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Peter Bauman: Hello everyone and welcome to this special Le Random artist discussion on Tate Modern's Electric Dreams, which, if you're listening upon release, just opened a few weeks ago, back at the end of November in London. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, the Editor-in-Chief at Le Random, and joining me today are three of the exhibiting artists at Electric Dreams. They are Rebecca Allen, Analívia Cordeiro and Eduardo Kac. Also joining us is Le Random's Collection Lead, Conrad House. We're so grateful to have all of them to talk about this amazing show at Tate Modern.
Let me go ahead and introduce three guests that don't actually need any introduction. The first is Rebecca Allen, who is an internationally recognized artist at the forefront of exploring the intersection of art, technology and human perception for over four decades. Allen's pioneering work encompasses experimental video, large-scale performances, live simulations and virtual and augmented reality installations. Allen's work is exhibited internationally and is part of the permanent collections of major museums around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pompidou in Paris, LACMA and the MoMA in New York.
Analívia Cordeiro is a Brazilian dancer, choreographer and architect who pioneered the use of computers and video in the design and performance of dance in the early 1970s. Her work has been exhibited and performed globally and is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his groundbreaking work in contemporary art and poetry. In the early 1980s, Kac created digital, holographic and online work that anticipated the networked global culture we live in today, as well as net art with his Minitel work. In 1997, he coined the term bioart. His works are in major collections such as the MoMA in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern.
We have these three incredible guests, Conrad and I do, whose work is being exhibited at what I think is the most important show of the year. What we also realized was that it's the first time Analívia and Rebecca have ever spoken or met. We're incredibly excited to share this conversation. So let's get started.
The work of all three of yours is showing at Electric Dreams. I think all three of your work does a really good job of demonstrating one of the major themes of the show, which is this transition and link between opto-kinetic art and the birth of digital art. I think all three of you were around during that transition, which the show covers. How did that opto-kinetic tradition inform your interventions with digital technologies?
Analívia Cordeiro: Well, I can begin. I think, visually, it is a real transition. But theoretically, I think about the constructivism and the concrete and also the visual gestalt that put the science, really, visual principles, instead of the Renaissance principles that were used before. So it's the moment of art history when there is a real break. It's not continuation of figurative abstract but another basis, theoretical basis. But visually, it is the op art and kinetic art that did this transition.
For me, the book Point and Line to Plane from Kandinsky is a Bible for the arts to today, and the Koffka, the principles of visual gestalt. We cannot forget the New Tendencies in Zagreb, where in '68, '69 they begin to join the computer art production together with the conception. Nowadays, I think this is very important because we are beginning a moment when people are interested in historical digital art. It means that they should be interested not only in the results but how we fight to find and to construct the thinking in the software. And Rebecca did the same, I did the same. So Eduardo did also. So there is nothing to use. We didn't have a library of software to play with. It was a real challenge. And each small result was like a great achievement.
There is a moment when you have to go inside this software that we made, what we have, the documentation, and study it, because a software is what directs the future. What you can do or cannot do, what's in or what's off. And what's in goes. What's off, it's off. So if a software points in one direction, that's the direction that goes.
So what Val, I call her Valentina because I talk in Italian, but what Val is doing is very important, and she's doing it in a light way, which means for the public to understand easily. There are works there that are joy. For example, one of them is the cover of a Jonathan Benthall book from '74, Art and Technology Today. Well, for me to look at that piece, look, no price. It's just emotion pure.
“We didn't have a library of software to play with. It was a real challenge. And each small result was like a great achievement.” — Analívia Cordeiro 4:42
Rebecca Allen: I was very much influenced by my former artworks. I decided to shift my whole direction in art making while I was an art student, a young art student, with a mission to both make motion-based art and think of the dimension of motion and the aesthetic of motion in my work, and then to work with new tools. I was very much inspired by tools of the machine age. A lot of the artwork that they're showing is coming from physical machines, machines that you can see them at work. They're there and they're physical, but they're partners with the artist in making the final work.
Analívia has mentioned the conceptual art. That was also a movement going on there as well. To me, it tied in with op art, where I love the idea always of the body, even the viewer's body, me being included in the artwork. For me, op art was about some new... There were new discoveries about how the eye works, how the eye sees, the physiology. That was inspiring some of the op art that was going on. Without the physical eye and how it works, the op art wouldn't function. I love the machine-like making of the art. It really tied into where I was going digitally in a funny way, but that was a big inspiration for me.
I felt it was somewhat of a seamless transition to then, instead of mechanical machines to make your art, have these more virtual computer machines. The electronics were invisible. You couldn't see the machine moving the way you could with industrial-age tools. That moved it into a different dimension. But as I say, movement itself was very important to me as well. With op art, I loved how there was movement without movement. The movement was happening within your eye and your brain, but there was movement in op art as well.
