SkyView I

Notes on streaming (or not streaming) art, and complicating where, exactly, the art is; where the lure of the idea enables our floating denial of the real.

Like democracy and marriage, the idea and promise of streaming are compromised by its layered, colliding realities. We intend to have a meeting or an art event, but instead we have dissonance and distraction. We deny the distortions and cling to the idea despite all the conditions that overwhelm it.

The superficial version of SkyView I, and possibly some of its appeal to participants and viewers, is sharing a peaceful moment in nature; a simple gesture that flies in the face of the scheduled, ordered urgency of work streaming. But the actual idea is more about how the desire for some secular spiritual escape to nature is frustrated by sharing and streaming itself. The art part is the breakdown of coherence at the intersection of intention, the pandemic, and the platforms. The aesthetic is the frustration of good intentions, and denial of ill-defined, fragile desires for something other than codec riddled work meetings. Where the frustrations and denials settle is the sweet spot of this project.

The initial concept was to upend the expectations of streaming: to present the boring, a lack of agenda, an absence of sequence. This was a pre-pandemic version of the idea, part of a cache of critical streaming ideas developed in brainstorming sessions and graduate research settings. Other versions involved variations on streaming things that barely moved and where (by conventional standards) nothing happened. One experiment involved two people sitting motionless in windowsills in different locations for half an hour. The feeds from the two locations were combined and streamed as a diptych for 30 minutes. Viewers were unsure whether it was live, a still image, or what.

So again, coming at SkyView I fresh as a viewer it is a kind of naive let’s get away from screens and get outside idea. On its face, it appears to be a minimalist idea (a lot of my work is a purposefully failing form of minimalism, and this project bears it out). That minimalist sentiment is present, but complicated and disrupted. First, it turns out that, for those who are privileged enough to remain employed and spend all day online, most do not want to spend another second on-screen - art or not. There were some compelling live projects and laudable efforts early on in the pandemic, but now we are somewhere else. We just want the screens out of our tired, overexposed faces. We’re not often sure where we want to put our faces, and so often it’s just a different screen. So streaming art is a kicking screaming situation from the outset. Second, for the participants, many of whom were students, it was not a relaxing time with the tree of their choosing. It was stressful. They were worried they were not doing it correctly, trying to stay out of the shot, wondering when they were live or not, whether it was over or not, etc.

So, for me, the art of the project was not “streaming trees” rather, it was more about the impossibility of having any kind of flow experience using streaming as we are often required to used it in our daily lives. One of the ongoing themes in my media work is that the technology overwhelms the idea and intention and it ends up not feeling like anything and might as well be a Best Buy display. Here is the disconnect between a minimalist, sincere intention and its platform and execution. It’s kind of like Facebook: hey, let’s be friends online and share things! And then fifteen years later, here we are, and WTF.

The next iteration of the project, SkyView II, will be framed differently. A single tree or view of the sky will be streamed over the course of a day so that it creates a parallel to whatever scheduled, agenda-driven, face-based streaming viewers are required to be doing. It is intended to be ambient, a peripherally reimagined version of Andy Warhol’s eight-hour-long film Empire State. The date will be chosen based on the day a particular tree decides to drop most of its leaves. I’m looking out the window now, waiting for it it to send me a notification.

In the live version, which lasted about thirty minutes, we leaned into the limitations of the platform, surrendering the visual presentation to Zoom, allowing it to set the framing, orientation, and video quality. As a multimodal new media project, there were multiple experiences, often isolated from one another: the participants, the viewers, the live experience, and the final documentation, which is purposefully at odds with the original performance.

In the end, as documentation, a version of the project is offered that pretends none of the trouble ever happened. There’s an edited video with only the best images presented, with sound recorded when the birds were just right. It is art that presents as its own selfie, fully fake, filtered, and decontextualized, feigning one thing when it is too many to see.

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Appendix: Original Instructions

SkyView 1 is a participatory livestream art project by Therefore / Dean Terry and graduate students. Anyone may participate. This is the first public iteration of the project. Each participant will livestream a tree for 15 minutes on Zoom. The idea is to create a collection of trees all being live-streamed from different locations at the same time. This is public - feel free to invite your friends.

