Strange Currency

Dorkbot's Bodies Electric
BY NATE LIPPENS

Electricity is seductive. It's one of the first things we are scolded away from as children; it comes out of the sky; it takes away the dark and vanquishes monsters. As art, it's often less seductive--the cold, minimalist literalism of neon bulbs or the gimmicky spectacle of gadgets that have the whiff of the trade show without much artistic rigor.

At its best, the second annual exhibition of interactive electric art at CoCA--sponsored by the Seattle chapter of dorkbot (dorkbot-sea)--dispels many of the sloppy assumptions about the medium while retaining its seductiveness. Dorkbot, founded in New York and now with branches in 22 cities internationally, is a loose collective with the motto "People Doing Strange Things with Electricity." That dictum allows for a diverse approach to electricity and technology. Curator Kate Seeking has smartly organized the show with an eye to balancing the hot and cold, the art and the gadgets.

The technological virtue of the 32 works is that they are all to some degree active. Roughly half of the pieces are interactive. The most successful of those question the expectations of interaction and audience participation. Social processes become part of the technology, and in some cases the exchange transforms the motion into art. Of course, there are several pieces that use exhausted tropes such as surveillance or gadgetry for its own sake. But the best artists here are deeply involved in the aesthetic explorations of electricity and of the interplay between the natural world and technology, the human body and its representations.

In that vein is Seth Lewis' S.R.I. (Sensory Reality Interface). The six machines look like robot crustaceans as imagined by William S. Burroughs or back massagers from Barbarella. Their aluminum shells are covered in fingers cast from the artist's hands in polyurethane resin, which act as legs and look like glowing quills. The machines stutter across the floor as motorized stand-ins for human contact and the personal touch of the artist. They are machines, but each appears to have personality: One is nearly sedentary, another inches busily forward, and my favorite is a relentless self-tangler, getting caught in its own cord.

Robert Lambert's quiet video installation Intravital portrays nature and the body through simple technology in a scientific setting. There are two black-and- white images in large Petri dishes on a narrow table. At first they appear to be almost lunar. Then they ripple--one is water and the other is skin. On the opposite wall, Eric McNeill's Untitled (Portrait/Movement) portrays an even more dissipated presence. The projected LED installation is a looped video of a person repeatedly walking across the field of view, sometimes seeming to pause or turn back. But it's hard to discern because the video loop is projected by 256 LEDs, which create a low-resolution image of a silhouette, stripping the subject of identity. The piece seems interactive at first. The LEDs appear to be sensor-activated light patterns triggered by the viewer's movements. Only when you stand back does it become clear that the image is of another person, unaffected by the viewer. The interaction is only one-way. It's voyeurism. The projected presence is an absence--a silhouette without details, features, or gender--and so is the viewer's presence, in that it's irrelevant to the work. Both versions of humanity are closed circuits.

The most disorienting piece involves the viewer's own image. John Bain's Cubist Mirror is a video installation tucked into an alcove. You walk in to face a monitor and see yourself. Cameras placed throughout the alcove capture you from nine different angles and then the images are rapidly edited and flashed on the screen in succession. The work creates a multiple-perspective portrait, a near- strobe version of self. As you move, the image changes and you appear as a wavering jump-cut hologram. The element of surveillance here isn't the clichˇd standard, which usually involves commentary on how being watched is about control. Cubist Mirror is about sensory overload and a self-confrontation. Disorientation comes from the speed of the flashing images but also from the shock of seeing yourself nearly three-dimensional, as the world sees you--a whole divided into pieces, an image fractured, and a self constantly re-angling. The beauty of it is that--like Frankenstein--it takes electricity to bring your own image to life.