For one of their class assignments, the students in Performance and Technology, Fall 2008, UC Berkeley, had to construct artworks of any medium that expressed ideas from one of the middle units of the class. These projects were so rich, complex, and interesting that Gail asked some students to come in and critique the pieces with her, to give each piece the attention it deserves.
Wafa Hazem, Evan Yu, and Jennifer Lowe all served as peer reviewers on these projects.
Jennifer: Maybe it's about how you can have a physical, emotional reaction to online gaming. It's in her gut - that's where she gets shot.
Wafa: Because you get drawn into it. The artwork is fabulous. Wow, I cannot believe she did that.
Evan: You had to take a lot of time...every line....
Wafa: The commitment. It's perfect. Genius.
Evan: His arm's not even an arm.
Jennifer: It looks like a canon.
Evan: He's a machine man [about the middle panel, which is the game world].
Jennifer: The skulls on the ground reminded me of Terminator.
Gail: The fact that it's an Army officer who's actually playing a video game is a very good tie-in to themes from unit - an Army officer playing a game that really shoots people, wounds them, harms them, kills them. It's a metaphor for how war works today.
Diane made a collage on white posterboard that she spraypainted gold. And on top of the gold paint is the title in cut-out letters, "The Uncanny Valley: Human Ideals of Beauty and Ugliness," and a large figure of a woman's torso with her face and hair made up of different images of women's hair and facial features. The torso is also "constructed" - there are lines like seams at her shoulder joints and there is thread (real thread - she really sewed the image) at her lower abdomen. There is a glitter bikini top on the woman's torso covering what look like artificially enhanced breasts - which are in the center of the piece, so they are the center of attention. All along the bottom of the poster, attached only halfway so that they form a jagged edge on the bottom, are images of artificial creatures that range from cute to weird.
There are several quotes written in gold bubbles on the upper right of the poster, all related to the concept of the Uncanny Valley. There are also brief "captions" for the quotations. "Appearance" and "Imagined Worlds" are two of the captions.
Wafa: The breasts are the first thing you look at it. I looked at the face way later. I think she did that on purpose.
Evan: Actually I saw the face first, b/c it's distorted, kind of grotesque. Because the body is pretty.
Jennifer: I think she's an Art major.
Wafa: I think Art History.
Jennifer: From far away, I thought it was pretty. And then I got up close.
Wafa: From far away, it looks like something one would want to see, because it catches your attention.
Diane also did an extra credit project called "Electronic Warfare." It's a vertically oriented white posterboard with two vertical stripes of gold that look like maybe they could be the twin towers, and between them is a plane that Diane drew by hand, and then dropping from the plane is the letters that form "ELECTRONIC WARFARE." The letters are dropping onto a pile of computer parts - monitors and hard drives and keyobards and cords, and they appear to be on fire, with red/orange flames rising from the pile, and there are words, like "Cybernetic Studies," "Machines," "Closed World Discourses," "Human-Machine Integration," placed randomly next to the computer parts as if they are also parts, like the keyboards. They seem to be part of the pile.
Jennifer: You can kind of see your reflection in the gold.
Wafa: I love the idea of it. I think it's so smart. How she has the two twin towers and the airplane and how it's just a bunch of computers. The first thing I imagined was that all the computers you see in everyday life are all a part of your environment, you see them everywhere, I imagined how many computers I see a day.
Jennifer: I think this is more a warfare against electronics, like a play on words.
Evan: Like it says what the title is.
Gail: I like that the plane is dropping words like bombs. There's also something like the the twin towers collapsed into computers, like the rubble left behind is all electronic, our worlds are all made up of electronic parts and if you destroy them, what's left behind is these electronic bites.
Jennifer: The color is relevant. The electronic stuff is grey (black and white sketches) but the gold towers are not, and you can see yourself in the gold, so you're not part of the grey. You're part of the open world (green world).
Miranda's project is entitled "Moving Away from Reality and into a Digital World...one step at a time." It consists of blue posterboard with silver stars (she did the stars by hand) and six "planets" or digital worlds that overlap, or perhaps levels of worlds. They might be spiraling outwards. Evan says, "I think they get more intense." The first (lowest?) level is images of people watching TV, working at computers, things that people do in daily life. The second-to-the-last level is The Sims and Second Life. The last (highest?) level is World of Warcraft and Zelda and maybe Final Fantasy. There are quotations for every level from the class readings.
Wafa: It's very creative how she had all these different sets of level.
Jennifer: It's very neat.
Wafa: It's very simple but also....
Jennifer: I think there's a sense that they multiply, the circles get bigger and bigger.
Evan: Yeah, b/c the entire world plays World of Warcraft. Different intensities.
Wafa: Each level is so different that she considers them whole different planets.
Jennifer: But you go "one step at a time." There's a sense that it's really easy to go from one world to the next, it's just one step away.
Evan: But it gets worse. You're in a Second Life and then bam, you're in a whole other world. First you're watching Beowulf and Polar Express and the next minute you're in another world.
