Making Content Work

It is rare that I read a book twice. “Making Art Work” byPatrick McCray is one of them. A book that sends you back to the future of the 50ies, a period in some sense similar to today, where we are again in a cold/warm war context, but where interesting collaborations between art, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and technologists make their appearance as well. Fortunately, it was not all doom then, and neither is it today.

The book is also a huge inspiration for The Scaffold, the transdisciplinary learning studio for the never-normal that I am trying to give birth in different constellations.

In the book, the author Patrick McGray looks at artists-engineers collaborations with a very specific lens: where usually art books glorify the artists, Making Art Work looks at the engineers that made the transdisciplinary artworks work. Hence the title “Making Art Work”.

One of the key insights in these transdisciplinary collaborations is the evolution from “What do I want?” to “What do we have?” Usually, the artist comes in with what she/he wants and asks the engineers to make that happen. This approach leads to a lot of misunderstandings and frustrations. A better take is to start with the question to the engineers “What do you have?” and let the artists play and be creative with what is already there.

The book is a treasure of other gems, anecdotes, and more in-depth research of the life and work of folks like Frank Malina (rocket engineer turned artist), Billy Klüver (laser-beam engineer turned curator/impresario), Jean Tingeley (artwork/machined that destroyed itself). These were also crazy times with Andy Warhol, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, and many others.

Jean Tingeley — Hommage to New York, 1960 — The New York Times — Photographer unknown

One of the initiatives described is the E.A.T. Experiments in Art and Technology, driven by curator/experimentalist/impresario Billy Klüver.

There was so much going on at E.A.T. and the best way to get a sense of the depth and breadth of their work is by reading the book, or sitting down, relaxing, and enjoying this +1hour video about the initiative, narrated by Julie Martin, at that time “Director of Experiments” at E.A.T., and in this video really charming and full of humor.

Not only is her title cool, but the title reflects the core E.A.T. ethos which was all about experiments. The outcome was deemed less important than the journey of the experiment.

The becoming is more important that the state of the thing.

In my earlier post “Apple Just Upgraded the Illusion”, I already touched upon process philosophy as “a way out of what is today seen as overly deterministic thinking about technology and time, and clears the road for thinking about digital technologies and digital selves not as objects but as processes and becoming”

“Projects that did not get realized are as interesting as projects that are”

Julie Martin talks about reverberating beyond careers and personal lives, cultivating a sense of play, disciplinary hybrids, “artrapreneurship”, and taking purposeful risks in order to explore new boundaries in both art and science. How cool is that!

The precursor of E.A.T. was an amazing one-time event “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” one of the first large-scale collaborations between artists and engineers and scientists, held in the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, a huge empty space that was transformed into a theatrical performance space in five days.

E.A.T. was also the main contractor/curator for the content at the PepsiCo Pavillion at the World Fair Japan in 1970.

Here is an excellent article in IEEE Spectrum Magazine of Feb 2020 by the author of Making Art Work, Patrick McCray.

I love the subtitle “50 years on, artists and engineers staged one of the most ambitious and expensive multimedia events — and infuriated their corporate backers”

Here are some pictures from that article:

Both “9 Weeks” and the “Pepsi Pavillion” highlight the importance of space in orchestrating new skills and behaviors. Space as a language. Space as in spatial computing. Space as in spatial thinking, spatial creation.

In re-reading the book “Making Art Work” and writing this post, I suddenly realized that most of my work is about “Making Space Work”, or even better “Making Content Work”. A practice where most of the work is an experiment. Where the becoming and the performance in space are more important than the resulting artifacts.

Performance by the performers on-stage, but also by the participants. Their journey becomes an experiment as well, a curious meandering through an endless labyrinth, letting them connect the dots and do the meaning-making, rather than considering the audience as passive consumers of content that need to be hand-held, directed, and manipulated by and in a scripted non-malleable “show”.

As I mentioned several times before, my practice is not in the entertainment business, my practice is in the learning “bildung” process. These methods are underpinning my work in the area of interventions, provocations, and interruptions. In other words, all my work is about similar forms of artistic and aesthetic expression and experience in the co-creation of content. These methods also led to a new vocabulary and a new set of aesthetics to describe and share what I do and why I do it.

I feel like I am painting with content. Making content work. I am hungry to unleash this creative energy in some big space, together with technologists, scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs.

Warmest

Petervan

Originally published at http://petervan.wordpress.com on July 1, 2023.