control artwork: the birds the bees the flowers and the seeds 2008
intro:
the birds the bees the flowers and the seeds is a narrative exploration of the relationship between desire, violence, and the uncanny, set in an imaginary, future garden. The garden setting functions as an allegory for the privileged space within the U.S., but also as an exploration of how war and flowers are similar. It might be argued that war attracts humans just as flowers attract bees in order to further their own evolution.
In the birds the bees the flowers and the seeds, visitors are given an orientation through randomly selected introductory audio "scores," piped through speakers nestled in ceramic flower pots. The audio scores instruct visitors to engage various objects -- such as seeds: to place them in the soil, poppy pods: to pull of their tops and toss them, snips: to run over the flowers -- as a way to continue the narrative scenarios. These RFID-embedded objects and their engagement is meant to have a dissociative, and uncanny effect, for the garden's seeds are actually bullets, the poppy pods, so used, seem like grenades, and the flower snips are actually military wire cutters (indeed, the installation as a whole displays both garden and state military aesthetics). When this piece was shown in the Spring of 2008, the engagement of the various objects that were both garden-like and violent, triggered brief news clips from the current war in Iraq, which temporarily interrupted the narrative scenarios. The initial narrative scenarios introduce plots that revolve around longing, love and memory in an ambiguous, sci-fi future; hence, the triggered war news clips extend and trouble the initial narratives.
RFID, Max/MSP, sonar sensors, and open-source Arduino micro-processing boards are some of the hardware and software involved "behind the scenes" of this project.
percept:
A series of spoken fictional "scores" fill the installation space in the form of rich reverberant audio, piped through a six-channel audio interface, with speakers that double as flower pots. Each of the scores begins with some version of the statement, "It is the future, you live in a future garden. You live in a beautiful garden of the future." These scores narrate some kind of scenario, where, although the garden is very beautiful and you have everything you need, you also miss certain people who are not in the garden, people you love and desire. Or you might need to select new mates to further your species. After outlining some such theme, the narratives then encourage the visitor to engage the garden in some way; this, they are told, will ensure contact with a lost love, or the selection of a new mate. Visitors are told that the future garden they find themselves in is a communication technology, or memory device.
Desires narrated in the future garden, then, collide with true stories of death and destruction outside the garden, creating deeply uncomfortable associations within the narratives, alluding to the positions and movements of bodies in wired spaces of security and those in violent, unpredictable spaces. At its most disturbing, the piece asks to what degree the garden -- perhaps not metaphorical but very literal -- is nourished by this violence.
ideas:
the birds the bees the flowers and the seeds seeks to reroute the past, the present and the future. By putting the visitor in the future (through narrative positioning), the present is reconsidered. The introductory sentence, consistent in all the scores, "It is the future," can be heard as either the creation of a fictional setting, or of a statement that the future is here. The past, manifest in some scenarios as the retrieval of memories or lost loves, is (hopefully) considered more immediate when brief clips from radio news recordings on the Iraq war play back as the garden is engaged. The past and present elide, in fact. Through a bodily engagement with various objects, the scores tell us we are engaging with memories or lost loves, but radio clips play back voices of Iraqi people devastated by a war in their homeland. The project seeks to force an intimate confrontation with our relationship to desire for others, linking it to a deeply uncomfortable way in which I, and the visitors of the piece are perhaps complicit with war, and the ways we receive information about violent calamities. The narrative scores reroute conceptions of time as a way to illustrate this. These are aesthetic decisions oriented towards rerouting normalized temporal flows. By skewing the linearity of time, visitors are seduced into a non-normal art space, where the deeply uncomfortable relationships we have with war can be exposed. Where Martha Rosler, in her series of collages entitled "Bringing the War Home," rearranges space to illustrate disconcerting intimacies, here I seek to rearrange time to do something similar.
