My new hat! The sun finally came out today~took a walk with Zoey Rabbit the dog. 

See? I am painting! :-) 

TROUBADOURS OF ART

NEW MEDIA AND MULTI SENSORY EXPLORATION IN THE ARTS

Language is a virus from outer space.
~William Burroughs

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

~William Burroughs

As these two life forms-human and machine-begin to merge a little bit, were talking about technology really as a kind of new nature, something to measure ourselves against, to make rules from , to investigate.
~Laurie Anderson

It’s like a game of add-on.
~Matthew Barney

The most awful, secret forces…lie at the heart of all things…a presence, that was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all form.
~Arthur Machen, The Great god Pan, 1894

Everything is deeply intertwingled.
~Ted Nelson, Creator of Hypertext

by
Wendy Jane Bantam



Between 1100-1350 in southern France there were a group of poets who traveled about the land writing and singing of courtly love. It is said they reached acclaim for their creativity and experimentation in metrical forms and were responsible for the development of the love lyric. They were said to have influenced Dante. They were called the troubadours.1
Much can be said of the influence artists have amongst each other, and the interludes they have with artists of different schools of media. Even more intriguing is the historical development of creative problem solving and the resources available to the artist. Artist and inventors alike have been responsible for the innovation of advancement in our communication abilities, communication being one of our most basic human needs.
Historically, many artists might be credited with studying methods which later directly influenced specific areas of technological development. The artists to be mentioned here display an inert understanding of thinking and creating work in a manner akin to networking systems or concept mapping and have brought artistic endeavors and technology to a level in multi media leading to forms of multi sensory communication.
Opening the doors to multimedia, technology aided the artist in allowing for increased synthesis of information. It is this synthesis of multi threaded and interwoven patterns which directly allows one to observe how an artist solves problems.
In the book, Multimedia from Wagner to Virtual Reality, Randall Packer and Ken Jordan map a timeline of sequential methods of thought and discovery dating from Richard Wagner’s idea of total artwork in 1849 to present methods of invention in virtual reality. 2
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Richard Wagner, who was a composer and a musician dreamed of an all encompassing environment. In his world, what he called “total artwork”, the audience would be immersed in sound, light, and totally encompassed by the theatre. This idea was later experimented with in cinema, and later taken to new levels in the exploration of virtual reality. One of the prevailing limitations during this early period was the presumption that everything must function compositionally in a purely linear fashion. A strict structure of beginning, middle and end.
Much later in 1959, William Seward Burroughs was given reverence for his fragmentary narrative. A writer and artist and the son of an inventor, Burroughs took a different stance on writing and wrote an essay entitled The Cut Up Method in which he advised writers to approach writing in the same manner painters had approached collage and filmmakers approached editing. He suggested writers cut up their writing, the writings of others (in particular Arthur Rimbaud) and piece everything together. In a quote from his essay he writes,
…cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation….you cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.”3

This indicated to build on a story, one must break up the linear single minded view of the telling of the story and approach the problem from multiple views. To do this one must have multiple sources.
Randall Packer and Ken Jordan state Burroughs’ narrative,
… operated as a vast, multi-threaded network that reflected the associative tendencies of the mind, collapsing the boundaries of time and space, drawing attention to previously undetected connections, drawing attention to the links between disparate ideas and elements. 4


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Burroughs stated himself,
“ There is no line between the real world and the world of myth and symbol. Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.” 5

Writers, painters, musicians and filmmakers alike were beginning to converge on a collective plane by taking away their respective boundaries from each other to create a narrative language.
It was also in 1959 the painter, Jasper Johns, explained his dissatisfaction with the manner in which, until then, he was processing information. He described how he had begun to discern what he chose to paint and implied he was beginning to combine historical points of view, threading relevance throughout and bringing a narrative story to inanimate objects.
“Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither…At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye….Three academic ideas which have been of interest to me are(speaking of Cezanne and Cubism) “the rotating point of view”; Marcel Duchamp’s suggestion “to reach the Impossibility of sufficient visual memory to transfer from one like object to another the memory imprint” and Leonardo’s idea that the boundary of a body is neither a part of the enclosed body nor a part of the surrounding atmosphere…” 6

