The Print Screen Festival is hosting 13 international video artists this year exploring the ways in which digital technology is changing our senses and relationships with each other and the world around us. The works glorify the digital apparatus and at the same time criticize it to raise questions about our relationship to the digital

Berdugo, Liat

English

University of San Francisco

The University of San Francisco USF Scholarship: a digital repository @ Gleeson Library | Geschke Center Art + Architecture College of Arts and Sciences 2015 Between Glorification and Catastrophization Liat Berdugo Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.usfca.edu/art-architecture  Part of the Digital Humanities Commons 1 “Between Glorif ication and Catastrophization” (English) Liat Berdugo  Erev Rav 27 May 2015  The Print Screen Festival  is hosting 13 international video artists this year exploring the ways in which digital technology is changing our senses and relationships with each other and the world around us. The works glorify the digital apparatus and at the same time crit icize it  to raise questions about our relationship to the digital. ____________________________________________________________   Sophie Barbasch, video still from Goodnight Call, 2012.  Back in 1970, when Jacques Ellul wrote his seminal book on the technological milieu in which we now live, to talk about technology was to talk about machines. Machines were 2 domestic: they were cars, vacuum cleaners, and cake-mixers. Machines were war objects: they were infrared detectors, tanks, and airplanes. And machines were research: they were microscopes, reactors, and early computers. Ellul celebrated the ways the machine had changed and enriched man: “The machine’s senses and organs have multiplied the powers of human senses and organs, enabling man to penetrate a new milieu and revealing to him unknown sights, liberties, and servitudes.” –Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society  Now – in the era of the Apple Watch – we can clearly see that technological devices have become adaptive appendages to the physical body. We wear little computers on our wrists just as we wear glasses on our noses. Information can be accessed readily: it is immediate, vast, and efficient. This access promises to be both authoritative and democratizing. Technology promises to extend our senses and our reach: to expand geographic freedom, to escape from the familiar, and to give us a sense that the world is vast but also easily navigable. All we have to do is touch the right buttons on our smartphones.  But the story is not as rosy as this. Embodied human action causes a response in the technological interface, but the bodily action is dictated by the apparatus. The line of causality, therefore, moves from interface to body rather than vice versa. New gestures feel autonomous and natural, but they are in fact controlled by the machine. Architech Frank Lloyd Wright famously wrote, “If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but his pushbutton finger.” And even Jaques Ellul weighs in with skepticism:  “[Man] has been liberated little by little from physical constraints, but he is all the more the slave of abstract ones.” –Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society  Yet this is not the full picture. In this now common debate – where the glorification of technology battles its catastrophization – lays a crop of artists whose work, collectively, resists to take sides. At this year’s Print Screen Festival are the works of thirteen international artists whose works explore whether -- and how -- digital technologies change our sensitivity toward one another and the world around us.  The first screening, entitled The Transhuman and his Emotional States, chips away at promises of glorification with the incisive tool of humor. “Transhumanism” is the belief that the human race can evolve past its current physical, intellectual, and psychological limitations through the use of advanced technology. In Ben Wheele’s, The Birth Tab  (2015), a woman travels through virtual space, hoping to find 'The Birth Tab' -- a mythical object that enables a person to witness their very own birth, via live webcam 3 feed. The work asks, what are the potential emotional conditions of such transcendent beings? What would it feel like to actually be present your own birth through an internet browser? The video was inspired by Wheele’s own experiences of drifting through Second Life using an Oculus Rift headset.   Ben Wheele, video still from The Birth Tab, 2015. Another work in that collection draws from LaTurbo Avedon, an avatar artist: LaTurbo is a digital manifestation of a person that has never existed outside of a computer. LaTurbo’s existence and creative output reside entirely online. Without a real world referent, LaTurbo Avedon’s digital sculptures and environments disregard this lack of physicality, and instead emphasize the practice of virtual authorship. In Facebook Lookback, we see a year in the Facebook world of the artist, set to cheesy music meant to evoke nostalgia for personal history. LaTurbo and I are Facebook friends, and we communicate entirely through that platform. Rumor has it that she (he? it?) lives in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, but she has never revealed any inklings of ‘real life’ identity to me or to any other curators who have worked with her.   The second screening of the series, Connect me: Dial-up, Ring tone, and Camera Flash, explores how the technological landscape impacts human connection. How do we attempt to reach through digital voids? How does technology mediate connection? Sophie Barbasch’s brilliant work, Goodnight Call (2012), creates intimate scenarios by 4 Craigslist crowdsouring that are at once tender and alienating. In Goodnight Call, Barbasch collected goodnight messages from strangers on Craigslist, where she posted an ad in the strictly platonic personals section: “leave me a goodnight voicemail before you go to sleep at night as though we have been together for years. i will listen to it before i go to sleep.” Men leave her mundane fantasies (of the “I’m-on-a-business-trip” variety) and strange tender wishes. The work highlights the craving for connection and the strange ways it can be played out through the Internet.  The final screening of the collection – entitled Everyday Emotional Computing – brings us to the present moment. It focuses on the emotional landscape in the face of current digital, technological, and Internet-based modalities: on nostalgia and loss, on frustration and sharing, on trust and death. The works in this collection explore the physical storage of digital memories, and on how today’s technology conflates public and private forms of expression, with bodies and minds always on display. One of my favorite works in this collection is Sophia Brueckner’s conceptual piece, Crying to Dragon Dictate (2011). Like many computer programmers, Brueckner ended up with repetitive stress injuries to her wrists. She could no longer type and was forced to use Dragon Dictate, a popular speech recognition program, to interact with her computer. At one point, Brueckner spent an hour attempting to type only a few sentences, and broke down crying in frustration while the speech recognition software was still running – literally translating her sobs into words. Brueckner’s work addresses the raw emotions that we share through technology -- or that we have, as private experiences, in front of our TV sets and computers.   These thirteen video artists tackle hard questions: what added senses does technology provide us, and what are their limitations? Does a technologically-heightened sensibility lead to added sensitivity? How does technology impact emotions, and change our awareness toward the social injustices and global concerns? Together, this series aggrandizes the digital apparatus, cuts it down to size. It works from the technological, but more so from the logos of the tehknē: from a principle of art that creates its own -- and often absurd -- ground between technology’s vows and its reneges, between what the digital world promises us, and what it takes away.     Hypersensitive: Video Art Programme Curator: Liat Berdugo Assistant Curator: Samantha Adler de Oliveira  5 Works by LaTurbo Avedon (US), Sophie Barbasch (US), Sophia Brueckner (US), Coalfather Industries (US), Alina Deckel (IL), Omer Fast (IL), Jason Huff (US), John C. Kelley (US), Mores McWreath (US), Chen Serfaty (IL), Laliv Sivan (IL), Ben Wheele (UK), and Benjamin Yavuzsoy (DE) 

Between Glorification and Catastrophization

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Between Glorification and Catastrophization

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