Violencia was the result of a collaboration of 4 artists in the early 1990’s - Patrick Howell, Gordon Van Huizen, Sean Van Tuyn and Laura Malone. It was conceived and developed at a time when the idea of creating interactive experiences that generated meaning rather than mere sensation was new territory in the art world. Sadly the installation shots and large images have been lost, but it is included to share the concept of this exciting project.

Violencia

An Interactive Art Piece on Violence and Beauty in America

vi-o-lence \ ‘vi-e-len(t)s\n

{ME, fr. OF, fr. L violentia, fr. violentus}      

1. exertion of physical force to injure or abuse

2. injury by or as if by distortion, infringement, or profanation

3. intense, turbulent, or furious and often destructive action or force (as of a storm)

4. distortion of meaning; undue alteration (as of wording or sense in editing a text)

Carl Jung said that myths are a culture’s dreams. Today our culture broadcasts its dreams in the media. Certainly, American culture has a myth about violence. Violencia is an interactive confrontation with that myth -- with our relationship to violence both in the culture and in the media.

Violence is nature turned against itself. In nature, violence is often beautiful. People don’t make endless documentaries showing a lion making a kill simply because it is gratuitous or shocking. Violence is a process. In nature we depersonalize the process and thus feel we can explain it. When violence takes the form of human against human we say it is senseless because it is personal and we can’t see the process.

The relationship between beauty and violence is complex, partly because of our ambivalence towards its relatedness. In a culture where intense experiences are forbidden, our attraction to violence might be seen as the longing for what is real, and the simultaneous avoidance of reality. What is real is what is true and, as the poet Keats said, “Beauty is truth and truth is beauty.” In Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction, a contract killer asks his victim to look at him because he wants to see “the reverence” in his face. Killing has become an aesthetic experience for this character. This master film maker thus also explores the relationship between violence and beauty,  between “the awe” and the awful.

When violence becomes part of the content of a work of art of any kind, aesthetic issues are considered regardless of the content, nevertheless reflecting upon it. Robert Maplethorpe, by making beautiful compositions out of sacrilegious subject matter, drives a wedge between form and content, forcing us up against a paradox: the perception of beauty is indifferent to and at the same time inseparable from, content.

Violence, both natural and man-made, has been subject matter for art since the first cave paintings. Any discussion of the titillating use of violent imagery in the media is undeniably cliché. Pop artists, most notably Andy Warhol, dealt not only with violence, but with the viewer’s relationship to it. In his “Death and Disaster” pictures he confronts us with our voyeuristic responses to violence and death.

In traditional art, the viewer’s response is private and receptive. The viewer responds to the artwork and may attempt to communicate with others about his or her response. In interactive art, the piece is completed by the viewer. As the user establishes a personal relationship with the piece, this relationship is simultaneously made public; others are allowed to witness the nature of the user’s engagement. The viewer is made “response-able”. The eyes are turned back on the voyeur.

But the images belong to the culture, and the culture is also responsible. The culture is the voyeur and the voyeur is seeing itself. In Violencia, as the user enters into the creative process, the user’s awareness moves back and forth between abstract perceptions of color and sound -- that is, aesthetic experiences -- and the reality of the subject matter, that of American media and culture.

Most popular American movies allow the viewer to maintain a distance from the reality of violence, even when it is quite graphic. Because the viewer never fully identifies with either the victim or the perpetrator, violence is robbed of real pain and hatred. In Violencia, the viewer is both the victim and the perpetrator, the artist and the audience. In as much as the audience is the culture, the culture has the opportunity to see itself.

Press

"VIOLENCIA"


Digital Asylum, "Violencia," details from the multi-media installation, 1996.

by Beate Bermann-Enn

(Gallerie Spagnolo, San Diego) One of the most riveting concerns of the 1980s and '90s is the violence in our society. This multi-media, multi-artist installation and exhibition will address some of the aspects of this topic. Not just what is violence--what shapes and forms it takes--in nature, in sublimated forms, in the past, in overt and aggressive shapes; but also its seductive shapes made acceptable and fascinating by a kind of beauty that can envelop it.

