Kristin Lucas, "Surveillance Café," 2000, video
installation
In The Electric Donut, there's coffee, tea and hot chocolate to
drink, comfy places to lounge, games to play, images to look at and ways
to keep tabs on fellow Donut visitors. By transforming the gallery into
a video game arcade and café, Kristin Lucas and Joe McKay recreate
the structures of a video-game arcade-lights, sounds, action, refreshments
and all. Don't be completely fooled, though, because they go a step further,
inverting, recasting and reordering those structures. In interactive computer
programs and fully functional video games they make evident the limitations
of computer interactivity and the physical and psychological effects of
our interactions with the machine systems we have created.
In McKay's Progress Clocks (2001), for example, the bars we scroll across give us the current US Central Time as measured from a zero point for each measure of: days, months, seconds etc. The bars recall computer program task bars that fill up with color until the moment the task is done. As we mouse over the bars, we realize that McKay's computer is clocking up the time although the bars have no connection to how the computer calculates time. And yet, it is often this meaningless bar that we anxiously await as computer users.
Describing similar effects in her work Lucas says, "Because of the integration of computers into our lifestyles, we are more likely than ever to be following paths that have been predetermined for us. (Turn on computer, use pull down menu, double click on icon…)"1 In Lucas's work interfaces between humans and machines are layered into videos such as Watch Out for Invisible Ghosts (1996) or built into the structure of the games BLAM! (2001) and Electromagnegligence (2001). In Invisible Ghosts Lucas portrays both a player and a character. Shifting between a player operating the joystick and a figure-in-action, Lucas' image is literally layered into games such as Pac-Man and Defender. But more than physically occupying the game, Lucas is emotionally tied in as well. Shifting between player and character guises, she expresses elation, anxiety and sadness as the game action progresses. The game lives both on the screen and in her head.
In the Surveillance Café, BLAM! and Electromagnegligence we visitors are submitted as image and voice into the action around us. In Electromagnegligence hitting key icons (clue: the video camera is one of three of these secret icons) with electro-waves will trigger images sent into the BLAM! screen. Texts submitted to BLAM! can be sent back as responses. The cameras sprouting from the Surveillance Café's tables continuously send your image to a monitor hanging where all can see. So, watch what you do!
As the electro-waves of Electromagnegligence suggest, the electronic devices that surround us-from ATMs to cell phones to video games-emit electromagnetic signals, the effects of which we are just beginning to understand. The Simulcast Mobile Kit #1 available in the Simulcast Vending Machine is designed in a low-tech way to "moderate the flow of competing and conflicting energies generated by the emissions of electronic devices." (Kit Brochure) A protective and interventionist possibility, the Simulcast Kit playfully mocks our high tech fetish fantasies at the same time that it points to real effects in our increasingly electronic world.
Playing and played, pictured and quoted, controlling and controlled, we visitors are absorbed into the realm of The Electric Donut. It was Robert Smithson who said in the early days of video art, "I'm interested in the apparatus I'm being threaded through." The Electric Donut makes clear that we are more than threaded through technological apparatuses. Hooked into, interfaced with, pre-programmed by, networked within, and even automated by technology, we are interpenetrated by its proliferation around us.
-Lorelei Stewart, 2001
1. Lucas in "Kristin Lucas, Online" by Beatrix
Ruf in Temporary Housing for the Despondent Virtual Citizen, (O. K. Center
for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria: 2000), p. 14.
