On a tip from Dartmouth professor Larry Polansky, I spent Wednesday evening at Dorkbot. Dorkbot, which shares the space with Roulette Intermedium, is basically a trio of presentations every month on some projects at the intersection of art and technology. It’s probably best just to detail last night’s event:
Julia Burns‘s work focuses on online privacy issues, particularly with regards to (American) Internet surveillance. The questions posed about surveillance, however, were not nearly as interesting as they could have been; they began and ended with the premise that surveillance is bad, that privacy is key, and that there is no longer any privacy. To this end, it was political polemic. Which is not to say that it was not art–I don’t like the a-word, whether for paintings or performance, because of what it necessarily excludes.
One of her works, called Cached Evidence (full video available toward the bottom of the page), shows a thwarted pedophile trying to delete Internet history from his computer. However, he is surrounded (literally) by pages from Google’s cache of historical Internets, and exhausts himself trying to tear this evidence away. The premise being that privacy is impossible in an age of Internet archiving, the piece is successful. But this seems like a weak premise to stand on: privacy in what we surrender to the cloud, not in our lives. There is no deeper layer here, except that we are all inevitably hiding something and this is impossible with surveilled tubes. This is not deep; this does not dissect privacy and the nature of privacy, but rather reduces people to their Internet selves.
The argument was that privacy is essential for experimentation, and that without privacy politics and art will be subject to instantaneous review and possible censorship. To which I respond: is this news? Thoreau lived in the woods (check my Facebook pictures); Charles Ives lived in relative seclusion; countless others purposely cut themselves off from a society seen as too overstimulating, too worldly, and too condemning of difference. The Internet has not changed this.
That said, her work that she did not present seemed especially interesting, particularly her “performance” where she twittered on a couch outside in downtown Sydney (Austrialia) with her laptop plugged into a widescreen TV facing the sidewalk. She gets points for referring to this as a “public experiment” rather than a performance; a more blunt phrasing would be, “experiment on the public.” Would people stand and read her tweets in public, or would they avoid looking? It’s interesting to watch as singletons walk by, yet–as beginnings of a crowd gather–people feel more inclined (or comfortable) to stop and watch. The technical and conceptual chops are all there, but I question the extent and the depth of artistic inquiry. Still time, though. I’ll drudge up this post in months and click the links and see what she’s doing, because if nothing else I’m curious.
Yuliya Lanina creates crazy hybrid dolls, dissembling other dolls and fusing them into Frankenstein monster machines. These are so intricate and well-crafted that it’s difficult to see what is “real” and what has been modified. I’ll let you watch the videos (self-explanatory) for yourselves, but what I thought was interesting was the way that the discussion shaped up. Yuliya really didn’t give much of a hint toward her impetus, except that she was an artist and this was her medium, but the visceral reaction of the audience was clear. It was part wonder and part disgust (albeit a strange kind of disgust–a pleasurable disgust) and for an unapologetically dorky crowd there were fewer technical questions than artistic ones.
Britta Riley presented on an ongoing project called Window Farms, which is a particularly interesting fusion of art with the more (most) “practical” part of life. She’s growing food in her window, but not in planter boxes. As she said, they get all their data from pot growers and NASA. That’s right, they’re growing hydroponics in their windows. Except these aren’t regular pot-light hydroponics, but instead they’re like huge curtains hanging over the whole window, containing quite a few plants in relatively little space.
More than just a demonstration of a sustainable design, the window farms concept is also an excellent example of collaborative development. Many people work on this project, posting problems to a community board, and others experiment to find, say, the perfect water pump system to circulate nutrients to all the plants. Finally, these planters can be used year-round, as they exist inside peoples’ apartments. Apparently chard does great in the Northeast’s winter growing season. Check them out, and if you build a window farm then I salute you.
