Dinosaurs and Mummies: Augmenting the Art Experience at Onishi Gallery, Chelsea
This story starts with a dinosaur.
It’s a bipedal one, sort of like a mini Tyrannosaurus, running around by my feet. My friend laughs as he sees it scurry beneath me. It’s somewhat different from what I’d imagined, though. I press a button, and it changes skin tone. I try to touch it, and my hand passes straight through. But as I crouch down, it looks me straight in the eye. Then it waves and vanishes into a wall. It’s gone.
The dinosaur before me is a stunning example of mixed reality, the subject of a recent show at Onishi Gallery in Chelsea sponsored by Canon and KBK Ltd. Mixed reality places virtual world objects onto the real world, allowing anything from dinosaurs to interior design concepts come to life. Unlike screen-based augmented reality and 3D projections, these headsets create a fundamentally different experience by capturing your entire periphery. The two worlds of computers and physical objects truly mesh.
Both wearing headsets, a visitor and I are able to share in the same experience of the dinosaur.
“People would be surprised when they entered the gallery,” said gallery director Nana Onishi over sips of green tea. ”‘It’s not art,’ they would tell me. ‘It’s technology.’” Her eponymous gallery focuses on traditional Japanese art in contemporary contexts, such as metal leaf work and scrolls inspired by the Tale of Genji. This was her first technology show.
“I was like them,” she said of her first encounter with Canon’s headsets. Shortly thereafter, however, she decided to host them at her gallery, where they showed the technology to the general public for the first time. “Since I’ve come to know the project, I have had so many ideas and images for projects.”
Connections at MIT Museum
I have never met Aaron Zinman. Not in person, anyway. I’ve spoken with him a few times on the phone, and we’ve chatted via email and Twitter, but I’ve never actually seen the man. But for a few months this past summer, Aaron’s art project became an Internet sensation, and I wanted to know why.
A quick web search tells me he’s pursuing a PhD at MIT’s Media Lab, and it looks like he did some interesting things with IBM and Google. Some of his recent Flickr images suggest he likes to go skiing or snowboarding. He’s a DJ, he frequents Cafe Fabulous in Cambridge, and according to his own Twitter feed, he’s “remarkably able at catching falling objects.” In almost all the pictures I’ve seen of Aaron, he’s flashing a big smile, and most of his emails contain at least one smiley, and more than one exclamation mark. Overall, he seems like an intelligent, passionate, likeable kind of guy.
Aaron Zinman, the artist, designer, and technologist behind Personas
I also know through my searching that last year, Aaron launched Personas, which does what I did—search around—and presents its findings. It’s a simple site, designwise, but it reveals a more complex infrastructure and compels us to ask complex questions.
You click over and enter your name. It could be your full name — first, middle, and last. It could be your professional name. Personas then searches the web, like I did for “Aaron Zinman” and uses “a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.” In painfully simplistic terms, it Googles you and paints a pretty picture.
Another quick web search shows that Personas quickly took off shortly after it was launched. All kinds of Web sites, from the niche TechCrunch, to the more mainstream CNN talked up the site. It’s easy to see why. Beautifully designed, the clean background shows you what it’s finding and processing in real time, complete with futuristic animations. What comes out is a spectrum of colors and labels, neatly arranged and visually intuitive.
The Personas search results for "An Xiao"
Typing in my name, an uncommon one on both sides of the Pacific, I’m not surprised to find large chunks of the spectrum devoted to “online” and “art.” I assume the slivers of “religion” and “books” relate to my explorations of Zen poetry. I can even see how the “genealogy” result might make sense.
But a few of them puzzle me: Why “military” and “aggression”? Why “sports”? I’ve never campaigned for or against any wars, and the only way I realized the Super Bowl had come and gone was because I was looking at Twitter’s trending topics.
“Personas is an experiment in data portraiture,” Aaron told me. “You get a sense of a machine-kind of thinking and making sense of you. How is the machine parsing you? It’s normally a very opaque process.”
