Gregory Little
Associate Professor of Digital Arts
School of Art
Bowling Green State University


Artist Statement (300 words)

forthcoming

Artist Statement (1000 words)

forthcoming

Artist Statement (2000 words)
During the summer of 2000, upon returning from a research residency at the Virtual Reality and Innovation Centre, University of Teesside, UK; I made a decision that permanently and positively altered the trajectory of my academic career. I resigned from a tenured position at Kent State University to continue working as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Digital Arts at Bowling Green State University. Since that unconventional decision, I have been appointed as a tenure-track professor at BGSU, and have expanded my research activity across boundaries of a variety of disciplines, successfully incorporating my research into the classroom and into a wide range of communities.
I gave up tenure in the School of Art at Kent because I had exhausted my potential to move my creative practice toward a research agenda based in a theoretical and aesthetic critique of science, and technology through art. I had gained support from upper administration and research committees for my work, but the bottom line was unmoving—I had been hired to teach painting and drawing. Growing external support for my work (two Ohio Arts Council Grants, international exhibitions, conference, and residencies) made clear to me that to take my dreams and aspirations to the next level, I had to find a situation that would be more supportive of my work. I had been at BGSU for one year when I decided to resign from Kent State University. Finally I was able to teach the courses I longed to teach, have unlimited access to many of the technical configurations I had been dreaming of, and feel a strong affinity with my colleagues.
My work prior to 1986 was a combination of formal investigations of space, and alchemic and scientific processes. I began using computers in 1986 as a tool to study color and composition in my paintings, and soon began to investigate other electronic processes, incorporating xerography, fax, video, and simple interactions. In 1991 I met several virtual reality developers, including Jaron Lanier and Scott Fisher, along with artists Alan Rath and Joan Truckenbrod, and a number of pioneers in the fields of scientific visualization. Through these contacts I came to understand that computation is not simply a tool but a dynamic medium, a place or space, and a highly problematic cultural condition. It was the problematic nature and quantity of unresolved issues inherent in the intersection of computation and creativity, coupled with the unexplored possibilities for creative expression, that consumed my imagination and led me to a paradigm shift from traditional media to computational media. This realization in 1991 laid the seeds for all inquiries to follow. In 1997, during the From Energy to Information conference at the University of Texas, Austin; the luminous keynote address by 1977 Nobel Prize recipient Ilya Prigogine summed up the relationship between art and science with one simple phrase: “Astonishment leads to creativity”1. Prigogine's scientific theories related to uncertainty and emergence from chaos inspired a deep, aesthetic sense of awe in me. I interacted with individuals ranging from scientists to art historians, hypertext authors, cyberpunk critics, artists, medical researchers, and computer programmers. I understood that computation as a medium and ideology is being practiced, shaped, and analyzed by researchers across the disciplines of the humanities and the sciences, and that I was participating in defining the perimeters of the field. I recall thinking “these are my people.”
Like art, science asks provocative questions and grapples with uncertainty; however art is also deeply concerned with giving voice to multiple audiences and recontextualizing new forms of communication, qualities not frequently associated with scientific research. Therefore the arts can and have become a site for valuable independent critical research into the meaning and impact of science. Full participation into independent critical art/sci research requires from the artist a working comprehension of aspects of fields like computer science, cyber-psychology, cybernetics, genetics, remote sensing, communications theory, or electrical engineering. This level of understanding is required if an artist is to become a core participant in research agendas that intersect art, science, and technology. Advances in science and technology effect art, but more importantly form a cultural force that shapes how people in the developed world work, play, and dream. However, elements of critique, irony, abjection, idiosyncrasy, and identity so emphatically part of the rhetoric of post-modernism are largely absent from empirical research deemed “serious” by its practitioners; and as a consequence the research is fraught with limitations and problems. I bring these critical elements into my encounters with science and technology. Participation in scientific and technological research through the lens of critical theory and aesthetics is at the core of my creative work. To merge “serious” research agendas with creative and critical practice, I have needed to expand my definitions of art materials and venues. I produce works of art from computer code, human genomic DNA, medical imaging, gaming engines, theoretical texts, candy, survey results, memories, children's drawings and the virtualized organs of a convicted murderer. As a consequence my research produces a number of outcomes, including virtual worlds, tactical media, collaborative research, visualization, 2d prints, and theoretical writing. In addition to exhibiting my work in traditional contexts, I have produced and exhibited in city streets, high-end computer laboratories, grade-school classrooms, on ebay, at scientific conferences, in shopping malls, and on the Internet. Context is part of the content of my work.
Since my first research residency at the Virtual Reality Centre, University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, UK in 1999 I have been investigating a VR project centering around the poet Antonin Artaud's reflections on The Body w/o Organs (BwO). Artaud longed to be free of his body's design, anatomy, limitations, and organization, in his terms, his organs:

“When you have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom, then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out...2” (Artaud, 1947)

