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COLLETTE
GAITER
"SPACE | R A C E, 2000"
SPACE | R A C E explores the 1960s as the zenith of mass-mediated
events in the U.S. The work looks at the U.S. space program
and the civil rights movement from 1961––when John
Kennedy declared the initiative to go to the moon––to
1969 when astronauts planted the U.S. flag on the moon. Holding
up concurrent events in the two parallel, but divergent, initiatives
provides an opportunity to examine alternative beliefs and values
around shared public experiences. We did not all understand
these events in exactly the same way, even though that is what
historians tells us.
Gaiter believes that a persistent mythological idea of U.S.
society was born during these years, as a result of these two
missions. She is interested in how these two huge societal events
were motivated by existing mythology about our national character
and how they subsequently changed "the master narrative" of
U.S. culture.
Her objective is to create environments (the computer piece
and text) that allow for paradox and ambiguity. Media representations
have separated the civil rights movement and space program along
racial lines, and condensed them into simplistic images and
sound bites, ignoring the symbiotic and complex relationship
between these stories. Combining images, sound, video, text,
animation, and interactivity, the work encourages audiences
to examine the relationships between facts, perceptions, mythology,
and reality as presented in mass media.
Listen to an audio sample
Read an article about this piece by the artist:
http://eserver.org/bs/33/gaiter.html
LEAH GILLIAM
"Split: Whiteness, Retrofuturism, Omega Man, 1998
"
"Welcome to the end of the world." Split is a cd-rom
project that investigates the science fiction-film's unique
relationship to representation, racial classification,
and allegory. The cornerstone of the project is a reading
of Boris Sagal's 1971 film Omega Man, a dystopian
thriller that chronicles a post-holocaust Los Angeles
plagued by a family of diseased, "white" vampires.
A web-like collage of fact and fiction, Split explores
images of racial and sexual difference in the science
fiction genre. Subtitled Whiteness, Retrofuturism,
Omega Man, it uses digital processing and image manipulation
to revise texts that are futuristic in scope but retrogressive
in world view. For example pills, drug company advertisements,
and other metaphors of disease highlight the criminality
of difference in the film Omega Man, while a high
contrast palette emphasizes the fixity of race across
the novel Ape and Essence (Aldous Huxley, 1949)
and the Planet of the Apes film series.
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TANA
HARGEST
"Bitter Nigger, Inc., 2001 "
Using the different mediating forces of the pharmaceutical,
entertainment, and consumer culture (with the art world
as a subculture within the latter), Hargest humorously
illustrates how the construction of racism operates within
contemporary culture. She points out that in the global
economy, corporate structures are not so different from
art world structures. How do we navigate daily, mundane
racism as we work within these structures and they continue
to act upon us? Hargest is interested in exploring these
ideas beyond an interactive viewer experience into the
performance realm.
Artist’s Statement:
Chairwoman’s Letter
Tana R. Hargest
Chairwoman of the Board
and Chief Executive Officer
To Our Potential Shareholders:
For Bitter Nigger, Inc. and our investors, 2000 proved
to be an extraordinary year. We expanded our cultural
intervention mission in three exciting areas; Bitter Nigger
Pharmaceutical, Bitter Nigger Product Division and The
Bitter Nigger Broadcast Network.
Much of Bitter Nigger, Inc.’s success is attributable
to our increased focus on doing what we do best: discovering,
developing, and bringing to market innovative cultural
interventions to save, protect, and enhance lives. Since
I became CEO in 1997, we have divested all of our non-cultural
intervention businesses, including in 1998 all of the
businesses that had been part of our Art Career/Art Star
Group. Despite these divestitures, in the last eight months,
Bitter Nigger’s ideas have doubled, viewer investment
in Bitter Nigger, Inc. has more than tripled, and the
value of our relevancy stock has grown eightfold.
We created Bitter Nigger, Inc. to fill the void in the
contemporary art market. Bitter Nigger, Inc. provides
fresh ideas in the arena of political art and illustrates
the changing perception of African-American cultural production.
Through our packaging of concepts as consumable products
we have increased the relevancy of art for viewers beyond
the art world.
The road we have mapped out for ourselves is exciting.
With careful planning and a focus on creativity we endeavor
to deliver the highest quality cultural interventions
available. |
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PAMELA
JENNINGS
"Solitaire: dream journal, 1996 "
Jennings suggests that the narrative structures of non-Western
cultures offer languages compatible with the sophistication
of new Western technologies. Specifically, she articulates
the idea that the theories and processes of African oral
literature provide a suitable foundation for such a narrative
model. Solitaire: dream journal mixes the metaphor
of the game board and the book. Solitaire takes
the user through what its designer describes as a haunting
journey in quest of peace with oneself and connection
with others. A three-dimensional solitaire game is the
engine that moves the player through the journal.
