I have a work in progress called Assembled Cinema that uses a random select script to assembled video clips on the fly. http://nujus.net/gh_04/gallery11.html

I've also done a series of morph clips that operate on a random select so that there is no looping.
http://nujus.net/gh_04/gallery10.html

These are inspired by a Philip K. Dick novel, VALIS, where three men go to a movie in which the narrative is essentially the same but unfolds differently each time they see the movie.

From: Christiane Paul

Joseph,
I very much enjoyed reading the review and wish I could see the exhibition in person. I really like some of the works and artists included in the show and it was great to get your perspective on them. What most resonated with me were the two closing paragraphs, which brilliantly sum up some of my main complaints about the art world's take on connectivity or "relational aesthetics." It was great to read the following (thank you!!): You wrote: "I concluded that the show’s relationship to connectivity is gravely naïve and passé (if pleasant in a quaint, charming way) in lieu of the multi-networked world in which we now reside. By now various theories of complexity have established an undeniable influence within cultural theory by emphasizing open systems and collaborative adaptability. One ponders if Rondinone has ever even heard of the theories of Tiziana Terranova, Eugene Thacker or other cultural workers involved in the issues of human-machine symbiosis as interface within our inter-network media ecology. So yes, part of the pleasure for me was bathing in this old fashioned naivety, having just spent some serious time reading and writing on the topics of conspiratorial shadow activities (****) and viral software logic based on complex inter-connectionism (*****). Placed against issues of avant-garde cybernetics, the coupling of nature and biology via code, media ecologies, distributed management teams, internet mash-up music, artificial life swarms, the political herd mind, and Negri/Hardt’s multitudes; THE THIRD MIND played in my mind like a romp through a kindergarten playpen. Nice. It felt good to forget about that pervasive nagging political/cultural feeling of stalemate created by the resilience of our current reality in that it assimilates everything. "

From: Arthur Clay

The Dream Machine was conceived by artist and writer Brion Gysin in the early sixties with the help of the Scientist Ian Sommerville. It consist of a cylinder with slots cut into its sides and it is placed on a turntable that is set at the speed of 78 rpm. A light, suspended on a wire into the center of the spinning cylinder, allows light to come out from the slots as it spins on the turntable. The user sits comfortably in front of the Dreamachine, with the closed eyes approximately at center (half height) of the cylinder and quite close (5 cm). The resulting pulsating light seen against the eyelids stimulates the optical nerve and thereby alters the brain's electrical oscillations, causing vivid visions of very bright moving and morphing colours in geometrical patterns to appear "projected" behind the eyelids across the complete the field of vision. We would to thank Corrina Mattner and Sebastian Ulbrich for the building of the Dream Machines.

http://www.digitalartweeks.ethz.ch/web/DAW/LowVoltage07

Rondinone has a show up now in New York at Matthew Marks that is a marvel of fabrication, like a number of other shows lately with Keith Tyson at Pace taking first prize. Both could be said to use what looks like randomness as a premise to explore connectivity in the gallery environment. So I'm not sure if their lack of digital media means they are ignoring it. More likely the know the art world has become so obsessed with the inability to find ways to profit from the limitless commodification of digital product that it has withdrawn into a materialist cocoon. See the recent ceramics show at Gladstone. You can't get much farther from digital than clay.

Interesting to hear of. This chimes in with the current October issue of Artforum that I just read which is about production/fabrication. You have to read the digital as subtext in most cases. The issue of pointcasting seems to be the relevant one.

Also your point about clay is relevant. Again I question where are the third manoeuvres similar to what Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs called the third mind? BTW - The third mind is based on Brion Gysin's rediscovery of Tristan Tzara's (1896-1963) Dada cut-up writing method which he encountered while cutting through a newspaper upon which he was trimming floor mats.

The Keith Tyson exhibit at Pace on 22nd Street is called "Large Field Array" and consists of a hundred or so (it seems) elements in a 3D grid arranged so that a limited number of visitors can walk through them on the ground level. Each element is an example of a fabricated image taken to its limit and as you wander through them you start to draw connections. The entire work is one piece and has been purchased by a collector in England and is scheduled to be put on exhibit in London in a private museum. On first visit it's pretty awesome but upon seeing it a second time the novelty wears off I think to myself this seems like the end of something just as Hirst's "Shark", now on exhibit at the Met, was the beginning and give a little sigh of relief.

Norbert Wiener foresaw analog technology coupling with computers in the 1950s for a new era of hyperautomated cybermanufacturing that, to his horror, also turned into modern warfare. But he was right in understanding that digital technology alone is dull and needs technologies that will embody information physically and perform tangible actions in the world in contrast to digital devices that code information in ones and zeros. So, we have the iPod.

