Archive for the ‘karialtmann’ Category

Monday, June 21st, 2010

In High Fives-Apple Fingerworks Multitouch Patents Sheet by Kari Altmann (a particular body of work within Altmann’s on-going No Glove, No Love meme), one views, at first glance anyway, a series of smeared, blood-colored handprints slapped to the surface of black & white printouts of x-y graphs each of which itself contains an orderly representation of both seemingly arbitrary numbers as well undecipherable technical language around a set of black streaks.

This direct indexical imprint of the biological body over the formal representation of abstracted, automatically copied technical data creates a collision between opposed iconographic elements (each instance of the series suggests either a paint-crazy toddler run amok with their older sibling’s physics homework or a 1980s corporate-office slasher film in which the maniac killer slices up a victim at the copy machine).

The title of the work–High Fives-Apple Fingerworks Multitouch Patents Sheet—points out for the viewer where to go from there.

Each of the diagrams over which the artist places her blood-colored handprint is, it turns out, the schematic diagram of a touchscreen computer technology (a touchscreen computer technology being, for example, the touch responsive interface of the Apple iPhone in which the user scrolls through a Web page by running their finger down the screen as opposed to employing an external device such as a mouse or keyboard to do so).

With this information in mind, one can, then, read the “black streaks” described above as themselves representations of handprints which are labeled with accompanying data.

As such, what one views here, then, is not a collision between the slapping of Altmann’s blood-red handprint over any old data, but rather over data representing the pressure exerted on the screen of a technology which is itself designed to be directly manipulated via pressure from the human hand.

It’s a “high five”—the physical trace of the artist’s handprint colliding with the copied and quantified representation of an anonymous user’s handprint over a touchscreen device.

What’s important to reiterate here is that the immediate impression of each of the iconographic elements colliding in the space of the image doesn’t favor either the technical representation of the handprint in the background nor the messy, bodily handprint in the foreground; rather each are roughly equivalent in graphic power.

This equivalency becomes a site of meaning in the work when one considers that as touchscreen technologies become increasingly mobile and responsive to the physics and ergonomic constraints of the human body in the physical world, they simultaneously become increasingly influential in directing the control of the human body towards the ubiquitous usage of these very technologies.

It’s great that the interface of the iPhone opens up possibilities for greater bodily freedom in the use of computer technologies, but is it great that this  interface also enables one to now spend all of their time checking things on the network through their phone, oblivious to their immediate physical environment?

Regarding this point, Altmann writes:

In High Fives the idea is to use red finger paint to represent fake blood, and provide a handprint on this map of flesh and touch interaction being controlled by the interface.  Resembling the handprints some of the earliest cave dwellers left as a mark of their civilization, this handprint in blood is a way of leaving a mark on the infrastructure being created by these systems of power and product–the virtual “cave” that technology often expects us to live in more and more, filtered from direct experience. It’s also a way of meeting every interface confrontation with an unexpected and human reaction.

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Altmann’s handprint, then, is a sign of the human body confronting the technology which influences its control—yes–but, through her choice of blood-red for the color of the handprints, it becomes something more intense, as well—a sign of aggressively confronting the technology which influences its control.

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Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Rumble (1993) is a work created in 2009 by Kari Altmann in which the artist plays a YouTube clip depicting hand-held, date-stamped camcorder footage of a rumbling Malaysian landslide dating from 1993 through the yooouuutuuube.com video mosaic effect generator (yooouuutuuube.com being a tool where-in one enters both a YouTube url as well as a “size” for the video referenced in the url which results in—first—the creation of a domino [or rumble] effect of multiple “screens”–each of which plays the video just a hair off of the time of the one preceding it–and–second—the eventual filling-in of the entire screen with these streaming, out-of-sync video ripples–each of which contains several to dozens to hundreds of the original videos in an ongoing mosaic flicker through the run-time of the video).

Initially, in the case of Rumble (1993), one doesn’t quite know what one is viewing as—within each video–seemingly random shots of large industrial apparatus in an otherwise empty, arid landscape are contextualized within the rippling visual jumble of the mosaic itself.

Eventually, though, the camera seems to settle on the face of a naturally-occurring “wall” of dirt and rock (as in a “canyon” or some such) which is situated in the landscape.

And–then—an “event” (occurring in both the video as well as the mosaic) happens:

1. The natural wall collapses and dust fills the frame.

2. This “dusty” imagery streams from the bottom-most to the upper-most rows of the video mosaic in rippling streams.

When one, then, looks back down to the bottom-most rows of the grid, though, the event, it seems, is done happening.

One waits a beat in anticipation.

And—then–another event—another wall collapse resulting in even more dust and destruction–ripples through both the video image as well as the mosaic.

