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NEW MEDIA,
DIGITAL FINE ART,
MEDIA BASED ART
"we are compelled by the quantity of available social and political facts to learn a new visual language for mastering the inner dynamics by the outer" (McLuhan, New Media as Political Forms 2-3).
Welcome to my DigIOsophy.
COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS: Wyndham Lewis wrote that all "living art is the history of the future". The formula is we become what we behold. What our culture compels us to behold is the holographic ICONOSCOPE: all the new media that both virtually surround and contain, as well as permeate our lives, and comprise an intrinsic part of our environment. Debord called it a Society of the Spectacle, emphasizing it's visual nature. Spectacle as a commodity is embodied in so-called Reality TV. The War on Terror is a materialized ideology, fighting an Idea. Ideology is the problem, not the solution to human survival technology.
YOU TURN ME I-ON-A: We broadcast our identities as a fusion of recombinant personae, cliches, and archetypes: infinite fractal use of finite iconography: technological self-amplification of our bodyminds. You turn me on; I turn you on in a fusion of knowner and known. I call my broadcast "Radio Free Qabala". coming to you from station IONA, sponsored by the Temple of Living Light. Channels may vary in your locale, that is by your capacity to comprehend my essential nature. Hegel said, “Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself only insofar as it exists in and for another self-consciousness; that is, it exists only by being recognized and acknowledged.” Arguably, language was the first real technology, and all others mere extensions of our five senses. We are a fractalization of collective history. We are carried forward by the anticipation of our own lives, their emergent qualities. Infinite mirroring and anticipation is beyond synchronicity; Xenochrony is the holomovement of Xenochronicity. Only the level of resolution changes not the content.
TECHNOTOPIA: Evolving technology resonates like feedback in our phenomenology. Buckminster Fuller did not view technology as separate from nature and our nature, biological intelligence and tecnological evolution, including speech. Our separateness has created the pursuit of individual "reality wormholes" which reconnect us with collective unconscious, collective identity through "voluntary ESP". We no longer live as point-particles but in our waveforms, often spread simultaneously over several timezones. We can read the entire holographic timelog of the Akashic Records at our local theater or on DVD.
KINETIC FIELD OF DREAMS: The Digital Revolution is here and it IS being televised but not on your Grandmother's screen. For artists, the 21st Century is a Digital Universe. Even conventional artists can manipulate their images into a myriad of morphs. Because of insurance problems, fine art has moved toward the giclee print where originals are printed onto canvas and overpainted with a topcoat of paint. But why even bother with the smelly stuff? High end galleries are installing projectors. Popular art is being displayed as virtual paintings on plasma screens in private homes.
NEW MEDIA: Media guru Mark Stahlman defines this term he coined as the media which replace the cinesthesia of TELEVISION as the dominant environment in our lives and culture. Surround sound is already the medium that replaced television. Home theaters now dominate the consumer electronics business. They are simply big television sets with multi-channel sound added, replicating the experience of multi-channel sound in movie theaters. Acoustic space as surround sound replaced the "tactility" of television. Media analyst/cultural theorist, Marshall McLuhan stressed that ALL media are ultimately a matter of sensory balances and sensory biases. He believed that artists need to integrate, analyze and utilize rapid changes in technology, in order to truly have a mass impact on people in the modern age. But the electronic environment isn't limited to artists but is available to virtually everyone. No one escapes its influence. Rapid evolution of communication devices enables and future-shocks us at the same time.
FIGURE-GROUND SHIFT: Shift happens. New Media are the various implementations and the profound implications of the shift by acoustic space from the ground of our lives under the conditions of the electric media environment (i.e. television). They are becoming the figures of expression in our increasingly post-electric world -- in particular, as reflected in three-channel stereo (3CS.) When you run your own multimedia content through your home theater, it becomes your own Church of Self-Amplification. The post-electronic environment is the ground that is the true medium which creates the message, altering our perceptions of self, others and world.
