|
I |
study humanities computing
[1]
with focus on
storytelling, literature, photography, and the cultures of media and
location. I am among those who work to
share, empower and express in digital art spaces while remaining mindful of my
commitment to traditional art venues in an evolving mediasphere.
In the
theory and practice of new media, boundaries are blurred. Art and science
commingle. Aesthetic disciplines and technological mediums previously employed
as entities unto their own collide, converge and create opportunity for new
ways of seeing.
New ways of seeing can bring new ways of DOing,
of BEing. Thus, this is an exciting, yet confusing, time for artists and for audients.
As John Berger said “the way we see things is affected by what we know or what
we believe.”
[2]
Employing traditional and digital
technology, I experiment with form and meaning in art and in culture.
The art I make is often labeled
“vernacular” or “regional” because it is based in location. Being a
“regionalist” in the modernist way of thinking has its drawbacks. For instance:
“her work can’t be any good or she would be in
Place is much more than a point on a map or a
locale where one lives. It is a state of being and states of being are
culturally and psychologically perceived – molded by and handed down from
generations of families and local communities that have lived in a given
geographic region and by others who view a place as based on what they have
heard of it.
So it goes with space, areas designed and
designated for a specific purpose.
I live
outside of that space known as “the box.” I study conditions that have placed
us in these confining spaces and I practice thinking and BEING outside of them.
Breaking free of categories, intellectually and
emotionally, and creating new realities, new language, new practices is what
art is about,” Roy Ascott asserted in Art, Technology, Consciousness
(4).
My art is about much more than making art,
although I do submit to creative fancies of no other purpose than amusing
myself. Much of my theoretical inquiry and artistic practice seeks to determine
how the use of and reception to art forms affect the access to and exchange of
communications. I also explore and experiment with the effects of new media
communications on the humanities knowledge base. Using computer hardware,
software, digital cameras and an electronic tablet, among traditional art
tools, including film and paint, I practice art made with and for the computer,
much of it for viewing on the electronic frontier where aesthetic and
governmental regulations are few. For now that is. Certainly, regulators have
noticed the amount of activity, especially of the commercial nature, taking
place in cyberspace.
Proponents of cyberculture contend the Internet is
a place that possesses the power to change society for the better. Opponents of these utopian forecasts counter
that the Internet is simply another social control mechanism, another space
wherein bullies are still bullies and bigots remain bigots. I detest such black
and white conclusions because I believe the truth is between these poles.
Mostly, I believe cybercommunity does not have to be a mirror.
We can BE
otherwise.
Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web and
founder of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) said he designed the Web “for a
social effect – to help people work together – and not as a technical toy. The
ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the
world.” (Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the
World Wide Web by its Inventor (123)
This is not the first time artists and audiences
are experiencing far-reaching flux. The history of art is replete with examples
of change as John Dewey, among many other thinkers, have shown.
Dewey’s explanation of the stages of development
when a new technique is introduced will withstand scrutiny with regard to the
use of computers to make art. In Art as Experience, published some 70
years ago, he said:
“At first, there is experimentation on the side of
artists, with considerable exaggeration of the factor to which the new
technique is adapted … On the side of the public there is general condemnation
on the intent and subject-matter of these adventures in art.” (142)
However, transformations have both positive and
negative consequences. I keep this in mind as I experiment with and produce art
in new spaces.
My primary mediums are creative writing and
photography. I write nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. I make collage,
photomontage, and documentary and fine art photography. I also paint in the
abstract. I have been combining
traditional arts disciplines to make art in new mediums known as hypertext,
hyperfiction and digital imaging. In the end, though, no matter whether images
and words merge in new worlds or remain apart in my more traditional art
objects, there is always a story in the work I do. I love hearing, seeing and
telling stories.
History – particularly that involving the Appalachian Pennsylvania Anthracite Region,
women, literature and nature – has always played a part in my literary and
visual arts practices, even when I was not conscious of its presence in my
work. For me, making art is about trying
to make sense of the past, the present and people. It is about giving voice and
story to marginalized groups and to the environment. It is about communicating
my impressions and expressions through my art.