the birds the bees the flowers and the seeds, in engaging non-linear narrative techniques that reorder time, engages several ideas of plot, as outlined by Hayden White, in his short essay, "Bodies and Their Plots." Plots refer to positions of bodies in space, points in narrative, and the "final resting place," or the grave plot. the birds the bees the flowers and the seeds has certain sites of physical engagement with objects; these sites become like plot points, where all 3 definitions of plot become engaged. Bodies are positioned in space and have certain gestures, which lead to narrative engagement that occur at a cross section of fiction and mediated non-fiction. This cross section reveals the final definition, where a confrontation with real loss of life occurs. There is resonance here as well with Bakhtin's articulation of chronotopes as "'the points where narratives are tied and untied,' and where time is bound to space."3 I draw a connection between a critical reflection that can occur at these moments of disjunction that are also immersive. This critical reflection exists as a line of flight, the moment of Deleuze and Guattari's wasp and orchid. The non-linear narrative techniques also function to draw a visitor in to the installation. Being in the future creates a suspension of disbelief critical to participation and immersion. These techniques are prompts through which a user's actions and thoughts are elicited. My practice as a partipatory artist explores ways to trigger participation from "spectactors," to use Augusto Boal's term, who are at once immersed and critical. I am making sketches and studies moving towards ways that engaging narrative can be generated entirely by spectactors. The work conducted this summer is also a move towards writing about my findings in this regard.
The rearrangement of time, the creation of new temporalities, facilitates intimacies that illustrate complicity with violence. When we take away the distance linear time allows for, how would we fit into the landscape of war? And what if our very existence is dependent upon certain violence?
The most common contemporary routes to knowing about war, for many civilians in the US, occur in disembodied ways. This is manifest most acutely in regards to the privileging of information. The privileging of disembodied information such as body counts, number wounded, geographical coordinates removed from physical context , as argues Rose, attempts to break with the past as if enough facts demonstrate a closure.4 The privileging of information thus obfuscates the work of mourning and prevents one from seeing how the past is never over. My work strives to re-contextualize information not only through an embodied interactive installation that interfaces with a living archive, but also via temporal reconfigurations. What kinds of new feelings and behaviors arise when we cannot achieve closure and break with the past?
Thus, the birds the bees the flowers and the seeds works as an exploratory model towards more embodied archives, as a study in the effects of temporal reconfigurations on sense of complicity, as a move toward audience generated narrative, as well as an actual archive.
intro:
the birds the bees the flowers and the seeds is a narrative exploration of the relationship between desire, violence, and the uncanny, set in an imaginary, future garden. The garden setting functions as an allegory for the privileged space within the U.S., but also as an exploration of how war and flowers are similar. It might be argued that war attracts humans just as flowers attract bees in order to further their own evolution.
In the birds the bees the flowers and the seeds, visitors are given an orientation through randomly selected introductory audio "scores," piped through speakers nestled in ceramic flower pots. The audio scores instruct visitors to engage various objects -- such as seeds: to place them in the soil, poppy pods: to pull of their tops and toss them, snips: to run over the flowers -- as a way to continue the narrative scenarios. These RFID-embedded objects and their engagement is meant to have a dissociative, and uncanny effect, for the garden's seeds are actually bullets, the poppy pods, so used, seem like grenades, and the flower snips are actually military wire cutters (indeed, the installation as a whole displays both garden and state military aesthetics). When this piece was shown in the Spring of 2008, the engagement of the various objects that were both garden-like and violent, triggered brief news clips from the current war in Iraq, which temporarily interrupted the narrative scenarios. The initial narrative scenarios introduce plots that revolve around longing, love and memory in an ambiguous, sci-fi future; hence, the triggered war news clips extend and trouble the initial narratives.
RFID, Max/MSP, sonar sensors, and open-source Arduino micro-processing boards are some of the hardware and software involved "behind the scenes" of this project.
percept:
A series of spoken fictional "scores" fill the installation space in the form of rich reverberant audio, piped through a six-channel audio interface, with speakers that double as flower pots. Each of the scores begins with some version of the statement, "It is the future, you live in a future garden. You live in a beautiful garden of the future." These scores narrate some kind of scenario, where, although the garden is very beautiful and you have everything you need, you also miss certain people who are not in the garden, people you love and desire. Or you might need to select new mates to further your species. After outlining some such theme, the narratives then encourage the visitor to engage the garden in some way; this, they are told, will ensure contact with a lost love, or the selection of a new mate. Visitors are told that the future garden they find themselves in is a communication technology, or memory device.
