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Networks and Networks
John Haberin New York City
The Korean Media Arts Festival
Doug Aitken and Sara Cwynar
There are networks, and then there are networks. Can new-media artists connect them all?
There are networks of people. (What artists never wish that they were better at networking?) There is the infrastructure, from highways to cities, that brings them together. There are, too, the formal and informal networks that define a community or a nation. The networks within a work of art may aspire to do the same. They might be pixels or, for an abstract painter, the grid. 
There are the neural networks behind thought and action—and the data networks that track real and virtual reality. And then there is the Internet, with a Web site on top of an exhibition for the Korean Media Arts Festival. With museums and galleries reduced for months to "virtual exhibitions," the Web may be the only connection many of us have left. David Aitken online captures lives connected only by a song. Art turns an eye on their energy and loneliness, but as the song goes, "I Only Have Eyes for You."
Speaking of song, at the heart of Glass Life, a video by Sara Cwynar, is a voice. A male voice, it is and is not the artist's. It moves easily, often quotably, between philosophy and love as if they were much the same thing. And for him they are, laden with urgency and anxiety. Not even hundreds of images, the remains of a culture of imagery, can drown it out. Which, though, is truer to a networked life, online and under glass?
Techno-what?
The Korean Media Arts Festival has room for all of these networks and, at its best, does indeed connect them. Step into a dark room with Haru Ji and Graham Wakefield, and they threaten to encompass you as well. A projection in violent perspective appears to come ever forward at one's feet. The jagged spurts in its network of light seem both high tech and organic. One might be stepping into one's own brain. The grid on the adjacent wall breaks things down into evolving data points in real time, which titles in a computer font connect to the health-care industry.
They are all aspects, the show's title explains, of "Technoimagination." (Need I say that I learned about it on the Web?) The gallery expands to three floors for the occasion, curated by the Donghwa Cultural Foundation. (As an additional sign of networking, the president of the gallery is the chair of the foundation.) Still, it sticks to just seven installations, to help in telling the uses of networking apart. Ji and Wakefield introduce a floor for "Living Data," while another floor displays "Memories in Time and Space."
In other words, one floor has digital recreations of the human presence, with an overflow of information. The other has human stories in (relatively) low tech. An intermediate floor for Beikyoung Lee treats data and narrative alike as visual and physical sensation. Lee simulates a rolling ocean surface, like a painting by Vija Celmins, with white blocks. (Excuse me, "hexahedra.") The components of this network hardly change at all.
Wall text refers to Stephen Hawking and Arthur C. Danto, whose prediction of pluralism "after the end of art" has pretty much come true. (Think of zombie formalism.) Still, the underlying stories can remain buried in their connections, which is half the point. Hahkyung Darline Kim tells of a lost girl amid the turmoil of the Japanese occupation and the Korean War, without ever settling on it as truth or legend. Chan Sook Choi enters a model community in Korea's demilitarized zone, built as propaganda but still for some a place to call home. Cheol-Woong Sim looks back to an official government almanac starting before World War II—first with archival photos and then with tables of economic data.
One may never piece together the legend, spot the aging survivors in the village, or make much sense of imports and exports. Still, the narrator of the legend, long shots of village interiors, and fading images all take on lives of their own. And then the bodies come that much more to life with hard living data. Yoon Chung Han converts the viewer's eye into a photographic and sonic signature, which unseen other eyes can then treat, scarily, as biometric data. Eunsu Kang takes that very signature into the realm of science fiction. Inspired by Kurt Vonnegut, Kang imagines "aural fauna" that react to the viewer's sound and touch.
Political or not, art here shies away from taking sides, much like the artists in film and performance in "Only the Young" at the Guggenheim. One might expect easy villains in Japan and North Korea, but the artists question more their own government and their own experience. They also avoid the pop culture and anime of contemporary Japanese art. They make up for it with a greater maturity, focused stories, and raw sensation. The blood vessels in enlarged human eyes connect to the neural networks to one side and the revolving eye of a lamp to the other, while small blocks in the shape of model houses connect to the white ocean and to the interiors missing a seventeen-year-old girl. For a westerner in New York, the networks may or may not encompass you.
These eyes
"Monet is only an eye—but what an eye!" Paul Cézanne may have offered a left-handed compliment, but it rings true. It also sums up the experience of art. To earn it, Claude Monet had first to translate his vision into paint, for all to see. When you enter a museum of Impressionism, it becomes your vision, too. One can almost hear him sing, "I Only Have Eyes for You"
Care to sing along? You are here, and so am I—and so are at least a dozen others in a 2012 video by Doug Aitken. The classic song gets them through a lost moment, a lonely night, or a repetitive job. You will not hear a popular version by Art Garfunkel or the Flamingos (and you will not miss it), only them. Just when you think that you have pinned one down, another begins, and then they all disappear from view. Although a night-club act comes first and returns later on TV, others must sing to themselves, and they can count on only the artist's gaze and yours.
