My Secret (Canvases), 2012 – 2015

Index cards, envelopes, pencils, fish bowl, and archival ink on 9″ x 12″ canvases. Dimensions variable.

Presented at “Tell Me How You REALLY Feel: Diaristic Tendencies”, The Center for Book Arts, New York, NY, 2012; “Operating System”, Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Art Gallery, New York, NY, 2012; and “Index”, Part of the Borimix Festival, CSV Center, New York, NY, 2012

Project Description:

This is a simple participatory artwork where people are invited to write down a sexual secret in pencil, on an index card, put it in a small envelope, and deposit it into an empty fish bowl.

Secrets pulled from the bowl are turned into text paintings on canvas, and a small set of these canvases are displayed above and around the station for writing.

The structure of display is intended to suggest that these shared secrets are like beautiful little fragments or gifts, thus diffusing lurid or unsettling qualities in the massage and encouraging the reader to focus on the humanity of the truth revealed.

Inspiration for the project comes from a number of sources. Many artists have worked with the idea of secrets, and there are numerous websites devoted to sharing anonymous confessions of one sort or another. I have also been intrigued by the jpeg and gif messages left by people for one another on line, often showing some cheesy romantic or sexy image along with a simple text message. (The kind of images that were to be found on My Space, Pinterest or other social interactive sites, and not infrequently covered with dancing sparkles, or animated water reflection effects.) Other sites encourage people to take photos of themselves holding paper signs with messages or promotions, or invite others to write letters or postcards and mail them anonymously to the site, where the most interesting ones will be posted.

The project is also influenced by the many short form writing technologies currently popular, including texting, IM, and Twitter.

Most of the canvases for “My Secret” are messages of only 15 to 25 words or so. Use of the index cards, rather than say a sheet of paper for participants to share secrets on, is intended to encourage this kind of short form writing.

Though the project is largely inspired by internet and digital phenomena, I chose to invite people to participate though old fashioned chirography, in part to suggest the feeling of writing in a diary, and also to evoke the long lost art of the writing of love letters, and notions of secret paramours, and found physical traces of the intimate lives of others.


White Plains Story, 2013

720p, 29.97fps, 41 minutes and 45 seconds, two channel video installation, projected on a 107″ x 432″ roll of Super White Set paper.

One of the artworks in Paul Clay’s solo show entitled “Sketches and Memories, (synthesized compositions rendered later, upon the artists’ safe return home)”, Part of the Hudson Vally Center for Contemporary Art’s Peekskill Project V, at ArtWestchester’s The Arts Exchange Building, White Plains, NY, 2013.

Through and invitation from Livia Straus, President of HVCCA, and organized by curator Kianga Ellis.

Painters of the Hudson River School traveled to rather remote natural locations where they made sketches, studies and gathered visual memories, but then trekked back to the safety of their homes (and studios) to make the paintings, often combining elements from a variety of different locales into a single synthesized composition. My title for the exhibit is an oblique reference to this practice.

“Sketches and Memories…” is a collection of works addressing the history of Peekskill and White Plains New York, as well as that of the entire Hudson River Valley. The works combine the subjective and personal with larger forces, tracing geology, prehistory, international politics, and global cultural diffusion to tell the story of the region.

Installation Photo:

Video Excerpt (4 minutes, 30 seconds):

Project Description:
The video artwork “White Plains Story” incorporates subjective bits of White Plains history from interviews and personal experiences, and also looks at the connection between White Plains and New York City, told in the form of a cartoon, collage or animated comic book, and a long scrolling text. The two channels are projected onto a 9 foot high by 36 foot wide roll of white paper, scrolled up at both left and right ends to create a 22 foot screen.

