Sand runs shallow or deep. Sand measures time. Markers are lost in the shifting floors of deserts. Sand in the form of crystalline silicon makes microchips. A line of poetry muses over a world in a grain of sand. And Jorge Luis Borges writes of trading a rare bible for The Book of Sand in which he can never fix a place, precisely return to an image or text, or calculate from beginning to end. His is a book of relationships or relativities in which one can only remember or try to remember where one has bee n, seeking in vain to arrive again in the same place in the same way.
Borges's story "The Book of Sand" served as a catalyst for Ken Feingold in
The Surprising Spiral, his first interactive video installation, where
sand has so many significances--from the various images which appear on
screen, to the unseen silicon chips w hich drive the computer that powers
it. From the micro to the macro, the precise and the shifting, sand is a
fitting metaphor for The Surprising Spiral as an interactive work
of art and the way it is structured.
The Surprising Spiral is concerned at once with travel, thinking and
perceiving. For his installation Feingold works with images and ambient
sounds gathered over a 12-year period from Japan, India, Sri Lanka,
Thailand, Scotland, Argentina and the U.S., ad ding Japanese commercials,
computer animations and segments from Alain Robbe-Grillet's 1963
L'Immortelle, as well as words and texts from a half dozen different
languages.
Through two well camouflaged "interfaces," to employ the computer term, a
viewer "plays" or "performs" or "uses" Feingold's piece--terms that
express the move from spectator to participant in an interactive work. The
main one is a large, beautifully bound , antique-looking book, the size of
an unabridged dictionary, which is hollowed out. In its cover is a window
which doubles as a touch screen, and bears faint fingerprints. Its insides
are silk-lined, with two rubber hands, a child's pointing to the palm of
an adult's, resting on top of a yellowing page inscribed with several
ancient and esoteric alphabets. Sitting at the bench before the book, the
reader becomes player by touching the fingerprints which cause the large
projected images and/or the sounds heard to change. On the book's spine is
the title of the work in Spanish, La Espiral Sorprendente, together
with its pseudonymous author, Pierre de Toucher.
Next to the book is a plastic mouth with a sensor in its lips. Touching
the lips sometimes calls up a voice reading from Octavio Paz's Monkey
Grammarian, at other times, ambient sound or the clatter of a
television commercial. This second, purely audial interface, reminds us of
the importance given to sound and language in The Surprising Spiral
in their relationship to the imagery. And the image of the mouth recalls
Nauman's From Hand to Mouth, 1967, as well as two Jasper Johns's,
both of 1955, his Target with Four Faces in which the plaster faces
above the target reveal mouths and noses, boxed to conceal the eyes, and
his Target with Plaster Casts, the small hinged boxes over the
large target housing body fragments. Both works bring us to muse over the
relationship between language and objects, as does the Paz text, and to
the sexuality of the target and its suggestion of the spiral in
Feingold's title.
From here it is an easy passage to Marcel Duchamp, a much more prominent
reference in The Surprising Spiral. The pseudonym, Pierre de
Toucher, is a pun on a work by Duchamp who did the front and back
cover of a catalog, Le Surrealisme, for the 1947 international
exhibit of the same title which he organized with Breton. On the front of
the numbered edition of the catalog is a soft pinkish-colored foam
life-sized rubber breast protruding from black velvet and on the back is
the phrase "Priere de Toucher," (please touch) with Duchamp's signature.
An animation of one of Duchamp's Rotoreliefs of 1935 appears in
several segments of Feingold's videodisc. The eccentric circles of the
Rotoreliefs suggest the spiral and sexuality. But the
Rotoreliefs, as Duchamp had conceived of them, were to be played on
a phonograph at 33RPM, the perfect allusion to the laser formatted
spinning videodisc used here.
While these references recall the strong associations in Duchamp's art
among the body, sexuality and the machine, the fragments of
Robbe-Grillet's L'Immortelle provide an important subtext in The
Surprising Spiral very much about touching, the male lead always trying
to make contact with the woman he desires through touching, be it through
a gate, on the street, in bed.
And we touch the fingerprints on the glass cover of La Espiral
Sorprendente in order to move, to get somewhere. And in the imagery we
are continuously on the move, on foot, by car or cart, by train or boat,
save for those pauses when we observe nature and natural phenomena. As we
press on, we are the peripatetic thinker reminded about perceiving and
thinking by Paz on his long walking journey in India. Through these Paz
ruminations and the lists of concepts and sensations which appear on
screen over imagery, such as "Forms / Feelings/ Discriminations /
Compositional Factors / Consciousness" or "Things Arise and Cease to Exist
Depending on Causes and Conditions" or "The Existence of the Self Is
Established Between A Basis of Imputation and an Imputing Mind," Feingold
embeds Buddhist reflection and thinking into The Surprising Spiral.
