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SPACE ODYSSEYS: sensation & immersion
Artists
| Luc Courchesne | David Haines/Joyce Hinterding | Gary Hill | |
| Mariko Mori | Bruce Nauman | James Turrell | Lynette Wallworth |
Luc Courchesne
(Canada b.1952)
Luc Courchesne began his explorations in interactive visitor-triggered video
in 1984 when he co-authored Elastic Movies with Bill Seamen among others
at MIT. He has since produced several installations including Encyclopaedia
Chiaroscuro (1987), Portrait One (1990), Family Portrait (1993),
Landscape One (1997), Passages (1998) and Rendezvous (1999).
He has had a solo show at Museum of Modern Art in New York. These experiments
with conversational interfaces have been elaborated to give the impression of
communication between visitors and virtual beings. The video sequences are stored
on laser-disc and displayed as reflections on a glass plate positioned directly
above the video projection. Of late, Courchesne has tried to make a more closed
sense of space, and to create a better sense of immersion. His latest work is
with interactive devices set in a single-channel panoramic viewer, Panoscope
360, a doughnut-shaped anamorphic video, which gives a seamless image and uses
voice for input. 'In expanding the field of view', writes Courchesne, 'immersive
imaging frees the viewer's body and multiplies the possible points of view,
[...] transforming spectators into visitors.'
David Haines
(Australia b.1966) and Joyce Hinterding (Australia b.1958)
David Haines is an installation artist who has been practising for over
ten years. Originally trained as a painter, his work since the mid 'eighties
has focused on combining time-based art forms such as video, sound and computer
animation with static objects and images to create a vivid environment. Haines'
work draws on pre-Rationalist magic to be found in the written word, when symbols
were seen to be as powerful as the things they represented, from alchemical
emblems to heraldry. Something of this is returned to signs in the age of 3D
animation and graphics terminal design. For Haines, humour is a tool of disruption.
Haines explores the underbelly of language, replete with bizarre hybridisations
and deliberate misspellings. Medievalism-musical/non musical kingdoms
was a major video work of 1997 involving multi video monitors and projections
shown at Artspace, Sydney. For the collection of works Avatar at the Physics
room, Haines had taken an assemblage approach to present a series of works
that are hallucinatory, intense and playful, along with the text of some incongruous
ideas.
Joyce Hinterding has created sculptural installations that set out to
investigate dynamic systems in acoustic and electrical phenomena. In one work,
for example, she used phase-shift oscillators in order to synthesise sounds
from controlled feedback. Electricity generated by a solar panel is fed into
drawings (made up of pencil marks, silver and paper) that conduct, impede or
collect electricity. A transistor and speaker attached to the drawing is wired
for sound. In Aeritus (1998), a magnetic turbulence around ordinary objects
(a fork, a knife and a chair) allows for a map of electronic flows through harmonic
phase disturbance. Siphon (1997) stored electricity inside insulated
jars. With these she created room-sized electronic circuits, with speaker magnets
and voice coils emitting hums of electrons crashing into atoms. Her work has
been shown in Australian Perspecta 1991 and the Biennale of Sydney 1992.
Together, Haines and Hinterding have produced Edges, Cape Bruny Lightstation,
Tasmania, 1999 and The Levitation Grounds, Artspace Sydney, 2000.
Gary Hill
(USA b.1951)
Along with Bill Viola, Gary Hill has lifted video installation art -- generally
compared to mainstream television -- up to the 'highest reaches of the fine
arts world'. His images usually contain people or spoken and written words (such
as the text from Maurice Blanchot's The Gaze of Orpheus or Wittgenstein's
Remarks on Colour). He investigates the conditions of perception
with interactive installations. What interests him are the gaps between meaning
and reference and where image ends and reality begins. Hill has staged shows
in major museums and galleries all over the world. One-person shows have been
organised in museums such as Centre Pompidou (1992), I.V.A.M. in Valencia (1993),
Stedelijk Van Abbe Museum in Amsterdam (1993) and in many American institutions.
At the Venice Biennale (1995), Hill presented a labyrinth of 'words' which were
activated by the presence of the viewer and which created different discourses
according to the paths taken. In Australia he is exhibiting his Tall Ships,
('the one undisputed hit of Documenta IX and the 1993 Whitney Biennial, and
remains one of the most compelling works of the last decade'), a long and dark
corridor that the viewer can walk through, while activating moving images of
human figures on the walls as they are approached.