At this point, the video’s cameraman apparently opens his iris (?) and the image becomes bright white–just before—a third event—a third wall dramatically collapsing–occurs, reminding one of, say, the documentary footage of Asphalt Rundown by Robert Smithson (except, in this case, the documentation is itself running up through the screen [as opposed to down the mountain] in the form of rippling time streams).

For the remaining two-and-a-half minutes of the work’s loop, then, this rumbling in both the original video (which, by the way, is itself something like a cult-classic in the “haphazardly filmed natural disaster” genre on YouTube) and the yooouuutuuube video mosaic tool continues unabated.

So, ok—what’s going on here?

Why is it worth considering the filtering of this video through this tool as a work of art?

Well, at first glance it could be said that there’s something pleasurable about the artist’s formal linkage of the “rumbling” effect of yooouuutuuube.com (the stretching of YouTube into yooouuutuuube gives one a visual hint as to what this effect looks like) and the appearance of the rumbling landslide itself.

This, anyway, would account for one part of the work’s title:

Rumble.

But what about the other part of the title—the seemingly random “dating” of the “rumble”:

(1993)?

This gesture provides one a bit more food for thought.

Like, why even bother citing the date of the original video in the title unless it was somehow especially necessary to associate that particular year with the work?

Well, what happened in 1993 (other than the Malaysian landslide depicted in the video)?

For one thing, CERN (the same Swiss organization behind the Large Hadron Collider) announced that the World Wide Web would be free to “jack into” for anyone with an Internet connection.

That created quite a rumble.

In fact when one considers that the video footage taken in 1993 depicted in Rumble (1993) is being viewed through this very network and allegorized as such through the use of the yooouuutuuube mosaic tool (in which [ostensibly] endless automatic reproductions of the video footage are presented in a rippling stream), one begins to take away an interesting set of themes:

1. Distance to nature.

Benjamin, in his Work of Art essay, discusses (amongst other themes) the way in which the desire of (at least the culture he was writing in) to get “closer” to reality through technology paradoxically results in a deeper separation from this very reality accompanied by subsequent “innervations” into one’s sensorium which direct one towards different, more virtualized realities.

This paradox is (if one is ready to see it) dramatized in Rumble (1993):

In an effort to get closer to the magnitude of the natural event recorded in 1993, a cameraman—first–films it on magnetized analog videotape, mutating the event into reproducible moving image media (one level of virtual distance introduced); second—the cameraman digitizes this videotape footage, thus eliminating any connection between the event and a simultaneous physical inscription (it’s all just code now, a second level of virtual distance introduced); and—third—the cameraman uploads this digitized videotape to the rumble of the World Wide Web or what has been described as “The Big Database” in which its existence is now just a tiny novelty—a drop in an ocean filled with tiny novelties (a third level of virtual distance in which one’s closeness to the natural event is rendered completely absurd).

2. Something lost and something gained.

As one takes-in this separation between natural-event and network-upload, the idea of a “return to nature” is—it would seem—lost, while a forward escape into a new nature—“a new natural”—consisting of a dense landscape of events rumbling through not dirt and rock, but zeroes and ones—becomes visible.

Within this context, Altmann, like the cameraman of the video, might be viewed as a tiny being doing her best to look a landslide in the eye and take a picture of it.

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Monday, April 5th, 2010

Some of the key differences between magnetized (that is, pre-digital) videotape and celluloid film are the quantitative shifts in the following three categories:

1. Memory storage capacity.

Videotape, as a media storage device, holds more temporal information and affords un-interrupted recording for up to (approximately) an hour.

2. Affordability.

Videotape is less expensive then celluloid film.

3. And mobility.

Videotape is more robust in more light conditions then celluloid film.

That is to say, automatic moving image reproductions are—with the onset of magnetized videotape in the 1960s anyway–no longer quite as precious.

Rather:

They’re fast cheap and out of control:

Just shoot–shoot a lot; shoot at your house; shoot at the park; shoot down time, not just up time—just shoot.

In response to these mutations in videotape’s temporal memory storage capacities over the capacities of celluloid film’s own, then, many artists began to explore the technology’s unique relationship to the way in which an artist could picture him or herself as creating (and performing this creating) in time.

Bruce Nauman, for example–in a particular series of videos from the late 1960s, anyway—pictures the artist not as one who represents an act of creation, but rather as one who (through the technology’s ability to depict greatly extended units of un-interrupted time) represents acting (creating)–performing actions (creating space for new actions (and thus new creations)) as an artist–in time.

In the videos themselves, one views Nauman, for example, stomp on the ground of his bare artist studio (perhaps as an allegory of art creation) in a rigorous rhythm for approximately 60 minutes (the approximate length of one video tape).

What one is shown  here is not the stomp (an act of creation) or a bit of stomping (a bit of creating), but just stomping (creating)—again and again and again and again—for one hour.

