Simone Osthoff - Object Lessons (1996)

8/12/2019 Simone Osthoff - Object Lessons (1996)

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Originally published in the art magazine World Art , N. 1, 1996, pp. 18-23

Object Lessons

In his performances and telepresence displays, Eduardo Kac breaks down language in a bid to questioncultural differences. From performing on the beach to surfing the Net, Simone Osthoff learns how toeliminate space.

by Simone Osthoff

"I don't see myself as an 'American artist' or a 'Brazilian artist,' a 'Holography artist' or a'Computer artist,' a 'Language artist' or an 'Installation artist,'" Eduardo Kac insists. "Labels arenot very helpful and are often used to marginalize people. I prefer not to be bound by any particularnationality or geography. I work with telecommunications, trying to break up these boundaries."Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1962, Kac (pronounced Katz) moved to the US in 1989 to study fine artat the Art Institute of Chicago. With a characteristic disregard for national boundaries, he went on torepresent both the US and Brazil in international exhibitions.

Kac belongs to the '80s generation who fought to reclaim political freedom in Brazil after 15 yearsof military dictatorship. His work continues to explore the issues of information censorship andfreedom of speech that so obsessed Brazilian social life at this time. However, Kac is among thefew artists from that generation to continue charting new territory, using new technologies andexploring the cultural problems they raise.

Currently assistant professor of new media in the department of art at the University of Kentucky,Lexington, Kac is documenting the unrecorded history of electronic art in Brazil. A member of theeditorial board of Leonardo, he is also guest editor for the American journal Visible Language of aninternational issue on the relationship between experimental poetry and new media. Although helives in Lexington, he uses the Internet to work all over the world.

Back in 1983, it was language that drew Kac to holography, or 'holopoetry' as he describes it. "Iam not interested in holography as a 3-dimensional form. I am really interested in holography as atime-based medium. In many of my holograms, time flows back and forth, in non-linear ways. I

just don't think in terms of one word after another, as we normally speak and write. I'm lessinterested in conveying the result of my thought than in conveying the process of my thought.That's why the language in my holograms fluctuates, oscillates, changes and disappears. By nothaving a linear sequence, you can explore the image in any direction you want. You have atime-reversal possibility. You orchestrate time structures in space. You're really dealing with aspace-time continuum and breaking it into orchestrated discontinuities. "The holographic mediumallows me to work with language floating in space and time, breaking down, melting anddissolving, and recombining itself to produce new meanings. This work reveals a distrust, adisbelief in the idea that we can simply use language to communicate a message, as the slave of meaning. I'm more interested in suggestion and evocation."

The intersection of word and image has always been of interest to artists and poets, and was acentral concern of the Brazilian Neoconcrete movement of the late '50s. Regardless of the level of ambiguity found in their work, most postconceptual artists, such as Jenny Holzer, Barbara Krugerand Lorna Simpson, have used language in a very direct way. By contrast, Kac's use of language isan equivocal one.

"Words are not containers that hold meaning, like a cup contains coffee," he explains. "I don't think one can fully understand anything or anyone. There will always be a tension between what one triesto communicate and what one tries to understand, and this tension oscillates with the dynamicpattern of language.

"I am interested in proposing alternatives to the unidirectionality of the system of art; we have cometo realize that language is truly unstable and absolutely turbulent. We would like to be in control of language and arrest this flux of events that surrounds us. I believe in the negotiation of meaning,


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not the communication of meaning. When we use language in a linear way, in art and poetry, weare in danger of by-passing the fundamental problem of our own medium, which is language itself.What about language's role in shaping our perception of the world?"

In much contemporary art, words are immediately legible, as they are in the mass media. In Kac'sseries of still images Erratum, however, he created a visual amalgam that makes the words less

readily perceptable. "I would like the viewer to spend some time with the work, to explore his orher own readings. The series is very painterly, so it plays with certain expectations the viewer mightbring to the experience. But the seduction of color and surface is fully integrated with the suggestedsemantic resonations, which brings the viewing - or reading - experience much closer to literature.In Erratum, pairs of words are seen in a field in which layers of colors embed and dissolve theverbal forms. It is as if the semantic tensions created between the words were rendered visually,translated into the perceptual tension created between the word fragments and the surroundingfield." Like many of Kac's works, Erratum can be seen on the Internet.

The emphasis on experience and process is central to Kac's telepresence installations, as it was tohis public performances in Rio in the early '80s. "In my work in the early '80s the body waseverything. The body was the tool I used to question conventions, dogmas and taboos - patriarchy,religion, heterosexuality, politics, puritanism. The body became my writing medium ultimately."

In such performances Kac would use props such as 'object poems' (seen on pages 18-19) andprovoke the audience to participate. If a member of the audience could answer his questions theycould take the prop home. On February 13, 1982, Kac celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Week of Modern Art of 1922, which launched modern art in Brazil, with a performance at Ipanema. "Thewhole beach was energized," Kac recalls. "It concluded with a call for everybody on the beach toundress (which is absolutely illegal) and enjoy themselves. Several people did. This was followedby a naked demonstration along the beach. We carried banners and posters, and distributedpamphlets calling for a new art, a new society and a new life. The very last action of theperformance was a symbolic dive into the Atlantic Ocean. We all came out of the water together -wet and reborn."