BYTE ME: In 2006, New Media are Broadband, Wireless, High Def, and creating portable environments: the cell phone, high rez digicam, digital video recorder, gaming, podcasting, V-cast. The cell phone has become both the mini computer and TV screen with on demand self-programming of content. Portable screens represent a crucial inflection in the arc of digital media development. McLuhan's famous dictum, "The Medium is the Message" had a second part -- "The Audience is the Content." Entertainment content must become more and more compelling or we simply make our own. We all now have the capacity to capture virtually every nuance of our lives digitally. We don't have to "download" our psyches into the computer; they are already out there in the data streams as disembodied bytes in the aethyr, each with discrete wavelengths: our images, thoughts, and emotions.
LUMONICS: High Brow art dominated the artworld before Duchamp, followed by Low Brow postmodern rejection of all metanarratives. Arguably video guru Nam June Paik ushered in Know-Brow art based in electronic media. Only light can capture the nuance of energetic processes. Special FX pushes it imaginatively over the top. The multisensory electronic moving image is now an artist's medium. It can be employed to express representational and abstract imagery through recorded and virtual technologies. The moving image is central to our visual culture, articulating new strategies and forms of image making. The kinetic image fuses electronic and digital media into a new form of expression. We can easily alter both materiality and composition of the electronic image; we can refashion its content, visual vocabulary, and plastic forms. Desk-top cinema has made individual productions a possibility that has jumped the Theatre of the Mind, to become sensuously embodied as a "body without organs", an Android Meme. In the vernacular of paramedia ecologist Bob Dobbs, the parts of the Android Meme are the Chemical Body, the Astral Body, the TV Body, and the Chip Body.
PARAMEDIA ECOLOGY: Primal man made his environment by magic rituals that were re-enactments and dramatizations of the creative process by which the world comes into being. Even Renaissance art was trying to capture the values of the past technologically, but 21st Century art is a holographic time machine. Your beliefs determine what century you are inhabiting. Technology has the power to be environmental entirely independent of art as environmental. Even Jung had no idea of the psychic role in creating technologies or in responding and reacting to them. Yet technologies, especially electronic tech, are extensions of the body, making us all Cyborgs. The psychic and social saturation resulting from electric extension of the nerves is much swifter than effects of mere extensions to our physical being, such as clothing, or the wheel, or mirrors. The environmental role of art can be spiritual or concretely physical. The actual effects of new technologies turns old environments into art forms that help define us as modern humans.
"Media are really environments, with all the effects geographers & biologists associate with environments. We live inside our media. We are their content. TV images come to us so fast, in such profusion, they engulf us, tattoo us. We're immersed. It's like skin diving. We're surrounded & whatever surrounds, involves. TV doesn't wash over us and then go "out of mind." It goes into mind, deep into mind. The subconscious is a world in which we store everything, not something, and TV extends the subconscious....Such experiences are difficult to describe in words. Like dreams or sports, they evade verbal classification." (Edmund Carpenter; They Became... 63)
According to anthropologist Carpenter,we are forced into new modes of communication and forced to create our own environments of declassified information when media render old patterns of perception obsolete. When we program our own psychic and sensory lives, we turn to artists who practice creating their own lives for reference. In many ways we are forced to improvise, taking what is at hand, and forming it into something that could be, into something new, but which is made from the parts of the old in a fractal reiteration.
ANTI-MYSTERY SCHOOL: SACRED AND PROFANE. We virtually 'worship' that which we give our attention; the more we give it the more we worship it. Our society is compulsive. Technology as the "demon of progress" is a spiritual rival, a rival to spiritual technologies, our "technical destiny". Naturally in the electric age this rivalry for the soul of man is far more intense than ever before: inner vs. outer quest. Today's 21st Century Media Mystery Schools retrain our perceptions even reviewing obsolete Reality Tunneling of the past: ritualized utility and understanding without boundaries or satcom interconnectedness. Technology competes for and effects human senses and perceptions. Art is inherently and seamlessly wed to media ecology. In some sense, the environment can be seen as merely a war between good and bad art. The question becomes not what do we believe and have faith in, but how can we live more artfully and heartfully, developing human survival technologies that feed our souls and spirits.
