While many groups strove to highlight the capabilities of computers through sound and visual means, our group attempted to represent through physical objects the ways in which our personal and academic lives are tied to computers. This literal representation culminated in an equally literal “crash” in which the computer was destroyed during lunch hour at Sayles-Hill, leaving the contents strewn about and lost to the user.
Construction of our project began with a trip to a computer recycling plant in Eagan, MN. There we acquired an old CRT monitor shell, which we soon began to fill with items that had symbolic importance to the common uses of computers in academic and personal contexts. We lined the inside of the monitor with CDs and DVDs, as well as littered the bottom of the computer with personal items, such as disposed AIM conversations, a Facebook profile, bank account statements, video game websites, a new media art
Blog, personal photos, and an online newspaper article. Suspended in the computer, as the objects are in their elevated position in society, are celebrities, political figures, as well as a couple pornographic images.
The computer also contained acade
mic content, which is a highly important aspect of the computer on a college campus.
Items included old term papers, class readings, personal musings, class notes, poetry, an old e-mail, and a transcript from the Hub.
The desktop was a printed image of a Macintosh desktop whose background was the Art Walk’s poster. One of the rectangular regions of the poster was cut out in order to allow a view of the computer’s interior. The interior was also lit by a small flashligh
t, which reflected off of the CDs and DVDs.
The performance section of our project featured a student whose computer unexpectedly crashed. His work and personal items were scattered on the floor. Most of them were irretrievable, but a couple of papers were salvageable.
The main goal of our project was to emphasize the integral nature of computers to student’s personal and academic lives in a college
environment. Sayles was the perfect environment for us to display our project in both because of the density of students during common time and because Sayles is a place where the academic and personal parts, of student’s lives converge. Students both eat and socialize as well as study into the night in Sayles. Furthermore, Sayles contains the bookstore, a place of academic supplies as well as personal goods.
We encountered some difficulty in transferring these entirely digital concepts into physical realities.
Teddy Wolff
Apple Chapel [Teddy Wolff]
For this project I used a low powered projector to throw an Apple logo onto the Carleton College Skinner Memorial Chapel. I ran extension cords out of the north doors of the building to power my projector and laptop. I situated the projector on top of the small hill that is between the walk (past the Bald Spot) and the chapel. The logo was positioned underneath the stained glass window and dead center.
The positioning was important for a couple of reasons. First of all, visibility was a big concern, so the placement along the most trafficked side of the building made sense. But, equally important to me, was the believability of the logo. Apple’s designers, who deal with product packaging, casing, etc., have a very particular way of placing the logo on products and buildings. I sought to replicate their scheme through both, the central, prominent placement of the logo, and the scale of the logo relative to the rest of the building.
In one sense this projection is meant as a kind of reaction to discursive site-specific art. Instead of seeking to mediate and exhibit the socio-historical meaning of a site, often as a way of clarification and affirmation of community, the chapel projection intends to interpret the momentum of today’s highly global society. Thus, it intends to mediate a discussion of the future, placing emphasis on corporations, the important non-state actors of an increasingly global world.
In Jihad vs McWorld, Benjamin Barber convincingly argues that globalization, which causes the vast destruction of culture and of peoples’ perceived identities, is not oppositional to the forces of ethno-religious fundamentalism. Instead he argues that globalization is complimented and accompanied by that form of fundamentalism. While seemingly accurate, I think this argument is perhaps a bit short sighted. Globalization has increased fanaticism, but only as a response to its nearly universal attack on traditional perceptions of identity.
If globalization has caused a flare in fundamentalism, it is only a part of the broader fire that is destroying traditional identity associations. Religion is one of the strongest of these traditional identifiers. Considering our rate of progress in understanding the natural world, as well as the dynamic (but still youthful) world of artificial intelligence, it is compelling to image a future where the biggest unknowns are not natural, but man-made. Apple users are notorious for their zealotry and evangelism. (Apple consumers find themselves in a closed world in which only Apple products can be used, causing their contentment to be dependant upon the belief that they only want Apple products). This tendency towards fundamentalism in Apple’s following represents an embryonic unity between “Jihad” and “McWorld” and it is this attribute of the company in combination with its ruthlessness and savvy that makes it a compelling candidate for a new type of mega-corporation. This entity would not only be a company but an important global socio-cultural-religious identifier.
The use of a corporate symbol in this site-specific work goes against the largely anti-consumerist tendencies of site-specific art. I recently came across a particularly glaring example of this tendency in the Graffiti Research Labs Laser Tag program. The program is free and open source, but contains a stipulation that it may not be used for “advertising, marketing, or promotion.” It might be reasonably argued that this projection of the Apple logo is at least one of the three. It is important to provide some opposition to this anti-consumerism for reasons pertaining to both the importance of corporations in developing the technology tool necessary for many site-specific works and to the developing notions of corporations as identifiers previously discussed.
In discussions with John Schott about the projection he voiced that it evoked thoughts of original sin. In response to this I considered the meaning of the logo. Regardless of what the company says, I remain convinced that the logo is derived from the story of Alan Turring, a Brilliant British mathematician and in many ways the father of computer science. He was a gay man and was tried and convicted of gross indecency. After his conviction he became very depressed and killed him self by dipping an apple in cyanide and taking a bite.