Desires narrated in the future garden, then, collide with true stories of death and destruction outside the garden, creating deeply uncomfortable associations within the narratives, alluding to the positions and movements of bodies in wired spaces of security and those in violent, unpredictable spaces. At its most disturbing, the piece asks to what degree the garden -- perhaps not metaphorical but very literal -- is nourished by this violence.
ideas:
the birds the bees the flowers and the seeds seeks to reroute the past, the present and the future. By putting the visitor in the future (through narrative positioning), the present is reconsidered. The introductory sentence, consistent in all the scores, "It is the future," can be heard as either the creation of a fictional setting, or of a statement that the future is here. The past, manifest in some scenarios as the retrieval of memories or lost loves, is (hopefully) considered more immediate when brief clips from radio news recordings on the Iraq war play back as the garden is engaged. The past and present elide, in fact. Through a bodily engagement with various objects, the scores tell us we are engaging with memories or lost loves, but radio clips play back voices of Iraqi people devastated by a war in their homeland. The project seeks to force an intimate confrontation with our relationship to desire for others, linking it to a deeply uncomfortable way in which I, and the visitors of the piece are perhaps complicit with war, and the ways we receive information about violent calamities. The narrative scores reroute conceptions of time as a way to illustrate this. These are aesthetic decisions oriented towards rerouting normalized temporal flows. By skewing the linearity of time, visitors are seduced into a non-normal art space, where the deeply uncomfortable relationships we have with war can be exposed. Where Martha Rosler, in her series of collages entitled "Bringing the War Home," rearranges space to illustrate disconcerting intimacies, here I seek to rearrange time to do something similar.
the birds the bees the flowers and the seeds, in engaging non-linear narrative techniques that reorder time, engages several ideas of plot, as outlined by Hayden White, in his short essay, "Bodies and Their Plots." Plots refer to positions of bodies in space, points in narrative, and the "final resting place," or the grave plot. the birds the bees the flowers and the seeds has certain sites of physical engagement with objects; these sites become like plot points, where all 3 definitions of plot become engaged. Bodies are positioned in space and have certain gestures, which lead to narrative engagement that occur at a cross section of fiction and mediated non-fiction. This cross section reveals the final definition, where a confrontation with real loss of life occurs. There is resonance here as well with Bakhtin's articulation of chronotopes as "'the points where narratives are tied and untied,' and where time is bound to space."3 I draw a connection between a critical reflection that can occur at these moments of disjunction that are also immersive. This critical reflection exists as a line of flight, the moment of Deleuze and Guattari's wasp and orchid. The non-linear narrative techniques also function to draw a visitor in to the installation. Being in the future creates a suspension of disbelief critical to participation and immersion. These techniques are prompts through which a user's actions and thoughts are elicited. My practice as a partipatory artist explores ways to trigger participation from "spectactors," to use Augusto Boal's term, who are at once immersed and critical. I am making sketches and studies moving towards ways that engaging narrative can be generated entirely by spectactors. The work conducted this summer is also a move towards writing about my findings in this regard.
The rearrangement of time, the creation of new temporalities, facilitates intimacies that illustrate complicity with violence. When we take away the distance linear time allows for, how would we fit into the landscape of war? And what if our very existence is dependent upon certain violence?
The most common contemporary routes to knowing about war, for many civilians in the US, occur in disembodied ways. This is manifest most acutely in regards to the privileging of information. The privileging of disembodied information such as body counts, number wounded, geographical coordinates removed from physical context , as argues Rose, attempts to break with the past as if enough facts demonstrate a closure.4 The privileging of information thus obfuscates the work of mourning and prevents one from seeing how the past is never over. My work strives to re-contextualize information not only through an embodied interactive installation that interfaces with a living archive, but also via temporal reconfigurations. What kinds of new feelings and behaviors arise when we cannot achieve closure and break with the past?
Thus, the birds the bees the flowers and the seeds works as an exploratory model towards more embodied archives, as a study in the effects of temporal reconfigurations on sense of complicity, as a move toward audience generated narrative, as well as an actual archive.