In subsequent interpretations of the BwO by Deleuze and Guattari, De Landa, and Lorraine, organs become systems of organization at all levels, the body becomes body politic, body of knowledge; and Artaud's desire to “dance wrong side out” becomes “a process of dismantling the organization of structures, hierarchies, and systems that control a given entity”3. My virtual worlds and 2d prints combine dismantled and irrationally placed but accurate computer models of the internal organs with manifestations of subjectivity gathered from a variety of sources and individuals. These multimedia datasets inhabit a virtual model of my own skin, obtained from a high resolution 3d laser scan courtesy of the US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Instances of the project have been shown in a number of contexts. In 2002 I was invited to do a seminar and exhibition at a CAVETM at Brown University. During the three day seminar I worked with Computer Science majors from Brown and Illustration majors from the Rhode Island School of Design in a class on medical visualization.(see Art-1) The seminar included researchers from commercial vr companies and members of the RISD and Brown communities. In 2003 an instance of the BwO was part of. the “Mediated Nature” exhibition at the Here Here Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio. This version of the piece was exhibited using a portable hardware and software solution; reflecting my desire to be independent of rarified high-end simulators like the CAVETM.(see Art-2) Since 2000 I have been developing an iteration of the BwO with Dr. Brian Betz, a social psychologist, and artist and aesthetics researcher Dr. Dena Eber. Our collaboration, Presence and the Aesthetic Experience in Artistic Virtual Environments, involves qualitative and quantitative studies on the nature of presence in VR. Our research findings become part of subsequent iterations of the BwO. This research has produced seven abstracts and ten paper presentations at international conferences. In 2004 we applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation and are awaiting the results.(Grants and Awards-1) In addition, I have produced a number of digital prints based in both a taxonomy of the data included in the BwO, and high resolution 3d renderings of the virtual world. In 2004 this work was part of “Bits and Pieces @ PBL”, at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. This was the first art exhibition in the newly completed Frank Gehry building, and included artists from Cleveland, New York, and Sweden.(see Art-3)
Since I began working with computation as a medium in 1990, I have been conceiving and building works whose purpose is, more directly than the BwO, to challenge or undermine institutional structures. These works are known as “media hacks”, “tactical media”, or “interventionist”, and include my July 28, 1996 hack of the on line 3d chat room “thePalace”, where I inserted an abject avatar (see Publications-1) into the chat environment.(see Art-4) Another example is the April 2000 hack with ®™ark of the Whitney Biennial, where we created a redirect from ®™ark's website in the NetArt section of the exhibition to a randomly loading array of websites, including my 1992 speculations on cyberspace. (see Art-4 bottom) In 2003, in a project with Dena Eber called “panacea”, we placed a tiny candy replica of a human heart on ebay for sale. The heart contained approximately 1 µl of human genomic DNA and draws attention to our desire for a quick fix to our mortality, as well as the cult-like status of genetic research.(see Art-5)
Theory is for me largely a heuristic, not hermeneutic process; as the focus of my writing is on speculation, possible futures, and the creation of new knowledge, less on the analysis of extant research. However, in all my work an understanding of theory is required for me to recontextualize scientific research. One critical strategy is the pursuit of abandoned or discredited scientific and technological inquiries. In two published essays, “The Synnoetic Construction of Self as an Aesthetic Oeuvre” in technoetic arts, 2004; and “Art/Psi: Toward an Aesthetics of Synnoetic Interactivity” in Intelligent Agent in 2002, I explore questionable research agendas like synnoetics, psi phenomena, and the paranormal. (see Publications-2 and 3) “Art/Psi: Toward an Aesthetics of Synnoetic Interactivity” has been used as a text in graduate classes at the University of Southern California and at Giessen University in Germany, as well as in a seminar on New Media taught in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. The work was recently quoted in Alon Isocianu's A New Media Manifesto, published on line by Ryerson University in Canada. My relationship to writing and art forms an associative and non-hierarchical flow or folding between results and initiatives, most clearly illustrated by the research on presence cited above, and in the installation “A Synnoetic System”. The work was part of a three person exhibition at the Stubneitz Gallery, Adrian College in Michigan, and explores the possibilities of the creation of a synnoetic system (see Publications-2 ). A synnoetic system, as defined by Louis Fein in 1960, described:

“the cooperative interaction, or symbiosis, of people, mechanisms, plant or animal organisms, and automata into a system that results in a mental power (power of knowing) greater than that of its individual components”4

The installation combined real-time monitoring of seismic phenomena on a planetary level, with children's provocations of the paranormal, and visualizations of biofeedback data from participants. This installation is outlined in greater detail in “The Synnoetic Construction of Self as an Aesthetic Oeuvre” (see Publications-2)
Much of the work cited above was funded with research money, including an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship.(Grants and Awards-2) Of 79 awards made in 2003, 10, including mine, were at the $10,000 level; the remaining 69 were at the $5,000 level. The two decisions I made to alter the “arrow” of my career (taking a new job, and moving into a technologically-based process) were based in a desire to find appropriate contexts for me to explore what is possible, to discover and challenge institutional boundaries, and finally, to share my findings with others. Life in the “belly of the monster” has required that I spend more time seeking the support, and knowledge that will allow me to participate with significance in research agendas, than in pursuit of galleries, curators, and commercial sales. I intend to continue the quest for scientific collaborations; however I foresee popular and social forms of art, like the gaming, forming a simultaneously plebeian and critical delivery system as I continue to explore the interstitial regions between art, science, and technology.