Where does
the name come from?
The name came from two sources, though this work is about of other things
as well. The first is science-fiction movies, where a visitor from another
planet addresses those who have come to meet him or her as "Earthlings."
The second is Sun Ra's sci-fi-blaxploitation-jazz film, Space Is The
Place, in which Sun Ra and the Intergalactic Solar Arkestra descend
on forties' Chicago from Saturn to enlighten "Earthlings"
about an alternative planet built on good vibrations. I am also very
much attracted to magazine culture, which is a kind of distributed information
system. you can go through these magazines and DJ or VJ them; you can
chose them, post-produce them, edit them.
What is you relation to them? Do you collect them or do you
buy them everyday? you have something of an archive, though I'm not
exactly what you'd call it. You deal so much with information. Do you
have an archive for processing, for testing everyday information? Do
you have a kind of art lab?
I do have a kind of art lab. This project started in a very different
way and then it changed midway. It began with going to cafes, as all
these pictures take place in cafes.
And you were recording in cafes?
Yes, I was very interested in this idea of indeterminate spaces, spaces
where people kind of linger and then move on. Tourists always go to
cafes, the bohemian culture started in cafes, and I wanted to connect
with that. In the beginning of this series I started using whatever
magazine I found at the cafe as a readymade or found object. It operated
as a kind of fetish of the cafe. Then, as the project progressed, I
became more interested in magazines in general. It was then that I started
collecting them. The project started about two years ago, and about
a year ago I started realizing that I was missing some of the great
headlines: this one about Tony Blair in the Morning Star, for
instance, concerns the idea of the delusion. I didn't find that one
in a cafe. I saw it on a newsstand and realized that I really wanted
to utilize all the information available and not restrict myself to
a certain set of rules or regulations.
___I think that artists have to put some
regulations on the projects they do, otherwise they become unfocused.
In this case, I changed the rules and started collecting the magazines
from anywhere and anyplace. A lot of different things started happening
when I made that decision, and that is when I really got into the language
of magazines. How funny they can be. How funny certain juxtapositions
of headlines, titles, and advertisements can be, like Surrealist/Situationist
jokes. I became interested in how headlines were use in different ways,
in the multiple layers of textuality, and how they relate to different
kinds of temporality. For instance, the headline is something like a
sound bite. It has a very quick temporality. Then you have the subtitles,
which are read in a different amount of time. You can read the newspaper
in different temporal zones and you can utilize different methodologies
to access the information. You can read each article through and through
and in a serial way, moving from one article to another, or you can
read it randomly like a dérive.
What interests me is that you are always bridging to other disciplines:
you have a great and interesting connection to science and architecture.
Can you tell me a little bit more about how you came into this contact
zone, about how it started?
Well, I have always been interested in history and critical theory.
I have believed from the beginning that art should produce new sensations,
new kinds of perceptions, new kinds of imaginings.
Like Felix Gonzalez-Torre's art produces extraordinary experiences?
Or hallucinatory experience. Let's go beyond that. Art is a kind of
exercise for the possibilities of the mind. It's like break-dancing
or ballet.
Like a
non-chemical LSD?
Yes, like a non-chemical LSD. That could get me into my theory called
the "Society of Neurons," which is a different question and
one I'm not sure I want to trip into right now. But since you asked,
here is a little of that theory. Different kinds of artistic experience
stimulate or call out to different populations of neurons which produce
signals utilizing different neurochemistries, like dopamine, acetylcholine,
etc. In some cases, artists take specific drugs, like peyote, as part
of the rituals surrounding their art production. Ecstasy, an
exhibition currently going on at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, addresses this very issue that the experience and the consciousness
it facilitates is the product of what I am referring to as "Society
of Neurons" and how they all act in harmony at any moment of awareness.
They express themselves differentially depending on context in a ratiomatic
manner. The ontogency, or individual development, of the nervous system
and the subject may be a result of a coevolutionary process by which
certain kinds of cultural context call out to the developing nervous
system differentially and favor the selection of certain kinds of cultural
context call out to the developing nervous system differentially and
favor the selection of certain neurochemical systems over others. Each
culture may provide a stable enough network or symbolic ecology, which
has evolved over thousands of years and which produces individual subjectivities
generation over generation through sculpting networks of neurons, spatially
and dynamically, preferentially. Art affects visual, auditory, and haptic
culture. Art, like cinema, accordingly to Deleuze, may create new forms
of connectivity possibly affecting the distribution of neurochemical
systems in the brain. This theory gives a powerful new important to
art.
___My ideas about art and the brain are
not intended to illustrate concepts and ideas of neuroscience, which
can be a problem for art-science intiatives. They are about importing
a new vocabulary that artists can fold into their art practice, as a
way of energizing it through the production of difference and hybridity.
If anything, my work is not about perception of sensation but rather
about evolution and ontogeny. Artists like Seurat, Duchamp. Cézanne,
the Futurists, Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, Gary Hill, and Dan Graham
were all interested in science. Olafur Eliasson, Matthew Ritchie, and
Carsten Holler are artists today who also share this interest. I once
talked to Dan Graham about the early seventies and he told me that all
the artists were reading electronics and science magazines. What I am
trying to say is that many artists have folded concerns with science
almost imperceptibly into larger networks of culture, sociology, psychology,
economics, and history to produce a Gesamtkunstwerk.
Marina
Abramovich's interest in Tessler and so on...
Yes, absolutely. Artists have always worked that way. It's also interesting
what happened post 1992/1993, after the internet explosion. What happened
was that all the barriers, all the specificity of materials, started
breaking down. Whether you are talking about art or you are talking
about the barriers between different knowledge fields like science,
cultural theory, or critical theory, they all started breaking down.
Has
the internet changed the way you work?
