The second day of Transmediale was packed with interesting speakers. I’d particularly like to draw attention to two events that made my day yesterday (besides those couple of hours I took to drift around the city): Warren Neidich’s short lecture and Stelarc’s session. I’ll let the climax build.

Artist Warren Neidich participated with Ingeborg Reichle in a panel titled Unfinished Creation where he spoke both about his works and cognitive issues and quirks he has encountered while developing his work. What made his part particularly interesting was how he converged the accumulated cognitive research results and philosophical questions arising from these scientific conclusions. I particularly liked his remark that it is interesting how among the most interesting philosophical discussions and questions today are brought up by scientists and not so much by humanists.

Another point brought up by Neidich which as a researcher in digital contemporary art I found particularly interesting was how ideas influence the material and how material in return influences ideas, with the process practically continuing ad infinitum until the work is finished. Once such a statement is uttered it sounds obvious, while building a taxonomy of art makeing is tedious and difficult to describe, specifically the complex process of the development of an artwork, which take place between the initial idea and the final work.

Large part of his presentation, however, Neidich was talking about his views on neural darwinism and neural constructivism. Particularly compelling was his pondering on genetic vs. brain connection changes, where genetic changes take a very long time, while brain is able to adapt to changes very, very quickly building up new connections and killing off unused even before we are born and practically until we die. Of course, this rises the question of what good do all these elaborate brain connections do to the human race if they cease to exist with the death of the individual both producing and carrying them, thus unretreivably obliterating the knowledge of the individual who carried them.

Still, it seemed like Neidich at least a little bit believes that individual’s experience and knowledge contribute to the genetic evolutionary processess; extremely slowly, but changes do occur over long periods of time. The gist of his justification wa based on the example of language development (which in itself is rather difficult to prove in the first place). Neidich contends that the individuals who had genetic predisposition for the developing of lanugage had a better chance of survival, and reproduction than those who lacked it. In a similar way, Neidich claims, even our contemporary culture is influencing us in the same way. Unfortunately he did not touch on what exactly are our genes preferring culturally today that would make a significant genetical change, which would implicate the development of a human brain over a long period of time.

Stelarc on the other hand mostly spoke about his work, both past and present. Even though he has performed in Ljubljana several times, this is the first time I have seen him live. First impression: he has a very wicked laughter and obviously audience found it very amusing; it somehow puts into context his work. Anyway, Stelarc’s entertaining and insightful presentation lasted for two whole hours that passed in an eye-blink.

In the packed auditorium of the Berlin Akademie der Künste Stelarc spoke about everything from his suspended bodies works (you can read an insightful text on the series of works here) to stomach sculpture and the third hand. But by far the most interesting was one of his most recent experiments with acquiring an extra ear. It borders on insane, especially once you hear what he went through to get the ear.

Initially he had the idea for the third ear already in the mid 1990’s but it was not realizable. One of the reasons being that he wanted to have it on his cheek, right in front of his other two ears. He dropped the idea only after doctors told him that as a result of the operation part of his face might be paralyzed. Although it seemed like he had found the idea that his third ear would be wiggling as he moves his jaws much more off putting.

As bio-technology for growing living tissue improved in the last decade so it seems his idea of getting an extra ear progressed. So in 2006 he had begun materializing it. The process begun when he went through the process of growing excess skin on his left forearm where the ear shaped mold on which the ear would grow was later inserted. He already had the ear inserted by his surgeon friends and wore it until the bluetooth microphone which was inserted alongside with the mold caused an infection. A bluetooth microphone? It was only naturally for him to insert a microphone, as it was an extra ear, afterall. He envisioned that the wireless microphone would enable the curious to listen on what his new ear is catching. At this point I begun wondering what’s the point as it seemed that he is doing this just because he can do it, but without a developed concept supporting his actions.

Anyway, Sterlarc’s keynote was full of videos and anecdotes. The first complete miniature ear his friend had grown for him on a mold needed some special attention. Besides having to feed it regularly, it had to be kept at a constant 37C in order to survive. A machine was taking care of that. But when his friend had to fly across Australia on a four hour flight, the ear would die if it was not kept at body temperature. So his friend carried it “in his panties.” I can imagine how the airport security would freak out if he had to go through a body search.

Mladen

The rest of this week I will be spending in Berlin at the other digital and electronic art festival, Transmediale 07. I’ve arrived last night, am staying in the incredibly cool East Berlin and will be networking and wallowing in what the event has to offer until Sunday. Hopefully a lot of events will be interesting as there’s no lack of interesting people around here.

I have just participated in a very interesting session about the very little known electronic artist Mary Ellen Bute. It’s a surprise how someone who has done such incredible work in the electronic arts gets so easily overlooked. During the session which basically served more or less as an introduction to the recently established Institute for Media Archeology, Sandra Neumann spoke about Mary Ellen Bute and has shown three animations made by Bute. And in one word, her work is impressive.

Unfortunately Bute’s work is not very easy to get by, so I just can’t give you a link and let you experience it by yourself. There are a few stills here and there on the net, but they are nowhere near as telling as these electronic and light animations are when they are in motion. Bute not only experimented with light and shadow, abstracting different utensils from beaters and egg cutters to ping pong balls, but also used oscilloscopes and cathode ray tubes to visualize sounds. Most special about Bute is that she did all this from 1930’s onwards.

Her animations are quite intense and even though she begun using various electronic equipment already in the 1930’s, her work is fast paced with many, many short cuts, very much late 1990’s music video kind of cuts. Which is a reason why one of the session presenters hinted that Bute used music to sooth down the motion of animations. Some of her work could be characterized as an animated version of Kandinsky. But what I would like to see is her visualization of part of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

It’s interesting how just in the last few years electronic artists like Bute are all of a sudden being rediscovered. I’ve been following digital and electronic arts for around ten years now and pretty much all the time almost all the works have been revolving around the latest technology and gadgets. Unfortunately this is not just the position held by the festival curators, but also by the researchers and writers who have 95% of the time nonchalantly ignored electronic and digital arts’ roots. So I was happy to see that, for instance, Eliane Rodigue resurfaced at last years Ars Electronica. I am sure contemporary artists could learn a lot from their roots.

Mladen