William Burroughs described his method of problem solving as a formula for creating and suggested it was necessary to borrow from many realms to communicate by any means. Jasper Johns hints at this by disclosing the many facets of academic ideas he was connecting between Cezanne and Cubism, Marcel Duchamp, and Leonardo DaVinci.
Regarding creative problem solving Burroughs stated,





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“General procedure: Read and learn all you can about a problem. Look at the problem from a point of zero preconception. Devise variations and alternative solutions. Check back to see if your solution has a workable advantage over solutions previously arrived at…To carry the method a step further than solution of purely technical problem where purpose is implicit in the artifact: devising more efficient gun, tool, boat, signal system, medical or interrogation procedure.”7


His writing and work edged on divisive spontaneity and strongly influenced a perception and rendering of language. He believed himself to be a “map maker, an explorer of psychic areas.” 8 Whereas painters and musicians had started to break free of their boundaries the cut up method freed writers from the confines of rigid format. Burroughs merely indicated this was a format familiar already to film and photography. The work William Burroughs did, whether it influenced directly a push for inventiveness on the part of the artist, or if it was merely a natural progression of the collective consciousness of artists, connected artists and inventors alike to use and develop new media.
Performance artist Laurie Anderson was highly influenced by the work of William Burroughs and she collaborated with him on many projects. Prior to Laurie Anderson’s emergence on the scene of the art world, two futurist thinkers cleared the way by further developing exploratory tools of media. Ted Nelson created hypertext in 1963. And in 1985 Scott Fisher developed research opening doors to virtual reality.
Ted Nelson’s creation of hypertext was based on a derivative of William Burroughs’ intention. Rather than scissors, the computer was the medium.
He believed emerging information could extend the power of human memory… his main concern was the complex nature of the creative impulse, and he saw the computer as the tool that would make explicit the interdependence of ideas, drawing out connections between literature, art, music and science…Nelson’s critical breakthrough was to call for a system of non-sequential writing that would allow for reader to aggregate meaning in snippets in order of his choosing, rather than … structure fixed by the author. 9

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In 1985 Scott Fisher was lauded for his research in virtual reality. It seemed the idea of fragmentary narrative and finding new medium for language combined with the vision of all encompassing “total artwork” led to creating devices which would create a multi sensory world. Scott Fisher hoped to “… develop an interface to engage all the senses…this multi sensory interaction with cybernetic devices created the illusion of entering a digitized landscape...” And eventually toward the “projection of the self into a virtual world.” 10
To do this, one need not only dismantle the narrative and retell the story in a multi faceted metaphor, but project different views from multiple sources; and in this manner, literally affect the human senses.
In 1990 Scott Fisher did research for this project at NASA where later, in 2004, Laurie Anderson would be an artist in residence.

In 1979, the National Endowment of Arts awarded Laurie Anderson a grant with which she wrote and recorded “O Superman.” During this time she had been structuring the performance piece, United States, which was an eight hour production in four parts: Transportation, Politics, Money, and Love. She called it a “talking opera.”
The narrative was interlaced with
a complex multi media stage production consisting of thousands of slides and film clips. Projected over and behind the performers were images of maps, wild animals, astronauts, and electrical equipment. Anderson even devised a makeshift hologram, created by rapidly waving a violin bow in the light cast by a slide projector. Pairing violin and voice with electronic synthesizers and techno-pop drum beats, the sound of the opera matched her handling of images and subject matter. 11


