Margin Release

14 responses so far ↓

• 1 Sara K // Mar 17, 2008 at 7:39 pm

  Paul De Marinis and the ECamp class afterwards made me think about form and content. To make meaningful art we must choose our form to fit our content (but sometimes form decides the content….and that can be meaningful too…) Paul’s work has a form that intrigues and amazes. His content is not overlooked or ignored by the technology but is balanced steadily with it. He talked about how the aesthetic and form is a crucial aspect of installation work because it focus’s the attention to the content/meaning. Su Friedrich (Oberlin grad, feminist, film maker, theres a mini course on her this week) has developed her own film language that allows the viewer directly into her conscience/imagination/dream/idea. She has fine tuned her process, focused her skills on developing an index of techniques that work which allows her to pour a fluid communication of her idea. The British Artists, Gilbert and George have library of images that they have collected that suit their language. Each image is part of a meme. This is what i think Paul was speaking about too, the importance of successful tension and balance between the form/aesthetic and the content in order to achieve communication (success). Form must be fluid for content to arrive safely from the creators head, to the production of it and back to the viewers head. This is also what is incredible about Paul’s work is that he is able to practically make anything he imagines and its form is closely tied to its content. At least with the kind of art I am interested in making it feels important to use only and everything that we need to communicate our sentiment/question/position/purpose/meaning. Feels better to pick one thing and think about it for ten hours then to pick ten things and think about them for one hour.

• 2 matt // Mar 21, 2008 at 2:45 pm

  Paul is a new media artist who, by his own definition, works with “obsolete / impossible media.” He is an “excavator” who puts life back into old ideas, adapting them to our current situation.
  I find this type of new media work perplexing in its looking back to look forward. When Paul pulls out old physics diagrams that inspired his work with water, wax recordings, flames-as-amplifiers, etc. he reminds us that what is cutting edge today might be forgotten in thirty years. I don’t want to resurrect the argument completely, but in class a few weeks ago, we talked about how technology is moving faster and faster, and I tried to raise the point that it only seems that way because this is the age we are living in. Although today we seem so removed from the original work that inspired Paul’s pieces, how separate will they be viewed in two hundred years? Paul’s works inspire the viewer to walk down supposedly archaic avenues of expression with fresh eyes.
  Paul’s work reminds me that oftentimes, artists are so intent on being ahead of the curve that they forget that the present is still full of a trove of things to work with. In 75 years, what piece of technology/physics will be adapted to be the new media of the future?

• 3 cubby // Mar 30, 2008 at 9:40 pm

  Paul’s work is layered in that he has designed his instruments as well as the music they produce. He composes a mechanized orchestra but has also written the symphony. What kind of intertextual dynamic between invention (as in his design of machines to interact to produce sound) and creation (as in the design of the sound) does his work initiate? In this case discerning between the two doesn’t feel necessary, whereas generally there exists strict categorization between the two.

  Paul’s role as author of the whole work (inventive element and creative element together) challenges this categorization. If an inventive element and a creative element were divorced from each other, Paul would need to be an inventor and, exclusive from that, an artist. The talk showed he does not operate within such a system. More than one attendee of the talk called Paul a magician. I agree; he seems so because we are not often exposed to the management of practical laws of physics and artistic ideas. How exactly do we discern inventions (like light bulbs) from creations (like sculpture)? Blurring these lines is one way Paul’s work thinks critically about sound-making media.

• 4 dory // Apr 1, 2008 at 3:41 pm

  Today in class Sarah L mentioned something that I thought was pretty apt– I feel like I don’t have much to say about Paul’s presentation, because… well, because it was inarguably really rad, and for me that’s pretty much it. There’s no real political controversy for me to cling to; Paul’s making really fantastic, innovative art. And I think that’s the extent of my observations about it.
  Of all the work he showed us, I was the most struck by the flames-as-amplifiers installation, and I thought their use as speakers for the words of dictators was sort of perfect. I’ll admit that I have absolutely no grasp of the technology that makes the installation possible, but I think it’s exciting to see the potential of media we take for granted.

• 5 John // Apr 2, 2008 at 2:32 pm

  What Paul had in common with our other visitors is that he makes the hard-to-understand or the mythicized a little bit more tangible.

  In the case of Trigillio, he brought to the people access to a media that was before closed and off limits, and what is slowly becoming more archaic. Kurtz prods at science and challenges the exclusivity of knowledge by conducting his own garage science or bringing the lab out into the public sphere. DeMarinis dissects and reanimates old tech and sound systems to invite people’s interest and curiosity.
  They all have an element of interactivity to their work which brings their audience towards a different understanding of the world around them.

  It’s interesting because these are things that would otherwise be either taken for granted or overlooked. Yet these artists make their material tangible at different levels for different people. While they introduce and educate at some level through curiosity and interactivity, they also complicate it through fascination and creativity.

