Past the midway point, my installation is 25% funded. While I have a feeling I will made goal, it's going to be a difficult and probably painful journey indeed. Not that the platform or anything about the process is disappointing, but the challenge of launching something like this is not too different from launching a political campaign, with similar processes, tensions and outcomes.
I worked on a presidential campaign--made the trips to Ohio and Pennsylvania and all the etceteras--not with the belief that my candidate was going to win; no, no. My candidate HAD to win. What he believed in was that important, and I believed, important for my fellow citizens.
That conviction is what's needed when launching a crowd funding campaign. It's what fuels the resourcefulness, it's what makes strategies turn on a dime and switch paths in doing one thing: Getting a message across clearly.
Kickstarting an installation is like a presidential campaign in other ways: It's all or nothing. Either you're the president, or…you're not. Either you're funded, or not. Also, it's a highly targeted media blitz that pulls in smarts from every genre of creativity. What I find the greatest similarity, however, is that, funding an installation, just like campaigning for president, is getting people to believe in your idea, your passion, your experience. There's nothing tenable, not an ounce of predictability or guarantee. Just a belief in a promise and this is quite unlike other types of projects like products, games or technology--even fine art ones like painting.
Ultimately, it's what makes getting there so challenging and so rewarding.
Two people I know--a friend and a colleague--each funded their installations on Kickstarter. I know others who have successfully funded work there, but I refer to these two because they were able to fund experimental conceptual experiential work. And while I've backed eight projects on KS, I've watched none more that the Echoes Exhibit, an installation done by Teresa Flowers.
She, too, tried to fund an experience, and succeeded. But not easily, as her FB feed attests. I get the feeling it won't be much different for me.
The posts will get shorter over the next two weeks since a lot of time will be spent communicating with backers and potential ones, urging them to pledge. However, the network for the installation has grown, with well-wishers and fans around the world. True, the LED manufacturer has a vested interest in SIS, but the LED guy photographing the guys at the plant and sending me the shots is totally fun. I'm quite moved by it.
Look at this place! The shop looks clean enough to eat off the floor. In a few weeks I look forward to my stuff being built there. And while my KS is having a rough time, I'm confident that shaking up my would-be backers will get me there.
Other things has progressed this week on a technical side. In search of ideas on how to get this installation to fly (hang actually), I went to the shop in the college where I work to see what ideas could be offered. We have a full stage technology lab in our Entertainment Technology Department where students learn and sometimes develop the technology surrounding live performance. What better place than that?
The lab technician suggested that rather than hooks, using cable clamps with thimbles would do the trick. Two clamps for each wire for reinforcement, and it's fully adjustable. Great, another thing out of the way.
Didn't get to Trenton yesterday since I was having a video crisis.
But it was solved again, thanks to the handy Internet. I downloaded a sound program and edited a new sound piece, slapped together some images from another app I got from the web, and I have the new 1m45s vid below.
It's really short but I believe it says it all.
Repeating what I've been saying on this blog: This work, as with many conceptual works and performance pieces, loses everything in the translation off-site. While photos and videos help, nothing comes close to walking in the room, sliding past the intricate images, taking in the sound and welcoming the revelation that has come into your head.
Time and again I find myself contextualizing my work by looking at parallel installations. This comes after a visit to the ArtWorks in Trenton last Friday and discussions with its exhibition director and my engineer buddy on how to hang this work.
The top of the historic building is supported by an iron frame, not always criss-crossing in a place convenient to where I want my pieces to hang. So this leaves me looking for either a rigger to install scaffolding from which to hang nine 35-pound panels or modifying the grid above by joining metal tubing and hanging the pieces from there.
The video shows the ceiling of ArtWorks. While some think it's gonna be a snap to join pipe and hang the panels, I'm already losing sleep. However, while I was originally thinking of having the LED guys in China install long cable on the panels, I'm gonna instead have them install lengths of 3 meters (nine feet) . From there, I'll attach hooks. To the pipes above, I'd install heavy-duty cable, finishing with hooks. Borrowing generously from the blog, thisiscolossal.com,I've looked at the eight or so pages of their entries, poring over the methods artists used for hanging works. A white grid hangs from the ceiling of an art museum in Istanbul from which hundreds of books suspend.
I'm not wild about this particular work attributed to Hanif Shoaei. [He also works as a photographer in his native Iran, and creates quite inspiring panoramic works--another of my weaknesses, but that's another conversation.]
Many other suspended works are shown Colossal, and many, quite beautiful. But, I lean toward suspended sculptures that can be interacted with by walking through.
High on the list are the rope sculptures suspended outdoors by Italian sculptor Moneyless. More of his work can be seen at his gallery's website, http://www.unurth.com/Moneyless-San-Francisco-Oakland; as well as his own, www.moneyless.it. The image I've included just whets the appetite. His site shows his thought process through drawings and paintings, in which he fuses perfect geometry in the haphazard natural environment as a rite of purification. Lovely work.