I have strong and successful roots in print
writing, editing and design and in film photography for journalistic and public
relations markets. Additionally, a dozen years of stage
experience as writer, as director
and as performer in community and professional theater
taught me much about writing and story.
The stories I most enjoy writing, reading, hearing
and seeing are those that delve into historical and/or contemporary social
concerns, those that re-present and represent people and places not on the social and cultural
radar. Good stories, in my opinion, explore social issues (family, marginality,
justice, politics, for example) and even seeks to change conditions (unequal
pay, digital divide[3],
environmental degradation,) the artist believes are unjust. Good stories tackle
issues and bring them into perspectives readers and viewers may not have seen
before. Good stories give us people struggling to make it through life.
“… stories are the basis of how we understand our
world and how we explain it to others, ” said Sarah Sloane (Digital Fictions,
7). I like this definition.
Story evolved as storytellers learned to use new
tools, TECHNOLOGIES, with which to practice their art. Thus, I set out
to learn how to use this new space, which,
I have discovered, is a convergence
of canvas, page and stage.
Community art
making is important to me as well. I
love planning and staging interactive, as
in participatory, arts events.
Among my favorites
are the “Story time” sessions I have done for children and
the “Arts in the Park” days I developed for people of all ages by
asking fellow artists to donate a day to making art for community.
No matter how deeply my work in new media takes me, I shall never abandon my
traditional art venues, those places wherein face-to-face
exchanges are possible, wherein a handshake, a pat on the shoulder, a smile
shared, can make all the difference to someone struggling with life.
“When art is allowed to flourish in society, it can
help develop communities, address social ills, heal sickness, protect the
environment and renew the urban landscape. But art works most effectively when
the artist is at the energetic center of the community, not attached
prescriptively at its edges,”
Linda Frye Burnham said in her essay The Artist as Citizen.[4]
As I do not subscribe to technological
determinism, the material newness of the computer and peripherals is not what
compelled my scholarly interest and subsequent aesthetic experimentation.
Indeed, I would have been happy existing in the art worlds in which I have long
participated. Rather, in 2001, when I became editor and publisher of the
virtual community known as The Mine Country
and its online Anthracite History Journal, and facilitator of its
numerous online networking groups, the materiality and culture of online
environments became of significant interest to my work. Sitting in my tiny home
office in hard coal country, I was communicating and sharing resources with
artists, citizens, historians, students and teachers from places throughout the
world.
What, I asked, does this new world mean to us,
“us” being artists and audients? What is the history of these links that allow
you to journey? How do they work? Are there boundaries in cyberspace? What are
the potentials for making art? What are the pitfalls for society?
As one who works with many talented artists, I saw
a place for them to share and show their work. I felt the World Wide Web could
be a place for artists who have important, perhaps not profitable, messages to
share with people as close as next door and as far away as other continents. My
community became global.
“… it’s that the connections bring together the
people using those computers,” opined Andrew Glassner. “The future is jut as
it’s always been: people.” (Interactive
Storytelling for 21st Century Fiction 20)
Beyond my specialization in literary arts, I have
spent two decades walking in many other worlds
that influence the art I make:
the world of education, as a book discussion leader, workshop provider and a
speaker in school,
civic and social communities; the
world of single parenthood; the world of intervention on
behalf of women, feminism[5], and the
environment; the world of theater arts, as actor, playwright and
director; and, as of recent years, a new media artist, inquiring into the
usability of the new media and screen space for art.
Until two and a half years ago, I never called
myself a photographer or an artist. I was known as “the author” and I allowed
society to give me that title without reflecting how deeply I was involved as a
practitioner in numerous other art communities.
Professionally, I had cast away my camera for more
than a decade, having had enough of newspaper photojournalism. If a magazine
demanded photos with a story, I submitted, of course; but, I had stopped
carrying my equipment. I was sick of seeing lies and death. Grip-and-grins, car
accidents, house fires, arrests, abuses … I had had enough of seeing through
the lens. I had had enough of not being allowed to use the creative photographs
I often submitted to my news editors.
My migration from being solely a film/print
photographer and mainly documentary writer to an interdisciplinary artist has been
positive, although some times agonizing. It was often difficult to move beyond
the deeply embodied art making habits I had employed for more than two decades.
