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It’s the middle of winter and it’s a gorgeous day — jacket weather, sunny. I’ve done the bike ride around Stanley Park before, so this time I bike to the Art Gallery of BC to see a new show of BC artists. Some fun stuff, like an artist who made fake elevator doors, but almost as interesting was the amazing bird poop splatter in the top of the rotunda. 
There was also a nice audio piece — outside the museum entrance, hidden speakers playing the sound of English starlings from a tree. I then visit a museum devoted to the world of Bill Reid, an artist and activist who passed away in 1998. His dad was of European descent and his mom was from Haida Gwaii — she was Haida, one of the Northwest Indian or First Nation tribes on the west coast of North America. He made a huge sculpture dedicated to her, and that place, called “The Spirit of Haida Gwaii.” 
An image of this sculpture is on the Canadian $20 note. An old English lady is on the front. In the many photos of Bill in the museum, it seemed he looked pretty much like a typical Canadian of European descent, but he declared himself Haida and all his work owes a huge debt to the traditional work of those peoples. It’s a curious thing for me to try and wrap my head around. Reid’s work is somewhat contemporary — the material of the sculpture is untraditional — and he also made prints and lithographs. But what is curious to me is that the images look like, or are very closely related to, those typically seen in and on Northwest Coast tribal lodges that date back a century or more. He must have made a conscious decision to become part of a long lineage of imagery and mythology.
I suspect that the Haida view of art is different from the European view that dominates most museums. Reid worked using styles, images, characters and mythologies that were not his alone, but part of the long history of his people. Though he contemporizes the work by pulling the imagery into newer materials and contexts, he leaves very much of the traditional imagery intact — like an artisan working as an apprentice in a renaissance workshop. From a European standpoint, his work lies outside “official” art history — but he would say he’s part of a longer, deeper history. Reid became an activist, helping to prevent logging and deforestation of Haida lands. He constructed an elaborate model of a traditional village that is incredible — a giant diorama of decorated lodges, side by side, interspersed with a myriad of totem and other poles. The whole village appears like one giant ritual object, or a living symbolic sculpture, facing the nurturing sea. 
I then rode over to North Vancouver, over a bridge with a great view of the town, and a range of snow-capped peaks in the background. I’d been told by a friend in Seattle about a great Indian restaurant called Vij’s. Vij’s was only open for dinner (and I’ve got a show to do) but their next-door café Rangoli was open for lunch. It was worth the trip. I had a drink of something called Jal Jeera, a mixture of tamarind and cumin. I’d never tasted anything in the world like that combination before. I saw other people’s dishes arriving and they all looked incredible. I settled on the goat curry (how often do you see that on the menu?), which was delicious but not so different from flavors I’d had before — possibly just better, fresher.
There was a rack of coolers over by the register with pre-made boil-in-a-bag meals, so I bought a grocery bag’s full to divide among the buses for our long ride to Edmonton tonight. This restaurant is no local secret — Mark Bittman and Jamie Oliver have raved about it. Our show, in the 3000-seat Queen Elizabeth Theatre (that old English lady again), went very well. I noticed a little old lady, in an usherette/security uniform, trying to get people to stop dancing — or at least stay in their seats — but after the 4th song she gave up. After that there was no stopping the crowd — they were dancing almost the entire rest of the set. After the show, I was told that the mayor was backstage. Keith, Mauro and I hauled a bucket of beers and wine into the green room, where the guests were waiting. The mayor, Gregor Robertson, and his wife Amy chatted with most of us, and it turned out they had arrived on bikes! At one point they seemed slightly antsy, so as an out I offered that they probably had to get going, but they hung around — and after a bit, we all went to a nearby bar-rest for local wine and mussels. I chatted with Robertson about my own bike rides around Vancouver, and how NYC has made great strides in becoming more bike-friendly. I mentioned the efforts of Enrique Peñalosa, Janette Sadik-Kahn and Jan Gehl in transforming some cities into more livable places. Robertson said that there has been a radical transformation of the land and cityscape in a generation. Vancouver is no longer a small city, and having seen all the new condos and office buildings here, I wondered aloud if developers were simply unstoppable; if the city might lose some of its charm and character; that the human scale of the city will be lost if profit is left as the prime force determining urban texture. In Peñalosa’s terms this means that people with lots of money determine how everyone else lives, and what kind of city we all live in — which, he feels, is undemocratic. Robertson responded, “I don't really see them as unstoppable. I'm doing the aikido thing, moving that drive for building and profit into the most positive outcome possible for the community. Not a simple thing. But my hopes are high.”
He continued that the development industry in Vancouver has built lots of great stuff, and has accepted the terms and conditions requiring large whacks of community amenities (parks, childcare, public art, community centers, etc.). He claimed that the Vancouver formula is far better for the community than almost any other city’s, which has made for some very livable urban hoods.
“I'm encouraging projects with affordable and rental housing, and ensuring we keep pushing the leading green building standards we have. And I’m very much open for business.”
Being a New Yorker, maybe I’m sadly more cynical. In spite of how well things are going in New York, the balance is always precarious. I offered that the economic downturn might slow development a bit, and turn out to be an opportunity for all folks, wealthy and less wealthy, to reassess what kind of town they want to live in and what kind of life they want — given the unexpected (for some) break in the years of relentless acquisition and striving. “Given a second to think about it, would people really choose to live in vertical ‘rabbit hutches’?” I said, glancing out the window at a new condo tower with only a few lights on. “Well-appointed rabbit hutches,” Robertson replied. Change is not always a bad thing; I wouldn’t claim that all development is evil. But maybe with some safeguards in place, we might save that which makes a city livable — and that seems to be the tack that Robertson is taking.
Being only a visitor, my impressions are of the surface, and probably influenced by the mess that many US cities are in. Judging from their health care industry, maybe the Canadians have more perspective. Robertson chatted with Paul and mentioned the gang problem that Vancouver is dealing with. Paul suggested, semi-seriously, that the mayor might watch some episodes of The Wire. We said good night, I folded up my bike, and the drivers began the long haul to Edmonton. A little before 8am, I got out of my bunk to pee and glanced at the spectacular scenery outside. I never went back to bed. Here is the road around Lake Louise, near some hot springs — steam rose off the water and covered the road. 
