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Uncommon Senses:
Tactics for Challenging—Well—Everything
BRAINTRUSTdv interviews Andres Tapia-Urzua
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Andres Tapia-Urzua is a video artist and event organizer whose motivating ideology developed under a totalitarian military government in Chile, where video was by necessity used as a tool of popular dissent. As co-director and co-editor of When Video Came, he is also committed to the memory of the arrival of video technology as a medium of artistic expression in the U.S.
With the advantages of being both a guerrilla video artist and a historian with academic affiliation, Tapia-Urzua has a complex, well-informed, and provocative sensibility. In the following interview, he discusses the work of seminal video artists; describes alternatives to mass-media representations of terrorism; and urges video artists to move beyond "photomechanic-illusionistic-narrative" forms. |
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BRAINTRUSTdv: Many video artists and video essayists working today seem taken with the subjects of transnationalism and globalization. What accounts for this thematic preoccupation?
Andres Tapia-Urzua: There are new realities produced by new technologies. Electronic media artists participate of these new realities because, among other things, they use these new technologies to produce their own work. The main question is: How do we understand ourselves in relation to these new technologies?
BTdv: But why transnationalism and globalization in particular?
ATU: We live in a global world, and many of the technologies that were, and still are, instrumental in the implementation of a transnational situation are the same ones that media artists use for their productions: radio, TV, sound recorders, video, computers, digital info, the Internet, etc. Experientially, we relate to the subject of globalization through our tools of expression.
BTdv: Why is it important to challenge the "American culture industry's" representations, a measure which you've undertaken in your own work?
ATU: From the beginning of video art, artists have introduced fundamental questions such as: how is technology being used? What do we know about these mediums? Do we really understand what are the consequences of using such technologies? Who has control over our mass-media representations?
For all its mighty power of production, the "American cultural industry" functions in a very narrow, one-sided capacity. Any media artist who is working to reveal a broader understanding of the world, while using the same technologies of power, to offer original and independent cultural points of view, is generating a relevant discourse in our narrow media culture.
BTdv: How would you summarize the motivation behind your own work?
ATU: The ideas behind the kind of work that I do come from looking at the subjective qualities of the medium while exploring the poetic capabilities of its language.
BTdv: You grew up in Chile, which was under military rule at the time. How did those years of your life shape you as an artist?
ATU: As someone who spent thirteen years under a totalitarian regime, at some point in my life I stopped believing in the message of a mass-media monopoly whose information (propaganda) was at odds with the reality of my everyday life. I started to look for alternative sources of representation which I found in an emerging subculture that manifested itself through underground concerts, video festivals, theater performances, etc. Shortly after that, with a do-it-yourself kind of effort, I decided to participate in the action as well—writing, doing performances, music, videos, etc. What was happening with the punk movement during the late seventies was really encouraging to me.
The cultural industry in Chile was censored for political reasons. The national film industry, for example, was shut down and personal video cameras became the only tools for independent filmmaking. I understood the value of media efforts, which promoted critical thinking among us, regardless of the circumstances.
Those were also times of identity crisis where the regime's dissenters not only faced the problem of the dictatorship—a common enemy—but also the burden of a defeated cultural project from the left. As a cultural alternative for our society, this schizophrenic reality had to be exposed, and at the same time it had to provide a sense of empowerment for social change. Artistically, we had to stop acting metaphorically and begin to act radically. For example, the symbolic language that, in order not to get killed, was used by the artists-dissenters during the seventies changed into a direct, confrontational discourse during the eighties, when civil unrest was blatantly open in the streets.
Finally, democracy arrived in Chile during the late 1980s, but by then I was already living in the United States.
It is important to point out that the military regime vehemently imposed a free-market economy on the country, a situation that had profound effects on the cultural fabric of Chilean society. A great number of imported technologies and products—such as color TVs, radios, music records, TV shows, movies, cars, clothes, foods, etc.—saturated the local market, influencing the development of a transcultural understanding of reality.
This situation, plus the fact that I have been living in the U.S. for nineteen years, has been reflected in my videos called Spanglish and UP. Transcultural art became a way to represent this hybrid reality and to express myself according to this condition.
BTdv: The way you describe the political situation in Chile makes the so-called "DV revolution" in North American seem petty—a gesture of privilege and taste rather than an act meant to ensure ideological survival. That said, how do you feel about the stakes in the technological upheaval which surrounds you now? For instance, does it offend you when proponents of DV refer to themselves as "dissenters" and to the mainstream as a "regime"? Do you feel it trivializes legitimate political oppression?
ATU: As members of one of the richest neighborhoods in the world, "dissenters" in North America will probably have a less radical agenda than the ones from a society which may be in urgent need of social change, but this existential dilemma is beside the video format issue.
