There are plenty of indications that we may remember 2014 as the year that the encounter between art and technology made a definitive comeback. Over the course of the last year and a half we’ve seen, among other things, Fylkingen’s retake on the legendary congress Visions of the Present from 1966, The Stockholm Modern Museum’s exhibition of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering and Dansmaskiner, The Barbican’s massive Digital Revolution from last summer (showing now at the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology) and also this year’s edition of the biennial meta.morf in Trondheim. Besides these historical exhibitions, a number of new laboratories and incubation centers for art and technology are currently being established, such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s very newly instituted Art + Technology Lab and the piping fresh lab New Inc at New Museum in New York. Coincidentally, the Stockholm counterpart – Digital Art Center (DAC) – is now being relaunched inside NOD, the newly inaugurated visitor center for technology and design in Kista.
DAC describe themselves as an exhibition space for research communication, visualization and artistic representation; their aim is to pursue cross-pollinations between advanced technology and artistic disciplines. They have been operating as a pilot project for a few years, and have produced some exhibitions in that modality, though activities so far have mainly been centered on innovation and the contemporary. In conjunction with their reboot however, it seems DAC have become more ambitious in terms of their exhibitions, as they appear to have begun to look more closely at history, pioneering efforts and predecessors, in promising ways.
Their first exhibition in the still rather humble space is Electronic Pioneers, created in collaboration with the film and video archive Filmform. It presents a group of artists who in the 1960s began using the TV medium and advanced computer technology to experiment with audiovisual compositions. The six pioneers that we encounter in this exhibition (apart from the contemporary companion piece by Katarina Löfström, loosely tied in with her predecessors) all worked in close proximity with each other through Fylkingen or Elektronmusikstudion. This unusual glimpse of these rare works together provides a fascinating peephole into the golden age of Swedish electronic music and audiovisual, multidisciplinary and intermedial experimentation. Compared to similar international works from that era from filmmakers such as Harry Smith, Jordan Belson, John Whitney or Hy Hirsch, who also experimented with computer-generated moving images, but usually with entirely secondary sound treatment, it is striking how the sonic material here is actually aided by the images – just as intended. It is also unsurprising – many of the works of these composers were experiments in transferring and linking audio material to the visual medium, an audio-visual-composition or electroacoustic visualism that does not use Viking Eggeling’s and Oscar Fischinger’s visual music as a point of departure, but rather stems from how the visual and the sonic elements both maintain the same high level of abstraction.
That aside, let’s back up to electronic image production. One of the major pioneers in experimental computer animation in Sweden is the computer technician Göran Sundqvist, who worked in the Datasaab lab in the early 1960s, where he began to explore the ability of computers to convey screen images and create experiments in visualization using an oscilloscope, initially without any artistic aspirations. Most of his early material has been lost due to storage difficulties, but the short experiments that have been preserved, parts of which are shown here in the exhibition, give an interesting insight into what the artists around him would have encountered and been inspired by at the time. It’s strikingly primitive to be sure – examples include a dot moving across the screen – but the visual material still isn’t far from what international pioneers such as Norman McLaren, Evelyn Lambart or Mary Ellen Bute worked with during the same period. Sundqvist became involved with Fylkingen’s image group, which is where he came to collaborate with, or in other ways influence, a number of other artists, such as Jan W. Morthenson, Ralph Lundsten and Erkki Kurenniemi, who soon began to investigate the potential to combine visualization experiments with advanced electronic music. Shortly afterward a number of projects were initiated between the electronic music corps and Sveriges Television (SVT), Swedish public TV, which in 1966 created an internal experimental unit that for a few years became an important launch pad for continued audiovisual experimentation.
One of the works shown on Swedish public television was Jan Bark’s and Erkki Kurenniemi’s Spindrift (1966), a piece that was promoted as a «new form of music for black and white TV» and «kinetic music which you can hear with your eyes», though despite the emphasis that the rhetoric places on image, the work is quite captivating both in terms of visual and audio materials. Bark’s sound piece, which alternates between the aggressive and the meditative, combines analogue instruments (tablas and a tambura) with electronic manipulations and is at times intriguingly at odds with Kurenniemi’s programmed mandala configurations, fractals and abstractions. One gets the sense that a coffeecake or two may have ended up on the floor of living rooms across Sweden, and as it turns out both the viewing copy, as well as the negative, were lost shortly afterward. Last year Mika Taanila and Perttu Rastas successfully reconstructed the version shown in the exhibition from a surviving working copy and Bark’s unedited recordings and editing diagrams. Spindrift is the highlight of the exhibition and those who missed the screening at the Modern Museum’s documentary film festival Tempo earlier in the year now have an excellent opportunity to view it.
More gentle, and also the first among SVT’s experimental TV-productions was Ralph Lundsten’s EMS no. 1 (1966), a psychedelic piece of a more feel-good variety, consisting of cosmically meditative audio material combined with filmed abstract shapes and electronic overlay and displacements. However, the work pales a bit next to the rest of the material in the show. SVT’s next production, composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl’s Altisonans (1966), is more remarkable. Blomdahl described the work as an «image-sound-composition», and it contains one of his most experimental sound pieces – an abstract montage of bird calls, combined with satellite signals and sonic impulses caused by magnetic storms – together with images programmed by Lundsten which are, for the most part, aggressively nonfigurative. Much as with Spindrift the piece is so progressive it remains hard to fathom, nearly 50 years later, that it was given a time-slot on national television. However a similar radicalism existed at other TV-stations and Jan W. Morthenson soon began collaborations with German TV, where he performed the «TV-composition» Lux Sonora (1971) and where a lengthy documentary on him and his work was also shown, both of which are presented in the exhibition. This is another artifact that still amazes in its technological optimism and confidence.
Though suitably confident, the exhibition is also modest in terms of format and doesn’t consist of much else than six older TV monitors on which the films play simultaneously, free of bombast or spectacular installation design. Nonetheless it’s a great solution, which respects the older technology while also showing confidence in the material. Löfström’s concretist and completely pixel-based work – Score (2004) – is projected in giant format on the opposite wall, which works out to be a reasonable solution in this context, and corresponds well to her position in the show as a contemporary pendant. However I was struck several times – out of habit – by how interesting it would be to view all of these works on a larger screen or monitor. Still it is an excellent choice on the part of the museum’s curators to dare keep the format small and stay faithful to the original viewing mediums and technical conditions. My only complaint is that a couch and a piece of coffeecake might have gone well with that.
