While we casually continue to use the word nature to refer to the "outdoors" as a living habitat, it is highly debatable whether nature, in the sense of a realm untouched and uninfluenced by civilization or artificiality, still exists. Every aspect of our environment has been profoundly affected by centuries of civilization and our use (or exploitation) of natural resources. Nature has become "processed" or even designed. Moreover, we increasingly understand the world surrounding us through data sets that represent an "actuality" and, at the same time, are mediated. Our knowledge of the earth today is shaped by Geographic Information Systems (GIS), in combination with personal experiences, which are locative and limited. The age of digital technologies has brought about profound changes in the representation of nature: we have been experiencing a shift from the representation of the "reality" of nature to information visualization and a representation of data. From the weather forecast to satellite photography, nature has become intrinsically bound to mediation and simulation, a form of "second nature," in which data has become the mediating agent between humans and the environment surrounding them. We have grown so used to this new form of nature – as something processed, designed, or simulated – that our comprehension of it may itself have become "second nature," a habitual pattern of understanding based on familiarity.
The works shown in Second Natures – the faculty exhibition of the UCLA Design | Media Arts department for the opening of the new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center – to varying degrees all reference the concept of a "second nature," be it because they include and simulate natural elements and organic structures or operate on an inherent tension between nature and design. Pulling together the work of faculty members in a thematic exhibition is, by nature, a challenging task, and the background of the Design | Media Arts faculty is particularly hybrid. The influences and disciplines that have shaped their practices range from fine arts, architecture, the humanities, and programming to industrial, graphic, and set design. Two of the faculty members, Erkki Huhtamo and N. Katherine Hayles, are predominantly theorists and have contributed essays featured to this catalogue that represent their respective area of research.
The umbrella Design | Media Arts immediately suggests hybridity and raises questions about disciplinary boundaries. The relationship between art and design has been much discussed and has often been an uneasy one, with one field neatly separated from the other. One can make a convincing argument that so-called "new media art" (art that uses digital technologies as a medium for its production and presentation) has brought the two disciplines closer together. In the case of this art form, mediation involves interfaces – for display, participation, and interaction – and often entails the creation of virtual spaces and worlds. Industry standards for "user friendliness" aside, new media art cannot avoid considering interface, navigation and interaction design, which are crucial aspects of enabling the agency of the viewer / participant. Design is an important element of new media practice, and establishing a connection between the two fields becomes a necessity; the works in Second Natures therefore reflect intersections of art and design on various levels.
Given the wide-ranging practice of the artists brought together in this exhibition, it does not come as surprise that the work itself spans various media, from interactive installation and software art to sculpture and painting. Art that requires audience engagement is still notoriously difficult to exhibit within the context of a more traditional art space, a phenomenon that Erkki Huhtamo explores in more detail in his essay. At the same time, the mixture of interactive and non-interactive, technological and more traditional work creates a space of resonance for ideas that are ultimately not medium-specific. Digital technologies have brought about new possibilities for relationships between various media as well as text, visuals, and sound, a development that is further discussed in Katherine Hayles essay on how notions of text and literature are reconfigured in and through digital media. While the relationships between different forms and media have been explored for a long time in various art forms, they are taken to further levels through the use of new technologies.
When it comes to ideas of a second nature, Christian Moeller's light installation Heaven seems the most abstract and conceptual among the works in the exhibition. Within an almost blinding panel of light, viewers can decipher the word "heaven," which appears almost as an after-image or shadow word. The panel consists of an array of fluorescent lights, the backsides of which are blacked out with gaffer tape. Heaven is part of a series of thirteen light installations, all of which show words that poetically reference concepts of whiteness. Many of Moeller's works are explorations of vision and perception (which also play an important role in Vasa Mihich's work). Trained as an architect, Moeller has done numerous large-scale public projects that introduce interfaces into urban space and function as media architectures. At the core of his work is the decoding of visual and aural complexities, particularly in an urban environment. Moeller considers abstract installation as a form of urban design based on the premise that the spaces we inhabit are designable as sensation, technology, and cognition. His projects almost always generate ambiguities, operating in a space that suggests meanings, yet is never completely decipherable or comprehensible.