One video channel projects scrolling text, like one might see at the end of a feature film, but instead of credits, the text tells the history of the White Plains area. It involves three sections or chapters. The first covers the history and language of the Native American Lenape who lived in the region for thousands of years, and the Wappinger confederacy who interacted with European arrivals mostly from the 1600 to 1800’s, along with the Weckquaesgeek, band who lived in what was to become White Plains. The second section covers the history of the Arts Exchange Building, where ArtsWestchester is based, and the third, the history of what European settlers referred to as “the white plains”, from the first non-native settlement in 1683 right up to the present.

A second video channel also projects three sections. The artists trip from New York City up to White Plains, a sit down interview with Kathleen Reckling, Gallery Director of ArtsWestchester about her work and her life growing up in the area, and a driving tour with local resident David Licata through various neighborhoods of the city. This second channel is in the form of a cartoon, shot entirely on an iPhone with the ToonCamera app, to convert the video into the visual look of cartoons, and then edited and enhanced in Final Cut Pro.

Both channels are projected onto a 107 inch by 36 foot long roll of Super White Set or photo background paper, evoking the notion of pages in books, and comic books in particular, while at the same time suggesting scrolls which might contain histories or panoramic landscapes. It also references the technology of acetate film with the ends curled up, and the giant binder clips which hold it up the paper screen spaced along it like sprocket holes.

The two video channels, running concurrently, one historical text, the other lush colored cartoons telling personal stories, cause the viewer to jump back and forth between competing narratives, past and present, suggesting a continuum of reality about the region, which must be parsed and filtered to make sense of. All of the disperate competing truths coming together to suggest one possible White Plains Story.


My Secret, 2010

Note cards, miniature manila envelopes, Lace gift bags, decorative pen, fish bowl, folding table stand, desk, and chair. Dimensions variable.

Created at, and presented during The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts “Studio Residency for New York City Arts Workers”, New York City.

Project Description:
This is a simple interactive artwork where people are welcomed to write down a sexual secret on a small folding card, (resembling a mass produced gift card), put it in a small manilla envelope, and deposit it into an empty fish bowl. At intervals the secrets are pulled from the bowl and placed in miniature lace giftbags, where they are displayed on a small folding table stand. These can be opened and read by visitors, who then put them back for the next viewer to encounter.

The structure of display is intended to suggest that these shared secrets are like beautiful little gifts, thus diffusing lurid or unsettling qualities in the massage and encouraging the reader to focus on the humanity of the truth revealed.


Representation…, 2009

Representation, a Chronicle of the Essex Street Market

Paul Clay, 2009

A series of 44″x66″ digital prints on archival 100% cotton paper, using historical research, oral history, and the representational form of a comic book, to chart the sociocultural development of the Lower East Side through the story of the Essex Street Market.

A selection of the pieces will be on display, starting with the opening reception Saturday, December 12th, from 5pm-7pm in the North End of the Essex Market, 120 Essex St., New York City, and the exhibit will run through January 2010.

This project is made possible, in part, with public funds from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and with generous support from The New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Department of Small Business Services.

Project Description:

The comics are made from photos of actual people who work in and frequent the market,and include text in multiple languages, with both historical data, and information from oral histories, capturing a snapshot of a vibrant and volatile historical moment.

The Essex Street Market is a long standing center of everyday culture in the Lower East Side. It is unique on many fronts: for the products available, the atmosphere of the place, its inherent support for rapidly disappearing craft practices, and its tradition of multi generational handing-down of family business lore. Also, by its very layout, it supports high job density and the preservation of the aesthetic of the bodega, with its tradition of daily food purchase and simultaneous exchange of neighborhood, community and cultural information. The Essex Street Market is a vital business and cultural institution in the Lower East Side and this artwork highlights its special place within the community and the culture of New York City.

The neighborhood contains a diverse mix of cultures, from long standing Jewish residents to Puerto Ricans having arrived in the 60’s and 70’s, followed by Dominicans, and the expansion of Chinatown, not to mention local artists who settled in the area back when the rents were affordable, and the recent influx of Japanese and Koreans. Rapid gentrification over the recent past has created huge cultural flux and a wide range of levels of income among residents.


