VR

20181106: Mur | Kunsthaus Graz

20181106 Mur to Kunsthaus Graz

The light in Graz is diffuse, slightly foggy, the humidity coming up from the Mur, or densifying as the air moves up and against the mountains, is perfect for filming. It's not too bright or contrasted; it's not too dim. When the sun is blocked by clouds, a timeless, directionless state exists.

In the morning I went down to the bank of the Mur and followed a footpath to create a long shot. I had put my 5D3 on a gimbal to smooth out my ambulation. Travel videography is confronted with two problems. First, when traveling one isn't familiar with the landscape and not certain of the exact location one wants to capture. In a sense, it's this uncertainty that creates the need to travel in the first place, but logistically speaking, it makes it difficult to know what gear one should travel with, and within the trip, when one needs what gear and where. It's not always practical to carry a tripod with the open ended possibility of shooting a panning shot. And it's even less practical to carry all the gear everywhere, always.

Alternatively, it's not always possible to return to places one sees while traveling. But one wants to bring a camera along to capture the experience of discovery. The downside is that a camera without support creates video footage that is too unstable to use in most cases. A gimbal is supposed to complement a camera, and be less obtrusive for travel.

The footage that gimbal produces is something like a floating an eye. It's smooth enough to not reference a first person perspective, but has enough movement to not feel like a tableau, or omniscient god perspective. The gimbal allows for the disembodied eye.

In the afternoon Zihua and I stopped by the Künstlerhaus Graz, to see the exhibition "Artificial Paradise?" about virtual reality. The exhibition began or ended downstairs, with a landscape painting of Johann Kniep, "Ideale Landscaft mit untergehender Sonne," 1806. The painting depicts a Roman soldiers watching the setting sun while a young man talks with an older man and young woman reclines on a hill. The landscape has typical elements of the Romantic period: dramatic colors, vegetation, classical architecture in ruins, waterfalls, hills and atmospheric desaturation to suggest depth. The catalogue essay on the work explains how Arcadian scenes functioned as a mode of escapism for the Renaissance aristocracy, and parallels it to contemporary modes of immersion, a period when artists of Western Europe were imagining the ruins of Greece and Rome as portals into an epoch when landscape existed in a harmonious relationship to ruinous cityscape.

I spent time in all of the works, but those with headsets made strong reference to video games, while the works that were simply video recalled cinema. The nuances between these two types of entertainment become more evident when both media attempt to create an aesthetic experience.

In video games, there is always an initial comparative assessment: how "good" (real, better) does this look compared to other prior technologies. The march toward re-creating a realistic world within the context of a closed game scenario has been the success of the video game industry, while it seems that making life into a game would be the shorter, more elegant technology to adapt to the already-realistic world in which we live. But that territory is occupied by sports, athletes, and the physical.

Cinema is mistakenly thought of as moving images that convey information. But the appeal of cinema is widely the conveyance of emotions. Cinema has images, but we don't want them exclusively. Very few people want to just watch the moving images of a place. That would be like watching a security camera. Even after solving the variable of where to place the camera–in a paradise beach, gorgeous landscape, or girls locker room–we quickly bore of a representation of a place. It’s the job of narrative through which we frequently see personalities and desires, power dynamics and situations, and this is usually told through humans who play the characters. We vicariously put ourselves in situations; we see in stories, and we garner a liking or disliking to personalities, just as we do in real life; and we dislike movies that have characters that we feel neither liking nor disliking for, often more than performed personalities that we hate. In virtual reality, there may not be a character, just a disembodied camera that is located where your own embodied eyes are. The landscape is supposed to be a place you inhabit.

In the case of both forms at Künstlerhaus, these works are "interesting" but not engaging; they feel systematic and once the pattern becomes clear, we are left only to appreciate the accuracy of the representation of the objects in this virtual realm, which fall short. The element of immersion was the supposed innovative and decisive characteristic of the artworks, and the technology used, which encompassed a greater visual field, often by putting on a headpiece that obstructs seeing anything except the video content.

