By Rachel O’Reilly
Introduction
Curatorial practice discussions and debates are still vastly under-programmed in Australia; they sometimes take place in terms of legacy discussions (individual shows/ provocateurs); philosophies of aesthetics; local ritual digestions of recent international publications; or as a showcasing of emergent forms. This is hardly surprising given it has only been recently that curatorial histories and practice theories are being externalized, documented and are democratising across institutional and disciplinary divides. An art-science curatorial workshop adds another layer of complexity and questioning again to these only nascently-theorized intellectual operations and labour practices that contemporary curating is, and has become. It would have been impossible to address the breadth of debate in this area. Notably, prior to ANAT’s Masterclass in Melbourne, the CRUMB list discussed the topic of “interdisciplinary curating” throughout the month of November, and put many of the speakers of Superhuman in dialogue with participants of the “When Art met the Web-Sciences” event at the Institute for the Converging Arts and Sciences, University of Greenwich. There are some great archived posts there if you are interested in some of these debates. See also a condensation of more theoretical contestations among key practitioners here.
The Superhuman Curatorial Masterclass timed to coincide with Re:Live 2009 had a separate entry point to the Superhuman symposium and exhibition (those engaged nanoaesthetics, augmentation, disability arts, robotics, brain-machine interfaces, nanoaesthetics, therapeutic nanotechnologies, biotech ethics, synthetic ecology, and a keynote from artist Paul Brown). Thematically at one remove, the masterclass brought curators in contact with individual art and curatorial practices to showcase around four themes: Bio-art and Nano-art, Digital and Virtual Play, Interactive Installation, and Research and Networks.
Given full recordings of all sessions will soon be online at the ANAT site, this post skips between highlights and reflection on larger curatorial practice discourse.
On bioart – Session 1
Biomedia artist Jens Hauser, curator of Sk-interfaces http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/03/skinterfaces.php and Still, Living http://www.stillliving.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/, discussed his role in Skinterfaces before presenting a number of adaptations of curatorial thinking that happen around “biomedia” or “live biotechnological art” (his preferred terms over “bio-art”). Hauser emphasises/prioritizes: “presentation” over representations, since the art itself labours beyond vision-based hermeneutics; the democratization of biotechnological tools – studying, reviewing and critiquing the life sciences; and artistic experimentation “beyond epistemic value”. In addition to “subverting specific layers of biotechnological processes for aesthetic effect”, he emphasised coming to bioart and curation “beyond anthropocentric or promethean dominance over organic materials”, and using techniques inherently or explicitly critical of “engineering approaches to biomedia”. Hauser specifically introduced the concept of “production of presence” as a framing device or curatorial model for bio art curation, which he takes from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s book of the same name. His comments about the miscomprehension of bioart “spectatorship” (“it’s not about the image”) dialogued to my mind with larger debates about postconceptual art and spectacle in contemporary art and its marketing. An aesthetics of spectatorship (for bio-art) can only be interpreted by parataxis in Hauser’s view.
Mike Stubbs, CEO at FACT Liverpool, was the only speaker to directly raise the spectre of biopolitics throughout the two days (Hauser later spoke briefly but pointedly on this issue at Relive during question time). Stubbs skipped quickly over the apparent slated topic of ‘risk management’ in bioart at Skinterfaces and instead focussed attention on the lay vernacular connotations of Superhuman of an augmented/cyborgian soldier fighting body. His gesture was a challenge to the tendency to identify (moral) provocation, historic currency, or (scientific/artistic) progression with bioart’s experimentalism tout court. Stubbs essentially requested the audience reflect on the intersection of a ‘bios’/life politics and this un-acknowledged militarist notion of “superhumanism”, and addressed this in the public projection works of Polish artist Krystof Wodjesko. At FACT Liverpool, Wodjesko worked with British Veteran’s group, Combat Stress, to remix the testimonies of returned British soldiers’ psychoses, and their family’s in to night time audio-visual projections in inner-city Liverpool during Britain’s obvious continued troop commitments to Iraq. Stubbs situated risk precisely here: “any discussion of risks should involve thinking about how you take risks and risks that are involved in more than the artworld”!
Artist and academic Paul Thomas spoke about his role as “amateur curator” (his words) of the BEAP (Biennale of Electronic Art Perth) that has been paramount in bringing bio and nano art works, and critical art-science discourse “after Harraway” to Australia. Thomas framed the institution as a sort of necessary liability for bioart practice and exhibition creation, and “invented research questions” for exhibitions in order to attain academic funding. His ambivalence about institution-building spoke also to Douglas Kahn’s later art-historical perspectives on cold war era art-science collaboration; both tending to stress that independent and one-on-one conversations, pseudo-institutional strategies and geographic or intellectual remoteness so often combine to bring genuinely experimental cross-disciplinary projects to life.
