E L U S I V E : art // vision // memory // experience

Parallels Between an Artist’s Work and Life

by

Desireé Ann D’Alessandro

 

Stillness. It was 4:13AM and only my willing participant and I seemed to be awake and making a conscious effort to observe our surroundings. The road had become comparable to a black river, and our shadows were sometimes elongated by the intermittent streetlights. All was silent aside from the minimal sound of our footsteps and the participant’s whispers. She just commented on the hum of a highway in the distance. I hadn’t noticed. At the same time I became aware of the hum of the mechanisms turning in my video camera as I recorded her experience. Then I realized - in a sense, I am not only documenting her experience. My own experience in association to hers is also being recorded.

–D. D’Alessandro

 

My work often explores the elusive properties that are inherent to perception, memory, and experience. It is my intention to investigate the constructive qualities of psychological and physiological filtration systems, and explore our gaps in perception, interpretation, and understanding. Often through hybrid processes, I produce interactive installation settings, where I invite the viewers to explore and contemplate elusion in their engagement with the objects - and by extension, their engagement with life. I combine, or sometimes even interchange, the digital and the physical to reexamine and recontextualize the material I use, and invite viewers to actively engage the works.

 

My fascination with the elusive properties that are inherent to perception first began with a traumatic event from my adolescence. The catalyst was the passing of my beloved mother and older brother–my only sibling. There is a passage in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance by Peggy Phelan that still grips me today:

 

I've spent a lot of time trying to understand what a captivating presence my sister's ghost was and is. […] It was the one who was not with us that we worried about, thought about, remembered. In the clarity of her absence, we redefined ourselves. The real was the absence of her; we were representations of that loss. The incorporeal presence of my sister mattered to us I think […] because we were so bounded by the […] sameness of our features. We were living maps of one another's physical history and future.[1]

 

This passage is extremely powerful and personal to me, as I directly relate to these struggles and difficulties. My brother and I were very close and very similar, always competing in a playful sibling rivalry for the title of “most talented” in the fields of theatre, music, and visual arts. When he passed, there was a complete rupture and collapse in my self-definition. I cannot say today that all has been mended, or that I have completely regained my identity and awareness of self. Instead, understanding who I am now is driven by my explorations of how I understand as a process in and of itself. I was once told that, “Art is an inherently fluid state of grace sustained by internal conviction.  There is no solid ground upon which to build a conceptual fortress.”[2] I find that identity can be understood in this same sense, thus Art and Identity are issues that run parallel in my work. As I explore and investigate the elusive properties that define understanding, my comprehension of self develops in the process through maturity of character and realization of identity.

 

I make the priority of my work personal narrative and its relationship to social and political concerns. My insatiable desire to question and explore has been facilitated by research in science, philosophy, critical theory, and art. Turning to the world at large has inspired my recent efforts to explore the relationship between the personal and the social. I have developed a fondness for films that explore the human condition, a phrase that has been defined in metaphysical and experiential terms as the condition of humans trying to understand themselves and their role in the universe.[3] In dealing with the loss of my family members, I later came to realize the film Memento (2000) reminded me significantly of my adolescent mourning process. As I moved out for the first time, I faced the challenge of sorting through memorabilia from the past. I remember specifically only taking photographs that reminded me of our happiest moments so that it would help me to forget our struggles. At this time, I became aware of the powerful nature of photographs and the release of the film Memento reinforced my findings; as we inject and project our feelings on photographs (and vice versa), those pictures in turn possess the power to rewrite history – a more selective history. Other films, such as The Virgin Suicides (1998), American Beauty (1999), and Lost in Translation (2003), are also influential and inspirational to my work and life - Lost In Translation especially. I now find this film comparable to a similar jarring foreign experience I underwent in the summer of 2007. Being immersed in the saturated and rich culture of France for weeks was a life-altering experience and catalyst for existential contemplation. During this time, I became exposed to experiential and transformative acts and realized that these could be formulated as works of art. Research into the movements of the Situationists and the Dérive inspired and motivated me to incorporate these strategic elements into works that I could then share with my viewers.

In the work Affliction, I created a series of thaumatropes and flip books, amongst other interactive objects. These pieces initially encourage a child-like playfulness upon encounter, but the work's demeanor shifts from whimsical to serious as the animations yield unsettling political references – a man plummeting from the World Trade Center, women weeping for those lost in war, an innocent boy being operated on after being victim to a bombing raid, etc. Because the works are based on interaction, the viewers cannot address the works without involving themselves. This work specifically heightens tensions between personal interaction and involvement with the serious public and social concerns that emerge out of war. I hope to invite viewers to investigate a rich political terrain by creating an environment where they become physical activators of mediated footage, rather than passive bystanders. While the works utilize footage from the past, the installation’s engagement with the public encourages a progressive examination of the present and the future.

 

I found that the process of specifically dealing with this series of works alluded to the elusive nature of memory and perception. As I filtered through thousands of clips of mediated footage of war weaponry, raids, and other malicious and militant acts, I began to contemplate how a sense of collective identity is formulated through what is selectively filmed and released for public access. In turn, what is released then informs the collective memory and associated political traumas. It becomes evident that the very discourse of memory has come to play a central part in thinking about the relationship between the present and the past.