From: ARTFORUM http://www.artforum.com

THE PRODUCERS: A ROUNDTABLE

To chart the expanding parameters of fabrication today, Artforum invited curator Lynne Cooke, artists Angela Bulloch and Charles Ray, and art dealer Jeffrey Deitch to enter into a conversation with three leaders in the field of art production—Peter Carlson, Mike Smith, and Ed Suman—who between them have helped realize some of the most technologically ambitious artworks of our time. Michelle Kuo, whose brief history of fabrication and postwar art appears in this issue, moderated the discussion. The following is an excerpt of the full article; to read the rest, please pick up a copy of Artforum's October issue.

MICHELLE KUO Fabrication is currently everywhere and the range of its manifestations is dizzying: from calling a local company to order metalwork, a 3-D printout, or an audio mix; to employing a design and fabrication firm that connects artists to different services and skills; to becoming part of a dispersed network of production that also includes dealers, curators, and collectors. “The piece may be fabricated,” as Lawrence Weiner famously proposed in 1968, and artists seem to be taking up this suggestion now more than ever. But to what ends? I wonder how we might begin to define fabrication in our moment: How can we understand its relationship to prior models—Minimalism and Conceptual art, for example—and its practical and theoretical hold on the production of art today?

LYNNE COOKE I would like to begin by picking up on the suggestion that some artists might simply order their artworks from various industries over the phone. While this idea may have had a certain provocative currency in the 1960s—or ’30s?—in my experience no artist works like this today. Everyone seems so highly particular and exacting that any order made by phone has been preceded by vast amounts of research into materials, processes, etc. Moreover, artists tend to forge links with companies and producers of various kinds so that they return to them again and again as different bodies of related works evolve.

ED SUMAN We also find that the “telephone order” is more of a theoretical ideal than a reality, although it could be feasible in certain cases. I would tend to see fabrication as specifically having to do with making objects, although contemporary art production encompasses many complex technologies and processes that may result in an artwork in which “objectness” is secondary, such as Anya Gallaccio’s production of four hundred cases of Sonoma Valley zinfandel.

JEFFREY DEITCH All the serious artists with whom I’ve worked treat fabrication as an extension of their studio practices. None of them would order a work on the telephone, unless that was part of the concept. One of the reasons this discussion is timely, however, is that there are now many artists who do order work over the phone. It’s common for artists to make a small sculptural maquette and send it out to a fabricator who can blow it up to gallery size. There are artists who compose a painting on the computer and then e-mail the file to a lab that can print it on a large canvas. I’ve found that the sophisticated viewer can usually tell the difference between fabrication that is an extension of the hand and mind of the artist and fabrication that has simply been contracted out.

CHARLES RAY Just as artists work in many different ways, they also work with fabricators in many different ways. Some artists have an idea or a vision and go to the fabricator to see that vision realized. Perhaps they see this, in the best case, as a one-to-one relationship between what they want to have made and the finished product, but other noise inevitably bubbles up in the process of making things. Other artists might think of a fabrication company as a very complicated hand tool. Collaboration is a word that often comes up, but the initial vision is usually not a collaboration. One can have a collaboration with a fabricator as much as one can have a collaboration with a hammer—though a hammer only tells you what it can’t do the hard way, and a fabricator usually tells you this by talking about the budget. Does fabrication begin with the materials an artist selects? Is an artist who uses plywood alone in his studio working with unseen fabricators?

MIKE SMITH I don’t think a fabrication studio is just another hand tool. Many artists are disconnected from materials to the point that they need to work with people who have that connection. Invariably, this condition dictates that people can’t just order things over the phone unless it is a case of reproducing something that has already been made or discussed, such as an edition.

CHARLES RAY I agree with you that the fabrication studio is not literally a hand tool, but I think making art is not at all like making a ship. When we discuss the various techniques, materials, processes, and outside expertise, we tend to see artistic production as a product, and I believe something much messier is actually going on. When I refer to the fabrication studio as a hand tool, I’m trying to say that an artist does not necessarily lose the confusion, mistakes, and problems that come about while trying to give birth to a work.

*****

MICHELLE KUO Speaking of this “wow factor,” can we discuss the recent escalation of production value and the emulation of high-end commodity production—and perhaps some of the problems those developments pose for artists who lack the resources to pursue this type of practice?

