Mirror, mirror - Grapevine - ID/entity: Portraits in the 21st Century art exhibition

Afterimage, March, 2002 by Hana Iverson

In conjunction with the exhibition "ID/entity: Portraits in the 21st Century," November 23, 2001--January 15, 2002, The Kitchen organized a discussion moderated by Judith Donath, an Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. The exhibition was initiated by the Sociable Media Group (SMG), which is directed by Donath, and produced by the MIT Media Lab. It premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts in October 2001.

Donath introduced a diverse panel that included: Richard Kostelanetz and Hyun-Yeul Lee, who presented their "Alternative Autobiographies" (2001) installation; Marshall Reese and Raffi Krikorian, who collaborated on "Van Eyck's Mirror" (2001), a project that also Included Nora Ligorano and Stefan Agamanolis; and Paul Kaiser, Shelley Eshkar and Marc Downie talked about "Loops" (2001), the portrait they developed of the dancer Merce Cunningham.

Donath first outlined the background of the Sociable Media Group, which began with a mission to address the question of how technology is changing what it means to be human. As one aspect of this inquiry, the identity pieces on display in the exhibition were developed over a period of months to Investigate the idea of portraiture and how media are changing how we may "capture" a person. Technology has given us the ability to create portraits from sources ranging from a person's financial history to their DNA, and the purpose of the portraiture project was to explore how technology has expanded the artist's ability to create a portrait, and how it is changing the way we see artwork and view ourselves.

The first speaker, Richard Kostelanetz, is an artist trained In intellectual history who became interested in alternative forms of history and autobiography. He and Lee, a graduate student who is part of SMG, worked in a collaborative style based on the John Cage model of chance/trust, Kostelanetz allowed Lee free access to enter his world and creative license to design his portrait. Lee had always been interested in expressive typography. In reading Kostelanetz's writing she found "that he had written extensively dedicated to one subject: himself." She decided to create a textual portrait, a physical installation that would allow the viewer to become immersed in his world. She got to know Kostelanetz, "what he was wearing, his living style," and went through a process that began with digesting his work and ended with finding a physical form that conveyed this information while leaving room for the viewer. She pulled ideas from his books and organized them into the fundamental categories of birth, death, rela tionships and his self-perception as a writer. Her installation took form as a sparsely furnished room: window, fireplace, desk, computer and typewriter. The flame In the fireplace represented the motion of birth; ink in the inkwell stood for continuous prose. The window was the interface between Kostelanetz and the world, while the typewriter and computer chronicled a transition from the historical to the modern. People were able to email Kostelanetz and access updates to his autobiography, which he posts on the Web regularly. Going beyond a static representation, the interaction with the viewer created a dynamic and evolving portrait.

Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese developed "Van Eyck's Mirror" in collaboration with Raffi Krikorian and Stefan Agamanolis. Ligorano and Reese's previous works have included a video clock project where parallel times and parallel technologies make a statement about changes in language, literature and information. They proposed "a mirror at the back of one's head...[since] likeness in an electronic age is as much about identity as it is about anonymity," finding inspiration in Van Eyke's painting The Arnolfinl Marriage (1434), which pictures a convex mirror showing the backs of the subjects and a tiny portrait of the painter. In their installation, a sensor detects the approaching viewer and triggers a projected image of Van Eyck to appear in the mirror. At first the ghostly painter looks directly at the viewer but then he turns away. Krikorian, a computer scientist and software developer who helped bring the piece to life, had not communicated with artists before and found that speaking outside the model of c ross-industry communication left him "at the mercy of the minute details of the English language" and the whims of email typos. One of those typos created a three-day calamity, a reason he continues to see the piece in terms of its technical flaws. But the artists reinterpreted these "bugs" as "features," so that now, as the viewer leaves the piece, Van Eyck turns again to look, watching as it were, the back of the viewer's head. Regardless of how this inadvertent "feature" manifested, it remained a haunting gesture.

Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser worked with Merce Cunningham and Marc Downie on "Loops." Eshkar and Kaiser also worked with Cunningham on "Virtual Dances, Hand-Drawn Spaces" (an installation) and "Bi-ped," Cuningham's acclaimed performance piece that debuted in 2000 at the Lincoln Center Summer Arts Festival. Their proposal for the "ID/entity" show was to create a portrait of Cunningham based on the motion of his hands and the sound of his voice, a portrait that was "always in motion, never still and abstract." As one of the great dancers of the twentieth century whose ability to perform is limited by age and rheumatism, his face and hands are still extraordinarily expressive. For months Cunningham rehearsed a hand-dance on airplanes and in hotel rooms as they were touring "Bi-ped." Kaiser reported: "Merce gave the most unbelievable performance of the piece, where each joint was moving at a different rate. It was the most complex time/motion capture we'd ever done." They used that data as the template for "Loops."