Associação Cultural Videobrasil

On Marcia Vaitsman, "The One Made of Light Stuff"

One of the most impressive features of Marcia Vaitsman's ongoing project The one made of light stuff is her unique involvement in the subject of the skin. The work will use the image of human skin as a kind of interface, through which the viewer can explore various different stories behind it. More precisely, you are supposed to 'touch' some parts of the skin displayed on the panel, in order to step farther into her work. Scars you will find on the skin give you a clue about where you should touch.

The skin image in her work look very realistic, but at the same time, it is something that you would never find in this real world. The image is made by joining together photos of the skin from different part of the body of different people. So, in a way, it is the image of a collective skin, which does not belong to any particular part of any particular person. It is as if the skin had acquired its own life, by means of digital image processing. The skin extends itself like an unknown, living landscape in which you can move around.

Let's think a little bit about what the skin is. The Skin is not just a surface of our body. Its function is not only that of wrapping or protection. When you take a microscopic view on the skin, you will find an astonishing landscape totally different from that you see everyday. The skin is not two-dimensional, but totally complex living structure, which allows exchange of various matters, energy and information between the body and the environment. So, from scientific point of view, we will understand how dynamic the skin works. Its function can be called paradoxical, because the skin separates and connects two things at the same time, i.e. the inside and the outside, the self and the outer world. Already in our real world, the skin works as an interface between the living organism and the environment around it.

Only when an organism dies, the skin turns into a mere surface covering the inner part of the body, like an artificial skin of a doll. So, you can say it is the dynamic function of the skin as the interface, which mediates the inside and the outside, that distinguish life and death. The skin in Marcia's work is of course not a real skin but the image processed using the computer, and displayed on a flat touch screen. However, it is not a simple surface. The skin regains its life in the form of interactive relationship between the work and the viewer.

In this context, it is crucially important that the artist refers to "Human Museum in Helsinki" in this work. Museums as we know are normally supposed to contain objects, which are already 'dead' in the sense that they have been -- whether they are artworks, historical items, or scientific specimens -- removed from their original context in the particular time and place, and exhibited in a abstract space, in a showcase in a museum, placed just like a dead body in a coffin. (Theodor W.Adorno once mentioned in an essay* a tonal association between 'Museum' and 'Mausoleum.') Exactly because they are 'dead,' they can be safely purchased, collected, owned, studied, and evaluated. *Theodor W. Adorno, "Valery Proust Museum", in Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, 1955.

In this imaginary "Human Museum," however, it is human beings, instead of dead objects, that are displayed to the audience. It contains living 'exhibits' from thirty different ethnic groups. You can see, for example, a native Amazon woman, or, maybe an old White European man, and touch their hair or their skin, to see how they feel. This situation deconstructs the very idea of the museum, because there is no 'safe' distance between the viewer and the viewed, the object and the subject. It will tell us that our conventional idea of the museum has been based on a fictional, asymmetrical relation between the two. One side(objects) should be dead and the other side(viewers) alive -- this is the necessary condition for the experience to appreciate works in the normal way in a museum.

More important and interesting features about Human Museum is that the audience are invited to touch the 'exhibits' in the former, while they are usually not allowed to do so in real museums. You would be warned even when you come a little too close to a painting. 'Touching' is a taboo in our normal way to appreciate art works in the museum, because it could cause a change in them. But touching can never be a one-way action. When you touch something, it means you are touched by it. Just imagine how it would be if you touch the heir of a living person in Human Museum. You couldn't possibly persuade yourself that you are only appreciating an exhibit in a museum. You would immediately feel that you are being touched at the same time.

Touching a scar, even if it is a scar displayed in the screen, would make you feel as if you were doing the same thing in reality. The image of scars is so powerful. Scars are the trace of time accumulated on a body, and by touching a scar you can try to listen to the voice of the body. By doing so, you are touched by the scar as well. In your action of touching it, the scar is listening to your inner voice, too. A number of stories, memories and dreams you will experience in the work of Marcia Vaitsman seem to suggest what these voices coming from deeper place in the body talk. So, scars are not a flaw on the body which people wish to keep perfect, but an important sign leading us to a more profound experience of our body and mind.

