Public (E-Journal, York University)

Allan, Ken

The A-poetic Poetry of Bernar Venet

Trnka, Peter

English

Naturally, the weather: On complexity, philosophy, and world systems

Lischi (trans. Duru H.M. Eldahudy), Sandra

Poetico-Political Audio Visions

Leeming, Frances

When The Hand Is Not Always 
Quicker Than The Eye 
Frances Leeming 
From my early formation as an intermedia artist my interests in the tem- 
porality of performance art and experimental film have been maintained. 
I followed other artists (Robert Whitman, Carolee Schneeman, Alex Hay, 
etc.) who had earlier incorporated film within their performances and 
happenings. I initially used film to produce magnification and dislocation 
of staged meanings of the body and space in performance. Newsreel dis- 
aster films were projected onto models of domestic architecture. Such acts 
contributed to what Kim Sawchuk has termed "monstrous feminist aes- 
thetics." Because my films are initially constructed by manipulating picto- 
rial bodies by hand and not by computer, the film object retains a 
relationship to the gestures of the bodies in performance. I see this simple 
but laborious technique of image pixilation I see as a theatricality that 
plays with and troubles the convincibility of animation's desire for real- 
ism as filmic spectacle. 
My feminist research focus during the last fifteen years has tracked cul- 
tural issues of gender construction and consumption, advertising as the 
"official art  of cultural capitalism," fantasy architectures, and cultural 
tourism. This has included image research into representations of women, 
the feminine and domesticity, and the rhetorics of science and progress 
that have appeared in photojournalism, advertising, Hollywood film, and 
television texts since the 1940s. 
Man-Made Life (1985) 
The Orientation Express (1987) 
The social critiques within my animated films Man-Made Life and The 
Orientation Express borrowed from the photo-montage work of Hannah 
Hoch and John Heartfield. Found imagery is taken from historically spe- 
cific mass-media circulation photomagazines (Life, Look, National 
Geographic, Vanity Fair, etc.), institutional photo archives, and some 
original photography. 
A core research thematic for my current work is a continued explo- 
ration of subjectivity and what strategies of resistance can be re-discov- 
ered as fictional interventions. The Orientation Express articulated 
representations of women acting out within prescribed social spheres of 
home, education, religion, and the workplace. 
Pavilions in a Theme Park (2002) 
The just-completed film suggests what Mirielle Peron calls a "feminist 
pataphysics" at the level of imaginary solutions, a re-invented gendered 
science through fictive narratives. The research for this project analyses 
discourses of genetic engineering and reproductive technologies and con- 
trol for their metaphorical and liminal possibilities. The liminal for my 
purposes is the contrast between the civil and unruly common to fair- 
grounds, theme parks, world's fairs, and heritage sites. 
Pavilions in a Theme Park takes place at four sites: 
1. A Fortune Teller's Booth / Information Centre: The Fortune Teller 
counsels the wife of a successful entertainment mogul, a bio-engineer, and 
a surrogate mother. 
2. The Centre for Genetic Admiration: A review of Walt Disney's confu- 
sions between the "natural world" of human and botanical reproduction 
into anthropormorphic pedagogies. 
3. Franchising Futures: A trade show of bio-entrepreneurialism featuring 
reproductive technology laboratories, sperm and egg banks, etc. 
4. Sea World: A pavilion whose architecture is the third trimester preg- 
nant body, which battles the scientific/medical interventions of competing 
teams of professionals. 
Each Act of the fllm 
begins with a Fortune 
Telllng sesslon. The For- 
tune Teller has the tech- 
nology and the intuition 
to embrace the past, pre- 
sent, and future. Mrs D. 
requlres an explanation of 
the past, Mr B.E. (the blo- 
entrepreneur) is facing the 
1 present, and MS S.M. (the 
surrogate mother) is in the 
process of making deci- 
sions about her immediate 
future. 
In the first session we see 
the appearance of Walt 
Disney as a pollinating bee 
(Fig. 4) in sex education 
demonstrations. Disney's 
fictional depictions of pro- 
creation without sex-his 
Pinocchio character has 
been referred to as "mass 
culture's first test tube boy" 
-are referenced along with 
, "human pollination" evoca- 
' 
tions by fertility expert Sev- 
girls are seen working in a 
sperm donation clinic (Fig. 6). 7 Photojournalism's miracles 
I of Life, Birth, Creation, etc. 
are captured in mayonnaise 
rld 1s an amphitheatre 
tractable roof (Fig. 7). 
deals with the repre- 
s of the mother and 
cted needs and pro- 
tections of the fetus. Peggy 
---a!pv Tm Phelan's article "White Men 
b and Pregnancy -Discovering 
, The Body to  be Rescued" 
gave me a plot line to follow. 
The surrogate mother who 
we see talking to the Fortune 
Teller is the Sea World pavil- 
ion. 
There are many above-and- 
; = ,W below water scenes in Sea 
World. Expensive yachts are 
seen raclng (Fig. 8) in the amniotic fluld. The yachts are also exploration 
vessels searching for new forms of life. Wildlife documentary addresses 
are borrowed for the narrative. 
The production process for this and my last film does not utilize a stan- 
dard approach for animated film. Following the content research, I build 
collections of imagery from which I create and rehearse narratives. I then 
write dialogue and layer the narratives further with genres of music and 
sound effects. This leads to the real post-production stage at which point 
I might re-shoot scenes, re-write the screenplays and re-edit the picture 
stories. 