Mengjia-108, 2009

A 90 minute two channel video art installation, involving video projection on paper covered windows in a 100 plus year old Chinese warehouse building, Chalk floor drawing, signage, and lighting.

Presented as part of “Fusion Folks – Contemporary Art Exhibition” Organized by the Taipei Department of Cultural Affairs and planned by Taiwanese independent curator Mr. Sean C.S. Hu. 24 artists both Taiwanese and international, create works related to the Bo-Pi-Liao Historic Center, in the Wanhua District, creating closer ties between art, history, and local customs. Taipei City, Taiwan, from 8/29/09 to 11/01/09.

Installation Photos:


3D Model of Installation:

Video stills of both Channels:

Video Documentation:
[tubepress video=”I5ZJ6oMCwF0″ embeddedWidth=”610″ embeddedHeight=”380″ length=”true”]

Project Description:

Mengjia-108, is a two channel video installation which explores the complex multicultural history of the Wanhua District, in Taipei City, a site of continuous human habitation along the Danshui River, for thousands of years. The title of the work refers to an ancient name for the area, along with the current postal code number.  Wanhua’s long history and its contemporary status are thus juxtaposed in simultaneous existence. The work employs collage, video filter effects, and text overlay, to present images of past and present, as well as differing viewpoints, angles, and cultural perspectives.

Taiwan has been inhabited for perhaps tens of thousands of years, and the first people in the Taipei basin area arrived around 6000 years ago. These first peoples, or first nations, formed a robust river and seafaring culture. Both they and their language eventually spread all across the islands of South Asia and the Pacific, as far as New Zealand and even the land of the current United States of America. Due to lack of written records and in the absence of large scale architectural remains in long lasting materials, this monumental technological and cultural achievement has garnered little recognition.

Starting in the 1600’s successive waves of peoples including the Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and Han Chinese took control of all or parts of Taiwan, each leaving their mark on its cultural heritage. Throughout this history the Danshui River, and the Wanhua District area have played a major roll.

Wanhua has been an important harbor and trading site for thousands of years, and Mengjia-108 traces some of the disparate viewpoints and little known truths about the area. The Wanhua district has a proud and complex multicultural past, appreciation of which can serve as a guide to the shaping of its future.


Sun Dried Boys, 2009

Sun Dried Boys (Red Pepper Found Installation), Paul Clay, 2009

Presented in conjunction with (but not associated with), the 2009 Incheon Women Artists Biennale, Incheon Korea.

Multimedia work. Text description, digital photos of storefront installation with red paper-covered windows, television set, red plastic wash basin, flattened cardboard box, two black nets, drying red peppers. Dimensions variable.

Project Description:

Sun Dried Boys starts with a “found installation” or readymade in the form of something already existing, that looks for all the world like an art installation.

The space is photographed and then explicated at length, putting the “installation” in context within the contemporary art scene. The actual artwork consists of the photographs and the text in the form of a fictional “Project Description”. In one way such a work could simply be read as prankster art, but the real intent is to use the found space as a lens to view the art context of which the installation is supposedly a part.

Sun Dried Boys thus explores the social network around the 2009 Incheon Women Artists Biennale, acknowledges folk art and undervalued women’s practices, rips-off or riffs-on, the exploration of other artists work during the exhibit, and acknowledges the gendered power structures that still exist in society and in the contemporary art scene.

The artwork can be viewed at the following url:

http://sundriedboys.blogspot.com/


Dumbo Comic (Print Work), 2009

Two works from this series appeared in the group exhibit, “Anthropology: Revisited, Reinvented, Reinterpreted”, at Central Booking, Brooklyn, NY, November 2009. The work is intended to explore the Brooklyn neighborhood of Dumbo, and is available in two forms:

As individual 44″ x 66″, or 22″ x 33″ prints, archival ink, on acid free 100 percent cotton paper.
As individual images without text in the form of 38″ x 54″ archival ink prints on canvas.

