[ISEA2008] Artists Talk: Geoffrey Alan Rhodes & Caitlin Fisher – Approaching a Material for Expression in the Aesthetics of New Media

Artists Statement

In 1972, media theorist Rosalind Krauss described the new material for expression in emerging video art as a narcissistic circuit– a circuit that includes the performer and their own live mediation. With the current emergence of artistic expression in mixed and augmented reality, a new material for expression is offered that creates a circuit with the digital processor. This new circuit of expression both expands and frustrates the traditional relationship of artist to material: the translation of performance in to code forces the performer into relationship with the black-box of the machine, where the only true analogues occur in total failure: system crashes, noise, and other collapses. The embedding of the performer in the circuit of capture-process-render requires new attitudes for expression in media that can be found in a survey of current new media art practices; the filter as abstract expression, the virtual as the paranormal, and interactivity as identification are among the solutions found.

  • Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, USA, is a writer, artist, and film maker.   garhodes.com
  • Caitlin Fisher York University, Canada. A co-founder of York’s Future Cinema Lab, Caitlin Fisher’s research investigates the future of narrative through explorations of interactive storytelling and interactive cinema in Augmented Reality environments.   yorku.ca/caitlin/home