Eduardo Kac: I'm going to offer a different perspective because the issues that have informed the development of my work are different. In fact, I also see this exhibition, Electric Dreams, in a different perspective, in the sense that the show that is currently trying to examine this thesis of a possible relationship between op and digital, in my opinion, is not Electric Dreams but another show that is taking place in New York State at the Buffalo Albright-Knox Gallery Art Museum, called Electric Op. That is the stated goal of that particular show. In fact, there is also a very nice catalog, and it's going to go to France as well next year.
But in my view, Electric Dreams has a different ambition, and that is to tell the story for the first time of the entire field of art and technology in all its different nuances. It involves, for example, the Electric Dress, which is more performative. It has examples of video art in which there's nothing op about it. It's really about manipulating electronic signals, understanding the materiality of the signal, frequency, amplitude, the aspects of the signal itself. It has interactive works, which are about you seeing yourself in the work. There is also an aspect of playfulness and viewer participation with Cruz-Diez. There's so many different strands, and it seeks really to tell the whole story, the history of the field as a whole, everywhere in the world where it happened, since 1956. From my perspective, the curatorial thesis of Electric Dreams is different. Electric Op is the one that seeks, in my view, to look particularly at the possible connection between op and digital. That's one perspective.
In regards to my personal perspective, what motivated me to create these works online is a series of factors that are not really related to issues that informed, theoretically and practically, op art. On the one hand, we know since the late '60s, especially starting in '67 with Oscar Masotta in Buenos Aires, the notion of dematerialization of art, where the artwork progressively ceases to be anchored on physical matter, and action and ideas and language begin to be predominant. But to me, starting in the early '80s with the rise of the personal computer and the early networks, the issue was no longer dematerialization. The issue was a direct creation at the immaterial level, meaning digital. We're no longer having matter as a primary reference. We are already forging a realm of the immaterial where digital creation begins to be produced in its own terms and generates its own culture.
To me, the early '80s mark a profound paradigm shift. This is when the first cell phone is demonstrated. In fact, here in Chicago, at Soldier Field, a Motorola demonstration in 1981. This is when we have the early Minitel network and a few other time-sharing digital networks and of course the personal computer. All of these factors create the elements that will generate a new cultural fabric, which is the one that we have today. To me, the question was, in this context, art and poetry have a role to play. This is a new culture that we are creating, which is entirely different. We know that because everybody who uses a cell phone, everybody who uses the Internet, knows that this is a different culture. But that was beginning to be created at that moment in the early '80s for the reasons that I mentioned. Of course, one can see connections between something new and something ancient all the time. But I think the real interest for me, at least personally, the real motivator, is to understand that the early '80s is a paradigm shift. Here we have the beginning of a new culture, which is the one that we have today. For me, that was the motivation to develop these works.
Analívia Cordeiro: Yes. I wanted to say something very important. I am a dancer, and I am used to have freedom to move. But when I begin to work, I was educated in this conceptual art, these works, performances, happenings, how they called that at the time, and I was doing this. But when I began to work with video, then I said, "That's going back. That's going to the frame again." We have only the rectangular frame of the video. That's a prison. Okay, now we have what? This or this. But this exhibition has a message that's not so maybe intentional. But for young people, for people that are born 30 years ago, let's say, they have to go out of this frame. In their mind, if you don't put something in the rectangular frame, you cannot communicate. That's very serious, even for the human being, not more than art. Eduardo, what you were saying made me remember and say that I'm lucky that I had the opportunity to do happenings and performances before going to video art.
Peter Bauman: Eduardo, you brought up a really good point that the opto-kinetic tradition wasn't the only thing being celebrated in the show, as illustrated by things like beginning in the '50s with Atsuko Tanaka and the Electric Dress and also incorporating that performative and conceptual element. It's interesting what you said about the '80s being such a transformative period. Maybe that can be a good transition to talk about the work that you're all exhibiting at the show, that Val has chosen from your work. Maybe we can start with Analívia. You're showing 0°=45°, Versions I, IV and III. This is video work of human dancers performing computer choreography. Can you just tell us about this work and how it aligns with some of these themes of the show, which are all these disparate influences on early digital art?
Analívia Cordeiro: The most important thing I have to say is that I worked with a computer that had 5 megabytes of storage and 256 kilobytes of memory. That's a real limitation. Any idea I could have, I had to fit in this. So I had a main program in many subroutines. I work one subroutine. Then I erase. Then the other. That's the only way I could have to manage the data.
My idea was to do a dance for video. Nobody was doing this because they were researching ways of writing dance movement but for the dancer to perform it. Okay, me too. But I wanted the dance to be in video. The dancer had to understand the camera, and then they had to think and dance at the same time. This was something that was not very usual at that time. There was a fight saying that the digital art, I mean the computer art, that's the name, was cold. They called me "bionic dancer" because I didn't feel the movements. I was mechanical. I'm not going to say a bad name here, but you know. Yes, what is this? Then, I don't care. I said, "You know what? I had my father, I had my contacts, I had my mind." I was so young. I had my friends, and they danced in the video.
