Author: gsmith

DATE – 1994
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM – Telepreseence robot
STATUS – Displayed in front of the White House in Washington DC
WEBLINKS
http://www.ecafe.com/museum/hilites/1994.html

A project done in collaboration with the Electronic Café in Los Angles that linked a series of musicians and poets located at COMDEX in Las Vegas to the telepresence robot Wilma who performed in fro=nt of the White House in Washington.

The Washington Post
Cyber-culture: The Louvre to the Lewd – Tom Allen
Sunday December 4, 1994, Page G8

MEDIA RARE– But suppose you’re a struggling young artist. Someone who grew up on Nintendo Co. who’s been using computers since grade school call who graduated from college with an Internet address but no corporate work ethic. Wouldn’t it be nice to create your own music studio in cyberspace — or even a television studio? Some were no wide world, you just might find an audience for your art that’s the whole idea of the open info — road, isn’t it? Power to the people?

On our rainy November day, across the street from the White House, a video robot named Wilma is trolling for content. A 25-year-old poet named Josie steps before Wilma’s lens and rants blasphemous verse:

I bake bread and make stuffing!
Cook our trespassers, spread them apart and eat them!

Leads him into temptation!
Forgive me who art is in heaven:

We are all evil and this is how it is on Earth.

The robot transmits Jose Sandoval’s “New Lord’s prayer” to New York City and Las Vegas, where appreciate the truth audiences of techno — beatniks or watching the videocast live as it comes over digital telephone lines hooked up to monitors. It’s an experiment put on by the electronic Café in the McLuhan program of the University of Toronto underwritten by Motorola.

Here on Friday afternoon in Washington, you can glimpse the farthest reaches of the info superhighway, where fringe artists create their own interactive broadcasting technology and talk of quotation marks “PMC — MOO poetry slams” and the figure minus ground environment (which is a concept from Marshall McLuhan’s the global village which despite all its prophecies never mentioned digital cleavage)

“McLuhan saw artists as having and insights that the rest of society didn’t yet have,” Graham Smith, the bearded, shaky — haired project leader, is saying. “McLuhan knew that artists were not tied up in conversations what were doing here is something that has never been done in five years it will be your telephone.”

Smith, 35, cobbled together Sen. or Willem Wilma pobot — a mobile videoconferencing system — using a 486 computer loaded with $6000 worth of picture tells software and hardware, servers both feet dry cell batteries and 200 feet of ISDN cable which he spooled out of 7th floor window of his room at the Hay-Adams Hotel on the H St. below. He’d wanted to use the ISBN antenna — go wireless — but the Secret Service didn’t like the looks of a yard long silvery thing aimed at the White House from the hotel window. Agents paid a visit, effectively mixing that techno — trial

“For people on the street, this is their first video conference, says Smith. The idea is to give people control over this technology. It will mean the death of the TV stations because once the technology is in place we all become TV stations.”

Visionaries such as Smith like to think this technology will revolutionize society by fully democratic sizing access to media. The talk of smashing the one-way broadcasting monopoly that spoon feeds asked lowest common denominator programming they proclaim a future in which Internet offers everyone the ability to create and disseminate art. This goal is noble. And in time it might even be possible.

DATE – 1993
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM – Telepresence robotic installation
STATUS – Displayed at the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy and the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, Canada

This exhibition was linked to the 1993 Venice Biennale as part of their “Aperto” program from The McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto via ISDN based videoconferencing. The German group MASA out of Cologne organized the overall project as part of something called the “Casio Container” which was a shipping container converted into a mobile electronic café which was the place people controlled the robot in Canada.

ARTISTS
Doug Back, Vera Frenkel, Francis LeBouthillier, Simone Jones, Steev Morgan, Cathy Orfald, Nancy Paterson, Runt, Jim Ruxton, Victoria Scott, Graham Smith, Karen Tzventarny, Norman White

DATE – 1992
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM – Interactive panoramic sculpture
STATUS – Image du Futur, Old Port, Montreal, Canada
WEBLINKS

A panoramic imaging display exhibited at the “Image du Futur” exhibition in Montreal, Canada

DATE – 1989
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM – Panoramic Photography
STAUS – Displayed at Museum Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, Germany and at the Harbourfront Photography Gallery, Toronto, Canada

A series of panoramic images shot at the Berlin Wall in Berlin Germany. The exhibition was funded through a Media Arts grant from the Canada Council of the Arts.

The Toronto Star January 17, 1989
G4 – Christopher Hume
Roving cameramen pieces world together

IMAGE – Panoramic jigsaw. Graham Smith’s Checkpoint Charlie photograph puts day and night the same picture says critic Christopher Hume.

Roving cameramen pieces world together
most photographers use a camera to freeze the moment. Graham Smith sees it as a means of freeing time and motion.