When the Hand Is Not Always Quicker Than the Eye

Hoolboom, Mike

This Year It's All About the Money

Wees, William C.

The Changing of the Guard

Contributors 
Ken Allan is a graduate student in the 
History of Art department at the Univer- 
sity of Toronto. He has written for Para- 
chute magazine and contributed the essay 
"Understanding Information" to the 
book, Conceptual Art, edited by Michael 
Corris and forthcoming from Cambridge. 
Lang Baker is a writer, composer and 
translator living in Toronto. He is a mem- 
ber of the Public editorial collective. 
Iain Baxter is an artist living in Windsor, 
Ontario. From 1966 to 1978, he, along 
with then wife Ingrid Baxter, worked as 
N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., which produced pio- 
neering work in the areas of Conceptual 
art, Environmental art, Installation, and 
Media art. He continues to work in a wide 
range of media and is represented by the 
Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver. 
Ron Benner is an artist and gardener from 
London, Ontario and is a survivor of 
Agricultural Engineering. His photo- 
graphic artist project in this issue, 
Translmission : African Vectors, 2000- 
2001, derives from a photographiclgarden 
installation of same name, held in 2002 at 
the Gairloch Gardens, Oakville Galleries, 
Oakville, Ontario. He would like to thank 
Scott Toguri McFarlane. 
Jody Berland is Associate Professor at 
Atkinson College and the Graduate Pro- 
gram in Communication and Culture at 
York University. She has published widely 
on cultural studies, Canadian communica- 
tion theory, music, radio, weather, tech- 
nology, and social space. She is the editor 
of Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural 
Studies (www.yorku.caltopia), and is 
presently completing a book on culture, 
music, technology and space. 
Bill Burns is the director of the Museum of 
Safetv Gear for Small Animals. The 
Museum has been shown in whole or in 
part at the Stedelijk Museum in Amster- 
dam, 303 Gallery and Art in General in 
New York, and the Wellcome Trust in Lon- 
don England. His works are included in 
collections at the MOMA, New York, 
Getty Center, Los Angeles, Tate Britain and 
Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He 
is currently preparing a book about ani- 
mals and biomedicine for semiotext(e). 
Peter Culley lives in South Wellington, 
near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. He is 
the author of Twenty-one, The Climax 
forest, and numerous works of art criti- 
cism. Hammertown, a new collection that 
returns much of The Climax Forest to 
print along with new poems, is forthcom- 
ing from New Star Books in 2002. 
Sarindar Dahliwal is a Toronto artist who 
has exhibited widely in Canada and 
abroad. She has recently completed resi- 
dencies in Trinidad and India. Her work is 
represented by the Edward Day Gallery. 
Elisabeth de Fontenay is Professor Emeri- 
tus in Philosophy at University of Paris I. 
Her previous publications include Les Fig- 
ures juives de Marx (1973) and Diderot 
OM le mate'rialisme enchant6 (1981). 
Elizabeth Grosz teaches feminist theory in 
the Department of Women's and Gender 
Studies at Rutgers University. Her most 
recent books are Architecture from the 
Outside. Essays in Virtctal and Real Space 
(The MIT Press: 2001), and Becomings. 
Explorations in Time, Memory and 
Futures (Cornell UP: 1999). 
Bob Hanke is Sessional Assistant Professor 
in the Communication Studies Program, 
Division of Social Science, and on the fac- 
ulty of the Joint Graduate Programme in 
Communication and Culture, at York Uni- 
versity. He has published widely in televi- 
sion studies, most recently in the Canadian 
Journal of Communication and in Televi- 
sion Histories: Shaping Collective Memory 
in a Media Age. His current research is in 
technocultural studies and he is slowly fin- 
