A
CONVERSATION WITH SONYA RAPOPORT
on the Interactive Art Conference on Arts Wire
June 1995
Anna Couey
Judy and I are excited to welcome Sonya Rapoport to the Interactive conference
this month! Sonya is a seminal San Francisco Bay Area artist who has utilized
computers in her work since the mid-70s, often in an interactive installation
environment. Her works are complex, humorous and playful.
I first experienced Sonya's work in
the mid-80s at Media, a now defunct artists space in San Francisco. Her
installation "Shoe Field" involved the audience in taking off our
shoes, entering shoe preferences criteria data into a computer, and receiving a
beautiful abstract print out of our "shoe field" that included a
personality analysis based on our input.
Her most recent work, Smell Your
Destiny, is designed for the World Wide Web, and is located at:
http://www.lanminds.com/local/sr/srapoport.html
Anna Couey
Sonya has contributed a wonderful bio that describes the evolution of her work:
During my computer assisted
art-producing years dating back to the mid-70's, metaphors and word
associations have been the framework within which cross-cultures, diverse time
periods, and multi-disciplines have comprised the content.
Previously, I was rooted in
contemporary visual arts having been trained in the Hans Hoffmann push-pull
tradition at UC Berkeley, I was associated with the original John Bolles Art
Gallery in San Francisco in the early 60's and my exhibition record included
one-person museum exhibits at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, the
San Jose Museum of Art and the Crocker Art Museum.
In the early 70's grasping for modes
of expression in the exciting electronic world, I started by decoding
scientific research printouts and drawing directly on the output.
Since then, my work has employed digital
tools with which I have addressed human concerns in an interactive installation
environment. Current scientific issues of gene splicing and prescribed
medication for personality change are subjects for my most recent art projects.
THE TRANSGENIC BAGEL
(with sound by Craig Harris) is a computer interactive work in which the
participant gambles for a trait that is spliced from an animal. SMELL YOUR
DESTINY, an interactive WEB project, answers our quest for success by
prescribing aromatherapy. Both are humorous parodies, range in time from the
Bible to the present and both reveal the desire for individual control over
behavior. These works will be exhibited respectively this coming fall at ISEA95
in Montreal and DIGITAL SALON in New York.
Earlier works were triggered by my
own personal experiences. These experiences were repeated by participants with
the use of a computer in an expanded conceptual format. Content such as
analyzing a collection of objects, keeping a daily calendar, and wearing shoes
were associated variously with American Indian culture, palmistry, and Mudra
gesture language. Franklin Furnace and the New School for Social Research in
New York, 80 Langton Street in San Francisco and the Peabody Museum at Harvard
during the late 70's through 1988 were venues for solo presentations for these
works.
Personal experience subject matter
later gave way to universal anxieties. COPING WITH SEXUAL JEALOUSY, an audience
participation event, was performed at the Pauley Ballroom, U.C. Berkeley in
1984. Its interactive electronic adaptation, SEXUAL JEALOUSY: The Shadow of
Love (with a musical score by Michael McNabb) was shown at FISEA93 in
Minneapolis. THE ANIMATED SOUL, adapted from the Egyptian Book of the
Dead, confronts the subject of everlasting life. The viewer chooses paths to
follow both on the computer and in realtime amid an environment of caskets,
pillows and balloons. A casket warehouse, a private gallery and the Kuopio
Museum in Finland were sites for this installation in 1991-92.
Anna Couey
Welcome, Sonya! There are so many things to ask you about your work...but I'll
try to restrain myself to start at more or less a beginning point - what was
your first interactive work? How was it interactive, and how did interactivity
relate to the content of the work? Did you know you wanted to produce an
interactive piece when you started, or did the interactivity evolve from the
making of the work?
Judy Malloy
Welcome Sonya! It is wonderful to see you here and to get a chance to explore
your seminal work in interactive installation in detail.
Sonya Rapoport
Hi Anna and Judy:
Thanks for the great introductions. I'm glad to be here and will try to answer
all questions. Let's get started.
