I met Wayne Ashley, the Founding Artistic Director of FuturePerfect, in Montreal, at Elektra Festival, when his project was just beginning in New York. FuturePerfect now is a performance, media, visual art and technology platform. They commission, produce, and present new work, offer residencies, talks, education, and opportunities for touring. Interview.
How was FuturePerfect born? What is the philosophy of the project?
The name FuturePerfect refers to the future perfect tense, and not to a utopian future made better by technology or art. It is an overlapping of future and past, anticipation and retroaction that is best indicated by the future perfect tense—what will have been. The name is a way of complicating the relationship of past, present and future—with no predictable outcome, and possibility for ambiguity, circularity, and no finality. We wanted to get away from previous ideas about the coupling of “future” and “technology” as markers of the “new”, “better”, and “predictable”. And also to escape the utopian and dystopian polarities that tend to structure narratives around technology.
FuturePerfect abandoned the previous decade’s concern with defining what was essential about electronic media. We are not interested in reinforcing the categories variously termed “electronic arts”, “new media”, or “digital culture”. We don’t want to rigidly differentiate “electronic” or “digital” from “analog”, or from bounding off practices based on computation from those of theater, painting, dance, video, or any other expressive culture. We are interested in all forms of human / machinic intermingling, organic and inorganic trespassing—the mixing of human and non-human systems including both screen and non-screen based interfaces. We are invested in a kind of productive messiness that emerges because artists and scientists together are exploring, thinking, and making across different practices and ideas previously unavailable to one another. FuturePerfect intensifies dialogues across media, locating and exploiting antagonisms between platforms, histories, and different aesthetic and social economies—from the web, to the street, park, club, gallery, theater, and opera house.
We offer commissions, production assistance, workshops, presentation opportunities, and marketing to selected artists, researchers, and scientists invested in these issues; as well as public dialogue and debate to a growing and increasingly sophisticated audience. The projects we are producing map the ongoing but intensifying interplay between the fields of contemporary performance on the one hand, and technologies of mediation, software, transmission, and simulation on the other—the crossing of live, mediated, recorded, networked, and machinic channels of address.
In 1999, when I became the Director of Arts in Multimedia at BAM, every major New York City cultural institution had an art and technology initiative including Guggenheim, The Whitney, Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, The New Museum, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, along with countless other smaller scale art/tech labs. There was even a National Art and Technology Network established to share research, produce, and tour work generated by dialogues occurring between the sciences and art. Between 2001 and 2005, and exacerbated by the telecommunications industry collapse and the dot.com bust, executive management of most of these organizations either marginalized these initiatives, or dissolved them into other pre-existing programs. This occurred not only in New York City, but in other major US cities as well, including San Francisco’s MoMa, and Minneapolis’s Walker Arts Center. The reasons for this exit are complex and many informal ideas circulate among curators, artists and cultural workers. Some thought the art and technology dialogue was merely a short-lived fad that needed to disappear, presumably, along with the hyped up success and promise of a networked society; others disliked the work being produced under the art and technology banner and used the collapse of the industry, in part, to further dismiss and de-legitimize the work; still others felt that the increasing commercialization and ordinariness of the internet and computer technology eroded the possibility for a critical and “original” art practice. And the largest complaint: the work seemed primarily to be about state-of-the-art computer technology, with little “content.” Moreover, the issue of how to sell, display, maintain and preserve this kind of work was becoming more challenging and expensive requiring organizations to hire additional staff, and constantly upgrade hardware and software.
Whatever the case may be, those of us who remained committed to the field felt artists were just beginning to develop the necessary conceptual and critical skills for creating masterful works, moving beyond technological fetishism. A generation of artists was becoming proficient in software programming, electromechanical systems design, and physical computing. The telecommunications industry rebounded again with a plethora of social media tools and platforms, with new ways for people to connect, upload, share and store a multitude of content, along with an emerging and robust mobile technology. More and more artists began doing hybrid work opening out to other artistic traditions—dance, theater, opera, sculpture, painting, and symphony. From my perspective, the increasing incursion of computers and networks into peoples’ everyday lives, and the tech industry’s growing ability to shape, design, distribute, and define how these technologies can be used, required not a retreat, but an intensification and diligent focus on alternative uses, aesthetics, politics, knowledge production, and economies.