This is the first, the second one. I decided to do one notation that was not in plotter. Now I have the plotter version I did in the '80s, but it was just hand drawing the vectors, the six numbers, the vectors of the output. Then these were positions of the body. Instead of going in animation and connecting the positions in animation, I said, "You know what? I'm going to ask the dancer to feel the space between the positions." Then I realized that this was positive because the dancer was emotionally involved with it. The dancer really was there. Each one would do a different dance. And that's what the versions show.
And nowadays, this year, I did one with a breaking dancer. I mean, what they do with their body nowadays, it's crazy. And I could not show because it was in the eighth. And said to me, no, you cannot show. I said, "But one day we will show." And then it's good because I sent by mail the dance and I said, "You perform it." We don't have to put this. That's one of the good real messages, because nowadays we have so little space to express ourselves as persons, as individuals. So many rules for so many years that we feel sometimes a little oppressed, and young people feel depressed. Old people don't feel depressed because they have the back; they have the memories of good times. But who is just there, say, "Wow, what about my future? I don't exist." And then this is one good message nowadays of this work.
And one other point that's just curious is the background. I had this background that was also composed by computer. But instead of using a regular network, I mean just the squares, I begin building the basis. I did big square, four small squares, rectangle. This was the basis for the work. Then inside this regular network went the black and white figures. If you look at the back, you see that's not regular. That's something that's interesting, and at that time it was really much more than today.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it's an amazing work, and it was really nice to see it at Electric Dreams, juxtaposed really with Rebecca's work. And Rebecca, I wonder if you could talk about your work Steps, which is on display at the show. It came out around 10 years later, after Analívia's work, in the mid-'80s, in that transformative period in the middle of the show that Eduardo was talking about. Also, a major difference between your work and Analívia's was that your work was a simulation and Analívia was using dancers. Can you tell us about your work Steps and this cutting-edge motion capture and 3D modeling that you developed for it and how it's one of the earliest examples of human motion simulation?
Rebecca Allen: Yes. It's funny how we were approaching it from two different ways, because 1974 is when I made my first computer art, a moving piece, and it was called Girl Lifts Skirt, a woman lifting her skirt, very much thinking about the role of women in this early '70s and the fact that not only was technology very male-focused, the art world was very male-focused. So I came from drawing and wanted to make these experimental animations with drawing and other kinds of techniques in addition to the computer. My image from the very beginning was more about putting the human in the computer, the feminine in the computer. The computer, even today, it was, "Oh, it's this cold, emotionless machine," whatever. I don't know why people thought that, but I wanted to show that it didn't have to be that and that there could be this other perspective in it.
My interest in human motion, not necessarily dance per se, but dance certainly fit to that, it's a creative expression of human motion, was what I was studying so much then, how through subtle movements, gestures, we convey so much information. Even way back then in the '70s, when I was imagining this future, when the computer and technology would take over more and more, I wanted to think about where the human is going, where our body... I was very interested in where our body would go in this future world. For many years, it was putting the body in the computer.
So that was '74. After art school at RISD, I went to MIT, learned a lot more, not only about computers but very much about the interface, ways that we and our bodies and our minds can interface with the computer. This was all very new thinking back then. Then by the time after that, I got to this computer graphics lab where there was this focus on three-dimensional modeling and animation. Very new idea. We were actually inventing a lot of the first software to do any of this. I wasn't. I mean, this is very hard software to develop. I was working as part of the team, but we had this frozen female model, 3D model, that actually had been modeled around 1974 by Ed Catmull. I took on the role of bringing her to life and getting her to move. The first experiment I did was Swimmer, for instance, in 1981. This was all about inventing the software while you were inventing the art. This felt like the perfect role for an artist and a woman to be in at the invention stage. I was very much committed to having an impact while all of this software that we are so familiar with now was being used.
“My image from the very beginning was more about putting the human in the computer, the feminine in the computer.” — Rebecca Allen 22:23
In this case, working with a three-dimensional model, this was the only female model in the world at that time. I was so happy it was female. I would make steps. I had this image, Woman Ascending the Staircase. It was just to think about the steps, how a dancer steps, how my figure could actually... how I could figure out how to step. But it was done not as a dancer. It was done more like a puppeteer or something. You described older processes with animation. There may be this position, this key position. The computer in three dimensions could help with these in-between movements. That's how that motion was initially made. Really time-consuming, but very much a craft, too, of me using my skills and understanding of the body to get her to move.
Then part of this piece that's being shown at Tate called Steps, as I said, it was about literally getting the dancer to do a step. But movements such as Bauhaus Theater were so interesting to me and inspiring to me, where Oskar Schlemmer had these geometric forms that the performers would wear and do somewhat robotic, what we think of as robotic movements. I was trying to change that, too. Most models at that time in the early '80s were geometric forms. I took these forms that really didn't look like humans, and only through their movement, they would begin to express and to dance. I was trying to take some of the ideas of Bauhaus Theater further. Then I combined with this piece both the more figurative female figure and then these abstractions also doing an elegant dance performance.