RECYCLING CONSCIOUSNESS: McLuhan taught that the environment is a programmed teaching machine. He was arguably the first feedback artist, hungry for people with new ideas, angles, insights, so he could use that material to generate more of his own. Feedback of feedback is bad feed, imitation and parody rather than the chaotic creative edge. Now, with weblife, cell phone/cameras, and Sidekicks we all live in our nonlocal "chip bodies" and have become feedback artists, perhaps imagining we are generating our own content of infinite fractal reiterations in a vast parody of ourselves-the put on, the spectacle. Is there any CONTENT without an audience to receive it? Between space and ground camera surveillance and GPS accountability no one is ever really ALONE; no first-person singular exists anymore. In Dobbs-speak, between voluntary ESP (net) and synthetic telepathy we no longer own our own thoughts and can't even know what they are or might have been without that perturbation. No wonder there is so much static on the Reality Channel of the Digital Universe. Also see http://www.fivebodied.com/project/
DIGITAL CONTEXT: In 1993 I wrote an article on the Digital Universe for CHAOSOPHY Journal based on Fredkin's theory of digital physics, that information is more fundamental than matter and energy, that atoms, electrons, and quarks consist ultimately of bits--binary units of information. Online at http://asklepia.tripod.com/
Chaosophy/chaosophy21.html
A DIGITAL UNIVERSE?
SCIENCE MIRRORS ART;
ART MIRRORS SCIENCEDIGITAL CONTENT: The interface of computer science and physics has led to the concept that information may be as fundamental as matter and energy. Some believe that information is just one of many forms of matter and energy, which is embodied in things like a computer's electrons and a brain's neural firings. Others suggest information should be part of the new scientific triad--matter/energy/information--the main ingredients of reality.
Ed Fredkin goes one step further, with his notion of "digital physics." In this, and other systems, information is more fundamental than matter and energy. He believes that atoms, electrons, and quarks are ultimately binary bits of information. These discrete bits of information may be compared to the quantization of energy in light (photons). The work of Nobel laureate, T.D. Lee suggests that time may also be discrete.
Discrete states are the essence of the digital nature of computer operation. Discreteness depends ultimately on quantum mechanics. A general state which 'spreads' is a superposition of such discrete states.
Fredkin suggests that the universe may be a vast computer which creates reality through ceaseless repetition--taking information it has just transformed and transforming it further to generate pervasive complexity. Space and time are discrete, the laws of the universe are algorithmic, and the universe works according to the same principles as a computer.
According to Fredkin, not everything is best viewed as information, but it helps us model reality and create programs to test our notions. What he is saying is that "at the most basic level of complexity an information process runs what we think of as physics. At the much higher level of complexity life, DNA--the biochemical functions--are controlled by a digital information process. Then, at another level, our thought processes are basically information processing." "But for the practicing artist . . . works of art are not made from ideas or doctrines but, like ourselves, must come into existence by a process which is indifferent to the winds of doctrine. Yet if the artistic process must always be the same the conditions of art and the artist are always changing (McLuhan, "Coleridge as Artist," in The Interior Landscape, 118-19).
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PSYCHEDELIA:
BLUE ELF MAGICK
1/26/06
NEW ANIMATION OF IO ART
I’m interested in subcultures and Psychedelic Intelligentsia as subject matter; occulture, and cultural engineering.
