Stand close to the wall of eight images. See eight head shots of Albert Einstein. Walk back 15 paces. Albert transforms into Madonna and Harry Potter. A visual inversion from physics to popular culture, “Eight Einsteins: Hybrid Illusions” by Aude Oliva, Antonio Torralba, and Amanda O’Keefe was an installation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum. The National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) conference, with the theme of Common Wealth, opened with a reception at this location in which conferees migrated among installations, probing interfaces between new technologies, the body, perception, and data flows. “Eight Einsteins” stands as a digital trompe l’oeil: it superimposes two images, one at a low spatial frequency and the other at a high spatial frequency. Depending on where you stand, you’ll see either Einstein or Madonna—interpretation resides as a function of viewing distance. Einstein inverts into Madonna as distance between the viewer and image increases. The installation becomes a structural metaphor for the entire conference, a system of superimpositions of different spatialities and altitudes of our complex, endlessly inverting, public media ecology.

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Time-based art predominates at this year’s Venice Biennale, curated by Daniel Birnbaum. The exhibition takes place in the Arsenale, the Exhibition Palazzo, and the Giardini, where individual countries select work to show in their national pavilions. The Biennale includes several outstanding films, notably by Fiona Tan and Krzysztof Wodiczko in the Giardini, and Paul Chan in the Arsenale.

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Inklings that the future isn’t what it used to be were found throughout the tenth annual 2009 Media Ecology Association (MEA) convention. Hosted by St. Louis University, this year’s event was missing certain elements, suggesting that subtle change was underway. While the legacy of older media such as television and film were still hanging around, it was the newer and emerging forms, such as social media, mobile media, and spatial media that stood firmly in the convention spotlight.

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It has been a while since Alfred Korzybski reminded the world that “the map is not the territory,” and in the intervening decades the study of general semantics has spent an unexplainable amount of time off the cultural radar, proliferating on the sidelines. But if the reception of the 2009 Institute of General Semantics (IGS) international conference is any indication, Korzybski and general semantics are experiencing a bit of a cross-disciplinary resurgence.

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At the seventh Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia, the Mexican documentary, feature, and shorts scene pulses with topics like labor, agribusiness, and toxins conveyed through visual and editing innovations. Film highlights included the muckraking documentary Pueblos Unidos (2008, directed by Felipe Casanoa and Miguel Ángel Diáz), charting the relationship between swine fl u and the Carroll Company pig farm in Veracruz, and the epic hybrid experimental/documentary El General (2009, Mexico/U.S.), Natalia Almada’s exquisite film questioning the articulation of power and Mexican political history.

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You have done your homework, organized your portfolio, perhaps even tested the waters at Critical Mass or the Society for Photographic Education. Better yet, you have taken a workshop with Mary Virginia Swanson and perfected your branding and presentation. Now you think you are ready for the big time—one of the four key photography festivals in Europe. These diverse events present many opportunities to behold the bodies of work of various international photographers. The following summer festivals accomplished just that, enriching their visitors along the way.

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Since the advent of reality television, the entire notion of “the real” has been scrambled, remixed, and mashed up before our eyes. It often takes a huge dose of media literate acumen to discern the faux from the authentic, and even then, fantasy, fame, and fiction intermingle. Even in feature-length documentaries, the rules of storytelling sometimes stretch to fashion a coherent narrative out of the chaotic pieces that define real lives. As far back as Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), the documentary genre has always toyed with staging, performing, and recording notions of “the real.” In YouTube land, where dancing, camera mugging, crying, and karaoke-singing by “real” people warrants continual upload, what does it mean to “get real?” With independent and big time distributors of documentary programming vying for viewers, fiction and truth often interweave and blur in the interests of constructing a coherent storyline or creating tantalizing “spin.” In the case of two recent acclaimed documentaries about teens, American Teen (2008) by Nanette Burstein and Going on 13 (2008) by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Dawn Valadez, the versions of teen reality couldn’t be more diverse. Burstein headed to Warsaw, Indiana, to document five real teens during their senior year of high school, while Guevara-Flanagan and Valadez stayed close to their home turf in the San Francisco Bay Area to film four multicultural girls, over the course of four years, as they entered adolescence. Both projects had to grapple with similar questions: how “real” is it to train cameras on teenagers every day for ten months, or intermittently for four years? What happens when pre-teens and teens open up for the lens? Is it possible to capture an authentic perspective, a glimpse of truth, or will they default to a borrowed script?

