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ANNA FRANTS VISIONARY DREAMS No. 3292–3296 UNIDENTIFIED OBJECTS

Anna Frants. VISIONARY DREAMS No. 3292–3296. UNIDENTIFIED OBJECTS Multimedia installation in Borey gallery halls. Supported by CYLAND Media Laboratory. December 21–30, 2021

What is “unidentified”? A city madman without identification? Any object of unusual shape? In fact, it could be anything about which we lack sufficient information.

According to Marcel Duchamp, an artist doesn’t necessarily need to create a work of art—they can simply choose an unidentified, unknown, found object, a readymade, and place it in the context of a museum or gallery, thus turning it into an objet d’art.

A character in a Soviet-era film says he’ll attach “a thing like this” to a readymade object, “and it will fly”—becoming an unidentified flying object, even if not in the shape of a saucer. Anna Frants, a new media artist, “attaches” electronic devices or “things” to readymade or repurposed objects. These objects might not take flight, but they will be ready to comprehend the cosmos and explore the chaos.

“Simple Pleasures.” Installation. Cinegraphs, robotics, mixed media. 2021, St. Petersburg. With support from the CYLAND Media Laboratory

Borey Gallery December 21 – 30, 2021

TECHNOLOGY OF THE CYBER-BEAUTY

The works of art can make a profound impression on us and we often are unable to explain why. We can appreciate art without thinking about it or fully understanding the reasons. Sigmund Freud in Moses of Michelangelo noticed that “the apparently paradoxical fact that precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unresolved riddles to our understanding. We admire them, we feel overawed by them, but we are unable to say what they represent to us.” Further, Freud suggested that our response to art has to be driven by a combination of an intellectual comprehension and an emotional attitude. We perceive art by engaging our senses, and strive to interpret its meaning given our past experiences and knowledge. What we feel and think is deeply personal, but at the same time it is influenced by the culture, socio-economic conditions, our education and the media. The balance between intellectual and emotional also depends on the form of the art. For example, when we encounter conceptual art, we need to understand the idea and the intent of the artist first and then respond to that idea emotionally and/or intellectually.

Computer-based art is often similar to conceptual art in its emphasis on the intellectual comprehension: a spectator needs to understand the artist’s intent. This understanding is even more crucial in the interactive projects, because how we respond depends on our ability to understand an artist’s idea and expectations. Cyberart is more challenging, because it relies on technology and media, which are less intuitive to us and novel in form. Another difficulty lies in the time dimension. Most traditional art objects are static: the colors and shapes are frozen in time. The audience undergoes the change; the painting and sculpture are timeless (if we discount effects of deterioration). Even art films, once edited and printed can be played again and again, repeating predetermined sequence of images.

The use of computers allows the artist and the audience to break away from this deterministic nature of traditional arts. While opening new possibilities for the artists, techno-centric nature of the cyberspace potentially deters the audience from emotional engagement. Cyberart may appear distant, cold and unfamiliar; without emotional clues anchoring viewer to his/her past experiences and memories; looking into cold substance behind the computer screen that (s)he cannot physically feel, smell or touch. The interactive nature of cyberart is not equivalent to a soma-somatic experience of real human touch, which is a one of the basic ways we learn about the world, starting from the childhood with “touch me” books with different textures. We “touch” the cyberart mostly through our cognitive engagement. The depth of our emotional response is related to the degree of abstractness in the idea behind the art project and to the artistic metaphor chosen for the communication of that idea. To illustrate this point let’s consider two projects dealing with a concept of “a passage of time.”

The first project is Fragile by Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima. Fragile is an abstract, digital, 3-dimentional “constellation,” every node of it is a tiny (a quarter- inch) LED linked by almost weightless silver rays. Displays show a sequence of numbers from 1 to 9 (apparently Miyajima never employs zero) and create a digital landscape of time. The landscape of these infinitely progressing numbers is Miyajima’s metaphor: “Everything changes. Everything keeps going on forever. Everything is interacted with each other.” This metaphor is not intuitive, because of the high level of the abstraction and the deep philosophical meaning of the concept itself–”infinite time”–and because there is no a unique experience, emotion or instinct associated for most of us with the progression of numbers. However, once the intent of the artist is revealed, we undoubtedly become overwhelmed by the experience of seeing Fragile time.

