Theoretical Perspectacles
The Spiritualization of Electricity:
An Argument for the Use of Computer and Electronic Technologies as a Medium in the Plastic Arts
or: Why All Art Today Should Conduct Electricity.
By Rich Miller
My wife, my daughter and I share a house in Queens with another couple. It’s a row house, attached to the house on the left and three feet from the next house on the right. Being Queens, telephone, television and power cables crisscross our street in a manner that would give a spider nightmares.
Our house is small, but it has a small yard, a basement and just enough room to give us each a little space to call our own. All in all I think we’re quite happy with it and like how it has come to reflect each of our characters. My housemate and I share the basement as studio space (he’s a painter), and it’s there that I do most of my work, including designing and building circuits. It’s not uncommon to find prototypes of circuits and other electrical apparatus on my workbench, and my studio mate has taken to asking casually as he passes by, “How’s the bomb coming?”
He’s joking, of course, mostly – it’s just not kosher to build bombs these days – and while I should preface this by saying that as such things go my good friend has more than his share of technological anxieties, it’s also true that he’s expressing what I feel is a common, if fading, suspicion of all things electrical. This can hardly be taken as a groundless suspicion; our world is charged with stories of house fires caused by faulty wiring, idiots finding out the hard way that the drying of one’s hair is best left as a post-bath experience, and recently, a dog losing its life from “stray voltage” on a New York City sidewalk.
And yes, we do now have to worry about crazed idiots building bombs in their basements.
Most of us are fortunate enough (or smart enough) not to have such direct experience with electricity’s deadly potential, but everyone is given a regular, direct and dramatic illustration of its destructive force with each bolt of lightening we see. This is not to say that I believe that anyone worries that her iPod will strike her a fatal blow Zeus would be proud of, but that knowledge of electricity’s ability to take life lends to its personification in our minds - and by extension, anything that harnesses its power - becomes on a level our equal. I would argue that anything capable of killing us is transformed in our minds into a predator seeking to do just that. We elevate such forces of nature to a spiritual level as our ‘other’; thus lightening becomes Zeus to the Greeks, fearsome storms become the work of Hurucan, god to the Taino.
It is amazing how easily one can spark this sense of the electrical other. I have heard many people, when first learning to work with circuits, worry that the relatively innocuous charge of a low-current, 12-volt power supply would hurt them. While reason and a bit of knowledge prevent us from worshipping the Wall Wart, many treat it with a level of suspicion worthy of one’s opponent. Any sense that there is activity in a circuit, that something is happening, that, as we say, it is “live” brings it immediately into the viewer’s timeframe: it exists as we exist. Something so simple as being plugged into a wall outlet (regardless of whether the outlet is real) turns an exposed circuit into Death incarnate. Give me a blinking light and I’ll think I’ve found a friend.
Our internalization of our interaction with all things electrical increases with each passing year and our fears of the technologies are ebbing away (at least so long it’s safely boxed away). Our culture’s interest in, our dependence upon, and our lust for the latest electronic gadget show no sign of weakening. It now seems natural that ear buds should sprout from human ears, it’s almost unthinkable that anyone would live without a computer in his home and medical equipment and even RFID chips are routinely implanted in our bodies for any number of reasons. Well, Maybe the RFID implant isn’t ‘routine’ yet (though if my father had his way my daughter would have one). We are becoming steadily more comfortable with the idea that the “other” we interact with is a machine - whether it be desktop computer, television or pacemaker - it’s now only a matter of time before we become comfortable with becoming the machine. We already identify with it.
Of course, though artists have been taking advantage of this for generations, such an artistically advantageous path is not without its potholes. I often think about a warning a classmate of mine in art school received from one of our sculpture instructors about his work in glass. Badly paraphrased, the teacher said something like, “some materials are so engaging in and of themselves that it’s difficult to rise above the material”. I’ve seen many attempts at electronic art that seemed to be not so much the use of electronics as a medium with which to convey meaning as a sort of graphic infatuation with the medium and it’s astounding abilities. Making art is hard, regardless of the medium.
While electricity and electronics have been used and commented upon in art throughout the last century or so, we’re at a point now in our society where its use is particularly valuable. These technologies have an ever-greater impact on our lives even as they become less obvious to the eye. The closer we get, and the more indistinguishable we get from our technology the more powerful the re-appropriation and re-contextualization of these technologies becomes as an artistic reference to the human experience. Our technology is becoming even more significant to our spiritual identity – our sense of self -than our homes and even our bodies. It is the artist’s responsibility to comment upon this relationship.
