Incoherently Massiver

(More incoherently massive, incoherently more massive?) A few days ago I returned to the Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria. This time I saw the larger-scale works on the ground floor, "larger-scale" being the distinguishing feature. The largest of all is the enormous reclining Buddha by Xu Zhen that dominates the forecourt, but there were a considerable number of other works that each took up a sizeable room. Perhaps the most impressive for me was the sinister mass of the work by Shilpa Gupta (not given a title), which was a roughly spherical shape some four metres across, the outside covered with microphones, placed in a dark room. There were evidently speakers inside the mass, as there was sound, a mixture of crowds talking, music, and other noises. The work was conceived as a meditation on borders and flows of refugees, referring in particular to the separation of Pakistan from Gupta's native India in 1947.

Detail of Shilpa Gupta's work

Another work that appealed to me was the large grouping of extraordinary masks under the title "Vespers" by Neri Oxman, who directs the Mediated Matter group in the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  The works were made using newly developed 3D printing techniques. They were also very effectively lit, each plinth having small lights pointing upwards; there were also narrow-beam spotlights in the ceiling.

From the "Vespers" series by Neri Oxman

Cross-cultural exuberance was provided by the Javanese artist Uji (Hahan) Handoko Eko Saputro, whose work combines traditional Javanese images with pop-culture styles. Another exuberant work was by the American artist Pae White, who strung a room with brightly coloured threads as well as decorating the walls in bold patterns; and a third was the "Flower Obsession" room by well-known Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. On entry to this we were given a paper flower with an adhesive base, and asked to add it somewhere in the room. A contrast was the too-cool-for-school array of chairs by the Japanese designer Aki Sato, from Nendo Design. It is claimed that the chairs were inspired by the visual gestures found in manga comics.

One of the works inn the installation by Uji (Hahan) Handoko Eko Saputro

Part of Pae White's room

Yayoi Kusama's "Flower Obsession" (part)

One of Aki Sato's chairs

Another Japanese work was "Moving Creates Vortices and Vortices Create Movement" by teamLab from Tokyo. This was a swirling vortex-like projection on the floor of a room with mirrored walls; the centre area of the projection was responsive to the movements of people nearby.  Then there was the selfie heaven of "Santa Cruz River" by Alexandra Kehayoglu (Argentina); an unfair description, as the work has a serious purpose, being based on a threatened ecosystem.

 teamLab's swirling floor

Alexandra Kehayoglu's "Santa Cruz River"

The last of the room-sized installations I'll mention is "Noss Noss", the treatment of the downstairs café in the NGV by Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj. The main element is repeated red octagons containing an Arabic word. On this visit I found out what the word means: it is "stop" in Arabic; the octagons are Arabic stop signs.

The floor of the café (Hassan Hajjaj)

I'll close by mentioning a work that does not take up a whole room by itself, though it does occupy three large panels: "Sump System" by Hong Kong/Australian artist Richard Giblett. This is a detailed drawing of a semi-abstracted industrial landscape, the whole appearing to be reflected in some black liquid like sump oil, the "sump" of the title; it refers to the invisible dark underside of our society of profligate consumption. I assume this work was inspired in part by British artist Richard Wilson's work "20:50", which consisted of an actual lake of sump oil in a room; I saw it in London some years ago and the oil did act as a very effective (and spooky) black mirror.

Detail of Richard Giblett's "Sump System"

My tentative opinion of the Triennial from my last visit has been confirmed: there is a lot of interesting and varied work, but there seemed to be no particular reason for bringing together these works at this time, except maybe Instagrammability.

To Edition or Not to Edition?

When I started making digital prints I hesitated for some time about whether the prints should be in limited editions. I found that galleries are only interested in limited editions, so from a practical standpoint that answered the question, full stop.
 
From one point of view the idea of a limited edition digital print is silly. With a traditional technique such as engraving on copper, the plate is relatively soft and prints gradually decrease in quality as the plate becomes worn. Thus in the traditional practice different prints from the same plate vary in quality, and there is a natural limit to the number of prints produced. If prints beyond this number are wanted, it is necessary for someone (likely not the original artist) to rework the plate, going over it with an engraving tool to sharpen up the lines. This may be seen as lessening the contribution of the original artist, so prints from the reworked plate probably don't have the same authority or value as those from its original state.

With digital prints there is no plate to wear out, the source being a computer file in a format like TIFF. Prints from the same file can still vary, according to the choice of paper and inks, the quality of the printing equipment and the ability of the person doing the printing to get the best out of the machinery. But this has nothing to do with edition numbers.

So, why limit edition numbers? The artist Marius Watz, well-known for working with computer code, has said in part:

"The simple answer is because there is no market for unlimited copies … the argument that limited copies imbue the object with perceived value might be uncomfortable to accept, but it's hard to refute. To sell to collectors … it is necessary to build a personal connection between the collector, artist and artwork. Scarcity is simply a shortcut to achieving this goal, however illusory."