With its blacked-out fluorescent lights, Heaven produces a refractive shadow that creates bitmap graphics, raster graphics images that consist of a grid of pixels and are now mostly associated with the digital image. Moeller has created several analogue versions of bitmap graphics as large-scale public art installations, for example "bitwalls" that construct portraits of people as reliefs of empty spaces and elevated, pixel-like squares. In some cases, these images remain abstract until shadows cast on the surface through moving sunlight create legible graphics. Heaven operates on the basis of similar principles and establishes a connection between light, perception, and semantics as relative or even imaginary concepts. Whiteness, commonly thought of as an absence of color, contains all the colors of the visible spectrum. Heaven, metaphorically associated with whiteness, encompasses a spectrum of meaning that ranges from the natural (the sky enveloping the earth) and the religious (the abode of God and angels) to the perceptional (a condition or place of great happiness, delight, or pleasure).
In contrast, Victoria Vesna's project Water Bowls explicitly addresses concepts of nature as they relate to the "connectedness" of the human condition, be it technologically or in the sense of interdependency with the environment. The idea of connections has been an underlying narrative thread of Vesna's work, manifesting itself in projects that explore issues of identity in networks of people and data bodies, as will as intersections of art and science and the ways in which they influence perceptions of identity.
The Water Bowls installation first suggests a serene, contemplative space, with projections onto or through four bowls filled with water (and in one case, oil) that seem to extend the bowls in circular imagery appearing on the walls behind them. Without any human interaction, the installation space creates a tranquil, meditative mood and evokes imagery such as the reflection of the moon in a body of water. Engagement with the both locally and remotely interactive work, however, reveals layers of connections and connotations that disrupt or reposition any romantic notion of nature. In the case of the Moon bowl, visitors are invited to run their hands through the water, and the usually almost inaudible sounds created by their hand movements are picked up and amplified by an underwater microphone. Projected onto the water is an animation of water molecules cycling from a heavily polluted state to clearing and back. The beauty of the physical object comes with a reminder of environmental contamination, the ways in which human interaction has affected one of the most precious resources on the planet, and the scientific systems developed to counteract these negative effects. A different form of pollution quite literally surfaces in the Sound bowl, which allows visitors to experience sound vibrations when they touch the water. The sounds are both naturally occurring ones, such as those created by whales and cell vibrations, and those of underwater pollution produced by sonar frequencies, explosions, and submarines. Again the audience cannot avoid being aware of how natural habitats have been invaded and how the natural and outside disturbances blend.
In both the Drop and the Oil bowl, connectivity is taken to a further, technological level that engages the audience in yet other ways. Suspended over each of the bowls is a dispenser from which people visiting the project website can remotely release a drop of water or a copper coin, respectively, into the bowls. Visitors to the website are asked to pick and identify themselves with any body of water of their choice – for example, a river such as the Nile or Ganges, or the Atlantic Ocean. A topographical map of the location chosen by the Web visitor then appears on their screen and is also projected onto the bowl in the exhibition space. When the user releases the drop, the surface of the water in the bowl is broken and the map of the water body ripples away. The concept of location does not only emerge on a virtual level (through the remote connection between the exhibition site and cyberspace) and a metaphorical level (through identification with a river or sea); the visitor is also implicated in the installation in a concrete, locative way. The location of visitors to the website is mapped by tracking the IP (Internet Protocol) address of their computer and locating it on the map next to the body of water they chose. The location of remote participants therefore appears in the projection in the exhibition space. Whatever our location "on the map" is, the effects of our actions are traceable not only in our immediate environment. The Oil bowl – containing both water and oil, which appear as clearly separated substances –does not only allude to the common use of "water and oil" as a metaphor for opposition but literally juxtaposes what could be seen as the most important natural resources today. At the project website, visitors can type in a wish and remotely release a copper coin into the bowl from the dispenser. Projected onto the oil and visible on the wall behind the bowl, the wish then disintegrates in the form of dissolving particles. The rather sentimental act of dropping a coin, accompanied by a wish, into a fountain of water is a familiar ritual (commonly performed by tourists). As it usually is the case in participatory new media work, the wishes of web visitors will presumably range from the profane to the sublime; from highly personal desires and aspirations to acknowledgement of the specific context of the installation. But even if they embody the deeply personal, these wishes exist in a larger environment of connectivity on which they leave temporary inscriptions that dissolve and become part of the whole.