LSD: Problem Child of Albert Hoffman, Animations
http://www.sign69.com/medialounge/space693.html
http://www.sign69.com/medialounge/space721.html
Art Frames - http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.
dir=/1561&.src=ph&.tok=phVEVVEBQhFiPa_b
Conference Pix (Jeff Keim)
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.
dir=/57be&.src=ph&.tok=phQQTUEBZ1a.p4Xy
Universal Solvent: “Blue Elf Magick”:
Still frames and Hyperdelic animation of Io digital fine art and pix from Albert Hoffman 100th B-day party, Basel, Switzerland. Io collabo with electronic artist Philip Wood, France. Music: Plastic Ono Band, “Do the Oz”.
Coming: MAY 2006; Memorial Day Weekend
ASSACON, May ’06 http://www.assacon.com
San Francisco, California; Memorial Day Weekend
Workshop Title: Altered States of Sex, Love, Intelligence
Co-facilitators:
Sobey Wing, Vancouver B.C. and Iona Miller, So. Oregon
The mixing of the psychedelic experience and the world of relationships can be a road to enlightenment or suffering. Love itself being considered a drug gives rise to possibilities of harm reduction approaches to the way we share energies. Neo-tribalist, Sobey Wing and Cybersybil, Iona Miller provide an inter-generational bridge in a culture lab investigating the potentialities of dyad voyages from preparation to post-integration of the entheogenic experience. Use of aphrodisiacs will also be touched upon. Looking at questions that hinder our intimacies and create armoring of the heart, we will seek ways to empower the resource states in ourselves. Applications draw on tools that including free writing, discussions and breakout groups, movement and self hypnosis as we explore ways to re-pattern mind states to anchor more sacredness in our love and sexuality. Also see more at ASSACON PAGE HERE for details http://digitaluniverse.50megs.com/custom2.html |
PSYOPS
PsiCoSomatics
SpyCoSomatics
1/15/06
NEW WEBSITE: PSIONA
Iona’s parapsychology/paraphysics history, writings and collaborations, 1970s - 2006. PSIber Kult, Emergent Mind, Nexus, PsiOps, John Curtis Gowan, Heartstrings Nonlocal Healing, Asklepia Dreamhealing, Mankind Research Unlimited, Beyond MK Ultra, OAK, Inc., more. 21st C. Psi Research, Holographic Concept, Co-consciousness, Quantum Bioholography, Multiverse, Chaosophy, Nonlocal Healing, Mind Control, Self-Regulation, etc.
http://psiona.50megs.com NEW 6-2006 MY ZERO POINT
http://myzeropoint.50megs.com |
MEDIA BASED ART
VIRTUAL QABALAH DVD
by Iona Miller and Merlyn Morgan
Qabalah is the ART of being fully human. It is a tecnology for the embodiment of spirituality. The paths of the Tree of Life exemplify templates for all ways of being and becoming. VIRTUAL QABALAH is a first of its kind animated multimedia guided tour of the initiatory mindscapes of Tarot and Qabalah. Much like science, deep mysticism goes beyond beliefs to present direct experience. The whole system incorporates not only the brain and body, but most importantly the outside world too. This view is esentially circular and dynamic, not linear and fixed. Consciousness is access to a sensorium and/or informational input. We are modified by both incoming and self-generated sensory data...a cosmic feedback device.
FUTURE HERITAGE: The Qabalistic worldview is a dynamic system, a Whole which differentates itself into parts which then integate back into resonant wholes. The Tree is a general pattern of activity in an endlessly flowing substrate. It's a process, not a thing. Using visionary art and pathworking symbolism, the viewer witnesses the Qabalistic Creation story: emanation of the Spheres of the Tree of Life. Next, through a series of multisensory guided visualizations, he or she finds personal meaning by ldquo;climbing” the Tree, in an exaltation of soul and spirit.
HIGH TECH HYPNOSIS: Using congruent yet amorphous imagery at some points provides generic metaphors of transformation as templates or blank canvas for the subjective projections of each viewer, allowing them to identify with the generic aspirant in a personalistic, yet undefined, way. Ultimately, it is our sense organs which help us interpret the world and our experience through our perceptions. They help us make a distinction between what is "real" and "unreal." The emotional part of the brain, (the right, spatial lobe), cannot analytically distinguish a symbol from a symbolic representation.