The 30-year-old Toronto photographer inventor has devoted the last two years to devising ways of allowing the camera to see the world in a more complete and human way.

The result of his latest experiments, on display at the photography gallery at harbor front until January 29 are an interesting as anything done recently with the camera.

For one thing Smith doesn’t concentrate on single images but assembles huge panoramas comprised of hundreds of ports. The three large pieces in the current show titled intersections through time Berlin 88 or impressive visual documents but more than that intriguing explorations into the nature of perception.

The works consist of groups made up of photographs arranged five deep unruly dozens long. They were taken from a camera device of Smith’s making that scans the scene team shot from almost every angle possible, from straight up to directly down. At the same time the camera is receiving from the scene as it turns 360°.

Initially the effect is confusing takes a minute or two to realize were looking at a three-dimensional view flattened out and rendered in two dimensions. To see the same view in real life we would have to rotate three or four times while walking backwards.

I create my own technology for each piece I do Smith explains in this case I want to record movement through time. I was shooting a length of space as wall as a panorama spiraling through space.

He calls his works progress and through time. To emphasize the point, the bottom photograph in each row of the clock on it. Peace taken about two hours to shoot. Smith is also started to take his panoramas late in the afternoon to the picture gets darker as time and evening events.

This is best seen in checkpoint Charlie work taken roughly between 4 PM and 6 PM. Justice this technique turned straight lines into U-shaped curves but stay a night into the sky at the same time.

Photographers always think in terms of a single instant of time but nothing is static’s missives. It just can’t happen. Besides we didn’t just look at one thing or see everything at once we scan.

All three pieces were taken last fall at sites along the Berlin wall. As well as being full of graphic appeal specially the combination of uniformed guards and graffiti on the scenes provide a fascinating glimpse and the realities of the Cold War.

Berlin is the New York of Europe, Smith says. They help me in every way they could than evens exhibited the work.

The East Germans provided less helpful. They refused to let me cross over and appear only as inquisitive heavies on at all sure they like what Smith is doing.

He could’ny cross the border but his camera did

doug back
carl hamfelt
laura kikauka
arlene levin
monika merinat
david rokeby
christiane scher
peter sepp
graham smith
norman white

Toronto-Salerno, Italy
May 28 & 29, 1986
11am-4pm

Toronto-Paris, France
June 3&4, 1986
12pm – 2:30pm

STRATEGIC ARTS INITIATIVE
(Program Notes)

The Strategic Arts Initiative (SAI) is a Canadian answer to the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative. Its purpose is to show the relevance of the arts in the world’s communication ecology. Communications technologies are putting us in touch with the whole planet, but most of us are not aware of how this situation can change our sensibility. We are all trapped in an invisible mesh of electronic talk. We still use communications to transport information. We have not yet understood that the new technologies are also transforming relationships. One of the roles of the artist in this context is to reveal these relationships.

The inspiration for SAI came from the late Marshall McLuhan whose work and particularly his theme of the “global village”, prompted a few artists in Europe and the US to explore the esthetic possibilities implicit in ordinary media such as the telephone, radio, TV, video and telematics. After E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology, at the New York Museum of Modern Art. 1968) The idea seems to have abated in the U.S. during the seventies. A new impetus to create an international movement came from the initiative of Mario Costa in Italy, Fred Forest in France and Horacio Zabala in Argentina. Together they issued the first “Manifeste pour une esthétique de la communication” at Mercato San Severino, Oct 29th 1983. Since that time there have been several international colloquia to bring together artists and theoreticians to give shape and meaning to the activities.

The present occasion is Art Media II, an international colloquium on Communication and Arts, to be held in Salerno (Italy), May 27-30) under the direction of Mario Cost, professor and art critic at the University of Salerno. The theme is Art and Planetary Communication. This event includes a participation from the Future Theatre of Expo 86 in Vancouver which is dedicated to the theme of “Communications and Transportation”. The first colloquium in this series, art Media I, on Arts et communications occurred in Paris (La Sorbonne, October 1985) under the direction of Robert Allezaud. A third one, Art Media III, should take place in Toronto in October 1987, under the direction of Derrick de Kerckhove. Other colloquia on related themes involving artist, media and art critics, academia and the general public have been held in Toronto (Computer/Culture 1979-81), Villeneuve-lez-Avigon (Informatique/Culture, 1983), Tel Aviv (Artcom, October, 1984), Paris (Electra, December, 1984), Salerno (Artmedia, May 1985) and gain Paris (Recontres et Performances sur l’esthetique de la communication, Beaux-Arts, January, 1986).