While Vesna's piece more literally reflects on natural processes, Casey Reas simulates the latter in organic visual structures. Through programming, he creates abstractions of systems that occur in the natural world. His work falls into the field of generative art, a practice where the artist creates a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, or a machine, which is activated and – with some degree of autonomy – produces an artwork. Reas is interested in and inspired by biology, artificial life and intelligence, robotics and the principles of emergence, where possibilities for interaction between elements are outlined in programming, and structures evolve through actions / movements of the elements within the given parameters.
These generative principles are at the core of Reas Process series of which three pieces – all of them derivatives of Process 4 – are exhibited in the exhibition. Visually, the structures emerging from Reas' software programs are organic and vaguely reminiscent of scientific images of cells and tissue. At the same time, they point to the art-historical roots of the digital medium in Dada, Fluxus, and conceptual art, which all placed an emphasis on the variations of formal instructions and focused on concept, event, and audience participation as opposed to art as a unified object. The layer of "code" and algorithmic instructions in digital art constitutes a conceptual level that connects to pieces by Duchamp, John Cage, and Sol LeWitt based on the execution of rules. In the conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s, idea and concept were considered as more central to the work than its execution. As Sol LeWitt famously put it: "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."
The "software structures" created by Reas explore the relevance of conceptual art to the idea of software as art. He creates text descriptions outlining dynamic relations between elements and then implements them as software. The instruction for Process 4 (Software 1), for example, reads
A rectangular surface filled with varying sizes of Element 1.
Draw a line from the centers of two Elements when they are touching. Set the value of the shortest line to black and the longest to white, with varying grays between.
Another version of Process 4 (Seoul B) is interactive and allows the audience to draw automated software elements onto a screen with their fingers, which then interact with each other, creating additional patterns. Also included in the exhibition is an inkjet print derived from the Process 4 software, which depicts the state of the process at a specific point. Together, the three different manifestations of the work illustrate that the underlying "process" transcends the medium.
The concept of emergence is also at the core of Rebecca Allen's interactive software Bush Soul #3 (1997 - 2000), which explores "intelligent" or behavior-driven systems and Artificial Intelligence (AI), a term that was officially coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in the 1960s. As early as 1936, mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) – one of the early influential theoreticians of AI – outlined the Turing machine, a theoretical apparatus that which established a connection between the process of the mind, logical instructions, and a machine. At the basis of digital art projects dealing with artificial intelligence are inherent characteristics of digital technologies: the programming of certain behaviors (such as fleeing, seeking, and attacking) for "autonomous" information units or characters; and the seemingly independent "intelligence" of machines through analytical or associative processes, decision-making, and communication.
Bush Soul #3 was a result of the Emergence project that Rebecca Allen directed at UCLA, a software system designed for the development of interactive art. The system supports the creation of multi-user virtual worlds that are "alive" and responsive. Through a scripting language, one can describe possible behaviors and relationships between characters and objects, which then interact with each other and the user in a three-dimensional, computer-generated environment.