In the wake of videotape technology, though, a further series of media storage generational mutations have come and gone which result in (for the time being, anyway) the end of material storage devices such as videos or hard drives (on a personal level, anyway) and the birth of the virtual data cloud—the immaterial field of code transformed into information signage—both private as well as public–hovering in, out, and around one’s physical locations in space.

Each one of these generational mutations, then, has necessitated subsequent mutations in the pictures artists draw of their own body performing actions through time.

Kari Altmann, for example, considers her work to be located not in individual works (as meaningful as they may be), but rather in a single work—her avatar inside the data cloud wherein one views her perform the excavation and molding of her own artistic archive in mutable cloud-space, cloud-time.

Sometimes she’ll just add an image for research or edit an older project; sometimes she’ll list, but not show new projects she’s working on; sometimes she’ll add a new video; sometimes she’ll take a video away; and so on and so on and so on and so on in a plethora of permutations one follows the artist play with her own cloud data:

Change, evolve—not to “better” data, just different data—data occurring in an ecological network of additional data networks which are—as a whole–growing and becoming self-reflexive, becoming visible to themselves (and its self).

The performative focus here, then, is not on the physical body repeating an action, but rather on the virtual body mutating its own archival network:

As in time-travel:

And as in the principals of time-travel (as they are depicted in pop science-fiction anyway):

A change to the present changes the future; a change to the past changes the present.

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Saturday, February 13th, 2010

Infinity Float by Kari Altmann is a video animation depicting a missile.

Altmann’s missile, though, never hits a target.

Rather, it draws infinity signs in the plume of its continuously billowing smoke again and again and again and again until one begins to watch the continuous delineation of infinity as much as the missile drawing this delineation.

What disturbs this pleasant vision of blissed-out endlessness, though, is the float of the infinity sign, itself.

Past.

As the sign rises slowly but continuously towards the top of the frame and finally beyond it, it ends up reading less as “up” and more as “out”– a memory.

And as one peers into the background upon which these memories were staged, does one perhaps begin to delineate the background as much as the memories it provokes?

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Friday, February 12th, 2010

Exotic-A by Kari Altmann is a video of continuously fracturing digital imagery depicting a natural “exotica” of tropical flora and fauna.

In its palimpsest of video documents moving in, out, and through one another in a continuous flux, yet bound by both a static, “bedrock” background image, as well as a static, diaphanous foreground “gauze,” Altmann provides a Jeep Cherokee vision of the landscape –on acid.

One cannot master this landscape–the views shift in and out of focus, it all remains maya, illusion.

Un-graspable.

(Like a memory of nature on the tip of one’s tongue.)

The work, thus, mirrors the indeterminacy of the natural world.

It is not a coherent form with an essential focal point; it is an ecology—in motion.

Altmann’s broader project works with these same ecological principals.

When one views Altmann’s website, most of her projects are listed, but not linked to as they are either works in progress, or research for future projects, or simply not available to be viewed.

But, go back to her site a month later and something’s changed.

Some of the work from the more distant historical past is made available, and some of the work from the more recent historical past is made un-available.

Projects are listed; projects are taken away.

Altmann understands her personal archive of work to be mutable, taking advantage of the instantaneousness and general ease of change in the digital, to place her own history in flux.

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Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

R-U-IN?S Catalogue #0001 is a zine and .pdf by Iain Ball, Sebastian Moyano, Matteo Giordano, and Kari Altmann, who initiated the project.

It consists of 95 pages of collaged photographic media depicting digital technophilia such as product shots of Sony flat screen televisions, computer-generated pornography, and portable memory storage devices, as well as crumbling geological formations in barren landscapes such as canyons, deserts, and beaches.  In many of the images, these themes are combined as in, for instance, the product shot of a flat screen television displaying imagery of the Grand Canyon.

At first glance, this confrontation of the ancient and natural with the contemporary and electronic may seem arbitrary, but as one moves through the imagery, a provocative logic emerges.

The title of the piece gives one a clue as to where to go from here.

R-U-IN?S

It reads as both “Are you in(s)?” and “ruins.”

“Are you in?” mutated into the text message lingo of “R U IN?” reeks of social status, cliques, peer pressure, coolness, fashions, and the latest technological gadgetry.  R U in or R U out?  It also reads as something aggressively temporary—something one knows will quickly lose its luster, but for the moment, is the only place to be.

“Ruins,” on the other hand, are the crumbled remains of what was once “in.”  The ruins of ancient civilization mock “in-ness”: they are the opposite of “in-ness”—indeed, they are a reminder of time’s assault on one’s attempts to be “in.”  (Think of Shelley’s Ozymandias, the “king of kings” whose only remains are “two vast and trunkless legs of stone.”)

