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MEMORIES OF PLACE: NYC THOUGHT PICTURES web page 1/3 |
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Advisor: Robert Bowen | April 15, 1999 |
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 3 ABSTRACT 4 INTRODUCTION 5 HISTORY 7 THEORY 10 DESCRIPTION OF COMPLETED PROJECT 14 RATIONALE 16 CONCLUSION 17 BIBLIOGRAPHY 18 ARTIST'S STATEMENT 23 JOURNAL PAGES 24 FORMS 29 |
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| LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Illustr. 1 Title Page, screen shot from Memories of Place: NYC Thought Pictures, page 1 (cover). Illustr. 2 Context, screen shot from Memories of Place: NYC Thought Pictures, page 6. Illustr. 3 Main Selector (1), screen shot from Memories of Place: NYC Thought Pictures. page 8. Illustr. 4 Fragments, screen shot from Memories of Place: NYC Thought Pictures, page 10. Illustr. 5 Main Selector (2), screen shot from Memories of Place: NYC Thought Pictures, page 12. Illustr. 6 Bronx 1940-1958, screen shot from Memories of Place: NYC Thought Pictures, page 15. Illustr. 7 City, screen shot from Memories of Place: NYC Thought Pictures, page 16. Illustr. 8 Manhattan 1945-1970, screen shot from Memories of Place: NYC Thought Pictures, page 17. Illustr. 9 Time, screen shot from Memories of Place: NYC Thought Pictures, page 21. Illustr. 10 Brooklyn 1920-1950, screen shot from Memories of Place: NYC Thought Pictures, page 22. |
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| ABSTRACT Memories of Place: NYC Thought Pictures is a personal and eclectic view of New York as experienced and remembered by several diverse individuals. I have always been fascinated by the power of "seemingly" ordinary events and places, which ultimately turn out to be monumental within the schema of an individual's life. I would gladly listen to several hours of New York stories from the 1940's as told by my 84 year old Viennese neighbor, over watching the more sensational celebrity tales from Robin Leach's "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous". For me, the personal and idiosyncratic hold the power. Therefore, as the basis for my thesis, I have chosen to interview several diverse individuals about their New York "place" stories. These stories along with "visual" quotes from Walter Benjamin and Graeme Gilloch (a Benjamin scholar) form the theoretical and visual armature of this thesis. The work is constructed from non-copyrighted archival and recent images of the city, along with the story teller's own personal photos and ephemera. As a totality, these images aid in revealing the "micro" tales of specific places and neighborhoods within the larger view of New York City's five boroughs. Inherent in this project, and specific to the digital medium in which I am working, is a strong random navigational structure. My goal with this thesis has been to create a structure which allows the viewer to be aware of his/her place or location within the work, yet limit his/her ability to control the path taken. This also keeps the work fresh, and alleviates the boredom which often results after an initial viewing of a linear digital work. The final format for this project is an interactive 8 bit, 256 color, CD Rom work, created with Macromedia Director. |
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| INTRODUCTION In determining a topic for my thesis for a Masters of Fine Arts in Computer Art, I vacillated between doing a "practical" or "creative" project. Graduate school is one of those rare opportunities to explore a topic or issue that no one in the commercial world would ever consider "viable". Therefore, after having the luxury of a year to wrestle with several ideas which were more "practical" in nature, I came to the conclusion that I should take advantage of the lack of commercial pressures inherent in a thesis project and explore a personal area of interest. Coming from a background in curating and organizing exhibitions, the idea of spaces and places and their power over each one of us has always fascinated me. I started by thinking about "places", such as various cultural institutions, i.e. museums and monuments, and how they impress, intimidate, overpower and imprint the individual visitor. Depending on one's experiences and background, one can think of these "places" as towering edifices that hold a wealth of knowledge or off-putting "places" for the elite to show off their "treasures". But ultimately, I determined that the idea of cultural space as it related to institutions seemed too "precious" for my investigation -- I am more interested in the personal icons we encounter and create. I wanted to discuss places that effected an individual on some intimate level, without carrying the larger cultural baggage of a monument or museum. I wanted to explore places that sparked individual memories, yet when seen all together, create a very personal and idiosyncratic vision of a larger whole. Finally, I concluded that communities and neighborhoods are perfect examples of individual "place" experiences that when viewed together create a "whole". Yet, I was still left with the task of creating a theoretical shell for this idea of place. I have always enjoyed and found timely Walter Benjamin's essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which gives serious thought to the new technological possibilities of photography and film and their impact on art and culture in general, but was unaware of his vast body of writings on literature, theater, urban experience, memory and Marxist theory. His wide range of studies have always made him a bit hard to categorize. I found his text and essays in bookstores and libraries under many different section headers, i.e. "Literary Criticism", "Collected Personal Essays", "Literary Letters" and "Memoirs". My interest was piqued. I'm a big fan of iconoclasts. If Benjamin defied easy classification then he was my man! I've always felt that neat, black and white, finite categories were too simple. I much prefer material which forces the viewer to come to his or her own conclusions. Benjamin's writings on Berlin, Moscow, Paris and Naples provided the theoretical underpinnings for developing an investigation of the four central themes in my thesis work, i.e. "Memory", "Time", "Fragmentation" and "City Experience". The fragmentary writing style and sometimes open-ended conclusions in Benjamin's work is well suited to my visual style and theoretical view point. I have, therefore, chosen to create an interactive thesis project (using Director) which explores the power of place. In particular, I am bringing together various New York stories of "place" and how they inform and impress the individual storyteller. These stories are, in turn, couched by the urban theoretical writings of Walter Benjamin and Graeme Gilloch. By doing so, I am presenting a very personal and eclectic view of New York as a "place"; experienced and remembered by several diverse individuals, and simultaneously suggesting a larger universal and shared experience. |