In Bush Soul #3, the user is implicated into a virtual environment inhabited by these autonomous characters. Users control their avatar (the graphic representation of a user in virtual environments) with a joystick in order to navigate the environment and interact with the creatures living in the virtual world in ever-changing encounters. The project explicitly focuses on social behaviors; encounters with the different characters and objects in this virtual world can lead to very different exchanges – a character may be hostile or friendly, the user may be able to "inhabit" a character or receive feedback through the joystick. Bush Soul is an aesthetic exploration of virtual identity in its relation to concepts of embodiment and disembodiment and a seemingly "living" and autonomous artwork. Visually and aesthetically, the project is embedded in the larger context of computer games, which are now based on more and more sophisticated artificial intelligence. However, Bush Soul is not in any way goal-driven but entirely focused on exploration of its virtual world and the characters inhabiting it.
At a first glance, Robert Israel's work in the realm of set and costume design seems to constitute a break with – or at least occupy a space "in between" – the pieces shown in the Second Natures exhibition. Theater and opera sets and costumes are a traditional area of design that appears fairly removed from media arts, apart from the fact that the use of "multimedia" on the stage has steadily increased over the past decade. However, set design for the stage is intrinsically connected to new media practice and its work process on various levels. As new media arts, opera and theater are based on a highly collaborative process where different areas need to seamlessly merge: sets, costumes, music, choreography (in an opera) or visuals, sound, interfaces, programming backend and interaction design (in a new media project) have to be integrated and support each other to form a "whole" that is larger than the sum of its parts. Each of these areas may place restrictions on the other; for example, the length of time it may take to go through changes or movements within the set of an opera is ultimately dictated by the musical performance. As many new media projects, theater and opera are time-based and require a coordination of spatial and temporal components.
A set designer ultimately creates a "virtual" world, which may not be simulated by means of computer technology but is as much a product of the imagination as an actual architecture.
The bodies of the performers can be understood as an interface that connects and mediates between the elements on the stage and the audience.
If simulation is defined as the imitative representation (that is, artistic likeness or image) of the functioning of one system or process by means of the functioning of another, it can be understood as a form of second nature. One could certainly draw parallels between the design of a stage and that of a 3D world – as representational spaces of Cartesian x, y, z coordinates – and propose that the creation of digital 3D environments and media spaces can learn a lot from theater design.
The models for Robert Israel's stage designs included in the exhibition – Parsifal (Richard Wagner) and The Voyage (Philip Glass) as well as Oedipus and a Greek Satyr Play – give insight into his aesthetic and architectural approach to the stage as space of representation. Israel's set and costume designs for opera and theater have been seen at prestigious international venues, such as the Metropolitan Opera and the Paris and Vienna Opera, and have ranged from "classics" such as Wagner's Ring Cycle to the world premieres of four operas by Philip Glass. As complex as the actual architectures of Israel's designs may be, they never appear convoluted but rather minimalist, stripping architectures to their essentials and working with empty space. The staircase for his design of Wagner's Parsifal is a detailed architectural column that grounds an otherwise empty stage and is entirely sunk into the stage floor, with a performer standing on it, within seconds at the end of the act. (Staged not too long after September 11, the "collapse" of the structure into the ground had rather frightening connotations for audiences). While Israel's set designs do not typically incorporate media technologies – unless they create a meaningful language for the overall concept – the production of Parsifal included high-resolution digital imagery as backdrops for the scenes.
The merging of choreography, performance, sound and visuals also is essential to the work of Jennifer Steinkamp who frequently collaborates with sound artists and has occasionally created visuals for performances and rock concerts. Steinkamp's projects are also deeply architectural; she has created large-scale outdoor projections and public art pieces and often works with the space of the gallery in a site-specific way. Many of her works interlace not only multiple projections but also the shadow of the viewer.
