Nervous Systems

The contributors to Nervous Systems reassess contemporary artists' and critics' engagement with social, political, biological, and other systems as a set of complex and relational parts: an approach commonly known as systems thinking. Demonstrating the continuing relevance of systems aesthetics within contemporary art, the contributors highlight the ways that artists adopt systems thinking to address political, social, and ecological anxieties. They cover a wide range of artists and topics, from the performances of the Argentinian collective the Rosario Group and the grid drawings of Charles Gaines to the video art of Singaporean artist Charles Lim and the mapping of global logistics infrastructures by contemporary artists like Hito Steyerl and Christoph Büchel. Together, the essays offer an expanded understanding of systems aesthetics in ways that affirm its importance beyond technological applications detached from cultural contexts. Contributors. Cristina Albu, Amanda Boetzkes, Brianne Cohen, Kris Cohen, Jaimey Hamilton Faris, Christine Filippone, Johanna Gosse, Francis Halsall, Judith Rodenbeck, Dawna Schuld, Luke Skrebowski, Timothy Stott, John Tyson

Imagination und Genauigkeit. Verschränkungen in Künsten und Wissenschaften

Genauigkeit gilt in vielen kulturellen Bereichen – von der wissenschaftlichen Forschung bis zur Pünktlichkeit eines Zuges – als erstrebenswertes Ideal. Nicht selten werden hierbei präzise technische Apparaturen ebenso wie organisatorische Kompetenzen und perfektionierte menschliche Fähigkeiten als Hinweise dafür genannt, es handle sich um genaue Verfahren. Doch was macht diese genauer als andere Prozedere, etwa die präzise sprachliche Übertragung einer Übersetzerin? Woran sind solche Vorstellungen, Ideale und Verfahren von Genauigkeit gekoppelt – und welche Rolle übernimmt hier eigentlich die Imagination? Entgegen der verbreiteten Annahme einer Gegensätzlichkeit von Imagination und Genauigkeit verhandelt der Sammelband gerade deren Verschränkungen in Wissenschaften und Künsten. Robert Musil hat dieses Verhältnis auf die Frage zugespitzt, was denn eine genaue Abhandlung über die Ameisensäure am Jüngsten Tag überhaupt nützen würde – dass gleichzeitig aber auch jeder Vorstellung des Jüngsten Tags zu misstrauen sei, die nicht einmal die Ameisensäure genau erforscht habe. Diese zwei Seiten des Bestrebens, die Welt zu verstehen, finden sich wieder in Musils Idee einer „phantastischen Genauigkeit“. Doch wie verbindet sich der Fokus auf Fakten und Gewissheiten, auf die Etablierung von Gesetzen und Regeln, die überprüfbar und genau sind, mit jenem imaginären und „phantastischen“ Teil, der allererst neue Möglichkeitsräume denken lässt? Solchen Transfer- und Konfliktmomenten von Genauigkeit und Imagination widmen sich die Beiträge des interdisziplinären Sammelbands. Von den Aufzeichnungsprozessen von Pulskurven über kartografische und statistische Übertragungsleistungen bis zu künstlerischen Praktiken aus Literatur, Malerei und Video Art wird eine Reihe unterschiedlicher Episoden vorgeschlagen, in welchen die Auslotung dieses Verhältnisses einen Anfang findet.

Colonial Legacies

In Colonial Legacies, Gabriella Nugent examines a generation of contemporary artists born or based in the Congo whose lens-based art attends to the afterlives and mutations of Belgian colonialism in postcolonial Congo. Focusing on three artists and one artist collective, Nugent analyses artworks produced by Sammy Baloji, Michèle Magema, Georges Senga and Kongo Astronauts, each of whom offers a different perspective onto this history gleaned from their own experiences. In their photography and video art, these artists rework existent images and redress archival absences, making visible people and events occluded from dominant narratives. Their artworks are shown to offer a re-reading of the colonial and immediate post-independence past, blurring the lines of historical and speculative knowledge, documentary and fiction. Nugent demonstrates how their practices create a new type of visual record for the future, one that attests to the ramifications of colonialism across time.

Excessive Attachments: Twenty-First-Century Queer and Trans Video Art in the United States

This chapter provides an overview of the queer video artists who are working in the United States in the twenty-first-century and presenting their work primarily in gallery and museum contexts, either in traditional shows or performance/time-based interventions. Their work is divided into purposefully capacious and fluid categories: reimagining a queer/trans world, restaging the medium, and re-articulating appropriation. Queer affect is considered alongside discourses of self-reflexivity and appropriation that are central to art-historical debates around modernism and postmodernism. Above all, the chapter argues that contemporary queer video art is untethered in its definition but nevertheless constellates around certain themes and bodies. Expanded definitions of queerness often negate the specific strategies taken on by queer and trans artists and privilege a nonspecific and disembodied queer abstraction. The chapter seeks to supplement those lacunae with new ways of theorizing media alongside new ways of theorizing queer representation.

