Session 20 MIT 4.370 Interrogative Design Workshop

so thank you for coming to this evening's event public fantasy Judith Barry one of our senior fellows here at the center for advanced visual studies we at MIT and locals welcome you Judith thank you for coming Judith has been an outstanding feminist Voyer media productionist sounding board Evangelical media artist and participant writer bookmaker traveler and architect I can't say enough good things about the input that Judith has given me personally over my own artistic career born in Columbus Ohio she's been everywhere in fact I usually see Judith in far-flung cities not where she lives echo in the shadow of the city Vampira is an exod ition piece that I saw many years ago and I'm always reminded of even in my current production it's also true that many of the things Judith has said over the years appears in the writings of others later and I'm surprised but somehow we all remember Judith when she first said when she talked about the interactivity as a primal ingredient of art production and spatial construction and identity so with no further Ado I'd like to welcome uh Judith thank you for coming hi um well I want to thank Julia for that great introduction and also thank Cavs Lissa and Meg for having me here as a senior fellow can you hear me yeah okay I can't turn off the lights oh um not yet just a second um you'll have plenty of chance to sit in the dark um what I'm going to do tonight is to just give you an overview of my work as an artist as juliia mentioned I've been working for a really long time and I have a lot of different projects so what I decided to do for tonight is excerpt from a number of types of Works rather than giving you much of an overview about any kind of work and I think for those of you who are students in the audience it's always really good to know what people's day jobs are and have been how they've developed through different moments in their career because I think that's the kind of thing that often you want to take away from one of these sorts of talks so I will be mentioning those things when I when I'm talking I began as an architect and now now you can turn off the lights um I began as an architect and um lucky for me but you know probably not so so lucky if you're pursuing an architecture career when I was first out of architecture school I got a job at Skidmore Owings and Marl and almost immediately was laid off and that propelled me back into school and this I'm I'm talking about 1977 or so and I went back to school at the San Francisco art institute and also began taking classes in University of California at Berkeley in the rhetoric Department which just happened to be the place where all of postmodernity and postmodern thinking was funneling through the United States through people like uh Jean France leotar through Raymond bour through chrisan Mets through dareda uh Fuko etc etc and it was completely an accident and completely by chance that I happened to be there at that time but being there at that time in San Francisco really framed um my thinking and the kind of work that I was doing and one of the first kinds of work that I started doing was performance art because when I was going to art school this again this is 1977 everybody in art school was a performance artist and Joan was one of the most famous performance artists of all and one of the few women who were actually working in performance art and I remember seeing your performance at aing lton Street I think in 1976 I don't know if you remember that but I but I remember because it was a very compelling moment so I became interested in performance art and I also saw performance and the performative as a way of presenting certain kinds of ideas and at this particular time in performance art it was transitioning out of performance using the body or about the body so particularly into other forms of media because we're at the end of the 1970s when questions around video and how video is being used in the art world first come into play and so what you're looking at here is my actual very first performance and it was done at aing Lon Street in 1978 I believe and what I did trying to make use of my architecture because I I've never wanted to give anything up or let anything go is I built out this room at aing lton Street in such a way that it housed a 2,000 pound or 2000 yeah 2,000 PB trough of sand that went horizontally across the room and the screen that you see are projecting stories called from women's lives it was a time when questions about identity and the performative in terms of identity for those of you familiar with Judith Butler it's it's the notion that we all perform our identities differently and construct them differently every day so on these three screens I had all of these different stories of women's lives and then in front of that I was performing using a piece of wire mesh and I was turning that wire mesh MH into different sculptures almost like sculptural gesture drawings using them you know one minute setups with a pose another one minute setup with a pose etc etc for about 20 minutes until at one point after about 10 minutes this is backwards but I hung up this the um screen and made a hammock out of it and then at a certain point in the performance I pulled the screen thread that held the sand in place and all the sand dumped down on me and that's kind of Midway through the performance and that's the end and then in True Performance fashion because Al also these things you know they're events and they were one night only and so about the last thing you wanted to do this took two weeks to build about the last thing you want to do is clean it up so I left it up for a week or so until the next performance artist came in and transformed the space and so this became known as a performance installation and I think I think you did that with your work to too then too but you know the whole idea of performance installation which the art world seems to think just happened a year ago is has been around for a very long time at any rate um this performance led to several other performances where I also was exploring questions of media and I'm not going to go into them in very great detail but I did one that took place over two weeks at the San Francisco art institute in a show called motion the women's performance Collective and it basically dealt with soap oper themes in particular the pleasure associated with performing as an evil character and in this particular case it was sort of scenes from a relationship um and I would change the order of eight scenes over the course of this twoe period so it was very you know soap opera derived and these are just some shots of it and the audience for this was located in the center and the performance took place all around them and I used a lot of slides and video and and stuff like that um this is another shot from it where people are sleeping but they're sleeping against the wall um ultimately this became a video and similarly in another space llama Mel I did another performance called cup couch which explored the relationship between metaphor and M metomic again I was trying to apply what I was learning in graduate school to questions around the performative and again the audience was situated in the center of the room and the media took place all