3/6/06
An Argument for the Use of Computer and Electronic Technologies as a Medium in the Plastic Arts
or: Why All Art Today Should Conduct Electricity.
By Rich Miller
My wife, my daughter and I share a house in Queens with another couple. It’s a row house, attached to the house on the left and three feet from the next house on the right. Being Queens, telephone, television and power cables crisscross our street in a manner that would give a spider nightmares.
Our house is small, but it has a small yard, a basement and just enough room to give us each a little space to call our own. All in all I think we’re quite happy with it and like how it has come to reflect each of our characters. My housemate and I share the basement as studio space (he’s a painter), and it’s there that I do most of my work, including designing and building circuits. It’s not uncommon to find prototypes of circuits and other electrical apparatus on my workbench, and my studio mate has taken to asking casually as he passes by, “How’s the bomb coming?”
He’s joking, of course, mostly – it’s just not kosher to build bombs these days – and while I should preface this by saying that as such things go my good friend has more than his share of technological anxieties, it’s also true that he’s expressing what I feel is a common, if fading, suspicion of all things electrical. This can hardly be taken as a groundless suspicion; our world is charged with stories of house fires caused by faulty wiring, idiots finding out the hard way that the drying of one’s hair is best left as a post-bath experience, and recently, a dog losing its life from “stray voltage” on a New York City sidewalk.
And yes, we do now have to worry about crazed idiots building bombs in their basements.
Most of us are fortunate enough (or smart enough) not to have such direct experience with electricity’s deadly potential, but everyone is given a regular, direct and dramatic illustration of its destructive force with each bolt of lightening we see. This is not to say that I believe that anyone worries that her iPod will strike her a fatal blow Zeus would be proud of, but that knowledge of electricity’s ability to take life lends to its personification in our minds - and by extension, anything that harnesses its power - becomes on a level our equal. I would argue that anything capable of killing us is transformed in our minds into a predator seeking to do just that. We elevate such forces of nature to a spiritual level as our ‘other’; thus lightening becomes Zeus to the Greeks, fearsome storms become the work of Hurucan, god to the Taino.
It is amazing how easily one can spark this sense of the electrical other. I have heard many people, when first learning to work with circuits, worry that the relatively innocuous charge of a low-current, 12-volt power supply would hurt them. While reason and a bit of knowledge prevent us from worshipping the Wall Wart, many treat it with a level of suspicion worthy of one’s opponent. Any sense that there is activity in a circuit, that something is happening, that, as we say, it is “live” brings it immediately into the viewer’s timeframe: it exists as we exist. Something so simple as being plugged into a wall outlet (regardless of whether the outlet is real) turns an exposed circuit into Death incarnate. Give me a blinking light and I’ll think I’ve found a friend.
Our internalization of our interaction with all things electrical increases with each passing year and our fears of the technologies are ebbing away (at least so long it’s safely boxed away). Our culture’s interest in, our dependence upon, and our lust for the latest electronic gadget show no sign of weakening. It now seems natural that ear buds should sprout from human ears, it’s almost unthinkable that anyone would live without a computer in his home and medical equipment and even RFID chips are routinely implanted in our bodies for any number of reasons. Well, Maybe the RFID implant isn’t ‘routine’ yet (though if my father had his way my daughter would have one). We are becoming steadily more comfortable with the idea that the “other” we interact with is a machine - whether it be desktop computer, television or pacemaker - it’s now only a matter of time before we become comfortable with becoming the machine. We already identify with it.
Of course, though artists have been taking advantage of this for generations, such an artistically advantageous path is not without its potholes. I often think about a warning a classmate of mine in art school received from one of our sculpture instructors about his work in glass. Badly paraphrased, the teacher said something like, “some materials are so engaging in and of themselves that it’s difficult to rise above the material”. I’ve seen many attempts at electronic art that seemed to be not so much the use of electronics as a medium with which to convey meaning as a sort of graphic infatuation with the medium and it’s astounding abilities. Making art is hard, regardless of the medium.
While electricity and electronics have been used and commented upon in art throughout the last century or so, we’re at a point now in our society where its use is particularly valuable. These technologies have an ever-greater impact on our lives even as they become less obvious to the eye. The closer we get, and the more indistinguishable we get from our technology the more powerful the re-appropriation and re-contextualization of these technologies becomes as an artistic reference to the human experience. Our technology is becoming even more significant to our spiritual identity – our sense of self -than our homes and even our bodies. It is the artist’s responsibility to comment upon this relationship.
3/6/06
posted by Rich Miller at 6:41 PM
1 Comments:
I enjoyed your words.
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