I hope my interdisciplinary story voices are
effective, affective and enjoyable for the people with whom and for whom I make
art. For, when the big curtain drops and I exit life’s stage, I want to feel
that my work has helped to make a difference in a world of information clutter
and confusion. I came rather close to that final bow during my graduate
studies.
In
the summer of 2004, as lay
dying,
in
John O’Hara’s Gibbsville,
Has what have done
with my life
helped anyone?”
The term “regional” coursed through my veins with
the morphine my friendly RN injected every two hours. I have been both praised
and negated for being a “regional” artist. My blood pressure elevated and the
nurse summoned the doctor.
“Your pressure shouldn’t have done that,” the
nurse said.
I told her I was upset.
“Why?”
“Because I haven’t yet figure something out and I
need to get out of here to do it. I don’t have time for this.”
“Oh, well,” she answered, “What can be THAT
important?”
“I need to know whether what I do here helps
people in other places. I need a computer in here for starters.”
I stopped thinking about it just then. Medicine
knocked the thoughts right out of me. Once I was on the mend, though, the
questions returned and my will to pursue answers was stronger than ever.
“Today, the
term regionalism, most often applied
to conventional mediums such as painting and printmaking, continues to be used
pejoratively, to mean corny backwater art flowing from the tributaries that
might eventually reach the mainstream but is currently stagnating out there in
the boondocks,” Lucy Lippard stated. (The Lure of the Local, 36)
As
a maker/marketer/distributor of vernacular art, I see and hear such reactions
and I live for opportunities to explain the importance of what I do and why I
do it. Certainly, there are moments when I think about abandoning these places
and spaces about which, for which, and in which I make art. When I was a novice
author, I often wondered if visitors -- art aficionados and readers -- who buy
the work of local artists do so because they want a souvenir from the hokey
hinterlands. After five years on the book signing and lecture circuit, I have
come to realize that many visitors appreciate the work either for its
re-presentation of cultural history or because cultural and social issues
transcend location. Individuals living worlds outside of mine identify with
matters of the heart.
I agree with Lippard who asserted “… all art is
regional, including that made in our art capitol,
I also concur with Lippard’s statement: “In all
discussions of place, it is a question of abstraction and specifics. If art is
defined as ‘universal’ and form is routinely favored over content, then artists
are encouraged to transcend their immediate locales. But if content is
considered the prime component of art, and lived experience is seen as a prime material, then regionalism is
not a limitation but an advantage, a welcome base that need not exclude outside
influences but sifts them through a local filter. Good regional art has both
roots and reach.” (37)
Consider the effects that the authors O’Hara,
Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Eudora Welty, among other so-called regionalists,
had, indeed still have, on the real worlds from which they drew their work.
Generally, we view them as literary masters and pay homage to the worlds they
created for us, the very real worlds about which they wrote – and wrote well.
Let’s not overlook painters such as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, also
labeled regionalists. The internationally known Appalachia’s Roadside Theater,
whose members are indigenous to the southern
The physical microcosms these artist presented in
their art were macrocosms of the heart for readers and viewers of the nation,
and in some cases, such as O’Hara’s, of many other countries in the world. “The human mind is a mass of associations –
associations more poetic even than actual … the truth is, fiction depends for
its life on place. Location is at the crossroads of circumstance, the proving
ground of ‘What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?” and that is the heart’s
field,” Welty said. (The Eye of the Story 118)
My truth is that all ART depends for its life on
place because we so deeply embody place.
In the early days of my immersion into new media
art, I thought a great deal about Welty’s statement concerning the human mind
being a “mass of associations” and how this related to Ted Nelson’s statements
about hypertext emulating the way a mind works. Nelson, a digital writing
pioneer, coined the term “hypertext” in the 1960s. In Writing Space.
Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Jay David Bolter
recalled Nelson’s assertion:
“the structure of ideas is never sequential; and
indeed, our thought processes are not very sequential either. True, only a few
thoughts at a time pass across the central screen of the mind; but as you
consider a thing, your thoughts crisscross it constantly, reviewing first one connection,
then another (emphasis mine)” (42).