Instructions
1) Find a tree that is away from buildings and wires and other markers of civilization. Think about doing this ahead of time. It is fall, so consider finding a tree that is dropping its leaves.
2) From your phone, login to the Zoom call at 2:25 PM CST and turn on video. Turn on front-facing camera. Turn off sound.
3) Place your phone flat at the base of the tree, facing upward so that the tree takes up most of the screen and the trunk is clearly visible. See the reference image in this message / post.
4) Move away from the phone so you are not in the shot (this is important) and enjoy the moment. Please do not move the phone or look into the shot. The orientation (which way is up or down) doesn't matter.
5) The piece will start at 2:30 PM CST. After at least 15 minutes (at 2:45 PM CST) you may leave the call, or stay on a little longer if you wish. The effect of people leaving the call gradually will be like leaves falling from a tree. The call will automatically end at 3 PM CST.

What: SkyView 1 participatory art project by Therefore / Dean Terry and graduate students
When: Wednesday November 11, 2:30 PM CST.
Where: Zoom

This is the first in a series of experimental livestreams from Therefore Research

Notes on Artists and Social Media

Originally Published in GlassTire August 2020

Artists have always had to contend with popular media. Sometimes the dynamic is symbiotic, other times antagonistic. Art often requires physical boundaries - galleries, theaters, concert halls - in order to be properly contextualized. But opportunities for physical exhibitions and events are largely nonexistent during a pandemic. Social media can seem the best way to get your work to a public. But is it?

Artists cultivate and rely on rich internal worlds, robust machineries of meaning making. It takes time, isolation, and is often fragile. Social media makes us porous, distracted, diffuse. It encourages us to frame our work within conventions of platform specific discourse, to repeat patterns and repost cliche’s in exchange for attention. The arts have commercial and social pressures no different than any other field: marketability, timeliness, etc. Social media amplifies and distorts these issues, and adds its own demands.

It’s like making art with PowerPoint. A few have done it, conscious of and exploiting the limitations and cliches, but mostly everything just looks like PowerPoint. Same with social media - everything looks like social media. You are one among the endless stream along with the meme of the week and someone’s new puppy. Speaking of puppies, a number of years back I posted a found photo of a puppy that wasn’t mine and labeled it “new puppy!” It received more likes and comments than anything I had posted to date, and took less than a minute to “make” and post. Creative and research projects that took weeks or months and hundreds of hours couldn’t compete. Fake puppy defeated them all.

Oscar Wilde said that a writer - and I would add every kind of artist - is “someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.” There are no ways in which using social media is avant- garde, unless we come at it fully obliquely, from the outskirts, beneath or around its social and political assumptions and emotional reductionism. Successful, or even merely acceptable posts, exist within a range of evolving trends. Social media rewards you for coloring within lines drawn by others. Likes and reposts are awarded to the conventional - even if the convention is but hours or days old. A truly avant-garde post would generally garner minimal response. It doesn’t compute. It’s not part of the conversation, and outside the bounds of what we might call an Overton Window of social media.

Over the years I made a series of critical media art projects that went directly at the assumptions of social media and the internet in general. But critiques that were once controversial are now commonly acknowledged, and we continue to participate. We know that Facebook is a data inhaling advertising platform, for example, and that all 2.6 billion users are the product. We know it was a key enabler in the 2016 election, and it’s happening again. We know it is propelled by propaganda, influence campaigns, bots, and thrives on conspiracies, anger, and outrage.

So how do our considered, sensitive, thoughtful, posts about our life’s work fit in this context? A delicate drawing; an honest, wrenching poem? Not to worry, nearly 50,000 Facebook employees are on it. The drawing is analyzed with computer vision and AI and the poem is parsed and correlated with advertising profiles. As Marc Andreessen said, software eats everything – which today means AI is doing the chewing. All posts feed the machine, further enriching Zuckerberg and @Jack and ByteDance. Our art is happily eaten and digested by algorithms.

Another early approach, shared with a few others several years ago, was to flood my data stream with false information; to pollute and obfuscate my online identity to the point of complete unreliability to those who would exploit it. But now the internet thrives on falsity, and we elect our leaders in no small measure because of it. Obsequiousness and self dealing are de rigueur. It’s an ouroboros of ungrounded, vacuous attention. And then there's that painting with your soul spilled all over it. Are these places we should even be?

So where to go, what to do? We might learn something from the K-pop fans and Tiktok users who successfully leveraged their networks to pollute data collection efforts by the Trump campaign (reserved tickets) and Dallas police (protest videos). This kind of strategic, timely approach cleverly exploits the amplifying effects of social media platforms. It is targeted, specific, and uses the power of networks rather than being used by them.

But “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” as Facebook calls it, cuts both ways. We may applaud one effort and be bitten by another one scroll later. And most art is not made for the network, we just want the network effects of distribution and interaction for our existing projects. But as with physical spaces, we decide how and if we want to engage, and have to consider how our ideas are recontextualized, used, and what ethical conditions are introduced. Imagine placing your work, or holding an event, in, say, a megachurch, a Waffle House, or a major bank. These are easy to get your head around, and simple decisions to make. But the internet?

