Michael Workman

Our lives are filled with media: TV, radio and print. But interactive media--appropriately dubbed "new media"--remains known to most only through the still-limited capacity of our desktop computers and video games. And as a subject, Nazi death camps have figured prominently in video games since the earliest experiments with virtual environments. But it's a morbidly interesting (the nice way of putting it) and perhaps chintzy (the not-so-nice way) notion to treat the death camp at Birkenau as a kind of video-game environment with any seriousness. The violent context of interactive video can't fully inform the content as video games, with their richness of violence and passion for grisly scenes of carnage, spring from a potential for interactive media that has not yet been fully realized. That potential is what local art group Applied Interactives, in collaboration with art(N), sought to advance with "Special Treatment." An interactive video installation, it's available for view only a few days at a temporary exhibition space at 847 West Jackson. As seen from stills of the video, it's a Birkenau constructed with a fair amount of historical accuracy: buildings are depicted with approximately correct spatial parameters between bunkers and fences. The installation is only available for three day because the group has insufficient staffing to shepherd viewers through use of the complex technology necessary for "Special Treatment"'s proper viewing; visitors must wear headphones and use hand-held navigational devices to move around in this virtual Birkenau. The group hopes this limited showing will lead to a lengthier exhibition elsewhere.

Video technologies of this sort suffer the stigma of comic books in the thirties: the received wisdom is that they're bad for our children. Whereas Communism was the bugbear in the early part of the 20th century, unbridled violence is the threat now. In this exhibition, none of that violence is of any consequence; the screen is empty of discernable "avatars" (the stand-in for the player in gaming parlance). It's merely an empty space for viewers to move around in, evincing all the desperate air and looming spiritual morbidity of unimaginable mass cruelty. But the atmosphere has been choppily rendered in a three-dimensional landscape of too-flat ground and structures with edges that cut lines much too fine for reality. It's a kind of cartoon Birkenau, an animated version of the historically stigmatized geography.

So why build it? And not just why build it, but why--as member Geoff Baum explained it--spend three whole years building it? What are Applied Interactives and art(N) thinking about? Worrying about? As the artists' statement tells us, "any occurrence which exhibits the tragedy of 'history repeating itself' provides a powerful framework for taking a critical look at how and what people remember, how they change their thoughts over time and how cultural biases influence personal recollection." As an attempt to use technology as a tool for the exploration of our collective cultural memories of Birkenau and of the Holocaust, this installation may suffer the fate of an environment stripped to its blueprint. No bodies, no summary executions in action. Maybe it's good that this differentiates it from mainstream uses of similar video technology. But does that make this a bloodless examination of genocide? Admittedly, it would be fitting for a country obsessed with the Jewish Holocaust while in denial of our own systematic extermination of Native Americans.

But at the core of this video installation lingers a charge of cartoonishness that, as virtual technologies are used in the mainstream, leaves the complaints about represented violence ringing empty: how could such cartoon characters conceivably urge us on to the real blood and pain of any "real world" willingness to do harm? But such complaints, which plague interactive video art, inevitably act as a double-edged sword. "Special Treatment" substitutes computer-generated gore with Birkenau itself as a ghostly symbol of mankind's capacity for savagery in a spiritual void. It's less the video representation of Birkenau itself that will be interesting--an instance of what McLuhan referred to as a "ditto device"--than the reaction to it of individual viewers.

Two's company

To celebrate its one-year anniversary, the Johnsonese Gallery stuck the names of its artists in a hat and pulled them out two by two. Many of the pairings had off-the-wall results, such as Jennifer Lopez and Stephanie Dean's cyanotype bed sheet, napped in by the artists and titled "We Slept Together the First Time We Met." Artists Chris Knight and David Lozano teamed up on an assemblage project depicting a buffalo tipped over on its side. The work also includes sand, "used as a symbol of time." There are also individually made works by a few artists who opted-out of the two-person format, but can those possibly be as fun? Patrons can view the results at the opening night, a party that gallerists promise to top off with "stale wedding cake and champagne."

"Special Treatment" shows at 847 West Jackson Boulevard, (773)489-1147. OPENING RECEPTION: January 7, 6-10pm. Through January 8. "Arranged Marriage" shows at Johnsonese Gallery, 867 West Buckingham Place, (773)525-5877. OPENING RECEPTION: January 7, 7:30-9:30pm. Through February 26.

(2005-01-04)

Also by Michael Workman

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Eye Exam
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Tip of the Week
(2004-10-27)

Gaylen Gerber
(2004-10-27)

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