• 6 anna // Apr 2, 2008 at 5:14 pm

  Although I didn’t understand the physical properties of Demarinis’s work, I thought that part of his work it debunking technology as this impenetrable thing. It is easy to give technology a power over ourselves, to think that it will mend us and society. I think Demarinis empowers the user through nature of his work. His work is so incredible to us because he has such an astute control over the technologies that he is using which we (the civilian) perceive as unbelievable. Not understanding how something works can feel disempowering, like the machine is smarter than the human. Yet Demarinis, although seemingly super-human, takes hold of that myth and shakes the life out of it.
  I liked how he deals in lost technologies and ridiculous technologies. Technology has taken a certain path and evolved from vinyl to mp3, and in other forms in ways that are more efficient. Demarinis deconstructs the need for efficiency and strips technologies down the thing they are. For example, an instrument to play music or project sound. He does not care about humanity’s drive for the cutting edge and the efficient, rather he digs into why we employ machines and technologies in the first place.

• 7 the once and future noah // Apr 3, 2008 at 12:37 am

  I thought Demarinis’ work was really unequivocally phenomenal. I don’t think I can really entertain any kind of really in depth analysis, because in point of fact I just thought it was so cool that I suspended my natural inclination to analyze it to death. I thought his work was a fantastic convergence of electronic music, visual art, machinery, and a rich historical understanding of the development of sound and our relationship with it.

  His projects were smart investigations into various technologies, and his work evidenced a really nice sense of humor and whimsy. I liked that idea that he made increasingly abstracted mechanical contraptions, like etching sound into a glass hologram, seemingly for no purpose other than his own curiosity and amusement. He seemed to have an almost childish glee about these experiments, and I found it really refreshing in a field where people take themselves much too seriously. All in all, I thought it was really great, and I’m pissed that I had theory at 1:30.

• 8 Hannah // Apr 3, 2008 at 7:16 am

  Paul Demaris makes anything seem possible. When I first heard of his ‘Singing in the rain’ project in which energy charged raindrops fall off a roof to drop onto umbrella’s that act as amplifiers, to somehow produce music; I was astounded. I (in my technologically un-savvy state) would not even attempt to dream up such a cool project. I think the thing that makes him such a fascinating artist is the extraordinary combination an intensely creative mind, working almost effortlessly with strange technology.
  I would agree with Anna, in saying that his use of out-dated or forgotten technologies is one of the most interested parts of his work. I love the fact that he combs through old physics text books in his spare time looking for interesting technologies that have fallen by the way side of technological advancement. I think his work takes technology out of its context of societal advancement and shows the play and creativity that is integral to invention and technology. Although I could not understand exactly how most of his projects work, they made me want to play with them.

  P.S. I would love to see the inside of his studio! I imagine nests of wires, records, umbrellas and old taken apart electronics!

• 9 ally // Apr 3, 2008 at 7:17 am

  So I’ve been brainstorming for a while since Paul’s visit, and I am going to propose a definition for New Media:

  New Media is the deconstruction of old medias, which are then recontextualized through a techno-historical lens.

  Michael Trigilio and NPR used radio, a medium with 100+ years of history, to serve a purpose they felt was not being met by modern media–a community centered, completely open platform for dialogue and interaction between artists, activists, leaders, and just plain ol’ folks on the street.

  Steve Kurtz and the CAE use the book, perhaps the oldest known form of media, and change the typical forms of manual reproduction to an electronic one to make it accessible to a far larger audience.

  Paul pushed this definition of New Media the furthest, taking extinct technologies such as the gas flame speaker (which I am still trying to understand the science of…any help would be appreciated!) and using it to broadcast contentious historical political speeches, so that both the speech and the technology became, essentially, art.

• 10 Louie // Apr 6, 2008 at 3:32 pm

  Paul’s work, in conjunction with some of the ideas we have been throwing around in class, are helping to solidify, or at least strengthen my understanding about how new media operates as a form of communication.
  Paul’s work, in conjunction with NPR and others, is helping me realize that new media is just as much a process of cultural, techonological, and historical retrospection, as much as it is about a form of projective communication. Paul’s work seems to debunk, or at least challenge the notion that our historical and cultural understanding derives from our changing, and advancing relationships to materials and tools. Paul’s installations serve to unearth technologies that have fallen by the way side as a way (possibly) to provide an alternative narrative to the story of technological history–one that stresses the significance of technological successes as well as failures as important markers of change.