In the Sketch of a Field of Grass, American device artist and interaction designer Ryan Wolfe attempts to capture a moment in time, familiar, almost certainly, to all of us–a grass field suddenly coming alive with a turbulent breath of a wind gust. Wolfe ‘s interests are in “…isolating the definitive qualities of remembered experiences and reinterpreting them within the confines of a constructed object, essentially condensing the whole of a lived moment in time in refined, physical interpretation.” The “field” is a collection of small, sand filled boxes, each containing a few blades of artificial grass. Boxes are connected through a system of wires, resembling a web of roots. “Wind” is an electrical signal propagated through the network of computationally autonomous boxes. The diversity of grass responses creates an illusion of an invisible wind blowing over the landscape. While an eye only can see a symbolic, robotic grass plant, the mind perceives the ethereal wind. We can feel this wind independently of our knowledge about the technical details or concepts involved because we can recognize and respond to an emotional queue distilled though a simple, random grass movement.

The two projects illustrate how technology enables artists to find novel ways in conveying complex concepts and ideas. Every innovative work gives us a new glimpse into the infinitely-expanding art universe and teaches us to understand its creative vocabulary. When photography was invented in 1839, many did not recognize its artistic potential and saw just a mere reproduction of reality by mechanical devices, cold and soulless. It took decades before photography became widely accepted as an art form. Hopefully, we, as a society, are now further on the learning curve and can advance faster in understanding and appreciating the new art forms. The beauty will find its way into the mind and the heart of the beholder…

by Anna Frants, Lena Sokol

IS IT ALL QUIET ON THE CYBER FRONT?

The “Dada” exhibition opened in June at the Museum of Modern Art in New York with more than 400 objects in every medium existing at the beginning of the 20th Century. It was truly an international, cultural movement with artists organizing demonstrations, performances, and publishing art and literary journals. The Dadaists’ revolt against the traditional aesthetics and culture forever changed the Western cultural landscape and galvanized the new movements, including Surrealism and Pop Art. Ninety years have passed since the first gathering in the Cabaret Voltaire during which the artists, in Marcel Janco words, “began by shocking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order.”

    Different art movements came to life since then which have received much public attention or stirred controversy. But nothing came close to Dada in the real world or on the web. Why have the advances in technology and communications in the past few decades not fostered a new art movement rebelling against cultural and intellectual conformity at the turn of the 20th century? The past decade is characterized by the major wars in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The uncontrolled economic growth threatens the global environment. The gap between the rich and the poor is widening at an accelerating pace. In the age of the information superhighway, are there cyberartists challenging the prevailing order and breaking the cultural and social taboos? Undoubtedly, there are.
    The project by Brazilian artists Aloice Cristina Caetano, Cecila Noriko ito Saito and Martha C. Cruz Gabriel chooses the format of the video game to create collages from quotes about peace, which appear every time one of the toy solders makes a move. Cory Arcangel, named by New York magazine the Best Emerging Artist for 2005, created a number of projects such as Mig-29 fighter and clouds, Kurt Cobain’s Suicide Letter vs. Google AdSence, and Don’t Touch My Computer Home Users Guide with similar to Dada sensibilities set in contemporary themes and technologies. One can draw a parallel between Duchamp’s Fountain and the homemade animation Bomb Iraq, which Arcangel salvaged from a found computer at the Salvation Army store in Buffalo and displayed at Pace Wildenstein gallery.
    As in the Dadaist’s times, internet artists can come under public fire for opening up a Pandora’s Box of social taboos. In 2002, J.C.C.S., the designer of the Spanish public domain computer game Slaughter Cofrade was “formally accused by the Cristo del Gran Poder of violating section 525 of the penal code, which forbids any sort of ‘attack’ on religious dogma, beliefs, or ceremonies .” Other subjects, such as sex and prostitution, probably lost some notoriety and became more acceptable as a focus of the art projects. The Aphrodite shoes is a high-tech platform version of the prostitutes’ sandals from the times of antiquity, which would leave footprints with “Follow Me” signs. The contemporary version includes a built-in GPS receiver and emergency button. Shoes also are able to transmit their location via APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System). The Platforms panel discussion, which included both artists and university faculty, was able to elevate the project to a dignified academic level by touching on a number of big topics at the intersection of art, sex work, design and technology.
    These are just a few examples of the novel and innovative projects fueled by creative power of the new media artists. There are thousands of them around the world, which is far more technologically complex and information-overloaded compared to the times of Tzar and his friends at the Cabaret Voltaire. As New York magazine said in 2005, “The revolution in digital and internet technologies hasn’t had a major impact on art yet, but the geeks are hard at work.” The power of this impact will depend on the synergy between the original ideas, innovative implementations and creative ways to present and disseminate cyberarts. The success of contemporary digital artists promises the rise of new cyberart movements, which will, undoubtedly, produce the impact similar or even greater than Dadaism almost a century ago.

by Anna Frants, Elena Sokol

New York Arts Magazine (NYARTS) October 5, 2006