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I first heard about the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s online exhibit “010101: Art in Technological Times” back in January, right here on creativepro.com, and that exhibit proved every bit as intriguing to me as it had to my fellow creativepro.com contributing editor. In typical fashion, I only got around to seeing the physical component of the exhibit at SFMOMA on the very last weekend before it closed. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I would find. I had the vague feeling that such a show would all be “digital art” of one sort or another—something high-concept but sort of irritating to view, like certain kinds of intellectual video art. Instead the show was varied, stimulating, amusing, and well conceived.
Each of the three dozen or so artists took a very different approach to technology and art, but collectively their work did indeed explore the boundary between the physical and the digital. There were a lot of screens set up throughout the exhibit, displaying changing quotations or selections from the “010101” Web site, but it was the physical environment that was most striking.
Walking into a room full of square pedestals topped with Karin Sander‘s miniature humans tends to bring the digital world into physical reality in a disturbingly literal way. Sander had a series of friends and acquaintances stand and be scanned from all sides, then reproduced them at one-tenth scale by extruding thin layers of plastic cross-sections and layering them like a human topographical map. Add some careful painting of the plastic, to re-create the colors of the actual person and his or her clothes, and you’ve got in effect little action figures of real people. (Except that, like most real people “sitting” self-consciously for a portrait, the subjects mostly stood in stiff, inert poses, and their likenesses look vaguely uncomfortable.)
Karin Sander created her miniatures by scanning friends and acquaintances on all sides, then reproducing the images at one-tenth scale.
The effect of Sander’s miniatures is heightened when the walls of the room display drawings by Rebeca Bollinger of visual documents found on the Web, rendered as thumbnail-sized pencil drawings, arranged in tiny grids on vellum. The sketches are so tiny that the information contained in the documents is lost, yet until you bend close to look at them they seem to be presenting dense fabrics of information.
Type in Technological Art
I was fascinated to see how type and letters were used in the various pieces of art and in the exhibit itself, though of course many of the art works had no type in them at all.
Where Bollinger’s drawings gave the illusion of type but lacked content, Tatsuo Miyajima‘s “Floating Time” used numbers to create an immersive experience of degrading time: a projection on a floor-screen (which you were encouraged to walk on) of isolated numerals from LED displays, each one in a different size and color, each one appearing at random and then counting down from 9 to 1. A very simple concept, but the effect was to make you feel as though you’d wandered right into cyberspace.
“The Fiction Between 1999 & 2000,” by Hu Jie Ming, was a different kind of immersive experience. It consisted entirely of a maze of floor-to-ceiling curtains of transparent photographic film, covered with black-and-white screen shots taken from TV screens in the 24 hours of January 1, 2000. Most of these shots, arranged in strict grids that fill the curtains, came from Chinese TV, so most of the printed words you see are in Chinese; interspersed, you find shots from CNN and other Western sources with English words and phrases. Some images are from news reports, others from popular movies or ads or special “millennium” entertainment. Walking among their static images—which you can see from back as well as front—produces another form of confusion between the screen and reality.
A portion of Hu Jie Ming’s “The Fiction Between 1999 & 2000,” as pictured in the exhibit catalog.
John Maeda‘s “Tap Type Write,” which I had seen in action once before during a lecture he gave at the Boston ATypI conference, was one of the interactive prototypes, with a keyboard and screen available to play with. The screen simply shows white dot-matrix letters floating in space, in changing shapes and patterns. Each time you type a letter on the keyboard, the corresponding letter on the screen does something—something well outside the usual behavior of letters. The catalog describes how this mechanism grew out of something that Maeda developed to please his young daughters: “Whenever he was working on the computer, they wanted to play with the keyboard, so he programmed his Macintosh so that something unexpected would happen when they touched the keys: letters would fly, somersault, grow, pulsate, and perform a circus full of acrobatics on the screen.”
Text Commentary
Surrounding and commenting on these works of art was the signage and the captions that usually punctuate any art exhibit. The accompanying text had its share of pretentious phrases, but it usually did manage to illuminate the art. Reading the caption for meaning and context was often useful—though it was sometimes hard to do, as the text was presented in silver/gray lettering on a black panel. (But as readers of this column may remember, I have a running argument with the way text is displayed in most museum installations.)
The greatest amount of text and type, of course, is to be found in the exhibit’s catalog—a remarkably unpretentious little book that costs only $10 and can be carried around like a novel. The 150-page catalog measures a bit smaller than 6 by 9 inches, and it’s printed on uncoated white stock in saturated color. The design draws attention to itself, with its color blocks setting off the margins from the body of the text, but once you get used to it, it works well enough.
The exhibit’s handy 150-page catalog uses color blocks to set off margins.
The one aspect of the catalog’s design that bothers me is the designer’s decision to use an elegant old-style text typeface for the essays but to use spindly-looking, faked small caps to start off each essay. Jonathan Hoefler‘s Requiem (the typeface in question) is a family with true small caps, extensive ligatures, and even three different versions at different optical sizes; why didn’t the designer make use of them? (The catalog entries are in a bold, squarish, highly condensed sans serif that I ought to recognize but don’t. No faked small caps there.)
The catalog uses faked small caps to begin each essay, despite the availability of true small caps in the Requiem typeface used.
It’s hard to tell what the catalog would mean to someone who hadn’t seen the show, but it’s a handy little compendium, useful for reference, and of course it does include quite a few essays, along with stage-setting quotations from various sources. The three components of “010101” are the Web site, the catalog, and the exhibits themselves in the museum. Since the exhibits are no longer in place, we’re left with the very appropriate duality of a physical book and an utterly digital Web site.
All art created now is “art in technological times,” even art that’s rooted in millennia of technique and tradition. “010101” is just a pointer, a way of focusing our attention so we see the interface of ourselves and the digital future.
This article was last modified on July 18, 2023
This article was first published on July 13, 2001
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