 

The book Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory reveals that pertinent concerns have arisen regarding the inherent (re-) constructive process of memory: “[The] reliability of memory and experience as exact records of the past, [and] also the very notion of historical truth have come into question."[4] Psychologists and sociologists are intrigued with collective memory because the memories are so often distorted.[5] Thus, turning to memory to determine the truth of the past is problematic as both ‘memory’ and ‘truth’ here are unstable and destabilizing terms.

 

Interestingly, a passage in Memory and Understanding reveals that "…[m]emory itself, as a capacity, is unconscious . . . [and remembrance], being a result achieved by activating this capacity, is conscious."[6] Thus the way individuals transform this implicit process into an explicit one involves decisions that affect the essence of the very information transcribed. In other words, the re-articulation of any event inherently carries with it alterations. This specifically reminded me of the task filmographers and editors endure, and how what they film, how they edit, and what gets released to the public is a process that parallels and shapes (as well as is shaped by) the process of memory. This (re-) constructive activity of memory and editing not only exists in individual and social interpretation, but it is also infused in our physiological ability to perceive, which led me deeper into the process of executing my works of art.

 

People always say that “seeing is believing,” but as we have discovered, what one sees and in turn believes is not always the truth. I discovered sources of research that articulated the inherent flaws of the visual system. Much like memory, vision is a form of unconscious inference, where relativity and physiological limitations play crucial roles. Helmholtz, whose work on vision is regarded as fundamental to modern science, proclaimed vision to be a matter of deriving a probable interpretation from incomplete data.[7] This references the inherent inadequacies of the human eye's visual system:

 

The visual system is the part of the nervous system which […] interprets the information from visible light to build a representation of the world surrounding the body. The visual system has the complex task of (re-) constructing a three-dimensional world from a two-dimensional projection of that world. The psychological manifestation of visual information is known as visual perception.[8]

 

Given that there are physiological flaws with the very act of seeing, I find further problems in witnessing what is shown to the public audience. Through the media, seeing becomes an automatic tertiary experience. I located footage that was too gruesome to be aired on public television in Internet collective banks and underground documentary films. This footage entails segments of trucks being loaded with the carcasses of children and other victims of bombing attacks, women collapsing as they pray to God for divine justice and the ruthless demise of opponents, and rotting corpses being kicked and mocked. This accumulative video is exhibited in the pedestal element of the Affliction installation. Pedestals generally elevate a subject for public viewing in a pristine and clean manner. I chose the specific juxtaposition of the tradition of the pedestal and the gore of the video to collide in a viewing experience that would jar the viewer. Where the pedestal was once a stand that was disregarded, now the formerly disregarded footage is encased in glass and foregrounded by the pedestal itself as the video becomes the subject for viewer speculation and examination.

 

Also, in a process that is inherent to memory and perception, I made flip books from this mediated footage and systematically retained certain frames while discarding others to recreate simple animations that were simultaneously complex in concept. These filters affect the sensorial essence of experience, as do other physiological traits such as persistence of vision, which was first noted in 1820 by Peter Mark Roget. “This property refers to the length of time the retina […] retains an image after the object is gone.”[9] Also, Phi phenomenon, accredited as a visual human instinct, automatically mentally associates images in close proximity.[10] With all the ways vision physiologically interprets sight, it is a problematic construction of inference. However, these physiological flaws are what makes the brain process and understand the animations of the flip books and thaumatropes. Revealing the constructive qualities of these filtration flaws as successful in other terms of perception was amongst the most difficult of the challenges I faced, and was also one that elevated a significant importance: it was essential that these objects be presented and exist solely upon viewer activation to (re-)create the conceptual connections between the viewer and the work – and by extension, the social phenomenon.

 

Gilles Deleuze articulates in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation that studies of infants have revealed that their "…sensory world [is] populated by pure intensities (of sound, light, hunger, etc.) in which the baby cannot yet distinguish between itself and the world."[11] This is, in part, attributed to an under-developed visual system. As we mature, we adapt to filter these overpowering stimuli and distinguish ourselves from our surroundings. Deleauze concludes that "…in sensing, both self and world unfold simultaneously for the sensing subject."[12] Hence having works dependent on viewer activation and participation reconnects the subject to the referential importance of the work. The viewers are empowered by their understanding and acknowledgment of the work as they take active roles, rather than functioning as passive bystanders with no invested relationship. One focus in my art is to encourage perspectives of intersubjectivity and awareness. Rather than being didactic in my works, I find that encouraging the public’s engagement with subjects perhaps neglected or overlooked is a simple gesture with critical potential. In How We Walk in Tampa, a collaborative project I have also been working on, the simple act of walking is the subject for contemplation in relation to the political relevance and social landscape of the Tampa Metropolitan area. I further encouraged contemplation on the notion of social landscape through intimate personal perspectives in my most recent work, PROJECT SLEEP WALK/TALK.