CONNECTING TO SOURCE: In imagination or virtual reality it becomes a moot point. Fantasy, in fact, animates both our inner and outer worlds, and creates meaning. The on-going imaginative process of the psyche is the ground of being. Jung spoke of the psychoid aspect of psyche as the vast non-human action of the universal forces. Aesthetic flow and harmony appeals to the emotional brain, while systematic orderliness appeals to the cognitive nature, creating holistic congruence in the viewing experience.
PSYCHOTRONICS: This video DOES things to you: it resonates with and awakens deep layers of the psyche, “rototills” your subconscious mind in an organic way, planting the seeds of transformation, Cosmosis. Self-Regulation is the antidote to Corporate and Political Mind Control.
Ionatopia Updates 2006
THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION:
THE WAR OF BAD ART vs GOOD ART
(Courtesy of 'GlobalResearch') : http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=view
Article&code=BRO20060129&articleId=1842
US Plans to 'Fight the Net' Revealed
by Adam Brookes
January 29, 2006
BBC
A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.
Bloggers beware. As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.
From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war. The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.
Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it. The "roadmap" calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military's ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare.
The document says that information is "critical to military success". Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance.
Propaganda
The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.
All these are engaged in information operations. Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.
"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.
"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.
The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. "Specific boundaries should be established," they write. But they don't seem to explain how.
"In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States - even though they were directed abroad," says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive.
Credibility problem
Public awareness of the US military's information operations is low, but it's growing - thanks to some operational clumsiness.
Late last year, it emerged that the Pentagon had paid a private company, the Lincoln Group, to plant hundreds of stories in Iraqi newspapers. The stories - all supportive of US policy - were written by military personnel and then placed in Iraqi publications.
And websites that appeared to be information sites on the politics of Africa and the Balkans were found to be run by the Pentagon. But the true extent of the Pentagon's information operations, how they work, who they're aimed at, and at what point they turn from informing the public to influencing populations, is far from clear.
The roadmap, however, gives a flavour of what the US military is up to - and the grand scale on which it's thinking. It reveals that Psyops personnel "support" the American government's international broadcasting. It singles out TV Marti - a station which broadcasts to Cuba - as receiving such support.
It recommends that a global website be established that supports America's strategic objectives. But no American diplomats here, thank you. The website would use content from "third parties with greater credibility to foreign audiences than US officials".
It also recommends that Psyops personnel should consider a range of technologies to disseminate propaganda in enemy territory: unmanned aerial vehicles, "miniaturized, scatterable public address systems", wireless devices, cellular phones and the internet.
'Fight the net'
When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone. It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system.
"Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system," it reads.
The slogan "fight the net" appears several times throughout the roadmap. The authors warn that US networks are very vulnerable to attack by hackers, enemies seeking to disable them, or spies looking for intelligence.
"Networks are growing faster than we can defend them... Attack sophistication is increasing... Number of events is increasing."
US digital ambition
And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum".
US forces should be able to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum".
Consider that for a moment. The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.
Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real? The fact that the "Information Operations Roadmap" is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon.
And that the scale and grandeur of the digital revolution is matched only by the US military's ambitions for it. QUOTES“A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses.” ~ Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy
“When art leaves the frame and when the written word leaves the page-not merely the physical frame and page, but the frames and pages of assigned categories-a basic description of reality itself occurs, the liberal realization of art. Each dedicated artist attempts the impossible. Success will write Apocalypse across the sky. The artist aims for a miracle, the painter who wills his picture to move off the canvas outside of the picture, and one rent in the fabric is all it takes for pandaemonium to sluice through.” ~ William Burroughs, Introduction to Apocalypse
“Works of art provide new experiential gestalts and, therefore, new coherences. From the experientialist point of view, art is, in general, a matter of imaginative rationality and a means of creating new realities. Aesthetic experience is thus not limited to the official art world. It can occur in any aspect of our everyday lives, whenever we take note of, or create for ourselves, new coherences that are not part of our conventionalized mode of perception or thought.” ~ Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
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PAIK WAKE, NYC: Feb. 3, 2006
The World Will Miss Him
Reports from
Bob Dobbs
and Laurence GartelBob Dobbs is paramedia ecologist Marshall McLuhan's archivist, and Gartel is pioneer Digital Media Artist to whom video guru Paik's torch has been passed.