Indeed, watching the animation again, I see other An Xiaos pop up in its searches. There’s “An Xiao Wei,” a kung fu champion. A number of An Xiaos who write academic papers. “An Xiao Qian,” a character in a Chinese action film. Anyone who has the vaguest idea of what I do could tell at a glance that these people obviously aren’t me, but machines can’t recognize that. Not Personas, not Bing, not Google, at least not yet.
Aaron wrote in his project description, that Personas “is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.”
In retrospect, as I learned more about the project, I came to realize that its swift popularity is less a puzzle than an inevitability.
“Rachel Is” | An Interview with Rachel Perry Welty
Screenshot from "Rachel is" (Facebook status via iPhone), performed March 11, 2009. Online performance documented by a 551-photograph slideshow of mobile update screen captures from an iPhone. 27 minutes 55 seconds set to loop continuously.
Appropriately enough, I first met conceptual artist Rachel Perry Welty via social media, when word spread about her Facebook-based performance, “Rachel is.” On March 11, 2009, from 7:35 a.m. to 10:56 p.m., she performed using the increasingly popular social network. Every sixty seconds during waking hours she attempted to faithfully answer the status question at the time, “What are you doing right now?” (since replaced by “What’s on your mind?”). We eventually met in person at Status Update, an exhibition at Yale/Haskins Laboratories curated by Debbie Hesse and Donna Ruff that explored the work of artists looking at emerging social media technologies.
Rachel uses a variety of media in her work—sculpture, video, performance, drawing, and installation—mixing minimal aesthetics with Pop humor and homespun craft to create works that point to the mundane and poetic aspects of our everyday lives. Her obsession with mapping the remnants of her daily rituals extends to fruit stickers and bread tags, twist ties and take-out containers, wrong number messages and computer spam. The world of Facebook, quickly becoming a mundane aspect of daily life in the 21st century, presents a logical next step for her explorations.
As so much of my work of late has been with the @Platea social media art collective, I was fascinated with Rachel’s project. I sat down with her via email and chatted a bit about her performance and where she sees social media and art going today.
An Xiao: How long have you been using online social media? How do you use Facebook, Twitter, and other media in your daily life?
Rachel Perry Welty: I’ve been using Facebook and Twitter for less than a year. The New York Times magazine had an in-depth piece about these social networking sites in early September 2008, and this, combined with friends requesting that I join, prompted me to investigate. I’ve found Facebook to be useful as a view to the global artist community, but I don’t send gifts or answer quizzes or throw sheep at people. And I don’t update my status on Facebook anymore after my performance on March 11.
Twitter feels very different to me from Facebook. For one thing, tweets don’t beg for a response. I don’t always want to have a discussion, as much as I just want to report. I have decided to use Twitter as a sort of Amish diary, you know, “Today I plowed the West field and gave birth to a baby boy” sort of thing. Every action is equal. No one experience gets more or less emphasis. I am driven by the limited word count to compose carefully to get as much information in as I can while keeping the poetry alive. All the better when I can do that and twoosh.
I use Twitter as an extension of my creative process, in the sense that it’s a view into the daily life of a working artist. As an artist, my project is concerned with the minutiae of life. As humans, we spend most of our time engaged in the small moments (whether we tweet or Facebook about them or not) and in my project I am trying to get people to notice the things they wouldn’t ordinarily. In that sense, Twitter seems like a perfect platform for me. It’s an ongoing performance.
Kickstarting Creative Projects: An Innovative Micro-Giving Site, Part 2 of 2
Following up on yesterday’s post, An continues her conversation with Yancey Strickler and sums up her experience of fundraising via Kickstarter.—Ed.
An Xiao: Tell me a little more about the financial side of things. If most artists are like me, they’re not the best with keeping records and managing payments.
Yancey Strickler: We like Amazon Payments because it’s what our entire system runs on. They’re the only ones that can handle our needs. PayPal currently cannot. Plus, we’re working with the most trusted e-commerce site ever. Most people already have an Amazon account, so backing a project is like buying a book. Super simple.
