C105 review

Venice Biennale: technology

Some facts in life are immensely perplexing, and one that I am more and more perplexed by as the years go by is that there is still no mechanism for successfully showing interactive media in public spaces. The webolution has been declared, we all flit on and offline unthinkingly, and artists have efficiently slotted computer technologies into all aspects of the art process. Despite this, we are still faced with the spectacle of rows of computers, miserably blinking error messages, scattered around the Arsenale, the site of Biennale director Francesco Bonami's ambitious but ultimately ill-fated collaborative curatorial experiment.

In one memorable scene I saw an unfortunate viewer pawing absently at a laptop screen, one of a row being used inexplicably to show a series of noninteractive movies. Moving to the keyboard the individual accidentally paused the movie and in a guilty attempt to rectify the situation switched the machine off. Exit panicked art lover stage left. Aided by dramatic total power cuts, the Arsenale presented quite a few of these laptop disasters among the cacophony generated by the collective efforts of the ten international curators. Surely if the worlds most prestigious art event can afford bevvies of these expensive machines they should also pursue a solution to lock down some functionality and permit the works to operate.

In the Gardini, the increasingly fraught zone which hosts a portion of the national pavilions, technology was very much present in the form of sound, video and electronics. But one site in which it took center-stage, in the form of an interactive installation, was the Romanian Pavilion. The piece, titled Alteridem.exe_2, was commissioned by Calin Man and the featured artist was...Calin Man, in collaboration with a collective, kinema ikon. The work was impossible and refused to give up its secrets, however much I trawled its many avenues. Even careful scrutiny of the catalogue text revealed little beyond that it was a highly collaborative work. Artists using technology fall into the dreaded trap of hypercomplexity once again. Michal Rovner, in the Israeli pavilion, operated on the other side with absolute simplicity, using editing technologies to present little dark figures re-contextualised into DNA-like strings. Despite a rapturous reception, I felt the effect, recreated ad nauseam across the pavilion in the form of projections and petri-dish-type monitors, was a little flat.

The complete absence of technology was striking in Katie Holten's charming and generous intervention into Venetian life, Laboratorio della Vigna, which offered something of an oasis from the sheer bombardment of the rest of the Biennale. There I settled down to enjoy a glass of wine and flick through a library of simply produced booklets relating to various wandering topics: water, flying, love etc. One was particularly quaint in that it presented lists and lists of weblinks, presumably to be carried home and investigated at your leisure. Here an online element could have widened the breadth of the work and rendered it more current and global in scope, irrespective of its local focus. That said the printed juxtaposition of ttp://www.heritageireland.ie, http://www.hermit-crabs.com and http://www.hoax.org did bring a smile to my lips.

Ironically, one of the most exquisite usages of technology in Venice was a sculptural piece by American artist Jennifer Pastor, which boasted not a machine in sight. Included in the excellent Francesco Bonami and Daniel Birnbaum Delays and revolutions section in the Italia pavilion, the piece, titled The perfect ride, was an inverted and abstracted sculptural representation of the Hoover Dam in the United States. Made using computer-aided design and casting technologies, the work consisted of a voluminous translucent shape representing the dam basin, tethered to the floor by anodized aluminium. In its weightlessness and hypermodernity it recalled the fantastic earlier works of Siobhán Hapaska, made using similar technologies and luminescent plastics. In the same section a real show-stopper was Dan Graham's Opposing mirrors and video monitors on time delay. A captivating and sophisticated work which does pretty much as described on the label, I was genuinely shocked to discover it dated from 1974, the year of my birth.

The canny usage of new technologies, computer and otherwise, presents many possibilities for the exquisite and the magical, as demonstrated by Pastor and Graham. Increasingly, I am realizing that, like wonderful artworks of any kind, these are very rare. Perhaps I am wrong to be disappointed in the year 2003 to find only two or three such examples, even in so vast an exposition as the much fêted Biennale di Venezia.

John Gerrard is currently artist in residence to the Ars Electronica Futurelab, Austria; see johngerrard.net.

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