The question is what kind of dialogue we want between our work and social media platforms, and how symbiotic or dissonant it is. Would your art be better, worse, or not exist without social media? If we were to design an interaction model between our work and our public from scratch, would it look like any existing social media platform? Would we remap the axes of tension, redefine connections, rethink community? Artists are always breaking the traditional structures and roles of venue / creator / viewer. Taking an oblique, critical angle on our social media use might be a start at remapping our engagement with it.

In the end is it about the work we have created, or is it about all the things we’ve liked, meals we’ve had, faces we’ve made, and memes we’ve reposted? What will we remember? Or rather, what will Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and whatever else remember for us? Will it be a body of work with occasional sprinkles of personal detail, or simply sprinkles?

In The Throw

(looking up god’s name)

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You find it in the throw
The flick in the smoke

The wrist snaps because the neck
The fire lands where it will

An arc of aching
From hand to helmet

The crackling shields
Collect the spit

We don’t know the name
But the color is choking collapse

Empire falls
Backward into its shadows


5/31/2020

Now, Later, Never

originally published in GlassTire April 2020

If art is about transforming experiences, broadly writ, into work, then this process takes time. It can be now, later, or never. Artists respond to some experiences immediately, their work rapidly rebounding off a moment and bouncing around in the world. Others need time, and their work requires current experience to drive deep, settle within the bedrock, enmesh with the roots, and smolder. For still others, now is not a time to make things at all, but rather to tend to themselves and others, or to just pay attention and be quiet.

Many initial responses from the arts community were pandemic this and pandemic that. Insert title here. I made a few myself. This was well before we knew where we were, what this is. We still don’t fully know. Rivers of culture, politics, and commerce are being rerouted yet we have no clear visibility on it. Unless it is strongly felt or thought, or an unavoidable compulsion and flowing of images, sounds, words, and ideas then it may suit us to be still. To wait. To ponder, fester, and broil. To pay very close attention from multiple angles, and then question the vantage points on which our angles rely.

That said, contemporaneous responses to experiences both internal and external can evoke the feeling of the moment and, in hindsight, have the benefit of reminding us what it felt like to be situated there, translated through the processes of the artist. For some, it’s not a question or an option, it is unavoidable. It might be messy quarantine inspired sketches, ephemeral experiences and objects, or networked folk art, as some have described. Whatever it is it has the value of now. But nowness can vary in its meaning and value. It can be tone deaf, myopic, or worse, just like everything else we make. Still, despite its immediacy, work created in the moment can sometimes get it exactly right.

Patrick Murphy, untitled work in progress, 10x10” oil on board.

I had an immediate reaction at the beginning of the Pandemic, a four part epic (I imagined) transmedia poem with images and live streaming elements. That was early March. It felt fresh and captured my sense of the moment – the initial disorientation, naïveté, and all. Conversely, years ago I lived through a series of disasters in Los Angeles – fires, riots, earthquakes – and was able to draw on them only recently in my creative work. They were too big, the experiences too rich and complex to transform quickly. How they fed the work and resonated with the current world were not apparent until now.

This is commonly the case with creative work that takes its time to appear. There’s an experience, a set of thoughts, images, feelings, any number of things that sit and stir, unresolved. They wait for the right moment, to develop into the proper size, feeding off

other experiences and prior work. Experiences are often well beyond us in scope and import, and we can only grasp little pieces of them. Sometimes these bits are like metaphors and stand in for the whole. Other times fragments connect with others to form a statement. Work that develops over time like this can feel resolved, like a grouping of complex shapes, chords, colors or textures that sit exactly as they should.

If you are driven to do work, if you are the agent and servant of the work, if artistic practice is unavoidable, then you are busy right now whether you are actively making things or not – taking it all in or letting it all out. If it’s about attention, or if attention and drive are commingled as they often are, now would be a good time to sort that out.

As we navigate this new world, elements of which will persist and unfold unpredictably into what comes next, it is worth distinguishing between the immediate work of rapid reconfiguring and the longitudinal work of deep planting. This distinction may help us frame internal and external pressures to exploit the current situation. The weight of the moment is immense and its evolving meaning largely impenetrable, yet the pressure to make is ever present. Now is the time to question all the ordinary dynamics of pressure, their source, and to understand the varieties of creative processes within ourselves. It’s our choice, in our work, to either ignore this experience, to decorate around it, to pay close attention and absorb it for the future, or to reflect it without varnish in the now.