DOBBS: It was an astounding event. Apparently he's bigger than McLuhan. South Korea is building a big museum dedicated to his oeuvre. The Smithsonian has a lot of his work on display.
All the avant-garde luminaries were there. Speeches were given by Yoko Ono, Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, Bill Viola, Gartel and yours truly (I told some MM/Paik stories). Telegrams from the President of Korea, the German culture czar, the Smithsonian, etc. His nephew was the best. Here's how he ended his talk:
"This is an interesting story I'll tell you. Aside from trying to keep him liquid, this is one of the most interesting things I did with him. In 1998, Nam June was invited to a state dinner at the Clinton White House, June of '98. If some of you remember, it's not that long ago, that was the
height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which had broken out earlier, in January or February. Nam June was going, and he asked if I would go with him. So I said, sure. I went with him. I wheeled him into the White House, and these gigantic Marines took over from there. Nam June was very amused, I think. He was having a great time, talking to all the people there. Then we got to the receiving line. Nam June decided to show respect, I think, to the president, Mrs. Clinton, and the other dignitaries there. He decided to get up from his wheelchair, get on his walker, and try to walk across the receiving line. Across the receiving line at the state dinner is the World's press. They're all there; I don't know how many, tens of cameras and video cameras, everything. So as Nam June is talking to President Clinton, and I'm standing right behind him as he's making some small talk to President Clinton, Nam June turns around and says to me: Ken, I think my pants are falling. True story here. And I said, What? My pants are falling! he says. I look down, and his pants are falling! They are completely down on the floor. And he has no underwear on! So I pick up his pants. I pull them up and I just hold them there. Now, Bill Clinton is such a cool president he still continued to have small talk with my uncle. I think they were talking about Chelsea, maybe, I don't know. A little bit down the line, I could see that Hillary was really not amused at all. She was ticked. But Bill Clinton was saying nothing. It was really quite amazing.
After that interesting dinner, Nam June was inundated with phone calls, faxes, everything. All his friends around the world thought that was the was an accident or whether it was, because you have to remember, my uncle is in a wheelchair now but he has a reputation for being a cultural terrorist. So I asked Nam June, did you drop your pants on purpose? Was it an act? Was it an artistic statement? A political statement? And so he said, My pants dropped. That's all. He told me, and this is very Nam June, he said, It really doesn't matter. It was a great event. He's just like that, totally unfazed. Was he embarrassed? No, of course not! And I think Bill Clinton was very cool about that, too. The press was so excited that somebody else's pants, not the president's, had dropped in the White House. They were so excited by that. It was the ultimate Fluxus event.
About two hours ago, I called Nam June and I told him I was going to receive this Medal for him, and I asked him, What advice do you have for the artists in the Colony? I'll pass on to you what he said. He said, Work hard. Be lazy - which is a very Nam June Paik thing to say. And he wished you all well. Thank you very much."
At the end of the memorial today, the nephew handed out about fifty scissors and asked everyone to cut off the tie of the man next to you or you wouldn't be allowed in the reception. Everyone cut off their neighbor's tie and then Yoko suggested everyone put the pieces in Nam's open casket. Everyone did. More amazing things happened at the reception.
Bob Dobbs
P.S. Since he was a "global artist", Paik asked to be buried in 10 countries.