Memphis
In the afternoon, one group went to the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and raved about how interesting, well thought out, and moving it is. I went to visit Winston Eggleston regarding a project to project some of his dad’s photos onto the side of a massive former Sears building here in November. This project would coincide with dad Bill’s upcoming retrospective at the Whitney in New York City. Jenni and Graham stopped by Willie Mitchell’s studio, where so many amazing records were and are recorded. On my way to the Eggleston Trust, I took a phone call from Teenie Hodges, co-writer of “Take Me to the River,” while I was biking down Poplar Avenue. (Teenie played guitar on most of those great Al Green songs and hundreds of others.) We agreed to connect in a few hours.
Between the richness of the Country music that we had soaked up by osmosis in Nashville and the Soul music that still lives in this town, a big part of my cynicism that continually dogs me about the U.S. got lifted, slightly. The beauty and depth of the music from many of these places is simply astounding. There are scoundrels and greed and things are fucked up, but look at the music these folks have produced and you sense there’s a lot of soul and heart beyond the highways and strip malls. Not just the music — Teenie joined us on stage for our version of his song wearing a bright yellow and blue outfit with an open shirt revealing a kind of shiny blue spandex wifebeater. I am reminded of Elvis’ outfits too, and all those spangly Nudie suits the Country artists used to wear — a whole world of haberdashery untouched by the fashion and tastes of the big coastal cities.
We sat around the catering table backstage after soundcheck as Teenie told stories about being mistaken for Al Green (he signed a lot of autographs) and playing on an Albert Collins session without knowing who he was — thinking to himself, “Who is this unhip guy with the process? And why is a white man carrying his amp for him?” After the Collins session got underway, they cut maybe 7 songs in 3 hours. Teenie, nicknamed Cool Breeze by his bandmates (many of whom were his brothers) was nudged by one of them who said, “What do you think NOW, Breeze?”
At the end of our set, as I began to introduce Teenie as “someone many of you will know,” someone in the audience shouted out his name, confirming my suspicion that these guys — Teenie, his brothers, and many others — are not completely overlooked and unknown in their home town. Sometimes there is a little tiny bit of justice.
I’m here at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid to take part in a large museum show called “Máquinas y Almas: Arte digital” (“Machines and Souls: Digital Art”), which, as one might expect, includes a lot of contemporary techie work. The exhibition title presumes an opposition, and I suspect that many of the show’s participants might disagree with this implied duality since much of the work here demonstrates a symbiotic relationship between artist and machine. Just as Descartes once separated the mind and body, we now separate machines — which we see as extensions of our body and senses — from something we refer to as our souls.
What is a soul? Some suggest it’s what survives death, joining the other evanescent and matterless essences when our “machines,” our bodies, cease to function. Some claim it has a weight, that the body mysteriously loses 21 grams at the moment of our passing. In this view, it is not DNA but the soul that contains the true self, our sacred and immutable identities.
When a limb is amputated, is part of the soul lost? According to convention, no, it is not. When a lobotomy is performed or a person has a stroke is part of the soul “lost” or diminished? Presumably not — even a person in a vegetative state still has a soul, though we don’t know exactly where it is. Where do we draw the line? Would a brain kept alive but apart from its body still have a soul? Who cares?
I remember a comic book I read as an adolescent, Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary, by Justin Green.
It’s an irreverent look at a young man’s tortured Catholic upbringing. In one section, after being inundated with Church dogma regarding the soul, young Binky tries to imagine what it looks like. Where is this thing they keep referring to, and what form does it take? Binky imagines his own soul is a small, amorphous lump located somewhere in the chest, tarnished and dirtied by his accumulated sins. In other narratives, evil scientists and Voodoo priests know how to locate and remove the soul, or to control it, while normal doctors haven’t a clue to its existence or where it hides.
What about machines? Will there come a time when machines have the characteristics of a sentient, self-aware being? Raymond Kurzweil believes that a day will soon come when machines and living beings will merge. He predicts that we will augment ourselves with machines to such an extent that our sense of self will encompass the silicon, the circuitry, and the chunks of titanium — we and the machines will become one, what he calls The Singularity.
During some intensely emotional portions of my recent past, I would dream that I either lost my laptop, or that the screen suddenly went blank, and I would feel traumatized and distraught. The laptop, it seems, was a stand-in for myself. Others may toss and turn when they dream of losing their Blackberries, or their houses burning down, or their cars mysteriously dying, but for me it was my computer.
Our identities can be tied to certain machines, though not just any type. A power drill? Probably not, but a luxury watch, a sexy car, a camera (for a DP, or photographer, maybe?), a typewriter (for a writer stuck in the last century?), and a computer for those like me who use it to store their personal information and to interface with others. The tools we use can represent — at least symbolically — our very identities: a Western gunfighter sees his weapon as a totem, a chef lovingly sharpens his knives, and the suburban guy washes his new car in the driveway for all to see. Though, it seems some of these machines might be standing in for a different organ, and not the soul. Oh, well.
I don’t think what I’ve addressed thus far really engages the supposed theme of the exhibition; many works seem to address the uncanny, the creepy, and the vaguely lifelike, though there are some exceptions. For instance, Theo Jansen’s marvelous giant walking sculptures are somewhat uncanny. Their insect-like movements make them appear to be alive since the artist didn’t rely on wheels or other common mechanical devices. A piece by the Japanese artist Sachiko Kodama creates weird shapes with iron filings suspended in oil, which, when subjected to massive magnetic forces, makes even stranger shapes, seeming to morph organically from one shape to another. These squirming shapes appear disturbingly alive.