Analívia Cordeiro: I think that Rebecca's work, if you see, okay, you see those lines, they go in the body. But if you put this from the end to beginning, suppose you have the body and then you see going off. If you see this, it can tell us what's going on now, because we are trying to get into the body, and now we are trying to get off technology. Her work could be really a marker, I don't know how to say the word in English, but it's symbolic what she did: go inside, and now we are going outside. This is very nice.
When she mentioned Schlemmer... Rebecca, I was nine years old and I would go to the Goethe-Institut and I would imitate the Triadic Ballet. I knew it. I'm very friend of Schlemmer nowadays because I think he was like a genius. When I planned my movements, the robotic ones, well, for sure, if you dance, you never dance. It's inside. We have so much in common.
Rebecca Allen: Yeah, it's interesting. In the early days, no internet. The only way to get any information about what else might be going on, you dig around, maybe libraries, maybe a magazine article or one of the rare books. It was so hard to even know any artists that were experimenting in this way. These historical shows are great to introduce me and everyone to other people who were doing this.
Peter Bauman: I definitely want to touch more about Analívia and Rebecca, the similarities between your practices. But maybe we can just move to Eduardo, the piece that you're displaying at Electric Dreams. This is your videotex/Minitel work titled Horny. That is some of the earliest network art ever made that predates net art by a decade, again during that transformative '80s period that you were talking about earlier. I wonder if you can just tell us about why did Val use this piece and how does it align with the show's themes of all these disparate influences for digital art?
Eduardo Kac: Well, I can't speak for the curator because the curator has the overall view of the entire exhibition, but I can speak from my perspective. To work online in the early '80s was indeed a very different experience. The word is the same, online, but what it meant is very different, because nowadays you begin to have a phone in your hands at the age of two. You're two years old and you're online. You don't know a world without that level of connectivity and access to information. But it was very different indeed. To be online in the early '80s, it was definitely opening an entirely new horizon of experience and creativity.
For me to communicate to a potential audience that the work was online, I had to use standard traditional media, like magazines and newspapers. I can't control the journalists, but I always asked them to publish the access code when they wrote about it so that the readers could actually go and put in the access code and then access the work. If they didn't do that, people just would know about it. They couldn't actually have the aesthetic experience of the work. You had to rely on that. One way that I would know that people actually saw it is sometimes they would send me letters, physical letters. I've got a letter, "Oh, I saw your work. I'm here in city XYZ, and I saw the work online." It was really very different.
You have to remember that we're talking about a world that was connected through the traditional analog telephone networks. What that means in a very tangible way is 3.1 kilobits per second. Anything else above that is compression. The bandwidth of the Minitel was a whopping 1.2 kilobits per second. You're talking about white colors. That's the environment that you are exercising your creativity. But it's not only that. You look at my works in the show at Tate Modern and you might think, "Oh, they're animations." Well, yes and no. Now with AI, it's a little bit different. But traditionally, when you say animation, you're thinking keyframes. It's not really how that worked out, because the transition from one page to the next was given by the system. You couldn't control that. It was given by the system through an alphanumeric scanning from left to right, top to bottom.
You look at the works in the show and you can tell that they're dramatically different, one from the other. The rhythm, the movement, the logic, everything is dramatically different, because I have always created these works against the grain, against the current, in the opposite direction that the system is supposed to work. For example, if I have information on the first line, every single pixel has to be transmitted. Then you have the duration of that line being transmitted, and again and again and again. I worked with a black background, which is in a sense the antithesis of what the system is supposed to do, because it's supposed to show you these static, colorful images. By having a black background, I am not transmitting any pixel information. So that line goes super fast. You don't see that line running, basically, because it's absence of information against the blackness of a screen that is not being excited, you see? The phosphors are not being excited. Understanding that the system controls the transitions, I programmed my pieces to have different rhythms by transmitting more or less information. In other words, these works are very specific to the online environment of the Minitel network itself. That's one aspect of it.
The other aspect has to do with the creation of a truly digital poetry, because all these three pieces are poetic. They all use language. They all work in tandem with the literary and the visual. I was committed to the idea that in this new digital culture that collectively we were developing, poetry had a role to play, but not the traditional sonnet or even experimental forms like futurism, surrealism. No, because they had value in themselves. Here we're talking about a new culture, a new environment, and it was necessary to completely create a new poetry that was truly original in its process of creation, original in its process of publication, which is online, and also unique in the experience of the viewer, which was looking at the poem that performed its own rhythm in a visual, dynamic way.