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 Illustration 2 |
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| HISTORY The historical precedents for my thesis, Memories of Place: NYC Thought Pictures are many. It is not the first nor will it be the last time that someone has chosen to write or illustrate the small stories of a particular place. Literary figures, such as John Cheever and Paul Auster come to mind. The bookstores are full of photo-essays, journals, fiction and non-fiction which explores the divergent visual, political and societal forces which compose the urban landscape. It is also not the first time an interactive work is used to create a planned, yet random navigational system. Yet, the convergence of this traditional topic with the visual possibilities inherent in a computer generated art work have allowed me to work within a new (since the early sixties) non-linear narrative structure. The repetitive and programmed random functions that are possible in Lingo, the scripting language native to Macromedia Director, along with the non-linear quality of interactive storytelling support a fragmentary narrative and visual style which has been present in my past curatorial endeavors. In organizing exhibitions, I often presented groups of seemingly disparate art works, ephemera, and "non-art" images and objects. Seen together salon style, these diverse fragmented visual elements confronted the finite and limiting categories traditionally accepted in the art world, and addressed the idea of a visual message which uses many different voices to present a cohesive whole . Also, if one thinks of the way a gallery or museum viewer experiences an exhibition, one is struck by the often random path he/she takes through each room of the overall exhibition space. Visitors, other than those listening to taped or live tour guides, often "meander" through a room, gravitating to images which might draw them in for any number of reasons. It is this sense of being able to chose one's path; the viewer's ability to participate in the process of selecting a visual and auditory experience which interests me. It was therefore, fortuitous that I encountered Walter Benjamin's "Denkbilder" or "City" writings. Along with his above mentioned essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," his urban writings, in particular "One Way Street", champion the fragmented style I favor. Both the literary style Benjamin uses to write these essays, as well as, the stories and observations themselves, are morsels or snippets of information. They are purposefully pieced together like a large quilt. The Benjamin scholar, Graeme Gilloch devotes an entire book to describing the random, repetitive, and fragmentary style and content of the cityscape stories.
Gilloch's observations and description of Benjamin's urban tapestries are so pertinent to my investigation, that I use fragments of his text interwoven into my art work. It is the description of these fragments being used as fragments which further reinforces the overall aesthetic and thesis of Memories of Place, NYC Thought Pictures. |
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 Illustration 3 |
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| Random and repetitive visual elements have long been exploited in the video works of artists like Bruce Nauman, Laurie Anderson, Vito Acconci and more recently, Gary Hill (his work "Circular Breathing" is currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art), along with the music of Philip Glass. However, until the advent of the computer as a tool for making art, most randomness was "hard-coded". In essence, a seemingly random display of images in a video or notes in a work of music were pre-planned and cleverly veiled to appear otherwise. Now, with the programming power of computer languages, such as Lingo (within Macromedia Director); Perl, C or C++ (within a CGI script on the web) and Java, the idea of presenting a truly random image, sound or video is possible. It is within this context, I am able to create a work such as Memories of Place: NYC Thought Pictures. Central to my thesis is the desire to present the viewer with a totally different collection of images each time he/she visits the main selector, the connected stories fragments and the theoretical modules. However, I do not want the viewer to feel totally "lost" within this work, so I have "hard-coded" several landmarks, which help the viewer maintain a sense of "tenuous control" over the visual experience. My goal is that the viewer should "meander through this art work in the same way he or she would visit an exhibition -- zigzag within each room, while maintaining an overall sense of the room order. If I am forced to answer the question, "Could this work have been created outside the digital domain?", I would have to respond, "Maybe!" It is certainly not new to explore the divergent forces at work within our urban experience. However, the random image sequencing armature of this work has only been accessible to most visual artists since the advent of the personal computer (early 1980's). It is therefore, a marriage of the old familiar "place" story to a new technological, non-linear structure that is at the essence of my thesis. In the end, Memories of Place: NYC Thought Pictures is simultaneously antiquated and cutting edge. |
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