A series of video projections resembles tiny deep-sea creatures or protoplasmic life, pulsing, slithering, and interacting with one another. The piece by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen gathers blog texts, then filters and speaks them aloud, evoking a visible/audible manifestation of the hive mind, and makes me wonder if our the essence of our being is now scattered, dispersed into the ether, across the internet, and living in the computers of a billion people across the world.
Other pieces move away from the uncanny, addressing different ideas. Natalie Jerimenjenko’s hydroponic plants act as lungs to cleanse the air outside the museum. Antonio Mutanda’s map shows human connectivity around the globe, as does the work of some of the other artists.
Julio, the singing robot made in collaboration with David Hanson’s lab, fits in mainly with the creepy uncanny side of the show. Julio is old-school creepy — he resembles a person, uses lifelike motions, and — yikes! — smiles and looks around, mumbles to himself, and then bursts into song. He recalls a Frankenstein monster, although, instead of being outwardly and obviously scary, he’s quasi-friendly looking and bursting with emotion. I hope the sense of realism together with the singing make him doubly creepy. How can a machine be feeling what’s expressed in the songs? 
I could have designed Julio to say “human” things like, “Hi there!” or “Wussup?” I thought of having him say more disturbing things like “Touch me,” “I’m so horny,” or “Come closer.” But instead I opted for singing.
Like many animals, humans sing for pleasure, for sex, for attention, to express pain, to relieve angst and to join and participate in a social group. All of these urges seem, if not uniquely human, at least not at all machine like. To see machines mimic these aspects of human life, is to watch some part of our imagined souls being appropriated.
[Link to video of Julio singing]
While machines can mimic aspects of human, animal and biological processes, they still lack souls, or whatever it is that leaves us sentient, independent beings. Machines, even computers, are for the most part still modeled on digital, binary and logical thought processes, clutching the legacy of Descartes and the Enlightenment. For machines to truly simulate human beings, they will need to reason with their hearts, their emotions, as we and other animals do. We may like to think that cool logic guides, buffers, and tames our hot emotions, but many now believe that the amygdala and other emotional areas of the brain do most of the “thinking.” It seems that much of our thought process is unconscious, based on impulse, gut feeling, and instinct — and no less wise because of it. This is what’s absent in these machines.
For me, an important part of this show is about this lacuna, this missing part. Witnessing a machine approach being human — and for it to be almost believable, but not quite — can be a creepy and unsettling experience. [See Julio the Uncanny essay]
What would a machine that “feels” be like? I think it would have something like acquired instincts — a lot of them — coupled with a constellation of fears, desires, and loves. The machine would experience desire, hate, friendship, and inexorable ties to other objects and living beings. It would learn the art of deceit, whom to trust, and test the limits of its relationships. It would perform favors and help out, but might expect something in return. What a handful!
In order to think like a human, or like an animal, the machine would need the faults, foibles, and self-interests characteristic of living things. Of course, it would have mirror neurons too — or some equivalent capacity — allowing it to predict what people, animals and other sentient machines were feeling and how they might behave or react next.
We can guess the potential scenarios to follow. We’ve seen them in a hundred sci-fi movies in which the machines take over. In some of these, the machines are even arguably “better” than the people (and certainly better than some of the actors). They make more informed decisions, behave more altruistically, and are marginally less fucked up. In some dramas, the machines adopt the ultimate human foible, or strength, depending on your point of view — religion. They should be showing Battlestar Galactia at this exhibition.
Does this stuff belong in an art museum? Shouldn’t it be in the science museum, some might ask? Is it even science? Some would say that it’s engineering and innovative design, not true science, and certainly not art. I’d argue that their essentially useless content and attention to metaphor in these works suggest that they can only be shown alongside art — thereafter, let the deciders decide.
Participating artists:
Antoni Abad, 1956, ES
David Byrne, 1952, UK & David Hanson, US, robot
Daniel Canogar, 1964, ES
Vuk Cosic, 1966, RS
Evru / Zush, 1946, ES
Harun Farocki, 1944, CZ, football
Paul Friedlander, lights
Pierre Huyghe 1962, FR, anime girl
Theo Jansen 1948, NL, insect machines
Natalie Jeremijenko, 1966, AU, recycling
Sachiko Kodama magnet forms
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, 1967, MX
Chico MacMurtrie
John Maeda, 1966, US
Antoni Muntadas, 1942, ES, map
Daniel Rozin, 1961
Ben Rubin & Mark Hansen 1964, US, blog feed
About a year ago, I was approached by some Spanish curators to participate in a show scheduled to open at the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid at the end of this month. I was told the show would be called “Machines and Souls: Digital Art,” so I suggested I work with David Hanson (of Hanson Robotics) to make a quasi-realistic singing robot. Animatronics date at least as far back as Disney’s Lincoln robot delivering part of the Gettysburg address, although Abraham’s delivery all but ignored any emotional fervor. Having seen some of Hanson’s work at Wired Magazine’s Nextfest—and having heard about it for years before that—I thought it might be time to attempt a collaboration. I immediately thought the robot should perform an action with a weird emotional resonance, like singing. An impassioned speech, laughter, or tears, would have worked just as well, but I had an inkling I could write a short passionate song (in both English and Spanish) for Julio the robot to croon.
Here is a piece I wrote for the museum:
Julio The Uncanny
I had heard of David Hanson and his robot creations—the Einstein head and especially the robot of Phillip K. Dick that responded to questions from the public—but I had never seen one. At an event called Nextfest in New York, I saw a prototype of Jules, a fairly lifelike-looking head of an ordinary young man, slightly androgynous, who could change his facial expressions to simulate emotions. Jules could frown, smile and look slightly skeptical. In addition, Jules could make eye contact—of a sort. Hanson had rigged a system by which the thing could lock on to someone standing in front of it and then, within limits, follow them as they changed position. The robot thus appeared to be looking at you—which in a way it was. There were other robots at this event, but Hanson’s seemed to me to be on the verge of something—something both truly uncanny and something that might cause us to question what is seeing, what are emotions and what is communication and conversation.
