Nam June Paik Paik was "at the forefront of a new generation of artists creating an aesthetic discourse out of television and the moving image. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he also worked as a teacher and an activist, supporting other artists and working to realize the potential of the emerging medium." (Source) TV Garden first created in 1974 is a large-scale installation consisting of forty television sets lying on the floor amidst many tropical plants while a video of Global Groove plays on the screens of the TV sets. (Source) Miltos Manetas
"Privileged European White Male Artist" ÑEWPRESSIONISM "FROM SCREEN TO NATURE" AND Back AGAIN "We live in days of Metascreen. Screens and networks are-for good or bad-part of nature. Screens "project", "transmit", "translate" but also "protect", "conceal" and "isolate". Screens hide from us the large view and isolate us from the whole showing us just a bit." "The Atari applies certain constraints that contribute the ideas I wanted to get across with this work. For one part, it all but eliminates the need (or indeed the possibility) of creating complex instantial assets like images and sounds. Many of today’s “artgames” adopt coarse visual and sound design as a way of recovering the simplicity of earlier games while extending them to new subjects. The Atari invites such designs by necessity. Its limited technical abilities and small file size demands invite symbolism. For another, it lets me harness the platform’s history of more abstract gameplay, even if such gameplay was once about concrete things like dogfights or dungeon crawling. This fact should remind us that older forms are worth returning to for their aesthetics. For yet another, even in its commercial heydey Atari games were created by a single person, which mirrors the production process for a poem. And for yet another, it imposes serious constraints on development while still allowing for many different kinds of games. And finally, it gives me a natural excuse to adopt a very small file size as a constraint." SPRING One humid sweater One puddle busts up each drive The sogginess strikes SUMMER Sleep smells of mosses While insects wink atop them Wild precipitate In May 1974, Joseph Beuys shared a room in West Broadway’s René Block Gallery with a wild coyote for eight hours a day, for three days. "It was a performance, entitled I Like America and America likes Me, taut with caution (the animal at first was erratic, and tore apart a blanket in the room), but one that was ultimately a success: the coyote grew tolerant, accepting, simply through Beuys’ desire to heal. It’s a potent, profound image, and one that today is as prescient as ever. The United States of America is in a troublesome situation as a declining global power, having to now deal with the failings of modernity and late capitalism." (Source) "The animal appears as a heteronomous Other. Whereas humans never cease to reconfigure their societies and their identities within them, a coyote, it seems, is always a coyote. The animal is in this sense a limit, the outermost edge of the human." (Pinto, Ana. The Post-Human Animal, 2015.) Note: he regarded teaching as an essential element of his work as an artist. This brings to my mind the film Never Cry Wolf (1983), and the following video. In 2005, Mircea Cantor brought a wolf and a deer into an empty white-cube gallery room. While Beuys' coyote eventually became comfortable with him, the deer and wolf in Cantor's Deeparture remained eager to avoid each other for the full duration of the performance. (Pinto.) |
This journal documents my research relating to the animal in digital media since the 1970’s, which marks the birth of the environmental movement and the start of the digital age.
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November 2020
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