We were able to visit the Whitechapel, to especially check out the films by Harun Farocki and Eva and Franco Mattes. Farocki didn’t fail to impress us with ‘Parallel I-IV’. ‘Parallel I’ opens up a history of styles (be those choices or merely all that was possible at the time) in computer graphics. The first games consisted of only horizontal and vertical lines. This abstraction was seen as a failing, and today representations are oriented towards photo-realism – yet there are many that enjoy the ‘retro’ aesthetic of those earlier games and attempt to revive it. ‘Parallel II’ explores the borders and boundaries of the game worlds. This could be our favourite of the four due to how it expands upon a thought that almost al people who have ever played a video game have had. The film follows characters attempts to escape the edges of their animated world by any means, and seeks to reveal what lies outside of the defined spaces and digital borders. The narrator speaks of this in a very romantic way – the characters attempting to break free of the games, very obvious, attempts to keep them in check. ‘Parallel III’ seeks out the backdrops of the game worlds and the nature of their digital objects. It reveals digital worlds which take the form of discs floating in the universe – reminiscent of pre-Hellenistic conceptions of the universe. The animated worlds appear as one-sided theatre stages, flat backdrops revealed only by the movements of an all-knowing, all-seeing camera. Parallel IV explores the actions of the heroes and protagonists of the video game world. A feature we hadn’t previously considered was that these heroes have no parents or teachers; they must test their relationships with others and determine of their, own accord, the rules to follow. Humans create them, which gives users the feeling they can relate to them, meaning that whoever plays with them almost has a share in the creator's pride. Our interest in video games/computer animation is related to the fact that for so long photography and film were the leading media. From the start, they served not only to inform and entertain, but were also media of research and documentation. That’s also why these reproduction techniques were associated with notions of objectivity and contemporaneity, as opposed to images created by drawing and painting indicated subjectivity. These images fall somewhere in between due to the fact we see far more objectivity and the hand of the artist is far more hidden.
It was also fun seeing the first three Dark Content’ episodes by Eva and Franco Mattes on a big screen. The films contain interviews with several anonymous content moderators previously employed by companies with clients such as Vimeo (you never work directly for the platform needing your services) over chat and email correspondence. Since it’s such an elusive occupation, the Mattes had to pose as a company interested in hiring content moderators in order to get in contact with any. A frustrating curatorial decision was to put their videos on a loop with Tor Jørgen van Eijk’s ‘Purgatory’ which consists of a series of videos where the camera records its own image, exploring how the apparatus of analogue video generates visual feedback. This is a fairly aggressive and repetitive selection of moving images, meaning that anyone who wondered into that room wouldn’t stay for more than thirty seconds. This is obviously fine if that’s the only film, just a matter of taste, but if people firstly come into contact this ‘Purgatory’ there’s no way they would make it to ‘Dark Content’ which felt like a shame to us.
Eva and Franco Mattes were giving a talk at Photographers gallery with Zach Blas. When attending a talk by people who you’ve previously researched fairly heavily, it’s less likely to be mind blowing in terms of the art they produce and more so joining the works to bigger ideas. The Mattes and Blas both fall into this category; we’ve been aware of and interested in their work for quite some time. An interesting point that was brought up was Umberto Eco notion of ‘The Open Work’. It was brought up with reference to a painting of a woman crying holding a dead baby. If the baby is removed, the work is far more open to interpretation; a narrative is built, a question I posed which is completed by a viewer; ‘what is the woman crying about?’ Speaking more generally, it’s an attempt to understand artworks, which can be rendered ‘open’ by their author, and further completed by the performer, viewer, reader or audience. It legitimates the variety of interpretations one work may give us. But despite how we may never know which interpretation is the ‘correct one’, we cannot have unlimited interpretations of a work either. Eco’s concept of openness relates to interpretation and to modern aesthetics. In his book ‘The Open Work,’ Eco uses Stockhausen as an example of a musical piece rendered open by its own author. The work created rejects the definitive, concluded message and rather multiplies the formal possibilities of distribution and performances. A single music sheet with a series of groupings is presented, and the performer is given the freedom choose the order or the sequence. So Stockhausen’s piece can have a variety of forms given by different composers.
To Eco, this idea of ‘openness’ is essential to contemporary art. In ‘The Open Work’ he explains that this idea of ‘openness’ is far removed from meaning ‘infinite possibilities’ and complete freedom of reception. What in fact is available is a rage of rigidly pre-established and ordained interpretative solutions, and these never allow the reader, the performer or the viewer to move outside the strict control of the author. With the example of Stockhausen’s musical piece, it is evident that the performer can re-invent the work in collaboration with the author itself. This can be compared to the work of Sol LeWitt in the sense that he plays the part of an administrator or director than an artist. To return to the talk, Blas spoke of killing the Internet and the series of political demands and technical operations that went with it. This is in reference to when the Internet was shut off in Egypt in 2011 due to a clash between anti-government protesters and police. A funny question that was posed after was that if the Internet was ‘killed’, since it is now ‘alive’ again, is it a zombie of its previous self? He also spoke about biometrics and how non-normative, othered, and minoritarian groups are most acutely and consistently made vulnerable to policing and discrimination by biometric authentication, often because such machines render them ‘illegible’.