Independent artists and story tellers who champion DV are doing it as a practical alternative to more expensive and mainstream ways of film production that are practiced by the cultural industry—an industry that, traditionally, had relegated less commercially successful, critical, or non-conformist views of reality to the margins of the filmic experience. A non-equitable situation that, in terms of technological quality of production, is being leveled, but not yet in terms of distribution and fair access to exposure.
Historical times and social contexts have determined the particular medium, format, and reasons that one may use to express an independent view in relation to the mainstream. During the eighties in Chile, for example, VHS was the available video format for the independent filmmaker, and the lack of freedom of expression was the reason for dissent. Today, DV is the convenient video format used by independent filmmakers, but the truth is that video technology has changed very often—during the last twenty years I have worked with VHS, Betamax, Super-VHS, Hi8, 3/4 inch, Betacam SP, MiniDV and DVCam video formats.
Nevertheless, what is—and always should be—a consistent quality in the independent's way of production is his commitment to critical thinking, his freedom of expression, and his creative subjectivity.
BTdv: You recently organized the My Terrorism Video Festival in the Pittsburgh area. The press release states: "The festival promotes a personal and artistic perspective on the subject matter as an alternative to the vertical information on terror that we have been receiving from the mass media." What inspired you to organize this festival?
ATU: After September 11, 2001, I became frustrated in seeing how poorly the issue of terrorism was being presented by the U.S. news media—how, in order to justify controversial political decisions, for example, terrorism was being exploited as the new "boogie man." I also realized that the U.S. population was living in fear with no one daring to address the subject of terror in a rational way. Everyone simply ran for their guns or listened passively to their "leaders" telling them what to do and how to react to terror. I did, under the Bush White House, recognize an authoritarian ideological pattern here that I had already experienced under the Pinochet's regime in Chile.
So I decided to do a video called Terminal, which is about terrorism and the subjective ways in which this term is used and abused. While working on it, I thought that there might be other video producers that had something to say on the matter. I started calling for submissions with the idea of producing a festival on "terrorism" in all its known manifestations. My intention was to demystify the subject, to offer diverse points of view about it, and to make terrorism an issue that could be discussed by the community instead of being understood only as something terrifying that was coming from above. After receiving a variety of personal interpretations on the subject, I decided to call it the My Terrorism Video Festival.
BTdv: How did the Pittsburgh community respond to the festival?
ATU: The festival premiered to a diverse, standing-room-only crowd. We viewed ninety minutes of lucid, empowering, and critical video approaches to terrorism.
BTdv: When Video Came, with a strikingly conservative running time of forty minutes, is an intoxicating primer on the birth of video as a medium of artistic expression, featuring candid and inspiring interviews with seminal practitioners of the form. It is one of the most exciting documentaries on any art form, as it delightfully exposes the fundamental urges of the artistic process and avoids merely celebrating the technology around which it revolves. Formally speaking, it is a beautiful movie—its earnestness and childlike energy are hemmed by an incongruous gracefulness. What was your role in making When Video Came and how did you become involved?
ATU: Ralph Vituccio and I used to work together at Carnegie Mellon University. He had started a project based on video art (a documentary on video art), applied for grants, and was starting to do interviews. I was a young video-maker at the time and I started to collaborate with him on the project. Whenever artists were in town, I helped him with the interviews. At some point in the process, when we needed to go off to different cities to continue with the interviews, I volunteered to do them. I interviewed a lot of people in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, and Rochester. After all the interviews were done, I thought that that was going to be the end of my involvement, but nothing happened with the footage. After several years, I decided to give a fresh start to the project by editing the footage. I used the interviews to reflect on video history as well as to comment on contemporary media culture. Ralph came back to help on the off-line editing, and for months we worked on the final video until it was ready to be exhibited as our collaboration. Video art and independent electronic cinema are issues that interest me a lot, so it became a personal challenge to complete what I envisioned as an important document for future generations to have.
BTdv: It's a dynamic documentary because it addresses so many facets of the birth of video technology, and it captures the sense of mystery and excitement. In one of the interviews, Woody Vasulka says, "When video came, I just grabbed it. This was the medium of total freedom, an unwritten territory. It was free of all education...I never felt I could possibly compete with [Bergman or Fellini], so I was just very relieved to move to video, and there was just a handful of competitors." Did you get a sense from most of these early video artists that they were primarily filmmakers looking for new tools, or did the new medium tend to attract artists who hadn't previously been interested in the moving image?
ATU: In the same documentary, Margot Lovejoy comments on the notion of time as being a new creative dimension to work with. She says, "To bring in the idea of time into art that has always dealt with sculpture and painting and drawing is different; it presents a whole range of new concepts that are additional to a single rendering of something. For example, my students are studying sculpture or printmaking or painting; many of them are realizing that those images are not enough by themselves, that they are missing a dimension. So, I believe that time is adding a dimension that they are becoming very aware of in their work."