Project Description:
Dumbo Comic (Print Work) takes 30 Washington Street as its starting point, to explore Dumbo’s unique history, and its architectural and sociological development. The artworks, in the form of comics, take inspiration from the factories built along the East River waterfront, and from Robert Gair’s position in the end of the 19th century as an inventor involved in industrial printing, cardboard box manufacturing, and real estate.

The work includes reference to the idea of the “Walled City”, a nickname for Brooklyn in the time before the bridges, when there were so many warehouses along the river that it created the look of a walled fortress from the water side. The name can also be interpreted as a reference to the subsequent isolation that Dumbo suffered from, following the construction of the bridges and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. The bridges and expressway not only made it hard to pass directly into Dumbo from the rest of Brooklyn, but also, because of the length of the exit-ways off of the bridge actually made all the Brooklyn/Manhattan traffic bypass Dumbo, traveling several stories above it. This (at first) tragic walling off, ultimately helped to preserve many of the historic qualities of the neighborhood which are valued today.

Dumbo, New York City’s 90th historic district, is bounded by John Street to the north, York Street to the south, Main Street to the west and Bridge Street to the east, and includes 91 buildings that reflect its industrial heritage. The Brooklyn waterfront region was one of the premier industrial areas in the United States, and at the turn of the 20th century, Brooklyn was the fourth-largest manufacturing center in the country.

Dumbo Comic (Print Work) looks at the historical development of this area through the use of line drawing, and the comic. The line is a simple yet powerful visual tool. Greek legend has it that the first drawing originated from someone using a stick to copy shadows in the sand, and line drawing has long functioned to allow a kind of caricature, or portrait of a person or thing. Comics use a simplified, or iconic visual language to explain complex ideas and narrative structures – a kind of “amplification through simplification”. The form tends to be democratic in nature, and readily accessible to a broad spectrum of society.

The origins of the modern single frame political cartoon can be traced to Britain in the 1800’s and is distinguished by the use of caricature. Throughout much of the United States’ history, political cartoons have held a prominent place. In the Civil War era, Thomas Nast invented the “Donkey” and “Elephant” that remain today the standard signs for the Democratic and Republican parties. They help us focus on the metaphors used in societal discourses.

Comics (or multi-frame cartoons) developed in the late 19th and early 20th century, alongside the similar forms of film and animation. The history and development of comics is directly linked to the development of 19th century manufacturing, to newspapers, and to the re-invention of printing as a large-scale industrial process. Robert Gair was a part of this movement, and the development of serial frame comics was happening at exactly the same time he was building “Gairville” in what is now Dumbo. Further, Gair’s newly developed process of industrial printing on cardboard, and his industrial production system for cardboard boxes was likely inspired by newspaper industrialization. Gair’s former factory was located in Manhattan near the Puck building, an historic area in the development of industrial printing.

Dumbo is a place of outsized architecture. Everything is at the scale of elephants or super heroes. In addition to its rich history, it is currently the site of some of the most intense gentrification in New York City. In Dumbo Comic (Print Work) the neighborhood and the buildings themselves are characterized through the visual language of the comic book, in order to provoke thought on issues of urban planning, quality of life, and the visual impact of the street level built environment. The project acknowledges the scale of the area and the special place which architecture and development holds here.

Methods:
Dumbo Comic (Print Work) consists of two series of works with images starting from 12 megapixel digital stills shot on the streets of Dumbo. These images are then individually run through a variety of different types of desktop printing software and extensively reworked and elaborated, resulting in a set of “Technicolor” schemed cartoon prints, capturing architectural detail, and the street level build environment.

Text has been added by doing a Google search for the word “Dumbo” and culling bits of text and actual quotes from the search results. Part of the byproduct of this method is that elements of text treating the 1941 Walt Disney Animated feature by the same name also make their way into the work, serendipitously adding to critique of issues within the neighborhood.

