Creating connections
At the Hotel Waterloo in Wellington my grandmother hurries to room 507 to write a letter to her husband. From her window she can see the port where he is preparing to board a ship bound for Egypt.
As I am unable to see you to give you one more last goodbye hug I have rushed back here to write you my goodbyes.
Dearest remember always no matter where you are and in what circumstances I am with you – closer than breathing – spirit with your spirit. I am so at one with you.
She is separated from him. Himeros: she desires his embrace. Yet she cannot. Instead she writes to him: Pothos. He is absent and she shapes the space between them with language. In this space she connects to her beloved. Only here in the mediated or virtual realm, created through language, can she be closer than breathing.
Villem Flusser writes that communication is an artificial construct. The words “I love you” that as a sixteen year old I first whispered into a girl’s ear are no more natural than the electric images glowing from a box in a lounge room. Communication and the various systems of language constructed by man exist for the purpose of rendering the abstract tangible. Allowing the unknown to exist in our daily discourses. Language can, through abstraction, create space for the imagining of meaning.
John Hanhardt writes that Gary Hill’s work is ironic in that it concerns itself with the threat of the erasure of language by the very technologies he uses in his art. There is however no chasm between language and communication technologies such as video. Language is not limited to the written or spoken word. Language is by definition a system of communication and the written and spoken word is so often supplanted with the term “language” because it is a system that can be easily measured.
The English alphabet has a set of 26 symbols and these symbols are combined and collected into compilations called dictionaries that list how the symbols should be defined. The written and spoken word therefore is very typical of a system if a system were to be defined as set of principles and guidelines similar to the rules of a game. If we were however to define a system as a set of things that are interconnected together into a network then new communication technologies such as the internet or television, which are focused primarily on creating connections, are as valid, if not more valid, than the written and spoken word as language. This definition of a system as an interconnecting network is more suitable as it is the very nature of communication to create connections.
As a media artist I create connections, or rather I mediate. I present a medium, be it a video, a sound or a website, be it hot or cool, it is a medium, and this is what differentiates the media artist from the traditional concept of an artist. The medium shapes a void where connections can take place. A media artist presents a medium, not an object. The difference is of intention and not necessarily technology. A media artist presents a work with the intention to communicate rather than create. The naïve boundaries drawn up by technologies are neglect to consider why particular tools have been adopted by media artists. Media artists predominantly utilise technologies that have been developed for communication purposes, technologies such as video were developed to aid transmission for broadcast television. The use of these technologies are primarily motivated by a desire to create a connection.
In this regard a media artist is not dissimilar to a lover writing a letter to their beloved. Both the media artist and the lover utilise language, an interconnecting system, to present a medium that shapes the imaginary void where we can be closer than breathing.