So-called 'interactive media art' has often been supposed to be new because it make use of digital media for artistic expression. I think this is a serious misunderstanding. Newness of media art and newness of technology are not same. However new technology a work uses, it can still be very old as a work of art. If a work of media art is understood in the same context as that of the conventional art, i.e. created as an art object, exhibited in the museum and appreciated as a masterpiece and so on, there would not be much to say about the new, unique character of media art. Interactive media art can only be new, when it attempts to create a new territory of artistic experience.

Now, more than a decade after the period of rapidly spreading Internet, of computer culture and of booming media art in early 1990s, media art seems to be confronted with the question: how can we create a really new artistic experience using digital media? What exactly is unique and new in media art, apart from newness of technology? Perhaps these questions should more seriously be asked in technologically highly advanced nations, like US or Japan. I think this is part of the reason why Marcia Vaitsman was invited as an artist in residence in spring 2004, to Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), Gifu, one of the leading media art schools in Japan. (ref. http://www.iamas.ac.jp/)

Your work is connected to the new media scene. How did you begin to work in this field? Were you attracted to the technologies and the creative possibilities that could be set up?

In 1989, it was already cheap to make home videos, but I hated to see what people were doing. It was when I was studying at an American high-school that I first came in contact with HyperCard (to make small databases and interlink information - it was fascinating!), programming, image editing and BBS, but when I came back to Brazil everything vanished because I didn't have a computer at home. In 1991, there were no new media courses at USP (University of São Paulo), but people were already talking about the Internet and hypertext, and something about computer graphics, but not at ECA (Communication and Arts School). In a way it was good, because we had to learn how to think and write. I was never a technology freak, but I always liked to use the “machine”, so I had to do something. Actually, I liked many things like animation and cinema, but I didn't like to work in groups and I thought the process of working with cinema was too bureaucratic; I wanted to make things and to be able to show these things. In 1995, people were already talking about CD-ROM, but just a few knew how to make it, and I was lucky to have friends that could make it, and they were really good. They gave me the Director 3 and a book. I went to the house of a friend who had a 4MB PC and learnt to use the program. Mixing technology with the monster-city and the will to make a fanzine, Guilherme, from Candyland Comics, Mariana Rillo and I produced “Biographies”. Afterwards, my fascination for the “machine” increased…. Then, I learnt to use the Internet to communicate with my family that was in Austria. I learnt HTML in a week, then I worked with some technology freaks who created the first Internet servers in São Paulo, they taught me a lot of things. It was extraordinary to know that people could see what I was doing from anyplace, anytime, but I didn't have time anymore to do my own work. The process was quick: in 1998 the web was almost as unbearable as TV (or even more), and I lost my interest. It was time to go to Germany.

In one of your texts you state that you use the computer as a media because you have a certain illusion that you have more control over time then you would have working with video or cinema. How do you relate time to interactivity in your work?

Interactivity as “pressing a button” doesn't interest me. I began to pay attention to time when I wanted to put written text on video and people told me it wasn't appropriate. In my works, interactivity is used to dissolve animated image's time. I talk about an illusion of control because time as a natural phenomenon is not our invention, and it cannot be controlled by anybody, but media time can be controlled, because it is a human invention. If cinema invented the moving image, interactivity invented the control over this movement, and the control over time. But it is too obvious that the interactive works represent only the space, ignoring the “media” time. That's why I decided to create Mpolis, a video city.

You worked at KHM, in Cologne, and now you are working as an artist at IAMAS. Do these “walks” in different cultural contexts affect your works?

They do not only affect my works, they are also their basis. I couldn't work in Brazil as I work here, because in Brazil there is no money for this kind of work, and the artist or creator must eat, pay their children's school etc. Looking at the complexity of works like Mpolis, A common ancestral stranger or The one made of light stuff, and working almost alone, taking from one to three years to realize a project, I know I couldn't make it in Brazil, and it makes me sad because I only feel at home in the monster-city, and I need it to create. However, it's exciting to live within the context of art and media in countries like Japan and Germany, super-producers of technology, and to see how art and culture are influenced by the industry, and also to know that there are people in these places that are interested in my work. I am not an export product from the Brazilian culture, as music and cinema, which now have official export programmes, and my works are not projected specifically for the European use. And I move to be able to work, and my travels are always affecting my work.

You have created printed and interactive works (CD-ROM, DVD and the Web), as well as interactive audiovisual installations. How do you choose the supports during the creative process? Is there a decisive factor?