around and I'm also just mentioning this just to remind people that media and art have been around for a very long time at any rate what happened to me in terms of performance was that it was pretty clear to me by the end of the 1980s that I wasn't going to be able to be a performance orst because it was kind of over in the sense of of getting people to fund things or or even having people um invite me to do things I kind of had missed that particular moment in the art world and the art world I think is is and Julia and Joan and Joe and other people may disagree with me but I think the art world is very periodized by what it will support and what it won't support So as a young artist and you know trying to get out of school I immediately switched into making videotapes and um while I was making that switch and also trying to come to terms with my interest in film Theory what became known as academic feminism and also questions about architecture that that were still circulating in my uh thinking I started to make videotapes but meanwhile I also had to have a job one of those horrible things um and so my job after I got laid off was to design party spaces for big corporations and what you're looking at is San Francisco it in the 1980s excuse me and it it's an old hanger or kind of warehouse space that coca colola took over and that went from this space to this space and little did I know as an extremely young person that it would be the biggest budget I ever had because you think oh this will just continue forever um and of course it didn't um but this this space was built to to become a party space for a 2hour party that Coca-Cola was having for its bottlers in San Francisco and for those of you who are architecture architecture trained if you decoded this you would see that I was very very influenced by the work of um Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi in particular they were my very big heroes in architecture school and I was particularly affected by learning from Las Vegas because I decided that how I would manage this space which was basically a corridor with food was I would make this um series of of uh kind of disney-esque eating huts and you would be able to eat your way through the ethnic history of San Francisco and so this is pretty much um all that cocacola agreed to however because I was in school and because I was extremely naive and and perhaps it was a good thing I was also trying to to have an effect on the corporate world and so I kept proposing well why don't we do something that's more historically accurate about what happened when Coca-Cola gained hemony worldwide and so these are some drawings I made about when Coca-Cola came to Japan and the Coca-Cola dispenser replaces the refrigerator I mean they were meant to be also humorous I thought I could use irony and humor in the corporate world more successfully than I was able to do this is China where um the changing room has a Coca-Cola dispenser next to it and this is the only one that they did do which unfortunately I don't have any shots of but the one thing that they did go for was just was a Hut basically made out of recycled Coca-Cola cans that would allow us also to dump garbage because at a party with 4,000 people in 2 hours and they're only allowed to drink Coke there's no place for garbage and nobody wanted to have garbage cans around and that kind of thing and so we made a moat and made the Hut out of recycled Coca-Cola cans and we featured avocado and sprouts and all of this stuff we're in 1980 now we featured all of this and that was of new to the people who were attending the party because they were mostly from the Midwest so um this project I published quite a bit because also in architecture as those of you in architecture know in architecture we have a long tradition of publishing and that's Al often been negatively viewed as paper architecture however in the art World Young Artists tend not to publish nearly as much and for me this project was quite useful because I published it so much that finally curators saw it and that did lead to to further projects I'm going to show you um two more architecture projects and I should also mention that for me when I was in architecture school I was thinking about how or what is architecture and I think that question is still very much um both needs to be asked in architecture and very much is asked in most architecture programs as and I I know it's asked here at MIT and when I decided architecture was for me was actually the representation in built space of our social relations and you can see in that formulation some of the traces of my history or my interest at the time which were Marxism questions about feminism questions about social relations questions about how people use space and also how all of these codes or these uh different forms of conceiving space actually impact the built world and I've pretty much even today still refer to that Trope when I'm thinking about architecture Visa V space at any rate in 1980 after um the Coca-Cola piece Lyn hman who's a very well-known artist from San Francisco had a museum that she called The Floating Museum and it was an alternative space essentially with no permanent space and she asked me to do a project at a shopping mall that was going out of business in Silicon Valley and this shopping mall didn't have a um a nean Marcus it had a pennies and the owner of the shopping mall thought if we only could bring High art here maybe the rich people would shop here it was as you can imagine a pretty silly idea but nonetheless for me it was a great launching pad to do a project and again I referred a lot to the work of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi in the parking lot I proposed that we make an alternative kind of Museum out of the shopping mall and I called it display Museum of signs and in the windows I wanted to have a kind of changing Panorama of what this Museum would be and it was kind of up to the shopkeepers to to make those decisions I was also basing this very much on Notions about the memory Theater which I was very interested in at the time and continueed to be interested in which is a way of reading images and inputting architecture into your mind in order to remember things as well as a way of encoding information and so I used this concept of the memory theater in conceiving of um of this Museum and if you wanted to read about that Francis Yates is still the best um person and her book is called the art of memory anyway at the at the center of this um shopping mall I located the map and this is you know very typical of a California shopping mall and this was a map that would describe how the museum worked and functioned what you could do in this Museum and again you know this was totally meant as an imaginary construct and additionally I was playing with all kinds of things that had to do with questions about Marxism and psychoanalysis such as trying to get the shop owners to collaborate on the construction of their displays instead of competing setting up things within the shop so that you would actually have um strange Notions about what you desired and what you didn't desire and why and so it was kind of a treasure hunt and in the center is kind of where I located the main part of this you can also see that this was a very expensive