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Anderson’s use of multi media as a communication tool are present in the lyrics of her 1981 work “O Superman”. The lyrics were ominous and suggested a foreboding of war and the terror of communication alone.
O Superman. O judge. O Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad.
O Superman. O judge. O Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad.
Hi. I'm not home right now. But if you want to leave a
message, just start talking at the sound of the tone.
Hello? This is your Mother. Are you there? Are you
coming home?
Hello? Is anybody home? Well, you don't know me,
but I know you.
And I've got a message to give to you.
Here come the planes.
So you better get ready. Ready to go. You can come
as you are, but pay as you go. Pay as you go.
And I said: OK. Who is this really? And the voice said:
This is the hand, the hand that takes. This is the
hand, the hand that takes.
This is the hand, the hand that takes.
Here come the planes.
They're American planes. Made in America.
Smoking or non-smoking?
And the voice said: Neither snow nor rain nor gloom
of night shall stay these couriers from the swift
completion of their appointed rounds.
'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force.
And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi Mom!
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. So hold me,
Mom, in your long arms.
In your automatic arms. Your electronic arms.
In your arms.
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms.
Your petrochemical arms. Your military arms.
In your electronic arms.12
Warner Bros. Records released the song in England where it shot to No. 2 on the charts and then they released the song on an album of songs called “Big Science”. At the time, it was an exciting statement of American culture. The big record label and the reclusive culture of the art world embraced to propel the pioneering efforts of a performance artist.
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Until his death in Lawrence, Kansas in 1996, Laurie Anderson collaborated often with William Burroughs, most notably in her directed film, “Home of the Brave” from 1986.
Burroughs was a direct influence to the performance work of Anderson. His departure from the predictable confines of poetry to a stream of consciousness style of writing coupled with the cut up opened a door through which she stepped to create visual sound interlaced with language.
From 1989 until 1992 Anderson visited Burroughs often in Kansas and gave lectures on performance and media at the University of Kansas.13 Between these years she performed twice at the university and was performing with so much technical equipment she could barely be seen on the stage.
Laurie Anderson’s performance art in the following years directly reflected the changing media and illustrated the multi sensory aspect of her work. However, her thematic structure did not change. The problems she resolved through her work did not alter with the development of multi media. Her skill with new media allowed her to bring narrative to a different level for the viewer by illuminating the senses through sound and light projection. This brought the narrative closer to its goal of eloquent communication by adding multi layers of meaning.

In 2002, eleven years after her performances in Kansas, she performed at the Scottsdale Center for Contemporary art in Arizona. It was one year after the World Trade Center tragedy and she called her performance “Happiness”. Composed with only
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a flexible headband as a microphone, she used her head as a percussive instrument and had only an I-Pod on stage with her. Compared to earlier performances, it was exhilarating to hear such powerful sound evoke such disturbing images from a minimal arrangement. Her interest in technology freed her from the cumbersome piles of sound and light equipment while at the same time freeing her narrative and increasing her association with the audience.
Last year she was named the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Artist in Residence. Through NASA, she will be developing an installation on the cosmos, mapping out the moon and the stars.
In her most recent work, “The End of the Moon”, she explores the themes of consumerism, spirituality, and war. These themes she works to communicate and solve have been threaded throughout her art since her earliest days of performance and video art. In an interview which appears on her website she states,
“The End of the Moon I guess is a phrase that has some of the melancholy I feel at the moment. Not just melancholy really. More like loss. Like I lost something and I can’t put my finger on what it is. Actually I think what I lost was a country. The last three years have been pretty tough. Pretty alienating for a lot of people.”14

She exhibits this alienation through her work using binaural sounds, creating the sensation you’re on a journey somewhere, but without a destination. Even more, she creates the sensation we are all floating on our journey, lost. Then it seems this had been at the core of her work since 1979.


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Presently, she is working with Japanese designers on an infrared system which allows her to access sounds using small wireless cards. She is now able to travel, unencumbered, to performances with two small briefcases.

Dr Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient for his work on “neuroanthropology” has said,
“We are not given the visual world as a whole; there are…forty or fifty different systems in the brain, which are involved in the breakdown, and reconstruction in the analysis and recreation of a visual world. We may start with a little picture, a little photograph at the back of the retina, but that is only the source in the beginning of this enormous process of breakdown, and reconstruction.”15

One of the most important factors in problem solving is being able to look at a problem from different perspectives. One of the distinct troubles in looking at a problem from one limited perspective is that one cannot objectify the total spectrum. The manner in which both William Burroughs and Laurie Anderson did their work allowed them to open new avenues of communication by exploring multi sensory media and resolve their root themes. Burroughs did this by breaking up language and Laurie Anderson through an integration of multimedia, beginning on a path to extra sensory networking.
Developing objectivity in problem solving is essential, along with the capacity to integrate and network many different sources.
Problem solving is both fragmented and structured in the mind of the inventor and artist. Both the artist and the inventor work to develop tools and create methods by which to resolve the problem. Artists see the root theme as multi layered. The root themes in Laurie Anderson’s work, for instance, being consumerism, spirituality and war. The solution is derivative of an all encompassing organization of metaphor.
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Friedrich August Kekule, a chemist responsible for conceiving the benzene molecule, a molecular entity in the shape of a ring, wrote how the solution came to him.
“I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes…{my mental eye} could distinguish larger structures, of manifold conformation; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke.” 16

