julia chang

The meat of this essay I mean to attempt to apply the ideas explored in the fall semester of the post-medium condition in seminar with art historian/theorist Rosalind Krauss to two works by the artist David Moreno. It is a didactic essay, in an attempt to create a point of departure of discussion of de-materialization as the rhetoric has evolved in art theory, in order to find articulations in other social science fields grappling with the common phenomena. The many exercises of articulating the idea of the post-medium condition in application to different artists within Krauss’s guided seminar led me to conclude that the post-medium condition applies not to a general state that artists are working within, but only to certain artists — those that invent their own mediums by de-railing traditional conventions of a (or multiple combination of) given support(s). As in the case of James Coleman’s works, which Krauss discusses in her 1997 essay through which he takes the slide-tape “from the commercial world of advertising or promotion and import(s) [it] into an aesthetic context.”[1] This is the first criteria: defining of conventions.

David Moreno’s work comes to my attention through the recent Greater New York 2005 survey exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, in which his piece Stereomo (2004) was included. It consisted of two bass speakerheads each mounted atop a stiff six-foot-tall coil spring, that allows a flexibility for the stereoheads to sway in response to the size of the sound waves emitted. A one-liner visualization of the physics of sound, limiting the discussion of a post-medium condition since there is 1) no element of either applying the traditional conventions of the stereo speakers or of the sound waves into a new context (visualization of sound is a pursuit of the recording of a machinic impulse, and has been since at least the nineteenth century) or 2) no combination of supports that gives focus to a newly invented convention. This is the second criteria.

The third criteria: obsolescence. “When a form falls into obsolescence, an evocation of the utopian ideals that the form held in promise at its advent re-emerge, freed from the technological cell we’re in.”[2] Herein lies the key to David Moreno’s more complicated pieces Television Noise (2005) and Video to Audio to Video (2005). David Joselit describes the general trajectory of a technology’s cycle as one that originates from a hobbyist’s occupation to a military application and finally to a commercial usurpation.[3] Television is unique in that it had slim military application and jumped rather directly into its commercial application. The incredible rate of so-called technological advances in consumer electronics has increased exponentially, and even more so since the introduction of the personal computer. Planned obsolescence is a quotidian experience in the twenty-first century, creating the overwhelming “heteronomous forces” that constantly break in on our consciousness, so that the autonomy of the individual and “its capacity for involvement with extra-mental reality [can] no longer be presumed,”[4] as Adorno describes the concept of distraction. Further, he identifies them as functions of commercialism, destabilizing reality and substituting interaction with technical objects “that primarily demand adaptation to their own instructions”[5] for activity. Sound familiar? Obsolescence is a major driver of this contemporary anxiety, and the obsolete technologies become very precise markers of specific time periods, down to the minutiate level of our own memories.

These nostalgic tendencies, though, are more than a mere artistic wistfulness, and, as I shall attempt to describe in relation to Moreno’s work, the focus on obsolescent technologies constitutes an effort to re-create a referent time-place. In the post-historical period, within which the isolation of geographic boundaries are diminished and a linear sense of temporal progress is disrupted prismically, nostalgia manifests in the visual arts through forms created and framed by the aesthetics of a given technology that was available at a specific point in time. A work, then, that employs an obsolete technology will evoke associations with the time period within which it had been relevant. The technology is freed from its function as a device to spur consumption, and beyond its potentially melancholic evocations, can be utilized to demonstrate a site of resistance.[6] Moreno employs this method at the point of digitization of analog broadcast television and radio by combining various audio and video equipment on the verge of obsolescence to focus on the medium of analog broadcast itself. “Digital broadcasting is providing high resolution content and eliminating the possibility of noise within the system. Soon all broadcast will be perfect, but also perfectly controlled (and potentially perfectly controlling).”[7]