To this end, we started FuturePerfect.
Who are you, how did you get involved in this area of art & technology?
I grew up in Orange County, California in the 1950s. My father was an engineer and passionate entrepreneur, and my mother was an artist, dancer, and therapist. I can say without question that this combination produced an incredibly complex emotional and intellectual environment that still continues to have impact upon the questions I ask, the experiences I seek, the work I produce, and the kinds of collaborations I am attracted to. Apart from our weekly cultural excursions to Los Angeles, there was one dominant cultural energy in Orange County that attracted me in various ways throughout my youth, and has returned to haunt my adult life: Disneyland. From the age of five, I visited the sprawling theme park at least twice a year. And in the summer after my first year at college, I worked there as a janitor, scraping off gum from streets and carpets, mopping up bathrooms in Tomorrowland, and vacuuming the floors of such technological wonders as the Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion. While I do not ignore the criticisms leveled against Disney—its insistent branding, and consumerist ideology run amok—I cannot ignore the complex ways Disney had already proposed for coupling together art, technology, and mass entertainment. Apart from the very rare exhibit of technological art that came to Los Angeles, and the more frequent displays of scientific achievement at planetarium and science museums, Disneyland provided me an early entry into the fields of animation, robotics, telepresence, simulations, immersive environments, stereophonic surround sound, 360 degree films, and new perceptual experiences that engaged both the physical body, sound, and the visual image. I am still confronting these ghosts.
After conducting extensive research in India, and finishing a degree in Performance Studies at New York University, I moved to Seattle. In 1995, I became involved in digital media production, and taught imaging software to designers and photographers at one of the largest photo-imaging establishments in the Pacific Northwest. Soon after I became one of eight program directors of Open Studio, a US national funding initiative of the Benton Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. Fearing that corporations and large media companies were colonizing more and more of the internet, thus eliminating the possibility of an “electronic public space”, Open Studio aimed to insure that digital production and information technologies reached underserved populations, cultural institutions, and artists.
From July 1999 to December 2001 I was the Director of New Media at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), one of America's foremost presenters of contemporary music, opera, theater, dance and film from around the world. I was hired to establish BAM's New Media Department; design, direct, and implement Arts in Multimedia (AIM), a research, art and technology project with Bell Labs; and begin producing and presenting works that confronted assumed ideas about performance in the context of rapidly changing information and interactive technologies. I produced three major works for BAM’s Next Wave Festival and began curating and producing exhibits for BAM’s online environment. In 2002 I became the New Media Curator and Program Director at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). At LMCC I worked to broaden and diversify audiences by creating programs that attracted artists, but also anthropologists, political scientists, theater directors, engineers, architects, and game designers. One of my major projects, Downtown Digital Futures, was a six-month long effort investigating ways in which artists and innovators were using new technologies to influence, disrupt, and expand the experience and development of today’s cities. An important conference I organized in 2003, The Future of War: Aesthetics, Politics, Technologies, put new media art practice smack in the middle of one of the most confusing and scary crises of the 21st century—this country’s “war on terrorism” and our subsequent war with Iraq. I asked participants to bring their analytical and visual tools to bear on a number of fronts: the virtual network war in the media and on the Internet; the high-tech surveillance war overseas, in our airports, cities, and homes; and the “war on terrorism” using some of the most sophisticated computer modeling and simulation technologies.
Tell us a little bit about the first events and the evolution of FuturePerfect since the beginning of it.
FuturePerfect is a start up organization, funded primarily with private monies. The works we produce are often complex and costly to implement, and require different kinds of partnerships, resource sharing, and economic models to sustain. We do not have our own space, but rather, seek out the most appropriate place and context for each new project we produce. Sometimes we have to build our own spaces from scratch. We do not as yet have our own regular festival or performance season, and as needed, bring on consultants with the appropriate production, technical, developmental, and community-building expertise. Currently there are two program coordinators helping to move FuturePerfect into its next growth phase—Lisa Reynolds and Kate Little. In this sense we are nomadic, which also enables us to create works and projects in other cities and geographical locations.