On Digital and virtual Play – Session 2
Given that philosophies of play and 90s-theoretical virtuality have been paramount in bringing interactive and ‘live’ media work in to gallery spaces, it was interesting that this panel ended with Helen Stuckey, ex-curator of ACMI Games Lab suggesting that that moment for actual large scale game curating in public institutions has somewhat passed, and “is not so relevant any more”. Stuckey considered that at ACMI at least, the conditions for curating games were compromised from the start; the management/censorship of multi-user realitme interaction a major impasse. She was philosophical: curatorial attention at ACMI had significant impact on the development of a larger independent culture of small scale games production, meanwhile ‘the art world has moved on’.
Speaking first on this panel, Erich Berger chief curator at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, gave an overview of the curatorial research and exhibition design behind his ambitious co-curated show HOMO LUDENS LUDENS. This was a dense theory treat for the game art historians in the audience, with equally strong curatorial attention to exhibition design which you can see here. Those interested in Berger’s curatorial frameworks and theory will enjoy listening to the whole talk.
Angela Main spoke about her interactive art practice through the lens of Richard Shusterman’s work, and his alternative theories of the gaze. Where’s the screen/ interaction theory for this other non-scopic tendency of the gaze? (Interestingly, only monkeys, elephants, humans and crows have been found to have identificatory relationships with the mirror.) Her works elaborate on the peripheral and soft engagement Shusterman outlines in their design. Main also pondered our tendencies to psychologically profile artists and scientists who study biological and psychological processes, from Darwin’s time to today. Darwin suffered terrible health and “reacted poorly to social situations” – does his combination of “complete intellectual dispassion and simultaneous notorious empathy for life” say something about artistic inquiry? See especially his book on barnacles…
Curator/academic Kathy Cleland http://www.kathycleland.com/ considered her curation of Mirror States (co-curated with Lizzy Muller) through a curatorial model of the magic circle: “a temporary world within the ordinary world”. This borrowing of ritual magic and game theory (see also Castranova and Zimmerman) to talk about digitality, interactivity, projection and otherness preceded a tour through individual works in the show. Christine Paul later queried the application of similar concepts to frame art work interaction within what are “highly coded” spaces of exhibition. It might have been interesting to bring up and really recognize this tendency of splitting between Turing and Duchamp (or similar) in new media/-art paradigms, in terms of the way it impacts curatorial and interaction models.
On interactive installation – Session 3
Christiane Paul http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu/post/conference-2005/participants/christiane-paul spoke candidly about curatorial tensions and impasses negotiated in her recognised work as Adjunct Curator of new media at the Whitney, New York. Theorising the curator as a “designer of experiences” – she summarised that design work for the Whitney’s 2nd Avenue audiences as tough. From my view, she likened her practice to a sort of persistent, sometimes flagrant, mostly underappreciated practice of considered insertion – placing ‘new media’ work in to what are fairly resolutely conservative zones of spectatorship. Audiences complain: “It’s all about technology; It doesn’t work; It belongs in a science museum; I work on a computer all day, I don’t want to see art on it in my free time; It’s all about technology”. Paul beautifully deconstructed what we all know as the “the wow effect” critique of new media works (in my experience curators/historians, just as often as inexperienced public audiences, draw on this to categorically withdraw an overworked researcher’s gaze). “The wow effect applies”, Paul points out, “to any new media art work where the technology is not understood” but particularly in spaces where “art is the equivalent of consumption” – where the concept of interaction is reduced to account only for the “indic space of play”. Great! Sarah Cook later in the symposium considered such criticisms in the context of the fact that some of the key recognised works of media art have only received support from science museums in the past – the National Science Museum in London have a particularly strong reputation for the public display of new media art as Sarah Cook pointed out.
George Khut’s art practice presentation took seriously the matter of “other spaces” for new media art work and engagement. The Heart Library Project he staged at St Vincent’s hospital was a way for people to collaborate and gather stories about health and their own bodies. The interest lay in the hospital site, “but not as the site of pathology”. Prior to The Heart Library, the hospital already had a funded, but “no frills” (painting, photography) art program, and a large waiting room with a constant potential audience. Khut’s message could perhaps be summarised as: take advantage of existing and purpose-sympathetic infrastructure. “People tend to engage with new media work differently (better, he suggests) outside of art museum spaces.” Khut’s mindfulness of the curation of the project (figured with curator Lizzy Muller) took into account the installation as a perceptual field, and its relational structures in the hospital, down to who is there to greet people each time.
