Glitch, Gulf, Glyph, Grid, Graph, Gram: On the Digital Humanism of Lee Arnold's Sidereal Messenger
GLITCH, GULF,
GLYPH, GRID, GRAPH, GRAM:
ON THE DIGITAL HUMANISM OF LEE ARNOLD'S SIDEREAL MESSENGER
Ricky Yanas’ essay, Glitch, Gulf, Glyph, Grid, Graph, Gram: On the Digital Humanism of Lee Arnold's Sidereal Messenger, is the eighth in a series of essays archiving one year of Grizzly Grizzly exhibitions, in celebration of our 10th year as an artist collective. Throughout the year, we will be collaborating with exhibiting artists and emerging and established writers to produce essays that critically reflect on the exhibitions and expand the ideas explored in our experimental project space. In addition to being posted on this blog, the collected essays will culminate in our first bound publication, to be released in September 2019. Support for this year-long project, that fosters writing in the visual arts, was generously provided by The Velocity Fund administered by Temple Contemporary with generous funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
1610
In 1610, Galileo Galilei published 550 copies of his Sidereus Nuncius, Sidereal Messenger, or Starry Messenger, an astronomical treatise based on observations, made through a telescope, of the moon and the stars the previous year. Looking through a lens at an undetermined distance from his subjects, Galilei noted the phases of our moon and the movement of other celestial bodies. The modest etchings he produced, with lines carefully replicating the shifting light reflecting off the moon’s bumpy, blemished surface, were revolutionary. Sidereus Nuncius confronted centuries-old assumptions about the physical nature of the objects in our night sky. The Roman Catholic Church sought to suppress his discoveries not only because they put the idea of a human-centric universe into question but also placed scientific observation in a position to supersede the church’s role as sole mediator of earthly experience.
A NOTE
I was raised in a Catholic, Mexican-American family. This experience still colors my appreciation of the material world. Since I detached from the church, art has filled the gulf. So it is not surprising that the formal qualities of Lee Arnold’s process-oriented videos (the grids, textures, symmetry) panged my subconscious and moved me to begin this essay by mapping my early structural-perceptual grid onto his work.
A MESSAGE
Sidereal Messenger, an installation of Lee Arnold’s works, is analogous to a chapel: a small, dark, meditative space filled not with iconic figures, colorful stained-glass, or warm sunlight, but with rhythmic bursts of pattern, color, and glitchy imagery, emanating from horizontally oriented LCD monitors both self-standing on tripods and mounted to the walls. A series of visual-textural videos, or short films, playing on the monitors fill the room with spasmodic light and a musical atmosphere, both calming and energizing. Some of the screens have headphones attached, playing tonal counterparts to their corresponding images; some have earmuffs to cancel out the noise in the room, enabling their videos to be viewed in silence. An oculus projected high onto the back of the small gallery, operating as a focal point in the installation, displays a rotating set of images; a looping video of the night sky, silhouettes of plants, and sonic patterns rotate. The room, at moments, feels like it’s moving.
A DIFFERENCE
It is difficult not to draw comparisons to other chapel-like art spaces like James Turrell’s Skyspaces and Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin (2018) on the University of Texas at Austin campus. These spaces focus on color, light, silence, emphasizing site-specificity. The precious, individual experience they offer evokes desires for pilgrimages honoring great men, dedicated to rendering natural beauty and pure form. But unlike these austere and expensive franchise fixtures, Arnold’s work, its jittery, non-passive affect, makes the space that it keeps. Transferable and malleable, formal and playful, the works are more akin to the holy spirit than a cathedral.
First-century Christians performed their small masses in their homes, outside the view of Roman persecutors, changing locations often. The subversive networks that emerged from these gatherings were based on the sharing of ritual meals and exchanging clandestine information. Similarly, Arnold’s work yields a nomadic, lateral field of experience; he intentionally makes his videos available online without site-specific requirements, to be consumed and presented based on the preference of the user.
ANALOGY
American professor of cognitive science and philosopher Douglas Hofstadter states that the core of human cognition is analogy.1 Our ability to map situations onto other situations is not simply an artifact of our thinking, it’s the way we think. Early in life we begin to make these connections, gradually making packages of analogies, grouping them together in categories, larger concepts, and lexicons. Over time, these categories become more and more robust, nuanced, and abstract. Categories blur, blend, and leap from their assumed centers. Scientific and artistic leaps, like those of Galileo, are the product of this process: Observing the shared essence of objects over the surface of Jupiter with our own moon sparked a revolutionary hypothesis.
Hofstadter also refers to “lexical blends” that occur “when a situation evokes two or more lexical items at once and fragments of the various evoked competitors wind up getting magically, sometimes seamlessly, spliced together into the vocalized output stream...”2 Verbal slippages like saying “Take-luck” is evidence of our brains attempting to choose between two appropriate but slightly different salutations: “Take care” and “Good luck.” Arnold’s videos embody a similar process of mapping images and more complex lexical categories onto others, compressing them into small chunks of time, looping endlessly, making the process of processing, recording, and translating information the core of their content.
In the following, I will consider Arnold’s work through six associated categories, each a formal artifact, each a point to engage their thematic essences.