They cannot count on you for long. At a time of museum closures and "virtual exhibitions," his gallery gives just four days each to a single video, as 601TV, and it is hard to single out just one. The pace approaches Aitken himself, in the video's constant reinvention. Song 1starts with a click, as reel-to-reel tape sets in motion and the camera closes in, and it ends with a firmer click on those same reels, like a pair of enormous eyes. Still, it takes a few moments to guess at its subject, past a motel strip and a hand striking a match. And then one catches that club act, on stage amid a circle of candles—and the song.
The moon may be high, but I can't see a thing in the sky—and no wonder. It is out of reach, beyond artificial lights in an endless night. It lies beyond taillights on a highway, factory workers, and a cook in a diner that Edward Hopper could only admire. Aitken is searching for art and love, but also the sleepless underside of America, as with Sleepwalkers in 2008. In place of continuity, he finds only disruption, much as he did with a wrecking ball in Chelsea in 2013. A young woman turns from behind the wheel of a car to meet your eyes, and you should be flattered, though you may wish she kept her eyes on the road.
He finds, too, a sleepless rhythm. The clink of factory equipment and the bell of diner orders could almost conform to the song. Other red cars join the young woman's in synchronized driving. Aitken divides many a scene into two or three images, for video or audio counterpoint that his subjects never saw or heard. He is not above manipulating images either to create his own high-tech rhythms. Playing cards or letters from the lyrics tumble through the air, and the factory becomes a kaleidoscope.
His actors are complicit, too, for all their felt isolation. They snap their fingers and move their lips, and it is hard to know which are lip synching and which are singing along. Just when you think that you are back in the parking lot with that young woman, you discover an older blond standing alone. They may not find company, but they may yet find relief. When a rumpled man in an empty station returns beside a huge bay window, he looks less weary, more collected, and downright rich. Still, they only have eyes for you.
Shattered glass houses
Is there anything more exhilarating than an escape to the Web? Is there anything more frightening? You might be happy, angry, or desperate to say no on both counts, after yet another session with that person who cannot be bothered to look up from the phone—and another day lost to the Internet's big four. Everything about you now seems open to others to see and to control, but then everything else is open to you. What is left of an artist and her voice? Sara Cwynar is living not just in glass houses, but a glass life.
She is also shattering the glass and displaying the fragments. Cwynar takes her title from The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, a psychologist. I had never heard of it, but then I cannot pin down half of what I saw. It must have something to do with capitalism and its temptations, with found images of food, sports, celebrities, and an adorable cartoon pig. The old-world interior of a palace, cathedral, or museum swirls past, in full circle above one's head, and so do aisles after aisles of a shoe store with everything on sale. A skater's whirl gives way to the camera's motion.
Six channels enhance the experience and its shattering. Two screens tilt forward at their outer edges from a central screen, placing the viewer in the center of a world apart from the gallery—and at the center of images that never quite match or add up. It may take longer to notice three more channels off to the side, of a more vulnerable face at perfect rest. It is a woman's face, and many of the other faces and bodies are female, too. Is that an affirmation of women or a reminder of a culture that reduces a woman's dreams to the male gaze? Cheerleaders like Mickalene Thomas and Amy Sherald, take note.
There are hands, too, apart from faces. They could be the artist's own cataloguing and sorting—or just another image bank. They peel away the faces in piles of reproductions, putting them in their place on gridded paper and then moving them again. And then the faces come off the wall and into the free-floating space of the video. The Internet starts to look real, even as reality does not. A still greater longing comes through not in the images, but in narration, from that stubborn, anxious male.
It asks what remains of a voice and what remains after the images fade. Language seems more relevant than ever, critical theory insists, after everything is text—while speech becomes less relevant as the text takes on lives of its own. But then it may linger in your head well after you have forgotten its zingers, much less interpretations like mine. The speaker takes care to cite his sources, literary and postmodern, although there is no guarantee that a quote precedes each dutiful citation. Meanwhile the hands place a woman's face over that of Jacques Lacan on the cover of a book, at once reviving and taking down postmodern psychology.
Cwynar is not alone in using new media to embody a networked existence. Sports imagery, a breakneck pace, and fear of exhaustion combine most notably in Arthur Jafa as well. Is that enough without Jafa's concern that black lives matter? Will you sit through the video's nineteen minutes without picking up your smartphone? Is a critic's more than a betrayal of Cwynar's voice? If not, she will be there to pick up the pieces.
The Korean Media Arts Festival ran at Sylvia Wald and Po Kim through December 14, 2019, Doug Aitken at 601Artspace through July 25, 2020, and Sara Cwynar at Foxy Productions through October 23, 2021. Related articles look at Doug Aitken at (or on the exterior wall of) MoMA and the Korean artists in "Only the Young" at the Guggenheim.