project because it would have cost them a lot of money to actually go to all the trouble of Designing and building building all these things and then the final thing I wanted to do with the project was to make a labeling Center so you could so the the entire or at least one store would be under deconstruction Allah Dara and so you know this is you know many ways a graduate project but still it it um was very important to me and it fueled a lot of different research projects and of course like all of these sorts of projects it was not done surprise um but what I decided to do remember I'm the person who doesn't like to lose anything was I decided to write an article about it which I called casual imagination and I also made a videotape because I had spent so much time in the shopping mall making friends with all these people and doing all these studies that I decided Well how can I make use of this contact and how can I make something out of this so I made a single Channel video called casual Shopper which um you can go ahead and put that in well actually let me just set it up first because I'm I'm going to try not to talk over my work which is something new for me um but what the video was about was it took off from a very important article that was written by Laura mvy in 1975 it was called visual pleasure and narrative Cinema and in that article she's writing as a feminist and also as a film theoretician she's asking the question how come in mainstream film when the woman comes on the screen the action stops there's a kiss an interlude or something but virtually nothing happens then the kiss is over and the narrative resumes and something happens etc etc so I thought what would happen if I made a film where when the woman came on the screen something happened and when the man came on he disappeared and so that's really the kind of logic that underscores this film and I decided to make it about shopping because shopping is such an interesting Trope of 20th century culture and it has such a long history if you think about Walter Benjamine and the Flor I thought about this female character as a kind of fluse so you can you can start it and this is about about a 7 minute clip from this um film oh okay uh oh is it playing no okay good cuz if it's playing then we probably missed the clip you know for the for the um the film we need to turn the light off can we do that okay the that light because it'll it'll really make it um an already very old VHS look even worse and it has sound p you can turn it up just oh just looking n for e I should also say that it's not this yellow we didn't have a chance to do a tech rehearsal so it's um usually more um color balanced um one of the things you'll notice is that um she kind of becomes a sort of um in becoming a female Fen um she kind of becomes a sort of stalker because she follows him or tries to find him in an imaginary way throughout the shopping mall and when I made this this is 1980 obviously the notion of the stalker wasn't so much a part of popular culture but now um as one of my students pointed out when I showed this recently at a film school she would probably be arrested so again that question of like whether or not there can be such a thing as a female fleno following along from Walter Benjamin's Flor is um still up for grabs I guess anyway you can stop this um thanks um so I made a lot of single Channel videos and after this after this one and this this is about 30 minutes long and it's right on that edge of it being excruciating or not and in order to understand the context I also want to mention that at the time experimental film was still around um in the in the sense of experimental film is the way Peter Wen meant it when he wrote the article to Avant guards where many in quotes avantgard artists such as Peter Cabela Michael snow Hollis Frampton and so on were experimenting with the image track but they were not making narrative and I was playing with a notion of introducing a little bit of narrative and also reintroducing questions that had been also abolished from avagard film which had to do do with questions of pleasure and I wanted to make this film that was both pleasurable and unpleasurable so I'm mously and if that's that's probably more than you want to know about this particular period but it's a very important period to understand if you're looking at the history of US avantgard Film from say the 70s up through the mid 80s as I said I made a number of these uh videotapes and for the most part I found the practice of making them extremely unsatisfactory a lot of which had to do with the viewing conventions in museums often often times when your work was shown in a museum if you were lucky enough to be invited to show your work was shown in a room that was in a hallway next to the bathroom by the cafeteria etc etc so nobody ever really got a chance to see your work look very good and I BEC I became increasingly frustrated with being known as a video artist in quotes and also with with the viewing conventions and so I took a brief detour um into MTV and I'm going to show you MTV starts at in 1982 as some of you most of you are way too young to know this but um it did and I was um a producer there for a while during its early days before it was bought by Time Warner when it actually was very artist friendly and there were many many artists who were Affiliated in one way or another and the interesting thing about MTV at the time was that it was trying to rethink what is television it had no idea what it wanted to be when it first began it was you know started by two very young boys who like to have fun and so there was about four or five years where it was actually fun and you could try lots of experiments and um I'm not going to go into that now but one of the things that we did try was um I made a number of very very very short films of which this one is one so if you can put in number two but you should turn the light out for first please because it's very short I think it's 10 seconds so and I I like really short things although I hardly ever get to do them but I the okay stop the tape please very very sharp but we were really experimenting with content and you know that advertising the stuff between programming or the programming the stuff between the advertisements and so forth anyway when it was bought by Time Warner uh the party was over and um I was fired um but not before I got to make a of music videos which were also another kind of dead end and I'm going to show you one of those and it's too bad that we can't turn up the sound um because it really is about the music but um during the early 1980s was the beginning of of the um music video business when some people got enormous budgets other people never did some people got enormous budgets some of the time and um I uh conformed to the latter one but I'm going to show you one of the first ones I did because it was actually for no money with Sonic Youth and Richard Kern called Death Valley 69 so you can play that and I made probably around a hundred music videos um over the over about 10 years all yeah Val the I I you so I had to together yes yes yes I love this now okay you can stop the table um anyway that led to um as I said I made a lot of music videos and um they that also became increasingly corporatized and even more exploitative