ishing an article on McLuhan's and Vir- 
ilio's approaches to speed. 
Mike Hansen is a Toronto artist and 
musician. He teaches encaustics at the 
Ontario College of Art and Design, and 
hosts a jazz radio program on CKLN. He 
is represented by Lonsdale Gallery. 
Marwan Hassan is a writer who lives in 
Ottawa. He would like to thank Catherine 
Shepherd for editing his text. 
Sherri Hay is a visual artist working in 
Toronto. She is currently involved with the 
new LiveARTs project at the Toronto Zoo. 
Banu Helvacioglu teaches Political Theory 
in the Department of Political Science, 
Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. She is 
currently doing research on "Deconstruct- 
ing Masculinity" in Turkey. 
Geoffrey James is a Toronto-based photog- 
rapher who has exhibited widely and has 
published several thematic photography 
books including Paris, Running Fence, 
Asbestos, and The Italian Garden. The 
asbestos mine photographs reproduced in 
this issue were taken in Quebec between 
October 1992 and October 1993. 
Sue Lloyd is a Toronto-based visual artist 
who makes photobased work, currently in 
a digital environment. She teaches in the 
Visual Studies Programme in the Fine Art 
Department at University of Toronto. In 
spring 2003 her work will travel to Kam- 
loops and Winnipeg. She is co-founder of 
Giant-S, who will soon release BOX, an 
anthology of interactive works by artists. 
Susan Lord teaches in the Department of 
Film and Video at Queen's University. She 
has published on feminist film and video 
culture in several journals and antholo- 
gies. Is coeditor of two forthcoming 
anthologies, one on digital culture and the 
other on gender and violence. She is cur- 
rently working on a project concerning 
the films of Sara G6mez. 
Carol Lukitsch teaches art at North Vir- 
ginia Community College. Her work has 
been widely exhibited in the United States, 
Europe and Russia. 
Miriam Nichols teaches contemporary lit- 
erature and theory at University College 
of the Fraser Valley. Her articles on poetry 
and poetics have appeared in SCL, 
Tessera. Open Letter, Sulphur, and 
Sagetrieb. Recent publications include 
Even On Szlnday: Essays, Readings, and 
Archival Materials on the Poetry and 
Poetics of Robin Baser (Orono, ME: 
National Poetry Foundation, 2002). 
Lisa Robertson is a poet and freelance 
writer. Her poetry publications include 
XEclogue (1993 & 1997), Debbie: An 
Epic (1997), and Weather (2001). All are 
available from New Star Books. Her recent 
critical work has appeared in Telling it 
Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990's, 
eds. Mark Wallace and Steven Marks 
(Alabama, 2001), and in Assembling 
Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poet- 
ries Transnationally, ed. Romana Huk 
(Wesleyan, forthcoming). 
Catriona (Cate) Sandilands is Associate 
Professor in the Faculty of Environmental 
Studies at York University (Toronto). Her 
research focuses on gender, nature and 
sexuality in political cultures, and includes 
work on nationalism and national parks 
and "queer" ecologies. She is the author 
of The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofemi- 
nism and the Quest for Democracy (Min- 
nesota). 
Peter Trnka is Associate Professor of Phi- 
losophy and Director of the Graduate Pro- 
gramme in Humanities at Memorial 
University of Newfoundland. He has just 
returned to Canada from a year in Prague, 
where he taught at Charles University. 
Recent publications include essays on 
Deleuze in Angelaki and on Canguilhem 
in the Journal of Medicine and 
Philosophy. 
Bernar Venet is a French artist living and 
working in New York. He is one of the 
original Conceptual artists and has exhib- 
ited in galleries and museums internation- 
ally since the 1960s. His most recent 
shows were held at the Robert Miller 
Gallery and at the Gran Selwyn Gallery, 
both in New York. 