The only drawback is that Amazon Payments are only set up for US customers to receive money, though anyone from other countries can give money. They’re working on expanding their services to other countries, but I don’t know when that will be changed.
Kickstarter's super clear project dashboard, intuitive for even the most numbers-averse artist
AX: A few of my donors had issues with Amazon Payments initially, though these were quickly resolved and had nothing to do with Amazon or Kickstarter. However, one backer was never able to resolve the issue, so he opted to send me a check. How do you manage financial questions?
YS: I’m the one customer service person for Kickstarter. If anyone has any payment problems, I will end up talking to them. It’s fairly common, as you’re often putting down your credit card information three months before the card is actually charged and things happen. We work very closely with anyone who has any trouble, and there’s a full week to correct any payment problems. The number of declined or failed transactions on Kickstarter is very, very, very low.
The power of momentum: if a project reaches 25% of its funding goal, it has a 90% chance of eventual success.
AX: That’s great—so artists can really focus on on the fundraising rather than the details of actually collecting the pledges.
YS: Absolutely. For a creator, it’s their job to spread the word and let people know about the project. The financials and all of that will just flow through Amazon. And best of all: creators get an email with each new pledge. It becomes this incredibly gratifying feeling—especially when it’s complete strangers doing the backing.
Continue reading »
Kickstarting Creative Projects: An Innovative Micro-Giving Site, Part 1 of 2
July 7, 2009. It’s the middle of summer, and I’ve just heard from the folks at the DUMBO Arts Center that my installation proposal, Phone-Tastic View, has been approved for the 13th Annual DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival. I’m thrilled, of course, but now I’m up against a new problem: how on earth am I going to pay for this? The installation calls for a standard street sign to be installed on the waterfront. The sign would instruct viewers to send a text message to receive quirky information about the view of the skyline, so I also need to fund the text messaging service. After adding up the numbers, I’m realizing this will cost at least 500 dollars.
That’s when I learn about Kickstarter, a new site for artists to help them crowdsource fundraising, Obama-style, through small donations. What follows is an interview with Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, interweaved with the story of my own fundraising efforts for my first public art installation, along the Brooklyn waterfront.
An Xiao: Tell me a little about the origins of Kickstarter. What, if you will, kickstarted this idea?
Yancey Strickler: Our CEO/co-founder Perry Chen came up with idea when he was living in New Orleans a few years ago. He was trying to put on a concert for the New Orleans Jazz Festival, but in order to make it happen he needed to front a lot of money.
He thought that there’s clearly another way to do it without fronting the money out of pocket. If only he could know demand before he started. So he got the idea of a conditional transaction—you only start the project if you raise enough to fund it. He and I met about four years ago and we started working on applying this idea.
AX: So it started in classic Internet start-up style, with two people and an idea. But now you have a team of five.
YS: Yes, Perry and I were the first two. Then we met Charles Adler, a user experience designer. He designed the whole site. Lance Ivy, the technical founder of User Voice, developed it. Andy Baio joined us as chief technology officer after first serving as an adviser. He runs the very popular Waxy.org, and previously founded a company (Upcoming) that Yahoo eventually purchased. And our primary adviser is Sunny Bates, who just knows everyone and has just been incredible with us. She’s been very helpful in making the site successful.
We’re all spread around the country. Only once have we all been in the same room.
AX: Wow. Where was it?
YS: Shortly after the site launched, we flew everyone into New York. But even then we only had time for us all to sit down together once.
AX: Sounds like we need to get a Kickstarter page going for your reunion.
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The Cosplay Ethic
I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m a bit of a cosplay fanatic. Yes, these days I sport DKNY glasses and sleek monochromatic clothing, but my urban fashionability is merely a cloak for a tremendous amount of geekery. To be fair, I don’t cosplay myself. When I was most active, I served more as the tagalong, helping with costumes and the like, and these days, I focus on photographing others, rather than participating myself.