of artists labor than the art world was so around 198 two when I was beginning to do all these music videos and also making all these single Channel vide tapes I started to think about the coming back more into the art world as an artist and for me it was a a moment of Crisis because I was very dissatisfied with the viewing conventions that I mentioned and also increasingly even in 1982 dissatisfied with a world of popular culture since it wasn't really turning out as I had hoped so I began to think about what my I do that would combine all of my interests I was interested in performance I was still interested in architecture I had half of a PhD from UC Berkeley and film Theory feminism and other madeup things which I knew would be useless in terms of actually getting a job so I thought H the art world that doesn't look so bad and actually I think the art world is a place still where you can try things out and experiment and there aren't that many other places in in US culture anywhere where that's possible possible so I began to propose um actuallyy you should put in tape number four I began to propose this VD this um video installation film um installation called in the shadow of the city Vampira that Julia was mentioning in her introduction and I tried to combine all of my interests in one project and soon as it comes on um I will um tell you about it um it was a very simple very low Tech project it used two slides on each side of a screen that bisected a room and in those two slides which dissolved continuously I projected two film loops and I made the space here you can see the setup and those are the film loops and the little proje projections and then the slides are in the back and I made it so that you could see the whole thing in a minute because obviously one of the problems of viewing video in a gallery is that no one is going to come and spend a half an hour they really want a quick hit and at the time in the art world what was around was a lot of painting and by the way this is not yellow it's um actually kind of pink um at any rate so I wanted to make something that you could actually see get in and out in maybe 15 seconds if that's all you all you wanted to spend and actually have some idea of what you were seeing and so that was sort of the brief in terms of like an architectural brief of what I was trying to do the subject matter came from my reading of Jean Louie bodri AR's notion of the kind of subjectivity that you and I and everyone performs when they're in front of the television set and in his reading which is very very pessimistic we all become schizophrenics in front of the screen and so I decided in the title using the notion of them vampire the vampire to propose another way of understanding our insatiable hunger for images and that's with a vampire and so I kind of wrote this um I I thought it was funny anyway article about this vampiric subject who has a sensationable hunger for images and who consumes images at of acious pace and and wanders the city etc etc um and so that became the title of the piece and how the piece actually functioned is that because when you look at a Hollywood film you're used to getting something called narrative closure in other words you look for the beginning and the middle and the end in the film how this piece functioned was that you watched it and watched the different slides changing in relationship to the film Loops all the while looking for this narrative closure and what would actually happen to you as a viewer as you wandered around was that you would actually never get this narrative closure but it would excite your desire for it and so this piece sort of kept you circling around it in this as a kind of anxious form of subjectivity um can you stop the tape for a second and then what I'm going to do now is um so that was my big breakthrough piece for me I mean it um doesn't seem like that much when you you know when I talk about it but for me it was a very big deal because I had solved some of these problems that I was trying to solve the other thing that I really wanted to do at this point in in uh in the art world was I really wanted to use the art world to explore issues that I was interested in so by this time I had already decided something else which as an artist is not the best solution to make but it was the one that I made at the time and that was not to have a signature style so that each of my projects comes out of a research methodology meaning I'll have an idea about something I'm interested in exploring and then both the form and the content come from that and obviously in an art World which has become increasingly corporate and we're in the kind of height of a corporate art world right now at least in New York City this doesn't necessarily serve you very well as an artist but it has let me have a fairly interesting practice as an artist because it's let me follow my own interests and go where they take me rather than having to make product or the same thing so the collector can can show his friend and say oh I have one of those oh I have one of those so but I wouldn't I have to say and if somebody wants to ask me about this we can talk about this later I wouldn't necessarily recommend this as a solution it's just what I did um not that it's not too late um it's never too late to change but anyway so the the projects that I'm going to show you now very very quickly in video form are different experiments that take up different issues and for each one I generally as I said do research I often write an article or two which I publish and then I do the artwork and the artwork may have several different parameters like it may be film or video it might be a book it might be an an architecture installation or an exhibition design there's a whole part of my practice which um I'm not going to show you at all tonight where I did a lot of exhibition designs as an art arti so if you ever see my CV you'll see a lot of those mentioned I have to say that in that one area me being an exibition designer as an artist the art world had a very hard time accepting that it was always like huh what what are what was your role in this because I had crossed that imaginary divide between the Artist as artist and the museum side of the Artist as curator or exhibition designer but nonetheless I made a number of these and I really enjoyed making these exhibition designs like the Coca-Cola one I showed you where the project of um display excuse me display Museum of signs because it actually let me try out in real space stuff that I couldn't try out in my own work and so I found this very fruitful as well as i' I very much enjoyed working with the curators and designing these exhibitions and a lot of them were themed in relationship to questions of new technology or new things that were happening in popular culture such as Zen culture and I had brought slides of one of those to show but I I think we're going to run out of time so I'm not going to show you those but just remember that that's um another part of my Pro my project at any rate um can you start the tape again after um in the shadow of the city I made a number of pieces that were like in the shadow of the city sort of but with different sets of conditions and by 1987 when I was invited to be in the Whitney by bi anual with an installation I had been