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Another Day
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Another Day
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Translator II: Grower
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Translator II: Grower
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I think I got IKEA’d: Finish Fetish, Code, and Culture
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Maquilápolis
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Maquilápolis
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Buscando el sol
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Musical Kettle
Curatorship Opening: Dissidences. Non places & Device Art (first disagreement)
Documentary // MAQUILAPOLIS
Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre
We are both artists who believe that art can and does participate in a cultural dialogue concerning social change and justice. Our work is informed by our own hybrid lives: Vicky is a U.S. citizen who grew up in four countries and six cities, including Mexico City. Sergio is a U.S. and Mexican citizen who was raised in Tijuana and migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area as an adult. Our work on Maquilapolis is part of our ongoing investigations into biculturalism, migration, gender, and labor. We began the project in 2000, by inviting factory workers in Tijuana and community organizations in Mexico and the U.S. to join us in creating a film that depicts globalization through the eyes of the women who live on its leading edge. The factory workers who appear in the resulting film, Maquilapolis [city of factories], have been involved in every stage of production, from planning to shooting, from scripting to outreach. We wanted to engage in a collaborative process that would break with the traditional documentary practice of dropping into a location, shooting and leaving with the “goods,” which would only repeat the pattern of the maquiladora itself. We sought to merge art making with community development and to ensure that the film’s voice would be truly that of its subjects. While films rarely effect measurable, concrete changes in the world, they are powerful tools: they open minds and create dialogue, and are necessary precursors to and ingredients of action. One of our great pleasures has been to watch Maquilapolis open up new realms of thought, emotion and experience for audiences, just as the process of making the film opened our own minds and hearts. We hope that through this film and discussion guide viewers come to understand their own intimate relation with Tijuana, with Carmen, Lourdes and other maquiladora workers. We hope that people on both sides of the production/consumption equation begin to recognize each other as global citizens rather than simply as consumers and producers. We hope that people will understand that NAFTA-style treaties do not benefit the many but the few, and that one way to combat them is to support causes like those of the Chilpancingo Collective, CITTAC and the NGOs that organize to question and to resist the dark side of globalization. We hope that you will be inspired to action, so that the work of women like Carmen and Lourdes can lead to even greater changes for the better, in Tijuana and around the world.
Interactive installation // ANOTHER DAY
I create as I speak I have always considered myself merely a reader of texts. The pre-existing text can be anything that I can treat as a score: a diary, a plan, an old photo, a footpath, sheet music, etc. The reading can take the form of a performance, a sculpture, a photo, or a video. Thus, a musical score may result in a sculpture, and a travelogue in a video, or the plans for a flying machine in a photo. Therefore, in my artworks, what looks like invention is but re-enactment, and what seems to be exploration is but walking in someone else’s footsteps. However, not unlike a musician playing from a score, or an actor performing from a play –the pre-existence of a text does not preclude passion, enthusiasm, humor and new meanings. Reading is a creative and free act. Being a reader, don’t I have more in common with the public than with the author? It is that commonality that I find inspiring in working with pre-existing materials. This was the basis of most of my work throughout the nineties. I am still working from this heart felt premise. However, I see my role extending beyond being a private reader, and into someone who invites viewers to join in. The result of this shift is the reassertion of a contract between the artwork and its public. This contract stipulates that the works are here for them (you). You must give to receive; the work needs you: even if it is just a penny, a wish, a silent recitation, or the consent in the copying of one of your keys. In this regard, Another Day (3 monitors), 2003 was modeled after arrival and departure displays from airports and train stations. It tracks the sunrise for 90 cities around the world. The chosen cities are evenly spaced along every fourth meridian. The display counts down to the next sunrise. When the sun rises on the top city on the list, the countdown pauses, then the top city disappears and the list is updated.
Robotic piece // TRANSLATOR II: GROWER
My works are designed to heighten people’s awareness of the social space they share – as well as the uniqueness of their moment within it. The forms I create are inspired by innovations in mobile, sustainable, and modular architecture and by generative art processes. I’ve long been fascinated by spaces such as Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House, that are designed to be mechanically shifted and/or transmuted on-the-fly in order to accommodate different functions, needs, and/or inhabitants. These designs inspired me to begin creating interactive, machine-based installations capable of ‘reading’ their environment through sensor arrays and responding by altering sonic, lighting, and or physical elements within. My installations may sense levels of activity, the scale of space, and/or the movement of people and in return, they provide a visual record of life in that space. Their record(s) amplify any evidence of change in the space –whether the change may be rapid and transitory, or more gradual or evolutionary in nature. My interest is in defining new ways in which generative and responsive environments might provide useful or poignant information to a community. An example of this type of work I’ve created is Translator II: Grower, 2004-6 (v2). This work is a small ‘rover’ vehicle that navigates around the periphery of a room. It hugs the room’s walls and responds to the carbon dioxide levels in the air by drawing varying heights of ‘grass’ on the walls in green ink. The Grower robot receives carbon dioxide (CO2) readings via a wireless signal transmitted from a CO2 sensor mounted in the space. The number of people in that location breathing in oxygen and exhaling CO2 has an immediate effect on the sensor. My robot takes a reading of the CO2 level every few seconds and in response it draws a vertical line in green ink on the wall. The line height pertains directly to the level of CO2 (and therefore also the people traffic) in the space. The more CO2, the higher the line is drawn. Once Grower completes a line, it moves forward several millimeters and repeats the process. The end of an exhibition covers the bases of the walls in the space covered with fine green lines that together resemble a cross-section of a field of grass. The metaphoric vision then, is that grass needs CO2 in nature to grow. Here, my simulated grass needs the breath of human visitors in order to thrive. The height of the ‘grass’ directly reflects on the human activity or traffic in the space. The more people that visit that space, the more amenable that space is to my machine’s ability to create. This piece therefore makes visible how art institutions depend on their visitors to make them ‘healthy’ spaces for new art to evolve and flourish within.