Sonya Rapoport
OBJECTS ON MY DRESSER was my first interactive piece. After having made
art about "other" cultures and "other" artifacts, I
proceeded to evaluate the random set of objects that had accumulated on my
dresser for about 20 years. Their color, shape, material, monetary value and
source were the attributes that I first concentrated on. Then, In 1979, I
conceived a psychological analysis that focused on image to image and image
toward associations as an art process. Psychiatric social worker Winifred De
Vos and myself shared aesthetic and emotional responses about the objects and
my connective associations. We looked at this material as an artwork and at the
artist as a person.
OBJECTS ON My Dresser was produced as an audio/visual
installation at the Franklin Furnace later that year, in 1980 at 80 Langton
Street and on KPFA's ART TALK produced by Don Joyce and Jane Hall. For the
installations the themes that had been derived in the psychologically oriented
dialogue became the headings for six axes that bisected a 14 foot NETWEB plot
on the floor. My associative connections between objects and themes were
demonstrated by images of the objects that had been xeroxed and glued on 4 x
6" cards with easels. These were placed along the theme axes.
A few months later in my studio,
viewer/participants were invited to make their own projections by moving the
cards from my original plot to another plot free of any image cards. This was
the beginning of many different group viewer interactive participations.
Later on, Sonya
Judy Malloy
Fascinating.... So what led you to involve viewers as participants? It was
certainly a radical idea for that time.
Sonya Rapoport
Judy: I'm trying to reconstruct what happened to trigger me into audience
involvement. I think the answer is also pertinent to Anna's question of intent
and awareness of making an interactive artwork. The dialogue between
psychologist and myself contributed to the evolving form of the work; mainly,
to its structure for interactivity. I originally had intended to enhance the
art in some two-dimensional way through a deeper understanding of the objects;
but the vitality in the exchange between us catalyzed further three dimensional
expression. Having resolved the visual execution of the piece, which I can
discuss more fully later, the unmistakable excitement of discovery through
verbal interaction caused me to extend this method of self inquiry into use by
others.
Just as many discoveries just happen
by chance, a few months after the Langton Street installation, a group (about
40) of my husband's chemistry graduate students and post-docs were coming over
for Thanksgiving dinner. For their entertainment, I drew on my studio floor two
NETWEBS, mine with my own associative distribution of card images placed along
related theme axes; and the empty plot for them to fill. Very amenable and
bright and interested in my art work, the group viewed the configuration that
reflected me, the artist, and were excited to reconstruct their own
configuration. Winifred interviewed and taped each participant's response as to
choice of image card and why the placement in the particular theme. The verbal
inquiry heightened the sense of participation, intensified the vitality of the
process and provided documentation. So I added another phase to OBJECTS ON
MY DRESSER.
Judy Malloy
Nice story Sonya. Thanks. Can you tell us a little more about the objects that
were on your dresser? What were they? (or a few of them) What kind of meanings
did you and Winifred find that they revealed?
Anna Couey
Yes indeed - thanks Sonya! It's wonderful to learn more about how you
approached interactivity originally...how it grew from the communications
element of the work itself. Did you see group interaction as a way to provide
discovery for your viewers? Or to extend the scope of your examination? The
first incarnation of the work was a self portrait, right? - Did you still
consider it portraiture once you began to work with groups?
Did chance determine the group
interaction was with an identifiable group of scientists? Or did you choose
this group to interact with the piece for a particular reason? Many questions,
I know...and Judy's are good ones too. Feel free to answer at your own pace...
Sonya Rapoport
There is much to relate since we are scanning a project ongoing from 1979
through 1983. Before I get specific about the objects, Judy, I'd like to
mention that I started creating the work while grieving for my Mother who had
then recently died. Secondly, while enmeshed in experimenting with interaction
to make the artwork, I was constantly concerned with how I would express
visually each evolving stage . I never consciously thought I was doing
interactivity per se, I just did it because the work called for it.