GLITCH
Significant in Arnold’s looped videos is their jittery, jumpy energy. Images of mountains (Stereograph (2018)) and grids (Interference (2017)) and graph-like forms (Signal/Noise (2019)) fall apart and reconfigure second by second. Similarities with contemporary digital phenomena like GIFs are clear; his hybrids of still and moving imagery manifest a seductively repetitive imagery created by grating textures and overlapping images. The patterns, rotating colors, and rhythmic breaks transfix our gaze (a hypnotizing effect that recalls Joan Jonas’ landmark work Vertical Roll (1972)), settling us into a space of ritual or meditation.
GULF
Stereograph is a three-dimensional video loop presenting a view of a mountain top. The sequential composite of two views of the mountain repeated causes the image to jump and jitter; colorful, gridlike etchings appear with every convulsion. The stereograph, a method of image making popular in the mid-19th century, took two images photographed or drawn from slightly different perspectives and placed them side-by-side to be viewed through an apparatus called a stereoscope. Viewing each image through the individual oculi of the stereoscope would create an illusion, making the images appear as one three-dimensional view. The simple apparatus compressed the two views to a magical effect.
Galileo’s telescopic lens collapsed the space between us and the moon, making it present, observable; the celestial image became an object. In Stereograph, the mountain is both literal and a metaphor for all great distances that we wish to surmount, fueled sometimes by the desire for victory but most often by curiosity. The image, its constant jerking away, its attempt to graph its subject, evokes sensations akin to the existential sublime of 19th century German painter Caspar David Fredrich.
GLYPH
Historically, we know hieroglyphics as signifying motifs from ancient societies. Today, glyphs exist in logos and in our alphabet as collectively accepted symbols, packaged iconic elements, as stand-ins for complex and simple ideas. The hand-made and the digital marks that appear in Sidereal Messenger represent ancient and modern motifs: the grid, the oculus, the moon, the leaf, and the moire signify natural elements, visual phenomena and scientific inquiry. Like the early Christians’ ichthys (two intersecting arcs creating a symbol resembling a fish), Arnold draws an ellipses that we must complete. The glyphs in his works invite us to parse out the forms, to consider their relationships, but more importantly, to take pleasure in that practice.
GRID & GRAPH
The grid is both a formal structure and a motif, creating order and signifying it. The Romans utilized the grid-plan in major works, most notably in their temples and city planning. The grid is an ideal metaphor for the western desire for control. Arnold uses the grid and other graphing motifs to the contrary. In Interference, a series of hand-drawn grids appear on the screen, overlapping, building up, and shifting in unison with a melodic rhythmic tone playing through headphones. Dark Nebula (2015) and Signal/Noise utilize NASA data to create undulating, organic forms projected into a simulated oculus in the gallery. Through Arnold’s window we see the sky, water, and leaves merge into a musical, celestial experience. The works perform measurement yet do not desire results. Joyfully and reverently, Arnold engages recorded data, a stand-in for “objective truth,” as a subject for interpretation, inquiry, and material engagement. The outcome is the concrete evidence of a material process, not a representation.
GRAM
Arnold’s films are infinitely transferable and scalable and can be displayed with infinite flexibility; there is no authentic version. Recalling Charles and Ray Eames’ exploration of scale in their iconic film Powers of Ten (1977), if the size of the image changes, the structure is constant. On a phone or projected in a gallery, the images retain their motion, rhythm, and play, limited only by the capacity of the display or the size of the file. This is a significant decision in that it compresses the gulf between the maker and the user; a gesture of interpretation is assumed, a relationship implied. Like Galileo Galilei, Lee Arnold, a starry messenger in his own right, shares his image of the universe, and the tools we use to interpret it, in the form of short, textural-visual songs, full of complexity, for us to contemplate and commune with—no cathedrals necessary.
[1] Hofstadter, Douglas. “Analogy as the Core of Cognition.” The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science, MIT Press/ Bradford Book, Cambridge, MA 2001.
http://worrydream.com/refs/Hofstadter%20-%20Analogy%20as%20the%20Core%20of%20Cognition.pdf. accessed 10 July. 2019.
[2] Hofstadter, Douglas. “Analogy as the Core of Cognition.” The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science, MIT Press/ Bradford Book, Cambridge, MA 2001.
http://worrydream.com/refs/Hofstadter%20-%20Analogy%20as%20the%20Core%20of%20Cognition.pdf. accessed 10 July. 2019.
RICKY YANAS is a Texas-born artist, educator, and curator living in Philadelphia. Working within a pragmatic tradition of problem finding, Yanas aims to create intersectional spaces of inquiry and mutual engagement through art-making and art-thinking. In 2016 Yanas founded Ulises Books with Nerissa Cooney, Lauren Downing, Joel Evey, Kayla Romberger, and Gee Wesley. Recent projects include Extension or Communication: Puerto Rico at Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Taller Puertorriqueño in Philadelphia, PA; and The Green Sun, a collaboration with artist Kristen Neville Taylor.
LEE ARNOLD was born in London and lives in Brooklyn, NY. In his work, he examines systems of natural phenomena and the aesthetics of information using a variety of forms, including film, video, animation, photography, collage, drawing, and sound. His diverse practice engages with perceptions of time, memory, and visual experience through the lens of philosophical and scientific inquiry. Arnold has exhibited at venues including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Eyebeam, and Exit Art in New York, NY; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, PA; and SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. He is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and DAAD, Berlin.