john klima + interview

to get back to the landscape art theme: trolling for information on model railroad landscapes, I came across descriptions of artist John Klima's piece "Train".

A model railway landscape featuring scenes from a variety of films (including "Bad Lieutenant", "And God Created Woman", and "Sid and Nancy"), bears two trains, each carrying a gameboy which is remotely operable by cellphone. The viewer selects a character from the scene depicted in the landscape when the train goes by it, thereby "picking up" that character. The gameboy then displays a CG animation of a new scene between characters from different movies, cobbled together from dialogue from their disparate films. The viewer can listen in to the conversation via cellphone, while phoneless viewers hear it on speaker.

I detest one-liner art and prefer density, so the description fascinated me. Equally fascinating were the decidedly negative reviews of "Train" that led me to the work in the first place. The one from Art Forum actually blames Klima for not fulfilling the expectations of his press release. Given that I haven't seen the work in the flesh, and may never do so, I'll have to withhold judgment, perhaps forever. But, always giving artists who layer the benefit of the doubt, I went to Klima's website.

Such a reward for the map geek! If we're speaking of body as landscape, here's a 2003 piece called "Terrain", which uses the projected image of a woman's naked body to create a light-responsive terrain.

"A large matrix of 225 electro-mechanical actuators conform a projection surface to match a 3d image/dataset in real-time. Using only light, the "terrain machine" surface reacts instantly to the light and shadow projected upon it. Viewers can "insert" themselves into the datastream, casting shadows on the input matrix, directly manipulating the surface, in real-time."

The website has a video, which demonstrates better than words or stills how the piece works. It's simple when you approach it, but lets you spin out multiple implications (not least, how the terrain retracts at the touch of a stranger, the female figure becoming by turns brazen and shy, curious and modest.) Lovely.

Perhaps more essential to his practice so far is his 2001 piece, "EARTH" (image at top), which digitally projects a variety of data about terrain and topography onto screen or rounded object, and permits a viewer with a tracking ball to rotate the terrain and remotely drill down data for desired locations. Sound familiar? Yes, this is the pre-Google-Maps-Hacks version: more difficult and much prettier.

Building on the "EARTH" project, Klima has produced "EARTH: Discrete Terrains":

"Based on the EARTH dataset, individual terrain sections are printed with the 3d Systems solid object printer. These rapid prototyping prints then become the molds for archival plaster casts. The casts then become a projection surface for digital data from the specific locations. Using only a single 35mm slide projector, "Discrete Terrains" are the absolute simplest technological reduction of the "EARTH" and "Terrain Machine" projects."

He has also used the data to create specific local terrains that relate to politics and emotions, such as in his project "EARTH: Political Landscape, Emotional Terrain". But his applications of "EARTH" data in artwork seem to peter out around 2004.

I looked for artist statements and project descriptions on his very usable website, but couldn't find anything satisfactory, so I got the following brief email interview yesterday.

*****

How does google maps (and its world) differ from EARTH and the various applications you've been creating around it? (In terms of aesthetics, purpose, proposed viewer experience, tech, etc.) I guess i'm partly asking how one being "art" and the other being "utilitarian" makes them different. Do you think the ubiquity of GIS apps has pushed the EARTH pieces more into the realm of art (and away from novelty or utility)?

I'd insist they are art from the beginning, and needed no additional pushing ;)

First off, EARTH and its offshoots have no utility. You can't "look up" a location, you have to know where it is ahead of time. There are no place names until you zoom all the way down to the terrain level, and these place names are only locations of weather stations, mostly at airports. There are no national borders, or any other features normally found on maps.

Second, EARTH is an exploration into the aesthetics of mapping, digitally, in three dimensions. It is also an exploration into the errors and limits of that mapping. I display the data in a natural state, I do not correct projection discrepancies, I don't make clean seams between the data patches, I don't do a fake "morph" or "blend" when traveling through layers, as Google Earth and the Hummer adverts on TV do. If you know what to look for, you can see just the exact moment they "fake" the transition. It is essentially an artifact of a viewpoint switching from a global overhead viewpoint into a "driver's seat" cruise over the surface view, as well as resolution differences in the available data.

Third, the imagery and how it is presented is entirely created by me, from the raw data. It is my parsing of the data, my choice of color, resolution, etc. I made lots of artistic decisions about how EARTH finally appears, and those decisions were based not on utility, or on mapping convention, or any other such thing. It is all simply "how I wanted it to look."

What things like GIS and Google Earth do, however, is make it clearer to people that my EARTH is indeed a different kind of thing all together. At the time I first showed EARTH, there was nuthin else like it, so people perhaps assumed it was less art, more map. But now that we do have utilitarian "earths" it becomes easier to view my EARTH from the perspective of art.

Have you abandoned EARTH or do you plan to push it forward?

I am proud to have made it long before Google, but I see no reason at this point to continue with it. I've said what I wanted to say with it. Though who knows, maybe it will come back in some way.

I'm loving the TRAIN piece since I have a bee in my bonnet about model railways right now. I'm wondering why you decided to pack it so densely (the model railway landscape issue, the gameboy, the film references, the cell phone). I have some ideas myself but I wanted to hear your thinking. Also, how did you choose the scenes and characters? Are they personal landmarks, or do they map to some sort of larger narrative or progression?

TRAIN comes from a lot of different urges. First, I just felt like there was a compelling and evocative connection between a railroad, a cellphone, and a gameboy. And of course historically these technologies share a common parentage.

Second, there is great pressure for new media artists to make work that is easy for the audience to comprehend, easy to display, doesn't require the audience to, Jah forbid, touch the work etc. The "problem" with my work is that it is NONE of those things. It is complex, some would say baroque, it is difficult for the viewer to see their agency in the work, something that often pisses them off. They dont get how it works, therefore it must be bad. I don't give a damn if large portions of the audience dont get how it works, its not my job to appease them. It is not a shopping website, I could care less about usability. So, this bad attitude I have creates a situation where sometimes I have to view the work as a "hobby" because it is damn hard to make a living making interactive work that pisses people off because it's hard to use. Oddly, TRAIN was actually sold for a handsome figure to a museum in Spain, so I feel somehow vindicated.

The characters are all marginal individuals. I see a bit of them all in myself. The general film themes were chosen largely by the model figures available. I went to a train store in Germany, and bought all the freakiest figures I could find. Drunks, punks, prostitutes, artists, cops, medical technicians, nudists, protestors. I then started thinking about films that have these characters in them, and selected the films that resonated most with me. The scenes were chosen based on both what is expressable within the landscape of a model railroad, and the significance of each scene in the film in question. I played with the scenes a lot, blending some together, adding elements to the scene and taking elements away from its original filmic rendition. There is a general progression on the layout as the train travels, from artist/nudist to protester/cop to punk/drunk to emt/prostitute. These are the basic character decisions the viewer makes, in more or less that order (the layout is branching and looping, so it is not always that exact progression).

And what are you working on now?

Well, funny you ask. I am basically performing sex change operations on gundam models and making my own universe of all female gundam super-heroes, essentially a combat force of dominatrix gundams, a.k.a. domdams. I will then use them to make scenes and build a narrative that will also have a strong digital component in the way of a fairly straightforward computer game aesthetic.

I have also spent a great deal of time inventing a procedural human animation system I will use for a variety of pieces, including the domdam work, as well as a piece I am working on with another artist, France Cadet. We are making a virtual/real robot circus with her as the ringmaster. We think its gonna be really fun and funny. It's also a great excuse to travel to Aix-en-Provence frequently ;)