by Edson Cruz and Kiel Pimenta
The present and past of cybernetic art met at the second roundtable of Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 Symposium. Writer and curator Jasia Reichardt and performance artist Golan Levin gave explanations that incidentally combined perfectly.
Jasia focused on the past. She was assistant-director at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), in London, from 1963 to 1971 and became famous for having organized Cybernetic Serendipity, in 1968, one of the first exhibitions to explore the relations between art and technology, even before the appearance of computers as we know them today. She started her presentation by showing images of precursor works, such as collages of the 20’s that already worked with the theme of the machine-man relation, up to the famous exhibit of 1968.
Serendipity means the possibility of making a casual and happy discovery, and that was exactly the objective of the exhibition: to gather people who had never met before, who didn’t even have to be artists, as long as they were able to create art with the new technological tools. In addition to photos of the works and some videos shown in the exhibition, Jasia brought forth some interesting points: the poster was typed and there was no catalogue. But the most complicated detail is that there is neither a filmed recording of the exhibition, nor of the 16 lectures given.
Levin spoke first, but he brought information from the present which complemented Jasia’s talk “serendipitously”. A renowned new media artist, he showed some projects that synthesize his proposal of studying the relation of human beings and machines. Mentioning as a source of inspiration one of the pioneers of electronic art, Myron Krueger, who said that “response is the medium”, and making a counterpoint with the theories of Marshall McLuhan, Levin stated that he is interested in a non-verbal dialogue between man and machine and the visualization of the communication processes. “My work is mistakenly associated with sound and image, but I am interested in gestures,” he said. “The response [the way signals are transmitted] is the main focus of my work,” he added.
To do this, he created the Audiovisual Environment Suite software that enables the production of sounds as of abstract animations drawn in real time, on a computer.
Among the most interesting projects shown was A Telesymphony, from 2001, in which he gathered 200 people in a theater, who on having their mobile phone numbers registered at a data bank received a new ringtone. During the event, the production crew called the mobile cell phones, which reproduced the new sounds, one after the other, forming a real symphony. Another project shown was Re-Mark, from 2002, in which the voice of the spectator reproduced on a microphone and his shadows projected on a screen triggered a response in the form of sounds and words. A more sophisticated version of this idea can be seen at the Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 exhibition: the work Messa di Voce, from 2003, made in partnership with Zachary Lieberman.
At the final debate, when questioned about what she would do next, Jasia quoted Apollinaire, who had already talked about virtual reality way before it happened, to justify that she is still interested in new technologies and in their possibilities. And she was ironic: “Today, there is a search for the past. Therefore, I am busy.”