 

PROJECT SLEEP WALK/TALK is an ongoing performative and participatory art project that began in fall of 2007. In this series, willing participants allowed me to follow and document their experience as they embarked on an unconventional nighttime walk that was tailored to their desires and decisions. Details such as location, distance, and duration of the walk were decided by the participants, along with their stream-of-conscious narrative that was captured by a tape recorder. Project documentation produced materials such as night-vision videos, satellite location maps, audio recordings, and transcripts that were then utilized in a physical installation and a corresponding web component of the work. PROJECT SLEEP WALK/TALK explores the human condition through peoples’ provoked thoughts, fears, and prompted memories as they engage their environment in unaccustomed circumstances. In addition to investigating each participant’s psychoscape, the project further investigates peoples’ willingness and/or reluctance to subject themselves to experiences in which familiar environments and experiences become estranged. This work examines the complex terrain between the personal and the public.

 

Much like Affliction, I incorporated physical and digital elements within the PROJECT SLEEP WALK/TALK installation. In Affliction, I took what was digital and brought it to a physical realm, and in PROJECT SLEEP WALK/TALK I instead made an effort to document the physical with digital means. Due to this interchange of media usage, I have become increasingly aware of the limitations of both methods and the parallels between the processes of making and the convoluted processes of experiencing. I found great difficulties in presenting materials that created a physical instance of an experiential process, which was the very essence of PROJECT SLEEP WALK/TALK. Despite the vast amounts of data that is presented for each participant’s encounter, I still consider the material which cannot be presented to be the soul of the work. To re-reference the passage by Peggy Phelan, it is in the clarity of absence - the details that cannot be presented or depicted that make PROJECT SLEEP WALK/TALK captivating and compelling.

 

Călin Dan is a Romanian artist and theorist based in Amsterdam whose work I relate to and respect. He also deals with issues of reconstructing perspectives of environmental settings from information that can and cannot be acquired. I had the privilege of speaking with him about his approach and his work recently, which has been abbreviated on his website:

 

Through his observations of the city, his explorations of neighborhoods, his contacts with dwellers and visitors, and through his research of traditions, Călin Dan develop[s] an almost psychoanalytical way of looking at things. His work is an original blend of personal observations, folklore, historical facts and architectural analysis.[13]

 

PROJECT SLEEP WALK/TALK draws many parallels to his approach, as willing participants allowed me to document and record their vocalized inner-monologues that revealed their questions, observations, and realizations. I feel that I present these different scenarios in a psychoanalytical manner that references Dan’s work. Also, I feel my scope of presentation includes factual elements in the walking trajectory-marked maps and satellite location images. Similar to Dan’s work, I make an effort to reconfigure and combine the relational values that cannot be mapped and absolute values that can.

 

Felix Gonzales-Torres is another artist I admire, whose work was based on the principle of what he selectively revealed and disclosed to the public. I had the privilege of seeing his work represent the United States in the American Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. The clean and minimalist-aesthetic approach to the installations also depends upon viewer interactions. He often worked with bulk materials. In several ways, I attribute elements of my formal preferences and procedural methods to a Gonzales-Torres inspired sensibility. Gonzales-Torres utilized thousands of candies and piles of paper; I utilize an abundance of visual information as well. In Affliction, I used hundreds of individually selected frames to make the flip books, and over ten thousand white-coated soldiers. In PROJECT SLEEP WALK/TALK, participants took countless steps on the walking excursions, and there is an abundance of byproducts that are all presented in a structured fashion. I find that beyond these two series of works, there are previous installations that also deal with bulk materials: PeepSHOW, a collaborative installation with the [FL]WHAT.IF?SOCIETY algorithmically arranged thousands of Peeps^®, and Like Son and Unlike Daughter, an installation that consisted of thousands of pills and pill bottles. I find that there is a beautiful and transformative quality to handling and examining every individual instance of these materials. In the monotony, the absolute terms of quantity and physicality become transparent and instead, relational and inter-relational attributes surface. Each object transcends referent status and instead becomes a powerful signifier that strengthens the process and outcome of the work. Through combining a minimalist palette and clean presentation with a maximalist use of bulk materials, I find the resulting visual tensions between aesthetic stimulation and quantity of materials intriguing.

 

After serious contemplation, I have decided that my work’s element of interactivity and dependence on the viewer is its most important characteristic. Being successful in initiating viewers to actively engage and examine the work and openly participate is how I measure my work’s significance and success. Being installed in galleries, museums, or locations of establishment is less pivotal to the work – actually, specific location is irrelevant because I argue that my work’s ultimate terrain is life.

 

For Nietzsche, "…art transforms even as it thus 'represents.' It is no simple faithful mirror of the contents of these states, but rather 'a transfiguring mirror.'”[14] The reflections within this mirror reveal that life and art are fundamental cohorts: that "…life is essentially artistic and that art is an expression of the fundamental nature of life."[15] The transmitted transfigurations of truth transcend actual truth, thus heightening our powers of insight and understanding.[16]

 

With this heightened understanding and newfound insight brought about through my work and life experience, I aspire to share my knowledge with viewers through interactive and subtly transformative installations. As a human being, I will continue to engage and experience life. As an artist, I will continue to explore and examine it. I look forward to the experiences and artworks that lie before me.