The four artists of Digit Asylum who created the interactive multimedia Violence and Beauty in America are Patrick Howell, Laura Malone, Gordon Van Huizen and Sean van Tyne. Timed to happen simultaneously in the gallery and on the Internet, this piece gives the user the responsibility of what happens on the screen, and makes the viewers in the gallery and on the Internet witnesses to the users' relationship to the violent options on the computer.

The friendly and familiar guidance of the mouse component of this installation seduces the viewer to activate violent sequences on a computer screen. Music interweaves with the images, sometimes contrasting with soft romantic tunes the stabbing and pain on the screen, sometimes underscoring the action the user always has the option to stop, not be violent, or to go to a different sequence The inescapable question is posed about the frightening willingness of the viewer/users to engage in acts of violence if they are clothed in contemporary media aesthetics.

Jeff Laudenslager contributes an installation which that includes several multimedia components ranging from etched glass to evocative shadows on the wall. They deal with the diverse nature of violence. One, the demolition of a Soviet guard tower in East Berlin, refers to a heroics of violence that we can cheer. Another is a newspaper story, etched on glass, of three white Africaaners, two dead and one to be executed by a black militiaman. The visible hatred in the eyes of the white man about to be executed plays off against the black oppressed man about to execute his oppressor, confronting the viewer with the question of the justification of violence. The third component of this installa- tion uses the image of the swastika, a clear and emblematic sign of violence. It appears here once as a reflected shadow on the wall, and again as a very real swastika blade in a skillsaw.

Shauna Peck will present a purposefully unromantic installation that leads the viewer back to the "commonness" of death, using a body bag. This item is common in war, present at accidents, used by every medical examiner, never recycled, and is used all over the world. They are manufactured in Southeast San Diego, by rows of women sowing zippers into the body bags, which comes in different colors, but only one size. It does not vary and production has gone up. Peck creates a surrounding that evokes a very normal day in a very normal life, very simple, very generic, not even female/male oriented--but containing the unplanned-for presence of the bag. Death as the out-of-place intruder in a normal life.

Raoul Guerero will be represented with three lithographs of "wanted" posters. They are made up of people and characters that might have been real. Reflecting upon the mythology of the West, violence as an inheritance, Guerero uses his experience and impressions from a sojourn in the Black Hills of South Dakota. He infers with the types of his characters a deeper connection to German, Dutch and Scottish forebears whose daring and hardiness might have laid the foundation for the types that ended up on wanted posters in the past.

Ronin Mintz has a different take on violence, a counterpoint to the interactive media piece in the gallery. He examines the depersonalization of violence--really of life in our time--and confronts the computer. In this view technology has made us insensitive to violence by distancing us from the act. Film, television and now Virtual Reality has taken the place of reality, causing people to lose the skills to interact as people. Mintz presents a conveyor belt with computer parts sitting on it, some of them "alive:" computer disks spinning, LED lights flashing, memory boards etc. The belt moves every once in a while, passing under suspended old hand tools like mallets, sickles and hammers that pound them. The tools destroy the new vehicle for violence.

Joyce Cutler Shaw presents a Message Monument featuring the words "We the People" in melting ice. Water for the ice has been collected from all 50 states. The original work had been conceived for the west front of the Capitol building in Washington D.C. for the Bicentennial in 1976. Shaw incorporated the legislative process into the piece: an act of Congress was needed for permission to set up the piece in that location. Having been endorsed by the bicentennial commission and approved by the chairman of the House, the art project together with other issues were swallowed up and wiped away by the Hayes-Elizabeth Ray scandal, and so never came to actual realization at the capitol. With this installation and readings, Shaw reflects on the intervening 20 years-- on what violence is, not just physical but also the effects of neglect, the encroachments into freedom of speech and other issues.

Violencia is an interactive art a collaboration between 4