been in as a single Channel artist I was um up against the fact that the technology that I was using to make super r film had died and so I was if I wanted to do something with projection which I did I was forced to use video and I began to think about what I could do using video given the fact that I was offered two choices I was offered the bathroom and I was off also offered the stairs and since Kenny sharf had the bathroom to years before me and had done a great job I decided no bathroom stairs and then I decided okay what can I do and so when I did is I decided that to use um a piece that I had been collecting information for which is was called first and third which was immigrant stories of people who were coming to New York with their expectations and what you're looking at here is a clip tape that I've made to try to get grants and so every time I show first and third and the other there's seven other pieces in this series I use an architectural reference for the projection but anyway what the piece did is it actually projected on the stairwell at the Whitney Museum these different immigrant stories which I collected using a documentary methodology and then I edited them down to about one to two minute sound bites so that they were deliverable by an actor who was hired and paid to deliver them in one single te take and they're giant heads that are projected and I projected them on the side of the Tate modern in London in 1991 um on on many different buildings around the world you should turn that one down yeah because and on glass brick I mean every kind of projection surface that I can find I project can you turn it down yeah thanks um so so after doing the first one of these which is called first okay um it's just I can't it's hard for me to talk over it um if you want to read these stories some of them are collected in October magazine 1995 I believe in a piece called not reconciled at any rate um so you can you know so what I did is I explored like how I could use the projector where I could project etc etc meanwhile I found these projects to be quite interesting and as I mentioned earlier I've done about seven of them right now I'm working on a set of stories in Cairo using women from um from corillian women and we're going to do something um with them I hope as soon as I I can get back there as soon as the political tensions ease a little bit uh and with these stories and each time I do them in KIRO they're about lives of middle class lives um in Cairo I've done them in Corsica can you stop the tape please um in Corsica I've done them about um the fact that there's no 20th century culture in Corsica there's only 18th century agrarianism and then tourism culture from the 20th century but nothing in between in rdam I did them about the kinds of housing projects that were built in rdam after Rotterdam was bombed and so forth and so on but the thing about the stories that's uh the most interesting to me is that as an artist you become a kind of facilitator and you can disappear or or get away a little bit from that kind of aour ship or your name having to be attached to everything in quite the same way as it always has to be in the art world and I find that very liberating and I also very much enjoy working with the different groups of people who've contacted me to do these kinds of stories they're not exactly agit prop and they're not speak outs they're much more longer term stories about real social conditions that usually don't change very quickly so they're not for example issue oriented they're they're much more um about deeper cultural issues um you can start you can start the tape again and this is another one I think um from the same time period yeah this is this is another outdoor one that I did in um actually in um in London in 19 1991 where I I projected outside on the um in a kiosk in a in a um in a um in the Hammersmith tube stop as it was being renovated the other thing I like about um these stories and and every so often um what's called city of culture projects also provide this is that sometimes when a cultural project works with infrastructure questions and urban issue questions an artwork can function in a very different way and one project that I'm not going to show you but I'll just talk about it was a project that I did in uh also around this time in Glasgow when Glasgow was city of culture and the project actually used um historical footage from Glasgow contrasted with all the ship plans and architecture drawings that had been done to produce the kind of Glorious industrial past of Glasgow and how the city of Glasgow working in conjunction with a lot of artists use this is they were able to attract a lot of media attention which directly led to Glasgow becoming the financial capital of Western Great Britain or Northern Great Britain I mean so that the unemployment rate which was 44% when Glasgow was city of culture three years later had dropped to 21% so it was a very big change um the next couple of projects I'm going to show you are uh very short experiments and for a while I did a lot of experiments in public space because there was a kind of log rest in the in the end of the 1980s where there was a lot of money for artists and Architects too to do projects in public space and this one was done in um for the opening of a building in Midtown Manhattan and it was called um the name of my project was called U Maelstrom Max laughs and it looked at the history of computing and computer Graphics in relation to the kinds of social positions that the computer sets up and it's about a two-minute Loop that you're meant to walk on and for those of you I know that there's I've discovered that there's not much Graphics at in MIT but um if anybody is a graphics person in the audience the amount of time that we spent making this two-minute Loop was probably about 9 months of of very expensive high-end time and now you could do this in a half an hour practically on your home computer so you know the computer is really trickled down but what the piece um tried to do is have you walk on this floor and as you walked on the floor you decoded what was happening underneath your feet and it's usually installed as a corridor piece and then also it tried to take you on a ride using motion control technology and so in the mid of this this is a Mac animation from Circa 1988 but the next thing that comes up is um symbolic 3D animation Circ in 1988 which took about 6 months to build and it's about you know 30 seconds long and it was just you know a major nightmare of a 3D animation to try to produce and yet you know nowadays you could do it in 3D Studio Max and you know a heartbeat so um you know it's kind of a you know very different landscape that we're that we're looking at now but it was you know kind of interesting to try to to play play with those is issues I guess it already I think we I think I chopped it out in this particular version um oh no here here it comes so just you know just this is where it starts it's and you can see it's very clunky uh from 1988 and then um but if you think of you know the computational time I was trying to show in a kind of materialist Cinema way all uh Jean Luke Gard in his materialist Cinema phase um kind of how the computer works together in with motion control to to create new illusions of space so that