Scott Kildall: Art and Research

Second Front performed Babula Rasa as part of “The Artist is Elsewhere” — a one-night performance event hosted by ZERO1 and curated by Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert. These are some stills from the event.

My idea was to use Google Docs, specifically its spreadsheet as a virtual Tabula Rasa — a blank slate for performance. I had imagined word-play, formulas, formatting changes and text-upon-text revisions and edits. I’ve often found Mail Art to be a source of inspiration, where artists re-purposed communication networks for art discourse. I was hoping for a similar effect with Google Docs, a space normally reserved for business documents or household expense sheets.

However, my Second Front compatriots always surprise me and they quickly begain inserting images into Google Docs. Who knew? Apparently everyone else but me.

Projected live for 2 hours during “The Artist is Elsewhere” event, this quickly became a group collage. In the first 30 minutes what appeared was the “I Say” Shark, various blue women appeared, Patrick Lichty’s birthday cake, and lots and lots of cats.

Images from various Second Front performances popped up: Last Supper and Wrath of Kong. And lots of memes from popular culture, reminding me of How Conceptual Art Influenced the World Wide Web.

We could overhear the other performances live on a UStream channel. At one point, one of the performances seemed to be carrying on for a long time and someone (maybe me) uploaded Chuck Barris from the Gong Show.

At the 1-hour mark, the Shark is still there but now with the Shaggy D.A., the Tweets in Space logo, Dr. McCoy, an evil bunny and more.

Does this embrace, reject or dry-hump the New Aesthetic? That’s for you to decide.

And like all Second Front performances, we had to bomb the virtual venue when we were done…only this time with cats.

Participating Second Front members: Yael Gilks, Bibbe Hansen, Doug Jarvis, Scott Kildall, Patrick Lichty, Liz Solo with stealth guest appearance by Victoria Scott.

As part of the “2049″ project for the Regeneration show at the New York Hall of Science, I will be burying a time capsule called “Imagine 2049″ on the grounds of the NYSCI.

I will be asking visitors both locally and remotely to submit inventions that might help people in the year 2049 such as medical devices, personal technologies and ways to sustain the planet. The letters and notes will be buried and opened 36 years from now in the year 2049.

It turns out that the old World’s Fair site will be harboring other time capsules as well. In the two World’s Fairs in Queens in 1939 and 1964, The Westinghouse Company buried two time capsules, called the Westinghouse Time Capsules.

Fortunately for me, both are scheduled to be opened 5000 years in the future, well after the Imagine 2049 Time Capsule.

For the upcoming show, Moon Lust, this is one of serveral augments that I am making (in collaboration with Mark Skwarek) for Moon v Earth, which portrays a fictitious struggle of moon colonists for independence from Earth.

On the weekend of March 31st-April 1st, Upgrade! SF (I am one of the co-founders) produced its first ever workshop. The theme was Augmented Reality and the guest instructor from Boston was artist John Craig Freeman.

The full reportback is here on the Upgrade SF! site

Learn how to use Augmented Reality with media artist and activist John Craig Freeman!

Upgrade! San Francisco is proud to present a weekend workshop called “Making Art with Augmented Reality”, hosted by SOMArts in San Francisco.

Register here: http://bit.ly/yj0lKo

Your artwork will be included in the “I Am Crime” show, along with a 17 x 22 print!

When: Weekend of March 31st-April 1st, 2012
Where: SOMArts, 834 Brannan St., San Francisco
Also: There will be an artist talk by Freeman on March 29th, 7pm as part of the ongoing Upgrade! SF conversations and events.

About the Instructor: John Craig Freeman is a public artist with over twenty years of experience using emergent technologies to produce large-scale public works at sites where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. He has produced work and exhibited around the world including in Xi’an, Belfast, Los Angeles, Beijing, Zurich, New York City, Taipei, São Paulo, Warsaw, Kaliningrad, Miami, Bilbao, Havana, Atlanta, Calgary, Buffalo, Boston, Mexico City, London and San Francisco. Freeman received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990. He is currently an Associate Professor of New Media, at Emerson College (Boston) in the Department of Visual and Media Arts and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, at UC San Diego.

Support for this workshop is provided by Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Grant Program.

Pictured above: Border Memorial Frontera de los Muertos by John Craig Freeman

This weekend in San Francisco, I will be presenting a popup show in conjunction with Wire + Nail Gallery called Sperm Bank.