Her project Dervish, featured in the exhibition, seems to quite literally present a simulated nature – high definition, wall-size projections of animations of trees with twirling branches. Yet the movement of these trees is far from a natural occurrence. The project was inspired by the dances of the dervishes of the Mevlavi sect of Islam, which Steinkamp encountered while traveling in Turkey. The term dervish derives from the Persian word Darvish and refers to a mendicant ascetic and a worldview indifferent to material possessions. Whirling dance, which is the practice of the Mevlevi dervishes in Turkey, is one of the physical methods to try to reach religious ecstasy. During a trance, dervishes spin in a motion that represents the release of the soul and a communication with the divine. The movement of the tree branches mimics the whirling dance of the dervishes, oscillating between control and disorder. At the same time, the motion is restrained and always bound by the roots of the trees. Rather than returning to notions of the romantic sublime, Dervish suggests the possibility of a release from the material world and simultaneously renders it an impossibility, a prospect that can never transcend natural laws. Despite their enchanted movement, the virtual trees are forever caught in limbo between the force of nature and the promise of transcendence.
Yet another perspective on nature is presented by Rebeca Méndez’ Homeland, a series of six murals measuring 40 x 104 inches each, which are presented in the exhibition as an installation elevated from the floor. The series was originally conceived as a site-specific permanent installation commissioned by architect Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis for a student recreation center on the campus of the University of Cincinnati, which opened in May 2006. Six murals (9 by 20 feet each) were suspended from the ceiling at the convenience store of the Recreation Center.
While the university imagined market scenes as a theme for the murals, Méndez decided to acknowledge the specific context of the site, a convenience store with giant bags of Doritos and university paraphernalia. Based on her documentary photography done in locations such as Patagonia and the Sahara desert, she composed 24 panoramic scenes to which she refers as "ever sustaining landscapes" since "all products and nourishment have as their origin the extraction or harvest of the raw materials provided by the earth.” Méndez’ intent was to give an impression of the integrity and beauty of these raw materials and, at the same time, expose the processing of these goods before they are conveniently packaged and distributed for consumption.
On a formal level, the landscapes' horizon lines have become thresholds to imaginary, non-existent landscapes: glaciers float over puffy clouds and Nordic cows graze on top of tropical waters. Méndez invites the viewer to look beyond the horizon, which she understands as “the perpetual aim of humanity.” Incorporated in each landscape is a short line of text capturing a sensation, memory, or experience triggered by the landscape, including references to sustenance – for example, the words “till the last tree” over an image of cows grassing. The texts thus refer back to the core theme of landscapes being farmed, drilled, eroded, and melted for our "convenience." The processing of nature unfolds both on the level of mediation – in a photographic, panoramic landscape – and the actual harvesting of resources.
The titles of the Homeland series and its individual panels introduce yet another layer of meaning, establishing a connection between current discussions surrounding environmental destruction and a more specific political context, that of "homeland security." Each of the six landscapes has a dominating, key colour: red, orange, yellow, blue, green and white. The first five of these colors correspond to the United States’ Department of Homeland Security’s "National Alert Threat Levels," from green indicating a low threat level to red representing a severe one. Realizing that the concept of peace was missing from the chart, Méndez created a sixth, white mural symbolizing peace as the most important ambition of humanity. Her murals occupy an ambiguous space without a clear horizon line – a space that raises questions about what constitutes security and what the cost of convenience might be.
Compared to the use of landscape in Méndez' work, the concept of "nature" seems to be fairly removed from the sculptures and paintings of Vasa Mihich, which are both conceptual / theoretical and meticulously designed. However, the development of these works is deeply rooted in the human eye's perception of colors, in optical phenomena, and the behavior and properties of light.