Tina Gonsalves, one of Australia’s prominent media-art-science practitioners gave insight in to the specific kinds of questions (for Gonsalves it was “psychophysiolgocial interactivity”) that lead artists to seek genuine, in-depth relations and long term institutionalised collaboration. Gonsalves: “I wanted to work with people who knew what body data meant, and to create more figurative and emotionally challenging video images that respond biologically to bodies”. What I appreciated most about Gonsalves’ discussion of the works were the complex temporal awareness of the vicitudes of instinct, experience and outcome for each work, the persistent tinkering experimentation, and her interrogation of the full range of the affect system, including obviously her own: feeltrace turned out to be so finely programmed as to be “traumatising”; Feel Insula presented the artist as “so vulnerable that I never wanted to show it again”. Her practice is interesting in this way that it cuts through discourses of spectatorship as a terminal or finite affectivity – this also reflected in her unfolding, multi-stage approach to research and experimentation of adaptations of works across sites and over time. That sort of persistence with variability and experimentation is evident in Emotional Contagion: a longrunning collaboration with neuroscientists, that has an ongoing display and research life due to the work’s own memory system, its gallery tour schedule and institutional research support, and parallel artisticand neuroscientific publication avenues.
Lizzy Muller valiantly changed her topic at the last minute in order to directly address the conversation about “curatorial models” and curatorial labour that was happening more in the discussion periods of the masterclass than in the presentations themselves. Drawing on David Rokeby’s work ‘The Giver of Names’ as a case study, and her experience with video-cued recall to playback and study audience experience, she introduced the concept of “the indeterminate archive” that she developed from her work with media artists “at prototype stage”, as a curator at Beta-space, Casula Powerhouse, and with the David Langlois Foundation, extending the Variable Media Questionaire beyond the preservation of the object. Her point: “Documentation is often completely staged today (for interactive works). The artwork tends to give a completely different experience from that assumed by the artist, and from the version given in its documentation.” For Muller this means there is a “huge gap around the reality of these works. What was it really like to be there?” She gave four examples of entirely different visitors’ engagements with Rokeby’s piece, “not a single one of which”, she emphasised, is “the definitive version of the work… (but) the value is what they reflect back on the idealized descriptions that the artist gives in his intention.” An interdeterminate archive would include all four, “refrain from truth claims about the actual experience of The Giver of Names”; allows conservators to assess a “better idea of original presentation” (through a multiplicity of engagements). I’ve never seen this use of video recall used before to theorise engagement with work (which also featured in George’s talk). I had questions about the model design and its ineluctable focalizations.
(Four great takes on) Networks – Session 4
(1) “Remember the amateurs, and talk one on one” Douglas Kahn brought some critical and art-historical perspective to the art-science and networks conversation. Kahn is not an official member of any (networks), partly because his work doesn’t have a lot of existing scholarship (“there’s plenty on Cage but little post-cage”); but also because there’s “no commodity culture” for experimental music. His historical work involves documenting the extensive and unacknowledged contributions of specific scientists to individual experimental arts practices (e.g. Variation 7 – engineer Bill Kluger). He listed the The Society for Literature, Science and the Arts as one of his preferred academic forums…the College Art Association also. He lurks on the Yahoo VLF (very low frequencies) group and takes on the role of the ‘historian’ of the list, sometimes having conversations (e.g. on Finnegan’s wake and early vlf technology) “kicked off-list by techies”. His ‘networks’ advice: contact anyone and do your homework ahead of time. Bring scientists into historical research – not just as adjuncts or institutional support. “Scientists have ideas and engage with artists and ideas in particular ways… switch from conversations with artists, straight to engineers/scientists for feedback and back again”. He placed due attention on the role of amateur and independent scientists here – acknowledging them in the networks between art and science in a third space, their important legwork. “A lot of scientists are in amateur communities. A lot of artists get information from amateur scientist books. So any discussion of art and science needs to include art, science, and amateurs.”
(2) “Curating around the concept of cool is not that interesting.” That was Amanda McDonald Crowley, Director of Eyebeam en-route to the virtual walk through she gave of the organisations restructure, and many tiered levels and arms of projects via the Eyebeam website. Eyebeam has a highly transparent and research-based curatorial architecture with a whole range of platforms that look out to various communities in the process of the production of new works. Programming comes after, not before, the work of the research community. Beyond ‘new work’ the project is equally about “open cultures research” “open hardware systems” and “open culture” (across organisations), the latter covering dedicated projects on net neutrality, tactical culture and design for change. ”Curating” for Crowley/eyebeam includes “trying to build up a body of knowledge and networks that thread off exhibitions into other grounded projects”. The website as open culture links all this together, archiving practices and knowledge not related to eyebeam but sprouting from the organisation’s work.
