O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Virtually Interesting : ‘Machine Culture’ Show Gives Hint of What Technology Can Do

I witnessed an eye-popping marriage of art and future-tech last week, but the newlyweds struck me as rather ill at ease.

Despite the investment of lavish amounts of expertise, creative brainpower and highly sophisticated equipment, many of the works were more like toys or games than thoughtful works of art.

Still, the questions raised by the very notion of combining art and cutting-edge technology made “Machine Culture: The Virtual Frontier” worth seeing. The six-day exhibition at the Anaheim Convention Center, which ended on Friday, was part of the annual meeting of SIGGRAPH (the Assn. for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics). The show, like the convention itself, was not open to the general public.

The 30 works in “Machine Culture,” selected by an international seven-member committee, were made by artists, computer experts and artist/techno-buff teams from the United States, Germany, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and Japan. (Orange County was represented by Laguna Beach resident Victoria Vesna’s installation, “Another Day in Paradise,” in which scenes on video monitors encased in preserved palm trees contrasted the coldly immaculate look of local malls and business centers with the harrowing story of a young Vietnamese immigrant.)

Viewed as a group, the work in the show demonstrated the current status of “interactive” and “virtual” artworks. The interactive pieces involved touching a screen, making sounds, pulling a lever, rolling a ball, and so forth; the virtual pieces--some of which unfortunately weren’t working when I visited--immersed the viewer into a three-dimensional computer-generated universe.

Mind you, there’s no doubt about the wizardly nature of such work. Viewers could simulate the feeling of flying above a planet simply by spreading their arms and leaning from side to side in front of an interactive projected image (“Small Planet,” by Myron Kruger).

Viewers touching potted plants could make plant imagery “grow” on a screen (“Interactive Plant Growing,” by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau).

By murmuring or screaming into a microphone, viewers could wiggle the facial features of a cartoon baby programmed to “react” to different vocal inflections (“Neuro Baby,” by Naoko Tosa).

Considered as art, however, rather than as technical toys, most of the works in the show lacked ambiguity, metaphorical depth or psychological complexity.

The visual and interactive qualities of the pieces tended to be as overbearing and unsubtle as the harsh colors, simple imagery and conquer-and-destroy maneuvers in a computer arcade game.

For example, “Animatrix,” an interactive installation by Akke Wagenaar and Nasahiro Miwa, featured a headless, double-jointed, seven-armed figure that “danced” on a screen to bleepy electronic music when animated by a joystick.

Although the relationship between the viewer’s actions and the variety and speed of the figure’s movements--or the rhythm of the music--were quite subtle, the resulting images were formulaic and the music was wretched, even by electronic standards.

We already expect cartoon figures to be able to perform inhuman feats, so the bizarre acrobatics on view were nothing special. Conversely, the variable factors of speed and rhythm in the piece lacked the organic wholeness, psychological shading and complex blend of nuance and predictability characteristic of real dancers and real musicians.

The piece made me wonder whether the artists considered just what it is about the combination of movements and music in an expert live dance performance that compels our attention and gains our appreciation. Getting a computer to simulate those qualities--whatever they are--would make a much more persuasive piece.

Viable ideas of any sort--real ideas, that is, not just gimmicks--for the most part seemed in short supply.

“Hyper Scratch,” by Haruo Ishii, involved a visual deluge of media-derived images that mixed and matched on a big screen according to the viewer’s touch-pad commands.

The resulting bursts of texts, imagery and garish color blocks looked like so much visual “noise,” unsatisfying simply as a sensory phenomenon and--unlike the groundbreaking work of Nam June Paik--seemingly devoid of a cultural viewpoint.

A few artists clearly made attempts to “say” something in their work, but the results proved disappointing. A hackneyed message and format doomed Nancy Paterson’s “The Machine in the Garden,” which contrasted rapid-fire TV imagery on three monitors with images of the artist making “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” gestures.

Linda Dement’s “Typhoid Mary” contained such a confusing jumble of painful personal texts and visual imagery (dissected penises, a heart operation, sutured skin) that it seemed to defeat the artist’s worthy aim of dealing with gender issues without the slick look of computer graphics.

“Family Portrait,” an interactive four-monitor laser-disc piece by Canadian artist Luc Courchesne, inadvertently illustrated the current limitations of technology’s attempt to deal with psychological and perceptual issues.

A touch-screen allowed viewers to choose among several mildly serious or frivolous questions answered by lifelike moving images of French-speaking men and women. (Replies were translated into English.)

Viewers could flirt with a female student (“Are you prepared to go further?”) or describe themselves to a bespectacled young male choreographer (one possibility: “I am a rich patron of the arts”). Prompted by a programmed question, a grandmotherly woman spoke wistfully about the “dream life” of women today.

