Art, Language & Virtual Objects - remote theorist - Rita Raley
[Rita Raley’s comments on work by David Rokeby and John Cayley are now posted followed by Raley’s bio:]
e and eye: Art, Language and Virtual Objects
13 November 2006
There are suggestive correlations between Sol LeWitt’s instructions (Room 5) and algorithmic writing, text-generation procedures such as one finds in John Cayley’s work. So, too, there are suggestive correlations between the readymade (Room 8) and the code poetry of Ted Warnell, who incorporates excerpts of personal communications and code scripts into his texts. But the theme of the fourth Tate event – “Art, Language, and Virtual Objects” – takes us rather to Room 11 (“Image/Text”), a fitting backdrop for the exploration of words as sculptural objects in David Rokeby’s inter/face (2002) and Cayley’s Torus (2005-). Both digital works presents three-dimensional letters that are sculptural, geometric, and situated on the line between semiotic and non-semiotic. The letters function both as literal letters but also as material objects – even, in the case of Rokeby’s inter/face, as embodied objects.
Rokeby describes his project, a contribution to Digifest 2002:
Each of the 26 letters of the alphabet are rendered in uppercase Helvetica. These outlines are used as the floorplans for architectural spaces. The surfaces of these spaces are mapped with very high resolution photographic textures of human skin. The surfaces of these letter spaces are articulated so that they can flex and bend in complex and fluid ways. At any give time, the viewer is positioned within one of these letter spaces, experiencing the interior space of that letter. Subtle movements of the viewer’s face cause these surfaces to flex and bend, deforming the space quite radically and responsively. If the facial gestures get too agitated, the letter space drifts away and joins the other 25 letters in a fluid swarm of letters. Eventually a new letter drifts in to enclose the viewer's point of view.
The viewer here is a functioning mechanism in the text, at once situated within the field of the text, within its “letter spaces,” and within a feedback loop between text and environment. Perplexity that registers in animated facial expressions animates the letters, the body’s voluntary and involuntary reflexes enacting textual events over which it has no definitive control. That the individual letters should be photographically mapped with human skin suggests that any stable ontological distinction between body and language, viewer and object, system and ‘interface,’ must necessarily be impossible.
Cayley’s long-term exploration of the literalizing of the letter continues in his Cave project Torus. His artistic signature, transliteral letter substitutions (odd to speak of the signature perhaps in the context of the readymade), gains a greater visual and linguistic complexity in the Cave. There are five textual fragments from Proust on the vanes of the torus at any given moment; spatial proximity will produce some relation among the fragments and there are moments when the fragments are in what Cayley terms their “natural language state.” The title “torus” suggests a three-dimensional space without edges or vertices, while the Cave environment in a sense promises the illusion of that seamless three-dimensional space. The three-dimensional presentation of the respective text installations – video for Rokeby and a Cave for Cayley – allow letters to take on an object-ness. Writing, in each, becomes a material figure.
Rita Raley lectures in the digital humanities at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book, Tactical Media, a study of new media art in relation to neoliberal globalization, is under contract and forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in its ‘Electronic Mediations’ series. She has published on hypertext, codework, and new media writing in journals such as Postmodern Culture, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and Electronic Book Review. She is at work on a second project, ‘Reading Code,’ which addresses code as an object and medium of contemporary critical inquiry, political engagement, and artistic and literary production.
e and eye
a remote theorist/critic was invited to write a short text for each evening event ...