Presently, we are in an intensive exploratory phase, trying out different models of artistic production, collaboration, and audience building. We inaugurated FuturePerfect in 2009 with ZEE, a sold out three-week installation by Austrian / US artist Kurt Hentschlager, co-produced with 3LD Art & Technology Center in association with Performance Space 122. For over a decade, Hentschläger has been exploring ways of enhancing and intensifying perception, by temporarily removing individuals from their taken-for-granted surroundings and subjecting them to the otherworldly effects of stroboscopic lighting and shifting color fields, intense soundscapes and sub-bass, often amidst enormous multi-screen surround environments, or inside of special enclosures built specifically for the work.
Dissatisfied with the two-dimensionality of video and film projection and the limitations of adapting his work to a given architectural space, Hentschläger has constructed his own alternative worlds through live performance, installations, and video. From the large-scale audiovisual events produced as part of the Austrian duo Granular Synthesis, to collaborations with French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj and vocalist Diamanda Galas, to his solo immersive installations, Hentschläger finds ways of collapsing the gap between viewer and work, image and reality, inside and outside. Offering a compelling contemporary version of the aesthetic of the sublime, Hentschläger’s work insists that we not merely “watch” and “listen” to images and sounds at a safe distance, but that they penetrate, confront, and overwhelm us by their sense of limitless power and complexity.
The New York City premiere of ZEE extended Hentschläger’s intensity and technique into an abstract world of pulsing light and spatial disorientation that was at once exhilarating and meditative. Ten participants at a time were led inside of a special enclosure built specifically for the work. All the usual cues that contribute to depth perception—texture, shadow, size, perspective—were erased by the fog, returning each spectator, as it were, to a state of “tabula rasa”, where one’s perceptual framework is reset and then recalibrated. By carefully composing the sound, and manipulating the pulse, speed, intensity and color of the strobes, Hentschlager induced an intense 20-minute hallucinatory experience in each spectator’s mind—a kind of dramaturgy of the brain.
In November we presented the Norwegian artist collective Verdensteatret’s And All the Question Marks Started to Sing. The group is recognized as one of the leading performance ensembles in Norway, known for surprising uses of new and old technologies in the making of contemporary theater, performance and art. Verdensteatret’s works are presented internationally in a variety of contexts, including galleries, music festivals and theaters. Based in Oslo and led by Lisbeth J. Bodd and Asle Nilsen, Verdensteatret has long had strong ties to the European, especially German, theatrical tradition that includes Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Heiner Müller. Following experiments in visual performance, environmental theater and text-based theater, the group has recently tended toward the ambitiously interdisciplinary. Today, Verdensteatret consists of video artists, computer animators, sound engineers, musicians, artists and a painter, among others.
In this New York City premiere, co-presented with Dance Theater Workshop and PS122, the company performed a bewilderingly complex orchestration of video, sound and projected shadows, meticulously produced from the refuse of everyday life—old bicycle wheels, joysticks, hand-twisted and soldered scraps of metal cable and levers, lenses, celluloid film strips, obsolete amplifier tubes and other contraptions and whirligigs. By literally manipulating and “playing” the various objects on the stage, performers initiated, sped up, slowed down, advanced, magnified and mixed an expanding and contracting world of proto-cinematic images and sound. These were not the smooth and seamless computer-generated images we have become accustomed to, but rather images forged through an elaborate system of pulleys and gears, the pulse of electricity, the grinding of metal, the labor of human bodies. Verdensteatret riffs on the animation filmmakers the Quay Brothers and Ladislav Starevich, the automata and mechanical toys of the 19th century, modern kinetic and conceptual sculpture, and early electronic music (1920—1960), among other influences, to create their own unique hybrid.
We also premiered the Norwegian musical duo NEXT LIFE in bars and clubs throughout the city. Featuring the composer and stage artist Hai Nguyen Dinh on guitars, and Tormod Christensen on keyboard, NEXT LIFE’s central interest is discovering the musical potential of mixing the alternative sounds of hardcore heavy metal with the sonic culture of video games.