Contributors

Rose, Chloe Brushwood

Fisher, Caitlin

Piccinato, Marc

Sheridan, Sarah Robayo

Being on Time 
In November 2000, the Public Access Collective presented "Being on 
Time," an extensive public art project which brought ten professional 
artists into a working relationship with students from Central Technical 
School in downtown Toronto for a period of six weeks. With the inten- 
tion of provoking a timely discussion around the themes of technology, 
time, art and education, installations were devised exclusively for the 
school's Art Centre building. Conceived as additions to the existing archi- 
tecture, the installations lived unobtrusively among the student works 
which permanently adorn the walls, seamlessly occupying washrooms, 
hallways, lockers, and even creeping into the sacrosanct domain of the 
teachers' lounge. As is the nature of site-specific installations, many of the 
works presented were ephemeral in nature and so particular to the site 
and time of the exhibition that it would be difficult to imagine a life for 
them outside the context of the school. And yet, with the publication of 
this issue we are proposing just such a continuation. Rather than offer an 
epilogue to the exhibition, we have sought to generate renewed considera- 
tions of the original experiment. 
The exhibition was conceived as a spatial intervention into the dynam- 
ics of public high school, where teenagers negotiate for expressive free- 
dom and self-identity within an institutional routine. "Being on Time" 
offered a means to explore the subjective experience of this place - both 
the space of the high school and the time of the new millenium. This issue 
of Public opens further perspectives on the lived experience of institu- 
tional learning, with the exhibition as a conceptual model and point of 
departure. In the design of this issue, we have sought our own expressive 
freedom within the parameters of a textual framework, to create an open- 
ended discourse in different media - indeed to insinuate the nature of the 
media into the discussion itself. 
In this way, this issue is also an intervention into questions of represen- 
tation in the context of new times and technologies. As editors, our task 
was to translate the experiences and conceptualizations that surrounded 
an art exhibition in a high school onto the printed page and into the digi- 
tal CD-Rom (found at  the back of this issue). In addition, we wanted to 
find a way to 'reproduce' or translate the actual exhibition installations 
themselves. In this sense, our work was to mediate the relationship 
between art object and page, analog and digital. In addition to exploring 
the relation between the actual event of the exhibit and what appears here 
in these pages, editing this issue of Public has been an exploration of the 
relations between the digital and typographic technologies, which 
together make up this issue of the journal. What is the relation between 
these media? What do each of these media offer the subject re-viewing the 
exhibition and its themes? 
For the students and visitors who toured the exhibition as it was taking 
place in Central Technical High School, "Being on Time" offered an 
exploration of adolescence, education, time, art and technology. Each of 
the artists and authors whose work appears in this issue continue to 
examine these themes, asking questions such as what is the time of ado- 
lescence or the time of education? What is the time of production, the 
time of making art? And what is the time of technology and the virtual? 
These are urgent questions for the twenty-first century and taken together 
they form an indispensable constellation of ideas for being in our time. 
Chloe Brushwood Rose, Caitlin Fisher, Marc Piccinato & Sarah Robayo Sheridan 