Working with the form of the comic, this project attempts to provoke thought on issues of urban planing, quality of life, and visual impact of the street level built environment.


Six Strategies, 2008

Presented at the Bronx River Art Center as part of the goup exhibit Metro Poles, Art in Action, a curatorial collaboration between tne Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning (JCAL), the Bronx River Art Centre (BRAC), the Asian American Arts Center (AAAC), and the Maiden Lane Exhibition Space. The work is intended to explore the Bronx, the neighborhood of West Farms, the area’s relationship to the gallery, and the premise of the exhibit.

Here is the comic, in its entirety:


 

Project Description:

Because this group exhibit is intended to focus on process, blur lines between artworks, and reduce the primacy of the individual artist in favor of a loose integrated net of creativity that blankets the entire gallery – even the act of writing a statement about the individual work could be seen to detract from the exhibit’s mission.

What follows is therefore, not a concise statement but rather a description of participation.

In the spring of this year I was invited by Jose Ruiz, curator of Bronx River Art Centre (BRAC) and Heng-Gil Han, curator for the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning (JCAL), to submit responses to a set of questions.

They were asking a variety of artists to respond to the idea of an exhibit where artists would make work in a gallery setting and then have it subsequently altered by others. Among the questions asked were: “What contribution can you make to this unconventional exhibition?”, “Can you allow other artists to revise your installation?”, and “Who would be other artists that you would like to invite to the exhibition for the revision and collective art-making?”

The resulting exhibit: “Metro Poles, Art in Action”, is a curatorial collaboration with Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning (JCAL), the Bronx River Art Centre (BRAC), the Asian American Arts Center (AAAC), and the Maiden Lane Exhibition Space.

 

Among the things I wrote back in my initial response were the following:

“I will photograph in or near the display space – i.e. nearby buildings, back yards, whatever. The available views will function as a filter or organizing principle. This will become the target of research.”

“I will then go out on the street and find anecdotal information from passersby (as well as from people employed by the art institution) regarding who lives there, what business is conducted, what events have been witnessed etc.”

“In a third step I will do further historical research about the visually identified locations on-line. I will then make a collage from the various information materials, printed with ink jet, in a variety of sizes and textures of paper and post the information on the galley walls, like fliers or even gorilla-style like paper street art.”

“All this material, both the physical printing on paper and the conceptual structure surrounding it would then be available as raw materials to use by subsequent artists in any way they see fit. I would simply hope they might function as a launching off point of interest in the creative process going forward.”

I also invited artists Chang-Jin Lee, Marcy Brafman, and Ã…sa Elzén to be “team members” for our group, one of seven groups to work in the space.

For my part I ultimately adopted six strategies, relating to my initial proposal that were designed to explore the Bronx, West Farms, (the neighborhood where BRAC is located), and the area’s relationship to the gallery and the mission of the exhibit.

 

Strategy One: Gathering images based on a net search for the word “Bronx”

This was a way to begin to understand the visual history in relation to what people have recorded on the internet, about the Bronx.

This doesn’t constitute a comprehensive compendium of visual material for two reasons. First, many things visual known and recorded were done by people prior to the world wide web and those people tend to be less connected, and thus fail to get their visual info recorded to a web readable format, and posted. As a result, much of this human visual archive is missing from a current search.

Secondly, visual searches are still in the dark ages of technology, or in their infancy. Most digital visual images must be “tagged” with text either in their name, metadata (invisible information attached to the digital visual file) or through some similar structure, in order to show up in a search. Smart search engines may also give some weight to images on web pages titled with the search term or in which text containing the term is laid out in close proximity to an image, but this is obviously a tricky mix to accomplish successfully and thus leaves out much of the valuable information that actually has been posted, but hasn’t yet been tagged.