Hanson and I chatted briefly and later, when the organizers of “Máquinas y Almas" asked me if I had something that might be appropriate for the exhibit I immediately thought of contacting Hanson to see if he could program Jules to appear to sing if I recorded a vocal for him. By sing I don’t just mean open and close the mouth—that wouldn’t fool anyone. What we call singing is not just the vibrating of the vocal chords and the mouth moving to create the proper syllables and timbres; it’s also tied to a host of emotions that play across the muscles and tissues of the face and neck. The movements of these muscles, the facial expressions, give us clues as to what the singer is feeling, what the singer intends to communicate and what the song means.
Of course, a large percentage of this meaning is in the song itself—the sound and lyrics—but one of the reasons we enjoy a live performance is that we are given (visual) bonus features, clues that give us additional information about the singer, the song and about our immediate situation.
Hanson said such a thing was possible, so I suggested that we make the presentation very simple: just a young man, dressed in a nondescript, ordinary manner, standing in a room, singing to himself. Hanson suggested that this new robot be christened Julio.
Part of the enjoyment of seeing the various robots at Nextfest was experiencing a taste of the uncanny. The idea of the uncanny was proposed by Ernst Jentsch in 1906. He refers to the uncanny as something uncertain or undecidable which therefore makes us uncomfortable. [Freud disagreed—or elaborated on this]. He calls it un-heimlich, the un-home-like. His idea is that our psychological concept of home implies familiarity and comfort, a sense of ease, and, according to him, any concept we hold also implies the existence of its polar opposite—the un-home-like, the unusual, the unknown, the strange.
I love where this is going. It brings to mind an image of someone sitting in a comfortable chair, maybe with friends, and maybe they’re having drinks—and at the same time Jentsch posits that layered over or under this image is the profoundly creepy, the deeply strange and disturbing. We’re in the land of David Lynch and Hitchcock. ET landing in the familiar U.S. suburbs could be viewed this way, or the various living dead and vampire movies.
More recently Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori proposed the existence of something called the uncanny valley. This “valley” is an area of emotional uncertainty and often revulsion experienced by an observer when a robot or computer animation (for example) approaches being human, is almost believable, but not quite.
He suggests that our emotional empathy with animations and robots increases as they get closer and closer to being human (or animal)—but then, at a certain point, they fall into the valley, and our empathy turns to disgust. In his view they switch from being a cute thing approaching humanity to a bad or faulty version of humanity. It is at this point that we see them as not merely slightly strange, but as a human with serious problems. If the creation can succeed in being a little bit better as a believable creature the feeling of revulsion disappears. For some viewers, recent films like Beowulf fall into this valley, while others find the almost humans acceptable.
Mori further suggests that this reaction might be innate—that it might be linked to our biological reactions to people who are physically or mentally ill—or to corpses. Evolution would have ingrained this reaction as a way of weeding out sick people from the social group. Hanson and others dispute the scientific veracity of the uncanny valley, but I think no one can doubt the strange and weird emotions that well up when confronted by one of these entities.
Knowing that singing elicits an emotional reaction from a listener and observer, I sense that encountering Julio might push some very odd buttons. I remember that my first encounter with Hanson’s robot made me rethink what it means to see, to look. We think of seeing and looking as something optical, something the eyes do. But actually seeing something, and recognizing it, is a lot more than that—it is the act of “naming” the thing the eyes are locking on to. It involves other meta brain functions that often have nothing to do with optics or the muscles controlling the eye. If seeing were just the visual and eye-muscle behavior, then isn’t that the same as what Jules does? And then isn’t singing, and displaying the attendant emotions, the same as what Julio does?
We tend to think that our emotions live inside—in our “hearts” and minds—and that the cues given by facial expressions, for example, are simply more or less involuntary reflections of these “true” inner feelings.
I think it’s more complicated and more confusing than that. I sense that sometimes the effect can produce the cause. Smiling can make you happy. Scowling can make you aggressive and angry. Actors experience this all the time—many of them act by learning to produce the visual effects of an emotion—the posture and facial expressions, the tone of voice—rather than always having to summon up an interior emotion in order to self-generate those affects. (That’s method acting, another whole topic)
So—if an entity displays the correct facial expressions, sounds and gestures, who’s to say it’s not “experiencing” the emotions? I personally still think it’s not, as emotions trigger hormonal release, breathing changes and a whole range of other physiological changes, and they’re not simply limited to what we see. They imply future action or inaction—they imply a set of behaviors guided and steered by the emotions we only see displayed in the face and voice. I love that Julio might make us confront some of these issues—that his emotional singing might give us a discomforting pause.
A video and other images of the robot can be found on the project's webpage, here.
It’s still a work in progress—the movements will be more “natural,” as will his hair. But this definitely demonstrates the creepiness factor at work!
Playing the Building — my installation in the Battery Marine Building — opened to the public today. Creative Time had music, hot dogs, beer and ice cream downstairs. (No food or drink from the party was allowed in the actual installation space.) My iPod provided the music and I saw at least one couple dancing! The line to play the organ traversed all the way to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. The fire department only allows 150 people in the space at one time since the exits are not all well lit — hence the long wait times. But there were other long lines were just for ice cream or beer.
There was a piece in the NY Times and in Newsweek, which helped get the word out. I felt bad that folks were waiting in a line to get in, but it was one of those lovely NY days, and lots of the folks seemed to run into old friends (I did too), so the waiting didn’t seem all that tedious. At times the party seemed to spill out to the street.
I was happy to see that the crowd has few trepidations about getting their hands on the device, and the New Yorkers were, contrary to their reputation, incredibly polite about not hogging the thing. It was also good to see such a demographically diverse crowd: little kids (well, with their parents), students, twenty-somethings, hipsters, artists and musicians (I met one of the guys from Mouse on Mars), city officials, and some folks even older than myself.
Elsewhere on my website and on the Creative Time site there is more information about the installation. It will be open to the public every weekend through most of the summer. Big thanks to Anne Pasternak, the donors, and to Mark McNamara, Justin Downs, and Danielle Spencer for their work on this piece.