Consequently, I have done a lot of thinking about
how I think. I learned that I think associatively. I discovered that I always
have thought this way and I finally figured out why I was such a “handful” as a
child, why I was told I did “not know my place.” Where I am from, not knowing “my place” means
that I am a bohemian who disobeys societal and religious strictures.
I do not know how it came to be, but I have spent
my entire life thinking differently than most of my family and many of my
associates and friends. In earlier years, it made for tough going. Now, I revel
in the space I am afforded for being different. Learning to live among
different people and in various cultures has taught me how to BE. Being “of”
but “not of” meant that to communicate, I had to work within and without
numerous arts, cultural and social borders. Hence, I can color in the lines
rather well,
but I like going
outside the lines best.
As did Vannevar Bush[6] and as does Nelson, I
believe that hypertext emulates the operation of the human mind. The
associations an artist can inspire through use of the hypertext medium are what
compel me to use the computer as art tool and stage. The associations – LINKS
one can make through the hypertext links– are what I believe make for enriching
learning experiences.
Moreover, Nelson proclaimed the potential of
hypertext as a tool for widespread discourse and social activism. In World Wide Web Design Guide,
Stephan Wilson noted that Nelson talked about: “radical implications” for
networked hypermedia because it encourages:
populism insofar as it is available to all authors at a low cost;
pluralism because it supports many points of view; unorthodoxy in that it
promotes discussion of controversial issues; and universalism because it
contains the potential to extend ideas beyond geographical and other
boundaries.
One has only to consider how the bloggers – web
log writers – are affecting cultures.
I see parallels between Welty’s
statement “location is at the crossroads of circumstance” and Nelson’s
assertion that hypertext promotes pluralism and universalism. Many human
circumstances (conditions) and the lifestyles and emotions these conditions
engender are universal. For example, the
present socioeconomics that extraction industry left behind in
Hypertext, I suggest, is an excellent medium in
which to make and share so-called “regional art” with communities local and
global, with micro and macro worlds of the artists, each of whom comes from
SOME place and each of whom produces
work that is somehow “inevitably,” Lippard opined and I concur, affected by
these places. (36)
In recent years, I have come to
realize that to forget the history, distant and recent, of my native soil is to
turn my back on the world – that’s
right the world. It’s not such a big place, after all. Historical social and economic conditions in
northeastern
My experiences in digital artmaking indicate that
regional art and citizen interaction with it has significant potential to
transform individuals who intermingle in cyber community. I use my roots, my
background in poverty, domestic abuse, lack of education and ravaged landscapes
to reach others in or inquiring about similar situations. Hypertext and related
media, such as digital story, virtual photo galleries, virtual reality,
artificial life art, and streaming video, freely distributed on the Internet,
reaches individuals far beyond my geographical region but very much related
through social and cultural circumstances.
At heart, I am a teacher, but I am not one who
follows the provincial pedagogical paradigms as dictated by the multitude of
our education institutions – primary, secondary and beyond. I call myself a
facilitator and define this term as a state of being in which I am as much a
listener as are those with whom I share my knowledge and my values and as much
a learner as my students, who have important life lessons to share with me.
Fundamentally,
I am also a wanderer.
Having been moved around a lot during my girlhood
years, I could live anywhere and still have the same
curiosity and passion about geographical places,
social and cultural spaces
and the people who inhabit them. I
will be a seeker of meaning and truth no matter where I am physically located.
“We may have heard that the era of modern slavery
is finished, is ‘history,’ that the genocide against tribal peoples and the
expropriation of land held in trust by them are over and done with along with
the last wagon trains. But such institutions and policies do not die – they
mutate – and we are living them still: they are the taproots of the economic
order that has taken ‘democracy’ as its alias. Our past is seeded in our present and is trying to become our future.”
(emphasis mine) (149)
Inside O'Hara's study, which is re-created at the
Pattee-Paterno Library at
Marie-Laure Ryan cited this quote in
her discussion about the poetics of immersion. She noted Conrad's “artistic
goal prefigures the emphasis of VR developers on a rich and diversified sensory
involvement.” (Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in
Literature and Electronic Media 89)
O'Hara, to whom my published collection of
short stories is a tribute, was a master of using the written word to make
people hear, feel and see his tales. His first novel “Appointment in
Since my journalism days in the late 1980s, I have
worked by the Conrad goal, as reiterated and practiced by O’Hara, of
storytelling. How interesting, then, that Ryan said it outlines a goal of
virtual reality, of computer-mediated art worlds. I believe this shows that
artists of all eras and movements aim to entrance the audient and that the
foundation for casting this spell is quality story, whether in oral form, on
the page, or on the screen.