Returning to the reasons why SIS must be a suspended work is the need for the viewer to walk around the panels. The installation's intent is for the viewer to accomplish a number for tasks: on a basic level, they are needed to trip the sensors otherwise the installation is silent. On the conceptual level, this work is for the viewer, through the abstract media, to connect to a remote nuance in their past. Putting images on pedestals makes it [already said] pedestrian!
The exhibition director at ArtWorks had voiced concern about bringing a scaffold from which to suspend the works: Any kind of roof overhead would render the space claustrophobic and ruin the sensation of light-emitting rectangles floating in mid-air.
He's right. I'm boxing with this as my Kickstarter gets off to a very slow start. [Sigh].
With affordable 3D printers bursting on the scene, many artists' and designers' response is to utilize the replicating shape creating streams and chains that build on one another into more complex shapes, much the way the DNA molecule helixes itself into proteins that make up organisms.
One is Skylar Tibbits an artist, architect and scientist from the MIT Media lab and winner of the Ars Electronica Next Wave prize. He's the talk of the town with his inclusion in other shows, notably the one I saw at The New School's Gallery on Fifth Avenue.
Mr. Tibbits works with the forms and shapes making up his sculptures as building units; they strongly evoke biological forms, at first appearing haphazard and chaotic, but in fact, creating an order in which their irregularities make them more amenable, understandable and approachable. Suspending the works adds to their surreal quality; allowing the viewer to walk through their arrangement envelops them as if they are in a journey through themselves.
In February he presented his development of a self-building lab at a TED Talk in which the process to make his work goes one step further: works themselves are programmed at the material's structure level, and programming extends to the sculptures erecting themselves. The designer (or artist, if you will) programs the path of construction to achieve the shape or function by supplying a simple energy source. I venture to say the animation itself could be part of the art form.
The 3D lab recently unveiled at the school where I teach, The New York City College of Technology (City Tech), showed off their latest creations from the architecture school in a small but thorough exhibition in the lobby of Voorhees Hall at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. Simple shapes, programmed to replicate and arrange themselves, achieve structures approaching protein arrangements and shell patterns, some suspended as if in a primordial soup of their own, calling back to the TWA Building at JFK.
One of the entryways to the main
lobby of the TWA Terminal, de-
signed by Eero Saarinen in 1956. He
surely didn't have a 3D printer, though
3D printers are being developed for
building construction.
Not using the 3D printer but utilizing enormous spaces and sometimes self-engineered machines, Tim Hawkinson creates suspended environments for viewers to walk through intestines (presumably his own, since much of his work is self-confronting). I've seen his shows at the Ace Gallery and the Whitney throughout the years; and like Mr. Tibbets, Hawkinson concerns himself with the creation process--calling it production is not appropriate here--going so far to design and build the machines that make his art.
Among my many favorites is a piece that employs a studded phonograph turntable that jolts the arm into writing his signature. A conveyor pulls the paper through a scissor set to a timer, shearing the slips of paper, landing in a pile, shown below. What's endearing is the use of analog components, kluged to make the machine/contraption/sculpture. It dissolves any glimmer of manufacture. Magnificent.
And while we haven't heard much of him here as yet, Jang Yong Son has created a collection of blissfully organic pieces from small steel tubular components welded together until large, intricate forms reminiscent of microscopic images of bacteria (referred to by the art blogging site ThisIsColossal.com as an amoeba) are formed.
The sculptor does not employ the 3D printer, crafting the scultures by hand. However, the precision--and size--of the work make it breathtaking, as do the irregularities that give it credence and affability. He too, suspends some of his sculptures, much to the delight of the viewer.
Bathsheba Grossman, an early 3D printer artist is a mathematician turned artist. Saying of herself that she explores the world between math and art, she takes inspiration from nature such as pollen, viruses, jelly fish. These seem to be the evocative shapes at the moment; but an argument awakens about the programming of the printer and production of the sculptures.
Tusk, by Bethsheba
Grossman
When a machine can be programmed to sculpt an image, is it a craft or an art? Does perfect symmetry turn the object into a mathematical rendering? Or, going further, is programming an irregularity part of the creating process rather than building or manufacturing process? Can art be a product? Of course. The persistent discussion of art and philosophy of the 20th Century was precisely where do we draw the line between the sacred art piece and its replication--and, is its value the ability to reach the masses?
Clones of the image are manufactured all time, as with photography, and the original item retains its status as art while multiples are editions. But when the originals themselves are created using programmable, predictable means, are the pieces art or objects and is their multiplication called prints or units? What's the difference between an item coming off a litho press, a Heidelberg or a MakerBot?
Hawkinson's autograph machine.
A stinging observation was made by Otto Rank in Art and Artist in 1932: I paraphrase: the difference between a craftsman and an artist is that a craftsman knows what the finished piece will look like before he or she begins the work; whereas the artist who has brought a vision to the work, is also motivated by an exploration stemming from the self. This caveat lays a path away from the original vision of the finished piece during the process, thus creating an art piece, not making one.
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