Thomas Kvam Reasearch Fellow, National Academy of The Art, Oslo

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4: The Machine Project

http://www.kontejner.org/index_en.html

The machine project Essay by Ruzica Zimunovic Future belongs to the awakened machines.... Peter Sloterdijk Norwegian artists Thomas Kvam featured as guests at the O.K. gallery in Rijeka (25 February 2003) and Gliptotekain Zagreb (1 March 2003), in an event organized by KONTEJNER- office for contemporary artistic practice, managed by Sunica Ostoi and Olga Majcen. The artists presented a robotic video and audio performance entitled Machine Project. By enclosing and darkening a part of the ground-floor area in Zagreb gallery Gliptoteka, Thomas Kvam simulated the atmosphere of a cinema, which is among the important preconditions for the Machine Project performance. Judging by the multitude of the interested visitors, this work of art would have probably gained on complexity had the authors adapted the entire hall, since that would have facilitated the flow of visitors from one crucial point of performance to another - the two machines or, shall we say, two robots, which are the carriers of the powerful structure of Gesamstkunstwerk - one controlled through the computer interface, another live, together with music and video recordings. By investigating the correlation of sound, video, and machine installations through a technologically demanding and extremely sophisticated performance, Thomas Kvam and Frode Oldereid have sought to provoke, as we said, the video experience in real space and time. The shocking audio-visual Machine Projections indeed to be understood as heralding a new, direct mode of communication with a work of art, one of such modes being the additional shaping of experience and meaning through one? own presence and behavior. Thus, the participation of spectators is significant. Those in Zagreb -be it for the lack of space, the age and social structure, or the temperament - did not respond to the invitation for the creation of party feeling, which was suggested by the music and the movements, especially of the larger machine. Although it might be stated that the project was at loss for this fact, such a behavior pattern of Croatian audience as opposed to, for example, the Swedish case, in which the audience was locked in a dark container, desperately trying to find an exit, might start a debate on the unpredictability of reactions to the aggressiveness of performance and the influence of its apocalyptic predictions upon individuals. The two Norwegians have cooperated on projects with machines since 1997, the year of the creation of Machine 3.0, based upon Kvam earlier projects. This artist, trained at the Art Academy in Oslo and Goldsmiths in London, created his first video- robotic installation in 1996, using a projection of his own face for that of the robot. It stammered, emitting a speech-like sound. Kvam had interfaced into this machine a computer program that created black and white lines, which eventually resulted in some sort of drawing. He pointed out that the project had first intrigued him precisely because of the capacities of the machine, which he continued exploring together with Oldereid. The latter artist had studied at the Oslo Institute for Sound and Drama and researched on documentary and TV report and production, media, and sociology at the University of Bergen, working with sound and video. The fertile fusion of his and Kvam ideas resulted in a first version of both the larger Machine 5.0 and the smaller Machine 6.0, which were united in the performances of Rijeka and Zagreb. Both machines suggest a state of the world at the time of the death of civilization, as we know it - as Paul Virilio has argued, at the time of the final triumph of prostetics over our bodies. Kvam provokingly suggest that we should not wait for the advent of some future computerized world of cyborgs, since it has already happened. Therefore, their project presents a higher level than that of a patent interactive show with two robots, music, or video projections alternating images of masses of people marching mechanically, of a globe turning into an observing eye, or of a frenetic multitude from advertisement posters. The Machine Project performance takes place in cyberspace, in which we are plunged without the aid of a hardware helmet and gloves. However, by basing the performance on two different machines, the artists are able to avoid a one-sided cybersituation, staging instead one of its specific moments of dramatic scission. The large machine - which is of undefined gender identity, for its face and voice are now female, now male - stands on a pneumatic, spider-like construction and is, one might say, some sort of a non-aestheticised copy of the Robocop or the replicants from the Blade Runner. It is a machine laid bare - in its own words, all meat has been burned from its bones - which can still operate only on the pre-inscribed human memory. The other, smaller machine is one step further in the evolution of cyborgs. The white, formless mass, out of which it rises, suggests that, just like the man had been created out of dust, it will announce its birth from a cyborg. Such a post-cyborg will inherit the memory of its predecessor but, instead of propping up on the robotic structure that presupposes movement, will be happily static in its bio-hybrid form. Since the era of cyborgs no longer knows a od who made man in his likeness, it will be a clone with deformed head, captured in an unidentified shape of a mutant. It will inherit from cyborgs merely a selected memory. If Kvam first machine stammered, now both of them are more than eloquent. Thomas Kvam have thus staged the moment in which both the cyborg and his successor are born almost simultaneously. Whereas the first has gone through the hell of initiation, fighting with human heritage, the second has been calmly investigating, recycling the superfluous, and has finally adopted memory without conscience. In this thirty-minutes long episode, which for one machine meant an agony of self-acceptance, and for the other a machine-like, cold, and patient reading of selected memory, both master fully the nightmare era of the other and the different, the intentional oblivion of the dictatorship of mind and body. The larger machine, which has inherited such suppressed collective memory, utters with a male voice, in a deafeningly aggressive way, things like excerpts from Marinetti Manifesto of Futurism, written in praise of the new industrial era, but also in service of dark ideologies. From time to time, the machine becomes weary and gloomy. It says: it is still silent, just like the day when I was born, and then, to the great pleasure of the smaller machine, which psychotically enjoys the way in which the former settles scores with lethargic dreamers and frightened masses, apprehends with relief the final absence of fear. The invitation of the small, diabolically ruthless clone to the barricades, to the glorification of power and greed, silenced even the female voice, which experienced in its last breath, through desperate and screaming exploration, the entire tragedy of birth into the world of paranoia and complete supervision, ultimately acknowledging the impossibility of freedom. What Kvam proposes is, in a way, an apocalyptic vision, though not of the future, but rather of the present state of the world. Indeed, the artists even seek to blur the historical context by means of video clips in the background. The ecstatic dialogue of the two machines does not announce the Judgment Day; rather, it is the image of the waning of civilization, the cynical and frustrating walk through the New World Order of technology and capital, which is not the privilege of our times only, but the mark of the entire past century. Mute masses passing in the background and the machine of female identity are an intermediate phase rather than one deprived of remorse, and the flexible will overcome. Having turned away from the archetypal image of woman and mother, they will be joined by the last possible enemy from within. In this way, the artists play with those marginal conditions in which, having lost our identity, we parasitically give way to conformism, we become, so to say, cyborgs, after which we are - be it indeed with the help of digital technology or subtly, out of everyday commodity - just one step away from our own clone.