• 11 arden // Apr 6, 2008 at 6:44 pm

  I would have to agree with Dory when she says that Paul Demarinis’s work leaves little for us to say. His work is wildly complex and strikingly thought provoking, demonstrating how sound has the capability to be used in multiple forms. Beyond this innovative quality, it aids in clarifying our notion of what new media is. Like we addressed in class, I find that Demarinis’s pieces show that new media is not always about the medium, but rather about how the medium is used. By using sound in unique and interactive ways, the viewer is able to connect with art even if they cannot immediately grasp how it was created. Most importantly, I found that his work was so pleasing because it was enjoyable to a variety of people. Although the pieces are extremely complicated in their conception, their purpose is apparent, illustrating how a work’s success is also accredited to its ability to speak to an audience.

• 12 Gavin // Apr 9, 2008 at 10:39 pm

  Recently a visiting lecturer in the Art History department gave a talk concerning Social Realism. The content of the lecture was very intriguing, however, what impacted me most was a generalization she questioned related to the field of art historical research. Specifically, the majority of research is done on those artists whose body of work is part of the collective memory that we call history. As with all research, this requires some form, vestige, etc. The history of art, technology or their interrelation, is in many ways genealogical, a bifurcating path of branches varying in length. Nonetheless, a common approach is to collapse this structure onto a temporal trajectory that eliminates the “in-between”. While the work of Paul DeMarinis may not always delve into this other space, the specter of this collapsed in-between space is certainly a current theme. Whether it be a reconstruction of those projects never-realized, or those that simply fell out of favor, DeMarinis’ work is evocative of an unremembered historical past. This translates to his work with clay pots qua records, positing another formal possibility for those institutions that we hold as normal. Similar to previous visitors, his work provokes a re-evaluation of our current state and caused me to consider the history that could have been… that was, at some point. Could this perhaps instill a continued re-evaluation of future technological and social trajectories?

  Also, the umbrella instillation was illuminating.

• 13 Lauren Barrett // May 11, 2008 at 3:40 pm

  The work of Paul Demarinis has taken me back to the 19th century. I see a strong parallel between his pieces and the inquisitive nature of the mad scientists who created different photographic processes. The people who invented cyanotypes, daguerrotypes, vandykes, gum printing etc. were more or less chemists experimenting with different combinations to create a permanent photograph. If i add soduim bichromate to gum arabic will the picture stay? This trial and error approach to art is why we have these processes today. For me photography is a confusing jumble of incomprehinsible chemsitry, i dont know how fixer works and why color chemistry is far more toxic than black and white, i dont know how the picture comes onto the film and how it stays there and how the light reacts. But we have these processes and techniques because there were a few fearless experimenters mixing and failing and ultimately mustering up the drive to succeed and create lasting processes. Now, I feel that Paul’s approach is kind of the reverse of this. We have electronics, we know they work we take them for granted. I dont know how a cd plays music i dont know what i am looking at when i see a motherboard i dont know how sound gets amplified through wires when i put the needle on a record. Paul does! I think Paul Demarinis’s work is an effort to demisitfy these electronic devices that we take for granted on a daily basis. They are not magical mystery machines, there is science and logic behind them, and if it werent for kooky scientists and many failures we would not have these devices, much like were it not for those nineteenth century scientists we would not have photography. I think Paul’s work shows us not to be afraid, it is ok to explore and deconstruct and try to figure out how things work. As children we want to know why and how things work and as adults we just want to know that it does work and can i use it and will it break on me. Singing in the Rain and the Edison effect both deconstruct musical technology that we take for granted, speakers and record players. By dismantling the technology to the bare essentials, Paul was able to make rain and umbrellas into speakers, and goldfish and lasers into a record player. By using natural elements to create the seemingly unnatural electronic technology that we use every day, demarinis works towards the understanding and demystification of these technologies. A speaker isnt just something in your computer, it can be rain and a walk through the park. Demarinis shows us that this technology did not come out of the blue, it came as a result of inquisitive thinkers and people with a dream, i want to make a sound machine and then the speaker was born with countless failed attempts i am sure. Demarinis embodies the spirit of the scientists of the past reinterpreting modern technology and bringing back the spirit of curiosity and wonder that inspired these inventions in the first place.

• 14 ben // May 16, 2008 at 11:08 am

  The thing that strikes me most about the work of Paul Demarinis is how each and every one of his installations emerges from a deep theoretical and historical background. I am often frustrated by the arbitrary nature of installation art; too often it is based off of vague concepts that the viewer may or may not be intended to understand. Paul’s work forces us to confront the chance happenings that have defined the technological world we live in today, and to consider alternate technologies in both practical and artistic applications.

  Paul Demarinis has re-assumed the role of the 19th-century inventor, one that has been regrettably replaced by corporate-sponsored research and development. Only as an artist has Demarinis been able to rediscover fantastic and whimsical inventions of the 19th century such as the speaking flame and the talking bathtub. His work has forced me to reevaluate the technological world that I live in, and better appreciate discarded technologies of the past.

  I don’t have much else to say—Paul’s presentation was absolutely captivating.

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