Video to Audio to Video connects the video out of a VCR to the input of an audio mixer via cable. From the audio mixer, part of the signal is sent to an analog delay effect and then returned to the mixer to be combined with the original signal. This new signal is sent via the audio out of the mixer to the video in of a television monitor. A random control voltage is controlling the delay time of the analog delay effect. The visual result is three bodies of equipment: the television, the audio mixers, and the VCR, all connected with standard coaxial cables. The television screen that starts with a blank blue screen before the audio mixer is attached to the television comes to life with the analog audio noise that is sent from the mixer that is processing the signal from the VCR in the form of constantly fluctuating scanlines moving horizontally across the screen. It is an expansion of the visuality of sound explored in Stereomo by converting a video signal into an audio signal that is then re-constituted as a video image on screen. Moreno explains that because of the random element being introduced into the system, this work can run continuously without ever quite repeating.

The implications of an autonomous personality or life of analog signals is apparent in this piece. By extricating the functions of these three equipment from their (most widely) intended commercial use of communicating a narrative composition of a movie, a television program, or music to a human viewer/listener, Moreno has created a hardware community amongst the equipment themselves to draw out the imperfections in the application of analog technology. Digital technology ostensibly eliminates the analog delay effect, the random control voltage, and the constant horizontal scan reception that is visible to the naked eye. This piece, while combining several elements of traditionally-defined supports, does so without any content. There is no videotaped image. There is no recorded or performed sound. There is no received television broadcast. Video into Audio into Video reduces the elements down to the otherwise imperceptible signals that the equipments use to communicate to each other, and the imperfections of those technologies is what gives them their idiosyncratic character, which many a stereophile has complained about.

Television Noise exists in two forms: first as a 16mm film, and secondly as a video-taped version of the film that has a sound element added. Moreno produces the visual element by filming the screen of a normal analog color television that is receiving a broadcast signal through a dipole rabbit ear antenna. The television is tuned in-between stations where there is only broadcast static or ‘noise’ on the screen, which is further interrupted by Moreno as he touches the antenna at various points with his fingers and other objects. The 16mm film camera is mounted on a rotating camera mount designed by the artist to allow the camera to spin 360 degrees around the center of the lens during the exposure of the film. The visual result is a spray of technicolor red and green-blue vectors and flickers of incandescent static in constant kaleidoscopic motion that is viewed in the first form as a projection, and in the second form on a screen (television as a video tape, or, computer converted as a DVD).

In this piece, we are even more aware of Moreno’s concerns about the potentially homogenizing effect of digital broadcast technology, since Television Noise could not exist without the interstitial points of reception between FCC-allotted stations that digital broadcast will eliminate completely. Dial knobs on televisions have all but disappeared, and the capability to scan through the radio dial is rapidly disappearing with the advent of podcasts and satellite radio technology.

What is the in-between static broadcasting, anyway? All the weaker signals of light and other electronic frequencies--an amalgamation of unorganized, unintentional communications on the electronic level. Without motivation from the commercial sector, the potential of these spaces has been under-investigated and virtually illegalized by the mandatory regulation by the FCC. Although the internet has ostensibly fulfilled this possibility by creating a direct connection to the mass public without mediation through federal or commercial regulation, the infinite number of precise points that exist on the internet makes the potential of ‘coming across’ a renegade site is very low.

The aestheticization of analog broadcast in Television Noise, as with Coleman’s slide-tapes, brings Moreno’s works into the sphere of art, on the one hand transforming the otherwise unpleasant crackle of broadcast static into a visual contemplation that subjects it to an historical lineage of evaluation of craft, and, on the other, brings it into the politicized sphere of the art institution that it has become in the postmodern period, particularly through the lens of institutional critique. As in the case of contemporary artists such as Krysztof Wodiczko, Rainer Ganahl, or Allora & Calzadilla, the museum site or art festival (biennials, etc.) site have become incorporated into the concept of the medium. These are artists that utilize the iconic status of the art institution as cultural arbiter to contextualize the political activism in their works, as the forums for such reactionary messages become increasingly folded into commercially influenced or governmentally censored institutions.