Mihich's early art education in Yugoslavia was focused on painting and drawing. While teaching at a school of architecture that was as devoted to drawing skills as to architectural geometries, he produced sketches and realist watercolors. Mihich arrived in the US in 1960, when the major influence in visual arts and painting, in particular, was still Abstract Expressionism. His paintings moved into the realm of the abstract and in the mid- to late 60s, he began to produce his signature sculptural works, a recent example of which is included in this exhibition. These cast acrylic sculptures, made from clear and colored sheets of acrylic plastic laminated with polymerized glue, create radiant, visually complex structural planes with ever-changing appearances. Industrially produced cast acrylic, which comes in sheets of different thicknesses, has high optical qualities. Mihich envelops clear with colored plastic of various thickness or vice versa to craft blocks, spheres, and columns of geometric patterns that create optical illusions of transparency or solid color. What the viewer may perceive as solid color may in fact be mostly clear plastic sandwiching a thin slice of color; what may be perceived as a transparent block may be a reflection of a plane of color.
While he never considered himself a minimalist, Vasa Mihich's art was largely associated with minimalism in the 1960s and was included in numerous shows devoted to the art movement that was a reaction against Expressionism and the idea of self-expression. On a more superficial level, there certainly is an obvious connection between minimalist art and Mihich's sculptures and paintings of lines and geometries: the use of limited numbers of color and simple geometric designs offering only outlines of structure; repetition and iteration; a spare quality that reduces the work to its essentials and fundamentals. Yet Mihich's art also fundamentally deviates from minimalist work. While minimalists sculptors used industrial materials that were arranged rather than modified by the artist in any way, Mihich's sculptures are laboriously crafted in a factory-style studio with multiple assistants; the colors he uses are often custom-made.
Ad Reinhardt once described minimalist style by stating that the eye is a menace to clear sight and that art should begin with the getting rid of nature. One could make an argument that Vasa Mihich's art is to a large extent about the eye, about light (as an intrinsic part of nature) and its reflection. Mihich's work also connects to the optical art or Op art of the 1960s, in which artists such as Victor Vasarely, Julio Le Parc, and Nicolas Schöffer used patterns to create optical illusions of movement, vibration, and warping. Op art in turn overlaps with kinetic art where motion is not an illusion but physical, often produced by machines activated by the viewer. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s kinetic light sculptures and his concept of virtual volumes – "the outline or trajectory presented by an object in motion" – can be traced today in quite a few recent new media installations. While movement does not manifest as an actuality in Vasa Mihich's sculptures, they certainly can be understood as "virtual volumes" that create changing trajectories as one moves around them and perceives reflections of light.
Optics and perception are also at the core of Vasa Mihich's paintings, which explore ideas that, rather than having been the product of a minimalist phase, continued to interest him for the past four decades. These works, created by means of acrylic paint and layers of masking tape, explore possibilities of breaking through structured surfaces and, more specifically, "fighting the grid." The grid is deconstructed in seemingly endless variations, for example through the use of lines in different hues that may have the same value of grey and are offset with white or black lines of varying thickness that override the color. The paintings start with a specific idea of perception that is iterated through numerous variations with an almost automated quality. It makes perfect sense that Mihich started using the computer as a tool in developing these ideas and reiterations. As he became more familiar with this form of structural experimentation and developed a more acute understanding of its process, the computer became superfluous as a design facilitator and he abandoned it. The twelve small paintings (2003 - 2004) exhibited in Second Natures, arranged in a grid, illustrate the reiteration of structural concepts, picking up on each others' elements – color arrangements, horizontal, and vertical lines – and emphasizing and deconstructing them. A larger painting, 182 N (2003), loosely references a Claude Monet painting both in its scale and light color scheme, and in establishing parallels between its disrupted lines and the "broken" brushstrokes of Impressionism. Focusing and refocusing one's eyes on the painting, one can decipher the interspersed white disruptions of lines as a multitude of numbers suggesting a highly methodical approach to the achieved effect.
n their different approaches and media, the works brought together in Second Natures construct a multi-faceted picture of the possible meanings and connotations of nature – a picture that is very much of its time and informed by the current climate (in a cultural, political, and aesthetic sense). Nature appears as processed, both in the sense of natural resources and medium – as designed, simulated, technologically connected, and filtered through human perception, or as an imaginary space.