Processing...

Processing...

contributed by "tewosret"

Eye and Ear Clinic Event: Adalberto Müller

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

September 9, 2013

The speaker’s words are processed through a sound device to make his voice audible. The voice says, "We live in post history. Not because the advancement of the capitalist model which depends more and more on technology. There are those who know how to change programs, the "programmers", and the 'programmed'.

It is the late afternoon and the first floor of the Leroy Neiman Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago is set for a speaker-to-audience exchange. An almost 10 foot-wide projection screen will aid Adalberto Müller, film critic and Visiting Fellow at the Film Studies Program at Yale University, throughout his presentation at the first Eye + Ear Clinic Event on this Monday afternoon, September 9, 2013.

Of Brazilian origin, Müller informs the audience of his interest in Vilém Flusser's time spent in Sao Paolo, Brazil and his approach to philosophy during the Linguistic Turn of the 20th century. Concerned with what was then the "New Media" (television, radio, etc.), Flusser posited questions as to how the new media interferes with human thinking and knowledge.

At the ten-minute mark, the speaker has engaged a large amount of students, faculty, and guests. This is when Adalberto Müller makes the impressive connection, that the creative activity of Art is affected if new media (technology and the digital world) interferes with our "natural" human thought processes. The speaker pauses and advances a digital "slide", utilizing a digital presentation application. The image on the screen blinks to a slide with more information.  Adalberto Müller proceeds and begins to interpret two of Flusser's works, Line and Surface and Towards a Philosophy of Photography through the lens of a "critic of images".

The following is a quick breakdown of the interpretation:

1. Lines create history (we live in a historical world). Müller: "… to the men of the caves, images were not irreversible. They were 'seams' of the world. More than that, they were magic as they could create continuity in the world. In essence, the painter produces a very different image. His image is constructed to historicize what would have been just 'magic'…"

2. The invention of writing is the creation of new symbols and the transferal of writing the image into lines. History in a true sense begins with the act of writing. Much like writing, lines communicate processes and depend on specific points, causes, and effects.

3. Processes can only be described by lines or texts. These can represent or project possible worlds.

4. Representation is a new concept. Representation is found in a multitude of forms (lab displays, projections, photographs, advertising, the internet).

5. There are no longer representations of the world. What would have been representations are now new worlds.

6. According to Flusser, the most important part of a photograph is what is behind the scene. A photograph always hides a text or the "lines" behind what it presents.

7. Without these lines/hidden texts, the photograph does not exist. Müller uses the analogy of a program-- "When you click a button you are inside a program which was designed. Your click was designed because it is inside a program.

In the second half of the hour, it is from the platform of Vilém Flusser's thoughts on digital media, that Müller has become a pseudo critic-turned-mediator and advances to a collection of digital slides that represent two significant works that reflect parts of his and Flusser's philosophies of image-making in a culture influenced by digitization. 45 minutes in, and the bridge to art-making is built when Müller mentions two artists that explore our culture through the digital and hyper-technical contemporary culture.

In a room full of artists and creative, knowledge-hungry minds, Adalberto asks his audience, "What is the way artists can change those programs you use to make those images?… We are mostly ignorant of those machines. It is not those images we make with those machines… because we are projecting universes and scenes." Müller focuses on the idea it is important to know who actually does the programming in our culture and why. The reward for an accelerated culture is the control of the 1's and 0's that ultimately take over our lives. Müller offers a suggestion as to what our collective illness might be-- that life itself is being digitized. I check the time on my smartphone and it looks like the private life is digitized as well. I know exactly when the next train home arrives. In these 1’s and 0’s, we are losing possibility. The possibility of a continuous world and trading that possibility for an absolute life experience.

As a part of his "Natural History of the Enigma" series, Edunia (created between 2003 and 2008, and first exhibited in 2009) is a work by Eduardo Kac (Artist and faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) that combines the artist's DNA with the flower's genetic code. Kac is quoted, "Edunia expresses my identity exclusively in its red veins." Müller is quick to the point-- that Kac's botanical recreation is not a projection of a flower, but that the expression is actually a code itself-- the deliberate action of writing with genetic coding is to rein in the poetic function of language that adheres to a message in the flower-art-object by Kac. Müller suggests that, instead of mere genetic coding and writing, that this is, in fact, a different form of writing. Edunia, he offers, "...is a poem". As an audience member one is to understand that Kac's Edunia is a projection of a flower, not an actual, "real" flower and that genetics are translated in this way, from "myself" to the "other" in order to create a new pattern and form of communication.

The audience members are still in their chairs. They continue to stare forward, at the screen. Edunia, in its coded glory, reflects back. The presentation advances.

David Hockney is another example of an artist becoming a programmer. We are introduced to his famous photo collages, Joiners, where Hockney utilizes the subversive process of photographing a scene into fragments that are then turned digital and recomposed (Photoshop), and then projected as models. This is the expression of the line (the object, the chemistry) becoming surface matter (the techno-image, the digital world).

Flusser philosophized as to how man might be able to "humanize" technology while Aldaberto offers the audience a counterpoint that technology is essentially nonhuman and that the question is a distraction. Perhaps, the answer lays with the artist, in this case David Hockney who preferred the staying power of photographs and connected to them as how humans actually see and perceive in continuous series of images.

Our concepts and interpretations of our human-based reality are often transformed and manipulated by the dominant culture that is capitalist and globally driven. Our guest speaker has ultimately demonstrated that Flusser, Kac, and Hockney have transformed their lines (writing, genetic coding, photographing) into offerings of expression through art form that do not merely express domination and submission or offerings that are only to be consumed. These men involved are programmers. It is with the utilization of the digital projector that Müller has himself become a programmer, right in front of our eyes. As an audience, we have become the programmed, however, Müller offers us a way out, and his speaker box voice becomes human-like, "Artists… work with discrete elements or technical apparatus. Much like scientists. Show us that real revolution should begin in black boxes of a brave new world."