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GARTEL: Too all my friends, colleagues, collectors, associates, and curiosity seekers:
NAM JUNE PAIK
I attended the funeral of my dear friend Nam June Paik yesterday. The funeral took place at the Frank Campbell Funeral Chapel on 81st Street and Madison Avenue, New York City.
In attendance were the complete A List of the Art world. Yoko Ono, Merce Cunningham, Jean Claude and Christo, Besty Broun director of the Smithsonian, John H. Hanhardt, curator of the Guggenheim, and Bill Viola.
There were faces in the crowd of people I hadnt seen in some 30 years. German museum director Wulf Herzogenrath told me that he purchased the "Paik Abe Synthesizer " for his museum. That was the very first piece of electronic equipment my hands ever touched. Suffice to say, Herr Herzogenrath was delighted to learn this news, as the medium was at its shear infancy in 1975.
Paik influenced the entire world, taking steps that were not there before. He called me "A crazy man" because I took stills of moving images which he was not doing and saw the digital world just above the mountain. As most of you know, Paik was kind enough to write the Introduction to my book, "Laurence GARTEL: A Cybernetic Romance," published by Gibbs Smith, Utah, 1989. I will forever be indebted to him for his wonderful words, and kind thoughts.
In true Fluxus style, Paik's nephew Ken Paik Hakuta told everyone to cut off their neck ties in homage to Paik. Yoko Ono placed half a tie on Paik's body resting gently. It was indeed outrageous and Paik's final performance.
I have the whole Funeral and "After Party" at the Mark Hotel documented in both stills and digital clips. I plan on posting this on my website as soon as possible for all the world to see. gartelmuseum.com
May the vision of great men live on.
-Laurence GARTEL
Digital Media Artist
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GARTEL'S EXPERIMENTAL ERA
In 1975 Laurence Gartel found himself at Media Study/ Buffalo, an experimental not for profit organization funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Here, artists were able to experiment with the beginning electronic equipment in order to produce works of art. Most of the work produced there, were crude videotapes that required large and cumbersome 1-inch reel to reel machines. There were no storage devices as we know it today, and everything was “on the fly” and “fleeting.”
While working at the Center, Gartel met video guru, Nam June Paik who thought Gartel’s work was highly “avant garde.” While everyone else was making moving works of art, Gartel saw the still image as a way to capture the “motion.” He therefore set up a camera on a tripod, and photographed the video screen. Technically speaking, this was a difficult thing to do, as the motion of the scan lines on the monitor refreshed itself the shutter speed of the camera needed to be in synch, otherwise there would be a big line across the image.
Gartel used several innovative machines to do his work. One such machine was called the Rutt-Etra Synthesizer, named after its designers: Steve Rutt and Bill Etra. This apparatus bent images electronically. The Paik-Abe Synthesizer was another machine used named after Paik and Shuyasha Abe, which also modified images. The Paik-Abe Colorizer stripped in color to otherwise black and white images. Another words, various gray values were exchanged for different colors.
After 1978 Gartel made another journeys to upstate New York where he got annual grants to work at the Experimental Television Center, in Owego, New York. The facility there was similar to Media Study, expect there were difference machines such as the Jones Keyer/Jones Colorizer, Wobulator, Voltage Control Amplifier, and later on in 1981, added the first pure digital computer, the Cromemco Z-2. This computer has a 12 inch floppy disk with 2K of memory. In later years (1985) the Center added a Commadore Amiga Computer. Gartel created work at the Experimental Television Center from 1978 to 1986. The Center itself is still in existence and has added a great variety of new digital computers and editing facilities.
In 1979 another Center appeared on Long Island called the Intermedia Art Center, in Bayville, New York. Here Gartel worked for several years with equipment such as the Panasonic synthesizer, Colorizer, and Grass Valley Switcher. Gartel worked there as well through 1986, also receiving grants to help support his creative efforts. The Early Works in this exhibition have been made by scanning the original slides and printing them to the Kodak Dye Sublimation Printer.
iona@ionamiller.org |