(From https://www.quora.com/Why-should-an-artist-make-limited-edition-prints-of-a-painting-as-opposed-to-selling-an-unlimited-amount-of-prints)

So, that gives two reasons for making limited editions: they use scarcity to impart perceived value, and they give the chance of a personal connection, especially with smaller edition numbers. I accept these reasons, but there is something else as well. For me, having a limited edition gives a sense of boundary or closure to a project, and I want that. I'm not sure what I'm feeling here. It has something to do with the physical presence of the print once it has been made, an artefact that can be quite imposing and requires respectful handling. No doubt this is linked to the "aura" of the unique work of art, but that is a topic for another time.

 

C, Programming Language of the Year

Five or so years ago I was renovating my programming practice, and I looked at the popularity of programming languages at that time (http://gommog-blog.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/popularity-of-programming-languages.html).

Now I am doing a minor overhaul of my programming practice. I don't intend to change my main programming language (which remains C++), but I thought I would see what changes there have been over five years.

I am not interested in determining "the best" programming language. Obviously there is no single "best" language: what is "best" depends on the job to be done, the skills of the programmer(s), and things like the availability of suitable program libraries; C++ fits my situation. But a popular language will have an active user community and a lot of online resources, so popularity does have benefits.

Last time I looked at two indices of popularity, the TIOBE index (http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index//) and another called the Transparent Language Popularity Index. That is now defunct, so this time I looked at the IEEE's index (http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programming-languages-2017). IEEE stands for "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers", but the Institute has broadened its scope beyond engineering to computer science and other areas.

Last time I looked at 11 languages. This time the TIOBE index and the IEEE index have the same top five languages: Java, C, Python, C++ and C#, though the ordering differs between the two indices. All of these except Python were designed as general-purpose programming languages, and were certainly very popular five years ago. Python started off as a scripting language, but soon joined the general-purpose club and increased in popularity.

The  surprise is the continuing longevity of the C language. The TIOBE index awarded it "language of the year" for 2017, as it increased its usage the most during the year (according to TIOBE's calculation). Of all the the languages mentioned in the this post, C is the oldest by some way (dating from 1973) and it is the only one in the top five that is not object-oriented. TIOBE speculates that C's ongoing popularity is due to being taken up by the manufacturing industry. It is suited to so-called embedded systems, computers that are built into other products; since all computers that were around in 1973 were small by today's standards, it isn't surprising that C is suitable for the new wave of small computers.

If I take a sort of average of the two indices, the next six languages after the five above are JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, R, Swift and Visual Basic, making up 11 languages altogether. The first three are associated with Web development, and R is designed for data handling and statistics. Swift is Apple's new general-purpose language, intended to replace Objective-C, and Visual Basic is a general-purpose Microsoft language with quite a long history in different versions.

Compared to five years ago, the newcomers are Swift and R. Swift has displaced Apple's previously favoured language of Objective-C, and R has more or less come from nowhere, presumably due at least in part to the rise of Big Data. The scripting language Perl has dropped out of my top 11, but would be number 12 by my rough ordering.

So the most popular languages are quite stable over five years, and I am pleased to see that C++ is still very much alive and kicking.


 

Incoherently Massive

Earlier this week I visited the National Gallery of Victoria's NGV Triennial exhibition. This is free to enter and is a very large show, claiming over 100 artists from 32 countries. I only saw a fraction of the works, so I will be back. But here are some first impressions.

Firstly, there were a lot of people here. Secondly, the works that I saw are very diverse. The NGV has made a point of including design, fashion and craft alongside art, and information about the show states that there was initially no set theme, but that five themes or "prevalent ideas" emerged: Movement, Time, Change, Body and Virtual. It is hard to think of anything not covered by at least one of these.

And thirdly, the show is certainly tuned into modern media. Apart from actual multimedia artworks there are screens around the place showing words and images related to the five themes, and on the third level there is a bar with tablets for people to use, linked to all sorts of vaguely connected discussions, and more screens around the walls. And visitors are encouraged to get on social media and say what they think.

There were, as expected, a number of works dealing with refugees and with climate change. Some of these turned out to be political in a way that the NGV perhaps didn't expect, turning into protests against the employment by the NGV of Wilson Security, who have been involved in brutal treatment of detainees on Manus island. Two artists, Candice Breitz and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, retitled their works to include the words "Wilson must go", and a third, Richard Mosse, edited his work to include statements from Behrouz Bouchani, a refugee detained on Manus Island who had been mistreated by Wilson Security. The changes came too late to be included in the catalogue, but they are included in the NGV's online material.

On this visit I saw two of the works just mentioned. Richard Mosse's Incoming is a large installation showing videos and still images of refugee camps and the like, obtained by using a military-grade infrared telephoto camera. The images are crisp, black and white, and with an eerie quality that reminds us that this camera does not see the same way that we do. Candice Breitz's Wilson Must Go consisted of six in-depth interviews with people driven out of their countries, and also a news-bite version consisting of brief extracts from the interviews read by two Hollywood actors, Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore. There was a point here about the way that celebrities acting a part are more real to us than the actual people who have lived through the events.