As much as people enjoyed the device, I think they also enjoyed entry into an incredibly beautiful building in downtown Manhattan that was previously closed to the public for fifty years! It’s almost hard to believe such a thing could be possible, so thanks to CT and others for opening up that secret doorway in our city.
I’m currently working on a piece for a benefit supporting the local arts organization, The Kitchen. The event, scheduled for May 21st at the Puck Building, will honor artist and DJ Christian Marclay. I like much of Marclay’s work, so my piece is sort of a tribute to him — or at least it’s fairly inspired by his work. My piece will be comprised of a kind of carpet of one hundred guitar pedals, which benefit attendees must walk on in order to enter the main dining and performance space. A guitar will be plugged into and run through all the pedals, and then into an amp. We’ve tested a portion of it to see if there are any unexpected problems and I was surprised to discover how well it works. Of course, the sounds are fairly random, and stepping on one or two of the distortion or fuzz pedals raises the screaming noise level pretty high, but that will be adjusted. Happily, some pedals will loop whatever is going on at the time of their activation, and so there will be constant sound changing all the time. Here is a picture of it partially finished in my studio:
The organizers pragmatically pointed out that there could be issues for attendees in heels, as did CS. I had hoped to make participation in the installation mandatory, something each guest would have to experience in order to move from cocktails to the next part of the event. But women’s heels will be my Achilles heel, uh, duh…It’ll still be OK. We’ll just have to leave a narrow passageway or alternate route for the heeled ladies, or place the thing in a less obtrusive location.
Playing the Building
Thanks to the folks at Creative Time, this installation will finally open in NYC at the end of this month. Here is the press release: Playing the Building, a 9,000-square-foot, interactive, site-specific installation by David Byrne, will transform the interior of the landmark Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan into a massive sound sculpture that all visitors are invited to sit and “play.” Byrne’s project will consist of a retrofitted antique organ placed in the center of the building’s cavernous second-floor gallery that will control a series of devices attached to its structural features—metal beams, plumbing, electrical conduits, and heating and water pipes. These machines will vibrate, strike, and blow across the building elements, triggering unique harmonics and producing finely tuned sounds. As Byrne explains, it is an elaborate system for “activating the sound-producing qualities that are inherent in all materials.”
Playing the Building marks the first time in decades that the second floor of the Battery Maritime Building will be accessible to the public. The space will be open and free to all visitors on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday throughout the summer of 2008. Everyone will be invited to sit at the organ, tap on the keys, and create a unique array of sounds that travel through the space. In addition, David Byrne and Creative Time will invite guest musicians to challenge his creation through a series of performances and jam sessions.
A new page on davidbyrne.com contains more info on this project, including the location and hours, pictures, videos, interviews, and all that.
Here Lies Love Continues…
Cyndi Lauper came in to the studio last week to sing 1½ songs for the Here Lies Love album. She was about an hour and a half late to the session, so I fully expected to be in for some prime diva behavior. But, as I’d run overtime on the earlier brass sessions, it all worked out great, and Cyndi gave an amazingly fine-tuned performance. Not only is she a wonderful singer from a technical point of view, but she can tailor her attitude and performance to suit the character and the character’s emotional state.
This is exactly the skill set I need for this project. After giving Cyndi the back-story on a particular song and establishing the context of the lyrics, I would give directions like, “Yes, she’s a little angry, but also heartbroken and confused.” Cyndi would then incorporate these complex emotions into her performance with seeming ease. She’d ask, for example, “You want more anger in this verse?” And sure enough, she’d dial a little more in. Very impressive.
I’m in Dallas — or more accurately, Richardson, a silicon suburb north of the city — to meet with David Hanson, a maker of realistic (i.e. human) looking robots.
We’re collaborating on a piece that, if all goes well, will be part of a group show at The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid this summer. Some time ago, the curators invited me to be part of a tech-oriented art show, and I suggested approaching Hanson to make a singing robot for which I would write and record a song.
Hanson’s robots flirt with the uncanny and test our notions of what it means to be human. They have rubbery flesh made of what he calls frubber, with tiny wires on the inside that pull the “skin” to mimic human facial expressions (to an extent). Some of them can also make eye contact and some can carry on a weird dialogue, adding to their profoundly disturbing nature. Part of what makes this human likeness so creepy is our instinctive desire to empathize with the robots and to ascribe to their behavior human motivations and even emotions.
As a result, Hanson’s machines make us wonder how much of our interaction with our fellow humans (and animals) is based on instinctual empathy. We believe that behind the actions, words and facial expressions of the people and animals we encounter there is a life force and a consciousness. But the robots force us to ask how much of that is presumption on our part.
I was curious whether a singing robot might push these reactions even further. We often assume that singing is “from the heart” — or at least some part of it is. I myself believe that it is and it isn’t: it’s both a developed skill (to emote convincingly), and a true outpouring of emotion, as the physiological effect of singing is by nature more connected to the lizard brain than to the rationalizing frontal lobes. The fact that singing can engage both parts of the brain makes it maybe the least likely thing one would expect a robot to do.
There have been other singing robots. For instance, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL sings “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)” as he is powered down. The scene demonstrates HAL regressing from independent thought to mere parroting, and was not meant to be a kind of expression of HAL’s feelings.
Before leaving for Dallas, I wrote and recorded a short song in New York, something I believe is passionate, over the top, and extremely emotional sounding. The song is sung a cappella.
Getting down south had its share of setbacks. Due to some McDonald-Douglas planes having untreated technical problems, three successive American Airlines flights were cancelled. The reason was never given at the time. They would say things like “we can’t find a crew.”
I eventually arrived in Texas and drove from the massive Dallas-Fort Worth airport (it’s larger than Manhattan) across the flat plains of northern Texas. The gracefully curving highways were the color of the surrounding earth — a sort of warm beige. After about twenty miles, I turned north on Highway 75 on what might be the mightiest and most awe-inspiring interchange I’ve ever seen. At least five levels of roads are stacked up, all swooping over, under and around each other as if in some mighty concrete mating dance. It’s a truly incredible work, graceful, and of a scale so large that it is impossible to see the whole thing from any one vantage point.