There are algorithms (the most effective of which are currently mostly available only to large corporations), which can search for the actual visual elements of an image, or its genuine “mediatic criteria”, such as color, luminance etc. These can find an image no matter what it has been tagged, but even these currently cutting edge technologies can only look for an image once they already have a base image to compare, so they can find close matches, but only to images they already know about.

All this means that right now, doing a visual search on the Bronx yields a strikingly limited set of results. Nonetheless, it begins to tell some stories about what people, corporations, and organizations valued enough to tag and post.

To display I printed a selection of the results, 16 images to a page, on 8 1/2″ x 11″ ink jet paper, along with the name of each file displayed below it, on 18 pages, and taped them to the gallery wall, much as I might do in my studio.

 

Strategy Two: Download text related to the history of the Bronx and the neighborhood of West Farms.

I chose 9 of the most compelling texts among many dozen I had saved, formatted them in a formal structure designed to be reminiscent of poems, and pinned these to the wall.

In most cases, the written work was stripped to ASCII text, every comma was removed and converted to a carriage return, and every period was removed and converted to two carriage returns, to create text block separations, and finally the entire text was hard wrapped to 35 characters, to produce short phrases. I did a bit of clean up for readability, printed the texts and push pinned them to the wall.

The texts cover a range of subjects from how the Bronx got its name to the demographics and transportation structure of West Farms.

 

Strategy Three: Non-linear story telling, through the use of Comics

I have little connection to the world of comics, and never read them as a kid. I came at the format from video art, looking for a way to accomplish similar results, but in a form that allows the viewer more leeway in the amount of time they devote to the process. Still images allow more immediate intake.

The text for the comics comes not from the net research, (as is the case with many of my past projects) but from things that people actually said to me. This is combined with photos that are digitally reworked to become a sort of cartoon or comic book, printed in non archival inks on 13″x19″ mat ink jet paper and pinned to the gallery wall. Various walks as well as interviews with gallery staff and local patrons provided the materials. Some responses also came from emailed questions to specific participants.

 

Strategy Four: Mapping and modeling the neighborhood

Using a data projector I traced a street map of the entire neighborhood of west Farms onto a big 8′ x 10′ piece of paper and then cut the map roughly out of the center of it and pinned it to the gallery wall. I then recorded impressions about the neighborhood and where I met the people who became part of the comic.

Using a ground plan of the BRAC gallery I made a quick 3D computer model of the space and recorded where the first elements of the project were placed in the space.

I photographed part of an MTA subway map with my phone, showing West Farms, then emailed it to BRAC while on route to the gallery. Once there, I had them print the email with the map and posted it with the other mapping elements. This related to the personal nature of the work and to the idea of the documentarist or participant-observer including information about themselves within the surroundings being documented.

In the same vein, I downloaded an app to my mobile phone allowing me to track my GPS location and record in real time to a version of Google Maps. I posted a printout of one particular tracking event documenting my crossing of the entire length of West Farms, when the MTA train I was taking to the gallery went express and passed my intended stop. I thought, “This must happen all the time, when you live in West Farms.”

 

Strategy Five: Incorporation with other works.

I placed an old laptop within an arrangement of refuse, which another artist had put together. The computer displays the text from the “poems” I had created from the earlier documentary material, and so creates another avenue of historical communication, and also relates to the work it is situated in by referring to the problem of e-waist.

I Added text comments to artist Marcy Brafman’s work, in the areas where the public is invited to participate.

I filled in several blanks in mad libs left on the walls by another artist.

I created a stick figure comic from one of the many works on paper strewn throughout the gallery, referring to both that work and other art in the gallery, using text from a visitor as inspiration, and which questions what constitutes art.