Working with playful interpretations of the masculine seed, I will be selling various goods for the holidays. You can purchase plexiglass multiples for your wall, soap and vinyl cutouts with special versions for your laptop or bicycle.

Times: Saturday night, 6:30-9:30 and Sunday afternoon 12pm-4pm.
Where: Wire + Nail Gallery, 3150 18th Street, 104, San Francisco

I will also be displaying a spreadsheet reflecting the cost-of-goods and how much the pop-op shops makes as an experiment in open accounting.

Finally, we will have this animation on display (as a formally-editioned artist work):

I’ve been enjoying all the creative interpretations of the pepper-spraying meme. I couldn’t help but join in the fun.

Last Thursday, Upgrade! San Francisco met at the Exploratorium — an art & science institution founded in 1969. Hosted by the New Media Studio, whose mandate is a hands-on educational experience, we got a tour from staff & Upgraders: Eric Socolofsky, Lotte Meijer and Chris Cerrito. In the after hours, we learned about three of NM Studio’s projects and the behind-the-scenes techniques to make a rich viewer-based experience.

The first installation we saw was Elastrotron — an interactive installation, which acts as neo-funhouse mirror, warping our reality. In front of the screen, visitors quickly loose their inhibitions, performing with their bodies and creating interactions with strangers.

We then played with Where do you belong? in which you can take a picture of yourself, inserting your image in between two other people you select. The buttons to take your picture are at the edges of the frame, creating an effect so that you appear to be holding hands with your two neighbors. The challenges here were less conceptual — as the idea was straightforward — but instead of user-interface. The solution was to make two large buttons that you have to hit with both hands at the same time and also a countdown timer so that that you don’t repeatedly hit the ‘take picture’ button (a common result, especially with younger kids).

This bubble floor, called Social Projections impressed me by its non-interactive nature. At first, it looks like it responds to movement, reminding me of Scott Snibbe’s Boundary Functions — but instead, there is no camera vision. People quickly make up their own rules. Different shapes appear and move through the space. People negotiate social behavior, jumping over lines, stepping in and out and performing collaborative tasks, all without interaction.

We followed up the tour with conversation along the lines of development process, how to generate user feedback and more. Here, it turns out that the new media staff spends a lot of time casually observing how people use the interfaces, refining the process. Prototypes are put on the floor without a huge degree of bureaucracy, creating a truly experimental science space.

For the No Matter project, Victoria Scott and I designed 40 “imaginary objects” first in the virtual world of Second Life and then materialized into real life. One of our favorites is this paper sculpture of Schrödinger’s Cat.

Many have asked us what is “Schrödinger’s Cat” and I usually respond that it is a thought experiment illustrating principles of quantum physics. With a hot debate in science over the Copenhagen Interpretation or the Multiverse interpretation, the mind reels.

In this one-minute video, Henry Reich explains what this is with line drawings and voiceover. Great job!

Last Saturday, I did my first recording session with Double Reflection — a sculpture I made during a residency a few years ago at Anderson Ranch — in Dolores Park, San Francisco. The object itself is a human-sized sculpture with a two-way mirror and inside rests a camera which records what the artwork “sees” in portrait mode, capturing the scenery while people puzzle at its purpose in public space. The sculpture and resulting video will be on exhibition at an upcoming show, Keeping an Eye on Surveillance, at the Performing Arts Institute in San Francisco.

The reactions were amazing, capturing the gaze of curious passer-bys. Many guessed there was a camera inside. Others thought it was a “grooming station” and one person ventured that it was a solar cooker.

As I moved the sculpture to various sites in the park, I would sit on a blanket nearby, watching the interactions with a sly grin on my face. Was I making fun of people? Sort of, but more than anything, this was an experiment in sculpture performing in public space.

What has changed since I built the work in 2008 was that surveillance in pubic spaces such as a park no longer seems to bother most people. I explained that there was a camera inside to some folks. Did anyone care? Absolutely not. I attribute this to the naval-gazing culture of Facebook rather than the proliferation of CCTV cameras. People have become comfortable with their images being captured and reproduced by others in a surprisingly short amount of time. This strikes me as a beautiful media gesture, accepting ourselves for how we appear rather than cowering from it, and understanding that our image is beyond our control.

I will release the video soon, but will wait until after the show opens on September 10th, 2011, just before the 10th anniversary of 9/11.