When driving on the upper levels, you are almost completely unaware that you are arcing and swooping and curving in a ballet with all the other vehicles exiting and merging down below. You simply see the curve of the road ahead, and some signs alerting you of approaching merging lanes and future exits.
 
I ate dinner at the Renaissance Hotel. The restaurant’s only other diner sat off in the distance. I’m currently reading Temple Grandin’s book Animals in Translation, which seems appropriate for this project. She’s a highly functioning autistic person who claims her autism has helped her to better understand and empathize with the animal point of view.
From the door to my hotel room I could see across the atrium to the identical rooms on the other side. The building’s massive scale, warm moody lighting, and repetitive pattern of doors, plantings, and balconies felt more like some very peculiar temple than a place to sleep. Within this strange temple, all individuality is erased, all ego lost, and, as with many religious sites, one experiences transcendence, a sense of being part of something beyond and greater than oneself.
In religious practice, this glimpse of a profound truth would be channeled via word, sound and symbol to join a pre-established system and set of myths. In this case, one wonders where such channeling might lead? To the world of meetings, creative business exchanges and exciting capitalist enterprises?
The next morning I went to Hanson’s studio, located in an office/industrial park called The Telecom Corridor, where corporate headquarters for companies like Texas Instruments, Samsung, Ericsson and AT&T abound. One building — of a new type springing up here and there — houses data archives, so it has no windows. It’s beautiful in a strange way.
It’s like being in a new world where humans are merely visitors. We work to secure the data and take care of it, like worker bees for machines.
I arrive at the studio, which is on a street called West Executive Drive. The studio itself consists of a reception area, a conference room and few workshops. Some workshops are dedicated to hand-sculpting the heads and faces that will be cast in the fleshy frubber that Hanson has invented. Others are littered with servo motors and laptops that tell the partially assembled robots what facial expression (or Viseme, as Hanson says) to display and how to move their heads and arms. It’s a scene from a thousand science fiction movies, which is pretty exciting to actually walk into.
I proposed that I be videotaped singing the short song, enabling Hanson and his crew to study the series of head movements and facial expressions that I instinctively produce when performing. I do a number of takes, some with more movement, some with less. A few of the robots have mechanical arms, so I do a couple performances moving my arms like I normally would when singing. The robot — which doesn’t resemble me, by the way — won’t mimic my particular mannerisms, but will instead render the performance of a typical singer.
I also suggested that I write and record a version in Spanish since the audience in Madrid will be mainly Spanish-speaking. So, while the wire “tendons” are being attached to the inside of the skin, I hole up in the empty conference room and come up with a Spanish verse that might work.
Just as in the English language, some words and phrases can sound strange and awkward in Spanish. Moreover, the use of melody can place the non-native Spanish speaker at even greater risk. For instance, a melodically emphasized syllable effectively accents the vowel, which, in some cases, conjugates the word into the past tense, or changes its meaning entirely.
To be sure I hadn’t inadvertently done any of that, Thomas, one of Hanson’s collaborators, took me to meet a poetry teacher fluent in Spanish at the nearby UT Dallas (a school that originated as a Texas Instruments Research & Development facility). I sang what I had written for her and she helped with a few phrases. Sadly, I discovered that two of the lines didn’t work at all — though most of the others did — leaving me with a little homework to take back to New York. But, once complete, I’ll be able to record the Spanish version, too.
We returned to the studio, and eventually Hanson’s crew of assistants and collaborators drifted off to their homes and day jobs and I went back to the towering atrium by the side of the highway. That night, Kevin — a Hanson collaborator and production manager — and his boyfriend Carter hosted a BBQ at their traditional Dallas bungalow. (The bricks used to make Dallas bungalows and many newer houses as well are the same color as the highways.) The inside of their home is filled with their paintings and artwork, some of which leans against the walls or lies stacked in piles in the various rooms. One painting displays the Kool Aid pitcher man brandishing a bundle of dynamite. Others show a young Shirley Temple making a cute expression and wielding a butcher knife. These latter paintings have been popular so Kevin will paint more of them.
Hanson once did a stint at Disney in LA, which is no surprise since the Magic Kingdom calls on sculpting and molding skills like his for their theme park needs. While there, he began to develop Frubber, but didn’t work out all the problems and get a patent until after he left the Kingdom. I hope they don’t steal the formula; the Disney folks are rumored to be ruthless. Hanson also worked at the LA studio of artist Paul McCarthy. Although McCarthy’s work leans towards the obscene and scatological, the molding and sculpting techniques are probably not much different than those employed at the Disney parks. The crossover between McCarthy and Disney is, I think, significant.
Heather, a former Hanson employee, said over BBQ that she’s heading to LA this week to apply for similar work. There’s a circle of modelers, engineers and artists mixing technology with artier impulses. They float between the art world, theme parks, Hollywood, and high-tech AI conferences.
Hanson went to RISD, the same art school I briefly attended. Early on in his attendance, Hanson wanted to mix his tech and performance interests with more traditional art techniques and skills. But the school strongly discouraged this, since they lacked a department capable of overseeing that kind of work.
I had a similar experience. While working on a photo-based semi-conceptual art project, I was advised to try my luck in NYC instead of trying to fit in to the school programs. “We don’t teach this stuff,” they told me. At the time it was very frustrating, although in retrospect it turned out to be good advice. And at least I managed to acquire some valuable drawing skills while there.
Hanson and I decide that all programming and adjustments for the English song should be complete within two weeks. In the meantime, he’ll send me a video of the work-in-progress. Once I finish the Spanish song, I might revisit Dallas to facilitate programming Julio’s face for this alternate version. The robot’s body should be ready two weeks later, and then we’ll decide whether the arms will move, whether the head will bob in time with the song’s meter, and whether the torso will sway just a little to the (implied) beat. That leaves us a month to solve any additional problems and install in Madrid — the opening is in June.
