Manfred Mohr

Digital Salon Artists’ Statements 441 tre for the Arts, is one of six interactive modules included in our soon-to-be-completed DVD-ROM Electric Living in Canada, containing full-text interview transcripts and an additional fiftyfour video interviews with digital artists and media theorists “thinking out loud,” and placed in a neomodern painterly interface . Electric Living in Canada is assembled from over eighty hours of video interviews with mostly Canadian media theorists and artists who use technology in their work, including Stelarc, Arthur Kroker, Derrick de Kerckhove, Niranjan Rajah, Thecla Schiphorst, Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew, Dale Amundson, James Faure Walker, Mark Jones, Bruce Powe, Reva Stone, John Oswald, Christof Migone, Robert Ouellette, Jeanne Randolph, Sara Diamond, Elizabeth Fischer, Nancy Paterson, Adrianne Wortzel, Dave Watson, John Pungente, Liss Jeffrey, Vera Frenkel, Daniel Jolliffe, Jean-Paul Longavesne, Alain Mongeau, Eric McLuhan, and many others. We ask the question, “Where are things going, and what are the emerging new media languages?” This project has emerged from McLuhan’s research on “organizing ignorance for discovery” and is an extension of the approach he originated and developed with the help of his various colleagues, especially Barrington Nevitt. The resulting DVD-ROM and Web site attempt to reveal a transition or impact point that can communicate not only the information gathered in the project but the total effect of the project ’s inquiry. For more information, please contact electric@telus.net or visit the Web site http://www3.bc. sympatico.ca/ElectricLiving. KEVIN MUTCH My recent work is an attempt to marry the verisimilitude of photography with clearly fictitious (and highly distorted) computergenerated images. In so doing, I’m hoping both to call into question the means by which photography assures us of its “realness” and to explore the ways in which the ideas of reality and being human are under assault from emerging technologies. Using commercially available 3D and image-editing software as well as a digital camera, I’ve been creating digital images that use some of the conventions of art history (portraiture, the figure in the landscape, direct reference to art-historical sources, etc.) while deliberately foregrounding their digital “strangeness.” For example, Power Girls is intended both as a contemporary Three Graces and as a rumination on the possibly transformative influences of impending biotechnology on the human body. The figures and ground were modeled with software, while the faces were shot photographically from living models and composited into the digital image. As with the rest of this body of work, the piece attempts to exploit a tension between the various visual cues that establish the “reality” of the photographic elements and the obviously fictive picture into which they are blended. Similarly, Self-Portrait is meant to take a highly familiar artistic trope and reimagine it through the use of contemporary imaging technologies. My own eyes, nose, and mouth have been incorporated into a digital figure which has had its geometry “stressed” to the point of failure, creating unexpected distortions. By exploiting these digital accidents, I’m hoping to evoke a sense of a possible “posthuman ” future in which our physical beings might become malleable. In addition to these issues, my work attempts to respond to contemporary expectations about immersion into virtual reality. Since the digital figures and grounds are clearly created by the same processes as role-playing computer games, directly imposing photographs of living people into these images allows a more complete entrance into a fantasy world. However, instead of structured narrative choices and rules of play, my pieces are meant to offer a problematic vision, with an ambiguous relationship to a possibly dystopian future. Ugly Stupid Man, for example, sets up a picture of a figure undergoing disintegration, revealing a crumpled digital infrastructure as his surface peels apart. Advent of Superstalker, in contrast, is meant to be more optimistic. Physically puffed up into a grotesque exaggeration of a body-building superhero, the Superstalker is nevertheless presented as a sort of flower in the desert, marching inexorably forward. MANFRED MOHR In my artistic development I did not have the typical constructivist background. I was an action painter and jazz musician. Through a development of consciousness, I detached myself from spontaneous expressions, and...