn to will be a curator or art historian, technical staff, or someone else who will now have to accept the risks and mediate the author’s work. The risk lies in the fact that a possible lack of relevant experience, professional qualification or artistic sense, or a simple misinterpretation of the author’s intent can lead to catastrophic consequences and render the work unrecognisable. This unpleasant situation is aggravated by the fact that although the author has no control over the process and the final result, they will remain fully accountable for their work to the audience.

This problem can be solved by an introduction of a new participant of the artistic process – a professional artist-interpreter who would become the missing link between the author and the viewer. The art industry has long had in its arsenal an entire army of potential contenders for this job – the ‘invisible’ assistants to the artists, who for the time being remain in the shadows.

To lead today’s assistants into the spotlight and turn them into artists-interpreters, we need to wholly reconsider their role in the entire artistic process. The tendency to legitimise assistants as autonomous and rightful participants of the process of creation – despite the resistance from the traditionalists – is already somewhat noticeable. It is becoming increasingly common for artists not to produce their work themselves and to fully entrust their assistants or professional companies with this part of the process instead. This can be the artists’ conceptional position or it can also be connected to the complexities of the technological process necessary to produce their work. But in any case, this practice is gaining traction, and the names of the works’ actual makers or manufacturing companies can be found in catalogues or on exhibition labels with increasing frequency.

Here, one might remember Sol LeWitt, whose wall drawings were quite publicly drafted and painted by different teams of painters-assistants, who even continued doing so after the artist’s passing.

Or let us look at Damien Hirst, for example, who is perhaps the biggest champion of the legitimization of the labour performed by his assistants. When discussing a series of his paintings of colourful spots, he once said: "The spots I painted are shite… The best person who ever painted spots for me was Rachel [Howard]. She's brilliant. The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel."

Another prime example of this tendency is Marina Abramović. During her big MoMA retrospective, her performances, which, as it would seem, are inseparable from the artist herself, were executed by forty-one specially trained actors. As such, not only did her performances receive a life of their own, they will now be able to survive for many years in the future.

So, as we can see, the main strategies and methods for survival and proliferation of a work that are common in the field of music are also available to new visual art. What could not be exhibited, sold, and stored using traditional methods can have a chance to survive.

Radical changes that visual art continually undergoes will inevitably force the entire artistic field to adopt the new rules and conditions, and sooner or later the entire system will adjust and start working like clockwork. Then the new media will stop being new. They will become a commodity which a lay consumer will be happy to buy for their living room or nursery. That is when we will see the visual substance transition to the next state of matter.

Previously, when discussing different states of matter, we only mentioned three. But there is a fourth one: a mystical and mysterious state in which electrons driven mad by high energy leave their nuclei and turn the substance into the substance of stars – into plasma… The best is yet to come!

Maxim Tyminko, 2014

English translation by Lara Perski, 2017