Yes, trying to combine an intuition with an original characteristic of these media. I felt oppressed, for instance, by the idea of using images to talk about the imagination of blind people. Another example is the Unstable CD, that could exist only as a CD-ROM, or the work MediaScan, that could exist only as a static image. If a work can exist only as words, it must be a text, like Nó na garganta (Lump in the Throat). Pisando em ovos em Buenos Aires (Treading on Eggs in Buenos Aires) was an attempt to deny everything that I have just said. I cannot think: “I want to make a video” or “web art”, because I don't think this kind of classification is significant. I think that I can work this way because I got rid of the paranoia of having to keep a total control over the techniques I use. I love the technical imperfections of my works.

Some of your works treat the theme of the body. How do you perceive the relations between body and technology in your works?

The body represents the definition of a being - I never talk about the body only as a group of accumulated cells. It is the centre of our perception; in brief, culture and other inventions are its continuations. The “machine” seems to be something difficult to be comprehended by the average man, but it is nothing more than a bad copy of the models that try to define a small part of what we are. To represent the body using a computer is basically a historic result, or maybe an ironic redundancy. I have personal arguments because the body (as identification) and the media are important to me. One of them is the recollection of, when I was a child, not understanding why the women on TV were never Asian-looking.

What is the central theme of The one made of light stuff, the work you are developing right now?

The central theme is an individual's identification with the group. This time, I don't treat the cultural identification as an issue that belongs only to the stranger, the immigrant. I talk about the conscience of being an individual, the imitation and the belonging to a “group” (any group). Obviously, body and time are strong themes in this work, as well as the blindness, the skin and the scars. The theme of the blindness as something exotic has worn me out, so I have decided to approach a new perspective that is much more interesting: the identification, the formation of the personal taste, learning and imitation - all this through the sight. Developing this work in Japan is very important to me, not because the work displays Japanese culture, but because it is a place that is part of my existence, of my looking, a place that defines half of my body, and that, at the same time, is so new for me as any other foreign country.

Marcia Vaitsman began to work as an artist when she was still at the university, in the beginning of the 90's, producing experimental videos. She is graduate in Radio and Television Production at the University of São Paulo, and finished her postgraduate studies at KHM, in Cologne, Germany, Vaitsman has been participating in important expositions, festivals and exhibitions in many countries.

After her first videos, which were assembled in the trilogy Partícula [Particle] (1992), Vaitsman began to produce multimedia works. The first work is the CD-ROM Biografias ñ autorizadas [Unauthorized Biographies] (1996), realized with Guilherme Caldas, from Candyland Comics, who produced the illustrations, and Mariana Rillo, who produced the photographs. The work shows the daily lives of three young men who live alone in São Paulo.

The issues related to the body appear for the first time in the interactive installation Topography (2000). A touch sensitive screen simulates a magic eye which enables the visitors to interact with the images of a body.

Already living in Cologne, Germany, and studying at KHM, Vaitsman produced with other artists the installation Das Genlaboratorium (2001), which uses the genetic algorithms to recombine music and sound fragments, and even relates the non-linear narrative techniques of the films to the genetic recombinations. The artists, together with the Fraunhofer Institut's scientists, created a laboratory for the manipulation of tobacco genes. A website (www.genlaboratorium.khm.de) was created in parallel with the exposition, which took place in the Galerie Projektraum.

In that same year, she produced the CD-ROM Psycotropic (2001), which approaches in a peculiar way the contradictions and differences in the tropics. Afterwards, she created the installation Solid happiness (2001). The installation was part of the exposition 3 x 3, at the Galeria Nanquim, in São Paulo. It is made of animated photographs in loop; the animation is very slow, so that the visitors cannot realize it. This work treats the idea of the sight being modified by chemical substances or psychological states of mind.

Between 1999 and 2001, Vaitsman worked as a tutor for the multimedia and performance laboratory of the artist Valie Export, and afterwards as a professor in the Media Design department, both at KHM.

In 2001, Marcia Vaitsman returned to the theme of the body and produced A common ancestral stranger, CD-ROM and installation that show images of a body through which we can move some tattoos that reveal hidden parts of this “metabody”, as memory and faith. According to Vaitsman, the work displays “a man's thoughts which synthesize the lives of 50 million people who live as foreigners in many parts of the world.” This work was exhibited in many festivals and exhibitions, as the EMMA Award - Electronic Multimedia Award (London, 2001), 13th Videobrasil - International Electronic Art Festival (São Paulo, 2001), Villete Numérique - 1st Digital Art Biennial (Paris, 2002), Medio@rte Latino, in the Transmediale context (Berlin, 2002), and others.