From the beginning, video has been an open platform from where many generations of artists have worked with a diversity of approaches. I will describe a few of them:
In the early sixties, we had a first generation of artists that came from the tradition of modern art—they didn't grow up with TV—and, basically, continued their traditional art practices through video technology. They understood TV as a symbolic object, reacting to its meaning from the perspective of modern art, but at the same time questioning the tradition of modern art from the perspective of this new technology. Their work was mainly tri-dimensional and gallery-oriented.
During the late sixties and early seventies, there was another generation composed of artists from a variety of fields (dance, painting, literature, performance, etc.) that had access to video and that used this technology to freely express themselves. These were artists that basically learned the job in the making—they didn't have any previous training in film or video production. They produced conceptually interesting works that were viewed as an alternative to the supertext being developed by the media industry. But there was a lack of communication between these artists and the public in general—an audience that had already been exposed to the way of the established mass media industry and that seemed to have adopted this one as the only way to understand video, TV, and film.
The eighties and nineties were influenced by several generations that studied video production, communications, etc. They had grown up with a substantial amount of exposure to TV, film, and, to some extent, computers. They recognized the presence of an established media supertext, and they worked from within this media supertext establishing sub-alternative positions of action in relation to the monopoly of the media industry. They also looked for alternative outlets of exhibition—spaces outside of the art gallery system and within the mainstream media.
More recently, video is incorporated into the work of multimedia artists to whom video-making is viewed as just one part of a whole. Their products belong to an evolving conceptual universe where digital technology leads the way on media representation, a universe where media technology becomes the most important creative variable to master, deconstruct, and/or personalize in order to produce art. This is an issue that relates to what Woody Vasulka once called "the battlefield of the tool," a battlefield where media technology is not passively consumed, looked at from the outside, or recreated through science fiction, but practiced within our experience.
BTdv: Gene Youngblood sums up the question posed by video art: "What is this new clay? What is this new substance called the electron, the signal? From a formal and graphic point of view, what can you do with it?" Do you think digital video has inspired much theoretical scrutiny and experimentation, as analog video did when it arrived?
ATU: The typical theoretical scrutiny related to video began with a serious attempt to define its specificity in relation to traditional filmmaking. Since then, video has become a very adaptable medium in an ever-expanding digital scenario. With multiple applications and a promising formal feeling, video has become a very convenient way of production. The prospect of shooting low-cost video with film-like results and/or HDTV quality are only but two of its latest marketing strengths. Indeed, digital video is the development of a form of moviemaking that already existed in the marketplace (analog video). And because the medium became so accessible, a lot more people are making it rather that talking about it.
Artistically speaking, to me, one of the main theoretical questions concerning video is: how do we position ourselves in relation to these technologies? How do we understand them and how do we make use of them to make sense of the world around us?
BTdv: What differences do you see between the culture which first embraced analog video and the culture which has enthusiastically embraced digital video?
ATU: Because of the availability of personal computers and the integration of video processors within them, making videos today could be considered the equivalent of writing with a typewriter machine during the 1950s. In that sense, video writes/records time, space, sound, colors, etc. Each one of its carbon copies is exactly the same as the original, and these copies can be transformed into different kinds of media according to the needs of the "writer." Indeed, digital video is a good reinforcement for personal filmmaking.
BTdv: Elsewhere in When Video Came, Mary Lucier reminisces: "Nobody studied video in 1972...You just picked it up. You borrowed a camera from somebody and sort of learned. I learned as I went along, like everybody else in my generation." This sounds like the same thing occurring today, but the difference with digital video technology is that it allows artists and storytellers to compete more viably with the commercial giants of filmmaking. It's the opposite of what Woody Vasulka describes—now people are picking up this equipment in order to compete with veterans and icons of the industry. As someone connected to academia, do you feel that this current rash of self-taught moviemakers lacks some essential ingredient? Or do you feel that they're offering something fresh and pertinent?
ATU: If the practice of moviemaking is happening spontaneously, the so-called self-taught moviemakers may indeed bring new approaches to the process. The kind of creativity that they bring to filmmaking will depend on their own imagination.
Of course, a formal education is desirable and can also save you a lot of learning time. For me, it was rewarding on a theoretical level because I was exposed to the history of image-making with a critical point of view. I did also learn the basics of video production, but it was through my practice where I learned how to deeply understand how to play with the language of video. In the end, I think that quality differences among indie practitioners have always been determined by factors such as personal talent, education, and dedication to their art.
I also think that the so-called self-taught moviemakers of today have a huge advantage over the videographers from the seventies because video is not a new tool anymore, and their exposure to the moviemaking process has been significantly more sophisticated. Although I have the feeling that since everyone is individually covering almost every aspect of production now, there is a lack of individuals dedicated to the details of the craft—"experts" in the fields of lighting, sound, photography, etc. So within this general knowledge of the process one has to find his expertise.