Being on TIme

Crichlow, Warren

Cool Timing: Temporality, Art and 
Learning 
Warren Crichlow 
7' 
For some time I have been pursuing a project that I used to call "Adoles- 
cent Learning in Art Galleries and Museums." The project is really about 
the idea of the school excursion or field trip to art galleries and museums. 
I have been interested in what it means to  the idea of learning for a 
teacher to take his or her class out of school into an art gallery or museum 
to think about art objects? 
The project brought me into a circle with a type of educator that I had 
not previously been in contact with-the proverbial 'education curator.' I 
have since learned that that is a bad word in art galleries and that people 
tend to call themselves 'education officers' or simply 'museum educators.' 
I have been talking to people who do this kind of work and it has been 
interesting to  see how they work, how they begin to  think about the 
objects that are in the collection, how they try to link those objectslarti- 
facts to certain kinds of curriculum needs and how they actually plan to 
execute learning experiences in those institutions. The Being on Time 
exhibition changes all of that for me. It reverses the polarity of the whole 
experience of learning from art objects because it not only brings art 
objects into the school but it actually engages the process of producing 
those objects. Also, the exhibition engages adolescents with practicing 
artists in the production of artworks that are then made available to us, 
the community-not just the community of adolescents but the wider 
community around the school and the art community itself. 
The question of Being on Time changes the whole space-time idea that 
I had in this project and it really enforces the idea that we may not always 
have to go out of the school into the art galleries or museums to think 
about learning from art, but that that very process can come into the 
school itself in the very unique way that has been provided by the Being 
on Time exhibition. So in my view the Being on Time exhibition is an 
extraordinarily innovative endeavour. It brings contemporary visual artists 
and high school students together to collaboratively inquire into time, art 
and learning and what these categories individually and collectively might 
mean for the future of community, both inside and outside the school. I 
found this approach, what I call an inter-generational as well as an inter- 
spatial dialogue as having very important pedagogical implications for 
the conduct of art and education in public schools. I don't say 'art-educa- 
tion' because I think it is important to separate art and education by the 
'and' (that fundamental sign 'and') because sometimes art in schools is in 
art and sometimes it is in education. And so the time-space question I 
think is quite significant to considerations of art in the context of public 
schools. Foremost, in my view, the exhibition as an intervention embodies 
and enacts the fundamental refusal to separate ideas about images, sym- 
bolic representations and surface qualities of art objects from the actual 
events and lived circumstances of contemporary culture. I think that is 
quite different from what you would normally find about art and educa- 
tion. 
In contra-distinction to a popular imaginary of the teenager who is 
deliberately slow and laxidasical, sauntering in your face, too cool to care 
or to be on time, this exhibition shows how spot-on young people are 
about learning in the visual arts and understanding how diverse practices 
of cultural representation might inform active ways of making change 
from the seemingly limited and intractible history of our present environ- 
ment. The collaborative installation projects produced for this exhibition 
by the high school students and practicing artists raise significant ques- 
tions about cross-cutting cultural/political predicaments and subjective 
passions with which we live. At the same time, these works also insis- 
tently remind us that the potential to imagine creatively and differently is 
not yet spent. In regards to the critical practice of Being on Time, I pro- 
pose the trope "Cool Timing" to characterize the way this exhibition 
slows time down, encouraging the viewer to pay attention to  art and 
artists, to construct a different time relation in which to experience and 
reflect upon objects created by others for us. 
Wandering the hallways and stairwells of the Art Centre at Central 
Tech one looks at, but also must engage with, curiosities of art located in 
unusual and unexpected locations. A piece in the girls' bathroom chal- 
lenges our ideological desires for a mirror image; another encourages us 
to listen carefully to a soundscape of muffled adolescent fears between the 