I have my fingers crossed. If it all works — even forgoing some of the more ambitious ideas — it will be pretty astounding.
Some robot and artificial intelligence labs discourage and frown on work like Hanson’s. According to his detractors, building robots to mimic human appearance and expression is for the most part irrelevant. More significant investigations will explore what actions the bot can accomplish. Can it learn? How does it process sensory information? In what ways can it react to its environment? Hanson’s work may be less academically rigorous, but it does probe at some sensitive areas that traditionally focused engineers and theoreticians might prefer not to think about.
I pick up Malu, and we have breakfast at a funky, charming little place in Silverlake. As we eat, the couple next to us are chatting while busy knitting. Both of them! The coffees we have later at Intellegencia are incredible. This seems to be common knowledge — the place is filled with hipsters waiting patiently to order. The sun is shining, and the hyper-colorful exteriors of the Salvadoran markets and clubs remind me that this city has pockets where a wonderfully crazy mixture of all different kinds of people end up living in more or less in the same hood. I’m not sure the disparate layers of Angelinos actually mingle and cross paths very often — as sometimes happens in old NY neighborhoods in transition — but the visuals are great and the availability of authentic regional foods is incredible.
Afterwards, Malu and I go together to the Murakami show at the downtown Geffen Contemporary museum, notorious in some circles for having a Louis Vuitton boutique right in the middle of the museum — just for this show. Murakami designed some versions of the LV handbags a few years ago, and has also had his anime eyeball pattern printed on them alongside the LV logos. These designs are also presented on canvases, as works of art.
Other rooms display the copious amounts of merchandise that Murakami has produced — T-shirts, plastic figurines, toys, CD covers — so the mix of art and commerce is pretty fluid and seamless. To some of us, this mix is scandalous, sort of, but to M it isn’t even worth a mention. It’s a non-issue. I tell her that some people find the mix of art and luxury branding disturbing, and I get a strange look. There were lines to get into the museum and lines just as long to get into the Murakami gift shop. (NOT the LV shop, which has turned over a reported thirteen million in goods, no part of which goes to the museum. I’ll bet the curator who made that deal won’t work again in LA any time soon.)
It’s a hugely popular show, mostly filled with kids around Malu’s age and slightly older (in their twenties I’d guess) wandering around the museum-cum-recombinant psychedelic manga universe. Not everything he did is cute. As is common in the okatu and manga world, there is sometimes a pervy undercurrent of nerdy sexual obsession. Some short videos on a plasma screen show a CG character — an adolescent alien boy with no hair, a huge head, and beady eyes — obsessing over the uniformed Japanese schoolgirls in his midst. In one piece, he returns home after school and lying in bed he remembers a girl classmate and as a result his (plaid?) pants poke up. His face gets a look of confusion and horror.
Other fabricated mannequin-like sculptures show a manga boy spurting a massive steam of jism out of his hard on.
The front of a transformer girl’s body — her breasts down to her pinkish red vagina — flips forward on a hinge, and there are little dragonfly wings on her back. The rest of the stuff is pretty cute, though fragmented and freaky, as only the Japanese can do.
Some of the relentless merchandising seems out of control, like the infinite variations of the DOB character on t-shirts and everything else, its jellyfish eyes arrayed on any imaginable surface. But some of it is truly inspired — little teeny figurine versions of some characters were given away inside candy boxes sold in Japan. Like luxury arty Crackerjack prizes! And the carpet in the video screening room is a subdued pattern of flowers with his smiley faces in the middle of them.
Tonight the Grammy Awards will take place. They’re held at the Staples Center, a huge downtown sports arena, which, I am told, explains why downtown seems so lively today. The talk is all about Amy Winehouse’s substance abuse problems, and which megastars will give good moments on TV. The dire situation of the record business is never mentioned, not once.
We attend a gala opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a massive new wing of the County Museum here. C has many, many pieces in this new wing, so they flew her out for this. (Eli Broad has amassed more of her work than any other collector.) The County Museum is situated on a massive park site off Wilshire Blvd, which is also the location of the famous tar pits. As you approach the museum complex from the east, one of the pits is plainly visible — a small black lake can be seen just off Wilshire Blvd. A white statue of a struggling wooly mammoth sits within it. The animal is depicted lurching and crying out, so we can imagine the theoretical scenario.
When the rains fall, these bubbling ponds of tar and oil emanating from beneath the LA geology become covered in a thin layer of water. Long ago, prehistoric critters, seeing only the aqueous top layer, would wade in the pond thinking it was comprised of fresh water, inevitably becoming stuck in the black goo. Nearby, a covered pavilion houses a dig that has continued for decades, uncovering lots of bones and fragments. Somehow, the sight of giant beasts stuck in tar pits amidst the backdrop of LA’s extreme luxury and urban sprawl seems a too perfect metaphor: big lumbering creatures lured to their demise by what they think is a lovely sparkling fresh water pond…or something like that.
Outside the museum entrance, valet parking attendants await newcomers, systematically arrayed so that no one has to wait too long to be relieved of their car. We have a rented Prius, and I overhear one of the parking guys asking another if he knows how to drive it. (They don’t start like regular cars.) Guests are immediately dumped onto the red carpet and I ask C if she wants to let the photographers get some snaps or just run for it. Too late — a young woman quickly attaches herself to us and makes us stop every few yards, allowing pack after pack of photographers to get their snaps. I’m kind of game, up to a point. At each stop, I urge us on after enduring a minute of flashing bulbs. C is taken aback, blinded by the barrage of flashes, which I suspect she must have also endured at the various NY fashion shows she has attended; but this is more drawn out and structured.
The actual entrance features a collection of vintage cast-iron lampposts from LA County, painted light gray by Chris Burden. I read about these somewhere. He bought them when he heard that these and other bits of civic detritus were being sold or auctioned, and then he stored them on his Topanga Canyon property. Now he has declared them a “piece” and I assume has sold them to the museum, or to Eli Broad, the developer who funded much of this wing.