So Far, the Canadian participation in these events and in the ongoing international investigation into the relevance of the arts to communications has been very good and well recognized. Thanks to the efforts of such artists as Norman White (Hearsay project 1985), Robert Adrain X (I.P. Sharp network – since 1977), Lisa Sellyeh (pARTiciFAX, October 1984), Bill Bartlett (i>P. Sharp and slow-scan TV), Glenn Howarth (Telidon Show, 1983 Sao Paolo Biennale), Herve Ficher (Marcro Polo project 1984-85), and the ongoing support of theorists and administratots such as Richard Hill Photo/Electric Arts Foundation), Tom Sherman (Media Arts, Canada Council), Derek Dowden (Cultural Software, Semiotica/Simulacra, April 1984) and Derrick de Kerkhove, (McLuhan Program Seminars on Communication in Art), the Canadian profile is high and has been dubbed as “the light from the North”. Canada has acquired an international reputation for expertise in communications and it is once again demonstrated by the thematic choice of Expo 1986.

There are no hard fast rules about how to fit in the SAI ideology. The artists are joined by a common interest in communication media and their artistic possibilities. All the work so far is based on performances. Though all involve technological installations, some performances are punctual, such as the work of Hamfelt/Kikauka, Rokeby, Smith and Back/White: while others are on-going processes inviting a random audience participation over a period of time (Merinat/Scher and A-line). Whether punctual or on-going, almost all these performances require the involvement of an anonymous audience. This is very important as the works are open and interactive in nature. The intent is to create relationships and these relationships are available to anyone who cares to enter them. Another important feature is that all performances involve action-at-a distance rather than localized events. This is the ‘planetary” dimension of the new artform.

At a deeper level, these performances do not generally stress content and information but effects and sensibility change. The audience is their content. This is the main source of their esthetic value. Other than sensations, feelings and emotions, these communication artist are not very concerned about communicating anything in particular.

Two of the performances stress auditory and tactile sensations across vast distances. To feel a physical pressure through the telephone lines in Back/White Telephonic Arm Wrestling performance is a novel and unsettling sensation which underscores the real proximity and intimacy the telephone has given us since it began. There is an immediate sensuality to David Rokeby’s body of communication by sound which can be felt almost intimately at 6000 Kms distance.

Merinat/Scher and A-Line’s performances complement each other. Both elicit random responses from an anonymous audience, but the first is purposely “artistic” and assumedly “high-brow”, while the other is spontaneous. The first uses radio, a broadcast system, while the other uses the telephone, a person-to-person communication system. Both performances give voices to indeterminate numbers of people who are given a chance to communicate in ways unknown before.

Smith’s performance highlights the fact that we are now extending our eyes and our minds technically across huge distances. Smith’s work is a new kind of closed-circuit TV, a way of making television’s power, a personal power, not only because it gives us a real-time personal vision on a distant object, but also because we can guide our “eye in space”, just as surely as Space remote control systems.

There is more than a touch of humor in most, if not all of the performances, and this humor is stressed in Hamfelt/Kikauka in their attempt to parody the poor man’s communication system., with the sophisticated means of present-day technology. The humor reacts against the deadlock of technology and introduces play where work only has been considered by the technocrats.

If communication has a future, it better be fun. Technology is not sacred. It’s merely functional. The whole world is under its gun. When we are through with the Telephonic Armwrestling performance, we plan to send the device to Ronald Regan and Mikhail Gorbachev. It might save us from the red telephone.

DATE – 1986
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM – Panoramic film and kinetic sculpture
STATUS – In development

A five camera panoramic film that moves through downtown Toronto at the intersection of King and Bay that was shot in 1985. The piece is designed to be a kind of “time machine” as core sections of the video are designed to be re-shot in exactly the same locations a generation later to explore the progression of time in an urban environment. This project was funded with the help of two Canada Council Integrated Media grants in 1984 and 1985.

DATE – 1986
DISCIPLINE – Art
MEDIUM – Telepresence robotic installation
STATUS – Displayed simultaneously in Toronto, Canada and Salerno, Italy

Photography artist Graham Smith was born in Vancouver but he works in Toronto. His work in progress includes a Kinetic Time Machine which will photographically record environments over extended periods of time. The art I create is shaped by the environment in which I live. I see technology not as a tool but as a palette: video, robotics and kinetics are simply different colors ready to be mixed into a new work”.

Displaced Perspectives allows viewers to explore distant environments through the video eyes of a remotely controlled robot. It is a teleguidance system which will allow participants in Salerno or Paris to explore a site in Toronto by directing a small video camera mounted on a remotely-controlled robot, which transmits real-time digitized images via the Macintosh computer “MacVision” system.

“This ability to see, and control a machine, across the Atlantic is the most visible part of the piece, yet conceptually it is only a surface element. The true power of the piece lies in it’s definition of communication as an interactive explorative process which results in the construction of a 3-dimensional mental model. The robot uses the same scanning process people use when entering any new space; they look all over and build up a 3-dimensional model from many different perspectives. It is this definition of communication: many small pieces making up something greater than the whole, which lies at the heart of this piece” G. Smith).