in::FORMATION: The Aesthetic Use of Machinic Beings

THE LEONARDO GALLERY© James R. Hugunin LEONARDO, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 249–261, 2000 249 in::FORMATION: The Aesthetic Use of Machinic Beings The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity just because he [sic] is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception. —Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media (1964) The artist is now only the mechanic, the maker, the stage manager, not the star. —Tina Matkovic in Primary Structures (The Jewish Museum, 1966) Today, the main option people have for expressing themselves powerfully is through machines. —Mark Pauline, Survival Research Laboratories (1987) The group sine::apsis experiments is a network of artists—Valerie Sullivan Fuchs, Kevin Heisner, Dan Miller, Kym Olsen, Fernando Orellana, Sabrina Raaf, Lauren Was and Amy Youngs—who interface bodies and technologies. Steve Boyer and Kenneth E. Rinaldo, contemporary media artists, were invited by sine::apsis as special guests for “in::FORMATION,” an exhibition of art that moves and makes artworks in the process. Often natural life processes are introduced into artificial media. The results are immersive and responsive art experiences generated by computer-mediated kinetic and interactive sound sculptures, light installations, experiments with microorganisms and performance works. Besides pre-programmed activity, randomness is introduced into their works. Like scientists in cybernetics and sociobiology, these artists agree in that they see randomness not simply as a lacking pattern but as the creative ground from which patterns can emerge [1]. Such systems result in “emergence” whereby surprising and unaccounted -for properties arise and develop in ways not anticipated. The pieces form developed networks that impart an upward tension to the recursively looped programs such that “like a spring compressed and suddenly released, the processes break out of the pattern of circular self-organization and leap outward into the new” [2]. They ask us to see technology and the human as contiguous, rather than opposed, and speculate upon the advent of new mutual evolution. The group (formerly known as “synApse”) began in 1998 when Sabrina Raaf and Fernando Orellana invited nine other Chicago-based artists to meet and discuss issues concerning art and technology [3]. Commonalities were found, mutual technical support was given, and a collective vision formulated. For instance, the interrelationship between information and entropy interests them, such as how technologies encourage rapid restructuring and new use of our bodies that then change experiences of our embodiment in the world. This then impacts the metaphoric networks at play within culture and encourages new life-choices. But also of interest to them is how technologies are geared to accelerate a planned obsolescence that feeds rampant consumerism. On the market, machines have short life spans. In one of their manifestos , the group declares a stoic resignation to the inevitable obsolescence and breakdown of their automata and their own mortal bodies, even as they utopically formulate a vision of themselves as machine-assisted artists producing artworks that are art-producing machines. 250 Leonardo Gallery To focus only on the machine’s mortality might lead one to think that these artworks by sine::apsis and their invited guest exhibitors are heirs of Swiss artist Jean Tinguely’s hilariously self-destroying machine-sculptures or American Richard Stankiewicz’s infernal motorized junk. However, the artists in “in::FORMATION” eschew both the former’s slapstick lampooning of, and the latter’s sardonic attack on, modernity’s child—the machine. Tinguely delighted in contrasting, as K.G. Pontus Hultén put it, “the paroxysm of junk in motion” to the fluidity of human locomotion. Stankiewicz resurrected metallic monsters from our glut of junk; as Hultén observed, he awakens machine parts from their dreams and makes them come alive. Anything brought back to life in this way is frightful and menacing. Stankiewicz is apparently afraid of the power of machines; when they are smashed, their degraded strength seems even more frightening than before [4]. Hence, the true contemporary heir to the Tinguely-Stankiewicz legacy is not sine::apsis, but Mark Pauline’s and Matt Heckert’s San Francisco–based Survival Research Laboratories’ (SRL) manic machinic black comedy performances wherein humor and threat meet. For modernists Tinguely and Stankiewicz, aesthetic logic succeeds only by maintaining an antipodal contrast: human...