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the SpaceProbe show - an exhibition of electro-physical art |
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Front Page Artists' Statements and Photographs Introduction On behalf of the artists presenting in the SpaceProbe Show, I wish to thank all the members of the Art & Robotics Group for their support, and especially those who volunteered their time and expertise in presenting lectures and workshops this past year. I would also like to thank InterAccess and its staff and members for providing us with a meeting and exhibition space, equipment, administrative, financial, and moral support. Finally, thanks is due to the Canada Council for the Arts for their generous financial support of the SpaceProbe project. Jeff Mann, Coordinator, Art & Robotics Group SpaceProbe: Art that Inhabits Space...the world is a sea of systems and signals...electronics and robotics technologies enable the creation of artworks that inhabit and explore this physical and symbolic space; that sense, interpret, and send back telemetry from this rich milieu of sound, light, touch, language, motion, and emotion...If the task of the artist, as James Joyce put it, is "to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race", then certainly an exploration of the experience and effects of technology is a worthy pursuit for any artist living in an industrialized society. Whether it is in the utilization of new electronic media to realize previously impossible works, or a critique of the increasingly technocratized and commerce-dominated public imagination, "art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it." (Marshal McLuhan). Art can be imagined as a space probe sent into the future. McLuhan described well the idea that by extending human senses, new media change the way we think and live. But what happens when technology itself aquires the ability to sense its environment? Doors that open without a touch, cars that insist the door is ajarthese are the primordial ancestors of a new culture of artifacts that manifest behaviour and the appearance, at least, of intelligence and consciousness.
"This trend will not merely continue; it will explode in the very near future as technology crosses the boundary where it becomes feasible to imbue most of the common (and even disposable) objects in our environment with some degree of sensing, communication, actuation, and processing...The social implications of such a thoroughly animated environment are difficult to envision...life in a world saturated with such capability will be vastly different from the transitory phase that we are entering now." Dr. Joseph A. Paradiso, Technology Director, MIT Media Lab's Things That Think Consortium.When the objects in our environment become capable of probing physical and symbolic space when technology wakes up the world will be transformed in almost unimaginable ways. It is the practiced imagination of the artist that will help to envision, and perhaps give warning to the culture of the beginning of the new millennium.
ARG: SpaceProbe a series of open meetings leading to an exhibition of electro-physical artToronto's Art & Robotics Group was founded at InterAccess in 1996 to provide an environment for knowledge sharing, exploration, critique, and collaborative experimentation in electronic media art. Its first project, called SpaceProbe, brought together a diverse group of about thirty artists for weekly meetings, artist presentations, and workshops. The aim was to develop artistic practice, both technical and aesthetic, and to produce a number of new installation works. The SpaceProbe Show documented in this catalogue represents the culmination of this year-long project. The show was uncurated and open to all members of the group.The aesthetic of the show resists the current commercially-driven obsession with high-tech virtual reality, cyberspace, and "point-and-click" media in favour of an older, historical tradition of electro-physical sculpture and installation work that has existed in Toronto for several decades. As opposed to the predominantly male aesthetic of "robotics", the term is used to refer to a wide range of sensing, processing, and actuating technologies used in our work. While the SpaceProbe project is now complete, the Art & Robotics Group continues to meet and develop new initiatives building on the experience and knowledge resources developed through this project. We hope to explore further the social and aesthetic implications of new technology as a probe of the collective "unconscience" of future culture. Jeff Mann, Coordinator, Art & Robotics Group April 1998 |