I already had a history of being a scientist, having studied neurosciences
and been a doctor in the eighties. After completing a project called
Camp O.J, where I photographed the press at the O.J. Simpson
trial as one would a rock-and-roll concert for Spin Magazine.
I felt that I had nothing more to say about the relation of the production
and mediation of the real using the theoretical tools that make up the
toolbox of art. I realized that it was time to embrace my past as a
scientist in order to inject a new vocabulary into my work, as well
as perhaps to discover the neurobiological roots of what I was observing
in the macrocultural field. Perhaps I felt the need to reinvent myself
as well. Perhaps political and social systems were operating at the
level of the neuron network, and biopolitical through, as in the "Society
of Control" outlined by Foucault, was being directed toward the
brain. The Earthling series and a recent text I wrote for a
forthcoming book edited by Deborah Hauptmann called The Body in
Architecture and my essay therein is called "Resistance is
Futile: The Neurobiopolitics of Consciousness" are to some extent
the culmination of this project...
Have you
ever thought about memory in your work, because memory has always been
considered static, whereas in actuality it is a dynamic process?
I have done a number of projects concerning different aspects of memory.
Artists have always embraced memory and one could say there was an aesthetic
memory. For instance, Christian Boltanski and Annette Messanger have
explored cultural memory and traumatic memory for some time now. American
History Reinvented (1986-1991), Collective Memory-Collective
Amnesia (1990-1994) and Beyond the Vanishing Point: Media and
Myth in America (1996-2001) were three projects I did in which
memory was a preponderant interest. The Earthling project riffs
off these and concerns the construction of a global memory in the sense
of what Paul Virilio called "phaticity." The word phatic is
the root of the word emphatic. The history of the image, coevolving
with that of the imagination, is one in which images are being produced
that are more and more attention-grabbing, more phatic. These images
are in competition with each other in the visual-cultural field, and
over time they are becoming more refined, or what I call cognitively
ergonomic-the images that most successful in drawing the attention of
the observer are the ones that take advantage of the dynamic ontogenic
proclivities of the nervous system. What I mean is that the static condition
of photography has been superseded by the linear dynamic time of cinema,
which has been remediated by the non-linear digital time and space of
new media (non-narrative cinema is a transitional phase). The addition
of dynamic aspects has made images more and more phatic, more and more
cognitively ergonomic. This refinement is the product of the image-industry,
of collusion between advertising, cinematic special-effects, and now
the political propaganda machine. ...
In your
work you use photography, video, sculpture, installation, and drawing,
even the reinvention of photography. If you look at the work of Ed Ruscha
you could say that the car is his medium. What is your medium?
What is my medium? Well, I started as a photographer. By the way, Rirkrit
Tiravanija started as a photographer too, I don't know if you knew that.
He wanted
to become a documentary photographer like a Magnum photographer.
Well, in answer to your question, if Ruscha's medium is his car mine
might be the brain. I mean that as a joke. Anyway, what is very important
to understand about my work is that since I began as a photography I
tend to think of all mediums in terms of photography. For instance,
in London I did this project called Blindsight in which I used
the machine they paint streets with to paint a green line from the subway
station to Moorfields Eye Hospital, so that partially sighted people
could find their way there. It was a kind of Situationist project about
nested perceptual realities within the larger framework of the urbanscape.
In the end, however, the line became something that I photographed and
that generated images. Beyond the photographs of the document of my
performance I actually made images that recounted the very nature of
what it is to be blind and described the limits of the camera as image
machine. Could the camera act like touch and construct a total image
from a multiplicity of possible focal points in time, in memory?
___I did another work called Silent
in Madrid. My partner, Elena Bajo, and I bought something that's usually
installed in suburban communities-a highway sound barrier- into the
center of Madrid. It was a 70m sculpture that created a space of solitude
and mediation in the middle of the city. For me, it ended up as something
to photograph. It was reminiscent of a large earth work like Spiral
Jetty, which became known more as a series of documentary images.
I mention this because I am still very much a photography. No matter
what I do, it always comes down to the static image of the photograph
or the video. The difference between myself and Nan Goldin, and what
make me very close to somebody like Thomas Ruff, it is that I am not
so much interested in the image. I am not a photographer that explored
the image and tried to construct a specific style: i am more interested
in artists who use different mediums within photography itself. I used
many kinds of historical processes in American History Reinvented, from
Platinum to albumen prints. In the O.J. Simpson and Beyond
the Vanishing Point projects I cross-processed the photographs.
I am much more about mediums than actual images, although I do think
there is always a perfect process for a particular group of images.
I am also about apparatus. Like Jean-Luc Godard, I use different apparatuses.
I am interested in how an image is produced. I am making the production
of the image transparent. I am not interested in dislocating the viewer
from how the image was made, but want him or her to feel part of the
process. In Godard's Mépris, for instance, the first scene opens
with a man holding the microphone for the actress and the next scene
is simply the camera lens. In the middle of the film Godard stops the
action and interviews himself.
It's
very much like Lars Von Trier, but in an interesting way he creates
a different situation.
Lars Can Trier is very much like Godard in that he dispenses with all
the high-tech paraphernalia of cinematic production, leaving you with
the grain of the film, poor lighting, and camera movement. So, by complete
denial, you affirm what is it you want to relinquish. As I said, everything
is Godard.
Everything
is Godard.
Yes, everything is Godard. If you look at what many artists are doing
today, so much is influenced by him.
I think that is a great conclusion. Thank you.
Warren
Neidich is currently a visiting art and research fellow at the Center
for Cognition, Computation and Culture at Goldsmiths College, London.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, London
and curator at the Museum of Modern Art Ville de Paris, France. He curated
"Utopia Station" at the 2003 Venice Biennial.
"Warren
Neidich," Spot Magazine of the Houston Center of Photography,
Spring 2005