Rebecca Allen: To take on from a few points that Eduardo made. When I think of the work I did in 1974 and then even into the '80s, the machines were so limited, state-of-the-art machines, that it was about a minimalism, like in '74 Girl Lifts Skirt, how few lines and points can I use to get this expression of motion from the figure? That carried on working in 3D. We had four megabytes of RAM. We couldn't believe how much we had. That was state of the art then. Everything was about limits. When internet art came on, I felt like, "Oh, here we go back again," because the limits were so extreme in the early days. I think this is why I just passed over that as a potential art form for me, because already throughout the first 10, 15 years, the limits were... It was always working so much within the limitations of what the software could do and the hardware could do at that time.
I also wanted... It's funny. Analívia, we're on the same brainwave, because I worked with breakdancers in 1983. In fact, a piece back then, again, you couldn't show your work. The art world rejected it completely if you dared touch the computers. I had to figure out how can I show this work? When MTV and music videos came out, it's like, "Oh, here's a way to get an audience for these short experimental works." I initially did two videos, one called Adventures in Success, another Smile. In Smile, I had already worked with Twyla Tharp, doing The Catherine Wheel. She's a major choreographer and modern dance inventor. I was in New York, I saw breakdancing. It's like, that's a different movement. I made a piece called Smile with breakdancers dancing with a character I called Bauhaus Frau, because it was still based on these geometric shapes, and both of them doing breakdance moves back then. It's funny how these threads carry through.
Analívia Cordeiro: Yeah. First of all, I want to see your videos. Please, I don't know how, but I think...
Rebecca Allen: Sure.
Analívia Cordeiro: No, because till now, I had this breakdancer now. They are poor. They don't have any access to... They are out of the society now, but nowadays, it's still the same. But they are the urban dance. They are the real answer to the urban culture. And I want to see your video. But there is one thing. I asked Val to put that article I wrote in '77, because you are right, we were working in such tight limits that in that article, I say I could put a few positions of time and the time, but I could not work on muscular strength. I do something like that and I do like that. It's completely different. It's the same position. But the muscle strength, it's what defines the expression. So I say no movement, no control over the fluency, because the dancer that makes the... So I tried always to explain that I was not so primary as the computer was forcing me to do the things. And I had the imagination for the future.
Rebecca Allen: What you're saying, it's true. We faced this as artists.
Conrad House: I find it fascinating that... Maybe I got this wrong, but is this the first time, Rebecca, you've gotten to speak with Analívia?
Rebecca Allen: Yes.
Conrad House: That, at least to me, is a bit mind-blowing, because you have so much overlap in your careers and your style and creative processes. Even in today's contemporary space, when we talk about Rebecca Allen's work, it's almost impossible not to bring up Analívia. When we talk about Analívia, it's almost impossible not to bring up Rebecca. The two of you are must-haves in conversation about body and digital art. And you two were both at the forefront and so instrumental to bringing this theme of work into the digital space. Maybe you can start, Rebecca. Where does this fascination or prioritization of bringing the body into your digital work come from? Where is this inspiration initially rooted? I think you touched on it a bit before, but I would love to hear more about that from both of you.
Rebecca Allen: Yes. Even as I was thinking about and starting to work with the computer in the '70s, I just had this obsession with human motion and studied it deeply, the research in human motion, how we're so tuned to human motion and how much information it conveys that we don't even understand yet, subtle movements and larger movements. Perhaps, too, historically, women artists have a lot of connection to the body. I think the way the body was expressed in art through most of art history, which was very male-focused, had a very different sense of the body. I wanted to bring this feminine perspective of the body specifically, which seemed to also contrast so much with the idea of using these machines.
But I had been working also, while I was doing the computer, I was using other techniques, even video synthesis processing of movements. I was really exploring how I can take human motion and then modify it visually in different ways, even within Steps, where we see that they often show this black and white image, but actually I did the motion data and I wanted to see how many... Let's see some different ways we can process that same movement visually and come up with different visual looks for it. So this was very much in my experimentation.
As I mentioned, too, very quickly, I had this strange intuitive sense about technology and where it would be going. The big question was, where's our body going to be going? I mean, even from very early, I understood virtual reality and what that means. It was invented way back in the '60s, '70s, too. I was familiar with it. There was always this question, even that term virtual reality: Are we leaving reality? Why are we leaving this physical reality? Why are we leaving the physicality? What are we doing with our bodies? And I think now we can see with our technology, our technology doesn't require us to move our bodies. Everyone's getting obese. There's a real phenomenal change happening with humanity and our relationship to our physical world and to our bodies that a lot has been brought up about with the inventions of technology, which I continue to think about in different ways, too.