was it and that took six months um at any rate so there's um there's this piece and then there's another piece that I did for a big group show the opening of the Caesar P buildings um down in the financial district in um in lower Manhattan also in 1988 which is another little animation which also took I don't think it took quite as much time it took maybe 3 weeks of Fairly serious um editing but it was designed to to question the notion of public space in the financial district in relationship to who uses public space why there is no public space at this particular time in New York we had an enormous homeless population many of whom were camped out out in front of um mayor dkin who was the mayor of New York um at the time they were camped out in front of City Hall and it was a a huge huge problem of course later on when Giuliani took over he busted them out of the city so the homeless people kind of disappeared and they're not they're not really um so evident even though we have even greater numbers of homeless people in New York City than we we did back then um this is various installations of this piece it's um with all of my pieces that are site specific especially I try to find homes for them in other installations because they are very expensive to make and I think it's kind of wasteful just to to do them only once so what I tend to do is I tend to um redo them or or design them again into other spaces and so you're looking at another another version of um of this piece which is called Adam's wish but the clip is going to come on in a second yeah here it is and it starts off um with a worker being bored in the Caesar P space and then he yawns and when he yawns he basically ingests the world and he flies into the sky and then a number of things happen and again it's you know it's it's very much a cartoon of a a certain sense of of public space and so here here he is in the cistin chapel and then there are all these different ways that he flies through space and you know different kind of historical moments in the construction of space until he falls into a line drawing of Donald Trump's um Trump Tower in Manhattan which you see there and then into City Hall and he has a number of costume changes which as you can see is the homeless part and then he looks around and he can't find another space to be and so he actually decides that corporate space isn't so bad and the subtext of this in fact was the notion that a lot of corporate space which we often think of as public space when it's been divied away or bargained away for air rights is in fact actually private space and so that was sort of the central question um that this piece was was trying to ask um can you stop that tap tape now I'm going to switch to some more recent work um when you put in tape number six I think I'm going to talk for like 10 more minutes is that okay because I know I've been talking a long time so yeah okay um so I'll show you three more U pieces and I'll give you the URL for this um uh well maybe we'll show show that too just for a minute okay you can can start the tape um I'm I'm not going to show the sound with this and I'm going to um excerpt these um as hopefully you can kind of tell I really do like to experiment and um in 19 I think it was 1993 or 19 yeah 1993 I was given as a gift um a lot a lot a lot like a kind of truck full of side illuminated fiber optics and those are the kind of fiber optics that are fully capable of projecting sound and video and it was s you know somebody called me up from California and said I'm getting I'm going out of business do you want all this stuff and and I thought of you Julia um when I got this phone call and I said sure and so on my doorstep arrived you know tons and tons and tons of side illuminated fiber optics and so then the question of was what can I do with them and I was had been invited to into several um big site specific installations which as I mentioned earlier at the end of the 80s there was actually quite big budgets for me anyway and and many artists to make site specific works and so what you're looking at is an exploded ceiling that I made out of fiber optics for this place in antor called the Muka when Anor was city of culture and what happens is that the people on the floor are reading a glossery which is the history of antor in relationship to Smart materials and Magic um antor has a long alchemical tradition and while they're sitting there reading they're also occasionally hearing their own voices circulating back through speakers that are hidden into in this room and so at the time 1993 this whole this piece was kind of mesmerizing in the sense that you could actually sit on the floor for those of you who haven't been to the Muka it's an extremely C building it's made out of concrete there was no Cafe at the time Etc so it became you know a place where people really like to sit you can stop that tape um actually can you turn the light on because I can't see my own notes can you put in tape number eight so there's those kinds of pieces and I you know because I had all these fiber optics I felt compelled to use them and I must have made seven or eight of these pieces most of which are in storage sadly um because the tech on it was just too heavy for most collectors to to deal with um lately I've been making and and now we're kind of more into the present I've been trying to make simpler video pieces that in invoke spaciality in some way and this is a piece called voice off which is probably the most popular piece I've made simply because it only uses two video projectors um many of my other pieces use N9 or 10 or eight or six or something like that and the brief for this project was to try to make something that showed how the voice might be visualized it was a show for for initially for a show called voice off and so I decided to Stage it as two different sides of the same listening condition and on one side you have these characters you can turn up the sound a little bit here because it'll be clearer you have these characters who are in this kind of miasmic space which is literally a catalog of all the ways that sound affects you when you speak and you know when you're speaking you're not you're you're really possessed by the act of speaking or singing or you find yourself singing a song that you've heard from someone else or you find yourself hearing fragments from a movie that you've just seen etc etc so that side represented all the way The Voice could possess you on the other side I decided in order to really stage this that I needed to have somebody listening and being affected by listening and so on this side I had a guy who was working in his office and briefly what happens is he kind of is Driven Crazy by all the noise he hears on the other side of the screen and so he actually breaks through the wall into the other side of this room but by the the time he gets there of course there's nothing there so you as a viewer are left wondering was he crazy was there really something there what's this about and so forth and so on and so this piece actually has a secret screen that you can pass through as a viewer in the screen of the two sides of the projection it's like one wall with projections on either side you can you can stop the tape um can you put in tape number nine please and again I'm going I'm just kind