Problem solving in art through multimedia also calls for a hyper immersion of narrative and information. Reflective of Ted Nelson’s concept that total immersion of information (eventually leading to multi sensory impact) has the capacity to extend human memory. In so doing, these artists also have taken in the earliest concepts of total theatre, total art and have been most successful in their investigations of language, sound, imagery and they network.
One thing always stays the same no matter the development or solution of the problem and those are the base themes.
Arthur Koestler wrote in The Act of Creation, “..the creative act always involves a regression to earlier, more primitive levels on the mental hierarchy, while other processes continue simultaneously on the rational surface.”17
By networking interdisciplinary methods artists are able to create multilayered levels of meaning in root themes instigating hyper sensory base response in the viewer.




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Matthew Barney’s work is exemplary of this. In 1996 Laurie Anderson and Matthew Barney were both finalists for the Hugo Boss Prize in significant achievement in art. 18 In 1996, the first year the Hugo Boss prize was awarded, revealed the significance of Laurie Anderson’s past contribution and heralded the work of the incoming troubadour.
Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle, a five part film series with respective works of stills and sculpture surrounding the work was released in its final state in 2002. Written on the inside cover of Barney’s Guggenheim exhibition catalogue is the statement, “Only the perverse fantasy can still save us.” Calling to mind the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas in which it is written Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is inside of you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is inside of you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
The Cremaster Cycle is a complex construction of mythological narrative. Choreographed as an opera (19) would be, yet without moving in a linear narrative, and laced together in a multi systemic network so that the cycle works “simultaneously on various levels of meaning...created out of sequence...the cycle has at least two sets of beginnings, at least two endings, and many more points of entry. It is a polymorphous organism of an artwork, continuously shifting guises….” 20
Within its multi layers Barney has embedded several base thematic structures such as the extension of and the workings of the human body (i.e., human musculature and reproductive system), a sense of place ( Canada, Utah, New York, Northern Ireland, Budapest to name a few), figureheads such as Harry Houdini and Gary Gilmore as
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symbols for his narrative and secret societies (The Freemasons) and religious groups (The Mormans) representing of a body of law adapted to protect societal structure. These are a few of the overall themes running throughout the Cycle and they are woven into a system using a method reminiscent of the cut up and utilizing nearly every cause and effect in multi media to create an experience that evokes body sensations in the viewer of disturbing levels.
Arthur Koestler wrote “…the distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single ‘plane’ …and the creative act…” is that the “…creative act…always operates on more than one plane.” 21 It seems the great service of new media to the artist is to break up, network, and layer information.
Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is a perfect example of the lengths an artist can go to communicate a concept. As a small example of his problem solving method he states the intention of character development in his films
“…comes during the making of the previous piece….In that way there is a resistance to character development beyond a certain point, beyond a kind of threshold between a sculptural entity and something that might be an over determined element. In that way there is a lack of character development that interests me-the fact that they can quiver between something understood as a character with agency and something that operates more as a state of some sort, or a zone.” 22







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What seems fractured works on a system with Barney. What seems chaotic and disconnected, seems ordered when given enough distance. What seems like an exit in the narrative, later appears in mythological structure as an entrance. What seems to be a state of entropy later appears as order. This is the same thread which interrelates the networking systems of hypertext and virtual reality. As Nancy Spector writes, “the underlying theme of a system in conflict with itself to remain
undifferentiated, when all determining factors point toward differentiation, informs the Cremaster project as a whole”.23
The artists presented here have been at the helm of multimedia. And truly the most common endeavor amongst them must be the communication of exploration.
Although their narratives are dissimilar, their mutual influence is a passion for problem solving for it has given them cause to investigate. And though their narrative themes, at the base, are as old as the oldest stories we know, they have found new means by which to satisfy our perceived human needs and wants and intoxicate, encompass and surround us.