Analívia Cordeiro: You know, Rebecca, after this, my first experience, I went into a way of writing dance, writing the movement. I was not... I prepared the link to show you, but I'm going to show you perfectly. I'm going to be in touch with you. Because I was trying to see how people could communicate between them. How we could talk. For example, if I do this, everybody sees that I'm drawing a circle. The Greeks, they used to say that dance is drawing the air. But technology could allow us to see the drawing of the articulations in the space, in 3D. And that's what I was working. It looks like abstract, but it is not. And I was not going into the body modeling, because I know you worked on it for long. You were doing so well that I said, "She's going to do this. I'm going to do another part." That's how we can use the movement drawings to communicate. And nowadays, I just launched an app where you can send your movement through email to another person. You can talk. And I tested this in many countries, so even a child or an illiterate person can do it.
Because, Rebecca is right, where are we going with our bodies? It looks like the body is made to hold the head. It looks like this, but it's not true. And the touch. She worked with a few touch sensations, and she's right. Touch. Young people, they don't feel so comfortable with touch. And touch, my goodness, how many subtle things you can see touching. I mean, it's not to be afraid of. I mean, maybe the effect on your body when you are not using it, it's too strong. A very subtle, just a little touch can make you breathless. But we are humans, and that's what we have to use. So thank you, Rebecca, for saying what you said. For me, it's really a partner.
Rebecca Allen: Well, just to add to that, too, a piece I've done more recently, a virtual reality piece, is called Life Without Matter. It was because I'm thinking, "Oh, we're all going to live in the metaverse for some reason." I don't know why we're supposed to want to do that. We think of virtual reality where things can look very realistic, like reality. They can sound like reality, but there's no matter. There's no physical. We can't touch anything or each other in virtual reality. I think there's a real deliberate thing with technology developers that the sense of touch is not getting much attention. I've worked with haptics, which are part of technology where you can get feedback on your body. Touch has always been important to me, but I think it's no surprise that technology, which is still to this day sadly created by a very narrow group of people, computer scientists, engineers, that are defining where all of humanity is going, and they didn't think touch was important, so touch isn't important. I mean, it's pretty extreme what's happening with the advent of technology and where it's gone. But I just wanted to add that part.
Conrad House: It's such a great dialogue to listen between you two. I'm glad that this is the first moment we get to hear it and it's to be recorded and shown around. Maybe we'll jump to Eduardo for one of our next questions. It's this question of, is this show a "finally" moment for you? Maybe we can direct this towards Eduardo to start with. Because this is one of Tate's most ambitious shows, where they're really trying to, like you mentioned, lay out the broad history of digital art and all the inspirations and nuances that go about it. But then again, it's 2024. It's decades after these pieces were created, decades after these processes were created. Does Electric Dreams feel a little bit too late? Does it feel like a significant step in terms of recognition, or does it feel more of an incremental step in a decades-long process for you?
Eduardo Kac: Well, I wouldn't say too late. No, not at all. It's very, very welcome indeed. Just the fact that this field has approximately 100 years of history and we are for the first time seeing an exhibition that seeks to tell its story starting in the second half of the 20th century is significant. I hope there will be many other shows that will perhaps even expand and even try to tell the whole history from the beginning of the 20th century, with people like Moholy-Nagy and others. Pešánek in the Czech Republic and others. Gabo, when he was still working in Russia. There's so many others. The list is long. But no, it doesn't feel late at all.
I think that when you think about Jasia Reichardt's Cybernetic Serendipity, that was a show of young people working now, in the late '60s. It wasn't a retrospective. It wasn't a historical overview. That was the up-and-coming folks that were working in the field. In a sense, you have bookends, with that show pushing it forward and then this show having a retrospective look. But one of the things that is really interesting about Val's show is that it really makes a very serious effort to look globally. It's not just about what happened in the global north. It's really Croatia, Rio, São Paulo, Japan, so many other places, Tokyo and other cities. The fact that the field did in fact happen all over the world, and a lot of other exhibitions didn't really take that into account. The show does. And kudos to her for really casting the net wide and looking at the phenomenon as it in fact really happened.
Analívia Cordeiro: Yeah, I think there's another point, that is showing the poetry and those messages, especially now that technology is going to enter in another realm like politics. We have to understand that LACMA showed the counterculture movements. Rebecca worked when feminism was not at all inside of this technology culture. I was a dancer. I was like an animal in the zoo. Everybody said, "Oh, look at the dancer. She arrived." The other said, "Hello." I'm like, "Hello." "Do you want help?" Just because I was a dancer, I was using a minicomputer, and they said, "Oh, I want to help her." But nothing to do with my work. They didn't believe at all in my ideas. But then this exhibition shows the art in the most broad sense, for the general public. That's important. We are between us. We are specialists. With the general public, they're tasting what we tasted. I saw Cybernetic Serendipity myself. I was a girl. I was there. I saw the dinosaur. For me, it was like a playground. You know, Eduardo, he's right. It was a playground. It was everybody knowing movement, shaking and energy. It was just fun, but now it's different. This exhibition, in a very subtle way, says this.