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Overlapping exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) held between the fall of 2001 and spring of 2002 produced a dialogue on the politics of cultural remembrance and witnessing as representation. Two rapidly organized responses to the events of September 11, 2001, exemplified what Pierre Nora describes as the archival character of modern memory, which “relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of recording, the visibility of the image.” Hence, he argues the existence of an “obsession with the archive that marks our age,” which attempts “at once the complete conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past.” “New York September 11 by Magnum Photographers” opened exactly ten weeks after the terrorist attacks. Large-format photographs and a compelling twenty-five minute video by Evan Fairbanks were accompanied by large freestanding aluminum framed slabs containing names of the victims, evoking the minimalist format of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. During three weeks in February 2002, visitors could move from these images of destruction to “WTC: Monument,” an exhibition devoted to the building of the World Trade Center (WTC) during the 1960s and early 1970s, with a final gallery of images taken on September 11. Both exhibitions were the product of “History Responds,” a project headed by the N-YHS and established to compile, caretake, catalog, and exhibit historical evidence related to September 11, and its “continuing aftermath.”

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Gary Hill is a Seattle-based media artist and writer whose work has been exhibited internationally for the past thirty years. One of the early innovators in video art, Hill’s work addresses themes of language and communication. Inspired by philosophy and linguistics, Hill continues to reinvent the medium of video. This interview was conducted via Skype on August 4, 2009.

Colette Copeland: Michael Rush, in his 2003 book Video Art, categorizes you as a video installation artist. In George Quasha and Charles Stein’s essay, “Speaking for Before,” both avoid categorizing you as a video artist, citing it as reductive or condescending. You are quoted as saying that video is ultimately the wrong word for what you are involved with. It seems that this paradox of the inadequacy, yet necessity, of language and our desire to “name and categorize” is an underlying theme throughout your work. How would you describe yourself and your work?

Gary Hill: Categories aside, I would say my work resides between media; it rather deals with the flux of poetic space. George and Chuck make the argument that I’m perhaps more a language artist than a video artist, and there is indeed some truth to that. The reality is that, when one is working, the question of what it is that one does vanishes into the process that is happening at that given moment. The culture of mind and creativity is very different than the world that is attempting to put things in their proper places so as to be understood. These worlds mix about the same as oil and water, though. I work with “stuff ” more than language or installation. I work with stuff and what’s happening now.

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[Ed. note: This is the first part of a two-part essay.]

During an exhibition opening at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna in 2006, several people showed up with their shoelaces undone, stood talking to each other, and were photographed periodically. Later, Polaroids appeared under the title “Resistance,” identifying artist Roman Ondák as the mastermind of this intervention and providing the temporary performance with the potential for permanence. However, by retrospectively calling this performance “Resistance,” the artist intervened not only in the ritualized situation of the opening, but also in a much broader field. He relates this slight disturbance of everyday gestures to an important artistic and critical tradition that presents disturbances of language and interruptions of convention as acts of political resistance; hence, Ondák inscribed his work within this tradition. By using the museum and a public meeting of art connoisseurs for his intervention, he highlighted the judgment of such a process as “resistant,” but at the same time he revealed that such a judgment might also become the subject of questioning and reflection. Seen this way, this artwork creates a kind of pictorial equivalent of the starting position of a research enterprise1 also designed to investigate this particular artistic, political, and critical tradition—that sees aesthetic tactics of irregularity and disturbance (such as montage, alienation, parody, or irony) as “resistant” or “subversive,” and thereby contrasts them to “conventional” or “dominant” aesthetic and political formations. Similar to Ondák’s artwork, this project was determined to question such a binary division of the aesthetic-political world that ascribes a quasi-essentialist political effect to certain aesthetic tactics regardless of how they are used and the reactions they trigger, not by criticizing from a bird’s-eye view, but by working through the arguments brought up by this tradition.

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Jo Ann Callis emerged on the Los Angeles photography scene in the mid 1970s, where she gained a reputation as an artist who worked with color photography, making pictures that were suggestive, sensual, and surreal. Schooled at UCLA under the eye of Robert Heinecken, Callis never considered photography as a frame of observed reality. Rather, she fabricated situations to be captured on camera. The trajectory of “Woman Twirling,” the title of her recent survey exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, for example, parallels the ups and downs in Callis’s personal life. She sees herself as a woman twirling, perhaps spiraling out of control at times, as the title suggests. Yet it is her ability to channel emotional turmoil into evocative images that resonate beyond the particulars of a situation that makes Callis’s vision unique.

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The near crisis, the muted climax, the restrained confrontation, simply controlled chaos. This is invariably what the ambiguous and perplexing narrative schemas of Aernout Mik’s video works are pushing toward: situations on the brink of reaching a climax, disintegrating or halting before total chaos is reached. From the moment visitors entered the Museum of Modern Art, which recently exhibited newer works by the Dutch multimedia artist, they were surrounded by video projections. Placed at various locations throughout the museum but concentrated around the Special Exhibitions Galleries, the brilliantly curated show, organized by Laurence Kardish and Kelly Sidley of MOMA’s film department, immersed visitors in Mik’s continuous stream of images.

