Browse Books

Reviewer: Paul Bratley

The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence (PAIR) program invites artists who use new media to the Palo Alto Research Center and pairs them with researchers who use the same media, though in different contexts. The aim is to produce both interesting art and scientific innovation. One cannot judge from this book whether the second aim is achieved. On the evidence, however, the attempt to produce interesting art is a failure. The book begins with four sections devoted to the background of the PAIR program: how it came about, how it is administered, and so forth. We learn, for instance, that at PARC both the size of offices and the quantity and kind of furniture are determined by rank and function. However, even in small, shared offices, each worker has enough space for at least one personal desk with one computer. No great surprises there. After some heart-searching, the visiting artists were assigned to any available office and given a standard computer. All but one team apparently found this perfectly tolerable. The remainder of the book describes a number of projects carried out in the context of the PAIR program. Jeanne Finley and John Muse describe (I think) a film, or perhaps a videotape, combining an autobiographical narrative, a documentary, and a “performance-driven work that stages the administration of a psychological test to a young girl.” Judy Malloy, investigating the narrative variety inherent in MOOs (multi-user dungeons—object-oriented) created three different narratives. With Cathy Marshall, she also produced an “interactive hypernarrative, a densely interwoven collection of vignettes,…neither literal truth nor fiction but rather a single transcendent vision formed from two pasts.” Margaret Crane, Dale MacDonald, Scott Minneman, and Jon Winet devised a variety of participatory installations. It is hard to tell quite what Paul De Marinis did, though it clearly involves sounds. And so on: there are three other sections in a similar vein. A final chapter on art shows that have been held at PARC completes the book. Although the various authors come from differing backgrounds, they have points in common. One is a total lack of humor. Readers will hope in vain for even a momentary flash of wit to leaven the high-minded earnestness with which the projects are described. Instead of searching for redeeming social values, one longs for rather less of them. Everybody in the PAIR program, it seems, is concerned to inspire, to inform, or to empower; the idea that art might actually be entertaining never crosses their collective mind. Then there is the language. If there were prizes for texts combining banality of content with pretentiousness of expression, this one would be a sure winner. Try this: “The totality of the process of the system was intended to be understood as a performance.” Again: “Or someone looks back, with or without permission, at the one who had previously wielded the gaze as an instrument of domination and in doing so destabilizes permission itself. Or scopophilia itself is put into crisis, and ambivalence wanders onto the set.” Yet again, glance (briefly) at the two “poems” on facing pages, both by women, both about seeing men masturbate in public. Maybe these things happen more often in California than where I live. Occasional glimpses of honesty shine through: “What seemed to surprise me then, but doesn't now, was that the researchers doing work in fields most related to my work…appeared profoundly uninterested in my ideas and projects.” How one sympathizes! And I must admit I liked the candor of this confession: “Although there are no rules to the PAIR program…we all had a sense that we needed to produce something tangible during Pamela's year-long residency. In fact, Pamela kept extending her residency because she did not feel we had actually made anything concrete. But all along we were having great conversations.” The book itself is rather ugly. Many of the chapters resort to typographic tricks in an attempt (vain, in my case) to hold the reader's attention. Most of the illustrations are muddy gray images that do nothing to enliven the surrounding text. Eight of them are also reproduced in a small color inset. As these include two screen shots and a picture of a black-and-white document, it is hard to see the rationale behind this. The book is part of the Leonardo series, produced jointly by the MIT Press and the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. The poor man is probably turning in his grave.