Yes, Anna, the NETWEB was THE
20th CENTURY PORTRAIT (Phase 6), advertised as a participation performance
exhibition at Stephen Moore's Los Angeles LOCUS in 1982. We were hoping the
viewing audience would commission a portraits of themselves but no one
did.However, Phase 8, a project for HERESIES Magazine was more lucrative in
that a resultant readjusted SONYA NETWEB depicted exclusively the
objects and words revealing my relationship with my Mother. The grieving period
terminated.
Now for the objects themselves The
dresser was a Tansu, on top was a batik. These I counted among the 29 objects
which appear to me now as a very eccentric collection of stuff: a toy auto,
plastic furniture cups to protect rugs, a satin pocket from a jacket, two
slices from a conch shell, belly dancers' cymbals, a kinetic spool thread
holder, crystal knobs, a half inch round slice of wood, plastic foliage, tiny
ceramic hearts, etc. After generating color coded bar graphs of their
attributes, I wanted something more probing. I assigned correlated images to
each object and then assigned words to each of these, now 58, objects. Winnie
and I recognized the words as well as the images "as clues to pre-eminent
concerns. We looked for inner logic of elements that were repetitious. We speculatively
played idiosyncratic symbolism against universal symbolism and we considered
what was missing in representations apropos to a normative framework
"(W.D.).
SEE was the predominant reference
among both the words and images. SEA related to the pattern on the batik and
the shell slices; SEE- THROUGH, the response to the crystal knobs, the oval
glass tray and the furniture cups and the correlative object, a doll's glass
eye. SEEING also surfaced for a photograph of a woman looking through an eye mask,
even if a symbol of obscuration. Although this material was illustrated by
imaginative x,y coordinate graphs, the words were obviously a tool for further
communication, another link with the viewer.
Judy, Some of the meanings that
evolved from the "play" with the SEE variations were: observation as
a need to search, or comprehend; a way of dealing with developmental
frustrations; artist as subject and object of mastery; herself seen as
reflected by mirrors or by insight; a flexible reordering and a form of
manipulating. Eventually EYE became one of the axis themes for the soon to be
created NETWEB.
Judy Malloy
Thanks Sonya. It is nice to be talking with you. I saw the installation with
the netweb on the floor at the old Langton St. and it was quite wonderful. Can
you talk a little about what the netweb is/looks like? It is quite interesting
that you choose that term (in 1980 or 81 I think this was)
Valerie Gardiner
Hi Sonya, I just downloaded this discussion. Looking forward to reading
Anna Couey
Yes, a prescient term for sure! It'd be interesting to see the NETWEB designed
for the World Wide Web - because of its sensitivity to correspondences.
Beth Kanter
Hi Sonya -- I've been looking forward to this discussion and like Valerie will
be downloading and reading in the next few days . . .
Sonya Rapoport
Valerie and Beth, I appreciate your interest in what seems to me a long story.
However, because of a relevance to the conceptual configuration of the
INTERNETS' WEB, I'm hanging in there.
Anna, I'll think about it as a WEB
project. Any suggestions out there about HOW?
Judy, here's a description of the
installation you saw in 1980: Today's World Wide Web recalls the strategies of
interconnections that I applied fifteen years ago when I created the NETWEB you
saw at 80 Langton Street. Vance Martin was largely responsible for the dynamic
presentation. It was a geometric configuration of a spiderweb about 14 feet in
diameter, reflected onto the floor from a slide projector attached to the
ceiling. Six bisecting axes, the tick marks on each axis and the linear
connections from tick to tick were projected on a star-shaped area of white
contact paper. The image cards, now reminding me of today's provocative Home
Pages, were placed in their positions on numbered ticks along their selected
theme axes: EYE, HAND, CHEST, MASKING, THREADING, and MOVING. I had made
several duplicate cards because I wanted some associations to be in more than
one theme. Everything was interconnected by lines crossing the axes and joining
similar tick positions on other themes. The slide used in the projection was of
the spiderweb graph that had been plotted on 30 inch wide vellum. To generate
this plot, numbers of the selected objects and their theme placement positions
were punched onto cards and put into a now antiquated computer system. The
installation included my dresser with all its objects, except the antique inch
round brass box that had been stolen from the Franklin Furnace exhibit; a
plethora of xerox images of the objects documented with image-word vignettes;
and graphs, data tools not used for fine art expression at that time.