BTdv: Elsewhere in When Video Came one hears that "[t]he most successful work with video was not to be led by the technology but to challenge the technology." You've written an essay titled "The Instrumentalization of the Senses," which posits sharp warnings about artistic passivity in the face of new technologies. You write, "Form is so predominant over the image that it snatches away the ethical and emotional meaning of the content." Can you expound on this idea?
ATU: In some cultures they use plastics to imitate wood; in other cultures they use plastics in all shapes and colors because the creative possibilities of the material in itself.
There have been great advances in media technology, and many artists have been closely following these developments—the market seems to have us where they want to. Nevertheless, we are not yet producing meaningful images, myths, and connections based on the creative possibilities of these developments. We are not yet producing a new understanding of the world beyond a kind of "common sense" use of our technological parameters. We are still using these new tools to recreate an old consciousness, and that is why we imitate wood.
I often compare the cultural development of the electronic/digital filmmaker to the time when the electric guitar appeared in the market. The beginnings of its use were very technically-oriented, and for the most part it was just a way to play classical guitar electronically. Then, thanks to the creative work of visionary players with "uncommon sense," a shift in the musical perceptions of the time did happen. Since then, the electric guitar became something else; it became a way to make different kind of sounds that belonged specifically to the electronic era and that kept expanding our sonic consciousness until very recently. Well, that perceptual shift on behalf of the electronic film culture and the appreciation of its creative possibilities—beyond a basic photomechanic-illusionistic-narrative form of entertainment—is well overdue.
BTdv: What accounts for the slowness of the perceptual shift?
ATU: Sometimes I feel as if our social imagination remains frozen at a certain stage, and that we just keep on repeating our childhood's fairy tales over and over again, as if we still have not been able to overcome certain aspects of our psychological development in order to move toward new stages. The individual artist is capable of challenging media technology beyond our "common sense" to lead us into innovative ways of expressing ourselves through it—an activity that in itself can lead to the production of newer technologies.
BTdv: Elsewhere in the same essay, you write, "The main 'creative' variable of the computational/digital dispositive of production is its accuracy, its control over the image, the total subjugation of each particle/pixel to the 'subjectivity' of the user. Curiously, this 'subjective' operation depends on a methodological menu pre-established in a digital universe which has been traced beforehand by the designers of corporate hardware and software." Your eloquent argument is that someone other than the artist created the tools, and therefore the artist is limited by the tools; his imagination is limited by the imagination of whoever designed the tools. How is this different from a painter using a brush made by someone else or a canvas made to specifications which she herself did not approve? Even in the realm of literature, the governing systems of vocabulary and syntax prevent the poet or prosateur from expressing himself to the extent of his imagination, except in extreme cases such as Finnegan's Wake. Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, and Samuel Beckett, for all their experimentation, remained bound by tools which made them more or less intelligible. Explain how digital technology is different from the tools of painting and literature.
ATU: In video, we use a methodology of production that is understood as an objective-semi-automatic way to represent reality. Painting and writing require abstract language and their capabilities of representation are not imbedded in the instruments of representation. We can't just turn them on.
Unlike writing and painting, where the subjectivity of the messenger has always been understood as omnipresent, the filmic way of representation was historically conceived as a mechanical, objective, almost scientific exercise of truth. Therefore, in this case, and as Walter Benjamin told us many years ago, once again the aura of the unique object disappears with the arrival of this mechanical way of reproduction. When I am working with video, I am working with virtual time and space that has been conceived as a generic, industrial, electronic, and now digital way of representing the real.
During the creative process of traditional painting and literature, we always start with the dilemma of how to make the subjective quality of these mediums something more objective, and with the creative practice of digital video we have to figure out how to make its objectivity—such as its advertised transparency—something subjective. In video, I have the need to surpass the mechanical qualities of the medium through the use of a personal language.
BTdv: No matter how far-fetched, tell us what you see as the ultimate long-term goal for digital video technology in terms of production, distribution, exhibition, and public reception.
ATU: Nine scenarios:
1) Digital video technology will be everywhere in all shapes and forms (we will wear video loops as decorative body patches).
2) TV and film, as we know it, will be considered a very traditional and limited way of experiencing moving images.
3) There will be an even closer connection between how people think, how they express themselves, and the language of media.
4) Video production will be an average daily activity.
5) Movies become the new folklore.
6) The distribution of independent video will be outlawed.
7) Electronic eyes will surround us.
8) Our sense of the real is going to be: Always—right here, right now—faster and faster.
9) We will inhabit a virtuality understood as the digital image of our souls—a new form of religion.
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