Paul Chan's video in this exhibition notably references video games through pixelated characters who are fucking and killing in loops. The curatorial statement refers to Chan’s borrowing from Charles Fourier and Henry Darger, but Salò came to mind, though without the reverberation to anything cautionary; again lacking narrative or evoking any connection to character. The power of Salò is not the graphic content, but the power structure exposed through the narrative, which makes the graphic content not only visceral but suggests its possibility. 

The absence of narrative has been a defining element of video art. The blanket rejection of the toolset that facilitates the emotional experience that is central to cinema. It's why people, like Emilia, describe video art as something that people don't really "like" or want to watch, but appreciate it on the grounds that it is an art form. For many, intentionally watching a movie has become synonymous with the cinema. Yet the lack of an obligation to the audience to connect to the content on an emotional level has afforded artists a wider variety of video content, but also relegated the content to a smaller audience compared to cinema, and made video artists impoverished, compared to their cinematic counterparts. The audience's eye, if looking through a camera lens, is even more disembodied if no body is in the audience.

Steve R. McQueen is a rare example of a visual artist who made a transition from video art to the world of narrative cinema. His adaptation of “12 Years a Slave” can be used as a rebuttal to the claim of immersive video: we inhabited the horror and pain of Patsey being whipped for going to get soap not because a headset inhibits us looking away, but because Edwin makes Solomon punish her, because Mistress Epps is overflowing with jealousy. Our esophagus shortens, our stomach twists around our heart at the sound of each popping whip because the injustice is palpable; we want to look away but we know we would see only our own world, a sphere of injustice in which we are not only immersed, but also complicit and collateral damage.

The element of immersion was the supposed to be innovative and a decisive characteristic of the artworks, and the technology used. Frequently the commonality of encompassing a greater visual field by putting on a headpiece that obstructs seeing anything except the video content obstructed the most common thread in the show, which was the use of consumer technology to make art. Many works were not immersive in the visual sense–Addie Wagenknecht’s Data and Dragons refers to the physical complexity of everyday data infrastructure around us. 

Manuel Roßner’s VR work Du musst dien Leben ändern reveals large line sculptures that exist in the space. His project Float Gallery, an online virtual gallery space, is more interesting than the low-level AR piece in the show, but both explore the misnomer of virtual space, which was originally referencing storage capacity, not the ‘sculptural space’ that preoccupied modernist sculptures.

The most out-of-place award in the show goes to Ivana Bašić Belay My Light, the Ground is Gone, courtesy the artist and Marlborough Contemporary, which doesn’t represent the artist but is likely trying to include the work in shows in order to increase its historical and economic value. It’s a stunning piece, but the curatorial decision to include it is questionable.

Marc Lee’s 10.000 Moving Cities–Same but Different is an app that’s for sale for $349.99, recreates cities with images about them. I didn’t see this in the show, maybe it was over?

Harun Farocki’s works, Serious Gamer I-III, were the most interesting and critical, although I’ve seen them at MoMA years ago. Farocki focused on the US military’s training through virtual reality games.

The exhibition missed an important lesson from the Romantic period, which was the movement away from then modern life–industrialization and urbanization–and toward a past life that were never really lived by Europeans, i.e. the Classical Age in Greece. Greek Civilization functioned as an imaginary of eternal truths, distant, aged but also a connection to the permanence of European values. The perspective of the viewer in those works is objective, what becomes the fourth wall in theatre. The eye is disembodied. We are on-lookers, but from a distance that is separated by time and space. Kniep’s figure were not 19th Century Romantics, but white Middle-Eastern time travelers from almost 2000 years before. The Romantics imagined backwards, depicting a world that could be observed. The works in Artificial Paradise locate the eye of the viewer within a loaded context–within the headset, within an understood social context–and all of them, even Farocki through cinema, recapitulate the dogma of consumer technologies: that transcendence is possible.