The numerous art projects I
initiated in the course of my study are as much experiments with new media art
making and participation as they are expressions of my views on the art
theories and media cultural issues with which I had
been or continue to be working. Although
we shall look at four of these projects in depth; a summary of the work is in
order for those who research and read “associatively” rather than in the traditional
linear fashion, for those who may be interested in a certain component of the
overall work collected herein and available at christinegoldbeck.com. In this
document, the projects are presented in the order I conceived them as I
advanced with my studies. Knowing this, I think you will see the transformation
my practice has undergone. I began my program with a remediation of print for
screen space and progressed to a wholly visual story, but not before allowing
myself to unite text with photography and digital imagery to make visual art
objects.
Covalent Bonds
is a digital story, a hyperfiction, that I wrote and designed, RE-wrote and
RE-designed several times
as I learned to master the tools (software for hyperfiction and for digital
imaging) and the medium, hypertext. The story, a literary metafiction, is
designed on information I gleaned from my first of two practicums, a
survey of what people are reading and whether they
read online fiction, which I conducted in partial fulfillment of my graduate
degree requirements. The results of this survey appear in the appendix. Covalent
Bonds is also an experiment with hypermediacy, a remediation[7] strategy, whereby the
style of visual representation is designed to remind the viewer of the
medium, much like early 20th
century photomontage and medieval illuminated manuscripts did. In digital arts,
hypermediacy is achieved through “buttons” and “windows”.
My Coal Country
began as the second practicum. It is a community photographic project designed
to create a new and never-ending photo documentary of life in
History is Not
Destiny is an intervention for multiple locations and in several
formats. Created in response to a lack of attention paid to social and culture
problems, it is comprised of online posters and postcards, many of which remain
in process. I have plans to manufacture
placemats featuring the same messages.
The Voice of
Home is my response to my work as the curator for My Coal Country.
It is my way of telling a story about the beauty of the land despite its
manmade scars. It is an installation symbolic of the synthesis occurring
between art and science, between the word and the image, and within me, of
course, as I continue to critically view and practice interdisciplinarity of
artistry and place. This project is also my adventure with transparent
immediacy, another remediation device, wherein the design strategy is to cause
to viewer to forget the presence of the medium.
I designed and completed two
additional projects that turned out to be helpful to my abilities to make
digital, multimedia art. Coal Mining
in American Literature, Art, and Song and John O'Hara: The Mighty and Enduring Pen are multimedia shows
that I use in narrative performances and offer for general viewing to groups or
individuals. I solicited both to the Pennsylvania Humanities Council
Commonwealth Speakers Program and both were accepted and have been
well-received in locations where I have shown them.
Having
made more than 2,000 film and digital photographs during the two and a half
years that I explored digital imaging in hypermedia, I am surrounded by a
record of my photographic metamorphosis. Some of my images are singular art
works. Others are units in photo stories. I like to work with the narratives of
flowers, reflections, shadows, fog, trees and windows. As to the number of
images I have made, I do not view the volume as production. I see it as
practice. Once more, I now carry a camera at all times.
Through critical inquiry and artistic practice, I
answered my questions about the potentials and pitfalls of the computer as an
art tool and the Internet as a community. The answers I discovered were not
always pleasing. Thus, I was compelled to engage in deeper inquiry about
immersion, interactivity and embodiment in new media art spaces. In this
document, I shall discuss those issues
topics briefly; however, the history and
employment of each of
those qualities in art making and participation warrants its own
book.
Exploration and learning are
lifelong endeavors for me. I shall continue to walk in many worlds, looking for
untold and ignored stories to tell in multifaceted forms from multiple stages. As
Leslie Marmon Silko said
“You don’t have
anything
if you don’t
have the stories.”