Title: Machine 6.0 (2000)

Robotic video and sound installation
Sound: Dolby Surround 5:1

 

   

 

    

 

    

    

Intervjue LE MONDE diplomatique, nr. 4, april 2005. Av Beate Petersen Thomas Kvam har latt roboter stå i sentrum for spektakulære performancer. I hans spektakulære installasjoner er det i mindre grad en eksplisitt politisk agenda. Hans kombinasjoner av roboter, video og lyd, laget i samarbeid med Frode Oldereid, frem­står snarere som futuristiske (skrekk)scenarier. Installasjonene er vist en rekke steder på Balkan – sist i en performance kalt Machine Project på galleri Gliptoteka i Zagreb. Performancen besto av to roboter – agitatoren og kommentatoren – begge med Kvams ansikt projisert mot «hodene» sine. Robotene befant seg i hver sin ende av gal­lerirommet, med publikum som en masse mellom seg. Agitatoren skiftet kontinuerlig identitet. Med en aggressiv mannsstemme lovpriste den det siste århundrets mørke ideologiske krefter, for så i neste øyeblikk å feire den nye verdensordenen – alt mens den lille kommentatoren kom med høylytte hyl­lester. Agitatoren sveipet videre innom futuristenes feiring av maskinalderens estetikk og vår tids dyr­kelse av globaliseringen, før den til slutt gikk inn i sin egen ekstase, og endte opp i en ny form for «rage against the machine», en ny type punk. – Den fascistoide iscenesettelsen refererer like mye til 30-tallets politiske massemøter som til demonstrasjonene mot WTO i Seattle, sier Kvam, som i arbeidet med denne performancen nøye har studert den politiske talens retoriske grep: – Men her er det ikke lenger et menneske som målbærer de politiske ideologiene, men et maskinelt monster, et sett av aggregater. Utopien er ikke lenger forankret i noen erfaring. Slik illus­trerer maskinene det mekaniske skjelettet i det politiske utsagnet. De viser vår mulighet til å være politiske i offentligheten. Vi tror vi har unnsluppet det hierarkiske maktapparatet, og at de globale nettverkene skaper frihet, flyt og jevnbyrdighet. Men når systemene forandrer seg, forandrer maktenseg. Makten har blitt horison­tal, usynlig og flytende. Den kan ikke lenger ikonifiseres. Da Kvam/Oldereid viste Machine Project i Zagreb, etter Nato-bombingen og borgerkrigen, gikk de inn i en offentlighet med en helt annen poli­tisk temperatur enn de var vant til. Installasjonen ble tolket ikke bare i lys av det autoritære styreset­tet kroatene hadde vært underlagt. Den ble også oppfattet som et bilde på det kapitalistiske syste­met, og ikke minst, på en offentlighet som var blitt fullstendig dekonstruert. – Det er i en slik situasjon, der den politiske agendaen ikke er definert, at kunsten kan bli en eksperimentell plattform og en arena for dialog, avslutter Kvam.

 

  

Machine 6.0 Göteborg Posten 11-8-2002, (Saltarvet Kunsthall, Sverige) "Utanfor den grå træbyggnaden som hyser Saltarvets konsthall står en plåtcontainer och mullrar. Mitt i solvärmen verkar den förebåda något mörkt och klaustrofobiskt. Och mycket riktigt, därinne härskar vansinnet, det urspårade egot, den militanta manin, nämligen en docka med knyckiga rörelser och ett groteskt grimaseranda ansikte med ögon så levande at jag ryggar tilbaka. Do you hear that noise? Väser den. QUIET! skriker den. Men sedan flåsningen; Its MY noise. Orden kommer sporadiskt, lätene blir ibland tung techno. Först tycker jag at varelsen med sitt metall stång siktar på mig med ett vapen men inser snart at den så å säga siktar på sig selv med en liten projector: ett filmat ansikte projiceras på skulpturens egentligen vita tomma. Det är som om den stirrar inn i spegelen som samtidig är själva dess upphov." "På vägen ut av konsthallen passerar jag den mullrande containern. Någon verkar hållas fången därinne. Visst är det skönt at han inte släpps lös bland de övriga verken. Men sällan har en utställning haften nødvändigare motpol" Mikael Olofsson