dark and foreboding rows of lockers. Art in the making is available to us 
as it degenerates with each scuffmark of the shoe. This exhibition asks us 
to choose to be addressed by artists of our time, young and older. Educa- 
tors like Maxine Breen and Deborah Britzman and others firmly believe 
that in making such a choice we choose to make ourselves into new 
publics who may exceed what everyday thought tolerates as normal. 
This kind of demand is not the typical one we find in schools of art. In 
fact, I would argue that the time for art in schools can no longer be imag- 
ined unproblematically as a "Cool Time" -the time of the joy of learning 
from the uncertainties and difficulties, the freedom that possibilities of 
creativity demands. I suggest that now, today, time for art in school can 
only be understood as a dilemma. The intensification of the question of 
Cig to right hand 57 
time is filled with more and more demand and accountability, calls for 
pragmatism and the usual refrain "we can't teach everything." Time for 
art in school has always been imagined as a different kind of time. Art has 
been seen as a time for creativity. The art time has always differentiated 
itself from the other school subjects by claiming the territory of creativity 
as its exclusive domain. Creativity means not simply time for learning 
about art objects, more importantly it ought to be a time for learning 
from the responsibilities of originality-of what is at stake once the imag- 
ination is released. A time for accepting uniqueness as difference and 
exploring self and other as part of the cost of realizing freedom. But art 
time has always been subject to increasing contraints-the constraints of 
time itself, of exclusiveness, of the high low culture divide, of budgets, of 
materials and their particular temporality (usually those that fit a criteria 
of safety and expedience). In the curriculum there is the ever-present 
restraint of positivism in the guise of formalism if not rationalist stan- 
dardized evaluation, the enduring question of uniformity and expectation 
of accomplishment. There are also the constraints found in the time of 
day the subject is offered, usually in the afternoon or on Fridays and the 
limited and decreasing space devoted to art studios and for classrooms in 
the school building. As it is well known in the province of Ontario and in 
North America, South and North, beyond the commodification of art in 
the marketplace, we have entered the time of a lowered and lowering sta- 
tus of art in the curriculum. Despite the reception of postmodernism into 
art education (and I would note in the Ontario Curriculum document 
terms like interdisciplinary, theory, creation, analysis and an emphasis on 
linearity in structure) there remains the old recycling of a Western artistic 
canon to a certain pastiche of artistic styles. A detachment is implicit in 
the constant learning about language within the curriculum guide. This 
distance relies, in increasingly clever ways, on the containment and 
absorbtion of the decentring difference that art from other cultures and 
the diversity of art styles threatens to provoke. Namely here I refer to 
challenging practices emanating from artists of the Aboriginal First 
Nations Indigenous Peoples movements and the post-colonial diaspora, 
feminists and queer artists as well as the heterogeneous popular culture of 
youth and new media art of the late twentieth century. Despite its best 
rhetoric and practice, our thinking about art and education in the official 
curriculum seems caught in a time warp in relation to the broader ques- 
tions which are raised by the rapid changes in our understanding of repre- 
sentation. All of these factors have led to the institutionalization of time 
and space for school art and for art to be experienced by youth. 
I think that it is rare that we have art classes where people of various 
ages can learn from one another in a site like this one, where there is a 
58 Coffee 12345 
mixture of high school and adult art practioners and those learning from 
art. Time made positive in art would give value to the tremendous fluctu- 
ations in both skill and imagination that may be found among students of 
any class. Particularly in a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic classroom space 
like the artist school community of Toronto, there ought to be more of a 
recognition of the heterogeneity of abilities-that ought to be the rule 
rather than the exception. 
In art education, and education generally, once the well-known critique 
of schooling has been made, it is difficult to overcome its overwhelming 
despair and pessimism. But I think that with Being on Time, we have 
gone a long way towards overcoming that kind of exhibition, and perhaps 
even moved closer to a more interesting representational future. 
Drink 12345 59 