Audiotapes of the dialogue between Winnie and myself played on a loop. I
remember that people walked around and around probably engaging in self projections,
evaluating their own mementos and what could be done with them. "The work
elicited a sense of partaking of an artist's private world and a sense of that
world's having aesthetic and effective parallels with the viewer's private
world." (W.D) I remember distinctly two comments: What is a nice Jewish
girl doing with Jesus Christ on her dresser? The other, from a distant
relative: It's shocking that you say those things about your Mother.
Interactivity with the NETWEB was gaining momentum.
Anna Couey
Sonya, my first hazy thought about a Web iteration of this piece was to involve
scripts so that viewers could make their own NETWEB and then read an analysis
about it. Extending the social meaning that you brought to NETWEB, by asking
particular groups to interact with the work, the Web version could perhaps
include a survey that would map responses to categories.
You've continued to make
computer-based interactive work...how have your conceptions about interactivity
evolved or changed? What role does interactivity play in your work now - is it
a more conscious element?
Sonya Rapoport
Anna: I do want to talk about the different group responses and the different
ways I installed the set up. It's a great idea to add another format of
interactivity by listing possibilities for choices on the WEB. Will think about
it. Now, Anna, you have opened a can of worms regarding my current attitudes
about interactivity which I could go into after my last (next) description of
interaction with OBJECTS ON MY DRESSER.
Later on.
Sonya.
Judy Malloy
Hi Sonya. I loved the responses to Objects that you related and was interested
in how the artists/lawyers/scientists differed in their responses (which sounds
like what you might want to talk about at some point), but your current attitudes
about interactivity that Anna asked about would also be very interesting.
and to add to the can of worms, I
have come to feel that as interactive art comes of age as a medium, it is
important, as in all art forms, that it be judged as art. (not on how
interactive it is or what kind of interactivity it uses which is kind of like
judging painting on how much paint is used) but rather on does it succeed as
art.
I should add that I certainly think
Sonya's work does succeed as art and that the interactgivity is very much a
part of her work.
Timothy Collins
Hi Sonya....I remember your work at MEDIA and am very much enjoying this topic!
Looking forward to more ideas about interartivity!
Judy Malloy
interactgivity interartivity :-)
Sonya Rapoport
Tim, it's so good to hear that someone else saw my SHOE-FIELD
installation at MEDIA. One always wonders where our art ashes are scattered.
Before going on to INTERACTIVITY, I
must get OBJECTS ON MY DRESSER off my chest. I did not set out to have
specialized groups participate. However, we had captive science participants
between my husband's chemists from Berkeley and our son Robert's
pharmacologists from Stanford; invitations came from art sites, among which
were Sarah Lawrence College, New School for Social Research, and Artists Space,
in New York; and Heller Gallery at UC Berkeley. For the participants the
interviews proved to be the most challenging aspect to the participation - a
complex activity of converting projections to the articulation of reason . . .
why and what do the stimuli elicit? When I analyzed the results by plotting the
NETWEBS, I noticed that the same interest groups' NETWEBS appeared similar to
each other.
To investigate further, I raided a
neighbor's law firm party to persuade the hosts to allow their guests to come
next door to my "laboratory" in order to participate in interactive
art. They agreed. At first there was pushing and shoving among husbands and
wives (both lawyers, I assumed) when placing the cards on the same theme axes.
It was an intense, yet playful evening. I was a little disappointed that Winnie
and I weren't invited for dessert when the attorneys were called back by their
hosts.
But I was grateful and ready to combine
the specialized group data into three different NETWEBS, Art, Science and Law.
The Art and Science WEBS were more alike than the sparse Law WEB. This meant
that the attorneys made similar selections in placing the image cards on the
same theme axes so there was less spreading of connective lines within the
configuration. Most diversity of interconnections was amongst the art interest
group who generated an evenly distributed plot. The verbal responses were also
distinctive. The science responded to placement on the EYE theme by being
challenged to fill in what cannot be seen. For the art group the EYE or seeing
process was a means to thinking - a magical psychic entry rather than surface
observing. The law group conveyed a self-consciousness in looking. They
indicated a heightened sense of visual process of carefulness and alertness.