Rebecca Allen: I think I'll feel a bit differently from Eduardo about this "too late." I think there's been a series of historical digital art shows within the last two or three years, and others that I've talked about in the past. Very few, though. And talking about Cybernetic Serendipity, I think that was brilliant to say it was of the time, where now we're just looking at the very long cast on this. And I have to say I've been extremely disappointed in the whole art world, that they ran from this. They were afraid of it. They wouldn't talk to artists that worked with the computer. It was just the most bizarre thing. They didn't understand how marble worked, but somehow they could talk about a marble sculpture, even though they could never make it or understand the materials or the tools for it. But with the computer... Even video art got a lot more acceptance much earlier. I can't tell you how many times when I mentioned I made this for the computer, it wouldn't be shown. The doors would close.
It's been way too long for me. I mean, to start in '74 and think by the '80s, "Oh, within the next few years, the art world is going to embrace this." I thought the art world was supposed to lead humanity into the future, not be running away and wait till it's all over and then now think, "Wait, maybe there was something going on here that makes sense to us." I love the show, and I love what it's doing, because when the art world finally discovered digital art, it was because of things like NFTs and VR and digital natives, which means young people. There was no sense that there was a history. The pioneer from 2015 is showing us something. So now at least the art world is looking at history, which is part of their job. But I think the recent technology is as bad and as harmful as it is because too many people from the arts ran away from it instead of jumping in and forcing it to be something more interesting, more relevant to humans, more aligned with humanity. So that's my feeling about things showing up today.
And I'll add one little thing, too, because I have a second piece in Tate called Creation Myth, and that was made in 1985. That was a moment in '84, '85, where everyone was figuring out how to simulate nature in general. The movement of nature, particle systems, for instance, physics-based, all this stuff thrown into this generative art category we hear about today, which they think is a new thing. With Creation Myth, I was using very early use of particle systems, fractals. You realize everything in nature can be made with these simple rules. And not only the objects like trees and water and fire that I used in my piece, but the movements, the dancing I did of the trees, these were things that I could use from these simulated animations of natural movement. That was generative art, but nobody talked about it back then, because they were too afraid of the computer, I guess.
Eduardo Kac: I'm going to second that and mention I worked with particle animation in the hologram, which is basically impossible, because by definition a hologram has to be stereoscopic. If a particle is here with your left eye and the same particle is here with your right eye, by definition it's not going to be stereoscopic. But it works and it's really interesting. This is also to say that human experience, by definition, is always, without exception, always analog. We experience the world analog, no matter if you put a VR headset. Human experience is by definition analog. When you say digital, you're really talking about primarily a means of production and in some cases also a means of distribution. But human experience, let's remember, is always, by definition, analog.
Analívia Cordeiro: I have an experience very serious. I lived with the Indians in Amazonia in '75, and I saw something amazing. One day, there was a trunk. They had to do that cylindrical geometrical painting. Then a man, a special one, arrived. He had a little piece of wood and the ink, and they don't have numbers. They don't have writing. He walked around the trunk a few times, and then he began to paint a geometrical painting, and he did the whole circle and he finished perfectly. I cannot explain. I'm just telling you what I saw. I mean, geometrical is much different than mathematics.
But I have a good experience in the art world on that subject. It's my father. It took 30 years for them to look at the computer art. He's in the market. They pay any price for the concrete art. They pay for the scenic works, but computer, they jump off. They are afraid of mathematics. They are afraid of the... They don't know the technical terms. I don't know. The curators, they don't mention this. But nowadays, the young people, they have it in school. They have video art in art schools. So it took a long time for them to feel comfortable.
“This is also to say that human experience, by definition, is always, without exception, always analog. We experience the world analog, no matter if you put a VR headset.” — Eduardo Kac 55:24
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think everyone brought up the recognition that the show is finally giving the movement and how we're really grateful for that and what Tate's done and what the show is doing. To just about the end, maybe I can ask one more wrap-up question as a bit of a springboard for adding anything else. Another one of the major themes of the show was engaging with emerging technologies so that artists could have a seat at the table. Val talked about that and how important that was, going back to Metzger, and how important that's been for the last 60, 70 years. I'm wondering if you can just talk about how your work in any way was this expression of reclaiming art and technology, claiming a seat at the table, especially in terms of when art and technology was mostly associated with things like governments and military and men and large tech companies. How did your work, either in poetry or with the body, socially and politically, try to claim a seat at the table for what you were interested in creating?
Rebecca Allen: Well, I think from the very beginning, for me, it was about claiming a seat at the table. I have an interview I did way back in the '80s, in '83, with CBS News, a series they were doing called The Computers Are Coming. This is in the '80s. It's going to invade all of our lives. It's going to be part of it. I always said, even on that, it has to include... this is all about humanity. Of course, it has to include all of the arts and psychology, all the human sciences.