Cool Timing: Temporarlity, Art and Learning

Burnett, Ron

Art Has Always Been Virtual 
Ron Burnett 
Although I have briefly visited the Being on Time exhibition, I will not 
refer to it directly. Many of the pieces make use of digital tools and what 
interests me is how the digital is becoming an important part of the work 
of artists in all disciplines. Computers are allowing us to enter a new rela- 
tionship with images and are helping to redefine the relationship between 
representation and reality. In addition, the melding of digital and analog 
modes of expression is, in my opinion, creating one of the foundations for 
virtual reality. What I want to try and talk about are a number of meta- 
phors that might trigger in you some sense of why the virtual has become 
the real, and in fact why it always has been crucial to our culture's efforts 
to define and explain reality. 
Our culture has been exploring the virtual by trying to move thought 
and creativity from the self into objects, or in the case of architecture and 
the Internet, into space. One of the impulses that governs this movement 
of self to another place, or the transportation in time of the self into 
another context, has been a strong desire to break down the relationship 
between art, expression, representation and lived reality. That is in part 
what this exhibit is about-to take the seams that divide art from the 
everyday and break them down and make of the artwork something that 
is both virtual and living. Throughout the history of art and the history 
of images, the struggle with the virtual has been a crucial characteristic of 
the communicative process. Communication always involves some rela- 
tionship to the real, whether it is as a result of communicating with an 
audience or the reality of the artist as a creator trying to bridge the gaps 
between expression and understanding. This is quite different from think- 
ing about art as just a canvas on a wall, or an image on a screen. The 
effort is to break down the tissue that separates what is created from the 
audiences who experience works of art in all mediums (remembering all 
of the time that the artist is always standing in for the audience when he 
or she creates a work). 
Why is this argument important? Why do we care so much about the 
relationship between our lives and the art that artists create? Moreover, 
what does this have to do with virtuality? It seems to me that images, 
icons and most forms of symbolic expression are involved in the genera- 
tion of virtual spaces and artifacts that try to break down the separation 
between representation and experience. It is for that reason that I do not 
consider the move to virtuality in art and society as something new. I am 
of course fascinated with the cultural assumptions of newness and with 
the ways in which that translates into artistic activity. Take an artist like 
Jackson Pollock, for example. He is obviously viewed as a non-figurative 
artist and was considered a revolutionary during his life. Yet, with time it 
becomes clear that he understood and anticipated the advent of postmod- 
ernism both with respect to the way he painted and the paintings them- 
selves. He captured something about the fluidity of the movement 
between time and space, between subject and perception that represents 
the networked spaces that our culture is creating. He also painted during 
a crucial period when television was effectively rewriting the rules for 
mass media and when radio was becoming central to the everyday life of 
North Americans. Are these connections important? I believe that they 
are. 
So, while Jackson Pollock saw his historical period through paintings 
which celebrated change and the dynamics of form, photography as a 
medium was, for the first time, becoming an important fixture of every- 
day life. Photography immediately breaks down the relationship between 
expression, representation and understanding. Are you the person in your 
passport photo? Isn't that photograph the virtual 'you' generated for a 
system of surveillance that has accepted the conventions of portraiture 
established in the nineteenth century? Here, artifice and artificiality come 
together through both desire and social convention. 
I would argue part of what is so interesting and exciting right now in 
the digital and media world that we are building is that we are swimming 
in this bath of simulations. Finally, we are realizing that we have always 
been swimming in a bath of simulations. Except now, more people can 
swim, and actually many more people might be able to create the pools 
that we need. And so, there's this very intelligent process developing here 
which I think will ultimately reconstruct the very premises of artistic 
activity and introduce a whole new sense of what it means to engage with 
simulated spaces. The difficulty is that the boundary between art and 
reality is actually so elastic. The boundary between the real and simula- 
tion is equally elastic, and some of this comes down to language and dis- 
course, to the terms we use to define art and culture for ourselves. How 
does one engage a simulation? How does one engage with the issues that 
relate to the boundaries between simulation and reality? What position 
are you in to make a distinction between what is simulated and what is 
not, what is real and what isn't? From which vantage point can one actu- 
ally make the analysis? Are you standing outside of it? Are you inside of 
it? Are you reacting to it? Are you creating it? Where are you in relation 
to the processes of cultural reconstruction? To me, these are crucial ques- 
tions for all artists. 
Smoke and exhale 6 1 
They are also ontological questions. This debate becomes ontological 
because we now can create computer programs that produce autonomous 