The elevation of an individual’s personal collection of curios to the status of an artwork in it’s own right seems increasingly common these days. Recently, a NY gallery featured an artist’s collection of kitsch sculptures of a monkey holding Darwin’s skull. It seemed like an eBay collection to me — charming and wacky if I saw it at someone’s house, but presented as a stand-alone artwork?
The artist Francis Alÿs did a similar thing last year at a museum in NYC, where he presented his collection of found paintings of the same Mexican Saint. Some were refined, some crude, and they filled the whole place — again, a sort of eBay collection as an integral original work. Or not. My friend Ford has some wonderfully eccentric collections: grotesque clown dolls and paintings, a whole series of bottles made to look like logs, yardsticks.
Jim Shaw, the LA artist, did something vaguely similar years ago when he presented his collection of paintings he’d picked up in thrift stores as “his” show. (This was pre-eBay.) It was great, and the book of these paintings was and still is inspiring. He picked out the weirdest and most disturbing, the creepiest and most surreal artistic attempts I’d ever seen. In a sense, the show was really about his eye and sensibility — and the objects had obviously been diligently accrued over quite a few years. Together, these paintings suggest a mass of dark, twisted creativity lurking beneath the amateur Sunday painter — a deep strangeness informing some “unprofessional” art making. The intimation is such that this unusual and powerful creativity also lurks beneath the country at large. It was a powerful show.
We wander around the throngs of black suited elderly men, and women dressed in unusual gowns. I comment that the age of the folks at this gathering made me feel young.
We aren’t yet allowed into the new museum wing — that prize would be saved for later. Instead, we are herded into a huge enclosed tent the size of the Parthenon, through a dark, covered passage, containing small, isolated pools of light.
The new wing is the pink and blue boxes seen below (shouldn’t those colors be reserved for Miami?) and the tent is the big gray thing behind them. The other wings of the museum are over to the right, and further over are the tar pits.
Photo: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
Inside the tent, huge white cubes the size of small houses hung from the ceiling, the BCAM acronym on their sides, and some abstract projections undulating on their bottom surfaces. We found our seats and were served some food as various speeches congratulate Broad, Renzo Piano (the architect of this extension), and others, one after another.
Afterwards, Lionel Richie, Nicole’s “father”, takes the stage and sings about being easy like Sunday morning. I head to the restrooms. Kind of shocking that a place purporting to support innovative and groundbreaking contemporary art plays such middle of the road music. Well, OK, if they’d asked me to perform while people finished dessert and networked, I’d have said no, so maybe it’s not that surprising. And maybe contemporary music requires an investment of time and a bit more focus and involvement — whether it’s academic, quasi-classical, post-rock or electronic — than the average work of contemporary art. So maybe that explains the disconnect as well.
Lionel and Co., leave the stage and a second smaller platform descends from the ceiling, hosting a piano player and a fiddle player — and maybe a third musician? — playing a version of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir! Duh duh duh — duh duh duh — go the grand chords, while the violin (it sounds like there is more than one) does the Indo-Arabic fills and licks that lend that classic rock tune its exotic identity. It’s a great song, but not what I expect to hear right now. And this slightly lounge version of it — though still powerful — is less than thunderous. It’s been somewhat tamed, even though it’s still a nicely weird surprise.
It’s not long before the little stage ascends once more to prepare for the coup de théâtre — the wall of the tent separating us from the new wing suddenly drops (a trick I’d seen in quite a few Kabuki shows) to reveal a walkway leading to the huge, illuminated buildings. On either side of the walkway there are some fiddlers made up like the blue man group, only these ones have bald heads painted red (to avoid copyright infringement?) They’re situated on either side of the walkway, on a lower grassy area, on a grid of little plinths, sawing away as the Zeppelin tune continues.
The museum wing is enormous. There is more space inside than in two of the major NY museums put together, or so I hear. On the outside it’s nothing spectacular — it will never be an architectural destination or a landmark like some other recent museum structures. But the building does its job. The large rooms are easy to understand and to navigate; they don’t distract or try to upstage the art, which is a relief these days. Even the stairs have been moved outside (a possibility in LA). So other than a large elevator, the whole building appears to be display space. Many artists, including C, have gigantic rooms devoted to (mostly) Broads’ collection of their work over the years. He seems to have collected some artists’ works in depth, seemingly ignoring others all together. Maybe, as is rumored, this is only a small sampling of his holdings, and this is just what he has decided to put on view here now.
In other cities, like Miami, some major collectors have built their own independent museums – separate from any city institutions — to display their private collections and curated shows of newly acquired work. They don’t have to contend with other board members or museum directors. Here at the LACMA wing, things are fuzzier — it is clearly a Broad showcase, but it’s also a county institution. Yet, the works don’t belong to the museum, they’re on loan.
The evening’s elaborate spectacle was, I suspect, the work of the folks who usually do “industrials,” its lavish fanfare the type usually reserved for trade fairs and at corporate shareholder events. I’ve always wanted to attend one of those, as they often employ the most advanced spectacle technology and money is generally no object. These things are deigned to hype the product, produce oohs and ahhs, and entertain the armies of shareholders and board members who have traveled from far and wide to attend. It’s true industrial theater: auto-ballets, smells, massive screens, sound and light are typical, so I hear. The public is never invited, but I still think maybe one day I’ll get to see one. I guess I am seeing one. (I had storyboarded my version of one for possible inclusion in my mid-80s movie True Stories, but that scene didn’t happen.)
I suspect that a spectacle on this scale can be ordered up pretty easily from one of those outfits, though I’d like to think that someday, someone might say, “Hey, why don’t we have one of the artists, or a contemporary theater director do the spectacle?” Julie Taymor is a no brainer. Or Robert Wilson (though the dinner might then go on for five hours). Or David Lynch. Or Peter Sellers or….
Same issue as with the music, I surmise. Why not make it as contemporary and groundbreaking as the art on display? Funny how things can be compartmentalized that way.
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