The piece unintentionally pointed up the huge gap between the complexity of the visual data viewers received (Gallic shrugs, smiles, stares, pauses, personal tics and so forth) and the narrow, linear framework of the questions viewers were permitted to pose.

Fortunately, a few works in “Machine Culture” seemed genuinely viable as works of art. My favorite was Perry Hoberman’s “Faraday’s Garden,” described in the SIGGRAPH catalogue as an interactive “orchestra” of outdated appliances. (The title refers to the 19th-Century physicist Michael Faraday, known for his work in electricity and magnetism.)

Phonographs, egg beaters, juicers, mixers, clock radios, hand-held slide viewers, a miniature vacuum cleaner, an Ice-o-Matic, a Waring blender, an electric fan and other vintage household goods were displayed as if in a forgotten storeroom. As the viewer walked past each object, its motor--powered by sensors in the floor--turned on for a brief moment.

Like so many vintage windup toys, each object had a noisily pathetic moment in the spotlight. A vacuum cleaner puffed up with air; a mixer whirled unidentified pink liquid; record players played fragments of silly old records; a massager ran uselessly back and forth; the projectors showed almost subliminal historical film clips; the can opener pretended to chew on an already open tin of Campbell’s Soup.

This was a wry postmodern version of history in which the electric objects made during a particularly optimistic era of American culture (post-World War II) assumed a temporary cult status, each one “performing” on command and giving contemporary viewers conflicting feelings of nostalgia and (technological) superiority. (The soup can also suggested a sly homage to Andy Warhol, who built his career on the recognition of such cultural markers.)

Best of all, the technology in this piece exquisitely served the idea behind it, since the objects remained dormant until viewers activated them--as if they didn’t even exist until someone remembered them.

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Another piece, Hillary Kapan’s “Blind Date,” reminded me of how the earliest photographs and moving picture experiments so often involved sexual themes (nudes, peep shows). For some reason, voyeurism seems inextricably linked to the technology of art.

The intriguing difference in the new interactive works is that they necessarily involved the sense of touch--or even full-body movements by the viewer--as well as sight. (One of the panels at SIGGRAPH, “Nan-o-Sex and Virtual Seduction,” posed the question of whether this new “erotic space” might develop “better understanding and relations between the genders.”)

Kapan exploited the kinky aspect of touch in her slight but amusing piece, tailor-made for the Age of Safe Sex. A video monitor draped with satin and velvet rested on a love seat.

On the screen, a man’s hand moved slightly. On the sofa, there was ample room for the viewer-user to cuddle up. When she touched the screen, a male voice urged: “Don’t stop. Rub it!” If she did as she was told, the hand curled and writhed. “It’s never been like this,” it murmured. “Oh God, you’re good . . . .”

I also fancied Martin Spanjaard’s motorized, computerized and vocally anthropomorphized ball, “Adelbrecht,” who mostly whined (when rolled or petted) about his life as a ball. (He could distinguish 17 different situations, including bumping a lot, bumping normally and being stuck. His brief remarks were designed to be understandable but not predictable.)

As Spanjaard wrote in his droll explanatory booklet (which was almost as good, on a purely conceptual level, as the piece itself), Adelbrecht “confronts us with the boundaries between Being and Machine.” He is also “an actor, trying to interest us enough to follow him for a spell.”

Lust figured prominently in Adelbrecht’s small, self-important life. “Petting heightens his lust,” Spanjaard wrote. “If he gets stuck, his lust quickly wanes and he gets increasingly angry and will finally switch himself off, but not before asking for help.”

In a different vein, “Onyrisk”--a “kinetic canvas” by Alain Mongeau, Eric Mattson, Marc Lavallee and Suzie Dumont--offered an elaborate four-cycle system of imagery that was oddly mesmerizing--partly because you worked with it on an intimate, small-scale level rather than seeing it projected on a big screen.

Images that appeared momentarily on infinitely receding concentric rectangles registered on the mind on an almost subliminal level.

Although the recognizable subjects (forests, planes flying, water flowing, fire burning) were rather banal, their primal references and continual metamorphosis gave them an intensity and an abstract, fluid quality. I felt immersed in an almost drug-like world of endlessly shifting, unpredictable visual events.

Pieces like these suggest that interactive computer artworks will someday be welcomed as full-fledged citizens in the world of sophisticated art. Surely the links between technical and artistic creativity eventually will be much clearer.

Who knows? Perhaps the resulting new art forms may be praised in high places for qualities that critics decry today. It would be fascinating to be able to check back in another lifetime or so, to see how this brave new world evolved.