Taken together, there is a fluid exchange between “R U In?” and “ruin” and–as in Robert Smithson’s “Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey”–one sees that the built-in obsolescence of contemporary materiality marks the “in” as always already a ruin.

That is to say that the newest technologies are monuments to themselves before they are created.  No one really believes that a piece of technology will last beyond a couple of years at most.

When one pages (or scrolls) through the Catalogue, one, then, sees less of a clear delineation between “new technology” and “old rocks” and more a continuous stream of dead surfaces: ruins.

In the text which appears on the final two pages of the Catalogue, the artists explain their intentions in similar terms.

They write:

R-U-IN?S is a project initiated by Kari Altmann using an archaeological approach (online and offline) to search the deteriorating surfaces, objects, and codes in the contemporary world.  Topics of interest were addressed as ruined places and times in the database, from which artifacts and recordings were taken.

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Shortly later in the text, the artists make the point that because this “archaeological” investigation into the database is conducted in the very database it mines, “it became a study in and of itself.”

If one wants to follow that idea to its conclusion, it suggests that, not only are all of the images and actions depicted in the pages ruins, but that the software and hardware one uses to view the images and actions outside of the pages are already ruins, as well.

Your computer is not in; it is already a ruin.

That’s a bummer.

However.

It should be said that while this project critiques the idea of sustainable meaning (“in-ness”), it also advances a positive, living force which, one might say, inhabits time more than space.

That is to say, that the project’s existence is bound up with the final product (a self-reflexive ruin), for sure; but, it is also bound up with the evolving, networked collaboration between the four artists whose archaeology was publicly performed in time on the Tumblr blogging platform.

In the “back end,” process became work as the artist’s developed a continuously mutating ecology which began to refer to itself in networks nested into networks nested into networks in an improvisatory form of autopoiesis.

They write:

After several months of communicating through this new language of imports and exports (these artists are all from different countries), a fluency was reached where a raw concept could be expressed through one or several posts and instantly expanded in new ways by the others in the group.  At this point it became self-perpetuating and continued to spawn newer and better products.  An ecosystem was formed where viral ideas could thrive.

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Like jazz music, it becomes difficult to know if the work is in the improvisation on the way to the final product, or if the work is the final product, or if this tension between process and final product is, itself, somehow the work—like, the work plus the trace of liveness equals the work.

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Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Blackmoth.org is a website maintained by Kari Altmann.

The content of the site is—at the present moment anyway–minimal: one views a relatively lengthy, vertically-scrolling display of approximately 70 still images and YouTube video players set off against a white background–no text.

That in itself is nothing new—artists have been making these types of heterogeneous found image displays for some time now and, as Seth Price points out in his Teen Image essay, the style is itself lifted from something print magazines have been exploring for at least fifteen years.

But what distinguishes Altmann’s project from what Price terms “hoardings” is the self-reflexive intentionality of her particular images.

She wants to show you something in particular: time, decay, built-in obsolescence.

Memento mori.

We see collisions of two themes: obsolete technologies of the “just past” such as compact discs or previous generations of flat-screen televisions as well as crumbling architectural details and rock formations of the ancient past.

In the most potent images, we see both at once—dialectically.

The first diptych of images at the top of the page gets at this dialectic nicely and–as a diptych–they, then, create another level of dialectic between the images, themselves.

In the image to the left of the diptych, one views what appears to be two fangs divorced from a jaw—the sort of relic one might see in a display of fossils and bones of the pre-historic at a natural history museum (think “saber tooth tiger”).

However, these fangs are noticeably de-fanged, made innocuous by the USB connection sticking out of their bases.  Their power resides not in the prick of their tips, but in the information they store as little Flash Drives.

It should be pointed out, though, that the USB connection is neutralized, too–by the fangs.

They ultimately both come across as obsolete hardware in the soft age of “data cloud.”

(Remember teeth are technology.)

In the image to the right of the diptych, one views a broken slab of what, at first glance anyway, reads as an “ancient monument”—perhaps a temple–displayed behind a glass cube in a museum setting.

Reflecting against the glass cube and ultimately as important both compositionally and thematically as the slab, itself, is the rainbow colored ring of a camera flash.

The flash is an interesting imp in the history of photography. It leads one away from the subject matter of the photograph and towards the moment of the photograph itself: the moment now past.

When the flash reflects back against the glass display of a slab taken from ancient architecture, one is confronted with a death mask.  The architecture, the photograph, and the photographer are each “a breath in the wind”–illuminated and brought to a momentary re-birth in the camera flash.

As one scrolls-down through the rest of Altmann’s images, this tension is explored again and again and again and, at its best, the tension climaxes and pricks one, revealing the hardware and browser design through which one views Altmann’s images and videos; beyond that—perhaps revealing one’s own relationship to built-in obsolescence.

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