Digital Vision, Digital Voice

    Guest Curator: Robert Kendall

              
The Painted Bride Art Center
230 Vine St.
Philadelphia, PA 19106
(215) 925-9914

Apr. 7 to June 24, 1995

We live in an age nearly saturated by information technology, yet we're moving inexorably toward a future that's even more electronically charged. Digital Vision, Digital Voice takes a hard look at where we're headed. The work in this exhibition, largely by Philadelphia artists, explores the technocentricity of modern life by appropriating the technology itself rather than just passively commenting on it. It examines modern communication from the inside, dissecting the ways in which mass media and computerization influence and control our lives.

The six artists in this show warn us of the dangers of the electronic age but also celebrate the potential of electronic media for enriching our lives. They prove the computer to be not just a sterile, dehumanizing agent of modern bureaucracy but a vehicle for the most intense and personal artistic expression. This exhibit should reassure those who fear that the digital revolution has little more than mind-numbing video games to offer them.

All of the works featured here were created with the aid of the computer, eloquently attesting to its potency as an artist's tool. Most are pieces on videotape that tap the rich well of digital editing technology. Even more telling expressions of our digital times are the works that use the computer itself as their medium. The PC screen becomes the artwork, inviting viewers to make selections with a mouse or touch screen to shape its content. The gallery-goer is no longer merely an observer but becomes an active participant in the aesthetic and conceptual environment the artist has created.

Electronic technology began a remarkable cross-fertilization among different artistic disciplines, which bore fruit in video. Theater, music, dance, and abstract visual art all come together in this medium, which even achieves a sculptural presence in installations such as Coleman and Powell's Ballet Di.Gi.Tal Suite.

Then came the computer, a medium that not only combines sound and image but extends its reach even to the literary arts. The PC's high-resolution monitor accommodates text almost as readily as the printed page and lets viewers control the flow of words to read at their own pace. A central concern of Digital Vision, Digital Voice is the interplay between images and words, the two resources we have for making ourselves understood to other human beings. The art featured in this show casts this interplay in a new, revealing light.

The collaborative team of Connie Coleman and Alan Powell explores video as a surrogate for human memory. Guess What! and Through the Rabbit Hole distill the artists' oral reminiscences into something strikingly removed from casual storytelling. "Summer" from Automatic Writing (which will eventually become an interactive work on CD-ROM) reprocesses personal snapshots into a surreal landscape. In these three works, digital manipulation and distortion parallel the way the mind "edits" its collection of experiences. On the surface these treatments seem to distance us from the original encounters, yet on a deeper level they are truer to them.

Coleman and Powell's Ballet Di.Gi.Tal Suite puts video to more impersonal use, hovering on that mysterious border where perception becomes recognition. It digitally deconstructs the movement of the human face and body into almost abstract patterns of motion and reworks fragments of speech and song into verbal collage. It culls material from the airwaves and turns it inward on itself to challenge the veracity of what we've become accustomed to seeing on the television screen.

Thomas Porett creates kinetic collages of shifting images, investigating the ways in which context and cumulative effect ultimately determine what pictures communicate. Porett describes his work as an effort to "make 'linguistic' interconnections between images." He treats images like words whose meaning can be altered by what comes before and after, building visual structures as if they were literary forms.

Porett's Deceptions distorts and juxtaposes photographs of faces to reflect the hidden emotional tensions and undercurrents that can permeate interpersonal communications. Mystery Street extracts a pictorial cross-section of this country in its moods from celebration to despair and weaves it into visual counterpoint. It's a metaphorical walk down America Street. The interactive Hymns of the Republic is an ironic audiovisual tour of the nation's incongruities and extremes. Like America itself, the work lets people choose which of its avenues to explore and hence is different for everyone who comes into contact with it.

individual electric (aka Norman Douglas and Vibeke Jensen) brings the virtual world of electronic media and the physical world into jarring opposition by embedding interactive computer displays in rugged metal constructions. The imposing installation Mo[nu]ment 1.23: Memory & Forgetfulness expresses the tension between the physical artifacts of language, such as newspapers, and the less tangible electronic manifestations of text.

Mo[nu]ment is a symbolic recreation of the New York Times Morgue, the subterranean complex of file cabinets where manuscripts are laid to rest once they're published. This is a work about the death of print on another level as well, examining the rise of electronic alternatives to words on paper. The installation's computer display lets the viewer browse interwoven texts and images. By selecting words, images, or symbols on the screen, viewers choose their own routes through this labyrinthine exploration of media and meaning.

Robert Kendall'sWordScape: Three Interactive Poems is visual literature, an electronic book that challenges the traditional limits of written language. Presented on a PC monitor, these poems recognize that we always perceive words within a visual context, whether it be the vociferous colors of an electric sign or the serene, dignified rows of type in a fine book. The pictorial presence of this poetry is as much a part of its impact as are its linguistic significations. Words are even choreographed into movement upon the screen, drawing printed text into the realm of performance and giving it the immediacy of speech.

By letting the viewer interact with it to alter the content, Kendall's poetry becomes a little like the workings of the mind. One of the Three Interactive Poems lets the viewer change its emotional state and the causal connections between the experiences being recounted. The poem thus emulates rather than merely describing the poet's ambivalence toward the personal loss he's reflecting upon and reproduces the instability of memory.