The Last Generation
Culturally altered for better or worse, every day we are
steps closer to the cyber-fictional world of man/machine.
From
20th century analog bulk-mass and "slowness" to
early 21st century speed and compactness, this transition
hurtles us forward. At some point in the near future the
analog world of the 20th century will be a distant memory....
Many of you remember:
There was a day when the phone rang, and was left unanswered
if nobody was home. Then came answering machines, which brought
the first wave of automation into the home. The LP record and
8-track tape were gradually replaced by smaller cassettes.
One day after MTV hit, I walked into a major record store,
and seemingly overnight everything in the racks was a sleek
(wow!) compact disc, with the old technology overstock in leftover
bins...
As the years flew by we witnessed a technological boom...ATM
machines cropping up everywhere, satellite television installations
in almost every home, and the pc revolution…
A phrase that most often refers to recently outmoded technology,
a quick internet search on "The Last Generation" reveals
thousands of references to video gaming, holocaust and A-bomb
survivors, tomes written on the political history of the last
generation of the Roman Republic, and end-time Christian ideology
on "the rapture.” Such a term then indicates an
irrepressible change from past knowledge towards an encounter
or collision with new ideas and altered forms.
In contemporary art, the juxtaposition of the analog and
digital has led to an ambiguous back and forth between the
two. The
virtual has seeped into our consciousness like a stimulant
drug, and we find ourselves in an ambiguous artistic terrain
that is grounded in the intangibility of matter. As physical
objects become more condensed we find their origins in virtual
forms, as seen in the unusual shapes of the architecture
and design of Gehry and Hadid.
The group of artists hereby assembled represents a generation
that experienced the last decades of an analog dominated
world. While fully immersed in the digital ether of now,
they maintain
a strong link to analog processes and esthetics--in music
often described as warm, as opposed to the coldness of digital.1
Emerging from this hyperspace of 21st century altermodernity
and its numbing visual and informational matrix, many artists
have found ways to process and edit the flux of our post-industrial
information age.2 Such is the case in this show where the
appropriation strategies of the 1980's are utilized in addition
to some of
the post-production techniques of post-90's art. Late postmodern
irony has led us into the first decade of a new century full
of paradox, marked by an exchange between naturally occurring
phenomena (as in the physical world I associate with analog
and the body) and the simulated supra-plasticity of the digital
with its implied modifications of the real.
Immanuel Kant set up a distinction between phenomena and
noumena—”phenomena” being
that which can be experienced, and “noumena” being
things that are beyond the possibility of experience and
transcend the vehicles of representation. In the phenomenal
world we
experience something that reaches the senses and clues us
in to an added dimension that leads to heightened perception.
Videos, sculptures, and television monitors initially offer
the viewer an analog (phenomenal) experience by virtue of
their
physical presence. Then digital compression takes over the
information and a moment of conflation occurs, a seamless
balance in the space/time continuum.
Situated on the axis of the phenomena/noumena, these works
occupy the space where the raw materials of the analog world
and the subtleties of the virtual interact, expand, and contract.
The body is represented as a robotic tool that receives commands
from an unknown source, coldly executing movements that (strangely)
emote human neuroses (Farrell) / Text references hypertext,
physical aberrations of mass produced signage, and the structure
of words as thought in constructed form and connotation (Mancuska,
Myles) / The propagandistic visual sound-bytes of the media
are enlarged to a colossal scale, compounding their power
to induce fear and awe (Gonzales) / The retrieval of dreams
from
the database of the unconscious underscores the encoded narrative
of sleep cycles and the search for their meanings (Montaron)
/ Simply animated characters move with analog-like slowness
like our lowest common denominator, the consuming television
viewer (Ezawa) / A vortex of complexly layered pop imagery
references western philosophers, numerology, cognitive association,
and spatial perception, mirroring the brain’s synaptic
response to a flood information and our ability to process
it (Kerckhoven) / Eastern mysticism and metaphysical transcendence
are evident in the landscape where a person dematerializes.
Is this a romantic gesture or a hallucinatory moment in the
virtual? (Halpern)
In the above-mentioned works there is a moment of cognition
that takes the viewer from the alien to the familiar, a cause
and effect within their mechanistic analog/digital sleight
of hand. As such, "The Last Generation” is for
me the equivalent of a transformer of the perceptual. The
rich
tonality associated with the analog is present, as are the
cold, unquantifiable depths of the virtual. A visual blueprint
for the exhibition might look like an analog/digital converter
where one form transmutes into another and a double take
reveals more.
Distancing itself from nostalgia and aware of Modernity's
failed utopia, “The Last Generation” contains
nonetheless a sense of the sublime. Not in the 19th-century
Romantic sense,
but by virtue of an intangible network of associations that
push art further into the terrain of physics. As though gazing
at a scaffold surrounding an invisible edifice, we experience
the duality of nothing and something at the same time.
Max Henry
2005
1. In layman's terms: analog is defined as a signal that
has a continuously and smoothly varying amplitude or frequency.
Digital is signal composed of electrical pulses representing
either zero or one. Because digital signals are made up only
of binary streams, less information is needed to transmit
a
message.
2. Nicolas Bourriaud has coined the term “altermodernity” which
I interpret as a characterization of 21st century modernity:
a modernity which is no longer a linear march forward but
rather a revolving door that allows movement in either direction.Max
Henry is an independent curator and critic based in New York. |
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