Also in 2001, she produced “Mpolis”, an interactive DVD which displays an imaginary city structured as a game, through which the users can interact. The space of the city, which begins showing images of São Paulo, is divided in four zones (Ilinx, Mimikry, Alea, and Agon), inspired by Roger Callois' work.

Afterwards, Vaitsman produced printed works through digital processes. “Amarelinha” [Hopscotch] (2002) is a vinyl print which reproduces the hopscotch game, but with eggs on the squares forming a strange carpet. This work, which has been exhibited in many artistic spaces, is also a “work in progress,” for it will be exhibited in a collection of hopscotch games from many places that the artist has or will visit for the first time (Argentina, Japan, Taiwan etc). Vaitsman also produced “Nó na garganta” [Lump in the throat] (2002), another printed work. This work consists of a long text (about 50 feet length) that reproduces a diary of a person who lives in a kind of social captivity. This work was exposed, together with other works by young artists, in an abandoned factory in the outskirts of São Paulo, as part of the exposition Cativeiro (Captivity).

MediaScan (2003) is also a large-sized printed work. To create it Vaitsman produced a digital anamorphosis from images of a TV report on the Iraq war. The images in motion, which last for about three minutes, are digitized by a scanner and condensed into a unique image that keeps the passing of time.

Selbstfortpflanzungszellenproteinstrukturanalysebericht (unstable CD) (2003) is a CD-ROM that articulates itself around the ideas of multimedia and interactivity in a critical way. Thus, it is impossible to control the navigation and repeat the access to any fragment, which may appear in different ways, giving no hint of what might be seen. In the same year Marcia Vaitsman produced the audioinstallation Wireframe. The installation, structured around the ideas of sight and blindness, led the visitors to a totally dark space, where they could listen to a poetic dialogue between a blind man and a blind woman. This work was a result of a seminar given by Golder and Vaitsman.

In 2004, Marcia began an artistic residency at IAMAS, in Ogaki, Japan, where she is developing her new work: The one made of light stuff.

This year, she has exposed her works at the Boquitas Pintadas - Buenos Aires pop hotel, an alternative space for expositions of plastic arts and electronic music events. The exposition Pisando em ovos em Buenos Aires (Treading on eggs in Buenos Aires) displayed for the first time the character of A Common Ancestral Stranger (2001) out of the context of the CD-ROM, in a printed work and large-sized photographs, together with other images and objects. Amarelinha (2002) was also part of this exposition. Vaitsman is part of the group Mídia Nômades (Media Nomads), formed by artists that work in the new media field. In January 2004, the group took part in the exposition Em trânsito (In transit) at the Goethe Institut, in Lisbon. Also in 2004, she took part in the exposition O corpo entre o público e o privado (The Body between the Public and the Private) at the Paço das Artes, São Paulo.

Marcia Vaitsman's work is marked by travels and moves abroad. She makes new connections with artists, curators and theorists in every city she stays to work or study. To extend the approach to Marcia's work, we have listed some important links about her work and the connections she has made.

IAMAS: IAMAS is the abbreviation for two institutions - the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences and the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences - that work together with the aim of strengthening the development and learning of the new information technologies. Situated in Ogaki, these institutions have an essential role in the development of media art in Japan and other countries, supporting an important residency programme for artists (Marcia Vaitsman included). In the IAMAS website, there is information about the exposition n_ext: New Generation of Media Artists, which assembles the new generation of Japanese artists. We highlight the pair of artists Exonemo.

http://www.iamas.ac.jp
http://www.iamas.ac.jp/TP/E/archive04.html

KHM: The Academy of Media Arts from Cologne, Germany, is one of the most important educational and media art research centres in the world. Marcia Vaitsman is a researcher at KHM.

DIATXT: The Kyoto Art Center's magazine is edited by Hiroshi Yoshioka, professor at IAMAS, who has written an essay on Marcia Vaitsman's work (published in this FF Dossier). The magazine Diatxt approaches issues related to the contemporary artistic production. The theme of the last edition of the magazine is the “slowness”.

MARCIA VAITSMAN'S WEBSITE: For more information on Marcia Vaitsman's work.