Mar. 08, 2006 - Issue #542: Crowds/Conversations/Confessions
Taking technology over to the dark side, gallery’s exhibit coerces us to face the force
Art Gallery of Alberta's multimedia show questions how our relationship with technology shapes us
“So, do you want to be me? Say something.”
With a terrifying question and a vague imperative, Max Dean and Kristan Horton’s “Be Me,” one of the most striking pieces in the Art Gallery of Alberta’s Crowds / Conversations / Confessions exhibition of media installation, asks participants to consider the network of power, control, identity and performance they exist in.
As the sitter speaks, the motion-detecting camera translates their facial gestures onto Dean’s projected visage while the microphone amplifies their words. It’s real-time, interactive portraiture—through their decisions in controlling Dean’s digital image, sitters reveal themselves.
The portraits created through interaction with the work are ephemeral, unrecorded, of the moment.
“It’s a piece about an experience,” Horton says, “to be had and to be kept by those people”—the sitter and her audience.
And as Dean and Horton joyfully discuss the cultural characters that have been revealed over the course of international exhibitions—the curious but spotlight-shy Japanese contrasting with, for example, the guy in Ottawa who crooned through an entire Sinatra tune—one gets the feeling (which both artists deny) that the “Be Me’s” true audience is the curious creators themselves.
The element of performance, of being private in public, is a common thread
throughout the exhibition, which curator Catherine Crowson describes as
“playing with the idea that technologies bring us closer together, but
also reinforces a sort of distance.”
That’s not a new idea, but when it’s placed before us in this
context, explicitly expressed and manipulated with the force of art, we have
a hard time remaining unconscious of the powers and problems of our electric
society.
Consider Don Ritter’s “Vox Populi,” a huge installation
almost dominating the show. Consisting of a podium facing three large video
screens on which a gathered crowd is displayed, the piece invites one to step
up to the lectern and speak.
Speeches from such figures as JFK, Martin Luther King Jr, and George W Bush
are displayed on a teleprompter, and as participants speak—on-script or
off—the virtual audience reacts either positively or negatively,
cheering wildly or hissing.
It’s an interesting experience for the speaker and observers ... but
even more interesting is how, in a gallery context, we find profundity in
that which we wouldn’t think twice about in a videogame or a karaoke
bar.
George Bures Miller’s “Conversation / Interrogation”
engages in similar role-playing games to somewhat more disturbing
effect.
As with “Be Me,” the installation consists of a single chair
facing an image of the artist’s face, but rather than taking control of
a digital avatar, the viewer is instead subjected to a disorienting
questioning from the onscreen image.
As the title suggests, the tone of the virtual interview shifts from banal
chatter to manipulative interrogation, and its intent is never clear. The
nausea produced by pseudo-conversation with an inflexible humanoid
machine—now a fact of our daily life –—is central to the
nightmare quality of the experience.
“Conversation / Interrogation,” “Vox Populi” and
“Be Me” explicitly and enthusiastically place the participant
into the role of another—an interviewee, a leader-figure, the artist
himself—in an exhibitionistic context.
In David Rosetsky’s “Custom Made,” however, the role
substitution is more subtle. In experiencing Rosetsky’s series of
videotaped stories, uncomfortably intimate accounts of important personal
relationships from a variety of people, the viewer ceases to be a stranger
distant in space and time and becomes instead a trusted listener, a
confidant.
Rostezky says he didn’t have an image of the Catholic confessional
in mind when designing the installation space, but what he came up with is an
example of convergent evolution: with warm, familiar wood veneer and close,
womb-like alcoves he creates a space for secrets analogous to that which
churchgoers have enjoyed for centuries.
And like the confessional booth, Rosetzky’s alcoves are only
pseudo-private; they exist in public space, your entry, presence and exit
from the intimate zone obvious to anybody who cares to notice … and
passersby and those in other alcoves aren’t fully hidden.
Alone in the role of confidant to a fading series of storytelling
not-strangers, your mind turns to your own stories, your own relationships,
confessing to yourself in public view, an exhibitionist even as you play the
voyeur. Privacy, individuality, and the preciousness of the personal are
revealed as conceits.
Privacy may be an illusion and individuality may be vanity, but as
interconnected as we may be, we are still desperately distanced from each
other, as Laiwan’s haunting “Kiss” contends.
In this piece, projected from two 16-millimetre film loops, two lovers are
endlessly attracted without attachment, never reaching the moment of
intimacy—and the space between them crackles with energies of hope and
frustration.
Atom Egoyan’s film and audio installation “Hors d’usage: le
recit de Marie-France Marcil” shares some of Rosetzky’s theme,
but rather than inverting the intimacy of the confessional to deny the
individual, Egoyan explores the deficiency of media and memory itself in
preserving that which makes us us.
The reel-to-reel tapes Egoyan’s protagonist confronts do not serve the
preserving, archival role they were designed for—these pieces of the
past only serve as reminders of all that is long gone, lost and
forgotten.
As engaging and thought-provoking as it may be, there is something missing
from Crowds / Conversations / Confessions that gives it an almost nostalgic
air: for an exhibition focused on human communication (and thus identity) and
how that communication is both facilitated and hindered by our technologies,
it’s strange that it seems to exist in a world without an
Internet.
How many of the questions raised here have had their answers changed or
reinforced by the advent of impossibly powerful social networking
technology?
According to curator Crowson, the lack of net art is attributable to the
gallery building itself: its bunkerlike construction and pre-digital
infrastructure make ’net-connected installations extremely problematic,
a deficiency which the upcoming renovation will correct.
It’s somewhat fitting, then, that one of the last pre-reno (and one of
the first post-name-change) technology-heavy exhibitions is based around
20th-century tech.
Along with the painting-centric “Building a Collection”
retrospective still running on the main floor, Crowds / Conversations /
Confessions feels like a goodbye to the past. V
Mar 11 - Jun 10
Crowds / Conversations / Confessions
Art By Max Dean, Kristan Horton, Atom Egoyan, Laiwan, George Bures
Miller, Don Ritter, David Rosetzky
Art Gallery of Alberta
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