And they work with the lists--an inventory of items read from a Borges
story, trees described and enumerated from The Monkey Grammarian,
titles of Duchamp works recited by computer simulated voice, extremely
long book titles cited. Yet, the other kinds of lists familiar from
interactive information and business applications--lists of menus or
numbers from which to choose the items we hear and see--are nowhere here
to be found. We almost certainly cannot repeat our exact steps. Nothing
tells us or asks us what to do. Touch elicits sound immediately, while
images may or may not change immediately, causing us to wonder what effect
we've had.
Our present moves are conditioned by our previous ones. Having wandered
into the Japanese commercial for Post Water--with its graphics which zip
along from four legged primate to upright man, and its claims for the
virtues of this late human "Gatorade"-like beverage over so primitive a
drink as water-- how to return to it? Or to the young monks delivering
their sand deposits, remnants of their paintings, to the river, least
their artisanry ever be construed as permanent? Or to the elephant in the
bush or the almost surrealist-like store window from L'Immortelle? If we
wander into one of the cul de sacs, the loops of nature imagery such as
the mountain tops or the swimming fish, and stay there for a few moments,
the computer will erase our past steps. Like Borges trying to recreate
how he arrived and where he arrived in his Book of Sand, we try the
same. I may be lucky; I may guess as I fumble over the fingerprints on the
touch screen or I may try to remember how I had arrived at a certain place
earlier. Unlike Borges who could never ever return to the same page,
image, number in his infinite book, The Surprising Spiral is quite
finite; yet I remain with the questions of how I get back to an image or a
sequence or else how I avoid it. Other than by guessing, to succeed is an
extraordinary feat of remembering, something more than the Renaissance
memory device of visualizing words and phrases by placing them in
different spaces, because Our present moves are conditioned by our
previous ones. Having wandered into the Japanese commercial for Post
Water--with its graphics which zip along from four legged primate to
upright man, and its claims for the virtues of this late human
"Gatorade"-like beverage over so primitive a drink as water-- how to
return to it? Or to the young monks delivering their sand deposits,
remnants of their paintings, to the river, least their artisanry ever be
construed as permanent? Or to the elephant in the bush or the almost
surrealist-like store window from L'Immortelle? If we wander into one of
the cul de sacs, the loops of nature imagery such as the mountain tops or
the swimming fish, and stay there for a few moments, the computer will
erase our past steps. Like Borges trying to recreate how he arrived and
where he arrived in his Book of Sand, we try the same. I may be
lucky; I may guess as I fumble over the fingerprints on the touch screen
or I may try to remember how I had arrived at a certain place earlier.
Unlike Borges who could never ever return to the same page, image, number
in his infinite book, The Surprising Spiral is quite finite; yet I remain
with the questions of how I get back to an image or a sequence or else how
I avoid it. Other than by guess ing, to succeed is an extraordinary feat
of remembering, something more than the Renaissance memory device of
visualizing words and phrases by placing them in different spaces, because
The Surprising Spiral's complexity is compounded by the program the ar
tist orchestrated for his computer. The Surprising Spiral's
complexity is compounded by the program the ar tist orchestrated for his
computer.
The language about thinking and perceiving, the lists of things and ideas,
events, sensations all go hand-in-hand with the images in a purposefully
fragmented structure outside of a narrative time, outside of a clear
destination. The title, The Surprising Spiral, like the sounds and
images employed, does not trace a trajectory to a finish. Instead it is a
reference to the silently revolving videodisc on which are stored a mix of
strange, fascinating and familiar images which are not causal and linear,
which have neither a beginning nor an end, only moments edited and
interrupted, refusing a conclusion.
The structure of Feingold's The Surprising Spiral thwarts "figuring it
out" in any exact or consistent way, as we might expect, assuming as we
are wont to do that the computer is destined to deliver us what is
absolutely logical. Again like Borges's Book of Sand, the "book" of
images we call up is relative. We interact with it. It changes with each
changing action, each changing relationship. Feingold's computer script
drives our shifting "book" of images and shapes his elusive "book of
sand."
The language about thinking and perceiving, the lists of things and ideas,
events, sensations all go hand-in-hand with the images in a purposefully
fragmented structure outside of a narrative time, outside of a clear
destination. The title, The Surprising Spiral, like the sounds and
images employed, does not trace a trajectory to a finish. Instead it is a
reference to the silently revolving videodisc on which are stored a mix of
strange, fascinating and familiar images which are not causal and linear,
which have neither a beginning nor an end, only moments edited and
interrupted, refusing a conclusion.
Ken Feingold | artworks | catalog | reference texts | contacts