Marie did a multi-panel project that opens up, like doors opening up. The two "doors" say "The Closed World," with a quote on the bottom right-hand side which asks about the use or value of technology. There are two images, one of a cyborg and the other of two people working at a huge computer, maybe in a military station. When you open up the doors to the Closed World, you see a green palm tree, and each branch of the palm tree is sprouting technology. Pictures of airplanes, militaristic technology, graphs, the electromagnetic spectrum. There are two flaps that open, one that (when opened) says Cylindrical Reflector Surface and Feed Array and the other one that has a graph. There are quotes around the tree and on the black tree trunk. On the back of the project, is a large title that says "Green World," but all of the images are still militaristic and war-related images. The Trojan horse, people fighting on horseback, a nuclear cloud, wounded people, a cemetery and urns, people fighting in the jungle. There are several quotes as captions for the images about the green world: "an unbounded natural setting," "open space."
Jennifer: I think the captions are ironic.
Wafa: It's awesome how she actually had the Green World in the back of the Closed World.
Gail: It seems like the back is the most controversial part.
Jennifer: You see lots of people in the Green World whereas the Closed World was all graphs, mathematical symbols, machines.
Gail: But the green world is still suffused with war.
Evan: I think it's one too many pictures. I think it's conflicting.
Wafa: Overwhelming.
Jennifer: But she might be going for that. The humans trying to fight war in the green world are all messy, but the inside of the closed world is all clean.
Deborah made a project called "Digital World" on black posterboard and features a large earth hovering above a human hand (as if held by that hand), and there are several words and phrases, like "Freedom" and "Enslaving?" "Senses/Communication/Technology" all intersect in a kind of crossword puzzle arrangement. The earth is covered by binary code, and on the right side of the earth is a cell phone, and extending from the cell phone is a gold telephone cord extending from the earth to the right with a telephone handset off its hook.
Evan: I don't understand the telephone.
Jennifer: The world is digital. It's called "Digital World." From a distance, you don't see the quotations and they look like lines. I thought at first they were connecting everything. Like they were connecting the world to the hand.
Evan: There's a question written in the corner, "Are we okay with that?"
Jennifer: And "Enslaving?" is a question too. It's asking if this is enslaving or freeing.
Evan: We're a giant network. All the codes....We're all connected.
Jennifer: I kind of like how the binary is a part of the earth. You can blue and the green and the digital all at once.
Gail: Like the green world and the closed world are all the same.
Jennifer: Rather than them being separated, you can see them all at the same time.
Naomi did a piece on a slim piece of vertically oriented posterboard. There are four panels: "Artifacts from the Future" which shows a futuristic sci-fi city but rendered to look realistic, in color; "Puma Mirai Prosthetics" advertising prosthetic robot-like legs on soccer players, which look like puma (the animal)'s legs; an ad for "Mirai Fashion," which shows two women wearing what look like garbage bags, one woman revealing her torso and the other very covered up (both their heads are covered); and "Google Book Search" which shows a book with an arrow to a computer screen with an arrow to pages propped against a binder. Three of the panels have quotations from the readings: Marinetti, Vannevar Bush, Paul Edwards.
Wafa: It's very neat once you look at it. It's very well organized.
Evan: The colors match. Everything flows.
Jennifer: It's a bit bland almost.
Evan: I like bland.
Jennifer: It's almost commonsense. Like duh, people have implants, no big deal.
Gail: It makes it seem like these things are all normal and real.
Jennifer: They all look like something from now.
Evan: But also from the future.
Wafa: It's cool.
Lisa did a chart by hand on a canvas. The canvas is gold at the top and silver for the bottom 2/3. The chart is a genealogy of electronic music genres. At the very top is a silver moon, of which we only see the bottom half, and it's labeled "Disco." Right beneath the moon are the words "Post Soul." And then the genealogy/chart is in the silver portion, framed by tin foil. The geneology has several clusters: Electronic is the overarching "source," the other major clusters are "Dance, "Synthpop," "Futurepop," "Trance," "Breakbeat," "Techno," "House." There are several subgenres within each genre. There are different colors representing the genres and subgenres. There is a yellow cloud around the genres, Synthpop and Futurepop, and colored rhinestones mark those genres and subgenres. On the back are quotes, and also on the top (in the gold section). The quotes on the back are labeled, "Origins: Discotechnology" and "Synthpop Facts."
Evan: It's so generalized.
Wafa: It's very broad in a way. No matter how specific she seems to want it to be.
Jennifer: It's pretty. The tinfoil.
Gail: I like genealogies. I like seeing where genres come from and how they're related, so I like seeing the relationships traced out.
Evan: Like a family tree.
Gail: It looks futuristic. It looks like something that George Clinton would make - the tinfoil.
Jennifer: It made me think a little of the Data Thief, with the yellow.
Wafa: You have to sit down and stare at it for a long time to understand it.
Evan: There is a line from New Wave to the Synthpop....
Jennifer: But it's faint.
