I am proposing here a mode of presentation based on a series of objects as props: rotating projections on suspended screens accompanied by sculptural wooden cylinders that begin to rotate when sitted by a member of the public. This brings to the foreground the element of mediation, through its co-ordination within the space of the real-time live event, investigating its involvement in the cognitive process and sensual experience of the public.

‘I am what I see’ is an old saying dating back to the middle ages and refering to the effects of the visual world on the Lacanian ‘I’. The power of the image is by no means reduced in the age of reason, science and information, instead the digital further accennuates the problematic basis of pictorial culture, leading some thinkers to speak of the anxiety and loss of the image and call for the need to update Walter Benjamin and his essay on the age of mechanical reproduction. My attempt to brake down and analyse the pictorial effect, leads me to wonder wherther I am not myself hypnotized and subjected by power of the image.

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Here are some stills from time-based visual set-ups and tests of what could take place in simultaneous viewings of rotations. In presenting the project, each screen can be separated from the series and located in relation to the space.

To view the time-based version follow the link

www.eleanalouka.co.uk/set-ups.html

http://eleanalouka.co.uk/bust.html

for ‘clickable’ images or follow the link below for a time-based version. Further down, I bring up Luhmann’s text in regard to communication and interactivity in art, as well as some of his ideas on the relation (distinction) between form and medium

http://vimeo.com/12325619

Luhmann belongs to the German sociological tradition, which closely relates to the Medium Theory by examining how the medium –and in our case, the art medium and the digital- affect the psychic and social systems in their processing of meaning. Art is of particular significance to Luhmann because it is believed to be rooted in perception. He places perception to the centre of psychic experience and communication as the key function of social systems. His theory is developed as an al-round analysis of society as a system, comprised of subsystems, one of which is the art-system itself. Other systems include economic, political, legal, scientific, religious and educational structures that retain their complexity and particularity in all their formations. They are seen as distinct and closed in their functions and operations, thus autopoietic, which means autonomous in their production of meaning and indifferent to their environment. Nevertheless, sociology departs from the point that they must be jointly compared as similar structures and thus analyzed from a common perspective. In similar manner, each medium consists of an entity and a discipline, but the precisely the interdisciplinary research and experiment on the comparisons of all media is what can really afford an insight and understanding on their specific function and affect to the production and formation of meaning. One must remember that the Art and artwork are not singularly definable and there is no irreducible element to them. Rather they are utterly relative to the operations of the social art system, within which they are located.

In the age of information the key medium is the internet: It has provided the first decided interactive platform, empowered the user with the offering of a source of knowledge and signaled the free spread of information and communication. Some people attribute it with the claim of having provided us with the first black US President. The internet’s potential towards communication is of primary interest to Luhmann, who has elaborated his theory on the distinction between medium and form, with the intention of posing the question ‘Can Art be possible as communication?’ He then registers the artwork, not as a distinct object which is ‘about something and embodies something’ but simply as that, which has been intentionally created to establish observational relationships. ‘Once someone recognizes, from the manner of presentation, an arrangement that is produced for an observer, a social medium has come into existence. (…) The unity of art resides in that it creates for the sake of observation and observes for the sake of being observed’. Thus Art is only differentiated when observed as such and artwork is that, which is recognized by an observer, as long as it has been created especially for him. This reading of the artwork clearly empowers the viewer. The Artwork can no longer be conceived in reference to the artist, his genius, his decisions or authority. Rather the observer seems the more appropriate basic figure as the site of realization of the work. He is the part, which is absolutely necessary for the realization of the work. Once the artist gives way to the observer, the concept of the object is no longer needed. The observer can be a social system and observation can be communication. The Artwork can be the tool or the machine, and the Viewer can use it to realize a process. This is the political meaning of interactivity in art. It allows the shift of power from the author to the receptor.

I am interested in the history and thory of the Mediology discource and the theoretical positions of Niklas Luhmann, Michael Ligner and other post modern thinkers, which propose interactivity and the exchange between artwork and ‘observer’ as the crucial property of progressive work and analogue to the idea of social and political antagonism, as articulated by Chantal Mouffe. The question of the materiality of the digital, its elusive nature, the difficulty in thinking of its elements and diverse functions seems to develop in parallel with sculptural and spatial practices, examining the material and the physical encounter between the artwork and the Viewer. In a way, the sculpture and the digital seem to c0-exist simultaneously, as opposite others, bound together as the two poles of the same quality, bearing canonically antithetical features. The image must be seen as an object, the sculpture stands for the consciousness of the body and the body tends to be articulated as an Image. This is one of the reasons that most live/performative work reaches us in the form of a photographic image. It is a cycle of media, which does exactly what it says: it mediates our perception, thinking and experience.

For this project, I am putting together a series of images depicting torsos, sculptural busts and other forms that allude to the flatness and frontality of the pictorial structure -as the inherited reading of Mondrian. Notions of classicism and sculpture are also relating to traditional ideas of proportion, balance, size, scale and composition, and in effect, the tradition of visual appearance and its affirmation to aestheticism as a system of values. On the event of a click, each still image is activated into a slow rotation around itself, highlighting its flatness, two-dimensionality, and braking down the effect of photographic representation, the effect that captures, absorbs and transfixes the viewer, when transporting away from real time. The piece also suggests the presence of a virtual space that doubles and reflects the physical space. This is why, we are currently thinking of Photography and Video not in relation to Painting but Sculpture and the real presence of the body. Clearly, the specificity of photography resides not in its materiality but in realism.