of giving you the briefest outline of of some of these but they'll just give you a better sense for you know what my work is about and also should mention that I um really do do a lot of book projects and and graphic projects often for shows where there's nobody no budget for video um oh actually um I guess I don't want to oh yeah yeah I'll talk about this why not this yeah these will be the last two that I'll talk about I forgot about this piece um this is what you're looking at too I should uh mention is video documentation so please don't think what you saw tonight has anything to do with what the work really looks like but um in in 1997 I was invited to be part of a border project called Insight which happens every few years and this is one of the pieces I I did for them in 1997 and it's an interesting project because it's right on the border between Tijana and San Diego and you can see in the landscape the differences that are rought by infrastructure questions San Diego has all the water uana has no water the US is on one side San Diego looks like every other Southern California town it's very generic Tijana looks like Mexico and so what I did is I made a giant sign that was t-shaped and I projected different images and this this is um one of the long horizontal sides of the image and I tried to use the notion of water and this notion of the water how it's used in a kind of postcard graphic way to affect um what's actually projected can you can you actually fast forward in this I'll just talk through the screens a little bit um then I also used a water wipe um in oh play that sorry um I also used a water wipe and in this section which was a little imagine a capital T and then imagine laying the te on its side and that's in fact um how this functioned as a as a piece of sculpture it's about 15 feet by 15 feet on a side and it's 10 feet tall and usually I suspend it so it's floating in the space obviously I like it when it can be really really big um this is this the side where the Tijana side and the San Diego side cross and what I was interested in this piece was setting up these anical relationships between the use of the land in Tijana and the use of the land in San Diego and this happens to be the madora area of Tiana which is where large manufacturing plants have have erected their structures however they don't care anything about Landscaping it's just about working and getting the work out and so within that landscape or some very haunting pictures and so I tried to show how they Collide and actually when I was filming there was a big fire there so I happened to catch the you know the money shot which I was happy to do and can you fast forward to the the next one and then the next side are the sides that represent Tijana and I was very particular about not taking up a point of view in other words I wasn't trying to say San Diego is bad and Tiana is good good or or vice versa I really wanted people to really look at the landscape and make their their own opinion or form their own opinion and I try to do that as much as possible um in the pieces so this shows a crosswalk which is a certain kind of crosswalk that was invented in TJ and I decided to use dust wipes in order to take people through the landscape and can you fast forward to the next one and then this is the the Baja Coast which is an incredible Coast which where we all should have um vacation homes or trailers although they don't allow that anymore but this coast of course is being massively developed now and so I just um used a kind of Paintbrush effect to really um look at what's being projected for that landscape but it's exactly the same coast of course that fronts San Diego and yet on the Baja side it's um you know unspoiled and not developed etc etc but s L not for long okay can you fast forward to the next one okay and then this is a project is a this is a three 360 degree projection and this is hard to talk about and I don't have very good slides but I just um thought I would show it because it's so technologically complex and after all I'm at MIT so this is my my chance to talk about it if I you know if I can't talk about it here where can I talk about it and what it is it's it's a composite of four different stories that take place in that narrative um in the in the band which is the narrative center of the piece and the naked girl is projected and stretched in a in something that I called a leaning theater about 360 Degrees around you it's a it's an oval that's 7et by 10t and that's what it looks like in a very bad video um rendition where somebody's standing in the middle of the theater and you stand in the center and you actually can drive through the last five minutes in the lives of four characters who are dying and the characters are in various states of human machine robotic Etc so that um that's kind of what that piece is about um can you stop the tape and should we try to show this one I guess I is this is this hooked up and the last one I'm going to show you is a is a piece that I did actually here in Boston for the a right as they were fundraising for their um their new building that Diller and scaffido are designing and it's it's a piece called the museum you want and it asks you to play a 20 second a 20 Questions game where I collect data from you about the kind of digital or online Museum that you might find interesting and I think I made this piece in 19 no in 2002 or 2003 I can't remember but um it's been in quite a lot of uh festivals and so I have a very big database about what people want is it not showing up no oh well anyway you can visit it if you just Google the museum you want it'll come up and um I was going to show it but I guess it's not going to it doesn't show up at all cuz it's on my computer but um anyway it's a it's um it's designed by the same person who actually does the 22nd question I mean the the 20 question game I don't know if anybody's ever played that but um he's a uh his name is Robin burer and he's a Canadian programmer that I've been working with for a long time and we also have a children's game which is the 22nd children's game TW I mean 20 question children's game which um is a little kind of um device you can buy that lights up kind of like the old um uh what was that old ball that you that you you you shake in and you asking a question and it it's yeah yeah it was like it was it's based on that anyway so that's the end everybody should stretch thank you any questions comments J seems like there's a certain debate going on uh now around MIT and elsewhere about the prescriptive nature of some digital tools uh so that the software that we use often will permit certain things and not perm other and as one who's who's over number of years has been sort of at the Forefront of using technology to toward greater expression I wonder if you do have an opinion about about that aspect of of Technology yeah I mean I think that debate circulates a lot I mean I remember it in in um the early 90s when Photoshop became the when people were saying oh Photoshop is the greatest artist you know and that was do you remember that uh you know and you'd be on a panel and someone would actually say what do you think about the notion that photoshop is the greatest AR I mean I think that the answer to that is programming programming programming and in