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On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina passed over New Orleans, leaving behind utter devastation. It is the sort of destruction that the photography medium is well suited to chronicle. Robert Polidori’s well known photograph, 2732 Orleans Avenue, New Orleans, La., September 2005, from the series “New Orleans, After the Flood,” provides a perfect example: the image captures a small, white house with a white car parked at an angle in front of it. The line left behind when the water receded marks them both. Slowly, the viewer notices that the car is on the sidewalk, its windshield rendered opaque by sediments in the water. The graphic pleasure of the line fades into the chill of realization that this house and car have been abandoned. The inhabitants have fled, perhaps never to return. Polidori’s restrained approach lets just a few details speak the horror of the hurricane’s devastation. The scene of a specific devastation such as  Hurricane Katrina is an easier subject for photography than the macro issue of climate change itself. Two photographers, Mary Mattingly, and Joel Sternfeld, addressed the urgency of global warming in recent projects, though in very different ways. Neither went to the sites of visible devastation. Mattingly imaged a version of the future as a way of life following a catastrophe. Sternfeld likewise turned his camera toward people trying to understand, prevent, and manage global warming. Both supplemented photography: Mattingly with sculpture and performance, Sternfeld with text and design. Both were compelled to take actions to make their own behavior carbon neutral.

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Yang Fudong’s epic five-part film cycle, Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003–07), made its museum premiere in the United States this summer at the Asia Society in New York City, presenting viewers with a rare twenty first- century Proustian world of lengthy, meditative reflections on the passage of life.

The film cycle begins with a reenactment of an ancient Chinese tale in which individuals from the third century leave their bureaucratic jobs and move to a bamboo forest in hopes of achieving a pure intellectual lifestyle. In Part I, we meet seven modern intellectuals of the urban generation who go on an excursion to the scenic Yellow Mountain. The group, two women and five men, are poster children for China’s yuppie bourgeois. They are passionate lovers, sentimental poets, stylish philosophers, and sometimes reckless narcissists with grand ambitions and high ideals. Each was born trapped in an emotional uncertainty and their irresolvable contradictions continued by pre-existing cultural paradigms. For example, the seven try to evade the notion of responsibility, which is vitally important in Chinese culture. As one intellectual quietly confesses, “I’m selfish. I feel sorry for my parents. For the one I love, I left my family.”

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“Architecture of Authority” is an exhibition of forty-four largeformat color photographs by Richard Ross recently on display at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. A professor at the University of  California, Santa Barbara, Ross traveled across the United States and around the world photographing empty interiors and exteriors of schools and prisons, courtrooms and detention centers, churches and mosques, phone booths and cells. The sheer beauty—light, sense of space, iconic detail—of these large-format photographs belie their disturbing content: the subtle and overt ways authorities shape power relationships through building design and retrofitting. Ross decodes the semiotics of public architecture through photographic framing and understatement, and deconstructs institutional secrecy with a lens. His photographs and the exhibition design encourage an unusually broad range of interpretation, while the location of the exhibition in Washington, D.C., underlines the relevance of photographs of the U.S. military prisons at Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo) and Abu Ghraib. The visitor soon discovers that to look at these large-scale photographs is to enter—that viewing is an act of witness. Unfolding in a series of adjoining galleries, the exhibition evokes a loose photographic “journey” from outer to inner rings of authority, starting at an FBI service window in the first gallery and ending at the Isolation Room, or “rubber room” (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, San Ysidro, California) in the last gallery. The exhibition narrative propels the viewer onward and inward as large format photographs prompt viewers’ empathy and juxtapositions suggest disquieting comparisons, for example, between holding cells at Gitmo and Khmer Rouge Prison 21 in Cambodia.

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In light of the recent plenitude of artwork, books, and symposia devoted to the topic of walking, Tate Britain’s inclusive Richard Long retrospective offered a welcome opportunity to reconsider his longstanding and influential practice in “Heaven and Earth.” A veteran of conceptual art’s heyday, Long has continued to maintain his rigorous series of creative investigations, interweaving the related phenomena of walking, mapping, and traveling. In so doing, his works have convincingly served to blur unnecessary distinctions between photography, documentation, and installation. The exhibition was both spacious and elegant, allowing Long’s austere and subtle images to hang effectively without the impediment of claustrophobic groupings. His works instead can be read as a slow accretion of detailed renderings and insightful commentaries. Long’s typical sans serif typeface becomes an instantly recognizable signature, as is his most characteristic mode of expression: dry, selective lists featuring the dates, locations, and specific details of his excursions: A walk of 24 hours: 82 miles/A walk of 24 miles in 82 hours.