Thus the artwork had evolved into group characterization of commonality of
interest class through graphic configuration.
Now, we are all eager to squirm with
that can of worms (words) that Anna opened. Judy, we'll see if we are killing
or nourishing the artamphibia when we cut them into interactgivity,
interartivity and reactivity for bait.
Judy Malloy
Thanks Sonya! I was in the same show at Heller I think and I remember that you
tape recorded some of the responses and then a little later the netweb showed
up in that Gallery that Terry Ellis and David (can't remember his last name but
he was such a nice guy and died of AIDS as did Terry) had. It was a window
gallery and the web was in the window and I think from the street you could
push a button and hear some of the previously recorded responses.
David Mott. (Is that right?)
Sonya Rapoport
Judy, thanks for boomeranging me to the NETWEB because I'd like to talk about a
few site specific formats, especially Terry Ellis' WINDOW. Terry eventually
moved to New York and made his mark as a promising artist before he died. In my
Egyptian ritual ANIMATED SOUL installation at the TAKADA Gallery I hung Terry's
portrait over a mummy's mask. This was my way of saying goodbye to him.
Among other NETWEB interactive
formats was a presentation in the JOURNAL, The Los Angeles Institute of
Contemporary Art magazine publication. .Readers were to check a list and mail
it to me in return for a plot. The window of a Philadelphia store front,
donated by a bank-neighbor, consisted of irregularly angled glass panes. WEBS
from various interactions serpentined along the glass. But the setup on the
floor was sparse because bank employees couldn't stand my pornographic and
violent images and had them removed.
The installation at Terry Ellis' and
David Mott's WINDOW was a different story. Its data had come from the from the
Heller Gallery (U.C.) performance where your piece was near-bye, Judy. There I recorded
the responses that eventually blasted on the street from a loud speaker that
was installed outside. Pedestrians passing by could push a button to hear the
"why" of OBJECT choice-placements such as: "I placed it (a sea
creature) on HAND" because I wouldn't want to touch it."; "I
placed the snake on EYE because I wouldn't want it to get near my hand";
"I placed an EYE (big bosoms) image in front of HAND. because you can't
kiss and breathe at the same time"; "I put the screw on MOVING
because you move when you screw". Illustrating the sound track, these
images and their corresponding theme axes were glued to the large window (16
feet wide).
In the smaller window, a six foot
photograph of the dresser hung as background for the object images stacked in rows
on the floor. Cards and pencils were available for responses to be dropped into
the mail slot. During the process of recycling the objects back to nature by
associating them with visual information in James Randklev's Sierra Club
photographs, Winnie and I had our last interactive OBJECTS ON MY DRESSER
exchange. In 1983 Humboldt State University was last host for the audience
participation installation.
Anna Couey
OBJECTS ON MY DRESSER certainly had many permutations, that seem opened
up largely because of the interactivity you brought into the piece and then
investigated. It is rich fabric you have woven there!
Judy...your statement that
interactive art needs to be judged on how it succeeds as art is a provocative
one. I can perhaps guess, but what do you mean? In conveying meaning rather
than technique?
And Sonya, whenever you're ready to
dive into that current views of interactivity question, please do! I've been
fascinated by everything you posted so won't be distraught if there's another
direction you'd like to head! Was interested to read about the
installations...did you make installations prior to working with
computer-assisted art?
Sonya Rapoport
Anna, I can't resist getting into the "interactive" discussion by
evaluating interactivity as art in OBJECTS ON MY DRESSER. There is no
doubt that interactivity motivated the excitement and interest in the piece.
