Anna Lovatt on “I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen”

TWENTY YEARS AGO, debates on the presence of screens in art museums centered on questions of space. Artists, art historians and curators have seen the projected image as a place of tension between the physical environment of the gallery and the illusory space on screen, between the modes of embodied and cinematic spectatorship. In recent years, the proliferation of digital screens has complicated matters, giving audiences – or users – the power not only to see but also to act on virtual and physically distant spaces. Such developments have, in turn, had major consequences for the institutional experience of digital art. Art historian Kate Mondloch has proposed that digital screens exacerbate the “spatial uncertainties” of previously projected images, triggering a “standoff between being ‘both here And there” – psychologically and physically invested simultaneously in the physical space of the gallery and in the screen spaces – and being “neither here neither he’-be overwhelmed by so many screen-dependent spaces that he is effectively prevented from being consciously present in any of them. Deeply destabilizing to the individual, this condition also disrupts the type of focused, contemplative viewing that museums have historically sought to foster.

“I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen,” curated by Alison Hearst for the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art, was a case study in the circumstances described by Mondloch. Encompassing the work of fifty artists diversely engaged in analog and digital media, the exhibition cast its net far beyond the early days of video art to include computer art, video installation, internet art , AI generated work, augmented reality pieces and artwork. hit as NFT. Also included were montages of images found on the Internet, paintings informed or generated by digital technologies, and sculptural objects produced through the accumulation and reuse of electronic waste. The exhibit began its timeline in 1969 – the year of the televised moon landing and the launch of the first Arpanet computer network – and has extended to the present day. This extended tenure created a cacophonous, sometimes entertaining, yet often incoherent viewing experience that exposed the challenges of wrestling with such a varied subject as “the digital screen.”

Hearst organized the exhibition around nine themes that she acknowledged were porous and overlapping. Certain headings, such as “Connectivity” and “Surveillance,” are so pervasive in discussions of screen culture that they have done little to contextualize or illuminate the strategies on display. The exhibition grouped most of the works produced between the 1960s and the 1990s in the first room under the title “Liminal Space”. There, visitors were greeted by a 1992 iteration of Nam June Paik tv buddha, emphasizing the central thesis of the show: that screens “offer a mirror to society and help to give meaning to life and to the dominant culture”. In Paik’s signature work, a Buddha statue appears to contemplate its own image on a monitor in a continuous feedback loop made possible by CCTV.

At Modern, this monitor was placed in front of a temporary wall that separated it from and connected to Lynn Hershman Leeson’s pioneering interactive installation. Lorne, 1979–84, which also centers on a character staring at a television screen. This figure is the viewer, who is invited to enter the fictional Lorna’s apartment, sit in her chair, and use a remote control to navigate through thirty-six chapters on a videodisc (originally a LaserDisc) displayed on a monitor. Reconstituting Lorna’s agoraphobic existence, the spectator negotiates the different chapters and makes decisions that could lead to the character’s suicide, his continued confinement or the violent destruction of his television set. Seeing this work in conjunction with Paik’s more well-known installation was eye-opening. While Paik’s work highlights the liveliness and immediacy of the video screen, qualities that give it a mirror-like appearance, Lorne treats the screen as a permeable interface through which users can manipulate other subjects and spaces with potentially catastrophic results.

The multitude of screens in “I’ll Be Your Mirror” – not to mention the smartphones in all our pockets – placed viewers in a confusing but increasingly familiar space that was, according to Mondloch, “neither here nor there. “. Tadao Ando’s building facilitated this effect, coaxing visitors around, in and out of the central exhibition spaces hosted by the structure’s five pavilions, the multidirectional flow sometimes feeling symptomatic of curatorial uncertainty. Some works appeared in a group in the catalog, to be rearranged in the exhibition. In the publication, for example, Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds, 2002, was discussed in the context of video game culture with works by Cassie McQuater and Eva and Franco Mattes, but in the exhibition it was projected onto an entire wall alongside paintings by Jacqueline Humphries and Laura Owens, hinting at a shared digital aesthetic. . This confusion was particularly felt in the gallery devoted to “The Posthuman Body”. There, paintings by Caitlin Cherry and Avery Singer jostled for space with early webcam video by Petra Cortright, machinima film by Carson Lynn and AR face filters by Huntrezz Janos, in a chaotic installation that distracted and detracted. to every job involved. Formal resemblances triumphed without regard for the divergent viewership modes that the different works invited.

More compelling was the section titled “Ecology,” which explored the environmental impact of digital technologies and presented a readable guideline. Two by Simon Denny NFT mining offsets as of 2021, in-house ethereum miners were shown, the powerful computers used to create, authenticate, and add new transactions to the blockchain before the cryptocurrency platform transitioned to a proof-of-stake system supposedly more energy efficient by 2022. Denny bought the miners on eBay, taking them off the grid and donating their processing power to an environmental research project that uses such computers to model climate change outcomes. Presenting these objects as ready-made sculptures and digital animation, Denny’s project made ethereum miners palpable as emphatically physical polluting machines. Nearby, Rick Silva’s West Fronts: Siskiyou Waterfall, Gold Butte, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears, 2018, demonstrated a similar point, combining drone footage with 3D animation to consider the threat of resource extraction posed on Indigenous public lands after the Trump administration relaxed national monument protections. Here too, the supposed immateriality of the digital is betrayed by its brutal ecological impact. Opposite, Elias Sime repurposed Western consumer electronics collected from Ethiopian markets to create an intricate multi-panel relief sculpture, updating the Rauschenbergian assemblage for the era of global e-waste trade.

Curiously, the works that performed best in “I’ll Be Your Mirror” were those presented in spaces of their own, including Gretchen Bender’s frenetic, whirling performance. Total recall, 1987; Hito Steyerl’s two-piece installation How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Educational Tutorial .MOV File, 2013, which extends the historic function of the screen as a form of concealment and camouflage; and that of Arthur Jafa The white album, 2018, which exposes and dismantles whiteness in a video collage that is by turns excoriating, tender and chilling. These works demanded – and got – the viewer’s full attention, even as they amplified and parodied aspects of film culture. Bender once proposed that her work deliberately invited the sweeping television gaze that ’80s audiences had become accustomed to, explaining that she had “turned up the tension” to ward off and critique that gaze. Perhaps museums should follow suit. While the viewership patterns of digital culture have inevitably impacted the art viewing experience, institutions should strive to critically examine this viewer, presenting digital artworks in ways that not to flatten but to individualize and make their specific effects legible – thus freeing us from entrenched gazes.

Anna Lovat is an associate professor of art history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.