 

Strategy 6: Blog and website. I created a blog to document my own progress so that other artists could see what was happening, and am also posting materials to this site.

http://west-farms-studio.blogspot.com/


The Artist Drawing from the, 2004

The Artist Drawing from the Model (HTML image tag for an unfinished work)

Presented in the group exhibit “Shared” – organized by Mark Power

A Graphite drawing on paper, of the invisible HTML image placement tag for a jpeg of the following drawing: “Rembrandt van Rijn, Dutch, 1606 – 1669, The Artist Drawing from the Model, c. 1639,  etching, drypoint and burin, sheet: 23.4 x 18.2 cm (9 3/16 x 7 3/16 in.),  Print Purchase Fund (Rosenwald Collection), 1968.4.1, from “the collection” directory of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.’s web site.

Original URL: http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo?Object=50563+0+none

HTML Code Snippet:
<img align=”bottom”
src=”/thumb-l/a00054/a0005462.jpg”
width=”152″ height=”190″ border=”0″
alt=”image of The Artist Drawing from the Model”>

Project Description:
It is a kind of take on the Rembrandt van Rijn work and the process of art making, but it is also intended to explore some of the issues of what it means to be an artist today.

The work references the unfinished etching by Rembrandt and the invisible information tags or code which instruct web browser software how to draw web pages. The Webpage itself is unfinished until the image associated with the tag is added, completing the composition.

With his etching, Rembrandt was in the process of creating a kind of quintessential popular image of the “artist”, and the artist in the image could be Rembrandt himself, as the working figure bears some resemblance to his other self portraits. The artist is drawing the model while surrounded by the paraphernalia of the studio, and immediately behind him, a large unpainted canvas rests on its easel.

There are other references as well. In the right background is a sculpted bust covered over with a cloth. The model stands on a low platform while holding some fabric and a palm frond. Common enough props, but also visual suggestions that, even though the artist is drawing rather than sculpting, Rembrandt, the history painter, is working with the idea of Pygmalion.

It is Pygmalion’s story, in a round about way, that leads to the inspiration for the 2004 artwork. Pygmalion, legendary figure of Cyprus, is referenced in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,book 10, in which he is a sculptor who falls in love with a female statue he carved out of ivory. According to Ovid, after seeing the Propoetides prostituting themselves, Pygmalion is ‘not interested in women’, but his statue is so realistic that he falls in love with it. He offers the statue presents and eventually prays to Venus who takes pity on him and brings the statue to life.

The story of living statues has parallels with Daedalus, who was said to use quicksilver to make his statues speak, and Hephaestus, who created automata for his workshop, and even Pandora, and the Golem who were both said to be created from clay. Though this is myth, it is inspired by actual fact.

The eastern Mediterranean islands were known in ancient times for their astounding mechanical engineering creations, including what today might be referred to as animatrons or mechanical people. Pindar the Greek poet notes in describing Rhodes: “The animated figures stand adorning every public street and seem to breathe in stone, or move their marble feet.” The Antikythera mechanism, the first known mechanical computer, designed to calculate astronomical positions, was discovered in a wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901, and is dated to about 150–100 BC.

So in the story of Pygmalion the idea of conceptual or aesthetic creation, engineering and computing, and religious/magical substantiation is all tied together, and comes from the commonplace trope of sculptures so lifelike they are real.

In contemporary society individuation of tasks has continued in a branching process for a long time, with the engineer and the artist seemingly having parted ways. Yet recent technological innovations such as desktop publishing and laptop video production are allowing specializations to recombine, and allowing non specialists to take on tasks previously accessible only to experts.

Further, new technologies are regularly picked up by contemporary artists to create work with. Recent developments in computer code have even provoked engineers and programers to question whether what they are doing can be said to constitute an art form in itself.  All kinds of media are being used and explored and exploited as art. Thus this snippet of computer code works for a variety of reasons to make an analogy with Rembrandt’s work about artists.

Rembrandt is known for his amazing ability to convey feeling through physical gesture. His work is about an artist drawing, and so I also try my hand at physical gesture in graphite. The text in the 2004 artwork has not been written, but has been delineated by sketching the outlines of the forms of letters and then filling them in. Van Rijn’s work has a meta level to it, with the story of drawing contained within the actual drawing. Likewise the drawing of computer code functions as a meta level for the jpeg image of drawing it refers to.