Analívia Cordeiro: For me, the point of the feminine inside the technology is meaningful. I agree with her. She says that most of people that make the technology are people that live inside the laboratories and don't have the experience outside the world. So what they make is limited in terms of human language. This is something I always thought from the very beginning. I was inside the art world since I was born. I always look at the artists as something that could give a message, and there was public to listen to them. That's it. I said, "That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to talk about the human being in the whole everything, the movement, the feeling. I'm not going to do less than I should do." I always find ways, or talking or dancing or writing. I always was fighting for this. Nowadays, this is coming out. It took a little time. But I have to say that for a few years, I mean 25 years, I worked only for my father. I was quiet. Eduardo met me through my father, because I had to put his work. It was not ethical to mix with my work. For a few years, 25, it's a lot. I talk about him, but I wasn't working anyway.
Eduardo Kac: I was just going to mention, in regards to the context, because we're talking about works in the show, in my case that takes us to the early '80s. I remember very clearly that indeed nobody wanted to touch, no museum, no art collector, no art professional wanted to touch anything that I was producing with art and technology. Because if it's technological, it wasn't art. It didn't belong in a museum. It didn't belong in a collection. Critics was a little bit different. Some critics wrote about it respectfully, intelligently. That was a source of encouragement and a place of dialogue that I valued tremendously. But the only thing that the entire art world wanted to talk about in the early '80s were these large, neo-abstract, expressionist paintings that were being produced all over the world. In Italy, they were known as Transavanguardia, and they were championed by Bonito Oliva, an important art critic. But they were being made in New York. Sometimes they were called Bad Paintings as a name, with a capital B, a capital P. They were also being made all over the world, in Austria, in Berlin, in Germany. But it was all pretty much the same. They were large, colorful and semi-figurative, semi-neo-expressionist. That's the only thing that people were interested in. Digital or holographic, because I also worked with holography, and I started to create telepresence art by combining telecommunications and robotics in the '80s as well. These bodies of work were cast aside, marginalized. It's rewarding to see that a major institution is recognizing this type of work and looking at it now. It would have been nice to see it all along, as Rebecca pointed out, too. But it's nice to see that the light is being cast on it at this point.
Rebecca Allen: One thing with talking about the history of it. For years, for decades, well, for me, a couple of decades, you had to work in a laboratory, a very foreign, not an art studio at all. I always thought of myself as infiltrating these laboratories, because I had to figure out how to make myself useful to be able to finally do just some of the work that I wanted to do. Then by the '90s, I did feel, and, Eduardo, you probably felt this, too, there were some peaks where it looked like... In the '80s, I got commissions, late '90s in Europe. They wanted to think about art and technology. Each time I thought, "Okay, it's happening." But then it just disappeared again. In the '90s, I started a department at UCLA in art, where I thought, finally, mid-'90s, we can start to bring the technology into the artist studio, because it was cheaper and it was more powerful and commercial software was starting to be out there. I started a department there to try to grow these artists and get them out. One student, the biggest one now, my teaching assistant, was Refik Anadol. It's interesting when you think of his work. No one really talks about this, but what he so often is using are particle systems. And because particle systems... I see this as op art, too. Particle systems, because they're based on natural movement, really draw us into it. People don't realize that it's really because of the naturalism of the movement that it appeals to us so much. Even that layer of discussion, I feel like needs to happen, too. The movement and the fact that it is based on our natural world and how we relate to the natural world, how our whole sensory systems are connected to that. And that's why there's certain works of art using technology that are simulating nature that people are responding to.
Conrad House: I think before we wrap up, I love that, Rebecca. I think humans are pattern recognition machines, and we spend our lives in a very geometric world and mathematical world, like you mentioned before. Everything from leaves to plants to grass flowing can all be equated down to one simple equation at the end of the day. So the fact that we naturally can appeal to certain things without even really understanding why we appeal to it is a really fascinating part of digital art and algorithmic art.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, absolutely. Just talking about the history of institutional negligence about digital art, it really highlights how historically overdue but also necessary and important Electric Dreams is and just how grateful we are for the show and that it's there to give us a chance, and for everybody a chance, to learn more and also celebrate your work in particular, the three of your work and your careers and how essential all three have been to the development of digital art. Really, I can't thank you all enough for joining us and having this conversation with us and celebrating such an amazing show. Thank you all so much.
Eduardo Kac: It's been really a great privilege and pleasure for us.
Rebecca Allen: Well, it's such an honor to be with both of these artists, too. That's why I decided. I just got back to LA, and it's like, "Okay, I'll do this," because it's so rare to be able to meet up with you and have a discussion with such important artists, important thinkers, and we're still alive to enjoy it. I feel so bad for my other colleagues who didn't even live long enough to finally see some shows like this happening and get the recognition.
Analívia Cordeiro: You are right. We are alive. We are well. We take care of what we eat, we exercise and we are producing art. That's the most important thing.
Eduardo Kac: Well, thanks for the opportunity. It's an honor. It's an honor, really. A real pleasure.
Analívia Cordeiro: A real pleasure. Hug everybody. Virtual hug. Thank you.