Installation // I THINK I GOT IKEA’D: Finish Fetish, Code and Culture
I THINK I GOT IKEA’D: Finish Fetish, Code, and Culture, along with the Step and Repeat Cycles: Location, Media, Remix Series, continue a sixteen-year investigation into techniques, mechanisms, and systems related to and implied or implicated by technology to comment upon the effects that our increasingly consuming, digitally-driven, speed culture has on society at large. A recurring theme in much of this work is that efficiency and expediency do not necessarily translate into better conditions, at least not without something being lost (or forsaken) in translation. In addition, the projects seek to show how the profit-driven accounting ledgers of corporate driven tastes, as culturally determined through consumer culture, are reflected in “created” desires, wants, and needs, and, how media and technology are complicit in the global trend of “flat-packing” cultural identity. This recent work draws considerably from my interests, research, and investigations into: 1) Locative media, ubiquitous and pervasive computing as cultural software, 2) automation and variability, 3) game theory, determinism and generative processes, 4) remote-media based authoring and publishing. The conceptually layered new media artworks seek to chronicle the ironies, displacements, shifting values, economies and systems: the transformations of “site-location” and most poignantly, one’s own identity, sense of place and purpose in translation.
Installation // Anemophilous formula for computer art
Owen Mundy and Joelle Dietrick often collaborate while developing individual bodies of work. Although their collaborations consider a variety of topics, the artworks typically encourage and often engage the involvement of non-traditional art audiences. Like Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art, many of our projects consider new understandings of place. Inspired by Jim Campbell’s Formula for Computer Art and Tallahassee’s annual sea of tree pollen, Owen Mundy and Joelle Dietrick created a generative animation referencing new forms of cross-pollination and re-use. Intentionally meditative and aesthetically pleasing, the format parodies computer art that simply crunches numbers to create useless forms. The diligently recorded data of the National Allergy Board guides the animation down a predictable path and stands in stark contrast to the chaos of everyday life. The project calls into question our obsession with mapping nature, as if grasping its sublimity would be essential to finding lifelong satisfaction.
DEVICE ART
Installation // MUSICAL KETTLE
Musical Kettle is about contributing to the design of daily domestic noises formed by alarms, mobile phones, doorbells, and so on. In terms of Suzuki, not enough thought has been given to the noises that we produce. The musical kettle is a part of series that re-design our soundscape. As the kettle boils it whistles your favorite tune.
Interactive Installation // FLYER PAPER PIANO
Flypaper piano repurposes common household flypaper as musical notation to create a chance composition. An array of sensors on a player piano interprets the body of each dead fly as a single musical note. Depending on the relative position of the fly on the paper, a corresponding key on a toy piano is struck. Each individual life is reduced to a single musical note to create an open-ended melody. The music changes and evolves as flies accumulate on the paper. It is a self-recording musical machine. The melody is choreographed by the passage of time and the chance landing of flies. A system is set up but a gap is left for the environment to step in. But Flypaper Piano is more than an experiment in open forms of music. It explores the paradoxical nature of childhood, where playfulness and sadism often coexist. It acts as a metaphor for the implicit violence within the domestic sphere where different systems of control are reinforced. The home is the place where pests are regularly exterminated and children are disciplined. Flypaper Piano is a system where cruelty and entertainment, poverty and excess, function and absurdity are simultaneously at play. It is an emotional and metaphorical science experiment, an idiosyncratic machine evoking a child’s perspective on death, poised between comedy and pathos.
Object // SOVIET ORACLE
The Soviet Oracle of all times
By the half of the 20th century, during the aerospace race, Soviet engineers developed a series of small crystal tubes containing gas and displaying Arabic numerals by means of orange and pink neon discharges. This clock is a tribute to those engineers and to the electric poetry they carried out in their time. This instrument’s crystal bulbs were hidden in small cardboard boxes for half a century. Now, they come alive, abducted from their time, thanks to modern technology circuits. We are displaying a random time clock configured as a small oracle in which a couple of controls allow us to program the direction, the progress and the ceasing of a time counter connected to a generator of arbitrary formulae derived from a source of chaos. If the instrument were continuously interrogated for two thousand years, it would most likely turn into a sort of Soviet oracle.
Robotic piece // SEARCHING FOR THE SUN (Euphorbia fotomotriz)
This work consists of robotic vegetables –succulent, pertaining to the nomad family– characterized by their hybrid nature, halfway along a vegetable and a machine. This species are the product of evolution and adaptation to surroundings transformed by human activity. We deal with an organism that has developed a locomotive system of survival to reach for solar lighting. Its locomotive system invests it with the ability of remaining in illuminated territories, constantly escaping from the shadows. This allows it to expand the usage of solar energy, which the organism seizes through organic and inorganic leaves, in order to complete its photovoltaic and photosynthetic processes –feeding both vegetative and locomotive systems. By modifying the anatomical condition of leaves, stems and/or roots, this species has managed to maintain reservoirs that allow it to survive in nearly inhabitable environments. The need to adapt to low solar lighting has forced some succulent species to modify their constitutive nature, thus converging with other vegetable species of the nomad family. Their relation to human surroundings taints the evolution of these strange creatures.
Artists:
Sabrina Raaf, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Carlos Rosas, Vicky Funari, Sergio De la Torre, Joelle Dietrick, Owen Mundy, Yuri Suzuki, Nova Jiang, Ariel Guzikand Gilberto Esparza
Curatorship:
Machiko Kusaharaand Eduardo Navas
- Oct 1, 2009
