Doran Massey                                                                       Physical Computing

Cynthia Lawson                                                                                 Nov. 4, 2003

Various Artists at ICP Strangers:  The First Triennial of Photography and Video

Almost half of the artists in this triennial are showing video works.  This is a comment on both the increasing importance of video within the photography world and the growing accessibility of video tools.  In the last five years there’s been a technological revolution in video cameras and video editing.  It’s now possible to buy, shoot and edit broadcast quality video with a few thousand dollars using off-the shelf camcorders and laptops.  This gives the artist a highly mobile, highly flexible production capability that did not exist six years ago. 

Less exciting are the street photography and the other photojournalistic photography.  These seem like such a waste of artists’ and technology’s potential to show us things we’ve never seen or even imagined.  More exciting are the artists, like Francis Alys, who use composition and time to create new awareness and perspectives.  There’s Yto Barrada with his wonderful use of color, subject, angle, line, space and composition to create emotional impact in the viewer.  Dis-Armor 2 by Krzysztof Wodiczko is the most physical computing related work.  It resembles a futuristic helmet and breast-plate armor that is meant to amplify the wearer’s facial and vocal expressions.  It uses a laptop, 3 LCD screens and 3 video cameras, microphone, amplifier, speaker and speech recognition software.  The three LCD screens aren’t large enough to really give a good sense of the wearer’s expressions.  A face-sized our larger, single LCD screen on the back of the heard or chest would communicate more.  Nevertheless, this is the first wearable, interactive video installation I’ve seen and is worth recognition for that fact alone.

The clearest example of what current technology is capable of with a little imagination is Kiki Seror’s Not of Her Body, Her Thoughts Can Kill: Dulcinea, a ho-hum title for a fascinating work of art.  Though a loop only thirty five seconds long, it’s a joy to watch over and over again.  Seeing new things and getting new thoughts and impressions each time, it has a meditative effect.