Here we go, Judy: would the discussions between Winnie and me or the
participants' activity of making choices and placing their projections on the
plot stand alone as art? The verbal interchange added another dimension for
further aesthetic formats; and although some musical duets or literary
exchanges in scripts can be considered art,
I think that the interaction between Winnie and myself is taking deconstructive
theory a little too far. The application of the participants' contributions
changed the graphic art configuration of the NETWEB. This influence upon the
artwork itself is the highest form of interactive art. Whether the results are
a high art is anotherstory. However, the interactivity did transcend into art
concept and maybe that's what we are talking about..
Judy Malloy
Well it was that "highest" yardstick that I was questioning.
And actually I do think there is some validity to Steve Wilson's idea that work
is most interactive that integrates the participant's responses into the work
as you did. I think this is definitely something to strive for. But - yeah -
you could have framed your conversations with Winnie in some other way and that
could have been art also. But what I meant was forinstance in your web work the
interaction is much "lower". Does that mean it has less validity as
interactive art? Does that matter?
Sonya Rapoport
Yes, Judy, it was Steve Wilson who defined the three different levels of
interactivity in art: 1. the viewer completes the work by perceiving it; 2. the
viewer interacts with computer programs from a predetermined set of options; 3.
the viewer's choices alter the final form of the artwork.
My web work, SMELL YOUR DESTINY,
utilizes the above 2nd level of interactivity. Here, according to www protocol,
the viewer clicks on a highlighted phrase or icon to access the next link. This
is a newer feature in the 2nd level of interactivity. I do not think level 2 is
less valid as interactive art. Although interactivity plays a major role in
executing my piece, the implication of using both words (interactive and art)
as a phrase can be that the art is on one level and the interactivity operates
on another. I like to think of SMELL YOUR DESTINY as an integrated
artwork and the interactivity is a device for supporting its ideas and for
getting the viewer personally involved in them.
Interactivity has become a buzz
word. Any excuse is used to get into the act. What is interactivity by itself?
Is it interactivity or just reactivity when a response is generated by a sound,
a movement, or a pressed button, and no further interchange results?
Interactivity has come of age as a medium just as oil paint did. Innovation of
the former depends on the technical sophistication of the creator just as skill
depended on the technique of the latter. Currently, if the end product purports
to be interactive art, development of the art is required as well. A
combination of technical and art skills is necessary. We may anticipate that
the results will be so innovative that at first we wont recognize it.
Two examples of innovative
interactive interface are on exhibition in San Francisco this month of June.
Jim Campbell and Marie Navarre's UNFORSEEABLE MEMORIES installation is
at Capp Street where changes in the room occur from immediate viewer movement
to more subtle activity over a two month period. For example projected images
will dissolve and others will go from one location to another. The technology
here is rather arcane and it is hard to tell what and how changes are
triggered. Bruce Cannon's PORTRAIT at the Paule Anglim Gallery consists
of two objects, a wooden box, the control unit, that will remain in the
artist's studio; and a sculpture of a scale, which will reside with the owner.
These two devices are linked by telephone. The artist recodes the control unit
monthly. The balance beam at the owner's home moves one degree per year of the
artist's life. Whether the art in the Campbell/Navarre installation is as
highly developed as the technology is yet to be absorbed. Bruce Cannon's PORTRAIT
has achieved an even balance.
Judy Malloy
Bruce Cannon's PORTRAIT sounds like a really interesting idea - a kind
of connection which interests me since I like to think of interactivity as a
way of connecting the artist and the viewer.
And, ideally the interactivity and
the art are seamlessly integrated which is what I think you are saying.
This conversation has been
stimulating and the many unfollowed threads we could still follow are
indicative how much interactive art has developed in 15 years or so since you
began to work on Objects on My Dresser. Thanks again for sharing your
work and ideas with us!
Sonya Rapoport
It has been a great experience digging into my interactive roots
Anna Couey
Many thanks for your participation, Sonya! It's been wonderful to learn more
about your work and how you've approached interactivity.
Transcript of A Conversation with
Sonya Rapoport, Item 56, Interactive Art Conference, Arts Wire.
Posted to the Web with participants' permission.
© http://www.well.com/~couey/interactive/rapoport/sonya.html
(Date: 09-12-08)