the in the early 90s there were a lot of artist programmers who like uh David Rockabye you know I think I think the us right now in terms of the Art Market it's just so incredibly corporate and there's not enough debate in the art World anyway about these issues I don't know how it is in the in architecture I mean I don't know whether people are talking about you know what would happen if you were actually writing programming languages that would allow you to do the things that you need to do because for almost all of my work when I take it to the next level when you want to get as they love to say in advertising out of the box you have to write program in order to get out of the box I mean it's not something that happens magically you know on the highend of video I work a lot in um with a discrete um logic products like Inferno Etc and that you know they come with plugins that you pay for but to make them do things that you haven't seen 2,000 times then you have to change the code because that's how you that's you know how it's written getting hold of that code because it's so propriety proprietorial and you know getting access to it is very difficult um but I I I still think that's the answer and you know a place like MIT has the opportunity to actually train people certainly in the Computing skills and you know hopefully in the graphic end of things to actually be able to do this so I mean it should be I think it should be happening at schools like MIT at R and and or rental a or whatever it's called you know even at UCLA in the architecture school I should be happening I don't know if it is but so but keep asking the question yeah I then again in that same vein once you do that and you you put in the the effort and the thought and and code something new it immediately becomes Common Place thereafter mhm well that's that's true of all graphic Solutions though I mean that's why you know for artists I mean I think you know they're only like working with projectors and with video they're only so you know you can you know you can make you could make a list of all the ways you can use the projector and what you can project on etc etc and it's going to be used up like that just like with certain tropes and advertising you know nobody uses morphs anymore you know you know if you see a morph it's like oh that's really tacky and you know even the um you know the um the camera arrays have also become a cliche where people are you know I when I'm ever at client meetings and sitting in on with somebody who's going to do a high-end commercial and somebody says oh let's do one of those you know Matrix shots and then you hear people groan so I think you know even on the highend things get used up I think as artists you have to be you have to think differently about some of these issues and and really try to make them have meaning which doesn't happen in the in the corporate world because you're never going to be able to be ahead of the curve and I can remember in 1981 which is when that first video I showed you came out casual Shopper at that time computer Graphics really weren't used very much in the art World computer editing had just come into being around 1978 79 and so artists really didn't have access to the means of technology so that little U video cost me and I was a student so it cost me my car and you know a lot of money but it was like you know $6,000 total was what I spent by 1982 which is only like a year and a half later I was hearing about artist video projects that had budgets of $100,000 and I just thought that was completely crazy so because of the whole computer graphic world had entered digital video had entered and people were beginning to want access to these tools and unfortunately even if facilities were willing to give you and you know a um a nighttime rate it still costs a lot of money so at that time you began to see artists thinking differently about this but also artists were realizing that this notion of being in the Forefront or the in quote Avant guard is something that's very debatable in terms of those old questions about the Avant guard in terms of the images that actually affect people's lives and you know I would say that for the most part artists do make images that affect people's lives but so do people working in advertising you know perhaps on a broader level but it's definitely a question that that comes up all the time yeah to build on that last comment about um being involved in helping well I'm actually I'm tilting you toward the helping part about your imagination and your um creativity and building environments have you thought of doing places spaces uh of in help in healing environments like hospitals or rehabs where there's many hundreds of hours that you have to physically go through pain and if you can be in a fun and creative environment then you know you are immersed in that so to speak and um and have you thought well nobody's ever invited me to do that so I have to say no but I'd be very interested if you have such a project because I think that would be a good you know public project to try to do I'm but I also would have to say at the same time that somebody's one person's idea of a comforting space is probably another person's idea of hell so you know I think it would have to be PR programmable to to have the environment change then you can have a menu or palette yeah yeah I mean in when when I was doing more um sort of crossover I guess I would call it commercial commercial artistic design and again this was the'80s in in New York City I did do a couple of restaurants that had environments that would change but they never really had the money to keep them up and running so they would they'd have like a three Monon shelf life and then something would break and then you know they might go out of business or something like that but you know I think there's a lot of possibilities for those kinds of environments just one more question maybe an open-ended one about just your your general listening to you said you recorded some of the comments in one installation in particular you just you mentioned and then you fed back so that people would hear their own voice and comments and you have I'm sure heard overheard but have you also recorded or can you share some of the um threedimensional experiential com comments well actually you know a lot of times I don't have you know have that luxury I mean you know I think people like to Delight in in the space in a spatial experience and even though you know it's a funny thing because we're so um I guess inundated with all these different kinds of spaces that we we I guess we're overstimulated all the time so if you can again this is something that the art world does that say going to the mall which is equally stimulating doesn't do very well because it's not trying to do that but you know I think the the difference is one of intent and so when people go into an art experience they're usually in a more contemplative mood so they're more willing to give themselves over whereas when you go into blooming Dales at Christmas time and you can't find the exit you're really pissed off even though that space has been very carefully orchestrated to exactly produce that effect of not being able to get out of the store and so you know I think it's one of intent but Judah thank you so much