JEFFREY DEITCH As Peter and Ed know, I helped finance and develop Jeff Koons’s “Celebration” project and endured the challenges of high-production-value fabrication that broke new technological ground. At the early stages, the work cost more to fabricate than it could be sold for. Now the selling prices are well beyond the fabrication costs. The buoyant art market has made possible many ambitious fabrication projects that would not have been economically viable ten years ago. Koons’s “Celebration” works can only be realized using expensive materials and processes. This is inherent to the aesthetic meaning of the work. But I sense there is now a post-Koons cult of extreme production values developing, in which the expense of the production overshadows the content of the work. This was done, perhaps deliberately, in the case of Damien Hirst’s $100 million diamond skull. It became the most talked-about art object of the year, not because of its quality or its power as an image, but because of how much it cost to make and its price. These issues also lead to the question of overfabrication. I’ve had the experience of looking at a body of work that I helped finance and feeling that I gave the artist too much money. The work would have been better if the artist had had to stretch the use of inexpensive materials and had edited out the directions that were not worth pursuing. Fabrication sometimes overwhelms the content of the work.

ANGELA BULLOCH This is an interesting point, Jeffrey. It can be easy to see this after the work is done but more complicated for both artist and fabricator at the time of production. With film production in particular, it can be hard for the director to keep the team focused on the film she or he wants to make, especially when there are so many different people and elements that need to conform to the director’s idea. That’s not so different from making a costly large-scale installation within a limited amount of time and with many people involved in the production.

CHARLES RAY As we see more and more money available for young artists, we see the emulation of a certain production value that becomes stylistic. Many years ago a serious work got its currency from being produced in bronze, and a few years ago fiberglass really seemed like the contemporary bronze. One can find these problems in all ages, as we often mistake production value and style for good quality in the art itself. The issue of overproduction in younger artists’ work is a temporal problem as well. Using other people’s money—the patronage of collectors and art centers—removes the sense of completion from the artists’ into the funders’ deadlines. These deadlines lie outside the nature and problems one might encounter in bringing forth a work from idea to object. Older artists perhaps have enough authority to miss a deadline, to pull out of a show, to keep working at their own pace, while younger artists might be swept into these other production cycles.

*****

MICHELLE KUO So would it be fair to say that the current widespread adoption of fabrication is in part a way of meeting the hunger for spectacular effects and the demand for more and bigger artworks that are the result of institutional expansion from the ’60s to today?

CHARLES RAY Not necessarily. There are many works that were produced by very sophisticated fabricators for a great deal of money that simply cannot hold up to the crowds or the poorly guarded and maintained spaces of many contemporary art centers or biennials. Video projections, along with installations produced from fairly cheap materials, are good examples of work that fits these spaces pretty well.

MIKE SMITH But I think it is important to understand the demands being made on artists to produce work and to exhibit in larger and more numerous museums, galleries, etc. With this explosion of possibilities, artists have not been able to cope with the demand for their work.

CHARLES RAY Well, perhaps some artists see the fabricator as a production line and are able to produce vast amounts of work in a kind of serial order, but other artists run into new technical and engineering questions for each project and don’t work in a serial manner. This is probably a bit more exciting for the fabricator.

MIKE SMITH Our studio has worked with people in a serial manner, and yes, it can be dull. The projects that are more interesting and challenging to me personally are those that involve a marriage of new and old technologies or processes that we didn’t imagine could coexist. I think that artists now work without boundaries and ultimately this means that they work with a wider range of people with different skills, because it is not possible for one person to harbor all this knowledge and to be able to produce the work.

*****

MIKE SMITH The idea of patenting a process or technique is quite alluring, but in reality these things are developed in order to realize a project, and they become part of the process. As they are developed in this way, then they are automatically within the public realm and are therefore difficult to patent. Ultimately, patenting is a very expensive process and may actually not be worth the effort.

PETER CARLSON I agree that patenting is an expensive process, but what would you think of using the particular process developed for one artist in another artist’s work? Do you think there is an ethical or moral issue to limit its use?

MIKE SMITH I don’t think the author always drives the project. On more than one occasion we have resuscitated projects with artists when they were very close to throwing in the towel.

CHARLES RAY Are you talking about an artist being stuck on how to direct a project or on what technology to use to build the project?

MIKE SMITH It’s more to do with artists’ expectations and their ability to communicate—and possibly my own misunderstanding. This can lead to a minor or major crisis within a project. Many artists make work for exhibitions rather than simply making work. In this scenario, with short lead times, when things don’t work out in the way everyone envisaged, it can lead to disappointment. This is not an issue of mismanagement but rather a case of the unexpected or, in some cases, naïveté. The main problem is that artists seem to spend less time “living” with their work before it reaches the public realm, and this raises various questions that challenge their control of the process.

"...the idea of patenting a process or technique is quite alluring, but in reality these things are developed in order to realize a project..."

Oh I see, art is a manufacturing process. Ho hum, how 20th century.
Let's see there's the producers of art and then there's the delivery system and then there's the consumers of art. Nice little package. Perfectly neat. Which are you ... a producer or a consumer? Or maybe you're both.

http://nujus.net/gh

If you want to see some images - this piece has been web published here: http://www.artlist.biz/ARTList.ARTVIEWS.ThirdMind.JN.htm