The copied code for the jpeg from National Gallery of Art site becomes a kind of conceit. The code is about location, position and relationship to surroundings, as well as the fact that there is no border or frame to be drawn around the image. All this loosely relates to the artists surroundings and the unframed canvas featured in Rembrandt’s background. The word “thumb” becomes a synecdoche referring to the artist’s drawing hand. Lastly, the female figure Galatea (“she who is milk-white”), appears in countless paintings of the Pygmalion myth shown from behind, just as she does in Rembrandt’s work. The code referring to image alignment (img align=”bottom”) thus functions as a joking reference to the glowing white ass that becomes the central image in these male dominated fantasies, and equates with the structuring of the viewer’s gaze to align on Galatea’s Bottom.

It has been said that for Rembrandt etching a plate was a process of exploration, not a straightforward transcription. In his work he is considering details for a kind of portrait of an artist. Yet it is not a portrait of what the artist looks like, but rather what his circumstances are, and what drives him.

The drawing of a bit of text with pencil on paper seems hardly a finished work, and the code itself without the final jpeg image inserted would constitute an unfinished web page. In The Artist Drawing from the Model (HTML image tag for an unfinished work,) the project of what it means to be an artist is being worked, and yet it remains unresolved.


Translating Angel, 2001

Translating Angel, Engine of Desire. Erotic Love Poems of the Translating Angel.

A set of digital poems first presented as part of rhizome.org’s Open Mouse series, New York City, involving text sources from Andrea Dworkin’s definition of pornography, and from medical abstracts about sexual dysfunction, run repeatedly through translation engines till they break down into poems.

View video stills:

 

Video Samples:
Note: The following are three poems from a larger collection. This work is video only, (there is no audio.)
[tubepress mode=’playlist’, playlistValue=’ED81ED45195EA5DF’]
Project Description:
Digital poetry as a form of literature is pursued through a wide variety of approaches, including in this instance, the use of machine translation to assist in the generation of work.

The translation process may be stated as follows: one, decoding the meaning of the source text, and two, re-encoding this meaning in the target language. Since the 1950’s and even before, people have been searching for a solution that allows machines, in this case computers, to do the job of translation effectively. None the less, problems with living languages such as inherent structural ambiguity, bilingual structural differences, and word-sense disambiguation when a word can have more than one meaning, have remained significant stumbling blocks in the way of this goal.

Today rough machine translation is available to everyone on the web, but it is still only moderately effective. Errors are compounded if the text is run through the translator back and forth repeatedly, and especially if it is translated across a host of languages. This “round-trip translation” method has been used by a number of people for the sake of humor. Most of this work focuses on the preposterous errors that arise and lack of usability, or loss of meaning in the origin texts.

My interest, on the other hand, is in the way meaning continues to cling to words even as text is radically altered through machine transcription. By taking preliminary sources that are dry descriptions of sexual dysfunction or list definitions of what constitutes pornography and running them though this generative process, the academic structure and catalogue nature of the text breaks down. Simultaneously, that which the words refer to opens up, suggesting stories of individuals with questionable secrets struggling with the momentous life issues associated with sex.

Much beauty in poetry derives from the very linguistic anomalies that confound machines in translation, and use of computing to either create poetry all on its own, or to serve as a tool to generate forms for alteration or inspiration, is a growing activity.

The poems in the Translating Angel have been run through a translator many times with experimentation in terms of languages used, order of cycles and number of iterations. This process produced a large series of works from which a small set were chosen. These were then lightly edited, mostly to remove odd characters and certain non English or gibberish words.

The title of the work is a reference to Charles Babbage’s precursor to the computer, the difference engine, and to the classical notion of poetry taking flight.