forms of 'computerized' life. The artificial life and the artificial intelli- 
gence movement have existed in theoretical and practical forms for many 
years, but artists have actually begun incorporating it into their work in a 
dramatic fashion. An exhibit in Los Angeles recently was quite marvelous. 
Colonies of fish were reproduced through programming (programming 
being understood as deliberate and determinate). Most computer pro- 
grams are actually quite autonomous. They take on a life of their own. 
They allow things to happen that are unpredictable. What happened was 
the colony of fish inside the computer reproduced themselves at a rate far 
greater than the computer programming conditions had actually sug- 
gested. When there were too many on the screen, the screen ceased to be a 
screen anymore and was obliterated. The result was the dissolution of 
individual objects as more layers were added. Suddenly there were more 
and more fish, starfish and flowers, and the whole thing dissolved into a 
big, wonderful soup! 
Nevertheless, what interested me about the exhibit was, here is this 
space, inside the screen inside the computer. It was created by someone 
who wants to talk about this autonomous world through the artificial fish 
present in it. Then it begins to mimic (albeit in a minor fashion) a little bit 
of that autonomy of imagination and fantasy that constitutes so much of 
what we describe as subjectivity. If the first phase of virtuality was the 
struggle to break down the tissue between artifice and lived reality, so the 
next stage of this is the beginning of the breakdown between machine and 
human. 
The breakdown between machine and human-the best examples of 
this can be found at the Playdium. If you go into the Playdium and watch 
and occasionally participate as I do, you will see people boxing with an 
image (or doing karate, or skiing, or snowboarding) and they are sweat- 
ing. Well, what is happening? What happens when you box with an 
image? You are really boxing with yourself. You against you-and so 
your sweat represents this extraordinary effort to overcome an 'other'- 
an other that is you. To me, it is a quintessential example of a temporal 
shift. It is kind of Star Trekkian because we fight with ourselves all the 
time to varying degrees, and we encounter our own subjectivity in a vari- 
ety of situations. But here, a conscious choice has been made to engage in 
a fight with the self because as we know, there's nothing there. The other 
is not there. 
Time breaks apart at the Playdium. How can one interpret the games? 
How can one articulate the experience? Is the Playdium one of the key 
aspects of a new landscape for human experience? 
62 Lean forward 
Let me mention another example here. I am also very interested in 
where genetics is taking us as our culture explores the human genome. 
The notion is that you can decode the body-and it may be possible 
somewhat-but the further notion that you can code and decode con- 
sciousness just is not possible. The mind is too wonderfully complex and 
the information that we possess is too distributed, there is too much 
going on, too many connections. What I am interested in is the choice, the 
underlying metaphors that govern this approach and the ways in which 
artists are taking on those metaphors. There are many artists in North 
America now making what they describe as genetic art. What is genetic 
art? Genetic art is increasingly similar to the simulated art that I described 
-it is art that produces autonomous life within programmed environ- 
ments. The fact that this is art that produces and reproduces itself (some- 
times autonomously) is what is actually exciting to many creators and 
audiences. And, because most of it takes place inside computer programs 
and on computer screens, it seems to be a feasible if not realistic. To pro- 
gram a number of shifts and changes and to create algorithms that pro- 
duce an image of autonomy and an image of evolution-well, that is the 
equivalent of taking control of very sophisticated coding, but it is not 
about the creation of life. So, we have a metaphor here that portrays the 
illusory control artists have over the production of simulated forms and 
has this not been the dilemma of all art for centuries? What are these 
metaphors about? I think they represent what culturally we've always 
been doing all along, which is the construction of an artwork that 
attempts to some degree to create an autonomous space that has a life of 
its own. But here, that life could be more present than past, a life evolving 
in front of your eyes as opposed to simply having been created in a studio 
or by using a camera. 
I want to mention one other example. One of the more fascinating cul- 
tural phenomena that I am sure you are all aware of is the tendency to 
talk about how much memory our computers have. Quite an amazing 
example of the transposition of the lived into the machine, because no 
machine can have memory. But it is such a powerful metaphor that now 
the memory of machines becomes a way of judging human memory. Even 
though I haven't the faintest idea-and I do a fair amount of research on 
this-how human memories are constructed, sustained and maintained in 
the brain, the term has been transposed into machines with great ease. 
Why would one put so much into machines and does this lead to a redefi- 
nition of what it means to be human? I would suggest that this final 
example shows us the degree to which our culture has moved beyond the 
initial boundaries of reality and simulation into the wonderful phantas- 
magoria that is virtuality. 
Crush. Lean back Take out book Look at back cover 12345. Open. (read). Twist neck (read). Twist neck. (read) 


Art Has Always Been Virtual

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