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The mood is quiet, innocent and honest beyond words. This, faithfully, is the way East Main Street looked on a midweek summer afternoon. This is how the county courthouse rose from the pavement in sharp, endearing ugliness. These precisely, are the downtown telegraph poles fretting the sky, looped and threaded from Hight Street to the depot and back again, humming of deaths and transactions. Not everyone could love these avenues just emerged from the mud-rut period, or those trolley cars under the high elms. But those who did loved well, and were somehow nourished thereby.

This account reads like a description of the way Walker Evans’s photographs are carried by a formal but quotidian eye. However, it is not—these are Evans’s own words, praising the picture postcard in a 1948 essay for Fortune magazine. Evans was an obsessive collector—of driftwood, soda can pull tops, roadside signs—but most of all, of postcards—the kind that filled mailboxes in the early twentieth century. In this tender little show, drawn from Evans’s collection of 9,000 postcards from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Walker Evans Archive, curator Jeff L. Rosenheim made the visual argument that the aesthetics of what the photographer called “honest, direct little pictures” were essential to the development of Evans’s photographic eye.

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Somewhere in my garage is a catalog for “Light 7” an exhibition at MIT’s Hayden Gallery in 1968. It was from this catalog that I learned that the real subject of black-and-white photography is not objects or scenes, but how objects and places are revealed by light. Minor White’s exhibition was large—almost seventy photographs—and was accompanied by a poetic manifesto exalting black-and-white photography to the level of a mystical gesture. “Elements of Photography” at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago is a very small exhibit, but it offers perspective to the important stream of the self-reflexive ideas White explored in “Light7” Each of the photographs in the exhibit takes these physical properties and the process of their interaction with the camera as a subject supporting the premise of the exhibition: water and light are essential elements of photography.

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It is rare to find a photography book that is also classified as a sociology text by the publisher, but Dream Street by Douglas McCulloh fits the label. It opens with a prescient foreword by D.J. Waldie, who traces the evolution of hopes and dreams in California from mid nineteenth- century gold mining operations, through the single family building boom of the twenties to the post-World War II expansion of suburbia in Southern California. By the beginning of the twenty first century, Waldie describes a tract housing industry “involving immigrant labor, construction wages in free fall, predatory lenders, and working-class flight from barrios and ghettos. The ominous and unsettling aspects of McCulloh’s photographs are not purely photographic; they are in the stories that surround them”.

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Beauty and aesthetics were separated following the French Revolution as social changes fostered a sense of self in relation to community and state that politicized the individual. Historically extolled as the purpose and meaning of art, beauty took a passenger’s seat next to the ascendency of an aesthetics of power. As individual points of view defined the subject matter chosen, so did the artist’s role shift, as Marx wrote, to gaze “with open eyes upon his conditions of life and true social relations.” Beauty, investigates the subject’s shifting position following avantgardism and modernism. Organized under three section headings, The Revival of Beauty, Concepts and Contexts, and Positions, editor Dave Beech collected the essays “with the politics of beauty in mind.” The first offering is Dave Hickey’s seminal 1993 essay, “Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty,” in which he complains that church priests were replaced by academics at liberal arts institutions suspicious of beauty’s power to distract and seduce from the “higher calling” to practice social critique and political activism. Pushing something to the sidelines to languish in the shadows rarely de-potentiates. Beauty gained the power of darkness. It became, according to Hickey, “the snake in the garden. It steals the institution’s power and seduces its congregation”

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Rita Raley’s study of tactical media is competent and well researched. While the forms of this stream of critical practice are not homogenous, Raley recognizes some shared “pedagogical and ideological investments”. Among these are a suspicion of the revolutionary metanarratives of the Left, with their emphasis on mass action in the streets and their emancipatory aim of “visible and permanent social change”. Rejecting old/new macropolitical strategies for a passage to classless society, tactical media practitioners opt for a “micropolitics of disruption, intervention, and education”. In this, they embrace a main orientation of postmodernist theory, which is unsurprising for a generation whose practices “have specifically emerged out of, and in direct response to, both the postindustrial society and neoliberal globalization”

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Caterwauling through perceived misery is a long-standing tradition in art—photography included—and unless handled deftly and with powerful restraint, it often empties the work of authority and critical perspective while diminishing the subject. At its worst, defects are embellished and malfunction celebrated to no good end. The lines crossed are muted, even invisible. The well-intentioned gesture becomes grotesque, not because of what it captures, but simply because that act is executed thoughtlessly. In Jed Fielding’s new book of photographs entitled Look at me: Photographs from Mexico City, he turns his camera on blind school children. Fielding posed the children against walls or lying on the floor, sometimes using a black cloth backdrop. His technique is both robust and sure-handed. These are deliberate and focused photographs of a vulnerable population, yet the central conceit here is too obvious and overstated. A disconnect between seeing and being seen serves as a sort of portraiture in half-measure, in which a conceptual twist is layered over the work. This imbalance, inherently present in each photograph, wears thin quickly, leaving the viewer to straddle a line between discomfort and puzzlement.

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