Visitors to the gallery were intrigued by Jeffrey Aaronson’s artwork. (Photo by Lilach Assayag) “I’ve been told I’m sexy and sweet,” said the recorded voice of “Sexy Grandmother Wanting Dance Partner.”
“Grandmother” is one of the individuals who took part in Jeffrey Aaronson’s visual art installation, “Maybe It’s You,” that deals with the search of identity and intimacy in the digital age. Anderson and ten other media artists were featured last month at DCCC’s biennial “Articulture” exhibition, which was opened with keynote speaker Ben Rubin.
On the opening eve, Rubin, a renowned media artist, shared with the audience thoughts and challenges that went into the makings of a few of his large-scale art projects.
In 2001, as Internet use largely grew, Rubin and his colleague, Mark Hansen, were interested to know what people were saying on the Web. To find out, Rubin and Hansen designed a digital collector, “an antenna in a way,” Rubin said, to gather random text from chat rooms. “That was before text messages and social networking sites,” Rubin added.
In two hours of text gathering, Rubin said, the phrase “I am” appeared the most (1028 times). “Welcome back” took second place and “I know” or “I think” came third. This inspired the artists to create “Listening Pole,” a digital system that drew real-time sentences with shared phrases from online chat rooms, bulletin boards and forums, and presented them on a grid of 200 small electronic screens.
The sentences, in pairs or groups, appeared in clustered and scattered patterns across the grid as a synthesized voice narrated them. Periodically, all screens lit-up in a wave pattern to the sound of a typewriter, and the system resumes its operation.
To explain the social relevance, Rubin compared people on the Internet to fireflies, flashing to be noticed, saying, “Here I am; is there anyone out there for me?”
In his public artworks, Rubin combines elements that are unique to the hosting location, exposing the often hidden digital world to the outer living environment and creating intimate dialogues with the public through mass media tools.
An example is “Four Stories,” a light installation built into the back of two of Minneapolis Public Library glass elevators, which reveals the most recent checked-out book titles as the elevators go up and down.
Another example is “San Jose Semaphore” on the top of the Adobe building in San Jose, inspired by the San Jose’s legendary “Light Tower,” a 237-feet high construction built in 1881 as a part of a failed plan to replace the numerous gas street lamps with a few electric light sources.
Rubin’s “Semaphore,” features four illuminated pairs of half discs that spin synchronically accompanied by an audio of a word and a number broadcasted on AM frequency in the artwork’s vicinity. The public was invited to decipher the message behind the digital code, which turned out to be a chapter of a book.
“Ben Rubin showed that there are various types of art that we don’t think about, things that are not just pictures on the wall,” said Karen Brayhar, 28, a communication student at DCCC. “He comes up with ways to use the mass media and use it as a form of art.”
Collaborating once again in 2007, Rubin and Hansen engineered “Movable Type,” a permanent artwork designed for The New York Times Building in New York City. Expanding the concept of “Listening Pole,” this artwork pulls text from the newspaper’s archive and current text, “crunching the text,” Rubin said, and displaying corresponding sentences in various patterns on 560 electronic screens.
At the end of Rubin’s lecture, guests were invited to and to walk through the gallery and refresh themselves with light fare and soft drinks accommodated by the college’s culinary department.
Inspired by the intensity of exposure that emanated from personal ads on Craigslist (an online classified ads board), Aaronson invited individuals like “Grandmother” to record the content of their message in their own voice. Viewers were able to stand in front of unique enlarged portraits and listen to the corresponding recordings on music players that the artist provided.
“[Aaronson] was able to get such polar opposite people,” said Helen Rankin, 21, a marketing student at DCCC, “and you were able to hear how they’re all looking for the same thing, they’re all looking for love.”
Among the exhibits was also a series of photos titled “Concrete Intervention” by Kathryn Williamson, capturing herself tumbling on a crosswalk. The purpose of the captions, she explained in the exhibition booklet, is to paint a social portrait by capturing and examining the behavior of her unsuspecting audience.
Displayed on a computer screen was Aaron Oldenburg’s “The Mischief of Created Things,” an interactive Flash environment based on real characters and scenery from Mali, where the artist spent two years as a development worker.With the movement of the mouse, the user could stroll around the village, and learn a thing or two about the life of Mali through the call-outs that appeared when clicking on characters and structures.
All of the artworks presented in the exhibition depict intimate moments and personal experiences through digital media.
Breaking the cold and distant stereotype usually associated with the computerized medium, the artists granted the viewers a sneak peek into private lives from far away countries or perhaps even from around the corner.