'Telepresence art,' according to Kac, occurs at the intersection of robotics, telecommunications andcomputers, within a wider framework of electronic interactive art. "It implies less stress on formand composition, and more emphasis on behavior - choice, action - and negotiation of meaning. Ithighlights the public who, as participants, acquire an active role in shaping their experience. Insteadof the performance of the artist, members of the public now perform. The role of the artist in thiscase is not so much to encode messages unidirectionally, as to define parameters from whichexperiences will unfold. Telepresence art also implies the primacy of real time over real space."This issue of real time over real space informs an ongoing collaboration with Ed Bennett that beganin 1989. "I created installations to the scale of a telerobot, that we call 'Ornitorrinco,' or 'platypus'in Portuguese." 'Ornitorrinco' - a 'hybrid' creature, an egg-laying mammal - is an apt title for theheterogeneous mixtures that are represented by the telerobot. The resulting work, Ornitorrinco inEden, took place on October 23, 1994, for approximately 5 hours. Kac believes this to have beenthe first telepresence art work on the Internet, explaining that "the word 'telepresence' here refersspecifically to our fully mobile, wireless telerobot. The piece bridged the placeless space of theInternet to physical spaces in Seattle, Chicago and Lexington. It consisted of these three nodes of active participation and multiple nodes of observation worldwide."

The telerobot in Chicago was controlled in real time, via a regular telephone link, by participants inLexington and Seattle. "Communication took place not through any verbal or oral exchange butthrough the rhythms that resulted from their engagement in what was a shared, a mediated,experience. And as the piece was experienced through the Internet, anybody in the world with Netaccess could see it, dissolving gallery boundaries and making the work accessible to largeraudiences. The theme of the installation was the accelerated decay of media. Ornitorrinco wasimmersed in a garden of technological obsolescence made of old records, damaged computerboards, broken mechanisms and erased tapes."

Viewers from various countries, including Finland, Canada, Germany and Ireland, came on-lineand were able to see the remote installation in Chicago from the point of view of Ornitorrinco ascontrolled by anonymous participants in Lexington and Seattle. The idea of looking at the worldfrom the perspective of the object is a fascinating one. "Klee once wrote that objects in his studio


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contemplated him," says Kac. "Lacan speaks of objects looking back, in the sense that objects havemeaning not only because we can see them, but because they are part of a much larger network of meanings, which includes language. Ideas in art can't always be thought of literally. "What thetelepresence installation with the Ornitorrinco telerobot is all about is to metaphorically ask theviewer to look at the world from someone else's point of view. It's a non-metaphysical out-of-bodyexperience, if you will. You are asked, or provoked, to remove yourself from your direct sense of

the space that surrounds you and transport yourself, in space and time, to another body, to anothersituation, to another identity. This unique situation raises the issue of whether this is even possible,or desirable, and what its implications are."

This work creates a new communicative situation that has not been experienced before."Ornitorrinco in Eden created a context in which anonymous participants perceived that it is onlythrough their shared experience and non-hierarchical collaboration that little by little, or almostframe by frame, a new reality is constructed. In this new reality, spatio-temporal distances becomeirrelevant, virtual and real spaces become equivalent, and linguistic barriers are temporarily removedin favor of a common empowering experience."

Kac's work implies that the fundamental relationship today is that between appearance anddisappearance rather than that between appearance and reality. "We live in a world where our mental

images of places, cultures and people are no longer being acquired through direct observation. Wecan all conjure up images of the Moon, we can dream and see ourselves on the Moon. We havememories of places we have never visited. We think of places and we have developed conceptsabout cultures that we have never seen, never experienced. In my telepresence installations, I'mmaking geographic displacements that reflect that. Nothing exists until you make it your own, untilyou claim it, until you create your own narrative, until you construct it.

The linkage between physical spaces and computer and telephone networks appears in differentforms throughout his recent work. He cites Essay Concerning Human Understanding, acollaboration with New York-based Japanese artist Ikuo Nakamura, in which a bird in a cage inLexington had a sonic dialogue over a regular phone line with a plant located at the Science Hall inNew York City. "The bird's voice was sensed by the plant over the phone," says Kac. "The plant'sresponse, a fluctuating electric field, was converted to audible sound and sent back to the bird'scage on a loop."

In another work, Dialogical Drawing, two identical pieces hang on a wall: one at the Museum of Brazilian Art-FAAP, So Paulo, and one in the Center for Contemporary Art, Lexington. As peoplelook at them, and make comments to each other, they hear sounds coming from the piece on thewall. The 'drawing' on the wall (a 3-dimensional piece created with mahogany, wires, speakers,microphones and circuit boards) enables a live, two-directional sonic bridge linking strangers inremote countries, in two time zones. "The work is about surprise; the interaction of foreigners, theircultural references, and the conversations that result from these interactions."While optimistic about the Net's potential as a venue for artistic investigation, Kac remainscautious. "There are a number of problems," he says. "One is a new kind of 'digital colonialism,'so to speak, because the language of the Internet is English. The other problems are censorship andaccess. If you look at the map of the Internet, you see that Africa and South America do not havethe same density of nodes you see in Europe and North America. People that live in these continentsare being underprivileged, left behind. This is another very important problem, because you'retalking about new technologies and communication media on a global scale. Ironically, the distancesbetween different cultures shrink on a physical level but remain largely untouched on a social andpolitical level. The perpetuation of distance becomes an impediment to knowledge of differentcultures and viewpoints. And in this sense, the simulated experience of a new and temporaryidentity in my telepresence work points to the need for a qualitative change in the use of communications technology."In many underdeveloped countries, even a basic thing like the telephone is a very complex problem.Technology has layers and levels of meaning in our lives that really haven't been addressed; that'strue from a political view - technology has the potential to empower people in many ways. If weleave technology behind in art, if we don't question how technology affects our lives, if we don'ttake charge, if we don't use these technological media to raise questions about contemporary life,who is going to do that?"

Documents

Simone Osthoff - Object Lessons (1996)