End Notes
1. (http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/wheeler/lit_terms_T.html)
2. Packer, Randall; and Jordan, Ken. Multimedia:From Wagner to Virtual Reality. W.W. Norton & Company; January 15, 2001.
3. http://www.hyperreal.org/wsb/wsbbib.html
4. Packer, Randall; and Jordan, Ken. Multimedia:From Wagner to Virtual Reality. W.W. Norton & Company; January 15, 2001.
5. Literature/ Beat Generation
6. Rose, Barbara. Readings in American Art 1900-1975 Praeger Publishers, New York, 1975.
7.http://www.artpolitic.org/infopedia/wi/William_S._Burroughs.html
8. Remembered from a lecture at the University of Kansas when Laurie Anderson introduced William Burroughs to the student body as her mentor.
9. http://www.artmuseum.net/w2yr/timeline/Nelson.html
10. Packer, Randall ; and Jordan, Ken. Multimedia:From Wagner to Virtual Reality . W.W. Norton & Company; January 15, 2001.
11. ( http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/anderson/card1.html)
12.Big Science released on Warner Bros. Records 01.04.1984.
13.Lived in Lawrence, Kansas and attended these lectures. Laurie Anderson was hosted by William Burroughs and Roger Shimomura.
14. laurieanderson.com
15. Dr. Oliver Sacks inaugural lecture at the Center for the Mind in Canberra (Australian National University)
16.(http://www.woodrow.org/teachers/chemistry/institutes/1992/Kekule.html)
17. Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation
18. (http://www.hugobossprize.com)
19. John Louis DiGaetani, An Invitation to the Opera (New York: Facts on file, 1986; Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1991),p.15
20. Nancy Spector Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle
21. Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation . MacMillan Publishing Company, 1970.
22. Barney, quoted in Sans, “Matthew Barney; Modern Heroes, “ p. 30.
23. Spector, Nancy. Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle Guggenheim Museum Solomon R. Guggenheim Publications, New York, NY 2002.












Bibliography

Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity New York Dutton, 1979.

Bell, Max. “Voyeuristic Tales From Cyberspace”, London Evening Standard, Thursday, June 8, 1995.

Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. (Originally pub.1946) Reprint Edition; citadel Press, 1992.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Harper Collins 1996.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Society, culture, person: A systems view of creativity. In R.J. Sternberg (Eds.) The nature of creativity (pp. 325-339). New York: Cambridge University Press. (1988).

Freeman, M. Finding the Muse: A Sociopsychological Inquiry into the Conditions of Artistic Creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1993.

Goldberg, Roselee. Live Art Since the 60’s. Thames and Hudson. 1998.

Hull, Anne. Moon and Stars Align for Performance Artist: Laurie Anderson Accepts Art Commission from NASA. Washington Post, June 30, 2004.

Johnson-Laird, D.N. Freedom and Restraint on Creativity. In the Nature of Creativity,
edited by R. Sternberg. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pp 202-219,1988.

Jung, C.G. The Fight with the Shadow. Listener, Nov. 7., 1946

Kimmelman, Michael. The Importance of Matthew Barney New York Times Magazine. Oct. 10, 1999.

Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation. MacMillan Publishing Company, 1970.

Martindale, Colin. The Clockwork Muse: The Laws of Artistic Change. New York, NY, Basic Books, 1990.

McCorduck, Pamela. America’s Multi-Mediatrix. Wired Magazine. Issue 2.03 /March 1994.

Oland, Dana. Matthew Barney: From Boise’s Capital High to the Worlds Hottest Artist. The Idaho Statesman March 9, 2003.

Packer, Randall; and Jordan, Ken Multimedia:From Wagner to Virtual Reality. W.W. Norton & Company; January 15, 2001.

Perkins, D.N. The Minds’s Best Work, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. (reprint edition) 1983.

Rose, Barbara. Readings in American Art 1900-1975. Praeger Publishers, New York, 1975.

Ross, Stephen David. Art and Its Significance . State University of New York Press, 1987.

Spector, Nancy. Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle. Guggenheim Museum: Solomon R. Guggenheim Publications, New York, NY 2002.

Salk, J. Anatomy of Reality: Merging Intuition and Reason. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Saunders, Rob and Gero, John S. Artificial Creativity: Emergent Notions of Creativity in Artificial Societies of Curious Agents. Study for the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition. The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. 2001.

Vasari, G. (1550) Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. New York: The Modern Library. 1959.

William S. Burroughs:

www.hyperreal.org
http://www.spress.de/author/burroughs/
Matthew Barney:
http://www.cremaster.net
Laurie Anderson:
http://www.laurieanderson.com
August Kekule:
(http://www.woodrow.org/teachers/chemistry/institutes/1992/Kekule.html)
Hugo Boss:
(http://www.hugobossprize.com)
Oliver Sacks:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s10338.htm
http://www.oliversacks.com

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