A detail from Richard Mosse's Incoming

A number of the works in the Triennial were placed in among the NGV's permanent collection. This applied in particular to Ron Mueck's Mass, a massive collection of oversize skulls, in with 18th-century European paintings. The wall text referred to the tradition of vanitas painting, but the surrounding paintings didn't reflect this. For more, and more varied, skulls, come to Ballarat and see the exhibition Romancing the Skull, on until 28th January (http://artgalleryofballarat.com.au/gallery_exhibitions/romancing-the-skull/).

Ron Mueck's Mass in among the 17th-18th century European painting

Another work from the Triennial placed in among the permanent collection is Ore Streams, from the Dutch Formafantasia design studio. This complex installation is about mining of metals; the group consider that by about 2080 most of the available ores will have been mined, so the source of metals will have to be recycling: "the era of above-ground mining is upon us". Ore Streams was placed among the 19th-century paintings, and there was no discernible connection. But the placing did lead to some of the 19th-century works getting more attention than usual, even if of the selfie-taking kind.

Ore Streams, installation view (one side)

In front of John Rogers Herbert, Moses Bringing down the Tables of the Law (1870s)

Some other works I saw, across art, design and fashion: Sean O'Connell made images made by placing jewellery (rings made out of different materials) in the path of electric discharges that then struck photographic plates. The design studio Joris Laarman Lab had a large table in the form of a bridge, made by advanced manufacturing techniques. Timo Nasseri had a modern take on muqarnas, a technique used in Islamic architecture of covering the inside of a dome or vault with repeating three-dimensional shapes. Nasseri made a small version covered in mirrors and placed in a wall; it showed kaleidoscopic fragmentary reflections of the people passing by. Iris van Herpen had a remarkable dress cut somehow out of leather.

One of Sean O'Connell's Spark Ring works.

Joris Laarman Lab, Bridge Table (prototype)

Timo Nasseri, Epistrophy

Leather dress by Iris van Herpen

What I took away from this first visit was a feeling of incoherence. There are a lot of interesting things here (and I know I haven't seen some of the most interesting ones yet), but there didn't seem to be any reason for selecting these particular works and bringing them together. There wasn't even a post-modern line like "the theme is that there is no theme". What I saw reads as though the curators took a bunch of interesting works and threw them at the wall to see what would stick, always with one and a half eyes on mass audience appeal. The catalogue gives the same impression of incoherence, being a heterogeneous collection of essays, statements, interviews and images; the amount of space given to individual artists represented in the Triennial varies wildly.

After I had visited the Triennial I came across two contrasting reviews, an enthusiastic one by the Guardian at http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/18/ngv-triennial-astounding-blockbuster-grips-the-heart-and-repels-the-nostrils, and a remarkably jaundiced one by Giles Fielke at http://memoreview.net/blog/triennial-at-ngv-international-by-giles-fielke. I haven't made up my mind about the exhibition yet, and I need to see more of it. I will definitely be back.

What's in a name? (Again)

Some years ago I had to choose a name for my art practice. Now I am returning to this, as I am starting a Facebook artist's page (facebook.com/GordonMonroArtist) and an Instagram page (instagram.com/gordonmonroartist). It is apparently necessary to have a label that is at most three words long, in accordance with the idea of an "elevator statement" (U.S. usage, but "lift statement" sounds odd): you find yourself in a lift with an influential person: you want to tell them what you do, but you only have the time it takes the lift to travel a couple of floors.

My practice is to write computer programs that generate all or most of an artwork. There is an established name for the practice where artists set up systems (computerised or not) that generate artworks, and that is generative art. I would like to call myself a generative artist; unfortunately the term isn't well known, so it needs explanation; no good for elevator statements.

"Process artist" also needs explanation, and an artist's "process" generally refers to the personal process an artist goes through when making or developing work, such as reflecting on events or personal experience, gathering material, and so on. This is quite different from setting up a system that then makes the art.

"Computer artist" brings to mind someone who uses tools like Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator to make art, which is not what I do.

I thought about "programmer/artist", since I write programs as part of my practice. But I am not a professional programmer, and "programmer/artist" (or "artist/programmer") emphasises the programming side too much.  For me programming is a means to artistic ends.  Also I don't want to use "software artist", as "software art" has had the meaning of art, made in software certainly, that is about software (and about the way governments and big corporations use it); my art is not about software as such, nor about its political implications, except in a very indirect fashion.

I have a similar problem with "mathematician/artist". It is quite a while since I have been active as a mathematician. I certainly use ideas from mathematics as one of the major inspirations for my work, and I use a certain amount of relatively low-level mathematics while writing my programs, but "mathematician/artist" over-emphasises the mathematical side (even if it might be good branding).

So the best three-words-or-fewer approximation I can think of is still "digital media artist". If I am allowed five words I could say "generative artist (digital media artist)", but it would have to be a long lift journey.