Artistic Digital Display and Analysis of Interactive Media Wireless Sensor Clusters

For video art, the coupling of digital technology and postmodernist thinking has brought not only technical progress and formal transformation but also a new mode of thinking and way of living around visual experience and even a change in the whole world view. The digitalization of the image not only lies in the change of the surface form, but also it has evolved into a supermedium, connecting the real world and the virtual world, becoming a new way and means for us to grasp the world, which can be considered a huge transformation. However, while digitalization has brought great development to video art, it has also confused many issues that need to be further explored, especially the inevitable transformation in creation. This paper takes digital video art as the main object of study and explores the crisis of representation and the problem of transformation that has arisen in it, with reference to “technology,” “form,” “concept,” and even “social and cultural life.” We also analyze, summarize, and conclude the transformation of video art and its creation rules in the digital context and propose corresponding creation strategies, taking “technology,” “form,” “concept,” and even “social and cultural life“ as the starting point. For the detection of a small area, a star structure can be used to achieve a flexible arrangement of each sensor while satisfying the real-time performance. For the collection of information in a large monitoring area, if a star structure is used, the nodes are overloaded with low reliability and low utilization of communication lines. The wireless data acquisition system uses the relatively scalable UCB telosb hardware platform, while the hardware platform uses an operating system with good portability, which can give full play to the hardware performance of the platform and effectively reduce the power consumption of the system. Based on the current art trend, this paper discusses the transformation of video art in the digital background from the perspective of “technology” and “concept” and proposes corresponding creation strategies to provide theoretical to practical support for digital video art creation practice and bring some inspiration to creators. It will also bring some inspiration to the creators. Cluster analysis is used to effectively improve the introduced algorithm, and the simulation results show that the improved algorithm can reasonably plan each sensor node in the region while reducing the number of sensors, so that the effectiveness of each sensor node can be well utilized.

Glitch in Contemporary Video Art (Iranian Glitch Artists)

Glitch art is the use of digital or analog errors for cosmetic purposes by corrupting digital data or physical manipulation of electronic devices. What's called "glitch art" usually means visual bugs, whether in a still or moving image. It is difficult to classify and recognize a glitch. Primarily from a theoretical, scientific and non-artistic perspective, Glitch is the unexpected result of a malfunction. This artistic genre has influenced the art of video and has led to the interest of many video artists in this art genre, in this research, the works of video glitch of Iranian artists have been investigated and the techniques employed by the artist are described. In this regard, 6 samples of the works of different Iranian video glitch artists were selected and examined. According to the study, it can be concluded that Iranian video art artists have used this artistic genre in their works to express their intention and purpose.

Gender, action and expression in Pipilotti rist’s ever is over all video art

In this study, two channelled and coloured video installation called Ever is Over All dated 1997 by Pipilotti Rist’s being one of the artists who shaped video installations is analysed. In this installation produced by Pipilotti Rist as a woman artist, a woman in an entranced mood is shown smashing the glasses of some of the cars parked on the roadside. There is the vast space of the flower field on the one side and then there is a cheerful woman as the main character crashing the glasses of the parked cars on the roadside with a long stemmed flower just like from the field. The female body is especially important in audio and video installations of Rist. This installation by the artist has been assessed in terms of gender, action (movement), expression, freedom and solidarity. The flower used by the woman to smash the car glasses is considered over themes such as nature, life and woman and the fact that a passing by female police officer does not intervene in the situation and goes on her way just by greeting our heroine and smiling is assessed using concepts such as gender, action/movement, expression and freedom. In this research, the effects created by the medium of expression in art are touched upon in the video installation titled Ever is Over All and it has been concluded that the subjects and objects included in the video inspire the solidarity of woman, community and nature. Keywords: video art, Pipilotti Rist, Gender-Action-Expression

Screendance in the Wake of Screened Dance: Moving Forward Through Interactive Video

This paper argues that screendance has always had a potential for interactivity, looks specifically at interactive video, and tracks its history through video art and video games. Taking into account the higher volume of dance that is migrating to the screen as a result of the Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic, it also suggests a new term, screened dance, to differentiate those dances and dance events which otherwise would have been live and co-present. Bringing together a transmedia screendance work that unfolded on social media, and interactive narrative works currently available to stream on Netflix, I argue that the innovations and adaptation in the delivery of dance content due to lockdowns imposed by Covid-19, have provided an opportunity for the possibility of interactive screendance.