Mariko Mori
(Japan b.1967)
Born in Tokyo, Mariko Mori studied fashion design and worked as a fashion model
during the late 1980s. She attended art schools in London and New York and her
multimedia work reflects the combination of influences from Eastern and Western
cultures and mixes new technologies with the spirituality and traditions of
the past. Using computer imaging techniques, Mori becomes a mermaid figure that
appears and disappears in Empty Dream (1995), or is transformed into
an oversized, plastic pop-star doll in Birth of a Star (1996), complete
with pop song composed and sung by the artist. Dream Temple is a postmodern
reconception of the ancient (739 AD) Yumedono Temple of Horyuij Japan, where
Prince Shotoku would go to transcend time and space. Mori's virtual version
using iridescent glass, takes the visitor on a 4-minute, 44-second experience
that leads them further inside their own consciousness. Whether techno-shaman,
cyborg Buddha or futuristic hostess in a traditional tea ceremony, Mariko Mori
takes us on a journey to a utopian place where geographical and cultural boundaries
dissolve.
Bruce Nauman
(USA b.1941)
Bruce Nauman began exhibiting internationally soon after graduating from the
University of California in 1965. After encountering John Cage and Jasper Johns
and reading Samuel Beckett, he began working in non-traditional materials (video,
film, light, sound, holography, mathematics, words and more) as a way to ridicule
the obvious, just as Duchamp once used the obvious to ridicule art. One Hundred
Live and Die (1972) is a neon piece consisting of 100 short phrases (e.g.
'live and eat', 'shit and die') which flash one at a time, culminating in a
blast of all phrases simultaneously lit. Aggressive and ironic, Nauman's uncanny
works often induce anxiety attacks and yet, throughout the decades, there is
a persistence that has intensified and deepened, making him one of the more
durable of the 'anti-art' artists from the 'sixties. Clown Torture (1987)
is a series of videos of a clown being endlessly humiliated. The critic Peter
Schjeldahl has observed, '[his] radical scepticism is directed against assumptions
not only of art experience, but experience itself.' As in the work of Samuel
Beckett, there is the contradictory drive to connect combined with the futility
of connection. As a result there is something both dignified and uncomfortable,
both amusing and despairing in Nauman. The end is: isolation, refuge and a kind
of imposing human solitude.
> See Having Fun/Good Life/Symptoms 1985 [http://www.cmoa.org/html/art/frametime.htm
(click the fourth-last image on the 'Sculpture' line, or go directly to http://www.cmoa.org/html/art/popup/zzbig.html)]
James Turrell
(USA b.1943)
James Turrell, a major figure in contemporary art, creates enclosed spaces without
objects: except, that is, for the intangible medium of light, with its manifold
hues, shades and intensities. By merging light with the concept of space, questions
arise about the complex nature of vision and about the limits and possibilities
of the viewer's perception. Early works include aperture-like pieces, with light
trapping hallways, acting as photographic darkrooms; many are simple, standard
drywall constructions with commercial light fixtures. But the effects are compelling
and highlight the nature of seeing: what appears to be a window, for example,
becomes a physical skin of light holding onto to the wall. His largest exterior
work is Roden Crater, 1972-c.2000 [http://www.rodencrater.org],
a natural cinder volcano situated on the south western edge of the Painted Desert
in northern Arizona. James Turrell is transforming the crater into a panoramic
artwork that relates, through the medium of light, to the universe of the surrounding
sky, desert landscape and local Hopi culture.
Lynette
Wallworth (Australia b.1961)
Lynette Wallworth has worked in photography, short film, installation and performance.
A New Media Arts grant enabled her to develop a partnership to investigate visual
technologies including scanning microscopy at James Cook University, astronomical
photography at the Anglo-Australian Observatory and underwater macro-filming
techniques utilising medical imaging technologies. Lynette Wallworth was the
head curator and responsible for the project concept of Big New Sites,
produced by The Performance Space in Sydney. Big New Sites placed the
works of visual and sound artists on cinema screens throughout Australia over
a twelve month period. Her short film for the SBS Eat Carpet, 'Still Moving'
Project, Nocturne 1 looked at light pollution and the loss of darkness.
Her video installation for Space Odysseys is on catchments of imagery
derived from the natural world.
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