Dispatch from the Frontier of Art & Tech
The director of tech education at Pioneer Works, a nonprofit art and innovation incubator in Brooklyn, is thinking about buying a laser cutter. David Sheinkopf is conscientious and detail oriented so it’s more complicated than you’d imagine: If you want to cut acrylic with lasers, you first have to think about ventilation. Luckily, this unit comes with an air purifier that can take the toxic gas vented from the ablating acrylic (ablation is the process of erosion through heat; distinct from burning) and turn it back into breathable air. The alternative method is to simply vent the gas outside the building at the expense of your neighbors. Or, if you’re really bargain-basement, just inhale the stuff.
It’s a very post-modern conversation, happening as it does in a Civil War-era boiler factory on the Red Hook waterfront. Like most aged boiler factories, this one has moved on to other uses. The room we’re in was most recently used as a research facility for Nanotronics, producer of the world’s most sophisticated microscopes. There’s one sitting in the middle of the room but it’s no longer used for research. The slight swayings of the third floor in this antique building were many hundreds of times larger than the calibrations of the microscopes, making it difficult to test the machinery on windy days. This microscope — a hulking behemoth, by the way — has been given over to the artists who make up the general population of Pioneer Works.
“IF YOU ZOOM IN CLOSELY ENOUGH ON ANY COLOR,” SAYS SHEINKOPF, “NO MATTER HOW PURE, THE PIGMENTS EVENTUALLY RESOLVE INTO A GRADIENT. WHAT WE’RE SEEING IS ALWAYS AN AVERAGE,” HE SAYS, CASUALLY BLOWING MY MIND.
While Sheinkopf is vague about his plans for the new laser cutter, the purchase is in line with the premise of the space and with his role in particular — which is to explain the potential uses of different softwares and hardwares to artists. “People have heard of most of it, but unless you went to art school in the last five years, you haven’t been exposed to this kind of technology.”
Pioneer Works is the brainchild of Dustin Yellin, a popular physical/conceptual artist who specializes in three-dimensional collages. By layering collaged images on glass plates, Yellin creates intricate sea-like dreamscapes that invite absorption. The space he’s created is something of an incubator, offering one-month to one-year residences to artists and makers who are exploring the intersection of art and technology.
Aside from the artists, Pioneer Works hosts Clocktower Radio on an indefinite residency, and Nanotronics, founded by former Columbia University physics professor Matthew Putman.
The partnership between Nanotronics and Pioneer Works seems like a less-than-equitable paring on the surface. Pioneer Works gets access to the best microscopes in the world and a bunch of Oculus Rift virtual reality glasses. Nanotronics gets… a shaky old building? But, Putman says, giving artists access to the equipment is actually a valuable form of beta testing for Nanotronics. In fact, their current visual display model emerged directly from a conversation with an artist who was struggling with an older interface. And being housed in an incubator space keeps the artists and the physicists from getting trapped in stale ideas. The art excites the physicists and the physics excites the artists. Win/win.
Here’s an example: An artist creates a 360 degree series of images of a gold particle using the big microscope upstairs. They render the images into a three-dimensional universe that you can explore using an Oculus Rift. They then compose a symphony that can only be experienced by walking around on the particle of gold.
Technological revolutions are the stuff of art history, but they’re rarely reckoned as being primarily technological. Through that lens, the invention of oil painting in the 16th century and its spread across Europe allowed artists to explore the complexities of another emergent Renaissance phenomenon — the development of optics. The cubists were great explorers of the 20th century phenomenon of relativity, using another new tool — acrylics. The invention of photography made representational painting obsolete practically overnight.
This particular revolution — the Electronic Art revolution — is actually nothing new. The Theremin, the first (and probably weirdest) electronic instrument, was invented in 1919. But the current state of the art merges visual/musical and physical technology to create works that could broadly be termed “experiential.” The applications are big and just beginning to be explored. Case in point, an artist asks me if I thought it would be possible to convert the Empire State Building into an enormous Theremin receiver.
Another surreal example: When you visit the bathroom, a synthesized voice greets you and invites you to log in. Sensors track how many squares of toilet paper you use and report the information to your social media feed when you flush. If you text the bathroom, the synthetic voice will repeat your text aloud to listeners who are waiting in line to use it.
Art and technology are running in close parallel at the moment. Technology is becoming more concrete (the so-called “hardware revolution”) Art, on the other hand, is becoming more ephemeral. Pixels are on screens, sounds are bits. Most art has always been an individual experience (most of what makes a painting matter is how you feel when you look at it), but “tech art” can be unique, individual, and also disposable. An exhibit might take months to prepare, cost many thousands of dollars, and be over in a single night, having been experienced by a few hundred people. It begs the question of whether a work has to be lasting in order to be artistic, and it also creates logistical challenges for the artists. The ephemeral nature and high cost of production and display has pushed art in the same direction as technology — unless you’re a millionaire, you wind up sharing spaces, equipment, and ideas. And, as Pioneer Works has discovered, the equipment, spaces, and ideas can be exactly the same for both groups.
Another way of moving past the disposability of tech art is by helping the dialogue transcend the individual works. Pioneer Work’s strategy for this includes the “Scientific Controversies” lecture series, organized by Putman. A designer of the Large Hadron Collider and a theoretical physicist got on stage to discuss the hunt for the Higgs Boson. The talk was very physics heavy, but it was engaging and amusing. The audience was mostly artists and community members. There were drinks afterward, and it emerged that 95 percent of the matter in the universe is invisible to our detectors; we simply infer it from its gravity.
“THERE’S A CONCURRENT INFERENCE: BASED ON OUR RELATIVE LACK OF MASS, FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF MOST OF THE UNIVERSE WE ARE AS INSUBSTANTIAL AS GHOSTS. THIS IS A NOTION TO BLOW THE MIND OF ARTISTS AND SCIENTISTS ALIKE.”
Putman’s core motivation for housing Nanotronics in the space was to create a dialogue, an environment in which artists respond to the scientists and scientists respond to the artists. “When people work and live together,” he said, “they spend time together… I didn’t know that there would be any direct applications commercially. It was a serendipity.”
In the same way that early photographers improved their technology to allow the capture of rapid motion or low light, artists, scientists, and technologists are now pushing the limits of existing sensors and displays. A main focus is to hack the individual nature of consumer technology, to allow for more collective experiences. Using technology to provoke aesthetic responds can be a mixed bag, as more intimate experiences can also make us lonelier. Overcoming this challenge means merging the boundaries of individuality and interaction — this would be the true definition of an immersive artistic experience. To challenge this, Sheinkopf and others are showing artists how to hack their tools to fit their projects.
The most cutting edge experts on this are actually advertisers. Some have big creative budgets at digital agencies, which lets them experiment. Pioneer Works does the same thing on a shoestring, as using technology for purely artistic purposes means improvising, calibrating, and creating a dialogue. Sheinkopf’s most important role, though, might be bridging the gap between the artists and the technology. Aside from the laser cutter, the microscope, and the Oculus Rifts, they have a 3D printer and a 3D scanner, and enough dangerous machinery that they’ve installed a big red “Stop Everything” button in the middle of the room.
Microscopes and art actually share a goal — they both look more closely at the elements of reality. Like the gradient of a color, for example, they take something that appears stable and shows the dynamic differences within it. The partnership seems more intuitive in this light — Pioneer Works and Nanotronics both zoom, in search of a revealed truth.
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