Dekyi painted a multipaneled piece on a canvas. Each panel is a square. There are panels of white fluffy clouds against pale blue sky, clouds against darker purple sky, several panels of a brown monolith - maybe indicating ground - several panels of a human figure sitting in lotus position. The piece seems to be divided into five columns, and in each column, there is a ground, a figure, and clouds, but each theme appears in a different spot (the order is different) in each column. In two of the panels with the human figure, there are flowers growing next to the human figure. Seven of the panels have quotations at the bottom or top of the panel (or, in the case of one panel, both the top and bottom). The quotes are from Poster and Moravec and Artaud, and Wafa says, "they stress the idea of virtual reality."
Evan: I like it. It's really clean.
Wafa: It's very artistic.
Evan: I get a peaceful sense from looking at it. Like the person in it. I want to go take yoga classes now.
Jennifer: Outside.
Wafa: It's one of those things that you want to stare at.
Jennifer: Maybe like the quote says, "narcissistic stupor." It could be you [the human figure]. There's no face.
Evan: I would totally hang this up in my house.
Jennifer and Wafa: Me too.
Jennifer: It's so pretty. I want it.
Evan: I was thinking the exact same thing. I was going to say, "I'll return it..." (laughs)
Gail: The images are almost like icons, appearing again and again. How do they relate to her quotes about creating another reality?
Jennifer: The virtual can be switched up. The elements of the old reality can be different in the new realities. Poster says we watch things over and over, and here we are looking at the same things over and over. Mirror images. "Virtual and real communities mirror each other in chiasmic juxtaposition." That's from Poster.
[we all look up "chiasmic" and see that it has to do with the ordering of words in a sentence: "a rhetorical construction in which the order of the words in the second of two paired phrases is the reverse of the order of the first" ("Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure" - Byron)]
Gail: So obviously, Dekyi is playing with the order of her icons - putting them in mirror relationships, switched relationships to their previous orderings.
Evan: We need to stop looking at this.
Wafa: Yeah, we're just getting lost in this dreamworld.
Jon Brooks did a piece in paint, markers, crayons, and some paper collage, and maybe some other media that is brightly colored, consisting of lots of small regions, all flowing together.
Evan: Looks like a fiery scene.
Wafa: It's very dramatic.
Evan: It's kind of hellish.
Wafa: It kind of gives me a headache looking at it. Not in a bad way. It's just a lot to take in. What's it about? Did he say anything?
Evan: He totally did. But I totally forgot what he said. I really don't remember.
Gail: There are squares and curvy shapes...
Evan: wavy lines...
Wafa: squiggly lines...in a rushed way....
Evan: Seems kind of demonic. Maniacal.
Wafa: Very very colorful. It's like BAM.
Evan: In your face.
Gail: Pinks, silvers, blacks, deep reds.
Evan: Bright colors and dark colors, hot and cold, subtle ones on the side.
Gail: So it's about contrast maybe.
Evan: I think it's someone breaking through something.
Gail: Let's call it a suggestive piece that doesn't denote a particular object but is fascinating nonetheless.
Evan: It is very fascinating.
Wafa: That's what makes it fascinating is the fact that we can't figure it out.
Christine (Chrissy) made a poster that is a collage of various human or humanoid-looking figures, and the title is "Unit 4: Climbing the Uncanny Valley." In the center is a kid sitting at a keyboard and mouse but no computer screen, instead of a screen he's looking his bedroom window and the caption is "Reality: Worst. Game. Ever." There are "people" from Polar Express, Second Life, A Scanner Darkly, a scary-looking dancing baby. And at the top center is the instruction, "Escape from the real world, get lost in the digital world." On the right side are faces of a real person - the faces start out normal but then get progressively stranger-looking due to CGI alterations. There are several quotes from the reading.
Wafa: There are just a lot of pictures, so it's nice, but she could have narrowed it down to something more specific. It's one of those things that just had you thinking, lots of characters and different things.
Evan: I like the faces, how it shows the transitions. That was pretty cool.
Wafa: Very very thoughtful.
Evan: It looks like it was put together fast.
Jennifer: Took longer to find the pictures, though.
Gail: I like the suggestion that images that can creep us out [in terms of falling into the Uncanny Valley] surround us. All of these images are so scary in their own way. We don't have to look too far for the Uncanny Valley. A lot of stuff online looks creepy.
Evan: That's definitely true.
Gail: Maybe that'll get better with time.
And now a brief diversion from Jennifer:
"I discovered my ground state, I think. And everyone was scared when they saw me. We had a long day driving, I was really really tired, so I gave up on trying to look like anything. People asked me, 'Are you okay? We don't want you to be sad.' But I wasn't sad. I was just expressionless."
Gail told Evan to pick a couple of works to leave out, and put the rest in the closet. Every month, he'll come in and change what's on exhibit in Gail's office. People can also come by and pick up their artwork if they want to.
I found one of the robots (the one on the far right) from Diane's project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbFFs4DHWys&NR=1
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