(3) Take advantage of curatorial knowledge spaces! Sarah Cook http://www.sarahcook.info/ curator/writer and co-founder of CRUMB pitched a genuine curatorial masterclass presentation around her project Beam me up, and tailored it to both inform and take advantage of the international audience of curators, artists, academics in the room. Cook had the luxury of being approached by xcult.org with a brief to pitch a platform for online work, the only proviso that it be “about science-art concepts regarding ideas of space”. She pitched Beam Me Up, addressing ‘outerspace’ strategically tying it to the International Year of Astronomy, which was a great way to link exhibition communication to some of the similarly-themed science communication initiatives and funding of that year. Beam Me Up straddled art-science complexes in ways that shed insight on curation and science communication practice both. Cook gave some insight in to the kinds of ‘new’ curatorial decisions involved once projects become more heavily dependent on dialogue with scientists. E.g. “Do you just have to take their word for it that they are getting the science right?” 😉 To destabilize input along curation vs hard-science lines, she asked the scientist to contribute exhibition/site text, and built her own science communication skills and networks. Her question posed to the audience: what do you think about the timeline and curatorial responsibility for maintaining durationally-specific online projects after they’re over?
(4) Networks need not be about infinite growth! from MAAP put critical perspective on the valorization of (social) networks, as a bastardized concept in media curation. For Machan, MAAP emphasises “relationships” over networks, which better describes personal and institutional flexibility tailored to nail both longrunning and short term meaningful collaborations, as well as MAAPs need for active positioning in pursuit of fresh conceptual space. “Why focus on groups or projects becoming bigger and bigger and bigger?” Growth and continuity is not so necessary: “If it’s not useful (i.e. to the practice community), stop doing it!” Though MAAP is regional, the “map” that the organisation services is just as relational, strategic and conceptual as the organisational plan, given the fact that geographic “networks” or regions are economically drawn. The “Asia” concept is “not marked by common concern but by economic interest in the region”. This emphasis on calling the shots on building and ending projects and networks was a nice end to the day.
Network Links Discussion
The discussion that followed the final session was usefully pragmatic and more macro. Lists of the interesting orgs and networks doing art science work were rattled off: Perry Farrelly – and the Citizen Science projects; Partisan labs; Arts catalyst in the UK; of course Symbiotica; the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille CNRS in France; Seed magazine; The Exploratorium in San Francisco; artsactive.net. What can be said about the fact that Art-science collaborations are more often initiated by the arts insitutions, rather than working the other way around? Douglas Kahn emphasised that in the US, the two cultures/camps mentality is strong because of the kind of graduate training regimes in place. “Its difficult to have conversations with scientists”. He emphasised that he and groups like the Critical Arts Ensemble focus on personal individual relationships only. Sarah Cook similarly emphasised the utility and progressive politics of the concept of the amateur view: “as a curator-facilitator and maker of situations, the move to a model of curation that sees the curator as an amateur knowledge worker is important…not needing to be a specialist in a field is a way of dealing with collaboration and cross-disciplinary practice”. It was mentioned also that the newly established Ri Australia in Adelaide might open up interesting collaborations with ANAT in relation to art-science.
Brief Reflections
The thematic framing of the Superhuman Curatorial Masterclass seemed to be responsible for the curious non-discussion of the inherent criticality of curatorial practice and labour quite generally, and on theme (biopolitics? post-humanism? etc). Some shared reference points apart from the Superhuman exhibition – a book chapter, some links, perhaps a relevant paper gleaned from the symposium? – distributed prior to the sessions might have been useful to implant as a meeting point, given “Superhuman” and “Darwin” are more like synecdoches than concepts able to encourage genuine intersubjectivity. (See a deeply enjoyable but entirely unrelated review of Darwin’s year here. The default vision of curation risks being reduced to singular artwork and network brokerage if/wherever the labour of articulating (and often reframing) specific relationships between knowledges, practices and experimentation, within a range of sometimes conflicting intellectual, professional, and community networks, is taken too much for granted (for a whole range of pragmatic but also symptomatic reasons). On the above points, Superhuman was perhaps not quite of masterclass design. It was however an otherwise rich, immersive, and (over-)stimulating two days; much was gleaned, and the organisers should be thanked for their initiation and incredibly tight management of a rare, generous and open gathering of expertise.