NEXT LIFE
In the spring, we presented the performance installation Shuffle at the New York Public Library periodical room as part of the library’s centennial celebration. A FuturePerfect commission, the project brought together the collaborative energies of one of New York City’s accomplished theater ensembles Elevator Repair Service (ERS), UCLA professor and statistician Mark Hansen, and artist Ben Rubin. I had already known Hansen and Rubin intimately since 1999 when I produced their seminal and award winning work The Listening Post for the Next Wave Festival at BAM in 2001. The work went on to On the Boards, Seattle, The Whitney and later won the Golden Nica Award at Ars Electronica.
Shuffle was an entirely new kind of ERS performance, one with constantly re-generated texts and an almost aleatory structure. Performed in twenty-minute increments, eight actors read and improvised from a script that was generated anew in real time by interconnected software algorithms that searched a database containing every line from the three books that ERS had previously performed (either in adapted form or in full)—The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and The Sound and the Fury. A computer delivered these lines to the actors, in synch, to iPod touches, like miniature teleprompters, embedded in paperback books. Instructions also dictated when and where in the room actors should move, and a future iteration of the work will initiate a musical score for each scene. Wandering amongst the actors, audience members derived pleasure from the possibility of discovering new relationships, and alternative insights from the machine’s ongoing disarticulation and re-composing of canonical literary texts, and the actors’ both awkward and successful attempts to create sense.
We accompany all of our events with artist talks and panels on such topics as performance and immersion; curating, presenting and producing; installation and art machines.
4. What is your program in terms of artistic choice? What's coming next ?
I am driven by an almost compulsive desire to bring people together who seem to occupy disparate histories, training systems, cultural backgrounds, and disciplinary fields. My experience is that this kind of deep heterogeneous play has the potential of producing new questions and insights into both artistic and social processes. Collaborators are, by necessity, forced to re-think habitual ways of working and knowing because they must confront the language, metaphors, and perspectives of their colleagues. FuturePerfect chooses artists who are capable of creating links between disparate worlds. I call these “bridge” artists, whose works make possible dialogues between seemingly impenetrable institutions, forms of knowledge, classes, and ethnicities.
So for example we produced an artist panel, Immersion and Performance, designed to explore links between the concept immersion in art and installation, but also video games and 3D cinema, new counterinsurgency strategies for simulating theaters of war, and realistic touch feedback medical training systems. We invited not only visual artists and theater directors to participate in this discussion, but an anthropologist as well. FuturePerfect wants to connect what artists are doing to larger and larger spheres of political and social import.
We are in the process of exciting growth and outreach, however, I can only mention a couple projects because many of our new works are still in negotiation or in early planning stages for 2012 - 2014. Some of these projects involve creating new long-term partnerships. We are working with Fusebox, an annual contemporary art and performance festival that takes place in Austin, Texas, to help build their own art and technology platform. We have plans to co-produce work together, and engage in inter-institutional and inter-city initiative building. We have embarked on a partnership with Society for Art and Technology (SAT) in Montreal in order to produce a repertoire of new performance works for planetarium and other immersive environments. FuturePerfect will be producing and touring Verdensteatret’s new work (in development) throughout the US in 2013; and we are exploring a partnership with the French national dramatic center Comedie de Caen, which will involve co-producing a new work titled Don’t Mess with Texas. The work, directed by Jean Lambert-wild with a musical score by Jean-Luc Therminarias, will combine the aesthetics and structure of a graphical novel, real-time and pre-rendered animation, music, recitation, and live action. Briefly, the performance represents two parallel time frames and narratives: the journey of French socialist Victor Considerant in 1852 to Texas to establish La Réunion, a utopia advocating republican political activism, direct democracy, and the voluntary association of capital and labor in various types of cooperatives. And the present-day journey through contemporary Texas by a French theater director and musician. The performance posits the failures of La Réunion as a strategy for exploring current debates about the impossibility of real political opposition in a world that no longer harbors any utopian visions, or competing notions of the future.
We will feature a series of online video works around the new work in development by artist Colin Gee, called I, who am the chorus. Filmed in Rome, the series will be comprised of 20 two-minute videos that explore the relationship between memory and location. Video still from Colin Gee’s Water Clock, 2010
Published in the Digitalarti Mag #8.
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