The solitaire board is designed as a tetrahedron (a three-faced
pyramid), whose triangular sides correspond to the themes
of melancholy, flight, and balance. A move made on one
side of the tetrahedron randomly opens up a chapter of
the three corresponding "books": "the book of melancholy,"
"the book of flight," or "the book of balance." The idea
is to see how many pages you can access. The better your
strategy, the more chapters you will be able to enter
and explore. These chapters (windows) provide a way for
Solitaire to place you in several contexts at the
same time. In the game, your identity is the sum of your
distributed presence. Solitaire is a document of
self–discovery––the documentation of Jennings’
narrative with a player’s credits creates an aesthetic
of recovery that unfolds dense layers of heterogeneous
material culled from personal and popular memory. Mathematical
and statistical "facts" are not presented objectively
or subjectively, but rather, are presented in a conceptual
manner in which the player becomes involved in a thick
discursive text.
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ART
JONES
"#FFFFFF, 2000"
The third "album" in a series
of interactive cd-roms, #FFFFFF is a non-linear
collage/essay about the reception aesthetics of pixels,
and other elements, including subliminal information and
digitalized/racialized bodies on the verge of the "biotech
age". Cut-and-paste aesthetics determine the user interface,
the content of each "song" and perhaps the experience
of the user. |
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LOS
CYBRIDS: LA RAZA TECHNO-CRITICA
"Los Cybrids Portfolio,
2000 "
A junta of polyethnic cultural diggers of the Latino sort
dedicated to the critique of cyber-cultural negotiation
via artistic activity, Los Cybrids: La Raza Techno-Crìtica
are three artists exploring cultural and somatic mutations
caused by the implosion of advanced information technology.
Amid the tensions of the fast-paced mythologies of the
Information Age, Los Cybrids have emerged to challenge
notions that purport a friction-free market, a one-world
community, and global access at our fingertips. Los Cybrids
employ performance, burla, and high-tech art to undermine
the uncritical, passive acceptance of the overarching
social, cultural and environmental consequences of Information
Technologies.
A "Cybrid" is a Latino digi-tech artist from an ethnic
demographic disproportionately under-represented in the
cyberworld. They function as a collaborative artistic
group that performatively counters the hyperbolic discourse
around "cyberspace." As a junta, they instigate a critical
dialogue around access and desire in cyber-culture, considering
multiple issues of economic equality, cultural transformation,
social reorganization, educational imperatives, and environmental
impact.
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KEITH PIPER
"TRANSFORMER: Tracing the Automaton’s Bloodline,
2001 "
With this piece Piper explores the evolving fascination
with the automated being or "automaton", as it appears
and re-appears in its three principal forms: the robot,
the android, and the cyborg. Piper parallels the robot
as unit of labor that mines the harsh alien landscape
in response to remote commands until its power cells exhaust
the body of an enslaved African. The piece also investigates
robot entities as controlled "helpers" who can potentially
run amok as monsters. Piper makes a clear metaphorical
connection between the robot and perceptions of the visible
racial "other" that pervade contemporary culture.
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DONALD
RODNEY
"Donald Rodney AUTOICON, 2001 "
AUTOICON is
a dynamic artwork that simulates both the physical presence
and elements of the creative personality of the artist
Donald Rodney who––after initiating the project––died
from sickle-cell anemia in March 1998. It builds on Rodney’s
artistic practice in his later years, when he increasingly
began to delegate key roles in the organization and production
of his artwork. Referring to this working process, AUTOICON
is developed by a close group of friends and artists (ironically
described as "Donald Rodney plc") who have acted as an
advisory and editorial board in the artist's absence,
and who specified the rules by which the 'automated' aspects
of the project operate.
This cd-rom in parallel to the Internet version (http://www.iniva.org/autoicon)
is automated by programmed rule-sets and works to continually
maintain creative output. Users will encounter a "live"
presence through a "body" of data (which refers to the
mass of medical data produced on the human body), be able
to engage in simulated dialogue (derived from interviews
and memories), and in turn affect an auto-generative montage-machine
that assembles images collected from the user's hard-drive
(rather like a sketchbook of ideas in flux). Through AUTOICON
participants can generate new work in the spirit of Rodney's
art practice as well as offer a challenge to and critique
of the idea of monolithic creativity. In this way, the
project draws attention to current ideas around human-machine
assemblages, dis-embodied exchange, and deferred authorship––and
raises timely questions over digital creativity, ethics,
and memorial.
**Authorship as follows:
Software written by Adrian Ward (adrian@signwave.co.uk).
Produced by Geoff Cox & Mike Phillips, STAR (Science Technology
Arts Research, University of Plymouth), inIVA (Institute
of International Visual Arts) and Signwave, with support
from the Arts Council of England (New Media Fund). With
contributions from Eddie Chambers, Richard Hylton, Angelika
Koechert, Virginia Nimarkoh, Keith Piper, Gary Stewart
& Diane Symons.
Images courtesy of the estate of Donald Rodney.
URL:
http://www.iniva.org/autoicon
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