Cao Fei, "Golden Fighter (COSPlayers Series)," 2004. © Cao Fei, courtesy the artist and Lombard-Freid Projects, New York.
But there will always be a special place in my heart for cosplay, so you’ll understand my excitement when I first stumbled upon Cao Fei’s visual work at The Thirteen: Chinese Video Now, a group exhibition at PS1 three years ago. In the video, cosplayers venture through the streets of a rapidly-growing but desolate Guangzhou, acting out epic battles while the normalcy of the city chugs along. In both her photos and videos, we see cosplayers outside the glitzy-geekery of anime and comic conventions and immersed in the context of the everyday.
The work itself is visually stunning. The contrast of the colorful costumes with the staid backdrop of the city speaks to the fantasy projected in cosplay culture, and how much that fantasy can clash with the mundanities of making a living, getting along with parents and growing up in a country that itself is coming of age in the 21st century.
The series struck a personal chord in me in particular, as it reminded me so much of my cosplaying friends. After each convention, I’d watch them shed their outfits, cram into nondescript cars, don school uniforms and work attire, argue with their parents, watch television and just generally return to a normal life. In their heads, they still wanted to live the epic lives of Tifa Lockheart and Naruto, normal life be damned, and they’d immerse themselves in anime message boards and costume-making circles in anticipation of the next big event.
Cao Fei, "Yanmy at Home (COSPlayers Series)," 2004. © Cao Fei, courtesy the artist and Lombard-Freid Projects, New York.
Does art expand our ability to imagine? Cao Fei’s series is no doubt imaginative. After my first exposure to her work, I found myself lost in her images, and I started seeing swords and fireballs coursing through the streets of Manhattan. But it’s also the imagination of her subjects that helps bring these photos to life. In their eyes is a world far removed from the anxieties of a developing China, a world where people (not always human) fly and shoot fireballs and twirl weapons effortlessly, and the fate of the universe rests in the balance. In so many ways, Cao Fei’s subjects are as much artists as the artist herself.
Perhaps it’s my bias as an artist, but engaging in art, creating art both as a response to and in imitation of others’ work is often the best way to step into an artist’s imagination, whether it be faraway surrealist dreams or sharp technical realism. Rather than passively absorb the stories told in hard-to-find DVDs of their favorite Japanese animation, cosplayers take the experience further by creating these worlds in their daily lives. They construct three dimensional costumes based on two dimensional designs and act out alternate storylines inspired by a limited series run. In other words, their imaginations come alive.
@Platea: Art in the Web 2.0 Ethos
Social technologies have been around for decades, but mainstream use of social media platforms has grown exponentially only over recent years. This column explores uses of social media platforms relevant to the arts community: by artists, art-based organizations, and the general audience. Leading off the column is a post from New York-based artist, An Xiao.
If there’s anything revealed about the use of social media technologies in the Iranian election, it’s that Twitter, Facebook and other social spaces online have become a new form of public space. Like any public space, social media serve as a place to meet with friends, people watch and, as we’ve seen, even protest. The key difference with this digital public space is one of scale and access, as users find ways to reach an international and growing user base, limited only by access to a computer or mobile phone and, to a certain extent, a common language.
One question I explore in my social media work is how this new public space can become a site for public art. I recently founded @Platea, a global online public art collective, to explore this very issue, and to take some salient features of public art–performance, displacement and activation, engagement–and both translate and transform them into the realm of online media.
Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor (photo by An Xiao)
During the week of May 3-9, @Platea gathered more than 40 individiduals from a half dozen countries to participate in @Platea’s Project II: Co-Modify, a public performance art project. The idea was simple. First, each performer chose a megacorporation to be “sponsored by” for the week. They then acted it out, imagining the sponsorship as defined by their company. The project was designed firstly as a commentary on the commodification of social media, and, by extension, our social lives in general, but also as a look at the possibilities of collective performance art in the realm of social media.
