[ISEA2015] Artist Statement: Donna Szoke — New Work, or, Automatic Control and Utopian Media Devices

Artist Statement

As a mid-career media artist, I’m drawn to research-based inspiration, rooted in the issues of contemporary culture. These issues play out in my practice from spectacle to subtlety, from the haptic to the cosmic. My recent work is inspired the pre-history of media art. The Book of Ingenious Devices by Banu Musa, published in ancient Persia in 850 A.D., describes 100 mechanical devices including automata (or early mechanical robots) and includes the first programmable machines. The devices are distinguished for their automatic controls. Another important source of inspiration is Walter Benjamin’s last radio play Lichtenberg (1933) that includes his invented utopian media devices that exist within a dystopian social context. These fantastical inventions posit the integration of individual, natural and interplanetary forces.
I create installations and interfaces that interrupt the historic view of pictorial landscape
art and instead mimic our experience of landscape as an inhabited experience that unfolds in time. An important element in my work is the relationship between the viewer’s embodied presence in relation to the installation. My work shifts video from the purely visual to include bodily-based perception (proprioception). Rather than a spectacular interface, this work is a subtle visual interface that explores the viewer’s haptic (or touch-based) perception. It bridges the viewer’s nearest (or proximal) senses and external (or distal) perceptions. It brings an environmental awareness into the experience of the gallery space. This talk will touch upon my recent work Invisible Histories a geo-locative phone app.
“Invisible Histories” began when I came across the astonishing fact that 270,000 radioactive mice are buried at the Niagara Falls Storage Site (NFSS) near Niagara Falls NY as a result of research for atomic weaponry. This interactive phone app gives the user feedback about the proximity and direction of the NFSS. When the viewer launches the app an animated green glowing mouse runs across the screen. Using the phone’s GPS and compass functions, the direction of the mouse indicates the compass direction of the storage site; the mouse runs across the screen with increasing frequency as one nears the storage site. These mice operate as a hidden history of the area, now manifested through this geo-locative smart phone app. This work exists as a type of monument, or anti-monument that engages in the missing spectacle in the Niagara
Falls landscape—a landscape of otherwise extravagant sites. New media becomes an avenue for marking, memorializing and re-activating history. As activist art, it nods to critical animal studies, and questions the ways in which we engage, abuse and memorialize the animal other. It invites the viewer to visualize other historical outcomes, and hopefully by extension, to imagine other presents, and other futures. Invisible Histories
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  • Donna Szoke is a Canadian artist whose practice includes video, animation, media art, installation, drawing, writing and collaboration. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, USA, France, Germany, Turkey, Hungary, Croatia, Cuba and Dubai, UAE. Szoke’s art practice began in Winnipeg, Manitoba designing for Guy Maddin’s early films, creating performance art and conceptually based drawings. After moving to Vancouver her practice shifted to digital video, collaboration, and installation. Her recent work includes interactive animation and printmaking. Her work is informed by critical studies with repeating themes of immanence, embodied perception, and the fluidity of lived experience. She has received numerous awards for her art research from funders including SSHRC, Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and Ontario Arts Council. She holds a BA, BFA, Sculpture Diploma, and an Interdisciplinary MFA. She is currently Chair and Associate Professor of Visual Art at Brock University, St. Catharines, ON. donnaszoke.com